The contributions in this volume shed new light on the discussion of whether the DP hypothesis applies universally or not. The issue is prominent not only for Slavic languages. Drawing on evidence from many other languages, Greek, East Asian, and Basque among them, the book has important implications for answering fundamental questions about the nature of definiteness and quantification.

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.

Exploring Nanosyntax provides the first in-depth introduction to the framework of nanosyntax, which originated in the early 2000s as a formal theory of language within Principles and Parameters framework. Deploying a radical implementation of the cartographic "one feature - one head" maxim, the framework provides a fine-grained decomposition of morphosyntactic structure, laying bare the building blocks of the universal functional sequence. This volume makes three contributions: First, it presents the framework's constitutive tools and principles, and explains how nanosyntax relates to cartography and to Distributed Morphology. Second, it illustrates how nanosyntactic tools and principles can be applied to a range of empirical domains of natural language. In doing so, the volume provides a range of detailed crosslinguistic investigations which uncover novel empirical data and which contribute to a better understanding of the functional sequence. Third, specific problems are raised and discussed and new theoretical strands internal to the nanosyntactic framework are explored. Bringing together original contributions by senior and junior researchers in the field, Exploring Nanosyntax offers the first all-encompassing view of this promising framework, making its methodology and exciting results accessible to a wide audience.

Cleft constructions have long presented an analytical challenge for syntactic theory. This monograph argues that clefts and related constructions cannot be analysed in a straightforwardly compositional manner. Instead, it proposes that the locality conditions on modification (for example by a restrictive relative clause) must be reformulated such that they account for the apparent compositionality of DP-internal modification whilst also permitting ‘discontinuous’ modification of the type which is independently needed for constructions such as relative clause extraposition. The empirical focus of the book is on clefts in English and Russian, which have a similar interpretation but considerably divergent syntactic structures. The author argues that, despite these syntactic differences, both types of cleft are mapped to their semantic interpretations in the same manner. This monograph will be essential reading for those working on cleft constructions and copular sentences more generally, and will be of interest to those working on the syntax-semantics interface.

This exceptional book of selected essays by the leading Czech linguist and member of the Prague Linguistic Circle contains 26 essays in English and 4 in German. It presents the wide scope of Sgall's interest and in six parts introduces the main spheres of author's interest - the first part of the book deals with general and theoretical questions, the second contains Sgall's contribution to syntax, the third covers the functional sentence perspective, the fourth sentences and discourse, the fifth language typology and the last part covers speech and writing

The volume advances our understanding of the role of scales and hierarchies across the linguistic sciences. Although scales and hierarchies are widely assumed to play a role in the modelling of linguistic phenomena, their status remains controversial, and it is these controversies that the present volume tackles head-on.

Despite a recent spate of publications, the valency of nouns is a topic that still remains in the shadow of the valency of verbs. This volume aims to contribute to the discussion of noun valency not only from a theoretical point of view, as is often the case, but also from an empirical one by presenting a series of studies focusing on particular questions and based on data-driven research. It explores properties of valency nouns in a variety of languages, including Bulgarian, Czech, German, Latin, Romanian, and Spanish. The specificity of this book consists in the diversity of the methodological approaches used. It includes empirical studies and it explores different theoretical frameworks: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), the Minimalist Program within Generative Grammar, Functional Generative Description (FGD), and Construction Grammar. Special attention is paid to deverbal nouns, but nouns expressing quantity and “compound-like” constructions involving relationship and interactivity are also dealt with.

Relative clauses play a hugely important role in analysing the structure of sentences. This book provides the first evidence that a unified analysis of the different types of relative clauses is possible - a step forward in our understanding. Using careful analyses of a wide range of languages, Cinque argues that the relative clause types can all be derived from a single, double-headed, structure. He also presents evidence that restrictive, maximalizing, ('integrated') non-restrictive, kind-defining, infinitival and participial RCs merge at different heights of the nominal extended projection. This book provides an elegant generalization about the structure of all relatives. Theoretically profound and empirically rich, it promises to radically alter the way we think about this subject for years to come.