1,721,206 research outputs found
Word Order in Old Italian
No full textThis book explores sets of movement cases in medieval Italian from 1200 to 1315. It offers an integrated description of all the relevant aspects of word order in Old Italian based on uniform principles (analysing the left periphery of the sentence, of the verbal phrase, and of the determiner phrase, and the interaction of these structures with quantification and negation). From the theoretical point of view, it considers the possibilities of a syntactic model in which the (left) edges of the constituents play an essential role in determining the possible structures. The author suggests that Old Italian has a rule preposing topic and focus elements to dedicated positions not only in the left periphery of the complementizer phase but also in the left periphery of other phases. She also provides an account of the apparent optional negative concord pattern exhibited by Old Italian in terms of dedicated positions. The book concludes with a summary of the various types of preposing presented in the book, arguing that all cases of optionality can be resolved within a single grammar and without need to resort to the double base hypothesis, which requires competence of the speakers on two different grammatical systems. The book makes important contributions to the medieval history of Italian, to Romance historical linguistics, and to the study of diachronic syntactic change more generally
The Relevance of Lesser Used Languages for Theoretical Linguistics: The Case of Cimbrian and The Support of The TITUS Corpus
No full text
Leopard spot variation: what dialects have to say about variation, change and acquisition.
No full textIn this work I intend to discuss some general properties of dialectal variation which have import on the theory of language acquisition. I will first briefly discuss whether dialectal variation is qualitatively different from typological variation, a prediction made by a theory which assumes that there exist macro and microparameters, as dialectal variation should only display microparameters. As this is not the case, I argue against the idea of a hierarchical order of parameters that the child has to set progressively in language acquisition, and in favor of an idea of a constellation abstract properties connected by the fact that they share some primitive components that cluster to form what we call “formal features” in a way similar to articulatory features cluster to combing phonemes. The second part of the article deals with what is indeed peculiar to dialectal variation, namely the type of distribution called by traditional dialectologists “leopard spots” and puts forth the idea that it can be used to formulate more precise hypotheses on the structure of functional items inside a framework like the cartographic/nano-syntax one
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