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Nominal Syntax at the Interfaces

Nominal Syntax at the Interfaces PDF 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”.

Nominal Syntax at the Interfaces

Nominal Syntax at the Interfaces PDF 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”.

The Syntax of Nominalizations across Languages and Frameworks

The Syntax of Nominalizations across Languages and Frameworks PDF Author: Artemis Alexiadou
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110245876
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
The volume explores the syntax of nominalizations, focusing on deverbal and deadjectival nominalizations, but also discussing the syntax of genitives and the syntax of distinct readings of nominalizations. The volume investigates the morpholgy-syntax interface as well as the semantics-syntax interface in the domain of nominalizations. The theoretical frameworks include distributed morphology, and minimalist syntax. Data from a variety of languages are taken into consideration, e.g. Hebrew, Bulgarian, Serbian, French, Spanish, German and English.

Interfaces in Grammar

Interfaces in Grammar PDF Author: Jianhua Hu
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027262683
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Book Description
This volume is an important contribution to the theoretical and empirical study of the interactions of grammatical components in Chinese and other languages. With contributions by Edward L. Keenan, Henk van Riemsdijk, Alain Rouveret, and scholars in Chinese Linguistics, this volume investigates the common structural properties that may be considered as possible candidates for UG. It addresses syntactic and semantic issues such as anaphora universals over non-isomorphic languages, the role that the forces of attraction and repulsion play in the grammar of natural languages, computational and semantic aspects of resumption, the dichotomy between inner and outer reflexive adverbials, system repairing strategies at interfaces, the v-copy construction in Chinese, the scope of disjunction, interactions between focus, negation and event quantification, null object constructions and VP-Ellipsis, child language acquisition of nominal structure, word order and referentiality as well as second language acquisition of interface properties in Chinese double NP constructions. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of syntax, semantics, theoretical linguistics, and language acquisition, as well as scholars in Chinese linguistics.

The Syntax and Semantics of the Nominal Construction

The Syntax and Semantics of the Nominal Construction PDF Author: Diego Gabriel Krivochen
Publisher: Potsdam Linguistic Investigations / Potsdamer Linguistische Untersuchungen / Recherches Linguistiques à Potsdam
ISBN: 9783631624487
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This book proposes a novel analysis of Nominal Construction from the syntax-semantics interface. It is based on the newly developed framework of Radical Minimalism, and provides both a concise introduction to this formal model and the application of the theory to real examples provided by native speakers. The theory, which makes use of mathematics, cognitive science, and physics combined with formal syntax, is explained in detail before entering the domain of the nominal construction where straightforward, clear analyses are provided for multiple interlinguistic phenomena. Even though mainly theoretical, the book has a strong empirical basis and enables the reader to continue the quest by applying the framework to phenomena of his interest.

Minimalist Interfaces

Minimalist Interfaces PDF Author: Yosuke Sato
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255385
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
"Empirically rich, analytically sophisticated, and theoretically necessary. A major step forward in minimalist theorizing." --

Agreement, case and locality in the nominal and verbal domains

Agreement, case and locality in the nominal and verbal domains PDF Author: Ludovico Franco
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961102007
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Book Description
This book explores the Agree operation and its morphological realisations (agreement and case), specifically focusing on the connection between Agree and other syntactic dependencies such as movement, binding and control. The chapters in this volume examine a diverse set of cross-linguistic phenomena involving agreement and case from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with a view to elucidating the nature of the abstract operations that underlie them. The phenomena discussed include backward control, passivisation, progressive aspectual constructions, extraction from nominals, possessives, relative clauses and the phasal status of PPs.

Explorations of the Syntax-Semantics Interface

Explorations of the Syntax-Semantics Interface PDF Author: Jens Fleischhauer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110720299
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
The articles in this volume present original research on the encoding of meaning in a variety of constructions and languages. Many of the contributions take the framework of Role and Reference Grammar as a point of reference, either by applying it to the analysis of linguistic data or by discussing, extending, and challenging some of its assumptions. The topics of the articles range from general questions concerning the relation of meaning and its syntactic realization to the study of specific grammatical phenomena in a number of typologically diverse languages, including Yucatec Maya, Kabardian, Tagalog, Murik-Kopar, Avatime, Whitesands, Tundra Yukaghir, and various Indo-European languages. The articles will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. This series 'Studies in Language and Cognition' explores issues of mental representation, linguistic structure and representation, and their interplay. The research presented in this series is grounded in the idea explored in the Collaborative Research Center `The structure of representations in language, cognition and science' (SFB 991) that there is a universal format for the representation of linguistic and cognitive concepts.

Syntax

Syntax PDF Author: T. Givón
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027297932
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 520

Book Description
This new edition of Syntax: A functional-typological introduction is at many points radically revised. In the previous edition (1984) the author deliberately chose to de-emphasize the more formal aspects of syntactic structure, in favor of a more comprehensive treatment of the semantic and pragmatic correlates of syntactic structure. With hindsight the author now finds the de-emphasis of the formal properties a somewhat regrettable choice, since it creates the false impression that one could somehow be a functionalist without being at the same time a structuralist. To redress the balance, explicit treatment is given to the core formal properties of syntactic constructions, such as constituency and hierarchy (phrase structure), grammatical relations and relational control, clause union, finiteness and governed constructions. At the same time, the cognitive and communicative underpinning of grammatical universals are further elucidated and underscored, and the interplay between grammar, cognition and neurology is outlined. Also the relevant typological database is expanded, now exploring in greater precision the bounds of syntactic diversity. Lastly, Syntax treats synchronic-typological diversity more explicitly as the dynamic by-product of diachronic development or grammaticalization. In so doing a parallel is drawn between linguistic diversity and diachrony on the one hand and biological diversity and evolution on the other. It is then suggested that — as in biology — synchronic universals of grammar are exercised and instantiated primarily as constraints on development, and are thus merely the apparent by-products of universal constraints on grammaticalization.

Polynesian Syntax and its Interfaces

Polynesian Syntax and its Interfaces PDF Author: Lauren Clemens
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192604856
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
This volume brings together current research in theoretical syntax and its interfaces in the Polynesian language family, with chapters focusing on Hawaiian, Māori, Niuean, Samoan, and Tongan. Languages in this family present multiple characteristics of particular interest for comparative syntactic research, and in recent years, data from Polynesian languages has also contributed to advances in the fields of prosody and semantics, as well as to the study of parametric variation. The chapters in this volume offer in-depth analyses of a range of theoretical issues at the syntax-semantics and syntax-prosody interfaces, both within individual languages and from a comparative Polynesian perspective. They examine key topics including: word order variation, ergativity and case systems, causativization, negation, raising, modality and superlatives, and the left periphery of both the sentential and nominal domains. The findings not only shed light on the theoretical typology of Polynesian languages, but also have implications for linguistic theory as a whole.

Epithets at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

Epithets at the Syntax-Semantics Interface PDF Author: Pritty Patel-Grosz
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443883883
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
This book is one of the first extensive cross-linguistic theoretical investigations on epithets. Epithets (such as “the bastard”) are anaphoric expressions which take the shape of a definite description, contain an evaluative component, and are typically unstressed. This monograph shows that, in order to understand the perplexing nature of epithets, one must consider what kinds of behavior they exhibit in different components of the language faculty. In this vein, the text adopts a broad approach, analysing epithets from the perspective of the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface. The empirical focus of this monograph is on epithets in embedded clauses. It unearths new empirical findings and shows that the acceptability of epithets is affected by a variety of influences, including syntactic factors, such as whether the epithet is in the subject position of an embedded clause, or its object position. Semantic-pragmatic restrictions further navigate the nature of epithets, such as whether they are intended to refer to an attitude holder whose beliefs or other attitudes embed the clause that contains them. Based on these findings, the book argues that epithets are a type of pronoun, subject to interface restrictions concerning the semantics and pragmatics of attitude reports. The insights in this monograph raise new questions concerning the division of labour of the language faculty with respect to the processes and mechanisms involved in Binding Theory.