Product Description: This book offers, for the first time, a detailed comparative study of how speakers of different languages express memory concepts. While there is a robust body of psycholinguistic research that bears on how memory and language are related, there is no comparative study of how speakers themselves conceptualize memory as reflected in their use of language to talk about memory...read more

Product Description: This volume combines different perspectives on case-marking: (1) typological and descriptive approaches of various types and instances of case-marking in the languages of the world as well as comparison with languages that express similar types of relations without morphological case-marking; (2) formal analyses in different theoretical frameworks of the syntactic, semantic, and morphological properties of case-marking; (3) a historical approach of case-marking; (4) a psycholinguistic approach of case-marking...read more

Issues addressed in this contributed volume include lexical semantics, morphosyntax, and phonology based on the broad theme of formal approaches to language universals and variation. Aspects of natural language variation are investigated from a formal theoretical perspective, including the Principles and Parameters/Minimalist Program, Lexical Functional Grammar and Optimality Theory. A wide range of languages and language families are considered, including Amharic, Arabic, Bantu, Berber, Chamorro, English, French, Japanese, Malyalam, Polish, Spanish, Tagalog, Turkish, and Warlpiri.This is an important addition to the growing body of literature on language universals and variation from formal theoretical perspectives. It will be a useful reference to linguistics specialists and other cognitive scientists. The topics covered are also diverse, ranging from pronominal clitic variation in dialects of Spanish to passives in Bantu and Polish and the typology of Wh-in-situ questions and vowel place constraints. (view table of contents)