"Although standardly recognized by linguists of many diverse theoretical persuasions, finiteness continues to figure among [...] the most poorly understood concepts of linguistic theory”. This was eloquently stated by Ledgeway (2000, 2007) and remains true even today. The present volume thus aims to shed some much needed light on this area of linguistic theorizing, with eleven chapters approaching finiteness phenomena from the fields of syntax, semantics, language acquisition, and Creole studies, and providing data from a range of different languages. Traditionally, approaches to finiteness within the Principles and Parameters framework have seen as their main aim to understand the relation between the morphological exponents of finiteness and the syntactic operations seemingly depending on these exponents. The papers in this volume mostly take their point of departure from this more traditional view on finiteness, before elaborating on, modifying and diverging from this tradition in novel and interesting ways.

As a gateway to central questions in linguistics, non-finiteness is unavoidable in both typological studies and aspects of natural language processing, such as text segmentation and annotation. This study presents a 'process relation framework' to explain the more complex, previously unaccounted for, instances of non-finiteness in clause structure.

One hot topic in contemporary linguistics concerns how we express the passage of time in natural language. In particular, interesting questions have been raised as to how formerly understudied languages fit into deep-rooted theoretical frameworks, which among other features comprise a grammatical category of tense. This monograph mainly contributes to this debate in two complementary ways: through a detailed description of a large set of new data from two varieties of Caboverdean, a Portuguese-related language, and through a novel approach to the role of its few temporal morphemes, which allows to better define how tense meanings, aspect, and mood, together with other linguistic and extralinguistic information, provide what we understand as past, present, and future. The adequate study of this non-standardized language, with its impressive internal variation, thus brings new insights to old theoretical problems. Additionally, a welcome side effect of these new descriptions and analyses is that they promote a scientifically grounded attitude towards linguistic diversity.

This volume contains writings focusing on semantic phenomena and their interpretation in the analysis of the language of a learner. The variety of phenomena that are addressed is substantial: temporal aspect and tense, specificity, quantification, scope, finiteness, focus structure, and focus particles. These phenomena are investigated is many languages. The volume creates a theoretical as well as an empirical bridge between semantic research on the one hand and psycholinguistic acquisition studies on the other.

This book explores the nature of finiteness, one of most commonly used notions in descriptive and theoretical linguistics but possibly one of the least understood. Scholars representing a variety of theoretical positions seek to clarify what it is and to establish its usefulness and limitations. In doing so they reveal cross-linguistically valid correlations between subject licensing, subject agreement, tense, syntactic opacity, and independent clausehood; show how these properties are associated with finiteness; and discuss what this means for the content of the category. The issues explored include how different grammatical theories represent finiteness; whether the finite/nonfinite distinction is universal; whether there are degrees of finiteness; whether the syntactic notion of finiteness has a semantic corollary; whether and how finiteness is subject to change; and how finiteness features in language acquisition. Irina Nikolaeva opens the book by describing the history of finiteness and its place in current thinking and research. She then introduces the chapters of the book, comparing the authors' perspectives and showing what they have in common. The book is then divided into four parts. Part I considers the role finiteness plays in formal syntactic theories and Part II its deployment in functional theories and as the subject of research in typology. Parts III and IV look respectively at the finite/nonfinite opposition in individual languages and at the role finiteness plays in linguistic change and linguistic development. The book is written and structured to appeal to scholars and students of syntax and general linguistics at graduate level and above.

This volume brings together current research in theoretical syntax and its interfaces in the Polynesian language family. Chapters offer in-depth analyses of a range of theoretical issues of particular interest for comparative syntactic research, such as ergativity and case systems, negation, and the left periphery.

This volume explores predication in Niuean, an endangered Polynesian language spoken on the island of Niue and in New Zealand. It extends our understanding of cross-linguistic sentence structure and grammatical case, and will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, typology, and theoretical linguistics.

This book provides a novel analysis for the syntax of the clausal left periphery, focusing on various finite clause types and especially on embedded clauses. It investigates how the appearance of multiple projections interacts with economy principles and with the need for marking syntactic information overtly. In particular, the proposed account shows that a flexible approach assuming only a minimal number of projections is altogether favourable to cartographic approaches. The main focus of the book is on West Germanic, in particular on English and German, yet other Germanic and non-Germanic languages are also discussed for comparative purposes.

An intermediate textbook in English syntax and contemporary syntactic theory, full of helpful features for students and instructors alike.

This volume is a comprehensive, state-of-the-science treatment of the acquisition of different Indo- and Non-Indo-European languages in different contexts (i.e., L1, L2, L3/Ln, bi/multilingual language, heritage languages, pathology and language impairment and sign language acquisition) conducted within the generative framework. It also encompasses the diversity of methodologies and issues that can be found with contemporary research in the field. The different chapters contain original research from several different angles and provide a basis for dialogue between researchers working on diverse projects with the aim to further our understanding of how languages are acquired and, at the same time, refine and propose new theoretical constructs, such as complexity of linguistic features as a relevant factor forming children’s, adult’s and bilingual’s acquisition of syntactic, morphological, lexical and phonological structures.