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This book considers the syntax of the left periphery of clauses in relation to the extra‐sentential context. The prevailing point of view, in the literature in this field is that the external context does not intervene at all in the syntax of the sentence, and that the interaction between sentence and context takes place post‐syntactically. This monograph challenges this view and proposes that reference to indexicality is syntactically encoded in the left‐most position of the clause, where the speaker's temporal and spatial location is represented. To support this hypothesis, it analyses various kinds of temporal dependencies in embedded clauses, such as indicative versus subjunctive, and proposes a new analysis of the imperfect and the future‐in‐the‐past. The book also compares languages such as Italian and English with languages which have different properties of temporal interpretation, such as Chinese. Finally, analysis of the literary style known as Free Indirect Discourse also supports the hypothesis, showing that it may have a wide range of consequences.

This pioneering study is based on an analysis of over 200 languages, including African, Amerindian, Australian, Austronesian, Indo-European and Eurasian (Altaic, Caucasian, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Dravidian, Uralic), Papuan, and Sino-Tibetan. Adpositions are an almost universal part of speech. English has prepositions; some languages, such as Japanese, have postpositions; others have both; and yet others, kinds that are not quite either. As grammatical tools they mark the relationship between two parts of a sentence: characteristically one element governs a noun or noun-like word or phrase while the other functions as a predicate. From the syntactic point of view, the complement of an adposition depends on a head: in this last sentence, for example, a head is the complement of on while on a head depends on depends, and on is the marker of this dependency. Adpositions lie at the core of the grammar of most languages, their usefulness making them recurrent in everyday speech and writing. The author examines their morphological features, syntactic functions, and semantic and cognitive properties. He does so for the subsets both of adpositions that express the relations of agent, patient, and beneficiary, and of those which mark space, time, accompaniment, or instrument. Adpositions often govern case and are sometimes gradually grammaticalized into case. The author considers the whole set of function markers, including case, which appear as adpositions and, in doing so, throws light on processes of morphological and syntactic change in different languages and language families.

This book uses the cartographic theory to examine the left periphery of the English clause and compare it to the left-peripheral structures of other languages. The book argues that the dissimilar surface characteristics of these languages (primarily English and Romance, but also Gungbe, Hungarian, Hebrew, Dutch, and others) can be explained by universal constraints, and that the same structures apply across the languages. The book focuses on main clause transformations—movement operations that can only take place in main clauses.

This volume advances our understanding of how word structure in terms of affix ordering is organized in the languages of the world. Affix ordering is a central issue in linguistic theory and there has been much research on the topic. The present volume contributes novel data from typologically diverse well-studied and lesser-studied languages as well as original analyses, and covers the major approaches in the field. Unlike previous research, most of the contributions in this collection consider more than one language. Discussed are, among other things, cases of affix ordering that pose problems to linguistic theory such as affix repetition, variable ordering, and interaction of prefixes and suffixes in terms of parasynthesis and mobile affixation. Novel examples of affix repetition and variable ordering are given, and the volume provides evidence that these phenomena are neither rare nor typical only of lesser-studied languages with unstable grammatical organization, as has been claimed in the literature so far. This book also offers an explicit discussion on the (non)existence of phonological affix ordering and a discussion on the emergence of affix ordering in child language, the first of its kind in the literature. Repetitive operations that are hard to explain in many theories are frequent in early child language and seem to serve as trainings for morphological (de)composition and affix stacking. Thus, the volume also raises the question about the general architecture of grammar and the nature and the side effects of our theoretical assumptions.

This book develops a theory of wh- prosody according to which wh- expressions must avoid forming prosodic constituents with overt complementizers at the level of Intonational Phrase. The theory is inspired by Richards’s (2010, 2016) Contiguity Theory and is based empirically on asymmetries in the distribution of wh- items in five West African languages: Krachi (Kwa: Ghana), Bono (Kwa: Ghana), Wasa (Kwa: Ghana), Asante Twi (Kwa: Ghana), and Nupe (Benue-Congo: Nigeria). The observations and analyses stem from original fieldwork on all five languages and represent some of the first prosodic descriptions of the languages. The theory is shown to successfully derive a number of famous and less well-known asymmetries in wh- in-situ distribution in a variety of languages unrelated to those the theory was originally designed to analyze. Against the backdrop of data from eighteen languages, the theory is parameterized to account for wh- item distribution across typologically diverse languages.

That some dialects of Arabic negate with a pre-posed mā alone, some with what is called ‘bipartite’ negation mā … š, and some with post-positive -š alone has invited comparisons with a similar process, called Jespersen’s Cycle, said to have occurred in French, whereby the pre-posed negator ne became associated with an emphatic post-positive particle pas ‘step’—and, in some French vernaculars, with a post-positive pas alone. Yet the similarity between Arabic and French is purely superficial, lacking supporting linguistic evidence. Forcing the facts of Arabic into preconceived theoretical constructs, both formal and functional, engenders erroneous conclusions. The source of the Arabic negator -š is polar interrogation, for which evidence does indeed exist in various Arabic dialects, including Andalusi, Egyptian, Levantine, Maltese, Tunisian, and Yemeni. The polar interrogative šī, itself derived from an existential particle, ultimately arose from the Proto-Semitic presentative ša and 3rd person pronouns šū, šī, and šunu. Supporting evidence for this comes from the West Semitic Modern South Arabian languages, which possess an existential particle, an indefinite determiner, and inchoate interrogative śi analogous in form and function to that of the Arabic šī. With this, it becomes possible to propose the operation of a different cycle in Arabic: the negative-existential (or Croft’s) cycle. Such comparative evidence from Arabic dialects and sister languages, along with historical records of an Arab presence in the Fertile Crescent centuries before the arrival of Arabic speaking Muslims in the 7th century AD, provides convincing evidence for the antiquity of the Arabic dialects.

Imagine how the discipline of linguistics would be if expert practitioners of different theories met in a collaborative setting to tackle the same challenging data—to test the limits of their model’s infrastructure and examine how the concrete predictions of their theories differ about the same data. This book represents the result of attempting to achieve this for syntactic theory, using data from Archi (Nakh–Daghestanian, Lezgic), an endangered language with an extremely complex agreement system. We undertake a controlled evaluation of three widely practised syntactic theories, through detailed examination of the theoretical principles underlying the mechanisms that model agreement. Our objective is to assess the tractability and predictive power of these leading models of syntax—Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), and Minimalism—using a complete set of data on an agreement system from a language that has not hitherto been analysed in these frameworks.

Whether word-based or morpheme-based, the morphological literature in generative grammar (and beyond) is interested in productive word formation — i.e., derivation of open class categories, compounding, and, of course, inflection. While that includes functional morphemes, or corresponding word-formation rules, it almost always involves an open class stem. This book, by contrast, is an investigation of regularities in the internal structure of a set of function words, the determiners. With an emphasis on West Germanic and an occasional broadening of the empirical domain, the book discusses demonstratives, distributive quantifiers, interrogative, negative, and possessive determiners. The core finding is that there are striking regularities regarding the internal structure of these different kinds of determiners. In fact, what has long been assumed without much argument or explanation, namely that determiners are adjectival, is shown and explained here in detail. It turns out that determiners are entire extended adjectival projections, xAPs, with a lexical layer, an inflection layer, and a left periphery, all part of what (sometimes) appear to be function words. The book proposes that determiners are xAPs with a closed class minimal stem. The second focus of this book is on adjectival inflection in German, which the Book divides into two subdomains, both of which receive a radically novel analysis: (a) The weak/strong agreement contrast is treated in terms of adjective movement akin to verb movement in the clause, and (b) the syncretisms in dative and genitive morphology are related to each form’s idiosyncratic syntax in a way that makes the syncretism patterns dissolve in epiphenomeny.

Nouns in many Bantu languages show a strikingly unrestricted syntactic distribution, leading to proposals that syntactic case does not play an active role in the grammar of Bantu. This book argues for a different conclusion, proposing on the basis of Zulu that Bantu languages have not only a system of structural case, but also a complex system of morphological case that is comparable to systems found in languages like Icelandic. Comparing this system of argument licensing in Zulu to those found in more familiar languages yields a number of insights onto the organization of the grammar. First, while this book argues for a case-licensing analysis of Zulu, it locates the positions where case is assigned lower in the clause in nominative-accusative languages. In addition, while Zulu shows evidence that case and agreement are two distinct syntactic operations, the order in which these operations occur in the syntax mirrors patterns found in Icelandic and other languages. Second, this book proposes a novel type of morphological case that serves to mask the effect of structural licensing in Zulu. Though the effects of this case are unfamiliar, its existence is predicted by the current typology of case. Finally, this book explores the consequences of case and agreement as dissociated operations, showing that other unusual properties of Bantu languages, like hyper-raising, are a natural result. This exploration yields the conclusion that some of the more unusual properties of Bantu languages result from small variations to deeply familiar syntactic principles such as case, agreement, and the EPP.

Linguistics is the science of language, similar to how mathematics is the science of numbers. A reference grammar is a scientific enterprise. It brings together a coherent treatment of each language as a system where everything fits together, within the cultural, and historical, context of the language. This book introduces the principles and practice of writing a comprehensive reference grammar. The aim of this book is to offer a guide for creating a reference grammar based on empirical facts and combining description, interpretation, and analysis, spanning phonology, morphology, syntax, discourse, and semantics. The book consists of fifteen chapters and is accompanied by a Glossary of terms.

This book investigates the temporal structure of language. It deals with central issues in the understanding of tense and aspect, proposes a new approach to the main problems in the area, and seeks to establish the universal semantic properties of two important and contentious aspectual categories: perfectivity and imperfectivity. The book develops an original theory of aspect. It shows how this accounts for aspectual categories in Russian, and that it can used to compare Russian to other languages where similar aspectual issues arise. The book devotes particular attention to English, a language which appears to have no grammatical categories of perfectivity and imperfectivity. It argues that the semantic properties established for the Russian tense-aspect system are reflected in English, and reveals parallels in the expression of temporal and aspectual information in the two languages.

This book argues that aspect-based split ergativity does not mark a split in how Case is assigned, but rather, a split in sentence structure. The contexts in which we find the appearance of a nonergative pattern in an otherwise ergative language—namely, the nonperfective aspects—involve an intransitive aspectual matrix verb and a subordinated lexical verb. The book begins with an analysis of split person marking patterns in Chol, a Mayan language of southern Mexico. It argues that the appearance of split ergativity in the language follows naturally from the fact that the progressive and the imperfective morphemes are verbs, while the perfective morpheme is not. Ergative-patterning perfective constructions are thus monoclausal, while progressives and imperfectives involve an aspectual matrix verb and a nominalized embedded clause. The fact that the nonperfective morphemes are verbs, combined with independent properties of Chol grammar, results in the appearance of a split. The book next surveys aspect splits in a variety of unrelated languages and offer an explanation for the following universal: in a language with an aspectual split, the perfective aspect will always retain an ergative pattern. It suggests that the cross-linguistic tendency for imperfective aspects to pattern with locative constructions is responsible for the biclausality which causes the appearance of a nonergative pattern. The book proposes that the perfective is never periphrastic (and thus never involves a split) because there is no preposition in natural language that correctly captures the relation of the assertion time to the event time denoted by the perfective aspect; instead, perfective is the default aspect.

This book is about the grammar of clitics. It considers all points of view, including their phonology and syntax and relation to morphology. In the process, it deals with the relation of second position clitics to verb-second phenomena in Germanic and other languages, the grammar of contracted auxiliary verbs in English, noun incorporation constructions, and several other much discussed topics in grammar. The book includes analyses of a number of particular languages, and some of these — such as Kwakw'ala (nullKwakiutlnull) and Surmiran Rumantsch — are based on the author's own field research. The study of clitics has broad implications for a general understanding of sentence structure in natural language.

This book develops a new analysis of the interpretation of verb phrases and VP adjunction by arguing that the lexical subcategorization information of verbs is systematically underspecified and is only resolved when verb phrases are built in context, with recourse to pragmatic knowledge. This idea is formally implemented in the framework Dynamic Syntax by introducing an underspecified semantic type into the logical system. This provides an account of how verb phrases are built on-line and how verbs can be used with a different array of complements on each occasion of use. Under this dynamic view, the interpretation of verbs is argued to be essentially pragmatic, making use of the notion of ad hoc concept formation developed in Relevance theory. The approach is illustrated in detail by a case study of Swahili applied verbs. The study brings together results from dynamic approaches to syntax and Relevance theoretic pragmatics, and charts the stretch of the syntax-pragmatic interface where lexical information from verbs and contextual concept formation meet.

Functional sequencing has been one of the major empirical goals of the 20-year old cartographic enterprise in Syntax. The papers in this collection extend this goal in several directions. Several chapters consider the impact of functional sequence on the semantics and pragmatics of focus. Others discuss the distortion of the functional sequence, as it were, by movement, and the relation between cartographic maps and the case/agreement system. Developments in the cartography of the left periphery of the clause and the noun phrase are the subject of a third group of papers. The determination of the hierarchical order of functional heads by semantic selection and the relation between cartography and labeling are explored in the final section.

This book proposes a theory of the syntax-morphology interface. A radically modular view of grammar is defended: the grammar contains separate ‘macromodules’ that deal with the wellformedness of syntactic, phonological, and semantic structures, respectively. The structures produced in the respective macromodules are not derivationally related. Rather there is a set of correspondence rules that regulate, for example, what parts of a syntactic structure can correspond to what parts of a phonological structure and vice versa. Within the ‘macromodules’, there are separate submodules that deal with sub-word structure and supra-word structure. Thus, the syntactic macromodule contains a submodule that deals with the wellformedness of complex words and a submodule that deals with the wellformedness of sentences. Similarly, the phonological macromodule contains a submodule that deals with lexical phonology and a submodule that deals with sentence-level prosodic phonology. The submodules dealing with sub-word structure jointly comprise what is usually referred to as ‘morphology’. The book discusses in detail (i) the ways in which the sentence-level and word-level submodules within the larger syntax macromodule interact; and (ii) phenomena that follow from interaction of the syntactic macromodule with the phonological macromodule.

This book considers whether in some languages there are phenomena which are unique to morphology, determined neither by phonology or syntax. Central to these phenomena is the notion of the ‘morphome’, conceived by Mark Aronoff in 1994 as a function, itself lacking form and meaning but which serves systematically to relate them. The classic examples of morphomes are determined neither phonologically or morphosyntactically, and appear to be an autonomous property of the synchronic organization of morphological paradigms. The nature of the morphome is a problematic and much debated issue at the centre of current research in morphology, partly because it is defined negatively as what remains after all attempts to assign putatively morphomic phenomena to phonological or morphosyntactic conditioning have been exhausted. However, morphomic phenomena generally originate in some kind of morphosyntactic or phonological conditioning which has been lost while their effects have endured. Quite often, vestiges of the original conditioning environment persist, and the boundary between the morphomic and extramorphological conditioning may become problematic. In a series of pioneering explorations of the diachrony of morphomes this book throws important new light on the nature of the morphome and the boundary—seen from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives—between what is and is not genuinely autonomous in morphology.

Prosodic morphology concerns the interaction of morphological and phonological determinants of linguistic form and the degree to which one determines the other. Although prosodic morphology has been the testing ground for theoretical developments in phonology over the past twenty years, from autosegmental theory to optimality theory, this is the first book devoted to understanding the definition and operation of canonical forms — fixed shaped prosody — which are the defining characteristic of prosodic morphology. This book discusses past research in the field and provides a critical evaluation of the current leading theory, the Generalized Template Hypothesis, showing that it is empirically inadequate. The leading theory proposes that canonical shape of morphemes in processes like reduplication, templatic morphology, hypocoristics, and word minimality follows from the canonical shape of stress feet. The central problem with this proposal is that many of the world’s languages do not have word stress. Even in those that do, there is often a mismatch between the canonical stress foot and canonical morpheme shape. The book sets out an alternative approach, namely, that the basic prosody-morphology correlation is between the syllable and the morpheme. This new approach is tested in a cross-linguistic analysis of phonological and morphological forms over a wide range of languages, including several not previously studied from this perspective.

This is the first book to present Canonical Typology, a framework for comparing constructions and categories across languages. The canonical method takes the criteria used to define particular categories or phenomena (e.g. negation, finiteness, possession) to create a multidimensional space in which language-specific instances can be placed. In this way, the issue of fit becomes a matter of greater or lesser proximity to a canonical ideal. Drawing on the expertise of world-class scholars in the field, the book addresses the issue of cross-linguistic comparability, illustrates the wide range of areas—from morphosyntactic features to reported speech—to which linguists are currently applying this methodology.

This book takes Chinese to be an ideal testing ground for the cartographic approach due to its robust analyticity, where functional elements typically distribute over the entire span of a sentence in a discrete and orderly manner. By studying a variety of syntactic constructions in Chinese from a comparative angle, it becomes possible to map out a well-defined topography of relevant syntax-semantics correspondences with such notion as “the height of interpretation”. As a result, we are be able to open a window into the very nature of syntactic cartography, while addressing specific issues such as the distinction between the left periphery and the vP periphery, the syntactic encoding of the information/discourse structure, and the fine structure of prepositional and nominal projections. This book thus not only provides valuable information concerning the typological features of Chinese, but also contributes to our understanding of the inner workings of human language in general.