General

The Feminist Critique of Language provides a wide-ranging selection of writings on language, gender, and feminist thought. It serves both as a guide to the current debates and directions and as a digest of the history of twentieth-century feminist ideas...

Critical Thinking: A Shepherd's Guide to Tending Sheep portrays people as sheep. Not a wholly original idea. As anthropomorphic as it may be, human beings tend to follow various shepherds, and they tend to do so in herds. The irony, however, is that most...

Understanding Minimalism, first published in 2005, is an introduction to the Minimalist Program - the model of syntactic theory within generative linguistics. Accessibly written, it presents the basic principles and techniques of the minimalist program,...

Comparison of the grammars of human languages reveals systematic patterns of variation. Typology and universals research uncovers those patterns to formulate universal constraints on language and seek their exploration. In this essential textbook,...

Syntax: Basic Concepts and Applications provides a systematic introduction to core topics in syntax, focusing on how the basic concepts apply in the analysis of sentences. Assuming no background in linguistic analysis, the book gives students a working...

Binding theory seeks to explain how different kinds of nominal expressions such as names, noun phrases and pronouns have anaphoric relations amongst one another, and how they come to have reference to things in the world. This textbook provides a...

Icelandic is a syntactically interesting language, with aspects of its word order, clause structure, agreement patterns and case system arousing much theoretical interest and debate in recent years. This is an informative and accessible guide to the...

Linguistic relativity is the claim that culture, through language, affects the way in which we think, and especially our classification of the experienced world. This book reexamines ideas about linguistic relativity in the light of new evidence and...

Cecilia E. Ford explores the question: what work do adverbial clauses do in conversational interaction? Her analysis of this predominating conjunction strategy in English conversation is based on the assumption that grammars reflect recurrent patterns of...

Andrew Radford's textbook is written for students with little or no background in syntax, and introduces them to key concepts of Chomsky's minimalist programme (e.g. merger and movement, checking, economy and greed, split VPs, agreement projections), as...

In this major new work Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell set out to establish a general framework for the investigation of linguistic change. Systematic cross-linguistic comparison of syntactic change across a wide variety of languages is used to construct...

This book is an investigation into the problems of generating natural language utterances to satisfy specific goals the speaker has in mind. It is thus an ambitious and significant contribution to research on language generation in artificial...

Categories of the verb in natural languages include tense, aspect, modality (mood) and voice. Among these, voice, in its rich and diverse manifestations, is perhaps the most complex. But most prior research concentrates on only certain types,...

The key argument of this book, originally published in 1984, is that when human beings communicate with each other by means of a natural language they typically do not do so in simple sentences but rather in connected discourse - complex expressions made...

John Lyons is recognized internationally as one of the most influential scholars in modern linguistics. This volume contains essays spanning many years of his thought and research, in addition to previously unpublished pieces. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 make...

Language typology identifies similarities and differences among languages of the world. This textbook provides an introduction to the subject which assumes minimal prior knowledge of linguistics. It offers the broadest coverage of any introductory book,...

Argument structure - the pattern of underlying relations between a predicate and its dependents - is at the base of syntactic theory and the theory of the interface with semantics. This comprehensive guide explores the motives for thematic and...

A practical step-by-step introduction to the analysis of English grammar, this book leaves the reader confident to tackle the challenges analysing grammar may pose. The first textbook to take an integrated approach to function and structure in...

Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey is a comprehensive introduction to current research in all branches of the field of linguistics, from syntactic theory to ethnography of speaking, from signed language to the mental lexicon, from language acquisition to...

This is a textbook of a fundamental kind, designed to introduce students to the basic concepts of syntax. Professor Matthews does not expound the model of any one theoretical school; nor does he attempt a straightforward synthesis of already published...

Ellipsis occurs when certain portions of a sentence are not spoken - for example 'Mary has read more books than Bill has [read books]' and 'Jack called, but I don't know where [he called] from'. These constructions interest linguists because the meaning...

Word grammar is a theory of language structure and is based on the assumption that language, and indeed the whole of knowledge, is a network, and that virtually all of knowledge is learned. It combines the psychological insights of cognitive linguistics...

Parametric variation in linguistic theory refers to the systematic grammatical variation permitted by the human language faculty. Although still widely assumed, the parametric theory of variation has in recent years been subject to re-evaluation and...

English has an interesting variety of noun phrases, which differ greatly in structure. Examples are 'binominal' (two-noun) phrases ('a beast of a party'); possessive constructions ('the author's opinion'); and discontinuous noun phrases ('the review...

The Language Organ treats human language as the manifestation of a faculty of the mind, a mental organ whose nature is determined by human biology and whose functional properties should be explored just as physiology explores the functional properties of...

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The past quarter of a century has seen a surge in Chinese syntactic research that has produced a sizeable literature on the analysis of almost every construction in Mandarin Chinese. This guide to Chinese syntax analyses the majority of constructions in...

This unique three-volume 2007 survey brings together a team of leading scholars to explore the syntactic and morphological structures of the world's languages. Clearly organized and broad-ranging, it covers topics such as parts-of-speech, passives,...

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Sentences may pertain to states or processes or events. They may express duration, frequency, habituality, and many other forms of temporality. How do they do this? It is the aspectual properties of sentences in natural languages which allow the user to...

The publication of Webster's Third New International Dictionary in 1961 set off a storm of controversy in both the popular press and in scholarly journals that was virtually unprecedented in its scope and intensity. This is the first full account of the...

This comprehensive new work provides extensive evidence for the essential role of language contact as a primary trigger for change. Unique in breadth, it traces the spread of the periphrastic perfect across Europe over the last 2,500 years, illustrating...

This book examines the role of syntax in theories of sentence comprehension, and argues for a distinct processing component which is devoted to the recovery of syntactic structure and which utilizes the contrasting types of information found within a...

In this book, Ljiljana Progovac presents cross-linguistic data on negative polarity, reflexive binding and the subjunctive mood, and proposes a unified analysis for various languages, including English and Serbian/Croatian. She argues that Negative...

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This 1991 book proposes a theory of definiteness in language. It argues that definiteness should be viewed as a cover-term comprising three basic oppositions within the areas of familiarity (locatability), quantity (inclusiveness) and generality...

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The view that language is in some way 'arbitrary', that there is no formal relationship between a linguistic message and the thought it is meant to convey, is long established and pervasive. The goal of John Haiman's study is to challenge the monopoly of...

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English has an interesting variety of noun phrases, which differ greatly in structure. Examples are 'binominal' (two-noun) phrases ('a beast of a party'); possessive constructions ('the author's opinion'); and discontinuous noun phrases ('the review...