Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

‘Scrambling’, the kind of word order variation found in West Germanic languages, has been commonly treated as a phenomenon completely unrelated to North Germanic ‘Object Shift’. This book questions this view and defends a unified analysis on the basis of strictly syntactic and phonological evidence. Given that its main conclusions are drawn from German data, it also sheds light on several problematic aspects of the grammar of this language, which have traditionally resisted a principled account. Prominent among these are: the inconsistent behaviour of German coherent infinitives with respect to extraction of their internal arguments; the existence of a less ‘liberal’ type of ‘Scrambling’ within topicalised VPs; the link between reordering possibilities and headfinalness; the asymmetry exhibited by monotransitive and ditransitive structures with respect to the interaction between ‘Scrambling’ and the unmarked word order, and, finally, certain anomalies in the reordering of the lower arguments of ditransitive predicates that assign inherent case.

This monograph presents a new model of the internal syntax of nominal phrases. The model is mainly based on Scandinavian, since with the wide range of variation that Scandinavian displays in the nominal domain, despite the close genetic relationship between the different varieties, Scandinavian is particularly well-suited for explorations into nominal syntax. Among the topics covered are the basic syntactic structure of nominal phrases, definiteness, adjective phrases, possessors, relative clauses, and nominal predicates. The model is however meant to be a tool for analysing the nominal phrases of any language. While the base-generated structure is taken to be universally uniform, the model allows for variation in the feature makeup of individual elements, in the phonological realisation of the features, and in the movements that may or may not apply. Hence, as shown in the final chapter, patterns found in languages outside of Scandinavian can also be accounted for within the model.

This volume contains a selection of papers dealing with constructions that have a passive-like interpretation but do not seem to share all the properties with canonical passives. The fifteen chapters of this volume raise important questions concerning the proper characterization of the universal properties of passivization and reflect the current discussion in this area, covering syntactic, semantic, psycho-linguistic and typological aspects of the phenomenon, from different theoretical perspectives and in different language families and backed up in most cases by extensive corpora and experimental studies.

Building on a substantial earlier literature, the chapters in this volume further advance knowledge and understanding of properties of the noun phrase in English. The empirical material for the papers includes both historical and present-day data, with the two often shedding light on each other in a process of mutual illumination. The topics addressed are: the structure of nounless NPs like the poor and the obvious; the article/zero alternation in expressions like go to (the) church; developments in the early history of adjective stacking; the semantics of N + clause units in present-day English; the history of N + BE + clause constructions; and the decline of two anaphoric NPs in Early Modern English. The volume will appeal to scholars working in this area and will also help those interested in the general field of English grammar to keep abreast of recent methods and results in NP-related work.

This collective volume on nominal expressions in Basque, a language isolate with no known relatives, comprises original papers on the syntactic structure and the interpretation of both Noun Phrases and nominalization constructions – a traditionally neglected aspect of Basque linguistics. The minute attention to properties and paradigms previously overlooked, and the analyses of them in the light of recent advances in syntactic theory make this book a valuable tool for syntacticians, semanticists and morphologists. This work fills a gap in the theoretical study of Basque, and the richness of data presented makes it interesting for any researcher from whatever particular theoretical persuasion. This volume is especially useful for researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students of comparative grammar, typology, and theoretical linguistics.

Extraction has traditionally been one of the main topics in generative grammar, and it retains this status in current variants of the theory. German provides a good testing ground for traditional as well as current theories of extraction. The nine contributions to this volume document the recent lively discussions on the adequate analyses of extraction constructions, on the impact of extraction on semantic interpretation, and, above all, on the question of which constructions are to be analysed as extractions and which not.

Uli Lutz gives an overview of extraction theory. Marga Reis challenges the standard analysis of extraction from verb-second clauses and opts for a parenthetic analysis. Franz d’Avis confronts current approaches to wh-islands with the facts in German and investigates the semantic properties of topicalization from wh-clauses. Sigrid Beck derives various negative island effects from a constraint on Logical Form. Jürgen Pafel relates the differences between two kinds of extraction from noun phrases to the structure of the noun phrases. Daniel Büring and Katharina Hartmann argue for the traditional analysis of extraposition as rightward movement, based on a detailed comparison with alternative accounts. Gereon Müller derives the peculiar restrictions on extraposition from a theory of improper movement. Hubert Haider defends his analysis of extraposition as a base-generated construction against his critics. Chris Wilder develops a minimalist account of extraposition and takes extraposition and coordination ellipsis to be instances of the same process.

This monograph pursues a structural analogy between the availability of an existential interpretation in states and the telicity of events. Focusing on evidence from both verbal and adjectival predicates, it argues that quantization forms the basis of a unified theory of aktionsart and provides a theory in which the availability of an existential interpretation in states is, like the telicity of events, determined compositionally by the predicate and the quantization of its internal argument. Quantization is further argued to reflect the internal temporal constitution of the stages of an individual which is tied to the generation of an existential interpretation. This monograph will be of interest to syntacticians and semanticists who are specifically concerned with compositional approaches to eventualities, and to those who have a more general interest in the role linguistic theory can play in determining core properties of the mind.

This monograph is one of the first theoretical studies of optatives. Optative constructions express desire without an overt lexical item that means ‘desire’. The author specifically investigates optatives with the syntax of embedded clauses that contain prototypical particles such as ‘only’. He rejects the view that optativity arises compositionally from the standard semantics of embedded clauses and prototypical particles. The following system is proposed: Desirability is due to a generalized scalar exclamation operator EX. Furthermore, clausal properties such as factivity/counterfactuality are encoded in a Mood head, which co-determines morphological mood and complementizer choice. Finally, the prototypical particles that optatives contain are truth-conditionally vacuous presupposition triggers. As a result, these meaning components do not interact directly, but their meanings converge, with the consequence that they prototypically co-occur. This monograph is of interest for formal semanticists, syntacticians, pragmaticists and morphologists, and especially relevant for research on mood and particle semantics.

This outstanding volume offers the first comprehensive collection of optimality-theoretic studies in Spanish phonology. Bringing together most of the best-known researchers in the field, it presents a state-of-the-art overview of research in Spanish phonology within the non-derivational framework of optimality theory. The book is structured around six major areas of phonological research: phonetics–phonology interface, segmental phonology, syllable structure and stress, morphophonology, language variation and change, and language acquisition, including general as well as more specialized articles. The reader is guided through the volume with the help of the introduction and a detailed index. The book will serve as core reading for advanced graduate-level phonology courses and seminars in Spanish linguistics, and in general linguistics phonology courses. It will also constitute an essential reference for researchers in phonology, phonological theory, and Spanish, and related areas, such as language acquisition, bilingualism, education, and speech and hearing science.