This study provides a unified analysis of reduplication, a highly complex word formation process, in Afrikaans. Botha concludes that the reduplication principles at work in Afrikaans are not unique to that tongue and, in fact, that they are used by many other languages. Furthermore, Botha shows that neither special conceptual structures nor even standard reduplication procedures are needed to interpret Afrikaans reduplication, thus supporting recent work in cognition by Ray Jackendoff and other scholars. The book's analysis provides concrete illustration of Galilean linguistic inquiry at work...

Slavic Prosody is about the Slavic languages and how they changed over time, especially in their syllable structure and accent patterns. This is not a traditional comparative grammar but rather a discussion of selected problems in Slavic and how they relate to contemporary linguistic theory.

This book proposes a theory of the distribution of adverbial adjuncts in a Principles and Parameters framework, claiming that there are few syntactic principles specific to adverbials; rather, for the most part, adverbials adjoin freely to any projection. A wide range of adverbial types is analyzed; predicational adverbs (such as manner, and modal adverbs), domain expressions such as financially, temporal, frequency, duration, and focusing adverbials; participant PP's (e.g. locatives and benefactives); resultative and conditional clauses, and others, taken primarily from English, Chinese,...

Using data from Sissala, a previously unanalyzed language, this book shows that the analysis of text and discourse is best approached from a cognitive rather than a strictly linguistic point of view. In two introductory chapters, Regina Blass argues that Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory, a general account of communication and cognition, sheds more light on conversational data than do alternative linguistic approaches based on such notions as cohesion, coherence, and topic. In subsequent chapters, she discusses the Sissala equivalents of words such as "indeed," "so," "after all," and...

This study uses evidence from early English poetry to determine when certain sound changes took place in the transition from Old to Middle English. It builds on the premise that alliteration in early English verse reflects faithfully the identity and similarity of stressed syllable onsets; it is based on the acoustic signal and not on the visual identity of letters. Examination of the behaviour of onset clusters leads to new conclusions regarding the causes for the special treatment of sp-, st-, sk-, and the chronology and motivation of cluster reduction.

Matthew Chen's landmark study offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of the rich and complex patterns of tone used in Chinese languages. Chinese has a wide repertoire of tones that undergo often surprising changes when they are connected in speech flow. This tonal alternation is known as tone sandhi. Chen examines tone sandhi phenomena across a variety of Chinese dialects. His book is the culmination of a ten-year research project and explores a range of important theoretical issues against a wealth of empirical data not previously accessible to linguists.

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.

This book analyzes some differences among English, Scottish and American accents of English, and shows how they developed and why they have their current form. Although the revised version of lexical phonology presented here is intended to describe present-day patterns, it can also show how historical sound changes gave rise to these patterns.

Develops a pragmatic theory of anaphora, which is a key topic in theoretical linguistics.

Categories of the verb in natural languages include tense, aspect, modality (mood) and voice. Among these, voice, in its rich and diverse manifestations, is perhaps the most complex. But most prior research concentrates on only certain types, predominantly passives. Voice expresses relations between a predicate and a set of nominal positions - or their referents - in a clause or other structure. Grammatical Voice is the first typological study of voice systems based on a multi-language survey. It introduces a threefold classification of voice types, in the first place distinguishing...