Oliver Bond - Böcker

This book explores unusual patterns of agreement, one of the most intriguing and theoretically challenging aspects of human language. Agreement is typically thought to reflect a structural relationship between a verb and its arguments within the clause, and all major theories of agreement have been developed with the centrality of this relationship in mind. But beyond the verb, items belonging to practically every other part of speech have been found to function as agreement targets, including adpositions, adverbs, converbs, nouns, pronouns, complementizers, and other conjunctions. Data on these targets provide rich insights into the structural domains in which agreement operates, demonstrating that unusual targets can be associated with unexpected domains that are independent of the agreement domain of the verb.Following an introduction to the typology of unusual targets and unexpected domains across the world's languages, the chapters in this volume provide detailed treatments of a wide range of rare and complex agreement phenomena in seven languages, belonging to five different language families of Eurasia and the Pacific. The contributions are all based on novel data collected by the authors, which detail the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of agreement on non-verbal targets within the clause.

This book presents a controlled evaluation of three widely practised syntactic theories on the basis of the extremely complex agreement system of Archi, an endangered Nakh-Daghestanian language. Even straightforward agreement examples are puzzling for syntacticians because agreement involves both redundancy and arbitrariness. Agreement is a significant source of syntactic complexity, exacerbated by the great diversity of its morphological expression. Imagine how the discipline of linguistics would be if expert practitioners of different theories met in a collaborative setting to tackle such challenging agreement data - to test the limits of their models and examine how the predictions of their theories differ given the same linguistic facts. Following an overview of the essentials of Archi grammar and an introduction to the remarkable agreement phenomena found in this language, three distinct accounts of the Archi data examine the tractability and predictive power of major syntactic theories: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, and Minimalism. The final chapter compares the problems encountered and the solutions proposed in the different syntactic analyses and outlines the implications of the challenges that the Archi agreement system poses for linguistic theory.

This volume is the first to provide a comprehensive cross-linguistic overview of an understudied typological phenomenon, the clause-level argument-like behaviour of internal possessors. In some languages, adnominal possessors - or a subset thereof - figure more prominently than expected in the phrase-external syntax, by controlling predicate agreement and/or acting as a switch-reference pivot in same-subject relations. There is no independent evidence that such possessors are external to the possessive phrase or that they assume head status within it. This creates a puzzle for virtually all syntactic theories, as it is generally believed that agreement and switch-reference target phrasal heads rather than dependents.Following an introduction to the typology of the phenomenon and an overview of possible syntactic analyses, chapters in the volume offer more focussed case studies from a wide range of languages spoken in the Americas, Eurasia, South Asia, and Australia. The contributions are largely based on novel data collected by the authors and present thorough discussions of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of prominent internal possessors in the relevant languages. The volume will be of interest to researchers and students from graduate level upwards in the fields of comparative linguistics, syntax, typology, and semantics.

In a field still dominated by syntactic perspectives, it is easy to overlook the words that are the irreducible building blocks of language. Morphological Perspectives takes words as the starting point for any questions about linguistic structure: their form, their internal structure, their paradigmatic extensions, and their role in expressing and manipulating syntactic configurations. With a team of authors that run the typological gamut of languages, this book examines these questions from multiple perspectives, both the canonical and the non-canonical. By taking these questions seriously, and letting loose a full battery of analytical techniques, the following chapters not only celebrate the pioneering work of Greville G. Corbett but present new thinking on traditional approaches, including the paradigm, deponency and morphological features.

In a field still dominated by syntactic perspectives, it is easy to overlook the words that are the irreducible building blocks of language. Morphological Perspectives takes words as the starting point for any questions about linguistic structure: their form, their internal structure, their paradigmatic extensions, and their role in expressing and manipulating syntactic configurations. With a team of authors that run the typological gamut of languages, this book examines these questions from multiple perspectives, both the canonical and the non-canonical. By taking these questions seriously, and letting loose a full battery of analytical techniques, the following chapters not only celebrate the pioneering work of Greville G. Corbett but present new thinking on traditional approaches, including the paradigm, deponency and morphological features.