This essential Middle English textbook, now in its third edition, introduces students to the wide range of literature written in England between 1150 and 1400.
New, thoroughly revised edition of this essential Middle English textbook.
Introduces the language of the time, giving guidance on pronunciation, spelling, grammar, metre, vocabulary and regional dialects.
Now includes extracts from 'Pearl' and Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde'.
Bibliographic references have been updated throughout.
Each text is accompanied by detailed notes.

Andrew Radford has acquired an unrivalled reputation over the past thirty years for writing syntax textbooks in which difficult concepts are clearly explained without the excessive use of technical jargon. Analysing English Sentences continues in this tradition, offering a well-structured introduction to English syntax and contemporary syntactic theory which is supported throughout with learning aids such as summaries, lists of key hypotheses and principles, extensive references, handy hints and exercises. Instructors will also benefit from the book's free online resources, which include PowerPoint slides of chapter key points and analyses of exercise material, as well as an answer key for all the in-book exercises. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated throughout, including additional exercises and an entirely new chapter on exclamative and relative clauses. Assuming no prior knowledge of grammar, this is an approachable introduction to the subject for undergraduate and graduate students.

It is not entirely clear if modern Chinese is a monosyllabic or disyllabic language. Although a disyllabic prosodic unit of some sort has long been considered by many to be at play in Chinese grammar, the intuition is not always rigidly fleshed out theoretically in the area of Chinese morphology. In this book, Shengli Feng applies the theoretical model of prosodic morphology to Chinese morphology to provide the theoretical clarity regarding how and why Mandarin Chinese words are structured in a particular way. All of the facts generated by the system of prosodic morphology in Chinese provide new perspectives for linguistic theory, as well as insights for teaching Chinese and studying of Chinese poetic prosody.

Being a successful speaker of a given language involves control of the meaning and use of vocabulary items, taking in their lexical content (what phenomena they refer to), combinatorial behaviour (what items they occur with) and situational characteristics (e.g. as colloquial or formal terms). This essential reference book provides clear information on these aspects for around three hundred groups of Japanese near-synonyms, supplemented by a wide range of authentic examples. The result is a clear profile of the meaning and use of each item, highlighting similarities and distinctions among neighbouring terms and expanding learners' lexical range. The book is designed primarily for English-speaking learners, and the selection of groups and items and the overall treatment adopted reflects the author's extensive experience in teaching Japanese to English speakers. Japanese forms and examples appear in both romanisation and Japanese orthography, and the bilingual indexes allow readers to locate synonyms quickly and easily.

Austin's words on page 1 of his seminal work How to do things with words are valid for this study on clause typing in the Old Irish verbal complex: "The phenomenon to be discussed is very widespread and obvious, and it cannot fail to have been already noticed, at least here and there, by others. Yet I have not found attention paid to it specifically". Old Irish, a regular V1 language, morphologically distinguishes six clause types, to wit, declarative, relative, wh- and polar interrogative, responsive and imperative clause types. After discussing the constituency of the Old Irish verbal complex and the pragmatically marked orders, i.e. cleft-sentence and left-dislocation, the form, function, paradigmatic consistency and syntax of those clause types are then analysed in detail. The other main issues of this study are the descriptively adequate paradigm of clause types and the interaction of clause typing with subordination and with non-verbal predication in Old Irish. This monograph offers a comprehensive view of clause typing, its morphological expression and related phenomena in the earliest Insular Celtic language, and may also contribute to the general consideration of these topics in both the typological and diachronic perspectives.

This pioneering work introduces and presents the first full publication of the text of an unusual fourteenth-century Bulgarian gospel manuscript known as the Curzon Gospel. Volume I is an annotated transcription edition of the manuscript. Volume II is a comprehensive introduction and commentary volume analyzing its linguistic, orthographic, and textual features.
The Curzon Gospel c. 1354, is important both for the study of the development of the Bulgarian language and for understanding the medieval Slavic tradition of Gospel transmission. Unlike most medieval Slavic manuscripts, it is reliably datable and serves as a chronological reference point for other gospel manuscripts. Professor Vakareliyska's annotated transcription edition includes modern chapter and verse numeration and a line-by-line comparison of the text with a corpus of twelve other Church Slavonic manuscripts. It has an index verborum of all orthographic and morphological forms in the text and their locations. Professor Vakareliyska has written and designed her commentary volume for a general audience of linguists, medievalists, Byzantinists, and Church historians. She examines the Curzon Gospel's close relationship to the thirteenth and fourteenth-century Dobreisho and Banitsa gospels and, by comparing the three manuscripts, offers a broad reconstruction of their common ancestor. She includes a detailed discussion of the Curzon Gospel's calendar of saints, discussing its relation to the tenth-century Constantinople Typikon and Latin martyrologies, and its implications for the understanding of the medieval Slavic calendar tradition. The book is fully indexed.
These volumes offer a unique resource for the studyof the medieval Church Slavonic language and Gospel tradition, and the veneration of saints in the Slavic Eastern Orthodox tradition. Cynthia Vakareliyska's work will be treasured by generations of scholars.

Imagine this book was written in Comic Sans. Would this choice impact your image of me as an author, despite causing no literal change to the content within? Generally, discussions of how language variants influence interpretation of language acts/users have focused on variation in speech. But it is important to remember that specific ways of representing a language are also often perceived as linked to specific social actors. Nowhere is this fact more relevant than in written Japanese, where a complex history has created a situation where authors can represent any sentence element in three distinct scripts. This monograph provides the first investigation into the ways Japanese authors and their readers engage with this potential for script variation as a social language practice, looking at how purely script-based language choices reflect social ideologies, become linked to language users, and influence the total meaning created by language acts. Throughout the text, analysis of data from multiple studies examines how Japanese language users' experiences with the script variation all around them influence how they engage with, produce, and understand both orthographic variation and major social divides, ultimately evidencing that even the avoidance of variation can become a socially significant act in Japan.

This book takes Korean as a basis to provide a detailed universal Determiner Phrase (DP) structure. Adnominal adjectival expressions are apparently optional noun dependents but their syntax and semantics have been shown to provide an important window on the internal structure of DP. By carefully examining data from Korean, an understudied language, as well as from other unrelated languages, the book provides a broad perspective on the phenomenon of noun modification and its cross-linguistic variations. Furthermore, it offers not only a thorough syntactic analysis but also a formal semantic analysis of noun modifiers that extends beyond a single language. This book will be of great interest to researchers interested in theoretical syntax, its interfaces with semantics, pragmatics, linguistic typology, and language variation.

This is a comprehensive description of a language spoken some 450 km offshore from the mainland of Papua New Guinea. The language is remarkable for its phonological, morphological and syntactic complexity. As the sole surviving member of its language family, and with little historical contact with surrounding languages, the language provides evidence of the kind of languages spoken in this part of the world before the Austronesian expansion. The grammar provides detailed information on the phoneme inventory, morphology, syntax and select semantic fields. Remarkable features include a 90 phoneme inventory including unique sounds, a morphology with thousands of non-compositional portmanteau elements, complex rules for negation, and extensive ergative syntax. Unusual patterns are also found in the organization of semantic fields, for example in partonymies of the body, taxonomies of the natural world, verbal semantics and kinship terms. The combination of linguistic 'rara' suggest that linguistic evolution under low contact can yield baroque and unusual patterns. The volume should be of special interest to linguists, typologists, sociolinguists, anthropologists and researchers in Oceania and Melanesia. Endorsement: "This long-awaited grammar is a major contribution to Papuan and general linguistics, providing as it does by far the most comprehensive and accurate grammatical description of a language that has already assumed a position as one of the world's most complicated. Hitherto, the most extensive grammatical description of the language has been the survey-like Henderson (1995), and while Levinson explicitly acknowledges his debt to this earlier grammar and to unpublished work by Henderson, his own detailed grammar clearly takes the level of description and analysis of the language to a completely new level. In particular, Levinson's grammar makes clear precisely to what extent and in what ways the language's morphology is complex beyond even what most studies on morphologically complex languages envisage. In addition, it provides a much more detailed account of the language's syntax, based on a judicious combination of corpus attestation and careful elicitation (incl. using the kits developed by Levinson's group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics). The grammar thus not only fills a major lacuna in our knowledge of the non-Austronesian languages of the New Guinea area, but also provides grist for future studies on the implications of the language's complexities." Bernard Comrie, University of California, Santa Barbara

This thoroughly revised third edition of Finnish: An Essential Grammar is grounded in fundamental insights of modern linguistics and incorporates some of the latest achievements in the description of written and spoken Finnish. It gives a systematic account of the structures of the written language and offers increased attention to the key characteristics of present-day colloquial Finnish. No prior knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader and grammatical rules are clearly explained without jargon. Features of this new edition include: * pronunciation guide, including the tendencies in present-day colloquial Finnish * thorough descriptions of morphology (word structure) and syntax (sentence structure) * clear rules and an abundance of concrete examples, from both written and colloquial Finnish * updated vocabulary in the examples * an effective new scheme for detecting the morphological structure of any word form * subject index. This is the ideal reference source both for those studying Finnish independently and for students in schools, colleges, universities and adult classes of all types.

Semantic alignment refers to a type of language that has two means of morphosyntactically encoding the arguments of intransitive predicates, typically treating these as an agent or as a patient of a transitive predicate, or else by a means of a treatment that varies according to lexical aspect. This collection of new typological and case studies is the first book-length investigation of semantically aligned languages for three decades. Leading international typologists explore the differences and commonalities of languages with semantic alignment systems and compare the structure of these languages to languages without them. They look at how such systems arise or disappear and provide areal overviews of Eurasia, the Americas, and the south-west Pacific, the areas where semantically aligned languages are concentrated. This book will interest typological and historical linguists at graduate level and above.

Originally published in 1948, this book was written to provide students learning to write Italian with a guide to 'continuous composition of an advanced and serious kind'. Quotations from Italian authors are used to exemplify the constructions considered, revealing the tone and contexts in which they are used. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the Italian language and the history of education.

No legacy from antiquity to the Latin Middle Ages was more pervasive, or more enduring, than that of grammar and rhetoric. Cicero's son would have felt at home in a Tudor schoolroom, and the classical curriculum is readily recognizable in that of the Tudor schoolroom. And yet, grammatical and rhetorical theory and practice did change during those 1500 years, in ways that continue to demand, and richly reward, investigation. The twelve essays in this book contribute to the rapidly growing body of knowledge about the teaching and uses of grammar and rhetoric in the Latin West from late antiquity to the dawn of a new era in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Since grammar and rhetoric dominated (indeed, almost monopolized) schooling from Cicero's Rome until the twelfth-century revival of Roman law and the rise of universities, clearly a collection of essay examining aspects of these two subjects will, by definition, enrich the larger history of education as well.This transitional period of profound cultural change throughout the former Roman Empire-including the spread of Christianity, the decline of public schools, and the influx of non-Latin-speaking peoples-rewards a diachronic focus on delimited, sharply focused topics. Each author considers such questions as: How did medieval teachers and writers interpret or "repurpose" grammatical and rhetorical texts they inherited from antiquity? What innovations, what new attitudes, did they bring to the task of teaching these two foundational subjects? The book should appeal to students and teachers of classics and late antiquity, rhetoric, the history of education, monasticism, and medieval studies in general.

This book is intended for modern students, inside or outside the classroom, as a work of reference rather than a "teach yourself" textbook. It presents an introductory sketch of Pali using both European and South Asian grammatical categories. In English-language works, Pali is usually presented in the traditional terms of English grammar, derived from the classical tradition, with which many modern students are unfamiliar. This work discusses and reflects upon those categories, and has an appendix devoted to them. It also introduces the main categories of traditional Sanskrit and Pali grammar, drawing on, in particular, the medieval Pali text Saddaniti, by Aggavamsa. Each grammatical form is illustrated by examples taken from Pali texts, mostly canonical. Although some previous knowledge of Sanskrit would be helpful, the book can also be used by those without previous linguistic training. A bibliographical appendix refers to other, complementary resources. Steven Collins is professor of South Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, and was formerly a council member of the Pali Text Society (London). He is the author of Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism and Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire.

Originally published in 1940, this book was written in 'an attempt to drive a few main lines through the almost unexplored tract of Old English syntax'. The text also reaches important conclusions regarding the characteristic features of Old English style and its close relationship with syntactical elements, both in prose and verse. Reference is frequently made to the 'traditional text' of Beowulf. That is to say, the text as it was usually punctuated by editors at the time of publication. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Old English and linguistics.

This introduction to the role of information structure in grammar discusses a wide range of phenomena on the syntax-information structure interface. It examines theories of information structure and considers their effectiveness in explaining whether and how information structure maps onto syntax in discourse. Professor Erteschik-Shir begins by discussing the basic notions and properties of information structure, such as topic and focus, and considers their properties from different theoretical perspectives. She covers definitions of topic and focus, architectures of grammar, information structure, word order, the interface between lexicon and information structure, and cognitive aspects of information structure. In her balanced and readable account, the author critically compares the effectiveness of different theoretical approaches and assesses the value of insights drawn from work in processing and on language acquisition, variation, and universals. This book will appeal to graduate students of syntax and semantics in departments of linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.

In the course of our everyday lives, we generally take our knowledge of language for granted. Occasionally, we may become aware of its great practical importance, but we rarely pay any attention to the formal properties that language has. Yet these properties are remarkably complex. So complex that the question immediately arises as to how we could know so much. The facts that will be considered in this book should serve well to illustrate this point. We will see for example that verbs like arrivare 'arrive' and others like telefonare 'telephone', which are superficially similar, actually differ in a large number of respects, some fairly well known, others not. Why should there be such differencces. we may ask. And why should it be that if a verb behaves like arrivare and unlike tetefonare in one respect. it will do so in all others consistently, and how could everyone know it? To take another case, Italian has two series of pronouns: stressed and unstressed. Thus, for example, alongside of reflexive se stesso 'himself which is the stressed form. one finds si which is unstressed but otherwise synonymous. Yet we will see that the differences between the two could not simply be stress versus lack of stress, as their behavior is radically different under a variety of syntactic conditions.

This study aims at developing a unified perspective on nonfiniteness, encompassing its morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects. It puts the emphasis on clause types distinct from standard infinitives (gerund clauses, Celtic verbo-nominal structures, Portuguese inflected infinitives, Latin dominant participle constructions) and takes advantage of the most recent developments in syntactic theory. The notions of defectiveness and completeness, the inheritance hypothesis, the labeling requirement, the syntactic definition of lexical categories, once combined together, appear to make accessible tighter and more elegant analyses than previous accounts.

This volume intends to fill the gap in the grammaticalization studies setting as its goal the systematic description of grammaticalization processes in genealogically and structurally diverse languages. To address the problem of the limitations of the secondary sources for grammaticalization studies, the editors rely on sketches of grammaticalization phenomena from experts in individual languages guided by a typological questionnaire.

The volume contains most updated theoretical and empirical research on foreign or second language processes analyzed from the perspective of cognition and affect. It consists of articles devoted to various issued related to such broad topics as gender, literacy, translation or culture, to mention a few. The collection of papers offers a constructive and inspiring insight into a fuller understanding of the interconnection of the language-cognition-affect trichotomy.

This handbook provides a comprehensive account of current research on the finite-state morphology of Georgian and enables the reader to enter quickly into Georgian morphosyntax and its computational processing. It combines linguistic analysis with application of finite-state technology to processing of the language. The book opens with the author's synoptic overview of the main lines of research, covers the properties of the word and its components, then moves up to the description of Georgian morphosyntax and the morphological analyzer and generator of Georgian.The book comprises three chapters and accompanying appendices. The aim of the first chapter is to describe the morphosyntactic structure of Georgian, focusing on differences between Old and Modern Georgian. The second chapter focuses on the application of finite-state technology to the processing of Georgian and on the compilation of a tokenizer, a morphological analyzer and a generator for Georgian. The third chapter discusses the testing and evaluation of the analyzer's output and the compilation of the Georgian Language Corpus (GLC), which is now accessible online and freely available to the research community.Since the development of the analyzer, the field of computational linguistics has advanced in several ways, but the majority of new approaches to language processing has not been tested on Georgian. So, the organization of the book makes it easier to handle new developments from both a theoretical and practical viewpoint.The book includes a detailed index and references as well as the full list of morphosyntactic tags. It will be of interest and practical use to a wide range of linguists and advanced students interested in Georgian morphosyntax generally as well as to researchers working in the field of computational linguistics and focusing on how languages with complicated morphosyntax can be handled through finite-state approaches.

This monograph gives a unified account of the syntactic distribution of subjunctive mood across languages, including Romance, Balkan (South Slavic and Modern Greek), and Hungarian, among others. Starting from a close scrutiny of the environments in which subjunctive mood occurs and of its semantic contribution, we present a feature-based approach which reveals the common properties of the class of verbs which embed subjunctive, and which takes into account the variation in subjunctive-related complementizers. Two main proposals can be highlighted: (i) the lexical semantics of the main clause predicate plays a crucial role in mood selection. More specifically subjunctive mood is regulated by a specific property of the main predicate, the emotive property, which is associated with the external argument of the embedding verb (usually the Subject). The book proposes a nanosyntactic analysis of the internal structure of embedding verbs. (ii) Cross- and intra-linguistic variations are dealt with according to different patterns of lexicalization, i.e., variations depend on what portions of the verb's and complementizer's functional sequence is lexicalized and on how it is packaged by languages. In doing so, this approach provides a uniform account of the phenomenon of embedded subjunctives. The monograph takes a novel, feature-based approach to the question of subjunctive licensing, providing a detailed analysis of the features of the matrix verb, of the complementizer and of the embedded subjunctive clause. It is also based on a wide empirical coverage, ranging from the relatively well-studied groups of Romance and Balkan languages to less explored languages from non-Indo-European families (Hungarian).

Predicates and their Subjects is an in-depth study of the syntax-semantics interface focusing on the structure of the subject-predicate relation. Starting from where the author's 1983 dissertation left off, the book argues that there is syntactic constraint that clauses (small and tensed) are constructed out of a one-place unsaturated expression, the predicate, which must be applied to a syntactic argument, its subject. The author shows that this predication relation cannot be reduced to a thematic relation or a projection of argument structure, but must be a purely syntactic constraint. Chapters in the book show how the syntactic predication relation is semantically interpreted, and how the predication relation explains constraints on DP-raising and on the distribution of pleonastics in English. The second half of the book extends the theory of predication to cover copular constructions; it includes an account of the structure of small clauses in Hebrew, of the use of be' in predicative and identity sentences in English, and concludes with a study of the meaning of the verb be'.

The preposition is of particular interest to syntacticians, historians and sociolinguists of English, as its placement within a sentence is influenced by syntactic and sociolinguistic constraints, and by how the 'rules' regarding prepositions have changed over time, as a result of language change, of change in attitudes towards language, and of processes such as standardization. This book investigates preposition placement in the early and late Modern English periods (1500-1900), with a special focus on preposition stranding (The house which I live in) in opposition to pied piping (The house in which I live). Based on a large-scale analysis of precept and usage data, this study reassesses the alleged influence of late eighteenth-century normative works on language usage. It also sheds new light on the origins of the stigmatisation of preposition stranding. This study will be of interest to scholars working on syntax and grammar, corpus linguistics, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.

This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.