This book treats the morphosyntax of Borgomanerese, a Northern Italian dialect. The rich description of the many unusual features of this dialect, some of which have not been previously reported in the literature, gives rise to a number novel theoretical analyses, advancing our understanding of syntax and syntactic theory.

This book examines morphosyntactic variation in the Romance varieties spoken in Italy from both a regional and historical perspective. It examines a range of phenomena, backed up by extensive empirical data, and will be a valuable resource not only for specialists in Italo-Romance but also for researchers in morphosyntactic change more generally

This book presents and analyzes various features of the morphosyntax of Borgomanerese, a Gallo-Italic dialect spoken in the town of Borgomanero, in the Piedmont region of Northern Italy. The study is highly comparative, drawing on the literature on numerous other Italian dialects and Romance languages (as well as English), to inform our understanding of the Borgomanerese phenomena. Christina Tortora takes the many unusual and understudied (and often novel) facts of Borgomanerese grammar as compelling grounds for revisiting and reformulating current analyses of syntactic phenomena in these other languages. The phenomena treated include the syntax and semantics of the weak locative in presentational sentences; the syntax of object clitics and argument prepositions; the syntax of subjects and subject clitics; the syntax of interrogatives; clausal architecture; and the relationship between orthography and theoretical analysis. The principal value of this book lies both in the rich description of the morphosyntactic phenomena of Borgomanerese, many of which have not been previously reported in the literature, and in the consequent novel analyses developed, which contribute insights for other languages and dialects, and advance our understanding of syntax and syntactic theory in general.

The Grammar of Central Trentino provides a comprehensive grammatical description of a Romance dialect spoken in the North-East of Italy. The description of morphological, syntactic and pragmatic phenomena is accessible to a non-specialist public interested in Romance varieties.

Linguistic variation, loosely defined as the wholesale processes whereby patterns of language structures exhibit divergent distributions within and across languages, has traditionally been the object of research of at least two branches of linguistics: variationist sociolinguistics and linguistic typology. In spite of their similar research agendas, the two approaches have only rarely converged in the description and interpretation of variation. While a number of studies attempting to address at least aspects of this relationship have appeared in recent years, a principled discussion on how the two disciplines may interact has not yet been carried out in a programmatic way. This volume aims to fill this gap and offers a cross-disciplinary venue for discussing the bridging between sociolinguistic and typological research from various angles, with the ultimate goal of laying out the methodological and conceptual foundations of an integrated research agenda for the study of linguistic variation.

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.

Contains twenty-nine papers. Twenty-five were presented at the International Conference on Historical Dialectology (Regional and Social) held at Blazejewko, Poland (May,1986). Papers deal with various aspects of historical regional dialectology. Some border on the issue of dialectology and linguistic change. Although most deal with English, a number discuss more general issues such as Bartoli's norms, the role of the center and periphery in dialect distribution with reference to the adoption, diffusion and spread of linguistic change, the naturalness problems, the problem of convergence, the use of the computer in historical dialectology. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

It is standardly assumed that Universal Grammar (UG) allows a given hierarchical representation to be associated with more than one linear order. This book proposes a restrictive theory of word order and phrase structure that denies this assumption. According to this theory, phrase structure always completely determines linear order, so that if two phrases differ in linear order, they must also differ in hierarchical structure. It is standardly assumed that Universal Grammar (UG) allows a given hierarchical representation to be associated with more than one linear order. For example, English and Japanese phrases consisting of a verb and its complement are thought of as symmetrical to one another, differing only in linear order. The Antisymmetry of Syntax proposes a restrictive theory of word order and phrase structure that denies this assumption. According to this theory, phrase structure always completely determines linear order, so that if two phrases differ in linear order, they must also differ in hierarchical structure. More specifically, Richard Kayne shows that asymmetric c-command invariably maps into linear precedence. From this follows, with few further hypotheses, a highly specific theory of word order in UG: that complement positions must always follow their associated head, and that specifiers and adjoined elements must always precede the phrase that they are sister to. A further result is that standard X-bar theory is not a primitive component of UG. Rather, X-bar theory expresses a set of antisymmetric properties of phrase structure. This antisymmetry is inherited from the more basic antisymmetry of linear order. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph No. 25

Award-winning lecturer Kenneth R. Bartlett applies his decades of experience teaching the Italian Renaissance to this beautifully illustrated overview. In his introductory Note to the Reader, Bartlett first explains why he chose Jacob Burckhardt's classic narrative to guide students through the complex history of the Renaissance and then provides his own contemporary interpretation of that narrative. Over seventy color illustrations, genealogies of important Renaissance families, eight maps, a list of popes, a timeline of events, a bibliography, and an index are included.

This volume contains a selection of peer-reviewed articles first presented at the 43rd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), held in New York in 2013. The articles deal with various synchronic and diachronic aspects of Romance languages and dialects world-wide. They will be of interest to scholars in Romance and in general linguistics.