Books in the Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics series

In this book, leading linguists explore the empirical scope of syntactic theory, by concentrating on a set of phenomena for which both syntactic and nonsyntactic analyses appear plausible. The volume is organized into four thematic sections: architectures; syntax and information structure; syntax and the lexicon; and lexical items at the interfaces

This volume explores the expression of the concepts count and mass in human language and probes the complex relation between seemingly incontrovertible aspects of meaning and their varied grammatical realizations across languages.

This book considers the recent results and evaluations of the Theta System in both theoretical and experimental domains. Distinguished linguists from all over the world examine the theory in the context of an impressive array of new empirical data ranging from Germanic, Romance, and Slavic to Ugro-Finnish, and Semitic languages.

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 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 brings together research on the topic of causation from experts in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. It draws on data from a wide range of languages and seeks to arrive at a more sophisticated understanding of how causal concepts are expressed in causal meanings, and how those meanings are organized into structures.

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 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 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 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 volume investigates the morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of language, and the interactions between them, from the perspective of Optimality Theory. It integrates optimization processes into the formal and functional study of grammar, interpreting optimization as the result of conflicting, violable ranked constraints.

This volume explores the many ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders or classes. The findings in the volume have significant implications for syntactic theory and theories of interpretation, and contribute to a greater understanding of the interplay between inflection and derivation.

This volume explores the many ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders or classes. The findings in the volume have significant implications for syntactic theory and theories of interpretation, and contribute to a greater understanding of the interplay between inflection and derivation.

This volume presents a crosslinguistic survey of the current theoretical debates around copular constructions from a generative perspective. The chapters combine the study of empirical data with theoretical analyses and shed light on key issues such as agreement, the nature of grammatical categories, and nominal predicates in syntax and semantics.

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 possible and impossible word meanings, with a specific focus on the meanings of verbs. It presents a new theory of possible root meanings and their interaction with event templates that produces a new typology of possible verbs, with semantic and grammatical properties determined not just by templates, but also by roots.

This book investigates the syntax and semantics of proportional most and other majority quantifiers across a wide range of languages. The findings have implications for the study of a variety of crucial issues in linguistic theory, including number marking, partitivity, kind reference, and (in)definiteness marking.