Cet article étudie les délimitations morphosyntaxiques des noms propres en s’inspirant de la sémantique de la syntaxe. Les propriétés typographiques, morphologiques et syntaxiques des noms propres sont mises en lien et se répondent parfois iconiquement afin de faire émerger une nouvelle description des noms propres en tant que nominaux – et non plus simples noms ou syntagmes nominaux. Les noms propres sont des unités de rang « nominal » qui cherchent à intégrer des formes potentiellement marginales au sein du domaine (...) nominal, par une double action 1) de préservation d’une altérité formelle et linguistique et 2) d’imitation du comportement morphosyntaxique du nom commun. L’analyse s’appuie principalement sur le corpus commun en anglais mais reste transposable en majeure partie aux exemples du corpus en français. (shrink)

This book contains a selection of papers on issues of current interest in syntax and morpho-syntax. Most topics pertain to the question of the relation between word order and syntactic structure. The discussion starts with a proposal of extending the theory of relativization to reason clauses. It continues with the analysis of the realization of focus in Basque and the discussion of current views on the syntax of cleft constructions. Next, an inquiry into the rigidity of (...) sentence left-periphery is offered in a cross-linguistic perspective. The two final contributions discuss feature-free derivations in syntax applied to a single morpho-syntactic problem, and the question of gradient acceptability of Polish sentences featuring possessive items in the context of the competition between their reflexive and pronominal forms. (shrink)

Le projet ANR Profiterole avait pour objectifs la constitution de ressources pour le français médiéval (9e-15e s.) : un corpus annoté en (morpho-)syntaxe et des lexiques, la conception d'analyseurs syntaxiques pour le français médiéval, le développement d’outils de diffusion et d’analyse textométrique de l’annotation syntaxique dans le contexte de la plateforme TXM, et, enfin, la modélisation de certains aspects syntaxiques de l’évolution du français. Nous commençons par décrire la constitution du corpus Profiterole en termes de choix de textes, genres (...) et périodes et de types d’annotation. Puis nous présentons les modèles d’analyse syntaxique développés conjointement à la constitution du corpus, ainsi que la manière dont leurs prédictions ont été combinées pour assister la correction manuelle de l’annotation du corpus. Enfin, nous abordons les modalités de diffusion des données et modèles produits dans le cadre du projet avec un accent particulier sur l’intégration du corpus annoté à TXM, tant dans sa version en ligne accessible depuis le portail de la Base de français médiéval (BFM) que dans sa version pour ordinateur personnel, avec des exemples de requêtes CQP et TIGER facilitant l’exploration et l’analyse du corpus. (shrink)

The interpretation of `much/many' has been argued to be regulated by Uniform Dimensionality (Hackl 2000; Solt 2009): `much' is underspecified but `many' encodes cardinality. However, given some data where `many' denotes ‘volume’, Snyder (2021) proposes the need for Multiform Dimensionality: both `much' and `many' are underspecifed. After reviewing the English data, and in light of novel cross-linguistic data, we argue that neither generalization is fully accurate. Instead, following Wellwood (2015, 2018), we argue for an alternative, Abstract Uniform Dimensionality, which we (...) propose to be universal: MUCH always measures cardinality when it scopes over semantically interpretable plural. We derive the universal by proposing that MUCH can occupy different positions in the NP, only one of which has semantic plural in its scope. Variation is thus not semantic, but morpho-syntactic. (shrink)

The current study investigated the production of third-person subject and object pronouns in monolingual and bilingual children with High Functioning Autism (HFA) and typical language development (TLD). Furthermore, it evaluated the underlying linguistic and non-linguistic prerequisites of pronoun use, by assessing the role of morpho-syntactic skills, Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities, working memory and inhibition on pronoun use. A total of 85 children aged 4 to 9 years participated in four groups: 27 children with HFA [14 monolingual (monoHFA) and (...) 13 bilingual (biHFA)], and 58 children with TLD [28 monolingual (monoTLD) and 30 bilingual (biTLD)]. All children spoke Hebrew and the bilingual children spoke Russian as their Heritage Language. Third-person subject and object pronouns were elicited in Hebrew. The results yielded no effect of bilingualism, and a robust effect of HFA on the use of pronouns. Bilingual Russian-Hebrew speaking children paired up with their monolingual Hebrew-speaking peers in pronominal use in Hebrew. Monolingual and bilingual children with TLD showed nearly ceiling performance on pronoun use. The facilitative effect of pronominal acquisition in Hebrew among bilingual children was attributed to similarities in the pronominal systems of the two languages of bilingual children. Age was found to be a predictive factor of pronoun use in children with TLD. Conversely, children with HFA had a lower rate of pronoun production compared to the TLD groups. Both third-person subject and object pronouns were largely predicted by morpho-syntactic abilities of children with HFA. In addition, subject pronoun use was predicted by ToM skills and working memory confirming that pronoun use is a complex phenomenon, which requires integration of multiple linguistic and non-linguistic components. To conclude, our findings suggest that morpho-syntactic development is a prerequisite for third-person subject and object pronoun use in children with HFA, and ToM and working memory are involved in third-person subject pronoun use. In addition, we show that pronoun use is not compromised by dual language exposure in children with TLD and with HFA. (shrink)

The Rwandan writer, Scholastique Mukasonga chronicles her eye-witness account of Rwandan civil war and genocide; her two novels are part of literary attempts to historicize ethnic collective trauma and memory, but they end up traumatizing national history itself and deconstructing Eurocentric representations. Her works are popularly read as autobiographies and could be mapped under trauma studies. However, this study intends to read these works as autoethnographical texts which this hyphenated writer uses to dismantle conventional boundaries of linguistic morpho-syntax (...) of French, to deconstruct European historical constructions and to contest Eurocentric epistemologies that gave rise to the literary cartography of the Other world. This Eurocentrism produces markers of post/colonial idioms such as “civilized/primitive” and “modern/traditional” as means of justifying the essence of empires. Mukasonga’s account opens our eyes to Rwandan indigenous art, science, medicine and society; therefore, it contests the ontology of European civilization. Although her novels are predominantly written in French, Mukasonga uses her native dialect of Kinyarwanda to unveil age-long Rwandan [African] civilization, thus forcing her European readership to see the “lilies in the mires”. (shrink)

Résumé La linguistique du texte a pour tâche la théorisation et la description des opérations de segmentation qui délimitent des unités de rang et de longueur différentes, et la théorisation et la description des différents effets de continuité créés par les opérations de liage de ces unités. À la structuration phrastique-périodique par la morpho-syntaxe et la prosodie à l’oral, la ponctuation à l’écrit, le palier micro-textuel ajoute six facteurs de texture transphrastique : les liages référentiels et isotopiques, les liages (...) du signifiant, l’ensemble des phénomènes de connexion, les relations d’implicitation, la cohésion énonciative et la cohésion illocutoire. À partir de trois textes, cet article illustre systématiquement et détaille ces six formes de liage transphrastique des unités textuelles de base. (shrink)

Like many languages, Korean has a special form of negation that is used in imperative clauses (see (1)c), to the exclusion of the usual clausal negation in (1)b: (1) a. ka-la b. *ka-ci anh-ala c. ka-ci mal-ala go-Imp go-Comp Neg-Imp go-Comp Neg-Imp ‘Don’t go!’ ‘Don’t go!’ ‘Go!’ Sadock and Zwicky (1985) noted that negation in imperative(-like) clauses shows special morpho-syntax in many languages, a fact documented in more detail by Zanuttini (1997) or Han (2000). In this paper I (...) will consider the semantic properties of Korean clauses that use the negative form mal-, and suggest a more indirect relationship to the morpho-syntax than has been assumed in previous work.∗ In section 2 I present the basic account of clausal semantics in the HPSG framework of Ginzburg and Sag (2000), and then in section 3 I return to a fuller consideration of data like that in (1). (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous examinerons quelques aspects de la syntaxe du sujet dans les dialectes occitans du Piémont occidental, dans les dialectes francoprovençaux du Piémont occidental et du Val d’Aoste, y compris les parlers de Celle di Faeto (francoprovençal) dans les Pouilles et de Guardia Piemontese (occitan) en Calabre : l’existence de clitiques sujets, l’absence de l’accord entre verbe et sujet post-posé, l’inversion du verbe et du clitique sujet dans les constructions interrogatives. Toutes ces propriétés morphosyntaxiques qui apparaissent dans les (...) dialectes occitans et francoprovençaux caractérisent également les autres dialectes de l’Italie septentrionale (Bracco, Brandi et Cordin 1985, Poletto 1993, 2000, Rizzi 1986). En revanche, les dialectes occitans et francoprovençaux ne forment pas un groupe identifiable d’une manière univoque, mais ils se subdivisent en typologies grammaticales différentes. (shrink)

This book presents a collection of chapters on the nature, flexibility and acquisition of lexical categories. These long-debated issues are looked at anew by exploring the hypothesis of lexical polycategoriality –according to which lexical forms are not fully, or univocally, specified for lexical category– in a wide number of unrelated languages, and within different theoretical and methodological perspectives. Twenty languages are thoroughly analyzed. Apart from French, Arabic and Hebrew, the volume includes mostly understudied languages, spoken in New Guinea, Australia, New (...) Caledonia, Amazonia, Meso- and North America. Resulting from a long-standing collaboration between leading international experts, this book brings under one cover new data analyses and results on word categories from the linguistic and acquisitional point of view. It will be of the utmost interest to researchers, teachers and graduate students in different fields of linguistics (morpho-syntax, semantics, typology), language acquisition, as well as psycholinguistics, cognition and anthropology. (shrink)

L’omission de clitiques sujets préverbaux en frioulan : méthodologie et analyse à base de contraintesEn frioulan, les clitiques sujets en position préverbale sont omis en général quand le verbe est précédé de la particule négative, d’un clitique objet ou d’un pronom réfléchi. Toutefois, les conditions précises de cette omission n’ont pas été analysées jusqu’à présent de manière approfondie. Dans cet article, je propose une analyse dans le cadre de la théorie de l’optimalité fondée sur des données empiriques. L’analyse est basée (...) sur des jugements de grammaticalité de 52 locuteurs représentant les trois principales variétés frioulanes. Les données sont aussi comparées à celles d’un autre corpus, une bible frioulane. L’article conclut que l’omission des clitiques sujets est déterminée par la phonologie et par une stratégie visant à éviter les syncrétismes. (shrink)

Structuring Sense explores the difference between words however defined and structures however constructed. It sets out to demonstrate over three volumes, of which this is the first, that the explanation of linguistic competence should be shifted from lexical entry to syntactic structure, from memory of words to manipulation of rules. Its reformulation of how grammar and lexicon interact has profound implications for linguistic, philosophical, and psychological theories about human mind and language. Hagit Borer departs from both language specific constructional approaches (...) and lexicalist approaches to argue that universal hierarchical structures determine interpretation, and that language variation emerges from the morphological and phonological properties of inflectional material. In Name Only applies this radical approach to nominal structure. Integrating research in syntax, semantics, and morphology, the author argues that nominal structure is based on the syntactic realization of semantic notions such as classifier, quantity, and reference. In the process she seeks to do away with lexical ambiguity and type-shifting. Among the topics she considers are the interpretation of proper names, the mass-count distinction, the weak-strong interpretation of quantifiers, partitive and measure phrases, and the structural representation of the definite article. In the process she explores inter-language variation through the properties of the morpho-phonological system. The languages discussed include English, Chinese, Italian, and Hebrew. (shrink)

In this paper I will discuss certain cases in Japanese and Korean morphosyntax where forms compete to express the same semantic and grammatical information, and attempt to show that in each instance the most economical form is chosen. Presenting an account in terms of Optimality Theory (OT; see Prince and Smolensky (1993), Grimshaw (1995)), I will argue that constraints such as ‘Avoid Word’ and ‘Avoid Affix’ (as in (1)) are motivated as the forces behind the economization. (1) Avoid Word, Avoid (...) Affix. In OT, constraints are violable and ranked. For a given input—in this paper, abstract grammatical and semantic information—the optimal output is the morpho-syntactic expression which best satisfies the constraints in their ranking, even if some constraints are violated. If the constraints in (1) were the only forces on grammatical expression, the optimal output would be silence; but such an output would fail to express any of the information in the input. Hence, there are constraints on what is called ‘Faithfulness’ in OT, constraints which require linguistic material to faithfully express the abstract input information. In the next section of the paper, I discuss cases where a single word competes with a syntactic formation to express the same input information, illustrating a case where ‘Blocking’ extends from morphology into syntax. (shrink)

Gervain et al. discuss both behavioral and neurophysiological AGL studies that investigate rule and structure learning processes in infants. The paper provides an overview of all the major AGL paradigms used to date to investigate infant learning abilities at the level of morpho‐phonology and syntax from a very early age onwards. Gervain et al. also discuss the implications of the results for a general theory of natural language acquisition.

The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research (...) on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns (furniture, police force, clothing). (shrink)

Gervain et al. discuss both behavioral and neurophysiological AGL studies that investigate rule and structure learning processes in infants. The paper provides an overview of all the major AGL paradigms used to date to investigate infant learning abilities at the level of morpho‐phonology and syntax from a very early age onwards. Gervain et al. also discuss the implications of the results for a general theory of natural language acquisition.

The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched, though, across languages and with respect (...) to particular phenomena within a given language, with respect to its connection to cognition, and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns.The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched, though, across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language, with respect to its connection to cognition, and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns. (shrink)

Semantics plays a role in grammar in at least three guises. (A) Linguists seek to account for speakers‘ knowledge of what linguistic expressions mean. This goal is typically achieved by assigning a model theoretic interpretation in a compositional fashion. For example, *No whale flies* is true if and only if the intersection of the sets of whales and fliers is empty in the model. (B) Linguists seek to account for the ability of speakers to make various inferences based on semantic (...) knowledge. For example, *No whale flies* entails *No blue whale flies* and *No whale flies high*. (C) The wellformedness of a variety of syntactic constructions depends on morpho-syntactic features with a semantic flavor. For example, *Under no circumstances would a whale fly* is grammatical, whereas *Under some circumstances would a whale fly* is not, corresponding to the downward vs. upward monotonic features of the preposed phrases. It is usually assumed that once a compositional model theoretic interpretation is assigned to all expressions, its fruits can be freely enjoyed by inferencing and syntax. What place might proof theory have in this picture? (shrink)

It is commonly argued that the rules of language, as distinct from its semantic features, are the characteristics which most clearly distinguish language from the communication systems of other species. A number of linguists (e.g., Chomsky 1972, 1980; Pinker 1994) have suggested that the universal features of grammar (UG) are unique human adaptations showing no evolutionary continuities with any other species. However, recent summaries of the substantive features of UG are quite remarkable in the very general nature of the features (...) proposed. While the syntax of any given language can be quite complex, the specific rules vary so much between languages that the truly universal (i.e. innate) aspects of grammar are not complex at all. In fact, these features most closely resemble a set of general descriptions of our richly complex semantic cognition, and not a list of specific rules. General principles of the evolutionary process suggest that syntax is more properly understood as an emergent characteristic of the explosion of semantic complexity that occurred during hominid evolution. It is argued that grammatical rules used in given languages are likely to be simply conventionalized, invented features of language, and not the result of an innate, grammar-specific module. The grammatical and syntactic regularities that are found across languages occur simply because all languages attempt to communicate the same sorts of semantic information. (shrink)

I CATEGORIES AND PRINCIPLES ii Introductory Remarks The value of linguistics as a cognitive science lies largely in its potential for providing insights ...

The study of syntax is fundamental to linguistics and language study, but it is often taught solely within the framework of transformational grammar. This book is unique in several respects: it introduces the basic concepts used in the description of syntax, independently of any single model of grammar. Most grammatical models fail to deal adequately with one aspect of syntax or another, and the authors argue that an understanding of the concepts used in any full description of (...) language is crucial for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of formal grammars. Formal approaches to some of these concepts are critically examined. This book will train students, of either linguistics or language, to understand and make the best use of any grammar they encounter. Secondly, the book deals with the whole of syntax from immediate constituents and relations between sentences. It also examines concepts like subject and object, agent and patient, topic, comment and theme. Thirdly, there is a section on morphology, and a discussion of the relationship between syntax and morphology. As a book which explains, in a lucid and approachable way, why linguists have adopted certain solutions to problems and not others, this will be an invaluable introductory text. It is profusely illustrated with diagrams, and there are sets of exercises for every chapter which can be used in class, or by students working independently. This second edition has been extensively revised to take account of recent developments in syntactic studies. (shrink)

The discrepancy between syntax and semantics is a painstaking issue that hinders a better comprehension of the underlying neuronal processes in the human brain. In order to tackle the issue, we at first describe a striking correlation between Wittgenstein's Tractatus, that assesses the syntactic relationships between language and world, and Perlovsky's joint language-cognitive computational model, that assesses the semantic relationships between emotions and “knowledge instinct”. Once established a correlation between a purely logical approach to the language and computable psychological (...) activities, we aim to find the neural correlates of syntax and semantics in the human brain. Starting from topological arguments, we suggest that the semantic properties of a proposition are processed in higher brain's functional dimensions than the syntactic ones. In a fully reversible process, the syntactic elements embedded in Broca's area project into multiple scattered semantic cortical zones. The presence of higher functional dimensions gives rise to the increase in informational content that takes place in semantic expressions. Therefore, diverse features of human language and cognitive world can be assessed in terms of both the logic armor described by the Tractatus, and the neurocomputational techniques at hand. One of our motivations is to build a neuro-computational framework able to provide a feasible explanation for brain's semantic processing, in preparation for novel computers with nodes built into higher dimensions. (shrink)

This groundbreaking book offers a new and compelling perspective on the structure of human language. The fundamental issue it addresses is the proper balance between syntax and semantics, between structure and derivation, and between rule systems and lexicon. It argues that the balance struck by mainstream generative grammar is wrong. It puts forward a new basis for syntactic theory, drawing on a wide range of frameworks, and charts new directions for research. In the past four decades, theories of syntactic (...) structure have become more abstract, and syntactic derivations have become ever more complex. Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff trace this development through the history of contemporary syntactic theory, showing how much it has been driven by theory-internal rather than empirical considerations. They develop an alternative that is responsive to linguistic, cognitive, computational, and biological concerns. At the core of this alternative is the Simpler Syntax Hypothesis: the most explanatory syntactic theory is one that imputes the minimum structure necessary to mediate between phonology and meaning. A consequence of this hypothesis is a far richer mapping between syntax and semantics than is generally assumed. Through concrete analyses of numerous grammatical phenomena, some well studied and some new, the authors demonstrate the empirical and conceptual superiority of the Simpler Syntax approach.Simpler Syntax is addressed to linguists of all persuasions. It will also be of central interest to those concerned with language in psychology, human biology, evolution, computational science, and artificial intellige. (shrink)

Proponents of the language of thought (LOT) thesis are realists when it comes to syntactically structured representations, and must defend their view against instrumentalists, who would claim that syntactic structures may be useful in describing cognition, but have no more causal powers in governing cognition than do the equations of physics in guiding the planets. This paper explores what it will take to provide an argument for LOT that can defend its conclusion from instrumentalism. I illustrate a difficulty in this (...) project by discussing arguments for LOT put forward by Horgan and Tienson. When their evidence is viewed in the light of results in connectionist research, it is hard to see how a realist conception of syntax can be formulated and defended. (shrink)

The Morpho-Syntactic and Lexical Encoding of Tense and Aspect in Semitic: Proceedings of the Erlangen Workshop on April 16, 2014. Edited by Lutz Edzard. Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, vol. 104. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2016. Pp. 242. €58.

W. Labov's & T. Labov's findings concerning their child grammar acquisition ("Learning the Syntax of Questions" in Recent Advances in the Psychology of Language, Campbell, R. & Smith, P. Eds, New York: Plenum Press, 1978) are interpreted in terms of different semantics of why & other wh-questions. Z. Dubiel.

Minimalist Syntax is a collection of essays that analyze major syntactic processes in a variety of languages, all unified by their perspective from within the Minimalist Program. Introduces important concepts in the Minimalist approach to syntactic theory. Emphasizes empirical consequences of the Minimalist approach through innovative analyses. Highlights the importance of Minimalist syntax in explaining features of natural languages. Includes contributions from leading syntacticians.

The influence of Spengler on Wittgenstein's philosophical development is considered. The point of interest is in a significant methodological restructuring which it appears to have produced. After an initial over-enthusiastic reception, Wittgenstein is seen to object on some points which he attempted to emend in his own philosophy. Spengler's name disappeared inreworked manuscripts but traces persist in the Philosophical Investigations and an important section (§89-133) is found to be connected with it.

This review considers Semantic Syntax and Slavic Transformational Syntax particularly in the light of their contributions to the theory of grammar. Semantic Syntax is shown to have a polemical bias against the Aspects model and toward generative semantics. Its editor's position in the constellation of semantic logicians is defined; pro-Chomskian objections to the logical-cognitive semantic theory are advanced. Slavic Transformational Syntax is comprised of essays with a wide range of theoretical stances; the insights of the radical (...) case grammar of James Miller are compared with those of Semantic Syntax. Remarks on deixis by Richard Brecht are discussed in relationship to semantic-logic approaches. Certain similarities of Jakobsonian functionalism and generative semantics are discussed. (shrink)

I critically examine some provocative arguments that John Searle presents in his book The Rediscovery of Mind to support the claim that the syntactic states of a classical computational system are "observer relative" or "mind dependent" or otherwise less than fully and objectively real. I begin by explaining how this claim differs from Searle's earlier and more well-known claim that the physical states of a machine, including the syntactic states, are insufficient to determine its semantics. In contrast, his more recent (...) claim concerns the syntax, in particular, whether a machine actually has symbols to underlie its semantics. I then present and respond to a number of arguments that Searle offers to support this claim, including whether machine symbols are observer relative because the assignment of syntax is arbitrary, or linked to universal realizability, or linked to the sub-personal interpretive acts of a homunculus, or linked to a person's consciousness. I conclude that a realist about the computational model need not be troubled by such arguments. Their key premises need further support. (shrink)

1. Une polémique historique En matière de syntaxe, la notion de corpus fut très controversée et reste encore problématique. Avant Chomsky, les structuralistes utilisaient des corpus, mais le terme désignait alors un échantillon représentatif et homogène d’un aspect syntaxique particulier ou d’une langue donnée et était utilisé dans une perspective behaviouriste exlusivement empiriste et taxinomique. C’est contre ce type de « corpus » que Chomsky s’est prononcé lorsqu’il a commencé à développe...

This book presents a new approach to studying the syntax of human language, one which emphasizes how we think about time. Tilsen argues that many current theories are unsatisfactory because those theories conceptualize syntactic patterns with spatially arranged structures of objects. These object-structures are atemporal and do not lend well to reasoning about time. The book develops an alternative conceptual model in which oscillatory systems of various types interact with each other through coupling forces, and in which the relative (...) energies of those systems are organized in particular ways. Tilsen emphasizes that the two primary mechanisms of the approach - oscillators and energy levels - require alternative ways of thinking about time. Furthermore, his theory leads to a new way of thinking about grammaticality and the recursive nature of language. The theory is applied to a variety of syntactic phenomena: word order, phrase structure, morphosyntax, constituency, case systems, ellipsis, anaphora, and islands. The book also presents a general program for the study of language in which the construction of linguistic theories is itself an object of theoretical analysis. (shrink)

Belonging to the textual genetics, discipline that studies the creation process of major literary or scientific works, the following paper discusses the Crocian myth of the uniqueness of the work that implies the uniqueness of the genesis. The work isn’t unique but just original and its genesis too. This hypothesis also allows also the articulation of common morphologies of the process of the invention. The paper proposes a plurality of types of genesis, such as the linear, canonic or partial, that (...) aren’t able to satisfy the needs of the individual project, and twin genesis or hypergenesis, of which genetic substance supersedes the needs of an individual project, nourishing other works that constitute themselves into typological families. Such a classification represents an efficient epistemological instrument to studying the genesis of various texts. This kind of view is an entirely new way of looking at the invention and creation processes. (shrink)

Linear Syntax makes a case for a critical reassessment of the wide-spread view that syntax can be reduced to tree structures. It argues that a crucial part of the description of German clausal syntax should instead be based on concepts that are defined in terms of linear order. By connecting the descriptive tools of modern phrase-structure grammar with traditional descriptive scholarship, Andreas Kathol offers a new perspective on many long-standing problems in syntactic theory.

This collection covers the fundamental concepts and analytic tools of generative transformational syntax of the last half century, from Chomsky's Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew (1951) to the present day. It makes available, in one place, key published material on important areas such as phrase structure, transformations, and conditions on rules and representations. Presenting articles by leading contributors to the field such as Baltin, Bokovic, Bresnan, Chomsky, Cinque, Emonds, Freidin, Hale, Higginbotham, Huang, Kayne, Lasnik, McCawley, Pollock, Postal, Reinhart, Rizzi, Ross, (...) Stowell, Torrego, Travis, Vergnaud, and Williams, this fascinating collection also includes a general introduction by the editors and an index, thus providing a comprehensive single reference resource for students and researchers alike. (shrink)

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 crosslinguistic comparative approach to verb initial syntax, this volume provides new data to (...) some old problems anddebates and explores some innovative approaches to the derivation of verb initial order. (shrink)

Recently several philosophers of science have proposed what has come to be known as the semantic account of scientific theories. It is presented as an improvement on the positivist account, which is now called the syntactic account of scientific theories. Bas van Fraassen claims that the syntactic account does not give a satisfactory definition of "empirical adequacy" and "empirical equivalence". He contends that his own semantic account does define these notations acceptably, through the concept of "embeddability", a concept which he (...) claims cannot be defined syntactically. Here, I define a syntactic relation which corresponds to the semantic relation of "embeddability". I suggest that the critical differences between the positivist account and van Fraassen's account have nothing to do with the distinction between semantics and syntax. (shrink)

The features of lexical items interact through agreement to influence the shape of syntactic structure and the process of semantic interpretation. We can often tell from the form of a construction that agreement has taken place: the value of a particular feature is morphologically represented on more than one lexical item, even though semantic interpretation may be lacking on some of these lexical items. Less obvious is the nature of the process that yields agreement in the first place. Less obvious (...) as well is the syntax of the output of this process. Because of the central role played by agreement in syntactic theory, much work over the last decade has been devoted to all these topics. (shrink)