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 Functional Categories and Parametric Variation written by Jamal Ouhalla and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the idea that functional categories are the flesh and blood of grammar'. From within the context of the Principles and Parameters framework put forward by Chomsky and others, Jamal Ouhalla develops the argument that much of what we understand by the term grammar and grammatical variation involves functional categories in a crucial way. His main thesis is that most, if not all, of the information which determines the major grammatical processes and relations (movement, agreement, case, etc.) and consequently parametric (or crosslinguistic) variation is associated with functional categories. By identifying parameters with a limited set of lexical properties associated with a well-defined group of functional categories, the book offers a new and highly constrained version of the theory of Lexical Parametrization. Dr Ouhalla begins by identifying a set of lexical properties which distinguish functional categories from substantives, arguing that each of them represents a parameter in its own right. He then goes on to argue on the basis of evidence drawn from a broad range of languages that functional categories, most of which are bound morphemes, behave in important respects like independent syntactic categories, and therefore should be assigned a full categorial status on a par with substantives. The remainder of the book contains detailed discussions of how this conclusion, together with the theory of Lexical Parametrization developed, account naturally for some major typological differences having to do mainly with word order in sentences and noun phrases. Although the various discussions it contains are conducted within the Chomskyan framework, Functional Categories and Parametric Variation is comprehensible to linguists of all theoretical persuasions. It is an original and important contribution to syntactic theory in general.
Download or read book Functional Categories and Parametric Variation written by Jamal Ouhalla and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From within the context of the Principles and Parameters framework put forward by Chomsky and others, Jamal Ouhalla develops the argument that much of what we understand by the term grammar involves functional categories.
Download or read book Grammaticalization and Parametric Variation written by Montserrat Batllori and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-08-11 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this outstanding collection of new work the methods and theories of formal syntax are focussed on grammatical variation and change. The editors open the volume with an extensive and accessible introduction to the ideas and techniques deployed in the book and the phenomena and issues on which they are brought to bear. Seventeen chapters follow, divided into two parts, the first concerned with grammaticalization and the second with parametric variation. These show what the application of contemporary theories of syntax and language variation can reveal about syntactic change and variation and the processes of parametric change which lie behind them. They also demonstrate the value of testing and constructing synchronic theories on the basis of historical data. The analyses range over many languages and language families, including Germanic, Romance, Greek, and Chinese. This book will interest scholars and students of grammatical change and theory at graduate level and above.
Download or read book A Companion to Chomsky written by Nicholas Allott and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO CHOMSKY Widely considered to be one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky has revolutionized modern linguistics. His thought has had a profound impact upon the philosophy of language, mind, and science, as well as the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science which his work helped to establish. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to his substantial body of work and the range of its influence, an international assembly of prominent linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists reflect upon the interdisciplinary reach of Chomsky's intellectual contributions. Balancing theoretical rigor with accessibility to the non-specialist, the Companion is organized into eight sections—including the historical development of Chomsky's theories and the current state of the art, comparison with rival usage-based approaches, and the relation of his generative approach to work on linguistic processing, acquisition, semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. Later chapters address Chomsky's rationalist critique of behaviorism and related empiricist approaches to psychology, as well as his insistence upon a "Galilean" methodology in cognitive science. Following a brief discussion of the relation of his work in linguistics to his work on political issues, the book concludes with an essay written by Chomsky himself, reflecting on the history and character of his work in his own words. A significant contribution to the study of Chomsky's thought, A Companion to Chomsky is an indispensable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers with interest in Noam Chomsky's intellectual legacy as one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Microparametric Syntax and Dialect Variation written by James R. Black and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1996-11-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Kayne’s introduction to this volume stresses that comparative work on the syntax of very closely related languages and dialects is a research tool promising to provide both a broad understanding of parameters at their finest-grained and an approach to the question of the minimal units of syntactic variation. The 11 articles in this collection demonstrate the use of this tool in analyzing microparametric variation, principally with reference to Chomsky’s Minimalist program, in a variety of languages. Topics include se/si constructions, hypothetical infinitives and adverbial quantifiers in French and other Romance languages; that-trace variation, Scandinavian possessive constructions, reflexives and subject-verb agreement in Icelandic & Faroese, and verb clusters in continental West Germanic dialects; anaphoric agreement in Labrador Inuttut; negative particle questions in Chinese; imperative inversion in Belfast English; and the second person singular interrogative in the traditional vernacular of Bolton.
Download or read book Parametric Variation in Clitic Constructions written by Hagit Borer and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book OV and VO variation in code switching written by Ji Young Shim and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph is intended as a contribution to the field of bilingualism from a generative syntax perspective at a variety of levels. It investigates code-switching between Korean and English and also between Japanese and English, which exhibit several interesting features. Due to their canonical word order differences, Korean and Japanese being SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) and English SVO (Subject-Verb-Object), a code-switched sentence between Korean/Japanese and English can take, in principle, either OV or VO order, to which little attention has been paid in the literature. On the contrary, word order is one of the most extensively discussed topics in generative syntax, especially in the Principles and Parameter’s approach (P&P) where various proposals have been made to account of various order patterns of different languages. By taking the generative view that linguistic variation is due to variation in the domain of functional categories rather than lexical roots (e.g. Borer 1984; Chomsky 1995), this monograph investigates word order variation in Korean-English and Japanese-English code-switching, with particular attention to the relative placement of the predicate (verb) and its complement (object) in two contrasting word orders, OV and VO, which was tested against Korean-English and Japanese-English bilingual speakers’ introspective judgments. The results provide strong evidence indicating that the distinction between functional and lexical verbs plays a major role in deriving different word orders (OV and VO, respectively) in Korean-English and Japanese-English code-switching, which supports the hypothesis that parametric variation is attributed to differences in the features of a functional category in the lexicon, as assumed in minimalist syntax. In particular, the explanation pursued in this monograph is based on feature inheritance, a syntactic derivational process, which was proposed in recent developments the Minimalist Program. The monograph shows that by studying diverse and creative word order patterns of code-switching, we are at a better disposal to understand how languages are parameterized similarly or differently in a given domain, which is the very topic that generative linguists have pursued for a long time.
Download or read book Parametric Variation in Germanic and Romance written by Elisabet Engdahl and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Parameter Hierarchies and Universal Grammar written by Ian Roberts and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a minimalist approach to cross-linguistic morphosyntactic variation. Ian Roberts argues that the essential insight of the principles-and-parameters approach to variation can be maintained - albeit in a somewhat different guise - in the context of the minimalist program for linguistic theory. The central idea is to organize the parameters of Universal Grammar (UG) into hierarchies that define the ways in which properties of individually variant categories and features may act in concert. A further leading idea, which is consistent with the overall goal of the minimalist programme to reduce the content of UG, is that the parameter hierarchies are not directly determined by UG, and are instead emergent properties stemming from the interaction of the three factors in language design. Cross-linguistic variation in word order, null subjects, incorporation, verb-movement, case/alignment, wh-movement, and negation are all analyzed in the light of this approach. This book represents a significant new contribution to the formal study of cross-linguistic morphosyntactic variation on both the empirical and theoretical levels, and will appeal to researchers and students in all areas of theoretical linguistics and comparative syntax.
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 Theoretical Approaches to Linguistic Variation written by Ermenegildo Bidese and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions of this book deal with the issue of language variation. They all share the assumption that within the language faculty the variation space is hierarchically constrained and that minimal changes in the set of property values defining each language give rise to diverse outputs within the same system. Nevertheless, the triggers for language variation can be different and located at various levels of the language faculty. The novelty of the volume lies in exploring different loci of language variation by including wide-ranging empirical perspectives that cover different levels of analysis (syntax, phonology and prosody) and deal with different kinds of data, mostly from Romance and Germanic languages, from dialects, idiolects, language acquisition, language attrition and creolization, analyzed from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. The volume is divided in three parts. The first part is dedicated to synchronic variation in phonology and syntax; the second part deals with diachronic variation and language change, and the third part investigates the role of contact, attrition and acquisition in giving rise to language change and language variation in bilingual settings. This volume is a useful tool for linguistics of diverse theoretical persuasions working on theoretical and comparative linguistics and to anyone interested in language variation, language change, dialectology, language acquisition and typology.
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 Phase Theory written by Ángel J. Gallego and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a detailed and up to date review of the framework of phases (Chomsky 2000 and subsequent work). It explores the interaction between the narrow syntactic computation and the external systems from a minimalist perspective. As has sometimes been noted, "Phase Theory" is the current way to study the cyclic nature of the system, and 'phases' are therefore the natural locality hallmark, being directly relevant for phenomena such as binding, agreement, movement, islands, reconstruction, or stress assignment. This work discusses the different approaches to phases that have been proposed in the recent literature, arguing in favor of the thesis that the points of cyclic transfer are to be related to uninterpretable morphology (the ?-features on the heads C and v*). This take on phases is adopted in order to investigate raising structures, binding, subjunctive dependents, and object shift (word order) in Romance languages, as well as the nature of islands.
Download or read book Child Language written by William Snyder and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-06-21 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a systematic presentation of the parametric approach to child language. Linguistic theory seeks to specify the range of grammars permitted by the human language faculty and thereby to specify the child's "hypothesis space" during language acquisition. Theories of language variation have central implications for the study of child language, and vice versa. Yet the acquisitional predictions of such theories are seldom tested against attested data. This book aims to redress this neglect. It considers the nature of the information the child must acquire according to the various linguistic theories. In doing so it sets out in detail the practical aspects of acquisitional research, addresses the challenges of working with children of different ages, and shows how the resulting data can be used to test theories of grammatical variation. Particular topics examined in depth include the acquisition of syllable structure, empty categories, and wh-movement. The data sets on which the book draws are freely available to students and researchers via a website maintained by the author. The book is written for scholars and students of child language acquisition in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. It will be a valuable reference for researchers in child language acquisition in all fields.
Download or read book Natural Language and Speech written by Ewan Klein and published by . This book was released on 1991-11-15 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the proceedings of the Symposium on Natural Language and Speech held during the ESPRIT conference of November 1991. The symposiumwas organized by the newly launched Network of Excellence on Language and Speech which brings together the foremost European experts and institutions in the two domains. The proceedings contain ten invited papers from leading experts in language and speech research, together with a set of position papers from a panel session on 'Spoken language systems: technological goals and integration issues'. The papers cover a wide spectrum of research topics, ranging from logical aspects of discourse structure to problems of prosody and automatic speech understanding. A recurrent theme is the development of an integrated cognitively motivated theory of the process by which spoken language is understood. This volume is the second of the ESPRIT Basic Research Series. The ESPRIT Basic Research efforts aim at forging stronglinks between academic and industrial teams carrying out research, often interdisciplinary, at the forefront of information technology. The quality of content of this series and its broad distribution should have a majorimpact in making these advances accessible to both academic and industrial researchers.
Download or read book Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14 written by Lori Repetti and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains a peer-reviewed selection of papers presented at the 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 46) that took place in April 2016 at Stony Brook University (SUNY), New York. The most current research and debates on bilingualism, historical linguistics, morphology, phonology, semantics, sociolinguistics, and syntax can be found in its pages. This collection will be of interest to Romance linguists and general linguists as well.
