Phrasal Movement and Its Kin

Phrasal Movement and Its Kin PDF Author: David Pesetsky
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262264099
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
This study investigates the types of movement and movement-like relations that link positions in syntactic structure. David Pesetsky argues that there are three such relations. Besides overt phasal movement, there are two distinct types of movement without phonological effect: covert phrasal movement and feature movement. Focusing on wh-questions, he shows how his classification of movement-like relations allows us to understand the story behind wh-questions in which an otherwise inviolable property of movement—"Attract Closest"—appears to be violated. By demonstrating that more movement takes place in such configurations than previously suspected, he shows that Attract Closest is actually not violated at all in these cases. This conclusion draws on recent research in both syntax and semantics, and depends crucially on Pesetsky's expanded repertoire of movement-like relations. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph No. 37

Phrasal Movement and Its Kin

Phrasal Movement and Its Kin PDF Author: David Pesetsky
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262264099
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study investigates the types of movement and movement-like relations that link positions in syntactic structure. David Pesetsky argues that there are three such relations. Besides overt phasal movement, there are two distinct types of movement without phonological effect: covert phrasal movement and feature movement. Focusing on wh-questions, he shows how his classification of movement-like relations allows us to understand the story behind wh-questions in which an otherwise inviolable property of movement—"Attract Closest"—appears to be violated. By demonstrating that more movement takes place in such configurations than previously suspected, he shows that Attract Closest is actually not violated at all in these cases. This conclusion draws on recent research in both syntax and semantics, and depends crucially on Pesetsky's expanded repertoire of movement-like relations. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph No. 37

A Uniform Syntax for Phrasal Movement

A Uniform Syntax for Phrasal Movement PDF Author: Coppe van Urk
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This dissertation argues that all instances of phrasal movement are the result of Agree and Merge (Chomsky 1995, 2001), and, in addition to this, that the existence of different types of movement derives solely from variation in properties of the feature involved in the Agree relation. Guided by novel data from the Nilotic language Dinka Bor (South Sudan), I apply this view to three kinds of movement: A-movement, A-movement, and intermediate movement steps of successive-cyclic dependencies. In addition, I present a novel argument, from patterns of pronoun copying, that all phrasal movement arises from Merge.

Composing Questions

Composing Questions PDF Author: Hadas Kotek
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262351072
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
An investigation of the syntax and semantics of wh-questions through the lens of intervention effects, offering a new proposal on overt and covert wh-movement. In this book, Hadas Kotek investigates the syntax and semantics of wh-questions, offering a new solution to a central question in the study of interrogatives: given that overt wh-movement is cross-linguistically common, is syntactic movement a prerequisite for the interpretation of wh-phrases? Some linguists argue that all wh-phrases undergo movement to interrogative C, even if covertly; others propose mechanisms of in-situ interpretation that do not require any movement. Kotek moves beyond these positions to argue that wh-in-situ does move covertly, but not necessarily to C. Instead, she contends, wh-in-situ undergoes a short movement step akin to covert scrambling. This makes the LF behavior of English parallel to the overt behavior of German. Kotek presents a series of self-paced reading experiments, alongside judgment data from German, to substantiate the idea of covert scrambling. She introduces new diagnostics for the underlying structure of questions, using as a principal tool the distribution of intervention effects. This system allows her to offer the first unified account for a range of phenomena of interrogative syntax-semantics as pied-piping, superiority effects, the cross-linguistically varied syntax of questions, and intervention effects. Kotek develops a theory of interrogative syntax-semantics; studies the phenomena of intervention effects in wh-questions, proposing that the nature of intervention is crucially tied to the availability of wh-movement in a question; and shows that covert wh-movement should be modeled as a short scrambling operation rather than an unbounded, successive-cyclic, and potentially long-distance movement operation.

New Directions in the Acquisition of Romance Languages

New Directions in the Acquisition of Romance Languages PDF Author: João Costa
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443870277
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
This book puts together a selection of papers presented at The Romance Turn V Workshop, held in Lisbon in 2012. The papers presented at the workshop discussed general problems in the field of Language Acquisition, with a special focus on data from several Romance varieties. The papers in the volume cover a wide array of topics and subfields of acquisition studies, including L1 and L2 acquisition, typical and atypical development, acquisition of syntax, semantics, and phonology.

The Grammar of French Quantification

The Grammar of French Quantification PDF Author: Lena Baunaz
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400706219
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
This book is the first extensive study on French Quantification in the field of Syntax. It provides a typology of four main quantified noun phrases in French (existential, universal, negative and wh-), detailing their syntactic, semantic and prosodic behaviors and showing that they can be reduced to two classes—Split-DP structures or Floating quantification. Relying on syntax and semantics, the book establishes a three-way structural typology of wh in-situ phrases and extends it to existentials. It pays special attention to the prosodic properties associated with their different readings and proposes an analysis of the distribution of subextraction and pied-piping. Similarly based on semantic and syntactic tests, the book reveals N(egative) words to be universal Quantifiers. It proposes a new structure of N-words in terms of constituent negation and includes a detailed analysis of the difference between not an N and not all the N in French.

Towards a Derivational Syntax

Towards a Derivational Syntax PDF Author: Michael T. Putnam
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902725527X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This volume explores recent advancements in the Minimalist Program that adopt Stroik s (1999, 2009) Survive Principle as the principle means of accounting for displacement phenomena in earlier versions of generative theory. These contributions bring to light many advantages and challenges that beset the Survive-minimalist framework, including topics such as the lexicon-syntax relationship, coordinate symmetries, scope, ellipsis, code-switching, and probe-goal relations. Despite the diverse, broad range of topics discussed in this volume, the papers are connected by a renewed investigation of Frampton & Gutmann s (2002) vision of a crash-proof syntax. This volume provides new and interesting perspectives on theoretical issues that have challenged the Minimalist Program since its inception and will provide ample food for thought for syntacticians working in the Minimalist tradition and beyond."

Analysing English Sentences

Analysing English Sentences PDF Author: Andrew Radford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521516978
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
This book provides a concise introduction to work in syntactic theory, drawing on the key concepts of Chomsky's Minimalist Program.

The Grammar of Q

The Grammar of Q PDF Author: Seth Cable
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195392264
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
'The Grammar of Q' puts forth a novel syntactic and semantic analysis of wh-questions, based on an in-depth study of the Tlingit language, an endangered and under-documented Native American tongue. A major conclusion is that the phenomenon classically dubbed 'pied-piping' does not actually exist.

Foundational Issues in Linguistic Theory

Foundational Issues in Linguistic Theory PDF Author: Robert Freidin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262562332
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Essays by leading theoretical linguists—including Noam Chomsky, B. Elan Dresher, Richard Kayne, Howard Lasnik, Morris Halle, Norbert Hornstein, Henk van Riemsdijk, and Edwin Williams—reflect on Jean-Roger Vergnaud's influence in the field and discuss current theoretical issues Jean-Roger Vergnaud's work on the foundational issues in linguistics has proved influential over the past three decades. At MIT in 1974, Vergnaud (now holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in Humanities at the University of Southern California) made a proposal in his Ph.D. thesis that has since become, in somewhat modified form, the standard analysis for the derivation of relative clauses. Vergnaud later integrated the proposal within a broader theory of movement and abstract case. These topics have remained central to theoretical linguistics. In this volume, essays by leading theoretical linguists attest to the importance of Jean-Roger Vergnaud's contributions to linguistics. The essays first discuss issues in syntax, documenting important breakthroughs in the development of the principles and parameters framework and including a famous letter (unpublished until recently) from Vergnaud to Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik commenting on the first draft of their 1977 paper “Filters and Controls.” Vergnaud's writings on phonology (which, the editors write, “take a definite syntactic turn”) have also been influential, and the volume concludes with two contributions to that field. The essays, rewarding from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, not only offer insight into Vergnaud's impact on the field but also describe current work on the issues he introduced into the scholarly debate. Contributors Joseph Aoun, Elabbas Benmamoun, Cedric Boeckx, Noam Chomsky, B. Elan Dresher, Robert Freidin, Morris Halle, Norbert Hornstein, Richard S. Kayne, Samuel Jay Keyser, Howard Lasnik, Yen-hui Audrey Li, M. Rita Manzini, Karine Megerdoomian, David Michaels, Henk van Riemsdijk, Alain Rouveret, Leonardo M. Savoia, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Edwin Williams

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax PDF Author: Giglielmo Cinque
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190208279
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 990

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Book Description
Comparison across formal languages is an essential part of formal linguistics. The study of closely-related varieties has proven extremely useful in comparing differences that might otherwise appear unrealted, and has helped to identify the core principles of Universal Grammar. This comprehensive handbook serves two functions. It will provide a general and theoretical introduction to comparative syntax, its methodology, and its relation to other domains of linguistic inquiry; and it will provide a systematic selection of the best comparative work being done today on those language groups and families where substantial progress has been achieved. With top-notch editors and contributors from around the world, this volume will be an essential resource for scholars and students in formal linguistics.