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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure
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Universal Grammar in the Reconstruction of Ancient Languages (Hardcover, Reprint 2011)
Loot Price: R4,837
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Universal Grammar in the Reconstruction of Ancient Languages (Hardcover, Reprint 2011)
Series: Studies in Generative Grammar [SGG]
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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Philologists aiming to reconstruct the grammar of ancient languages
face the problem that the available data always underdetermine
grammar, and in the case of gaps, possible mistakes, and
idiosyncracies there are no native speakers to consult. The authors
of this volume overcome this difficulty by adopting the methodology
that a child uses in the course of language acquisition: they
interpret the data they have access to in terms of Universal
Grammar (more precisely, in terms of a hypothetical model of UG).
Their studies, discussing syntactic and morphosyntactic questions
of Older Egyptian, Coptic, Sumerian, Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew,
Classical Greek, Latin, and Classical Sanskrit, demonstrate that
descriptive problems which have proved unsolvable for the
traditional, inductive approach can be reduced to the interaction
of regular operations and constraints of UG. The proposed analyses
also bear on linguistic theory. They provide crucial new data and
new generalizations concerning such basic questions of generative
syntax as discourse-motivated movement operations, the correlation
of movement and agreement, a shift from lexical case marking to
structural case marking, the licensing of structural case in
infinitival constructions, the structure of coordinate phrases,
possessive constructions with an external possessor, and the role
of event structure in syntax. In addition to confirming or refuting
certain specific hypotheses, they also provide empirical evidence
of the perhaps most basic tenet of generative theory, according to
which UG is part of the genetic endowment of the human species -
i.e., human languages do not "develop" parallel with the
development of human civilization. Some of the languages examined
in this volume were spoken as much as 5000 years old, still their
grammars do not differ in any relevant respect from the grammars of
languages spoken today.
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