Bringing together diachronic research from a variety of perspectives, notably typology, formal syntax and semantics, this volume focuses on the interplay of syntactic and semantic factors in language change - an issue so far largely neglected both in (mostly lexical) historical semantics as well as historical syntax, but recently brought into focus by grammaticalization theory as well as Minimalist diachronic syntax.
The volume describes the frequency, the forms and the functions of different cleft construction types across two language families: the Romance languages (with discussion of Italian, French and Spanish data) and the Germanic languages (with focus on English, German, Swiss German and Danish).
Argument-marking, morphological partitives have been the topic of language specific studies, while no cross-linguistic or typological analyses have been conducted.
This volume aims at analyzing the relationship between the dialogical accomplishment of spoken talk-in-interaction on the one hand and entrenched patterns of linguistic and socio-cultural knowledge (constructions, frames, and communicative genres) on the other.
This volume, which has textbook character, is intended to provide an in-depth introduction to different theoretical and methodological research frameworks concerned with the role of item-specific grammatical and lexical behaviour.
Medieval French, usually analyzed as a null subject language, differs considerably from modern Romance null subject languages such as Spanish in the availability of non-expressed subject pronouns; specifically, it shows characteristics reminiscent of non-null, rather than null subject languages, such as the expression of expletive subject pronouns.
The field of constructionist linguistics is rapidly expanding, as research on a broad variety of language phenomena is increasingly informed by constructionist ideas about grammar.
The book systematically discusses the formal and functional properties as well as the rules of the manifold productive reduplication types of Bikol, an Austronesian language of the Philippines.
This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects.
This book offers an introduction to the derivation of meaning that is accessible and worked out to facilite an understanding of key issues in compositional semantics.
