Few issues in the history of the language sciences have been an object of as much discussion and controversy as linguistic categories. The eleven articles included in this volume tackle the issue of categories from a wide range of perspectives and with different foci, in the context of the current debate on the nature and methodology of the research on comparative concepts – particularly, the relation between the categories needed to describe languages and those needed to compare languages. While the first six papers deal with general theoretical questions, the following five confront specific issues in the domain of language analysis arising from the application of categories. The volume will appeal to a very broad readership: advanced students and scholars in any field of linguistics, but also specialists in the philosophy of language, and scholars interested in the cognitive aspects of language from different subfields (neurolinguistics, cognitive sciences, psycholinguistics, anthropology).

Linguistic variation is a topic of ongoing interest to the field. Its description and its explanations continue to intrigue scholars from many different backgrounds. By taking a deliberately broad perspective on the matter, covering not only crosslinguistic and diachronic but also intralinguistic and interspeaker variation and examining phenomena ranging from negation over connectives to definite articles in well- and lesser-known languages, the volume furthers our understanding of variation in general. The papers offer new insights into, among other things, the theoretical notion of comparative concepts, the social or mental nature of language structure, the areal factor in lexical typology and the diachronic implications of semantic maps. The collection will thus be of relevance to typologists and historical linguists, as well as to people studying variation within the areas of cognitive and functional linguistics.

This book addresses the topic of linguistic categorization from a novel perspective. While most of the early research has focused on how linguistic systems reflect some pre-existing ways of categorizing experience, the contributions included in this volume seek to understand how linguistic resources of various nature (prosodic cues, affixes, constructions, discourse markers, ...) can be ‘put to work’ in order to actively build categories in discourse and in interaction, to achieve social goals. This question is addressed in different ways by researchers from different subfields of linguistics, including psycholinguistics, conversation analysis, linguistic typology and discourse pragmatics, and a major point of innovation is represented in fact by the interdisciplinary nature of the volume and in the systematic search for converging evidence.

VIrtually all the papers in these volumes originated in presentations at the Fourth Groningen Round Table, held in July 1980. That conference, organ ized by the Institute for General linguistics of Groningen University was the fourth in an irregular series of meetings devoted to issues of topical interest to linguists. Its predecessor, the Third Round Table, was held in June 1976, and dealt with the semantics of natural language. A selection of the papers was published as Syntax and Semantics 10, Selections from the Third Groningen Round Table, ed. by F. Heny and H. Schnelle, Academic Press, 1979. This fourth meeting was more narrowly focussed. The original intention was to examine the hypothesis of Akrnajian, Steele and Wasow in their paper 'The Category AUX in Universal Grammar', Linguistic Inquiry 10, 1-64. Ultimately the topic was broadened considerably to encompass not only the syntax, semantics and morphology of auxiliaries and related elements, but to tackle the problem (implicit in the original work of Akmajian, Steele and Wasow) of justifying the selection of categories for the analysis of natural language. In the summer of 1979, a workshop and short, informal conference were held at the University of Salzburg, in preparation for the Round Table. These were organized in conjunction with the Summer Institute of the linguistic Society of America. The cooperation of the LSA and of the University of Salzburg, and in particular of the Director of that Institute, Professor Gaberell Drachman, is hereby gratefully acknowledged.

Recent research on the syntax of signed language has revealed that, apart from some modality-specific differences, signed languages are organized according to the same underlying principles as spoken languages. This book addresses the organization and distribution of functional categories in American Sign Language (ASL), focusing on tense, agreement and wh-constructions.

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

This book offers a systematic account of syntactic categories - the building blocks of sentences and the units of grammatical analysis - and explains their place in different theories of language. It sets out and clarifies the conflicting definitions of competing frameworks which frequently make it hard or impossible to compare grammars. Gisa Rauh describes the history and nature of traditional and contemporary accounts and definitions of grammatical categories. She explains their properties and use in generative, cognitive, and functional theories, and considers their function in language typology. She distinguishes between the cognitive functions of categories that relate to traditional parts of speech and serve to structure a language's lexicon; and those which determine the syntactic behaviour of the linguistic items they specify. Professor Rauh illustrates her account with a wide range of examples. Her clear and balanced exposition will be welcomed by students and scholars in all branches of linguistics as well as by those in related subjects such as computational science and the philosophy of language.

This book provides a readable and clearly articulated introduction to an important area in the broader field of Cognitive Linguistics. Taking as its starting point the categorization of colour it explores the far reaching implications of Eleanor Rosch's seminal work on prototype categorization extending it's application of prototype theory from lexical semantics to the study of morphology, syntax, and phonology. First published in 1989 the third edition of this populat text has been fully revised and updated to include recent developments in Cognitive Linguistics. It introduces basic issues in the study of word meaning, and demonstrates the viability of the prototype approach to the study of phonology, syntax and acquistion. The new edition expands the treatment of polysemy, meaning relatedness, idioms and grammatical constructions The book presupposes no prior knowledge of linguistics and will therefore be particulary suited to undergraduate courses.

This is the first monograph on the emerging area of linguistic linked data. Presenting a combination of background information on linguistic linked data and concrete implementation advice, it introduces and discusses the main benefits of applying linked data (LD) principles to the representation and publication of linguistic resources, arguing that LD does not look at a single resource in isolation but seeks to create a large network of resources that can be used together and uniformly, and so making more of the single resource. The book describes how the LD principles can be applied to modelling language resources. The first part provides the foundation for understanding the remainder of the book, introducing the data models, ontology and query languages used as the basis of the Semantic Web and LD and offering a more detailed overview of the Linguistic Linked Data Cloud. The second part of the book focuses on modelling language resources using LD principles, describing how to model lexical resources using Ontolex-lemon, the lexicon model for ontologies, and how to annotate and address elements of text represented in RDF. It also demonstrates how to model annotations, and how to capture the metadata of language resources. Further, it includes a chapter on representing linguistic categories. In the third part of the book, the authors describe how language resources can be transformed into LD and how links can be inferred and added to the data to increase connectivity and linking between different datasets. They also discuss using LD resources for natural language processing. The last part describes concrete applications of the technologies: representing and linking multilingual wordnets, applications in digital humanities and the discovery of language resources. Given its scope, the book is relevant for researchers and graduate students interested in topics at the crossroads of natural language processing / computational linguistics and the Semantic Web / linked data. It appeals to Semantic Web experts who are not proficient in applying the Semantic Web and LD principles to linguistic data, as well as to computational linguists who are used to working with lexical and linguistic resources wanting to learn about a new paradigm for modelling, publishing and exploiting linguistic resources.

Space is presently the focus of much research and debate across disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. One strong feature of this collection is to bring together theoretical and empirical contributions from these varied scientific traditions, with the collective aim of addressing fundamental questions at the forefront of the current literature: the nature of space in language, the linguistic relativity of space, the relation between spatial language and cognition. Linguistic analyses highlight the multidimensional and heterogeneous nature of space, while also showing the existence of a set of types, parameters, and principles organizing the considerable diversity of linguistic systems and accounting for mechanisms of diachronic change. Findings concerning spatial perception and cognition suggest the existence of two distinct systems governing linguistic and non-linguistic representations, that only partially overlap in some pathologies, but they also show the strong impact of language-specific factors on the course of language acquisition and cognitive development.