Bøker i Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics-serien

This dissertation introduces the notion 'existential faithfulness', which plays a crucial role in the analysis of dissimilation, feature movement and the emergence of the unmarked in reduplication.

This book incorporates data from various Italian dialects along with historical evidence to address the problem of word-initial gemination (raddoppiamento sintattico) in Italian, a popular topic of phonological study.

This work presents the first experimental study of articulatory dynamics of Russian and of secondary articulents in general. Special focus is on the nature of positional markedness scales (Optimality Theory), a key concept in phonological theory.

A significant contribution to the current debate on the role of phonetic optimalisation, this book presents a formal and unified characterization of lenition patterns.

Baauw discusses to what extent errors young children make with their interpretation of definite articles and pronouns are due to their immature pragmatic skills and to what extent incomplete syntactic development plays a role.

The main topic of this work is the interaction between syntactic structure and meanin within the noun phrase, with data drwn primarily from English and Italian.

Based on a wide variety of languages, this study examines the ways in which modal notions, such as permission and obligation, interact with negation. In particular, the study focuses on how ambiguities in scope are resolved. It is shown that languages overwhelmingly make use of two different strategies. The first strategy (the Modal Suppletion Strategy) is to use different modal verbs for the different scope interpretations. This strategy is found in languages such as English, Finnish, and Tamil. The second strategy (the Negation Placement Strategy), which is found in French, Russian, and Modern Greek (among others) is to use two different places for the negation to surface. It turns out that these two strategies have two different foundations: the first strategy is a semantic one, while the second strategy is syntactic in nature. That there is a difference can be shown by appealing to syntactic tests. The Modal Suppletion Strategy is not sensitive to these tests, while the Negation Placement Strategy is. It can also be shown that the two different strategies are correlated with word order: the Negation Placement Strategy is found exclusively in languages with a basic SVO order and with a negative morpheme that precedes the verb. This is checked against a database of 75 languages. Finally, these results are compared to other scope resolutions in languages.

A study of the relationship between the Case of a noun phrase (NP) and its quantificational character. Develops a hypothesis about strong and weak readings of NPs, and on type of Case assignment, using examples from Finnish, Turkish, Inuit, English, and Dutch. Contains chapters on the semantics of

This Study investigates the syntax of complement and relative clauses in English which lack overt complementizers (clauses without "that). The central analytical claim is that these clauses differ in phrase structure from their synonymous counterparts with overt complementizers. In particular, novel evidence from adjunction facts is used to demonstrate that clauses without "that are more appropriately analyzed as bare sentences of the category IP rather than CP with a phonologically null head, a proposal which has since been adopted in many economy-driven approaches to phrase structure. In addition to strong empirical support, the IP-analysis is shown to provide explanations for a variety of related syntactic phenomena, superior to those available under the previous CP-analysis. These include the restricted syntactic distribution of "that-less complements, in addition to the adjacency restrictions on "that-less relative clauses. The analytical task posed by the "that-trace effect is also very much reduced under the IP-analysis. The work also examines the syntax of 'subject contact clauses' (e.g."There's a man wants to see you.), common in many non-standard varieties, including Hiberno-English and establishes that they have all the distinctive properties of other "that-less relative clauses. This book will be of interest to a broad variety of readers: scholars working in all areas of generative syntax, specialists in English and Germanic syntax, in addition to researchers in non-standard English and Hiberno-English.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This work is an investigation of the relationship between prosodic structure, intonational structure and focus realization in European Portuguese. It is discussed from a cross-linguistic perspective, with special reference to languages like English, Dutch, German, and Italian.

Interest in statistical natural language generation is rapidly increasing. This work sheds important light from theoretical linguistics on the type of information crucial to statistical NLG algorithms.

This book analyses 153 languages from a large variety of families to establish a previously unexplored relationship between phonetically conditioned sound changes such as lenitions and functional considerations.

Investigates various phenomena affecting both stressed and unstressed vowels in Romance languages and analyses vowel reduction, which involves a change of vowel quality in stressless syllables that favours vowel qualities that are maximally distinguishable from one another.

With a database of over 180 languages and dialects, this book proposes a typology of the phonological patterning of ejectives, drawing together widely-scattered information.

This work explores cross linguistic variation in nasalization.

This work explores effect of speech perception strategies upon morphological structure. Jennifer Hay investigates the role of two factors known to be relevant to speech perceptions: phonotactics and lexical frequency.

Central questions addressed are the analysis of subjects in Spanish and English (DP vs. NP and null vs. preverbal vs. postverbal) and the nature of constructions such as topicalization, left-dislocation, and focus preposing.

Offering a new perspective on natural language predicates by analyzing data from the Plains Cree language, this text demonstrates that what is known about aspectual properties of well-studied languages is also true of the less-studied Cree language.

Investigating the operation ellipsis and wa-marking in a corpus of colloquial Japanese speech, this title shows that Japanese conversation obeys certain principles of argument ellipsis that appear to be language universal: the tendency to omit transitive and human subjects and the tendency to express no more than one argument per clause.

This study examines the meaning of proto-typical conditional-sentence markers like English if and Spanish si from a primarily pragmatic perspective.

Investigating variation and change in Old English word order, this text includes special emphasis on the position of the verb.

This text examines the typology of "wh-" expressions and indefinite NPs within the minimalist framework.

Builds a semantics for several kinds of future-referring expressions, including will sentences, be going to sentences, and futurates. This title addresses a number of issues of interest to formal semanticists, from modal and aspectual semantics, to the mapping of functional elements in the clause, to the logical form of conditionals.

Drawing insights from conceptual semantics, cognitive semantics, generative lexicon, construction grammar and formal syntax, this book is the first attempt at a comparative account of lexical semantic issues in Mandarin Chinese.

This book provides evidence for the importance of auditory properties of speech sounds in phonology. The analyses, drawn from diverse languages, identify processes which have no articulatory commonality, but do share auditory features.

Jennifer Smith shows that phonological processes specific to strong positions are distinct from those involved in classic positional neutralization effects.