Download or read book Information Structure and Agreement written by Victoria Camacho-Taboada and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection consists of thirteen contributions focusing on the latest trends of information structure and agreement, couched in the most current developments of Minimalism, Cartography, and Optimality. Some chapters focus on the syntax of information structure in relation with the position occupied by different constituents in the CP domain and their interpretation such as the distinction between contrastive and corrective focus; the inclusion of given information in focus; the interplay of information structure and binding; the relative position of complementisers; and discourse-based constituents in the left periphery. Information structure is also analysed with regards to prominence phenomena at word level. Other chapters deal with the notion of agreement and its role in the syntax of specific constructions such as applicatives, correlatives, or different types of CP like relatives or embedded interrogatives. This selection of papers was originally presented at the 21st Colloquium on Generative Grammar, held at the University of Seville in April 2011.

Download or read book The Syntax of Information Structural Agreement written by Johannes Mursell and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this research monograph, Johannes Mursell discusses the syntactic impact of information-structural features on agreement. So far, the syntactic contribution of this type of feature has mostly been reduced to movement of topics or foci clause-initial position. Here, the author looks at a different phenomenon, syntactic agreement, and how this process can be dependent on information-structural properties. Based partly on original fieldwork from a typologically diverse set of languages, including Tagalog, Swahili, and Lavukaleve, it is argued that for most areas for which information-structural features have been discussed, it is possible to find cases where these features influence phi-feature agreement. The analysis is then extended to cases of Association with Focus, which does not involve phi-features but can still be accounted for with agreement of information-structural features. The book achieves two main goals: first it provides a uniform analysis for different constructions in unrelated languages. Second, it also gives a new argument that information-structural features should be treated as genuine syntactic features.

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 Agreement in Natural Language written by Center for the Study of Language and Information (U.S.) and published by Center for the Study of Language (CSLI). This book was released on 1988-07 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although grammatical agreement or concord is widespread in human languages, linguistic theorists have generally treated agreement phenomena as secondary or even marginal. All the papers in this volume, however, take agreement phenomena seriously, as presenting either a general issue in theory construction or a descriptive problem in particular types of languages. The theoretical perspectives range from purportedly theory-neutral typological frameworks to assumptions about the validity of one or another current formal model. Further, the degree of generality ranges from a universalist nature-of-human-language agenda to concern with one or another aspect of grammatical agreement or with agreement in a single language or language group.

Download or read book Objects and Information Structure written by Mary Dalrymple and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cross-linguistic study of how objects are affected by information structure.

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 The Bantu Romance Connection written by Cécile de Cat and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-09-26 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark volume is the first work specifically designed to explore the extent to which striking surface morpho-syntactic similarities between Bantu and Romance languages actually represent similar syntactic structures. In particular, it explores the timely and much debated issues of verbal morphology and agreement, the structure of DPs, and word order/information structure, with the goal of providing a better understanding of the structure of the different languages investigated, and the implications this holds for syntactic theory more generally. All of the papers draw on data from both Bantu and Romance languages, providing a framework for much-needed further comparative research on the nature of linguistic structure, its diversity and constraints, and the implications this has for learnability/acquisition. The volume also provides an important precedent for incorporating insights from Bantu linguistic structure into mainstream of syntax research.

Download or read book Syntax Information Structure Interactions in the Sentential Verbal and Nominal Peripheries written by Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-03 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the connection between information structure and syntax, exploring formal explanations to account for the distribution of discourse-based phenomena such as topic preposing and focus fronting across languages, with a particular focus on English and Spanish. It discusses issues such as word order and the diverse conditions under which types of topics and foci are licensed in different contexts. It shows the different behaviors of languages with respect to specific discourse-oriented operations to be the consequence of feature inheritance, which takes place in the different peripheries detected in the sentence. The book will be of interest to linguists and MA and PhD students of linguistics.

Download or read book Information Structure and Sentence Form written by Knud Lambrecht and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-13 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do speakers of all languages use different grammatical structures under different communicative circumstances to express the same idea? Professor Lambrecht explores the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which it is used. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumption about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions and formal sentence structure is governed by rules and conventions of grammar, in a component called 'information structure'. Four independent but interrelated categories are analysed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus.

Download or read book On Information Structure Meaning and Form written by Kerstin Schwabe and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of articles offers a new and compelling perspective on the interface connecting syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics. At the core of this volume is the hypothesis that information structure represents the common interface of these grammatical components. Information structure is investigated here from different theoretical viewpoints yielding typologically relevant information and structural generalizations. In the volume's introductory chapter, the editors identify two central approaches to information structure: the formal and the interpretive view. The remainder of the book is organized accordingly. The first part examines information structure and grammar, concentrating on generalizations across languages. The second part investigates information structure and pragmatics, concentrating on clause structure and context. Through concrete analyses of topic, focus, and related phenomena across different languages, the contributors add new and convincing evidence to the research on information structure.

Download or read book Information Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition written by Christine Dimroth and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003-09-18 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume focus on the impact of information structure on language acquisition, thereby taking different linguistic approaches into account. They start from an empirical point of view, and examine data from natural first and second language acquisition, which cover a wide range of varieties, from early learner language to native speaker production and from gesture to Creole prototypes. The central theme is the interplay between principles of information structure and linguistic structure and its impact on the functioning and development of the learner's system. The papers examine language-internal explanatory factors and in particular the communicative and structural forces that push and shape the acquisition process, and its outcome. On the theoretical level, the approach adopted appeals both to formal and communicative constraints on a learner’s language in use. Two empirical domains provide a 'testing ground' for the respective weight of grammatical versus functional determinants in the acquisition process: (1) the expression of finiteness and scope relations at the utterance level and (2) the expression of anaphoric relations at the discourse level.

Download or read book Split Intransitivity in Italian written by Delia Bentley and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-07-13 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Split intransitivity has received a great deal of attention in theoretical linguistics since the formulation of the Unaccusative Hypothesis by David Perlmutter (1978). This book provides an in-depth investigation of split intransitivity as it occurs in Italian. The principal proposal is that the manifestations of split intransitivity in Italian, whilst being variously constrained by well-formedness conditions on the encoding of information structure, primarily derive from the tension between accusative (syntactic) and active (semantic) alignment. In contrast to approaches which consider the selection of the perfective operator to be the primary diagnostic of unaccusative or unergative syntax, this study identifies two morphosemantic domains in intransitive constructions on the basis of the analysis of a cluster of related phenomena (including agreement, argument suppression, ne -cliticization, past-participle behaviour, the morphosyntax of experiencer predicates and word order, as well as the selection of the perfective operator). Analysing the degree to which semantic, syntactic and discourse factors interact in determining each manifestation of split intransitivity, this work captures successfully the mismatches in the scope of the various diagnostics. Drawing upon insights provided by Role and Reference Grammar, and relying on corpus-based evidence and crossdialectal comparison, this study makes new empirical and theoretical contributions to the debate on split intransitivity. The book is accessible to linguists of all theoretical persuasions and will make stimulating reading for researchers and scholars in Italian and Romance linguistics, typology and theoretical linguistics.

Download or read book Complementation written by Kaoru Horie and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000-11-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complementation, i.e. predication encoded in argument slots, is well-renowned for its syntactic and semantic variability across languages. As such, it poses a tantalizing descriptive/explanatory challenge to linguists of any theoretical persuasion. Recent developments in Cognitive and Functional-typological linguistics have enabled researchers to address various unexplored research questions on complementation phenomena. The seven papers included in this volume represent the most recent endeavors to explore cognitive-functional foundations of complementation phenomena from various theoretical perspectives (Cognitive Grammar, Mental Space Theory, Typology, Discourse-functional linguistics, Cognitive Science). The seven papers are prefaced by an introductory chapter (Kaoru Horie and Bernard Comrie) which situates the current volume within the major complementation studies of the past forty years. This work presents a new theoretical venue of complementation studies and enhances our understanding of this complex yet intriguing syntactic and semantic phenomenon.

Download or read book The Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar written by Mary Dalrymple and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2023-12-14 with total page 2192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches.

Download or read book Diachronic Studies on Information Structure written by Gisella Ferraresi and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last few years a lively discussion on information packaging has arisen, where traditional dichotomies Theme/Rheme, Topic/Comment and Focus/Background have been taken up again and partly reinterpreted. The discussion is mainly being held in syntax, but also in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. Some remarkable progress has been made especially in Focus phonology. Even if the role of information conveying and information packaging in the Indoeuropean languages was hinted at as early as in the classical studies of the Neogrammarians, this field has remained neglected in today's historical linguistics. This volume tries to partly cover this lack with a sample of papers which offer a various range of new empirical data analyzed from the point of view of information structure. The novelty of the papers consists in the modern theoretical perspective from which the data are analyzed and in the various phenomena considered, which range from the rise of clitic elements to word order change and verb movement. Editorial board Dr. habil. Kai Alter (Newcastle University Medical School) Prof. Dr. Ulrike Demske (Universität des Saarlandes) Prof. Dr. Ewald Lang (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Prof. Dr. Rosemarie Lühr (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena) Prof. Dr. Thomas Pechmann (Universität Leipzig) Prof. em. Dr. Anita Steube (Universität Leipzig)

Download or read book On the Role of Contrast in Information Structure written by Jorina Brysbaert and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In research on Information Structure, there is an ongoing discussion about the role of contrast. While most linguists consider contrast to be compatible with both focus and topic, some argue that it is an autonomous IS category. Contrast has been shown to be encoded by different linguistic means, such as specific morphemes, adverbials, clefts, prosodic cues. Hence, this concept is also related to other domains, in particular morphosyntax and prosody. The precise way in which they interact is however not yet entirely clear. Moreover, from a methodological point of view, the identification and annotation of contrast in corpora is not straightforward. This volume provides a selection of articles discussing the definition of contrast, the importance of distinguishing different types of contrast, the use of several encoding strategies, and the annotation of contrast in corpora using the Question Under Discussion Model. The contributions offer data on English, French, French Belgian Sign Language, German, Hindi, Italian and Spanish.

Download or read book The Syntax Information Structure Interface written by Timothy Gupton and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-10-24 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is quite remarkable that, after over a half-century of generative grammar, there is still uncertainty with respect to the analysis of preverbal subjects in a number of languages. According to canonical analyses, preverbal subjects are arguments (A-elements). However, following non-canonical analyses, preverbal subjects are not arguments, but rather A’-elements that behave like topical preverbal direct and indirect objects, which have received a CLLD analysis in the literature (e.g. Cinque 1990). The implications of this debate are far-reaching for generative theory: if preverbal subjects are non-arguments, one must question the universality of the EPP (as in e.g. Alexiadou & Agnostopoulou 1998), as well as its associated features and feature-strengths. Galician is an underdocumented Romance language within the generative paradigm. In this book, I develop an experimental program for establishing clausal word order preferences for a number of information structure contexts. The preference data suggest that preverbal subjects behave like canonical elements, and not CLLD elements. These results inform the model of the preverbal field that I propose for Galician, which also takes into account the enclisis-proclisis divide and reco.