On the Syntax of Missing Objects

On the Syntax of Missing Objects PDF Author: Marta Ruda
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 902726483X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Focusing on objects, this book aims at contributing to the on-going inquiry into modelling structures with missing arguments. In addition to offering detailed discussion and analyses of a unique combination of three very different systems (English, Polish, and Hungarian), a larger goal here is to provide a framework for deriving cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic variation in the domain of object drop. Variation of this type is hypothesised to follow, first and foremost, from the association of heads in the extended nominal projection with phonemic features and from the system of interpretation of nominal expressions in a language. The book will be of interest to both theoretically- and descriptively-oriented researchers, since, even though its focus is theoretical, a detailed discussion of the empirical facts, including some novel findings drawn from corpus studies and grammaticality judgements, is also offered.

On the Syntax of Missing Objects

On the Syntax of Missing Objects PDF Author: Marta Ruda
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 902726483X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book Here

Book Description
Focusing on objects, this book aims at contributing to the on-going inquiry into modelling structures with missing arguments. In addition to offering detailed discussion and analyses of a unique combination of three very different systems (English, Polish, and Hungarian), a larger goal here is to provide a framework for deriving cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic variation in the domain of object drop. Variation of this type is hypothesised to follow, first and foremost, from the association of heads in the extended nominal projection with phonemic features and from the system of interpretation of nominal expressions in a language. The book will be of interest to both theoretically- and descriptively-oriented researchers, since, even though its focus is theoretical, a detailed discussion of the empirical facts, including some novel findings drawn from corpus studies and grammaticality judgements, is also offered.

Tough Construction in English

Tough Construction in English PDF Author: Yoon-Suk Chung
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description


Formal Perspectives on Secondary Predication

Formal Perspectives on Secondary Predication PDF Author: Marcel den Dikken, Hideki Kishimoto
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110981939
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description


Minimalist Essays

Minimalist Essays PDF Author: Cedric Boeckx
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027233551
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
The Minimalism Program is many things to many researchers, and there are by now many alternative versions of it. Central to all is the fundamental question: to what extent is the human language faculty an optimal solution to minimal design specifications. Taken as a whole, the volume outlines the main features of Minimalism, its historical and conceptual sources, and provides an illustration of minimalist theorizing by looking at several properties of the syntactic component of grammar. Some contributions concentrate on what kind of computational tools are made available in a minimalist syntactic component, and how the computational system interacts with external and interface domains of the mind/brain. Other contributions specifically focus on direct empirical gains that emerge from adopting minimalist guidelines.

American Doctoral Dissertations

American Doctoral Dissertations PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertation abstracts
Languages : en
Pages : 796

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Book Description


Null Operator Constructions

Null Operator Constructions PDF Author: Marguerite Ann Browning
Publisher: Garland Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description


Building and Interpreting Possession Sentences

Building and Interpreting Possession Sentences PDF Author: Neil Myler
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262551098
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
A wide-ranging generative analysis of the typology of possession sentences, solving long-standing puzzles in their syntax and semantics. A major question for linguistic theory concerns how the structure of sentences relates to their meaning. There is broad agreement in the field that there is some regularity in the way that lexical semantics and syntax are related, so that thematic roles (the different participant roles in an event: agent, theme, goal, etc.) are predictably associated with particular syntactic positions. In this book, Neil Myler examines the syntax and semantics of possession sentences, which are infamous for appearing to diverge dramatically from this broadly regular pattern. On the one hand, Myler points out, possession sentences have too many meanings; in any given language, the construction used to express archetypal possessive meanings (such as personal ownership) is also often used to express other apparently unrelated notions (body parts, kinship relations, and many others). On the other hand, possession sentences have too many surface structures; languages differ markedly in the argument structures used to convey the same possessive meanings. Myler argues that recent work on the syntax-semantics interface in the generative tradition has developed the tools needed to solve these puzzles. Examining and synthesizing ideas from the literature and drawing on data from many languages (including some understudied Quechua dialects), Myler presents a novel way to understand the apparent irregularity of possession sentences while preserving explanations of general cross-linguistic regularities, offering a unified approach to the syntax and semantics of possession sentences that can also be integrated into a general theory of argument structure.

Syntax

Syntax PDF Author: Andrew Radford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521589147
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
This textbook provides a concise, readable introduction to contemporary work in syntactic theory, particularly to key concepts of Chomsky's minimalist programme. Andrew Radford gives a general overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive devices used in 1990s work. The discussion is largely based on data from a range of varieties of English (not only Modern Standard, but also Belfast English, Shakespearean English, Jamaican Creole, etc.) and does not presuppose any prior knowledge of syntax. There are exercises and a substantial glossary. This is an abridged version of Radford's major textbook Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English: A Minimalist Approach, and will be welcomed as a short introduction to current syntactic theory.

Nonfinite Structures in Theory and Change

Nonfinite Structures in Theory and Change PDF Author: D. Gary Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198299608
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
This book seeks to answer the questions: why do grammars change, and why is the rate of such change so variable? A principal focus is on changes in English between the Anglo-Saxon and early modern periods. The author frames his analysis in a comparative framework with extended discussions of language change in a wide range of other Indo-European languages. He deploys Chomsky's minimalist framework in a fruitful marriage of comparative and theoretical linguistics within an argument that will be accessible to practitioners in both fields.

Definitions

Definitions PDF Author: Annabel Cormack
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135671370
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The answer to the question "How can we understand and use a definition?" provides new constraints on natural language and on the internal language in which meaning is mentally represented. Most syntax takes the sentence as the basic unit for well-formedness, but definitions force us to focus on words and phrases, and hence to focus on compositional syntax in parallel with compositional semantics. This study examines both dictionary definitions and definitions from textbooks, from the points of view of their syntax, semantics, and use for learning word meaning. The tools used throughout are Principles and Parameters syntax, Relevance theoretic pragmatics, Model theoretic semantics, and the formal theory of definitions. The analyses argue that because phrases can be understood in isolation, some standard syntactic analyses must be modified. 'NP movement' has to be reanalysed as transmission of theta roles. These ideas are then applied to a variety of adjectives which take propositional complements. The final chapter argues that for definitions to be understood, the syntax of the Language of Thought must be close to that of Natural Language in specifiable way.