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A Romance Perspective on Language Knowledge and Use
Twenty-one articles from the 31st LSRL investigate cutting-edge issues and interfaces across phonology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, semantics, and syntax in multiple dialects of such Romance languages as Catalan, French, Creole French, and Spanish, both old and modern. Research in Romance phonology moves from the quantitative and synchronic to cover issues of diachrony and Optimality theory. Work within pragmatics and sociolinguistics also explores the synchronic/diachronic link while topicalizing such issues as change of non-pro-drop Swiss French toward pro-drop status, scalar implicatures, speech acts, word order, and simplification in contexts of language contact. Finally, debates in linguistic theory are resumed in the work on syntax and semantics within both a Minimalist perspective and an Optimality framework. How do Catalan and French children acquire AGR and TNS? Can Basque Spanish be compared to topic-oriented Chinese? If Spanish preverbal subjects occur in an A-position, can Spanish no longer be compared to Greek?
Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing
Top researchers in prosody and psycholinguistics present their research and their views on the role of prosody in processing speech and also its role in reading. The volume characterizes the state of the art in an important area of psycholinguistics. How are general constraints on prosody (‘timing’) and intonation (‘melody’) used to constrain the parsing and interpretation of spoken language? How are they used to assign a default prosody/intonation in silent reading, and more generally what is the role of phonology in reading? Prosody and intonation interact with phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics and thus are at the very core of language processes.
Disentangling Bare Nouns and Nominals Introduced by a Partitive Article
This volume edited by Tabea Ihsane focuses on different aspects of the distribution, semantics, and internal structure of nominal constituents with a “partitive article” in its indefinite interpretation and of potentially corresponding bare nouns. It further deals with diachronic issues, such as grammaticalization and evolution in the use of “partitive articles”. The outcome is a snapshot of current research into “partitive articles” and the way they relate to bare nouns, in a cross-linguistic perspective and on new data: the research covers noteworthy data (fieldwork data and corpora) from Standard languages - like French and Italian, but also German - to dialectal and regional varieties, including endangered ones like Francoprovençal.
Expressing Surprise at the Crossroads
Expressing Surprise at the Crossroads has as its aim to evaluate the impact of mirativity in Romance languages or –expressed differently– to determine how these languages apprehend surprise and related notions as linguistic devices. The different contributions included in the book point to revealing conclusions concerning the status of surprise in Romance as well as the place that mirativity occupies (if any) in the grammar of these languages. In this vein, the volume tries to answer questions such as to what extent do interactional contexts influence the development of mirative structures or how is the solidarity synchrony / diachrony reflected in mirative constructions.
Majority Quantification and Quantity Superlatives
This book investigates the syntax and semantics of proportional most and other majority quantifiers across languages. Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin and Ion Giurgea draw on data from around 40 languages to demonstrate the existence of two distinct semantic types of most: a distributive type, which compares cardinalities of sets of atoms, and a cumulative type, which involves measuring plural and mass entities with respect to a whole. On the syntactic side, the most significant difference is between partitive and non-partitive configurations: certain majority quantifiers are specific to partitive constructions, while others are also allowed in non-partitives. The volume also explores complex expressio...
Null Subjects in Slavic and Finno-Ugric
Even though null subjects have been extensively studied in the past four decades, there is a growing interest in partial null subject languages (e.g. Finnish) and a subtler classification of null subject phenomena overall. This volume aims at contributing to this trend, focusing on Slavic and Finno-Ugric groups, with some extension to Baltic and Samoyedic languages. Interestingly, these groups offer an impressive array of macro- and microvariation. Moreover, given an increasing interest towards the internal structure of the pronominal elements and the role of various types of topics in the left periphery of the sentence structure, the enterprise taken up in this book is to investigate lexica...
Functional Heads
The cartographic project considers evidence for a functional head in one language as evidence for it in universal grammar. In this volume, some of the most influential linguists who have participated in this long-lasting debate offer their recent work in short, self contained case studies.
Biased questions
Asking a question means, essentially, presenting the hearer with a set of propositions with the request that she choose from it those that are true. It is a well-known fact about natural language that questions can be "biased": the propositions presented are not all equal, so to speak. For example, the speaker's belief, or contextual evidence, might favor some against others. The formal means employed by grammar to express such biases have been of interest to linguists for a long time, and the investigation is still on-going. The contributions in this volume all pertain to biased questions. They grew out of talks presented at the workshop Biased Questions: Experimental Results and Theoretica...
The Compositionality of Meaning and Content
Representational systems such as language, mind or brain, exhibit a structure that is widely assumed to be compositional, i.e., the semantic value of complex representations is determined by the semantic values of its parts. Dating back to the late nineteenth century, the principle of compositionality has recently regained wide attention. Since the way the principle has been dealt with differs across disciplines, the aim of these two volumes is to conjoin the diverging approaches. The editors have assembled a collection of original essays that cover the topic of compositionality from virtually all perspectives of interest in the contemporary debate. The well chosen international list of auth...
