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This book shows that it is possible to extend research on child language to children's semantic competence, adopting the same theoretical framework that has proven useful to the study of children's syntactic competence.
This book investigates two prominent issues with regard to the inflected infinitive-the syntactic distribution of the Portuguese inflected infinitive, and its origin and development from Early Romance. The syntactic analysis offered here differs from traditional descriptions of the inflected infinitive in that it uses a theoretical approach to propose one concise condition which predicts all possible occurrences of the Portuguese inflected infinitive within the framework of relational grammar. While the first section of this book offers a synchronic study of the use of the inflected infinitive, the second section examines the theories previously posited to explain its origin and provides additional evidence from Latin and other Romance languages to support the proposal that the inflected infinitive was a historical development rooted in the Latin imperfect subjunctive. This study presents a detailed comparison of the syntactic environments common to both the imperfect subjunctive and the inflected infinitive, and examines the survival of an inflected infinitive in other Romance varieties as well as the existence of other inflected non-finite forms in these languages.
As with many other languages, Mandarin Chinese exhibits a rich variety of ways in expressing the arguments of the predicator in a sentence. Unlike other languages, such variation is typically devoid of any formal marking. Previous attempts in explaining such phenomena usually focus on the syntax as an explanatory tool. This book argues that a large majority of such argument structure phenomena are better accounted for by recourse to enriched representations in lexical semantics. Drawing insights from conceptual semantics, cognitive semantics, Generative Lexicon, construction grammar and formal syntax, this book constitutes the first attempt at a comprehensive account of lexical semantic issues in Mandarin Chinese.
This is the very first publication mapping onomatopoeia in the languages of the world. The publication provides a comprehensive, multi-level description of onomatopoeia in the world’s languages. The sample covers six macro-areas defined in the WALS: Euroasia, Africa, South America, North America, Australia, Papunesia. Each language-descriptive chapter specifies phonological, morphological, word-formation, semantic, and syntactic properties of onomatopoeia in the particular language. Furthermore, it provides information about the approach to onomatopoeia in individual linguistic traditions, the sources of data on onomatopoeia, the place and the function of onomatopoeia in the system of each language.
This book is the first detailed investigation and description of phonotactic sound patterns affecting Khoesan click consonant inventories. It also includes the first quantitative study of phonation types in Khoesan languages, and the first study of phonation types associated with pharyngeal consonants all around. Although bases of OCP constraints have been presumed to be perceptual, this is the first quantitative study showing the acoustic basis of a particular OCP constraint in a specific language. Amanda L. Miller-Ockhuizen describes the phonetics and phonology of gutturals in the Khoesan language of Ju|'hoansi. Hers is the first study of voice quality cues associated with epiglottalized v...
This book investigates a number of word order phenomena in Spanish, concentrating on this language's unmarked word order and the perturbations of this order that result from topicalization and wh-movement.
This book analyzes 153 languages from a large variety of families to establish a previously unexplored relationship between phonetically conditioned sound changes such as lenitions and functional (meaning maintenance related) considerations. Carefully collecting numerous inventories of consonants, this collection is likely to become an important resource for future linguistics research. By distinguishing between phonetic and phonological neutralization, and showing that the first does not necessarily result in the second, Naomi Gurevich uncovers previously unexplored and often surprising trends in the relationship between phonetics and phonology.
This volume was originally inspired by a 2017 conference to honour the scholar and linguist Cao Xuân Hạo, whose landmark work – in many diverse areas of language study – established a bridge between traditional Vietnamese scholarship and contemporary theories of grammatical organisation. The book offers the reader a closely edited collection of papers, representing a wide spectrum of frameworks, approaches and methods, from traditional fieldwork studies of non-standard dialects, to corpus-based discussions of language and gender, to formal syntactic and semantic analyses of key functional morphemes, to laboratory experiments, and work in first language acquisition. Many of the papers present detailed analyses of original data, as well as novel treatments of established facts; considered together – as well as in contrast to one another – they make a significant empirical contribution to our understanding of how Vietnamese is structured, acquired and put to use. The papers should be of value to anyone interested in contemporary approaches to Vietnamese linguistics, and Southeast Asian languages more generally.
This books studies syntax of NPIs and their interaction with sentential negatives in Hindi. It outlines the clause structure of Hindi and locates the syntactic position of sentential negatives as well as constituent negatives within the structure. It is argued that sentential negative in Hindi negation marker heads its own maximal projection, NegP, which is immediately dominated by TP. In addition to locating the position of negation markers in the clause structure, it outlines the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) in Hindi and the structural constraints on their licensing by sentential negative. The book argues that an NPI in Hindi is licensed overtly in the course of derivatio...
Miglio argues that to assess the relative markedness of a segment, frequency of occurrence in vowel inventories is insufficient when considered on its own. In its analysis of the Great Vowel Shift, this book elaborates a more useful model of a unitary change even in a surface-oriented theory such as optimality theory, with the help of local conjunction. Miglio extends the device of local conjunction to model opaque relations, and calls for reranking and lexicon optimization as the means to capture change within optimality theory.