Gereon Müller

Wolfgang Sternefeld

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

Competition in Syntax

Incomplete Category Fronting is a detailed investigation of the syntax of incomplete category fronting in German, carried out from a cross-linguistic perspective. The study presents a wealth of empirical evidence involving unbound traces created by remnant topicalization, wh-movement, scrambling, left dislocation, and extraposition. Four characteristic properties of remnant movement are identified that pose severe problems for a representational movement theory. It is argued that these properties can be fruitfully addressed on the basis of Chomsky's minimalist program, and that they follow from a derivational movement theory that incorporates the Barriers Condition, the Strict Cycle Condition, Fewest Steps, Last Resort, and the Minimal Link Condition but completely dispenses with surface filters. Incomplete Category Fronting provides an empirical underpinning for the minimalist program and presents a powerful argument for a derivational theory of grammar. Audience: Incomplete Category Fronting will interest all linguists working on theoretical syntax, Germanic syntax or the syntax-semantics interface.

A Derivational Approach to Remnant Movement in German

Incomplete Category Fronting

Harmonic serialism is an active research programme in phonology and syntax but has so far not been pursued in morphology. This book delivers a proof of concept: It shows that harmonic serialism can be substantiated as a viable approach to inflectional morphology, covering roughly the same ground as standard models like Distributed Morphology or Paradigm Function Morphology. Furthermore, based on empirical evidence from a variety of typologically different languages, Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism offers a fresh perspective on the composition of inflected words that is made possible by a strictly derivational orientation incorporating repeated optimization procedures. This gives rise to new and convincing solutions to some recalcitrant problems in inflectional morphology, related to phenomena like affix order, extended exponence, disjunctive blocking, non-local stem allomorphy, *ABA patterns, impoverishment effects, deponency, and paradigm gaps.The book introduces harmonic serialism from scratch and develops morphological analyses against the background of applications of the theory in phonology and syntax. It will be of use to students and scholars interested in morphology, phonology, syntax, and grammatical theory more generally.

Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism

A Study in Movement Types

A-bar Syntax

Arnim von Stechow

Uli Lutz

This volume deals with what the WH-movement parameter has to say about varieties of WH-dependencies in different languages. Section two introduces WH-scope marking and the related concept of partial WH-movement. Section three, the main approaches to WH-scope marking are introduced.

Wh-scope Marking

Begins with an introduction to the phenomenon of incomplete category fronting in German, presents two fundamentally different approaches to the construction, reports some evidence in favor of the remnant movement approach, and then develops four problems related to this approach which are solved in the remainder of the book. Intended for linguists working on theoretical syntax, Germanic syntax, or the syntax-semantics interface. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Gisela Zifonun

Lutz Gunkel

Explorations in Nominal Inflection is a collection of new articles that focus on nominal inflection markers in different languages. The studies are concerned with the morphological inventories of markers, their syntactic distribution, and, importantly, the interaction between the two. As a result, the contributions shed new light on the morphology/syntax interface, and on the role of morpho-syntactic features in mediating between the two components. Issues that feature prominently throughout are inflection class, case, gender, number, animacy, syncretism, iconicity, agreement, the status of paradigms, the nature of morpho-syntactic features, and the structure of nominal projections. Recurrent analytical tools involve the concepts of competition (optimality, specificity), underspecification, and economy, in various theoretical frameworks. James P. Blevins: Inflection Classes and Economy Bernd Wiese: Categories and Paradigms. On Underspecification in Russian Declension

Explorations in Nominal Inflection

Artemis Alexiadou

Tibor Kiss

Syntactic dependencies are often non-local: They can involve two positions in a syntactic structure whose correspondence cannot be captured by invoking concepts like minimal clause or predicate/argument structure. Relevant phenomena include long-distance movement, long-distance reflexivization, long-distance agreement, control, non-local deletion, long-distance case assignment, consecutio temporum, extended scope of negation, and semantic binding of pronouns. A recurring strategy pursued in many contemporary syntactic theories is to model cases of non-local dependencies in a strictly local way, by successively passing on the relevant information in small domains of syntactic structures. The present volume brings together eighteen articles that investigate non-local dependencies in movement, agreement, binding, scope, and deletion constructions from different theoretical backgrounds (among them versions of the Minimalist Program, HPSG, and Categorial Grammar), and based on evidence from a variety of typologically distinct languages. This way, advantages and disadvantages of local treatments of non-local dependencies become evident. Furthermore, it turns out that local analyses of non-local phenomena developed in different syntactic theories (spanning the derivational/declarative divide) often may not only share identical research questions but also rely on identical research strategies.

Gereon Müller

About

Books

Join the club