This is the first monograph to provide a detailed account of the fundamental changes which have recently affected-and which still are affecting-the system of English auxiliaries.

This study improves our understanding of both the present and the past of a central domain of the English grammar and will thus appeal to historical linguists and linguists focusing on present-day English alike. On account of its innovative approach and empirical scope, it will serve as the standard reference work on English modal constructions. The book is also valuable for its proposal of two prototype-oriented models for the emergence of a new verbal category. While it addresses primarily an area of English grammar, as a study in grammaticalization it also provides hypotheses (e.g. regarding reanalysis and unidirectionality) which can be tested in work on grammatical change of any other language. On a higher level of abstraction, then, this book offers new insights to linguists and advanced students interested in any one of the following areas: grammaticalization (phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic change), modality, functionalism, corpus linguistics, prototype theory, iconicity, sociolinguistics and stylistics.

The book overviews a wide range of vocabulary research methodologies, and offers practical advice on how to carry out valid and reliable research on first and second language vocabulary. It includes a Resources section which outlines the lexical tests, corpora, software, internet sites, and other resources available to vocabulary researchers.

Vowel Harmony and Correspondence Theory covers the major issues in the generative analysis of vowel harmony and vowel harmony typology. The book offers an economical account of the most prominent features of vowel harmony systems (root control, affix control, dominance, vowel opacity, and neutrality) within the framework of optimality theory, extending the notion of correspondence to the syntagmatic dimension.The book contains a typological overview of vowel harmony patterns, an introduction to the basics of optimality theory including some of its most recent extensions and detailed studies of harmony systems in 10 languages from a variety of language families.

The two great epics of (old) India, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, are written in a language, which differs from so-called classical Sanskrit in many details. Both texts still are of an enormous importance in India and other countries. Because of this, a grammar describing all the different characteristics of epic Sanskrit has been missed until now. The Grammar of Epic Sanskrit will now close this gap.

This collection of nine original articles deals with the expression of possession at various levels of grammar, morphological, phrasal, and syntactic, and from a typologically diverse range of languages (including Germanic, Oceanic, Meso-American, and Australian Aboriginal). There are two main aims. The first is to reveal something of the range of constructions employed cross-linguistically in the expression of possession, and second, to present an understanding of the possessive relation itself as a cognitive and linguistic phenomenon. A guiding principle in the selection of contributors has been to invite linguists whose research, while not necessarily directly dealing with possession, touches on it, and indicates that they are likely to provide fresh perspectives on this well-trodden field. Key features: William McGregor is a well known expert in this field of research Possession is a paradigm for studies on typology, ethnology etc., because a multitude of linguistic and cultural varieties are reflected in this field new series textbook"

English for Journalists has established itself as an invaluable guide to the basics of English in newsrooms the world over, focusing on the essential aspects of writing, from reporting speech to the house styles and jargon central to the language of journalism. Written in a highly accessible and engaging style, English for Journalists covers the fundamentals of grammar, spelling, punctuation and journalistic writing, with all points illustrated through a series of concise and illuminating examples. The book features practical, easy to follow rules, the correct and incorrect ways to report stories, and examples of common mistakes and problem words in journalistic writing. The twentieth anniversary edition adds a new introduction to the work from author Wynford Hicks, as well as updated examples throughout to improve accessibility, and a revised first chapter on the state of English today. This is an essential guide to written English for all practicing journalists and students of journalism today.

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

The result of over five years of close collaboration among an international group of leading typologists within the EUROTYP program, this volume is about the morphology and syntax of the noun phrase. Particular attention is being paid to nominal inflectional categories and inflectional systems and to the syntax of determination, modification, and conjunction. Its areal focus, like that of other EUROTYP volumes, is on the languages of Europe; but in order to appreciate what is peculiarly European about their noun phrases, a more comprehensive and genuinely typological view is being taken at the full range of cross-linguistic variation within this structural domain. There has been no shortage lately of contributions to the theory of noun phrase structure; the present volume is, however, unique in the extent to which its theorizing is empirically grounded.

This work presents a unified theory of aspect within Universal Grammar. It provides an unusual combination of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic approaches to a single domain, and gives detailed linguistic analyses of five languages with very different aspectual systems: English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Navajo and Russian. This second edition has been completely revised to include further development of the two-component theory, including new treatments of boundedness, dynamism and a general account of aspectual shifts. It includes syntactic and semantic tests.

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

This book explores the nature of sentential stress, how it is assigned and its interaction with information structure. Its central thesis is that the position of sentential or nuclear stress, the element with the highest prominence in the sentence, is determined syntactically and that cross-linguistic differences in this respect follow from syntactic variations. Presented in a Chomskian multiple spell-out framework, the author develops the Sentential Stress Rule and provides a systematic way of accounting for a wide range of cross-linguistic facts, with data taken from Persian, English, German and Eastern Armenian. The author further proposes the Focus Stress Rule to handle the interaction between sentential structure and information structure. Sentential stress is thus determined through an interplay between two components, the default Sentential Stress Rule and the Focus Stress Rule. Syntactic phenomena are not, the author argues, triggered by phonology or prosodic motivations: the relationship between syntax and phonology is always from syntax to phonology.
This important contribution to understanding processes at the syntax-phonology interface will interest syntacticians and phonologists at graduate level and above.

Gaagudju is a previously undescribed and now nearly extinct language of northern Australia. This grammar provides an overall description of the language. Australian languages generally show a high degree of structural similarity to one another. Gaagudju conforms to some of the common Australian patterns, yet diverges significantly from others. Thus while it has a standard Australian phonological inventory, its prosodic systems differ from those of most Australian languages, with stressed and unstressed syllables showing marked differences in realisation. Like many northern languages, it has complex systems of both prefixation and suffixation to nominals and verbs. Prefixation provides information about nominal classification (4 classes), mood, and pronominal cross-reference (Subjects, Objects, and Indirect Objects). Suffixation provides information about case, tense, and aspect. As in many languages, there is a clear distinction between productive and unproductive morphology. Gaagudju differs from most Australian languages in that a considerable amount of its morphology is unproductive, showing complex and irregular allomorphic variation. Gaagudju is like most Australian languages in that it may be described as a free word order language. However, word order is not totally free and strictly ordered phrasal compounding structures are significant (e.g. in the formation of denominal verbs).

It's or Its? Full stop inside or outside the inverted commas? What's the difference between a semi-colon and a colon? Cooperate or co-operate? Punctuation For Now describes in a witty but authoritative way how our present system of punctuation has grown out of the history of our language. It also indicates the conventions that govern the best punctuation in the English of today. The rules are set out clearly, and reinforced by abundant examples from the work of such authors as Kingsley Amis and Evelyn Waugh. Anyone with an examination to pass, or with a child who is learning to use English, or who writes it for a living, will find Punctuation For Now an invaluable guide and friend.

"Arguing that a corpus-based approach is indispensable for the study of changes of complementation in British and American English, the author examines several central patterns of sentential complementation in a number of electronic corpora to shed light on the emergence and spread of innovative constructions in relatively recent English"--

How do new ways of encoding valence alternations emerge, how and why do they spread, and what are the consequences of their emergence and spread for already existing patterns? This book discusses these questions on the basis of a concrete example of valence alternation, the French causative-anticausative alternation. The main focus of the proposed analysis is the anticausative member of the alternation and the relation between the two formal types of anticausative verbs in French, the reflexive and the unmarked anticausative (La branche s'est cassee vs. La branche a casse 'The branch broke'). The emergence and spread of the reflexive anticausative, the consequences of these processes for the unmarked anticausative and the semantic relation between reflexive and unmarked anticausatives are analyzed on the basis of several corpus studies.

This volume presents the proceedIngs of the Twelfth Annual LIn guistics Symposium of the UniversIty of WisconsIn-Milwaukee held March 11-12, 1983 on the campus of UWM. It includes all papers that were given at the conference with the exception of Genevieve Escure and Glenn Gilbert's joint paper "Syntactic marking/unmarking phenomena in the creole continuum of Belize" which was not submitted for publication by the authors. Many of the papers appear in this volume in a revised form that is somewhat different from the oral version. We would like to thank the various departments and other units at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that sponsored the mark- ness symposium. These are: the Department of Linguistics, the English as a Second Language Intensive Program, the College of Let ters and Science, the Division of Urban Outreach, the Center for Latin America and the Spanish Speaking Outreach Institute. Finally, we wish to thank Lisa Carrara for doing a careful joh on the preparation of the index, and J. L. Russell, for his patience and perseverance in typing a difficult manuscript."

The contributions in this book are a representative cross-section of recent research on verb-particle constructions. The syntactic, semantic, morphological, and psycholinguistic phenomena associated with the constructions in English, Dutch, German, and Swedish are analyzed from the various different theoretical viewpoints.

What factors influence the choice between alternative grammatical structures such as the following: a lit / a lighted cigarette, more full / fuller of convincing arguments, the main thesis of the book / the book's main thesis, take hostage a group of 15 holiday makers / take a group of 15 holidaymakers hostage, conceding that the argument is convincing / conceding the argument to be convincing? This is the central issue explored in this volume, which contains a unique selection of innovative in-depth empirical studies written in a broadly functional framework. The factors investigated include the following: phonological influences (such as the principle of rhythmic alternation and optimal syllable structure), frequency, pervasive semantic and pragmatic aspects (including iconicity, markedness, grammaticalization and typological tendencies), information structure, processing complexity and horror aequi (the avoidance of identity effects).

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

Book 3 of the book series is designed for intermediate to advanced learners of Cantonese. This volume provides an authentic and contextualized approach to the learning of the language. This volume includes language scenarios various language functions, such as expressing views, summarizing, suggesting, persuading, and presenting data. The language examples in Book 3 contain speeches, connected discourses and narrations. Some sample discourse structures are presented in the 'Learning points' sections. Learners can apply the structure templates to build up longer connected discourses. Book 3 of the book series can be used by universities, colleges, schools in Hong Kong, and by institutions around the world. This book is suitable for learners who are looking for self-study materials.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

Syntax-Based Collocation Extraction is the first book to offer a comprehensive, up-to-date review of the theoretical and applied work on word collocations. Backed by solid theoretical results, the computational experiments described based on data in four languages provide support for the book's basic argument for using syntax-driven extraction as an alternative to the current cooccurrence-based extraction techniques to efficiently extract collocational data. The work described in Syntax-Based Collocation Extraction focuses on using linguistic tools for corpus-based identification of collocations. It takes advantage of recent advances in parsing to propose a novel deep syntactic analytic collocation extraction that has applicability to a range of important core tasks in Computational Linguistics. The book is useful for anyone interested in computational analysis of texts, collocation phenomena, and multi-word expressions in general.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.