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Expecting the Unexpected: Exceptions in Grammar
Every linguistic theory has to come to grips with a fundamental property of human language: the existence of exceptions, i.e. phenomena that do not follow the standard patterns one observes otherwise. The contributions to this volume discuss and exemplify a variety of approaches to exceptionality within different formal and non-formal frameworks. Topics include criteria for exceptionality, the diachronic rise of exceptions, the relevance of different grammatical subsystems and their interaction in the explanation of exceptions, and the crucial characteristics of grammatical models that can accommodate exceptions. A special feature of the book is that the articles are accompanied by peer-commentaries and responses thereupon, thus opening up the papers to further discussion.
Exploring Crash-proof Grammars
The Minimalist Program has advanced a research program that builds the design of human language from conceptual necessity. Seminal proposals by Frampton & Gutmann (1999, 2000, 2002) introduced the notion that an ideal syntactic theory should be crash-proof . Such a version of the Minimalist Program (or any other linguistic theory) would not permit syntactic operations to produce structures that crash . There have, however, been some recent developments in Minimalism especially those that approach linguistic theory from a biolinguistic perspective (cf. Chomsky 2005 et seq.) that have called the pursuit of a crash-proof grammar into serious question. The papers in this volume take on the daunting challenge of defining exactly what a crash is and what a crash-proof grammar would look like, and of investigating whether or not the pursuit of a crash-proof grammar is biolinguistically appealing."
Syntax - Theory and Analysis. Volume 2
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 Expression of Information Structure
Information structure deals with the linguistic forms and techniques that support the integration of what is said into the current informational and attentional state of the addressee. This shows in categories like topic-comment structuring, focus to highlight expressions, marking of givenness and of presupposed information, and ways to indicate that the information provided is restricted. The book relates infor-mation structure to theoretical models of grammar, to computation and modelling and brings together what is known about the expression of information structure in human language with regard to its empirical investigation, its psycholinguistic aspects and the acquisition of informatio...
Phonology in Perception
Review text: "This volume contains exciting and potentially valuable new contributions that attempts to expand our understanding of the role of phonology and phonetics in speech perception. This volume has much to contribute for not just linguistics, but psycholinguistics more generally, and so concepts contained in this volume should form the basis of many discussions in future speech perception studies."Andrew Blyth in: Linguist List 21.3465.
Grammatical theory
This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to the...
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.
French subject islands
This book examines extractions out of the subject, which is traditionally considered to be an island for extraction. There is a debate among linguists regarding whether the “subject island constraint” is a syntactic phenomenon or an illusion caused by cognitive or pragmatic factors. The book focusses on French, that provides an interesting case study because it allows certain extractions out of the subject despite not being a typical null-subject language. The book takes a discourse-based approach and introduces the “Focus-Background Conflict” constraint, which posits that a focused element cannot be part of a backgrounded constituent due to a pragmatic contradiction. The major novel...
The Architecture of Focus
This collection investigates the architecture of focus in linguistic theory from different theoretical perspectives. Research on focus and information structure in the last four decades has shown that the phenomenon of focus is highly complex, the theoretical approaches manifold, and the data highly sensitive. The main emphasis has been placed on the integration of the notion of focus in generative grammar. In recent years, however, the approaches to focus and information structure underwent a radical change in perspective. The theoretical concept of focus, its related terms and phenomena became the object of research. Along with it, the research questions shifted: instead of locating focus ...
Categoriality and continuity in prosodic prominence
Prosody has been characterised as a "half-tamed savage" being shaped by both discrete, categorical aspects as well as gradient, continuous phenomena. This book is concerned with the relation of the "wild" and the "tamed" sides of prosodic prominence. It reviews problems that arise from a strict separation of categorical and continuous representations in models of phonetics and phonology, and it explores the potential role of descriptions aimed at reconciling the two domains. In doing so, the book offers an introduction to dynamical systems, a framework that has been studied extensively in the last decades to model speech production and perception. The reported acoustic and articulatory data ...
