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The Evolution of Grammar
Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is...
194X
During the Second World War, American architecture was in a state of crisis. The rationing of building materials and restrictions on nonmilitary construction continued the privations that the profession had endured during the Great Depression. At the same time, the dramatic events of the 1930s and 1940s led many architects to believe that their profession--and society itself--would undergo a profound shift once the war ended, with private commissions giving way to centrally planned projects. The magazine Architectural Forum coined the term "194X" to encapsulate this wartime vision of postwar architecture and urbanism. In a major study of American architecture during World War II, Andrew M. S...
The Establishment of Modern Chinese Grammar
This book investigates historical motivations for the emergence of the resultative construction in Chinese from the following four aspects: (a) disyllabification, (b)adjacent context, (c) semantic integrity, and (d) frequency of co-occurence of a pair of verb and resultative. The author also addresses a series of grammatical changes and innovations caused by the formation of this resultative construction, such as the development of aspect, mood, verb reduplication, the new predicate structure, the disposal construction, the passive construction, the verb copying construction, and the new topicalization construction, all of which together shape the grammatical system of Modern Chinese. The present analysis raises and discusses a number of theoretical issues that are meaningful to various linguistic disciplines like pragmatics, discourse analysis, grammaticalization, and general historical linguistics.
ModalityAspect Interfaces
The main topics pursued in this volume are based on empirical insights derived from Germanic: logical and typological dispositions about aspect-modality links. These are probed in a variety of non-related languages. The logically establishable links are the following: Modal verbs are aspect sensitive in the selection of their infinitival complements – embedded infinitival perfectivity implies root modal reading, whereas embedded infinitival imperfectivity triggers epistemic readings. However, in marked contexts such as negated ones, the aspectual affinities of modal verbs are neutralized or even subject to markedness inversion. All of this suggests that languages that do not, or only partially, bestow upon full modal verb paradigms seek to express modal variations in terms of their aspect oppositions. This typological tenet is investigated in a variety of languages from Indo-European (German, Slavic, Armenian), African, Asian, Amerindian, and Creoles. Seeming deviations and idiosyncrasies in the interaction between aspect and modality turn out to be highly rule-based.
Morphology
This is a textbook right in the thick of current interest in morphology. It proposes principles to predict properties previously considered arbitrary and brings together the psychological and the diachronic to explain the recurrent properties of morphological systems in terms of the processes that create them. For the student, the clear discussion of morphology and morphophonemics and the rich variety of data brought in on the way to the theoretical conclusion is material for a direct learning experience.
The Grammar of Space
A cross-linguistic study of grammatical morphemes expressing spatial relationships that discusses the relationship between the way human beings experience space and the way it is encoded grammatically in language. The discussion of the similarities and differences among languages in the encoding and expression of spatial relations centers around the emergence and evolution of spatial grams, and the semantic and morphosyntactic characteristics of two types of spatial grams. The author bases her observations on the study of data from 26 genetically unrelated and randomly selected languages. It is shown that languages are similar in the way spatial grams emerge and evolve, and also in the way specific types of spatial grams are used to express not only spatial but also temporal and other non-spatial relations. Motivation for these similarities may lie in the way we, as human beings, experience the world, which is constrained by our physical configuration and neurophysiological apparatus, as well as our individual cultures.
Perspectives on Grammaticalization
This is the second of two volumes deriving from papers presented at the Nineteenth Annual UWM linguistics Symposium held in Milwaukee in 1990. It focuses on the evolution of grammatical form and meaning from lexical material, which has reinvigorated historical analysis and theory and led to advances in the understanding of the relation between diachrony and universals. The richness and potential of some of the leading approaches to grammaticalization are here illustrated in thirteen selected papers.
Functionalist and Usage-based Approaches to the Study of Language
The contributions to this volume honor Joan Bybee’s 2005 LSA Presidential address “Grammar is Usage and Usage is Grammar,” as a cumulative articulation of Professor Bybee's long and influential career in linguistics. The volume begins with a functional examination of child language acquisition of ergative languages. The next three contributions successively investigate the grammaticalization of Greek postural verbs, Spanish third person pronouns, and American Sign Language topicalization constructions. The two following papers report on usage-based phonological studies of Spanish /s/ and /d/, respectively. The book concludes with four papers that address usage-based effects concerning the grammatical status of ain’t in African American English, Spanish verbs of “becoming”, and English lexis and prefabs. This volume will be of interest to a wide audience of functional and cognitive linguistic researchers.
