This is an investigation into the grammaticalized system of focus-background agreement in Mandarin Chinese. The particles cai, jiu, dou and ye are, in a specific use type, shown to form the core of a highly systematic paradigm. This book is not just a valuable companion for anyone interested in core aspects of Mandarin Chinese grammar. It caters for the interests of theoretical linguists as well as for linguists from other fields with an interest in information-structure, focus and contrastive topics, and quantification. The outstanding characteristic of this book, viz. its effortless integration of findings from formal semantics without heavy formal load, makes it rewarding reading both for linguists with a less formal background, and for researchers with some knowledge of formal semantics.

This is an investigation into the grammaticalized system of focus-background agreement in Mandarin Chinese. The particles "cai, jiu, dou and ye" are in a specific use type, shown to form the core of a highly systematic paradigm. Foci agree with their backgrounds, with the particles being the agreement markers. The semantic categories involved are different types of quantification over alternatives: all alternatives may be true, or some, or not all, or none. This minimal semantics is capable of explaining the use of "cai, jiu, dou and ye and two more" "particles (hai and zai") in various contexts that have figured in controversial debates over the past three decades. This book is not just a valuable companion for anyone interested in core aspects of Mandarin Chinese grammar, it caters for the interests of theoretical linguists as well as for linguists from other fields with an interest in information structure, focus and contrastive topics, and quantification. The outstanding characteristics of this book, viz. its effortless integration of findings from formal semantics without heavy formal load, makes it rewarding reading for both linguists with a less formal background, and for researchers with some knowledge of formal semantics.

The present collection of articles grew out of a workshop on Vietnamese linguistics in 2009 at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. To our knowledge, no workshop with a comparable scope has been held outside of Vietnam for the past 20 years, or even longer. Given the important typological status of Vietnamese as a paradigm case of an isolating language, the volume covers the most relevant fields in linguistics: syntax, semantics, phonology, and the lexicon. A guiding principle in assembling the chapters for this volume has been to take an inclusive stance as far as the commitment to different frameworks and research methodologies is concerned. All the contributors are proponents of recent developments in their individual areas of specialization. The editors have taken special care to cater for a readership which should be as broad as possible. This means that each contribution is self-contained and does not presuppose any knowledge of Vietnamese. The volume is recommended to general linguistis, comparative linguists, typologists and to researchers specializing in languages of East and South East Asia.

Acid rain is still with us. Although it is a problem that people have worked diligently to solve, there are still many problem areas throughout the world. In reality the focus of acid rain research has shifted, and this book adds new vision to the topic. It contains papers, selected from Acid Rain 2005, the 7th International Conference on Acid Deposition, that take a broad perspective of the issues, emphasizing a number of themes: - the emission, concentration and deposition of pollutants - nitrogen and trace elements in ecosystems and their effects on forests, water and soil - studies of material damage and recovery - critical loads.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language and Computation, TbiLLC 2013, held in Gudauri, Georgia, in September 2013. The conference series is centered around the interaction between logic, language and computation. The contributions represent these three fields and the symposia aim to foster interaction between them. The book consists of 16 papers that were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 submissions. Each paper has passed through a rigorous peer-review process before being accepted for publication. The volume also contains two summaries of the tutorials that took place at the symposium: the one on admissible rules and the one on the formal semantics of aspectual meaning from a cross-linguistic perspective.

In its versatilility the German dative is a poorly understood area of grammatical research. This study develops the first unified and explicitly formal theory of the free dative voice in the German language. The central argument is that every free dative functions as an antecedent of a reflexive diathesis. Traditional dative types include the possessive dative, the dativus (in)commode, and the dativus iudicantis.