Bøker i Cambridge Studies in Linguistics-serien

In studying discourse, the problem for the linguist is to find a fruitful level of analysis. Carlota Smith offers a new approach with this study of discourse passages. She introduces the key idea of the 'Discourse Mode', identifying five modes and analyzing the properties that distinguish each mode.

In this book, first published in 1975, Dr Kempson argues that previous work on presupposition has been mistakenly based on a conflation of two different disciplines: semantics, the study of the meanings assigned to the formal system which constitutes a language, and pragmatics, the study of the use of that system in communication.

The Movement Theory of Control (MTC) makes one major claim: that control relations in sentences like 'John wants to leave' are grammatically mediated by movement. This book presents the main arguments for and against MTC and shows it to have many theoretical advantages.

Originally published in 1972, this was the most thorough discussion of morphological theory to appear in recent years, and one of the few to be based directly on an 'inflecting' or 'fusional' language - in this case Latin. The book is addressed to theoretical and descriptive linguists in general and no knowledge of Latin is assumed.

Professor Dixon examines the grammar of Yidin, an Australian dying language, through phonology, syntax and of a 'mixed ergative' type that cannot easily be accommodated in terms of standard syntactic theory.

David Crystal OBE provides the reader with a thorough and fascinating analysis of the patterns of intonation and prosody found within the English language. He begins by contextualising his work on prosody within existing studies, before going on to discuss voice quality and sound attributes in prosodic systems.

Originally published in 1979, this volume was the first to attempt to apply the principles of social linguistics within a British urban community. Particularly influenced by the ideas of William Labov, it puts forward the view that linguistic expression in Norwich is intimately linked to the process of social stratification.

This book, first published in 1975, examines the natural language numeral systems through generative grammar and gives specific examples with English, French, Mixtec, Hawaiian, Danish, Welsh and Yoruba languages. The book is primarily intended for linguists, but is accessible also to anthropologists and mathematicians.

This book proposes an intriguing theory of argument structure. Babby puts forward the theory that this set of arguments (the verb's 'argument structure') has a universal hierarchical composition which directly determines the sentence's case and grammatical relations.

Linguists researching the sounds of languages do not just study lists of sounds but seek to discover generalizations about sound patterns by grouping them into categories. They study the common properties of each category and identify what distinguishes one category from another. Vowel patterns, for instance, are analysed and compared across languages to identify phonological similarities and differences. This account of vowel patterns in language brings a wealth of cross-linguistic material to the study of vowel systems and offers theoretical insights. Informed by research in speech perception and production, it addresses the fundamental question of how the relative prominence of word position influences vowel processes and distributions. The book combines a cross-linguistic focus with detailed case studies. Descriptions and analyses are provided for vowel patterns in over 25 languages from around the world, with particular emphasis on minor Romance languages and on the diachronic development of the German umlaut.

Grammatical categories (e.g. complementizer, negation, auxiliary, case) are some of the most important building blocks of syntax and morphology. This is a study of grammatical categories, drawing on an unusually large amount of original dialect data.

In many languages, the objects of transitive verbs are either marked by grammatical case or agreement on the verb, or they remain unmarked. This book is a cross-linguistic study of how object marking is affected by information structure, the grammatical structuring of the utterance in accordance with context.

What is the nature of syntactic structure? Why do some languages have radically free word order ('nonconfigurationality')? Do parameters vary independently (the micro-view) or can they co-vary en masse (the macro-view)? Mirrors and Microparameters examines these questions by looking beyond the definitional criterion of nonconfigurationality - that arguments may be freely ordered, omitted, and split. Drawing on data from Kiowa, a member of the largely undescribed Kiowa-Tanoan language family, the book reveals that classically nonconfigurational languages can nonetheless exhibit robustly configurational effects. Reconciling the cooccurrence of such freedom with such rigidity has major implications for the Principles and Parameters program. This approach to nonconfigurational languages challenges widespread assumptions of linguistic theory and throws light on the syntactic structures, ordering principles, and nature of parametrization that comprise Universal Grammar.

Jerrold Sadock develops his influential theory of grammar, formalizing several generative modules that independently characterize the levels of syntax, semantics, role structure, morphology and linear order. The modules are simple enough to be cast as phrase structure grammars and make descriptions of grammatical phenomena more explicit than other studies.

Particle verbs (combinations of two words but lexical units) are a notorious problem in linguistics. Is a particle verb like look up one word or two? It has its own entry in dictionaries, as if it is one word, but look and up can be split up in a sentence: we can say He looked the information up and He looked up the information. But why can't we say He looked up it? In English look and up can only be separated by a direct object, but in Dutch the two parts can be separated over a much longer distance. How did such hybrid verbs arise and how do they function? How can we make sense of them in modern theories of language structure? This book sets out to answer these and other questions, explaining how these verbs fit into the grammatical systems of English and Dutch.

Using the examples of English and Mandarin Chinese, Crain demonstrates that the underlying expressions and structures in these typologically different languages directly correlate to those of classical logic. Moreover Crain presents experimental data which shows the emergence of these concepts in the languages spoken by young children.

In this illuminating new theory of grammar, Hubert Haider explores the basic asymmetry in the phrase structure of any language, whatever sentence structure it takes. He identifies a new third type of sentence structure, in addition to object-verb (OV) and verb-object (VO), and uses it to explore the cognitive evolution of grammar.

Niina Ning Zhang addresses the issues raised by coordinate pairings and the implications for syntax within English and Chinese. The volume covers some major questions regarding coordinates in syntactic theory and practice, providing a fresh perspective on arguments raised within previous literature.

This book surveys a wide variety of polarity items, both negative and positive, commonly found in English and other languages to show that grammatical sensitivities arise regularly and only in semantic domains which are inherently scalar.

The null subject has always been central to linguistic theory, because it tells us a great deal about the underlying structure of language in the human brain, and about the interface between syntax and semantics. Null subjects exist in languages such as Italian, Chinese, Russian and Greek where the subject of a sentence can be tacitly implied, and is understood from the context. In this systematic overview of null subjects, Jose A. Camacho reviews the key notions of null subject analyses over the past thirty years and encompasses the most recent findings and developments. He examines a balance of data on a range of languages with null subjects and also explores how adults and children acquire the properties of null subjects. This book provides an accessible and original account of null subject phenomena, ideal for graduate students and academic researchers interested in syntax, semantics and language typology.

In this radically new approach to morphological typology, the authors set out new and explicit methods for the typological classification of languages. Drawing on evidence from a diverse range of languages, they propose innovative ways of measuring inflectional complexity.

In this book Bruce Tesar, one of the founders of the study of learnability in Optimality Theory, presents the theory of output-driven maps and provides a fresh perspective on the extent to which phonologies can be characterized in terms of restrictions on outputs.

This book explains how children's early ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns helps them acquire complex sentence structure. The theoretical claims of the book expand the well-known hypotheses of syntactic and semantic bootstrapping, resulting in greater coverage of the core principles of language acquisition.

This evaluation of Chomsky's work from the perspectives of linguistics, evolution of language, history of physics, and philosophy of mind is interdisciplinary. It encourages linguists to reflect on the foundations of their discipline, and invites non-linguists to appreciate the complexity of human language and its place in the world.

In Case, Mark Baker develops a unified theory of how the morphological case marking of noun phrases is determined by syntactic structure. Designed to work well for languages of all alignment types - accusative, ergative, tripartite, marked nominative, or marked absolutive - this theory has been developed and tested against unrelated languages of each type, and more than twenty non-Indo-European languages are considered in depth. While affirming that case can be assigned to noun phrases by function words under agreement, the theory also develops in detail a second mode of case assignment: so-called dependent case. Suitable for academic researchers and students, the book employs formal-generative concepts yet remains clear and accessible for a general linguistics readership.

Sometimes dismissed as linguistically epiphenomenal, inflectional paradigms are, in reality, the interface of a language's morphology with its syntax and semantics. Drawing on abundant linguistic evidence, Stump develops a new theoretical framework to explicate the centrality of paradigms in resolving the frequent and varied mismatches between words' form and content.

English Nouns explores the mechanisms by which English nominalizations come to have a variety of readings depending on their syntactic context. It debunks previous syntactic treatments using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008) and proposes a lexical semantic analysis within Lieber's Lexical Semantic Framework (2004).

Prosody in English, German and Chinese is outlined as a principal component of linguistic form for communicative functions in speech interaction.

Are compounds words or phrases, neither or both? How should we classify compounds? Are compounds a linguistic universal? Why do we need compounds, when there are other ways of creating the same meanings? Based on over forty years' research, this controversial new book aims to answer these and other questions.

A pioneering introduction to heritage languages that covers all the main components of grammar and shows easy familiarity with approaches ranging from formal grammar to typology, and from sociolinguistics to psycholinguistics. Written by a leading scholar in the study of heritage languages, it is the foundational book on the subject.