Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

In this research monograph, Johannes Mursell discusses the syntactic impact of information-structural features on agreement. So far, the syntactic contribution of this type of feature has mostly been reduced to movement of topics or foci clause-initial position. Here, the author looks at a different phenomenon, syntactic agreement, and how this process can be dependent on information-structural properties. Based partly on original fieldwork from a typologically diverse set of languages, including Tagalog, Swahili, and Lavukaleve, it is argued that for most areas for which information-structural features have been discussed, it is possible to find cases where these features influence phi-feature agreement. The analysis is then extended to cases of Association with Focus, which does not involve phi-features but can still be accounted for with agreement of information-structural features. The book achieves two main goals: first it provides a uniform analysis for different constructions in unrelated languages. Second, it also gives a new argument that information-structural features should be treated as genuine syntactic features.

This volume brings the data that many in formal linguistics have dismissed as peripheral straight into the core of syntactic theory. By bringing together experts from syntax, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, language acquisition, aphasia, and pidgin and creole studies, the volume makes a multidisciplinary case for the existence of nonsententials, which are analyzed in various chapters as root phrases and small clauses (Me; Me First!; Him worry?!; Class in session), and whose distinguishing property is the absence of Tense, and, with it, any syntactic phenomena that rely on Tense, including structural Nominative Case. Arguably, the lack of Tense specification is also responsible for the dearth of indicative interpretations among nonsententials, as well as for their heavy reliance on pragmatic context. So pervasive is nonsentential speech across all groups, including normal adult speech, that a case can be made that continuity of grammar lies in nonsentential, rather than sentential speech.

This book presents a cross-section of recent generative research into the syntax of relative clauses constructions. Most of the papers collected here react in some way to Kayne’s (1994) proposal to handle relative clauses in terms of determiner complementation and raising of the relativized nominal. The editors provide a thorough introduction of these proposals, their background and motivations, arguments for and against. There are detailed studies in the syntax and the semantics of relative clauses constructions in Latin, Ancient Greek, Romanian, Hindi, (Old) English, Old High German, (dialects of) Dutch, Turkish, Swedish, and Japanese. The book should be of interest to any linguist working within generative syntax.

This monograph conducts a syntactic study of Tuki, a Bantu language spoken in Cameroon, from a cartographic perspective. The following domains are meticulously explored: The Complementizer Domain, the Inflectional Domain and the Verbal Domain. This study reveals that there is a relative phrase (RelP) located between ForceP and FocP. Moreover, a detailed analysis of an articulated IP provides the order of clausal functional heads that manifest aspectual morphology, which is theoretically closely related to issues in adverbial syntax. Additionally, the language under study unveils a very rich structural make up of DP and the surface word orders attested in this phrase can be accounted for in terms of snowballing movement operations along the lines previously sketched in the format of the Split DP Hypothesis. Overall, this cartographic analysis is bound to enrich our morphosyntactic knowledge of UG clausal architecture by demonstrating that its rich underlying structural skeleton is correlated by a wealthy surface structural and functional map.



Edmond Biloa is professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Yaounde I in Cameroon (Africa).

Multiple interrogatives, questions with multiple wh-phrases (e.g. Who bought what?), have long presented analytical challenges for linguistic theory. This monograph presents a new theoretical and experimental study of this construction. The theoretical findings concern the interaction between superiority effects, subject-auxiliary inversion, and the distribution of pair-list and single-pair readings cross-linguistically. The author examines multiple interrogatives under sluicing (i.e. clausal ellipsis), presenting new arguments for the deletion analysis of sluicing. The author also reports the results of several experimental studies on how children acquire the language-specific properties of multiple interrogatives in English, Russian, and Malayalam. The results suggest a correlation between the acquisition of multiple interrogatives and the acquisition of contrastive focus, which has been independently motivated in the syntactic literature. The monograph will be of interest to linguists concerned with syntax, semantics, and language acquisition, as well as readers who are interested in a comprehensive theory of language in general.

This book presents an experimental and theoretical investigation of the interplay between information structure, word order alternations, and prosody in Italian. Left/right dislocations, focus fronting, and other reordering phenomena are analyzed, taking into account their morphosyntactic and prosodic properties. It is argued that a restricted set of discourse-related properties are inserted in the numeration as formal features. These discourse-related features drive the syntactic derivation and the formation of the prosodic representation in compliance with the T-model of grammar. Based on the cartographic approach, this study proposes a model of the syntax–prosody interface in which the phonological computation of prosody is fed by syntactically encoded properties of information structure. However, this computation is also governed by structural requirements intrinsic to the phonological domain, and thus, a bijective relation between information structure and prosodic representation is not guaranteed. The monograph will be of interest to any linguist concerned with syntax, information structure, and prosody.

The contributions of this book deal with the issue of language variation. They all share the assumption that within the language faculty the variation space is hierarchically constrained and that minimal changes in the set of property values defining each language give rise to diverse outputs within the same system. Nevertheless, the triggers for language variation can be different and located at various levels of the language faculty. The novelty of the volume lies in exploring different loci of language variation by including wide-ranging empirical perspectives that cover different levels of analysis (syntax, phonology and prosody) and deal with different kinds of data, mostly from Romance and Germanic languages, from dialects, idiolects, language acquisition, language attrition and creolization, analyzed from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives.

The volume is divided in three parts. The first part is dedicated to synchronic variation in phonology and syntax; the second part deals with diachronic variation and language change, and the third part investigates the role of contact, attrition and acquisition in giving rise to language change and language variation in bilingual settings.

This volume is a useful tool for linguistics of diverse theoretical persuasions working on theoretical and comparative linguistics and to anyone interested in language variation, language change, dialectology, language acquisition and typology.

The objective of this book is to develop a deeper understanding of the form and interpretation of number. Using insights from Generative syntax and Distributed Morphology, we develop a theory of distributed number, arguing that number can be associated with several functional heads and that these projections exist depending on the features they specify. In doing so, we make a strong claim for a close mapping between the syntactic structure and the semantics in the noun phrase, since each node corresponds to a different interpretation of number. Despite some technical implementations, the book is accessible to linguists working outside any particular syntax-semantic framework, since we propose generalizations that are applicable in many, if not all, models of grammar. The book focuses on Arabic, but also discusses a number of languages including English, French, Ojibwe, Blackfoot, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Turkish, Persian, and Western Armenian.

This volume is a collection of papers that highlights some recurring themes that have surfaced in the generative tradition in linguistics over the past 40 years. The volume is more than a historical take on a theoretical tradition; rather, it is also a "compass" pointing to exciting new empirical directions inspired by generative theory. In fact, the papers show a progression from core theoretical concerns to data-driven experimental investigation and can be divided roughly into two categories: those that follow a syntactic and theoretical course, and those that follow an experimental or applied path. Many of the papers revisit long-standing or recurring themes in the generative tradition, some of which seek experimental validation or refutation. The merger of theoretical and experimental concerns makes this volume stand out, but it is also forward looking in that it addresses the recent concerns of the creation and consumption of data across the discipline.