Download or read book Mapping the Left Periphery written by Paola Beninca and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-16 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mapping the Left Periphery, the fifth volume in "The Cartography of Syntactic Structures," is entirely devoted to the functional articulation of the so-called complementizer system, the highest part of sentence structure. The papers collected here identify, on the basis of substantial empirical evidence, new atoms of functional structure, which encode specific features that are typically expressed in the left periphery. The volume also submits the richly articulated CP structure to further crosslinguistic checking. The research presented here has led to the identification of new, important restrictions in the relative sequence of elements appearing in the left periphery. With contributions from African languages, Chinese, Hungarian, Romance languages, and Italian dialects, Mapping the Left Periphery will be of interest to syntacticians working on comparative syntax, and more specifically on Romance grammar.

Download or read book Mapping the Left Periphery written by Paola Benincà and published by Oxford Studies in Comparative. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mapping the Left Periphery, the fifth volume in "The Cartography of Syntactic Structures," is entirely devoted to the functional articulation of the so-called complementizer system, the highest part of sentence structure. The papers collected here identify, on the basis of substantialempirical evidence, new atoms of functional structure, which encode specific features that are typically expressed in the left periphery. The volume also submits the richly articulated CP structure to further crosslinguistic checking. The research presented here has led to the identification of new,important restrictions in the relative sequence of elements appearing in the left periphery.With contributions from African languages, Chinese, Hungarian, Romance languages, and Italian dialects, Mapping the Left Periphery will be of interest to syntacticians working on comparative syntax, and more specifically on Romance grammar.

Download or read book The Left Periphery written by Anne Sturgeon and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of the interaction of syntax, pragmatics, and prosody in left peripheral positions focuses on two left dislocation constructions in Czech, Hanging Topic Left Dislocation and Contrastive Left Dislocation. The structure of the left periphery is delineated though a thorough description and analysis of these constructions with respect to their syntactic behavior, discourse function and prosody. Following recent work on the Syntax-Phonology interface, prosody in these constructions is shown to interact in interesting ways with the narrow syntax. Unexpected patterns of left-edge resumption are explained though the role of the PF component of the grammar.

Download or read book The Cartography of Chinese Syntax written by Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume provides new insights into the architecture of Chinese grammar from a comparative perspective, using principles of cartography. Cartography is a research program within syntactic theory that is guided by the view that syntactic structures contain grammatical and functional information that is ideal for semantic interpretation - by studying the syntactic structures of a particular language, syntacticians can better understand the semantic issues at play in that language. The chapters in this book map out the "topography" of a variety of constructions in Chinese, specifically information structure, wh-question formation, and peripheral functional elements. The syntactic structure of Chinese makes it an ideal language for this line of research, because functional elements are often spread throughout sentences rather than clumped together as is usually dictated by language-specific morphology. Mapping Chinese syntactic structures therefore offers a window into the origin of heavily "scrambled" constructions often observed in other languages. The book includes a preface that will discusses the goal of cartography and explains how the collection contributes towards our understanding of this approach to syntax. The subsequent seven original articles all contain original syntactic data that is invaluable for future research in cartography, and the collection as a whole paints a broader picture of how the alignment between syntax and semantics works in a principled way.

Download or read book A Criterial Approach to the Cartography of V2 written by Giuseppe Samo and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-12-05 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a mechanism to uncover the extremely rich split-CP of V2 languages, in both root and embedded clauses, on the basis of theoretical arguments and empirical findings. The movement of the inflected verbal head is triggered to agree with the profiled informational value of the fronted XP. The V2 “constraint” shall thus be observed as a sum of micro-V2s, in which the inflected head creates Spec-Head configurations with the activated criterial positions in the relevant context. The “second linear” position of the verb results from the movement of the inflected verb to the highest activated criterial head. In other words, there is no “bottleneck effect”, but ordinary violations in terms of locality between fronted XPs. This monograph is aimed principally at postgraduate students and researchers interested in the description of natural languages adopting the guidelines of the Cartography of Syntactic Structures.

Download or read book Nominal Arguments and Language Variation written by Li Julie Jiang and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nominal Arguments in Language Variation investigates nominal arguments in classifier languages, refuting the long-held claim that classifier languages do not have overt article determiners. Li Julie Jiang brings the typologically unique Nuosu Yi, a classifier language that has an overt definite determiner (D), to the forefront of the theoretical investigation. By comparing nominal arguments in Nuosu Yi to those in Mandarin, a well-studied classifier language that has no overt evidence of an article determiner, Jiang provides new accounts of variation among classifier languages and extends the parameters to argument formation in general. In addition to paying particular attention to these two classifier languages, the discussion of nominal arguments also covers a wider range of classifier languages and number marking languages from Romance, Germanic, and Slavic to Hindi. Using a broad cross-linguistic perspective and detailed empirical analysis, Nominal Arguments in Language Variation is an important contribution to research on classifier languages and the fields of theoretical syntax, semantics, language variation, and linguistic typology.

Download or read book Variation in P written by Jacopo Garzonio and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Variation in P is an essential follow-up to the seminal proposals of the generative tradition regarding prepositional syntax. Recent research shows that prepositional phrases have a complex internal structure, and that the grammatical encoding of locative meaning has its own place in universal grammar. The papers collected in the first part of this volume not only test these proposals against new comparative data, but also shed light on the relation between spatial expressions and other semantic relations like possession. The second part of the volume explores the role of prepositions in non-spatial environments as well as in more general phenomena like verbal affixation, ellipsis, and complementation. By drawing on evidence from less studied languages, and by considering prepositional syntax in interaction with clausal syntax as well as within prepositional phrases, Variation in P refines and develops theories introduced by previous generative studies.

Download or read book The Linker in the Khoisan Languages written by Chris Collins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-13 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The linker introduces ("links") a variety of expressions into the verb phrase, including locatives, the second object of a double object construction, the second object of a causative, instruments, subject matter arguments, and adverbs. This volume collects together Chris Collins's published work on the linker in the Khoisan languages. Here, Collins offers a systematic description of the linker in [lHoã, Ju|'hoan, N|uu, and to a lesser extent !Xoõ and |Xam. For each language, Collins illustrates various uses of the linker, drawing attention to cross-linguistic generalizations as well as to variation between the languages. The work presented in this volume should be of interest to researchers working in a wide variety of syntactic frameworks on different languages of the world.

Download or read book Rethinking Parameters written by Luis Eguren and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parameters of linguistic variation were originally conceived, within the chomskyan Principles and Parameters Theory, as UG-determined options that were associated with grammatical principles and had a rich deductive structure. This characterization of parametric differences among languages has changed significantly over the years, especially so with the advent of Minimalism. This book collects a representative sample of current generative research on the status, origin and size of parameters. Often taking diverging views, the papers in the volume address some or all of the main debated topics in parametric syntax: i.e. are parameters provided by UG, or do they constitute emergent properties arising from points of underspecification?; in which component(s) of the language faculty are parameters to be found?; do clustering effects actually hold across languages?; do macroparameters exist alongside microparameters?; are there parameter hierarchies?; which is the origin and role of parameters in the process of language acquisition? The volume is organized into two parts. Part I ("The nature of variation and parameters") brings together studies whose main goal is to discuss general issues related to parameters (or variation more generally). Part II ("Parameters in the analysis of language variation: case studies") includes a number of works that deal with the empirical basis and proper formulation of well-known particular parameters: the Null Subject Parameter, the NP/DP Parameter, the Compounding Parameter, the Wh-Parameter and the Analyticity Parameter.

Download or read book Parameters of Predicate Fronting written by Vera Lee-Schoenfeld and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-28 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of the world's languages permit or require clause-initial positioning of the primary predicate, potentially alongside some or all of its dependents. While such predicate fronting (where "fronting" may or may not involve movement) is a widespread phenomenon, it is also subject to intricate and largely unexplained variation. In Parameters of Predicate Fronting, Vera Lee-Schoenfeld and Dennis Ott bring together leaders in the field of comparative syntax to explore the empirical manifestations and theoretical modelling of predicate fronting across languages. There exists by now a rich literature on predicate fronting, but few attempts have been made at synthesizing the resulting empirical observations and theoretical implementations. While individual phenomena have been described in some detail, we are currently far from a complete understanding of the uniformity and variation underlying the wider cross-linguistic picture. This volume takes steps towards this goal by showcasing the state of the art in research on predicate fronting and the parameters governing its realization in a range of diverse languages. Covering topics like prosody, VP-fronting, and predicate doubling across a wide arrange of languages, including English, German, Malagasy, Niuean, Ch'ol, Asante, Twi, Limbum, Krachi, Hebrew, and multiple sign languages, this collection enriches our understanding of the predicate fronting phenomenon.

Download or read book Smuggling in Syntax written by Adriana Belletti and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the fundamental properties of human language is movement, where a constituent moves from one position in a sentence to another position. This book investigates how different movement operations interact with one another, focusing on the special case of smuggling, in which displacement occurs in two steps thus allowing for otherwise inaccessible movement operations.

Download or read book Deconstructing Ergativity written by Maria Polinsky and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-01 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 The Morphosyntax of Portuguese and Spanish in Latin America written by Mary A. Kato and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-26 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent trends in syntax and morphology have shown the great importance of doing research on variation in closely related languages. This book centers on the study of the morphology and syntax of the two major Romance Languages spoken in Latin America from this perspective. The works presented here either compare Brazilian Portuguese with European Portuguese or compare Latin American Spanish and Peninsular Spanish, or simply compare Portuguese and its varieties with Spanish and its varieties. The chapters advance on a great variety of theoretical questions related to coordination, clitics , hyper-raising, infinitives, null objects, null subjects, hyper-raising, passives, quantifiers, pseudo-clefts, questions and distributed morphology. Finally, this book provides new empirical findings and enriches the descriptions made about Portuguese and Spanish Spoken in the Americas by providing new generalizations, new data and new statistical evidence that help better understand the nature of such variation. The studies contained in this book show a vast array of new phenomena in these young varieties, offering empirical and theoretical windows to language variation and change.

Download or read book Functional Structure from Top to Toe written by Peter Svenonius and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-26 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume consists of nine original chapters on central issues in theoretical syntax, all written by distinguished authors who have made major contributions to generative syntax, plus an introductory chapter by the editor. Dedicated to Tarald Taraldsen, the collection reflects the diverse energies that have pushed the cartographic program forward over the last decade. The first three papers deal with subject extraction, the que/qui alternation, and relative clause formation. Luigi Rizzi presents arguments that subjects are 'criterial' and that subject extraction is highly restricted. Hilda Koopman and Dominique Sportiche concur, suggesting that what appears to be subject extraction in French has been misanalyzed, and involves a relative structure. Adriana Belletti shows that children avoid using object relatives, preferring subject relatives, even when it requires passivization. The fourth paper, by Ian Roberts, analyzes the loss of pro-drop in the history of French and Brazilian Portuguese. The papers by M. Rita Manzini and Richard S. Kayne both present novel analyses of complementizers, suggesting that they are essentially nominal, rather than verbal. The final three papers address the relationship of morphology to syntax. The first two argue for a syntactic approach to word formation, Guglielmo Cinque's in a typological context and Anders Holmberg's within an analysis of Finnish focus constructions. The final paper, by Edwin Williams, presents an argument for the limitations of the syntactic approach to word formation.

Download or read book Questions of Syntax written by Richard S. Kayne and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-22 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are far more syntactically distinct languages than we might have thought; yet there are far fewer than there might have been. Questions of Syntax collects sixteen papers authored by Richard S. Kayne, a preeminent theoretical syntactician, who has sought over the course of his career to understand why both these facts are true. With a particular emphasis on comparative syntax, these chapters collectively consider how wide a range of questions the field of syntax can reasonably attempt to ask and then answer. At issue, among other topics, are the relation between syntax and (certain aspects of) semantics, the relation between syntax and what appear to be lexical questions, the relation between syntax and morphology, the relation between syntax and certain aspects of phonology (insofar as silent elements and their properties play a substantial role), and the extent to which comparative syntax can provide new and decisive evidence bearing on these different kinds of questions. To Kayne, comparative syntax can shed light on what may initially seem lexical questions, and antisymmetry on the evolution of human language itself. Taken as a whole, these essays elucidate the theoretical contributions of one the most influential scholars in linguistics.

Download or read book Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography written by Fuzhen Si and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book illustrates recent developments in cartographic studies, seen from a comparative perspective. The different chapters explore various aspects of theoretical and descriptive syntax, bearing on such topics as selection, causativity, binding, light verb constructions, the structure of the high and low peripheral zones. Syntactic issues in the study of dialects and ancient languages are also addressed. The languages investigated include French, Hebrew, Standard Dutch and the Ghent dialect, Etruscan, Japanese, English, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese and the Teochew dialect. The intended readers of this book include researchers and students working on natural language syntax, the interface between syntax and semantics/pragmatics, and comparative and typological linguistics, as well as scholars interested in particular languages such as East Asian and Romance languages.

Download or read book Aspects of Split Ergativity written by Jessica Coon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aspects of Split Ergativity argues that aspect-based split ergativity does not mark a split in how Case is assigned, but rather, a split in sentence structure. The contexts in which we find the appearance of a nonergative pattern in an otherwise ergative language-namely, the nonperfective aspects-involve an intransitive aspectual matrix verb and a subordinated lexical verb.