Partitions And Atoms Of Clause Structure

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 monograph provides an in-depth investigation of the structural integration and the licensing of adverbs in relation to clause structure, with special emphasis on the structural implementation of the relation between the position and interpretation of adverbs. The book substantiates the hypothesis that the licensing of adverbs within and across the three layers of the clause is contingent on specifier-head agreement and that variation in the linear order of adverbs and other elements of the clause follows from the interplay of a small number of factors. The central claims made are: functional projections hosting adverbs are not confined to the inflectional and complementizer layer of the clause, but also play a central role in the shaping of the lexical layer; postverbal adverbs are realized within a semantically empty verbal projection and licensed under specifier head agreement by proxy; and adverbs that occur within the complementizer layer of the clause do so by either move or merge.

This outstanding resource for students offers a step-by-step, practical introduction to English syntax and syntactic principles, as developed by Chomsky over the past 15 years. Assuming little or no prior background in syntax, Andrew Radford outlines the core concepts and how they can be used to describe various aspects of English sentence structure. This is an abridged version of Radford's major new textbook Analysing English Sentences (also published by Cambridge University Press), and will be welcomed as a handy introduction to current syntactic theory.

This outstanding resource for students offers a step-by-step, practical introduction to English syntax and syntactic principles, as developed by Chomsky over the past 15 years. Assuming little or no prior background in syntax, Andrew Radford outlines the core concepts and how they can be used to describe various aspects of English sentence structure. This is an abridged version of Radford's major new textbook Analysing English Sentences (also published by Cambridge University Press), and will be welcomed as a handy introduction to current syntactic theory.

Following crucial insights on the functional structure of the clause and recent developments within the cartographic projects and minimalism, this book addresses various central themes in Italian and Romance syntax ranging from verb syntax and the syntax of verb-related phenomena of agreement and cliticization, to word order issues and their status in discourse contexts. It illustrates a research program where the basic formal components of grammar, the rich cartographic syntactic structures, are directly implicated in morphosyntactic computations proper as well as in the articulation of discourse strategies.

This monograph examines the syntax of bare infinitival and participial complements of perception verbs in English and other European languages, and investigates the general conditions under which verbal complement clauses are licensed. The introductory chapter is followed by an overview of the major syntactic and semantic characteristics of non-finite complements of perception verbs in English. The third chapter presents an analysis within the framework of Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist Program according to which event-denoting complements are minimally realised as projections of an aspectual head. In the next chapter, it is argued that verbs capable of licensing aspectual complement clauses must be able to function as a special type of control predicate, an assumption which is shown to account for a number of seemingly unrelated properties of the constructions under consideration. The final chapter examines syntactically reduced clausal complements from a cross-linguistic perspective, showing that Southern Romance languages differ from Germanic ones with respect to the availability of 'bare' aspectual complement clauses, a difference that is attributed to morphological properties of verbs in these languages.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics, LACL 2001, held in Le Croisic, France, in June 2001. The 16 revised full papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation. Among the topics covered are categorical grammars, dependency grammars, formal language theory, grammatical inference, hyperintensional semantics, minimalism, type-logical semantics, language learning, and natural language processing.

Locality offers a range of new perspectives on an important aspect of syntactic movement. The papers collected here explore locality in two ways: the first section approaches locality in terms of pure syntax; the second approaches it in terms of psycholinguistics.