The Role Of Economy Principles In Linguistic Theory

Die Reihe publiziert Originalarbeiten zur Beschreibung und theoretischen Analyse der Struktur natürlicher Sprachen. Schwerpunkt sind die Prinzipien und Regeln der grammatischen und lexikalischen Kenntnis sowohl unter einzelsprachlichen wie unter sprachvergleichenden Gesichtspunkten. Abgedeckt werden alle systematischen Bereiche der Sprachwissenschaft, insbesondere Phonologie, Morphologie, Syntax, Semantik und Pragmatik, unter Einbeziehung von Aspekten des Spracherwerbs, des Sprachwandels, der Sprachverwendung und der phonetischen und neuronalen Realisierung.

Chiefly selected papers from a conference held in Feb. 1995 in Berlin.

This book contains 15 revised papers originally presented at a symposium at Rosendal, Norway, under the aegis of The Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The overall theme of the volume is 'internal factors in grammatical change.' The papers focus on fundamental questions in theoretically-based historical linguistics from a broad perspective. Several of the papers relate to grammaticalization in different ways, but are generally critical of 'Grammaticalization Theory'. Further papers focus on the causes of syntactic change, pinpointing both extra-syntactic (exogenous) causes and – more controversially – internally driven (endogenous) causes. The volume is rounded up by contributions on morphological change 'by itself.' A wide range of languages is covered, including Tsova-Tush (Nakh-Dagestan), Zoque, and Athapaskan languages, in addition to Indo-European languages, both the more familiar ones and some less well-studied varieties.

Economy considerations have always played an important role in the generative theory of grammar. Indeed, the very development of the theory has been characterized by natural considerations of simplicity and economy. In the Minimalist Program, the operations of the computational system that produce linguistic expressions must satisfy general considerations of simplicity referred to as Economy Principles. In The Syntax of Nonfinite Complementation: An Economy Approach, the author completes two major research projects that solidify the foundation of the Minimalist Program: the elimination of c-selection and government. He then investigates in detail the nature of the Economy Principles in syntax. The discussion, which focuses on infinitival and participial complements, shows that a number of facts that previously have either not been accounted for or have received unsatisfactory treatment can be explained in a principled way once Economy Principles and, more generally, the Minimalist Program are adopted.

The Going Romance conferences are a major European annual discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages. Selected papers are published in the Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory volumes. This is the fourth such volume, containing a selection of the papers that have been presented at the 2002 conference, which was held at the State University of Groningen. The three-day program included a workshop on Acquisition. The articles in this volume focalize on specifics of one or more Romance languages or varieties: clausal structure, verb-movement, topic, focus and reinforcement constructions, nominal ellipsis, (absence of) pronouns in child language, and other current issues in Romance linguistics.

This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual languages and their cross-linguistic realizations to explain what syntactic analyses can do and at the same time to show in what respects syntactic theories differ from each other. It investigates how syntax is related to neighbouring disciplines and investigate the role of the interfaces especially the relationship between syntax and phonology, morphology, compositional semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. The phenomena chosen bring together renowned experts in syntax, and represent the consensus reached as to what has to be considered as an important as well as illustrative syntactic phenomenon. The phenomena discuss do not only serve to show syntactic analyses, but also to compare theoretical approaches with each other.

This book explores the nature of sentential stress, how it is assigned and its interaction with information structure. Its central thesis is that the position of sentential or nuclear stress, the element with the highest prominence in the sentence, is determined syntactically and that cross-linguistic differences in this respect follow from syntactic variations. Presented in a Chomskian multiple spell-out framework, the author develops the Sentential Stress Rule and provides a systematic way of accounting for a wide range of cross-linguistic facts, with data taken from Persian, English, German and Eastern Armenian. The author further proposes the Focus Stress Rule to handle the interaction between sentential structure and information structure. Sentential stress is thus determined through an interplay between two components, the default Sentential Stress Rule and the Focus Stress Rule. Syntactic phenomena are not, the author argues, triggered by phonology or prosodic motivations: the relationship between syntax and phonology is always from syntax to phonology. This important contribution to understanding processes at the syntax-phonology interface will interest syntacticians and phonologists at graduate level and above.

This book examines the question of whether languages can differ in grammatical complexity and, if so, how relative complexity differences might be measured. The volume differs from others devoted to the question of complexity in language in that the authors all approach the problem from the point of view of formal grammatical theory, psycholinguistics, or neurolinguistics. Chapters investigate a number of key issues in grammatical complexity, taking phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic considerations into account. These include what is often called the 'trade-off problem', namely whether complexity in one grammatical component is necessarily balanced by simplicity in another; and the question of interpretive complexity, that is, whether and how one might measure the difficulty for the hearer in assigning meaning to an utterance and how such complexity might be factored in to an overall complexity assessment. Measuring Grammatical Complexity brings together a number of distinguished scholars in the field, and will be of interest to linguists of all theoretical stripes from advanced undergraduate level upwards, particularly those working in the areas of morphosyntax, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics.

Understanding Minimalism, first published in 2005, is an introduction to the Minimalist Program - the model of syntactic theory within generative linguistics. Accessibly written, it presents the basic principles and techniques of the minimalist program, looking firstly at analyses within Government and Binding Theory (the Minimalist Program's predecessor), and gradually introducing minimalist alternatives. Minimalist models of grammar are presented in a step-by-step fashion, and the ways in which they contrast with GB analyses are clearly explained. Spanning a decade of minimalist thinking, this textbook will enable students to develop a feel for the sorts of questions and problems that minimalism invites, and to master the techniques of minimalist analysis. Over 100 exercises are provided, encouraging them to put these skills into practice. Understanding Minimalism will be an invaluable text for intermediate and advanced students of syntactic theory, and will set a solid foundation for further study and research within Chomsky's minimalist framework.