Conversation is an autonomous word-world. In an anlternation of utterances, conversation is a spontaneous activity deprived of a precise communicative intent, a fortuitous joining of people in an exchange of speech, or it can be an intentional cooperation, directed towards an abstract goal having a meaningful substance. The complex psychological and intellectual motivation engenders a common world, conscious or not of its own existence. By trying to stress the idea that conversation is an autonomous universe, we appeal to the concept of conversational complicity. We call the solidarity and the cohesive responsibility that is manifested inside the linguistic interaction a CONVERSATIONAL COMPLICITY. Engaged in weaving their communicative interests, partners commit themselves to reciprocal solidarity. The concept of conversational complicity is used metaphorically, enabling us to perceive the inter-actional solidarity in the form of a co-agency, a multi-level cooperative activity.

This volume is a study addressed to professors and students interested in the philosophy of language. It is generally accepted, though in not sufficiently rigorous terms, that doxastic dialectics can be defined as being an exchange of opinions. Given the subjective rationality of doxa, the traditional doctrine uncovers philosophical limitations in this regard. Instead of minimizing the heuristic power of doxastic dialectics, this book looks at whether it might be possible to affirm doxa’s cognitive autonomy regarding episteme, focusing on the mechanism of decidability in doxastic thinking. The text advances three cognitive theses: that doxastic dialectics engenders cognitive intervals between belief, opinion and doxa; that doxastic dialectics opens conditions for an alternative truth, semantically constituted, not analytically proved; and that doxastic dialectics is the exclusive procedure by means of which the fundaments of axiology can be established.

This volume, the fifth in the series Case and Grammatical Relations across Languages, is devoted to genitive constructions in a range of Indo-European languages (Russian, French, Romanian, German and Swedish), as well as Finnish, Bantu languages and Northern Akhvakh (Northeast Caucasian). Definitions of genitives typically start out from the notion of an inflectional marker, often suffixal, that marks dependency relations of a noun phrase with respect to another noun phrase and conveys possessive meaning. The contributions in this volume demonstrate a huge range of variation in genitives, semantically (from possessive meaning to generalized dependency), morphologically (from affixes to different types of clitics) and syntactically (from adnominal uses to argument relations and adjunct uses). The volume contains both general surveys of genitives and case studies of the semantics, pragmatics and historical development of specific genitive constructions. It will be of interest to scholars and students in syntax, semantics, morphology, typology, and historical linguistics.

This bibliography of semiotic studies covering the years 1975-1985 impressively reveals the world-wide intensification in the field. During this decade, national semiotic societies have been founded allover the world; a great number of international, national, and local semiotic conferences have taken place; the number of periodicals and book series devoted to semiotics has increased as has the number of books and dissertations in the field. This bibliography is the result of a dedicated effort to approach complete coverage.

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.

This book explores the micro-variation in the realization of definiteness across languages belonging to the Balkan Romance family: Romanian, Aromanian, Istro-Romanian and Megleno-Romanian. Daniela Isac offers a unified analysis of the different patterns observed, based on a post-syntactic spell-out rule.

This volume looks at the growing interest of different specialists in the problems associated with political discourse, in general, and parliamentary discourse, as one of its major sub-genres, in particular. Its main goal is to offer a deeper understanding of the diversity of parliamentary practices across space and time. The papers aim to highlight the role played by local social and historical factors, ideologies, collective mentalities, and social psychology in building up culture-specific traditions of political institutions. Approaching the problems from a large variety of theoretical perspectives, the investigations are based on flexible, interdisciplinary, and multi-layered methodologies, offering an image of the multifaceted manifestations of parliamentary debates. The volume addresses specialists in several fields, such as linguistics, discourse analysis, history, political science, sociology, (social) anthropology, (social) psychology, media and communication.

This volume brings together selected papers from the 48th annual Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages, held at York University in Toronto, Canada, in April 2018. It presents original research on a wide variety of Romance languages both past (Latin, Old Catalan, Old Iberian Romance, Old Spanish, Old Portuguese, and West-Iberian Medieval Latin) and present (Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, French, Picard, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish) along with a number of contemporary dialects, including Basque Country Spanish, Dominican Spanish, Maine French, Neapolitan, and Picardie French. Divided into four sections — Interfaces, Bridging issues at the CP-TP-vP levels, Bridging issues at the PP-DP levels, and Bridging issues in linguistics — the volume gives researchers and advanced students access to contemporary issues and novel ideas bridging across various areas of Romance linguistics (e.g., morphology, syntax, semantics, phonology, sociolinguistics, first and second language acquisition).

This book investigates the syntax of Romanian ditransitives building on new experimental data with a view to enable a more accurate understanding of these constructions regarding their underlying configuration(s), the structural import of Differential Object Marking or Clitic Doubling among others. One first attempt is to explain the (relatively) free word-order manifested by the two internal arguments, and their symmetrical potential for anaphor and possessor binding. Evidence is provided as to the relative hierarchical order of the two object DPs, with the direct object as the lower one. The featural make-up of the two objects also proves crucial in disentangling the various experimentally uncovered aspects regarding their interaction e.g., differentially marked direct objects bear a [Person] feature and compete with the indirect object in valuing the person feature of the applicative. The feature specification is further refined function of the presence of clitic doubling or the lack thereof. The experimental insights we gain into the syntax of Romanian ditransitives help us integrate them with their counterparts in Romance thereby contributing to a better cross-linguistic understanding of these constructions.