LINGUIST List 10.511

Thu Apr 8 1999

Books: Syntax and Morphology

Editor for this issue: Scott Fults <scottlinguistlist.org>

Links to the websites of all LINGUIST's supporting publishers are available at the end of this issue.

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Mike Groseth, SYNTAX AND MORPHOLOGY (4 Titles)

Message 1: SYNTAX AND MORPHOLOGY (4 Titles)

Date: Mon, 05 Apr 1999 09:44:01 -0500
From: Mike Groseth <MJGOUP-USA.ORG>
Subject: SYNTAX AND MORPHOLOGY (4 Titles)

ENGLISH SYNTAX: From Word to Discourse Lynn M. Berk, Florida International University

English Syntax: From Word to Discourse is a clear and highly accessible descriptive grammar of English with a strong semantic and discourse/functional focus. Designed for beginning graduate students and advanced undergraduates in linguistics, it is also suitable for use in TESOL/ESL programs and in English departments. The text explains the basics of English syntax while providing students with a comprehensive view of the richness and complexity of the system. Each structure is discussed in terms of its syntactic features, its meaning, and its uses in discourse, and each discussion is extensively illustrated by examples from written texts of all kinds and by excerpts of spoken language. While the presentation has been influenced by a number of theories, the book presumes no theoretical background on the part of the student and the approach is relatively informal. Syntactic structures are graphically illustrated by means of nesting boxes rather than tree diagrams. Historical information illuminates some particularly problematic constructions, and the book is punctuated with intriguing facts about English syntax. All terminology is carefully explained and most terms are defined again in the extensive glossary. Berk anticipates areas where students are likely to have trouble, warns them of pitfalls, and shows them how to avoid common mistakes. English Syntax: From Word to Discourse provides a unique alternative to the formal, generative approach of other texts in the field.

February 1999 336 pp. 0-19-512353-0 paper $24.95 0-19-512352-2 cloth $55.00 Oxford University Press FRAGMENTS: Studies in Ellipsis and Gapping Edited by Shalom Lappin, University of London, and Elabbas Benmamoun, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne

This volume contains essays on ellipsis -- the omission of understood words from a sentence -- and the closely related phenomena of gapping. This volume presents work by leading researchers on syntactic, semantic and computational aspects of ellipsis. The chapters bring together a variety of theoretical perspectives and examine a range of cross-linguistic phenomena involving ellipsis in Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, and in English. This volume will be of interest to syntacticians, semanticists, computational linguists, and cognitive scientists.

January 1999 320 pp. 0-19-512302-6 $60.00 Oxford University Press SYNTACTIC CHANGE IN WELSH: A Study of the Loss of Verb-Second David W. E. Willis, Jesus College, University of Oxford

Scholars have often been puzzled by the fact that the basic word-order rule of Welsh seems to have changed twice in the last 1000 years. David Willis explores how and why these changes have taken place. He examines the relationship between the literary and spoken language throughout the history of Welsh, points out similarities between the rules of earlier Welsh and other European languages, and looks at the forces that cause languages to change over time.

January 1999 320 pp.; 25 figures 0-19-823759-6 $98.00 Oxford University Press ADVERBS AND FUNCTIONAL HEADS: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective Guglielmo Cinque, University of Venice, Italy

(Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax)

One of the world's leading syntacticians presents evidence for locating Adverb Phrases in the specifiers of distinct functional projections within a novel and well articulated theory of the clause. In this theory, both adverbs and heads, which encode the functional notions of the clause, are ordered in a rigid sequence. Cinques cutting-edge proposal suggests that the structure of natural language sentences is much richer than previously assumed.

March 1999 288 pp. 0-19-511527-9 paper $45.00 0-19-511526-0 cloth $65.00 Oxford University Press _________________________________________________________

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