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The 25 contributions of this volume represent a selection from the more than 120 papers originally presented at the International Conference on Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies (MIMS), held in Hamburg (October 2010) and organized by the Collaborative Research Center Multilingualism after twelve years of successful research. It presents a panorama of contemporary research in multilingualism covering three fields of investigation: (1) the simultaneous and successive acquisition of more than one language, including language attrition in multilingual settings, (2) historical aspects of multilingualism and variance, and (3) multilingual communication. The papers cover a vast variety of linguistic phenomena including morphology, syntax, segmental and prosodic phonology as well as discourse production and language use, taking both individual and societal aspects of multilingualism into account. The languages addressed include numerous Romance, Slavic and Germanic varieties as well as Welsh, Hungarian, Turkish, and several South African autochthonous languages.
This collection of papers investigates two specific linguistic phenomena from the point of view of first- and second-language acquisition. While observations on the acquisition of scrambling or pronominal clitics can be found in the literature, up until the recent past they were sparse and often buried in other issues. This volume fills a long-existing gap in providing a collection of articles which focus on language acquisition but at the same time address the overarching syntactic issues involved (for example, the X-bar status of clitics, base-generation vs. movement accounts of scrambling). This volume contains an overview of L1 (and, in one case, L2) acquisition data from a number of dif...
Henk van Riemsdijk has long been known as one of Europe’s most important linguists. His seminal ideas have been influential in developing generative grammar in Europe and beyond. As the initiator, co-founder, and chair of the GLOW society, he made the society the leading platform of European generative linguistics. He has also been editor of the series Studies in Generative Grammar since its foundation. As a teacher and supervisor, he has inspired generations of students. On the occasion of his relocation from the Netherlands to Italy, his friends, students and colleagues celebrate his work with this collection of essays on numerous topics of current theoretical interest.
This collection presents novel insights into the micro- and macro-variation of causal clauses from a cross-linguistic perspective. It contains a general introduction to the topic setting the scene and nine chapters based on data from Dutch, German, English, Icelandic, Chinese, and Japanese. Topics discussed in the individual chapters involve, inter alia, external, internal and linear syntax of adverbial clauses expressing a causal relation, their semantic interpretation and information-structural properties, verb position, volitionality, and the development of particular causal conjunctions. The findings gained here are of synchronic and diachronic nature and offer new theoretical perspectives on how causal dependency relationships are expressed by inherent causal morpho-syntactic patterns. They also provide a deeper comprehension of how sentential modifiers work, emerge, and develop in general. This volume is an asset to grammarians, syntacticians, theoretical, and historical linguists.
This volume offers new perspectives on the tension between the rich patterns of language variation that emerge from comparative studies and the quest for simple theoretical primitives. The chapters explore the debate between Cartography and Minimalism: on the one hand, the need for detailed and articulated descriptions of the clausal architecture, and on the other, the endeavor to reduce the theoretical apparatus to fundamental computational mechanisms. The first part of the book begins with a reflection on the goals of modern linguistic theory, and investigates the principles of human language, in an effort to subsume the regularities of particular grammars under a small set of morphosyntac...
Challenging existing lexical-semantic accounts, this book presents a compositional approach to the concept of factivity and its acquisition. Factive sentences such as 'John forgot that he bought wine' presuppose the truth of the embedded complement. The author argues that a satisfactory characterization of factivity can only be accomplished if its multiple dimensions are acknowledged. A thorough examination of the empirical data demonstrates that factivity, rather than being a property of the matrix predicate, results from the complex interaction of lexical-semantic, syntactic, and discourse-semantic factors. Focusing on English, the predictions of this compositional approach to factivity ar...
This book contains 51 chapters based on papers presented at the GALA (Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition) conference held in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2011. It thus reflects the GALA 2011 scientific presentations and discussions and raises issues that are currently at the centre of language acquisition research. Such issues examined in this volume include first and second language acquisition and processing by children and adults; language acquisition by individuals with linguistic and/or cognitive impairment; and cross-linguistic comparisons in (a)typical language acquisition. As such, Advances in Language Acquisition constitutes a valuable reference guide for current work on the interdisciplinary research field of language acquisition.
Providing a study of three salient phenomena of West Germanic, namely scrambling, remnant movement and restructuring, this book discusses their interrelatedness. In particular, restructuring is shown to break down into remnant movement of the major phases of the infinitival clause.
This volume is a comprehensive, state-of-the-science treatment of the acquisition of different Indo- and Non-Indo-European languages in different contexts (i.e., L1, L2, L3/Ln, bi/multilingual language, heritage languages, pathology and language impairment and sign language acquisition) conducted within the generative framework. It also encompasses the diversity of methodologies and issues that can be found with contemporary research in the field. The different chapters contain original research from several different angles and provide a basis for dialogue between researchers working on diverse projects with the aim to further our understanding of how languages are acquired and, at the same time, refine and propose new theoretical constructs, such as complexity of linguistic features as a relevant factor forming children’s, adult’s and bilingual’s acquisition of syntactic, morphological, lexical and phonological structures.
o. COMPARATIVE GERMANIC SYNTAX This volume contains 13 papers that were prepared for the Seventh Workshop on Comparative Germanie Syntax at the University of Stuttgart in November 1991. In defining the theme both of the workshop and of this volume, we have taken "comparative" in "comparative Germanic syntax" to mean that at least two languages should be analyzed and "Germanic" to mean that at least one of these languages should be Germanic. There was no require ment as such that the research presented should be situated within the framework known as Principles and Parameters Theory (previously known as Government and Binding Theory), though it probably is no accident that this nevertheless t...