Synopsis:

This volume contains a selection of papers that were originally presented at a workshop "Cross-disciplinary approaches to Information Structure in African languages", held in Porto-Novo, Benin in 2022. Eight papers explore information structure in Niger-Congo languages from different linguistic angles: phonetics, phonology, syntax and semantics. The papers address a range of topics in different Niger- Congo languages from both junior and senior scholars in the field of linguistics, reflecting both the diversity of languages and scholarship in African linguistics.

Synopsis

Locative and existential predications are fundamental linguistic constructions that exhibit significant formal overlap while serving distinct communicative functions. Locative clauses typically anchor a definite referent to a spatial context, whereas existential clauses introduce new, often indefinite, referents into discourse. Despite their central role in syntactic and typological research, the cross-linguistic diversity of these predications remains largely underexplored. This collective volume originates from workshops held in 2023 at the Annual SLE Meeting in Athens and the International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Heidelberg. It brings together in-depth analyses of locative and existential predications across a wide range of languages, drawing on diverse methodological and theoretical approaches. Rather than imposing a single framework, the volume deliberately allows for variation in how these constructions are defined and analyzed, reflecting the complexity and diversity of linguistic structures. A key theme of the book is the relationship between locative, existential, and possessive predication. Many of the included studies highlight the formal and functional connections between these domains, illustrating how different languages encode possession through structures that overlap with locative and existential constructions. The volume also challenges conventional assumptions about structural distinctions between these predications, showing that in many languages, such boundaries are blurred or even nonexistent. The introductory chapter reviews key findings from prior research and offers a refined typology of locative and existential predications. It also highlights the major insights from the remaining chapters, each of which provides a detailed empirical analysis of these constructions in one or several underdescribed languages. The contributions address (i) the structural and functional properties of locative and existential clauses, (ii) criteria for distinguishing these constructions in languages where formal differentiation is minimal, (iii) their frequency and usage in natural discourse, and (iv) grammaticalization pathways that link locative, existential, and possessive predication. By integrating data from a broad range of languages and perspectives, this volume advances our understanding of locative and existential predication and offers a foundation for future research in typology, syntax, and historical linguistics.

Synopsis

Humans are confronted everyday with an influx of sounds coming from several sources. In a given auditory environment, some of the sound events might be unexpected, rare, or new. Our cognitive system has the ability to detect such sounds, and consequently activate an attention orienting response.

This book provides an in-depth investigation of the interplay between prosody and attention orienting during online speech processing by using two complementary experimental methods, electrophysiology and pupillometry. In particular, it examines the cognitive and functional relevance of intonation for the orienting response in speech, emphasising the crucial role of rising contours. More specifically, it investigates the influence of prosodic structure, showing that rising tones at constituent edges attract attention similarly to accentual rising tones, challenging important tenets of prosodic theory and typology.

The book shows that contextual expectations shape the orienting response, extending insights beyond purely acoustic cues to pragmatically meaningful linguistic signals. Finally, much like cues from auditory cognition, rising tones activate both involuntary and voluntary attentional mechanisms – the former driven by signal-based acoustic cues, while the latter arise from contextual influences guiding voluntary attention orienting.

Taken together, the findings in this book enhance our understanding of the role of intonation in attention orienting, emphasising the significance of rising tones. The book establishes key connections to general cognition and individual variability while exploring potential extensions for an architecture of attention orienting in spoken language.

Synopsis:

With the exception of English and its varieties, all Present-Day Germanic languages display some kind of verb-second (V2) rule, according to which the finite verbal form has to be put in the second position of the clause in declarative utterances. But even within the Germanic domain, the exact contours of the V2 rule vary strongly in time and space. Above all, the so-called bottleneck demanding that one and only one constituent be placed before the finite verb is not equally respected in all Germanic varieties. The typology of V2 violations, apparent or real, is now regarded as a core question for the typology of V2 itself. The present volume is concerned with all kinds of alleged “cracks in the bottleneck”, involving argument stacking, remnant movement, or adverbial resumption. A general introduction by Modicom and Harchaoui discusses the current state of linguistic research on verb-third phenomena in Germanic languages, both in synchrony and diachrony. The introduction is followed by a diachronic panorama of V3 phenomena in the history of High German, by A. Speyer, who shows that behind the apparent stability of V2, the syntactic typology of apparent V3 in German has undergone significant changes over the last centuries. The other contributions to the volume follow this variational and historical thread: E. Klaevik-Pettersen and N. Catasso discuss the validity of the bottleneck hypothesis in present and ancient V2 varieties. E. Louviot, Th. Robin, Chr. Nilsen and B. Bloom focus on verb-third phenomena involving resumptive items in the history of English, High German, Low German and Swedish. In their paper on Old West Germanic verse corpora, Louviot and Robin concentrate on clause-initial tha/tho, investigating which factors determine its capacity to either be followed by the finite verb (V2) or by another constituent before the finite verb (V3). Nilsen is concerned with the semantic evolution of verb-third adverbial resumption involving da and så in Swedish. Bloom focuses on the V3 use of one resumptive, so, in Early New High German during the 16th century, tackling the discourse-organizational factors behind adverbial resumption. Finally, the chapters by L. Riccardelli, R. Madaro, A. Tomaselli and E. Bidese investigate how contact between Germanic and Romance may have interacted with language-internal dynamics in the history of several varieties of Rhaeto-Romance (Riccardelli) and Upper German (Madaro, Tomaselli and Bidese).

Synopsis

This collection of ten texts offers a unique glimpse into the language and culture of the Muyu, a Papuan people living in the heart of New Guinea. It features narratives from six storytellers, all of which have been transcribed, translated, and linguistically annotated.

The presentation follows a two-part structure: first, a parallel-text format with Muyu and English arranged in columns; second, an interlinearized version for detailed linguistic analysis. The texts revolve around two central themes—myths of origin and accounts of encounters with animals.

A brief introduction to the Muyu language and its speakers precedes the texts, providing essential context for readers from both linguistic and anthropological backgrounds.

Synopsis:

This book explores the development of prosodic and interactional competence in second language acquisition, drawing on data from peer interactions by Italian learners of German in both German and their native language, Italian, as well as from German native speakers. Three key aspects of spoken interaction are examined across proficiency levels: prosodic marking of information status, turn-taking, and backchannels. The analysis of prosodic marking of information status reveals that learners mark givenness using distinct fundamental frequency patterns, as in their native language, but apply a reduction in prosodic strength typically found postfocally in native German, irrespective of its function. This suggests that learners perceive deaccentuation as a salient marker of native German, which they adopt during their learning. This book also presents a novel approach to quantifying interactional competence, showing that lower proficiency negatively affects the smoothness of interactional flow, resulting in reduced speech time and increased overall silence. Finally, it provides new insights into backchannel use in second language and cross-linguistic contexts. Results show a complex, non-arbitrary mapping between lexical type, turn-taking function, and intonation in both native languages. In second language speech, dyad-specific behaviour was found to have a stronger effect on backchannel frequency and duration than second language proficiency. Furthermore, learners tend to transfer preferred lexical backchannel types from their first language into their second language. Overall, this book offers a multidimensional perspective on second language spoken interaction and lays the groundwork for future applications in language teaching and assessment.

The doctoral work, on which this book is based, was awarded the IPA PhD Thesis Award for the “Best PhD Thesis in the broad area of Phonetics, Speech Sciences, and Laboratory Phonology” in 2024.

Synopsis:

This collective volume investigates linguistic dynamics in language contact, focusing on heritage speakers. The chapters provide new insights into the role of speaker repertoires and the distinction between contact-induced change and language-internal variation by reporting on corpus-linguistic studies across different communicative situations in heritage and majority languages. Conducted in the context of the DFG Research Unit “Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations” (FOR 2537), the studies focus on bilingual adolescent and adult speakers of German, Greek, Russian and Turkish as heritage languages, and of English and German as majority languages, and on monolingually raised adolescent and adult speakers of all five languages. Crucially, they are not restricted to standard language, but target broader speaker repertoires that cover informal as well as formal settings in both spoken and written modes. The contributions are united by their positive perspective on language contact and multilingual speakers, a comparative approach across several heritage and majority languages, and a shared methodology that captures variation within repertoires for both heritage speakers and monolinguals. The chapters take various theoretical standpoints, highlighting different facets of the data as well as its potential for enhancing our understanding of language contact and language variation.

Synopsis:

This volume presents a timely discussion on one of the most fundamental and yet elusive questions in historical linguistics: why do certain linguistic changes take place in some languages at specific times, but not in others, even under similar conditions? The actuation problem, first articulated by Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968), remains a central puzzle in the study of language change, at the crossroads between language structure, cognitive processes, and social dynamics. While significant progress has been made in identifying pathways and constraints on change and in understanding the social embedding of linguistic variation, the ultimate challenge of predicting language change remains unresolved, raising the question of whether historical linguistics can ever be a predictive science. The main reason for skepticism is that the inherent complexity of language structure and use makes it extremely challenging to predict when and how a given change may occur. Even so, a reassessment of where the discipline stands with respect to its most central research question is in order.

Building on recent advances in variationist sociolinguistics, grammaticalization theory, and probabilistic modeling of language, the contributions in this volume offer fresh theoretical and methodological perspectives on the actuation problem, discussing the interplay between principles of language change, the role of bilingualism and language contact more generally, the distinction between innovation and propagation, and the role of sociocultural change. Research presented in this volume shows that there is indeed cause for hope, bringing at least a probabilistic answer to the actuation problem within closer reach.

Synopsis:

The book Universality of semantic frames and language specific Bulgarian data is devoted to the principles of data organisation in the Bulgarian FrameNet, which has been in development for more than 20 years and has gone through various phases. Originally it was developed as an independent resource, but for about fifteen years it has been correlated with the Berkeley FrameNet, observing the following basic principles: The information in the FrameNet that is relevant for the description of Bulgarian is considered language-independent (e.g. definition of frames and relations between them, definitions of frames and elements and relations between them, etc.) and is automatically transferred into a structure called a superframe. For each superframe, there may be one or more Bulgarian frames in which the language-independent information is restructured, if necessary, so that it corresponds exactly to the description for the Bulgarian language. The Bulgarian verbs of communication, change, movement, contact and emotion are described in more detail, their subclasses are delineated and the similarities and differences in the semantic and syntactic description for Bulgarian and English are compared and discussed. It is shown how the semantic frames can be used in an experiment to assess children's mastery of semantic conceptualisation and syntactic use of verbs from their basic vocabulary. These and a number of other applications: automatic assignment of semantic roles, automatic recognition of events in news, automatic recognition of scenes in images and videos are some of the applications in which the Bulgarian FrameNet can be used. In addition, the semantic and syntactic information in the Bulgarian FrameNet can be used for theoretical considerations, including comparative studies focussing on the modern state of the Bulgarian language and other languages for which a FrameNet has been developed.

Synopsis:

This book showcases the latest research from the world’s leading experts on Celtic linguistics. The 15 chapters span a variety of linguistic subdisciplines as well as theoretical and methodological perspectives. Together, these articles highlight critical aspects of contemporary inquiry into the linguistic systems of Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and their ancestor languages. The volume is organized around four key sub-areas: (1) Syntax and Semantics, (2) Phonology and Phonetics, (3) Language Change, Historical Linguistics and Grammaticalization, and (4) Sociolinguistics and Language Documentation. The volume's papers offer detailed investigations of current theoretical issues in Celtic syntax, semantics, phonology, and phonetics, as well as of language policy and ideology, language weaponization, and diachronic and synchronic language change. These state-of-the-art contributions represent the impressive diversity of the field of Celtic linguistics and emphasize the wide body of work being conducted in the language communities of the six Celtic nations.

Synopsis:

Yongning Na, also known as Mosuo, is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Southwest China. This book provides a description and analysis of its tone system, progressing from lexical tones towards morphotonology. Tonal changes permeate numerous aspects of the morphosyntax of Yongning Na. They are not the product of a small set of phonological rules, but of a host of rules that are restricted to specific morphosyntactic contexts. Rich morphotonological systems have been reported in this area of Sino-Tibetan, but book-length descriptions remain few. This study of an endangered language contributes to a better understanding of the diversity of prosodic systems in East Asia.

The analysis is based on original fieldwork data (made available online), collected over the course of ten years, commencing in 2006.

This book is a new edition of https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/109

The analysis is based on original fieldwork data (made available online), collected over the course of ten years, commencing in 2006.

Synopsis:

The volume Discourse structure and narration: A diachronic view from Germanic deals with questions of information structuring at discourse level, focusing on narrative discourses. More precisely, it is about the contribution of grammatical devices to the organization of texts as well as their diagnostic potential for the narrative text type. Although it is well-known that information packaging had a much greater impact on the distribution of grammatical patterns in historical stages of a language than it does today, so far many studies on the relationship between information structure and grammatical patterns do not go beyond the sentence level, in other words, they do not take into account the possible influence of the text type on the manifestation of certain grammatical patterns. How and to which degree changes in grammatical patterns correlate or are affected by changes in either discourse and/or narrative structure, how the two layers interact with each other and affect each other, and how such issues can be operationalized are still understudied. This volume aims to shed more light on these issues by presenting eight papers, which address these questions more or less explicitly. As the research questions imply, the papers all take a historical or diachronic perspective. Another commonality between the studies is that they all focus on data from Germanic languages, as we assume that by comparing closely related languages, the relationships in question become more pronounced. Specifically, the languages in question are German, Dutch, English and Icelandic. Understandably, the contributions in this volume can only highlight some aspects of the complex relationship between grammar and narration(s). Addressing among others questions of narrative progression, temporal structure, reference tracking and discourse functions, the contributions discuss phenomena such as temporal adverbials at the left periphery as well as later in the clause, left dislocation structures, fronting of the finite verb in dependent and independent clauses, linguistic means to express aspectual and tense information, and the distribution of nominalization patterns across text types.

Synopsis:

Fillers are non-silent linguistic devices used in disfluencies to gain time while searching for words. In addition, they are frequently used intentionally to avoid words for reasons of politeness, ‘conspirational’ motivations, or rhetorical purposes. Two syntactically distinct types of conventionalized fillers can be distinguished: placeholders and hesitatives (also called hesitators). Placeholders are referential and morphosyntactically integrated, while hesitatives are neither. Strikingly, even though fillers are cross-linguistically widespread, dedicated studies of such items in particular languages are still largely lacking.

This collective volume comprises in-depth descriptions of conventionalized fillers in a substantial variety of languages from Eurasia, Papunesia, Australia, and the Americas, hoping to stimulate typological research on fillers, both hesitatives and placeholders. The book aims to contribute to a better visibility of the topic among general linguists, to make data and analyses accessible that will be useful for further typological studies on the topic, and to provide models for descriptive linguists.

The introductory chapter discusses issues emerging from the previous literature and offers a new typology of fillers. It also highlights the major findings of the eleven remaining chapters. Each of these contains a detailed and typologically informed analysis of fillers in one or several underdescribed languages, based on corpora of natural speech and focusing on lexical fillers rather than on phenomena below the word-level (phonetic lengthening, truncation) or above the word-level (such as idioms and discourse markers like ‘you know’, or rhetorical questions like ‘what’s the word for that?’). The chapters cover a large amount of diversity, both in terms of languages and with respect to the type of filler. They focus on (i) the criteria for identification of the various types of fillers and the terminology used, keeping in mind that the domain is still largely under construction, (ii) a detailed analysis in terms of morphosyntactic distribution and, if possible, (iii) frequency in speech, and (iv) some reflection on the diachronic development of these disfluency markers.

Synopsis:

This book is composed of four studies that all investigate different aspects of word stress in Papuan Malay, an Austronesian language spoken in eastern Indonesia. These aspects, in order of presentation, include acoustic realisation, auditory perception, lexical analyses and word disambiguation. The introduction provides the theoretical background against which the studies are undertaken. All studies are empirical in nature; they either report acoustic analyses, production or perception experiments, or corpus-based analyses. Taken together, the results of all studies pose a challenge to maintaining a stressless analysis of Papuan Malay. At the same time, the type of word stress that emerges from the reported results is unlike its common theoretical conception and therefore requires more work to be integrated in prosodic theory. Given the controversy on word stress in Indonesian languages, the results are always discussed and carefully interpreted in a cross-linguistic context. In this way, the current thesis extends and deepens our knowledge and understanding of word stress in prosodic theory.

Synopsis:

The present volume in the series Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics collects a curated selection of papers from the 2023 Colloque de Syntax et Sémantique à Paris (CSSP 2023), held on December 7-8, 2023, at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. The result aims to be a snapshot of contemporary linguistic research in the areas of syntax and semantics.

The eight contributions investigate phenomena spanning focus, meaning, modification, and discourse, offering new insights into how grammatical structures encode and convey information, and illustrating how detailed empirical work informs our understanding of grammatical phenomena. Drawing on data from multiple languages and employing diverse analytical frameworks, these studies advance current debates while maintaining the methodological rigor characteristic of contemporary formal linguistics.

The collection provides a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students working in syntax, semantics, and related areas.

Synopsis:

Lexicography, in its many forms, is a very old, practical discipline solving practical problems concerning word usage. The term “word” seems more appropriate than “language” in this context, as lexicography addresses more questions relating to what we now call lexicology. As with all areas of human endeavour, what developed gradually through trial and error has eventually been subjected to a theoretical framework. The role of historical lexicography is to look back on the development of these highly varied word lists to understand how we arrived at the tremendous variety that characterises practice throughout the world.

This volume is both a selection of expanded papers from one conference on historical lexicography and lexicology, held under the aegis of the International Society for Historical Lexicography and Lexicology (ISHLL) in Lorient, France, in May 2022, and also the first in a new book series dedicated to the field. The new series represents a collaboration between two sister associations, ISHLL and the Helsinki Society for Historical Lexicography (HSHL). The volume contains texts in both English and French that provide insights into dictionaries, their compilers and users using evidence from numerous languages across the globe. It is also diachronic, moving from topics on medieval usage to contemporary issues concerning open access and digital publishing in historical lexicography. The title reflects the global scope of its authors and content, encompassing Japan to the United States, Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom, and Portugal.

Synopsis:

North American Norwegian (NAmNo) is a diasporic heritage variety of Norwegian spoken primarily in the Upper Midwest of the United States. NAmNo has been in use since the mid-19th century, but it is now moribund. This volume serves as a synopsis of previous research focusing on the syntax of this language while also expanding upon these findings in key domains. Beyond the rich empirical description of facets of North American Norwegian syntax, the chapters in this volume also contribute to theory-building efforts from a Minimalist perspective. Kari Kinn and Michael T. Putnam begin the volume introducing the language and the theoretical preliminaries of aspects of the Minimalist Program found throughout the volume. The introductory chapter is followed by a detailed history of the emigration and language during the settlement period by Arnstein Hjelde. Brita Ramsevik Riksem and Mari Nygård explore the intricacies of agreement in determiner phrases, while Yvonne van Baal investigates its properties of definiteness. Kari Kinn rounds out the contributions on aspects of determiner phrases by taking a closer look at how possession is licensed in these structures. Shifting focus to the verbal and clausal domains, Kristin Eide’s chapter addresses the syntactic reflexes of tense, modality, and aspect in NAmNo. The structure of non-finite clauses is the theme of Michael T. Putnam and Åshild Søfteland’s contribution, which is followed up by Merete Anderssen, Helene R. Jensberg, Terje Lohndal, Björn Lundquist, and Marit Westergaard’s treatment of verb second (V2) word and finite verb placement. Ida Larsson and Kari Kinn analyze argument placement in NAmNo, focusing particularly on subject shift, object shift, and verb particles. Michael T. Putnam and Kari Kinn conclude the volume with an epilogue, highlighting the key empirical and theoretical findings of these contributions as well as charting a course for future research on the syntax of NAmNo. In summary, this volume is the first of its kind whose mission is not only to simultaneously summarize previous and ongoing research on the syntax of NAmNo, but to also demonstrate the important role heritage language syntax contributes to our understanding of the acquisition, attrition, change, and maintenance of heritage language syntax.

Synopsis:

This book is dedicated to Ilse Zimmermann, who was a pioneer of Generative Grammar in Germany and made important contributions to the analysis of German and Slavic languages. It contains original articles by Zimmermann as well as newly written papers inspired by her work. Zimmermann's original articles cover a wide range of topics over a long period of research – the earliest dating from 1983 – and they make it clear that issues that are highly topical today have long been the subject of linguistic research. The newly written papers are closely related to Zimmermann's topics ranging from DP structure, verbal inflection and reciprocity to the modification of causative verbs, all from a Slavic perspective. They are rounded off by a contribution highlighting the leading role played by the Strukturelle Grammatik research group, of which Zimmermann was a member, in the development of linguistics in Germany.

Dieses Buch ist Ilse Zimmermann gewidmet, die eine Pionierin der Generativen Grammatik in Deutschland war und wichtige Beiträge zur Analyse des Deutschen und der slawischen Sprachen geleistet hat. Es enthält sowohl Originalartikel von Zimmermann als auch neu verfasste Beiträge, die durch ihre Arbeit inspiriert wurden. Zimmermanns Originalartikel decken ein breites Spektrum von Themen in einem langen Forschungszeitraum ab – der früheste datiert aus dem Jahr 1983 – und sie machen deutlich, dass Fragen, die heute hochaktuell sind, schon lange Gegenstand der linguistischen Forschung sind. Die neu verfassten Kapitel stehen in engem Zusammenhang mit Zimmermanns Themen. Sie reichen von der DP-Struktur über verbale Flexion und Reziprozität bis hin zur Modifikation kausativer Verben, alles aus slawischer Perspektive. Abgerundet werden sie durch einen Beitrag, der die führende Rolle der Forschungsgruppe Strukturelle Grammatik, deren Mitglied Zimmermann war, für die Entwicklung der Linguistik in Deutschland hervorhebt.

Synopsis:

Tsova-Tush is an East Caucasian language spoken in one single village in Eastern Georgia by approximately 300 speakers. Since its early description, scholars have been intrigued by the high degree of linguistic influence from the Georgian language. This book has a threefold goal: (1) To contribute to the overall description of the Tsova-Tush language, by filling gaps in the previous literature in absence of a reference grammar. (2) To contrast Tsova-Tush constructions with functionally equivalent constructions in Chechen and Ingush, its closest relatives, and with Georgian, the language of wider communication which all Tsova-Tush speakers speak as a second language, in order to form hypotheses concerning which Tsova-Tush construction is inherited, and which has arisen under influence of Georgian. (3) To provide the most probable diachronic scenario of language contact, by looking at historical Tsova-Tush language data, as well as at its historical sociolinguistics.

This book provides a basic description of Tsova-Tush, in particular in the domain of spatial cases (which exhibit a two-slot system similar to Daghestanian languages), TAME categories (indentifying a Iamitive and a Past Subjunctive developing indirect evidential semantics), complex verbs, and subordination and clause-chaining (which in Tsova-Tush is finite).

In terms of language contact, this book concludes that (1) Tsova-Tush conforms to most established borrowing hierarchies and theories surrounding intensity of contact, except for the borrowing of a verbal inflection marker in a remarkably early stage of contact; (2) The Georgian influence that Tsova-Tush shows in sources from the 1850 suggest that a notable increase in bilingualism occured already at a point where there was little institutional or numeral dominance of surrounding the Georgian-language population. A change in ethnic self-identification can be the underlying factor for the early instances of contact-induced change.

Synopsis:

Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2022 brings together a collection of 22 articles originating as talks presented at the 15th Formal Description of Slavic Languages conference (FDSL 15) held in Berlin on 5–7 October, 2022. The contributions cover a broad spectrum of topics, including clitics, nominalizations, l-participles, the dual, verbal prefixes, assibilation, verbal and adjectival morphology, lexical stress, vowel reduction, focus particles, aspect, multiple wh-fronting, definiteness, polar questions, negation words, and argument structure in such languages as BCMS, Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Russian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, and Upper Sorbian.

The wide range of topics explored in this volume underscores the diversity and complexity of Slavic languages. The contributions not only advance our understanding of languages belonging to the Slavic group but also offer fresh perspectives for linguistics more broadly