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Description:
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This book examines some knotty problems in natural language. These
typically involve questions where the sense or the grammaticality of an
utterance teeters on or over the edge of acceptability among native
speakers. The phenomena in question have been examined within syntactic
theory for over two decades with no wholly satisfactory outcome. Dr
Truswell broadens the scope of the enquiry to the interface between
syntactic structure and other, indirectly related, cognitive, and semantic
structures such as aspect, agentivity, and presupposition. Uniting work
from philosophical, cognitive and linguistic perspectives, he develops a
model of the internal structure of events as perceptual and cognitive
units. He deploys the model to explain and predict the acceptability of
particular formulations. He considers the individuation of events in the
light of the model and provides a novel account of patterns of question
formation. He shows that these patterns throw new light on central claims
of Chomsky's biolinguistic minimalist program and Jackendoff's parallel
architecture theory of mind and language. This is work at the cutting edge
of linguistic theory, catholic in its theoretical scope, open to insights
from cognate fields, and illustrated with examples from a wide range of
languages. It will interest philosophers, semanticists and cognitive
scientists concerned with topics like events, agentivity, and planning, as
well as linguists studying syntax or the syntax-semantics interface.
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