Cross-Linguistic Studies of Imposters and Pronominal Agreement

Erscheinungsjahr 2014
ISBN: 978-0-19-933686-9
Verlag: OUP US

Buch, Englisch, 282 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 484 g

Reihe: Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax

Imposters are third person DPs that are used to refer to the speaker/writer or addressee, such as:

(i) Your humble servant finds the time before our next encounter very long.

(ii) This reporter thinks that the current developments are extraordinary.

(iii) Daddy will be back before too long.

(iv) The present author finds the logic of the reply faulty.

This volume explores verbal and pronominal agreement with imposters from a cross-linguistic perspective. The central questions for any given language are: (a) How do singular and plural imposters agree with the verb? (b) When a pronoun has an imposter antecedent, what are the phi-features of the pronoun? The volume reveals a remarkable degree of variation in the answers to these questions, but also reveals some underlying generalizations. The contributions describe imposters in Bangla, Spanish,

Albanian, Indonesian, Italian, French, Romanian, Mandarin and Icelandic.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Collins, Chris

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Grammatik, Syntax, Morphologie

Über Autor(innen)

Chris Collins is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT in 1993. He specializes syntactic theory, including the syntax of English and the syntax of African languages.