This book offers a thorough discussion of morphological theory and is based directly on an 'inflecting' or 'fusional' language - Latin.

This 1979 volume was the first to apply the principles of social linguistics within a British urban community, specifically Norwich.

The relationship between the meaning of words and the structure of sentences is an important area of research in linguistics. Studying the connections between lexical conceptual meaning and event structural relations, this book arrives at a modular classification of verb types within English and across languages. Ramchand argues that lexical encyclopedic content and event structural aspects of meaning need to be systematically distinguished, and that thematic and aspectual relations belong to the latter domain of meaning. The book proposes a syntactic decompositional view of core verbal...

'Contrast' - the opposition between distinctive sounds in a language - is one of the most central concepts in linguistics. This book presents a fascinating account of the logic and history of contrast in phonology. It provides empirical evidence from diverse phonological domains that only contrastive features are computed by the phonological component of grammar. It argues that the contrastive specifications of phonemes are governed by language-particular feature hierarchies. This approach assigns a key role to abstract cognitive structures, challenging contemporary approaches that favour...

Each verb in natural language is associated with a set of arguments, which are not systematically predictable from the verb's meaning and are realized syntactically as the projected sentence's subject, direct object, etc. Babby puts forward the theory that this set of arguments (the verb's 'argument structure') has a universal hierarchical composition which directly determines the sentence's case and grammatical relations. The structure is uniform across language families and types, and this theory is supported by the fact that the core grammatical relations within simple sentences of all...

David Crystal OBE provides the reader with a thorough and fascinating analysis of the patterns of intonation and prosody found within the English language.

One of the major arenas for debate within generative grammar is the nature of paradigmatic relations among words. Intervening in key debates at the interface between syntax and semantics, this book examines the relation between structure and meaning, and analyzes how it affects the internal properties of words and corresponding syntactic manifestations. Adapting notions from the Evo-Devo project in biology (the idea of 'co-linearity' between structural units and behavioural manifestations) Juan Uriagereka addresses a major puzzle: how words can be both decomposable so as to be acquired by...

Originally published in 1975, this was the first detailed linguistic study of natural language numeral systems. It draws on two quite different scholarly traditions. The first is carried on by anthropologists and others compiling and cataloguing data on the different counting-systems of the world. The second explores generative grammar, which analyses the universal features and the formal organisation of these numeral systems. Dr Hurford is able to extend and modify the detailed theory of generative grammar by testing it against this material and discovering the rules, conventions and...

What is the nature of syntactic structure? Why do some languages have radically free word order ('nonconfigurationality')? Do parameters vary independently (the micro-view) or can they co-vary en masse (the macro-view)? Mirrors and Microparameters examines these questions by looking beyond the definitional criterion of nonconfigurationality - that arguments may be freely ordered, omitted, and split. Drawing on data from Kiowa, a member of the largely undescribed Kiowa-Tanoan language family, the book reveals that classically nonconfigurational languages can nonetheless exhibit robustly...

This book explains how particle verbs fit into the grammatical systems of English and Dutch.