Linguistics

This book discusses a class of Reduced Constructions which exhibit both mono- and bi-clausal characteristics. In Spanish, as well as other Romance languages, the most salient mono-clausal characteristic is the possibility of clitic climbing, i.e. the possibility of an object clitic attaching to a ve..

Natural language understanding is central to the goals of artificial intelligence. Any truly intelligent machine must be capable of carrying on a conversation: dialogue, particularly clarification dialogue, is essential if we are to avoid disasters caused by the misunderstanding of the intelligent i..

This collection of essays developed out of a conference held in Hong Kong in 1988. The aim was to provide a forum for an exchange of views between academics working within the field of sociolinguistics, in particular between those working in the West and those working in the East. Sociolinguistics T..

In acquiring communicative competence, children must learn to speak not only grammatically but also appropriately. Although rules for appropriate language use may vary from culture to culture, they are usually sensitive across languages to many of the same factors, including the context and the topi..

The book explores ways in which the formal methods of linguistics can cast light on the structure of verbal interaction, and in particular considers how successive utterances cohere together in continuous spoken discourse. Beginning with an earlier model of discourse analysis elaborated to deal with..

First published in 1988, this book is a landmark in the study of one of the major African languages: Hausa. The volume brings together contributions from the major contemporary figures in Hausa language studies from around the world. It contains work on the linguistic description of Hausa, various a..

The essays in this volume, by contributors to the linguistic atlases and other dialectologists, describe some of the problems that bedevil the study of dialect and the methodological solutions employed to minimise them. They also survey the contributions that linguistic cartography can make to the s..

This introductory textbook explores and analyses the various approaches to multimodality and offers the first comprehensive, in-depth survey of all aspects of the text-image relation...

This book provides an introduction to Chomsky’s linguistics, laying out his basic assumptions and aims – in particular, his consistent drive to make linguistics a science. It examines the implications for other fields such as philosophy and psychology, as well as the main challenges to Chomsky’s pos..

In this volume, the author deals explicitly and literally with the speech-thought relationship. Departing boldly from contemporary linguistic and psycholinguistic thinking, the author offers us one of the truly serious efforts since Vygotsky to deal with this question. A unifying theme is the organi..

In recent work the imperative seems to have attracted much less attention than the interrogative, perhaps because it appears to be a rather simple structure. This has meant that quite general analyses sometimes find it necessary to relegate the imperative to a footnote or exclude it from the discuss..

This book studies the syntax of switch-reference and its implications for the theory of grammar. Switch-reference, found in many genetically and geographically diverse languages, is a phenomenon whereby referential identity between subjects of hierarchically adjacent clauses is encoded by the presen..