Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

This volume offers a unique collection of articles investigating the often neglected phenomenon of parentheticals, which are commonly seen as expressions interrupting the linear structure of a host utterance, but lacking a structural relation to it. The book provides an up-to-date introduction to the subject, as well as a range of research articles addressing questions including the syntactic link between parenthetical and frame utterance, the relation between syntactic and prosodic form, the usage and interpretation of parentheticals, and many more. It embraces research findings from different European languages (English, German, Dutch, Romance) and covers an array of forms of syntactic interpolations (from one-word parentheticals to clausal) and a range of methodologies, including empirical research, corpus research, and theoretical analyses. The collection underlines the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to a multi-faceted phenomenon such as parentheticals.

This book offers a new account of the transitive particle verb construction in English. The main emphasis is on the alternation between the two word orders possible in English (continuous: hand in the manuscript vs. discontinuous: hand the manuscript in). The central aim is to show that the choice of the word order is not optional as has often been claimed in related literature on the topic and that a syntactic analysis should thus not be based on optional movement operations or optional feature selection. The author argues in some detail that the choice of the word order is determined to a great extent by the information structuring of the context in which the relevant construction is embedded. The syntactic structure she develops is based on a substantial combination of empirical facts, evidence from theoretical research and the results of two experimental studies on the intonation patterns of the construction.

In this book, the traditional definition of ‘grammaticalization’ is challenged in the light of current developments in grammar theory. The main innovation of this approach is the focus on the feature composition of lexical items. From this perspective, the loss of past participle agreement in Catalan is analyzed on the basis of newly collected data as a consequence of the grammaticalization of formal features. The emergence of syntactic formal features through grammaticalization is understood as a last-resort repair mechanism for pragmatically costly derivations. Further far-reaching implications of this proposal under discussion are: the interplay between (re-)parametrization, economy, cyclicity, and grammaticalization; the characterization of free variation under a modified version of the Interface Hypothesis; and the precedence of syntactic over morphological change. This book is not only of interest to specialists in Romance languages but also to anyone working on diachronic linguistics.

This book is the first book-length study on the Swedish present perfect. It provides an in-depth exploration of the present perfect in English, German and Swedish. It is claimed that only a discourse-based ExtendedNow-approach fully accounts for the present perfect. The main claim is that the length of the ExtendedNow-interval varies cross-linguistically. The book is couched within the framework of the Discourse Representation Theory and also within Distributed Morphology. It is shown that Swedish provides empirical evidence against all previous research in the field. The following questions are investigated: Is it possible to assign a single uniform meaning to the present perfect? How can we account for the different readings of the perfect? How can we account for the cross-linguistic variation? These issues are addressed from a comparative perspective by integrating previous research on the present perfect. This book is of interest to all those working in the field of tense and aspect.

This book provides a detailed and up to date review of the framework of phases (Chomsky 2000 and subsequent work). It explores the interaction between the narrow syntactic computation and the external systems from a minimalist perspective. As has sometimes been noted, Phase Theory is the current way to study the cyclic nature of the system, and 'phases' are therefore the natural locality hallmark, being directly relevant for phenomena such as binding, agreement, movement, islands, reconstruction, or stress assignment. This work discusses the different approaches to phases that have been proposed in the recent literature, arguing in favor of the thesis that the points of cyclic transfer are to be related to uninterpretable morphology (the Φ-features on the heads C and v*). This take on phases is adopted in order to investigate raising structures, binding, subjunctive dependents, and object shift (word order) in Romance languages, as well as the nature of islands.

Polarity phenomena have been known to linguists since Klima’s seminal work on English negation. In this monograph Giannakidou presents a novel theory of polarity which avoids the empirical and conceptual problems of previous approaches by introducing a notion wider than negation and downward entailment: (non)veridicality. The leading idea is that the various polarity phenomena observed in language are manifestations of the dependency of certain expessions, i.e. polarity items, to the (non)veridicality of the context of appearence. Dependencies to negation or downward entailment emerge as subcases of nonveridicality.The (non)veridical dependency may be positive (licensing), or negative (anti-licensing), and arises from the sensitivity semantics of polarity items. The book is also concerned with the syntactic mapping of the sensitivity dependency. It is argued that licensing does not necessarily correspond to a requirement that the licensee be in the scope of the licenser. In some cases, for instance for the interpretation of negative concord, the reverse is required: that the licensee takes the licenser in its scope. The theory is applied to an extended set of old and new data concerning affective, free-choice dependencies, and mood choice in relative clauses. The primary focus is on Greek, but data from Dutch, English, and to a lesser extend Romance and Slavic, are also considered.

This book presents papers in honor of Jerry Sadock’s rich legacy in pragmatics and Autolexical Grammar. Highlights of the pragmatics section include Larry Horn on almost, barely, and assertoric inertia; William Lycan on Sadock’s resolution of the Performadox with truth₁ and truth₂; and Jay Atlas on Moore’s Paradox and the truth value of propositions of belief. Highlights of the Autolexical Grammar section include Fritz Newmeyer’s comparison of the minimalist, autolexical, and transformational treatments of English nominals; Barbara Abott’s extension of Sadock’s PRO-less syntax to a PRO-less semantics of the infinitival complements of know how; and Haj Ross’s syntactic connections between semantically related English pseudoclefts. Encompassing a range of languages (Aleut, Bangla, Greenlandic, Japanese, and a home-based sign language) and extending into psycholinguistics (language acquisition, sentence processing, and autism) this volume will interest a range of readers, from theoretical linguists and philosophers of language to applied linguists and exotic language specialists.

Synthesizing ideas from event semantics and psycholinguistics, this monograph provides a new perspective on the processing of linguistic aspect and aspectual coercion. Confronting alternative semantic accounts with experimental evidence, the author develops a comprehensive model of online aspectual interpretation. The first part of the book critically reviews competing theoretical accounts of aspectual coercion. As an analytical tool the author introduces a computational model based on the event calculus by Hamm & van Lambalgen (2005) which makes use of planning formalisms from artificial intelligence. Detailed predictions from this framework are then tested in the experimental work reported in the second part. The focus here is on such questions as: Is aspectual coercion a uniform phenomenon or must we distinguish different types? Is aspect processed incrementally or is it computed only at the clause boundary? And finally, what insights can event related potentials yield about how the brain resolves local aspectual mismatch?

The contributions of this thematic collection center around the typology of pronominal paradigms, the generation of syntactic and semantic representations for constructions containing pronouns, and the neurological underpinnings for linguistic distinctions that are relevant for the production and interpretation of these constructions. They come from different theoretical approaches and methodological backgrounds and take into account data from a wide range of Indoeuropean and non-Indoeuropean languages. Bringing together a cross-section of recent research on the grammar and representation of pronouns, the volume offers a kaleidoscope of studies united by the common topic of pronouns as a domain of language that exemplarily shows the interaction of different components responsible for computational (syntactic and semantic), lexical, and discourse-pragmatic processes.