This authoritative survey shows readers how specific methodological assumptions underlie the core analyses on which syntactic theory is based. The author, an internationally respected figure in the field, gives extensive treatment of Government and Binding (GB) theory and summarizes the major proposals and results of Case theory, Theta theory, X' theory, Binding theory, the theory of A- and A' movement, locality conditions, and the theory of Logical Form (LF). He also provides an up-to-date introduction to a number of more recent proposals, including Chomsky's Minminalist Program, Larsonian...

This book shows how grammar helps people communicate and looks at the ways grammar and meaning interrelate. The author starts from the notion that a speaker codes a meaning into grammatical forms which the listener is then able to recover: each word, he shows, has its own meaning and each bit of grammar its own function, their combinations creating and limiting the possibilities for different words. He uncovers a rationale for the varying grammatical properties of different words and in the process explains many facts about English - such as why we can say I wish to go, I wish that he would...

The third edition of the book widely recognized as providing the most readable and clearly articulated introduction to Cognitive Linguistics is fully revised and updated to include the considerable developments in Cognitive Linguistics since 1987. It covers recent research on polysemy, meaning relatedness and metaphors, as well as expanding the discussion of syntactic categories and the relevance of computer simulations.

This book shows how grammar helps people communicate and looks at the ways grammar and meaning interrelate. The author starts from the notion that a speaker codes a meaning into grammatical forms which the listener is then able to recover: each word, he shows, has its own meaning and each bit of grammar its own function, their combinations creating and limiting the possibilities for different words. He uncovers a rationale for the varying grammatical properties of different words and in the process explains many facts about English - such as why we can say I wish to go, I wish that he would...

How and why are languages constantly changing? Historical linguistics seeks to find out by going beyond the history of individual languages to discover the general principles which underlie language change. But our evidence is severely limited. Most of the world's languages are still unwritten, and even in areas with long written traditions, such as Europe and the Near East, documentary evidence stretches only a little way back along the path of the historical development of languages. How, then, can we uncover our long linguistic prehistory, and what can it tell us about language change?...

In this book, Peter Culicover introduces the analysis of natural language within the broader question of how language works - of how people use languages to configure words and morphemes in order to express meanings. He focuses both on the syntactic and morphosyntactic devices that languages use, and on the conceptual structures that correspond to particular aspects of linguistic form. He seeks to explain linguistic forms and in the process to show how these correspond with meanings.
The book's clear, step-by-step exposition is presented within the Simpler Syntax framework whose...

This book provides an introduction to compositional semantics and to the syntax/semantics interface. It is rooted within the tradition of model theoretic semantics, and develops an explicit fragment of both the syntax and semantics of a rich portion of English.
Professor Jacobson adopts a Direct Compositionality approach, whereby the syntax builds the expressions while the semantics simultaneously assigns each a model-theoretic interpretation. Alongside this approach, the author also presents a competing view that makes use of an intermediate level, Logical Form. She develops parallel...

This is the first textbook on Functional Discourse Grammar, a recently developed theory of language structure which analyses utterances at four independent levels of grammatical representation: pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological. The book offers a very systematic and highly accessible introduction to the theory: following the top-down organization of the model, it takes the reader step-by-step though the various levels of analysis (from pragmatics down to phonology), while at the same time providing a detailed account of the interaction between these different levels. The...