Syntax and Morphology

Depictive secondary predicates such as ‘raw’ in ‘George ate the fish raw’ are important for current issues in syntactic and semantic theory, in particular predication theory, phrase structure theories, issues of control and grammatical relations, and verbal aspect. This book approaches depictive secondary predication from a cross-linguistic point of view. It traces all the relevant phenomena and brings together critical surveys and new contributions on their morphosyntactic and semantic properties. It particularly considers similarities and differences between secondary predicates and other types of adjuncts, including adverbials of manner, comparison, quantity, and location. The book's approach is theory-neutral and pragmatic: it draws on insights and research traditions ranging from the minimalist program to semantic maps methodology.

This book offers a 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 more complex. The book traces this development through the history of contemporary syntactic theory, showing how much it has been driven by theory-internal rather than empirical considerations. It develops 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 richer mapping between syntax and semantics than is generally assumed. Through analyses of grammatical phenomena, some old and some new, the book demonstrates the empirical and conceptual superiority of the Simpler Syntax approach.

This book is a multi-authored volume of eleven chapters dedicated to the analysis of sluicing in a range of languages from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Sluicing is the term applied to sentences in which the ellipsis of a sequence of words following an embedded wh question word appears to occur, and hearers must somehow recover the content of missing material, as in English: Someone saw her, but I don’t know who …. Elliptical constructions of this type are now known to occur widely in the world’s languages in some form or another, and create interesting problems for linguistic analysis, involving complex interactions between syntax, semantics, and morphology, as well as prosody. Because of this interdependence of different subcomponents of language, sluicing is a phenomenon with a strong interface characteristic, requiring integrative analyses and a formal modeling of permissible connections between syntax, morphology, semantics, and certain aspects of phonology. The present volume brings together a set of significant, new pieces of research by a team of leading experts who analyze sluicing constructions in English, Dutch, Frisian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Turkish, Malagasy, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, and Bengali. The collection of chapters critically expands our current understanding of the ways in which languages allow for ellipsis of the sluicing type to occur, and shows how sluicing constructions reveal important information about the general architecture of grammar. In addition to the nine chapters dedicated to specific languages, the volume features an introduction chapter and Haj Ross’s original (1969) landmark chapter on sluicing.

In this book leading scholars address the issues surrounding the syntax‐phonology interface. These principally concern whether the phonological component can influence syntax and if so how far and in what ways: such questions are a prominent component of current work on the biolinguistics of speech production and reception. The problematic relationship between syntax and phonology has long piqued the interest of syntacticians and phonologists: the connections between sound and structure have played a key role in generative grammar from its inception, initially relating to focus and the prosodic marking of constituent structure and more recently to word‐order constraints. This book advances this work in a series of critical and interlinked presentations of the latest thinking and research. In doing so it draws on data from a wide range of languages, evidence from disordered language, and related work in language acquisition.

Since Juan Uriagereka originated the multiple spell-out model in 1999 it has been one of the most influential lines of research in syntactic theorizing. The model simplified a crucial element of the minimalist account of language making it a more accurate reflection of syntax and its acquisition. This book explores important consequences of the multiple spell-out hypothesis and of the linked notion of cyclicity. It combines the latest thinking in linguistics with perspectives drawn from physics, biology, and animal behaviour, aiming thereby to advance the field first described by Noam Chomsky as biolinguistics. Without simplifying, this book seeks to present the issues and their broader biological significance. The subjects discussed include the linearization of structure, the punctuated nature of a derivation (the multiple spell-out model), cyclicity and its consequences for locality, and the definition of c-command and its relevance to various types of grammatical dependency. The book discusses the evolutionary implications of Uriagereka's work, considering, for example, whether the punctuated nature of the derivation is a resolution of conflicting demands that yield an equilibrium found in nature more generally.

This book presents a typology of subordination systems across the world's languages. Traditional definitions of subordination are based on morphosyntactic criteria, such as clausal embedding or non-finiteness. This book shows that these definitions are untenable in a cross-linguistic perspective, and provides a cognitive-based definition of subordination. The analysis is based on a representative eighty-language sample, and represents the broadest study so far conducted on the cross-linguistic coding of several types of complement, adverbial, and relative sentence. These sentence types display considerable structural variation across languages. However, this variation turns out to be constrained, and appears crucially related to the functional properties of individual sentence types. This book provides a systematic attempt to establish comprehensive implicational hierarchies describing the coding of complement, adverbial, and relative sentences at a single stroke. Concepts from typological theory and cognitive linguistics are integrated to account for these hierarchies.

This book explores the consequences for syntax of assuming that language is substantively based, or grounded, in extralinguistic cognition and perception. Groundedness does not just apply to the categories of syntax, like verb and noun, but also to other aspects of syntactic structure. Thus hierarchization (dependency), linearity, and phonological expression of categories, especially by intonation, are grammaticalizations of, respectively, cognitive salience, our perception of time, and our perception of sound. The major linguistic module of syntax is characterized by a set of categories based on distinctions in the perceived ontological status of what the categories represent, and this basis determines the distribution of categories, defined by category members that are prototypical. This is familiar from the tradition of notional grammar. Submodules in syntax are characterized by the substance they grammaticalize. The first part of the book traces the development in the twentieth century of anti-notionalism, culminating in the autonomy of syntax assumption. Subsequently the book addresses various syntactic phenomena, many of them involving the fundamental notion of finiteness, that illustrate the need to appeal to grounding. Among other things, groundedness permits a lexicalist approach that enables the syntax to dispense with structural mutations such as category change, and the invocation of ‘empty categories’, or of ‘universal grammar’ in general.

This book contributes to the exploration of a view of language wherein its elements are grounded, or substantively based. It looks in particular at the role of the lexicon, and morphology, as a complex interface relating the syntactic representations to the representations of phonology. Language structure is assumed to be modular, such that modules are defined by the particular aspect of extralinguistic mental content they grammaticalize. This establishes two basic modules: syntax, which is cognitively based, and phonology, based on sound perception. Morphology has no such distinctive basis, only bracketing into formatives of the phonological representation of a word on the basis of the syntactic categories expressed and such non-syntactic classifications as conjugation. The book focuses on inflectional morphology and in particular the expressive role of inflection. Mechanisms deriving from the need for expressiveness compensate for the commonly accepted unidirectionality of exponence, whereby the exponent does not influence what it expounds. Two manifestations of a mechanism of compensation are addressed. Firstly, it is outlined, and illustrated from Old English verb morphology, how the syntactic information that is eventually expressed in paradigms (morphosyntax) may be reorganized to facilitate formulation of the exponence relations (morphophonology). Secondly, on the basis of more general exemplification, there is outlined the mechanism whereby grammatical periphrases compensate for gaps in the finite verb paradigm. Finally, the volume argues that it is the substantive differences between verbs and nouns that account for the absence of periphrases in nominal structures and the marking of agreement, especially of gender, including via classifiers.

As has been variously discussed in the past, phonology and syntax manifest analogical structural properties. This volume is concerned with establishing something of the extent of these and the factors limiting them. These analogies are based on perceived similarities between the two planes of languages and the common cognitive apparatus that structures them. They reflect similarities between the respective mental domains that are represented grammatically by phonology and syntax: sound-perception and cognition. And limitations on analogy similarly reflect the differing demands of these domains with which the two planes interface and their own interfacing via the lexicon. Representation by syntax of complex conceptualizations leads to greater structural elaboration, and the restricted perceptual domain grammaticalized by phonology, as well as physical constraints on its implementation as sound, imposes limitations not paralleled in syntax. The debate concerning the existence and nature of an autonomous universal grammar impinges on the notion of analogy, in so far as the latter depends on similarity in extralinguistic substance.The substantive basis, or groundedness, of both phonology and syntax is a basic analogy, as is hierarchization in terms of dependency. A range of further analogies and their compromises are also investigated: these include harmony phenomena, the redundancy of much of linearity, and the categorization of the basic unit, and associated phenomena such as contrastivity, neutralization, underspecification, polysystemicity, and grammaticalization. The greater complexity of syntax resides in properties not suitable or possible in the phonology, such as the distinction between functional and lexical categories, lexical derivation, and recursiveness and long-distance dependency.

This book explores a central aspect of language change: the nature and degree to which changes in morphology (inflectional word endings, for example) cause changes in syntax (for example, in word order). The twenty-two contributors consider such phenomena within the context of Chomsky's minimalist revision of his principles (of universal grammar) and parameters (of individual languages) theory. They also address some of the main unanswered problems associated with the book's hypothesis — that all grammatical change is driven by the way in which children acquire language. These questions are discussed in the context of a wide range of languages by scholars from around the world.