Adverbials And The Phase Model

This monograph addresses two issues, phases and adverbials. It proposes that there is a correlation between the phase structure, the tripartite quantificational structure and the information structure of the sentence. This correlation plays an important role not only in referential and information-structural properties of arguments and the verb but also in adverbial properties. For instance, the study shows that certain sentence adverbials can occur in the sentence-final position in the vP phase when they represent the extreme value with respect to the set of focus alternatives. The proposed correlation also becomes important in anaphoric relations with respect to adjuncts. Only an R-expression spelled out and interpreted in the CP phase of an adjunct clause can corefer with the coindexed pronoun. The study also discusses adverbial ordering and shows that the relative order of certain adverbials can be reversed if they occur in different phases. The monograph will appeal to syntacticians and linguists interested in the relationship between syntax and its interfaces.

This book offers a fresh take on several long-standing issues relating to the (non-)truth-conditional interpretation of epistemic, evidential, hearsay and attitudinal sentence adverbials. Drawing on a wealth of data from English and German, it shows for the first time that all four adverbial classes can have both truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional (parenthetical) readings. A novel account is presented according to which (non-)truth-conditional readings may arise at either the syntactic or the pragmatic level. Couched in relevance theory, the book also re-examines the explicature and illocutionary status of the adverbial qualification and the qualified proposition, and refines the notions of pointhood and at-issueness to provide an original information-structural analysis applicable to not just sentence adverbials but a range of other propositional qualifiers. Finally, the investigation identifies five factors affecting (non-)truth-conditional interpretation: linear position, prosody, the semantics of the adverbial, its information-structural properties and the wider context. The book will be of interest to those interested in relevance theory, the semantics/pragmatics interface, the syntax/pragmatics interface and information structure, as well as for syntacticians, semanticists and pragmatists interested in sentence adverbials, other propositional qualifiers and parentheticality, syntactic and interpretational.

Expressing negation is a universal property of all human languages. There is considerable variation, however, in the exact ways negation materializes cross-linguistically. Strict Negative Concord differs both from the Negative Polarity Item strategy and the Asymmetric Negative Concord strategy in that the sentence becomes negative only if the sentence negator is overtly expressed in it, irrespective of how many negative expressions are used. The central aim of this book is to describe Strict Negative Concord in some Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages. In particular, the volume gives an insight into the forms Strict Negative Concord manifests itself in Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovenian (Slavic), Finnish, Hungarian, Mari (Finno-Ugric) and the closely related Selkup (Samoyedic) to a wide linguistic community. It aims to create a platform for comparison with similar phenomena in well-described European languages.

The minimalist notion of a phase has often been investigated with a view to the interfaces. ‘Phases’ provides a strictly syntax-internal perspective. If phases are fundamental, they should provide the grounds for a unifying treatment of different syntactic phenomena. Concentrating on displacement, the book argues that this expectation is borne out: there is an empirical clustering of properties, whereby the phrases that undergo pied-piping are also the phrases that host intermediate traces of cyclic movement. The same phrases also host partial and secondary movement. Finally, the immediate complements within these phrases never strand the embedding heads. The phrases that show this behaviour are the phases (CP, vP, DP, and PP). To account for the cluster of properties, phases are claimed to have two special properties: their complement is inaccessible to operations outside, the Phase Impenetrability Condition; their heads may be endowed with unvalued features that are neither connected to the categorical status of the phase nor interpreted on it. It is shown how the cluster of empirical properties flows naturally from these two assumptions, supporting the idea that phases are indeed a fundamental construct in syntax.

The impact of phonology on word order phenomena has become a central research agenda ever since the Minimalist Program emphasised the role of interface conditions on syntactic operations. This book is a detailed study of extraposition from NP, which has traditionally been the domain of syntactic investigation and information-structural studies. After an examination of syntactic accounts of PP and relative clause extraposition, which are largely found inadequate, it explores the possibility of phonological solutions by comparing the prosodic structure of canonical and extraposed word orders. Particular attention is payed to the informational status of extraposed constituents and the focus structure of the sentence. The book shows that extraposition optimises the prosodic structure of sentences and in some cases their rhythmic structure, while focus structure only plays a role in extraposition of defocused constituents. The book further argues that extraposition occurs at PF, while certain binding-theoretical consequences of extraposition can be resolved by LF movement. With its focus on the interface between syntax and phonology, the book will appeal to researchers working on either domain.

Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in the notion of salience in linguistics and related disciplines. While in top-down salience, perceivers endogenously direct their attention to a certain stimulus, in the bottom-up salience, it is the stimulus itself which attracts attention. In prototypical cases of bottom-up salience, the stimulus stands out because it is incongruous with a given ground by virtue of intrinsic physical characteristics. But a stimulus may also cause surprise by virtue of deviating from a cognitive ground, e.g., when violating social or probabilistic expectations. This has prompted researchers to examine the relationship between expectations and the perceptual salience of linguistic stimuli in new ways. This e-book features contributions from different scientific frameworks. The reader will find commentaries, reviews, and original research articles on models of sociolinguistic and morphological salience, the role of attention, affect, and predictability, and on how salient items are processed, categorized and learned. Taken together, the articles in this volume contribute to our understanding of how the perceptual salience of linguistic forms and variants can be theoretically framed and methodologically operationalized in different areas of linguistic processing.

This volume explores and develops the framework of phases (so-called Phase Theory), first introduced in Chomsky (2000). The antecedents of such framework go back to the well-known notion of “cycle”, which concerns broader notions, such as compositionality, locality, and economy conditions. Within generative grammar, this idea of the cycle took a concrete form in the fifties, with Chomsky, Halle, and Lukoff’s (1955) pioneering work on stress, later on extended in Chomsky & Halle (1968), Halle & Vergnaud (1987), and further applied to morpho-phonology (Mascaró 1976 and Kiparski 1982), semantics (Jackendoff 1969), and syntax (Chomsky 1965, 1973). In recent years, several attempts have tried to refine and reformulate the cycle (Freidin 1999, Lasnik 2006, Uriagereka 2011). Such was the goal behind explorations on bounding nodes (Chomsky 1973) and barriers (Chomsky 1986), for which there is substantial empirical evidence showing how computation proceeds in a step-by-step fashion. Much work within minimalism has been devoted to investigate the nature of phases and their relevance for other areas of linguistic inquiry. Although it has been argued that phases have natural correlates at the interfaces, it is still unclear what the defining properties of these domains are, whether they can help us understand language acquisition, language variation, or language evolution. This book aims at addressing these questions, sharpening our understanding about phases and the nature of the Faculty of Language. Ángel J. Gallego (ed.), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 1. Cedric Boeckx, Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats / Universitat de Barcelona 2. Zeljko Bošković, University of Connecticut 3. Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 4. Samuel D. Epstein, University of Michigan 5. Wolfram Hinzen, Durham University 6. Hisatsugu Kitahara, Keio University 7. Julie Anne Legate, University of Pennsylvania 8. Hiroki Narita, Waseda Institute for Advanced Study 9. Miki Obata, Mie University 10. Marc D. Richards, University of Frankfurt 11. Ian G. Roberts, University of Cambridge 12. Bridget Samuels, University of Southern California 13. Yosuke Sato, National University of Singapore 14. T. Daniel Seely, Eastern Michigan University 15. Juan Uriagereka, University of Maryland

This book elucidates the nature of the semantics / pragmatics distinction in both synchrony and diachrony and proposes a definition of semantics and pragmatics that is orthogonal to the question of truth-conditionality. A corollary aim of the study is to propose an account of how and why erstwhile pragmatically-determined elements of meaning may, in the course of time, become semanticized.