This volume explores the many ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders or classes. A noun may belong to a given class because of its logical or symbolic similarities with other nouns, because it shares a similar morphological form with other nouns, or simply through an arbitrary convention. The aim of this book is to establish which functional or lexical categories are responsible for this type of classification, especially along the nominal syntactic spine. The book's contributors draw on data from a wide range of languages, including Amharic, French, Gitksan, Haro, Lithuanian, Japanese, Mi'kmaw, Persian, and Shona. Chapters examine where in the nominal structure gender is able to function as a classifying device, and how in the absence of gender, other functional elements in the nominal spine come to fill that gap. Other chapters focus on how gender participates in grammatical concord and agreement phenomena. The volume also discusses semantic agreement: hybrid agreement sometimes arises due to a distinction that grammars encode between natural gender on the one hand and grammatical gender on the other. The findings in the volume have significant implications for syntactic theory and theories of interpretation, and contribute to a greater understanding of the interplay between inflection and derivation. The volume will be of interest to theoretical linguists and typologists from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

The approximately 250 languages of the Tibeto-Burman family are spoken by 65 million speakers in ten different countries including Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Burma and China/Tibet. They are characterized by a fascinating linguistic, historical and cultural diversity. The languages spoken in the Himalayas, on their southern slopes and on the high Tibetan plateau in the north constitute the core of this diversity. Thus, the 21 papers mainly deal with these languages and some go even beyond to the area of the Blue Lake in northern Amdo and to southern Kham within linguistic Tibet. The ten papers dedicated to Tibetan linguistic studies offer approaches to the phonological analysis of Balti, to labial place assimilation, perfective stem renovation and stem alternation connected with verbal valence in Amdo Tibetan, to directional markers in Tokpe Gola in northeastern Nepal, to secondary verb constructions in Kham Tibetan, to narrative texts in Dzongkha, to case-marking patterns in various Tibetan dialects and to language history of Tibetan in general. Other papers deal with deictic patterns and narratives in western Himalayan Kinnauri and with the classification of neighbouring Bunan. With the Tamangic languages of northern Nepal the relationship between vowels and consonants and the development of demonstratives and plural markers are addressed. A further paper investigates the genetic relationship between Dzala and Dakpa, two East Bodish languages, and another one case-marking in Rabha and Manipuri in northeastern India. With the Kiranti languages Sampang, Limbu, Chaurasia and Sunwar in eastern Nepal, questions of accent, pronominally marked determiners, subclassification and language shift are discussed. The impressive selection of languages and linguistic topics dealt with in this book underlines the diversity of the Tibeto-Burman languages in Central and South Asia and highlights their place within present-day linguistic research. The results achieved by leading experts are remarkable in general, and the book is of interest to linguists, anthropologists and geographers.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

The book is a detailed generative study of a number of derivational and inflectional processes of suffixation in contemporary English and Polish. The theoretical focus is on the constraints on morphological rules. Suffixes are shown to be sensitive to morphological structure of their hosts in ways which undermine some major claims of the current mainstream generative theory of the flexion. Alternative constraints are proposed instead.

This collection of articles brings together new research from both established and emerging international experts in the study of English grammar, all of whom have engaged with the notion of 'construction' in their work. The research here is concerned with both synchrony and diachrony, with the relationship between Construction Grammar and other linguistic theories, and with a number of issues in the study of grammar, such as raising and control phenomena, transitivity, relative clause structure, the syntax of gerunds, attributive and predicative uses of adjectives, modality, and grammaticalization. Some of the articles are written within a constructional framework, while others highlight potential problems with constructional approaches to English grammar; some of the articles are based on data collected from corpora, some on introspection; some of the articles suggest potential developments for diachronic construction grammar, while others seek to compare Construction Grammar with other cognitive linguistic theories, most particularly Word Grammar. The research reported in this volume presents a series of ways of looking at the relationship between constructions and patterns in English grammar, either now or in the past. The book addresses scholars and advanced students who are interested in English grammar, constructional approaches to language, and the relationship between functional and formal issues in linguistic description and theory.

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.

In almost every part of the world, minority languages are threatened with extinction. At the same time, dedicated efforts are being made to document endangered languages, to maintain them, and even to revive once-extinct languages. The present volume examines a wide range of issues that concern language endangerment andlanguage revitalization. Among other things, it is shown that languages may be endangered to different degrees, endangerment situations in selected areas of the world are surveyed and definitions of language death and types of language death presented. The book also examines causes of language endangerment, speech behaviour in a language endangerment situation, structural changes in endangered languages, as well as types of speakers encountered in a language endangerment situation. In addition, methods of documentation and of training for linguists are proposed which will enable scholars to play an active role in the documentation of endangered languages and in language revitalization. The book presents a comprehensive overview of the field. It is clearly written and contains ample references to the relevant literature, thus providing useful guidance for further research. The author often draws on his own experience of documenting endangered languages and of language revival activities in Australia. The volume is of interest to a wide readership, including linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, and educators.

Aimed at undergraduate and beginning graduate students, this work covers the varieties of syntactic phenomena in different languages and a method of analyzing and describing them. The method is based on the concept of the syntactic construction, which is shared by various views of language structure. In this particular presentation, a construction is characterized as a combination of obligatory and optional functions, and each of these functions is related to a class of manifestations. Syntax as a whole is then seen as interrelating constructions on the ranks (size-levels) of the phrase, clause, and sentence. Besides the essential features of phrase, clause, and sentence structures, there are chapters devoted to special topics such as clitics, negation, clausal organization, and voice and related devices.

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.

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

Walapai (Hualapai), a language of the Yuman group (Hokan stock), is spoken in Northern Arizona. The volume contains texts of various genres - mythical tales, stories from everyday life, oral histories - which were collected by the author in the late '50s and early '60s. As in the case of Winter's earlier publications, the texts are presented in a morphologically analyzed form and are provided with full translations.

Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten [Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies from all the central areas of general linguistics and the linguistics of individual languages which address topical questions, discuss new data and advance the development of linguistic theory.

Focusing primarily on Swedish, a Germanic language whose particles have not previously been studied extensively, Non-Projecting Words: A Case Study on Swedish Particles develops a theory of non-projecting words in which particles are morphologically independent words that do not project phrases.

Particles have long constituted a puzzle for Germanic syntax, as they exhibit properties of both morphological and syntactic constructs. Although non-projecting words have appeared in the literature before, it has gone largely unnoticed that such structures violate the basic tenets of X-bar theory. This work identifies these violations and develops a formally explicit revision of X-bar theory that can accommodate the requisite "weak" projections.

The resulting theory, stated in terms of Lexical-Functional Grammar, also yields a novel classification of clitics, and it sheds new light on a range of recent theoretical proposals, including economy, multi-word constructions, and the primitives of lexical semantics. At an abstract level, we see that the modular, parallel-projection architecture of LFG is essential to the description of a variety of otherwise recalcitrant facts about non-projecting words.

A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. The Yearbook of Morphology series, published since 1988, has proven to be an eminent support for this upswing of morphological research, since it contains articles on topics which are central in the current theoretical debates which are frequently referred to. The Yearbook of Morphology 1998 focuses on two issues: the position of inflection in the grammar, and the interaction of morphology with phonology, in particular the problem of allomorphy. In addition, this volume presents a study of the relation between transposition and argument structure, a declarative model of word formation applied to conversion in German, an analysis of Dutch verbal compounds and a study of the semantic aspects of nominalization. The relevant evidence comes from a wide variety of languages. Theoretical, descriptive, and historical linguists, morphologists, phonologists, and psycholinguists will find this book of interest.

English has several periphrastic verbal forms that are semantically close to particular modal verbs and perform suppletive functions in relation to them. After an exploration of the properties of potential periphrastic forms, this study investigates the nature of the relationship between the modals must, should, will and can and various semantically close periphrastics. The focus is on the pragmatic interpretation of the items compared, with some attention to their functions in discourse. Despite the relative idiosyncracy of all these items, the general marked status of periphrastics is evident, and this is shown to be reflected in a number of different ways. Level of formality is a further differentiating factor here.

Incomplete Category Fronting is a detailed investigation of the syntax of incomplete category fronting in German, carried out from a cross-linguistic perspective. The study presents a wealth of empirical evidence involving unbound traces created by remnant topicalization, wh-movement, scrambling, left dislocation, and extraposition. Four characteristic properties of remnant movement are identified that pose severe problems for a representational movement theory. It is argued that these properties can be fruitfully addressed on the basis of Chomsky's minimalist program, and that they follow from a derivational movement theory that incorporates the Barriers Condition, the Strict Cycle Condition, Fewest Steps, Last Resort, and the Minimal Link Condition but completely dispenses with surface filters. Incomplete Category Fronting provides an empirical underpinning for the minimalist program and presents a powerful argument for a derivational theory of grammar. Audience: Incomplete Category Fronting will interest all linguists working on theoretical syntax, Germanic syntax or the syntax-semantics interface.

It is a fact that tense, aspect and modality together form one of the most recurring and active areas of research in contemporary syntax and semantics, as well as in other disciplines of linguistics. A large number of syntactic and semantic phenomena are concerned by the temporal-aspectual-modal level of representation: information about time, aspect and modality is part of virtually all sentences; inflexion is quite widely considered as the core of syntactic projections. Because of this very crucial situation and role in the sentence structure, temporal-aspectual and modal information concerns virtually any part of the sentence and this information has scope over the whole characterization of the eventuality denoted by the sentence. This book is an up-to-date milestone for the studies of temporality and language, in particular regarding syntax and semantics, but with incidental hints to pragmatics and theories of human natural language understanding. Through this very tight selection of 15 papers (originally delivered during the 6th Chronos colloquium), tenses, aspect and modality are investigated both at the descriptive and theoretical levels, involving many different Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The volume sheds light on a wide array of phenomena that remained too little explored until now. These include the following: modal subordination in Japanese, epistemic modals in Dutch and English in Free Indirect Speech contexts, aspectual readings of idioms, adverb-licensing with the German perfect, French imperfective past compared with English progressive past, infinitival perfect in English, Adult Root Infinitives, economy constraints on temporal subordinations, future modality, past interpretation of present tense in embedded clauses, and time without tenses in Mandarin and Navajo. The book is of interest to scholars and advanced students in the fields of linguistics (general linguistics, semantics, syntax) as well as philosophy and logic.

Mapping the Left Periphery, the fifth volume in "The Cartography of Syntactic Structures," is entirely devoted to the functional articulation of the so-called complementizer system, the highest part of sentence structure. The papers collected here identify, on the basis of substantial empirical evidence, new atoms of functional structure, which encode specific features that are typically expressed in the left periphery. The volume also submits the richly articulated CP structure to further crosslinguistic checking. The research presented here has led to the identification of new, important restrictions in the relative sequence of elements appearing in the left periphery.
With contributions from African languages, Chinese, Hungarian, Romance languages, and Italian dialects, Mapping the Left Periphery will be of interest to syntacticians working on comparative syntax, and more specifically on Romance grammar.

Loanwords and Japanese Identity: Inundating or Absorbed? provides an in-depth examination of public discussions on lexical borrowing in the Japanese language. The main objective of this book is to explore the relationship between language and identity through an analysis of public attitudes towards foreign loanwords in contemporary Japanese society. In particular, the book uncovers the process by which language is conceived of as a symbol of national identity by examining an animated newspaper controversy over the use of foreign loanwords. The book concludes that the fierce debate over the use of loanwords can be understood as a particular manifestation of the ongoing (re-)negotiation of Japanese national identity. This book will appeal to scholars and students in sociolinguistics, translation studies, and discourse analysis, while its cultural and geographic focus will attract readers in Japanese studies and East Asian studies.

This book implements a multidisciplinary approach in describing language both in its ontogenetic development and in its close interrelationship with other human subsystems such as thought, memory, and activity, with a focus on the semantic component of the evolutionary-synthetic theory.The volume analyzes, among others, the mechanisms for grammatical polysemy, and brings to light the structural unity of artefact and natural concepts (such as CHAIR, ROAD, LAKE, RIVER, TREE). Additionally, object and motor concepts are defined in terms of the language of thought, and their representation in neurobiological memory codes is discussed; finally, the hierarchic structure of basic meanings of concrete nouns is shown to arise as a result of their step-by-step development in ontogeny.

This is the first book which brings together the fields of theoretical and empirical studies in syntax on the one hand and the methodology of quantitative linguistics on the other hand. The author provides the theoretical background for this enterprise on the basis of the philosophy of science and of linguistic considerations including a discussion of Chomsky's attitude against the application of statistical methods to syntactic phenomena. He gives a short introduction into the aims and methods of the quantitative approach to linguistics in general and to syntax in particular. The following chapters inform the reader about the measurement of syntactic properties, possibilities to acquire empirical data from syntactically annotated text corpora and the most common mathematical models and methods for the analysis of syntactic and syntagmatic material. Then, a number of prominent approaches and hypotheses about interrelations between properties of syntactic constructions are presented and evaluated on material from various languages and text kinds. Finally, the theory of synergetic linguistics and its application to syntax is introduced including the integration of such famous hypotheses as Yngve's depth hypothesis and Hawkins's "Early immediate constituent" principle. The book concludes with a number of perspectives with respect to follow-up studies and extensions to the presented models with interfaces to neighbouring disciplines.

"Structural Ambiguity in English" is a major new scholarly work that provides an innovative and accessible linguistic description of those features of the language that can be exploited to generate structural ambiguities.
Most ambiguity scholarship is concerned with "disambiguation"--the process of making what is ambiguous clear. This book takes the opposite approach as it focuses on describing the features in the English language that may contribute towards the creation of structural ambiguities, which form the core of some of the best word-plays found in advertising, comedy and marketing.
Oaks utilizes a systematic and comprehensive inventory approach that identifies individual elements in the language and their distinctive behaviors that can be manipulated in the deliberate creation of structural ambiguities. In doing so he also provides authentic examples to illustrate the concepts he presents.
This book will appeal to researchers and academics interested in the structure of the English language, usage, pragmatics, communication, natural language processing, editing, and humor studies as well as those in marketing, advertising, or humor writing.