Elly van Gelderen examines the linguistic cycle and describes how it offers a unique perspective on the language faculty.

A proposal that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. This book offers a significant reconceptualization of the person system in natural language. The authors, leading scholars in syntax and its interfaces, propose that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. They map the journey of person features in grammar, from semantics through syntax to the system of morphological realization. Such an in-depth cross-modular study allows the development of a theory in which assumptions made about the behavior of a given feature in one module bear on possible assumptions about its behavior in other modules. The authors' new theory of person, built on a sparse set of two privative person features, delivers a typologically adequate inventory of persons; captures the semantics of personal pronouns, impersonal pronouns, and R-expressions; accounts for aspects of their syntactic behavior; and explains patterns of person-related syncretism in the realization of pronouns and inflectional endings. The authors discuss numerous observations from the literature, defend a number of theoretical choices that are either new or not generally accepted, and present novel empirical findings regarding phenomena as different as honorifics, number marking, and unagreement.

Bringing together a team of well-known scholars, this book examines the link between linguistic cognition and morphological diversity.

"Structure is at the rock-bottom of all explanatory sciences" (Jan Koster). Forty years ago, the hypothesis that underlying the bewildering variety of syntactic phenomena are general and unified structural patterns of unexpected beauty and simplicity gave rise to major advancements in the study of Dutch and Germanic syntax, with important implications for the theory of grammar as a whole. Jan Koster was one of the central figures in this development, and he has continued to explore the structure preserving hypothesis throughout his illustrious career. This collection of articles by over forty syntacticians celebrates the advancements made in the study of syntax over the past forty years, reflecting on the structural principles underlying syntactic phenomena and emulating the approach to syntactic analysis embodied in Jan Koster's teaching and research.

The concept of “constraint” is widely used in linguistics, computer science, and psychology. However, its implementation varies widely depending on the research domain: namely, language description, knowledge representation, cognitive modelling, and problem solving. These various uses of constraints offer complementary views on intelligent mechanisms. For example, in-depth descriptions implementing constraints are used in linguistics to filter out syntactic or discursive structures by means of dedicated description languages and constraint ranking. In computer science, the constraint programming paradigm views constraints as a whole, which can be used, for example, to build specific structures. Finally, in psycholinguistics, experiments are carried out to investigate the role of constraints within cognitive processes (both in comprehension and production), with various applications such as dialog modelling for people with disabilities. In this context, Constraints and Language builds an extended overview of the use of constraints to model and process language. This book will be useful for researchers willing to get a grip on the various uses of constraints in natural language processing, and also as a class book for academic staff who want to set up advanced courses around the concept of constraint-based natural language processing.

Elly van Gelderen provides examples of linguistic cycles from a number of languages and language families, along with an account of the linguistic cycle in terms of minimalist economy principles. A cycle involves grammaticalization from lexical to functional category followed by renewal. Some well-known cycles involve negatives, where full negative phrases are reanalyzed as words and affixes and are then renewed by full phrases again. Verbal agreement is another example: full pronouns are reanalyzed as agreement markers and are renewed again. Each chapter provides data on a separate cycle from a myriad of languages. Van Gelderen argues that the cross-linguistic similarities can be seen as Economy Principles present in the initial cognitive system or Universal Grammar. She further claims that some of the cycles can be used to classify a language as analytic or synthetic, and she provides insight into the shape of the earliest human language and how it evolved.