Syntax

The area covered by this book, originally published in 1953, is one that has long been recognized as presenting many problems from the point of view of Bantu linguistic studies. Almost all the material set out in this present work is based on notes taken...

Originally published in 1952, this volume shows the structural characteristics of the Berber language and its interrelations as far as these are known; the distribution of the language and the numbers speaking it; its use as literary and educational...

The first volume of this pair, The Classification of Bantu Languages, originally published in 1948, investigates the questions arising out of the use of the term Bantu. It establishes and illustrates the criteria used in identifying languages as members...

The classification and distribution of the languages of the Northern Bantu Borderland between the Great Lakes and the Indian Ocean have been given in Volume 1 of The Linguistic Survey of the Northern Bantu Borderland, where however, the linguistic...

Surveying over 300 languages, this typological study presents new theoretical insights into the nature of agreement, as well as empirical findings about the distribution of agreement patterns in the world's languages. Focussing primarily on agreement in...

In both Romance and English literature, relational adjectives have received special attention due to their apparently idiosyncratic behaviour, as both nouns and adjectives at the same time. Stepping away from the usual analyses that concentrates...

This book is a collection of key readings on Minimalist Syntax, the most recent, and arguably most important, theoretical development within the Principles and Parameters approach to syntactic theory. Brings together in one volume the key readings on...

An Annotated Syntax Reader brings together a collection of seminal articles published over the last forty years that demonstrate the empirical and theoretical foundations of current syntactic theory. Includes introductions, annotations by the editors,...

This handbook deals with research into the nature of events, and how we use language to describe events. The study of event structure over the past 60 years has been one of the most successful areas of lexical semantics, uniting insights from morphology...

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book explores...

Nominal Arguments in Language Variation investigates nominal arguments in classifier languages, refuting the long-held claim that classifier languages do not have overt article determiners. Li Julie Jiang brings the typologically unique Nuosu Yi, a...

This book provides a detailed survey of Korean and Japanese syntax from a comparative perspective, based within a generative framework. Yukata Sato and Sungdai Cho demonstrate that while the two languages exhibit remarkably similar morphosyntactic...

This volume explores the progress of cross-linguistic research into the structure of complex nominals since the publication of Chomsky's 'Remarks on Nominalization' in 1970. In the last 50 years of research into the division of labour between the mental...

This book explores how grammatical oppositions - for instance, the contrast between present and past tense - are represented in the syntax of natural languages. The nature of syntactic contrast is tied to a fundamental question in generative syntactic...

This book serves as a definitive reference for the inverse morphology of the Algonquian languages, which has attracted much attention in typological and theoretical linguistics. Will Oxford describes the patterning of inverse morphology across the...

This book is the first to present a comprehensive theory of non-canonical questions, those question types that do not (only) request information from the addressee, but rather (additionally) tell us something about the speaker's epistemic and/or...

This book explores unusual patterns of agreement, one of the most intriguing and theoretically challenging aspects of human language. Agreement is typically thought to reflect a structural relationship between a verb and its arguments within the clause,...

Are you curious to know what all languages have in common and how they differ? Do you want to find out how language can be used to trace different peoples and their past? Now in its fourth edition, this fascinating book guides beginners through the rich...

This book brings a basic yet detailed description of Icelandic nominalizations to bear on the general theoretical and architectural issues that nominalizations have raised since the earliest work in generative syntax. While nominalization has long been...

This book is intended primarily for undergraduate students of English, though it will also be useful for undergraduates in linguistics focusing on English. It shows how a restricted set of principles can account for a wide range of the phenomena of...

This volume, originally published in 1957, contains the linguistic evidence for the classification of the languages encountered by the western team of the Northern Bantu Borderland Survey. To appreciate fully its implications it should be read in close...

This volume examines subordinate wh-clauses that lack an interrogative interpretation, particularly those in which the wh-word seems to deviate from its literal meaning. These include subordinate manner wh-clauses that have a declarative-like meaning,...

Head-movement has played a central role in morpho-syntactic theory, but its nature has remained unclear. While it is widely accepted that the main grammatical constraint controlling head-movement is the Head Movement Constraint (HMC), this constraint is...

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This is the first...

Nominal Arguments in Language Variation investigates nominal arguments in classifier languages, refuting the long-held claim that classifier languages do not have overt article determiners. Li Julie Jiang brings the typologically unique Nuosu Yi, a...

This book documents the interrogative system of Ikpana, an endangered indigenous Ghana-Togo Mountain language of eastern Ghana also known as Logba. The system is notable in several respects. It exhibits features that buck certain typological trends, act...

Volume 4 of African Languages includes articles originally published in 1978, written in French and English on educational, literary, cultural, historical and socio-linguistic aspects of language in Africa, as well as descriptive and comparative studies...

Originally published in 1945, this volume represented the first to classify Bantu languages. This volume does not record all the dialects but makes reference to those in which some grammatical study has been done and classifies them according to mainly...

The strikingly unrestricted syntactic distribution of nouns in many Bantu languages often leads to proposals that syntactic case does not play an active role in the grammar of Bantu. This book offers a different conclusion that the basis of Zulu that...

This volume is the first to provide a comprehensive cross-linguistic overview of an understudied typological phenomenon, the clause-level argument-like behaviour of internal possessors. In some languages, adnominal possessors - or a subset thereof -...

This book presents the first serious attempt to set out a functional-semantic definition of diachronic transcategorial shift between the major classes noun/nominal and verb/clause. In English, speakers have different options to refer to an event, ranging...

For undergraduate and graduate level courses in English grammar, syntax, and writing; also appropriate for a course in teaching English at the secondary level. Approaching grammar as a process and not a product, this text engages students in a...

Volume 5 (2) of African Languages originally published in 1979, is a special issue focussing on languages and education in Africa. There are chapters on African language education from a socio-linguistic perspective, the problems of bi-lingualism and...

Polarity sensitivity is a ubiquitous phenomenon involving expressions such as anybody, nobody, ever, never, somebody and their counterparts in other languages. These expressions belong to different classes such as negative and positive polarity, negative...

This book tests the hypothesis that plural agreement with collective nouns is becoming frequent in French. It addresses questions concerning the methodological challenges of studying variation and change in morphosyntax, and the application of...

This volume explores the grammar of Niuean, an endangered Polynesian language spoken on the island of Niue and in New Zealand, with a focus on the issue of predication. Since Aristotle, it has been claimed that a sentence consists of a subject and a...

The book of Judges is full of characters of ambivalent moral integrity and acts of dubious propriety, such as Jael's murder of Sisera and the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter. And yet the terse narrative and the reticent narrator frequently leave the...

This is an elementary introduction to syntactic analysis. Assuming no prior knowledge of the subject whatsoever, it is intended for students who are encountering such analysis for the first time. For those embarking on a longer term study of syntax, this...

Since its first publication in 1991 Liliane Haegeman's Introduction to Government and Binding Theory has become established as the most authoritative introduction to the Principles and Parameters approach to syntactic theory. This new edition has been...

This engaging textbook bridges the gap between traditional and functional grammar. Starting with a traditional approach, students will develop a firm grasp of traditional tools for analysis and learn how SFG (Systemic Functional Grammar) can be used to...