This book investigates Polarity Mood (PM) in Peninsular Spanish and how the phenomenon has evolved diachronically. In particular, it explores from a theoretical and empirical perspective the interaction of PM with five other linguistic phenomena: (i) the verb class of the matrix predicate, (ii) the presence of a first-person subject; (iii) the type of matrix clause, (iv) information structure, and (v) the presence of Negative Polarity Items. Drawing inspiration from the competing grammars framework, the book starts by proposing an account of mood morphology in terms of three competing systems: one in which mood morphology is used as a hedging device to express the degree of commitment; another in which mood is analyzed as a pronoun which indicates that the world of evaluation lies in some accessible Context Set; and another in which mood is used as a purely grammaticalized syntactic marker. The second part of the book shows how the historical competition between these systems explains the diachronic development observed in corpus data, as well as the present-day mood selection patterns.

Dieses Buch befasst sich mit dem in der theoretischen linguistischen Literatur stark diskutierten Phänomen der lexikalischen Adjektiv-Intensivierung. Dabei wird ein graduierbares Adjektiv – z. B. schön – durch eine Intensitätspartikel modifiziert.

Der Strand ist ∅ schön. Positiv Der Strand ist sehr schön. Deskriptiv Der Strand ist mega schön. Expressiv

Durch die Modifikation erfährt das Adjektiv eine Bedeutungsverstärkung, die sich in einer gesteigerten Intensität und einer höheren Position auf einer zugehörigen mentalen Skala niederschlägt.

Im Fokus steht die experimentelle Untersuchung von deskriptiven und expressiven Intensitätspartikeln. Expressive Intensivierer (Gutzmann & Turgay 2012) wie mega und super treten vor allem in der Umgangssprache auf, meist in Gestalt von Adjektiven, und erfüllen eine ähnliche Funktion wie „deskriptive Intensivierer“ (ebd.), etwa die deutsche Standard-Intensitätspartikel sehr. In beiden Fällen wird im Vergleich zum Positiv ein höheres Ausmaß der bezeichneten Eigenschaft ausgedrückt; bei expressiven Intensivierern wird dieser Grad jedoch – so die in der Literatur vorherrschende Annahme – intuitiv als stärker empfunden. Zudem offenbaren expressive Partikeln aufgrund einer emotional-expressiven Zusatzkomponente mutmaßlich auch die persönliche Einstellung der sprechenden Person zum Sachverhalt, die nicht Teil der Proposition ist.

Obwohl die Erforschung von Expressivität in der formal orientierten Sprachwissenschaft in den letzten drei Jahrzehnten erheblich an Dynamik gewonnen hat, ist die Gültigkeit dieser grundlegenden Annahmen bislang nicht empirisch abgesichert. Die noch bestehende Lücke an experimentellen Untersuchungen zu schließen, ist eines der zentralen Ziele dieser Arbeit. Aufbauend auf der aktuellen Forschungslage unternimmt sie den ersten Versuch, durch eine breit angelegte Untersuchung neue Erkenntnisse über den semantischen Unterschied zwischen deskriptiven und expressiven Intensitätspartikeln zu gewinnen. Hierfür wird auf eine systematisch aufeinander aufbauende Kombination aus verschiedenen linguistischen Methoden wie Korpusanalyse (Empirieteil I) und Rating-Experimente (Empirieteil II) zurückgegriffen, mithilfe derer die aus der Literatur hergeleiteten Forschungshypothesen erstmals überprüft werden.

This book investigates the realization of subject focus in French and Spanish from a comparative, variationist perspective. Building on spontaneous dialogical data, it examines the range of syntactic, prosodic, and elliptical strategies speakers use to encode narrowly focused subjects. The study draws on two highly comparable sub-corpora of spontaneous speech elicited through the same task, allowing for fine-grained cross-linguistic comparison. Adopting a Question Under Discussion (QUD) framework, it analyzes how discourse factors such as focus type, givenness, and argument structure condition speakers’ choices among competing focus-marking strategies. Particular attention is paid to the alternation between full forms (e.g. clefts, postverbal subjects) and more economical elliptical answers (e.g. fragments, reduced clefts). Quantitative analyses show that subject focus realization is not free but systematically constrained by pragmatic and semantic factors, albeit differently across the two languages. The results challenge rigid form–function mappings and highlight the role of language economy in discourse. Overall, the book contributes to a more flexible typology of focus realization and to our understanding of syntactic variation in closely related Romance languages.

If we were to imagine an inflectional morphological system as a galactic universe with its matter and governing laws, "uninflectedness" would mark the outer boundaries of this system, the "voids," zones where the gravitational pull of inflection weakens and different structural principles come into play. Uninflectedness helps trace the limits of inflectional organization and offers valuable insights into how inflection operates and interacts with its periphery. Uninflectedness is thus a complex phenomenon that this book examines in depth for the first time, assembling a collection of 13 edited chapters that explore the phenomenon both theoretically and descriptively with the purpose of building a better typologically informed theory of inflection.

Despite decades of scholarship on lexical borrowing in post-Conquest England, the vocabulary of the medieval countryside has remained largely outside the lens of contact linguistics — an oversight shaped by the long-standing assumption that French influence was confined to elite domains. At the same time, the multilingual reality of medieval England has made monolingual lexicography an increasingly inadequate tool: the Anglo-French, Medieval Latin, and Middle English lexicons of the period cannot be studied in isolation, yet no single trilingual resource has existed to study them together.

This book provides that resource. Drawing on the historical dictionaries of all three languages and grounded in cognitive semantics, it constructs an onomasiological thesaurus of the vocabulary associated with the medieval English manor — concepts and referents attested from 1100 to 1500, arranged in conceptual groupings modelled on the structure of the \textit{Historical Thesaurus of English} and the \textit{Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England}.

The findings reframe received assumptions. Language contact shaped the rural lexicon far more deeply than the literature has claimed: French- and Latin-origin vocabulary dominates the terminology of manorial society, while native English holds its ground in the vocabulary of familiar locations. The asymmetry illuminates the social mechanics of borrowing in non-elite environments and carries implications for the history of English into the present day.

This book will be essential reading for specialists in the history of the English language, the history of linguistics, historical lexicology and lexicography, and medieval studies, as well as for historical linguists and advanced students of language contact and multilingualism.

Thinking of and talking about future events is a crucial part of our everyday lives. Thus, it is not surprising that in the languages of the world, a variety of markers for future time reference has developed. The goal of this volume is to take a contrastive perspective on the evolution of future constructions by bringing together scholars working on different languages and language families. In doing so, the edited volume opens up new perspectives on long-standing questions regarding the diachronic development of future constructions across languages, with implications not only for research on tense-aspect-mood systems but also for research on grammaticalization and language change more generally.

A key challenge of studying the historical phonology of any language is how to reconstruct the pronunciation of periods before the availability of sound recording. Many studies of pre-twentieth-century pronunciation rely on sources that comment on how people spoke, or infer pronunciation from spelling variation or rhymes. This book is the first to investigate the phonology of nineteenth-century English based on a new kind of written source material: it examines pronunciation evidence provided by contemporary grammar books, and offers quantitative and qualitative analyses of the phonological commentary found in a collection of 258 English grammars published in Britain, Ireland, and North America during the nineteenth century.

The nineteenth century has been described as the century of prescriptivism, and this book examines the tensions between prescriptive and descriptive approaches in the grammars. Individual case studies detail several linguistic features which were undergoing change and which were reportedly stigmatised at the time. Consonantal features include non-rhoticity, /h/- dropping and /h/-insertion, the WHICH-WITCH merger, /v/-/w/ interchange, and the pronunciation of -ing. Further studies chart variation in the vowel of BATH words, and in the diphthongs of words such as FACE and GOAT, which are characteristic of both RP and American English pronunciation. In exploring the potential of this understudied source material as evidence of historical pronunciation, this book contributes to the fields of historical phonology, grammaticography, the study of prescriptivism, and historical sociolinguistics.

This collection of ten texts in Uruangnirin offers insights into the language and culture of the inhabitants of the Karas Islands in eastern Indonesia. All stories relate to life and death. They range from narratives about important life events such as circumcision, engagement and burial to accounts of natural and supernatural threats to the environment of the Uruangnirin speakers.

The presentation of the texts are as follows: first, the complete text in Uruangnirin with a free translation into English; second, an interlinearized version for detailed linguistic analysis.

The texts are preceded by a brief introduction to the Uruangnirin language and its speakers, which provides readers with a linguistic and anthropological background.

Das Buch ist eine abgeschlossene Einführung in das Framework der Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. In einem einführenden Kapitel wird der Übergang von einfachen Phrasenstrukturgrammatiken zu den komplexeren Repräsentationen mit Merkmalbeschreibungen motiviert. Das zweite Kapitel führt allgemein verständlich in den Formalismus der Merkmalstrukturen ein. In den verbleibenden Kapiteln werden phänomenbezogen verschiedene Grammatikbereiche diskutiert, wobei die Analysen jeweils für das Deutsche ausgearbeitet werden. Der Schwerpunkt liegt hierbei auf syntaktischen Phänomenen (Konstituentenstruktur, Konstituentenstellung, Kasus, Passiv, Kongruenz, Verbalkomplex und Partikelverben), die Morphologie (Flexion und Derivation) wird aber ebenfalls behandelt, und es wird gezeigt, wie die Bedeutung morphologischer und syntaktischer Konstruktionen kompositional bestimmt werden kann.

In den Analyseabschnitten wurde bewußt auf die Diskussion von Alternativen verzichtet. Den Alternativen ist jeweils ein eigener Abschnitt gewidmet, der dem fortgeschrittenen Leser den Vergleich mit anderen HPSG-Ansätzen aber auch mit Ansätzen aus der Konstruktionsgrammatik (CxG), der Lexikalisch-Funktionalen-Grammatik (LFG) und mit Varianten der Government & Binding-Theorie (GB) ermöglichen soll. Bei der Diskussion der Alternativen spielen sowohl formale Eigenschaften der jeweiligen Theorien als auch empirische Befunde aus dem Deutschen und anderen Sprachen eine Rolle.

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht das Framing von Extremismusvarianten im medialen Diskurs der Jahre 1999 – 2021 und entwickelt eine corpus-driven Methode zur Erschließung und Visualisierung semantischer Frames. Sie verbindet Frame-semantische Theorie nach Busse mit Methoden und Annahmen der distributionellen Semantik und entwickelt ein Verfahren, um diskursives Wissen aus der musterhaften Verteilung von Wörtern in Korpora induktiv zu rekonstruieren.

Als Datengrundlage dient ein umfangreiches Korpus aus Online-Artikeln der Zeitungen taz, Spiegel und Welt. Methodisch kombiniert die Arbeit Word Embeddings und Kollokationsanalysen, um Frame-Elemente und ihre Relationen zu identifizieren und als Kollokationsnetzwerke zu visualisieren. Dieser Ansatz ermöglicht es, einen großen Teil des verstehensrelevanten Wissens zu erschließen, das zum Verständnis von Extremismus als sozialem Konzept notwendig ist, ohne auf vorab definierte Kategorien zurückzugreifen.

Die Analyse untersucht kontrastiv das Framing von Rechts- und Linksextremismus sowie Islamismus über acht Zeiträume hinweg sowie im Vergleich der Zeitungen. Sie zeigt, wie unterschiedliche Extremismusvarianten in den drei Zeitungen gerahmt werden, welche Akteure als extremistisch gelten, welche Handlungen ihnen zugeschrieben werden und wie sich diese diskursiven Konstruktionen im Zeitverlauf wandeln. Die Arbeit leistet damit sowohl einen methodischen Beitrag zur korpuslinguistischen Diskursanalyse als auch einen inhaltlichen zur Beschreibung des medialen Extremismusdiskurses in Deutschland.

Der Verkaufspreises dieses Buches in Deutschland wird auf 45 EUR festgesetzt.

This study examines the framing of variants of extremism in media discourse between 1999 and 2021 and develops a corpus-driven method for identifying and visualizing semantic frames. It combines Busse's frame-semantic theory with methods and assumptions of distributional semantics and develops a method for inductively reconstructing discursive knowledge from the patterned distribution of words in corpora.

An extensive corpus of online articles from the newspapers taz, Spiegel and Welt forms the empirical basis. Methodologically, the work combines word embeddings and collocation analysis to identify frame elements and their relations, visualizing them as collocation networks. This approach makes it possible to explore a large part of the knowledge relevant to understanding extremism as a social concept without resorting to predefined categories.

The analysis contrasts the framing of right-wing and left-wing extremism as well as Islamism over eight time periods and compares coverage across the three newspapers. It shows how different variants of extremism are framed, which actors are considered extremist, which actions are attributed to them, and how these discursive constructions change over time. The work thus contributes both a methodological innovation for corpus-assisted discourse studies and empirical insights into media representations of extremism in Germany.

The volume examines migration from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to the German diaspora, offering a multifaceted perspective that combines historical and contemporary insights. It moves beyond viewing migration as a momentary event, instead situating it within a broader narrative that considers the impact of origin countries. By studying communities such as Georgians, Jews, Aramaic speakers, Kurds, Afghans and Berbers, the book explores how linguistic, social, and cultural factors shape their experiences both in their homelands and as migrants in Germany. A key focus is the interplay between spoken vernaculars (such as Judeo-Spanish, Kurmanji Kurdish, Pashto and Tarifit Berber) and prestigious written languages (such as Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and Persian). It delves into how language choices, including scripts and writing systems, reflect deeper identity struggles within communities and across borders. In offering or restricting legal, pedagogical and communicative conditions for language acquisition, intercultural exchange and identity formation, Germany, like other European host societies, contributes significantly to these developments. The book also shifts the lens of migration studies to explore not just the challenges in host countries but also the conditions in the migrants’ places of origin, from linguistic diversity to social stratification and historical conflicts. It offers unique insights into how these factors shape the identities of minority groups and influence their lives as migrants. This book is a resource for anyone interested in the complex intersections of migration, identity, language, and culture. It sheds light on the experiences of often marginalised communities, offering valuable perspectives for scholars, policymakers, and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the realities of migration and minority life.

For 150 years there has been a question over how the Austronesian languages of eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste fit into the Austronesian world. The area is severely under-documented. There has been no consensus on the classification of these languages, and scholars admit to being perplexed. This is the first systematic attempt at subgrouping the whole region based on historical phonology, supplemented by morphosyntax and the lexicon. Insights from archaeology, DNA studies, and awareness of long-term contact with Papuan languages inform this study.

Nine Wallacean subgroups are identified, along with their internal structures. Light is shed on languages whose classification has been unclear. Discontinuities in the historical phonology suggest different groups speaking different Austronesian languages got off different boats at different places, probably at different times. No evidence is found supporting a monolithic Austronesian advance through the region, nor a common Austronesian parent language below PMP that links all Wallacean subgroups.

Speakers of SVO Austronesian languages with prepositions, preverbal negation, numbers before nouns, and post-posed possessors came into contact with speakers of languages of unrelated Papuan families, with postpositions, clause-final negation, numbers following nouns, preposed possessors, and other features of SOV languages. Austronesian languages adopted these features but not uniformly, such that features attributed to contact are uneven across the region. Some are not found in some subgroups or branches within subgroups. Distribution maps of phonological, grammatical, and lexical features show many features are not found in all subgroups, do not align with each other, and some are found outside the region. Austronesian languages in the region are a kind of uneven hybrid that make them typologically different from Austronesian languages to the west and north.

The study evaluates earlier proposals along with new possibilities to link subgroups in different ways, but finds no exclusively shared innovations inherited from a common parent. Scenarios are explored of how Austronesian-speaking peoples came into the region. The uneven distribution of various features is addressed. Implications are many, and warrant a revised picture of the Austronesian world.

Several factors enabled this more in-depth study than has been previously possible. Both authors have extensive experience in the region. Many Dutch-era sources have become accessible online. Recent publications and unpublished data have been shared by others. This enabled the authors to glean data from 517 Austronesian and Papuan languages from within the region as well as to the west and east of it, providing context. Within the region, data have been gleaned from 292 varieties (256 Austronesian, 36 Papuan), some of which are now extinct. The volume is data rich with 334 data tables, 78 figures (including 32 maps), and 195 numbered examples/lists of data.

The functional domain of apprehensionality encompasses grammatical markers or constructions which conventionally encode or pragmatically implicate that the situation described by the clause is an undesirable possibility. Its main manifestations discussed in this volume are (i) apprehensives, which are modal markers which can occur in main clauses, and thus could serve to translate English might in Don't go near this dog, it might bite (but also add a component of undesirability), and (ii) precautionary subordinators such as English lest in Don't go near this dog, lest it bite. As just illustrated, such elements tend to occur in warnings and are often but not necessarily accompanied by an instruction as to how to avoid the undesirable situation. Although wide-spread cross-linguistically, they have received very little attention in the linguistic literature and their discussion has been mostly restricted to brief sections in language-specific discussions of some lesser studied languages. This volume addresses this gap by presenting in-depth discussions of apprehensional markers in individual languages (and in some contributions, language groups), by experts on these languages and based on first-hand data. The editors' introduction offers a review of the existing literature, including of the varied terminology used and of the main research questions arising. The individual papers present detailed investigations of the semantic and pragmatic properties of the construction(s) in question, their syntactic status, and in many cases also their diachrony. The final contribution is a questionnaire for the in-depth exploration of variation within apprehensional constructions. The volume is aimed at typologists, semanticists interested in modality, and general linguists.

The papers in this volume were selected from those presented at the 54th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, which was held at the University of Connecticut in June, 2024. The volume contains 22 papers with diverse topics within phonology, morphology, syntax, language acquisition, and historical linguistics. The African languages that are investigated in this volume include Kom, Igbo, Dagaare, Igala, Kalenjin, Rɨ̀kpá, Ekhwa Adara, Hausa, Nduga, Maa, Lugwere, Emai, Seenku, Kirundi, Chichewa, Tiriki, Kono, and Kasem.

This volume presents a series of studies and reviews that provide insights into grammatical variation and the development of code-switching in neurotypical speakers, as well as into language mixing practices among individuals with neurodevelopmental conditions. Across seven chapters, a range of themes is explored, including: community norms and language practices, the influence of caregivers on bilingual development, attitudes and ideologies surrounding bilingualism, code-switching as a communicative resource, and the intersection of neurodiversity and bilingualism. By offering up-to-date perspectives on these topics, the volume builds on existing research into code-switching, such as work by Margaret Deuchar, and it highlights open data initiatives for advancing future research in this area.

Even is an endangered Northern Tungusic language spoken in numerous small settlements by formerly completely nomadic hunters and reindeer herders dispersed over northeastern Siberia, from the Lena-Yana watershed in the west to the Sea of Okhotsk and Kamchatka in the east. This geographical spread has led to considerable dialectal fragmentation, with substantial differences between the peripheral dialects, not least due to differential contact influence.

This text collection contains a selection of monological narratives from two geographically distant and linguistically divergent Even dialects: Lamunkhin Even spoken in the village Sebjan-Küöl in the Kobjaj district of Central Yakutia, and Bystraja Even spoken in two villages of the Bystraja district of Central Kamchatka. Of these, the Lamunkhin dialect is still relatively viable, being spoken by some children and adolescents, while Bystraja Even is highly endangered, with no fluent speakers younger than 50 years.

The overall theme of the volume is the traditional Even way of life, namely reindeer herding and hunting and, in Kamchatka, fishing. Reindeer herding has always been a defining way of life of the Evens and other so-called Indigenous Small-numbered Peoples of the North; this is reflected in their language, culture, and identity. However, it is becoming increasingly endangered, making its documentation important for anthropologists and community members alike.

The collection comprises excerpts from 16 recordings made between 2007 and 2010 and amounting to nearly 8,000 words in total. Excerpts were chosen to be maximally informative with respect to the traditional way of life, but also to be interesting to read and to include linguistically interesting and important features of Even. In order to make the texts usable for the Even communities, a vernacular version of each text is included. This consists of the Cyrillic transcription used in the communities with a parallel Russian translation.

The preparation of the data for this text collection and further transformation into the CLDF format was supported by the DFG grant #517860213 “Open Text Collections”.

This monograph provides the first large-scale comparative study of how verbal morphology encodes directionality across Chadic languages. Drawing on a database of 91 languages spoken in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad, the book analyzes ventive, itive, vertical, and boundary-crossing extensions. The quantitative study examines where directional extensions occur and what meanings they can co-express, highlighting issues of multifunctionality and efficiency in grammar, as well as providing initial insights into their grammaticalization. The study advances the descriptive foundation of the least-documented Afroasiatic language family, while also contributing to theoretical discussions of motion events, verbal morphology, and morphosyntactic typology.

This paper develops a political-economy game of skilled exit, redistribution, repression, and regime survival. Skilled workers are economically valuable because they become entrepreneurs, pay taxes, and generate productive externalities for low-skilled workers. They are also politically dangerous because they can enter political competition in democracy, participate in revolutionary collective action in autocracy, or leave the country altogether. Governments therefore face a strategic tradeoff. Retaining skilled citizens raises output and fiscal capacity, but it can also increase electoral or revolutionary pressure. Allowing skilled citizens to leave weakens development, but it may relax the incumbent’s political constraint. In democracy, redistribution toward the low-skilled majority lowers the return to skilled entrepreneurship and can induce exit. In autocracy, exit barriers and repression are alternative technologies of political survival: hard dictatorships can restrict exit and extract from skilled workers, while soft dictatorships may tolerate emigration because it reduces the pool of potential protesters. We characterize this logic in a one-shot benchmark and a dynamic extension with persistent brain drain and absorbing political turnover. We also allow repression costs to rise with the human-capital intensity of the economy, so that repression becomes more destructive precisely when skilled labor is more productive. The model yields a comparative regime logic of skilled exit: emigration is highest where exit directly relaxes the incumbent’s political constraint, as in soft dictatorship, or where redistribution lowers the domestic return to skilled entrepreneurship, as in redistributive democracy; it is lower in elitist democracy and lowest in hard dictatorship.