Bücher der Reihe Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics

This book examines turn-taking in English and Japanese conversations and political news interviews to investigate the relationship between language and interaction.

This book investigates the nature of the relationship between phonology and syntax and proposes a theory of Minimal Indirect Reference which solves many of the problems found in the field.

Investigates various phenomena affecting both stressed and unstressed vowels in Romance languages and analyses vowel reduction, which involves a change of vowel quality in stressless syllables that favours vowel qualities that are maximally distinguishable from one another.

A specific indefinite presupposes that someone has in mind an individual who has the property denoted by its descriptive content. Having an individual inmind means that the agent knows who the referent is. This affects the information state of the agent, but not the others. The asymmetric information, shared by all conversational participants, requires a common ground to have multiple information states, each for each participant. The information state of the agent who has an individual in mind must be structured into sub-information-states so that each sub-information-state associates the specific indefinite with a different unique individual. It then conveys the information that the agent has some individual in mind, but that it is not known yet who it is. This analysis thus requires a new dynamic semantics which is partially representational and partially denotational. Specific indefinites tend to have widest scope, which is explained by claiming that specific indefinites trigger presuppositions. Presuppositions are assumed to have various scopes with respect to operators in a sentence, and the strongest reading is preferred on rational and economic basis. Stronger readings roughly correspond to wider scopes. This book will be of interest to scholars who work on indefinite NPs, presuppositions, anaphora in belief contexts, and dynamic semantics in general.

This work presents the first experimental study of articulatory dynamics of Russian and of secondary articulents in general. Special focus is on the nature of positional markedness scales (Optimality Theory), a key concept in phonological theory.

A significant contribution to the current debate on the role of phonetic optimalisation, this book presents a formal and unified characterization of lenition patterns.

Baauw discusses to what extent errors young children make with their interpretation of definite articles and pronouns are due to their immature pragmatic skills and to what extent incomplete syntactic development plays a role.

The main topic of this work is the interaction between syntactic structure and meanin within the noun phrase, with data drwn primarily from English and Italian.

Based on a wide variety of languages, this study examines the ways in which modal notions, such as permission and obligation, interact with negation. In particular, the study focuses on how ambiguities in scope are resolved. It is shown that languages overwhelmingly make use of two different strategies. The first strategy (the Modal Suppletion Strategy) is to use different modal verbs for the different scope interpretations. This strategy is found in languages such as English, Finnish, and Tamil. The second strategy (the Negation Placement Strategy), which is found in French, Russian, and Modern Greek (among others) is to use two different places for the negation to surface. It turns out that these two strategies have two different foundations: the first strategy is a semantic one, while the second strategy is syntactic in nature. That there is a difference can be shown by appealing to syntactic tests. The Modal Suppletion Strategy is not sensitive to these tests, while the Negation Placement Strategy is. It can also be shown that the two different strategies are correlated with word order: the Negation Placement Strategy is found exclusively in languages with a basic SVO order and with a negative morpheme that precedes the verb. This is checked against a database of 75 languages. Finally, these results are compared to other scope resolutions in languages.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.