No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".

In this long-awaited book—the first in a three-volume work—David M. Perlmutter has co-authored and edited ten essays that introduce relational grammar, a novel conception of sentence structure that offers far-reaching conclusions for universal grammar. The basic ideas of relational grammar can be simply stated. First, grammatical relations such as 'subject of,' 'direct object of,' and 'indirect object of,' are needed to characterize the class of grammatical constructions in the clausal syntax of natural languages, to formulate universals of grammar, and to construct adequate and insightful grammars of individual languages. Second, the range of linguistic variation in word order and case patterns makes it impossible to define grammatical relations in terms of phrase structure configurations or case. Rather, grammatical relations must be taken as primitive notions of linguistic theory. The papers collected here take up the first of these ideas. They lay out the basic theoretical constructs of relational grammar and discuss three areas of grammar—advancement construction, raising, and clause union. In his introduction, Perlmutter discusses each of the papers—most of which are published here for the first time—and places them in the context of the whole of linguistic study.

Linguistics has become an empirical science again after several decades when it was preoccupied with speakers' hazy "intuitions" about language structure. With a mixture of English-language case studies and more theoretical analyses, Geoffrey Sampson gives an overview of some of the new findings and insights about the nature of language which are emerging from investigations of real-life speech and writing, often (although not always) using computers and electronic language samples ("corpora"). Concrete evidence is brought to bear to resolve long-standing questions such as "Is there one English language or many Englishes?" and "Do different social groups use characteristically elaborated or restricted language codes?" Sampson shows readers how to use some of the new techniques for themselves, giving a step-by-step "recipe-book" method for applying a quantitative technique that was invented by Alan Turing in the World War II code-breaking work at Bletchley Park and has been rediscovered and widely applied in linguistics fifty years later.

Analiza: Metodología sintáctica y gramática universal; Bases de las "marcas" lingúísticas para las categorías sintácticas; Hacia una definición externa de las categorias sintácticas; Roles temáticos, semántica verbal y estructura causal; Marcas de casos y orden causal de participantes; Formas verbales y conceptualización de los sucesos.

This book presents a theory of grammatical relations among sentential constituents which is a development of Chomsky's Government-Binding Theory. The cross-linguistic predictive power of the theory is unusually strong and it is supported in the examination of a wide range of languages.Within the syntax of a language, grammatical relations determine such things as word order, case marking, verb agreement, and the possibilities of anaphora (co- and disjoint reference) among nominals. Other approaches to grammatical relations have considered them to name classes of constituents that share clusters of properties, including most prominently structural positions or case marking, Still others have claimed that grammatical relations are primitives in syntactic theory, but are related essentially to semantic roles. Rejecting these approaches, this monograph develops a theory which includes at its core a "projection principle": The syntax of a language is assumed to be a (direct) "Projection" of the compositional sematics, and the mechanisms of projection are explicitly spelled out.Chapters cover the two asymmetries and two lexical features on which the theory is built; semantic and syntactic data from a wide variety of languages that support the universal applicability and explanatory power of these asymmetries and features; features of passive, antipassive, dative-shift, anticausative, causative, and applied verb constructions in the worlds' languages explained by the theory; confirmations of the theory's predictions in languages for which alternative approaches to grammatical relations fail to provide successful analyses; and, comparison of the book's conception of grammatical relations to those in the GB framework, Montague Grammar, Relational Grammar, and Lexical-Functional Grammar.Alec Marantz is affiliated with the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. On The Nature of Grammatical Relations is a Linguistic Inquiry Monograph.