This volume features fourteen papers by leading specialists on various aspects of historical morpho-syntax in the Ibero-Romance languages. In these papers, fine-grained analyses are developed to capture the richness of undiscussed or —often— previously unknown data. Comparative across the (Ibero-)Romance languages and diverse in terms of the approaches considered, ranging from cognitive-functionalist to generativist to variationist, they combine in this volume to showcase the merits of different, yet complementary, perspectives in understanding linguistic variation and language change. The gamut of phenomena scrutinised varies from morpho-phonological puzzles and word-formation to syntax and interface-related phenomena to, as a coda, methodological suggestions for future research in old Ibero-Romance; thus making it ideal reading for scholars and postgraduate students alike.

"This book examines how speakers of Ibero-Romance 'do things' with conversational units of language, paying particular attention to what they do with utterance-oriented elements such as vocatives, interjections, and particles; and to what they do with illocutionary complementisers, items attested cross-linguistically which look like, but do not behave like, subordinators. Taking the behaviour of conversation-oriented units of language as a window into the indexical nature of language, it argues that these items provide insight into how language-as-grammar builds the universe of discourse. By identifying the underlying unity in how different Ibero-Romance languages, alongside their Romance cousins and Latin ancestors, use grammar to refer-i.e. to connect our inner world to the one outside-, the book's empirical arguments are underpinned by the philosophical position that the architecture of grammar is also the architecture of thought. The book thus brings together the recent flurry of work seeking to incorporate aspects of the context of the utterance into the syntax, a line of enquiry broadly founded on empirical considerations, with the pursuit of explanatory adequacy via a so-called 'un-Cartesian' grammar of reference. In so doing, it formalises the intuition that language users do things not with words, but with grammar. The book brings new insight to the comparative morphosyntax of (Ibero-)Romance, particularly in its diatopic, diastrastic, and diamesic dimensions, and showcases the utility of careful descriptive work on this language family in advancing our empirical and conceptual understanding of the organisation of grammar"--

The papers selected for this volume were first presented at the 14th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Bergamo, 2006). At that important event, alongside studies of phonology, lexis, semantics and dialectology (presented in two companion volumes in this series), many innovative contributions focused on syntax and morphology. A carefully peer-reviewed selection, including one of the plenary lectures, appears here in print for the first time, bearing witness to the quality of the scholarly interest in this field of research. In all the contributions, well-established methods combine with new theoretical approaches in an attempt to shed more light on phenomena that have hitherto remained unexplored, or have only just begun to be investigated. State-of-the-art tools, such as electronic corpora and concordancing software, are employed consistently, ensuring a methodological homogeneity of the contributions.

This collection of twenty-nine research papers is dedicated to the eminent Balticist, Slavicist and Indo-Europeanist, William R. Schmalstieg in commemoration of his seventy-fifth birthday. It contains contributions by specialists of mainly Baltic and Indo-European linguistics which are reflective of Schmalstieg's own scholarly interests over the decades of his career, including technical aspects of Baltic and Indo-European phonology, morphology and syntax, etymology, language universals, the history of linguistics and the Baltic text tradition. Contributors include prominent scholars from the United States and Europe, both east and west. All papers are in English, and all linguistic material in less commonly known languages is provided with an English translation, making the contents accessible to a wider audience of readers.

This is a selection of papers from the 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics held in Melbourne 13-17 August 2001, hosted by the Linguistics Program at La Trobe University. The papers range from the general theoretical to the study of particular languages and embrace most areas of linguistics, particularly morpho-syntax.

This dissertation is a historical examination of the distribution patterns of copulae, specifically ser, estar, and haber/haver, within the context of Ibero-Romance languages. Employing a multidimensional qualitative approach, the study conducts an in-depth analysis of their usage across various grammatical structures, encompassing sentences, phrases, and clauses. The theoretical framework primarily adopts a functional perspective centred around information structure and information status whilst also incorporating semantics, morphology, and syntax considerations. The investigation strategically focuses on the Castilian (Spanish), Portuguese, Catalan, and Aragonese languages. Chapter one is an inductive exploration of influential syntax, semantics, and pragmatics studies, establishing the theoretical foundations underpinning subsequent data analysis. Chapter two initiates with a brief discussion on existential and locative constructions in Latin, followed by a qualitative analysis of early Castilian and early Portuguese samples. Chapter three parallels the structure of chapter two by presenting data from early Catalan and early Aragonese. Throughout chapters two and three, relevant theoretical notions, including those previously introduced in chapter one, are integrated into the discussion. Finally, chapter four expands upon previous observations and proposals, offering avenues for further investigation and consolidating the principal conclusions derived from the preceding chapters. This research advances the field of Romance linguistics by conducting a re-evaluation of the taxonomy concerning locative and existential constructions within the framework of Ibero-Romance languages. Our argument asserts that despite their apparent differences in informational status, these constructions inherently share a common underlying informational structure and historical foundation. Moreover, we propose that the disappearance of the proform in Western Ibero-Romance catalysed a significant transformation in the usage of copulae for expressing existence and location in modern varieties. As a result, we identify three distinct categories: 1) General Presence, 2) Stage-level, and 3) Locative Presence, which present a novel model for the unification of presence expression.

Topics covered in this volume include: extreme subjectification - English tense and modals; schemas and lexical blends; valency and diathesis; functions of the preposition "kuom" in Dholou; and grammaticalization of postpositions in German.

The fourteen studies selected for this volume all of them peer-reviewed versions of papers presented at the 15th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics 2008 (23 30 August) at the University of Munich investigate syntactic variation and change in the history of English from two perspectives that are crucial to explaining language change, namely the analysis of usage patterns and the social motivations of language change. Documenting the way syntactic elements have changed their combinatory preferences in fine-grained corpus studies renders the opportunity to catch language change "in actu." A majority of studies in this book investigate syntactic change in the history of English from this viewpoint using a corpus-based approach, focusing on verbal constructions, modality and developments in the English noun phrase.The book is of primary interest to linguists interested in current research in the history of English syntax. Its empirical richness is an excellent source for teaching English Historical Syntax.Volume II to be announced soon."

This volume contains a selection of refereed and revised papers, originally presented at the 32nd Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages, dealing with linguistic theory as applied to the Romance languages, and on empirical studies on the acquisition of Romance, with studies on Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romansch and Latin. The theoretical section contains contributions concentrating on specific properties of Romance at the syntax/semantics interface, on morphosyntactic issues, on subject licensing and case, and on phonology. The acquisition section includes contributions on first, bilingual and second language acquisition of functional structure, word structure, quantification and stress.

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