LINGUIST List 12.703

Wed Mar 14 2001

Books: Syntax

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomilinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Kim Lewis Brown, Syntax: Argument Realization by Miriam & Holloway King (eds.)

Butt, Miriam (Universit�t Konstanz) and 
Tracy Holloway King (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center), eds.; 
ARGUMENT REALIZATION; paperback 
ISBN: 1-57586-266-2, cloth ISBN: 1-57586-265-4; 244 pages.
CSLI Publications 2001. http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , 
email: pubscsli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. 
Call their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736 (U.S. & Canada only) or 
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ 
(use the search feature to locate the book, then order).

Book description:

In "Argument Realization", Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King present
seven essays that survey fundamental argument realization issues
within a typologically broad range of languages. In these papers,
Butt, King, and other prominent linguists examine within the
architecture of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) the variety of ways
in which arguments of a predicate may be realized in the syntax.
Well-suited for this kind of examination, LFG allows for the complex
interaction of arguments, syntactic positions, and grammatical
functions.

Case marking alternations and the overt realization of case marking
within single clauses, including case stacking, have continued to
engage the attention of linguists working with different syntactic
theories. The phenomenon of clause union or complex predication has
led linguists to look at case marking and argument realization that
goes beyond the domain of the single clause. Regardless of the
complexity or simplicity of the predicational structure of a clause,
the papers included in this volume show how the relationship between
arguments and their overt realization can be dealt with.

These papers also treat multiple case marking in Australian languages,
possessor alternation in Welsh, directional complex predicates in
American Indian languages, and causatives in Japanese. Furthermore,
they discuss representational issues that encompass underspecification
and the encoding of semantic information needed to determine the
correspondence of thematic arguments to their overt syntactic
realization.