Comprising eleven studies on languages with designated structural topic and focus positions, this volume includes an introduction surveying the empirical and theoretical problems involved in the description of this language type. Focusing on languages outside the traditional Indo-European group, the essays look at Chadic, Somali, Basque, Catalan, Old Romance, Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, and Quechua. The papers provide interesting new empirical data, as well as a variety of means and alternatives of representing them structurally. At the same time, they address important theoretical...

Philologists aiming to reconstruct the grammar of ancient languages face the problem that the available data always underdetermine grammar, and in the case of gaps, possible mistakes, and idiosyncracies there are no native speakers to consult. The authors of this volume overcome this difficulty by adopting the methodology that a child uses in the course of language acquisition: they interpret the data they have access to in terms of Universal Grammar (more precisely, in terms of a hypothetical model of UG). Their studies, discussing syntactic and morphosyntactic questions of Older Egyptian,...

The purpose of this book is to argue for the claim that Hungarian sentence structure consists of a non-configurational propositional component, preceded by configurationally determined operator positions. In the course of this, various descriptive issues of Hungarian syntax will be analyzed, and various theoretical questions concerning the existence and nature of non- configurational languages will be addressed. The descriptive problems to be examined in Chapters 2 and 3 center around the word order of Hungarian sentences. Chapter 2 identifies an invariant structure in the apparently freely...

Clearly written and comprehensive in scope, this is an essential guide to syntax in the Hungarian language. It describes the key grammatical features of the language, focusing on the phenomena that have proved to be theoretically the most relevant and have attracted the most attention. Katalin E. Kiss's textbook explores issues currently at the center of theoretical debates, including the syntax and semantics of focus, the analysis of quantifier scope, and negative concord.

Katalin Kiss, of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, has brought together in this volume substantial new results in a novel field of research.

The text analyzes the syntactic and semantic consequences of event structure. The studies contained in this volume test the hypothesis that event structure correlates with a number of things, including word order, the presence or absence of the verbal particle, and the ]/- specific] feature of the internal argument.

Clearly written and comprehensive in scope, this is an essential guide to syntax in the Hungarian language. It describes the key grammatical features of the language, focusing on the phenomena that have proved to be theoretically the most relevant and have attracted the most attention. Katalin E. Kiss's textbook explores issues currently at the center of theoretical debates, including the syntax and semantics of focus, the analysis of quantifier scope, and negative concord.