Dependency and Directionality

Marcel den Dikken

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781107177567
• eBook ISBN: 9781316830062
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

The direction in which the structure of sentences and filler-gap dependencies are built is a topic of fundamental importance to linguistic theory and its applications. This book develops an integrated understanding of structure building, movement and locality embedded in a syntactic theory that argues for a 'top down' approach, presenting an explicit counterweight to the bottom-up derivations pervading the Chomskian mainstream. It combines a compact and comprehensive historical perspective on structure building, the cycle, and movement, with detailed discussions of island effects, the typology of long-distance filler-gap dependencies, and the special problems posed by the subject in clausal syntax. Providing introductions to the main issues, reviewing extant arguments for bottom-up and top-down approaches, and presenting several case studies in its development of a new theory, this book should be of interest to all students and scholars of language interested in syntactic structures and the dependencies inside them.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Directionality of Structure Building
• 3 Find the Gap
• 4 A Syntactic Typology of Long Ā-dependencies
• 5 The Trouble with Subjects
• 6 Conclusion
• Abstracts and Keywords
• References
• Index