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The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.
This book presents an innovative analysis that relates informational structure, syntax and morphology in Quechua. It provides a minimalist account of the relationship between focus, topic, evidentiality and other left-peripheral features and sentence-internal constituents marked with suffixes that have been previously considered of a pragmatic nature. Intervention effects show that these relationships are also of a syntactic nature. The analysis is extended to morphological markers that appear on polarity sensitive items and wh-words. The book also provides a brief overview of the main characteristics of Quechua syntax as well as additional bibliographical information.
This book examines the semantics of comparative constructions using words such as more, as, too, and so on, and proposes a new account that rejects a fundamental assumption of the degree semantics framework. The findings have implications not only for semantics but also for language acquisition and cognitive science more broadly.
This volume is not an attempt to give a comprehensive treatment of the many facets of intelligence. Rather, the intention is to present multiple approaches to interesting and novel ways of looking at old problems. The focus is on the visual and some of the conceptual intelligences. Vision is man's primary cognitive contact with the world around him, and we are vividly reminded of this by Roman Jakobson's autobiographical note, "The Evasive Initial" with which this volume begins. That we see the world as well as we do is something of a miracle. Looking out through our eyes, our brains give us reliable knowledge about the world around us in all it beauty of form, color and movement. The chapte...
Synthesizing ideas from event semantics and psycholinguistics, this monograph provides a new perspective on the processing of linguistic aspect and aspectual coercion. Confronting alternative semantic accounts with experimental evidence, the author develops a comprehensive model of online aspectual interpretation. The first part of the book critically reviews competing theoretical accounts of aspectual coercion. As an analytical tool the author introduces a computational model based on the event calculus by Hamm & van Lambalgen (2005) which makes use of planning formalisms from artificial intelligence. Detailed predictions from this framework are then tested in the experimental work reported in the second part. The focus here is on such questions as: Is aspectual coercion a uniform phenomenon or must we distinguish different types? Is aspect processed incrementally or is it computed only at the clause boundary? And finally, what insights can event related potentials yield about how the brain resolves local aspectual mismatch?
The claim that ?pronominals have phonological features only where they must, for some reason, is strongly supported by the occurrence of the null pronoun PRO as coined and introduced by Noam Chomsky. How reference of PRO is determined is the main subject of control theory, the subsystem of core grammar to which this study is dedicated. Chomsky has not followed up his natural suggestion that choice of controller is determined by theta roles or other semantic properties of the verb, perhaps pragmatic conditions of some sort. But then, a great many students of control have engaged in exploring thematic roles as tools most suitable for investigating control. Shifting analysis of control ...
This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.
Linguistic forms -- Search -- Studies -- "Was it for this?" and the study of influence -- Act as if and useful fictions -- WWJD? and the history of imitatio christi -- Milton's depictives and the history of style -- Conclusions -- Shakespeare's constructicon -- God is dead, long live philology
Leviticus 17–26, an ancient law text known as the Holiness Code, prescribes how particular persons are to behave in concrete, everyday situations. The addressees of the law text must revere their parents, respect the elderly, fear God, take care of their fellow, provide for the sojourner, and so on. The sojourner has his own obligations, as do the priests. Even God is said to behave in various ways towards various persons. Thus, the law text forms an intricate web of persons and interactions. There is a growing awareness that ancient law texts were not arbitrary collections of legal paragraphs but articulations of certain world views. The laws were rational in their own respect and were ba...
This new volume serves to focus and clarify the debate surrounding long-distance reflexives by examining the role of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics/discourse in the use of long-distance reflexives in a variety of languages. It discusses a broad range of questions about syntactic categories and presents a number of theoretical frameworks.