Download or read book Expletive and Referential Subject Pronouns in Medieval French written by Michael Zimmermann and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-09-12 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval French, usually analyzed as a null subject language, differs considerably from modern Romance null subject languages such as Spanish in the availability of non-expressed subject pronouns; specifically, it shows characteristics reminiscent of non-null, rather than null subject languages, such as the expression of expletive subject pronouns. The central goal of this book is to put forward an account of these differences. On the basis of the analysis of an extensive, newly established data corpus, the development of the expression of both expletive and referential subject pronouns until the 17th c. is determined. Following a thorough discussion of previous approaches, an alternative approach is presented which builds on the analysis of Medieval French as a non-null subject language. The non-expression of subject pronouns, licit in specific contexts in non-null subject languages, is shown to be restricted to configurations generally involving left-peripheral focalization. These configurations – and, concomitantly, non-expressed subject pronouns – are finally argued to be eventually lost for good in the wake of the initial observation by 17th c. writers of pertinent instructions campaigned for in highly influential works of language use.

Download or read book Expletive and Referential Subject Pronouns in Medieval French written by Michael Zimmermann and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-09-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval French, usually analyzed as a null subject language, differs considerably from modern Romance null subject languages such as Spanish in the availability of non-expressed subject pronouns; specifically, it shows characteristics reminiscent of non-null, rather than null subject languages, such as the expression of expletive subject pronouns. The central goal of this book is to put forward an account of these differences. On the basis of the analysis of an extensive, newly established data corpus, the development of the expression of both expletive and referential subject pronouns until the 17th c. is determined. Following a thorough discussion of previous approaches, an alternative approach is presented which builds on the analysis of Medieval French as a non-null subject language. The non-expression of subject pronouns, licit in specific contexts in non-null subject languages, is shown to be restricted to configurations generally involving left-peripheral focalization. These configurations – and, concomitantly, non-expressed subject pronouns – are finally argued to be eventually lost for good in the wake of the initial observation by 17th c. writers of pertinent instructions campaigned for in highly influential works of language use.

Download or read book Null Subjects in Generative Grammar written by Federica Cognola and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the null-subject phenomenon, whereby some languages lack an overtly realized referential subject in specific contexts. It explores novel empirical data and new theoretical analyses covering the major approaches to null subjects in generative grammar, and examines a wide range of languages from different families.

Download or read book Referential Null Subjects in Early English written by Kristian A. Rusten and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a large-scale quantitative investigation of referential null subjects as they occur in Old, Middle, and Early Modern English. Using corpus linguistic methods, and drawing on five corpora of early English, it empirically examines the occurrence of subjectless finite clauses in more than 500 early English texts, spanning nearly 850 years. On the basis of this substantial data, Kristian A. Rusten re-evaluates previous conflicting claims concerning the occurrence and distribution of null subjects in Old English. He explores the question of whether the earliest stage of English can be considered a canonical or partial pro-drop language, and provides an empirical examination of the role played by central licensors of null subjects proposed in the theoretical literature. The predictions of two important pragmatic accounts of null arguments are also tested. Throughout, the book builds its arguments primarily by means of powerful statistical tools, including generalized fixed-effects and mixed-effects logistic regression modelling. The volume is the most comprehensive examination of null subjects in the history of English to date, and will be of interest to syntacticians, historical linguists, and those working in English and Germanic linguistics more widely.

Download or read book The Handbook of Historical Linguistics Volume II written by Richard D. Janda and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entirely new follow-up volume providing a detailed account of numerous additional issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics. This brand-new, second volume of The Handbook of Historical Linguistics is a complement to the well-established first volume first published in 2003. It includes extended content allowing uniquely comprehensive coverage of the study of language(s) over time. Though it adds fresh perspectives on several topics previously treated in the first volume, this Handbook focuses on extensions of diachronic linguistics beyond those key issues. This Handbook provides readers with studies of language change whose perspectives range from comparisons of large open vs. small closed corpora, via creolistics and linguistic contact in general, to obsolescence and endangerment of languages. Written by leading scholars in their respective fields, new chapters are offered on matters such as the origin of language, evidence from language for reconstructing human prehistory, invocations of language present in studies of language past, benefits of linguistic fieldwork for historical investigation, ways in which not only biological evolution but also field biology can serve as heuristics for research into the rise and spread of linguistic innovations, and more. Moreover, it: offers novel and broadened content complementing the earlier volume so as to provide the fullest available overview of a wholly engrossing field includes 23 all-new contributed chapters, treating some familiar themes from fresh perspectives but mostly covering entirely new topics features expanded discussion of material from language families other than Indo-European provides a multiplicity of views from numerous specialists in linguistic diachrony. The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, researchers and professional linguists, as well as all those interested in the history of particular languages and the history of language more generally.

Download or read book Unraveling the complexity of SE written by Grant Armstrong and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes a novel contribution to our understanding of Romance SE constructions by combining both diachronic and synchronic theoretical perspectives along with a range of empirical data from different languages and dialects. The collection, divided into four sections, proposes that SE constructions may be divided into one class that is the result of grammaticalization of a reflexive pronoun up the syntactic tree, from Voice and above, and another class that has resulted from the reanalysis of reflexive and anticausative morphemes as an argument expletive or verbal morpheme generated in positions from Voice and below. The contributions, while varied in both empirical content and theoretical approach, all serve to highlight different aspects of the overarching idea that SE constructions have evolved from these two distinct grammaticalization paths. The book appeals to researchers and academics in the field and closes with a unified approach to various SE constructions that makes important use of its status as a verbal morpheme. In addition to aligning a novel string of empirical contributions under a new theoretical umbrella, a clear research direction emerges from this volume based on the morphosyntactic nature of SE itself: Is it a clitic, an agreement morpheme, or a verbal morpheme?

Download or read book Definiteness Effects written by Susann Fischer and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-17 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores in detail the empirical and conceptual content of the definiteness effect in grammar. It brings together a variety of relevant observations from a typological, diachronic and a bilingual/second language acquisition perspective, and provides a general overview of different approaches concerned with the syntactic, morphological, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the Definiteness Effect in a series of European and non-European languages.

Download or read book Rethinking Verb Second written by Rebecca Woods and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 979 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive treatment available of the Verb Second property, which has been a central topic in formal syntax for decades. While Verb Second has traditionally been considered a feature primarily of the Germanic languages, this book shows that it is much more widely attested cross-linguistically than previously thought, and explores the multiple empirical, theoretical, and experimental puzzles that remain in developing an account of the phenomenon. Uniquely, formal theoretical work appears alongside studies of psycholinguistics, language production, and language acquisition. The range of languages investigated is also broader than in previous work: while novel issues are explored through the lens of the more familiar Germanic data, chapters also cover Verb Second effects in languages such as Armenian, Dinka, Tohono O'odham, and in the Celtic, Romance, and Slavonic families. The analyses have wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of the language faculty, and will be of interest to researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of syntax, historical linguistics, and language acquisition.

Download or read book Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax written by Andreas Dufter and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 978 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.

Download or read book Language Change at the Interfaces written by Nicholas Catasso and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers an up-to-date survey of linguistic phenomena at the interfaces between syntax and prosody, information structure and discourse – with a special focus on Germanic and Romance – and their role in language change. The contributions, set within the generative framework, discuss original data and provide new insights into the diachronic development of long-burning issues such as negation, word order, quantifiers, null subjects, aspectuality, the structure of the left periphery, and extraposition. The first part of the volume explores interface phenomena at the intrasentential level, in which only clause-internal factors seem to play a significant role in determining diachronic change. The second part examines developments at the intersentential level involving a rearrangement of categories between at least two clausal domains. The book will be of interest for scholars and students interested in generative accounts of language change phenomena at the interfaces, as well as for theoretical linguists in general.

Download or read book Continuity and Variation in Germanic and Romance written by Sam Wolfe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Variation and Change in Gallo Romance Grammar written by Sam Wolfe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-07 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a wide-range of case studies on variation and change in the sub-family of the Romance languages that includes French and Occitan: Gallo-Romance. Both standard and non-standard Gallo-Romance data can be of enormous value to studies of morphosyntactic variation and change, yet, as the volume demonstrates, non-standard and comparative Gallo-Romance data have often been lacking in both synchronic and diachronic studies. Following an introduction that sets out the conceptual background, the volume is divided into three parts whose chapters explore a variety of topics in the domains of sentence structure, the verb complex, and word structure. The empirical foundation of the volume is exceptionally rich, drawing on standard and non-standard data from French, Occitan, Francoprovençal, Picard, Wallon, and Norman. This diversity is also reflected in the theoretical and conceptual approaches adopted, which span traditional philology, sociolinguistics, formal morphological and syntactic theory, semantics, and discourse-pragmatics. The volume will thus be an indispensable tool for researchers and students in French and (Gallo-) Romance linguistics as well as for readers interested in grammatical theory, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics.

Download or read book Verb Second in Medieval Romance written by Sam Wolfe and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Diachronic Syntax written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 751 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second edition of Ian Roberts's highly successful textbook on diachronic syntax has been fully revised and updated throughout to take account of the multiple developments in the field in the last decade. The book provides a detailed account of how standard questions in historical linguistics - including word order change, grammaticalization, and reanalysis - can be explored in terms of current minimalist theory and Universal Grammar. This new edition offers expanded coverage of a range of topics, including null subjects, the Final-over-Final Condition, the diachrony of wh-movement, the Tolerance Principle, and creoles and creolization, and explores further advances in the theory of parametric variation. Each chapter includes suggestions for further reading, and the book concludes with a comprehensive glossary of key terms. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field, the volume will remain an ideal textbook for students of historical linguistics and a valuable reference for researchers and students in related areas such as syntax, comparative linguistics, language contact, and language acquisition.

Download or read book Verb Second written by Horst Lohnstein and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-03-09 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses a general phenomenon in the European languages: verb second. The articles provide a comprehensive survey of synchronic vs. diachronic developments in the Germanic and Romance languages. New theoretical insights into the interaction of the properties of verbal mood and syntactic structure building lead to hypotheses about the mutual influence of these systems. The diachronic change in the syntax together with changes in the inflectional system show the interdependence between the syntactic and the inflectional component. The fact that the subjunctive can license verb second in dependent clauses reveals further dependencies between these subsystems of grammar. "Fronting finiteness" furthermore constitutes an instance of a main clause phenomenon. Whether "assertion" or "at-issueness" are encoded through this grammatical process will be a matter in the debates discussed in the book. Moreover, information structure appears to be directly related to the fronting of other constituents in front of the finite verb. Questions concerning the interrelations between these various subcomponents of the grammatical system are investigated.

Download or read book Semantic and syntactic aspects of impersonality written by Peter Herbeck and published by Helmut Buske Verlag. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Herbeck, Bernhard Pöll & Anne C. Wolfsgruber: Foreword Hubert Haider: On expletive, semantically void, and absent subjects Janayna Carvalho: Incorporated subjects in Existential Impersonal Sentences in Brazilian Portuguese Thórhallur Eythórsson, Anton Karl Ingason & Einar Freyr Sigurðsson: Flavors of reflexive arguments in Icelandic impersonals Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir & Joan Maling: From passive to active: diachronic change in impersonal constructions Anne C. Wolfsgruber: Impersonal interpretations of Medieval Romance se - tracing initial contexts Eduardo Amaral & Wiltrud Mihatsch: Incipient impersonal pronouns in colloquial Brazilian Portuguese based on pessoa, pessoal and povo

Download or read book Optimality Theory and Language Change written by D.E. Holt and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work discusses many optimization and linguistic issues in great detail. It treats the history of a variety of languages, including English, French, Germanic, Galician/ Portuguese, Latin, Russian, and Spanish and shows that the application of Optimality Theory allows for innovative and improved analyses. It contains a complete bibliography on OT and language change. It is of interest to historical linguists, researchers into OT and linguistic theory, and phonologists and syntacticians with an interest in historical change.