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20 results

The Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Syntax
  • Edited by Sjef Barbiers, Norbert Corver, Maria Polinsky
  • Published online:
    05 January 2026
    Print publication:
    04 September 2025
  • Bringing together a globally representative team of scholars, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of comparative syntax, the study of universal and variable properties of the structure of building blocks in natural language. Divided into four thematic parts, it covers the various theoretical and methodological approaches to syntactic variation; explores dependency relations and dependency marking; shows how the building blocks of syntax both vary and display universal properties across languages, and explores the interfaces between syntax and other aspects of language structure. It also includes examples from a typologically broad range of languages, as well as data from child language, sign language, language processing, and diachronic syntax, giving a clear picture of the ubiquity of cross-linguistic variation. It serves as a source of inspiration for future research, and forges a deeper understanding of the variant and invariant parts of language, making it essential reading for researchers and students in linguistics.

  • 7 - Micro-Comparative Syntax, Dialectology, and Sociolinguistics

  • from Part I - Comparative Syntax: Theory, Methodology, and Data Collection
  • Edited by Sjef Barbiers, Universiteit Leiden, Norbert Corver, Universiteit Utrecht, Maria Polinsky, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Syntax
    Published online:
    05 January 2026
    Print publication:
    04 September 2025, pp 203-227

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the subdiscipline of micro-comparative syntax in its relation to dialectology and sociolinguistics. While micro-comparative syntax seeks to contribute to a theoretical cognitive model of the human language capacity, dialectology and sociolinguistics study the relation between linguistic properties and external factors such as geography, age, gender, and social class. Differences and similarities between the three subdisciplines are discussed, as well as the ways they can be combined. The chapter has a strong focus on methodology. The appendix to this chapter provides an overview of recent large-scale dialect syntax projects with links to the project websites and databases.

  • 2 - Theoretical Approaches to Comparative Syntax

  • from Part I - Comparative Syntax: Theory, Methodology, and Data Collection
  • Edited by Sjef Barbiers, Universiteit Leiden, Norbert Corver, Universiteit Utrecht, Maria Polinsky, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Syntax
    Published online:
    05 January 2026
    Print publication:
    04 September 2025, pp 23-74

  • Summary

    This chapter provides an overview of the various approaches to theoretical modeling of syntactic variation in human language. Three main types of syntactic variation, i.e., word order variation, silence and doubling, are described and then used to demonstrate how different generative theories capture these phenomena. The generative theories discussed include Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG), Government and Binding (GB) Theory, Minimalism (including Optimality Theory), Nanosyntax, Distributed Morphology, and post-GB Parameter Theory (including parameter hierarchies and the Universal Spine Hypothesis). Taking into account a great many different languages and dialects, the chapter shows that strong progress has been made in our understanding of the nature, range, and limits of syntactic variation.

  • 24 - Microsyntacticvariation

  • from Part VI - Syntax and the external interfaces
  • Edited by Marcel den Dikken, City University of New York
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    25 July 2013, pp 899-926

  • Summary

    Tense, aspect, and modality are grammatical categories that occur as functional heads in clause structure. They are traditionally grouped together by virtue of their semantic cohesion and their frequent morphological clustering or fusion. Research in generative syntax has focused on describing the morphosyntactic encoding of features related to temporal meaning, and on accounting for the general properties of tenses that occur in natural language. The tense section outlines empirical generalizations and their generative syntactic description. The term 'aspect' refers to two different layers of temporal information in the predicate phrase: the classification of events according to their temporal properties (stative/non-stative, punctual/durative, telic/atelic); and grammatical aspect, a temporal framework within which the event is located or described. Modality and mood are relational categories that express a mode by which a proposition is anchored to the external context of evaluation.

  • Syntactic doubling and the structure of wh-chains1

  • SJEF BARBIERS, OLAF KOENEMAN, MARIKA LEKAKOU
  • Journal:
    Journal of Linguistics / Volume 46 / Issue 1 / March 2010
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    29 September 2009, pp. 1-46
    Print publication:
    March 2010

  • This paper discusses cases of syntactic doubling in wh-dependencies attested in dialects of Dutch, where more than one member of the same chain is spelled out. We focus on cases of non-identical doubling, in which the chain links spelled out have different forms. We demonstrate that the order of elements in a chain is fixed: the first (or syntactically higher) one is less specific that the second one. We argue that this generalization follows from partial copying, a process that copies a proper sub-constituent and remerges it higher in the structure. This naturally excludes the ungrammatical orders, as these would involve full copying plus the addition of features, in violation of the inclusiveness condition. The proposal requires pronouns to be spell-outs of phrases, and it is in combination with this hypothesis that the full set of data is accounted for in a uniform way. Advantages over alternative accounts of syntactic doubling are discussed.