This text traces the many strands of study in the field of word formation that have developed since the seminal work of Marchand and Lees in the 1960s. It covers the historical development of theories of word formation within generative grammar.

The alignment splits in the Neo-Aramaic languages display a considerable degree of diversity, especially in terms of agreement. While earlier studies have generally oversimplified the actual state of affairs, Paul M. Noorlander offers a meticulous and clear account of nearly all microvariation documented so far, addressing all relevant morphosyntactic phenomena. By means of fully glossed and translated examples, the author shows that this vast variation in morphological alignment, including ergativity, is unexpected from a functional typological perspective. He argues the alignment splits are rather the outcome of several construction-specific processes such as internal system harmonization and grammaticalization, as well as language contact.

The book examines the originsof language and grammar and also looks at the nature of being human. As a species, we have a long history of trying to find aspects of ourselves that are exclusively human.Some of the features of humanity thought to be solely the realm of the spiritual - for example cognition andemotion -are increasingly being explained in terms of physical effects.Exclusive physical functions are now questioned too - bipedality, dexterity, socialisation, delayed gratification. Couldthe differences between the human and animal kingdombe a matter of degrees rather than absolutes? Language, and language grammar,is one territory that might provide an answer. Martin Edwardes builds a story examining the evolutionary sources of our self-recognition, of human culture and social institutions andof the cognitive forms that lie behind our linguistic grammatical forms.He covers the current thinking in the field of language origins and goes on todevelop an essentialnewtheory of the origins of grammar.

This innovative analysis of noun incorporation and related linguistic phenomena does more than just give readers an insightful exploration of its subject. The author re-evaluates and forges links between two influential theories of phrase structure: Chomsky s Bare Phrase Structure and Richard Kayne s Antisymmetry. The text details how the two linguistic paradigms interact to cause differing patterns of noun incorporation across world languages. With a solid empirical foundation in its close reading of Northern Iroquoian languages especially, Barrie argues that noun incorporation needs no special mechanism, but results from a symmetry-breaking operation.

Drawing additional data from English, German, Persian, Tamil and the Polynesian language Niuean, this synthesis has major implications for our understanding of the formation of the verbal complex and the intra-position (roll-up) movement. It will be priority reading for students of phrase structure, as well as Iroquoian language scholars.

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This book contains eight studies on Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), with work by FDG's foremost proponents, who provide both an introduction to the theory and a glimpse of current research projects. FDG derives its name from taking the discourse act as the basic unit of linguistic analysis. Each such unit receives four paralle analyses displaying its interpersonal, representational, morphosyntactic and phonological characteristics respectively. What is striking about the emergence of FDG is that it enters into lively debate with various other contemporary frameworks that share its functionalist orientation. This facet of FDG is highlighted in this book, every chapter of which brings out the interconnectedness of current theoretical trends.

This textbook provides a comprehensive, balanced introduction to syntactic theory. The author shows how the diversity of syntactic theories, which at first seems confusing, can be approached by examining how each deals with conflicting data. This approach helps the student to understand how syntactic theories are related to each other, what they necessarily have in common, and in what ways they actually differ. Theories introduced here include Transformational Generative Grammar, Relational Grammar, Word Grammar, Functional Grammar, and Optimality Theory, amongst others. The textbook includes chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading, exercises and a glossary of terms, which make this text an essential student-friendly resource. The appendix contains parallel data from six languages, which can be used for analysis or reference. "An Introduction to Syntactic Theory" will be essential reading for undergraduate students of linguistics, whether they are new to the subject or studying it at a more advanced level.

This text provides an overview of the literature on bilingual sentence processing from a psycholinguistic and linguistic perspective. Research focuses on both the visual and spoken modalities, including specific areas of research interest including an integrated review of methods and the utility of those methods which allows readers to have the appropriate background and context for the chapters that follow. Next, issues surrounding acquisition and pragmatic usage are covered with a focus on code-switching and the actual parsing of sentence material both within and between languages. Third, issues regarding memory, placing language in a broader context, are explored as the connection between language, memory, and perception is reviewed for bilingual speakers. Finally, all of this work has direct implications for educational settings-specifically issues surrounding the assessment of proficiency, the development and nature of dominance, and the acquisition of reading skills and reading comprehension for bilingual speakers.

The main function of language is to convey meaning. Therefore, argues Bernd Heine in these pages, the question of why language is structured the way it is must first of all be answered with reference to this function. Linguistic explanations offered in terms of other exponents of language structure (for example, syntax) are likely to highlight peripheral or epi-phenomenal-rather than central-characteristics of language structure. Heine provides a solid introductory treatment of the ways in which language structure (that is, grammar) and language usage can be explained with reference to the processes underlying human conceptualization and communication. Exploring and area of linguistics that has developed only recently and is rapidly expanding, Cognitive Foundations of Grammar will appeal to students of linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, especially those interested in grammaticalization processess.

Moves the analysis of grammar and language structure onto the next stage - interpreting it from a semantic and pragmatic point of view. Clearly shows how grammar works in different literary contexts - literary, non-literary, spoken and written. Explores a wide range of linguistic themes, including sociolinguistics, language acquisition and register. Provides guidance on how people can put their knowledge of grammar into daily practice and how this is interpreted by others. Organised in the same way as Rediscover Grammar for quick reference. Unique, lively writing and clear explanations from the world-class grammar expert.

One of the core challenges in linguistics is elucidating compounds-their formation as well as the reasons their structure varies between languages. This book on Modern Greek rises to the challenge with a meticulous treatment of its diverse, intricate compounds, a study as grounded in theory as it is rich in data. Enhancing our knowledge of compounding and word-formation in general, its exceptional scope is a worthy model for linguists, particularly morphologists, and offers insights for students of syntax, phonology, dialectology and typology, among others. The author examines first-tier themes such as the order and relations of constituents, headedness, exocentricity, and theta-role saturation. She shows how Modern Greek compounding relates to derivation and inflection, and charts the boundaries between compounds and phrases. Exploring dialectically variant compounds, and identifying historical changes, the analysis extends to similarly formed compounds in wholly unrelated languages.

The Athabaskan language family is the largest group of Amerindian languages in North America, including languages such as Navajo and Apache. This volume is a collection of previously unpublished articles on Athabaskan syntax, semantics, and morphology, and will be of interest not only to those with a anthropological interest in Native American languages, but also to theoretical linguists concerned with issues discussed. The book will also be useful in that it directly confronts the problems facing languages like Navajo as they struggle to survive; the list of contributors thus brings together not only prominent linguists (including Navajos) but educators as well.

This is the first book to present Canonical Typology, a framework for comparing constructions and categories across languages. The canonical method takes the criteria used to define particular categories or phenomena (eg negation, finiteness, possession) to create a multidimensional space in which language-specific instances can be placed. In this way, the issue of fit becomes a matter of greater or lesser proximity to a canonical ideal. Drawing on the expertise of world class scholars in the field, the book addresses the issue of cross-linguistic comparability, illustrates the range of areas - from morphosyntactic features to reported speech - to which linguists are currently applying this methodology, and explores to what degree the approach succeeds in discovering the elusive canon of linguistic phenomena.

This first volume in a series presenting the collected works of Professor M.A.K. Halliday contains seventeen papers, including a new piece titled "A Personal Perspective" in which Professor Halliday offers his own perspective on language and linguistic theory as covered in his collected works. The first part presents early papers (1957-1966) on basic concepts such as category, structure, class, and rank. The second part highlights how over the span of two decades (mid-sixties to mid-eighties) Halliday developed systemic theory to account for linguistic phenomena extending upward through the ranks from word to clause to text. The third part includes more recent work in which Halliday discusses the issues confronting those who would study linguistics, or as Firth described it "language turned back on itself."

This book is all about ellipsis in natural language - the phenomena in which words and phrases go missing in the linguistic signal, but are nonethe less interpreted by the receiver, eg in the following sentence, the second instance of read is understood whether or not it is spoken Claire read a book and Heather [read] a magazine. Contemporary theoretical linguistics has described several forms of ellipsis in English, and different syntactic mechanisms have been proposed which account for their structures. Kirsten Gengel investigates pseudogapping, which, she proposes, is one variety of ellipsis. At the heart of her discussion lies the interaction between focus and deletion. Her analysis - which draws on new research in Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch, as well as data from Portuguese, French, and English - provides a novel approach to not only this particular form of ellipsis but to the derivation of ellipsis in general, and has the potential of unifying several elliptical phenomena in generative grammar.

This book examines the diachronic development of negation in Low German, from Old Saxon up to the point at which Middle Low German is replaced by High German as the written language. It investigates both the development of standard negation, or Jespersen's Cycle, and the changing interaction between the expression of negation and indefinites in its scope, giving rise to negative concord along the way. Anne Breitbarth shows that developments in Low German form a missing link between those in High German, English, and Dutch, which have been much more widely researched. These changes are analysed using a generative account of syntactic change combined with minimalist assumptions concerning the syntax of negation and negative concord. The book provides the first substantial, diachronic analysis of the development of the expression of negation through the Old Saxon and Middle Low German periods, and will be of interest not only to students and researchers in the history of German, but also to all those working on the syntax of negation from a diachronic and synchronic perspective.

Kyle Johnson University of Massachusetts at Amherst Ian Roberts University of Stuttgart An important chapter in the history of syntactic theory opened as the 70's reached their close. The revolution that Chomsky had brought to linguistics had to this point engendered theories which remained within the grip of the philologists' construction-based vision. Their image of language as a catalogue of independent constructions served as the backdrop against which much of transformational grammar's detailed exploration evolved. In a sense, the highly successful pursuit of th phonology and morphology in the 19 century as compared to the absence of similar results in syntax (beyond observations such as Wackemagel's Law, etc. ) attests to this: just noting that, for example, French relative clauses allow subject-postposing but not preposition-stranding while English relatives do not allow the former but do allow the latter does not take us far beyond a simple record of the facts. Prior to this point, th syntactic theory had not progressed beyond the 19 century situation. But as the 80's approached, this image began to give way to a different one: grammar as a puzzle of interlocking "modules," each made up of syntactic principles which cross-cut the philologist's constructions. More and more, "constructions" decomposed into the epiphenomenal interplay of encapsulated mini-theories: X Theory, Binding Theory, Bounding Theory, Case Theory, Theta Theory, and so on. Syntactic analyses became reoriented toward the twin goals of identifying the content of these modules and deconstructing into them the descriptive results of early transformational grammar.

Headless relative clauses have received little attention in the linguistic literature, despite the many morpho-syntactic and semantic puzzles they raise. These clauses have been even more neglected in the study of Mesoamerican languages. Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages constitutes the first in-depth, systematic study of the topic. Spanning fifteen languages from five language families, it is the broadest crosslinguistic study of headless relative clauses yet conducted. For most of these languages there is no previous descriptive or documentary material on wh-constructions in general, let alone headless relative clauses. Many of the languages are threatened or endangered; all are understudied. Each chapter in this volume constitutes an original contribution to typological and theoretical linguistics. The first chapter provides a comprehensive introduction to the varieties of headless relative clauses and their importance to the study of human language, while the other chapters are language-specific and follow a uniform format to facilitate comparisons and generalizations across languages. Through the collective work of a team of twenty-one scholars, Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages presents a clear and systematic introduction to relative and interrogative clauses in Mesoamerican languages.

Over the past two decades, statistical and other quantitative concepts, models and methods have been increasingly gaining importance and interest in all areas of linguistics and text analysis, as well as in a number of neighboring disciplines and areas of application. The term "quantitative linguistics" comprises all scientific and technical approaches which use such terms and methods in the analysis of or work with language(s), texts and other related subjects. The 71 articles in this handbook, written by internationally-recognized experts, offer a broad, up-to-date overview of the scientific-theoretical principles, the history, the diversity of the subject areas studied, the methods and models used, the results obtained thus far and their applications. The articles are divided up into thirteen chapters: the first chapter includes contributions on the basic principles and the history of the field, nine additional chapters are dedicated to individual descriptions of the levels of linguistic research (from phonology to pragmatics) as well as typological, diachronic and geolinguistic questions. The next two chapters include a description of important models, hypotheses and principles; selected areas of application; and references to neighboring disciplines. The last portion of the handbook is an informative contribution, with information about publication forums, bibliographies, major projects, Internet links, etc. This handbook is useful not only for researchers, teachers and students of all branches of linguistics and the philologies, but also for scientists in neighboring fields, whose theoretical and empirical research touches on linguistic questions (for instance, psychology and sociology), or for those who want to make use of the proven methods or results from quantitative linguistics in their own research. Key features: International authors Unique and fundamental systematics of the field Multidisciplinary and application-oriented

The monograph constitutes an attempt to demonstrate how Cognitive Grammar (CG) can be employed in the foreign language classroom with a view to aiding learners in better understanding the complexities of English grammar. Its theoretical part provides a brief overview of the main tenets of Cognitive Grammar as well as illustrating how the description of English tense and aspect can be approached from a traditional and a CG perspective. The empirical part reports the findings of an empirical study which aimed to compare the effects of instruction utilizing traditional pedagogic descriptions with those grounded in CG on the explicit an implicit knowledge of the Present Simple and Present Continuous Tenses. The book closes with the discussion of directions for further research when it comes to the application of CG to language pedagogy as well as some pedagogic implications

Foreigners often say that English language is "easy." A language like Spanish is challenging in its variety of verb endings (the verb speak is conjugated hablo, hablas, hablamos), and gender for nouns, whereas English is more straight forward (I speak, you speak, we speak). But linguists generally swat down claims that certain languages are "easier" than others, since it is assumed all languages are complex to the same degree. For example, they will point to English's use of the word "do" -- Do you know French? This usage is counter-intuitive and difficult for non-native speakers. Linguist John McWhorter agrees that all languages are complex, but questions whether or not they are all equally complex. The topic of complexity has become a hot issue in recent years, particularly in creole studies, historical linguistics, and language contact. As McWhorter describes, when languages came into contact over the years (when French speakers ruled the English for a few centuries, or the vikings invaded England), a large number of speakers are forced to learn a new language quickly, and this came up with a simplified version, a pidgin. When this ultimately turns into a "real" language, a creole, the result is still simpler and less complex than a "non-interrupted" language that has been around for a long time. McWhorter makes the case that this kind of simplification happens in degrees, and criticizes linguists who are reluctant to say that, for example, English is simply simpler than Spanish for socio-historical reasons. He analyzes how various languages that seem simple but are not creoles, actually are simpler than they would be if they had not been broken down by large numbers of adult learners. In addition to English, he looks at Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Malay, and some Arabic varieties. His work will interest not just experts in creole studies and historical linguistics, but the wider community interested in language complexity.

The Substance of Language Volume I: The Domain of Syntax Volume II: Morphology, Paradigms, and Periphrases Volume III: Phonology-Syntax Analogies John M. Anderson The three volumes of The Substance of Language collectively overhaul linguistic theory from phonology to semantics and syntax to pragmatics and offer a full account of how the form/function relationship works in language. Each explores the consequences for the investigation of language of a conviction that all aspects of linguistic structure are grounded in the non-linguistic mental faculties on which language imposes its own structure. The first and third look at how syntax and phonology are fed by a lexical component that includes morphology and which unites representations in the two planes. The second examines the way morphology is embedded in the lexicon as part of the expression of the lexicon-internal relationships of words. The Domain of Syntax explores the consequences for syntax of assuming that language is grounded in cognition and perception. It shows that syntax is characterized by a set of categories based on distinctions in what the categories are perceived to represent. The first part of the book traces the twentieth-century development of anti-notionalism, culminating in the assumption that syntax is autonomous. The author then looks at syntactic phenomena, many involving the fundamental notion of finiteness. He considers whether the appeal to grounding permits a lexicalist approach that would allow syntax to dispense not only with structural mutations such as category-change and 'empty categories' but with universal grammar itself. The many detailed proposals of John Anderson's fine trilogy are derived from an over-arching conception of the nature of linguistic knowledge that is in turn based on the grounding of syntax in semantics and the grounding of phonology in phonetics, both convincingly subsumed under the notion of cognitive salience. The Substance of Language is a major contribution to linguistic theory and the history of linguistic thought.

Complementing Brown & Miller's recent "Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories (1996)," to which this is a companion volume, this encyclopedia is a collection of articles drawn from the highly successful "Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics." It presents a collection of 79 articles, all of which have been revised and updated. It also provides a number of newly commissioned articles, one of which has been substantially updated and extended. The volume is alphabetically organised and includes an introduction and a glossary. The "Concise Encyclopedia of Grammatical Categories" will provide a uniquely comprehensive and authoritative overview of the building blocks of syntax: word classes, sentence/clause types, functional categories of the noun and verb, anaphora and pronominalisation, transitivity, topicalisation and work order.

The aim of this Handbook is to provide a forum in which some of the generative syntacticians whose work has had an impact on theoretical syntax over the past 20 years are invited to present their views on one or more aspects of current syntactic theory. The following authors have contributed to the volume: Mark Baker, Michael Brody, Jane Grimshaw, James McCloskey, Jean-Yves Pollock, and Luigi Rizzi. Each contribution focuses on one specific aspect of the grammar. As a general theme, the papers are concerned with the question of the composition of the clause, i.e. what kind of components the clause is made up of, and how these components are put together in the clause. The introduction to the volume provides the backdrop for the papers and highlights some of the developments that have occurred in theoretical syntax in the last ten years. Elements of Grammar is destined for an audience of linguists working in the generative framework.

A range of electronic corpora has become increasingly accessible via the WWW and CD-ROM. This development coincided with improvements in the standards governing the collecting, encoding and archiving of such data. Less attention, however, has been paid to making other types of digital data available. This is especially true of that which one might describe as 'unconventional', namely, the fragmentary texts and voices left to us as accidents of history. This book is a first step toward developing similar standards for enriching and preserving these neglected resources.