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This book uses data from English, Mandarin Chinese, and Modern Greek to develop a new theory of control structures that relates them to restructuring and the semantics of the embedding verb. The theory has implications both for clausal structure and for the relationship between form and meaning in natural language.
"An important idea in generative grammar is that form does not always follow function; that is, not all syntactic behavior is explainable by appeal to semantic considerations. But some syntactic behavior is so explainable, and surely it is no accident that many of the verbs and adjectives we use for describing our mental lives have the ability to embed sentences or sentence-like constituents: it is emblematic of what philosophers of mind call intentionality, which is the capacity of the mind to represent mind-external objects. Beliefs and desires, for example, have objects, and often those objects are of the sort that we can use sentences to name or describe them. Perhaps not all of the mental states and actions described by the words in (1) work like this in every situation. Maybe, for example, I can have "undirected" anger (ultimately, this is a question for psychologists or philosophers, not linguists). But I can also be angry about something or angry that something is the case"--
An integrative exploration of the concept of beliefs and their applications as studied across the cognitive sciences.
A critical survey of key issues in the analysis of propositional attitude reports, a central topic in natural language semantics.
This book deals with the category of case and where to place it in grammar. The crux of the debate lies in how the morphological expression of grammatical function should relate to formal syntax. In the generative tradition, this issue was addressed by the influential proposal that abstract syntactic Case should be dissociated from the morphological expression of case. The chapters in this book deal with a number of key issues in the ongoing debates that have emerged from this proposal. The first part discusses the modes that we need for structural case assignment, and how Case would relate to a theory of parameters. In the second part, contributors explore the division of labour between str...
Expressing Surprise at the Crossroads has as its aim to evaluate the impact of mirativity in Romance languages or –expressed differently– to determine how these languages apprehend surprise and related notions as linguistic devices. The different contributions included in the book point to revealing conclusions concerning the status of surprise in Romance as well as the place that mirativity occupies (if any) in the grammar of these languages. In this vein, the volume tries to answer questions such as to what extent do interactional contexts influence the development of mirative structures or how is the solidarity synchrony / diachrony reflected in mirative constructions.
Papers of the forty-third Algonquian Conference held at University of Michigan in October 2011. The papers of the Algonquian Conference have long served as the primary source of peer-reviewed scholarship addressing topics related to the languages and societies of Algonquian peoples. Contributions, which are peer-reviewed submissions presented at the annual conference, represent an assortment of humanities and social science disciplines, including archeology, cultural anthropology, history, ethnohistory, linguistics, literary studies, Native studies, social work, film, and countless others. Both theoretical and descriptive approaches are welcomed, and submissions often provide previously unpu...
This volume explores subordinate wh-clauses that lack an interrogative interpretation, particularly those in which the wh-word differs from its literal meaning. The chapters draw on data from a wide range of languages, combining the study of cross-linguistic variation in patterns of subordination with formal semantic and syntactic analyses.
This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate what we say from what is actually going on, allowing us to talk about what might happen or might have happened, as well as what is required, desirable, or permitted. Chapters in the book demonstrate that modality involves many more syntactic categories and levels of syntactic structure than traditionally assumed. The volume distinguishes between three types of modality: 'low modality', which concerns modal interpretations associated with the verbal and nominal cartographies in syntax; 'middle modality', or modal interpretation associated with the syntactic cartography internal to the clause; and 'high modality', relating to the left periphery. It combines cross-linguistic discussions of the more widely studied sources of modality with analyses of novel or unexpected sources, and shows how the meanings associated with the three types of modality are realized across a wide range of languages.
This book explores the micro-variation in the realization of definiteness across languages belonging to the Balkan Romance family: Romanian, Aromanian, Istro-Romanian and Megleno-Romanian. Daniela Isac offers a unified analysis of the different patterns observed, based on a post-syntactic spell-out rule.