Download or read book Phrasal Movement and Its Kin written by David Pesetsky and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000-10-10 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigates the types of movement and movement-like relations that link positions in syntactic structure. David Pesetsky argues that there are three such relations. Besides overt phasal movement, there are two distinct types of movement without phonological effect: covert phrasal movement and feature movement. Focusing on wh-questions, he shows how his classification of movement-like relations allows us to understand the story behind wh-questions in which an otherwise inviolable property of movement—"Attract Closest"—appears to be violated. By demonstrating that more movement takes place in such configurations than previously suspected, he shows that Attract Closest is actually not violated at all in these cases. This conclusion draws on recent research in both syntax and semantics, and depends crucially on Pesetsky's expanded repertoire of movement-like relations. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph No. 37

Download or read book Zero Syntax written by David Michael Pesetsky and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The analysis and theory developed in Zero Syntax is an important contribution to the understanding of Universal Grammar. The overriding theme is the notion that the availability and syntactic positioning of arguments is not a matter of chance but arises from laws governing the structure of lexical entries and from laws governing syntactic structures themselves. Along the way, Zero Syntax also examines issues of broad significance to current theoretical linguistic research in syntax and lexical semantics. Zero Syntax develops two main topics: a simple view of syntactic linking regularities that it defends in the domain of Experiencer predicates (predicates such as annoy), and a theory of syntactic constituency that involves two parallel modes of structural organization (one of which is the Cascade syntax). The theme that ties these issues together is the supposition that phonologically null (zero) morphology is present in structure, detectable through its syntactic and morphological consequences. The arguments inZero Syntax will be relevant to debates about such issues as empty elements in syntax and morphology, whether syntactic structures should be binary branching, the structure of double-object constructions, and whether verbs have multiple meanings related by lexical rules or abstract/general meanings that are ambiguated in particular constructions. Current Studies in Linguistics No. 27

Download or read book Composing Questions written by Hadas Kotek and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of the syntax and semantics of wh-questions through the lens of intervention effects, offering a new proposal on overt and covert wh-movement. In this book, Hadas Kotek investigates the syntax and semantics of wh-questions, offering a new solution to a central question in the study of interrogatives: given that overt wh-movement is cross-linguistically common, is syntactic movement a prerequisite for the interpretation of wh-phrases? Some linguists argue that all wh-phrases undergo movement to interrogative C, even if covertly; others propose mechanisms of in-situ interpretation that do not require any movement. Kotek moves beyond these positions to argue that wh-in-situ does move covertly, but not necessarily to C. Instead, she contends, wh-in-situ undergoes a short movement step akin to covert scrambling. This makes the LF behavior of English parallel to the overt behavior of German. Kotek presents a series of self-paced reading experiments, alongside judgment data from German, to substantiate the idea of covert scrambling. She introduces new diagnostics for the underlying structure of questions, using as a principal tool the distribution of intervention effects. This system allows her to offer the first unified account for a range of phenomena of interrogative syntax-semantics as pied-piping, superiority effects, the cross-linguistically varied syntax of questions, and intervention effects. Kotek develops a theory of interrogative syntax-semantics; studies the phenomena of intervention effects in wh-questions, proposing that the nature of intervention is crucially tied to the availability of wh-movement in a question; and shows that covert wh-movement should be modeled as a short scrambling operation rather than an unbounded, successive-cyclic, and potentially long-distance movement operation.

Download or read book New Directions in the Acquisition of Romance Languages written by João Costa and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book puts together a selection of papers presented at The Romance Turn V Workshop, held in Lisbon in 2012. The papers presented at the workshop discussed general problems in the field of Language Acquisition, with a special focus on data from several Romance varieties. The papers in the volume cover a wide array of topics and subfields of acquisition studies, including L1 and L2 acquisition, typical and atypical development, acquisition of syntax, semantics, and phonology.

Download or read book The Grammar of French Quantification written by Lena Baunaz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-03-02 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first extensive study on French Quantification in the field of Syntax. It provides a typology of four main quantified noun phrases in French (existential, universal, negative and wh-), detailing their syntactic, semantic and prosodic behaviors and showing that they can be reduced to two classes—Split-DP structures or Floating quantification. Relying on syntax and semantics, the book establishes a three-way structural typology of wh in-situ phrases and extends it to existentials. It pays special attention to the prosodic properties associated with their different readings and proposes an analysis of the distribution of subextraction and pied-piping. Similarly based on semantic and syntactic tests, the book reveals N(egative) words to be universal Quantifiers. It proposes a new structure of N-words in terms of constituent negation and includes a detailed analysis of the difference between not an N and not all the N in French.

Download or read book Towards a Derivational Syntax written by Michael T. Putnam and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores recent advancements in the Minimalist Program that adopt Stroik s (1999, 2009) Survive Principle as the principle means of accounting for displacement phenomena in earlier versions of generative theory. These contributions bring to light many advantages and challenges that beset the Survive-minimalist framework, including topics such as the lexicon-syntax relationship, coordinate symmetries, scope, ellipsis, code-switching, and probe-goal relations. Despite the diverse, broad range of topics discussed in this volume, the papers are connected by a renewed investigation of Frampton & Gutmann s (2002) vision of a crash-proof syntax. This volume provides new and interesting perspectives on theoretical issues that have challenged the Minimalist Program since its inception and will provide ample food for thought for syntacticians working in the Minimalist tradition and beyond."

Download or read book Analysing English Sentences written by Andrew Radford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-12 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a concise introduction to work in syntactic theory, drawing on the key concepts of Chomsky's Minimalist Program.

Download or read book The Grammar of Q written by Seth Cable and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Grammar of Q' puts forth a novel syntactic and semantic analysis of wh-questions, based on an in-depth study of the Tlingit language, an endangered and under-documented Native American tongue. A major conclusion is that the phenomenon classically dubbed 'pied-piping' does not actually exist.

Download or read book Foundational Issues in Linguistic Theory written by Robert Freidin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-05-09 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by leading theoretical linguists—including Noam Chomsky, B. Elan Dresher, Richard Kayne, Howard Lasnik, Morris Halle, Norbert Hornstein, Henk van Riemsdijk, and Edwin Williams—reflect on Jean-Roger Vergnaud's influence in the field and discuss current theoretical issues Jean-Roger Vergnaud's work on the foundational issues in linguistics has proved influential over the past three decades. At MIT in 1974, Vergnaud (now holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in Humanities at the University of Southern California) made a proposal in his Ph.D. thesis that has since become, in somewhat modified form, the standard analysis for the derivation of relative clauses. Vergnaud later integrated the proposal within a broader theory of movement and abstract case. These topics have remained central to theoretical linguistics. In this volume, essays by leading theoretical linguists attest to the importance of Jean-Roger Vergnaud's contributions to linguistics. The essays first discuss issues in syntax, documenting important breakthroughs in the development of the principles and parameters framework and including a famous letter (unpublished until recently) from Vergnaud to Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik commenting on the first draft of their 1977 paper “Filters and Controls.” Vergnaud's writings on phonology (which, the editors write, “take a definite syntactic turn”) have also been influential, and the volume concludes with two contributions to that field. The essays, rewarding from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, not only offer insight into Vergnaud's impact on the field but also describe current work on the issues he introduced into the scholarly debate. Contributors Joseph Aoun, Elabbas Benmamoun, Cedric Boeckx, Noam Chomsky, B. Elan Dresher, Robert Freidin, Morris Halle, Norbert Hornstein, Richard S. Kayne, Samuel Jay Keyser, Howard Lasnik, Yen-hui Audrey Li, M. Rita Manzini, Karine Megerdoomian, David Michaels, Henk van Riemsdijk, Alain Rouveret, Leonardo M. Savoia, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Edwin Williams

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax written by Giglielmo Cinque and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 990 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparison across formal languages is an essential part of formal linguistics. The study of closely-related varieties has proven extremely useful in comparing differences that might otherwise appear unrealted, and has helped to identify the core principles of Universal Grammar. This comprehensive handbook serves two functions. It will provide a general and theoretical introduction to comparative syntax, its methodology, and its relation to other domains of linguistic inquiry; and it will provide a systematic selection of the best comparative work being done today on those language groups and families where substantial progress has been achieved. With top-notch editors and contributors from around the world, this volume will be an essential resource for scholars and students in formal linguistics.

Download or read book The Clause Structure of Wolof written by Harold Torrence and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates the clausal syntax of Wolof, an understudied Atlantic language of Senegal. The goals of the work are descriptive, analytical, and comparative, with a focus on the structure of the left periphery and left peripheral phenomena. The book includes detailed examination of the morpho?syntax of wh?questions, successive cyclicity, subject marking, relative clauses, topic/focus articulation, and complementizer agreement. Novel data from Wolof is used to evaluate and extend theoretical proposals concerning the structure of the Complementizer Phrase (CP) and Tense Phrase (TP). It is argued that Wolof provides evidence for the promotion analysis of relative clauses, an exploded CP and TP, and for analyses that treat relative clauses as composed of a determiner with a CP complement. It is further argued that Wolof has a set of silent wh?expressions and these are compared to superficially similar constructions in colloquial German, Bavarian, Dutch, and Norwegian. The book also presents a comparison of complementizer agreement across a number of related and unrelated languages. Data from Indo?European (Germanic varieties, French, Irish), Niger?Congo (Atlantic, Bantu, Gur), and Semitic (Arabic) languages put the Wolof phenomena in a larger typological context by showing the range of variation in complementizer agreement systems."

Download or read book Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition written by Jill de Villiers and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-08-27 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern linguistic theory has been based on the promise of explaining how language acquisition can occur so rapidly with such subtlety, and with both surprising uniformity and diversity across languages. This handbook provides a summary and assessment of how far that promise has been fulfilled, exploring core concepts in acquisition theory, including notions of the initial state, parameters, triggering theory, the role of competition and frequency, and many others, across a variety of syntactic topics that have formed the central domains of investigation and debate. These topics are treated from the unique perspective of central actors in each domain who have helped shape the research agenda. The authors have presented a summary of the data, the theories under discussion, and their own best assessments of where each domain stands. Providing as well the agenda for future work in the field showing both particular needs and general directions that should be pursued in the coming decades.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Syntax written by Andrew Carnie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 937 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of syntax over the last half century has seen a remarkable expansion of the boundaries of human knowledge about the structure of natural language. The Routledge Handbook of Syntax presents a comprehensive survey of the major theoretical and empirical advances in the dynamically evolving field of syntax from a variety of perspectives, both within the dominant generative paradigm and between syntacticians working within generative grammar and those working in functionalist and related approaches. The handbook covers key issues within the field that include: • core areas of syntactic empirical investigation, • contemporary approaches to syntactic theory, • interfaces of syntax with other components of the human language system, • experimental and computational approaches to syntax. Bringing together renowned linguistic scientists and cutting-edge scholars from across the discipline and providing a balanced yet comprehensive overview of the field, the Routledge Handbook of Syntax is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in syntactic theory.

Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax 8 Volume Set written by Martin Everaert and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-12-26 with total page 5254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An invaluable reference tool for students and researchers in theoretical linguistics, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition has been updated to incorporate the last 10 years of syntactic research and expanded to include a wider array of important case studies in the syntax of a broad array of languages. A revised and expanded edition of this invaluable reference tool for students and researchers in linguistics, now incorporating the last 10 years of syntactic research Contains over 120 chapters that explain, analyze, and contextualize important empirical studies within syntax over the last 50 years Charts the development and historiography of syntactic theory with coverage of the most important subdomains of syntax Brings together cutting-edge contributions from a global group of linguists under the editorship of two esteemed syntacticians Provides an essential and unparalleled collection of research within the field of syntax, available both online and across 8 print volumes This work is also available as an online resource at www.companiontosyntax.com

Download or read book Competition in Syntax written by Gereon Müller and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-06-10 with total page 416 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 Minimalist Syntax written by Randall Hendrick and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Minimalist Syntax is a collection of essays that analyze major syntactic processes in a variety of languages, all unified by their perspective from within the Minimalist Program. Introduces important concepts in the Minimalist approach to syntactic theory. Emphasizes empirical consequences of the Minimalist approach through innovative analyses. Highlights the importance of Minimalist syntax in explaining features of natural languages. Includes contributions from leading syntacticians.

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.