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The Syntax of Specifiers and Heads

Author : Hilda J Koopman

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 330 pages

File Size : 14,74 MB

Release : 2003-09-02

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 1134718233

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Book Description

Specifiers and Heads covers such topics as: * interpretation and distribution of pronouns * ECP effects * specifiers and phrase structure * the role and functioning of head movement * the architecture of grammar Each chapter draws syntactic arguments from phenomena in a broad range of languages and brings these to bear on the structure of syntactic theory and the understanding of crosslinguistic variation. Among the languages studied are the African languages, Welsh and Irish, Norwegian, French, English and Dutch.



Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English

Author : Andrew Radford

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 580 pages

File Size : 43,57 MB

Release : 1997-07-10

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9780521477079

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Book Description

Andrew Radford's textbook is written for students with little or no background in syntax, and introduces them to key concepts of Chomsky's minimalist programme (e.g. merger and movement, checking, economy and greed, split VPs, agreement projections), as well as providing detailed analysis of the syntax of a range of different construction types (e.g. interrogatives, negatives, passives, unaccusatives, complement clauses). Illustrative material is drawn from varieties of English (Standard English, Belfast English, Shakespearean English, Jamaican Creole and Child English). There is a substantial glossary and an extensive integral workbook section at the end of each chapter with helpful hints and model answers, which aim to get students to analyse phrases and sentences for themselves within a minimalist framework.



Current Approaches to Syntax

Author : András Kertész

Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Page : 761 pages

File Size : 18,61 MB

Release : 2019-05-06

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 3110538377

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Book Description

Even though the range of phenomena syntactic theories intend to account for is basically the same, the large number of current approaches to syntax shows how differently these phenomena can be interpreted, described, and explained. The goal of the volume is to probe into the question of how exactly these frameworks differ and what if anything they have in common. Descriptions of a sample of current approaches to syntax are presented by their major practitioners (Part I) followed by their metatheoretical underpinnings (Part II). Given that the goal is to facilitate a systematic comparison among the approaches, a checklist of issues was given to the contributors to address. The main headings are Data, Goals, Descriptive Tools, and Criteria for Evaluation. The chapters are structured uniformly allowing an item-by-item survey across the frameworks. The introduction lays out the parameters along which syntactic frameworks must be the same and how they may differ and a final paper draws some conclusions about similarities and differences. The volume is of interest to descriptive linguists, theoreticians of grammar, philosophers of science, and studies of the cognitive science of science.



Introducing Syntax

Author : Olaf Koeneman

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 315 pages

File Size : 18,10 MB

Release : 2017-04-13

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 1108184057

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Book Description

Syntax is the system of rules that we subconsciously follow when we build sentences. Whereas the grammar of English (or other languages) might look like a rather chaotic set of arbitrary patterns, linguistic science has revealed that these patterns can actually be understood as the result of a small number of grammatical principles. This lively introductory textbook is designed for undergraduate students in linguistics, English and modern languages with relatively little background in the subject, offering the necessary tools for the analysis of phrases and sentences while at the same time introducing state-of-the-art syntactic theory in an accessible and engaging way. Guiding students through a variety of intriguing puzzles, striking facts and novel ideas, Introducing Syntax presents contemporary insights into syntactic theory in one clear and coherent narrative, avoiding unnecessary detail and enabling readers to understand the rationale behind technicalities. Aids to learning include highlighted key terms, suggestions for further reading and numerous exercises, placing syntax in a broader grammatical perspective.



The Syntax of Jamaican Creole

Author : Stephanie Durrleman

Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing

Page : 207 pages

File Size : 50,46 MB

Release : 2008

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9027255105

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Book Description

This book offers an in-depth study of the overall syntax of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole, the first since Bailey (1966). The author, a Jamaican linguist, meticulously examines distributional and interpretative properties of functional morphology in Jamaican Creole (JC) from a cartographic perspective (Cinque 1999, 2002; Rizzi 1997, 2004), thus exploring to what extent the grammar of JC provides morphological manifestations of an articulate IP, CP and DP. The data considered in this work offers new evidence in favour of these enriched structural analyses, and the instances where surface orders differ from the underlying functional skeleton are accounted for in terms of movement operations. This investigation of Jamaican syntax therefore allows us to conclude that the 'poor' inflectional morphology typical of Creole languages in general and of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole in particular does not correlate with poor structural architecture. Indeed the free morphemes discussed, as well as the word order considerations that indicate syntactic movement to designated projections, serve as arguments in favour of a rich underlying functional map.



Microparametric Syntax and Dialect Variation

Author : James R. Black

Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing

Page : 288 pages

File Size : 13,20 MB

Release : 1996

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9027236437

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Book Description

Richard Kayne's introduction to this volume stresses that comparative work on the syntax of very closely related languages and dialects is a research tool promising to provide both a broad understanding of parameters at their finest-grained and an approach to the question of the minimal units of syntactic variation. The 11 articles in this collection demonstrate the use of this tool in analyzing microparametric variation, principally with reference to Chomsky's Minimalist program, in a variety of languages. Topics include se/si constructions, hypothetical infinitives and adverbial quantifiers in French and other Romance languages; that-trace variation, Scandinavian possessive constructions, reflexives and subject-verb agreement in Icelandic & Faroese, and verb clusters in continental West Germanic dialects; anaphoric agreement in Labrador Inuttut; negative particle questions in Chinese; imperative inversion in Belfast English; and the second person singular interrogative in the traditional vernacular of Bolton.



The Syntax of Verb Initial Languages

Author : Andrew Carnie Assistant Professor of Linguistics University of Arizona

Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA

Page : 270 pages

File Size : 15,31 MB

Release : 2000-05-31

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 0195344014

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Book Description

This volume contains twelve chapters on the derivation of and the correlates to verb initial word order. The studies in this volume cover such widely divergent languages as Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Old Irish, Biblical Hebrew, Jakaltek, Mam, Lummi (Straits Salish), Niuean, Malagasy, Palauan, K'echi', and Zapotec, from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives, including Minimalism, information structure, and sentence processing. The first book to take a cross-linguistic comparative approach to verb initial syntax, this volume provides new data to some old problems and debates and explores some innovative approaches to the derivation of verb initial order.



The Syntax of Tuki

Author : Edmond Biloa

Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing

Page : 639 pages

File Size : 34,65 MB

Release : 2013-06-15

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9027272360

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Book Description

This monograph conducts a syntactic study of Tuki, a Bantu language spoken in Cameroon, from a cartographic perspective. The following domains are meticulously explored: The Complementizer Domain, the Inflectional Domain and the Verbal Domain. This study reveals that there is a relative phrase (RelP) located between ForceP and FocP. Moreover, a detailed analysis of an articulated IP provides the order of clausal functional heads that manifest aspectual morphology, which is theoretically closely related to issues in adverbial syntax. Additionally, the language under study unveils a very rich structural make up of DP and the surface word orders attested in this phrase can be accounted for in terms of snowballing movement operations along the lines previously sketched in the format of the Split DP Hypothesis. Overall, this cartographic analysis is bound to enrich our morphosyntactic knowledge of UG clausal architecture by demonstrating that its rich underlying structural skeleton is correlated by a wealthy surface structural and functional map. Edmond Biloa is professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Yaounde I in Cameroon (Africa).



Towards an Elegant Syntax

Author : Michael Brody

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 318 pages

File Size : 12,16 MB

Release : 2005-10-24

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 1134423543

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Book Description

This collection of essays, written between 1980 and 2001, places the search for theoretical elegance at centre stage. and makes available important and some less easily accessible publications with new introductory material.



The Design of Agreement

Author : Sandra Chung

Publisher : University of Chicago Press

Page : 452 pages

File Size : 27,90 MB

Release : 1998-11

Category : Foreign Language Study

ISBN : 9780226106076

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Book Description

Sandra Chung proposes that linguistic theory must recognize not one but two agreement relations—a featural relation that lies behind agreement's impact on the form of words and a configurational relation that lies behind agreement's impact on syntactic structure. She identifies the two relations and argues that neither can be reduced to the other. Chung offers the most comprehensive analysis of the syntax of Chamorro that has appeared to date and relates her proposals to what is known about analogous constructions in English, Italian, Irish, Japanese, Maori, and other languages.