Phi Features And The Modular Architecture Of Language

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Phi-features and the Modular Architecture of Language

Milan Rezac
Phi features and the Modular Architecture of Language Book PDF

Author : Milan Rezac
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2010-11-12
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789048196982

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Phi-features and the Modular Architecture of Language by Milan Rezac Pdf

This monograph investigates the modular architecture of language through the nature of "uninterpretable" phi-features: person, number, gender, and Case. It provides new tools and evidence for the modular architecture of the human language faculty, a foundational topic of linguistic research. At the same time it develops a new theory for one of the core issues posed by the Minimalist Program: the relationship of syntax to its interfaces and the nature of uninterpretable features. The work sets out to establish a new cross-linguistic phenomenon to study the foregoing, person-governed last-resort repairs, which provides new insights into the nature of ergative/accusative Case and of Case licensing itself. This is the first monograph that explicitly addresses the syntactic vs. morphological status of uninterpretable phi-features and their relationship to interface systems in a similar way, drawing on person-based interactions among arguments as key data-base.

Features

Greville G. Corbett
Features Book PDF

Author : Greville G. Corbett
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 341 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2012-10-11
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781139789721

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Features by Greville G. Corbett Pdf

Features are a central concept in linguistic analysis. They are the basic building blocks of linguistic units, such as words. For many linguists they offer the most revealing way to explore the nature of language. Familiar features are Number (singular, plural, dual, ...), Person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and Tense (present, past, ...). Features have a major role in contemporary linguistics, from the most abstract theorizing to the most applied computational applications, yet little is firmly established about their status. They are used, but are little discussed and poorly understood. In this unique work, Corbett brings together two lines of research: how features vary between languages and how they work. As a result, the book is of great value to the broad range of perspectives of those who are interested in language.

Deconstructing Ergativity

Maria Polinsky
Deconstructing Ergativity Book PDF

Author : Maria Polinsky
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2016-04-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780190256609

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Deconstructing Ergativity by Maria Polinsky Pdf

Nominative-accusative and ergative are two common alignment types found across languages. In the former type, the subject of an intransitive verb and the subject of a transitive verb are expressed the same way, and differently from the object of a transitive. In ergative languages, the subject of an intransitive and the object of a transitive appear in the same form, the absolutive, and the transitive subject has a special, ergative, form. Ergative languages often follow very different patterns, thus evading a uniform description and analysis. A simple explanation for that has to do with the idea that ergative languages, much as their nominative-accusative counterparts, do not form a uniform class. In this book, Maria Polinsky argues that ergative languages instantiate two main types, the one where the ergative subject is a prepositional phrase (PP-ergatives) and the one with a noun-phrase ergative. Each type is internally consistent and is characterized by a set of well-defined properties. The book begins with an analysis of syntactic ergativity, which as Polinsky argues, is a manifestation of the PP-ergative type. Polinsky discusses diagnostic properties that define PPs in general and then goes to show that a subset of ergative expressions fit the profile of PPs. Several alternative analyses have been proposed to account for syntactic ergativity; the book presents and outlines these analyses and offers further considerations in support of the PP-ergativity approach. The book then discusses the second type, DP-ergative languages, and traces the diachronic connection between the two types. The book includes two chapters illustrating paradigm PP-ergative and DP-ergative languages: Tongan and Tsez. The data used in these descriptions come from Polinsky's original fieldwork hence presenting new empirical facts from both languages.

Variation in Datives

Beatriz Fernandez,Ricardo Etxepare
Variation in Datives Book PDF

Author : Beatriz Fernandez,Ricardo Etxepare
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780199937363

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Variation in Datives by Beatriz Fernandez,Ricardo Etxepare Pdf

Variation in Datives collects new research on the nature of syntactic micro-variation in datives. The papers in this volume examine different aspects of internal variation in dative marking, such as agreement and case alternations, distribution of adpositional structures and dative case-marking, the different structural positions of dative arguments and their semantic contribution, and patterns of syncretism in the clitic and/or agreement system. Interest in these topics has grown significantly in the past 20 years. Variation in Datives makes a significant contribution to our understanding of language variation, as it adds the micro-comparative perspective to the general discussion and includes 10 new articles on a wide range of European languages, including Greek, Basque, Icelandic, and Serbo-Croatian. Variation in Datives will appeal to scholars and advanced students of syntax, linguistic variation, and especially syntactic micro-variation.

Morphotactics

Karlos Arregi,Andrew Nevins
Morphotactics Book PDF

Author : Karlos Arregi,Andrew Nevins
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 434 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2012-05-23
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789400738898

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Morphotactics by Karlos Arregi,Andrew Nevins Pdf

This comprehensive treatment of several phenomena in Distributed Morphology explores a number of topics of high relevance to current linguistic theory. It examines the structure of the syntactic and postsyntactic components of word formation, and the role of hierarchical, featural, and linear restrictions within the auxiliary systems of several varieties of Basque. The postsyntactic component is modeled as a highly articulated system that accounts for what is shared and what exhibits variation across Basque dialects. The emphasis is on a principled ordering of postsyntactic operations based on their intrinsic properties, and on the relationship between representations in the Spellout component of grammar with other grammatical modules. The analyses in the book treat related phenomena in other languages and thereby have much to offer for a general morphology readership, as well as those interested in the syntax-morphology interface, the theory of Distributed Morphology, and Basque.

Resumptive Pronouns at the Interfaces

Alain Rouveret
Resumptive Pronouns at the Interfaces Book PDF

Author : Alain Rouveret
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 439 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027208224

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Resumptive Pronouns at the Interfaces by Alain Rouveret Pdf

"This volume is based on a round table on resumptive pronouns which was held at the UFR de Linguistique, Universite Paris-Diderot, on June 21 and 22, 2007."

Language, from a Biological Point of View

Cedric Boeckx,María del Carmen Horno-Chéliz
Language from a Biological Point of View Book PDF

Author : Cedric Boeckx,María del Carmen Horno-Chéliz
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2012-03-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781443838429

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Language, from a Biological Point of View by Cedric Boeckx,María del Carmen Horno-Chéliz Pdf

The present volume offers a collection of essays covering a broad range of areas where currently a rapprochement between linguistics and biology is actively being sought. Following a certain tradition, we call this attempt at a synthesis “biolinguistics.” The nine chapters (grouped into three parts: Language and Cognition, Language and the Brain, and Language and the Species) offer a comprehensive overview of issues at the forefront of biolinguistic research, such as language structure; language development; linguistic change and variation; language disorders and language processing; the cognitive, neural and genetic basis of linguistic knowledge; or the evolution of the Faculty of Language. Each contribution highlights exciting prospects for the field, but they also point to significant obstacles along the way. The main conclusion is that the age of theoretical exclusivity in Linguistics, much like the age of theoretical specificity, will have to end if interdisciplinarity is to reign and if biolinguistics is to flourish.

Agree to Agree

Peter W. Smith,Johannes Mursell,Katharina Hartmann
Agree to Agree Book PDF

Author : Peter W. Smith,Johannes Mursell,Katharina Hartmann
Publisher : Language Science Press
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2020
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783961102143

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Agree to Agree by Peter W. Smith,Johannes Mursell,Katharina Hartmann Pdf

Agreement is a pervasive phenomenon across natural languages. Depending on one’s definition of what constitutes agreement, it is either found in virtually every natural language that we know of, or it is at least found in a great many. Either way, it seems to be a core part of the system that underpins our syntactic knowledge. Since the introduction of the operation of Agree in Chomsky (2000), agreement phenomena and the mechanism that underlies agreement have garnered a lot of attention in the Minimalist literature and have received different theoretical treatments at different stages. Since then, many different phenomena involving dependencies between elements in syntax, including movement or not, have been accounted for using Agree. The mechanism of Agree thus provides a powerful tool to model dependencies between syntactic elements far beyond φ-feature agreement. The articles collected in this volume further explore these topics and contribute to the ongoing debates surrounding agreement. The authors gathered in this book are internationally reknown experts in the field of Agreement.

Niuean

Diane Massam
Niuean Book PDF

Author : Diane Massam
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 379 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2020-04-09
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780198793557

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Niuean by Diane Massam Pdf

This volume explores the grammar of Niuean, an endangered Polynesian language spoken on the island of Niue and in New Zealand, with a focus on the issue of predication. Since Aristotle, it has been claimed that a sentence consists of a subject and a predicate. Niuean constitutes the perfect testing ground for this claim: it displays verb-subject-object word order, in which the subject interrupts the predicate, and has an ergative case system, in which subjects are not clearly distinguished from objects in their marking for grammatical case. Diane Massam uses the framework of generative grammar to carry out a detailed analysis of the internal structure of Niuean predicates and arguments, as well as the relations between them, touching on many other topics including the nature of displacement, word formation, determiners, and thematic roles. The proposal is that Niuean complex predicates are formed via successive inversion, prior to the merge of all arguments (high argument merge), and that the predicate undergoes fronting to initial position across the arguments, with the same structure found also in nominal clauses. The conclusion is that Niuean does not have a subject in the usual sense, and this is related to the fact that the language has isolating morphology, lacking all tense and agreement inflection and nominative case. Instead, the language exhibits low absolutive predication, applicative ergative agents, and predicate fronting in lieu of subject extraction. The book extends our understanding of cross-linguistic sentence structure and grammatical case, and will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, typology, and theoretical linguistics.

The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity

Jessica Coon,Diane Massam,Lisa deMena Travis
The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity Book PDF

Author : Jessica Coon,Diane Massam,Lisa deMena Travis
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 960 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2017-06-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780191059773

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The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity by Jessica Coon,Diane Massam,Lisa deMena Travis Pdf

This volume offers theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the issues pertaining to ergativity, a grammatical patterning whereby direct objects are in some way treated like intransitive subjects, to the exclusion of transitive subjects. This pattern differs markedly from nominative/accusative marking whereby transitive and intransitive subjects are treated as one grammatical class, to the exclusion of direct objects. While ergativity is sometimes referred to as a typological characteristic of languages, research on the phenomenon has shown that languages do not fall clearly into one category or the other and that ergative characteristics are not consistent across languages. Chapters in this volume look at approaches to ergativity within generative, typological, and functional paradigms, as well as approaches to the core morphosyntactic building blocks of an ergative construction; related constructions such as the anti-passive; related properties such as split ergativity and word order; and extensions and permutations of ergativity, including nominalizations and voice systems. The volume also includes results from experimental investigations of ergativity, a relatively new area of research. A wide variety of languages are represented, both in the theoretical chapters and in the 16 case studies that are more descriptive in nature, attesting to both the pervasiveness and diversity of ergative patterns.

The Morphology and Phonology of Exponence

Jochen Trommer
The Morphology and Phonology of Exponence Book PDF

Author : Jochen Trommer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2012-09-27
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780191638114

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The Morphology and Phonology of Exponence by Jochen Trommer Pdf

Exponence refers to the mapping of morphosyntactic structure to phonological representations, a research area which is not only highly controversial, but also approached in fundamentally different ways in theoretical morphology and phonology. This volume brings together leading specialists from morphosyntax and morphophonology. The authors address common problems, questions and solutions in both areas, and formulate a coherent research program for exponence which integrates the central insights of the last decades and provides important new challenges for the future. The book is aimed at phonologists, morphologists, and syntacticians of all theoretical persuasions at graduate level and above.

Microparameters in the Grammar of Basque

Beatriz Fernández,Jon Ortiz de Urbina
Microparameters in the Grammar of Basque Book PDF

Author : Beatriz Fernández,Jon Ortiz de Urbina
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2016-09-09
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027266422

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Microparameters in the Grammar of Basque by Beatriz Fernández,Jon Ortiz de Urbina Pdf

This book is an endeavor to present and analyze some standard topics in the grammar of Basque from a micro-comparative perspective. From case and agreement to word order and the left periphery, and including an incursion into determiners, the book combines fine-grained theoretical analyses with empirically detailed descriptions. Working from a micro-parametric perspective, the contributions to the volume address in depth some of the exuberant variation attested in the different dialects and subdialects of Basque. At the same time, although the contributions focus mainly on Basque data, cross-linguistic evidence is also presented and discussed. After all, the goal pursued in this book is to attempt to explain variation in Basque as a particular instantiation of variation in human language at large. The volume presents and analyzes a wide range of empirical phenomena, many typologically marked among European languages, and will therefore be a welcome resource to linguists looking for detailed description and/or theoretical discussion.

Archi

Oliver Bond,Greville G. Corbett,Marina Chumakina,Dunstan Brown
Archi Book PDF

Author : Oliver Bond,Greville G. Corbett,Marina Chumakina,Dunstan Brown
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2016
Category : History
ISBN : 9780198747291

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Archi by Oliver Bond,Greville G. Corbett,Marina Chumakina,Dunstan Brown Pdf

This book presents a controlled evaluation of three widely practised syntactic theories on the basis of the extremely complex agreement system of Archi, an endangered Nakh-Daghestanian language. Even straightforward agreement examples are puzzling for syntacticians because agreement involves both redundancy and arbitrariness. Agreement is a significant source of syntactic complexity, exacerbated by the great diversity of its morphological expression. Imagine how the discipline of linguistics would be if expert practitioners of different theories met in a collaborative setting to tackle such challenging agreement data - to test the limits of their models and examine how the predictions of their theories differ given the same linguistic facts. Following an overview of the essentials of Archi grammar and an introduction to the remarkable agreement phenomena found in this language, three distinct accounts of the Archi data examine the tractability and predictive power of major syntactic theories: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, and Minimalism. The final chapter compares the problems encountered and the solutions proposed in the different syntactic analyses and outlines the implications of the challenges that the Archi agreement system poses for linguistic theory.

Gender and Noun Classification

Éric Mathieu,Myriam Dali,Gita Zareikar
Gender and Noun Classification Book PDF

Author : Éric Mathieu,Myriam Dali,Gita Zareikar
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2018-11-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780192563200

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Gender and Noun Classification by Éric Mathieu,Myriam Dali,Gita Zareikar Pdf

This volume explores the many ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders or classes. A noun may belong to a given class because of its logical or symbolic similarities with other nouns, because it shares a similar morphological form with other nouns, or simply through an arbitrary convention. The aim of this book is to establish which functional or lexical categories are responsible for this type of classification, especially along the nominal syntactic spine. The book's contributors draw on data from a wide range of languages, including Amharic, French, Gitksan, Haro, Lithuanian, Japanese, Mi'kmaw, Persian, and Shona. Chapters examine where in the nominal structure gender is able to function as a classifying device, and how in the absence of gender, other functional elements in the nominal spine come to fill that gap. Other chapters focus on how gender participates in grammatical concord and agreement phenomena. The volume also discusses semantic agreement: hybrid agreement sometimes arises due to a distinction that grammars encode between natural gender on the one hand and grammatical gender on the other. The findings in the volume have significant implications for syntactic theory and theories of interpretation, and contribute to a greater understanding of the interplay between inflection and derivation. The volume will be of interest to theoretical linguists and typologists from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

The Algonquian Inverse

Will Oxford
The Algonquian Inverse Book PDF

Author : Will Oxford
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 359 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2023-11-28
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780192699879

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The Algonquian Inverse by Will Oxford Pdf

This book serves as a definitive reference for the inverse morphology of the Algonquian languages, which has attracted much attention in typological and theoretical linguistics. Will Oxford describes the patterning of inverse morphology across the Algonquian family and presents a framework for understanding the structure and function of the Algonquian inverse that is empirically driven and typologically grounded. He presents data from all documented Algonquian languages and considers not only the morphology of the inverse construction but also its syntax and pragmatics, giving equal weight to diachronic, typological, functional, and formal perspectives. From the integration of these perspectives, a simple and coherent understanding of the nature of the inverse emerges. The key proposal is that the inverse is "deep" in some contexts and "shallow" in others. In interactions between two third persons, the inverse is a "deep" patient voice construction that inverts the canonical morphology, syntax, and pragmatics of a transitive clause. In interactions between a third person and a first or second person, the inverse is a "shallow" hierarchical agreement pattern implemented through a spurious use of patient voice morphology, inverting the canonical morphology of a transitive clause but having no effect on syntax or pragmatics. This split analysis, which reflects the likely diachronic development of the Algonquian inverse, is argued to have various benefits, including the resolution of a longstanding controversy over the syntactic status of the inverse.