Günther Grewendorf

Monika Rathert

This volume explores new interfaces between linguistics and jurisprudence. Its theoretical and methodological importance lies in showing that many questions asked within the field of language and law receive satisfactory answers from formal linguistics. The book starts with a paper by the two editors in which they explain why the volume - as a whole and with its individual papers - is an innovation in the field of language and law. In addition, an overview about the most important research projects on language and law is given. The first chapter of the book is on understanding the law. Jurists and laypersons always ask for the precise meaning of a certain piece of the law. In linguistics, the discipline investigating 'meaning' is semantics; thus, it is to be expected that semantics can contribute to a correct understanding of the law. Chapter 1 also investigates the alleged incomprehensibility of legal language with the help of psycholinguistics. Chapter 2 is on identifying the criminal. To find the author of a blackmailer's letter, text/ corpus linguistics is instrumental. If the blackmailer uses the telephone instead of the letter, speaker identification and phonetics are necessary. The BKA stores all blackmailing letters in a database, but databases are only one possibility of organizing legal systems; another possibility is the application of tools from computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. These tools can be useful to handle terminology, to retrieve information, or to model legal theorizing in a formal system. Chapter 3 demonstrates a variety of examples of organizing legal systems. The topic of chapter 4 is multilingualism and the law. The European legislation is a product of legal and linguistic diversity, as the member states do not only differ in languages but also in their legal systems. One paper shows how Switzerland handles its multilingualism in legal drafting. The input of translation studies is of course vital in this field of research. An index for both subjects and persons complements the volume.

Formal Linguistics and Law

Artemis Alexiadou

Arnim von Stechow

This volume contains contributions dealing with the syntax, morphology, semantics, and diachronic development of the Perfect and the components it is built on across languages. The volume brings these aspects together, working towards a comprehensive theory of the Perfect which takes into consideration the interfaces between the various components of the grammar. Issues addressed include: the temporal vs. aspectual character of the perfect, the contribution of adverbial modification, the structure of the perfect participle.

Perfect Explorations

Anastasia Giannakidou

This book addresses recent developments in the study of quantifier phrases, nominalizations, and the linking definite determiner. It presents challenging ideas at the syntax-morphology, syntax-semantics, and lexicon-morphology interfaces and advances understanding of how quantification, definiteness, and nominalizations are encoded in grammar.

Quantification, Definiteness, and Nominalization

Renate Musan

This book addresses recent developments in the study of tense from a cross-paradigm and cross-linguistic point of view. Leading international scholars explore challenging ideas about tense at the interfaces between semantics and syntax as well as syntax and morphology. The book is divided into three main subsections: 1) Tense in tenseless languages; 2) Tense, mood, and modality, and 3) Descriptive approaches to some tense phenonema. Although time is a universal dimension of the human experience, some languages encode reference to time without any grammatical tense morphology of the verb. Some of these exceptional “tenseless” languages are investigated in this volume: Kalaallisut, Paraguayan Guaraní and Movima. Modal verbs are polyfunctional in the sense that they express both tense and modality. In this volume, an untypical modal is analyzed, a modal analysis of imperatives is argued for, and sentential mood, which is closely related to modality, is analyzed. It is always interesting to look at the expression of tense in understudied languages, which is done here for Scottish Gaelic, Austronesian Rukai and German dialects. The volume can be used for graduate and undergraduate level teaching

Tense across Languages

The volume explores new interfaces between linguistics and jurisprudence. Its theoretical and methodological importance lies in showing that many questions asked within language and law receive satisfactory answers from formal linguistics, including computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, translation studies, psycholinguistics, semantics, phonetics and corpus linguistics.

Professor and Chair of the Institute of English Linguistics Artemis Alexiadou

This series consists of collected volumes and monographs about specific issues dealing with interfaces among the subcomponents of linguistic structure: phonology-morphology, phonology-syntax, syntax-semantics, syntax-morphology, and syntax-lexicon. Recent linguistic research has recognized that the subcomponents of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. What is currently under debate is the actual range of such interactions and their most appropriate representation in grammar, and this is precisely the focus of this series. Specifically, it provides a general overview of various topics by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components. The books function as a state-of- the-art report of research.

The volume explores the syntax of nominalizations, focusing on deverbal and deadjectival nominalizations, but also discussing the syntax of genitives and the syntax of distinct readings of nominalizations. The volume investigates the morpholgy-syntax interface as well as the semantics-syntax interface in the domain of nominalizations. The theoretical frameworks include distributed morphology, and minimalist syntax. Data from a variety of languages are taken into consideration, e.g. Hebrew, Bulgarian, Serbian, French, Spanish, German and English.

Monika Rathert

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