Author: Idan Landau
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262366118
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
A novel, systematic theory of adjunct control, explaining how and why adjuncts shift between obligatory and nonobligatory control. Control in adjuncts involves a complex interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, which so far has resisted systematic analysis. In this book, Idan Landau offers the first comprehensive account of adjunct control. Extending the framework developed in his earlier book, A Two-Tiered Theory of Control, Landau analyzes ten different types of adjuncts and shows that they fall into two categories: those displaying strict obligatory control (OC) and those alternating between OC and nonobligatory control (NOC). He explains how and why adjuncts shift between OC and NOC, unifying their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties. Landau shows that the split between the two types of adjuncts reflects a fundamental distinction in the semantic type of the adjunct: property (OC) or proposition (NOC), a distinction independently detectable by the adjunct's tolerance to a lexical subject. After presenting a fully compositional account of controlled adjuncts, Landau tests and confirms the specific configurational predictions for each type of adjunct. He describes the interplay between OC and NOC in terms of general principles of competition--both within the grammar and outside of it, in the pragmatics and in the processing module--shedding new light on classical puzzles in the acquisition of adjunct control by children. Along the way, he addresses a range of empirical phenomena, including implicit arguments, event control, logophoricity, and topicality.
Author: Idan Landau
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262542854
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
A novel, systematic theory of adjunct control, explaining how and why adjuncts shift between obligatory and nonobligatory control. Control in adjuncts involves a complex interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, which so far has resisted systematic analysis. In this book, Idan Landau offers the first comprehensive account of adjunct control. Extending the framework developed in his earlier book, A Two-Tiered Theory of Control, Landau analyzes ten different types of adjuncts and shows that they fall into two categories: those displaying strict obligatory control (OC) and those alternating between OC and nonobligatory control (NOC). He explains how and why adjuncts shift between OC and NOC, unifying their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties. Landau shows that the split between the two types of adjuncts reflects a fundamental distinction in the semantic type of the adjunct: property (OC) or proposition (NOC), a distinction independently detectable by the adjunct's tolerance to a lexical subject. After presenting a fully compositional account of controlled adjuncts, Landau tests and confirms the specific configurational predictions for each type of adjunct. He describes the interplay between OC and NOC in terms of general principles of competition--both within the grammar and outside of it, in the pragmatics and in the processing module--shedding new light on classical puzzles in the acquisition of adjunct control by children. Along the way, he addresses a range of empirical phenomena, including implicit arguments, event control, logophoricity, and topicality.
Author: Anne Mucha
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027259585
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
Control, typically defined as a specific referential dependency between the null-subject of a non-finite embedded clause and a co-dependent of the matrix predicate, has been subject to extensive research in the last 50 years. While there is a broad consensus that a distinction between Obligatory Control (OC), Non-Obligatory Control (NOC) and No Control (NC) is useful and necessary to cover the range of relevant empirical phenomena, there is still less agreement regarding their proper analyses. In light of this ongoing discussion, the articles collected in this volume provide a cross-linguistic perspective on central questions in the study of control, with a focus on non-canonical control phenomena. This includes cases which show NOC or NC in complement clauses or OC in adjunct clauses, cases in which the controlled subject is not in an infinitival clause, or in which there is no unique controller in OC (i.e. partial control, split control, or other types of controllers). Based on empirical generalizations from a wide range of languages, this volume provides insights into cross-linguistic variation in the interplay of different components of control such as the properties of the constituent hosting the controlled subject, the syntactic and lexical properties of the matrix predicate as well as restrictions on the controller, thereby furthering our empirical and theoretical understanding of control in grammar.
Author: Mary Dalrymple
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961104247
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 2192
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Book Description
Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches.
Author: Barbara E. Bullock
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961104050
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
The present volume presents a selection of the revised and peer-reviewed proceedings articles of the 50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 50) which was hosted virtually by the faculty and students from the University of Texas at Austin. With contributions from rising and senior scholars from Europe and the Americas, the volume demonstrates the breadth of research in contemporary Romance linguistics with articles that apply corpus-based and laboratory methods, as well as theory, to explore the structure, use, and development of the Romance languages. The articles cover a wide range of fields including morphosyntax, semantics, language variation and change, sociophonetics, historical linguistics, language acquisition, and computational linguistics. In an introductory article, the editors document the sudden transition of LSRL 50 to a virtual format and acknowledge those who helped them to ensure the continuity of this annual scholarly meeting.
Author: Helen Goodluck
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303096440X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 124
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Book Description
This book examines the language abilities of persons with Down Syndrome who are able to read. The text defends the ‘delayed but not deviant view’ of linguistic abilities by examining a range of syntactic phenomena that develop at different points for typically developing children, and for which a similar overall pattern is found for persons with Down Syndrome. The volume also defends the ‘delayed but not deviant view’ against challenges arising from studies of the comprehension of definite pronouns. The study fits within a picture of linguistic abilities that is modular: skills with language do not emerge from other cognitive functions. It is an important source of information for readers in the departments of linguistics, speech and language therapy, and cognitive science.
Author: Idan Landau
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262028859
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 129
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Book Description
A theory of control, equally grounded in syntax and semantics, that argues that obligatory control is achieved either through predication or through logophoric anchoring. This book revives and reinterprets a persistent intuition running through much of the classical work: that the unitary appearance of Obligatory Control into complements conceals an underlying duality of structure and mechanism. Idan Landau argues that control complements divide into two types: In attitude contexts, control is established by logophoric anchoring, while non-attitude contexts it boils down to predication. The distinction is also syntactically represented: Logophoric complements are constructed as a second tier above predicative complements. The theory derives the obligatory de se reading of PRO as a special kind of de re attitude without ascribing any inherent feature to PRO. At the same time, it provides a principled explanation, based on feature transmission, for the agreement properties of PRO, which are stipulated on competing semantic accounts. Finally, it derives a striking universal asymmetry: the fact that agreement on the embedded verb blocks control in attitude contexts but not in non-attitude contexts. This book is unique in being firmly grounded in both the formal semantic and the syntactic studies of control, offering an integrated view that will appeal to scholars in both areas. By bringing to bear current sophisticated grammatical analyses, it offers new insights into the classical problems of control theory.
Author: Chris Collins
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262379120
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
A new theory of argument structure, based on the syntactic operation Merge and presented through an in-depth analysis of properties of the English passive construction. In Principles of Argument Structure, Chris Collins investigates principles of argument structure in minimalist syntax through an in-depth analysis of properties of the English passive construction. He formulates a new theory of argument structure based on the only structure-building operation in minimalist syntax, Merge, which puts together two syntactic objects to form a larger one. This new theory should give rise to detailed cross-linguistic work on the syntactic and semantic properties of implicit arguments. Collins presents an update and defense of his influential 2005 theory of the passive, including a completely original theory of implicit arguments. He makes a direct empirical argument for the Theta-Criterion against various claims that it should be eliminated. He also discusses the conception of voice in syntactic theory, arguing that VoiceP does not introduce external arguments, a position otherwise widely accepted in the field. He shows how the ”smuggling” approach to the passive extends naturally to the dative alternation accounting for a number of striking c-command asymmetries. He compares syntactic and semantic approaches to argument structure, outlining conceptual problems with adopting formal semantics as the basis for a theory of argument structure. The book will be of interest not only to syntacticians and semanticists, but also to typologists investigating the cross-linguistic properties of the passive, psycholinguists and computer scientists working on natural language understanding, and philosophers thinking about the issue of “implicit content.” It includes an appendix that provides common-sense guidelines for doing syntactic research using internet data.
Author: Elise Newman
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262549107
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
A novel theory of argument structure based on the order in which verbs and their arguments combine across a variety of languages and language families. Merge is the structure-building operation in Chomsky’s Minimalist Program. In When Arguments Merge, Elise Newman develops a new Merge-based theory of the syntax of argument structure, taking inspiration from wh- questions. She uncovers new connections between disparate empirical phenomena and provides a unified analysis of patterns across many languages and language families, from Mayan to Bantu to Indo-European languages (among others). The result is a syntactic theory with a small inventory of features and categories that can combine in a limited number of ways, capturing the range of argument configurations that we find cross-linguistically in both declarative and interrogative contexts. Newman’s novel approach to argument structure is based on the time at which different kinds of arguments merge and move in the verbal domain. Assuming that all kinds of Merge are driven by features, she proposes that subset relationships between elements bearing different sets of features can constrain the distribution of arguments in unexpected ways and that different feature bundles can predict unusual interactions between arguments in many contexts. The positions of arguments in different contexts have consequences for agreement alignment and case assignment, which are reflected in the Voice of the clause. Examining the order in which verbs and their arguments are combined, she explores the consequences of different orders of combination for the kinds of utterances observed across languages.
Author: Marcel Den Dikken
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110981742
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 430
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Book Description
The topic of secondary predication has attracted much attention especially in the generative literature. The present volume distinguishes itself from previous volumes on this topic in that all chapters discuss current issues in the syntax and semantics of secondary predication in the languages of Europe (including the Indo-European languages English, Dutch, French, and Spanish, as well as Hungarian, a Finno-Ugric language) and the languages of Asia (including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean) from formal linguistic perspectives. This book brings to light important new results in and directions for research on secondary predication.
