Every human language has some syntactic means of distinguishing a negative from a non-negative sentence; in other words, every speaker's syntactic competence provides a means to express sentential negation. This ability, however, may be expressed in different ways, as shown by the fact that individual languages employ different syntactic strategies for the expression of the same semantic function of negating a sentence. Zanuttini's goal here is to characterize the range of such variation by comparing the different syntactic means for expressing sentential negation exhibited by the members of one language family--the Romance languages--and by reducing the differences we witness to a constrained set of choices available to the particular grammars of these languages. This sort of analysis is a first step towards the ultimate goal of determining and understanding what limits there are on the syntactic options that universal grammar imposes on the expression of sentential negation.

This book is the first cross-linguistic study of clausal negation based on an extensive and systematic language sample. Methodological issues, especially sampling, are discussed at length. Standard negation – the basic structural means languages have for negating declarative verbal main clauses – is typologized from a new perspective, paying attention to structural differences between affirmatives and negatives. In symmetric negation affirmative and negative structures show no differences except for the presence of the negative marker(s), whereas in asymmetric negation there are further structural differences, i.e. asymmetries. A distinction is made between constructional and paradigmatic asymmetry; in the former the addition of the negative marker(s) is accompanied by further structural differences in comparison to the corresponding affirmative, and in the latter the correspondences between the members of (verbal etc.) paradigms used in affirmatives and negatives are not one-to-one. Cross-cutting the constructional-paradigmatic distinction, asymmetric negation can be further divided into subtypes according to the nature of the asymmetry. Standard negation structures found in the 297 sample languages are exemplified and discussed in detail. The frequencies of the different types and some typological correlations are also examined. Functional motivations are proposed for the structural types – symmetric negatives are language-internally analogous to the linguistic structure of the affirmative and asymmetric negatives are language-externally analogous to different asymmetries between affirmation and negation on the functional level. Relevant diachronic issues are also discussed. The book is of interest to language typologists, descriptive linguists and to all linguists interested in negation.

Shlonsky uses Chomsky's Government and Binding Approach to examine clausal architecture and verb movement in Hebrew and several varieties of Arabic. He establishes a syntactic analysis of Hebrew and then extends that analysis to certain aspects of Arabic clausal syntax. Through this comparative lens of Hebrew, Shlonsky hopes to resolve a number of problems in Arabic syntax. His results generate some novel and important conclusions concerning the patterns of negations, verb movement, the nature of participles, and the gamut of positions available to clausal subjects in both languages.

The researchers in the field of theoretical and theoretically inclined descriptive linguistics have for a long time felt a need for detailed and clearly presented linguistic treatments of various syntactic phenomena in South Asian languages. Clause Structure in South Asian Languages: provides a comprehensive overview and covers major aspects of clause structure in a variety of South Asian languages; provides detailed analyses of several aspects of phrase structure of many prominent South Asian languages; gives theoretically up-to-date treatment of several important issues in South Asian syntax and semantics; contains papers by some of the most prominent linguists working on South Asian languages.

Presenting cutting-edge research in syntax and semantics, this important volume furthers theoretical claims in generative linguistics and represents a significant addition to present scholarship in the field. Leading scholars present crosslinguistic studies dealing with clausal architecture, negation, and tense and aspect, and the issue of whether a statistical model can by itself capture the richness of human linguistic abilities. Taken together, these contributions elegantly show how theoretical tools can propel our understanding of language beyond pretheoretical descriptions, especially when combined with the insight and skills of linguists who can analyze difficult and complex data. Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics covers a range of topics currently at the center of lively debate in the linguistic literature, such as the structure of the left periphery of the clause, the proper treatment of negative polarity items, and the role of statistical learning in building a model of linguistic competence. The ten original contributions offer an excellent balance of novel empirical description and theoretical analysis, applied to a wide range of languages, including Dutch, German, Irish English, Italian, Malagasy, Malay, and a number of medieval Romance languages. Scholars and students of semantics, syntax, and linguistic theory will find it to be a valuable resource for ongoing scholarship and advanced study.

The three volumes of Language Typology and Syntactic Description offer a unique survey of syntactic and morphological structure in the languages of the world. Topics covered include parts of speech; passives; complementation; relative clauses; adverbial clauses; inflectional morphology; tense, aspect and mood; and deixis. The major ways these notions are realized in the languages of the world are explored, and the contributors provide brief sketches of relevant aspects of representative languages. Each volume is written in an accessible style with new concepts explained and exemplified as they are introduced. Although each volume can be read independently, together they provide a major work of reference that will serve as a manual for field workers and anyone interested in cross-linguistic generalizations.

This volume investigates the clausal syntax of Wolof, an understudied Atlantic language of Senegal. The goals of the work are descriptive, analytical, and comparative, with a focus on the structure of the left periphery and left peripheral phenomena. The book includes detailed examination of the morpho?syntax of wh?questions, successive cyclicity, subject marking, relative clauses, topic/focus articulation, and complementizer agreement. Novel data from Wolof is used to evaluate and extend theoretical proposals concerning the structure of the Complementizer Phrase (CP) and Tense Phrase (TP). It is argued that Wolof provides evidence for the promotion analysis of relative clauses, an exploded CP and TP, and for analyses that treat relative clauses as composed of a determiner with a CP complement. It is further argued that Wolof has a set of silent wh?expressions and these are compared to superficially similar constructions in colloquial German, Bavarian, Dutch, and Norwegian. The book also presents a comparison of complementizer agreement across a number of related and unrelated languages. Data from Indo?European (Germanic varieties, French, Irish), Niger?Congo (Atlantic, Bantu, Gur), and Semitic (Arabic) languages put the Wolof phenomena in a larger typological context by showing the range of variation in complementizer agreement systems."

This monograph provides an in-depth investigation of the structural integration and the licensing of adverbs in relation to clause structure, with special emphasis on the structural implementation of the relation between the position and interpretation of adverbs. The book substantiates the hypothesis that the licensing of adverbs within and across the three layers of the clause is contingent on specifier-head agreement and that variation in the linear order of adverbs and other elements of the clause follows from the interplay of a small number of factors. The central claims made are: functional projections hosting adverbs are not confined to the inflectional and complementizer layer of the clause, but also play a central role in the shaping of the lexical layer; postverbal adverbs are realized within a semantically empty verbal projection and licensed under specifier head agreement by proxy; and adverbs that occur within the complementizer layer of the clause do so by either move or merge.