The organization of the lexicon, and especially the relations between groups of lexemes is a strongly debated topic in linguistics. Some authors have insisted on the lack of any structure of the lexicon. In this vein, Di Sciullo & Williams (1987: 3) claim that “[t]he lexicon is like a prison – it contains only the lawless, and the only thing that its inmates have in commonis lawlessness”.…
This book is the first typological study of adjective attribution marking. Its focus lies on Northern Eurasia, although it covers many more languages and presents an ontology of morphosyntactic categories relevant to noun phrase structure in general. Beside treating synchronic data, the study contributes to historical linguistics by reconstructing the origin of new types specifically in the lan…
Speakers use a variety of different linguistic resources in the construction of their identities, and they are able to do so because their mental representations of linguistic and social information are linked. While the exact nature of these representations remains unclear, there is growing evidence that they encode a great deal more phonetic detail than traditionally assumed and that the phon…
Sign languages and spoken languages have many fascinating differences, caused primarily by the reaction of the human mind to different modalities, but also by some important social differences. This book examines the effects of these and other differences on sign language phonology and phonetics using observation, experimentation and theory. Languages examined include Asian, Middle Eastern, Eur…
Winner of the 2016 Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Book Prize Sites of Translation illustrates the intricate rhetorical work that multilingual communicators engage in as they translate information for their communities. Blending ethnographic and empirical methods from multiple disciplines, Laura Gonzales provides methodological examples of how linguistic diversity can be studied in pra…
There is an age-old tradition in linguistics and philosophy to identify the meaning of a entence with its truth-conditions. This can be explained by the fact that linguistic and philosophical investigations are usually carried out in a logical framework that was originally designed to characterize valid reasoning. Indeed, in order to determine whether an argument is valid, it suffices to know t…
Why is it that some ways of using English are considered "good" and others are considered "bad"? Why are certain forms of language termed elegant, eloquent or refined, whereas others are deemed uneducated, coarse, or inappropriate? Making Sense of "Bad English" is an accessible introduction to attitudes and ideologies towards the use of English in different settings around the world. Outlining …
Collected for the first time in a single volume, these essays and articles by Naoki Fukui form an outline of some of the most significant and formative contributions to syntactic theory. Focusing particularly on the typological differences between Eng/type language and Japanese/type languages, Fukui examines the abstract parameters that both link and divide them. Linguistic universals are consi…