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Proposing a new approach to the study of language, this book argues for the need to consider syntax in context and to engage with a wider variety of perspectives that better reflect the modern world and the changes to our language prompted by increased cultural diversity, the prevalence of social media, AI, and more. Referencing big data and drawing on a corpus of linguistic research, the book explores in particular the socio-pragmatic sensitivity and complexity within East Asian languages including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, offering new insights that step away from traditional approaches to formal syntax. In tracing the history of syntactic theory, it highlights the shifts in our communication as we adapt to technological developments, and focuses in particular on the significant advances in AI. Arguing that traditional syntactic theory is no longer in keeping with real life communication, Jieun Kiaer scrutinises current approaches and raises key questions about the need for a more appropriate grammar better suited to the diversity of human language.

Locality in Grammar: From Narrow Syntax to Interfaces investigates the operation of locality conditions in syntax and semantics from a cross-linguistic perspective.It is claimed that there are two different types of locality conditions. One is the Generalized Minimality Condition (GMC), and the other is the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC). This book demonstrates that these locality conditions play different roles in different computational components of human language, and, therefore, cannot be unified as one constraint as proposed in the literature.The main idea of the book is that the two different locality conditions are sensitive to the difference between syntactic derivation and semantic interpretation and that of overt and covert syntactic derivations. Further investigation shows a more fine-grained distinction must be made between syntactic computations. It is true that GMC does not constrain overt syntactic derivations and PIC does not play a role in semantic interpretations; however, they both regulate covert syntactic computations.This book will inform postgraduate students and scholars in the field of linguistics.

All men speak. All human groups speak. Each indigenous society has its language. The slaves in tropical islands made their languages and spoke them. In modern societies, language is everywhere. It is uttered, written, kept in books or on records, and exchanged on social networks. In restaurants and streets and on phones, radio and TV, humans speak. Children speak a lot. Love implies language. Politics is founded on language. As early as 1250 BC, Ramses II used hieroglyphic writing for his propaganda. In modern societies, humans are solicited by enormous amounts of uttered sentences delivered on media, while written language has invaded their private lives through technical documents, SMS and social network texts. Nowadays, an individual is submitted to a permanent receptive language flow. The new human era on earth is often called “anthropocene”. It might be coined “language-cene.” In this book, the author hypothesizes that syntax, precisely defined, is a cultural and functional autonomous entity with a profound specificity and particular internal mechanisms. We speak of a “basic syntax.” We would like to understand how all types of human beings in the entire world, and possibly for millennia, have organized a basic sequence of their words, so that they can describe their environment, and express their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

This book provides an overview of the structures, topics and main theories of syntactic processing. It covers the last 40 years of sentence-level psycholinguistic research and debates and makes it accessible to both theoretical linguists and experimental psychologists. Tying linguistically relevant issues to psycholinguistic theory, this book: Covers the processing of the grammatical phenomena adjunction, agreement and gap filling and discusses the relationship between grammars and parsers Discusses experimental work and theories, demonstrating how psychologists have made real strides in understanding language and how studying the processing of syntactic structure is the same as studying the nature of language Explores the key theories of psycholinguistics, including recent developments Explains the different methodologies of sentence processing, such as eye-tracking and electroencephalography Bridging the gap between psycholinguistic research and the study of language, this book is essential reading for advanced students and scholars of linguistics and experimental psycholinguistics as well as cognitive science and psychology.

A novel theory of argument structure based on the order in which verbs and their arguments combine across a variety of languages and language families.Merge is the structure-building operation in Chomsky's Minimalist Program. In When Arguments Merge, Elise Newman develops a new Merge-based theory of the syntax of argument structure, taking inspiration from wh- questions. She uncovers new connections between disparate empirical phenomena and provides a unified analysis of patterns across many languages and language families, from Mayan to Bantu to Indo-European languages (among others). The result is a syntactic theory with a small inventory of features and categories that can combine in a limited number of ways, capturing the range of argument configurations that we find cross-linguistically in both declarative and interrogative contexts. Newman's novel approach to argument structure is based on the time at which different kinds of arguments merge and move in the verbal domain. Assuming that all kinds of Merge are driven by features, she proposes that subset relationships between elements bearing different sets of features can constrain the distribution of arguments in unexpected ways and that different feature bundles can predict unusual interactions between arguments in many contexts. The positions of arguments in different contexts have consequences for agreement alignment and case assignment, which are reflected in the Voice of the clause. Examining the order in which verbs and their arguments are combined, she explores the consequences of different orders of combination for the kinds of utterances observed across languages.

Much recent influential work within Generative grammar argues that syntax plays a key role in grammar and meaning composition, whereas the role of the lexicon is minimal. This book provides evidence that supports a more balanced division of labor between syntax and the lexicon in the creation of meaning. The author argues that grammatical theory can only ignore lexical meaning at its own peril and defends a theoretical standpoint which is underrepresented in much of the current work in this area. This book explores a wide range of relevant empirical data and makes a compelling case for a theory that can make adequate predictions about possible linguistic structures by allowing the lexicon and the grammar to dynamically interact and impose restrictions on each other.

Attending to the Literary: The Distinctiveness of Literature is a foray into current debates about the nature of the literary. What is literary? Is literarity a thing? Are there still aesthetic standards of taste? Is the category of literary aesthetics an obstacle to understanding the uses of literature? What does it mean to count the reading of literature as an experience in its own right? What would be the deficits to human experience without literature? Attending to the Literary addresses all of these questions with a view to challenging the notion of literarity as merely representative of experience. On the contrary, Alan Singer shows how literarity is an enacting of experience. Through close readings of an eclectic repertoire of literary sentences – culled from the genres of fiction, poetry, and drama – Singer demonstrates how syntax stages human capacities for attending ever more consequentially to the world of practical experience. These stagings of forms of attention involve readers in the drama of reason-giving and expand the possibilities of rational imagination.Attending to the Literary speaks to a broad audience of readers for whom the question'Does literature matter?'remains an urgent intellectual challenge.

In der fachdidaktischen und fachwissenschaftlichen Forschung sind Konnektoren ein beliebter Forschungsgegenstand, weil sie Kohärenz herstellen und die Rezeption erleichtern können. Gleichzeitig zeigt sich auch, dass der Einsatz von Konnektoren bei Schüler:innen unterschiedlicher Jahrgangsstufen nicht immer unproblematisch ist. Der Fokus der empirischen Studie liegt auf der Eruierung des Verstehens und Produzierens von Kausalsätzen bei Sechstklässler:innen vor und nach dem Zeigen verschiedener Visualisierungen, um den Auf- und Ausbau einer semantisch-kategorialen Bewusstheit zu unterstützen.

While Verb-third (V3) patterns have long been studied in verb-second (V2) languages, a similar pattern in which an initial adverbial constituent is resumed by a clause-internal element has been much less studied. The latter is referred to as'adverbial resumption'and it also has the character of being a V3 phenomenon. Therefore, the pattern is labelled'adverbial V3 resumption'or'adverbial V3.'The present volume is an up-to-date overview of the subject featuring case studies of individual languages that display certain patterns of V3. The authors discuss this pattern in relation to several different languages, addressing among other things issues of microvariation in contemporary varieties and diachronic variation. The book covers Medieval Romance, Old Italian, Old English, diachronic and synchronic varieties of German, varieties of Flemish and Dutch, Icelandic, varieties of Swedish, and Norwegian. Through analyses of adverbial resumptive V3 orders in Germanic and Romance, the contributors explore the nature of V2: while adverbial resumption only occurs in varieties that observe the V2 rule, in itself it leads to apparent violations of linear V2 order, namely to V3 orders. Adverbial Resumption in Verb Second Languages provides comparative analyses which touch upon the nature of sentence-external versus sentence-internal adjuncts, and the fine-grained architecture of the clausal functional hierarchy. These papers constitute a valuable contribution to the theoretically important topics of V2 and V3 that will be of interest to comparative linguists, Germanic linguistics, Romance linguists, and anyone working on formal grammar in general.

What is the most descriptively and explanatorily adequate format for syntactic structures and how are they constrained? Different theories of syntax have provided various answers: sets, feature structures, tree diagrams… Building on formal and empirical insights from a wide variety of approaches spanning more than 70 years (including Transformational Grammar, Relational Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, and Tree Adjoining Grammar), this monograph develops a new, mathematically grounded, framework in which objects known as graphs, and the constraints that follow from them, are argued to provide the best characterisation of the system of expressions and relations that make up natural language grammars. This new approach is motivated and exemplified via detailed and formally explicit analyses of major syntactic phenomena in English and Spanish.

This book is the first to present a comprehensive theory of non-canonical questions, those question types that do not (only) request information from the addressee, but rather (additionally) tell us something about the speaker's epistemic and/or emotional state, such as can't-find-the-value questions, echo questions, rhetorical questions, and surprise questions. While much recent research has explored the formal semantics and the phonetics and phonology of both canonical and non-canonical questions, the literature is still lacking a comprehensive account from a syntax-pragmatics perspective that brings together the multiple findings and strands of research from the last twenty years. The standard view in the syntax-pragmatics literature is that most special interpretations of non-canonical questions involve syntactic projections at or even above the level of illocutionary force. In this work, Andreas Trotzke argues that this approach is a mistake, and proposes a new alternative theory of non-canonical questions in which both their special pragmatics and their syntax, as well as in many cases their emotive component, can be derived solely from propositional-level operators that do not affect the illocutionary level of utterances and can be found across illocutionary forces. This account dramatically simplifies the syntactic analysis of non-canonical questions and is also able to capture some previously unobserved data in the discourse behavior of those question types.

This book focuses on conversation analysis in Czech, including the prosody-syntax-interface and online-syntax in real time that deals with turn initiating elements in everyday conversations. By combining a pragmatic formal theory with a formal syntax model, this book serves as a guide to the problems of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of spoken everyday talk and as a handbook on conversational analysis.

This volume showcases the contributions that formal experimental methods can make to syntactic research in the 21st century. Syntactic theory is both a domain of study in its own right, and one component of an integrated theory of the cognitive neuroscience of language. It provides a theory of the mediation between sound and meaning, a theory of the representations constructed during sentence processing, and a theory of the end-state for language acquisition. Given the highly interactive nature of the theory of syntax, this volume defines'experimental syntax'in the broadest possible terms, exploring both formal experimental methods that have been part of the domain of syntax since its inception (i.e., acceptability judgment methods) and formal experimental methods that have arisen through the interaction of syntactic theory with the domains of acquisition, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Syntax brings these methods together into a single experimental syntax volume for the first time, providing high-level reviews of major experimental work, offering guidance for researchers looking to incorporate these diverse methods into their own work, and inspiring new research that will push the boundaries of the theory of syntax. It will appeal to students and scholars from the advanced undergraduate level upwards in a range of fields including syntax, acquisition, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics.

The specialised language of fashion draws theresearch interest of linguists and semioticiansas well as communication experts and fashionhistorians. This volume contributes to advancingthe knowledge of crucial aspects in thelanguage of fashion that still need deep investigation.It brings together contributions thatshed light on the morphological, lexical, pragmatic,and cultural aspects of the language offashion, without ignoring cognitive and semioticphenomena. The diversity of topics and perspectivesof the chapters presented here testifiesto the variety and vitality of scientificresearch in the complex and multifaceted languageof fashion.

Syntactic priming is a naturally-occurring psycholinguistic phenomenon that has been used as an experimental manipulation to great effect: over the last 20 years, syntactic priming research with children of different backgrounds has added to our understanding of the mechanisms and stages of syntactic development and priming. This collection of original articles explores the state of the art in that literature. Ten chapters review the findings of syntactic priming research with monolingual and multilingual, typically-developing and atypically-developing child populations from a variety of language backgrounds. The expert authors explore what syntactic priming has revealed about children's development of syntax and propose ways in which methodological innovations and broadening the scope of future research can build on this. The collection will be a useful resource for researchers from diverse areas of the field of child language, particularly those with a focus on grammatical development.

This volume brings together empirical studies and keynote addresses presented at the 15th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition conference hosted by the University of Nevada, Reno in 2019. The studies selected for the volume reflect how the latest developments in generative syntactic theory and psycholinguistic methodologies have impacted second language acquisition research in the last decade, from the linguistic properties under investigation and L1-L2/Ln language pairings down to the specific research questions in each study. The minimalist view of language architecture is at the center of studies investigating L2 acquisition of raising, scope, definiteness, phonological representations, and interlanguage transfer. The volume also showcases the latest research on interface phenomena, language processing, and working memory. Studies analyze data collected with a variety of L2 populations from adult foreign language learners to adolescent L3 learners and heritage speakers.

A study on anaphoric dependencies that derives the conditions on anaphora in natural language from the design properties of the language system.Pronouns and anaphors (including reflexives such as himself and herself) may or must depend on antecedents for their interpretation. These dependencies are subject to conditions that prima facie show substantial crosslinguistic variation. In this monograph, Eric Reuland presents a theory of how these anaphoric dependencies are represented in natural language in a way that does justice to the the variation one finds across languages. He explains the conditions on these dependencies in terms of elementary properties of the computational system of natural language. He shows that the encoding of anaphoric dependencies makes use of components of the language system that all reflect different cognitive capacities; thus the empirical research he reports on offers insights into the design of the language system. Reuland's account reduces the conditions on binding to independent properties of the grammar, none of which is specific to binding. He offers a principled account of the roles of the lexicon, syntax, semantics, and the discourse component in the encoding of anaphoric dependencies; a window into the overall organization of the grammar and the roles of linguistic and extralinguistic factors; a new typology of anaphoric expressions; a view of crosslinguistic variation (examining facts in a range of languages, from English, Dutch, Frisian, German, and Scandinavian languages to Fijian, Georgian, and Malayalam) that shows unity in diversity.

Imagine for a moment the only way to confirm a yes-no question was by saying Yeah. How different would this make our communication? Relying on a large corpus of naturally occurring recordings of spontaneous social interaction, this book explores all of the ways that we confirm questions in our everyday social lives. Tanya Stivers analyzes what these different ways of responding allow us to do that is unique to each answer type. When do we answer with Yeah rather than He is, for instance; or when do we use more complicated forms of confirming? This information provides us with the basic response possibility space. From that point we can examine what the range of responses, in particular answers, tells us about what is important to us in managing social relationships through social interaction. The book explains that we can conceptualize the response possibility space as having three dimensions: alignment, autonomy, and affiliation. Speakers rely on the details of their response to position themselves at a particular point in that three-dimensional space, sometimes accepting trade-offs among the dimensions to achieve a stance that is higher in alignment and autonomy and lower in affiliation or higher in affiliation and autonomy but lower in alignment. The Book of Answers uses real-life conversations to find hidden patterns in how we do things together such as reach decisions, tell stories, or arrive at agreement or disagreement. Delving into the science of how we talk, this book investigates what those patterns tell us about human communication and our social lives.

This book addresses the question of how in-situ wh-phrases are licensed from a minimalist perspective in which the basic assumptions about narrow syntax need to be reduced to the bare minimum. I propose that in-situ wh-phrases are licensed by way of either minimal Search or covert internal Merge: while in-situ wh-adjuncts are uniformly licensed by covert internal Merge, in-situ wh-arguments have a choice between the two options, depending on whether the licensing C head is overtly manifested. I also discuss sluicing, an ellipsis construction with a remnant wh-phrase, and address the question of how the remnant wh-phrase is licensed. I support the in-situ approach to sluicing, advocated in my previous book The In-Situ Approach to Sluicing (John Benjamins), according to which the remnant wh-phrase stays in situ. I argue against the more standard analysis, endorsing the main claim of this previous book that island repair by ellipsis is a myth.

This book examines the language abilities of persons with Down Syndrome who are able to read. The text defends the ‘delayed but not deviant view'of linguistic abilities by examining a range of syntactic phenomena that develop at different points for typically developing children, and for which a similar overall pattern is found for persons with Down Syndrome. The volume also defends the ‘delayed but not deviant view'against challenges arising from studies of the comprehension of definite pronouns. The study fits within a picture of linguistic abilities that is modular: skills with language do not emerge from other cognitive functions. It is an important source of information for readers in the departments of linguistics, speech and language therapy, and cognitive science.

Natural phenomena, including human language, are not just series of events but are organized quasi-periodically; sentences have structure, and that structure matters.Howard Lasnik and Juan Uriagereka “were there” when generative grammar was being developed into the Minimalist Program. In this presentation of the universal aspects of human language as a cognitive phenomenon, they rationally reconstruct syntactic structure. In the process, they touch upon structure dependency and its consequences for learnability, nuanced arguments (including global ones) for structure presupposed in standard linguistic analyses, and a formalism to capture long-range correlations. For practitioners, the authors assess whether “all we need is Merge,” while for outsiders, they summarize what needs to be covered when attempting to have structure “emerge.”Reconstructing the essential history of what is at stake when arguing for sentence scaffolding, the authors cover a range of larger issues, from the traditional computational notion of structure (the strong generative capacity of a system) and how far down into words it reaches to whether its variants, as evident across the world's languages, can arise from non-generative systems. While their perspective stems from Noam Chomsky's work, it does so critically, separating rhetoric from results. They consider what they do to be empirical, with the formalism being only a tool to guide their research (of course, they want sharp tools that can be falsified and have predictive power). Reaching out to skeptics, they invite potential collaborations that could arise from mutual examination of one another's work, as they attempt to establish a dialogue beyond generative grammar.

Syntax is seen as the synthetic construction of complex linguistic signs bringing together different areas of experience through the sign function, and is integrated with semantics to account for communicational reality and the nature of meaning. The disposing factors at the interface between experience and verbal means in the application of signs are investigated with detailed examples. The analysis of verbal constructs provides linguistic perspectives on a range of philosophical issues, and illuminates the role of language in what it is to be human. The work consists of thematically related papers, and takes a broadly Saussurean/functionalist “European” approach.

This volume explores the role that functional elements play in syntactic change and investigates the semantic and functional features that are the driving force behind those changes. Structural developments are explained in terms of the reanalysis of parts of the functional sequences in the clausal, nominal, and adpositional domains, through changes in parameter settings and feature specifications. The chapters discuss'microdiachronic'syntactic changes that often have implications for large-scale syntactic effects, such as word order variation, the emergence (and lexicalization) of syntactic projections, grammaticalization, and changes in information-structural properties. The volume contains both case studies of individual languages, such as German, Hungarian, and Romanian, and detailed investigations of cross-linguistic phenomena, based primarily on digital corpora of historical and dialectal data.

Este libro se centra en el estudio de los vocativos, tan habituales en la lengua hablada como olvidados en los estudios gramaticales, sobre todo desde una perspectiva sintáctica. Basado en la tesis doctoral Aspectos gramaticales del vocativo en español, se trata de una investigación multidisciplinar, en la que prima el enfoque sintáctico-semántico, si bien la pragmática, la morfología, la entonación y la variación dialectal y lingüística también han estado muy presentes en esta investigación.

This book examines a challenging problem at the intersection of theoretical linguistics and the psychology of language: the interpretation of gradient judgments of sentence acceptability in relation to theories of grammatical knowledge. Acceptability judgments constitute the primary source of data on which such theories have been built, despite being susceptible to various extra-grammatical factors. Through a review of experimental and corpus-based research on a variety of syntactic phenomena and an in-depth examination of two case studies, Elaine J. Francis argues for two main positions. The first is that converging evidence from online comprehension tasks, elicited production tasks, and corpora of naturally-occurring discourse can help to determine the sources of variation in acceptability judgments and to narrow down the range of plausible theoretical interpretations. The second is that the interpretation of judgment data depends crucially on the theoretical commitments and assumptions made, especially with respect to the nature of the syntax-semantics interface and the choice of either a categorical or a gradient notion of grammaticality. The theoretical frameworks considered in this book include derivational theories (e.g. Minimalism, Principles and Parameters), constraint-based theories (e.g. Sign-based Construction Grammar, Simpler Syntax), competition-based theories (e.g. Stochastic Optimality Theory, Decathlon Model), and usage-based approaches. The volume shows that while acceptability judgment data are typically compatible with the assumptions of various theoretical frameworks, some gradient phenomena are best captured within frameworks that permit soft constraints-non-categorical grammatical constraints that encode the conventional preferences of language users.

Conçu comme une introduction générale à la syntaxe, cet ouvrage présente les notions de base nécessaires à une étude de la combinaison des unités lexicales et grammaticales au sein d'un énoncé. Sans se placer dans un cadre préconçu, l'ouvrage étudie les différentes possibilités pour la représentation des structures syntaxiques, en fonction des principes généraux et des critères particuliers retenus. Élaboré avec l'objectif de fournir une base pour l'enseignement de la syntaxe à l'université, cet ouvrage souhaite montrer qu'on peut dégager de manière méthodique les propriétés des langues et mettre de l'ordre dans la forêt vierge que constitue chaque langue. Il est divisé en trois parties : comment élaborer le modèle d'une langue, comment déterminer les unités de base de la langue en fonction de leur sens, forme et combinatoire, comment définir et représenter les différents modes d'organisation des unités. Cette dernière partie présente une abondance de diagrammes syntaxiques de diverses natures. L'ouvrage est découpé en de petites sections, alternant le contenu principal avec des éclairages, des notes historiques, des élaborations plus formelles, des exemples linguistiques dans diverses langues, des propositions de lectures additionnelles et des exercices avec des éléments de correction. Kim Gerdes et Sylvain Kahane collaborent depuis 20 ans et ont publié ensemble plus de 40 articles. Ils se sont intéressés à différents aspects de la syntaxe des langues. Après avoir travaillé sur la modélisation formelle de l'ordre des mots en allemand et en français, ils ont commencé à partir de 2008 à développer des corpus annotés en syntaxe de dépendance pour le français parlé, s'intéressant à la fois aux problèmes théoriques de l'analyse en dépendance et aux questions plus particulièrement posées par les productions orales, notamment concernant les limites de la syntaxe. Conceived as a general introduction to syntax, this book presents the basic concepts necessary for a study of the combination of lexical and grammatical units within an utterance. The book does not impose a preconceived framework, but rather examines the various possibilities for the representation of syntactic structures, according to the general principles and specific criteria that have been adopted. The aim of this book is to provide a basis for teaching syntax at university, and to show that it is possible to identify the properties of languages in a methodical way and to put order in the jungle of each language. The book is divided into three parts: How to develop the model of a language? How to determine the basic units of a language according to their meaning, form, and combinatorial nature? How to define and represent the different ways in which the units are organized? This last part presents an abundance of syntactic diagrams of a wide range of types. The book is divided into small sections, alternating the main content with insights, historical notes, formal elaborations, linguistic examples in diverse languages, proposals for further reading, and exercises with answer keys. Kim Gerdes and Sylvain Kahane have been collaborating for 20 years and have published together more than 40 articles. They have been interested in different aspects of the syntax of languages. After working on formal modeling of word order in German and French, they started in 2008 to develop annotated corpora in dependency syntax for spoken French, focusing both on theoretical problems of dependency analysis and on questions more specifically raised by oral productions, notably concerning the limits of syntax.

Este libro está dirigido a cualquier estudiante, investigador o lector interesado en la perspectiva generativista del lenguaje, desde quien simplemente quiere ponerse al día con las últimas propuestas de Chomsky hasta quien se sienta intrigado por la implementación de un programa minimista en la teoría lingüística. En la Wikipedia, minimalismo se define como «cualquier cosa que haya sido reducida a lo esencial, despojada de elementos sobrantes». Es usual escuchar esa etiqueta aplicada a actividades muy diversas (p. e., la música, la arquitectura, la pintura o incluso la decoración y la cocina), pero no a la lingüística, o a ninguna disciplina académico-científica, para el caso: no hay una biología, una literatura o unas matemáticas minimistas. Simplemente eso ya debería despertar nuestra curiosidad, estemos o no familiarizados con Chomsky y lo que ha dicho. A lo largo de los capítulos se van introduciendo términos técnicos que se describen e ilustran en el momento relevante, y aparecen recogidos en un índice de materias al final del libro. El libro consta de cuatro capítulos, que más o menos cubren los trabajos publicados por Chomsky desde 1993 hasta 2019, un cuarto de siglo aproximadamente. El primero de ellos esboza los objetivos del minimismo desde una perspectiva relativamente general y es, por tanto accesible a todo el público. En el segundo se presentan las modificaciones de la arquitectura de la gramática en el paso de la teoría de Rección y Ligamiento al minimismo, y, además, se discuten las operaciones computacionales básicas, el ensamble y la concordancia. En el tercero se discute el peso de uno de los factores no exclusivos del lenguaje y su impacto en el funcionamiento de este: la eficiencia computacional. Para ello se explora la noción de «fase» (Chomsky 2000 et seq.), que no es otra cosa que la versión actualizada de los «nudos frontera» de Chomsky (1977) o las «barreras» de Chomsky (1986). Finalmente, el cuarto capítulo está dedicado a la variación lingüística (los «parámetros»), a su caracterización desde los años ochenta ala actualidad y a aquellos aspectos que hay que tener en cuenta para estudiarla desde un punto de vista minimista.

Symmetrizing Syntax seeks to establish a minimal and natural characterization of the structure of human language (syntax), simplifying many facets of it that have been redundantly or asymmetrically formulated. Virtually all past theories of natural language syntax, from the traditional X-bar theory to the contemporary system of Merge and labeling, stipulate that every phrase structure is'asymmetrically'organized, so that one of its elements is always marked as primary/dominant over the others, or each and every phrase is labeled by a designated lexical element. The two authors call this traditional stipulation into question and hypothesize, instead, that linguistic derivations are essentially driven by the need to reduce asymmetry and generate symmetric structures. Various linguistic notions such as Merge, cyclic derivation by phase, feature-checking, morphological agreement, labeling, movement, and criterial freezing, as well as parametric differences among languages like English and Japanese, and so on, are all shown to follow from a particular notion of structural symmetry. These results constitute novel support for the contemporary thesis that human language is essentially an instance of a physical/biological object, and its design is governed by the laws of nature, at the core of which lies the fundamental principle of symmetry. Providing insights into new technical concepts in syntax, the volume is written for academics in linguistics but will also be accessible to linguistics students seeking an introduction to syntax.

This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. The theoretical breadth of the volume makes it the most complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date: at first glance, it appears to be a syntactic matter, but the survey raises theoretical and empirical questions not just for syntax, but also across semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure. Rather than promoting a single analysis, Daniel Altshuler and Robert Truswell outline reasonable hypotheses that allow theoretical conclusions to be deducted from empirical facts. The theoretical conclusions show that coordinate structures have the potential to discriminate between current syntactic theories, and to inform work on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. In many cases, however, the necessary empirical work has not yet been carried out, and too much of the literature revolves around the same handful of primarily English examples. The volume offers a starting point for further research on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in understudied languages, and provides a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings.

What explains variation in human language? How are linguistic and social factors related? How do we examine possible semantic differences between variants? These questions and many more are explored in this volume, which examines syntactic variables in a range of languages. It brings together a team of internationally acclaimed authors to provide perspectives on how and why syntax varies between and within speakers, focusing on explaining theoretical backgrounds and methods. The analyses presented are based on a range of languages, making it possible to address the questions from a cross-linguistic perspective. All chapters demonstrate rigorous quantitative analyses, which expose the conditioning factors in language change as well as offering important insights into community and individual grammars. It is essential reading for researchers and students with an interest in language variation and change, and the theoretical framework and methods applied in the study of how and why syntax varies.

A proposal that syntax extends to the domain of discourse in making core syntax link to the conversational context.In Syntax in the Treetops, Shigeru Miyagawa proposes that syntax extends into the domain of discourse by making linkages between core syntax and the conversational participants. Miyagawa draws on evidence for this extended syntactic structure from a wide variety of languages, including Basque, Japanese, Italian, Magahi, Newari, Romanian, and Spanish, as well as the language of children with autism. His proposal for what happens at the highest level of the tree structure used by linguists to represent the hierarchical relationships within sentences—“in the treetops”—offers a unique contribution to the new area of study sometimes known as “syntacticization of discourse.” Miyagawa's main point is that syntax provides the basic framework that makes possible the performance of a speech act and the conveyance of meaning; although the role that syntax plays for speech acts is modest, it is critical. He proposes that the speaker-addressee layer and the Commitment Phrase (the speaker's commitment to the addressee of the truthfulness of the proposition) occur together in the syntactic treetops. In each succeeding chapter, Miyagawa examines the working of each layer of the tree and how they interact.

Diese Einführung gibt einen grundlegenden Überblick zur Terminologie und analytischen Betrachtung der deutschen Syntax. Nach der Lektüre verfügen Sie über grundlegende Kompetenzen in der Beschreibung und Analyse deutscher Sätze. Wichtige Begriffe erklärt die Autorin anschaulich und mit zahlreichen Beispielen. Für Leserinnen und Leser ohne linguistische Vorkenntnisse konzipiert, ist die Einführung in leicht verständlicher Sprache geschrieben. Kurzum: Dieses Buch ist die ideale Einführung in die Syntax des Deutschen für Studienanfänger der Germanistik sowie in Studiengängen mit Bezug zu Deutsch als Fremd-und Zweitsprache (DaF/DaZ). Lehrende finden hier zudem zahlreiche Ansätze und Beispiele für den Unterricht.

Syntax ist ein von der Fachkommunikationsforschung bislang wenig bearbeitetes Gebiet. Zu Unrecht. Dieser Band stellt das komplexe Forschungsfeld vor, zeigt Potenziale auf und gibt neue Impulse für die weitere Diskussion in diesem hochinteressanten Bereich. Im Fokus des Bandes steht die Syntax romanischer Sprachen und des Deutschen. Übersichtlich gegliedert werden 1. übereinzelsprachliche, 2. einzelsprachliche, 3. kontrastive und 4. translationswissenschaftliche Dimensionen von Syntax in Fachkommunikation beleuchtet. Die Autorinnen und Autoren bieten einen neuen Blick auf Reduktions- und Universalienhypothese, beschreiben syntaktische Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten in fachkommunikativen Situationen und widmen sich dem interlingualen Vergleich syntaktischer Aspekte in Textsorten. Sie erkunden ferner synsemiotische Kohäsion in fachbezogenen Videos, diskutieren Übersetzungsprobleme wie auch Fragen, die die Syntax Leichter und Einfacher Sprache betreffen, und untersuchen darüber hinaus ausgewählte diachronische Aspekte von Syntax in Fachkommunikation.

Pete, Jem and Belle play hide and seek. Pete has a very good hiding spot – will they ever find him?Targeting Subject-Verb-Object sentences and prepositions, this book provides repeated examples of early developing syntax and morphology which will engage and excite the reader while building pre-literacy skills and make learning fun, as well as exposing children to multiple models of the target grammar form.Perfect for a speech and language therapy session, this book is an ideal starting point for targeting client goals and can also be enjoyed at school or home to reinforce what has been taught in the therapy session.

Pete and Jem are having lots of fun at the zoo, but they both want to see different animals, and are pulling their mother in different directions!Targeting Subject-Verb-Object sentences and regular plurals, this book provides repeated examples of early developing syntax and morphology which will engage and excite the reader while building pre-literacy skills and make learning fun, as well as exposing children to multiple models of the target grammar form.Perfect for a speech and language therapy session, this book is an ideal starting point for targeting client goals and can also be enjoyed at school or home to reinforce what has been taught in the therapy session.

This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters address a central theoretical issue in diachronic syntax: whether syntactic variation can always be attributed to differences in the features of items in the lexicon, as the Borer-Chomsky conjecture proposes. In answering this question, all the chapters develop analyses of syntactic change couched within a formalist framework in which rich hierarchical structures and abstract features of various kinds play an important role. The first three parts of the volume explore the different domains of the clause, namely the C-domain, the T-domain and the?P/VP-domain respectively, while chapters in the final part are concerned with establishing methodology in diachronic syntax and modelling linguistic correspondences. The contributors draw on extensive data from a large number of languages and dialects, including several that have received little attention in the literature on diachronic syntax, such as Romeyka, a Greek variety spoken in Turkey, and Middle Low German, previously spoken in northern Germany. Other languages are explored from a fresh theoretical perspective, including Hungarian, Icelandic, and Austronesian languages. The volume sheds light not only on specific syntactic changes from a cross-linguistic perspective but also on broader issues in language change and linguistic theory.

This volume is the first to present a detailed survey of the systems of verb-verb complexes in Asian languages from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. Many Asian languages share, to a greater or lesser extent, a unique class of compound verbs consisting of a main verb and a quasi-auxiliary verb known as a'vector'or'explicator'. These quasi-auxiliary verbs exhibit unique grammatical behaviour that suggests that they have an intermediate status between full lexical verbs and wholly reduced auxiliaries. They are also semantically unique, in that when they are combined with main verbs, they can convey a rich variety of functional meanings beyond the traditional notions of tense, aspect, and modality, such as manner and intensity of action, benefaction for speaker or hearer, and polite or derogatory styles in speech. In this book, leading specialists in a range of Asian languages offer an in-depth analysis of the long-standing questions relating to the diachrony and geographical distribution of verb-verb complexes. The findings have implications for the general understanding of the grammaticalization of verb categories, complex predicate formation, aktionsart and event semantics, the morphology-syntax-semantics interface, areal linguistics, and typology.

An argument that Merge is binary but its binarity refers to syntactic positions rather than objects.In this book, Barbara Citko and Martina Gračanin-Yüksek examine the constraints on Merge--the basic structure-building operation in minimalist syntax--from a multidominant perspective. They maintain that Merge is binary, but argue that the binarity of Merge refers to syntactic positions Merge relates: what has typically been formulated as a constraint that prevents Merge from combining more than two syntactic objects is a constraint on Merge's relating more than two syntactic positions.

This second edition of Ian Roberts's highly successful textbook on diachronic syntax has been fully revised and updated throughout to take account of the multiple developments in the field in the last decade. The book provides a detailed account of how standard questions in historical linguistics - including word order change, grammaticalization, and reanalysis - can be explored in terms of current minimalist theory and Universal Grammar. This new edition offers expanded coverage of a range of topics, including null subjects, the Final-over-Final Condition, the diachrony of wh-movement, the Tolerance Principle, and creoles and creolization, and explores further advances in the theory of parametric variation. Each chapter includes suggestions for further reading, and the book concludes with a comprehensive glossary of key terms. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field, the volume will remain an ideal textbook for students of historical linguistics and a valuable reference for researchers and students in related areas such as syntax, comparative linguistics, language contact, and language acquisition.

La interrelación entre la estructura gramatical y la estructura de significado subyacente a aquélla constituye la base sobre la cual la comunicación humana encuentra su asidero para transmitir piezas de información entre emisor y receptor. Para alcanzar esta meta, es necesario que el sentido codificado de las estructuras lingüísticas se encuentre apropiadamente cohesionado conformando un texto, de modo que se establezca una línea temática ininterrumpida que permita acceder al intercambio comunicativo.

This book is all about the captivating ability that the human language has to express intricately logical (mathematical) meanings using tiny (microsemantic) morphemes as utilities. Languages mark meanings with identical inferences using identical particles and these particles thus creep up in a wide array of expressions. Because of their multi-tasking capacity to express seemingly disparate meanings, they are dubbed Superparticles. These particles are perfect windows into the interlock of several grammatical modules and the nature of the interaction of these modules through time. With a firm footing in the module where grammatical bones are built and assembled (narrow morpho-syntax), superparticles acquire varied interpretation (in the conceptual-intentional module – semantics) depending on the structure they fea- ture in. What is more, some of the interpretations these particles trigger are inferential and belong, under the standard account, to the realm of pragmatics. How can suchtiny particles, rarely exceeding a syllable of sound, have such powerful and over-arching effects across the inter-modular grammatical space? This is the Platonic background against which this book is set.

This book illustrates recent developments in cartographic studies, seen from a comparative perspective. The different chapters explore various aspects of theoretical and descriptive syntax, bearing on such topics as selection, causativity, binding, light verb constructions, the structure of the high and low peripheral zones. Syntactic issues in the study of dialects and ancient languages are also addressed. The languages investigated include French, Hebrew, Standard Dutch and the Ghent dialect, Etruscan, Japanese, English, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese and the Teochew dialect. The intended readers of this book include researchers and students working on natural language syntax, the interface between syntax and semantics/pragmatics, and comparative and typological linguistics, as well as scholars interested in particular languages such as East Asian and Romance languages.

The lectures in this book are immensely Chomskyan in spirit, recursive-syntactic in nature, and tethered to a framework which takes as the null hypothesis the notion that language is an innate, pre-determined biological system—a system which by definition is multi-complex, human-specific, and analogous to a philosophy highly commensurate of Descartes'great proverbial adage which announces the calling for a ‘ghost-in-the-machine'. The book begins with a gradual assessment of the kinds of complex constructs students of syntax need to work-up. Leading to the classic ‘Four-Sentences'—each of which bears as a kind of post-mark its own decade of Chomskyan analysis—we trace the origins of generative grammar from the fields of child language acquisition (of the 1960s), to psycholinguistics (of the 1970s), to where we stand today within the Minimalist Program. Various spin-off proposals have been spawned by envisioned analyses which treat syntactic movement as the quintessential human processing—a processing which would give rise to human language. Such spin-offs include ‘Proto-language'and a new treatment of the so-called morpho-syntactic ‘Dual Mechanism Model'.

Propositional attitude reports are sentences built around clause-embedding psychological verbs, like Kim believes that it's raining or Kim wants it to rain. These interact in many intricate ways with a wide variety of semantically relevant grammatical phenomena, and represent one of the most important topics at the interface of linguistics and philosophy, as their study provides insight into foundational questions about meaning. This book provides a bird's-eye overview of the grammar of propositional attitude reports, synthesizing the key facts, theories, and open problems in their analysis. Couched in the theoretical framework of generative grammar and compositional truth-conditional semantics, it places emphasis on points of intersection between propositional attitude reports and other important topics in semantic and syntactic theory. With discussion points, suggestions for further reading and a useful guide to symbols and conventions, it will be welcomed by students and researchers wishing to explore this fertile area of study.

This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us. The chapters develop novel insights into a number of core syntactic phenomena, such as the structure of and variation in diathesis, alignment types, case and agreement splits, and the syntax of null elements. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and they provide varied perspectives on current research in synchronic and diachronic comparative syntax. This book is complemented by volume I available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/275 and volume II available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/276.

In this research monograph, Johannes Mursell discusses the syntactic impact of information-structural features on agreement. So far, the syntactic contribution of this type of feature has mostly been reduced to movement of topics or foci clause-initial position. Here, the author looks at a different phenomenon, syntactic agreement, and how this process can be dependent on information-structural properties. Based partly on original fieldwork from a typologically diverse set of languages, including Tagalog, Swahili, and Lavukaleve, it is argued that for most areas for which information-structural features have been discussed, it is possible to find cases where these features influence phi-feature agreement. The analysis is then extended to cases of Association with Focus, which does not involve phi-features but can still be accounted for with agreement of information-structural features. The book achieves two main goals: first it provides a uniform analysis for different constructions in unrelated languages. Second, it also gives a new argument that information-structural features should be treated as genuine syntactic features.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the morpho-syntactic and semantic aspects of the antipassive construction from synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives. The nineteen contributions assembled in this volume address a wide range of aspects pertinent to the antipassive construction, such as lexical semantics, the properties of the antipassive markers, as well as the issue of fuzzy boundaries between the antipassive construction and a range of other formally and functionally similar constructions in genealogically and areally diverse languages. Purely synchronically oriented case studies are supplemented by contributions that shed light on the diachronic development of the antipassive construction and the antipassive markers. The book should be of central interest to many scholars, in particular to those working in the field of language typology, semantics, syntax, and historical linguists, as well as to specialists of the language families discussed in the individual contributions.