This thesis presents accounts of a range of linguistic phenomena in an extended categorial framework, and develops proposals for processing grammars set within this framework. Linguistic phenomena whose treatment we address include word order, grammatical relations and obliqueness, extraction and island constraints, and binding. The work is set within a flexible categorial framework which is a version of the Lambek calculus (Lambek, 1958) extended by the inclusion of additional type-forming operators whose logical behaviour allows for the characterization of some aspect of linguistic phenomena. We begin with the treatment of extraction phenomena and island constraints. An account is developed in which there are many interrelated notions of boundary, and where the sensitivity of any syntactic process to a particular class of boundaries can be addressed within the grammar. We next present a new categorial treatment of word order which factors apart the specification of the order of a h...

Since the pioneering work of Lees and Klima (1963), it has commonly been assumed that a single generalization determines the possible antecedents of anaphors (reflexive and reciprocal expressions) in English. The mechanisms proposed to express this generalization have evolved considerably over the last quarter century, but the transformations

The aim of this study is to provide an autosegmental description of Hungarian morphology. Chapter 1 sketches the (meta)theoretical background and summarizes the main argument. In Chapter 2 phonological prerequisites to morphological analysis are discussed. Special attention is paid to Hungarian vowel harmony. In Chapter 3 a universal theory of lexical categories is proposed, and the category system of Hungarian is described within it. The final chapter presents a detailed description of nominal and verbal inflection in Hungarian, and describes the main features of a computer implementation based on the analyses provided here. 1

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the morphological behaviour of pronominal clitics in European Portuguese (EP) and to develop an inflectional account of cliticisation within the theory of Paradigm-Function Morphology (Stump 2001). It is argued that EP clitic pronouns exhibit most of the affixal properties attested for clitic pronouns in various Romance languages (Auger 1994 and Miller&Sag 1997, for French; Monachesi 1999, for French, Brines 2001, for Spanish). These similarities include rigid ordering, idiosyncratic co-occurrence restrictions, fusion, syncretism, and allomorphic variation. Affixal status is also supported by the behaviour of EP enclitics (i.e., postverbal clitics) which form a morphologically cohering unit with the verb. In particular, enclitics cannot be separated from the verb, may intervene between the verbal stem and tense/agreement suffixes, and induce stem allomorphy. Based on this evidence, clitic sequences are best viewed as affixal sequences and postverbal clitics are best analysed as verbal suffixes. EP proclitics (i.e., preverbal clitic pronouns) however seem to complicate the inflectional status of the EP clitic system. Even though they are phonologically exactly identical to enclitics, they display distributional and scopal properties that are untypical of verbal affixes: they can have wide

One of the central issues in morphology/morphosyntax has been the locus of the mechanisms responsible for word formation. LEXICALISM claims that the mechanisms employed forword formation are distinct from those found in other domains (e.g. syntax). I examine in this article so-called ‘lexical ’ V-V compound formation in Japanese from a lexicalist point of view and show that it is indeed LEXICAL (some claim that it is syntactic). Though Japanese V-V compounds have been studied extensively, a principled and unified account has not been proposed due to their complexities, especially one that deals with the question of how arguments of component verbs are to be synthesized into a single argument structure. The current proposal embodies the notion of THEMATIC PROTO-ROLE and devises semantically driven argument matching giving rise to an argument structure of a V-V compound as a whole. In such a process, syntactic apparatuses or grammatical relations per se play no central role.

A recent survey of 267 dialects of Dutch (SAND; Barbiers et al. 2005) provides 6 cases of doubling in syntactic chains.

Abstract: I argue that despite their traditional verb-first vs. verb second partition, Welsh and Breton both instantiate a ban on verb-first and I present an analysis of these two languages as fundamentally verb second. In this view, so-called verb first orders prototypically illustrated by Welsh result from inconspicuous strategies to fill in the preverbal position, whereas traditional verb second prototypically illustrated by Breton results from conspicuous strategies to fill in the preverbal position. I show that both conspicuous and inconspicuous verb second orders are present in both Welsh and Breton. The difference in word order between Welsh and Breton is reduced to (i) a lexical parameter, that is availability of a free preverbal expletive particle in Welsh, and (ii) a syntactic parameter: Breton allows for the creation of expletives by short movement, a parameter shared with Icelandic and other languages instantiating stylistic fronting.

In this paper. I argue that there is do (ha)-support in Korean, which is strong evidence that verbal inflectional elements are independently projected as formatives in syntactic structure. Pointing out that ambiguities shown in so-called 'VP-focus ' constructions containing *ha- ' result from structural ambiguities, this paper has reinterpreted 'ha- ' either as being one of 'VP-focus ' in which case it functions as a main verb, or as being one of 'event-focus ' in which case it functions as a dummy verb to spell out the XP left behind by XP localization. Focusing on various 'event-focus ' constructions, this paper argues that under the 'Ha-support ' analysis and the assumption that verbal roots as well as verbal inflectional affixes are independently projected to the syntactic structure we can precisely capture a close relationship between 'event-focus ' constructions and the corresponding simple sentences, and also correctly predict the distribution of aspect, tense and mood affixes, each of which is assumed to be the head of an aspect phrase, tense phrase, and mood phrase, respectively. 1.

1 Syntactic doubling and Dutch WH-constructions

Abstract not found