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This volume offers a critical examination of the cartographic assumption that there is a rich array of functional projections whose hierarchical order is fixed and determined by Universal Grammar. The contributions discuss the nature of these hierarchies and their relation to the central theoretical goal of explanatory adequacy.
This volume presents new work by leading researchers on central themes in the study of event structure: the nature and representation of telicity, change, and the notion of state. The book advances our understanding of these aspects of event structure by combining foundational semantic research with a series of case studies from a variety of languages. The book begins with an overview of the theoretical issues central to the volume, along with a brief presentation of the remaining chapters and the points of contact between them. The chapters, developed within several different theoretical perspectives, promote cross-theory as well as cross-linguistic comparison. The work will interest scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, semantics, and their interfaces. It will also appeal to researchers in philosophy, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition who are interested in the notions of telicity, change, and stativity.
This book presents a new approach to gender and its effects on morphosyntax. Using data from genetically diverse languages such as Amharic, Somali, and Romanian, it provides one of the first large-scale, cross-linguistically-oriented, theoretical approaches to the word and sentence structure effects of gender.
Alessandra Giorgi considers the semantic and syntactic nature of indexicals: linguistic expressions whose reference shifts from utterance to utterance.
This book concerns the interpretation and structure of non-verbal predicates in copular sentences (i.e. sentences with the verb 'be'). The author provides a unifying analysis based on a ternary distinction between defining/characterizing/situation-descriptive predicates.
This book provides a detailed cross-linguistic study of pseudo-noun incorporation, a phenomenon whereby an argument forms a 'closer than usual' relation with the verb. Imke Driemel draws on data from Tamil, Mongolian, Korean, Turkish, and German, and applies diagnostic tests across eleven noun types in each of the languages under consideration. What emerges is a coherent effect of pseudo-incorporated arguments that maps loss of case marking to obligatory narrow scope, lack of binding and control relations, and a potentially restricted movement pattern. The book provides a unifying theory that is able to capture all properties with a single assumption: pseudo-incorporation effects result from...
This volume gathers selected papers from the workshops Facing Movement and Meeting Clitics held in the context of the Barcelona Linguistic Institute. The authors explore a wide variety of languages, from Icelandic to Mayan, from Japanese to Russian and Italian, from various data sources: adult grammar, first and second language acquisition, developmental language disorders and language change. The papers on movement address the issues of reconstruction in parasitic gaps; the alternation between short and long distance movement in Germanic; subextraction from subjects; wh- in situ in Greek; word order alternations derived by movement in bilingual acquisition; intervention effects in L2 acquis...
This book is a cross-linguistic investigation of resumptive pronouns and related phenomena. Pronominal resumption is the realization of the base of a syntactic dependency as a bound pronoun. Resumption occurs in unbounded dependencies, such as relative clauses and questions, and in the variety of raising known as copy raising. Processing factors may also give rise to resumption, even in environments where it does not normally occur in a given language. Ash Asudeh proposes a new theory of resumption based on the use of a resource logic for semantic composition and the typologically robust observation that resumptive pronouns are ordinary pronouns in their morphological and lexical properties....
This volume takes a variety of approaches to the question 'what is a word?', with particular emphasis on where in the grammar wordhood is determined. Chapters in the book all start from the assumption that structures at, above, and below the 'word' are built in the same derivational system: there is no lexicalist grammatical subsystem dedicated to word-building. This type of framework foregrounds the difficulty in defining wordhood. Questions such as whether there are restrictions on the size of structures that distinguish words from phrases, or whether there are combinatory operations that are specific to one or the other, are central to the debate. In this respect, chapters in the volume d...
This book examines some knotty problems in natural language. These typically involve questions where the sense or the grammaticality of an utterance teeters on or over the edge of acceptability among native speakers. The phenomena in question have been examined within syntactic theory for over two decades with no wholly satisfactory outcome. Dr Truswell broadens the scope of the enquiry to the interface between syntactic structure and other, indirectly related, cognitive, and semantic structures such as aspect, agentivity, and presupposition. Uniting work from philosophical, cognitive and linguistic perspectives, he develops a model of the internal structure of events as perceptual and cogni...