This book examines the hypothesis of "e;direct compositionality"e;, which requires that semantic interpretation proceed in tandem with syntactic combination.
This is a self-contained introduction to the Minimalist Program for linguistic theory, the boldest and most radical version of Noam Chomsky's naturalistic approach to language.
This book brings together new work by leading syntactic theorists from the USA and Europe on a central aspect of syntactic and morphological theory: it explores the role of agreement morphology in the morphosyntactic realization of a verb's arguments.
Languages can be similar in many ways - they can resemble each other in categories, constructions and meanings, and in the actual forms used to express these.
This book represents the state of the art in the study of gradience in grammar - the degree to which utterances are acceptable or grammatical, and the relationship between acceptability and grammaticality.
Constructions of Intersubjectivity shows that the meaning of grammatical constructions often has more to do with the human cognitive capacity for taking other peoples' points of view than with describing the world.
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.
This book addresses a question fundamental to any discussion of grammatical theory and grammatical variation: to what extent can principles of grammar be explained through language use?
Depictive secondary predicates, such as 'raw' in 'George ate the fish raw', are central to current issues in syntactic and semantic theory - in particular predication theory, phrase structure theories, issues of control and grammatical relations, and verbal aspect.
This book is a general introduction to the structures of the different medieval Romance vernaculars most commonly known as Old or Medieval Spanish, as preserved in texts from Spain from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries.
This book examines the diachronic development of negation in Low German, from Old Saxon up to the point at which Middle Low German is replaced by High German as the written language.
This book examines the question of whether languages can differ in grammatical complexity and, if so, how relative complexity differences might be measured.
In this book, leading linguists explore the empirical scope of syntactic theory, by concentrating on a set of phenomena for which both syntactic and nonsyntactic analyses initially appear plausible.
This handbook offers an extensive crosslinguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English.
This handbook offers an extensive crosslinguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English.
This book explores the uses of adjectives in different constructions, and of the problems that arise in their analysis, both in terms of syntactic theory and philosophy of grammar.
This book provides argues for a compositional, truth-conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based.
This book is about one of the most intriguing features of human communication systems: the fact that words that go together in meaning can occur arbitrarily far away from each other.
This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis.
The first lessons we learn in school can stay with us all our lives, but this was nowhere more true than in the last decades of the fourteenth century when grammar-school students were not only learning to read and write, but understanding, for the first time, that their mother tongue, English, was grammatical.
The first lessons we learn in school can stay with us all our lives, but this was nowhere more true than in the last decades of the fourteenth century when grammar-school students were not only learning to read and write, but understanding, for the first time, that their mother tongue, English, was grammatical.
This volume features cutting-edge research from leading authorities on the nature and structure of the verbal domain and the complexity of the Verb Phrase (VP).
The third edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics is an authoritative and invaluable reference source covering every aspect of its wide-ranging field.
This volume is the first to present a detailed survey of the systems of verb-verb complexes in Asian languages from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective.
This book examines Latin word order, and in particular the relative ordering of i) lexical verbs and direct objects (OV vs VO) and ii) auxiliaries and non-finite verbs (VAux vs AuxV).
This volume offers a thorough, systematic, and crosslinguistic account of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based.
This volume offers a thorough, systematic, and crosslinguistic account of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based.
This volume brings together distinguished scholars from all over the world to present an authoritative, thorough, and yet accessible state-of-the-art survey of current issues in pragmatics.