This research monograph is an investigation of wh-movement and wh-expletive constructions in the Indic languages Kashmiri and Hindi-Urdu. It advances a novel theory of the periphery, or the clausal positions that mediate A-bar movement. In particular, a detailed study of wh-expletives and wh-expletive constructions reveals an underlying similarity of design between the A and A-bar systems, and indicates that the two can be understood as driven by the same basic set of mechanisms. The monograph offers an account of wh-movement and the clausal periphery in the two languages, informed by the latest strands of research on the syntax and semantics of A-bar movement. This micro-comparative analytical method yields an important result: we can understand a set of systematic contrasts between the two languages in terms of the properties of specifically the phase-defining heads C and v. Empirically, this work explores the lesser-studied language Kashmiri, bringing to the fore linguistic data not yet discussed in formal syntactic literature. The significance of these data for the development of the wider theoretical framework is stressed throughout, making the book of substantial interest for general linguistic research.

Spanish Phonetics and Phonology in Contact: Studies from Africa, the Americas, and Spain brings together scholars working on a wide range of aspects of the Spanish sound system and how their coexistence with another language in speech communities across the Hispanophone world influences their manifestation. Drawing upon seminal works in the fields of language contact in general, Spanish in contact with indigenous and regional languages, and laboratory approaches tied to the languages in question, the volume’s contents employ acoustic and quantitative approaches, as well as both controlled and spontaneous data elicitation procedures, to shed light on how linguistic, historical, and social variables drive contact phenomena, and in turn, shape specific varieties of Spanish. It will pique the interest of researchers and students of fields such as contact linguistics, language variation and change, segmental and suprasegmental phonetics and phonology, and sociolinguistics.

This book contributes to illustrating the methodological and technological issues of data management in Pervasive Systems by using the DataBenc project as the running case study for a variety of research contributions: sensor data management, user-originated data operation and reasoning, multimedia data management, data analytics and reasoning for event detection and decision making, context modelling and control, automatic data and service tailoring for personalization and recommendation. The book is organized into the following main parts: i) multimedia information management; ii) sensor data streams and storage; iii) social networks as information sources; iv) context awareness and personalization. The case study is used throughout the book as a reference example.

Constraint-Based Grammar Formalisms provides the first rigorous mathematical and computational basis for this important area.

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a challenge for both the natural language applications and the linguistic theory because they often defy the application of the machinery developed for free combinations where the default is that the meaning of an utterance can be predicted from its structure. There is a rich body of primarily descriptive work on MWEs for many European languages but comparative work is little. The volume brings together MWE experts to explore the benefits of a multilingual perspective on MWEs. The ten contributions in this volume look at MWEs in Bulgarian, English, French, German, Maori, Modern Greek, Romanian, Serbian, and Spanish. They discuss prominent issues in MWE research such as classification of MWEs, their formal grammatical modeling, and the description of individual MWE types from the point of view of different theoretical frameworks, such as Dependency Grammar, Generative Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Lexicon Grammar.