Download or read book Features Categories and the Syntax of A Positions written by E. Haeberli and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates various aspects of the distribution of nominal arguments, and in particular the cross-linguistic variation that can be found among the Germanic languages in this domain of the syntax. The empirical topics discussed include variable vs. fixed argument order, the distribution of subjects with respect to adjuncts, expletive constructions, and oblique subjecthood. These are analyzed within a theoretical framework which is based on the Minimalist Program.
Download or read book Features Categories and the Syntax of A Positions written by E. Haeberli and published by . This book was released on 2002-08-31 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Feature Based Syntax of Functional Categories written by Michael Hegarty and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops ideas of Minimalist syntax to derive functional categories from the partially-ordered features expressed by functional elements, thereby dispensing with functional categories as primitives of the theory. It generalizes attempts to do this in the literature, while drawing significant empirical consequences from general constraints formulated to block overgeneration. The resulting theory of the construction of functional categories is applied to various problems in syntactic analysis and comparative and historical syntax, including variation across Germanic languages in patterns of verb-second and in the occurrence of expletive subjects in existential constructions, verb positions in Old and Middle English, problems regarding the placement of clitic pronouns in Romance languages and Modern Greek, and some previously unexamined structures of reduced clause coordination in colloquial English. Facts from early stages of the acquisition of syntax are shown to follow from the mechanisms for the projection of functional features as functional categories, exercised before all of the features for a language, along with their ordering and feature co-occurrence restrictions, have been acquired. It is observed that child acquisition of functional elements exhibits successive developmental stages, each characterized by the number of clausal functional elements which can be represented together within a clause. This, and facts regarding the lag in development of functional categories by children with specific language impairment, are shown to be not entirely reducible to limitations in working memory or processing capacity, but to depend in part on the growth of representational resources for the projection of functional categories.
Download or read book Diachronic and Comparative Syntax written by Ian Roberts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together for the first time a series of previously published papers featuring Ian Roberts’ pioneering work on diachronic and comparative syntax over the last thirty years in one comprehensive volume. Divided into two parts, the volume engages in recent key topics in empirical studies of syntactic theory, with the eight papers on diachronic syntax addressing major changes in the history of English as well as broader aspects of syntactic change, including the introduction to the formal approach to grammaticalisation, and the eight papers on comparative syntax exploring head-movement, the nature and distribution of clitics, and the nature of parametric variation and change. This comprehensive collection of the author’s body of research on diachronic and comparative syntax is an essential resource for scholars and researchers in theoretical, comparative, and historical linguistics.
Download or read book The Syntax and Morphology of English Verbs written by Joseph Embley Emonds and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-05-09 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book provides a detailed empirical approach to constructing grammatical analysis and theory, in particular the analysis of English verbs. It develops an integrated formal description of the English verbal system and offers several theoretical advances in the treatment of verbs that have escaped formulation until now.
Download or read book Studies on Old High German Syntax written by Katrin Axel and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-07-19 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph is the first book-length study on Old High German syntax from a generative perspective in twenty years. It provides an in-depth exploration of the Old High German pre-verb-second grammar by answering the following questions: To what extent did generalized verb movement exist in Old High German? Was there already obligatory XP-movement to the left periphery in declarative root clauses? What deviations from the linear verb-second restriction are attested and what do such phenomena reveal about the structure of the left sentence periphery? Did verb placement play the same role in sentence typing as in the modern verb-second languages? A further major topic is null subjects: It is claimed that Old High German was a partial pro-drop language. All these issues are addressed from a comparative-diachronic perspective by integrating research on other Old Germanic languages, in particular on Old English and Gothic. This book is of interest to all those working in the fields of comparative Germanic syntax and historical linguistics.
Download or read book Comparative Studies in Germanic Syntax written by Jutta Hartmann and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This selection of papers presented at the 20th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop brings together contributions that address issues in syntactic predication and studies in the nominal system, as well as papers on data from the history of English and German. Showing a strong comparative commitment, the contributions include studies on previously neglected data on case and predicative structures in Icelandic and other Germanic languages, on the (non-)syntactic distinction of predicative vs. argument NP/DPs, on quirky V2 in Afrikaans, the pronominal system, resumptive pronouns with relative clauses in Zurich German, as well as historical papers on word-formation processes, on auxiliary selection in relation to counter factuality, and on the development of VO-OV orders in the history of English. This volume presents a wide range of studies that enrich both the theoretical understanding and the empirical foundation of comparative research on the Germanic languages.
Download or read book Clausal Architecture and Subject Positions written by Sabine Mohr and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2005-10-13 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comparative study of the Germanic languages. It promotes a new approach to the OV vs. VO classification, according to which all clauses have a universal base where the internal argument is always merged in SpecVP. Word order differences and their correlates result from an interaction of checking conditions, the EPP and different types of verb movement, and from parametric variation concerning the location of the subject of predication in the I- or in the C-system. In the discussion of a range of impersonal constructions in German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, Icelandic, the Mainland Scandinavian languages and English, it is shown that crosslinguistic variation as regards, e.g., the distribution of the expletive in impersonal passives and the occurrence of a Definiteness Effect in Transitive Expletive Constructions is mainly due to the choice of different kinds of 'expletive' elements (each associated with different featural make-ups which force them to show up in different positions), namely true expletives, event arguments and quasi-arguments, whereas expletive pro is shown not to exist.
Download or read book The MIHI EST construction written by Mihaela Ilioaia and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-12-18 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the Romanian mihi est construction (Mi-e foame/frică, me.dat = is hunger/fear ‘I am hungry/ afraid’). While it disappeared from all other Romance languages to be replaced with a habeo structure, the mihi est pattern is in Romanian the most common way of expressing psychological or physiological states. By means of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, the book investigates the status of the core arguments of the mihi est structure, i.e. the dative experiencer and the nominative state noun, as well as its evolution throughout the centuries. The data analysis reveals that the dative experiencer syntactically behaves like nominative subjects, whereas the state noun shows predicate behavior. As for the evolution of the mihi est structure, the analysis shows a certain tendency toward innovation, since in present-day Romanian it can coerce nouns coming from other semantic fields into the construction’s psychological or physiological interpretation. Could this be another unique trait of Romanian, which causes it to seemingly go against the tendency of most Romance languages toward canonical marking of core arguments?
Download or read book The Emergence of Order in Syntax written by Fortuny and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The syntactic component of the faculty of language is argued to be a rewiring of a few independently motivated components: features, the conjunction of a successive operation of union-formation ('Merge') and of derivational records ('nests'), and principles of analysis. Since nests linearize terminals (Kuratowski 1921), Kayne's (1994) LCA becomes dispensable. The study of how features are ordered in discontinuous, analytic and syncretic patterns, governed by the Full Interpretation Condition and the Maximize Matching Effects Principle, provides a simple account for several syntactic phenomena, like the C-Infl connection, certain cartographic observations due to Cinque (1999), the A'-status of preverbal subjects in Null Subject Languages (Solà 1992), the alleviation of wh-island effects in English when the embedded wh-phrase is a subject (Chomsky 1986) and the dynamic V2 patterns in double agreement dialects observed by Zwart (1993). The possibility that Comp-trace effects derive from the contraction of the C-Infl discontinuity is explored and subject islands and wh-islands are derived from the Relativized Opacity Principle, an alternative to Chomsky's PIC.
Download or read book The Syntax of Time written by Jacqueline Guéron and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 684 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of recent studies by leading scholars that examines the syntactic analysis of time from varying perspectives.
Download or read book The Syntax and Semantics of the Left Periphery written by Horst Lohnstein and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2004 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This series consists of collected volumes and monographs about specific issues dealing with interfaces among the subcomponents of linguistic structure: phonology-morphology, phonology-syntax, syntax-semantics, syntax-morphology, and syntax-lexicon. Recent linguistic research has recognized that the subcomponents of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. What is currently under debate is the actual range of such interactions and their most appropriate representation in grammar, and this is precisely the focus of this series. Specifically, it provides a general overview of various topics by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components. The books function as a state-of- the-art report of research.
Download or read book Main Clause Phenomena written by Lobke Aelbrecht and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Main Clause Phenomena: New Horizons takes the study of Main Clause Phenomena (MCP) into the 21st century, without neglecting the origins of the topic. It brings together work by both established and up-and-coming scholars, who present analyses for a wide range of MCP, from a variety of languages, with a particular focus on particles and agreement markers, complementizers and verb second, and the licensing of MCP in different types of clauses. Besides enriching the empirical domain, this volume also engages with the theoretical question of how best to capture the distribution of MCP and, in particular, to what extent they are embeddable and why. The diverse patterns and analyses presented challenge the idea that MCP constitute a homogeneous class. Main Clause Phenomena: New Horizons is of interest not just to scholars specializing in the study of MCP, but to all linguists interested in the syntax and/or semantics of the clause.
Download or read book Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English written by Anneli Meurman-Solin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English is the first book to apply information structure as it relates to language change to a corpus-based analysis of a wide range of features in the evolution of English syntax and grammars of prose in long diachrony.
Download or read book Discovering Syntax written by Joseph E. Emonds and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume, dating from 1991 onwards, focus on highly characteristic constructions of English, Romance languages, and German. Among clause-internal structures, the most puzzling are English double objects, particle constructions, and non-finite complementation (infinitives, participles and gerunds). Separate chapters in Part I offer relatively complete analyses of each. These analyses are integrated into the framework of Emonds (2000), wherein a simplified subcategorization theory fully expresses complement selection. Principal results of that framework constitute the initial essay of Part I. areas. The self-contained essays can all be read separately. They are rich in empirical documentation, and yet in all of them, solutions are constructed around a coherent, relatively simple theoretical core. In Romance languages, classic generative debates have singled out clitic and causative constructions as the most challenging. Separate essays in Part II lay out the often complex paradigms and propose detailed syntactic solutions, simple in their overall architecture yet rich in detailed predictions. Concerning movements to clausal edges, especially controversial topics include passives, English parasitic gaps, and the nature of verb-second systems exemplified by German.. The essays in Part III each use rather surprising but still theoretically constrained structural accounts to solve thorny problems in all three.
Download or read book Parametric Variation written by Theresa Biberauer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-10 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parametric variation in linguistic theory refers to the systematic grammatical variation permitted by the human language faculty. Although still widely assumed, the parametric theory of variation has in recent years been subject to re-evaluation and critique. The Null Subject Parameter, which determines among other things whether or not a language allows the suppression of subject pronouns, is one of the best-known and most widely discussed examples of a parameter. Nevertheless its status in current syntactic theory is highly controversial. This book is a defence of the parametric approach to linguistic variation, set within the framework of the Minimalist Program. It discusses syntactic variation in the light of recent developments in linguistic theory, focusing on issues such as the formal nature of minimalist parameters, the typology of null-subject language systems and the way in which parametric choices can be seen to underlie the synchronic and diachronic patterns observed in natural languages.
Download or read book Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory written by Thórhallur Eythórsson and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-03-06 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains 15 revised papers originally presented at a symposium at Rosendal, Norway, under the aegis of The Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The overall theme of the volume is ‘internal factors in grammatical change.’ The papers focus on fundamental questions in theoretically-based historical linguistics from a broad perspective. Several of the papers relate to grammaticalization in different ways, but are generally critical of ‘Grammaticalization Theory’. Further papers focus on the causes of syntactic change, pinpointing both extra-syntactic (exogenous) causes and – more controversially – internally driven (endogenous) causes. The volume is rounded up by contributions on morphological change ‘by itself.’ A wide range of languages is covered, including Tsova-Tush (Nakh-Dagestan), Zoque, and Athapaskan languages, in addition to Indo-European languages, both the more familiar ones and some less well-studied varieties.
