The Iranian languages form the major eastern branch of the Indo-European group of languages, itself part of the larger Indo-Iranian family. Estimated to have between 150 and 200 million native speakers, the Iranian languages constitute one of the world's major language families. This comprehensive volume offers a detailed overview of the principle languages which make up this group: Old Iranian, Middle Iranian, and New Iranian. The Iranian Languages is divided into fifteen chapters. The introductory chapters by the editor present a general overview and a detailed discussion of the linguistic typology of Iranian. The individual chapters which follow are written by leading experts in the field. These provide the reader with concise, non-technical descriptions of a range of Iranian languages. Each chapter follows the same pattern and sequence of topics, taking the reader through the significant features not only of phonology and morphology but also of syntax; from phrase level to complex sentences and pragmatics. Ample examples on all levels are provided with detailed annotation for the non-specialist reader. In addition, each chapter covers lexis, sociolinguistic and typological issues, and concludes with annotated sample texts. This unique resource is the ideal companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students of linguistics and language. It will also be of interest to researchers or anyone with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistics anthropology and language development. Gernot Windfuhr is Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan; he has published widely on Persian and Iranian languages and linguistics and related languages, as well as on other aspects of Iranian culture including Persian literature and Pre-Islamic Iranian religions.

After Piaget moves beyond the harsh critiques of Piaget that have for decades circled among the followers of more popular paradigms such as socio-cultural or cognitivism approaches since Piaget lost his prominence. This collection of essays looks at the achievements of Jean Piaget and how his ideas have advanced long after his death.

Piaget should be viewed as a thinker who moved towards the adoption of the dialectical perspective in developmental psychology and influenced many contemporaries. The move towards the creation of new models for psychology continues to be the hallmark of the future. Taking the qualitative synthesis of new forms seriously was central to Piaget's legacy.

The School of Geneva has made possible a variety of empirical extensions of Piaget's general ideas by his students and exemplified the heterogeneity of research traditions that have come into existence. This cutting edge work brings together new developments of ideas and research practices that have grown out of Piaget's tradition and provides a retrospective glance into the intellectual atmospheres of the different periods at which the contributors encountered Piaget. This book continues the fine innovative tradition in the History and Theory of Psychology series edited by Jaan Valsiner.

In this book, modality and its learner variety in Japanese are investigated from the perspective of grammaticalization in the functional framework. It describes the grammatical system of modality in Japanese in terms of the form-function relationship within the scope of a framework based on the European school of modality.

Accordingly, it deals with the modal system and its constituents in Japanese, accommodating all the grammatical means of modariti (modality) in the Nihongo bunpou (Japanese grammar system). This study also casts light on the learner variety of modality, which is comprised of two core systems, epistemic and deontic, both of which are evident at the utterance level and the morphosyntactic level.

The learner variety of modality elucidated here is presented as a proto-modality, which is viewed as a system in its own right rather than as an improvised or distorted version of the native modal system in Japanese.

Studies in Linguistics and Cognition offers a comprehensive collection of essays in the interdisciplinary fields of linguistics and cognition. These essays explore the connections between cognitive approaches and different theoretical and applied linguistic theories, such as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics and semantics among others, providing revealing insights into the nature of the cognitive processes underlying language. The authors discuss a variety of fundamental questions, ranging from the study of figurative language, phrasal verbs and humorous discourse to the analysis of fuzzy concepts, attitude verbs and neologisms. These and other related questions are dealt with in this integrative overview of the linguistic and cognitive processes. The volume is structured in three main sections, each corresponding to a distinct level of meaning description: Section I deals with Lexicon and Cognition, Section II with Semantics and Cognition and Section III with Communication and Cognition. This book provides thought-provoking reading for linguists, pragmaticians, psychologists, philosophers and cognitive scientists as well as scholars in computational linguistics and natural language processing who are interested in gaining a better understanding of the interface between cognition and linguistics.

The Glot International State-of-the-Article books constitute the ideal solution for every-one who wants to have a good idea of what the others are doing but does not have time to follow the developments in all other parts of the field on a day to day basis. All articles were previously published in Glot International and have been revised and updated, and special attention was given to the extensive bibliography, which constitutes an important part of each overview article. Among the essays in the first volume are overview articles dealing with VP ellipsis (by Kyle Johnson), Ergativity (by Alana Johns), tone (by San Duanmu), acquisition of phonology (by Paula Fikkert), and semantic change (by Elizabeth Closs Traugott). The second volume offers articles on subjects ranging from the development of grammars (by David Lightfoot) and markedness in phonology (by Keren Rice) to the syntactic representation of linguistic events (by Sara Thomas Rosen), optionality in Optimality syntax (by Gereon Muller) and the nature of coordination (by Ljiljana Progovac).

Generative Grammar presents a substantial contribution to the field of linguistics in drawing together for the first time the author's most significant work on the theory of generative grammar. The essays collected here display Freidin's role in moving the theory forward in terms of new proposals, and analyse the efforts to understand the evolution and history of the theory by careful investigation of how and why it has changed over the years.

The syntax and semantics of deverbal action nominals, notoriously ambiguous between event and result interpretation, have been a thought-provoking issue in many areas of theoretical linguistics. This volume contributes to current work on this topic by showing how the analysis of these nouns can benefit from a morphological and lexical-semantic treatment. While being a revealing synthesis of a number of formal accounts on this popular research domain, this study specifically targets the largely unexplored area of result nouns and addresses several crucial issues. What are result nouns in a strictly lexical-semantic perspective? Why do some verb classes allow ambiguous event/result nominal correlates, while others do not? What are the relevant verbal features involved in result noun formation? Is there a range of predictability in the number and types of meaning conveyed by a derived nominal? Couched within a framework of decompositional lexical semantic, the analysis offers original formal solutions to the polysemy issues arising in this word formation domain and convincingly argues in favor of the semantic alignment between the morphologically simplex and complex lexicon. A compelling range of Italian data provides empirical support to the author's claims.

Over the years, a major strand of Miyagawa's research has been to study how syntax, case marking, and argument structure interact. In particular, Miyagawa's work addresses the nature of the relationship between syntax and argument structure, and how case marking and other phenomena help to elucidate this relationship. In this collection of new and revised pieces, Miyagawa expands and develops new analyses for numeral quantifier stranding, ditransitive constructions, nominative/genitive alternation, "syntactic" analysis of lexical and syntactic causatives, and historical change in the accusative case marking from Old Japanese to Modern Japanese. All of these analyses demonstrate an intimate relation among case marking, argument structure, and word order.

'Referential expressions' are terms like determiners, proper names, noun phrases, and definite/indefinite articles that we use to make reference to things, beings, or events. The first of its kind, this book presents a detailed, integrated account of typical and atypical uses of referential expressions, combining insights from discourse, cognitive, and psycholinguistic literature within a functional model of language. It first establishes a foundation to reference, including an overview of key influences in the study of reference, the debates surrounding definiteness, and a functional description of referring expressions. It then draws on a variety of approaches to provide a comprehensive explanation of atypical uses, including referring in an uncollaborative context, indefinite expressions used for definite reference, reference by and for children, and finally metonymic reference with a special focus on metonymy in medical contexts. Comprehensive in scope, it is essential reading for academic researchers in syntax, discourse analysis, and cognitive linguistics.

Derivations draws together some of the most influential work of one of the world's leading syntactitians, Juan Uriagekera. These essays provide several empirical analyses and technical solutions within the Minimalist Program. The book persues a naturalistic take on Minimalism, explicitly connecting a variety of linguistic principles and conditions to arguably analogous laws and circumstances in nature.

The volume is a collection of papers reporting the results of investigations on the interaction of discourse and sentence structure in the languages of Europe. The subjects discussed in the book include: morphosyntactic characteristics of spontaneous spoken texts; different patterns of word order in a pragmatic perspective; the coding of the pragmatic functions topic and focus in sentences with non-canonical word orders (e.g. dislocations, clefts); the range of functions of verb-subject order in declarative clauses and the notion of theticity; prosodic patterns of de-accenting of given information; deixis and anaphora; coding of definiteness and article systems. The book provides the empirical basis for the comparative survey of major phenomena found in the languages of Europe which have pragmatic relevance. Beside traditional areas of investigation at the interface between syntax and pragmatics such as dislocations, new areas are explored, such as the prosody of given information. Data are considered within a functional-typological approach.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten [Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies from all the central areas of general linguistics and the linguistics of individual languages which address topical questions, discuss new data and advance the development of linguistic theory.

This monograph explores the different types of clausal relations in the world's languages. In the recent literature, there have been claims that the strict dichotomy of subordination and coordination cannot be maintained since some constructions seem to be in between these two categories. This study investigates these constructions in detail. The first part is concerned with clause chaining constructions, while the second is concerned with different cases of asymmetric coordination in English. In both parts, it is shown that the different tests to distinguish clausal relations indeed yield different results for the specific constructions. This poses a severe challenge for the established theories of clausal relations. However, as it is argued, recent analyses of coordination provide for the possibility to map a subordinate structure onto a coordinate one by means of regular transformational rules. It is shown that a single movement step derives all the peculiar properties of the phenomena in question. This book thus provides the first comprehensive solution for a long-standing problem in theoretical syntax.

This volume, first published in 1960 to commemorate the one hundredth birthday of Jespersen, collects together as many of his writings as possible in order to allow students of the English language, or indeed of language in general, to read those shorter papers which have hitherto escaped their notice. The layout of the book largely follows the nature of the subjects dealt with: English grammar, phonetics, history of English, language teaching, language in general, international language and miscellaneous papers.

With more than 50 years of teaching experience between them, Ilse Depraetere and Chad Langford present a grammar pitched precisely at advanced learners of English who need to understand how the English language really works without getting lost in the complex specifics. Now fully updated and revised throughout, the second edition of this book pulls from linguistic theory all the relevant notions that will enable the language student to fully grasp English grammar. After introducing form and function, the authors cover verbs, nouns, aspect and tense, modality and discourse. Readers are led through the underlying principles of language use, with the book presupposing only a basic grasp of linguistic terminology and focusing on the critical issues. Full of challenging exercises and supported by a companion website featuring an extensive answer key, a glossary and further exercises for study, this is the reference grammar of choice for both native and non-native English speakers.

This book systematically discusses the link between bilingual language production and its manifestation in historical documents, drawing together two branches of linguistics which have much in common but are traditionally dealt with separately. By combining the study of historical mixed texts with the principles of modern code-switching and bilingualism research, the author argues that the cognitive processes underpinning the human capacity to produce mixed utterances have remained unchanged throughout history, even as the languages themselves are constantly changing. This book will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics, syntactic theory (particularly generative grammar), language variation and change.

This is an account of the phonology and morphology of modern spoken Arabic, the first to be published in any language and based largely on the author's research. Dr Watson's approach is theoretically innovative and aware, but accessible to Arabic language specialists outside linguistics. Broad in coverage, this is an important and pioneering book.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

This volume brings together various strands of research focusing on aspects of the syntax of agreement, and the role that agreement plays in linguistic theory. The essays collected here show how and why agreement has emerged in recent years as the central theoretical construct in minimalism. Although the theoretical context of the volume is minimalist in character, Boeckx formulates formal and substantive universals in the domain of agreement.

With close to 100 million speakers, Tai-Kadai constitutes one of the world's major language families. The Tai-Kadai Languages provides a unique, comprehensive, single-volume tome covering much needed grammatical descriptions in the area.

It presents an important overview of Thai that includes extensive cross-referencing to other sections of the volume and sign-posting to sources in the bibliography. The volume also includes much new material on Lao and other Tai-Kadai languages, several of which are described here for the first time.

Much-needed and highly useful, The Tai-Kadai Languages is a key work for professionals and students in linguistics, as well as anthropologists and area studies specialists.

ANTHONY V. N. DILLER is Foundation Director of the National Thai Studies Centre, at the Australian National University.

JEROLD A. EDMONDSON is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas Arlington and a member of the Academy of Distinguished Scholars.

YONGXIAN LUO is Senior Lecturer in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne and a member of the Australian Linguistic Society.