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This book examines the nature, creation, and comprehension of constructions in which words that go together in meaning occur arbitrarily far away from each other. It provides a detailed survey of the factors responsible for their creation and comprehension, alongside new experimental evidence and suggestions for future research.
List of contents
- 1: Introduction
- 2: Extraction types
- 3: Extraction constraints
- 4: Movement-based approaches
- 5: Non-movement-based approaches
- 6: Experience-based effects
- 7: The acquisition of UDCs
- 8: Conclusion
About the author
Rui P. Chaves is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. His work focuses on how linguistic knowledge interfaces with cognition, and in particular with probabilistic information that shapes linguistic behavior. He has specialized in formally explicit construction-based models of grammar.
Michael T. Putnam is Associate Professor of German and Linguistics at Penn State University. His research focuses on achieving a more refined understanding of linguistic phenomena along the morphology-syntax-semantics continuum. He has a particular interest in Germanic languages and the effects of bilingualism across the lifespan.
Summary
This book examines the nature, creation, and comprehension of constructions in which words that go together in meaning occur arbitrarily far away from each other. It provides a detailed survey of the factors responsible for their creation and comprehension, alongside new experimental evidence and suggestions for future research.
Additional text
Unbounded dependency constructions have played an important role in linguistic theory for more than 50 years. In this volume, Chaves and Putnam present a comprehensive survey of this research with a large number of well-chosen examples and detailed references. This will be very useful to both established and beginning linguists. The authors compare movement-based theories such as Chomsky's Minimalist Program with non-movement-based theories which adopt Gazdar's seminal proposal to replace movement with feature percolation. The formal properties of these two types of theories are scrutinized and evaluated from the perspective of language processing and acquisition, leading to the authors' own constructivist exemplar-based model of how island constraints emerge.
