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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
  • Cited by 11
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9780511804571
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511804571
Subjects:
Grammar and Syntax, English Language and Linguistics: General Interest, Language and Linguistics
Collection:
Cambridge Handbooks of Linguistics
Series:
Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
Information

Book description

Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.

Reviews

‘This magisterial overview of the historical development and current state of generative syntax is balanced, wide-ranging, intermittently controversial, always constructive, and consistently useful to neophyte and seasoned researcher alike.’

Neil Smith - Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, University College London

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 19 - Ellipsis phenomena
    pp 701-745
  • View abstract

    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.
  • 20 - Tense, aspect, and modality
    pp 746-792
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Raising and control are two phenomena that have been at the forefront of linguistic theory. This chapter examines these phenomena and surveys the basic approaches to them in linguistic theory. The first section of this chapter surveys the basic properties of raising and control structures. Raising and control constructions differ in their ability to nominalize. The second section of this chapter presents the current Minimalist views on raising and control. The third section of this chapter shows the main approaches to raising and control in unification-based lexicalist theories. This chapter has presented the empirical foundations of raising and control constructions and has outlined major theoretical approaches to these constructions, with a focus on syntactic analyses. The true success of the debate between the syntactic and semantic approach to raising and control is to uncover a broader range of natural language phenomena.
  • 21 - Negationand negativepolarity
    pp 793-826
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Core cases of agreement can be characterized as morphological marking on the central verb of a clause that reflects some features of a noun phrase in that clause. Virtually all generative treatments begin with subject-verb agreement, for reasons that are easy to understand. First, this is the most common kind, being found in almost 75 percent of languages sampled, whereas object agreement is only found in some 50 percent. In addition to changing perspective on the structural conditions on agreement, Chomsky also inverted the relative importance of agreement and case within generative syntax. The role of case theory is now often backgrounded, and case is seen as an additional side effect of the primary relation of Agree. The agreement and case are lively areas of ongoing inquiry, an integral part in one way or another of the larger generative enterprise.
  • 22 - The syntax of scopeand quantification
    pp 827-859
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Syntactic theory of Chomskyan orientation has recognized that syntactic dependencies can span only a limited portion of structure, and that apparent long-distance dependencies typically consist of a succession of local dependencies. This property of syntactic dependencies is called locality. This chapter focuses on the locality of filler-gap dependencies, quintessentially represented by the wh movement, and sketch a historical perspective on its development. The theory of barriers marks the first significant development in generativist theorizing about locality in syntax since the introduction of the Subjacency Condition. The binding-based filler-gap dependencies across islands never exhibit island effects. Relativized Minimality provides an immediate syntactic account of a variety of well-known locality effects. There are a number of empirical observations that can be taken to provide evidence for the size and location of locality domains. Syntactic operations, most prominently movement, must not be too local. This has come to be known as anti-locality.
  • 24 - Microsyntacticvariation
    pp 899-926
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Tense, aspect, and modality are grammatical categories that occur as functional heads in clause structure. They are traditionally grouped together by virtue of their semantic cohesion and their frequent morphological clustering or fusion. Research in generative syntax has focused on describing the morphosyntactic encoding of features related to temporal meaning, and on accounting for the general properties of tenses that occur in natural language. The tense section outlines empirical generalizations and their generative syntactic description. The term 'aspect' refers to two different layers of temporal information in the predicate phrase: the classification of events according to their temporal properties (stative/non-stative, punctual/durative, telic/atelic); and grammatical aspect, a temporal framework within which the event is located or described. Modality and mood are relational categories that express a mode by which a proposition is anchored to the external context of evaluation.
  • 25 - Parameters: the pluses and the minuses
    pp 927-970
  • View abstract

    Summary

    A universal property of natural language is that every language is able to express negation, i.e., every language has some device at its disposal to reverse the truth value of the propositional content of a sentence. The syntax of negation is indissolubly connected to the phenomenon of (negative) polarity. The second section of this chapter deals with the syntax of negative markers, and the third section deals with the syntax and semantics of (negative) polarity items. The chapter focuses specifically on negative concord (i.e., the phenomenon where multiple instances of morphosyntactic negation yield only one semantic negation), with special emphasis on the ambivalent nature of n-words. The various studies of the syntactic properties of negative markers (most notably Zanuttini's analyses of negative markers in Romance varieties) led to a much better understanding of what constrains the cross-linguistic variation that languages exhibit with respect to the expression of sentential negation.
  • 26 - Syntax and the brain
    pp 971-1005
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The initial breakthrough in our understanding of natural language quantification came with Frege's insight that quantifiers are operators prefixed to an open sentence. The study of quantification within the generative syntactic tradition since Montague can be characterized as a search for principled ways of regulating scopal dependencies and interactions. This chapter focuses on quantified noun phrases and wh expressions. It discusses the phenomena of quantifier split and quantifier float, showing how the challenges posed by syntactic deviations from the normal form of quantification. The chapter also deals with the wh-scope marking and wh-copy constructions, illustrating their special properties by comparing them to regular wh-extraction. Thornton and Crain report an acquisition study that provides interesting corroboration of the division between wh-scope marking and wh-copying constructions. Much of the work in the domain of long-distance wh-dependency has focused on the nature of quantification involved.
  • References
    pp 1006-1139
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter surveys the relation between syntactic structure, information structure, and prosodic structure. It explicates what prosodic structures look like in general, and which prosodic structures go with which syntactic structures. As suggested by this formulation, the perspective here is that syntax and prosody are each generative systems, which independently define two sets of well-formed structures, one of syntactic phrase markers and one of prosodic structures. The two aspects of (English) prosody most easily detected by naive listeners are (relative) prominence and pauses or breaks. An empirically plausible, and theoretically interesting hypothesis is that syntax should be 'phonology free'. Extraneous features influence the shape of prosodic structure, but the ultimate realization of focus and other information structural features is best understood as an interplay between narrow syntactic mapping constraints, prosody-internal well-formedness constraints and constraints of extraneous feature mapping like Focus Prominence.

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