Formal approaches to DPs in Old Romanian offers the first collection of papers on this topic published in English. All the analyses adopt the conceptual tools of generative grammar to explain the syntactic peculiarities of Old Romanian nouns, synchronically and diachronically. Old Romanian noun syntax displays non-trivial peculiarities both in the internal structure of the DP (e.g., inflected possessive marker, polydefinite agreement, optional definite article on proper nouns) and in the way the DP is used in clause derivation (e.g., variable location of object pronouns, reanalysis of the relative item from phrasal to head). The analyses emphasize the relevance of the data for a finer-grained typology of Romance/Balkan languages as well as for the theory of grammar.

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the syntax of old Romanian written in English and targeted at a non-Romanian readership. It draws on an extensive new corpus analysis of the period between the beginning of the sixteenth century, the date of the earliest attested Romanian texts, and the end of the eighteenth century, generally considered to mark the start of the modernization of Romanian. Gabriela Pană Dindelegan and her co-authors adopt both a synchronic and diachronic approach by providing a detailed corpus analysis in a given period, while also comparing old and modern Romanian. They examine the evolution of a variety of syntactic phenomena, including the elimination or diminishing of certain facts or generalization of others, the total or partial grammaticalization of phenomena, competition between structures, and cases of syntactic variation. The book takes a typological and comparative perspective, focusing on those phenomena that are considered specific to Romanian (either on the Romance or in the Balkan area), and adopts a modern framework while still remaining accessible to readers from any background.

The book provides a formal analysis of root and complement clauses in Old Romanian, focussing on the combination of Balkan syntactic patterns and Romance morphology. It presents a new perspective on the manifestation of Balkan Sprachbund properties in the language, and on the nature of parametric differences in relation to other Romance languages.

This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the origins, development, and stabilization of differential object marking (DOM) in Romanian. DOM, a means by which a grammar distinguishes between objects based on semantic features such as animacy or definiteness, has been a fruitful area of research in syntax, historical linguistics, and typology. In this volume, Virginia Hill and Alexandru Mardale demonstrate that Romanian DOM reflects a typological mix of Balkan and Romance patterns, and is in fact composed of three distinct mechanisms. Their analysis of these mechanisms reveals that DOM triggers in Romanian are located in the nominal domain, in contrast to languages such as Spanish, where they are located in the verbal domain. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted in the volume sheds light on existing typologies of DOM, particularly in relation to the variation observed in the merging location of the DOM particle and of the doubling pronominal clitic.

The papers assembled in this volume aim to contribute to our understanding of the human capacity for language: the generative procedure that relates sounds and meanings via syntax. Different hypotheses about the properties of this generative procedure are under discussion, and their connection with biology is open to important cross-disciplinary work. Advances have been made in human-animal studies to differentiate human language from animal communication. Contributions from neurosciences point to the exclusive properties of the human brain for language. Studies in genetically based language impairments also contribute to the understanding of the properties of the language organ. This volume brings together contributions on theoretical and experimental investigations on the Language Faculty. It will be of interest to scholars and students investigating the properties of the biological basis of language, in terms the modeling of the language faculty, as well as the properties of language variation, language acquisition and language impairments.

“The book is impressive through: (a) the general theoretical framework, well mastered, and by the global theoretical results; (b) the results related to the manifestation of ellipsis in Romanian, highlighting the specific features of Romanian within Romance and non-Romance languages; (c) the descriptive and theoretical results of the two sorts of ellipsis and the relation established between them; (d) several sections of convincing monographs regarding the syntax of Romanian; (e) many other detailed results which can be taken over as such, as they represent solutions to certain thorny problems in the Romanian grammar; (f) the ability to cover and master very diverse bibliographic references, and to critically comment on them; (g) the capacity to accommodate the old Romanian bibliography with the novel theoretical information; (h) the ability to use the diachronic information in order to support and account for certain interpretations and analyses.” (Gabriela Pană Dindelegan, Corresponding Member of the Romanian Academy)

The book provides a comprehensive description and in-depth analysis of the major word order changes that took place in the clausal and the nominal domains in the transition from old to modern Romanian. The data are set in a comparative Romance perspective, with attention also paid to the impact of the Balkan Sprachbund and the influence of Old Church Slavonic. Alexandru Nicolae's analysis is based on a qualitative and quantitative examination of a large number of phenomena in a representative corpus of old Romanian texts. Some of these phenomena, such as scrambling, interpolation, discontinuous constituents, and variation in the position and linearization of DP-internal adjectival modifiers, are found across Romance, while others, such as the low position for pronominal cliticization, are relatively rare. Still others are specific to old and modern Romanian, such as the proclitic and enclitic realization of the same pronominal clitic, the low definite article, and the adjectival article construction. From an empirical perspective, the volume fills a gap in the Romance linguistics literature, as several of the phenomena it explores have been largely neglected to date. More broadly it offers a valuable contribution to research into word order typology and change, the nature and content of syntactic parameters, and the theory of grammaticalization and syntactic change.

This book offers the first comprehensive account of the development of the Romanian morphological system. Romanian is one of the most morphologically complex Romance languages, but has remained relatively understudied compared with better-known languages such as French and Spanish. Following an introduction that provides an outline of the history of Romanian, its writing system and major typological characteristics, and the major patterns of allomorphy, chapters in this volume explore a range of fascinatingly complex aspects of Romanian grammar whose structure and history have to date been largely inaccessible to the English-speaking world. Among the most distinctive morphological characteristics of Romanian discussed by the authors are its inflexional case system; the highly unpredictable formation of the plural; the existence of a non-finite verb form that appears to be the continuation of the Latin supine; the near-absence of distinctive subjunctive morphology; and the complex patterns of allomorphy brought about by successive sound change. The frequently controversial origins of many of these developments have important implications for broader historical Romance linguistics and indeed for morphological theory more generally.

The World's Major Languages features over 50 of the world's languages and language families. This revised edition includes updated bibliographies for each chapter and up-to-date census figures. The featured languages have been chosen based on the number of speakers, their role as official languages and their cultural and historical importance. Each language is looked at in depth, and the chapters provide information on both grammatical features and on salient features of the language's history and cultural role. The World’s Major Languages is an accessible and essential reference work for linguists.

Differential argument marking has been a hot topic in linguistics for several decades, both because it is cross-linguistically widespread and because it raises essential questions at multiple levels of grammar, including the relationship between abstract processes and overt morphological marking, between case and agreement, and between syntax and information structure. This volume provides an introduction into the current state of the art of research on differential case marking and chapters by leading linguists addressing theoretical questions in a wide range of typologically and geographically diverse languages from the Indo-European, Sinitic, Turkic, and Uralic families. The chapters engage with current theoretical issues in the morphology, syntax, semantics, and processing of differential argument marking. A central issue addressed by all the authors is the adequacy of various theoretical approaches in modelling (different varieties of) differential case marking, such as those determined by topicality, those driven by cumulative factors, and those that involve double marking. The volume will be of interest to students and researchers working on cross-linguistic variation in differential marking and its theoretical modelling.