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Finiteness Matters
On finiteness-related phenomena in natural languages
"Although standardly recognized by linguists of many diverse theoretical persuasions, finiteness continues to figure among [...] the most poorly understood concepts of linguistic theory”. This was eloquently stated by Ledgeway (2000, 2007) and remains true even today. The present volume thus aims to shed some much needed light on this area of linguistic theorizing, with eleven chapters approaching finiteness phenomena from the fields of syntax, semantics, language acquisition, and Creole studies, and providing data from a range of different languages. Traditionally, approaches to finiteness within the Principles and Parameters framework have seen as their main aim to understand the relation between the morphological exponents of finiteness and the syntactic operations seemingly depending on these exponents. The papers in this volume mostly take their point of departure from this more traditional view on finiteness, before elaborating on, modifying and diverging from this tradition in novel and interesting ways.
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 231] 2016. vi, 346 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 15 August 2016
Published online on 15 August 2016
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- IntroductionKristin Melum Eide | pp. 1–44
- Part I: Finiteness: underlying relations
- Finiteness and PseudofinitenessElizabeth Cowper | pp. 47–78
- The Split T AnalysisHalldór Ármann Sigur∂sson | pp. 79–92
- Universals and variation: Encoding anaphoric dependenciesEric J. Reuland | pp. 93–120
- Finiteness, inflection, and the syntax your morphology can affordKristin Melum Eide | pp. 121–168
- Part II: Morphosyntactic exponents of (non-)finiteness
- Agreement is not an essential ingredient of finiteness: Evidence from impersonal sentences in Norwegian dialects and in EnglishTor A. Åfarli | pp. 171–188
- Non-finiteness in SaamákaMarleen Susanne van de Vate and Tonjes Veenstra | pp. 189–210
- Finiteness and response particles in West FlemishLiliane Haegeman and Andrew Weir | pp. 211–254
- Part III: Finiteness in language acquisition
- Word order and finiteness in acquisition: A study of Norwegian and English Wh-questionsMarit Westergaard | pp. 257–286
- The influence of phonological factors on the expression of finiteness by children learning Dutch as their first and second languageElma Blom and Nada Vasić | pp. 287–308
- Contradictory parameter settings in one mind: A case study of a Mandarin-Norwegian bilingual’s acquisition of finiteness and V2 in NorwegianFufen Jin and Kristin Melum Eide | pp. 309–342
- Index | pp. 343–346
“Integrating syntactic theory, cross-linguistic variation, and acquisition, this is the most wide ranging and up-to-date set of studies available on the concept of finiteness.”
David Adger, Queen Mary University London
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Nam, Stanley
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