Ellipsis and Focus in Generative Grammar PDF Download

Author: Susanne Winkler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110890429
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309

View

Book Description
Covering linguistic research on empty categories over more than three decades, this monograph presents the result of an in-depth syntactic and focus-theoretical investigation of ellipsis in generative grammar. The phenomenon of ellipsis most generally refers to the omission of linguistic material, structure and sound. The central aim of this book is to explain on the basis of linguistic theorizing of how it is possible that we understand more than we actually hear. The answer developed throughout this book is that ellipsis is an interface phenomenon which can only be explained on the basis of the complex interaction between syntax, semantics and information structure. Scholars of grammar and cognitive scientists will profit from reading this book.

Author: Kirsten Gengel
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191643114
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 203

View

Book Description
This book is all about ellipsis in natural language - the phenomena in which words and phrases go missing in the linguistic signal, but are nonethe less interpreted by the receiver, eg in the following sentence, the second instance of read is understood whether or not it is spoken Claire read a book and Heather [read] a magazine. Contemporary theoretical linguistics has described several forms of ellipsis in English, and different syntactic mechanisms have been proposed which account for their structures. Kirsten Gengel investigates pseudogapping, which, she proposes, is one variety of ellipsis. At the heart of her discussion lies the interaction between focus and deletion. Her analysis - which draws on new research in Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch, as well as data from Portuguese, French, and English - provides a novel approach to not only this particular form of ellipsis but to the derivation of ellipsis in general, and has the potential of unifying several elliptical phenomena in generative grammar.

Author: Marlies Kluck
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501500465
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 363

View

Book Description
This volume presents a cross-section of research addressing the interaction of two prominent areas in linguistic theory: parenthesis and ellipsis. The contributions address various theoretical questions raised by 'incomplete' parenthetical constituents, covering a diverse empirical domain and various subfields of linguistics.

Author: Jeroen van Craenenbroeck
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
ISBN: 0198712391
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1147

View

Book Description
This handbook is the first volume to provide a comprehensive, in-depth, and balanced discussion of ellipsis, a phenomena whereby expressions in natural language appear to be incomplete but are still understood. It explores fundamental questions about the workings of grammar and provides detailed case studies of inter- and intralinguistic variation.

Author: Kirsten Gengel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description

Author: Anne Lobeck
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195357930
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 221

View

Book Description
This book elaborates a theory of ellipsis that sheds new light on a well-known phenomenon, bringing it under the aegis of general and universal principles. Lobeck argues that ellipted categories in IP (VP Ellipsis), DP (N' Ellipsis), and CP (Sluicing) are empty, non-referential pronominals, subject to the same licensing and identification conditions as referential pro. She proposes that both types of empty pronominals must be licensed under head-government to satisfy the Empty Category Principle, and identified through strong agreement. In the case of ellipsis, agreement-type features make the empty category visible to interpretive processes of reconstruction. These licensing and identification conditions derive the result that ellipses are complements of functional categories DET, COMP, and INFL, but not of lexical categories. The analysis is supported by contrastive evidence from ellipsis in French and German, in which licensing and identification interact with Verb Raising, feature checking, and a parameter defining "strong" agreement.

Author: Güliz Güneş
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192589296
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

View

Book Description
This volume explores the nature of ellipsis, the core phenomenon that results in various types of omission in sentences. The chapters adopt the popular 'silent structure' accounts of ellipsis, and investigate the question of when linguistic material becomes silenced during the derivation and realization of syntactic structure. The book begins with a detailed introduction from the editors that outlines the current generative syntactic approaches to the derivational timing of ellipsis. In the chapters that follow, internationally-recognized experts in the field address key topics including structure building, the architecture of grammar, the interaction of distinct modules with syntax, the order of operations in the post-syntactic component, and constraints on binding relations. The authors also present novel arguments for and against the derivational approaches to ellipsis, the licensing of ellipsis, and phonological constraints on elliptical sentences. The findings, based on data from English and other languages such as Armenian, Italo-Romance, Ossetic, Spanish, Taiwanese, and Turkish, facilitate a deeper understanding of the interaction between syntax and the neighbouring modules in the formation of elliptical utterances.

Author: Marcel den Dikken
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107354587
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1412

View

Book Description
Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.

Author: Kerstin Schwabe
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110952157
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280

View

Book Description
The papers of the volume mirror the ongoing debate on approaches towards two related topics: conjunction and ellipsis. The major issues are the syntactic relationship between the conjuncts, the syntactic category of the conjunction words, the size of the conjuncts, the syntactic and semantic status of the null elements, and semantic and information structural restrictions. A wide range of facts from various languages are explored in relation to phrasal coordination, Gapping, Pseudogapping, VP-ellipsis, and Sluicing.

Author: Michael Shaun Rochemont
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027227918
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 234

View

Book Description
The topic of this book is the notion of focus and its linguistic characterization. The main thesis is that focus has a uniform grammatical identification only as a syntactic element with in English at least a certain systematic phonological interpretation and presumably universally a range of semantic interpretations. In broad respects, the framework within this investigation is conducted is that of Chomsky & Lasnik (1977) and the subsequent Government and Binding framework. After considering defining the location of prominence in a focused phrase in terms of constituent structure, the author argues that an argument structure approach to the focus phrase/prominence relation is more promising. This is then exemplified in analyses of cleft focus and constructional focus.