Bøker i Bloomsbury Studies in Theoretical Linguistics-serien

Alan Brazil's pioneering work on the grammar of spoken discourse ended at "A Grammar Of Speech" (1995) due to his untimely death. In this title, the author picks up the baton and tests the description of used language against a conversational corpus. It is of interest to researchers in applied linguistics, discourse analysis and also EFL/ESL.

Taking as a point of departure ideas and principles from the 18th century Danish tradition, and from 20th century traditions of the Copenhagen School of linguistics, this book attempts to set up a formal theory of syntax that addresses some of the weak points of Chomskyan grammar.

This book discusses existential and possessive constructions in two important, yet under-studied, language families, Slavic and Finno-Ugric. Using data from the Slavic languages of Polish, Belarusian and Russian, and the Finno-Ugric languages of Finnish, Hungarian, Meadow Mari, Komi-Permiyak and Udmurt, as well as the closely related Selkup of the Samoyedic family, the chapters in this volume analyse predicative possession in current syntactic terms. Seeking an answer to the theoretical question of whether BE-possessives and HAVE-possessives are just accidental values of the 'Possessive Parameter' or are intrinsically related, this book takes a comparative approach to a whole range of syntactic and semantic phenomena that appear in these constructions, including the definiteness restriction, genitive of negation, person/number agreement, argument structure and extractability. The individual case studies can be easily integrated into the Principles & Parameters framework in terms of parametric variation. Approaches to Predicative Possession is an important contribution to our understanding of predicative possession across languages, with findings that can be fruitfully extended to other language families. It is an equally useful source of information for theoretical linguists, typologists, and graduate students of linguistics.

Proposes robust onomasiological semantic formalism and applies it to a wide variety of linguistic phenomena.

Presents a study of various important aspects of Tamazight Berber syntax within the generative tradition. The author looks at three seemingly disparate ranges of syntactic phenomena, namely Subject-verb agreement, Clitic-doubling, and Negative Concord.