Theoretical Linguistics

This is the first book to present Canonical Typology, a framework for comparing constructions and categories across languages. The canonical method takes the criteria used to define particular categories or phenomena (e.g. negation, finiteness, possession) to create a multidimensional space in which language-specific instances can be placed. In this way, the issue of fit becomes a matter of greater or lesser proximity to a canonical ideal. Drawing on the expertise of world-class scholars in the field, the book addresses the issue of cross-linguistic comparability, illustrates the wide range of areas—from morphosyntactic features to reported speech—to which linguists are currently applying this methodology.

This book presents a detailed model of syntax-information structure interaction. It presents clear empirical arguments that this interaction takes place at the phase level, with a privileged role for the edge of the phase. The phenomena discussed in this book are mostly taken from the Romance languages: dislocations, focus fronting, p-movement, accusative A and clitic doubling, with some discussion of Germanic scrambling and object shift as well as other relevant phenomena. Careful analyses of these constructions show that notions such as “topic” and “focus”, as usually defined, yield no predictions and instead a feature system based on the notions “discourse anaphor” and “contrast” is proposed.

This book adopts the strong Minimalist thesis that grammar contains no rules or principles specifically designed to account for anaphors and pronouns. Lexically, anaphors have unvalued φ-features, which need to be valued under Agree. This leads to the novel assumption that anaphors c-command their antecedents. This idea underlies the analysis of both simplex and complex reflexives. Simplex reflexives are merged in a configuration of inalienable possession, with the simplex reflexive c-commanding its antecedent inside a possessive small clause. Self-reflexives share the syntax of self-intensifiers and floating quantifiers, raising to a vP-adjoined position to c-command their antecedents. In contrast to anaphors, pronouns have lexically valued φ-features. Postsyntactic lexical insertion accounts for absence of Principle B effects observed in many languages. The behaviour of pronouns and self-forms in snake-sentences is related to the nature of the Axpart projection of the locative preposition. Semantically, the difference between simplex and complex reflexives derives from the way they refer to spatiotemporal stages of their antecedents.

This book presents new data and a formal analysis of the inflectional system and syntax of Kayardild, a typologically striking language of Northern Australia. It sets forth arguments for recognizing an intricate syntactic structure that underlies the exuberant distribution of inflectional features throughout the clause, and for an intermediate, ‘morphemic’ level of representation that mediates morphosyntactic features' realization as morphological forms. The book differs from existing treatments of Kayardild in unifying the explanation of shared morphological exponents, positing a detailed, empirically-grounded underlying syntax, identifying new clausal and nominal structures, simplifying the analysis of Kayardild's dual tense system, rejecting an analysis according to which some case markers are morphologically ‘verbalizing’ and some tense markers ‘nominalizing’, and arguing that upper bounds on syntactic complexity are inherently syntactic rather than derivative of constraints on morphology. Analyses are expressed formally in terms of syntactic structures and morphosyntactic features which will be interpretable to a broad range of theories. Early chapters provide overviews of Kayardild phonology and morphological structure in general, and a final chapter implements the analysis in constraint-based grammar. Example sentences are glossed across four or five lines, furnishing explicit analyses at multiple levels of representation, and an appendix gathers over one hundred example sentences to provide large-scale empirical support for the syntactic analysis of tense inflection. Kayardild Morphology and Ssyntax will appeal to the formal or typological syntactician, morphologist, or phonologist, to advanced students, and to all who wish to understand more about the typological significance of Kayardild.

This book presents new work on how Merge and formal features, two Basic factors in the Minimalist program, should determine the syntactic computation of natural language. Merge combines similar objects into more complex ones. Formal features establish dependencies within objects. This book examines the intricate ways in which these two factors interact to generate well-formed derivations in natural language. It is divided into two parts concerned with formal features and interpretable features — a subset of formal features. The book combines grammatical theory with the analysis of data drawn form a wide range of languages, both in the adult grammar and in first language acquisition. The mechanisms at work in linguistic computation are considered in relation to a variety of linguistic phenomena, including A-binding, A'-dependencies and reconstruction, agreement, word order, adjuncts, pronouns, and complementizers.

This study investigates the behaviour of the negation in the ellipsis type of gapping and shows that gapping sentences with a negation in the first conjunct but not in the second can receive one of the following readings: (¬A&¬B), (¬A&B), (¬(A&B)). Which reading arises depends on phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors. The book proposes a syntactic copying analysis of gapping, which, combined with semantic‐pragmatic criteria such as balanced contrast between the conjuncts, accounts for the various readings. A thorough investigation of different subtypes of negation – predicate‐propositional‐illocutionary – further determines the structure of the resulting gapping structure.

This book offers a syntax and a semantics of nonverbal predicates (i.e., nominal, adjectival, and prepositional predicates) in copular sentences. It explores how the different interpretations of nonverbal predicates can be accounted for in a system that maintains a single structure for predication. The book departs from earlier studies by arguing in favor of a ternary distinction between defining/characterizing/situation-descriptive predicates rather than the more common stage-level/individual-level distinction. The distinction is based on two semantic criteria, namely maximality (i.e., whether the predicate describes an eventuality that has spatio-temporal properties or not) and density (i.e. whether the spatio-temporal properties are perceived as atomic or not). The book argues in favor of a strong correlation between the semantic properties of predicates and their internal syntactic structure. Density and maximality are structurally realized in two distinct projections, namely Classifier Phrases and Number Phrases, respectively. Predicates interpreted as maximal involve a NumP layer; predicates interpreted as non-dense involve a ClP layer; while dense predicates lack both projections. The analysis is shown to account for apparently unrelated data across languages as the apparent optionality of the indefinite article in French, the distribution of the two copulas serestar in Spanish, the distribution of nominal and adjectival predicates in Irish, and case marking on Russian predicates. The languages this study is based on are primarily French, Spanish, Modern Irish, and Russian.

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.

This volume offers the reader a wide and updated view of some of the most important approaches to three key questions in contemporary syntactic theory: What are the operations available for (syntactic) structure-building in natural languages? What are the triggers behind those structure-building operations? Which constraints operate on the structure-building operations available? All the chapters in this book aim at providing new answers to these questions on the basis of a detailed discussion of a wide range of phenomena (gapping, Right-Node-Raising, Comparative Deletion, Across-the-Board (ATB) movement, tough-constructions, nominalizations, scope interactions, wh-movement, A-movement, Case and Agreement relations, among others), and using evidence from a rich variety of languages (Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Croatian, English, German, Icelandic, Japanese, Spanish, Vata, or Vietnamese, etc.). The proposals presented clearly illustrate the shift in the locus of the explanation of linguistic phenomena that characterizes contemporary linguistic theory. A shift, in many cases, from a model which relied on properties of systems external to narrow syntax (such as the Lexicon or the PF component), to one which relies on properties of the structure-building mechanisms available.