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From Sounds to Structures
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...
The Interaction of Focus, Givenness, and Prosody
This is an open access title available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. This book examines some of the main factors determining the word order of Italian sentences. One such factor, contrastive focus, concerns the final position of phrases that are emphatically contrasted relative to other similar phrases (e.g. "JOHN called, not Bill"). The study of Italian has been particularly relevant to claims that these phrases must always be placed in specific positionstoward the front of a sentence. This book examines the conflicting conditions affecting sentences containing both focused and unfocused phrases, showing that when these conditions and their effects areidentified, the position of contrastively focused phrases is radically different from what was previously thought. The book also investigates why this would be the case, concluding that prosodic conditions concerning the placement of intonational stress are ultimately responsible for key aspects of the word order of Italian sentences, an unexpected result showing that intonation can affect how words are combined together.
It-Clefts
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 struct...
Why is ‘Why’ Unique?
Why is ‘Why’ Unique? Its Syntactic and Semantic Properties considers the behaviour of this peculiar wh-element across many different languages, including Ewe, Trevisan, Italian, Basque, German, Dutch, Cantonese, Mandarin, English and Hebrew. In ten original chapters, the authors explore various aspects of why-questions, such as the way why interacts with V2 constructions in Basque, with a subject clitic in Trevisan or how its morpho-syntactic make-up determines its merge position in Ewe, to mention but a few. Furthermore, a clear-cut distinction is established between high and low reason adverbials which are subsequently examined in why-stripping environments in Dutch. Beyond why proper,...
The syntax of functional left peripheries
This book provides a novel analysis for the syntax of the clausal left periphery, focusing on various finite clause types and especially on embedded clauses. It investigates how the appearance of multiple projections interacts with economy principles and with the need for marking syntactic information overtly. In particular, the proposed account shows that a flexible approach assuming only a minimal number of projections is altogether favourable to cartographic approaches. The main focus of the book is on West Germanic, in particular on English and German, yet other Germanic and non-Germanic languages are also discussed for comparative purposes.
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2013
The Going Romance conferences are a major European annual discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages. This volume assembles a selection of the papers that were presented at the 27th edition of Going Romance, which was organized by the University of Amsterdam in November 2013. The papers present the theoretical analysis of subjects that cover three main themes of interest within current Romance linguistics: word order, the verb, and the DP. The range of languages discussed is broad, and includes not only standard continental but also non-continental Romance languages, and not only standard languages, but also dialectal variation. Furthermore Romance is analyzed not only from a synchronic perspective (including acquisition), but also from a diachronic point of view.
Information Structure and Agreement
Consists of thirteen contributions that focuses on the trends of information structure and agreement, couched in the present developments of Minimalism, Cartography, and Optimality. In this book, chapters deal with notion of agreement and its role in syntax of specific constructions such as applicatives and correlatives.
Intonation in Romance
This book offers the first comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages that takes into account internal dialectal variation. Teams of experts examine the prosody of Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish using the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the Tones and Breaks Indices (ToBI) transcription system. The chapters all share a common methodology, based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire, and provide extensive empirical data. The authors then analyse how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means such as syntactic constructions and discourse particles in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language as well as on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages. This book will pave the way for more systematic typological comparisons of prosody across both Romance and non-Romance languages.
Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography
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.
The Grammar of Emphasis
This book reconsiders the linguistic notion of emphasis. For many, the concept of emphasis is confined to information structure. However, our understanding of the grammatical reflexes of emphasis is only partial as long as the expressive side of utterances is not taken into account. The book explores similarities, differences, and interactions between information structure and the expressive dimension of language in the domain of natural language grammar. Specifically, this monograph demonstrates that specific word order options, sometimes in combination with discourse particles, yield meaning effects that are typical for the expressive side of utterances and endow them with an exclamative flavor. Approaching this issue from a syntactic point of view, the book shows that there are syntactic categories (e.g., a certain class of particle verbs) and word orders (e.g., certain fronting patterns involving discourse particles) that directly connect to expressive meaning components. The work presented in this monograph combines theoretical analysis with experimental evidence from both perception and production studies.
