These previously unpublished articles offer a cross-linguistic perspective on small clauses. They discuss subjects such as the different types of small clauses across languages and lexical items, the internal syntax of small clauses and their structure, and the general topic of the grammar of predication, ranging from a total questioning of the existence of small clauses to claims that they exist in every predication context. The editors' cross-linguistic approach addresses syntactic and lexical issues as well as the relationships between small clauses and language acquisition among children....

This new volume serves to focus and clarify the debate surrounding long-distance reflexives by examining the role of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics/discourse in the use of long-distance reflexives in a variety of languages. Graduate students, upper class undergraduates, theoretical linguists, computational linguists, psycholinguists, and linguists at large will find this an important tool. Syntacticians, as well as specialists in language acquisition and processing, will find the volume central to their work. The book is also of great value to those interested in Asian languages,...

Syntactic doubling is the phenomenon in which a constituent, i.e., a morphosyntactic feature, morpheme, word or phrase, is expressed two or more times within a clause. Since such duplicates are often redundant in that they do not contribute to semantic interpretation, the question arises as to why they are possible or necessary. This theoretical question becomes even more urgent in view of the fact that closely related language varieties such as the dialects of one dialect family often differ with respect to the possibility of doubling. This book puts together seventeen papers on...

Complex predicates can be loosely defined as a sequence of items that behave as a single predicate, projecting a single argument structure within a clause. Each of the members of the predicate contributes part of the information ordinarily associated with a single head. The present volume presents a collection of theoretical linguistic results on the study of complex predicates in different perspectives and with a variety of approaches. Important empirical and theoretical issues cutting across various subfields of linguistics are being addressed in this book, such as: -Syntactic and semantic...

While experimental data collection has been common in psycholinguistics for some time, only relatively recently have experimental methods been employed to collect data for research in formal linguistics. Experimental methods can be particularly useful for investigating phenomena at the interfaces of the components of grammar, where the sources of multiple types of information need to be carefully controlled. Experiments at the Interfaces, edited by Jeffrey T. Runner from the University of Rochester, brings together recent experimental research examining a variety of issues within syntax and...

A central question in the study of language concerns the mechanisms by which the participants in an event described by a sentence come to occupy their positions and acquire their interpretation. The papers included in this volume explore current issues and re-assess generally accepted premises on the relationship between lexical meaning and the morphosyntax of sentences by confronting two competing approaches to this issue. A long-standing approach is based on the assumption that it is the lexical meaning of a verb that determines, albeit indirectly, the basic properties of sentence structure...

Crosslinguistic Studies on Noun Phrase Structure and Reference contains 11 studies on the grammar of noun phrases. Part One explores NP-structure and the impact of information structure, countability and number marking on interpretation, using data from Russian, Armenian, Hebrew, Brazilian Portuguese, Karitiana, Turkish, English, Catalan and Danish. Part Two examines language specific definiteness marking strategies in spoken and signed languages--differentiated definiteness marking in Germanic, double definiteness in Greek, adnominal demonstratives in Japanese, 'weak' definiteness in...

This volume brings together recent research on the semantics and syntax of pseudo-incorporation (PI), which is a construction of crucial significance for linguistic explorations as it brings together several fundamental areas of linguistic research, such as morphology, argument structure, modification, discourse and information structure. The main purpose of the book is to further improve our understanding of the phenomenon, expand the domain of inquiry by bringing into focus new empirical data from a wide array of languages, offer new formal analyses of PI, and strengthen the links with...