This volume demonstrates that phonology is a subsystem of the mind/brain and explores the theoretical and practical (including medical) consequences of this insight. Written by American and European specialists at the cutting-edge of research in areas ranging from phonetics to neurology, the book addresses central questions relating to the cognitive status of phonological representation and phonetic implementation and the links between mental and physical representation of sound systems.

Two of the best studied and most intriguing areas in syntax and semantics are ellipsis and wh-movement, and although these areas have generated immense interest individually, their intersection - in elliptical wh-questions known as sluicing - has remained largely neglected. This book fills that gap. It does so on the basis of the most sustained empirical investigation of sluicing ever conducted, drawing on novel data from thirty languages that give rise to a number of surprising and theoretically-challenging generalizations. The author shows that sluicing structures are crucial to answering...

Linguists have realized for some time that predicates of the "know" and "wonder" classes behave differently in semantic terms with respect to their interrogative complements, but have not so far fully understood how or why. This book seeks to explore and to provide solutions to this and to related problems in explaining the meaning and grammar of embedded interrogatives and the predicates that take interrogative complements (indirect questions and how they are answered).

Marten explores the interaction of syntax, pragmatics, and semantics in the behavior of verb phrases and how they interact with the information provided by the verb. He also considers how the component elements of linguistic theory explain what appear to be simple utterances, but whose structure is hard to analyze--how, for example, "Fran is baking Mary a cake in the oven" is different from "Fran is baking Mary a cake in the kitchen."

This book presents new insights on the phonology-morphology interface. It discusses a wide range of central theoretical issues, including the role of paradigms in synchronic grammars, and does so in the context of a wide variety of languages including several non-Indo-European languages.

The first book to cover the grammar of clitics from all points of view, including their phonology, morphology, and syntax, and the first comprehensive survey of clitic phenomena for twenty years. Written with exceptional clarity and based on a course given to graduate students.

This book considers the interaction of morphological and phonological determinants of linguistic form and the degree to which one determines the other. It considers the operation of canonical forms, the invariant syllabic shapes of morphemes and the defining characteristic of prosodic morphology. Dr Downing presents an original theory which she tests on data from a wide variety of languages. Her book will be of central interest to scholars and advanced students of phonology and morphology, and of linguistic theory more generally.

Aspect and Reference Time investigates the temporal structure of language. It deals with central issues in the understanding of tense and aspect, proposes a new approach to the main problems in the area, and seeks to establish the universal semantic properties of two important and contentious aspectual categories, perfectivity and imperfectivity.
Dr Borik develops an original theory of aspect. She shows how this accounts for aspectual categories in Russian, and that it can used to compare Russian to other languages where similar aspectual issues arise. She devotes particular attention to...

In this book, Doris Penka delivers a cross-linguistic, unified analysis of the semantics and syntax of negative indefinites, as in the expressions nobody, nothing, no (as determiner), never and nowhere and their counterparts in other languages. While it is standard to assume that negative indefinites behave like negative quantifiers, the author argues that these expressions are not inherently negative and are only licensed by a covert negation.
In an analysis motivated by three phenomena found in the structure and semantics of negative indefinites in different languages - namely negative...

Before she died in 2007, Tanya Reinhart had gone a long way towards developing the Theta System, a theory in which formal features defining the thematic relations of verbs are encoded in the lexicon, enabling an interface between the lexical component and the computational system/syntax, directly, and the Inference system, indirectly.
This book considers the recent results and evaluations of Tanya Reinhart's research in both theoretical and experimental domains. After a comprehensive presentation of the framework by the editors, distinguished linguists from all over the world examine the...