Download or read book The Conduct of Linguistic Inquiry written by Rudolf P. Botha and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-12-04 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Reflexivity of Language and Linguistic Inquiry written by Dorthe Duncker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-09 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the reflexivity of language both from the perspective of the lay speaker and the linguistic analyst. Linguistic inquiry is conditional upon linguistic reflexivity, but so is language. Without linguistic reflexivity, we would not be able to make sense of everyday linguistic communication, and the idea of a language would not be conceivable. Not even fundamental notions such as words or meaning would exist. Linguistic reflexivity is a feature of the communication process, and it essentially depends on situated participants and time. It is a defining characteristic of the human language but despite its obvious importance, it is not very well understood theoretically, and it is strangely under-researched empirically. Throughout history and in modern linguistics, it has mostly either been taken for granted, misconstrued, or ignored. Only integrational linguistics fully recognizes its specifically linguistic implications. However, integrational linguistics does not provide the necessary methodological basis for investigating linguistic phenomena empirically. This catch-22 situation means that the goal of the book is twofold: one part is to explore the reflexivity of language theoretically, and the other part is to propose an applied integrational linguistics and to implement this proposal in practice.
Download or read book Linguistic Inquiry written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 806 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research on current topics in linguistic theory, including new theoretical developments based on the latest international discoveries.
Download or read book A Syntax of Substance written by David Adger and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new approach to grammar and meaning of relational nouns is presented along with its empirical consequences.
Download or read book Re labeling written by Carlo Cecchetto and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new theory of labeling that sheds light on such syntactic phenomena as relativization, successive cyclicity, island phenomena, and Minimality effects. When two categories merge and a new syntactic object is formed, what determines which of the two merged categories transmits its properties one level up—or, in current terminology, which of the two initial categories labels the new object? In (Re)labeling, Carlo Cecchetto and Caterina Donati take this question as the starting point of an investigation that sheds light on longstanding puzzles in the theory of syntax in the generative tradition. They put forward a simple idea: that words are special because they can provide a label for free when they merge with some other category. Crucially, this happens even when a word merges with another category as a result of syntactic movement. This means that a word has a “relabeling” power in that the structure resulting from its movement can have a different label from the one that the structure previously had. Cecchetto and Donati argue that relabeling cases triggered by the movement of a word are pervasive in the syntax of natural languages and that their identification sheds light on such phenomena as relativization, explaining for free why relatives clauses have a nominal distribution, successive cyclicity, island effects, root phenomena, and Minimality effects.
Download or read book Syntax of Scope written by Joseph Aoun and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Syntax of Scope takes up the issue of relative operator scope in generative grammar and offers a comparative study of quantifiers and interrogative wh-operators.
Download or read book Barriers written by Noam Chomsky and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding written by Noam Chomsky and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the study of government and binding is an outgrowth of Chomsky's earlier work in transformational grammar, it represents a significant shift in focus and a new direction of investigation into the fundamentals of linguistic theory.
Download or read book The Architecture of the Language Faculty written by Ray Jackendoff and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ray Jackendoff steps back to survey the broader theoretical landscape in linguistics, in an attempt to identify some of the sources of the widely perceived malaise with respect to much current theorizing. Over the past twenty-five years, Ray Jackendoff has investigated many complex issues in syntax, semantics, and the relation of language to other cognitive domains. He steps back in this new book to survey the broader theoretical landscape in linguistics, in an attempt to identify some of the sources of the widely perceived malaise with respect to much current theorizing. Starting from the "Minimalist" necessity for interfaces of the grammar with sound, meaning, and the lexicon, Jackendoff examines many standard assumptions of generative grammar that in retrospect may be seen as the product of historical accident. He then develops alternatives more congenial to contemporary understanding of linguistic phenomena. The Architecture of the Language Faculty seeks to situate the language capacity in a more general theory of mental representations and to connect the theory of grammar with processing. To this end, Jackendoff works out an architecture that generates multiple co-constraining structures, and he embeds this proposal in a version of the modularity hypothesis called Representational Modularity. Jackendoff carefully articulates the nature of lexical insertion and the content of lexical entries, including idioms and productive affixes. The resulting organization of the grammar is compatible with many different technical realizations, which he shows can be instantiated in terms of a variety of current theoretical frameworks. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph No. 28
Download or read book Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry written by Naomi L. Shin and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the world, professional linguistic inquiry is in full bloom, largely as result of pioneering thinkers who helped rapidly modernize the study of human language in the last century. As the field continues to move forward, further solidifying its position as a conduit of insight into the human condition, it is essential to take stock of the theoretical primitives that have given linguistics its intellectual foundation. This volume does precisely that, inspecting the load-bearing components of the edifice upon which contemporary linguistics has been constructed. The volume’s authors – whose expertise spans the Generativist, Functionalist, and Variationist research traditions – remind us of the need to revisit the conceptual bedrock of the field, clarifying and assessing our primary theoretical moves, including those relating to such elemental components as the ‘linguistic sign’, ‘a language’, ‘structural relations’, ‘grammatical category’, ‘acquisition’, ‘bilingual’, ‘competence’, and ‘sociolinguistic variable’.
Download or read book Restriction and Saturation written by Sandra Chung and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-10-24 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this study of Maori and Chamorro, Sandra Chung and William Ladusaw make a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the formal semantic analysis of non-Indo-European languages. Their ultimate focus is on how the study of these Austronesian languages can illuminate the alternatives for semantic interpretation and their interaction with syntactic structure. Revisiting the analysis of indefiniteness in terms of restricted free variables, they claim that some varieties of indefinites are better analyzed by taking restriction and saturation to be fundamental semantic operations.Chapters examine the general topic of modes of composition (including predicate restriction and syntactic versus semantic saturation), types of indefinite determiners in Maori, and object incorporation in Chamorro (including discussions of the extra object and restriction without saturation). The authors' goal is that the two case studies they offer, and their larger focus on modes of composition, will contribute to a broader account of the interaction of form, position, and semantic interpretation.
Download or read book On the Definition of Word written by Anne-Marie Di Sciullo and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1987-01 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On The Definition of Word develops a consistent and coherent approach to central questions about morphology and its relation to syntax. In sorting out the various senses in which the word word is used, it asserts that three concepts which have often been identified with each other are in fact distinct and not coextensive: listemes (linguistic objects permanently stored by the speaker); morphological objects (objects whose shape can be characterized in morphological terms of affixation and compounding); and syntactic atoms (objects that are unanalyzable units with respect to syntax). The first chapter defends the idea that listemes are distinct from the other two notions, and that all one can and should say about them is that they exist. A theory of morphological objects is developed in chapter two. Chapter three defends the claim that the morphological objects are a proper subset of the syntactic atoms, presenting the authors' reconstruction of the important and much-debated Lexical Integrity Hypothesis. A final chapter shows that there are syntactic atoms which are not morphological objects. Anne Marie Di Sciullo is in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Quebec. Edwin Williams is in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts. On The Definition of Word is Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 14.
Download or read book Probabilistic Linguistics written by Rens Bod and published by A Bradford Book. This book was released on 2003-04-08 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past forty years, linguistics has been dominated by the idea that language is categorical and linguistic competence discrete. It has become increasingly clear, however, that many levels of representation, from phonemes to sentence structure, show probabilistic properties, as does the language faculty. Probabilistic linguistics conceptualizes categories as distributions and views knowledge of language not as a minimal set of categorical constraints but as a set of gradient rules that may be characterized by a statistical distribution. Whereas categorical approaches focus on the endpoints of distributions of linguistic phenomena, probabilistic approaches focus on the gradient middle ground. Probabilistic linguistics integrates all the progress made by linguistics thus far with a probabilistic perspective. This book presents a comprehensive introduction to probabilistic approaches to linguistic inquiry. It covers the application of probabilistic techniques to phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. It also includes a tutorial on elementary probability theory and probabilistic grammars.
Download or read book Subjunctive Conditionals written by Michela Ippolito and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A proposal for a compositional semantics for subjunctive (or would) conditionals in English. In this book, Michela Ippolito proposes a compositional semantics for subjunctive (or would) conditionals in English that accounts for their felicity conditions and the constraints on the satisfaction of their presuppositions by capitalizing on the occurrence of past tense morphology in both antecedent and consequent clauses. Very little of the extensive literature on subjunctive conditionals tries to account for the meaning of these sentences compositionally or to relate this meaning to their linguistic form; this book fills that gap, connecting the different lines of research on conditionals. Ippolito's proposal will be of interest both to linguists and to philosophers concerned with conditionals and modality more generally. Ippolito reviews previous analyses of counterfactuals and subjunctive conditionals in the work of David Lewis, Robert Stalnaker, Angelika Kratzer, and others; considers the contrast between future simple past subjunctive conditionals and future past perfect subjunctive conditionals; presents a proposal for subjunctive conditionals that addresses puzzles left unsolved by previous proposals; reviews a number of presupposition triggers showing that they fit the pattern predicted by her proposal; and discusses an asymmetry between the past and the future among subjunctive conditionals, arguing that the best account of our linguistic intuitions must include an indeterministic view of the world.
Download or read book The Antisymmetry of Syntax written by Richard S. Kayne and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1994-12-14 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is standardly assumed that Universal Grammar (UG) allows a given hierarchical representation to be associated with more than one linear order. This book proposes a restrictive theory of word order and phrase structure that denies this assumption. According to this theory, phrase structure always completely determines linear order, so that if two phrases differ in linear order, they must also differ in hierarchical structure. It is standardly assumed that Universal Grammar (UG) allows a given hierarchical representation to be associated with more than one linear order. For example, English and Japanese phrases consisting of a verb and its complement are thought of as symmetrical to one another, differing only in linear order. The Antisymmetry of Syntax proposes a restrictive theory of word order and phrase structure that denies this assumption. According to this theory, phrase structure always completely determines linear order, so that if two phrases differ in linear order, they must also differ in hierarchical structure. More specifically, Richard Kayne shows that asymmetric c-command invariably maps into linear precedence. From this follows, with few further hypotheses, a highly specific theory of word order in UG: that complement positions must always follow their associated head, and that specifiers and adjoined elements must always precede the phrase that they are sister to. A further result is that standard X-bar theory is not a primitive component of UG. Rather, X-bar theory expresses a set of antisymmetric properties of phrase structure. This antisymmetry is inherited from the more basic antisymmetry of linear order. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph No. 25
Download or read book Linguistic Inquiry Index written by Michiya Kawai and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Local Economy written by Chris Collins and published by Mit Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This monograph will provoke a great deal of constructive discussion and debate among syntacticians of all kinds. Collins has done an especially good job of making the work accessible to those of us who didn't "grow up" in Building 20." -- Molly Diesing, Cornell University Any theory of grammar must contain a lexicon, an interface with the mechanisms of production and perception (PF), and an interface with the interpretational system of semantics (LF). A traditional way to relate these three components in generative theory is through a derivation. Noam Chomsky's Minimalist Program postulates that grammatical derivations are constrained by economy conditions, requiring that derivations be minimal. One of the most important questions of syntax is what the economy conditions are and how they operate. In "Local Economy," Chris Collins proposes that economy conditions are local. According to this theory, evaluating economy conditions does not involve comparing whole derivations. Rather, economy conditions are evaluated at each step in the derivation. Collins shows that locative inversion and quotative inversion provide strong arguments for local economy. In addition, he explores the far-reaching consequences of this proposal for other areas of syntax, including the strict cycle, binary branching, successive cyclicity, and expletive constructions. He demonstrates that local economy is superior to global economy on conceptual as well as empirical grounds. "Local Economy" is one of the first books other than Chomsky's "The Minimalist Program" (MIT, 1995) to deal in a general way with economy of derivation and Minimalism. "Linguistic InquiryMonograph No. 29"
