Bøger i Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics serien

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book investigates variation and change in Old English word order, with special emphasis on the position of the verb.

This book examines the phenomenon of vowel reduction, in which two or more underlying vowel qualities are neutrilized in unstressed position.

This book examins the influences of morphological factors on stress and pitch accent within Optimality Theory.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This study presents an analysis of morphological case in Finnish within the Principles and Parameters framework. Finnish has a rich system of inflection for both case and agreement, making it an important language for testing hypotheses about the relationships between morphological case and abstract Case, and Case/case and agreement. The focus of the study is a set of syntactic environments where internal DP arguments appear in nominative case, but alternate with accusative personal pronouns. Because these environments lack an external argument coindexed with agreement, the data is particularly relevant to predictions made by Burzio's Generalization. By testing the generalization against a range of sentence types, Finnish is shown to contain an ergative split within an accusative main system. The assignment of the objective cases, accusative and partitive, is linked with the licensing of aspectual roles at D-structure, and finite Tense posited as a bi-unique Case assigner. The case split then arises as the result of two case features being assigned simultaneously to an internal argument, objective Case at D-structure associated with aspect, and nominative Case at S-structure associated with finite Tense where an external argument is not available. Morphological spell-out rules for particular argument types are proposed which determine the surface case realization of doubly-case assigned nominals.

The answer to the question "How can we understand and use a definition?" provides new constraints on natural language and on the internal language in which meaning is mentally represented. Most syntax takes the sentence as the basic unit for well-formedness, but definitions force us to focus on words and phrases, and hence to focus on compositional syntax in parallel with compositional semantics. This study examines both dictionary definitions and definitions from textbooks, from the points of view of their syntax, semantics, and use for learning word meaning. The tools used throughout are Principles and Parameters syntax, Relevance theoretic pragmatics, Model theoretic semantics, and the formal theory of definitions. The analyses argue that because phrases can be understood in isolation, some standard syntactic analyses must be modified. 'NP movement' has to be reanalysed as transmission of theta roles. These ideas are then applied to a variety of adjectives which take propositional complements. The final chapter argues that for definitions to be understood, the syntax of the Language of Thought must be close to that of Natural Language in specifiable way.

Using both theoretical and language acquisition arguments, this study proposes a new model of the lexicon-syntax interface defined in terms of checking event-semantic features. The research is based on Dutch verbs and their possible verb frames (intransitive, transitive, etc.) and two studies of children's Dutch. The model developed from these cases represents more generally the way in which Universal Grammar organizes the lexicon of a language and the mapping system that associates a verb's lexical features with its syntactic projection.

The book examines the formal characterization of multiple association from the perspective of a declarative constraint-based phonological framework. Both the autosegmental and constraint-based aspects of the book are highly relevant to recent developments in phonological theory, predating the current interest in constraint interaction and optimization. Inspired by the empirical and formal success of Unification-Based grammars, all phonological rules and representations are interpreted as hard constraints on well-formedness.In general then, constraints are simply conjoined, and faithfulness to the lexical entry is obligatory. Alternations arise from underspecification. The multiple sequenced tiers of Autosegmental Phonology are shown to be redundant, and linear order is limited to the root tier. Association is then defined as the inverse of dominance within the feature geometry, so multiple association is co-dominance of a feature by two roots. The No Crossing Constraint is not applicable since non-root features are not on sequenced tiers, and the Sharing Constraint is introduced instead as the key means of forcing locality on co-dominance: it bans co-dominance by non-adjacent roots. Thus, because features and association lines are indestructible, the key Autosegmental properties of Integrity and Inalterability are predicted to occur.Long distance dependencies are then considered. From the perspective of structural integrity, discontinuous geminates in planar morphologies are more like fake geminates than true geminates, which is predicted by the Sharing Constraint. Only a tiny amount of nontonal data can be presented in favor of non-local multiple association which feedsphonological rules: Chaha displays non-local inalterability and Javanese, the opposite (side-effects). Thus the balance of evidence is against a single mechanism uniting local and non-local multiple association.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This text investigates the core meaning and syntactic distribution of gradable adjectives: adjectives such as "long", "short", "bright" and "dim", with respect to which objects can be ordered and compared.

Argues that if the underlying linguistic competence of code switchers people who switch back and forth between languages, dialects, or levels of formality is the same as that of monolinguals for the languages they use, then code switching should not be stigmatized in schools. Also contends that a b

Studies two related phenomena in human language: the ability of verbs and other lexical items to describe how a situation (event or state) develops or holds in time (lexical aspect) and the view some verbal auxiliaries and affixes present of the development or result of a situation at a given time

This book investigates the syntactic distribution of the Algonquian Conjunct verb from the theoretical perspective of the minimalist programme.

This book examines the interplay between the semantics of noun phrases and verbal predicates, with an emphasis on data drawn from Czech and English and comparisons to German and Finnish.

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

This work studies various aspects of word clause order and clause structure proved problematic for syntactic theory.

This work is an investigation of the relationship between prosodic structure, intonational structure and focus realization in European Portuguese. It is discussed from a cross-linguistic perspective, with special reference to languages like English, Dutch, German, and Italian.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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.