The Syntax and Semantics of the Left Periphery
The Syntax and Semantics of the Left Periphery

Author: Horst Lohnstein

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-04-17

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 3110912112

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The left periphery of clausal structures has been a prominent topic of research in generative linguistics during the last decades. Closer examination of its properties unfolds a rich array of perspectives like the status of barriers for extraction and government, the articulation of the topic focus structure, the fixation of wh-scope, the marking of clausal types, the interaction of syntactic structure with inflectional morphology as well as the determination of sentence mood and illocutionary force to mention just a few. The purpose of this book is to collect different and relevant studies in this field and to give a general overview of the various theoretical approaches concerned with morphological, syntactic and semantic properties together with the diachronic development of the left periphery.

The Syntax of Surprise
The Syntax of Surprise

Author: Matteo Greco

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9781527540927

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Negation is a universal syntactic phenomenon only employed in human languages. People use negative sentences in everyday conversations, and they display complex semantic and syntactic properties when doing so. Crucially, some languages employ negative sentences to assert affirmative and surprise propositions. A clear example of this is offered by Italian, as in: â ~E non (not) mi è scesa dal treno Maria?!â (TM) (â ~Maria got off the train!â (TM)). This special type of negation is called surprise negation, and it belongs to the class of expletive negation. This book sheds light on this puzzling phenomenon, by means of a theoretical analysis and an experimental study. It explores the contexts, mainly syntactic, in which negation receives its expletive interpretation, and considers whether expletive negation is grammatically distinct from standard negation.

Peripheries
Peripheries

Author: David Adger

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2006-01-14

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 1402019106

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The syntactic periphery has become one of the most important areas of research in syntactic theory in recent years, due to the emergence of new research programmes initiated by Rizzi, Kayne and Chomsky. However research has concentrated on the empirical nature of clausal peripheries. The purpose of this volume is to explore the question of whether the notion of periphery has any real theoretical bite. An important consensus emerging from the volume is that the edges of certain syntactic expressions appear to be the locus of the connection between phrase structure, prosody, and information structure. This volume contains 16 papers by researchers in this area. The book: - contains an extensive introduction setting out the research questions addressed and setting the contributions in an overall theoretical context, - has a distinct comparative slant, - brings together work from a range of theoretical perspectives, while maintaining a unity of purpose, - could serve as the basis for a graduate course on peripheral positions, - contains papers addressing: = the question of the fine-grainedness of syntactic representations, = the relevance of syntactic edges to locality and semantic interpretation, = the nature of the dependencies connecting peripheral elements to the syntactic core. Audience: Academics and graduate students interested in syntax and its interfaces with semantics and prosody, acquisition of syntax, cross-linguistic comparison.

Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography
Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography

Author: Fuzhen Si

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2021-10-15

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9027259771

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This book illustrates recent developments in cartographic studies, seen from a comparative perspective. The different chapters explore various aspects of theoretical and descriptive syntax, bearing on such topics as selection, causativity, binding, light verb constructions, the structure of the high and low peripheral zones. Syntactic issues in the study of dialects and ancient languages are also addressed. The languages investigated include French, Hebrew, Standard Dutch and the Ghent dialect, Etruscan, Japanese, English, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese and the Teochew dialect. The intended readers of this book include researchers and students working on natural language syntax, the interface between syntax and semantics/pragmatics, and comparative and typological linguistics, as well as scholars interested in particular languages such as East Asian and Romance languages.

Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics
Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics

Author: Raffaella Zanuttini

Publisher: Georgetown University Press

Published: 2006-05-19

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9781589013056

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Presenting cutting-edge research in syntax and semantics, this important volume furthers theoretical claims in generative linguistics and represents a significant addition to present scholarship in the field. Leading scholars present crosslinguistic studies dealing with clausal architecture, negation, and tense and aspect, and the issue of whether a statistical model can by itself capture the richness of human linguistic abilities. Taken together, these contributions elegantly show how theoretical tools can propel our understanding of language beyond pretheoretical descriptions, especially when combined with the insight and skills of linguists who can analyze difficult and complex data. Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics covers a range of topics currently at the center of lively debate in the linguistic literature, such as the structure of the left periphery of the clause, the proper treatment of negative polarity items, and the role of statistical learning in building a model of linguistic competence. The ten original contributions offer an excellent balance of novel empirical description and theoretical analysis, applied to a wide range of languages, including Dutch, German, Irish English, Italian, Malagasy, Malay, and a number of medieval Romance languages. Scholars and students of semantics, syntax, and linguistic theory will find it to be a valuable resource for ongoing scholarship and advanced study.

The Emergence of Hybrid Grammars
The Emergence of Hybrid Grammars

Author: Enoch Oladé Aboh

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-08-27

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 0521769981

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This account of language acquisition in a multilingual context explains how hybrid grammars develop and can result in language change.

The Morphology and Syntax of Topic and Focus
The Morphology and Syntax of Topic and Focus

Author: Liliana Sánchez

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 9027255520

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This book presents an innovative analysis that relates informational structure, syntax and morphology in Quechua. It provides a minimalist account of the relationship between focus, topic, evidentiality and other left-peripheral features and sentence-internal constituents marked with suffixes that have been previously considered of a pragmatic nature. Intervention effects show that these relationships are also of a syntactic nature. The analysis is extended to morphological markers that appear on polarity sensitive items and wh-words. The book also provides a brief overview of the main characteristics of Quechua syntax as well as additional bibliographical information.

Syntactic Nuts
Syntactic Nuts

Author: Peter W. Culicover

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780198700234

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How are native speakers of a language instinctively able to make precise linguistic judgements about marginal syntactic matters? What does this tell us about both the structure of language and our innate language ability as humans? These questions form the focus of Professor Culicover's in-depth study which will appeal to both graduate students and professionals within the fields of linguistic theory and cognitive science.

The Interaction of Focus, Givenness, and Prosody
The Interaction of Focus, Givenness, and Prosody

Author: Vieri Samek-Lodovici

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0198737920

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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book provides an in-depth investigation of contrastive focalization in Italian, showing that its syntactic expression systematically interacts with the syntactic expression of discourse-given phrases. Vieri Samek-Lodovici disentangles the properties genuinely associated with contrastive focalization from those determined by highly productive operations affecting discourse given phrases in Italian, namely right dislocation and marginalization. Based on a vast aggregate of evidence, he shows that in the default case contrastive focalization occurs in situ and that left-peripheral focalization patterns arise from the interaction with right dislocation and generalize well beyond the familiar cases examined in Rizzi (1997) and most literature since. In the final chapter, the author examines how the key properties unveiled in the previous sections, such as focalization in situ, follow from the prosodic constraints governing stress placement, thus reinterpreting and extending Zubizarreta's (1998) insight about the role of prosody in shaping syntax. Overall, the book offers an evidence-backed radical departure from current views of focalization proposing a high, fixed, focus projection at the left periphery of the clause. It also provides the most comprehensive study of Italian marginalization and right dislocation available to date.