Auxiliaries are one of the most complex areas of English syntax. Disagreement over both the principles and details of their grammar has been substantial. Anthony Warner here offers a detailed account of both their synchronic and diachronic properties. He first argues that lexical properties are central to their grammar, which is relatively non-abstract. He then traces in detail the history of processes of grammaticalisation in their development and claims most notably that we can identify a group of auxiliaries in English from an early period on formal, not just semantic, grounds. This book...

In this study Terence McKay demonstrates how the principles of the theory of Government and Binding apply to German syntax and in particular to an aspect that has exposed especially problematic and interesting issues: the properties of the infinitival constructions with lassen, scheinen and the verbs of perception. Previous attempts to account for the syntactic ambivalence between mono- and bisententiality of these constructions have been demonstrably inadequate or incomplete. Here Dr McKay argues convincingly for a bisentential approach, which is compatible not only with standard...

Language is spoken at a particular time, in a particular place, by a particular person; and certain words, the deictic terms, can only be fully defined by recourse to this extra-linguistic context. Consequently many linguists considered deixis as something peripheral in the working language and its central importance in what Quine has called the ontogenesis of reference has only recently been recognised. In these studies Dr Tanz investigates children's acquisition of the deictic distinctions involved in the (single) personal pronouns, the spatial terms in back of and in front of, the verbs...

Conditional constructions have long fascinated linguists, grammarians and philosophers. Eve Sweetser and Barbara Dancygier offer a new descriptive framework by broadening the range of study. Using a gamut of English conditional constructions, they explore issues such as the compositionality of constructional meaning, describing both the mental-space building processes underlying conditional thinking, and the form-meaning relationship involved in expressing conditionality.

This study offers a comprehensive and illuminating account of one of the characteristics shared to some degree by the languages of the Balkan peninsula - Greek, Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian and Romanian - namely the loss of the infinitive and its replacement by finite verb forms. Dr Joseph meticulously examines the documentary evidence for this loss and, in the light of his findings, many of the oversimplifications, misinterpretations and omissions in earlier accounts are rectified. Many of the issues raised in his discussion, for example how 'infinitive' or 'finiteness'...

Questions about the development of the Romance future have engaged scholars since Thielmann's classic statement of 1885, yet a century later a number of the fundamental issues remain unresolved. Professor Fleischman suggests that this is in part due to the narrow sense in which the question has traditionally been formulated - as simply the history of the future-tense' slot in the grammar - and in part the result of the investigative approach, which until recently has taken little account of important advances in general linguistics in the field of diachronic syntax. The present volume...

Dr Thrane makes an original contribution to one of the central topics in syntax and semantics: the nature and mechanisms of reference in natural language. He makes a fundamental distinction between syntactic analyses that are internal to the structure of a language and analyses of the referential properties that connect a language with the 'outside world' - and therefore derive in some sense from common human capacities for perceptual discrimination. Dr Thrane argues that the failure to make this distinction and to attend separately to both kinds of analysis has vitiated previous general...

In this impressive empirical survey, Annette Schmidt analyses the changes that have taken place in the Dyirbal spoken by the last generation of its speakers.

Provides a comprehensive account of how children acquire complex sentences.

This study comprehensively describes and analyses the syntax and semantics of German reflexive constructions known as middles.