Agreement in language relates to the correspondence between words in a sentence, in terms of gender, case, person, or number. For example, in the sentence 'he runs', the suffix -s 'agrees' with the singular 'he'. Patterns of agreement vary dramatically cross-linguistically, with great diversity in the way it is expressed, and the types of variation permitted. This textbook offers an insight into how agreement works, and how linguists have tried to account for it. It will be essential reading for all those studying the structure and mechanisms of natural languages.

The second edition of this essential textbook has been thoroughly rewritten and updated to reflect advances in typology and universals over the past decade. It reviews new methodologies such as the semantic map model and questions of syntactic argumentation; discussion of current debates over explanations for specific classes of universals; and comparison of the typological and generative approaches to language.

Grammaticalization refers to the change whereby lexical terms and constructions serve grammatical functions in certain linguistic contexts and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions. Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Traugott synthesize research from several areas of linguistics in this revised introduction to the subject. The book includes substantial updates on theoretical and methodological issues that have arisen in the decade since the first edition, as well as a significantly expanded bibliography. Particular attention is paid to recent debates over directionality...

This study explores how different kinds of nominal expressions such as names, noun phrases and pronouns develop anaphoric relations among each another that have reference to physical elements. Providing a thorough and comprehensive introduction to modern binding theory, this book introduces a variety of nominal and, especially, pronominal expressions from the world's languages. Including numerous exercises and examples, the textbook will be invaluable to graduate and advanced undergraduate students of syntax and semantics.

This book is based on a substantial collection of video recordings of everyday medical consultations in the UK, and offers a micro-analysis of the visual and vocal aspects of the interaction between doctors and patients. Using actual examples, accompanied by numerous illustrations, Christian Heath explores the moment-by-moment coordination of body movement and speech by and between doctor and patient. He discusses various aspects of medical examination, leave-taking, and the ways in which the participants sustain each other's attention. He also raises certain practical issues of medical work,...

This book demonstrates the contribution that statistics can and should make to linguistic studies. The range of work to which statistical analysis is applicable is vast: including, for example, language acquisition, language variation and many aspects of applied linguistics. The authors give a wide variety of linguistic examples to demonstrate the use of statistics in summarising data in the most appropriate way, and then making helpful inferences from the processed information. The range of techniques introduced by the book will help the reader both to evaluate and make use of literature...

Lexical Semantics is about the meaning of words. Although obviously a central concern of linguistics, the semantic behaviour of words has been unduly neglected in the current literature, which has tended to emphasize sentential semantics and its relation to formal systems of logic. In this textbook D. A. Cruse establishes in a principled and disciplined way the descriptive and generalizable facts about lexical relations that any formal theory of semantics will have to encompass. Among the topics covered in depth are idiomaticity, lexical ambiguity, synonymy, hierarchical relations such as...

Bernard Comrie defines tense as the grammaticalisation of location in time. In this textbook he introduces readers to the range of variation found in tense systems across the languages of the world, bringing together a rich collection of illustrative material that student and specialist alike will find invaluable. This systematic account of the data is carefully integrated with a theoretical discussion of tense that is sensitive both to the range of tense oppositions found cross-linguistically and also to the constraints on that variation. For the most part the book is written without...

What is the phonological organisation of natural languages like? What theoretical and analytical approaches are most fruitful? Is there any phonological theory that is 'the best' in all ways? The student of phonology is currently faced with a number of major and apparently competing theories, and the textbook writer who genuinely wishes to confront these questions is faced with the task of assessing the contribution each theory can make, while avoiding the merely fashionable or ephemeral in this contentious and evolving discipline. Roger Lass sees phonology as essentially a problem-centred...

Discourse analysis is a term that has come to have different interpretations for scholars working in different disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it is concerned mainly with the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation; for a psycholinguist, it is primarily concerned with the nature of comprehension of short written texts; for the computational linguist, it is concerned with producing operational models of text-understanding within highly limited contexts. In this textbook, first published in 1983, the authors provide an extensive overview of the many and diverse approaches...