Bøger i Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] serien

This volume investigates the linguistic and semantic encodings and conceptions of space in the East-Polynesian language Marquesan by focusing on the great variety of language- and culture-specific ways of referring to space, thus documenting an essential part of human behaviour and everyday communication in a South Pacific island population. On the basis of a large corpus of both natural and elicited spoken language data the morphosyntactic and semantic properties of all relevant lexical and grammatical units and constructions used for spatial reference are analysed in detail. Remarkable for this language is the fact that a particular kind of spatial orientation system based on local landmarks of the environment - a so-called 'absolute system' - is used for spatial description even on a micro-level or so-called 'table-top' space. Marquesan -A Grammar of Space is the first comprehensive description and in-depth study of spatial language to be found in an Austronesian language. Apart from examining the complex sociolinguistic situation, the degree of language endangerment in the bilingual speech community and the resulting rapid linguistic change in spatial language use, the book also offers a detailed description of the theoretical background of 'language and space' research and the linguistic variability to be found across languages. Moreover, the volume contains an extensive grammatical sketch of Marquesan which complements the language description of the specific domain space in a useful way providing the reader with general insights into one of the not well documented Oceanic languages. The volume addresses linguists, psycholinguists, anthropologists, fieldworking linguists, and especially Oceanists and Austronesianists. Moreover, it provides important insights for researchers from other disciplines that are interested in the study of space.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

Describes the frequency, the forms and the functions of different cleft construction types across two language families: the Romance languages (with discussion of Italian, French and Spanish data) and the Germanic languages (with focus on English, German, Swiss German and Danish).

Information structure and the organization of oral texts have been rarely studied crosslinguistically. This book contains studies of the grammatical organization of information in languages from different areas (Amazonian, Finno-Ugric, South-Asian) from a variety of theoretical angles.

The relation between the Surinam Creoles and the languages of West Africa, where slaves who created the creoles originated, has been hotly debated. This book argues that the close relationship can be viewed in terms of a Trans Atlantic Sprachbund.

Contains a collection of papers dealing with the question of how rhythm shapes language.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

This book presents the theory that the linguistic and cultural landscape of Europe north of the Alps and the Pyrenees was shaped in prehistoric times by the interaction of Indo-European speakers with speakers of languages related to Basque and to Semitic. These influences on the lexicon, grammar, and toponymy of the West Indo-European languages (with special focus on Germanic) are demonstrated in German and English research papers, provided here with summaries, commentaries, and a new introduction in English, and with general and etymological indexes.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

This monograph examines the ideological legacy of the the apparently innocent kinship metaphors of "e;mother tongue"e; and "e;native speaker"e; by historicizing their linguistic development. It shows how the early nation states constructed the ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism, a composite of national language, identity, geography, and race. This ideology invented myths of congenital communities that configured the national language in a symbiotic matrix between body and physical environment and as the ethnic and corporeal ownership of national identity and local organic nature. These ethno-nationalist gestures informed the philology of the early modern era and generated arboreal and genealogical models of language, culminating most divisively in the race conscious discourse of the Indo-European hypothesis of the 19th century. The philosophical theories of organicism also contributed to these ideologies. The fundamentally nationalist conflation of race and language was and is the catalyst for subsequent permutations of ethnolinguistic discrimination, which continue today. Scholarship should scrutinize the tendency to overextend biological metaphors in the study of language, as these can encourage, however surreptitiously, genetic and racial impressions of language.

After reviewing, from a grammaticalization perspective, the main stages in the evolution of Italian object clitic pronouns, the book discusses the distinctive morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features of Italian clitics. In particular, the book offers an original study of the most common examples of so-called verbi procomplementari, verbs which are characterized by the incorporation of clitics that no longer function as pronouns, and which are widely used in present-day Italian. Their emergence involves both grammaticalization of the clitic pronoun into an obligatory element, and lexicalization of the verb+clitic sequence. This study is essentially descriptive and maximally data-driven. The discussion of grammaticalization and lexicalization is reduced to the essentials and aims primarily at defining how these terms, which have received different and at times divergent interpretations, are employed in the book. The book is accessible to a wide and varied readership, which includes Italian and Romance linguists of functional and formal orientation, Italian language scholars, grammaticalization scholars interested in new case studies, as well as students of language change and variation.

The book is dedicated to linguistic morphology andit contains a sketch of a complete morphological theory, centered around a discussion offundamental concepts suchas morph vs. morpheme, inflectional category, voice, grammatical case, agreement vs. government, suppletion, relationships between linguistic signs, etc.: the hottest issues in modern linguistics! The book introduces rigorous and clear concepts necessary to describe morphological phenomena of natural languages. Among other things, it offers logical calculi of possible grammemes in a given category. The presentation is developed in a typological perspective, so that linguistic data from a large variety of languages are described and analyzed (about 100 typologically very different languages). The main method is deductive: the concepts proposed in Aspects of the Theory of Morphology are based on a small set of indefinibilia and each concept is defined in terms of these indefinibilia and/or other concepts defined previously; as a result, logical calculi can be constructed (similar to Mendeleev's Periodical Table of Elements in chemistry). Then the concept is applied to the actual linguistic data to demonstrate its validity and advantages. Thus, Aspects of the Theory of Morphology combines metalinguistic endeavor (a system of concepts for morphology) with typological and descriptive orientation. It reaches out to all students of language, including the border fields and applications.

In its evolution from a synthetic to an analytic language, Bulgarian acquired a grammaticalized category of definiteness. The book presents the first attempt to explore in detail how this happened by comparing the earliest Modern Bulgarian texts with contemporary dialect and standard Bulgarian data. The basic units of analysis are the various types of nominal structures headed by nouns or pronouns. The analysis requires the strict terminological disentanglement of form from content and the adoption of a default inheritance model of definiteness that allow the exhaustive classification and tagging of nominal structures encountered in the texts. Tagging makes it possible to apply quantitative analysis to nominal structure and to assess the types available in the early texts from a current native-speaker perspective. Based on an S-curve model of language change, the study establishes that overt markers of definiteness were first made available to identifiability-based definites, then to inclusiveness-based definites, quantitative generics and unique referents. The overt markers of indefiniteness followed suit, separating indefinites from non-specifics and typifying generics. This progression of definiteness was directed by variables such as person, animacy, gender, number and noun-class, and started in contexts in which definiteness closely interacted with possessivity. Such an analysis leads to the realization that the two-dimensional S-curve model does not account for all language change and that there is a need for a three-dimensional model. It also demonstrates that, contrary to previous assumptions, there is continuity between the early Slavic marker of definiteness (long-form adjectives) and the Modern Bulgarian article. This discovery, in conjunction with geolinguistic arguments, sheds new light on the role that relations inside the Balkan Sprachbund played in the grammaticalization of Bulgarian definiteness.

As a contribution to the ongoing discussion of the genesis of the Germanic language, this book investigates the strong verbs of Proto-Germanic using a new approach that combines historical and typological morphology with quantitative etymology. It reveals that the morphological peculiarities and the etymological problems of the strong verbs have been considerably underestimated. The first part of the bookexplains how drastically the inherited verb system was transformed when it was uniformized and simplified around a functionalized verbal ablaut. In particular, it is shown that the systemic position of ablaut is typologically different from that in the verb morphology of the Indo-European parent language. Moreover, the origin of the lengthened grade preterits and other well-known morphological problems of the strong verbs are discussed. After developing a methodological framework, the second part of the book presents a quantitative analysis of the etymological situation of the strong verbs. It demonstrates that the etymological relations of the strong verbs are significantly less clear than commonly assumed, as almost half of them have no accepted etymology. A comparative quantification of the primary verbs of Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, both of which possess much better etymological connections within the Indo-European language family, underlines the significance of the Germanic data and the validity of the analytical framework. Taken together, the investigations presented in this book put the Germanic strong verbs in a new and markedly different light. Their largely obscure etymological situation in combination with their far-reaching morphological restructuring has telling implications for the prehistory of the Germanic languages and suggests new pathways for future research.

This book proposes a new synthesis of the functions of proper names, from a semantic, pragmatic and syntactic perspective. Proper names are approached constructionally, distinguishing prototypical uses from more marked ones such as those in which names are used as common nouns. Since what is traditionally regarded as 'the' class of names turns out to be only one possible function of name-forms (though a prototypical one), the notion of 'proprial lemma' is introduced as the concept behind both proprial and appellative uses of such categories as place names and personal names. New formal arguments are adduced to distinguish proper name function from common noun or pronoun function. The special status of proper names is captured in a unified pragmatic-semantic-syntactic theory: a proper name denotes a unique entity at the level of langue to make it psychosocially salient within a given basic level category. The meaning of the name, if any, does not determine its denotation. An important formal reflection of this characterization of names is their ability to appear in such close appositional constructions as the poet Burns or Fido the dog. The neurolinguistic finding that proper names constitute a separate category is introduced and interpreted within a general linguistic frame of reference. The different kinds of meanings associated with names (categorical, associative, emotive, and grammatical) are shown to be presuppositional in nature. In addition, the book proposes an entirely new classification of proper names as forming a continuum ranging from prototypical (personal and place names) to nonprototypical categories (brand and language names) to citations and autonyms, and a new diachronic classification of family names and nicknames. This book fills an important gap in the current literature, because the most recent linguistic book in English on name theory dates back to 1973. It is explicitly interdisciplinary, taking into account linguistic, philosophical, neurolinguistic, sociolinguistic and dialect geographical aspects of proper names.

Language users are creatures of habit with a tendency to re-use morphosyntactic material that they have produced or heard before. In other words, linguistic patterns and tokens, once used, persist in discourse. The present book is the first large-scale corpus analysis to explore the determinants of this persistence, drawing on regression analyses of a variety of functional, discourse-functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and external factors. The case studies investigated include the alternation between synthetic and analytic comparatives, between the s-genitive and the of-genitive, between gerundial and infinitival complementation, particle placement, and future marker choice in a number of corpora sampling different spoken registers and geographical varieties of English. Providing a probabilistic framework for examining the ways in which persistence - among several other internal and external factors - influences speakers' linguistic choices, the book departs from most writings in the field in that it seeks to bridge several research traditions. While it is concerned, in a classically variationist spirit, with internal and external determinants of grammatical variation in English, it also draws heavily on ideas and evidence developed by psycholinguists and discourse analysts. In seeking to construct a comprehensive model of how speakers make linguistic choices, the study ultimately contributes to a theory of how spoken language works. The book is of interest to graduate students and researchers in variationist sociolinguistics, probabilistic linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.

In Modularity in Language, Etsuyo Yuasa investigates exceptions and idiosyncrasies in various complex clauses in Japanese and English within the framework of multi-modular approaches to grammar. She proposes original analyses of various complex clauses in Japanese and English, which deviate from the norms of other complex clauses in the same language or in other languages, and shows how these cases of syntax-semantics mismatch justify the independence (or 'autonomy') of different levels of grammatical structures. Yuasa's significant contribution is the incorporation of the notion of 'construction' from Construction Grammar into multi-modular approaches to grammar. She claims that the idiosyncratic cases examined in this study are instances of constructional and categorial mismatches where a syntactic representation of a prototypical construction is paired with a semantic representation of another prototypical construction. Modularity in Language is aimed at those interested in grammatical theories in general, the parallel architecture of grammar (including Lexical-Functional Grammar, Autolexical Grammar, Representational Modularity), Constructional Grammar, syntax/semantics interface, and Japanese linguistics.

The history of modern European languages has been largely determined by the range of functions they have acquired, particularly after 1500. This development necessitated a notable expansion of their syntax and lexis, but is most characteristically reflected in the conventionalization of text types. Starting from the German concept of Textsorte as developed from the 1960s onwards, the present account is a first comprehensive attempt at charting the field for the history and present-day situation of the English language. In text types, a designation is linked with a more or less stable form which guides the writer's production as well as the reader's expectation, permitting one to recognize straightforward uses as well as deliberate misuses. Some two thousand of such designations are here listed with minimal definitions and dates for first occurrences. The discussion then concentrates on selected types, which are seen as especially illustrative for English: book dedications, cooking recipes, advertisements, church hymns, lexical entries, and jokes. Their functions and development over time are treated in correlation with their specific linguistic characteristics and adaptations to different period styles and social changes in the readership. The functional range of text types in traditions outside England and the consequences of the export of English categories are exemplified by the history of Scots/Scottish English and of English in India. The arguments are accompanied by a lavish supply of textual excerpts and more than fifty pages of facsimiles, which are especially relevant for insights derived from typographical features. A full bibliography and indices are provided at the end. The book will prove useful for decisions on the constitution of representative text corpora and stimulate research into a greater number of individual text types as well as contrastive analyses at least among European languages.

This is the first book in Chinese linguistics which discusses the grammar of a dialect group, in this case the Xiang dialect spoken in Hunan, from both a synchronic and diachronic prespective. The author uses new data and new frameworks to present her analysis. The synchronic part covers contemporary grammar across localities within the Xiang-speaking area by using the methods and theories of comparative and typological linguistics. The diachronic analysis reconstructs earlier grammatical systems based mainly on modern data but also on historical written records, and analyses the development of the syntactic systems of the Xiang dialects, adopting the methods and theories of historical linguistics and grammaticalization. The discussions in this book raise new issues on dialect research which have not yet been fully acknowledged by Chinese dialectologists. The author shows, for example, how the earlier layers of grammar may be reconstructed on the basis of modern data, and how the path of grammaticalization of functional words may be traced. The discussions reveal that the Xiang dialect group forms a transitional zone between northern and southern dialects. The syntactic constructions in these two areas often co-exist or are mingled in Xiang. Thus, the grammatical constructions in different localities of the Xiang dialect group often provide a bridge connecting the constructions of northern and southern Chinese, or Modern Chinese and Chinese of earlier periods. This book is of interest to scholars and students who are working on grammar, dialectology, historical linguistics, comparative linguistics, typological linguistics, and grammaticalization, as well as those researchers focusing on language policy, language acquisition, and education.

The Munda Verb is a unique book on the typology of the verb in the Munda language family, and the first of its kind on any language family of the Indian subcontinent. The authorpainstakingly works out nearly all the details of the morphology of the verb in each modern Munda language andoffers a description of the typology of the Munda verbal systems both individually and collectively. The author uses a large amount of data from modern Munda languages, as well as an extensive cross-linguistic corpus offering comparisons from genetically unrelated languages such as Fox, Amele, Kinyarwanda, Luyia, Takelma, Tonkawa, Burushaski, or Tangut where relevant. Points of note include the unusual incorporation system of South Munda Sora and the elaborate and complex system of verb agreement attested in the Kherwarian Munda languages. Further, the author discusses models for a Proto-Munda verbal system and problems in its reconstruction at various points throughout. This book is of great interest to specialists working on the Munda languages, South Asian linguistics, language typology, historical linguistics and to scholars of both morphology as well as syntax.

In The Power of Anology, Dieter Wanner argues for reinstating historical linguistics, especially in (morpho-)syntax, as constitutive of any theoretical account of language. In the first part, he provides a critique of some foundational concepts of an object-oriented linguistic perspective, questioning the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, dichotomous parametrization, grammaticality judgments, and formal generalization. Instead, the immanent perspective of the linguistic individual, licensed by broad cognitive functions, highlights such relegated dimensions as similarity, (surface) redundancy, frequency of form, and social and environmental conditions on language use. In the second part, Dieter Wanner relies on a systematic construct of analogy as the dynamic force enabling language, tying together acquisition, language use, and linguistic change. Such analogy is pervasive, driven by local models, and inevitably spreading through the social web of linguistic practice. The unpredictability, incompletion, and typical slowness of change thereby become the norm, while categorical closure remains a marked possibility. The framework of "e;Soft Syntax"e; spells out an operative model for syntax relying on precedence, cohesion, dependence, agreement, constructional identity, and concatenation. These six dimensions and their interplay undergo a detailed exploration of their diachronic operation and implications, applying them to typical examples taken from the history of the Romance languages. The openness of the framework enables diachronic linguistics to approach old problems in a new light and to ask new questions about the mechanics and nature of language change.

This book presents a unique approach to the semantics of verbs. It develops and specifies a decompositional representation framework for verbal semantics that is based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML), the graphical lingua franca for the design and modeling of object-oriented systems in computer science. The new framework combines formal precision with conceptual flexibility and allows the representation of very complicated details of verbal meaning, using a mixture of graphical elements as well as linearized constructs. Thereby, it offers a solution for different semantic problems such as context-dependency and polysemy. The latter, for instance, is demonstrated in one of the two well-elaborated applications of the framework within this book, the investigation of the polysemy of German setzen. Besides the formal specification of the framework, the book comprises a cognitive interpretation of important modeling elements, discusses general issues connected with the framework such as dynamic and static aspects of verbal meanings, questions of granularity, and general constraints applying to verbal semantics. Moreover, first steps towards a compositionalsemanticsare undertaken, and a new verb classification based on this graphical approach is proposed. Since the framework is graphical in nature, the book contains many annotated figures, and the framework's modeling elements are illustrated by example diagrams. Not only scholars working in the field of linguistics, in particular insemantics, will find this book illuminating because of its new graphical approach, but also researchers of cognitive science, computational linguistics and computer science in general will surely appreciate it.

This study presents a comparative approach to a universal theory of TENSE, ASPECT and MOOD, combining the methods of comparative and historical linguistics, fieldwork, text linguistics, and philology. The parts of the book discuss and describe (i) the concepts of TENSE, ASPECT and MOOD; (ii) the Tibetan system of RELATIVE TENSE and aspectual values, with main sections on Old and Classical Tibetan, "e;Lhasa"e; Tibetan, and East Tibetan (Amdo and Kham); and (iii) West Tibetan (Ladakhi, Purik, Balti); Part (iv) presents the comparative view. Discussing the similarities and differences of temporal and aspectual concepts, the study rejects the general claim that ASPECT is a linguistic universal. A new linguistic concept, FRAMING, is introduced in order to account for the aspect-like conceptualisations found in, e.g., English. The concept of RELATIVE TENSE or taxis, may likewise not be universal. Among the Tibetan varieties, West Tibetan is unique in having fully grammaticalized the concept of ABSOLUTE TENSE. West Tibetan is compared diachronically with Old and Classical Tibetan (documented since the mid 8th century) and synchronically with several contemporary Tibetan varieties. The grammaticalized forms of each variety are described on the basis of their employment in discourse. The underlying general function of the Tibetan verbal system is thus shown to be that of RELATIVE TENSE. Secondary aspectual functions are described for restricted contexts. A special focus on the pragmatic or metaphorical use of present tense constructions in Tibetan leads to a typology of narrative conventions. The last part also offers some suggestions for the reconstruction of the Proto-Tibetan verb system.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

How to Show Things with Words is an interdisciplinary research study at the interface between linguistics and philosophy which sheds new light on the narrative-theoretical issue of proximal vs. distal stance adoption in discourse. Narrative distance ultimately depends on the epistemological source of the information conveyed, but English and other Indo-European languages have no inflectional systems for (en)coding that source of knowledge. To fill in the gap, speech act theory is (re)considered in the light of philosophical research on linguistic functions and a parallel is drawn between grammaticalized evidential categories and the objectifying acts of Husserl's phenomenology of constitution. These intuitive vs. signitive intentional acts do, indeed, roughly correspond to direct vs. indirect evidentiary forms and can be inferred from the temporal-perspectival organization of discourse by the so-called intimation or announcement function of language-systems. It turns out that perspectival immediacy requires tenses with overlapping event- and reference-points, but predictions of the sort are non-monotonic forms of reasoning defeasible by quantificational aspect distinctions, on the one hand, and inherent meaning considerations, on the other. To substantiate this claim, the bulk of the book provides an in-depth formal semantic account of tense, aspect and Aktionsart, interwoven with a detailed analysis of the cognitive processes associated with eventuality-description types. The book adresses an audience of linguists in general, formal semanticists, cognitive scientists, philosophers and narratologists with an interest in natural language semantics.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.