Little Words: Their History, Phonology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, and Acquisition

Little Words is an interdisciplinary examination of the functions and change in the use of clitics, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, discourse particles, auxiliary/light verbs, prepositions, and other “little words” that have played a central role in linguistic theory and in language acquisition research. Leading scholars present advanced research in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse function, historical development, variation, and acquisition by children and adults.

This unique volume integrates the views and findings of these different research areas into one professional source to be used within and across disciplines. Languages studied include English, Spanish, French, Romanian, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Slavonic, and Medieval Leonese.

Ronald P. Leow is an associate professor of Spanish applied linguistics and director of Spanish Language Instruction at Georgetown University.

Héctor Campos is an associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese, linguistics, and modern Greek at Georgetown University.

Donna Lardiere is an associate professor of linguistics at Georgetown University.