Wh-movement—the phenomenon by which interrogative words appear at the beginning of interrogative sentences—is one of the central displacement operations of human language. Noam Chomsky's 1977 paper "On Wh-Movement," a landmark in the study of wh-movement (and movement in general), showed that this computational operation is the basis of a variety of syntactic constructions that had previously been described in terms of construction-specific rules.
This monograph exemplifies a new trend in grammatical theory in which researchers combine findings from more than one area of linguistics. Specifically, the author looks at the relationship between phrasal prominence and focus in Romance and Germanic languages to provide new insights into how these properties are grammatically articulated. Building upon previous results in the field, she argues that phrasal prominence (nuclear stress) reflects syntactic ordering.
Syntactic doubling is the phenomenon in which a constituent, i.e., a morphosyntactic feature, morpheme, word or phrase, is expressed two or more times within a clause. Since such duplicates are often redundant in that they do not contribute to semantic interpretation, the question arises as to why they are possible or necessary. This theoretical question becomes even more urgent in view of the fact that closely related language varieties such as the dialects of one dialect family often differ with respect to the possibility of doubling.
The work reported in this book came about as a result of the realization that the issue of the role of syntactic gaps in processing was unresolved. It is surprising that this should be the case, since there are few fields of study which seem to allow experimental approaches to produce answers to syntactic questions, and these few are generally investigated with great zeal. Gap processing shows the potential to be such a field, and it too had been very popular in the late eighties and the first half of the nineties.
This book examines in detail the following five English constructions, and elucidates the syntactic, semantic, and functional requirements that the constructions must satisfy in order to be appropriately used: the There-Construction, the (One’s)Way Construction, the Cognate Object Construction, the Pseudo-Passive Construction, and the Extraposition-from-Subject-NP Construction. It shows that syntactic claims based on the unergative–unaccusative distinction of intransitive verbs that have been made by other scholars about these constructions do not hold.
