Download or read book A Lexicalist Account of Argument Structure written by Stefan Müller and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Currently, there are two prominent schools in linguistics: Minimalism (Chomsky) and Construction Grammar (Goldberg, Tomasello). Minimalism comes with the claim that our linguistic capabilities consist of an abstract, binary combinatorial operation (Merge) and a lexicon. Most versions of Construction Grammar assume that language consists of flat phrasal schemata that contribute their own meaning and may license additional arguments. This book examines a variant of Lexical Functional Grammar, which is lexical in principle but was augmented by tools that allow for the description of phrasal constructions in the Construction Grammar sense. These new tools include templates that can be used to model inheritance hierarchies and a resource driven semantics. The resource driven semantics makes it possible to reach the effects that lexical rules had, for example remapping of arguments, by semantic means. The semantic constraints can be evaluated in the syntactic component, which is basically similar to the delayed execution of lexical rules. So this is a new formalization that might be suitable to provide solutions to longstanding problems that are not available for other formalizations. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Download or read book A lexicalist account of argument structure written by and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are two prominent schools in linguistics: Minimalism (Chomsky) and Construction Grammar (Goldberg, Tomasello). Minimalism comes with the claim that our linguistic capabilities consist of an abstract, binary combinatorial operation (Merge) and a lexicon. Most versions of Construction Grammar assume that language consists of flat phrasal schemata that contribute their own meaning and may license additional arguments. This book examines a variant of Lexical Functional Grammar, which is lexical in principle but was augmented by tools that allow for the description of phrasal constructions in the Construction Grammar sense. These new tools include templates that can be used to model inheritance hierarchies and a resource driven semantics. The resource driven semantics makes it possible to reach the effects that lexical rules had, for example remapping of arguments, by semantic means. The semantic constraints can be evaluated in the syntactic component, which is basically similar to the delayed execution of lexical rules. So this is a new formalization that might be suitable to provide solutions to longstanding problems that are not available for other formalizations. While the authors suggest a lexical treatment of many phenomena and only assume phrasal constructions for selected phenomena like benefactive and resultative constructions in English, it can be shown that even these two constructions should not be treated phrasally in English and that the analysis would not extend to other languages as for instance German. I show that the new formal tools do not really improve the situation and many of the basic conceptual problems remain. Since this specific proposal fails for two constructions, it follows that proposals (in the same framework) that assume phrasal analyses for all constructions are not appropriate either. The conclusion is that lexical models are needed and this entails that the schemata that combine syntactic objects are rather abstract (as in Categorial Grammar, Minimalism, HPSG and standard LFG). On the other hand there are constructions that should be treated by very specific, phrasal schemata as in Construction Grammar and LFG and HPSG. So the conclusion is that both schools are right (and wrong) and that a combination of ideas from both camps is needed.

Download or read book Argument Structure written by Eric J. Reuland and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-11-28 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent developments in the generative tradition have created new interest in matters of argument structure and argument projection, giving prominence to the discussion on the role of lexical entries. Particularly, the more traditional lexicalist view that encodes argument structure information on lexical entries is now challenged by a syntactic view under which all properties of argument structure are taken up by syntactic structure. In the light of these new developments, the contributions in this volume provide detailed empirical investigations of argument structure phenomena in a wide range of languages. The contributions vary in their response to the theoretical questions and address issues that range from the role of specific functional heads and the relation of argument projection with syntactic processes, to the position of argument structure within a broader clausal architecture and the argument structure properties of less studied categories.

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax written by Marcel den Dikken and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.

Download or read book Argument Structure and Syntactic Relations written by Maia Duguine and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The topic of this collection is argument structure. The fourteen chapters in this book are divided into four parts: Semantic and Syntactic Properties of Event Structure; A Cartographic View on Argument Structure; Syntactic Heads Involved in Argument Structure; and Argument Structure in Language Acquisition. Rigorous theoretical analyses are combined with empirical work on specific aspects of argument structure. The book brings together authors working in different linguistic fields (semantics, syntax, and language acquisition), who explore new findings as well as more established data, but then from new theoretical perspectives. The contributions propose cartographic views of argument structure, as opposed to minimalistic proposals of a binary template model for argument structure, in order to optimally account for various syntactic and semantic facts, as well as data derived from wider cross-linguistic perspectives. "Argument structure plays a central role in the articulation of syntax. Yet whether this contribution is primordial or derivative, derivational or representational, minimalist or cartographic, is entirely up for grabs. This is what makes a book like the present one equivalent to a murder thriller: one cannot finish one chapter without wanting to read the next. While the solution to the underlying mystery remains as open as it ever was, the clues offered here seem just impossible to ignore."

Download or read book Arguments and Structure written by Teun Hoekstra and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains 14 articles by Teun Hoekstra (1953-1998) on core issues in syntactic theory. Some articles focus on the structure of DP, others on the structure of the sentence as a whole, while others still deal explicitly with the parallels between the two. The papers are distributed over four sections: "Argument structure", "T-chains", "The morpho-syntax of verbal and nominal projections" and "Small clauses". More than half of the articles in this book are published here for the first time or appear for the first time in English. Hoekstra's work is characterized by a fundamental interest in the central questions of syntactic theory, most notably the relation between argument structure and X-bar structure. This concentrated interest led to a deep understanding of the notion of transitivity, with respect to both the status of the external argument and that of the internal argument, where "status" refers to both the content and the licensing. In this collection of papers, Hoekstra reports on his insights in these matters. As far as content and licensing of the external argument is concerned, this collection contains papers on the relation between passives and their active counterparts, the parallels between possessives and transitives and the differences and similarities between past participles and infinitives. As to the internal argument, we find papers addressing sentential complementation, verbal affixation and resultatives. And there is a whole section on tense, and its role in keeping the sentence together. One of the papers in this collection is Hoekstra's classic, but hitherto unpublished "Small clauses everywhere" (more than 70 pages), which summarizes Hoekstra's views on such issues as resultatives, particle verbs and double object constructions.

Download or read book Argument Structure in Usage Based Construction Grammar written by Florent Perek and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The argument structure of verbs, defined as the part of grammar that deals with how participants in verbal events are expressed in clauses, is a classical topic in linguistics that has received considerable attention in the literature. This book investigates argument structure in English from a usage-based perspective, taking the view that the cognitive representation of grammar is shaped by language use, and that crucial aspects of grammatical organization are tied to the frequency with which words and syntactic constructions are used. On the basis of several case studies combining quantitative corpus studies and psycholinguistic experiments, it is shown how a usage-based approach sheds new light on a number of issues in argument realization and offers frequency-based explanations for its organizing principles at three levels of generality: verbs, constructions, and argument structure alternations.

Download or read book Arguments in Syntax and Semantics written by Alexander Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-29 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to the relations between a predicate and its arguments, for researchers and advanced students in linguistics. Engages foundational issues in both syntax and semantics, with attention to the correspondence between structure at the two levels. Chapters include discussion questions and suggestions for further reading.

Download or read book Arguments in Syntax and Semantics written by Alexander Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-29 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argument structure - the pattern of underlying relations between a predicate and its dependents - is at the base of syntactic theory and the theory of the interface with semantics. This comprehensive guide explores the motives for thematic and event-structural decomposition, and its relation to structure in syntax. It also discusses broad patterns in the linking of syntactic to semantic relations, and includes insightful case studies on passive and resultative constructions. Semantically explicit and syntactically impartial, with a careful, interrogative approach, Williams clarifies notions of argument within both lexicalist and nonlexicalist approaches. Ideal for students and researchers in syntactic and semantic theory, this introduction includes: • A comprehensive overview of arguments in syntax and semantics • Discussion questions and suggestions for further reading • A glossary with helpful definitions of key terms.

Download or read book Word Meaning and Syntax written by Stephen Wechsler and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the nature of the interface between word meaning and syntax, one of the most controversial and elusive issues in contemporary linguistics. It approaches the interface from both sides of the relation, and surveys a range of views on the mapping between them, with an emphasis on lexical approaches to argument structure. Stephen Wechsler begins by analysing the fundamental problem of word meaning, with discussions of vagueness and polysemy, complemented with a look at the roles of world knowledge and normative aspects of word meaning. He then surveys the argument-taking properties of verbs and other predicators, and presents key theories of lexical semantic structure. Later chapters provide a description of formal theories and frameworks for capturing the mapping from word meaning to syntactic structure, as well as arguments in favour of a lexicalist approach to argument structure. The book will interest scholars of theoretical linguistics, particularly in the fields of syntax and lexical semantics, as well as those interested in psycholinguistics and philosophy of language.

Download or read book The Theta System written by Martin Everaert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the recent results and evaluations of the Theta System in both theoretical and experimental domains. Distinguished linguists from all over the world examine the theory in the context of an impressive array of new empirical data ranging from Germanic, Romance, and Slavic to Ugro-Finnish, and Semitic languages.

Download or read book Preferred Argument Structure written by John W. Du Bois and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003-09-29 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preferred Argument Structure offers a profound insight into the relationship between language use and grammatical structure. In his original publication on Preferred Argument Structure, Du Bois (1987) demonstrated the power of this perspective by using it to explain the origins of ergativity and ergative marking systems. Since this work, the general applicability of Preferred Argument Structure has been demonstrated in studies of language after language. In this collection, the authors move beyond verifying Preferred Argument Structure as a property of a given language. They use the methodology to reveal more subtle aspects of the patterns, for example, to look across languages, diachronically or synchronically, to examine particular grammatical relations, and to examine special populations or particular genres. This volume will appeal to linguists interested in the relationship of pragmatics and grammar generally, in the typology of grammatical relations, and in explanations derived from data- and corpus-based approaches to analysis.

Download or read book The Syntax of Argument Structure written by Artemis Alexiadou and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Die Buchreihe Linguistische Arbeiten hat mit über 500 Bänden zur linguistischen Theoriebildung der letzten Jahrzehnte in Deutschland und international wesentlich beigetragen. Die Reihe wird auch weiterhin neue Impulse für die Forschung setzen und die zentrale Einsicht der Sprachwissenschaft präsentieren, dass Fortschritt in der Erforschung der menschlichen Sprachen nur durch die enge Verbindung von empirischen und theoretischen Analysen sowohl diachron wie synchron möglich ist. Daher laden wir hochwertige linguistische Arbeiten aus allen zentralen Teilgebieten der allgemeinen und einzelsprachlichen Linguistik ein, die aktuelle Fragestellungen bearbeiten, neue Daten diskutieren und die Theorieentwicklung vorantreiben.

Download or read book New Perspectives on Argument Structure in Functional Grammar written by Ricardo Mairal Usón and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present monograph deals with lexical representation and linking within the framework of Functional Grammar. The notion of predicate frame as originally proposed in 1978 and subsequent refinements of the theory are challenged in that a new format of representing argument taking properties is formulated. This new format opens new lines of research towards the design of a new linking algorithm in Functional Grammar.

Download or read book Linking written by Janet H. Randall and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-11-07 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linking is one of the challenges for theories of the syntax-semantics interface. In this new approach, the author explores the hypothesis that the positions of syntactic arguments are strictly determined by lexical argument geometry. Through careful argumentation and original analysis, her study provides a framework for explaining the linking patterns of a range of verb classes, leading to a number of insights about lexical structure and a radical rethinking of many verb classes.

Download or read book Argument Structure written by Jane Grimshaw and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 1992-04-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argument Structure is a contribution to linguistics at the interface between lexical syntax and lexical semantics. It formulates an original and highly predictive theory of argument structure that accounts for a large number of syntactic phenomena. The main analytical focus is on passives, nominals, psychological predicates, and the theory of external arguments. In the course of Argument Structure, Jane Grimshaw suggests that, contrary to the prevailing view, argument structure is in fact structured; it encodes prominence relations among arguments which reflect both their thematic and their aspectual properties. The prominence relations support a new theory of external arguments, with far reaching consequences for the syntactic behavior of predicates, and the nature of cross-categorial variation in argument structure.

Download or read book Phrase Structure and Argument Structure written by Terje Lohndal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-06 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the relationship between syntax and semantics, bringing together two seemingly unrelated hypotheses: that verbs do not require arguments, and that specifiers are not required by the grammar. The analysis has consequences for the theory of locality, agreement, serial verbs, and multidominance structures.