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The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

Following up on the Guide to Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface Theories (2011), written from a theory-neutral point of view, this book lays out the author's approach to the representational side of the interface. The book is thus about how information is transmitted to phonology when an object is inserted into phonological representations (as opposed to the derivational means, i.e. phase theory today). The idea of Direct Interface is that diacritics such as hash-marks in SPE or prosodic constituency since the early 80s, which mediate between morpho-syntax and phonology, are illegal in a modular environment where computational systems can only process domain-specific vocabulary. Direct Interface instead holds that only truly phonological vocabulary can carry morpho-syntactic information. It is shown that of all representational objects only syllabic space qualifies. Couched in CVCV (or strict CV), i.e. Government Phonology, this insight is then applied in detailed case studies of Belarusian, Corsican, Greek and the exhaustive lexical inventory of sonorant-obstruent-initial words in 13 Slavic languages,. In this sense, the book is the 2nd volume of A Lateral Theory of Phonology (2004).

Pied-piping, the phenomenon that wh-movement may target categories not marked with the feature [wh], has generally been considered idiosyncratic and pathological. On Pied-Piping argues that this assessment is not correct. The book presents a compilation of crosslinguistic generalizations on pied-piping and a theory that derives them. Pied-piping is incorporated into a derivational theory of successive cyclic wh-movement that includes input-output optimization, the operation Agree, and phase theory. The resulting theory is a step towards closing a long-standing gap in syntactic theorizing.

The book provides a theoretical and empirical evaluation of a field that has been the focus of generative theories on language acquisition: the acquisition of finiteness and related properties such as root infinitives, verb movement and null subjects. It contains a critical empirical assessment of the various hypotheses, lists the implications for linguistic theory and provides alternative analyses. Issues covered are: (i) the semantics of children's root infinitives (tense, modality and aspect), (ii) the relation between lexical, morphological and syntactic development in the domain of finiteness, (iii) the role of the input, and (iv) the interference of cognitive development. Typological focus is on Germanic languages.

The goal of this book is twofold. On the one hand we want to offer a discussion of some of the more important properties of the nominal projection, on the other hand we want to provide the reader with tools for syntactic analysis which apply to the structure of DP but which are also relevant for other domains of syntax. In order to achieve this dual goal we will discuss phenomena which are related to the nominal projection in relation to other syntactic phenomena (e.g. pro drop will be related to N-ellipsis, the classification of pronouns will be applied to the syntax of possessive pronouns, N-movement will be compared to V-movement, the syntax of the genitive construction will be related to that of predicate inversion etc.). In the various chapters we will show how recent theoretical proposals (distributed morphology, anti-symmetry, checking theory) can cast light on aspects of the syntax of the NP. When necessary, we will provide a brief introduction of these theoretical proposals. We will also indicate problems with these analyses, whether they be inherent to the theories as such (e.g. what is the trigger for movement in antisymmetric approaches) or to the particular instantiations. The book cannot and will not provide the definitive analysis of the syntax of noun phrases. We consider that this would not be possible, given the current flux in generative syntax, with many new theoretical proposals being developed and explored, but the book aims at giving the reader the tools with which to conduct research and to evaluate proposals in the literature. In the discussion of various issues, we will apply the framework that is most adequate to deal with problems at hand. We will therefore not necessarily use the same approach throughout the discussion. Though proposals in the literature will be referred to when relevant, we cannot attempt to provide a critical survey of the literature. We feel that such a survey would be guided too strongly by theoretical choices, which would not be compatible with the pedagogical purposes this book has. The book is comparative in its approach, and data from different languages will be examined, including English, German, Dutch (West-Flemish), Greek, Romance, Semitic, Slavic, Albanian, Hungarian, Gungbe.

The essays in this volume, dating from 1991 onwards, focus on highly characteristic constructions of English, Romance languages, and German. Among clause-internal structures, the most puzzling are English double objects, particle constructions, and non-finite complementation (infinitives, participles and gerunds). Separate chapters in Part I offer relatively complete analyses of each. These analyses are integrated into the framework of Emonds (2000), wherein a simplified subcategorization theory fully expresses complement selection. Principal results of that framework constitute the initial essay of Part I. areas. The self-contained essays can all be read separately. They are rich in empirical documentation, and yet in all of them, solutions are constructed around a coherent, relatively simple theoretical core. In Romance languages, classic generative debates have singled out clitic and causative constructions as the most challenging. Separate essays in Part II lay out the often complex paradigms and propose detailed syntactic solutions, simple in their overall architecture yet rich in detailed predictions. Concerning movements to clausal edges, especially controversial topics include passives, English parasitic gaps, and the nature of verb-second systems exemplified by German.. The essays in Part III each use rather surprising but still theoretically constrained structural accounts to solve thorny problems in all three.

This study shows that Scandinavian object shift and so-called A-scrambling in the continental Germanic languages are the same, and aims at providing an account of the variation that we find with respect to this phenomenon by combining certain aspects of the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory. More specifically, it is claimed that representations created by a simplified version of the computational system of human language CHL are evaluated in an optimality theoretic fashion by taking recourse to a very small set of output constraints.

This study addresses the problems scrambling langauges provide for the existing syntactic theories by analyzing the interaction of semantic and discourse functional factors with syntactic properties of word order in this type of languages, and by discussing the implications of this interaction for Universal Grammar. Three interrelated goals are carefully followed in this work. The first is to analyze the syntactic structure of Persian, a language which exhibits free word order. With this analysis, the author has accounted for the relative order of categorized expressions, the motivation for their possible rearrangements, and the grammatical results of those reorderings. In this respect, a broad range of major syntactic phenomena, including object shift, Case, Extended Projection Principle (EPP), binding, and scope interpretation of quantifiers, interrogative phrases, adverbial phrases, and negative elements are examined. This monograph is the first major theoretical work ever published on Persian, and therefore fills the existing gap by providing insight into the syntactic structure of this language. The second goal is to connect these insights to similar linguistic properties in languages in which scrambling occurs (e.g. German, Dutch, Hindi, Russian, Japanese, and Korean), and to provide a deeper understanding of this group of genetically diverse, but typologically related languages. The final and principal goal is to situate the results of this work within the framework of the Minimalist Program (MP). The investigations in this study indicate that scrambling is not an optional rule, and that certain principles of MP, such as the Minimal Link Condition, are only seemingly violated in these languages. Furthermore, it is shown that careful analysis of scrambling with respect to binding and scope relations, and a reanalysis of the properties of A and A' movements, cast some doubts on the relevance of a typology of movement in natural language.

Tense/Mood/Aspect-agreeing Infinitivals is an in-depth investigation of the syntax of verb-verb agreement phenomena in Swedish, including pseudocoordinations of the form John started and wrote 'John started writing' and double participles of the form John had been-able written 'John had been able to write'. Providing evidence from facts concerning extraction, locality, selection, and interpretation, the book argues that the relevant construction types all involve surface variants of "e;infinitives in disguise"e;; infinitivals that agree with the matrix clause in tense/mood/aspect. Arguments are presented in favour of taking the dependencies underlying the agreement to be instances of Agree between functional heads of the same label, a configuration that yields restructuring/clause-union. The main theoretical contributions of the book are two: (i) Agreement is proportional to functional structure: The possibility of "e;copying"e; a particular morphosyntactic form is contingent on the presence of the corresponding functional projection in the agreeing XP. (ii) Size constancy between restructuring/non-restructuring infinitivals: The category selected by a verb may remain constant between restructuring and non-restructuring configurations. It is suggested that an important aspect of restructuring may be alternation between unmarked (negatively specified) features and unvalued varieties of the same features, capturing properties such as "e;tenselessness"e;, "e;finitelessness"e;, etc. of restructuring infinitivals. The book is an important contribution to the syntax of infinitival clauses, the syntax of clause-union/restructuring, and more generally to the syntax of agreement phenomena in natural language. In addition, it provides a general reference source for anyone interested in the syntax of Swedish and other Scandinavian languages.

This book proposes a new model of phonology that integrates rules and repairs triggered by markedness constraints in a classical derivational model. In developing this theory, the book offers new solutions to many long-standing problems involving syllabic and segmental phonology with analyses of natural language data, both well-known and relatively unknown. The book also includes a new treatment of Palatalization and Affrication processes, a novel theory of feature visibility as an alternative to feature underspecification and an extensive critique of Optimality Theory.

Theta Theory explores the lexicon as an interface in the strict sense, as facilitating the flow of information between cognition and the computational system of language. It argues for the traditional concept of a listed lexicon, where semantic roles are encoded as features of verbs, and against event decomposition. Part one of the book discusses the link between cognition and the lexicon. Mainstream theories of lexical semantics are critically reviewed. Furthermore, this part provides an extensive description of the relevant data in German, including agentivity, causation, psychological predicates, and different types of diathesis alternations. Part two is devoted to the link between the lexicon and syntax. It develops a parallel model of grammatical derivation, which allows the formulation of robust generalizations over thematic role assignment, but at the same time acknowledges the relevance of other components, in particular morpho-phonology and narrow syntax. The theory is applied to a wide range of German constructions including modal infinitives, the present and gerundive participle, the past/passive/adjectival participle, verbal particles, auxiliary selection, and unaccusatives/reflexives. The book is of interest for students and scholars of lexical semantics, for descriptive German linguistics, and for linguists concerned with the development of the Minimalist Program.

European Portuguese, like other Romance languages, display a great amount of word order variation. Out of the six logically possible permutations between Subject, Verb and Complement in a transitive sentence, five are possible: SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS and OSV. The primary goal of this book is to provide an analysis of the several positions where the subject may surface in European Portuguese. Departing from an architecture of the clause as sketched in early minimalist work, containing two subject-related functional categories above VP (AgrP and TP), it is shown that the subject may surface in all potential landing sites: Spec,AgrP, Spec,TP and Spec,VP. Moreover, just like any other argument of the clause, it is claimed that subjects also have the possibility of surfacing in a left-dislocated position, arguably adjoining to the clause's left periphery. It is shown that there is no free variation. Each of these positions may be occupied by the subject, only if two requirements are met:i)The position is made available by syntax;ii)The position does not violate any interface condition.In other words, the following model is argued for: syntax generates legitimate outputs. At the interface levels, each output may be selected or filtred out, according to requirements of the interface. The picture emerging from the proposal made in this book is the following: syntax proper does not need to refer to conditions best placed at the interface. All that is needed from syntax is that it generates an array of well-formed outputs. Such outputs may be evaluated a posteriori by each of the interfaces. If they meet requirements of the interface, they are selected as legitimate. If, on the contrary, some interface condition is violated, they are ruled out. Under this approach, three in-dependent results are derived: i) an explanation is found for the patterns of word order variation; ii) syntax proper may be reduced to its own tools, not having to manipulate semantic, discourse or prosodic variables; iii) the intuition that European Portuguese is an SVO language is derived: this word order corresponds to the one in which the subject occupies the only specifier position in which the other interfaces play no role.

Generative analyses of comparatives traditionally include two construction specific ellipsis operations, Comparative Deletion and Comparative Ellipsis. Drawing from a wide array of new data, the present monograph develops a novel, directly semantically interpretable analysis of comparatives which does not require reference to designated deletion processes. On the one hand, Comparative Deletion is reinterpreted in terms of overt movement of the degree predicate. The resulting head-raising analysis contributes to an understanding of various puzzles for comparatives related to binding, locality and the influence of word-order variation on the interpretation and size of the ellipsis site. On the other hand, it is argued that Comparative Ellipsis can entirely be subsumed under standardly sanctioned ellipsis operations such as Gapping, Right Node Raising and Across-the-Board-movement. In addition, the study presents arguments for an ellipsis analysis of phrasal comparatives (such as Millhouse saw more movies than Bart). Empirical support for this conception derives, among others, from the complex interdependencies between ellipsis and serialization in English and German, and the binding properties of remnants inside the comparative complement. The study is directed towards readers interested in formal syntax and the syntax/semantics interface.

This book contains 14 articles by Teun Hoekstra (1953-1998) on core issues in syntactic theory. Some articles focus on the structure of DP, others on the structure of the sentence as a whole, while others still deal explicitly with the parallels between the two. The papers are distributed over four sections: "e;Argument structure"e;, "e;T-chains"e;, "e;The morpho-syntax of verbal and nominal projections"e; and "e;Small clauses"e;. More than half of the articles in this book are published here for the first time or appear for the first time in English. Hoekstra's work is characterized by a fundamental interest in the central questions of syntactic theory, most notably the relation between argument structure and X-bar structure. This concentrated interest led to a deep understanding of the notion of transitivity, with respect to both the status of the external argument and that of the internal argument, where "e;status"e; refers to both the content and the licensing. In this collection of papers, Hoekstra reports on his insights in these matters. As far as content and licensing of the external argument is concerned, this collection contains papers on the relation between passives and their active counterparts, the parallels between possessives and transitives and the differences and similarities between past participles and infinitives. As to the internal argument, we find papers addressing sentential complementation, verbal affixation and resultatives. And there is a whole section on tense, and its role in keeping the sentence together. One of the papers in this collection is Hoekstra's classic, but hitherto unpublished "e;Small clauses everywhere"e; (more than 70 pages), which summarizes Hoekstra's views on such issues as resultatives, particle verbs and double object constructions.

Vowel Harmony and Correspondence Theory covers the major issues in the generative analysis of vowel harmony and vowel harmony typology. The book offers an economical account of the most prominent features of vowel harmony systems (root control, affix control, dominance, vowel opacity, and neutrality) within the framework of optimality theory, extending the notion of correspondence to the syntagmatic dimension.The book contains a typological overview of vowel harmony patterns, an introduction to the basics of optimality theory including some of its most recent extensions and detailed studies of harmony systems in 10 languages from a variety of language families.

This book presents a unified formal approach to various contemporary linguistic formalisms such as Government & Binding, Minimalism or Tree Adjoining Grammar. Through a careful introduction of mathematical techniques from logic, automata theory and universal algebra, the book aims at graduate students and researchers who want to learn more about tightly constrained logical approaches to natural language syntax. Therefore it features a complete and well illustrated introduction to the connection between declarative approaches formalized in monadic second-order logic (MSO) and generative ones formalized in various forms of automata as well as of tree grammars. Since MSO logic (on trees) yields only context-free languages, and at least the last two of the formalisms mentioned above clearly belong to the class of mildly context-sensitive formalisms, it becomes necessary to deal with the problem of the descriptive complexity of the formalisms involved in another way. The proposed genuinely new two-step approach overcomes this limitation of MSO logic while still retaining the desired tightly controlled formal properties.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

Prosodic Phonology by Marina Nespor and Irene Vogel is now available again. "e;Nespor & Vogel 1986"e; is a citation classic - even after twenty years, it is still recognized as the standard resource on Prosodic Phonology. This groundbreaking work introduces all of the prosodic constituents (syllable, foot, word, clitic group, phonological phrase, intonational phrase and utterance) and provides evidence for each one from numerous languages. Prosodic Phonology also includes a chapter in which experimental psycholinguistic data support the proposed hierarchy.A perceptual study provides evidence that prosodic constituent structure - not syntactic constituent structure - predicts whether listeners are able to disambiguate different types of ambiguous sentences. A chapter on the phonology of poetic meter examines portions of Dante's Divine Comedy.It is demonstrated that the constituents proposed for spoken language also make interesting predictions about literary metrical patterns. Prosodic Phonology is an important reference not only for phonologists, but for all linguists interested in the issue of interfaces among the components of grammar.It is also a basic resource for psycholinguists and cognitive scientists working on linguistic perception and language acquisition.

This book makes an important contribution to the expanding body of work in generative phonology which aims to reduce the number of traditionally recognized melodic categories in order to achieve a greater degree of restrictiveness. By analyzing data from a large number of different languages, Nasukawa establishes a clear affinity between nasality and voicing, and demonstrates the advantages of treating these two properties as different phonetic manifestations of a single nasal-voice category. The choice of whether to interpret this category as voicing or nasality is determined by the active or inactive status of a complement tier; when active, this complement tier enhances the acoustic image of its head category and is interpreted as voicing. This study deepens our understanding of the typological relation between nasality and voicing, and sheds new light on a number of related agreement phenomena such as nasal harmony, postnasal voicing assimilation, voiced-obstruent voicing assimilation and spontaneous prenasalisation.

This book presents a development of Jean Lowenstamm's idea that phonological constituent structure can be reduced to a strict sequence of non-branching Onsets and non-branching Nuclei. The approach at hand is known as 'CVCV', and emerged from Government Phonology. Since its very beginnings in the early 80s, the central claim of this theory has been that syllable-based generalisations are due to lateral relations among constituents, rather than to the familiar arboreal structure. This book shows that Standard Government Phonology did not go far enough in implementing this idea. CVCV completes the missing steps: structure and causality are fully lateralised. Detailed discussion is offered how basic phonological objects and processes such as Codas, closed syllables, long vowels, geminates, syllabic consonants, vowel-zero alternations, closed syllable shortening, compensatory lengthening, lenition and the like can be represented within the CVCV frame. The first part of the book is called "e;What is CVCV ?"e;. It presents the properties of the theory. The second part focuses on the reasons why it is worthwhile considering CVCV a valuable and viable approach. The primary goal of the book is not to engage the dialogue with other phonological theories. Rather, it aims at establishing a player in the general game: defining the properties of a theory is always prior to its comparison with other models. In the current OT-dominated phonological scene, then, CVCV appears as a true theory of the 80s insofar as it is representational at core: representations exist and are primitive, rather than arising as accidental results from a heterogeneous set of constraints. The original analyses presented in this book are grounded in the languages that the author is best familiar with, i.e. (Western) Slavic, French, German and some Semitic. Particular attention is paid to diachronic evidence in its relation to the synchronic state of languages.

Infinitives: Restructuring and Clause Structure offers a detailed study of the clausal architecture of infinitival constructions providing a unified analysis of restructuring, control, modals, and raising. The book critically evaluates previous proposals from both syntactic and semantic perspectives and presents a new analysis incorporating many recent developments in generative linguistic theory. In addition to its theoretical contribution, Infinitives contains a detailed descriptive overview of a range of constructions, primarily from the Germanic languages and will thus not only be of value to generative linguists but will also serve as a general reference source for those interested in the Germanic languages.