One of the world's leading syntacticians presents evidence for locating Adverb Phrases in the specifiers of distinct functional projections within a novel and well articulated theory of the clause. In this theory, both adverbs and heads, which encode the functional notions of the clause, are ordered in a rigid sequence. Cinques cutting-edge proposal suggests that the structure of natural language sentences is much richer than previously assumed.
Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.
This volume collects the recent published articles of Guglielmo Cinque of the University of Venice, one of the world's top linguists. The book is divided into two sections, the first on restructuring, a central topic in Romance syntax and with connections to other language groups as well. The second part focuses on the consequences of treating clausal functional heads as members of a universal hierarchy in the domain of morphpsyntax, offering a new perspective on many intricate problems arising in a variety of natural languages.
Collects the articles of Guglielmo Cinque of the University of Venice. This book is divided into two sections, the first on restructuring, a central topic in Romance syntax and with connections to other language groups as well. The second part focuses on the consequences of treating clausal functional heads as members of a universal hierarchy.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19 International Conference on Formal Grammar 2014, collocated with the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information in August 2014. The 10 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 19 submissions. Traditionally linguistics has been studied from the point of view of the arts, humanities and letters, but in order to make concrete ideas which might otherwise be fanciful the study of grammar has been increasingly subject to the rigours of computer science and mathematization i.e. articulation in the language of science.
This volume contains a selection of refereed and revised papers, originally presented at the 30th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, representing the areas of syntax, semantics, their interfaces, and second language acquisition. The topics addressed include movement (both wh- and head-movement), control, issues of second language acquisition related to the Determiner Phrase, the effect of word order and syntactic simplification in second language acquisition, adverbials, syntactic constraints on access to lexical structure, a semantic characterization of the subjunctive in Spanish, and impersonal constructions and impersonal reflexive pronouns. The papers in this volume not only discuss issues related to most of the major Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian and Spanish) and a Portuguese Creole, but also include comparisons with languages from other families (Marathi, Bulgarian, Polish and Slovenian). This collection of papers illustrates the richness in the field of Romance linguistics and the value of cross-linguistic research and multi-modular approaches.
The theoretical domain of investigation of this volume is the nature of the syntax-phonology interface. The empirical domain of investigation is cliticization in South Slavic. The central theoretical questions are how syntax and phonology interact and whether PF can affect word order.
Adverbs seem to raise unsolvable issues for theories of word-classes, both crosslinguistically and language-internally. The contributions in this volume all address this categorial problem from a variety of formal and functional points of view. In the first part, current definitions of the class for Romance and Germanic languages are being questioned and improved, drawing on data from English, German and Italian. The second part is devoted to adverbial scope in Romance (French, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese), Germanic, Modern Greek and Chinese, under special consideration of modal adverbs, subject-oriented manner adverbs and domain adverbs and adverbials. Syntactic and semantic relationships appear to lay the ground for a robust and fine-grained functional definition of adverbs and adverbials.
This monograph provides an in-depth investigation of the structural integration and the licensing of adverbs in relation to clause structure, with special emphasis on the structural implementation of the relation between the position and interpretation of adverbs. The book substantiates the hypothesis that the licensing of adverbs within and across the three layers of the clause is contingent on specifier-head agreement and that variation in the linear order of adverbs and other elements of the clause follows from the interplay of a small number of factors. The central claims made are: functional projections hosting adverbs are not confined to the inflectional and complementizer layer of the clause, but also play a central role in the shaping of the lexical layer; postverbal adverbs are realized within a semantically empty verbal projection and licensed under specifier head agreement by proxy; and adverbs that occur within the complementizer layer of the clause do so by either move or merge.
This book offers both a retrospective view on how theories of aspectuality have developed over the past 30 years, and presents current, new directions of aspectuality research. The articles in this book take a wide crosslinguistic scope including aspectual analyses of the following languages: English and two varieties of English: African American English and Colloquial Singapore English, Italian, French, Bulgarian, Czech, Mandarin Chinese, West-Greenlandic, Wakashan languages, and Nahk-Daghestanian languages.
