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Last update:
9 February 2010

© John Benjamins
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Verb First

On the syntax of verb-initial languages

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Edited by Andrew Carnie, Heidi Harley and Sheila Ann Dooley
The University of Arizona

2005. xiv, 434 pp.
Publishing status: Available

HardboundIn stock
978 90 272 2797 3 / EUR 140.00
978 1 58811 610 9 / USD 210.00
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e-BookAvailable from e-book platforms
978 90 272 9475 3 / EUR 140.00 / USD 210.00
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This collection of papers brings together the most recent crosslinguistic research on the syntax of verb-initial languages. Authors with a variety of theoretical perspectives pursue the questions of how verb-initial order is derived, and how these derivations play into the characteristic syntax of these languages. Major themes in the volume include the role of syntactic category in languages with verb-initial order; the different mechanisms of deriving V-initial order; and the universal correlates of the order. This book should be of interest to scholars who work on theoretical approaches to word order derivation, typologists, and those who work on the particular grammars of Celtic, Zapotec, Mixtec, Polynesian, Austronesian, Mayan, Salish, Aboriginal, and Nilotic languages.


Table of contents

Contributors
vii
Acknowledgments
ix
Abbreviations
xi
Introduction: When verbs come first
Andrew Carnie, Sheila Ann Dooley and Heidi Harley
1–5
Part I. VP movement vs Head-movement
What fronts? On the VP-raising account of verb-initial order
Sandra Chung
9–29
Coordination and constituency in St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish)
Henry Davis
31–64
Two derivations of VSO: A comparative study of Niuean and Tongan
Yuko Otsuka
65–90
Force first: Clause-fronting and clause typing in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec
Felicia Lee
91–106
V1 and wh-questions: a typology
Kenji Oda
107–133
Preverbal particles in verb-initial languages
Dirk Bury
135–154
A note on predicates and heads in Irish clausal syntax
James McCloskey
155–174
Seediq: Antisymmetry and final particles in a Formosan VOS language
Arthur Holmer
175–201
VP-internal structure in a VOS language
Lisa deMena Travis
203–224
Part II. Categories, Information Structure, and Prosodic factors
Lexical categories, lack of inflection, and predicate-fronting in Niuean
Diane Massam
227–242
Word order without syntactic categories: How Riau Indonesian does it
David Gil
243–263
Nominal properties of vPs in Breton: A hypothesis for the typology of VSO languages
Mélanie Jouitteau
265–280
On the parallelism of DPs and clauses: Evidence from Kisongo Maasai
Hilda Koopman
281–301
Ordering clitics and postverbal R-expressions in Tagalog: a unified analysis?
Loren Billings
303–339
The syntax of Chalcatongo Mixtec: Preverbal and postverbal
Monica Macaulay
341–366
Accounting for verb-initial order in an Australian language
Mary Laughren, Robert Pensalfini and Tom Mylne
367–401
References
403–426
Index
427–431


This books presents valuable insights into the syntax of a variety of verb-initial languages and as such is a great contribution to our understanding of syntax. Accounting for word order across languages is one of the main goals of syntactic theory, yet it is the word order problems that often present the toughest challenges for syntacticians. The research represented in this book goes a long way in elucidating the issues related to a particular subset of word orders, those where the verb comes first.
As such, this book not only provides an overview of the cutting-edge research on this subject, but also sets goals for future research.
Asya Pereltsvaig, Cornell University, on Linguist List 16.2503, 2005