This addition to the Cognitive Science and Second Language Acquisition series presents a comprehensive review of the latest research findings on sentence processing in second language acquisition. The book begins with a broad overview of the core issues of second language sentence processing research and then narrows its focus by dedicating individual chapters to each of these key areas. While a number of publications have discussed research findings on knowledge of formal syntactic principles as part of theories of second language acquisition, there are fewer resources dedicated to the role of second language sentence processing in this context. This volume will act as the first full-length literature review of the field on the market.

In this book, Yael Greenberg discusses and clarifies a number of controversial issues and phenomena in the generic literature, including the existence of "episodic genericity," existential presuppositions, and contextual restrictions of generics.

The foundation of this book is a line-by-line analysis of enjambement, or the syntactical relationship between successive verses, in the Iliad. Such a study develops naturally from Milman Parry's work, which sought to show the importance for oral composition, and specifically for Homer, both of the syntactical link between lines and the frequency of each type of enjambement. In contrast to earlier studies, which utilized only portions of the text, Dr. Higbie's book is unique in presenting analyses of the complete poem. In doing so, she makes material available which can be used to answer larger stylistic questions of genre, effect, and the manipulation and enjambing of formulae. Speeches, similes, battle scenes, and catalogues, for example, can be distinguished by the length and structure of the sentences, as well as by the relationship between the individual sentence and the hexameter verse. Moreover, the flexibility and survival of the formula depend in part upon its grammatical construction. The importance of enjambement to Homeric verse makes this book an essential reference work for scholars and students of Homer alike.

Irish English, also termed 'Anglo-Irish' or 'Hiberno-English', as in this book, is not usually perceived as having a grammatical system of its own. Markku Filppula here challenges this misconception and offers a descriptive and contact-linguistic account of the grammar of Hiberno-English. Drawing on a wide range of authentic materials documenting Hiberno-English dialects past and present Filppula examines: * the most distinctive grammatical features of these dialects * relationships with earlier and other regional varieties of English * the continuing influence of the Irish language on Hiberno-English * similarities between Hiberno-English and other Celtic-influenced varieties of English spoken in Scotland and Wales The Grammar of Irish English is a comprehensive empirical study which will be an essential reference for scholars of Hiberno-English and of value to all those working in the field of Germanic linguistics.

This addition to the Cognitive Science and Second Language Acquisition series presents a comprehensive review of the latest research findings on sentence processing in second language acquisition. The book begins with a broad overview of the core issues of second language sentence processing research and then narrows its focus by dedicating individual chapters to each of these key areas. While a number of publications have discussed research findings on knowledge of formal syntactic principles as part of theories of second language acquisition, there are fewer resources dedicated to the role of second language sentence processing in this context. This volume will act as the first full-length literature review of the field on the market.

Intended for both students and practitioners in public administration who want to communicate more effectively with a variety of audiences, this book offers clear, easy-to-understand guidelines on how to write more clearly, concisely, and coherently, as well as correctly. It covers the basics of good English and applies those basics to general forms (such as memos, letters, and e-mails) and more specific forms (such as newsletters, proposals, budget justifications, and rules) used in the public sector.

Spanish Subjunctive in Context is a new type of subjunctive resource manual. It aims to prove the essential ingredient missing in traditional grammar explorations and isolated single sentence examples; the full context of the situation. The subjunctive is presented in a clear and methodical way using full-length Spanish comic strips, where the full context that generates the subjunctive can be seen.

As the oldest literary Latin preserved in any quantity, the language of Livius shows many features of linguistic interest and raises intriguing questions of phonolgy, morphology and syntax. In this book, Ivy Livingston frames an examination of Livius' Latin in the form of a commentary.

It is widely recognized that language is humanity's most distinctive and valuable faculty. In this work, originally published in 1974, Roger Fowler explains the character and absorbing interest of language. Designed as an introductory text for students and others concerned with human communication, the book is clearly and concisely written, yet it in no way oversimplifies its rich and complicated subject. The opening chapters set the scene by a discussion of the power of language in the social and psychological life of a man, while the main body of the book is an introduction to linguistics, the science of language study. Coverage is provided of the main topics in linguistic description - semantics, syntax, phonetics - as well as of the functions of language, its status in society and its relation to the individual. The reader is invited to participate in some advanced thinking within an up-to-date and consistent linguistic theory. Particular attention is given to the individual as language-learner, since the process of language acquisition illuminates most clearly the naturalness and the complexity of language. The author's arguments are illustrated with hundreds of examples from English and other languages. Suggestions for further reading are included in the exposition, and the reader who follows the arguments and pursues the carefully arranged bibliographical recommendations will acquire a substantial insight into contemporary linguistics - the most important and advanced of the modern human sciences.

This important new study examines in detail a semantic-pragmatic pattern surrounding the basic verb 'acquire' in nearly 30 Southeast Asian languages, concentrating on Lao, Vietnamese, Khmer, Kmhmu, Hmong, and varieties of Chinese. The book makes a significant contribution to empirical work on semantic and grammatical change in a linguistic area, as well as representing theoretical advances in cognitive semantics. Gricean pragmatics, semantic change, grammaticalization, language contact, and areal linguistics. The book also examines how changes in the speech of individuals actually become changes in large-scale public convention, 'language contact' is reconsidered, and traditional distinctions such as that between 'internal' and 'external' linguistic mechanisms are challenged. This groundbreaking new book is for specialists in Southeast Asian linguistics as well as scholars of descriptive semantics and pragmatics, grammaticalisation, linguistic change and evolution, areal linguistics and language contact, history and linguistic anthropology.

This volume advances our understanding of how word structure in terms of affix ordering is organized in the languages of the world. A central issue in linguistic theory, affix ordering receives much attention amongst the research community, though most studies deal with only one language. By contrast, the majority of the chapters in this volume consider more than one language and provide data from typologically diverse languages, some of which are examined for the first time. Many chapters focus on cases of affix ordering that challenge linguistic theory with such phenomena as affix repetition and variable ordering, both of which are shown to be neither rare nor typical only of lesser-studied languages with unstable grammatical organization, as previously assumed. The book also offers an explicit discussion on the non-existence of phonological affix ordering, with a focus on mobile affixation, and one on the emergence of affix ordering in child language, the first of its kind in the literature. Repetitive operations, undesirable in many theories, are frequent in early child language and seem to serve as trainings for morphological decomposition and affix stacking. Thus, the volume also raises important questions regarding the general architecture of grammar and the nature and side effects of our theoretical assumptions.

This pioneering study is based on an analysis of over 200 languages, including African, Amerindian, Australian, Austronesian, Indo-European and Eurasian (Altaic, Caucasian, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Dravidian, Uralic), Papuan, and Sino-Tibetan. Adpositions are an almost universal part of speech. English has prepositions; some languages, such as Japanese, have postpositions; others have both; and yet others kinds that are not quite either. As grammatical tools they mark the relationship between two parts of a sentence: characteristically one element governs a noun or noun-like word or phrase while the other functions as a predicate. From the syntactic point of view, the complement of an adposition depends on a head: in this last sentence, for example, a head is the complement of on while on a head depends on depends and on is the marker of this dependency. Adpositions lie at the core of the grammar of most languages, their usefulness making them recurrent in everyday speech and writing. Claude Hagege examines their morphological features, syntactic functions, and semantic and cognitive properties. He does so for the subsets both of adpositions that express the relations of agent, patient, and beneficiary, and of those which mark space, time, accompaniment, or instrument. Adpositions often govern case and are sometimes gradually grammaticalized into case. The author considers the whole set of function markers, including case, that appear as adpositions and, in doing so, throws light on processes of morphological and syntactic change in different languages and language families. His book will be welcomed by typologists and by syntacticians and morphologists of all theoretical stripes.

This book addresses the problems of the nature of the category of aspect, its formal expression and its relation to Action modes, to the Aorist/Imperfect and Perfect/Non-Perfect distinctions. The discussion is largely based on data from Bulgarian -- a Slavonic language where aspect as a grammatical category systematically coexists not only with verbal prefixation, but also with temporal boundedness, correlation and, in the nominal sphere, definiteness. Cross-language parallels with English and French data and the mapping of Bulgarian structures to notions drawn from the «western tradition of aspectual study result in the outline of a framework for an integrated study of the expression of aspectuality in languages belonging to different language groups. Refuting existing views of aspect as a «compensatory phenomenon for nominal definiteness, the book presents arguments in favour of a systematic relation between verbal prefixation and NP quantification in Slavonic languages and of a compositional, syntactic dimension of aspectual analysis.

Collected for the first time in a single volume, these essays and articles by Naoki Fukui form an outline of some of the most significant and formative contributions to syntactic theory. Focusing particularly on the typological differences between English/type language and Japanese/type languages, Fukui examines the abstract parameters that both link and divide them. Linguistic universals are considered in the light of cross-linguistic variation and typological (parametric) differences are investigated from the viewpoint of universal principles. The book's main focus is the nature and structure of invariant principles and parameters (variables) and how they interact to give principled accounts to a variety of seemingly unrelated differences between English and Japanese. The contrasts between these two types of language is an ideal testing ground, since the languages are superficially different in virtually every aspect of their linguistic structures from word order and wh-movement, to grammatical agreement and case-marking systems, among many others. These articles constitute a considerable contribution to the development of the principles-and-parameters model in its exploration and refinement of theoretical concepts and fundamental principles of linguistic theory, leading to some of the basic insights that lie behind the minimalist program.

Published at a time when literacy and spelling are issues of topical concern, A Survey of English Spelling offers an authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date overview of this important but hitherto neglected area of the English language.
The text brings together a vast body of knowledge, both synthesised from diverse sources and original, unpublished research. The emphasis is on a functional exploration of the spelling regularities and markers that underpin literacy in English.
An extensive database has been used throughout to provide a wealth of examples, statistics and analyses. The carefully signposted text and detailed contents listing allow students, professionals, teachers and academics in all areas of English Language, Linguistics and Speech Pathology to access specific information with ease.

This is book is a collection of papers on various aspects of the syntax and morphosyntax of Germanic and Slavic languages (English, German, Czech, Polish, and Russian), stemming from the Syntax Session of the 2006 PLM conference in Poznan (Poland). Gisbert Fanselow and Caroline Fery discuss lack of Superiority with German movement; Gereon Muller links pro-drop to non-impoverished inflectional morphology; Christopher Wilder deals with English constructions with a directional locative and imperative; Adam Bialy decomposes event structure; Katarzyna Sowka analyses the semantics of German verbs of giving; Ewa Bulat takes a fresh look at null subjects; Helen Trugman presents the distribution of adnominal adjectives in Russian; Agnieszka Pysz explores the same issue in Old English; Bozena Cetnarowska employs OT to describe possessives in Polish; Katarzyna Miechowicz-Mathiassen and Pawel Scheffler compare Polish and Italian reversible verbs; Radek Simik describes different relative pronouns in Czech; Mojmir Docekal discusses lack of WCO effects in Czech; Michael Moss argues for a complex structure of the Polish clause, and Jacek Witkos demonstrates that control-as-movement penetrates CPs.

This book is the first detailed investigation and description of phonotactic sound patterns affecting Khoesan click consonant inventories. It also includes the first quantitative study of phonation types in Khoesan languages, and the first study of phonation types associated with pharyngeal consonants all around. Although bases of OCP constraints have been presumed to be perceptual, this is the first quantitative study showing the acoustic basis of a particular OCP constraint in a specific language. Amanda L. Miller-Ockhuizen describes the phonetics and phonology of gutturals in the Khoesan language of Ju|'hoansi. Hers is the first study of voice quality cues associated with epiglottalized vowels. Thus, it is the first study to show that laryngeal and pharyngeal vowels are unified phonetically by non-modal voice qualities associated with them. It is also the first study to show that in addition to laryngeal coarticulation, whereby voice quality cues associated with laryngeal consonants are spread to a following vowel, pharyngeal coarticulation also involves spreading of voice quality cues. Thus, guttural consonants are united in that they all spread voice quality cues onto a following vowel. Voice quality cues found on vowels following guttural consonants are as large as similar cues associated with guttural vowels. This acoustic similarity is shown to be the basis of a novel Guttural OCP constraint found in the language, which is demonstrated to exist via co-occurrence patterns found over a recorded database of all of the known roots. Thus, this is the first book to provide a detailed perceptual basis of an OCP constraint. The database study also reports several other novel phonotactic constraints involving gutturals, as well as a reanalysis of the well-known Back Vowel Constraint. This book describes both phonetics and phonology of the natural class of guttural consonants, and shows through a quantitative acoustic investigation how the phonetic cues associated with these sounds are the bases of phonotactic constraints involving them.

* highlights important language elements by utilising original and recent Chinese texts regarding social issues * Designed to progress learners' language competency to an advanced level through a natural connection between Chinese language learning and Chinese Social Studies. * Facilitates language learning and provides important insight for the formation of cross-cultural relationships. * Prepares readers for the transition from academic study to employment. * Written by a team of native and non-native speakers.

This auspicious new volume is designed for linguists who are interested in the deeper issues of their science. Introduction to Linguistic Philosophy lays a solid foundation of linguistic philosophy presenting theories of leading linguistic analysts such as Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Quine. I. E. MackenzieAEs exploration into these theories equips readers for advanced work on most topics in semantics and the study of language. The structure of this book reflects the fact that the philosophical study of language is not systematic, but centers on aspects of language that are considered to be of fundamental conceptual significance. Therefore, this book need not be read in any specific order. Whenever a chapter presupposes an understanding of something that is explained elsewhere in the book, a specific cross-reference is given. MackenzieAEs approach to the philosophy of language stresses the importance of observing how language is used rather than the assuming that it conforms to a pre-existing logical structure. In addition to dealing with foundational issues, such as truth, meaning, and the nature of language, this book explores specific linguistic phenomenaudescriptions, names, non-extesional contexts and quantificationuwhich have attracted considerable philosophical attention. Introduction to Linguistic Philosophy is a student-centered resource that is recommended for students in linguistics, communication, and philosophy.

This book is concerned with the meaning and use of two kinds of declarative sentences: 1) It's raining? 2) It's raining. The difference between (1) and (2) is intonational: (1) has a final rise--indicated by the question mark--while (2) ends with a fall. Christine Gunlogson's central claim is that the meaning and use of both kinds of sentences must be understood in terms of the meaning of their defining formal elements, namely declarative sentence type and rising versus falling intonation. Gunlogson supports that claim through an investigation of the use of declaratives as questions. On one hand, Gunlogson demonstrates that rising and falling declaratives share an aspect of conventional meaning attributable to their declarative form, distinguishing them both from the corresponding polar interrogative (Is it raining?) and constraining their use as questions. On the other hand, since (1) and (2) constitute a minimal pair, differing only in intonation, systematic differences in character and function between them--in particular, the relative "naturalness" of (1) as a question compared to (2) --must be located in the contrast between the fall and the rise. To account for these two sets of differences, Gunlogson gives a compositional account of rising and falling declaratives under which declarative form expresses commitment to the propositional content of the declarative. Rising versus falling intonation on declaratives is responsible for attribution of the commitment to the Addressee versus the Speaker, respectively. The result is an inherent contextual "bias" associated with declaratives, which constitutes the crucial point of difference with interrogatives. The compositional analysis is implemented in the framework of context update semantics (Heim 1982 and others), using an articulated version of the Common Ground (Stalnaker 1978) that distinguishes the commitments of the individual discourse participants. Restrictions on the use of declaratives as questions, as well as differences between rising and falling declaratives as questions, are shown to follow from this account. Gunlogson argues that neither rising nor falling declaratives are inherently questioning--rather, the questioning function of declaratives arises through the interaction of sentence type, intonation, and context.

This book was first published in 1954.

Free adjuncts and absolutes typically function as adverbial clauses which are not overtly specified for any particular adverbial relation. The book is a non-formal, corpus based study of their current use in English. Its particular focus is on a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of their semantic indeterminacy and the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors that help resolve it.

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Constructions such as 'make an accusation against', or 'give one's approval for' can be seen as 'stretched' versions of simple verbs, such as 'accuse' or 'approve of'. What is the precise linguistic nature of stretched verbs, and how many basic types are there? What kinds of grammatical connections are involved, and what lexical limits are there on these constructions? What is their precise semantic value? These are some of the questions that this book sets out to answer in its investigation of stretched verb constructions.

The book introduces a framework for examining the validity of tests that aim to assess second-language (L2) proficiency development over time and/or in relation to L2 instruction. It also reports the findings of a longitudinal study that aimed to examine the sensitivity to change of a test of L2 proficiency development. Specifically, the study examined changes over time in Progress scores and the linguistic characteristics of essays written in response to Progress by learners who took the test before, during and after a period of L2 instruction in different countries. The book furthers our understanding of the nature of L2 proficiency as it develops over time and in relation to L2 instruction and provides a framework that can be used in future endeavours to design and validate tests of L2 proficiency development. The book is intended for graduate students, test developers, and researchers doing research in applied linguistics and L2 assessment.