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This book considers examples such as the one below on the interpretation where Nancy thinks that this course is not interesting: Nancy doesn't think this course is interesting. It argues that such examples instantiate a kind of syntactic raising known as Classical NEG Raising (NR). This involves the raising of a NEG (negation) from the embedded clause to the matrix clause. The book develops three main arguments to support its claim. First, it shows that Classical NR obeys island constraints. Second, it documents that a syntactic raising analysis predicts both the grammaticality and particular properties of what it terms Horn clauses (named for Laurence Horn, who discovered them). Finally, it argues that the properties of certain parenthetical structures strongly support the syntactic character of Classical NR. The book also offers a detailed analysis of the main argument in the literature against a syntactic raising analysis (which it calls the Composed Quantifier Argument). It shows that the facts appealed to in this argument not only fail to conflict with their approach but actually support a syntactic view. The book also touches on a variety of related topics, including the syntax of negative polarity items, the status of sequential negation, and the scope of negative quantifiers.

This book offers a snapshot of current research in Distributed Morphology, highlighting the lasting influence of Morris Halle, a pioneer in generative linguistics. Distributed Morphology, which integrates the morphological with the syntactic, originated in Halle's work. This book, written to mark his 90th birthday, makes an original theoretical contribution to the field and emphasizes Halle's foundational contributions to the study of morphology. The chapters primarily focus on the issues of locality, exploring the tight connection of morphology to phonology, syntax, and semantics that lies at the core of Distributed Morphology. The nature of phases, the notion of a morpho-syntactic feature, allomorphy and exponence, the synthetic/analytic alternation, stress assignment, and syntactic agreement are all shown to link to more than one grammatical module. Animated discussion with students has been central to Halle's research, and the development of Distributed Morphology has been shaped and continued by his students, many of whom have contributed to this volume. Halle's support, advice, and enthusiasm encouraged the research exemplified here.

This book offers a wide-ranging empirical investigation of word use and meaning in language. It fills the need for a lexically based, corpus-driven theoretical approach that will help people understand how words go together in collocational patterns and constructions to make meanings. Such an approach is now possible, the book argues, because of the availability of new forms of evidence (corpora, the Internet) and the development of new methods of statistical analysis and inferencing. The book offers a new theory of language, the theory of norms and exploitations, which makes a systematic distinction between normal and abnormal usage—between rules for using words normally and rules for exploiting such norms in metaphor and other creative use of language. Using hundreds of citations from corpora and other texts, it shows how matching each use of a word against established contextual patterns plays a large part in determining the meaning of an utterance. The book's goal is to develop a coherent and practical lexically driven theory of language that takes into account the immense variability of everyday usage, and which shows that this variability is rule governed rather than random. Such a theory will complement other theoretical approaches to language, including cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, generative lexicon theory, priming theory, and pattern grammar.

This book owes its title to a simple idea: words are special because they can provide a label for free when they merge with some other category. An exemplification of this special power of words is introduced by the familiar head-complement configurations. For example, the structure that is created when a verb and a direct object DP are merged receives a label from the verb, namely it is a VP. One idea that unifies the linguistic analyses presented in this book is that a word can provide the label even in case of movement. This has important consequences, because movement of a word is special in one respect: it can “relabel” the structure, namely the structure resulting from movement of a word can have a different label from the one that the structure had before movement. The new label is the one provided by the word that has moved. Relabeling cases triggered by the movement of a word are pervasive in the syntax of natural languages and their identification sheds lights on phenomena like relativization, successive cyclicity, island phenomena, and Minimality effects. We discuss the relabeling cases by adopting an explicit theory of labeling that builds on the idea that the label results from the Probing operation (and not from Merge). More precisely, the Probe provides the label. A corollary is that, if no Probe is present, the structure created by Merge remains label-less. This happens in a very restricted, yet important, set of cases.

In this book, David Pesetsky argues that the peculiarities of Russian nominal phrases provide significant clues concerning the syntactic side of morphological case. Pesetsky argues against the traditional view that traditional case categories such as nominative or genitive have a special status in the grammar of human languages. Supporting his argument with a detailed analysis of a complex array of morpho-syntactic phenomena in the Russian noun phrase, he proposes instead that the case categories are just part-of-speech features copied as morphology from head to dependent as syntactic structure is built. The empirical basis for the investigation is one of the thorniest topics in Russian grammar: the morpho-syntax of noun phrases with numerals (including those traditionally called the “paucals” — ‘two’, ‘three’ and ‘four’). For example, the Russian counterpart of ‘these last two beautiful tables’ occupies a nominative environment, the pre-numeral demonstrative and adjective (‘these last’) bear nominative plural morphology, and the numeral itself is nominative. The post- numeral adjective (‘beautfiul’), however, is often genitive plural; and the noun (‘table’) is genitive singular. These and other complex facts follow directly from from the general proposal that the cases are to be identified with the parts of speech, against an independently motivated backdrop of Russian sentence structure. Building on work by Norvin Richards, Pesetsky argues that this view of case also illuminates the grammar of languages superficially quite different from Russian, with French and the Australian language Lardil as case studies.

Syntax has shown that there is a hierarchical ordering of projections within the verb phrase, although researchers differ with respect to how fine grained they assume the hierarchy to be). This book explores the hierarchy of the verb phrase from a semantic perspective, attempting to derive it from semantically sorted zones in the compositional semantics. The empirical ground is the auxiliary ordering found in the grammar of English. A new theory of semantic zones is proposed and formalized, and explicit semantic and morphological analyses are presented of all the auxiliary constructions of English that derive their rigid order of composition without recourse to lexical item specific ordering statements.

This book proposes a new approach to phrase structure that eschews functional heads and labels structures exocentrically. The proposal simultaneously simplifies the syntactic system and restricts the range of possible structures, ruling out the ubiquitous (remnant) roll-up derivations and forcing a separation of arguments from their apparent heads. This new system has a number of empirical consequences, which the book explores in the domain of relational nominals across different language families, including Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Polynesian, and Semitic. The book shows that the relationality of such nouns as hand, edge, or mother—which seem to have as part of their meaning a relation between substances—is actually part of the syntactic representation in which they are used rather than an inherent part of their meaning. This empirical outcome follows directly from the new syntactic system, as does a novel analysis of prepositions phrase complements to nouns and possessors. Given this, the book argues that nouns can, in general, be thought of as simply specifications of substance, differentiating them from true predicates. It contributes to debates in theoretical syntax about the nature of syntactic representations, and how they connect to semantic interpretation and linear order.

Voice and v investigates the syntactic structure of voice, using Acehnese as the empirical starting point. A central claim is that voice is encoded in a functional projection, VoiceP, which is distinct from, and higher than, vP. The book further claims that VoiceP may be associated with phi-features that semantically restrict the external argument position but do not saturate it. Through minor variations in the properties of VoiceP, a wide range of non-canonical voice constructions are explained, including: agent-agreeing passives, grammatical object passives, impersonals, object voice constructions, and applicative voice in causatives. The analysis draws on data from a typologically diverse set of languages, not only Malayo-Polynesian, but also Celtic, Scandinavian, and Slavic. Voice and v provides a detailed investigation into the syntactic structure of an understudied Malayo-Polynesian language, and thereby reveals important insights for the theoretical analysis of voice and the verb phrase. Moreover, the work applies and broadens these insights to a range of related passive-like constructions crosslinguistically. Voice and v thus joins a handful of model volumes that enlist typological depth and breadth to further our development of modern linguistic theory.