The Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories presents a collection of articles on all major syntactic theories, current or past, taken from the award-winning Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics.
Provides an introduction to syntactic theory. This book includes theories such as transformational generative grammar, relational grammar, word grammar, functional grammar, and optimality theory. It also includes chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading, exercises, a glossary of terms, and an appendix for analysis or reference.
This is the first exhaustive investigation of gradience in syntax, conceived of as grammatical indeterminacy. It looks at gradience in English word classes, phrases, clauses and constructions, and examines how it may be defined and differentiated. Professor Aarts addresses the tension between linguistic concepts and the continuous phenomena they describe by testing and categorizing grammatical vagueness and indeterminacy. He considers to what extent gradience is a grammatical phenomenon or a by-product of imperfect linguistic description, and makes a series of linked proposals for its theoretical formalization. Bas Aarts draws on, and reviews, work in psychology, philosophy and language from Aristotle to Chomsky., and writes clearly on a fascinating and important aspect of language and cognition. His book will appeal to scholars and graduate students of language and syntactic theory in departments of (English) linguistics, philosophy and cognitive science.
Complementing Brown & Miller's recent Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories (1996), to which this is a companion volume, this encyclopedia is a collection of articles drawn from the highly successful Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. It presents a collection of 79 articles, all of which have been revised and updated. It also provides a number of newly commissioned articles, one of which has been substantially updated and extended. The volume is alphabetically organised and includes an introduction and a glossary. The Concise Encyclopedia of Grammatical Categories will provide a uniquely comprehensive and authoritative overview of the building blocks of syntax: word classes, sentence/clause types, functional categories of the noun and verb, anaphora and pronominalisation, transitivity, topicalisation and work order.
The Linguistics Encyclopedia has been thoroughly revised and updated and a substantial new introduction, which forms a concise history of the field, has been added. The volume offers comprehensive coverage of the major and subsidiary fields of linguistic study. Entries are alphabetically arranged and extensively cross-referenced, and include suggestions for further reading. New entries include: Applied Linguistics; Cognitive Linguistics; Contrastive Linguistics; Cross-Linguistic Study; Forensic Linguistics; Stratificational Linguistics. Recommissioned or substantially revised entries include: Bilingualism and Multilingualism; Discourse; Genre Analysis; Psycholinguistics; Language acquisition; Morphology; Articulatory Phonetics; Grammatical Models and Theories; Stylistics; Sociolinguistics; Critical Discourse Analysis. For anyone with an academic or professional interest in language, The Linguistics Encyclopedia is an indispensable reference tool.
Language is one of our most precious and uniquely human capacities, so it is not surprising that research on its neural substrates has been advancing quite rapidly in recent years. Until now, however, there has not been a single introductory textbook that focuses specifically on this topic. Cognitive Neuroscience of Language fills that gap by providing an up-to-date, wide-ranging, and pedagogically practical survey of the most important developments in the field. It guides students through all of the major areas of investigation, beginning with fundamental aspects of brain structure and function, and then proceeding to cover aphasia syndromes, the perception and production of speech, the processing of language in written and signed modalities, the meanings of words, and the formulation and comprehension of complex expressions, including grammatically inflected words, complete sentences, and entire stories. Drawing heavily on prominent theoretical models, the core chapters illustrate how such frameworks are supported, and sometimes challenged, by experiments employing diverse brain mapping techniques. Although much of the content is inherently challenging and intended primarily for graduate or upper-level undergraduate students, it requires no previous knowledge of either neuroscience or linguistics, defining technical terms and explaining important principles from both disciplines along the way.
This is a general introduction to grammaticalization, the change whereby lexical terms and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions. The authors synthesize work from several areas of linguistics. The second edition has been thoroughly revised with substantial updates on theoretical and methodological issues that have arisen in the decade since the first edition, and includes a significantly expanded bibliography. Particular attention is paid to recent debates over directionality in change and the role of grammaticalization in creolization.
This book presents a novel analysis of the word-order alternation of English transitive phrasal verbs (Particle Movement) from a cognitive-functional and psycholinguistic perspective. Its main objective, however, is a methodological one, namely, to demonstrate the superiority of corpus-based, multifactorial and probabilistic approaches to grammatical phenomena over traditional analyses based on acceptability judgements and minimal pair tests. The advantages resulting from the advocated multifactorial approach to Particle Movement are: Particle Movement can be described at a previously unknown level of detail; all determinants ever proposed to govern the alternation can be integrated into a single hypothesis explaining the alternation; constructions can be compared to each other with respect to their degree of prototypicality and similarity; it is possible to actually predict with a high degree of accuracy which of the two word orders native speakers will subconsciously choose in the natural production of speech and text (thereby passing the most rigorous test conceivable); finally, competing hypotheses can be compared in terms of their predictive power. Apart from these methodological points, the study also addresses the more theoretical and linguistic question of how to explain such results. It is argued that theories of language production that rest on the notion of processing effort are, contrary to some contemporary analysts, not ideally suited to explain such phenomena and that interactive activation models of language production allow for a more elegant interpretation and implementation of the results.
The honoree of this Festschrift has for many years now marked modern trends in diachronic and synchronic linguistics by his own publications and by stimulating those of numerous others. This collection of articles presents data-oriented studies that integrate modern and traditional approaches in the field, thus reflecting the honoree's contribution to contemporary linguistics. The articles relate to comparative data from (early) Indo-European languages and a variety of other languages and discuss the theoretical implications of phenomena such as linguistic universals, reconstruction, and language classification.
The Routledge Linguistics Encyclopedia is a single-volume encyclopedia covering all major and subsidiary areas of linguistics and applied linguistics. The 79 entries provide in-depth coverage of the topics and sub-topics of the field. Entries are alphabetically arranged and extensively cross-referenced so the reader can see how areas interrelate. Including a substantial introduction which provides a potted history of linguistics and suggestions for further reading, this is an indispensable reference tool for specialists and non-specialists alike. This third edition has been thoroughly revised and updated, with new entries on: attitudes to language conversation analysis English Language Teaching gesture and language idioms language and advertising language and new technologies linguistics in schools optimality theory research methods in linguistics slang. The following entries have been recommissioned or substantially revised: Animals and Language, Artificial Languages, Computational Linguistics to Language Engineering, Contrastive Analysis/Contrastive Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Dialectology, Discourse Analysis, Dyslexia, Genre Analysis, Historical Linguistics, Intonation, Language and Education, Language, Gender and Sexuality, Language Origins, Language Surveys, Language Universals, Linguistic Typology, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Rhetoric, Semantics, Semiotics, Sociolinguistics, Stylistics, Systemic-Functional Grammar, Writing Systems.