Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today (vols. 1–226, 1980–2015)

Head Movement in Syntax argues that verb movement is a narrow syntactic phenomenon that can affect locality constraints. The altered locality domains are detectable from the way certain phrasal elements such as a phrase containing a Wh are forced to undergo movement. The basic idea explored in the book dates back to Chomsky (1986) where the movement of a verb is proposed to be able to affect and alter a barrier. This idea is translated into contemporary minimalist apparatus to capture locality conditions, with Wh movement in Malayalam, a Dravidian language spoken in Southern India, providing the necessary data. The book also points out that analysing Wh movement in Malayalam as a sub-case of Focus movement is untenable and offers a fresh perspective on Wh-in-situ versus Wh-movement. In addition, the book provides a comprehensive analysis of the pronominal system in Malayalam, a language that violates the canonical binding conditions.

The volume contains 18 contributions from senior and junior scholars covering core issues within the theoretical investigation of the architecture and the mechanisms of the faculty of language, with particular emphasis on the computational component. They all pursue a comparative approach, investigating and comparing different languages and dialects or comparing different modes of acquisition, as in Adriana Belletti’s work, to whom the volume is dedicated. The papers in the first part (by Chomsky, Rizzi, Bianchi & Chesi, Cinque, Costa, Calabrese) deal with theoretical issues such as labeling, the cartography of structures and the locality of derivations in a broad sense. The papers in the second part (by Haegeman & Lohndal, Delfitto & Fiorin, Cruschina, Lahousse, Di Domenico and Contemori, Dal Pozzo & Matteini) concentrate on the realization of structure relative to discourse, particularly on topic and focus positions in the vP periphery, and on referential dependencies. The third part collects papers (by Cardinaletti & Volpato, Friedmann, Yachini & Szterman, Snyder & Hyams, Hamann & Tuller, Cecchetto & Donati, Grewendorf & Poletto) that specifically target intervention effects in relative clauses as apparent in different structures, different languages, and different populations.

Övdalian is spoken in central Sweden by about 2000 speakers. Traditionally categorized as a dialect of Swedish, it has not received much international attention. However, Övdalian is typologically closer to Faroese or Icelandic than it is to Swedish, and since it has been spoken in relative isolation for about 1000 years, a number of interesting linguistic archaisms have been preserved and innovations have developed. This volume provides seven papers about Övdalian morphology and syntax. The papers, all based on extensive fieldwork, cover topics such as verb movement, subject doubling, wh-words and case in Övdalian. Constituting the first comprehensive linguistic description of Övdalian in English, this volume is of interest for linguists in the fields of Scandinavian and Germanic linguistics, and also historical linguists will be thrilled by some of the presented data. The data and the analyses presented here furthermore challenge our view of the morphosyntax of the Scandinavian languages in some cases – as could be expected when a new language enters the linguistic arena.

This volume brings together studies in the domain of weak referentiality, the phenomenon that a definite or indefinite noun phrase lacks its usual referential force. Several papers investigate syntactic or semantic properties of indefinite noun phrases, such as modality, number neutrality, narrow scope, incorporation, predication, and case marking, and that in a range of languages (Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, German, Papiamentu, Russian). Other papers deal with weakly referential definite noun phrases in various languages (Basque, Dutch, English, French) involving scrambling, modification, possession, and accessibility. The papers demonstrate a range of empirical methods and theoretical models. This volume will not only be of interest to researchers and students in syntax and semantics, but also in psycholinguistics and language typology.

The contributions in this volume are devoted to various aspects of the internal and external syntax of DPs in a wide variety of languages belonging to the Slavic, Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Semitic and Germanic language families. In particular, the papers address questions related to the internal and external cartography of various types of simplex and complex DPs: the position of DPs within larger structures, agreement in phi-features and/or case between DPs and their predicates, as well as between sub-elements of DPs, and/or the assignment of case to DPs in specific configurations. The first four chapters of the book focus primarily on the external syntax of DPs, and the remaining chapters deal with their internal syntax.

Since the advent of syntactic cartography, left sentence peripheries have begun to take center stage in linguistic research. Following the lead of Rizzi (1997), much work on left peripheries has been focused on Italian, whereas other Romance languages have attracted somewhat less attention. This volume offers a well-balanced set of articles investigating left sentence peripheries in Spanish. Some articles explore the historical evolution of left dislocation and fronting operations, while others seek to assess the extent – and the limits – of variation found between different geographical varieties and registers of the contemporary language. Moreover, the volume comprises several case studies on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and information structure, and the implications of these for pragmatic interpretation and the organization of discourse. Cross-linguistic and typological perspectives are also provided in due course in order to position the analyses developed for Spanish within a larger research context.

The contributions of this volume offer new perspectives on the relation between syntax and information structure in the history of Germanic and Romance languages, focusing on English, German, Norwegian, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. In addition to discussing changes in individual languages along the syntax–information structure axis, the volume also makes a point of comparing and contrasting different languages with respect to the interplay between syntax and information structure. Since the creation of increasingly sophisticated annotated corpora of historical texts is on the agenda in many research environments, methods and schemes for information structure annotation and analysis of historical texts from a theoretical and applied perspective are discussed.

This book is a research monograph that investigates the crosslinguistic distribution of multiple determiners. In some languages, noun phrases permit or even seem to require a double or multiple realization of definite/indefinite markers in certain modification environments. The book develops tools that can be used to keep the different instantiations of the phenomenon apart and argues that a uniform account thereof is not desirable. On the basis of these tools, it advances the proposal that there are different types of multiple occurrences of determiners (and sub-types thereof), some are syntactic, while others are purely morphological. It then puts forth a theoretical proposal that regulates the presence of the different types of multiple determiners across languages. The book will be of interst to researchers and students working on the structure of DP, the syntax of modification and the typology of noun phrases. Languages discussed include Greek, Romanian, Scandinavian, English, dialects of German, Hebrew, Albanian, Chinese, French, and Slovenian.

The chapters in this volume address current topics in the morphology, syntax, and semantics of nominalizations, drawing on a range of typologically and geographically diverse languages. Nominalizations represent a long-standing puzzle to linguists: How is a noun, such as destruction, related to the verb destroy? The semantic parallel between the deverbal nominalization and its related verb suggests that there is a close connection between the two. This volume contributes to the ongoing debates on how to capture this connection and how to account for the apparent mixed categorical status of nominalizations. This volume is essential for students and researchers interested in the morphology-syntax and syntax-semantics interfaces.

The phenomenon of clefts is beyond doubt a golden oldie. It has captivated linguists of different disciplines for decades. The fascination arises from the unique syntax of clefts in interaction with their pragmatic and semantic interpretation. Clefts structure sentences according to the information state of the constituents contained in them. They are special as they exhibit a rather uncommon syntactic form to achieve the separation of the prominent part, either focal or topical, from the background of the clause. Despite the long-lasting interest in clefts, linguists have not yet come to an agreement on many basic questions. The articles contained in this volume address these issues from new theoretical and empirical perspectives. Based on data from about 50 languages from all over the world, this volume presents new arguments for the proper derivation of clefts, and contributes to the ongoing debate on the information-structural impact of cleft structures. Theoretically, it combines modern syntactic theorizing with investigations at the interface between grammar and information-structure.