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.

This book addresses three fundamental questions in the study of negation: What are the main ways of expressing sentential negation? What are the distributional properties of lexically-encoded negative elements? And, what implications do the answers to these two questions have for the theory of grammar? In answering these questions, Jong-Bok Kim investigates various aspects of negation in Korean, English, French and Italian. Addressing both empirical and theoretical issues relating to negation in these languages, he develops a nonderivational, lexicalist analysis within the constraint-based framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. This work demonstrates that a constraint-based approach can capture the distributional possibilities of negative elements and explain related phenomena simply through their lexical properties and the interaction of the elementary morphosyntactic and valence properties of syntactic heads. The resulting constraint-based theory allows a conservative division of labor between morphology and syntax.