The Licensing Of Nominal And Verbal Ellipsis In Romanian

“The book is impressive through: (a) the general theoretical framework, well mastered, and by the global theoretical results; (b) the results related to the manifestation of ellipsis in Romanian, highlighting the specific features of Romanian within Romance and non-Romance languages; (c) the descriptive and theoretical results of the two sorts of ellipsis and the relation established between them; (d) several sections of convincing monographs regarding the syntax of Romanian; (e) many other detailed results which can be taken over as such, as they represent solutions to certain thorny problems in the Romanian grammar; (f) the ability to cover and master very diverse bibliographic references, and to critically comment on them; (g) the capacity to accommodate the old Romanian bibliography with the novel theoretical information; (h) the ability to use the diachronic information in order to support and account for certain interpretations and analyses.” (Gabriela Pană Dindelegan, Corresponding Member of the Romanian Academy)

Alexandra Cornilescu is an internationally renowned linguist, whose pioneering ideas have been influential in developing generative grammar in Romania, Europe and beyond. The weightiness of her contributions to the field is matched only by her talent for disseminating them. Ever since 1970, when she started teaching at the University of Bucharest, she has continuously played a tireless and inspirational role in the creation of several generations of linguists, which the academic world has come to admiringly refer to as The Bucharest School. As the initiator of the AICED conference, held annually in the English Department at the University of Bucharest, she has turned it into one of the leading platforms of generative linguistics in Europe. She has published extensively on Romanian and English linguistics and is also the founder and past editor of the journal Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics. On the occasion of her 75th birthday, her friends, students and colleagues celebrate Alexandra Cornilescu’s work with this collection of essays on various topics of current theoretical interest.

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.

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 book is the first comprehensive grammar in English of present-day standard Romanian. It is an indispensable resource for Romance linguists, from advanced undergraduate level and above.

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the syntax of old Romanian written in English and targeted at a non-Romanian readership. It draws on an extensive new corpus analysis of the period between the beginning of the sixteenth century, the date of the earliest attested Romanian texts, and the end of the eighteenth century, generally considered to mark the start of the modernization of Romanian. Gabriela Pan&a Dindelegan and her co-authors adopt both a synchronic and diachronic approach by providing a detailed corpus analysis in a given period, while also comparing old and modern Romanian. They examine the evolution of a variety of syntactic phenomena, including the elimination or diminishing of certain facts or generalization of others, the total or partial grammaticalization of phenomena, competition between structures, and cases of syntactic variation. The book takes a typological and comparative perspective, focusing on those phenomena that are considered specific to Romanian (either on the Romance or in the Balkan area), and adopts a modern framework while still remaining accessible to readers from any background.