This book provides an introduction to some classic ideas and analyses of transformational generative grammar, viewed both on their own terms and from a more modern, or minimalist perspective. The major focus is on the set of analyses treating English verbal morphology. The book shows how the analyses in Chomsky's classic Syntactic Structures actually work, filling in underlying assumptions and often unstated formal particulars.
The book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). It provides a critical and practical guide to computational techniques for handling morphological and syntactic phenomena, showing how these techniques have been used and modified in practice.
Marit Julien investigates the relation between morphology and syntax, or more specifically, the relation between the form of inflected verbs and the position of those verbs. She surveys 530 languages and shows that, with the exception of agreement markers, the positioning of verbal inflectional markers relative to verb stems is compatible with a syntactic approach to morphology.
The purpose of this volume is to explore the question of whether the notion of periphery has any real theoretical bite. An important consensus emerging from the volume is that the edges of certain syntactic expressions appear to be the locus of the connection between phrase structure, prosody, and information structure. This volume contains 16 papers by researchers in this area.
The book: -contains an extensive introduction setting out the research questions addressed and setting the contributions in an overall theoretical context, -has a distinct comparative slant, -brings together work from a range of theoretical perspectives, while maintaining a unity of purpose, -could serve as the basis for a graduate course on peripheral positions, -contains papers addressing: the question of the fine-grainedness of syntactic representations, the relevance of syntactic edges to locality and semantic interpretation, the nature of the dependencies connecting peripheral elements to the syntactic core.
This informative book examines several aspects of the syntax of imperative clauses in English and in a variety of other Germanic languages in the context of the challenge that apparent optional movement poses for the Minimalist Program. At a more general level, the book engages in current debate on one of the key issues in syntactic theory - the motivation for displacement operations in natural language.
