Search

The book "Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography: A crosslinguistic perspective" edited by Fuzhen Si and Luigi Rizzi provides a comprehensive study of syntactic cartography. The book is organized into 12 papers that focus on theoretical and descriptive issues of specific aspects of syntactic cartography. The chapters cover topics such as the left periphery, the Inflection Phrase (IP) zone, and the Verb Phrase (VP) zone. The book includes contributions from leading scholars and explores various languages, including Romance, Germanic, Semitic, Japanese, and Chinese. It is recommended for linguists interested in generative syntax and offers new theories and unfamiliar data for exploration. [Extracted from the article]

Guglielmo Cinque, the author of the book under review, once claimed that the asymmetries of linear order fit directly into Kayne's LCA (Cinque [5]). Berwick & Chomsky ([1]) and Chomsky ([4]) suggest that structures are created by the operation Merge in narrow syntax, and unordered structures are externalized in the sensorimotor system. Chomsky ([2]) partially agrees with Kayne ([8]) and "takes the LCA to be a principle of the phonological component" (Chomsky [2]: 313). [Extracted from the article]

In Chapter 1, "The structuralist ascendancy in American linguistics", Newmeyer considers how structuralism of a particular kind came to dominate American linguistics. The most interesting in my view is Chapter 6, 'The European reception of early transformational generative grammar', which sketches the very different ways in which generative grammar was received in the various countries of Europe. Newmeyer turns to generative grammar in Chapter 4, 'Early transformational generative grammar: Some controversial issues'. This book is concerned with the evolution of American linguistics from the foundation of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in 1924 until the 1960s. [Extracted from the article]

Miyagawa's monograph is a compelling, very well-written, and extremely insightful look at the syntax-discourse interface from a generative perspective. In Chapter 1 ("Setting the stage", 1-36), the author discusses the notion of "root (clause)" and its implications for the representation of speaker and addressee in the syntax. Miyagawa's monograph is organized in six chapters preceded by a foreword, preface, and list of abbreviations. [Extracted from the article]

Thomas contends that 'Bloomfieldian formalism...had a major impact on linguistics in the first half of the twentieth-century America' (22), and Chomsky's formalism dominated the second half. In her content-filled 118 pages of Formalism and Functionalism in Linguistics, Margaret Thomas provides a lucid, comprehensive and balanced history of a complex subject in contemporary linguistics. In the first chapter, 'Defining "formalism" and "functionalism"', Thomas prepares the reader for the difficulty of working with these terms that do not have either-or boundaries; instead, she compares it to political discourse, in which terms such as "liberal" or "conservative" are subject to varying viewpoints. In Chapter 2, "Background to the current debate", Thomas offers a brief history of the concepts of formalism and functionalism, claiming that 'Remarkably, there has been little reflection on whether the comparison between formalism and functionalism has much of a past' (15). [Extracted from the article]

What Boeckx finds most compelling about generative linguistics is the earliest results pertaining to the Chomsky hierarchy, the necessity to posit forms of nested and crossing dependencies, and the consensus that 'natural languages are both strongly and weakly mildly context-sensitive' (14). His new book is a reference to Chomsky (1975), I Reflections on Language. i We might expect that his next book will explore ' I Paleoanthropological Aspects of the Theory of Syntax i ', although Boeckx never explicitly renounces his earlier minimalist work - but it seems implicit. Boeckx, Cedric, (Conceptual Foundations of Language Science 6). Boeckx's previous book was entitled I Elementary Syntactic Structures i (Boeckx 2014), a reference to Chomsky (1957). [Extracted from the article]

This article investigates soft labial conspiracy in Kurpian, a dialect of Polish that has not been discussed in the generative literature to date. The conspiracy involves four processes: decomposition, simplification, depalatalization, and vowel retraction. These processes are united by the goal to eliminate palatalized labials from the surface representation. The article argues against bidirectional IDENT constraints and for the tenet of Derivational/Stratal OT that analysis must proceed in steps. The evidence comes from the nature of decomposition and from the fact that depalatalization constitutes a Duke-of-York derivation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is well known that Australian languages make heavy use of nominal juxtaposition in a wide variety of functions, but there is little discussion in the theoretical literature of how such juxtapositions should be analysed. We discuss a range of data from Australian languages illustrating how multiple nominals share a single grammatical function within the clause. We argue that such constructions should be treated syntactically as set-valued grammatical functions in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). Sets as values for functions are well-established in LFG and are used in the representation of adjuncts, and also in the representation of coordination. In many Australian languages, coordination is expressed asyndetically, that is, by nominal juxtaposition with no overt coordinator at all. We argue that the syntactic similarity of all juxtaposed constructions (ranging from coordination through a number of more appositional relations) motivates an analysis in which they are treated similarly in the syntax, but suitably distinguished in the semantics. We show how this can be achieved within LFG, providing a unified treatment of the syntax of juxtaposition in Australian languages and showing how the interface to the semantics can be quite straightforwardly defined in the modular LFG approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-sentential utterances (NSUs), utterances that lack an overt verbal (more generally predicative) constituent, are common in adult speech. This paper presents the results of a corpus study of the emergence of certain classes of NSUs in child language, based primarily on data from the Manchester Corpus from CHILDES. Our principal finding is the LATE SHORT QUERY EFFECT: the main classes of non-sentential queries (NSQs) are acquired much later than non-sentential answers (NSAs). At a stage when the child has productive use of sentential queries, and has mastered elliptical declaratives and the polar lexemes 'yes' and 'no', non-sentential questions are virtually absent. This happens despite the fact that such questions are common in the speech of the child's caregivers and that the contexts are ones which should facilitate the production of such NSUs. We argue that these results are intrinsically problematic for analyses of NSUs in terms of a single, generalized mechanism of phonological reduction, as standard in generative grammar. We show how to model this effect within an approach of DIALOGUE-ORIENTED CONSTRUCTIONISM, wherein NSUs are grammatical words or constructions whose main predicate is a contextual parameter resolved in a manner akin to indexical terms, the relevant aspect of context being the discourse topic. We sketch an explanation for the order of acquisition of NSUs, based on a notion which combines accessibility of contextual parameters and complexity of content construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of adjectival diathesis alternations lags behind the study of verbal diathesis and nominalization. This paper aims to diminish the gap by applying to the adjectival domain theoretical tools with proven success elsewhere. We focus on evaluative adjectives, which display a systematic alternation between a basic variant (John was rude) and a derived one (That was rude of John). The alternation brings about a cluster of syntactic and semantic changes - in the semantic type of the predicate, its valency and the mode of argument projection. We argue that the adjectival variants are related by the joint application of two operators: a lexical SATURATION operator (also seen in verbal passive) and a syntactic REIFICATION operator (also seen in nominalization). The analysis straightforwardly extends to similar alternations with Subject- and Object-Experiencer adjectives (proud, irritating). Among its important implications are (i) lexical saturation is not restricted to external arguments (internal ones may also be saturated), and (ii) ' referential ' (R) roles are not restricted to nominal predicates (adjectives may assign them as well). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wh-dependencies are known to be formed rapidly in real-time comprehension. The parser posits the location of gap sites in advance of the bottom-up evidence for missing constituents, and must therefore have a means of deciding when and where to project dependencies. Previous studies have observed that the parser avoids building ungrammatical wh-dependencies, for example, by restricting the search for gap sites from island domains. This paper tests the stronger claim that constraints are not merely respected, but that grammatical knowledge actively prompts the construction of some representations in advance of the input. Three self-paced reading experiments examined patterns of wh-dependency formation in multiple-dependency constructions: obligatory across-the-board (ATB) extraction from coordinated verb phrases, and from optional parasitic gaps in post-verbal adjunct clauses. The key finding is that comprehenders immediately enforce the requirement for extraction from coordinates, and hence actively search for multiple gap sites within a coordinate VP; but they do not search for post-verbal parasitic gaps. This difference cannot be attributed to relative differences in acceptability, as comprehenders rated both of these multiple-gap constructions equally highly, nor can it be explained by general parsing incentives to develop maximal incremental interpretations of partial strings. More plausibly, the difference reflects the deployment of detailed grammatical knowledge in a parser that is motivated to satisfy structural licensing requirements in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most familiar syntactic frameworks recognize the category 'phrase', and are built around phrase structure relationships. However, the Word Grammar dependency model does not acknowledge the category 'phrase' as a primitive in the grammar; instead, all relationships are word-based, with phrases having no syntactic status. Here, I investigate the theoretical validity of the notion 'phrase' by examining the phenomenon in Welsh known as syntactic soft mutation, contrasting a phrase-based account with a dependency account. I conclude that an empirically adequate analysis of syntactic soft mutation must make reference to phrases as a category, thus ruling out the dependency account. A further theoretical question concerns the role played in the grammar by syntactically present but phonetically unrealized elements, including empty categories such as wh-traces and unrealized material in ellipsis. Syntactic soft mutation proves an interesting testing ground in these contexts, but the data again fail to support the dependency account. The conclusion is that a phrase-based account of the mutation is better motivated and empirically more accurate than the alternative dependency account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on combinatorial variability and the compatibility of the findings of variationist sociolinguistics with standard versions of Minimalism. The author provides an analysis of the variable patterns of use and was and were in Buckie English which, according to him, assumed a purely linguistic module, free of social and usage information. He defends a model of Sociolinguistics-free Syntax and Use-free Syntax. He contends that from his perspective, the mechanisms that build grammatical structure are blind to information about social facts or facts about usage.

Adger (2006) claims that the Minimalist Program provides a suitable theoretical framework for analysing at least one example of inherent variability: the variation between was and were after you and we in the Scottish town of Buckie. Drawing on the feature analysis of pronouns and the assumption that lexical items normally have equal probabilities, his analysis provides two 'routes' to we/you was, but only one to we/you were, thereby explaining why the former is on average twice as common as the latter. This comment points out four serious flaws in his argument: it ignores important interactions among sex, age and subject pronoun; hardly any social groups actually show the predicted average 2:1 ratio; there is no general tendency for lexical items to have equal probability of being used; the effects of the subject may be better stated in terms of the lexemes you and we rather than as semantic features. The conclusion is that inherent variability supports a usage-based theory rather than Minimalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cappelen & Lepore (2005, 2006a, 2007) note that linguistic communication requires 'shared content' and claim that Relevance Theory makes content sharing impossible. This criticism rests upon two important errors. The first is a flawed understanding of Relevance Theory, shown in the application of an omniscient third party perspective to parts of Relevance Theory that depend only upon subjective judgements made by the addressee of an utterance. The second is confusion about different definitions of content. Cappelen & Lepore's evidence actually involves the communication of what they term Speech Act content, which need not be perfectly 'shared' according to their own position. Looking beyond this flawed criticism, a general comparison of Relevance Theory with Cappelen & Lepore's semantic minimalism reveals significant parallels, pointing to a notable convergence of two distinct approaches - one cognitive-pragmatic, the other philosophical-semantic - on the rejection of currently dominant assumptions in linguistic semantics. The key remaining difference is Cappelen & Lepore's claim that shared content is propositional. This contradicts other claims made for such content and in any case plays no active role in the explanation of communication. Cappelen & Lepore's position thus poses no threat to Relevance Theory; rather, Relevance Theory can benefit from their philosophical analysis of the state of semantic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the status of the Ezafe particle -(y)e in Persian and provides an affixal analysis of the Ezafe, formalized within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The Ezafe, a feature of certain Western Iranian languages, is realized as an enclitic and links the head noun to its modifiers and to the possessor NP. The latter follow the head and are linked to one another by the Ezafe. On the basis of crucial empirical facts that have never been discussed in previous studies, I argue that the Ezafe is best regarded as an affix attaching to nominal heads (nouns, adjectives and some prepositions), as well as to nominal intermediate projections, and marking them as expecting a modifier or a direct nominal complement. Viewed as such, the Ezafe construction is an instance of the head-marked pattern of morphological marking of grammatical relations. This analysis differs from all previous accounts of the Ezafe (i.e. as case-marker, syntactic or phonological linker) and entails that the Ezafe, which originated in the Old Iranian relative particle -hya, has undergone a process of reanalysis-grammaticalization, to end up as a part of nominal morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we present evidence that subjects have a privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our analysis shows that the sub-lexical structure of iconic signs denoting states of affairs in these languages manifests an inherent pattern of form-meaning correspondence: the signer's body consistently represents one argument of the verb, the subject. The hands, moving in relation to the body, represent all other components of the event - including all other arguments. This analysis shows that sign languages provide novel evidence in support of the centrality of the notion of subject in human language. It also solves a typo-logical puzzle about the apparent primacy of object in sign language verb agreement, a primacy not usually found in spoken languages, in which subject agreement generally ranks higher. Our analysis suggests that the subject argument is represented by the body and is part of the lexical structure of the verb. Because it is always inherently represented in the structure of the sign, the subject is more basic than the object, and tolerates the omission of agreement morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a unified analysis of adverb scope and quantifier scope phenomena in a lexicalist approach to complex predicates. I first observe that the availability of scope ambiguity for adverbs and for quantifiers always coincides for a given type of complex predicate, drawing on data from different kinds of compound verb constructions, the verbal noun-taking predicates and the nominative object construction. The challenge for a unified treatment in lexicalist frameworks comes from the fact that syntactic structures cannot be taken as the locus for representing the scope of adverbs and quantifiers, unlike in derivational frameworks where such an analysis is the most natural. Thus, a previous lexicalist analysis by Manning, Sag & lida (1999) makes use of completely different mechanisms to account for adverb scope and quantifier scope, failing to capture the close parallel between them. I remedy this problem of Manning et al.'s analysis by proposing a unified account of adverb scope and quantifier scope that crucially makes use of a slightly enriched semantic representation explicitly encoding the property of mono-/biclausality with respect to scopal phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses phonologically motivated gaps in inflectional paradigms. A model is offered in which the appearance of gaps is based on a tension between markedness constraints, faithfulness constraints, and constraints which require the expression of morphological categories. After presenting the model, additional implications are analyzed. Situations in which the same problem has different solutions in different morphological contexts are predicted insofar as constraints requiring the expression of different categories can vary in their ranking relative to some faithfulness constraint. Hence, the same phonotactic problem can yield a gap in one situation and a repair in another. This prediction is illustrated and further details of the prediction are explored, including the identification of a situation requiring a more restrictive version of the model. This is achieved by drawing on Smith's (2001) proposal that faithfulness constraints can be indexed to lexical categories to model this situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a constructional approach to English progressives. On this view, progressivity is a construction-level property, rather than a lexical property of the ing forms that progressive verb phrases contain or of the auxiliary. The incompatibility of ing forms with state verbs in progressive constructions provides crucial evidence in support of the construction-based perspective, given that stative ing forms are fully acceptable in gerundive and other ing constructions. Of course, underlying this approach is the proposal that gerund is neutralizable with present participle (Huddleston 1984, 2002b, c; Pullum 1991; Blevins 1994). A lexicalist and construction-based analysis of gerundive nominals, as in Pullum (1991) and Blevins (1994), offers a means of claiming that progressivity is a property of the combination of an auxiliary and ing participle, just as the perfect aspect is expressed by the combination of have and a past participle, as proposed in Ackerman & Webelhuth (1998) and Spencer (2001b), and implicitly in Curme (1935) and other traditional grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The approach adopted here identifies finiteness with the capacity to license an independent predication. The prototypical independent predication is positive and declarative; other ‘moods’, or main-clause types, while finite, may fail to display the morphosyntactic properties associated with this prototype. These properties vary from language to language, but the recurrent core properties are verbal, since the verb is the prototypical predicator. Some constructions that occur in both main and subordinate clauses, such as the infinitival in English, differ in interpretation in these two different circumstances; this may be the only difference between finite (main-clause) and non-finite (subordinate-clause) use. This general approach is contrasted with one in which finiteness is identified with the presence of a particular set of morphosyntactic properties: such a view as the latter can be maintained, if at all, only on the basis of massive recourse to covert categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The point of departure of this paper is the consideration of how words with the meanings of property concept states (states that are lexicalized as adjectives in languages that have that lexical category, cf. Dixon 1982), e.g. ‘red’, are related to words denoting their corresponding change of state, e.g. ‘redden’. It is shown that while many languages relate words with these meanings to one another via some morpholexical process, this is not so in the Polynesian language Tongan. A detailed case study shows that in this language there are no non-causative change of state lexemes based on property concepts. Rather, these meanings are derived pragmatically from verbs denoting the corresponding state via aspectual coercion (Moens & Steedman 1988, Jackendoff 1997, de Swart 1998, Zucchi 1998, Michaelis 2004). This finding is shown to have consequences for the understanding of the typology of change of state predicates (Koontz-Garboden 2005, 2006, Koontz-Garboden & Levin 2005) and for theories of event structure: (a) the typological space is broader than previously thought and (b) theories of event structure need to be reconsidered in order to account for the postlexical derivation of meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term morphological reversal describes the situation where the members of a morphological opposition switch their functions in some context (as with Hebrew gender marking, where -Ø∼-a marks masculine∼feminine with adjectives but feminine∼-masculine with numerals). There is a long tradition of polemic against the notion that morphology can encode systematic reversals, and an equally long tradition of reintroducing them under different names (e.g. polarity, exchange rules or morphosyntactic toggles). An examination of some unjustly neglected examples (number in Nehan, aspect in Tübatulabal, tense in Trique and argument marking in Neo-Aramaic) confirms the existence of morphological reversal, particularly as a mechanism of language change. This is strong evidence for the separateness of morphological paradigms from the features that they encode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a critique of two foundational assumptions of generative work culminating in the Minimalist Program: the assumption that, as a matter of conceptual necessity, language has a ‘double-interface property’ and the related assumption that phonology has a realizational function with respect to syntax-semantics. The issues are broached through a critique of Holmberg's (2000) analysis of Stylistic Fronting in Icelandic. We show that, although empirically motivated, and although based on the double-interface assumption, this analysis is incompatible with that assumption and with the notion of (phonological) realization. Independently of Stylistic Fronting, we argue that the double-interface assumption is a problematic legacy of Saussure's conception of the linguistic sign and that, conceptually, it is neither explanatory nor necessary. The Representational Hypothesis (e.g. Burton-Roberts 2000) develops a Peircian conception of the relation between sound and meaning that breaks with the Saussurian tradition, though in a way consistent with minimalist goals. Other superficially similar approaches (Lexeme—Morpheme Base Morphology, Distributed Morphology, Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture) are discussed; it is argued that they, too, perpetuate aspects of Saussurian thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to provide a plausibility argument for a new way of thinking about intra-personal morphosyntactic variation. The idea is embedded within the framework of the Minimalist Program, and makes use of notions of feature interpretability and feature checking. Specifically, I argue that underspecification of uninterpretable features in a matching relation with interpretable features allows us to model categoricality and variability within a single system. Unlike many current approaches to intra-personal variation (which involve multiple grammars or building stochastic weightings into the grammar itself), the system attempts to predict (rather than capture) frequencies of variants. It does this by combining an evaluation metric for the acquisition of uninterpretable features with the standard properties of features and syntactic operations in the Minimalist framework. The argument is made through a case study of was/were variation in a Scottish dialect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents grammar and languages and syntax in the "Minimalist syntax" and "Core syntax" textbooks. It states that although the Minimalist Program has opened up new research avenues for Principles and Parameters theory, it has left the analytical part of the theory in poor condition. The theoretical flaws in the mentioned textbooks are symptomatic of problems in the Minimalist Program at large and the books are used to look for underlying problems with the programmatic Minimalist approach to P&P theory.

This study investigates how the parser employs thematic and contextual information in resolving temporary ambiguities during sentence processing. We report results from a sentence-completion task and from a self-paced reading experiment with native speakers of Greek examining two constructions under different referential context conditions: relative clauses (RCs) preceded by complex noun phrases with genitives, [NP1 +NP2Gen], and RCs preceded by complex noun phrases containing prepositional phrases, [NP1 + PP[P NP2]]. We found different attachment preferences for these two constructions, a high (NP1) preference for RCs with genitive antecedents and a low (NP2) preference for RCs with PP antecedents. Moreover, referential context information was found to modulate RC attachment differently in the two experimental tasks. We interpret these findings from the perspective of modular theories of sentence processing and argue that on-line ambiguity resolution relies primarily on grammatical and lexical-thematic information, and makes use of referential context information only as a secondary resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first provides an overview of the various senses in which the terms 'marked' and 'unmarked' have been used in 20th-century linguistics. Twelve different senses, related only by family resemblances, are distinguished, grouped into four larger classes: markedness as complexity, as difficulty, as abnormality, and as a multidimensional correlation. In the second part of the paper, it is argued that the term 'markedness' is superfluous, because some of the concepts that it denotes are not helpful, and others are better expressed by more straightforward, less ambiguous terms. In a great many cases, frequency asymmetries can be shown to lead to a direct explanation of observed structural asymmetries, and in other cases additional concrete, substantive factors such as phonetic difficulty and pragmatic inferences can replace reference to an abstract notion of 'markedness'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's reply to a review of his book, "Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective," by Pieter Seuren. In the review Seuren argues that the reason that the book is fundamentally misguided is that it is neither modular nor does it refer to rules. His real objection to the book is clear from the review, however: he objects to the sign-based model of grammar employed by the book, in which grammatical units are pairings of form (syntactic structure) and meaning (semantic structure). Seuren's position is more usually defined as the autonomy of syntax, the notion that syntax forms a self-contained system separate from semantics. According to the author, while the terms "module" and "rule" have been used with a wide range of meanings in linguistics and cognitive science, Seuren has used them in certain specific contexts. The author emphasizes that syntactic theory is in fact diverse and has not converged on the position Seuren takes for granted. According to him, Seuren is actually referring to Chomskyan generative grammar, which retains the principles of autonomy of syntax and uses transformational rules.

Examines a number of phenomena that belong to the periphery of the grammar of Danish. Generative concerns over the Left Periphery of clause structure; Argument that normal movement principles cannot account for the sharing of information between the Specifier and the Complement of Top; Cases of breakstructures.

Discusses complementizers of phrase structures in Bengali and hybrid languages. Lexical choice of the initial complementizers and final complementizers; Motivation for initial periphery movement in hybrid languages; Kayne's theory on generative grammar; Spec-clausal periphery's overt and covert movement; Author's arguments on the derivation of final complementary clauses; Origin of je and bole in Bengali.