Diachronic Studies on Information Structure: Language Acquisition and Change
This volume is a collection of papers on the role informational categories like topic and focus can play in language change phenomena. The novelty of the papers contained in this volume consists in the analyses offered by the authors from a modern theoretical perspective.
Investigating Chemistry: A Forensic Science Perspective
In its new second edition, Investigating Chemistry: A Forensic Science Perspective remains the only book that uses the inherently fascinating topics of crime and criminal investigations as a context for teaching the fundamental chemical concepts most often covered in an introductory nonmajors course. Covering all the standard topics, Matthew Johll capitalizes on the surge of interest in the scientific investigation of crime (as sparked by CSI and other television shows), bringing together the theme of forensic science and the fundamentals of chemistry in ways that are effective and accessible for students.
Impersonal Constructions: A cross-linguistic perspective
This volume offers a much needed typological perspective on impersonal constructions, which are here viewed broadly as constructions lacking a referential subject. The contributions to this volume deal with all types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates (A-impersonals), presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality (T-impersonals), and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties (R-impersonals), i.e. both meteo-constructions and man-constructions
Some things are funny--jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed--but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking.
