Addressing an issue that has puzzled the linguistics community for many years, this book offers a novel approach to the exceptional wide scope behaviour of indefinites. It is the first book explicitly dedicated to exceptional wide scope phenomena. Its unique approach offers an explanation for the fact that it is only a proper subset of the indefinites that shows this exceptional wide scope behaviour. The author draws a careful distinction between genuine and apparent scope readings, a distinction that is usually not taken care of and has thus led to certain confusions. In particular, it is argued that functional readings have to be kept strictly apart from non-functional ones and that all proposals that use functional mechanisms to explain the phenomena at hand face severe problems. The existing body of literature on the main issues of the book is thoroughly reviewed. This makes the book well suited as background literature for graduate seminars on those topics.

This volume is a collection of previously unpublished articles focusing on the following aspects of Portuguese syntax: clause structure, clitic placement, word order variation, pronominal system, verb movement, quantification, and distribution of particles. The articles are written within the principles and parameters framework and contrast Portuguese with other Romance languages.

Hungarian word-order is characterized by large scale preposing of constituents to sentence-initial positions. This study examines systematically the elements which occur in the left periphery. Focal, wh- and negative operators which have scope over the whole sentence must appear in the left periphery overtly; topicalized elements precede the scope operators and appear in an organized system as well. The author proposes that the structure of the Hungarian sentence comprises a rich set of left-peripheral functional projections, organized into sub-systems, like the Scope field and the Topic field. On the basis of the structure of Hungarian, the study proposes to consider these sub-systems as being in turn split, that is hierarchically organized into specific functional projections. The study also examines the well-formedness conditions linked to multiple preposing. It is shown that the various well-formedness criteria apply overtly in Hungarian. This enables to make a direct link between the scope properties of affective operators and the articulated structure of the left periphery.

Read this book to get a deeper understanding of a wide range of semantics research on complex sentences and meaning in discourse. These in-depth articles from leading names in their fields cover the core concepts of sentential semantics such as tense, modality, conditionality, propositional attitudes, scope, negation, and coordination. The highly cited material, covers questions, imperatives, copular clauses, and existential sentences. It also includes essential research on sentence types, and explains central concepts in the theory of information structure and discourse structure, such as topics, cohesion and coherence, accessibility and discourse particles.

This is the first book on the syntax of a Niger-Conger language family, which includes most of the languages of sub-Saharan Africa. Aboh, who is a native speaker of one of the languages (Gungbe) discussed, analyzes different aspects of the syntax of the "Kwa" language group. Aboh also suggests how grammatical pictures for these languages can shed some light on Universal Grammar in general.

This volume is about 'dislocation' – the removal of phrases from their canonical positions in a sentence to its left or right edge. Dislocation encompasses a wide range of linguistic phenomena, related to nominal and adverbial expressions and to the information structuring notions of topic and focus; and takes intriguingly different forms across languages. This book reveals some of the empirical richness of dislocation and some key puzzles related to its syntactic, semantic, and discourse analysis.

Mapping the Left Periphery, the fifth volume in "The Cartography of Syntactic Structures," is entirely devoted to the functional articulation of the so-called complementizer system, the highest part of sentence structure. The papers collected here identify, on the basis of substantial empirical evidence, new atoms of functional structure, which encode specific features that are typically expressed in the left periphery. The volume also submits the richly articulated CP structure to further crosslinguistic checking. The research presented here has led to the identification of new, important restrictions in the relative sequence of elements appearing in the left periphery. With contributions from African languages, Chinese, Hungarian, Romance languages, and Italian dialects, Mapping the Left Periphery will be of interest to syntacticians working on comparative syntax, and more specifically on Romance grammar.

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This book deals with the interpretation of adverbially quantified sentences containing definite DPs and Free Relatives (FR) Thereby, it concentrates on the origins of Quantificational Variability Effects (QVEs), i.e. readings according to which the respective quantificational adverb seems to quantify over the individuals denoted by the respective DP/FR. QVEs are usually discussed only in connection with singular indefinites and bare plurals. This book therefore provides the first comprehensive account of QVEs with definite DPs and Free Relatives (while also discussing singular indefinites and bare plurals). Presenting new empirical observations and arguments for the assumption that Q-adverbs quantify over situations exclusively, it is also an important contribution to the theoretical debate concerning the quantificational domain of Q-adverbs.. It is of interest to linguists working in formal semantics and the syntax-semantics interface as well as to philosophers of language who are interested in adverbial quantification and situation semantics. Furthermore, it offers an introduction to the core issues of situation semantics and adverbial quantification and is therefore accessible to graduate students interested in these topics.

This volume contains innovative papers that target the linguistic status of topic at the interface between grammar and discourse. The purpose of the volume is to discuss the universal properties of topics and, at the same time, to document the range of discourse-semantic and grammatical variation within this phenomenon in European languages. The volume is structured accordingly: (i) theoretical foundations of topicality in grammar and discourse; (ii) discourse-semantic correlates of topicality; (iii) variation in the grammatical (external and internal) encoding of topicality; (iv) topics from the diachronic perspective. The articles take different perspectives, including contrastive studies of modern languages, studies on diachronic development, and typological generalizations. They also take into consideration various types of empirical data – introspective data, semi-spontaneously produced data, experimental data and language corpora. The articles in this volume show that the concept of topic is necessary for the description and explanation of a number of discourse-semantic phenomena. They present a state of the art account of the architecture of topic while making recent research on the phenomenon accessible to a wider readership.