This volume presents new work by leading researchers on central themes in the study of event structure: the nature and representation of telicity, change, and the notion of state. The book advances our understanding of these aspects of event structure by combining foundational semantic research with a series of case studies from a variety of languages. The book begins with an overview of the theoretical issues central to the volume, along with a brief presentation of the remaining chapters and the points of contact between them. The chapters, developed within several different theoretical perspectives, promote cross-theory as well as cross-linguistic comparison. The work will interest scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, semantics, and their interfaces. It will also appeal to researchers in philosophy, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition who are interested in the notions of telicity, change, and stativity.

Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten [Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies from all the central areas of general linguistics and the linguistics of individual languages which address topical questions, discuss new data and advance the development of linguistic theory.

This book integrates the research being carried out in the field of lexical semantics in linguistics with the work on knowledge representation and lexicon design in computational linguistics. It provides a stimulating and unique discussion between the computational perspective of lexical meaning and the concerns of the linguist for the semantic description of lexical items in the context of syntactic descriptions.

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.

Like the journal TOPOl, the TOPOl Library is based on the assumption that philosophy is a lively, provocative, delightful activity, which constantly challenges our inherited habits, painstakingly elaborates on how things could be different, in other stories, in counterfactual situations, in alternative possible worlds. Whatever its ideology, whether with the intent of uncovering a truer structure of reality or of shooting our anxiety, of exposing myths or of following them through, the outcome of philosophical activity is always the destabilizing, unsettling generation of doubts, of objections, of criticisms. It follows that this activity is intrinsically a dialogue, that philosophy is first and foremost philosophical discussion, that it requires bringing out conflicting points of view, paying careful, sympathetic attention to their structure, and using this dialectic to articulate one's approach, to make it richer, more thoughtful, more open to variation and play. And it follows that the spirit which one brings to this activity must be one of tolerance, of always suspecting one's own blindness and consequently looking with unbiased eye in every comer, without fearing to pass a (fallible) judgment on what is there but also without failing to show interest and respect.

This book is a cross-linguistic examination of the different grammatical means languages employ to represent a general set of semantic relations between clauses. The investigations focus on ways of combining clauses other than through relative and complement clause constructions. These span a number of types of semantic linking. Three, for example, describe varieties of consequence - cause, result, and purpose - which may be illustrated in English by, respectively: Because John has been studying German for years, he speaks it well; John has been studying German for years, thus he speaks it well; and John has been studying German for years, in order that he should speak it well. Syntactic descriptions of languages provide a grammatical analysis of clause types. The chapters in this book add the further dimension of semantics, generally in the form of focal and supporting clauses, the former referring to the central activity or state of the biclausal linking; and the latter to the clause attached to it. The supporting clause may set out the temporal milieu for the focal clause or specify a condition or presupposition for it or a preliminary statement of it, as in Although John has been studying German for years (the supporting clause), he does not speak it well (the focal clause). Professor Dixon's extensive opening discussion is followed by fourteen case studies of languages ranging from Korean and Kham to Iquito and Ojibwe. The book's concluding synthesis is provided by Professor Aikhenvald.

Salomo A. Birnbaum (1891?1989) is the uncontested pioneer in two large closely related research areas, namely historical Jewish linguistics and the palaeographyof Hebrew and all Jewish successor languages. This collection of essays provides a cross-section through Birnbaum s life s work. Volume I contains articles on Jewish philology and a survey of additional Jewish languages and individual studies. Volume II documents the development of Hebrew palaeography, which began to be established in the period between the 1930s and 1960s."

Making pragmatics accessible to a wide range of students and instructors without dumbing down the content of the field, this text for language professionals:

• raises awareness and increases knowledge and understanding of how human beings use language in real situations to engage in social action
• fosters the ability to think critically about language data and use
• helps readers develop the ability to "do pragmatics"

The book features careful explanations of topics and concepts that are often difficult for uninitiated readers, a wealth of examples, mostly of natural speech from collected data sources, and attention to the needs of readers who are non-native speakers of English, with non-Western perspectives offered when possible. Suggested Readings, Tasks, Discussion Questions, and Data Analysis sections involve readers in extending and applying what they are reading. The exercises push readers to recall and synthesize the content, elicit relevant personal experiences and other sources of information, and engage in changing their own interactional strategies. The activities go beyond a predictable framework to invite readers to carry out real life observations and experiment to make doing pragmatics a nonjudgmental everyday practice.

Although there is no shortage of definitions for pragmatics the received wisdom is that 'pragmatics' simply cannot be coherently defined. In this groundbreaking book Mira Ariel challenges the prominent definitions of pragmatics, as well as the widely-held assumption that specific topics - implicatures, deixis, speech acts, politeness - naturally and uniformly belong on the pragmatics turf. She reconstitutes the field, defining grammar as a set of conventional codes, and pragmatics as a set of inferences, rationally derived. The book applies this division of labor between codes and inferences to many classical pragmatic phenomena, and even to phenomena considered 'beyond pragmatics'. Surprisingly, although some of these turn out pragmatic, others actually turn out grammatical. Additional intriguing questions addressed in the book include: why is it sometimes difficult to distinguish grammar from pragmatics? Why is there no grand design behind grammar nor behind pragmatics? Are all extragrammatical phenomena pragmatic?

Carl Vogta (TM)s quarrel with Rudolph Wagner is considered to be a culmination of the materialism dispute in the 19th century. Out of this basically academic issue on the nature of human mental functions, a personal dispute quickly developed which was unrivalled in thematic incisiveness and expression. The aim of this study is the detailed linguistic analysis of the polemics and argumentation in this dispute based on extensive text excerpts, in which for the first time detailed linguistic studies on Vogt and Wagner are presented.

Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability brings together fifteen original essays by experts in philosophy and linguistics. These specially written chapters draw on themes from the work of Dorothy Edgington, the first woman to hold a chair in philosophy at the University of Oxford. The contributors to this volume focus on the key topics to which Edgington has made many important contributions, including conditionals, vagueness, the paradox of knowability, and probability. Their insights will be of interest to philosophers, linguists, and psychologists working in philosophical logic, natural language semantics, and reasoning.

This book provides an in-depth typological account of the forms, functions, and histories of serial verb constructions. Serial verbs, in which several verbs combine to form a single predicate, describe what is conceptualized as a single event. The verbs in the construction have the same tense, aspect, mood, modality, and evidentiality values, cannot be negated or questioned separately, and usually share the same subject and object. They are a powerful means of portraying various facets of one event, and can express grammatical meanings such as aspect, direction, and causation, particularly in languages where few other means are available. In this volume, Alexandra Aikhenvald seeks to answer unresolved questions such as: What are the parameters of variation in serial verbs? How do serial verbs differ from other, superficially similar multi-verb constructions? How do serial verbs emerge, and what happens to them over time? What role do they play in the representation of event structure? The book uses an inductively-based framework for the analysis and draws on data from languages with different typological profiles and genetic affiliations. It will be of interest to researchers and students from a wide range of fields of linguistics, especially typology, anthropological linguistics, and language contact.

This study undertakes a systematic analysis of French prepositional connectors. It explains the tendency of prepositions to form connectors and provides a model of complementary semantic and pragmatic categories covering the types, functions, and usage of connectors across a variety of genres.

In our everyday speech we represent events and situations, but we also provide commentary on these representations, situating ourselves and others relative to what we have to say and situating what we say in larger contexts. The present volume examines this activity of discourse marking from an enunciative perspective, providing the first English-language study of the highly influential Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations. This semantic/pragmatic theory is popular among academics who specialize in linguistics, discourse analysis, translation studies and didactics in France, but has not yet been widely adopted elsewhere. The tools of this theory are applied to a variety of specific discourse markers in contemporary English and semantic hypotheses are tested using the data-based approach of corpus linguistics. This book therefore provides an English-speaking readership with the keys to understand the theory underlying the author's analysis of a selection of markers ('anyway', 'indeed', 'in fact', 'yet', 'still', 'like' and 'I think'). This book will provide a valuable resource for students and researchers in linguistics with an interest in discourse markers, natural language argumentation, formal semantics, the interfaces between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, linguistic theorisation and French - or "poststructural" - models of discourse analysis.

Corpus Linguistics for Pragmatics provides a practical and comprehensive introduction to the growing field of corpus pragmatics. Taking a hands-on approach to showcase the applications of corpora in the exploration of core topics within pragmatics, this book: * covers six key areas of corpus-pragmatic research including speech acts, deixis, pragmatic markers, evaluation, conversational structure, and multimodality; * demonstrates the use of freely-available corpora, corpus interfaces and corpus analysis tools to conduct original pragmatic analyses; * is accompanied by an e-resource which hosts multimodal data sets for additional exercises. Featuring case studies and practical tasks within each chapter, Corpus Linguistics for Pragmatics is an essential guide for students and researchers studying or conducting their own corpus-based research in pragmatics.

Semantics for Reasons is a book about what we mean when we talk about reasons. It not only brings together the theory of reasons and natural language semantics in original ways but also sketches out a litany of implications for metaethics and the philosophy of normativity. In their account of how the language of reasons works, Bryan R. Weaver and Kevin Scharp propose and defend a view called Question Under Discussion (QUD) Reasons Contextualism. They use this view to argue for a series of novel positions on the ontology of reasons, indexical facts, the reasons-to-be- rational debate, moral reasons, and the reasons-first approach.

L2 Spanish Pragmatics is a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of current research into pragmatics and Spanish language teaching. It presents the research on the teaching of pragmatics and Spanish language as a multifaceted discipline. Written by an international cohort of scholars, the breadth of topics includes innovative topics in the teaching of Spanish, such as genre analysis, discourse markers, politeness and impoliteness, nonverbal communication, irony, and humor, as well as web-based pragmatics resources. Key features: An overview of new trends in Spanish pragmatics research and the growing need for instruction in intercultural communication; Insights derived from important theoretical and empirical works that may contribute to integrate pragmatics in the teaching of the language; Explanations with great clarity, plenty of examples and references, as well as connections to language teaching and learning; Tasks and activities that can help teachers move from a traditional curricular approach to a more innovative and engaging one; Descriptions of numerous activities or guidelines for the classroom, supplemented with additional materials; A bilingual glossary of terms in pragmatics that will help teachers in their implementation of activities to teach L2 Spanish pragmatics. L2 Spanish Pragmatics constitutes a reference book on current research on learning and teaching Spanish pragmatics. It will be of interest to university lecturers, researchers, and graduate students. It will also be an excellent resource for language educators and K-16 teachers willing to expand their knowledge and apply the teaching of pragmatics as an integral component in the teaching of the Spanish language.

This volume provides a detailed account of the syntax of expressive language, that is, utterances that express, rather than describe, the emotions and attitudes of the speaker. While the expressive function of natural language has been widely studied in recent years, the role that grammar plays in the interpretation of expressive items has been largely neglected in the semantic and pragmatic literature. Daniel Gutzmann demonstrates that expressivity has strong syntactic reflexes that interact with the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of these utterances, and argues that expressivity is in fact a syntactic feature on a par with other established features such as tense and gender. Evidence for this claim is drawn from three detailed case studies of expressive adjectives, intensifiers, and vocatives; their puzzling properties are accounted for through a minimalist approach to syntactic features and agreement, which shows that expressivity can partake in agreement operations, trigger movement, and be selected for syntactically. The analysis not only supports the hypothesis of expressive syntax, but also highlights the hidden role that grammar may play in phenomena that are traditionally considered to be solely semantic in nature.