Formal models in the study of language: applications in interdisciplinary contexts

This volume presents articles that focus on the application of formal models in the study of language in a variety of innovative ways, and is dedicated to Jacques Moeschler, professor at University of Geneva, to mark the occasion of his 60th birthday. The contributions, by seasoned and budding linguists of all different linguistic backgrounds, reflect Jacques Moeschler?s diverse and visionary research over the years. The book contains three parts. The first part shows how different formal models can be applied to the analysis of such diverse problems as the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of tense, aspect and deictic expressions, syntax and pragmatics of quantifiers and semantics and pragmatics of connectives and negation. The second part presents the application of formal models to the treatment of cognitive issues related to the use of language, and in particular, demonstrating cognitive accounts of different types of human interactions, the context in utterance interpretation (salience, inferential comprehension processes), figurative uses of language (irony pretence), the role of syntax in Theory of Mind in autism and the analysis of the aesthetics of nature. Finally, the third part addresses computational and corpus-based approaches to natural language for investigating language variation, language universals and discourse related issues. This volume will be of great interest to syntacticians, pragmaticians, computer scientists, semanticians and psycholinguists.

1 Formal Models in the Study of Language: Introduction; 1 Introduction; 1.1 Background Context; 1.2 Formal Models in the Study of Language; References; Linguistic Models; 2 A Feature-Based Account of Weak Islands; Abstract; 1 Introduction; 2 Locality; 2.1 Impenetrability; 2.2 Intervention Locality: Relativized Minimality; 3 Extractions from Weak Islands; 3.1 Asymmetries with Weak Islands; 3.2 The Argument-Adjunct Asymmetry Revisited; 3.3 Extraction from Infinitive Weak Islands; 3.4 Wh-Adjunct Extraction Across Another Wh-Adjunct; 3.5 Animacy ([+Human]) in Wh-Argument Extraction.

3.6 Categorial Feature, DP Versus PP4 Weak Islands in Other Languages; 4.1 Italian; 4.2 Romanian; 5 Feature Hierarchy for A'-Elements; 6 Conclusions; References; 3 On the Syntax and Pragmatics of Some Clause-Peripheral Positions; Abstract; 1 Introduction; 2 Some Formal and Interpretive Properties of Topic and Focus Constructions; 3 Topics and Information Structure; 4 Types of Foci: New Information Focus Versus Corrective Focus Versus Mirative Focus; 4.1 New Information Focus; 4.2 Corrective Focus; 4.3 "Mirative" Focus; 4.4 On Some Cross-Linguistic Differences; 5 Conclusion; Acknowledgements.

6 A Pragmati…