Description
Book SynopsisThis book explores the view that impoverishment and Agree operations are part of a single grammatical component. The architecture set forth here gives rise tocomplex but highly systematic interactions between the two operations. This interaction is shown to provide a unified and general account of apparentlydiverse and unrelated intances of eccentric argument encoding that so far haveremained elusive to a unified theoretical account. The proposed view of the grammatical architecture achieves an integration of these phenomena withinbetter-studied languages and thus gives rise to a more general theory of caseand agreement phenomena. The empirical evidence on the basis of which the proposal is developed drawsfrom a wide range of typologically non-related languages, including Basque, Hindi, Icelandic, Itelmen, Marathi, Nez Perce, Niuean, Punjabi, Sahaptin, Selayarese, Yukaghir, and Yurok . The proposal has far-reaching consequences for the study of grammatical architecture, linguistic interfaces, derivational locality in apparently non-local dependencies and the role of functional considerations in formal approaches tothe human language faculty.
Trade Review"I consider Stefan Keine's book an important (truly groundbreaking) contribution to the generative study of case and agreement, as well as to the more general problems pertaining to the architecture and mechanisms of grammar. It offers a highly appealing, technically simple, and conceptually uniform account of a number of apparently disparate phenomena from languages as diverse as Icelandic, Hindi, and Nez Perce, many of which have been poorly understood before."Peter M. Arkadiev in: Linguist List 22.2151
