Typical cases of agreement are easy to identify, but where the boundaries of agreement lie depend on what aspects of the agreement relation are considered to be defining properties. It is a short step from viewing agreement in the traditional way, as a matching of features, to defining agreement as any relation that ensures consistency of information in two separate structures. This book takes as its topic agreement as it is traditionally conceived, one that only involves morphosyntactic categories.
Typical cases of agreement are easy to identify, but where the boundaries of agreement lie depend on what aspects of the agreement relation are considered to be defining properties. It is a short step from viewing agreement in the traditional way, as a matching of features, to defining agreement as any relation that ensures consistency of information in two separate structures. This book takes as its topic agreement as it is traditionally conceived, one that only involves morphosyntactic categories.
Although grammatical agreement or concord is widespread in human languages, linguistic theorists have generally treated agreement phenomena as secondary or even marginal. All the papers in this volume, however, take agreement phenomena seriously, as presenting either a general issue in theory construction or a descriptive problem in particular types of languages. The theoretical perspectives range from purportedly theory-neutral typological frameworks to assumptions about the validity of one or another current formal model. Further, the degree of generality ranges from a universalist nature-of-human-language agenda to concern with one or another aspect of grammatical agreement or with agreement in a single language or language group.
This volume presents a selection of the best papers from the 21st Annual University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Linguistics Symposium. Researchers from linguistics, psychology, computer science, and philosophy, using many different methods and focusing on many different facts of language, addressed the question of the existence of linguistic rules. Are such rules best seen as convenient tools for the description of languages, or are rules actually invoked by individual language users? Perhaps the most serious challenge to date to the linguistic rule is the development of connectionist architecture. Indeed, these systems must be viewed as a serious challenge to the foundations of all of contemporary linguistics.Four broad themes emerged from the Milwaukee conference, corresponding to the four parts of the volume. Part I centers on arguments for the existence of symbolic rules in linguistic competence and performance. Part II contains arguments against symbolic rules, presenting connectionist models and other alternatives to the symbolic paradigm. Parts III and IV take up two issues that are central to a number of language researchers: Language acquisition and learnability, and modularity. These issues are addressed from within both rule-based and non-rule-based perspectives.Contributors: Farrell Ackerman, Michael Barlow, Catherine Best, David Corina, Roberta Corrigan, Kim Daugherty, Bruce Derwing, Jeff Elman, Alice Faber, John Goldsmith, Helen Goodluck, Neil Jacobs, Richard Janda, Brian Joseph, Michael Kac, Alan Kawamoto, Suzanne Kemmer, Susan Lima, Brian MacWhinney, Steven Pinker, Alan Prince, Gerald Sanders, Hinrich Schutze, Mark Seidenberg, Royal Skousen, Nicholas Sobin, Joseph Stemberger, Gregory Stone, Ann Thyme, Robert Van Valin.
Complementing Brown & Miller's recent Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories (1996), to which this is a companion volume, this encyclopedia is a collection of articles drawn from the highly successful Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. It presents a collection of 79 articles, all of which have been revised and updated. It also provides a number of newly commissioned articles, one of which has been substantially updated and extended. The volume is alphabetically organised and includes an introduction and a glossary. The Concise Encyclopedia of Grammatical Categories will provide a uniquely comprehensive and authoritative overview of the building blocks of syntax: word classes, sentence/clause types, functional categories of the noun and verb, anaphora and pronominalisation, transitivity, topicalisation and work order.
