In the past few decades, the development of theoretical linguistics has proved to be successful in shedding light on the intricate nature of language and knowledge of grammar, which contributes to a deeper understanding of the human mind. This book discusses various issues in syntax and logical structure of natural language from theoretical perspectives. The primary data on which theoretical claims are made is drawn from Japanese and Japanese-type languages, but it also contains discussion of related phenomena in English which have never been discussed from the same viewpoint in the current literature. Although the book is written in the format of a version of the Extended Standard Theory tradition, informally referred to as the Principles and Parameters Approach or 'Government and Binding (OB) Theory', it should be of interest to a much wider audience. The reader interested in other theoretical frameworks will find the discussion in this book easily translatable in the framework of his or her choice - in fact, I would like to claim that the problems posed by this book are inevitable in any theory of syntax and semantics of natural language.

The format of this book is unusual, especially for a book about linguistics. The book is meant primarily as a research monograph aimed at linguists who have some background in formal semantics, e. g. Montague Grammar. However, I have two other audiences in mind. Linguists who have little or no experience of formal semantics, but who have worked through a basic mathematics for linguists course (e. g. using Wall, 1972, or Partee, 1978), should, perhaps with the help of a sympathetic Montague gramma rian, be able to discover enough of how I have adapted some of the basic ideas in formal semantics to make the developments that I undertake in the rest of the book accessible. Logicians and computer scientists who know about model theoretic semantics and formal systems should be able to glean enough from Chapters I and II about linguistic concerns and techniques to be able to read the remainder of the book, again possibly with the help of a sympathetic Montague grammarian. However, readers should beware. Chapter II is not meant as a general introduction either to formal semantics or to linguistics and while much of the presentation there is going over ground that is already well covered in the literature, the particular formulation and the emphases are very much oriented to the developments to be undertaken later in the book.

Quantification is a topic which brings together linguistics, logic, and philosophy. Quantifiers are the essential tools with which, in language or logic, we refer to quantity of things or amount of stuff. In English they include such expressions as no, some, all, both, and many. Peters and Westerstahl present the definitive interdisciplinary exploration of how they work - their syntax, semantics, and inferential role.Quantifiers in Language and Logic is intended for everyone with a scholarly interest in the exact treatment of meaning. It presents a broad view of the semantics and logic of quantifier expressions in natural languages and, to a slightly lesser extent, in logical languages. The authors progress carefully from a fairly elementary level to considerable depth over the course of sixteen chapters; their book will be invaluable to a broad spectrum of readers, from those with a basicknowledge of linguistic semantics and of first-order logic to those with advanced knowledge of semantics, logic, philosophy of language, and knowledge representation in artificial intelligence.

No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".

The goal of this book is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of parthood and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language. The monograph aims to investigate syntactic constructions and lexical categories, e.g., partitives, whole-adjectives, and multipliers, encoding different kinds of part-whole structures both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages. It is envisioned to inspire radical rethinking of the ontology of models accounting for nominal semantics. Specifically, it provides novel evidence for a mereotopological approach to meaning, i.e., a theory of wholes that captures not only parthood but also topological relations holding between parts. This evidence comes from the phenomenon of subatomic quantification, i.e., quantification over parts of referents of concrete count nouns.

An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory offers beginning students a comprehensive overview of and introduction to our current understanding of the rules and principles that govern the syntax of natural languages. Includes numerous pedagogical features such as 'practice' boxes and sidebars, designed to facilitate understanding of both the 'hows' and the 'whys' of sentence structure Guides readers through syntactic and morphological structures in a progressive manner Takes the mystery out of one of the most crucial aspects of the workings of language – the principles and processes behind the structure of sentences Ideal for students with minimal knowledge of current syntactic research, it progresses in theoretical difficulty from basic ideas and theories to more complex and advanced, up to date concepts in syntactic theory

Cognitive linguists have proposed that metaphor is not just a matter of language but of thought, and that metaphorical thought displays a high degree of conventionalization. In order to produce converging evidence for this theory of metaphor, a wide range of data is currently being studied with a large array of methods and techniques. Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage aims to map the field of this development in theory and research from a methodological perspective. It raises the question when exactly evidence for metaphor in language and thought can be said to count as converging. It also goes into the various stages of producing such evidence (conceptualization, operationalization, data collection and analysis, and interpretation). The book offers systematic discussion of eight distinct areas of metaphor research that emerge as a result of approaching metaphor as part of grammar or usage, language or thought, and symbolic structure or cognitive process.

This handbook compares the main analytic frameworks and methods of contemporary linguistics. It offers a unique overview of linguistic theory, revealing the common concerns of competing approaches. By showing their current and potential applications it provides the means by which linguists and others can judge what are the most useful models for the task in hand. Distinguished scholars from all over the world explain the rationale and aims of over thirty explanatory approaches to the description, analysis, and understanding of language. Each chapter considers the main goals of the model; the relation it proposes from between lexicon, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology; the way it defines the interactions between cognition and grammar; what it counts as evidence; and how it explains linguistic change and structure. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis offers an indispensable guide for everyone researching any aspect of language including those in linguistics, comparative philology, cognitive science, developmental philology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, computational science, and artificial intelligence. This second edition has been updated to include seven new chapters looking at linguistic units in language acquisition, conversation analysis, neurolinguistics, experimental phonetics, phonological analysis, experimental semantics, and distributional typology.

This book is a collection of studies applying game-theoretical concepts and ideas to analysing the semantics of natural language and some formal languages. The bulk of the book consists of several papers by Hintikka, Carlson and Saarinen and discusses several of the central problems of the semantics of natural language. The topics covered are the semantics of natural language quantifiers, conditionals, pronouns and anaphora more generally. Hintikka’s famous essay presenting examples of "branching quantifier structures" in English, as well as one formulating his "any-every thesis", are included. The book also includes Hintikka’s closely argued philosophical discussion of the relationships between the new semantical games with the language games of Wittgenstein. Other papers apply the game-theoretical approach to formal languages including tense logics and tense anaphora (Saarinen), deontic logic and Ross’ paradox (Hintikka), and usual predicate logic (Rantala). The latter amounts to an explication of the "impossible possible" worlds as is shown in Hintikka’s concluding paper.

Even though the range of phenomena syntactic theories intend to account for is basically the same, the large number of current approaches to syntax shows how differently these phenomena can be interpreted, described, and explained. The goal of the volume is to probe into the question of how exactly these frameworks differ and what if anything they have in common. Descriptions of a sample of current approaches to syntax are presented by their major practitioners (Part I) followed by their metatheoretical underpinnings (Part II). Given that the goal is to facilitate a systematic comparison among the approaches, a checklist of issues was given to the contributors to address. The main headings are Data, Goals, Descriptive Tools, and Criteria for Evaluation. The chapters are structured uniformly allowing an item-by-item survey across the frameworks. The introduction lays out the parameters along which syntactic frameworks must be the same and how they may differ and a final paper draws some conclusions about similarities and differences. The volume is of interest to descriptive linguists, theoreticians of grammar, philosophers of science, and studies of the cognitive science of science.