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The Infinite Gift
A child's very first word is a miraculous sound, the opening note in a lifelong symphony. Most parents never forget the moment. But that first word is soon followed by a second and a third, and by the age of three, children are typically learning ten new words every day and speaking in complete sentences. The process seems effortless, and for children, it is. But how exactly does it happen? How do children learn language? And why is it so much harder to do later in life? Drawing on cutting-edge developments in biology, neurology, psychology, and linguistics, Charles Yang's The Infinite Gift takes us inside the astonishingly complex but largely subconscious process by which children learn to ...
Wh-scope Marking
This volume deals with what the WH-movement parameter has to say about varieties of WH-dependencies in different languages. Section two introduces WH-scope marking and the related concept of partial WH-movement. Section three, the main approaches to WH-scope marking are introduced.
Historical Linguistics
This innovative textbook demonstrates the mutual relevance of historical linguistics and contemporary linguistics.
The Price of Linguistic Productivity
An investigation of how children balance rules and exceptions when they learn languages. All languages have exceptions alongside overarching rules and regularities. How does a young child tease them apart within just a few years of language acquisition? In this book, drawing an economic analogy, Charles Yang argues that just as the price of goods is determined by the balance between supply and demand, the price of linguistic productivity arises from the quantitative considerations of rules and exceptions. The learner postulates a productive rule only if it results in a more efficient organization of language, with the number of exceptions falling below a critical threshold. Supported by a wide range of cases with corpus evidence, Yang's Tolerance Principle gives a unified account of many long-standing puzzles in linguistics and psychology, including why children effortlessly acquire rules of language that perplex otherwise capable adults. His focus on computational efficiency provides novel insight on how language interacts with the other components of cognition and how the ability for language might have emerged during the course of human evolution.
Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions
This volume brings together some of the most recent developments in the field of experimental pragmatics, specifically empirical approaches to theoretical issues in presupposition theory. It includes studies of the online processing of presupposed content; investigations of the interpretive properties of presuppositions in various linguistic contexts; comparative perspectives relative to other aspects of meaning, such as asserted content and implicatures; cross-linguistic comparisons of presupposition triggers; and perspectives from language acquisition. Taken together, these novel contributions provide a snapshot of state-of-the art developments in this area and will serve as a point of reference for numerous emerging avenues of future work. It makes for an ideal set of readings for advanced university courses on experimental studies of meaning and is a must-read for anyone interested in experimental research on meaning in natural language.
The Place of Case in Grammar
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...
Introducing Arguments
This compositional theory of verbal argument structures explores how 'noncore' arguments (i.e. arguments that are not introduced by verbal roots themselves) are introduced into argument structure, and examines cross-linguistic variation in introducing arguments.
Asymmetry in Grammar
Asymmetry in Grammar: Syntax and Semantics brings to fore the centrality of asymmetry in DP, VP and CP. A finer grained articulation of the DP is proposed, and further functional projections for restrictive relatives, as well as a refined analyses of case identification and presumptive pronouns. The papers on VP discuss further asymmetries among arguments, and between arguments and adjuncts. Double-object constructions, specificational copula sentences, secondary predicates, and the scope properties of adjuncts are discussed in this perspective. The papers on CP propose a further articulation of the phrasal projection, justifications for Remnant IP movement, and an analysis of variation in c...
The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity
This volume examines the phenomenon of ergativity, a grammatical patterning whereby direct objects are in some way treated like intransitive subjects, to the exclusion of transitive subjects. It includes theoretical approaches from generative, typological, and functional paradigms, as well as 16 language-specific case studies.
The Verbal Domain
This volume features cutting-edge research from leading authorities on the nature and structure of the verbal domain and the complexity of the Verb Phrase (VP). The book is divided into three parts, representing the areas in which contemporary debate on the verbal domain is most active. The first part focuses on the V head, and includes four chapters discussing the setup of verbal roots, their syntax, and their interaction with other functional heads such as Voice and v. Chapters in the second part discuss the need to postulate a Voice head in the structure of a clause, and whether Voice is different from v. Voice was originally intended as the head hosting the external argument in its specifier, as well as transitivity. This section explores its relationship with "syntactic" voice, i.e. the alternation between actives and passives. Part three is dedicated to event structure, inner aspect, and Aktionsart. It tackles issues such as the one-to-one relation between argument structure and event structure, and whether there can be minimal structural units at the basis of the derivation of any sort of XP, including the VP.
