Human language is a phenomenon of immense richness: It provides finely nuanced means of expression that underlie the formation of culture and society; it is subject to subtle, unexpected constraints like syntactic islands and cross-over phenomena; different mutually-unintelligeable individual languages are numerous; and the descriptions of individual languages occupy thousands of pages. Recent work in linguistics, however, has tried to argue that despite all appearances to the contrary, the human biological capacity for language may be reducible to a small inventory of core cognitive competencies.
The essays in this volume, dating from 1991 onwards, focus on highly characteristic constructions of English, Romance languages, and German. Among clause-internal structures, the most puzzling are English double objects, particle constructions, and non-finite complementation (infinitives, participles and gerunds). Separate chapters in Part I offer relatively complete analyses of each. These analyses are integrated into the framework of Emonds (2000), wherein a simplified subcategorization theory fully expresses complement selection.
This volume presents an interactional perspective on linguistic variability that takes into account the construction of social identities through the formation of social communicative styles. It shows that style is a useful category in bridging the gap between single parameter variation and social identity. Social positioning, i.e., finding one's place in society, is one of its motivating forces.
This book is a research monograph on impersonal si constructions (ISC) in Italian within the Minimalist program framework. The book offers a new point of view on ISCs, providing a new set of crucial data that were previously unknown, and pointing out many characteristics of ISCs that were overlooked before. It results in the introduction of additional means of syntactic analysis at the edge between narrow syntax and pragmatics.
From The Preface : Six of the nine essays published in this book were written between 1959 and 1971. "The Poetics of the Open Work" (Chapter 1) and "The Myth of Superman" (Chapter 4)written respectively in 1959 and in 1962, before I fully developed my semiotic approachrepresent two opposing aspects of my interest in the dialectic between 'open' and 'closed' texts. The introductory essay of this book makes clear what I mean today by such a categorial polarity and how I see it as a special case of a more general semiotic phenomenon: the cooperative role of the addressee in interpreting messages.
