Challenging Clitics

Challenging Clitics
Author: Christine Meklenborg Salvesen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2013-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027271941

Challenging Clitics deals with multiple sides of cliticisation from different theoretical frameworks and with data from a number of different languages. Unlike many other books on clitics where clitics are considered from a mere syntactical point of view, this book also discusses the acquisition of clitics; the role of the PF in cliticisation; the morphophonological aspects of cliticisation; and historical change – to name but a few of the approaches presented. As such this collection presents cutting edge theoretical considerations as well as new data on clitics. Taken together, the contributions in this volume not only provide insight into the extremely complex nature of clitics, but also into derivations and structures in language that go beyond the study of clitics themselves.

Spanish Clitics on the Move

Spanish Clitics on the Move
Author: Elisabeth Mayer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2017-04-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1501500880

This volume explores the complex relationship between primary agreement by means of object marking or differential object marking (DOM), and secondary agreement through clitics in non-standardized variation data from Limeño Spanish contact varieties (LSCV). As such it is concerned with diachronic as well as synchronic morphosyntactic variation of the third person object pronoun paradigm, so called clitics, as used in Standard Spanish and non-standardized Spanish contact dialects. The argumentation as well as the data presented cross diachronic and synchronic boundaries.

Romance Object Clitics

Romance Object Clitics
Author: Diego Pescarini
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2021
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0198864388

This book offers an empirical and theoretical exploration of the development of object clitic pronouns in the Romance languages, drawing on data from Latin, medieval vernaculars, modern Romance languages, and lesser-known dialects. Diego Pescarini examines phonological, morphological, and especially syntactic aspects of Romance object clitics, using the findings to reconstruct their evolution from Latin to Romance and to model clitic placement in modern Romance languages. On the theoretical side, the volume engages with previous accounts of clitics, particularly in generative theory. It challenges the received idea that cliticization resulted from a form of syntactic deficiency; instead, it proposes that clitics resulted from the feature endowment of discourse features, which initially caused freezing of certain pronominal forms and then - through reanalysis - their successive incorporation to verbal hosts. This approach leads to a revision of earlier analyses of well-known phenomena such as interpolation, climbing, and enclisis/proclisis alternations, and to new approaches to issues including V2 syntax, scrambling, and stylistic fronting, among many others.

Serbian Clitics

Serbian Clitics
Author: Jasmina Milićević
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2023-02-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027254648

Clitics, those “funny little words” like English contracted future tense and pluperfect tense/conditional mood markers (’ll and ’d) or French pronominal objects (le ‘him’, la ‘her’, lui ‘to him/her’, etc.), have long been a source of fascination for linguists. Lacking an inherent stress that characterizes “well-behaved” words, clitics prosodically depend on a stressed sentence element, called their host, which makes them look and, in some contexts, behave like affixes (parts of words). Some clitics, Serbian second-position clitics being the case in point, also obey stringent linear ordering rules, different from those holding for fully-fledged sentence elements. This monograph offers a comprehensive formalized description of second-position clitics in standard Serbian from the viewpoint of the Meaning-Text theory, an approach relying on syntactic dependencies and oriented towards speech production, which sets it apart from most contemporary frameworks. It will be of interest for general linguists, Slavists, and advanced learners of Serbian.

Clitics

Clitics
Author: Andrew Spencer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2012-07-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0521682924

In most languages we find 'little words' which resemble a full word, but which cannot stand on their own. Instead they have to 'lean on' a neighbouring word, like the 'd, 've and unstressed 'em of Kim'd've helped'em ('Kim would have helped them'). These are clitics, and they are found in most of the world's languages. In English the clitic forms appear in the same place in the sentence that the full form of the word would appear in but in many languages clitics obey quite separate rules of placement. This book is the first introduction to clitics, providing a complete summary of their properties, their uses, the reasons why they are of interest to linguists and the various theoretical approaches that have been proposed for them. The book describes a whole host of clitic systems and presents data from over 100 languages.

Clitics in the wild

Clitics in the wild
Author: Zrinka Kolaković
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 484
Release:
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961103364

This collective monograph is the first data-oriented, empirical in-depth study of the system of clitics on Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. It fills the gap between the theoretical and normative literature by including solid data on variation found in dialects and spoken language and obtained from massive Web Corpora and speakers’ acceptability judgements. The authors investigate three primary sources of variation: inventory, placement and morphonological processes. A separate part of the book is dedicated to the phenomenon of clitic climbing, the major challenge for any syntactic theory. The theory of complexity serves as the explanation for the very diverse constraints on clitic climbing established in the empirical studies. It allows to construct a series of hierarchies where the factors relevant for predicting clitic climbing interact with each other. Thus, the study pushes our understanding of clitics away from fine-grained descriptions and syntactic generalisations towards a probabilistic modelling of syntax.

Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax

Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax
Author: Andreas Dufter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 978
Release: 2017-09-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 311037708X

This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.

On a law of Indo-European word order

On a law of Indo-European word order
Author: Jacob Wackernagel
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 454
Release:
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961102716

Jacob Wackernagel’s 1892 essay on second-position enclitics in the Indo-European languages has long been hailed as groundbreaking in both historical and theoretical linguistics. Until now, however, it has only been available in the original German. This book provides a full translation into English, including glossed and translated examples from several early Indo-European languages and varieties and full bibliographical details of the references drawn upon, as well as a new edition of the German original. It should be of interest to researchers in historical and Indo-European linguistics and in general linguistics working on the interfaces between morphology, prosody and syntax.

Sound, Syntax and Contact in the Languages of Asturias

Sound, Syntax and Contact in the Languages of Asturias
Author: Guillermo Lorenzo
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2022-03-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027257906

This is the first generative-oriented volume ever published about Asturian and Asturian Galician, two Romance languages which, along with their intrinsic interest, are crucial to understand the parametric distance between Spanish and Galician/Portuguese. Its chapters offer new insights about old puzzles, like pronominal enclisis or apparent violations of bans on clitic combinatorics, but they also deal with less explored grounds, like aspect, negation or prosody. Chapters make special emphasis on how the concerned issues result from complex interactions between syntax proper and its interfaces with sound and meaning. The book focuses on particular aspects of Asturian and Asturian Galician, as well as on some effects of their contact with Spanish in their corresponding locations.

Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics

Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics
Author: Jared Klein
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 1026
Release: 2018-06-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110542439

This book presents the most comprehensive coverage of the field of Indo-European Linguistics in a century, focusing on the entire Indo-European family and treating each major branch and most minor languages. The collaborative work of 120 scholars from 22 countries, Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics combines the exhaustive coverage of an encyclopedia with the in-depth treatment of individual monographic studies.