Non-Projecting Words

A Case Study of Swedish Particles

von I. Toivonen

237 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Focusing primarily on Swedish, a Germanic language whose particles have not previously been studied extensively,
Non-Projecting Words: A Case Study on Swedish Particles
develops a theory of non-projecting words in which particles are morphologically independent words that do not project phrases.

Particles have long constituted a puzzle for Germanic syntax, as they exhibit properties of both morphological and syntactic constructs. Although non-projecting words have appeared in the literature before, it has gone largely unnoticed that such structures violate the basic tenets of X-bar theory. This work identifies these violations and develops a formally explicit revision of X-bar theory that can accommodate the requisite "weak" projections.

The resulting theory, stated in terms of Lexical-Functional Grammar, also yields a novel classification of clitics, and it sheds new light on a range of recent theoretical proposals, including economy, multi-word constructions, and the primitives of lexical semantics. At an abstract level, we see that the modular, parallel-projection architecture of LFG is essential to the description of a variety of otherwise recalcitrant facts about non-projecting words.

• Reihe: Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
• ISBN: 9781402015328
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 30.09.2003
• Genre: Sprachwissenschaft, Literaturwissenschaft/Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft
• Verlag: Springer Netherland