Clause Structure

Clause structure is the most widely-studied phenomenon within syntactic theory. This accessible book synthesizes the most important research findings, examines a range of examples taken from data acquisition, typology and language change, and includes discussion questions, helpful suggestions for further reading and a useful glossary.

xv NOTES ON THE ORTHOGRAPHY AND CITATIONS xxi LIST OF ABBREVIA TIONS XXIIl CHAPTER 1: GRAMMATICAL NOTES 1 1. Introduction 1 2. Basics 1 3. Major Lexical Classes 2 3. 1. V 3 3. 2. N 3 3. 3. A 5 3. 3. 1. Quantifiers 6 3. 3. 2. Existentials and Locatives 6 4. Minor Lexical Classes 7 4. 1. Clitics 7 4. 1. 1. Clause-proclitic 7 4. 1. 2. S-enclitic 8 4. 1. 3. V-enclitic 8 4. 1. 4. Clause-second 9 4. 2. Directionals 9 4. 3. Particles 11 5. Flagging 11 6. Word Order 12 7. Construction Survey 12 7. 1. Negation 12 13 7. 2. Questions 7. 3. Complement Clauses 14 16 7. 4. Motion cum Purpose 17 7. 5. Topics 7. 6. Prepredicate Position 18 19 Notes CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL SKETCH 20 20 1. Arcs vii Vlll T ABLE OF CONTENTS 1. 1. Sets of Grammatical Relations 22 1. 2. Stratum 24 Ergative and Absolutive 1. 3. 25 1. 4. 25 Formal Connections between Arcs 2. Sponsor and Erase 26 2. 1. Successors 26 2. 2. Replacers 28 2. 3. Self-Sponsor and Self-Erase 30 3. Ancestral Relations 31 4. Pair Networks 31 Resolution of Overlapping Arcs 32 5. 6. Coordinate Determination 33 7. Rules and Laws 35 8. Word Order 36 9. APG Versions of RG Laws 36 9. 1. Stratal Uniqueness Law 36 9. 2. Chomeur Law and Motivated Chomage Law 36 Relational Succession Law and Host Limitation Law 9. 3.

A collection of papers devoted to the syntactic analysis of modification and extraction strategies in Austronesian languages such as Kavalan, Malagasy, Niuean, Seediq, and Tagalog. This work elucidates the categorical and phrase structural status and the scopal behavior of sentence-level adverbs, ordering constraints on adjectival modifiers.

The researchers in the field of theoretical and theoretically inclined descriptive linguistics have for a long time felt a need for detailed and clearly presented linguistic treatments of various syntactic phenomena in South Asian languages. Clause Structure in South Asian Languages: provides a comprehensive overview and covers major aspects of clause structure in a variety of South Asian languages; provides detailed analyses of several aspects of phrase structure of many prominent South Asian languages; gives theoretically up-to-date treatment of several important issues in South Asian syntax and semantics; contains papers by some of the most prominent linguists working on South Asian languages.

This volume investigates the clausal syntax of Wolof, an understudied Atlantic language of Senegal. The goals of the work are descriptive, analytical, and comparative, with a focus on the structure of the left periphery and left peripheral phenomena. The book includes detailed examination of the morpho‑syntax of wh‑questions, successive cyclicity, subject marking, relative clauses, topic/focus articulation, and complementizer agreement. Novel data from Wolof is used to evaluate and extend theoretical proposals concerning the structure of the Complementizer Phrase (CP) and Tense Phrase (TP). It is argued that Wolof provides evidence for the promotion analysis of relative clauses, an “exploded” CP and TP, and for analyses that treat relative clauses as composed of a determiner with a CP complement. It is further argued that Wolof has a set of silent wh‑expressions and these are compared to superficially similar constructions in colloquial German, Bavarian, Dutch, and Norwegian. The book also presents a comparison of complementizer agreement across a number of related and unrelated languages. Data from Indo‑European (Germanic varieties, French, Irish), Niger‑Congo (Atlantic, Bantu, Gur), and Semitic (Arabic) languages put the Wolof phenomena in a larger typological context by showing the range of variation in complementizer agreement systems.

The Principles-and-Parameters approach to linguistic theory has triggered an enormous amount of work in comparative syntax over the last decade or so. A natural consequence of the growth in synchronic comparative work has been a renewed interest in questions of diachronic syntax, and this collection testifies to that trend. These papers focus on questions of clause structure which have become a central theme of theoretical work since the pioneering work in the late 1980s by Chomsky, Pollock, and others. The languages studied by an international roster of contributors include all the major Romance and Germanic languages. This volume is of central importance for anyone working in theoretical, comparative, or historical syntax.

This collection brings together some of Dominique Sportiche's best work, including essays that are published here for the first time. The articles discuss the architecture of syntax in natural languages and Sportiche suggests that languages do not differ at all in their syntactic organization. This view takes shape through the analysis of a variety of syntactic configurations and essays examine what it means to be a Subject, how Case marking functions, how it relates to Agreement, and how Pronominal Clitic Constructions should be analyzed.

This book examines Latin word order, and in particular the relative ordering of i) lexical verbs and direct objects (OV vs VO) and ii) auxiliaries and non-finite verbs (VAux vs AuxV). In Latin these elements can freely be ordered with respect to each other, whereas the present-day Romance languages only allow for the head-initial orders VO and AuxV. Lieven Danckaert offers a detailed, corpus-based description of these two word order alternations, focusing on their diachronic development in the period from c. 200 BC until 600 AD. The corpus data reveal that some received wisdom needs to be reconsidered: there is in fact no evidence for any major increase in productivity of the order VO during the eight centuries under investigation, and the order AuxV only becomes more frequent in clauses with a modal verb and an infinitive, not in clauses with a BE-auxiliary and a past participle. The book also explores a more fundamental question about Latin syntax, namely whether or not the language is configurational, in the sense that a phrase structure grammar (with 'higher-order constituents' such as verb phrases) is needed to describe and analyse Latin word order patterns. Four pieces of evidence are presented that suggest that Latin is indeed a fully configurational language, despite its high degree of word order flexibility. Specifically, it is shown that there is ample evidence for the existence of a verb phrase constituent. The book thus contributes to the ongoing debate regarding the status of configurationality as a language universal.