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The Languages and Linguistics of Africa
This innovative handbook takes a fresh look at the currently underestimated linguistic diversity of Africa, the continent with the largest number of languages in the world. It covers the major domains of linguistics, offering both a representative picture of Africa’s linguistic landscape as well as new and at times unconventional perspectives. The focus is not so much on exhaustiveness as on the fruitful relationship between African and general linguistics and the contributions the two domains can make to each other. This volume is thus intended for readers with a specific interest in African languages and also for students and scholars within the greater discipline of linguistics.
Structures and Strategies
Following crucial insights on the functional structure of the clause and recent developments within the cartographic projects and minimalism, this book addresses various central themes in Italian and Romance syntax ranging from verb syntax and the syntax of verb-related phenomena of agreement and cliticization, to word order issues and their status in discourse contexts. It illustrates a research program where the basic formal components of grammar, the rich cartographic syntactic structures, are directly implicated in morphosyntactic computations proper as well as in the articulation of discourse strategies.
The Syntax of Specifiers and Heads
Specifiers and Heads covers such topics as: * interpretation and distribution of pronouns * ECP effects * specifiers and phrase structure * the role and functioning of head movement * the architecture of grammar Each chapter draws syntactic arguments from phenomena in a broad range of languages and brings these to bear on the structure of syntactic theory and the understanding of crosslinguistic variation. Among the languages studied are the African languages, Welsh and Irish, Norwegian, French, English and Dutch.
Towards an Elegant Syntax
This collection of essays, written between 1980 and 2001, places the search for theoretical elegance at centre stage. The author shows that although the conceptual difference between 'elegance' and the minimalist search for 'perfection' may appear to be subtle, its consequences are in fact wide ranging and radical. These considerations lead to a markedly different and novel theory of syntax where most of the major features of minimalism, such as derivation, economy, merge, move, phrases and projection, are not just reanalysed or shifted to other components but in a majority of cases are dispensed with completely or reduced to much simpler notions. Towards an Elegant Syntax makes available important and some less easily accessible publications with new introductory material.
The Passive in Japanese
This book describes and analyzes the passive voice system in Japanese within the framework of generative grammar. By unifying different types of passives conventionally distinguished within the literature, the book advances a simple minimalist account where various passive characteristics emerge from the lexical properties of a single passive morpheme interacting with independently-supported syntactic principles and general properties of Japanese. The book both reevaluates numerous properties previously discussed within the literature and introduces interesting new data collected through experiments. This novel analysis also benefits from considering the important issue of interspeaker variability, in terms of grammaticality judgments and context requirements, and its implications for individual grammar. The book will be of interest not only to students and scholars working on passive constructions, but more generally to scholars working on generative grammar, experimental syntax, language acquisition, and sentence processing.
Minority Languages, Microvariation, Minimalism and Meaning
This volume presents a selection of papers from the first international conference of the Irish Network in Formal Linguistics (INFL). INFL is well placed to attract expertise on both microvariation and the linguistics of the Celtic languages, and the volume reflects this expertise. Microvariation approaches the analysis of dialect variation with a focus on how it contributes to the understanding of linguistic theory. The synchronic and diachronic variation examined in this volume includes Irish English, dialects of Italian and dialects of Flemish. Under the linguistic study of Celtic languages, the papers included address important architectural questions in linguistic theory, as well as cha...
Variation in P
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.
Configurations of Sentential Complementation
The investigation of sentential complementation focuses on properties of sentences that are embedded in other sentences. This book brings together a variety of studies on this topic in the framework of generative grammar. The first part of the book focuses on infinitival complements. The author provides new perspectives on raising and control, longstanding problems in infinitival complementation. He then examines the problem of clitic ordering in infinitives in Romance languages. The second part of the book addresses various aspects of Wh- sentences: extraction from negative and factive islands, agreement in relative clauses, and the relation between French relative and interrogative qui and que.
Explorations in Maximizing Syntactic Minimization
This volume presents a series of papers written by Epstein, Kitahara and Seely, each of which explores fundamental linguistic questions and analytical mechanisms proposed in recent minimalist work, specifically concerning recent analyses by Noam Chomsky. The collection includes eight papers by the collaborators (one with Miki Obata), plus three additional papers, each individually authored by Epstein, Kitahara and Seely, that cover a range of related topics including: the minimalist commitment to explanation via simplification; the Strong Minimalist Thesis; strict adherence to simplest Merge, Merge (X, Y) = {X, Y}, subject to 3rd factor constraints; and state-of-the-art concepts and conseque...
