This work is a contribution to our understanding of relativization strategies and clefting in Italian Sign Language, and more broadly, to our understanding of these constructions in world languages by setting the discussion on the theories that have been proposed in the literature of spoken languages to derive the syntactic phenomena object of investigation.
This work is a contribution to our understanding of relativization strategies and clefting in Italian Sign Language, and more broadly, to our understanding of these constructions in world languages by setting the discussion on the theories that have been proposed in the literature of spoken languages to derive the syntactic phenomena object of investigation.
Case Marking and Grammatical Relations in Polynesian makes an outstanding contribution to both Polynesian and historical linguistics. It is at once a reference work describing Polynesian syntax, an investigation of the role of grammatical relations in syntax, and a discussion of ergativity, case marking, and other areas of syntactic diversity in Polynesian. In its treatment of the history of case marking in Polynesian, it attempts to specify what counts as evidence in syntactic reconstruction and how syntactic reanalysis progresses. It therefore represents a first step toward a general theory of syntactic change. Chung first describes the basic syntax of the Polynesian languages, discussing Maori, Tongan, Samoan, Kapingamarangi, and Pukapukan in depth. She then presents an investigation of the grammatical relations of these languages and their relevance to syntax and shows that the syntax of all these languages—even those with ergative case marking—revolves around the familiar grammatical relations subject and direct object. Finally the book traces the historical development of the different case systems from their origins in Proto-Polynesian.
This work, first published in 1979, was a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on June 22nd 1973. The ostensible central topic of this essay is a construction which is generally known as the "pseudo-cleft" construction. This essay aims to provide an overall picture of the construction, and show why another treatment of it is necessary. This book will be of interest to those pursuing the topic of copular sentences.
Ura demonstrates that his theory of multiple feature-checking, an extension of Chomsky's Agr-less checking theory, gives a natural explanation for a wide range of data drawn from a variety of languages in a very consistent way with a limited set of parameters.
This volume comprises twenty eight papers selected from the widely known work of K.A. Jayaseelan and R. Amritavalli on Dravidian. Collectively, these papers cover the entire area of Dravidian syntax: they range from broad questions such as sentence structure and word order to more particular questions such as the morphological basis of anaphora, the genesis of lexical categories, the morpho-syntax of quantifiers, and the syntax and semantics of questions. Important universalist claims are embedded in these essays; for this reason, this volume will be of interest also to a student of the general theory of syntax. No future discussion of Dravidian (or South Asian) languages is possible without taking into account the insightful analyses set forth in these pages.
Clefts are intricate objects which, starting with Jespersen (1937), have motivated much work in descriptive and formal linguistics. Nonetheless, almost a century later their exact internal structure and status are still widely debated, therefore a multidisciplinary volume on this theoretically complex structure across different languages of the world is greatly needed. The articles featured in this volume follow an in-depth Introduction written by the editors, in which we offer a survey of the state-of-the-art on clefts by way of a strong contextualisation to the volume, including a number of robust empirical observations on the morphosyntactic and interpretational properties of these structures in numerous standard and non-standard Romance varieties, as well as a critical presentation of the contributions included in the volume. Among other things, the ten selected articles propose new insights into the widely-reported interpretational asymmetry between subject and object clefts, the features involved in their derivation, the ways in which the low and high peripheries are variously exploited in the derivation, the morphosyntactic and interpretational differences between clefts and their non-cleft counterparts, the role and formal properties of the copula, the notion of sub-extraction of features, a reconsideration of the very notion of focus via clefting, and much more. The volume, written by renown experts, offers an in-depth overview of the structure of it-clefts, taking into account different and complementary fields of the study of linguistics (cartography, quantitative methods, experimental investigations, nanosyntax, typology and dialectology) and robust empirical data from numerous languages including Romance varieties, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, and two Spanish- and French-lexifier creoles. Our belief is that the synchrony of clefts will only be appropriately understood once diachronic, typological, historical, experimental and dialectological aspects are all brought together. We offer through this volume a first attempt at providing such a variegated picture of the cross-linguistic morphosyntax of it-clefts.
Cleft constructions occur across languages and are much analyzed in relation to syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Mika Kizu, working in a Principles and Parameters framework, with some consideration of the Minimalist Program, provides the first coherent account of cleft constructions in Japanese. She claims that the construction is analyzed on a par with topic constructions and some types of relative clause. One of the most interesting properties, the syntactic phenomenon of 'connectivity' is closely examined.
The study of grammaticalization raises a number of fundamental theoretical issues pertaining to the relation of langue and parole, creativity and automatic coding, synchrony and diachrony, categoriality and continua, typological characteristics and language-specific forms, etc., and therefore challenges some of the basic tenets of twentieth century linguistics.This two-volume work presents a number of diverse theoretical viewpoints on grammaticalization and gives insights into the genesis, development, and organization of grammatical categories in a number of language world-wide, with particular attention to morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic issues. The papers in Volume I are divided into two sections, the first concerned with general method, and the second with issues of directionality. Those in Volume II are divided into five sections: verbal structure, argument structure, subordination, modality, and multiple paths of grammaticalization.
This first published full-scale study of the Ghanaian variety of West African Pidgin English (GhaPE) makes extensive use of hitherto neglected historical material and provides a synchronic account of GhaPE's structure and sociolinguistics. Special focus is on the differences between GhaPE and other West African Pidgins, in particular the development of, and interrelations between, the different varieties of restructured English in West Africa, from Sierra Leone to Cameroon. This monograph further includes an overview of the history of Afro-European contact languages in Lower Guinea with special emphasis on the Gold Coast; an outline of the settlement of Freetown, Sierra Leone, with a description of how and when the transplantation of Sierra Leonean Krio to other West African countries took place; an analysis of the linguistic evidence for the origin, development, and spread of restructured Englishes on the Lower Guinea Coast; an account of the different varieties of GhaPE and their sociolinguistic status in the contemporary linguistic ecology of Ghana; as well as a comprehensive structural description of the uneducated variety of GhaPE. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM which contains illustrative material such as spoken GhaPE and photographs.
