This book opens with Angelika Kratzer and Luigi Rizzi talking about contemporary issues, such as non-recursiveness of focus and the semantics of topics. The chapters climb down the spine from the left periphery to DP: the value of subjunctive across the history of German, expressive expressions in Brazilian Portuguese, left and right dislocation and the speaker’s perspective in Italian, Brazilian double subjects and left dislocated topic, long versus short wh-movement in Brazilian Portuguese and Quebec French, low adverbs and the raising of the verb in Brazilian Portuguese, ellipsis and null objects in Brazilian and European Portuguese, and bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese. The chapters propose original accounts for language variation and historical changes, most of them focusing on Brazilian Portuguese, a challenge to syntax and semantics. Thus, the volume contributes to Brazilian and Portuguese Linguistics, as well as to general and contemporary research on syntax and semantics of natural languages.

Increased personal contact among people of all parts of the world has underscored the inadequacy of traditional language study to meet contemporary communications needs. Linguistic science, in recent years, has responded to this breakdown of communications by emphasizing spoken, versus literary, language in the teaching of foreign languages. Very real differences do exist between what is spoken and what is written in virtually every language. In Brazilian Portuguese, especially, the gulf between the two is wide: In many cases, the most cultured Brazilian is unable to comprehend with ease Brazilian literature written only fifty years ago. THE SYNTAX OF SPOKEN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE is the first thorough analysis of the spoken language of contemporary Brazil, in English, for students and teachers of the language. Useful as a text in advanced language courses, the work is intended primarily for reference and as a research aid to future authors of Portuguese language textbooks.

This volume addresses core issues on complement clauses, focusing on Portuguese (European, Brazilian and Mozambican varieties). It contributes to the discussion of complementation, providing an overview of how theoretical syntax and acquisition studies may combine to broaden our knowledge about the topic. The articles are organized in two sections, each one followed by a comment paper: the first section, more theoretical in its nature, gathers contributions analyzing major syntactic aspects of complementation in Portuguese, from a synchronic and a diachronic point of view; the second section includes articles on L1 and L2 acquisition of Portuguese complementation. Both sections especially focus on infinitival structures; mood selection and the interpretation of subjects in finite complement clauses are also topics of particular relevance. The volume is meant for researchers and students interested in formal syntax and acquisition in general and Portuguese syntax and acquisition in particular.

Over the last three decades, Brazilian Portuguese bare nominals have turned into a hot topic in the cross-linguistic study of nominal syntax and semantics. This contribution is the first comprehensive, book-length treatment of the issue, covering both the long-standing discussion about the adequate analysis of these forms as well as the establishment of a solid empirical basis for future research. The book goes further than previous accounts in also taking into consideration the phonetic-phonological dimension, showing the advantages of a more comprehensive account. The empirical section outlines an innovative approach in which different methods and data types are combined and focuses on the underresearched definite / specific / referential uses and interpretations of bare singulars. The book also addresses the traditional topics in the study of bare nominals – genericity, the mass/count distinction, NP-internal plural agreement, the NP/DP distinction, and syntax-semantics-phonology interface questions – in the light of the new findings.

Neste trabalho, desenvolvemos uma análise da flutuação existente no emprego do subjuntivo em contextos orais do Português do Brasil, com ênfase na variação subjuntivo/indicativo. Tomando por base a perspectiva de linguagem e gramática oferecida nos desenvolvimentos teóricos da Lingüística Cognitiva, notadamente as proposições de G. Lakoff acerca dos efeitos de prototipia nas categorias gramaticais e as de E. Sweetser sobre a precedência cognitiva da modalidade deôntica em relação à epistêmica, examinamos situações de flutuação, apresentando um mapeamento dos casos e levantando diferentes fatoresmotivantes envolvidos. O trabalho fornece elementos para uma caracterização semântico-pragmática e morfossintática do que seriam os usos mais prototípicos do subjuntivo em Português, argumentando em favor da tese de que a flutuaçãonão é aleatória, incidindo com maior freqüência em empregos menos prototípicos dessa categoria gramatical.

"Give me the salt" and "Please pass the salt" make the same request, but in a polite situation the first utterance may give offense, while the second may not. How and why such differences in wording and intonation, in a particular context, produce different effects is the concern of pragmatics, the area of linguistics that deals with how speech is used in interaction. In this innovative study of pragmatics in Brazilian Portuguese, Dale Koike analyzes the politeness phenomenon, specifically in the context of speech acts known as "directives." As acts intended to get someone to do something, directives bring into play a variety of sociocultural factors, depending on the relationship between the participants. Using empirical data obtained through natural language observation and from questionnaires of over one hundred adult native speakers, Koike identifies factors—such as age, education, and gender—that influence the strategies of politeness a given speaker is likely to use in making a directive. This research clarifies the unwritten language rules and assumptions that native speakers intuitively follow in phrasing their directive utterances. Koike also includes important material on the acquisition of strategies for politeness by children and adult second-language learners, as well as on gender differences in politeness forms. Her research proposes important additions to the theory of speech acts as conceived by Austin and Searle, particularly in the application of deictic organization to account for a hierarchy of pragmatic forms. Language and Social Relationship in Brazilian Portuguese will be of interest to a wide audience in diverse fields, including linguistics, anthropology, interaction analysis, communications, semantics, sociology, psychology, and education.

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.