Bücher der Reihe Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics

This book analyses 153 languages from a large variety of families to establish a previously unexplored relationship between phonetically conditioned sound changes such as lenitions and functional considerations.

Analyzing the semantic and pragmatic constraints on the Japanese particle mo, roughly equivalent to the English too, this book shows how the complex mechanism of the constraints accounts for its discourse function.

This book examines turn-taking in English and Japanese conversations and political news interviews to investigate the relationship between language and interaction.

This book investigates the nature of the relationship between phonology and syntax and proposes a theory of Minimal Indirect Reference which solves many of the problems found in the field.

Telicity and durativity are notions which have become increasingly influential in both the semantic and the syntactic. This book studies the linguistic representation of events by examining the relevance of two salient event characteristics - telicity and durativity - to the grammatical system of natural language.

A specific indefinite presupposes that someone has in mind an individual who has the property denoted by its descriptive content. Having an individual inmind means that the agent knows who the referent is. This affects the information state of the agent, but not the others. The asymmetric information, shared by all conversational participants, requires a common ground to have multiple information states, each for each participant. The information state of the agent who has an individual in mind must be structured into sub-information-states so that each sub-information-state associates the specific indefinite with a different unique individual. It then conveys the information that the agent has some individual in mind, but that it is not known yet who it is. This analysis thus requires a new dynamic semantics which is partially representational and partially denotational. Specific indefinites tend to have widest scope, which is explained by claiming that specific indefinites trigger presuppositions. Presuppositions are assumed to have various scopes with respect to operators in a sentence, and the strongest reading is preferred on rational and economic basis. Stronger readings roughly correspond to wider scopes. This book will be of interest to scholars who work on indefinite NPs, presuppositions, anaphora in belief contexts, and dynamic semantics in general.

This work presents the first experimental study of articulatory dynamics of Russian and of secondary articulents in general. Special focus is on the nature of positional markedness scales (Optimality Theory), a key concept in phonological theory.

A significant contribution to the current debate on the role of phonetic optimalisation, this book presents a formal and unified characterization of lenition patterns.

Baauw discusses to what extent errors young children make with their interpretation of definite articles and pronouns are due to their immature pragmatic skills and to what extent incomplete syntactic development plays a role.

The main topic of this work is the interaction between syntactic structure and meanin within the noun phrase, with data drwn primarily from English and Italian.

Based on a wide variety of languages, this study examines the ways in which modal notions, such as permission and obligation, interact with negation. In particular, the study focuses on how ambiguities in scope are resolved. It is shown that languages overwhelmingly make use of two different strategies. The first strategy (the Modal Suppletion Strategy) is to use different modal verbs for the different scope interpretations. This strategy is found in languages such as English, Finnish, and Tamil. The second strategy (the Negation Placement Strategy), which is found in French, Russian, and Modern Greek (among others) is to use two different places for the negation to surface. It turns out that these two strategies have two different foundations: the first strategy is a semantic one, while the second strategy is syntactic in nature. That there is a difference can be shown by appealing to syntactic tests. The Modal Suppletion Strategy is not sensitive to these tests, while the Negation Placement Strategy is. It can also be shown that the two different strategies are correlated with word order: the Negation Placement Strategy is found exclusively in languages with a basic SVO order and with a negative morpheme that precedes the verb. This is checked against a database of 75 languages. Finally, these results are compared to other scope resolutions in languages.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This work is an investigation of the relationship between prosodic structure, intonational structure and focus realization in European Portuguese. It is discussed from a cross-linguistic perspective, with special reference to languages like English, Dutch, German, and Italian.

Interest in statistical natural language generation is rapidly increasing. This work sheds important light from theoretical linguistics on the type of information crucial to statistical NLG algorithms.

Investigates various phenomena affecting both stressed and unstressed vowels in Romance languages and analyses vowel reduction, which involves a change of vowel quality in stressless syllables that favours vowel qualities that are maximally distinguishable from one another.

This dissertation introduces the notion 'existential faithfulness', which plays a crucial role in the analysis of dissimilation, feature movement and the emergence of the unmarked in reduplication.

With a database of over 180 languages and dialects, this book proposes a typology of the phonological patterning of ejectives, drawing together widely-scattered information.

This work explores effect of speech perception strategies upon morphological structure. Jennifer Hay investigates the role of two factors known to be relevant to speech perceptions: phonotactics and lexical frequency.

Central questions addressed are the analysis of subjects in Spanish and English (DP vs. NP and null vs. preverbal vs. postverbal) and the nature of constructions such as topicalization, left-dislocation, and focus preposing.

Offering a new perspective on natural language predicates by analyzing data from the Plains Cree language, this text demonstrates that what is known about aspectual properties of well-studied languages is also true of the less-studied Cree language.

Investigating the operation ellipsis and wa-marking in a corpus of colloquial Japanese speech, this title shows that Japanese conversation obeys certain principles of argument ellipsis that appear to be language universal: the tendency to omit transitive and human subjects and the tendency to express no more than one argument per clause.

This study examines the meaning of proto-typical conditional-sentence markers like English if and Spanish si from a primarily pragmatic perspective.

Investigating variation and change in Old English word order, this text includes special emphasis on the position of the verb.

This text examines the typology of "wh-" expressions and indefinite NPs within the minimalist framework.

Builds a semantics for several kinds of future-referring expressions, including will sentences, be going to sentences, and futurates. This title addresses a number of issues of interest to formal semanticists, from modal and aspectual semantics, to the mapping of functional elements in the clause, to the logical form of conditionals.

Drawing insights from conceptual semantics, cognitive semantics, generative lexicon, construction grammar and formal syntax, this book is the first attempt at a comparative account of lexical semantic issues in Mandarin Chinese.

An exploration of the meaning and use of two kinds of declarative sentences and their intonational differences: It's raining? and It's raining. To account for the differences, the text gives a compositional account of rising and falling declaratives under which declarative form expresses commitment to the prepositional content of the declarative.

Jennifer Smith shows that phonological processes specific to strong positions are distinct from those involved in classic positional neutralization effects.