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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod


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Book Information

   

Title: Bare Grammar
Subtitle: Lectures on Linguistic Invariants
Written By: Edward L. Keenan
Edward P. Stabler
Series Title: Stanford Monographs in Linguistics
Description:

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This work studies invariants of generative grammars, independently of the specific format in which a grammar is specified, drawing on general algebraic notions of structure and symmetry. Structural notions in generative grammar such as dominance and c-command are provably invariant in all grammars, and specific morphemes, such as case markers and voice markers, are invariant in exactly the same sense in languages which have them, so structural properties of languages are not restricted to those that are coded into tree structures or hierarchical feature structures of any kind. This work also illustrates how relations such as the anaphor-antecedent relation can be invariant in all grammars even if realized differently in different languages. Grammars with anaphora constrained by nominal case marking and others with anaphora constrained by voice marking are elaborated. Thus the existence of universal invariants does not assume that grammars of different languages are isomorphic. This work further supports a strong form of compositionality and hypothesizes that syntactically invariant morphemes denote semantically invariant objects, revealing that the relation between form and meaning is not entirely arbitrary.

Publication Year: 2004
Publisher: CSLI Publications
Review: Become a Reviewer
BibTex: View BibTex record
Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
Syntax

Versions:
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 1575861895
ISBN-13: N/A
Pages: 197
Prices: U.S. $ 70.00

 
 
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 1575861887
ISBN-13: N/A
Pages: 197
Prices: U.S. $ 25.00