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This work discusses many optimization and linguistic issues in great detail. It treats the history of a variety of languages, including English, French, Germanic, Galician/ Portuguese, Latin, Russian, and Spanish and shows that the application of Optimality Theory allows for innovative and improved analyses. It contains a complete bibliography on OT and language change. It is of interest to historical linguists, researchers into OT and linguistic theory, and phonologists and syntacticians with an interest in historical change.
This volume presents a collection of specially commissioned papers devoted to analyzing the linguistics of Modern Hebrew from a number of perspectives. Various aspects of Modern Hebrew grammar are discussed including the structure of the lexicon, grammatical features and inflectional morphology, as well as the grammaticalization of semantic and pragmatic distinctions. The psycholinguistic issues addressed include the acquisition of morphological knowledge, the pro-drop parameter and question formation, as well as language use in hearing-impaired native speakers. The collection of these papers together in a single volume allows these phenomena to be considered not in isolation but in the context of the grammatical system of which the language is an expression. As a consequence, more general issues connected to Modern Hebrew begin to emerge, such as the role of the inflectional morphological system in the grammar, and a rich set of facts and analyses relevant for many related issues are made available to the reader.
Complex predicates present different levels of complexity at the syntactic and morphological levels crosslinguistically. The focus of this book is a subset of these constructions (causative and applicative) in three polysynthetic languages of the South Caucasian language family, in which the functional morphology associated with the argument structure of these constructions is unusually rich. Due to such focus, the syntax-morphology interface in causative and applicative constructions is subject to scrutiny in two main chapters of the book. The analysis includes the argument structure of causatives and applicatives along with the morpho-phonological instantiation of the functional heads involved in these constructions. The book is written very clearly and is accessible for a wide audience including undergraduate students in the introductory syntax and morphology courses as well as graduate students in basic syntax courses and seminars in linguistics. It naturally appeals to a general linguistic audience interested in theoretical linguistics.
This book explores the nature of stative verbs, their eventuality structure, and the patterns of argument realization. The study shows that there is no single class of stative verbs. Rather, several distinct groups of verbs are found: Verbs that undergo a systematic stative/eventive ambiguity; verbs that allow for a stative reading only; and verbs that seem to have an intermediate status (verbs of position and verbs of internal causation). The study concludes that there is a discrete boundary between stative and eventive verbs, excluding any intermediate status. Stativity arises because the aspectual operators DO and BECOME are absent in the lexical-semantic structure. Eventivity arises if one of these is present. A minimalist view on argument realization and event structure completes the book: Theta features on the arguments are checked against the aspectual heads within the verb phrase.
In this work, David Pesetsky argues that the peculiarities of Russian nominal phrases provide significant clues concerning the syntactic side of morphological case. Pesetsky argues against the traditional view that case categories such as nominative or genitive have a special status in the grammar of human languages.
'The Grammar of Q' puts forth a novel syntactic and semantic analysis of wh-questions, based on an in-depth study of the Tlingit language, an endangered and under-documented Native American tongue. A major conclusion is that the phenomenon classically dubbed 'pied-piping' does not actually exist.
Expressing negation is a universal property of all human languages. There is considerable variation, however, in the exact ways negation materializes cross-linguistically. Strict Negative Concord differs both from the Negative Polarity Item strategy and the Asymmetric Negative Concord strategy in that the sentence becomes negative only if the sentence negator is overtly expressed in it, irrespective of how many negative expressions are used. The central aim of this book is to describe Strict Negative Concord in some Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages. In particular, the volume gives an insight into the forms Strict Negative Concord manifests itself in Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovenian (Slavic), Finnish, Hungarian, Mari (Finno-Ugric) and the closely related Selkup (Samoyedic) to a wide linguistic community. It aims to create a platform for comparison with similar phenomena in well-described European languages.
Interactions of Degree and Quantification is a collection of chapters edited by Peter Hallman that deal with superlative, equative and differential constructions cross-linguistically, interactions of the comparative with both individual quantifiers and event structure, the use of the individual quantifier ‘some’ as a numeral, and the question of whether the very notion of ‘degree’ is reducible to a relation between individuals. These issues all represent semantic parallels and interactions between individual quantifiers (every, some, etc.) and degree quantifiers (more, most, numerals, etc.) in the expression of quantity and measurement. The contributions presented here advance the analytical depth and cross-linguistic breadth of the state of the art in semantics and its interface with syntax in human language.
This volume explores the expression of the concepts count and mass in human language and probes the complex relation between seemingly incontrovertible aspects of meaning and their varied grammatical realizations across languages. In English, count nouns are those that can be counted and pluralized (two cats), whereas mass nouns cannot be, at least not without a change in meaning (#two rices). The chapters in this volume explore the question of the cognitive and linguistic universality and variability of the concepts count and mass from philosophical, semantic, and morpho-syntactic points of view, touching also on issues in acquisition and processing. The volume also significantly contribute...
This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.