The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

This book examines historical changes in the grammar of the Indo-Aryan languages from the period of their earliest attestations in Vedic Sanskrit (around 1000 bc) to contemporary Hindi. Uta Reinöhl focuses specifically on the rise of configurational structure as a by-product of the grammaticalization of postpositions: while Vedic Sanskrit lacks function words that constrain nominal expressions into phrasal units - one of the characteristics of a non-configurational language - New Indo-Aryan languages have postpositions which organize nominal expressions into postpositional phrases. The grammaticalization of postpositions and the concomitant syntactic changes are traced through the three millennia of Indo-Aryan attested history with a focus on Vedic Sanskrit, Middle Indic Pali and Apabhramsha, Early New Indic Old Awadhi, and finally Hindi. Among the topics discussed are the constructions in which the postpositions grammaticalize, the origins of the postpositional template, and the paradigmatization of the various elements involved into a single functional class of postpositions. The book outlines how it is semantic and pragmatic changes that induce changes on the expression side, ultimately resulting in the establishment of phrasal, and thus low-level configurational, syntax.

Some fundamental questions regarding sentence structure in linguistics concern whether all languages, at some level of abstraction, have the same structure, and what are the basic categories with which to describe sentence structure. The contributors of this volume are specialized in two quite different languages: Hungarian and German. Of the German papers three are mainly about focus (Abraham, Jacobs, and Stechow-Uhman), whereas the remaining ones (Haider and Scherpenisse) are mainly about V-second. The Hungarian papers are all about focus, of which those of Kálman, Kiefer, Marácz, and De Mey-Marácz are about focussing in the stricter sense. Hunyadi, Kenesei and É. Kiss focus on the pre-verbal area in general and the interpretation of operators in Hungarian in particular. The remaining papers (Horvath, Komlósy, and Szabolczi) are on the position of the PRE-V, the position immediately after the finite verb.

The purpose of this book is to argue for the claim that Hungarian sentence structure consists of a non-configurational propositional component, preceded by configurationally determined operator positions. In the course of this, various descriptive issues of Hungarian syntax will be analyzed, and various theoretical questions concerning the existence and nature of non configurational languages will be addressed. The descriptive problems to be examined in Chapters 2 and 3 center around the word order of Hungarian sentences. Chapter 2 identifies an invariant structure in the apparently freely permutable Hungarian sentence, pointing out systematic correspondences between the structural position, interpre tation, and stressing and intonation of the different constituents. Chapter 3 analyzes the word order phenomenon traditionally called 'sentence inter- I twining' of complex sentences, and shows that the term, in fact, covers two different constructions (a structure resulting from operator movement, and a base generated pattern) with differences in constituent order, operator scope and V-object agreement. Chapter 4 deals interpretation, case assignment, with the coreference possibilities of reflexives, reciprocals, personal pro nouns, and lexical NPs. Finally, Chapter 5 assigns structures to the two major sentence types containing an infinitive. It analyzes infinitives with an AGR marker and a lexical subject, focusing on the problem of case assignment to the subject, as well as subject control constructions, accounting for their often paradoxical, simultaneously mono- and biclausal behaviour in respect to word order, operator scope, and V-object agreement.

This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on topic, prosody, and implicature. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in the field, including focus, quantification, and sign languages, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including processes involved in its acquisition and comprehension. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research.

This 1999 textbook investigates definiteness both from a comparative and a theoretical point of view, showing how languages express definiteness and what definiteness is. It surveys a large number of languages to discover the range of variation in relation to definiteness and related grammatical phenomena, such as demonstratives, possessives and personal pronouns. It outlines work done on the nature of definiteness in semantics, pragmatics and syntax, and develops an account on which definiteness is a grammatical category represented in syntax as a functional head (the widely discussed D). Consideration is also given to the origins and evolution of definite articles in the light of the comparative and theoretical findings. Among the claims advanced are that definiteness does not occur in all languages, though the pragmatic concept which it grammaticalizes probably does.

Comprising eleven studies on languages with designated structural topic and focus positions, this volume includes an introduction surveying the empirical and theoretical problems involved in the description of this language type. Focusing on languages outside the traditional Indo-European group, the essays look at Chadic, Somali, Basque, Catalan, Old Romance, Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, and Quechua. The papers provide interesting new empirical data, as well as a variety of means and alternatives of representing them structurally. At the same time, they address important theoretical questions in the framework of generative theory. This is the first study to apply methods of comparative syntax to the study of topic and focus.

Warrongo is an extinct Australian Aboriginal language that used to be spoken in northeast Australia. This volume is largely based on the rich data recorded from the last fluent speaker. It details the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language. In particular, it provides a truly scrutinizing description of syntactic ergativity - a phenomenon that is rare among the world's language. It also shows that, unlike some other Australian languages, Warrongo has noun phrases that are configurational. Overall this volume shows what can be documented of a language that has only one speaker.

This book examines grammatical changes during the transition from Latin to the Romance languages and the factors proposed to explain them. It challenges orthodoxy, presents new perspectives on language change, structure, and variation, and will appeal equally to Romance linguists, Latinists, philologists, and historical linguists of all persuasions.