First in the WWI alternate reality trilogy. “Duncan has a wonderful knack of conjuring up wacky scenarios and making them believable and fascinating” (Kirkus Reviews). The Great Game of Gods is afoot in a world on the brink of madness . . . In the summer of 1914, a young man of reputation beyond reproach awakens under police guard—grievously injured and accused of heinous, impossible murder. And in a strange, distant place, the youngest member of a penniless acting troupe has been taken prisoner by the loyal minions of a corrupt, vengeful goddess. For an ancient prophecy has divided the realm’s ruling deities into warring factions—a prophecy that mentions the crippled captive child and a youth recovering from inexplicable wounds in a British hospital bed. The game weaves through worlds and dimensions as it has since time immemorial—a deadly contest of skill and manipulations that ruthlessly creates wizards, destroys human pawns, and transforms ordinary men, women, and children into something more.

This volume contains ten articles exploring a wide range of issues in the analysis of the imperative clause from a generative perspective. The language data investigated in detail in the articles come from Dutch, English, German, (old) Scandinavian, Spanish, and South Slavic; there is further significant discussion of data from other Germanic and Romance languages. The phenomena addressed (in several cases in more than one article, leading to some lively debate about contentious issues) include the following: the nature and interpretation of imperative subjects; the properties of participial imperatives; clitic behavior; restrictions on topicalization; word order; null arguments; negative imperatives; and imperatives in embedded clauses. The volume has a substantial introduction, sketching the results of earlier generative work on the topic (most of it scattered across disparate outlets), the issues left open by this earlier work, and the contribution to further insight and understanding made by the book's articles.

This volume offers the first comprehensive description of English imperatives made from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. It proposes a new way of explaining the meaning and function of the imperative independently of illocutionary act classifications, which allows for quantifying the strength of imperative force in terms of parameters and numerical values. Furthermore, the book applies the theory of Construction Grammar to account for the felicity of imperatives in complex sentences. The model of description explains explicitly a wide range of phenomena, including frequency of use, prototypical vs. non-prototypical uses of the English imperative and the choice between longer vs. shorter directives including the imperative. A Cognitive Linguistic Analysis of the English Imperative: With Special Reference to Japanese Imperatives is intended for both researchers and students interested in the English imperative and Directive Speech Acts at large and for the linguists working within the Cognitive Linguistics and/or Construction Grammar approach.

This book addresses controversial issues in the application of the comparative method to the languages of Australia which have recently come to international prominence. Are these languages ‘different’ in ways that challenge the fundamental assumptions of historical linguistics? Can subgrouping be successfully undertaken using the Comparative Method? Is the genetic construct of a far-flung ‘Pama-Nyungan’ language family supportable by classic methods of reconstruction? Contrary to increasingly established views of the Australian scene, this book makes a major contribution to the demonstration that traditional methods can indeed be applied to these languages. These studies, introduced by chapters on subgrouping methodology and the history of Australian linguistic classification, rigorously apply the comparative method to establishing subgroups among Australian languages and justifying the phonology of Proto-Pama-Nyungan. Individual chapters can profitably be read either for their contribution to Australian linguistic prehistory or as case studies in the application of the comparative method.