Before she died in 2007, Tanya Reinhart had gone a long way towards developing the Theta System, a theory in which formal features defining the thematic relations of verbs are encoded in the lexicon, enabling an interface between the lexical component and the computational system/syntax, directly, and the Inference system, indirectly. This book considers the recent results and evaluations of Tanya Reinhart's research in both theoretical and experimental domains. After a comprehensive presentation of the framework by the editors, distinguished linguists from all over the world examine the underpinning of the Theta System, compare the framework to alternative approaches, and consider its implications for the architecture of grammar. In addition, they consider and exemplify the applications of the system and offer improvements and extensions. The book is an important contribution to linguistic research. It engages in the key dialogue between competing lexicalist and syntactic approaches to lexico-semantic problems and does so in the context of an impressive array of new empirical data ranging from Germanic, Romance, and Slavic to Ugro-Finnish, and Semitic languages.

In this volume Silvio Cruschina uses a comparative analysis to determine the syntax of the functional projections associated with discourse-related features, and to account for the marked word orders found in Romance-particularly in the fronting phenomena. Several language-specific analyses of discourse-related phenomena have been proposed in the literature, including studies on the notions of topic and focus in Romance, but the lack of a uniform definition of these notions, together with different assumptions in relation to the triggering features, has led to the perception that the Romance languages show many distinct and heterogeneous properties with respect to dislocation and fronting constructions. This volume is intended to complement the existing literature by integrating recent work on the topic and by emphasizing original and unifying reflections that combine and coordinate diverse elements. Cruschina's investigations clarify fundamental notions such as topic, focus, and contrast, drawing on new data from Sicilian, Sardinian, and other Romance varieties.

This volume is the first book-length presentation of the grammatical category of Associated Motion. It provides a framework for understanding a grammatical phenomenon which, though present in many languages, has gone unrecognized until recently. Previously known primarily from languages of Australia and South America, grammatical AM marking has now been identified in languages from most parts of the world (except Europe) and is becoming an important topic in linguistic typology. The chapters provide a thorough introduction to the subject, discussion of the relation between AM and related grammatical concepts, detailed descriptions of AM in a wide range of the world's languages, and surveys of AM in particular language families and areas.

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 book presents the latest work in the field of complementation studies. Leading scholars and upcoming researchers in the area approach complementation from various perspectives and different frameworks, such as Cognitive Grammar and construction grammars, to offer a broad survey of the field and provide thought-provoking reading.

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 book examines the distribution and interpretation of anaphors and pronouns. Through a detailed analysis of simplex and complex anaphors in Dutch and English, as well as other Romance and Germanic languages, the authors show that the relationship between an anaphor and its antecedent can be captured in terms of general Minimalist principles.

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 book deals with one aspect of Greek and Proto-Indo-European nominal morphology, the formation, inflection and semantics of s-stem nouns and adjectives. It uncovers the mechanisms of their creation and shows their limitation. The established view that the nouns are an unproductive category is challenged; at the same time, the expanding and partly changing nature of the basis governing the creation of the adjectives is explained. Morphology and semantics are studied in tandem, and a large chronological span of the Greek language is covered. The historical side is then extended into prehistory, and in particular the Greek evidence is tested against recent theories on Proto-Indo-European ablaut, leading to a reassessment of the morphonological characteristics in question.

This book presents a comprehensive picture of reflexive pronouns from both a theoretical and experimental perspective, using the well-researched languages of English, German, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. In order to understand the data from varying theoretical perspectives, the book considers selected syntactic and pragmatic analyses based on their current importance in the field. The volume consequently introduces the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach, which is a novel theoretical synthesis incorporating a sentence and pragmatic processor that accounts for reflexive pronoun behaviour in these six languages. Moreover, in support of this model a vast array of experimental literature is considered, including first and second language acquisition, bilingual, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic and clinical studies. It is through both the intuitive and experimental data linguistic theorizing relies upon that brings out the strengths of the modelling adopted here, paving new avenues for future research. In sum, this volume unites a diverse array of the literature that currently sits largely divorced between the theoretical and experimental realms, and when put together a better understanding of reflexive pronouns under the auspices of the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach is forged.

This is the first account of Jarawara, a Southern Amazonia language of great complexity and unusual interest, and now spoken by less than two hundred people. It has only two open lexical classes, noun and verb, and a closed adjective class with fourteen members which can only modify a noun. Verbs have a complex structure with three prefix and some twenty-five suffix slots. There is an eleven-term tense-modal system with an evidentiality contrast (eyewitness/non-eyewitness) in the three past tenses. Of the two genders, feminine and masculine, feminine is unmarked. There are at least eight types of subordinate clause constructions, including complement clauses, relative clauses, coreferential dependent clauses, and 'when', 'if', 'due to the lack of' and 'because of' clauses.There are only eleven consonants and four vowels but an extensive set of ordered phonological rules of lenition, vowel assimilation and unstressed syllable omission. There are four imperative inflections (with different meanings) and three explicit interrogative suffixes within the mood system. The book is entirely based on field work by the authors.

In this book, Doris Penka delivers a cross-linguistic, unified analysis of the semantics and syntax of negative indefinites, as in the expressions nobody, nothing, no (as determiner), never and nowhere and their counterparts in other languages. While it is standard to assume that negative indefinites behave like negative quantifiers, the author argues that these expressions are not inherently negative and are only licensed by a covert negation. In an analysis motivated by three phenomena found in the structure and semantics of negative indefinites in different languages - namely negative concord (in which multiple occurrences of negative constituents express a single negation), split readings (in which negative and indefinite parts take scope independently of each other), and the limited distribution of negative indefinites in Scandinavian languages - Doris Penka considers data from a wide range of languages and reviews the most recent literature on the semantics and syntax of negative indefinites. Her book will interest all linguists working on negation in particular and the syntax-semantics interface more generally.

In this book, Doris Penka delivers a cross-linguistic, unified analysis of the semantics and syntax of negative indefinites, as in the expressions nobody, nothing, no (as determiner), never and nowhere and their counterparts in other languages. While it is standard to assume that negative indefinites behave like negative quantifiers, the author argues that these expressions are not inherently negative and are only licensed by a covert negation. In an analysis motivated by three phenomena found in the structure and semantics of negative indefinites in different languages - namely negative concord (in which multiple occurrences of negative constituents express a single negation), split readings (in which negative and indefinite parts take scope independently of each other), and the limited distribution of negative indefinites in Scandinavian languages - Doris Penka considers data from a wide range of languages and reviews the most recent literature on the semantics and syntax of negative indefinites. Her book will interest all linguists working on negation in particular and the syntax-semantics interface more generally.

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 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.

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

This book presents corpus-based research on functional syntax. It is the first book to present a comprehensive investigation into grammatical metaphor in English clause combining in large-size corpora. By providing a systematic illustration of features such as parataxis, hypotaxis and embedding, it fills a gap in the systemic functional literature. It also offers insights into testing grammatical metaphors using a corpus linguistics methodology. The book is a useful resource for anyone interested in writing development.

This book is the first comprehensive description of the Manambu language of Papua New Guinea and is based entirely on the author's immersion fieldwork. Manambu belongs to the Ndu language family, and is spoken by about 2,500 people in five villages: Avatip, Yawabak, Malu, Apa:n, and Yambon (Yuanab) in East Sepik Province, Ambunti district. Manambu can be considered an endangered language. The Manambu language has many unusual properties. Every noun is considered masculine or feminine. Feminine gender - which is unmarked - is associated with small size and round shape, and masculine gender with elongated shape, large size, and importance. The Manambu culture is centered on ownership of personal names, and is similar to that of the Iatmul, described by Gregory Bateson. After an introductory account of the language and its speakers, Professor Aikhenvald devotes chapters to phonology, grammatical relations, word classes, gender, semantics, number, case, possession, derivation and compounding, pronouns, morphohology, verbs, mood and modality, negation, clause structure, pragmatics, discourse, semantics, the lexicon, current directions of change, and genetic relationship to other languages. The description is presented in a clear style in a framework that will be comprehensible to all linguists and linguistically oriented anthropologists.

English for Journalists has established itself in newsrooms the world over as an invaluable guide to the basics of English and to those aspects of writing, such as reporting speech, house style and jargon, which are specific to the language of journalism. Written in a highly accessible and engaging style, English for Journalists covers the fundamentals of grammar, spelling, punctuation and journalistic writing, with all points illustrated through a series of concise and illuminating examples. The book features practical, easy-to-follow advice with examples of common mistakes and problem words.

This thirtieth anniversary edition features a revised first chapter on the state of English today by author Wynford Hicks, and a chapter on writing for social media by Gavin Allen, along with an updated glossary and references.

This is an essential guide to written English for practising journalists and students of journalism today.

Table of Contents

Introduction: how this book began

1 English today

2 Grammar: the rules

3 Grammar: 10 common mistakes

4 Grammar: problems and confusions

5 Spelling

6 Punctuation

7 Reporting speech

8 Style

9 Social media

10 Words

11 Foreign words

12 Figures

Appendix 1 Style guide

Appendix 2 The ‘fronted adverbial’ muddle

Appendix 3 Glossary of terms

Further reading

Index

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.

Meaning and the Lexicon brings together 35 years of pathbreaking work on language by Ray Jackendoff. It traces the development of his Parallel Architecture, in which phonology, syntax, and semantics are independent generative components, and in which knowledge of language consists of a repertoire of stored structures. Some of these structures, such as words and morphemes, are idiosyncratic mappings between phonology, syntax, and meaning; some, such as idioms, attach meaning to larger syntactic structures; other structures are purely syntactic or morphosyntactic; and yet others are pieces of meaning with no syntactic or phonological form. The Parallel Architecture also seeks to explain and understand how language is integrated with human cognition, particularly with vision.
Professor Jackendoff examines inherently meaningful syntactic constructions, incorporating insights from Construction Grammar; and he looks at how aspects of meaning can be unexpressed but nevertheless understood, integrating approaches from Generative Lexicon theory. A recurring focus is the balance in grammar between idiosyncrasy, regularity, and semiregularity. The chapters cover a wide range of phenomena, from well-studied domains such as the mass-count distinction, event structure, resultatives, and noun-noun compounds, to offbeat aspects of English grammar such as the time-away construction (We're twistin' the night away), contrastive focus reduplication (Do you LIKE-him-like him?) and the noun-preposition-noun construction (week after week).
Ray Jackendoff draws on work in a wide range of fields, including linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy. His writing combines depth of thought with clarity and wit. Meaning and the Lexicon will be read and enjoyed by linguists of all theoretical persuasions, and will be of great interest to cognitive scientists, philosophers, and anyone interested in how language operates in the mind, brain, and human communication.

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).

This book explores the empirical and theoretical aspects of constituent structure in natural language syntax. It surveys a wide variety of functionalist and formalist theoretical approaches, from dependency grammars and Relational Grammar to Lexical Functional Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, and Minimalism. It describes the traditional tests for constituency and the formal means for representing them in phrase structure grammars, extended phrase structure grammars, X-bar theory, and set theoretic bare phrase structure. In doing so it provides a clear, thorough, and rigorous axiomatic description of the structural properties of constituent trees.
Andrew Carnie considers the central controversies on constituent structure. Is it, for example, a primitive notion or should it be derived from relational or semantic form? Do sentences have a single constituency or multiple constituencies? Does constituency operate on single or multiple dimensions? And what exactly is the categorial content of constituent structure representations? He identifies points of commonality as well as important theoretical differences among the various approaches to constituency, and critically examines the strengths and limitations of competing frameworks.
This new edition includes textual revisions as well as a new final chapter and ensures that Constituent Structure remains the definitive guide to constituency for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, as well as theoretical linguists of all persuasions in departments of linguistics, cognitive science, computational science, and related fields.

This book explores the empirical and theoretical aspects of constituent structure in natural language syntax. It surveys a wide variety of functionalist and formalist theoretical approaches, from dependency grammars and Relational Grammar to Lexical Functional Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, and Minimalism. It describes the traditional tests for constituency and the formal means for representing them in phrase structure grammars, extended phrase structure grammars, X-bar theory, and set theoretic bare phrase structure. In doing so it provides a clear, thorough, and rigorous axiomatic description of the structural properties of constituent trees.
Andrew Carnie considers the central controversies on constituent structure. Is it, for example, a primitive notion or should it be derived from relational or semantic form? Do sentences have a single constituency or multiple constituencies? Does constituency operate on single or multiple dimensions? And what exactly is the categorial content of constituent structure representations? He identifies points of commonality as well as important theoretical differences among the various approaches to constituency, and critically examines the strengths and limitations of competing frameworks.
This new edition includes textual revisions as well as a new final chapter and ensures that Constituent Structure remains the definitive guide to constituency for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, as well as theoretical linguists of all persuasions in departments of linguistics, cognitive science, computational science, and related fields.