Russian Case Morphology and the Syntactic Categories
Russian Case Morphology and the Syntactic Categories

Author: David Pesetsky

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-12-27

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 026252502X

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A proposal for a radical new view of case morphology, supported by a detailed investigation of some of the thorniest topics in Russian grammar. In this book, David Pesetsky argues that the peculiarities of Russian nominal phrases provide significant clues concerning the syntactic side of morphological case. Pesetsky argues against the traditional view that case categories such as nominative or genitive have a special status in the grammar of human languages. Supporting his argument with a detailed analysis of a complex array of morpho-syntactic phenomena in the Russian noun phrase (with brief excursions to other languages), he proposes instead that the case categories are just part-of-speech features copied as morphology from head to dependent as syntactic structure is built. Pesetsky presents a careful investigation of one of the thorniest topics in Russian grammar, the morpho-syntax of noun phrases with numerals (including those traditionally called the paucals). He argues that these bewilderingly complex facts can be explained if case categories are viewed simply as parts of speech, assigned as morphology. Pesetsky's analysis is notable for offering a new theoretical perspective on some of the most puzzling areas of Russian grammar, a highly original account of nominal case that significantly affects our understanding of an important property of language.

The Syntax of Russian
The Syntax of Russian

Author: John F. Bailyn

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0521885744

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An essential guide to Russian syntax, which examines major syntactic structures and grammatical puzzles of the language.

Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change
Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change

Author: Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-02-26

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0192568744

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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.

Diagnosing Syntax
Diagnosing Syntax

Author: Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng

Publisher:

Published: 2013-07-25

Total Pages: 617

ISBN-13: 0199602492

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Drawing on the expertise of over 20 leading scholars and their empirically rich data, this book presents current thoughts on, and practical answers to, the question: What are the diagnostic signs, techniques and procedures that can be used to analyse natural language syntax?

Advances in the Syntax of DPs
Advances in the Syntax of DPs

Author: Anna Bondaruk

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2014-10-15

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9027269696

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The contributions in this volume are devoted to various aspects of the internal and external syntax of DPs in a wide variety of languages belonging to the Slavic, Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Semitic and Germanic language families. In particular, the papers address questions related to the internal and external cartography of various types of simplex and complex DPs: the position of DPs within larger structures, agreement in phi-features and/or case between DPs and their predicates, as well as between sub-elements of DPs, and/or the assignment of case to DPs in specific configurations. The first four chapters of the book focus primarily on the external syntax of DPs, and the remaining chapters deal with their internal syntax.

Recent Developments in Phase Theory
Recent Developments in Phase Theory

Author: Jeroen van Craenenbroeck

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-08-10

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1501510193

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The overarching goal of this volume is to explore a number of recent developments in Phase Theory (both theoretical and empirical), thus contributing to our overall understanding of the concept of phases. The volume is divided into three parts, of which the first focuses on the traditional role played by phases in defining successive cyclicity, while at the same time examining the interaction between that traditional role and Chomsky (2013)’s proposal about labeling. The second part focuses on the question of whether only the highest projection of the clausal and nominal domain, CP and DP, are phases or whether those domains also contain an internal phase: vP and NP/NumP/QP, while the third part contains two chapters that focus on the extent to which ellipsis can be used as a reliable diagnostic for phasehood. As a whole, the volume provides a detailed and in-depth view on a number of recent developments in Phase Theory, which will likely continue to dominate the debate for several years to come.

Of Grammar, Words, and Verses
Of Grammar, Words, and Verses

Author: Esther Torrego

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 9027208255

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This book offers new work by some major figures in the field of linguistics, addressing old debates from the perspective of current explanatory grammatical theory. These include paradigmatic relations among words, and agreeing adjectives and their grammatical source. Covering a broad range of empirical domains, the contributors of this volume examine the role of Economy in syntax and in syntactic interfaces with phonology and semantics, and their implications for processing. The evidence is taken from a great variety of languages, including Arabic dialects, Basque, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Latin, and Spanish. Two chapters on metrics complete honoring Carlos Piera s longstanding scholarship in linguistic theory within Spain and abroad."

Crosslinguistic Studies on Noun Phrase Structure and Reference
Crosslinguistic Studies on Noun Phrase Structure and Reference

Author: Patricia Cabredo Hofherr

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2013-11-29

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 9004261443

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Crosslinguistic Studies on Noun Phrase Structure and Reference contains 11 studies on the grammar of noun phrases. Part One explores NP-structure and the impact of information structure, countability and number marking on interpretation, using data from Russian, Armenian, Hebrew, Brazilian Portuguese, Karitiana, Turkish, English, Catalan and Danish. Part Two examines language specific definiteness marking strategies in spoken and signed languages—differentiated definiteness marking in Germanic, double definiteness in Greek, adnominal demonstratives in Japanese, ‘weak’ definiteness in Martiniké and the special referring options made avilable by signing. Part Three examines the second-language acquisition of genericity in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in syntax, formal semantics, and language acquisition. Contributors include: Željko Bošković, Patricia Cabredo Hofherr, Edit Doron, Nomi Erteschik Shir, Brigitte Garcia, Elaine Grolla, Tania Ionin, Loïc Jean-Louis, Makoto Kaneko, Marika Lekakou, Silvina Montrul, Ana Müller, Asya Pereltsvaig, Marie-Anne Sallandre, Helade Santos, Serkan Şener, Rebekka Studler, Kriszta Szendröi, Anne Zribi-Hertz.

Dravidian Syntax and Universal Grammar
Dravidian Syntax and Universal Grammar

Author: K.A. Jayaseelan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-07-13

Total Pages: 705

ISBN-13: 0190630256

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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.

Beyond Functional Sequence
Beyond Functional Sequence

Author: Ur Shlonsky

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-04-20

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0190266325

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Cartography is a research program within syntactic theory that studies the syntactic structures of a particular language in order to better understand the semantic issues at play in that language. The approach arranges a language's morpho-syntactic features in a rigid universal hierarchy, and its research agenda is to describe this hierarchy -- that is, to draw maps of syntactic configurations. Current work in cartography is both empirical -- extending the approach to new languages and new structures -- and theoretical. The 16 articles in this collection will advance both dimensions. They arise from presentations made at the Syntactic Cartography: Where do we go from here? colloquium held at the University of Geneva in June of 2012 and address three questions at the core of research in syntactic cartography: 1. Where do the contents of functional structure come from? 2. What explains the particular order or hierarchy in which they appear? 3. What are the computational restrictions on the activation of functional categories? Grouped thematically into four sections, the articles address these questions through comparative studies across various languages, such as Italian, Old Italian, Hungarian, English, Jamaican Creole, Japanese, and Chinese, among others.