Frank Palmer's new book is a typological survey of grammatical roles, such as Agent, Patient, and Beneficiary, as well as grammatical relations, such as Subject, (Direct) Object and Indirect Object, which are familiar concepts in traditional grammars. A great wealth of examples is used to show that the grammatical systems of the familiar European languages are far from typical of many of the world's languages. Grammatical Roles and Relations will be welcomed by all those interested in language typology.

This is a history of the spread and dominance of North American linguistic theory, concentrating on the influential ideas of Bloomfield and Chomsky. It gives an account of the development and continuity of three dominant ideas in linguistics: the study of formal relations can and should be separated from that of meaning; sentences are composed of linear configurations of morphemes; many aspects of grammar are determined genetically. This is an invaluable survey for all linguists wishing to trace the origins of their discipline.

Henry Smith develops a theory of syntactic case and examines its synchronic and diachronic consequences. Within a unification-based framework, he draws out pervasive patterns in the relationship between morphosyntax "linking" and grammatical function. Beginning with a detailed study of dative substitution in Icelandic, the author moves on to examine a wide array of synchronic and diachronic data and to construct a typology of case.

This book analyzes some differences among English, Scottish and American accents of English, and shows how they developed and why they have their current form. Although the revised version of lexical phonology presented here is intended to describe present-day patterns, it can also show how historical sound changes gave rise to these patterns.

A new textbook written for students with no background in syntax, which introduces them to key concepts of Chomsky's Minimalist program (e.g. merger and movement, checking, economy and greed, split VPs, agreement projections), as well as providing detailed analysis of the syntax of a range of different construction types. Illustrative material is mainly drawn from varieties of English (Belfast English, Shakespearean English, Jamaican Creole, etc.). There is a substantial glossary and extensive workbook section with helpful hints and model answers.

This book is an introduction to syntactic theory and analysis which can be used for both introductory and advanced courses in theoretical syntax. Offering an alternative to the standard generative view of the subject, it deals with the major issues in syntax with which all theories are concerned. It presents syntactic phenomena from a wide range of languages and introduces students to the major typological issues that syntactic theories must address. A generous number of exercises is included, which provide practice with the concepts introduced in the text and in addition expose the student...

Referencing new developments in cognitive and functional linguistics, phonetics, and connectionist modeling, this book investigates various ways in which a speaker/hearer's experience with language affects the representation of phonology. Rather than assuming phonological representations in terms of phonemes, Joan Bybee adopts an exemplar model, in which specific tokens of use are stored and categorized phonetically with reference to variables in the context. This model allows an account of phonetically gradual sound change that produces lexical variation, and provides an explanatory account...

Bernd Heine argues that the structure of grammatical categories is predictable to a large extent once we know the range of possible cognitive structures from which they are derived. The author uses as his example the structure of predicative possession, and shows how most of the possessive constructions to be found in the world's languages can be traced back to a small set of basic conceptual patterns. Using grammaticalization theory Heine describes how each affects the word order and morphosyntax of the resulting possessive construction.

One of the basic premises of the theory of syntax is that clause structures can be minimally identified as containing a verb phrase, playing the role of predicate, and a noun phrase, playing the role of subject. In this study Andrea Moro identifies a new category of copular sentences, namely inverse copular sentences, where the predicative noun phrase occupies the position that is canonically reserved for subjects. In the process, he sheds new light on such classical issues as the distribution and nature of expletives, locality theory and cliticization phenomena.

This new edition of R. A. Hudson's Sociolinguistics will be welcomed by students and teachers alike. To reflect changes in the field since publication of the first edition in 1980, the author has added new sections on politeness, accommodation, and prototypes; and he has expanded discussion of sex differences in language use, and the relationship between language and thought. Ample coverage of classic topics such as varieties of language, speech as social interaction, the quantitative study of speech, and linguistic and social inequality, remains.