All modes of perception (vision, hearing, etc.) are organized into foreground or focus and background constituents. Natural language sentences are no different. This book explores the role of focusing in natural language sentences and the role of this basic cognitive mechanism in explaining sentence stress, meaning and structure. The result is an innovative view of our linguistic competence.

This study focuses on the cognitive processes involved in creole genesis: relexification, reanalysis, and direct leveling. The role of these processes is documented by a detailed comparison of Haitian creole with its two major contributing languages, French and Fongbe, to illustrate how mechanisms from source languages show themselves in creole. The author examines the input of adult, as opposed to child, speakers and resolves the problems in the three main approaches, universalist, superstratist and substratist, which have been central to the recent debate on creole development.

When first published in 1980, Dialectology broke new ground by giving an integrated account of the social and regional aspects of dialectology. In this updated edition, the authors offer new sections on dialectometry and mapping variability, as well as updates of recent developments. The book examines dialectology in its widest sense, as the study of the way language, dialect and accent vary from place to place, social group to social group and time to time. As a comprehensive account of all aspects of dialectology this new edition makes an ideal introduction to the subject.

A study of the analysis of discourse markers (words like 'so', 'however', and 'well').

The importance of discourse markers (words like "so," "however," and "well") lies in the theoretical questions they raise about the nature of discourse and the relationship between linguistic meaning and context. Diane Blakemore asserts that the exercise in classification that has dominated discourse marker research should be replaced by the investigation of the way in which linguistic expressions contribute to the inferential processes involved in utterance understanding.

This book proposes a theory of the distribution of adverbial adjuncts in a Principles and Parameters framework, claiming that there are few syntactic principles specific to adverbials; rather, for the most part, adverbials adjoin freely to any projection. A wide range of adverbial types is analyzed; predicational adverbs (such as manner, and modal adverbs), domain expressions such as financially, temporal, frequency, duration, and focusing adverbials; participant PP's (e.g. locatives and benefactives); resultative and conditional clauses, and others, taken primarily from English, Chinese,...

The sounds of language can be divided into consonants, vowels, and tones--the use of pitch to convey meaning. Seventy percent of the world's languages use pitch in this way. Assuming little or no prior knowledge of the topic, this textbook provides a clearly organized introduction to tone and tonal phonology. Comprehensive in scope, it examines the main types of tonal systems found in Africa, the Americas, and Asia, using examples from the widest- possible range of tone languages.

Drawing on data from over five hundred languages, Anna Siewierska compares the use of person within and across different languages, and examines the factors underlying variation. Siewierska demonstrates how person forms vary in substance (how large they are), in the nature of the semantic distinctions they convey (e.g., gender, number, case), and in their use in sentences and discourse. The textbook covers the grammatical category of person, which includes the first person (the speaker), the second person (the hearer), and the third person (neither the speaker nor the hearer).

A new contribution to linguistic theory, this book presents a formal framework for the analysis of word structure in human language. It sets forth the network of hypotheses constituting Paradigm Function Morphology, a theory of inflectional form. The book differs from other recent works on the same subject in that it treats inflectional morphology as an autonomous system of principles rather than as a subsystem of syntax or phonology and it draws on evidence from a diverse range of languages in motivating the proposed conception of word structure.

In studying discourse, the problem for the linguist is to find a fruitful level of analysis. Carlota Smith offers a new approach with this study of discourse passages, units of several sentences or more. She introduces the key idea of the "Discourse Mode," identifying five modes: Narrative, Description, Report, Information, Argument. Smith analyzes the properties that distinguish each mode, focusing on grammatical rather than lexical information. The book also examines presentational matters: topic and focus; variation in syntactic structure; and subjectivity, or point of view.