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Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today
Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today (LA) provides a platform for original monograph studies into synchronic and diachronic linguistics. Studies in LA confront empirical and theoretical problems as these are currently discussed in syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology, and systematic pragmatics with the aim to establish robust empirical generalizations within a universalistic perspective.
101 - 120 of 285 results
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From OV to VO in Early Middle English
Author(s): Carola TripsPublication Date December 2002More LessThis monograph answers the question of why English changed from an OV to a VO language on the assumption that this change is due to intensive language contact with Scandinavian. It shows for the first time that the English language was much more heavily influenced by Scandinavian than assumed before, i.e., northern Early Middle English texts clearly show Scandinavian syntactic patterns like stylistic fronting that can only be found today in the Modern Scandinavian languages. Thus, it sheds new light on the force of language contact in that it shows that a language can be heavily influenced through contact with another language in such a way that it affects deeper levels of language. It further gives an introduction to working with the Penn-Helsinki-Parsed Corpus of Middle English II (PPCMEII). It discusses the texts included in the corpus, it describes the format of the texts, and it explains how to search the corpus with the tool called Corpus Search. The book targets researchers in diachronic syntax, comparative syntax and in general linguists working in the field of generative syntax. It can further be used as an introduction to working with the PPCMEII.
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From Pseudo-relatives to Causative Constructions
Author(s): Mara Frascarelli and Giorgia Di LorenzoPublication Date September 2022More LessThis volume proposes a novel structural analysis for causative constructions, offering a solution for the long-standing mono/bi-clausal dualism. Causatives are claimed to instantiate a ‘complex object’ construction, insofar as the causee is not only the subject of the lexical verb, but also a participant that is related to the whole event. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that the realization of causatives implies a crucial interplay with the pseudo-relative construction, a much-debated structure as well. Data from Scandinavian languages are highlighted, through the results of an experimental test on the scope of negation and adverbs supporting the present analysis. The book offers a cross-linguistic perspective as it discusses the relevant constructions in languages including Italian, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.
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The Function of Function Words and Functional Categories
Editor(s): Marcel den Dikken and Christina TortoraPublication Date August 2005More LessThis volume brings together papers which address a range of issues regarding the syntax of function words and functional categories in the Germanic languages. The works offered in this volume derive specifically from comparative studies of Germanic; at the same time they all bear directly on long-standing problems in syntactic theory and universal grammar. The contributions include novel theoretical and empirical approaches to infinitives, the syntax and acquisition of Verb Second, the structure and interpretation of present tense, the syntax and semantics of reflexives, the relationship between expletive syntax and the EPP, the syntax of possession, and the DP-internal syntax of pronouns. Some contributions present the results of experimental research which provide an entirely fresh perspective on previously unchallenged claims.
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Functional Structure in Nominals
Author(s): Artemis AlexiadouPublication Date September 2001More LessThis monograph offers an in depth investigation of nominalization processes across languages e.g. Greek, Germanic, Romance, Hebrew, Slavic. Adopting and extending the view that category formation does not involve any lexical operation (recently put forth within the framework of Distributed Morphology), it shows how the behavior of nominals as opposed to that of verbs follows from general processes operating in specific syntactic structures, and is linked with the presence or absence of functional layers (T, D, Aspect, v). It further defines criteria on the basis of which the organization of nominal functional structure can be determined. Moreover, it demonstrates how nominals split into several types, across languages and within a language, depending on the number and the type of functional projections they include. Furthermore, it substantiates the hypothesis that aspects of the syntax of DPs of nominative-accusative languages are strikingly similar to aspects of the syntax of ergative languages and discusses aspects of the syntax of the perfect. The book targets researchers in theoretical linguistics, comparative syntax, morphology and typology. It can also be used as a foundation book on the morpho-syntax of nominals, argument structure and word formation.
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Grammar as Processor
Author(s): Roland PfauPublication Date January 2009More LessSpontaneous speech errors provide valuable evidence not only for the processes that mediate between a communicative intention and the articulation of an utterance but also for the types of grammatical entities that are manipulated during production. This study proposes an analysis of speech errors that is informed by grammar theory. In particular, it is shown how characteristic properties of erroneous German utterances can be accounted for within Distributed Morphology (DM). The investigation focuses on two groups of errors: Errors that result from the manipulation of semantic and morphosyntactic features, and errors which appear to involve the application of a post-error repair strategy. It is argued that a production model which incorporates DM allows for a straightforward account of the attested, sometimes complex, error patterns. DM mechanisms, for instance, render unnecessary the assumption of repair processes. Besides providing an account for the attested error patterns, the theory also helps us in explaining why certain errors do not occur. In this sense, DM makes for a psychologically real model of grammar.
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The Grammar of Focus
Editor(s): Georges Rebuschi and Laurice TullerPublication Date November 1999More LessThe grammar of focus has been studied in generative grammar from its inception. It has been the subject of intense, detailed cross-linguistic investigation for over 20 years, particularly within the Principles and Parameters framework. It is appropriate at this point, therefore, to take stock. Appraisal at this particular point is all the more legitimate because it comes at a time of general evaluation of the results of the profound activity that has characterized the Principles and Parameters framework. This general assessment has produced a radical new direction within that framework.
The volume starts off with an introductory chapter that aims to provide an outline for the assessment, to be followed by an overview of the evolution of the study of focus in generative grammar, and a recapitulation of the principal issues associated with focus. These issues are taken up in the remaining chapters of the book, where various grammatical means of marking focus (as well as grammaticalization of focus marking) are analyzed in a wide variety of languages.
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The Grammar of Repetition
Author(s): Jason KandybowiczPublication Date November 2008More LessDisplacement is a fundamental property of grammar. Typically, when an occurrence moves it is pronounced in only one environment. This was previously viewed as a primitive/irreducible property of grammar. Recent work, however, suggests that it follows from principled interactions between the syntactic and phonological components of grammar. As such, the phonetic character of movement chains can be seen as both a reflection of and probe into the syntax-phonology interface. This volume deals with repetition, an atypical outcome of movement operations in which displaced elements are pronounced multiple times. Although cross-linguistically rare, the phenomenon obtains robustly in Nupe, a Benue-Congo language of Nigeria. Repetition raises a tension of the descriptive-explanatory variety. In order to achieve both measures of adequacy, movement theory must be supplemented with an account of the conditions that drive and constrain multiple pronunciation. This book catalogs these conditions, bringing to light a number of undocumented aspects of Nupe grammar.
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Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory
Editor(s): Thórhallur EythórssonPublication Date March 2008More LessThis book contains 15 revised papers originally presented at a symposium at Rosendal, Norway, under the aegis of The Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The overall theme of the volume is ‘internal factors in grammatical change.’ The papers focus on fundamental questions in theoretically-based historical linguistics from a broad perspective. Several of the papers relate to grammaticalization in different ways, but are generally critical of ‘Grammaticalization Theory’. Further papers focus on the causes of syntactic change, pinpointing both extra-syntactic (exogenous) causes and – more controversially – internally driven (endogenous) causes. The volume is rounded up by contributions on morphological change ‘by itself.’ A wide range of languages is covered, including Tsova-Tush (Nakh-Dagestan), Zoque, and Athapaskan languages, in addition to Indo-European languages, both the more familiar ones and some less well-studied varieties.
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The Grammatical Realization of Polarity Contrast
Editor(s): Christine Dimroth and Stefan SudhoffPublication Date November 2018More LessThe polarity of a sentence is crucial for its meaning. It is thus hardly surprising that languages have developed devices to highlight this meaning component and to contrast statements with negative and positive polarity in discourse. Research on this issue has started from languages like German and Dutch, where prosody and assertive particles are systematically associated with polarity contrast. Recently, the grammatical realization of polarity contrast has been at the center of investigations in a range of other languages as well. Core questions concern the formal repertoire and the exact meaning contribution of the relevant devices, the kind of contrast they evoke, and their relation to information structure and sentence mood. This volume brings together researchers from a theoretical, an empirical, and a typological orientation and enhances our understanding of polarity with the help of in-depth analyses and cross-linguistic comparisons dealing with the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and/or prosodic aspects of the phenomenon.
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Grammaticalization as Economy
Author(s): Elly van GelderenPublication Date August 2004More LessThis book provides much detail on the changes involving the grammaticalization of personal and relative pronouns, topicalized nominals, complementizers, adverbs, prepositions, modals, perception verbs, and aspectual markers. It accounts for these changes in terms of two structural economy principles. Head Preference expresses that single words, i.e. heads, are used to build structures rather than full phrases, and Late Merge states that waiting as late as possible to merge, i.e. be added to the structure, is preferred over movement. The book also discusses grammar-external processes (e.g. prescriptivist rules) that inhibit change, and innovations that replenish the grammaticalized element. Most of the changes involve the (extended) CP and IP: as elements grammaticalize clause boundaries disappear. Cross-linguistic differences exist as to whether the CP, IP, and VP are all present and split and this is formulated as the Layer Principle. Changes involving the CP are typically brought about by Head Preference, whereas those involving the IP and VP by Late Merge.
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Head Movement in Syntax
Author(s): Rosmin MathewPublication Date October 2015More LessHead 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.
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A History of English Reflexive Pronouns
Author(s): Elly van GelderenPublication Date October 2000More LessThis book brings together a number of seemingly distinct phenomena in the history of English: the introduction of special reflexive pronouns (e.g. myself), the loss of verbal agreement and pro-drop, and the disappearance of morphological Case. It provides vast numbers of examples from Old and Middle English texts showing a person split between first, second, and third person pronouns. Extending an analysis by Reinhart & Reuland, the author argues that the ‘strength’ of certain pronominal features (Case, person, number) differs cross-linguistically and that parametric variation accounts for the changes in English. The framework used is Minimalist, and Interpretable and Uninterpretable features are seen as the key to explaining the change from a synthetic to an analytic language.
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History of German Negation
Author(s): Agnes JägerPublication Date January 2008More LessThis book represents the first comprehensive overview over the history of negation in German. It addresses both the development of the negation particles as well as the diachrony of indefinites in the scope of negation and the phenomenon of Negative Concord. Being based on a corpus study of several Old and Middle High German texts, it comprises a wealth of historical examples with additional comparison to Modern Standard German and dialects, as well as crosslinguistic data from a variety of languages. The findings are placed in the context of typological research and are analysed in terms of current syntactic and semantic theory of negation arguing for an unchanged underlying syntactic structure, with changes in the lexical filling of NegP and in the lexical features of indefinites resulting in crucial changes in the syntactic patterns of negation. This book is of interest to scholars of German linguistics, historical linguists, as well as anyone working in the field of negation.
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Imperative Clauses in Generative Grammar
Editor(s): Wim van der WurffPublication Date July 2007More LessThis volume contains ten articles exploring a wide range of issues in the analysis of the imperative clause from a generative perspective. The language data investigated in detail in the articles come from Dutch, English, German, (old) Scandinavian, Spanish, and South Slavic; there is further significant discussion of data from other Germanic and Romance languages. The phenomena addressed (in several cases in more than one article, leading to some lively debate about contentious issues) include the following: the nature and interpretation of imperative subjects; the properties of participial imperatives; clitic behavior; restrictions on topicalization; word order; null arguments; negative imperatives; and imperatives in embedded clauses. The volume has a substantial introduction, sketching the results of earlier generative work on the topic (most of it scattered across disparate outlets), the issues left open by this earlier work, and the contribution to further insight and understanding made by the book's articles.
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In Search of Universal Grammar
Editor(s): Terje LohndalPublication Date January 2013More LessThis volume in honor of Jan Terje Faarlund covers the areas in which he has contributed to linguistic theorizing, ranging from in-depth studies of Norwegian and Scandinavian grammar both synchronically and diachronically, to work on the Indian language Chiapas Zoque. The book is organized thematically with two chapters on each topic: The grammar of the Scandinavian languages (Tor A. Åfarli and Christer Platzack); language policies and sociolinguistics (Unn Røyneland and Peter Trudgill); French (Hans Petter Helland and Christine Meklenborg Salvesen); language change (Werner Abraham and Elly van Gelderen); lesser-studied languages (Alice Harris and Jerry Sadock); language acquisition (David Lightfoot and Marit Westergaard); and language evolution (Erika Hagelberg and Salikoko Mufwene). This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers, from students to scholars working on any of the areas covered.
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The In-Situ Approach to Sluicing
Author(s): Jun AbePublication Date April 2015More LessIt has been standardly claimed since Merchant (2001) that island violations can be repaired by simply deleting the categories that induce such violations, as witnessed by sluicing, an ellipsis construction that deletes TP with a remnant wh-phrase. This book aims to argue that such “repair by ellipsis” is simply a myth. Alternatively, the author argues for what is called the in-situ approach to sluicing, originally proposed by Kimura (2007, 2010), according to which the remnant wh-phrase in sluicing stays in situ. This approach immediately explains the island-insensitivity of sluicing, since no overt wh-movement is involved in the derivation of this construction. Hence, it challenges the approach in terms of island repair by ellipsis in that it nullifies the necessity of a repair mechanism. This book makes an important contribution to the field in providing an alternative way of approaching ellipsis phenomena that are claimed to induce “island repair.”
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Individuals in Time
Author(s): María J. ArchePublication Date August 2006More LessThis monograph investigates the temporal properties of those predicates referring to individuals – the so-called individual-level (IL) predicates – in contrast to those known as stage-level (SL) predicates. Many of the traditional tenets attributed to the IL/SL dichotomy are not solidly founded, this book claims, as it examines current theoretical issues concerning the syntax/semantics interface such as the relation between semantic properties of predicates and their syntactic structure. By using the contrast found in Spanish copular clauses (ser vs. estar), Individuals in Time shows that the conception of IL predicates as permanent and stative cannot be maintained. The existence of nonstative IL predicates is demonstrated through analyzing the correlation between the syntactic presence of certain projections (specifically, prepositional complements) and process-like aspect properties. This detailed examination of IL predicates in the domains of inner aspect, outer aspect, and tense will be welcomed by scholars and students with an interest in event structure, tense, and aspect.
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Infinitival Syntax
Author(s): Tanja SchmidPublication Date June 2005More LessThis monograph offers a new analysis of West Germanic ‘Infinitivus Pro Participio’ (IPP) constructions, within the framework of Optimality Theory. IPP constructions have long been problematic for syntactic theory, because a bare infinitive is preferred over the expected past participle. The book shows how the substitution of the past participle by the infinitive in IPP constructions can be captured straightforwardly if constraints are assumed to be violable. The basic idea is that IPP constructions are exceptional because they violate otherwise valid rules of the language. Thus, IPP is a ‘last resort’ or repair strategy, which is only visible in cases in which the past participle would be ‘even worse’ . Furthermore, as the choice of Optimality Theory naturally leads to a crosslinguistic account, the book systematically examines and compares infinitival constructions from seven West Germanic languages including Afrikaans, Dutch, German, West Flemish, and three Swiss German dialects.
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Inflection and Word Formation in Romance Languages
Editor(s): Sascha Gaglia and Marc-Olivier HinzelinPublication Date July 2012More LessMorphology, and in particular word formation, has always played an important role in Romance linguistics since it was introduced in Diez’s comparative Romance grammar. Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in inflectional morphology, and current research shows a strong interest in paradigmatic analyses. This volume brings together research exploring different areas of morphology from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. On an empirical basis, the theoretical assumption of the ‘Autonomy of Morphology’ is discussed critically. ‘Data-driven’ approaches carefully examine concrete morphological phenomena in Romance languages and dialects. Topics include syncretism and allomorphy in verbs, pronouns, and articles as well as the use of specific derivational suffixes in word formation. Together, the articles in this volume provide insights into issues currently debated in Romance morphology, appealing to scholars of morphology, Romance linguistics, and advanced students alike.
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Information Structure and Agreement
Editor(s): Victoria Camacho-Taboada, Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández, Javier Martín-González and Mariano Reyes-TejedorPublication Date January 2013More LessThis collection consists of thirteen contributions focusing on the latest trends of information structure and agreement, couched in the most current developments of Minimalism, Cartography, and Optimality. Some chapters focus on the syntax of information structure in relation with the position occupied by different constituents in the CP domain and their interpretation such as the distinction between contrastive and corrective focus; the inclusion of given information in focus; the interplay of information structure and binding; the relative position of complementisers; and discourse-based constituents in the left periphery. Information structure is also analysed with regards to prominence phenomena at word level. Other chapters deal with the notion of agreement and its role in the syntax of specific constructions such as applicatives, correlatives, or different types of CP like relatives or embedded interrogatives. This selection of papers was originally presented at the 21st Colloquium on Generative Grammar, held at the University of Seville in April 2011.
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