Full Description
This volume offers a range of synchronic and diachronic case studies in comparative Germanic and Romance morphosyntax. These two language families, spoken by over a billion people today, have played a central role in linguistic research, but many significant questions remain about the relationship between them. Following an introduction that sets out the methodological, empirical, and theoretical background to the book, the volume is divided into three parts that deal with the morphosyntax of subjects and the inflectional layer; inversion, discourse pragmatics, and the left periphery; and continuity and variation beyond the clause. The contributors adopt a diverse range of approaches, making use of the latest digitized corpora and presenting a mixture of well-known and under-studied data from standard and non-standard Germanic and Romance languages. Many of the chapters challenge received wisdom about the relationship between these two important language families. The volume will be an indispensable resource for researchers and students in the fields of Germanic and Romance linguistics, historical and comparative linguistics, and morphosyntax.
Contents
List of abbreviations
The contributors
1: Sam Wolfe and Christine Meklenborg: Germanic and Romance: Data, method, and theory
Part I: The Subject System and the Inflectional Layer
2: Liliane Haegeman and Elisabeth Stark: Register-specific subject omission in English and French and the syntax of coordination
3: Anna Cardinaletti: The position of subjects in Germanic and Romance questions
4: Jan Casalicchio: Expressing perception in parallel ways: Sentential Small Clauses in German and Romance
5: Federica Cognola and George Walkden: Pro-drop in interrogatives across older Germanic and Romance languages
6: Matthew L. Maddox and Jonathan E. MacDonald: Reflexive constructions in German, Spanish, and French as a product of cyclic interaction
7: Benjamin L. Sluckin, Silvio Cruschina, and Fabienne Martin: Locative inversion in Germanic and Romance: A conspiracy theory
Part II: Inversion, Discourse Pragmatics, and the Left Periphery
8: Roland Hinterhölzl: V2 and topicalization in Germanic and Romance
9: Christine Meklenborg, Hans Peter Helland, and Terje Lohndal: Topics in French and Norwegian
10: Ans van Kemenade and Christine Meklenborg: Issues in the left periphery of Old French and Old English: Topic types and the V2 constraint
11: Sam Wolfe: Evaluating the contact hypothesis for Old French word order
12: Ian Roberts: Second positions: A synchronic analysis and some diachronic consequences
13: Kristin Føsker Hagemann and Signe Laake: Deconstructing stylistic fronting in Old Norwegian and Old Spanish
14: Verner Egerland: The grammaticalization of sic: On narrative particles in Romance and Scandinavian
15: Cecilia Poletto and Emanuela Sanfelici: Against complementizers
16: Richard S. Kayne: On complementizers and relative pronouns in Germanic vs Romance
Part III: Continuity and Variation beyond the Clause
17: Giuliana Giusti: Adjectival concord in Romance and Germanic
18: Jacopo Garzonio and Silvia Rossi: Functional and lexical prepositions across Germanic and Romance
19: Kersti Börjars, Nigel Vincent, and Sam Wolfe: Locative prepositions in the house
20: John Charles Smith: 'Have' in English and Romance
References
Index
