This book combines theoretical and experimental aspects of the establishment of dependency. It provides an account of dependency relations by focusing on the representation and interpretation of referentially dependent elements, particularly regular reflexives, logophors, and pronouns. First, the establishment of dependency is discussed within a model of syntax—discourse correspondences that predicts an economy-based dependency hierarchy contingent on the level of representation at which the dependency is formed as well as the internal structure of the dependent element and its antecedent. Secondly, the model’s predictions are substantiated by a series of experimental studies (conducted in English and Dutch) providing evidence from three sources of online sentence comprehension: reaction time studies, Broca’s aphasia patient studies, and event-related brain potential studies. The findings show that dependencies are established at distinct levels of linguistic encoding (i.e. syntax or discourse) determined by the presence or absence of coargumenthood and the representation of the dependency-forming elements.

This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. The theoretical breadth of the volume makes it the most complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date: at first glance, it appears to be a syntactic matter, but the survey raises theoretical and empirical questions not just for syntax, but also across semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure. Rather than promoting a single analysis, Daniel Altshuler and Robert Truswell outline reasonable hypotheses that allow theoretical conclusions to be deducted from empirical facts. The theoretical conclusions show that coordinate structures have the potential to discriminate between current syntactic theories, and to inform work on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. In many cases, however, the necessary empirical work has not yet been carried out, and too much of the literature revolves around the same handful of primarily English examples. The volume offers a starting point for further research on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in understudied languages, and provides a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings.

Until recently, little attention has been paid within syntax to components of discourse meaning that go beyond information structure and fall into the domain of non-at-issue meaning operating at the level of illocutionary force. To approach this domain, many of the contributions of this volume deal with the syntax of discourse particles. However, the issue of how to account for discourse particles within a more explicit map of the illocutionary domain is a good starting point for considering further phenomena related to the syntax of speech acts. By focusing on speech-act related particles and/or meaning domains, this volume makes a new contribution to the field, as existing collections either do not offer a comparatively narrow focus on particles or are not limited to syntax-oriented approaches. The primary audience of this volume are researchers and graduate students interested in state-of-the-art approaches to the syntax-discourse interface within the cartographic approach to syntax.

Contemporary and Emergent Theories of Agrammatism provides an in-depth review of the previous five decades of research on agrammatism focusing specifically on work which has been informed by linguistic theory. The final chapters reflect the recent turning point in the conceptualization of the underlying causes of the impairments agrammatic individuals present with. The book includes chapters on impairments to grammatical morphemes the tree pruning and trace deletion hypotheses verb deficits in sentences, and as single words generalized minimality adaptation theory and slow syntax the involvement of discourse To facilitate student reading the writing is clear and accessible, and the book includes a glossary of unfamiliar terms. Contemporary and Emergent Theories of Agrammatism will be of great interest to advanced students and researchers in areas such as psychology of language, linguistics, neurolinguistics, aphasiology and speech and language therapy.

The study of syntax over the last half century has seen a remarkable expansion of the boundaries of human knowledge about the structure of natural language. The Routledge Handbook of Syntax presents a comprehensive survey of the major theoretical and empirical advances in the dynamically evolving field of syntax from a variety of perspectives, both within the dominant generative paradigm and between syntacticians working within generative grammar and those working in functionalist and related approaches. The handbook covers key issues within the field that include: • core areas of syntactic empirical investigation, • contemporary approaches to syntactic theory, • interfaces of syntax with other components of the human language system, • experimental and computational approaches to syntax. Bringing together renowned linguistic scientists and cutting-edge scholars from across the discipline and providing a balanced yet comprehensive overview of the field, the Routledge Handbook of Syntax is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in syntactic theory.

In Theoretical and Experimental Aspects of Syntax-Discourse Interface in Heritage Grammars, Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan investigates comprehension and production of anaphoric dependencies with null and overt subject pronouns. She discusses the divergent behaviour of the heritage speakers of Russian by providing a closer look at their proficiency level, quantity of input and order of language acquisition. She explains the results with various degrees of successful application of pragmatic principles and efficiency in allocating cognitive resources. The contribution of the monograph lies in the discussion of theoretical and experimental issues related to anaphora resolution along with an investigation of all aspects of representation and processing of anaphoric pronouns by various kinds of bilinguals: heritage speakers, L2 learners and L1 attriters.

Anaphora processing is a central topic in the study of natural language and has long been the object of research in a wide range of disciplines. The correct interpretation of anaphora has also become increasingly important for real-world natural language processing applications, including machine translation, automatic abstracting, information extraction and question answering. This volume provides a unique overview of the processing of anaphora from a multi- and inter-disciplinary angle. It will be of interest and practical use to readers from fields as diverse as theoretical linguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, computer science, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, human language technology, psycholinguistics, cognitive science and translation studies. The readership includes but is not limited to university lecturers, researchers, postgraduate and senior undergraduate students.