Syntactic Phenomena

In controlled contexts, young children find it more difficult to learn novel words for actions than words for objects: Imai et al. found that English-speaking three-year-olds mistakenly choose a novel object as a referent for a novel verb about 42% of the time despite hearing the verb in a transitive sentence. The current two studies investigated whether English three- and five-year-old children would find resultative actions easier than the non-resultative, durative event types used in Imai et al.’s studies. The reverse (...) was true. Furthermore, if the novel verbs were taught on completion of the action, this did not improve performance, which contrasts with previous findings. Our resultative actions were punctual, change-of-location events which may be less visually salient than the non-resulative, durative actions. Visual salience may play a greater role than does degree of action causality in the relative ease of verb learning even at three years. (shrink)

It is argued that genuinely subsentential phrases, such as a discourse-initial utterance of “From France“ to indicate the provenance of an item, provide evidence for the reality of the pragmatic process of free enrichment. I consider recent attempts to treat such discourse-initial fragments as linguistic ellipsis of some kind while accommodating the difference between these cases and accepted types of ellipsis such as sluicing and gapping. I claim that the mechanisms they posit to save an ellipsis story have no role (...) in an account of performance. An argument against the enrichment approach from the indeterminacy of the content of subsentential utterances is discussed, and refuted, and it is shown how this indeterminacy is accommodated in a contextualist pragmatic theory. (shrink)

In this essay, I explain how certain suggestions put forth by Frege. Wittgenstein, and Schlick regarding the interpretation of indexical expressions may be incorporated within a systematic semantic account. I argue that the 'hybrid' approach they propose is preferable to more conventional systems, in particular when it comes to the interpretation of cases of cross-contextual ellipsis. I also explain how the hybrid view entails certain important and independently motivated distinctions among contextually dependent expressions, for instance between 'here' and 'local'.

Locality is a key concept not only in linguistic theorizing, but in explaining pattern of acquisition and patterns of recovery in garden path sentences, as well. If syntax relates sound and meaning over an infinite domain, syntactic dependencies and operations must be restricted in such a way to apply over limited, finite domains in order to be detectable at all. The theory of what these finite domains are and how they relate to the fundamentally unbounded nature of syntax is the (...) theory of locality. The papers in this collection all deal with the concept of locality in syntactic theory, and, more specifically, describe and analyze the various contributions Luigi Rizzi has made to this area over the past three and a half decades. The authors are all eminent linguists in generative syntax who have collaborated with Rizzi closely, and in eleven chapters, they explore locality in both pure syntax and psycholinguistics. This collection is essential reading for students and scholars of linguistic theory, generative syntax, and comparative syntax. (shrink)

By the late 1980s, Government and Binding Theory - which was central to almost all research in generative grammar - threatened to become as large and as intricate as the language it described. To counter this, Noam Chomsky introduced a minimalist program with the aim of making explanations of language as simple and general as possible. It has since gained widespread acceptance, to the extent that the most recent first-year textbook in syntax is based on it. One of the areas (...) subjected to this minimalist scrutiny has been phrase structure, the fundamental basis of grammar. This book focuses on the most controversial area of phrase structure, the notion of specifiera notion encompassing the traditional categories of subjects, possessors, determiners, auxiliaries, and adjuncts. It examines what place the notion has in the new theory and how the projection of specifiers is to be eliminated or extended. The contributors draw on empirical, theoretical research in cross-linguistic phenomena and first and second language acquisition. The substantial introductory chapter provides an up-to-date account of minimalist syntactic theory and a critical evaluation of the notion of specifier within it. (shrink)

This state-of-the-art guide to some of the most exciting work in current linguistics explores how the core components of the language faculty interact. It examines how these interactions are reflected in linguistic and cognitive theory, considers what they reveal about the operations of language within the mind, and looks at their reflections in expression and communication. Leading international scholars present cutting-edge accounts of developments in the interfaces between phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. They bring to bear a rich (...) variety of methods and theoretical perspectives, focus on a broad array of issues and problems, and illustrate their arguments from a wide range of the world's languages. After the editors' introduction to its structure, scope, and content, the book is divided into four parts. The first, Sound, is concerned with the interfaces between phonetics and phonology, phonology and morphology, and phonology and syntax. Part II, Structure, considers the interactions of syntax with morphology, semantics, and the lexicon, and explores the status of the word and its representional status in the mind. Part III, Meaning, revisits the syntax-semantics interface from the perspective of compositionality, and looks at issues concerned with intonation, discourse, and context. The authors in the final part of the book, General Architectural Concerns, examine work on Universal Grammar, the overall model of language, and linguistic and associated theories of language and cognition. All scholars and advanced students of language will value this book, whether they are in linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, artificial intelligence, computational science, or informatics. (shrink)

A complement clause is used instead of a noun phrase; for example one can say either I heard [the result] or I heard [that England beat France]. Languages differ in the grammatical properties of complement clauses, and the types of verbs which take them. Some languages lack a complement clause construction but instead employ other construction types to achieve similar ends; these are called complementation strategies. The book explores the variety of types of complementation found across the languages of the (...) world, their grammatical properties and meanings. Detailed studies of particular languages, including Akkadian, Israeli, Jarawara, and Pennsylvania German, are framed by R. M. W. Dixon's introduction, which sets out the range of issues, and his conclusion, which draws together the evidence and the arguments. This book will interest scholars of typology, language universals, syntax, information structure, and language contact in departments of linguistics and anthropology, as well as advanced and graduate students taking courses in these subjects. (shrink)

This is the first exhaustive investigation of gradience in syntax, conceived of as grammatical indeterminacy. It looks at gradience in English word classes, phrases, clauses and constructions, and examines how it may be defined and differentiated. Professor Aarts addresses the tension between linguistic concepts and the continuous phenomena they describe by testing and categorizing grammatical vagueness and indeterminacy. He considers to what extent gradience is a grammatical phenomenon or a by-product of imperfect linguistic description, and makes a series of linked (...) proposals for its theoretical formalization.Bas Aarts draws on, and reviews, work in psychology, philosophy and language from Aristotle to Chomsky., and writes clearly on a fascinating and important aspect of language and cognition. His book will appeal to scholars and graduate students of language and syntactic theory in departments of linguistics, philosophy and cognitive science. (shrink)

According to the contemporary consensus, when reaching in the lexicon grammar looks for items like nouns, verbs, and prepositions while logic sees items like predicates, connectives, and quantifiers. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a single lexical category contemporary grammar and logic both make use of. I hope to show that while a perfect match between the lexical categories of grammar and logic is impossible there can be a substantial overlap. I propose semantic definitions for all the major parts (...) of speech . I argue that the differences among these categories can be captured in terms of distinctions recognized in logic. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the most important aspects of English interjections, giving a more detailed account of the difference between exclamations and interjections, the formal characteristics of the latter, their sentence position and the meaning implications of this part of speech. The analysis is complemented with a comprehensive list of interjections that are used in the English language with corresponding explanations of their meaning.

Following the theoretical assumption that similarities in syntactic form may correspond to discourse-functional similarities in the use of those forms, English declarative sentences with non-subject initial elements were examined in their syntactic, textual, and pragmatic aspects. Parameters influencing discourse functions of such word order changes include syntactic ones, semantic and pragmatic ones, and semantic and textual ones. Taking discourse functions to be additional elements of meaning introduced in the propositional content of sentences with canonical word order and the contribution of (...) such word order changes to the context in which the sentence is used, we identified two basic types: 1) pragmatic functions of achieving prominence and emphasis , and 2) textual ones, which chiefly deal with linking with the preceding and the following text and rearranging of elements within a sentence. (shrink)

This thesis examines the syntactic structures within which a theory of predication may operate. The range of investigation includes saturation in adjectival structures, predicate nominal structures, genitive structures, and superlative nominal structures. ;A theory of adjectival structure and predication forms the basis for the remaining structures proposed in the thesis. It is assumed that when in construction with nouns adjectives are generated in either of two positions: as transitive heads of adjectival phrases, selecting noun phrase complements, or as intransitive heads (...) of adjectival phrases, adjoined to noun phrases. How saturation becomes complete in either of these two possible configurations is demonstrated via a theory of thematic role percolation and discharge in which thematic attributes of adjectives found in one position are distinct from the thematic attributes of adjectives found in the other position. ;The theory of syntactic structure and predication is extended to simple predicate nominals introduced by "indefinite" determiners . It is shown that the configurations for intransitive adjectives and the nouns they modify generalize to the appropriate structures for predicate nominals. This partially relies on analyses proposing a similarity in logical form between adjectival modification and the behavior of the indefinite determiners. ;A look at the class of predicate nominals introduced by a genitive reveals that their distribution is the same as that of simple predicate nominals. Similar structures to those of the predicate nominals introduced by determiners are proposed for the genitive variety of predicate nominal. The theory of saturation is shown to support the proposed structures for genitive constructions, and evidence from Swedish, Finnish and Greek provides some cross-linguistic support for the structural claims. ;Superlative nominals may occur in the same distribution as other predicate nominals . As an expansion on proposals made earlier in the thesis about adjectival structure and the structure of predicate nominals, predication structures are provided for these superlative nominals. The superlative complement is argued to be sister to the superlative morpheme in these structures, following several proposals in the recent literature. (shrink)

This thesis argues for a reformulation of the A/A-bar distinction in the theory of syntax. In the first part of this thesis, it is shown that this reformulation is forced by both theoretical considerations raised by VP internal subject theories and also certain empirical considerations relating to scrambling operations in Hindi. Evidence for the reformulation includes locality constraints on movement, weak crossover phenomena, reconstruction effects and binding properties associated with movement. This evidence also leads to a new approach to the (...) study of scrambling phenomena. It is suggested that scrambling operations that move NPs may belong to two different kinds of syntactic operations--an operation that involves substituting the scrambled element into a SPEC of a functional projection internal to IP and an operation that adjoins the scrambled NP to a maximal projection . The approach developed here yields a framework that seems to be promising for the study of variation found with respect to scrambling phenomena in natural languages. ;The second part of this thesis argues that a language that does not have overt wh-movement at s-structure may not have wh-movement to SPEC CP at LF either. It is argued that in a language like Hindi, the wh-phrases simply undergo QR at LF. This operation adjoins a wh-phrase to the nearest IP. We show that this approach yields a number of consequences that are desirable in Hindi, a language that at first glance seems to be mixed between a language with overt wh-movement in syntax as well as wh-in-situ. We discuss some aspects of wide scope quantification in Hindi and some other languages and show that the absence of wh-movement to SPEC CP at LF yields certain effects that would be surprising under the approaches that permit wh-movement to SPEC CP at LF. (shrink)

: Our first aim in this paper is to respond to four novel objections in Jason Stanley's ‘Context and Logical Form’. Taken together, those objections attempt to debunk our prior claims that one can perform a genuine speech act by using a sub‐sentential expression—where by ‘sub‐sentential expression’ we mean an ordinary word or phrase, not embedded in any larger syntactic structure. Our second aim is to make it plausible that, pace Stanley, there really are pragmatic determinants of the literal truth‐conditional (...) content of speech acts. We hope to achieve this second aim precisely by defending the genuineness of sub‐sentential speech acts. Given our two aims, it is necessary to highlight briefly their connection—which we do in the first part of the Introduction. Following that, we introduce Stanley's novel objections. This is the role of the second part of the Introduction. We offer our rebuttals in Section 2 and Section 3. (shrink)

While "A needs X" often calls for supplementation by the Y X is needed for, Thomson, Wiggins and Braybrooke have argued that there is a sense of "need" for which this is unnecessary. But Gricean conventions for conversation allow us to use ellipsis in a unified account of "need" while explaining the data Thomson and Wiggins appeal to: nondetatchment of bare needs from more fully specified ones, avoidance of serious harm as a default filling of the Y-slot, and the apparent (...) normativeness of some need-statements. Their detailed discussions also undermine the utility of demarcating a sense of "fundamental" need. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to a reaction to our joint paper Measuring Duration in Dutch (1971).