Download or read book Parametric Syntax written by Hagit Borer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-10-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

Download or read book Verb Phrase Syntax A Parametric Study of English and Spanish written by Karen Zagona and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is concerned with the structure of verb phrases in English and Spanish, and with syntactic processes involving VP and Vo. A primary focus of attention is auxiliary verbs. It is argued that the structure dominating these verbs is essentially the same in English and Spanish, as is the structure dominating auxiliaries and 'main' verbs in each language. It must be concluded that the occurrence of distinct syntactic processes affecting auxiliaries and other VP constituents in the two languages does not follow from parametrization of phrase structure. It is argued that similarities between the two languages with respect to the composition of so-called "V*" constructions derive from the fact that VP is licensed under both clauses of the Principle of Full Interpretation, i. e. , predication and sub categorization. Distinct syntactic processes in English and Spanish are argued to follow from the fact that there are inflectional features related to each of these licensing conditions (including specification for [ ± PAST) and nominal person/number features) which affect government relations in distinct ways, resulting in parametrization of S-structure representa tions. xi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my appreCiatIOn to the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Washington for support for preparation of the final manuscript, and to the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at the University of Virginia for a leave during which much of this research was accomplished.

Download or read book Parametric Variation written by Theresa Biberauer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010 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. This book is a defence of the parametric approach to linguistic variation, set within the framework of the Minimalist Program.

Download or read book Theoretical Analyses on Romance Languages written by José Lema and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the papers presented at the 26th LSRL, this volume offers a selection of a contributions on phonological issues and on syntax. Most of the grammatical phenomena discussed are treated within the frameworks of the Minimalist Program, Distributed Morphology, or Optimality Theory. It was apparent from the diversity of the papers delivered, that these approaches are exposing novel phenomena, which enrich and widen our knowledge and understanding of language. The analyses undertaken in these articles range over a variety of (dialects of) Romance languages.

Download or read book Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10 written by Ernestina Carrilho and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains a selection of papers of the 28th Going Romance conference, which was organized by the Linguistics centers of Universidade de Lisboa and Universidade Nova de Lisboa in December 2014. It assembles the invited contributions by Alain Rouveret, Guido Mensching, Luigi Rizzi, and Roberta D’Alessandro, and eleven peer-reviewed papers that were presented at the conference or at the workshops on Constituent Order Variation, Crosslinguistic Microvariation in Language Acquisition, and Subordination in Old Romance. The volume covers a wide range of topics in syntax and its interfaces, and brings to current linguistic theorizing new empirical grounding from Romance languages (including standard, diachronic or regional varieties of Asturian, Brazilian and European Portuguese, Catalan, French, Galician, Italian, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish). This will be of interest to scholars in Romance and in general linguistics.

Download or read book Representing Structure in Phonology and Syntax written by Marc van Oostendorp and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-08-17 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Formal grammars by definition need two parts: a theory of computation (or derivation), and a theory of representation. While recent attention in mainstream syntactic and phonological theory has been devoted to the former, the papers in this volume aim to show that the importance of representational details is not diminished by the insights of such theories.

Download or read book International Encyclopedia of Linguistics written by William J. Frawley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 2218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 2nd Edition encompasses the full range of the contemporary field of linguistics, including historical, comparative, formal, mathematical, functional, and philosophical linguistics with special attention given to interrelations within branches of linguistics and to relations of linguistics with other disciplines. Areas of intersection with the social and behavioral sciences--ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and behavioral linguistics--receive major coverage, along with interdisciplinary work in language and literature, mathematical linguistics, computational linguistics, and applied linguistics. Longer entries in the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, ranging up to four thousand words, survey the major fields of study--for example, anthropological linguistics, history of linguistics, semantics, and phonetics. Shorter entries treat specific topics within these fields, such as code switching, sound symbolism, and syntactic features. Other short entries define and discuss technical terms used within the various subfields or provide sketches of the careers of important scholars in the history of linguistics, such as Leonard Bloomfield, Roman Jakobson, and Edward Sapir. A major portion of the work is its extensive coverage of languages and language families. From those as familiar as English, Japanese, and the Romance languages to Hittite, Yoruba, and Nahuatl, all corners of the world receive treatment. Languages that are the subject of independent entries are analyzed in terms of their phonology, grammatical features, syntax, and writing systems. Lists attached to each article on a language group or family enumerate all languages, extinct or still spoken, within that group and provide detailed information on the number of known speakers, geographical range, and degree of intelligibility with other languages in the group. In this way, virtually every known language receives coverage. For ease of reference and to aid research, the articles are alphabetically arranged, each signed by the contributor, supported by up-to-date bibliographies, line drawings, maps, tables, and diagrams, and readily accessible via a system of cross-references and a detailed index and synoptic outline. Authoritative, comprehensive, and innovative, the 2nd edition of the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics will be an indispensable addition to personal, public, academic, and research libraries and will introduce a new generation of readers to the complexities and concerns of this field of study.

Download or read book The Equilibrium of Human Syntax written by Andrea Moro and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assembles a collection of papers in two different domains: formal syntax and neurolinguistics. Here Moro provides evidence that the two fields are becoming more and more interconnected and that the new fascinating empirical questions and results in the latter field cannot be obtained without the theoretical base provided by the former. The book is organized in two parts: Part 1 focuses on theoretical and empirical issues in a comparative perspective (including the nature of syntactic movement, the theory of locality and a far reaching and influential theory of copular sentences). Part 2 provides the original sources of some innovative and pioneering experiments based on neuroimaging techniques (focusing on the biological nature of recursion and the interpretation of negative sentences). Moro concludes with an assessment of the impact of these perspectives on the theory of the evolution of language. The leading and pervasive idea unifying all the arguments developed here is the role of symmetry (breaking) in syntax and in the relationship between language and the human brain.

Download or read book Rethinking Parameters written by Luis Eguren and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parameters of linguistic variation were originally conceived, within the chomskyan Principles and Parameters Theory, as UG-determined options that were associated with grammatical principles and had a rich deductive structure. This characterization of parametric differences among languages has changed significantly over the years, especially so with the advent of Minimalism. This book collects a representative sample of current generative research on the status, origin and size of parameters. Often taking diverging views, the papers in the volume address some or all of the main debated topics in parametric syntax: i.e. are parameters provided by UG, or do they constitute emergent properties arising from points of underspecification?; in which component(s) of the language faculty are parameters to be found?; do clustering effects actually hold across languages?; do macroparameters exist alongside microparameters?; are there parameter hierarchies?; which is the origin and role of parameters in the process of language acquisition? The volume is organized into two parts. Part I ("The nature of variation and parameters") brings together studies whose main goal is to discuss general issues related to parameters (or variation more generally). Part II ("Parameters in the analysis of language variation: case studies") includes a number of works that deal with the empirical basis and proper formulation of well-known particular parameters: the Null Subject Parameter, the NP/DP Parameter, the Compounding Parameter, the Wh-Parameter and the Analyticity Parameter.

Download or read book Continuity and Variation in Germanic and Romance written by Sam Wolfe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 623 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a range of synchronic and diachronic case studies in comparative Germanic and Romance morphosyntax. These two language families, spoken by over a billion people today, have played a central role in linguistic research, but many significant questions remain about the relationship between them. Following an introduction that sets out the methodological, empirical, and theoretical background to the book, the volume is divided into three parts that deal with the morphosyntax of subjects and the inflectional layer; inversion, discourse pragmatics, and the left periphery; and continuity and variation beyond the clause. The contributors adopt a diverse range of approaches, making use of the latest digitized corpora and presenting a mixture of well-known and under-studied data from standard and non-standard Germanic and Romance languages. Many of the chapters challenge received wisdom about the relationship between these two important language families. The volume will be an indispensable resource for researchers and students in the fields of Germanic and Romance linguistics, historical and comparative linguistics, and morphosyntax.

Download or read book The Acquisition of Spanish Morphosyntax written by Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent developments in linguistic theory, as well as the growing body of evidence from languages other than English, provide new opportunities for deeper explorations into how language is represented in the mind of learners. This collection of new empirical studies on the acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax by leading researchers in the field of language acquisition, specifically contributes to the characterization of the L1 / L2 connection in acquisition. Using L1 and L2 Spanish data from children and adults, the authors seek to address the central questions that have occupied developmental psycholinguists in the final decades of the previous century and that will no doubt continue engaging them into the present one.

Download or read book Theoretical Comparative Syntax written by Naoki Fukui and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-04-18 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1. Specifiers and projection -- 2. LF extraction of naze : some theoretical implications -- 3. Strong and weak barriers : remarks on the proper characterization of barriers -- 4. Parameters and optionality -- 5. A note on improper movement -- 6. The principles-and-parameters approach : a comparative syntax of English and Japanese -- 7. Symmetry in syntax : merge and demerge -- 8. Order in phrase structure and movement -- 9. An A-over-A perspective on locality -- 10. The uniqueness parameter -- 11. Nominal structure : an extension of the Symmetry Principle -- 12. Phrase structure -- 13. The Visibility Guideline for functional categories : verb-raising in Japanese and related issues.

Download or read book Micro syntactic Variation in North American English written by Raffaella Zanuttini and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparative work on linguistic varieties that are overall very similar can help us determine where and how exactly grammatical systems differ from one another, and how they change over time. This book explores a range of data on unfamiliar constructions across regional and social dialects, thereby shedding light on the varieties under examination and on the properties of English syntax more generally.

Download or read book Second Language Acquisition written by Tania Ionin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-26 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on classic and cutting-edge research, this textbook shows how grammatical phenomena can best be taught to second language and bilingual learners. Bringing together second language research, linguistics, pedagogical grammar, and language teaching, it demonstrates how linguistic theory and second language acquisition findings optimize classroom intervention research. The book assumes a generative approach but covers intervention studies from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Each chapter describes relevant linguistic structures, discusses core challenges, summarizes research findings, and concludes with classroom and lab-based intervention studies. The authors provide tools to help to design linguistically informed intervention studies, including discussion questions, application questions, case studies, and sample interventions. Online resources feature lecture slides and intervention materials, with data analysis exercises, ensuring the content is clear and ready to use. Requiring no more than a basic course in linguistics, the material serves advanced undergraduates and first-year graduate students studying applied linguistics, education, or language teaching.

Download or read book The Atoms Of Language written by Mark C Baker and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether all human languages are fundamentally the same or different has been a subject of debate for ages. This problem has deep philosophical implications: If languages are all the same, it implies a fundamental commonality-and thus the mutual intelligibility-of human thought. We are now on the verge of answering this question. Using a twenty-year-old theory proposed by the world's greatest living linguist, Noam Chomsky, researchers have found that the similarities among languages are more profound than the differences. Languages whose grammars seem completely incompatible may in fact be structurally almost identical, except for a difference in one simple rule. The discovery of these rules and how they may vary promises to yield a linguistic equivalent of the Periodic Table of the Elements: a single framework by which we can understand the fundamental structure of all human language. This is a landmark breakthrough, both within linguistics, which will thereby become a full-fledged science for the first time, and in our understanding of the human mind.

Download or read book The Grammar of Interactional Language written by Martina Wiltschko and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cutting-edge work, this book analyses the grammar of interactional language with a focus on discourse markers and their typology.

Download or read book Deconstructing Ergativity written by Maria Polinsky and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nominative-accusative and ergative are two common alignment types found across languages. In the former type, the subject of an intransitive verb and the subject of a transitive verb are expressed the same way, and differently from the object of a transitive. In ergative languages, the subject of an intransitive and the object of a transitive appear in the same form, the absolutive, and the transitive subject has a special, ergative, form. Ergative languages often follow very different patterns, thus evading a uniform description and analysis. A simple explanation for that has to do with the idea that ergative languages, much as their nominative-accusative counterparts, do not form a uniform class. In this book, Maria Polinsky argues that ergative languages instantiate two main types, the one where the ergative subject is a prepositional phrase (PP-ergatives) and the one with a noun-phrase ergative. Each type is internally consistent and is characterized by a set of well-defined properties. The book begins with an analysis of syntactic ergativity, which as Polinsky argues, is a manifestation of the PP-ergative type. Polinsky discusses diagnostic properties that define PPs in general and then goes to show that a subset of ergative expressions fit the profile of PPs. Several alternative analyses have been proposed to account for syntactic ergativity; the book presents and outlines these analyses and offers further considerations in support of the PP-ergativity approach. The book then discusses the second type, DP-ergative languages, and traces the diachronic connection between the two types. The book includes two chapters illustrating paradigm PP-ergative and DP-ergative languages: Tongan and Tsez. The data used in these descriptions come from Polinsky's original fieldwork hence presenting new empirical facts from both languages.