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Advances in the Analysis of Spanish Exclamatives
Ignacio Bosque
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Advances in the Analysis of Spanish Exclamatives is the first book entirely devoted to Spanish exclamatives, a special sentence type often overlooked by contemporary linguists and neglected in standard grammatical descriptions. The seven essays in this volume, each by a leading specialist on the topic, scrutinize the syntax—as well as the semantic and pragmatic aspects—of exclamations on theoretical grounds.
The book begins by summarizing, commenting on, and evaluating previous descriptive and theoretical contributions on Spanish exclamatives. This introductory overview also contains a detailed classification of Spanish exclamative grammatical types, along with an analysis of their main properties. Special attention is devoted in the book throughoutto the syntactic structures displayed by exclamative patterns; the differences between exclamations and other speech acts (specifically questions and imperatives); the peculiar semantic denotation of exclamative words and their relationship to quantifiers denoting high degree; the semantics of adjectives and adverbs expressing extreme evaluation; the form and interpretation of negated and embedded exclamatives; the properties of optative utterances; and the different ways in which expressive contents are related to unexpected reactions of the speaker, as well as possible knowledge shared by interlocutors.
This groundbreaking volume provides a complete and accurate picture of Spanish exclamation by integrating its numerous component parts.
 
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Al-'Arabiyya
Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic. Volume 49, Volume 49
Mohammad T. Alhawary
Georgetown University Press

Al-'Arabiyya is the annual journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic and serves scholars in the United States and abroad. Al-'Arabiyya includes scholarly articles and reviews that advance the study, research, and teaching of Arabic language, linguistics, literature, and pedagogy.

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Analytic Syntax
Otto Jespersen
University of Chicago Press, 1984
Here the great Danish linguist Otto Jespersen puts forward his views on grammatical structure in a kind of shorthand formalism, devising symbols that represent various grammatical elements and then analyzing numerous sentences in terms of these symbols. The contemporaneity of these analyses is remarkable, for they allude to concepts that were uncongenial to linguists in 1937 when the book was first published, but which have come to be generally accepted in the linguistics community during the past twenty-five years.
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Architectures, Rules, and Preferences
Variations on Themes by Joan W. Bresnan
Edited by Annie Zaenen
CSLI, 2007
Architectures, Rules, and Preferences reflects the interests and honors the influence of Joan W. Bresnan’s two decades of foundational work on Lexical-Functional Grammar. This comprehensive volume includes contributions by leading linguists on language typology, synchronic variation, language change, constituent structure, function identification, subject condition, control, complex predicates, NP internal structure, wh-constructions, syntactic features, and lexical issues. Featuring an impressive range of empirical and theoretical research, this collection covers more than a dozen spoken languages as well as American Sign Language.
 
 
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Aspects of Old English Poetic Syntax
WHERE CLAUSES BEGIN
Mary Blockley
University of Illinois Press, 2001
In Aspects of Old English Poetic Syntax, Mary Blockley uses modern linguistics to tackle the thorny problem of how to interpret a written language that relied neither on punctuation nor on capitalization to mark clause boundaries and subordination.
 
Distinguished by a remarkable combination of erudition and lucidity,  Aspects of Old English Poetic Syntax provides new insight into the rules that govern syntactic relationships and indicates how these rules differ for prose and verse. Blockley considers the functions of four of the most common and most syntactically important words in Old English, as well as such features of clauses as verb-initial order, negative contraction, and unexpressed but understood subjects. Picking up where Bruce Mitchell's classic Old English Syntax left off, Blockley shows how such common words and structures mark the relationships between phrases and clauses.
Blockley also considers how the poetic tradition compensated for the loss in written texts of the syntactic functions served by intonation and inflection. Arguing that verse relied instead on a prescriptively regulated, unambiguous syntax, she suggests principles that promise more complex and subtle interpretations of familiar texts such as Beowulf as well as a wealth of other Old English writings.
 
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Attic Greek Prose Syntax
Revised and Expanded in English, Volume 1
K. W. Kruger
University of Michigan Press, 1998

The language of classical Greek literature has been extensively studied since the Renaissance, and the most generally admired approach to Greek grammar and syntax has long been K. W. Krüger's Griechische Sprachlehre. In this translation Guy L. Cooper III accepts Krüger's simple and transparent organization, but greatly expands the substance of the earlier work by increasing the total number of citations from the original texts. Research since 1875, especially the contributions of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, is incorporated so as to create a reference work, in English, which covers the full range of this complex subject.

Krüger's original paragraph numbering has been maintained so that references in previously published works can be followed directly in the new work. However, every paragraph and chapter has been revised and expanded, opening up new subheadings within Krüger's format. The English has moved away from Krüger's laconic style to a more flowing, readable presentation, without jargon and unexplained technical language. A complete index of passages cited and the impressive number of citations make the work a running syntactic commentary on the whole range of Attic prose literature. The net result is a new comprehensive reference work, an essential reference for libraries and personal collections alike.

Guy L. Cooper III is Professor Emeritus of Classics, University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Volume 2
cloth ISBN 0-472-10844-1

Set of Volumes 1 & 2
cloth ISBN 0-472-10844-1

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Attic Greek Prose Syntax
Revised and Expanded in English, Volume 2
K. W. Kruger
University of Michigan Press, 1998

The language of classical Greek literature has been extensively studied since the Renaissance, and the most generally admired approach to Greek grammar and syntax has long been K. W. Krüger's Griechische Sprachlehre. In this translation Guy L. Cooper III accepts Krüger's simple and transparent organization, but greatly expands the substance of the earlier work by increasing the total number of citations from the original texts. Research since 1875, especially the contributions of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, is incorporated so as to create a reference work, in English, which covers the full range of this complex subject.

Krüger's original paragraph numbering has been maintained so that references in previously published works can be followed directly in the new work. However, every paragraph and chapter has been revised and expanded, opening up new subheadings within Krüger's format. The English has moved away from Krüger's laconic style to a more flowing, readable presentation, without jargon and unexplained technical language. A complete index of passages cited and the impressive number of citations make the work a running syntactic commentary on the whole range of Attic prose literature. The net result is a new comprehensive reference work, an essential reference for libraries and personal collections alike.

Guy L. Cooper III is Professor Emeritus of Classics, University of North Carolina at Asheville.

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Beyond Alternations
Laura A. Michaelis and Josef Ruppenhofer
CSLI, 2001
Beyond Alternations provides a unified account of the semantic effects of the German applicative ("be-") construction. Using natural data from a variety
of corpora, the authors propose that this pattern is inherently meaningful and that its meaning provides the basis for creative extensions.
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Case Marking and Grammatical Relations in Polynesian
By Sandra Chung
University of Texas Press, 1978

Case Marking and Grammatical Relations in Polynesian makes an outstanding contribution to both Polynesian and historical linguistics. It is at once a reference work describing Polynesian syntax, an investigation of the role of grammatical relations in syntax, and a discussion of ergativity, case marking, and other areas of syntactic diversity in Polynesian. In its treatment of the history of case marking in Polynesian, it attempts to specify what counts as evidence in syntactic reconstruction and how syntactic reanalysis progresses. It therefore represents a first step toward a general theory of syntactic change.

Chung first describes the basic syntax of the Polynesian languages, discussing Maori, Tongan, Samoan, Kapingamarangi, and Pukapukan in depth. She then presents an investigation of the grammatical relations of these languages and their relevance to syntax and shows that the syntax of all these languages—even those with ergative case marking—revolves around the familiar grammatical relations subject and direct object. Finally the book traces the historical development of the different case systems from their origins in Proto-Polynesian.

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Complex Predicates
Edited by Alex Alsina, Joan Bresnan, and Peter Sells
CSLI, 1996
Complex predicates can be defined as predicates which are composed of more than one grammatical element (either morphemes or words), each of which contributes a non-trivial part of the information of the complex predicate. The papers collected in this volume, which were presented at a workshop at Stanford in 1993, represent a variety of approaches to the question of the range and nature of complex predicates, and draw on data from a wide spectrum of languages. This collection develops a better understanding of the range of phenomena that a general theory of complex predicates would have to account for, and to see what kinds of linguistic ideas and methodologies would be necessary for such a task.
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Complex Predicates in Japanese
A Syntactic and Semantic Study of the Notion 'Word'
Yo Matsumoto
CSLI, 1996
In this thoroughly revised version of 1992 Stanford dissertation, the author presents an extensive discussion of Japanese complex predicates. A broad range of constructions and predicates are discussed, which include predicative complement constructions, light verbs, causative predicates, desiderative predicates, syntactic and lexical compound verbs, and complex motion predicates. A number of new interesting facts are uncovered, and a detailed syntactic and semantic analyses are presented. On the basis of the analyses, the author argues that the notion 'word' must be relativized to at least three different senses: morphological, grammatical (functional), and semantic; and that this observation can be insightfully captured in the theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar. Previous proposals for each type of predicate that involve such mechanisms as argument transfer, incorporation, restructuring, etc. are thoroughly reviewed. Concrete proposals on the constraints on semantic wordhood are also made (an issue rarely discussed in the literature), drawing insights from cognitive linguistics.
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Complex Words, Causatives, Verbal Periphrases and the Gerund
Romance Languages versus Czech (A Parallel Corpus-Based Study)
Edited by Petr Cermák, Dana Kratochvílová, Olga Nadvornikova, and Pavel Štichauer
Karolinum Press, 2020
This book focuses on the typological differences among the four most widely spoken Romance languages--French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish--and Czech. Utilizing findings from the Czech National Corpus’ massive language database, the authors analyze a range of linguistic categories to discover the differences and similarities between Czech and the Romance languages. Due to the massive amount of data mined, as well as the high number of languages examined, this book presents general and individual typological features of the four Romance languages and Czech that often exceed what has previously been accepted in the field of comparative linguistics.
 
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A Concise Introduction to Syntactic Theory
The Government-Binding Approach
Elizabeth A. Cowper
University of Chicago Press, 1992
This textbook is intended to give students a quick start in using theory to address syntactic questions. At each stage, Cowper is careful to introduce a theoretical apparatus that is no more complex than is required to deal with the phenomenon under consideration. Comprehensive and up-to-date, this accessible volume will also provide an excellent refresher for linguists returning to the study of Government-Binding theory.

"Cowper exhibits the analytical devices of current principles-and-parameters approaches, takes readers carefully through the central elements of grammatical theory (including very recent work), and ushers them selectively into the technical literature. . . . A serious introduction for those who want to know the nuts and bolts of syntactic theory and to see why linguists are so excited these days."—David Lightfoot, University of Maryland

"An excellent short introduction to the Government and Binding model of syntactic theory. . . . Cowper's work succeeds in teaching syntactic argumentation and in showing the conceptual reasons behind specific proposals in modern syntactic theory."—Jaklin Kornfilt, Syracuse University

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Constraint-Based Approaches to Germanic Syntax
Edited by W. Detmar Meurers and Tibor Kiss
CSLI, 2001
A wealth of research has been conducted on the various linguistic phenomena found in Germanic languages. But these studies were restricted by their use of only one theoretical perspective to analyze one particular language. Inspired by the need to expand the research base of Germanic languages while broadening the empirical coverage of constraint-based linguistic approaches, a handful of researchers are employing various constraint-based theoretical perspectives to study multiple Germanic languages.

This volume begins with an introduction to the recent research performed on Germanic syntax using constraint-based frameworks. It then goes on to investigate the linguistic phenomena found in the grammar of the German and Danish languages. Using such approaches as Lexical-Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, contributors shed a different light on theoretical issues addressed by past studies, including semi-free word order, partial front phenomena, and complex predicate formation. While alternative approaches have assumed that meaning (semantics) is dependent on form (syntax), various analyses presented in this volume explore the idea that both form and meaning are equally constitutive for grammatical descriptions.
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Constraint-Based Syntax and Semantics
Papers in Honor of Danièle Godard
Edited by Anne Abeille and Olivier Bonami
CSLI, 2018
This volume is devoted to the syntax and semantics of various languages, studied with models based on constraints. Both French and international linguists present their work in tribute to Danièle Godard, emeritus research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in France, a member of the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle at Université Paris Diderot, and a specialist in the syntax and semantics of French and Romance languages.
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Constraints and Resources in Natural Language Syntax and Semantics
Edited by Gosse Bouma, Erhard Hinrichs, Geert-Jan M. Kruijff, and Richard Oehrle
CSLI, 1999
This collection draws together recent work on constraint-based and resource-sensitive approaches to the grammar of natural languages. Some of the issues addressed are: extraction phenomena in a range of languages, the syntax of nominal phrases, the role of argument structure, defining the interface between syntax and morphology and between semantics and prosody, quantifier scope, remnant movement, construction grammar, and formal and computational aspects of grammar formalisms. This volume brings together the leading linguists, logicians, and computer scientists working on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Categorial Grammar. Derived from two recent conferences on Formal Grammar and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar in Aix (1997) and Saarbrücken (1998), this volume represents the most current work in these frameworks.
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Constructions
A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure
Adele E. Goldberg
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Drawing on work in linguistics, language acquisition, and computer science, Adele E. Goldberg proposes that grammatical constructions play a central role in the relation between the form and meaning of simple sentences. She demonstrates that the syntactic patterns associated with simple sentences are imbued with meaning—that the constructions themselves carry meaning independently of the words in a sentence.

Goldberg provides a comprehensive account of the relation between verbs and constructions, offering ways to relate verb and constructional meaning, and to capture relations among constructions and generalizations over constructions. Prototypes, frame semantics, and metaphor are shown to play crucial roles. In addition, Goldberg presents specific analyses of several constructions, including the ditransitive and the resultative constructions, revealing systematic semantic generalizations.

Through a comparison with other current approaches to argument structure phenomena, this book narrows the gap between generative and cognitive theories of language.
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The Core and the Periphery
Data-Driven Perspectives on Syntax Inspired by Ivan A. Sag
Edited by Philip Hofmeister and Elisabeth Norcliffe
CSLI, 2013
The Core and the Periphery is a collection of papers inspired by the linguistics career of Ivan A. Sag (1949-2013), written to commemorate his many contributions to the field. Sag was professor of linguistics at Stanford University from 1979 to 2013; served as the director of the Symbolic Systems Program from 2005 to 2009; authored, co-authored, or edited fifteen volumes on linguistics; and was at the forefront of non-transformational approaches to syntax. Reflecting the breadth of Sag’s theoretical interests and approaches to linguistic problems, the papers collected here tackle a range of grammar-related issues using corpora, intuitions, and laboratory experiments. They are united by their use of and commitment to rich datasets and share the perspective that the best theories of grammar attempt to account for the full diversity and complexity of language data.
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Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics
Negation, Tense, and Clausal Architecture
Raffaella Zanuttini, Héctor Campos, Elena Herburger, and Paul H. Portner, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2006

Presenting cutting-edge research in syntax and semantics, this important volume furthers theoretical claims in generative linguistics and represents a significant addition to present scholarship in the field. Leading scholars present crosslinguistic studies dealing with clausal architecture, negation, and tense and aspect, and the issue of whether a statistical model can by itself capture the richness of human linguistic abilities. Taken together, these contributions elegantly show how theoretical tools can propel our understanding of language beyond pretheoretical descriptions, especially when combined with the insight and skills of linguists who can analyze difficult and complex data.

Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics covers a range of topics currently at the center of lively debate in the linguistic literature, such as the structure of the left periphery of the clause, the proper treatment of negative polarity items, and the role of statistical learning in building a model of linguistic competence. The ten original contributions offer an excellent balance of novel empirical description and theoretical analysis, applied to a wide range of languages, including Dutch, German, Irish English, Italian, Malagasy, Malay, and a number of medieval Romance languages. Scholars and students of semantics, syntax, and linguistic theory will find it to be a valuable resource for ongoing scholarship and advanced study.

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Deconstructing Morphology
Word Formation in Syntactic Theory
Rochelle Lieber
University of Chicago Press, 1992
One of the major contributions to theoretical linguistics during the twentieth century has been an advancement of our understanding that the information-bearing units which make up human language are organized on a hierarchy of levels. It has been an overarching goal of research since the 1930s to determine the precise nature of those levels and what principles guide interactions among them.

Linguists have typically posited phonological, morphological, and syntactic levels, each with its own distinct vocabulary and organizing principles, but in Deconstructing Morphology Rochelle Lieber persuasively challenges the existence of a morphological level of language. Her argument, that rules and vocabulary claimed to belong to the morphological level in fact belong to the levels of syntax and phonology, follows the work of Sproat, Toman, and others. Her study, however, is the first to draw jointly on Chomsky's Government-Binding Theory of syntax and on recent research in phonology.

Ranging broadly over data from many languages—including Tagalog, English, French, and Dutch—Deconstructing Morphology addresses key questions in current morphological and phonological research and provides an innovative view of the overall architecture of grammar.
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Discontinuous NPs in German
A Case Study of the Interaction of Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics
Kordula De Kuthy
CSLI, 2002
This book investigates the occurrence of discontinuous noun phrases, arguing that many of the factors that previous literature has tried to explain in terms of syntactic restrictions on movements are in fact derivable from discourse factors. De Kuthy’s HPSG and information-structure analyses provide an exemplary argument for rethinking the division of labor between syntax and a theory of discourse.
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The Dynamics of Lexical Interfaces
Ruth Kempson, Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Christine Howes
CSLI, 2011

Dynamic Syntax is a formal model of utterance description that attempts to articulate and substantiate the claim that human linguistic knowledge is essentially the ability to process language in context. The model provides an explicit demonstration of how interpretation is built up incrementally from the information provided by the words as they are encountered. Drawing from a range of analyses of natural language data, the authors use formal definitions, step-by-step derivations, and detailed lexical definitions to illustrate this new form of syntactic analysis and to show how the model can be applied to a broad range of constructions and languages.

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Dynamics of Meaning
Anaphora, Presupposition, and the Theory of Grammar
Gennaro Chierchia
University of Chicago Press, 1995
In The Dynamics of Meaning, Gennaro Chierchia tackles central issues in dynamic semantics and extends the general framework.

Chapter 1 introduces the notion of dynamic semantics and discusses in detail the phenomena that have been used to motivate it, such as "donkey" sentences and adverbs of quantification. The second chapter explores in greater depth the interpretation of indefinites and issues related to presuppositions of uniqueness and the "E-type strategy." In Chapter 3, Chierchia extends the dynamic approach to the domain of syntactic theory, considering a range of empirical problems that includes backwards anaphora, reconstruction effects, and weak crossover. The final chapter develops the formal system of dynamic semantics to deal with central issues of definites and presupposition. Chierchia shows that an approach based on a principled enrichment of the mechanisms dealing with meaning is to be preferred on empirical grounds over approaches that depend on an enrichment of the syntactic apparatus.

Dynamics of Meaning illustrates how seemingly abstract stances on the nature of meaning can have significant and far-reaching linguistic consequences, leading to the detection of new facts and influencing our understanding of the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface.
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The Earliest Missionary Grammar of Tamil
Fr. Henriques' Arte da Lingua Malabar: Translation, History, and Analysis
Jeanne Hein
Harvard University Press

Arte da Lingua Malabar is a grammar of the Tamil spoken in the sixteenth century by the Parava pearl fisher community on the east coast of South India between Kanyakumari and Rameswaram. Fr. Henrique Henriques, S.J., a Portuguese Jesuit missionary to South India, was the first diligent student of Tamil from Europe. He wrote this grammar in Portuguese around 1549 CE for the benefit of his colleagues engaged in learning the local language for spreading their religious beliefs. Consequently, Arte da Lingua Malabar reflects the first linguistic contact between India and the West.

This grammar is unique in many aspects. It is not based on traditional Indian grammars; rather, it uses Latin grammatical categories to describe sixteenth-century Tamil. The effort to describe a language (Tamil) in terms of an unrelated language (Portuguese) has resulted in several inaccuracies in transliteration and scribing. Yet, Arte da Lingua Malabar is the best evidence for showing how sixteenth-century Tamil was heard and written by a sixteenth-century Portuguese. This English translation by Jeanne Hein and V. S. Rajam also includes analysis of the grammar and a description of the political context in which it was written.

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English Syntax
An Introduction
Jon-Bok Kim and Peter Sells
CSLI, 2008
Focusing on the descriptive facts of English, this volume provides a systematic introduction to English syntax for students with no prior knowledge of English grammar or syntactic analysis. English Syntax aims to help students appreciate the various sentence patterns available in the language, understand insights into core data of its syntax, develop analytic abilities to further explore the patterns of English, and learn precise ways of formalizing syntactic analysis for a variety of English data and major constructions such as agreement, raising and control, the auxiliary system, passive, wh- questions, relative clauses, extrapolation, and clefts.
 
 
 
 
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Ergativity
Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations
Christopher D. Manning
CSLI, 1996
This volume considers and examines some of the phenomena that have led languages to be considered 'ergative'. Languages considered 'ergative' have only been sparsely studied, and many fundamental questions in their analysis seem at best incompletely answered. This volume fills that void by focussing on some of the basic issues: when ergativity should be analyzed as syntactic or morphological; whether languages can be divided into two classes of syntactically and morphologically ergative languages, and if so where the division should be drawn; and whether ergative arguments are always core roles or not. Christopher Manning's codification of syntactic approaches to dealing with ergative languages is based on a hypothesis he terms the 'Inverse Grammatical Relations hypothesis.' This hypothesis adopts a framework that decouples prominence at the levels of grammatical relations and argument structure. The result is two notions of subject: grammatical subject and argument structure subject and a uniform analysis of syntactically ergative and Philippine languages. These language groups, the syntactically ergative and Philippine languages, allow an inverse mapping in the prominence of the two highest terms between argument structure and grammatical relations. A level of argument structure is shown to be particularly well motivated by the examination of syntactically ergative languages. A study of Inuit, Tagalog, and Dyirbal shows that constraints on imperative addressee and controllee selection, antecendent of anaphors, and the controller of certain adverbial clauses are universally sensitive to argument structure. Thus, these phenomena are always accusative or neutral, explaining why passive agents and causes can generally bind reflexives. However, constraints on relativization, topicalization, focussing or questioning, specificity or wide scope, coreferential omission in coordination, etc. are shown to be universally sensitive to grammatical relations. Examining just these phenomena, which are sensitive to grammatical relations, it becomes evident that many languages are indeed syntactically ergative, and so must be countenanced by linguistic theory. This volume combines good scholarship with innovative ideas into an important work that will appeal to a wide range of linguists and scholars.
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Focus Projection in Serbo-Croatian
Svetlana Godjevac
CSLI, 2004
Research on the English language suggests that the relationship between phonological prominence, word order, and focus—better known as focus projection—is mediated through syntax. This book breaks new ground with its demonstration of how the Serbo-Croatian language shows the workings of this relationship.

Svetlana Godjevac explores the development of focus projection. Further distinguishing her work from the numerous studies of the English language, she analyzes how focus projection in Serbo-Croatian also depends on the semantic type of the prominence bearing element. This volume is an innovative analysis of linguistic theory as well as a study of a lesser examined language.
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From Syntax to Text
The Janus Face of Functional Sentence Perspective
Libuse Dusková
Karolinum Press, 2015
The volume deals with the interaction between syntax, informational structure (or functional sentence perspective), and text in present-day English and Czech. Libuše Dušková focuses on the two facets of functional sentence perspective: syntactic structures as carriers of informational structure functions and the connection of functional sentence perspective within the level of text. Functional sentence perspective is investigated as a potential factor of syntactic divergence between English and Czech, and the role of functional sentence perspective is examined with respect to theme development, text build-up, and style. Other topics include the hierarchical relationship between syntax and functional sentence perspective and general and specific questions of word order, with major attention paid to the role of semantics.
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The Generic Book
Edited by Gregory N. Carlson and Francis Jeffry Pelletier
University of Chicago Press, 1995
In an attempt to address the theoretical gap between linguistics and philosophy, a group of semanticists, calling itself the Generic Group, has worked to develop a common view of genericity. Their research has resulted in this book, which consists of a substantive introduction and eleven original articles on important aspects of the interpretation of generic expressions. The introduction provides a clear overview of the issues and synthesizes the major analytical approaches to them. Taken together, the papers that follow reflect the current state of the art in the semantics of generics, and afford insight into various generic phenomena.
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Grammar and Discourse Principles
Functional Syntax and GB Theory
Susumu Kuno and Ken-ichi Takami
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In Grammar and Discourse Principles, Susumu Kuno and Ken-ichi Takami critically examine recent work in the Government and Binding framework developed by Chomsky, Rizzi, Lasnik and Saito, Huang, Aoun, and others. They demonstrate that this work encounters a variety of empirical and theoretical difficulties when confronted by an expanded range of data. Alternatively, the authors offer independently motivated functional explanations that account for these data and that do not require postulation of concepts like "L-marking" and "blocking category."

Kuno and Takami begin by looking at extraction phenomena, including extraction from complement clauses, the overt subject requirement, and subjacency, and provide functional accounts that improve on the Barriers analysis. Next, they discuss multiple wh questions in English and Japanese, with special reference to why and naze. The authors also examine and ultimately reject the major arguments in support of Larson's "light predicate raising" analysis. Finally, Kuno and Takami discuss coreferentiality of picture noun reflexives and the relation of quantifier scope interpretations, particularly those in sentences involving psychological verbs such as bother, worry, and please.

In this subtly argued book, the authors raise questions of critical importance for theoretical linguists of all persuasions.
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Interfaces and Domains of Quantification
Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach
The Ohio State University Press, 2014
Quantification is an intrinsically complex mechanism of expression in natural language, comprising a variety of structural shapes and semantic domains whose inventory has not been completely charted to date. Several linguistic forms associated with quantification in Spanish are explored in Interfaces and Domains of Quantification by Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, from indefiniteness and ellipsis to the quantificational properties of relative clauses and adverbial particles.
 
Interfaces and Domains of Quantification advocates an interface approach to the grammar of Spanish quantification. Only a precise characterization of the syntactic properties of quantificational constructions and of their associated meanings allows us to understand how more general syntactic and semantic constraints are at work. Among other findings, the interaction of scope and parallelism with ellipsis is reconsidered; the structural significance of modal anchoring and essential properties for the interpretation of indefiniteness is explored in detail; additionally, quantificational variability and correlativity phenomena in relative clauses are analyzed; degree expression is characterized for concessive conditionals and superlatives; and, finally, several discourse particles with a quantificational core are shown to be critical for the articulation of semantic and discourse-pragmatic relations. Taking a detailed look at the different forms, patterns and structures associated with several quantificational domains seems to be the only fully explanatory way to advance our knowledge of the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of quantificational structures.
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Jacy
An Implemented Grammar of Japanese
Melanie Siegel, Emily M. Bender, and Francis Bond
CSLI, 2017
This book describes the fundamentals of Jacy, an implementation of a Japanese head-driven phrase structure grammar with many useful linguistic implications. Jacy presents sound information about the Japanese language (syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) based on implementation and tested on large quantities of data. As the grammar development was done in a multilingual environment, Jacy also showcases both multilingual concepts and differences among the languages and demonstrates the usefulness of semantic analysis in language technology applications.
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Language Files
Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics, 13th Edition
Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Language Files has become one of the most widely adopted, consulted, and authoritative introductory textbooks to linguistics ever written. The scope of the text makes it suitable for use in a wide range of courses, while its unique organization into student-friendly, self-contained sections allows for tremendous flexibility in course design. 
 
The thirteenth edition has been revised, clarified, and updated throughout to ensure that it remains the most comprehensive and accessible introductory linguistics textbook on the market. The revised chapter on morphology includes a more thorough discussion of allomorphy and adds sections on templatic morphology, suprasegmental morphology, and morphological metathesis to give students a more complete picture of all morphological phenomena. The chapter on language and computers has been updated with new sections on deep learning, artificial neural networks, and on other areas of computational linguistics, providing readers with a better sense of current research and applications in this rapidly developing field. Other additions include new sections on syntactic non-constituents and non-generative rule systems in the syntax chapter and a complete rewrite to the creole languages file in the language contact chapter. We have also adopted the use of the singular they when referring to a generic person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant. Exercises and lists of other readings have been updated throughout.
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Language from a Cognitive Perspective
Grammar, Usage, and Processing
Edited by Emily M. Bender and Jennifer E. Arnold
CSLI, 2011

This book is a collection of papers on language processing, usage, and grammar, written to commemorate the career of Thomas Wasow on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. Wasow has been professor of linguistics and philosophy at Stanford University since 1973, and is affiliated with the Symbolic Systems Program. He has made significant contributions to the study of English syntax, psycholinguistics, and philosophy of linguistics.

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Lectures on Contemporary Syntactic Theories
An Introduction to Government-Binding Theory, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, and Lexical-Function Grammar
Peter Sells
CSLI, 1985
Sells provides an introduction to the most important aspects of three major contemporary syntactic theories. A strong linguiustic background is not presupposed, and a brief introductory chapter is included for the nonlinguist. PETER SELLS is a postdoctoral research affliate at CSLI. 1/1/1985 ISBN (Paperback): 0937073148 ISBN (Cloth): 093707313X Subject: Linguistics; Grammar--Syntax; Government-Binding Theory
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Lexical and Constructional Aspects of Linguistic Explanation
Edited by Gert Webelhuth, Jean-Pierre Koenig, and Andreas Kathol
CSLI, 1999

front cover of Linking by Types in the Hierarchical Lexicon
Linking by Types in the Hierarchical Lexicon
Anthony R. Davis
CSLI, 2001
Actions are described by verbs whose subjects, objects, and other complements refer to various participants in those actions. What linguistic principles determine which participants are referred to by each component of a verb?

Many previous approaches to this problem have employed a set of thematic roles, such as agent and patient, to classify varieties of participants. The alternative developed here fits within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar while utilizing typed feature structures, certain basic features of verb meaning, a hierarchical classification of verb meanings, and constraints from more general to more specific word classes. Relying on no special mechanisms or components of grammar, this book is unique in its ability to account for the observed range of verb types in human languages with a simple yet widely applicable set of principles.
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Masked Inversion in French
Paul M. Postal
University of Chicago Press, 1989
In this important work of linguistic analysis, Paul M. Postal addresses a paradigm anomaly in French that has hitherto resisted explanation. A general restriction limiting the form of direct objects in complex infinitival constructions with main verbs like faire fails to hold with certain subordinate verbs, especially connaître. Marshaling extensive evidence, Postal argues that this apparent irregularity is a symptom of a deeper regularity. Rather than being an ordinary transitive complement, the subordinate clause in these cases is actually an Inversion structure, one in which the logical subject demotes to indirect object. However, since this demotion induces no word order change or other direct morphological consequences, the inversion is "masked," and revealed only by several types of apparent anomalies.

This analysis has significant consequences for contemporary syntactic theories. First, the arguments support the view that a sentence's superficial structure cannot be identified with its syntactic structure, even though such an identification is a fundamental assumption of several currently influential grammatical frameworks. Second, even certain theories that do posit abstract aspects of grammatical form fail to allow for the needed Inversion structures. Postal's study supports theories based on the notion of arc and stratification into levels which provide a natural treatment consistent with the factual requirements.

Masked Inversion in French is the first systematic account of this puzzling French syntactic anomaly, and its findings will stimulate research in many areas of natural language grammatical structure.
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Mechanisms of Syntactic Change
Edited by Charles N. Li
University of Texas Press, 1977

Historical linguistics, the oldest field in linguistics, has been traditionally dominated by phonological and etymological investigations. Only in the late twentieth century have linguists begun to focus their interest and research on the area of syntactic change and the insight it provides on the nature of language. This volume represents the first major contribution on the mechanisms of syntactic change.

The fourteen articles that make up this volume were selected from the Symposium on the Mechanisms of Syntactic Change held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1976, one of a series of three conferences sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

These papers clearly demonstrate that the generative approach to the study of language does not explain diachronic processes in syntax. This collection is enlightening, provocative, and carefully documented with data drawn from a great variety of language families.

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Mismatch
Form-Function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar
Edited by Elaine J. Francis and Laura A. Michaelis
CSLI, 2002
Linguistic mismatch phenomena involve semiotic functions that attach to forms in defiance of grammatical design features. Noun phrases, when used as predicates, provide one example: how do predicate nominals correspond to our theories of what nouns mean? How do such phenomena challenge traditional conceptions of grammar? How do competing theories of the syntax-semantics interface stand up when confronted with mismatch phenomena? Mismatch addresses these questions through the efforts of some of the most original thinkers in syntactic and semantic theory, exploring a wide variety of mismatch phenomena in a broad sampling of languages.
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Mixed Categories in the Hierarchical Lexicon
Robert P. Malouf
CSLI, 2000
Mixed category constructions like the English verbal gerund involve words that seem to be central members of more that one part of speech. This poses a problem for the standard view of syntactic categories.

This book presents a novel analysis of this and similar mixed category constructions in languages including Quechua, Tibetan, Arabic, Fijian, Dagaare, and Jacaltec. Under this analysis, Robert P. Malouf shows that verbal gerunds share the selectional properties of verbs and the distributional properties of nouns. He further shows that since different dimensions of grammatical information can vary independently, the behavior of mixed categories creates no paradox. These dimensions are in principle independent. However, certain types of mixed categories are quite common in the world's languages, while others are rare or nonexistent. The book discusses how cross-linguistic variation can be accounted for by a lexical categorial prototype. By stating these prototypes as default constraints in a hierarchy of lexical information, Malouf argues that one can bring insights from cognitive and functional approaches to linguistics into a formal analysis, thus building on the strengths of both approaches.
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Mood, Aspect, Modality Revisited
New Answers to Old Questions
Edited by Joanna Blaszczak, Anastasia Giannakidou, Dorota Klimek-Jankowska, and Krzysztof Migdalski
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Over the past several decades, linguistic theorizing of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM), along with a strongly growing body of crosslinguistic studies, has revealed complexity in the data that challenges traditional distinctions and treatments of these categories. Mood, Aspect, Modality Revisited argues that it’s time to revisit our conventional assumptions and reconsider our foundational questions: What exactly is a linguistic category? What kinds of categories do labels such as “subjunctive,” “imperative,” “future,” and “modality” truly refer to? In short, how categorical are categories?

Current literature assumes a straightforward link between grammatical category and semantic function, and descriptions of well-studied languages have cultivated a sense of predictability in patterns over time. As the editors and contributors of Mood, Aspect, Modality Revisited prove, however, this predictability and stability vanish in the study of lesser-known patterns and languages. The ten provocative essays gathered here present fascinating cutting-edge research demonstrating that the traditional grammatical distinctions are ultimately fluid—and perhaps even illusory. Developing groundbreaking and highly original theories, the contributors in this volume seek to unravel more general, fundamental principles of TAM that can help us better understand the nature of linguistic representations.
 
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front cover of Morphology and its Relation to Phonology and Syntax
Morphology and its Relation to Phonology and Syntax
Patrick Farrell
CSLI, 1998
Leading experts in the field have contributed to this volume which explores key issues in current morphology and the interactions of morphology with phonology and syntax. Included here are papers on compounding, argument structure, voice systems, agreement marking, movement of constituents in compounds and derived forms, haplology, affix realization, stem selection and allomorphy, levels in phonology- morphology interactions, and nonisomorphism across grammatical components. These topics are considered from a variety of theoretical perspectives, among them the theory of Lexical Conceptual Structure, the Principles and Parameters framework, Lexical Functional Grammar, Autolexical Syntax, Optimality Theory, Distributed Morphology, Paradigm-Based Realizational Morphology, and the theory of Cophonologies.
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Optimal Communication
Edited by Reinhard Blutner, Helen de Hoop and Petra Hendriks
CSLI, 2005
This volume explores how the effectiveness of communication is shaped by aspects of semantics and pragmatics such as compositionality, the role of the speaker and hearer, and the acquisition of meaning. Optimal Communication surveys recent research in the fields of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and draws from optimality theory to argue that optimal meanings result from a compromise between competing constraints. Optimal Communication will be an invaluable resource for students in cognitive science, linguistics, and natural language semantics.
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Optimality-Theoretic Syntax
A Declarative Approach
Jonas Kuhn
CSLI, 2003
With this book, Jonas Kuhn greatly advances Optimality Theory (OT) by clarifying the significant choices in the design of a formally precise OT approach to syntax. Building on OT work that uses the representation structures of Lexical Functional Grammar (OT-LFG), Kuhn defines the notion of an OT-syntactic grammar in a declarative, non-derivational way.

Along with the standard OT architecture, which is based on a generation metaphor, Kuhn also formalizes parsing-based OT, and goes on to discuss possible combinations of these two architectures. This is followed by an examination of assumptions under which the computational tasks of generation and parsing are decidable for an OT-syntactic grammar.
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Passive Sentences in English and Portuguese
Milton M. Azevedo
Georgetown University Press, 1980

This study analyzes passive sentences in English and Portuguese which result from a post-semantic transformation applied when a nound, which does not play the semantic role of actor, is chosen as syntactic subject. Choice between a passive and its non-passive or active counterpart reflects differences in the distribution of information in the sentence as regards the relative importance of the latter's constituents for communication. Such distribution is analyzed in terms of Praque school theory, especially that involving the notions of communicative dynamism and the distribution of theme and rheme.

The book concludes with a contrastive analysis of English and Portuguese passive sentence patterns which serves as the basis for observations on the teaching of Portuguese passives to native speakers of English.

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The Phonology-Syntax Connection
Edited by Sharon Inkelas and Draga Zec
University of Chicago Press, 1990

front cover of Practical Guide to Syntactic Analysis, 2nd Edition
Practical Guide to Syntactic Analysis, 2nd Edition
Georgia M. Green and Jerry L. Morgan
CSLI, 2001
The Practical Guide to Syntactic Analysis is a resource for students and practitioners of syntax at all levels, addressing matters that textbooks do not explain. Relatively independent sections target issues ranging from the seductive metaphors of generative grammar and the character of linguistic argumentation to practical advice about both getting started and presenting analysis. This second edition adds a reference guide to over sixty grammatical phenomena that every syntactician should be familiar with.
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Projecting Morphology
Edited by Louisa Sadler and Andrew Spencer
CSLI, 2003
The separation of syntax and morphology is a major principle in contemporary lexicalist theories. The syntactic theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar recognizes this separation on a structural level but argues that both are equal, interacting, and competing contributors in a functional setting. This book discusses the relationship between morphology and LFG, reintroducing two seminal papers on the theory's impact on morphology and presenting new material on current morphological issues, including the nature of morphosyntactic paradigms and the role of optimality theory.
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The Projection of Arguments
Lexical and Compositional Factors
Edited by Miriam Butt and Wilhelm Geuder
CSLI, 1998
It is becoming increasingly clear that the standard approach to argument linking in terms of "thematic roles", which are determined by the lexical meaning of verbs, has some serious shortcomings. This volume sets out to explore alternatives to a rigid model of lexical projection. It brings together a set of papers from different backgrounds that converge on the general hypothesis that the many semantic factors which influence the projection of arguments should be attributed to compositional processes rather than to the fixed contents of lexical entries. Proposals for a reassessment of the lexicon-syntax interface include flexible models of lexical meaning with productive derivation of alternants, as well as models where the structural context supplants much of the putative role of lexical entries. The topics addressed include questions of argument hierarchies and adicity of predicates, and the syntax and semantics of argument alternations in a set of very diverse languages, which include English, Dutch, Scottish Gaelic, Finnish, Hebrew, Kannada, Malay, Inuit, and Yaqui.
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Relevant Linguistics
An Introduction to the Structure and Use of English for Teachers
Paul W. Justice
CSLI, 2001
As linguistic diversity in schools continues to rise, more educators find themselves studying linguistics in teacher training programs. Unfortunately, the vast majority of introductory linguistics texts do not address their needs; such teachers are likely to find the texts inaccessible and irrelevant. Relevant Linguistics, written with teachers and future teachers in mind, provides a straightforward, accessible introduction to the basics of phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax.
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The Semantic Basis of Argument Structure
Stephen Wechsler
CSLI, 1995
Stephen Wechsler Subject: Linguistics; Semantics; Grammar--Syntax
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The Semantics of Syntax
A Minimalist Approach to Grammar
Denis Bouchard
University of Chicago Press, 1995
During the last thirty years, most linguists and philosophers have assumed that meaning can be represented symbolically and that the mental processing of language involves the manipulation of symbols. Scholars have assembled strong evidence that there must be linguistic representations at several abstract levels—phonological, syntactic, and semantic—and that those representations are related by a describable system of rules. Because meaning is so complex, linguists often posit an equally complex relationship between semantic and other levels of grammar.

The Semantics of Syntax is an elegant and powerful analysis of the relationship between syntax and semantics. Noting that meaning is underdetermined by form even in simple cases, Denis Bouchard argues that it is impossible to build knowledge of the world into grammar and still have a describable grammar. He thus proposes simple semantic representations and simple rules to relate linguistic levels. Focusing on a class of French verbs, Bouchard shows how multiple senses can be accounted for by the assumption of a single abstract core meaning along with background information about how objects behave in the world. He demonstrates that this move simplifies the syntax at no cost to the descriptive power of the semantics. In two important final chapters, he examines the consequences of his approach for standard syntactic theories.
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Specifying Syntactic Structures
Edited by Patrick Blackburn and Maarten de Rijke
CSLI, 1997
The papers in this book apply mathematical and logical methods to the description of linguistic structures. Such descriptions are useful for a variety of purposes. For example, they make it easier to design and debug software for dealing with human languages. The purpose of the volume is to introduce a number of new and better methods for describing linguistic structures. The volume contains contributions on the logical foundations of current syntactic theories, as well as on logical methods that lead to new ways of describing syntactic structures.
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The Structure of Complex Predicates in Urdu
Miriam Butt
CSLI, 1995
Complex predicates in a number of diverse languages present an interesting problem for formal linguistics as their overall semantics cannot be placed into a simple one-to-one correspondence with the syntactic or morphological pieces which form the complex predicate.  A central issue in the investigation of complex predicates thus is the interaction between syntax and semantics.

This book takes a detailed look at two differing complex predicates in the South Asian language Urdu.  The Urdu permissive in particular brings into focus the problem of the syntax-semantics mismatch.  An examination of the syntactic properties of this complex predicate shows that it is formed by the combination of two semantic heads, but that this combination is not mirrored in the syntax in terms of any kind of syntactic or lexical incorporation.
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The Structure of English
Studies in Form and Function for Language Teaching
Jeanette S. DeCarrico
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Covering the spectrum of grammatical structures, The Structure of English teaches why grammatical structures are important and how to use them through literary illustrations and clear explanations of grammar's effective use and communicative function. It is directed at future English teachers, as well as the new ESL/EFL teacher.

With an emphasis on discourse function throughout, students are never expected to rely on lists of unrelated, constructed example sentences. Rather, when major points of grammar are presented, the structures are illustrated with rich, "real world" contexts excerpted from literature (mostly American), including novels, short stories, poems, essays, and drama. Exercises in the companion workbook are likewise based on naturally occurring stretches of discourse.
Though informed by modern linguistic theory, explanations are framed in more traditional terminology and are designed to help build students' confidence in using English grammar by deepening their understanding of its forms and functions..
For advanced ESL students and graduate TESOL and certificate programs.
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Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations
The Cognitive Organization of Information
William Croft
University of Chicago Press, 1990

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Syntactic Development
William O'Grady
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Syntactic Development presents a broad critical survey of the research literature on child language development. Giving balanced coverage to both theoretical and empirical issues, William O'Grady constructs an up-to-date picture of how children acquire the syntax of English.

Part 1 offers an overview of the developmental data pertaining to a range of syntactic phenomena, including word order, subject drop, embedded clauses, wh-questions, inversion, relative clauses, passives, and anaphora. Part 2 considers the various theories that have been advanced to explain the facts of development as well as the learnability problem, reporting on work in the mainstream formalist framework but also considering the results of alternative approaches.

Covering a wide range of perspectives in the modern study of syntactic development, this book is an invaluable reference for specialists in the field of language acquisition and provides an excellent introduction to the acquisition of syntax for students and researchers in psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science.
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The Syntactic Phenomena of English
James D. McCawley
University of Chicago Press, 1998
This second edition of James D. McCawley's classic textbook offers in one volume a complete course in the syntactic structure of English. New to this edition are sections on appositive constructions, parasitic gaps, contrastive negation, and comparative conditional sentences, as well as expanded coverage of cleft sentences and free relatives. The presentation is coherent, comprehensive, and systematically organized, beginning with an overview of McCawley's approach to syntactic analysis and progressing through the major constructions and processes of English grammar. No prior special knowledge of syntax is presupposed, and the number and variety of exercises after each chapter have been increased.

And now available from the author! Answers to Selected Exercises.

Instructors using James D. McCawley's The Syntactic Phenomena of English, Second Edition may request a complimentary copy of Answers to Selected Exercises in The Syntactic Phenomena of English by writing on their department's letterhead to the author, James D. McCawley, Department of Linguistics, 1010 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. [Note: This material is available only from the author and is not available from the University of Chicago Press.]

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front cover of The Syntactic Phenomena of English, Volume 1
The Syntactic Phenomena of English, Volume 1
James D. McCawley
University of Chicago Press, 1988
This second edition of James D. McCawley's classic textbook offers in one volume a complete course in the syntactic structure of English. New to this edition are sections on appositive constructions, parasitic gaps, contrastive negation, and comparative conditional sentences, as well as expanded coverage of cleft sentences and free relatives. The presentation is coherent, comprehensive, and systematically organized, beginning with an overview of McCawley's approach to syntactic analysis and progressing through the major constructions and processes of English grammar. No prior special knowledge of syntax is presupposed, and the number and variety of exercises after each chapter have been increased.

And now available from the author! Answers to Selected Exercises.

Instructors using James D. McCawley's The Syntactic Phenomena of English, Second Edition may request a complimentary copy of Answers to Selected Exercises in The Syntactic Phenomena of English by writing on their department's letterhead to the author, James D. McCawley, Department of Linguistics, 1010 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. [Note: This material is available only from the author and is not available from the University of Chicago Press.]
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The Syntactic Phenomena of English, Volume 2
James D. McCawley
University of Chicago Press, 1988
This second edition of James D. McCawley's classic textbook offers in one volume a complete course in the syntactic structure of English. New to this edition are sections on appositive constructions, parasitic gaps, contrastive negation, and comparative conditional sentences, as well as expanded coverage of cleft sentences and free relatives. The presentation is coherent, comprehensive, and systematically organized, beginning with an overview of McCawley's approach to syntactic analysis and progressing through the major constructions and processes of English grammar. No prior special knowledge of syntax is presupposed, and the number and variety of exercises after each chapter have been increased.

And now available from the author! Answers to Selected Exercises.

Instructors using James D. McCawley's The Syntactic Phenomena of English, Second Edition may request a complimentary copy of Answers to Selected Exercises in The Syntactic Phenomena of English by writing on their department's letterhead to the author, James D. McCawley, Department of Linguistics, 1010 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. [Note: This material is available only from the author and is not available from the University of Chicago Press.]
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Syntactic Theory
A Formal Introduction, 2nd Edition
Ivan A. Sag, Thomas Wasow, and Emily M. Bender
CSLI, 2003
This second edition of Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction expands and improves upon a truly unique introductory syntax textbook. Like the first edition, its focus is on the development of precisely formulated grammars whose empirical predictions can be directly tested. There is also considerable emphasis on the prediction and evaluation of grammatical hypotheses, as well as on integrating syntactic hypotheses with matters of semantic analysis.

The book covers the core areas of English syntax from the last quarter century, including complementation, control, "raising constructions," passives, the auxiliary system, and the analysis of long distance dependency constructions. Syntactic Theory's step-by-step introduction to a consistent grammar in these core areas is complemented by extensive problem sets drawing from a variety of languages.

The book's theoretical perspective is presented in the context of current models of language processing, and the practical value of the constraint-based, lexicalist grammatical architecture proposed has already been demonstrated in computer language processing applications. This thoroughly reworked second edition includes revised and extended problem sets, updated analyses, additional examples, and more detailed exposition throughout.

Praise for the first edition:
"Syntactic Theory sets a new standard for introductory syntax volumes that all future books should be measured against."—Gert Webelhuth, Journal of Linguistics
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Syntax and Human Experience
Nicolas Ruwet
University of Chicago Press, 1991
"[Ruwet] raises fundamental questions about the place of grammar in the study of language and provides several studies which suggest the possibility that some core data are outside the realm of grammatical explanation. A very remarkable book, in which the breadth of Ruwet's reflection is both challenging and deeply rewarding."—Denis Bouchard, University of Quebec, Montreal
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The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek
An Introduction: Third Edition
Albert Rijksbaron
University of Chicago Press, 2007

The verb is, in any language, the motor of all communication: no verb, no action. In Greek, verb forms change not only with person, number, tense, and voice, but in four possible moods as well. Available now in a special reprint for the North American market, The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek is an incomparable resource to students and scholars charged with the considerable task of untangling the Greek language’s many complexities. With clear, concise instruction, Albert Rijksbaron shows how the various verb forms contribute to the richness of the Greek literature as we know it, in this essential guide for both novices and experienced practitioners.

“[This study] belongs in the library of any Hellenist and any linguist interested in ancient Greek.”—Classics Newsletter (Anzeiger für die Altertumswissenschaft)

“Every use is described with concision and clarity.”—Kratylos

“The book offers an example of how the empirical thoroughness of traditional Classical scholarship can be brought into contact with general linguistic theory.”—Language

 

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Syntax and Speech
William E. Cooper and Jeanne Paccia-Cooper
Harvard University Press, 1980

Syntax and Speech is the first extensive examination of the relation between sentence structure and the organization of speech. Combining the methods of cognitive psychology, linguistics, and acoustics, the Coopers show that a surprising amount of syntactic information is conveyed by the subtle ways a speaker times the delivery of a sentence.

Syntax and Speech provides abundant experimental evidence that the syntactic boundaries of surface phrase structure have strong effects on the timing of the speech signal.

The Coopers develop a detailed theory of structural representation to account for the location of pauses and elongated speech sounds. This work bears importantly both upon psychological theories of speech production and linguistic theories of sentence structure. Moreover, their methods of examining speech provide an admirable model of how complex human behavior can be successfully analyzed. The results, which can be applied to language pathology and communications engineering and have clear parallels in other expressive behaviors such as American Sign Language, music, and animal communication, provide the starting point for many new lines of research in cognitive science.

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Syntax of Dutch
Adjectives and Adjective Phrases
Hans Broekhuis
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
A series that aims to define Dutch grammar comprehensively, Syntax of Dutch synthesizes forty years of linguistic scholarship. Concerned primarily with description, this series is written in a direct and lucid style that renders each volume accessible to advanced students and scholars alike. Topics covered in this third volume include complementation and modification of adjective phrases; comparative and superlative formation; and the attributive, predicative, and adverbial uses of adjective phrases.

All together, the series will include seven volumes to be published between 2012 and 2016, each an essential addition to the library of any linguist working with Dutch.
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Syntax of Dutch
Adpositions and Adpositional Phrases
Hans Broekhuis
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
Part of the larger Syntax of Dutch series, this volume focuses on the internal makeup and distribution of adpositional phrases in Dutch. It covers such topics as complementation and modification of adpositional phrases, as well as their predicative, attributive, and adverbial uses.
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Syntax of Dutch
Coordination and Ellipsis
Hans Broekhuis
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
The multi-volume work Syntax of Dutch presents a synthesis of current thinking on Dutch syntax. The text of the seven already available volumes was written between 1995 and 2015 and issued in print between 2012 and 2016. The various volumes are primarily concerned with the description of the Dutch language and, only where this is relevant, with linguistic theory. They will be an indispensable resource for researchers and advanced students of languages and linguistics interested in the Dutch language.This volume is the final one of the series and addresses issues relating to coordination. It contains three chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the syntactic and semantic properties of coordinate structures and their constituting elements, that is, the coordinators and the coordinands they link. Chapter 2 discusses the types of ellipsis known as conjunction reduction and gapping found in coordinate structures. Chapter 3 discusses elements seemingly exhibiting coordination-like properties, such as dan ‘than’ in comparative constructions like Jan is groter dan zij ‘Jan is taller than she’.
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Syntax of Dutch
Nouns and Noun Phrases, Volume 2
Hans Broekhuis and Marcel den Dikken
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
Syntax of Dutch presents a synthesis of formal linguistic research of the Dutch language from over forty years of scholarship. It is primarily concerned with language description, and provides support to all researchers interested in matters relating to the syntax of Dutch. These volumes provide a dense yet highly organized description of the internal structure of the noun phrase as well as its external distribution within the clause. These works are written with a directness and lucidity that makes it accessible to linguists of all kinds, including advanced students. This work, which will published in seven volumes in the period 2012–2016, is an essential addition to the library of any linguist working with Dutch.

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Syntax of Dutch
Nouns and Noun Phrases (Volume I)
Hans Broekhuis and Evelien Keizer
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
Syntax of Dutch presents a synthesis of formal linguistic research of the Dutch language from over forty years of scholarship. It is primarily concerned with language description, and provides support to all researchers interested in matters relating to the syntax of Dutch. These volumes provide a dense yet highly organized description of the internal structure of the noun phrase as well as its external distribution within the clause. These works are written with a directness and lucidity that makes it accessible to linguists of all kinds, including advanced students. This work, which will be published in seven volumes total in the period 2012–2016, is an essential addition to the library of any linguist working with Dutch.
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Syntax of Dutch
Verbs and Verb Phrases. Volume 1
Hans Broekhuis
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
R>The Syntax of Dutch aims at presenting a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of Dutch. It is primarily concerned with language description and not with linguistic theory, and provides support to all researchers interested in matters relating to the syntax of Dutch, including advanced students of language and linguistics.

Syntax of Dutch: Verbs and Verb Phrases consists of three volumes. Volume 1 opens with a general introduction to verbs, including a review of various verb classifications and discussions on inflection, tense, mood, modality and aspect. This is followed by a comprehensive discussion of complementation (argument structure and verb frame alternations). Volume 2 continues the discussion of complementation, but is more specifically focused on clausal complements: the reader will find detailed discussions of finite and infinitival argument clauses, complex verb constructions and verb clustering. Volume 3 concludes with a description of adverbial modification and the overall structure of clauses in relation to, e.g., word order (verb placement, wh-movement. extraposition phenomena, scrambling, etc.).
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Syntax of Dutch
Verbs and Verb Phrases. Volume 2
Hans Broekhuis
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
Syntax of Dutch: Verbs and Verb Phrases consists of three volumes. Volume 1 opens with a general introduction to verbs, including a review of various verb classifications and discussions on inflection, tense, mood, modality and aspect. This is followed by a comprehensive discussion of complementation (argument structure and verb frame alternations). Volume 2 continues the discussion of complementation, but is more specifically focused on clausal complements: the reader will find detailed discussions of finite and infinitival argument clauses, complex verb constructions and verb clustering. Volume 3 concludes with a description of adverbial modification and the overall structure of clauses in relation to, e.g., word order (verb placement, wh-movement. extraposition phenomena, scrambling, etc.).
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Syntax of Dutch
Verbs and Verb Phrases. Volume 3
Hans Broekhuis
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
The Syntax of Dutch aims at presenting a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of Dutch. It is primarily concerned with language description and not with linguistic theory, and provides support to all researchers interested in matters relating to the syntax of Dutch, including advanced students of language and linguistics. Syntax of Dutch: Verbs and Verb Phrases consists of three volumes. Volume 1 opens with a general introduction to verbs, including a review of various verb classifications and discussions on inflection, tense, mood, modality and aspect. This is followed by a comprehensive discussion of complementation (argument structure and verb frame alternations). Volume 2 continues the discussion of complementation, but is more specifically focused on clausal complements: the reader will find detailed discussions of finite and infinitival argument clauses, complex verb constructions and verb clustering. Volume 3 concludes with a description of adverbial modification and the overall structure of clauses in relation to, e.g., word order (verb placement, wh-movement. extraposition phenomena, scrambling, etc.).
[more]

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Syntax of Hungarian
Coordination and Ellipsis
Zoltán Bánréti
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Syntax of Hungarian aims to present a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of the Hungarian language, rooted in theory but providing highly detailed descriptions, and intended to be of use to researchers, as well as advanced students of language and linguistics. As research in language leads to extensive changes in our understanding and representations of grammar, the Comprehensive Grammar Resources series intends to present the most current understanding of grammar and syntax as completely as possible in a way that will both speak to modern linguists and serve as a resource for the non-specialist. This volume provides a comprehensive overview and description of coordinate structures, the syntactic and semantic types of conjunctions, as well as the types of ellipses in sentences and short dialogues. It discusses multiple conjunctions, coordinated wh-constructions, sluicing, and sentence fragments.
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Syntax of Hungarian
Nouns and Noun Phrases, Volume 1
Edited by Gábor Alberti and Tibor Laczkó
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
These books aim to present a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of the Hungarian language, rooted in theory but providing highly detailed descriptions, and intended to be of use to researchers, as well as advanced students of language and linguistics. As research in language leads to extensive changes in our understanding and representations of grammar, the Comprehensive Grammar Resources series intends to present the most current understanding of grammar and syntax as completely as possible in a way that will both speak to modern linguists and serve as a resource for the non-specialist.
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Syntax of Hungarian
Nouns and Noun Phrases, Volume 2
Edited by Gábor Alberti and Tibor Laczkó
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
These books aim to present a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of the Hungarian language, rooted in theory but providing highly detailed descriptions, and intended to be of use to researchers, as well as advanced students of language and linguistics. As research in language leads to extensive changes in our understanding and representations of grammar, the Comprehensive Grammar Resources series intends to present the most current understanding of grammar and syntax as completely as possible in a way that will both speak to modern linguists and serve as a resource for the non-specialist.
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Syntax of Hungarian
Postpositions and Postpositional Phrases
Katalin É. Kiss
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
The Syntax of Hungarian aims to present a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of the Hungarian language, rooted in theory but providing highly detailed descriptions, and intended to be of use to researchers, as well as advanced students of language and linguistics. As research in language leads to extensive changes in our understanding and representations of grammar, the Comprehensive Grammar Resources series intends to present the most current understanding of grammar and syntax as completely as possible in a way that will both speak to modern linguists and serve as a resource for the non-specialist.
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The Syntax of Spoken Arabic
A Comparative Study of Moroccan, Egyptian, Syrian, and Kuwaiti Dialects
Kristen Brustad
Georgetown University Press, 2000

This book is the first comparative study of the syntax of Arabic dialects, based on natural language data recorded in Morocco, Egypt, Syria, and Kuwait. These four dialect regions are geographically diverse and representative of four distinct dialect groups.

Kristen E. Brustad has adopted an analytical approach that is both functional and descriptive, combining insights from discourse analysis, language typology, and pragmatics—the first time such an approach has been used in the study of spoken Arabic syntax. An appendix includes sample texts from her data.

Brustad's work provides the most nuanced description available to date of spoken Arabic syntax, widens the theoretical base of Arabic linguistics, and gives both scholars and students of Arabic tools for greater cross-dialect comprehension.

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The Syntax of Sports, Class 1
The Words Under the Words
Patrick Barry
Michigan Publishing Services, 2019
The Syntax of Sports is that course you wish you took in college—even if you aren’t a sports fan. It’s interesting. It’s practical. It’s inspiring. And best of all, it teaches you a skill that is at once highly marketable and potentially transforming: how to become a better thinker and writer.

The beginning of a multi-volume series, this initial book recreates the first day of class as it was taught to undergraduates at the University of Michigan. The examples are compelling. The dialogue is fast moving. The stories are ones you’ll want to return to and retell over and over again. There is a reason the actual students who took The Syntax of Sports said the following things about it:

Every class I learned something new that I know I’ll actually use in my writing for years to come. Couldn’t be happier that I took a chance on Syntax of Sports.”

Prof. Barry has structured the course so that it’s almost impossible not to learn something valuable to take with you to future classes and future career possibilities.”

I have learned a ton of techniques for being a better writer in this class. I have also learned many life lessons that will undoubtedly guide how I act in the future.”

“I absolutely loved this course because the teacher was so awesome. I enjoyed sitting through class listening to Professor Barry and falling in love with his brain.”
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The Syntax of Sports, Class 2
The Power of the Particular
Patrick Barry
Michigan Publishing Services, 2020

What can we learn from baseball great Ted Williams about how to improve our writing? What can we learn we from the iconic ESPN show SportsCenter  about how to manage information? And are you sure you really know what the word “peruse” means? 

Explore these and other questions in the second volume of The Syntax of Sports, a series designed to recreate a popular course at the University of Michigan. Here are a few things students have said about the experience of taking it.

  •  “Patrick Barry is the best teacher I have ever had. I have never learned so much in a class. I hated English my whole life until I took this course.”

  • “I feel like this is and always will be the most valuable class I've ever taken here.”

  • “I genuinely wanted to show up to this class due to the amount I knew I would learn.” 

  •  “I'm going to severely SEVERELY miss this course.”

  • “Every student should try to take one of Prof. Barry’s classes if he or she wants to become a better writer.”

  •  “My writing is now 113x better.”

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The Syntax of Sports, Class 3
The Rule of Three
Patrick Barry
Michigan Publishing Services, 2021

It’s not an accident that hall of fame coaches, Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, and the marketing teams at the most innovative companies in the world often rely on a certain three-part structure when trying to communicate their ideas. This third volume of The Syntax of Sports series explores the mechanics of that structure and shows how it can add a compelling mix of clarity and sophistication to your writing.

Like in the previous volumes, the materials come from a popular course at the University of Michigan. Here are comments from students who have taken it:

“The quality of this course was fantastic!”

“Professor Barry really knows how to keep students engaged.”

“Professor Barry is very passionate about teaching, and his enthusiasm made me want to write and learn.”

“This course not only helps you become a better writer but also sheds light on how you might become a better person.”

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The Syntax of Sports, Class 4
Parallel Structure
Patrick Barry
Michigan Publishing Services, 2022

“Once you find the right structure, perhaps it will be easier to find the right content.” That’s one of the key insights from this fourth book in the series The Syntax of Sports. Others include:

  • The importance of being “radically inclusive”
  • The power of defining something by what it is not
  • The creative elegance of the word “as”

So join Professor Patrick Barry as he continues to share lessons from the popular writing course at the University of Michigan on which The Syntax of Sports is based. You’ll learn about language. You’ll learn about advocacy. And you’ll get to explore some illuminating connections between everything from the speeches of Winston Churchill, to the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, to—perhaps most surprisingly—the face of NFL legend (and former University of Michigan quarterback) Tom Brady. 

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The Syntax of Sports Class 5
Rhetorical Repetition
Patrick Barry
Michigan Publishing Services, 2024
Here are some of the words that the people who have attended Patrick Barry's classes and workshops have used to describe his unique, multidisciplinary approach to teaching writing:
  • "Fantastic"
  • "Phenomenal"
  • "Very engaging and informative:
  • "Incredibly useful
  • "Full of practical lessons for both my career and life generally"
This fifth book in his Syntax of Sports series gives you a chance to experience his creative (and capacious) mind for yourself. Whether you've already read the previous four books in the series or are trying one out for the very first time, you're in for quite the educational treat.
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The Syntax of Sports Class 6
Drafting and Editing
Patrick Barry
Michigan Publishing Services, 2024

How do you start a piece of writing? How do you edit one? And what can be done to combat those pesky—and paralyzing—feelings of perfectionism that often derail our most important sentences and paragraphs?

This sixth volume of the Syntax of Sports series creatively uses the language of baseball, football, tennis, and many other sports to explore these questions. Based on a popular course at the University of Michigan, it captures the energy, originality, and discipline - crossing insights that make its author, Professor Patrick Barry, such a sought-after teacher and presenter.

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The Syntax of Subjects
Koichi Tateishi
CSLI, 1994
Linguists who work on the Japanese language have disagreed about the notion of subject with resopect to Japanese; many linguists argue that there is no formal symtactic position for the subject in Japanese. Tateishi does deeper research on the surface syntax of the subject, and looks in particular at the syntax of the subject and phenomena which have been treated as S-adjunctions. These two have been identified with each other on many occasions in the history of Japanese linguistics and are of interest with respect to the debate over configurationality in the language, which has been revivedd in different forms following the emergence of the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis, the merits of which Tateishi discusses at length. Tateishi's main claim is that despite all the non-configurational characteristics found in the language, Japanese is in a sense more configurational than the so-called configurational languages. Japanese allows more types of hierarchies to be involved in the subject-predicate relation than English allows, as Japanese does not have the same kind of restrictions on the phrase structure as the configurational languages have. Koichi Tateishi is a professor of linguistics at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies.
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Tense Times
Rhetoric, Syntax, and Politics in US Crisis Culture
Lee M. Pierce
University of Alabama Press, 2023
How the syntax used in US political discourse creates the very crises it describes

American public culture is obsessed with crisis. Political polarization, economic collapse, moral decline—the worst seems always yet to come and already here. Tense Times argues that the ways we discuss these crises, especially through verb tenses, not only contribute to our perception and description of such crises but create them.

Past. Present. Future. These are the three principal verb tenses—the category of syntax that allows us to discuss time—that account for much of what is written about our crisis culture. Lee M. Pierce invites readers to expand their syntactic inventory beyond tense to include aspect (duration) and mood (attitude). Doing so opens new possibilities for understanding crisis discourse, as Pierce demonstrates with close readings of three syntaxes: the historical present, the past imperfective, and the retroactive subjunctive. Each mode produces a different experience of crisis and can help us understand our current political reality.

The book investigates a dozen widely circulated discourses from the past decade of US political culture, from Beyoncé’s controversial hit single “Formation” to the presidential campaign slogans of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, from the dueling rallies of Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart at the National Mall to the Ground Zero Mosque controversy and the 2007–2008 bailout. Taking a comparative approach that integrates theories of syntax from rhetorical, literary, affect, and cultural studies as well as linguistics, computer science, and Black studies, Tense Times suggests that the public’s conjuring of crisis is not inherently problematic. Rather, it is the openness of that crisis to contingency—the possibility that things could have been otherwise—that ought to concern anyone interested in language, politics, American culture, current events, or the direction this country is headed.
 
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Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought
Mood, Modality, and Propositional Attitudes
Anastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari
University of Chicago Press, 2021

Can language directly access what is true, or is the truth judgment affected by the subjective, perhaps even solipsistic, constructs of reality built by the speakers of that language? The construction of such subjective representations is known as veridicality, and in this book Anastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari deftly address the interaction between truth and veridicality in the grammatical phenomena of mood choice: the indicative and subjunctive choice in the complements of modal expressions and propositional attitude verbs.

Combining several strands of analysis—formal linguistic semantics, syntactic theory, modal logic, and philosophy of language—Giannakidou and Mari’s theory not only enriches the analysis of linguistic modality, but also offers a unified perspective of modals and propositional attitudes. Their synthesis covers mood, modality, and attitude verbs in Greek and Romance languages, while also offering broader applications for languages lacking systematic mood distinction, such as English. Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought promises to shape longstanding conversations in formal semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, among other areas of linguistics.

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The Unity of Unbounded Dependency Constructions
Robert D. Levine and Thomas E. Hukari
CSLI, 2006
How do languages transmit information about the properties of phrases over large structural distances? This is the difficult question raised by the phenomenon of extraction, and while extraction has driven the development of syntactic theory for decades, there is still no consensus on what form the connectivity mechanism should take. A number of recent theoretical approaches share the view that extraction is not a unitary phenomenon, but this monograph offers data that radically undercuts this view. The grammar of extraction connectivity, the authors conclude, is relatively simple, homogenous in construction type, and uniform in the position of the extractee.
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Voice and Grammatical Functions in Austronesian Languages
Edited by Peter K. Austin and Simon Musgrave
CSLI, 2005
This volume explores various problems in the syntax of Austronesian languages, which are found primarily in Malaysia and the Polynesian islands. Using the framework of constraint-based theories of syntax, contributors discuss the nature of these voice systems, the function of their verbal morphology, valence, verbal diathesis and transitivity in such languages, and the nature of their lexical categories. Each analysis is presented within the frameworks of lexical-functional grammar and head-driven phrase structure grammar.
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Word Order and Constituent Structure in German
Hans Uszkoreit
CSLI, 1987
This book applies the highly constrained grammatical framework of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar of the syntax of German, focusing on the complex interaction of word order phenomena and constituent structure. Uszkoreit modifies and extends this framework to permit the adequate treatment of partially free word order as it occurs in German and probably to some degree in all natural languages. Through Uszkoreit's redefined notion of linear precedence rules, it has become possible for the first time to present a formalized analysis of the interaction of the competing syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and stylistic principles that determine the order of arguments and adjuncts. Most of the book is dedicated to the proof that a phrase-structure-grammar model can offer an adequate description of a language with much freer word order than English and at the same time provide new insights in the structure of this language. A highly concentrated and elegant grammar fragment is given, which offers intuitive analyses for such notoriously problematic phenomena as (1) word order differences between main clauses and subordinate clauses, (2) the second position of the finite verb in assertion main clauses, (3) the order among main, auxiliary, and modal verbs, (4) the derivation and distribution of separable prefix verbs, and (5) the partially free order among verb complements and adjuncts.
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