Böcker i Linguistic Inquiry Monographs-serien

An exploration of the architecture of the grammar, where conditions apply, and the nature of the lexical/functional split.

"A syntactic analysis of and solution to the semantic problem: how can speakers convey the same meaning using different speech acts?"--

A novel, systematic theory of adjunct control, explaining how and why adjuncts shift between obligatory and nonobligatory control.Control in adjuncts involves a complex interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, which so far has resisted systematic analysis. In this book, Idan Landau offers the first comprehensive account of adjunct control. Extending the framework developed in his earlier book, A Two-Tiered Theory of Control, Landau analyzes ten different types of adjuncts and shows that they fall into two categories: those displaying strict obligatory control (OC) and those alternating between OC and nonobligatory control (NOC). He explains how and why adjuncts shift between OC and NOC, unifying their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties.Landau shows that the split between the two types of adjuncts reflects a fundamental distinction in the semantic type of the adjunct: property (OC) or proposition (NOC), a distinction independently detectable by the adjunct''s tolerance to a lexical subject. After presenting a fully compositional account of controlled adjuncts, Landau tests and confirms the specific configurational predictions for each type of adjunct. He describes the interplay between OC and NOC in terms of general principles of competition--both within the grammar and outside of it, in the pragmatics and in the processing module--shedding new light on classical puzzles in the acquisition of adjunct control by children. Along the way, he addresses a range of empirical phenomena, including implicit arguments, event control, logophoricity, and topicality.

A proposal that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a "person space" at the heart of every pronominal expression.

An examination of the evidence for and the theoretical implications of a universal word order constraint, with data from a wide range of languages.

A groundbreaking, comprehensive formal theory of grammatical person that recasts its empirical foundations and re-envisions its theoretical core.

A theory of control, equally grounded in syntax and semantics, that argues that obligatory control is achieved either through predication or through logophoric anchoring.

A new analysis of adjectives, supported by comparative evidence.

It is standardly assumed that Universal Grammar (UG) allows a given hierarchical representation to be associated with more than one linear order. This book proposes a restrictive theory of word order and phrase structure that denies this assumption. According to this theory, phrase structure always completely determines linear order, so that if two phrases differ in linear order, they must also differ in hierarchical structure.

An argument that agreement and agreementless languages are unified under an expanded view of grammatical features including both phi-features and certain discourse configurational features.

An argument that the word order of a given language is largely predictable from independently observable facts about its phonology and morphology.

A novel view of the syntax-semantics interface that analyzes the behavior of indefinite objects.

Argument Structure is a contribution to linguistics at the interface between lexical syntax and lexical semantics.

A comprehensive theory of selective opacity effects-configurations in which syntactic domains are opaque to some processes but transparent to others-within a Minimalist framework.

An investigation of the syntactic structure of voice and v, using Acehnese (Malayo-Polynesian) as the empirical starting point.

An investigation of the syntax and semantics of wh-questions through the lens of intervention effects, offering a new proposal on overt and covert wh-movement.

Investigates the relationship between the syntactic and semantic representations of sentences within the framework of generative grammar. Diesing also considers the problem of deriving logical representations from syntactic representations of sentences.