This pathbreaking study presents a new perspective on the role of derivation, the series of operations by which sentences are formed. Working within the Minimalist Program and focusing on English, the authors develop an original theory of generative syntax, providing illuminating new analyses of some central syntactic constructions. Two key questions are explored: first, can the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) be eliminated from Minimalist analysis without loss, and perhaps with a gain in empirical coverage; and second, is the construct 'A-Chain' similarly eliminable? The authors argue...

This book proposes a new theory of definiteness in language. It argues that definiteness should be viewed as a cover-term comprising three basic oppositions within the areas of familiarity (locatability), quantity (inclusiveness) and generality (extensivity). Further, the oppositions are not discrete but scalar, and lend themselves to characterization in terms of fuzzy set theory. Dr. Chesterman examines these themes, firstly by drawing on several traditions of research on the rich system of articles in English, and then by looking at how the concept of definiteness is realized in Finnish, a...

This is a unified account of all quantity changes affecting English stressed vowels during the Early Middle English period. Dr. Ritt discusses Homorganic Lengthening, Open Syllable Lengthening, Trisyllabic Shortening, and Shortening before Consonant Clusters. The study is based on a statistical analysis of the Modern English reflexes of the changes. The complete corpus of analysed data is made available to the reader in the appendices. All of the changes are shown to derive from basically the same set of quasi-universal tendencies, while apparent idiosyncrasies are shown to follow from...

Guglielmo Cinque is one of the world's leading theoretical syntacticians, and is particularly known for his application of recent theory to the analysis of Italian. This volume brings together eleven of his essays, some published here for the first time and others not hitherto easily available. Cinque explores a wide range of aspects of Italian syntax, and compares Italian with the syntax of other Romance, and also Germanic, languages. This volume will be welcomed by all those working on Italian syntax, and on theoretical syntax more generally.

In this extraordinary new work, Dr. Backhouse undertakes a semantic study of taste terms in modern spoken Japanese. Through an investigation of the range of vocabulary available for the description of taste qualities, and their interrelationship in terms of meaning, Dr. Backhouse presents a sensitive elucidation of the structure of Japanese taste terms, which has significant implications for anthropological linguistics. He explores important semantic issues, such as the relationship between evaluative and descriptive meaning, the intralinguistic mechanisms at work in metaphor, and draws...

In central cases of switch-reference, a marker on the verb of one clause is used to indicate whether its subject has the same or different reference from the subject of an adjacent, syntactically-related clause. In central cases of logophoricity, a special pronoun form is used within a reported speech context to indicate coherence with the source of reported speech. Lesley Stirling argues that these types of anaphoric linkage across clause boundaries cannot be adequately accounted for by Binding Theory. Her detailed examination of the two phenomena, including a case study of the Papuan...

In this new book Liliane Haegeman presents an account of sentential negation within a Government and Binding framework. Building on the work of Klima and Lasnik, Haegeman demonstrates the parallelism between negative sentences and interrogative sentences, and gives a unified analysis in terms of a well-formedness condition on syntactic representations: the AFFECT criterion, instantiated as the WH criterion in interrogative sentences and as the NEG criterion in negative sentences. It is shown that in the same way that in many languages the WH criterion gives rise to WH movement, the NEG...

This book reviews current theories of the sound-structure of words and syllables. Dr. Coleman presents technical arguments showing that the contemporary theories are too complex and that a simpler theory, Declarative Phonology, is adequate. This theory is exemplified with detailed accounts of the sound-structure of words and syllables in English and Japanese.

Heinz Giegerich investigates the way in which alternations in the sound patterns of words interact with the processes of word formation in the language. Drawing examples from English and German, he uncovers and spells out in detail the principles of "lexical morphology and phonology," a theory that has in recent years become increasingly influential in linguistics. He queries many of the assumptions previously made in it to produce a formally coherent theory that offers new accounts of some central phenomena in the phonology of English.

In this book, Ljiljana Progovac presents cross-linguistic data on negative polarity, reflexive binding and the subjunctive mood, and proposes a unified analysis for various languages, including English and Serbian/Croatian. She argues that Negative Polarity Items (NPIs), such as ?anyone? and ?ever?, are anaphoric in nature and must be bound in their governing category, while Positive Polarity Items (PPIs), such as ?someone? and ?already?, are subject to Principle B of the Binding Theory. She also suggests that possible binders (and SUBJECTS) for polarity items are negation or else a polarity...