General

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...

This book presents a collection of papers on the issue of focus in its broadest sense. While commonly being considered as related to phenomena such as presupposition and anaphora, focusing is much more widely spread, and it is this pervasiveness that...

The 'subject' of a sentence is a concept that presents great challenges to linguists. Most languages have something which looks like a subject, but subjects differ across languages in their nature and properties, making them an interesting phenomenon for...

A substantially revised edition of Huddleston's contribution to Sentence and Clause in Scientific English, the final report of a research project into the linguistic properties of scientific English carried out at University College London in 1964-7. The...

Georgian has sometimes been described as a language that is 'totally irregular', where the notions of 'subject', 'object' and 'indirect object' have no relevance. Although it is often cited in work on general linguistics, language universals and language...

Images of English was the first book to focus exclusively on opinions about the language as they have evolved through time. Through the use of abundant quotations, Richard Bailey lets voices from the past speak to our present assumptions and challenges...

This book develops a pragmatic theory of anaphora within the neo-Gricean framework of conversational implicature. Chomsky claims that anaphora reflects underlying principles of innate Universal Grammar, and the view is widely held that only syntactic and...

The phenomenon of grammaticalization - the historical process whereby new grammatical material is created - has attracted a great deal of attention within linguistics. This is an attempt to provide a general account of this phenomenon in terms of a...

A ready lexicon of interest to students and scholars of Indian languages. The work is the most comprehensive and exhaustive study of the Chinook jargon in existence to-day, comprising a complete grammar and dictionary, with nearly three thousand...

Alessandra Giorgi and Giuseppe Longobardi's important 1991 study of the argument structure of lexical projections, in particular of noun phrases, makes substantial advances in this relatively neglected area. Working within a Government and Binding...

This book, first published in 2000, addresses the fundamental linguistic question of how the perceived world is expressed through systems of nominal classification that are grammatically encoded in various languages. A team of leading international...

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...

This 1999 textbook investigates definiteness both from a comparative and a theoretical point of view, showing how languages express definiteness and what definiteness is. It surveys a large number of languages to discover the range of variation in...

Inspired by the ideas of the Prague School, the theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP) is concerned with the distribution of information as determined by all meaningful elements, from intonation (for speech) to context. A central feature of FSP...

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...

This collection of essays by some of the leading scholars in the field sheds new light on the verb in English. The central concern of the volume is to illustrate that verbs can only be adequately and properly understood if studied from both a theoretical...

One of the basic premises of the theory of syntax is that clause structures can be minimally identified as containing a verb phrase, playing the role of predicate, and a noun phrase, playing the role of subject. In this study Andrea Moro identifies a new...

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...

Guglielmo Cinque is one of the world's leading theoretical syntacticians, and is particularly known for his application of recent theory to the analysis of Italian. This volume brings together ten of Professor Cinque's essays, some of which are published...

This is a unified account of all quantity changes affecting English stressed vowels during the early Middle English period. Dr Ritt discusses homorganic lengthening, open syllable lengthening, trisyllabic shortening, and shortening before consonant...

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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...

The 'subject' of a sentence is a concept that presents great challenges to linguists. Most languages have something which looks like a subject, but subjects differ across languages in their nature and properties, making them an interesting phenomenon for...

The formal sciences, particularly mathematics, have had a profound influence on the development of linguistics. This insightful overview looks at techniques that were introduced in the fields of mathematics, logic and philosophy during the twentieth...

Construction Grammar has gained prominence in linguistics, owing its popularity to its inclusive approach that considers language units of varying sizes and generality as potential constructions – mentally stored form-function units. This Element serves...

AI can assist the linguist in doing research on the structure of language. This Element illustrates this possibility by showing how a conversational AI based on a Large Language Model (AI LLM chatbot) can assist the Construction Grammarian, and...

In a coordination construction, which is universally available, two or more syntactic constituents are combined, with or without an overt coordinator. This Element examines how coordinate structures are derived syntactically, focussing on the syntactic...

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...

The Merge Hypothesis is the central empirical theoretical contribution of the Minimalist Program (MP) to syntactic theory. This book offers an accessible overview of the MP, debunking common sixty years of Generative research, culminating in GB theory...

Although there have been numerous investigations of biolinguistics within the Minimalist Program over the last ten years, many of which appeal to the importance of Turing's Thesis (that the structural design of systems must obey physical and mathematical...

Using data from a variety of languages such as Blackfoot, Halkomelem, and Upper Austrian German, this book explores a range of grammatical categories and constructions, including tense, aspect, subjunctive, case and demonstratives. It presents a new...

It is widely believed that inconsistency is one of the greatest sins a scholar can commit. This issue is especially relevant in linguistics due to the rich diversity of data types, exceptions to the rules, counterexamples to the hypotheses, and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780820456584Author Michael SinghFormat PaperbackPage Count 274Imprint Peter Lang AGPublisher Peter Lang AGWeight(grams) 410g

Accounts of syntax are usually based on two assumptions: firstly, that a sentence comprises a hierarchy of phrases, forming a 'tree' structure; and secondly, that phrases have 'heads', on which subordinate units depend. These fundamental assumptions are...

What is the lexicon, what does it contain, and how is it structured? What principles determine the functioning of the lexicon as a component of natural language grammar? What role does lexical information play in linguistic theory? This accessible...

This textbook, first published in 2004, provides a concise, clear, and accessible introduction to current syntactic theory, drawing on the key concepts of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. Assuming little or no prior grammatical knowledge, Andrew Radford...

Andrew Radford's textbook, Minimalist Syntax, provides a concise, clear, and accessible introduction to syntactic theory, drawing on the key concepts of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. Assuming little or no prior knowledge of syntactic theory, Radford...

Analyzing Grammar is a clear introductory textbook on grammatical analysis, designed for students beginning to study the discipline. Covering both syntax (the structure of phrases and sentences) and morphology (the structure of words), it equips them...

Case is an accessible introduction for students of linguistics to the ways relations between words in sentences are marked in languages. Case is fundamental to the whole system of language. One of its most interesting features is the recurrence of...

Case, a system which marks the relationships between words in a sentence, is fundamental to every language. Looking at how different theories of syntax have accounted for the distribution of case across languages, this accessible 2006 textbook introduces...