Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

The South Asian languages, mainly Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, have become a focus of interest in the formal study of language as a natural consequence of the research program of the Principle and Parameters approach and an enforced interest in exploring the parametrical space of human language. The contributions to the present volume combine theoretical reasoning in syntax and phonology with a comparative research agenda in which South Asian languages figure prominently. The topics range from issues of clause structure, serial verb constructions, cleft- and question formation, to the question of what the proper syntactic format of modification should be, issues of binding theory and raising, and issues of complementation, the clausal periphery and clausal typing. The collection of articles concludes with two chapters on Dravidian and comparative phonology and a chapter on the shaping of phonological awareness by different writing systems. The authors and the editors devote this piece of work to Professor K.A. Jayaseelan, one of present-day India’s most influential linguists.

This monograph presents a systematic exploration of Japanese syntax within the cartographic approach, paying special attention to the locality effects induced by discourse-based features such as topic and focus. Although the main focus is on Japanese syntax, implications of the analyses developed are investigated from a broader comparative perspective. Unlike previous works on Japanese generative syntax, this book is based partially on informant surveys, including the distribution of adverbials and the categorical status of nominative-Case-marked adverbials, as well as an exhaustive survey of ditransitive predicates in terms of word formation and idioms in Koujien, one of the most comprehensive Japanese dictionaries. A systematic syntactic study of the nature of clause-final particles in Japanese, an area previously only explored in the framework of discourse analysis, is also presented. It is shown that the EPP may be satisfied by such discourse-related elements as topic and focus and by these sentence final particles.

Materials on Left Dislocation consists of two parts. Part I contains a selection of the main texts on which our present understanding of the Left Dislocation construction is based. For various reasons most of these texts had never been published, or are published in obsolete places. These articles, by Van Riemsdijk & Zwarts, Rodman, Hirschbuehler, Vat, Cinque and Zaenen, contain the first arguments that pertain to the major questions about Left Dislocation (for example whether movement or base-generation is involved), and they present the rationale for the now standard distinctions between Hanging Topic LD, Contrastive LD, and Clitic LD.

In Part II a number of recent contributions to the grammar of Left Dislocation are brought together. In these articles, by Anagnostopoulou, Demirdache, Escobar, Van Hoof and Wiltschko, new aspects are being explored such as the relationship between LD and the grammar of focus and the role of clitic doubling and its semantic effects in Clitic LD. Furthermore, the empirical basis is broadened to encompass more languages. Finally, these articles explore the relationship between LD and a number of apparently unrelated constructions such as split topicalization.

The book constitutes an indispensable tool for any linguist who seriously works on dislocation phenomena.

The articles in this volume are inspired by the Minimalist Program first outlined in Chomsky’s MIT Fall term class lectures of 1991 and in his seminal paper “A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory”. The articles seek to develop further some key idea in the Minimalist Program, sometimes in ways deviating from the course taken by Chomsky.

The articles are preceded by a 40 page introduction into the minimalist framework. The introduction pays special attention to the question how the minimalist framework developed out of the Principles and Parameters (Government and Binding) framework. The introduction serves as a guide through the entire volume, presenting the issues to be discussed in the articles in detail, and offering a thematic overview over the volume as a whole.

Most of the articles in this volume are concerned with issues raised in Chomsky’s first two minimalist papers, namely “A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory” (1993, first distributed in 1992) and “Bare Phrase Structure” (1995a, first distributed 1994). In acknowledgment of this, each article starts out with a quote from Chomsky (1993, 1995a). This quote also serves to highlight the particular grammatical or theoretical issue that is primarily discussed in the relevant article.

Several articles relate issues raised in Chomsky’s first two minimalist papers to the basic ideas in Kayne’s book, The Antisymmetry of Syntax (1994, distributed in part in manuscript form in 1993). In many respects, therefore, these articles develop alternatives to ideas proposed in chapter 4, “Categories and Transformations,” of Chomsky’s most recent book, The Minimalist Program (1995b). Some of the articles contain references to chapter 4, and some comments on similarities and differences between ideas developed in these papers and in chapter 4 of Chomsky 1995b can also be found in the Introduction to this volume.

The Minimalism Program is many things to many researchers, and there are by now many alternative versions of it. Central to all is the fundamental question: to what extent is the human language faculty an optimal solution to minimal design specifications. Taken as a whole, the volume outlines the main features of Minimalism, its historical and conceptual sources, and provides an illustration of minimalist theorizing by looking at several properties of the syntactic component of grammar. Some contributions concentrate on what kind of computational tools are made available in a minimalist syntactic component, and how the computational system interacts with external and interface domains of the mind/brain. Other contributions specifically focus on direct empirical gains that emerge from adopting minimalist guidelines.

This monograph explores the interface between syntax and its related components through in-depth investigation of a sizable portion of the grammar of Indonesian and Javanese. It can be read on two levels. Theoretically, it proposes the minimalist interface thesis that syntax-external linguistic interfaces are endowed with domain-specific operations (insertion, deletion, and type shifting) to legitimize an otherwise non-convergent result of the syntactic derivation for phonological and semantic interpretation. Empirically, the monograph substantiates this thesis from detailed analyses of four phenomena (reduplication, active voice morphology, P-stranding under sluicing, and nominal denotation). The study not only contains a wealth of new insights into comparative syntax from the perspective of Indonesian and Javanese, but also necessitates serious reconsideration of the common view of the interfaces as merely ornamental components of natural language grammar. The monograph should appeal to syntacticians, linguists interested in linguistic interfaces and the organization of grammar, and researchers on Austronesian languages.

This book provides a broad overview of the issues relevant for the study of syntax of modals and their interaction with the verbal system. A large number of novel observations are offered from a variety of languages, including Dutch, (Modern and Middle) English, German, Lele, Macedonian, Middle Dutch and Slovene. The wealth of data, the critical evaluation of existing syntactic analyses of modality and the alternative analyses proposed make the book interesting for both for descriptively and for theoretically oriented syntacticians. Major concerns addressed are: the distinction between epistemic and root modality (where the arguments pro and contra the assumption of a corresponding difference in syntactic structure are evaluated, refined, and supplemented by arguments for syntactic distinction between necessity and possibility modals and by consideration of the influence of the modal’s complement on the interpretation), the interaction between modality and clausal phenomena (in particular negation, but also imperatives, aspect and Aktionsart), and the acquisition of modality (addressing cross-linguistic differences in the possibility for root infinitives to express modal interpretations and the late acquisition of epistemic interpretations as compared with non-epistemic interpretations).

The field of morphology is particularly heterogeneous. Investigators differ on key points at every level of theory. These divisions are not minor issues about technical implementation, but rather are foundational issues that mold the underlying anatomy of any theory. The field has developed very rapidly both theoretically and methodologically, giving rise to many competing theories and varied hypotheses. Many drastically different and often contradictory models and foundational hypotheses have been proposed. Theories diverge with respect to everything from foundational architectural assumptions to the specific combinatorial mechanisms used to derive complex words. Today these distinct models of word-formation largely exist in parallel, mostly without proponents confronting or discussing these differences in any major forum. After forty years of fast-paced growth in the field, morphologists are in need of a moment to take a breath and survey the drastically different points of view within the field. This volume provides such a moment.

This book presents an innovative analysis that relates informational structure, syntax and morphology in Quechua. It provides a minimalist account of the relationship between focus, topic, evidentiality and other left-peripheral features and sentence-internal constituents marked with suffixes that have been previously considered of a pragmatic nature. Intervention effects show that these relationships are also of a syntactic nature. The analysis is extended to morphological markers that appear on polarity sensitive items and wh-words. The book also provides a brief overview of the main characteristics of Quechua syntax as well as additional bibliographical information.

This book argues that syntactic parameters are set in a principled fashion on the basis of overt functional morphology. The main focus of the book is on the different positions of the finite verb in the Germanic SVO languages. In addition, other syntactic phenomena (null subjects, transitive expletive constructions and object shift) and other language families (Romance, Semitic and Slavic) are discussed. A common explanation for all of the discussed phenomena is proposed: If and only if the features for “person” are distinctively marked by the agreement morphology, the agreement affixes are listed separately in the lexicon and project phrases of their own in syntax where they attract the verb to the head positions and allow the specifier positions to be filled by various phonologically (un)realized elements. Special attention is given to issues of historical development and child language acquisition.