First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This dissertation investigates the syntax of possession in Japanese within the framework of the Minimalist Program. A primary focus is on the question of how possessive semantics is represented in syntax at the sentential level when there seems to be no designated verb of possession - specifically, in possessives with verbs aru be.inanimate, iru be.animate and suru do. Takae Tsujioka seeks the source of possessive semantics in the nominal domain. Adapting Szabolcsi's (1994) analysis of Hungarian possessives, the author proposes that possessive sentences with aru and iru are derived from...

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This title addresses the problem of word-initial gemination (raddoppiamento sintattico) in Italian, a popular topic of phonological study. Incorporating data from various Italian dialects along with historical evidence to enhance our picture of this process, the analysis accounts for the complexities of the phenomenon, including the different (and seemingly unrelated) environments, as well as the varied behaviour in the dialects, using optimality theory. The interaction of word-initial gemination with lenition, stress and vowel length illuminates these very processes and the phonological...

The first-ever investigation of sentence processing in Hindi, Working Memory in Sentence Comprehension studies the predictions of three existing, wide-coverage sentence processing models. In experiments that apply these models to Hindi, Shravan Vasishth develops a new sentence processing model that builds on existing theories and overcomes their empirical problems. Advancing the understanding of human parsing processes, this book is a landmark in cross-linguistic research, presenting a challenging set of sentence processing facts that will impact future theories.

In linguistic study, tone is usually equated with pitch. This text argues that this view of tone is problematic. Its acoustic analysis of tone in Vietnamese uses data from various speakers to show that the phonation features of breathiness and creakiness correlate much more closely with tonal perceptions than pitch height alone.

This work investigates the operation of two linguistic mechanisms, ellipsis and wa-marking, in a corpus of colloquial Jpanaese speech. Its data set is the CallHome Japanese (CHJ) corpus, a collection of transcripts and digitized speech data for 120 telephone conversations between native speakers of Japanese. To make the CHJ data useful for linguistic research, John Fry annotates the original transcripts with a comprehensive set of acoustic, phonetic, syntactic and semantic tags. John Fry demonstrates that Japanese conversation obeys certain principles of argument ellipsis that appear to be...

This book offers a new perspective on natural language predicates by analyzing data from the Plains Cree language. Contrary to traditional understanding, Cree verbal complexes are syntactic constructs composed of morphemes as syntactic objects that are subject to structurally defined constraints, such as c-command. Tomio Hirose illustrates this in his study of vP syntax, event semantics, morphology-syntax mappings, unaccusativity, noun incorporation, and valency-reducing phenomena.

Miglio argues that to assess the relative markedness of a segment, frequency of occurrence in vowel inventories is insufficient when considered on its own. In its analysis of the Great Vowel Shift, this book elaborates a more useful model of a unitary change even in a surface-oriented theory such as optimality theory, with the help of local conjunction. Miglio extends the device of local conjunction to model opaque relations, and calls for reranking and lexicon optimization as the means to capture change within optimality theory.