Why Agree? Why Move?: Unifying Agreement-Based and Discourse-Configurational Languages (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs) - Softcover

Miyagawa, Shigeru

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262513552 ISBN 13: 9780262513555

Publisher: MIT Press, 2009

Synopsis

An argument that not only do movement and agreement occur in every language, they also work in tandem to imbue natural language with enormous expressive power.

About this title

About the Author

Shigeru Miyagawa is Professor of Linguistics and Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT. He is the author of Why Agree? Why Move? Unifying Agreement-Based and Discourse-Configurational Languages (MIT Press).

Review

Miyagawa goes straight to the heart of the crucial questions of linguistics: how are natural human languages the same, and in what ways can they be different? To see how he compares and substantially unifies the syntax of case-marking, head-final languages like Japanese, with agreement-rich, head-initial languages, like English and Bantu informs this powerful book. It is rare to see this even attempted with such sophistication, much less achieved. I learned a lot.

―Mark Baker, Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University (Endorsement)

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0262513552
• ISBN 13: 9780262513555
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 200