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Triggers (Hardcover)
Anne Breitbarth, Henk Van Riemsdijk
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R5,319
Discovery Miles 53 190
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The concept of 'trigger' is a core concept of Chomsky's Minimalist
Program. The idea that certain types of movement are triggered by
some property of the target position is at least as old as the
notion that the movement of noun phrases to the subject position is
triggered by their need to receive nominative case. In more recent
versions of syntactic theory, triggering mechanisms are thought to
regulate all of movement. Furthermore, a quite narrow range of
triggering mechanisms is permitted. As is to be expected, such a
restrictive approach meets a variety of difficulties. Specifically,
the question is whether all triggering elements required to cover
displacement of all kinds in natural language can be independently
motivated. Further, how can a trigger theory, which crucially
relies on the idea that all movement is obligatory, deal with
apparently optional movement processes? Are features an adequate
means to express the triggering function in all cases? More
radically, are all movement phenomena really the result of the
checking of trigger features? And what about apparent triggering
factors that are 'external' to syntax such as prosody - can they be
captured in a rigid trigger theory? In other words, could certain
aspects of triggered movement be due to interface conditions? Such
is the range of questions addressed by the fourteen contributions
to this book. They cover a considerable range of languages
(including Afrikaans, Breton, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French,
German, Gungbe, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kiswahili, Romanian).
These papers present materials, both empirical and theoretical,
that will not fail to have considerable impact on the further
development of the concept of trigger in syntactic theory.
This is the second book in a two-volume comparative history of
negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The work
integrates typological, general, and theoretical research,
documents patterns and directions of change in negation across
languages, and examines the linguistic and social factors that lie
behind such changes. The aim of both volumes is to set out an
integrated framework for understanding the syntax of negation and
how it changes. While the first volume (OUP, 2013) presented linked
case studies of particular languages and language groups, this
second volume constructs a holistic approach to explaining the
patterns of historical change found in the languages of Europe and
the Mediterranean over the last millennium. It identifies typical
developments found repeatedly in the histories of different
languages and explores their origins, as well as investigating the
factors that determine whether change proceeds rapidly, slowly, or
not at all. Language-internal factors such as the interaction of
syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and the biases inherent in child
language acquisition, are investigated alongside language-external
factors such as imposition, convergence, and borrowing. The book
proposes an explicit formal account of language-internal and
contact-induced change for both the expression of sentential
negation ('not') and negative indefinites ('anyone', 'nothing'). It
sheds light on the major ways in which negative systems develop, on
the nature of syntactic change, and indeed on linguistic change
more generally, demonstrating the insights that large-scale
comparison of linguistic histories can offer.
This volume explores the multiple aspects of cyclical syntactic
change from a wide range of empirical perspectives. The notion of
'linguistic cycle' has long been recognized as being relevant to
the description of many processes of language change. In
grammaticalization, a given linguistic form loses its lexical
meaning - and sometimes some of its phonological content - and then
gradually weakens until it ultimately vanishes. This change becomes
cyclical when the grammaticalized form is replaced by an innovative
item, which can then develop along exactly the same pathway. But
cyclical changes have also been observed in language change outside
of grammaticalization proper. The chapters in this book reflect the
growing interest in the phenomenon of grammaticalization and
cyclicity in generative syntax, with topics including the diachrony
of negation, the syntax of determiners and pronominal clitics, the
internal structure of wh-words and logical operators, cyclical
changes in argument structure, and the relationship between
morphology and syntax. The contributions draw on data from multiple
language families, such as Indo-European, Semitic, Japonic, and
Athabascan. The volume combines empirical descriptions of novel
comparative data with detailed theoretical analysis, and will
appeal to historical linguists working in formal and usage-based
frameworks, as well as to typologists and scholars interested in
language variation and change more broadly.
This book examines the diachronic development of negation in Low
German, from Old Saxon up to the point at which Middle Low German
is replaced by High German as the written language. It investigates
both the development of standard negation, or Jespersen's Cycle,
and the changing interaction between the expression of negation and
indefinites in its scope, giving rise to negative concord along the
way. Anne Breitbarth shows that developments in Low German form a
missing link between those in High German, English, and Dutch,
which have been much more widely researched. These changes are
analysed using a generative account of syntactic change combined
with minimalist assumptions concerning the syntax of negation and
negative concord. The book provides the first substantial,
diachronic analysis of the development of the expression of
negation through the Old Saxon and Middle Low German periods, and
will be of interest not only to students and researchers in the
history of German, but also to all those working on the syntax of
negation from a diachronic and synchronic perspective.
This is the first book in a two-volume comparative history of
negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The work
integrates typological, general, and theoretical research,
documents patterns and directions of change in negation across
languages, and examines the linguistic and social factors that lie
behind such changes. The first volume presents linked case studies
of particular languages and language groups, including French,
Italian, English, Dutch, German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Uralic,
and Afro-Asiatic. Each outlines and analyses the development of
sentential negation and of negative indefinites and quantifiers,
including negative concord and, where appropriate,
language-specific topics such as the negation of infinitives,
negative imperatives, and constituent negation. The second volume
(to be pubished in 2014) will offer comparative analyses of changes
in negation systems of European and north African languages and set
out an integrated framework for understanding them. The aim of both
is a universal understanding of the syntax of negation and how it
changes. Their authors develop formal models in the light of data
drawn from historical linguistics, especially on processes of
grammaticalization, and consider related effects on language
acquisition and language contact. At the same time the books seek
to advance models of historical syntax more generally and to show
the value of uniting perspectives from different theoretical
frameworks.
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