Anybody who reads or writes Chinese characters knows that they obey a grammar of sorts: though numerous, they are built out of a much smaller set of constituents, often interpretable in meaning or pronunciation, that are themselves built out of an even smaller set of strokes. This book goes far beyond these basic facts to show that Chinese characters truly have a productive and psychologically real lexical grammar of the same sort seen in spoken and signed languages, with non-trivial analogs of morphology (the combination of potentially interpretable constituents), phonology (formal regularities without implications for interpretation), and phonetics (articulatory and perceptual constraints). Evidence comes from a wide variety of sources, from quantitative corpus analyses to experiments on character reading, writing, and learning. The grammatical approach helps capture how character constituents combine as they do, how strokes systematically vary in different environments, how character form evolved from ancient times to the modern simplified system, and how readers and writers are able to process or learn even entirely novel characters. This book not only provides tools for exploring the full richness of Chinese orthography, but also offers new ways of thinking about the most fundamental question in linguistic theory: what is grammar?

All languages and cultures appear to have one or more "mind-like" constructs that supplement the human body. Linguistic evidence suggests they all have a word for someone, and another word for body, but that doesn't mean that whatever else makes up a human being (i.e. someone) apart from the body is the same everywhere. Nonetheless, the (Anglo) mind is often reified and thought of in universal terms. This volume adds to the literature that denounces such reification. It looks at Japanese, Longgu (an Oceanic language), Thai, and Old Norse-Icelandic, spelling out, in a culturally neutral Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), how the "mind-like" constructs in these languages differ from the Anglo mind.

This book explores theoretical issues of the syntax-phonology interface within the Minimalist Program of linguistic theory and proposes an entirely new approach to prosodic categories. Conceptual as well as empirical questions are addressed, concerning how syntactic objects are mapped to the sensorimotor system through the processes of externalization. Elaborating on recent progress in the theories of labelling and workspace-based syntactic derivation, this book further develops a null theory of the prosodic domains, and recasts these as the domains of interpretation that are reducible to more fundamental concepts of linguistic theory. Phonological phrases are characterized by Minimal Search, a third factor principle of efficient computation. Intonational phrases are taken to be reflexes of the termination of syntactic derivation, which is formulated in terms of the workspace to which MERGE applies. This book explores the new implications this theory has for the general architecture of grammar as well as for linguistic interfaces. It provides a comprehensive review of the development of theories of the syntax-phonology interface from over the past three decades. The book is well-suited for general linguistic readers as well as phonologists, syntacticians, and any linguist interested in interface research.

This book falls in the broad subject area of psycholinguistics and second-language acquisition. More specifically, this book is written for researchers stepping into the field of morphological processing so that they are not overwhelmed by the large number of individual studies and do not lose sight of the whole picture. With a comprehensive review of the relevant factors that first- and second-language morphological processing researchers need to take into consideration, including material- and procedure-related factors, participant individual differences, and participant group-level differences, this book is a useful theoretical reference work for morphological processing researchers. By considering the various potential confounding factors reviewed in this book, researchers are in a better position to more scientifically and meticulously reduce or eliminate the effects of potential covariates so that they can focus on their independent variables of interest. It may also help researchers in evaluating previous studies and their findings and whether or not these studies may have failed to consider possible confounding factors.

Interrogative Phrases and the Syntax-Semantics Interface starts by analyzing the interpretation of interrogative phrases in single and multiple constituent questions, including their interpretation under adverbs of quantification. The results are then put to work in a novel approach to some of the constraints on dependencies between fronted interrogative phrases and the associated gaps: superiority, weak crossover, as well as the so-called weak islands' (the WH-island, the negative island and the Factive Island). It is argued that the possibility of fronting an interrogative phrase out of these configurations is determined by a semantic/pragmatic condition on questions, which requires them to be answerable. The analysis is worked out principally on Romanian, a language which allows multiple wh-fronting. The results are then extended to English. Audience: Researchers and students in syntax, semantics and their interface, as well as linguists studying the relation between the acceptability of sentences and the larger discourse context.

Not all sentences encode their subjects in the same way. Some languages overtly mark some subjects depending on certain features of the subject argument or the sentence in which the subject figures. This is known as Differential Subject Marking (DSM). Containing illuminating discussions of DSM from languages all over the world, this book shows that DSM is often the result of interactions between conflicting constraints on language use.

This volume showcases previously unpublished research on theoretical, descriptive, and methodological innovations for understanding language patterns grounded in a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective. Featuring contributions from an international range of scholars, the book demonstrates how advances in SFL have developed to reflect the breadth of variation in language and how descriptive methodologies for language have evolved in turn. Taken together, the volume offers a comprehensive account of Systemic Functional Language description, providing a foundation for practice and further research for students and scholars in descriptive linguistics, SFL, and theoretical linguistics.

* based on solid research in the field of Second Language Acquisition and also addresses the need for better textbooks dealing with the contextualized teaching of grammar * provide grammar in a cultural context to engage and learn at the same time * based on frequency data to enable students to earn the most used words in the German language

This grammar provides a clear and comprehensive overview of contemporary West Greenlandic. It follows a systematic order of topics beginning with the alphabet and phonology, continuing with nominal and verbal morphology and syntax, and concluding with more advanced topics such as complex sentences and word formation. Grammatical points are illustrated with authentic examples reflecting current life in Greenland. Grammatical terminology is explained fully for the benefit of readers without a background in linguistics. Features include: Full grammatical breakdowns of all examples for ease of identifying individual components of complex words. A detailed contents list and index for easy access to information. An alphabetical list of the most commonly used West Greenlandic suffixes. A glossary of grammatical abbreviations used in the volume. The book is suitable for a wide range of users, including independent and classroom-based learners of West Greenlandic, as well as linguists and anyone with an interest in Greenland's official language.

The volume is a collection of papers in diverse areas of Slavic linguistics, selected from the 14th annual meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society, held at the University of Potsdam on 11-13 September 2019. The volume is dedicated to Peter Kosta, longtime chair of Slavic linguistics at the Department of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Potsdam, in recognition of his enormous contributions to the field. Contents: Publications of Peter Kosta - Vrinda Subhalaxmi Chidambaram: A Case of Parasitic Attrition: The disappearance of the degree morpheme - s in Bulgarian and Macedonian superlative adjectives - Steven Franks: Reflexive Typology, Movement, and the Structure of NP - Jadranka Gvozdanovic:'Have' + infinitive in Czech: A long multilingual history - Iliyana Krapova and Tomislav Socanac: Factivity in South Slavic languages: Complement and relative clauses - Alexander Letuchiy: 'Missed TAM': The lack of tense and mood marking in Russian argument conditionals - semantic and formal motivation - Franc Lanko Marusic and Rok Zaucer: Investigation of Slovenian copular agreement - James Joshua Pennington: Today's Grammaticalization Theory is Yesterday's Grammaticalization: The BCMS Future as An(other) Strike Against the Unidirectionality Hypothesis - Katrin Schlund: On the origin of East Slavic Elemental Constructions/Adversity Impersonals. Evidence from town chronicles of Old Rus' - Luka Szucsich and Karolina Zuchewicz: Incrementality and (non)clausal complementation in Slavic - Alan Timberlake: String Syntax - Beata Trawinski: Polish zeby under Negation - Mladen Uhlik and Andreja Zele: Reflexive Possessive Pronouns in Slovene: A Contrastive Analysis with Russian - Vladislava Warditz: Structural Variation in Heritage Russian in Germany: Language Usage or Language Change? - Jacek Witkos: On Some Aspects of Agree, Move and Bind in the Nominal Domain - Ilse Zimmermann: On Pronouns Relating to Clauses

This collection brings together the authors' previous research with new work on the Register-Functional (RF) approach to grammatical complexity, offering a unified theoretical account for its further study. The book traces the development of the RF approach from its foundations in two major research strands of linguistics: the study of sociolinguistic variation and the text-linguistic study of register variation. Building on this foundation, the authors demonstrate the RF framework at work across a series of corpus-based research studies focused specifically on grammatical complexity in English. The volume highlights early work exploring patterns of grammatical complexity in present-day spoken and written registers as well as subsequent studies which extend this research to historical patterns of register variation and the application of RF research to the study of writing development for L1 and L2 English university students. Taken together, along with the addition of introductory chapters connecting the different studies, the volume offers readers with a comprehensive resource to better understand the RF approach to grammatical complexity and its implications for future research. The volume will appeal to students and scholars with research interests in either descriptive linguistics or applied linguistics, especially those interested in grammatical complexity and empirical, corpus-based approaches.

A Sociolinguistic History of British English Lexicography traces the evolution of British English dictionaries from their earliest roots to the end of the 20th century by adopting both sociolinguistic and lexicographical perspectives. It attempts to break out of the limits of the dictionary-ontology paradigm and set British English dictionary-making and research against a broader background of socio-cultural observations, thus relating the development of English lexicography to changes in English, accomplishments in English linguistics, social and cultural progress, and advances in science and technology. It unfolds a vivid, coherent and complete picture of how English dictionary-making develops from its archetype to the prescriptive, the historical, the descriptive and finally to the cognitive model, how it interrelates to the course of the development of a nation's culture and the historical growth of its lexicographical culture, as well as how English lexicography spreads from British English to other major regional varieties through inheritance, innovation and self-perfection. This volume will be of interest to students and academics of English lexicography, English linguistics and world English lexicography.

The volume explores the syntax of nominalizations, focusing on deverbal and deadjectival nominalizations, but also discussing the syntax of genitives and the syntax of distinct readings of nominalizations. The volume investigates the morpholgy-syntax interface as well as the semantics-syntax interface in the domain of nominalizations. The theoretical frameworks include distributed morphology, and minimalist syntax. Data from a variety of languages are taken into consideration, e.g. Hebrew, Bulgarian, Serbian, French, Spanish, German and English.

This book argues (a) that there is no principled way to distinguish inflection and derivation and (b) that this fatally undermines conventional approaches to morphology. Conceptual shortcomings in the relation between derivational and lexically-derived word forms, Andrew Spencer suggests, call into question the foundation of the inferential-derivational approach. Prototypical instances of inflection and derivation are separated by a host of intermediate types of lexical relatedness, some discussed in the literature, others ignored. Far from finding these an embarrassment Professor Spencer deploys the wealth of types of relatedness in a variety of languages (including Slavic, Uralic, Australian, Germanic, and Romance) to develop an enriched and morphologically-informed model of the lexical entry. He then uses this to build the foundations for a model of lexical relatedness that is consistent with paradigm-based models. Lexical Relatedness is a profound and stimulating book. It will interest all morphologists, lexicographers, and theoretical linguists more generally.

This collection of original papers is a representative survey of recent theoretical and cross-linguistic work on reciprocity and reflexivity. Its most remarkable feature is its combination of formal approaches, case studies on individual languages and broad typological surveys in one volume, showing that the interaction of formal approaches to grammar and typology may lead to new insights and results for both fields. Among the major issues addressed in this volume are the following: How can our current knowledge about the space and limits of variation in the relevant domain be captured in a structural typology of reciprocity? What light can such a typology shed on the facts of particular languages or groups of languages (e.g. Austronesian)? How can recent descriptive and typological insights be incorporated into a revised and more adequate version of the Binding Theory? How do verbal semantics, argument structure and reciprocal markers interact? How can we explain the pervasive patterns of ambiguity observable in these two domains, especially the use of the same forms both as reflexive and reciprocal markers? What are the major sources in the historical development of reciprocal markers? This combination of large-scale typological surveys with in-depth studies of particular languages provides new answers to old questions and raises important new questions for future research.

Ukrainian: A Comprehensive Grammar is a complete reference guide to modern Ukrainian grammar.
The authors have consulted a great number of sources, in addition to a wide range of native speakers. The result is the first true reference grammar of Ukrainian to be published outside Ukraine, it will be the standard reference work for years to come.
The volume is organized to enable students of the language to find the information they seek quickly and easily, and to promote a thorough understanding of Ukrainian grammar. It presents the complexities of the language in a systematic and user-friendly form.
Features include
* detailed tables in each chapter for easy reference
* numerous examples throughout
* thorough descriptions of all parts of speech
* list of grammatical terms in English and Ukrainian
* complete descriptions of the word-formational processes of Ukrainian
* an overview of past and present changes in the language
* bibliography of works relating to Ukrainian
* full index.

This study investigates adverbial clauses from a cross-linguistic perspective. In line with other recent typological research in the context of complex sentences and clause-linkage, it proceeds from a detailed, multivariate analysis of the morphosyntactic characteristics of the phenomenon under scrutiny.

This book offers a comprehensive account of adjuncts in generative grammar, seeking to reconcile the differing ways in which they have been treated in the past by proposing a method of analysis grounded in simplification based on Simplest Merge. The volume provides an up-to-date review of the existing literature on adjuncts and outlines their characteristic properties and the subsequent difficulties in adequately defining and treating them. The book compares previous attempts to account for adjuncts which have tended to use additional mechanisms or syntactic operations as a jumping-off point from which to propose a new way forward for analyzing them grounded in minimalist theory. Adopting an approach in the spirit of the strong minimalist thesis (SMT), Bode suggests an analysis of adjuncts which applies a minimalist approach based on theoretical simplicity, one which does not resort to extra mechanisms in capturing the empirical properties of adjuncts. Offering a comprehensive overview of research on adjuncts and foundational minimalist principles, this book will be of particular interest to graduate students and practicing researchers interested in syntax.

This collection explicates one of the core ideas underpinning Minimalist theory - explanation via simplification - and its role in shaping some of the latest developments within this framework, specifically the simplest Merge hypothesis and the reduction of syntactic phenomena to third factor considerations. Bringing together recent papers on the topic by Epstein, Kitahara, and Seely, with one by Epstein, Seely and Obata, and one by Kitahara, the book begins with an introduction which situates the papers in a cohesive overview of some of the latest research on Minimalism, as facilitated by current theoretical developments. The volume integrates a historical overview of evolutions in Merge, starting with Chomsky's (pre-Merge) Aspects model up to current theoretical models, including a primer of Chomsky's most recent theory of Merge based on the concept of Workspace. The Minimalist notions of "perfection" and "simplification" are also outlined, providing clearly explicated coverage of key technical concepts within the framework as applied to grammatical phenomena. Taken as a whole, the collection both introduces and advances Minimalist theory for students and scholars in linguistics and related sub-disciplines of psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science, as well as offering new directions for future research for researchers in these fields.

The present volume is a monographic study devoted to selected aspects of English historical phonology, orthography, syntax, morphology and semantics. It is the result of international cooperation of scholars affiliated with various academic institutions around the world, such as the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA; the University of Edinburgh, UK; the University of Westminster, UK; the University of Tours, France, the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands; the Boris Grinchenko University in Kiev, Ukraine; the South-West University "Neofit Rilski", Bulgaria; the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland; the University of Silesia, Poland; the Silesian University of Technology, Poland.

In the last 25 years foreign language teaching has been able to increase its efficiency through an orientation towards authentic language materials, pragmatic language functions and interactive learning methods. However, so far foreign language teaching has lacked a sufficiently strong theoretical framework to support the teaching of language in all its aspects. Arguably, such a linguistic theory has to be usage-based and cognition-oriented. Since cognitive linguistics - and especially cognitive grammar - is concerned with conceptual issues against the larger background of human cognition and because it is based on actual language use, it becomes a powerful tool for dealing adequately with the main issues of a pedagogical grammar. A pedagogical grammar aims at providing all the essential linguistic patterns considered relevant by theoretical and descriptive linguistics for the preparation of teaching materials and their exploitation in foreign language instruction. The volume contains thirteen contributions organized into three parts. In Part 1 Langacker, Taylor and Broccias introduce the basic grammar concepts, rules and models that are available in cognitive linguistics and which are directly relevant to the construction of a pedagogical grammar. Meunier, on the other hand, describes how such a grammar could benefit from corpus linguistics. Part 2 looks at some cognitive tools and conceptual errors with contributions by Danesi and Maldonado and also reconsiders contrastive analysis in the papers by Ruiz de Mendoza and Valenzuela & Rojo. Part 3, finally, discusses language-specific constraints on a number of linguistic phenomena such as the construal of motion events (papers by Cadierno and De Knop & Dirven), distinctions in the tense-aspect system (papers by Niemeier & Reif and Schmiedtova & Flecken), and voice (Chen & Oller).

Scientific insight is obtained through the processes of description, explanation, and prediction. Yet grammatical theory has seen a major divide regarding not only the methods of data eliciting and the kinds of data evaluated, but also with respect to the interpretation of these data, including the very notions of explanation and prediction themselves. The editors of the volume organized a conference bringing together adherents of two major strands of grammatical theory illustrating this clash, traditionally grouped under the labels of formalist and functionalist theories. This book includes five keynote lectures given by internationally renowned experts. The keynotes offer insight into the current debate and show possibilities for exchange between these two major accounts of grammatical theory.

Originally published in 1990, Nature and History examines how Darwin's theory of evolution has been expanded by scholars and researchers to include virtually every scientific discipline. The book presents a morphological analysis of historical and social sciences - sciences which have traditionally have been viewed as too random in their progressions to conform to a model. Through the evaluation of empirical and factual evidence, the book builds a case for an evolutionary paradigm which encompasses both natural and social sciences, and presents the form's adaptiveness in working historical models.

This volume is a concise introduction to the lively ongoing debate between formalist and functionalist approaches to the study of language. The book grounds its comparisons between the two in both historical and contemporary contexts where, broadly speaking, formalists' focus on structural relationships and idealized linguistic data contrasts with functionalists' commitment to analyzing real language used as a communicative tool. The book highlights key sub-varieties, proponents, and critiques of each respective approach. It concludes by comparing formalist versus functionalist contributions in three domains of linguistic research: in the analysis of specific grammatical constructions; in the study of language acquisition; and in interdisciplinary research on the origins of language. Taken together, the volume opens insight into an important tension in linguistic theory, and provides students and scholars with a more nuanced understanding of the structure of the discipline of modern linguistics.

The main purpose of the publication is to present a linguo-cultural picture of traditional values (such as the value of life, freedom, dignity, family, religion, community, truth, good, beauty, and God) reflected in Anglo-American and Polish paremiology. The author analyzes the proverbs with the use of semantic approach and divides them into several thematic categories and subcategories related to the sphere of values. The paremiological analysis carried out from a contrastive perspective provides additional evidence to support the claim that, despite some widespread axiological views common to languages, there exist distinct differences characteristic only of a given linguo-culture, naturally caused by different, among others, geographical, historical, social, and cultural environments.