Syntax and Morphology

This book considers the syntax of the left periphery of clauses in relation to the extra‐sentential context. The prevailing point of view, in the literature in this field is that the external context does not intervene at all in the syntax of the sentence, and that the interaction between sentence and context takes place post‐syntactically. This monograph challenges this view and proposes that reference to indexicality is syntactically encoded in the left‐most position of the clause, where the speaker's temporal and spatial location is represented. To support this hypothesis, it analyses various kinds of temporal dependencies in embedded clauses, such as indicative versus subjunctive, and proposes a new analysis of the imperfect and the future‐in‐the‐past. The book also compares languages such as Italian and English with languages which have different properties of temporal interpretation, such as Chinese. Finally, analysis of the literary style known as Free Indirect Discourse also supports the hypothesis, showing that it may have a wide range of consequences.

This book develops a new analysis of the interpretation of verb phrases and VP adjunction by arguing that the lexical subcategorization information of verbs is systematically underspecified and is only resolved when verb phrases are built in context, with recourse to pragmatic knowledge. This idea is formally implemented in the framework Dynamic Syntax by introducing an underspecified semantic type into the logical system. This provides an account of how verb phrases are built on-line and how verbs can be used with a different array of complements on each occasion of use. Under this dynamic view, the interpretation of verbs is argued to be essentially pragmatic, making use of the notion of ad hoc concept formation developed in Relevance theory. The approach is illustrated in detail by a case study of Swahili applied verbs. The study brings together results from dynamic approaches to syntax and Relevance theoretic pragmatics, and charts the stretch of the syntax-pragmatic interface where lexical information from verbs and contextual concept formation meet.

This book draws together nine original investigations by leading linguists and promising young scholars on the syntax of complementisers (eg that in She said that she would) and their phrases. The chapters are divided into two parts, each of which highlights aspects of the behaviour and function of complementisers. The first part looks at how and when subjects, or parts of subjects, can and cannot move outside their canonical position in a sentence. Each chapter examines and compares the relevance of a number of syntactic factors in languages such as English, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Brazilian Portuguese, and Bavarian. In the second part, the focus turns to the nature and function of complementisers themselves, with discussions drawing on evidence from Italian, Italian dialects, Hebrew, and Dutch.

Copulas (in English, the verb to be) are conventionally defined functionally as a means of relating elements of clause structure, especially subject and complement, and considered to be semantically empty or meaningless. They have received relatively little attention from linguists. This book goes some way towards correcting this neglect. In doing so it takes issue with both accepted definition and description. The book presents an analysis of grammatical descriptions of more than 160 languages drawn from the language families of the world. The book shows that some languages have a single copula, others several, and some none at all. In a series of statistical analyses it seeks to explain why by linking the distribution of copulas to variations in lexical categorization and syntactic structure. The book concludes by advancing a comprehensive theory of copularization which it relates to language classification and to theories of language change, notably grammaticalization.

This volume explores the expression of the concepts count and mass in human language and probes the complex relation between seemingly incontrovertible aspects of meaning and their varied grammatical realizations across languages. In English, count nouns are those that can be counted and pluralized (two cats), whereas mass nouns cannot be, at least not without a change in meaning (two rices). The chapters in this volume explore the question of the cognitive and linguistic universality and variability of the concepts count and mass from philosophical, semantic, and morpho-syntactic points of view, touching also on issues in acquisition and processing. The volume also significantly contributes to our cross-linguistic knowledge, as it includes chapters with a focus on Blackfoot, Cantonese, Dagaare, English, Halkomelem, Lithuanian, Malagasy, Mandarin, Ojibwe, and Persian, as well as discussion of several other languages including Armenian, Hungarian, and Korean. The overall consensus of this volume is that while the general concepts of count and mass are available to all humans, forms of grammaticalization involving number, classifiers, and determiners play a key role in their linguistic treatment, and indeed in whether these concepts are grammatically expressed at all. This variation may be reflect the fact that count/mass is just one possible realization of a deeper and broader concept, itself related to the categories of nominal and verbal aspect.

Perception verbs – such as look, see, taste, hear, feel, sound, listen, and observe – present unresolved problems for linguistic theories. This book examines the predictability of relations between their semantics and syntactic behaviour, the different kinds of polysemy they exhibit, and the role of evidentiality in verbs like seem and appear. After an opening chapter explaining the nature of the issues, there is a concise introduction to Word Grammar. Chapter 3 considers the implications of the approach for a general theory of event structure, and looks at how Word Grammar can be applied to causation, argument linking, and the modelling of polysemy. Chapter 4 explores the polysemy of see; chapter 5 looks at relations between verbs of active perception like listen, and verbs of involuntary perception such as hear; chapter 6 explores the semantics of non‐finite predicative complementation; and chapter 7 discusses verbs of appearance. Chapter 8 presents some conclusions.

This book proposes a novel, interface-based analysis of patterns of wh-movement in English in which constraints are stated over both syntactic and semantic representations. Firstly, a theory is presented of the internal structure of events as perceptual and cognitive units. The key question concerns the circumstances in which multiple smaller events, or subevents, can be perceived as jointly forming a single macroevent. Macroevent formation is possible if the subevents in question are perceived as related by one of two contingent relations, namely direct causation and enablement, where the latter is a relation holding among events that form part of an agent's plan. There is no single phrase-structural configuration which corresponds to enablement, so cognitive and semantic representations of event structure differ from syntactic representations of phrase structure in nontrivial ways. Certain patterns of extraction from adjuncts in English are amenable to simple descriptions stated over event-structural units and relations, but exhibit substantial differences from the patterns typically described by syntactic theories of locality. However, syntactic locality theories, as elaborated over the past 50 years, remain essential to an accurate description of the distribution of movement relations. The central challenge addressed by this work is therefore to allow syntactic and nonsyntactic factors to act jointly to constrain the syntactic operation of wh-movement without vitiating necessary assumptions about the modularity of the language faculty.

This book presents a critical overview of current work on linguistic features and establishes new bases for their use in the study and understanding of language. Features are fundamental components of linguistic description: they include gender (feminine, masculine, neuter); number (singular, plural, dual); person (1st, 2nd, 3rd); tense (present, past, future); and case (nominative, accusative, genitive, ergative). Despite their ubiquity and centrality in linguistic description, much remains to be discovered about them: there is, for example, no readily available inventory showing which features are found in which of the world's languages; there is no consensus about how they operate across different components of language; and there is no certainty about how they interact. This book seeks both to highlight and to tackle these problems. It brings together perspectives from phonology to formal syntax and semantics, expounding the use of linguistic features in typology, computer applications, and logic. Linguists representing different standpoints spell out clearly the assumptions they bring to different kinds of features and describe how they use them. Their contrasting contributions highlight the areas of difference and the common ground between their perspectives. The book brings together original work by leading international scholars. It will appeal to linguists of all theoretical persuasions.

This book is a cross-linguistic investigation of resumptive pronouns and related phenomena. Pronominal resumption is the realization of the base of a syntactic dependency as a bound pronoun. Resumption occurs in unbounded dependencies, such as relative clauses and questions, and in the variety of raising known as copy raising. Processing factors may also give rise to resumption, even in environments where it does not normally occur in a given language. A new theory of resumption is proposed that is based on two key assumptions, one theoretical and one empirical/typological. The first assumption is that natural language is resource-sensitive (the Resource Sensitivity Hypothesis); this is captured through the use of a resource logic for semantic composition. The second assumption is that resumptive pronouns are ordinary pronouns in their morphological and lexical properties, based on typologically robust observations (McCloskey's Generalization). The theory is formalized in terms of Glue Semantics for semantic composition, with a Lexical-Functional Grammar syntax. The theory achieves a novel unification of hitherto heterogeneous resumption phenomena. It unifies two kinds of resumptive pronouns that are found in unbounded dependencies --- one kind behaves syntactically like a gap, whereas the other kind does not. It also unifies resumptive pronouns in unbounded dependencies with the obligatory pronouns in copy raising. The theory also provides the basis for a new understanding of processing-based resumption, both in production and in parsing and interpretation.

This exploration of the syntax-semantics interface is concerned with negative indefinites like English ‘nobody’, ‘nothing’, etc. and their counterparts in other languages. A cross-linguistically unified analysis is proposed and applied to several languages. While negative indefinites are standardly assumed to be semantically negative quantifiers, this work argues for a different analysis. It is motivated by three phenomena, which negative indefinites give rise to in different languages and which are unexpected under the negative quantifier analysis. The first, negative concord, has been widely discussed in both semantic and syntactic literature. The fact that in many languages negative indefinites can co-occur with other seemingly negative elements without contributing a negation to the semantics motivates the assumption that these expressions are not inherently negative. Following recent work on negative concord, an analysis is elaborated that is based on the assumption that negative indefinites are semantically non-negative and must be licensed by a — possibly covert — negation. This analysis explains the behaviour of negative indefinites in a number of languages. In a next step, this analysis is extended to languages that do not exhibit negative concord. Motivation for this comes from the fact that even in non-negative concord languages, the negative quantifier analysis cannot account for the semantics of negative indefinites. Crucial evidence comes from the existence of split readings, in which another operator takes scope in between the negative and the indefinite meaning component. Moreover, in many languages the distribution of negative indefinites is subject to syntactic restrictions. It is shown how this follows from the proposed analysis and independently motivated syntactic properties.