Lena Baunaz - Böcker

Exploring Nanosyntax provides the first in-depth introduction to the framework of nanosyntax, which originated in the early 2000s as a formal theory of language within Principles and Parameters framework. Deploying a radical implementation of the cartographic "one feature - one head" maxim, the framework provides a fine-grained decomposition of morphosyntactic structure, laying bare the building blocks of the universal functional sequence. This volume makes three contributions: First, it presents the framework's constitutive tools and principles, and explains how nanosyntax relates to cartography and to Distributed Morphology. Second, it illustrates how nanosyntactic tools and principles can be applied to a range of empirical domains of natural language. In doing so, the volume provides a range of detailed crosslinguistic investigations which uncover novel empirical data and which contribute to a better understanding of the functional sequence. Third, specific problems are raised and discussed and new theoretical strands internal to the nanosyntactic framework are explored. Bringing together original contributions by senior and junior researchers in the field, Exploring Nanosyntax offers the first all-encompassing view of this promising framework, making its methodology and exciting results accessible to a wide audience.

Exploring Nanosyntax provides the first in-depth introduction to the framework of nanosyntax, which originated in the early 2000s as a formal theory of language within Principles and Parameters framework. Deploying a radical implementation of the cartographic "one feature - one head" maxim, the framework provides a fine-grained decomposition of morphosyntactic structure, laying bare the building blocks of the universal functional sequence. This volume makes three contributions: First, it presents the framework's constitutive tools and principles, and explains how nanosyntax relates to cartography and to Distributed Morphology. Second, it illustrates how nanosyntactic tools and principles can be applied to a range of empirical domains of natural language. In doing so, the volume provides a range of detailed crosslinguistic investigations which uncover novel empirical data and which contribute to a better understanding of the functional sequence. Third, specific problems are raised and discussed and new theoretical strands internal to the nanosyntactic framework are explored. Bringing together original contributions by senior and junior researchers in the field, Exploring Nanosyntax offers the first all-encompassing view of this promising framework, making its methodology and exciting results accessible to a wide audience.

This monograph gives a unified account of the syntactic distribution of subjunctive mood across languages, including Romance, Balkan (South Slavic and Modern Greek), and Hungarian, among others.

This monograph gives a unified account of the syntactic distribution of subjunctive mood across languages, including Romance, Balkan (South Slavic and Modern Greek), and Hungarian, among others.

What is the extent to which various grammatical levels – from features through subjecthood through cleft layers – reuse and reemploy certain structure-building operations? In this volume, organized in terms of successively expanding domains, leading contributors report research into the complex edifice of grammatical structure of human language that one might liken to the terraced layers of a ziggurat. Following the heuristics of reverse-engineering, the chapters in this collection draw on theoretical and experimental analyses from Taqbaylit Berber to the sign language Cena, from the Romance language family to the Semitic family, in a kind to ‘reverse-architecture’ effort to understand the modes that compose multiple planes of morphosyntax. The volume, presented to honor the work and influence of Ur Shlonsky within linguistics, is aimed at a readership accessible to advanced undergraduates as well as specialists placed at distinct vantage points.

This book is the first extensive study on French Quantification in the field of Syntax. It provides a typology of four main quantified noun phrases in French (existential, universal, negative and wh-), detailing their syntactic, semantic and prosodic behaviors and showing that they can be reduced to two classes—Split-DP structures or Floating quantification.Relying on syntax and semantics, the book establishes a three-way structural typology of wh in-situ phrases and extends it to existentials. It pays special attention to the prosodic properties associated with their different readings and proposes an analysis of the distribution of subextraction and pied-piping. Similarly based on semantic and syntactic tests, the book reveals N(egative) words to be universal Quantifiers. It proposes a new structure of N-words in terms of constituent negation and includes a detailed analysis of the difference between not an N and not all the N in French.