This monograph addresses fundamental syntactic issues of classifier constructions, based on a thorough study of a typical classifier language, Mandarin Chinese.
This book centers on the idea that some verbs and other argument structure constructions have an inherently different propensity to realize lexically unfamiliar arguments, independently of lexical semantic meaning.
This book argues that in order to account for the compositional behavior of many near-synonymous items, semantic analyses need to pay close attention to at least two semantic dimensions: standard assertions and conventional implicatures, which express additional side comments.
Syntactic dependencies are often non-local: They can involve two positions in a syntactic structure whose correspondence cannot be captured by invoking concepts like minimal clause or predicate/argument structure.
This volume examines how the displacement property of language is characterized in formal terms under the Minimalist Program and to what extent this proposed characterization of it can explain relevant displacement properties.
This monograph argues for a novel approach to split topicalization and quantifier float in German, based on the premise that syntactic structure-building proceeds solely via free application of Merge.
This book deals with syntax in three dimensions: in part I with the history of grammatical theory, in part II with synchronic aspects of Present-Day English, and in part III with diachronic aspects of English.
Linguists have standardly assumed that grammar is about identifying all and only the 'good' sentences of a language, which implies that there must be other, 'bad' sentences - but in practice most linguists know that it is hard to pin those down.
This is the first comprehensive description of Savosavo, a non-Austronesian (Papuan) language spoken by approximately 2,500 speakers on Savo Island, Solomon Islands.
The volume brings together a well-selected collection of twelve articles providing a comprehensive and very informative summary of contemporary work on lexical blending.
The structural and semantic properties of adverbials represent a still poorly understood area of sentential syntax and semantics in Germanic languages.
The volume is a collection of thirteen papers given at the "e;Third Syntax of the World's Languages"e; conference, complemented with four additional papers as well as an introduction by the editors.
Functionalism, as characterized by Allen, (2007:254) "e;holds that linguistic structures can only be understood and explained with reference to the semantic and communicative functions of language, whose primary function is to be a vehicle for social interaction among human beings.
This book investigates specific syntactic means of event elaborationacross seven Indo-European languages (English, German, Norwegian,French, Russian, Latin and Ancient Greek): bare and comitative smallclauses ("e;absolutes"e;), participle constructions and related clause-like butnon-finite adjuncts that increase descriptive granularity with respect toconstitutive parts of the matrix event (elaboration in the narrowestsense), or describe eventualities that are co-located and connectedwith but not part of the matrix event.
The volume explores the relationship between well-studied aspects of language (constructional alternations, lexical contrasts and extensions and multi-word expressions) in a variety of languages (Dutch, English, Russian and Spanish) and their representation in cognition as mediated by frequency counts in both text and experiment.
