Ways of Structure Building

by Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria (Editor), Vidal Valmala (Editor)

This volume addresses some of the most important approaches to the following key questions in contemporary generative syntactic What are the operations available for (syntactic) structure-building in natural languages? What are the triggers behind them? and Which constraints are involved in the operations? Internationally recognised scholars and young researchers propose new answers on the basis of detailed discussions of a wide range of phenomena (Gapping, Right-Node-Raising, Comparative Deletion, Across-The-Board movement, Tough-constructions, Nominalizations, Scope interactions, Wh-movement, A-movement, Case and Agreement relations, among others). Their discussions draw on evidence from a rich variety of languages, including Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Croatian, English, German, Icelandic, Japanese, Spanish, Vata, and Vietnamese.

The proposals presented illustrate the shift in the locus of the explanation of linguistic phenomena that characterizes contemporary linguistic a shift, in many cases, from a model which relies on properties of systems external to narrow syntax (such as the Lexicon or the Phonetic Form component) to one which relies on properties of the structure-building mechanisms themselves. The volume will interest researchers and students of theoretical linguistics from advanced undergraduate and above.

448 pages, Paperback

First published June 7, 2012