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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.
201 - 250 of 285 results
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Putting Adpositions in Place
Author(s): Kaori TakaminePublication Date June 2017More LessThis monograph explores the grammar of modifier PPs in Japanese, concentrating on their word order. The study argues that (i) modifier PPs are hierarchically arranged and (ii) there is an interesting fine-grained correlation between different PP types and Modal/Aspect functors which indicates that Temporal and Locative appear relatively freely with respect to a certain range of the Modal/Aspect functors in the middle field, whereas the rest of the PP types are more constrained in this respect. Unlike cartographic approaches to PPs (Schweikert 2005, Cinque 2006), the book adopts the working hypothesis that the fine-grained hierarchies can be derived in a constrained manner along the lines of Svenonius and Ramchand (2014) and proposes that the properties of the PPs characterized by (i) and (ii) can be captured in a sortal domain analysis. The book appeals to a linguistic audience interested in modifier syntax as well as in Japanese.
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Quantifier Scope in German
Author(s): Jürgen PafelPublication Date January 2006More LessThis book presents a comprehensive account of quantifier scope in German. The author investigates scope behavior of ordinary quantifiers and negative, adverbial, interrogative, relative and particle quantifiers. The areas which are dealt with include: relative scope in simple sentences, absolute and relative scope in complex sentences, noun-phrase internal scope, and scope behavior of indefinite noun phrases. A theory of explicit and implicit quantification is proposed and a uniform process of scope determination is sketched which encompasses the scope of explicit as well as implicit quantifiers. Quantifier scope is a challenge to linguistic theory as it is a phenomenon which is determined by the interplay of diverse syntactic and semantic factors, which interact in a weighted and cumulative way. The factors' interplay is part of the syntax/semantics-interface, i.e., the constraints relating syntax and semantics, which are considered to be relatively autonomous, parallel levels connected by an interface of correspondence constraints.
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Quantifying Expressions in the History of German
Author(s): Dorian Roehrs and Christopher SappPublication Date May 2016More LessThis study describes the 1200-year history of German quantifying expressions like nîoman anderro > niemand anderer ‘nobody else’, analyzing the morpho-syntactic developments within the generative framework. The quantifiers examined arose from various lexical sources/categories (nouns, adjectives, and pronouns) but all changed to adjectival quantifiers. These changes are interpreted as a novel type of upward reanalysis from head to specifier, which we associate with degrammaticalization driven by analogy. As for the quantified phrases, most appeared in the genitive in Old High German, indicating a bi-nominal structure. During the Early New High German period, most quantified nouns and adjectives changed to agreement with the quantifier. By Modern German, only quantified DPs and pronouns remain in the genitive. These changes involve downward reanalysis of the quantified elements, being integrated into the matrix nominal depending on the structural size of the quantified phrase. Overall, we conclude that diachronically quantifying expressions may have different syntactic analyses.
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A Reference Grammar of Romanian
Editor(s): Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin and Ion GiurgeaPublication Date December 2013More LessBased on recent research in formal linguistics, this volume provides a thorough description of the whole system of Romanian Noun Phrases, understood in an extended sense, that is, in addition to nouns, pronouns and determiners, it examines all the adnominal phrases: genitive-marked DPs, adjectives, relative clauses, appositions, prepositional phrases, complement clauses and non-finite modifiers. The book focuses on syntax and the syntax-semantics interface but also includes a systematic morphological description of the language. The implicitly comparative description of Romanian contained in the book can serve as a starting point for the study of the syntax/semantics of Noun Phrases in other languages, regardless of whether or not they are typologically related to Romanian. This book will be of special interest to linguists working on Romanian, Romance languages, comparative linguistics and language typology, especially because Romanian is relevant for comparative linguistics not only as a Romance language, but also as part of the so-called Balkan Sprachbund.
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Rethinking Syntactocentrism
Author(s): Andreas TrotzkePublication Date October 2015More LessThe term ‘syntactocentrism’ has been used to criticize the claim that syntax, as regarded in generative linguistics, plays the central role in modeling the mental architecture of the human language faculty. This research monograph explores the conjecture that many of the objections to the generative perspective, as they are formulated in alternative frameworks such as construction grammar, disappear once the consequences of recent minimalist theory are taken seriously. To show this, the book applies recent concepts of minimalist grammar to phenomena like the syntactic flexibility of idioms, the pragmatics of left-periphery-movement, or opacity effects involved in subextraction patterns. The book makes a new contribution to the field, as existing monographs on architectural matters in minimalism neither discuss alternative frameworks at length nor place a premium on pragmatic explanations for syntactic facts. The primary audience of this book are researchers and graduate students interested in a state-of-the-art discussion of grammatical architecture.
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Right Peripheral Fragments
Author(s): Javier Fernández-SánchezPublication Date February 2020More LessIn recent years, a number of authors (De Vries 2009, Truckenbrodt 2015, Ott and de Vries 2016, inter alia) have defended that right dislocations (RD) should be treated as bisentential structures, where the “dislocated” constituent is actually a remnant of a clausal ellipsis operation licensed under identity with an antecedent clause. Although Romance RD is a fertile area of research, the consequences of the biclausal analysis remain unexplored in these languages. This monograph intends to fill this gap. Adopting this approach not only solves some issues that have always been at the core of dislocation structures in general; it also allows us to uncover novel sets of data and to provide straightforward explanations for well-known generalizations. Further, it brings RD along with a set of phenomena which are structurally very similar, like afterthoughts or split questions, which have been independently argued to display a bisentential structure. Under alternative, monoclausal approaches to RD, the striking similarities between these phenomena must be rendered anecdotal.
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Rightward Movement
Editor(s): Dorothee Beermann, David LeBlanc and Henk van RiemsdijkPublication Date December 1997More LessSymmetries and asymmetries have always played an important role in linguistic theorizing. From the early works on potentially universal properties of transformational processes, differences between rightward and leftward movement processes were noted and constituted a challenge to theories of conditions on transformations. The upward boundedness of extraposition rules vs. the successive cyclic character of question word movement, for example, remains a vexing problem. An idea which has gained considerable prominence in the most recent syntactic work, in particular Noam Chomsky's 'Minimalist Program' and Richard Kayne's 'Antisymmetry' proposal, is that rightward movement simply does not exist. This means, in essence, that what looks like an element that has been moved rightward is either base-generated in its surface position, or it is actually moved leftward but all its surrounding materials have been moved leftward even further. Clearly, these radical proposals have generated a large number of new analyses of the relevant phenomena, and they have fostered considerable controversy about the viability and desirability of this type of approach. The present volume brings together a representative group of articles discussing a variety of aspects of (apparent) rightward movement processes, including considerations having to do with parsing, and representing the various opposing lines of thought on this matter. Empirically, they cover a wide array of constructions (extraposition, scrambling, quantifier-floating, etc.) and languages ( American Sign Language, Bengali, Dutch, French, Frisian, German, Hindi, Japanese, Marathi, etc.).
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Rightward Movement in a Comparative Perspective
Editor(s): Gert Webelhuth, Manfred Sailer and Heike WalkerPublication Date July 2013More LessThis book represents the state of the art on rightward movement in one thematically coherent volume. It documents the growing importance of the combination of empirical and theoretical work in linguistic analysis. Several contributions argue that rightward movement is a means of reducing phonological or structural complexity. The inclusion of corpus data and psycholinguistic results confirms the Right Roof Constraint as a characteristic property of extraposition and argues for a reduced role of subsentential bounding nodes. The contributions also show that the phenomenon cannot be looked at from one module of grammar alone, but calls for an interaction of syntax, semantics, phonology, and discourse. The discussion of different languages such as English, German, Dutch, Italian, Italian Sign Language, Modern Greek, Uyghur, and Khalkha enhances our understanding of the complexity of the phenomenon. Finally, the analytic options of different frameworks are explored. The volume is of interest to students and researchers of syntax, semantics, psycholinguistics, and corpus linguistics.
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The Rise of Agreement
Author(s): Eric FußPublication Date October 2005More LessThis book investigates the historical paths leading from pronouns to markers of verbal agreement and proposes a unified formal account of this grammaticalization process. In opposition to beliefs widely held in the literature, it is argued that new agreement formatives can be coined in a multitude of syntactic environments. Still, the individual paths toward agreement are shown to exhibit a set of underlying similarities which are attributed to universal principles that govern the reanalysis of pronominal clitics as exponents of verbal agreement across languages. It is claimed that syntactic principles impose only a set of necessary conditions on the reanalysis in question, while its ultimate trigger is morphological in nature. More specifically, it is argued that the acquisition of inflectional morphology is governed by blocking effects which operate during language acquisition and promote the grammaticalization of new markers if this change serves to replace ‘worn-out’, underspecified forms with new, more specified candidates.
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The Rise of Functional Categories
Author(s): Elly van GelderenPublication Date October 1993More LessIn recent years, word order has come to be seen, within a Government Binding/Minimalist framework, as determined by functional as well as lexical categories. Within this framework, functional categories are often seen as present in every language without evidence being available in that language. This book contains arguments that even though Universal Grammar makes functional categories available, the language learner must decide whether or not to incorporate them in his or her grammar. For instance, it is shown that English has one (not two as often assumed) functional category between the complementizer and the Negation, but that languages such as Dutch, Swedish, German and Old and Middle English have none. The title of the book can be seen in terms of the direction current research is taking; it can also be seen in terms of the changes that have taken place in English.
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The Role of Agreement in Non-Finite Predication
Author(s): Gréte DalmiPublication Date November 2005More LessThis comparative syntactic study claims that agreement is the most central functional category responsible for licensing predication in finite, non-finite and small clauses alike. Intriguing syntactic phenomena like Icelandic infinitival predicates taking non-nominative (quirky) subjects; psych-impersonal and modal predicates in Italian, Hungarian and Russian; meteorological predicates, existential clauses, post-verbal and null subjects in the so-called null-subject VSO languages can all be better analyzed through a concept of predication that is closely related to AGRP, manifesting subject-verb agreement. The overt agreement marking in Hungarian and Portuguese infinitival clauses further strengthens this view. Obviation and control subjunctive clauses in the Balkan languages, Welsh finite and non-finite infinitival clauses as well as case-marked secondary predicates in Icelandic, Slovak, Hungarian, Russian and Finnish also lend support to an analysis where the [+pred] feature is checked in AGRP.
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Romance Interrogative Syntax
Author(s): Caterina BonanPublication Date March 2021More LessThis monograph offers an innovative understanding of the mechanisms involved in Romance ‘optional’ wh-in situ. New supporting evidence in favour of Cable’s (2010) Grammar of Q is presented, as well as novel implementations of his original theory. In particular, it is claimed that wh-in situ idioms are characterised not only by language-specific choices between Q-projection and Q-adjunction, and between overt and covert movement of Q, but also in terms of the locus where they check the features relevant to wh-questions: while some languages check both [q] and [focus] in C, others make use of the clause-internal vP-periphery to check [focus]. Thanks to the vast amount of data presented and discussed, along with the predictions and theoretical contributions made, this monograph will be of interest to a wide range of specialists in human language, from typologists to Romance specialists and formal syntacticians, but also to the many experts in languages with overt Q-particles who wonder why Romance specialists have long been so resistant to the implementation of silent Q-particles in their theoretical models.
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Scope and Specificity
Author(s): Feng-hsi LiuPublication Date December 1997More LessScope and Specificity is an investigation of quantifier scope interaction in natural language, with special reference to English and Chinese. In particular, it is concerned with semantic properties of NPs. Quantifier scope plays an important role in current theories of syntax and semantics. However, most studies of quantifier scope are only concerned with the behavior of a small number of quantifiers, e.g. ‘every’, ‘some’, ‘all’. As a result, the generalizations made on the basis of these quantifiers often do not hold when a wider range of quantifiers is considered. In this study a wide variety of NP types are examined with respect to how they interact with other NPs. The key concept explored is that of semantic scope dependency/independence. NPs are considered according to two properties: whether they can induce scope-dependency and whether they can be scope-dependent. By observing how in basic sentences NPs behave with respect to the two properties, the author presents a picture of quantifier scope much different from what has been assumed in the literature.
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Scrambling and Barriers
Editor(s): Günther Grewendorf and Wolfgang SternefeldPublication Date January 1990More LessThe articles in this volume deal with various phenomena which have been covered traditionally by the term scrambling. The analyses presented here refer to the most recent developments in generative grammar (the so-called Barriers-framework developed in Chomsky 1986). Some of the topics discussed are: the movement vs the base structure approach to scrambling, the correlation between the possibility of scrambling and certain infinitive structures, scrambling and ergativity, barriers and domains for scrambling.
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Scrambling and the Survive Principle
Author(s): Michael T. PutnamPublication Date October 2007More LessLanguages with free word orders pose daunting challenges to linguistic theory because they raise questions about the nature of grammatical strings. Ross, who coined the term Scrambling to refer to the relatively ‘free’ word orders found in Germanic languages (among others) notes that “… the problems involved in specifying exactly the subset of the strings which will be generated … are far too complicated for me to even mention here, let alone come to grips with” (1967:52). This book offers a radical re-analysis of middle field Scrambling. It argues that Scrambling is a concatenation effect, as described in Stroik’s (1999, 2000, 2007) Survive analysis of minimalist syntax, driven by an interpretable referentiality feature [Ref] to the middle field, where syntactically encoded features for temporality and other world indices are checked. The purpose of this book is to investigate the syntactic properties of middle field Scrambling in synchronic West Germanic languages, and to explore, to what possible extent we can classify Scrambling as a ‘syntactic phenomenon’ within Survive-minimalist desiderata.
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The Semantics of Generics in Dutch and Related Languages
Author(s): Albert OosterhofPublication Date April 2008More LessThis monograph is a comprehensive study of the various ways in which genericity can be expressed in Dutch, dialects of Dutch, and languages related to Dutch. On the basis of empirical (corpus- and questionnaire-based) data, a wide range of topics are discussed which have been addressed in the literature on the semantics and pragmatics of generics. The empirical data presented in this book shed new light on issues crucial to the study of genericity. A number of widely accepted ideas are shown to be problematic. For example, arguments are presented against the well-known claim that progressive forms typically exclude characterizing interpretations. Furthermore, the author shows that speakers do not agree in their judgements of the acceptability of bare plurals (as well as other noun phrase types) in generic contexts. Such data are a problem for the influential thesis that bare plurals refer to kinds unambiguously.
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Sentential Form and Prosodic Structure of Catalan
Author(s): Ingo FeldhausenPublication Date November 2010More LessThis monograph presents an experimental and theoretical inquiry into the role of sentential form and variation in the prosodic structure of Catalan. The empirical section examines intonational phrasing across sentence forms, including SVO structures with either nominal or sentential objects and structures involving clitic left- and right-dislocations. The results show variation in phrasing that depends on syntactic factors and non-syntactic factors such as topic-hood and prosodic binarity. The theoretical section uses Stochastic Optimality Theory to model the variation and frequency distributions associated with the observed prosodic patterns. Various syntactic and non-syntactic factors are represented by alignment constraints, which play a major role in Catalan, and by constraints that limit size and those that limit the overall amount of prosodic structure. This study represents a combined approach to prosody and syntax and is of particular relevance for theoretical and empirical linguists interested in the relationship between these domains both in Catalan and other languages.
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Silently Structured Silent Argument
Author(s): Yuta SakamotoPublication Date May 2020More LessTheoretical linguistics in the generative tradition has payed much attention to issues related to silence ‒ children know the syntax of silence despite the fact that they do not have direct access to it throughout their language acquisition process. One of the issues that have been hotly discussed regarding silence in natural languages is whether it involves syntactic structure or not. This book is concerned with a particular instance of silence in natural languages, what is called radical pro-drop, showing that it is silently structured on the basis of novel data from Japanese as well as Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, and Turkish. The discussion in this book also has consequences for the dichotomy between PF-deletion vs. LF-copying, shedding a new light on the proper analysis of several syntactic phenomena in Japanese, including wh-in-situ and control.
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Small Phrase Layers
Author(s): Satu ManninenPublication Date September 2003More LessThis monograph examines the structure and properties of Finnish manner adverbials. The central idea is that, instead of AdvPs, DPs, APs, PPs, NumPs and InfinitivalPs, manner adverbials have the form of either kPs or pPs, and they are licensed as unique specifiers of a manner-related small vP. Secondly, because ”obligatory” and ”optional” manner adverbials are merged as specifiers of one and the same small vP, the computational system of language sees no difference between them. This is why ”obligatory” and ”optional” manner adverbials often behave in exactly the same way with regard to syntactic operations such as movement. Thirdly, the author shows that, although all arguments and VP-internal adverbials are merged as specifiers of a unique small vP, this hierarchical structure need not always be reflected in an unambiguous linear order: in many languages VP-internal manner, place and time adverbials are allowed to permute freely because they have no features which would need checking by the features of a higher functional head, and because their original Spec,vP positions are ”invisible” to the Linear Correspondence Axiom. Although the argumentation and analyses are mainly supported by Finnish data, the author also shows how they can be applied to other languages. The book also contains an extensive introduction to Finnish, to help readers unfamiliar with the language to follow the discussion.
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Space in Tense
Author(s): Kyung-Sook ChungPublication Date July 2012More LessThis monograph explores the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality of Korean, which has a rich verbal inflectional system, and proposes novel treatments within the framework of compositional semantics. One of the major contributions is the demonstration that Korean has two types of deictic tense—simple deictic and spatial deictic tense. Spatial deictic tense refers to the notion of the speaker’s ‘perceptual field’ (or deictic range), as well as to temporality, functioning to set up a condition for a systematic evidential distinction. The research in this volume shows that the basic paradigm of evidentiality of Korean derives from the standard TMA system combined with the notion of space. This volume also shows that perfect and past tense utilize different primitives. The intended readership of this volume extends beyond Koreanists to scholars interested specifically in tense, mood, aspect, and evidentiality as well as in general theories of grammar and semantics-pragmatics.
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The Spanish and the Portuguese Present Perfect in Discourse
Author(s): Lukas MüllerPublication Date February 2023More LessThis monograph presents a theoretical and empirical study of the Spanish and the Portuguese Present Perfect (PP). The innovative claim is that the two tense forms operate in the field of tension between temporal quantification and temporal reference. Based on this approach, it presents the first in-depth study that explicitly takes into account the level of discourse. The following questions are investigated: How do the Spanish and the Portuguese PP interact with discursive factors, such as adjacent tense forms? What kind of discursive meaning do they generate? Which diachronic trends do their discourse functions reveal? It is argued that while the Spanish PP tends to a referential drift (traditionally labelled as an aoristic drift), the Portuguese PP tends to preserve and specialize its quantificational meaning. The book is of interest to all those working on the Present Perfect or generally in the field of tense and aspect in discourse.
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Stative Inquiries
Author(s): Alfredo García-PardoPublication Date November 2020More LessThis monograph studies stative predicates from a neo-constructionist perspective and integrates them in a comprehensive theory of event and argument structure. It focuses on two sets of stative verbs: govern-type verbs and object experiencer psychological verbs. For govern-verbs, it shows how notions such as causativity and resultativity can also be ingredients of stative predicates and be derived syntactically. The consequences of this proposal are further pursued in a crosslinguistic investigation of adjectival passives, which are stative predicates of sorts. For object-experiencer psychological verbs, it is shown that their Experiencer theta-role can and should be derived as an aspectual entailment mediated by prepositional structure. In defending this view, this monograph reveals a syntactic parallelism between location verbs and object-experiencer psychological verbs in many languages that has hitherto gone unnoticed. This book will primarily appeal to researchers interested in lexical aspect and its connection to morphosyntax.
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The Structure of Stative Verbs
Author(s): Antonia RothmayrPublication Date July 2009More LessThis book explores the nature of stative verbs, their eventuality structure, and the patterns of argument realization. The study shows that there is no single class of stative verbs. Rather, several distinct groups of verbs are found: Verbs that undergo a systematic stative/eventive ambiguity; verbs that allow for a stative reading only; and verbs that seem to have an intermediate status (verbs of position and verbs of internal causation). The study concludes that there is a discrete boundary between stative and eventive verbs, excluding any intermediate status. Stativity arises because the aspectual operators DO and BECOME are absent in the lexical-semantic structure. Eventivity arises if one of these is present. A minimalist view on argument realization and event structure completes the book: Theta features on the arguments are checked against the aspectual heads within the verb phrase.
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Structure Preserved
Editor(s): C. Jan-Wouter Zwart and Mark de VriesPublication Date July 2010More Less"Structure is at the rock-bottom of all explanatory sciences" (Jan Koster). Forty years ago, the hypothesis that underlying the bewildering variety of syntactic phenomena are general and unified structural patterns of unexpected beauty and simplicity gave rise to major advancements in the study of Dutch and Germanic syntax, with important implications for the theory of grammar as a whole. Jan Koster was one of the central figures in this development, and he has continued to explore the structure preserving hypothesis throughout his illustrious career. This collection of articles by over forty syntacticians celebrates the advancements made in the study of syntax over the past forty years, reflecting on the structural principles underlying syntactic phenomena and emulating the approach to syntactic analysis embodied in Jan Koster's teaching and research.
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Structures, Strategies and Beyond
Editor(s): Elisa Di Domenico, Cornelia Hamann and Simona MatteiniPublication Date August 2015More LessThe volume contains 18 contributions from senior and junior scholars covering core issues within the theoretical investigation of the architecture and the mechanisms of the faculty of language, with particular emphasis on the computational component. They all pursue a comparative approach, investigating and comparing different languages and dialects or comparing different modes of acquisition, as in Adriana Belletti’s work, to whom the volume is dedicated. The papers in the first part (by Chomsky, Rizzi, Bianchi & Chesi, Cinque, Costa, Calabrese) deal with theoretical issues such as labeling, the cartography of structures and the locality of derivations in a broad sense. The papers in the second part (by Haegeman & Lohndal, Delfitto & Fiorin, Cruschina, Lahousse, Di Domenico and Contemori, Dal Pozzo & Matteini) concentrate on the realization of structure relative to discourse, particularly on topic and focus positions in the vP periphery, and on referential dependencies. The third part collects papers (by Cardinaletti & Volpato, Friedmann, Yachini & Szterman, Snyder & Hyams, Hamann & Tuller, Cecchetto & Donati, Grewendorf & Poletto) that specifically target intervention effects in relative clauses as apparent in different structures, different languages, and different populations.
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Structuring Variation in Romance Linguistics and Beyond
Editor(s): Mirko Grimaldi, Rosangela Lai, Ludovico Franco and Benedetta BaldiPublication Date December 2018More LessCurrent theoretical approaches to language devote great attention to macro- and micro-variation and show an ever-increasing interest in minority languages. In this respect, few empirical domains are as rich and lively as the Italo-Romance languages, which together with Albanian were the main research domain of Leonardo M. Savoia. The volume covers areas as different as phonology, morphology, syntax and the lexicon. A broad range of Romance languages is considered, as well as Albanian, Greek and Hungarian, shedding new light on many classical topics. The first section focuses on morphosyntax, both in the narrow sense and with regard to its interfaces. The second section focuses on clitics and pronouns. The third section deals with a number of issues in phonology and syntax-phonology interface. The last section turns the reader’s attention beyond formal linguistics itself and examines variation in the light of neurosciences, pathology, historical linguistics and political discourse.
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Studien zur Modernen Deutschen Lexikographie
Author(s): Ruth KlappenbachEditor(s): Werner AbrahamPublication Date January 1980More LessThe book sketches the history and technical apparatus of dictionary writing, in detail Ruth Klappenbach’s Wörterbuch der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Berlin: Akademieverlag 1956, a loner at its time and setting the pattern for the many other German dictionaries to come. The book’s main chapters are: structure of the single dictionary entry; meaning variants; validations of style; grammatical specifications; quotes; pronunciation; etymologies.
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Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax
Editor(s): C. Jan-Wouter Zwart and Werner AbrahamPublication Date December 2002More LessThis volume presents a collection of articles reporting on new research carried out within the theoretical framework of generative grammar on the comparative syntax of the Germanic languages.
Divided in four main sections, the book focuses on issues of subordination and complementation (with emphasis on German/Dutch and Danish), displacement phenomena discussed in relation with richness of morphology (with special attention to English, German/Dutch, and Norwegian, as well as presenting more general discussion of the issue), language variation and change (studying historical English syntax and Frisian contact dialects), and the syntax-semantics interface viewed from a Germanic perspective (addressing ellipsis, reflexivity, and the behavior of quantifiers).
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Studies in West Frisian Grammar
Author(s): Germen J. de HaanEditor(s): Jarich Hoekstra, Willem Visser and Goffe JensmaPublication Date August 2010More LessIn this volume, Germen de Haan gives a multi-faceted view of the syntax, sociolinguistics, and phonology of West-Frisian. The author discusses distinct aspects of the syntax of verbs in Frisian: finiteness and Verb Second, embedded root phenomena, the verbal complex, verbal complementation, and complementizer agreement. Because Frisian has minority language status and is of interest to sociolinguists, the author reviews the linguistic changes in Frisian under the influence of the dominant Dutch language and, more generally, reflects on how to deal with contact-induced change in grammar. Finally, in three phonological articles, the author discusses nasalization in Frisian, the putatively symmetrical vowel inventory of Frisian, and the variation between schwa + sonorant consonants and syllabic sonorant consonants.
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Studies in Övdalian Morphology and Syntax
Editor(s): Kristine Bentzen, Henrik Rosenkvist and Janne Bondi JohannessenPublication Date January 2015More LessÖvdalian is spoken in central Sweden by about 2000 speakers. Traditionally categorized as a dialect of Swedish, it has not received much international attention. However, Övdalian is typologically closer to Faroese or Icelandic than it is to Swedish, and since it has been spoken in relative isolation for about 1000 years, a number of interesting linguistic archaisms have been preserved and innovations have developed. This volume provides seven papers about Övdalian morphology and syntax. The papers, all based on extensive fieldwork, cover topics such as verb movement, subject doubling, wh-words and case in Övdalian. Constituting the first comprehensive linguistic description of Övdalian in English, this volume is of interest for linguists in the fields of Scandinavian and Germanic linguistics, and also historical linguists will be thrilled by some of the presented data. The data and the analyses presented here furthermore challenge our view of the morphosyntax of the Scandinavian languages in some cases – as could be expected when a new language enters the linguistic arena.
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Studies on Agreement
Editor(s): João Costa and Maria Cristina Figueiredo SilvaPublication Date April 2006More LessThe status of agreement is a core issue in current morphological and syntactic theory. The collection of papers in this volume focuses on important issues, such as the nature of the relation between syntax and morphology in determining agreement relations; whether and which syntactic configurations are relevant for determining agreement; the relevance of verbal agreement for the purposes of EPP; the inquiry into the existence of connections between verbal and DP-internal agreement; on the morphological and syntactic distinction of person, number and gender agreement; how and why AGREE and Spec,head relations trigger different agreement effects; and the type of relation that exists between head-movement and morphological agreement. The data collected come from a wide variety of languages and the studies presented discuss innovative and thought-provoking ideas for dealing with agreement phenomena.
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Studies on Old High German Syntax
Author(s): Katrin Axel-ToberPublication Date July 2007More LessThis monograph is the first book-length study on Old High German syntax from a generative perspective in twenty years. It provides an in-depth exploration of the Old High German pre-verb-second grammar by answering the following questions: To what extent did generalized verb movement exist in Old High German? Was there already obligatory XP-movement to the left periphery in declarative root clauses? What deviations from the linear verb-second restriction are attested and what do such phenomena reveal about the structure of the left sentence periphery? Did verb placement play the same role in sentence typing as in the modern verb-second languages? A further major topic is null subjects: It is claimed that Old High German was a partial pro-drop language. All these issues are addressed from a comparative-diachronic perspective by integrating research on other Old Germanic languages, in particular on Old English and Gothic. This book is of interest to all those working in the fields of comparative Germanic syntax and historical linguistics.
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Studies on Universal Grammar and Typological Variation
Editor(s): Artemis Alexiadou and Tracy Alan HallPublication Date February 1997More LessThe articles of the present volume consist of generative analyses dealing with several current topics of discussion and debate in syntactic theory, such as clitics, word order, scrambling, directionality, movement. The data in the volume are drawn from a number of typologically diverse languages (e.g. Arabic, Berber, Dutch, Gaelic, Greek, Malagasy).
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Symmetry Breaking in Syntax and the Lexicon
Author(s): Leah S. BaukePublication Date July 2014More LessThis book is a research monograph that explores the implications of the strongest minimalist thesis from an antisymmetric perspective. Three empirical domains are investigated: nominal root compounds in German and English, nominal gerunds in English and their German counterparts, and small clauses in Russian and English. A point of symmetry that has the potential of stalling the derivation emerges in the derivation of all of these constructions. Building on certain assumptions on how Merge works, this book shows that the points of symmetry can all be resolved in the same way; despite the fact that the three empirical domains under investigation are standardly derived from distinct structural configurations, such as head-head merger in the case of root compounds, head-phrase merger as it arises from standard complementation/predication structures for nominal gerunds, and phrase-phrase merger in small clauses. This book is of interest to all researchers working on syntax and its interfaces.
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Syntactic and Semantic Variation in Copular Sentences
Author(s): Daniel J. WilsonPublication Date July 2020More LessThis book presents a novel account of syntactic and semantic variation in copular and existential sentences in Classical Hebrew. Like many languages, the system of Classical Hebrew copular sentences is quite complex, containing zero, pronominal, and verbal forms as well as eventive and inchoative semantics. Approaching this subject from the framework of Distributed Morphology provides an elegant and comprehensive explanation for both the syntactic and semantic variation in these sentences. This book also presents a theoretical model for analyzing copular sentences in other languages included related phenomena– such as pseudo-copulas. It is also a demonstration of what can be gained by applying modern linguistic analyses to dead languages. Citing and building off previous studies on this topic, this book will be of interest to those interested in the theoretical examination of copular and existential sentences and to those interested in Classical Hebrew more specifically.
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Syntactic Aspects of Topic and Comment
Author(s): André MeinungerPublication Date October 2000More LessThe book focuses on the syntactic behavior of argument noun phrases depending on their discourse status. The main language of consideration is German, but it is shown that the observations can be carried over to other languages. The claim is that discourse-new arguments remain inside the VP where they are base generated. The hierarchy of argument projection is claimed to be fix within and across languages. With the major attention to direct objects it is then argued that discourse-old, here called topical noun phrases undergo raising to agreement projections. This movement can be realized differently: scrambling, object agreement, clitic-doubling, differences in morphological case and stress pattern turn out to be analyzable as one underlying phenomenon. It is furthermore shown that many so-called subject:object asymmetries boil down to topic:non-topic differences, for example with respect to extraction. Thus, irrespectively of the argumental status discourse-new constituents do not act as barriers whereas topical arguments create (weak) islands.
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Syntactic Effects of Conjunctivist Semantics
Author(s): Tim HunterPublication Date July 2011More LessThis book explores the syntactic and semantic properties of movement and adjunction in natural language. A precise formulation of minimalist syntax is proposed, guided by an independently motivated hypothesis about the composition of neo-Davidsonian logical forms, in which there is no atomic movement operation and no atomic adjunction operation. The terms 'movement' and 'adjunction' serve only as convenient labels for certain combinations of other, primitive operations, and as a result the system derives non-trivial predictions about how movement and adjunction should interact; in particular, it yields natural explanatory accounts of the constituency of adjunction structures, the possibility of counter-cyclic attachment, and the prohibitions on extraction from adjoined domains (adjunct islands) and from moved domains (freezing effects). This work serves as a case study in deriving explanations for syntactic patterns from a restrictive theory of semantic composition, and in using an explicit grammatical framework to inform rigourous minimalist theorising.
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The Syntactic Licensing of Ellipsis
Author(s): Lobke AelbrechtPublication Date January 2010More LessThis monograph presents a theory of ellipsis licensing in terms of Agree and applies it to several elliptical phenomena in both English and Dutch. The author makes two main claims: The head selecting the ellipsis site is checked against the head licensing ellipsis in order for ellipsis to occur, and ellipsis – i.e., sending part of the structure to PF for non-pronunciation – occurs as soon as this checking relation is established. At that point, the ellipsis site becomes inaccessible for further syntactic operations. Consequently, this theory explains the limited extraction data displayed by ‘Dutch modals complement ellipsis’ as well as British English do: These ellipses allow subject extraction out of the ellipsis site, but not object extraction. The analysis also extends to phenomena that do not display such a restricted extraction, such as sluicing, VP ellipsis, and pseudogapping. Hence, this work is a step towards a unified analysis of ellipsis.
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The Syntactic Nature of Inner Aspect
Author(s): Jonathan E. MacDonaldPublication Date November 2008More LessThis book explores the syntactic nature of inner aspect from a minimalist perspective. It begins with the new observation that there are two independent properties at play in English inner aspect: the object-to-event mapping and event structure. From a discussion of English statives and Russian, it is concluded that the former property is variant and the latter universal; a minimalist conception of language variation arises naturally in this context. Additionally, an exploration of a lexical derivational approach to achievements leads to the expectation that there are no accomplishments in the lexicon. A detailed look at idioms suggests that this expectation is met. These results support the division of labor between an operative lexicon and narrow syntax in aspectual composition; this naturally poses a problem for (neo-)constructional approaches to inner aspect. Finally, one conclusion reached about the syntactic nature of inner aspect regards the object-to-event mapping: it is a purely syntactic phenomenon.
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Syntactic Phrase Structure Phenomena in Noun Phrases and Sentences
Editor(s): Christa Bhatt, Elisabeth Löbel and Claudia Maria SchmidtPublication Date January 1989More LessThe main topic of this volume is the phrase structural analysis of noun phrases and sentences. This analysis is based on recent ideas within the Government and Binding framework and makes crucial use of such modules as Theta assignment, Binding Theory, Case assignment, as well as different definitions of the notion Barrier. The ten papers deal with certain aspects of English and German noun phrases.
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Syntactic Variation and Verb Second
Author(s): Federica CognolaPublication Date January 2013More LessThis monograph investigates the syntax of the finite verb in Mòcheno, a minority language spoken in a German speech island of Northern Italy. Basing her study on detailed new data collected during extensive fieldwork, and focusing on finite verb movement; on multiple access to the left periphery; on pro licensing and on the distribution of OV/VO word orders, the author refutes the traditional view that the syntactic variation found in Mòcheno is due to the presence of two competing grammars as a consequence of contact with Romance varieties and accounts for the peculiarities of Mòcheno syntax within a theory couched in the framework of Generative Grammar. This book contributes to our understanding of the verb-second phenomenon and sheds new light on the asymmetries between Old Romance and Germanic verb-second languages. A useful tool for all linguists working on both theoretical and comparative syntax and to anyone interested in language variation, dialectology and typology.
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Syntax and Semantics of Spatial P
Editor(s): Anna Asbury, Jakub Dotlačil, Berit Gehrke and Rick NouwenPublication Date May 2008More LessThe category P belongs to a less studied area in theoretical linguistics, which has only recently attracted considerable attention. This volume brings together pioneering work on adpositions in spatial relations from different theoretical and cross-linguistic perspectives. The common theme in these contributions is the complex semantic and syntactic structure of PPs. Analyses are presented in several different frameworks and approaches, including generative syntax, optimality theoretic semantics and syntax, formal semantics, mathematical modeling, lexical syntax, and pragmatics. Among the languages featured in detail are English, German, Hebrew, Igbo, Italian, Japanese, and Persian. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of formal semantics, syntax and language typology, as well as scholars with a more general interest in spatial cognition.
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The Syntax of (Anti-)Causatives
Author(s): Florian SchäferPublication Date June 2008More LessThis book develops an approach to the causative alternation that assumes syntactic event decomposition and a configurational theta theory. It is couched within the framework of the Minimalist Program and, especially, within Distributed Morphology. Central to the work is the syntax and semantics of canonical external arguments of causative verbs as well as of oblique causers and causative PPs in the context of anticausative verbs in different languages such as Germanic, Romance, Balkan, and Caucasian languages. The book also develops a new account of the origin and nature of the morphological marking which is often found on anticausatives across languages. The main claim is that this morphology is a reflex of a syntactic way to prohibit the assignment of the external theta role. Moreover, the book develops an account about the origin of the implicit agent in generic middles which often bear the same morphology as marked anticausatives.
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The Syntax of Cape Verdean Creole
Author(s): Marlyse BaptistaPublication Date January 2003More LessThis book offers an in-depth treatment of a variety of morpho-syntactic issues in Cape Verdean Creole (CVC) both from a descriptive and theoretical perspective. The investigated topics include the determiner system, Tense, Mood, Aspect markers and pronominal paradigms. The study of TMA markers reveals morpho-syntactic configurations with interesting ramifications for syntactic theory and parametric variation. This book targets creolists, theoretical linguists, and the Cape Verdean community. Given the diversified targeted audience, the descriptive chapters are purposefully kept separate from their theoretical counterparts, presenting issues that are later revisited in the Minimalist framework. The data used in this study are primarily drawn from 83 transcribed interviews from a pool of 187 speakers. The interviews were collected during fieldwork conducted in 1997, 2000 and 2001 in the Cape Verdean Sotavento (leeward) islands representing the more basilectal varieties of the creole. As all natural languages, CVC displays syntactic similarities and differences with other creoles and noncreoles. Hence, in the spirit of comparative syntax, this volume compares CVC to other creoles like Guinea-Bissau Creole and to noncreoles like Portuguese, French, Icelandic and Italian dialects.
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The Syntax of Information-Structural Agreement
Author(s): Johannes MursellPublication Date September 2021More LessIn 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.
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The Syntax of Jamaican Creole
Author(s): Stephanie DurrlemanPublication Date August 2008More LessThis book offers an in-depth study of the overall syntax of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole, the first since Bailey (1966). The author, a Jamaican linguist, meticulously examines distributional and interpretative properties of functional morphology in Jamaican Creole (JC) from a cartographic perspective (Cinque 1999, 2002; Rizzi 1997, 2004), thus exploring to what extent the grammar of JC provides morphological manifestations of an articulate IP, CP and DP. The data considered in this work offers new evidence in favour of these enriched structural analyses, and the instances where surface orders differ from the underlying functional skeleton are accounted for in terms of movement operations. This investigation of Jamaican syntax therefore allows us to conclude that the 'poor' inflectional morphology typical of Creole languages in general and of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole in particular does not correlate with poor structural architecture. Indeed the free morphemes discussed, as well as the word order considerations that indicate syntactic movement to designated projections, serve as arguments in favour of a rich underlying functional map.
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The Syntax of Nonsententials
Editor(s): Ljiljana Progovac, Kate Paesani, Eugenia Casielles-Suárez and Ellen BartonPublication Date September 2006More LessThis 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.
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The Syntax of Norwegian Passive Constructions
Author(s): Tor A. ÅfarliPublication Date November 1992More LessThis book provides an analysis of the passive phenomenon in general and of Norwegian passive constructions in particular. Related topics such as English passive constructions and Norwegian ergative constructions are also examined. The analysis is carried out within a Government and Binding framework. Chapter 1 contains a very brief introduction to GB syntax and a description of the passive phenomenon and its manifestation in Norwegian. The “orthodox analysis” of the passive as proposed in Chomsky's Lectures on Government and Binding is contrasted with the “new analysis”, which claims that “the passive morpheme” is an argument of the verb. The book sets out to show that a version of this “new analysis” successfully explains the basic properties of Norwegian passives. Chapters 2 and 3 examine properties of Norwegian passives, notably properties related to Theta-role assignment and Case assignment. Chapter 4 compares the Norwegian with the English passive and proposes a unified analysis of the two. Chapter 5 discusses various cases of passivization failure in Norwegian , while Chapter 6 focuses on the scope of movement in passive and ergative constructions in Norwegian and proposes a syntactic level “beneath” D-structure.
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The Syntax of Relative Clauses
Editor(s): Artemis Alexiadou, Paul Law, André Meinunger and Chris WilderPublication Date July 2000More LessThis 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.
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The Syntax of the Be-Possessive
Author(s): Hakyung JungPublication Date May 2011More LessThis book is the first attempt to provide a unified account of the be-possessive syntax and its extension to the modal and the perfect constructions in Russian/North Russian within a generative framework. Apparently diverse constructions are construed as deriving from the have/be parameter, which depends on the utilization of the prepositional complementizer with a Case feature. The be-perfect structure provides an adequate environment where ergativity is encoded via verbal nominalization. The relevance of the be-perfect structure for a split ergative pattern shows that the ergative system is a syntactically conditioned phenomenon rather than a purely morphological diversity. This volume also offers the diachronic study of the be-syntax, investigating the evolution of the be-perfect and be-modal constructions, which has rarely been explored within a formal framework. Concrete scenarios are proposed for the developmental paths of the be-perfect and the be-modal constructions, based on textual evidence in old North Russian.
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