Using examples from a wide variety of languages, this book reveals why speakers vary their pitch, what these variations mean, and how they are integrated into our grammars. All languages use modulations in pitch to form utterances. Pitch modulation encodes lexical "tone" to signal boundaries between morphemes or words, and encodes "intonation" to give words and sentences an additional meaning that isn't part of their original sense.

Lexicalization, a process of language change, has been conceived in a variety of ways. In this up-to-date survey, Laurel Brinton and Elizabeth Traugott examine the various ideas that have been presented. In light of contemporary work on grammaticalization, they then propose a new, unified model of lexicalization and grammaticalization. Their approach is illustrated with a variety of case studies from the history of English, including present participles, multi-word verbs, adverbs, and discourse markers, as well as some examples from other Indo-European languages.

The relationship between verbs and their arguments is a widely debated topic in linguistics. This comprehensive survey provides an overview of this important research area, exploring theories of how a verb's semantics can determine the morphosyntactic realization of its arguments. Assuming a close connection between verb meaning and syntactic structure, the analysis constructs a bridge between lexical-semantic and syntactic research. Synthesizing work results from a range of linguistic subdisciplines and a variety of theoretical frameworks, it will be invaluable to research in syntax,...

This book describes Optimality Theory from the top down, explaining and exploring the central premises of OT and the results that follow from them. Examples are drawn from phonology, morphology, and syntax, but the emphasis throughout is on the theory rather than the examples, on understanding what is special about OT and on equipping readers to apply it, extend it, and critique it in their own areas of interest. The book's coverage extends to work on first- and second-language acquisition, phonetics and functional phonology, computational linguistics, historical linguistics, and...

Using examples from a wide variety of languages, this book reveals why speakers vary their pitch, what these variations mean, and how they are integrated into our grammars. All languages use modulations in pitch to form utterances. Pitch modulation encodes lexical "tone" to signal boundaries between morphemes or words, and encodes "intonation" to give words and sentences an additional meaning that isn't part of their original sense.

Although there is no shortage of definitions for pragmatics the received wisdom is that 'pragmatics' simply cannot be coherently defined. In this groundbreaking book Mira Ariel challenges the prominent definitions of pragmatics, as well as the widely-held assumption that specific topics implicatures, deixis, speech acts, politeness naturally and uniformly belong on the pragmatics turf. She reconstitutes the field, defining grammar as a set of conventional codes, and pragmatics as a set of inferences, rationally derived. The book applies this division of labor between codes and inferences to...

Although there is no shortage of definitions for pragmatics the received wisdom is that 'pragmatics' simply cannot be coherently defined. In this groundbreaking book Mira Ariel challenges the prominent definitions of pragmatics, as well as the widely-held assumption that specific topics implicatures, deixis, speech acts, politeness naturally and uniformly belong on the pragmatics turf. She reconstitutes the field, defining grammar as a set of conventional codes, and pragmatics as a set of inferences, rationally derived. The book applies this division of labor between codes and inferences to...

Quantification forms a significant aspect of cross-linguistic research into both sentence structure and meaning. This book surveys research in quantification starting with the foundational work in the 1970s. It paints a vivid picture of generalized quantifiers and Boolean semantics. It explains how the discovery of diverse scope behaviour in the 1990s transformed the view of quantification, and how the study of the internal composition of quantifiers has become central in recent years. It presents different approaches to the same problems, and links modern logic and formal semantics to...