Search Results

This bulky chapter is devoted to the examination of Late Medieval Greek (11th–15th c. AD), the first period after late antiquity which provides us with material in a “vernacular” variety of Greek. The investigation, based on both literary and non‐literary sources, gives new insights into a great variety of issues, such as the semantic development of the μέλλω AVC—illustrated here for the first time. The much discussed and debated “θέ νά” construction is investigated at length, and a new account of its development is proposed, partly based on language contact between Greek‐ and Romance‐speaking populations, a largely unexplored issue.

This chapter discusses the overall paradigmatic distribution of gaps in the Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula. It revisits the Spanish data from a historical and comparative perspective, considering the closely related language, Portuguese. Ibero-Romance paradigm gaps are determined by the lexical rarity and the morphemic patterning. Paradigm gaps are also affected by ‘low speaker confidence’. This behaviour defines the avoidance of allomorphy even in the absence of reasonable grounds to expect the occurrence of allomorphy. Such behaviour is triggered by the speaker's sensitivity to a major distributional pattern of root allomorphy in Spanish and Portuguese such as that in non-first conjunction verbs, the first person singular present indicative together with all persons and numbers of the present subjunctive in shared root allomorph. In addition to determining the defectiveness in the Ibero-Romance languages, the chapter also provides a discussion on the general domains and determinants of defectiveness.

This chapter shows that, in contrast to Latin, the Romance languages present abundant evidence for the widespread existence of functional structure and associated functional categories in the left edge of the nominal, verbal, and clausal groups. Within the context of the discussion of the rise of configurationality in Chapter 3, these facts now find an immediate and natural explanation. In particular, we can link the rise of Romance functional structure directly to the emergence of configurationality: as long as Latin had a flat, non-configurational structure, it also lacked functional structure, which only began to emerge when the language started to develop configurationality, first at the level of the clause (CP) and in the prepositional group (PP), and subsequently within the verbal (IP) and nominal (DP) groups. In short, when in the passage from Latin to Romance the language began to project configurational phrase structure according to the universally available X-bar schema, the functional projections CP, PP, IP, and DP (and eventual splits thereof) came at once ‘for free’.

In contrast to Chapters 3 and 4, which considered an approach to the changes in word order and sentence structure from Latin to Romance in terms of the progressive rise of configurationality and concomitant functional structure, this chapter attempts to demonstrate how the same empirical generalizations can be captured within an approach that assumes the presence of both configurational and functional structure already in Latin. In essence, the perceived non-configurationality of Latin is broken down into two main ingredients: grammatically free word order resulting from an ongoing change in the head directionality parameter (ultimately interpreted as the progressive loss of roll-up), which a priori allows dependents/complements to occur on either side of their head; and pragmatically driven word order, often producing discontinuous structures, resulting from the greater accessibility of topic- and focus-fronting to positions situated in the left edge of individual (phasal) functional projections.

This chapter is devoted to diachronic aspects of referential systems, particularly those involving bound pronouns. It considers how languages change their referential systems over time. It presents three case studies, each concerned with a certain genealogical group of languages: Athabaskan, Romance, and Slavic. It shows different routes of how referential systems can change over time, including the processes of developing and losing bound and/or tenacious pronouns. There is sufficient evidence of the accretion of bound pronouns in a language, but a converse evolution, that is loss of bound pronouns, is possible as well. The final section of this chapter offers a wider typological picture of possible evolutionary pathways in the domain of reduced referential devices.

This chapter examines the Surmiran dialect which is a form of Swiss Rumantsch. Surmiran is a Romance language which is one of the spoken languages in the canton of Graubünden in Switzerland. The emphasis of this chapter is on a single verb which lacks many of the forms other verbs possess, hence forcing the speakers to use a distinct, but almost synonymous verb as an alternative. Treated within a broader context, the verb dueir in Sumiran which is a Latin reflex of the dēbēre, provides an opportunity to evaluate how gaps should be treated within the context of Optimal Theory. This defectiveness in the Surmiran dueir was a result of the morphologization of the vowel alternations of the Swiss Rumantsch.

The dispersal of the Romance language family by the Roman Empire is an attractive model for examining the spread of Quechua. Wari and Tiwanaku are often considered the first Andean empires, during the Middle Horizon (cal. ad 650–1050). Despite being contemporaries sharing the same religious iconography, they were unlikely to have spoken and dispersed the same language. Tiwanaku material culture rather implies ethnic and linguistic diversity, not least in its best-documented colonization in Moquegua. Wari, meanwhile, appears culturally and administratively unified, colonizing and controlling a territory across southern Peru, from Cuzco to Nasca. If Wari was responsible for a language dispersal, then this should represent its core territory; and it is indeed the heart of Southern Quechua. In northern Peru, Wari presence seems less intense, its rule more complex and indirect. The Moche region remained essentially beyond Wari influence, while for the central coast and distant Aguada culture more research is needed.

This introductory chapter focuses on the properties of verbal complex in various Romance languages and considers cliticization as well as complex predicates, that is, auxiliary verbs as well as modal, aspectual, and motion verbs in Romance languages. Moreover, it investigates the nature of the interface between syntax and other components of the grammar, particularly phonology, morphology, and argument structure. It provides an outline of the topics discussed in this book. It shows several examples, explains arguments, and proves some theories highlighted in this study.

This chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to examine the changes that occurred in the morphosyntax of the speech of the populations of the formerly Latin-speaking regions, which led to the wide typological variation witnessed in the Romance languages and dialects written and spoken today and in the past. Among Romance linguists of all theoretical persuasions, there is general recognition that, in the passage from Latin to Romance, the morphosyntax of the emerging languages underwent significant changes in three fundamental areas of the grammar involving: the nominal group; the verbal group; and the sentence.

Malcolm MacNaughtan Bowie (1943–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was appointed from an assistant lectureship at the University of East Anglia to one in the University of Cambridge in 1969. At Cambridge, he worked as a specialist in difficult poets in French beginning with ‘M’, particularly Henri Michaux and Stephane Mallarmé. These are writers of involuted complexity, to read whom both a sensitivity to how word play plays and to how French prosody in poetry or prose works were essential. These studies by Bowie were followed by work on mind-altering psychoanalysis: on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. He was the first director of the Romance Languages Institute, ran its vigorous seminar programme, and gave this a strong international profile by his invitations. At the University of Oxford, Bowie set up the European Humanities Research Centre, followed by an associated publishing venture, Legenda.

This chapter examines the main similarities and differences in the prosodic and intonation systems of the nine Romance languages and their varieties described in the previous chapters. The first section is devoted to patterns of prominence and phrasing, providing a survey of word and phrase-level prominence features and prosodic domains that are intonationally relevant for each language. The second section discusses the nuclear contours of main utterance types, as well as the use of lexical and syntactic markers to convey pragmatic meanings, and their interaction with intonation. The third section offers a systematic comparison of the nine intonation systems, focusing on the types, complexity, and distribution of pitch events, and the types of nuclear configurations obtained. The final section offers an overview of the common prosodic features and of the main dimensions of variation found across Romance languages, together with a reflection on their contribution to prosodic typology.

In the first part of the chapter the Romance languages are defined, and the (largely negative) significance of the distinction between a language and a dialect for the morphological data is discussed. The sources for the data on verb morphology are reviewed, and some criteria for assessing the validity of these data are examined. Finally, a comparative–historical structural sketch of the morphology of the Latin and Romance verb is given.

This chapter examines medieval Romance word order patterns concentrating on XP-V-subject and Aux-XP-V-participle. It argues both patterns are related to each other in that the latter overtly shows the position of some XP at the boundary of the vP phase. From this position, the XP is visible for higher functional categories, thus allowing for XP-V-subject, where XP checks T°'s [EPP]-feature, at least when XP is a topic. Both patterns follow from one (lexical) parameter—generalized [EPP]-feature on v°—which made the movement of a constituent to [spec,vP] possible. Since this feature was lost in the course of time, clitic pronouns became obligatory in these constructions. The clitics may be considered as a device to supply the relevant [EPP]-feature. The chapter is based on Chomsky (2000 et seq.), showing that a non-cartographic approach can account for the data, if the probe-goal approach is enhanced to allow information structural probes.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the main themes covered in this book. Cinque proposed that the DP-internal word-order difference between Romance and Germanic should not be seen as arising from a different base generation of the adjectives, but in terms of the noun raising across some of the adjectives in Romance, within one and the same, possibly universal, underlying structure. Since then, a number of problems have emerged that demand a reconsideration of that analysis, which is presented in the subsequent chapters.

In order to account for morphosyntactic microvariation, an approach based on silent elements provides an alternative (one that is more tightly tied to other aspects of syntax) to an approach based on syncretism: languages are not more or less syncretic, they just happen to have a certain distribution of empty morphemes. This chapter analyses cases of 3rd person clitics in French and Italian (on, ci), which, in addition to their impersonal use, are also used as 1st person plural pronouns. It proposes that these impersonal pronouns do not convey 1st person plural, but rather a silent WE pronoun present in the syntax does. The chapter analyzes which element (WE o impersonal clitic) is responsible for a variety of syntactic phenomena.