The study of syntax over the last half century has seen a remarkable expansion of the boundaries of human knowledge about the structure of natural language. The Routledge Handbook of Syntax presents a comprehensive survey of the major theoretical and empirical advances in the dynamically evolving field of syntax from a variety of perspectives, both within the dominant generative paradigm and between syntacticians working within generative grammar and those working in functionalist and related approaches. The handbook covers key issues within the field that include: • core areas of syntactic empirical investigation, • contemporary approaches to syntactic theory, • interfaces of syntax with other components of the human language system, • experimental and computational approaches to syntax. Bringing together renowned linguistic scientists and cutting-edge scholars from across the discipline and providing a balanced yet comprehensive overview of the field, the Routledge Handbook of Syntax is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in syntactic theory.

This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual languages and their cross-linguistic realizations to explain what syntactic analyses can do and at the same time to show in what respects syntactic theories differ from each other. It investigates how syntax is related to neighbouring disciplines and investigate the role of the interfaces especially the relationship between syntax and phonology, morphology, compositional semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. The phenomena chosen bring together renowned experts in syntax, and represent the consensus reached as to what has to be considered as an important as well as illustrative syntactic phenomenon. The phenomena discuss do not only serve to show syntactic analyses, but also to compare theoretical approaches with each other.

This volume brings the data that many in formal linguistics have dismissed as peripheral straight into the core of syntactic theory. By bringing together experts from syntax, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, language acquisition, aphasia, and pidgin and creole studies, the volume makes a multidisciplinary case for the existence of nonsententials, which are analyzed in various chapters as root phrases and small clauses (Me; Me First!; Him worry?!; Class in session), and whose distinguishing property is the absence of Tense, and, with it, any syntactic phenomena that rely on Tense, including structural Nominative Case. Arguably, the lack of Tense specification is also responsible for the dearth of indicative interpretations among nonsententials, as well as for their heavy reliance on pragmatic context. So pervasive is nonsentential speech across all groups, including normal adult speech, that a case can be made that continuity of grammar lies in nonsentential, rather than sentential speech.

Focusing on objects, this book aims at contributing to the on-going inquiry into modelling structures with missing arguments. In addition to offering detailed discussion and analyses of a unique combination of three very different systems (English, Polish, and Hungarian), a larger goal here is to provide a framework for deriving cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic variation in the domain of object drop. Variation of this type is hypothesised to follow, first and foremost, from the association of heads in the extended nominal projection with phonemic features and from the system of interpretation of nominal expressions in a language. The book will be of interest to both theoretically- and descriptively-oriented researchers, since, even though its focus is theoretical, a detailed discussion of the empirical facts, including some novel findings drawn from corpus studies and grammaticality judgements, is also offered.

This book provides a novel analysis for the syntax of the clausal left periphery, focusing on various finite clause types and especially on embedded clauses. It investigates how the appearance of multiple projections interacts with economy principles and with the need for marking syntactic information overtly. In particular, the proposed account shows that a flexible approach assuming only a minimal number of projections is altogether favourable to cartographic approaches. The main focus of the book is on West Germanic, in particular on English and German, yet other Germanic and non-Germanic languages are also discussed for comparative purposes.

This book is a cross-linguistic study of the syntax of yes-no questions and their answers, drawing on data from a wide range of languages with particular focus on English, Finnish, Swedish, Thai, and Chinese. There are broadly two types of answer to yes-no questions: those that employ particles such as 'yes' and 'no' (as found in English) and those that echo a part of the question, usually the finite verb, with or without negation (as found in Finnish). The latter are uncontroversially derived by ellipsis, while the former have been claimed to be clause substitutes. Anders Holmberg argues instead that even answers that employ particles are complete sentences, derived by ellipsis from full sentential expressions, and that the two types share essential syntactic properties. The book also examines the related cross-linguistic and intralinguistic variation observed in answers to negative questions such as 'does he not drink coffee?', whereby 'yes' in one language appears to correspond to 'no' in another. The book illustrates how a seemingly trivial phenomenon can have the most wide-ranging consequences for theories of language, and will be of interest not only to theoretical linguists but also to students and scholars of typological and descriptive linguistics.

This volume brings together a selection of articles illustrating the multifaceted nature of current research in generative syntax. The authors, including some of the leading figures in the field, present analyses of typologically diverse languages, with some studies drawing on dialectal, acquisitional and diachronic evidence. Set against this rich empirical background, the contributions address an equally wide range of theoretical issues.

This book investigates the syntax and usage of fragments (Morgan 1973), apparently subsentential utterances like "A coffee, please!" which fulfill the same communicative function as the corresponding full sentence "I'd like to have a coffee, please!". Even though such utterances are frequently used, they challenge the central role that has been attributed to the notion of sentence in linguistic theory, particularly from a semantic perspective. The first part of the book is dedicated to the syntactic analysis of fragments, which is investigated with experimental methods. Currently there are several competing theoretical analyses of fragments, which rely almost only on introspective data. The experiments presented in this book constitute a first systematic evaluation of some of their crucial predictions and, taken together, support an in situ ellipsis account of fragments, as has been suggested by Reich (2007). The second part of the book addresses the questions of why fragments are used at all, and under which circumstances they are preferred over complete sentences. Syntactic accounts impose licensing conditions on fragments, but they do not explain, why fragments are sometimes (dis)preferred provided that their usage is licensed. This book proposes an information-theoretic account of fragments, which predicts that the usage of fragments in constrained by a general tendency to distribute processing effort uniformly across the utterance. With respect to fragments, this leads to two predictions, which are empirically confirmed: Speakers tend towards omitting predictable words and they insert additional redundancy before unpredictable words.

A comprehensive look at the syntactic properties of Portuguese, focusing on differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese such as their pronominal and agreement systems, null subjects, null complements and word order. It is essential reading for researchers and students of Portuguese language, Romance linguistics and theoretical syntax.

The volume is a collection of original articles that present new research on first and second language acquisition from the perspective of current generative linguistics, using a detailed case study of Portuguese as a first, second and third language. The book focuses on studies exploring both empirical/experimental and theoretical aspects of the acquisition of syntax and its interfaces with morphology, with semantics/pragmatics, and language change. The volume includes chapters on the child and adult acquisition of European and Brazilian Portuguese, and several chapters that also compare and contrast the two varieties from these different perspectives.