Download or read book Weak Island Semantics written by Márta Abrusán and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a novel semantic account of weak islands, structures that block the displacement of certain elements in a sentence. Dr Abrusan's argument that the behaviour of these constructions has a semantic rather than syntactic explanation removes some of the most important reasons for postulating abstract syntactic rules as part of universal grammar.
Download or read book Weak Island Semantics written by Márta Abrusán and published by Oxford Studies in Semantics an. This book was released on 2014 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a novel semantic account of weak islands, structures that block the displacement of certain elements in a sentence. Dr Abrusán's argument that the behaviour of these constructions has a semantic rather than syntactic explanation removes some of the most important reasons for postulating abstract syntactic rules as part of UG.
Download or read book Weak Island Semantics written by Márta Abrusán and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-02-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a novel semantic account of weak, or selective, islands. Weak islands are configurations that block the displacement of certain elements in a sentence. Examples of island violations with acceptable counterexamples include '#How much wine haven't you drunk?' (but 'Which girl haven't you introduced to Mary?'), '#How does John regret that he danced at the party?' (but 'Who does John regret that he invited to the party?') or '#How much wine do you know whether you will produce?' (but 'Which glass of wine do you know whether you'll poison?'). For forty years or more, explanations of the unacceptability of these island constructions have been syntactic. Syntactic accounts have also provided some of the key empirical motivation for Chomsky's claim that universal grammar (UG) contains language independent abstract syntactic constraints. But syntactic accounts, however subtle, fail to explain why many weak island violations are made almost acceptable by modals and attitude verbs, as in 'How much wine aren't you allowed to drink?'; 'How fast do you hope Lewis didn't drive?'; or 'How does Romeo regret he was allowed to go to the party?' Dr Abrusán considers which contexts and expressions create - or are sensitive to - weak island violations, and examines the factors that go some way to curing them. She puts forward a semantic analysis to account for the unacceptability of violations of negative, presuppositional, quantificational and wh-islands. She explains why grammaticality violations can be obviated by certain modal expressions, and why and how far the grammaticality judgments of speakers depend on the context of the utterance. The book argues that there is no need to assume abstract syntactic rules in order to derive these facts; rather, they can be made to follow from independent semantic principles. If correct, this work has a fundamental consequence for the field of linguistics in general: it removes some of the most important reasons for postulating abstract syntactic rules as part of UG, and hence weakens the arguments for postulating a module of UG.
Download or read book Dynamic Excursions on Weak Islands written by Martin Honcoop and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Experimental Syntax and Island Effects written by Jon Sprouse and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together cutting-edge experimental research from leaders in the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics to explore the nature of a phenomenon that has long been central to syntactic theory - 'island effects'. The chapters in this volume draw upon recent methodological advances in experimental methods in syntax, also known as 'experimental syntax', to investigate the underlying cognitive mechanisms that give rise to island effects. This volume presents a comprehensive empirical review of a contemporary debate in the field by including contributions from researchers representing a variety of points of view on the nature of island effects. This book is ideal for students and researchers interested in cutting-edge experimental techniques in linguistics, psycholinguistics and psychology.
Download or read book Syntactic Islands written by Cedric Boeckx and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phenomenon of the syntactic 'island' - a clause or structure from which a word cannot be moved - is central to research and study in syntactic theory. This book provides a comprehensive overview of syntactic islands. What are they? How do they arise? Why do they exist? Cedric Boeckx discusses the pros and cons of all the major generative accounts of island effects, and focuses the discussion on whether islands are narrowly syntactic effects, are due to interface factors or are 'merely' performance effects. Thanks to the diversity of island effects, readers are given a unique opportunity to familiarize themselves with all the major research styles and types of analysis in theoretical linguistics and have the chance to reflect on the theoretical implications of concrete natural language examples, allowing them to develop their own synthesis.
Download or read book The Syntax and Semantics of Split Constructions written by A. Butler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-04-07 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Split constructions are very widespread in natural languages. The separation of the semantic restriction of a quantifier from that quantifier is a typical example of such a construction. This study addresses the problem that such discontinuous strings exhibit a number of locality constraints, including intervention effects. These are shown to follow from the interaction of a minimalist syntax with a semantics that directly assigns a model-theoretic interpretation to syntactic logical forms. The approach is shown to have wide empirical coverage and a conceptual simplicity. The book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of syntax and semantics.
Download or read book The Limits of Syntax written by Peter Culicover and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains a collection of essays which explore the ways in which greater incorporation of nonsyntactic explanations into linguistic research may deepen the understanding of problematic linguistic phenomena and, at the same time, strengthen syntactic research. It also addresses the status of syntactic constraints.
Download or read book Interrogative Phrases and the Syntax Semantics Interface written by I. Comorovski and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interrogative Phrases and the Syntax-Semantics Interface starts by analyzing the interpretation of interrogative phrases in single and multiple constituent questions, including their interpretation under adverbs of quantification. The results are then put to work in a novel approach to some of the constraints on dependencies between fronted interrogative phrases and the associated gaps: superiority, weak crossover, as well as the so-called `weak islands' (the WH-island, the negative island and the Factive Island). It is argued that the possibility of fronting an interrogative phrase out of these configurations is determined by a semantic/pragmatic condition on questions, which requires them to be answerable. The analysis is worked out principally on Romanian, a language which allows multiple wh-fronting. The results are then extended to English. Audience: Researchers and students in syntax, semantics and their interface, as well as linguists studying the relation between the acceptability of sentences and the larger discourse context.
Download or read book Questions written by Veneeta Dayal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book synthesizes and integrates 40 years of research on the semantics of questions, and its interface with pragmatics and syntax, conducted within the formal semantics tradition. A wide range of topics are covered, including weak-strong exhaustiveness, maximality, functional answers, single-multiple-trapped list answers, embedding predicates, quantificational variability, concealed questions, weak islands, polar and alternative questions, negative polarity, and non-canonical questions. The literature on this rich set of topics, theoretically diverse and scattered across multiple venues, is often hard to assimilate. Veneeta Dayal, drawing on her own research, brings them together for the first time in a coherent, concise, and well-structured whole. Each chapter begins with a non-technical introduction to the issues discussed; semantically sophisticated accounts are then presented incrementally, with the major points summarized at the end of each section. Written in an accessible style, this book provides both a guide to one of the most vibrant areas of research in natural language and an account of how this area of study is developing. It will be a unique resource for the novice and expert alike, and seeks to appeal to a variety of readers without compromising depth and breadth of coverage.
Download or read book Ways of Scope Taking written by A. Szabolcsi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume is as much a book co-authored by all the contributors as it is an edited collection of their papers. Most of the contributors have been involved in regular discussions over the past years, often inspiring the questions, or some aspects of the proposals, in each other's papers or actually collaborating on co-authored papers. ! For this reason, the contributions make related assumptions and explore highly related issues. The organization of the volume reflects this unity of aims and interests. It starts out with an overview of some of the shared formal background, and the chapters are arranged in a sequence that is intended to invite the reader to proceed from one directly to the next. Nevertheless, there has been no attempt to eliminate individual differences in either assumptions or choice of topic. All the chapters are entirely self-contained, so the reader will find it equally possible to read any of them in isolation. Two members of the UCLA community do not appear in this volume but have been an important source of inspiration for this project: Ed Keenan and Feng-hsi Liu. Many of Keenan's works have drawn attention to the empirically diverse behavior of natural language determiners and developed theoretical tools for studying them. Liu's 1990 dissertation examined the abilities of a representative sample of noun phrases to participate in scopal dependencies and branching, coming up with provocative generalizations and pointing out their significance for then-standard theories in powerful terms.
Download or read book The Semantic Conception of Logic written by Gil Sagi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of new essays presents cutting-edge research on the semantic conception of logic, the invariance criteria of logicality, grammaticality, and logical truth. Contributors explore the history of the semantic tradition, starting with Tarski, and its historical applications, while central criticisms of the tradition, and especially the use of invariance criteria to explain logicality, are revisited by the original participants in that debate. Other essays discuss more recent criticism of the approach, and researchers from mathematics and linguistics weigh in on the role of the semantic tradition in their disciplines. This book will be invaluable to philosophers and logicians alike.
Download or read book Unbounded Dependency Constructions written by Rui P. Chaves and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about one of the most intriguing features of human communication systems: the fact that words that go together in meaning can occur arbitrarily far away from each other. In the sentence This is technology that most people think about, but rarely consider the implications of, the word 'technology' is interpreted as if it were simultaneously next to the words 'about' and 'of'. This kind of long-distance dependency has been the subject of intense linguistic and psycholinguistic research for the last half century, and offers a unique insight into the nature of grammatical structures and their interaction with cognition. The constructions in which these unbounded dependencies arise are remarkably difficult to model and come with a rather puzzling array of constraints that have often defied characterization or proper explanation. This work provides a detailed survey of these constructions and the factors responsible for their creation and comprehension, describes new experimental evidence that sheds light on the nature of the phenomenon, and suggests new avenues for future research. The volume will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in the fields of morphosyntax, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science.
Download or read book From Grammar to Meaning written by Ivano Caponigro and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the study of formal semantics and formal pragmatics has grown tremendously, showing that core aspects of language meaning can be explained by a few principles. These principles are grounded in the logic that is behind - and tightly intertwined with - the grammar of human language. In this book, some of the most prominent figures in linguistics, including Noam Chomsky and Barbara H. Partee, offer new insights into the nature of linguistic meaning and pave the way for the further development of formal semantics and formal pragmatics. Each chapter investigates various dimensions in which the logical nature of human language manifests itself within a language and/or across languages. Phenomena like bare plurals, free choice items, scalar implicatures, intervention effects, and logical operators are investigated in depth and at times cross-linguistically and/or experimentally. This volume will be of interest to scholars working within the fields of semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition and psycholinguistics.
Download or read book The Semantics of Evidentials written by Sarah E. Murray and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides argues for a compositional, truth-conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. Central to the proposed theory is the distinction between what propositional content is at-issue and what content is not-at-issue. Evidentials contribute not-at-issue content, and can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, which is contributed by sentential mood. In this volume, Sarah Murray builds on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, and proposes a semantics that does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, she argues that all sentences make three semantic contributions: at-issue content, not-at-issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At-issue content is presented and made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground; not-at-issue content directly updates the common ground; and the illocutionary relation uses a proposition to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type, can trigger further updates. The analysis is supported by extensive empirical data from Cheyenne, drawn from the authors own fieldwork, as well as from English and a variety of other languages.
Download or read book Subjectivity and Perspective in Truth theoretic Semantics written by Peter Lasersohn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores linguistic and philosophical issues presented by sentences expressing personal taste, such as Roller coasters are fun, and examines how truth-theoretic semantics can account for expressions of this type. It provides a detailed and explicit formal grammar paired with semantic analysis and pragmatic theory.
Download or read book Adjunct Islands in English written by Andreas Kehl and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-06-19 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Island phenomena are a central topic in generative grammar, especially because of principled exceptions to these general extraction constraints. This volume investigates exceptional extractions from phrasal adjunct islands. It argues, based on experimental studies, that several factors identified in the previous literature are uninformative about locality conditions because they show effects in both extraction and non-extraction sentence forms. The volume develops a multifactorial model to account for these effects without appealing to universal extraction conditions and argues that the relative acceptability of the underlying proposition determines acceptability across sentence types.
