The Syntax and Semantics of Noun Modifiers and the Theory of Universal Grammar. A Korean Perspective

 

Book Description:

The Syntax and Semantics of Noun Modifiers and the Theory of Universal Grammar by Min-Joo Kim (2019, Springer), published as the 96th volume of Springer's highly acclaimed Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory series, takes up the long-standing question of why noun modifiers are seemingly optional, but they occur only in certain orders. Approaching these questions from the perspective of Korean—a language that lacks adjectives—while drawing data from numerous other unrelated languages, this book locates all noun modifiers of human language in a testable syntactic framework. And it further proposes a universal nominal structure and a formal mechanism, which together capture relevant crosslinguistic variation.

 

Author Bio:

Min-Joo Kim is Professor of Linguistics at Texas Tech University. She specializes in theoretical syntax, semantics, and their interface. She also has secondary research interests and expertise in language acquisition, pragmatics, and grammaticalization. She has over 30 publications including three books and one edited volume, and her work has appeared in prestigious linguistics journals such as Linguistic Inquiry and Natural Language Semantics. She is a 2019 Integrated Scholar at Texas Tech University, and Associate Editor for the high-impact Open Access journal Glossa.