1,721,043 research outputs found
Indefinites between Latin and Romance
No full textThis book investigates the syntactic and semantic development of a selection of indefinite pronouns and determiners (such as aliquis 'some', nullus 'no', and nemo 'no one') between Latin and the Romance languages. Although these elements have undergone significant diachronic change since the Classical Latin period, the modern Romance languages show a remarkable degree of similarity in the way their systems of indefinites have evolved and are structured today. In this volume, Chiara Gianollo draws on data from Classical and Late Latin texts, and from electronic corpora of the early stages of various Romance languages, to propose a new account of these similarities. The focus is primarily on Late Latin: at this stage, the grammar of indefinites already shows a number of changes, which are homogeneously transmitted to the daughter languages, leading to parallelism in the various emerging Romance systems. The volume demonstrates the value of using methods and models from synchronic theoretical linguistics for investigating diachronic phenomena, as well as the importance of diachronic research in understanding the nature of crosslinguistic variation and language change
Negative concord: the first 133 years
No full textThis chapter provides an overview of how the notion of “negative concord” originated and spread in linguistic description and theorizing, and of how it is employed in current work. Various issues addressed by research on neg- ative concord are critically reviewed: the relation with agreement, dimensions of cross-linguistic variation, the negativity and the indefiniteness of the items involved in negative concord
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads
No full textThe journal aims to host research within the field of linguistic typology. It is meant to give space above all, but not exclusively, to studies exploring the crossroads at which linguistic typology meets its closest neighbors. The journal will therefore welcome works dealing especially with the intersections between typology and other areas of linguistics, such as diachrony, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus-based analysis of speech and discourse.
Contributions should be of interest to the community of linguists as a whole, independently of particular specializations or theoretical frameworks.
Papers accepted for publication are selected solely on the basis of scientific quality and scholarly standing
CLUB Working Papers in Linguistics
No full textCLUB WORKING PAPERS IN LINGUISTICS (CLUB-WPL) è una collana editoriale a cura del CLUB – Circolo Linguistico dell'Università di Bologna. La collana ospita contributi relativi alle iniziative del CLUB e dei suoi membri. I volumi, sottoposti a una procedura di peer-review, sono pubblicati esclusivamente online – sulla piattaforma AMS Acta dell'Università di Bologna – e sono liberamente accessibili
Open Romance Linguistics
No full textThe series covers Romance linguistics. This includes both studies in linguistics of the individual Romance languages (chiefly Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish but also smaller speech communities and dialects) and studies in a comparative Romance perspective. The series is open to high-quality research from diverse theoretical backgrounds, and a synchronic or a diachronic perspective. Research published in the series should have a strong empirical footing while at the same time reflecting recent theoretical developments. The series invites the following kinds of publications: monographs, topical collective volume
Redundant negation with ne...quidem in Classical Latin
Full text linkClassical Latin is a Double Negation language: sentential negation is expressed by a single morphologically negative element (a negative marker, a negative adverb or a negative indefinite); if multiple morphologically negative elements occur in a sentence, they cancel each other out. In Early and Classical Latin, exceptions to this general system are very rare (Ernout and Thomas 1953: 154–155, Molinelli 1988), and typically justified as particularly emphatic statements, where the additional negative element can be analyzed as a weakly syntactically integrated afterthought (Orlandini 2001: 67–72; Gianollo 2018: 189–191).
Against this background, the behavior of the complex negative focus particle ne...quidem ‘not even, not either’ poses an interesting challenge, since with this particle redundant marking of negation is observed more often and, what is more important, in a systematic fashion. In this work I study ne...quidem in a corpus of Classical Latin and I propose an analysis connecting formal redundancy to the syntax of focus in Classical Latin: specifically, I analyze patterns of redundancy in terms of movement-mediated doubling, following Poletto (2008), and I attribute their existence to the interaction between the syntax of negation and focus. Moreover, I argue that these Latin patterns may have played a role in the development of Romance Negative Concord
CLUB Working Papers in Linguistics
Full text linkCon questo volume, la collana "CLUB Working Papers in Linguistics" giunge al suo terzo anno di vita, e presenta ancora una volta, con 18 contributi in formato open access, i risultati dello scambio di idee e di prospettive che si è sviluppato attraverso i vari incontri organizzati dal CLUB nell’a.a. 2017–18. Il volume, che ospita anche i risultati del CLUB DAY su "Tipologia e diacronia: alla ricerca di sinergie", contiene saggi a firma di Fabio Ardolino, Silvia Ballarè, Alessandra Barotto, Chiara Calderone, Sonia Cristofaro, Ilaria Fiorentini, Fernando Giacinti (vincitore del premio CLUB ‘Una tesi in linguistica’ per l’anno 2018), Chiara Gianollo, Eugenio Goria, Nicola Grandi, Pierre Larrivée, Pauline Levillain, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Elisabetta Magni, Yahis Martari, Francesca Masini, Simone Mattiola, Caterina Mauri, Marco Mazzoleni, Maria Napoli
Grammaticalization parameters and the retrieval of alternatives: Latin nec from discourse connector to uninterpretable feature
Full text linkBy means of the study of Latin focus-sensitive negation nec (‘furthermore not’; ‘nei- ther’; ‘not even’), I address a more general question on the scope and the cyclicity of semantic change. I review Lehmann’s syntagmatic parameters of grammatical- ization (structural scope, bondedness, syntagmatic variability) with the aim of eval- uating to what extent they are reflected in some types of semantic change. With nec we see the evolution, from Latin to Romance, of a discourse-structuring parti- cle with an additive component into the building block of new emphatic (scalar) negative polarity items, which in turn are later reanalyzed as elements of Negative Concord (endowed with uninterpretable formal features). I argue that an impor- tant aspect of this change concerns the way alternatives to the focused element are retrieved in the context. I propose that increase in bondedness and decrease in syntagmatic variability correlate with a change in the form taken by alternatives, which decrease in scope from discourse units to individual alternatives
Ways to 'save'
Full text linkIn contemporary Italian it is possible to find the preposition 'salvo' with two apparently contrasting meanings: ‘except’ and ‘provided’, ‘subject to’. That is, the same element can introduce a negative or a positive condition. Speakers are aware of this apparent ambiguity and consciously react to it, showing that the process has reached a diachronic tipping point. I try to reconstruct how this point was reached, and show that the exceptive use, which is nowadays prevalent, arose as an innovation in the diachronic development from Latin to Italian, whereas the ‘provided’ meaning combines a conservative semantics with an innovative form. The case of Italian 'salvo' is yet another witness to the theoretical and diachronic interest of exceptive constructions
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