LINGUIST List 9.419

Thu Mar 19 1998

Books: Syntax & Morphology

Editor for this issue: Martin Jacobsen <martylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Kristen Mitchell, new books in Syntax & Morphology (3 titles)

NEGATION AND CLAUSAL STRUCTURE: A Comparative Study of Romance
Languages
Raffaella Zanuttini, Georgetown University

(Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax)

"Zanuttini is absolutely at the cutting edge of research both in
Romance languages and in theoretical syntax....A significant
contribution to the field."--Donna Jo Napoli, Swarthmore College

Every human language has some syntactic means of distinguishing a
negative from a non-negative sentence; in other words, every speaker's
syntactic competence provides a means to express sentential negation.
This ability, however, may be expressed in different ways, as shown by
the fact that individual languages employ different syntactic
strategies for the expression of the same semantic function of
negating a sentence.

Zanuttini's goal here is to characterize the range of such variation
by comparing the different syntactic means for expressing sentential
negation exhibited by the members of one language family--the Romance
languages--and by reducing the differences we witness to a constrained
set of choices available to the particular grammars of these
languages. This sort of analysis is a first step towards the ultimate
goal of determining and understanding what limits there are on the
syntactic options that universal grammar imposes on the expression of
sentential negation.

September 1997 216 pp.; 18 charts
0-19-508055-6 paper $39.95
Oxford University Press

 
CLAUSE STRUCTURE AND WORD ORDER IN HEBREW AND ARABIC:
An Essay in Comparative Semitic Syntax
Ur Shlonsky, University of Geneva

(Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax)

Shlonsky uses Chomsky's Government and Binding Approach to examine
clausal architecture and verb movement in Hebrew and several varieties
of Arabic. He establishes a syntactic analysis of Hebrew and then
extends that analysis to certain aspects of Arabic clausal syntax.
Through this comparative lens of Hebrew, Shlonsky hopes to resolve a
number of problems in Arabic syntax. His results generate some novel
and important conclusions concerning the patterns of negations, verb
movement, the nature of participles, and the gamut of positions
available to clausal subjects in both languages.

June 1997 304 pp.
0-19-510867-1 paper $45.00
0-19-510866-3 cloth $75.00
Oxford University Press
 


TENSE AND ASPECT: From Semantics to Morphosyntax
Alessandra Giorgi, University of Bergamo, Italy, and Fabio Pianesi,
Institute for Technology and Scientific Research (IRST), Trento, Italy

(Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax)

This book examines the interactions between the morphosyntax and the
semantic interpretation of tense and aspect in the Germanic and
Romance languages. These languages diverge not only in their variety
of tense and aspectual forms, but also in the distribution and
interpretation of given forms. Adopting Noam Chomsky's minimalist
framework, Alessandra Giorgi and Fabio Pianesi attempt to provide
theoretical explanations for the observed patterns of form and meaning
which link the morphosyntactic properties of languages in both
universal and language-particular constraints on interpretation.

December 1997 336 pp.
0-19-509193-0 paper $35.00
0-19-509192-2 cloth $85.00
Oxford University Press
 
 
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Press: e-mail: linguisticsoup-usa.org or Visit the Oxford University
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1998 Contributors