BibTeX
@MISC{Kobele09syntaxand,
author = {Gregory M. Kobele},
title = {Syntax and Semantics in Minimalist Grammars},
year = {2009}
}
Share
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
OpenURL
Abstract
This chapter presents a grammar for a fragment of English A-movement. The constructions accounted for include raising, passivization, and control. Section 1 motivates our basic syntactic theory, culminating in an account of raising and passivization, along with a novel account of expletive it, which immediately explains the ban on superraising in terms of independently motivated notions of intervention and case assignment. Section 2 presents a directly compositional semantics for our syntactic theory, one which maps derivations incrementally to model-theoretic objects, making no reference to syntactic trees. We extend our fragment with quantifiers, and show how we can derive quantifier scope ambiguities without a seperate operation of quantifier raising (QR). The tense clause boundedness of QR is easily shown to be simply and directly replicable in our system in terms of independently motivated assumptions about feature checking. We extend our fragment once more to account for control, which, given our semantic operations, is naturally implemented in terms of movement to theta positions. This treatment
Keyphrases
minimalist grammar novel account model-theoretic object seperate operation syntactic tree include raising english a-movement compositional semantics tense clause boundedness case assignment feature checking scope ambiguity basic syntactic theory quantifier raising syntactic theory semantic operation
