Daniel Harbour – författare

Phi-features, such as person, number, and gender, present a rare opportunity for syntacticians, morphologists and semanticists to collaborate on a research enterprise in which they all have an equal stake and which they all approach with data and insights from their own fields. This volume is the first to attempt to bring together these different strands and styles of research. It presents the core questions, major results, and new directions of this emergent area of linguistic theory and shows how Phi Theory casts light on the nature of interfaces and the structure of the grammar. The book will interest scholars and students of all aspects of linguistic theory at graduate level and above.

Phi-features, such as person, number, and gender, present a rare opportunity for syntacticians, morphologists and semanticists to collaborate on a research enterprise in which they all have an equal stake and which they all approach with data and insights from their own fields. This volume is the first to attempt to bring together these different strands and styles of research. It presents the core questions, major results, and new directions of this emergent area of linguistic theory and shows how Phi Theory casts light on the nature of interfaces and the structure of the grammar. The book will interest scholars and students of all aspects of linguistic theory at graduate level and above.

Phi-features, such as person, number, and gender, present a rare opportunity for syntacticians, morphologists and semanticists to collaborate on a research enterprise in which they all have an equal stake and which they all approach with data and insights from their own fields. This volume is the first to attempt to bring together these different strands and styles of research. It presents the core questions, major results, and new directions of this emergent area of linguistic theory and shows how Phi Theory casts light on the nature of interfaces and the structure of the grammar. The book will interest scholars and students of all aspects of linguistic theory at graduate level and above.

What is the nature of syntactic structure? Why do some languages have radically free word order ('nonconfigurationality')? Do parameters vary independently (the micro-view) or can they co-vary en masse (the macro-view)? Mirrors and Microparameters examines these questions by looking beyond the definitional criterion of nonconfigurationality - that arguments may be freely ordered, omitted, and split. Drawing on data from Kiowa, a member of the largely undescribed Kiowa-Tanoan language family, the book reveals that classically nonconfigurational languages can nonetheless exhibit robustly configurational effects. Reconciling the cooccurrence of such freedom with such rigidity has major implications for the Principles and Parameters program. This approach to nonconfigurational languages challenges widespread assumptions of linguistic theory and throws light on the syntactic structures, ordering principles, and nature of parametrization that comprise Universal Grammar.

What is the nature of syntactic structure? Why do some languages have radically free word order ('nonconfigurationality')? Do parameters vary independently (the micro-view) or can they co-vary en masse (the macro-view)? Mirrors and Microparameters examines these questions by looking beyond the definitional criterion of nonconfigurationality - that arguments may be freely ordered, omitted, and split. Drawing on data from Kiowa, a member of the largely undescribed Kiowa-Tanoan language family, the book reveals that classically nonconfigurational languages can nonetheless exhibit robustly configurational effects. Reconciling the cooccurrence of such freedom with such rigidity has major implications for the Principles and Parameters program. This approach to nonconfigurational languages challenges widespread assumptions of linguistic theory and throws light on the syntactic structures, ordering principles, and nature of parametrization that comprise Universal Grammar.

Number is a major research domain in semantics, syntax and morphology. However, no current theory of number is applicable to all three fields. In this work, the author argues that a unified theory is not only possible, but necessary for the study of Universal Grammar. Through insightful analysis of unfamiliar data, the author shows that one and the same feature set is implicated in semantic and morphological number phenomena alike, with syntax acting as the conduit between the two. At the heart of the study is an original treatment of Kiowa, a North American language with a remarkable constellation of characteristics, including semantically based noun classification and complex agreement morphology.This volume presents: (1) the foundations of a unified morphosemantic theory of number; (2) insight into the flow of information from the lexicon, via syntax, into the morphology; (3) wide-ranging topics: nominal semantics, noun classes, DP syntax, agreement, suppletion, complex morphology.

Number is a major research domain in semantics, syntax and morphology. However, no current theory of number is applicable to all three fields. In this work, the author argues that a unified theory is not only possible, but necessary for the study of Universal Grammar. Through insightful analysis of unfamiliar data, the author shows that one and the same feature set is implicated in semantic and morphological number phenomena alike, with syntax acting as the conduit between the two. At the heart of the study is an original treatment of Kiowa, a North American language with a remarkable constellation of characteristics, including semantically based noun classification and complex agreement morphology.This volume presents: (1) the foundations of a unified morphosemantic theory of number; (2) insight into the flow of information from the lexicon, via syntax, into the morphology; (3) wide-ranging topics: nominal semantics, noun classes, DP syntax, agreement, suppletion, complex morphology.

‘Brilliantly conveys the thrill of connecting with the ancient world’ ALEX BELLOS'All the drama of a political thriller, the intrigue of a detective story, and the challenge of a cryptic crossword' DAVID CRYSTAL'A remarkable uncovering of hidden treasures' IAN McMILLANAn immersive journey into the art of decipherment and the lost past that emerges when ancient scripts are brought back to lifeTwo hundred years ago, in the 1820s, history did not reach back further than the Iron Age. Less than a hundred years later, an extraordinary group of people had pushed our knowledge of the past back by 3,000 years. Sixty per cent of the timeline of recorded world history went from unreadable to read in a matter of decades.Part detective story, part history, part linguistic adventure, The Book of Lost Languages traces the decipherers who made this happen. In cracking lost languages, they recovered forgotten worlds.We meet the novelist, saved from the French Revolution by his fictions, whose love of forgotten classics led him to decipher an ancient alphabet in a single night – and who then sifted through the king's coin collection to decipher a second, then a third. We meet the Irish cleric, banished to an insignificant parish, who had an almost magical intuition for lost languages. With time, wit and a good armchair, he cracked the writing of Mesopotamia. And we encounter the mysteriously inscribed 'dragon bones' unearthed by illiterate farmers that drove the decipherment of Old Chinese.Moving through these discoveries, Daniel Harbour celebrates the minds behind them – their strengths and quirks, their brilliance and pettiness, their inexplicable flashes of insight. He reveals the astonishing engine that drives decipherment: when we unravel forgotten scripts, we connect across millennia with the minds that created them.The result is an exhilarating story of people and politics, dogma and doubt, genius and ingenuity, and of the beguiling artistry behind some of the greatest puzzles ever created.

‘Brilliantly conveys the thrill of connecting with the ancient world’ ALEX BELLOS'All the drama of a political thriller, the intrigue of a detective story, and the challenge of a cryptic crossword' DAVID CRYSTAL'A remarkable uncovering of hidden treasures' IAN McMILLANAn immersive journey into the art of decipherment and the lost past that emerges when ancient scripts are brought back to lifeTwo hundred years ago, in the 1820s, history did not reach back further than the Iron Age. Less than a hundred years later, an extraordinary group of people had pushed our knowledge of the past back by 3,000 years. Sixty per cent of the timeline of recorded world history went from unreadable to read in a matter of decades.Part detective story, part history, part linguistic adventure, The Book of Lost Languages traces the decipherers who made this happen. In cracking lost languages, they recovered forgotten worlds.We meet the novelist, saved from the French Revolution by his fictions, whose love of forgotten classics led him to decipher an ancient alphabet in a single night – and who then sifted through the king's coin collection to decipher a second, then a third. We meet the Irish cleric, banished to an insignificant parish, who had an almost magical intuition for lost languages. With time, wit and a good armchair, he cracked the writing of Mesopotamia. And we encounter the mysteriously inscribed 'dragon bones' unearthed by illiterate farmers that drove the decipherment of Old Chinese.Moving through these discoveries, Daniel Harbour celebrates the minds behind them – their strengths and quirks, their brilliance and pettiness, their inexplicable flashes of insight. He reveals the astonishing engine that drives decipherment: when we unravel forgotten scripts, we connect across millennia with the minds that created them.The result is an exhilarating story of people and politics, dogma and doubt, genius and ingenuity, and of the beguiling artistry behind some of the greatest puzzles ever created.