Böcker i Cambridge Studies in Linguistics-serien

A brilliant analysis of colloquial English, both its syntax and its variations, using novel data from live, unscripted radio and TV broadcasts and the internet.

Henry Smith develops a theory of syntactic case and examines its synchronic and diachronic consequences. Within a unification-based framework, the book draws out pervasive patterns in the relationship between morphosyntax 'linking' and grammatical function, with an examination of a wide array of synchronic and diachronic data.

A great deal of the grammatical machinery in a language is devoted to the speaker's ability to signal the temporal relations between different events and different people making it clear who is being talked about. Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar explores how different grammatical systems accomplish this.

Of interest to German, Dutch, Frisian, English, and Scandinavian linguists, and also those in general historical linguistics, phonology, and Indo-European, this book examines the relationship between three major quantity changes in the history of the Germanic language group: consonant lengthening, vowel lengthening, and consonant weakening, highlighting the role of syllable structure.

The first book to consider all components of verbal transitivity and their development in child language acquisition. Ideal for advanced readers in language acquisition and syntactic theory, it demonstrates for non-specialist readers the intricacies of verbal transitivity, and how children rely on structural, lexical and pragmatic knowledge to unravel the system.

This volume breaks new ground in syntax by arguing for a 'top-down' approach to syntactic structures, and the locality restrictions on filler-gap dependencies. Written by a leading scholar in theoretical linguistics, it represents the first book-length study on the subject and paves the way for important future research.

Syntactic theory has been dominated in the last decades by theories that disregard semantics in their approach to syntax. This book presents an alternative approach to syntax, showing that syntax can be analyzed from a semantic perspective.

Inflectional morphology plays a paradoxical role in language. On the one hand it tells us useful things, for example that a noun is plural or a verb is in the past tense. On the other hand many languages get along perfectly well without it, so the baroquely ornamented forms we sometimes find come across as a gratuitous over-elaboration. This is especially apparent where the morphological structures operate at cross purposes to the general systems of meaning and function that govern a language, yielding inflection classes and arbitrarily configured paradigms. This is what we call morphological complexity. Manipulating the forms of words requires learning a whole new system of structures and relationships. This book confronts the typological challenge of characterising the wildly diverse sorts of morphological complexity we find in the languages of the world, offering both a unified descriptive framework and quantitative measures that can be applied to such heterogeneous systems.

Micheal O Siadhail considers modern Irish dialects against the background of their common grammar, providing a comprehensive overview for Celticists and general linguists with an interest in dialectical comparison. His Modern Irish contains a wealth of empirical data which is analysed in a fresh and accessible manner, keeping technical terminology to a minimum. It includes background information on the Irish language and gives explanations of basic concepts in order to compare the phonology, morphology and syntax of the dialects. Students of linguistics amd the Irish language will welcome this clear and sensible cross-dialectal survey by Micheal O Siadhail, who is well-known as an Irish scholar and as a poet.

In this study Michael Covington considers the origins and development of the theories of sentence structure formulated by the Modistae, a group of grammarians and logicians who flourished in Paris between about 1270 and 1310. Some of the concepts of the medieval theoretical framework, notably government and dependency, have survived to the present day, and Dr Covington introduces insights from modern grammatical theories where appropriate. Nevertheless his principal aim is not to compare medieval and modern theories, or to provide a comprehensive historical study. Rather, recognising that 'it is the difference as much as the similarity that makes the Modistae interesting', Dr Covington offers an original critical exegesis of these influential theories. The book will be accessible both to linguists who may know little about medieval philosophy and to medievalists who may know little about linguistics.

Bringing together fifty years' worth of cross-linguistic research, this pioneering monograph explores the complex interaction between tense, mood and aspect. It looks at the long way of combining elementary semantic units at the bottom of phrase structure up to and including the top of a sentence. Rejecting ternary tense as blocking compositionality, it introduces three levels obtained by binary tense oppositions. It also counters an outdated view on motion by assuming that change is not expressed as having an inherent goal but rather as dynamic interaction between different number systems that allows us to package information into countable and continuous units. It formally identifies the central role of a verb in a variety of argument structures and integrates adverbial modifiers into the compositional structure at different tense levels of phrase structure. This unique contribution to the field will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers in the syntax-semantics interface.

"The study of morphology is central to linguistics, and morphotactics - the general principles by which the parts of a word form are arranged - is essential to the study of morphology. Drawing on evidence from a range of languages, this is a comprehensive and up-to-date account of the principles of morphotactic analysis. Stump proposes that the arrangement of word forms' grammatically significant parts is an expression of the ways in which a language's morphological rules combine with one another to form more specific rules. This rule-combining approach to morphotactics has important implications for the synchronic analysis of both inflectional and derivational morphology, and it provides a solid conceptual platform for understanding both the processing of morphologically complex words and the paths of morphological change. Laying the groundwork for future research on morphotactic analysis, this is essential reading for researchers and graduate students in linguistics, and anyone interested in understanding language structure"--

"Supported by data from linguistic fieldwork conducted in the Faroe Islands and Iceland, this book presents a pioneering approach to syntactic analysis, 'Optimal Linking Grammar' (OLG), which brings together two existing models, Linking Theory and Optimality Theory (OT). OT, which assumes spoken language to be based on the highest-ranking outcome from a number of competing underlying constraints, has been central mainly to phonology; however its application to syntax has also gained ground in recent years. OLG not only provides a robust account of case-marking phenomena in Faroese and Icelandic; it also explains a wide range of sentence types, including passives, ditransitives, object shift, and word order variation. The book demonstrates how OLG can resolve numerous issues in competing theories of formal syntax, and how it might be successfully applied to other languages in future research. It is essential reading for researchers and students in syntax, morphology, sociolinguistics, and European languages"--

The imperative clause is one of three major sentence types that have been found to be universal across the languages of the world. Compared to declaratives and interrogatives, the imperative type has received diverse analyses in the literature. This cutting-edge study puts forward a new linguistic theory of imperatives, arguing that categories of the speech act, specifically Speaker and Addressee, are conceptually necessary for an adequate syntactic account. The book offers compelling empirical and descriptive evidence by surveying new typological data in critical assessment of competing hypotheses towards an indexical syntax of human language. An engaging read for students and researchers interested in linguistics, philosophy and the syntax of language.

This book reduces, to a bare minimum, the primitive notions required to characterize the syntax of natural language systems, providing a simple yet explanatory formal basis for investigation at all levels of the structure and function of language. It will be ideal for graduates and academic researchers concerned with human language and syntax.

Examines how accents differ in 'voice quality' across languages and presents a new framework for its analysis with a revised model of lower-vocal-tract articulation, focusing on the larynx in speech. It will appeal to students and researchers in linguistics, phonetics, child language, speech science, clinical linguistics, and forensic phonetics.

This book characterises the diverse morphological complexity we find in the languages of the world.