This book is the first in-depth investigation of the expression of agency in verbal noun and impersonal/passive constructions in medieval Welsh and Irish, drawing on a database of texts from different genres: narrative, legal, and annalistic. The analysis is primarily data-oriented, rather than theory-oriented, although it draws on methods and concepts from functional grammar approaches and cognitive linguistics. Written with readers from a wide variety of backgrounds in mind, Agents in Early Welsh and Early Irish goes beyond earlier contributions in the field of Celtic syntax and semantics in several important ways: It presents data from both Welsh and Irish It discusses both the internal structure of verbal noun and passive/impersonal constructions and their contributions to their contexts It offers new analyses of agency and its markers in medieval Welsh and Irish, as well as analyses of the marking of instrument, cause, and indirect agency

Description of an endangered and under-documented Austronesian language. Socio-historical information relating to the Tondano sppech comunity Detailed explanations of phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax of the language Data from in-situ fieldwork completed 2011-2015 Applies fieldwork and experience to describe details of the language

This book investigates the architecture of the language faculty by considering what the properties of language reveal about the mental abilities and processes involved in language acquisition. The language faculty, the author argues, must be able not only to accommodate what is general, exceptionless, and universal in language, but must also be capable of dealing with what is irregular, exceptional, and idiosyncratic. In Syntactic Nuts Peter Culicover shows that this is true not only of the lexicon, but for syntax. Marginal and exceptional cases, where there is no straightforward form-meaning correspondence, are dealt with by the language faculty easily and precisely as the general cases. In considering how and why this should be the author argues against the prevailing trend in generative grammar, which takes the learner as either incorporating maximally global generalisations as part of its innate capacity for language, or projecting global generalisations from a very limited input on the basis of innate mechanisms. He suggests that the learning mechanism does not generalize significantly beyond the evidence presented to it, and further that it seeks to form generalizations based on all and only the evidence presented to it. Syntactic Nuts makes a fundamental contribution to generative grammar and syntactic theory. It situates syntactic theory within cognitive science in a novel way. It contributes to an alternative, and yet in many ways traditional, perspective on the manner in which knowledge is represented and processed in the mind.

This book is the third volume of a four-volume set on modern Chinese complex sentences, with a focus on adversative complex sentences and relevant forms. Complex sentences in modern Chinese are unique in formation and meaning. The author proposes a tripartite classification of Chinese complex sentences according to the semantic relationships between the clauses, i.e., coordinate, causal, and adversative. This volume analyzes representative forms of adversative type, including the prototype, the clauses linked by connectives referring to otherwise, the combinations of clause structures and certain adversative conjunctions or linking adverbs indicating an adversative relationship, the adversative factors and relationship in two typical progressive structures, factive sentences and concessive forms. It also discusses the adversative type in the broad sense, classifying the different forms and also analyzing the semantic meaning, pragmatic value, and implications for research and language teaching. The book will be a useful reference for scholars and learners of the Chinese language interested in Chinese grammar and language information processing.

As the second volume of a two-volume set that presents a comprehensive syntactical picture of Singapore Mandarin, this title analyses various expressions relating to number, quantity, time and place, composite sentences and the characteristics and standardisation of Singapore Mandarin. The first two chapters discuss expressions of number, quantity, time and place in Singapore Mandarin and touch upon the differences in these expressions between Singapore and Chinese Mandarin (Putonghua). Composite sentences are then analysed, covering seven types of compound sentences and eight types of complex sentences, as well as connective words with a focus on conjunctions. The final part of the volume analyses the characteristics of Singapore Mandarin grammar compared with Chinese Mandarin, on the level of phrase, lexicon and sentence. From the perspectives of language contact, political and social contexts and bilingualism, it summarises the possible reasons for the differences between the two varieties of Chinese and points out primary challenges and major concerns of the standardisation of Singapore Mandarin. With rich and authentic language examples, the book will serve as a must read for learners and teachers of Mandarin Chinese and linguistics scholars interested in global Chinese and especially Singapore Mandarin.

This book challenges the current consensus on the analysis of wh-questions and reflexives from the perspective of the syntax-semantics interface. An integrated approach incorporating analyses of the interaction between different levels of linguistic knowledge is proposed. It argues that the derivation and interpretation of wh-questions and reflexives are not purely syntactic in nature but are regulated by principles operating at the syntax-semantics interface. Two general principles underlying our knowledge of language and cognition are proposed in this work. One is the Principle of Locality, and the other is the Principle of Prominence. It shows that although wh-quantification and reflexivization belong to two different domains of study in generative grammar, their derivation and interpretation are basically constrained by the complex interaction between prominence and locality in grammar. The first part of the book discusses how wh-questions are formed and interpreted in Chinese and English and shows that the formation and interpretation of wh-questions are constrained by the interaction between prominence and locality. It is shown that in wh-interpretation prominence is used to define the set generators so as to licence other wh-words in the pair-list reading in multiple wh-questions. It also discusses wh-island effects in English and Chinese, and unlike previous claims made in the literature (cf. Huang 1982a, 1982b), it argues that the so-called wh-island effects in English are also observed in Chinese. The second part of the book investigates the role that prominence and locality play in reflexive binding. It is shown that in reflexive binding, the binding domain of the reflexive is defined by prominence. It proposes a unified account for both the noncontrastive compound reflexive and the bare reflexive in Chinese and shows that they are constrained by the same reflexive binding condition proposed in this work, though they employ different definitions of the most prominent NPs to determine their binding domains. Prominence and Locality in Grammar: The Syntax and Semantics of Wh-Quesitons and Reflexives is an important theoretical contribution to the syntax-semantics interface studies and can serve as a valuable text for graduate students and scholars in the field of Chinese, linguistics, and cognitive science.

One prominent function of natural language is to convey information. One peculiarity is that it does not do so randomly, but in a structured way, with information structuring formally recognized to be a component of grammar. Among all information structuring notions, focus is one primitive needed to account for all phenomena. Focus Manifestation in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese: A Comparative Perspective aims to examine from a semantic perspective how syntactic structures and focus adverbs in Mandarin Chinese and semantic particles in Cantonese conspire to encode focus structures and determine focus manifestation in Chinese. With both being tonal languages, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese manifest different morpho-syntactic configurations to mark focus. A general principle governing focus marking in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese is given in the book, which aims to give a better understanding of the underlying principles the two use to mark additive and restrictive meanings, and related focus interpretations. Particular attention is also drawn to the co-occurrence of multiple forms of restrictive and additive particles in Cantonese, including adverbs, verbal suffixes and sentence-final particles. Linearity has been shown to be an important parameter to determine how focus is structured in Cantonese. This book is aimed at advanced graduate students, researchers, and scholars working on Chinese linguistics, syntax and semantics, and comparative dialectal grammar.

By the late 1980s, Government and Binding Theory - which was central to almost all research in generative grammar - threatened to become as large and as intricate as the language it described. To counter this, Noam Chomsky introduced a minimalist program with the aim of making explanations of language as simple and general as possible. It has since gained widespread (if not quite universal) acceptance, to the extent that the most recent first-year textbook in syntax (Radford, CUP, 1997) is based on it. One of the areas subjected to this minimalist scrutiny has been phrase structure, the fundamental basis of grammar. This book focuses on the most controversial area of phrase structure, the notion of specifiera notion encompassing the traditional categories of subjects, possessors, determiners, auxiliaries, and adjuncts. It examines what place the notion has in the new theory and how the projection of specifiers is to be eliminated or extended. The contributors (prominent American, British, and European scholars) draw on empirical, theoretical research in cross-linguistic phenomena and first and second language acquisition. The substantial introductory chapter provides an up-to-date account of minimalist syntactic theory and a critical evaluation of the notion of specifier within it.

"This was a different man," said Mr Welbecker. "Listen! This man was called Hamlet and his uncle had killed his father because he wanted to marry his mother." "What did he want to marry his mother for?" said William. "I've never heard of anyone wanting to marry their mother."* In almost any conversation the meaning of what is said depends on the listener seeing how some words refer to what has already been said, and that others must be related to the characteristics of time, place, or person of the situation around which the conversation revolves. These modes of reference, anaphora and deixis respectively, involve surprisingly complicated cognitive and syntactic processes, which people (normally) perform easily and unerringly. But they present formidable problems for the linguist and cognitive scientist trying to explain precisely how comprehension is achieved. Anaphora and deixis are thus a central research focus in syntactic theory, while understanding and modelling their operation in discourse are important targets in computational linguistics and cognitive science. In this ambitious work, Francis Cornish sets out an original theory of anaphora and deixis, and proposes a new and elegant theoretical model to represent the transfer of meaning in discourse. Dr Cornish considers anaphoric reference in discourse from both psychological and linguistic perspectives. He argues that anaphora and deixis are essentially parts of integrative discourse procedures that facilitate the linking of representations held in working memory. He brings together work by linguists, formal semanticists, psychologists, and researchers in artificial intelligence, as well as drawing on his own extensive experimental work on a variety of corpora of different genres in French and English. Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding will interest researchers and advanced students in a variety of fields within and outside linguistics, including cognitive science, artificial intelligence, syntactic theory, formal semantics, and the analysis of discourse. [* from William - The Pirate by Richmal Crompton, London, Macmillan, 1932]

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.

Architecture of the Periphery in Chinese offers a comprehensive survey on the fine structure of the sentence peripheral domain in Mandarin Chinese from a cartographic perspective. Different functional projections hosting sentence-final particles, implicit operators and other informational components are hierarchically ordered according to the "Subjectivity Scale Constraint" functioning at syntax-discourse interface. Three questions will be essentially addressed: What is the order? How to determine such an order? Why such an order? This research not only gives a thorough examination of the peripheral elements in Chinese but also improves the general understanding of the ordering issue in the left-periphery crosslinguistically. This book is aimed at scholars interested in Chinese syntax or generative syntax.

• 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.

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.

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 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.

Gildea has two goals in this book, first to argue that grammaticalization theory has advanced to the point that it can be used with the comparative method to reconstruct the grammar of Proto-Languages; and second to give a detailed case study of this methodology in examining the typologically interesting Cariban language family in South America - a group of languages which has provided counterexamples to a number of proposed typological universals of morphosyntax. His conclusions challenge a long-standing tradition which asserts that syntax cannot be reconstructed. It will interest linguists working on South American languages as well as on grammaticalization, and linguists working in the descriptive or functional traditions.

*Winner of AEDEAN Leocadio Martin Mingorance Book Award on Theoretical and Applied English Linguistics (2021)* *Winner of ESLA Guadalupe Aguado Research Award for Young Researchers (2022)* *Winner of ESSE Book Award 2022 for Young Researchers in the category 'English Language and Linguistics* This book uses corpus-based methodologies to investigate the wide variety of factors behind verb number agreement with complex collective noun phrases in English. The literature on collective nouns and their agreement patterns spans an array of disciplines and approaches. However, little of the research conducted to date has focused on the influence of of-dependents on verb number with relational collective nouns, as in examples such as a bunch of or a group of. Drawing on data from two case studies - one based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), and the other on the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) - Fernandez-Pena uses statistical modelling to unpack the different morphological, syntactic, semantic and lexical dimensions of the variables affecting verb number agreement with complex collective noun phrases in English. This multidimensional analysis of the significance of of-dependents in the patterning and contemporary usage of collective nouns offers new insight into and understanding of both synchronic variation and diachronic change. This book is an essential read for scholars of English language variation and change, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and usage-based approaches to the study of language.

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 collection explores the relationships between theory and evidences in functional linguistics, bringing together perspectives from both established and emerging scholars. The volume begins by establishing theoretical common ground for functional approaches to language, critically discussing empirical inquiry in functional linguistics and the challenges and opportunities of using new technologies in linguistic investigations. Building on this foundation, the second part of the volume explores the challenges involved in using different data sources as evidence for theorizing language and linguistic processes, drawing on work on lexical cohesion in language variation, neuroimaging and neuropathological data, and keystroke logging and eye-tracking. The final section of the volume examines the ways in which evidences from a wide range of data sources can offer new perspectives toward challenging established theoretical claims, employing empirical evidences from corpus linguistic analysis, keystroke logging, and multimodal communication. This pioneering collection synthesizes perspectives and addresses fundamental questions in the investigation of the relationships between theory and evidences in functional linguistics and will be of particular interest to researchers working in the field, as well as linguists working in experimental and interdisciplinary approaches which seek to bridge this gap.

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.

Intransitive Predication constitutes a major contribution to the study of typological linguistics and theoretical linguistics in general. Basing his analysis on a sample of 410 languages, Leon Stassen investigates cross-linguistic variation in one of the core domains of all natural languages. The author views this domain as a `cognitive space', the topography of which is the same for all languages. It is assumed to consist of four subdomains, which correspond to a four-way distinction between the semantic classes of event predicates, property predicates, class predicates, and locational predicates. Leon Stassen offers a typology of the structural manifestations of this domain, in terms of the nature and number of the formal strategies used in its encoding. He discusses a number of abstract principles which can be employed in explaining the cross-linguistic variation embodied by the typology. In the final chapter, he brings together the research results in a universally applicable model, which can be read as a `flow chart' for the encoding of intransitive predications in different language types.

The label `semiotic grammar' captures a fundamental property of the grammars of human languages: not only is language a semiotic system in the familiar Saussurean sense, but its organizing system, its grammar, is also a semiotic system. This proposition, explicated in detail by William McGregor in this book, constitutes a new theory of grammar. Semiotic Grammar is `functional' rather than `formal' in its intellectual origins, approaches, and methods. It demonstrates, however, that neither a purely functional nor a purely formal account of language is adequate, given the centrality of the sign as the fundamental unit of grammatical analysis. The author distinguishes four types of grammatical signs: experiential, logical, interpersonal, and textural. The signifiers of these signs are syntagmatic relationships of the following types, respectively: constituency, dependency, conjugational (scopal) and linking (indexical, connective). McGregor illustrates and exemplifies the theory with data from a variety of languages including English, Acehnese, Polish, Finnish, Japanese, Chinese, and Mohawk; and from his pioneering research on Gooniyandi and Nyulnyul, two languages of the Kimberleys region of Western Australia.

- The first volume to investigate all Spanish verbalisation patterns in a unified fashion and provide a comprehensive and empirically-detailed theoretical analysis of the different ways in which Spanish builds verbs from nouns and adjectives. - Provides detailed empirical descriptions of each one of the nine major ways of building lexical verbs in Spanish as well as an integral analysis of those patterns that shows the significance of the contrast between them how these address some foundational questions in morphological theory.

Presents a unique description of lexis and syntax of Chinese Examines the influence of Western languages on Mandarin Chinese A classic work on Chinese grammar by one of the most distinguished Chinese linguists

Presents a unique description of lexis and syntax of Chinese Examines the influence of Western languages on Mandarin Chinese A classic work on Chinese grammar by one of the most distinguished Chinese linguists