How does our knowledge of the language on the one hand, and of the context on the other, permit us to understand what we are told, to resolve ambiguities, to grasp both explicit and implicit content, to appreciate metaphor and irony? These issues have been studied in two disciplines: linguistic pragmatics and psycholinguistics, with only limited interactions between the two. This volume lays down the foundation for a new field: "Experimental Pragmatics." Contributions review pioneering work and present novel ways of articulating theories and experimental methods in the area.

Possession and Ownership brings together linguists and anthropologists in a series of cross-linguistic explorations of expressions used to denote possession and ownership, concepts central to most if not all the varied cultures and ideologies of humankind. Possessive noun phrases can be broadly divided into three categories - ownership of property, whole-part relations (such as body and plant parts), and blood and affinal kinship relations. As Professor Aikhenvald shows in her extensive opening essay, the same possessive noun or pronoun phrase is used in English and in many other Indo-European languages to express possession of all three kinds - as in "Ann and her husband Henry live in the castle Henry's father built with his own hands" - but that this is by no means the case in all languages. In some, for example, the grammar expresses the inalienability of consanguineal kinship and sometimes also of sacred or treasured objects. Furthermore the degree to which possession and ownership are conceived as the same (when possession is 100% of the law) differs from one society to another, and this may be reflected in their linguistic expression. Like others in the series this pioneering book will be welcomed equally by linguists and anthropologists.

This book explores the interaction of grammatical components in a wide variety of languages, and presents and exemplifies new experimental and analytic techniques for studying linguistic interfaces. Speaking a language requires access to the different aspects of its grammar -- semantic, syntactic, phonological, pragmatic, morphological, and phonetic. Knowing how these interact is crucial to understanding the operations of any specific language and to the explanation of how language in general operates in the mind. The new research presented here combines theoretical and experimental perspectives on one of the most productive fields in contemporary linguistics.
After the editors' introduction the volume is organized along four themes: the structural properties of sentences interfacing with meaning and the lexicon; internal word structure and its effect on the syntactic and phonological components; the syntax-phonology interface and its relation to the phonetics-phonology interface; and the implications of interfaces for language acquisition and language processing. The book will interest theoretical linguists and all those in linguistics and cognitive science working on the mental operations of language.

Features, Categories, and the Syntax of A-Positions investigates various aspects of the distribution of nominal arguments, and in particular the cross-linguistic variation that can be found among the Germanic languages in this domain of the syntax. The empirical topics that are discussed include variable vs. fixed argument order, the distribution of subjects with respect to adjuncts, expletive constructions, and oblique subjecthood. These and many other phenomena are analyzed within a theoretical framework which is based on the Minimalist Program. The book argues that the traditional theoretical devices accounting for the distribution of arguments in generative syntax (abstract Case, the Extended Projection Principle) should be eliminated from the grammar and that their apparent effects can be derived from the feature specifications of syntactic categories. Furthermore, it is shown that several aspects of the cross-linguistic variation found in the syntax of arguments can be related to variation in the domain of inflectional morphology.

This book provides the first empirical study of the history and spread of mediopassive constructions. It investigates the productivity of the pattern, the spread of the construction in Modern English, and looks into text type-specific preferences for the construction. On a more abstract level, it combines the corpus-based description of mediopassive constructions with cognitive linguistic models, drawing largely on notions such as 'prototype', 'family resemblances', 'patch' and 'construction'. The theoretical modelling is largely based on data from real texts. These come from publicly available machine-readable corpora, text-databases and a single-register 'corpus' (American mail-order catalogues). The study combines the corpus-based approach with cognitive theories and is therefore of interest to both empirical and theoretical linguists.

The format of this book is unusual, especially for a book about linguistics. The book is meant primarily as a research monograph aimed at linguists who have some background in formal semantics, e. g. Montague Grammar. However, I have two other audiences in mind. Linguists who have little or no experience of formal semantics, but who have worked through a basic mathematics for linguists course (e. g. using Wall, 1972, or Partee, 1978), should, perhaps with the help of a sympathetic Montague gramma rian, be able to discover enough of how I have adapted some of the basic ideas in formal semantics to make the developments that I undertake in the rest of the book accessible. Logicians and computer scientists who know about model theoretic semantics and formal systems should be able to glean enough from Chapters I and II about linguistic concerns and techniques to be able to read the remainder of the book, again possibly with the help of a sympathetic Montague grammarian. However, readers should beware. Chapter II is not meant as a general introduction either to formal semantics or to linguistics and while much of the presentation there is going over ground that is already well covered in the literature, the particular formulation and the emphases are very much oriented to the developments to be undertaken later in the book."

Most linguistic theories assume that each grammatical relation is established in a unique structural configuration. Neeleman and Weerman take issue with this view, arguing for a more flexible approach on the basis of conceptual considerations and data taken mostly, but not exclusively, from the Germanic languages. In-depth analyses of word order phenomena as well as diachronic and typological generalizations motivate a re-evaluation of the role of case in the projection of arguments. Case is shown to provide a syntactic foothold for thematic interpretation, something which is necessary in a grammar that does not allow fixed theta-positions. Thus, this study does not only offer a genuine alternative to many standard assumptions, it also explains why there should be such a thing as case in natural language.

Researchers in Romance languages will find this book a stimulating and broad-ranging treatment of the development of grammar, demonstrating the relevance of markedness for both linguistic theory and language teaching. A substantial and original account of a unique body of data, across first and second language acquisition, creolization and historical linguistics and across a wide range of languages and contact varieties, demonstrates a new impetus and predictive force for markedness theory.

A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. Since 1988, the Yearbook of Morphology book series has proven to be an eminent platform for the growth of morphological research, containing articles on topics that are central in the current theoretical debates. The Yearbook of Morphology 1996 focuses on the relationship between morphology and psycholinguistics. Basic questions such as the following are discussed. To what extent does the morphological structure of a word play a role in its perception and production? Are regular complex words created anew each time they are used, or are they stored in the lexicon? The relevant evidence comes from a variety of European languages. Another important theme in this yearbook is the degree of autonomy of morphology: in which respect does it differ from other modules of the grammar? The present yearbook also contains articles on periphrasis, the nature of inflectional morphology and syncretism in derivational morphology. Audience: Theoretical and historical linguists, morphologists, phonologists and psycholinguists will find this book of interest.

This book contains an original analysis of the existential there-sentence from a philosophical-linguistic perspective. At its core is the claim that there-sentences' form is distinct from that of ordinary subject-predicate sentences, and that this fundamental difference explains the construction's unusual grammatical and discourse properties.

Particles are words that do not change their form through inflection and do not fit easily into the established system of parts of speech. Examples include the negative particle "not," the infinitival particle "to" (as in "to go"), and do and let in "do tell me" and "let's go." Particles investigates the constraints on the distribution and placement of verbal particles. A proper understanding of these constraints yields insight into the structure of various secondary predicative constructions. Starting out from a detailed analysis of complex particle constructions, den Dikken brings forth accounts of triadic constructions and Dative Shift, and the relationship between dative and transitive causative constructions--all of them built on the basic structural template proposed from complex particle constructions. Drawing on data from Norwegian, English, Dutch, German, West Flemish, and other languages, this book will interest a wide audience of students and specialists.

A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. The Yearbook of Morphology series, published since 1988, has proven to be an eminent support for this upswing of morphological research, since it contains articles on topics which are central in the current theoretical debates which are frequently referred to.
In the Yearbook of Morphology 2002 a number of articles is devoted to the morphology of a variety of pidgin and creole languages which appear to have much more morphology than traditionally assumed.
A second topic of this volume is the morphological use of truncation for the coinage of proper names in Germanic and Romance languages, in particular endearment forms, with highly interesting consequences for the theory of phonology-morphology interaction.
Thirdly, this volume contains articles on how affixes are combined and ordered in complex words, and the complex linguistic principles behind these orderings.

Virtually all the papers in these volumes originated in presentations at the Fourth Groniogen Round Table, held in July 1980. That conference, organ ized by the Institute for General linguistics of Groniogen University was the fourth in an irregular series of meetings devoted to issues of topical interest to linguists. Its predecessor, the Third Round Table, was held in June 1976, and dealt with the semantics of natural language. A selection of the papers was published as Syntax and Semantics 10, Selections from the Third Groningen Round Table, ed. by F. Heny and H. Schnelle, Academic Press, 1979. This fourth meeting was more narrowly focussed. The original intention was to examine the hypothesis of Akmajian, Steele and Wasow in their paper 'The Category AUX in Universal Grammar', Linguistic Inquiry 10, 1-64. Ultimately the topic was broadened considerably to encompass not only the syntax, semantics and morphology of auxiliaries and related elements, but to tackle the problem (implicit in the original work of Akmajian, Steele and Wasow) of justifying the selection of categories. for the analysis of natural language. In the summer of 1979, a workshop and short, informal conference were held at the University of Salzburg, in preparation for the Round Table. These were organized in conjunction with the Summer Institute of the linguistiC Society of America. The cooperation of the LSA and of the University of Salzburg, and in particular of the Director of that Institute, Professor Gaberen Drachman, is hereby gratefully acknowledged."

In A Grammar of Murui (Bue), Katarzyna Wojtylak provides the first complete description of Murui, an endangered Witotoan language, spoken by the Murui-Muina (Witoto) people from Colombia and Peru. The grammar is written from a functional and typological perspective, using natural language data gathered during several fieldtrips to the Caqueta-Putumayo region between 2013 and 2017. The many remarkable characteristics of Murui include a complex system of classifiers, differential subject and object marking, person-marking verb morphology, evidential and epistemic marking, head-tail linkage, and a system of numerals, including the fraternal (brother-based) forms for 'three' and 'four'. The grammar represents an important contribution to the study of Witotoan languages, linguistic typology of Northwest Amazonia, and language contact in the area.

Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English is the first book to apply information structure as it relates to language change to a corpus-based analysis of a wide range of features in the evolution of English syntax and grammars of prose in long diachrony. Its unifying topic is the role of information structure, broadly conceived, as it interacts with the other levels of linguistic description, syntax, morphology, prosody, semantics and pragmatics. The volume comprises twelve chapters by leading scholars who take a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. Their work affirms, among other things, that motivations for selecting a particular syntactic option vary from information structure in the strict sense to discourse organization, or a particular style or register, and can also be associated with external forces such as the development of a literary culture.

In recent years, the Cognitive Grammar account of language and mind has become an influential framework for the study of textual meaning and interpretation. This book is the first to bring together applications of Cognitive Grammar for a range of stylistic purposes, including the analysis of both literary and non-literary discourse. Demonstrating the diverse range of uses for Cognitive Grammar, chapters apply this framework to diverse text-types including poetry, narrative fiction, comics, press reports, political discourse and music, as well as exploring its potential for the teaching of language and literature in a range of contexts. Combining cutting-edge research in cognitive, critical and pedagogical stylistics, New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style showcases the latest developments in this field and offers new insights into our experiences of literary and non-literary texts by drawing on current understandings of language and cognition.

This work presents a unified theory of aspect within Universal Grammar. It provides an unusual combination of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic approaches to a single domain, and gives detailed linguistic analyses of five languages with very different aspectual systems: English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Navajo and Russian. This second edition has been completely revised to include further development of the two-component theory, including new treatments of boundedness, dynamism and a general account of aspectual shifts. It includes syntactic and semantic tests.

Volume 1 of A Grammar and Dictionary of Indus Kohistani contains around 8.000 lemmata, many of which are supplemented with parallels from adjacent dialects, from other Dardic, from Nuristani, Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Dravidian and Munda languages, and from Burushaski. The lemmata have been, wherever possible, provided with information about their origin, and they are connected by numerous cross-references. Since Indus Kohistani is a pitch accent language with complicated rules governing the behaviour of the two pitch accents in compounding, derivation, and inflexion, the lemmata are not only marked with their appropriate pitch accents, but the behaviour of the accents (change of value, shift) is illustrated with a large number of inflected forms and cross-references. And since Indus Kohistani has a rich (and frequently irregular) inner and outer conjugation, most verbs are provided with many finite and participle forms. In addition, the dictionary contains two indexes (English - Indus Kohistani and Old Indo-Aryan - Indus Kohistani), and lists with place and clan names, names of the months, etc.

"Arguing that a corpus-based approach is indispensable for the study of changes of complementation in British and American English, the author examines several central patterns of sentential complementation in a number of electronic corpora to shed light on the emergence and spread of innovative constructions in relatively recent English"--

Witty, entertaining, and informative, this book on so-called 'false friends' will be of immediate use to anyone using the French language and needing to understand French society and culture. The individual entries have been carefully designed to carry the basic linguistic information required and then develop into a wider consideration of the social and cultural context within which the specific words and phrases are used in current French. As this title is supposed to be used in conjunction with and not instead of a dictionary, it also offers a brief list of recommended reading ranging from standard dictionaries to introductory works on French society and institutions.

This volume presents the proceedIngs of the Twelfth Annual LIn guistics Symposium of the UniversIty of WisconsIn-Milwaukee held March 11-12, 1983 on the campus of UWM. It includes all papers that were given at the conference with the exception of Genevieve Escure and Glenn Gilbert's joint paper "Syntactic marking/unmarking phenomena in the creole continuum of Belize" which was not submitted for publication by the authors. Many of the papers appear in this volume in a revised form that is somewhat different from the oral version. We would like to thank the various departments and other units at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that sponsored the mark- ness symposium. These are: the Department of Linguistics, the English as a Second Language Intensive Program, the College of Let ters and Science, the Division of Urban Outreach, the Center for Latin America and the Spanish Speaking Outreach Institute. Finally, we wish to thank Lisa Carrara for doing a careful joh on the preparation of the index, and J. L. Russell, for his patience and perseverance in typing a difficult manuscript."

It's or Its? Full stop inside or outside the inverted commas? What's the difference between a semi-colon and a colon? Cooperate or co-operate? Punctuation For Now describes in a witty but authoritative way how our present system of punctuation has grown out of the history of our language. It also indicates the conventions that govern the best punctuation in the English of today. The rules are set out clearly, and reinforced by abundant examples from the work of such authors as Kingsley Amis and Evelyn Waugh. Anyone with an examination to pass, or with a child who is learning to use English, or who writes it for a living, will find Punctuation For Now an invaluable guide and friend.