This work explores effect of speech perception strategies upon morphological structure. Jennifer Hay investigates the role of two factors known to be relevant to speech perceptions: phonotactics and lexical frequency.

Lithuanian: A Comprehensive Grammar is a complete reference guide to modern Lithuanian grammar. It includes detailed treatment of all grammatical structures and parts of speech, and their semantic and grammatical categories: gender, number, case of nouns, adjectives, numerals and pronouns; degree of comparison of adjectives and adverbs; tense, mood, person, transitivity, aspect and voice of verbs. The morphology chapters describe the formation, inflection and use of the different forms of every part of speech. Under syntax the syntactic relations and types of sentences, the expression of questions and negation, comparison, word order and interpolation are described. All grammatical phenomena are illustrated with examples from the modern language. Descriptions of phonetics and accentuation as well as orthography and punctuation are also included. Lithuanian: A Comprehensive Grammar is an essential reference for learners and users of Lithuanian. It is suitable for independent study and use in schools, colleges, universities and adult classes of all types.

'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.

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.

In the last few years categorial grammars have been the focus of dramatically expanded interest and activity, both theoretical and computational. This book, the first introduction to categorical grammars, is written as an objective critical assessment. Categorial grammars offer a radical alternative to the phrase-structure paradigm, with deep roots in the philosophy of language, logic and algebra. Mary McGee Wood outlines their historical evolution and discusses their formal basis, starting with a quasi-canonical core and considering a number of possible extensions. She also explores their treatment of a number of linguistic phenomena, including passives, raising, discontinuous dependencies and non-constituent coordination, as well as such general issues as word order, logic, psychological plausibility and parsing. This introduction to categorial grammars will be of interest to final year undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in current theories of grammar, including comparative, descriptive, and computational linguistics.

This book studies the syntax of switch-reference and its implications for the theory of grammar. Switch-reference, found in many genetically and geographically diverse languages, is a phenomenon whereby referential identity between subjects of hierarchically adjacent clauses is encoded by the presence of a morpheme, usually suffixed to the verb of the subordinate clause. This book argues that switch-reference should be analysed as a syntactic rather than a purely pragmatic or functional feature of language.

In this volume, the author reviews the results of research on language performance and proposes a model of production and comprehension. Although recent developments in linguistics are taken into account, consideration of other requirements of a performance model leads to the conclusion that the grammar the speaker has in mind differs from the grammar as currently conceived of by most linguists. The author is also critical of recent computer simulations of language performance on the basis that they fall short of describing what goes on in human production and comprehension. The author therefore proposes that the basic issues must be rethought and new theoretical foundations reformulated, in order to arrive at a viable theory of language functioning. In developing the framework of the model presented in this book, requirements of flexibility in the performance mechanisms, the probabilistic nature of comprehension processes, and the interleaving of linguistic rules with context and knowledge of the world are emphasized.

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.

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.

The central concern of this book is the explanation of linguistic form. It examines in detail certain cross-linguistic patterns in morphological systems, providing unified explanations of the observation that suffixes predominate over prefixes and the correlation between affix position and syntactic head position. The explanation of the suffixing preference is one which appeals to principles of language processing, tempered by cognitive constraints underlying language change. These factors, coupled with generative morphological analysis, also provide an explanation for the head/affix correlation. The extended case-study illustrates a unified, integrative approach to explanation in linguistics which stresses two major features: the search for cognitive or other functional principles that could potentially underlie formally specified regularities; and the need for a micro-analysis of the mechanisms of 'linkage' between regularity and explanation. The natural methodological consequence of such an approach is a move towards greater cooperation between the various subdisciplines of linguistics, as well as a greatly needed expansion of cross-disciplinary research. The author's broad training in theoretical morphology, formal and typological universals, and language processing, allows him to cross traditional boundaries and view the complex interactions between theoretical linguistic principles and cognitive mechanisms with considerable clarity of vision.

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 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.

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.

Accessing Noun-Phrase Antecedents offers a radical shift in the analysis of discourse anaphora, from a purely pragmatic account to a cognitive account, in terms of processing procedures. Mira Ariel defines referring expressions as markers signalling the degree of Accessibility in memory of the antecedent. The notion of Accessibility is explicitly defined, the crucial factors being the Salience of the antecedent, and the Unity between the antecedent and the anaphor. This analysis yields an astonishing array of new results. The precise distribution of referring expressions in actual discourse is directly predicted. Several universals of anaphoric relations are stated. Thus, although not all languages necessarily have the same markers, and nor do they assign them precisely the same function, Ariel shows that they all obey the same Accessibility marking hierarchy. This book will be compulsory reading for anyone with an interest in the semantics and pragmatics of referring expressions, in the interaction of semantics and pragmatics, and more generally in the interaction between peripheral and central cognitive systems.

This book examines the frequencies of the six possible basic word (or constituent) orders (SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS) provides a typologically grounded explanation for those frequencies in terms of three independent, functional principles of linguistic organization. From a database of nearly 1,000 languages and their basic constituent orders, a sample of 400 languages was produced that is statistically representative of both the genetic and areal distributions of the world's languages. This sample reveals the following relative frequencies (in order from high to low) of basic constituent order types: (1) SOV and SVO, (2) VSO, (3) VOS and OVS, (4) OSV. It is argued that these relative frequencies can be explained to be the result of the possible interactions of three fundamental functional principles of linguistic organization. Principle 1, the thematic information principle, specifies that initial position is the cross-linguistically favoured position for clause-level thematic information. Principle 2, the verb-object bonding principle, describes the cross-linguistic tendency for a transitive verb and its object to form a more tightly integrated unit, syntactically and semantically, than does a transitive verb and its subject. Principle 3, the animated principle, describes the cross-linguistic tendency for semantic arguments which are either more animate or more agentive to occur earlier in the clause. Each principle is motivated independently of the others, drawing on cross-linguistic data from more than 80 genetically and typologically diverse languages. Given these three independently motivated functional principles, it is argued that the relative frequency of basic constituent order types is due to the tendency for the three principles to be maximally realized in the world's languages. SOV and SVO languages are typologically most frequent because such basic orders reflect all three principles. The remaining orders occur less frequently because they reflect fewer of the principles. The 1,000-language database and the genetic and areal classification frames are published as appendices to the volume.

This book presents an account of certain problems of morphological analysis that occurs within a theoretical framework that derives its inspiration from recent studies of the lexicon in generative grammar. The starting point is the controversy about the proper analysis of synthetic compounds. Are they really compounds, or phrasal derivations, or do they constitute a type of word formation of their own?

What is the relationship between the structure of existential sentences and their meaning? How do hearers interpret existential sentences using pragmatic assumptions? This study attempts to account for the relationship between the structure of existential sentences (ES) and their meaning. The study of ES has received a great deal of attention because the construction has complex syntactic properties, is associated with restrictions of a semantic nature, and provides an interesting area for investigation at a pragmatic level.

According to Chomsky, to learn a language is to develop a grammar for it - a generative grammar which assigns a definite structure and a definite meaning to each of a definite set of sentences. This forms the speaker's linguistic competence, which represents a distinct faculty of the mind, called the faculty of language. This view has been widely criticised, from many separate angles and by many different authors, including some of Chomsky's pupils. As one of the earliest and most persistent critics, Professor Matthews is especially well placed to tie these arguments together. He concludes that Chomsky's notion of competence finds no support within linguistics. It can be defended, if at all, only by assuming a traditional philosophy of mind. The notion of grammar should therefore be restricted to descriptive linguistics, and should not have psychological interpretations foisted on it. Peter Matthews' book covers a variety of topics, from morphology to speech acts, from word meaning to the study of language variation, and from blending in syntax to the relation of language and culture. This wide range of subject matter is incisively handled in a style which is both elegant and economical.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.