Results by title

Using data from a variety of languages, this book investigates the place of clitics in the theory of language structure, and their implications for the relationships between syntax, morphology and phonology. It is argued that the least powerful theory of language requires us to recognise at least two classes of clitics, one with the syntax of independent phrases and the other with the syntax of inflectional affixes. It is also argued that prosodic conditions may influence the surface position of clitics beyond what may be accomplished by filtering potential syntactic structures. Finally, the relationship between syntactic, morphological, and phonological constituents within wordlike elements is explored.

This book examines the scrambling phenomena in German and Korean from the perspective that different ordering possibilities are motivated and constrained by interactions among syntactic, semantic, and discourse principles. Using Optimality Theory, Optimizing Structure in Context demonstrates how these principles from different modules of grammar interact and thus resolve conflicts among themselves to yield the most optimal output, that is, a sentence with a particular word order, in a given semantic and discoursal context. This way, it explains various meaning-related effects associated with scrambling such as definiteness effect and focus effect. While developing constraints in the discourse domain, it also proposes a new model of information structure based on basic discourse features. By expanding the core idea of constraint interaction in Optimality Theory to interactions 'between' modules of grammar as well as 'between', this book provides a model of interface theory.