Download or read book Argument Licensing and Agreement written by Claire Halpert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The strikingly unrestricted syntactic distribution of nouns in many Bantu languages often leads to proposals that syntactic case does not play an active role in the grammar of Bantu. This book offers a different conclusion that the basis of Zulu that Bantu languages have not only a system of structural case, but also a complex system of morphological case that is comparable to systems found in languages like Icelandic. By comparing the system of argument licensing found in Zulu to those found in more familiar languages, Halpert introduces a number of insights onto the organization of the grammar. First, while this book argues in favor of a case-licensing analysis of Zulu, it locates the positions where case is assigned lower in the clause than what is found in nominative-accusative languages. In addition, Zulu shows evidence that case and agreement are two distinct operations in the language, located on different heads and operating independently of each other. Despite these unfamiliarities, there is evidence that the timing relationships between operations mirror those found in other languages. Second, this book proposes a novel type of morphological case that serves to mask many structural licensing effects in Zulu; the effects of this case are unfamiliar, Halpert argues that its existence is expected given the current typological picture of case. Finally, this book explores the consequences of case and agreement as dissociated operations, showing that given this situation, other unusual properties of Bantu languages, such as hyper-raising, are a natural result. This exploration yields the conclusion that some of the more unusual properties of Bantu languages in fact result from small amounts of variation to deeply familiar syntactic principles such as case, agreement, and the EPP.

Download or read book Argument Licensing and Agreement in Zulu written by Claire Halpert and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thesis, I examine some core grammatical phenomena - case licensing, agreement, the EPP - through the lens of the Bantu language Zulu. Zulu has a number of remarkable and puzzling properties whose analysis affords us new insight on the interaction between these components. Despite a number of unusual-looking properties in the domain of nominal distribution, I propose that Zulu has a both a system of asbtract structural case and a system of morphological case. This conclusion is notable because it has long been assumed that Bantu languages lack both of these types of case (e.g. Harford Perez, 1985). Though the type of case system that I propose for Zulu is at its core similar to our current understanding of case, there are a number of differences between the case system I argue for in Zulu and more familiar case systems. In particular, I demonstrate that the positions in which structural licensing occur in Zulu are not the familiar positions of structural licensing: none of the heads that function as structural licensers in a language like English - T0, v0 , and P0 - are licensers in Zulu. The absence of licensing from these positions gives rise to a system in which case-licensing and phi-agreement have no syntactic overlap. I show that the interactions between phi-agreement and morphological case in Zulu provide a novel argument in favor of treating phi-agreement as a syntactic process. I also argue that Zulu has a novel type of morphological case: the augment vowel functions as a freely-applying case-licenser for nominal that lack structural case. The existence of such a morpheme is notable because this type of element has been explicitly ruled out by various theories (e.g. Schutze, 2001) on the grounds that it would render the Case Filter vacuous. Finally, I build on this system of case in Zulu to analyze constructions that involve a puzzling agreement pattern: complex NPs and raised subjects appear to allow optional agreement in positions where Zulu otherwise requires it. I argue that the optional agreement effect in these constructions arises from the possibility for T to agree with a CP. From these construction, we gain insight into the properties of agreement and the EPP in Zulu. Specifically, these constructions demonstrate the inadequacy of a theory of "reverse agree" to capture the patterns in Zulu and the primacy of a syntactic EPP to Zulu syntax.

Download or read book The Conjoint Disjoint Alternation in Bantu written by Jenneke van der Wal and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together descriptions and analyses of the conjoint/disjoint alternation, a typologically significant phenomenon found in many Bantu languages. The chapters provide in-depth documentation, comparative studies and theoretical analyses of the alternation from a range of Bantu languages, showing its crosslinguistic variation in constituent structure, morphology, prosody and information structure.

Download or read book Descriptive and Theoretical Approaches to African Linguistics written by Galen Sibanda and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descriptive and Theoretical Approaches to African Linguistics contains a selection of revised and peer-reviewed papers from the 49th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, held at Michigan State University in 2018. The contributions from both students and more senior scholars, based in North America, Africa and other parts of the world, provide a glimpse of the breadth and quality of current research in African linguistics from both descriptive and theoretical perspectives. Fields of interest range from phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics to sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, language documentation, computational linguistics and beyond. The articles reflect both the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa and the wide range of research areas covered by presenters at ACAL conferences.

Download or read book A Featural Typology of Bantu Agreement written by Jenneke van der Wal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores variation in Bantu subject and object marking on the basis of data from 75 Bantu languages. It specifically addresses the question of which features are involved in agreement and nominal licensing, and examines how parametric variation in those features accounts for the settings and patterns that are attested crosslinguistically.

Download or read book Aspects of Argument Licensing written by Bethany Lochbihler and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Agreement and Its Failures written by Omer Preminger and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-09-12 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel proposal regarding predicate-argument agreement that combines detailed empirical investigation with rigorous theoretical discussion. In this book, Omer Preminger investigates how the obligatory nature of predicate-argument agreement is enforced by the grammar. Preminger argues that an empirically adequate theory of predicate-argument agreement requires recourse to an operation, whose obligatoriness is a grammatical primitive not reducible to representational properties, but whose successful culmination is not enforced by the grammar. Preminger's argument counters contemporary approaches that find the obligatoriness of predicate-argument agreement enforced through representational means. The most prominent of these is Chomsky's “interpretability”-based proposal, in which the obligatoriness of predicate-argument agreement is enforced through derivational time bombs. Preminger presents an empirical argument against contemporary approaches that seek to derive the obligatory nature of predicate-argument agreement exclusively from derivational time bombs. He offers instead an alternative account based on the notion of obligatory operations better suited to the facts. The crucial data involves utterances that inescapably involve attempted-but-failed agreement and are nonetheless fully grammatical. Preminger combines a detailed empirical investigation of agreement phenomena in the Kichean (Mayan) languages, Zulu (Bantu), Basque, Icelandic, and French with an extensive and rigorous theoretical exploration of the far-reaching consequences of these data. The result is a novel proposal that has profound implications for the formalism that the theory of grammar uses to derive obligatory processes and properties.

Download or read book Textbooks in the Zulu language written by Zulu Language and published by . This book was released on 1935 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Agree to Agree written by Peter W. Smith and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agreement is a pervasive phenomenon across natural languages. Depending on one’s definition of what constitutes agreement, it is either found in virtually every natural language that we know of, or it is at least found in a great many. Either way, it seems to be a core part of the system that underpins our syntactic knowledge. Since the introduction of the operation of Agree in Chomsky (2000), agreement phenomena and the mechanism that underlies agreement have garnered a lot of attention in the Minimalist literature and have received different theoretical treatments at different stages. Since then, many different phenomena involving dependencies between elements in syntax, including movement or not, have been accounted for using Agree. The mechanism of Agree thus provides a powerful tool to model dependencies between syntactic elements far beyond φ-feature agreement. The articles collected in this volume further explore these topics and contribute to the ongoing debates surrounding agreement. The authors gathered in this book are internationally reknown experts in the field of Agreement.

Download or read book Subject and Object Agreement in Zulu written by Sonja Elva Bosch and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory written by Dominique Sportiche and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory offers beginning students a comprehensive overview of and introduction to our current understanding of the rules and principles that govern the syntax of natural languages. Includes numerous pedagogical features such as 'practice' boxes and sidebars, designed to facilitate understanding of both the 'hows' and the 'whys' of sentence structure Guides readers through syntactic and morphological structures in a progressive manner Takes the mystery out of one of the most crucial aspects of the workings of language – the principles and processes behind the structure of sentences Ideal for students with minimal knowledge of current syntactic research, it progresses in theoretical difficulty from basic ideas and theories to more complex and advanced, up to date concepts in syntactic theory

Download or read book Understanding Morphology written by Martin Haspelmath and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of Understanding Morphology has been fully revised in line with the latest research. It now includes 'big picture' questions to highlight central themes in morphology, as well as research exercises for each chapter. Understanding Morphology presents an introduction to the study of word structure that starts at the very beginning. Assuming no knowledge of the field of morphology on the part of the reader, the book presents a broad range of morphological phenomena from a wide variety of languages. Starting with the core areas of inflection and derivation, the book presents the interfaces between morphology and syntax and between morphology and phonology. The synchronic study of word structure is covered, as are the phenomena of diachronic change, such as analogy and grammaticalization. Theories are presented clearly in accessible language with the main purpose of shedding light on the data, rather than as a goal in themselves. The authors consistently draw on the best research available, thus utilizing and discussing both functionalist and generative theoretical approaches. Each chapter includes a summary, suggestions for further reading, and exercises. As such this is the ideal book for both beginning students of linguistics, or anyone in a related discipline looking for a first introduction to morphology.

Download or read book Probes and Their Horizons written by Stefan Keine and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive theory of selective opacity effects—configurations in which syntactic domains are opaque to some processes but transparent to others—within a Minimalist framework. In this book, Stefan Keine investigates in detail “selective opacity”— configurations in which syntactic domains are opaque to some processes but transparent to others—and develops a comprehensive theory of these syntactic configurations within a contemporary Minimalist framework. Although such configurations have traditionally been analyzed in terms of restrictions on possible sequences of movement steps, Keine finds that analogous restrictions govern long-distance dependencies that do not involve movement. He argues that the phenomenon is more widespread and abstract than previously assumed. He proposes a new approach to such effects, according to which probes that initiate the operation Agree are subject to “horizons,” which terminate their searches. Selective opacity effects raise important questions about the nature of locality in natural language, the representation of movement-type asymmetries, correlations between clause structure and locality, and possible interactions between syntactic dependencies. With a focus on in-depth case studies of Hindi-Urdu and German, Keine offers detailed investigations of movement dependencies, long-distance agreement, wh-dependencies, the A/A' distinction, restructuring, freezing effects, successive cyclicity, and phase theory. Keine's account offers a thorough understanding of selective opacity and the systematic overarching generalizations to which it is subject.

Download or read book The Syntax of Imperatives written by Asier Alcázar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-23 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The imperative clause is one of three major sentence types that have been found to be universal across the languages of the world. Compared to declaratives and interrogatives, the imperative type has received comparatively less attention. Using compelling empirical evidence, this cutting-edge study presents a new linguistic theory of imperatives.

Download or read book The Grammar of Copulas Across Languages written by María J. Arche and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a crosslinguistic survey of the current theoretical debates around copular constructions from a generative perspective. Following an introduction to the main questions surrounding the analysis and categorization of copulas, the chapters address a range of key topics including the existence of more than one copular form in certain languages, the factors determining the presence or absence of a copula, and the morphology of copular forms. The team of expert contributors present new theoretical proposals regarding the formal mechanisms behind the behaviour and patterns observed in copulas in a wide range of typologically diverse languages, including Czech, French, Korean, and languages from the Dene and Bantu families. Their findings have implications beyond the study of copulas and shed more light on issues such as agreement relations, the nature of grammatical categories, and nominal predicates in syntax and semantics.

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 1412 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 Heritage Languages and Their Speakers written by Maria Polinsky and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-16 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering study of heritage languages, from a leading scholar in this area of study world-wide.