Kategoria BISAC: Language Arts & Disciplines >> Linguistics - Syntax

Over the past decade, many issues leading towards refining the model have been identified for a theory of syntax under minimalist assumptions. One of the central questions within the current theoretical model, Phase Theory, is architectural in nature: Assuming a minimal structure of the grammar, how does the computational system manipulate the grammar to construct a well-formed derivation that takes items from the mental lexicon to the interpretive interfaces? This collection addresses this issue by exploring the design of the grammar and the tools of the theory in order to shed light on...

In the 1980s generative grammar recognized that functional material is able to project syntactic structure in conformity with the X-bar-format. This insight soon led to a considerable increase in the inventory of functional projections. The basic idea behind this line of theorizing, which goes by the name of cartography, is that sentence structure can be represented as a template of linearly ordered positions, each with their own syntactic and semantic import.

In recent years, however, a number of problems have been raised for this approach. For example, certain combinations of...

The first case study focuses on instances of stranding to the right of a sluiced wh-phrase: prepositions in English (What about?) and demonstrative pronouns in southern Dutch dialects (Wie dat? 'who that'). Van Craenenbroeck gives both of...

The first case study focuses on instances of stranding to the right of a sluiced wh-phrase: prepositions in English (What about?) and demonstrative pronouns in southern Dutch dialects (Wie dat? 'who that'). Van Craenenbroeck gives both of...

The contributions to The Fruits of Empirical Linguistics. Volume 1: Process reveal why the data-driven approach makes for a research environment which is fast-moving and democratic: technological change has made the sources of linguistic data readily accessible. These contributions show the methods both professional and student linguists are using to gather more evidence more easily than before.

This book clarifies - on the basis of mainly Hungarian data - basic issues concerning the category 'adverb, ' the function 'adverbial, ' and the grammar of adverbial modification. It argues for the PP analysis of adverbials, and claims that they enter the derivation via left- and right-adjunction. Their merge-in position is determined by the interplay of syntactic, semantic, and prosodic factors. The semantically motivated constraints discussed also include a type restriction affecting adverbials semantically incorporated into the verbal predicate, an obligatory focus position for scalar...

Examining its subject from a generative perspective, this highly detailed text deals with the syntax of nominal expressions. It focuses on empirical data taken from the Spanish language, though the author goes further to draw conclusions of wider theoretical interest from material culled from other languages too.

The book considers crucial phenomena in the nominal domain, such as extraction out of nominal phrases and ellipsis in these phrases, as well as their modification. In doing so it provides the reader with a unified explanation of a number of phenomena that have not...

This rich volume deals comprehensively with cross-linguistic variation in the morphosyntax of ditransitive constructions: constructions formed with verbs (like give) that take Agent, Theme and Recipient arguments. For the first time, a broadly cross-linguistic perspective is adopted. The present volume, consisting of an overview article and twenty-odd in-depth studies of ditransitive constructions in individual languages from different continents, arose from the conference on ditransitive constructions held at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) in 2007. It...

This book analyzes the form and function of the English passive from a verb-based point of view. It takes the position that the various surface forms of the passive (with or without thematic subject, with or without object, with or without by-phrase, with or without auxiliary) have a common source and are determined by the interplay of the syntactic properties of the verb and general syntactic principles. Each structural element of the passive construction is examined separately, and the participle is considered the only defining component of the passive.

Special emphasis...

In The Syntax of Adjectives, Guglielmo Cinque offers cross-linguistic evidence that adjectives have two sources. Arguing against the standard view, and reconsidering his own earlier analysis, Cinque proposes that adjectives enter the nominal phase either as "adverbial" modifiers to the noun or as predicates of reduced relative clauses. Some of his evidence comes from a systematic comparison between Romance and Germanic languages. These two language families differ with respect to the canonical position taken by adjectives, which is prenominal in Germanic and both pre- and postnominal in...