Locality and Information Structure

Locality and Information Structure
Author: Yoshio Endo
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2007-10-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027291950

This monograph presents a systematic exploration of Japanese syntax within the cartographic approach, paying special attention to the locality effects induced by discourse-based features such as topic and focus. Although the main focus is on Japanese syntax, implications of the analyses developed are investigated from a broader comparative perspective. Unlike previous works on Japanese generative syntax, this book is based partially on informant surveys, including the distribution of adverbials and the categorical status of nominative-Case-marked adverbials, as well as an exhaustive survey of ditransitive predicates in terms of word formation and idioms in Koujien, one of the most comprehensive Japanese dictionaries. A systematic syntactic study of the nature of clause-final particles in Japanese, an area previously only explored in the framework of discourse analysis, is also presented. It is shown that the EPP may be satisfied by such discourse-related elements as topic and focus and by these sentence final particles.

Locality in WH Quantification

Locality in WH Quantification
Author: Veneeta Dayal
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9401148082

Locality in WH Quantification argues that Logical Form, the level that mediates between syntax and semantics, is derived from S-structure by strictly local movement. The primary data for the claim of locality at LF is drawn from Hindi but English data is used in discussing the semantics of questions and relative clauses. The book takes a cross-linguistic perspective showing how the Hindi and English facts can be brought to bear on the theory of universal grammar. There are several phenomena generally thought to involve long-distance dependencies at LF, such as scope marking, long-distance list answers and correlatives. In this book they are handled by explicating novel types of local relationships that interrogative and relative clauses can enter. Amore articulated semantics is shown leading to a simpler syntax. Among other issues addressed is the switch from uniqueness/maximality effects in single WH constructions to list readings in multiple WH constructions. These effects are captured by adapting the treatment of WH expressions as quantifying over functions to the cases of multiple WH questions and correlatives. List readings due to functional dependencies are systematically distinguished from those that are based on plurality.

Prolific Domains

Prolific Domains
Author: Kleanthes K. Grohmann
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027227898

Standard conceptions of Locality aim to establish that a dependency between two positions may not span too long a distance. This book explores the opposite conception, Anti-Locality: Don't move too close. The model of clause structure, syntactic computation, and locality concerns Kleanthes Grohmann develops makes crucial use of derivational sub-domains, Prolific Domains, each encapsulating particular context information (thematic, agreement, discourse). The Anti-Locality Hypothesis is the attempt to exclude anti-local movement from the grammar by banning movement within a Prolific Domain, a Bare Output Condition. The flexible application of the operation Spell Out, coupled with an innovative view on grammatical formatives, leads to a natural caveat: Copy Spell Out. Grohmann explores a theory of Anti-Locality relevant to all three Prolific Domains in the clausal layer as well as the nominal layer, and offers a unified account of Standard and Anti-Locality regarding clause-internal movement and operations across clause boundaries, revisiting successive cyclicity.

A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure

A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure
Author: Luis López
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2014-05-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 019156527X

In this volume, Luis Loṕez sheds new light on information structure. 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.

Contrasts and Positions in Information Structure

Contrasts and Positions in Information Structure
Author: Ivona Kučerová
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2012-07-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1139536230

Information structure, or the way the information in a sentence is 'divided' into categories such as topic, focus, comment, background, and old versus new information, is one of the most widely debated topics in linguistics. This volume incorporates exciting work on the relationship between syntax and information structure. The contributors are united in rejecting accounts that assume designated syntactic positions associated with specific information-structural interpretations, and aim instead to derive information-structural conditions on word order and other phenomena from the way syntax and syntax-external systems interact. Beyond this shared aim, the authors of the various chapters advocate a number of approaches, based on different types of data (syntactic, semantic, phonological/phonetic) from a range of languages. The book is aimed at specialists in syntax and/or information structure, as well as students and linguists in related fields keen to familiarise themselves with current issues in this fascinating area of research.

The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax

The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
Author: Marcel den Dikken
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1412
Release: 2013-07-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1107354587

Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.

Information-Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles

Information-Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles
Author: Pierre-Yves Modicom
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2020-03-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027261466

The articles collected in this volume offer new perspectives into the relevance of notions such as topic, antitopic, contrastive topic, focus, verum focus and theticity for the analysis of the syntax and semantics of modal particles, sentence-final particles and other medial, sentential and illocutive particles. This book addresses three great questions in a variety of languages ranging from Japanese to Mohawk, including Basque, French, German, Italian, Kazakh, Spanish and Turkish, with some insights from English and Russian. The first question is the role played by information-structural strategies such as left dislocations, clefts or the morphological marking of focus in the rise of discourse particles. In the second part, papers are concerned with the relevance of information structure for the study of polysemic and polyfunctional discourse particles. Finally, the contribution of particles to the determination of the information-structural profile of the clause is examined, as well as their role in the information-structural specification of illocutionary types. Language-specific papers alternate with comparative approaches in order to show how newer insights on information structure can help resolve some of the classical issues of the linguistic research on particles.

Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing

Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing
Author: Gheorghe Almási
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 747
Release: 2007-05-25
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3540725202

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing, LCPC 2006, held in New Orleans, LA, USA in November 2006. The 24 revised full papers presented together with two keynote talks cover programming models, code generation, parallelism, compilation techniques, data structures, register allocation, and memory management.