Chungmin Lee

Pierre Larrivée

This volume offers insights on experimental and empirical research in theoretical linguistic issues of negation and polarity, focusing on how negation is marked and how negative polarity is emphatic and how it interacts with double negation. Metalinguistic negation and neg-raising are also explored in the volume. Leading specialists in the field present novel ideas by employing various experimental methods in felicity judgments, eye tracking, self-paced readings, prosody and ERP. Particular attention is given to extensive crosslinguistc data from French, Catalan and Korean along with analyses using semantic and pragmatic methods, corpus linguistics, diachronic perspectives and longitudinal acquisitional studies as well as signed and gestural negation. Each contribution is situated with regards to major previous studies, thereby offering readers insights on the current state of the art in research on negation and negative polarity, highlighting how theory and data together contributes to the understanding of cognition and mind.

Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives

James Pustejovsky

Pierrette Bouillon

Hitoshi Isahara

Kyoko Kanzaki

This collection of papers takes linguists to the leading edge of techniques in generative lexicon theory, the linguistic composition methodology that arose from the imperative to provide a compositional semantics for the contextual modifications in meaning that emerge in real linguistic usage. Today’s growing shift towards distributed compositional analyses evinces the applicability of GL theory, and the contributions to this volume, presented at three international workshops (GL-2003, GL-2005 and GL-2007) address the relationship between compositionality in language and the mechanisms of selection in grammar that are necessary to maintain this property. The core unresolved issues in compositionality, relating to the interpretation of context and the mechanisms of selection, are treated from varying perspectives within GL theory, including its basic theoretical mechanisms and its analytical viewpoint on linguistic phenomena.

Advances in Generative Lexicon Theory

Matthew Gordon

During the 2001 Linguistic Summer Institute at University of California, Santa Barbara, a group of linguists gathered at a workshop to discuss the expression and role of topicalization and focus from a variety of perspectives: phonetic, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. The workshop was designed to lay the groundwork for collaborative efforts between linguists devoted to the study of meaning and linguists engaged in the quantitative study of intonation. This volume contains papers emerging from the Santa Barbara Workshop on Topic and Focus. A wide variety of methodologies and research interests related to topic and focus are represented in the papers. Some works present results of phonetic studies, either acoustic or perceptual, on the expression of topic and/or focus; others examine semantic or pragmatic features of topic and/or focus, while others are concerned with the interface between intonation and meaning. Data from several different languages are represented in the papers, including several languages with relatively little documentation particularly in the venue of topic and focus, e. g. Basque, Chickasaw, Indonesian, Polish, Taiwanese. The broad sample of languages coupled with the wide variety of research topics addressed by the papers promise to enrich our typological understanding of topic and focus phenomena and provide an impetus for further research. The following paragraphs offer brief summaries of the papers contained in this volume: Gorka Elordieta’s paper describes prosodic conditions governing focus in a dialect of Basque with pitch accents.

Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Meaning and Intonation

Topic and Focus

Young-Wha Kim

Byeong-Uk Yi

Focusing mainly on classifiers, Numeral Classifiers and Classifier Languages offers a deep investigation of three major classifier languages: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This book provides detailed discussions well supported by empirical evidence and corpus analyses. Theoretical hypotheses regarding differences and commonalities between numeral classifier languages and other mainly article languages are tested to seek universals or typological characteristics. The essays collected here from leading scholars in different fields promise to be greatly significant in the field of linguistics for several reasons. First, it targets three representative classifier languages in Asia. It also provides critical clues and suggests solutions to syntactic, semantic, psychological, and philosophical issues about classifier constructions. Finally, it addresses ensuing debates that may arise in the field of linguistics in general and neighboring inter-disciplinary areas. This book should be of great interest to advanced students and scholars of East Asian languages.

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

Numeral Classifiers and Classifier Languages

Ferenc Kiefer

Manfred Krifka

A group of authors containing both leading authorities and young researchers addresses a number of issues of contrastiveness, polarity items and exhaustivity, quantificational expressions and the implicatures they generate, and the interaction between semantic operators and speech acts. The 19 contributions provide insights on the interplay between semantics and pragmatics. The volume’s reach is cross-linguistic and takes an unorthodox multi-paradigm approach. Languages studied range from European languages including Hungarian and Russian to East Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean, with rich data on focus and discourse particles. This volume contributes to a major area of research in linguistics of the last decade, and provides novel, state-of-the-art views on some of the central topics in linguistic research, and will appeal to an audience of graduate and advanced undergraduate researchers in linguistics, philosophy of language and computational linguistics.

Chungmin Lee

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