Current Studies in Italian Syntax

Current Studies in Italian Syntax PDF Author: Guglielmo Cinque
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 0585473943
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Includes sixteen contributions which are representative of the research carried out in Italy on Italian and, more generally, Romance syntax. The essays in this work are collected to pay homage to Professor Lorenzo Renzi, a scholar who has since the 1960s promoted and shaped the study of Italian syntax in Italy.

Current Studies in Italian Syntax

Current Studies in Italian Syntax PDF Author: Guglielmo Cinque
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 0585473943
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Includes sixteen contributions which are representative of the research carried out in Italy on Italian and, more generally, Romance syntax. The essays in this work are collected to pay homage to Professor Lorenzo Renzi, a scholar who has since the 1960s promoted and shaped the study of Italian syntax in Italy.

Italian Syntax and Universal Grammar

Italian Syntax and Universal Grammar PDF Author: Guglielmo Cinque
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521475139
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
This volume of essays offers a wide-ranging comparative analysis of Italian syntax.

Italian Syntax

Italian Syntax PDF Author: L. Burzio
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9027720150
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
In the course of our everyday lives, we generally take our knowledge of language for granted. Occasionally, we may become aware of its great practical importance, but we rarely pay any attention to the formal properties that language has. Yet these properties are remarkably complex. So complex that the question immediately arises as to how we could know so much. The facts that will be considered in this book should serve well to illustrate this point. We will see for example that verbs like arrivare 'arrive' and others like telefonare 'telephone', which are superficially similar, actually differ in a large number of respects, some fairly well known, others not. Why should there be such differencces. we may ask. And why should it be that if a verb behaves like arrivare and unlike tetefonare in one respect. it will do so in all others consistently, and how could everyone know it? To take another case, Italian has two series of pronouns: stressed and unstressed. Thus, for example, alongside of reflexive se stesso 'himself which is the stressed form. one finds si which is unstressed but otherwise synonymous. Yet we will see that the differences between the two could not simply be stress versus lack of stress, as their behavior is radically different under a variety of syntactic conditions.

Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics

Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics PDF Author: Raffaella Zanuttini
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 9781589013056
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Presenting cutting-edge research in syntax and semantics, this important volume furthers theoretical claims in generative linguistics and represents a significant addition to present scholarship in the field. Leading scholars present crosslinguistic studies dealing with clausal architecture, negation, and tense and aspect, and the issue of whether a statistical model can by itself capture the richness of human linguistic abilities. Taken together, these contributions elegantly show how theoretical tools can propel our understanding of language beyond pretheoretical descriptions, especially when combined with the insight and skills of linguists who can analyze difficult and complex data. Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics covers a range of topics currently at the center of lively debate in the linguistic literature, such as the structure of the left periphery of the clause, the proper treatment of negative polarity items, and the role of statistical learning in building a model of linguistic competence. The ten original contributions offer an excellent balance of novel empirical description and theoretical analysis, applied to a wide range of languages, including Dutch, German, Irish English, Italian, Malagasy, Malay, and a number of medieval Romance languages. Scholars and students of semantics, syntax, and linguistic theory will find it to be a valuable resource for ongoing scholarship and advanced study.

Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography

Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography PDF Author: Fuzhen Si
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027259771
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This book illustrates recent developments in cartographic studies, seen from a comparative perspective. The different chapters explore various aspects of theoretical and descriptive syntax, bearing on such topics as selection, causativity, binding, light verb constructions, the structure of the high and low peripheral zones. Syntactic issues in the study of dialects and ancient languages are also addressed. The languages investigated include French, Hebrew, Standard Dutch and the Ghent dialect, Etruscan, Japanese, English, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese and the Teochew dialect. The intended readers of this book include researchers and students working on natural language syntax, the interface between syntax and semantics/pragmatics, and comparative and typological linguistics, as well as scholars interested in particular languages such as East Asian and Romance languages.

Studies in Italian as a Heritage Language

Studies in Italian as a Heritage Language PDF Author: Francesco Bryan Romano
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110759624
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This series offers a wide forum for work on contact linguistics, using an integrated approach to both diachronic and synchronic manifestations of contact, ranging from social and individual aspects to structural-typological issues. Topics covered by the series include child and adult bilingualism and multilingualism, contact languages, borrowing and contact-induced typological change, code switching in conversation, societal multilingualism, bilingual language processing, and various other topics related to language contact. The series does not have a fixed theoretical orientation, and includes contributions from a variety of approaches.

The Structure of CP and IP

The Structure of CP and IP PDF Author: Luigi Rizzi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195159497
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The purpose of this edited volume is to study the structure of the inflectional field and the left peripheral field of clauses, often described as the systems of IP (Inflection Phrase) and CP (Complementizer Phrase).

The Morphosyntax of Imperatives

The Morphosyntax of Imperatives PDF Author: Daniela Isac
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191047937
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This book studies the properties of imperative clauses in the context of a theory of Universal Grammar. Daniela Isac argues that the specificity of imperative clauses cannot be the result of a unique imperative Force feature; instead, the `type' of imperative clauses can be traced back to a plurality of finer grained features, such as Modality and phi-features, hosted by the Mod, Infl, and Speech Event heads, among others. The data are drawn from a wide range of languages including various Romance, Slavic, and Germanic languages, as well as Finnish and Inuktitut. The analysis accounts for recurrent patterns in the interaction of imperative mood with phenomena like negation, restrictions on grammatical subjects, and the possibility of embedding imperative clauses. The approach, which focuses exclusively on morphosyntactic rather than semantic features, is potentially transferable to the analysis of other clause types, such as exclamatives, interrogatives, and declaratives.

Universal Grammar in the Reconstruction of Ancient Languages

Universal Grammar in the Reconstruction of Ancient Languages PDF Author: Katalin É. Kiss
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110902222
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
Philologists aiming to reconstruct the grammar of ancient languages face the problem that the available data always underdetermine grammar, and in the case of gaps, possible mistakes, and idiosyncracies there are no native speakers to consult. The authors of this volume overcome this difficulty by adopting the methodology that a child uses in the course of language acquisition: they interpret the data they have access to in terms of Universal Grammar (more precisely, in terms of a hypothetical model of UG). Their studies, discussing syntactic and morphosyntactic questions of Older Egyptian, Coptic, Sumerian, Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, Classical Greek, Latin, and Classical Sanskrit, demonstrate that descriptive problems which have proved unsolvable for the traditional, inductive approach can be reduced to the interaction of regular operations and constraints of UG. The proposed analyses also bear on linguistic theory. They provide crucial new data and new generalizations concerning such basic questions of generative syntax as discourse-motivated movement operations, the correlation of movement and agreement, a shift from lexical case marking to structural case marking, the licensing of structural case in infinitival constructions, the structure of coordinate phrases, possessive constructions with an external possessor, and the role of event structure in syntax. In addition to confirming or refuting certain specific hypotheses, they also provide empirical evidence of the perhaps most basic tenet of generative theory, according to which UG is part of the genetic endowment of the human species - i.e., human languages do not "develop" parallel with the development of human civilization. Some of the languages examined in this volume were spoken as much as 5000 years old, still their grammars do not differ in any relevant respect from the grammars of languages spoken today.

It-Clefts

It-Clefts PDF Author: Caterina Bonan
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110734141
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Clefts are intricate objects which, starting with Jespersen (1937), have motivated much work in descriptive and formal linguistics. Nonetheless, almost a century later their exact internal structure and status are still widely debated, therefore a multidisciplinary volume on this theoretically complex structure across different languages of the world is greatly needed. The articles featured in this volume follow an in-depth Introduction written by the editors, in which we offer a survey of the state-of-the-art on clefts by way of a strong contextualisation to the volume, including a number of robust empirical observations on the morphosyntactic and interpretational properties of these structures in numerous standard and non-standard Romance varieties, as well as a critical presentation of the contributions included in the volume. Among other things, the ten selected articles propose new insights into the widely-reported interpretational asymmetry between subject and object clefts, the features involved in their derivation, the ways in which the low and high peripheries are variously exploited in the derivation, the morphosyntactic and interpretational differences between clefts and their non-cleft counterparts, the role and formal properties of the copula, the notion of sub-extraction of features, a reconsideration of the very notion of focus via clefting, and much more. The volume, written by renown experts, offers an in-depth overview of the structure of it-clefts, taking into account different and complementary fields of the study of linguistics (cartography, quantitative methods, experimental investigations, nanosyntax, typology and dialectology) and robust empirical data from numerous languages including Romance varieties, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, and two Spanish- and French-lexifier creoles. Our belief is that the synchrony of clefts will only be appropriately understood once diachronic, typological, historical, experimental and dialectological aspects are all brought together. We offer through this volume a first attempt at providing such a variegated picture of the cross-linguistic morphosyntax of it-clefts.