Morphology-driven Syntax

Morphology-driven Syntax
Author: Bernhard Wolfgang Rohrbacher
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 306
Release: 1999
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027227365

This book argues that syntactic parameters are set in a principled fashion on the basis of overt functional morphology. The main focus of the book is on the different positions of the finite verb in the Germanic SVO languages. In addition, other syntactic phenomena (null subjects, transitive expletive constructions and object shift) and other language families (Romance, Semitic and Slavic) are discussed. A common explanation for all of the discussed phenomena is proposed: If and only if the features for “person” are distinctively marked by the agreement morphology, the agreement affixes are listed separately in the lexicon and project phrases of their own in syntax where they attract the verb to the head positions and allow the specifier positions to be filled by various phonologically (un)realized elements. Special attention is given to issues of historical development and child language acquisition.

Boundaries of Morphology and Syntax

Boundaries of Morphology and Syntax
Author: Lunella Mereu
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1999-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027284628

The volume collects a selection of papers presented at a European Colloquium held at the Università degli Studi di Roma Tre in October 1997. It focuses on phenomena at the boundary between morphology and syntax, and provides analyses for data from the fields of both inflectional and derivational morphology and word order. Morpho-syntactic phenomena are analysed cross-linguistically and cross-theoretically, as typologically-different languages (European, Afro-Asiatic, American and Austronesian ones) are dealt with and compared according to a variety of approaches, from minimalism and lexical-functional grammar to grammaticalization theory, taking into account both synchronic variation and diachronic change. The volume is divided into three sections: I. Morphological phenomena and their boundaries, II. Morpho-syntax and pragmatics, and III. Morpho-syntax and semantics, as the interaction with the higher components of the grammar is seen as contributing to explaining variation in morpho-syntactic behaviour.

Computational Approaches to Morphology and Syntax

Computational Approaches to Morphology and Syntax
Author: Brian Roark
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2007-08-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 019153451X

The book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). It provides a critical and practical guide to computational techniques for handling morphological and syntactic phenomena, showing how these techniques have been used and modified in practice. The authors discuss the nature and uses of syntactic parsers and examine the problems and opportunities of parsing algorithms for finite-state, context-free and various context-sensitive grammars. They relate approaches for describing syntax and morphology to formal mechanisms and algorithms, and present well-motivated approaches for augmenting grammars with weights or probabilities.

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
Author: Stefan Müller
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 1632
Release:
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961102554

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism).

One-to-many-relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics

One-to-many-relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics
Author: Berthold Crysmann
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2021
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961103070

The standard view of the form-meaning interfaces, as embraced by the great majority of contemporary grammatical frameworks, consists in the assumption that meaning can be associated with grammatical form in a one-to-one correspondence. Under this view, composition is quite straightforward, involving concatenation of form, paired with functional application in meaning. In this book, we discuss linguistic phenomena across several grammatical sub-modules (morphology, syntax, semantics) that apparently pose a problem to the standard view, mapping out the potential for deviation from the ideal of one-to-one correspondences, and develop formal accounts of the range of phenomena. We argue that a constraint-based perspective is particularly apt to accommodate deviations from one-to-many correspondences, as it allows us to impose constraints on full structures (such as a complete word or the interpretation of a full sentence) instead of deriving such structures step by step. Most of the papers in this volume are formulated in a particular constraint-based grammar framework, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The contributions investigate how the lexical and constructional aspects of this theory can be combined to provide an answer to this question across different linguistic sub-theories.

The Syntax-Morphology Interface

The Syntax-Morphology Interface
Author: Matthew Baerman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2005-09-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521821810

This pioneering book provides a full-length study of inflectional syncretism, presenting a typology of its occurrence across a wide range of languages.

Voice at the interfaces

Voice at the interfaces
Author: Itamar Kastner
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 286
Release:
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961102570

This books presents the most comprehensive description and analysis to date of Hebrew morphology, with an emphasis on the verbal templates. Its aim is to develop a theory of argument structure alternations which is anchored in the syntax but has systematic interfaces with the phonology and the semantics. Concretely, the monograph argues for a specific formal system centered around possible values of the head Voice. The formal assumptions are as similar as possible to those made in work on non-Semitic languages. The first part of the book (four chapters) is devoted to Hebrew; the second part (two chapters) compares the current theory with other approaches to Voice and argument structure in the recent literature.

Non-Transformational Syntax

Non-Transformational Syntax
Author: Robert Borsley
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2011-09-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1444395025

This authoritative introduction explores the four main non-transformational syntactic frameworks: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, and Simpler Syntax. It also considers a range of issues that arise in connection with these approaches, including questions about processing and acquisition. An authoritative introduction to the main alternatives to transformational grammar Includes introductions to three long-established non-transformational syntactic frameworks: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, and Categorial Grammar, along with the recently developed Simpler Syntax Brings together linguists who have developed and shaped these theories to illustrate the central properties of these frameworks and how they handle some of the main phenomena of syntax Discusses a range of issues that arise in connection with non-transformational approaches, including processing and acquisition

Introducing Morphology

Introducing Morphology
Author: Rochelle Lieber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0521895499

A lively introduction to the study of how words are put together.