A wide-ranging generative analysis of the typology of possession sentences, solving long-standing puzzles in their syntax and semantics. A major question for linguistic theory concerns how the structure of sentences relates to their meaning. There is broad agreement in the field that there is some regularity in the way that lexical semantics and syntax are related, so that thematic roles (the different participant roles in an event: agent, theme, goal, etc.) are predictably associated with particular syntactic positions. In this book, Neil Myler examines the syntax and semantics of possession sentences, which are infamous for appearing to diverge dramatically from this broadly regular pattern. On the one hand, Myler points out, possession sentences have too many meanings; in any given language, the construction used to express archetypal possessive meanings (such as personal ownership) is also often used to express other apparently unrelated notions (body parts, kinship relations, and many others). On the other hand, possession sentences have too many surface structures; languages differ markedly in the argument structures used to convey the same possessive meanings. Myler argues that recent work on the syntax-semantics interface in the generative tradition has developed the tools needed to solve these puzzles. Examining and synthesizing ideas from the literature and drawing on data from many languages (including some understudied Quechua dialects), Myler presents a novel way to understand the apparent irregularity of possession sentences while preserving explanations of general cross-linguistic regularities, offering a unified approach to the syntax and semantics of possession sentences that can also be integrated into a general theory of argument structure.

Bridging theoretical modelling and advanced empirical techniques is a central aim of current linguistic research. The progress in empirical methods contributes to the precise estimation of the properties of linguistic data and promises new ways for justifying theoretical models and testing their implications. The contributions to the present collective volume take up this challenge and focus on the relevance of empirical results achieved through up-to-date methodology for the theoretical analysis and modelling of argument structure. They tackle issues of argument structure from different perspectives addressing questions related to diverse verb types (unaccusatives, unergatives, (di)transitives, psych verbs), morpho-syntactic operations (prefixation, simple vs. particle verbs), case distinctions (dative vs. accusative, case vs. prepositions), argument and voice alternations (dative vs. benefactive alternation, active vs. passive), word order alternations and the impact of animacy, agentivity, and eventivity on argument structure. The volume will be of interest to theoretical linguists, psycholinguists, and corpus linguists interested in the syntax of argument structure and its modelling using precise empirical methods.

This book discusses existential and possessive constructions in two important, yet under-studied, language families, Slavic and Finno-Ugric. Using data from the Slavic languages of Polish, Belarusian and Russian, and the Finno-Ugric languages of Finnish, Hungarian, Meadow Mari, Komi-Permiyak and Udmurt, as well as the closely related Selkup of the Samoyedic family, the chapters in this volume analyse predicative possession in current syntactic terms. Seeking an answer to the theoretical question of whether BE-possessives and HAVE-possessives are just accidental values of the 'Possessive Parameter' or are intrinsically related, this book takes a comparative approach to a whole range of syntactic and semantic phenomena that appear in these constructions, including the definiteness restriction, genitive of negation, person/number agreement, argument structure and extractability. The individual case studies can be easily integrated into the Principles & Parameters framework in terms of parametric variation. Approaches to Predicative Possession is an important contribution to our understanding of predicative possession across languages, with findings that can be fruitfully extended to other language families. It is an equally useful source of information for theoretical linguists, typologists, and graduate students of linguistics.

This book brings a basic yet detailed description of Icelandic nominalizations to bear on the general theoretical and architectural issues that nominalizations have raised since the earliest work in generative syntax. While nominalization has long been central to theories of argument structure, and Icelandic has been an important language for the study of argument structure and syntax, Icelandic has not been brought into the general body of theoretical work on nominalization. In this work, Jim Wood shows that Icelandic-specific issues in the analysis of derived nominals have broad implications that go beyond the study of that one language. In particular, Icelandic provides special evidence that Complex Event Nominals (CENs), which seem to inherit their argument structure from the underlying verbs, can be formed without nominalizing a full verb phrase. This conclusion is at odds with prominent theories of nominalization that claim that CENs have the properties that they have precisely because they involve the nominalization of full verb phrases. The book develops a theory of allosemy within the framework of Distributed Morphology, showing how one single syntactic structure can get distinct semantic interpretations corresponding to the range of readings that are available to derived nominals. The resulting proposal demonstrates how the study of Icelandic nominalizations can both further our understanding of argument structure and shed new light on the syntax-semantics interface.

This volume explores the progress of cross-linguistic research into the structure of complex nominals since the publication of Chomsky's 'Remarks on Nominalization' in 1970. The contributors take stock of developments in this area and offer new perspectives based on data from a wide range of typologically diverse languages.

This book presents a novel account of syntactic and semantic variation in copular and existential sentences in Classical Hebrew. Like many languages, the system of Classical Hebrew copular sentences is quite complex, containing zero, pronominal, and verbal forms as well as eventive and inchoative semantics. Approaching this subject from the framework of Distributed Morphology provides an elegant and comprehensive explanation for both the syntactic and semantic variation in these sentences. This book also presents a theoretical model for analyzing copular sentences in other languages included related phenomena– such as pseudo-copulas. It is also a demonstration of what can be gained by applying modern linguistic analyses to dead languages. Citing and building off previous studies on this topic, this book will be of interest to those interested in the theoretical examination of copular and existential sentences and to those interested in Classical Hebrew more specifically.

Pioneers an innovative framework for theorizing about meaning in natural language and the role of context in interpretation.