Language description enriches linguistic theory and linguistic theory sharpens language description. Based on evidence from the world's languages, functional-typological linguistics has established a number of thorough generalizations about the nature of linguistic categorizations and their manifestation in natural languages. Empirical studies in these fields of linguistics have contributed to sharpen linguistic theory in several respects.

This volume is a collection of 19 contributions from outstanding scholars in the field of functional-typological linguistics that address...

This volume continues the tradition of presenting the latest findings by typologists and field linguists, relevant to general linguistic theory and research methodology. Cross-linguistic studies based on large samples and in-depth studies of previously undescribed languages highlight new refinements and revisions to our current understanding of established categories and classifications.

This book demonstrates how the underlying principles of the English-based FrameNet project are successfully applied to the description and analysis of typologically diverse languages. The collection of stimulating articles exemplifies the liveliness of current research on cross-lingual applications of Frame Semantics to natural language processing.

South Asia is home to a large number of languages and dialects. Although linguists working on this region have made significant contributions to our understanding of language, society, and language in society on a global scale, there is as yet no recognized international forum for the exchange of ideas amongst linguists working on South Asia.

The Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics is designed to be just that forum. It brings together empirical and theoretical research and serves as a testing ground for the articulation of new ideas and approaches which...

The volume addresses an issue hotly debated in current linguistic theory: the relation between language usage and language structure. The contributors represent different theoretical positions. What they have in common is that they recognize structure and usage as non-reducible linguistic phenomena and take seriously the challenge to describe the relation between them.

While cognitive linguistics has become established as a comprehensive research paradigm over the last three decades, it has so far hardly contributed to investigations into processes of lexical creation as traditionally captured in research on word formation. In light of this, the volume at hand is the first one to take a step ahead towards illuminating diverse aspects of word formation from cognitive perspectives. The book combines contributions to the 2nd International Cognitive Linguistics Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association with a selection of invited...

The study of the interaction between syntax and information structure has attracted a great deal of attention since the publication of foundational works on this subject such as Enric Vallduvi's (1992) The Informational Component and Knud Lambrecht's (1994) Information Structure and Sentence Form. The book inserts itself in this contemporary interest by providing a collection of articles on different aspects of the syntax-pragmatics interface in the indigenous languages of The Americas.

The first chapter provides a brief introduction of the some of the basic...

This book is a comprehensive study of the evidential system in German. It presents a systematic description of the encoding of evidentiality in present-day German, as well as a diachronic reconstruction of the relevant sources and paths of grammaticalization from the Old High German period onwards. Based on empirical corpus research, the study investigates the degree of grammaticalization of each single evidential construction and the make-up of the present-day system as well as the diachronic stages that lead to the present state. The book focuses on three main issues. First, it is concerned...

The volume addresses the role of salience in discourse and provides broad coverage of various perspectives on and functions of discourse salience. The range of multidisciplinary approaches adopted in the volume differ with regard to the underlying theoretical proposals and foci of research. The topics range from (i) entity-based salience to (ii) discourse-structural salience of utterances to (iii) extra-linguistic factors of salience in discourse. Accordingly, the volume is organized into three sections. Part I focuses on discourse referents and the choice of referring expressions. The...

The book introduces the concept of intertextual memory into the domain of linguistic theory. All new facts of speech are grounded in the speakers' memory of previous experiences of using language. The new meaning is shown to be always superscribed on the familiar and recognizable, as its more or less radical alteration.