This volume reflects the centrality of the existential construction in current linguistic research and offers studies that both consolidate and challenge established research agendas. It addresses (i) a variety of constructions related to ‘prototypical’ existentials (including the have-possessive construction), and investigates (ii) the relationships between locative, existential, and information structure, (iii) the quantification of the pivot and (iv) the issue of negative existentials. It brings together different and complementary approaches (functional, cognitive, pragmatic, typological, comparative, diachronic, philosophical) based on a wide variety of data sources. The contributions illustrate how the so-called existential construction can take a variety of forms – more or less grammaticalized – and functions – ranging from the expression of literal existence to that of localization and discursive focus – in a wide range of languages. The book will be valuable for linguists, researchers or students, interested in the cross-linguistic manifestations of existential constructions at the interface between syntax, semantics and information structure.

This cognitive contrastive study of ten languages (Chinese, Dalabon, English, French, Spanish, Romanian, Kurdish, Khmer, Polish, Tibetan) focuses on the concept of giving from six main points of view, namely argument structure, lexical semantics and event structure, role marking in the three argument construction and in other constructions, lexicalization, grammaticalization and constructionalization of the verb from a cognitive construction grammar point of view, and central and extended meanings. It is proposed that a continuum approach to grammar and lexicon is needed in order to describe the typological and historical facts. The volume argues for a concrete and abstract transfer ‘cluster model’ involving coverage of lexical and grammatical extension or bleaching phenomena and that the semantic extensions (metaphorical and otherwise) exploit various portions of this schema. The volume is deeply anchored in the Cognitive Construction Grammar theoretical movement, and proposes analyses of constructional phenomena to illustrate a grammar to lexicon continuum, in synchrony and diachrony: language change, grammaticalization chains, constructionalization analysis, and an invariant hypothesis of giving as a basic activity in human cognition.

What is the relationship between the structure of existential sentences and their meaning? How do hearers interpret existential sentences using pragmatic assumptions? This study attempts to account for the relationship between the structure of existential sentences (ES) and their meaning. The study of ES has received a great deal of attention because the construction has complex syntactic properties, is associated with restrictions of a semantic nature, and provides an interesting area for investigation at a pragmatic level.

This volume explores in detail the empirical and conceptual content of the definiteness effect in grammar. It brings together a variety of relevant observations from a typological, diachronic and a bilingual/second language acquisition perspective, and provides a general overview of different approaches concerned with the syntactic, morphological, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the Definiteness Effect in a series of European and non-European languages.

This edited book reflects the state of the art in learner corpus and related approaches to Chinese as a second language (CSL). CSL as a field has flourished in the past few decades due to the increasingly important role of the Chinese language at the world stage, yet studies of Chinese as a second language based on learner corpora have been less well developed due to the limited availability of data and lack of theoretical insights. This book represents the latest research in this area by 1) assembling a large group of active researchers from multiple international research communities (USA, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, Taiwan, and France); 2) discussing the latest resources and technologies in Chinese and other Asian languages learner corpora and corpus building; 3) basing Chinese as a second language studies on data from learners of Chinese with a wide range of first language backgrounds (English, Japanese, Korean, French, among others); and 4) integrating corpus methods with a wide range of related methods in allied fields—language acquisition, usage-based linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. This comprehensive collection is indispensable for anyone who is interested in corpus approaches to CSL and Chinese applied language studies in general.

Reformulation and Acquisition of Linguistic Complexity proposes a new answer to the question of the appropriation or acquisition of a mother tongue – a complex object, one that is both stable and perpetually evolving. This answer is based on the reformulating principle that children spontaneously apply; a principle that is illustrated here with children retelling the same story. These children are all 6, 8 or 10 years old and speak French, Italian, Croatian or Polish as a first language. This book demonstrates that the acquisition of any mother tongue is explained by the application of various reformulation procedures between source predications and reformulated predications. These procedures are comparable from one language to another, and different from one age group to another. This book also studies certain complex phenomena at the lexical and syntactical levels, and analyzes how children, depending on their age, treat these phenomena. Finally, we show that the acquisition of a mother tongue is a fundamentally linguistic activity.

Quantification is a topic which brings together linguistics, logic, and philosophy. Quantifiers are the essential tools with which, in language or logic, we refer to quantity of things or amount of stuff. In English they include such expressions as no, some, all, both, and many. Peters and Westerstahl present the definitive interdisciplinary exploration of how they work - their syntax, semantics, and inferential role.Quantifiers in Language and Logic is intended for everyone with a scholarly interest in the exact treatment of meaning. It presents a broad view of the semantics and logic of quantifier expressions in natural languages and, to a slightly lesser extent, in logical languages. The authors progress carefully from a fairly elementary level to considerable depth over the course of sixteen chapters; their book will be invaluable to a broad spectrum of readers, from those with a basicknowledge of linguistic semantics and of first-order logic to those with advanced knowledge of semantics, logic, philosophy of language, and knowledge representation in artificial intelligence.

Definiteness has been a central topic in theoretical semantics since its modern foundation. However, despite its significance, there has been surprisingly scarce research on its cross-linguistic expression. With the purpose of contributing to filling this gap, the present volume gathers thirteen studies exploiting insights from formal semantics and syntax, typological and language specific studies, and, crucially, semantic fieldwork and cross-linguistic semantics, in order to address the expression and interpretation of definiteness in a diverse group of languages, most of them understudied. The papers presented in this volume aim to establish a dialogue between theory and data in order to answer the following questions: What formal strategies do natural languages employ to encode definiteness? What are the possible meanings associated to this notion across languages? Are there different types of definite reference? Which other functions (besides marking definite reference) are associated with definite descriptions? Each of the papers contained in this volume addresses at least one of these questions and, in doing so, they aim to enrich our understanding of definiteness.

This is the first comprehensive grammar of Shaowu, a Min language spoken in Shaowu city and its environs in northwestern Fujian province, China. The book offers first-hand linguistic data collected over four years in the field, now placed at the disposal of researchers and students working in language documentation, comparative linguistics and Sinitic typology. It can serve as a reference grammar for those interested in learning the Shaowu language, thereby helping to preserve it. In addition, the book provides insights into Shaowu's classification which has been widely debated, thus elucidating its genetic affiliation. The book first presents Shaowu's geography, demography and history. It then profiles the language's phonology and lexicon, before providing a detailed description of its syntax, notably on its nominal, predicate, clausal and complex sentence structures, which are the focus of the book. The typological profile of Shaowu is also treated with the conclusion that the language has Gan, Hakka, Mandarin and even some Wu overlays on its Min base. The Shaowu language serves an excellent example to illustrate the degree of hybridity a language can attain due to intensive language contact over time.

This book offers a comprehensive description of Kukama-Kukamiria, spoken by about 1000 elders in the Peruvian Amazon. The empirical basis for the grammar is fifteen years of fieldwork, including text data from 36 fluent speakers. Seventeen chapters deal with phonology, morphology, syntax and discourse phenomena. Salient typological features include a robust morphological distinction between male and female speech; the expression of TAM categories via fixed clitics; the encoding of three-place predicates by means of transitive clauses; six directive constructions that distinguish degrees of pragmatic force; and multiple types of purpose clauses that differ in terms of coreference control. This grammar also shows the Tupí-Guarani origin of an important number of Kukama-Kukamiria grammatical structures and advances comparative studies in the region.