Directionality and Logical Form provides a detailed treatment of the syntax of focusing particles, such as only and even in a cross-linguistic perspective. The derivation of logical forms is shown to be under the control, not only of the ECP and subjacency, but also of directionality of government and the particular word-order parameter that holds in a given language: head-final languages systematically disallow certain derivations or readings that are available in head-initial languages. The reason is that heads that deviate in their selection properties from canonical head-finality project a directionality barrier. Various strategies are explored by which this barrier can be circumvented. Although the theory is developed mainly on the basis of the head position in German, it can be directly used to explain constraints on the scope of Wh-in-situ in Bengali and closely related languages. Audience: Syntacticians and semanticists interested in parametric variation, as well as linguists working on Germanic and/or Indo-Aryan languages.

This book covers topics in formal linguistics, intonational phonology, computational linguistics, and experimental psycholinguistics, presenting them as an integrated theory of the language faculty. In this book Mark Steedman argues that the surface syntax of natural languages maps spoken and written forms directly to a compositional semantic representation that includes predicate-argument structure, quantification, and information structure without constructing any intervening structural representation. His purpose is to construct a principled theory of natural grammar that is directly compatible with both explanatory linguistic accounts of a number of problematic syntactic phenomena and a straightforward computational account of the way sentences are mapped onto representations of meaning. The radical nature of Steedman's proposal stems from his claim that much of the apparent complexity of syntax, prosody, and processing follows from the lexical specification of the grammar and from the involvement of a small number of universal rule-types for combining predicates and arguments. These syntactic operations are related to the combinators of Combinatory Logic, engendering a much freer definition of derivational constituency than is traditionally assumed. This property allows Combinatory Categorial Grammar to capture elegantly the structure and interpretation of coordination and intonation contour in English as well as some well-known interactions between word order, coordination, and relativization across a number of other languages. It also allows more direct compatibility with incremental semantic interpretation during parsing. The book covers topics in formal linguistics, intonational phonology, computational linguistics, and experimental psycholinguistics, presenting them as an integrated theory of the language faculty in a form accessible to readers from any of those fields.

Symmetries and asymmetries have always played an important role in linguistic theorizing. From the early works on potentially universal properties of transformational processes, differences between rightward and leftward movement processes were noted and constituted a challenge to theories of conditions on transformations. The upward boundedness of extraposition rules vs. the successive cyclic character of question word movement, for example, remains a vexing problem. An idea which has gained considerable prominence in the most recent syntactic work, in particular Noam Chomsky's 'Minimalist Program' and Richard Kayne's 'Antisymmetry' proposal, is that rightward movement simply does not exist. This means, in essence, that what looks like an element that has been moved rightward is either base-generated in its surface position, or it is actually moved leftward but all its surrounding materials have been moved leftward even further. Clearly, these radical proposals have generated a large number of new analyses of the relevant phenomena, and they have fostered considerable controversy about the viability and desirability of this type of approach. The present volume brings together a representative group of articles discussing a variety of aspects of (apparent) rightward movement processes, including considerations having to do with parsing, and representing the various opposing lines of thought on this matter. Empirically, they cover a wide array of constructions (extraposition, scrambling, quantifier-floating, etc.) and languages ( American Sign Language, Bengali, Dutch, French, Frisian, German, Hindi, Japanese, Marathi, etc.).

During the past 20 years the investigation into meaning of natural languages has emerged into one of the most active disciplines in theoretical linguistics. The different traditions of linguistics, philosophy of language and philosophical logic converged in the paradigm of truth conditional semantics, which now plays a central role in the cognitive sciences. From empirical research in particular languages more principal questions arise of how the speaker succeeds in expressing particular types of meaning by use of formal combination of signs. The theories developed to cope with the question assume that for a hearer, the meaning of a complex expression must be "computable", and therefore, modern theoretical semantics uses formal algebraic methods to construct the meaning compositionally in view of syntactic structur. Furthermore, meaning need to be "anchored" in the experience available to hearer. In order to deal with this, theoretical semantics extensivly uses the concept of truth conditions, which roughly explain how a world must be structured in order to be matched by certain linguistic expressions. Semantic analyses are complemented by context theory and the theory of speech acts. Thus, linguistic meaning must be related to human cognitive capacities, and therefore, theoretical semantics is tightly connected with philosophical logic as well as cognitive sciences in general. The aim of this handbook is to represent the body of theoretical knowledge which has evolved in the international research of the last two decades. Some of the theories can now be termed "classical" in that they belong to the commonly accepted base of theoretical semantics. Other theories are still disputed, and there areproblems still to be solved - as normal in a more developed science. The authors, who are leading experts in the field of semantics, try to balance the accepted and the questionable results. It goes without saying that each author hold a particular position in this respect. Some articles are written in English, some in German. Since semantics is considered to be a subfield of linguistics, the articles are arranged due to linguistic points of view. In the first 5 chapters (comprising 15 articles) the common principles of semantics are presented: ontological foundations of semantics, composition of meaning, problems of use (context, speech acts, and lexical base of meaning. The next 5 chapters (comprising 25 articles) are concerned with semantic phenomena, theories and problems which are specific for a particular class of linguistic expressions. These are arranged according to parts of speech: nouns, functional categories, verbs, adjectives and so on.This division does not reflect a theoretical position by itself, however it allows one to recognize problems connected with one another. Some more general questions are discussed in more than one article, in different perspective and vicinity. The Handbook is complemented by a service article on formal methods in semantics, followed by a comprehensive bibliography including about 1700 entries, and both a subject and a name index. This handbook is indispensable for all research in linguistics and neighboring disciplines (philosophy of language, cognitive sciences). Some of the articles can serve as basic literature for classes of advanced students.

*** Pre-Order The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, second edition, publishing December 2017. Find out more at www.companiontosyntax.com *** This long-awaited reference work marks the culmination of numerous years of research and international collaboration by the world’s leading syntacticians. There exists no other comparable collection of research that documents the development of syntax in this way. Under the editorial direction of Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk, this 5 volume set comprises 70 case studies commissioned specifically for this volume. The 80 contributors are drawn from an international group of prestigious linguists, including Joe Emonds, Sandra Chung, Susan Rothstein, Adriana Belletti, Jim Huang, Howard Lasnik, and Marcel den Dikken, among many others. A unique collection of 70 newly-commissioned case studies, offering access to research completed over the last 40 years. Brings together the world’s leading syntacticians to provide a large and diverse number of case studies in the field. Explores a comprehensive range of syntax topics from an historical perspective. Investigates empirical domains which have been well-documented and which have played a prominent role in theoretical syntax at some stage in the development of generative grammar. Serves as a research tool for not only theoretical linguistics but also the various forms of applied linguistics. Contains an accessible alphabetical structure, with an index integral to each volume featuring keywords and key figures. Each multi-volume set is also accompanied by a CD Rom of the entire Companion. Like the prestigious Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics series, this multi-volume work, in the new The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Linguistics series, can be relied upon to deliver the quality and expertise with which Blackwell Publishing’s linguistics list is associated.

The book focuses on the syntactic behavior of argument noun phrases depending on their discourse status. The main language of consideration is German, but it is shown that the observations can be carried over to other languages. The claim is that discourse-new arguments remain inside the VP where they are base generated. The hierarchy of argument projection is claimed to be fix within and across languages. With the major attention to direct objects it is then argued that discourse-old, here called topical noun phrases undergo raising to agreement projections. This movement can be realized differently: scrambling, object agreement, clitic-doubling, differences in morphological case and stress pattern turn out to be analyzable as one underlying phenomenon. It is furthermore shown that many so-called subject:object asymmetries boil down to topic:non-topic differences, for example with respect to extraction. Thus, irrespectively of the argumental status discourse-new constituents do not act as barriers whereas topical arguments create (weak) islands.