Deriving Syntactic Relations

Deriving Syntactic Relations PDF Author: John Bowers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107096758
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book

Book Description
This book proposes that the fundamental building blocks of syntax are relations between words rather than constituents formed from words.

Deriving Syntactic Relations

Deriving Syntactic Relations PDF Author: John Bowers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107096758
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book

Book Description
This book proposes that the fundamental building blocks of syntax are relations between words rather than constituents formed from words.

Deriving Syntactic Relations

Deriving Syntactic Relations PDF Author: John Bowers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108547044
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book

Book Description
A pioneering new approach to a long-debated topic at the heart of syntax: what are the primitive concepts and operations of syntax? This book argues, appealing in part to the logic of Chomsky's Minimalist Program, that the primitive operations of syntax form relations between words rather than combining words to form constituents. Just three basic relations, definable in terms of inherent selection properties of words, are required in natural language syntax: projection, argument selection, and modification. In the radically simplified account of generative grammar Bowers proposes there are just two interface levels, which interact with our conceptual and sensory systems, and a lexicon from which an infinite number of sentences can be constructed. The theory also provides a natural interpretation of phase theory, enabling a better formulation of many island constraints, as well as providing the basis for a unified approach to ellipsis phenomena.

Argument Structure and Syntactic Relations

Argument Structure and Syntactic Relations PDF Author: Maia Duguine
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255415
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book

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."

A Derivational Approach to Syntactic Relations

A Derivational Approach to Syntactic Relations PDF Author: Samuel David Epstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195354877
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book

Book Description
This book presents a Minimalist analysis of syntactic relations. The authors argue that certain fundamental relations such as c-command, dominance, and checking relations can be explained within a derivational approach to structure-building couched within a new and controversial level-free model of the syntactic component of the human language faculty.

Argument Structure and Syntactic Relations

Argument Structure and Syntactic Relations PDF Author: Maia Duguine
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027288135
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book

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.

The Derivation of Anaphoric Relations

The Derivation of Anaphoric Relations PDF Author: Glyn Hicks
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027290008
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book

Book Description
The Derivation of Anaphoric Relations resolves a conspicuous problem for Minimalist theory, the apparently representational nature of the binding conditions. Hicks adduces a broad variety of evidence against the binding conditions applying at LF and builds upon the insights of recent proposals by Hornstein, Kayne, and Reuland by reducing them to the core narrow-syntactic operations (specifically, Agree and Merge). Several novel and independently motivated claims about syntactic features and phases are made, not only explaining the previously stipulated roles played by c-command, reference, and locality, but furnishing the dervational binding theory with sufficient flexibility to capture some long-problematic empirical phenomena: These include connectivity effects, ‘picture-noun’ reflexives in English, and anaphor/pronoun non-complementarity. Specific proposals are also made for extending the derivational approach to accommodate structured crosslinguistic variation in binding, with thorough expositions and analyses of the Dutch, Norwegian, and Icelandic pronominal systems.

Deriving Coordinate Symmetries

Deriving Coordinate Symmetries PDF Author: John R. te Velde
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027293724
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book

Book Description
This monograph proposes a minimalist, phase-based approach to the derivation of coordinate structures, utilizing the operations Copy and Match to account for both the symmetries and asymmetries of coordination. Data are drawn primarily from English, German and Dutch. The basic assumptions are that all coordinate structures are symmetric to some degree (in contrast to parasitic gap and many verb phrase ellipsis constructions), and these symmetries, especially with ellipsis, allow syntactic derivations to utilize Copy and Match in interface with active memory for economizing with gaps and assuring clarity of interpretation. With derivations operating at the feature level, troublesome properties of coordinate structures such as cross-categorial and non-constituent coordination, violations of the Coordinate Structure Constraint, as well as coordinate ellipsis (Gapping, RNR, Left-Edge Ellipsis) are accounted for without separate mechanisms or conditions applicable only to coordinate structures. The proposal provides support for central assumptions about the structure of West Germanic.

Bare Phrase Structure

Bare Phrase Structure PDF Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Generative grammar
Languages : en
Pages : 66

Get Book

Book Description


Syntactic Relations

Syntactic Relations PDF Author: Peter Hugoe Matthews
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521845769
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Get Book

Book Description
A critique of two fundamental assumptions: do phrases really form hierarchical 'trees' and have 'heads'?

A Derivational Approach to Syntactic Relations

A Derivational Approach to Syntactic Relations PDF Author: Samuel David Epstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195111141
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book

Book Description
A fundamental concept in all syntactic theories is that of a syntactic relation between syntactic objects. While recent work in the Minimalist Framework has attempted to explain the nature of syntactic objects in terms of simple and conceptually necessary assumptions regarding the language faculty, the relations that hold between syntactic objects has not been similarly explored. The authors initiate such an exploration and argue that certain fundamental relations such as c-command, dominance, and checking relations can be explained within a derivational approach to structure-building.This approach has significant consequences concerning the architecture of the syntactic component. Semantic and phonological interpretation need not operate upon the output phrase-structure representation created by the syntactic derivation. Interpretation is more readily computed derivationally, by interpreting the steps of a derivation, rather than the single output structure created by it. The result is a new and controversial level-free model of the syntactic component of the human language faculty. This topical and timely Minimalist analysis will interest professional and theoretical linguists, syntacticians, and anyone interested in contemporary approaches to syntactic theory.