Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Browse subjects
  3. Language and Linguistics
  4. Sociolinguistics
  5. Content listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

8753 results in Sociolinguistics

Page 155 of 438

  • 11 - Collaborating beyond Disciplinary Boundaries

  • from Part II - Transitions within a Profession
    • By Seongsook Choi, lecturer in the Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh, UK
  • Edited by Jo Angouri, University of Warwick, Meredith Marra, Victoria University of Wellington, Janet Holmes, Victoria University of Wellington
  • Book:
    Negotiating Boundaries at Work
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    20 December 2017
    Print publication:
    18 May 2017, pp 216-237

  • Summary

    Introduction

    This chapter reports on the impact of one of the many transitions currently reconfiguring the academic landscape, namely, interdisciplinary approaches to research. Due to financial constraints, most universities and major funding agencies in the UK (and beyond) encourage, and increasingly expect, collaborations across disciplinary boundaries, simultaneously breaking down existing disciplinary silos; however, the impact of these changes remains largely unexplored (Choi and Schnurr 2014).

    I draw on an ongoing large-scale research study that follows several interdisciplinary teams over the life cycle of a research project. To date, more than 400 hours of authentic interactions have been recorded, including large team meetings, as well as smaller (interdisciplinary) PhD supervision meetings. The overall aim of the project is to explore the ways in which interdisciplinary engagement is reflected at the micro-level of interaction: how do team members from different disciplines work together successfully by drawing on their expert knowledge? Using a subsection of the larger corpus, this chapter aims to identify and describe some of the discursive processes used by team members including the ways in which opposing viewpoints and approaches are negotiated within the group.

    Preliminary analyses suggest that in these interdisciplinary teams hierarchical ranking has less relevance than subject expertise. As a consequence, knowledge exchange and generation takes place dynamically, involving senior as well as relatively junior team members. Nevertheless, disciplinary orientations also feature. This boundary crossing has been described by Repko (2008: 22) as ‘the process of moving across knowledge formations for the purpose of achieving an enlarged understanding’. Here, I show how this is only one aspect of a more complex phenomenon with important relational implications.

    (Inter)disciplinarity

    The literature on interdisciplinarity has yet to settle on a definition or on core terminology. Common terms such as multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (Klein 2008; Stokols et al. 2003) shed little light on the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity, and all assume an underlying disciplinary structure. As Aldrich notes:

    one cannot build an interdisciplinary approach except on the basis of disciplines, because there is nothing to be ‘inter’ about without disciplines coming first. But more than that academy [sic] is itself built on disciplines, and the academy's values are grounded in the values of a discipline. (Aldrich 2014: 1–2)

  • 5 - ‘Doing Evaluation’ in the Modern Workplace: Negotiating the Identity of ‘Model Employee’ in Performance Appraisal Interviews

  • from Part I - Transitions to a Profession
    • By Dorien Van De Mieroop, Associate Professor in the Linguistics department of KU Leuven, Belgium, Stephanie Schnurr, Associate Professor at the Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick, UK.
  • Edited by Jo Angouri, University of Warwick, Meredith Marra, Victoria University of Wellington, Janet Holmes, Victoria University of Wellington
  • Book:
    Negotiating Boundaries at Work
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    20 December 2017
    Print publication:
    18 May 2017, pp 87-108

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Developments and transitions have characterised modern-day organisations ever since the historic shift from the industrial worker to the knowledge worker has put increasing emphasis on employees’ skills and knowledge. This process has been referred to as the ‘new work order’ (Gee et al. 1996) and is characterised by several diverse tendencies. One of these tendencies is ‘the dispersal of centralised authority and hegemony’ (Gee et al. 1996: xiii), which implies that ‘top-down hierarchies are replaced by “flat” allegedly egalitarian systems’ (Angouri 2013: 577). In these ‘flat’ hierarchical systems, workers ‘are expected to share the vision of the employer they work for’ while also orienting to ‘a set of core values – for example, equality, trust, collaboration, quality’ (Sarangi 2005: 163). These transitions to seemingly flatter organisational structures (Geis et al. 1990) have also led to changes in management approaches. These have been increasingly oriented to the egalitarian ideal of the new work order and have put more and more emphasis on empowering rather than directing employees. This worker empowerment ‘thus amounts to taking full responsibility and remaining accountable for what they [the employees] do (not) achieve’ (Sarangi 2005: 163). So, employees are made responsible for ‘motivating, disciplining and directing themselves’ (Cameron 2000: 14). Many organisational practices, such as problem solving, and standardising procedures which were traditionally the responsibilities of individuals in senior positions are often redefined in the modern workplace as the collective responsibility of the team, thus illustrating the shift ‘from top-down/ bottom-up to the level of the team’ (Angouri 2013: 577).

    In turn, such a transition towards more participatory approaches has had profound effects on the professional identities of employees, that is, the ways in which they perceive themselves, and their roles and responsibilities in the wider context of their workplace (see Fairclough 1992). For example, in a study of a gaming machine factory and a teaching hospital, Iedema and Scheeres (2003) observed how structural changes in these workplaces led to challenges for the staff in conceptualising their (new) roles and constructing their (new) professional identities.

  • 3 - Constructing a ‘Mission Statement’: A Multimodal Perspective on Believable Identity Construction in a Job Interview

  • from Part I - Transitions to a Profession
  • Edited by Jo Angouri, University of Warwick, Meredith Marra, Victoria University of Wellington, Janet Holmes, Victoria University of Wellington
  • Book:
    Negotiating Boundaries at Work
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    20 December 2017
    Print publication:
    18 May 2017, pp 50-65

  • Summary

    Introduction

    The job interview forms an integral part of workplace discourse, and is a crucial stage in an individual's transition into new employment. As a gatekeeping encounter, it operates within the discursive boundaries of existing workplace ideologies and is a site of professional and social identity construction. Research on job interviews has shown that constructing a ‘believable identity’ is a key element in promoting positive outcomes (Kerekes 2006; Roberts and Campbell 2006). In order to achieve this, prospective employees are expected to demonstrate situational competency characterised by their ability to combine various discourses – personal, professional and institutional (Iedema 2003; Roberts and Campbell 2006).

    The gatekeeper's analysis of this competency centres on the candidates’ background presentations – their first opportunity to establish a believable identity. This process typically takes place in a face-to- face setting in which speech is only one of many communicative means available to the participants. It is thus inherently multimodal, as modes such as gesture, gaze, body orientation and written text intersect with speech in the creation of meaning. This chapter extends the existing research on gatekeeping by applying a multimodal approach that considers interaction as an ‘ensemble’ in which individuals utilise different communicative means in co-constructing meaning (Jewitt 2009) and ultimately negotiating their identities. To this end, multimodal interaction analysis (Norris 2004a) is applied to observe the different discourses in action.

    The job interview: a transition gate

    The transition into employment typically revolves around the evaluation of an individual's discourse expected to evoke organisation-specific values and competencies (Erickson and Shultz 1982; Roberts 2000). This requirement often takes the form of a criteria list not revealed to the applicant but embedded in the interview questions (Adelswärd 1988; Iedema 2003; Roberts 1985; Roberts and Campbell 2006). It is a conversation but, at the same time, so much more than just a conversation. It is where the candidate's identity is evaluated against an institutionally predetermined list; this identity, created in the here-and- now of the job interview, is then used as a predictor of more or less desired workplace behaviours and, ultimately, the candidate's fit with the organisation and their suitability for the job.

  • 6 - Negotiating Social Legitimacy in and across Contexts: Apprenticeship in a ‘Dual’ Training System

  • from Part I - Transitions to a Profession
    • By Stefano A. Losa, PhD in Sociology from the University of Geneva, Switzerland., Laurent Filliettaz, Professor of Adult and Vocational Education at the University of Geneva, Switzerland
  • Edited by Jo Angouri, University of Warwick, Meredith Marra, Victoria University of Wellington, Janet Holmes, Victoria University of Wellington
  • Book:
    Negotiating Boundaries at Work
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    20 December 2017
    Print publication:
    18 May 2017, pp 109-130

  • Summary

    Transitions from school to work in a ‘dual’ apprenticeship system

    This chapter advances a new perspective for approaching the role of discourse and interaction in vocational education and training (VET), a perspective that sees these ingredients not as peripheral components of the training curriculum, but rather as central mediating tools for vocational learning.

    The chapter focuses on apprenticeship programmes in the context of Switzerland, where the dominant form of training consists of a complex combination of school-based and practice-based learning. According to such a ‘dual’ training system, apprentices experience a plurality of training sites. They move back and forth between vocational schools or training centres, where they are introduced to both technical and general content, and ordinary workplaces, where they acquire practical skills and encounter the specific requirement of work production tasks. For many years, apprenticeship programmes following the scheme of the dual system have regularly been reported as efficient strategies for securing employment and supporting smooth transitions from school to work (Dubs 2006). However, recent research also shows that accomplishing the transition between learning sites such as vocational schools and workplaces is not always a benign experience, but provides apprentices with numerous challenges and, often, contradictory expectations. Depending on the occupations and the geographical areas, between 20 per cent and 40 per cent of apprentices who enter the dual VET system do not complete their apprenticeship within the stated terms of their contracts (Stalder and Nägele 2011). Of these, 9 per cent change occupation, 11 per cent have to repeat a year, 7 per cent change training company, and 7 per cent drop out from the apprenticeship system without having any immediate alternative pathway. Recent studies have investigated the causes leading to young people dropping out or making changes in apprenticeship programmes (Lamamra and Masdonati 2009). These studies depict a nuanced portrait of the dual VET system and show that transitions from school to work are often far from smooth and unproblematic. They conclude that poor working conditions, low support by trainers and unsatisfactory workplace relations emerge as the main causes leading to dropout.

  • 7 - Multilingualism and Work Experience in Germany: On the Pragmatic Notion of ‘Patiency’

  • from Part II - Transitions within a Profession
    • By Kristin Bührig, professor for Linguistics of German Language, Jochen Rehbein, studied medicine, Germanic philology, general linguistics and philosophy at various universities (including Berlin and Paris).
  • Edited by Jo Angouri, University of Warwick, Meredith Marra, Victoria University of Wellington, Janet Holmes, Victoria University of Wellington
  • Book:
    Negotiating Boundaries at Work
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    20 December 2017
    Print publication:
    18 May 2017, pp 133-154

  • Summary

    Crossing: leaving for Germany

    In the Introduction to this volume the editors identify several subjects of relevance with respect to the topics of boundary marking. One of them is ‘how individuals scrutinise their own understanding of how things work’ within the process of crossing boundaries, be it between different countries, between different languages, or socialising into a new group.

    In a worldwide perspective, crossing boundaries comes hand in hand with complex urbanisation by which living, working and talking together is becoming more and more abstract, opaque as well as multifaceted, and so the societal structures are increasingly difficult to grasp not only for the immigrant but also for the domestic citizen (Rehbein 2010). Closely examined, by the process of urbanisation, leaders (entrepreneurs) and clerks, white-and blue-collar workers, agents and clients of institutions and other actants are equally subjected to the objective determinants of the social space of action, its contrariness, vicissitudes and unpredictabilities as are those who cross the boundaries and have to discern the objective determinants in the new urban framework from the very first (Zikic et al. 2010).

    In view of globalised societies being in a state of flux, it seems that we are dealing with two antagonistic types of activities connected to different ‘actancies’. Intervening ‘actancy’, the first type, based on planning and decision-making and aiming at the restructuring of the space of action, is generally known as ‘agency’ (e.g. von Wright 1968; Goldman 1970; Davidson 1971; Rehbein 1977; Ahearn 2001; Duranti 2004; Helfferich 2012). The second type, which requires accommodation to objective social structures, involves perception, processing of new experiences (Ehlich and Rehbein 1977) and mental restructuring. In what follows, we focus on the concrete analysis of the second type of actancy based on narrative fragments, stemming from interviews with Turkish migrant workers which were conducted in the early 1980s in Germany's Ruhr region.

    The reason why we rely on these early data has to do with the specific history of mass immigration into Germany. Let us briefly recall the situation of immigrants leaving Turkey for Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  • 9 - ‘Have You Still Not Learnt Luxembourgish?’: Negotiating Language Boundaries in a Distribution Company in Luxembourg

  • from Part II - Transitions within a Profession
    • By Anne Franziskus, completed her PhD thesis on the language practices, norms and ideologies of cross-border workers in Luxembourg at the University of Luxembourg
  • Edited by Jo Angouri, University of Warwick, Meredith Marra, Victoria University of Wellington, Janet Holmes, Victoria University of Wellington
  • Book:
    Negotiating Boundaries at Work
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    20 December 2017
    Print publication:
    18 May 2017, pp 178-196

  • Summary

    Introduction

    In today's globalised economy, people frequently move between jobs, crossing national, professional and linguistic boundaries in order to optimise their career opportunities. In turn, the increased mobility of workers results in the emergence of more dynamic workplace communities, in which people of diverse national, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds get together and interact. Because people spend a large amount of time in their workplaces, these constitute promising social and interactional contexts for investigating how language ideologies, group norms and various identities are negotiated, constructed and challenged through talk (Holmes et al. 2011; Marra and Angouri 2011). When moving between linguistic, national and professional spaces, workers are faced with the need to socialise into new groups and, therefore, to engage in a process of learning and adapting to different norms and expectations (Roberts 2010). Speaker's language resources, as well as their ability to conform to new norms for language use, can be crucial for successfully navigating their way into the community. Given that such norms exist at different societal, community and interactional levels (Holmes et al. 2011), the transition is a multilayered process for newcomers and ‘ old-timers’ alike.

    Where newcomers are expected to adapt to shared ways of doing and speaking, existing group members may also be faced with changes to their established practices. They might show resistance to this change, if they perceive it as threatening power structures. Recent research into multilingualism at work provides evidence that established groups can feel threatened by the internationalisation processes of their company. In a case study involving multinational companies (MNCs) in the Czech Republic, Nekvapil and Sherman (2009, 2013) demonstrate that the local Czech staff members, who were predominantly blue-collar workers and less educated than international staff, expressed ambivalent feelings towards the expatriates. Similarly, in a study of a Danish company that had recently adopted English as its corporate language, Lønsman (2011) found that low-skilled Danish staff members showed resistance to the need to use English and created boundaries with international expatriates who did not learn the local language.

  • 8 - The ‘Internationalised’ Academic: Negotiating Boundaries between the Local, the Regional and the ‘International’ at the University

  • from Part II - Transitions within a Profession
    • By Anne H. Fabricius, teaches sociolinguistics at Roskilde University, Denmark where she is Associate Professor of English Language
  • Edited by Jo Angouri, University of Warwick, Meredith Marra, Victoria University of Wellington, Janet Holmes, Victoria University of Wellington
  • Book:
    Negotiating Boundaries at Work
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    20 December 2017
    Print publication:
    18 May 2017, pp 155-177

  • Summary

    Introduction

    With mobility in the workplace ubiquitous nowadays, the negotiation of boundaries in professional contexts has become a focus area for sociolinguistic research. When individuals move abroad, as many exchange students do during young adulthood, they are placed beyond a local comfort zone, and experience what Cushner (2007: 29) characterises as ‘physical and psychological transitions that engage the cognitive, affective, and behavioural domains’. The interesting question that arises, then, is whether and to what extent this type of experience can become part of a later identity as a professional. Much of the work on boundary crossing and boundary negotiation in the present volume concerns the analysis of everyday interactions in the workplace; in this chapter, however, I analyse a reflective interview, and show how linguistic details as well as themes in some of the stories that are told can afford insights into the boundary crossing and boundary setting that are the focus of this volume.

    The analytical case in point in this chapter is an interview with a university teacher and researcher whose history (at an English-speaking high school as an exchange student) was perceived to be part of what made him an experienced and competent English-medium instructor at the university. One is not after all born an internationally oriented academic; one becomes one, and in the current global and economic climate ‘cosmopolitanism’ is often celebrated as a desirable norm, a trope which is found in many public discourses (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010). With that backdrop, the present chapter arises from a wider study with an interest in a sociolinguistic view of personal and professional biographies and how they contribute to professional development and performance as ‘an international academic’. The intention of the data analysis presented here is to show how the internationalised university as professional context is negotiated by one speaker in boundary defining and boundary crossing. We take the theoretical stance expressed in Auer (1998: 1) that ‘code-switching has and creates communicative and social meaning, and is in need of an interpretation by co-participants as well as analysts’.

  • 2 - Oh It's a DANISH Boyfriend You've Got’: Co-membership and Cultural Fluency in Job Interviews with Minority Background Applicants in Denmark

  • from Part I - Transitions to a Profession
    • By Marta Kirilova, research associate at the Center for Internationalization and Parallel Language
  • Edited by Jo Angouri, University of Warwick, Meredith Marra, Victoria University of Wellington, Janet Holmes, Victoria University of Wellington
  • Book:
    Negotiating Boundaries at Work
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    20 December 2017
    Print publication:
    18 May 2017, pp 29-49

  • Summary

    Job interviews across borders

    Moving between geographic and linguistic boundaries in order to find opportunities for personal and professional self-fulfilment is a common experience in the age of globalisation. Whether motivated by a personal choice, as is often the case with students and free movers, or by a political agenda, as is the case with asylum seekers and migrants from less developed countries, workforce mobility increasingly shapes our lives. The ‘job for life’ paradigm has become obsolete, since lifetime employment no longer suits the dynamics of globalisation and mobility. To keep pace, contemporary employees must muster not only practical skills of sustenance but also adequate linguistic competences, flexibility in a variety of contexts, and adaptiveness to challenges in space and time. These efforts are aggravated by employers who rely on employment strategies that do not account for candidates’ full range of potentials. One of the widely known methods for selection in professional contexts is the job interview. Employers use job interviews to determine whether a given person is suitable for a given job or not. Although candidates are required to have a solid set of qualifications to be selected for a job, it is usually what happens in the interactional moment that matters. In this sense the job interview is a ritual of power with rules often obscure to candidates.

    To find out how candidates are selected for a job and to shed light on the intricacies of such a selection process, this chapter discusses and analyses data from two authentic job interviews conducted in Denmark. It focuses on the following two questions: first, what discourses develop in the communication between applicants and interviewers, especially when the interlocutors do not share a common first language; second, how do these discourses influence the interviewers’ assessments of applicants?

    By answering these questions, the chapter provides insight into shortfalls in institutional selection processes within the field of migration studies and institutional communication in the age of globalisation. Through the concept of cultural fluency it also offers a more nuanced understanding of the ideology of intercultural communication in professional contexts.

  • Introduction: The Language Machine

  • Olaf Koeneman, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Hedde Zeijlstra, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    Introducing Syntax
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    13 April 2017, pp 1-6

  • Summary

    We humans are surrounded by technology. We have machines for almost everything and computers allow us to achieve things that were long deemed impossible. We live in a day and age where dreams can become reality overnight due to technical innovation, and the amount of information that we have access to via a tiny machine in our pockets is simply astounding. There is talk right now about flying people to Mars and growing tomatoes there. Yes, we humans are a smart bunch.

    Despite all this, there are some things we are still unable to do, and some machines we simply cannot build. And some of these failures have to do with language. A machine that can translate one language into another language perfectly? No, we don't have it (and please don't insult us by referring to Google Translate). Okay, how about something more modest, like a machine that can for any combinations of words in a single language (say, English) say whether it is a good sentence or not? It is perhaps hard to believe but even that is still out of our reach. Language, as it turns out, is an evasive and slippery creature.

    At the same time, it is clear that such a machine, capable of stating for every English sentence whether it is grammatical or not, does exist. In fact, we have about 360 million of those machines on our planet. They are called native speakers of English. These speakers have at their disposal the knowledge of their mother tongue, English, and this knowledge can generate zillions of distinct combinations of English words and evaluate each of them, whether old or new, as being either a good sentence or not. Probably you have never heard someone say Syntax is one of the most fascinating topics in linguistic theory, but if you are a native speaker of English you know immediately that the sentence is grammatically correct (and hopefully after reading this book you will also find it to be correct content-wise). So these native speaker brains can do something that we cannot imitate with any man-made machine. The fact that we cannot mimic such everyday human language behaviour shows us that there is something worthwhile studying.

  • 7 - Unifying Movement and Agreement

  • Olaf Koeneman, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Hedde Zeijlstra, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    Introducing Syntax
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    13 April 2017, pp 164-193

  • Summary

    CHAPTER OUTLINE

    We have seen that words or constituents can remerge. Remerge, also known as movement, explains a lot of things. Thanks to Remerge we are able to understand that a constituent can appear in a position far removed from the case and θ-role assigner on which it depends. And, by assuming that subjects start out in the VP and are subsequently remerged, we are able to treat all syntactic dependencies on a par, including the previously problematic nominative case relation between a subject and Fin. But what we don't yet understand is why elements must remerge. Why do subjects remerge into FinP, and Wh-phrases into CP? In this chapter we address this question, and we will conclude that the same feature-checking mechanism that we have already used to characterise syntactic dependencies provides us with the trigger for such instances of Remerge.

    Insight: Agreement Triggers Remerge

    In the previous chapter, we established that constituents – heads and phrases alike – can be remerged into the structure we build, thereby giving rise to the effect that we know as movement. By adopting this notion of Remerge we were able to understand a number of phenomena that would otherwise remain rather mysterious. In addition, it allowed us to maintain generalisations that would otherwise be lost, such as our unified characterisation of syntactic dependencies in terms of [F]–[uF] feature checking.

    The fact that we can analyse certain phenomena as involving Remerge, however, does nothing to explain why these instances of Remerge actually take place. Take two significant Remerge operations that we have considered: (i) Remerge of a Wh-constituent to a clause-initial position and (ii) Remerge of the subject from VP to FinP.

    (1) a. Which yellow chair has Adrian always liked <which yellow chair>?

    b. The teachers are all <the teachers> dancing on the table.

    Assuming that Remerge has taken place in (1a) allowed us to maintain our restrictions on case agreement, and to assume that θ-role assignment is strictly local, and always takes place within the VP. These reasons also accounted for remerger of the subject in (1a) from spec-VP to spec-FinP, and for the presence of the floating quantifier all between the auxiliary and main verb.

  • 5 - Agreement and Uninterpretable Features

  • Olaf Koeneman, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Hedde Zeijlstra, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    Introducing Syntax
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    13 April 2017, pp 110-137

  • Summary

    CHAPTER OUTLINE

    In the previous chapter we encountered a particular syntactic dependency: case. Even though sentences containing constituents with the wrong case marking would be semantically good, syntax does not allow them. In this chapter we will see that case is not the only kind of syntactic dependency that can be identified. There are more constructions that, from a semantic perspective, would be good, but that syntax does not like. For instance, sentences like *I walks (instead of I walk) or *She walk (instead of She walks) are bad. Other examples are sentences like *John hopes that Mary loves himself (instead of John hopes that Mary loves him), or *I love me (instead of I love myself). These sentences are clearly ungrammatical, even though it is not that hard to figure out what they could mean. The big question that arises is whether all these syntactic dependencies are different in nature, or underlyingly the same. The latter would be the best outcome, since in that event there is only one mechanism in syntax that we need to understand rather than several. Indeed it turns out that all these syntactic dependencies are the result of a single mechanism: agreement.

    Insight: Agreement Reflects Syntactic Dependencies

    The previous two chapters introduced two main constraints on what you can create with the Merge operation: θ-theory and Case theory. θ-theory is essentially a semantic constraint; verbal categories that merge with too few or too many arguments yield degraded sentences, since the meaning of the verb dictates how many arguments it should merge with. θ-theory has an effect on syntax, since it partly determines the structural size, but it is not a syntactic constraint. Case theory, by contrast, is a syntactic constraint. Sentences that are perfect from a semantic point of view (She loves I instead of She loves me) are ruled out by the syntax. Every DP should be assigned case, and particular structural positions are responsible for particular case assignments.

    A question that may now arise is whether there are more syntactic dependencies than just those involving case assignment. The answer is yes.

  • Afterword

  • Olaf Koeneman, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Hedde Zeijlstra, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    Introducing Syntax
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    13 April 2017, pp 268-279

  • Summary

    In this book, we have moved from looking at the grammar of English as a set of basically arbitrary rules toward looking at the grammar of English as a set of rules that are the result of a restricted set of principles underlying them. To put it differently, we have uncovered several fundamental patterns underneath the surface rules.

    Here is an example. The fact that in English a Wh-constituent must be in clause-initial position is a surface rule that is caused by the underlying fundamental principle for interpretable features to c-command their uninterpretable counterparts. The former (surface) rule is not fundamental for English, the latter is: the former is a consequence of the latter and not the other way around. And the latter principle captures not just the surface rule that Wh-constituents appear in clause-initial position, but it captures all syntactic dependencies.

    Another one. The rule that in English you must say eat a sausage and not a sausage eat is not an arbitrary fact about verbs and objects in English but follows from the more fundamental choice in English to linearise complements after their heads. This is not just true for verbs and objects but also for determiners and nominal phrases, and for complementisers and clauses. It is, in fact, the rule within English phrases in general.

    Many more examples can be given. Syntacticians try to capture general, underlying patterns on the basis of the surface patterns we observe, and formalise these into a theory. The theory we developed in this way for English meets a couple of requirements we can set for any scientific theory:

  • (i) The theory is uniform in a lot of ways because it is based on generalisations that go beyond the surface data, as just explained. Syntax, we conclude, is not a machine with 200 distinct operations but offers a highly constrained way of building phrases and sentences: it is basically Merge plus a constraint on feature checking (every uninterpretable feature needs to be checked by a matching local c-commanding interpretable feature).

  • (ii) The theory is highly explicit. It does not say ‘Well, we have certain constituents in some kind of structure that have to be able to see each other in some way or other.’ No, we say that an interpretable feature must c-command its uninterpretable counterpart.

  • 1 - Categories and Features

  • Olaf Koeneman, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Hedde Zeijlstra, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    Introducing Syntax
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    13 April 2017, pp 7-29

  • Summary

    CHAPTER OUTLINE

    So, let's start. In the introduction we stated, very ambitiously, that by studying the rules underlying proper English sentences we may ultimately be able to better understand what is going on in the human mind or brain. So how do we study those rules? We will begin by looking at simple sentences and reveal an important insight: syntactic rules do not apply to particular words, but rather to particular categories that words belong to, e.g. nouns and verbs. That simple but fundamental insight already reduces the number of potential syntactic rules in a drastic way, and therefore saves us a lot of work. Moreover, we will see that words belong to a particular category because they carry features that are purely syntactic, and that must be distinguished from features that tell you how to pronounce those words or that tell you what they mean. These features will play a very important role throughout the book, and, for starters, they will help us make a first syntactic discovery: there are words that are never uttered.

    Insight: Words and Categories

    Syntax tries to understand why certain sentences (like Mary loves Suzanne) are good English sentences, whereas other ones (such as loves Mary Suzanne or Mary snores Suzanne) are bad English sentences. What causes them to be either good or bad?

    Language consists of words. Words are elements that can be combined into sentences. In a way, you can think of words as the building blocks (like Lego blocks) with which sentences can be built. A simple sentence like Mary loves Suzanne consists of three words. The first idea therefore might be to say that there are certain rules in language (in this case, the English language) that allow the words loves, Suzanne and Mary to be combined in a particular order.

    In essence, then, you need rules. If there weren't any rules, nobody could explain the correctness, often called the grammaticality, of some sentences and the ungrammaticality of others. There would be no way of stating the distinction if there were no rules. But how specific must these rules be?

  • 6 - Movement and Remerge

  • Olaf Koeneman, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Hedde Zeijlstra, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    Introducing Syntax
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    13 April 2017, pp 138-163

  • Summary

    CHAPTER OUTLINE

    We saw in the previous chapter that every syntactic dependency reflects a relation between an interpretable and uninterpretable feature of the same type. In this way, we were able to generalise over case assignment, agreement relations and binding phenomena. However, we were not at that stage able to provide a uniform analysis for [F]–[uF] agreement, since nominative case agreement did not really fit in: the [uFin] feature on the subject in spec-FinP c-commands the [Fin] feature on the Fin head (and not the other way around), whereas other dependencies show the opposite c-command relationship. We have seen that an attempt to simplify the system usually leads to new insights. We will therefore hypothesise that we have not yet been able to account for agreement in a uniform way because we are still missing something. This chapter introduces this missing piece of the puzzle, which is a topic in its own right. It involves the recognition that constituents sometimes appear in positions in which we do not interpret them. They seem to move around. Syntactic movement, we will show, is not a new property of syntax. Rather, it follows immediately from the building procedure we already have: Merge. The existence of movement phenomena is therefore a prediction, and a confirmed one, made by the Merge hypothesis.

    Insight: Constituents Can Move

    So far, we have created structures by binary application of Merge. What does this mean? It means that you take two constituents and put them together. And if you want to build something bigger, you take a new constituent and add that to the structure you previously created. So if you have a sentence like Adrian has always liked this yellow chair, you take yellow and chair and merge them, and you merge the result yellow chair with this. Then you merge the DP this yellow chair with liked; this result you merge with always, you then take has and merge it with what you have. Finally, you merge that product with Adrian and you get Adrian has always liked this yellow chair.

  • 4 - Case Theory

  • Olaf Koeneman, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Hedde Zeijlstra, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    Introducing Syntax
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    13 April 2017, pp 78-109

  • Summary

    CHAPTER OUTLINE

    In chapter 2, we saw that the Merge operation, elegant as it is, can still create both grammatical and ungrammatical structures. We therefore concluded that we need constraints that filter out these ungrammatical structures. θ-theory was the first serious constraint we introduced. The nature of this constraint is semantic: we saw the number of arguments present in the syntax must match the semantics of the verb. Sentences like Edith assigns or John loves Mary Paul (where Mary and Paul are two different people) are now correctly filtered out. It is quite easy to see, however, that more work needs to be done. Let us give you a very simple example. The sentence Him calls she is ungrammatical, despite the fact that the verb can assign both its θ-roles to the arguments that are present (i.e. the AGENT role to him and the PATIENT role to she). In terms of the meaning, then, nothing is wrong, but something is not quite right with the form of the sentence. This chapter will explore in detail how to make this explicit, and how syntax will ensure that the structures it creates have the right form. This second filter on the Merge operation is called Case theory. We will see that the Case theory presented in this chapter has far-reaching consequences for the syntax of English sentences.

    Insight: Case as a Filter on Syntactic Structures

    Although θ-theory is a necessary filter on constructions created by the Merge operation, at least three problems emerge if we say that θ-theory forms the only constraint on Merge.

    The first problem concerns θ-mismatches, examples in which the number of arguments does not match up with the number of θ-roles that the verb needs to assign. It turns out that an unassigned θ-role is not as bad as an argument without a θ-role. For instance, transitive verbs that are used intransitively can be quite bad (as expected by θ-theory), but sometimes they can survive. Edith assigns could be said in a situation in which the manager, on asking who assigns tasks to new employees, is told that it is Edith who does the assignments. The same holds for the verb to kill.

Page 155 of 438