V, ThemelPatients to the lowest specifier of V', and Agents to a position outside the minimal VP. Again, thematic information is encoded in terms of configurational properties. Addressing the issue of phrase structure in another domain, Margaret Speas investigates the status of null pronominal objects in Navajo. Following Rizzi (1986), she assumes that null pronouns must meet both a licensing and an identification condition. More specifically, she demonstrates that distributional restrictions on null pronominal objects in Navajo can be explained if it is assumed that null objects obey the identification condition expressed by the Generalized Control Rule of Huang (1984). Distinguishing three types of null objects, she argues that relevant licensing condition on two subtypes of null objects involves rich agreement. However, it appears that there are languages lacking rich agreement but with pro in object position. Speas accounts for these phenomena by a rule of economy of projection. A second series of papers is concerned with the way in which functional categories derive aspects of sentential interpretation. Three issues in this research program are investigated here: external arguments as arguments of functional projections (Kratzer), the specificity interpretation of clitics (Sportiche), and the interpretation of tense (Stowell). In all three cases, phrase structure is put to use to derive interpretive effects. Angelika Kratzer proposes that external arguments are not part of the verb.

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism).

Analyzing Grammar is a clear introductory textbook on grammatical analysis, designed for students beginning to study the discipline. Covering both syntax (the structure of phrases and sentences) and morphology (the structure of words), it equips them with the tools and methods needed to analyze grammatical patterns in any language. Students are shown how to use standard notational devices such as phrase structure trees and word-formation rules, as well as prose descriptions. Emphasis is placed on comparing the different grammatical systems of the world's languages, and students are encouraged to practice the analyses through a diverse range of problem sets and exercises. Topics covered include word order, constituency, case, agreement, tense, gender, pronoun systems, inflection, derivation, argument structure and grammatical relations, and a useful glossary provides a clear explanation of each term. Accessibly written and comprehensive, Analyzing Grammar is set to become a key text for all courses in grammatical analysis.

Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.

One of the few scholarly attempts to reconcile a generatively-based approach to the structure of the lexicon with the cognitive approach of Cognitive Grammar

This volume contains new research on the lexicon and its relation to other aspects of linguistics. These essays put forth empirical arguments to claim that specific theoretical assumptions concerning the lexicon play a crucial role in resolving problems pertaining to other components of grammar. Topics include: syntactic/semantic interface in the areas of aspect, argument structure, and thematic roles; lexicon-based accounts of quirky case, anaphora, and control; the boundary between the lexicon and syntax in the domains of sentence comprehension and nominal compounding; and the possibility of extending the concept of blocking beyond the traditional lexicon. Ivan Sag is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. Anna Szabolcsi is an associate professor of linglustics at UCLA.

There are two prominent schools in linguistics: Minimalism (Chomsky) and Construction Grammar (Goldberg, Tomasello). Minimalism comes with the claim that our linguistic capabilities consist of an abstract, binary combinatorial operation (Merge) and a lexicon. Most versions of Construction Grammar assume that language consists of flat phrasal schemata that contribute their own meaning and may license additional arguments. This book examines a variant of Lexical Functional Grammar, which is lexical in principle but was augmented by tools that allow for the description of phrasal constructions in the Construction Grammar sense. These new tools include templates that can be used to model inheritance hierarchies and a resource driven semantics. The resource driven semantics makes it possible to reach the effects that lexical rules had, for example remapping of arguments, by semantic means. The semantic constraints can be evaluated in the syntactic component, which is basically similar to the delayed execution of lexical rules. So this is a new formalization that might be suitable to provide solutions to longstanding problems that are not available for other formalizations. While the authors suggest a lexical treatment of many phenomena and only assume phrasal constructions for selected phenomena like benefactive and resultative constructions in English, it can be shown that even these two constructions should not be treated phrasally in English and that the analysis would not extend to other languages as for instance German. I show that the new formal tools do not really improve the situation and many of the basic conceptual problems remain. Since this specific proposal fails for two constructions, it follows that proposals (in the same framework) that assume phrasal analyses for all constructions are not appropriate either. The conclusion is that lexical models are needed and this entails that the schemata that combine syntactic objects are rather abstract (as in Categorial Grammar, Minimalism, HPSG and standard LFG). On the other hand there are constructions that should be treated by very specific, phrasal schemata as in Construction Grammar and LFG and HPSG. So the conclusion is that both schools are right (and wrong) and that a combination of ideas from both camps is needed.

This books provides an introduction to three contemporary syntactic theories, Government-Binding Theory, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, and Lexical-Functional Grammar. In successive chapters, Sells lucidly presents and illustrates the fundamental apsects of each theory. In an introductory chapter he describes the basic syntactic concepts and assumptions shared by each theory; in the postscript, Thomas Wasow provides a more general overview of the different perspectives of these three approaches.

Actions are described by verbs whose subjects, objects, and other complements refer to various participants in those actions. What linguistic principles determine which participants are referred to by each component of a verb? Many previous approaches to this problem have employed a set of thematic roles, such as agent and patient, to classify varieties of participants. The alternative developed here fits within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar while utilizing typed feature structures, certain basic features of verb meaning, a hierarchical classification of verb meanings, and constraints from more general to more specific word classes. Relying on no special mechanisms or components of grammar, this book is unique in its ability to account for the observed range of verb types in human languages with a simple yet widely applicable set of principles.