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Idioms have always aroused the curiosity of linguists and there is a long tradition in the study of idioms, especially within the fields of lexicology and lexicography. Without denying the importance of this tradition, this volume presents an overview of recent idiom research outside the immediate domain of lexicology/lexicography. The chapters address the status of idioms in recent formal and experimental linguistic theorizing. Interdisciplinary in scope, the contributions are written by psycholinguists and theoretical and computational linguists who take mutual advantage of progress in all disciplines. Linguists supply the facts and analyses psycholinguists base their models and experiment...
TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.
Henk van Riemsdijk has long been known as one of Europe’s most important linguists. His seminal ideas have been influential in developing generative grammar in Europe and beyond. As the initiator, co-founder, and chair of the GLOW society, he made the society the leading platform of European generative linguistics. He has also been editor of the series Studies in Generative Grammar since its foundation. As a teacher and supervisor, he has inspired generations of students. On the occasion of his relocation from the Netherlands to Italy, his friends, students and colleagues celebrate his work with this collection of essays on numerous topics of current theoretical interest.
The contributions in this book are a representative cross-section of recent research on verb-particle constructions. The syntactic, semantic, morphological, and psycholinguistic phenomena associated with the constructions in English, Dutch, German, and Swedish are analyzed from the various different theoretical viewpoints.
Although the interest in the concept of partitivity has continuously increased in the last decades and has given rise to considerable advances in research, the fine-grained morpho-syntactic and semantic variation displayed by partitive elements across European languages is far from being well-described, let alone well-understood. There are two main obstacles to this: on the one hand, theoretical linguistics and typological linguistics are fragmented in different methodological approaches that hinder the full sharing of cross-theoretic advances; on the other hand, partitive elements have been analyzed in restricted linguistic environments, which would benefit from a broader perspective. The a...
This volume brings together 19 cutting edge studies written by some of the most prominent linguists working on Chinese formal syntax, as a Festschrift volume dedicated to Yen-Hui Audrey Li. The contributions to the volume address a wide range of issues currently developing in the field of Chinese syntax, grouped into five thematic sections on the structure of lexical and functional projections, modal verb syntax, syntax-semantics interactions, the syntax and interpretation of particles, and the acquisition of syntactic structures. With its rich descriptive content sourced from different varieties of Chinese, and its theoretical orientation and analyses, the book provides an important new resource both for researchers with a primary interest in Chinese and other linguists interested in discovering how properties of Chinese can inform the analysis of other languages.
Island phenomena are a central topic in generative grammar, especially because of principled exceptions to these general extraction constraints. This volume investigates exceptional extractions from phrasal adjunct islands. It argues, based on experimental studies, that several factors identified in the previous literature are uninformative about locality conditions because they show effects in both extraction and non-extraction sentence forms. The volume develops a multifactorial model to account for these effects without appealing to universal extraction conditions and argues that the relative acceptability of the underlying proposition determines acceptability across sentence types.
The monograph investigates the relationship between form and meaning in different domains and centers on a group of methods referred to as “linguistic profiles” that have been developed recently by researchers at the University of Tromsø. These methods are based on the observation that there is a strong correlation between semantic and distributional properties of linguistic units. This book discusses grammatical, semantic, constructional, collostructional and diachronic profiles. Linguistic profiles as a group of methods are based on recent developments in the area of cognitive and functional linguistics: 1) form in language always has a relation to meaning, 2) a categorical approach to language is replaced with an understanding of language as a gradient phenomenon, which is investigated via statistics, 3) grammar is seen as a usage-based phenomenon. Throughout the book we see that each of the profiles determines a correlation between certain forms and certain meanings. By studying the distribution of different forms we can uncover the semantic restrictions standing behind them.
Displacement is a fundamental property of human language, and the restrictions on displacement have been a central concern in generative grammar ever since Ross' (1967) ground-breaking observations of island constraints. While island phenomena have been investigated in detail from various perspectives, a different domain, the domain of Freezing, originally defined in terms of non-base structures, has received far less attention. This volume brings together papers that address the questions of: What are the different concepts of Freezing? Which empirical domains can they explain? Is Freezing a core-syntactic restriction or does information structure, or processing play a role? The collection ...
The concept of ‘negative concord’ refers to the seemingly multiple exponence of semantically single negation as in You ain’t seen nothing yet. This book takes stock of what has been achieved since the notion was introduced in 1922 by Otto Jespersen and sets the agenda for future research, with an eye towards increased cross-fertilization between theoretical perspectives and methodological tools. Major issues include (i) How can formal and typological approaches complement each other in uncovering and accounting for cross-linguistic variation? (ii) How can corpus work steer theoretical analyses? (iii) What is the contribution of diachronic research to the theoretical debates?