Heather Burnett
List of John Benjamins publications in which Heather Burnett is involved.
2018 Variation as a testing ground for grammatical theory: Variable negative concord in Montréal French The Locus of Linguistic Variation, Lignos, Constantine, Laurel MacKenzie and Meredith Tamminga (eds.), pp. 117–150 | Article
This paper addresses the contribution that corpus-based studies of syntactic variation can make to the construction, elaboration and testing of formal syntactic theories, with a particular focus on the testing dimension. In particular, I present a new empirical study of obligatory and optional… read more
2016 Variation as a testing ground for grammatical theory: Variable negative concord in Montréal French The locus of linguistic variation, Lignos, Constantine, Laurel MacKenzie and Meredith Tamminga (eds.), pp. 267–299 | Article
This paper addresses the contribution that corpus-based studies of syntactic variation can make to the construction, elaboration and testing of formal syntactic theories, with a particular focus on the testing dimension. In particular, I present a new empirical study of obligatory and optional… read more
2014 Le prédicat résultatif adjectival en français médiéval Lingvisticæ Investigationes 37:1, pp. 156–180 | Article
The goal of this article is to show that adjectival resultative secondary predication was a syntactic possibility in Medieval French. From a diachronic point of view, the presence of this construction is surprising given that it is attested neither in Latin nor in Modern French. From a typological… read more
2012 The evolution of the encoding of direction in the history of French: A quantitative approach to argument structure change Historical Linguistics 2009: Selected papers from the 19th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Nijmegen, 10-14 August 2009, Kemenade, Ans M.C. van and Nynke de Haas (eds.), pp. 333–354 | Article
This paper presents a quantitative study of a change in the encoding of direction from the Old French period to the Middle French period: the loss of verb-particle combinations. Using a large electronic corpus, we test a previous hypothesis about the cause of this change from the theoretical… read more
2011 Degree fronting in Québec French and the syntactic structure of degree quantifier DPs Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2009: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' Nice 2009, Berns, Janine, Haike Jacobs and Tobias Scheer (eds.), pp. 39–54 | Article
In this paper, we compare two syntactic constructions involving degree adverbs in English and Québec French: the Degree Fronting (DF) construction and the Intensification at a Distance (IAD) construction. We argue that, although they display some similar properties, these similarities are… read more
2010 Pitch accent, focus, and the interpretation of non-wh exclamatives in French Romance Linguistics 2009: Selected papers from the 39th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Tucson, Arizona, March 2009, Colina, Sonia, Antxon Olarrea and Ana Maria Carvalho (eds.), pp. 369–386 | Article
This paper examines the cross-linguistic realization of the class of exclamatives in the Romance languages. I argue that, while the syntactic and semantic properties of exclamative sentences are usually viewed as being licensed by wh-morphology, other grammatical features such as f(ocus) marking… read more
2009 Variable-behavior Ps and the location of PATH in Old French Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ Amsterdam 2007, Aboh, Enoch O., Elisabeth van der Linden, Josep Quer and Petra Sleeman (eds.), pp. 25–50 | Article
This paper investigates the interaction between lexical semantics and syntactic structure in the interpretation of prepositional phrases through a study of the lexical encoding of directionality in prepositions and particles in Old French (OF). OF had a series of locative and directional… read more