Takafumi Maekawa's thesis

[Borsley R D]

Takafumi Maekawa's Ph.D. thesis 'The English Left Periphery in 
Linearisation-based HPSG' is available here:

http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~tmaeka/

Here is a table of contents:

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar - Theoretical Assumptions
Chapter 3: Linearisation-based approach to English clauses
Chapter 4: Wh-questions and relative clauses
Chapter 5: Adverbial Preposing
Chapter 6: Preposed negative expressions
Chapter 7: Comparison with other approaches
Chapter 8: Concluding remarks
Appendix A: Phrase types
Appendix B: Clause types 
Appendix C: Constraints on order domains 
Appendix D: More on who and whom (Chapter 4)

Here is the abstract:

In many theories of syntax, linear order is inseparable from syntactic 
structure. In Minimalism/Principles-and-Parameters theory, for example, 
the only information contained in tree diagrams is that of constituent 
structure, and not of linear order since the latter can be predicted from 
constituent structure (e.g., Kayne 1994). In contrast, recent years have 
seen an emergence of a view that linear order is to a considerable extent 
independent from constituency. Such an idea is most clearly manifested in 
a version of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG; Pollard and Sag 
1987, 1994), so-called 'linearisation HPSG'. In this framework, a linear 
sequence is analysed in terms of a level of 'order domains', which is
an ordered list of elements that often come from several local trees 
(e.g., Kathol 1995, 2000; Pollard et al. 1994; Reape 1994, 1996). The 
objective of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of a number 
of issues on linear order by providing an analysis of the English
left periphery within linearisation HPSG. More specifically, we provide a 
linearisation-based analysis of the following left peripheral elements: 
wh-phrases, preposed negative phrases, preposed adverbials and 
topic/focalised phrases. We explore their distributional possibilities, 
following Kathol's (1995, 2000, 2001) adaptation of 'topological fields', 
which has been traditionally employed in analyses of German syntax (e.g., 
Drach 1937; Höhle 1986). English clause structure is divided into six 
regions, and each element of a clause is marked for a particular region 
that it is assigned to. This thesis shows that linear precedence is more 
significant than constituent structure as the determining factor in 
formulating linguistic generalisations. We regard it as a preferable
conclusion from the perspective that linear order is epistemologically 
prior to constituent structure (Culicover and Jackendoff 2005, Culicover 
2003, Kathol 2000, etc.).


Bob Borsley


Prof. Robert D. Borsley
Department of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
COLCHESTER CO4 3SQ, UK

rborsley at essex.ac.uk
tel: +44 1206 873762
fax: +44 1206 872198
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~rborsley
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