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Bringing together fifty years' worth of cross-linguistic research, this pioneering monograph explores the complex interaction between tense, mood and aspect. It looks at the long way of combining elementary semantic units at the bottom of phrase structure up to and including the top of a sentence. Rejecting ternary tense as blocking compositionality, it introduces three levels obtained by binary tense oppositions. It also counters an outdated view on motion by assuming that change is not expressed as having an inherent goal but rather as dynamic interaction between different number systems that allows us to package information into countable and continuous units. It formally identifies the central role of a verb in a variety of argument structures and integrates adverbial modifiers into the compositional structure at different tense levels of phrase structure. This unique contribution to the field will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers in the syntax-semantics interface.

This article discusses the relation between the minimalist program (MP) and optimality theory (OT) and will show that, contrary to popular belief, MP and OT are not inherently incompatible or competing frameworks/theories. Instead, we will show (i) that the two can well be seen as complementary parts of a more general model of grammar and (ii) that the resulting hybrid system may be superior to the two constituting parts in isolation.

A universal property of natural language is that every language is able to express negation, i.e., every language has some device at its disposal to reverse the truth value of the propositional content of a sentence. The syntax of negation is indissolubly connected to the phenomenon of (negative) polarity. The second section of this chapter deals with the syntax of negative markers, and the third section deals with the syntax and semantics of (negative) polarity items. The chapter focuses specifically on negative concord (i.e., the phenomenon where multiple instances of morphosyntactic negation yield only one semantic negation), with special emphasis on the ambivalent nature of n-words. The various studies of the syntactic properties of negative markers (most notably Zanuttini's analyses of negative markers in Romance varieties) led to a much better understanding of what constrains the cross-linguistic variation that languages exhibit with respect to the expression of sentential negation.

To understand the properties of modern phrase structure grammars, it is useful to place their development in a wider formal and historical context. Phrase structure grammars and associated notions of phrase structure analysis have their proximate origins in models of Immediate Constituent (IC) analysis. Extended phrase structure models could exploit the descriptive value of feature information for describing local and nonlocal grammatical dependencies. Extended phrase structure models began to incorporate insights and perspectives from other monostratal approaches. In the subsequent development of phrase structure grammars, the interpretation of rules as partial descriptions of trees provided the model for a more comprehensive constraint-based or model-theoretic perspective. The models of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) develop a number of revisions in the context of a broad constraint-based conception of grammar. The current models of Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) integrate key empirical insights from the Berkeley Construction Grammar tradition.

Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) starts from the idea that grammatical knowledge is factored into different levels of representation, which encode different kinds of information, and are in not in a one-one mapping relation. LFG makes a sharp distinction between some grammatical information (at f-structure) and the overt structure which expresses that information (the c-structure). The c-structure encodes phrasal dominance and precedence relations, represented as a phrase structure tree. In contrast, the f-structure encodes information about the functional relations between the parts, such as what is the subject and what is the predicate, what agreement features are present, and so on. F-structure presents all of the grammatically relevant information about a sentence or other unit of analysis. C-structure is a representation of constituency, categorial labeling, and linear precedence relations. One central idea of the LFG approach is that the truly universal aspects of syntax are determined with regard to f-structure information.

The dichotomy between lexical categories and functional categories raises a number of questions from the perspective of syntactic projection of lexical information. The author presents the answers by stating that much generative research on syntactic projection takes the view that projection is symmetric (i.e. parallel) across syntactic categories. The chapter discusses the projection of phrasal structure, and deals with some X-bar theoretic issues. The chapter reviews a number of phrase structural properties, including (multi-) dominance, precedence, binary branching, and multiplanar phrase structure. The chapter deals the projection of thematic information within the lexical projection, the regulating roles of the Theta Criterion and the Extended Projection Principle, and, finally, the so-called VP internal Subject. The chapter deals with the nature of functional categories and the concept of extended projection. The chapter discusses the extended nominal projection, the extended adjectival projection, and the extended adpositional projection.

As speakers, the first grammar we learn is most often the grammar of things. The vocabulary of young English speaking children typically will include nominal expressions such as ball , mamma , dadda , cat , dog , juice , water , and so on. There is considerable variation of course but these word forms are used to communicate; that is, to ask for things or to tell someone something. They provide a basis upon which to build up the grammar of the language. The grammar of things is precisely what this chapter will describe. As was shown in the previous chapter, many of the main word classes form the basis of the main structural units of the clause. The most important of these is the unit of the group, which is considered as an extension of the word. Chapter 2 also introduced some terminology and notation that will be helpful for the exploration into analysing English grammar presented in this book. This chapter is the first detailed look at one particular part of the grammar. It begins with an introduction to referring expressions and then moves on in section 3.2 to describe the nominal group, which is the main linguistic resource for these expressions. The nominal group is a complex unit which expresses a range of meanings. Once this description is complete, some guidelines are presented in section 3.3 which offer help in recognizing nominal group boundaries. As a summary, 3.4 provides a worked example of nominal group analysis.

This chapter discusses how word order is conceptualized and theorized within Generative Grammar (GG), as defined in Chapter 3. It should be reiterated that within GG, the term ‘word order’ is infrequently used. Far more commonly used is ‘linear order’ or, abstractly, ‘linearization’ – the latter implying that formal representations, initially void of linear order, undergo an operation in order to assume particular linear-order properties. This labelling convention in GG will be adopted for purposes of this chapter. Readers unfamiliar (or vaguely familiar) with GG are advised to read Chapter 3 first, which will provide an overview of the historical and conceptual background of GG, deemed necessary to understand better the word-order research in GG. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. In §4.1, the role and status of linear order or linearization in GG, initially from the pre-Minimalist perspective and then from the Minimalist perspective, are briefly outlined as a backdrop for the main discussion that ensues. The focus of the chapter shifts in §4.2 and §4.3 to the way in which linear order, or linearization, has been handled within the context of GG. Discussed there is how linear order has been conceptualized in GG, initially as something stipulated in grammar and then as something deduced from modules or sub-theories of grammar (§4.2), or from some fundamental structural or configurational properties (§4.3). The latter theorizing of linearization, as most prominent in Kayne (1994), is also examined in §4.4, in conjunction with Cinque (1996, 2000, 2005), in the light of cross-linguistic (or Greenbergian) data. In §4.5, Kayne’s theory of linearization, which is based crucially on asymmetric c-command, is re-evaluated in the light of more recent developments in GG, namely the Minimalist Program. Also discussed in that section are different minimalist, albeit programmatic, attempts to reduce Kayne’s theory to the unadulterated concept of asymmetric c-command, or even to replace asymmetric c-command itself with a more fundamental syntactic operation, that is, Merge. The chapter comes to a close in §4.6, with concluding remarks.