The Left Periphery

This study of the interaction of syntax, pragmatics, and prosody in left peripheral positions focuses on two left dislocation constructions in Czech, Hanging Topic Left Dislocation and Contrastive Left Dislocation. The structure of the left periphery is delineated though a thorough description and analysis of these constructions with respect to their syntactic behavior, discourse function and prosody. Following recent work on the Syntax-Phonology interface, prosody in these constructions is shown to interact in interesting ways with the narrow syntax. Unexpected patterns of left-edge resumption are explained though the role of the PF component of the grammar.

The left periphery of clausal structures has been a prominent topic of research in generative linguistics during the last decades. Closer examination of its properties unfolds a rich array of perspectives like the status of barriers for extraction and government, the articulation of the topic focus structure, the fixation of wh-scope, the marking of clausal types, the interaction of syntactic structure with inflectional morphology as well as the determination of sentence mood and illocutionary force to mention just a few. The purpose of this book is to collect different and relevant studies in this field and to give a general overview of the various theoretical approaches concerned with morphological, syntactic and semantic properties together with the diachronic development of the left periphery.

The aim of this Handbook is to provide a forum in which some of the generative syntacticians whose work has had an impact on theoretical syntax over the past 20 years are invited to present their views on one or more aspects of current syntactic theory. The following authors have contributed to the volume: Mark Baker, Michael Brody, Jane Grimshaw, James McCloskey, Jean-Yves Pollock, and Luigi Rizzi. Each contribution focuses on one specific aspect of the grammar. As a general theme, the papers are concerned with the question of the composition of the clause, i.e. what kind of components the clause is made up of, and how these components are put together in the clause. The introduction to the volume provides the backdrop for the papers and highlights some of the developments that have occurred in theoretical syntax in the last ten years. Elements of Grammar is destined for an audience of linguists working in the generative framework.

This account of language acquisition in a multilingual context explains how hybrid grammars develop and can result in language change.

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.

Uses the cartographic theory to examine the left periphery of the English clause and compare it to the left-peripheral structures of other languages.

This monograph is one of the first studies that approaches Latin syntax from a formal perspective, combining detailed corpus-based description with formal theoretical analysis. The empirical focus is word order in embedded clauses, with special attention to clauses in which one or more constituents surface to the left of a subordinating conjunction. It is proposed that two such types of left peripheral fronting should be distinguished. The proposed analyses shed light not only on the clausal left periphery, but also on the overall structure of the Latin clause. The study is couched in the framework of generative grammar, but since a thorough introduction is provided, no special background in formal syntax is required. Major topics touched upon are word order, information structure, locality, and the syntax of pied-piping. The book covers both synchronic and diachronic topics of Latin syntax, and is of interest for classical philologists, historical linguists, and formal syntacticians.

Negation is a universal syntactic phenomenon only employed in human languages. People use negative sentences in everyday conversations, and they display complex semantic and syntactic properties when doing so. Crucially, some languages employ negative sentences to assert affirmative and surprise propositions. A clear example of this is offered by Italian, as in: â ~E non (not) mi è scesa dal treno Maria?!â (TM) (â ~Maria got off the train!â (TM)). This special type of negation is called surprise negation, and it belongs to the class of expletive negation. This book sheds light on this puzzling phenomenon, by means of a theoretical analysis and an experimental study. It explores the contexts, mainly syntactic, in which negation receives its expletive interpretation, and considers whether expletive negation is grammatically distinct from standard negation.