A group of authors containing both leading authorities and young researchers addresses a number of issues of contrastiveness, polarity items and exhaustivity, quantificational expressions and the implicatures they generate, and the interaction between semantic operators and speech acts. The 19 contributions provide insights on the interplay between semantics and pragmatics. The volume’s reach is cross-linguistic and takes an unorthodox multi-paradigm approach. Languages studied range from European languages including Hungarian and Russian to East Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean, with rich data on focus and discourse particles. This volume contributes to a major area of research in linguistics of the last decade, and provides novel, state-of-the-art views on some of the central topics in linguistic research, and will appeal to an audience of graduate and advanced undergraduate researchers in linguistics, philosophy of language and computational linguistics.

In research on Information Structure, there is an ongoing discussion about the role of contrast. While most linguists consider contrast to be compatible with both focus and topic, some argue that it is an autonomous IS category. Contrast has been shown to be encoded by different linguistic means, such as specific morphemes, adverbials, clefts, prosodic cues. Hence, this concept is also related to other domains, in particular morphosyntax and prosody. The precise way in which they interact is however not yet entirely clear. Moreover, from a methodological point of view, the identification and annotation of contrast in corpora is not straightforward. This volume provides a selection of articles discussing the definition of contrast, the importance of distinguishing different types of contrast, the use of several encoding strategies, and the annotation of contrast in corpora using the Question Under Discussion Model. The contributions offer data on English, French, French Belgian Sign Language, German, Hindi, Italian and Spanish.

The polarity of a sentence is crucial for its meaning. It is thus hardly surprising that languages have developed devices to highlight this meaning component and to contrast statements with negative and positive polarity in discourse. Research on this issue has started from languages like German and Dutch, where prosody and assertive particles are systematically associated with polarity contrast. Recently, the grammatical realization of polarity contrast has been at the center of investigations in a range of other languages as well. Core questions concern the formal repertoire and the exact meaning contribution of the relevant devices, the kind of contrast they evoke, and their relation to information structure and sentence mood. This volume brings together researchers from a theoretical, an empirical, and a typological orientation and enhances our understanding of polarity with the help of in-depth analyses and cross-linguistic comparisons dealing with the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and/or prosodic aspects of the phenomenon.

Negation is one of the most discussed phenomena within linguistics, on all language levels though it never seems to be exhausted. This operator establishes complex sentence structures and constantly challenges – from a cognitive, syntactical, semantic and morphologic viewpoint – presuppositions on language internal relations as rational and logic. It therefore arouses interest through all fields within language sciences. From a pragmatic perspective, where negation is conceived a marked structure, using negation often produces meanings beyond the one of a reversed affirmation "it is not the case that X”. This book explores the various uses and pragmatic meanings of negation in authentic communication, in different text types and in different languages, predominately romance languages. The multilingual composition marries a macro-micro perspective where aspects of genre, sociocultural context, memory, rhetoric and argumentation interplay with the negative morpheme’s nature and embedded instructions. This broad approach makes this book a unique contribution to negation studies and to pragmatics in general. The book is important and enriching reading for scholars in all linguistic domains, but particularly for researchers in semantics, pragmatics, argumentation and, discourse analysis.

This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. Speakers can modulate the meaning and effects of their utterances by changing the location of stress or of pauses, and by choosing the melody of their sentences. Although these factors often do not change the literal meaning of what is said, linguists have in recent years found tools and models to describe these more elusive aspects of linguistic meaning. This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. Daniel Büring presents the main phenomena involved, and introduces the details of current formal analyses of prosodic structure, relevant aspects of discourse structure, intonational meaning, and, most importantly, the relations between them. He explains and compares the most influential theories in these areas, and outlines the questions that remain open for future research. This wide-ranging book involves aspects of phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and will be of interest to researchers and students in all of these fields, from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-linguistic and philosophical research in the field, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to a range of fundamental questions ranging from why negation displays so many distinct linguistic forms to how prosody and gesture participate in the interpretation of negative utterances. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters are arranged in eight parts that explore, respectively, the fundamentals of negation; issues in syntax; the syntax-semantics interface; semantics and pragmatics; negative dependencies; synchronic and diachronic variation; the emergence and acquisition of negation; and experimental investigations of negation. The volume will be an essential reference for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and will facilitate further interdisciplinary work in the field.

The latest volume of OLINCO proceedings is a selected set of sixteen papers that grew from presentations at OLINCO 2023 - the international Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium held at Palacký University in June 2021. The papers collected here are unified by the topic of the colloquium: Language Use and Linguistic Structure, in that they all, in one way or the other, address the central questions of the study of human language. They all use standard scientific methodology and theory and solidly researched empirical evidence in favor of formalized structural representations of the language system.

This volume provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive treatment available of the Verb Second property, which has been a central topic in formal syntax for decades. While Verb Second has traditionally been considered a feature primarily of the Germanic languages, this book shows that it is much more widely attested cross-linguistically than previously thought, and explores the multiple empirical, theoretical, and experimental puzzles that remain in developing an account of the phenomenon. Uniquely, formal theoretical work appears alongside studies of psycholinguistics, language production, and language acquisition. The range of languages investigated is also broader than in previous work: while novel issues are explored through the lens of the more familiar Germanic data, chapters also cover Verb Second effects in languages such as Armenian, Dinka, Tohono O'odham, and in the Celtic, Romance, and Slavonic families. The analyses have wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of the language faculty, and will be of interest to researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of syntax, historical linguistics, and language acquisition.

Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language, and Meaning, TLLM 2022, which was held virtually in April 2022. The 9 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 13 submissions. The workshop covers a wide range of topics such as dynamic semantics, logical dynamics, Dynamic Epistemic Logic, Discourse Representation Theory, formal semantics, free choice inference, update semantics, and donkey sentences.