This volume provides a much-needed, critical overview of the field of constructions and construction grammar in the context of Singapore English, and poses the question of identifying a construction in contact when the lexicon is derived from one language and the syntax from another. Case studies are illustrated in which the possibility of a 'merger'-construction is offered to resolve such problems. The book is intended for students of construction theories, variation studies, or any researcher of contact grammars

Research in lexical semantics, logical semantics, and syntax has demonstrated a growing recognition that the grammars of natural languages structure and refer to events in particular ways. This convergence on events as grammatical objects cross these disciplines is the motivation for this volume, which brings together researchers from the areas of lexical semantics, logical semantics, and syntax specifically to address the topic of event structure. Lexical semantics and logical semantics are two enterprises that use different tools and address different questions. This volume specifically focuses on topics relating to events in grammar, where the work of lexical semanticists, logical semanticists, and syntacticians intersect.

Dialects are constantly changing, and due to increased mobility in more recent years, European dialects have 'levelled', making it difficult to distinguish a native of Reading from a native of London, or a native of Bonn from a native of Cologne. This comprehensive study brings together a team of leading scholars to explore all aspects of recent dialect change, in particular dialect convergence and divergence. Drawing on examples from a wide range of European countries - as well as areas where European languages have been transplanted - they examine a range of issues relating to dialect contact and isolation, and show how sociolinguistic conditions differ hugely between and within European countries. Each specially commissioned chapter is based on original research, giving an overview of work on that particular area and presenting case studies to illustrate the issues discussed. Dialect Change will be welcomed by all those interested in sociolinguistics, dialectology, the relevance of language variation to formal linguistic theories, and European languages.

Cognitive linguists have proposed that metaphor is not just a matter of language but of thought, and that metaphorical thought displays a high degree of conventionalization. In order to produce converging evidence for this theory of metaphor, a wide range of data is currently being studied with a large array of methods and techniques. Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage aims to map the field of this development in theory and research from a methodological perspective. It raises the question when exactly evidence for metaphor in language and thought can be said to count as converging. It also goes into the various stages of producing such evidence (conceptualization, operationalization, data collection and analysis, and interpretation). The book offers systematic discussion of eight distinct areas of metaphor research that emerge as a result of approaching metaphor as part of grammar or usage, language or thought, and symbolic structure or cognitive process.

The Minimalist Program has advanced a research program that builds the design of human language from conceptual necessity. Seminal proposals by Frampton & Gutmann (1999, 2000, 2002) introduced the notion that an ideal syntactic theory should be ‘crash-proof’. Such a version of the Minimalist Program (or any other linguistic theory) would not permit syntactic operations to produce structures that ‘crash’. There have, however, been some recent developments in Minimalism – especially those that approach linguistic theory from a biolinguistic perspective (cf. Chomsky 2005 et seq.) – that have called the pursuit of a ‘crash-proof grammar’ into serious question. The papers in this volume take on the daunting challenge of defining exactly what a ‘crash’ is and what a ‘crash-proof grammar’ would look like, and of investigating whether or not the pursuit of a ‘crash-proof grammar’ is biolinguistically appealing.

Table of contents

The study of negation across languages has left no stone unturned with respect to a range of frequently-researched areas, such as negative raising, negative concord, and the behavior of quantifiers under negative scope. Past research has chiefly focused on the category of negation from a cross-linguistic perspective, with probably less attention devoted to the study of negation across dialects of languages, or across contact languages. The observation of universal quantification in the scope of negation in the English spoken in Singapore, for example, is an area which has been largely under-researched in the literature, as has the rarely-reported phenomenon of negative raising in Singapore English. The present volume profiles some of the problems of negation in English and Singapore English, framed against the background of studies of negation in other contact dialects of English and pidgins/creoles, and offering a diverse range of theoretical approaches to the problems.

The last three decades have seen the emergence of Construction Grammar as a major research paradigm in linguistics. At the same time, very few researchers have taken a constructionist perspective on language contact phenomena. This volume brings together, for the first time, a broad range of original contributions providing insights into language contact phenomena from a constructionist perspective. Focusing primarily on Germanic languages, the papers in this volume demonstrate how the notion of construction can be fruitfully applied to investigate how a range of different language contact phenomena can be systematically analyzed from the perspectives of both form and meaning.

This tutorial book presents revised and extended lecture notes for a selection of the contributions presented at the International Summer School on Generative and Transformational Techniques in Software Engineering (GTTSE 2009), which was held in Braga, Portugal, in July 2009. The 16 articles comprise 7 long tutorials, 6 short tutorials and 3 participants contributions; they shed light on the generation and transformation of programs, data, models, metamodels, documentation, and entire software systems. The topics covered include software reverse and re-engineering, model driven engineering, automated software engineering, generic language technology, and software language engineering.