New Perspectives in Role and Reference Grammar presents a broad picture of current developments in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), a version of parallel structure grammar with an emphasis on typological adequacy. Since its inception, RRG has been applied to a wide range of languages, in particular to case marking, complex clauses (e.g. control, raising, and serial verb constructions), unaccusativity/unergativity, and the interplay between syntax and information structure. The present book is a continued investigation of the intermodular correspondence in a variety of languages and comprises 13 papers, which not only contribute to the further development of the theory, but also investigate controversial areas of linguistic theory including inflectional and derivational morphology, verbal semantics and argument structure (anticausative and serial verb constructions), the argument-adjunct distinction, an extended typology of complex clauses, the syntax-information structure interface, and interactions between the lexicon and constructions. In addition, three papers illustrate how RRG may be applied to sign languages, language acquisition, and machine translation from Arabic to English.

Une source inconnue indique : "This book provides a comprehensive overview of current research in African languages, drawing on insights from anthropological linguistics, typology, historical and comparative linguistics, and sociolinguistics. It covers a wide range of topics, from grammatical sketches of individual languages to sociocultural and extralinguistic issues."

This book is about reconstructing the grammar of Proto-Bantu, the ancestral language at the origin of current-day Bantu languages. While Bantu is a low-level branch of Niger-Congo, the world’s biggest phylum, it is still Africa’s biggest language family. This edited volume attempts to retrieve the phonology, morphology and syntax used by the earliest Bantu speakers to communicate with each other, discusses methods to do so, and looks at issues raised by these academic endeavours. It is a collective effort involving a fine mix of junior and senior scholars representing several generations of expert historical-comparative Bantu research. It is the first systematic approach to Proto-Bantu grammar since Meeussen’s Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions (1967). Based on new bodies of evidence from the last five decades, most notably from northwestern Bantu languages, this book considerably transforms our understanding of Proto-Bantu grammar and offers new methodological approaches to Bantu grammatical reconstruction.

An examination of the evidence for and the theoretical implications of a universal word order constraint, with data from a wide range of languages. This book presents evidence for a universal word order constraint, the Final-over-Final Condition (FOFC), and discusses the theoretical implications of this phenomenon. FOFC is a syntactic condition that disallows structures where a head-initial phrase is contained in a head-final phrase in the same extended projection/domain. The authors argue that FOFC is a linguistic universal, not just a strong tendency, and not a constraint on processing. They discuss the effects of the universal in various domains, including the noun phrase, the adjective phrase, the verb phrase, and the clause. The book draws on data from a wide range of languages, including Hindi, Turkish, Basque, Finnish, Afrikaans, German, Hungarian, French, English, Italian, Romanian, Arabic, Hebrew, Mandarin, Pontic Greek, Bagirmi, Dholuo, and Thai. FOFC, the authors argue, is important because it is the only known example of a word order asymmetry pertaining to the order of heads. As such, it has significant repercussions for theories connecting the narrow syntax to linear order.