The significant advances witnessed over the last years in the broad field of linguistic variation testify to a growing convergence between sociolinguistic approaches and the somewhat older historical and comparative research traditions. Particularly within cognitive and functional linguistics, the evolution towards a maximally dynamic approach to language goes hand in hand with a renewed interest in corpus research and quantitative methods of analysis. Many researchers feel that only in this way one can do justice to the complex interaction of forces and factors involved in linguistic variability, both synchronically and diachronically. The contributions to the present volume illustrate the ongoing evolution of the field. By bringing together a series of analyses that rely on extensive corpuses to shed light on sociolinguistic, historical, and comparative forms of variation, the volume highlights the interaction between these subfields. Most of the contributions go back to talks presented at the meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea held in Leuven in 2001. The volume starts with a global typological view on the sociolinguistic landscape of Europe offered by Peter Auer. It is followed by a methodological proposal for measuring phonetic similarity between dialects designed by Paul Heggarty, April McMahon, and Robert McMahon. Various papers deal with specific phenomena of socially and conceptually driven variation within a single language. For Dutch, Jose Tummers, Dirk Speelman, and Dirk Geeraerts analyze inflectional variation in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, Reinhild Vandekerckhove focuses on interdialectal convergence between West-Flemish urban dialects, and Arjan van Leuvensteijn studies competing forms of address in the 17th century Dutch standard variety. The cultural and conceptual dimension is also present in the diachronic lexicosemantic explorations presented by Heli Tissari, Clara Molina, and Caroline Gevaert for English expressions referring to the experiential domains of love, sorrow and anger, respectively: the history of words is systematically linked up with the images they convey and the evolving conceptualizations they reveal. The papers by Heide Wegener and by Marcin Kilarski and Grzegorz Krynicki constitute a plea against arbitrariness of alternations at the level of nominal morphology: dealing with marked plural forms in German, and with gender assignment to English loanwords in the Scandinavian languages, respectively, their distributional accounts bring into the picture a variety of motivating factors. The four cross-linguistic studies that close the volume focus on the differing ways in which even closely related languages exploit parallel morphosyntactic patterns. They share the same methodological concern for combining rigorous parametrization and quantification with conceptual and discourse-functional explanations. While Griet Beheydt and Katleen Van den Steen confront the use of formally defined competing constructions in two Germanic and two Romance languages, respectively, Torsten Leuschner as well as Gisela Harras and Kirsten Proost analyze how a particular speaker's attitude is expressed differently in various Germanic languages.

Irregularitat als sprachwissenschaftliches Konzept ist bisher nur unzureichend erforscht. Die Aufsatze widmen sich der Irregularitat in der Flexions-, Derivations- und Kompositionsmorphologie und leisten damit einen Beitrag zum besseren Verstandnis von Irregularitat. Untersucht wird, wo Regelhaftigkeit in der Irregularitat liegt, wie regelhafter Lautwandel Irregularitat erzeugt, wie Paradigmen funktionieren (speziell in Bezug auf Suppletivismus und "Overabundance") und wie die irregulare Morphologie mit Syntax und Pragmatik zusammenspielt. Irregularitat wird sowohl aus diachroner als auch aus synchroner Sicht beleuchtet. Einige Studien wahlen eine psycholinguistische Herangehensweise. Untersuchungssprachen reichen von Latein und seinen Tochtersprachen Franzosisch, Katalanisch und Italienisch uber Englisch, Deutsch, Griechisch, Russisch und Turkisch bis hin zu Thompson Salish und einigen irokesischen Sprachen. Die im Sammelband diskutierten Theorien reichen von der kanonischen Typologie uber die Distributed Morphology, die Whole Word Morphology und die Minimalistische Morphologie bis hin zu prozeduralen und deklarativen Modellen."

Open publication> The Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The book supplies profiles of the language families of Europe, including the sign languages. It also discusses the areal typology, paying attention to the Standard Average European, Balkan, Baltic and Mediterranean convergence areas. Separate chapters deal with the old and new minority languages and with non-standard varieties. A major focus is language politics and policies, including discussions of the special status of English, the relation between language and the church, language and the school, and standardization. The history of European linguistics is another focus as is the history of multilingual European 'empires' and their dissolution. The volume is especially geared towards a graduate and advanced undergraduate readership. It has been designed such that it can be used, as a whole or in parts, as a textbook, the first of its kind, for graduate programmes with a focus on the linguistic (and linguistics) landscape of Europe.

The book presents new issues and areas of work in modality and evidentiality in English(es), and in relation to other European languages (French, Galician, Lithuanian, Spanish). Given the complexity of the relations among modal and evidential expressions, their constant diachronic evolution, and the variation found in different English-speaking areas, and in different genres and discourse domains, the volume addresses the following issues: the conceptual nature of modality, the relationship between the domains of modality and evidentiality, the evolution and current status of the modal auxiliaries and other modal expressions, the relationship with neighbouring grammatical categories (tense, aspect, mood), and the variation in different discourse domains and genres, in modelling stance and discourse identities.

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 is a collection of linguistic and philosophical papers dealing with the semantic problems of determiners. The language under investigation is mostly English, although a few papers deal with French and German, and, to a lesser extent, with Dutch, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. The majority of the contributions focus on the semantics of the definite and indefinite articles, leading into discussions of anaphoricness, specificness, opacity and transparency, referentiality and attributiveness and genericness. The relation of the determiners to other parts of grammar, in particular relativisation and predication, is also investigated. Some attention is also given to quantifiers. In the spirit of pluralism, there is no single paradigm unifying all the papers, rather, the volume reflects elements of the Extended Standard Theory, Generative Semantics, Montague Grammar, (Gricean) Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory.

This book is a collection of linguistic and philosophical papers dealing with the semantic problems of determiners. The language under investigation is mostly English, although a few papers deal with French and German, and, to a lesser extent, with Dutch, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. The majority of the contributions focus on the semantics of the definite and indefinite articles, leading into discussions of anaphoricness, specificness, opacity and transparency, referentiality and attributiveness and genericness. The relation of the determiners to other parts of grammar, in particular relativisation and predication, is also investigated. Some attention is also given to quantifiers. In the spirit of pluralism, there is no single paradigm unifying all the papers, rather, the volume reflects elements of the Extended Standard Theory, Generative Semantics, Montague Grammar, (Gricean) Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory.

This book presents a detailed analysis of structural as well as pragmatic aspects underlying the phenomenon of noun ellipsis in English. Here Gunther examines the structure of elliptical noun phrases to account for the conditions on noun ellipsis and those on one-insertion, with special emphasis on the (oft-neglected) parallels between the two. She also examines the use of noun ellipsis with adjectives in order to shed light on this under-researched phenomenon, drawing on data from the British National Corpus.

Series Information:
Routledge Language Family Series

Provides a unique, up-to-date survey of twelve Germanic languages from English and German to Faroese and Yiddish.

This book presents a detailed analysis of structural as well as pragmatic aspects underlying the phenomenon of noun ellipsis in English. Here Gunther examines the structure of elliptical noun phrases to account for the conditions on noun ellipsis and those on one-insertion, with special emphasis on the (oft-neglected) parallels between the two. She also examines the use of noun ellipsis with adjectives in order to shed light on this under-researched phenomenon, drawing on data from the British National Corpus.

This handbook offers an in depth and comprehensive state of the art survey of the linguistic domains of modality and mood. An international team of experts in the field examines the full range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the many facets of the phenomena involved. Parts 1 and 2 of the volume present the basic linguistic facts about the systems of modality and mood in the languages of the world, covering the semantics and the expression of different subtypes of modality and mood respectively. The authors also examine the interaction of modality and mood, mutually and with other semantic categories such as aspect, time, negation, and evidentiality. In Part 3, authors discuss the features of the modality and mood systems in five typologically different language groups, while chapters in Part 4 deal with wider perspectives on modality and mood: diachrony, areality, first language acquisition, and sign language. Finally, Part 5 looks at how modality and mood are handled in different theoretical approaches: formal syntax, functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, and formal semantics.