Constraint-Based Approaches to Germanic Syntax

California Linguistic Notes Volume Xxxviii, No. 1 Spring 2013 Review of " Symmetry Breaking in Syntax "

Hubert Haider’ primary goal in his latest book is to establish a universal constraint on the branching structure of Language: there are only right branching structures and their mirror image—left branching ones—do not exist at all. Through this strong proposal, Haider seeks to shed light on what he considers a universal, inviolable aspect of the architecture of grammar, thus contributing to the...

Cross-linguistic Influence at Syntax-pragmatics Interface: A Case of OPC in Persian

Recent research in the area of Second Language Acquisition has proposed that bilinguals and L2 learners show syntactic indeterminacy when syntactic properties interface with other cognitive domains. Most of the research in this area has focused on the pragmatic use of syntactic properties while the investigation of compliance with a grammatical rule at syntax-related interfaces has not received...

The development of Old English

This volume is the second in Ringe’s Linguistic history of English, picking up where the previous book, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic (Ringe 2006), left off. It covers the time period from the break-up of Proto-Germanic until c. 900 ce, thus ending roughly in the middle of the Old English (OE) period as traditionally conceived. The scope of this monumental project will be apparent ...

THE NEW COMPARATIVE SYNTAX The Germanic SOV Languages and the Universal Base Hypothesis

Tibor Kiss and W . Detmar

This volume presents eight investigations into the grammar of Germanic languages. The approaches are based on the constraint-based architectures of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG, Bresnan, 1982a) and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG, Pollard and Sag, 1994), which share the idea that declarative constraints are used to describe the syntactic, semantic, and other properties of linguist...