Books in the Cambridge Studies in Linguistics series

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.

A brilliant analysis of colloquial English, both its syntax and its variations, using novel data from live, unscripted radio and TV broadcasts and the internet.

Henry Smith develops a theory of syntactic case and examines its synchronic and diachronic consequences. Within a unification-based framework, the book draws out pervasive patterns in the relationship between morphosyntax 'linking' and grammatical function, with an examination of a wide array of synchronic and diachronic data.

A great deal of the grammatical machinery in a language is devoted to the speaker's ability to signal the temporal relations between different events and different people making it clear who is being talked about. Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar explores how different grammatical systems accomplish this.

Of interest to German, Dutch, Frisian, English, and Scandinavian linguists, and also those in general historical linguistics, phonology, and Indo-European, this book examines the relationship between three major quantity changes in the history of the Germanic language group: consonant lengthening, vowel lengthening, and consonant weakening, highlighting the role of syllable structure.

The first book to consider all components of verbal transitivity and their development in child language acquisition. Ideal for advanced readers in language acquisition and syntactic theory, it demonstrates for non-specialist readers the intricacies of verbal transitivity, and how children rely on structural, lexical and pragmatic knowledge to unravel the system.

This volume breaks new ground in syntax by arguing for a 'top-down' approach to syntactic structures, and the locality restrictions on filler-gap dependencies. Written by a leading scholar in theoretical linguistics, it represents the first book-length study on the subject and paves the way for important future research.

Inflectional morphology plays a paradoxical role in language. On the one hand it tells us useful things, for example that a noun is plural or a verb is in the past tense. On the other hand many languages get along perfectly well without it, so the baroquely ornamented forms we sometimes find come across as a gratuitous over-elaboration. This is especially apparent where the morphological structures operate at cross purposes to the general systems of meaning and function that govern a language, yielding inflection classes and arbitrarily configured paradigms. This is what we call morphological complexity. Manipulating the forms of words requires learning a whole new system of structures and relationships. This book confronts the typological challenge of characterising the wildly diverse sorts of morphological complexity we find in the languages of the world, offering both a unified descriptive framework and quantitative measures that can be applied to such heterogeneous systems.