Sound and grammar / Susan Schmerling.

• Superior document: Empirical approaches to linguistic theory ; Volume 12
• Author: Schmerling, Susan.
• Place / Publishing House: Boston, MA : : Brill,, 2018.
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory 12.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (xix, 179 pages).

Sound and Grammar: A Neo-Sapirian Theory of Language by Susan F. Schmerling offers an original overall linguistic theory based on the work of the early American linguist Edward Sapir, supplemented with ideas from the philosopher-logicians Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Richard Montague and the linguist Elisabeth Selkirk. The theory yields an improved understanding of interactions among different aspects of linguistic structure, resolving notorious issues directly inherited by current theory from (post-) Bloomfieldian linguistics. In the theory presented here, syntax is a filter on a phonological algebra, not a linguistic level; linguistic expressions are phonological structures, and syntax is semantically relevant relations among phonological structures. The book shows how Neo-Sapirian Grammar sheds new light on syntax-phonology interactions in English, German, French, and Spanish.

Table of Contents

Introduction -- The Neo-Sapirian Model -- An nsg-Based Theory of Syntax -- The nsg Theory Applied to the Syntax (and Semantics) of English Imperatives -- A Case Study: NP-Internal Structure in German -- An nsg Study of English Finite Clauses -- French (and Spanish) Preposition-Article Portmanteaus as Phonologically Conditioned Phrase-Level Allomorphy -- Aligning Syntactic Constituents and Phonological Phrases in English -- Epilogue.