Linguistics

This book proposes a novel, interface-based analysis of patterns of wh-movement in English in which constraints are stated over both syntactic and semantic representations. Firstly, a theory is presented of the internal structure of events as perceptual and cognitive units. The key question concerns the circumstances in which multiple smaller events, or subevents, can be perceived as jointly forming a single macroevent. Macroevent formation is possible if the subevents in question are perceived as related by one of two contingent relations, namely direct causation and enablement, where the latter is a relation holding among events that form part of an agent's plan. There is no single phrase-structural configuration which corresponds to enablement, so cognitive and semantic representations of event structure differ from syntactic representations of phrase structure in nontrivial ways. Certain patterns of extraction from adjuncts in English are amenable to simple descriptions stated over event-structural units and relations, but exhibit substantial differences from the patterns typically described by syntactic theories of locality. However, syntactic locality theories, as elaborated over the past 50 years, remain essential to an accurate description of the distribution of movement relations. The central challenge addressed by this work is therefore to allow syntactic and nonsyntactic factors to act jointly to constrain the syntactic operation of wh-movement without vitiating necessary assumptions about the modularity of the language faculty.

This book is based on two ideas: first, that any language—English no less than any other—represents a universe of meaning, shaped by the history and experience of the men and women who have created it; and second, that in any language certain culture-specific words act as linchpins for whole networks of meanings, and that penetrating the meanings of those key words can therefore open our eyes to an entire cultural universe. This book demonstrates that three uniquely English words—evidence, experience, and sense—are exactly such linchpins. Using a rigorous plain language approach to meaning analysis, the book unpackages the dense cultural meanings of these key words, disentangles their multiple meanings, and traces their origins back to the tradition of British empiricism. In so doing the book reveals much about cultural attitudes embedded not only in British and American English, but other global varieties of English.

This book is about the nature of expression in speech. It is a comprehensive exploration of how such expression is produced and understood, and of how the emotional content of spoken words may be analysed, modelled, tested, and synthesized. Listeners can interpret tone-of-voice, assess emotional pitch, and effortlessly detect the finest modulations of speaker attitude; yet these processes present almost intractable difficulties to the researchers seeking to identify and understand them. In seeking to explain the production and perception of emotive content, the book reviews the potential of biological and cognitive models. It examines how the features that make up the speech production and perception systems have been studied by biologists, psychologists, and linguists, and assesses how far biological, behavioural, and linguistic models generate hypotheses that provide insights into the nature of expressive speech.

From its Germanic roots on the Continent, English has had many influences from other languages. This work documents the main influences on the lexicon and the structure. The earliest contacts were with the Romans, when many words were borrowed by the Germanic tribes from Vulgar Latin. In the British Isles, Roman influence continued but the primary influence, though largely substratal, was from Brythonic Celtic. In the later period the Latin influence became largely literary. Meanwhile, Danes settled northeast England, and the contact situation there was complicated but the major result was a high degree of koineization, reflected in major structural innovations shared with East Norse, primarily Old Jutland Danish. Subsequently, the French dominated southeast England and created a superstrate that resulted in Anglo-French on the one hand and the transfer of thousands of words to English on the other. As these words assimilated to the English lexicon, their affixes became an important part of English word formation, productivity beginning as early as the thirteenth century. The result of all this contact was that English preserved little of its Germanic heritage. Later influences were largely restricted to the lexicon and consisted mainly of learned Greek and latinate roots, many of which became standard English, though frequently of a higher register than native roots of similar import, and facilitated scientific word formation.

Through everyday talk, individuals forge the ties that can make a family. Family members use language to manage a household, create and maintain relationships, and negotiate and reinforce values and beliefs. The studies in this book are based on a unique research project in which four dual-income American families recorded everything they said for a week. This book extends our understanding of family discourse and of how family members construct, negotiate, and enact their identities as individuals and as families. This book addresses issues central to the academic discipline of discourse analysis as well as to families themselves, including decision-making and conflict-talk, the development of gendered family roles, sociability with and socialization of children, the development of social and political beliefs, and the interconnectedness of professional and family life. This book provides insights into the subtleties of family conversation.

This book presents a critical overview of current work on linguistic features and establishes new bases for their use in the study and understanding of language. Features are fundamental components of linguistic description: they include gender (feminine, masculine, neuter); number (singular, plural, dual); person (1st, 2nd, 3rd); tense (present, past, future); and case (nominative, accusative, genitive, ergative). Despite their ubiquity and centrality in linguistic description, much remains to be discovered about them: there is, for example, no readily available inventory showing which features are found in which of the world's languages; there is no consensus about how they operate across different components of language; and there is no certainty about how they interact. This book seeks both to highlight and to tackle these problems. It brings together perspectives from phonology to formal syntax and semantics, expounding the use of linguistic features in typology, computer applications, and logic. Linguists representing different standpoints spell out clearly the assumptions they bring to different kinds of features and describe how they use them. Their contrasting contributions highlight the areas of difference and the common ground between their perspectives. The book brings together original work by leading international scholars. It will appeal to linguists of all theoretical persuasions.

Everybody fights about something or other and language is usually at the very center of the conflict. We use language as we fight our battles, but when the dispute is over what is said or how it was worded, language becomes the very cause of the battle. Although there are many arenas in which language disputes can be observed, civil law cases offer the most fertile examples of this warfare over words. What did the business contract actually say or mean? Was there evidence of deceptive language practice in its promotional materials? Can the warning label become part of a product liability charge? Did the company evidence age discrimination or race discrimination against its employees or customers? Was one company's trademark too similar to another's? Did the company engage in copyright infringement? Was it guilty of procurement fraud in its business proposal? This book is about the way linguistic analysis describes, exposes, and helps corporations analyze disputed meanings and practices in various types of civil cases where the central issues revolve around the way language was used in commerce. It also provides all of the language data that was practical to include so that others can do their own analyses.

This book surveys the last thirty-five years of research in generative linguistics and related fields and offers a new understanding of how language, the brain, and perception intermesh. The book renews the conclusions of early generative linguistics: that language can be a valuable entrée into understanding the human mind and brain. The approach is interdisciplinary. The book proposes that the creativity of language derives from multiple parallel generative systems linked by interface components. This shift in basic architecture allows for a reconception of mental grammar and how it is learned. The book aims to reintegrate linguistics with philosophy of mind, cognitive and developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics. Among the major topics treated are language processing, the relation of language to perception, the innateness of language, and the evolution of the language capacity, as well as more standard issues in linguistic theory such as the roles of syntax and the lexicon. In addition, this book offers a sophisticated theory of semantics that incorporates insights from philosophy of language, logic and formal semantics, lexical semantics of various stripes, cognitive grammar, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches, and the author's own conceptual semantics.

This book essentially argues for the importance of word frequency as a factor in the analysis and explanation of language structure. In other words, the roles of words and other linguistic phenomena such as morphology, phonology, and syntax are highly influenced by low, medium, or high frequency with which they occur. The book includes three decades of influential research in one thematic source. It provides an introductory overview that traces the development of thinking on this important subject. The discussion covers word frequency in lexical diffusion, morphophonemics, lexical and morphological conditioning of alternations using Spanish verbs as example, rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense, morphological classes as natural categories, regular morphology and lexicon, sequentiality as the basis of constituent structure, and mechanisms of change in grammaticization.

This book examines the grammatical changes that took place in the transition from Latin to the Romance languages. The emerging language underwent changes in three fundamental areas involving the noun phrase, verb phrase, and the sentence. The impact of the changes can be seen in the reduction of the Latin case system; the appearance of auxiliary verb structures to mark such categories as tense, mood, and voice; and a shift towards greater rigidification of word order. The book considers how far these changes are interrelated and compares their various manifestations and pace of change across the different standard and non-standard varieties of Romance. It describes the historical background to the emergence of the Romance varieties and their Latin ancestry, considering in detail the richly documented diachronic variation exhibited by the Romance family. The book reviews the accounts and explanations that have been proposed within competing theoretical frameworks, and considers how far traditional ideas should be reinterpreted in light of recent theoretical developments. This account shows that the transition from Latin to Romance is not only of great intrinsic interest, but both provides a means of challenging linguistic orthodoxies and presents opportunities to shape new perspectives on language change, structure, and variation.