Licensing Theory and French Parasitic Gaps

Licensing Theory and French Parasitic Gaps PDF Author: C.R. Tellier
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401135967
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
The study of parasitic gap constructions (e. g. these are the reports; which you corrected _; before filing _i) has been a very lively area of research over the last decade. The impetus behind this lies mostly in the margi nality of the construction. Clearly, the intuitions that native speakers have about parasitic gaps do not stem from direct instruction; hence, it is reasoned, such knowledge follows from the restrictions imposed by Universal Grammar. Furthermore, it is unlikely that any principle of Universal Grammar refers specifically to parasitic gap constructions; their syntactic and interpretive properties must instead follow entirely from independent principles. My own interest in the phenomenon was sparked a few years ago, when, in a novel, I came across a sentence like the following: Chait un armateur; dont Ie prestige _; reposait largement sur la fortune _;, 'he was a shipbuilder of whom the prestige was largely based on the wealth'. As the indices indicate, the interpretation of the French sentence is un ambiguous: both the prestige and the wealth necessarily pertain to the same individual. In this aspect, the sentence much resembles the English parasitic gap construction above: in the former case too, the comple ments of correct and file must corefer with the noun phrase heading the relative (the reports). Yet, there is an important difference between the two constructions. Verbs like correct and file subcategorize their com plements.

Licensing Theory and French Parasitic Gaps

Licensing Theory and French Parasitic Gaps PDF Author: C.R. Tellier
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401135967
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
The study of parasitic gap constructions (e. g. these are the reports; which you corrected _; before filing _i) has been a very lively area of research over the last decade. The impetus behind this lies mostly in the margi nality of the construction. Clearly, the intuitions that native speakers have about parasitic gaps do not stem from direct instruction; hence, it is reasoned, such knowledge follows from the restrictions imposed by Universal Grammar. Furthermore, it is unlikely that any principle of Universal Grammar refers specifically to parasitic gap constructions; their syntactic and interpretive properties must instead follow entirely from independent principles. My own interest in the phenomenon was sparked a few years ago, when, in a novel, I came across a sentence like the following: Chait un armateur; dont Ie prestige _; reposait largement sur la fortune _;, 'he was a shipbuilder of whom the prestige was largely based on the wealth'. As the indices indicate, the interpretation of the French sentence is un ambiguous: both the prestige and the wealth necessarily pertain to the same individual. In this aspect, the sentence much resembles the English parasitic gap construction above: in the former case too, the comple ments of correct and file must corefer with the noun phrase heading the relative (the reports). Yet, there is an important difference between the two constructions. Verbs like correct and file subcategorize their com plements.

Parasitic Gaps

Parasitic Gaps PDF Author: Peter W. Culicover
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262262095
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive survey of research on parasitic gaps, an intriguing syntactic phenomenon. This book offers a comprehensive survey of research on parasitic gaps, an intriguing syntactic phenomenon. The first section of the book contains a history of work on the topic and three fundamental previously published papers. The remaining three sections present new perspectives on the theory of parasitic gaps based on data taken from diverse languages. Contributors Michael Calcagno, Peter W. Culicover, Elisabet Engdahl, Robert Hukari, Andreas Kathol, Christopher Kennedy, Katalin É. Kiss, Robert Levine, Alan Munn, Jamal Ouhalla, Paul M. Postal, Christine Tellier

The Bantu–Romance Connection

The Bantu–Romance Connection PDF Author: Cécile de Cat
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027290679
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
This landmark volume is the first work specifically designed to explore the extent to which striking surface morpho-syntactic similarities between Bantu and Romance languages actually represent similar syntactic structures. In particular, it explores the timely and much debated issues of verbal morphology and agreement, the structure of DPs, and word order/information structure, with the goal of providing a better understanding of the structure of the different languages investigated, and the implications this holds for syntactic theory more generally. All of the papers draw on data from both Bantu and Romance languages, providing a framework for much-needed further comparative research on the nature of linguistic structure, its diversity and constraints, and the implications this has for learnability/acquisition. The volume also provides an important precedent for incorporating insights from Bantu linguistic structure into mainstream of syntax research.

Clause Structure in South Asian Languages

Clause Structure in South Asian Languages PDF Author: V. Dayal
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402027192
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
The researchers in the field of theoretical and theoretically inclined descriptive linguistics have for a long time felt a need for detailed and clearly presented linguistic treatments of various syntactic phenomena in South Asian languages. Clause Structure in South Asian Languages: provides a comprehensive overview and covers major aspects of clause structure in a variety of South Asian languages; provides detailed analyses of several aspects of phrase structure of many prominent South Asian languages; gives theoretically up-to-date treatment of several important issues in South Asian syntax and semantics; contains papers by some of the most prominent linguists working on South Asian languages.

Peripheries

Peripheries PDF Author: David Adger
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402019106
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
The syntactic periphery has become one of the most important areas of research in syntactic theory in recent years, due to the emergence of new research programmes initiated by Rizzi, Kayne and Chomsky. However research has concentrated on the empirical nature of clausal peripheries. The purpose of this volume is to explore the question of whether the notion of periphery has any real theoretical bite. An important consensus emerging from the volume is that the edges of certain syntactic expressions appear to be the locus of the connection between phrase structure, prosody, and information structure. This volume contains 16 papers by researchers in this area. The book: - contains an extensive introduction setting out the research questions addressed and setting the contributions in an overall theoretical context, - has a distinct comparative slant, - brings together work from a range of theoretical perspectives, while maintaining a unity of purpose, - could serve as the basis for a graduate course on peripheral positions, - contains papers addressing: = the question of the fine-grainedness of syntactic representations, = the relevance of syntactic edges to locality and semantic interpretation, = the nature of the dependencies connecting peripheral elements to the syntactic core. Audience: Academics and graduate students interested in syntax and its interfaces with semantics and prosody, acquisition of syntax, cross-linguistic comparison.

Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax

Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax PDF Author: H. Haider
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401584168
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
o. COMPARATIVE GERMANIC SYNTAX This volume contains 13 papers that were prepared for the Seventh Workshop on Comparative Germanie Syntax at the University of Stuttgart in November 1991. In defining the theme both of the workshop and of this volume, we have taken "comparative" in "comparative Germanic syntax" to mean that at least two languages should be analyzed and "Germanic" to mean that at least one of these languages should be Germanic. There was no require ment as such that the research presented should be situated within the framework known as Principles and Parameters Theory (previously known as Government and Binding Theory), though it probably is no accident that this nevertheless turned out to be the case. Within this theory, it is seen as highly desirable to be able to account for several differences on the surface by deriving them from fewer under lying differences. The reason is that, in order to explain the ease with which children acquire language, it is assumed that not all knowledge of any given language is the result of learning, but that instead children already possess part of this knowledge at birth (the innate part of linguistic knowledge will obviously be the same for all human beings, and thus this theory also provides an explanation of language universals). The fewer "real" (i.e.

Beyond Principles and Parameters

Beyond Principles and Parameters PDF Author: Kyle Johnson
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401148228
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Kyle Johnson University of Massachusetts at Amherst Ian Roberts University of Stuttgart An important chapter in the history of syntactic theory opened as the 70's reached their close. The revolution that Chomsky had brought to linguistics had to this point engendered theories which remained within the grip of the philologists' construction-based vision. Their image of language as a catalogue of independent constructions served as the backdrop against which much of transformational grammar's detailed exploration evolved. In a sense, the highly successful pursuit of th phonology and morphology in the 19 century as compared to the absence of similar results in syntax (beyond observations such as Wackemagel's Law, etc. ) attests to this: just noting that, for example, French relative clauses allow subject-postposing but not preposition-stranding while English relatives do not allow the former but do allow the latter does not take us far beyond a simple record of the facts. Prior to this point, th syntactic theory had not progressed beyond the 19 century situation. But as the 80's approached, this image began to give way to a different one: grammar as a puzzle of interlocking "modules," each made up of syntactic principles which cross-cut the philologist's constructions. More and more, "constructions" decomposed into the epiphenomenal interplay of encapsulated mini-theories: X Theory, Binding Theory, Bounding Theory, Case Theory, Theta Theory, and so on. Syntactic analyses became reoriented toward the twin goals of identifying the content of these modules and deconstructing into them the descriptive results of early transformational grammar.

Handbook of Word-Formation

Handbook of Word-Formation PDF Author: Pavol Štekauer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402035969
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
This is the most comprehensive book to date on word formation in terms of scope of topics, schools and theoretical positions. All contributions were written by the leading scholars in their respective areas.

Aspectual Inquiries

Aspectual Inquiries PDF Author: Paula Kempchinsky
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402030339
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
The study of the linguistic reflexes of aspect has been an active field of research in various sub-disciplines of linguistics, such as syntax, semantics (including discourse theory) and acquisition studies. However, communication and dissemination of results across these various subfields has often been indirect. The different angles brought together give us a comprehensive picture of the representation of aspect in the mind/brain of the speaker. The papers in this volume represent the results of a workshop on the syntax, semantics and acquisition of aspect held in 2002 whose purpose was to foment active cross-disciplinary communication. A number of the papers examine the syntactic representation of lexical or situation aspect, while others focus on the syntactic interaction of lexical aspect with grammatical aspect, and of grammatical aspect and tense. Other papers examine the role of aspect in discourse representations, while a third group of papers reports on results of empirical studies on the acquisition of aspect in both first and second language acquisition, and patterns of loss of morphosyntactic reflexes of aspect in language attrition.

Ergativity

Ergativity PDF Author: Alana Johns
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781402041877
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
The overarching theme of this volume is the formal expression of the range and limits of ergativity. The book contains cutting-edge theoretical papers by top authors in the field, who also conduct original field work and bring new data to light. It contains articles that apply the most recent theoretical tools to the area of ergativity, and then explore the issues that emerge. Languages investigated in the text include Basque, Georgian, and Hindi.