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In linguistics, syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.
Topicalization is a mechanism of syntax that establishes an expression as the sentence or clause topic by having it appear at the front of the sentence or clause. This involves a phrasal movement of determiners, prepositions, and verbs to sentence-initial position. Topicalization often results in a discontinuity and is thus one of a number of established discontinuity types, the other three being wh-fronting, scrambling, and extraposition. Topicalization is also used as a constituency test; an expression that can be topicalized is deemed a constituent. The topicalization of arguments in English is rare, whereas circumstantial adjuncts are often topicalized. Most languages allow topicalization, and in some languages, topicalization occurs much more frequently and/or in a much less marked manner than in English. Topicalization in English has also received attention in the pragmatics literature.
Determiner, also called determinative, is a term used in some models of grammatical description to describe a word or affix belonging to a class of noun modifiers. A determiner combines with a noun to express its reference. Examples in English include articles, demonstratives, possessive determiners, and quantifiers. Not all languages have determiners, and not all systems of grammatical description recognize them as a distinct category.
In linguistics, differential object marking (DOM) is the phenomenon in which certain objects of verbs are marked to reflect various syntactic and semantic factors. One form of the more general phenomenon of differential argument marking, DOM is present in more than 300 languages. The term "differential object marking" was coined by Georg Bossong.
Scrambling is a syntactic phenomenon wherein sentences can be formulated using a variety of different word orders without any change in meaning. Scrambling often results in a discontinuity since the scrambled expression can end up at a distance from its head. Scrambling does not occur in English, but it is frequent in languages with freer word order, such as German, Russian, Persian and Turkic languages. The term was coined by Haj Ross in his 1967 dissertation and is widely used in present work, particularly with the generative tradition.
In semantics, a donkey sentence is a sentence containing a pronoun which is semantically bound but syntactically free. They are a classic puzzle in formal semantics and philosophy of language because they are fully grammatical and yet defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. In order to explain how speakers are able to understand them, semanticists have proposed a variety of formalisms including systems of dynamic semantics such as Discourse representation theory. Their name comes from the example sentence "Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it", in which "it" acts as a donkey pronoun because it is semantically but not syntactically bound by the indefinite noun phrase "a donkey". The phenomenon is known as donkey anaphora.
Anna Szabolcsi (//) is a linguist whose research has focused on semantics, syntax, and the syntax–semantics interface. She was born and educated in Hungary, and received her Ph.D. from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest.
Niina Ning Zhang is a theoretical linguist specializing in Mandarin Chinese syntax and semantics.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal concepts from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.
Barbara Kenyon Abbott is an American linguist. She earned her PhD in linguistics in 1976 at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of George Lakoff. From 1976 to 2006, she was a professor in the department of linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African languages at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in philosophy. She is now a Professor Emerita.
Henriëtte Elisabeth de Swart is a Dutch linguist.
Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng is a linguist with specialisation in theoretical syntax. She is a Chair Professor of Linguistics and Language at the Department of Linguistics, Leiden University, and one of the founding members of the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition.
A bare noun is a noun that is used without a surface determiner or quantifier. In natural languages, the distribution of bare nouns is subject to various language-specific constraints. Under the DP hypothesis a noun in an argument position must have a determiner or quantifier that introduces the noun, warranting special treatment of the bare nouns that seemingly contradict this. As a result, bare nouns have attracted extensive study in the fields of both semantics and syntax.
Craige Roberts is an American linguist, known for her work on pragmatics and formal semantics.
Anastasia Giannakidou is the Frank J. McLoraine Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. She is the founder and inaugural director of the Center for Hellenic Studies at the University of Chicago, and co-director of Center for Gesture, Sign and Language. She is best known for her work on veridicality, polarity phenomena, modal sentences, and the interactions of tense and modality. She holds a Research Associate position at Institut Jean Nicod, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, is a faculty fellow at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, and is an associate member of Bilingualism Research Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In formal semantics, the scope of a semantic operator is the semantic object to which it applies. For instance, in the sentence "Paulina doesn't drink beer but she does drink wine," the proposition that Paulina drinks beer occurs within the scope of negation, but the proposition that Paulina drinks wine does not. Scope can be thought of as the semantic order of operations.
In formal semantics and pragmatics, modal subordination is the phenomenon whereby a modal expression is interpreted relative to another modal expression to which it is not syntactically subordinate. For instance, the following example does not assert that the birds will in fact be hungry, but rather that hungry birds would be a consequence of Joan forgetting to fill the birdfeeder. This interpretation was unexpected in early theories of the syntax-semantics interface since the content concerning the birds' hunger occurs in a separate sentence from the if-clause.
- If Joan forgets to fill the birdfeeder, she will feel very bad. The birds will get hungry.
In linguistics, the syntax–semantics interface is the interaction between syntax and semantics. Its study encompasses phenomena that pertain to both syntax and semantics, with the goal of explaining correlations between form and meaning. Specific topics include scope, binding, and lexical semantic properties such as verbal aspect and nominal individuation, semantic macroroles, and unaccusativity.
Tara Mohanan is a linguist and co-founder of ThinQ, an educational organisation. She is known for work on Hindi, Malayalam, and other South Asian languages in the fields of semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology. Her husband is linguist K. P. Mohanan.
In formal semantics, homogeneity is the phenomenon where plural expressions that seem to mean "all" negate to "none" rather than "not all". For example, the English sentence "Robin read the books" requires Robin to have read all of the books, while "Robin didn't read the books" requires her to have read none of them. Neither sentence is true if she read exactly half of the books. Homogeneity effects have been observed in a variety of languages including Japanese, Russian, and Hungarian. Semanticists have proposed a variety of explanations for homogeneity, often involving a combination of presupposition, plural quantification, and trivalent logics. Because analogous effects have been observed with conditionals and other modal expressions, some semanticists have proposed that these phenomena involve pluralities of possible worlds.
References
- ↑ "Veneeta Dayal". Yale Linguistics. Retrieved 2022-07-19.
- ↑ "Students". scholar.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2022-07-19.
- ↑ "Veneeta Dayal" . Retrieved February 21, 2019.
- ↑ "Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study". Archived from the original on July 4, 2015. Retrieved July 2, 2015.
- ↑ "Veneeta Dayal". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2022-07-19.
- ↑ Forbes, Graeme (2012). "Acknowledgement to reviewers (2009–2012)". Linguistics and Philosophy. 35 (6): 533–535. doi:10.1007/s10988-013-9128-2. S2CID 62680903.
- ↑ "2004-2005 U.S. Fulbright Scholar Grantees" (PDF). Retrieved July 2, 2015.
- ↑ "NSF Award Search: Award # 0001669 - Quantification Without Quantifiers: Number Sensitivity in Articleless Constructions". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved 2022-07-19.
- ↑ Review by Maribel Romero. Language. Volume 75, Number 1, March 1999. 187.
