Phi Features And The Modular Architecture Of Language

Author : Milan Rezac
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9048196981
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Phi-features and the Modular Architecture of Language written by Milan Rezac and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-11-12 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph investigates the modular architecture of language through the nature of "uninterpretable" phi-features: person, number, gender, and Case. It provides new tools and evidence for the modular architecture of the human language faculty, a foundational topic of linguistic research. At the same time it develops a new theory for one of the core issues posed by the Minimalist Program: the relationship of syntax to its interfaces and the nature of uninterpretable features. The work sets out to establish a new cross-linguistic phenomenon to study the foregoing, person-governed last-resort repairs, which provides new insights into the nature of ergative/accusative Case and of Case licensing itself. This is the first monograph that explicitly addresses the syntactic vs. morphological status of uninterpretable phi-features and their relationship to interface systems in a similar way, drawing on person-based interactions among arguments as key data-base.

Author : Daniel Harbour
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191526738
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Phi Theory written by Daniel Harbour and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-05-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phi-features, such as person, number, and gender, present a rare opportunity for syntacticians, morphologists and semanticists to collaborate on a research enterprise in which they all have an equal stake and which they all approach with data and insights from their own fields. This volume is the first to attempt to bring together these different strands and styles of research. It presents the core questions, major results, and new directions of this emergent area of linguistic theory and shows how Phi Theory casts light on the nature of interfaces and the structure of the grammar. The book will interest scholars and students of all aspects of linguistic theory at graduate level and above.

Author : Greville G. Corbett
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139789724
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Features written by Greville G. Corbett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-11 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features are a central concept in linguistic analysis. They are the basic building blocks of linguistic units, such as words. For many linguists they offer the most revealing way to explore the nature of language. Familiar features are Number (singular, plural, dual, ...), Person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and Tense (present, past, ...). Features have a major role in contemporary linguistics, from the most abstract theorizing to the most applied computational applications, yet little is firmly established about their status. They are used, but are little discussed and poorly understood. In this unique work, Corbett brings together two lines of research: how features vary between languages and how they work. As a result, the book is of great value to the broad range of perspectives of those who are interested in language.

Author : Maria Polinsky
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190256605
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Deconstructing Ergativity written by Maria Polinsky and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nominative-accusative and ergative are two common alignment types found across languages. In the former type, the subject of an intransitive verb and the subject of a transitive verb are expressed the same way, and differently from the object of a transitive. In ergative languages, the subject of an intransitive and the object of a transitive appear in the same form, the absolutive, and the transitive subject has a special, ergative, form. Ergative languages often follow very different patterns, thus evading a uniform description and analysis. A simple explanation for that has to do with the idea that ergative languages, much as their nominative-accusative counterparts, do not form a uniform class. In this book, Maria Polinsky argues that ergative languages instantiate two main types, the one where the ergative subject is a prepositional phrase (PP-ergatives) and the one with a noun-phrase ergative. Each type is internally consistent and is characterized by a set of well-defined properties. The book begins with an analysis of syntactic ergativity, which as Polinsky argues, is a manifestation of the PP-ergative type. Polinsky discusses diagnostic properties that define PPs in general and then goes to show that a subset of ergative expressions fit the profile of PPs. Several alternative analyses have been proposed to account for syntactic ergativity; the book presents and outlines these analyses and offers further considerations in support of the PP-ergativity approach. The book then discusses the second type, DP-ergative languages, and traces the diachronic connection between the two types. The book includes two chapters illustrating paradigm PP-ergative and DP-ergative languages: Tongan and Tsez. The data used in these descriptions come from Polinsky's original fieldwork hence presenting new empirical facts from both languages.

Author : Beatriz Fernandez
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199937362
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Variation in Datives written by Beatriz Fernandez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Variation in Datives collects new research on the nature of syntactic micro-variation in datives. The papers in this volume examine different aspects of internal variation in dative marking, such as agreement and case alternations, distribution of adpositional structures and dative case-marking, the different structural positions of dative arguments and their semantic contribution, and patterns of syncretism in the clitic and/or agreement system. Interest in these topics has grown significantly in the past 20 years. Variation in Datives makes a significant contribution to our understanding of language variation, as it adds the micro-comparative perspective to the general discussion and includes 10 new articles on a wide range of European languages, including Greek, Basque, Icelandic, and Serbo-Croatian. Variation in Datives will appeal to scholars and advanced students of syntax, linguistic variation, and especially syntactic micro-variation.

Author : Karlos Arregi
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9400738897
Total Pages : 434 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Morphotactics written by Karlos Arregi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-05-23 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive treatment of several phenomena in Distributed Morphology explores a number of topics of high relevance to current linguistic theory. It examines the structure of the syntactic and postsyntactic components of word formation, and the role of hierarchical, featural, and linear restrictions within the auxiliary systems of several varieties of Basque. The postsyntactic component is modeled as a highly articulated system that accounts for what is shared and what exhibits variation across Basque dialects. The emphasis is on a principled ordering of postsyntactic operations based on their intrinsic properties, and on the relationship between representations in the Spellout component of grammar with other grammatical modules. The analyses in the book treat related phenomena in other languages and thereby have much to offer for a general morphology readership, as well as those interested in the syntax-morphology interface, the theory of Distributed Morphology, and Basque.

Author : Alain Rouveret
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027208220
Total Pages : 439 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Resumptive Pronouns at the Interfaces written by Alain Rouveret and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume is based on a round table on resumptive pronouns which was held at the UFR de Linguistique, Universite Paris-Diderot, on June 21 and 22, 2007."

Author : Diane Massam
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0198793553
Total Pages : 379 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Niuean written by Diane Massam and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-04-09 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the grammar of Niuean, an endangered Polynesian language spoken on the island of Niue and in New Zealand, with a focus on the issue of predication. Since Aristotle, it has been claimed that a sentence consists of a subject and a predicate. Niuean constitutes the perfect testing ground for this claim: it displays verb-subject-object word order, in which the subject interrupts the predicate, and has an ergative case system, in which subjects are not clearly distinguished from objects in their marking for grammatical case. Diane Massam uses the framework of generative grammar to carry out a detailed analysis of the internal structure of Niuean predicates and arguments, as well as the relations between them, touching on many other topics including the nature of displacement, word formation, determiners, and thematic roles. The proposal is that Niuean complex predicates are formed via successive inversion, prior to the merge of all arguments (high argument merge), and that the predicate undergoes fronting to initial position across the arguments, with the same structure found also in nominal clauses. The conclusion is that Niuean does not have a subject in the usual sense, and this is related to the fact that the language has isolating morphology, lacking all tense and agreement inflection and nominative case. Instead, the language exhibits low absolutive predication, applicative ergative agents, and predicate fronting in lieu of subject extraction. The book extends our understanding of cross-linguistic sentence structure and grammatical case, and will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, typology, and theoretical linguistics.

Author : Anne Mucha
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027259585
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Non-canonical Control in a Cross-linguistic Perspective written by Anne Mucha and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-09-17 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Control, typically defined as a specific referential dependency between the null-subject of a non-finite embedded clause and a co-dependent of the matrix predicate, has been subject to extensive research in the last 50 years. While there is a broad consensus that a distinction between Obligatory Control (OC), Non-Obligatory Control (NOC) and No Control (NC) is useful and necessary to cover the range of relevant empirical phenomena, there is still less agreement regarding their proper analyses. In light of this ongoing discussion, the articles collected in this volume provide a cross-linguistic perspective on central questions in the study of control, with a focus on non-canonical control phenomena. This includes cases which show NOC or NC in complement clauses or OC in adjunct clauses, cases in which the controlled subject is not in an infinitival clause, or in which there is no unique controller in OC (i.e. partial control, split control, or other types of controllers). Based on empirical generalizations from a wide range of languages, this volume provides insights into cross-linguistic variation in the interplay of different components of control such as the properties of the constituent hosting the controlled subject, the syntactic and lexical properties of the matrix predicate as well as restrictions on the controller, thereby furthering our empirical and theoretical understanding of control in grammar.

Author : Cedric Boeckx
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 144383842X
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language, from a Biological Point of View written by Cedric Boeckx and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume offers a collection of essays covering a broad range of areas where currently a rapprochement between linguistics and biology is actively being sought. Following a certain tradition, we call this attempt at a synthesis “biolinguistics.” The nine chapters (grouped into three parts: Language and Cognition, Language and the Brain, and Language and the Species) offer a comprehensive overview of issues at the forefront of biolinguistic research, such as language structure; language development; linguistic change and variation; language disorders and language processing; the cognitive, neural and genetic basis of linguistic knowledge; or the evolution of the Faculty of Language. Each contribution highlights exciting prospects for the field, but they also point to significant obstacles along the way. The main conclusion is that the age of theoretical exclusivity in Linguistics, much like the age of theoretical specificity, will have to end if interdisciplinarity is to reign and if biolinguistics is to flourish.