Adjective Adverb Interfaces In Romance

Within the current discussion on grammatical interfaces, the word-classes of adjective and adverb are of particular interest because they appear to be separated or joined in manifold ways at the level of word-class or syntax, with morphology playing a prominent role, especially in Romance. The volume provides typological and theoretical insights into the common or different usage of adjectives and adverbs in Romance. Diachronic change is discussed alongside with synchronic variation and the representation in grammar. The discussion turns out to be controversial, calling into question traditional assumptions such as the dogma of the invariability and the categorial status of the adverb.

Although the Germanic and Romance languages are two branches of the same language family and although both have developed the adjective as a separate syntactic and morphological category, the syntax, morphology, and interpretation of adjectives is by no means the same in these two language groups, and there is even variation within each of the language groups. One of the main aims of this volume is to map the differences and similarities in syntactic behavior, morphology, and meaning of the Germanic and Romance adjective and to find an answer to the following question: Are the (dis)similarities the result of autonomous developments in each of the two branches of the Indo-European language family, or are they caused by language contact?

This volume brings together new research on theoretical Romance Linguistics; its intended audience is scholars in the field of formal grammar, especially those specializing in Romance languages. It represents the latest work on the structure of Romance languages, with relevant comparisons to other languages such as English and Basque. As the volume's title indicates, two related themes recur in these studies: the role of grammatical features in sub-modules of the grammar, and the interaction of sub-modules with each other and with external systems at the “interfaces”. The contributions to this volume, all framed within current theoretical models, explore these and related problems in the analysis of Romance. The volume contains studies on morphology, phonology, syntax and semantics, and includes language and subject indices.

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.

In both Romance and English literature, relational adjectives have received special attention due to their apparently idiosyncratic behaviour, as both nouns and adjectives at the same time. Stepping away from the usual analyses that concentrates generally on their noun-like properties, this pioneer work explains their peculiar behaviour that has so far represented a challenge for current morphological theories. Mihaela Marchis Moreno takes an empirical approach to their distribution, and the syntactic and semantic conditions that govern their use. Drawing upon key findings from previous literature she proposes a new model of how relational adjectives work both cross-linguistically, and across the various interfaces of language.

The contributions of this book deal with the issue of language variation. They all share the assumption that within the language faculty the variation space is hierarchically constrained and that minimal changes in the set of property values defining each language give rise to diverse outputs within the same system. Nevertheless, the triggers for language variation can be different and located at various levels of the language faculty. The novelty of the volume lies in exploring different loci of language variation by including wide-ranging empirical perspectives that cover different levels of analysis (syntax, phonology and prosody) and deal with different kinds of data, mostly from Romance and Germanic languages, from dialects, idiolects, language acquisition, language attrition and creolization, analyzed from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. The volume is divided in three parts. The first part is dedicated to synchronic variation in phonology and syntax; the second part deals with diachronic variation and language change, and the third part investigates the role of contact, attrition and acquisition in giving rise to language change and language variation in bilingual settings. This volume is a useful tool for linguistics of diverse theoretical persuasions working on theoretical and comparative linguistics and to anyone interested in language variation, language change, dialectology, language acquisition and typology.

This book explores unusual patterns of agreement, one of the most intriguing and theoretically challenging aspects of human language. Agreement is typically thought to reflect a structural relationship between a verb and its arguments within the clause, and all major theories of agreement have been developed with the centrality of this relationship in mind. But beyond the verb, items belonging to practically every other part of speech have been found to function as agreement targets, including adpositions, adverbs, converbs, nouns, pronouns, complementizers, and other conjunctions. Data on these targets provide rich insights into the structural domains in which agreement operates, demonstrating that unusual targets can be associated with unexpected domains that are independent of the agreement domain of the verb. Following an introduction to the typology of unusual targets and unexpected domains across the world's languages, the chapters in this volume provide detailed treatments of a wide range of rare and complex agreement phenomena in seven languages, belonging to five different language families of Eurasia and the Pacific. The contributions are all based on novel data collected by the authors, which detail the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of agreement on non-verbal targets within the clause.

This book offers a comparative perspective on the structural and interpretive properties of root-clause complementizers in Ibero-Romance. The driving question the author seeks to answer is where the boundaries between syntax and pragmatics lie in these languages. Contrary to most previous work on these phenomena, the author argues in favor of a relatively strict distribution of labor between the two components of grammar. The first part of the book is devoted to root complementizers with a reportative interpretation. The second part deals with root complementizers and commitment attribution. Finally, the last part presents the results of empirical studies on the topic.