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1
Tomić, Olga Mišeska. Balkan Sprachbund Morpho-Syntactic Features. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4488-7.
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2
Brill, Frances. Analysing syntactic and textual linguistic features in relation to text-type and mode. Manchester: University of Manchester, 1995.
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3
Volpato, Francesca. Relative Clauses, Phi Features, and Memory Skills. Venice: Edizioni Ca' Foscari, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-392-2.
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This volume deals with the syntactic competence of Italian-speaking individuals with hearing impairment (cochlear implant users and LIS signers) and individuals with normal hearing (children, adolescents, and adults), focusing on relative clauses, a central topic in current research. The volume also presents the participants’ performance in different memory tasks discussing the relationship between sentence comprehension and memory resources in children with hearing impairment and with normal hearing.
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Marcato, Enrico. Personal Names in the Aramaic Inscriptions of Hatra. Venice: Edizioni Ca' Foscari, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-231-4.
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This book offers a comprehensive linguistic evaluation of the 376 personal names attested in the roughly 600 Aramaic inscriptions of Hatra, the famous Northern Mesopotamian city that flourished in the Parthian age, between the 1st century BC and the 3rd century AD. This study benefits from the publication of many Hatran inscriptions during recent decades, which have yielded rich onomastic data, and some fresh readings of these epigraphic sources. This work is subdivided into three main parts: an “Onomastic Catalogue”, a “Linguistic Analysis”, and a “Concordances Section”. The “Catalogue” is organized as a list of entries, in which every name is transliterated, translated (whenever possible), discussed from an etymological perspective, provided with onomastic parallels, and accompanied by its attestations in the Hatran Aramaic corpus. The “Catalogue” is followed by a “Linguistic Analysis” which describes, firstly, the principal orthographic, phonological, morphological, and syntactical features of Hatran names. The linguistic discussion proper is followed by a semantic taxonomy of the names which make up the corpus and an overview of the religious significance of the theophoric names. “Charts of Concordances” end the book.
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Boeckx, Cedric. Elementary Syntactic Structures: Prospects of a Feature-Free Syntax. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
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Boeckx, Cedric. Elementary Syntactic Structures: Prospects of a Feature-Free Syntax. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
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7
Boeckx, Cedric. Elementary Syntactic Structures: Prospects of a Feature-Free Syntax. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
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8
Elementary Syntactic Structures: Prospects of a Feature-Free Syntax. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
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9
Boeckx, Cedric. Elementary Syntactic Structures: Prospects of a Feature-Free Syntax. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
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10
Ssempuuma, Jude. Morphological and Syntactic Feature Analysis of Ugandan English: Influence from Luganda, Runyankole-Rukiga, and Acholi-Lango. Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Peter, 2019.
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11
Ssempuuma, Jude. Morphological and Syntactic Feature Analysis of Ugandan English: Influence from Luganda, Runyankole-Rukiga, and Acholi-Lango. Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Peter, 2019.
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12
Ssempuuma, Jude. Morphological and Syntactic Feature Analysis of Ugandan English: Influence from Luganda, Runyankole-Rukiga, and Acholi-Lango. Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Peter, 2019.
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13
Ssempuuma, Jude. Morphological and Syntactic Feature Analysis of Ugandan English: Influence from Luganda, Runyankole-Rukiga, and Acholi-Lango. Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Peter, 2019.
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14
Gutzmann, Daniel. The Grammar of Expressivity. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198812128.001.0001.
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While the expressive function of natural language has received much attention in recent years, the role grammar plays in the interpretation of expressive items has mainly been neglected in the semantic and pragmatic literature. On the other hand, while there have been syntactic studies of some expressive phenomena they do not explicitly connect to recent developments in semantics. This book bridges this gap, showing that semantics and pragmatics alone cannot capture all grammatical particularities of expressive items and that expressivity has strong syntactic reflexes that interact with the semantic interpretation and account for the mismatches between the syntax and semantics of these phenomena. The main thesis he argues for—the hypothesis of expressive syntax—is that expressivity is a syntactic feature, on a par with other established syntactic features like tense or gender. Evidence for this claim is drawn from three detailed case studies of expressive phenomena: expressive adjectives, expressive intensifiers, and expressive vocatives. These expressions exhibit some puzzling properties and by developing an account of them employing minimalist approaches to syntactic features and agreement, the author shows that expressivity, as a syntactic feature, can partake in agreement operations, trigger movement, and syntactically be selected for. This not only provides indirect evidence for the hypothesis of expressive syntax and extends the usefulness of operations on syntactic features operation beyond their traditional domains, but also highlights the hidden role grammar may play for phenomena that are often considered to be solely semantic in nature.
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Egedi, Barbara, and Veronika Hegedűs, eds. Functional Heads Across Time. Oxford University PressOxford, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198871538.001.0001.
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Abstract This volume brings together studies that contribute to our knowledge about the role functional elements play in syntactic changes, and the semantic and functional features that are the driving force behind the changes. Parameter resettings, structural reanalyses, and changes in the feature specification of functional heads are explored related to the functional sequence of the clausal as well as the nominal and adpositional domains. The chapters in this book discuss ‘microdiachronic’ syntactic changes that often have implications for large-scale syntactic effects, such as word order variation and change, the emergence (and lexicalization) of syntactic projections, grammaticalization, and changes in information structural properties. The volume contains case studies of individual languages (English, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Romanian are included) as well as discussions of cross-linguistic phenomena. The studies heavily rely on digital corpora of historical or dialectal data. The chapters are organized in an order that essentially reflects the hierarchy of projections in the clausal functional sequence and the other distinguished ph(r)asal projections from CP to DP.
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Jónsson, Jóhannes Gísli, and Thórhallur Eythórsson, eds. Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198832584.001.0001.
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This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters address a central theoretical issue in diachronic syntax: whether syntactic variation can always be attributed to differences in the features of items in the lexicon, as the Borer-Chomsky conjecture proposes. In answering this question, all the chapters develop analyses of syntactic change couched within a formalist framework in which rich hierarchical structures and abstract features of various kinds play an important role. The first three parts of the volume explore the different domains of the clause, namely the C-domain, the T-domain and the νP/VP-domain respectively, while chapters in the final part are concerned with establishing methodology in diachronic syntax and modelling linguistic correspondences. The contributors draw on extensive data from a large number of languages and dialects, including several that have received little attention in the literature on diachronic syntax, such as Romeyka, a Greek variety spoken in Turkey, and Middle Low German, previously spoken in northern Germany. Other languages are explored from a fresh theoretical perspective, including Hungarian, Icelandic, and Austronesian languages. The volume sheds light not only on specific syntactic changes from a cross-linguistic perspective but also on broader issues in language change and linguistic theory.
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Jónsson, Jóhannes Gísli, and Thórhallur Eythórsson. Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change. Oxford University Press, 2021.
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18
Bárány, András. Differential object marking in Hungarian. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198804185.003.0002.
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This chapter provides an overview of differential object agreement in Hungarian. Finite verbs in Hungarian always agree with the subject in person and number, and sometimes agree with the object. Generally, the trigger of object agreement is argued to be related to definiteness. It is argued that while both syntactic and semantic properties are relevant for determining object agreement, the syntactic structure of the object is the main factor: objects have to be DPs to agree, and can sometimes even be indefinite. The focus is on lexical, third person noun phrases, including common nouns and proper names, and modifiers like numerals, different types of quantifiers. The main claim is that objects that trigger agreement have a person feature, which makes them referential, but objects that do not trigger agreement lack person features.
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Tomic, Olga Miseska. Balkan Sprachbund Morpho-Syntactic Features. Tomic Olga M, 2010.
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Tomic, Olga M. Balkan Sprachbund Morpho-Syntactic Features. Springer, 2006.
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21
Dworkin, Steven N. Syntactic features of medieval Hispano-Romance. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199687312.003.0004.
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This chapter describes selected issues of noun phrase, verb phrase, and sentential syntax. It emphasizes differences between the selected constructions in Old Spanish and in the modern standard language. Specific issues discussed include the function of determiners, the use of subject pronouns, the preverbal or postverbal placement of clitic object pronouns, direct object marking, and issues involving subject-verb-object and noun-adjective word order. The section on verbal syntax examines the use of the present, imperfect, and preterit tenses in medieval Hispano-Romance, the syntax of analytic or compound tenses, the syntactic differences between the synthetic and analytic futures, the syntax and semantics of the subjunctive, and the syntax of aver/tener and ser/estar.
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Pescarini, Diego. Romance Object Clitics. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864387.001.0001.
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This book focuses on the evolution of object clitic pronouns in the Romance languages. It aims to explore the empirical facets of cliticization and elaborate on the theoretical ramifications of the topic. On the empirical side, the book deals with data ranging from Latin to modern languages and less well-known dialects from all areas of Romance. Medieval vernaculars take centre stage both in the reconstruction of the evolution from Latin to Romance and in the modelling of clitic placement in the modern languages. Syntactic, phonological, and morphological aspects are examined, but the main focus is on syntactic placement, which is the hallmark of Romance clitics. On the theoretical side, the books engage with the previous literature, in particular with Generative literature. In recent decades, our understanding of Romance clitics has grown in symbiosis with the Generative theory, and the importance of most empirical findings cannot be fully appreciated without being acquainted with the terms of the ongoing debate. The book challenges the received idea that cliticization resulted from a form of syntactic deficiency. Instead, it proposes that clitics resulted from the feature endowment of discourse features, which caused freezing of certain pronominal forms first and—through reanalysis—their successive incorporation into verbal hosts. This approach entails revising analyses of well-known phenomena such as interpolation, climbing, and enclisis/proclisis alternations (the so-called Tobler-Mussafia law), and addressing orthogonal phenomena such as V2 syntax, scrambling, and stylistic fronting.
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Yust, Jason. Hypermeter, Form, and Closure. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190696481.003.0008.
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Closural strength of cadences is an important syntactic feature of tonal music, and is traditionally defined by means of harmonic and melodic, but not rhythmic, features. This chapter discusses the importance of hypermeter to the effect of closure, focusing especially on the important role of cadential elision in preventing closure. The denial of closure via elision is important at the end of the sonata form expositions. Separation of rhythmic, formal, and tonal closure as distinct phenomena informs recent debates on this topic. Beethoven’s use of hypermetrical means to deny closure was an important stage in his development of new approaches to musical form in his middle period, specifically the method of open expositions.
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Hu, Xuhui. Theoretical foundations. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198808466.003.0002.
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Adopting the constructivist approach, especially building on Borer’s (2005a, b, 2013a) XS Model, two theoretical elements in the theory of the syntax of events are put forward. The first element concerns the specific constraints on the interaction between conceptual meaning and syntactic derivation. The content of the predicate will be integrated into the interpretation derived from the syntax via a set of Integration Conditions, according to which, the interpretation derived from syntax licenses the legitimacy of the predicate content. The second theoretical assumption is the addition of the DivP to the event phrase (EP) structure. A verbal feature is in nature an [iDiv] feature, which is equivalent to the interpretable feature provided by the classifier in the nominal domain. The stative/dynamic interpretation of an event is tied to the value of the [iDiv] feature, which further explains the grammatical distinction between two types of homogeneous predicates.
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Ferrando, Ignacio. The adnominal linker -an in Andalusi Arabic, with special reference to the poetry of Ibn Quzmān (twelfth century). Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198701378.003.0004.
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This chapter describes a syntactical structure typical of Andalusi Arabic, as well as many other Arabic varieties: the use of a nominal suffix -an/-in after an indefinite noun followed by a modifier. Some scholars have linked this morpheme to the so-called tanwīn (‘nunation’), the morpheme of indefiniteness of Classical Arabic. However, both the synchronic analysis of the linguistic facts as they appear in the Andalusi corpus explored in this chapter (the poetry of Ibn Quzmān, twelfth century) and the use of this suffix in other Arabic dialects suggest a different function. The adnominal linker represents not an indefiniteness morpheme or the remains of the tanwīn of Classical Arabic, but a syntactic connection between the indefinite noun and its modifier. It was not a sporadic, stylistic, or optional trait, but a specific and almost compulsory feature widespread in Andalusi Arabic sources, at least until the thirteenth century.
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Hirst, Daniel. Intonative Features: A Syntactic Approach to English Intonation. De Gruyter, Inc., 2019.
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27
Baptista, Marlyse. Pidgins and Creoles. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935345.013.13.
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This chapter offers an overview of the controversies surrounding the study of creole syntax while evaluating representative studies. This overview includes proposals that cast creoles as a “type” of languages, proposals that view creoles as interlanguages and resulting from second language acquisition, and proposals that consider them as hybrid grammars yielding innovative feature recombinations due to language contact. It also discusses the benefits of the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures, as it lays out a promising new direction in the investigation of pidgins and creoles by offering systematic comparisons of a large sample of creoles and their source languages. This collaborative Atlas provides broad empirical coverage, testing the hypotheses reflected by the various positions and schools of thought discussed in this chapter while unveiling the rich diversity of creole syntactic features.
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Hu, Xuhui. The syntax and semantics of Chinese resultatives. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198808466.003.0004.
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This chapter investigates the syntactic derivation of Chinese resultatives. While in English resultatives the [uDiv] feature is valued with the mechanism of feature sharing, in Chinese resultatives it is valued by a verbal C-functor, by nature equivalent to en in flatten. The Chinese V–V resultative compound is a single de-adjectival verb: the first verb is a verbal C-functor and the second one is an adjective. The V–V resultative construction is therefore analyzed as a causative construction involving a de-adjectival verb. This single hypothesis provides a unified account of the seemingly mysterious properties of Chinese resultatives as well as the differences from English resultatives. This account is based on a general hypothesis of Synchronic Grammaticalization: in an analytical language like Chinese where there is only a very limited array of functional items, lexical items are selected to serve as functional items to meet the universal requirement of feature valuation.
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Lavidas, Nikolaos. Case in diachrony: Or, why Greek is not English. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198747840.003.0009.
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Greek demonstrates both a change from inner (Aktionsart) into outer (grammatical) aspect as well as a change from demonstratives into definite articles, as does English. Even though aspect and definiteness are connected with Case, we argue that the tendencies in Greek with regard to the Case system differ in several aspects from the development of the Case system in English. We consider changes in the Case system of Greek in relation to syntactic properties of the clause, and in particular the realization of +/-interpretable features in inner and outer aspect. We argue that the change that takes place in the history of Greek involves a transitional stage in Ancient Greek where the relevant features can appear on the Trans[itivity] head (outer aspect) or the (inner) Asp[ect] head. The completion of the change in Post-Koine Greek involves the loss of the interpretable feature on Asp; thus Case remains (uninterpretable) on the higher Trans head.
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Speyer, Augustin, and Helmut Weiß. The prefield after the Old High German period. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198813545.003.0005.
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The filling of the prefield in Modern German is determined by information-structural constraints such as scene-setting, contrastiveness, and topichood. While OHG does not yet show competition between these constraints, competition arises from MHG onward. This has to do with the generalization of the V2 constraint (i.e. the one-constituent property of the prefield) for declarative clauses, in which context the information-structural constraints are loosened. The syntactic change whose result eventually was the loss of multiple XP fronting comprised a change of the feature endowment of C because the fronting of expletive thô (roughly in the OHG of the ninth century) led to the reanalysis of XP fronting as a semantically vacuous movement whose only function is to check the EPP feature of C. Data from doubly filled prefields in ENHG and post-initial connectives indicate that an articulated split CP-structure, as proposed within the cartographic approach, is also at play in German.
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van der Wal, Jenneke. A Featural Typology of Bantu Agreement. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198844280.001.0001.
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The Bantu languages are in some sense remarkably uniform (subject, verb, order (SVO) basic word order, noun classes, verbal morphology), but this extensive language family also show a wealth of morphosyntactic variation. Two core areas in which such variation is attested are subject and object agreement. The book explores the variation in Bantu subject and object marking on the basis of data from 75 Bantu languages, discovering striking patterns (the Relation between Asymmetry and Non-Doubling Object Marking (RANDOM), and the Asymmetry Wants Single Object Marking (AWSOM) correlation), and providing a novel syntactic analysis. This analysis takes into account not just phi agreement, but also nominal licensing and information structure. A Person feature, associated with animacy, definiteness, or givenness, is shown to be responsible for differential object agreement, while at the same time accounting for doubling vs. non-doubling object marking—a hybrid solution to an age-old debate in Bantu comparative morphosyntax. It is furthermore proposed that low functional heads can Case-license flexibly downwards or upwards, depending on the relative topicality of the two arguments involved. This accounts for the properties of symmetric object marking in ditransitives (for Appl), and subject inversion constructions (for v). By keeping Agree constant and systematically determining which featural parameters are responsible for the attested variation, the proposed analysis argues for an emergentist view of features and parameters (following Biberauer 2018, 2019), and against both Strong Uniformity and Strong Modularity.
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Bjorkman, Bronwyn M., and Daniel Currie Hall, eds. Contrast and Representations in Syntax. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198817925.001.0001.
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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.
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Hu, Xuhui. The syntax and semantics of English resultatives. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198808466.003.0003.
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This chapter argues that the English resultative construction denotes a single event involving two predicates. Therefore, only a single EP is involved in the syntactic derivation. The special thematic relationship is due to constraints imposed by the Integration Conditions proposed in Chapter 2. Dispensing with the CAUSE head of the event decomposition approach, this chapter explains the possible lack of causative meaning in English resultatives. A secondary predicate in a resultative can get a dynamic BECOME meaning (such as flat in John hammered the metal flat) because the secondary predicate shares the dynamic [iDiv] feature provided by V. Since both the activity denoted by the matrix V and the dynamic change of state take place in the same temporal scope of EP, the interpretation of a potential (and cancellable) culmination point is derived.
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Arregui, Ana, María Luisa Rivero, and Andrés Salanova, eds. Modality Across Syntactic Categories. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718208.001.0001.
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This volume explores the extremely rich diversity found under the “modal umbrella” in natural language. Offering a cross-linguistic perspective on the encoding of modal meanings that draws on novel data from an extensive set of languages, the book supports a view according to which modality infuses a much more extensive number of syntactic categories and levels of syntactic structure than has traditionally been thought. The volume distinguishes between “low modality,” which concerns modal interpretations that associate with the verbal and nominal cartographies in syntax, “middle modality” or modal interpretation associated to the syntactic cartography internal to the clause, and “high modality” that relates to the cartography known as the left periphery. By offering enticing combinations of cross-linguistic discussions of the more studied sources of modality together with novel or unexpected sources of modality, the volume presents specific case studies that show how meanings associated with low, middle, and high modality crystallize across a large variety of languages. The chapters on low modality explore modal meanings in structures that lack the complexity of full clauses, including conditional readings in noun phrases and modal features in lexical verbs. The chapters on middle modality examine the effects of tense and aspect on constructions with counterfactual readings, and on those that contain canonical modal verbs. The chapters on high modality are dedicated to constructions with imperative, evidential, and epistemic readings, examining, and at times challenging, traditional perspectives that syntactically associate these interpretations with the left periphery of the clause.
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Tomic, Olga M., and Olga Mišeska Tomić. Balkan Sprachbund Morpho-Syntactic Features (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory). Springer, 2006.
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36
Ruda, Marta. Syntactic representation of null arguments. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198815853.003.0010.
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Focusing on definite-argument drop, this chapter puts forward the hypothesis that null arguments are minimally represented as [nPn] and maximally as a fully-fledged pronoun ([DP D [PersP Pers [NumP Num [nPn]]]] or [PersP Pers [NumP Num [nPn]]]). The (un)availability of such arguments in a language is a consequence of independent features of its grammar: the lexical specification of its nominalizing n heads (esp. their association with phonetic material) and the avaialbility of post-syntactic type-shifting operations (esp. ι). The working of this approach is illustrated mostly with data from English, Polish, and Kashubian. The two latter languages are argued here to differ from English with respect to the inflectional properties of their nouns, as well as with respect to the mechanisms of NP interpretation. The chapter discusses the predictions thehypothesis makes about the identity of null arguments with respect to cross-linguistic variation in the patterns of argument omission.
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Samuelsson, Christer. Statistical Methods. Edited by Ruslan Mitkov. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199276349.013.0019.
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Statistical methods now belong to mainstream natural language processing. They have been successfully applied to virtually all tasks within language processing and neighbouring fields, including part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, semantic interpretation, lexical acquisition, machine translation, information retrieval, and information extraction and language learning. This article reviews mathematical statistics and applies it to language modelling problems, leading up to the hidden Markov model and maximum entropy model. The real strength of maximum-entropy modelling lies in combining evidence from several rules, each one of which alone might not be conclusive, but which taken together dramatically affect the probability. Maximum-entropy modelling allows combining heterogeneous information sources to produce a uniform probabilistic model where each piece of information is formulated as a feature. The key ideas of mathematical statistics are simple and intuitive, but tend to be buried in a sea of mathematical technicalities. Finally, the article provides mathematical detail related to the topic of discussion.
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Garrett, Merrill F. Exploring the Limits of Modularity. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190464783.003.0003.
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Psycholinguistic studies of language processing have revolved historically around “modular” and “interactive” accounts of language use. Experimental reports diverge in claims for the penetration of non-linguistic background information on processing for sentence comprehension. Syntactic processing effects can persist despite available contextual constraints that are sufficient to resolve temporary ambiguity or garden path errors. Nevertheless, there are multiple reports of interactive effects between basic sentence processing and both semantic and non-linguistic contextual information. The chapter suggests a rationalization of such conflicting findings in standard psycholinguistic and experimental pragmatic research, relying on interactions between language comprehension systems and language production systems. Production processes are designed to incorporate discourse and environmental constraints on linguistic formulation. These may be used to filter the products of comprehension mechanisms. A key feature of the argument for complementary roles of the two systems is a degree of modular processing for syntax to be found in both systems.
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Baunaz, Lena, and Eric Lander. Nanosyntax. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190876746.003.0001.
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This chapter offers a thorough introduction to nanosyntactic theory, a development of the cartographic program in generative grammar. It discusses the foundations on which nanosyntax was conceived, such as the “one feature–one head” maxim and the universal functional sequence (fseq). It also provides a brief comparison of theoretical and terminological issues in nanosyntax vs. the competing framework of Distributed Morphology. It is seen that the syntactic component according to nanosyntax unifies aspects of (what are traditionally called) syntax, morphology, and formal semantics. This is reflected in the tools used to probe linguistic structure in the nanosyntactic approach, such as morphological decomposition, syncretism, and containment. The chapter also discusses the technical details of the syntax–lexicon relation, detailing the matching or spellout process and Starke’s view of spellout-driven movement. This chapter is meant to provide readers with the necessary background to understand and navigate the rest of the chapters in this volume.
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van der Wal, Jenneke. Bantu Syntax. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935345.013.50.
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This chapter provides an overview of the common syntactic features as well as the syntactic microvariation found in the Bantu languages. It particularly highlights the importance of information structure for the analysis of morphosyntax in this language family: word order, valency, voice, tense-aspect marking, subject and object marking can all be influenced and affected by the information structure expressed in the sentence. The chapter furthermore shows how Bantu languages, despite their shared basic SVO word order, noun classes and extensive verbal morphology, display a remarkable variation in the conditions determining agreement relations and word order. This has influenced syntactic theory formation in the past and should continue to do so now that more data and analyses of Bantu syntactic phenomena become available.
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Wood, Jim, and Alec Marantz. The interpretation of external arguments. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198767886.003.0011.
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This chapter examines the syntactic and semantic properties of heads, e.g. Voice, Appl, and little p, that add participants to events. Instead of assuming that such heads exist as distinct primitives in the functional lexicon, it is proposed that there is one such head, which can get different interpretations depending on how it is merged into the structure. The chapter’s approach attributes the relative uniformity of the expression of argument structure to the principles that interpret syntactic structure semantically; thus, syntax is truly autonomous, with the atoms of syntactic representations carrying no inherent semantic values. Once syntactic heads are absolved from the necessity of explicitly carrying certain features relevant to their interpretation, a sparse inventory of functional heads can be developed. The system is applied to a set of constructions that present distinct challenges to theories that demand a kind of transparent reflection of argument structure in underlying syntactic representations.
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Alqassas, Ahmad. A Unified Theory of Polarity Sensitivity. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197554883.001.0001.
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This book examines polarity sensitivity—a ubiquitous phenomenon involving expressions such as anybody, nobody, ever, never, and somebody and their counterparts in other languages, with particular focus on Arabic. These expressions belong to different classes such as negative and positive polarity, negative concord, and negative indefinites, which led to examining their syntax and semantics separately. In this book, Ahmad Alqassas pursues a unified approach that relies on examining the interaction between the various types of polarity sensitivity. Treating this interaction is fundamental for scrutinizing their licensing conditions. Alqassas draws on data from Standard Arabic and the major regional dialects represented by Jordanian, Egyptian, Moroccan, and Qatari. The book provides a new perspective on the syntax–semantic interface and develops a unified syntactic analysis for polarity sensitivity. Through the (micro)comparative approach, Alqassas explains the distributional contrasts with a minimal set of universal syntactic operations such as Merge, Move, and Agree, and a fine-grained inventory of negative formal features for polarity items and their licensors. The features are simple invisibles that paint a complex landscape of polarity. The results suggest that syntactic computation of Arabic polarity (externally merged in the left periphery) is subservient to the conceptual–intentional interface. Alqassas argues for last resort insertion of covert negation operators in the CP layer to interpret non-strict NCIs, which is an extra mechanism that serves the semantic interface but adds to the complexity of syntactic computation. Likewise, head NPIs in the left periphery require licensing by operators higher than the tense phrase, adding more constraints on the syntactic licensing.
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Zbikowski, Lawrence M. Music and Emotion. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190653637.003.0003.
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This chapter explores the relationship between music and emotion, beginning with a review of research on emotion, followed by a review of research on music and emotion. It is proposed that the connection between music and the emotions reflects music’s capacity to provide sonic analogs for some of the most salient aspects of emotion processes. This proposal is illustrated through analyses of two movements from J. S. Bach’s cantata “Ich habe genug,” which make explicit two important features of musical grammar: syntactic processes and syntactic layers. The chapter concludes with observations about the ways music is used to shape emotional responses within liturgical settings of the kind that motivated and framed Bach’s cantata.
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Haspelmath, Martin. Theoretical Approaches to the Functions of Indefinite Pronouns. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198235606.003.0005.
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This chapter focuses on various theoretical approaches to the semantic and syntactic functions of indefinite pronouns. It begins with a discussion of structuralist semantics, which suggests that language is a system whose parts must be defined and described on the basis of their place in the system and their relation to each other, rather than on the basis of their own intrinsic properties. It then considers some of the problems associated with structuralist semantics, including the unclear status of the semantic features; significant overlap of the functions of grammatical items in many areas, including indefinite pronouns; and structuralist semantics makes wrong predictions about semantic change. The chapter proceeds by analysing logical semantics and the issues raised by this approach, along with syntactic approaches, the theory of mental spaces, pragmatic scales and scale reversal. Finally, it explains the relationship between focusing and sentence accent.
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Mooney, Raymond J. Machine Learning. Edited by Ruslan Mitkov. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199276349.013.0020.
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This article introduces the type of symbolic machine learning in which decision trees, rules, or case-based classifiers are induced from supervised training examples. It describes the representation of knowledge assumed by each of these approaches and reviews basic algorithms for inducing such representations from annotated training examples and using the acquired knowledge to classify future instances. Machine learning is the study of computational systems that improve performance on some task with experience. Most machine learning methods concern the task of categorizing examples described by a set of features. These techniques can be applied to learn knowledge required for a variety of problems in computational linguistics ranging from part-of-speech tagging and syntactic parsing to word-sense disambiguation and anaphora resolution. Finally, this article reviews the applications to a variety of these problems, such as morphology, part-of-speech tagging, word-sense disambiguation, syntactic parsing, semantic parsing, information extraction, and anaphora resolution.
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Whitman, John, and Yohei Ono. Diachronic interpretations of word order parameter cohesion. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198747840.003.0004.
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This chapter uses statistical tools to investigate the interrelationship between typological features in the World Atlas of Language Structures Online (Dryer and Haspelmath 2013) in the WALS 201 language sample, with the objective of determining how crosscategorial word order generalizations might emerge as the result of syntactic change. Multiple Correspondence Analysis and a variety of cluster analyses show that word order features tend to group along the familiar lines of the Head Parameter. But there is an important caveat to this, previously noticed by Albu (2006): word order features in NP (e.g. [Order of noun and determiner], [Order of noun and adjective]) group separately from word order features in VP and PP, with the exception of [Order of noun and genitive]. We provide a diachronic explanation for this fact: nouns and their arguments may be reanalysed as PPs, or in the case of reanalysed nominalizations, clauses.
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Watson, Janet. South Arabian and Arabic dialects. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198701378.003.0011.
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This chapter examines phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic data from a number of contemporary Arabic varieties spoken within historical Yemen—i.e. within the borders of current Yemen and up into southern ˁAsīr in Saudi Arabia—with (a) data from the Ancient South Arabian language, Sabaic; (b) what has been called ‘Ḥimyaritic’, as spoken during the early centuries of Islam; and (c) the Modern South Arabian languages, Mehri and Śḥerɛ̄t. These comparisons show a significant number of shared features. The density of shared features and the nature of sharing exhibited lead to the tentative suggestion that some of these varieties may be continuations of South Arabian with an Arabic overlay rather than Arabic with a South Arabian substratum.
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Abondolo, Daniel. Uralic Languages. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935345.013.6.
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All but three of the thirty-nine Uralic languages are endangered, most of them seriously so; of the family’s ten main branches, only two have members considered safe (Finnish and Estonian of the Fennic branch, plus Hungarian). This chapter surveys a selection of phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of the Uralic languages; the emphasis is on presenting aspects that are usually ignored, oversimplified, or misrepresented. Among the topics broached are vowel harmony; consonant gradation, which in the Uralic context is of four distinct kinds, three of them quite old; less-than-agglutinative (i.e. fairly fusional features of several languages); problems of phonological reconstruction; the inflection of personal pronouns; person marking on nouns and Subject, Agent, and Object marking on verbs; and kinds of relative, complement, and support clauses.
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Arregui, Ana, María Luisa Rivero, and Andrés Salanova. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718208.003.0001.
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This chapter offers an introduction to the book. Modality is a core research topic for most disciplines interested in language, including linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. By putting forward specific case studies across an extensive range of languages, the chapters in this book allow us to gain insights into features that are common across languages in the construction of modal meanings, as well as into constraints that are language-specific. The broad range of syntactic and morphological configurations under study in this book succeed in giving readers a sense of the extremely rich diversity found in natural language under the “modal umbrella.”
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Weiß, Helmut. The Wackernagel complex and pronoun raising. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198813545.003.0008.
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In many Indo-European languages, pronouns (and other clitic-like elements) tend to appear in second position or near it. This phenomenon was first described by Jakob Wackernagel, after whom the position is named the Wackernagel position (WP). This chapter describes the emergence of the WP in German where it is the third position following SpecCP and C. Since subject clitics in the WP interact phonologically and morphologically with verbs and complementizers in C, three additional syntactic features (double agreement, complementizer agreement, partial pro-drop) are associated with the WP in German (forming the so-called Wackernagel complex). The chapter surveys the evidence for the existence of the WP in OHG and, to a lesser extent, in MHG, using the additional features as diagnostics. It also contains a new explanation of how complementizer agreement could have emerged.