Roehrs Demonstratives and Definite Articles as Nominal Auxiliaries

Erscheinungsjahr 2009
ISBN: 978-90-272-8977-3
Verlag: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 140, 212 Seiten

Reihe: Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

Written in the cartographic tradition, this monograph is concerned with the inner structure and derivation of noun phrases. It proposes that demonstratives and definite articles are similar to auxiliaries in the clause. Referencing mostly Germanic languages, the book argues that determiners are base generated below adjectives and subsequently move to the left periphery in a successive-cyclic fashion. Demonstrating that determiners are complex elements, it is proposed that languages vary with regard to when and what part of the determiner they move. This provides a novel account of the variation in the Scandinavian noun phrase. With various copies left behind by moving the determiner, the restrictive and non-restrictive readings of adjectives and relative clauses are suggested to follow from the interpretation of these different copies. The system is extended to the strong and weak adjective inflections in German. Proposing that determiners are auxiliaries in the nominal domain explains these apparently unrelated data in a uniform way.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Roehrs, Dorian

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Grammatik, Syntax, Morphologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Table of contents

Preface

xi
Chapter 1. Introduction

1–30
Chapter 2. The syntactic distribution of determiners

31–81
Chapter 3. The syntax and semantics of non-/restrictive modifiers

83–116
Chapter 4. The strong and weak alternation in German

117–175
Chapter 5. Conclusion

177–178
References

179–191
Language index

193
Subject index

195–196