Ways of Structure Building

This volume addresses some of the most important approaches to the following key questions in contemporary generative syntactic theory: What are the operations available for (syntactic) structure-building in natural languages? What are the triggers behind them? and Which constraints are involved in the operations? Internationally recognised scholars and young researchers propose new answers on the basis of detailed discussions of a wide range of phenomena (Gapping Right-Node-Raising Comparative Deletion Across-The-Board movement Tough-constructions Nominalizations Scope interactions Wh-movement A-movement Case and Agreement relations among others). Their discussions draw on evidence from a rich variety of languages including Brazilian Portuguese Bulgarian Croatian English German Icelandic Japanese Spanish Vata and Vietnamese.The proposals presented illustrate the shift in the locus of the explanation of linguistic phenomena that characterizes contemporary linguistic theory: a shift in many cases from a model which relies on properties of systems external to narrow syntax (such as the Lexicon or the Phonetic Form component) to one which relies on properties of the structure-building mechanisms themselves. The volume will interest researchers and students of theoretical linguistics from advanced undergraduate and above.