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.

The Dravidian languages are spoken by nearly 200 million people in South Asia and in diaspora communities around the world. They include Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu, as well as over 20 non-literary languages. Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, one of the most eminent Dravidianists of our time, provides a linguistic overview of the Dravidian language family. He describes its history and writing system, discusses its structure and typology, and considers its lexicon. Distant and more recent contacts between Dravidian and other language groups are also covered.

Morphological productivity has, over the centuries, been a major factor in providing the huge vocabulary of English and remains one of the most contested areas in the study of word formation and structure. This book takes an eclectic approach to the topic, applying the findings for morphology to syntax and phonology. Bringing together the results of twenty years' work in the field, it provides new insights and considers a wide range of linguistic and psycholinguistic evidence.

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.

This study provides a unified analysis of reduplication, a highly complex word formation process, in Afrikaans. Botha concludes that the reduplication principles at work in Afrikaans are not unique to that tongue and, in fact, that they are used by many other languages. Furthermore, Botha shows that neither special conceptual structures nor even standard reduplication procedures are needed to interpret Afrikaans reduplication, thus supporting recent work in cognition by Ray Jackendoff and other scholars. The book's analysis provides concrete illustration of Galilean linguistic inquiry at work...

Slavic Prosody is about the Slavic languages and how they changed over time, especially in their syllable structure and accent patterns. This is not a traditional comparative grammar but rather a discussion of selected problems in Slavic and how they relate to contemporary linguistic theory.

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 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,...

Using data from Sissala, a previously unanalyzed language, this book shows that the analysis of text and discourse is best approached from a cognitive rather than a strictly linguistic point of view. In two introductory chapters, Regina Blass argues that Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory, a general account of communication and cognition, sheds more light on conversational data than do alternative linguistic approaches based on such notions as cohesion, coherence, and topic. In subsequent chapters, she discusses the Sissala equivalents of words such as "indeed," "so," "after all," and...

Matthew Chen's landmark study offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of the rich and complex patterns of tone used in Chinese languages. Chinese has a wide repertoire of tones that undergo often surprising changes when they are connected in speech flow. This tonal alternation is known as tone sandhi. Chen examines tone sandhi phenomena across a variety of Chinese dialects. His book is the culmination of a ten-year research project and explores a range of important theoretical issues against a wealth of empirical data not previously accessible to linguists.