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This book analyzes 153 languages from a large variety of families to establish a previously unexplored relationship between phonetically conditioned sound changes such as lenitions and functional (meaning maintenance related) considerations. Carefully collecting numerous inventories of consonants, this collection is likely to become an important resource for future linguistics research. By distinguishing between phonetic and phonological neutralization, and showing that the first does not necessarily result in the second, Naomi Gurevich uncovers previously unexplored and often surprising trends in the relationship between phonetics and phonology.
As with many other languages, Mandarin Chinese exhibits a rich variety of ways in expressing the arguments of the predicator in a sentence. Unlike other languages, such variation is typically devoid of any formal marking. Previous attempts in explaining such phenomena usually focus on the syntax as an explanatory tool. This book argues that a large majority of such argument structure phenomena are better accounted for by recourse to enriched representations in lexical semantics. Drawing insights from conceptual semantics, cognitive semantics, Generative Lexicon, construction grammar and formal syntax, this book constitutes the first attempt at a comprehensive account of lexical semantic issues in Mandarin Chinese.
Miglio argues that to assess the relative markedness of a segment, frequency of occurrence in vowel inventories is insufficient when considered on its own. In its analysis of the Great Vowel Shift, this book elaborates a more useful model of a unitary change even in a surface-oriented theory such as optimality theory, with the help of local conjunction. Miglio extends the device of local conjunction to model opaque relations, and calls for reranking and lexicon optimization as the means to capture change within optimality theory.
This books studies syntax of NPIs and their interaction with sentential negatives in Hindi. It outlines the clause structure of Hindi and locates the syntactic position of sentential negatives as well as constituent negatives within the structure. It is argued that sentential negative in Hindi negation marker heads its own maximal projection, NegP, which is immediately dominated by TP. In addition to locating the position of negation markers in the clause structure, it outlines the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) in Hindi and the structural constraints on their licensing by sentential negative. The book argues that an NPI in Hindi is licensed overtly in the course of derivatio...
In this book, Yael Greenberg discusses and clarifies a number of controversial issues and phenomena in the generic literature, including the existence of "episodic genericity," existential presuppositions, and contextual restrictions of generics.
Papers of the forty-fourth Algonquian Conference held at University of Chicago in October 2012. 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 book investigates two prominent issues with regard to the inflected infinitive-the syntactic distribution of the Portuguese inflected infinitive, and its origin and development from Early Romance. The syntactic analysis offered here differs from traditional descriptions of the inflected infinitive in that it uses a theoretical approach to propose one concise condition which predicts all possible occurrences of the Portuguese inflected infinitive within the framework of relational grammar. While the first section of this book offers a synchronic study of the use of the inflected infinitive, the second section examines the theories previously posited to explain its origin and provides additional evidence from Latin and other Romance languages to support the proposal that the inflected infinitive was a historical development rooted in the Latin imperfect subjunctive. This study presents a detailed comparison of the syntactic environments common to both the imperfect subjunctive and the inflected infinitive, and examines the survival of an inflected infinitive in other Romance varieties as well as the existence of other inflected non-finite forms in these languages.
Variation in P is an essential follow-up to the seminal proposals of the generative tradition regarding prepositional syntax. Recent research shows that prepositional phrases have a complex internal structure, and that the grammatical encoding of locative meaning has its own place in universal grammar. The papers collected in the first part of this volume not only test these proposals against new comparative data, but also shed light on the relation between spatial expressions and other semantic relations like possession. The second part of the volume explores the role of prepositions in non-spatial environments as well as in more general phenomena like verbal affixation, ellipsis, and complementation. By drawing on evidence from less studied languages, and by considering prepositional syntax in interaction with clausal syntax as well as within prepositional phrases, Variation in P refines and develops theories introduced by previous generative studies.
This book is the first detailed investigation and description of phonotactic sound patterns affecting Khoesan click consonant inventories. It also includes the first quantitative study of phonation types in Khoesan languages, and the first study of phonation types associated with pharyngeal consonants all around. Although bases of OCP constraints have been presumed to be perceptual, this is the first quantitative study showing the acoustic basis of a particular OCP constraint in a specific language. Amanda L. Miller-Ockhuizen describes the phonetics and phonology of gutturals in the Khoesan language of Ju|'hoansi. Hers is the first study of voice quality cues associated with epiglottalized v...