The Middle Voice

The Middle Voice

Author: Suzanne Kemmer

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9027229074

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This book approaches the middle voice from the perspective of typology and language universals research. The principal aim is to provide a typologically valid characterization of the category of middle voice in terms of which it can be incorporated in a cognitively-based theory of human language. The term “middle voice” has had a wide range of applications in the linguistic literature of this century. The main thesis in this volume is that there is a coherent, though complex, semantic category of middle voice in human language, which receives grammatical instantiation in many languages. The author claims there is a semantic property crucial to the nature of the middle, which she terms “relative elaboration of events”, that serves as a parameter along which the reflexive and the middle can be situated as semantic categories intermediate in transitivity between one-participant and two-participant events, and which differentiates reflexive and middle from one another. In this area, most analyses deal with one language and/or are limited to Indo-European languages. This work deals with a subset of middle-marking languages that was chosen so as to observe the highest possible number of different middle systems showing significant independent diachronic development.


Middle Voice

Middle Voice

Author: Markus Steinbach

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 9789027227713

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This book offers a completely new analysis of the syntax and semantics of transitive reflexive sentences in German, which is embedded in the major phenomenon of the middle voice in Indo-European languages. It integrates the interpretation of non-argument reflexives into a modified version of recent theories of binding. The ambiguity of the reflexive pronoun is derived at the interface between syntax and semantics and does not rely on additional lexical or syntactic rules of argument suppression and argument promotion. This shift towards the semantic interpretation of syntactic arguments enables the author to offer a unified analysis of the middle, the anticausative and the reflexive interpretations. Furthermore, the crucial distinction between structural and oblique case forms is discussed and it is illustrated how specific properties of middle constructions such as adverbial modification or subject responsibility can be related to the generic interpretation of middle constructions.


Syntax - Theory and Analysis. Volume 1

Syntax - Theory and Analysis. Volume 1

Author: Tibor Kiss

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2015-02-17

Total Pages: 894

ISBN-13: 3110394235

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This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual languages and their cross-linguistic realizations to explain what syntactic analyses can do and at the same time to show in what respects syntactic theories differ from each other. It investigates how syntax is related to neighbouring disciplines and investigate the role of the interfaces especially the relationship between syntax and phonology, morphology, compositional semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. The phenomena chosen bring together renowned experts in syntax, and represent the consensus reached as to what has to be considered as an important as well as illustrative syntactic phenomenon. The phenomena discuss do not only serve to show syntactic analyses, but also to compare theoretical approaches with each other.


Modern Icelandic Syntax

Modern Icelandic Syntax

Author: Joan Maling

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-01-13

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 9004373233

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This comprehensive overview of Icelandic syntax contains new analyses of word order and long-distance reflexivization, detailed studies of case-marking, and the first systematic description of the -st middles. It presents a complete picture of modern Icelandic syntax as seen in the tradition of generative grammar, striking a good balance between theory and description.


Colloquial Icelandic

Colloquial Icelandic

Author: Daisy L. Neijmann

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780415207065

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2x60-minute CDs featuring dialogues from the accompanying book. Designed to help improve pronunciation and listening skills.


Icelandic Morphosyntax and Argument Structure

Icelandic Morphosyntax and Argument Structure

Author: Jim Wood

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-01-05

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 3319091387

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This book provides a detailed study of Icelandic argument structure alternations within a syntactic theory of argument structure. Building on recent theorizing within the Minimalist Program and Distributed Morphology, the author proposes that much of what is traditionally attributed to syntax should be relegated to the interfaces, and adapts the late insertion theory of morphology to semantics. The resulting system forms sound-meaning pairs by generating hierarchical structures that can be translated into morphological representations, on the one hand, and semantic representations, on the other. The syntactic primitives, however, underdetermine both morphophonology and semantics. Without appealing to special stipulations, the theory derives constraints on the external argument of causative-alternation verbs, interpretive restrictions on nominative objects, and the optionally agentive interpretation of verbs denoting self-directed motion.


Word Order and Phrase Structure in Gothic

Word Order and Phrase Structure in Gothic

Author: Gisella Ferraresi

Publisher: Peeters Publishers

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9789042916944

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The book aims at providing a precise description of part of the Gothic syntax in the context of a formal theory of syntax. The following questions are addressed: To what extent can Gothic - despite its limited corpus - be used as data material? Further, which of the ascertained syntactic characteristics does Gothic have in common with other old Indo-European languages? Which of these features can be characterized as typically Germanic? It is shown that - despite a certain Greek influence - the Gothic Bible is indeed a rich source of data which can with some certainty be regarded as typically Gothic. Phenomena concerning the left periphery like personal pronouns, topicalization, left-dislocation and discourse particles are described and discussed within the generative framework, with additions from pragmatic and cognitive linguistics for those issues where syntax seems to be inadequate to cover the whole range of the phenomena concerned. The readership aimed at is that of linguists and philologists, and of scholars interested in the interrelation between both disciplines.


Passives and Middles in Mainland Scandinavian

Passives and Middles in Mainland Scandinavian

Author: Antonio Fábregas

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-03-23

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 3110670917

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This monograph explores the properties of passive and middle voice constructions in Norwegian and Swedish, concentrating on the linguistic variation related to these two constructions in Mainland Scandinavian. At an empirical level, we provide a detailed discussion of the morphosyntax and semantics of the two main types of passives in both languages, lexical (s-) and periphrasitic (bli-) passives. At a theoretical level, we propose an architecture of the language faculty where exponents play a central role. Exponents are selected to identify the structures generated by the grammar and provide a platform that make these units interpretable by the sensori-motor and conceptual-intentional interfaces. Exponents this play an essential role in determining the well-formedness of linguistic structures. We demonstrate how different syntactic structures identified and lexicalized by exponents in these two languages are capable of capturing the microvariation observed in the voice systems of these two languages in a straightforward way. The amount of linguistic information (i.e., aspect and mood) identified by each exponent in each language determines the types of complements and specifiers that can be integrated into and lexicalized by a given exponent. Although our approach shares certain affinities with other neo-constructionist approaches, a novel proposal we advance in this book is that exponents are housed in an intermediate level of structure that exists between the narrow syntax and its external interfaces. This exponency-level (Ʃ-structure) allows for a more parsimonious theoretical analysis that does not sacrifice descriptive adequacy.