Books in the Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics series

This volume explores the progress of cross-linguistic research into the structure of complex nominals since the publication of Chomsky's 'Remarks on Nominalization' in 1970. The contributors take stock of developments in this area and offer new perspectives based on data from a wide range of typologically diverse languages.

This book explores how grammatical oppositions - for instance, the contrast between present and past tense - are encoded in the syntax of natural languages. The chapters approach the topic from a range of perspectives, drawing on data from a variety of typologically diverse languages, including Blackfoot, Greek, Onondaga, and Scottish Gaelic.

This volume provides a detailed account of the syntax of expressive language. Based on case studies of expressive adjectives, intensifiers, and vocatives, it offers a new analysis of expressivity that bridges the gap between semantic and syntactic accounts, and shows that expressivity is a syntactic feature and not a purely semantic phenomenon.

This book explores the syntax of events in the framework of generative grammar, focusing on the question of how conceptual meaning interacts with narrow syntactic computation. It provides insights into parametric theory, the relationship between core arguments and predicates, the syntax of non-core arguments, and the verb/satellite-framed typology.

This book examines the cross-linguistic expression of changes of location or state. It is based on the idea that languages encode information either on the verb or on a non-verbal element such as an affix or preposition. It focuses principally on Latin, with important comparisons drawn with other language families, particularly Slavic.

This volume examines the meaning of scalar modifiers - expressions such as more than, a bit, and much - from the standpoint of the semantics-pragmatics interface. It draws on data from Japanese and a range of other languages to explore the information expressed by these modifiers at both the semantic and the pragmatic level.

This book explores why different languages have systematically different ways of saying the same thing. It focuses on adjectival predication and shows that systematic differences in the meaning of words expressing adjectival notions have systematic effects on the form of the sentences they appear in.

This book uses mathematical models of language to explain why there are certain gaps in language: things that we might expect to be able to say but can't. Lucas Champollion offers a theory that unifies the concepts of aspect, plural and mass reference, measurement, and distributivity, to account for these gaps.

This book presents a new analysis of concealed-question constructions, in which part of a sentence looks like a nominal complement but is interpreted as an indirect question. It provides a fully compositional account of a range of these constructions and offers insights into a variety of issues in semantic theory and the syntax-semantics interface.

This book focuses on the semantic phenomenon of evaluativity in sentences such as John is tall and its consequences across constructions. It proposes an account based on assumptions that speakers and hearers make about the relationship between the simplicity of a situation and the simplicity of the language used to describe that situation

This book takes concepts developed by researchers in theoretical computer science and adapts and applies them to the study of natural language meaning. Summarizing over a decade of research, Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan put forward the Continuation Hypothesis: that the meaning of a natural language expression can depend on its own continuation

This book examines how word order variations in language can be regulated by various factors in cyclic syntax. It offers a valuable contribution to the current debate concerning the effect of cyclic Spell-out on the (re-)ordering of elements in scrambling, principally using data from Korean and Japanese.

This book looks at the relationship between syntax and semantics, bringing together two seemingly unrelated hypotheses: that verbs do not require arguments, and that specifiers are not required by the grammar. The analysis has consequences for the theory of locality, agreement, serial verbs, and multidominance structures.

This book concerns the interpretation and structure of non-verbal predicates in copular sentences (i.e. sentences with the verb 'be'). The author provides a unifying analysis based on a ternary distinction between defining/characterizing/situation-descriptive predicates.

Doris Penka delivers a unified analysis of the semantics and syntax of negative indefinites - as in the expressions nobody, nothing, never and nowhere - and their counterparts in other languages. Contrary to standard assumptions, the author argues that these expressions are not inherently negative and are only licensed by a covert negation.

This book contains updated and substantially revised versions of Angelika Kratzer's classic papers on modals and conditionals. It represents some of the most important work on modals and conditionals and the semantics-syntax interface and will be of interest to linguists and philosophers of language of all theoretical persuasions.

This book is a cross-linguistic investigation of resumptive pronouns and related resumption phenomena. The author proposes a new theory of resumption based on the use of a resource logic for semantic composition and the typologically robust observation that resumptive pronouns are ordinary pronouns in their morphological and lexical properties.

This book examines the distribution and interpretation of anaphors and pronouns. Through a detailed analysis of simplex and complex anaphors in Dutch and English, as well as other Romance and Germanic languages, the authors show that the relationship between an anaphor and its antecedent can be captured in terms of general Minimalist principles.

This book presents a new approach to gender and its effects on morphosyntax. Using data from genetically diverse languages such as Amharic, Somali, and Romanian, it provides one of the first large-scale, cross-linguistically-oriented, theoretical approaches to the word and sentence structure effects of gender.

This book is an exploration of the syntax of external arguments in transitivity alternations from a cross-linguistic perspective. It uses data principally from English, German, and Greek to investigate the causative/anti-causative alternation and the formation of adjectival participles.

This book provides an in-depth investigation of contrastive focalization in Italian, showing that its syntactic expression systematically interacts with the syntactic expression of discourse-given phrases. It also provides the most comprehensive study of Italian marginalization and right dislocation available to date.

This book studies the properties of imperative clauses in the context of a theory of Universal Grammar. The analysis, based on data from a wide range of languages, accounts for patterns in the interaction of imperative mood with phenomena like negation, restrictions on grammatical subjects, and the possibility of embedding imperative clauses.

This book uses data from English, Mandarin Chinese, and Modern Greek to develop a new theory of control structures that relates them to restructuring and the semantics of the embedding verb. The theory has implications both for clausal structure and for the relationship between form and meaning in natural language.

Uniting work from philosophical, cognitive and linguistic perspectives, Dr Truswell develops a model of the structure of events as perceptual and cognitive units. He predicts the acceptability of particular formulations, considers the individuation of events in the light of the model, and provides a novel account of patterns of question formation.

Kirsten Gengel investigates pseudogapping, which, she proposes, is one variety of ellipsis in natural language. At the heart of her discussion lies the interaction between focus and deletion. Her novel approach, which draws on new empirical data from many languages, has the potential of unifying several elliptical phenomena in generative grammar.

In this volume, Luis Lopez sheds new light on information structure and makes a significant contribution to work on grammatical operations in the Minimalist Program. 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.

Considers the interaction of morphological and phonological determinants of linguistic form and the degree to which one determines the other. This book is of interest to scholars and advanced students of phonology and morphology, and of linguistic theory more generally.

This book explores the nature of sentential stress, how it is assigned and its interaction with information structure. Its central thesis is that the position of sentential or nuclear stress is determined syntactically and that cross-linguistic differences in this respect follow from syntactic variations.

This book explores the wide variety of cases in which the plural of nouns is lexical. Using tools from formal semantics and theoretical morphology, Dr Acquaviva analyzes the countless number of examples of word-dependent irregularities in the form and meaning of plural, and in doing so sheds light on the relation between grammar and the lexicon.