The Routledge Handbook of Vocabulary Studies provides a cutting-edge survey of current scholarship in this area. Divided into four sections, which cover understanding vocabulary; approaches to teaching and learning vocabulary; measuring knowledge of vocabulary; and key issues in teaching, researching, and measuring vocabulary, this Handbook: * brings together a wide range of approaches to learning words to provide clarity on how best vocabulary might be taught and learned; * provides a comprehensive discussion of the key issues and challenges in vocabulary studies, with research taken from the past 40 years; * includes chapters on both formulaic language as well as single-word items; * features original contributions from a range of internationally renowned scholars as well as academics at the forefront of innovative research. The Routledge Handbook of Vocabulary Studies is an essential text for those interested in teaching, learning, and researching vocabulary.

This volume explores the progress of cross-linguistic research into the structure of complex nominals since the publication of Chomsky's 'Remarks on Nominalization' in 1970. In the last 50 years of research into the division of labour between the mental lexicon and syntax, the specific properties of nominalized structures have remained a particularly central question. The chapters in this volume take stock of developments in this area and offer new perspectives on a range of issues, including the representation of morphological complexity in the syntax, the correlation of nominal affixes with different types of nominalizations, and the modelling of non-compositional meaning within syntactic approaches to word formation. Crucially, the contributors base their analyses on data from typologically diverse languages, such as Archi, Greek, Hiaki, Icelandic, Mebengokre, Turkish, and Udmurt, and explore the question of whether, cross-linguistically, nominalizations have a uniform core to their structure that can be syntactically described.

This book brings together novel work on the semantics and pragmatics of certain indefinite expressions that also convey modality. These epistemic indefinites are determiners or pronouns that signal ignorance on the part of the speaker, such as German irgendein and Spanish algun: the sentence Maria se caso con algun medico ('Maria married some doctor or other') both makes an existential statement that there is a doctor that Maria married and signals the speaker's inability or unwillingness to identify the doctor in question. Although epistemic indefinites have featured in recent semantic literature, a full understanding of the phenomenon is still lacking: there is currently no agreement on the source of their epistemic component; there is insufficient cross-linguistic data to develop a semantic typology of these items; and the parallelisms and differences between epistemic indefinites and other expressions that convey epistemic modality have not been explored in depth. In this volume, a team of experts in the field offer novel empirical observations and important theoretical insights on epistemic indefinites and related topics such as modal free relatives, modified numerals, and epistemic modals. They provide a coherent overview of the issues that shape the subject as well as placing them in the context of current semantic research, moving towards the development of a semantic typology of epistemic indefinites that explores the place of these expressions within a general typology of modal items.

Digital discourse has become a widespread way of communicating worldwide, WhatsApp being one of the most popular Instant Messaging tools. This book offers a critical state-of-the-art review of WhatsApp linguistic studies. After evaluating a wide range of sources, seeking to identify relevant works, two major thematic domains were found. On the one hand, references addressing WhatsApp linguistic characteristics: status notifications, multimodal elements such as emojis or memes, language variation, among others. On the other, the volume offers an overview of references describing the use of WhatsApp to learn English as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL). The author provides a broad critical review of previous works to date, which has enabled her to detect areas of research still unexplored.

Representing what someone else has said is an integral part of spoken and written communication. Speech representation occurs in many contexts from news reports and legal trials to everyday conversation. Although commonplace, it requires sophisticated choices regarding what to represent and how to represent it. These choices can highlight a speaker's voice, shape our perception of the reported speech, or support our claims of authority.While speech representation in Present-day English has been studied extensively, this book extends the discussion to historical periods. Speech Representation in the History of English explores speech representation of the past, providing in-depth analyses of how speakers and writers mark, structure, and discuss a previous speech event or fictional speech. Focusing on the Early Modern English and the Late Modern English periods (1500-1900), this volume covers topics such as parentheses as markers of represented speech, the development of like as a reporting expression, the gradual formation of free indirect speech reporting, and the interpersonal functions of represented speech. Chapters draw on a wide range of methodologies, including historical sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and corpus linguistics, and cover many genres from witness depositions, literary texts, and letters, to the spoken language of the recent past. In this comprehensive volume, Peter Grund and Terry Walker bring together a collection of works that use cutting-edge approaches to speech representation. Researchers and students of the history of English, sociolinguistics, and discourse studies alike will find Speech Representation in the History of English to be an invaluable addition to the field.

This synchronic study presents a new onomasiological, frame-theoretical model for the description, classification and theoretical analysis of the cross-linguistic content category aspectuality. It deals specifically with those pieces of information, which, in their interplay, constitute the aspectual value of states of affairs. The focus is on Romance Languages, although the model can be applied just as well to other languages, in that it is underpinned by a principle grounded in a fundamental cognitive ability: the delimitation principle. Unlike traditional approaches, which generally have a semasiological orientation and strictly adhere to a semantic differentiation between grammatical aspect and lexical aspect (Aktionsart), this study makes no such differentiation and understands these as merely different formal realisations of one and the same content category: aspectuality.

Ancient Greek is commonly considered a 'synthetic' or 'inflectional' language, that is, a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. Nevertheless, already at the earliest stages of the language one finds traces of multi-word 'periphrastic' constructions similar to those in the modern European languages, as in , 'it was happening', or *s , 'he has dishonoured'. Verbal Periphrasis in Ancient Greek offers a systematic investigation of periphrastic constructions with the verbs 'to be' and 'to have' based on an extensive corpus of texts, ranging from the eighth century BC to the eighth century AD. It clarifies the notions of 'verbal periphrasis' and 'adjectival periphrasis' from a theoretical point of view, and offers a broad introduction to a selection of recent advancements in linguistics. It includes a diachronic analysis which investigates constructions in all three main aspectual domains-perfect aspect, imperfective aspect, and perfective aspect-combining a qualitative with a quantitative approach. In doing so, the volume presents a substantial contribution to our understanding of the ancient Greek verbal system and its development over time.

This volume provides insight into linguistic pragmatics from the perspective of linguists who have been influenced by philosophy. Theory of Mind and perspectives on point of view are presented along with other topics including: semantics vs. semiotics, clinical pragmatics, explicatures, cancellability of explicatures, interactive language use, reference, common ground, presupposition, definiteness, logophoricity and point of view in connection with pragmatic inference, pragmemes and language games, pragmatics and artificial languages, the mechanism of the form/content correlation from a pragmatic point of view, amongst other issues relating to language use. Relevance Theory is introduced as an important framework, allowing readers to familiarize themselves with technical details and linguistic terminology. This book follows on from the first volume: both contain the work of world renowned experts who discuss theories relevant to pragmatics. Here, the relationship between semantics and pragmatics is explored: conversational explicatures are a way to bridge the gap in semantics between underdetermined logical forms and full propositional content. These volumes are written in an accessible way and work well both as a stimulus to further research and as a guide to less experienced researchers and students who would like to know more about this vast, complex, and difficult field of inquiry.

Research Design and Methodology in Studies on Second Language Tense and Aspect provides an up-to-date review of past and current methodologies for the study of the L2 acquisition of tense and aspect. More specifically, the book addresses the following issues related to the design of studies for research in tense and aspect: Theoretical frameworks (e.g., Are research questions investigated within one theoretical approach incompatible with other approaches?) Elicitation procedures (Do different types of tasks elicit different types of tense-aspect data?) Coding of data (e.g. How are lexical categories defined and coded?) Data analysis (e.g., What statistical tests are more appropriate to analyze language data?) The volume provides new insights into the study of L2 tense-aspect by bringing together well renowned scholars with experience in the research design of research this area of the field.

Assuming no prior experience, this core textbook introduces formal semantics in an accessible and engaging way and provides students with a solid understanding of a range of semantic phenomena. It explores a wealth of topics, including generalized quantifier theory, referential opacity, aktionsarten, thematic roles and lexical conceptual structure, tense and aspect and event semantics. Chapters are illustrated with numerous examples to contextualise the theory, and practical exercises encourage students to engage with the text and develop their problem-solving skills. This is an essential text for undergraduates and postgraduates involved in the study of semantics. It is an ideal text for a wide range of modules on the philosophy of language, linguistic meaning and formal semantics. New to this Edition: - Fully revised and updated, with new material on type theory, the lambda calculus, semantic composition, reference to times in a narrative and discourse representation theory - Exercises now graded according to level of difficulty, from beginner to very advanced level Accompanying online resources for this title can be found at bloomsburyonlineresources.com/modern-linguistics-series. These resources are designed to support teaching and learning when using this textbook and are available at no extra cost.

This book focuses on the form and the function of commands-directive speech acts such as pleas, entreaties, and orders-from a typological perspective. A team of internationally-renowned experts in the field examine the interrelationship of these speech acts with cultural stereotypes and practices, as well as their origins and development, especially in the light of language contact. The volume begins with an introduction outlining the marking and the meaning of imperatives and other ways of expressing commands and directives. Each of the chapters that follow offers an in-depth analysis of commands in a particular language. These analyses are cast in terms of 'basic linguistic theory'-a cumulative typological functional framework-and the chapters are arranged and structured in a way that allows useful comparison between them. The languages investigated include Quechua, Japanese, Lao, Aguaruna and Ashaninka Satipo (both from Peru), Dyirbal (from Australia), Zenzontepec Chatino (from Mexico), Nungon, Tayatuk, and Karawari (from Papua New Guinea), Korowai (from West Papua), Wolaitta (from Ethiopia), and Northern Paiute (a native language of the United States).

This book is a groundbreaking study of etiquette in the nineteenth century when the success of etiquette books reached unprecedented heights in Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. It positions etiquette as a fully-fledged theoretical concept within the fields of politeness studies and historical pragmatics. After tracing the origin of etiquette back to Spanish court protocol, the analysis takes a novel approach to key aspects of etiquette: its highly coercive and intricate scripts; the liminal rituals of social gatekeeping; the fear for blunders; the obsession with precedence. Interrogating the complex relationship between historical etiquette and adjacent notions of politeness, conduct, morality, convention, and ritual, the study prompts questions on gender stereotyping and class privilege surrounding the present-day etiquette revival. Through adopting a unique comparative approach and a corpus-based methodology this study seeks to revitalise our understandings of etiquette. This book will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics and pragmatics, as well as those in neighbouring fields such as literary criticism, gender studies and family life, domestic and urban spaces.

This book examines the variation found in modern spoken French, based on the research programme 'Phonology of Contemporary French' (Phonologie du Francais Contemporain, PFC). Extensive data are drawn from all over the French-speaking world, including Algeria, Canada, Louisiana, Mauritius, and Switzerland. Although the principal focus is on differences in pronunciation, the authors also analyse the spoken language at all levels from sound to meaning. The book is accompanied by a website hosting audio-visual material for teaching purposes, data, and a variety of tools for working with corpora. The first part of the book outlines some key concepts and approaches to the description of spoken French. Chapters in Part II are devoted to the study of individual samples of spoken French from all over the world, covering phonological and grammatical features as well as lexical and cultural aspects. The book's companion website provides a class-friendly ready-to-use multimedia version of these 17 chapters, as well as the sound files and full transcription for each extract. Part III looks at inter and intra-speaker variation: it begins with chapters that provide the methodological background to the study of phonological variation using databases, while in the second section authors present case studies of a number of PFC survey points, including Paris, the Central African Republic, and Quebec. Varieties of Spoken French will be an invaluable resource for researchers, teachers, and students of all aspects of French language and linguistics.

This book offers readers a collection of 50 short chapter entries on topics in the philosophy of language. Each entry addresses a paradox, a longstanding puzzle, or a major theme that has emerged in the field from the last 150 years, tracing overlap with issues in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, ethics, political philosophy, and literature. Each of the 50 entries is written as a piece that can stand on its own, though useful connections to other entries are mentioned throughout the text. Readers can open the book and start with almost any of the entries, following themes of greatest interest to them. Each entry includes recommendations for further reading on the topic. Philosophy of Language: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments is useful as a standalone textbook, or can be supplemented by additional readings that instructors choose. The accessible style makes it suitable for introductory level through intermediate undergraduate courses, as well as for independent learners, or even as a reference for more advanced students and researchers. Key Features: Uses a problem-centered approach to philosophy of language (rather than author- or theory-centered) making the text more inviting to first-time students of the subject. Offers stand-alone chapters, allowing students to quickly understand an issue and giving instructors flexibility in assigning readings to match the themes of the course. Provides up-to-date recommended readings at the end of each chapter, or about 500 sources in total, amounting to an extensive review of the literature on each topic.

This book presents the essential background for understanding semantic theories of mood. Mood as a category is widely used in the description of languages and the formal analysis of their grammatical properties. It typically refers to the features of a sentence-individual morphemes or grammatical patterns-that reflect how the sentence contributes to the modal meaning of a larger phrase, or that indicate the type of fundamental pragmatic function that it has in conversation. In this volume, Paul Portner discusses the most significant semantic theories relating to the two main subtypes of mood: verbal mood, including the categories of indicative and subjunctive subordinate clauses, and sentence mood, encompassing declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives. He evaluates those theories, compares them, and draws connections between seemingly disparate approaches, and he formalizes some of the literature's most important ideas in new ways in order to draw out their most significant insights. Ultimately, this work shows that there are crucial connections between verbal mood and sentence mood which point the way towards a more general understanding of how mood works and its relation to other topics in linguistics; it also outlines the type of semantic and pragmatic theory which will make it possible to explain these relations. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of semantics and pragmatics, philosophy, computer science, and psychology.

This volume brings together the latest research on the semantics of nouns in both familiar and less well-documented languages, including English, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, the Papuan language Koromu, the Dravidian language Solega, and Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara from Australia. Chapters offer systematic and detailed analyses of scores of individual nouns across a range of conceptual domains, including 'people', 'places', and 'living things', with each analysis fully grounded in a unified methodological framework. They not only cover central theoretical issues specific to the analysis of the domain in question, but also empirically investigate the different types of meaning relations that hold between nouns, such as meronymy, hyponymy, taxonomy, and antonymy. The collection of studies show how in-depth meaning analysis anchored in a cross-linguistic and cross-domain perspective can lead to unexpected insights into the common and particular ways in which speakers of different languages conceptualize, categorize, and order the world around them. This unique volume brings together a new generation of semanticists from across the globe, and will be of interest to researchers in linguistics, psychology, anthropology, biology, and philosophy.

This volume offers novel views on the precise relation between reference to an object by means of a linguistic expression and our mental representation of that object, long a source of debate in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and cognitive science. Chapters in this volume deal with our devices for singular reference and singular representation, with most focusing on linguistic expressions that are used to refer to particular objects, persons, or places. These expressions include proper names such as Mary and John; indexicals such as I and tomorrow; demonstrative pronouns such as this and that; and some definite and indefinite descriptions such as The Queen of England or a medical doctor. Other chapters examine the ways we represent objects in thought, particularly the first-person perspective and the self, and one explores a notion common to reference and representation: salience. The volume includes the latest views on these complex topics from some of the most prominent authors in the field and will be of interest to anyone working on issues of reference and representation in thought and language.

This book explores graded expressions of modality, a rich and underexplored source of insight into modal semantics. Studies on modal language to date have largely focussed on a small and non-representative subset of expressions, namely modal auxiliaries such as must, might, and ought. Here, Daniel Lassiter argues that we should expand the conversation to include gradable modals such as more likely than, quite possible, and very good. He provides an introduction to qualitative and degree semantics for graded meaning, using the Representational Theory of Measurement to expose the complementarity between these apparently opposed perspectives on gradation. The volume explores and expands the typology of scales among English adjectives and uses the result to shed light on the meanings of a variety of epistemic and deontic modals. It also demonstrates that modality is deeply intertwined with probability and expected value, connecting modal semantics with the cognitive science of uncertainty and choice.

This book synthesizes and integrates 40 years of research on the semantics of questions, and its interface with pragmatics and syntax, conducted within the formal semantics tradition. A wide range of topics are covered, including weak-strong exhaustiveness, maximality, functional answers, single-multiple-trapped list answers, embedding predicates, quantificational variability, concealed questions, weak islands, polar and alternative questions, negative polarity, and non-canonical questions. The literature on this rich set of topics, theoretically diverse and scattered across multiple venues, is often hard to assimilate. Veneeta Dayal, drawing on her own research, brings them together for the first time in a coherent, concise, and well-structured whole. Each chapter begins with a non-technical introduction to the issues discussed; semantically sophisticated accounts are then presented incrementally, with the major points summarized at the end of each section. Written in an accessible style, this book provides both a guide to one of the most vibrant areas of research in natural language and an account of how this area of study is developing. It will be a unique resource for the novice and expert alike, and seeks to appeal to a variety of readers without compromising depth and breadth of coverage.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book explores a key issue in linguistic theory, the systematic variation in form between semantic equivalents across languages. Two contrasting views of the role of lexical meaning in the analysis of such variation can be found in the literature: (i) uniformity, whereby lexical meaning is universal, and variation arises from idiosyncratic differences in the inventory and phonological shape of language-particular functional material, and (ii) transparency, whereby systematic variation in form arises from systematic variation in the meaning of basic lexical items. In this volume, Itamar Francez and Andrew Koontz-Garboden contrast these views as applied to the empirical domain of property concept sentences - sentences expressing adjectival predication and their translational equivalents across languages. They demonstrate that property concept sentences vary systematically between possessive and predicative form, and propose a transparentist analysis of this variation that links it to the lexical denotations of basic property concept lexemes. At the heart of the analysis are qualities: mass-like model theoretic objects that closely resemble scales. The authors contrast their transparentist analysis with uniformitarian alternatives, demonstrating its theoretical and empirical advantages. They then show that the proposed theory of qualities can account for interesting and novel observations in two central domains of grammatical theory: the theory of syntactic categories, and the theory of mass nouns. The overall results highlight the importance of the lexicon as a locus of generalizations about the limits of crosslinguistic variation. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

This book uses mathematical models of language to explain why there are certain gaps in language: things that we might expect to be able to say but can't. For instance, why can we say I ran for five minutes but not *I ran all the way to the store for five minutes? Why is five pounds of books acceptable, but *five pounds of book not acceptable? What prevents us from saying *sixty degrees of water to express the temperature of the water in a swimming pool when sixty inches of water can express its depth? And why can we not say *all the ants in my kitchen are numerous? The constraints on these constructions involve concepts that are generally studied separately: aspect, plural and mass reference, measurement, and distributivity. In this book, Lucas Champollion provides a unified perspective on these domains, connects them formally within the framework of algebraic semantics and mereology, and uses this connection to transfer insights across unrelated bodies of literature and formulate a single constraint that explains each of the judgments above.

This book presents a novel analysis of concealed-question constructions, reports of a mental attitude in which part of a sentence looks like a nominal complement (e.g. Eve's phone number in Adam knows Eve's phone number), but is interpreted as an indirect question (Adam knows what Eve's phone number is). Such constructions are puzzling in that they raise the question of how their meaning derives from their constituent parts. In particular, how a nominal complement (Eve's phone number), normally used to refer to an entity (e.g. Eve's actual phone number in Adam dialled Eve's phone number) ends up with a question-like meaning. In this book, Ilaria Frana adopts a theory according to which noun phrases with concealed question meanings are analysed as individual concepts. The traditional individual concept theory is modified and applied to the phenomena discussed in the recent literature and some new problematic data. The end result is a fully compositional account of a wide range of concealed-question constructions. The exploration of concealed questions offered in the book provides insights into both issues in semantic theory, such as the nature of quantification in natural languages and the use of type shifter in the grammar, and issues surrounding the syntax-semantics interface, such as the interpretation of copy traces and the effects on semantic interpretation of different syntactic analyses of relative clauses. The book will interest scholars and graduate students in linguistics, especially those interested in semantics and the syntax-semantics interface, as well as philosophers of language working on the topic of intensionality.

This open access book presents novel theoretical, empirical and experimental work exploring the nature of mental representations that support natural language production and understanding, and other manifestations of cognition. One fundamental question raised in the text is whether requisite knowledge structures can be adequately modeled by means of a uniform representational format, and if so, what exactly is its nature. Frames are a key topic covered which have had a strong impact on the exploration of knowledge representations in artificial intelligence, psychology and linguistics; cascades are a novel development in frame theory. Other key subject areas explored are: concepts and categorization, the experimental investigation of mental representation, as well as cognitive analysis in semantics. This book is of interest to students, researchers, and professionals working on cognition in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.

This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate what we say from what is actually going on, allowing us to talk about what might happen or might have happened, as well as what is required, desirable, or permitted. Chapters in the book demonstrate that modality involves many more syntactic categories and levels of syntactic structure than traditionally assumed. The volume distinguishes between three types of modality: 'low modality', which concerns modal interpretations associated with the verbal and nominal cartographies in syntax; 'middle modality', or modal interpretation associated to the syntactic cartography internal to the clause; and 'high modality', relating to the left periphery. It combines cross-linguistic discussions of the more widely-studied sources of modality with analyses of novel or unexpected sources, and shows how the meanings associated with the three types of modality are realized across a wide range of languages.

Honoured with the 2017 AESLA Research Award of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics. Corpus linguistics on the move: Exploring and understanding English through corpora comprises fourteen contributions by leading scholars in the field of English corpus linguistics, covering areas of central concern in corpus research and corpus methodology. The topics examined in the different chapters include issues related to corpus compilation and annotation, perspectives from specialized corpora, and studies on grammatical and pragmatic aspects of English, all these examined through a broad range of corpora, both synchronic and diachronic, representing both EFL and different native varieties of English worldwide. The volume will be of primary interest to students and researchers working on English corpus linguistics, but is also likely to have a wider general appeal. Contributors are: Bas Aarts, Sian Alsop, Anita Auer, Jill Bowie, Eduardo Coto-Villalibre, Pieter de Haan, Johan Elsness, Moragh Gordon, Hilde Hasselgard, Turo Hiltunen, Magnus Huber, Marianne Hundt, Mikko Laitinen, Martti Makinen, Beatriz Mato-Miguez, Mike Olson, Antoinette Renouf, and Bianca Widlitzki.