This chapter highlights the pivotal role of animal models in unraveling the intricate biological mechanisms and complex neural networks associated with emotional processing and psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, depression, and addiction. These models contribute significantly to understanding distinct brain circuits governing specific emotional behaviors and uncovering potential alterations in pathological conditions. Exploring inter-individual variability and sex differences in emotional behaviors using these models is crucial for advancing our knowledge of emotional processing and dysregulation. This chapter emphasizes the importance of extending the time window analyzed, as well as the importance of using computational tools such as machine learning. Integrating cutting-edge computational tools will enable a finer understanding of the neurobiology of emotions, fostering improved interpretability of both preclinical and clinical results. Ultimately, preclinical models play a vital role in comprehending the neurobiology underlying emotional dysregulation, contributing essential insights for the development of effective treatment strategies for mental disorders.

Pain is a complex experience that includes physical sensations and emotional responses. Research has shown that the central nervous system plays a significant role in how we experience pain. In this chapter, we review the current understanding of the neuroscience of pain, with a particular emphasis on pain processing in the brain. We cover early theories that emphasized the brain’s role in integrating and modulating pain, as well as modern approaches that view pain as distributed processing in the brain. We also introduce functional and computational frameworks for understanding the sensory and motivational aspects of pain and discuss various factors that contribute to the multidimensional nature of pain. The future direction of the study of pain neuroscience includes a deep sampling of subjective pain experience and the use of generative models.

The aim of this chapter is to offer an approachable introduction to the questions, goals, and techniques of affective neuroscience research in nonhuman animals. Rather than providing a detailed literature review, we attempt to outline the overarching principles of the neuroscience of emotion and highlight some areas of special interest. We begin by describing a broad conceptual framework for understanding emotion states that is relied upon by many affective neuroscientists working with nonhuman animals today. We then explore representative examples of work from especially instructive domains of emotion research in other animals, focusing on mice. We discuss each example in detail, introducing the relevant methods and highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, to convey the overall logic of affective neuroscience research in other animals and demonstrate its utility and potential for mechanistic insights into how emotions are manifested by the brain.

This chapter reviews the role of the close study of comparative syntax in advancing our knowledge and understanding of the mechanisms, triggers, and processes involved in syntactic change. While it is possible to infer significant insights and lessons about the nature of diachronic change from the study of successive synchronic stages of a single language, there is no doubt that the comparison of the historical development of two or more languages may offer broader empirical and deeper theoretical insights that are simply not available to language-specific investigations. This chapter therefore considers a number of representative examples which highlight the value and power of comparative linguistic investigation as a tool, not only for effectively probing linguistic reconstruction and linguistic relatedness, but above all for understanding the dimensions and limits of variation observed in how and why languages change through time and space.

This chapter examines two phenomena whose syntax and semantics reflect some of the key developments in modern linguistic theory: question formation and quantifier scope. Both of these require that the relevant expression, be it a wh-phrase or a QP, be interpreted at the level of the clause. We first discuss several ways in which one can derive the relevant meanings for basic questions (clauses with one wh-phrase) and basic quantificational structures (clauses with one quantifier, be it a universal or an existential) before moving on to more complicated structures that have more than one such expression: multiple wh-questions, sentences with more than one quantifier, questions with a quantifier and a wh-phrase. Finally, we consider sentences with ellipsis and note certain differences between the full version and the elliptical version. We connect these differences to the results from our earlier discussions. The general point we emphasize is the existence of distinct scope-taking mechanisms that govern question formation as well as quantifier scope.

This chapter presents a comparative-linguistic perspective on the functional architecture of the Extended Adjectival Projection (XAP). According to this view on phrasal structure, the lexical layer (AP) is structurally embedded in various functional layers, each of which encodes a particular kind of adjectival information such as "agreement," "degree," "comparison," et cetera. At the descriptive level, this chapter aims to give an overview of some of the dimensions of diversity attested in this syntactic domain of human language. At the analytical level, it aims to show how XAP-internal cross-linguistic variation can be associated with XAP’s functional architecture. The chapter discusses the following adjectival phenomena: adjectival agreement and concord, degree word modification, comparative and superlative formation, XAP-internal placement of arguments, measure adjectives, and subextraction of degree expressions.

Recent years have witnessed a steep increase in linguistic databases capturing syntactic variation. We survey and describe 21 publicly available morphosyntactic databases, focusing on such properties as data structure, user interface, documentation, formats, and overall user-friendliness. We demonstrate that all the surveyed databases can be fruitfully categorized along two dimensions: units of description and the design principle. Units of description refer to the type of data the database represents (languages, constructions, or expressions). The design principles capture the internal logic of the database. We identify three primary design principles, which vary in their descriptive power, granularity, and complexity: monocategorization, multicategorization, and structural decomposition. We describe how these design principles are implemented in concrete databases and discuss their advantages and limitations. Finally, we outline essential desiderata for future modern databases in linguistics.

All languages express quantification somehow, but the syntactic means by which it is expressed can vary dramatically from one language to another. This chapter presents a general description of the different syntactic realizations of quantifiers as determiners (D-quantifiers), adverbial elements (A-quantifiers), or predicates, as well as different realizations within each type across languages and broad generalizations about the types of quantifiers which fall into each of the categories. While it has been suggested in previous work that not all languages have D-quantifiers, this chapter critically re-examines this conclusion. In addition, syntactic differences in the realization of quantifier float in different languages is brought to bear on the D- vs. A-quantifier distinction.

This chapter discusses the subdiscipline of micro-comparative syntax in its relation to dialectology and sociolinguistics. While micro-comparative syntax seeks to contribute to a theoretical cognitive model of the human language capacity, dialectology and sociolinguistics study the relation between linguistic properties and external factors such as geography, age, gender, and social class. Differences and similarities between the three subdisciplines are discussed, as well as the ways they can be combined. The chapter has a strong focus on methodology. The appendix to this chapter provides an overview of recent large-scale dialect syntax projects with links to the project websites and databases.

This chapter seeks to give a brief overview of the syntax of information structure in the generative tradition. It concentrates on the notions of focus and topic, which are defined in a wide sense, and discusses their expression in typologically different languages. It briefly touches upon the notions of contrast and givenness when they relate to topic or focus. Two theoretical perspectives are systematically reviewed. The cartographic approach encodes information structure directly in the clausal spine by means of dedicated projections whose order is fixed cross-linguistically and where discourse-driven word orders result from syntactic features. In the interface-based approach, the information-structural roles of particular constituents are established through the mapping between the PF interface or the conceptual interface, and information-structure-related movement operations are subject to economy. Prosodic properties of both foci and topics are examined and, to the extent possible, related to their syntax. Finally, the chapter discusses typologically valid ordering restrictions between topics and foci and their interaction with scope.

This chapter presents and analyzes the main goals of linguistic typology and explores its relation to formal comparative syntax. It shows that typology can be understood in two different ways, as a subfield and as a methodology of comparative linguistic study. Understood in the former sense, a typological approach is complementary to a formal one; understood in the latter sense, a typological approach is inherent in formal comparative syntax. The chapter discusses critical differences between the subfield of functional typology and the subfield of formal comparative syntax and explains the difficulties on the way to their convergence. It uses studies of word order and case to compare the two approaches.

We review a variety of patterns in anaphoric dependencies as they are found in languages of the world. We discuss cross-linguistic variation together with language universals as presented in the literature, and show how differences and similarities between languages are captured by general principles of the grammatical computational system interacting with the morphosyntactic properties of pronouns and reflexives, and with properties of their syntactic environment. Small differences in structure may have major interpretive effects. Such effects result from the interaction of many factors, including Minimality restrictions and local identity avoidance. Thus, to understand patterns of anaphora in a language one must take into account many factors from different parts of the grammar. This has far-reaching methodological implications. One can no longer ‘‘falsify’’ an analysis based on a simple isolated observation about anaphors in language x, y, or z, as is often attempted. Serious cross-linguistic, typological work is therefore crucial for our understanding of the limits of language variation.

This chapter introduces the concept of clause type: a syntactic classification of clauses according to the kind of conversational effect (also known as sentential force) they canonically have when used as root sentences. Scholars traditionally identify three major types (interrogatives, declaratives, and imperatives) alongside several minor types. We review different theoretical approaches to clause types, emphasizing two important dimensions that distinguish them: whether they assume classical speech act theory or a version of the dynamic approach to meaning; and how they assume the conversational function of root sentences to arise at the syntax–semantics interface. We then highlight some of the most important morphosyntactic properties of the major clause types. For interrogatives, we discuss polar, wh-, and non-canonical questions. With regard to declaratives, we discuss whether they are in some sense the default type, and what this means for the syntax–semantics interface. In our review of imperatives, we discuss the special properties of their subjects, restrictions on embeddability and on sentential negation, and their verbal morphology.

This chapter provides a typological and theoretical overview of the phenomena of agreement and concord, both of which involve morphological covariance between elements. We take the canonical instance of agreement to involve covariance between a verbal element and its arguments, and we discuss the empirical landscape ranging from this core case to more complex and marginal instances of agreement. We focus particularly on empirical observations that have figured prominently in the theoretical literature on agreement, including hierarchy effects, case discrimination, and long-distance agreement. We also provide an overview of the theoretical treatment of agreement via the operation Agree, noting some key developments in the conception of this operation in recent years. We then turn to a discussion of concord, which we take to involve covariance between elements within a nominal phrase in the canonical instance. We discuss some theoretically important empirical patterns, including systems of mixed concord, and compare Agree-based and non-Agree-based theoretical treatments of concord. We evaluate the empirical coverage of these models and note some open empirical and theoretical issues.

The chapter first discusses the main arguments in favor of a more articulated functional structure within noun phrases, paying particular attention to some areas of controversy: for instance, the universality of the DP analysis but also the status of Number and Gender as functional projections. It briefly touches upon the representation of demonstratives and adjectives as specifiers of designated projections within the noun phrase. Finally, it discusses word-order restrictions within the noun phrase and Greenberg’s Universal 20, which provoked some controversy in the field.