UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

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Author: search.filters.author.Guimaraes Miranda, MaximilianoSubject: search.filters.subject.parentheticals

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    Derivation and Representation of Syntactic Amalgams
    (2004-08-06) Guimaraes Miranda, Maximiliano; Uriagereka, Juan; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation consists of an investigation of Syntactic Amalgamation (cf. Lakoff 1974): the phenomenon of combination of sentences that yields parenthetic-like constructions like (01). (01) John invited God only knows how many people to you can imagine what kind of a party. The theoretical framework adopted is the Generative-Transformational Grammar (Chomsky 1957, 1965, 1975, 1981, 1986b, 2000b), following (and elaborating on) the recent developments known as the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000a, 2001a, 2001b; Martin & Uriagereka 2000; Uriagereka 1998, 1999, 2002). As far as the representation of syntactic amalgams is concerned, the main claim made in this dissertation is that such constructions involve a radical form of shared constituency, where two or more matrix sentences share the same subordinate sentence, in a multiply-rooted phrase marker. As far as the derivation of syntactic amalgams is concerned, the main claims made in this dissertation are: (i) context-free shared constituency arises from overlapping numerations; and (ii) the computational system builds structure incrementally, in a generalized tucking-in fashion, which yields a left-to-right/top-to-bottom effect on the derivation, such that constituency is heavily dynamic (along the lines of Phillips 1996, 2003; Drury 1998a, 1998b, 1999; Richards 1999, 2003). The conclusion is that this particular kind of paratactic-like construction is better understood as a purely syntactic phenomenon, where the resources of the computational system are pushed to the limit.