On the Nature of Grammatical Relations

On the Nature of Grammatical Relations PDF Author: Alec Marantz
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9780262630900
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
This book presents a theory of grammatical relations among sentential constituents which is a development of Chomsky's Government-Binding Theory. The cross-linguistic predictive power of the theory is unusually strong and it is supported in the examination of a wide range of languages.Within the syntax of a language, grammatical relations determine such things as word order, case marking, verb agreement, and the possibilities of anaphora (co- and disjoint reference) among nominals. Other approaches to grammatical relations have considered them to name classes of constituents that share clusters of properties, including most prominently structural positions or case marking, Still others have claimed that grammatical relations are primitives in syntactic theory, but are related essentially to semantic roles. Rejecting these approaches, this monograph develops a theory which includes at its core a "projection principle": The syntax of a language is assumed to be a (direct) "Projection" of the compositional sematics, and the mechanisms of projection are explicitly spelled out.Chapters cover the two asymmetries and two lexical features on which the theory is built; semantic and syntactic data from a wide variety of languages that support the universal applicability and explanatory power of these asymmetries and features; features of passive, antipassive, dative-shift, anticausative, causative, and applied verb constructions in the worlds' languages explained by the theory; confirmations of the theory's predictions in languages for which alternative approaches to grammatical relations fail to provide successful analyses; and, comparison of the book's conception of grammatical relations to those in the GB framework, Montague Grammar, Relational Grammar, and Lexical-Functional Grammar.Alec Marantz is affiliated with the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. On The Nature of Grammatical Relations is a Linguistic Inquiry Monograph.

On the Nature of Grammatical Relations

On the Nature of Grammatical Relations PDF Author: Alec Marantz
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9780262630900
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
This book presents a theory of grammatical relations among sentential constituents which is a development of Chomsky's Government-Binding Theory. The cross-linguistic predictive power of the theory is unusually strong and it is supported in the examination of a wide range of languages.Within the syntax of a language, grammatical relations determine such things as word order, case marking, verb agreement, and the possibilities of anaphora (co- and disjoint reference) among nominals. Other approaches to grammatical relations have considered them to name classes of constituents that share clusters of properties, including most prominently structural positions or case marking, Still others have claimed that grammatical relations are primitives in syntactic theory, but are related essentially to semantic roles. Rejecting these approaches, this monograph develops a theory which includes at its core a "projection principle": The syntax of a language is assumed to be a (direct) "Projection" of the compositional sematics, and the mechanisms of projection are explicitly spelled out.Chapters cover the two asymmetries and two lexical features on which the theory is built; semantic and syntactic data from a wide variety of languages that support the universal applicability and explanatory power of these asymmetries and features; features of passive, antipassive, dative-shift, anticausative, causative, and applied verb constructions in the worlds' languages explained by the theory; confirmations of the theory's predictions in languages for which alternative approaches to grammatical relations fail to provide successful analyses; and, comparison of the book's conception of grammatical relations to those in the GB framework, Montague Grammar, Relational Grammar, and Lexical-Functional Grammar.Alec Marantz is affiliated with the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. On The Nature of Grammatical Relations is a Linguistic Inquiry Monograph.

Argument Selectors

Argument Selectors PDF Author: Alena Witzlack-Makarevich
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027263027
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Capitalizing on the by now widely accepted idea of the construction-specific and language-specific nature of grammatical relations, the editors of the volume developed a modern framework for systematically capturing all sorts of variations in grammatical relations. The central concepts of this framework are the notions of argument role and its referential properties, argument selector, as well as various conditions on argument selections. The contributors of the volume applied this framework in their descriptions of grammatical relations in individual languages and discussed its limitations and advantages. This resulted in a coherent description of grammatical relations in thirteen genealogically and geographically diverse languages based on original and extensive fieldwork on under-described languages. The volume presents a far more detailed picture of the diversity of argument selectors and effects of predicates, referential properties of arguments, as well as of various clausal conditions on grammatical relations than previously published grammatical descriptions.

Phrase Structure and Grammatical Relations in Tagalog

Phrase Structure and Grammatical Relations in Tagalog PDF Author: Paul Kroeger
Publisher: Center for the Study of Language (CSLI)
ISBN: 9780937073865
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Over the last twenty years or so, most of the work on the syntax of Philippine languages has been focused on the question of whether or not these languages can be said to have grammatical subjects, and if so which argument of a basic transitive clause should be analysed as being the subject. Paul Kroeger's contribution to this debate asserts that grammatical relations such as subject and object are syntactic notions, and must be identified on the basis of syntactic properties, rather than by semantic roles or discourse functions. A large number of syntactic processes in Tagalog uniquely select the argument which bears the nominative case. On the other hand, the data which have been used in the debate to assert the ambiguity of subjecthood are best analysed in terms of semantic rather than syntactic constraints. Together these facts support an analysis that takes the nominative argument as the subject. Kroeger examines the history of the subjecthood debate and uses data from Tagalog to test the theories that have been put forth. His conclusions entail consequences for certain linguistic concepts and theories, and lead Kroeger to assert that grammatical relations are not defined in terms of surface phrase structure configurations, contrary to the assumptions of many approaches to syntax including the Government-Binding theory. Paul Kroeger is presently doing fieldwork in Austronesian languages and teaching linguistics to fieldworkers from around the world.

The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology

The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology PDF Author: Jae Jung Song
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0199281254
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 776

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Book Description
This book provides a critical state-of-the-art overview of work in linguistic typology. It examines the directions and challenges of current research and shows how these reflect and inform work on the development of linguistic theory.

Grammatical Relations

Grammatical Relations PDF Author: Peter Cole
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description


Syntactic Structures

Syntactic Structures PDF Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3112316002
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".

On the Nature of Grammatical Relations

On the Nature of Grammatical Relations PDF Author: Alec Marantz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780262131964
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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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

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

Image, Language, Brain

Image, Language, Brain PDF Author: Alec Marantz
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262133715
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
The papers in this volume discuss the current status of the cognitive/neuroscience synthesis in research on vision, whether and how linguistics and neuroscience can be integrated, and how integrative brain mechanisms can be studied through the use of noninvasive brain-imaging techniques. Recent attempts to unify linguistic theory and brain science have grown out of recognition that a proper understanding of language in the brain must reflect the steady advances in linguistic theory of the last forty years. The first Mind Articulation Project Symposium addressed two main questions: How can the understanding of language from linguistic research be transformed through the study of the biological basis of language? And how can our understanding of the brain be transformed through this same research? The best model so far of such mutual constraint is research on vision. Indeed, the two long-term goals of the Project are to make linguistics and brain science mutually constraining in the way that has been attempted in the study of the visual system and to formulate a cognitive theory that more strongly constrains visual neuroscience. The papers in this volume discuss the current status of the cognitive/neuroscience synthesis in research on vision, whether and how linguistics and neuroscience can be integrated, and how integrative brain mechanisms can be studied through the use of noninvasive brain-imaging techniques. Contributors Noam Chomsky, Ann Christophe, Robert Desimone, Richard Frackowiak, Angela Friederici, Edward Gibson, Peter Indefrey, Masao Ito, Willem Levelt, Alec Marantz, Jacques Mehler, Yasushi Miyashita, David Poeppel, Franck Ramus, John Reynolds, Kensuke Sekihara, Hiroshi Shibasaki

Identity Relations in Grammar

Identity Relations in Grammar PDF Author: Kuniya Nasukawa
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1614518114
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Few concepts are as ubiquitous in the physical world of humans as that of identity. Laws of nature crucially involve relations of identity and non-identity, the act of identifying is central to most cognitive processes, and the structure of human language is determined in many different ways by considerations of identity and its opposite. The purpose of this book is to bring together research from a broad scale of domains of grammar that have a bearing on the role that identity plays in the structure of grammatical representations and principles. Beyond a great many analytical puzzles, the creation and avoidance of identity in grammar raise a lot of fundamental and hard questions. These include: Why is identity sometimes tolerated or even necessary, while in other contexts it must be avoided? What are the properties of complex elements that contribute to configurations of identity (XX)? What structural notions of closeness or distance determine whether an offending XX-relation exists or, inversely, whether two more or less distant elements satisfy some requirement of identity? Is it possible to generalize over the specific principles that govern (non-)identity in the various components of grammar, or are such comparisons merely metaphorical? Indeed, can we define the notion of identity in a formal way that will allow us to decide which of the manifold phenomena that we can think of are genuine instances of some identity (avoidance) effect? If identity avoidance is a manifestation in grammar of some much more encompassing principle, some law of nature, then how is it possible that what does and what does not count as identical in the grammars of different languages seems to be subject to considerable variation?