German: Syntactic Problems – Problematic Syntax

German: Syntactic Problems – Problematic Syntax PDF Author: Werner Abraham
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110914727
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
The volume assembles eleven articles presenting a linguistic approach to the grammar of German, English and the diachronic forerunners of English. Common to all is a theoretical discussion against the background of Chomskyan minimalism (1993) and more recent developments of it (Kayne 1993, Chomsky 1995), all of which make language typology comparisons an interesting proposition. Some of the articles are critical of certain aspects of these theoretical approaches. For all their claims to descriptive universality, it transpires that they fail to address a number of features specific to German.

Issues in Formal German(ic) Typology

Issues in Formal German(ic) Typology PDF Author: Werner Abraham
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027227669
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This book takes up a variety of general syntactic topics, which either yield different solutions in German, in particular, or which lead to different conclusions for theory formation. One of the main topics is the fact that languages that allow for extensive scrambling between the two verbal poles, V-2 and V-last, need to integrate discourse functions like thema and rhema into the grammatical description. This is attempted, in terms of Minimalism, thus extending the functional domain. Special attention is given to the asymmetrical scrambling behavior of indefinites vs. definites and their semantic interpretation. Related topics are: Transitive expletive sentences, types of existential sentences with either BE or HAVE, the that-trace phenomenon and its semantics, negative polarity items, ellipsis and gapping, passivization, double negation — all of which have extensive effects both on distributional behavior and semantic disambiguation, reaching far beyond effects observable in English with its rigid, 'un-scrambable' word order.

The Syntax of German

The Syntax of German PDF Author: Hubert Haider
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521865255
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
A broad coverage of German syntax, providing an in-depth look at object-verb sentence formation in comparison with other languages.

Studies on Old High German Syntax

Studies on Old High German Syntax PDF Author: Katrin Axel
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027233769
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session

Germanic syntax

Germanic syntax PDF Author: Stefan Müller
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961104085
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This book is an introduction to the syntactic structures that can be found in the Germanic languages. The analyses are couched in the framework of HPSG light, which is a simplified version of HPSG that uses trees to depict analyses rather than complicated attribute value matrices. The book is written for students with basic knowledge about case, constituent tests, and simple phrase structure grammars (advanced BA or MA level) and for researchers with an interest in the Germanic languages and/or an interest in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar/Sign-Based Construction Grammar without having the time to deal with all the details of these theories.

Prolific Domains

Prolific Domains PDF Author: Kleanthes K. Grohmann
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027295786
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Standard conceptions of Locality aim to establish that a dependency between two positions may not span too long a distance. This book explores the opposite conception, Anti-Locality: Don’t move too close. The model of clause structure, syntactic computation, and locality concerns Kleanthes Grohmann develops makes crucial use of derivational sub-domains, Prolific Domains, each encapsulating particular context information (thematic, agreement, discourse). The Anti-Locality Hypothesis is the attempt to exclude anti-local movement from the grammar by banning movement within a Prolific Domain, a Bare Output Condition. The flexible application of the operation Spell Out, coupled with an innovative view on grammatical formatives, leads to a natural caveat: Copy Spell Out. Grohmann explores a theory of Anti-Locality relevant to all three Prolific Domains in the clausal layer as well as the nominal layer, and offers a unified account of Standard and Anti-Locality regarding clause-internal movement and operations across clause boundaries, revisiting successive cyclicity.

The Discourse Potential of Underspecified Structures

The Discourse Potential of Underspecified Structures PDF Author: Anita Steube
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110209306
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 637

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Book Description
The volume demonstrates the interdependence of man’s language capacity and his other conceptual capacities. This enables linguistic structures to be minimalised, and for extra-linguistic domains to provide much of the interpretations of sound and meaning. Underspecification is demonstrated in the word formation of Indo-European, Late Archaic Chinese and modern Khmer; on the word- and sentence levels by the event structures of German; and in the information structure predominantly of languages with the so-called free word order: German, Slavic languages, Arabic compared with English and the tone language Hausa. The volume is noteworthy due to the close cooperation between theoretical and experimental research. Within grammar, it has especially strengthened prosodic research and the syntax-phonology interrelations and their interpretations, and it has helped to create data bases for the relations within texts and to evaluate the findings.

Grammatical theory : From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches

Grammatical theory : From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches PDF Author: Stefan Müller
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3985540608
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 890

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Book Description
This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, ConstructionGrammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured.

Spell-Out and the Minimalist Program

Spell-Out and the Minimalist Program PDF Author: Juan Uriagereka
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199593523
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
In this book Juan Uriagereka explores important consequences of the multiple spell-out hypothesis and of the linked notion of cyclicity. He combines the latest thinking in linguistics with perspectives drawn from physics, biology, and animal behaviour.

Datives and Other Cases

Datives and Other Cases PDF Author: Daniel Hole
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027293600
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
This volume provides a state-of-the-art account of research into datives and other morphological cases. The contributors, among them leading scholars in the field, present fresh insights into traditional issues such as the dichotomy between lexical and structural case, and open up fascinating new areas of research. A recurrent feature of the majority of contributions is their combined syntax-semantics perspective. Germanic varieties, Serbian, Albanian and other Balkan languages alongside Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog are discussed from various theoretical angles such as mainstream generativism, lexical-functional grammar, and functional typology. Despite the broad range of facts spanning the distance between acquisition data and dialectology, the papers are connected by a renewed interest in form-function correspondencies. This volume will be welcomed by theoretical linguists and typologists with an interest in argument and event structure, linguists studying the case systems of individual languages and researchers in search for up-to-date discussion of Germanic datives.