A study of why languages vary the way they do in the domain of adjectival modification in French as contrasted with other Indo-European languages (English, Celtic, Walloon, Romanian, Italian). Rejecting previous well-known analyses in terms of syntactic movement to various functional heads, the author proposes a model in which external properties of interfaces are the foundations from which the variation is derived. Limiting severely the technical apparatus of syntax, the author argues that the properties of number at the interfaces are shown to provide a simple and precise solution for longstanding problems of compositionality raised by adjectival modification. There is also a unified analysis of the many other properties involved. The model provides a principled explanation of the variation concerning nominals without determiners (bare NPs) and determiners without nominals (clitics).

Adjectives, Number and Interfaces: Why Languages Vary (North-holland Linguistic Series)

Reference

Bouchard, Denis

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Brill Academic Pub

Nature and Origin of Language (Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language)

This book looks at how the human brain got the capacity for language and how language then evolved. Its four parts are concerned with different views on the emergence of language, with what language is, how it evolved in the human brain, and finally how this process led to the properties of language. Part I considers the main approaches to the subject and how far language evolved culturally or genetically. Part II argues that language is a system of signs and considers how these elements first came together in the brain. Part III examines the evidence for brain mechanisms to allow the formation of signs. Part IV shows how the book's explanation of language origins and evolution is not only consistent with the complex properties of languages but provides the basis for a theory of syntax that offers insights into the learnability of language and to the nature of constructions that have defied decades of linguistic analysis, including including subject-verb inversion in questions, existential constructions, and long-distance dependencies. Denis Bouchard's outstandingly original account will interest linguists of all persuasions as well as cognitive scientists and others interested in the evolution of language.

Words, Language & Grammar

Oxford University Press

This book looks at how the human brain got the capacity for language and how language then evolved. Its four parts are concerned with different views on the emergence of language, with what language is, how it evolved in the human brain, and finally how this process led to the properties of language. Part I considers the main approaches to the subject and how far language evolved culturally or genetically. Part Ii argues that language is a system of signs and considers how these elements first came together in the brain. Part Iii examines the evidence for brain mechanisms to allow the formation of signs. Part Iv shows how the book's explanation of language origins and evolution is not only consistent with the complex properties of languages but provides the basis for a theory of syntax that offers insights into the learnability of language and to the nature of constructions that have defied decades of linguistic analysis, including including subject-verb inversion in questions, existential constructions, and long-distance dependencies. Denis Bouchard's outstandingly original account will interest linguists of all persuasions as well as cognitive scientists and others interested in the evolution of language.

During the last thirty years, most linguists and philosophers have assumed that meaning can be represented symbolically and that the mental processing of language involves the manipulation of symbols. Scholars have assembled strong evidence that there must be linguistic representations at several abstract levels—phonological, syntactic, and semantic—and that those representations are related by a describable system of rules. Because meaning is so complex, linguists often posit an equally complex relationship between semantic and other levels of grammar.The Semantics of Syntax is an elegant and powerful analysis of the relationship between syntax and semantics. Noting that meaning is underdetermined by form even in simple cases, Denis Bouchard argues that it is impossible to build knowledge of the world into grammar and still have a describable grammar. He thus proposes simple semantic representations and simple rules to relate linguistic levels. Focusing on a class of French verbs, Bouchard shows how multiple senses can be accounted for by the assumption of a single abstract core meaning along with background information about how objects behave in the world. He demonstrates that this move simplifies the syntax at no cost to the descriptive power of the semantics. In two important final chapters, he examines the consequences of his approach for standard syntactic theories.

The Semantics of Syntax: A Minimalist Approach to Grammar

University of Chicago Press

On the Content of Empty Categories (Studies in Generative Grammar [SGG], 14)

Walter de Gruyter

On the content of empty categories (Studies in generative grammar)

Foris

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