This series consists of collected volumes and monographs about specific issues dealing with interfaces among the subcomponents of linguistic structure: phonology-morphology, phonology-syntax, syntax-semantics, syntax-morphology, and syntax-lexicon. Recent linguistic research has recognized that the subcomponents of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. What is currently under debate is the actual range of such interactions and their most appropriate representation in grammar, and this is precisely the focus of this series. Specifically, it provides a general overview of various topics by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components. The books function as a state-of- the-art report of research.

The study of syntax over the last half century has seen a remarkable expansion of the boundaries of human knowledge about the structure of natural language. The Routledge Handbook of Syntax presents a comprehensive survey of the major theoretical and empirical advances in the dynamically evolving field of syntax from a variety of perspectives, both within the dominant generative paradigm and between syntacticians working within generative grammar and those working in functionalist and related approaches. The handbook covers key issues within the field that include: • core areas of syntactic empirical investigation, • contemporary approaches to syntactic theory, • interfaces of syntax with other components of the human language system, • experimental and computational approaches to syntax. Bringing together renowned linguistic scientists and cutting-edge scholars from across the discipline and providing a balanced yet comprehensive overview of the field, the Routledge Handbook of Syntax is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in syntactic theory.

Within the current discussion on grammatical interfaces, the word-classes of adjective and adverb are of particular interest because they appear to be separated or joined in manifold ways at the level of word-class or syntax, with morphology playing a prominent role, especially in Romance. The volume provides typological and theoretical insights into the common or different usage of adjectives and adverbs in Romance. Diachronic change is discussed alongside with synchronic variation and the representation in grammar. The discussion turns out to be controversial, calling into question traditional assumptions such as the dogma of the invariability and the categorial status of the adverb.

Adverbials have become an important testing ground for research on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The articles selected for this volume present recent research on this topic. Among the issues addressed are the occurrence of adverbials in various domains of the sentence Mittelfeld, left and right periphery, adverbials in front of gaps, and the influence of the discourse context on the interpretation and position of adverbials. Particular classes of adverbials that are discussed include domain, locative, temporal, manner, transparent, and degree adverbials. Beyond the exploration of these topics, the volume reflects the current debate between proponents of semantic-driven approaches to the positioning of adverbials which assume adverbials to be adjuncts and approaches that claim a primacy of syntax in conceiving of adverbials as specifiers in a universally valid hierarchy of functional projections.

This is the third volume in the series Within Language, Beyond Theories, which focuses on current linguistic research that surpasses the limits of contemporary theoretical frameworks in order to gain new insights into the structure of the language system and to offer more explanatorily adequate accounts of linguistic phenomena taken from a number of the world’s languages. This book offers a collection of fourteen chapters organized into three parts and serves as a vehicle for the survey of new voices in discourse analysis, pragmatics and corpus-based studies. Part I addresses a panorama of topics related to different discourse types, such as talk show discourse, multimodal discourse, and everyday spoken discourse, as well as written academic discourse. Part II covers a range of highly controversial issues in pragmatics, including the status of ad-hoc concepts, linguistically encoded meaning, explicit content, and the lexicographic treatment of modality. Part III encompasses chapters which offer an overview of some of the recent phenomena covered in the area of corpus-based research, including the semantic functions of the temporal meanings of selected prepositions; the diffusion of gerundive complements; the institutionalization and de-institutionalization of neologisms; contextual factors in the placement of the adverb “well”; the behaviour of the verb “bake” in copular constructions; the syntactic flexibility of English idioms and their thematic composition; tendencies in the formation of nouns in tabloids; and the application of cluster analysis to the categorization of linguistic data. Drawing on recent advances in discourse analysis, pragmatics and corpus-based studies, the majority of the issues discussed here are approached and investigated from a dual perspective. While on the theoretical side, an array of different theoretical models is surveyed, in the analytical parts, the practical applications of the models examined are tested against data from English (both British and American), Estonian and Polish. The wide range of theoretical and empirical issues discussed in this book will help to provoke further academic discussion on the study of language in the areas of discourse analysis, pragmatics, and corpus-based research.

This book contributes to the ongoing empirical, conceptual, and meta-theoretical debates regarding the merits and drawbacks of the cartographic program in linguistic theory. Although cartography has its roots in the study of the left periphery, its empirical scope has expanded significantly over the years and now covers a wide range of domains such as argument structure, modification, and constituent order. The chapters in this volume offer a critical examination of the cartographic assumption that there is a rich array of functional projections whose hierarchical order is fixed and determined by Universal Grammar. They discuss the nature of these cartographic hierarchies and their relation to the central theoretical goal of explanatory adequacy: are functional hierarchies an irreducible property of Universal Grammar (hence constituting part of the "residue" beyond the scope of principled explanation), or are they emergent, deriving from independent principles that do not require a further enrichment of Universal Grammar?

This volume contains eight papers, all presented at the 9th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (University of Debrecen, 2009), addressing a great variety of topics in the syntax, morphology, phonology, and semantics of Hungarian, and also offering discussion of related phenomena in other languages. The volume includes a syntax-based analysis of Hungarian external causatives in the framework of the Minimalist Program (MP); argumentation for the lack of phonological or acoustic evidence for secondary stress in Hungarian; an MP approach to a Hungarian modal construction with a counterfactual, reproaching reading; empirical arguments for assuming that in the case of embedded sentences factivity is irrelevant for syntax, and clauses are differentiated by referentiality; a comprehensive semantic account of result states in Hungarian; a claim that certain paradigmatic/morphophonological variation in the Hungarian verbal paradigm is caused by conflicting paradigmatic pressures; a purely interface-based MP account of the syntax of identificational focus in Hungarian; and an analysis of arbitrarily interpreted null subjects in Hungarian with third person, plural agreement on the finite and infinitival verb. The volume will be of interest not just to scholars working on Hungarian, but to a general audience of generative linguists.

How are evidential functions distinguished by means other than grammatical paradigms, i.e. by function words and other lexical units? And how inventories of such means can be compared across languages (against an account also of grammatical means used to mark information source)? This book presents an attempt at supplying a comparative survey of such inventories by giving detailed “evidential profiles” for a large part of European languages: Continental Germanic, English, French, Basque, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Modern Greek, and Ibero-Romance languages, such as Catalán, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish. Each language is treated in a separate chapter, and their profiles are based on a largely unified set of concepts based on function and/or etymological provenance. The profiles are preceded by a chapter which clarifies the theoretical premises and methodological background for the format followed in the profiles. The concluding chapter presents a synthesis of findings from these profiles, including areal biases and the formulation of methodological problems that call for further research.

The book presents a new perspective on clausal syntax and its interactions with lexical and discourse function information by analysing Hungarian sentences. It also demonstrates ways in which grammar engineering implementations can provide insights into how complex linguistic processes interact. It analyses the most important phenomena in the preverbal domain of Hungarian finite declarative and wh-clauses: sentence structure, operators, verbal modifiers, negation and copula constructions. Based on the results of earlier generative linguistic research, it presents the fundamental empirical generalisations and offers a comparative critical assessment of the most salient analyses in a variety of generative linguistic models from its own perspective. It argues for a lexical approach to the relevant phenomena and develops the first comprehensive analysis in the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. It also reports the successful implementation of crucial aspects of this analysis in the computational linguistic platform of the theory, Xerox Linguistic Environment.

This open access book presents novel theoretical, empirical and experimental work exploring the nature of mental representations that support natural language production and understanding, and other manifestations of cognition. One fundamental question raised in the text is whether requisite knowledge structures can be adequately modeled by means of a uniform representational format, and if so, what exactly is its nature. Frames are a key topic covered which have had a strong impact on the exploration of knowledge representations in artificial intelligence, psychology and linguistics; cascades are a novel development in frame theory. Other key subject areas explored are: concepts and categorization, the experimental investigation of mental representation, as well as cognitive analysis in semantics. This book is of interest to students, researchers, and professionals working on cognition in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.