Download or read book Modern Icelandic Syntax written by Joan Maling and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive overview of Icelandic syntax contains new analyses of word order and long-distance reflexivization, detailed studies of case-marking, and the first systematic description of the -st middles. It presents a complete picture of modern Icelandic syntax as seen in the tradition of generative grammar, striking a good balance between theory and description.

Download or read book The Syntax of Old Norse written by Jan Terje Faarlund and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004-09-30 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first account of Old Norse syntax for almost a hundred years and the first ever in a non-Scandinavian language. The language of the Vikings and of the Old Icelandic sagas is the best documented medieval Germanic language: the author presents a full analysis of its syntax and overviews of its phonology and morphology. He includes a complete bibliography of Old Norse syntax.

Download or read book Phases of Interpretation written by Mara Frascarelli and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the concept of phase, aiming at a structural definition of the three domains that are assumed as the syntactic loci for interface interpretation, namely vP, CP and DP. In particular, three basic issues are addressed, that represent major questions of syntactic research within the Minimalist Program in the last decade. A) How is the set of minimally necessary syntactic operations to be characterised (including questions about the exact nature of copy and merge, the status of remnant movement, the role of head movement in the grammar), B) How is the set of minimally necessary functional heads to be characterised that determine the built-up and the interpretation of syntactic objects and C) How do these syntactic operations and objects interact with principles and requirements that are thought to hold at the two interfaces. The concept of phase has also implications for the research on the functional make-up of syntactic objects, implying that functional projections not only apply in a (universally given) hierarchy but split up in various phases pertaining to the head they are related to. This volume provides major contributions to this ongoing discussion, investigating these issues in a variety of languages (Berber, Dutch, English, German, Modern Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Norwegian and West Flemish) and combining the analysis of empirical data with the theoretical insights of the last years.

Download or read book The Architecture of Focus written by Valéria Molnár and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 629 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection investigates the architecture of focus in linguistic theory from different theoretical perspectives. Research on focus and information structure in the last four decades has shown that the phenomenon of focus is highly complex, the theoretical approaches manifold, and the data highly sensitive. The main emphasis has been placed on the integration of the notion of focus in generative grammar. In recent years, however, the approaches to focus and information structure underwent a radical change in perspective. The theoretical concept of focus, its related terms and phenomena became the object of research. Along with it, the research questions shifted: instead of locating focus in the architecture of grammar, linguists investigate the architecture of focus itself. The central underlying idea of this collection is to document this change in perspective with the aim of isolating essential keystones and research areas in both the theoretical and empirical domain. The book is structured accordingly. Following the introduction, there are four main sections: The general section discusses the theoretical foundations of focus within grammar. The second section hosts papers which investigate the representation of focus and topic at the syntax-pragmatics interface. The third section discusses the phonological representation of focus and its relation to meaning. The papers of the final section investigate different types of focus constructions in a variety languages. The collection of papers on the architecture of focus, its interpretation and representation mirror the establishment of the focus research field.

Download or read book Interfaces Recursion Language written by Uli Sauerland and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human language is a phenomenon of immense richness: It provides finely nuanced means of expression that underlie the formation of culture and society; it is subject to subtle, unexpected constraints like syntactic islands and cross-over phenomena; different mutually-unintelligeable individual languages are numerous; and the descriptions of individual languages occupy thousands of pages. Recent work in linguistics, however, has tried to argue that despite all appearances to the contrary, the human biological capacity for language may be reducible to a small inventory of core cognitive competencies. The most radical version of this view has emerged from the Minimalist Program: The claim that language consists of only the ability to generate recursive structures by a computational mechanism. On this view, all other properties of language must result from the interaction at the interfaces of that mechanism and other mental systems not exclusively devoted to language. Since language could then be described as the simplest recursive system satisfying the requirements of the interfaces, one can speak of the Minimalist Equation: Interfaces + Recursion = Language. The question whether all the richness of language can be reduced to that minimalist equation has already inspired several fruitful lines of research that led to important new results. While a full assessment of the minimalist equation will require evidence from many different areas of inquiry, this volume focuses especially on the perspective of syntax and semantics. Within the minimalist architecture, this places our concern with the core computational mechanism and the (LF-)interface where recursive structures are fed to interpretation. Specific questions that the papers address are: What kind of recursive structures can the core generator form? How can we determine what the simplest recursive system is? How can properties of language that used to be ascribed to the recursive generator be reduced to interface properties? What effects do syntactic operations have on semantic interpretation? To what extent do models of semantic interpretation support the LF-interface conditions postulated by minimalist syntax?

Download or read book The Syntax of Mainland Scandinavian written by Jan Terje Faarlund and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the syntactic structures of Mainland Scandinavian, a term that covers the Northern Germanic languages spoken in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and parts of Finland. The continuum of mutually intelligible standard languages, regional varieties, and dialects stretching from southern Jutland to eastern Finland share many syntactic patterns and features, but also present interesting syntactic differences. In this volume, Jan Terje Faarlund discusses the main syntactic features of the national languages, alongside the most widespread or typologically interesting features of the non-standard varieties. Each topic is illustrated with examples drawn from reference grammars, research literature, corpora of various sorts, and the author's own research. The framework is current generative grammar, but the volume is descriptive in nature, with technical formalities and theoretical discussion kept to a minimum. It will hence be a valuable reference for students and researchers working on any Scandinavian language, as well as for syntacticians and typologists interested in Scandinavian facts and data without necessarily being able to read Scandinavian.

Download or read book The Syntax of Past Participles written by Verner Egerland and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work aims to show, firstly, that a number of problems of the syntax of ancient, literary Italian lend themselves to an analysis in terms of the theory of principles and parameters. Secondly, Italian data, supported by comparative remarks on modern Romance and Germanic, are shown to confirm the essential correctness of the antisymmetry framework of Kayne (1994). The theoretical and empirical problems discussed can be summarized in four general points: functional structure of the principle; word order; agreement patterns; and interpretation. The analysis focuses on the affectedness constraint.

Download or read book Verb Movement and the Syntax of Kashmiri written by R.M. Bhatt and published by Boom Koninklijke Uitgevers. This book was released on 1999-10-31 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the phenomenon of verb-second in a language outside the Germanic family, a relatively unknown and unanalyzed Indo-Aryan language called Kashmiri. Kashmiri is unique in that it exhibits both the German/Dutch type of verb-second as well as the Yiddish/Icelandic type. The comparative theoretical treatment adopted in this book serves three functions. First, it provides an opportunity to examine and ascertain the limitations of the current models of verb-second grammar in light of new, typologically different data. Second, it presents a parametric account of verb-second and explores its consequences for a general theory of verb movement, mainly in terms of triggers, landing sites, and clause structure. Third, it proposes a theory of Case and Checking that locates the structural positions where grammatical functions are licensed in verb-second clause-structure. The discussions also include a comprehensive account of most of the central and crucial syntactic processes of Kashmiri.

Download or read book The Derivation of VO and OV written by Peter Svenonius and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Derivation of VO and OV takes a new look at the relationship between head-final or OV structures and head-initial or VO ones, in light of recent work by Richard Kayne and others. The various papers in the volume take different positions with respect to whether one type of structure is derived from the other, and if so, which of the two orders is primary. Different options explored include derivation of VO order by head movement from a basic OV structure, derivation of VO by fronting of a phrasal VP remnant containing only the verb, derivation of OV by fronting of a remnant VP which the verb has vacated, and others. Each paper is thoroughly rooted in empirical observations about specific constructions drawn either from the Germanic languages or from others including Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, and Malagasy. The volume consists of eleven original papers by Sjef Barbiers, Michael Brody, Naoki Fukui & Yuji Takano, Liliane Haegeman, Hubert Haider, Roland Hinterhölzl, Anders Holmberg, Thorbjorg Hróarsdóttir, Matthew Pearson, Peter Svenonius, and Knut Tarald Taraldsen, plus an introduction by the editor.