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.

Ellipsis occurs when certain portions of a sentence are not spoken - for example 'Mary has read more books than Bill has [read books]' and 'Jack called, but I don't know where [he called] from'. These constructions interest linguists because the meaning of the sentence cannot be traced directly to the words it contains. This volume brings together a team of leading syntacticians to propose new and original solutions to some key questions in the study of ellipsis: What characterizes ellipsis? Under what conditions is it possible? What kinds of meanings are allowed to go unspoken? Drawing on a variety of authentic constructions, they examine ellipsis in the context of a range of syntactic phenomena such as binding, raising, anaphora, movement and scrambling. Making significant progress towards solving some central problems in syntactic theory, this cutting-edge volume will be of key interest to anyone working on theoretical syntax, semantics and psycholinguistics.

A Survey of Modern English covers a wide selection of aspects of the modern English language. Fully revised and updated, the major focus of the third edition lies in Standard American and British English individually and in comparison with each other. Over and beyond that, this volume treats other Englishes around the world, especially those of the southern hemisphere countries of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as well as numerous varieties spoken in southern, eastern and western Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Pacific. The main areas of investigation and interest include: pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary; multiple facets of English dialects and sociolects with an emphasis on gender and ethnicity; questions of pragmatics as well as a longer look at English-related pidgin and creole varieties. This authoritative guide is a comprehensive, scholarly, and systematic review of modern English. In one volume, the book presents a description of both the linguistic structure of present-day English and its geographical, social, gender, and ethnic variations. This is complemented with an updated general bibliography and with exercises at the end of each chapter and their suggested solutions at the end of the volume, all intended to provide students and other interested readers with helpful resources.

Imagine this book was written in Comic Sans. Would this choice impact your image of me as an author, despite causing no literal change to the content within? Generally, discussions of how language variants influence interpretation of language acts/users have focused on variation in speech. But it is important to remember that specific ways of representing a language are also often perceived as linked to specific social actors. Nowhere is this fact more relevant than in written Japanese, where a complex history has created a situation where authors can represent any sentence element in three distinct scripts. This monograph provides the first investigation into the ways Japanese authors and their readers engage with this potential for script variation as a social language practice, looking at how purely script-based language choices reflect social ideologies, become linked to language users, and influence the total meaning created by language acts. Throughout the text, analysis of data from multiple studies examines how Japanese language users' experiences with the script variation all around them influence how they engage with, produce, and understand both orthographic variation and major social divides, ultimately evidencing that even the avoidance of variation can become a socially significant act in Japan.

It is not entirely clear if modern Chinese is a monosyllabic or disyllabic language. Although a disyllabic prosodic unit of some sort has long been considered by many to be at play in Chinese grammar, the intuition is not always rigidly fleshed out theoretically in the area of Chinese morphology. In this book, Shengli Feng applies the theoretical model of prosodic morphology to Chinese morphology to provide the theoretical clarity regarding how and why Mandarin Chinese words are structured in a particular way. All of the facts generated by the system of prosodic morphology in Chinese provide new perspectives for linguistic theory, as well as insights for teaching Chinese and studying of Chinese poetic prosody.

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

This handbook provides a comprehensive account of current research on the finite-state morphology of Georgian and enables the reader to enter quickly into Georgian morphosyntax and its computational processing. It combines linguistic analysis with application of finite-state technology to processing of the language. The book opens with the author's synoptic overview of the main lines of research, covers the properties of the word and its components, then moves up to the description of Georgian morphosyntax and the morphological analyzer and generator of Georgian.The book comprises three chapters and accompanying appendices. The aim of the first chapter is to describe the morphosyntactic structure of Georgian, focusing on differences between Old and Modern Georgian. The second chapter focuses on the application of finite-state technology to the processing of Georgian and on the compilation of a tokenizer, a morphological analyzer and a generator for Georgian. The third chapter discusses the testing and evaluation of the analyzer's output and the compilation of the Georgian Language Corpus (GLC), which is now accessible online and freely available to the research community.Since the development of the analyzer, the field of computational linguistics has advanced in several ways, but the majority of new approaches to language processing has not been tested on Georgian. So, the organization of the book makes it easier to handle new developments from both a theoretical and practical viewpoint.The book includes a detailed index and references as well as the full list of morphosyntactic tags. It will be of interest and practical use to a wide range of linguists and advanced students interested in Georgian morphosyntax generally as well as to researchers working in the field of computational linguistics and focusing on how languages with complicated morphosyntax can be handled through finite-state approaches.

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.

This monograph gives a unified account of the syntactic distribution of subjunctive mood across languages, including Romance, Balkan (South Slavic and Modern Greek), and Hungarian, among others. Starting from a close scrutiny of the environments in which subjunctive mood occurs and of its semantic contribution, we present a feature-based approach which reveals the common properties of the class of verbs which embed subjunctive, and which takes into account the variation in subjunctive-related complementizers. Two main proposals can be highlighted: (i) the lexical semantics of the main clause predicate plays a crucial role in mood selection. More specifically subjunctive mood is regulated by a specific property of the main predicate, the emotive property, which is associated with the external argument of the embedding verb (usually the Subject). The book proposes a nanosyntactic analysis of the internal structure of embedding verbs. (ii) Cross- and intra-linguistic variations are dealt with according to different patterns of lexicalization, i.e., variations depend on what portions of the verb's and complementizer's functional sequence is lexicalized and on how it is packaged by languages. In doing so, this approach provides a uniform account of the phenomenon of embedded subjunctives. The monograph takes a novel, feature-based approach to the question of subjunctive licensing, providing a detailed analysis of the features of the matrix verb, of the complementizer and of the embedded subjunctive clause. It is also based on a wide empirical coverage, ranging from the relatively well-studied groups of Romance and Balkan languages to less explored languages from non-Indo-European families (Hungarian).

In their book, the authors describe the usage of and attitudes towards English in Asia since the 19th century, as well as the creative and dynamic ways in which Asians of the 21st century continually reinvent the lexicon of English, and the lexicons of their native tongues. The current biggest source of loanwords for many of the world's languages is English, the once obscure Germanic language that has risen to the role of a global lingua franca. However, the overwhelming influence of English is far from being entirely one-sided, at least from a lexical perspective. Many have decried the way that English has "invaded" the vocabularies of their languages, without realising that the English word stock is to some extent also being invaded by these languages. This book explores the phenomenon of word exchange by examining its occurrence between English and some of the major languages spoken in Asia-highly multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multilingual region where English is the predominant medium of international and intraregional communication. Students and researchers from various linguistic areas such as world Englishes, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, lexicology, and contact linguistics will find this book appealing.

The book provides an account of English inversion, a construction that displays perplexing idiosyncrasies at the level of semantics, phonology, syntax, and pragmatics. Basing his central argument on the claim that inversion is a linguistic representation of a Ground-before-Figure model, the author develops an elegant solution to a hitherto unsolved multidimensional linguistic puzzle and, in the process, supports the theoretical position that a cognitive approach best suits the multidimensionality of language itself. Engagingly written, the book will appeal to linguists of all persuasions and to any reader curious about the relationship between language and cognition.

This monograph is a collection of selected papers on Oceanic languages. For the first time, aspects of the morphology and syntax of Oceanic languages such as the encoding of sentence types, the structure of the noun phrase, noun incorporation, constituent order, and ergative vs. accusative alignment are discussed from a comparative point of view, thus drawing attention to genetic, areal and language-specific features. The individual papers are based on the field work of the authors on lesser-described and endangered languages and are basically descriptive studies. At the same time they also explore the theoretical implications of the data presented and analyzed, as well as the historical development of certain morpho-syntactic phenomena, without basing these explorations on a single theoretical framework. The book provides new insights into the morphosyntactic structures of Oceanic languages and is of interest primarily for linguists working on Austronesian, in particular Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian languages, but also for typologists and linguists working on language change.

This book offers a systematic account of syntactic categories - the building blocks of sentences and the units of grammatical analysis - and explains their place in different theories of language. It sets out and clarifies the conflicting definitions of competing frameworks which frequently make it hard or impossible to compare grammars.
Gisa Rauh describes the history and nature of traditional and contemporary accounts and definitions of grammatical categories. She explains their properties and use in generative, cognitive, and functional theories, and considers their function in language typology. She distinguishes between the cognitive functions of categories that relate to traditional parts of speech and serve to structure a language's lexicon; and those which determine the syntactic behaviour of the linguistic items they specify.
Professor Rauh illustrates her account with a wide range of examples. Her clear and balanced exposition will be welcomed by students and scholars in all branches of linguistics as well as by those in related subjects such as computational science and the philosophy of language.

This volume examines how the displacement property of language is characterized in formal terms under the Minimalist Program and to what extent this proposed characterization of it can explain relevant displacement properties. The birth of the Principles and Parameters Approach makes it possible to simplify transformational rules so radically as to be reduced to the single rule Move. The author proposes that Move, as conceived as a special case of Merge, named internal Merge, under the Minimalist Program requires two prerequisite operations: one is to "dig" into a structure to find a target of Merge, called Search, and the other is to make this target reach the top of the structure, called Float. The author argues that these two different operations are constrained by "minimal computation." Due to the nature of how they apply, these operations are constrained by this economy condition in such a way that Search must be minimal and Float obeys Minimize chain links, which requires that this operation cannot skip possible landing sites. The author demonstrates that this mechanism of minimal Search and Float deals with a variety of phenomena that involve quantifier raising, such as rigidity effects of scope interaction, the availability of cumulative readings of plural relation sentences and pair-list readings of multiple wh-questions. Also demonstrated in this volume is that the same mechanism properly captures the locality effects of topicalization, focus movement, and ellipsis with contrastive focus.

The main concern of this work is whether morphemes play a role in the lexical representation and processing of several types of polymorphemic words and, more particularly, at what precise representational and processing level. The book comprises two theoretical contributions and a number of empirical ones. One theoretical paper discusses several possible motivations for a morphologically organised mental lexicon (like the economy of representation view, and the efficiency of processing view), and lays out the weaknesses that are associated with some of these motivations. The other theoretical paper offers an interactive-activation reinterpretation of the findings that were originally reported within the lexical search framework. The empirical papers together cover a relatively broad array of language types and mainly deal with visual word recognition in normals in the context of lexical morphology (derived and compound words). Evidence is reported on the function of stems and affixes as processing units in prefixed and suffixed derivations. The role of semantic transparency in the lexical representation of compounds is studied, as is the effect of orthographic ambiguity on the parsing of novel compounds. The inflection-derivational distinction is approached in the context of Finnish, a highly agglutinative language with much richer morphology than the languages usually studied in psycholinguistic experiments on polymorphemic words. Two other contributions also approach the study object in the context of relatively uncharted domains: one presents data on Chinese, a language which uses a different script-type (logographic) from the languages that are usually studied (alphabetic script), and another one presents data on language production.

This book is a guide to the development of English syntax between the Old and Modern periods. Beginning with an overview of the main features of early English syntax, it gives a unified account of the significant grammatical changes that occurred during this period. Four leading experts demonstrate how these changes can be explained in terms of grammatical theory and the theory of language acquisition. Drawing on a wealth of empirical data, the book covers a wide range of topics including changes in word order, infinitival constructions and grammaticalization processes.

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

Kazakh: A Comprehensive Grammar is the first thorough analysis of Kazakh to be published in English. The volume is systematically organized to enable users to find information quickly and easily, and provides a thorough understanding of Kazakh grammar, with special emphasis given to syntax. Features of this book include: descriptions of phonology, morphology and syntax; examples from contemporary usage; tables summarizing discussions, for reference; a bibliography of works relating to Kazakh. Kazakh: A Comprehensive Grammar reflects the richness of the language, focusing on spoken and written varieties in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. It is an essential purchase for all linguists and scholars interested in Kazakh or in Turkic languages as well as advanced learners of Kazakh.

The minimalist notion of a phase has often been investigated with a view to the interfaces. 'Phases' provides a strictly syntax-internal perspective. If phases are fundamental, they should provide the grounds for a unifying treatment of different syntactic phenomena. Concentrating on displacement, the book argues that this expectation is borne out: there is an empirical clustering of properties, whereby the phrases that undergo pied-piping are also the phrases that host intermediate traces of cyclic movement. The same phrases also host partial and secondary movement. Finally, the immediate complements within these phrases never strand the embedding heads. The phrases that show this behaviour are the phases (CP, vP, DP, and PP). To account for the cluster of properties, phases are claimed to have two special properties: their complement is inaccessible to operations outside, the Phase Impenetrability Condition; their heads may be endowed with unvalued features that are neither connected to the categorical status of the phase nor interpreted on it. It is shown how the cluster of empirical properties flows naturally from these two assumptions, supporting the idea that phases are indeed a fundamental construct in syntax.

This book takes Korean as a basis to provide a detailed universal Determiner Phrase (DP) structure. Adnominal adjectival expressions are apparently optional noun dependents but their syntax and semantics have been shown to provide an important window on the internal structure of DP. By carefully examining data from Korean, an understudied language, as well as from other unrelated languages, the book provides a broad perspective on the phenomenon of noun modification and its cross-linguistic variations. Furthermore, it offers not only a thorough syntactic analysis but also a formal semantic analysis of noun modifiers that extends beyond a single language. This book will be of great interest to researchers interested in theoretical syntax, its interfaces with semantics, pragmatics, linguistic typology, and language variation.

Atypical demonstratives have not received adequate attention in the literature so far, or have even been completely neglected. By providing fresh insights and discussing new facets, this volume contributes to the better understanding of this group of words, starting from specific empirical phenomena, and advances our knowledge of the various properties of demonstratives, their syntactic multi-functionality, semantic feature specifications and pragmatic functions. In addition, some of the papers discuss different grammaticalization processes involving demonstratives, in particular how and from which lexical and morphosyntactic categories they originate cross-linguistically, and which semantic or pragmatic mechanisms play which role in their emergence. As such, the different contributions guide the readers on an adventurous journey into the realm of different exotic species of demonstratives, whose peculiar properties offer new exiting insights into the complex nature of demonstrative expressions themselves.

1 /Theoretical Background.- 1.1. Government-Binding Theory.- 1.1.1. X-Bar Theory.- 1.1.2. ?-Theory.- 1.1.3. Case Theory.- 1.1.4. Binding Theory.- 1.1.5. Control Theory.- 1.1.6. Bounding Theory.- 1.1.6.1. Bounding Nodes.- 1.1.6.2. Barriers.- 1.1.7. Government Theory.- 1.1.7.1. Disjunctive ECP.- 1.1.7.2. Conjunctive ECP.- 1.2. Parasitic Gaps.- Notes.- 2 / Universal Licensing.- 2.0. Introduction.- 2.1. Licensing.- 2.1.1. Full Interpretation.- 2.1.2. Universal Licensing.- 2.1.3. Full Interpretation at D-Structure.- 2.2. Licensing at D-Structure.- 2.2.1. Predication.- 2.2.1.1. Null Predicates.- 2.2.1.2. Adjunct Null Operators.- 2.2.2. Quantification.- 2.2.2.1. Operators in [Spec, CP].- 2.2.2.2. Base-generated Wh-constructions.- 2.2.2.3. Resumptive Pronouns within Questions and Relatives.- 2.2.2.4. Types of Resumptive Pronouns and the Wh/ Relative Asymmetry.- 2.2.2.4.1. Vata.- 2.2.2.4.2. Modern Hebrew.- 2.2.2.4.3. Standard Arabic.- 2.2.2.4.4. Hausa.- 2.3. Licensing at S-Structure: Null Operators.- 2.3.1. Parasitic Gaps.- 2.3.2. Null Operator Constructions in English and French.- 2.3.3. Null Topics.- 2.4. Universal Licensing and Parasitic Gaps.- 2.5. Summary.- Notes.- 3 / Double Dont Constructions.- 3.0. Introduction.- 3.1. Genitival Relatives.- 3.1.1. Dont as a Case-Marked C0.- 3.1.2. Dont Relatives and the Subject Condition.- 3.2. Non-Movement Relatives With Dont.- 3.3. Double Constructions with Dont.- 3.3.1. The Problem.- 3.3.2. Adnominal Complements and the Projection Principle.- 3.4. Identifying the Gaps.- 3.4.1. Adnominal Gaps Are Not Anaphoric.- 3.4.2. pro or Variable?.- 3.4.2.1. pro in French: Orphan Prepositions.- 3.4.2.2. Adnominal Gaps Are Not pro.- 3.4.2.3. Adnominal Gaps Are Variables.- 3.4.3. Problems With Multiple Extraction.- 3.5. Summary.- Notes.- 4/Null Operators In DPs.- 4.0. Introduction.- 4.1. Null Operators in Noun Phrases at S-Structure.- 4.1.1. DDCs Are Parasitic Gap Constructions.- 4.1.1.1. Syntactic A?-Movement.- 4.1.1.2. C-command from the Binder.- 4.1.1.3. Anti-c-command and Locality.- 4.1.2. [Spec, CP) as an A?-Position.- 4.2. Null Operators in Noun Phrases at D-Structure.- 4.2.1. The Thematic Structure of Nominals.- 4.2.2. Arguments and Adjuncts in DDCs.- 4.2.3. Relational Nouns and Possessor Arguments.- 4.2.3.1. Generic Contexts.- 4.2.3.2. Determiner Types.- 4.3. Easy-Type Constructions in Noun Phrases: Inalienable Possession.- 4.4. Summary.- Notes.- 5 / Locality In Double Dont Constructions.- 5.0. Introduction.- 5.1. Two Chain Approaches to External Locality.- 5.1.1. Chain Composition.- 5.1.2. Chain Formation.- 5.2. DDCs and Chain Composition.- 5.2.1. Adnominal Gaps Within PPs.- 5.2.2. Adjunct Clauses.- 5.2.3. Adnominal PGs in Embedded Clauses.- 5.3. Deriving the Properties of PG Constructions.- Notes.- References.- Index Of Names.- Index Of Subjects.

This book analyzes the structure of coordination from two perspectives: the symmetrical properties the construction imposes on its conjuncts, and how conjuncts interact with other categories outside coordination with respect to agreement and other grammatical phenomena. A substantial amount of data represented in this book are taken from varieties of Spanish. Unlike English, Spanish has a rich pattern of overt agreement between the subject and the verb, between nouns and adjectives, and also between clitics and lexical DP objects and indirect objects. Spanish agreement paradigms reveal very interesting patterns of agreement mismatch that provide important theoretical insights. Unless otherwise specified, it can be assumed that non-English examples are from Spanish. IX CHAPTER #1 INTRODUCTION Although coordination has figured more or less steadily in the Generative tradition beginning with Chornsky's (1957) Conjunction Transformation (later known as Conjunction Reduction), until recently, the two prevailing areas of research had been ellipsis (see, for example, Van Oirsouw 1987) and the semantic interpretation of conjuncts.' The internal structure of coordination was usually left unanalyzed, or assumed to be ternary branching, as in (I).

Austin's words on page 1 of his seminal work How to do things with words are valid for this study on clause typing in the Old Irish verbal complex: "The phenomenon to be discussed is very widespread and obvious, and it cannot fail to have been already noticed, at least here and there, by others. Yet I have not found attention paid to it specifically". Old Irish, a regular V1 language, morphologically distinguishes six clause types, to wit, declarative, relative, wh- and polar interrogative, responsive and imperative clause types. After discussing the constituency of the Old Irish verbal complex and the pragmatically marked orders, i.e. cleft-sentence and left-dislocation, the form, function, paradigmatic consistency and syntax of those clause types are then analysed in detail. The other main issues of this study are the descriptively adequate paradigm of clause types and the interaction of clause typing with subordination and with non-verbal predication in Old Irish. This monograph offers a comprehensive view of clause typing, its morphological expression and related phenomena in the earliest Insular Celtic language, and may also contribute to the general consideration of these topics in both the typological and diachronic perspectives.