Grebenyova Syntax, Semantics and Acquisition of Multiple Interrogatives

Who wants what?
Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-90-272-7336-9
Verlag: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 195, 209 Seiten

Reihe: Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

Multiple interrogatives, questions with multiple wh-phrases (e.g. Who bought what?), have long presented analytical challenges for linguistic theory. This monograph presents a new theoretical and experimental study of this construction. The theoretical findings concern the interaction between superiority effects, subject-auxiliary inversion, and the distribution of pair-list and single-pair readings cross-linguistically. The author examines multiple interrogatives under sluicing (i.e. clausal ellipsis), presenting new arguments for the deletion analysis of sluicing. The author also reports the results of several experimental studies on how children acquire the language-specific properties of multiple interrogatives in English, Russian, and Malayalam. The results suggest a correlation between the acquisition of multiple interrogatives and the acquisition of contrastive focus, which has been independently motivated in the syntactic literature. The monograph will be of interest to linguists concerned with syntax, semantics, and language acquisition, as well as readers who are interested in a comprehensive theory of language in general.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Grebenyova, Lydia

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Spracherwerb, Sprachentwicklung
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Grammatik, Syntax, Morphologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of abbreviations

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1. Superiority – Syntactic and interpretive

Chapter 2. Semantics of multiple interrogatives

Chapter 3. Multiple interrogatives and ellipsis

Chapter 4. Multiple left-branch extraction

Chapter 5. Acquisition of multiple interrogatives

Chapter 6. Acquiring contrastive focus and multiple interrogatives

Chapter 7. Concluding remarks

References

Appendix A: Test items in experiments on multiple interrogatives

Appendix B: Script for experimental stories on multiple interrogatives

Appendix C: Test items and script for experiments on contrastive focus

Index