In this book, Ljiljana Progovac proposes a gradualist, adaptationist approach to the evolution of syntax, subject to natural selection. She provides a specific framework for its study, combining the fields of evolutionary biology, theoretical syntax, typology, neuroscience, and genetics. The author pursues an internal reconstruction of the stages of grammar based on the syntactic theory associated with Chomskyan Minimalism and arrives at specific, testable hypotheses, which are then corroborated by an abundance of theoretically analysed 'living fossils' drawn from a variety of languages. Her approach demonstrates that these fossil structures do not just coexist alongside more modern structures, but are in fact built into the very foundation of more complex structures, leading to quirks and complexities that are suggestive of a gradualist evolutionary scenario. By reconstructing a particular path along which syntax evolved, Evolutionary Syntax sheds light on the crucial properties of language design itself, as well as on the major parameters of crosslinguistic variation. As a result, this reconstruction can be meaningfully correlated with both the hominin timeline and the ever-growing body of genetic evidence that is available.

In this book, Aidan Doyle traces the history of the Irish language from the time of the Norman invasion at the end of the 12th century to independence in 1922, combining political, cultural, and linguistic history. The book is divided into seven main chapters that focus on a specific period in the history of the language; they each begin with a discussion of the external history and position of the Irish language in the period, before moving on to investigate the important internal changes that took place at that time. A History of the Irish Language makes available for the first time material that has previously been inaccessible to students and scholars who cannot read Irish, and will be a valuable resource not only for undergraduate students of the language, but for all those interested in Irish history and culture.

This book examines several thousand examples of tense-aspect stem participles in the Rigveda, and the passages in which they appear, in terms of both their syntax and semantics. The Rigveda is an ancient collection of sacred Indian hymns, written in Vedic Sanskrit, and is one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. It is also a poetic text in which deliberate obscurity is the governing aesthetic and in which the rules of language are pushed to their limits in order to produce the ideal poetic expression. Many Vedic sentences are of controversial, disputed meaning, and Vedic scholarship is thus fraught with controversy. John J. Lowe applies formal linguistic analysis to the data and produces a comprehensive formal model of how participles are used. The author uses his findings to recategorize the data, by defining certain stems and stem-types as outside the synchronic category of participle on the basis of their syntactic and semantic properties. He suggests alternative sources for these forms and considers the linguistic processes that transformed old participles into non-participial entities. In his conclusion he reassesses the category of participles within the verbal and nominal systems, looks at their prehistory in Proto-Indo-European, and describes their universal, typological characteristics. Among his conclusions are that tense-aspect-stem participles have the technical properties of adjectival verbs, not verbal adjectives, and that such participles are not fully dependent on corresponding finite verbal forms. That is, a perfect participle, for example, need not share all the semantic and functional features of the finite perfect forms built to the same stem. These and many other conclusions drawn either directly challenge or radically revise received opinion and recent work.

The book provides a detailed empirical approach to constructing grammatical analysis and theory, in particular the analysis of English verbs. It develops an integrated formal description of the English verbal system and offers several theoretical advances in the treatment of verbs that have escaped formulation until now.

- Students will acquire a high level of proficiency, developing their skills in sentence structure, word order, and use of punctuation marks and function words. - Focuses on accuracy in the use of syntactic structures, filling a gap in Russian instruction at the advanced level * Each chapter contains mini-dialogues to illustrate language in use, while communicative exercises and self-assessments allow students to apply and check their understanding.

This volume offers a diachronic sociolinguistic perspective on one of the most complex and fascinating variable speech phenomena in contemporary French. Liaison affects a number of word-final consonants which are realized before a vowel but not pre-pausally or before a consonant. Liaisons have traditionally been classified as obligatoire (obligatory), interdite (forbidden) and facultative (optional), the latter category subject to a highly complex prescriptive norm. This volume traces the evolution of this norm in prescriptive works published since the 16th Century, and sets it against actual practice as evidenced from linguists' descriptions and recorded corpora. The author argues that optional (or variable) liaison in French offers a rich and well-documented example of language change driven by ideology in Kroch's (1978) terms, in which an elite seeks to maintain a complex conservative norm in the face of generally simplifying changes led by lower socio-economic groups, who tend in this case to restrict liaison to a small set of traditionally obligatory environments.

Early Greek Relative Clauses contributes to an old debate currently enjoying a revival: should we expect languages spoken a few thousand years ago, such as Proto-Indo-European, to be less well-equipped than modern languages when it comes to subordinate clauses? Early Greek relative clauses provide a test case for this problem. Early Greek uses several kinds of relative clause, but all these are usually thought to come from one, or at most two, prehistoric types. In a new look at the evidence, this book finds that a rich variety of relative clause types has been in place for a considerable time. The reconstruction of prehistoric linguistic stages requires detailed work on the individual languages descending from them. A substantial part of the book is therefore devoted to a new look at the relative clause systems found in a wide variety of early Greek texts. It emerges that the same basic system is in use across all these texts. Different kinds of relative clause predominate in different kinds of text, however, because relative clause syntax and semantics interact with the needs of different kinds of text. Considering material as diverse as the Homeric poems, laws inscribed in stone on the island of Crete, and the philosophical prose of Heraclitus, the discussion remains clear and straightforward as Probert considers the uses and histories of different relative clause types.

In the last decade a profound change has occurred in linguistic science. Not only have old problems been tackled from an entirely new point of view but also quite a few new fields of linguistic research have been opened. The common characteristic of the majority of the theories and methods developed recently is the search for a more adequate description of language. Adequacy does not mean simply that the theory must conform to the facts. It must also meet the general requirements of present-day theories: coherence, clear-cut notions, rigor of presentation. It has also become abundantly clear that linguistic research cannot be content with the registration and classification of linguistic phenomena. In one way or another linguistics must try to explain the deep-seated regularities in language which in general do not appear on the surface in some straightforward way. Therefore, we find the attribute 'deep' very often in contemporary linguistic literature. Linguistic theories seek an explanation for the observed facts in terms of a system of hypotheses about the functioning of language. As research proceeds these will undergo essential changes. Some of them will be waived, others com plemented. The papers of the present volume follow these general principles of linguistic theory though they may differ from each other in the way of presentation considerably. Some of the papers make use of the framework of transformational-generative grammar (e. g. Kuroda; Perlmutter), others approach the pertinent problem from a different angle (e. g. Dupraz and Rouault; Apresyan, Mel'cuk, and Zolkovski)."

This book, the second volume in A Linguistic History of English, describes the development of Old English from Proto-Germanic. Like Volume I, it is an internal history of the structure of English that combines traditional historical linguistics, modern syntactic theory, the study of languages in contact, and the variationist approach to language change. The first part of the book considers the development of Northwest and West Germanic, and the northern dialects of the latter, with particular reference to phonological and morphological phenomena. Later chapters present a detailed account of changes in the Old English sound system, inflectional system, and syntax. The book aims to make the findings of traditional historical linguistics accessible to scholars and students in other subdisciplines, and also to adopt approaches from contemporary theoretical linguistics in such a way that they are accessible to a wide range of historical linguists.

Using novel examples from live, unscripted radio/TV broadcasts and the internet, this path-breaking book will force us to reconsider the nature of everyday English and its complex interplay of syntactic, pragmatic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors. Uncovering unusual types of non-standard relative clauses, Andrew Radford develops theoretically sophisticated analyses in an area that has traditionally hardly been touched on: that of nonstandard (yet not clearly dialectal) variation in English. Making sense of a huge amount of data, the book demonstrates that some types of non-standard relative clauses have a complex syntactic structure of their own in which the relation between the relative clause and its antecedent is either syntactically encoded or pragmatic in nature, while others come about as a result of hypercorrection, and yet others arise from processing errors.

This book presents a novel semantic account of weak, or selective, islands. Weak islands are configurations that block the displacement of certain elements in a sentence. Examples of island violations with acceptable counterexamples include '#How much wine haven't you drunk?' (but 'Which girl haven't you introduced to Mary?'), '#How does John regret that he danced at the party?' (but 'Who does John regret that he invited to the party?') or '#How much wine do you know whether you will produce?' (but 'Which glass of wine do you know whether you'll poison?'). For forty years or more, explanations of the unacceptability of these island constructions have been syntactic. Syntactic accounts have also provided some of the key empirical motivation for Chomsky's claim that universal grammar (UG) contains language independent abstract syntactic constraints. But syntactic accounts, however subtle, fail to explain why many weak island violations are made almost acceptable by modals and attitude verbs, as in 'How much wine aren't you allowed to drink?'; 'How fast do you hope Lewis didn't drive?'; or 'How does Romeo regret he was allowed to go to the party?' Dr Abrusan considers which contexts and expressions create - or are sensitive to - weak island violations, and examines the factors that go some way to curing them. She puts forward a semantic analysis to account for the unacceptability of violations of negative, presuppositional, quantificational and wh-islands. She explains why grammaticality violations can be obviated by certain modal expressions, and why and how far the grammaticality judgments of speakers depend on the context of the utterance. The book argues that there is no need to assume abstract syntactic rules in order to derive these facts; rather, they can be made to follow from independent semantic principles. If correct, this work has a fundamental consequence for the field of linguistics in general: it removes some of the most important reasons for postulating abstract syntactic rules as part of UG, and hence weakens the arguments for postulating a module of UG.

This is the second volume in the Vancouver studies in Cognitive Science series, and also the second in a series of conferences hosted by the Cognitive Science Programme at Simon Fraser University devoted to the exploration of issues in cognition and the nature of mental representation. The volumes overall theme is the relationship between the contents of grammatical formalisms and their real-time realizations in machine or biological systems. The range of topics includes issues of learnability, implementary and computational issues, parameter setting, and neurolinguistic issues. The core subdisciplines of linguistics - syntax, semantics, morphology, and phonology - are all represented. The contributions are on the leading edge of research in these fields.

Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Graeme Trousdale develop an approach to language change based on construction grammar. Construction grammar is a theory of signs construed at the level of the phrase, clause, and complex sentence. Until now it has been mainly synchronic. The authors use it to reconceptualize grammaticalization (the process by which verbs like to have lose semantic content and gain grammatical functions, or word order moves from discourse-prominent to syntax-prominent), and lexicalization (in which idioms become fixed and complex words simplified). Basing their argument on the notions that language is made up of language-specific form-meaning pairings and that there is a gradient between lexical and grammatical constructions, Professor Traugott and Dr Trousdale suggest that language change proceeds by micro-steps that involve closely related changes in syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse functions. They illustrate their exposition with numerous English examples drawn from Anglo-Saxon times to the present, many of which they discuss in depth. The book is organized in six chapters. The first outlines the approach and the questions to be addressed. The second reviews usage-based models of language change. The third considers the relation between grammatical constructionalization and grammaticalization. Chapters 4 and 5 focus respectively on lexical constructionalization and the role of context. The final chapter draws the authors' arguments together and outlines prospects for further research. Constructionalization and Constructional Changes propounds and demonstrates a new and productive approach to historical linguistics.

Diagnosis is an essential part of scientific research. It refers to the process of identifying a phenomenon, property, or condition on the basis of certain signs and by the use of various diagnostic procedures. This book is the first ever to consider the use of diagnostics in syntactic research and focuses on the five core domains of natural language syntax - ellipsis, agreement, anaphora, phrasal movement, and head movement. Each empirical domain is considered in turn from the perspectives of syntax, syntax at the interfaces, neuropsycholinguistics, and language diversity. Drawing on the expertise of 20 leading scholars and their empirically rich data, the book presents current thoughts on, and practical answers to, the question: What are the diagnostic signs, techniques and procedures that can be used to analyse natural language syntax? It will interest linguists, including formalists, typologists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists.

* highlights important language elements by utilising original and recent Chinese texts regarding social issues * Designed to progress learners' language competency to an advanced level through a natural connection between Chinese language learning and Chinese Social Studies. * Facilitates language learning and provides important insight for the formation of cross-cultural relationships. * Prepares readers for the transition from academic study to employment. * Written by a team of native and non-native speakers.

* based on solid research in the field of Second Language Acquisition and also addresses the need for better textbooks dealing with the contextualized teaching of grammar * provide grammar in a cultural context to engage and learn at the same time * based on frequency data to enable students to earn the most used words in the German language

While previous research on collective nouns in Romance languages mostly adopts a semasiological and theoretical perspective focusing mainly on one single language, the present study takes an onomasiological and comparative approach which is strongly based on empirical evidence. Against this background and in analogy to the verbal domain, the work elaborates further the functional category of nominal aspectuality which describes the construal of extra-linguistic entities as well as the linguistic means reflecting it. In this sense, collective nouns are systematically compared with other (nominal) means of expression of collectivity in French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, focusing especially on object mass nouns, which have hardly been studied so far for Romance languages. On the basis of corpus analyses and acceptability judgement studies, a holistic picture is thus drawn of the semantic-syntactic and derivational properties of various noun types in the synchrony of present-day language as well as of the diachronic lexicalisation paths of these very nouns. The work thus contributes to the understanding of the verbalisation of pluralities by linking and complementing previous monodimensional approaches and, above all, by placing them on a broad empirical basis.

This book presents an overview of sociolinguistic research in England. Showcasing developments in sociolinguistic theory, method and application, the chapters examine sociolinguistic topics on different linguistic levels and in different geographical areas across the country. Allowing the reader to engage with contemporary research in the field, each chapter is unique in the topic or geographical area explored. Topics include historical sociolinguistics, British Sign Language, lexical variation, life-span change, and variation and innovation in urban and peripheral areas; while the regions covered range from Cornwall to West Cumbria. Edited and authored by a range of international scholars, this is sure to be a key research resource for students and scholars interested in language use in England.

This book documents an understudied phenomenon in Austronesian languages, namely the existence of recurrent submorphemic sound-meaning associations of the general form -CVC. It fills a critical gap in scholarship on these languages by bringing together a large body of data in one place, and by discussing some of the theoretical issues that arise in analyzing this data. Following an introduction which presents the topic, it includes a critical review of the relevant literature over the past century, and discussions of the following: 1. problems in finding the root (the "needle in the haystack" problem), 2. root ambiguity, 3. controls on chance as an interfering factor, 4. unrecognized morphology as a possible factor in duplicating evidence, 5. the shape/structure of the root, 6. referents of roots, 7. the origin of roots, 8. the problem of distinguishing false cognates produced by convergence in root-bearing morphemes from legitimate comparisons resulting from divergent descent, and 9. the problem of explaining how submorphemes are transmitted across generations of speakers independently of the morphemes that host them. The remainder of the book consists of a list of sources for the 197 languages from which data is drawn, followed by the roots with supporting evidence, a short appendix, and references.

Variation in Datives collects new research on the nature of syntactic micro-variation in datives. The papers in this volume examine different aspects of internal variation in dative marking, such as agreement and case alternations, distribution of adpositional structures and dative case-marking, the different structural positions of dative arguments and their semantic contribution, and patterns of syncretism in the clitic and/or agreement system. Interest in these topics has grown significantly in the past 20 years. Variation in Datives makes a significant contribution to our understanding of language variation, as it adds the micro-comparative perspective to the general discussion and includes 10 new articles on a wide range of European languages, including Greek, Basque, Icelandic, and Serbo-Croatian.
Variation in Datives will appeal to scholars and advanced students of syntax, linguistic variation, and especially syntactic micro-variation.

• The first introductory book of its kind to focus on morphology whilst assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics and linguistic concepts; • Written in a lively and conversational manner and uses a variety of languages as examples in order to appeal to not only an introductory undergraduate market studying linguistics but also a more general readership; • Includes pedagogical features throughout including data analysis, exercises and questions to engage with the reader.

Split constructions are widespread in natural languages. The separation of the semantic restriction of a quantifier from that quantifier is a typical example of such a construction. This study addresses the problem that such discontinuous strings exhibit--namely, a number of locality constraints, including intervention effects. These are shown to follow from the interaction of a minimalist syntax with a semantics that directly assigns a model-theoretic interpretation to syntactic logical forms. The approach is shown to have wide empirical coverage and a conceptual simplicity. The book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of syntax and semantics.

This grammar provides a clear and comprehensive overview of contemporary West Greenlandic. It follows a systematic order of topics beginning with the alphabet and phonology, continuing with nominal and verbal morphology and syntax, and concluding with more advanced topics such as complex sentences and word formation. Grammatical points are illustrated with authentic examples reflecting current life in Greenland. Grammatical terminology is explained fully for the benefit of readers without a background in linguistics. Features include: Full grammatical breakdowns of all examples for ease of identifying individual components of complex words. A detailed contents list and index for easy access to information. An alphabetical list of the most commonly used West Greenlandic suffixes. A glossary of grammatical abbreviations used in the volume. The book is suitable for a wide range of users, including independent and classroom-based learners of West Greenlandic, as well as linguists and anyone with an interest in Greenland's official language.