Linguistics

This book presents findings from a long-term study of a range of complex predicate types subsumed under the heading, Auxiliary Verb Constructions (AVCs), drawing on a database of over 800 languages. Chapter 1 discusses how the terms auxiliary verb and auxiliary verb construction are understood, and then provides an overview of the kinds of functional categories that AVCs serve to encode. A cursory typology is offered of the patterns of encoding inflectional/morphosyntactic/ functional semantic categories in AVCs, and notions of functional and formal headedness within AVCs are introduced. Five macro-patterns of inflection emerge, each with several sub-patterns. Chapters 2 to 5 are dedicated to the presentation of the varied sub-types of inflectional patterns seen in AVCs. These are called the AUX-headed, LEX-headed, doubled, and the split and split/doubled patterns. Each of these is extensively exemplified. In the final two chapters, various aspects of the diachronic origins of AVCs are discussed. Chapter 6 discusses where AVCs go once they have been grammaticalized, offering a range of complex verb forms that have derived from each of the inflectional macro-patterns of AVCs. Chapter 7 discusses diachronic origins of AVCs. This includes a discussion of both typical lexical source semantics for the grammaticalization paths of individual functional subtypes of AVC as well as the syntactic source construction types for each of the five macro-patterns and some of their more common sub-patterns. These source constructions draw into the discussion of how auxiliary verb constructions fit within the broadest possible typology of complex predicate phenomena. It offers an analysis of not only AVCs, but also such related complex predicate phenomena as serial verb constructions, verb complement structures, coordinate and clause chaining constructions, ‘light’ verbs, etc.

Are pronunciations such as cawfee and chawklit bad English? Is slang improper? Is it incorrect to mix English and Spanish, as in Yo quiero Taco Bell? Can you write “Who do you trust?” rather than “Whom do you trust?” This book looks at traditional notions of bad language and argues that they are often based in sterile conventionality. Examining grammar and style, cursing, slang, political correctness, regional dialects, ethnic dialects, foreign accents, and language mixing, this book discusses the strong feelings evoked by language variation, from objections to pronunciation, to complaints about bilingual education. It explains the natural desire for uniformity in writing and speaking, and traces the association of mainstream norms to ideas about refinement, intelligence, education, character, national unity, and political values. The book argues that none of these qualities is inherently connected to language. It is tempting but wrong to think of slang, dialects, and nonstandard grammar as simply breaking the rules of good English. Instead, we should view language as made up of alternative forms of orderliness adopted by speakers depending on their purpose. Thus, we can study the structure and context of nonstandard language in order to illuminate and enrich traditional forms of language, and make policy decisions based on an informed engagement.

This book proposes a theory of the syntax-morphology interface. A radically modular view of grammar is defended: the grammar contains separate ‘macromodules’ that deal with the wellformedness of syntactic, phonological, and semantic structures, respectively. The structures produced in the respective macromodules are not derivationally related. Rather there is a set of correspondence rules that regulate, for example, what parts of a syntactic structure can correspond to what parts of a phonological structure and vice versa. Within the ‘macromodules’, there are separate submodules that deal with sub-word structure and supra-word structure. Thus, the syntactic macromodule contains a submodule that deals with the wellformedness of complex words and a submodule that deals with the wellformedness of sentences. Similarly, the phonological macromodule contains a submodule that deals with lexical phonology and a submodule that deals with sentence-level prosodic phonology. The submodules dealing with sub-word structure jointly comprise what is usually referred to as ‘morphology’. The book discusses in detail (i) the ways in which the sentence-level and word-level submodules within the larger syntax macromodule interact; and (ii) phenomena that follow from interaction of the syntactic macromodule with the phonological macromodule.

This book examines issues of language, identity, and culture among the rapidly growing Asian Pacific American (APA) population. The distinguished contributors—who represent a broad range of perspectives from anthropology, sociolinguistics, English, and education—focus on the analysis of spoken interaction and explore multiple facets of the APA experience. The book covers topics such as media representations of APAs; codeswitching and language crossing; and narratives of ethnic identity. The collection examines the experiences of Asian Pacific Americans of different ethnicities, generations, ages, and geographic locations across home, school, community, and performance sites.

This book examines the life, language and grammar of Robert Lowth (1710–1787), founder of prescriptivism. Drawing on private documents, it maps his social networks and compares his own language to the grammar's model of correctness. By analysing his role in the establishment of the prescriptive canon, it portrays Lowth as a precursor to usage guides like Fowler's Modern English Usage.

Prosodic morphology concerns the interaction of morphological and phonological determinants of linguistic form and the degree to which one determines the other. Although prosodic morphology has been the testing ground for theoretical developments in phonology over the past twenty years, from autosegmental theory to optimality theory, this is the first book devoted to understanding the definition and operation of canonical forms — fixed shaped prosody — which are the defining characteristic of prosodic morphology. This book discusses past research in the field and provides a critical evaluation of the current leading theory, the Generalized Template Hypothesis, showing that it is empirically inadequate. The leading theory proposes that canonical shape of morphemes in processes like reduplication, templatic morphology, hypocoristics, and word minimality follows from the canonical shape of stress feet. The central problem with this proposal is that many of the world’s languages do not have word stress. Even in those that do, there is often a mismatch between the canonical stress foot and canonical morpheme shape. The book sets out an alternative approach, namely, that the basic prosody-morphology correlation is between the syllable and the morpheme. This new approach is tested in a cross-linguistic analysis of phonological and morphological forms over a wide range of languages, including several not previously studied from this perspective.

This is the first book to present Canonical Typology, a framework for comparing constructions and categories across languages. The canonical method takes the criteria used to define particular categories or phenomena (e.g. negation, finiteness, possession) to create a multidimensional space in which language-specific instances can be placed. In this way, the issue of fit becomes a matter of greater or lesser proximity to a canonical ideal. Drawing on the expertise of world-class scholars in the field, the book addresses the issue of cross-linguistic comparability, illustrates the wide range of areas—from morphosyntactic features to reported speech—to which linguists are currently applying this methodology.

This book focuses on some of the most puzzling case marking patterns in the Slavic languages and ties this pattern to different types of aspectual phenomena. It demonstrates that the accusative versus lexical case marking contrast on an internal argument with two-place verbs is directly linked to whether the lexical/semantic aspect of a so-called ‘base’ verb is compositional or not. It also shows that the instrumental versus case agreement dichotomy on a predicate in depictive, participle, and copular constructions in the East Slavic languages is linked to a grammatical aspect contrast, namely to whether the eventuality denoted by a predicate is bounded or unbounded in time.

This book investigates the case system and the marking of grammatical roles and relations in Semitic languages. It further attempts to provide an explanation for “unusual” usages of cases, especially the accusative, that seem to violate the traditional interpretation of Semitic as exhibiting nominative/accusative alignment from a diachronic perspective. The basic methodologies applied for the diachronic reconstruction are those of historical and comparative linguistics. These methodologies, however, face severe limitations based on the lack of sufficient data for the earliest historically attested periods of Semitic (~ 2500–1800 BC). It is argued that these limitations can be mitigated by employing linguistic typology, which is a linguistic discipline that has not found wide reception among scholars working on Semitic languages so far. Based on both the comparative method and typological principles, the book investigates the alignment and marking of grammatical roles, basic word order patterns connected to the marking of roles, head- and dependent-marking patterns, and the function of the individual cases across Semitic. It concludes that although the alignment of historically attested Semitic languages is nominative/accusative, both morphologically and syntactically, they exhibit vestiges of a more archaic system that reflects a marked-nominative system. In this archaic system, the accusative functioned as the unmarked and default form of the noun that was used as citation form, for nominal predicates, the vocative, and for direct objects of transitive verbs. The nominative on the other hand, was the morphologically and syntactically marked form that solely functioned to mark nominal subjects.

The main goal of this book is to demonstrate that the languages and dialects of Europe are becoming increasingly alike. This unifying process — that goes at least as far back as the Roman empire — is accelerating and affects every one of Europe’s 150 or so languages, including those of different families such as Basque and Finnish. The changes are by no means restricted to lexical borrowing, but involve every grammatical aspect of the language. They are usually so minute that neither native speakers nor trained linguists notice them. But they accumulate and give rise to new grammatical structures that lead, in turn, to new patterns of areal relationship. The book describes linguistic transfer from one language to another in terms of grammatical replication, using grammaticalization theory as a framework. The linguistic domains covered in more detail are definite and indefinite articles, possession, case marking, and the relationship between questions and subordination.