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This work is the culmination of an eighteen-year collaboration between Ken Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser on the study of the syntax of lexical items. It examines the hypothesis that the behavior of lexical items may be explained in terms of a very small number of very simple principles. In particular, a lexical item is assumed to project a syntactic configuration defined over just two relations, c…
"A Bradford book."Exploring the creativity of mind through children's language: how the tiniest utterances can illustrate the simple but abstract principles behind modern grammar--and reveal the innate structures of the mind.Every sentence we hear is instantly analyzed by an inner grammar; just as a prism refracts a beam of light, grammar divides a stream of sound, linking diverse strings of in…
"A Bradford book."OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"A Bradford book."AnnotationOCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"A Bradford book."OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
With this study of Maori and Chamorro, Sandra Chung and William Ladusaw make a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the formal semantic analysis of non-Indo-European languages. Their ultimate focus is on how the study of these Austronesian languages can illuminate the alternatives for semantic interpretation and their interaction with syntactic structure. Revisiting the analysis o…
"A Bradford book."Alice ter Meulen integrates current research in natural language semantics, with detailed analyses of English discourse, and logical tools from a variety of sources into an information theory that provides the foundation for computational systems to reason about change and the flow of time. The topic of temporal meaning in texts has received considerable attention in recent ye…
In this theoretical monograph, Edwin Williams demonstrates that when syntax is economical, it economizes on shape distortion rather than on distance. According to Williams, this new notion of economy calls for a new architecture for the grammatical system--in fact, for a new notion of derivation. The new architecture offers a style of clausal embedding--the Level Embedding Scheme--that predicti…
"A Bradford book."In Relators and Linkers, Marcel den Dikken presents a syntax of predication and the inversion of the predicate around its subject, emphasizing meaningless elements (elements with no semantic load) that play an essential role in the establishment and syntactic manipulation of predication relationships. One such element, the RELATOR, mediates the relationship between a predicate…