South Asia is home to a large number of languages and dialects. Although linguists working on this region have made significant contributions to our understanding of language, society, and language in society on a global scale, there is as yet no recognized international forum for the exchange of ideas amongst linguists working on South Asia. The Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics is designed to be just that forum. It brings together empirical and theoretical research and serves as a testing ground for the articulation of new ideas and approaches which may be grounded in a study of South Asian languages but which have universal applicability. Each volume will have four major sections: I. Invited contributions consisting of state-of-the-art essays on research in South Asian languages. II. Refereed open submissions focusing on relevant issues and providing various viewpoints. III. Reports from around the world, book reviews and abstracts of doctoral theses.

By integrating novel developments in both contact linguistics and morphological theory, this volume pursues the topic of borrowed morphology by recourse to sophisticated theoretical and methodological accounts. The authors address fundamental issues, such as the alleged universal dispreference for morphological borrowing and its effects on morphosyntactic complexity, and corroborate their analyses with strong cross-linguistic evidence.

The book analyzes and evaluates what major linguistic models say on the interaction of lexicon and syntax in language performance. To check the plausibility of the assumptions, they are compared with what psycholinguists have found out. Moreover, reformulations, situations of speech need, and the use of 'lexical stretches' are analysed for what they can contribute to the discussion, and for one of the main issues also experimental evidence is produced.

The book deals with the development of descriptive models of English grammar writing during the Early Modern English period. For the first time, morphology and syntax as presented in Early Modern English grammars are systematically investigated as a whole. The statements of the contemporary grammarians are compared to hypotheses made in modern descriptions of Early Modern English and, where necessary, checked against the Early Modern English part of the Helsinki Corpus. Thus, a comprehensive overview of the characteristic features of Early Modern English is complemented by conclusions about the descriptive adequacy of Early Modern English grammars. It becomes evident that comments by contemporary authors occasionally reflect the corpus data more adequately than the statements found in modern secondary literature. This book is useful for (advanced) university students, as well as for scholars of English and grammarians in general.

The volume presents recent results in the field of Information Structure based on research on Italian and Italian dialects, and on further studies on several typologically different languages. The central idea is that Information Structure is not an exclusive matter of syntax but an interface issue which involves the interplay of at least the phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic-pragmatic levels of analysis. In addition, the volume is based on the study of actual language use and it adopts a cross-linguistic point of view.

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.

Structure and Meaning in English is designed to help teachers of English develop an understanding of those aspects of English which are especially relevant for learners who speak other languages. Using corpus research, Graeme Kennedy cuts to the heart of what is important in the teaching of English. The book provides pedagogically- relevant information about English at the levels of sounds, words, sentences and texts. It draws attention to those linguistic items and processes which research has shown are typically hard for learners and which lead to errors. Each chapter contains: a description of one or more aspects of English an outline of typical errors or problems for learners specific learning objectives listed at the beginning of each chapter exercises or tasks based on aEURO~real EnglishaEURO (TM) taken from newspapers and other sources. discussion topics which can be worked through independently either as part of a course, or self study With answers to many of the tasks given at the back of the book, this groundbreaking work provides a comprehensive and accessible textbook on the structure and use of the language for teachers of English.

This book investigates the concept of phase, aiming at a structural definition of the three domains that are assumed as the syntactic loci for interface interpretation, namely vP, CP and DP. In particular, three basic issues are addressed, that represent major questions of syntactic research within the Minimalist Program in the last decade. A) How is the set of minimally necessary syntactic operations to be characterised (including questions about the exact nature of copy and merge, the status of remnant movement, the role of head movement in the grammar), B) How is the set of minimally necessary functional heads to be characterised that determine the built-up and the interpretation of syntactic objects and C) How do these syntactic operations and objects interact with principles and requirements that are thought to hold at the two interfaces. The concept of phase has also implications for the research on the functional make-up of syntactic objects, implying that functional projections not only apply in a (universally given) hierarchy but split up in various phases pertaining to the head they are related to. This volume provides major contributions to this ongoing discussion, investigating these issues in a variety of languages (Berber, Dutch, English, German, Modern Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Norwegian and West Flemish) and combining the analysis of empirical data with the theoretical insights of the last years.

Theoretical studies of Latvian grammar have a great deal to offer to contemporary linguistics. Although traditionally Lithuanian has been the most widely studied Baltic language in diachronic and synchronic linguistics alike, Latvian has a number of distinctive features that can prove valuable both for historical, and perhaps even more so, for synchronic language research. Therefore, at the very least, contemporary typological, areal, and language contact studies involving Baltic languages should account for data from Latvian. Typologically, Latvian grammar is a classic Indo-European (Baltic) system with well-developed inflection and derivation. However, it also bears certain similarities to the Finno-Ugric languages, which can be reasonably explained by its areal and historical background. This applies, for example, to the mood system and its connections with modality and evidentiality in Latvian, also to the correlation between aspect and quantity as manifested in verbal and nominal (case) forms. The relations between debitive mood, certain constructions with reflexive verbs, and voice in Latvian are intriguing examples of unusual morphosyntactic features. Accordingly, the book focuses on the following topics: case system and declension (with emphasis on the polyfunctionality of case forms), gender, conjugation, tense and personal forms, aspect, mood, modality and evidentiality, reflexive verbs, and voice. The examples included in this book have been taken from the Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian (Lidzsvarots musdienu latviesu valodas tekstu korpuss, available at www.korpuss.lv), www.google.lv, mass media, and fiction texts (see the List of language sources) without regard to relative frequency ratios.

This book is a comprehensive study of the evidential system in German. It presents a systematic description of the encoding of evidentiality in present-day German, as well as a diachronic reconstruction of the relevant sources and paths of grammaticalization from the Old High German period onwards. Based on empirical corpus research, the study investigates the degree of grammaticalization of each single evidential construction and the make-up of the present-day system as well as the diachronic stages that lead to the present state. The book focuses on three main issues. First, it is concerned with the general notion of evidentiality, its deictic character, and with the interrelations between the domains of evidentiality and epistemic modality. Second, the book presents the results of the synchronic corpus-based analysis of the German evidential periphrastic constructions werden 'become' + infinitive, scheinen 'seem', drohen 'threaten', versprechen 'promise' + zu 'to'- infinitive, which constitute a paradigm for coding evidentiality in Present Day German. Third, the diachronic development of the evidential constructions is represented as a complex grammaticalization process, interacting with the development of modal constructions and leading to a highly differentiated category of modal and evidential distinctions in the grammar of German.

Theta Theory explores the lexicon as an interface in the strict sense, as facilitating the flow of information between cognition and the computational system of language. It argues for the traditional concept of a listed lexicon, where semantic roles are encoded as features of verbs, and against event decomposition. Part one of the book discusses the link between cognition and the lexicon. Mainstream theories of lexical semantics are critically reviewed. Furthermore, this part provides an extensive description of the relevant data in German, including agentivity, causation, psychological predicates, and different types of diathesis alternations. Part two is devoted to the link between the lexicon and syntax. It develops a parallel model of grammatical derivation, which allows the formulation of robust generalizations over thematic role assignment, but at the same time acknowledges the relevance of other components, in particular morpho-phonology and narrow syntax. The theory is applied to a wide range of German constructions including modal infinitives, the present and gerundive participle, the past/passive/adjectival participle, verbal particles, auxiliary selection, and unaccusatives/reflexives. The book is of interest for students and scholars of lexical semantics, for descriptive German linguistics, and for linguists concerned with the development of the Minimalist Program.

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 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.

Explorations in Nominal Inflection is a collection of new articles that focus on nominal inflection markers in different languages. The studies are concerned with the morphological inventories of markers, their syntactic distribution, and, importantly, the interaction between the two. As a result, the contributions shed new light on the morphology/syntax interface, and on the role of morpho-syntactic features in mediating between the two components. Issues that feature prominently throughout are inflection class, case, gender, number, animacy, syncretism, iconicity, agreement, the status of paradigms, the nature of morpho-syntactic features, and the structure of nominal projections. Recurrent analytical tools involve the concepts of competition (optimality, specificity), underspecification, and economy, in various theoretical frameworks.James P. Blevins: Inflection Classes and EconomyBernd Wiese: Categories and Paradigms. On Underspecification in Russian Declension

Serial verbs and complex predicates have a long history of research, yet there is comparatively little documentation on Oceanic languages. This volume presents new data for further typological studies. While previous research on serial verbs in Oceanic languages was mostly devoted to "core" serial constructions (with non-contiguous sV(o)sV(o) nuclei), this volume contributes a more detailed investigation of the "nuclear" type of complex predicates involving contiguous sVV(o) nuclei. Complex predicates of the form VV may correspond to two different syntactic structures, either co-ranking or hierarchized (head-modifier). Though the VV pattern does evidence a tendency towards structural compression, often entailing the fusion of the argument structures of two or more nuclei, yet it cannot be reduced to cases of co-lexicalization, compounding or grammaticalization. The data also show the "nuclear" type to be compatible with all types of basic word orders (VSO, VOS, SVO, SOV), with no evidence that this results from any word order change. This challenges the claim that "nuclear" serialization correlates with verb-final order, and "core" serialization with verb-medial order.

The present monograph deals with lexical representation and linking within the framework of Functional Grammar. The notion of predicate frame as originally proposed in 1978 and subsequent refinements of the theory are challenged in that a new format of representing argument taking properties is formulated. This new format opens new lines of research towards the design of a new linking algorithm in Functional 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.

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.

Kopar is a very moribund, close to extinct, language spoken in three villages at the mouth of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. This is the only description of the language available. It also discusses areas where rapid language shift is affecting the structure of Kopar. Although the period of fieldwork was necessarily short, this book provides as comprehensive a description as possible of the grammatical structure of this complex and fascinating language. It is quite thorough and detailed and goes well beyond what is normally considered a sketch grammar. It covers all the phenomena essential to description and comparison and gives clear, typologically sound definitions and explanations. The grammar is written with the research interests of language typologists and comparative grammarians foremost in mind. Typologically, Kopar can be described as a split ergative, polysynthetic language. The language lacks nominal case marking so ergativity or lack thereof is signaled by verbal agreement affixes. Tenses and moods which describe as yet unrealized events, like future and imperative, pattern accusatively for agreement affixes, while those express realized events, like past and present, pattern ergatively. In addition, the ergative case schema is overlaid by a direct-inverse inflectional schema determined by a person hierarchy, a feature Kopar shares with other languages in its Lower Sepik family. As a polysynthetic language, incorporation of sentential elements like temporals, locationals, adverbials and verbals is extensive, though noun incorporation is not. Sadly, this work is all the documentation we will likely ever have of Kopar, a language of potentially very high theoretical interest, given its rare typological profile. It will certainly be of interest to language typologists and comparative grammarians, and anyone who wants to explore the range of language variation

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.

Lavukaleve is a Papuan Language spoken on the Russell Islands in the Central Province of the Solomon Islands. The phonology and morpho-phonology of Lavukaleve are described, as well as arguments adjuncts, the Lavukaleve predicate structure (including predicate types and core participant marking, the agreement suffix, focus constructions, tense, aspect and mood, word-level derivation, complex predicates), interclausal syntax, and the Lavukaleve discourse organisation. The book includes a list of affixes, a list of lexemes, and an appendix with Lavukaleve texts. The data used in this work was collected by the author during five field trips.

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

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.

This collection investigates the architecture of focus in linguistic theory from different theoretical perspectives. Research on focus and information structure in the last four decades has shown that the phenomenon of focus is highly complex, the theoretical approaches manifold, and the data highly sensitive. The main emphasis has been placed on the integration of the notion of focus in generative grammar. In recent years, however, the approaches to focus and information structure underwent a radical change in perspective. The theoretical concept of focus, its related terms and phenomena became the object of research. Along with it, the research questions shifted: instead of locating focus in the architecture of grammar, linguists investigate the architecture of focus itself. The central underlying idea of this collection is to document this change in perspective with the aim of isolating essential keystones and research areas in both the theoretical and empirical domain. The book is structured accordingly. Following the introduction, there are four main sections: The general section discusses the theoretical foundations of focus within grammar. The second section hosts papers which investigate the representation of focus and topic at the syntax-pragmatics interface. The third section discusses the phonological representation of focus and its relation to meaning. The papers of the final section investigate different types of focus constructions in a variety languages. The collection of papers on the architecture of focus, its interpretation and representation mirror the establishment of the focus research field.