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In this theoretical monograph, Edwin Williams demonstrates that when syntax is economical, it economizes on shape distortion rather than on distance. According to Williams, this new notion of economy calls for a new architecture for the grammatical system—in fact, for a new notion of derivation. The new architecture offers a style of clausal embedding—the Level Embedding Scheme—that predictively ties together the locality, reconstructive behavior, and "target" type of any syntactic process in a way that is unique to the model. Williams calls his theory "Representation Theory" to put the notion of economy at the forefront. Syntax, in this theory, is a series of representations of one sublanguage in another.
Explores the interaction of grammar with the factors reducing complexity. This book aims to bring about further understanding of the interfaces of the grammar in a broader biolinguistic sense. It anchors the formal properties of grammar at the interfaces between language and biology, language and experience, bringing about language acquisition.
Begins with an introduction to the phenomenon of incomplete category fronting in German, presents two fundamentally different approaches to the construction, reports some evidence in favor of the remnant movement approach, and then develops four problems related to this approach which are solved in the remainder of the book. Intended for linguists working on theoretical syntax, Germanic syntax, or the syntax-semantics interface. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The concept of 'trigger' is a core concept of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. The idea that certain types of movement are triggered by some property of the target position is at least as old as the notion that the movement of noun phrases to the subject position is triggered by their need to receive nominative case. In more recent versions of syntactic theory, triggering mechanisms are thought to regulate all of movement. Furthermore, a quite narrow range of triggering mechanisms is permitted. As is to be expected, such a restrictive approach meets a variety of difficulties. Specifically, the question is whether all triggering elements required to cover displacement of all kinds in natural lan...
This volume brings together a selection of the papers and round tables delivered at the 39th AEDEAN Conference, held at the University of Deusto in November 2015. The essays in On the Move: Glancing Backwards to Build a Future in English Studies often begin with typically-academic gestures such as retrieving a classic text and finding new ways of studying its genre or characterization; or remarking how certain ungrammatical constructions have gone frequently unnoticed —even in well-known texts— for various reasons; or entangling oneself in contentions about the adequacy of dissecting a literary text or linguistic problem by using innovative analytical tools. In all cases, though, there i...
Natural languages offer many examples of displacement, i.e. constructions in which a non-local expression is critical for some grammatical end. Two central examples include phenomena such as raising and passive on the one hand, and control on the other. Though each phenomenon is an example of displacement, they have been theoretically distinguished. Movement rules have generated the former and formally very different construal rules, the latter. The "Movement Theory of Control" challenges this differentiation and argues that the operations that generate the two constructions are the same, the differences arising from the positions through which the displaced elements are moved. In the context of the Minimalist Program, reducing the class of basic operations is methodologically prized. This volume is a collection of original papers that argue for this approach to control on theoretical and empirical grounds as well. The papers also develop and constrain the movement theory to account for novel phenomena from a variety of languages."
Tracing the development of linguistic theory from Descartes to Wilhelm von Humboldt, Chomsky's book is one of the most original and profound studies of language and mind ever written. This third edition includes a new and specially written introduction by James McGilvray, contextualising the work for the twenty-first century.
Head-movement has played a central role in morpho-syntactic theory, but its nature has remained unclear. While it is widely accepted that the main grammatical constraint controlling head-movement is the Head Movement Constraint (HMC), this constraint is flouted in many of the linguistic structures examined in this book. More specifically, the strictures of the HMC turn out to be sometimes inactive for specific grammars allowing multiple head-movement to take place in particular syntactic contexts. In The Grammar of Multiple Head-Movement, Phil Branigan shows that multiple head-movement is far from rare, forming a part of the grammar in Finnish, in English, in Perenakan Javanese, in northern ...
South Asia is home to a large number of languages and dialects. Although linguists working on this region have made significant contributions to our understanding of language, society, and language in society on a global scale, there is as yet no recognized international forum for the exchange of ideas amongst linguists working on South Asia. The Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics is designed to be just that forum. It brings together empirical and theoretical research and serves as a testing ground for the articulation of new ideas and approaches which may be grounded in a study of South Asian languages but which have universal applicability. Each volume will have three major sections: I. Invited contributions consisting of state-of-the-art essays on research in South Asian languages. II. Refereed open submissions focusing on relevant issues and providing various viewpoints. III. Reports from around the world, book reviews and abstracts of doctoral theses.
This is the first volume dedicated to the study of formal features and the expression of arguments within Phase Theory, the latest model of syntactic theorizing within the Minimalist Program. The collection addresses the nature of formal features and their role in the syntactic computation as well as checking mechanisms and configurations. It also investigates theoretical issues underlying the nature of syntactic arguments and their licensing (argument structure at large) and specific grammatical operations involving arguments (abstract and morphological case, empty elements, passivization, negation, and aspect). The chapters presented in this volume provide case studies from several, typologically unrelated languages. Apart from novel analyses of new as well as well-known facts, the contributions also provide interesting aspects of and challenges for Phase Theory in general, by critically exploring a number of theoretical extensions, proposing new syntactic mechanisms, and sharpening our tools for linguistic analysis.