Rich Descriptions and Simple Explanations in Morphosyntax and Language Acquisition
Rich Descriptions and Simple Explanations in Morphosyntax and Language Acquisition

Author: Giuliano Bocci

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-06-27

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0198889488

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This volume offers new perspectives on the tension between the rich patterns of language variation that emerge from comparative studies and the quest for simple theoretical primitives. The chapters explore the debate between Cartography and Minimalism: on the one hand, the need for detailed and articulated descriptions of the clausal architecture, and on the other, the endeavor to reduce the theoretical apparatus to fundamental computational mechanisms. The first part of the book begins with a reflection on the goals of modern linguistic theory, and investigates the principles of human language, in an effort to subsume the regularities of particular grammars under a small set of morphosyntactic and semantic primitives. The second part examines the clausal structure - both the CP-layer and the IP-layer - from a comparative perspective, which directly relates to the fundamental questions of universality, linguistic variation, and learnability addressed in the first part of the book. With chapters written by world-leading linguists who analyze a wide range of old and new phenomena, the volume will be a valuable resource for researchers and students interested in theoretical linguistics and language development.

Structures, Syntactic Computations and Acquisition
Structures, Syntactic Computations and Acquisition

Author: Adriana Belletti

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-29

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1000930254

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This book collects some of the most significant articles by Adriana Belletti published over the last ten years or so, offering readers a useful tool to see the mutual enrichment between linguistic theory and experimental studies on (modes of) language acquisition through her work. The volume explores domains of theoretical morphosyntax in the generative tradition and theoretically guided studies on language acquisition. An introduction specific to this volume contextualizes these contributions within ongoing developments in the field. Part I presents studies inspired by the illuminating interchange between linguistic theory and experimentation in the domain of language acquisition, leading to the formulation of explicit research questions tested experimentally and guiding in the proper interpretation of the results. Part II offers refined, detailed theoretical analyses of domains in which peripheral positions in the clause structures are crucially involved to express discourse contents, in sometimes not standard ways during development. Demonstrating how refined linguistic analyses play a crucial role in interpretating the peculiar shape of developmental data, this book will be of interest to scholars in syntax, language acquisition, and theoretical linguistics.

Smuggling in Syntax
Smuggling in Syntax

Author: Adriana Belletti

Publisher: Oxford Studies Comparative Syn

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9780197509876

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One of the fundamental properties of human language is movement, where a constituent moves from one position in a sentence to another position. This book investigates how different movement operations interact with one another, focusing on the special case of smuggling, in which displacement occurs in two steps thus allowing for otherwise inaccessible movement operations.

Diagnosing Syntax
Diagnosing Syntax

Author: Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2013-07-25

Total Pages: 617

ISBN-13: 0191624268

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Diagnosis is an essential part of scientific research. It refers to the process of identifying a phenomenon, property, or condition on the basis of certain signs and by the use of various diagnostic procedures. This book is the first ever to consider the use of diagnostics in syntactic research and focuses on the five core domains of natural language syntax - ellipsis, agreement, anaphora, phrasal movement, and head movement. Each empirical domain is considered in turn from the perspectives of syntax, syntax at the interfaces, neuropsycholinguistics, and language diversity. Drawing on the expertise of 20 leading scholars and their empirically rich data, the 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? It will interest linguists, including formalists, typologists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists.

Syntax over Time
Syntax over Time

Author: Theresa Biberauer

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2015-02-27

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 0191511749

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This book provides a critical investigation of syntactic change and the factors that influence it. Converging empirical and theoretical considerations have suggested that apparent instances of syntactic change may be attributable to factors outside syntax proper, such as morphology or information structure. Some even go so far as to propose that there is no such thing as syntactic change, and that all such change in fact takes place in the lexicon or in the phonological component. In this volume, international scholars examine these proposals, drawing on detailed case studies from Germanic, Romance, Chinese, Egyptian, Finnic, Hungarian, and Sámi. They aim to answer such questions as: Can syntactic change arise without an external impetus? How can we tell whether a given change is caused by information-structural or morphological factors? What can 'microsyntactic' investigations of changes in individual lexical items tell us about the bigger picture? How universal are the clausal and nominal templates ('cartography'), and to what extent is syntactic structure more generally subject to universal constraints? The book will be of interest to all linguists working on syntactic variation and change, and especially those who believe that historical linguistics and linguistic theory can, and should, inform one another.

Elements of Comparative Syntax
Elements of Comparative Syntax

Author: Enoch Aboh

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-09-11

Total Pages: 542

ISBN-13: 1501504037

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This volume brings together a selection of articles illustrating the multifaceted nature of current research in generative syntax. The authors, including some of the leading figures in the field, present analyses of typologically diverse languages, with some studies drawing on dialectal, acquisitional and diachronic evidence. Set against this rich empirical background, the contributions address an equally wide range of theoretical issues.

The Grammar of Multiple Head-Movement
The Grammar of Multiple Head-Movement

Author: Phil Branigan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-02-22

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0197677045

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Head-movement has played a central role in morpho-syntactic theory, but its nature has remained unclear. While it is widely accepted that the main grammatical constraint controlling head-movement is the Head Movement Constraint (HMC), this constraint is flouted in many of the linguistic structures examined in this book. More specifically, the strictures of the HMC turn out to be sometimes inactive for specific grammars allowing multiple head-movement to take place in particular syntactic contexts. In The Grammar of Multiple Head-Movement, Phil Branigan shows that multiple head-movement is far from rare, forming a part of the grammar in Finnish, in English, in Perenakan Javanese, in northern Norwegian and Swedish dialects, and generally in the Slavic and Algonquian language families. Basing his analysis on a new model of the grammatical parameters which control word formation in the human brain, Branigan shows how careful attention to the contexts in which multiple head-movement takes place allows new generalizations to be identified. And these, in turn, allow a new model to be formulated of how head-movement fits into the overall architecture of grammatical computation. Through careful comparative study, Branigan not only provides a better understanding of head-movement, but also provides new opportunities to address larger questions concerning the architecture of the grammatical system and the theory of linguistic parameters. A new account of how complex words are formed in languages as different as Russian or Innu-aimun, as well as in English, this study deepens our understanding of how languages vary and of the mental computational system of human grammars.

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.

Locality in Grammar
Locality in Grammar

Author: Xiaoshi HU

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-08

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1040010091

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Locality in Grammar: From Narrow Syntax to Interfaces investigates the operation of locality conditions in syntax and semantics from a cross-linguistic perspective. It is claimed that there are two different types of locality conditions. One is the Generalized Minimality Condition (GMC), and the other is the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC). This book demonstrates that these locality conditions play different roles in different computational components of human language, and, therefore, cannot be unified as one constraint as proposed in the literature. The main idea of the book is that the two different locality conditions are sensitive to the difference between syntactic derivation and semantic interpretation and that of overt and covert syntactic derivations. Further investigation shows a more fine-grained distinction must be made between syntactic computations. It is true that GMC does not constrain overt syntactic derivations and PIC does not play a role in semantic interpretations; however, they both regulate covert syntactic computations. This book will inform postgraduate students and scholars in the field of linguistics.

Principles of Argument Structure
Principles of Argument Structure

Author: Chris Collins

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2024-09-17

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 0262379120

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A new theory of argument structure, based on the syntactic operation Merge and presented through an in-depth analysis of properties of the English passive construction. In Principles of Argument Structure, Chris Collins investigates principles of argument structure in minimalist syntax through an in-depth analysis of properties of the English passive construction. He formulates a new theory of argument structure based on the only structure-building operation in minimalist syntax, Merge, which puts together two syntactic objects to form a larger one. This new theory should give rise to detailed cross-linguistic work on the syntactic and semantic properties of implicit arguments. Collins presents an update and defense of his influential 2005 theory of the passive, including a completely original theory of implicit arguments. He makes a direct empirical argument for the Theta-Criterion against various claims that it should be eliminated. He also discusses the conception of voice in syntactic theory, arguing that VoiceP does not introduce external arguments, a position otherwise widely accepted in the field. He shows how the ”smuggling” approach to the passive extends naturally to the dative alternation accounting for a number of striking c-command asymmetries. He compares syntactic and semantic approaches to argument structure, outlining conceptual problems with adopting formal semantics as the basis for a theory of argument structure. The book will be of interest not only to syntacticians and semanticists, but also to typologists investigating the cross-linguistic properties of the passive, psycholinguists and computer scientists working on natural language understanding, and philosophers thinking about the issue of “implicit content.” It includes an appendix that provides common-sense guidelines for doing syntactic research using internet data.