Bøger i Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics serien

This text examines the typology of "wh-" expressions and indefinite NPs within the minimalist framework.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Builds a semantics for several kinds of future-referring expressions, including will sentences, be going to sentences, and futurates. This title addresses a number of issues of interest to formal semanticists, from modal and aspectual semantics, to the mapping of functional elements in the clause, to the logical form of conditionals.

Drawing insights from conceptual semantics, cognitive semantics, generative lexicon, construction grammar and formal syntax, this book is the first attempt at a comparative account of lexical semantic issues in Mandarin Chinese.

This work is an unrevised version of the authors 1996 University of California, Santa Cruz Ph.D. dissertation. The only changes that have been made are corrections of typographical errors, minor rewording, updating of references, and the inclusion of an index.

This book provides evidence for the importance of auditory properties of speech sounds in phonology. The analyses, drawn from diverse languages, identify processes which have no articulatory commonality, but do share auditory features.

An exploration of the meaning and use of two kinds of declarative sentences and their intonational differences: It's raining? and It's raining. To account for the differences, the text gives a compositional account of rising and falling declaratives under which declarative form expresses commitment to the prepositional content of the declarative.

Jennifer Smith shows that phonological processes specific to strong positions are distinct from those involved in classic positional neutralization effects.

This book presents a detailed and enlightening examination of the effects of duration and sonority on the patterns of positional restriction of contour tones.

A specific indefinite presupposes that someone has in mind an individual who has the property denoted by its descriptive content. Having an individual inmind means that the agent knows who the referent is. This affects the information state of the agent, but not the others. The asymmetric information, shared by all conversational participants, requires a common ground to have multiple information states, each for each participant. The information state of the agent who has an individual in mind must be structured into sub-information-states so that each sub-information-state associates the specific indefinite with a different unique individual. It then conveys the information that the agent has some individual in mind, but that it is not known yet who it is. This analysis thus requires a new dynamic semantics which is partially representational and partially denotational. Specific indefinites tend to have widest scope, which is explained by claiming that specific indefinites trigger presuppositions. Presuppositions are assumed to have various scopes with respect to operators in a sentence, and the strongest reading is preferred on rational and economic basis. Stronger readings roughly correspond to wider scopes. This book will be of interest to scholars who work on indefinite NPs, presuppositions, anaphora in belief contexts, and dynamic semantics in general.

This comprehensive study will be of interest to linguists in a number of fields, ranging from prosody to semantics, pragmatics and discourse analysis.

Studies syntax of NPIs and their interaction with sentential negatives in Hindi. This book outlines the clause structure of Hindi and locates the syntactic position of sentential negatives as well as constituent negatives within the structure.

This book provides a unified theory of moraicity, contending that there are two types of weight labelled coerced and distinctive. Using optimality theory, Moren challenges traditional theories of vowel/consonant dichotomy and inherent moraicity.

This book examines the phonological phenomenon of compensatory lengthening, wherein the loss of a consonant or vowel triggers a compensatory lengthening of another phonetic element.

Analyzing the semantic and pragmatic constraints on the Japanese particle mo, roughly equivalent to the English too, this book shows how the complex mechanism of the constraints accounts for its discourse function.

This book examines turn-taking in English and Japanese conversations and political news interviews to investigate the relationship between language and interaction.

Revealing that the standard syllable-based analyses of consonant cluster divisions, definite article allomorphy and segment duration are not supported by the experiemental evidence, this study shows that the conditioning factors for these central processes in Italian phonology are segmental, contrast-based conditions.

This book investigates the nature of the relationship between phonology and syntax and proposes a theory of Minimal Indirect Reference which solves many of the problems found in the field.

Telicity and durativity are notions which have become increasingly influential in both the semantic and the syntactic. This book studies the linguistic representation of events by examining the relevance of two salient event characteristics - telicity and durativity - to the grammatical system of natural language.

This text investigates the meaning of conditional protasis markers like Spanish "si" and English "if" from a pragmatic perspective instead of taking them to be used in hypothetical or uncertain situations only.

Investigates various phenomena affecting both stressed and unstressed vowels in Romance languages and analyses vowel reduction, which involves a change of vowel quality in stressless syllables that favours vowel qualities that are maximally distinguishable from one another.

It has been claimed that 'category neutrality' where a word or a phrase is used simultaneously with more than one syntactic category, does not exist. This work shows that it does exist in English. This work not only challenges the current thinking, but also raises foundational questions about the nature of ambiguity.

This book incorporates data from various Italian dialects along with historical evidence to address the problem of word-initial gemination (raddoppiamento sintattico) in Italian, a popular topic of phonological study.

This work presents the first experimental study of articulatory dynamics of Russian and of secondary articulents in general. Special focus is on the nature of positional markedness scales (Optimality Theory), a key concept in phonological theory.

A significant contribution to the current debate on the role of phonetic optimalisation, this book presents a formal and unified characterization of lenition patterns.

Baauw discusses to what extent errors young children make with their interpretation of definite articles and pronouns are due to their immature pragmatic skills and to what extent incomplete syntactic development plays a role.

The main topic of this work is the interaction between syntactic structure and meanin within the noun phrase, with data drwn primarily from English and Italian.

Based on a wide variety of languages, this study examines the ways in which modal notions, such as permission and obligation, interact with negation. In particular, the study focuses on how ambiguities in scope are resolved. It is shown that languages overwhelmingly make use of two different strategies. The first strategy (the Modal Suppletion Strategy) is to use different modal verbs for the different scope interpretations. This strategy is found in languages such as English, Finnish, and Tamil. The second strategy (the Negation Placement Strategy), which is found in French, Russian, and Modern Greek (among others) is to use two different places for the negation to surface. It turns out that these two strategies have two different foundations: the first strategy is a semantic one, while the second strategy is syntactic in nature. That there is a difference can be shown by appealing to syntactic tests. The Modal Suppletion Strategy is not sensitive to these tests, while the Negation Placement Strategy is. It can also be shown that the two different strategies are correlated with word order: the Negation Placement Strategy is found exclusively in languages with a basic SVO order and with a negative morpheme that precedes the verb. This is checked against a database of 75 languages. Finally, these results are compared to other scope resolutions in languages.

A study of the relationship between the Case of a noun phrase (NP) and its quantificational character. Develops a hypothesis about strong and weak readings of NPs, and on type of Case assignment, using examples from Finnish, Turkish, Inuit, English, and Dutch. Contains chapters on the semantics of

This Study investigates the syntax of complement and relative clauses in English which lack overt complementizers (clauses without "that). The central analytical claim is that these clauses differ in phrase structure from their synonymous counterparts with overt complementizers. In particular, novel evidence from adjunction facts is used to demonstrate that clauses without "that are more appropriately analyzed as bare sentences of the category IP rather than CP with a phonologically null head, a proposal which has since been adopted in many economy-driven approaches to phrase structure. In addition to strong empirical support, the IP-analysis is shown to provide explanations for a variety of related syntactic phenomena, superior to those available under the previous CP-analysis. These include the restricted syntactic distribution of "that-less complements, in addition to the adjacency restrictions on "that-less relative clauses. The analytical task posed by the "that-trace effect is also very much reduced under the IP-analysis. The work also examines the syntax of 'subject contact clauses' (e.g."There's a man wants to see you.), common in many non-standard varieties, including Hiberno-English and establishes that they have all the distinctive properties of other "that-less relative clauses. This book will be of interest to a broad variety of readers: scholars working in all areas of generative syntax, specialists in English and Germanic syntax, in addition to researchers in non-standard English and Hiberno-English.