In spite of the vast literature on modality in English, very little research has been done on modal adverbs as a group. While there are studies of individual adverbs, the semantic and pragmatic relations between them have been left largely unexplored. This book takes a close look at the whole field of modal certainty as expressed by adverbs in English. On the basis of corpus data the most frequent adverbs of certainty, including certainly, indeed, and no doubt, are examined from the point of view of their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics. The corpus used is the International Corpus of English - Great Britain, supplemented by data from other present-day English corpora, and questionnaires testing native speakers' intuitions on fine-grained similarities and differences between closely related adverbs. The methodology also includes the study of cross-linguistic equivalents as indicators of semantic-pragmatic relations between adverbs. Translation corpora yield correspondences in Swedish, Dutch, French and German. A detailed study of those correspondences adds useful information for setting up a semantic-pragmatic profile of each adverb, showing where their meanings overlap and where the boundaries are. The concept of semantic maps is relied on for plotting these relations. The book not only provides a thorough empirical study of English adverbs expressing certainty, it also contributes to a better theoretical understanding of the complexity of modal certainty, how it is related to speakers' goals and to other semantic areas. It is the first in-depth study of this kind, combining rich information on English as well as opening up perspectives for further empirical and theoretical research into modality.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

--Grammar textbook focused on strategic choices for expression in practical contexts, rather than abstract rule-following --Can be used for designated grammar course, or for general composition courses, including courses geared towards multilingual and non-traditional students --Ideal for students and instructors for whom traditional prescriptive grammar instruction has been insufficient, as well as writers who want a more advanced understanding of why and how to use grammatical structures

The book series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie, founded by Gustav Groeber in 1905, is among the most renowned publications in Romance Studies. It covers the entire field of Romance linguistics, including the national languages as well as the lesser studied Romance languages. The editors welcome submissions of high-quality monographs and collected volumes on all areas of linguistic research, on medieval literature and on textual criticism. The publication languages of the series are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian as well as German and English. Each collected volume should be as uniform as possible in its contents and in the choice of languages.

This book systematically discusses the link between bilingual language production and its manifestation in historical documents, drawing together two branches of linguistics which have much in common but are traditionally dealt with separately. By combining the study of historical mixed texts with the principles of modern code-switching and bilingualism research, the author argues that the cognitive processes underpinning the human capacity to produce mixed utterances have remained unchanged throughout history, even as the languages themselves are constantly changing. This book will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics, syntactic theory (particularly generative grammar), language variation and change.

The author questions the status quo in Romance linguistics regarding such matters as auxiliary selection, partitive cliticization, bare subjects, participle agreement, and more. For the past two decades the Ergative/Unaccusative syntactic approach has been accepted as the orthodox analytical paradigm. He here re-examines both the theoretical imperative and the empirical evidence for that approach, drawing on a large amount of new and surprising data from Italian, Spanish, French and Catalan, and concludes that it is essentially unmotivated. Alternative explanations are advanced, based on information structure, semantics and the impact on synchrony of diachronic change. The picture that emerges is one of a complex but interrelated set of causalities.

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

Build your English skills with this bestselling guide to English verbs! Knowing when and why to use certain verbs can be confusing. This easy-to-use book explains everything you need to know to develop a solid understanding of English verbs. There are plenty of clear examples and tons of practice exercises to help you build your English skills and gain the confidence to choose the right verb for every situation. With this book to guide you, you'll master English verbs in no time at all. Practice Makes Perfect: English Verbs, 3rd Edition will help you: * Understand when and why to use different verb tenses* Learn how verbs work with everyday examples from a wide range of topics* Build your verb skills with more than 125 engaging exercises* Gain the skills you need to write and speak English with confidence* New to this edition: additional review questions in the book * Plus fun quizzes for study on-the-go via the McGraw-Hill Education Language Lab app

This volume, which has textbook character, is intended to provide an in-depth introduction to different theoretical and methodological research frameworks concerned with the role of item-specific grammatical and lexical behaviour.

The articles collected in this book are concerned with the issues of restrictiveness and learnability within generative grammar, specifically, within Chomsky's 'Extended Standard Theory'. These issues have been central to syntactic research for decades and they are even more central now as results on syntactic theory, on learnability, and on acquisition begin to converge. I hope that this book can provide researchers in all of these areas with some insight into the evolution of ideas about these issues. The articles appear in their original form, with the following exceptions: A few typographical and other minor errors have been corrected; bibliog raphic references have been updated and a unified bibliography provided. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge my vast intellec tual debt to Noam Chomsky. My research would not have been possible without his work, his advice, and his guidance. Next, I offer deep thanks to Chomsky and my other co-authors represented here: Bob Fiengo, Joe Kupin, Bob Freidin, and Mamoru Saito. I am grateful, indeed, for the opportunity to collaborate with such outstanding linguists, and, more immediately, for their permission to reprint their co-authored articles. I also offer general thanks to the holders of the copyrights of the reprinted material. Specific acknowledgements appear on a separate page."

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 book testifies of the great tolerance of Cognitive Linguists towards internal variety within itself and towards external interaction with major linguistic subdisciplines. Internally, it opens up the broad variety of CL strands and the cognitive unity between convergent linguistic disciplines. Externally, it provides a wide overview of the connections between cognition and social, psychological, pragmatic, and discourse-oriented dimensions of language, which will make this book attractive to scholars from different persuasions. The book is thus expected to raise productive debate inside and outside the CL community. Furthermore, the book examines interdisciplinary connections from the point of view of the internal dynamics of CL research itself. CL is rapidly developing into different compatible frameworks with extensions into levels of linguistics description like discourse, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics among others that have only recently been taken into account in this orientation. The book covers two general topics: (i) the relationship between the embodied nature of language, cultural models, and social action; (ii) the role of metaphor and metonymy in inferential activity and as generators of discourse ties. More specific topics are the nature and scope of constructional meaning, language variation and cultural models; discourse acts; the relationship between communication and cognition, the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse, the role of mental spaces in linguistic processing, and the role of empirical work in CL research. These features endow the book with internal unity and consistency while preserving the identity of each of the contributions therein.

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.

Essentials of Mastering English: A Concise Grammar is both an ideal companion for undergraduate students wishing to acquire a high level of grammatical proficiency and a readily accessible reference work for teachers of English at all levels. It provides an introduction to basic grammatical terms and to elementary syntactic description, enabling students to analyse sentences and utterances down to word level with a specification of both the form and the function of all constituents.

Generative analyses of comparatives traditionally include two construction specific ellipsis operations, Comparative Deletion and Comparative Ellipsis. Drawing from a wide array of new data, the present monograph develops a novel, directly semantically interpretable analysis of comparatives which does not require reference to designated deletion processes. On the one hand, Comparative Deletion is reinterpreted in terms of overt movement of the degree predicate. The resulting head-raising analysis contributes to an understanding of various puzzles for comparatives related to binding, locality and the influence of word-order variation on the interpretation and size of the ellipsis site. On the other hand, it is argued that Comparative Ellipsis can entirely be subsumed under standardly sanctioned ellipsis operations such as Gapping, Right Node Raising and Across-the-Board-movement. In addition, the study presents arguments for an ellipsis analysis of phrasal comparatives (such as Millhouse saw more movies than Bart). Empirical support for this conception derives, among others, from the complex interdependencies between ellipsis and serialization in English and German, and the binding properties of remnants inside the comparative complement. The study is directed towards readers interested in formal syntax and the syntax/semantics interface.

In this innovative study, Tomiko Narahara offers a multi-disciplinary description of the Japanese copula, revealing it to be at the interface of morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Most striking is her discovery of the copula's function to express the speaker's knowledge or ignorance about the proposition of the sentence. She provides a new morphological feature analysis to derive this modal function and further proposes a series of unified accounts for a wide range of discourse phenomena.

In a time when female scholars were rare in Japanese universities, Michiko Ogura completed an excellent doctorate in Old English syntax, then achieved a position at Chiba University, from which she obtained a year-long research fellowship in 1983-84 at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. During her career, Ogura has published major works on medieval English syntax, especially verbs. Professor Ogura retired at Chiba, then obtained a major research post at Keio University (2011-2015) and then a post at Tokyo Woman's Christian University, retiring in 2020. She obtained a D.Litt. from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland in 2008. The international contributors to this volume offer these studies of medieval syntax in her honor, in token of many years of friendship and scholarship.

The renewed focus on the evidential base of linguistics in general, but particularly on syntax, is in to a large degree dependent on technological developments: computers, electronic storage and transmission. These factors have enabled a revolution in the accessibility of digitally stored language, both in sampled and organized corpora and in its raw unsampled form on the internet. But this technology has also allowed a step-change in experimental methods readily available to linguists. The new arrival of such enormous quantities of data in greatly increased detail has made information accessible which could previously not even have been dreamed of. This volume is a selection of research reports from linguists who are making use of this new information and trying to integrate the new insights into their analyses and theoretical assumptions.

This volume presents novel analyses of morphosyntax and phonology by well-known scholars in their respective fields. The book offers chapters on a range of Romance languages and dialects, including Canadian French, Standard French, Modern French, Sardinian, Sicilian, and Spanish. Other chapters focus on diachronic topics on French and Italian. The volume will be of interest to researchers looking for current research in linguistics on the Romance languages. It will also serve as a reference volume or supplemental reading for graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in linguistics.

The objective of the work of W. South Coblin has been to collect various materials on Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages into a single list and to arrange this list in a clear and convenient form, with indexes which make the information easily accessible.The author presents the view that Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages must have descended from a common proto-language. He reconstructs Sino-Tibetan proto-forms from which Chinese and Tibeto-Burman reflexes can be derived by regular rules. The importance of the reconstructive exercise lies not in the detail of this or any other reconstructed system but in the fact that the exercise can be successfully carried out, regardless of theoretical convictions or orientations.

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.

This book is the first collection of studies on an important yet under-investigated linguistic phenomenon, the processing and production of head-final syntactic structures. Until now, the remarkable progress made in the field of human sentence processing had been achieved largely by investigating head-initial languages such as English. The goal of the present volume is to deepen our understanding by examining head-final languages and offering a comparison of those results to findings from head-initial languages. This book brings together cross-linguistic investigations of languages with prominent head-final structures such as Basque, Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, and Hindi. It will inform readers of linguistics with both theoretical and experimental backgrounds, as it provides accounts of previous studies, offers experimentally-based theoretical discussions, and includes experimental stimuli in the original languages.

1. OUTLINE German has the three main perfect constructions which are illustrated in (1. 1). 1 In each of these constructions, the verb appears in the past participial form and is combined with an auxiliary - in this case, haben ('have'); other verbs form their perfect constructions with the auxiliary sein ('be'). 2 The auxiliary can then be com bined with a tense -Le. the present tense as in (Ua), the past tense as in (b), or the future tense as in (c). 3 (1. 1) a. PRESENT PERFECT: Die Eule hat die Schule verlassen. the owl has the school left b. PAST PERFECT: Die Eule hatte die Schule verlassen. the owl had the school left c. FUTURE PERFECT: Die Eule wird die Schule verlassen haben. the owl will the school left have As will shortly become clear, the present perfect is the most intricate of the perfect constructions in German. It has been investigated intensely in the past, with the result that today there is little doubt about what the core problems concerning its semantics are."