Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to semantics as applied to transformational grammars of the ...

W. Labov's & T. Labov's findings concerning their child grammar acquisition ("Learning the Syntax of Questions" in Recent Advances in the Psychology of Language, Campbell, R. & Smith, P. Eds, New York: Plenum Press, 1978) are interpreted in terms of different semantics of why & other wh-questions. Z. Dubiel.

This thesis argues for a reformulation of the A/A-bar distinction in the theory of syntax. In the first part of this thesis, it is shown that this reformulation is forced by both theoretical considerations raised by VP internal subject theories and also certain empirical considerations relating to scrambling operations in Hindi. Evidence for the reformulation includes locality constraints on movement, weak crossover phenomena, reconstruction effects and binding properties associated with movement. This evidence also leads to a new approach to the (...) study of scrambling phenomena. It is suggested that scrambling operations that move NPs may belong to two different kinds of syntactic operations--an operation that involves substituting the scrambled element into a SPEC of a functional projection internal to IP and an operation that adjoins the scrambled NP to a maximal projection . The approach developed here yields a framework that seems to be promising for the study of variation found with respect to scrambling phenomena in natural languages. ;The second part of this thesis argues that a language that does not have overt wh-movement at s-structure may not have wh-movement to SPEC CP at LF either. It is argued that in a language like Hindi, the wh-phrases simply undergo QR at LF. This operation adjoins a wh-phrase to the nearest IP. We show that this approach yields a number of consequences that are desirable in Hindi, a language that at first glance seems to be mixed between a language with overt wh-movement in syntax as well as wh-in-situ. We discuss some aspects of wide scope quantification in Hindi and some other languages and show that the absence of wh-movement to SPEC CP at LF yields certain effects that would be surprising under the approaches that permit wh-movement to SPEC CP at LF. (shrink)

The possibility of extraction across awh-island is usually assumed to be dependent on whether or not the constituent in question can undergo “long” (i.e., nonlocal) Ā-movement across the island. However, the question of how to make a principled distinction between those elements which can violate locality and those which cannot is still rather controversial. I will propose that there are no well-formed locality violations in these cases, and that the grammaticality patterns observed derive from a semantic filter on the escape (...) hatch used to bypass the island. In other words, if a phrase is extracted across awh-island, it must adjoin to the island in order to get by. This adjunction site is restricted by the interpretive component: only traces which are interpreted as variables of typee can occur in this position, while higher-order variables are not allowed. This restriction is shown to capture the known facts aboutwh-island violations, as well as some less known phenomena, such as the absence of functional (and pair-list) readings acrosswh-islands. (shrink)

In certain languages, scope-marking structures are used to express long-distancewh-dependencies along with or instead of the more familiar extraction structure. The existence of these two strategies raises an interesting question for the mapping between syntactic structure and semantic representation. Should apparent semantic equivalence be taken as a guide and syntactic parallelism posited at an abstract level of syntax? Or should the surface syntactic distinction between them be maintained and an alternative explanation sought for the similarity in meaning? In this paper (...) I show that theoretical as well as empirical considerations argue against the first approach. I present a syntactic analysis of scope-marking structures in which the dependency betweenwh-expressions is indirect (in contrast to extraction structures which encode directwh-dependencies). I draw attention to certain differences between scope marking and extraction structures which show that they are not really equivalent. The interpretive procedure given for indirectwh-dependencies derives the considerable similarity in meaning between the two structures while maintaining the necessary distinctions. (shrink)