Author: Martin Honcoop
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Generative grammar
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Dynamic Excursions on Weak Islands
Author: Martin Honcoop
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Generative grammar
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Generative grammar
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Weak Island Semantics
Author: Márta Abrusán
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191664987
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
This book presents a novel semantic account of weak, or selective, islands. Weak islands are configurations that block the displacement of certain elements in a sentence. Examples of island violations with acceptable counterexamples include '#How much wine haven't you drunk?' (but 'Which girl haven't you introduced to Mary?'), '#How does John regret that he danced at the party?' (but 'Who does John regret that he invited to the party?') or '#How much wine do you know whether you will produce?' (but 'Which glass of wine do you know whether you'll poison?'). For forty years or more, explanations of the unacceptability of these island constructions have been syntactic. Syntactic accounts have also provided some of the key empirical motivation for Chomsky's claim that universal grammar (UG) contains language independent abstract syntactic constraints. But syntactic accounts, however subtle, fail to explain why many weak island violations are made almost acceptable by modals and attitude verbs, as in 'How much wine aren't you allowed to drink?'; 'How fast do you hope Lewis didn't drive?'; or 'How does Romeo regret he was allowed to go to the party?' Dr Abrusán considers which contexts and expressions create - or are sensitive to - weak island violations, and examines the factors that go some way to curing them. She puts forward a semantic analysis to account for the unacceptability of violations of negative, presuppositional, quantificational and wh-islands. She explains why grammaticality violations can be obviated by certain modal expressions, and why and how far the grammaticality judgments of speakers depend on the context of the utterance. The book argues that there is no need to assume abstract syntactic rules in order to derive these facts; rather, they can be made to follow from independent semantic principles. If correct, this work has a fundamental consequence for the field of linguistics in general: it removes some of the most important reasons for postulating abstract syntactic rules as part of UG, and hence weakens the arguments for postulating a module of UG.
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191664987
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
This book presents a novel semantic account of weak, or selective, islands. Weak islands are configurations that block the displacement of certain elements in a sentence. Examples of island violations with acceptable counterexamples include '#How much wine haven't you drunk?' (but 'Which girl haven't you introduced to Mary?'), '#How does John regret that he danced at the party?' (but 'Who does John regret that he invited to the party?') or '#How much wine do you know whether you will produce?' (but 'Which glass of wine do you know whether you'll poison?'). For forty years or more, explanations of the unacceptability of these island constructions have been syntactic. Syntactic accounts have also provided some of the key empirical motivation for Chomsky's claim that universal grammar (UG) contains language independent abstract syntactic constraints. But syntactic accounts, however subtle, fail to explain why many weak island violations are made almost acceptable by modals and attitude verbs, as in 'How much wine aren't you allowed to drink?'; 'How fast do you hope Lewis didn't drive?'; or 'How does Romeo regret he was allowed to go to the party?' Dr Abrusán considers which contexts and expressions create - or are sensitive to - weak island violations, and examines the factors that go some way to curing them. She puts forward a semantic analysis to account for the unacceptability of violations of negative, presuppositional, quantificational and wh-islands. She explains why grammaticality violations can be obviated by certain modal expressions, and why and how far the grammaticality judgments of speakers depend on the context of the utterance. The book argues that there is no need to assume abstract syntactic rules in order to derive these facts; rather, they can be made to follow from independent semantic principles. If correct, this work has a fundamental consequence for the field of linguistics in general: it removes some of the most important reasons for postulating abstract syntactic rules as part of UG, and hence weakens the arguments for postulating a module of UG.
Questions in Dynamic Semantics
Author: Maria Aloni
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 0080470998
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Book Description
The study of questions and answers is challenging for various fields of theoretical linguistics, logic, analytical philosophy, and more recently computer science. Research into questions and answers addresses old and raises new and important questions about the semantics / pragmatics interface and about the dynamics of interpretation. This book brings together current work on the topic as it has been developed in Amsterdam, and congenial academic sites, over the past 15 years. Amsterdam is one of the breeding grounds for the formal study of logic and language, for dynamic semantics, and for the study of questions and answers. It covers the major issues of pragmatic/semantic investigation, including logical relations, context dependence, information structure, and more. It illustrates how semantic/pragmatic stance can be used for problems in other areas of linguistic theorising.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 0080470998
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Book Description
The study of questions and answers is challenging for various fields of theoretical linguistics, logic, analytical philosophy, and more recently computer science. Research into questions and answers addresses old and raises new and important questions about the semantics / pragmatics interface and about the dynamics of interpretation. This book brings together current work on the topic as it has been developed in Amsterdam, and congenial academic sites, over the past 15 years. Amsterdam is one of the breeding grounds for the formal study of logic and language, for dynamic semantics, and for the study of questions and answers. It covers the major issues of pragmatic/semantic investigation, including logical relations, context dependence, information structure, and more. It illustrates how semantic/pragmatic stance can be used for problems in other areas of linguistic theorising.
The Syntax and Semantics of Split Constructions
Author: A. Butler
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230501605
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 231
Book Description
Split constructions are very widespread in natural languages. The separation of the semantic restriction of a quantifier from that quantifier is a typical example of such a construction. This study addresses the problem that such discontinuous strings exhibit a number of locality constraints, including intervention effects. These are shown to follow from the interaction of a minimalist syntax with a semantics that directly assigns a model-theoretic interpretation to syntactic logical forms. The approach is shown to have wide empirical coverage and a conceptual simplicity. The book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of syntax and semantics.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230501605
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 231
Book Description
Split constructions are very widespread in natural languages. The separation of the semantic restriction of a quantifier from that quantifier is a typical example of such a construction. This study addresses the problem that such discontinuous strings exhibit a number of locality constraints, including intervention effects. These are shown to follow from the interaction of a minimalist syntax with a semantics that directly assigns a model-theoretic interpretation to syntactic logical forms. The approach is shown to have wide empirical coverage and a conceptual simplicity. The book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of syntax and semantics.
Questions
Author: Veneeta Dayal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199281262
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
This book synthesizes and integrates 40 years of research on the semantics of questions, and its interface with pragmatics and syntax, conducted within the formal semantics tradition. A wide range of topics are covered, including weak-strong exhaustiveness, maximality, functional answers, single-multiple-trapped list answers, embedding predicates, quantificational variability, concealed questions, weak islands, polar and alternative questions, negative polarity, and non-canonical questions. The literature on this rich set of topics, theoretically diverse and scattered across multiple venues, is often hard to assimilate. Veneeta Dayal, drawing on her own research, brings them together for the first time in a coherent, concise, and well-structured whole. Each chapter begins with a non-technical introduction to the issues discussed; semantically sophisticated accounts are then presented incrementally, with the major points summarized at the end of each section. Written in an accessible style, this book provides both a guide to one of the most vibrant areas of research in natural language and an account of how this area of study is developing. It will be a unique resource for the novice and expert alike, and seeks to appeal to a variety of readers without compromising depth and breadth of coverage.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199281262
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
This book synthesizes and integrates 40 years of research on the semantics of questions, and its interface with pragmatics and syntax, conducted within the formal semantics tradition. A wide range of topics are covered, including weak-strong exhaustiveness, maximality, functional answers, single-multiple-trapped list answers, embedding predicates, quantificational variability, concealed questions, weak islands, polar and alternative questions, negative polarity, and non-canonical questions. The literature on this rich set of topics, theoretically diverse and scattered across multiple venues, is often hard to assimilate. Veneeta Dayal, drawing on her own research, brings them together for the first time in a coherent, concise, and well-structured whole. Each chapter begins with a non-technical introduction to the issues discussed; semantically sophisticated accounts are then presented incrementally, with the major points summarized at the end of each section. Written in an accessible style, this book provides both a guide to one of the most vibrant areas of research in natural language and an account of how this area of study is developing. It will be a unique resource for the novice and expert alike, and seeks to appeal to a variety of readers without compromising depth and breadth of coverage.
Crosslinguistic Studies of Clause Combining
Author: Ritva Laury
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027289913
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
The study of clause combining has been advanced lately by increasing interest in the study of actual language use in a typologically diverse set of languages. A number of received understandings have been challenged, among these the idea of clause combinations as being divisible into subordination and coordination in a binary fashion. Connected to this idea is the nature of conjunctions, a topic treated in several articles here. Couched within the larger issue of the nature of categoriality in language, several of the papers show that conjunctions are highly polyfunctional items, and that clause combining is only one of the uses to which speakers put them. Other topics treated in the volume are the historical development of conjunctions and the use of formulaic main clause constructions as projective units in conversation. The articles manifest both typological and theoretical breadth. They are based on data from Bulgarian, English, Estonian, Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, and Spanish. The theoretical approaches include discourse-functional, interactional, historical and generative linguistics.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027289913
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
The study of clause combining has been advanced lately by increasing interest in the study of actual language use in a typologically diverse set of languages. A number of received understandings have been challenged, among these the idea of clause combinations as being divisible into subordination and coordination in a binary fashion. Connected to this idea is the nature of conjunctions, a topic treated in several articles here. Couched within the larger issue of the nature of categoriality in language, several of the papers show that conjunctions are highly polyfunctional items, and that clause combining is only one of the uses to which speakers put them. Other topics treated in the volume are the historical development of conjunctions and the use of formulaic main clause constructions as projective units in conversation. The articles manifest both typological and theoretical breadth. They are based on data from Bulgarian, English, Estonian, Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, and Spanish. The theoretical approaches include discourse-functional, interactional, historical and generative linguistics.
Syntactic Islands
Author: Cedric Boeckx
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521138787
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 191
Book Description
A comprehensive overview of syntactic islands. What are they? How do they arise? Why do they exist?
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521138787
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 191
Book Description
A comprehensive overview of syntactic islands. What are they? How do they arise? Why do they exist?
The Second Glot International State-of-the-Article Book
Author: Lisa Cheng
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311089095X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 508
Book Description
The Glot International State-of-the-Article books constitute the ideal solution for every-one who wants to have a good idea of what the others are doing but does not have time to follow the developments in all other parts of the field on a day to day basis. All articles were previously published in Glot International and have been revised and updated, and special attention was given to the extensive bibliography, which constitutes an important part of each overview article. Among the essays in the first volume are overview articles dealing with VP ellipsis (by Kyle Johnson), Ergativity (by Alana Johns), tone (by San Duanmu), acquisition of phonology (by Paula Fikkert), and semantic change (by Elizabeth Closs Traugott). The second volume offers articles on subjects ranging from the development of grammars (by David Lightfoot) and markedness in phonology (by Keren Rice) to the syntactic representation of linguistic events (by Sara Thomas Rosen), optionality in Optimality syntax (by Gereon Müller) and the nature of coordination (by Ljiljana Progovac).
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311089095X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 508
Book Description
The Glot International State-of-the-Article books constitute the ideal solution for every-one who wants to have a good idea of what the others are doing but does not have time to follow the developments in all other parts of the field on a day to day basis. All articles were previously published in Glot International and have been revised and updated, and special attention was given to the extensive bibliography, which constitutes an important part of each overview article. Among the essays in the first volume are overview articles dealing with VP ellipsis (by Kyle Johnson), Ergativity (by Alana Johns), tone (by San Duanmu), acquisition of phonology (by Paula Fikkert), and semantic change (by Elizabeth Closs Traugott). The second volume offers articles on subjects ranging from the development of grammars (by David Lightfoot) and markedness in phonology (by Keren Rice) to the syntactic representation of linguistic events (by Sara Thomas Rosen), optionality in Optimality syntax (by Gereon Müller) and the nature of coordination (by Ljiljana Progovac).
Alternatives in Semantics
Author: A. Falaus
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137317248
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
This volume offers a survey of the use of alternatives in semantics and pragmatics, and an overview of current approaches and applications of alternative-based semantics, from both theoretical and experimental perspectives.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137317248
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
This volume offers a survey of the use of alternatives in semantics and pragmatics, and an overview of current approaches and applications of alternative-based semantics, from both theoretical and experimental perspectives.
Triggers
Author: Anne Breitbarth
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 311019743X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 503
Book Description
The concept of 'trigger' is a core concept of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. The idea that certain types of movement are triggered by some property of the target position is at least as old as the notion that the movement of noun phrases to the subject position is triggered by their need to receive nominative case. In more recent versions of syntactic theory, triggering mechanisms are thought to regulate all of movement. Furthermore, a quite narrow range of triggering mechanisms is permitted. As is to be expected, such a restrictive approach meets a variety of difficulties. Specifically, the question is whether all triggering elements required to cover displacement of all kinds in natural language can be independently motivated. Further, how can a trigger theory, which crucially relies on the idea that all movement is obligatory, deal with apparently optional movement processes? Are features an adequate means to express the triggering function in all cases? More radically, are all movement phenomena really the result of the checking of trigger features? And what about apparent triggering factors that are 'external' to syntax such as prosody - can they be captured in a rigid trigger theory? In other words, could certain aspects of triggered movement be due to interface conditions? Such is the range of questions addressed by the fourteen contributions to this book. They cover a considerable range of languages (including Afrikaans, Breton, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, German, Gungbe, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kiswahili, Romanian). These papers present materials, both empirical and theoretical, that will not fail to have considerable impact on the further development of the concept of trigger in syntactic theory.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 311019743X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 503
Book Description
The concept of 'trigger' is a core concept of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. The idea that certain types of movement are triggered by some property of the target position is at least as old as the notion that the movement of noun phrases to the subject position is triggered by their need to receive nominative case. In more recent versions of syntactic theory, triggering mechanisms are thought to regulate all of movement. Furthermore, a quite narrow range of triggering mechanisms is permitted. As is to be expected, such a restrictive approach meets a variety of difficulties. Specifically, the question is whether all triggering elements required to cover displacement of all kinds in natural language can be independently motivated. Further, how can a trigger theory, which crucially relies on the idea that all movement is obligatory, deal with apparently optional movement processes? Are features an adequate means to express the triggering function in all cases? More radically, are all movement phenomena really the result of the checking of trigger features? And what about apparent triggering factors that are 'external' to syntax such as prosody - can they be captured in a rigid trigger theory? In other words, could certain aspects of triggered movement be due to interface conditions? Such is the range of questions addressed by the fourteen contributions to this book. They cover a considerable range of languages (including Afrikaans, Breton, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, German, Gungbe, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kiswahili, Romanian). These papers present materials, both empirical and theoretical, that will not fail to have considerable impact on the further development of the concept of trigger in syntactic theory.