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Non-endocentric Syntax| old_uid | 4350 |
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| title | Non-endocentric Syntax |
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| start_date | 2008/03/18 |
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| schedule | 15h45-17h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | MPI Big conference room, 1.63 |
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| summary | Since Bloomfield (1933) and especially Harris (1946), the notion of endocentrism has played an important role in syntactic theory and analysis. The basic idea is that a noun phrase has a noun as the defining constituent or ‘head’, a verb phrase has a verb as the head, etc. X-bar syntax, originally proposed in Chomsky (1970) and based on ideas of Harris’, establishes endocentrism as the fundamental principle governing phrasal categories headed by lexical categories (noun, verb, adjective, preposition, etc.), and Chomsky (1986) extends this principle to apply to grammatical categories as well (e.g. tense, complementizer, negation). X-bar syntax has been posited at various times to be a major principle of Universal Grammar and therefore of the Language Acquisition Device posited by Chomsky. Despite the apparently common-sensical principle that e.g. a noun phrase should be headed by a noun, problems for endocentrism have been noted over the years. Several such problems will be discussed: noun phrases with non-nominal heads (Nootka, Tagalog), adjective phrases (English) and verb phrases (Wari’ [Chapakuran, Brazil]) with clausal ‘heads’. These phenomena point to the need for a non-endocentric syntax, and Role and Reference Grammar [RRG] (e.g. Van Valin 2005) provides a model of grammar in which the major phrasal categories are non-endocentric. The RRG theory of phrase structure, known as the layered structure of the clause, will be applied to the phenomena mentioned above, and each of the traditional major phrasal types, i.e. NP, VP, AdjP, PP, will be discussed. This reanalysis has interesting implications for the question of whether lexical categories are best conceived as falling into sharply divided, mutually exclusive categories or as being members of gradient and overlapping categories. |
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| responsibles | Zondervan |
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