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Author: Denis Bouchard Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226067339 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 544
Book Description
During the last thirty years, most linguists and philosophers have assumed that meaning can be represented symbolically and that the mental processing of language involves the manipulation of symbols. Scholars have assembled strong evidence that there must be linguistic representations at several abstract levels—phonological, syntactic, and semantic—and that those representations are related by a describable system of rules. Because meaning is so complex, linguists often posit an equally complex relationship between semantic and other levels of grammar. The Semantics of Syntax is an elegant and powerful analysis of the relationship between syntax and semantics. Noting that meaning is underdetermined by form even in simple cases, Denis Bouchard argues that it is impossible to build knowledge of the world into grammar and still have a describable grammar. He thus proposes simple semantic representations and simple rules to relate linguistic levels. Focusing on a class of French verbs, Bouchard shows how multiple senses can be accounted for by the assumption of a single abstract core meaning along with background information about how objects behave in the world. He demonstrates that this move simplifies the syntax at no cost to the descriptive power of the semantics. In two important final chapters, he examines the consequences of his approach for standard syntactic theories.
Author: Denis Bouchard Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226067339 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 544
Book Description
During the last thirty years, most linguists and philosophers have assumed that meaning can be represented symbolically and that the mental processing of language involves the manipulation of symbols. Scholars have assembled strong evidence that there must be linguistic representations at several abstract levels—phonological, syntactic, and semantic—and that those representations are related by a describable system of rules. Because meaning is so complex, linguists often posit an equally complex relationship between semantic and other levels of grammar. The Semantics of Syntax is an elegant and powerful analysis of the relationship between syntax and semantics. Noting that meaning is underdetermined by form even in simple cases, Denis Bouchard argues that it is impossible to build knowledge of the world into grammar and still have a describable grammar. He thus proposes simple semantic representations and simple rules to relate linguistic levels. Focusing on a class of French verbs, Bouchard shows how multiple senses can be accounted for by the assumption of a single abstract core meaning along with background information about how objects behave in the world. He demonstrates that this move simplifies the syntax at no cost to the descriptive power of the semantics. In two important final chapters, he examines the consequences of his approach for standard syntactic theories.
Author: Jarosław Jakielaszek Publisher: Studies in Philosophy of Language and Linguistics ISBN: 9783631659663 Category : Grammar, Comparative and general Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This book provides a discussion of consequences of label-theoretic developments of the Minimalist Program for the theory of the syntax-semantics relationship. It provides a debate of a proper modeling of interpretive reflexes of syntactic adjunction and syntactic displacement.
Author: Stefanie Bode Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000768015 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 181
Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive account of adjuncts in generative grammar, seeking to reconcile the differing ways in which they have been treated in the past by proposing a method of analysis grounded in simplification based on Simplest Merge. The volume provides an up-to-date review of the existing literature on adjuncts and outlines their characteristic properties and the subsequent difficulties in adequately defining and treating them. The book compares previous attempts to account for adjuncts which have tended to use additional mechanisms or syntactic operations as a jumping-off point from which to propose a new way forward for analyzing them grounded in minimalist theory. Adopting an approach in the spirit of the strong minimalist thesis (SMT), Bode suggests an analysis of adjuncts which applies a minimalist approach based on theoretical simplicity, one which does not resort to extra mechanisms in capturing the empirical properties of adjuncts. Offering a comprehensive overview of research on adjuncts and foundational minimalist principles, this book will be of particular interest to graduate students and practicing researchers interested in syntax.
Author: Randall Hendrick Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 0470758198 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 576
Book Description
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.
Author: Michael T. Putnam Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027289417 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 282
Book Description
This volume explores recent advancements in the Minimalist Program that adopt Stroik’s (1999, 2009) Survive Principle as the principle means of accounting for displacement phenomena in earlier versions of generative theory. These contributions bring to light many advantages and challenges that beset the Survive-minimalist framework, including topics such as the lexicon-syntax relationship, coordinate symmetries, scope, ellipsis, code-switching, and probe-goal relations. Despite the diverse, broad range of topics discussed in this volume, the papers are connected by a renewed investigation of Frampton & Gutmann’s (2002) vision of a crash-proof syntax. This volume provides new and interesting perspectives on theoretical issues that have challenged the Minimalist Program since its inception and will provide ample food for thought for syntacticians working in the Minimalist tradition and beyond.
Author: Cedric Boeckx Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027233551 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 416
Book Description
The Minimalism Program is many things to many researchers, and there are by now many alternative versions of it. Central to all is the fundamental question: to what extent is the human language faculty an optimal solution to minimal design specifications. Taken as a whole, the volume outlines the main features of Minimalism, its historical and conceptual sources, and provides an illustration of minimalist theorizing by looking at several properties of the syntactic component of grammar. Some contributions concentrate on what kind of computational tools are made available in a minimalist syntactic component, and how the computational system interacts with external and interface domains of the mind/brain. Other contributions specifically focus on direct empirical gains that emerge from adopting minimalist guidelines.
Author: Maia Duguine Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027255415 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 361
Book Description
The topic of this collection is argument structure. The fourteen chapters in this book are divided into four parts: Semantic and Syntactic Properties of Event Structure; A Cartographic View on Argument Structure; Syntactic Heads Involved in Argument Structure; and Argument Structure in Language Acquisition. Rigorous theoretical analyses are combined with empirical work on specific aspects of argument structure. The book brings together authors working in different linguistic fields (semantics, syntax, and language acquisition), who explore new findings as well as more established data, but then from new theoretical perspectives. The contributions propose cartographic views of argument structure, as opposed to minimalistic proposals of a binary template model for argument structure, in order to optimally account for various syntactic and semantic facts, as well as data derived from wider cross-linguistic perspectives. "Argument structure plays a central role in the articulation of syntax. Yet whether this contribution is primordial or derivative, derivational or representational, minimalist or cartographic, is entirely up for grabs. This is what makes a book like the present one equivalent to a murder thriller: one cannot finish one chapter without wanting to read the next. While the solution to the underlying mystery remains as open as it ever was, the clues offered here seem just impossible to ignore."
Author: Raffaella Folli Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191506265 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 479
Book Description
In this book, leading linguists explore the empirical scope of syntactic theory, by concentrating on a set of phenomena for which both syntactic and nonsyntactic analyses initially appear plausible. Exploring the nature of such phenomena permits a deeper understanding of the nature of syntax and of neighbouring modules and their interaction. The book contributes to both traditional work in generative syntax and to the recent emphasis placed on questions related to the interfaces. The major topics covered include areas of current intensive research within the Minimalist Program and syntactic theory more generally, such as constraints on scope and binding relations, information-structural effects on syntactic structure, the structure of words and idioms, argument- and event-structural alternations, and the nature of the relations between syntactic, semantic, and phonological representations. After the editors' introduction, the volume is organized into four thematic sections: architectures; syntax and information structure; syntax and the lexicon; and lexical items at the interfaces. The volume is of interest to syntactic theorists, as well as linguists and cognitive scientists working in neighbouring disciplines such as lexical and compositional semantics, pragmatics and discourse structure, and morphophonology, and anyone with an interest in the modular architecture of the language faculty.
Author: Diego Gabriel Krivochen Publisher: Potsdam Linguistic Investigations / Potsdamer Linguistische Untersuchungen / Recherches Linguistiques à Potsdam ISBN: 9783631624487 Category : Grammar, Comparative and general Languages : de Pages : 0
Book Description
This book proposes a novel analysis of Nominal Construction from the syntax-semantics interface. It is based on the newly developed framework of Radical Minimalism, and provides both a concise introduction to this formal model and the application of the theory to real examples provided by native speakers. The theory, which makes use of mathematics, cognitive science, and physics combined with formal syntax, is explained in detail before entering the domain of the nominal construction where straightforward, clear analyses are provided for multiple interlinguistic phenomena. Even though mainly theoretical, the book has a strong empirical basis and enables the reader to continue the quest by applying the framework to phenomena of his interest.
Author: Denis Bouchard
Author: Denis Bouchard
Author: Jarosław Jakielaszek
Author: Stefanie Bode
Author: Randall Hendrick
Author: Michael T. Putnam
Author: Yosuke Sato
Author: Cedric Boeckx
Author: Maia Duguine
Author: Raffaella Folli
Author: Diego Gabriel Krivochen