This volume deals with what the WH-movement parameter has to say about varieties of WH-dependencies in different languages. Section two introduces WH-scope marking and the related concept of partial WH-movement. Section three, the main approaches to WH-scope marking are introduced.

The direction in which the structure of sentences and filler-gap dependencies are built is a topic of fundamental importance to linguistic theory and its applications. This book develops an integrated understanding of structure building, movement and locality embedded in a syntactic theory that argues for a 'top down' approach, presenting an explicit counterweight to the bottom-up derivations pervading the Chomskian mainstream. It combines a compact and comprehensive historical perspective on structure building, the cycle, and movement, with detailed discussions of island effects, the typology of long-distance filler-gap dependencies, and the special problems posed by the subject in clausal syntax. Providing introductions to the main issues, reviewing extant arguments for bottom-up and top-down approaches, and presenting several case studies in its development of a new theory, this book should be of interest to all students and scholars of language interested in syntactic structures and the dependencies inside them.

Information structure, or the way the information in a sentence is 'divided' into categories such as topic, focus, comment, background, and old versus new information, is one of the most widely debated topics in linguistics. This volume incorporates exciting work on the relationship between syntax and information structure. The contributors are united in rejecting accounts that assume designated syntactic positions associated with specific information-structural interpretations, and aim instead to derive information-structural conditions on word order and other phenomena from the way syntax and syntax-external systems interact. Beyond this shared aim, the authors of the various chapters advocate a number of approaches, based on different types of data (syntactic, semantic, phonological/phonetic) from a range of languages. The book is aimed at specialists in syntax and/or information structure, as well as students and linguists in related fields keen to familiarise themselves with current issues in this fascinating area of research.

The basic claims of traditional truth-conditional semantics are that the semantic interpretation of a sentence is connected to the truth of that sentence in a situation, and that the meaning of the sentence is derived compositionally from the semantic values meaning of its constituents and the rules that combine them. Both claims have been subject to an intense debate in linguistics and philosophy of language. The original research papers collected in this volume test the boundaries of this classic view from a linguistic and a philosophical point of view by investigating the foundational notions of composition, values and interpretation and their relation to the interfaces to other disciplines. They take the classical theories one step further and closer to a realistic semantic theory that covers speaker’s intentions, the knowledge of discourse participants, meaning of fiction and literature, as well as vague and paradoxical utterances. Ede Zimmermann is a pioneering researcher in semantics whose students, friends, and colleagues have collected in this volume an impressive set of studies at the interfaces of semantics. How do meanings interact with the context and with intentions and beliefs of the people conversing? How do meanings interact with other meanings in an extended discourse? How can there be paradoxical meanings? Researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, anyone interested in foundational and empirical issues of meaning, will find inspiration and instruction in this wonderful volume. Kai von Fintel, MIT Department of Linguistics

This book synthesizes and integrates 40 years of research on the semantics of questions, and its interface with pragmatics and syntax, conducted within the formal semantics tradition. A wide range of topics are covered, including weak-strong exhaustiveness, maximality, functional answers, single-multiple-trapped list answers, embedding predicates, quantificational variability, concealed questions, weak islands, polar and alternative questions, negative polarity, and non-canonical questions. The literature on this rich set of topics, theoretically diverse and scattered across multiple venues, is often hard to assimilate. Veneeta Dayal, drawing on her own research, brings them together for the first time in a coherent, concise, and well-structured whole. Each chapter begins with a non-technical introduction to the issues discussed; semantically sophisticated accounts are then presented incrementally, with the major points summarized at the end of each section. Written in an accessible style, this book provides both a guide to one of the most vibrant areas of research in natural language and an account of how this area of study is developing. It will be a unique resource for the novice and expert alike, and seeks to appeal to a variety of readers without compromising depth and breadth of coverage.

"Structure is at the rock-bottom of all explanatory sciences" (Jan Koster). Forty years ago, the hypothesis that underlying the bewildering variety of syntactic phenomena are general and unified structural patterns of unexpected beauty and simplicity gave rise to major advancements in the study of Dutch and Germanic syntax, with important implications for the theory of grammar as a whole. Jan Koster was one of the central figures in this development, and he has continued to explore the structure preserving hypothesis throughout his illustrious career. This collection of articles by over forty syntacticians celebrates the advancements made in the study of syntax over the past forty years, reflecting on the structural principles underlying syntactic phenomena and emulating the approach to syntactic analysis embodied in Jan Koster's teaching and research.

This volume contains a peer reviewed selection of invited contributions, papers and posters that were presented at the 2018 venue of Going Romance (XXXII) in Utrecht (a four day program that included two thematic workshops). The papers all discuss data and formalized analyses of one or more Romance languages or dialects, in either synchronic or diachronic perspective, and pay particular attention to the variation and the actual variability that is at stake, not only in syntax and morpho-syntax but also in semantics and phonology. Beyond the discussion of differences between languages and/or dialects from a formalist perspective, the volume also contains a number of papers linking the theme of variation to sociolinguistic issues such as natural bilingualism and micro-contact.