The phenomenon of unaccusativity is a central focus for the study of the complex properties of verb classes. The Unaccusative Hypothesis has provided a rich context for debating whether syntactic behavior is semantically or lexically determined, the consequence of syntactic context, or a combination of these factors. No consensus has been reached. This book combines new approaches to the subject with several papers that have achieved a significant status, though formally unpublished.

This book explores the interface between syntax and the other components of the grammar, in particular phonology, morphology, and argument structure. The author proceeds through a consideration of case studies, such as clitics and complex predicates (auxiliary and modal verbs) in Romance, grounding theoretical analysis in constant exemplification. She shows that a careful analysis of their properties can lead to a better understanding of the interaction of the various components of the grammar. The syntactic properties of clitics are considered in relation to their phonological and...

This book presents the first cross-linguistic study of the phenomenon of infixation, typically associated in English with words like "im-bloody-possible," and found in all the world's major linguistic families. Infixation is a central puzzle in prosodic morphology: Professor Yu explores its prosodic, phonological, and morphological characteristics, considers its diverse functions, and formulates a general theory to explain the rules and constraints by which it is governed. He examines 154 infixation patterns from over a hundred languages, including examples from Asia, Europe, Africa, New...

Linguists have realized for some time that predicates of the 'know' and 'wonder' classes behave differently in semantic terms with respect to their interrogative complements, but have not so far fully understood how or why. This book seeks to explore and to provide solutions to this and to related problems in explaining the meaning and grammar of embedded interrogatives and the predicates that take interrogative complements (indirect questions and how they are answered).

This volume demonstrates that phonology is a subsystem of the mind/brain and explores the theoretical and practical (including medical) consequences of this insight. Written by American and European specialists at the cutting-edge of research in areas ranging from phonetics to neurology, the book addresses central questions relating to the cognitive status of phonological representation and phonetic implementation and the links between mental and physical representation of sound systems.

A recurrent issue in linguistic theory and psychology concerns the cognitive status of memorized lists and their internal structure. In morphological theory, the collections of inflected forms of a given noun, verb, or adjective into inflectional paradigms are thought to constitute one such type of list. This book focuses on the question of which elements in a paradigm can stand in a relation of partial or total phonological identity. Leading scholars consider inflectional identity from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with an emphasis on both case studies and predictive theories of...

This book presents the first cross-linguistic study of the phenomenon of infixation, typically associated in English with words like "im-bloody-possible," and found in all the world's major linguistic families. Infixation is a central puzzle in prosodic morphology: Professor Yu explores its prosodic, phonological, and morphological characteristics, considers its diverse functions, and formulates a general theory to explain the rules and constraints by which it is governed. He examines 154 infixation patterns from over a hundred languages, including examples from Asia, Europe, Africa, New...

A recurrent issue in linguistic theory and psychology concerns the cognitive status of memorized lists and their internal structure. In morphological theory, the collections of inflected forms of a given noun, verb, or adjective into inflectional paradigms are thought to constitute one such type of list. This book focuses on the question of which elements in a paradigm can stand in a relation of partial or total phonological identity. Leading scholars consider inflectional identity from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with an emphasis on both case studies and predictive theories of...

The pervasive use of dislocations (as in Le chocolat, c'est bon) is a key characteristic of spoken French. This book offers various new and well-motivated insights, based on tests conducted by the author, on the syntactic analysis, prosody, and the interpretation of dislocation in spoken French. It also considers important aspects of the acquisition of dislocation by monolingual children learning different French dialects.

The author argues that spoken French is a discourse-configurational language, in which topics are obligatorily dislocated. She develops a syntactically...

This book explores the wide variety of cases in which the plural of nouns is lexical. When a plural is lexicalized it becomes part of what it is to know a certain word: pence, for example, is lexical because it means a plurality of a certain kind - a multiple value, not a set of physical objects like pennies - and knowing this reading is knowing the word. Languages exhibit countless examples of similar word-dependent irregularities in the form and meaning of plural, but these have never been analyzed in depth from a unified perspective. Dr Acquaviva aims to do just that, using analytic tools...