Full Description
The South Asian languages, mainly Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, have become a focus of interest in the formal study of language as a natural consequence of the research program of the Principle and Parameters approach and an enforced interest in exploring the parametrical space of human language. The contributions to the present volume combine theoretical reasoning in syntax and phonology with a comparative research agenda in which South Asian languages figure prominently. The topics range from issues of clause structure, serial verb constructions, cleft- and question formation, to the question of what the proper syntactic format of modification should be, issues of binding theory and raising, and issues of complementation, the clausal periphery and clausal typing. The collection of articles concludes with two chapters on Dravidian and comparative phonology and a chapter on the shaping of phonological awareness by different writing systems. The authors and the editors devote this piece of work to Professor K.A. Jayaseelan, one of present-day India's most influential linguists.
Contents
1. Acknowledgements; 2. Introduction (by Bayer, Josef); 3. Clause Structure; 4. What is 'Argument Sharing'?: A Case Study on Argument Sharing under VP-Serialization in Oriya (by Beermann, Dorothee); 5. Pseudoclefts: a Fully Derivational Account (by Boeckx, Cedric); 6. The Cleft Question and the Question of Cleft (by Madhavan, P.); 7. Clausal Pied-piping and Subjacency (by Srikumar, K.); 8. Modification in DP; 9. On the Syntax of Quantity in English (by Kayne, Richard S.); 10. Binding; 11. Coreference Violations 'Beyond Principle B' (by Gueron, Jacqueline); 12. Perspectives on Binding (by Reuland, Eric J.); 13. Raising from a Tensed Clause and Linguistic Theory: Evidence from Maithili (by Yadava, Yogendra P.); 14. Complementizers and Complementation; 15. The Ubiquitous Complementizer (by Dasgupta, Probal); 16. Word Order, Parameters, and the Extended COMP Projection (by Davison, Alice); 17. The Particle ne in Direct yes-no Questions (by Barbora, Madhumita); 18. Phonology; 19. Underspecification and the Phonology of *NC -Effects in Malayalam (by Das, Shyamal); 20. The Disyllabic Word Minimum: Variations on a Theme in Bangla, Punjabi and Tamil (by Vijayakrishnan, K.G.); 21. Writing Systems and Phonological Awareness (by Sailaja, Pingali); 22. List of contributors; 23. Bibliography of K.A. Jayaseelan; 24. Index of names; 25. Index of languages; 26. Index of topics
