Bøger i Cambridge Studies in Linguistics serien

Brings to light largely unreported and unanalysed types of non-standard relative clauses in everyday English. A sophisticated and empirically rich analysis, it will be of interest to researchers and students working on syntax, the English language, language variation, corpus linguistics, experimental linguistics, and language change.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

An innovative investigation of 'missing' grammatical forms and their significance for linguistic theory. This accessible introduction to inflectional defectiveness draws on both formal and psycholinguistic perspectives to explore the structure of inflectional paradigms: the text's novel approach makes it essential reading for graduate students and researchers in linguistics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book, first published in 1975, examines the natural language numeral systems through generative grammar and gives specific examples with English, French, Mixtec, Hawaiian, Danish, Welsh and Yoruba languages. The book is primarily intended for linguists, but is accessible also to anthropologists and mathematicians.

The Movement Theory of Control (MTC) makes one major claim: that control relations in sentences like 'John wants to leave' are grammatically mediated by movement. This book presents the main arguments for and against MTC and shows it to have many theoretical advantages.

A description of the phonology of modern Greek dialects from the point of view of their historical development in so far as this may be reconstructed from their modern form. Throughout the work the historical development of numerous sample words is presented in order to illustrate the rules.

In studying discourse, the problem for the linguist is to find a fruitful level of analysis. Carlota Smith offers a new approach with this study of discourse passages. She introduces the key idea of the 'Discourse Mode', identifying five modes and analyzing the properties that distinguish each mode.

First published in 1973, this important work was the first systematic attempt to apply theoretical and methodological tools developed in America to the acquisition of a language other than English.

A detailed study of Old English, taking as its point of departure the 'standard theory' of generative phonology as developed by Chomsky and Halle. Dr Lass and Dr Anderson set out all the main phonological processes of Old English and aghainst their larger historical background (including subsequent developments in the history of English).

A study of the different roles which nouns play in the event or state expressed by the verb or adjective with which they are associated. The book explores within the framework of transformational-generative grammar the 'localist hypothesis', which asserts that all the roles for nouns involve basically the notions of location and direction.

The concept of the 'onset', i.e. the consonant(s) before the vowel of a syllable, is critical within phonology. In this book Nina Topintzi presents a new theory of onsets, arguing for their fundamental role in the structure of language both in the underlying and surface representation, unlike previous assumptions.

In this study Donna Jo Napoli takes a common-sense approach to the notions of argument and predicate. She presents a case for viewing the notion of predicate as a semantic primitive which cannot be defined by looking simply at the lexicon or syntactic structure, offering a theory or predication where the key to the subject-predicate relationship is theta-role assignment.

This book investigates, from a linguistic point of view, how rural migrants adjust to an urban environment. The focus of Dr Bortoni-Ricardo's study is speakers of Caipira, a dialect of Brazilian Portuguese. The volume examines in careful detail the historical and synchronic sociolinguistic background of the migrants and the changes that have taken place in their linguistic repertoire.

The 'standard theory' of Chomsky and Halle has dominated phonology in recent years. It has been subject to modification and to criticism but not of a really fundamental kind. Dr Foley does here offer a fundamental criticism and a genuine theoretical alternative.

This is a full-length study of a Celtic language from the standpoint of modern linguistic theory. Dr Awbery particularly discusses a topic - the passive form of the verb - which has itself been of central interest in previous work on transformational grammar. She is thus able to test certain tenets of transformational theory against data from a previously unconsidered language.

Dr Brown examines the functions of different types of rules in the phonological component of a generative grammar with examples especially from Lumasaaba, a Bantu language of eastern Uganda.

A central tenet of this volume is that theories of language development should be relatable to some general view of human development and, on this basis, Dr Atkinson presents a number of conditions that any adequate theory of language development should satisfy.