Category neutrality : a type-logical investigation
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Category neutrality : a type-logical investigation
(Outstanding dissertations in linguistics)(A Routledge series)
Routledge, 2016, c2005
- : pbk
Available at 3 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Based on the author's dissertation, Ohio State University
Bibliography: p. 305-312
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
"Feature neutrality" is an issue that has received much attention among linguists. For example, consider the sentence, "I have never, and will never, put my name on this document." Here, the verb 'put' acts simultaneously as a past participle (as in "have never put") and a base form (as in "will never put"), and is therefore said to be neutral between the two forms. Similar examples have been found for many languages.
The accepted wisdom is that neutrality is possible only for morphosyntactic features such as verb form, gender, number, declension class-not at the level of gross syntactic category, where the semantic differences are more significant. In other words, it has been claimed that "category neutrality," where a word or phrase is used simultaneously with more than one syntactic category, does not exist. (A famous example is the glaring ungrammaticality of this sentence, in which "can" is used simultaneously as a main verb and auxiliary verb: "I can tuna and get a new job.") In this book, however, Neal Whitman shows that category neutrality does exist in English. This not only challenges the current thinking, but also raises foundational questions about the nature of ambiguity.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements List of Tables List of Figures Introduction Chapter 1: Empirical Background Chapter 2: Theoretical Background Chapter 3: Neutrality and Mixed-wh interrogatives Chapter 4: Neutrality and Verbal Argument Alternatives Chapter 5: Neutrality and Predicative Phrases Chapter 6: Category Neutrality and Adverbial Nouns Conclusion Appendix A: Attestations of Mixed-wh interrogatives Appendix B: Questionnaire items Bibliography Index
by "Nielsen BookData"