In the past, discussions of absolute constructions (ACs) have been limited by an imprecise understanding of what ACs are. By examining the nature and function of ACs and related constructions in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, this new study arrives at a clear and simple definition of ACs. Focussing on the earliest attested material in each language, it highlights how AC usage differs between languages and offers explanations for these differences. Identifying the common core shared by all ACs, it suggests a starting-point and way by which they developed into Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. Further historical study reveals how ACs have been conceived of by grammarians, philologists and even Christian missionaries over the last two thousand years and how enduring misconceptions still affect our discussion of them today. All Sanskrit material is annotated in detail, making it accessible for classicists in particular and allowing a better understanding of ACs in Greek and Latin.

Noun Phrases and Nominalizations: The Syntax of DPs is a theoretical study of nominal expressions which covers central aspects of their syntax that have not been approached with concurrent tools in recent years. The study examines the functional structure, offers a structural definition of syntactic nominalization, and carefully draws the border line between the lexical nominalizing mechanism and its syntactic counterpart. The empirical base of the study is broad and varied: it explores the rich nominal system of Modern Hebrew with constant comparisons to relevant structures of other Semitic and non-Semitic languages. The analyses put forward have recourse to a minimal syntactic apparatus, thus lending support to Chomsky's recent view of language design. This book targets researchers in theoretical linguistics and comparative syntax. Alongside theoretical and cross-linguistic findings, the book also offers an abundant source of insights into Hebrew nominal expressions. It can be used both as a foundational book on the syntax of nominal expressions or as a reference book for linguists and graduate students of Semitic and comparative syntax.

This book is all about the captivating ability that the human language has to express intricately logical (mathematical) meanings using tiny (microsemantic) morphemes as utilities. Languages mark meanings with identical inferences using identical particles and these particles thus creep up in a wide array of expressions. Because of their multi-tasking capacity to express seemingly disparate meanings, they are dubbed Superparticles. These particles are perfect windows into the interlock of several grammatical modules and the nature of the interaction of these modules through time. With a firm footing in the module where grammatical bones are built and assembled (narrow morpho-syntax), superparticles acquire varied interpretation (in the conceptual-intentional module - semantics) depending on the structure they fea- ture in. What is more, some of the interpretations these particles trigger are inferential and belong, under the standard account, to the realm of pragmatics. How can such tiny particles, rarely exceeding a syllable of sound, have such powerful and over-arching effects across the inter-modular grammatical space? This is the Platonic background against which this book is set.

This book provides a state of the art collection of constructional research on syntactic structures in German. The volume is unique in that it offers an easily accessible, yet comprehensive and sophisticated variety of papers. Moreover, various of the papers make explicit connections between grammatical constructions and the concept of valency which has figured quite prominently in Germanic Linguistics over the past half century.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the syntactic variation of the dialects of Spanish. More precisely, it covers Spanish theoretical syntax that takes as its data source non-standard grammatical phenomena. Approaching the syntactic variation of Spanish dialects opens a door not only to the intricacies of the language, but also to a set of challenges of linguistic theory itself, including language variation, language contact, bilingualism, and diglossia. The volume is divided into two main sections, the first focusing on Iberian Spanish and the second on Latin American Spanish. Chapters cover a wide range of syntactic constructions and phenomena, such as clitics, agreement, subordination, differential object marking, expletives, predication, doubling, word order, and subjects. This volume constitutes a milestone in the study of syntactic variation, setting the stage for future work not only in vernacular Spanish, but all languages.

Earlier empirical studies on valency have looked at the phenomenon either in individual languages or a small range of languages, or have concerned themselves with only small subparts of valency (e.g. transitivity, ditransitive constructions), leaving a lacuna that the present volume aims to fill by considering a wide range of valency phenomena across 30 languages from different parts of the world. The individual-language studies, each written by a specialist or group of specialists on that language and covering both valency patterns and valency alternations, are based on a questionnaire (reproduced in the volume) and an on-line freely accessible database, thus guaranteeing comparability of cross-linguistic results. In addition, introductory chapters provide the background to the project and discuss its main characteristics and selected results, while a series of featured articles by leading scholars who helped shape the field provide an outside perspective on the volume's approach. The volume is essential reading for anyone interested in valency and argument structure, irrespective of theoretical persuasion, and will serve as a model for future descriptive studies of valency in individual languages.

This book addresses the three fundamental properties of V-V resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese: their generation, their syntactic structure, and their alternations. This book is original and new in the following aspects. First, adopting the 'inner vs. outer domain' theory, it provides new analysis and evidence that these compounds are generated in syntax, not in lexicon. Second, this book argues that the two subclasses of V-V resultative constructions, object-oriented vs. subject-oriented V-V resultatives, actually have different structures. Their syntactic contrasts have not been observed in the literature before. Third, this book is new in determining the syntactic structure of the V-V resultative constructions through their adverbial modification properties. It demonstrates that the previous isomorphism analysis of the syntactic structure of Chinese V-V resultatives does not hold. Finally, this book provides a new analysis of the issue of the alternations of V-V resultatives. In contrast to previous analyses, which generally view the causative alternation as the idiosyncratic property of particular V-V compounds, this book provides a principled analysis. This book makes a substantial improvement of the current understanding of the issues in the syntax of Mandarin Chinese and gives new support to certain theories of the generative grammar from the perspective of Mandarin Chinese.

Morphology is particularly challenging, because it is pervaded by irregularity and idiosyncrasy. This book is a study of word structure using a specific theoretical framework known as 'Network Morphology'. It describes the systems of rules which determine the structure of words by construing irregularity as a matter of degree, using examples from a diverse range of languages and phenomena to illustrate. Many languages share common word building strategies and many diverge in interesting ways. These strategies can be understood by distinguishing different notions of 'default'. The Network Morphology philosophy promotes the use of computational implementation to check theories. The accompanying website provides the computer coded version of the Network Morphology model of word structure for readers to test, customize and develop. This book will be a valuable contribution to the fields of linguistic typology and morphology and will be welcomed by researchers and graduate students in these areas.

This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual languages and their cross-linguistic realizations to explain what syntactic analyses can do and at the same time to show in what respects syntactic theories differ from each other. It investigates how syntax is related to neighbouring disciplines and investigate the role of the interfaces especially the relationship between syntax and phonology, morphology, compositional semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. The phenomena chosen bring together renowned experts in syntax, and represent the consensus reached as to what has to be considered as an important as well as illustrative syntactic phenomenon. The phenomena discuss do not only serve to show syntactic analyses, but also to compare theoretical approaches with each other.

Discourse and Power: An Introduction to Critical Narratology: Who Narrates Whom? is both an introduction to discourse research and an application of the concept of discourse to the problem of power. Divided into two sections, Part One is a presentation of the most important theories of discourse in which the link between discourse and power or language and power is central. It provides a critical overview of the most important discourse theories: Foucault, Bourdieu, Fairclough and Greimas' structural semiotics. In Part two, the section on practice, the insights gained in the first part of the book are applied to analyses of particular discourses and their involvement in power relations. Ranging from psychiatric, legal, political, literary and scientific discourses, examples include the presidential speeches of Obama, Trump and Biden and the novels of Camus and Pirandello. The book demonstrates it is possible to reduce the power factor to a minimum, improve theoretical innovation and thus pave the way for new insights in social sciences. This is an important and timely text from a leading scholar, suitable for use on discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis and rhetoric courses.

The collected essays in this volume present an overview and state-of-the-field of traditional and recently developed methodological approaches to the study of bilingual reading comprehension. It critically reviews and examines major findings from classical behavioral approaches such as the visual moving window, rapid-serial visual presentation (RSVP), and eye-tracking, as well as newly developing neuropsycholinguistic methodologies such as Event-Related Potentials (ERPS), and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Written to address a timely topic, Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research updates the field of bilingual reading by critically examining the contributions of the various behavioral and technologically-based reading techniques used to understand psychological processes underlying written language comprehension. Each topic is covered first from a theoretical, and then from an experimental, viewpoint. Moreover, the volume contributes to the development and establishment of Bilingual Reading as a subfield of bilingual sentence processing and fills a significant gap in the literature on bilingual language processing and thought. Significantly, Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research presents an overall view of some of the typical psycholinguistic techniques and approaches, as well as proposing other possible tasks that may prove viable in investigating such theoretical issues as bilingual lexical ambiguity resolution, or how bilingual speakers might resolve multiple sources of potentially conflicting information as they comprehend sentences and discourse during the communicative process. In addition, to aid reader comprehension and encourage readers to acquire "hands on" experience in the creation and development of experiments in the realm of bilingual reading research, each chapter includes a list of key words, suggested student research projects, and questions to both help the reader review the chapter and expand upon the reading. With its comprehensive coverage of a crucial subfield of psycholinguistics and language processing, Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research is an invaluable and informative resource for all students and researchers in bilingualism, neurolinguistics, bilingual cognition, and other related fields.

The order and behaviour of the premodifier (an adjective, or other modifying word that appears before a noun) has long been a puzzle to syntacticians and semanticists. Why can we say 'the actual red ball', but not 'the red actual ball'? And why, conversely, do some other premodifiers have free variation in sentences; for example we can say both 'German and English speakers' and 'English and German speakers'? Why do some premodifiers change the meaning of a phrase in some contexts; for example 'young man', can mean 'boyfriend', rather than 'man who is young'? Drawing on a corpus of over 4,000 examples of English premodifiers from a range of genres such as advertising, fiction and scientific texts, and across several varieties of English, this book synthesises research into premodifiers and provides a new explanation of their behaviour, order and use.

First published in 1959, this book aims to provide a practical introduction to semantics, relating the critical study of language to real-life situation, with a wealth of anecdotes and numerous illustrations drawn from everyday personal predicaments. This book provides much information and much material for profitable discussion, helping to make accessible what can be a highly academic subject comprehensible only to a minority. This book provides a highly valuable foundation for students of linguistics and will provide preparation for further study.

Georgian: A Comprehensive Grammar constitutes a complete reference work addressing all major elements of Modern Georgian grammar and usage. It provides a systematic and accessible description of the language's phonology, orthography, morphology, and syntax. The focus is on contemporary spoken and written usage, with attention devoted throughout to differences of register and genre. Points are illustrated with examples drawn from a range of authentic written and recorded sources such as press, radio, and television. The grammar is designed for a wide readership including students of Georgian, particularly at the intermediate and advanced levels, as well as scholars of Georgian and theoretical linguistics.

This book contains papers that were written to honor Professor Lyn Frazier on the occasion of her retirement from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Some were presented at the Lynschrift on May 19-20, 2018; others were written especially for this volume. The papers report original research on, or research-based theoretical analyses of, several of the domains that Professor Frazier contributed to during her career. The volume begins with a brief overview of Professor Frazier's research contributions and an appreciation of the contributions she has made to the field of psycholinguistics and to her students and colleagues. The next several chapters discuss the roles that prosody plays in language processing, and the volume continues with chapters on the topic that established Professor Frazier as a major psycholinguistic theorist, syntactic processing. The volume then explores the roles semantics and pragmatics play in language comprehension, and concludes with reports of applications and extensions of research on language processing. All chapters were contributed by current and former students and colleagues of Professor Frazier in gratitude for the impact she has had on their lives and careers.

Meanings of cultural importance are found not only in words but also in the very grammar of a language. This exciting volume presents eleven original studies of the relationship between grammar, culture, and cognition, with data from languages and cultures from around the world. Contributors discuss a wide variety of grammatical phenomena. This book shows that the study of culture can help to understand how and why languages differ in the ways they do.

In their book, the authors describe the usage of and attitudes towards English in Asia since the 19th century, as well as the creative and dynamic ways in which Asians of the 21st century continually reinvent the lexicon of English, and the lexicons of their native tongues. The current biggest source of loanwords for many of the world's languages is English, the once obscure Germanic language that has risen to the role of a global lingua franca. However, the overwhelming influence of English is far from being entirely one-sided, at least from a lexical perspective. Many have decried the way that English has "invaded" the vocabularies of their languages, without realising that the English word stock is to some extent also being invaded by these languages. This book explores the phenomenon of word exchange by examining its occurrence between English and some of the major languages spoken in Asia-highly multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multilingual region where English is the predominant medium of international and intraregional communication. Students and researchers from various linguistic areas such as world Englishes, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, lexicology, and contact linguistics will find this book appealing.

This volume is a study of co-ordination, i.e. structures with conjunctions such as "and", "but", and "or", arguing that these are important words in their constructions, rather than being unimportant and superfluous, because they have many properties in common with categories such as verbs and prepositions. Dr Johannessen has analyzed data from 33 languages, many of them unrelated, and has found striking similarities. She focuses in particular on "unbalanced co-ordination" (UC), that is, co-ordination in which the conjuncts differ with respect to crucial grammatical features such as case and word order. UC occurs in many of the languages in the study, and provides evidence for an analysis of overt, as well as covert, conjunctions as heads in an X-bar theoretical framework. Specifically, there is a strong correlation between the order of conjunctions and abnormal conjuncts and that of heads and complements generally in the languages that have UC. Dr Johannessen also considers extraordinary balanced co-ordination, in which both conjuncts are abnormal. This phenomenon provides additional evidence for conjunctions being heads. She gives a comprehensive account of co-ordination in gener

This book examines in detail the forms and functions of clause combination in English. Using a corpus linguistics methodology, it describes how the English clause system currently behaves, how it has developed over the history of the language, and how the features and properties of English clause combination have important theoretical and empirical significance. Adopting the cognitive-functional Adaptive Approach to grammar, it offers a series of interconnected studies that investigate how English clause combination interacts with the properties of coherence and cohesion in discourse across historical time, as well in contemporary language use. This work contributes to the ever-increasing common ground between corpus linguistics and cognitive-functional linguistics, producing new paths for interdisciplinary research.

The book contains a collection of papers dealing with the question of how rhythm shapes language. Until now, there was no comprehensive theory that addressed these findings adequately. By bringing together researchers from many different fields, this book will make a first attempt to fill this gap.

Non-literal language is ubiquitous in everyday life, and while hyperbole is a major part of this, it has so far remained relatively unexplored. This volume provides the first investigation of hyperbole in English, drawing on data from genres such as spoken conversation, TV, newspapers, and literary works from Chaucer to Monty Python. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, it uses approaches from semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and classical rhetoric, to investigate in detail both speaker-centered and emotive aspects of hyperbole, and also addressee-related aspects, such as interpretation and interactional uptake. Illustrated with a range of diachronic case studies, hyperbole is also shown to be a main means of linguistic creativity, and an important contributor to language change. The book concludes with an exploration of the role of hyperbole in political speaking, humour, and literature. Original and in-depth, it will be invaluable to all those working on meaning, discourse, and historical linguistics.

This volume presents the results of psycholinguistic research into various aspects of the grammar of quantification. The investigations involve children and adults, speakers of different languages, using a variety of experimental paradigms. A shared aspect of the studies is that they present their experimental results as evidence evaluating linguistic theories of quantification. Topics discussed include the interpretation of universal, comparative, and superlative quantifiers, quantifier spreading, scope interaction between pairs of quantifiers and between quantifiers and wh-phrases, distributivity and cumulativity, the interaction of quantifier interpretation with information structure, the disambiguating role of prosody, the functional overlap between universal quantification and perfectivity, and much more. The focus on experimental evidence makes this book essential reading for linguists (syntacticians, semanticists and pragmatists), psycholinguists and psychologists interested in quantification.

This book contains a selection of papers on issues of current interest in syntax and morpho-syntax. Most topics pertain to the question of the relation between word order and syntactic structure. The discussion starts with a proposal of extending the theory of relativization to reason clauses. It continues with the analysis of the realization of focus in Basque and the discussion of current views on the syntax of cleft constructions. Next, an inquiry into the rigidity of sentence left-periphery is offered in a cross-linguistic perspective. The two final contributions discuss feature-free derivations in syntax applied to a single morpho-syntactic problem, and the question of gradient acceptability of Polish sentences featuring possessive items in the context of the competition between their reflexive and pronominal forms.