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 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 Syntactic Change in French written by Sam Wolfe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-22 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Manual of Romance Word Classes written by Anna-Maria De Cesare and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-09-02 with total page 826 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Word classes are linguistic categories serving as basis in the description of the vocabulary and grammar of natural languages. While important publications are regularly devoted to their definition, identification, and classification, in the field of Romance linguistics we lack a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of the current research. This Manual offers an updated and detailed discussion of all relevant aspects related to word classes in the Romance languages. In the first part, word classes are discussed from both a theoretical and historical point of view. The second part of the volume takes as its point of departure single word classes, described transversally in all the main Romance languages, while the third observes the relevant word classes from the point of view of specific Romance(-based) varieties. The fourth part explores Romance word classes at the interface of grammar and other fields of research. The Manual is intended as a reference work for all scholars and students interested in the description of both the standard, major Romance languages and the smaller, lesser described Romance(-based) varieties.

Download or read book Palatal Sound Change in the Romance Languages written by André Zampaulo and published by Oxford Studies in Diachronic a. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a thorough investigation of the main diachronic changes that have taken place in the palatal sounds of the Romance languages, as well as their current patterns of synchronic variation. Andre Zampaulo draws on extensive data not only from diachronic sources, but also from a range of current phonetic, phonological, and dialectal studies to motivate a formal, constraint-based account of palatal sound change. The analysis takes into account the role of phonetic information in the shaping of phonological patterns, approaching sound change from its inception during the speaker-listener interaction and formalizing it as the difference in constraint ranking between the grammar of the speaker and that of the listener-turned-speaker. The volume offers insights into how and why similar types of change may take place in different varieties and/or the same language at different times, and will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, Romance linguistics, and dialectology more broadly.

Download or read book Romance Object Clitics written by Diego Pescarini and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an empirical and theoretical exploration of the development of object clitic pronouns in the Romance languages, drawing on data from Latin, medieval vernaculars, modern Romance languages, and lesser-known dialects. Diego Pescarini examines phonological, morphological, and especially syntactic aspects of Romance object clitics, using the findings to reconstruct their evolution from Latin to Romance and to model clitic placement in modern Romance languages. On the theoretical side, the volume engages with previous accounts of clitics, particularly in generative theory. It challenges the received idea that cliticization resulted from a form of syntactic deficiency; instead, it proposes that clitics resulted from the feature endowment of discourse features, which initially caused freezing of certain pronominal forms and then - through reanalysis - their successive incorporation to verbal hosts. This approach leads to a revision of earlier analyses of well-known phenomena such as interpolation, climbing, and enclisis/proclisis alternations, and to new approaches to issues including V2 syntax, scrambling, and stylistic fronting, among many others.

Download or read book Word Order and Parameter Change in Romanian written by Alexandru Nicolae and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book provides a comprehensive description and in-depth analysis of the major word order changes that took place in the clausal and the nominal domains in the transition from old to modern Romanian. The data are set in a comparative Romance perspective, with attention also paid to the impact of the Balkan Sprachbund and the influence of Old Church Slavonic. Alexandru Nicolae's analysis is based on a qualitative and quantitative examination of a large number of phenomena in a representative corpus of old Romanian texts. Some of these phenomena, such as scrambling, interpolation, discontinuous constituents, and variation in the position and linearization of DP-internal adjectival modifiers, are found across Romance, while others, such as the low position for pronominal cliticization, are relatively rare. Still others are specific to old and modern Romanian, such as the proclitic and enclitic realization of the same pronominal clitic, the low definite article, and the adjectival article construction. From an empirical perspective, the volume fills a gap in the Romance linguistics literature, as several of the phenomena it explores have been largely neglected to date. More broadly it offers a valuable contribution to research into word order typology and change, the nature and content of syntactic parameters, and the theory of grammaticalization and syntactic change.

Download or read book A New Companion to the Romance Languages written by Martin Glessgen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-09-02 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Romance languages offer unique potential for empirical analysis and methodological innovation within the vast field of linguistics, due to the survival of a large body of historical documentation, the rich diversity of dialects and languages, and the exceptional quality of the research undertaken to date. However, these same factors have led to an ever-increasing volume of material available for study, requiring the establishment of a shared canonical knowledge base. This companion offers a balanced overview of the core subjects and the methodology which make up the field of Romance linguistics. It provides a solid foundation in the discipline as well as easy and convenient access to highly-specialised areas of research by means of systematic references to the latest handbooks and encyclopedias. The companion is designed to be read from cover to cover or to be consulted for information on specific topics. Advanced students, early-career researchers, lecturers, specialists of other languages, philologists, and historians alike will all benefit from this accessible and up-to-date reference work, as it enables readers to contextualise any knowledge of the discipline they may already possess.

Download or read book Grammaticalization Scenarios from Europe and Asia written by Walter Bisang and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Phonetic Causes of Sound Change written by Daniel Recasens and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an integrated account of the phonetic causes of the diachronic processes of palatalization and assibilation of velar and labial stops and labiodental fricatives, as well as the palatalization and affrication of dentoalveolar stops. While previous studies have been concerned with the typology of sound inventories and of the processes of palatalization and assibilation, this volume not only deals with the typological patterns but also outlines the articulatory and acoustic causes of these sound changes. In his articulation-based account, Daniel Recasens argues that the affricate and fricative outcomes of these changes developed via an intermediate stage, namely an (alveolo)palatal stop with varying degrees of closure fronting. Particular emphasis is placed on the one-to-many relationship between the input and output consonant realizations, on the acoustic cues that contribute to the implementation of these sound changes, and on the contextual, positional, and prosodic conditions that most favour their development. The analysis is based on extensive data from a wide range of language families, including Romance, Bantu, Slavic, and Germanic, and draws on a variety of sources, such as linguistic atlases, articulatory and acoustic studies, and phoneme identification tests.

Download or read book Modular Design of Grammar written by I Wayan Arka and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the latest research in linguistic modules and interfaces in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). LFG has a highly modular design that models the linguistic system as a set of discreet submodules that include, among others, constituent structure, functional structure, argument structure, semantic structure, and prosodic structure; each module has its own coherent properties and is related to other modules by correspondence functions. Following a detailed introduction, Part I examines the nature of linguistic structures, interfaces, and representations in LFG's architecture and ontology. Parts II and III are concerned with problems, analyses, and generalizations associated with linguistic phenomena of long-standing theoretical significance, including agreement, reciprocals, possessives, reflexives, raising, subjecthood, and relativization, demonstrating how these phenomena can be naturally accounted for within LFG's modular architecture. Part IV explores issues of the synchronic and diachronic dynamics of syntactic categories in grammar, such as unlike category coordination, fuzzy categorial edges, and consequences of decategorialization, providing explicit LFG solutions to such problems, including those resulting from language change in progress. The final part re-examines and refines the precise representations and interfaces of syntax with morphology, semantics, and pragmatics to account for challenging facts such as suspended affixation, prosody in multiple question word interrogatives and information structure, anaphoric dependencies, and idioms. The volume draws on data from a range of typologically diverse languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Icelandic, Kelabit, Polish, and Urdu, and will be of interest not only to those working in LFG and related frameworks, but to all those working on linguistic interfaces from a variety of theoretical standpoints.

Download or read book Syntactic architecture and its consequences I written by András Bárány and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us. The chapters address research questions on the relation of syntax to other aspects of grammar and linguistics more generally, including studies on language acquisition, variation and change, and syntactic interfaces. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and give the reader a sense of the lively nature of current discussion of topics in synchronic and diachronic comparative syntax ranging from the core verbal domain to higher, propositional domains.

Download or read book Iranian Syntax in Classical Armenian written by Robin Meyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-07 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book draws on a detailed corpus analysis of fifth-century historiographical texts to explore the influence of the Iranian languages on the syntax of Armenian. While contact between the Iranian languages - particularly Parthian - and Armenian has been a fertile field of research for several decades, its effects on syntax have to date been somewhat neglected. Here, Robin Meyer argues that the Armenian periphrastic perfect construction with its unusual morphosyntactic alignment was created on the model of similar constructions in Parthian, along with a number of other syntagms. Unlike previous accounts, the language contact model presented in this book can explain all the idiosyncrasies of the construction, as well as its diachronic developments. The study also offers new insights into the historical social dynamics between Armenian and Parthian speakers, and suggests that the Parthians, who were the ruling class in the Armenian Kingdom for almost four centuries, eventually abandoned their native language.

Download or read book Dative External Possessors in Early English written by Cynthia L. Allen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first systematic, corpus-based examination of dative external possessors in Old and Early Middle English and their diachronic development. Modern English is unusual among European languages in not having a productive dative external possessor construction, whereby the possessor is in the dative case and behaves like an element of the sentence rather than part of the possessive phrase. This type of construction was found in Old English, however, especially in expressions of inalienable possession; it appeared in variation with the internal possessors in the genitive case, which then became the only productive possibility in Middle English. In this book, Cynthia Allen traces the use of dative external possessors in the texts of the Old and early Middle English periods and explores how the empirical data fit with the hypotheses put forward to date. She draws on recent developments in linguistic theory to evaluate both language-internal explanations for the loss of the dative construction and the possible role of language contact, especially with the Brythonic Celtic languages. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of historical syntax and morphology, language variation and change, and the comparative syntax of the Germanic languages.

Download or read book Functional Heads Across Time written by Barbara Egedi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the role that functional elements play in syntactic change and investigates the semantic and functional features that are the driving force behind those changes. Structural developments are explained in terms of the reanalysis of parts of the functional sequences in the clausal, nominal, and adpositional domains, through changes in parameter settings and feature specifications. The chapters discuss 'microdiachronic' syntactic changes that often have implications for large-scale syntactic effects, such as word order variation, the emergence (and lexicalization) of syntactic projections, grammaticalization, and changes in information-structural properties. The volume contains both case studies of individual languages, such as German, Hungarian, and Romanian, and detailed investigations of cross-linguistic phenomena, based primarily on digital corpora of historical and dialectal data.

Download or read book Germanic Phylogeny written by Frederik Hartmann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a computational re-evaluation of the genealogical relations between the early Germanic families and of their diversification from their most recent common ancestor, Proto-Germanic. It also proposes a novel computational approach to the problem of linguistic diversification more broadly, using agent-based simulation of speech communities over time. This new method is presented alongside more traditional phylogenetic inference, and the respective results are compared and evaluated. Frederik Hartmann demonstrates that the traditional and novel methods each capture different aspects of this highly complex real-world process; crucially, the new computational approach proposed here offers a new way of investigating the wave-like properties of language relatedness that were previously less accessible. As well as validating the findings of earlier research, the results of this study also generate new insights and shed light on much-debated issues in the field. The conclusion is that the break-up of Germanic should be understood as a gradual disintegration process in which tree-like branching effects are rare.

Download or read book Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics written by Jonathan Owens and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-28 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the long history of the Arabic language, from pre-Islamic Arabic via the Classical era of the Arabic grammarians up to the present day. While most traditional accounts have been dominated by a linear understanding of the development of Arabic, this book instead advocates a multiple pathways approach to Arabic language history. Arabic has multifarious sources: its relations to other Semitic languages, an old epigraphic and papyrological tradition, a vibrant and linguistically original classical Arabic linguistic tradition, and a widely dispersed array of contemporary spoken varieties. These diverse sources present a challenge to and an opportunity for defining a holistic but not necessarily linear Arabic language history. The geographical breadth and chronological depth of Arabic make it a fertile ground for a critical appraisal and application of perspectives from a range of subdisciplines including sociolinguistics, typology, grammaticalization, and corpus linguistics. Jonathan Owens draws on these approaches to investigate more than 20 individual case studies that cover more than 1500 years of documented and reconstructed history: the results demonstrate that Arabic is a far more complex historical object than traditional accounts have assumed. This complexity is further explored in a comparison of the historical morphology of three languages that can be compared over roughly the same period (500 AD-2022 AD): Icelandic, English, and Arabic. Icelandic and English are diametrically opposed on a parameter of linearity. Icelandic is effectively alinear: the morphology of the earliest Icelandic writings is the morphology of today. English is linear, having undergone a drastic change in morphology from its Old English stage to the Middle English period. Arabic is shown to be alinear in many important respects, but multilinear in others, with different sorts of linguistic changes being spread across many individual historical speech communities.