Download or read book Xp Adjunction in Universal Grammar written by Ayesha Kidwai and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-05-04 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most hotly debated phenomena in natural language is that of leftward argument scrambling. This book investigates the properties of Hindi-Urdu scrambling to show that it must be analyzed as uniformly a focality-driven XP-adjunction operation. It proposes a novel theory of binding and coreference that not only derives the coreference effects in scrambled constructions, but has important consequences for the proper formulation of binding, crossover, reconstruction, and representational economy in the minimalist program. The book will be of interest not only to specialists in Hindi-Urdu syntax and/or scrambling, but to all students of generative syntax.
Download or read book Subject Inversion in Romance and the Theory of Universal Grammar written by Aafke Hulk Professor of French Linguistics University of Amsterdam and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001-08-27 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Romance Languages document remarkable variations in subject word order in different constructions, and have various restrictions in their occurrence. No consensus has emerged on what the paramaters are for such variations. This volume does not attempt to create a consensus, but tries to represent and bring into dialogue the different sides of the debate.
Download or read book Subject Inversion in Romance and the Theory of Universal Grammar written by Aafke Hulk and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-20 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Romance Languages document remarkable variations in subject word order in different constructions, and have various restrictions in their occurrence. No consensus has emerged on what the paramaters are for such variations. This volume does not attempt to create a consensus, but tries to represent and bring into dialogue the different sides of the debate.
Download or read book Checking Theory and Grammatical Functions in Universal Grammar written by Hiroyuki Ura and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-01-06 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ura demonstrates that his theory of multiple feature-checking, an extension of Chomsky's Agr-less checking theory, gives a natural explanation for a wide range of data drawn from a variety of languages in a very consistent way with a limited set of parameters.
Download or read book XP adjunction in Universal Grammar written by Ayesha Kidwai and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text investigates the properties of Hindi-Urdu scrambling to show that it must be analyzed as uniformly a focality-driven XP-adjunction operation. It will be of interest to both students and specialists in Hindi/Urdu syntax.
Download or read book Scrambling and the Survive Principle written by Michael T. Putnam and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Languages with free word orders pose daunting challenges to linguistic theory because they raise questions about the nature of grammatical strings. Ross, who coined the term Scrambling to refer to the relatively 'free' word orders found in Germanic languages (among others) notes that the problems involved in specifying exactly the subset of the strings which will be generated are far too complicated for me to even mention here, let alone come to grips with (1967:52). This book offers a radical re-analysis of middle field Scrambling. It argues that Scrambling is a concatenation effect, as described in Stroik's (1999, 2000, 2007) Survive analysis of minimalist syntax, driven by an interpretable referentiality feature [Ref] to the middle field, where syntactically encoded features for temporality and other world indices are checked. The purpose of this book is to investigate the syntactic properties of middle field Scrambling in synchronic West Germanic languages, and to explore, to what possible extent we can classify Scrambling as a 'syntactic phenomenon' within Survive-minimalist desiderata.
Download or read book A Comparative Grammar of Borgomanerese written by Christina Tortora and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book treats the morphosyntax of Borgomanerese, a Northern Italian dialect. The rich description of the many unusual features of this dialect, some of which have not been previously reported in the literature, gives rise to a number novel theoretical analyses, advancing our understanding of syntax and syntactic theory.
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 Phases written by Klaus Abels and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The minimalist notion of a phase has often been investigated with a view to the interfaces. ‘Phases’ provides a strictly syntax-internal perspective. If phases are fundamental, they should provide the grounds for a unifying treatment of different syntactic phenomena. Concentrating on displacement, the book argues that this expectation is borne out: there is an empirical clustering of properties, whereby the phrases that undergo pied-piping are also the phrases that host intermediate traces of cyclic movement. The same phrases also host partial and secondary movement. Finally, the immediate complements within these phrases never strand the embedding heads. The phrases that show this behaviour are the phases (CP, vP, DP, and PP). To account for the cluster of properties, phases are claimed to have two special properties: their complement is inaccessible to operations outside, the Phase Impenetrability Condition; their heads may be endowed with unvalued features that are neither connected to the categorical status of the phase nor interpreted on it. It is shown how the cluster of empirical properties flows naturally from these two assumptions, supporting the idea that phases are indeed a fundamental construct in syntax.
Download or read book The Syntax of Italian Dialects written by Christina Tortora and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-03 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects original theoretical work on the syntax and morphology of Italian and a wide range of Italian dialects. It contains contributions by such leading figures as Cecilia Poletto, Guglielmo Cinque, and Richard Kayne, and examines topics such as the syntax of "ne", the internal structure of personal pronouns, the syntax/morphology interface, and functional projections at the clausal level.
Download or read book Principles and Parameters in a VSO Language written by Ian G. Roberts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-03 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study of Welsh syntax in English using minimalist theory. The central empirical issue addressed is an analysis of word order and clause structure in Welsh, within the context of the Principles and Parameters theory and Welsh as a VSO language. Roberts's central question: Which values of which parameters of Universal Grammar determine VSO order? To answer it, he makes use of parameters whose values are rooted in considerations of typology and language acquisition. Along the way, he shows that Chomsky's recent conception of the Extended Projection Principle is highly relevant, although it requires a slightly more abstract formulation. Roberts's careful use of parameters, his unique cross-linguistic coverage between Welsh and Romance languages, and his reformulation of the Extended Projection Principle make this book of interest to linguists concerned with generative theory and comparative syntax.
Download or read book Deconstructing Ergativity written by Maria Polinsky and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 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.
Download or read book Subjects Expletives and the EPP written by Peter Svenonius and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-09-19 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of previously unpublished articles examines Noam Chomsky's Extended Projection Principle and its relationship to subjects and expletives (works like "it" that stand for other words). Re-examining Chomsky's proposition that each clause must have a subject, these articles represent the current state of the debate, particularly with respect to the theory's universal applicability across languages. Presenting an international and highly respected group of contributors, the volume explores these questions in a variety of languages, including Italian, Finnish, Icelandic, and Hungarian.
Download or read book The Syntax of Negation and the Licensing of Negative Polarity Items in Hindi written by Rajesh Kumar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This books studies syntax of NPIs and their interaction with sentential negatives in Hindi. It outlines the clause structure of Hindi and locates the syntactic position of sentential negatives as well as constituent negatives within the structure. It is argued that sentential negative in Hindi negation marker heads its own maximal projection, NegP, which is immediately dominated by TP. In addition to locating the position of negation markers in the clause structure, it outlines the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) in Hindi and the structural constraints on their licensing by sentential negative. The book argues that an NPI in Hindi is licensed overtly in the course of derivation by a c-commanding negative marker. The bulk of the evidence presented in this book argues against previous theoretical accounts that claim that NPI licensing involves covert syntactic operations such as LF movement or reconstruction. With respect to the classification of NPIs , this book also shows the existence of two different types of NPIs in Hindi; namely, strong NPIs and weak NPIs. Strong NPIs require a clause mate c-commanding negative licensor, whereas weak NPIs are quantifiers and are similar to free choice 'any' in English that are interpreted as NPIs in the presence of a c-commanding negative licensor.
Download or read book Syntactic Heads and Word Formation written by Marit Julien and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title investigates the relationship between morphology and syntax. It examines the formation of morphologically complex words - that is, the mechanisms of grammar that may cause two or more of the simplest elements of language, or morphemes, to be combined into a single word.
Download or read book A Unified Theory of Verbal and Nominal Projections written by Yoshiki Ogawa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-11-29 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Syntactically speaking, it has long been known that noun phrases are parallel to clauses in many respects. While most syntactic theories incorporate this principle, nouns have generally been regarded as inferior to verbs in terms of their licensing abilities, and nominal projections have been regarded as less complex than verbal projections in terms of the number of functional categories that they contain. Ogawa, however, argues that clauses and noun phrases are perfectly parallel. This book provides a unified theory of clauses and noun phrases, ultimately helping to simplify numerous thorny issues in the syntax/morphology interface.
Download or read book Ergativity written by Alana Johns and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-02-05 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The overarching theme of this volume is the formal expression of the range and limits of ergativity. The book contains cutting-edge theoretical papers by top authors in the field, who also conduct original field work and bring new data to light. It contains articles that apply the most recent theoretical tools to the area of ergativity, and then explore the issues that emerge. Languages investigated in the text include Basque, Georgian, and Hindi.
