This chapter outlines the linguistic properties of Welsh and its historical and sociolinguistic context. It sketches the main features of Welsh phonology, including vowel, diphthong and consonant phoneme inventories, focusing on issues involving vowel length, the complex set of diphthongs, and voiceless nasal consonants, including major dialect differences. Mutation, changes in word-initial consonants triggered by morphosyntactic features, is a characteristic of Welsh that has drawn considerable attention, and both phonological and morphosyntactic aspects of the phenomenon are discussed. In morphology, topics of interest include extensive regular vowel alternation and the formation of the singular–plural distinction. Mildly synthetic verbal morphology sits alongside another typologically significant property, inflection of prepositions for person and number. Major features of Welsh syntax include head-initial and VSO word order, restrictions on finite verbs in complement clauses, an elaborate system of clause-initial particles, and marking of predicate adjectives and nominals with a dedicated predicative particle. A final section looks at current sociolinguistic issues, including changes in the traditional diglossic relationship between literary and spoken Welsh, and changes that are often attributed to language contact and revitalisation.

As children add words, they also add more specificity to their utterances, hence more complexity. They start to combine words with gestures, then words with other words. They advance from one word at a time to sequences of words and then combine these under the same intonation contour. The early composition of children’s vocabulary is strongly affected by adult input, and this may determine the proportions of nouns, verbs, and adjectives available to children early on. Their early constructions are limited in scope, tied to specific lexical items. Conversational exchanges at this stage often depend on adult scaffolding. Children distinguish ‘given’ from ‘new’ information, making use of word order and stress, as well as information from inflections, to identify word classes. Early word combinations in their first constructions are very similar across languages in the meanings expressed. Early combinations may be viewed as frozen forms, as intermediate forms, and as constructed forms, depending on their history in each child’s speech. Children learn to put together new combinations as they talk with adults and so discover more of the options in the language being acquired.

The chapter presents a broad overview of current research on the formal properties of Slavic languages developing in heritage language settings. Representative studies on heritage Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Croatian are synthesized along the following grammatical dimensions. In the nominal and verbal domains, I review properties of the heritage Slavic case and gender systems and the encoding of temporal distinctions through aspect and tense morphology. At the levels of sentence organization and discourse structure, I survey word order change pertaining to the syntax of clitics and the placement of clausal constituents to convey information-structural distinctions. The concluding discussion identifies the key overarching principles underlying the changes attested across the surveyed linguistic varieties and outlines directions for future studies in heritage Slavic linguistics.

We shed light on the question of how narrow information (F) and contrastive focus (CF) are intonationally and syntactically realized by heritage speakers (HSs) of Peninsular Spanish (PS) who have German as their second L1, and compare their data to those of monolingual speakers (MSs) of PS. Results from a production experiment show clear differences between the groups with respect to preferred syntactic strategies and, consequently, the intonational realization of focal pitch accents. The preferred strategy of HSs is stress shift, followed by p-movement and simple clefts, for both focus types. Conversely, MSs mostly use different strategies for each focus type; that is, pseudo-clefts and p-movement for F, and simple clefts and focus fronting for CF. Interestingly, stress shift is not a relevant option. The attested differences support the view that the interface between discourse on one hand, and syntax and phonology on the other, is challenging for bilingual speakers (Sorace, 2011).

Chapter 4 looks at the concepts of iconicity and image schemas. Iconicity refers to a phenomenon that illustrates natural resemblance between language and concepts and demonstrates direct correspondence between the linguistic form and the meaning to be conveyed. For instance, we tend to state events based on the temporal sequence of their actual occurrence. And linguistic distance often corresponds to conceptual distance. We use longer utterances iconic of “distance” to show politeness when talking to new acquaintances. Image schemas, as the bridge between sensorimotor experience and concepts, are the preconceptual structures derived from our sensorimotor experiences, through which we can structure abstract concepts and carry out inferences. This chapter discusses through a variety of examples how iconicity and image schemas can be useful in facilitating language learning.

Chapter 7 evaluates the force of a first argument in favor of the Innateness Hypothesis: the argument from universals. We will distinguish various types of universals, and examples will be provided. We will first look back at the organization of the mental grammar and ask which parts of that system could be innate. It is then made clear that we need to critically examine when alleged universals can be safely used to support the Innateness Hypothesis. We learn that the argument from universals has to be applied with care and without falling into logical fallacies. We need to realize that alleged universal properties of languages may, firstly, be applicable more generally to cognitive systems that include language (in which case they are not language-domain specific) and, secondly, be caused by factors that have nothing to do with the proposed innate Universal Grammar that nativists postulate. To use a universal in support of the Innateness Hypothesis, it needs to be specific to language and not be explainable in terms of other factors. We also see how Chomsky’s ideas about what might be innate for language have changed over time.

The chapter investigates the factors motivating the choice of mood in Early Latin indirect questions. Under what conditions would the speaker use the indicative rather than the subjunctive? subjunctive? Some factors have already been identified, such as exclamatory-style phrases, the degree of detachment of the indirect question, the head verb’s meaning and its mood. The present study submits that variation in mood can be motivated by (literary) register and the social identity of speaker and addressee. The question is addressed first by building a complete corpus of indirect questions in Early Latin drama, with each form tagged with the relevant markers (metrical context, status of speaker and addressee, etc.); from this corpus of data, instances in which indicative is most definitely retained as a rule are excluded, and instances are examined in which either mood was in principle allowable, with a view to identifying patterns. Attention is paid to style, metre, character type, and genre. This methodology enables a sociolinguistic approach to the question and considerations about the developments in usage over time.

This chapter introduces the concept of grammar of a particular language. The basic units of grammar in Chinese are introduced in order to underline the distinguishing characteristics of Chinese grammar. By comparing Chinese with English, the chapter demonstrates that Chinese words have no form changes in sentences regardless of quantity or tense; thus, the relationship between words plays an important role in determining their parts of speech.

This chapter introduces the two types of modification in a sentence: attributive and adverbial. Attributive modification generally assigns properties to nouns, and adverbial modification generally assigns properties to predicates. Special attention is paid to the uses of the marker 的 de for attributive modifications and the marker 地 de for adverbial modifications.

Chapter 7 lays out new data from both Faroese and Icelandic regarding triadic verbs, in particular the passive of ‘give’ and other three-place predicates. The theoretical apparatus presented in Chapter 6 is brought to bear on ditransitives and shown to predict the correct case frames and word orders in Icelandic and Faroese. First, an outline is given of double-object verbs in Faroese, noting that the evidence in some of the preceding literature is equivocal as to the acceptability of passive with ‘give’ and other triadic verbs. Data from a Faroese survey are discussed, the result being that no sentence with passive of ‘give’ was broadly accepted. Faroese evidence is discussed regarding the position of the theme and goal arguments in the active. Further data on the ‘give’ passive in Icelandic are presented; consistently with previous work, these Icelandic speakers have the option of either Goal-V-Theme or Theme-V-Goal orders in the passive. A Faroese survey on passives of ditransitives other than ‘give’ shows that the lexical semantics of a given verb interact with word order, such that if passive is judged acceptable, its mean acceptability is higher for the Theme-V-Goal order than for Goal-V-Theme.

Chapter 4 zooms in on dative-subject predicates in Faroese and presents new survey data from the Faroe Islands and Iceland. The preceding literature on Faroese non-nominative subjects is reviewed before the Faroese and Icelandic surveys on quirky case monotransitives are described in detail. The implications of the results are discussed in relation to case-assignment, agreement and word order, and the author’s proposed analysis is presented along with a factorial typology. Two Faroese surveys and one Icelandic survey testing possible object positions in quirky case sentences are discussed. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the structural object position of nominative arguments in Icelandic, and that of accusatives in Faroese, is the same regular object position of nominative–accusative case frames. On the other hand, the results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that the object position is different between the two languages (and hence that such a difference is responsible for the difference in case-marking). These conclusions are discussed in detail in the OLG analysis section, which attributes the difference to constraint interaction, particularly a different ranking of a pair of constraints enforcing structural object case (accusative) and agreement with a nominative argument, respectively.

Chapter 5 discusses possible orders other than SVO in European and Brazilian Portuguese and the discourse and morphophonological factors that trigger them

This chapter addresses the typological change in relative clauses from postnominal to prenominal position over time. It is also proposed that the constituent order between the relative clause and the head noun is not directly related to the verb and its argument as is generally assumed in the literature but is correlated with the ordering between the VP and PP instead. The diachronic evidence of Chinese shows that the order change of PP from postverbal to preverbal position was the critical motivation for the change in question.

This unit challenges and guides students with more difficult material. Songs, poems and demanding newspaper articles broaden and intensify their knowledge of the culture of the Spanish-speaking world. We also exemplify some of the differences in usage and the different ways that Cubans, Argentinians, Mexicans and Spaniards refer to common items. The important differences between word order in Spanish and English, and the consequent complications for translation, are explored. Attention is given to word formation in Spanish so that students can easily recognize related words and how the use of suffixes (diminutive, augmentative and pejorative) can change the meaning of the basic word in subtle and unexpected ways.

This unit challenges and guides students with more difficult material. Songs, poems and demanding newspaper articles broaden and intensify their knowledge of the culture of the Spanish-speaking world. We also exemplify some of the differences in usage and the different ways that Cubans, Argentinians, Mexicans and Spaniards refer to common items. The important differences between word order in Spanish and English, and the consequent complications for translation, are explored. Attention is given to word formation in Spanish so that students can easily recognize related words and how the use of suffixes (diminutive, augmentative and pejorative) can change the meaning of the basic word in subtle and unexpected ways.

In this chapter I discuss different criteria and strategies related to the order of words, morphemes and syntactic constituents. There are very many theories, especially in psycholinguistics, which argue for some word orders being more costly than others. I argue that different ways of minimizing processing costs can be interpreted as maximization of accessibility, according to the general principles introduced in Chapter 1. First, I discuss which factors can, according to different researchers, make word order more or less costly, based on the existing evidence. Next, I provide well-known examples of efficiency and discuss competing explanations. The strategies include minimization of dependency distances and syntactic domains, putting Subject first, using a specific order of noun phrase elements and morphemes, Greenbergian word order correlations and avoidance of crossing dependencies, which can be explained by the preference for continuous constituents.