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Aspects of Split Ergativity argues that aspect-based split ergativity does not mark a split in how Case is assigned, but rather, a split in sentence structure. The contexts in which we find the appearance of a nonergative pattern in an otherwise ergative language-namely, the nonperfective aspects-involve an intransitive aspectual matrix verb and a subordinated lexical verb.
The Mayan Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the language family associated with the Classic Mayan civilization (AD 200–900), a family whose individual languages are still spoken today by at least six million indigenous Maya in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. This unique resource is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mayan languages and linguistics. Written by a team of experts in the field, The Mayan Languages presents in-depth accounts of the linguistic features that characterize the thirty-one languages of the family, their historical evolution, and the social context in which they are spoken. The Mayan Languages: provides detai...
Nominative-accusative and ergative are two common alignment types found across languages. In the former type, the subject of an intransitive verb and the subject of a transitive verb are expressed the same way, and differently from the object of a transitive. In ergative languages, the subject of an intransitive and the object of a transitive appear in the same form, the absolutive, and the transitive subject has a special, ergative, form. Ergative languages often follow very different patterns, thus evading a uniform description and analysis. A simple explanation for that has to do with the idea that ergative languages, much as their nominative-accusative counterparts, do not form a uniform...
'The Grammar of Q' puts forth a novel syntactic and semantic analysis of wh-questions, based on an in-depth study of the Tlingit language, an endangered and under-documented Native American tongue. A major conclusion is that the phenomenon classically dubbed 'pied-piping' does not actually exist.
This book deals with the category of case and where to place it in grammar. The crux of the debate lies in how the morphological expression of grammatical function should relate to formal syntax. In the generative tradition, this issue was addressed by the influential proposal that abstract syntactic Case should be dissociated from the morphological expression of case. The chapters in this book deal with a number of key issues in the ongoing debates that have emerged from this proposal. The first part discusses the modes that we need for structural case assignment, and how Case would relate to a theory of parameters. In the second part, contributors explore the division of labour between str...
This volume explores the progress of cross-linguistic research into the structure of complex nominals since the publication of Chomsky's 'Remarks on Nominalization' in 1970. The contributors take stock of developments in this area and offer new perspectives based on data from a wide range of typologically diverse languages.
This study aims at developing a unified perspective on nonfiniteness, encompassing its morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects. It puts the emphasis on clause types distinct from standard infinitives (gerund clauses, Celtic verbo-nominal structures, Portuguese inflected infinitives, Latin dominant participle constructions) and takes advantage of the most recent developments in syntactic theory. The notions of defectiveness and completeness, the inheritance hypothesis, the labeling requirement, the syntactic definition of lexical categories, once combined together, appear to make accessible tighter and more elegant analyses than previous accounts.
A study of Denis Villeneuve's genre-transcendent film. In Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016), scientists must decipher the language of and peacefully communicate with aliens who have landed on Earth before the world's military attacks. In this first book-length study of the film, scholar David Roche argues that it is one of the most important films of this century, and the most brilliant science fiction film since Blade Runner. Roche posits Arrival as a blockbuster with artistic ambitions--an argument supported by the film's several Academy Award nominations--and looks closely at how the film engages with theoretical questions posed by contemporary film studies and philosophy alike. Each sect...
Many of the world's languages permit or require clause-initial positioning of the primary predicate, potentially alongside some or all of its dependents. While such predicate fronting (where fronting may or may not involve movement) is a widespread phenomenon, it is also subject to intricate and largely unexplained variation. In Parameters of Predicate Fronting, Vera Lee-Schoenfeld and Dennis Ott bring together leaders in the field of comparative syntax to explore the empirical manifestations and theoretical modelling of predicate fronting across languages. There exists by now a rich literature on predicate fronting, but few attempts have been made at synthesizing the resulting empirical obs...
One of the fundamental properties of human language is movement, where a constituent moves from one position in a sentence to another position. Syntactic theory has long been concerned with properties of movement, including locality restrictions. Smuggling in Syntax investigates how different movement operations interact with one another, focusing on the special case of smuggling. First introduced by volume editor Chris Collins in 2005, the term 'smuggling' refers to a specific type of movement interaction. The contributions in this volume each describe different areas where smuggling derivations play a role, including passives, causatives, adverb placement, the dative alternation, the place...