Verb Movement in Romance PDF Download

Author: Norma Schifano
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198804644
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This book provides a detailed account of verb movement across more than twenty standard and non-standard Romance varieties. Norma Schifano examines the position of the verb with respect to a wide selection of hierarchically-ordered adverbs, as laid out in Cinque's (1999) seminal work. She uses extensive empirical data to demonstrate that, contrary to traditional assumptions, it is possible to identify at least four distinct macro-typologies in the Romance languages: these macro-typologies stem from a compensatory mechanism between syntax and morphology in licensing the Tense, Aspect, and Mood interpretation of the verb. The volume adopts a hybrid cartographic/minimalist approach, in which cartography provides the empirical tools of investigation, and minimalist theory provides the technical motivations for the movement phenomena that are observed. It provides a valuable tool for the examination of fundamental morphosyntactic properties from a cross-Romance perspective, and constitutes a useful point of departure for further investigations into the nature and triggers of verb movement cross-linguistically.

Author: David Lightfoot
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521456616
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Work on the movement of phrase categories, mostly Noun Phrases, has been a central element of syntactic theorizing almost since the earliest work on generative grammar. Work on the movement of lexical elements, heads, has been much less central until recent years. Verb movement is now, however, the center of current research in syntax. Parallel to the theoretical interest has been the attention focused on the description of verb-second languages and on the movement operations that place the verb in its "second" position. This volume represents the latest work from many of the leading researchers in an important field, and draws on analyses from a wide range of languages. It will have a significant impact on its field.

Author: Virginia Hill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191056146
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The book provides a formal analysis of root and complement clauses in Old Romanian. Virginia Hill and Gabriela Alboiu examine the combination of Balkan syntactic patterns such as generalized subjunctive complementation on the one hand, and the Romance morphology that supplies complementizers and grammatical mood forms on the other. The consequences of this mixed typology range from root clauses with non-finite verbs to split heads and repeated recycling in clausal complements. The book argues that discourse triggers at the left periphery are responsible for fluctuations in verb movement in finite clauses, while with gerunds and imperatives verb movement follows from functional constraints. It further argues that clausal complements to control and raising verbs systematically display the pattern of the Balkan subjunctive, and that the spell out of these clausal complements has been repeatedly recycled during the development of Romanian. Verb Movement and Clause Structure in Old Romanian presents a new perspective on the manifestation of Balkan Sprachbund properties in the language, and on the nature of parametric differences in relation to other Romance languages. It provides a unified explanation for a range of constructions that have previously been treated as separate phenomena, and places diachronic changes in Romanian in a wider context.

Author: Sam Wolfe
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198804679
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This volume provides the first book-length study of the controversial topic of Verb Second and related properties in a range of Medieval Romance varieties. The findings have widespread implications for the understanding of both the key typological property of Verb Second and the development of Latin into the modern Romance languages.

Author: Natalya I. Stolova
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027269866
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This monograph offers the first in-depth lexical and semantic analysis of motion verbs in their development from Latin to nine Romance languages — Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, and Raeto-Romance — demonstrating that the patterns of innovation and continuity attested in the data can be accounted for in cognitive linguistic terms. At the same time, the study illustrates how the insights gained from Latin and Romance historical data have profound implications for the cognitive approaches to language — in particular, for Leonard Talmy’s motion-framing typology and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory. The book should appeal to scholars interested in historical Romance linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and lexical change.

Author: Cécile de Cat
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027290679
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
This landmark volume is the first work specifically designed to explore the extent to which striking surface morpho-syntactic similarities between Bantu and Romance languages actually represent similar syntactic structures. In particular, it explores the timely and much debated issues of verbal morphology and agreement, the structure of DPs, and word order/information structure, with the goal of providing a better understanding of the structure of the different languages investigated, and the implications this holds for syntactic theory more generally. All of the papers draw on data from both Bantu and Romance languages, providing a framework for much-needed further comparative research on the nature of linguistic structure, its diversity and constraints, and the implications this has for learnability/acquisition. The volume also provides an important precedent for incorporating insights from Bantu linguistic structure into mainstream of syntax research.

Author: Ane Berro
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004395393
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This is a collection of articles describing and analyzing several of the most important morphosyntactic features for which the formal comparison between Basque and its surrounding Romance languages is relevant, such as word order, inflection, case, argument structure and causatives. In the context of a language virtually all of whose speakers are bilingual in either Spanish or French, the theoretically informed in-depth description offered in this volume focuses on the fine grain of linguistic structures from languages typologically quite apart but coexisting and probably interacting in the minds of speakers. It therefore aims at shedding some light on the types of interactions between different systems and on the systems themselves.

Author: Enoch Aboh
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501504037
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
This volume brings together a selection of articles illustrating the multifaceted nature of current research in generative syntax. The authors, including some of the leading figures in the field, present analyses of typologically diverse languages, with some studies drawing on dialectal, acquisitional and diachronic evidence. Set against this rich empirical background, the contributions address an equally wide range of theoretical issues.

Author: C. Jan-Wouter Zwart
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780792342632
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Morphosyntax of Verb Movement discusses the phenomenon of Dutch, present in many Germanic languages, that the finite verb is fronted in main clauses but not in embedded clauses. The theoretical framework adopted is the so-called Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1995), the latest developmental stage of generative grammar. Taking issue with previous analyses, the author argues that phrase structure in Dutch is uniformly head initial, and that the finite verb moves to different positions in subject initial main clauses and in inversion constructions. The book contains lucid and detailed discussion of many theoretical issues in connection with the Minimalist Program, such as the relation between syntax and morphology, the nature of syntactic licensing, and the structure of the functional domain. At the same time, it offers a survey of the properties of Dutch syntax, a discussion of previous analyses of Dutch syntax and a wealth of material from dialects of Dutch and other Germanic languages.

Author: Elisa Barrajón López
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027267855
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
This volume offers a variety of perspectives on two of the main topics situated at the crossroads between lexical semantics and syntax, namely: (a) aspect and its correspondence with syntactic structure; and (b) the delimitation of syntactic structures from verb classes. Almost from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, it has been assumed that verbs invoke a mental image about the way in which eventualities are distributed over time. When it comes to determining time schemata, the lexical class to which the verb belongs represents a first step. Speaking about verb classes does not exclusively mean a semantic similarity; rather, verb classes exhibit a bundle of common features and thus show a set of recursive behavior patterns. Beyond the meaning of the verb, both semantic and syntactic factors, together with pragmatic ones, play a decisive role when establishing the aspectual classification of an eventuality. The contributions collected in this book approach the aforementioned lines, either analyzing the relationships between aspect and syntactic structure or traversing the path from a verb class to its syntactic manifestation. Some of them stress diachronic filiations, while others include processes of word formation in the debate; some of them focus on certain classes, such as movement verbs or psychological verbs, while others examine specific constructions. A number of chapters also discuss relevant theoretical issues concerning the analysis of aspect. In sum, the kaleidoscopic view provided by this book allows the reader to delve deeper into one of the most controversial – as well as exciting – topics within current linguistics.