In order to bring some minimal amount of order to the chaos that almost inevitably attends the use of the word 'existential' in a linguistic investigation, the author reserved the term existential sentence (ES) to designate all and only those English sentences in which there appears an occurrence of the unstressed, non-deictic, 'existential' there. Thus the term will be used as a characterisation of a class of syntactic objects, not as a semantic description. With ES sentences including formations such as 'There were several people talking' and 'There ensued a riot', perhaps nowhere else do we find so clearly displayed the complexity and subtlety of the syntactic and semantic interactions which determine the nature of human language.

The first available Elementary Grammar of Old Icelandic in the English language, this book is primarily intended for the beginner. To this end, the greater part of the space is devoted to a detailed treatment of the inflexions and of such points of syntax as are likely to cause difficulties.

This study deals with the complementation of verbs in Icelandic. The main emphasis is on clausal complements of verbs and the syntactic rules that operate in and on such complements. This study is written with two kinds of readers in mind. First, it is written for the theoretical linguist who is looking for phenomena of general theoretical interest, i.e. facts about Icelandic syntax that bear on the question what an adequate general linguistic theory must be like and hence shed some light on the nature of human language. Second, the study is also written with a different kind of reader in mind, namely a reader who is interested in Icelandic syntax in particular, perhaps from a more descriptive point of view.

This book discusses a class of Reduced Constructions which exhibit both mono- and bi-clausal characteristics. In Spanish, as well as other Romance languages, the most salient mono-clausal characteristic is the possibility of clitic climbing, i.e. the possibility of an object clitic attaching to a verb that is higher (in the appropriate sense) than the verb which selects the object to which the clitic corresponds. Reduced constructions come in essentially two varieties: clause reduction (or restructuring) constructions and union (or causative / perception verb)constructions. There has been a good deal of work on a number of aspects of reduced constructions; here the author discusses work in three areas: the analysis of pronominal clitics, the structure of clause reduction and union constructions (and how these treatments interact with the analysis of clitics to yield an account of clitic climbing), and the encoding of embedded subjects in union constructions.

'Lexical Phonology and Morphology' presents a description of the phonology and morphology of the nominal class system in Fula, a dialect which displays 21 nominal classes. These are identified by suffixes, which can attach to nominal, verbal and adjectival stems. The main objective of this work is to show, through a lexical analysis, that there are only two monomorphemic marker variants, and that the distribution of these variants is predictable.

Typical cases of agreement are easy to identify, but where the boundaries of agreement lie depend on what aspects of the agreement relation are considered to be defining properties. It is a short step from viewing agreement in the traditional way, as a matching of features, to defining agreement as any relation that ensures consistency of information in two separate structures. This book takes as its topic agreement as it is traditionally conceived, one that only involves morphosyntactic categories.

In recent work the imperative seems to have attracted much less attention than the interrogative, perhaps because it appears to be a rather simple structure, easily accounted for in a page or two in manuals of English grammar, and probably also because in so many respects it seems to be a rather awkward exception to otherwise powerful generalisations. This has meant that quite general analyses sometimes find it necessary to relegate the imperative to a footnote or exclude it from the discussion altogether, and that even when linguists have addressed themselves specifically to an account of imperatives, they have sometimes concluded that the imperative is simply an inherently idiosyncratic construction where we should not expect to find the tidy regularities we look for elsewhere. However, this study demonstrates that there are many interesting regularities to be accounted for, and that useful generalisations can be made which relate the imperative to other constructions. Throughout the work the emphasis is on detailed description of present-day usage, with the aim of identifying patterns which have previously been ignored and seeking explanations for those which have previously been dismissed as arbitrary. As well as examining the syntactic behaviour of the imperative, the book proposes a semantic characterisation quite different from the types usually adopted, and links this to a pragmatic account of the wide range of ways in which imperatives may be used and interpreted. There is no attempt to formulate syntactic rules within a specific theoretical framework; rather, generalisations are stated which any descriptively adequate grammar, of whatever theoretical slant, should be able to capture.

This book focuses on two major traditions in the study of Modern English grammar: 'old grammar' in the Great Tradition of Sweet, Poutsma, Kruisinga, Curme, Jespersen and Quirk; and 'new grammar' in applications to Modern English of Chomskyan generative syntax. The purpose is to promote the study of Modern English grammar through proper acquaintance with both these two approaches; and in general to promote positive evaluations of pluriformity in Modern English grammar. For the first time, this book brings together in one place general presentations of the two traditions, and of their mutual relations and perceptions. But it argues against the view that the one approach to grammar may 'use' the other. It sees the two approaches as essentially incompatible: 'old' grammar proceeds inductively and aims at comprehensive coverage of facts; 'new' grammar is deductive and attempts to attain depth in its accounts of pertinent facts. As the case studies show, both approaches make contributions to the study of Modern English grammar - precisely provided they retain their own distinctive natures. The core of book is it's a-Z case studies. These are detailed comparisons, arranged alphabetically by title for ease of reference, of twenty-six problems in Modern English grammar, from both the 'old' and 'new' viewpoints.

This collection of 15 articles reflects Edward Keenan's long-standing research interests in the comparative syntax of the languages of the world. It includes two seminal 'foundation' articles, Noun Phrase Accessibility and Universal Grammar (with Bernard Comrie) and Towards a Universal Definition of 'Subject of'. Most of the other articles have appeared in a variety of relatively inaccessible places, and so this book brings together for the first time a large body of work supporting the research directions taken in the foundation articles. In addition, one article of a psycholinguistic sort was specially prepared for this volume.

The main concern of this work is whether morphemes play a role in the lexical representation and processing of several types of polymorphemic words and, more particularly, at what precise representational and processing level. The book comprises two theoretical contributions and a number of empirical ones. One theoretical paper discusses several possible motivations for a morphologically organised mental lexicon (like the economy of representation view, and the efficiency of processing view), and lays out the weaknesses that are associated with some of these motivations. The other theoretical paper offers an interactive-activation reinterpretation of the findings that were originally reported within the lexical search framework. The empirical papers together cover a relatively broad array of language types and mainly deal with visual word recognition in normals in the context of lexical morphology (derived and compound words). Evidence is reported on the function of stems and affixes as processing units in prefixed and suffixed derivations. The role of semantic transparency in the lexical representation of compounds is studied, as is the effect of orthographic ambiguity on the parsing of novel compounds. The inflection-derivational distinction is approached in the context of Finnish, a highly agglutinative language with much richer morphology than the languages usually studied in psycholinguistic experiments on polymorphemic words. Two other contributions also approach the study object in the context of relatively uncharted domains: one presents data on Chinese, a language which uses a different script-type (logographic) from the languages that are usually studied (alphabetic script), and another one presents data on language production.

Definitions of language cluster around two non-contradictory views: one that language is a shared code, a social entity, and the other that language is the knowledge that enables a native speaker to produce and understand speech. In examining the language and culture of the Tojolabal (Mayan) Indians of Mexico, this book argues that language is a cognitive system, as is culture, of which language is but a part. The author is most interested in the interfaces between language and social phenomena and between language and other systems of culture, and demonstrates that research on the dialectic between language and social context, and that between language and other systems of culture, leads to fruitful generalizations about the nature of language as a human capacity.

This study covers a number of topics that are prominent in the grammars of Australian Aboriginal languages, especially ergativity and manifestations of the hierarchy that runs from the speech-act participants down to inanimates. This hierarchy shows up in case marking, number marking and agreement, advancement and cross-referencing. Chapter 1 provides an overall picture of Australian languages. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 deal with case systems, including voice alternations and other advancements. Chapter 5 deals with the distribution of case marking within the noun phrase. Chapter 6 deals with systems that allow the cross-referencing of bound pronouns. Chapter 7 deals with clauses which appear to have more than one verb. Chapter 8 deals with compound and complex sentences. Chapter 9 deals with word order, and emphasises a theme introduced in Chapter 5, namely the widespread use of discontinuous phrases. Chapter 10 draws together ergativity and various manifestations of the hierarchy, and attempts to interpret their distribution. The final section provides an interesting hypothesis about the evolution of core grammar in Australia.

This book treats aspects of the syntax of Halkomelem, a Salish language spoken in southwestern British Columbia, specifically those constructions which involve objects, and seeks to accomplish two goals. First, it provides natural language fodder for the debate concerning the nature of grammatical relations and their place in syntactic theory. Second, by showing that Halkomelem draws from a familiar class of universal constructions and organizes its syntax around some simple and common parameters, the author has brought the Salish languages, which due to their phonological and morphological complexity seemed particularly fearsome, into cross-linguistic perspective.

This book explores several topics in Cree morphology, syntax and discourse structure. Cree, an Algonquian language, is non-configurational: the grammatical relations of subject and object are not expressed by word order or other constituent structure relations, as they are in a configurational language like English. Instead, subjects and objects are expressed by means of the inflection on the verb. Cree is typical of non-configurational languages in allowing a great deal of word order variation. This study examines in detail aspects of the Plains Cree dialect, giving a valuable insight into the structure of this endangered language.

This is the first major study of any Chapakuran language and makes an important contribution to linguistic theory. This study is especially timely as the Chapakuran languages of Western Brazil and Eastern Bolivia are endangered, and less than 2,000 known speakers of Wari and its related dialects are left in existence.

Strong linguistic and ecological pressures are gradually pushing Koromfe, the local language spoken in the north of Burkina Faso, towards extinction. This book sheds light on many questions concerning both Koromfe & genetic & general linguistic issues.

The analysis is a contribution to contemporary linguistics, particularly the theory of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Within the theoretical framework of predicate-argument syntax (also known as semantic syntax), the author analyses the role of the adjective as an adjunctive predicative expression. The aim of the research is to create a description of an adjective which could be prospectively useful as a point of departure for analyses of phenomena analogous from the communication point of view in other languages. The book contains a rich text material and a large number of valuable pragmatic insights into Polish nominal syntagmas with an adjective.

This is the second volume of the multi-volume set A Contemporary Grammar of British English Dialects. The book again offers qualitative as well as corpus-based quantitative studies on grammatical variation in the British Isles. The three parts investigate complement clauses (Daniela Kolbe), personal pronouns (Nuria Hernandez) and modals (Monika Edith Schulz). The volume is of interest to dialectologists, sociolinguists, typologists, historical linguists, grammarians, and anyone working on the structure of spontaneous spoken English.

This book is a compilation of manuscripts and publications from 2001-2010 by Jean-Roger Vergnaud, in collaboration with colleagues and students. This work is guided by the scientific belief that broader mathematical principles should guide linguistic inquiry, as they guide classical biology and physics. From this, Vergnaud's hypotheses take the representation of the computational component of language to a more abstract level: one that derives constituent structure. He treats linguistic features as primitives, and argues that a 2 x n matrix allows for multiple discrete dimensions to represent symmetries in linguistic features and to derive the fabric of syntax (and perhaps of phonology as well). Three primary research questions guide the core of these papers. (A) Methodologically, how can broadly defined mathematical/cognitive principles guide linguistic investigation? (B) To what extent do general mathematical principles apply across linguistic domains? What principles guide computation at different levels of linguistic structure (phonology, metrical structure, syntax)? (C) How is the computational domain defined? In these manuscripts, Vergnaud's goal is not to radically depart from the Minimalist Program within generative grammar, but rather to take the underlying goal of the generative program and bring it to an even more general scientific level. The themes of symmetry and periodicity in this book reflect his goal of scientific progress in linguistics, and he has opened the doors to new exploration of old empirical problems in linguistics that may, someday, have deeper biological and physical explanations through the theory presented in this publication.

This book is the first major cross-linguistic study of 'flexible words', i.e. words that cannot be classified in terms of the traditional lexical categories Verb, Noun, Adjective or Adverb. Flexible words can - without special morphosyntactic marking - serve in functions for which other languages must employ members of two or more of the four traditional, 'specialised' word classes. Thus, flexible words are underspecified for communicative functions like 'predicating' (verbal function), 'referring' (nominal function) or 'modifying' (a function typically associated with adjectives and e.g. manner adverbs). Even though linguists have been aware of flexible world classes for more than a century, the phenomenon has not played a role in the development of linguistic typology or modern grammatical theory. The current volume aims to address this gap by offering detailed studies on flexible word classes, investigating their properties and what it means for the grammar of a language to have such a word class. It includes new cross-linguistic studies of word class systems as well as original descriptive and theoretical contributions from authors with an expert knowledge of languages that have played - or should play - a role in the debate about flexible word classes, including Kharia, Riau Indonesian, Santali, Sri Lanka Malay, Lushootseed, Gooniyandi, and Late Archaic Chinese.

This book analyzes the form and function of the English passive from a verb-based point of view. It takes the position that the various surface forms of the passive (with or without thematic subject, with or without object, with or without by-phrase, with or without auxiliary) have a common source and are determined by the interplay of the syntactic properties of the verb and general syntactic principles. Each structural element of the passive construction is examined separately, and the participle is considered the only defining component of the passive. Special emphasis is put on the existence of an implicit argument (ususally an agent) and its representation in the passive. A review of data from syntax, language acquisition, and psycholinguistics shows that the implicit agent is not just a conceptually understood argument. It is argued that it is represented at the level of argument structure and that this is what sets the passive apart from other patient-subject constructions. A corpus-based case study on the use of the passive in academic writing analyzes the use of the passive in this particular register. One of the findings is that about 20-25% of passives occur in constructions that do not require an auxiliary, a result that challenges corpus studies on the use of the passive that only consider full be-passives. It is also shown that new active-voice constructions have emerged that compete with the passive without having a more visible agent. The emergence of these constructions (such as "This paper argues...") is discussed in the context of changes in the rhetoric of scientific discourse. The book is mainly of interest to linguists and graduate students in the areas of English syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1977, Social Class, the Nominal Group and Verbal Strategies reports on the results of a grammatical analysis of the speech of a large sample (about 300) of five-year-old middle- and working-class children. The author is concerned in particular to answer the questions: What is the relationship, within certain restricted contexts, between the use of particular grammatical structures and factors such as social class, IQ and sex? How are any differences in the type or frequency of structures to be interpreted? The central part of the book presents the results of a set of correlations: the correlations of linguistic categories on the one hand, with sociological or 'background' categories on the other. The author then sets this study and its results in the perspective of related research and comments on some aspects of the 'deficit-difference' controversy. Finally, he presents his own conclusions in a detailed discussion. He argues that, instead of trying to ascertain the purely linguistic competence of children from different backgrounds, we must rather compare the different verbal strategies they use in a particular situation or context. The book will be of interest to students of language, linguistics, pedagogy and education.

The concept of 'trigger' is a core concept of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. The idea that certain types of movement are triggered by some property of the target position is at least as old as the notion that the movement of noun phrases to the subject position is triggered by their need to receive nominative case. In more recent versions of syntactic theory, triggering mechanisms are thought to regulate all of movement. Furthermore, a quite narrow range of triggering mechanisms is permitted. As is to be expected, such a restrictive approach meets a variety of difficulties. Specifically, the question is whether all triggering elements required to cover displacement of all kinds in natural language can be independently motivated. Further, how can a trigger theory, which crucially relies on the idea that all movement is obligatory, deal with apparently optional movement processes? Are features an adequate means to express the triggering function in all cases? More radically, are all movement phenomena really the result of the checking of trigger features? And what about apparent triggering factors that are 'external' to syntax such as prosody - can they be captured in a rigid trigger theory? In other words, could certain aspects of triggered movement be due to interface conditions? Such is the range of questions addressed by the fourteen contributions to this book. They cover a considerable range of languages (including Afrikaans, Breton, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, German, Gungbe, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kiswahili, Romanian). These papers present materials, both empirical and theoretical, that will not fail to have considerable impact on the further development of the concept of trigger in syntactic theory.

Again firmly rooted in Leonard Talmy's Cognitive Semantics, this new study moves beyond the analysis of single schematic systems in language contributing to the linguistic task of conceptual integration. It investigates for the first time effects of linking up Force Dynamics, a conceptual category generalizing over the traditional notion of the causative, and the Attention system of language, as detailed in Talmy's most recent extended draft version. To accommodate the conceptual and formal complexities involved at the interface of Attention, Force Dynamics, and Cognitive State and to allow for an appropriate degree of fine-grainedness the analytical framework affords, the exposition has been constrained to the golf scenario, where forces are at work in the physical and sociodynamic domains.