Ten leading scholars provide exacting research results and a reliable and accessible introduction to the new field of optimality theoretic pragmatics. The book includes a general introduction that overviews the foundations of this new research paradigm. The book is intended to satisfy the needs of students and professional researchers interested in pragmatics and optimality theory, and will be of particular interest to those exploring the interfaces of formal pragmatics with grammar, semantics, philosophy of language, information theory and cognitive psychology.

This volume collects twenty-nine published and unpublished papers by the linguist James Gair, considered the foremost western scholar of the Sri Lankan languages Sinhala and Jaffna Tamil. Ranging over thirty years, his work also considers issues in a variety of Indian languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Bengali. The collection reflects the wide range of Gair's interests, from morpho-syntactic questions to questions regarding historical and areal linguistics, especially language contact and diglossia, and extending to language acquisition. By collecting these papers and making them newly accessible, this volume will provide an important resource not only for scholars of these languages but for linguists interested in the theoretical issues Gair explores.

This manuscript is a revision of my 1982 MIT dissertation of the same name. A previous version of sections of chapters 1 and 5 appeared as 'Case Agreement in Russian', in The Mental Representation of Gram- matical Relations, edited by Joan Bresnan, MIT Press, 1983. I am grateful to MIT Press for permission to reproduce parts of that article here. I would like to express my appreciation to Catherine V. Chvany, who has read several versions of this manuscript over the years, and provided encouragement and invaluable comments. Thanks go also to Johanna Nichols whose careful reading and useful suggestions have improved the book. I am also deeply grateful to Joan Bresnan, Ken Hale, Morris Halle, Beth Levin, and Jane Simpson for helpful discussions of the material contained herein. For sharing their native intuitions, special thanks go to Alina Israeli, Boris Katz, and Evgenij Pinsky, and to Liza Chernyak, Volodja Gitin, Victoria Koff, Larissa Levin, Victoria Schiller, and Elena Semeka-Pankra- tova. Joyce Friedman, Beth Levin, and Jane Simpson kindly provided assistance with bibliographical references and proofreading. This manuscript was prepared using the computer facilities at Boston University, and lowe a large debt of gratitude to the following people for providing access to equipment and technical assistance: William H. Henneman, Philip Budne, Barry Shein, and Paul Blanchard. IX INTRODUCTION The study of case, once primarily of interest to philologists, has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves from syntacticians.

This book presents a comprehensive portrait of the "Kit b S bawayhi." It offers new insights into its historical and linguistic arguments and underlines their strong correlation. The decisive historical argument highlights al- ra s role, not only as the centre of pre-Islamic Arabic culture, but also as the matrix within which early Arab linguistics grew and developed. The "Kit b" s value as a communicative grammar forms the crux of the linguistic argument. The complementarity of syntax and pragmatics is established as a condition "sine qua non" for S bawayhi s analysis of language. The benefits of a complementary approach are reflected in the analysis of nominal sentences and related notions of "ibtid " and definiteness. The pragmatic principle of identifiability is uncovered as the ultimate determiner of word order.

"Structural Ambiguity in English" is a major new scholarly work that provides an innovative and accessible linguistic description of those features of the language that can be exploited to generate structural ambiguities.
Most ambiguity scholarship is concerned with "disambiguation"--the process of making what is ambiguous clear. This book takes the opposite approach as it focuses on describing the features in the English language that may contribute towards the creation of structural ambiguities, which form the core of some of the best word-plays found in advertising, comedy and marketing.
Oaks utilizes a systematic and comprehensive inventory approach that identifies individual elements in the language and their distinctive behaviors that can be manipulated in the deliberate creation of structural ambiguities. In doing so he also provides authentic examples to illustrate the concepts he presents.
This book will appeal to researchers and academics interested in the structure of the English language, usage, pragmatics, communication, natural language processing, editing, and humor studies as well as those in marketing, advertising, or humor writing.

This book is the first extensive study on French Quantification in the field of Syntax. It provides a typology of four main quantified noun phrases in French (existential, universal, negative and "wh-"), detailing their syntactic, semantic and prosodic behaviors and showing that they can be reduced to two classes Split-DP structures or Floating quantification.

Relying on syntax and semantics, the book establishes a three-way structural typology of "wh" in-situ phrases and extends it to existentials. It pays special attention to the prosodic properties associated with their different readings and proposes an analysis of the distribution of subextraction and pied-piping. Similarly based on semantic and syntactic tests, the book reveals N(egative) words to be universal Quantifiers. It proposes a new structure of N-words in terms of constituent negation and includes a detailed analysis of the difference between "not an N" and "not all the N" in French.

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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. The Yearbook of Morphology 1999 focuses on diachronic morphology, and shows, in a number of articles by renowned specialists, how complicated morphological systems develop in the course of time. In addition, this volume deals with a number of hotly debated issues in theoretical morphology: its interaction with phonology (including Optimality Theory), the relation between inflection and word formation, and the formal modeling of inflectional systems. A special feature of this volume is an article on morphology in sign language, a very new and exciting area of research in linguistics. The relevant evidence comes from a wide variety of languages, amongst which Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages are prominent. Audience: Theoretical, descriptive, and historical linguists, morphologists, phonologists, and psycholinguists will find this book of interest.

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

A revival of interest in morphology has taken place during recent years and the subject is seen now as a relatively autonomous subdiscipline of linguistics. As one of the important areas of theoretical research in formal linguistics, morphology has attracted linguists to investigate its relations to syntax, semantics, phonology, psycholinguistics and language change. The aim of the Yearbook of Morphology, therefore, is to support and enforce the upswing of morphological research and to give an overview of the current issues and debates at the heart of this revival.

The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the central issues in Chinese linguistics. Chapters are divided into four thematic areas: writing systems and the neuro-cognitive processing of Chinese, morpho-lexical structures, phonetic and phonological characteristics, and issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. By following a context-driven approach, it shows how theoretical issues in Chinese linguistics can be resolved with empirical evidence and argumentation, and provides a range of different perspectives. Its dialectical design sets a state-of-the-art benchmark for research in a wide range of interdisciplinary and cross-lingual studies involving the Chinese language. It is an essential resource for students and researchers wishing to explore the fascinating field of Chinese linguistics.

Series Information:
Communication and Linguistic Theory

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This reproduction of Visser's volumes is more than welcome, and timely, as the volumes have been out of print for quite some time and were sometimes a little bit difficult to navigate. Having a searchable and easy-to-use online version, although maybe not perfect, available now means a revival for scholarship that celebrates its fiftieth birthday without losing any of its relevance.

Anaphora is the study of referential relationships in language. Given the great flowering of the study of this topic in the last decade, it is time for a book that reports on the major results of recent research and sets the stage for further inquiry.

The authors represented in "Anaphora: A Reference Guide" are among the world's leading researchers on anaphora and are ideally suited to meet this goal. Their work draws on theoretical principles and methodologies in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy, as well as the integrated, broad perspective of cognitive science.

These stimulating reports of cutting-edge research will be useful to both undergraduate and graduate students and will find a large audience among professional researchers of anaphora and scholars who want to catch up on what is new and exciting in the area.

This book focuses on the relationship between syntax and meaning. Terje Lohndal's core claim is that it is possible to create a transparent mapping from syntax to logical form such that each syntactic Spell-Out domain directly corresponds to a conjunct at logical form. The argument focuses on two domains of grammar - phrase structure and argument structure - and brings together two independently established but seemingly unconnected hypotheses: that verbs do not require arguments, and that specifiers are not required by the grammar. Following the introduction, the second chapter looks in detail at the separation of the verb from its thematic arguments, and presents data from argument structure, reciprocals, and adjectival passives, while the third examines the claim that specifiers do not play a role as the target of various grammatical operations. Chapter 4 then brings these arguments together and proposes a syntax that maps transparently onto logical forms where all thematic arguments are severed from the verb. Moreover, the broader consequences of this approach are outlined in terms of Spell-Out, movement, linearization, thematic uniqueness, and agreement. The book closes with an examination of the relationship between grammatical and conceptual meaning, and a detailed discussion of the nature of compositionality.

In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics." The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thanking, congratulating, etc. Characteristically, a speaker performs one or more of these acts by uttering a sentence or sentences; but the act itself is not to be confused with a sentence or other expression uttered in its performance. Such types of acts as those exemplified above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts. Perlocutionary acts have to do with those effects which our utterances have on hearers which go beyond the hearer's understanding of the utterance. Such acts as convincing, persuading, annoying, amusing, and frightening are all cases of perlocutionary acts."

This book examines the syntax of direct object noun phrases in English within the Principles and Parameters, specifically Chomsky's Minimalist Program, approach to generative grammar. The main focus is on the phrase structural positions of object noun phrases at the various levels of representation, and secondarily on the relationship between structural position and semantic interpretation. Supported by a variety of empirical and conceptual arguments, the central claim of the book is that direct object noun phrases in English surface in a VP-external position; a secondary claim is that while in the overt syntax direct objects appear VP-externally, their position at the level of logical form varies depending on interpretation. Four basic constructions are studied: simple transitive clauses, transitive clauses with prepositional objects, the "raising to object" construction, and the "double object" construction. This book will be of interest to scholars in the areas of phrase structure syntax, English and Germanic syntax, the syntax-semantics interface, and all areas of generative approaches to syntax.

In this book we hope to acquaint the reader with the fundamentals of truth conditional model-theoretic semantics, and in particular with a version of this developed by Richard Montague in a series of papers published during the 1960's and early 1970's. In many ways the paper 'The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English' (commonly abbreviated PTQ) represents the culmination of Montague's efforts to apply the techniques developed within mathematical logic to the semantics of natural languages, and indeed it is the system outlined there that people generally have in mind when they refer to "Montague Grammar." (We prefer the term "Montague Semantics" inasmuch as a grammar, as conceived of in current linguistics, would contain at least a phonological component, a morphological component, and other subsystems which are either lacking entirely or present only in a very rudi mentary state in the PTQ system. ) Montague's work has attracted increasing attention in recent years among linguists and philosophers since it offers the hope that semantics can be characterized with the same formal rigor and explicitness that transformational approaches have brought to syntax. Whether this hope can be fully realized remains to be seen, but it is clear nonetheless that Montague semantics has already established itself as a productive para digm, leading to new areas of inquiry and suggesting new ways of conceiving of theories of natural language. Unfortunately, Montague's papers are tersely written and very difficult to follow unless one has a considerable background in logical semantics."

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 2001 a number of articles is devoted to the notion of productivity, and the role of analogy in coining new words. In relation to this topic, constraints on affix ordering in a number of Germanic languages are investigated.
A second topic of this volume is the necessity and the role of the paradigm in morphological analyses; arguments for and against the formal role of the paradigm are presented.
Thirdly, this volume discusses a number of general issues in morphological theory such as the relation between form and meaning in morphology, the accessibility of the internal morphological structure of complex words, and the interaction of morphology and prosody in truncation processes.

Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.

Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.

Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.

Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.

This distinctive cross-linguistic examination of spelling examines the cognitive processes that underlie spelling and the process of learning how to spell. The chapters report and summarize recent research in English, German, Hebrew, and French. Framing the specific research on spelling are chapters that place spelling in braod theoretical perspectives provided by cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistic, and writing system-linguistic frameworks. Of special interest is the focus on two major interrelated issues: how spelling is acquired and the relationship between reading and spelling. An important dimension of the book is the interweaving of these basic questions about the nature of spelling with practical questions about how children learn to spell in classrooms. A motivating factor in this work was to demonstrate that spelling research has become a central challenging topic in the study of cognitive processes, rather than an isolated skill learned in school. It thus brings together schooling and learning issues with modern cognitive research in a unique way. testing, children writing strings of letters as a teacher pronounces words ever so clearly. In parts of the United States it can also bring an image of specialized wizardry and school room competition, the "spelling bee." And for countless adults who confess with self-deprecation to being "terrible spellers," it is a reminder of a mysterious but minor affliction that the fates have visited on them. Beneath these popular images, spelling is a human literacy ability that reflects language and nonlanguage cognitive processes. This collection of papers presents a sample of contemporary research across different languages that addresses this ability. To understand spelling as an interesting scientific problem, there are several important perspectives. First, spelling is the use of conventionalized writing systems that encode languages. A second asks how children learn to spell. Finally, from a literacy point of view, another asks the extent to which spelling and reading are related. In collecting some of the interesting research on spelling, the editors have adopted each of these perspectives. Many of the papers themselves reflect more than one perspective, and the reader will find important observations about orthographies, the relationship between spelling and reading, and issues of learning and teaching throughout the collection.