The aim of this book is two-fold: to offer a retrospective view on the past thirty years of research on aspectuality and temporality as well as to develop new perspectives on the future development of the field. Articles contain overviews of the development of the field and/or present the state of the art of current research, suggesting new and upcoming lines of research. An important theme throughout the book is typological variation, and the relevance of empirical data for theory formation.

Together the articles in the book take a wide crosslinguistic scope including aspectual...

The aim of this book is two-fold: to offer a retrospective view on the past thirty years of research on aspectuality and temporality as well as to develop new perspectives on the future development of the field. Articles contain overviews of the development of the field and/or present the state of the art of current research, suggesting new and upcoming lines of research. An important theme throughout the book is typological variation, and the relevance of empirical data for theory formation.

Together the articles in the book take a wide crosslinguistic scope including aspectual...

Conflicts in Interpretation applies novel methods of constraint interaction, derived from connectionist theories and implemented in linguistics within the framework of Optimality Theory, to core semantic and pragmatic issues such as polysemy, negation, (in)definiteness, focus, anaphora, and rhetorical structure. It explores the hypothesis that a natural language grammar is a set of potentially conflicting constraints on forms and meanings. Moreover, it hypothesizes that competent language users not only optimize from an input form to the optimal output meaning for this form, or vice versa,...

This book investigates the morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of language, and the interactions between them, from the perspective of Optimality Theory. It integrates optimization processes into the formal and functional study of grammar, interpreting optimization as the result of conflicting, violable ranked constraints.
Unlike previous work on the topic, this book also takes into account the question of directionality of grammar. A model of grammar in which optimization processes interact bidirectionally allows both language generation-the process of selecting the...

This volume investigates the morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of language, and the interactions between them, from the perspective of Optimality Theory. It integrates optimization processes into the formal and functional study of grammar, interpreting optimization as the result of conflicting, violable ranked constraints.