Preferred Argument Structure offers a profound insight into the relationship between language use and grammatical structure. In his original publication on Preferred Argument Structure, Du Bois (1987) demonstrated the power of this perspective by using it to explain the origins of ergativity and ergative marking systems. Since this work, the general applicability of Preferred Argument Structure has been demonstrated in studies of language after language. In this collection, the authors move beyond verifying Preferred Argument Structure as a property of a given language. They use the methodology to reveal more subtle aspects of the patterns, for example, to look across languages, diachronically or synchronically, to examine particular grammatical relations, and to examine special populations or particular genres. This volume will appeal to linguists interested in the relationship of pragmatics and grammar generally, in the typology of grammatical relations, and in explanations derived from data- and corpus-based approaches to analysis.

Preferred Argument Structure offers a profound insight into the relationship between language use and grammatical structure. In his original publication on Preferred Argument Structure, Du Bois (1987) demonstrated the power of this perspective by using it to explain the origins of ergativity and ergative marking systems. Since this work, the general applicability of Preferred Argument Structure has been demonstrated in studies of language after language. In this collection, the authors move beyond verifying Preferred Argument Structure as a property of a given language. They use the methodology to reveal more subtle aspects of the patterns, for example, to look across languages, diachronically or synchronically, to examine particular grammatical relations, and to examine special populations or particular genres. This volume will appeal to linguists interested in the relationship of pragmatics and grammar generally, in the typology of grammatical relations, and in explanations derived from data- and corpus-based approaches to analysis.

This book offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on argument structure and its role in language acquisition. The volume is the outcome of an integrated research project and comprises chapters by both specialists in first language acquisition and field linguists working on a variety of lesser-known languages. Drawing on a broad range of crosslinguistic data, Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Argument Structure integrates important contemporary issues in linguistics and language acquisition.

The Structure of Argument covers critical thinking, reading, writing, and research. Concise but thorough, it includes questions, exercises, writing assignments, and a full semester’s worth of readings—everything students need in an affordable, compact format. Presenting Aristotelian and Rogerian as well as Toulmin argument, The Structure of Argument has been totally revised, with more than three-quarters of the readings new (including many multimodal selections available online at no extra charge), new coverage of multimodal argument, expanded treatment of key rhetorical concepts, a fresh new design, and additional support for research. Its emphasis on Toulmin argument makes Structure highly teachable, since the approach fits with the goals of the composition course.

This volume brings together work by scholars with backgrounds in linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, education, and language pathology. As such, the book adds psycholinguistic and crosslinguistic perspectives to the clinical and classroom approaches that have dominated the study of later language development . Incorporating insights from prior language acquisition research, it goes beyond preschool age to consider both isolated utterances and extended discourse, conversational interactions and monologic text construction, and both written and spoken language use from early school-age across adolescence. Data from French, Hebrew, Spanish, and Swedish as well as English cover varied domains: morphology and lexicon, syntax and verb argument structure, as well as peer interaction, spelling, processing of on-line writing, and reading poetry. The epilogue suggests explanations for the findings documented. Across the book, the authors show how cognitive and social maturation combines with increased literacy in the path taken by schoolchildren and adolescents towards the flexible deployment of a growing repertoire of lexical elements in varied morpho-syntactic constructions and different discourse contexts that constitutes the hallmark of maturely proficient language use.

This book discusses the first language acquisition of three morphosyntactic mechanisms of transitivity alternation in arctic Quebec Inuktitut. Data derive from naturalistic longitudinal spontaneous speech samples collected over a nine-month period from four Inuit children. Both basic and advanced forms of passive structures are shown to be used productively by Inuktitut-speaking children at an early age relative to English-speaking children, but consistent in age with speakers of non-Indo-European languages reported on in the literature; potential explanations of this difference include frequency of caregiver input and details of language structure. Morphological causatives appear slightly later in the acquisition sequence, and their first instances reflect use of unanalyzed routines. Lexical causatives are present from the earliest ages studied. Evidence of a period of overgeneralization of lexical causatives in one subject at the same time as the morphological causative shows signs of being productively acquired suggests that the seeming overgeneralization may reflect nothing more than as yet unstable use of the morphological causative. Noun incorporation structures are shown to be used productively by Inuktitut-speaking children at an early age relative to Mohawk-speaking children; potential explanations of this difference include details of language structure and relative language use in the environments of the learners. Findings are considered in light of current debates in the literature concerning continuity versus maturation of grammatical structure, and concerning the functional categories available to the child at early stages of acquisition. Data presented argue against late maturation, and suggest that all functional categories may be accessed by the Inuktitut-speaking child early in the acquisition process.

This volume, a case study on the grammar of third person references in two genres of spoken Ecuadorian Spanish, examines from a discourse-analytic perspective how genre affects linguistic patterns and how researchers can look for and interpret genre effects. This marks a timely contribution to corpus linguistics, as many linguists are choosing to work with empirical data. Corpus based approaches have many advantages and are useful in the comparison of different languages as well as varieties of the same language, but what is often overlooked in such comparisons is the genre of language under examination. As this case study shows, genre is an important factor in interpreting patterns and distributions of forms. The book also contributes toward theories of anaphora, referentiality and Preferred Argument Structure. It is relevant for scholars who work with referentiality, genre differences, third person references, and interactional linguistics, as well as those interested in Spanish morphosyntax.

The volume demonstrates the interdependence of man’s language capacity and his other conceptual capacities. This enables linguistic structures to be minimalised, and for extra-linguistic domains to provide much of the interpretations of sound and meaning. Underspecification is demonstrated in the word formation of Indo-European, Late Archaic Chinese and modern Khmer; on the word- and sentence levels by the event structures of German; and in the information structure predominantly of languages with the so-called free word order: German, Slavic languages, Arabic compared with English and the tone language Hausa. The volume is noteworthy due to the close cooperation between theoretical and experimental research. Within grammar, it has especially strengthened prosodic research and the syntax-phonology interrelations and their interpretations, and it has helped to create data bases for the relations within texts and to evaluate the findings.

Drawing on work in linguistics, language acquisition, and computer science, Adele E. Goldberg proposes that grammatical constructions play a central role in the relation between the form and meaning of simple sentences. She demonstrates that the syntactic patterns associated with simple sentences are imbued with meaning—that the constructions themselves carry meaning independently of the words in a sentence. Goldberg provides a comprehensive account of the relation between verbs and constructions, offering ways to relate verb and constructional meaning, and to capture relations among constructions and generalizations over constructions. Prototypes, frame semantics, and metaphor are shown to play crucial roles. In addition, Goldberg presents specific analyses of several constructions, including the ditransitive and the resultative constructions, revealing systematic semantic generalizations. Through a comparison with other current approaches to argument structure phenomena, this book narrows the gap between generative and cognitive theories of language.