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This volume brings together a selection of articles illustrating
the multifaceted nature of current research in generative syntax.
The authors, including some of the leading figures in the field,
present analyses of typologically diverse languages, with some
studies drawing on dialectal, acquisitional and diachronic
evidence. Set against this rich empirical background, the
contributions address an equally wide range of theoretical issues.
It is a fact that tense, aspect and modality together form one of
the most recurring and active areas of research in contemporary
syntax and semantics, as well as in other disciplines of
linguistics. A large number of syntactic and semantic phenomena are
concerned by the temporal-aspectual-modal level of representation:
information about time, aspect and modality is part of virtually
all sentences; inflexion is quite widely considered as the core of
syntactic projections. Because of this very crucial situation and
role in the sentence structure, temporal-aspectual and modal
information concerns virtually any part of the sentence and this
information has scope over the whole characterization of the
eventuality denoted by the sentence. This book is an up-to-date
milestone for the studies of temporality and language, in
particular regarding syntax and semantics, but with incidental
hints to pragmatics and theories of human natural language
understanding. Through this very tight selection of 15 papers
(originally delivered during the 6th Chronos colloquium), tenses,
aspect and modality are investigated both at the descriptive and
theoretical levels, involving many different Indo-European and
non-Indo-European languages. The volume sheds light on a wide array
of phenomena that remained too little explored until now. These
include the following: modal subordination in Japanese, epistemic
modals in Dutch and English in Free Indirect Speech contexts,
aspectual readings of idioms, adverb-licensing with the German
perfect, French imperfective past compared with English progressive
past, infinitival perfect in English, Adult Root Infinitives,
economy constraints on temporal subordinations, future modality,
past interpretation of present tense in embedded clauses, and time
without tenses in Mandarin and Navajo. The book is of interest to
scholars and advanced students in the fields of linguistics
(general linguistics, semantics, syntax) as well as philosophy and
logic.
This monograph gives a unified account of the syntactic
distribution of subjunctive mood across languages, including
Romance, Balkan (South Slavic and Modern Greek), and Hungarian,
among others. Starting from a close scrutiny of the environments in
which subjunctive mood occurs and of its semantic contribution, we
present a feature-based approach which reveals the common
properties of the class of verbs which embed subjunctive, and which
takes into account the variation in subjunctive-related
complementizers. Two main proposals can be highlighted: (i) the
lexical semantics of the main clause predicate plays a crucial role
in mood selection. More specifically subjunctive mood is regulated
by a specific property of the main predicate, the emotive property,
which is associated with the external argument of the embedding
verb (usually the Subject). The book proposes a nanosyntactic
analysis of the internal structure of embedding verbs. (ii) Cross-
and intra-linguistic variations are dealt with according to
different patterns of lexicalization, i.e., variations depend on
what portions of the verb's and complementizer's functional
sequence is lexicalized and on how it is packaged by languages. In
doing so, this approach provides a uniform account of the
phenomenon of embedded subjunctives. The monograph takes a novel,
feature-based approach to the question of subjunctive licensing,
providing a detailed analysis of the features of the matrix verb,
of the complementizer and of the embedded subjunctive clause. It is
also based on a wide empirical coverage, ranging from the
relatively well-studied groups of Romance and Balkan languages to
less explored languages from non-Indo-European families
(Hungarian).
This volume brings together a selection of articles illustrating
the multifaceted nature of current research in generative syntax.
The authors, including some of the leading figures in the field,
present analyses of typologically diverse languages, with some
studies drawing on dialectal, acquisitional and diachronic
evidence. Set against this rich empirical background, the
contributions address an equally wide range of theoretical issues.
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