You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A proposal that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. This book offers a significant reconceptualization of the person system in natural language. The authors, leading scholars in syntax and its interfaces, propose that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. They map the journey of person features in grammar, from semantics through syntax to the system of morphological realization. Such an in-depth cross-modular study allows the development of a theory in which assumptions made about the behavior of ...
The phenomena discussed by the authors range from synthetic compounding in English to agreement alternations in Arabic and complementizer agreement in dialects of Dutch. Their exposition combines insights from lexicalism and distributed morphology, and is expressed in terms accessible to scholars and advanced students. - unique exploration of interfaces of morphology with syntax and phonology - wide empirical scope with many new observations - theoretically innovative and important - accessible to students with chapters designed for use in teaching
This text addresses issues in morphosyntax. It covers areas including: noun incorporation; the morphosyntax of periphrastic participal constructions; derivation of lexical integrity; and mismatches between morphosyntax and morphophonology.
The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 23rd and 24th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop held at the University of Edinburgh and the Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussels. The contributions provide new perspectives on several topics of current interest for syntactic theory on the basis of comparative data from a wide range of Germanic languages. Among the theoretical and empirical issues explored are various ellipsis phenomena, the internal structure of the DP, the syntax-morphology interface, the syntax-semantics interface, Binding Theory, various diachronic developments, and 'do-support'-type phenomena. This book is of interest to syntacticians with an interest in theoretical, comparative and/or diachronic work, as well as to morphologists and semanticists interested in the connections their fields have with syntax. It will also be of interest to graduate and advanced undergraduate students in linguistic disciplines.
These include new versions of an old debate between constraints on derivations and constraints on representations and entirely new questions about the nature of the candidate set, as well as questions about learnability and computability.
This book explores the role of agreement morphology in the morphosyntactic realization of a verb's arguments. It examines the differences and parallels between configurational and nonconfigurational languages, languages that allow pronoun drop only in particular constructions, and languages which always require overt syntactic determiner phrases as arguments. These and related issues are explored in the context of a wide range of languages. The book will interest linguists at graduate level and above concerned with morphosyntactic theory, typology, and the interactions of syntax and morphology in different languages.
This book offers reconstructions of various syntactic properties of Proto-Germanic, including verb position in main clauses, the syntax of the wh-system, and the (non-)occurrence of null pronominal subjects and objects. Although previous studies have looked at the lexical and phonological reconstruction of Proto-Germanic, little is currently known about the syntax of the language, and it has even been argued that the reconstruction of syntax is impossible. Dr Walkden uses extensive evidence from the early Germanic languages - Old English, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Gothic - to show that syntactic reconstruction is not only possible but also profitable. He argues that while th...
This volume addresses a number of issues in current morphological theory from the point of view of diminutive formation, such as the role of phonology in diminutives and hypocoristics and consequently its place in the overall architecture of grammar, i.e. phonology-first versus syntax/morphology-first theoretical analyses, diminutives in the L1 acquisition of typologically diverse languages, and the borrowing of non-diminutive morphology for the expression of diminutive meanings, among others. Among the peculiarities of diminutive morphology discussed are the relation between diminutives and mass nouns, the avoidance of diminutives in plural contexts in some languages, and the relatively frequent semantic bleaching and reanalysis of diminutive forms cross-linguistically. Special attention is paid to the debate on the head versus modifier status of diminutive affixes (corresponding to high versus low diminutives in alternative analyses), with data from spoken and sign languages. Overall, the volume addresses a number of topics that will be of interest to scholars of almost all linguistic subfields and per
Main Clause Phenomena: New Horizons takes the study of Main Clause Phenomena (MCP) into the 21st century, without neglecting the origins of the topic. It brings together work by both established and up-and-coming scholars, who present analyses for a wide range of MCP, from a variety of languages, with a particular focus on particles and agreement markers, complementizers and verb second, and the licensing of MCP in different types of clauses. Besides enriching the empirical domain, this volume also engages with the theoretical question of how best to capture the distribution of MCP and, in particular, to what extent they are embeddable and why. The diverse patterns and analyses presented challenge the idea that MCP constitute a homogeneous class. Main Clause Phenomena: New Horizons is of interest not just to scholars specializing in the study of MCP, but to all linguists interested in the syntax and/or semantics of the clause.
This book provides a novel analysis for the syntax of the clausal left periphery, focusing on various finite clause types and especially on embedded clauses. It investigates how the appearance of multiple projections interacts with economy principles and with the need for marking syntactic information overtly. In particular, the proposed account shows that a flexible approach assuming only a minimal number of projections is altogether favourable to cartographic approaches. The main focus of the book is on West Germanic, in particular on English and German, yet other Germanic and non-Germanic languages are also discussed for comparative purposes.