Forty-one papers from the 1991 West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics are included. The papers deal with diverse topics ranging from the traditional linguistic fields of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics to the rapidly developing areas of cognitive and discourse linguistics.
This volume contains 52 of the 59 papers from the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 27), which was held at the University of California, Los Angeles on May 16-18, 2008. The authors present new work in syntax, semantics, morphology, and phonology. The proceedings includes Elliott Moreton's plenary paper, "Modelling Modularity Bias in Phonological Pattern Learning."
This book brings together research on the topic of causation from experts in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. It draws on data from a wide range of languages and seeks to arrive at a more sophisticated understanding of how causal concepts are expressed in causal meanings, and how those meanings are organized into structures.
This volume is the first to focus specifically on experimental studies of the semantics of gradability, scale structure and vagueness. It presents support for and challenges to current formal analyses of these phenomena in view of experimentally collected data, highlighting the ways semantic and pragmatic theory can benefit from experimental methodologies. The papers in the volume contribute to an explicit and detailed account of the use, representation, and online processing of gradable and vague expressions using various kinds of controlled speaker judgment tasks, eye tracking, and ERP. The aim is to strengthen the foundations of experimental semantics and promote interaction between linguists, psycholinguists, psychologists, and philosophers who are interested in the semantics of natural language. Using data representing different languages and a variety of nominal and adjectival constructions, including degree modification and comparatives, the contributions address scale-based classifications of gradable predicates, such as the absolute vs. relative distinction; the nature of the standards for applicability of gradable expressions and the ways in which standards are determined; the nature of dimensions and multidimensionality in the meaning of scalar expressions; and the role of embodiment, subjectivity, and sociolinguistic considerations in the use and understanding of gradable expressions.
This handbook is the first volume to provide a comprehensive, in-depth, and balanced discussion of ellipsis, a phenomena whereby expressions in natural language appear to be incomplete but are still understood. It explores fundamental questions about the workings of grammar and provides detailed case studies of inter- and intralinguistic variation.
This book examines the Romanian mihi est construction (Mi-e foame/frică, me.dat = is hunger/fear ‘I am hungry/ afraid’). While it disappeared from all other Romance languages to be replaced with a habeo structure, the mihi est pattern is in Romanian the most common way of expressing psychological or physiological states. By means of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, the book investigates the status of the core arguments of the mihi est structure, i.e. the dative experiencer and the nominative state noun, as well as its evolution throughout the centuries. The data analysis reveals that the dative experiencer syntactically behaves like nominative subjects, whereas the state noun shows predicate behavior. As for the evolution of the mihi est structure, the analysis shows a certain tendency toward innovation, since in present-day Romanian it can coerce nouns coming from other semantic fields into the construction’s psychological or physiological interpretation. Could this be another unique trait of Romanian, which causes it to seemingly go against the tendency of most Romance languages toward canonical marking of core arguments?
