Publications

The Architecture of Determiners

Leu, Thomas. 2014. The Architecture of Determiners. Oxford University Press. 240 pages.

Work in morphology is typically concerned with productive word formation and regular inflection, in any event with open class categories such as verbs, nouns, and adjectives, and their various forms. The Architecture of Determiners, by contrast, is devoted to a set of function words: the closed class of determiners. While it is traditionally assumed that function words are syntactically atomic, Thomas Leu shows that a comparative perspective on a series of determiners - each insistently vivisected into its minimal morphotactic segments - reveals an anatomy with properties analogous to clausal syntax, including a lexical, an inflectional, and left peripheral layer, as well as transformational relations among subconstituents. Leu argues that determiners are extended adjectival projections with a closed class minimal stem.

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Relabeling in Language Genesis

Lefebvre, Claire. 2014. Relabeling in Language Genesis. Oxford University Press. 328 pages.

Relabeling is a process that assigns a lexical entry of language-x a new label derived from a phonetic string drawn from language-y. This process plays a central role in the formation of contact languages such as mixed languages, pidgins and creoles, and New Englishes. In this book, Claire Lefebvre offers a coherent picture of research on relabeling over the last 15 years, and replies to the questions that have been directed at the relabeling-based theory of creole genesis presented in Lefebvre (1998) and related work. It addresses such questions as: how does relabeling apply across language contact situations and across lexicons, and what constraints act upon it? What other processes apply in language genesis and how do they interact with relabeling? Can a relabeling-based theory of creole genesis really account for all of the features that a theory of creole genesis must be able to account for?

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À l’ouest des Grands Lacs : communautés francophones et variétés de français dans les Prairies et en Colombie-Britannique.

Papen, Robert A. et Sandrine Hallion, dir. 2014. À l’ouest des Grands Lacs : communautés francophones et variétés de français dans les Prairies et en Colombie-Britannique. Québec : Presses de l’Université Laval. 314 pages.

Ce collectif a pour objectif de faire connaître les variétés de français parlées dans les quatre provinces de l’Ouest canadien (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta et Colombie-Britannique). Il est constitué de huit chapitres ainsi que d’un texte de présentation qui fait état des recherches antérieures sur les parlers français de l’Ouest canadien. Le premier article dresse un tableau historique des communautés francophones de l’Ouest et les sept autres traitent de divers aspects linguistiques (lexicologiques, phonétiques, phonologiques, morphosyntaxiques, etc.) des parlers français de l’Ouest. Chacune des provinces (sauf la Colombie-Britannique) est « représentée » par deux articles. La séquence des chapitres est celle des provinces d’est en ouest.

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Grammaire de la langue innue

Drapeau, Lynn. 2014. Grammaire de la langue innue. Québec : Presses de l’Université du Québec. 644 pages.

L’innu, une langue « imagée » à la structure simple et aux moyens réduits? Rien de plus faux! Cette grammaire de référence de la langue innue, inspirée de la basic linguistic theory ou linguistique empirique, déconstruit ce mythe en répertoriant les faits de langue, en les décrivant, en les expliquant et en les reliant entre eux de manière à en élucider la logique.

  • Distingue les dialectes de l’Ouest (parlés à Mashteuiatsh, Pessamit, Uashat mak Mani-utenam et Matimekush) et les dialectes de la Basse Côte-Nord (parlés à Ekuanitshit, Nutashkuan, Unaman-shipu et Pakut-shipu).
  • Répertorie les diverses catégories de nominaux : noms, pronoms, démonstratifs et possessifs.
  • Classifie les verbes et expose les conjugaisons, les modalités et les temps verbaux, de même que le système de voix de base et de voix dérivée.
  • Présente les types de propositions et leur articulation et explique les fonctions grammaticales de la phrase.
  • Décrit la formation des mots, soit celle des noms, des adverbes et des verbes.

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An Annotated Syntax Reader: Lasting Insights and Questions.

Kayne, Richard S., Thomas Leu et Raffaella Zanuttini, dir. 2014. An Annotated Syntax Reader: Lasting Insights and Questions. Wiley-Blackwell. 608 pages.

An Annotated Syntax Reader brings together a collection of seminal articles published over the last forty years that demonstrate the empirical and theoretical foundations of current syntactic theory.

  • Includes introductions, annotations by the editors, and discussion questions to teach students how to critically read precedent-setting works
  • Features writings by authors including Noam Chomsky, Paul Postal, and Luigi Rizzi
  • Focuses on significant ideas, core passages of articles, and resulting applications that have shaped the field of syntax
  • Encourages an active, participatory reading of the texts; one which motivates readers to read creatively and come up with their own novel observations

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The Nature and Origin of Language

Bouchard, Denis. 2013. The Nature and Origin of Language. Oxford University Press. 448 pages.

This book looks at how the human brain got the capacity for language and how language then evolved. Its four parts are concerned with different views on the emergence of language, with what language is, how it evolved in the human brain, and finally how this process led to the properties of language. Part I considers the main approaches to the subject and how far language evolved culturally or genetically. Part II argues that language is a system of signs and considers how these elements first came together in the brain. Part III examines the evidence for brain mechanisms to allow the formation of signs. Part IV shows how the book's explanation of language origins and evolution is not only consistent with the complex properties of languages but provides the basis for a theory of syntax that offers insights into the learnability of language and to the nature of constructions that have defied decades of linguistic analysis, including including subject-verb inversion in questions, existential constructions, and long-distance dependencies.

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New Perspectives on the Origins of Language.

Lefebvre, Claire, Bernard Comrie, et Henri Cohen, dir. 2013. New Perspectives on the Origins of Language. John Benjamins. 582 pages.

The question of how language emerged is one of the most fascinating and difficult problems in science. In recent years, a strong resurgence of interest in the emergence of language from an evolutionary perspective has been helped by the convergence of approaches, methods, and ideas from several disciplines. The selection of contributions in this volume highlight scenarios of language origin and the prerequisites for a faculty of language based on biological, historical, social, cultural, and paleontological forays into the conditions that brought forth and favored language emergence, augmented by insights from sister disciplines. The chapters all reflect new speculation, discoveries and more refined research methods leading to a more focused understanding of the range of possibilities and how we might choose among them. There is much that we do not yet know, but the outlines of the path ahead are ever clearer.

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Grammaire française – Mise à niveau (vol. 1)

Piron, Sophie. 2013. Grammaire française – Mise à niveau (vol. 1). Louvain-la-Neuve : De Boeck. 399 pages.

Aide à l'apprentissage de la grammaire française, cette méthode s'inscrit à côté des grammaires traditionnelles comme un outil de remédiation pour les étudiants ou les adultes, qu'ils soient non francophones ou en difficulté dans leur propre langue. Avec exercices en ligne.

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Towards a Biolinguistic Understanding of Grammar: Essays on interfaces.

Di Sciullo, Anna Maria, dir. 2012. Towards a Biolinguistic Understanding of Grammar: Essays on interfaces. John Benjamins. 367 pages.

The theoretical proposals brought forward in this book as well as the results from the reported experimental studies present genuine contributions to the biolinguistic program. The papers contribute to our understanding of the properties of the computations and the representations derived by the language faculty, viewed as an organism of human biological. Towards a Biolinguistic Understanding of Grammar: Essays on Interfaces adds to the usual notion of interfaces, which is generally understood as the connection between syntax and the semantic system, between phonology and the sensorimotor system. It raises novel interface questions about how these connections are at all possible within the biolinguistic program. It anchors the formal properties of grammar at the interfaces between language and biology, language and experience, bringing about language acquisition and language variation, and it also explores the interaction of grammar with the factors reducing complexity. This book aims to bring about further understanding of the interfaces of the grammar in a broader biolinguistic sense. Written in a language accessible to a wide audience, this book will appeal to scholars and students of linguistics, cognitive science, biology, and natural language processing.

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The Biolinguistic Enterprise: New Perspectives on the Evolution and Nature of the Human Language Faculty.

Di Sciullo, Anna Maria et Cedric Boeckx, dir. 2011. The Biolinguistic Enterprise: New Perspectives on the Evolution and Nature of the Human Language Faculty. Oxford University Press. 416 pages.

This book, by leading scholars, represents some of the main work in progress in biolinguistics. It offers fresh perspectives on language evolution and variation, new developments in theoretical linguistics, and insights on the relations between variation in language and variation in biology. The authors address the Darwinian questions on the origin and evolution of language from a minimalist perspective, and provide elegant solutions to the evolutionary gap between human language and communication in all other organisms. They consider language variation in the context of current biological approaches to species diversity -- the "evo-devo revolution" -- which bring to light deep homologies between organisms. In dispensing with the classical notion of syntactic parameters, the authors argue that language variation, like biodiversity, is the result of experience and thus not a part of the language faculty in the narrow sense. They also examine the nature of this core language faculty, the primary categories with which it is concerned, the operations it performs, the syntactic constraints it poses on semantic interpretation and the role of phases in bridging the gap between brain and syntax. Written in language accessible to a wide audience, The Biolinguistic Enterprise will appeal to scholars and students of linguistics, cognitive science, biology, and natural language processing.

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Département de linguistique

Le Département de linguistique regroupe un corps professoral internationalement reconnu dont les domaines de spécialisation recouvrent les principaux champs de la linguistique.

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