Full Description
This book explores how grammatical oppositions - for instance, the contrast between present and past tense - are represented in the syntax of natural languages. The nature of syntactic contrast is tied to a fundamental question in generative syntactic theory: what is universal in syntax, and what is variable? The chapters in this volume examine the dual role of features, which both define a set of paradigmatic contrasts and act as the building blocks of syntactic structures and the drivers of syntactic operations. In both of these roles, features are increasingly considered the locus of parametric variation. This identification of parameters with features has opened up new possibilities for investigating connections between the morphological system of a language and its syntax, and suggests a new role for featural contrast in syntactic theory. The contributors to this volume address these two major questions from a range of perspectives, drawing on data from a variety of typologically diverse languages, including Blackfoot, Greek, Onondaga, and Scottish Gaelic.
Contents
1: Bronwyn M. Bjorkman and Daniel Currie Hall: Contrast and representations in syntax: Introduction
Part I: Features in the inflectional spine
2: Gabriela Alboiu and Michael Barrie: A feature-geometric approach to verbal inflection in Onondaga
3: Andrew Carnie and Sylvia L. R. Schreiner: Restricted and reversed aspectual contrasts
4: Elizabeth Ritter: Sentience-based event structure: Evidence from Blackfoot
Part II: Contrast in the argument domain
5: Maria Kyriakaki: Definite expression and degrees of definiteness
6: Martha McGinnis: Cross-linguistic contrasts in the structure of causatives in clausal nominalizations
7: Leslie Saxon: The Tlicho syntactic causative and non-nominal CPs
Part III: Architectural questions
8: Carson T. Schütze: Against some approaches to long-distance agreement without AGREE
9: Daniel Currie Hall: Contrast in syntax and contrast in phonology: Same difference?
