Bücher der Reihe Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics

The phenomenon of unaccusativity is a central focus for the study of the complex properties of verb classes. Among the issues the authors address in this book are as follows: the determination of the unaccusative class of verbs, the problem of unaccusativity diagnostics, the properties of second-language lexicon, and more.

This book considers the ways natural languages vary with respect to their realisation of quantificational notions. Drawing on data from English, German, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Hausa and others, the authors also link the variation in the expression of quantification to the notions of polarity sensitivity, free-choice and indefiniteness.

Kirsten Gengel investigates pseudogapping, which, she proposes, is one variety of ellipsis in natural language. At the heart of her discussion lies the interaction between focus and deletion. Her novel approach, which draws on new empirical data from many languages, has the potential of unifying several elliptical phenomena in generative grammar.

This book uses data from English, Mandarin Chinese, and Modern Greek to develop a new theory of control structures that relates them to restructuring and the semantics of the embedding verb. The theory has implications both for clausal structure and for the relationship between form and meaning in natural language.

Uniting work from philosophical, cognitive and linguistic perspectives, Dr Truswell develops a model of the structure of events as perceptual and cognitive units. He predicts the acceptability of particular formulations, considers the individuation of events in the light of the model, and provides a novel account of patterns of question formation.

Considers the interaction of morphological and phonological determinants of linguistic form and the degree to which one determines the other. This book is of interest to scholars and advanced students of phonology and morphology, and of linguistic theory more generally.

This book explores the nature of sentential stress, how it is assigned and its interaction with information structure. Its central thesis is that the position of sentential or nuclear stress is determined syntactically and that cross-linguistic differences in this respect follow from syntactic variations.

This book explores the wide variety of cases in which the plural of nouns is lexical. Using tools from formal semantics and theoretical morphology, Dr Acquaviva analyzes the countless number of examples of word-dependent irregularities in the form and meaning of plural, and in doing so sheds light on the relation between grammar and the lexicon.

This book throws new light on the syntax, morphology, and phonology interfaces by focussing on the key current question of which elements in a paradigm can stand in a relation of partial or total phonological identity.

Linguists have realised that predicates of the "know" and "wonder" classes behave differently in semantic terms with respect to their interrogative complements, but have not so far fully understood how or why. This book seeks to explore and to provide solutions to this and to related problems.

Investigating the temporal structure of language, this book deals with central issues in the understanding of tense and aspect. It also proposes a different approach to the main problems in the area, and seeks to establish the universal semantic properties of two important and contentious aspectual categories, perfectivity and imperfectivity.

Provides an argument for a radically modular view of the human language faculty on the basis of the comprehensive study of how word formation is constrained by different components of the grammar. This book argues that complex words are generated by a dedicated rule system, which interacts with syntax and phonology.

The first in-depth investigation of gapping and negation shows accepted accounts do not explain differences across languages, and available readings of the negation. The author questions basic assumptions in the analysis of gapping and presents a new syntactic analysis with implications for the interpretation of scope, and the theory of ellipsis.

This book revives the study of conventional implicatures in natural language semantics. H. Paul Grice first defined the concept. Since then his definition has seen many redefinitions. Christopher Potts returns to the original and uses it as a key into two areas of natural language: supplements and expressives.

This title explores the interaction of syntax, pragmatics, and semantics in the behaviour of verb phrases, incluing noun and prepositional phrases, and how they interact with the information provided by the verb.

Investigates the way grammar deals with the representation of aspectual (aktionsart) concepts, focussing on issues of the lexicon-syntax interface. Various theories are developed in this collection, including those that take as their starting point the lexical-syntactic framework of Hale and Keyser.

This book of new research by leading experts expands our current understanding of the ways in which languages allow for ellipsis of the sluicing type to occur, and shows how sluicing constructions reveal important information about the general architecture of grammar.

This work focuses on the form of ellipsis known as sluicing, a feature of interrogative clauses, such as in "Sally's out hunting - guess what!"; and "Someone called, but I can't tell you who". The phenomenon is studied across 24 languages to try to explain it in linguistic and behavioural terms.

This book addresses recent developments in the study of quantifier phrases, nominalizations, and the linking definite determiner. It presents challenging ideas at the syntax-morphology, syntax-semantics, and lexicon-morphology interfaces and advances understanding of how quantification, definiteness, and nominalizations are encoded in grammar.

This book addresses the fundamental issues in the phase-based approach to the mental computation of language that have arisen from the recent developments in the Minimalist Program. Leading linguists focus on phase theory and the interaction of syntax with the semantic and phonological interfaces.

This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the study of generics. It gathers new work from senior and young researchers and is organized along three main areas of study: the generic and individuals; genericity and time; and the sources of genericity and types of judgment.

Drawing on the expertise of over 20 leading scholars and their empirically rich data, this book presents current thoughts on, and practical answers to, the question: What are the diagnostic signs, techniques and procedures that can be used to analyse natural language syntax?

This book examines the distribution and interpretation of anaphors and pronouns. Through a detailed analysis of simplex and complex anaphors in Dutch and English, as well as other Romance and Germanic languages, the authors show that the relationship between an anaphor and its antecedent can be captured in terms of general Minimalist principles.

In this volume, Luis Lopez sheds new light on information structure and makes a significant contribution to work on grammatical operations in the Minimalist Program. He presents a model of syntax-information structure interaction and argues that this interaction takes place at the phase level, with a privileged role for the edge of the phase.

This book brings together research on the semantics and pragmatics of adjectives and adverbs. It integrates lexical and compositional semantics and provides a full account of the structural and interpretive properties of adjectives and adverbs. It will interest students in linguistics and philosophy at graduate level and above.

This book brings together the different strands and styles of research on Phi-features, such as person, number, and gender. It presents the core questions, major results, and new directions of this area of linguistic theory and shows how Phi Theory casts light on the nature of interfaces and the structure of the grammar.

This book examines the hypothesis of "direct compositionality" which requires that semantic interpretation proceed in tandem with syntactic combination. In the first extended discussion of the hypothesis for twenty years, contributors from both sides of the debate draw on examples from a wide range of languages and discuss the place of direct compositionality in generative grammar.

This book presents new insights on the phonology-morphology interface. It discusses a wide range of central theoretical issues, including the role of paradigms in synchronic grammars, and does so in the context of a wide variety of languages including several non-Indo-European languages.

This volume presents new work by leading researchers on central themes in the study of event structure: the nature and representation of telicity, change, and the notion of state. The book advances our understanding of these aspects by combining foundational semantic research with a series of case studies from a variety of languages.

This book is a cross-linguistic investigation of resumptive pronouns and related resumption phenomena. The author proposes a new theory of resumption based on the use of a resource logic for semantic composition and the typologically robust observation that resumptive pronouns are ordinary pronouns in their morphological and lexical properties.