Grammatical categories
Subtitle: variation in romance languages
By: M. Rita Manzini, Leonardo Maria Savoia
Contributors: Savoia, Leonardo Maria, 1948-
Series: Cambridge studies in linguistics -- 128
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 351
ISBN-13: 9780521765190
Subjects: Comparative and general Grammar; Grammatical categories; Language and languages; Variation; LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / General
Description: "Grammatical categories (e.g. complementizer, negation, auxiliary, case) are some of the most important building blocks of syntax and morphology. Categorization therefore poses fundamental questions about grammatical structures and about the lexicon from which they are built. Adopting a 'lexicalist' stance, the authors argue that lexical items are not epiphenomena, but really represent the mapping of sound to meaning (and vice versa) that classical conceptions imply. Their rule-governed combination creates words, phrases and sentences - structured by the 'categories' that are the object of the present inquiry. They argue that the distinction between functional and non-functional categories, between content words and inflections, is not as deeply rooted in grammar as is often thought. In their argumentation they lay the emphasis on empirical evidence, drawn mainly from dialectal variation in the Romance languages, as well as from Albanian"--
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Introduction: the biolinguistic perspective; 1. The structure and interpretation of (Romance) complementizers; 2. Variation in Romance k-complementizer systems; 3. Sentential negation: adverbs; 4. Sentential negation: clitics; 5. The middle-passive voice: evidence from Albanian; 6. The auxiliary: have/be alternations in the perfect; 7. The noun (phrase): agreement, case and definiteness in an Albanian variety; 8. (Definite) denotation and case in Romance: history and variation.