These conference proceedings examine various aspects of formal linguistics. Individual topics covered include: sequences of tense, intentionality and scope; empty consonants and direct prosody; syllable weight and quantity in Dutch; finite control on modern Persian; and copular sentences.
Forty-one papers from the 1991 West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics are included. The papers deal with diverse topics ranging from the traditional linguistic fields of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics to the rapidly developing areas of cognitive and discourse linguistics.
This volume contains 45 papers from the 24th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 24), which was held at Simon Fraser University in 2005. The authors present new work in syntax, semantics, morphology, and phonology.
Since its inception in 1967, the Forum has provided an informal but critical setting for the presentation of new ideas and research on first language acquisition. The Forum itself is sponsored by the Linguistics Department at Stanford and is organised by graduate students. In this volume the contributors explore their findings in language acquisition in a variety of the world's languages. The papers presented here reflect the diversity of interests in the field and the range of languages being studied. This volume makes an empirical, as well as a theoretical, contribution to linguistic research.
Linguistics and philosophy, while being two closely-related fields, are often approached with very different methodologies and frameworks. Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It identifies a number of key phenomena at the cutting edge of research within both fields, such as reporting and ascribing, describing and referring, narrating and structuring, locating in time and space, typologizing and ontologizing, determining and questioning, arguing and rejecting, and implying and (pre-)supposing. Each chapter takes on a phenomena and explores it through a set of questions which are posed and answered at the outset of each chapter. An accessible and engaging resource, it is essential reading for researchers and students in both disciplines, and will empower exciting and illuminating conversations for years to come.
This book focuses on the role size plays in grammar. Under the umbrella term size fall the size of syntactic projections, the size of feature content, and the size of reference sets. The contributions in this first volume discuss size and structure building. The most productive research program in syntax where size plays a central role revolves around clausal complements. Part 1 of Volume I contributes to this program with papers that argue for particular structures of clausal complements, as well as papers that employ sizes of clausal complements to account for other phenomena. The papers in Part 2 of this volume explore the interaction between size and structure building beyond clausal complements, including phenomena in CP, vP, and NP domains. The contributions cover a variety of languages, many of which are understudied. The book is complemented by Volume II which discusses size effects in movement, agreement, and interpretation.
All humans are equipped with perceptual and articulatory mechanisms which (in healthy humans) allow them to learn to perceive and produce speech. One basic question in psycholinguistics is whether humans share similar underlying processing mechanisms for all languages, or whether these are fundamentally different due to the diversity of languages and speakers. This book provides a cross-linguistic examination of speech comprehension by investigating word recognition in users of different languages. The focus is on how listeners segment the quasi-continuous stream of sounds that they hear into a sequence of discrete words, and how a universal segmentation principle, the Possible Word Constraint, applies in the recognition of Slovak and German.