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Formal Grammar Formal Grammar This volume draws together fourteen previously published papers which explore the nature of mental grammar through a formal, generative approach. The book begins by outlining the development of formal gram- mar in the last fifty years, with a particular focus on the work of Noam Chomsky, and moves into an examination of a diverse set of phenomena in various languages that shed light on theory and model construction. Many of the papers focus on comparisons between English and Norwegian, high- lighting the importance of comparative approaches to the study of language. With a comprehensive collection of papers that demonstrate the richness of formal approaches, this volume is key reading for students and scholars interested in the study of grammar. Terje Lohndal is Full Professor of English linguistics in the Department of Language and Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Tech- nology, where he also serves as Deputy Head of Research and Director of the PhD program in Language and Linguistics. In addition he also holds an Adjunct Professor position at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Routledge Leading Linguists Edited by Carlos P. Otero University of California, Los Angeles, USA For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com 15 Regimes of Derivation in Syntax and Morphology Edwin Williams 16 Typological Studies Word Order and Relative Clauses Guglielmo Cinque 17 Case, Argument Structure, and Word Order Shigeru Miyagawa 18 The Equilibrium of Human Syntax Symmetries in the Brain Andrea Moro 19 On Shell Structure Richard K. Larson 20 Primitive Elements of Grammatical Theory Papers by Jean-Roger Vergnaud and His Collaborators Edited by Katherine McKinney-Bock and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta 21 Pronouns, Presuppositions, and Hierarchies The Work of Eloise Jelinek in Context Edited by Andrew Carnie and Heidi Harley 22 Explorations in Maximizing Syntactic Minimization Samuel D. Epstein, Hisatsugu Kitahara, and T. Daniel Seely 23 Merge in the Mind-Brain Essays on Theoretical Linguistics and the Neuroscience of Language Naoki Fukui 24 Formal Grammar Theory and Variation across English and Norwegian Terje Lohndal Formal Grammar Theory and Variation across English and Norwegian Terje Lohndal First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Terje Lohndal to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-28969-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-26705-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Acknowledgments vii Original Publication Details ix Introduction 1 PART A Transformational Constraints 17 1 Brief Overview of the History of Generative Syntax 19 2 Noam Chomsky: A Selected Annotated Bibliography 61 3 Comp-t Effects: Variation in the Position and Features of C 85 4 Freezing Effects and Objects 113 5 Medial-wh Phenomena, Parallel Movement, and Parameters 149 6 Sentential Subjects in English and Norwegian 175 7 Be Careful How You Use the Left Periphery 203 PART B The Syntax–Semantics Interface 229 8 Negative Concord and (Multiple) Agree: A Case Study Of West Flemish 231 9 Medial Adjunct PPs in English: Implications for the Syntax of Sentential Negation 265 10 Neo-Davidsonianism in Semantics and Syntax 287 11 Interrogatives, Instructions, and I-Languages: An I-Semantics for Questions 319 vi Contents PART C Multilingualism and Formal Grammar 369 12 Generative Grammar and Language Mixing 371 13 Language Mixing and Exoskeletal Theory: A Case Study of Word-Internal Mixing in American Norwegian 381 14 Grammatical Gender in American Norwegian Heritage Language: Stability or Attrition? 413 Index 443 Acknowledgments I am grateful to many scholars for commenting on the ideas and drafts behind the papers included in the present volume. In particular, I am grateful to Tor A. Åfarli, Artemis Alexiadou, Elly van Gelderen, Liliane Haegeman, Norbert Hornstein, Howard Lasnik, Paul Pietroski, and Marit Westergaard for all their comments and support over the years. I would also like to thank Carlos Otero for publishing this book in his esteemed series, and my co- authors for allowing me to include our joint work in this volume. Original Publication Details 1 Lasnik, Howard and Terje Lohndal. 2013. Brief Overview of the History of Generative Grammar. In The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax, Marcel den Dikken (ed.), 26–60. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press. 2 Lohndal, Terje and Howard Lasnik. 2013. Noam Chomsky. Oxford Bibliographies 3 Lohndal, Terje. 2009. Comp-t Effects: Variation in the Position and Fea- tures of C. Studia Linguistica 63: 204–232. 4 Lohndal, Terje. 2011. Freezing Effects and Objects. Journal of Linguis- tics 47: 163–199. 5 Lohndal, Terje. 2010. Medial-wh Phenomena, Parallel Movement, and Parameters. Linguistic Analysis 34: 215–244. 6 Lohndal, Terje. 2014. Sentential subjects in English and Norwegian. Syntaxe et Sémantique 15: 81–113. 7 Haegeman, Liliane and Terje Lohndal. 2015. Be careful how you use the left periphery. In Structures, Strategies and Beyond: Studies in Honour of Adriana Belletti, Elisa Di Domenico, Cornelia Hamann, & Simona Matteini (eds.), 135–162. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 8 Haegeman, Liliane and Terje Lohndal. 2010. Negative Concord and (Multiple) Agree: A Case Study of West Flemish. Linguistic Inquiry 41: 181–211. 9 De Clercq, Karen, Liliane Haegeman and Terje Lohndal. 2012. Medial adjunct PPs in English: Implications for the syntax of sentential nega- tion. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 35: 5–26. 10 Lohndal, Terje and Paul Pietroski. 2011. Interrogatives, Instructions, and I-languages: An I-Semantics for Questions. Linguistic Analysis 37: 458–515. 11 Lohndal, Terje. In press. Neodavidsonianism in semantics and syntax. In The Oxford Handbook of Event Structure, Robert Truswell (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 12 Lohndal, Terje. 2013. Generative grammar and language mixing. Theo- retical Linguistics 39: 215–224. x Original Publication Details 13 Berg Grimstad, Maren, Terje Lohndal and Tor A. Åfarli. 2014. Lan- guage mixing and exoskeletal theory: A case study of word-internal mix- ing in American Norwegian. Nordlyd 41: 213–237. 14 Lohndal, Terje and Marit Westergaard. 2016. Grammatical Gender in American Norwegian Heritage Language: Stability or attrition? Fron- tiers in Psychology. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00344 Introduction1 Human languages are inextricably a part of our mind/brain. No other ani- mal has a comparable ability with the same complexity and richness that humans do. An important research goal is to better understand this ability for language: What is it that enables human to acquire and use language the way we do? One way of answering this is to argue that there are aspects of our biology that enable us to acquire and use language. This has been the answer that in modern times has been advocated by generative grammar, in particular in approaches developed based on work by Noam Chomsky (1965, 1986, 2009), although its origins are much older. This approach holds that there are universal aspects of language that all humans share. However, it is at the same time evident that languages also differ: A child growing up in Japan will acquire Japanese whereas a child growing up in Norway will acquire Norwegian. An adequate theory of human language needs to be able to account for both possible universals and language variation. However, a core question is what such an adequate theory may look like. This volume consists of essays that adopt a formal approach to linguistic variation and apply it in different areas: syntactic variation in synchronic grammars, the interface between syntax and semantics, and aspects of the grammar of multilingual individuals. In this introduction, these general themes are discussed, albeit briefly, before a summary of the individual chapters is provided. A Formal Approach to Grammar Formal and generative linguists are concerned with developing formal descriptions of the structures of human language. In some of his earli- est work, Chomsky (1955, 1957), drawing on Harris (1951), developed phrase-structural analyses for a fragment of English. For example, the grammar in (2) can be utilized to generate the derivation in (3), yielding the sentence in (1). (1) Linda sings. (2) a. Designated initial symbol (Σ): S 2 Introduction b. Rewrite rules (F): S → NP VP NP → N VP → V N → Linda V → sings (3) a. Line 1: S b. Line 2: NP VP c. Line 3: N VP d. Line 4: N V e. Line 5: N sings f. Line 6: Linda sings Importantly, Chomsky introduced a level of abstract structure that was not present in earlier work. We see that in rewrite rules that utilize structure independently of the words (e.g., NP → N). In all modern work on formal grammars, an important research question has been the number of levels of representation and their nature. The formal details of this abstractness have changed as new approaches have emerged, but the existence of abstraction has always been a staple of formal approaches to grammar. Questions soon emerged regarding what phrase-structural grammars are describing. Chomsky (1959, 1965) argues that a formal grammar should describe the competence of the native speaker; that is, it should characterize the mental grammars that each of us have internalized.
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