Download or read book The Syntax of Nonfinite Complementation written by Željko Božković and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economy considerations have always played an important role in the generative theory of grammar. Indeed, the very development of the theory has been characterized by natural considerations of simplicity and economy. In the Minimalist Program, the operations of the computational system that produce linguistic expressions must satisfy general considerations of simplicity referred to as Economy Principles. In The Syntax of Nonfinite Complementation: An Economy Approach, the author completes two major research projects that solidify the foundation of the Minimalist Program: the elimination of c-selection and government. He then investigates in detail the nature of the Economy Principles in syntax. The discussion, which focuses on infinitival and participial complements, shows that a number of facts that previously have either not been accounted for or have received unsatisfactory treatment can be explained in a principled way once Economy Principles and, more generally, the Minimalist Program are adopted.
Download or read book Corpus Based Studies on Non Finite Complements in Recent English written by Paul Rickman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-02-19 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book showcases fresh research into the underexplored territory of complementation through a detailed analysis of gerunds and ‘to’ infinitives involving control in English. Drawing on large electronic corpora of recent English, it examines subject control in adjectival predicate constructions with ‘scared’, ‘terrified’ and ‘afraid’, moving on to a study of object control with the verbal predicate ‘warn’. In each chapter a case study is presented of a matrix adjective that selects both infinitival and gerundial complements, and a central theme is the application of the Choice Principle as a novel factor bearing on complement selection. The authors argue that it is helpful to view the patterns in question as constructions, as combinations of form and meaning, within the system of English predicate complementation, and convincingly demonstrate how a new gerundial pattern has emerged and spread in the course of the last two centuries. This book will appeal to scholars of semantics, corpus linguistics, and historical linguistics as well as those with an interest in variation and change in recent English more generally.
Download or read book Infinitival vs Gerundial Complementation with Afraid Accustomed and Prone written by Juho Ruohonen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-25 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the concept of complementation in the adjectival domain of English grammar. Alternation between non-finite complements, especially to infinitives and gerundial complements, has been investigated intensively on the basis of large corpora in the last few years. With very few exceptions, however, such work has hitherto been based on univariate analysis methods. Using multivariate analysis, the authors present methodologically innovative case studies examining a large array of explanatory factors potentially impacting complement choice in cases of alternation. This approach yields more precise information on the impact of each factor on complement choice as well as on interactions between different explanatory factors. The book thus presents a methodologically new perspective on the study of the system of non-finite complementation in recent English and variation within that system, and will be relevant to academics and students with an interest in English grammar, predicate complementation, and statistical approaches to language.
Download or read book Infinitives and Gerunds in Recent English written by Juhani Rudanko and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-31 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the grammar of to infinitives and gerundial -ing clauses, which is a central area at the interface of syntax and semantics, against the background of what has been called the Great Complement Shift. Over the course of six chapters, the author explores the semantic properties of constructions where the general spread of gerundial -ing clauses occurs at the expense of to infinitives. The author draws on large electronic corpora, ensuring that new perspectives are opened on the basis of authentic corpus evidence. He identifies trends of variation and change in the use of the two constructions and proposes The Choice Principle, an innovative perspective on the semantics of to infinitives and gerundial -ing complements. This book will be of interest to researchers and students working on English grammar or the recent history of English grammar.
Download or read book The Syntax of Nonsententials written by Ljiljana Progovac and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-09-13 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings the data that many in formal linguistics have dismissed as peripheral straight into the core of syntactic theory. By bringing together experts from syntax, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, language acquisition, aphasia, and pidgin and creole studies, the volume makes a multidisciplinary case for the existence of nonsententials, which are analyzed in various chapters as root phrases and small clauses (Me; Me First!; Him worry?!; Class in session), and whose distinguishing property is the absence of Tense, and, with it, any syntactic phenomena that rely on Tense, including structural Nominative Case. Arguably, the lack of Tense specification is also responsible for the dearth of indicative interpretations among nonsententials, as well as for their heavy reliance on pragmatic context. So pervasive is nonsentential speech across all groups, including normal adult speech, that a case can be made that continuity of grammar lies in nonsentential, rather than sentential speech.
Download or read book Nonfinite Structures in Theory and Change written by D. Gary Miller and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to answer the questions: why do grammars change, and why is the rate of such change so variable? A principal focus is on changes in English between the Anglo-Saxon and early modern periods. The author frames his analysis in a comparative framework with extended discussions of language change in a wide range of other Indo-European languages. He deploys Chomsky's minimalist framework in a fruitful marriage of comparative and theoretical linguistics within an argument that will be accessible to practitioners in both fields.
Download or read book The Syntax and Semantics of the Left Periphery written by Horst Lohnstein and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The left periphery of clausal structures has been a prominent topic of research in generative linguistics during the last decades. Closer examination of its properties unfolds a rich array of perspectives like the status of barriers for extraction and government, the articulation of the topic focus structure, the fixation of wh-scope, the marking of clausal types, the interaction of syntactic structure with inflectional morphology as well as the determination of sentence mood and illocutionary force to mention just a few. The purpose of this book is to collect different and relevant studies in this field and to give a general overview of the various theoretical approaches concerned with morphological, syntactic and semantic properties together with the diachronic development of the left periphery.
Download or read book The Minimalist Syntax of Defective Domains written by Acrisio Pires and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-10-31 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book unifies the analysis of certain non-finite domains, focusing on subject licensing, agreement, and Case and control. It proposes a minimalist analysis of English gerunds which allows only a null subject PRO (TP-defective gerunds), a lexical subject (gerunds as complements of perception verbs), or both types of subjects (clausal gerunds). It then analyzes Portuguese infinitives, showing that the morphosyntactic properties of non-inflected and inflected infinitives correlate with distinct treatments of obligatory and non-obligatory control. It explores these and other phenomena to show that tense and event binding do not correlate with the contrast between control and raising/exceptional case marking (ECM), against null Case theories of control. A Probe-Goal approach to Case and agreement is adopted in combination with a movement analysis of control. The book then investigates diachronic morphosyntactic phenomena involving infinitives, verb movement and cliticization in Portuguese, exploring a cue-based theory of syntactic change grounded in language acquisition.
Download or read book Infinitives at the Syntax Semantics Interface written by Lukasz Jedrzejowski and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The major aim of this volume is to investigate infinitival structures from a diachronic point of view and, simultaneously, to embed the diachronic findings into the ongoing theoretical discussion on non-finite clauses in general. All contributions subscribe to a dynamic approach to infinitival clauses by investigating their origin, development and loss in miscellaneous patterns and across different languages.
Download or read book Provocative Syntax written by Phil Branigan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-12-17 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new theory of syntactic movement within a Chomskyan framework. Chomsky showed that no description of natural language syntax would be adequate without some notion of movement operations in a syntactic derivation. It now seems likely that such movement transformations are formally simple operations, in which a single phrase is displaced from its original position within a phrase marker, but after more than fifty years of generative theorizing, the mechanics of syntactic movement are still murky and controversial. In Provocative Syntax, Phil Branigan examines the forces that drive syntactic movement and offers a new synthetic model of the basic movement operation by reassembling in a novel way isolated ideas that have been suggested elsewhere in the literature. The unifying concept is the operation of provocation, which occurs in the course of feature valuation when certain probes seek a value for their unvalued features by identifying a goal. Provocation forces the generation of a copy of the goal; the copy originates outside the original phrase marker and must then be introduced into it. In this approach, movement is not forced by the need for extra positions; extra positions are generated because movement is taking place. After presenting the central proposal and showing its implementation in the analyses of various familiar cases of syntactic movement, Branigan demonstrates the effects of provocation in a variety of inversion constructions, examines interactions between head and phrasal provocation within the “left periphery” of Germanic embedded clauses, and describes the details of chain formation and successive cyclic movement in a provocation model.
Download or read book Deriving Nominals written by Dimitrios Ntelitheos and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-07-25 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides original fieldwork data, uniquely generating all Malagasy deverbal nominals from a single structure-building mechanism, allowing variable syntactic attachment heights for different nominalizers and tracing the derivation of participant nominals to a relative clause source.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax written by Guglielmo Cinque and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-16 with total page 990 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Its twenty-one commissioned chapters serve two functions: they provide a general and theoretical introduction to comparative syntax, its methodology, and its relation to other domains of linguistic inquiry; and they also provide a systematic selection of the best comparative work being done today on those language groups and families where substantial progress has been achieved." "This volume will be an essential resource for scholars and students in formal linguistics."--Jacket.
Download or read book The Locative Syntax of Experiencers written by Idan Landau and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new account of the peculiar syntax of psychological verbs argues that experiencers are grammaticalized as locative phrases. Experiencers—grammatical participants that undergo a certain psychological change or are in such a state—are grammatically special. As objects (John scared Mary; loud music annoys me), experiencers display two peculiar clusters of nonobject properties across different languages: their syntax is often typical of oblique arguments and their semantic scope is typical of subjects. In The Locative Syntax of Experiencers, Idan Landau investigates this puzzling correlation and argues that experiencers are syntactically coded as (mental) locations. Drawing on results from a range of languages and theoretical frameworks, Landau examines the far-reaching repercussions of this simple claim. Landau shows that all experiencer objects are grammaticalized as locative phrases, introduced by a dative/locative preposition. “Bare” experiencer objects are in fact oblique, too, the preposition being null. This preposition accounts for the oblique psych(ological) properties, attested in case alternations, cliticization, resumption, restrictions on passive formation, and so on. As locatives, object experiencers may undergo locative inversion, giving rise to the common phenomenon of quirky experiencers. When covert, this inversion endows object experiencers with wide scope, attested in control, binding, and wh-quantifier interactions. Landau's synthesis thus provides a novel solution to some of the oldest puzzles in the generative study of psychological verbs. The Locative Syntax of Experiencers offers the most comprehensive description of the syntax of psychological verbs to date, documenting their special properties in more than twenty languages. Its basic theoretical claim is readily translatable into alternative frameworks. Existing accounts of psychological verbs either consider very few languages or fail to incorporate other theoretical frameworks; this study takes a broader perspective, informed by findings of four decades of research
Download or read book Concepts Syntax and Their Interface written by Tanya Reinhart and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-03-11 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A systematic exposition of Reinhart's Theta System, with extensive annotations and essays that capture subsequent developments. One of Tanya Reinhart's major contributions to linguistic theory is the development of the Theta System (TS), a theory of the interface between the system of concepts and the linguistic computational system. Reinhart introduced her theory in a seminal paper, “The Theta System: Syntactic Realization of Verbal Concepts” (2000) and subsequently published other papers with further theoretical development. Although Reinhart continued to work on the Theta System, she had not completed a planned Linguistic Inquiry volume on the topic before her untimely death in 2007. This book, then, is the first to offer a systematic exposition of Reinhart's Theta System. The core of the book is Reinhart's 2000 paper, accompanied by substantial endnotes with clarifications, summaries, and links to subsequent modifications of the theory, some in Reinhart's unpublished work. An appendix by Marijana Marelj discusses the domain of Case, based on an LSA course she taught with Reinhart in 2005. Two additional essays by Reinhart's linguistic colleagues discuss the division of labor between the lexicon and syntax and the apparent conflict between the Theta System and Distributed Morphology.
Download or read book Minimalist Investigations in Linguistic Theory written by and published by Routledge. This book was released on with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Companion to Syntax written by Silvia Luraghi and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bloomsbury Companion to Syntax is the definitive guide to a key area of linguistic study.
Download or read book Syntactic Effects of Morphological Change written by David Lightfoot and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discussing the nature and causes of language change, the authors of this text consider how far changes in morphology cause changes in syntax, and examine such phenomena from the perspective of syntactic and psycholinguistic theory.
