In this rich reference work, Beth Levin classifies over 3,000 English verbs according to shared meaning and behavior Levin starts with the hypothesis that a verb's meaning influences its syntactic behavior and develops it into a powerful tool for studying the English verb lexicon She shows how identifying verbs with similar syntactic behavior provides an effective means of distinguishing semantically coherent verb classes, and isolates these classes by examining verb behavior with respect to a wide range of syntactic alternations that reflect verb meaning The first part of the book sets out alternate ways in which verbs can express their arguments The second presents classes of verbs that share a kernel of meaning and explores in detail the behavior of each class, drawing on the alternations in the first part Levin's discussion of each class and alternation includes lists of relevant verbs, illustrative examples, comments on noteworthy properties, and bibliographic references The result is an original, systematic picture of the organization of the verb inventory Easy to use, "English Verb Classes and Alternations" sets the stage for further explorations of the interface between lexical semantics and syntax It will prove indispensable for theoretical and computational linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, lexicographers, and teachers of English as a second language Beth Levin is associate professor of linguistics at Northwestern University

English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation

Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse

1 Workshop at which this work was first presented (Utrecht, June 22-24, 1994). For comments on this material, we are grateful to them and the other workshop participants, especially Austin have provided valuable feedback; and the comments, questions, and suggestions from the participants in the (eventually joint) UMass and Rutgers Correspondence Theory seminars were particularly important for the development of this work. For useful discussion of numerous points, we would like to thank

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Faithfulness and reduplicative identity

Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of "universal," we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition. Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills.

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The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science

Ethnologue: Languages of the World

It is generally agreed that about 7,000 languages are spoken across the world today and at least half may no longer be spoken by the end of this century. This state-of-the-art Handbook examines the reasons behind this dramatic loss of linguistic diversity, why it matters, and what can be done to document and support endangered languages. The volume is relevant not only to researchers in language endangerment, language shift and language death, but to anyone interested in the languages and cultures of the world. It is accessible both to specialists and non-specialists: researchers will find cutting-edge contributions from acknowledged experts in their fields, while students, activists and other interested readers will find a wealth of readable yet thorough and up-to-date information.

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The Cambridge handbook of endangered languages

A Grammar of Diyari, South Australia

The syntax of the Australian Aboriginal language Warlpiri has led to two opposing models of non-configurationality: a dual structure hypothesis, which abandons the projection principle for a grammatical architecture that separates constituency and functional representations (Simpson 1983, 1991, Hale 1983, Kroeger 1993), and a pronominal argument hypothesis, which hypothesizes that bound or zero pronominals satisfy the projection principle in such languages, with free nominals analysed as adjuncts (Jelinek 1984, Baker 1991, Hale 1993). Although the pronominal argument hypothesis is widely accepted in the syntactic literature, we show that available evidence from Warlpiri, new evidence from the related language Jiwarli, and a survey of six other Australian languages actually support the dual structure hypothesis. The non-configurationality characteristics of free word order, null anaphora, and split NPs are in fact independent of each other and of the distribution of bound pronouns. Additionally, the clitic pronouns that Jelinek (1984) and others take to be the source of non-configurationality in Warlpiri are simply an areal feature of Australian languages that is independent of the syntactic properties that are supposed to derive from it.

Non-configurationality in Australian aboriginal languages

A number of Australian Aboriginal languages have syntactic mechanisms which can be analysed as instances of 'switch-reference'. These languages have verb suffixes indicating whether or not the subjects of syntactically-related main and subordinate clauses are referentially the same or different. The distribution of switch-reference in various subordinate clause types is examined here, and its formal and functional characteristics are described in detail for a number of language groups. The languages which have switch-reference are all geographically adjacent, but are not obviously related genetically. When the geographical spread of certain formal features such as the association between locative case and some 'relative clause' types is discussed, a number of general conclusions can be drawn, among them the suggestion that the syntactic mechanism of switchreference has been subject to indirect functional diffusion between language groups. It is further suggested that careful attention to the precise nature of syntactic similarities is necessary if any attempts to reconstruct the syntax of proto-languages in Australia are to be undertaken. This paper provides further evidence of the importance of linguistic diffusion in Australia, and raises a number of issues relevant to studies of areal features elsewhere in the world.*

Switch-Reference in Australia

Although one- and two-participant events, as expressed by intransitive and transitive constructions, have been extensively studied from a crosslinguistic perspective, little work has been done on three-participant events and the ways they operate in different languages. Where there is description and analysis it is typically confined to syntactic three-place predicates ignoring functional equivalent constructions in languages where such events may be realized with other argument configurations. Also, where analysis exists, it is typically limited to those three-participant events that get lexicalized as three-place predicates in English and other well-known languages. In this article, we explore the semantic categories of three-participant events and outline a range of different strategies for coding them crosslinguistically. We show that, as alternatives to syntactic three-place strategies, there are a variety of constructions that are syntactically two-place but express a third participant by some other means - morphological, syntactic, or pragmatic.

Peter Austin

Papers

The Cambridge handbook of endangered languages

A Grammar of Diyari, South Australia

Non-configurationality in Australian aboriginal languages

Switch-Reference in Australia

Three-participant events in the languages of the world: towards a crosslinguistic typology