The still largely mysterious question of how hierarchical linguistic structures are converted into sequentially ordered linear strings is the challenging problem at the heart of this volume. The ten contributions approach it from a range of angles, considering both specific empirical challenges in spoken and signed languages, and broader architectural and typological questions. This volume will be of interest to advanced students and researchers with interests in the externalisation of linguistic structure, the architecture of the language faculty and linguistic typology.

This book addresses how core notions of information structure (topic, focus and contrast) are expressed in syntax.The authorspropose that the syntactic effects of information structure come about as a result of mapping rules flexible enough to allow topics and foci to be expressed in a variety of positions, but strict enough to capture certain cross-linguistic generalisations about their distribution. Syntactic and semantic evidence from a range of languages are discussed.

Most natural languages display an inventory of pronominal elements that obligatorily or optionally remain phonologically null in a few, in many or even in all syntactic surroundings. The authors of the papers compiled in this book analyse such null pronouns in a synchronic and diachronic way and recover the specific morphological and syntactic prerequisites for their origin and insertion.

The mental representation of language cannot be directly observed but must be inferred and modelled from its effects at second hand. Linguists have traditionally responded to this in two ways, either going for a fairly data-light approach and valuing theoretical creativity, or pursuing just those goals for which data is available and trusting to data-driven descriptive work.

This volume is a collection of papers in this direction, using mostly experiment methods to yield insights into syntactic and semantic structures, language processing, and acquisition.

This highly successful text has long been considered a standard introduction to the practical analysis of English sentence structure. As in previous editions, key concepts such as constituency, category and function are carefully explained as they are introduced. Tree diagrams are used throughout to help the reader visualise the hierarchical structure of sentences. The final chapter sets the analysis in the context of generative grammar.