*This series is no longer actively adding new titles.*
By Ferdinand De Haan
November 27, 2015
First Published in 1997. This book is an updated version of the author's 1994 dissertation, submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Southern California. With updated references footnotes pointing to research published after May 1994, this study of modality showcases its long history. ...
By Betty Birner
November 24, 2015
First published in 1997. This dissertation presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an empirical study of natural language data. The central finding is that inversion is subject to a pragmatic constraint on the information status of its constituents; specifically, the ...
By Christine Bartels
November 24, 2015
English sentence prosody provides cues to both focus structure and speaker attitude. Taking the phonological model of intonation developed by Pierrehumbert (1880 et seq.) as point of departure, this work illuminates the communicative function of English pitch contours by (1) giving a detailed ...
By Jennifer L. Smith
August 07, 2015
Phonologically prominent or "strong" positions are well known for their ability to resist positional neutralization processes such as vowel reduction or place assimilation. However, there are also cases of neutralization that affect only strong positions, as when stressed syllables must be heavy, ...
By John D. Alderete
June 23, 2015
Alderete examines the influences of morphological factors on stress and pitch accent within Optimality Theory....
By Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai
June 23, 2015
First Published in 1999. This book is divided into two parts. The first part is essentially a response to a minimalist question: how perfect is language? There are so many factors involved in hiding the true nature of a language from casual observers. On the other hand, it is a lot easier to put a ...
By Scott Schwenter
June 23, 2015
First Published in 1999. This book investigates the meaning of conditional protasis markers like Spanish si 'if' and English if from a pragmatic perspective. A standard assumption in linguistics is that these words encode as part of their semantics notions like hypothetical, irrealis, or, from the ...
By Annabel Cormack
May 21, 2015
The answer to the question "How can we understand and use a definition?" provides new constraints on natural language and on the internal language in which meaning is mentally represented. Most syntax takes the sentence as the basic unit for well-formedness, but definitions force us to focus on ...
By Emily E. Scida
April 23, 2015
This book investigates two prominent issues with regard to the inflected infinitive-the syntactic distribution of the Portuguese inflected infinitive, and its origin and development from Early Romance. The syntactic analysis offered here differs from traditional descriptions of the inflected ...
By Takae Tsujioka
April 23, 2015
First Published in 2002. This volume is part of the 'Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics' series. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the syntax of possession expressions in Japanese at the sentential level. It starts with a background of possessive syntax and illustrates how Japanese ...
By Yael Greenberg
December 22, 2014
In this book, Yael Greenberg discusses and clarifies a number of controversial issues and phenomena in the generic literature, including the existence of "episodic genericity," existential presuppositions, and contextual restrictions of generics. ...
Edited
By Laurence Horn, Caro Struijke
September 11, 2014
First Published in 2003. Initially a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Maryland at College Park in August 2000, this book is a revised version with an expanded discussion on dissimilation, as well as looking at existential faithfulness relations in reduplicative TETU and feature ...