Gisbert Fanselow - Böcker

This book represents the state of the art in the study of gradience in grammar - the degree to which utterances are acceptable or grammatical, and the relationship between acceptability and grammaticality. Gradience is at the centre of controversial issues in the theory of grammar and the understanding of language. The acceptability of words and sentences may be linked to the frequency of their use and measured on a scale. Among the questions considered in the book are: whether such measures are beyond the scope of a generative grammar or, in other words, whether the factors influencing acceptability are internal or external to grammar; whether observed gradience is a property of the mentally represented grammar or a reflection of variation among speakers; and what gradient phenomena reveal about the relationship between acceptability and grammaticality, and between competence and performance. The book is divided into four parts. Part I seeks to clarify the nature of gradience from the perspectives of phonology, generative syntax, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Parts II and III examine issues in phonology and syntax. Part IV considers long wh-movement from different methodological perspectives. The data discussed comes from a wide range of languages and dialects, and includes tone and stress patterns, word order variation, and question formation. Gradience in Grammar will interest linguists concerned with the understanding of syntax, phonology, language acquisition and variation, discourse, and the operations of language within the mind.

The volume is a collection of 12 papers which focus on empirical and theoretical issues associated with syntactic phenomena falling under the rubric of Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990) or, in more recent terms, Minimal Link Condition (MLC, Chomsky 1995). The bulk of the papers are based on the ideas presented at the Workshop "Minimal Link Effects in Minimalist and Optimality Theoretic Syntax" which took place at the University of Potsdam on March 21-22, 2002.All contributors are prominent specialists in the topic of syntactic Minimality. The empirical phenomena brought to bear on Minimality/MLC in the present volume include, but not limited to: Superiority effects in multiple wh-questions, including those with 'D-linked' wh-phrase(s) (Müller, Haida, Haider) Stylistic Fronting in Germanic and Romance (Fisher, Poole) Transitive sentences in Hindi-type ergative languages (Stepanov) Word order 'freezing' effects in double-nominative constructions in Korean (Lee) Double object constructions in Greek (Anagnostoupoulou) Remnant constituent displacement in German and Japanese (Hale and Legendre)Nine of the proposed accounts are couched in the Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001), three in the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). Thematically, the contributions divide into three groups addressing the following major questions:How can apparent violations of syntactic Minimality/MLC be accounted for? (Haida, Stepanov, Poole, Fisher, Anagnostopoulou)What is the status of MLC? Is it a primitive or a theorem in the grammar? (Müller, Fanselow, Lechner, Vogel, Lee, Haider)Can Minimality phenomena shed decisive evidence in favor of a derivational (Minimalist type) or a representational (Optimality theory like) framework? (Hale and Legendre, Haider)

This book is a collection of papers on various aspects of the syntax and morphosyntax of Germanic and Slavic languages (English, German, Czech, Polish, and Russian), stemming from the Syntax Session of the 2006 PLM conference in Poznań (Poland). Gisbert Fanselow and Caroline Féry discuss lack of Superiority with German movement; Gereon Müller links pro-drop to non-impoverished inflectional morphology; Christopher Wilder deals with English constructions with a directional locative and imperative; Adam Biały decomposes event structure; Katarzyna Sówka analyses the semantics of German verbs of giving; Ewa Bułat takes a fresh look at null subjects; Helen Trugman presents the distribution of adnominal adjectives in Russian; Agnieszka Pysz explores the same issue in Old English; Bożena Cetnarowska employs OT to describe possessives in Polish; Katarzyna Miechowicz-Mathiasen and Paweł Scheffler compare Polish and Italian reversible verbs; Radek Šimik describes different relative pronouns in Czech; Mojmir Dočekal discusses lack of WCO effects in Czech; Michael Moss argues for a complex structure of the Polish clause, and Jacek Witkoś demonstrates that control-as-movement penetrates CPs.