Jieun Kiaer puts forward an argument in this book that the grammar of a language directly underpins the processing of the language, in real time. This is a view that runs against the orthodoxy of linguistic theorizing for the last 50 years, which has insisted that languages have to be characterized in terms that make little or no reference to the dynamics of language use.

This orthodox view fails to fit languages in which the verb has to be at the end of the clause -- which encompasses more than half of the world's languages. Thus, as this book shows, these languages remain very...

Creole languages have in recent years become a valuable source of data for current theories of syntax and theories of child/adult language acquisition. However, grammars of these languages, particularly those couched within theoretical frameworks of one kind of another, are few and far between.

This book contributes directly to creole linguistics by providing a detailed study of different aspects of the syntax of Mauritian creole within the theoretical framework of Principles and Parameters (Chomsky, 1981) and Minimalism (1995). It gives the reader a detailed account of the...

This volume contains a detailed, precise and clear semantic formalism designed to allow non-programmers such as linguists and literary specialists to represent elements of meaning which they must deal with in their research and teaching. At the same time, by its basis in a functional programming paradigm, it retains sufficient formal precision to support computational implementation.

The formalism is designed to represent meaning as found at a variety of levels, including basic semantic units and relations, word meaning, sentence-level phenomena, and text-level meaning. By drawing...