The Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories presents a collection of articles on all major syntactic theories, current or past, taken from the award-winning Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics.

Provides an introduction to syntactic theory. This book includes theories such as transformational generative grammar, relational grammar, word grammar, functional grammar, and optimality theory. It also includes chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading, exercises, a glossary of terms, and an appendix for analysis or reference.

This is the first exhaustive investigation of gradience in syntax, conceived of as grammatical indeterminacy. It looks at gradience in English word classes, phrases, clauses and constructions, and examines how it may be defined and differentiated. Professor Aarts addresses the tension between linguistic concepts and the continuous phenomena they describe by testing and categorizing grammatical vagueness and indeterminacy. He considers to what extent gradience is a grammatical phenomenon or a by-product of imperfect linguistic description, and makes a series of linked proposals for its theoretical formalization. Bas Aarts draws on, and reviews, work in psychology, philosophy and language from Aristotle to Chomsky., and writes clearly on a fascinating and important aspect of language and cognition. His book will appeal to scholars and graduate students of language and syntactic theory in departments of (English) linguistics, philosophy and cognitive science.

Complementing Brown & Miller's recent Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories (1996), to which this is a companion volume, this encyclopedia is a collection of articles drawn from the highly successful Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. It presents a collection of 79 articles, all of which have been revised and updated. It also provides a number of newly commissioned articles, one of which has been substantially updated and extended. The volume is alphabetically organised and includes an introduction and a glossary. The Concise Encyclopedia of Grammatical Categories will provide a uniquely comprehensive and authoritative overview of the building blocks of syntax: word classes, sentence/clause types, functional categories of the noun and verb, anaphora and pronominalisation, transitivity, topicalisation and work order.

The Linguistics Encyclopedia has been thoroughly revised and updated and a substantial new introduction, which forms a concise history of the field, has been added. The volume offers comprehensive coverage of the major and subsidiary fields of linguistic study. Entries are alphabetically arranged and extensively cross-referenced, and include suggestions for further reading. New entries include: Applied Linguistics; Cognitive Linguistics; Contrastive Linguistics; Cross-Linguistic Study; Forensic Linguistics; Stratificational Linguistics. Recommissioned or substantially revised entries include: Bilingualism and Multilingualism; Discourse; Genre Analysis; Psycholinguistics; Language acquisition; Morphology; Articulatory Phonetics; Grammatical Models and Theories; Stylistics; Sociolinguistics; Critical Discourse Analysis. For anyone with an academic or professional interest in language, The Linguistics Encyclopedia is an indispensable reference tool.

Language is one of our most precious and uniquely human capacities, so it is not surprising that research on its neural substrates has been advancing quite rapidly in recent years. Until now, however, there has not been a single introductory textbook that focuses specifically on this topic. Cognitive Neuroscience of Language fills that gap by providing an up-to-date, wide-ranging, and pedagogically practical survey of the most important developments in the field. It guides students through all of the major areas of investigation, beginning with fundamental aspects of brain structure and function, and then proceeding to cover aphasia syndromes, the perception and production of speech, the processing of language in written and signed modalities, the meanings of words, and the formulation and comprehension of complex expressions, including grammatically inflected words, complete sentences, and entire stories. Drawing heavily on prominent theoretical models, the core chapters illustrate how such frameworks are supported, and sometimes challenged, by experiments employing diverse brain mapping techniques. Although much of the content is inherently challenging and intended primarily for graduate or upper-level undergraduate students, it requires no previous knowledge of either neuroscience or linguistics, defining technical terms and explaining important principles from both disciplines along the way.

This is a general introduction to grammaticalization, the change whereby lexical terms and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions. The authors synthesize work from several areas of linguistics. The second edition has been thoroughly revised with substantial updates on theoretical and methodological issues that have arisen in the decade since the first edition, and includes a significantly expanded bibliography. Particular attention is paid to recent debates over directionality in change and the role of grammaticalization in creolization.