Books in the Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax series

These articles focus on clause structure, clitic placement, word order variation, pronominal system, verb movement, quantification, and distribution of particles. They are written within the "principles and parameters" framework and contrast Portuguese with other Romance languages.

These articles focus on clause structure, clitic placement, word order variation, pronominal system, verb movement, quantification, and distribution of particles. They are written within the "principles and parameters" framework and contrast Portuguese with other Romance languages.

The Romance Languages document remarkable variations in subject word order in different constructions, and have various restrictions in their occurrence. This volume does not attempt to create a consensus, but tries to represent and bring into dialogue the different sides of the debate.

The author investigates the distribution and placement of verbal particles, which are words that do not change their form through inflection and do not fit easily into the established system of parts of speech. He analyses data from Norwegian, English, Dutch, German, and other languages.

This volume brings together twelve previously unpublished case studies of languages in which either topic and focus (or both) are configurationally encoded, i.e. languages in which those two notions are controlled by the syntactic structure of the language, if at all. Taken together, the papers characterize the wide range of variation in this area of syntax.

Every language has a syntactic means of distinguishing a negative from a non-negative sentence. Zanutti aims to show the range of variation in this ability by comparing the romance languages, and to reduce the differences to a constrained set of choices available to the grammar of these languages.

Adriana Belletti here collects work by top scholars presented at the University of Siena in connection with a visit by Noam Chomsky. The eight articles collected touch on broader theoretical questions related to Chomsky's Minimalist Program in particular. Contributors include Guglielmo Cinque, Richard Kayne, Luigi Rizzi, Noam Chomsky, and others.

Adriana Belletti here collects work by scholars presented at the University of Siena in connection with a visit by Noam Chomsky. The book's eight articles touch on broader theoretical questions related to Chomsky's Minimalist Program in particular. Contributors include Guglielmo Cinque, Richard Kayne, Luigi Rizzi, Noam Chomsky, and others.

By offering the first in-depth introduction to the framework of nanosyntax, Exploring Nanosyntax fills a major gap in current theoretical literature. The volume contains original contributions by senior and junior researchers in the field and will also constitute an ideal handbook for advanced students and researchers in linguistics.

Using the Principles and Parameters framework, Henry analyses various syntactic constructions in Belfast English, and compares them with their Standard English counterparts to gain insight into both English syntax and general syntactic theory. The study will also make linguistic data on Belfast English readily available for the first time.

Develops a theory about the role of anaphora in the formulation of general syntax. This monograph shows that the complementary distribution of forms that support anaphoric readings is not accidental. It also shows that anaphora-specific principles are universal, and that the patterns of anaphora across languages arise from lexical properties.

This volume contains 12 chapters on the derivation of and the correlates to verb initial word order. The studies cover such widely divergent languages as Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Old Irish, and Biblical Hebrew.

Investigating the properties of Hindi-Urdu scrambling, this text analyses it as uniformly a focality-driven XP-adjunction operation. It proposes a theory of binding and co-reference that derives the co-reference effects in scrambled constructions.

Focusing on the relation between functional categories and lexical and phrasal categories in Arabic dialects, Benmamoun proposes that universally functional categories are specified for categorial features which determine their relation with lexical categories.

The authors present a theory of the role which subject-verb agreement and case morphology play in syntax, based mainly on a detailed comparison of the syntactic and inflectional properties of the Scandinavian languages.

Aims to study the structure of the inflectional field and the left peripheral field of clauses, often described as the systems of IP (Inflection Phrase) and CP (Complementizer Phrase). This book is useful for scholars with an interest in Italian and Romance languages and also for linguists interested in contemporary research in generative grammar.

This text argues that clauses and noun phrases are perfectly parallel. The book provides a unified theory of clauses and noun phrases, ultimately helping to simplify numerous thorny issues in the syntax/morphology interface.

This is the first linguistic study written within the Principles and Parameters framework to deal with the Slavic languages. Franks develops parametric solutions to related constructions among those languages. The book can serve both as an introduction to Government and Binding (GB) Theory for Slavic linguists as well as an introduction to Slavic languages for scholars of syntax.

This is a collection of (mostly) previously unpublished papers that examine function heads using the Principles and Parameters approach. The main theoretical focus is on the general theory of head movement, the properties of derived structures and their parametrization.

This is a collection of (mostly) previously unpublished papers that examine function heads using the Principles and Parameters approach. The main theoretical focus is on the general theory of head movement, the properties of derived structures and their parametrization.

This book is a treatise of a set of function words, the closed class of determiners. The dissection of a series of different determiners in German and other Germanic languages brings to light unexpected structural regularities previously unexplored in this class of words, regularities that resemble syntactic patterns familiar from the clause.

This text presents evidence locating adverb phrases in the specifiers of distinct functional projections within a theory of the clause. In this theory, both adverbs and heads, which encode the functional notions of the clause, are ordered in a rigid sequence.

Ura demonstrates that his theory of multiple feature-checking, an extension of Chomsky's Agr-less checking theory, gives a natural explanation for a wide range of data drawn from a variety of languages in a very consistent way with a limited set of parameters.

Looking at the grammars of Hebrew and several varieties of Arabic, Shlonsky examines clausal architecture and verb movement and the role of agreement in natural language, using Chomsky's Government and Binding approach.

The authors bridge the gap between the semantic and syntactic properties of verb tense and aspect, suggest a unified account of tense and aspect using Chomsky's Principles and Parameters Framework and compare tense and aspect systems in Romance languages with Germanic ones. In the OXFORD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE SYNTAX series.

A collection of previously unpublished papers on a specific topic in historical linguistics - clause structure. These papers testify to the recent renewal of interest in diachronic syntax, a consequence of the new emphasis on comparative issues in the principles and parameters framework.

This ambitious work represents the first full-scale attempt to provide a restrictive theory of parameters, i.e. of the nature and limits of syntactic variation.

This study argues that polysynthetic languages - in which verbs are built up of many parts and where one verb can act as a whole sentence - are more than an accidental collection of morphological processes; rather they adopt a systematic way of representing predicate-argument relationships.

This work investigates the syntax of the higher portion of the functional structure of the clause using comparative data from hundreds of Northern Italian dialects. The area contains dialects that are different in most ways yet homogenous syntactically, making it ideal for this type of analysis.

Overt subjects are usually considered as a property of finite clauses. However, most Romance languages permit specified subjects in a broad range of infinitive constructions. Guido Mensching analyses this phenomenon in stages of French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and other Romance varieties.