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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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Academic Paper


Title: Agreement (AGR) and the Pro-Drop/Non-Pro-Drop variation: A meta-analysis of GB and MP Accounts
Paper URL: http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/phin49/p49t4.htm
Author: Mehdi Vaez Dalili
Email: click here to access email
Homepage: http://mdalili.tripod.com
Institution: University of Isfahan
Linguistic Field: Syntax
Abstract: This paper aims to provide a meta-analysis of the role of Agreement (AGR) in the binary variation between pro-drop (e.g. Persian, Spanish, Italian) and non-pro-drop languages (e.g. English, French, Swedish). To this end, seven accounts based on the theory of Government and Binding (GB), and three major accounts formed according to the Minimalist Programme (MP), are investigated. The GB accounts mainly emphasise the relationship between rich agreement morphology and the pro-drop parameter. Also the MP accounts generally focus on checking strong nominal features of subjects, either through moving them out of their base-generated position in Spec-VP to Spec-IP or through forcing them to remain in-situ, respectively characterising non-pro-drop and pro-drop languages. The crux of the present study is to exactly reveal how rich/weak AGR morphology (in GB terms) or weak/strong nominal features (in MP terms) result in the pro-drop/non-pro-drop distinction and determine other subsidiary properties of each language type as a corollary of this distinction.
Type: Individual Paper
Status: Completed
URL: http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/phin49/p49t4.htm


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