There are several Romance language elements that overlap themselves, in a way that makes possible, to a certain extent and exclusively dependent on one's ability to focus, practice and express, a certain degree of mutual comprehension. In writing and reading inasmuch as in oral communication, overcome, of course, a series of linguistic obstacles such as dialectal variations, accents and vocabulary (which can eventually present a daunting drawback), the reader of this book should be armed with enough knowledge to tackle the distinctive problem of intercomprehension.
Nowadays thousands of grammar books, textbooks, outlines, references and language guides of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French are published year by year. However, all of them teach these languages separately. Here you will find a comparative grammar of the four major Romance languages together based on their grammatical and lexical similarities for you, lovers of foreign languages, to learn and compare Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French simultaneously. It is an audacious endeavor to find or create a novel way of learning to speak several languages and becoming a multilingual person. It took me over 3 years to finish the book. It consists of over 800 pages, 10 chapters covering all the grammatical aspects of these 4 languages. It includes over 1000 examples, 500 easy-to-follow charts and tables. It contains 138 geographical, historical and cultural facts about Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French countries.Below I will discuss several reasons why I decided to write this book and why you need it.1) First of all, this book is written for readers like you who are fond of or would like to learn Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French simultaneously or just to get an all-round knowledge of all these four Romance languages. It is designed not only for beginners who do not have an extensive knowledge of grammar, yet need a guide through the grammatical concepts of all mentioned above languages, but also intermediate and advanced students who would like to have a reference book ofseveral Romance languages at once.2) Second of all I spent many years learning these languages separately, which was a complete waste of time before I realized it. This book will hopefully save you a great deal of time and allow you to study and compare at a glance the four main Neo-Latin languages.3) Knowledge of foreign languages is fast becoming a necessary requirement for those who are involved in international business, tourism, culture and education. This book offers you four languages to learn, which will make you feel at homewherever you go, whether as a tourist or businessman.4) Learning several languages simultaneously or one by one will train and strengthen your memory and can help stave off such terrible diseases as Alzheimer's.5) If you have never studied several languages at once before and you like challenges, then you should definitely try it. Because it is a really entertaining and challenging task to do.In conclusion, I would like to sincerely thank you for preordering the book and your interest in it. I hope it will help youimprove your languages and become multilingual.
What is a Romance language? How is one Romance language related to others? How did they all evolve? And what can they tell us about language in general? In this comprehensive survey Rebecca Posner, a distinguished Romance specialist, examines this group of languages from a wide variety of perspectives. Her analysis combines philological expertise with insights drawn from modern theoretical linguistics, both synchronic and diachronic. She relates linguistic features to historical and sociological factors, and teases out those elements which can be attributed to divergence from a common source and those which indicate convergence towards a common aim. Her discussion is extensively illustrated with new and original data, and an up-to-date and comprehensive bibliography is included. This volume will be an invaluable and authoritative guide for students and specialists alike.
Every human language has some syntactic means of distinguishing a negative from a non-negative sentence; in other words, every speaker's syntactic competence provides a means to express sentential negation. This ability, however, may be expressed in different ways, as shown by the fact that individual languages employ different syntactic strategies for the expression of the same semantic function of negating a sentence. Zanuttini's goal here is to characterize the range of such variation by comparing the different syntactic means for expressing sentential negation exhibited by the members of one language family--the Romance languages--and by reducing the differences we witness to a constrained set of choices available to the particular grammars of these languages. This sort of analysis is a first step towards the ultimate goal of determining and understanding what limits there are on the syntactic options that universal grammar imposes on the expression of sentential negation.
This book describes the changes which led from colloquial Latin to the five major Romance languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian.
An argument for, and account of linguistic universals in the morphology of comparison, combining empirical breadth and theoretical rigor. This groundbreaking study of the morphology of comparison yields a surprising result: that even in suppletion (the wholesale replacement of one stem by a phonologically unrelated stem, as in good-better-best) there emerge strikingly robust patterns, virtually exceptionless generalizations across languages. Jonathan David Bobaljik describes the systematicity in suppletion, and argues that at least five generalizations are solid contenders for the status of linguistic universals. The major topics discussed include suppletion, comparative and superlative formation, deadjectival verbs, and lexical decomposition. Bobaljik's primary focus is on morphological theory, but his argument also aims to integrate evidence from a variety of subfields into a coherent whole. In the course of his analysis, Bobaljik argues that the assumptions needed bear on choices among theoretical frameworks and that the framework of Distributed Morphology has the right architecture to support the account. In addition to the theoretical implications of the generalizations, Bobaljik suggests that the striking patterns of regularity in what otherwise appears to be the most irregular of linguistic domains provide compelling evidence for Universal Grammar. The book strikes a unique balance between empirical breadth and theoretical detail. The phenomenon that is the main focus of the argument, suppletion in adjectival gradation, is rare enough that Bobaljik is able to present an essentially comprehensive description of the facts; at the same time, it is common enough to offer sufficient variation to explore the question of universals over a significant dataset of more than three hundred languages.
Its twenty-one commissioned chapters serve two functions: they provide a general and theoretical introduction to comparative syntax, its methodology, and its relation to other domains of linguistic inquiry; and they also provide a systematic selection of the best comparative work being done today on those language groups and families where substantial progress has been achieved." "This volume will be an essential resource for scholars and students in formal linguistics."--Jacket.
Professor Sapir analyzes, for student and common reader, the elements of language. Among these are the units of language, grammatical concepts and their origins, how languages differ and resemble each other, and the history of the growth of representative languages--Cover.
This book gives a comprehensive introduction to Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. It starts with a presentation of the languages of the family (from English and the other Germanic languages, the Celtic and Slavic languages, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit through Armenian and Albanian) and a discussion of the culture and origin of the Indo-Europeans, the speakers of the Indo-European proto-language.The reader is introduced into the nature of language change and the methods of reconstruction of older language stages, with many examples (from the Indo-European languages). A full description is given of the sound changes, which makes it possible to follow the origin of the different Indo-European languages step by step. This is followed by a discussion of the development of all the morphological categories of Proto-Indo-European. The book presents the latest in scholarly insights, like the laryngeal and glottalic theory, the accentuation, the ablaut patterns, and these are systematically integrated into the treatment. The text of this second edition has been corrected and updated by Michiel de Vaan. Sixty-six new exercises enable the student to practice the reconstruction of PIE phonology and morphology.
