This book presents a detailed analysis of structural as well as pragmatic aspects underlying the phenomenon of noun ellipsis in English. Here Gunther examines the structure of elliptical noun phrases to account for the conditions on noun ellipsis and those on one-insertion, with special emphasis on the (oft-neglected) parallels between the two. She also examines the use of noun ellipsis with adjectives in order to shed light on this under-researched phenomenon, drawing on data from the British National Corpus.

This book argues that language systems determine language use to a greater extent than is generally assumed. The author demonstrates how the typological characteristics of a language determine even the most general aspects of our stylistic preferences.
Through extensive analysis of examples in German and English, the author demonstrates how analogous options of sentence structure must be surrendered in order to achieve felicitous translations. Two major aspects that determine the appropriateness of language use are examined: language processing and discourse-dependency.
Essential...

This study presents a semantic framework for analysing all aspectual constructions in terms of the event-state distinction, and describes the grammatical expression of aspectual meanings in terms of a theory of grammatic constructions.

Tense is one of the central issues of linguistics, and has been the focus of much attention in recent years. In this book, Declerck offers a detailed discussion of the temporal structures that are expressed by the combination of tense forms with the conjunction when.

In this book, contributors have been brought together to discuss the role of two major factors shaping the grammars of different varieties of English (and of other languages) all over the world: so-called vernacular universals and contact-induced change. Rather than assuming a general typological perspective, the studies in this volume focus on putative universal vernacular features - significant phonological or (morpho-) syntactic parallels found in non-standard varieties of English, English-based Creoles, and also varieties of other languages, all of which represent widely differing...

Constructions such as 'make an accusation against', or 'give one's approval for' can be seen as 'stretched' versions of simple verbs, such as 'accuse' or 'approve of'. What is the precise linguistic nature of stretched verbs, and how many basic types are there? What kinds of grammatical connections are involved, and what lexical limits are there on these constructions? What is their precise semantic value? These are some of the questions that this book sets out to answer in its investigation of stretched verb constructions.

Despite the advances of radio and television and increasing mobility and urbanization, spoken English is by no means becoming more like the written standard. English dialect grammar, however, is still a new and relatively undeveloped area of research, and most studies to date are either restricted regionally, or based on impressionistic statements. This book provides the first thorough empirical study of the field of non-standard negation across Great Britain.