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Author: Enoch Oladé Aboh
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195159905
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 396
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Book Description
This is the first book on the syntax of the Niger-Conger language family, which includes most of the languages of sub-Saharan Africa. Aboh, who is a native speaker of one of the languages (Gungbe) discussed, analyzes different aspects of the syntax of the "Kwa" language group. Aboh also suggests how grammatical pictures for these languages can shed some light on Universal Grammar in general.
Author: Enoch Oladé Aboh
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195159905
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 396
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Book Description
This is the first book on the syntax of the Niger-Conger language family, which includes most of the languages of sub-Saharan Africa. Aboh, who is a native speaker of one of the languages (Gungbe) discussed, analyzes different aspects of the syntax of the "Kwa" language group. Aboh also suggests how grammatical pictures for these languages can shed some light on Universal Grammar in general.
Author: Enoch O. Aboh
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048131898
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
This book grew out of a concern we have had that very many theoretical and descriptive work on the Kwa languages were not accessible to the general linguistic community. As a result, these languages were only referred to in the context of very specific discussions such as serial verb constructions. But as the reader of this book will notice, syntactic topics discussed in the context of Kwa range from bare nouns, relative clauses, negation, discourse markers and the interaction with the clausal periphery, to argument structure. Many issues remain that need to be brought to the fore of the community and we hope that this book will trigger the curiosity of the reader to get to know more about these languages. Much of the work presented here could not have been possible without the help of many colleagues and the contri- tors whom we thank warmly for joining this enterprise. We are also grateful to the editors of the series, Marcel den Dikken, Joan Maling, Liliane Haegeman to have offered us this platform to initiate the debate about Kwa. We will also like to thank Helen van der Stelt and Jolanda Voogd from Springer for their kind collaboration and patience. We are also very grateful to Joscelyn Essegbey and Leston Buell for helping with editing the manuscript. Enoch, O. Aboh James Essegbey v Contents 1 The Phonology Syntax Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Enoch, O. Aboh and James Essegbey 2 The Morphosyntax of the Noun Phrase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Enoch, O.
Author: Ur Shlonsky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190210583
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
Cartography is a research program within syntactic theory that studies the syntactic structures of a particular language in order to better understand the semantic issues at play in that language. The approach arranges a language's morpho-syntactic features in a rigid universal hierarchy, and its research agenda is to describe this hierarchy -- that is, to draw maps of syntactic configurations. Current work in cartography is both empirical -- extending the approach to new languages and new structures -- and theoretical. The 16 articles in this collection will advance both dimensions. They arise from presentations made at the Syntactic Cartography: Where do we go from here? colloquium held at the University of Geneva in June of 2012 and address three questions at the core of research in syntactic cartography: 1. Where do the contents of functional structure come from? 2. What explains the particular order or hierarchy in which they appear? 3. What are the computational restrictions on the activation of functional categories? Grouped thematically into four sections, the articles address these questions through comparative studies across various languages, such as Italian, Old Italian, Hungarian, English, Jamaican Creole, Japanese, and Chinese, among others.
Author: Werner Abraham
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027290199
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 450
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Book Description
The main topics pursued in this volume are based on empirical insights derived from Germanic: logical and typological dispositions about aspect-modality links. These are probed in a variety of non-related languages. The logically establishable links are the following: Modal verbs are aspect sensitive in the selection of their infinitival complements – embedded infinitival perfectivity implies root modal reading, whereas embedded infinitival imperfectivity triggers epistemic readings. However, in marked contexts such as negated ones, the aspectual affinities of modal verbs are neutralized or even subject to markedness inversion. All of this suggests that languages that do not, or only partially, bestow upon full modal verb paradigms seek to express modal variations in terms of their aspect oppositions. This typological tenet is investigated in a variety of languages from Indo-European (German, Slavic, Armenian), African, Asian, Amerindian, and Creoles. Seeming deviations and idiosyncrasies in the interaction between aspect and modality turn out to be highly rule-based.
Author: Richard S. Kayne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199732523
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Comparisons and Contrasts collects eleven of Richard Kayne's recent articles in theoretical syntax, with an emphasis on comparative syntax, which uses syntactic differences among languages to probe the properties of the human language faculty. Kayne attaches particular importance to uncovering the primitives of syntax/semantics, demonstrating the existence of silent elements that are syntactically and semantically active, and showing their distribution and limitations. He attempts to derive the very existence of the noun-verb distinction-and to account for the sharp differences between nouns and verbs and for the lack of parallelism between them-from the antisymmetric character of syntax. The common theme is an exploration of how wide a range of questions the field of syntax can reasonably attempt to ask and then answer.Comparisons and Contrasts will appeal to scholars and graduate students interested in syntax, semantics, and their effects on other areas of linguistics.
Author: Hans Broekhuis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110892995
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 741
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Book Description
Henk van Riemsdijk has long been known as one of Europe’s most important linguists. His seminal ideas have been influential in developing generative grammar in Europe and beyond. As the initiator, co-founder, and chair of the GLOW society, he made the society the leading platform of European generative linguistics. He has also been editor of the series Studies in Generative Grammar since its foundation. As a teacher and supervisor, he has inspired generations of students. On the occasion of his relocation from the Netherlands to Italy, his friends, students and colleagues celebrate his work with this collection of essays on numerous topics of current theoretical interest.
Author: Susanne Maria Michaelis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199691398
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 572
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Book Description
The Atlas presents commentaries and colour maps showing how 130 linguistic features - phonological, syntactic, morphological, and lexical - are distributed among the world's pidgins and creoles. Designed and written by the world's leading experts, it is a unique resource of outstanding value for linguists of all persuasions throughout the world.
Author: Lieven Jozef Maria Danckaert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198759525
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
This book examines Latin word order, and in particular the relative ordering of i) lexical verbs and direct objects (OV vs VO) and ii) auxiliaries and non-finite verbs (VAux vs AuxV). In Latin these elements can freely be ordered with respect to each other, whereas the present-day Romance languages only allow for the head-initial orders VO and AuxV. Lieven Danckaert offers a detailed, corpus-based description of these two word order alternations, focusing on their diachronic development in the period from c. 200 BC until 600 AD. The corpus data reveal that some received wisdom needs to be reconsidered: there is in fact no evidence for any major increase in productivity of the order VO during the eight centuries under investigation, and the order AuxV only becomes more frequent in clauses with a modal verb and an infinitive, not in clauses with a BE-auxiliary and a past participle. The book also explores a more fundamental question about Latin syntax, namely whether or not the language is configurational, in the sense that a phrase structure grammar (with 'higher-order constituents' such as verb phrases) is needed to describe and analyse Latin word order patterns. Four pieces of evidence are presented that suggest that Latin is indeed a fully configurational language, despite its high degree of word order flexibility. Specifically, it is shown that there is ample evidence for the existence of a verb phrase constituent. The book thus contributes to the ongoing debate regarding the status of configurationality as a language universal.
Author: Petra Sleeman
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027287295
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
One of the recurrent questions in historical linguistics is to what extent languages can borrow grammar from other languages. It seems for instance hardly likely that each 'average European' language developed a definite article all by itself, without any influence from neighbouring languages. It is, on the other hand, by no means clear what exactly was borrowed, since the way in which definiteness is expressed differs greatly among the various Germanic and Romance languages and dialects. One of the main aims of this volume is to shed some light on the question of what is similar and what is different in the structure of the noun phrase of the various Romance and Germanic languages and dialects, and what causes this similarity or difference.
Author: Gabriela Soare
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110675161
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Why is ‘Why’ Unique? Its Syntactic and Semantic Properties considers the behaviour of this peculiar wh-element across many different languages, including Ewe, Trevisan, Italian, Basque, German, Dutch, Cantonese, Mandarin, English and Hebrew. In ten original chapters, the authors explore various aspects of why-questions, such as the way why interacts with V2 constructions in Basque, with a subject clitic in Trevisan or how its morpho-syntactic make-up determines its merge position in Ewe, to mention but a few. Furthermore, a clear-cut distinction is established between high and low reason adverbials which are subsequently examined in why-stripping environments in Dutch. Beyond why proper, the book explores a special class of wh-expressions in some in-situ languages which give rise to unexpected why-construals with a touch of whining force. The objective is to explain the unusual syntactic position of these wh-expressions as well as their association with peculiar pragmatics. The questions are addressed for Cantonese: are what-initial sentences genuine questions? To what extent are Cantonese what-initial sentences similar to how-initial sentences in Mandarin? Beside these what-as-why questions, a special class of rhetorical questions, the doubly-marked interrogatives in Hebrew, come under scrutiny. Why is ‘why’ unique also concerns the interface with prosody and several experimental studies investigate precisely this aspect.
