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The left periphery of clausal structures has been a prominent topic of research in generative linguistics during the last decades. Closer examination of its properties unfolds a rich array of perspectives like the status of barriers for extraction and government, the articulation of the topic focus structure, the fixation of wh-scope, the marking of clausal types, the interaction of syntactic structure with inflectional morphology as well as the determination of sentence mood and illocutionary force to mention just a few. The purpose of this book is to collect different and relevant studies in this field and to give a general overview of the various theoretical approaches concerned with morphological, syntactic and semantic properties together with the diachronic development of the left periphery.
This collection investigates the architecture of focus in linguistic theory from different theoretical perspectives. Research on focus and information structure in the last four decades has shown that the phenomenon of focus is highly complex, the theoretical approaches manifold, and the data highly sensitive. The main emphasis has been placed on the integration of the notion of focus in generative grammar. In recent years, however, the approaches to focus and information structure underwent a radical change in perspective. The theoretical concept of focus, its related terms and phenomena became the object of research. Along with it, the research questions shifted: instead of locating focus ...
This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual langu...
The volume contains articles that focus on the interface between linguistic and conceptual knowledge. The issues addressed in the volume include the preconditions of every level of the language system that are required for the transformation of linguistic information into conceptual representations. In accordance with Chomsky’s Minimalist language model, the language system is embedded into the performative systems where language is a part of the cognitive competence of human beings, i.e. system of articulation and perception (A/P) and the conceptual-intentional system (C/I). During the formation of linguistic structures, every performative system obtains well-formed representations as its...
This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into multiple central aspects of clause structure and word order, including verb placement, adverbial connectives, pronominal syntax, and information-structural factors.
Uses the cartographic theory to examine the left periphery of the English clause and compare it to the left-peripheral structures of other languages.
In recent years, a number of authors (De Vries 2009, Truckenbrodt 2015, Ott and de Vries 2016, inter alia) have defended that right dislocations (RD) should be treated as bisentential structures, where the “dislocated” constituent is actually a remnant of a clausal ellipsis operation licensed under identity with an antecedent clause. Although Romance RD is a fertile area of research, the consequences of the biclausal analysis remain unexplored in these languages. This monograph intends to fill this gap. Adopting this approach not only solves some issues that have always been at the core of dislocation structures in general; it also allows us to uncover novel sets of data and to provide straightforward explanations for well-known generalizations. Further, it brings RD along with a set of phenomena which are structurally very similar, like afterthoughts or split questions, which have been independently argued to display a bisentential structure. Under alternative, monoclausal approaches to RD, the striking similarities between these phenomena must be rendered anecdotal.
Discourse analytic approaches are central to translator training and translation analysis, but have been somewhat overlooked in recent translation studies. This volume sets out to rectify this marginalization. It considers the evolution of the use of discourse analysis in translation studies, presents current research from ten leading figures in the field and provides pointers for the future. Topics range from close textual analysis of cohesion, thematic structure and the interpersonal function to the effects of global English and the discourses of cyberspace. The inherent link between discourse and the construction of power is evident in many contributions that analyse institutional power and the linguistic resources which mark translator/interpreter positioning. An array of scenarios and languages are covered, including Arabic, Chinese, English, German, Korean and Spanish. Originally published as a special issue of Target 27:3 (2015).
Unlike the notion of "argument" that is central to modern linguistic theorizing, the phenomena that are commonly subsumed under the complementary notion "adjunct" so far have not attracted the attention they deserve. In this volume, leading experts in the field present current approaches to the grammar and pragmatics of adjuncts. The contributions scrutinize i.a. the argument-adjunct distinction, specify conditions of adjunct placement, discuss compositionality issues, and propose new analyses of event-related modification. They are meant to shed new light on an area of linguistic structure that is deemed to be notoriously overlooked.
In this book, Ljiljana Progovac proposes a gradualist, adaptationist approach to the evolution of syntax, subject to natural selection. She provides a specific framework for its study, combining the fields of evolutionary biology, theoretical syntax, typology, neuroscience, and genetics. The author pursues an internal reconstruction of the stages of grammar based on the syntactic theory associated with Chomskyan Minimalism and arrives at specific, testable hypotheses, which are then corroborated by an abundance of theoretically analysed 'living fossils' drawn from a variety of languages. Her approach demonstrates that these fossil structures do not just coexist alongside more modern structur...