Structuring Variation in Romance Linguistics and Beyond
Structuring Variation in Romance Linguistics and Beyond

Author: Mirko Grimaldi

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2018-12-15

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 9027263175

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Current theoretical approaches to language devote great attention to macro- and micro-variation and show an ever-increasing interest in minority languages. In this respect, few empirical domains are as rich and lively as the Italo-Romance languages, which together with Albanian were the main research domain of Leonardo M. Savoia. The volume covers areas as different as phonology, morphology, syntax and the lexicon. A broad range of Romance languages is considered, as well as Albanian, Greek and Hungarian, shedding new light on many classical topics. The first section focuses on morphosyntax, both in the narrow sense and with regard to its interfaces. The second section focuses on clitics and pronouns. The third section deals with a number of issues in phonology and syntax-phonology interface. The last section turns the reader’s attention beyond formal linguistics itself and examines variation in the light of neurosciences, pathology, historical linguistics and political discourse.

The Syntax of Relative Clauses
The Syntax of Relative Clauses

Author: Guglielmo Cinque

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-09-24

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 110884605X

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Relative clauses play a hugely important role in analysing the structure of sentences. This book provides the first evidence that a unified analysis of the different types of relative clauses is possible - a step forward in our understanding. Using careful analyses of a wide range of languages, Cinque argues that the relative clause types can all be derived from a single, double-headed, structure. He also presents evidence that restrictive, maximalizing, ('integrated') non-restrictive, kind-defining, infinitival and participial RCs merge at different heights of the nominal extended projection. This book provides an elegant generalization about the structure of all relatives. Theoretically profound and empirically rich, it promises to radically alter the way we think about this subject for years to come.

Structures, Syntactic Computations and Acquisition
Structures, Syntactic Computations and Acquisition

Author: Adriana Belletti

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-29

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1000930254

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This book collects some of the most significant articles by Adriana Belletti published over the last ten years or so, offering readers a useful tool to see the mutual enrichment between linguistic theory and experimental studies on (modes of) language acquisition through her work. The volume explores domains of theoretical morphosyntax in the generative tradition and theoretically guided studies on language acquisition. An introduction specific to this volume contextualizes these contributions within ongoing developments in the field. Part I presents studies inspired by the illuminating interchange between linguistic theory and experimentation in the domain of language acquisition, leading to the formulation of explicit research questions tested experimentally and guiding in the proper interpretation of the results. Part II offers refined, detailed theoretical analyses of domains in which peripheral positions in the clause structures are crucially involved to express discourse contents, in sometimes not standard ways during development. Demonstrating how refined linguistic analyses play a crucial role in interpretating the peculiar shape of developmental data, this book will be of interest to scholars in syntax, language acquisition, and theoretical linguistics.

A Linguistic Approach to the Study of Dyslexia
A Linguistic Approach to the Study of Dyslexia

Author: Gloria Cappelli

Publisher: Channel View Publications

Published: 2022-08-19

Total Pages: 573

ISBN-13: 1800415982

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This volume contributes to the growing body of research on developmental dyslexia, focusing on the disorder’s behavioural manifestations at different levels of the language system. It is organised into three sections that cover the three main vantage points from which the effects of dyslexia on communication can be observed: neuropsychology, linguistics and the perspective of educators. Together, the chapters provide an insightful overview of the ways in which dyslexia impacts different components of language, including lexical and pragmatic abilities, and present data from experimental and applied research, with suggestions for the application of research-based data in both innovative and traditional language teaching, ways to rehabilitate reading dysfunctions, as well as teacher training. The book will be essential reading for researchers and students investigating dyslexia, as well as foreign language teachers and professionals who work on the rehabilitation of linguistic performance dysfunctions in people with dyslexia.

Dative constructions in Romance and beyond
Dative constructions in Romance and beyond

Author: Anna Pineda

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 396110249X

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This book offers a comprehensive account of dative structures across languages –with an important, though not exclusive, focus on the Romance family. As is well-known, datives play a central role in a variety of structures, ranging from ditransitive constructions to cliticization of indirect objects and differentially marked direct objects, and including also psychological predicates, possessor or causative constructions, among many others. As interest in all these topics has increased significantly over the past three decades, this volume provides an overdue update on the state of the art. Accordingly, the chapters in this volume account for both widely discussed patterns of dative constructions as well as those that are relatively unknown.

Linguistic Variation: Structure and Interpretation
Linguistic Variation: Structure and Interpretation

Author: Ludovico Franco

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-12-16

Total Pages: 920

ISBN-13: 1501505106

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In this volume scholars honor M. Rita Manzini for her contributions to the field of Generative Morphosyntax. The essays in this book celebrate her career by continuing to explore inter-area research in linguistics and by pursuing a broad comparative approach, investigating and comparing different languages and dialects.

Convergence and divergence in Ibero-Romance across contact situations and beyond
Convergence and divergence in Ibero-Romance across contact situations and beyond

Author: Miriam Bouzouita

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-10-25

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 3110736314

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This book aims to provide a better understanding of convergence and non-convergence phenomena, such as divergence, from different theoretical perspectives. It brings together nine case studies that deal with contact between languages found in the Iberian Peninsula (Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese and Basque), between Spanish or Portuguese and another language (such as English), and between different varieties from Europe and other continents. The volume thus unites views from two fields that rarely interact: contact linguistics and dialectology. It discusses the mechanisms and consequences of language contact within the Ibero-Romance world, a geographical space characterised by a high rate of multilingual speakers and settings. The contributions deal with various combinations of convergence and divergence, for example between different varieties of the same language, language stability despite contact, as well as less studied aspects, such as the relation between language contact and second language acquisition, the linguistic landscape perspective of language contact, and divergence in linguistic identity construction.

New Perspectives on Bare Noun Phrases in Romance and Beyond
New Perspectives on Bare Noun Phrases in Romance and Beyond

Author: Johannes Kabatek

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2013-11-15

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9027271259

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This book envisions the study of bare noun phrases as a field of research in its own right rather than an accessory matter in the wider domain of nominal determination. Combining insights from different theoretical backgrounds and extending the empirical coverage of bare noun phenomena, the ten contributions provide new perspectives on long-standing but still actively debated problems as well as investigations into previously ignored issues. The volume focuses on the wide range of bare noun phenomena in Romance languages, including Spanish, Catalan, Brazilian and European Portuguese, Italian and French; but also widens its inherently comparative perspective to languages such as Bulgarian and Modern Hebrew. The authors discuss the importance of cross-linguistic patterns in the modeling of the syntax and semantics of noun phrases and of common noun denotations, the role of information structure as well as that of discourse traditions and coordination.

Beyond Functional Sequence
Beyond Functional Sequence

Author: Ur Shlonsky

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-04-20

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0190266325

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Cartography is a research program within syntactic theory that studies the syntactic structures of a particular language in order to better understand the semantic issues at play in that language. The approach arranges a language's morpho-syntactic features in a rigid universal hierarchy, and its research agenda is to describe this hierarchy -- that is, to draw maps of syntactic configurations. Current work in cartography is both empirical -- extending the approach to new languages and new structures -- and theoretical. The 16 articles in this collection will advance both dimensions. They arise from presentations made at the Syntactic Cartography: Where do we go from here? colloquium held at the University of Geneva in June of 2012 and address three questions at the core of research in syntactic cartography: 1. Where do the contents of functional structure come from? 2. What explains the particular order or hierarchy in which they appear? 3. What are the computational restrictions on the activation of functional categories? Grouped thematically into four sections, the articles address these questions through comparative studies across various languages, such as Italian, Old Italian, Hungarian, English, Jamaican Creole, Japanese, and Chinese, among others.

Differential Object Marking in Romance
Differential Object Marking in Romance

Author: Monica Alexandrina Irimia

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2023-12-15

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9027249725

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Differential marking as applied to direct objects has long been discussed as one of the characterizing traits of many Romance languages. There is, however, wide consensus that a detailed investigation into the nature of this phenomenon raises numerous challenges both at the empirical and theoretical level. Many questions are still being raised regarding which precise morpho-syntactic strategies count as differential object marking, whether the data can be unified, and, subsequently, how they are to be unified formally and theoretically. Additionally, a thorough investigation of this phenomenon is still needed for many Romance languages and especially at the micro-variation level. This volume brings together original papers addressing various aspects of differential object marking in Romance languages, focusing on micro-variation, from both a descriptive and formal perspective, touching on diachrony, language contact, synchrony, and using a large set of methodologies.