Bücher der Reihe Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]

New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax: Constituent Syntax (Quantification, Numerals, Possession, Anaphora) is the third of four volumes dealing with the long-term evolution of Latin syntax, roughly from the 4th century BCE up to the 6th century CE.

Although linguists working on the South Asia region have made significant contributions to our understanding of language, society, and language in society on a global scale, there is as yet no recognized international forum for the exchange of ideas amongst linguists working in this region. This title is designed to be just that forum.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

The status of grammaticalization has been the subject of many controversial discussions. The contributions to What makes Grammaticalization? approach the prevalent phenomenon from the angle of language structure and focus on the interrelation between the levels of phonology, pragmatics (inference), discourse and the lexicon and some of them try to integrate the areal perspective. A wealth of data from Slavonic languages as well as from languages of other genetic and areal affiliation is discussed. The book is of interest to linguists specializing in grammaticalization, lexicalization and morphological typology, to language typologists as well as to functional, historical and cognitive linguists.

Thebook provides a descriptive account of the semantics of three grammatical areas in informal Welsh: inflections of finite verbs, perfect aspect, and progressive aspect. The analyses distinguish context-independent primary meanings from other meanings which are due to implications and contextual effects. The inflections convey factuality, tense, (morphological) aspect, and habituality, but the inflections and their meanings are differently distributed over different sorts of verbs. The analysis of factuality outlines different sorts of counterfactual situations, and discusses whether counterfactual meaning can best be accounted for in terms of true statements in imagined possible worlds or in terms of false statements in the actual world. The analysis of tense argues that it conveys evaluation time and not situation time, which can be different to evaluation time, and that tense is not a collection of simple labels like 'past' or 'present' but is a combination of two times, a deictic reference time and a relative evaluation time, which organize the tenses as a system. Morphological aspect is discussed in terms of perfective and imperfective meanings. Habituality is a property of situations which can be described by all inflections but the study shows that bod 'be' alone has specialized forms to convey habituality. The discussion of the perfect aspect considers the appropriateness of anterior time, retrospective view, and current relevance to account for its meaning. Theauthor argues that the progressive aspect conveys a durative view and the non-progressive a non-durative view, and shows that the progressive can describe situations which are described by the non-progressive in other languages. The study also considers whether other expressions can be aspect markers. The book shows that the primary meanings of the three grammatical areas are subject to various constraints.

The study of the interaction between syntax and information structure has attracted a great deal of attention since the publication of foundational works on this subject such as Enric Vallduví's (1992) The Informational Component and Knud Lambrecht's (1994) Information Structure and Sentence Form. The book inserts itself in this contemporary interest by providing a collection of articles on different aspects of the syntax-pragmatics interface in the indigenous languages of The Americas. The first chapter provides a brief introduction of the some of the basic descriptive issues addressed in them, and of some of the theoretical tools that have been developed to analyze them. The readerfinds articles that focus mostly on empirical issues, while others are mostly oriented to theoretical issues. Diverse theoretical approaches are addressed, including Minimalism, Optimality-theoretic syntax, and Meaning-Text Theory. The volume includes articles on the following topics: the grammatical means to encode pragmatic notions in Tariana (A. Aikhenvald); the relation between clause structure and information structure in Lushootseed (D. Beck); the split distribution of null subjects in Shipibo (J. Camacho and J. Elías-Ulloa); the syntactic structure of left-peripheral discourse-related functions in Kuikuro (B. Franchetto and M. Santos), an agglutinative and head final language; word order and focus patterns in Yaqui (L. Guerrero and V. Belloro); SVO and topicalization in Yucatec Maya (R. Gutiérrez-Bravo and J. Monforte); the structure of the left-periphery in Karaja (Maia) and the interaction between the wh-words and polarity sensitivity in Southern Quechua (L. Sánchez).

In Modularity in Language, Etsuyo Yuasa investigates exceptions and idiosyncrasies in various complex clauses in Japanese and English within the framework of multi-modular approaches to grammar. She proposes original analyses of various complex clauses in Japanese and English, which deviate from the norms of other complex clauses in the same language or in other languages, and shows how these cases of syntax-semantics mismatch justify the independence (or 'autonomy') of different levels of grammatical structures. Yuasa's significant contribution is the incorporation of the notion of 'construction' from Construction Grammar into multi-modular approaches to grammar. She claims that the idiosyncratic cases examined in this study are instances of constructional and categorial mismatches where a syntactic representation of a prototypical construction is paired with a semantic representation of another prototypical construction. Modularity in Language is aimed at those interested in grammatical theories in general, the parallel architecture of grammar (including Lexical-Functional Grammar, Autolexical Grammar, Representational Modularity), Constructional Grammar, syntax/semantics interface, and Japanese linguistics.

This is the first book in Chinese linguistics which discusses the grammar of a dialect group, in this case the Xiang dialect spoken in Hunan, from both a synchronic and diachronic prespective. The author uses new data and new frameworks to present her analysis. The synchronic part covers contemporary grammar across localities within the Xiang-speaking area by using the methods and theories of comparative and typological linguistics. The diachronic analysis reconstructs earlier grammatical systems based mainly on modern data but also on historical written records, and analyses the development of the syntactic systems of the Xiang dialects, adopting the methods and theories of historical linguistics and grammaticalization. The discussions in this book raise new issues on dialect research which have not yet been fully acknowledged by Chinese dialectologists. The author shows, for example, how the earlier layers of grammar may be reconstructed on the basis of modern data, and how the path of grammaticalization of functional words may be traced. The discussions reveal that the Xiang dialect group forms a transitional zone between northern and southern dialects. The syntactic constructions in these two areas often co-exist or are mingled in Xiang. Thus, the grammatical constructions in different localities of the Xiang dialect group often provide a bridge connecting the constructions of northern and southern Chinese, or Modern Chinese and Chinese of earlier periods. This book is of interest to scholars and students who are working on grammar, dialectology, historical linguistics, comparative linguistics, typological linguistics, and grammaticalization, as well as those researchers focusing on language policy, language acquisition, and education.

Provides a useful overview of the thinking on semantic roles and argument linking. This book examines the interaction between the role hierarchy and the conceptual content of (generalised) semantic roles and investigates their cross-linguistic applicability and psychological reality.

This is the first book to focus on the problem of writing grammars of little-known languages, a task of major urgency as linguists face the challenge of documenting the many endangered languages around the world.

Language documentation is a rapidly emerging new field in linguistics which is concerned with the methods, tools and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language.

Presents important results of the Collaborative Research Center "Situated Artificial Communicators," which was funded by grants from the German Research Foundation for more than twelve years. This book explores the role of key notions such as context, integration (of multimodal information), reference, coherence, and robustness.

Brings together areas of research that so far do not interact to any significant extent: traditional South Asian descriptive linguistics and sociolinguistics, documentary linguistics, issues of intellectual and cultural property and fieldwork ethics, and language technology.

Presents a cognitive view of language by examining linguistic structure and its use in communication from the point of view of memory, thus providing a novel way of analysing language. This book discusses core linguistic areas in the contributions embracing syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis.

How are ontological structures reflected in intra- and cross-linguistic regularities? This volume unites contributions from Linguistics, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Artificial Intelligence into the outline of an approach that promises to develop into a vital branch of cognitive science.

Language users are creatures of habit with a tendency to re-use morphosyntactic material that they have produced or heard before. In other words, linguistic patterns and tokens, once used, persist in discourse. The present book is the first large-scale corpus analysis to explore the determinants of this persistence, drawing on regression analyses of a variety of functional, discourse-functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and external factors. The case studies investigated include the alternation between synthetic and analytic comparatives, between the s-genitive and the of-genitive, between gerundial and infinitival complementation, particle placement, and future marker choice in a number of corpora sampling different spoken registers and geographical varieties of English. Providing a probabilistic framework for examining the ways in which persistence - among several other internal and external factors - influences speakers' linguistic choices, the book departs from most writings in the field in that it seeks to bridge several research traditions. While it is concerned, in a classically variationist spirit, with internal and external determinants of grammatical variation in English, it also draws heavily on ideas and evidence developed by psycholinguists and discourse analysts. In seeking to construct a comprehensive model of how speakers make linguistic choices, the study ultimately contributes to a theory of how spoken language works. The book is of interest to graduate students and researchers in variationist sociolinguistics, probabilistic linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.

Looks at Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, and explores the changing habitat of languages since pre-colonial times. This book contains contributions that treat the languages from a structural and functional linguistic perspective, move on to the issue of cultural maintenance and then turn to language policy.

Relying on a functional-typological methodology, this book approaches historical Latin syntax from a non-traditional perspective, investigating diachronic phenomena primarily from their discourse function as revealed in Latin texts.

This book proposes a new synthesis of the functions of proper names, from a semantic, pragmatic and syntactic perspective. Proper names are approached constructionally, distinguishing prototypical uses from more marked ones such as those in which names are used as common nouns. Since what is traditionally regarded as 'the' class of names turns out to be only one possible function of name-forms (though a prototypical one), the notion of 'proprial lemma' is introduced as the concept behind both proprial and appellative uses of such categories as place names and personal names. New formal arguments are adduced to distinguish proper name function from common noun or pronoun function. The special status of proper names is captured in a unified pragmatic-semantic-syntactic theory: a proper name denotes a unique entity at the level of langue to make it psychosocially salient within a given basic level category. The meaning of the name, if any, does not determine its denotation. An important formal reflection of this characterization of names is their ability to appear in such close appositional constructions as the poet Burns or Fido the dog. The neurolinguistic finding that proper names constitute a separate category is introduced and interpreted within a general linguistic frame of reference. The different kinds of meanings associated with names (categorical, associative, emotive, and grammatical) are shown to be presuppositional in nature. In addition, the book proposes an entirely new classification of proper names as forming a continuum ranging from prototypical (personal and place names) to nonprototypical categories (brand and language names) to citations and autonyms, and a new diachronic classification of family names and nicknames. This book fills an important gap in the current literature, because the most recent linguistic book in English on name theory dates back to 1973. It is explicitly interdisciplinary, taking into account linguistic, philosophical, neurolinguistic, sociolinguistic and dialect geographical aspects of proper names.

Based on Chinese historical data collected over the past three thousand years, the articles in the volume investigate the development of new grammatical categories and the process of lexicalization and grammaticalization of unique grammatical words.

This edition brings together some lesser known grammaticalization paths travelled by `come' and `go' in familiar and less familiar languages. This study will increase our insight in grammaticalization processes in general as they force us to rethink certain aspects of grammaticalization.

Over the past decades functionalism has gained more ground, and we now have a substantial body of literature from various perspectives making a positive impact on the field of linguistics.

Vocatives have rarely been discussed in their various facets. With 12 contributions covering the diversity of vocative marking, structures, and functions, as well as the relevance of vocatives for theoretical and methodological reasoning, this volume provides a detailed picture of the vocative as a structure between 'system' and 'performance'.

This volume focuses on the interplay of syntactic and semantic factors in language change. The contributions draw on data from numerous Indo-European languages and address the question of how syntactic and semantic change are linked and whether both are governed by similar constraints, principles and systematic mechanisms.

A book for the studies of temporality and language, in particular regarding syntax and semantics. It investigates tenses, aspect and modality both at the theoretical and at the descriptive levels, involving many different Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages.

In its evolution from a synthetic to an analytic language, Bulgarian acquired a grammaticalized category of definiteness. The book presents the first attempt to explore in detail how this happened by comparing the earliest Modern Bulgarian texts with contemporary dialect and standard Bulgarian data. The basic units of analysis are the various types of nominal structures headed by nouns or pronouns. The analysis requires the strict terminological disentanglement of form from content and the adoption of a default inheritance model of definiteness that allow the exhaustive classification and tagging of nominal structures encountered in the texts. Tagging makes it possible to apply quantitative analysis to nominal structure and to assess the types available in the early texts from a current native-speaker perspective. Based on an S-curve model of language change, the study establishes that overt markers of definiteness were first made available to identifiability-based definites, then to inclusiveness-based definites, quantitative generics and unique referents. The overt markers of indefiniteness followed suit, separating indefinites from non-specifics and typifying generics. This progression of definiteness was directed by variables such as person, animacy, gender, number and noun-class, and started in contexts in which definiteness closely interacted with possessivity. Such an analysis leads to the realization that the two-dimensional S-curve model does not account for all language change and that there is a need for a three-dimensional model. It also demonstrates that, contrary to previous assumptions, there is continuity between the early Slavic marker of definiteness (long-form adjectives) and the Modern Bulgarian article. This discovery, in conjunction with geolinguistic arguments, sheds new light on the role that relations inside the Balkan Sprachbund played in the grammaticalization of Bulgarian definiteness.

A collection of articles which focus on the issue of complementation within different theoretical frameworks. It addresses questions ranging from discussions about the appropriate treatment of valency in syntactic theory to particular descriptive issues, contrastive studies and cognitive aspects such as the role of valency in language acquisition.

Brings together work by scholars engaging in comparative sign linguistics research. This title includes articles that discuss data from many different signed and spoken languages. It focuses on empirical and descriptive aspects of sign language variation and covers a range of topics from different areas of grammar.

Although linguists working on South Asian region have made significant contributions to our understanding of language, society, and language in society on a global scale, there is no recognized international forum for the exchange of ideas amongst linguists working on South Asia. This title is designed to be just that forum.

The book presents up-to-date theoretical and methodological findings by gifted typologists and field linguists. The authors address selected theoretical questions of general linguistic relevance drawing from a wealth of data hitherto unfamiliar to the general linguistic audience.