While cognitive linguistics has become established as a comprehensive research paradigm over the last three decades, it has so far hardly contributed to investigations into processes of lexical creation as traditionally captured in research on word formation. In light of this, the volume at hand is the first one to take a step ahead towards illuminating diverse aspects of word formation from cognitive perspectives. The book combines contributions to the 2nd International Cognitive Linguistics Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association with a selection of invited papers by scholars working on issues of word formation and cognitive linguistics. This selection is guided by pluralism in both methodology and topics. Thus, some contributions are of a primarily theoretical nature discussing, for example, recombinance as a model of word formation and a taxonomy of word formation processes as construction types. Several articles address interface issues such as word formation and phrasal constructions, word formation and inflection, as well as phonology and word formational patterns. The majority of the studies focuses on individual types of word formation (compounding, affixation, and conversion), and they contribute to reframing our understanding of these processes. With a focus on mostly Germanic languages (Afrikaans, Dutch, English, German, Luxembourgish, and Norwegian), data-driven analyses include corpus linguistic investigations, elicited data, psycholinguistic experiments, and computational linguistic applications. A few contributions follow a mainly introspective path of reasoning based on the discussion of selected examples as in the analysis of creative compounds. Overall, the volume provides a rich array of topics emerging under the umbrella of cognitive linguistic thought and established patterns and processes of word formation. The various studies add to a yet marginal body of research in cognitive word formation and, thus, advance our awareness about the benefits of applying cognitive linguistic thoughts for investigating processes of lexical creation.

This classic research monograph develops and illustrates the theory of linguistic structure known as Cognitive Grammar, and applies it to representative phenomena in English and other languages. Cognitive grammar views language as an integral facet of cognition and claims that grammatical structure cannot be understood or revealingly described independently of semantic considerations.

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 series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

Noam Chomsky's first book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is understood by experts in those fields. It is not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalogue, nor another specualtive philosophy about the nature of man and language, but rather a rigorus explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of languages; and it may well provide an opportunity for the application of explicity measures of simplicity to decide preference of one form over another form of grammar.

This new study on modality in English represents a departure from more traditional approaches to the subject, where the modal auxiliaries have been the usual focus of attention, by examining in detail the nature of their association with different categories of modal adverb. Modality is notoriously complex but the present work offers an accessible introduction to the topic, a comprehensive account of modal-adverb co-occurrence, and a reappraisal of the English modal system. The descriptive framework draws fresh insights from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic approaches to the study of language and communication, and from recent work in corpus linguistics. The book includes contrastive reference to the expression of modality in Spanish and a discussion of modality in such applied contexts as language teaching. A major feature is its reliance on authentic spoken and written language data. The study is suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students of linguistics, English language, communications studies and related disciplines.

This volume addresses the constructional variability with transitive and causative verbs from the point of view of their respective action and motion patterns. Drawing on the theoretical advances registered in cognitive approaches to language (Cognitive Grammar, Construction Grammar and space semantics), the papers substantiate new interpretations and adduce empirical evidence from various languages to refine or adjust existing analyses of transitivity and causation. The different contributions all address the crucial question of how concrete and abstract notions of human behavior drive linguistic expressions. Cognitive linguists consider that linguistic competence functions in terms of complex conceptual units: the native speaker knows and manipulates conceptual blocks without paying further attention to their constitutive parts or their internal organization. However, as this volume illustrates, the role of the constitutive parts and their internal organization cannot simply be reduced to zero. A multidimensional approach to construction schemas is at stake. That is, the speaker applies proper embodied subroutines to build a coherent meaning, but the construction schemas are also rooted in the linguistic patterns the speaker and hearer are familiar with. The volume is primarily intended for scholars working within cognitive-semantic research at large. Given its theoretical and applied character (in the sense of giving empirical evidence for specific problems in the grammar), the volume will also be of great interest to anyone concerned with syntactic processes, construction grammar or with the cognitive structure of discourse. The descriptive and theoretical insights indeed dwell on areas that are currently dealt with in modern linguistics.

Creating Texts emphasises a practical approach to composition and enables students to understand what is involved in the creation of a text and to learn from the practice of other writers. Extensively rewritten and updated from Walter Nash's earlier volume, Designs in Prose, attention is paid to the general theory of composition, in both traditional and original terms, so that students are made familiar with the basic resources of composition, in grammar and in the lexicon. The essence of every chapter is the discussion of examples of text, sometimes devised by the authors, but more often drawn from the work of authors writing in diverse styles of English. This practical approach is most evident in the final section of the book where detailed suggestions for projects and exercises reinforce the connection between theory and practice, and encourage students to develop their creative sense and to adapt their style of writing to fit the particular audience and context. In addition, this section is cross-referenced to the main text to allow students to consult easily the relevant chapter.

This study shows that Scandinavian object shift and so-called A-scrambling in the continental Germanic languages are the same, and aims at providing an account of the variation that we find with respect to this phenomenon by combining certain aspects of the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory. More specifically, it is claimed that representations created by a simplified version of the computational system of human language CHL are evaluated in an optimality theoretic fashion by taking recourse to a very small set of output constraints.

Syntactic description and theoretical syntax are central concerns in linguistics. For thirty years, the search for a single formal model of syntax has been the central task in the field; many theories have been proposed, some discarded, none universally adopted, and the problem continues to challenge linguists.

The award-winning "Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics" included many excellent articles on all major syntactic theories, current or past, written either by their originators or by eminent practitioners. These articles are now collected here in a single volume. All have been thoroughly updated; several entirely new articles have been added, while others have been significantly revised or extended.

This collection gives a full and fascinating picture of the evolution of linguists' attempts to wrestle with syntax. The comprehensive inclusion of less popular theories alongside more current ones provides the researcher with the context and perspectives necessary to appreciate why some avenues have been pursued, while others have not. This is valuable for the development both of the more generally accepted approaches, and of others now being revived or introduced.

The editors' extensive introduction gives an excellent overview of the theories covered and of the issues involved, and places each article in its historical and theoretical context. The reader is supported by the inclusion of a substantial Glossary and name and subject indexes. "The Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories" will be an invaluable reference work, not only for those studying specific theories, but also for those with a wider interest in matters of linguistic theory.

This book will be of special interest to the general reader concerned with the issue of language in the United States, as well as the language specialist and sociolinguist. It has been written to inform those wishing to learn more about the role that languages other than English have had, and continue to have, in the life of the most important United States city, New York. At the same time this volume makes an important contribution to the scholarly literature on urban multilingualism and the sociology of language. The book contains chapters on languages of ethnolinguistic groups who arrived early in New York and which have been somewhat silenced (Irish, German, Yiddish), the languages of groups who made early contributions and continue to be heard in the city (Italian, Greek , Spanish, Hebrew), and languages which are acquiring an important voice in the city today (Chinese, Indian languages, English creoles, Haitian Creole).

Causatives and Causation is the first comprehensive study of causative constructions found in the world's languages. This important new research, based on a data base of more than 600 languages, not only investigates fully the richness and variety of causative types, but also presents an alternative perspective to the traditional typological approach. The new typology enables a better understanding of how the human mind cognizes causation and how this is reflected in language. Causatives and Causation is also an important attempt to integrate language typology with diachrony by constructing a diachronic model of causative affixes on the basis of this new typology. Drawing on the theoretical insight of Role and Reference Grammar, this book provides a case study of the causative constructions in Korean, providing additional support for both the proposed new typology and the diachronic model. It also examines the pragmatic foundations of causatives, an important but previously unexplored area of study. This book will be essential and stimulating reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students involved in language typology and universals, historical linguistics, language and cognition, and pragmatics and will be an invaluable reference book for professional linguists in both teaching and research.

Complexity of grammatical structure has become a center of interest in recent typological and dialectological research. The contributions of the present volume discuss structural complexity from the perspective of language variation and change. Particular attention is paid to the hypothesis that languages and varieties spoken by small, isolated communities tend to display greater complexity than others.

This research monograph develops and illustrates an innovative theory of linguistic structure, called "cognitive grammar," and applies it to representative phenomena in English and other languages. Cognitive grammar views language as an integral facet of cognition and claims that grammatical structure cannot be understood or revealingly described independently of semantic onsiderations. It argues that grammar forms a continuum with the lexicon and is reducible to symbolic relationships (i.e. form-meaning pairings), and consequently that all valid grammatical constructs have some kind of conceptual import. The coherence and descriptive potential of cognitive grammar are exemplified by application to a broad variety of grammatical phenomena drawn from numerous languages.

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

For more than two decades now, cognitive science has been making overtures to literature and literary studies. Only recently, however, cognitive linguistics and poetics seem to be moving towards a more serious and reciprocal type of interdisciplinarity. In coupling cognitive linguistics and poetics, cognitive poeticians aim to offer cognitive readings of literary texts and formulate specific hypotheses concerning the relationship between aesthetic meaning effects and patterns in the cognitive construal and processing of literary texts. One of the basic assumptions of the endeavour is that some of the key topics in poetics (such as the construction of text worlds, characterization, narrative perspective, distancing discourse, etc.) may be fruitfully approached by applying cognitive linguistic concepts and insights (such as embodied cognition, metaphor, mental spaces, iconicity, construction grammar, figure/ground alignment, etc.), in an attempt to support, enrich or adjust 'traditional' poetic analysis. Conversely, the tradition of poetics may support, frame or call into question insights form cognitive linguistics. In order to capture the goals, gains and gaps of this rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of research, this volume brings together some of the key players and critics of cognitive poetics. The eleven chapters are grouped into four major sections, each dealing with central concerns of the field: (i) the cognitive mechanisms, discursive means and mental products related to narrativity (Semino, Herman, Culpeper); (ii) the different incarnations of the concept of figure in cognitive poetics (Freeman, Steen, Tsur); (iii) the procedures that are meant to express or create discursive attitudes, like humour, irony or distance in general (Antonopoulou and Nikiforidou, Dancygier and Vandelanotte, Giora et al.); and (iv) a critical assessment of the current state of affairs in cognitive poetics, and more specifically the incorporation of insights from cognitive linguistics as only one of the contributing fields in the interdisciplinary conglomerate of cognitive science (Louwerse and Van Peer, Sternberg). The ensuing dialogue between cognitive and literary partners, as well as between advocates and opponents, is promoted through the use of short response articles included after ten chapters of the volume. Geert Brone, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Jeroen Vandaele, University of Oslo, Norway.

The Munda Verb is a unique book on the typology of the verb in the Munda language family, and the first of its kind on any language family of the Indian subcontinent. The author painstakingly works out nearly all the details of the morphology of the verb in each modern Munda language and offers a description of the typology of the Munda verbal systems both individually and collectively. The author uses a large amount of data from modern Munda languages, as well as an extensive cross-linguistic corpus offering comparisons from genetically unrelated languages such as Fox, Amele, Kinyarwanda, Luyia, Takelma, Tonkawa, Burushaski, or Tangut where relevant. Points of note include the unusual incorporation system of South Munda Sora and the elaborate and complex system of verb agreement attested in the Kherwarian Munda languages. Further, the author discusses models for a Proto-Munda verbal system and problems in its reconstruction at various points throughout. This book is of great interest to specialists working on the Munda languages, South Asian linguistics, language typology, historical linguistics and to scholars of both morphology as well as syntax.

This is a ground-breaking study in the historical semantics and pragmatics of English in the 16th and 17th centuries. It examines the meaning, use and cultural underpinnings of confident- and certain-sounding epistemic expressions, such as forsooth, by my troth and in faith, and first person epistemic phrases, such as I suppose, I ween and I think. The work supports the hypothesis that the British Enlightenment and its attendant empiricism brought about a profound epistemic shift in the 'ways of thinking' and 'ways of speaking' in the English speaking world. In contrast to the modern ethos of empiricism and doubt, the 16th and 17th centuries were dominated by an ethos of truth and faith, which manifests itself in (among other ways) the meanings and usages of epistemic expressions for certainty and confidence. The study is firmly based on evidence from texts and collocations in the writings of the day. The study is conducted using the framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), an approach to semantic explanation developed by Cliff Goddard, Anna Wierzbicka and collaborators. This book can introduce this approach to readers who are unfamiliar with it, as well as show how it can open new horizons in historical semantics. The primary audience for this book is scholars and graduate students in the fields of linguistics and English studies, especially those interested in historical semantics, pragmatics and discourse studies. Because of the strongly cultural focus of the book and its drawing on non-linguistic literature, it will be of interest to scholars and graduate students in the fields of cultural history and the history of ideas, as well as in English studies in a broader sense.

This book is relevant for phonologists, morphologists, Slavists and cognitive linguists, and addresses two questions: How can the morphology-phonology interface be accommodated in cognitive linguistics? Do morphophonological alternations have a meaning? These questions are explored via a comprehensive analysis of stem alternations in Russian verbs. The analysis is couched in R.W. Langacker's Cognitive Grammar framework, and the book offers comparisons to other varieties of cognitive linguistics, such as Construction Grammar and Conceptual Integration. The proposed analysis is furthermore compared to rule-based and constraint-based approaches to phonology in generative grammar. Without resorting to underlying representations or procedural rules, the Cognitive Linguistics framework facilitates an insightful approach to abstract phonology, offering the important advantage of restrictiveness. Cognitive Grammar provides an analysis of an entire morphophonological system in terms of a parsimonious set of theoretical constructs that all have cognitive motivation. No ad hoc machinery is invoked, and the analysis yields strong empirical predictions. Another advantage is that Cognitive Grammar can identify the meaning of morphophonological alternations. For example, it is argued that stem alternations in Russian verbs conspire to signal non-past meaning. This book is accessible to a broad readership and offers a welcome contribution to phonology and morphology, which have been understudied in cognitive linguistics.

In Biblical Hebrew Grammar Visualized, Andersen and Forbes approach the grammar of Biblical Hebrew from the perspective of corpus linguistics. Their pictorial representations of the clauses making up the biblical texts show the grammatical functions (subject, object, and so on) and semantic roles (surrogate, time interval, and so on) of clausal constituents, as well as the grammatical relations that bind the constituents into coherent structures. The book carefully introduces the Andersen-Forbes approach to text preparation and characterization. It describes and tallies the kinds of phrases and clauses encountered across all of Biblical Hebrew. It classifies and gives examples of the major constituents that form clauses, focusing especially on the grammatical functions and semantic roles. The book presents the structures of the constituents and uses their patterns of incidence both to examine constituent order ("word order") and to characterize the relations among verb corpora. It expounds in detail the characteristics of quasiverbals, verbless clauses, discontinuous and double-duty clausal constituents, and supra-clausal structures. The book is intended for students of Biblical Hebrew at all levels. Beginning students will readily grasp the basic grammatical structures making up the clauses, because these are few and fairly simple. Intermediate and advanced students will profit from the detailed descriptions and comparative analyses of all of the structures making up the biblical texts. Scholars will find fresh ways of addressing open problems, while gaining glimpses of new research approaches and topics along the way.

The papers in this book describe and analyze rara in individual languages, covering an extraordinarily broad geographic distribution, including papers about languages from all over the globe. The range of theoretical subjects discussed shows an enormous breadth, ranging from phonology through word formation, lexical semantics to syntax and even some sociolinguistics.

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.