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The term ‘Maya’, in Indian traditions, refers to our sensory perception of the world and, as such, to a superficial reality (or ‘un–reality’) that we must look beyond to find the inner reality of things. Applied to the study of language, we perceive sounds, a superficial reality, and then we seek structures, the underlying reality in what we call phonology, morphology, and syntax. This volume starts with an introduction by the editors, which shows how the various papers contained in the volume reflect the spectrum of research interests of Andrea Calabrese, as well as his influence on the work of colleagues and his students. Contributors, united in their search for the abstract stru...
This volume is devoted to a major chapter in the history of linguistics in the United States, the period from the 1930s to the 1980s, and focuses primarily on the transition from (post-Bloomfieldian) structural linguistics to early generative grammar. The first three chapters in the book discuss the rise of structuralism in the 1930s; the interplay between American and European structuralism; and the publication of Joos's Readings in Linguistics in 1957. Later chapters explore the beginnings of generative grammar and the reaction to it from structural linguists; how generativists made their ideas more widely known; the response to generativism in Europe; and the resistance to the new theory by leading structuralists, which continued into the 1980s. The final chapter demonstrates that contrary to what has often been claimed, generative grammarians were not in fact organizationally dominant in the field in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.
Different components of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. It has been under debate what the actual range of interaction is and how we can most appropriately represent this in grammatical theory. The volume provides a general overview of various topics in the linguistics of Romance languages by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components and functions as a state-of-the-art report, but at the same time as a manual of Romance languages.
This book examines morphosyntactic variation in the Romance varieties spoken in Italy from both a regional and historical perspective. It examines a range of phenomena, backed up by extensive empirical data, and will be a valuable resource not only for specialists in Italo-Romance but also for researchers in morphosyntactic change more generally
Alexandra Cornilescu is an internationally renowned linguist, whose pioneering ideas have been influential in developing generative grammar in Romania, Europe and beyond. The weightiness of her contributions to the field is matched only by her talent for disseminating them. Ever since 1970, when she started teaching at the University of Bucharest, she has continuously played a tireless and inspirational role in the creation of several generations of linguists, which the academic world has come to admiringly refer to as The Bucharest School. As the initiator of the AICED conference, held annually in the English Department at the University of Bucharest, she has turned it into one of the leading platforms of generative linguistics in Europe. She has published extensively on Romanian and English linguistics and is also the founder and past editor of the journal Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics. On the occasion of her 75th birthday, her friends, students and colleagues celebrate Alexandra Cornilescu’s work with this collection of essays on various topics of current theoretical interest.
This is the first of a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. It examines the development of sentential negation and negative indefinites and quantifiers in languages and language groups such as Italian, English, Dutch, German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic.
This book presents and analyzes various features of the morphosyntax of Borgomanerese, a Gallo-Italic dialect spoken in the town of Borgomanero, in the Piedmont region of Northern Italy. The study is highly comparative, drawing on the literature on numerous other Italian dialects and Romance languages (as well as English), to inform our understanding of the Borgomanerese phenomena. Christina Tortora takes the many unusual and understudied (and often novel) facts of Borgomanerese grammar as compelling grounds for revisiting and reformulating current analyses of syntactic phenomena in these other languages. The phenomena treated include the syntax and semantics of the weak locative in presenta...
The concept of ‘negative concord’ refers to the seemingly multiple exponence of semantically single negation as in You ain’t seen nothing yet. This book takes stock of what has been achieved since the notion was introduced in 1922 by Otto Jespersen and sets the agenda for future research, with an eye towards increased cross-fertilization between theoretical perspectives and methodological tools. Major issues include (i) How can formal and typological approaches complement each other in uncovering and accounting for cross-linguistic variation? (ii) How can corpus work steer theoretical analyses? (iii) What is the contribution of diachronic research to the theoretical debates?
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...
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.