Additions To The Rhaeto Romantic Collection

The Rhaeto-Romance languages have been known as such to the linguistic community since the pioneering studies of Ascoli and Gartner over a century ago. There has never been a community of RR speakers based on a common history or polity and the various dialects are mutually unintelligible, but a unity, based on a number of common features, has been advanced. This book is the first general description of the Rhaeto-Romance languages to be written in English. It provides a critical examination of the phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax of the modern Rhaeto-Romance dialects within the broader perspective of Romance comparative linguistics.

The Rhaeto-Romance languages have been known as such to the linguistic community since the pioneering studies of Ascoli and Gartner over a century ago. There has never been a community of RR speakers based on a common history or polity and the various dialects are mutually unintelligible, but a unity, based on a number of common features, has been advanced. This book is the first general description of the Rhaeto-Romance languages to be written in English. It provides a critical examination of the phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax of the modern Rhaeto-Romance dialects within the broader perspective of Romance comparative linguistics.

This book investigates the historical paths leading from pronouns to markers of verbal agreement and proposes a unified formal account of this grammaticalization process. In opposition to beliefs widely held in the literature, it is argued that new agreement formatives can be coined in a multitude of syntactic environments. Still, the individual paths toward agreement are shown to exhibit a set of underlying similarities which are attributed to universal principles that govern the reanalysis of pronominal clitics as exponents of verbal agreement across languages. It is claimed that syntactic principles impose only a set of necessary conditions on the reanalysis in question, while its ultimate trigger is morphological in nature. More specifically, it is argued that the acquisition of inflectional morphology is governed by blocking effects which operate during language acquisition and promote the grammaticalization of new markers if this change serves to replace ‘worn-out’, underspecified forms with new, more specified candidates.

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