Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
A linguistics instructor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill provides a restrictive theory of parameters on the nature and limits of syntactic variation. "This study is a very important contribution to both German (and Germanic) syntax and to linguistic theory".--Jindrich Toman, University of Michigan.Synopsis
This work represents the first full-scale attempt to provide a restrictive theory of parameters—the nature and limits of syntactic variation. Focusing on syntactic saturation, Webelhuth hypothesizes that in natural language these phenomena are subject to the "Saturation Condition." He explains the principles behind this condition and demonstrates how it imposes strong constraints on what counts as a possible parameter in natural language. Webelhuth goes on to test this theory against empirical evidence from seven modern Germanic languages: German, Dutch, English, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic.