Empirical Issues in Formal Syntax and Semantics

The present volume is a collection of studies devoted to major issues in contemporary syntax and semantics: in particular, argument structure, ellipsis, negation and scope. The papers included, which represent a number of formally rigorous contemporary frameworks, bring out new facts from a large variety of languages as well as novel solutions to a broad range of analytic puzzles.

Part One illustrates the major ways in which argument structure is used and conceptualized. Part Two provides new perspectives on ellipsis, applying concepts and tools developed for focus, questions and quantification. Part Three introduces a number of novel proposals for the representation of scope, considerably enlarging the empirical domain of scope relations.

These studies are unusual in that they combine an enthusiasm for detailed syntactic and semantic data and a serious concern for formal rigor. They discuss data from a wide variety of languages, including Japanese, Bulgarian, French, Greek, English, Italian, German, Hungarian, Inuit and Western Austronesian languages. The main themes of the book include negation, argument structure, ellipsis, indefinites, telicity, presuppositions, modality and quantification.