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Recent years have seen a growing interest in grammatical variation, a core explanandum of grammatical theory. The present volume explores questions that are fundamental to this line of research: First, the question of whether variation can always and completely be explained by intra- or extra-linguistic predictors, or whether there is a certain amount of unpredictable – or ‘free’ – grammatical variation. Second, the question of what implications the (in-)existence of free variation would hold for our theoretical models and the empirical study of grammar. The volume provides the first dedicated book-length treatment of this long-standing topic. Following an introductory chapter by the editors, it contains ten case studies on potentially free variation in morphology and syntax drawn from Germanic, Romance, Uralic and Mayan.
Control, typically defined as a specific referential dependency between the null-subject of a non-finite embedded clause and a co-dependent of the matrix predicate, has been subject to extensive research in the last 50 years. While there is a broad consensus that a distinction between Obligatory Control (OC), Non-Obligatory Control (NOC) and No Control (NC) is useful and necessary to cover the range of relevant empirical phenomena, there is still less agreement regarding their proper analyses. In light of this ongoing discussion, the articles collected in this volume provide a cross-linguistic perspective on central questions in the study of control, with a focus on non-canonical control phenomena. This includes cases which show NOC or NC in complement clauses or OC in adjunct clauses, cases in which the controlled subject is not in an infinitival clause, or in which there is no unique controller in OC (i.e. partial control, split control, or other types of controllers). Based on empirical generalizations from a wide range of languages, this volume provides insights into cross-linguistic variation in the interplay of different components of control such as the properties of the constituent hosting the controlled subject, the syntactic and lexical properties of the matrix predicate as well as restrictions on the controller, thereby furthering our empirical and theoretical understanding of control in grammar.
Modern theoretical linguistics lives by the insight that the meanings of complex expressions derive from the meanings of their parts and the way these are composed. However, the currently dominating theories of the syntax-semantics interface hastily relegate important aspects of meaning which cannot readily be aligned with visible structure to empty projecting heads non-reductively (mainstream Generative Grammar) or to the syntactic construction holistically (Construction Grammar). This book develops an alternative, compositional analysis of the hidden aspectual-temporal, modal and comparative meanings of a range of productive constructions of which pseudorefl exive, excessive and directional complement constructions take center stage. Accordingly, a contradiction-inducing hence semantically problematic part of literally coded meaning is locally ignored and systematically realized „expatriately“ with respect to parts of structure that achieve the indexical anchoring of propositional contents in terms of times, worlds and standards of comparison, thus yielding the observed hidden meanings.