Structures and Beyond


Book Description

This is the third volume in the subset of volumes in the comparative syntax series devoted to the cartography of syntactic structures. Adriana Belletti has collected articles by top linguists that were originally presented at a workshop at the University of Siena in conjunction with a visit by Noam Chomsky. The articles go beyond mapping syntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties, also touching on broader questions, particularly related to the Minimalist Program and other recent theoretical developments. Contributors include Adriana Belletti, Alfonso Caramazza, Gennaro Chierchia, Guglielmo Cinque, Noam Chomsky, Richard Kayne, Jacques Mehler, Marina Nespor, Luigi Rizzi, Kevin Shapiro, and Michael Starke.




Foundations of French Syntax


Book Description

Designed for students, this detailed analysis of the principal areas of French grammar combines the insights of modern linguistic theory with those of more traditional grammarians. Theory is placed firmly in the service of description and analysis, and students are guided to an understanding of the French language which will complement the information offered by traditional reference grammars. The book includes discussion of verbs and verb phrases, voice, tense and mood, the noun phrase and pronouns, prepositions and variations in sentence-structure. The author pays special attention to those areas of French grammar which pose difficulties for an English-speaking reader. Each chapter is followed by a set of problems and exercises, and by a useful guide to further reading. Foundations of French Syntax assumes no prior knowledge of linguistics, and will appeal to students and teachers of linguistics, French and other Romance languages.




Linguistics in America 1769 - 1924


Book Description

Throughout this analytical book the idea is developed that theories of language do not transcend the language in which they are written, and ways are uncovered that are peculiar to the American-language linguistic tradition.




Linguistics and Evolution


Book Description

Linguistics and Evolution offers readers the first rethinking of an introductory approach to linguistics since Leonard Bloomfield's 1933 Language.




Cognitive Linguistics and Lexical Change


Book Description

This monograph offers the first in-depth lexical and semantic analysis of motion verbs in their development from Latin to nine Romance languages — Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, and Raeto-Romance — demonstrating that the patterns of innovation and continuity attested in the data can be accounted for in cognitive linguistic terms. At the same time, the study illustrates how the insights gained from Latin and Romance historical data have profound implications for the cognitive approaches to language — in particular, for Leonard Talmy’s motion-framing typology and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory. The book should appeal to scholars interested in historical Romance linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and lexical change.




Egyptian-Coptic Linguistics in Typological Perspective


Book Description

This volume presents the Egyptian-Coptic language in cross-linguistic (‘typological’) perspective. It is aimed at linguists of all stripes, especially typologists, historical linguists, and specialists in Egyptian-Coptic, Afroasiatic languages, or African languages. Uniquely, the contributions are written by both typologists and experts of Egyptian-Coptic and typologists. The former provide case studies dealing with particular aspects of the various phases of the Egyptian-Coptic language (e.g., COLLIER on conditional constructions), while the latter situate Egyptian-Coptic data in cross-linguistic perspective (e.g., those by GUELDEMANN and GENSLER). The volume also includes an introductory section that includes an overview of the Egyptian-Coptic language (HASPELMATH), a sketch of its sociohistorical setting (GROSSMAN & RICHTER), its relationship with language typology (RICHTER), and the way in which Egyptian-Coptic data should be presented to nonspecialists, focusing on transliteration and glossing (GROSSMAN & HASPELMATH). This is the first book to bring together language typology and the Egyptian-Coptic language in an explicit fashion.




Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics


Book Description

The papers in the first section of this volume, 'Variation in Arabic', deal with a wide range of topics: the function of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) vs. dialect variation in political speeches, patterns of variation in concord in Cairene dialect, the extent to which Cairenes 'know' MSA, and the scope of emphaticization in different dialects. In the section on 'Phonological Perspectives' there are papers dealing with emphasis spread and with gemination/degemination/antigemination in Iraqi Arabic. The papers in the section on syntax, all focused on MSA and within a GB framework, discuss aspects of Arabic that are problematic for current hypotheses in linguistics, and also more traditional issues such as word order and verbal vs. nominal sentences. The last two papers represent a historical, comparative Semitic perspective: on the function of energic suffixes, and on the reconstruction of the early Arabic sounds represented by siin and šiin.




Spanish Word Formation and Lexical Creation


Book Description

This volume contributes a wider approach to word formation processes and sheds light on some unsolved issues. While the formal relationships established between the different constituents of a complex word have been analyzed in great depth, the semantic links have received little dedication. In order to complete the analysis, it is necessary to pay attention to the semantic properties associated to verbalization. The main purpose of the book is to integrate both the semantic proposals and the formal perspectives concerning word formation. This theoretical aim becomes the framework to study several mechanisms of lexical creation and neologisms. Furthermore, word formation is presented as a new source for Applied Linguistics. Although the volume uses Spanish as a starting point, it means to delimit formation patterns which may also be productive in other languages. This book is sure to become an important reference in the controversial field of word formation.




Formalising Natural Languages with Nooj 2014


Book Description

This volume is composed of 22 peer-reviewed contributions selected from among the 52 presentations submitted for the 2014 International NooJ Conference held at the University of Sassari, Italy. NooJ is a linguistic development environment that allows linguists to formalize a wide range of linguistic phenomena, and then test, adapt, share and accumulate each elementary description so as to build linguistic “modules”, that is, structured libraries of linguistic resources. NooJ is also used as a corpus processor that can launch sophisticated queries over large corpora of texts, in order to produce various results, including concordances, statistical analyses, information extraction, and automatic translation. NooJ is used in many research centers all over the world, and linguistic modules are available for more than 20 languages. NooJ is also used by a growing number of software companies to develop various Natural Language Processing applications. Johanna Monti is Associate Professor at the University of Sassari, Italy, where she teaches Translation Studies, Computational Linguistics, and Machine-Translation and Computer-Aided Translation. She has acted as a member of the scientific committees of various renowned international conferences on Natural Language Processing, and as external evaluator for the Italian Ministry for Education, Universities and Research (MIUR) and the Horizon 2020 programme.




The Pragmatics of Uncertainty


Book Description