Scandinavian Object Shift and Optimality Theory


Book Description

This book presents an account of object shift, a word order phenomenon found in most of the Scandinavian languages where an object occurs unexpectedly to the left and not to the right of a sentential adverbial. With new and original observations, it is an important addition to the fields of phonology, optimality theory and theoretical syntax.










Derivations and Evaluations


Book Description

This study shows that Scandinavian object shift and so-called A-scrambling in the continental Germanic languages are the same, and aims at providing an account of the variation that we find with respect to this phenomenon by combining certain aspects of the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory. More specifically, it is claimed that representations created by a simplified version of the computational system of human language CHL are evaluated in an optimality theoretic fashion by taking recourse to a very small set of output constraints.




The Blackwell Companion to Syntax


Book Description

*** Pre-Order The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, second edition, publishing December 2017. Find out more at www.companiontosyntax.com *** This long-awaited reference work marks the culmination of numerous years of research and international collaboration by the world’s leading syntacticians. There exists no other comparable collection of research that documents the development of syntax in this way. Under the editorial direction of Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk, this 5 volume set comprises 70 case studies commissioned specifically for this volume. The 80 contributors are drawn from an international group of prestigious linguists, including Joe Emonds, Sandra Chung, Susan Rothstein, Adriana Belletti, Jim Huang, Howard Lasnik, and Marcel den Dikken, among many others. A unique collection of 70 newly-commissioned case studies, offering access to research completed over the last 40 years. Brings together the world’s leading syntacticians to provide a large and diverse number of case studies in the field. Explores a comprehensive range of syntax topics from an historical perspective. Investigates empirical domains which have been well-documented and which have played a prominent role in theoretical syntax at some stage in the development of generative grammar. Serves as a research tool for not only theoretical linguistics but also the various forms of applied linguistics. Contains an accessible alphabetical structure, with an index integral to each volume featuring keywords and key figures. Each multi-volume set is also accompanied by a CD Rom of the entire Companion. Like the prestigious Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics series, this multi-volume work, in the new The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Linguistics series, can be relied upon to deliver the quality and expertise with which Blackwell Publishing’s linguistics list is associated.




Competition in Syntax


Book Description

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.







Structure, Alignment and Optimality in Swedish


Book Description

This volume explores the grammatical structure of sentences in Swedish, presenting an account of the order of the words and phrases within the clause. This analysis is presented from the perspective of Optimality Theory within the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. This framework provides syntactic analysis in terms of functions within the clause such as subject, object, and also topic and focus, as well as part-of-speech analysis in terms of noun phrase, verb phrase, and so on, and the hierarchical structure of those constituents. Sells argues for the superiority of a base-generated account of the phenomenon known as Object Shift, and shows how an account based on the notion of Alignment within a ranked constraint system provides a natural account of it. The nature of the Verb-Second sentence pattern and syntactic differences between Swedish and the other Mainland Scandinavian languages are also considered.




Structure, Alignment and Optimality in Swedish


Book Description

This volume explores the grammatical structure of sentences in Swedish, presenting an account of the order of the words and phrases within the clause. This analysis is presented from the perspective of Optimality Theory within the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. This framework provides syntactic analysis in terms of functions within the clause such as subject, object, and also topic and focus, as well as part-of-speech analysis in terms of noun phrase, verb phrase, and so on, and the hierarchical structure of those constituents. Sells argues for the superiority of a base-generated account of the phenomenon known as Object Shift, and shows how an account based on the notion of Alignment within a ranked constraint system provides a natural account of it. The nature of the Verb-Second sentence pattern and syntactic differences between Swedish and the other Mainland Scandinavian languages are also considered.




Variation in the Input


Book Description

The topic of variation in language has received considerable attention in the field of general linguistics in recent years. This includes research on linguistic micro-variation that is dependent on fine distinctions in syntax and information structure. However, relatively little work has been done on how this variation is acquired. This book focuses on how different types of variation are expressed in the input and how this is acquired by young children. The collection of papers includes studies of the acquisition of variation in a number of different languages, including English, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Swiss German, Ukrainian, and American Sign Language. Different kinds of linguistic variation are considered, ranging from pure word order variation to optionally doubly filled COMPs and the resolution of scopal ambiguities. In addition, papers in the volume deal with the extreme case of variation found in bilingual acquisition.