To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the De Gruyter publishing house, the company is providing permanent open access to 270 selected treasures from the De Gruyter Book Archive. Titles will be made available to anyone, anywhere at any time that might be interested. The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire backlist of titles published since 1749 to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality primary sources that De Gruyter has published over the centuries.

The subject of this study, first published in 1979, is the role of the complementizer in English syntax and its implications for syntactic theory. It is argued that the familiar transformational treatment of complementizers is inadequate, and that they must be specified in deep structure by means of a Phrase Structure rule. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

This book presents a stage in the evolution of a theory of modality meanings and forms. It covers exclusively complements. There are two questions that this book addresses. Can one find a small, finite set of meanings which systematically underlies the enormous variety of meanings found in complements? And can one make any predictions from this set of meanings about the variety of forms they take? The answer to both questions is yes. The author convincingly shows how a multiplicity of sentence meanings and forms can be accounted for by breaking down sentence meaning into a small set of modules and howing how these modules combine to express certain meanings and how complement forms are related to them and their combinations.

Complementizers may be defined as conjunctions that have the function of identifying clauses as complements. In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that they have additional functions. Some of these functions are semantic in the sense that they represent conventional contributions to the meanings of the complements. The present book puts a focus to these semantic complementizer functions.

No detailed description available for "Semantic Structures for the Syntax of Complements and Auxiliaries in English".

This book offers a new and compendious account of important verbal patterns in present-day English. Serving as a central source of data, it updates and refines earlier research contributing to the syntactic and semantic description of English. Rudanko establishes an original framework, and systematically analyzes patterns of complementation using the tool of case grammar. The examination of Control, or EQUI, is a common theme and an important problem for transformationalists, and English syntacticians will value Rudanko's work on infinitive complements.

Complementation has received a great deal of attention in the past fifteen to twenty years; various approcahes have been used to study it and different groups of complement-taking verbs have been examined. The approach taken here employs analytic techniques which have not been systematically applied before to this group of temporal aspectual verbs. In other works which have concentrated on these same verbs (perlmutter, 1968, 1970 and Newmeyer, 1969a, 1969b) few insights about the semantic properties of the verbs are formalized. In the present study, the various verbs and their complement structures as they appear in surface forms are considered for their associated presuppositions and consequences (entailments). The notions of presup position and consequence are defmed and used so as to take conversational interaction into consideration. This adds considerably to the information that can be obtained about the verbs in question. Furthermore, the analysis of these temporal aspectual verbs leads to a description of their complement structures in terms of 'events', a semantic category found to appropriately characterize the quality of most of these structures. In this analysis, events are described as consisting of several different temporal segments; thus the sentences contained in the complements of these verbs are described as naming events, each containing one or more of several possible temporal segments. The aspectualizers in tum, act as referentials, each referring to one or another of the event-segments named in their complements.

“The semantics of grammar” presents a radically semantic approach to syntax and morphology. It offers a methodology which makes it possible to demonstrate, on an empirical basis, that syntax is neither “autonomous” nor “arbitrary”, but that it follows from “semantics”. It is shown that every grammatical construction encodes a certain semantic structure, which can be revealed and rigorously stated, so that the meanings encoded in grammar can be compared in a precise and illuminating way, within one language and across language boundaries. The author develops a semantic metalanguage based on lexical universals or near-universals (and, ultimately, on a system of universal semantic primitives), and shows that the same semantic metalanguage can be used for explicating lexical, grammatical and pragmatic aspects of language and thus offers a method for an integrated linguistic description based on semantic foundations. Analyzing data from a number of different languages (including English, Russian and Japanese) the author explores the notion of ethnosyntax and, via semantics, links syntax and morphology with culture. She attemps to demonstrate that the use of a semantic metalanguage based on lexical universals makes it possible to rephrase the Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in such a way that it can be tested and treated as a program for empirical research.

The major aim of this volume is to investigate infinitival structures from a diachronic point of view and, simultaneously, to embed the diachronic findings into the ongoing theoretical discussion on non-finite clauses in general. All contributions subscribe to a dynamic approach to infinitival clauses by investigating their origin, development and loss in miscellaneous patterns and across different languages.

Based on an empirical study of English verbs, the author discusses to what extent complementation is predictable from meaning by examining whether semantically similar verbs also exhibit the same syntactic properties. The significant number of idiosyncrasies presented rigorously challenge approaches that assume meaning to be the determining force in complementation.