Syntax, semantics and acquisition of multiple interrogatives : who wants what?

Bibliographic Information

Syntax, semantics and acquisition of multiple interrogatives : who wants what?

Lydia Grebenyova

(Linguistik aktuell, v. 195)

John Benjamins, c2012

  • : Hb

Available at  / 21 libraries

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Note

Bibliography: p. [169]-177

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Multiple interrogatives, questions with multiple wh-phrases (e.g. Who bought what?), have long presented analytical challenges for linguistic theory. This monograph presents a new theoretical and experimental study of this construction. The theoretical findings concern the interaction between superiority effects, subject-auxiliary inversion, and the distribution of pair-list and single-pair readings cross-linguistically. The author examines multiple interrogatives under sluicing (i.e. clausal ellipsis), presenting new arguments for the deletion analysis of sluicing. The author also reports the results of several experimental studies on how children acquire the language-specific properties of multiple interrogatives in English, Russian, and Malayalam. The results suggest a correlation between the acquisition of multiple interrogatives and the acquisition of contrastive focus, which has been independently motivated in the syntactic literature. The monograph will be of interest to linguists concerned with syntax, semantics, and language acquisition, as well as readers who are interested in a comprehensive theory of language in general.

Table of Contents

  • 1. List of abbreviations
  • 2. Preface
  • 3. Introduction
  • 4. Chapter 1. Superiority - Syntactic and interpretive
  • 5. Chapter 2. Semantics of multiple interrogatives
  • 6. Chapter 3. Multiple interrogatives and ellipsis
  • 7. Chapter 4. Multiple left-branch extraction
  • 8. Chapter 5. Acquisition of multiple interrogatives
  • 9. Chapter 6. Acquiring contrastive focus and multiple interrogatives
  • 10. Chapter 7. Concluding remarks
  • 11. References
  • 12. Appendix A: Test items in experiments on multiple interrogatives
  • 13. Appendix B: Script for experimental stories on multiple interrogatives
  • 14. Appendix C: Test items and script for experiments on contrastive focus
  • 15. Index

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