This chapter introduces syntax, i.e. sentence structure. It distinguishes between clauses and sentences and discusses sentence constituents and constituency tests. This chapter also discusses sentence structure and word order, which can be fixed or flexible, and considers how some word orders tend to correlate with other linguistic characteristics in a language. In addition, this chapter provides conlanging practice, a set of guided questions to develop the basic structure of sentences in a conlang, and outlines the sentence structure of the Salt language.

In this chapter, I will provide a brief outline of the structure of the mental grammar, referring for a more extensive treatment to ML, Chapter 6. This chapter then offers a conversation about what Noam Chomsky considers to be the most central linguistic argument for his Innateness Hypothesis (IH), the poverty of the stimulus argument. We then discuss some different ways in which the mental grammar could be organized. Finally, I will raise questions about what kinds of evidence could falsify the IH and whether such evidence can actually be found. In this connection, we will also ask how rich the alleged innate system needs to be.

How we find a voice to tell our story. Variations in first-person narrators; reflecting background and personality in speech. Engaging with the challenges presented by dialogue in historical fiction; accommodating regional accent and dialect.

Advances in natural language processing (NLP) and Big Data techniques have allowed us to learn about the human mind through one of its richest outputs – language. In this chapter, we introduce the field of computational linguistics and go through examples of how to find natural language and how to interpret the complexities that are present within it. The chapter discusses the major state-of-the-art methods being applied in NLP and how they can be applied to psychological questions, including statistical learning, N-gram models, word embedding models, large language models, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. The chapter concludes with ethical discussions on the proliferation of chat “bots” that pervade our social networks, and the importance of balanced training sets for NLP models.

This chapter surveys the field of recent grammatical change in English. We focus on the period since 1900 but also discuss how certain recent changes relate to longer-term trends. Many of our examples involve the verb phrase or verbal complementation, but changes in other areas such as the noun phrase are also noted. We address methodological issues that arise in researching recent change, considering the various kinds of corpora available and the complexities involved in tracking grammatical change over time. We then discuss how patterns of change vary between spoken and written language and across different genres. Finally, we consider a range of possible explanations or motivations for change, including grammaticalisation, economy and social influences.

Even after many decades of incessant research, the system of negation in English still has a story to tell, especially as concerns its diachronic development. This chapter will try to tell this story by reviewing a few of the main strands and occasionally delving into details. The chapter will follow a thematic, rather than a chronological, progression, and will mostly focus on sentential negation, which is still being discussed in its diachronic development more than a century after Jespersen’s hypothesised ‘negative cycle’. Formal approaches will be mentioned, but the chapter will give greater prominence to sociolinguistic and socio-pragmatic angles of research on English negation from a diachronic point of view. Some space is devoted to recent research on phenomena such as multiple negation, as well as to the influence of pragmatic factors on negation patterns and to lexicalised forms of negation.

This chapter summarizes the complex nature of bilingual academic communication, highlighting the gradual and non-binary process of language acquisition. It emphasizes the importance of academic language, which is structured with regular patterns that facilitate learning in subjects like math, history, and science. It advocates for a deeper understanding of how academic language proficiency is developed through the systematic practice of lexis, syntax, and discourse.

In an era of globalization, multilingualism is vital for social mobility and equity. Educational institutions must adapt to the multilingual reality of today’s classrooms, where proficiency in a global language can open doors to social rights and international participation. The chapter stresses that multilingualism should be seen as an asset, not a transitional quirk, and highlights the benefits of bilingual education in fostering cognitive flexibility and critical thinking. Finally, it explores the need for proper resources, including qualified bilingual teachers, to make bilingual education effective and accessible to all students.

This chapter explores the role of syntax in language development, showing how sentence structure evolves in bilinguals. Early L2 learners rely on L1 syntax or imitation, gradually forming independent L2 structures. Over time, L1 and L2 syntax merge, creating shared language nodes. Research confirms that both grammar systems remain active during language use.

Syntactic complexity is key to proficiency, measured through indices like clause structure and subordination. Advances in computational tools, such as Coh-Metrix and L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer, allow automated analysis of syntax. Studies show that bilinguals develop longer sentences, longer and more complex noun phrases, and more subordinate clauses over time.

Children worldwide follow a natural syntax progression – juxtaposition first, subordination later, and nominalization at higher levels. Bilinguals display unique patterns, with advanced L2 learners favouring longer sentences, relative clauses, and passive structures. This chapter highlights syntax’s role in bilingual growth and its impact on proficiency assessment.

Music & spoken language share many features by combining smaller units (e.g., words, notes) into larger structures (e.g., sentences, musical phrases). This hierarchical organization of sound is culturally contingent & communicates meaning to listeners. Comparisons of music & language from a cognitive neuroscience perspective provide several insights into commonalities & differences between these systems, how they are represented in the brain. The cognitive neuroscience research of music & language, emphasizes the pitfalls & promises identified, including (1) the apparent acoustic & structural similarities between these systems, (2) how both systems convey meaning to listeners, (3) how these systems are learned over the course of development, & (4) the ways in which experience in one domain influences processing in the other domain. We conclude that searching for similarities in how these complex systems are structured (e.g., comparing musical syntax to linguistic syntax) represents a pitfall that researchers should approach with caution. A promising approach in this area of research is to examine how general cognitive mechanisms underlie the learning & maintenance of both systems

This study examines the use of terminology related to syntactic variation in six linguistic journals (i.e., Corpora, the Journal of English Linguistics, the Journal of Germanic Linguistics, the Journal of Historical Linguistics, the Journal of Linguistics, and Syntax). Our analysis is based on a corpus consisting of articles published between 2012 and 2021. Subjecting these contributions to quantitative and qualitative analyses of the three target word pairs ‘canonical’ vs ‘non-canonical’, ‘marked’ vs ‘unmarked’, and ‘standard’ vs ‘non-standard’ revealed that the non-negated forms outmatch the negated forms in frequency. The collocation analysis showed that this can also be related to ‘marked’ being used as a past-tense verb form and ‘standard’ being used as a noun. Even though there are clear differences between journals, individual authors are also prone to favour specific terminology over other. Bigram analysis additionally revealed that the words of the three pairs are used with partially overlapping but also distinct meanings, at times reflecting ideological underpinnings. This might make it advisable for authors to explicitly reflect on their terminological choices when it comes to the description of syntactic phenomena related to (non-)canonicity.

Interest in linguistic alternatives was triggered by Labov’s sociolinguistic studies in the early 1960s, which showed that linguistic variation was not random but systematic. Typically, one of the variants is regarded as the default and the others as deviations. This introduction presents an approach to syntactic variation from the perspective of (non‑)canonicity. It first approaches the term ‘non-canonical’ from a morphological and etymological perspective before outlining the frequency- and the theory-based approaches to the notion. The introduction then defines as a canonical syntactic construction a default which under general circumstances will be chosen with the highest likelihood, while any deviation from the default is called ‘non-canonical’. The paper classifies these deviations into five basic but combinable types. While the status of one variant as default is typically stable in research on syntactic variation, research on syntactic (non‑)canonicity places particular emphasis on the elusive character of canonicity depending on, for instance, the variety, register, or mode of English. Thus, an infrequent deviation from the basic SXV order like topicalisation is clearly non-canonical in Standard British English but may well be canonical in another regional variety like Indian English. An overview of the structure of the volume concludes the introduction.

This synopsis rounds off the collected volume by summarising the main findings with regard to the concepts, approaches, and methods in studies on (non-)canonical syntax: First, the contributions corroborate the ubiquity of non-canonical syntax – a phenomenon which occurs in all areas of language use. The synopsis then refers back to the definition of the concept of (non‑)canonicity provided in the Introduction to the volume. The contributions to the volume, however, show that both the existence of neighbouring alternatives and the functions of non-canonical constructions are of importance when it comes to understanding non-canonical syntax and its longevity, despite its rarity. This demonstrates that a combination of the theory- and the frequency-based approaches is indeed essential. The synopsis also discusses the predominance of empirical and corpus-based approaches to the study of syntactic (non‑)canonicity, but also emphasises the merits of methodological pluralism, before it finally specifies a number of desiderata for future research into syntactic (non-)canonicity.

After acquiring sufficient vocabulary in a foreign language, learners start understanding parts of conversations in that language. Speaking, in contrast, is a harder task. Forming grammatical sentences requires choosing the right tenses and following syntax rules. Every beginner EFL speaker makes grammar errors – and the type of grammar errors can reveal hints about their native language. For instance, Russian speakers tend to omit the determiner “the” because Russian doesn’t use such modifying words. One linguistic phenomenon that is actually easier in English than in many other languages is grammatical gender. English doesn’t assign gender to inanimate nouns such as “table” or “cup.” A few years ago, the differences in grammatical gender between languages helped reveal societal gender bias in automatic translation: translation systems that were shown gender-neutral statements in Turkish about doctors and nurses assumed that the doctor was male while the nurse was female.

Syntactic phrases can be used as the base in word-formation, and can be used attributively in a construction which is usually taken to be a compound. While the syntactic phrases are often familiar or citations, neither is necessary. The syntax appears to be subject to some restrictions, which suggest that word-formation is involved rather than pure syntax.

The acquisition of a minority language undergoing revitalisation through education poses unique questions about the individual and environmental factors that modulate language development. Unlike monolingual acquisition, the acquisition of a minority heritage language such as Scottish Gaelic (Gaelic hereafter) always occurs in a bilingual, if not multilingual, context. Gaelic speakers are bilingual speakers whose proficiency in the two languages may differ as a function of exposure to the minority language, the languages spoken in the home and in early childhood, as well as the opportunity to use Gaelic outside the school context. This leads to great variability in the Gaelic language outcomes observed in the acquisition of Gaelic. In this chapter, we provide an overview of existing studies on the acquisition of Gaelic morphosyntax in children. We highlight the gaps in the literature and we identify the areas where research is yet to be carried out. We conclude by reviewing reasons why the study of Gaelic can inform us about (bilingual) language development more broadly.