Nominal classification systems are a prominent feature of many Aboriginal languages from Northern Australia. This volume provides a discussion of recent literature on classification systems and detailed material on some of the Aboriginal languages includin

Presents a radically semantic approach to syntax and morphology. It offers a methodology which demonstrates, on an empirical basis, that syntax is neither "autonomous" nor "arbitrary", but that it "follows from semantics". The author develops a semantic me

Chinese, as an aspect language, has played an important role in the development of aspect theory. This book is a systematic and structured exploration of the linguistic devices that Mandarin Chinese employs to express aspectual meanings. The work presented here is the first corpus-based account of aspect in Chinese, encompassing both situation aspect and viewpoint aspect. In using corpus data, the book seeks to achieve a marriage between theory-driven and corpus-based approaches to linguistics. The corpus-based model presented explores aspect at both the semantic and grammatical levels. At...

These two volumes offer a detailed description and comparison of three major structural-functional theories: Functional Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar and Systemic Functional Grammar, illustrated and tested throughout with corpus-derived examples from English and other languages.

Part 1 discusses the characteristics of functional theories and isolates a set of 'structural-functional grammars', among which FG, RRG and SFG are central. An overview of each theory in relation to the simplex clause is followed by a more critical comparison. Other chapters deal with phrasal units,...

Cross-linguistic semantics investigating how languages package and express meanings differently is central to the linguistic quest to understand the nature of human language. This set of studies explores and demonstrates cross-linguistic semantics as practised in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework, originated by Anna Wierzbicka. The opening chapters give a state-of-the-art overview of the NSM model, propose several theoretical innovations and advance a number of original analyses in connection with names and naming, clefts and other specificational sentences, and discourse...

This book details the development of eleven modal auxiliaries in late 18^th- and 19^th-century Canadian English in a framework of new-dialect formation. The study assesses features of the modal auxiliaries, tracing influences to British and American input varieties, parallel developments, or Canadian innovations. The findings are based on the Corpus of Early Ontario English, pre-Confederation Section, the first electronic corpus of early Canadian English. The data, which are drawn from newspapers, diaries and letters, include original transcriptions from...

This volume further complicates and advances the contemporary perspective on language endangerment by examining the outcomes of the most commonly cited responses to language endangerment, i.e. language documentation, language revitalization, and training. The present collection takes stock of many complex and pressing issues, such as the assessment of the degree of language endangerment, the contribution of linguistic scholarship to language revitalization programs, the creation of successful language reclamation programs, the emergence of languages that arise as a result of revitalization...

This volume presents new research on the pragmatics of personal pronouns. Whereas personal pronouns used to have a reputation of poor substitutes for full NP's, recent research shows that personal pronouns are a fundamental, if not universal, category, whose pragmatics is central to their understanding. For instance, personal pronouns may indicate attentional continuity or social deixis, and take on genre-specific pragmatic effects. The authors of the present collection investigate such effects and analyse competing forms in context (e.g. she / her in subject position), as well...