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This book considers the syntax of the left periphery of clauses in relation to the extra‐sentential context. The prevailing point of view, in the literature in this field is that the external context does not intervene at all in the syntax of the sentence, and that the interaction between sentence and context takes place post‐syntactically. This monograph challenges this view and proposes that reference to indexicality is syntactically encoded in the left‐most position of the clause, where the speaker's temporal and spatial location is represented. To support this hypothesis, it analyses various kinds of temporal dependencies in embedded clauses, such as indicative versus subjunctive, and proposes a new analysis of the imperfect and the future‐in‐the‐past. The book also compares languages such as Italian and English with languages which have different properties of temporal interpretation, such as Chinese. Finally, analysis of the literary style known as Free Indirect Discourse also supports the hypothesis, showing that it may have a wide range of consequences.

This book develops a new analysis of the interpretation of verb phrases and VP adjunction by arguing that the lexical subcategorization information of verbs is systematically underspecified and is only resolved when verb phrases are built in context, with recourse to pragmatic knowledge. This idea is formally implemented in the framework Dynamic Syntax by introducing an underspecified semantic type into the logical system. This provides an account of how verb phrases are built on-line and how verbs can be used with a different array of complements on each occasion of use. Under this dynamic view, the interpretation of verbs is argued to be essentially pragmatic, making use of the notion of ad hoc concept formation developed in Relevance theory. The approach is illustrated in detail by a case study of Swahili applied verbs. The study brings together results from dynamic approaches to syntax and Relevance theoretic pragmatics, and charts the stretch of the syntax-pragmatic interface where lexical information from verbs and contextual concept formation meet.

This book looks at brevity as an important topic for interdisciplinary study. It studies the diversity of ways in which brevity is achieved in conversation and examines the psychological, philosophical, and linguistic problems associated with the subject. When people make a contribution to a conversation, they tend towards brevity: they use elliptical constructions, exploit salient features of the environment in which the conversation is situated, make gestures, take account of what has been said before, either in the present conversation or in previous ones, and tailor their words to what they know of the beliefs and the personalities of the others taking part. In doing all this they generally make no obvious or unusual mental effort, and interpretation and comprehension are not hindered. Some of the problems of explaining this phenomenon are philosophically complex, and invite new explorations in linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and computer science. The book is the culmination of a multidisciplinary research project: it discusses psycholinguistic interpretations of the mechanisms at play in conversation, and takes full account of the latest developments in all the disciplines involved.

Plains Cree, an Algonquian language of western Canada, has two entirely distinct verbal inflectional paradigms: independent and conjunct. This book provides the first systematic investigation comparing these two verb types. It argues that the independent order denotes an indexical clause type with familiar deictic properties, while the conjunct order is an anaphoric clause type whose reference is determined by rules of anaphoric dependence. On the syntactic side, indexical clauses are shown to be restricted to a subset of matrix environments, and to exclude proforms that have clause‐external antecedents or induce cross‐clausal dependencies. Anaphoric clauses have an elsewhere distribution: they occur in both matrix and dependent contexts, and freely host and participate in cross‐clausal dependencies. The semantic discussion focusses primarily on the context in which a proposition is evaluated: it shows that indexical clauses have absolute tense and a speaker origo, consistent with deixis on a speech act. Anaphoric clauses, by contrast, use anaphoric dependencies to establish the evaluation context. Along the way, Plains Cree data is compared to English's matrix/subordinate system, to Amele's clause‐chaining system, and to Romance subjunctive clauses. In addition, a first micro‐typology of pronominal marking and initial change in Algonquian languages is provided.

This book examines the issue of competing motivations in grammar and language use. The term “competing motivations” refers to the conflicting factors that shape the content and form of grammatical rules and which speakers and addressees need to contend with when expressing themselves, or when trying to comprehend messages. For example, there are on-going competitions between the speaker's interests and the addressee's needs, or between constraints imposed by grammar and those imposed by online processing. These competitions impact a wide variety of systems, including case marking, agreement, and word order, politeness forms, lexical choices, and the position of relative clauses. The twenty-one studies are mostly based on English data but evidence from many languages is also discussed. In addition to grammar and usage in adult language, many of the chapters analyze data from first- and second-language acquisition as well; others probe into the motivations that drive historical change.

This book draws together nine original investigations by leading linguists and promising young scholars on the syntax of complementisers (eg that in She said that she would) and their phrases. The chapters are divided into two parts, each of which highlights aspects of the behaviour and function of complementisers. The first part looks at how and when subjects, or parts of subjects, can and cannot move outside their canonical position in a sentence. Each chapter examines and compares the relevance of a number of syntactic factors in languages such as English, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Brazilian Portuguese, and Bavarian. In the second part, the focus turns to the nature and function of complementisers themselves, with discussions drawing on evidence from Italian, Italian dialects, Hebrew, and Dutch.

Understanding the properties of questions and their embedding predicates has been a central project in theoretical syntax and semantics over the last fifty years. This book examines the semantic interpretation of various types of nominal complements in so-called concealed question (CQ) constructions, providing new results about the nature of CQs, their interaction with quantification, and the semantics of attitude ascriptions. Over the past forty years, several accounts have emerged (question-based accounts: Harris 2007, Aloni 2008, Roelofsen and Aloni 2008, Percus 2009; proposition-based accounts: Romero 2005, Nathan 2006; de-re analyses: Frana 2006, Schwager 2008; individual concept accounts: Heim 1979, Romero 2005, Frana 2010a, 2013), all of which successfully derive the intuitive meaning of sentences with simple definite CQs (e.g. John knows the price of milk). However, examination of these simple sentences does not discriminate one CQ-theory from another, nor does it tell us much about what ingredients are necessary for the proper treatment of CQs in natural language. For this reason, many authors have recently started investigating the interpretation of more complex CQ-constructions. This book can be located within this line of research. Its main result is to provide genuinely new analyses for a range of CQ data that seemed problematic for existing analyses, including (i) the presence (or absence) of so-called pair-list and set readings in sentences with quantified CQs and (ii) the interaction between this type of ambiguity with the ambiguity between so-called question and meta-question readings of sentences with nested CQs (as in Heim 1979?s famous sentence John knows the price that Fred knows).

How does a speaker decide what to say? This can be a complex problem even in relatively simple-looking domains. In the case of numerical expressions, there are often many choices that would be semantically acceptable: if ‘more than 200’ is true, then so are ‘more than 199’, ‘more than 150’, ‘more than 100’, and so on. Intuitively, as speakers, we don’t choose among these options just arbitrarily; but nor do we consistently follow any simple heuristic. And as hearers, we’re not just interested in what the speaker literally said, but also any inferences we can draw about, for instance, the falsity or unavailability of other statements. This book presents a novel pragmatic account of the meaning and use of numerically-quantified expressions. In it, the author lays out a set of criteria that are argued individually to influence the speaker’s choice of expression. The process of choosing what to say is then treated as a problem of multiple constraint satisfaction. This approach enables multiple different considerations, drawn from principles of semantics, pragmatics, philosophy, psycholinguistics and the psychology of number, simultaneously to be integrated within a single coherent account. The constraint-based model is shown to offer novel predictions about usage, and interpretation, that are borne out experimentally and in corpus research. It also explains problematic data in numerical quantification that have previously been handled by more stipulative means. And it offers a potential line of attack for addressing the problem of the speaker’s choice in more general linguistic environments.

The Construal of Spatial Meaning: Windows into Conceptual Space explores the construal and expression of various aspects of the SPACE domain. Within the broad framework of Cognitive Linguistics, the research reported probes the interaction between language and cognition. We take linguistics to encompass both verbal and non-verbal communication systems and include metaphorical as well as literal forms of expression. Although the papers focus on the relation between physical and mental space as expressed in human communication, they cover a wide variety of research topics and reflect the multidisciplinary character of the study of space. Through the structure of this book the editors wish to convey to the reader the metaphor that the different approaches in the analysis of SPACE offer windows through which researchers are able to catch glimpses of ‘inner space’. An eye-tracking experiment shows eye movement to reflect spatiality during visualizations of both pictures and spoken scene descriptions. A study of a child shows how the development of linguistic communicative ability may be seen as a transition from pointing in physical space to pointing in mental spaces. A study of drawings based on verbal stimuli suggests that people are engaging in an imaginative embodied simulation of metaphorical motion. In one gesture study on route direction with blocked visibility, participants tend to use the dominant hand for referential aspects and the weak hand for self-orientational functions. In another, through gestures and body postures, a girl with the Patau syndrome extracts and conveys intricate information in communication situations. In yet another gesture study, speakers express lateral (left/right) direction in co-speech gestures when using next to to complement the linguistic spatial unit with unlexicalized locative information. An analysis of the motion situation distinguishes between primary and secondary figure and ground, and subdivides Talmy’s notion of Manner into manner of static existence and dynamic activity and makes Talmy’s telic Path dependent on autonomous resultant state situations. One cross-linguistic study offers experimental support for basic-level verbs of locomotion without making recourse to the loose notion of Manner, while another, in which German and French children describe motion events, supports the view that general cognitive factors and language-specific properties determine children’s construction of the semantics of space when encoding Manner and Path. In a usage-based study of children’s acquisition of Dutch spatial adjectives it is suggested that children, who often use spatial adjectives to express contrast, store specific adjective–noun/object pairings from the input and start by reproducing them with the same communicative function as in the language they hear around them. A corpus-study of Danish directional adverbs shows how the forms can be described and explained as different ways of profiling a dynamic motion event in a basic Path event frame. A construction-grammar analysis of some complex predicate constructions reveals systematic differences between English and Spanish in the organization of the argument structure, and argues that fundamental typological distinctions should be based on the relative importance of constructional and lexical constraints. In a corpus-based study of road, path, way it is shown that both non-metaphorical and metaphorical instances of these terms are closely connected with people’s embodied experiences of travel through space along paths, roads, or ways. The last paper, investigating negation, opens up a window to the ‘inner space’ by suggesting that antonyms are organized into conceptual spaces. ‘Not’ is a degree modifier operating on the configurational construals in SPACE. In combination with BOUNDED antonyms it operates on the boundary and bisects a spatial structure, while with UNBOUNDED antonyms it modifies the UNBOUNDED SCALE structure and evokes a range on the scale in SPACE, like ‘fairly’.

The continuation of an expression is a portion of its surrounding context. This book proposes and defends the continuation hypothesis: that the meaning of a natural language expression can depend on its own continuation (it can denote a function on its surrounding context). Part I develops a continuation‐based theory of scope and quantificational binding. Taking inspiration from the theory of computer programming languages, and unlike other accounts of scope, continuations provide fine‐grained control over the order in which expressions are evaluated (processed). This leads to a principled yet nuanced explanation for sensitivity to order in scope‐related phenomena such as scope ambiguity, crossover, superiority, reconstruction, negative polarity licensing, dynamic anaphora, and donkey anaphora. Throughout Part I, concrete, explicit formal analyses are presented in a novel ‘tower’ format, which is designed to be easy to learn and easy to use, with diagrams, derivations, and detailed motivation and explanation. Part II develops an innovative substructural logic for reasoning about continuations. This enables an analysis of the notoriously challenging compositional semantics of adjectives such as “same” in terms of parasitic scope and recursive scope. In a separate investigation, certain cases of ellipsis are treated as anaphora to a continuation, leading to a new explanation for a subtype of sluicing known as sprouting. Attention is given throughout the book to the formal and computational properties of the analyses. Taken together, the empirical case studies support the conclusion that any complete and adequate theory of natural language meaning must recognize continuations as an essential explanatory element.

Relying primarily on data from English, Mandarin Chinese, and modern Greek, this book investigates the intimate relationship that control bears to restructuring and to the meanings of the embedding predicates that participate in these structures. It argues that restructuring is cross-linguistically pervasive and that, in virtue of its co-occurrence with some control predicates but not others, it evidences a basic division within the class of complement control structures, the division being keyed to how the semantics of the control predicate interacts with general principles of clausal architecture and of the syntax–semantics interface. In particular, three central claims are advanced: (1) Exhaustive control predicates instantiate functional heads in the inflectional layer of the clause and thereby give rise to monoclausal raising structures, whereas partial control predicates realize lexical heads and thereby give rise to biclausal PRO-control structures. (2) Exhaustive control predicates gain semantic access to their subject by incorporating a variable that is obligatorily bound by the subject when it raises. (3) A predicate restructures by corresponding semantically to an inflectional-layer functional head and thereby realizing that head. But some predicates systematically fail to restructure because they have meanings that would place them above Tense in the structure of the clause, and given that subjects are interpreted no higher than [Spec,TP], restructuring leads to failed variable binding and hence ungrammaticality.

Copulas (in English, the verb to be) are conventionally defined functionally as a means of relating elements of clause structure, especially subject and complement, and considered to be semantically empty or meaningless. They have received relatively little attention from linguists. This book goes some way towards correcting this neglect. In doing so it takes issue with both accepted definition and description. The book presents an analysis of grammatical descriptions of more than 160 languages drawn from the language families of the world. The book shows that some languages have a single copula, others several, and some none at all. In a series of statistical analyses it seeks to explain why by linking the distribution of copulas to variations in lexical categorization and syntactic structure. The book concludes by advancing a comprehensive theory of copularization which it relates to language classification and to theories of language change, notably grammaticalization.

This volume explores the expression of the concepts count and mass in human language and probes the complex relation between seemingly incontrovertible aspects of meaning and their varied grammatical realizations across languages. In English, count nouns are those that can be counted and pluralized (two cats), whereas mass nouns cannot be, at least not without a change in meaning (two rices). The chapters in this volume explore the question of the cognitive and linguistic universality and variability of the concepts count and mass from philosophical, semantic, and morpho-syntactic points of view, touching also on issues in acquisition and processing. The volume also significantly contributes to our cross-linguistic knowledge, as it includes chapters with a focus on Blackfoot, Cantonese, Dagaare, English, Halkomelem, Lithuanian, Malagasy, Mandarin, Ojibwe, and Persian, as well as discussion of several other languages including Armenian, Hungarian, and Korean. The overall consensus of this volume is that while the general concepts of count and mass are available to all humans, forms of grammaticalization involving number, classifiers, and determiners play a key role in their linguistic treatment, and indeed in whether these concepts are grammatically expressed at all. This variation may be reflect the fact that count/mass is just one possible realization of a deeper and broader concept, itself related to the categories of nominal and verbal aspect.

The book offers an original theory of meaning in discourse that combines a dynamic representation of discourse with an intentional explanation of processing. It contains an exposition of a theory of default semantics and its application to a range of language constructions. Default semantics provides cognitive foundations of discourse interpretation and does so in a broadly conceived truth-conditional framework where truth conditions are applied to utterances. The theory combines the subject matter of post-Gricean ‘truth-conditional pragmatics’ with the formalism and semanticization of meaning found in discourse representation theory (DRT). It is assumed that pragmatic information can contribute to the truth-conditional representation of an utterance. This information can have the form of (i) conscious inference, or it can have a form of default interpretation conceived of as (ii) cognitive defaults and (iii) social-cultural defaults. From DRT, it borrows the idea of dynamic semantics as context change implemented in semantic representation and the idea that meaning in discourse will, somehow or other, turn out to be compositional, that is, it will turn out to be a function of the parts and the structure. In short, default semantics combines two seemingly incompatible assumptions that (i) pragmatic input contributes to the truth conditions and (ii) the theory of meaning of utterances and discourses is a compositional, semantic theory. Such semantic representations are called merger representations in that they combine (merge) information from word meaning, sentence structure, pragmatic inference, and various kinds of defaults. Predicating compositionality of such merger representations aided by using an extended and amended language of DRT allows for the semanticization of the account of discourse meaning. The book is divided into two parts. Part I contains theoretical foundations and addresses the questions of the semantics/pragmatics boundary, underspecification, logical form, levels of representation, default meanings, and ‘pragmatic’ compositionality of merger representations. Part II contains some applications of the theory, including definite descriptions, propositional attitude reports, temporality, presupposition, sentential connectives, and number terms.

This book argues that definite descriptions refer to or range overindividuals, as claimed by Frege and Strawson. Working within asituation semantics framework, Elbourne maintains that definitedescriptions combine with a situation variable in the syntax; at thesemantic level, the whole expression is of type e and contains a locallyfree situation variable that can be either referential or bound by somehigher operator. The resulting theory is tested against a wide range ofdata from the literature, including problems related to the following:presupposition projection; the referential/attributive distinction;descriptions in predicative position; c-commanded and donkey anaphora;the de re/de dicto distinction and other modal issues; existenceentailments in embedded contexts; and incompleteness. Comparisons aredrawn between this theory and other theories that find contemporaryadvocates. Particular attention is paid to the relative merits of thecurrent theory and the Russellian theory. The penultimate chapterexamines the semantics of pronouns and argues that they too arebasically Fregean definite descriptions.

This volume investigates the role of some functional units—discourse and pragmatic markers—complementing theoretical chapters with case studies. These markers are used by speakers to index discourse organization (discourse markers, DM), the relationship with the interlocutor, and the speaker’s stance (pragmatic markers, PM). The book offers a wide spectrum of approaches to identifying different classes of DM and PM, thanks to the contribution of scholars who have researched the relationship between synchronic properties of functional markers and their patterns of development, moving from their lexical sources (i.e. verbs and adverbs). Different classes of DM and PM are analysed in Latin and Romance languages, including the less-investigated Romanian or Portuguese, to contrastively explore a pragmatic phenomenon in genealogically related languages. The development of DMs and PMs calls into question processes such as grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, setting crucial theoretical and methodological issues within the discussion on the interface between grammar, discourse, and interaction. Furthermore, within the debate on gradualness and gradience in language change, different case studies suggest that peculiarities shown by DMs and PMs and by their different paths of development entail diachronic gradualness and constructional (form–meaning) changes that occur in sequences of micro-changes.

This book introduces the rapidly evolving field of electronic lexicography. The aim is to provide a wide overview of the full process of electronic dictionary production and present some of the challenges faced by publishers, editors and lexicographers as well as the benefits offered to a wide range of users language learners, translators and professionals. Throughout the book particular focus is placed on user needs and the functionalities of electronic dictionaries that are designed to meet them. The volume contains chapters introducing some innovative dictionary projects and surveys of dictionary use. One of the hallmarks of the volume is that it is not limited to English but touches on a range of other languages (Bantu languages, French, German, Russian, Slovene, Spanish as well as sign language). Another key feature of the volume is that it embraces a wide range of lexicographic theories and practices.

This book presents a theory of enriched meanings for natural language interpretation. Certain expressions that exhibit complex effects at the semantics/pragmatics boundary live in an enriched meaning space while others live in a more basic meaning space. These basic meanings are mapped to enriched meanings just when required compositionally, which avoids generalizing meanings to the worst case. The theory is captured formally using monads, a concept from category theory. Monads are also prominent in functional programming and have been successfully used in the semantics of programming languages to characterize certain classes of computation. They are used here to model certain challenging linguistic computations at the semantics/pragmatics boundary. Part I presents some background on the semantics/pragmatics boundary, informally presents the theory of enriched meanings, reviews the linguistic phenomena of interest, and provides the necessary background on category theory and monads. Part II provides novel compositional analyses of the following phenomena: conventional implicature, substitution puzzles, and conjunction fallacies. Part III explores the prospects of combining monads, with particular reference to these three cases. The authors show that the compositional properties of monads model linguistic intuitions about these cases particularly well. The book is an interdisciplinary contribution to Cognitive Science: These phenomena cross not just the boundary between semantics and pragmatics, but also disciplinary boundaries between Linguistics, Philosophy and Psychology, three of the major branches of Cognitive Science, and are here analyzed with techniques that are prominent in Computer Science, a fourth major branch. A number of exercises are provided to aid understanding, as well as a set of computational tools (available at the book's website), which also allow readers to develop their own analyses of enriched meanings.

Within formal semantics, research on the expression of modality in natural language has traditionally focused on verbs. This book brings together novel work on the semantics and pragmatics of some nominal expressions that also convey modality. The book focuses on indefinites that can convey ignorance on the part of the speaker with respect to which individual satisfies the existential claim that they make. Despite the fact that epistemic indefinites have attracted some attention in the recent semantics literature, we still do not have a good understanding of the phenomenon: there is currently no agreement as to what the source of their epistemic component is, we lack sufficient cross-linguistic data to develop a semantic typology of these items, and the parallelisms and differences between epistemic indefinites and other expressions that convey epistemic modality have not been explored in depth. In this volume, the reader will find novel empirical observations on and important theoretical insights into epistemic indefinites, together with discussions of related topics (e.g. modal free relatives, modified numerals, and epistemic modals). This brings us one step closer to developing a semantic typology of epistemic indefinites that explores the place of these expressions within a general typology of modal items.

Perception verbs – such as look, see, taste, hear, feel, sound, listen, and observe – present unresolved problems for linguistic theories. This book examines the predictability of relations between their semantics and syntactic behaviour, the different kinds of polysemy they exhibit, and the role of evidentiality in verbs like seem and appear. After an opening chapter explaining the nature of the issues, there is a concise introduction to Word Grammar. Chapter 3 considers the implications of the approach for a general theory of event structure, and looks at how Word Grammar can be applied to causation, argument linking, and the modelling of polysemy. Chapter 4 explores the polysemy of see; chapter 5 looks at relations between verbs of active perception like listen, and verbs of involuntary perception such as hear; chapter 6 explores the semantics of non‐finite predicative complementation; and chapter 7 discusses verbs of appearance. Chapter 8 presents some conclusions.