This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate what we say from what is actually going on, allowing us to talk about what might happen or might have happened, as well as what is required, desirable, or permitted.

This book is a collective volume that reports the state of the art in the applications of type theory to linguistic semantics. The volume fills a 20 year gap from the last published book on the issue and aspires to bring researchers closer to cutting edge alternatives in formal semantics research. It consists of unpublished work by some key researchers on various issues related to the type theoretical study of formal semantics and further exemplifies the advantages of using modern type theoretical approaches to linguistic semantics.

Based on a transcultural understanding of politeness and translation, this book proposes a transdisciplinary methodology for detecting patterns of perceiving and realizing politeness by users of English with different lingua-cultural biographies. It contains aspects of automated data processing and is designed for long-term research.

This book discusses developments in the study of implicatures and presuppositions, drawing on recent linguistic and psycholinguistic literature. It provides original discussions of specific formal aspects of the theoretical reconstruction of these phenomena. The authors offer innovative experimental analyses in which crucial processing questions are addressed, and new experimental methodologies are introduced.

This book sets out to answer a question that many linguists have been hesitant to ask: are some languages better than others? Can we say, for instance, that because German has three genders and French only two, German is a better language in this respect? Jarawara, spoken in the Amazonian jungle, has two ways of showing possession: one for a part (e.g. 'Father's foot') and the other for something which is owned and can be given away or sold (e.g. 'Father's knife');
is it thus a better language than English, which marks all possession in the same way?