Endoclitics and the Origins of Udi Morphosyntax (Oxford Linguistics)

This book provides a description and analysis of a phenomenon that appears to be unique among languages that have been brought to the attention of linguists, namely the possibility of small words occurring inside other words. Examination of this is important because it helps us to understand what a word is from a cross-linguistic point of view. The second part of the book shows how Udi came to be so different from other languages, and how in this sense it explains the phenomenon.

Arabic Second Language Acquisition of Morphosyntax

While the demand for Arabic classes and preparation programs for Arabic language teachers has increased, there is a notable gap in the field of linguistic research on learning Arabic as a second language. Arabic Second Language Acquisition of Morphosyntax presents a data-driven and systematic analysis of Arabic language acquisition that responds to this growing need.

Based on large data samples collected from longitudinal and cross-sectional studies, this book explores a broad range of structures and acquisition issues. It also introduces new and comprehensive research, and it documents the successes and problems that native speakers of other languages, including English, Spanish, French, and Japanese, are likely to encounter in learning Arabic.



By integrating previously published findings with new research, the author has created a unified and streamlined resource for teachers, teachers-in-training, linguists, Arabic textbook authors, and second-language acquisition experts.

Early Communication Skills for Children With Down Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals (Paperback)

Written for both parents and professional caretakers, Early Communication Skills For Children With Down Syndrome by Libby Kumin (who has 23 years of experience in working with children with Down syndrome) is very highly recommended as an informational resource by parents, caretakers, teachers, and anyone else charged with the responsibility of dealing with Down Syndrome children. With a focus on speech and language development, through the stage of making 3-word phrases, Early Communication Skills For Children With Down syndrome offers in-depth insight, home communication activities, ways to help one's child learn basic rules of conduct, and much more. An excellent instructional resource, Early Communication Skills For Children With Down Syndrome is a welcome and necessary addition to institutional speech pathology and Special Education resource and reference collections.

The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (Paperback)

More than anything else, I came away from The First Word thinking that linguists love to argue. In fact, every few pages I found myself arguing with author Christine Kenneally and I'm not even a linguist. I disagreed with much of the book and wanted more evidence for many of her arguments. But when I find myself thinking about a book this much and discussing it with people at length, I have to give it five stars.

The subject is the origin of human language. How did it start? Obviously there's no way of knowing, but that doesn't (nor should it) keep linguists from looking for the answer. Since no one can prove or disprove any of the theories about language origin, it's a free-for-all. Linguists seem to enjoy knocking their colleagues' theories even more than they enjoy defending their own theories.

Kenneally is mostly even-handed in her presentation of the many interesting theories currently in debate. However, she chides Martin Gardner for a 1980 article he wrote debunking experiments claiming to have taught chimps, apes, and dolphins human language. Gardner acknowledged the popularity of such experiments, especially when they featured an attractive blonde scientist teaching an ape (evoking Beauty and the Beast) to "talk." Kenneally suspects that no one writes of Chomsky or other male scientists by describing their hair or appearance. Yet Kenneally thinks nothing of mentioning Steven Pinker's "flop of curls" or that Stephen Jay Gould is "short and remarkably loud."

Many of the theories about language origin seem to rest on isolated cases. Linguists cite the case of Genie, a girl who was raised by people who didn't speak to her. She didn't learn to speak and when she was removed from the abusive environment as a teenager, she couldn't learn to speak. It is difficult to draw valid conclusions from a few psychologically scarred individuals.

Kenneally is a linguist and also a journalist, so she is able to condense and present these complex ideas to people who have no background in linguistics but who are interested in it anyway. Sometimes the going gets a little tough, but there are some amusing asides to ease the way, such as the story of what happened when two gorillas who had learned sign language got together and had a sign language shouting match.

It's obvious that there's a lot more that we don't know about language origin and less that we do know. Only twenty or thirty years ago anthropologists were listing the attributes that make us human. Opposable thumbs, using tools, making tools, language, self-awareness. Point by point, evidence has shown that we are not unique, at least not in the ways we had defined ourselves. The same thing has happened with our arguments for why we speak but other animals don't: the descended larynx, the bigger brain, more complex thoughts, a greater need to communicate. Maybe we should stop trying to teach dolphins and apes to use human language and try to communicate with dolphins and apes in their language. We might learn something.

In any case The First Word is a great introduction and a tidy summary of the debate on language origin as it stands today. But read it soon because the evidence and theories are bound to change quickly.

Syntactic Wordclass Tagging (Text, Speech and Language Technology) (Hardcover)

Description
This book provides an in-depth discussion of the field of syntactic wordclass tagging, i.e. the annotation of the words in a text with tags indicating their syntactic properties. Represented are the viewpoints of the two main groups who take an interest in tagging: the users of tagged text and the developers of tagging software.
The book starts out by examining the field foremost from the user's point of view. After a brief historical overview, the nature and uses of tagging are discussed and current practice is described. Here the user will find what tagging is and the software developer what it is the user wants.
The book then switches to the other point of view and continues with a detailed explanation of the most common computational techniques for automatically tagging large amounts of text. Here the software developer finds information needed for the implementation of a tagger while the user gains insight into the possibilities and impossibilities of automatic tagging and how computer-provided tags should be interpreted.

Book Info
Provides an in-depth discussion of the field of syntactic wordclass tagging. Presents the viewpoint of two main groups who take an interest in tagging: the users of tagged text and the developers of tagging software.

XO: A Theory of the Morphology-Syntax Interface (Linguistics Inquiry Monographs) (Hardcover)

Description
This important monograph offers a resolution to the debate in theoretical linguistics over the role of syntactic head movement in word formation. It does so by synthesizing the syntactic and lexicalist approaches on the basis of the empirical data that support each side. In trying to determine how a morphologically complex word is formed in Universal Grammar, generative linguists have argued either that a substantial amount of morphological phenomena result from head movement in overt syntax (the widely adopted syntactic approach) or that morphological/lexical means are both necessary and sufficient for a theory of word formation (the Lexicalist Hypothesis). Li examines both the linguistic facts that are brought to light for the first time and the existing data in the literature and shows that each side has an empirical foundation that cannot be negated by the other. Since neither approach is adequate to explain all the facts of word formation, he argues, the way to achieve a unified account lies in synthesizing the empirically advantageous portions of both approaches into one simple and coherent theory.

Li begins by demonstrating how a theory that combines the essence of the syntactic and lexicalist approaches can account more accurately for the various morphological constructions analyzed in the literature by means of syntactic verb incorporation. He then examines causativization on the adjectival root, noun incorporation in polysynthetic languages, and the possibility that the word formation part of the Lexicalist Hypothesis -- which is crucial to his theory -- can be derived as a theorem from a version of the X-bar theory. He concludes by discussing methodological issues in current linguistic research.

About the Author
Yafei Li is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Morphosyntactic Change: Functional and Formal Perspectives (Oxford Surveys in Syntax and Morphology) (Paperback)

Description
Olga Fischer presents a critical analysis of morphosyntactic change and the mechanisms that trigger it. She shows how changes in discourse, lexicon, semantics, pragmatics, and sound interact with changes in morphosyntax, and considers the interface between the internal and external factors of change. She reveals how rates and speed of change in morphosyntax can be used to explore the degree to which grammar is innate or learned. Her book will be of central interest and value to students of linguistic change, at graduate level and above.

About the Author

Olga Fischer is Professor of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, where her PhD thesis Syntactic Change and Causation: Developments in Infinitival Constructions in English was accepted in 1990. She is a contributor to the Cambridge History of the English Language (CUP 1992), co-author of The Syntax of Early English (CUP 2000), and co-editor of Form Miming Meaning and Pathways of Change (Benjamins 2000 and 2001).

The Syntax-Morphology Interface: A Study of Syncretism (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics) (Hardcover)

Description
Syncretism--where a single form serves two or more morphosyntactic functions--is a persistent problem at the syntax-morphology interface. It results from a 'mismatch', whereby the syntax of a language makes a particular distinction, but the morphology does not. This pioneering book provides the first full-length study of inflectional syncretism, presenting a typology of its occurrence across a wide range of languages. It will be welcomed by linguists interested in the relation between words and the larger units of which they are a par

The Acquisition of Spanish Morphosyntax: The L1/L2 Connection (Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics) (Hardcover)

Description
Recent developments in linguistic theory, as well as the growing body of evidence from languages other than English, provide new opportunities for deeper explorations into how language is represented in the mind of learners. This collection of new empirical studies on the acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax by leading researchers in the field of language acquisition, specifically contributes to the characterization of the L1 / L2 connection in acquisition. Using L1 and L2 Spanish data from children and adults, the authors seek to address the central questions that have occupied developmental psycholinguists in the final decades of the previous century and that will no doubt continue engaging them into the present one.

Book Info
Investigates both the mental representations that can account for optionality as a trait of emergent grammars, role of morphology as a trigger for the acquisition of syntax across a variety of aspects of the developing grammar.

- Endoclitics and the Origins of Udi Morphosyntax (Oxford Linguistics) (Hardcover)

Description
This book provides a description and analysis of a phenomenon that appears to be unique among languages that have been brought to the attention of linguists, namely the possibility of small words occurring inside other words. Examination of this is important because it helps us to understand what a word is from a cross-linguistic point of view. The second part of the book shows how Udi came to be so different from other languages, and how in this sense it explains the phenomenon.

- Morphosyntax of Verb Movement: A Minimalist Approach to the Syntax of Dutch (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory) (Hardcover)

Description
Morphosyntax of Verb Movement discusses the phenomenon of Dutch, present in many Germanic languages, that the finite verb is fronted in main clauses but not in embedded clauses. The theoretical framework adopted is the so-called Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1995), the latest developmental stage of generative grammar. Taking issue with previous analyses, the author argues that phrase structure in Dutch is uniformly head initial, and that the finite verb moves to different positions in subject initial main clauses and in inversion constructions.
The book contains lucid and detailed discussion of many theoretical issues in connection with the Minimalist Program, such as the relation between syntax and morphology, the nature of syntactic licensing, and the structure of the functional domain. At the same time, it offers a survey of the properties of Dutch syntax, a discussion of previous analyses of Dutch syntax and a wealth of material from dialects of Dutch and other Germanic languages.

- Nuuchahnulth (Nootka) Morphosyntax (Paperback)

Description
This volume describes aspects of word- and sentence-formation in Nuuchahnulth (formerly known as Nootka), a language spoken on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Aspects included are polysynthetic word formation, word classes, and clause structure. The morphosyntactic regularities are examined in the context of general structural characteristics of the language in an attempt to contribute to the language an internally and typologically accurate understanding of Nuuchahnulth morphosyntactic structures.

- Roots and Patterns: Hebrew Morpho-syntax (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory) (Paperback)

Description

This book is simultaneously a theoretical study in morphosyntax and an in-depth empirical study of Hebrew. Based on Hebrew data, the book defends the status of the root as a lexical and phonological unit and argues that roots, rather than verbs or nouns, are the primitives of word formation. A central claim made throughout the book is the role of locality in word formation, teasing apart word formation from roots and word formation from existing words syntactically, semantically and phonologically.

The book focuses on Hebrew, a language with rich verb morphology, where both roots and noun- and verb-creating morphology are morphologically transparent. The study of Hebrew verbs is based on a corpus of all Hebrew verb-creating roots, offering, for the first time, a survey of the full array of morpho-syntactic forms seen in the Hebrew verb.

While the focus of this study is on how roots function in word-formation, a central chapter studies the information encoded by the Hebrew root, arguing for a special kind of open-ended value, bounded within the classes of meaning analyzed by lexical semanticists.

The book is of wide interest to students of many branches of linguistics, including morphology, syntax and lexical semantics, as well as of to students Semitic languages.

Balkan Sprachbund Morpho-Syntactic Features (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory)

Description

This book discusses the morpho-syntactic Balkan Sprachbund features in nine languages in which they are most numerous. It contains a wealth of Balkan linguistic material, collected from both the existing literature sources and from the authors own field work. Rather than making parallel lists of convergent phenomena, the author focuses on displaying similarities and differences in the representation of the most widely acknowledged Balkan Sprachbund morpho-syntactic features and their interaction with other features in the structure of the DP or the sentence of individual languages. The book stands at the intersection of traditional and formal linguistics. The use of a minimally technical terminology allows for a cross-framework accessibility of the data.

The book will be of interest to researchers and students working in the fields of comparative linguistics and Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Megle-no-Romanian, Aromanian, Albanian, Modern Greek and Balkan Romani languages.

Morphosyntactic Issues in Second Language Acquisition (Hardcover)

Description
This volume presents a selection of second language acquisition studies at the level of morphosyntax. It looks at different aspects of morphosyntactic development of bilingual language learners/users such as language transfer, syntactic processing, morphology and the pragmatics of language among others. The studies report on projects carried out in different language contact contexts, ranging from: English, German, Polish, Greek and Turkish. The volume also includes those studies which show the interface between research findings and pedagogy of foreign language teaching.

Morphosyntactic Expression in Functional Grammar (Functional Grammar Series) (Functional Grammar Series)

Description
Morphological and syntactic issues have received relatively little attention in Functional Grammar, due to the fact that this grammatical model, given its functional orientation, was primarily concerned with developing its pragmatic and semantic components. Now that these have been solidly developed, this book turns to the further development of the syntactic and morphological components of the model. Two recent developments receive pride of place: Bakker's Dynamic Expression Model and Hengeveld and Mackenzie's Functional Discourse Grammar. The first model aims at accounting for the complex interactions that one finds in many languages between the sets of expression rules that have to account for form on the one hand and those that establish order on the other. The second model takes a further step by considering morphosyntactic and phonological representations to be part of the underlying structure of the grammar rather than as the output of that grammar, contrary to the original assumptions in FG. The book accordingly contains synopses of these two proposals as well as applications of these to a variety of linguistic phenomena. Further articles provide detailed analyses of a range of semantic and pragmatic categories and their morphosyntactic expression in a wide variety of languages. The articles in this book contain data on some 60 different languages, including focused articles on phenomena in Arabic, Danish, English, Lengua de Señas Española, Mapudungun, Plains Cree, and Tanggu. In all, the contributions to this volume show that the issue of morphosyntactic expression in Functional Grammar is very much alive and moving into promising new directions, while at the same time contributing to a better understanding of a large number of morphosyntactic phenomena in a wide variety of languages.

Morphosyntactic Persistence in Spoken English: A Corpus Study at the Intersection of Variationist Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, and ..........

Description
Language users are creatures of habit with a tendency to re-use morphosyntactic material that they have produced or heard before. In other words, linguistic patterns and tokens, once used, persist in discourse. The present book is the first large-scale corpus analysis to explore the determinants of this persistence, drawing on regression analyses of a variety of functional, discourse-functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and external factors. The case studies investigated include the alternation between synthetic and analytic comparatives, between the s-genitive and the of-genitive, between gerundial and infinitival complementation, particle placement, and future marker choice in a number of corpora sampling different spoken registers and geographical varieties of English. Providing a probabilistic framework for examining the ways in which persistence - among several other internal and external factors - influences speakers' linguistic choices, the book departs from most writings in the field in that it seeks to bridge several research traditions. While it is concerned, in a classically variationist spirit, with internal and external determinants of grammatical variation in English, it also draws heavily on ideas and evidence developed by psycholinguists and discourse analysts. In seeking to construct a comprehensive model of how speakers make linguistic choices, the study ultimately contributes to a theory of how spoken language works. The book is of interest to graduate students and researchers in variationist sociolinguistics, probabilistic linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.

Variation and Morphosyntactic Change in Greek: From Clitics to Affixes (Palgrave Studies in Language History and Language Change) (Hardcover)

Description
This book deals with some of the major theoretical and descriptive concerns of the historical linguist. The author presents a variationist analysis of weak object pronoun placement in Greek during a transitional period of the language when these elements exhibited both clitic-like and affix-like behavior. The statistical analysis of the data, providing the first accurate description of the pattern of variation, is used in showing that existing accounts fall short of a full explanation. An alternative approach forces re-evaluation of the role of generalizations in linguistic explanation.

The present study deals with morphosyntactic variation in the late Middle English Paston letters.

Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Olga Fischer presents a critical analysis of morphosyntactic change and the mechanisms that trigger it. She shows how changes in discourse, lexicon, semantics, pragmatics, and sound interact with changes in morphosyntax, and considers the interface between the internal and external factors of change. She reveals how rates and speed of change in morphosyntax can be used to explore the degree to which grammar is innate or learned. Her book will be of central interest and value to students of linguistic change, at graduate level and above.

About the Author

Olga Fischer is Professor of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, where her PhD thesis Syntactic Change and Causation: Developments in Infinitival Constructions in English was accepted in 1990. She is a contributor to the Cambridge History of the English Language (CUP 1992), co-author of The Syntax of Early English (CUP 2000), and co-editor of Form Miming Meaning and Pathways of Change (Benjamins 2000 and 2001).

Social Networks And Historical Sociolinguistics: Studies In Morphosyntactic Variation In The Paston Letters (1421-1503) (Topics in English Linguistics

This is the first page of introduction.
The present study deals with morphosyntactic variation in the late Middle English Paston letters. The three central linguistic variables are the third person plural pronouns, relativization patterns, and light verb constructions. This study is basically couched in the framework of historical socio-linguistics, and in particular social networl analysis. .......