Describing Morphosyntax


Book Description

Of the 6000 languages now spoken throughout the world around 3000 may become extinct during the next century. This guide gives linguists the tools to describe them, syntactically and grammatically, for future reference.




Issues in Morphosyntax


Book Description

Of particular interest to morphologists and syntacticians Issues in Morphosyntax aims to contribute to the discussion on the question whether there exists a separate morphological module in the grammar, distinct from the other modules, with special focus on the connection of morphology with syntax. The view that is defended is that morphological operations do not take place in syntax, but that they are governed by the same principles that govern syntax. There are morphological categories distinct from syntactic categories, which appear in their own domain, below the zero X-bar level, so in this sense there is a morphological module. However, this module is not distinct from the syntactic one, in the sense that the same principles apply equally to the morphological and the syntactic domain. Specific topics of discussion include Noun Incorporation, past participle constructions in Germanic (passives, perfects, and auxiliary selection) and Lexical Integrity effects.




Morphosyntax


Book Description

Bringing together the results of sixty years of research in typology and universals, this textbook presents a comprehensive survey of Morphosyntax - the combined study of syntax and morphology. Languages employ extremely diverse morphosyntactic strategies for expressing functions, and Croft provides a comprehensive functional framework to account for the full range of these constructions in the world's languages. The book explains analytical concepts that serve as a basis for cross-linguistic comparison, and provides a rich source of descriptive data that can be analysed within a range of theories. The functional framework is useful to linguists documenting endangered languages, and those writing reference grammars and other descriptive materials. Each technical term is comprehensively explained, and cross-referenced to related terms, at the end of each chapter and in an online glossary. This is an essential resource on Morphosyntax for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and linguistic fieldworkers.




A Guide to Morphosyntax-phonology Interface Theories


Book Description

This book reviews the history of the interface between morpho-syntax and phonology roughly since World War II. Structuralist and generative interface thinking is presented chronologically, but also theory by theory from the point of view of a historically interested observer who however in the last third of the book distills lessons in order to assess present-day interface theories, and to establish a catalogue of properties that a correct interface theory should or must not have. The book also introduces modularity, the rationalist theory of the (human) cognitive system that underlies the generative approach to language, from a Cognitive Science perspective. Modularity is used as a referee for interface theories in the book. Finally, the book locates the interface debate in the landscape of current minimalist syntax and phase theory and fosters intermodular argumentation: how can we use properties of morpho-syntactic theory in order to argue for or against competing theories of phonology (and vice-versa)?




Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax


Book Description

This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.




Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax, Phonology, Pragmatics and Semantics


Book Description

This volume offers a selection of interface studies in generative linguistics, a valuable “one-stop shopping” opportunity for readers interested in the ways in which the various modules of linguistic analysis intersect and interact. The boundaries between the lexicon and morphophonology, between morphology and syntax, between morphosyntax and meaning, and between morphosyntax and phonology are all being crossed in this volume. Though its focus is on theoretical approaches, experimental studies are also included. The empirical focus of many of the contributions is on Hungarian, and several chapters respond to work published by István Kenesei, to whom the volume is dedicated.




Formal Approaches to Romance Morphosyntax


Book Description

Recent years have witnessed a (re)surfacing of interest on the interaction of morphology and syntax. For many grammatical phenomena, it is not easy to draw a dividing line between syntactic and morphological structure. This has led to the assumption that syntax is the module responsible not only for deriving syntactically complex phrases but also for deriving morphologically complex items, both in inflection and word formation. There are however also good reasons to think that syntax is not involved in all morphological processes and that there are consistent areas of morphology that are independent from syntactic processes. This book presents a collection of papers where phenomena from Romance languages and varieties are analysed under contrasting views on how morphology and syntax interact. All the contributions follow the aim to investigate what the analysed phenomena tell us about their structural make‐up and the grammatical processes involved.




Rich Descriptions and Simple Explanations in Morphosyntax and Language Acquisition


Book Description

This volume offers new perspectives on the tension between the rich patterns of language variation that emerge from comparative studies and the quest for simple theoretical primitives. The chapters explore the debate between Cartography and Minimalism: on the one hand, the need for detailed and articulated descriptions of the clausal architecture, and on the other, the endeavor to reduce the theoretical apparatus to fundamental computational mechanisms. The first part of the book begins with a reflection on the goals of modern linguistic theory, and investigates the principles of human language, in an effort to subsume the regularities of particular grammars under a small set of morphosyntactic and semantic primitives. The second part examines the clausal structure - both the CP-layer and the IP-layer - from a comparative perspective, which directly relates to the fundamental questions of universality, linguistic variation, and learnability addressed in the first part of the book. With chapters written by world-leading linguists who analyze a wide range of old and new phenomena, the volume will be a valuable resource for researchers and students interested in theoretical linguistics and language development.




Icelandic Morphosyntax and Argument Structure


Book Description

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.




The Morphosyntax of Negative Markers


Book Description

This book applies the tools of nanosyntax to the natural language phenomenon of negation. Most work on negation is concerned with the study of sentence negation, while low scope negation or constituent negation is hardly ever systematically discussed in the literature. The present book aims to fill that gap, by investigating scopally different negative markers in a sample of 23 typologically diverse languages. A four-way classification of negative markers is argued for and it is shown how meaningful syncretism patterns arise across those four groups of negative markers in the language sample investigated. The syncretisms are meaningful in that they track the natural semantic scope of negation, and provide support to the idea that morphology is not arbitrary, but points to submorphemic structure. Consequently, this study leads to a decomposition of the negative morpheme into five privative features: Tense, Focus, Classification, Quantity and Negation proper. Finally, the book argues that sentence, constituent and lexical negation can all be treated in the same module of the grammar, i.e. syntax.