The Rise of Functional Categories
The Rise of Functional Categories

Author: Elly van Gelderen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 9027227292

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In recent years, word order has come to be seen, within a Government Binding/Minimalist framework, as determined by functional as well as lexical categories. Within this framework, functional categories are often seen as present in every language without evidence being available in that language. This book contains arguments that even though Universal Grammar makes functional categories available, the language learner must decide whether or not to incorporate them in his or her grammar. For instance, it is shown that English has one (not two as often assumed) functional category between the complementizer and the Negation, but that languages such as Dutch, Swedish, German and Old and Middle English have none. The title of the book can be seen in terms of the direction current research is taking; it can also be seen in terms of the changes that have taken place in English.

Functional Categories in Language Acquisition
Functional Categories in Language Acquisition

Author: Annette Hohenberger

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2011-04-20

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 3110923521

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This study investigates the acquisition of Functional Categories (e.g., INFL (AGR, TNS), DET, COMP) from the perspective of self-organization in generative grammar. Language is conceived of as a dynamical system which evolves in time and bifurcates when critical thresholds are reached. The emergence of syntax as evidenced by the acquisition of Functional Categories is the major bifurcation in child language acquisition. Target values of syntactic parameters are attractors which children approach on individual trajectories. A proposed tripartite scenario of change - from a simple stable state A, via symmetry-breaking in a liminal phase B characterized by variation, to a new complex stable state C - accounts for the dynamics in early grammatical development. Traditional generative issues, such as the acquisition of case-marking, finiteness, V2, and wh-questions, are discussed as well as new issues, such as functional neologisms, and sentential blends. Dynamical notions like precursor, oscillation, symmetry-breaking, and trigger are important explanatory tools. The growing child phrase marker is a fractal mental object which represents syntactic information by way of self-similar extended projections. The book addresses researchers in language acquisition from various theoretical camps: generative, functional, connectionist, by giving new answers to old questions in the light of a novel challenging theory: self-organization.

A Feature-Based Syntax of Functional Categories
A Feature-Based Syntax of Functional Categories

Author: Michael Hegarty

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2011-12-22

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 3110895404

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This book develops ideas of Minimalist syntax to derive functional categories from the partially-ordered features expressed by functional elements, thereby dispensing with functional categories as primitives of the theory. It generalizes attempts to do this in the literature, while drawing significant empirical consequences from general constraints formulated to block overgeneration. The resulting theory of the construction of functional categories is applied to various problems in syntactic analysis and comparative and historical syntax, including variation across Germanic languages in patterns of verb-second and in the occurrence of expletive subjects in existential constructions, verb positions in Old and Middle English, problems regarding the placement of clitic pronouns in Romance languages and Modern Greek, and some previously unexamined structures of reduced clause coordination in colloquial English. Facts from early stages of the acquisition of syntax are shown to follow from the mechanisms for the projection of functional features as functional categories, exercised before all of the features for a language, along with their ordering and feature co-occurrence restrictions, have been acquired. It is observed that child acquisition of functional elements exhibits successive developmental stages, each characterized by the number of clausal functional elements which can be represented together within a clause. This, and facts regarding the lag in development of functional categories by children with specific language impairment, are shown to be not entirely reducible to limitations in working memory or processing capacity, but to depend in part on the growth of representational resources for the projection of functional categories.

Functional Categories and Parametric Variation
Functional Categories and Parametric Variation

Author: Jamal Ouhalla

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1134934750

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From within the context of the principles and parameters framework put forward by Chomsky and others, Jamal Ouhalla develops the argument that much of what we understand by the term "grammar" involves functional categories.

The Rise of Agreement
The Rise of Agreement

Author: Eric Fuss

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2005-01-01

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9789027228055

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This book investigates the historical paths leading from pronouns to markers of verbal agreement and proposes a unified formal account of this grammaticalization process. In opposition to beliefs widely held in the literature, it is argued that new agreement formatives can be coined in a multitude of syntactic environments. Still, the individual paths toward agreement are shown to exhibit a set of underlying similarities which are attributed to universal principles that govern the reanalysis of pronominal clitics as exponents of verbal agreement across languages. It is claimed that syntactic principles impose only a set of necessary conditions on the reanalysis in question, while its ultimate trigger is morphological in nature. More specifically, it is argued that the acquisition of inflectional morphology is governed by blocking effects which operate during language acquisition and promote the grammaticalization of new markers if this change serves to replace 'worn-out', underspecified forms with new, more specified candidates.

From Latin to Romance
From Latin to Romance

Author: Adam Ledgeway

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-05-17

Total Pages: 463

ISBN-13: 9780199584376

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This book examines grammatical changes during the transition from Latin to the Romance languages and the factors proposed to explain them. It challenges orthodoxy, presents new perspectives on language change, structure, and variation, and will appeal equally to Romance linguists, Latinists, philologists, and historical linguists of all persuasions.

Historical Linguistics 2001
Historical Linguistics 2001

Author: Barry J. Blake

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2003-01-01

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 9789027247490

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This is a selection of papers from the 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics held in Melbourne 13-17 August 2001, hosted by the Linguistics Program at La Trobe University. The papers range from the general theoretical to the study of particular languages and embrace most areas of linguistics, particularly morpho-syntax.

The Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar
The Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar

Author: Mary Dalrymple

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2023-12-14

Total Pages: 2192

ISBN-13: 3961104247

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Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches.

The Nature and Function of Syntactic Categories
The Nature and Function of Syntactic Categories

Author: Robert Borsley

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 1999-10-15

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1849500096

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To paraphrase, of the making of syntactic categories there is no end. For any theory of syntax, questions arise about its classificatory scheme: what are the categories? What properties do they have? How do they relate to each other? Eleven essays address these questions by inquiring whether there is a clear distinction between lexical and functional categories, how syntactic categories relate to semantic categories, the relation between syntactic and morphological information, as well as other inquiries. Above all the essays highlight the centrality of questions about syntactic categories for a number of different theoretical frameworks. It discusses a broad range of questions about syntactic categories and presents a number of theoretical frameworks.