Hans-Martin Gartner – författare

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 most radical version of this view has emerged from the Minimalist Program: The claim that language consists of only the ability to generate recursive structures by a computational mechanism. On this view, all other properties of language must result from the interaction at the interfaces of that mechanism and other mental systems not exclusively devoted to language. Since language could then be described as the simplest recursive system satisfying the requirements of the interfaces, one can speak of the Minimalist Equation: Interfaces + Recursion = Language.

The question whether all the richness of language can be reduced to that minimalist equation has already inspired several fruitful lines of research that led to important new results. While a full assessment of the minimalist equation will require evidence from many different areas of inquiry, this volume focuses especially on the perspective of syntax and semantics. Within the minimalist architecture, this places our concern with the core computational mechanism and the (LF-)interface where recursive structures are fed to interpretation. Specific questions that the papers address are: What kind of recursive structures can the core generator form? How can we determine what the simplest recursive system is? How can properties of language that used to be ascribed to the recursive generator be reduced to interface properties? What effects do syntactic operations have on semantic interpretation? To what extent do models of semantic interpretation support the LF-interface conditions postulated by minimalist syntax?

Clause Structure and Adjuncts in Austronesian Languages is a collection of papers devoted to the syntactic analysis of modification and extraction strategies in Austronesian languages such as Kavalan, Malagasy, Niuean, Seediq, and Tagalog. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, it elucidates the categorial and phrase structural status as well as the scopal behavior of sentence-level adverbs, ordering constraints on adjectival modifiers, and the nature of unbounded dependencies in interaction with Philippine-type voice systems. Guglielmo Cinque''s universal ordering hypothesis for adverbs and current work on remnant movement serve as theoretical points of reference.

More particularly the book contains an analysis of lower VP-adverbs in Kavalan as serial verbs (Chang), a defense of two types of adverbial heads in Seediq (Holmer), an account of possible DP-internal serializations in Niuean in terms of remnant movement (Kahnemuyipour Massam), a plea for relative, scope-based adverb ordering in Tagalog (Kaufman), a clefting approach to unbounded dependencies in Malagasy (Potsdam), a critical assessment of constraints on remnant movement as applied to adverb orderings in Malagasy (Thiersch), and an analysis of the Malagasy voice system on the basis of clitic left-dislocation (Travis). The editors'' introduction undertakes a critical survey of the relevant empirical and theoretical background.

A substantial part of the empirical facts are presented here for the first time, and the book will inspire additional systematic investigation of the often neglected aspects of modificational strategies in Austronesian languages.

The book will be of value to linguists interested in contemporary syntactic analysis and to everyone seeking a deeper understanding of the formal properties of Austronesian.