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  3. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics

The Cambridge Studies in Linguistics series aims to publish works of scholarship that make a substantive contribution to general, theoretical, and descriptive linguistics. Many volumes are of interest across a broad range of the disciplines, while others address a specialized particular topic, language or language area.

  • General Editors: Umberto Ansaldo, Peter Austin, Bernard Comrie, Tania Kuteva, Roger Lass, David Lightfoot, Keren Rice, Ian Roberts, Suzanne Romaine, Michelle Sheehan, Ianthi Tsimpli

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130 results in Cambridge Studies in Linguistics

Page 4 of 7

Slavic Prosody
  • Language Change and Phonological Theory
  • Christina Y. Bethin
  • Published online:
    07 September 2010
    Print publication:
    13 July 1998
  • In Slavic Prosody, first published in 1998, Professor Bethin gives a coherent account of the Slavic languages at the time of their differentiation and relates these developments to issues in phonological theory. First Professor Bethin argues that the syllable structure of Slavic changed before the fall of the jers and suggests that intrasyllabic and intersyllabic reorganization in Late Common Slavic was far more significant for Slavic prosody than the loss of weak jers. She then makes a case for the existence of a bisyllabic prosodic domain in Late Common Slavic and trochaic metrical organization. Finally, she explores the implications of Slavic data for phonological theory, discussing sonority, skeletal structure, the representation of length and prominence, and language typology in some detail.

Referential-Semantic Analysis
  • Aspects of a Theory of Linguistic Reference
  • Torben Thrane
  • Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    15 May 1980
  • Dr Thrane makes an original contribution to one of the central topics in syntax and semantics: the nature and mechanisms of reference in natural language. He makes a fundamental distinction between syntactic analyses that are internal to the structure of a language and analyses of the referential properties that connect a language with the 'outside world' - and therefore derive in some sense from common human capacities for perceptual discrimination. Dr Thrane argues that the failure to make this distinction and to attend separately to both kinds of analysis has vitiated previous general accounts of linguistic structure. The book focuses particularly on pronouns and on the role of determiners, quantifiers and other components of the noun phrase. Most of the data come from the modern Germanic languages, especially English, but Dr Thrane considers also the structural peculiarities of 'classifier languages' like Vietnamese. The book will be important for students of English language as well as for general linguists.

Universal Grammar and Language Learnability
  • Anjum P. Saleemi
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992
  • Anjum P. Saleemi argues that the acquisition of language as a cognitive system can properly be understood by pairing the formal approach to learning, often known as learnability theory, with Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar and its claim that human language is innately constrained, with some predefined space for variation. Focusing on specific areas of syntax, such as binding theory and the null subject parameter, Dr Saleemi unites learnability theory's methodology with Chomsky's principles-and-parameters model, and construes acquisition as a function of linguistic principles with largely domain-specific learning procedures, mediated by environmental input. The aim of this study is to show that a self-contained linguistic theory cannot by itself be psychologically plausible, but depends on a compatible theory of learning which embraces developmental as well as formal issues.

Coordination in Syntax
  • Niina Ning Zhang
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    10 December 2009
  • Coordination in syntax is an important part of the analysis of sentence structure. Niina Ning Zhang addresses the issues raised by coordinate pairings and the implications of these structures, looking in particular at examples within English and Chinese. The volume covers the major questions regarding coordinates in syntax, providing a fresh perspective to arguments raised within previous literature. She explains how such coordinate complexes are structured, how some coordinators can be combined in parts of speech, the fixed nature of some of these pairings and what changes exist between the coordinate and non-coordinate constructions. The theories raised are backed up by a rich variety of examples as well as providing a cross-linguistic perspective, contextualising these ideas within current syntactic research.

Acquiring Phonology
  • A Cross-Generational Case-Study
  • Neil Smith
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    24 December 2009
  • Children often mispronounce words when learning their first language. Is it because they cannot perceive the differences that adults make or is it because they can't produce the sounds involved? Neither hypothesis is sufficient on its own to explain the facts. On the basis of detailed analyses of his son's and grandson's development, Neil Smith explains the everyday miracle of one aspect of first-language acquisition. Mispronunciations are now attributed to performance rather than to competence, and he argues at length that children's productions are not mentally represented. The study also highlights the constructs of current linguistic theory, arguing for distinctive features and the notion 'onset' and against some of the claims of Optimality Theory and Usage-based accounts. Smith provides an important and engaging update to his previous work, The Acquisition of Phonology, building on ideas previously developed and drawing new conclusions with the aid of fresh data.

English Auxiliaries
  • Structure and History
  • Anthony R. Warner
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    18 November 1993
  • Auxiliaries are one of the most complex areas of English syntax. Disagreement over both the principles and details of their grammar has been substantial. Anthony Warner here offers a detailed account of both their synchronic and diachronic properties. He first argues that lexical properties are central to their grammar, which is relatively non-abstract. He then traces in detail the history of processes of grammaticalisation in their development and claims most notably that we can identify a group of auxiliaries in English from an early period on formal, not just semantic, grounds. This book meets the dual challenge of accounting for both the grammar and the history of the English auxiliary. It will be essential reading for all those interested in English syntax and its history.

The Syntax of Welsh
  • A Transformational Study of the Passive
  • G. M. Awbery
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    03 February 1977
  • This is a full-length study of a Celtic language from the standpoint of modern linguistic theory. Dr Awbery particularly discusses a topic - the passive form of the verb - which has itself been of central interest in previous work on transformational grammar. She is thus able to test certain tenets of transformational theory against data from a previously unconsidered language. The results are significant, and argue clearly for a separation of syntactic and semantic analysis; constructions which are related syntactically are shown to have no necessary semantic relation, and the type of description which can reveal one set of relationships is not able to reveal the other. The book is therefore a contribution both to linguistic theory and to the study of the Welsh language. Each step in the argument is carefully explained and documented, and no prior knowledge of Welsh is assumed.

Principles of Dependency Phonology
  • John Mathieson Anderson, Colin J. Ewen
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    13 August 1987
  • John Anderson and Colin Ewen, two of the most notable exponents of 'dependency phonology', present in this book a detailed account of this integrated model for the representational of segmental and suprasegmental structure in phonology. Dependency phonology departs from traditional 'linear' models of phonology, and the more recent non-linear models of autosegmental and metrical phonology, in several respects. Unlike in these models, suprasegmental structure is derived directly from the segmental representations, and these representations are based on single-valued features, or components (rather than Chomsky and Halle-type binary features), linked by the dependency relation to form suprasegmental structures, with the exact nature of the dependency relations being directly determined by the properties of the segmental structure. Phonology is currently noteworthy for the diversity of views within the discipline, but no linguist or phonetician with a serious interest in phonology can afford to ignore this book or fail to be interested by it.

Syntactic Theory in the High Middle Ages
  • Modistic Models of Sentence Structure
  • Michael A. Covington
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    01 November 1984
  • In this study Michael Covington considers the origins and development of the theories of sentence structure formulated by the Modistae, a group of grammarians and logicians who flourished in Paris between about 1270 and 1310. Some of the concepts of the medieval theoretical framework, notably government and dependency, have survived to the present day, and Dr Covington introduces insights from modern grammatical theories where appropriate. Nevertheless his principal aim is not to compare medieval and modern theories, or to provide a comprehensive historical study. Rather, recognising that 'it is the difference as much as the similarity that makes the Modistae interesting', Dr Covington offers an original critical exegesis of these influential theories. The book will be accessible both to linguists who may know little about medieval philosophy and to medievalists who may know little about linguistics.

Onsets
  • Suprasegmental and Prosodic Behaviour
  • Nina Topintzi
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    08 April 2010
  • The concept of the 'onset', i.e. the consonant(s) before the vowel of a syllable, is critical within phonology. While phonologists have examined the segmental behaviour of onsets, their prosodic status has instead been largely overlooked. In fact, most previous accounts have stipulated that onsets are insignificant when it comes to the 'heaviness' of syllables. In this book Nina Topintzi presents a new theory of onsets, arguing for their fundamental role in the structure of language both in the underlying and surface representation, unlike previous assumptions. To capture the weight behaviour of onsets, a novel account is proposed that relates their interaction with voicing, tone and stress. Using numerous case-studies and data from a variety of languages and phenomena (including stress, compensatory lengthening, gemination and word minimality), the book introduces a model that reflects the true behaviour of onsets, demonstrating profound implications for syllable and weight theories.

Morpheme Order and Semantic Scope
  • Word Formation in the Athapaskan Verb
  • Keren Rice
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    18 May 2000
  • Athapaskan languages are well known for their intricate morphology, in particular the complexity of their verbs. The significance of these languages for linguistic theory is widely acknowledged. In this book, Keren Rice offers a rich typological survey of morpheme ordering in Athapaskan verbs, with implications for both synchronic grammar and language change. She shows that verb structure is in fact widely predictable across Athapaskan languages if appropriate syntactic factors and an overarching principle of semantic scope are taken into account. The presentation also includes a detailed study of argument and aspectual systems. This landmark volume was the first major comparative study of its type for the Athapaskan language family, combining descriptive depth with a contemporary theoretical perspective. Clear and insightful, it will interest Athapaskanists, typologists, historical and theoretical linguists alike.

Functional Categories
  • Pieter Muysken
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    22 May 2008
  • In every language there are descriptive lexical elements, such as evening and whisper, as well as grammatical elements, such as the and -ing. The distinction between these two elements has proven useful in a number of domains, but what is covered by the terms, lexical and grammatical, and the basis on which the distinction is made, appear to vary according to the domain involved. This book analyses the grammatical elements ('functional categories') in language, a topic that has drawn considerable attention in linguistics, but has never been approached from an integrated, cross-disciplinary perspective. Muysken considers functional categories from the perspective of grammar, language history, language contact and psychology (including child language and aphasia). Empirically based, the book examines the available converging evidence from these various disciplines, and draws on comparative data from a wide range of different languages.

Ergativity
  • R. M. W. Dixon
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    02 June 1994
  • Although there is only one ergative language in Europe (Basque), perhaps one-quarter of the world's languages show ergative properties, and pose considerable difficulties for many current linguistic theories. R. M. W. Dixon here provides a full survey of the various types of ergativity, looking at the ways they interrelate, their semantic bases and their role in the organisation of discourse. Ergativity stems from R. M. W. Dixon's long-standing interest in the topic, and in particular from his seminal 1979 paper in Language. It includes a rich collection of data from a large number of the world's languages. Comprehensive, clear and insightful, it will be the standard point of reference for all those interested in the topic.

Modes of Discourse
  • The Local Structure of Texts
  • Carlota S. Smith
  • Published online:
    18 June 2010
    Print publication:
    17 April 2003
  • In studying discourse, the problem for the linguist is to find a fruitful level of analysis. Carlota Smith offers a new approach with this study of discourse passages, units of several sentences or more. She introduces the key idea of the 'Discourse Mode', identifying five modes: Narrative, Description, Report, Information, Argument. These are realized at the level of the passage, and cut across genre lines. Smith shows that the modes, intuitively recognizable as distinct, have linguistic correlates that differentiate them. She analyzes the properties that distinguish each mode, focusing on grammatical rather than lexical information. The book also examines linguistically based features that appear in passages of all five modes: topic and focus, variation in syntactic structure, and subjectivity, or point of view. Operating at the interface of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, the book will appeal to researchers and graduate students in linguistics, stylistics and rhetoric.

Socio-Historical Linguistics
  • Its Status and Methodology
  • Suzanne Romaine
  • Published online:
    05 May 2010
    Print publication:
    11 March 1982
  • Synchronic sociolinguistics has been particularly convincing in its use of quantitative models to demonstrates how 'the present might explain the past'. However, the relevance of sociolinguistics to historical linguistics 'using the past to explain the present', has been largely ignored. In this volume Dr Romaine lays the foundation for a field of research encompassing both historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, which aims to investigate and account for language variation within a particular speech community over time. The socio-historical approach is illustrated here by a detailed analysis of the development of relative clause formation strategies in Middle Scots. This case study raises fundamental questions about the epistemological status of sociolinguistic theory and in particular its claims to an empirical foundation. Her own preliminary suggestions for a truly integrative sociolinguistic theory will be of interest to sociolinguists, historical linguists and general linguists.

The Contrastive Hierarchy in Phonology
  • B. Elan Dresher
  • Published online:
    04 May 2010
    Print publication:
    03 September 2009
  • 'Contrast' - the opposition between distinctive sounds in a language - is one of the most central concepts in linguistics. This book presents a fascinating account of the logic and history of contrast in phonology. It provides empirical evidence from diverse phonological domains that only contrastive features are computed by the phonological component of grammar. It argues that the contrastive specifications of phonemes are governed by language-particular feature hierarchies. This approach assigns a key role to abstract cognitive structures, challenging contemporary approaches that favour phonetic explanations of phonological phenomena. Tracing the evolution of the hypothesis that contrastive features play a special role in phonology, it shows how this insight has been obscured by misunderstandings of the role of the contrastive feature hierarchy. Questioning the widely held notion that contrast should be based on minimal pairs, Elan Dresher argues that the contrastive hierarchy is indispensable to illuminating accounts of phonological patterning.

Syntax and Parsing
  • Paul Gorrell
  • Published online:
    30 March 2010
    Print publication:
    13 April 1995
  • This book examines the role of syntax in theories of sentence comprehension, and argues for a distinct processing component which is devoted to the recovery of syntactic structure and which utilizes the contrasting types of information found within a Government-Binding grammar. Paul Gorrell contrasts the primary relations (dominance and precedence) and secondary relations (case assignment, theta-role assignment, etc.) in a phrase-structure tree, and shows how this computational distinction of information types is reflected in the internal structure of the parser, which consists of two sub-components: a structure builder (responsible for creating nodes in a tree and positing primary relations between them), and a structure interpreter (responsible for analysing the tree in terms of secondary relations). This model can also predict garden-path phenomena in the processing of verb-final clauses.

Form and Meaning in Word Formation
  • A Study of Afrikaans Reduplication
  • Rudolf P. Botha
  • Published online:
    27 February 2010
    Print publication:
    24 March 1988
  • This study of reduplication in Afrikaans provides a unified and principled analysis of an unusual and highly complex word formation process, shedding new light on the scope and content of various fundamental lexicalist principles of word formation. Surprisingly, Rudolf Botha concludes that the principles involved in Afrikaans reduplication are not unique to Afrikaans, as has often been thought, and are used by many other languages. Moreover, the interpretation of Afrikaans reduplications depends on principles of conceptual structure that are restricted neither to Afrikaans nor to the interpretation of reduplications, thus supporting recent work on cognition and meaning undertaken by Ray Jackendoff and other scholars. In analysing the data, Professor Botha has also provided a concrete illustration of how the Galilean style of linguistic inquiry can fruitfully be applied in the study of word formation and meaning. The study thus represents an important theoretical and methodological advance which will be of as much interest for its method of inquiry and argumentation as for the fresh insights it provides for scholars and researchers in the fields of morphology, word formation and semantics.

Reduplication
  • Doubling in Morphology
  • Sharon Inkelas, Cheryl Zoll
  • Published online:
    24 February 2010
    Print publication:
    24 February 2005
  • This groundbreaking new study takes a novel approach to reduplication, a phenomenon whereby languages use repetition to create new words. Sharon Inkelas and Cheryl Zoll argue that the driving force in reduplication is identity at the morphosyntactic, not the phonological level, and present a new model of reduplication - Morphological Doubling Theory - that derives the full range of reduplication patterns. This approach shifts the focus away from the relatively small number of cases of phonological overapplication and underapplication, which have played a major role in earlier studies, to the larger class of cases where base and reduplicant diverge phonologically. The authors conclude by arguing for a theoretical shift in phonology, which entails more attention to word structure. As well as presenting the authors' pioneering work, this book also provides a much-needed overview of reduplication, the study of which has become one of the most contentious in modern phonological theory.

Mirrors and Microparameters
  • Phrase Structure beyond Free Word Order
  • David Adger, Daniel Harbour, Laurel J. Watkins
  • Published online:
    26 January 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009
  • What is the nature of syntactic structure? Why do some languages have radically free word order ('nonconfigurationality')? Do parameters vary independently (the micro-view) or can they co-vary en masse (the macro-view)? Mirrors and Microparameters examines these questions by looking beyond the definitional criterion of nonconfigurationality - that arguments may be freely ordered, omitted, and split. Drawing on data from Kiowa, a member of the largely undescribed Kiowa-Tanoan language family, the book reveals that classically nonconfigurational languages can nonetheless exhibit robustly configurational effects. Reconciling the cooccurrence of such freedom with such rigidity has major implications for the Principles and Parameters program. This approach to nonconfigurational languages challenges widespread assumptions of linguistic theory and throws light on the syntactic structures, ordering principles, and nature of parametrization that comprise Universal Grammar.

Page 4 of 7