Download or read book Selected Papers from the 2006 Cyprus Syntaxfest written by Kleanthes K. Grohmann and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a selection of contributions from the week-long Cyprus Syntaxfest in 2006, which brought together research in syntax by several respected and prolific theoretical linguists from all over the world. During the six days of the Syntaxfest, work from a variety of viewpoints in modern generative grammar was presented, and the research discussed and debated followed diverse methodological paths, with the thematic focus on left peripheries in linguistic structures and (their) interface interpretation. The current collection of expanded versions of selected research presented at the Cyprus Syntaxfest reflects a wide variety of approaches to these topics; it also provides a glimpse of the rich sample of cross-linguistic data that informed the discussions of syntactic peripheries and their interface interpretation. It offers eleven studies on clausal and nominal left-peripheral phenomena and their (role in) interpretation in a variety of typologically unrelated languages. More significantly, the contributions collected here underscore the by now established importance and theoretical interest of studying the edge of constituents, whether phasal or not. In every chapter, the blueprint of a general interpretive hierarchy driving and constraining syntax is also retraced throughout.
Download or read book The Complementizer Phase written by Phoevos Panagiotidis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text addresses the role complementisers and their phrases play in the phase-based approach to the mental computation of language. Leading linguists and promising young scholars draw on analyses of a wide range of languages to consider how complementisers behave in subject extraction phenomena.
Download or read book The Development of Grammar written by Esther Rinke and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2011-05-25 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on different aspects of language development. The contributions are concerned with similarities and differences between first and second language acquisition, the acquisition of sentence structure and functional categories, cross-linguistic influence in bilingual first language acquisition as well as the relation between language acquisition, language contact and diachronic change. The recurrent topic of the volume is the link between linguistic variation and the limitation of structural variability in the framework of a well-defined theory of language. In this respect, the volume opens up new perspectives for future research.
Download or read book Language Contact written by Kelechukwu U Ihemere and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-18 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the inception of modern contact linguistics through the works of Weinreich (1953) and Haugen (1953), numerous investigators have studied the manifestations of language contact across different disciplines, naturally adopting varied perspectives and approaches relevant to their particular field of inquiry. In spite of the many approaches and interests, quite simply, when speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. The influence could be as common as the exchange of words or what is termed vocabulary borrowing in the literature. It can also go deeper, extending to the exchange of even basic characteristics of a language, such as morphology and grammar. In some cases, the result of the contact of two languages can be the replacement of one by the other. This is most common in asymmetric relationships between languages, and sometimes leads to language shift and death. The present volume is unique in that it brings together research by distinguished scholars and other highly talented investigators from across the world to offer a multidimensional exploration of the field. The individual chapters present contemporary discussions and analyses of the topics, grouped into three parts.
Download or read book Developments in the Acquisition of Clitics written by Kleanthes K. Grohmann and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-03-17 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume presents new theoretical and empirical findings on the acquisition and development of clitics in and across different languages. It features ten chapters that largely emerged from the CYCL1A Workshop on the Acquisition of Clitics held in Nicosia, Cyprus, in May 2012. These chapters explore issues pertaining to the first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition of clitic pronouns. There is an emphasis on Greek, with the first four chapters discussing mono- and bilingual acquisition of clitics in Cypriot Greek and the next two chapters on Standard Modern Greek. Three contributions focus on Albanian, Serbo-Croatian, and European Portuguese, respectively. The last chapter of this volume is an invited contribution by Ken Wexler on the Unique Checking Constraint as an explanation of clitic omission in normal and SLI development. This volume will constitute a valuable reference guide for current work on the acquisition of clitic pronouns.
Download or read book Language Variation European perspectives II written by Stavroula Tsiplakou and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009-11-19 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains a selection of papers from the 4th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 4), which was held at the University of Cyprus from June 17th–19th 2007. The variety of theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives (from Generative Grammar, Word Grammar, Government Phonology, Optimality Theory and Distributed Morphology to quantitative, Labovian and ethnographic approaches to variation and change, real and apparent time studies, phonetic analysis and metatheoretical papers on quantitative analysis), as well as the sheer number of linguistic varieties examined, attest both to the breadth and scope of the conference and to its status as a meeting-place for synchronic and diachronic linguistic description and theoretical exploration. One of the major themes running through the volume is the explicit concern with methodological refinement. Almost all the contributions address issues of methodology in various aspects of data collection and analysis, be they questionnaire surveys and interview data, spoken or written corpora, real- and apparent-time studies, dialect atlases and maps, statistical models or software. Alongside methodological issues, and especially with regard to the treatment of historical data, many of the papers in the volume explicitly address theoretical issues, for example the relative weighting of linguistic/systemic, cognitive and discourse factors in the exploration of language variation and change.
Download or read book Analysing English Sentences written by and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Syntactic Reconstruction and Proto Germanic written by George Walkden and published by Oxford Studies in Diachronic a. This book was released on 2014 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers reconstructions of various syntactic properties of Proto-Germanic, including verb position in main clauses, the syntax of the wh-system, and the (non-)occurrence of null pronominal subjects and objects. Although previous studies have looked at the lexical and phonological reconstruction of Proto-Germanic, little is currently known about the syntax of the language, and it has even been argued that the reconstruction of syntax is impossible. Dr Walkden uses extensive evidence from the early Germanic languages - Old English, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Gothic - to show that syntactic reconstruction is not only possible but also profitable. He argues that while the reconstruction of syntax differs from lexical-phonological reconstruction due to the so-called 'correspondence problem', this is not insurmountable. In fact, the approach taken in current Minimalist theories, in which syntactic variation is attributed to the properties of lexical items, opens the door for syntactic reconstruction as lexical reconstruction. The book also discusses practical solutions for circumventing the correspondence problem, in particular the use of both distributional properties of lexical items and the phonological forms of such items in order to establish cognacy. The book will be of interest to historical linguists working on syntactic reconstruction and the Germanic languages, from graduate level upwards, as well as to advanced students of syntactic change more generally.
Download or read book Remnant Movement written by Günther Grewendorf and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-04-24 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses two crucial problems associated with the phenomenon of Remnant Movement: First, what evidence can be brought to bear in favor of, or opposing, Remnant Movement analyses of linguistic phenomena? Secondly, what does the presence or absence of Remnant Movement in the syntax tell us about constraints imposed by Universal Grammar on syntactic operations?
Download or read book The In Situ Approach to Sluicing written by Jun Abe and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been standardly claimed since Merchant (2001) that island violations can be repaired by simply deleting the categories that induce such violations, as witnessed by sluicing, an ellipsis construction that deletes TP with a remnant wh-phrase. This book aims to argue that such “repair by ellipsis” is simply a myth. Alternatively, the author argues for what is called the in-situ approach to sluicing, originally proposed by Kimura (2007, 2010), according to which the remnant wh-phrase in sluicing stays in situ. This approach immediately explains the island-insensitivity of sluicing, since no overt wh-movement is involved in the derivation of this construction. Hence, it challenges the approach in terms of island repair by ellipsis in that it nullifies the necessity of a repair mechanism. This book makes an important contribution to the field in providing an alternative way of approaching ellipsis phenomena that are claimed to induce “island repair.”
Download or read book Arabic Language and Linguistics written by Reem Bassiouney and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-16 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arabic, one of the official languages of the United Nations, is spoken by more than half a billion people around the world and is of increasing importance in today's political and economic spheres. The study of the Arabic language has a long and rich history: earliest grammatical accounts date from the 8th century and include full syntactic, morphological, and phonological analyses of the vernaculars and of Classical Arabic. In recent years the academic study of Arabic has become increasingly sophisticated and broad. This state-of-the-art volume presents the most recent research in Arabic linguistics from a theoretical point of view, including computational linguistics, syntax, semantics, and historical linguistics. It also covers sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and discourse analysis by looking at issues such as gender, urbanization, and language ideology. Underlying themes include the changing and evolving attitudes of speakers of Arabic and theoretical approaches to linguistic variation in the Middle East.
Download or read book Colloquial English written by Andrew Radford and published by Cambridge Studies in Linguisti. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant analysis of colloquial English, both its syntax and its variations, using novel data from live, unscripted radio and TV broadcasts and the internet.
Download or read book Analysing English Sentences written by Andrew Radford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-04 with total page 1221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Radford has acquired an unrivalled reputation over the past thirty years for writing syntax textbooks in which difficult concepts are clearly explained without the excessive use of technical jargon. Analysing English Sentences continues in this tradition, offering a well-structured introduction to English syntax and contemporary syntactic theory which is supported throughout with learning aids such as summaries, lists of key hypotheses and principles, extensive references, handy hints and exercises. Instructors will also benefit from the book's free online resources, which include PowerPoint slides of chapter key points and analyses of exercise material, as well as an answer key for all the in-book exercises. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated throughout, including additional exercises and an entirely new chapter on exclamative and relative clauses. Assuming no prior knowledge of grammar, this is an approachable introduction to the subject for undergraduate and graduate students.
Download or read book Micro change and Macro change in Diachronic Syntax written by Eric Mathieu and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chapters in this volume address the process of syntactic change at different granularities. The language-particular component of a grammar is now usually assumed to be nothing more than the specification of the grammatical properties of a set of lexical items. Accordingly, grammar change must reduce to lexical change. And yet these micro-changes can cumulatively alter the typological character of a language (a macro-change). A central puzzle in diachronic syntax is how to relate macro-changes to micro-changes. Several chapters in this volume describe specific micro-changes: changes in the syntactic properties of a particular lexical item or class of lexical items. Other chapters explore links between micro-change and macro-change, using devices such as grammar competition at the individual and population level, recurring diachronic pathways, and links between acquisition biases and diachronic processes. This book is therefore a great companion to the recent literature on the micro- versus macro-approaches to parameters in synchronic syntax. One of its important contributions is the demonstration of how much we can learn about synchronic linguistics through the way languages change: the case studies included provide diachronic insight into many syntactic constructions that have been the target of extensive recent synchronic research, including tense, aspect, relative clauses, stylistic fronting, verb second, demonstratives, and negation. Languages discussed include several archaic and contemporary Romance and Germanic varieties, as well as Greek, Hungarian, and Chinese, among many others.
Download or read book Syntax and its Limits written by Raffaella Folli and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, leading linguists explore the empirical scope of syntactic theory, by concentrating on a set of phenomena for which both syntactic and nonsyntactic analyses initially appear plausible. Exploring the nature of such phenomena permits a deeper understanding of the nature of syntax and of neighbouring modules and their interaction. The book contributes to both traditional work in generative syntax and to the recent emphasis placed on questions related to the interfaces. The major topics covered include areas of current intensive research within the Minimalist Program and syntactic theory more generally, such as constraints on scope and binding relations, information-structural effects on syntactic structure, the structure of words and idioms, argument- and event-structural alternations, and the nature of the relations between syntactic, semantic, and phonological representations. After the editors' introduction, the volume is organized into four thematic sections: architectures; syntax and information structure; syntax and the lexicon; and lexical items at the interfaces. The volume is of interest to syntactic theorists, as well as linguists and cognitive scientists working in neighbouring disciplines such as lexical and compositional semantics, pragmatics and discourse structure, and morphophonology, and anyone with an interest in the modular architecture of the language faculty.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis written by Jeroen van Craenenbroeck and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2019 with total page 1147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook is the first volume to provide a comprehensive, in-depth, and balanced discussion of ellipsis, a phenomena whereby expressions in natural language appear to be incomplete but are still understood. It explores fundamental questions about the workings of grammar and provides detailed case studies of inter- and intralinguistic variation.
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.
