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The Choctaw language, indigenous to the southeastern United States, now with its greatest concentrations ofspeakers in Missis sippi, Oklahoma, and Los Angeles, has in the main escaped the scrutinyoftheoreticallinguistics. ItisnotthatChoctaw isanintrin sicallyuninterestinglanguage- aquickglanceataclausewithfive agreement controllers and a mismatch between the caseofafree standingnominaland its agreement affix should dispelthat notion. Rather it is, I think, the question of what we can learn from a languageinwhichNPsdon'tmovearound, "WHs"don'tfront, and gaps simply arise from pronominalization. My hope is that the presentvolume, takentogetherwithagrowingliteraturespurredon by the workofPamMunro and her students atUCLA, will bring Choctawintothelightofdayand into the circleoflanguagescon sidered when constructing theories that define "possible human language". Thepresentstudy, arevisionofmy 1981dissertation(University ofCalifornia, SanDiego), focusesfirstandforemostontheChoctaw agreementsystem, takingthisasthekeytothestructureofChoctaw syntax. The immediate goal, then, is to provide a unified account ofthestructures and rules underlyingtheagreement system. Along the way a rangeofgrammatical phenomena is examined, taken as evidence for particular structural configurations, and incorporated into awell-integratedaccountofmorphologicaland syntacticfacts. The resultsbearon anumber ofcurrent issues, includingthe Un accusative Hypothesis, the existence of demotions, the nature of antipassive, disjunctive rule application, universals of causative constructions, and others. For these reasons Choctawdeserves the scrutinyoftheoreticians. The data forming the corpus for analysis represent a variety of Oklahoma Choctaw. They were collected from a nativespeaker in San Diego between 1978 and 1982 and from various speakers in Oklahoma during two extended visits to Broken Bow in 1980. I lX PREFACE x wishtothankthespeakerswhohelpedmebysharingtheirlanguage andencouragingmystudies. MyworkonChoctawwassupportedin partbyfundsfrom theNationalScienceFoundation(throughgrant numberBNS78-17498totheUniversityofCalifornia, SanDiego), theAmericanPhilosophicalSociety(throughaPhillipsFundgrant), andtheDepartmentofLinguisticsatUCSD.
This book is based in large part on fieldwork that I conducted in Brittany and Wales in 1983 and 1985. I am thankful for a Fulbright Award for Research in Western Europe and a Faculty Development Award from the University of North Carolina that funded that fieldwork. lowe a less tangible, but no less real, debt to Steve Anderson, G. M. Awbery, Steve Harlow and Jim McCloskey whose work initially sparked my interest, and led me to undertake this project. I want to thank Joe Emonds and Alec Marantz who read portions of Chapter 3 and 5. I am particularly grateful though to Kathleen Flanagan, Frank Heny and two anonymous referees who read a dyslexic and schizophrenic manuscript, providing me with criticisms that improved this final version considerably. The Welsh nationalist community in Aberstwyth and its Breton coun terpart in Quimper helped make the time I spent in Wales and Brittany productive. I am indebted to Thomas Davies, Partick Favreau, Lukian Kergoat, Sue Rhys, John Williams and Beatrice among others for sharing their knowledge of their languages with me. Catrin Davies and Martial Menard were especially patient and helpful. Without their assistance this work would have been infinitely poorer. I am hopeful that this book will help stimulate more interest in the Celtic languages and culture, and assist, even in a small way, those in Wales and Brittany who struggle to keep their language and culture strong.
This volume contains thirteen studies on various aspects of Greek syntax, as well as a general introduction by the editors. In recent years, the study of Greek has become important for the development of generative theory. The various contributions to this volume demonstrate clearly how much the field of Greek syntax has grown both in range and depth. The topics investigated include the phrase structure of clauses and nominal phrases, clitics in standard Greek and in dialects, the licensing of negative polarity items, the nature of sentential operators, control, argument structure and compounds. The studies highlight the importance of Greek for the development of a satisfactory theory of comparative syntax.
This collection spans diverse themes in the syntax of Arabic, Modern Arabic dialects and Hebrew. The original contributors are written by specialists with an eye to both broad theoretical and conceptual issues as well as empirical detail. The editors' introduction sets in Generative Grammar. Among the topics discussed in this collection are VSO and SVO, cliticization and agreement, questions and the syntax of wh-movement, cognate objects, adjectival Construct State , Though construction, Gapping, causatives, the syntax of negation and the semantics of the Nominal sentence. It is the only collection of its kind targeting theoretical linguists and specialists in Semitic language alike.
Most linguistic theories assume that each grammatical relation is established in a unique structural configuration. Neeleman and Weerman take issue with this view, arguing for a more flexible approach on the basis of conceptual considerations and data taken mostly, but not exclusively, from the Germanic languages. In-depth analyses of word order phenomena as well as diachronic and typological generalizations motivate a re-evaluation of the role of case in the projection of arguments. Case is shown to provide a syntactic foothold for thematic interpretation, something which is necessary in a grammar that does not allow fixed theta-positions. Thus, this study does not only offer a genuine alternative to many standard assumptions, it also explains why there should be such a thing as case in natural language.
The past decade and a half has witnessed a great deal of renewed interest in the study of Chinese linguistics, not only in the traditional areas of philological studies and in theoretically oriented areas of syn chronic grammar and language change but also in the cultivation of new frontiers in related areas of the cognitive sciences. There is a significant increase in the number of students studying one area or another of the linguistic structure of Chinese in various linguistic programs in the United States, Europe, Australia and in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia. Several new academic departments devoted to the study of linguistics have been established in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the past few years. The increasing research and study activities have also resulted in a number of national and international conferences, including the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL), which has been held annually in the United States; the International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL), which has had its fourth meeting since it was launched by Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 1990; the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (lACL), created in Singapore in 1992 and now incorporated in Irvine, California, which has held its annual meetings at major institutions in Asia, Europe, and the US.
An American Indian language belonging to the Muskogean linguistic family, Koasati is spoken today by fewer than five hundred people living in southwestern Louisiana and on the Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation in Texas. Geoffrey D. Kimball has collected material from the speakers of the larger Louisiana community to produce the first comprehensive description of Koasati. The book opens with a brief history of the Koasati. The chapters that follow describe Koasati phonology, verb conjugation classes and inflectional morphology, verb derivation, noun inflectional and derivational morphology, grammatical particles, and syntax and semantics. A discussion of Koasati speech styles illustrated with texts concludes the book. Because examples of grammatical construction are drawn from native speakers in naturally occurring discourse, they authoritatively document aspects of a language that is little known.
Thematic Relations provides information pertinent to thematic relations, which focus both on what sematic roles are expressible in the grammar and how these roles come to be associated with noun phrases. This book presents the interaction of components of the language faculty and other aspects of cognition. Organized into 13 chapters, this volume begins with an overview of the semantic relations involved in verb-argument structure. This text then examines the predicate-argument representations, which have come to figure prominently in all current generative theories of syntax. Other chapters consider the generalizations about thematic relations that are most insightfully captured at the level of syntax of at the level of semantics. This book discusses as well the importance of thematic roles to the grammar. The final chapter deals with the central role of thematic roles in language comprehension. This book is a valuable resource for linguists, syntacticians, and semanticists with an active involvement in research on natural language.
This collection of 31 articles (dedicated to Margaret Langdon) represents the multitude of approaches to Native American languages taken by linguists today. Half of the essays treat Hokan languages, but Uto-Aztecan, Penutian, Muskogean, Iroquoian, Mayan, and other groups are also represented, with pieces on phonology, syntax, the lexicon, and discourse.
The Mandarin VP deals with a number of constructions in Mandarin Chinese which involve the main verb and the material following it, like the object NPs, resultative phrases, durative expressions and other elements. The basis claim defended in this book is that all elements that follow the main verb in a Mandarin sentence form one single constituent which functions as the complement of the verb. The Mandarin VP offers new and original analyses of such hot issues as resultative constructions, the ba-construction and verb-le. In addition, the conclusions drawn from the research into Mandarin syntax are discussed in more general theoretic terms, which leads to original proposals regarding the internal make-up of accomplishments and the status of Theta Theory. The research reported on in this book was concluded within the bounds of mainstream generative theorizing. The Mandarin VP is of interest to all syntacticians, especially those interested in Chinese.