Word Order and Parameter Change in Romanian

Word Order and Parameter Change in Romanian PDF Author: Alexandru Nicolae
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198807368
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
The book provides a comprehensive description and in-depth analysis of the major word order changes that took place in the transition from old to modern Romanian. It examines a large number of phenomena, from those that are common across Romance to some that are specific to Romanian, filling an important gap in the Romance linguistics literature.

Word Order and Parameter Change in Romanian

Word Order and Parameter Change in Romanian PDF Author: Alexandru Nicolae
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198807368
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description
The book provides a comprehensive description and in-depth analysis of the major word order changes that took place in the transition from old to modern Romanian. It examines a large number of phenomena, from those that are common across Romance to some that are specific to Romanian, filling an important gap in the Romance linguistics literature.

Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German

Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German PDF Author: Agnes Jäger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198813546
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into multiple central aspects of clause structure and word order, including verb placement, adverbial connectives, pronominal syntax, and information-structural factors.

Syntactic Change in French

Syntactic Change in French PDF Author: Sam Wolfe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198864310
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
This book provides the most comprehensive and detailed formal account to date of the evolution of French syntax. It makes use of the latest formal syntactic tools and combines careful textual analysis with a detailed synthesis of the research literature to provide a novel analysis of the major syntactic developments in the history of French. The empirical scope of the volume is exceptionally broad, and includes discussion of syntactic variation and change in Latin, Old, Middle, Renaissance, and Classical French, and standard and non-standard varieties of Modern French. Following an introduction to the general trends in grammatical change from Latin to French, Sam Wolfe explores a wide range of phenomena including the left periphery, subject positions and null subjects, verb movement, object placement, negation, and the makeup of the nominal expression. The book concludes with a comparative analysis of how French has come to develop the unique typological profile it has within Romance today. The volume will thus be an indispensable tool for researchers and students in French and comparative Romance linguistics, as well as for readers interested in grammatical theory and historical linguistics more broadly.

Continuity and Variation in Germanic and Romance

Continuity and Variation in Germanic and Romance PDF Author: Sam Wolfe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192578057
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
This volume offers a range of synchronic and diachronic case studies in comparative Germanic and Romance morphosyntax. These two language families, spoken by over a billion people today, have played a central role in linguistic research, but many significant questions remain about the relationship between them. Following an introduction that sets out the methodological, empirical, and theoretical background to the book, the volume is divided into three parts that deal with the morphosyntax of subjects and the inflectional layer; inversion, discourse pragmatics, and the left periphery; and continuity and variation beyond the clause. The contributors adopt a diverse range of approaches, making use of the latest digitized corpora and presenting a mixture of well-known and under-studied data from standard and non-standard Germanic and Romance languages. Many of the chapters challenge received wisdom about the relationship between these two important language families. The volume will be an indispensable resource for researchers and students in the fields of Germanic and Romance linguistics, historical and comparative linguistics, and morphosyntax.

The Diachrony of Differential Object Marking in Romanian

The Diachrony of Differential Object Marking in Romanian PDF Author: Virginia Hill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192654098
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the origins, development, and stabilization of differential object marking (DOM) in Romanian. DOM, a means by which a grammar distinguishes between objects based on semantic features such as animacy or definiteness, has been a fruitful area of research in syntax, historical linguistics, and typology. In this volume, Virginia Hill and Alexandru Mardale demonstrate that Romanian DOM reflects a typological mix of Balkan and Romance patterns, and is in fact composed of three distinct mechanisms. Their analysis of these mechanisms reveals that DOM triggers in Romanian are located in the nominal domain, in contrast to languages such as Spanish, where they are located in the verbal domain. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted in the volume sheds light on existing typologies of DOM, particularly in relation to the variation observed in the merging location of the DOM particle and of the doubling pronominal clitic.

THE LICENSING OF NOMINAL AND VERBAL ELLIPSIS IN ROMANIAN

THE LICENSING OF NOMINAL AND VERBAL ELLIPSIS IN ROMANIAN PDF Author: ALEXANDRU NICOLAE
Publisher: Editura Universității din București - Bucharest University Press
ISBN: 6061611447
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
“The book is impressive through: (a) the general theoretical framework, well mastered, and by the global theoretical results; (b) the results related to the manifestation of ellipsis in Romanian, highlighting the specific features of Romanian within Romance and non-Romance languages; (c) the descriptive and theoretical results of the two sorts of ellipsis and the relation established between them; (d) several sections of convincing monographs regarding the syntax of Romanian; (e) many other detailed results which can be taken over as such, as they represent solutions to certain thorny problems in the Romanian grammar; (f) the ability to cover and master very diverse bibliographic references, and to critically comment on them; (g) the capacity to accommodate the old Romanian bibliography with the novel theoretical information; (h) the ability to use the diachronic information in order to support and account for certain interpretations and analyses.” (Gabriela Pană Dindelegan, Corresponding Member of the Romanian Academy)

The MIHI EST construction

The MIHI EST construction PDF Author: Mihaela Ilioaia
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111055620
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
This book examines the Romanian mihi est construction (Mi-e foame/frică, me.dat = is hunger/fear ‘I am hungry/ afraid’). While it disappeared from all other Romance languages to be replaced with a habeo structure, the mihi est pattern is in Romanian the most common way of expressing psychological or physiological states. By means of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, the book investigates the status of the core arguments of the mihi est structure, i.e. the dative experiencer and the nominative state noun, as well as its evolution throughout the centuries. The data analysis reveals that the dative experiencer syntactically behaves like nominative subjects, whereas the state noun shows predicate behavior. As for the evolution of the mihi est structure, the analysis shows a certain tendency toward innovation, since in present-day Romanian it can coerce nouns coming from other semantic fields into the construction’s psychological or physiological interpretation. Could this be another unique trait of Romanian, which causes it to seemingly go against the tendency of most Romance languages toward canonical marking of core arguments?

Grammaticalization Scenarios from Europe and Asia

Grammaticalization Scenarios from Europe and Asia PDF Author: Walter Bisang
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110560445
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
This volume intends to fill the gap in the grammaticalization studies setting as its goal the systematic description of grammaticalization processes in genealogically and structurally diverse languages. To address the problem of the limitations of the secondary sources for grammaticalization studies, the editors rely on sketches of grammaticalization phenomena from experts in individual languages guided by a typological questionnaire.

Quantitative Historical Linguistics

Quantitative Historical Linguistics PDF Author: Gard B. Jenset
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198718179
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
This book is an innovative guide to quantitative, corpus-based research in historical and diachronic linguistics. Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray argue that, although historical linguistics has been successful in using the comparative method, the field lags behind other branches of linguistics with respect to adopting quantitative methods. Here they provide a theoretically agnostic description of a new framework for quantitatively assessing models and hypotheses in historical linguistics, based on corpus data and using case studies to illustrate how this framework can answer research questions in historical linguistics. The authors offer an in-depth explanation and discussion of the benefits of working with quantitative methods, corpus data, and corpus annotation, and the advantages of open and reproducible research. The book will be a valuable resource for graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, as well as for all those working with linguistic corpora.

Gender from Latin to Romance

Gender from Latin to Romance PDF Author: Michele Loporcaro
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199656541
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
This book explores grammatical gender in the Romance languages and dialects and its evolution from Latin. Michele Loporcaro investigates the significant diversity found in the Romance varieties in this regard; he draws on data from the Middle Ages to the present from all the Romance languages and dialects, discussing examples from Romanian to Portuguese and crucially also focusing on less widely-studied varieties such as Sursilvan, Neapolitan, and Asturian. The investigation first reveals that several varieties display more complex systems than the binary masculine/feminine contrast familiar from modern French or Italian. Moreover, it emerges that traditional accounts, whereby neuter gender was lost in the spoken Latin of the late Empire, cannot be correct: instead, the neuter gender underwent a range of different transformations from Late Latin onwards, which are responsible for the different systems that can be observed today across the Romance languages. The volume provides a detailed description of many of these systems, which in turns reveals a wealth of fascinating data, such as varieties where 'husbands' are feminine and others where 'wives' are masculine; dialects in which nouns overtly mark gender, but only in certain syntactic contexts; and one Romance variety (Asturian) in which it appears that grammatical gender has split into two concurrent systems. The volume will appeal to linguists from a range of backgrounds, including Romance linguistics, historical linguistics, typology, and morphosyntax, and is also of relevance to those working in sociology, gender studies, and psychology.