Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory – serie

Click Consonants is an indispensable volume for those who want to understand the linguistics of clicks. Contributions include cutting edge research on the phonetic and phonological characteristics of clicks, as well as on sound changes involving clicks, and clicks in perception, in L2 acquisition, and in apraxia of speech.Contributors are Wm. G. Bennett, Catherine T. Best, Hilde Gunnink, Dan Dediu, E.D. Elderkin, Anne-Maria Fehn, Sean Fulop, Florian Lionnet, Timothy K. Mathes, Kirk Miller, Scott Moisik, Michael Proctor, Bonny Sands, Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL) members (Adam Lammert, Asterios Toutios, Shrikanth Narayanan, Yinghua Zhu), Mollie Steyn, Anita van der Merwe, Richard Wright.

The contributions in Moribund Germanic Heritage Languages in North America advance the ever-expanding research program in formal and theoretical treatments of heritage language grammars through in-depth empirical investigations. The core focus on moribund varieties of heritage Germanic languages extends beyond the exploration of the individual heritage language grammars and contributes to larger discussions in the field of Germanic linguistics.

In this book, Peter Juul Nielsen examines the foundations of morphological theory from a structural-functional perspective on language as a sign system. He offers a framework for the analysis of morpheme relations based on a thorough discussion of syntagmatic and paradigmatic structure, indexical relations, zero as meaningful absence and morphological relations across grammatical categories. It is argued that when paradigmatically related morphological structures have different syntactic functions, the semantics of the paradigmatic opposition consists in the specification of functional potential. The framework is applied in three detailed studies of Danish nonfinite verbs presenting new accounts of their morphological structure, semantic coding and paradigmatic organisation.

This volume contains a selection of recent theoretical studies, deriving from presentations at the 16th International Morphology Meeting (Budapest, 2014), on the organization of morphological paradigms, paradigm complexity, and the inflectional marking of morphosyntactic relations, as well as on the application of information theory to the analysis of morphological systems aiming to achieve a clearer understanding of the close relation between notions of ‘morphological information’ based on ‘uncertainty’ and ‘uncertainty reduction’ and the error-driven structure of discriminative learning models.

This book presents a detailed formal machinery for the conversion of the Semantic Analyses (SAs) of sentences into surface structures of English, French, German, Dutch, and to some extent Turkish. The SAs are propositional structures consisting of a predicate and one, two or three argument terms, some of which can themselves be propositional structures. The surface structures are specified up to, but not including, the morphology. The book is thus an implementation of the programme formulated first by Albert Sechehaye (1870-1946) and then, independently, by James McCawley (1938-1999) in the school of Generative Semantics. It is the first, and so far the only formally precise and empirically motivated machinery in existence converting meaning representations into sentences of natural languages.

This volume provides an unprecedented collection of data from Asia Minor Greek, namely from Cappadocian, Pharasiot, Silliot, Smyrniot, Aivaliot, Bithynian, Pontic, Propontis Tsakonian and the dialect of Adrianoupolis. It offers fresh and original reflections on the study of morphology, dialectology and language contact by examining issues regarding inflection, derivation and compounding, dealt with by Metin Bağrıaçık, Marianna Gkiouleka, Aslı Göksel, Mark Janse, Brian D. Joseph, Petros Karatsareas, Nikos Koutsoukos, Io Manolessou, Theodore Markopoulos, Dimitra Melissaropoulou, Nikos Pantelidis and Angela Ralli. An in-depth investigation of phenomena aims to increase our understanding of language change. They result either from a natural evolution of Asia Minor Greek, or from the interaction between the fusional Greek and the agglutinative Turkish or the semi-analytical Romance.

In Towards a Theory of Denominals, Adina Camelia Bleotu takes a comparative look at denominal verbs in English and Romanian from various theoretical frameworks such as lexical decomposition, distributed morphology, nanosyntax and spanning. The book proposes a novel spanning analysis, arguing for its explanatory superiority to incorporation/conflation or nanosyntax in accounting for the formation and behaviour of denominals. It provides useful empirical insights, drawing from rich data from English discussed widely in the relevant literature, but also presenting novel data from Romanian not explored in detail before. Many interesting theoretical issues are also discussed, such as the (lack of) correlation between the (un)boundedness of the nominal root and the (a)telicity of the resulting verb, the verb/ satellite-framed distinction and others.

The chapters collected in the volume Passives Cross-Linguistically provide analyses of passive constructions across different languages and populations from the interface perspectives between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The contributions are, in principle, all based on the background of generative grammatical theory. In addition to the theoretical contributions of the first part of this volume, all solidly built on rich empirical bases, some experimental works are presented, which explore passives from a psycholinguistic perspective based on theoretical insights. The languages/language families covered in the contributions include South Asian languages (Odia/Indo-Aryan and Telugu/Dravidian, but also Kharia/Austro-Asiatic), Japanese, Arabic, English, German, Modern Greek, and several modern Romance varieties (Catalan, Romanian, and especially southern Italian dialects) as well as Vedic Sanskrit and Ancient Greek.

The disappearance of the French simple past has been hotly debated since the early 20th century. This volume offers an overview of its fortunes since French emerged as a language, provides a description of its distinctive features, and discusses the potential impact of its supposed demise on the whole French verb system. These assumptions are tested against a large corpus of contemporary texts. The study concludes that, despite the erosion of its meaning and its increasingly infrequent use, the simple past tense is still used by native speakers in various contexts, and no single substitute has yet emerged. Nevertheless, the simple past may be evolving into a stylistic marker, making it fertile ground for future cross-linguistic studies.

What is the most descriptively and explanatorily adequate format for syntactic structures and how are they constrained? Different theories of syntax have provided various answers: sets, feature structures, tree diagrams… Building on formal and empirical insights from a wide variety of approaches spanning more than 70 years (including Transformational Grammar, Relational Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, and Tree Adjoining Grammar), this monograph develops a new, mathematically grounded, framework in which objects known as graphs, and the constraints that follow from them, are argued to provide the best characterisation of the system of expressions and relations that make up natural language grammars. This new approach is motivated and exemplified via detailed and formally explicit analyses of major syntactic phenomena in English and Spanish.

The nine contributions collected in this volume deal with clause linkage, focussing on asyndetic constructions that have been little researched in the area of the Ob-Yenisei region. The approaches are in-depth studies of particular languages and mostly based on original data collected in recent fieldworks or from corpora. Differences can be observed, among other things, in a more verbal or nominal use of converbs which take an important role in clause linkage strategies.

If you were to travel to Japan, you would likely hear 'giving' and 'receiving' verbs in conversations quite frequently. In Japanese, giving and receiving verbs are not only used to describe an object being transferred, but also metaphorically, for example to describe giving/receiving a favor or involvement in an event. Giving and receiving verbs in all of these situations are known as benefactive constructions. Role and Reference Grammar analysis allows us to analyze which structures of benefactive constructions correspond to different meanings. This book will explore the historic evolution of Japanese benefactive constructions and how children acquire these constructions.

This work examines Noam Chomsky's widely accepted ontological assumptions, now referred to as “biolinguistics”—and demonstrates that they are internally inconsistent. Notably, it is shown that Chomsky himself has at least once admitted this flaw. Additionally, the volume challenges a fundamental assumption from Chomsky’s 1950s linguistic writings. This is the claim that the grammars of natural languages, particularly of English, must be constructive (proof-theoretic) devices, usually called generative grammars. It is shown that this persistent view cannot in principal account for a multitude of linguistic structures realized as perfectly natural sentences.Finally, the work scrutinizes Chomsky’s frequent assertion that “there is essentially only one language spoken on Earth,” revealing it to have no actual substance.The exposition of these flaws calls for a reassessment of fundamental aspects of generative linguistics.

We constantly refer to counterfactual events—things that didn’t happen but could have—through conditional, wish, and modal constructions. Yet, despite their ubiquity, we still know surprisingly little about how these constructions have evolved across languages and through history. This book breaks new ground by tracing, for the first time, the development of counterfactual systems across different constructions, texts, linguistic registers, and historical stages. Drawing on extensive corpus data from Indo-European languages and nearly three millennia of Greek, it offers the first unified account of counterfactual and avertive constructions as core expressions of non-realization. In doing so, it also proposes a revised model of the counterfactual life cycle—one that integrates semantic, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic dimensions—providing typologists with a powerful framework for exploring how counterfactual expressions evolve across languages.