While experimental data collection has been common in psycholinguistics for some time, only relatively recently have experimental methods been employed to collect data for research in formal linguistics. Experimental methods can be particularly useful for investigating phenomena at the interfaces of the components of grammar, where the sources of multiple types of information need to be carefully controlled. Experiments at the Interfaces, edited by Jeffrey T. Runner from the University of Rochester, brings together recent experimental research examining a variety of issues within syntax and...

Crosslinguistic Studies on Noun Phrase Structure and Reference contains 11 studies on the grammar of noun phrases. Part One explores NP-structure and the impact of information structure, countability and number marking on interpretation, using data from Russian, Armenian, Hebrew, Brazilian Portuguese, Karitiana, Turkish, English, Catalan and Danish. Part Two examines language specific definiteness marking strategies in spoken and signed languages--differentiated definiteness marking in Germanic, double definiteness in Greek, adnominal demonstratives in Japanese, 'weak' definiteness in...

Complex predicates can be loosely defined as a sequence of items that behave as a single predicate, projecting a single argument structure within a clause. Each of the members of the predicate contributes part of the information ordinarily associated with a single head. The present volume presents a collection of theoretical linguistic results on the study of complex predicates in different perspectives and with a variety of approaches. Important empirical and theoretical issues cutting across various subfields of linguistics are being addressed in this book, such as: -Syntactic and semantic...

Interactions of Degree and Quantification is a collection of chapters edited by Peter Hallman that deal with superlative, equative and differential constructions cross-linguistically, interactions of the comparative with both individual quantifiers and event structure, the use of the individual quantifier ‘some’ as a numeral, and the question of whether the very notion of ‘degree’ is reducible to a relation between individuals. These issues all represent semantic parallels and interactions between individual quantifiers (every, some, etc.) and degree quantifiers (more, most, numerals,...

This volume edited by Tabea Ihsane focuses on different aspects of the distribution, semantics, and internal structure of nominal constituents with a “partitive article” in its indefinite interpretation and of potentially corresponding bare nouns. It further deals with diachronic issues, such as grammaticalization and evolution in the use of “partitive articles”. The outcome is a snapshot of current research into “partitive articles” and the way they relate to bare nouns, in a cross-linguistic perspective and on new data: the research covers noteworthy data (fieldwork data and...