Synopsis

The standard view of the form-meaning interfaces, as embraced by the great majority of contemporary grammatical frameworks, consists in the assumption that meaning can be associated with grammatical form in a one-to-one correspondence. Under this view, composition is quite straightforward, involving concatenation of form, paired with functional application in meaning. In this book, we discuss linguistic phenomena across several grammatical sub-modules (morphology, syntax, semantics) that apparently pose a problem to the standard view, mapping out the potential for deviation from the ideal of one-to-one correspondences, and develop formal accounts of the range of phenomena. We argue that a constraint-based perspective is particularly apt to accommodate deviations from one-to-many correspondences, as it allows us to impose constraints on full structures (such as a complete word or the interpretation of a full sentence) instead of deriving such structures step by step.

Most of the papers in this volume are formulated in a particular constraint-based grammar framework, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The contributions investigate how the lexical and constructional aspects of this theory can be combined to provide an answer to this question across different linguistic sub-theories.

Synopsis:

Cognitive aspects of the translation process have become central in Translation and Interpreting Studies in recent years, further establishing the field of Cognitive Translatology. Empirical and interdisciplinary studies investigating translation and interpreting processes promise a hitherto unprecedented predictive and explanatory power. This collection contains such studies which observe behaviour during translation and interpreting. The contributions cover a vast area and investigate behaviour during translation and interpreting – with a focus on training of future professionals, on language processing more generally, on the role of technology in the practice of translation and interpreting, on translation of multimodal media texts, on aspects of ergonomics and usability, on emotions, self-concept and psychological factors, and finally also on revision and post-editing. For the present publication, we selected a number of contributions presented at the Second International Congress on Translation, Interpreting and Cognition hosted by the Tra&Co Lab at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz.

This book presents an extensive dictionary of the Dagaare language (Niger-Congo; Gur (Mabia)), focussing on the dialect of Central Dagaare, spoken in the Upper West region of Ghana. The dictionary provides comprehensive definitions, example sentences and the English translations, phonetic forms, inflected forms, etymological notes as well as information dialectal variation. This work is intended as a resource for linguists, but also as a resource for Dagaare speakers. Also included is a grammatical sketch of Dagaare contributed by Prof. Adams Bodomo.

This monograph is intended as a contribution to the field of bilingualism from a generative syntax perspective at a variety of levels. It investigates code-switching between Korean and English and also between Japanese and English, which exhibit several interesting features. Due to their canonical word order differences, Korean and Japanese being SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) and English SVO (Subject-Verb-Object), a code-switched sentence between Korean/Japanese and English can take, in principle, either OV or VO order, to which little attention has been paid in the literature. On the contrary, word order is one of the most extensively discussed topics in generative syntax, especially in the Principles and Parameter’s approach (P&P) where various proposals have been made to account of various order patterns of different languages. By taking the generative view that linguistic variation is due to variation in the domain of functional categories rather than lexical roots (e.g. Borer 1984; Chomsky 1995), this monograph investigates word order variation in Korean-English and Japanese-English code-switching, with particular attention to the relative placement of the predicate (verb) and its complement (object) in two contrasting word orders, OV and VO, which was tested against Korean-English and Japanese-English bilingual speakers’ introspective judgments. The results provide strong evidence indicating that the distinction between functional and lexical verbs plays a major role in deriving different word orders (OV and VO, respectively) in Korean-English and Japanese-English code-switching, which supports the hypothesis that parametric variation is attributed to differences in the features of a functional category in the lexicon, as assumed in minimalist syntax. In particular, the explanation pursued in this monograph is based on feature inheritance, a syntactic derivational process, which was proposed in recent developments the Minimalist Program. The monograph shows that by studying diverse and creative word order patterns of code-switching, we are at a better disposal to understand how languages are parameterized similarly or differently in a given domain, which is the very topic that generative linguists have pursued for a long time.

The present volume seeks to contribute some studies to the subfield of Empirical Translation Studies and thus aid in extending its reach within the field of translation studies and thus in making our discipline more rigorous and fostering a reproducible research culture. The Translation in Transition conference series, across its editions in Copenhagen (2013), Germersheim (2015) and Ghent (2017), has been a major meeting point for scholars working with these aims in mind, and the conference in Barcelona (2019) has continued this tradition of expanding the sub-field of empirical translation studies to other paradigms within translation studies. This book is a collection of selected papers presented at that fourth Translation in Transition conference, held at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona on 19–20 September 2019.

The purpose of this book is to present recent studies in the field of multilingualism and L3, bringing together contributions from an international group of specialists from Austria, Canada, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and United States. The main focuses of the articles are three: language acquisition, language learning and teaching.

A collection of theoretical and empirical articles from scholars of multilingualism and language acquisition makes the book a significant resource as the papers present a wide perspective from main theories to current issues, reflecting new trends in the field.

The authors focus on the heterogeneity and complexity that characterize third language acquisition, multilingual learning and teaching. As the issues addressed in this book intersect, it represents an asset and therefore the texts will be of great relevance for the scientific community.

Part I presents different topics of L3 acquisition, such as syntax, phonology, working memory and selective attention, and lexicon. Part II comprises texts that show how the research on language acquisition informs pedagogical issues. For instance, the role of the knowledge of previous languages in the teaching of L3, the attitudes of multilingual teachers to plurilingual approaches, and the benefits of crosslinguistic pedagogy versus classroom monolingual bias. In sequence, Part III consists of texts on individual learning strategies, such as motivation and attitudes, crosslinguistic awareness, and students’ perceptions about teachers’ “plurilingual nonnativism”.

Nyakyusa is an underdescribed Bantu language spoken by around 800.000 speakers in the Mbeya Region of Tanzania. This book provides a detailled description of the verb in this language. The topics covered include the complex morphophonological and morphological processes as well as verb-to-verb derivation, copula verbs and grammaticalized verbs of motion. The main body of the book consists of a detailed description of tense, aspect and modality constructions, which includes not only an in-depth discussion of their sentence level semantics, but also of their patterns of employment in discourse.

This book deals with the phenomenon of third language (L3) acquisition. As a research field, L3 acquisition is established as a branch of multilingualism that is concerned with how multilinguals learn additional languages and the role that their multilingual background plays in the process of language learning. The volume points out some current directions in this particular research area with a number of studies that reveal the complexity of multilingual language learning and its typical variation and dynamics.

Prosody has been characterised as a "half-tamed savage" being shaped by both discrete, categorical aspects as well as gradient, continuous phenomena. This book is concerned with the relation of the "wild" and the "tamed" sides of prosodic prominence. It reviews problems that arise from a strict separation of categorical and continuous representations in models of phonetics and phonology, and it explores the potential role of descriptions aimed at reconciling the two domains. In doing so, the book offers an introduction to dynamical systems, a framework that has been studied extensively in the last decades to model speech production and perception. The reported acoustic and articulatory data presented in this book show that categorical and continuous modulations used to enhance prosodic prominence are deeply intertwined and even exhibit a kind of symbiosis. A multi-dimensional dynamical model of prosodic prominence is sketched, based on the empirical data, combining tonal and articulatory aspects of prosodic focus marking. The model demonstrates how categorical and continuous aspects can be inte- grated in a joint theoretical treatment that overcomes a strict separation of phonetics and phonology.

Outre la fragilité de certaines règles, la grammaire des temps souffre aussi d’un manque de clarté dû au fait que les explications viennent de plusieurs domaines, traités différemment selon les auteurs. Ceux-ci parlent du temps, du mode dont la description est souvent malaisée, et y ajoutent encore l’aspect, qui nous donne des indications sur le procès (l’action), et la modalité, qui nous dit comment évaluer le contenu de l’information (degré de vérité, degré de sûreté etc.) Le nombre d’aspects ou de modalités varie d’un auteur à l’autre, leur nom également. Certains aspects sont liés à la syntaxe, d’autres à la sémantique du verbe, d’autres enfin à la pragmatique. Comme la plupart des grammaires décrivent les détails, sans essayer de les rassembler en une unité dont ils pourraient montrer le fonctionnement, il serait temps que l’on mette sur pied une théorie unificatrice de tous ces détails, fondée sur un autre principe, qui explique l’emploi des temps dans une optique de compréhension, mais aussi d’expression.

Synopsis:

This volume offers a selection of papers presented during the 14th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS XIV, Paris, 2017). Part I brings together studies dealing with descriptive concepts. First examined is the notion of “accidens” in Latin grammar and its Greek counterparts. Other papers address questions with a strong echo in today’s linguistics: localism and its revival in recent semantics and syntax, the origin of the term “polysemy” and its adoption through Bréal, and the difficulties attending the description of prefabs, idioms and other “fixed expressions”. This first part also includes studies dealing with representations of linguistic phenomena, whether these concern the treatment of local varieties (so-called patois) in French research, or the import and epistemological function of spatial representations in descriptions of linguistic time. Or again, now taking the word “representation” literally, the visual display of grammatical relations, in the form of the first syntactic diagrams. Part II presents case studies which involve wider concerns, of a social nature: the “from below” approach to the history of Chinese Pidgin English underlines the social roles of speakers and the diversity of speech situations, while the scrutiny of Lhomond’s Latin and French textbooks demonstrates the interplay of pedagogical practice, cross-linguistic comparison and descriptive innovation. An overview of early descriptions of Central Australian languages reveals a whole spectrum of humanist to positivist and antihumanist stances during the colonial age. An overarching framework is also at play in the anthropological perspective championed by Meillet, whose socially and culturally oriented semantics is shown to live on in Benveniste. The volume ends with a paper on Trần Đức Thảo, whose work is an original synthesis between phenomenology and Marxist semiology, wielded against the “idealistic” doctrine of Saussure.

Synopsis:

This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us.

The chapters address research questions in comparative morphosyntax, including the modelling of syntactic categories, relative clauses, and demonstrative systems. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and give the reader a sense of the lively nature of current discussion of topics in morphosyntax and morphosyntactic variation.

This book is complemented by volume I available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/275 and volume III available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/277.

This volume contains thematic papers on semantic change which emerged from the second edition of Formal Diachronic Semantics held at Saarland University. Its authorship ranges from established scholars in the field of language change to advanced PhD students whose contributions have equally qualified and have been selected after a two-step peer-review process. The key foci are variablity and diachronic trajectories in scale structures and quantification, but readers will also find a variety of further (and clearly non-disjoint) issues covered including reference, modality, givenness, presuppositions, alternatives in language change, temporality, epistemic indefiniteness, as well as - in more general terms - the interfaces of semantics with syntax, pragmatics and morphology. Given the nature of the field, the contributions are primarily based on original corpus studies (in one case also on synchronic experimental data) and present a series of new findings and theoretical analyses of several languages, first and foremost from the Germanic and Romance subbranches of Indo-European (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish) and from Semitic (with an analysis of universal quantification in Biblical Hebrew).

This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives.

The papers in this volume address to different degrees issues on the relationship of articles systems and the pragmatic notions of definiteness and specificity in typologically diverse languages: Vietnamese, Siwi (Berber), Russian, Mopan (Mayan), Persian, Danish and Swedish. The main questions that motivate this volume are:

1.) How do languages with and without an article system go about helping the hearer to recognize whether a given noun phrase should be interpreted as definite, specific or non-specific? 2.) Is there clear-cut semantic definiteness without articles or do we find systematic ambiguity regarding the interpretation of bare noun phrases? 3.) If there is ambiguity, can we still posit one reading as the default? 4.) What exactly do articles in languages encode that are not analyzed as straightforwardly coding (in)definiteness? 5.) Do we find linguistic tools in these languages that are similar to those found in languages without articles?

Most contributions report on research on different corpora and elicited data or present the outcome of various experimental studies. One paper presents a diachronic study of the emergence of article systems. On the issue of how languages with and without articles guide the hearer to the conclusion that a given noun phrase should be interpreted as definite, specific or non-specific, the studies in this paper argue for similar strategies. The languages investigated in this volume use constructions and linguistic tools that receive a final interpretation based on discourse prominence considerations and various aspects of the syntax-semantics interface. In case of ambiguity between these readings, the default interpretation is given by factors (e. g., familiarity, uniqueness) that are known to contribute to the salience of phrases, but may be overridden by discourse prominence. Articles that do not straightforwardly mark (in)definiteness encode different kinds of specificity. In the languages studied in this volume, whether they have articles or do not have an article system, we find similar factors and linguistic tools in the calculation process of interpretations. The volume contains revised selected papers from the workshop entitled Specificity, definiteness and article systems across languages held at the 40th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS), 7-9 March, 2018 at the University of Stuttgart.

This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us.

The chapters address research questions on the relation of syntax to other aspects of grammar and linguistics more generally, including studies on language acquisition, variation and change, and syntactic interfaces. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and give the reader a sense of the lively nature of current discussion of topics in synchronic and diachronic comparative syntax ranging from the core verbal domain to higher, propositional domains.

This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language.

The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured.

This book provides a forum for methodological discussions emanating from researchers engaged in studying how individuals acquire an additional language. Whereas publications in the field of second language acquisition generally report on empirical studies with relatively little space dedicated to questions of method, the current book gave authors the opportunity to more fully develop a discussion piece around a methodological issue in connection with the interpretation of language-learning data. The result is a set of seven thought-provoking contributions from researchers with diverse interests. Three main topics are addressed in these chapters: the role of native-speaker norms in second-language analyses, the impact of epistemological stance on experimental design and/or data interpretation, and the challenges of transcription and annotation of language-learning data, with a focus on data ambiguity. Authors expand on these crucial issues, reflect on best practices, and provide in many instances concrete examples of the impact they have on data interpretation.