This textbook introduces and explains the fundamental issues, major research questions, and current approaches in the study of grammaticalization - the development of new grammatical forms from lexical items, and of further grammatical functions from existing grammatical forms.
This book investigates the phenomenon of morphological length manipulation: changes in segmental length that cannot be explained by phonological means alone but crucially rely on morphological information.
This book presents a controlled evaluation of three widely practised syntactic theories on the basis of the extremely complex agreement system of Archi, an endangered Nakh-Daghestanian language.
In this book, the first full-scale work of its kind in English, Harm Pinkster applies contemporary linguistic theories and the findings of traditional grammar to the study of Latin syntax.
This book examines the tone and accent of Oklahoma Cherokee, in which six possible pitch patterns can occur on a syllable: low, high, low-high, high-low, lowfall, and superhigh.
This volume offers theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the issues pertaining to ergativity, a grammatical patterning whereby direct objects are in some way treated like intransitive subjects, to the exclusion of transitive subjects.
This volume offers theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the issues pertaining to ergativity, a grammatical patterning whereby direct objects are in some way treated like intransitive subjects, to the exclusion of transitive subjects.
This book examines the cross-linguistic expression of changes of location or state, taking as a starting point Talmy's typological generalization that classifies languages as either 'satellite-framed' or 'verb-framed'.
This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the field of Persian linguistics, discusses its development, and captures critical accounts of cutting edge research within its major subfields, as well as outlining current debates and suggesting productive lines of future research.
This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the field of Persian linguistics, discusses its development, and captures critical accounts of cutting edge research within its major subfields, as well as outlining current debates and suggesting productive lines of future research.
This book is the first comprehensive comparative-historical survey of patterns of alternation in the Romance verb which appear to be 'autonomously morphological': although they can be shown to be persistent through time, they have long ceased to be conditioned by any phonological or functional determinant.
This book examines historical changes in the grammar of the Indo-Aryan languages from the period of their earliest attestations in Vedic Sanskrit (around 1000 bc) to contemporary Hindi.
This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.
This is the first textbook on Functional Discourse Grammar, a recently developed theory of language structure which analyses utterances at four independent levels of grammatical representation: pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological.
In this book, Aidan Doyle traces the history of the Irish language from the time of the Norman invasion at the end of the 12th century to independence in 1922, combining political, cultural, and linguistic history.
This book provides thorough descriptive and theory-neutral coverage of the full range of phonological phenomena of Chichewa, a Malawian Bantu language.
This book aims to assess the nature of morphological complexity, and the properties that distinguish it from the complexity manifested in other components of language.
This book explores language variation and change from the perspective of generative syntax, based on a case study of relative clauses in contemporary European Portuguese and earlier stages of Portuguese.
This book traces the origins and development of the Arabic grammatical marker s/si, which is found in interrogatives, negators, and indefinite determiners over a broad dialect area that stretches from the southern Levant to North Africa and includes dialects of Yemen and Oman.
Early Greek Relative Clauses contributes to an old debate currently enjoying a revival: should we expect languages spoken a few thousand years ago, such as Proto-Indo-European, to be less well-equipped than modern languages when it comes to subordinate clauses?
This Handbook is the first volume to provide a comprehensive, in-depth, and balanced discussion of ellipsis phenomena, whereby the meaning of an utterance is richer than would be expected based solely on its linguistic form.
This Handbook is the first volume to provide a comprehensive, in-depth, and balanced discussion of ellipsis phenomena, whereby the meaning of an utterance is richer than would be expected based solely on its linguistic form.
Chapters in this volume describe morphology using four different frameworks that have an architectural property in common: they all use defaults as a way of discovering and presenting systematicity in the least systematic component of grammar.
This book offers reconstructions of various syntactic properties of Proto-Germanic, including verb position in main clauses, the syntax of the wh-system, and the (non-)occurrence of null pronominal subjects and objects.
This book adopts a generative framework to investigate the diachronic syntax of Hungarian, one of only a handful of non-Indo-European languages with a documented history spanning more than 800 years.
This book investigates the phenomenon of control structures, configurations in which the subject of the embedded clause is missing and is construed as coreferential with the subject of the embedding clause (e.
