You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual langu...
Differential argument marking has been a hot topic in linguistics for several decades, both because it is cross-linguistically widespread and because it raises essential questions at multiple levels of grammar, including the relationship between abstract processes and overt morphological marking, between case and agreement, and between syntax and information structure. This volume provides an introduction into the current state of the art of research on differential case marking and chapters by leading linguists addressing theoretical questions in a wide range of typologically and geographically diverse languages from the Indo-European, Sinitic, Turkic, and Uralic families. The chapters enga...
This monograph investigates A’-dependencies in Standard German, Alemannic and Dutch where the dislocated constituent is indirectly, i.e. not transformationally, related to the position where it is interpreted. The study focuses on relative clauses and shows that an important part of the relativization system in these languages, long relativization, involves a hitherto ignored construction termed resumptive prolepsis. This construction is characterized by base-generation of the operator in the matrix middle-field and a resumptive pronoun in the position of the variable. It is shown that it involves short A’-movement in the matrix clause, empty operator movement in the complement clause an...
This book provides both language-specific and cross-linguistic comparative analyses of phenomena relating to person, case and case-marking, and agreement. The book combines data from eight different language families with theory and explicit analyses, and will be of interest to both formal and data-oriented linguists and typologists alike.
This monograph presents the first in-depth empirical and theoretical study of determiner sharing in German, addressing both its language-specific properties and its comparative syntax. Determiner sharing poses an interesting problem for syntactic theory as it seemingly relies on a parasitic relationship with another form of ellipsis, such as gapping. The first part provides an empirical basis by presenting three acceptability judgment studies for German. The results reveal the novel generalization that determiner sharing is not uniquely dependent on gapping, but can also occur in stripping contexts. The analysis that is developed in the second part shows that the apparent parasitism of determiner sharing can be derived by combining two independently available processes, namely a type of ellipsis like gapping, and a type of movement like split topicalization. The analysis thus avoids any construction-specific additions to the syntactic framework. The findings constitute an argument for approaches to ellipsis that posit an obligatory movement step and thereby contribute to an ongoing debate in the field.
Displacement is a fundamental property of human language, and the restrictions on displacement have been a central concern in generative grammar ever since Ross' (1967) ground-breaking observations of island constraints. While island phenomena have been investigated in detail from various perspectives, a different domain, the domain of Freezing, originally defined in terms of non-base structures, has received far less attention. This volume brings together papers that address the questions of: What are the different concepts of Freezing? Which empirical domains can they explain? Is Freezing a core-syntactic restriction or does information structure, or processing play a role? The collection ...
This dissertation is about the syntax and semantics of non-local dependencies. It focuses on wh-displacement and operator scope and addresses the challenge they pose to theoretical linguistics: How are form and meaning related and to which extent do syntax and semantics operate in parallel? A common approach of formal grammar theories is to assume that displacement and scope construal go hand in hand, and consequently to impose a strict correspondence between syntax and semantics. This approach is challenged, however, by a considerable amount of cases where the syntactic position of an operator expression does not coincide with its semantic scope position. This dissertation therefore pursues...
Exploring the major syntactic phenomena of German, this book provides a state-of-the-art account of German syntax, as well as an outline of the key aspects of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. It is one of the first comprehensive studies of the entire syntactic component of a natural language within the Minimalist Program, covering core issues including clause structure, binding, case, agreement, control, and movement. It introduces a phase-based theory of syntax that establishes Remove, an operation that removes syntactic structure, as a mirror image of Merge, which builds syntactic structure. This unified approach resolves many cases of conflicting structure assignments in syntax, as they occur with passivization, restructuring, long-distance passivization, complex prefields, bridge verbs, applicatives, null objects, pseudo-noun incorporation, nominal concord, and ellipsis. It will pave the way for similar research into other languages and is essential reading for anyone interested in the syntax of German, syntactic theory, or the Minimalist Program.
None