Guglielmo Cinque is one of the world's leading theoretical syntacticians, and is particularly known for his application of recent theory to the analysis of Italian. This volume brings together eleven of his essays, some published here for the first time and others not hitherto easily available. Cinque explores a wide range of aspects of Italian syntax, and compares Italian with the syntax of other Romance, and also Germanic, languages. This volume will be welcomed by all those working on Italian syntax, and on theoretical syntax more generally.

Bernd Heine argues that the structure of grammatical categories is predictable to a large extent once we know the range of possible cognitive structures from which they are derived. The author uses as his example the structure of predicative possession, and shows how most of the possessive constructions to be found in the world's languages can be traced back to a small set of basic conceptual patterns. Using grammaticalization theory Heine describes how each affects the word order and morphosyntax of the resulting possessive construction.

One of the basic premises of the theory of syntax is that clause structures can be minimally identified as containing a verb phrase, playing the role of predicate, and a noun phrase, playing the role of subject. In this study Andrea Moro identifies a new category of copular sentences, namely inverse copular sentences, where the predicative noun phrase occupies the position that is canonically reserved for subjects. In the process, he sheds new light on such classical issues as the distribution and nature of expletives, locality theory and cliticization phenomena.

This book presents an innovative theory of syntactic categories and the lexical classes they define. It revives the traditional idea that these are to be distinguished notionally (semantically). The author proposes a notation based on semantic features that accounts for the syntactic behavior of classes. The book also presents a case for considering this classification--again in a rather traditional vein--to be basic to determining the syntactic structure of sentences.

Athapaskan languages are of great linguistic interest due to their intricate morphology. In this clear and insightful book, Keren Rice offers a rich survey of morpheme ordering in Athapaskan verbs, with implications for both synchronic grammar and language change. She argues that verb structure is predictable across Athapaskan languages if certain abstract aspects of meaning are considered. This is the first major comparative study of its type for Athapaskan languages, combining descriptive depth with a contemporary theoretical perspective.

Referencing new developments in cognitive and functional linguistics, phonetics, and connectionist modeling, this book investigates various ways in which a speaker/hearer's experience with language affects the representation of phonology. Rather than assuming phonological representations in terms of phonemes, Joan Bybee adopts an exemplar model, in which specific tokens of use are stored and categorized phonetically with reference to variables in the context. This model allows an account of phonetically gradual sound change that produces lexical variation, and provides an explanatory account...

Psycholinguist Maya Hickmann presents an original comparative study of discourse development in English, French, German, and Chinese. Hickmann discusses the main theoretical issues in the study of first language acquisition and provides a wide review of available studies in three domains of child language: person, space and time. Her findings concern the rhythm of language acquisition, its formal and functional determinants, and its universal vs. language-specific aspects. The conclusions stress the importance of relating sentence and discourse determinants of acquisition in a crosslinguistic...

This book offers a new and in-depth analysis of English conditional sentences. Dancygier classifies conditional constructions according to time-reference and modality. She shows how the basic meaning parameters of conditionality correlate to formal parameters of the linguistic constructions that are used to express them. Focused on English, the study also provides a framework that can be extended to a broad range of grammatical phenomena in many other languages.

All modes of perception (vision, hearing, etc.) are organized into foreground or focus and background constituents. Natural language sentences are no different. This book explores the role of focusing in natural language sentences and the role of this basic cognitive mechanism in explaining sentence stress, meaning and structure. The result is an innovative view of our linguistic competence.

This study focuses on the cognitive processes involved in creole genesis: relexification, reanalysis, and direct leveling. The role of these processes is documented by a detailed comparison of Haitian creole with its two major contributing languages, French and Fongbe, to illustrate how mechanisms from source languages show themselves in creole. The author examines the input of adult, as opposed to child, speakers and resolves the problems in the three main approaches, universalist, superstratist and substratist, which have been central to the recent debate on creole development.