Author: Susann Fischer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110394839
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 755
Book Description
Different components of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. It has been under debate what the actual range of interaction is and how we can most appropriately represent this in grammatical theory. The volume provides a general overview of various topics in the linguistics of Romance languages by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components and functions as a state-of-the-art report, but at the same time as a manual of Romance languages.
Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance
Author: Susann Fischer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110394839
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 755
Book Description
Different components of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. It has been under debate what the actual range of interaction is and how we can most appropriately represent this in grammatical theory. The volume provides a general overview of various topics in the linguistics of Romance languages by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components and functions as a state-of-the-art report, but at the same time as a manual of Romance languages.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110394839
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 755
Book Description
Different components of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. It has been under debate what the actual range of interaction is and how we can most appropriately represent this in grammatical theory. The volume provides a general overview of various topics in the linguistics of Romance languages by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components and functions as a state-of-the-art report, but at the same time as a manual of Romance languages.
Features and Interfaces in Romance
Author: Julia Herschensohn
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027283702
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Book Description
This volume brings together new research on theoretical Romance Linguistics; its intended audience is scholars in the field of formal grammar, especially those specializing in Romance languages. It represents the latest work on the structure of Romance languages, with relevant comparisons to other languages such as English and Basque. As the volume's title indicates, two related themes recur in these studies: the role of grammatical features in sub-modules of the grammar, and the interaction of sub-modules with each other and with external systems at the “interfaces”. The contributions to this volume, all framed within current theoretical models, explore these and related problems in the analysis of Romance. The volume contains studies on morphology, phonology, syntax and semantics, and includes language and subject indices.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027283702
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Book Description
This volume brings together new research on theoretical Romance Linguistics; its intended audience is scholars in the field of formal grammar, especially those specializing in Romance languages. It represents the latest work on the structure of Romance languages, with relevant comparisons to other languages such as English and Basque. As the volume's title indicates, two related themes recur in these studies: the role of grammatical features in sub-modules of the grammar, and the interaction of sub-modules with each other and with external systems at the “interfaces”. The contributions to this volume, all framed within current theoretical models, explore these and related problems in the analysis of Romance. The volume contains studies on morphology, phonology, syntax and semantics, and includes language and subject indices.
Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change
Author: Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192568744
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters address a central theoretical issue in diachronic syntax: whether syntactic variation can always be attributed to differences in the features of items in the lexicon, as the Borer-Chomsky conjecture proposes. In answering this question, all the chapters develop analyses of syntactic change couched within a formalist framework in which rich hierarchical structures and abstract features of various kinds play an important role. The first three parts of the volume explore the different domains of the clause, namely the C-domain, the T-domain and the ?P/VP-domain respectively, while chapters in the final part are concerned with establishing methodology in diachronic syntax and modelling linguistic correspondences. The contributors draw on extensive data from a large number of languages and dialects, including several that have received little attention in the literature on diachronic syntax, such as Romeyka, a Greek variety spoken in Turkey, and Middle Low German, previously spoken in northern Germany. Other languages are explored from a fresh theoretical perspective, including Hungarian, Icelandic, and Austronesian languages. The volume sheds light not only on specific syntactic changes from a cross-linguistic perspective but also on broader issues in language change and linguistic theory.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192568744
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters address a central theoretical issue in diachronic syntax: whether syntactic variation can always be attributed to differences in the features of items in the lexicon, as the Borer-Chomsky conjecture proposes. In answering this question, all the chapters develop analyses of syntactic change couched within a formalist framework in which rich hierarchical structures and abstract features of various kinds play an important role. The first three parts of the volume explore the different domains of the clause, namely the C-domain, the T-domain and the ?P/VP-domain respectively, while chapters in the final part are concerned with establishing methodology in diachronic syntax and modelling linguistic correspondences. The contributors draw on extensive data from a large number of languages and dialects, including several that have received little attention in the literature on diachronic syntax, such as Romeyka, a Greek variety spoken in Turkey, and Middle Low German, previously spoken in northern Germany. Other languages are explored from a fresh theoretical perspective, including Hungarian, Icelandic, and Austronesian languages. The volume sheds light not only on specific syntactic changes from a cross-linguistic perspective but also on broader issues in language change and linguistic theory.
Pronouns in Embedded Contexts at the Syntax-Semantics Interface
Author: Pritty Patel-Grosz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319567063
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
This volume presents studies on pronouns in embedded contexts, and offers fundamental insights into this central area of research. Much of the recent research on pronouns has shown that embedded environments, such as clausal complements of attitude predicates, provide a window into the nature of pronouns. Pronouns in such environments not only exhibit familiar distinctions such as that between bound and referential pronouns; if they refer to the attitude holder, they also participate in a broader range of phenomena, e.g., distinguishing between a de se reading (involving a conscious self-directed belief) and a de re reading (involving an accidental belief about oneself). Topics covered include: the semantics of attitude reports that contain pronominal elements, the semantics of pronominal features and their connection to indexicality, new insights in the connection of pronominal typology and logophoricity or anti-logophoricity, and finally, the localization of embedded pronouns within a bigger picture involving the nature of perspective and the analysis of quasi-pronominal phenomena such as sequence of tense.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319567063
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
This volume presents studies on pronouns in embedded contexts, and offers fundamental insights into this central area of research. Much of the recent research on pronouns has shown that embedded environments, such as clausal complements of attitude predicates, provide a window into the nature of pronouns. Pronouns in such environments not only exhibit familiar distinctions such as that between bound and referential pronouns; if they refer to the attitude holder, they also participate in a broader range of phenomena, e.g., distinguishing between a de se reading (involving a conscious self-directed belief) and a de re reading (involving an accidental belief about oneself). Topics covered include: the semantics of attitude reports that contain pronominal elements, the semantics of pronominal features and their connection to indexicality, new insights in the connection of pronominal typology and logophoricity or anti-logophoricity, and finally, the localization of embedded pronouns within a bigger picture involving the nature of perspective and the analysis of quasi-pronominal phenomena such as sequence of tense.
Romance Linguistics
Author: Ana Teresa Pérez Leroux
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027247560
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 397
Book Description
This volume contains a selection of refereed and revised papers, originally presented at the 32nd Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages, dealing with linguistic theory as applied to the Romance languages, and on empirical studies on the acquisition of Romance, with studies on Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romansch and Latin. The theoretical section contains contributions concentrating on specific properties of Romance at the syntax/semantics interface, on morphosyntactic issues, on subject licensing and case, and on phonology. The acquisition section includes contributions on first, bilingual and second language acquisition of functional structure, word structure, quantification and stress.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027247560
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 397
Book Description
This volume contains a selection of refereed and revised papers, originally presented at the 32nd Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages, dealing with linguistic theory as applied to the Romance languages, and on empirical studies on the acquisition of Romance, with studies on Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romansch and Latin. The theoretical section contains contributions concentrating on specific properties of Romance at the syntax/semantics interface, on morphosyntactic issues, on subject licensing and case, and on phonology. The acquisition section includes contributions on first, bilingual and second language acquisition of functional structure, word structure, quantification and stress.
Nominal Syntax at the Interfaces
Author: Giuliana Giusti
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443885673
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Book Description
This volume offers a new perspective on the syntax of nominal expressions in various European languages, arguing that articles do not directly and biunivocally realise semantic definiteness. The first two chapters provide an accessible introduction to recent developments in generative syntax, namely the cartographic and minimalist approaches, by focusing on the “imperfect” parallels between clauses and nominal expressions. The third chapter shows that feature sharing is not the result of a unique syntactic process, but, rather, the consequence of Merge, which creates syntactic structure instantiating two types of relation: Selection and Modification. It argues for three different ways of transferring features: Agreement allows for an argument (an independent phase, selected by a head) to re-enter the computation as part of the predicate of the new phase. It targets Person features and is not involved in the feature sharing triggered by modification. Concord copies the features of N (notably gender, number and case, where this is present). It is the result of Modification and can coexist with Agreement. Finally, Projection is triggered by multiple internal mergers of the head, bundled with all its interpretable and uninterpretable features, which may be realized in different segments. The fourth chapter focuses on the nature of determiners such as articles, demonstratives, quantifiers, possessive adjectives and pronouns, personal pronouns and proper names, and shows that only articles have the properties to be attributed to “functional heads” because they are a segment of a scattered nominal head. The rest of the volume is devoted to the analysis of syntactic phenomena, such as double definiteness, expletive articles, and weak and strong adjectival inflection, by means of the proposal that (scattered) nominal or adjectival heads concord with their modifiers. This approach reinterprets head movement in a fashion that makes it compatible with minimalist requirements, provides an explanation for the apparent optionality of head movement, eliminates the typology of head movements by adjunction or substitution, and gives an original answer to the doubts raised about the legitimacy of the very notion of “functional category”.
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443885673
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Book Description
This volume offers a new perspective on the syntax of nominal expressions in various European languages, arguing that articles do not directly and biunivocally realise semantic definiteness. The first two chapters provide an accessible introduction to recent developments in generative syntax, namely the cartographic and minimalist approaches, by focusing on the “imperfect” parallels between clauses and nominal expressions. The third chapter shows that feature sharing is not the result of a unique syntactic process, but, rather, the consequence of Merge, which creates syntactic structure instantiating two types of relation: Selection and Modification. It argues for three different ways of transferring features: Agreement allows for an argument (an independent phase, selected by a head) to re-enter the computation as part of the predicate of the new phase. It targets Person features and is not involved in the feature sharing triggered by modification. Concord copies the features of N (notably gender, number and case, where this is present). It is the result of Modification and can coexist with Agreement. Finally, Projection is triggered by multiple internal mergers of the head, bundled with all its interpretable and uninterpretable features, which may be realized in different segments. The fourth chapter focuses on the nature of determiners such as articles, demonstratives, quantifiers, possessive adjectives and pronouns, personal pronouns and proper names, and shows that only articles have the properties to be attributed to “functional heads” because they are a segment of a scattered nominal head. The rest of the volume is devoted to the analysis of syntactic phenomena, such as double definiteness, expletive articles, and weak and strong adjectival inflection, by means of the proposal that (scattered) nominal or adjectival heads concord with their modifiers. This approach reinterprets head movement in a fashion that makes it compatible with minimalist requirements, provides an explanation for the apparent optionality of head movement, eliminates the typology of head movements by adjunction or substitution, and gives an original answer to the doubts raised about the legitimacy of the very notion of “functional category”.
Features of Person
Author: Peter Ackema
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262535610
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 383
Book Description
A proposal that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. This book offers a significant reconceptualization of the person system in natural language. The authors, leading scholars in syntax and its interfaces, propose that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. They map the journey of person features in grammar, from semantics through syntax to the system of morphological realization. Such an in-depth cross-modular study allows the development of a theory in which assumptions made about the behavior of a given feature in one module bear on possible assumptions about its behavior in other modules. The authors' new theory of person, built on a sparse set of two privative person features, delivers a typologically adequate inventory of persons; captures the semantics of personal pronouns, impersonal pronouns, and R-expressions; accounts for aspects of their syntactic behavior; and explains patterns of person-related syncretism in the realization of pronouns and inflectional endings. The authors discuss numerous observations from the literature, defend a number of theoretical choices that are either new or not generally accepted, and present novel empirical findings regarding phenomena as different as honorifics, number marking, and unagreement.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262535610
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 383
Book Description
A proposal that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. This book offers a significant reconceptualization of the person system in natural language. The authors, leading scholars in syntax and its interfaces, propose that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. They map the journey of person features in grammar, from semantics through syntax to the system of morphological realization. Such an in-depth cross-modular study allows the development of a theory in which assumptions made about the behavior of a given feature in one module bear on possible assumptions about its behavior in other modules. The authors' new theory of person, built on a sparse set of two privative person features, delivers a typologically adequate inventory of persons; captures the semantics of personal pronouns, impersonal pronouns, and R-expressions; accounts for aspects of their syntactic behavior; and explains patterns of person-related syncretism in the realization of pronouns and inflectional endings. The authors discuss numerous observations from the literature, defend a number of theoretical choices that are either new or not generally accepted, and present novel empirical findings regarding phenomena as different as honorifics, number marking, and unagreement.
The Syntax-Information Structure Interface
Author: Timothy Gupton
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1614512051
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
It is quite remarkable that, after over a half-century of generative grammar, there is still uncertainty with respect to the analysis of preverbal subjects in a number of languages. According to canonical analyses, preverbal subjects are arguments (A-elements). However, following non-canonical analyses, preverbal subjects are not arguments, but rather A’-elements that behave like topical preverbal direct and indirect objects, which have received a CLLD analysis in the literature (e.g. Cinque 1990). The implications of this debate are far-reaching for generative theory: if preverbal subjects are non-arguments, one must question the universality of the EPP (as in e.g. Alexiadou & Agnostopoulou 1998), as well as its associated features and feature-strengths. Galician is an underdocumented Romance language within the generative paradigm. In this book, I develop an experimental program for establishing clausal word order preferences for a number of information structure contexts. The preference data suggest that preverbal subjects behave like canonical elements, and not CLLD elements. These results inform the model of the preverbal field that I propose for Galician, which also takes into account the enclisis-proclisis divide and reco.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1614512051
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
It is quite remarkable that, after over a half-century of generative grammar, there is still uncertainty with respect to the analysis of preverbal subjects in a number of languages. According to canonical analyses, preverbal subjects are arguments (A-elements). However, following non-canonical analyses, preverbal subjects are not arguments, but rather A’-elements that behave like topical preverbal direct and indirect objects, which have received a CLLD analysis in the literature (e.g. Cinque 1990). The implications of this debate are far-reaching for generative theory: if preverbal subjects are non-arguments, one must question the universality of the EPP (as in e.g. Alexiadou & Agnostopoulou 1998), as well as its associated features and feature-strengths. Galician is an underdocumented Romance language within the generative paradigm. In this book, I develop an experimental program for establishing clausal word order preferences for a number of information structure contexts. The preference data suggest that preverbal subjects behave like canonical elements, and not CLLD elements. These results inform the model of the preverbal field that I propose for Galician, which also takes into account the enclisis-proclisis divide and reco.
The Grammar of the Utterance
Author: Alice Corr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192598503
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
This book examines how speakers of Ibero-Romance 'do things' with conversational units of language, paying particular attention to what they do with i) vocatives, interjections, and particles; and ii) illocutionary complementizers, items that look like subordinators but behave differently. Alice Corr argues that the behaviour of these conversation-oriented items provides insight into how language-as-grammar builds the universe of discourse. The approach identifies the underlying unity in how different Ibero-Romance languages, alongside their Romance cousins and Latin ancestors, use grammar to refer - i.e. to connect our inner world to the one outside - and the empirical arguments are underpinned by the philosophical position that the configurational architecture of grammar also configures the architecture of the mind. The book thus builds on existing work on the syntax of discourse not only by contributing new empirical and theoretical insights, but also by pursuing explanatory adequacy via a so-called 'un-Cartesian' grammar of reference. In so doing, it formalizes the intuition that language users do things not with words, but with grammar. Drawing on a wealth of naturalistic data from social media and online corpora, augmented by elicited introspective judgements, The Grammar of the Utterance offers new insights into the colloquial grammar and morphosyntactic variation of (Ibero-)Romance, and showcases the utility of comparative work on this language family in advancing our empirical and conceptual understanding of the organization of grammar.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192598503
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
This book examines how speakers of Ibero-Romance 'do things' with conversational units of language, paying particular attention to what they do with i) vocatives, interjections, and particles; and ii) illocutionary complementizers, items that look like subordinators but behave differently. Alice Corr argues that the behaviour of these conversation-oriented items provides insight into how language-as-grammar builds the universe of discourse. The approach identifies the underlying unity in how different Ibero-Romance languages, alongside their Romance cousins and Latin ancestors, use grammar to refer - i.e. to connect our inner world to the one outside - and the empirical arguments are underpinned by the philosophical position that the configurational architecture of grammar also configures the architecture of the mind. The book thus builds on existing work on the syntax of discourse not only by contributing new empirical and theoretical insights, but also by pursuing explanatory adequacy via a so-called 'un-Cartesian' grammar of reference. In so doing, it formalizes the intuition that language users do things not with words, but with grammar. Drawing on a wealth of naturalistic data from social media and online corpora, augmented by elicited introspective judgements, The Grammar of the Utterance offers new insights into the colloquial grammar and morphosyntactic variation of (Ibero-)Romance, and showcases the utility of comparative work on this language family in advancing our empirical and conceptual understanding of the organization of grammar.
Concepts, Syntax, and Their Interface
Author: Tanya Reinhart
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026233318X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Book Description
A systematic exposition of Reinhart's Theta System, with extensive annotations and essays that capture subsequent developments. One of Tanya Reinhart's major contributions to linguistic theory is the development of the Theta System (TS), a theory of the interface between the system of concepts and the linguistic computational system. Reinhart introduced her theory in a seminal paper, “The Theta System: Syntactic Realization of Verbal Concepts” (2000) and subsequently published other papers with further theoretical development. Although Reinhart continued to work on the Theta System, she had not completed a planned Linguistic Inquiry volume on the topic before her untimely death in 2007. This book, then, is the first to offer a systematic exposition of Reinhart's Theta System. The core of the book is Reinhart's 2000 paper, accompanied by substantial endnotes with clarifications, summaries, and links to subsequent modifications of the theory, some in Reinhart's unpublished work. An appendix by Marijana Marelj discusses the domain of Case, based on an LSA course she taught with Reinhart in 2005. Two additional essays by Reinhart's linguistic colleagues discuss the division of labor between the lexicon and syntax and the apparent conflict between the Theta System and Distributed Morphology.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026233318X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Book Description
A systematic exposition of Reinhart's Theta System, with extensive annotations and essays that capture subsequent developments. One of Tanya Reinhart's major contributions to linguistic theory is the development of the Theta System (TS), a theory of the interface between the system of concepts and the linguistic computational system. Reinhart introduced her theory in a seminal paper, “The Theta System: Syntactic Realization of Verbal Concepts” (2000) and subsequently published other papers with further theoretical development. Although Reinhart continued to work on the Theta System, she had not completed a planned Linguistic Inquiry volume on the topic before her untimely death in 2007. This book, then, is the first to offer a systematic exposition of Reinhart's Theta System. The core of the book is Reinhart's 2000 paper, accompanied by substantial endnotes with clarifications, summaries, and links to subsequent modifications of the theory, some in Reinhart's unpublished work. An appendix by Marijana Marelj discusses the domain of Case, based on an LSA course she taught with Reinhart in 2005. Two additional essays by Reinhart's linguistic colleagues discuss the division of labor between the lexicon and syntax and the apparent conflict between the Theta System and Distributed Morphology.