Papers From The Upenn Mit Roundtable On Argument Structure And Aspect

This book is simultaneously a theoretical study in morphosyntax and an in-depth empirical study of Hebrew. Based on Hebrew data, the book defends the status of the root as a lexical and phonological unit and argues that roots, rather than verbs or nouns, are the primitives of word formation. A central claim made throughout the book is the role of locality in word formation, teasing apart word formation from roots and word formation from existing words syntactically, semantically and phonologically. The book focuses on Hebrew, a language with rich verb morphology, where both roots and noun- and verb-creating morphology are morphologically transparent. The study of Hebrew verbs is based on a corpus of all Hebrew verb-creating roots, offering, for the first time, a survey of the full array of morpho-syntactic forms seen in the Hebrew verb. While the focus of this study is on how roots function in word-formation, a central chapter studies the information encoded by the Hebrew root, arguing for a special kind of open-ended value, bounded within the classes of meaning analyzed by lexical semanticists. The book is of wide interest to students of many branches of linguistics, including morphology, syntax and lexical semantics, as well as of to students Semitic languages.

This work is the culmination of an eighteen-year collaboration between Ken Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser on the study of the syntax of lexical items. It examines the hypothesis that the behavior of lexical items may be explained in terms of a very small number of very simple principles. In particular, a lexical item is assumed to project a syntactic configuration defined over just two relations, complement and specifier, where these configurations are constrained to preclude iteration and to permit only binary branching. The work examines this hypothesis by methodically looking at a variety of constructions in English and other languages.

In presenting the morphology of English in relation to theoretical developments that have shaped the field over the last couple of decades, this textbook gives a reasoned overview of the morphology of English.

First Published in 2002. This volume is part of the 'Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics' series. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the syntax of possession expressions in Japanese at the sentential level. It starts with a background of possessive syntax and illustrates how Japanese presents us with an interesting case study of possessive syntax

Includes papers that explore the issues and re-assess generally accepted premises on the relationship between lexical meaning and the morphosyntax of sentences by confronting two competing approaches to this issue.

This book investigates the nature of the relationship between phonology and syntax and proposes a theory of Minimal Indirect Reference that solves many classic problems relating to the topic.

Providing extensive data on a range of European languages, this book highlights the key role expressivity plays in all language.