Bücher der Reihe Research Surveys in Linguistics

Lexicalization, a process of language change, has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Broadly defined as the adoption of concepts into the lexicon, it has been viewed by syntacticians as the reverse process of grammaticalization, by morphologists as a routine process of word-formation, and by semanticists as the development of concrete meanings. In this up-to-date survey, Laurel Brinton and Elizabeth Traugott examine the various conceptualizations of lexicalization that have been presented in the literature. In light of contemporary work on grammaticalization, they then propose a new, unified model of lexicalization and grammaticalization. Their approach is illustrated with a variety of case studies from the history of English, including present participles, multi-word verbs, adverbs, and discourse markers, as well as some examples from other Indo-European languages. The first review of the various approaches to lexicalization, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of historical linguistics and language change.

Tone and Intonation are two types of pitch variation, which are used to give shape to utterances. In this book, Carlos Gussenhoven provides a survey of research into tone and intonation, discussing why speakers vary their pitch, what pitch variations mean, and how they are integrated into our grammars.

The relationship between verbs and their arguments is a widely debated topic in linguistics. This comprehensive 2005 survey explores this important research area, discussing theories of how a verb's semantics can determine the morphosyntactic realization of its arguments. It will be invaluable to those working in syntax, semantics, and related fields.

This book describes Optimality Theory from the top down, explaining and exploring the central premises of OT and the results of their praxis. The emphasis throughout is on understanding what is special about OT and on equipping readers to apply it in their own areas of interest.

Although there is no shortage of definitions for pragmatics the received wisdom is that 'pragmatics' simply cannot be coherently defined. In this groundbreaking book Mira Ariel challenges the prominent definitions of pragmatics, as well as the widely held assumption that specific topics naturally and uniformly belong on the pragmatics turf.

Quantification forms a significant aspect of cross-linguistic research into both sentence structure and meaning. This book surveys research in quantification starting with the foundational work in the 1970s. It explains how the discovery of diverse scope behaviour in the 1990s transformed the view of quantification.