Comparisons and Contrasts collects eleven of Richard Kayne's recent articles in theoretical syntax, with an emphasis on comparative syntax, which uses syntactic differences among languages to probe the properties of the human language faculty.
Clitics are grammatical elements that are treated as independent words in syntax but form a phonological unit with the word that precedes or follows it.
Ralph Ellison has been a controversial figure, both lionized and vilified, since he seemed to burst onto the national literary scene in 1952 with the publication of Invisible Man.
Word order is not a subject anyone reading Latin can afford to ignore: apart from anything else, word order is what gets one from disjoint sentences to coherent text.
Over the past twenty years or so, the work on Japanese within generative grammar has shifted from primarily using contemporary theory to describe Japanese to contributing directly to general theory, on top of producing extensive analyses of the language.
Despite the humble origins of its name (Anglo Saxon for "e;the speck at the head of a boil"e;), the dot has been one of the most versatile players in the history of written communication, to the point that it has become virtually indispensable.
This volume consists of nine original chapters on central issues in theoretical syntax, all written by distinguished authors who have made major contributions to generative syntax, plus an introductory chapter by the editor.
By comparing linguistic varieties that are quite similar overall, linguists can often determine where and how grammatical systems differ, and how they change over time.
The purpose of this edited volume is to study the structure of the inflectional field and the left peripheral field of clauses, often described as the systems of IP (Inflection Phrase, a syntactic category used to describe clauses without complement clauses) and CP (Complementizer Phrase, a word of phrase marking a complement clause).
Controversy over gendered pronouns, for example using the generic "e;he,"e; has been a staple of feminist arguments about patriarchal language over the last 30 years, and is certainly the most contested political issue in Western feminist linguistics.
The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied.
The Romance Languages document remarkable variations in subject word order in different constructions, and have various restrictions in their occurrence.
This work investigates the syntax of the higher portion of the functional structure of the clause using comparative data from hundreds of Northern Italian dialects.
Over the past several decades, linguistic theorizing of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM), along with a strongly growing body of crosslinguistic studies, has revealed complexity in the data that challenges traditional distinctions and treatments of these categories.
Polarity sensitivity is a ubiquitous phenomenon involving expressions such as anybody, nobody, ever, never, somebody and their counterparts in other languages.
Polarity sensitivity is a ubiquitous phenomenon involving expressions such as anybody, nobody, ever, never, somebody and their counterparts in other languages.
Many of the world's languages permit or require clause-initial positioning of the primary predicate, potentially alongside some or all of its dependents.
Many of the world's languages permit or require clause-initial positioning of the primary predicate, potentially alongside some or all of its dependents.
Headless relative clauses have received little attention in the linguistic literature, despite the many morpho-syntactic and semantic puzzles they raise.
Headless relative clauses have received little attention in the linguistic literature, despite the many morpho-syntactic and semantic puzzles they raise.
The Last Language on Earth is an ethnographic history of the disputed Eskayan language, spoken today by an isolated upland community living on the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines.
The Last Language on Earth is an ethnographic history of the disputed Eskayan language, spoken today by an isolated upland community living on the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines.
A recent wave of research has explored the link between wh- syntax and prosody, breaking with the traditional generative conception of a unidirectional syntax-phonology relationship.
A recent wave of research has explored the link between wh- syntax and prosody, breaking with the traditional generative conception of a unidirectional syntax-phonology relationship.
Every human language has some syntactic means of distinguishing a negative from a non-negative sentence; in other words, every speaker's syntactic competence provides a means to express sentential negation.
The study of comparative syntax in closely related languages has yielded valuable insights into syntactic phenomena--for example in the study of the Romance languages--yet little comparative work has been done on English dialects.
Offering a new perspective on auxiliaries in particular and language structure in general, this study argues that language cannot be explained satisfactorily with reference to linguistic variables alone; what is required in addition are extra-linguistic parameters relating to how we perceive the world around us, and how we utilize the linguistic resources available to us to conceptualize our experiences, and to communicate successfully.
Suffixaufnahme is an unusual pattern of multiple case marking due to agreement: a nominal that is already case-marked for its own adnominal function in addition copies the case of the nominal to which it is to be related.
The essays collected in this volume, most previously unpublished, address a number of closely interconnected issues raised by the comparative syntax of functional heads within the Principles-and-Parameters approach.
