Non-Projecting Words [electronic resource] : A Case Study of Swedish Particles /

Focusing primarily on Swedish, a Germanic language whose particles have not previously been studied extensively, Non-Projecting Words: A Case Study on Swedish Particles develops a theory of non-projecting words in which particles are morphologically independent words that do not project phrases. Particles have long constituted a puzzle for Germanic syntax, as they exhibit properties of both morphological and syntactic constructs. Although non-projecting words have appeared in the literature before, it has gone largely unnoticed that such structures violate the basic tenets of X-bar theory. This work identifies these violations and develops a formally explicit revision of X-bar theory that can accommodate the requisite "weak" projections. The resulting theory, stated in terms of Lexical-Functional Grammar, also yields a novel classification of clitics, and it sheds new light on a range of recent theoretical proposals, including economy, multi-word constructions, and the primitives of lexical semantics. At an abstract level, we see that the modular, parallel-projection architecture of LFG is essential to the description of a variety of otherwise recalcitrant facts about non-projecting words.

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Toivonen, Ida. author., SpringerLink (Online service)
Format: Texto biblioteca
Language:eng
Published: Dordrecht : Springer Netherlands : Imprint: Springer, 2003
Subjects:Linguistics., Comparative linguistics., Germanic languages., Grammar., Scandinavian languages., Syntax., Theoretical Linguistics., Scandinavian., Comparative Linguistics., Germanic Languages.,
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0053-6
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