Results by title

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.

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.

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.

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.