This chapter combines digital search tools with traditional philological methods to explore Shakespeare’s use of the linguistic repertoires embodied in the Book of Common Prayer and English translations of the Bible. On a daily, weekly, and yearly basis, Shakespeare (not to mention his readers and playgoing audience) heard and repeated the regimen of biblical quotations, prayers, and theological propositions encoded in the Book of Common Prayer. These repetitions made available a kind of embodied dictionary of formal categories and templates. Shakespeare’s plays and poems make extensive use of that dictionary. When Shakespeare filled these forms, he did so by selecting words and fitting them to the form in sometimes surprising ways. This chapter argues that the dramatic and poetic power of Shakespeare’s language derives from this filling of words with forms. Indeed, many of Shakespeare’s uses of forms from the Book of Common Prayer or the Bible carry with them what we call content or semantic features, so that our experience of Shakespeare’s language is in fact a register of Shakespeare’s experience of the language of the Bible.

Chapter 7 takes a relevance theory approach to literary humour, focussing on comic effects of literary form in funny rhymes, and the role of formal resemblance in literary parodies. The chapter surveys general theories of linguistic humour as well as existing relevance-theoretic work on humour. These theories suggest that humour arises from incongruity and resolution. This chapter alternatively argues that humour can result from incongruity alone, without resolution. Funny rhymes illustrate this claim in that the search for coherent readings encouraged by sound-patterned texts cannot arrive at any kind of meaning association or conceptual merging, and the result is disruptive of the interpretation process, which is in itself funny. This can be seen as an echoic mocking of a drive to make sound–meaning associations which may emerge from childhood processes of language acquisition. The chapter argues that literary parodies are also echoic in terms of reproducing both the content and form of original works or styles of writing. The chapter includes discussion of ‘The Ayrshire Orpheus’ by Mick Imlah, Henry Reed’s parody of ‘Burnt Norton’ by T. S. Eliot, Bret Harte’s parody of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Raymond Chandler’s parody of The Sun also Risesby Ernest Hemingway.

The Minimalist Program (MP) has a fraught relationship with morphology. On the one hand, the MP heaps an empirical and theoretical burden onto morphology: morphology in a pre-syntactic sense is the driver of all syntactic variation across languages, via features of lexical items (the Borer conjecture); morphology in a post-syntactic sense is responsible for all “complexity and variety” (Chomsky 2014: xi) in how syntactic structures are externalized, via a “Morphology module” in the phonological component (Chomsky 1995: ch. 4). But over the years the MP has given comparatively little consideration to developing a theory of the lexicon or the phonological component. This chapter takes up the challenge: What (if anything) is universal about the morphology – in particular the morphological engine – of human languages? Research in the past few decades has pushed us significantly forward, offering a resounding “yes” to the existence of universal principles of morphology. This chapter considers and defends three candidates for universal aspects of morphology: late insertion, bottom-up insertion, and domains/cycles.

Merge is the operation of Narrow Syntax that turns an unordered set of elements into a hierarchically structured object, yielding constituent structure and (asymmetric) dependency via the configurationally defined relation of c-command. This vignette defines the various conceptualizations of Merge within Minimalism, lists conditions on Merge, and discusses the position of Merge within the model of grammar.

This chapter focuses on topics in syntax. It first introduces a general but important topic—part of speech—and how linguists determine part of speech in general and for Chinese. It then delves deeper to examine syntactic features of Chinese nouns and noun phrases. Measure words and classifiers are distinguished; types of classifiers and dialectal variations in classifiers are discussed. In describing Chinese verbs and verb phrases, important notions such as verb arguments, syntactic and semantic roles, verbal complements and verbal aspects are introduced. Syntactic behaviors of Chinese adjectives and verbs are also compared. Finally, this chapter discusses the word order of Mandarin.

This chapter focuses on larger syntactic units, primarily sentences. It first discusses major sentence types in Mandarin (simple vs. complex sentences). Then it describes four types of sentences based on communicative functions, and the modal particles which are attached to different types of sentences. The chapter also describes the syntactic, semantic and discourse features of the bǎ and bèi constructions, and their socio-pragmatic functions.

Before we can talk about how we learn, use, and lose language, we need to define what it is, and what it isn’t. Over the centuries, many people have attempted to describe language. In this chapter was ask: what is language? This is a simple enough question although the answer is much more complicated, and intriguing, than it seems at first. The question of “what is language?” isn’t something we can just sum up in a single pithy sentence. Language is a system of communication, but it’s so much more than that. Language is multi-faceted. It involves signs and symbols, smaller and bigger segments, dialects and accents, and also writing and signing. This chapter serves as a primer to introduce us to the basic underlying principles of language sceince, so we can now talk the talk.

Heritage language speakers are second language (L2) speakers of a sociopolitically majority language. Their native heritage language is a minority language which typically develops under linguistic pressure from the majority L2 and eventually becomes secondary and weaker than the L2. In the past decade, research on heritage language speakers has investigated the degree of acquisition of different aspects of the heritage grammar and how the process and outcome of heritage language acquisition are similar to and different from adult L2 acquisition. Advances in the acquisition of heritage languages have contributed significantly to inform key questions in L2 acquisition. This chapter discusses the latest research on how L2 learners’ and heritage speakers’ exposure and use of the L2 and L1 affect the processing and acquisition the L2 and the heritage language and points to areas in need of further research.

A survey of phrase and sentence grammar, including discussion of the difference between grammaticality and acceptability, parts of speech-word classes, word order, case marking, verbal inflection, constituency, structural ambiguity, argument structure, anaphora, quantifiers, and negation.

American English is not a simple thing to define. The United States is a big place, with many different regions. American English is certainly different from British English, and yet it is hard to set boundaries on the differences. American culture also plays a role in American English, and some say that politics does as well. In the end, the multitude of voices of Americans of whatever belief and whatever region come together to emerge as what people around the world recognize as American English.

Music rhythm and speech rhythm share acoustic, temporal and syntactic similarities, and neuroscience research has shown that similar areas and networks in the brain are recruited to process both types of signals. Rhythm is a core predictive element for both music and speech, allowing for facilitated processing of upcoming, predicted elements. The combined study of music and speech rhythm processing can be particularly insightful, considering the stronger regularity and predictability of musical rhythm. Although speech rhythm is less regular, it still contains regularities, notably at syllabic and prosodic levels. In this chapter, we outline different research lines investigating connections between music and speech rhythm processing, including the recently proposed processing rhythm in speech and music framework, as well as music rhythm interventions and stimulations that aim to improve speech signal processing both in the short term and the long term. Implications for developmental language disorders and future research perspectives are outlined.

On phrasal timescales, spontaneous conversational speech is not very rhythmic. Instead, periods of speech activity are intermittent: Words tend to come in short bursts and are often interrupted with hesitations. Nonetheless, it has been suggested that there is a production mechanism that generates phrasal rhythmicity in speech. This chapter examines the empirical evidence for such a mechanism and concludes that speakers do not directly control the timing of phrases. Instead, it is argued that temporal patterns associated with phrases are epiphenomena of processes involved in conceptual-syntactic organization. A model is presented in which coherency-monitoring systems govern the initiation and interruption of speech activity. Hesitations arise when conceptual or syntactic systems fail to achieve sufficiently ordered states. The model provides a mechanism to account for intermittency on phrasal timescales.