The Future Of Syntax

Proposing a new approach to the study of language, this book argues for the need to consider syntax in context and to engage with a wider variety of perspectives that better reflect the modern world and the changes to our language prompted by increased cultural diversity, the prevalence of social media, AI, and more. Referencing big data and drawing on a corpus of linguistic research, the book explores in particular the socio-pragmatic sensitivity and complexity within East Asian languages including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, offering new insights that step away from traditional approaches to formal syntax. In tracing the history of syntactic theory, it highlights the shifts in our communication as we adapt to technological developments, and focuses in particular on the significant advances in AI. Arguing that traditional syntactic theory is no longer in keeping with real life communication, Jieun Kiaer scrutinises current approaches and raises key questions about the need for a more appropriate grammar better suited to the diversity of human language.

This volume is a collection of current work at the interface of linguistics and conversation analysis. The focus is on linguistic items in their action contexts: syntactic structures and lexical items in data from natural conversations in six European languages: Danish, English, Finnish, German, Italian and Swedish. Some of the studies deal with similar practices in two different languages, which enables cross-linguistic comparisons. The notion of 'construction' is brought together with an interactional perspective; the fact that constructions cannot always be clearly analysed as either syntactic or lexico-semantic has its reflection in this volume. So far, there have been fewer attempts at interactionally oriented work on lexical and semantic phenomena than on syntactic constructions. In this volume, several papers show the interactional relevance of word selection and lexical semantic issues. In the future, studies on syntax and lexico-semantics in interaction will enrich realistic grammars of our languages, and cross-linguistic description of comparable practices of organizing talk in interaction will be invaluable for the study of both inter-European and international communication.

The volume collects a selection of papers presented at a European Colloquium held at the Università degli Studi di Roma Tre in October 1997. It focuses on phenomena at the boundary between morphology and syntax, and provides analyses for data from the fields of both inflectional and derivational morphology and word order. Morpho-syntactic phenomena are analysed cross-linguistically and cross-theoretically, as typologically-different languages (European, Afro-Asiatic, American and Austronesian ones) are dealt with and compared according to a variety of approaches, from minimalism and lexical-functional grammar to grammaticalization theory, taking into account both synchronic variation and diachronic change. The volume is divided into three sections: I. Morphological phenomena and their boundaries, II. Morpho-syntax and pragmatics, and III. Morpho-syntax and semantics, as the interaction with the higher components of the grammar is seen as contributing to explaining variation in morpho-syntactic behaviour.

Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants’ speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world. The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada.

Although in the early days of generative linguistics Slovenian was rarely called on in the development of theoretical models, the attention it gets has subsequently grown, so that by now it has contributed to generative linguistics a fair share of theoretically important data. With 13 chapters that all build on Slovenian data, this book sets a new milestone. The topics discussed in the volume range from Slovenian clitics, which are called on to shed new light on the intriguing Person-Case Constraint and to provide part of the evidence for a new generalization relating the presence of the definite article and Wackernagel clitics, to functional elements such as the future auxiliary and possibility modals, the latter of which are discussed also from the perspective of language change. Even within the relatively well-researched topics like wh-movement, new findings are presented, both in relation to the structure of the left periphery and to the syntax of relative clauses.

The basic idea of the particular way of understanding mental phenomena that has inspired the "cognitive revolution" is that, as a result of certain relatively recent intellectual and technological innovations, informed theorists now possess a more powerfully insightful comparison or model for mind than was available to any thinkers in the past. The model in question is that of software, or the list of rules for input, output, and internal transformations by which we determine and control the workings of a computing machine's hardware. Although this comparison and its many implications have dominated work in the philosophy, psychology, and neurobiology of mind since the end of the Second World War, it now shows increasing signs of losing its once virtually unquestioned preeminence. Thus we now face the question of whether it is possible to repair and save this model by means of relatively inessential "tinkering", or whether we must reconceive it fundamentally and replace it with something different. In this book, twenty-eight leading scholars from diverse fields of "cognitive science"-linguistics, psychology, neurophysiology, and philosophy- present their latest, carefully considered judgements about what they think will be the future course of this intellectual movement, that in many respects has been a watershed in our contemporary struggles to comprehend that which is crucially significant about human beings. Jerome Bruner, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Boden, Ulric Neisser, Rom Harre, Merlin Donald, among others, have all written chapters in a non-technical style that can be enjoyed and understood by an inter-disciplinary audience of psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and cognitive scientists alike.

Science-fiction author William Gibson is famously quoted as saying, “The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed.” During the Covid pandemic, telehealth and remote monitoring were elevated from interesting innovations to essential tools in many healthcare systems, but not all countries had the infrastructure necessary to pivot quickly, amply demonstrating the negative consequences of the digital divide. This book presents the proceedings of MedInfo 2023, the 19th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics, held from 8 – 12 July 2023 in Sydney, Australia. This series of biennial conferences provides a platform for the discussion of applied approaches to data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in health and wellness. The theme and title of MedInfo 2023 was The Future is Accessible, but the digital divide is a major concern for health and care-informatics professionals, whether because of global economic disparities, digital literacy gaps, or limited access to reliable information about health. A total of 935 submissions were received for the conference, of which 228 full papers, 43 student papers and 117 posters were accepted following a thorough peer-review process involving 279 reviewers. Topics covered include: information and knowledge management; quality, safety and outcomes; health data science; human, organizational and social aspects; and global health informatics. Significant advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, and genomics hold great hope for future healthcare planning, delivery, management, education, evaluation, and research, and this book will be of interest to all those working to not only exploit the benefits of these technologies, but also to identify ways to overcome their associated challenges.