Despite their apparently divergent accounts of higher cognition, cognitive theories based on neural computation and those employing symbolic computation can in fact strengthen one another. To substantiate this controversial claim, this landmark work develops in depth a cognitive architecture based in neural computation but supporting formally explicit higher-level symbolic descriptions, including new grammar formalisms.
Pronouns and anaphors (including reflexives such as himself and herself) may or must depend on antecedents for their interpretation. These dependencies are subject to conditions that prima facie show substantial crosslinguistic variation. In this monograph, Eric Reuland presents a theory of how these anaphoric dependencies are represented in natural language in a way that does justice to the the variation one finds across languages. He explains the conditions on these dependencies in terms of elementary properties of the computational system of natural language.
In Edge-Based Clausal Syntax, Paul Postal rejects the notion that an English phrase of the form [V + DP] invariably involves a grammatical relation properly characterized as a direct object. He argues instead that at least three distinct relations occur in such a structure. The different syntactic properties of these three kinds of objects are shown by how they behave in passives, middles, -able forms, tough movement, wh-movement, Heavy NP Shift, Ride Node Raising, re-prefixation, and many other tests.
Chomsky showed that no description of natural language syntax would be adequate without some notion of movement operations in a syntactic derivation. It now seems likely that such movement transformations are formally simple operations, in which a single phrase is displaced from its original position within a phrase marker, but after more than fifty years of generative theorizing, the mechanics of syntactic movement are still murky and controversial.
Human communication is grounded in fundamentally cooperative, even shared, intentions. In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially cooperative structure of human (as opposed to other primate) social interaction.
In The Syntax of Adjectives, Guglielmo Cinque offers cross-linguistic evidence that adjectives have two sources. Arguing against the standard view, and reconsidering his own earlier analysis, Cinque proposes that adjectives enter the nominal phase either as "adverbial" modifiers to the noun or as predicates of reduced relative clauses. Some of his evidence comes from a systematic comparison between Romance and Germanic languages.
In Agreement and Head Movement, Ian Roberts explores the consequences of Chomsky's conjecture that head movement is not part of the narrow syntax, the computational system that relates the lexicon to the interfaces. Unlike other treatments of the subject that discard the concept entirely, Roberts's monograph retains the core intuition behind head movement and examines to what extent it can be reformulated and rethought.
In Localism versus Globalism in Morphology and Phonology, David Embick offers the first detailed examination of morphology and phonology from a phase-cyclic point of view (that is, one that takes into account recent developments in Distributed Morphology and the Minimalist Program) and the only recent detailed treatment of allomorphy, a phenomenon that is central to understanding how the grammar of human language works.
In Arguments as Relations, John Bowers proposes a radically new approach to argument structure that has the potential to unify data from a wide range of different language types in terms of a simple and universal syntactic structure.
A Linguistics Workbook is a supplement to Linguistics: An Introduction, sixth edition. It can also be used with other introductory and intermediate linguistics texts. Whereas most of the examples in the textbook are based on English, the workbook provides exercises in morphology, phonetics, phonology, syntax, and semantics, drawn from a wide variety of languages. This new edition has been updated, with exercises added.
An examination of more than sixty years of successes and failures in developing technologies that allow computers to understand human spoken language.
An engaging introduction to the use of game theory to study lingistic meaning.
Briankle G. ChangGarnet C. ButchartClassical, modern, and contemporary philosophical writings that address the fundamental concepts of communication.
An argument that the way we listen to speech is shaped by our experience with our native language.
John B. CarrollStephen C. LevinsonWritings by a pioneering linguist, including his famous work on the Hopi language, general reflections on language and meaning, and the “Yale Report.”
Briankle G. ChangGarnet C. Butchart
John B. CarrollStephen C. Levinson
