Linguistics

This book describes the diversity of serial verb constructions within Oceanic languages and constitutes a full account of this unusual linguistic phenomenon. Serial verb constructions are sequences of verbs placed one after another to express meanings which in other languages are typically expressed by means of single verbs. It has long been established that languages in West Africa, Southeast Asia, and Papua New Guinea are serializing languages, but the construction has only comparatively recently been recognized in Oceanic languages, which belong to a very large subgroup of the Austronesian family. Based on research throughout the Pacific region, the book demonstrates that patterns of serial verbs can exhibit structural diversity even within a single language, and examines how serial verbs originate. It also investigates issues such as language contact and functional issues in language change. Serial verbs are often subject to reanalysis and this book investigates how they have developed new grammatical functions in different languages.

In this book, we ask how space, language, and thought interact in learning and development. This encompasses not only how children learn about space and spatial language, but also how language and cognition are grounded in space. People think and act in a spatial medium. How does this impact language learning? How does it frame human concepts? Does the acquisition of language change the way we experience space? The chapters gathered here represent a broad range of perspectives on these questions. They are authored by experts in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics.

This book considers how people talk about the location of objects and places. Spatial language has occupied many researchers across diverse fields, such as linguistics, psychology, GIScience, architecture, and neuroscience. However, the vast majority of work in this area has examined spatial language in monologue situations, and often in highly artificial and restricted settings. Yet there is a growing recognition in the language research community that dialogue rather than monologue should be a starting point for language understanding. Hence, the current zeitgeist in both language research and robotics/AI demands an integrated examination of spatial language in dialogue settings. This book provides such integration and reports on the latest developments in this important field.

This is the second volume of three in the Structuring Sense series. This three-volume book sets out to demonstrate that the explanation of linguistic competence should be shifted from lexical entry to syntactic structure, from memory of words to manipulation of rules. Its reformulation of how grammar and lexicon interact has important implications for linguistic, philosophical, and psychological theories about the human mind and language. The book departs from both language specific constructional approaches and lexicalist approaches to argue that universal hierarchical structures determine interpretation, and that language variation emerges from the morphological and phonological properties of inflectional material. This volume applies this radical approach to event structure. Integrating research results in syntax, semantics, and morphology, the author shows that argument structure is based on the syntactic realization of semantic event units. The topics this volume addresses include the structure of internal arguments and of telic and atelic interpretations, accusative and partitive case, perfective and imperfective marking, the unaccusative-unergative distinction, existential interpretation and post-verbal subjects, and resultative constructions. The languages discussed include English, Catalan, Finnish, Hebrew, Czech, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.

This book explores the difference between words however defined and structures however constructed. It sets out to demonstrate over three volumes — of which this is the first — that the explanation of linguistic competence should be shifted from lexical entry to syntactic structure, from memory of words to manipulation of rules. Its reformulation of how grammar and lexicon interact has profound implications for linguistic, philosophical, and psychological theories about human mind and language. The book departs from both language specific constructional approaches and lexicalist approaches to argue that universal hierarchical structures determine interpretation, and that language variation emerges from the morphological and phonological properties of inflectional material. This volume applies this radical approach to nominal structure. Integrating research in syntax, semantics, and morphology, the volume argues that nominal structure is based on the syntactic realization of semantic notions such as classifier, quantity, and reference. In the process, this volume seeks to do away with lexical ambiguity and type-shifting. Among the topics the volume considers are the interpretation of proper names, the mass-count distinction, the weak-strong interpretation of quantifiers, partitive and measure phrases, and the structural representation of the definite article. In the process, the volume explores inter-language variation through the properties of the morpho-phonological system. The languages discussed include English, Chinese, Italian, and Hebrew.

This volume presents new work by leading researchers on a central theme in study of event structure: the nature and representation of telicity, change, and the notion of state, and the relation between them. The goal is to advance our understanding of these aspects of event structure by bringing foundational semantic research together with a series of case studies from a variety of languages that broaden the empirical base for testing theories of event structure by exploring telicity, change, and the notion of state not only within the verbal domain but also across a range of morpho-syntactic categories.

James Higginbotham's work on tense, aspect, and indexicality discusses the principles governing demonstrative, temporal, and indexical expressions in natural language, and presents new ideas in the semantics of sentence structure. The book brings together his key contributions to the fields, including his recent intervention in the debate on the roles of context and anaphora in reference. The book's chapters are presented in the form in which they were first published, with afterwords where needed, to cover points where the author's thought has developed.

Theories of Lexical Semantics offers a comprehensive overview of the major traditions of word meaning research in linguistics. In spite of the growing importance of the lexicon in linguistic theory, no overview of the main theoretical trends in lexical semantics is currently available. This book fills that gap by charting the evolution of the discipline from the mid nineteenth century to the present day. It presents the main ideas, the landmark publications, and the dominant figures of five traditions: historical‐philological semantics, structuralist semantics, generativist semantics, neostructuralist semantics, and cognitive semantics. The theoretical and methodological relationship between the approaches is a major point of attention throughout the text: going well beyond a mere chronological enumeration, the book does not only describe the theoretical currents of lexical semantics, but also the undercurrents that have shaped its evolution.

Taking the unique perspective of Reinhart's Theta system (Reinhart 1991, 1996, 2000, 2002 et seq.) as its anchor, this book contributes to the understanding of the interface between the system of concepts and the computational system directly, and the inference systems, indirectly. The volume presents the Theta system, evaluates its merits and shortcomings, and introduces proposals for its refinement, from both a theoretical and an experimental perspective. The fact that it nurtures an active dialogue between the competing lexicalist and syntactic approaches on a broad array of lexico-semantic issues gives this book an extra dimension. The authors are not only researchers adhering to different frameworks, but also researchers working in different fields (be it semantics, syntax, morphology, or language acquisition). In empirical terms, the volume not only examines some of the notorious puzzles from a new theoretical perspective, but also brings new data and findings to light.

Semantic alignment refers to a type of language that has two means of morphosyntactically encoding the arguments of intransitive predicates, typically treating these as an agent or as a patient of a transitive predicate, or else by a means of a treatment that varies according to lexical aspect. This book presents a collection of new typological examinations and case studies. International typologists explore the differences and commonalities of languages with semantic alignment systems and compare the structure of these languages to languages without them. They look at how such systems arise or disappear and provide areal overviews of Eurasia, the Americas, and the south-west Pacific — the areas where semantically aligned languages are concentrated.