The essays in this volume explore the relationship between lexical and grammatical categories, calling into question the strict dichotomy between the two that is sometimes assumed.

Unlike other textbooks, it helps students to understand grammar rather than see it as a set of facts and rules.

In functional grammar, the lexicon plays a central role. Lexical items form the basic building blocks around which the structure of a clause is built. This book examines 5 aspects of the role of the lexicon in functional grammar.

Language structure and use are largely shaped by cognitive processes such as categorizing, framing, inferencing, associative (metonymic), and analogical (metaphorical) thinking, and – mediated through cognition – by bodily experience, emotion, perception, action, social/communicative interaction, culture, and the internal ecology of the linguistic system itself. The contributors to the present volume demonstrate how these language-independent factors motivate grammar and the lexicon in a variety of languages such as English, German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, Croatian, Japanese, and Korean. The volume will be of great interest to students and scholars in cognitive and functional linguistics.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

As a typical interface phenomenon, clitics have become increasingly important in linguistic theory during the last decade. The present book contributes to the recent discussion and first provides a comprehensive overview of clitic sequencing, clitic placement and clitic doubling in the major Romance languages. In addition, new data from a northern Italian dialect are introduced. The author then gives a critical summary of the current morphological analyses of clitic phenomena. She also discusses recent Optimality-theoretical analyses of clitic combinations and clitic placement and shows how these analyses can be improved upon when we also consider a morphological treatment of clitics. This book provides innovative solutions to clitic phenomena within the framework of a constraint-based morphological theory and will be of interest not only to morphologists, syntacticians and those working on the grammar of Romance languages, but also to linguists who are interested in the organisation of the grammar and the lexicon.

Descriptive grammars are our main vehicle for documenting and analysing the linguistic structure of the world's 6,000 languages. They bring together, in one place, a coherent treatment of how the whole language works, and therefore form the primary source of information on a given language, consulted by a wide range of users: areal specialists, typologists, theoreticians of any part of language (syntax, morphology, phonology, historical linguistics etc.), and members of the speech communities concerned. The writing of a descriptive grammar is a major intellectual challenge, that calls on the grammarian to balance a respect for the language's distinctive genius with an awareness of how other languages work, to combine rigour with readability, to depict structural regularities while respecting a corpus of real material, and to represent something of the native speaker's competence while recognising the variation inherent in any speech community. Despite a recent surge of awareness of the need to document little-known languages, there is no book that focusses on the manifold issues that face the author of a descriptive grammar. This volume brings together contributors who approach the problem from a range of angles. Most have written descriptive grammars themselves, but others represent different types of reader. Among the topics they address are: overall issues of grammar design, the complementary roles of outsider and native speaker grammarians, the balance between grammar and lexicon, cross-linguistic comparability, the role of explanation in grammatical description, the interplay of theory and a range of fieldwork methods in language description, the challenges of describing languages in their cultural and historical context, and the tensions between linguistic particularity, established practice of particular schools of linguistic description and the need for a universally commensurable analytic framework. This book will renew the field of grammaticography, addressing a multiple readership of descriptive linguists, typologists, and formal linguists, by bringing together a range of distinguished practitioners from around the world to address these questions.

The organization of the lexicon, and especially the relations between groups of lexemes is a strongly debated topic in linguistics. Some authors have insisted on the lack of any structure of the lexicon. In this vein, Di Sciullo & Williams (1987: 3) claim that “[t]he lexicon is like a prison – it contains only the lawless, and the only thing that its inmates have in commonis lawlessness”. In the alternative view, the lexicon is assumed to have a rich structure that captures all regularities and partial regularities that exist between lexical entries.Two very different schools of linguistics have insisted on the organization of the lexicon. On the one hand, for theories like HPSG (Pollard & Sag 1994), but also some versions of construction grammar (Fillmore & Kay 1995), the lexicon is assumed to have a very rich structure which captures common grammatical properties between its members. In this approach, a type hierarchy organizes the lexicon according to common properties between items. For example, Koenig (1999: 4, among others), working from an HPSG perspective, claims that the lexicon “provides a unified model for partial regularties, medium-size generalizations, and truly productive processes”. On the other hand, from the perspective of usage-based linguistics, several authors have drawn attention to the fact that lexemes which share morphological or syntactic properties, tend to be organized in clusters of surface (phonological or semantic) similarity (Bybee & Slobin 1982; Skousen 1989; Eddington 1996). This approach, often called analogical, has developed highly accurate computational and non-computational models that can predict the classes to which lexemes belong. Like the organization of lexemes in type hierarchies, analogical relations between items help speakers to make sense of intricate systems, and reduce apparent complexity (Köpcke & Zubin 1984). Despite this core commonality, and despite the fact that most linguists seem to agree that analogy plays an important role in language, there has been remarkably little work on bringing together these two approaches. Formal grammar traditions have been very successful in capturing grammatical behaviour, but, in the process, have downplayed the role analogy plays in linguistics (Anderson 2015). In this work, I aim to change this state of affairs. First, by providing an explicit formalization of how analogy interacts with grammar, and second, by showing that analogical effects and relations closely mirror the structures in the lexicon. I will show that both formal grammar approaches, and usage-based analogical models, capture mutually compatible relations in the lexicon.

Structuring the Lexicon presents a cognitively realistic, clustered model for near-synonymy that explicitly addresses the question of how semantic knowledge is distributed along the continuum from grammar to lexicon. Usage-based in nature, it propos

Being direct descendants of the Aramaic spoken by the Jews in antiquity, the still spoken Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects of Kurdistan deserve special and vivid interest. Geoffrey Khan’s A Grammar of Neo-Aramaic is a unique record of one of these dialects, now on the verge of extinction. This volume, the result of extensive fieldwork, contains a description of the dialect spoken by the Jews from the region of Arbel (Iraqi Kurdistan), together with a transcription of recorded texts and a glossary. The grammar consists of sections on phonology, morphology and syntax, preceded by an introductory chapter examining the position of this dialect in relation to the other known Neo-Aramaic dialects. The transcribed texts record folktales and accounts of customs, traditions and experiences of the Jews of Kurdistan.