An argument that agreement and agreementless languages are unified under an expanded view of grammatical features including both phi-features and certain discourse configurational features.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
A wide-ranging generative analysis of the typology of possession sentences, solving long-standing puzzles in their syntax and semantics."A major question for linguistic theory concerns how the structure of sentences relates to their meaning. There is broad agreement in the field that there is some regularity in the way that lexical semantics and syntax are related, so that thematic roles (the d…
This is the first extended discussion of preferred interpretation in language understanding, integrating much of the best research in linguistic pragmatics from the last two decades. When we speak, we mean more than we say. In this book Stephen C. Levinson explains some general processes that underlie presumptions in communication. This is the first extended discussion of preferred interpret…
This is the first experimental study of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis. Among the universal principles are those known as the principles of the binding theory. These principles constrain the range of interpretations that can be assigned to sentences containing reflexives and reciprocals, pronouns, and referring express…
A groundbreaking, comprehensive formal theory of grammatical person that recasts its empirical foundations and re-envisions its theoretical core."Impossible persons, Daniel Harbour's comprehensive and groundbreaking formal theory of grammatical person, upends understanding of a universal and ubiquitous grammatical category. Breaking with much past work, Harbour establishes three core theses, on…
Linguists reconsider issues raised in Chomsky's 1977 article "On Wh-movement" from the perspective of current Minimalist theory.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
In What Counts, Elena Herburger considers the effects of focus on interpretation. She investigates how focus affects the pragmatics and truth conditions of a sentence by rearranging its quantificational structure.Adopting a neo-Davidsonian stance, Herburger claims that various pragmatic and truth-conditional effects of focus sustain a uniform explanation if focus is viewed as imposing structure…
After presenting the central proposal and showing its implementation in the analyses of familiar cases of syntactic movement, Branigan demonstrates the effects of provocation in a variety of inversion constructions, describes the details of chain formation and successive cyclic movement in a provocation model, and much more.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Norvin Richards argues that there are universal conditions on morphology and phonology, particularly in how the prosodic structures of language can be built, and that these universal structures interact with language-specific properties of phonology and morphology.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Adger proposes a new approach to phrase structure that eschews functional heads and labels structures exocentrically. The proposal simultaneously simplifies the syntactic system and restricts the range of possible structures, ruling out the ubiquitous (remnant) roll-up derivations and forcing a separation of arguments from their apparent heads. This new system has a number of empirical conseque…