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6 results

Analysing English Sentence Structure
  • An Intermediate Course in Syntax
  • Andrew Radford
  • Published online:
    16 September 2023
    Print publication:
    31 August 2023
  • Andrew Radford has acquired an unrivalled reputation over the past forty years for writing syntax textbooks in which difficult concepts are clearly explained without excessive use of technical jargon. Analysing English Sentence Structure continues in this tradition, offering a well-structured intermediate course in English syntax and contemporary syntactic theory. Chapters are split into core modules, each focusing on a specific topic, and the reader is supported throughout with learning aids such as summaries, lists of key hypotheses and principles, extensive references, exercises with handy hints, and a glossary of terminology. Both teachers and instructors will benefit from the book's free online resources, which comprise an open-access Students' Answerbook, and a password-protected Teachers' Answerbook, each containing comprehensive answers to exercises, with detailed tree diagrams. The book and accompanying resources are designed to serve both as a coursebook for use in class, and as a self-study resource for use at home.

  • 9 - Syntax in OLG

  • Daniel Galbraith, Stanford University, California
  • Book:
    Optimal Linking Grammar
    Published online:
    20 April 2023
    Print publication:
    27 April 2023, pp 193-254

  • Summary

    Chapter 9, the longest chapter, presents a step-by-step discussion of the OLG theory of syntax, focusing especially on issues of central concern to syntacticians: phrase structure, movement or filler-gap dependencies, and the architecture of grammar. A detailed walk-through of how to derive an English sentence is given, including formal definitions of syntactic features. Analyses of the range of typological variation observed in relevant word-order, case-marking and information-structural phenomena are presented from an OLG perspective, including detailed case studies of the Faroese clause structure facts presented in Chapter 2 and an in-depth treatment of object shift in Scandinavian languages. Ranking arguments, constraint definitions and factorial typologies are given where needed. Chapter 9 is intended to answer most of the major questions regarding how this theory handles a broader range of data.

  • 1 - Introduction

  • Daniel Galbraith, Stanford University, California
  • Book:
    Optimal Linking Grammar
    Published online:
    20 April 2023
    Print publication:
    27 April 2023, pp 1-32

  • Summary

    The introduction presents a general discussion of syntactic theories, contrasting transformational approaches with those that adopt feature-structural representations to show how they provide differing cognitive models of the human language faculty. The three key components of the OLG framework – Linking Theory (LT), Optimality Theory (OT) and Competing Grammars (CG) – are briefly laid out. These are motivated by phenomena that necessitate multiple levels of case, linking between levels that permits mismatches in some grammars, a means of restricting the linking apparatus while still capturing the data, and a cogent account of morphosyntactic variation. One such phenomenon is introduced: case-marking facts in Insular Scandinavian. The dative–nominative Icelandic predicates are contrasted with the Faroese dative–accusative pattern, along with plural number agreement with the object in Icelandic versus non-agreement in Faroese. Next, an overview is presented of the motivation for each theoretical component of OLG, in turn outlining the advantages of LT, OT and the CG hypothesis. The introduction concludes with an outline of the specific empirical findings from surveys conducted on the Faroe Islands and Iceland, including quirky case predicates and passives, followed by an overview of the book’s structure.

  • 12 - The functional structure of the sentence, and cartography

  • from Part III - Syntactic structures
  • Edited by Marcel den Dikken, City University of New York
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    25 July 2013, pp 425-457

  • Summary

    A fundamental question for syntactic theory concerns the nature of the basic computations that are used to construct grammatical representations. This chapter is devoted to a framework, Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG). TAG is a formalism that builds grammatical representations through the composition of smaller pieces of syntactic structure. The interest of TAG for linguistic theory comes not only from the prominence it assigns to structural recursion, but also from the perspective it offers on the nature of syntactic dependencies. The author explores the implications of TAG for the nature of the grammar, specifically in the domain of long-distance dependencies. The use of TAG in syntactic theory is also motivated by questions of formal complexity. The author explores the role that TAG can play in discussions of the computational constraints on grammar. Chomsky adopted a more powerful system for grammatical representation, one incorporating grammatical transformations.

  • 19 - Ellipsis phenomena

  • from Part V - Syntax and the internal interfaces
  • Edited by Marcel den Dikken, City University of New York
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    25 July 2013, pp 701-745

  • Summary

    The chapter presents the understanding about the portion of innate human language faculty that permits to understand the patterns of anaphoric possibilities permitted by linguistic forms and sentences that contain them. Although semantic issues intrude constantly, the primary focus of this chapter is on the consequences of the pattern of anaphora for syntactic theory. An anaphoric relation is typically said to hold whenever the semantic value of a linguistic form is related to the value of some previous or anticipated mention. The chapter lays out some boundary conditions for the syntax/semantics interface that anaphora questions inevitably invoke. The chapter explores Chomsky's Binding Theory. The richness of anaphoric morphology and its consequences for the syntax of anaphora are also discussed. Any plausible theory of anaphora must distinguish relations of dependent identity, pronouns bound as variables, and obviation. Competition-based theories of anaphora take the complementarities in the distributions of pronouns and anaphors.

  • 5 - Minimalism and Optimality Theory

  • from Part II - Modern generative approaches to the study of sentence structure
  • Edited by Marcel den Dikken, City University of New York
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    25 July 2013, pp 122-161

  • Summary

    This introductory chapter of the book The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides aim, structure and what is and is not included in the book. The book is designed to be a handbook in the truest sense of the term and the primary focus is the theory of generative syntax. The book is divided into six major parts and rich in empirical detail covering a broad range of different phenomena from a wide variety of the world's languages. In early generative grammar, statements enable anyone to synthesize or predict utterances in the language resurfaced as the phrase-structure (PS) rules that codified the well-formed underlying syntactic representations. With the introduction of the X-bar Theory of phrase structure, linear order was no longer automatically built into the phrase-structure component. Finally the book looks at linguistic variation, language development, and language production and processing, respectively.