32.3764, Books: Experimental investigations on the syntax and usage of fragments: Lemke

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3764. Thu Dec 02 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3764, Books: Experimental investigations on the syntax and usage of fragments: Lemke

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Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2021 22:38:18
From: Sebastian Nordhoff [Sebastian.Nordhoff at langsci-press.org]
Subject: Experimental investigations on the syntax and usage of fragments: Lemke

 


Title: Experimental investigations on the syntax and usage of fragments 
Series Title: Open Germanic Linguistics  

Publication Year: 2021 
Publisher: Language Science Press
	   http://langsci-press.org
	

Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/321 


Author: Robin Lemke

Electronic: ISBN:  9783961103317 Pages: 312 Price: Europe EURO 0 Comment: Open Access


Abstract:

This book investigates the syntax and usage of fragments (Morgan 1973),
apparently subsentential utterances like "A coffee, please!" which fulfill the
same communicative function as the corresponding full sentence "I'd like to
have a coffee, please!". Even though such utterances are frequently used, they
challenge the central role that has been attributed to the notion of sentence
in linguistic theory, particularly from a semantic perspective.

The first part of the book is dedicated to the syntactic analysis of
fragments, which is investigated with experimental methods. Currently there
are several competing theoretical analyses of fragments, which rely almost
only on introspective data. The experiments presented in this book constitute
a first systematic evaluation of some of their crucial predictions and, taken
together, support an in situ ellipsis account of fragments, as has been
suggested by Reich (2007).

The second part of the book addresses the questions of why fragments are used
at all, and under which circumstances they are preferred over complete
sentences. Syntactic accounts impose licensing conditions on fragments, but
they do not explain, why fragments are sometimes (dis)preferred provided that
their usage is licensed. This book proposes an information-theoretic account
of fragments, which predicts that the usage of fragments in constrained by a
general tendency to distribute processing effort uniformly across the
utterance. With respect to fragments, this leads to two predictions, which are
empirically confirmed: Speakers tend towards omitting predictable words and
they insert additional redundancy before unpredictable words.
 



Linguistic Field(s): Syntax


Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=158533




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