This collection of articles examines lexical and grammatical aspects of verbal elements and phrases in the context of recent generative research. General questions concern definitions of grammatical categories, classifications of auxiliaries and particles as functional categories, and problems of economy. Lexical matters range from affixation and category change (participles, gerunds) to semantic representations of specific verb classes (possessive, phrasal and intransitive verbs). The syntactic analyses focus on positional arrangements of aspectual and verbal units (V2, Verb Raising). The data are mainly drawn from English; perspectives on other Germanic languages are included.

This volume features cutting-edge research from leading authorities on the nature and structure of the verbal domain and the complexity of the Verb Phrase (VP). The book is divided into three parts, representing the areas in which contemporary debate on the verbal domain is most active. The first part focuses on the V head, and includes four chapters discussing the setup of verbal roots, their syntax, and their interaction with other functional heads such as Voice and v. Chapters in the second part discuss the need to postulate a Voice head in the structure of a clause, and whether Voice is different from v. Voice was originally intended as the head hosting the external argument in its specifier, as well as transitivity. This section explores its relationship with "syntactic" voice, i.e. the alternation between actives and passives. Part three is dedicated to event structure, inner aspect, and Aktionsart. It tackles issues such as the one-to-one relation between argument structure and event structure, and whether there can be minimal structural units at the basis of the derivation of any sort of XP, including the VP.

This book uses mathematical models of language to explain why there are certain gaps in language: things that we might expect to be able to say but can't. For instance, why can we say I ran for five minutes but not *I ran all the way to the store for five minutes? Why is five pounds of books acceptable, but *five pounds of book not acceptable? What prevents us from saying *sixty degrees of water to express the temperature of the water in a swimming pool when sixty inches of water can express its depth? And why can we not say *all the ants in my kitchen are numerous? The constraints on these constructions involve concepts that are generally studied separately: aspect, plural and mass reference, measurement, and distributivity. In this book, Lucas Champollion provides a unified perspective on these domains, connects them formally within the framework of algebraic semantics and mereology, and uses this connection to transfer insights across unrelated bodies of literature and formulate a single constraint that explains each of the judgments above.

The central idea of Dynamic Antisymmetry is that movement and phrase structure are not independent properties of grammar; more specifically, that movement is triggered by the geometry of phrase structure. Assuming a minimalist framework, movement is traced back to the necessity for natural language to organize words in linear order at the interface with the perceptual-articulatory module.Andrea Moro uses this innovative perspective to analyze several empirical domains, focusing on small clauses, split wh-movement, and clitic constructions. In a final speculative chapter, he examines the general consequences for the design of grammar implied by Dynamic Antisymmetry.The book is self-contained, with a synopsis of current theories of movement and a synthetic presentation of the theory of antisymmetry. An appendix presents the essentials of a unified theory of copular sentences, which plays a central role in the argument and has several important consequences for syntax, for example, for expletives and locality.Linguistic Inquiry Monograph No. 38

An analysis of Modern Irish syntax in which the particular of Irish grammar are shown to inform more general theoretical issues, revealing both the scope of Universal Grammar and the limits on syntactic variation. One by one considers all the major structures of Irish and compares them with structures in Germanic, Romance, Semitic, and other language families. Focusing on the concept of functional projection, shows that appealing to the theoretical notions of functional head and of Head Movement, allows for a highly restrictive account of Irish word order. Also analyzes consonant mutation as a form of syntactic representations. Based primarily on Chomsky's early theories, but also draws on his later work and more recent researchers. Of interest to specialists in theoretical syntax and comparative grammar, and perhaps to dedicated scholars of Celtic languages and linguistics. Unlike many civil servant posts, does not require a knowledge of Irish. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This volume addresses the problem of how language expresses conceptual information on event structures and how such information can be reconstructed in the interpretation process. The papers present important new insights into recent semantic and syntactic research on the topic. The volume deals with the following problems in detail: event structure and syntactic construction, event structure and modification, event structure and plurality, event structure and temporal relation, event structure and situation aspect, and event structure and language ontology. Importantly, the topic is discussed not only on the basis of English and German but on the basis of other languages including Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, and Igbo as well. This volume thus provides solid evidence towards clarifying the empirical use of event based analyses.

This monograph examines the syntax of bare infinitival and participial complements of perception verbs in English and other European languages, and investigates the general conditions under which verbal complement clauses are licensed. The introductory chapter is followed by an overview of the major syntactic and semantic characteristics of non-finite complements of perception verbs in English. The third chapter presents an analysis within the framework of Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist Program according to which event-denoting complements are minimally realised as projections of an aspectual head. In the next chapter, it is argued that verbs capable of licensing aspectual complement clauses must be able to function as a special type of control predicate, an assumption which is shown to account for a number of seemingly unrelated properties of the constructions under consideration. The final chapter examines syntactically reduced clausal complements from a cross-linguistic perspective, showing that Southern Romance languages differ from Germanic ones with respect to the availability of 'bare' aspectual complement clauses, a difference that is attributed to morphological properties of verbs in these languages.

This study is concerned with the categorial status of subordinating conjunctions and the internal and external structure of subordinate clauses. Starting out from the categorizations of subordinating conjunctions that prevail in recent generative linguistic theory, namely complementizers and prepositions, and from the division of syntactic categories into lexical and functional ones, the author investigates the lexical and grammatical properties of subordinating conjunctions which are held to account for both the distribution and the architecture of subordinate clauses. Central to this study is the relation between the category subordinating conjunction, the licensing of its projection and the licensing of its complement and specifier position. Part I is concerned with subordination in early Generative Grammar, the rise of the category C and the categorization of subordinating conjunctions. Part II focuses on recent conceptions of phrase structure, the inventory of syntactic categories, the lexical-functional dichotomy and syntactic movement. Part III is concerned with the lexical properties of complementizers (C), prepositions (P), and a third category of subordinating conjunctions (Subcon) which conflates properties of Cs and Ps. This categorization of subordinating conjunctions is arrived at on the basis of the distribution of the phrases they head and the mechanisms by which these elements license their complement and specifier. Cs, as typical functional heads, license both theirs complement and their specifier on the basis of feature checking mechanisms; Ps, as typical lexical heads, license these positions by theta-marking them. Within SubconP the complement is licensed by feature checking as within CP, and the specifier is licensed by theta-marking as within PP.