Examines multiple interrogatives under sluicing and presenting various arguments for the deletion analysis of sluicing. In this title, the author reports the results of several experimental studies on how children acquire the language-specific properties of multiple interrogatives in English, Russian, and Malayalam.
This Handbook is the first volume to provide a comprehensive, in-depth, and balanced discussion of ellipsis phenomena, whereby the meaning of an utterance is richer than would be expected based solely on its linguistic form. Natural language abounds in these apparently incomplete expressions, such as I laughed but Ed didn't, in which the final portion of the sentence, the verb 'laugh', remains unpronounced but is still understood. The range of phenomena involved raise general and fundamental questions about the workings of grammar, but also constitute a treasure trove of fine-grained points of inter- and intralinguistic variation. The volume is divided into four parts. In the first, authors examine the role that ellipsis plays and how it is analysed in different theoretical frameworks and linguistic subdisciplines, such as HPSG, construction grammar, inquisitive semantics, and computational linguistics. Chapters in the second part highlight the usefulness of ellipsis as a diagnostic tool for other linguistic phenomena including movement and islands and codeswitching, while part III focuses instead on the types of elliptical constructions found in natural language, such as sluicing, gapping, and null complement anaphora. Finally, the last part of the book contains case studies that investigate elliptical phenomena in a wide variety of languages, including Dutch, Japanese, Persian, and Finnish Sign Language.
This edited collection contains 43 papers presented at the GALA (Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition) conference 2009, held in Lisbon, Portugal. The volume contains a very wide and rich range of topics, reflecting the immense quality of the event: the acquisition of languages from different families is studied; comparisons between acquisition of L1, L2 and atypical language development are made; all areas of language development are explored (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicon, pragmatics and interactions between components). The proceedings of GALA are an invaluable reference for those interested in Language Acquisition, Language Development and Child Language.
Second language learners often produce language forms resembling those of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). At present, professionals working in language assessment and education have only limited diagnostic instruments to distinguish language impaired migrant children from those who will eventually catch up with their monolingual peers. This book presents a comprehensive set of tools for assessing the linguistic abilities of bilingual children. It aims to disentangle effects of bilingualism from those of SLI, making use of both models of bilingualism and models of language impairment. The book’s methods-oriented focus will make it an essential handbook for practitioners who look for measures which could be adapted to a variety of languages in diverse communities, as well as academic researchers.
Typological differences in the formation of multiple Wh-questions are well-known. One option is fronting all Wh-phrases to the sentence periphery. The contributions to this volume all explore this option from a number of perspectives. Topics covered include finer investigations of the “classic” multiple Wh-fronting languages (such as the South Slavic languages Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian), extensions to less well studied languages (Basque, Malagasy, Persian, Yiddish), explorations for languages that don’t obviously fall into this category (German, Hungarian), peripheral effects (optionality of fronting, Superiority vs. Anti-Superiority etc.), interface issues (with semantics, pragmatics, and phonology), and simply theoretical approaches aiming to capture the mechanisms involved in multiple Wh-fronting strategies. The theoretical framework adopted throughout is the Minimalist Program, viewed from different angles. This volume brings together some of the leading experts on the syntax of Wh-questions and offers up-to-date analyses of the topic. It will be indispensable for scholars investigating multiple Wh-questions, and will find an appropriate audience in advanced students and faculty alike.
From Language to Discourse contains selected texts from the 6th and 7th Linguistics Sharing Forums, which took place at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, on 25th November 2011 and 23rd November 2012, respectively. The articles included in this volume present the results of ongoing research in different domains of linguistics, such as phonology, language acquisition, syntax, and terminology. It is important to mention that these papers should be seen as work in progress, given that the young researchers who authored them are not yet PhD degree holders. However, all articles have been evaluated by an academic committee prior to publication. In addition, this book also includes the publication of two papers authored by João Costa, and Maria Antónia Coutinho, senior researchers of the Linguistics Centre of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (CLUNL).
Parameters have lain at the core of linguistic research in the generative tradition for decades. The theoretical questions they have raised are deep and broad: this reference text investigates how contemporary linguistics has best tried to answer them. This book looks at how parameters might be properly defined and what their locus might be :lexical information, functional heads, the computational system, the phonological branch of the grammar. What kind of data forms trigger acquisition of a parameter? Are parameters necessary or can we study languages without making reference to them? The questions looked at are not just theoretical: how can a theory of parameters be used to help understand second language acquisition, and what contributions can it make to the study of language typology? This is the right time to gather all this information, dispersed in many different kinds of publications by single authors and groups, into one comprehensive volume.
An investigation of the syntax and semantics of wh-questions through the lens of intervention effects, offering a new proposal on overt and covert wh-movement. In this book, Hadas Kotek investigates the syntax and semantics of wh-questions, offering a new solution to a central question in the study of interrogatives: given that overt wh-movement is cross-linguistically common, is syntactic movement a prerequisite for the interpretation of wh-phrases? Some linguists argue that all wh-phrases undergo movement to interrogative C, even if covertly; others propose mechanisms of in-situ interpretation that do not require any movement. Kotek moves beyond these positions to argue that wh-in-situ does move covertly, but not necessarily to C. Instead, she contends, wh-in-situ undergoes a short movement step akin to covert scrambling. This makes the LF behavior of English parallel to the overt behavior of German. Kotek presents a series of self-paced reading experiments, alongside judgment data from German, to substantiate the idea of covert scrambling. She introduces new diagnostics for the underlying structure of questions, using as a principal tool the distribution of intervention effects. This system allows her to offer the first unified account for a range of phenomena of interrogative syntax-semantics as pied-piping, superiority effects, the cross-linguistically varied syntax of questions, and intervention effects. Kotek develops a theory of interrogative syntax-semantics; studies the phenomena of intervention effects in wh-questions, proposing that the nature of intervention is crucially tied to the availability of wh-movement in a question; and shows that covert wh-movement should be modeled as a short scrambling operation rather than an unbounded, successive-cyclic, and potentially long-distance movement operation.
This collection of articles offers a new and compelling perspective on the interface connecting syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics. At the core of this volume is the hypothesis that information structure represents the common interface of these grammatical components. Information structure is investigated here from different theoretical viewpoints yielding typologically relevant information and structural generalizations. In the volume's introductory chapter, the editors identify two central approaches to information structure: the formal and the interpretive view. The remainder of the book is organized accordingly. The first part examines information structure and grammar, concentrating on generalizations across languages. The second part investigates information structure and pragmatics, concentrating on clause structure and context. Through concrete analyses of topic, focus, and related phenomena across different languages, the contributors add new and convincing evidence to the research on information structure.
