The investigation of sentential complementation focuses on properties of sentences that are embedded in other sentences. This book brings together a variety of studies on this topic in the framework of generative grammar. The first part of the book focuses on infinitival complements. The author provides new perspectives on raising and control, longstanding problems in infinitival complementation. He then examines the problem of clitic ordering in infinitives in Romance languages. The second part of the book addresses various aspects of Wh- sentences: extraction from negative and factive islands, agreement in relative clauses, and the relation between French relative and interrogative qui and que.
The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.
This is the first book on the syntax of the Niger-Conger language family, which includes most of the languages of sub-Saharan Africa. Aboh, who is a native speaker of one of the languages (Gungbe) discussed, analyzes different aspects of the syntax of the "Kwa" language group. Aboh also suggests how grammatical pictures for these languages can shed some light on Universal Grammar in general.
Understanding Minimalism is a state-of-the-art introduction to the Minimalist Program the current model of syntactic theory within generative linguistics. Accessibly written, it presents the basic principles and techniques of the minimalist program, looking firstly at analyses within Government and Binding Theory (the Minimalist Program s predecessor), and gradually introducing minimalist alternatives. Minimalist models of grammar are presented in a step-by-step fashion, and the ways in which they contrast with GB analyses are clearly explained. Spanning a decade of minimalist thinking, this textbook will enable students to develop a feel for the sorts of questions and problems that minimalism invites, and to master the techniques of minimalist analysis. Over 100 exercises are provided, encouraging them to put these new skills into practice. Understanding Minimalism will be an invaluable text for intermediate and advanced students of syntactic theory, and will set a solid foundation for further study and research within Chomsky s minimalist framework.
This monograph presents an important extension of government-binding theory in syntax. This monograph presents an important extension of government-binding theory in syntax. It offers a new characterization of locality in the theory of government through a relativization of the Minimality Principle, and it explores the consequences of this approach for the Empty Category Principle and the analysis of a variety of empirical domains, including intervention effects, That-trace phenomena, and argument/adjunct asymmetries. The final part of the book is devoted to a new interpretation of the argument/adjunct asymmetries that arise in various extraction processes. Referential indices, a fundamental ingredient of the binding relation, are restricted to occur on referential arguments, as in Chomsky's original proposal. This natural restriction has the surprising effect of capturing the major argument-adjunct asymmetries in a straightforward manner while permitting a radical simplification of the Empty Category Principle.
The study of syntactic complexity and the identification of the elementary structural units involved have always been a component of research in the field of theoretical syntax. Still, these topics have recently acquired a higher degree of prominence and autonomy, which has led to an expansion in the ways syntacticians conceptualize syntactic representations and their interactions with other research topics. The Structure of CP and IP is the second volume in the Cartography of Syntactic Structures, a subgroup within the Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax series. Funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, this research endeavor gave rise to the publication of the first such volume, The Functional Structure of DP and IP, which focuses primarily on the structure of nominal expressions and on certain aspects of clausal expressions. This second edited volume examines the structure of the clauses, with special reference to the inflectional domain (IP) and the left peripheral field of the clause (CP). With contributions by a select group of syntacticians, The Structure of CP and IP will be useful to scholars with an interest in Italian, Romance, and comparative syntax, and of substantial value to all linguists interested in contemporary research in generative grammar.
This monograph conducts a syntactic study of Tuki, a Bantu language spoken in Cameroon, from a cartographic perspective. The following domains are meticulously explored: The Complementizer Domain, the Inflectional Domain and the Verbal Domain. This study reveals that there is a relative phrase (RelP) located between ForceP and FocP. Moreover, a detailed analysis of an articulated IP provides the order of clausal functional heads that manifest aspectual morphology, which is theoretically closely related to issues in adverbial syntax. Additionally, the language under study unveils a very rich structural make up of DP and the surface word orders attested in this phrase can be accounted for in terms of snowballing movement operations along the lines previously sketched in the format of the Split DP Hypothesis. Overall, this cartographic analysis is bound to enrich our morphosyntactic knowledge of UG clausal architecture by demonstrating that its rich underlying structural skeleton is correlated by a wealthy surface structural and functional map. Edmond Biloa is professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Yaounde I in Cameroon (Africa).
This is a highly recommendable book. It elegantly introduces generative grammar as an empirical science. Written in a clear and friendly tone, it is extremely readable and makes complicated linguistic theory accessible to students' - Ken Ramshøj Christensen, Aarhus University, Denmark This clear and practical introduction to Syntactic Theory introduces students to theory building, hypothesis testing and evaluation through the framework of Chomsky's Government-Binding Theory. Initial chapters guide the student through essential topics such as X'-Theory, Transformations and elementary Binding Theory, progressing to cover more advanced issues such as Reconstruction, the light verb vP and control as movement. Presenting the core linguistic theory and problem solving skills that are essential to the subject, this updated and revised second edition features: • New material on the Minimalist Program and Government-Binding Theory • Expanded chapters on Phrase Structure and Functional Categories • A wealth of new tree diagrams as well as revised end-of-chapter exercises The liberal use of in-text exercises engage the reader at every stage of theory-development, while an 'Open Issue' at the end of each chapter encourages active participation and further exploration of the chapter's topic. With an engaging, informal style, Syntactic Theory makes the most difficult topics accessible to a wide range of students. Clear, practical and accessible, Syntactic Theory introduces students to theory building and evaluation through Government-Binding Theory. Now fully updated, this second edition features new chapters on the Minimalist Program, expanded chapters on Phrase Structure and Functional Categories and extensively revised end-of-chapter exercises.
This book examines argumental un-NPs and du/des-NPs in French: nominals with the indefinite article and with the so-called ‘partitive article’ respectively. The main aim is to account for the different interpretations of these indefinites and to determine how interpretation and structure are related. This study thus concerns the syntax-semantics interface, with an emphasis on the composition of the left periphery and the inflectional domain of the indefinites mentioned. It is realized in the framework of generative grammar and in a cartographic approach. A crucial proposal put forward in this book is that indefinites of different semantic types are associated with different left peripheries. The analysis further suggests that the inflectional domain of these indefinites may comprise three discrete functional projections encoding the features [count], [quantity] and [number]. Interestingly, these results seem to extend to a selection of bare nouns in Romance and Germanic languages.
