Author: Ian G. Roberts Publisher: ISBN: 9780415342025 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 2543
Book Description
The study of comparative grammar has been a concern of linguistic theory. Our notion of how grammatical systems vary and our ability to provide sophisticated analyses of this variation is greater than it has been at any time in the past. Concentrating on principles-and-parameters theory, this work presents an overview of what has been achieved.
Author: Robert Freidin Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 9780262061407 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 492
Book Description
These essays by an outstanding group of linguists present case studies in contemporary comparative grammar, illustrating the rich and varied ways in which the principles and parameters framework of generative grammar can provide explanations for both the underlying universal properties of the world's languages and the ways in which they differ. The final essay by Noam Chomsky offers a new perspective on the principles and parameters approach to comparative grammar. In his introduction, Freidin describes the historical background of current work in comparative grammar and compares this work to the comparative studies of the nineteenth century. He notes how the current approach traces the fundamental unity of all languages to the language faculty, in contrast to that of the nineteenth century which was primarily concerned with the ancestral relations among languages. The essays that follow convey the wide scope of the interaction between current theory and crosslinguistic studies. Topics include the relevance of binding theory for crosslinguistic studies; the interaction between the syntax/lexical semantics interface and the theory of UG; the role of phrase structure and levels of representation in accounting or syntactic variation; crosslinguistic variation in word order phenomena; and the ways in which the study of comparative grammar can itself contribute to the understanding of UG. Contributors Joseph Aoun. Adriana Belletti. Noam Chomsky. Robert Freidin. Wayne Harbert. Norbert Hornstein. C.-T. James Huang. Anthony S. Kroch. Howard Lasnik. Yen-hui Audrey Li. David Lightfoot. Luigi Rizzi. Ken Safir. Beatrice Santorini. Rex A. Sprouse. Timothy Stowell. Tarald Taraldsen. Lisa deMena Travis. Edwin Williams
Author: R. Freidin Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9400901356 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 395
Book Description
Current Issues in Comparative Grammar illustrates the diversity and productivity of research within the principles and parameters framework of generative grammar. In combination, the papers in this volume address a rich and varied set of issues in the study of comparative grammar, including the theories of binding, case and government, the parametric effects of inflection, the syntactic properties of infinitival constructions, the analysis of expletives and of clitics, and the interpretation of anaphoric properties at the level of Logical Form. The collection employs several different research strategies, ranging from a broad survey of related constructions in a wide range of languages to the close analysis of an unusual construction in a single language and its consequences for the theory of Universal Grammar. Some of the papers collected here are commentaries on others, or responses to commentaries.
Author: Phil Branigan Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0197677045 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 373
Book Description
Head-movement has played a central role in morpho-syntactic theory, but its nature has remained unclear. While it is widely accepted that the main grammatical constraint controlling head-movement is the Head Movement Constraint (HMC), this constraint is flouted in many of the linguistic structures examined in this book. More specifically, the strictures of the HMC turn out to be sometimes inactive for specific grammars allowing multiple head-movement to take place in particular syntactic contexts. In The Grammar of Multiple Head-Movement, Phil Branigan shows that multiple head-movement is far from rare, forming a part of the grammar in Finnish, in English, in Perenakan Javanese, in northern Norwegian and Swedish dialects, and generally in the Slavic and Algonquian language families. Basing his analysis on a new model of the grammatical parameters which control word formation in the human brain, Branigan shows how careful attention to the contexts in which multiple head-movement takes place allows new generalizations to be identified. And these, in turn, allow a new model to be formulated of how head-movement fits into the overall architecture of grammatical computation. Through careful comparative study, Branigan not only provides a better understanding of head-movement, but also provides new opportunities to address larger questions concerning the architecture of the grammatical system and the theory of linguistic parameters. A new account of how complex words are formed in languages as different as Russian or Innu-aimun, as well as in English, this study deepens our understanding of how languages vary and of the mental computational system of human grammars.
Author: Christina Tortora Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199945632 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 421
Book Description
This book presents and analyzes various features of the morphosyntax of Borgomanerese, a Gallo-Italic dialect spoken in the town of Borgomanero, in the Piedmont region of Northern Italy. The study is highly comparative, drawing on the literature on numerous other Italian dialects and Romance languages (as well as English), to inform our understanding of the Borgomanerese phenomena. Christina Tortora takes the many unusual and understudied (and often novel) facts of Borgomanerese grammar as compelling grounds for revisiting and reformulating current analyses of syntactic phenomena in these other languages. The phenomena treated include the syntax and semantics of the weak locative in presentational sentences; the syntax of object clitics and argument prepositions; the syntax of subjects and subject clitics; the syntax of interrogatives; clausal architecture; and the relationship between orthography and theoretical analysis. The principal value of this book lies both in the rich description of the morphosyntactic phenomena of Borgomanerese, many of which have not been previously reported in the literature, and in the consequent novel analyses developed, which contribute insights for other languages and dialects, and advance our understanding of syntax and syntactic theory in general.
Author: Guglielmo Cinque Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195136519 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 990
Book Description
Its twenty-one commissioned chapters serve two functions: they provide a general and theoretical introduction to comparative syntax, its methodology, and its relation to other domains of linguistic inquiry; and they also provide a systematic selection of the best comparative work being done today on those language groups and families where substantial progress has been achieved." "This volume will be an essential resource for scholars and students in formal linguistics."--Jacket.
Author: Perugia Adriana Belletti Associate Professor of Linguistics Universita per Stanieri Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0198024886 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
The essays collected in this volume, most previously unpublished, address a number of closely interconnected issues raised by the comparative syntax of functional heads within the Principles-and-Parameters approach. The general theory of head movement, the properties of derived structures created by incorporation, and the parameterization involved are the main theoretical foci. One major empirical area which is addressed concerns head movement in configurations involving certain kinds of operator-like elements, for example, the different manifestations of Verb Second phenomena in Wh and other constructions and the syntax of negative heads and specifiers. In addition, properties of functional heads and head movement in nominal and clausal structures and the causative construction are investigated.
Author: Liliane M. V. Haegeman Publisher: Longman Publishing Group ISBN: Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 310
Book Description
Drawing upon recent theoretical developments and empirical discoveries, this book provides a coherent and comprehensive introdution to generative research in this field. Dr. Haegeman brings together ten chapters to illustrate the new appraoch to comparative grammar which has developed against the background of the 'principles and parameters' model. The contributors show how this framework guides empirical research by seeking to reveal the underlying grammatical basis for similarities and differences between languages and language groups. Throughout the text, attention is drawn to the ways in which empirical study feeds into theory construction, raising new questions for the overall conceptual framework and sometimes providing new solution
Author: Naoki Fukui Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134326661 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 433
Book Description
1. Specifiers and projection -- 2. LF extraction of naze : some theoretical implications -- 3. Strong and weak barriers : remarks on the proper characterization of barriers -- 4. Parameters and optionality -- 5. A note on improper movement -- 6. The principles-and-parameters approach : a comparative syntax of English and Japanese -- 7. Symmetry in syntax : merge and demerge -- 8. Order in phrase structure and movement -- 9. An A-over-A perspective on locality -- 10. The uniqueness parameter -- 11. Nominal structure : an extension of the Symmetry Principle -- 12. Phrase structure -- 13. The Visibility Guideline for functional categories : verb-raising in Japanese and related issues.
Author: Höskuldur Thräinsson Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9781402002946 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
O. THE CONTENTS OF THIS VOLUME AND THE FIELD OF COMPARATIVE GERMANIC SYNTAX Comparati ve synchronic and diachronic syntax has become an increasingly popular and fruitful research area over the past 10-15 years. A central reason for this is that recent developments in linguistic theory have made it possible to formulate explicit and testable hypotheses concerning syntactic universals and cross-linguistic varia- tion. Here we refer to the so-called "Principles-and-Parameters" approaches (see Chomsky 1981a, 1982, 1986a, and also Williams 1987, Freidin 1991, Chomsky and Lasnik 1993, and references cited in these works). It may even be fair to say that the Government-Binding framework (first outlined by Chomsky 1981b)-a spe- cific instantiation of the Principles-and-Parameters approach-has been more influential than any other theoretical syntactic framework. Since 1984, syntacticians investigating the formal properties of Germanic languages have, as an international effort, organized "workshops" on comparative Germanic syntax. The first was held at the University of Trondheim in Trondheim, Norway (1984), the second at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, Iceland (1985), the third at the University of Abo in Abo, Finland (1986), the fourth at McGill University, Montreal, Canada (1987), the fifth in Groningen, The Nether- lands (1988), the sixth in Lund, Sweden (1989), the seventh in Stuttgart, Germany (1991), the eighth in Troms, Norway (1992), the ninth at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA (1994), the tenth at the Catholic University in Brussels, Belgium (1995), and the eleventh at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA (1995).
Author: Ian G. Roberts
Author: Robert Freidin
Author: R. Freidin
Author: Phil Branigan
Author: Christina Tortora
Author: Guglielmo Cinque
Author: Perugia Adriana Belletti Associate Professor of Linguistics Universita per Stanieri
Author: Liliane M. V. Haegeman
Author: Naoki Fukui
Author: Höskuldur Thräinsson