Remnant Movement

Remnant Movement
Author: Günther Grewendorf
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2015-04-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1501500503

This book addresses two crucial problems associated with the phenomenon of Remnant Movement: First, what evidence can be brought to bear in favor of, or opposing, Remnant Movement analyses of linguistic phenomena? Secondly, what does the presence or absence of Remnant Movement in the syntax tell us about constraints imposed by Universal Grammar on syntactic operations?

Dimensions of Movement

Dimensions of Movement
Author: Artemis Alexiadou
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027227690

This volume presents a collection of papers of recent generative research into the properties of phrasal and feature movement, which explore these key syntactic phenomena from different angles and across languages. The papers advance or build on models of movement which capitalize either on generalized feature movement or on generalized remnant movement. Both these approaches attempt to develop a restrictive theory of movement aiming at a simplification of the operations of the computational system. Despite the fact that they are so different technically, generalized feature movement and generalized remnant movement both push the theory of movement to the same direction in two important respects: (a) Elimination of head movement. (b) Elimination of covert movement. The book is of primary interest to researchers and students in theoretical linguistics and syntactic theory.

Scrambling, Remnant Movement, and Restructuring in West Germanic

Scrambling, Remnant Movement, and Restructuring in West Germanic
Author: Roland Hinterholzl
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2006-10-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0195345592

In this book, Hinterhölzl provides a comprehensive study of three salient phenomena of West Germaic, namely scrambling, remnant movement and restructuring, and discusses their interrelatedness. In particular, restructuring is shown to break down into remnant movement of the major phases of the infinitival clause, accounting for the formation of verb clusters and the transparency of restructuring infinitives.

The Unity of Movement

The Unity of Movement
Author: Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2024-04-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027247080

Displacement (of linguistic expressions) is a ubiquitous phenomenon in natural language. In the generative tradition, displacement is modelled in terms of transformation, or more precisely, movement, which establishes dependencies among syntactic constituents in a phrase structure. This book probes the question regarding to what extent movement theories can be unified. Specifically, I address issues surrounding the debate of the distinction between head movement and phrasal movement over the past few decades. The distinction presupposes that structural complexity of the moving element is correlated with its movement properties. The goal of this book is to show that this is an unwarranted assumption. Based on a number of case studies on verb displacement phenomena in Cantonese, I attempt a unified theory of movement by abandoning the head/phrase distinction in movement theories. These case studies converge on the conclusion that the phrase structure status of syntactic constituents bears a minimal role in theorizing displacement phenomena in natural language. This volume represents a minimalist pursuit of a unified theory of movement.

Agreement and Head Movement

Agreement and Head Movement
Author: Ian G. Roberts
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0262014300

An argument that, contrary to Chomsky, head-movement is part of the narrow syntax.

Probes and Their Horizons

Probes and Their Horizons
Author: Stefan Keine
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0262043610

A comprehensive theory of selective opacity effects—configurations in which syntactic domains are opaque to some processes but transparent to others—within a Minimalist framework. In this book, Stefan Keine investigates in detail “selective opacity”— configurations in which syntactic domains are opaque to some processes but transparent to others—and develops a comprehensive theory of these syntactic configurations within a contemporary Minimalist framework. Although such configurations have traditionally been analyzed in terms of restrictions on possible sequences of movement steps, Keine finds that analogous restrictions govern long-distance dependencies that do not involve movement. He argues that the phenomenon is more widespread and abstract than previously assumed. He proposes a new approach to such effects, according to which probes that initiate the operation Agree are subject to “horizons,” which terminate their searches. Selective opacity effects raise important questions about the nature of locality in natural language, the representation of movement-type asymmetries, correlations between clause structure and locality, and possible interactions between syntactic dependencies. With a focus on in-depth case studies of Hindi-Urdu and German, Keine offers detailed investigations of movement dependencies, long-distance agreement, wh-dependencies, the A/A' distinction, restructuring, freezing effects, successive cyclicity, and phase theory. Keine's account offers a thorough understanding of selective opacity and the systematic overarching generalizations to which it is subject.

The Free Word Order Phenomenon

The Free Word Order Phenomenon
Author: Joachim Sabel
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2008-08-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 311019726X

This book deals with the syntax of the free word order phenomenon (scrambling) in a wide range of languages - in particular, German, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Serbo-Croatian, Tagalog, Tongan, and Turkish - in some of which the phenomenon was previously unstudied. In the past, the syntax of free word order phenomena has been studied intensively with respect to its A- and A'-movement properties and in connection with its semantic (undoing) effects. The different articles in this volume offer new ways of analyzing free word order under (i) minimalist assumptions, (ii) concerning the typology of scrambling languages, (iii) with respect to the question of how it is acquired by children, (iv) in connection with its relatedness to information structural factors, and (v) with respect to its consequences for a highly elaborated sentence structure of the IP/VP domain. The articles that focus mainly on the emprical aspects of free word order phenomena deal with the properties and proper analysis of rightwards scrambling in Turkish, with the A-/A'-nature and triggers for VSO-VOS alternations in Tongan, as well as with left-branch extractions and NP-Split in Slavic and its consequences for a typology of scrambling languages. The articles that focus on theoretical aspects of scrambling deal with questions concerning the motivatation of a derivation with scrambling in a free word order language, such as whether scrambling has to be analyzed as topicalization or focus movement. Or assuming that scrambling is feature-driven, how the technical details of this analysis are implemented in the grammar to avoid unwarranted derivations, for example, derivations with string-vacuous scrambling. A further important question that is addressed is when scrambling is acquired in the development of the grammar, and what the consequences are for the timing of the acquisition of A- and A'-movement properties. This volume will be most relevant to researchers and advanced students interested in generative syntax, as well as typologists working on German, Japanese, Slavic, Turkish, Dravidian and Austronesian languages. We regret that due to a layout error the title of Miyagawa's article on "EPP and semantically vacuous scrambling" is misrepresented in the printed version of the book. You can download the article with the corrected title here.

The Structure of CP and IP

The Structure of CP and IP
Author: Luigi Rizzi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2004-06-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780198036159

The study of syntactic complexity and the identification of the elementary structural units involved have always been a component of research in the field of theoretical syntax. Still, these topics have recently acquired a higher degree of prominence and autonomy, which has led to an expansion in the ways syntacticians conceptualize syntactic representations and their interactions with other research topics. The Structure of CP and IP is the second volume in the Cartography of Syntactic Structures, a subgroup within the Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax series. Funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, this research endeavor gave rise to the publication of the first such volume, The Functional Structure of DP and IP, which focuses primarily on the structure of nominal expressions and on certain aspects of clausal expressions. This second edited volume examines the structure of the clauses, with special reference to the inflectional domain (IP) and the left peripheral field of the clause (CP). With contributions by a select group of syntacticians, The Structure of CP and IP will be useful to scholars with an interest in Italian, Romance, and comparative syntax, and of substantial value to all linguists interested in contemporary research in generative grammar.

The Mathematics of Language

The Mathematics of Language
Author: Christian Ebert
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2010-07-30
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642143210

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 10th and 11th Meeting of the Association for Mathematics of Language, held in Los Angeles, CA, USA in July 2007 and in Bielefeld, Germany, in August 2009.The 19 revised papers presented together with 3 invited speeches were carefully selected from numerous submissions. The papers in this collection reflect a wide range of theoretical topics relating to language and computation including papers on the intersection of computational complexity, formal language theory, proof theory, and logic, as well as phonology, lexical semantics, syntax and typology.

Minimalist Parsing

Minimalist Parsing
Author: Robert C. Berwick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-09-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0192514296

This book is the first dedicated to linguistic parsing - the processing of natural language according to the rules of a formal grammar - in the Minimalist Program. While Minimalism has been at the forefront of generative grammar for several decades, it often remains inaccessible to computer scientists and others in adjacent fields. This volume makes connections with standard computational architectures, provides efficient implementations of some fundamental minimalist accounts of syntax, explores implementations of recent theoretical proposals, and explores correlations between posited structures and measures of neural activity during human language comprehension. These studies will appeal to graduate students and researchers in formal syntax, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computer science.