Rethinking Verb Second (Rethinking Comparative Syntax) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198844301 ISBN 13: 9780198844303

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2020

Synopsis

This volume provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive treatment available of the Verb Second property, which has been a central topic in formal syntax for decades. While Verb Second has traditionally been considered a feature primarily of the Germanic languages, this book shows that it is much more widely attested cross-linguistically than previously thought, and explores the multiple empirical, theoretical, and experimental puzzles that remain in developing an account of the phenomenon. Uniquely, formal theoretical work appears alongside studies of psycholinguistics, language production, and language acquisition. The range of languages investigated is also broader than in previous work: while novel issues are explored through the lens of the more familiar Germanic data, chapters also cover Verb Second effects in languages such as Armenian, Dinka, Tohono O'odham, and in the Celtic, Romance, and Slavonic families. The analyses have wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of the language faculty, and will be of interest to researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of syntax, historical linguistics, and language acquisition.

About this title

About the Author

Rebecca Woods is Lecturer in Language and Cognition at Newcastle University. During the editing of this volume she was Senior Lecturer in Language Acquisition at the University of Huddersfield, having received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of York in 2016 for her work on the syntax of speech acts, which focuses on embedded verb movement. Her research interests lie in the syntax-semantics interface, especially the syntax and semantics of questions, and first language acquisition, both monolingual and multilingual.

Sam Wolfe is Associate Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine's College. Prior to this he held teaching and research positions at the Universities of Cambridge, Manchester, and Oxford as well as a Visiting Professorship at the University of Padua. His recent publications include Verb Second in Medieval Romance (2018) and he has published on a range of topics within French and comparative Romance linguistics, historical syntax, and formal syntax.

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198844301
• ISBN 13: 9780198844303
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 980
• Editor: Woods Rebecca, Wolfe Sam