Elizabeth Cowper
List of John Benjamins publications for which Elizabeth Cowper plays a role.
Articles
2017 The rise of contrastive modality in English: A neoparametric account Syntactic Variation and Change, Håkansson, David, Ida Larsson and Erik Magnusson Petzell (eds.), pp. 68–97 | Article
This paper proposes an account of the morphosyntactic and semantic changes involved in the historical development of the English modals as a distinct category. Adopting a neoparametric approach, in which a language’s inventory of grammatical features may change over time, we show that a cluster… read more
2016 Finiteness and Pseudofiniteness Finiteness Matters: On finiteness-related phenomena in natural languages, Eide, Kristin Melum (ed.), pp. 47–78 | Article
I argue that finiteness is a purely syntactic property, licensing case on the subject and agreement on the verb. Semantic properties associated with finiteness follow from the position of Finite in the geometry of clausal interpretable features. Considering possible counterexamples from Romance… read more
2009 Argumenthood, pronouns, and nominal feature geometry Determiners: Universals and variation, Ghomeshi, Jila, Ileana Paul and Martina Wiltschko (eds.), pp. 97–120 | Article
This article explores the syntactic and feature-geometric properties of English pronouns, and offers some novel solutions to questions identified by Déchaine & Wiltschko (2002) and Rullmann (2004). Building on work by Cowper & Hall (2003, 2005) and Cowper (2005), we propose denotations and… read more