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This book offers a perspective on the structure of human language. The fundamental issue it addresses is the proper balance between syntax and semantics, between structure and derivation, and between rule systems and lexicon. It argues that the balance struck by mainstream generative grammar is wrong. It puts forward a new basis for syntactic theory, drawing on a wide range of frameworks, and charts new directions for research. In the past four decades, theories of syntactic structure have become more abstract and syntactic derivations have become more complex. The book traces this development through the history of contemporary syntactic theory, showing how much it has been driven by theory-internal rather than empirical considerations. It develops an alternative that is responsive to linguistic, cognitive, computational, and biological concerns. At the core of this alternative is the Simpler Syntax Hypothesis: the most explanatory syntactic theory is one that imputes the minimum structure necessary to mediate between phonology and meaning. A consequence of this hypothesis is a richer mapping between syntax and semantics than is generally assumed. Through analyses of grammatical phenomena, some old and some new, the book demonstrates the empirical and conceptual superiority of the Simpler Syntax approach.

This is the most comprehensive reference work on Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), which will be of interest to graduate and advanced undergraduate students, academics, and researchers in linguistics and in related fields. Covering the analysis of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, and information structure, and how these aspects of linguistic structure interact in the nontransformational framework of LFG, this book will appeal to readers working in a variety of sub-fields, including researchers involved in the description and documentation of languages, whose work continues to be an important part of the LFG literature The book consists of three parts. The first part examines the syntactic theory and formal architecture of LFG, with detailed explanation and comprehensive illustration, providing an unparalleled introduction to the fundamentals of the theory. The second part of the book explores nonsyntactic levels of linguistic structure, including the syntax-semantics interface and semantic representation, argument structure, information structure, prosodic structure, and morphological structure, and how these are related in the projection architecture of LFG. The third part of the book illustrates the theory more explicitly by presenting explorations of the syntax and semantics of a range of representative linguistic phenomena: modification, anaphora, control, coordination, and long-distance dependencies. The final chapter discusses LFG-based work not covered elsewhere in the book, as well as new developments in the theory.

Depictive secondary predicates such as ‘raw’ in ‘George ate the fish raw’ are important for current issues in syntactic and semantic theory, in particular predication theory, phrase structure theories, issues of control and grammatical relations, and verbal aspect. This book approaches depictive secondary predication from a cross-linguistic point of view. It traces all the relevant phenomena and brings together critical surveys and new contributions on their morphosyntactic and semantic properties. It particularly considers similarities and differences between secondary predicates and other types of adjuncts, including adverbials of manner, comparison, quantity, and location. The book's approach is theory-neutral and pragmatic: it draws on insights and research traditions ranging from the minimalist program to semantic maps methodology.

This book is a study of the uses of adjectives in different constructions, and of the problems that arise in their analysis, both in terms of syntactic theory and philosophy of grammar. The history of English has been one in which their uses in the attributive and predicative positions have increasingly diverged. This raises problems in general for the definition of the category, and for analyses that have tried to relate one use to another, by syntactic transformations or other devices. It also raises problems in individual positions, which concern in particular the basic structure of noun phrases and the justification for binary constituents; the status of the copular and its uses in the progressive; the indeterminacy of what were once described as raised constructions; and the function of postmodifying adjectives and adjective phrases in relation to others. The nature of these problems is often as much theoretical, or philosophical, as factual.

The papers in this collection all deal with the concept of locality in syntactic theory and more specifically relate to the various contributions Luigi Rizzi has made in this connection over the past three and a half decades. The authors are all either former students of Rizzi’s or colleagues and friends who have collaborated with him closely over the years. Luigi’s influence on all our work, and on the development of syntactic theory as a whole, has been profound; this volume is a small attempt to recognise and show our gratitude for that influence.

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.

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.

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.

Does syntactic change exist? In some sense, it must do: change in constituent order, for instance, is well documented among the world’s languages. However, converging empirical and theoretical considerations have suggested that apparent instances of syntactic change may be attributable to factors outside syntax proper, such as morphology or information structure. Some even go so far as to propose that there is no such thing as syntactic change, and that all such change in fact takes place in the lexicon or in the phonological component. This volume is a critical investigation of these proposals, drawing on detailed case studies from Germanic, Romance, Chinese, Egyptian, Finnic, Hungarian, and Sámi. It aims to answer such questions as: Can syntactic change arise without an external impetus? How can we tell whether a given change is caused by information-structural or morphological factors? What can ‘microsyntactic’ investigations of changes in individual lexical items tell us about the bigger picture? How universal are the clausal and nominal templates (‘cartography’), and to what extent is syntactic structure more generally subject to universal constraints?

Syntactic contrasts, the systems of grammatical oppositions that exist within individual languages, are typically formally encoded in terms of features. The nature of syntactic contrast is tied to a fundamental question in generative syntactic theory: What is universal in syntax (and in language more generally), and what is variable? This volume explores the dual role of features, on the one hand defining a set of paradigmatic contrasts, and other the other hand acting as the building blocks of syntactic structures and the drivers of syntactic operations. In both roles, features are increasingly seen as the locus of parametric variation. The identification of parameters with features has opened up new possibilities for exploring connections between the morphological system of a language and its syntax, and suggests a new role for featural contrast in syntactic theory. The papers collected here represent a diversity of topics, perspectives, and concerns, but are united by an interest in morphosyntactic representations, and in the formal encoding of syntactic contrasts.