Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Sam Wolfe (Associate Professor of French Linguistics, Associate Professor of French Linguistics, University of Oxford) ,  Christine Meklenborg (Professor of French Linguistics, Professor of French Linguistics, University of Oslo)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.70cm , Height: 3.80cm , Length: 24.00cm
Weight:   1.068kg
ISBN:  

9780198841166

ISBN 10:   0198841167
Pages:   624
Publication Date:   20 May 2021
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
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Table of 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

Reviews

One must hope that more scholars from a diversity of theoretical backgrounds will follow the example of this volume and undertake comparable analyses of continuity, variation and contrast at the level of two or three families: these studies prove, if needed, that combining variational and contrastive stances is a highly productive way to deconstruct crucial syntactic phenomena that are too often taken for granted. * Pierre-Yves Modicom, LINGUIST *

Author Information

Sam Wolfe is Associate Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Oxford and Tutor and Official Fellow of St Catherine's College, having previously held teaching positions at the universities of Cambridge and Manchester. The principal focus of his current research is a monograph on syntactic change in French, and he has ongoing projects on Venetian and on contact-induced changes in Romance languages. His first book, Verb Second in Medieval Romance, was published by OUP in 2019, and he is the co-editor of the OUP volumes Rethinking Verb Second (with Rebecca Woods; 2020) and Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar (with Martin Maiden; 2020). Christine Meklenborg is Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Oslo, Norway. She specializes in Medieval French but in recent years has also been working on medieval Germanic languages, especially Old Swedish. From 2014 to 2019 she was Principal Investigator of the research project 'Traces of History'. She is the editor of A Micro-Perspective on Verb Second in Romance and Germanic (special edition of Linguistic Variation; Benjamins 2019) and, co-editor of Challenging Clitics (with Hans Petter Helland; Benjamins 2013).

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