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Author: Denis Bouchard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226067339
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
During the last thirty years, most linguists and philosophers have assumed that meaning can be represented symbolically and that the mental processing of language involves the manipulation of symbols. Scholars have assembled strong evidence that there must be linguistic representations at several abstract levels—phonological, syntactic, and semantic—and that those representations are related by a describable system of rules. Because meaning is so complex, linguists often posit an equally complex relationship between semantic and other levels of grammar. The Semantics of Syntax is an elegant and powerful analysis of the relationship between syntax and semantics. Noting that meaning is underdetermined by form even in simple cases, Denis Bouchard argues that it is impossible to build knowledge of the world into grammar and still have a describable grammar. He thus proposes simple semantic representations and simple rules to relate linguistic levels. Focusing on a class of French verbs, Bouchard shows how multiple senses can be accounted for by the assumption of a single abstract core meaning along with background information about how objects behave in the world. He demonstrates that this move simplifies the syntax at no cost to the descriptive power of the semantics. In two important final chapters, he examines the consequences of his approach for standard syntactic theories.
Author: Denis Bouchard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226067339
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 544
Get Book
Book Description
During the last thirty years, most linguists and philosophers have assumed that meaning can be represented symbolically and that the mental processing of language involves the manipulation of symbols. Scholars have assembled strong evidence that there must be linguistic representations at several abstract levels—phonological, syntactic, and semantic—and that those representations are related by a describable system of rules. Because meaning is so complex, linguists often posit an equally complex relationship between semantic and other levels of grammar. The Semantics of Syntax is an elegant and powerful analysis of the relationship between syntax and semantics. Noting that meaning is underdetermined by form even in simple cases, Denis Bouchard argues that it is impossible to build knowledge of the world into grammar and still have a describable grammar. He thus proposes simple semantic representations and simple rules to relate linguistic levels. Focusing on a class of French verbs, Bouchard shows how multiple senses can be accounted for by the assumption of a single abstract core meaning along with background information about how objects behave in the world. He demonstrates that this move simplifies the syntax at no cost to the descriptive power of the semantics. In two important final chapters, he examines the consequences of his approach for standard syntactic theories.
Author: Jarosław Jakielaszek
Publisher: Studies in Philosophy of Language and Linguistics
ISBN: 9783631659663
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This book provides a discussion of consequences of label-theoretic developments of the Minimalist Program for the theory of the syntax-semantics relationship. It provides a debate of a proper modeling of interpretive reflexes of syntactic adjunction and syntactic displacement.
Author: Uli Sauerland
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110207559
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
Human language is a phenomenon of immense richness: It provides finely nuanced means of expression that underlie the formation of culture and society; it is subject to subtle, unexpected constraints like syntactic islands and cross-over phenomena; different mutually-unintelligeable individual languages are numerous; and the descriptions of individual languages occupy thousands of pages. Recent work in linguistics, however, has tried to argue that despite all appearances to the contrary, the human biological capacity for language may be reducible to a small inventory of core cognitive competencies. The most radical version of this view has emerged from the Minimalist Program: The claim that language consists of only the ability to generate recursive structures by a computational mechanism. On this view, all other properties of language must result from the interaction at the interfaces of that mechanism and other mental systems not exclusively devoted to language. Since language could then be described as the simplest recursive system satisfying the requirements of the interfaces, one can speak of the Minimalist Equation: Interfaces + Recursion = Language. The question whether all the richness of language can be reduced to that minimalist equation has already inspired several fruitful lines of research that led to important new results. While a full assessment of the minimalist equation will require evidence from many different areas of inquiry, this volume focuses especially on the perspective of syntax and semantics. Within the minimalist architecture, this places our concern with the core computational mechanism and the (LF-)interface where recursive structures are fed to interpretation. Specific questions that the papers address are: What kind of recursive structures can the core generator form? How can we determine what the simplest recursive system is? How can properties of language that used to be ascribed to the recursive generator be reduced to interface properties? What effects do syntactic operations have on semantic interpretation? To what extent do models of semantic interpretation support the LF-interface conditions postulated by minimalist syntax?
Author: Stefanie Bode
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000768015
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 181
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Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive account of adjuncts in generative grammar, seeking to reconcile the differing ways in which they have been treated in the past by proposing a method of analysis grounded in simplification based on Simplest Merge. The volume provides an up-to-date review of the existing literature on adjuncts and outlines their characteristic properties and the subsequent difficulties in adequately defining and treating them. The book compares previous attempts to account for adjuncts which have tended to use additional mechanisms or syntactic operations as a jumping-off point from which to propose a new way forward for analyzing them grounded in minimalist theory. Adopting an approach in the spirit of the strong minimalist thesis (SMT), Bode suggests an analysis of adjuncts which applies a minimalist approach based on theoretical simplicity, one which does not resort to extra mechanisms in capturing the empirical properties of adjuncts. Offering a comprehensive overview of research on adjuncts and foundational minimalist principles, this book will be of particular interest to graduate students and practicing researchers interested in syntax.
Author: Randall Hendrick
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470758198
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 576
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Book Description
Minimalist Syntax is a collection of essays that analyze major syntactic processes in a variety of languages, all unified by their perspective from within the Minimalist Program. Introduces important concepts in the Minimalist approach to syntactic theory. Emphasizes empirical consequences of the Minimalist approach through innovative analyses. Highlights the importance of Minimalist syntax in explaining features of natural languages. Includes contributions from leading syntacticians.
Author: Yosuke Sato
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255385
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
"Empirically rich, analytically sophisticated, and theoretically necessary. A major step forward in minimalist theorizing." --
Author: Hans-Martin Gärtner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3050074752
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : de
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Die Reihe publiziert Originalarbeiten zur Beschreibung und theoretischen Analyse der Struktur natürlicher Sprachen. Schwerpunkt sind die Prinzipien und Regeln der grammatischen und lexikalischen Kenntnis sowohl unter einzelsprachlichen wie unter sprachvergleichenden Gesichtspunkten. Abgedeckt werden alle systematischen Bereiche der Sprachwissenschaft, insbesondere Phonologie, Morphologie, Syntax, Semantik und Pragmatik, unter Einbeziehung von Aspekten des Spracherwerbs, des Sprachwandels, der Sprachverwendung und der phonetischen und neuronalen Realisierung.
Author: Michael T. Putnam
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027289417
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
This volume explores recent advancements in the Minimalist Program that adopt Stroik’s (1999, 2009) Survive Principle as the principle means of accounting for displacement phenomena in earlier versions of generative theory. These contributions bring to light many advantages and challenges that beset the Survive-minimalist framework, including topics such as the lexicon-syntax relationship, coordinate symmetries, scope, ellipsis, code-switching, and probe-goal relations. Despite the diverse, broad range of topics discussed in this volume, the papers are connected by a renewed investigation of Frampton & Gutmann’s (2002) vision of a crash-proof syntax. This volume provides new and interesting perspectives on theoretical issues that have challenged the Minimalist Program since its inception and will provide ample food for thought for syntacticians working in the Minimalist tradition and beyond.
Author: Maia Duguine
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255415
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
The topic of this collection is argument structure. The fourteen chapters in this book are divided into four parts: Semantic and Syntactic Properties of Event Structure; A Cartographic View on Argument Structure; Syntactic Heads Involved in Argument Structure; and Argument Structure in Language Acquisition. Rigorous theoretical analyses are combined with empirical work on specific aspects of argument structure. The book brings together authors working in different linguistic fields (semantics, syntax, and language acquisition), who explore new findings as well as more established data, but then from new theoretical perspectives. The contributions propose cartographic views of argument structure, as opposed to minimalistic proposals of a binary template model for argument structure, in order to optimally account for various syntactic and semantic facts, as well as data derived from wider cross-linguistic perspectives. "Argument structure plays a central role in the articulation of syntax. Yet whether this contribution is primordial or derivative, derivational or representational, minimalist or cartographic, is entirely up for grabs. This is what makes a book like the present one equivalent to a murder thriller: one cannot finish one chapter without wanting to read the next. While the solution to the underlying mystery remains as open as it ever was, the clues offered here seem just impossible to ignore."
Author: Arthur Stepanov
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 311017961X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 455
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Book Description
The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.
