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Exploring the Syntax and Semantics of South Asian Languages
This collection offers fresh perspectives on the syntax and semantics of South Asian languages, drawing on novel data from Meiteilon, Haryanavi, Punjabi, Kannada, Malayalam, and Bangla. It covers three major grammatical aspects: namely, the status of primitive categories, clausal and nominal structure, and case/phi-agreement. All the contributions here provide comprehensive descriptive discussions followed by analyses couched within the generative paradigm, thereby offering detailed and clearly presented linguistic treatments of important issues in South Asian languages.
Deconstructing Ergativity
Building upon theoretical innovations and extensive empirical findings, this book explains variation in the syntactic behavior of ergative arguments across languages. It offers a new analysis of ergativity by recognizing two distinct types, PP-ergative- and DP-ergative-languages. Each type is characterized by a set of correlated features which result in structural consistency.
Ergativity
The overarching theme of this volume is the formal expression of the range and limits of ergativity. The book contains cutting-edge theoretical papers by top authors in the field, who also conduct original field work and bring new data to light. It contains articles that apply the most recent theoretical tools to the area of ergativity, and then explore the issues that emerge. Languages investigated in the text include Basque, Georgian, and Hindi.
Case and Agreement from Fringe to Core
This book explores the view that impoverishment and Agree operations are part of a single grammatical component. The architecture set forth here gives rise tocomplex but highly systematic interactions between the two operations. This interaction is shown to provide a unified and general account of apparentlydiverse and unrelated intances of eccentric argument encoding that so far haveremained elusive to a unified theoretical account. The proposed view of the grammatical architecture achieves an integration of these phenomena withinbetter-studied languages and thus gives rise to a more general theory of caseand agreement phenomena. The empirical evidence on the basis of which the proposal is developed drawsfrom a wide range of typologically non-related languages, including Basque, Hindi, Icelandic, Itelmen, Marathi, Nez Perce, Niuean, Punjabi, Sahaptin, Selayarese, Yukaghir, and Yurok . The proposal has far-reaching consequences for the study of grammatical architecture, linguistic interfaces, derivational locality in apparently non-local dependencies and the role of functional considerations in formal approaches tothe human language faculty.
Complex Predicates
Complex predicates present different levels of complexity at the syntactic and morphological levels crosslinguistically. The focus of this book is a subset of these constructions (causative and applicative) in three polysynthetic languages of the South Caucasian language family, in which the functional morphology associated with the argument structure of these constructions is unusually rich. Due to such focus, the syntax-morphology interface in causative and applicative constructions is subject to scrutiny in two main chapters of the book. The analysis includes the argument structure of causatives and applicatives along with the morpho-phonological instantiation of the functional heads involved in these constructions. The book is written very clearly and is accessible for a wide audience including undergraduate students in the introductory syntax and morphology courses as well as graduate students in basic syntax courses and seminars in linguistics. It naturally appeals to a general linguistic audience interested in theoretical linguistics.
Syntax - Theory and Analysis. Volume 1
This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual langu...
The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity
This volume offers theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the issues pertaining to ergativity, a grammatical patterning whereby direct objects are in some way treated like intransitive subjects, to the exclusion of transitive subjects. This pattern differs markedly from nominative/accusative marking whereby transitive and intransitive subjects are treated as one grammatical class, to the exclusion of direct objects. While ergativity is sometimes referred to as a typological characteristic of languages, research on the phenomenon has shown that languages do not fall clearly into one category or the other and that ergative characteristics are not consistent across languages. Chapters in t...
Auxiliary Selection in Italo-Romance
This book proposes a new solution to the long-standing puzzle of auxiliary selection in Romance languages, in particular Italian. The following questions are addressed: why the perfect auxiliary appears in the two forms be and have within a single language, what drives this distribution, and how cross-linguistic data can be accounted for. The solution to these issues consists of an Agreebased analysis that accounts for auxiliary selection in root clauses and restructuring in Standard Italian and in Italo-Romance varieties, which is also compatible with participle agreement. By answering these questions, the book also touches upon more theoretical and foundational problems, such as the distribution of labor between syntax, morphology and the lexicon, and the conditions on the operation Agree (in particular, multiple probing, locality, and minimality). This work contributes to the discussion in the fields of formal morpho-syntax, theoretical linguistics, and Romance linguistics.
Alignment and Alignment Change in the Indo-European Family
This volume brings together work from leading specialists in Indo-European languages to explore the macro- and micro-dynamic factors that contribute to variation and change in alignment and argument realization. Alignment is taken to include both basic alignment patterns associated with major construction types, as well as various valency-decreasing constructions such as passives, anticausatives, and impersonals. The chapters explore synchronic and diachronic aspects of alignment morphosyntax based on data from Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, Armenian, and Slavic. All have a strong empirical focus, drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods, and range from broad comparative studies to detailed investigations of specific constructions in individual languages. The book is one of very few studies to examine variation and change in alignment typology across languages in a single family. It contributes to a greater understanding of the roles played by analogy/extension, reanalysis, and areal factors in alignment change, and demonstrates the extent of variation found in the morphosyntax of argument realization in genetically-related languages.
The Structure of Language
Most of the time we communicate using language without considering the complex activity we are undertaking, forming words and sentences in a split second. This book introduces the analysis of language structure, combining both description and theory within a single, practical text. It begins by examining words and parts of words, and then looks at how words work together to form sentences that communicate meaning. Sentence patterns across languages are also studied, looking at the similarities and the differences we find in how languages communicate meaning. The book also discusses how context can affect how we structure our sentences: the context of a particular language and its structures, the context of old and new information for us and our addressee(s), and the context of our culture.
