Romance Object Clitics

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.

This book explores the development of object clitic pronouns in the Romance languages, drawing on data from Latin, medieval vernaculars, modern Romance languages, and lesser-known dialects. It offers new analyses of well-known phenomena such as interpolation, clitic climbing, enclisis/proclisis alternations, V2 syntax, and stylistic fronting.

Series statement "Oxford linguistics" from jacket.

This volume presents current research in the formal treatment of linguistic phenomena in the Romance languages. It focuses on a variety of issues in phonology, second language acquisition, semantics, and syntax. Topics in phonological theory include the analysis of geminates, assimilation, rhotics, aspiration, syllabification, the interaction of phonology with morphology, the phonology-phonetics interface, and issues of transderivation and allomorphy selection. The primary question addressed in the area of second language acquisition theory is the issue of learners' access to Universal Grammar. The studies in semantic theory examine the proper analysis of indefinites, bare plurals, and specificity, with a particular emphasis on the syntax-semantics interface. Finally, the essays on syntactic theory discuss issues pertaining to argument structure, functional projections, phrase structure and adjunction, feature checking, and the syntactic representation of tense.

This volume contains a selective collection of peer-reviewed papers that were presented at the 26th Going Romance conference, organized at the KU Leuven (Belgium) from 6-8 December 2012. The annual Going Romance conference has developed into the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages. The present volume testifies to the significance of the analysis of Romance languages for the field of linguistics in general, and theoretical linguistics in particular. It contains eleven articles dealing with issues related to all core linguistic domains and interfaces, and representing different empirical phenomena. The articles provide data from a significant range of Romance languages and language varieties (French, standard Italian and Italian dialects, Spanish, Catalan, Catalan Contact Spanish, standard and non-standard European Portuguese, Galician), as well as from Latin, English and German.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

Different components of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. It has been under debate what the actual range of interaction is and how we can most appropriately represent this in grammatical theory. The volume provides a general overview of various topics in the linguistics of Romance languages by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components and functions as a state-of-the-art report, but at the same time as a manual of Romance languages.

This monograph investigates the nature, properties, and consequences of the grammatical constraints that yield overt marking of objects in a variety of languages. The author, working within the Minimalist Program, concentrates on the syntactic and semantic behaviors of a particular class of objects: objects morphologically marked by the dative preposition in Romance languages, especially in several Spanish dialects, with consideration of similar phenomena in other languages. The central questions addressed revolve around the syntactic derivations that have accusative and dative complements and the role played by "doubling" clitics in these derivations. The analysis, concerned primarily with Case theory, unifies syntactic phenomena by isolating the grammatical factors that yield structures with accusative and dative objects. The monograph also includes an extended discussion of some classical themes of syntactic theory in the Romance languages, including asymmetries in the wh-movement of objects with clitics, and causatives. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 34