The investigation of sentential complementation focuses on properties of sentences that are embedded in other sentences. This book brings together a variety of studies on this topic in the framework of generative grammar.The first part of the book focuses on infinitival complements. The author provides new perspectives on raising and control, longstanding problems in infinitival complementation. He then examines the problem of clitic ordering in infinitives in Romance languages.

Bringing the advances of theoretical linguistics to the study of language change in a systematic way, this innovative textbook demonstrates the mutual relevance of historical linguistics and contemporary linguistics. Numerous case studies throughout the book show both that theoretical linguistics can be used to solve problems where traditional approaches to historical linguistics have failed to produce satisfying results, and that the results of historical research can have an impact on th...

From the point of view of psychology and cognitive science, much of modern linguistics is too formal and mathematical to be of much use. The newly emerging approaches to language termed, "Functional and Cognitive Linguistics," however, are much less formally oriented. Instead, functional and cognitive approaches to language structure are typically couched in terms already familiar to cognitive scientists: perception, attention, conceptualization, meaning, symbols, categories, schemas, pers...

Syntax: Basic Concepts and Applications provides a systematic introduction to core topics in syntax, focusing on how the basic concepts apply in the analysis of sentences. Assuming no background in linguistic analysis, the book gives students a working knowledge of syntactic analysis from a minimalist perspective. Step by step it explains the fundamentals of phrase structure, movement and deletion. Well-placed exercises throughout reinforce and extend the concepts and analyses presented in...

Clause structure is the most widely-studied phenomenon within syntactic theory, because it refers to how words and phrases are embedded within a sentence, their relationships to each other within a sentence, and ultimately, how sentences are layered and represented in the human brain. This volume presents a clear and up-to-date overview of the Minimalist Program, synthesizes the most important research findings, and explores the major shifts in generative syntax. As an accessible topic boo...

The central concern of this title, first published in 1994, is the syntactic nature of negation in Universal Grammar, and its relation to other functional elements in the Syntax. The study argues that negation is not a syntactic category on its own; rather, it is one of the values of a more abstract syntactic category, named Σ, which includes other sentence operators, such as affirmation and emphasis. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

This study, first published in 1990, presents a comprehensive description of the comparative constructions of Spanish and French, and shows that the apparently numerous differences in their syntactic realisations can be accounted for by general constraints on the expression of comparison. There is also a discussion of parallel constructions in other Romance languages, showing that these languages display a range of constructions equally compatible with the suggested pattern of possibilitie...

This new edition of Understanding Morphology has been fully revised in line with the latest research. It now includes 'big picture' questions to highlight central themes in morphology, as well as research exercises for each chapter.Understanding Morphology presents an introduction to the study of word structure that starts at the very beginning. Assuming no knowledge of the field of morphology on the part of the reader, the book presents a broad range of morpholog...

Structure and Function of the Arabic Verb is a corpus-based study that unveils the morpho-syntax and the semantics of the Arabic verb.Approaches to verbal grammatical categories - the constituents of verbal systems - often rely on either semantic-pragmatic or syntactic analyses. This research bridges the gap between these two distinct approaches through a detailed analysis of Taxis, Aspect, Tense and Modality in Standard Arabic. This is accomplished by showing, firstly, so...

Understanding Semantics, Second Edition, provides an engaging and accessible introduction to linguistic semantics. The first part takes the reader through a step-by-step guide to the main phenomena and notions of semantics, covering levels and dimensions of meaning, ambiguity, meaning and context, logical relations and meaning relations, the basics of noun semantics, verb semantics and sentence semantics. The second part provides a critical introduction to the basic notions of the...

This collection brings together some of Dominique Sportiche's best work, including essays that are published here for the first time. The articles discuss the architecture of syntax in natural languages and Sportiche suggests that languages do not differ at all in their syntactic organization. This view takes shape through the analysis of a variety of syntactic configurations and essays examine what it means to be a Subject, how Case marking functions, how it relates to Agreement, and how ...