Riemsdijk Henk van Riemsdijk – författare

Symmetries and asymmetries have always played an important role in linguistic theorizing. From the early works on potentially universal properties of transformational processes, differences between rightward and leftward movement processes were noted and constituted a challenge to theories of conditions on transformations. The upward boundedness of extraposition rules vs. the successive cyclic character of question word movement, for example, remains a vexing problem. An idea which has gained considerable prominence in the most recent syntactic work, in particular Noam Chomsky''s ''Minimalist Program'' and Richard Kayne''s ''Antisymmetry'' proposal, is that rightward movement simply does not exist. This means, in essence, that what looks like an element that has been moved rightward is either base-generated in its surface position, or it is actually moved leftward but all its surrounding materials have been moved leftward even further. Clearly, these radical proposals have generated a large number of new analyses of the relevant phenomena, and they have fostered considerable controversy about the viability and desirability of this type of approach. The present volume brings together a representative group of articles discussing a variety of aspects of (apparent) rightward movement processes, including considerations having to do with parsing, and representing the various opposing lines of thought on this matter. Empirically, they cover a wide array of constructions (extraposition, scrambling, quantifier-floating, etc.) and languages ( American Sign Language, Bengali, Dutch, French, Frisian, German, Hindi, Japanese, Marathi, etc.).

Materials on Left Dislocation consists of two parts. Part I contains a selection of the main texts on which our present understanding of the Left Dislocation construction is based. For various reasons most of these texts had never been published, or are published in obsolete places. These articles, by Van Riemsdijk & Zwarts, Rodman, Hirschbuehler, Vat, Cinque and Zaenen, contain the first arguments that pertain to the major questions about Left Dislocation (for example whether movement or base-generation is involved), and they present the rationale for the now standard distinctions between Hanging Topic LD, Contrastive LD, and Clitic LD.In Part II a number of recent contributions to the grammar of Left Dislocation are brought together. In these articles, by Anagnostopoulou, Demirdache, Escobar, Van Hoof and Wiltschko, new aspects are being explored such as the relationship between LD and the grammar of focus and the role of clitic doubling and its semantic effects in Clitic LD. Furthermore, the empirical basis is broadened to encompass more languages. Finally, these articles explore the relationship between LD and a number of apparently unrelated constructions such as split topicalization.The book constitutes an indispensable tool for any linguist who seriously works on dislocation phenomena.