Morphosyntactic Alternations In English

This volume brings together fourteen papers which explore the discourse-pragmatic, semantic, morphological and syntactic factors involved in English morphosyntactic alternations. The contributors to this volume deal with different types of "diathesis alternations" --broadly defined by Levin (English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation, 1993) as "alternations in the expressions of arguments, sometimes accompanied by changes of meaning" --i.e. transitivity alternations (such as the causative/inchoative alternation and the conative alternation), alternations involving arguments within the VP (such as the Swarm-alternation, and the dative or benefactive alternations), etc. The volume will also include some contributions dealing more generally with the issues of morphological relatedness and verb-specific alternations within functionalist, cognitive and/or constructionist frameworks. The book features a wide range of theoretical approaches, ranging from functionalist models such as Functional Discourse Grammar or the Cardiff Grammar version of Systemic Functional Linguistics to more cognitively-oriented approaches such as Goldberg's Construction Grammar or Fillmore's Frame Semantics. This attempt to describe morphosyntactic alternations within different contemporary theories¬¬ --derivational and non-derivational-- will hopefully contribute to a better understanding of the linguistic phenomena traditionally subsumed under the rubric of morphosyntactic alternation. The book will be of interest to experienced linguists and researchers of a functionalist, cognitivist or even functional-typological persuasion.

Addresses an issue hotly debated in the linguistic theory: the relation between language usage and language structure

This book presents a critical comparison of the two leading theories of linguistic change. After introducing the aims and methods of historical linguistics, Olga Fischer provides an exposition of the main theories used to describe morphosyntactic change and a full account of the causes and mechanisms by which their leading exponents seek to explain it. She measures the effectiveness of rival theories and methods in different contexts and in the process throws fresh light on the balance of factors influencing linguistic change. Professor Fischer emphazises the unity of form and meaning in the linguistic sign and examines the role played by analogy. She looks at how changes in discourse, lexicon, semantics, pragmatics, and sound interact with changes in morphosyntax, and explores the relationship between external and internal causes of change. She considers whether morphosyntactic change is gradual or abrupt and discusses how far rates of change reflect the degree to which grammar is innate or learned. She uses detailed case studies to illustrate different types of morphosyntactic change, and to show how each theory fares when put into practice. The author's clear style and her balanced approach to this fascinating and complex subject combine to make this a book that will be of central interest and value to scholars and students of linguistic change, at graduate level and above.

This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.

Written for both researchers and advanced students, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the field of Spanish linguistics. Balancing different theoretical perspectives among expert scholars, it provides an in-depth examination of all sub-fields of research in Hispanic linguistics, with a focus on recent advances.

The essays in this volume address a core question regarding the structure of linguistic systems: how much access do the grammatical components - syntax, morphology and phonology - have to each other? The book's fifteen essays make a powerful argument in favor of a particular view of the interaction of these various components, shedding light on the nature of locality domains for allomorph selection, the morphosyntactic properties of the targets of phonological exponence, and adjudicating between competing theories of morphosyntaxphonology interaction. These words incorporate insights from recent theoretical developments such as Optimality Theory and Distributed Morphology, and insights made available to us by contemporary empirical methodologies, including field work and experimental and corpus-based quantitative work.

This textbook explores functional discourse grammar, a recently developed theory of language structure which analyses utterances at the pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic, and phonological level. The book focuses principally on English and provides extensive exercises for students to use and evaluate the theory.

This book offers a fine-grained analysis of the most common ingressive and egressive verbs in present-day English in terms of the semantic-pragmatic and cognitive factors responsible for their various structural representations. It draws upon the fundamental assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics, according to which grammar is symbolic and conceptually motivated, and focuses in particular on the ability of these predicates to be integrated into constructions as a result of metonymic and metaphoric processes, which impose a well-defined set of constraints. The book supports its analysis and findings with examples both taken from three of the major corpora of English, namely BNC, COCA and GloWbe, and retrieved through ad hoc Internet searches. Although the literature on English aspectual verbs is vast, there are no studies of the language-external factors responsible for their different configurations. As such, this book fills this gap by offering linguists and students of linguistics a detailed investigation of this topic. It will also be of value to scholars with a more general interest in the linguistic evidence of cognitive activity in meaning construction.

A pioneering study of heritage languages, from a leading scholar in this area of study world-wide.