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First published in 1995. This investigation shows that cliticization is not a totally unified phenomenon. Asymmetries in the behaviour of phonological and syntactic clitics show that no single principle predicts all clitic behaviour. The study explores the idea that modifications to the original five parameter system of analysis can be altered to a more efficient analysis in terms of three parameters. This title will be of interest to students of phonetics and phonology.
AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE American Sign Language (ASL) is the visual-gestural language used by most of the deaf community in the United States and parts of Canada. On the surface, this language (as all signed languages) seems radically different from the spoken languages which have been used to formulate theories of linguistic princi ples and parameters. However, the position taken in this book is that when the surface effects of modality are stripped away, ASL will be seen to follow many of the patterns proposed as universals for human language. If these theoretical constructs are meant to hold for language in general, then they should hold for natural human language in any modality; and ifASL is such a natural human language, then it too must be accounted for by any adequate theory of Universal Grammar. For this rea son, the study of ASL can be vital for proposed theories of Universal Grammar. Recent work in several theoretical frameworks of syntax as well as phonology have argued that indeed, ASL is such a lan guage. I will assume then, that principles of Universal Gram mar, and principles that derive from it, are applicable to ASL, and in fact that ASL can serve as one of the languages which test Universal Grammar. There is an important distinction to be drawn, however, be tween what is called here 'American Sign Language', and other forms of manual communication.
American linguistics has a tradition of finding unique and important insights from studies of Native American languages, often leading to innovations in current theories. At the same time, research on Native languages has been enhanced by the perspectives of modern theory. This book extends this tradition by presenting original analyses of aspects of six Native languages of Canada--Algonquin, Athapaskan, Eskimo, Iroquoian, Salishan, and Siouan. Addressing problems relevant to phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, the authors make both descriptive and theoretical contributions by presenting data that has not been previously published or treated from the viewpoint of contemporary theory.
Grammaticalization is a well-attested process of linguistic change in which a lexical item becomes a function word, which may be further reduced to a clitic or affix. Proponents of the universality of grammaticalization have usually argued that it is unidirectional and have thus found it a useful tool in linguistic reconstruction. In this book Prof Norde shows that change is reversible on all levels: semantic, morphological, syntactic, and phonological. As a consequence, the alleged unidirectionality of grammaticalization is not a reliable reconstructional tool, even if degrammaticalization is a rare phenomenon. Degrammaticalization, she argues, is essentially different from grammaticalization: it usually comprises a single change, examples being shifts from affix to clitic, or from function word to lexical item. And where grammaticalization can be seen as a process, degrammaticalization is often the by-product of other changes. Nevertheless, she shows that it can be described, like grammaticalization, in a principled way, in order to establish whether a change in a word has been from more to less grammatical or vice versa, and the stages by which it has become so. Using data from different languages she constructs a typology of degrammaticalization changes. She explains why degrammaticalization is so rare and why some linguists have such strongly negative feelings about the possibility of its existence. She adds to the understanding of grammaticalization and makes a significant contribution to methods of linguistic reconstruction and the study of language change. She writes clearly, aiming to be understood by advanced undergraduate students as well as appealing to scholars and graduate researchers in historical linguistics.
The essays in this collection celebrate Ken Hale's lifelong study of underdocumented languages and their implications for universal grammar. The authors report their latest research in syntax, morphology, semantics, phonology, and phonetics. Contributors: Elena Anagnostopoulou, Noam Chomsky, Michel DeGraff, Kai von Fintel, Morris Halle, James Harris, Sabine Iatridou, Roumyana Izvorski, Michael Kenstowicz, Samuel Jay Keyser, Shigeru Miyagawa, Wayne O'Neil, David Pesetsky, Hyang-Sook Sohn, Kenneth N. Stevens, Ester Torrego, Cheryl Zoll.
This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into central aspects of clause structure and word order, outlining the different stages of their historical development. Each chapter combines a solid empirical basis with descriptive generalizations, supported by a detailed discussion of theoretical analyses couched in the generative framework. Reference is also made throughout to the more traditional descriptive model of the German clause. The volume is divided into three parts that correspond to the main parts of the clause. Part I explores the left periphery, looking at verb placement (verb second and competing orders), the prefield, and adverbial connectives, while Part II discusses the middle field, including pronominal syntax, the order of full NPs, and the history of negation. The final part examines the right periphery with chapters covering basic word order (OV/VO), prosodic and information-structural factors, and the verbal complex. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students in historical syntax and the Germanic languages, and for both descriptive and theoretical linguists alike.
The papers collected in this volume reflect the numerous interests in the field of Romance languages and Romance linguistics today. A far-ranging amount of Romance data are presented: French, Italian, and Spanish dialect data are crucial to several authors' arguments, Rumanian is the focus of two papers, and many of the papers included discuss overall Romance developments. It is noteworthy that formal approaches to syntax are here regularly applied to historical data (three papers specifically deal with pro-drop phenomena in Old French). Of the papers on phonology, syllabification and linking processes receive much attention.
Newmeyer persuasively defends the controversial theory of transformational generative grammar. Grammatical Theory is for every linguist, philosopher, or psychologist who is skeptical of generative grammar and wants to learn more about it. Newmeyer's formidable scholarship raises the level of debate on transformational generative grammar. He stresses the central importance of an autonomous formal grammar, discusses the limitations of "discourse-based" approaches to syntax, cites support for generativist theory in recent research, and clarifies misunderstood concepts associated with generative grammar.
In the course of our everyday lives, we generally take our knowledge of language for granted. Occasionally, we may become aware of its great practical importance, but we rarely pay any attention to the formal properties that language has. Yet these properties are remarkably complex. So complex that the question immediately arises as to how we could know so much. The facts that will be considered in this book should serve well to illustrate this point. We will see for example that verbs like arrivare 'arrive' and others like telefonare 'telephone', which are superficially similar, actually differ in a large number of respects, some fairly well known, others not. Why should there be such differencces. we may ask. And why should it be that if a verb behaves like arrivare and unlike tetefonare in one respect. it will do so in all others consistently, and how could everyone know it? To take another case, Italian has two series of pronouns: stressed and unstressed. Thus, for example, alongside of reflexive se stesso 'himself which is the stressed form. one finds si which is unstressed but otherwise synonymous. Yet we will see that the differences between the two could not simply be stress versus lack of stress, as their behavior is radically different under a variety of syntactic conditions.