Linguistics: An Introduction to Linguistic Theory is a textbook, written for introductory courses in linguistic theory for undergraduate linguistics majors and first-year graduate students, by twelve major figures in the field, each bringing their expertise to one of the core areas of the field - morphology, syntax, semantics, phonetics, phonology, and language acquisition. In each section the book is concerned with discussing the underlying principles common to all languages, showing how these are revealed in language acquisition and in the specific grammars of the world's languages.
Based on four historical corpora, the book is a comprehensive study of the demise of five preterite-present verbs in English. It offers a detailed description of their distribution in Old and Middle English. The subsequent comparison of the forms and uses of the preterite-presents in the two periods allows the author to suggest the reasons for their elimination from the language. The discussion focuses on phonological and morphological changes the verbs underwent as well as on the syntactic structures they appeared in.
This collection offers a snapshot of current research in Distributed Morphology, highlighting the lasting influence of Morris Halle, a pioneer in generative linguistics. Distributed Morphology, which integrates the morphological with the syntactic, originated in Halle's work. These essays, written to mark his 90th birthday, make original theoretical contributions to the field and emphasize Halle's foundational contributions to the study of morphology. The authors primarily focus on the issues of locality, exploring the tight connection of morphology to phonology, syntax and semantics that lies at the core of Distributed Morphology.
This book offers the first comprehensive study of Middle English prepositions and adverbs combining the prefix «be-» with a preposition, an adverb or a numeral recorded in prose texts. Six best established lexemes, i.e., «before, beyond, behind, beneath, between» and «betwixt» are analysed. The investigated aspects include the semantics of the prepositions and adverbs, their dialectal and textual distribution as well as their frequency of use viewed both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective.
This volume takes a variety of approaches to the question 'what is a word?', with particular emphasis on where in the grammar wordhood is determined. Chapters in the book all start from the assumption that structures at, above, and below the 'word' are built in the same derivational system: there is no lexicalist grammatical subsystem dedicated to word-building. This type of framework foregrounds the difficulty in defining wordhood.
