Description

The contributions making up this volume in honor of Eloise Jelinek are written from a formalist perspective that deals with stereotypically functionalist questions about language. Jelinek's pioneering work in formalist syntax has shown that autonomous syntax need not exist in a vacuum. Her work has highlighted the importance of incorporating the effects of discourse and information structure on the syntactic representation. This book aims to invoke Jelinek's work either in substance or spirit. The focus is on Jelinek's influential Pronominal Argument Hypothesis as an "non-configurational" language; the influence of discourse-related interface phenomena on syntactic structure; the syntactic analysis of the grammaticalization; interactions between morphology, phonology and phonetics; and foundational issues about the link between formal grammar and function of language, as well as the methodological issues underlying the different approaches to linguistics.

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ISBN: 978-1588113481

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/la.62

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Reviews 

• Language 80:3 616-617 (reviewer: Fritz Newmeyer, U. Washington): http://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2004.0139

• Bопроси Жазикознаныа 2006:3:139-144 (Voprosy Jazykoznanya) (reviewer: D.V. Gerasitov). download

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Ordering Information:​

• Purchase from John Benjamins

• Purchase from Amazon

 

Table of Contents

Contributors 

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Formalizing Functionalism (Andrew Carnie and Heidi Harley)

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Part I: The Pronominal Argument Hypothesis

• On the significance of Eloise Jelinek’s Pronominal Argument Hypothesis (Kenneth L. Hale)

• Categories and pronominal arguments (Emmon Bach)

• Doubling by Agreement in Slave (Northern Athapaskan) (Keren Rice)

• Quasi objects in St’át’imcets: On the (semi-)independence of Agreement and Case (Henry Davis and Lisa Matthewson)

• Agreement, dislocation, and partial configurationality (Mark C. Baker)

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Part II: Interfaces

• Multiple multiple questions (Molly Diesing)

• Attitude evaluation in complex NPs (Lynn Nichols)

• Topic-Focus articulation and degrees of salience in the Prague Dependency Treebank (Petr Sgall, Eva Hajičová and Eva Buráňová)

• Word order and discourse genre in Tohono O’odham (Colleen M. Fitzgerald)

• The prosody of interrogative and focus constructions in Navajo (Joyce McDonough)

• Subject number agreement, grammaticalization, and transitivity in the Cupeño verb construction

• (Jane H. Hill)

• Lexical irregularity in OT: DOT vs. Variable Constraint Ranking (Diana Archangeli)

• Rapid perceptibility as a factor underlying universals of vowel inventories (Natasha Warner)

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Part III: Foundational issues

• Argument hierarchies and the mapping principle (Eloise Jelinek and Andrew Carnie)

• Focus movement and the nature of uninterpretable features (Simin Karimi)

• Merge (D. Terence Langendoen)

• Phonotactics and probabilistic ranking (Michael Hammond)

• Deconstructing functionalist explanations of linguistic universals (Thomas G. Bever)

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Name index

Subject index

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