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This volume presents new work by leading researchers on central themes in the study of event structure: the nature and representation of telicity, change, and the notion of state. The book advances our understanding of these aspects of event structure by combining foundational semantic research with a series of case studies from a variety of languages. The book begins with an overview of the theoretical issues central to the volume, along with a brief presentation of the remaining chapters and the points of contact between them. The chapters, developed within several different theoretical perspectives, promote cross-theory as well as cross-linguistic comparison. The work will interest scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, semantics, and their interfaces. It will also appeal to researchers in philosophy, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition who are interested in the notions of telicity, change, and stativity.
Even though null subjects have been extensively studied in the past four decades, there is a growing interest in partial null subject languages (e.g. Finnish) and a subtler classification of null subject phenomena overall. This volume aims at contributing to this trend, focusing on Slavic and Finno-Ugric groups, with some extension to Baltic and Samoyedic languages. Interestingly, these groups offer an impressive array of macro- and microvariation. Moreover, given an increasing interest towards the internal structure of the pronominal elements and the role of various types of topics in the left periphery of the sentence structure, the enterprise taken up in this book is to investigate lexica...
Sonority is a central notion in phonetics and phonology and it is essential for generalizations related to syllabic organization. However, to date there is no clear consensus on the phonetic basis of sonority, neither in perception nor in production. The widely used Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) represents the speech signal as a sequence of discrete units, where phonological processes are modeled as symbol manipulating rules that lack a temporal dimension and are devoid of inherent links to perceptual, motoric or cognitive processes. The current work aims to change this by outlining a novel approach for the extraction of continuous entities from acoustic space in order to model dynamic...
This volume is a collection of studies in generative (morpho)syntax and phonology, which grew out of the 6th Generative Phonology in Poland (GLiP) meeting that took place at the University of Warsaw in the spring of 2008. The sixteen papers, written by the leading scholars in linguistics as well as young researchers, give a representative flavour of investigations across (morpho)syntax and phonology from the current generative perspective. Drawing on recent advances in formal linguistics, the majority of studies in this volume test the applicability of available theoretical frameworks to selected bodies of data. Some papers discuss the adequacy of competing theoretical solutions in the light of new experimental results. The empirical data is drawn from a variety of languages including standard and dialectal Polish, Russian, Croatian, Czech, English, Frisian and Swahili. The purpose is not only to illustrate long-standing problems but also to highlight less known facts. The collection will thus be relevant to those concerned with theoretical accounts, experimental findings, Slavic and general linguistics.
This volume explores predication in Niuean, an endangered Polynesian language spoken on the island of Niue and in New Zealand. It extends our understanding of cross-linguistic sentence structure and grammatical case, and will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, typology, and theoretical linguistics.
For decades, a small set of major world languages have formed the basis of the vast majority of linguistic theory. However, minoritized languages can also provide fascinating contributions to our understanding of the human language faculty. This pioneering book explores the transformative effect minoritized languages have on mainstream linguistic theory, which, with their typically unusual syntactic, morphological and phonological properties, challenge and question frameworks that were developed largely to account for more widely-studied languages. The chapters address the four main pillars of linguistic theory – syntax, semantics, phonology, and morphology – and provide plenty of case studies to show how minoritized language can disrupt assumptions, and lead to modifications of the theory itself. It is illustrated with examples from a range of languages, and is written in an engaging and accessible style, making it essential reading for both students and researchers of theoretical syntax, phonology and morphology, and language policy and politics.
This book investigates the properties of determiners in Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) Salish. Determiners in Skwxwú7mesh are shown to behave significantly differently from the definite determiner the in English, as Skwxwú7mesh lacks a definite/indefiniteness distinction. All Skwxwú7mesh DPs can be used in both familiar and novel contexts, and are not required to refer to a unique entity. Instead, Skwxwú7mesh determiners are split along deictic/non-deicticlines. Determiners can therefore vary in terms of their semantics. However, determiners are argued to universally encode contextual sensitivity (domain restriction). A strict correlation between the syntax and semantics of determiners is proposed: if an article occupies D, it is context sensitive. Conversely, articles that do not occupy D are not context sensitive. This book also explores determiner systems in other Salish languages. Deixis is a part of most of the Salish determiner systems, but the systems vary quite a bit from one another. Other languages discussed include Inuttut (Labrador Inuktitut), Lithuanian and Maori.
Addresses the syntactic issues raised by coordinate pairings, with particularly emphasis on their properties in English and Chinese.