This book owes its title to a simple idea: words are special because they can provide a label for nothing when they merge with some other category. An exemplification of this special power of words is introduced by the familiar head-complement configurations. For example, the structure that is created when a verb and a direct object DP are merged receives a label from the verb, namely it is a V…
An investigation of how children balance rules and exceptions when they learn languages."All languages have exceptions alongside overarching rules and regularities. How does a young child tease them apart within just a few years of language acquisition? In this book, drawing an economic analogy, Charles Yang argues that just as the price of goods is determined by the balance between supply and …
"A Bradford book."OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
AnnotationOCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
An in-depth analysis of how humanity's compulsion to categorize affects every aspect of our lived experience. The minute we are born -- sometimes even before -- we are categorized. From there, classifications dog our every step: to school, work, the doctor's office, and even the grave. Despite the vast diversity and individuality in every life, we seek patterns, organization, and control. In Ca…
"Two senior scholars explain what language does to human beings, especially how it affects our intersubjective competence"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Two distinguished linguists on language, the history of science, misplaced euphoria, surprising facts, and potentially permanent mysteries. In The Secrets of Words , influential linguist Noam Chomsky and his longtime colleague Andrea Moro have a wide-ranging conversation, touching on such topics as language and linguistics, the history of science, and the relation between language and the brain…
"A syntactic analysis of and solution to the semantic problem: how can speakers convey the same meaning using different speech acts?"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"A new theory on adjunct control from a leading linguistics researcher"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"An explantion of a knowledge-based system for creating computational agents with human-like language ability"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.