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This volume offers new perspectives on the tension between the rich patterns of language variation that emerge from comparative studies and the quest for simple theoretical primitives. The chapters analyze a wide range of phenomena, and relate them to fundamental questions of universality, linguistic variation, and learnability.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I. Foundational issues: Principles, primitives, and explanations in generative grammar
- 1: Noam Chomsky: Genuine explanation
- 2: Gennaro Chierchia: Four types of quantifiers at the interface between syntax and logic
- 3: Giorgio Graffi and Alessandro Riolfi: The explanatory power of the subjacency principle
- 4: Ian Roberts: The Strict Cycle Condition: 'One cycle to rule them all'
- 5: Richard S. Kayne: A more demanding approach to suppletion
- 6: Adriana Belletti: Truncation vs reduction in development
- Part II. Comparative perspectives on the functional structure of the clause
- 7: M. Rita Manzini and Anna Roussou: Recategorizing C
- 8: Mamoru Saito: Wh-phrases as genuine focus operators
- 9: Dominique Sportiche: Some (but not all) movement types systematically violate islands
- 10: Ronit Szterman and Naama Friedmann: Comprehension and production of sentences with V-C movement in orally-trained children with hearing impairment
- 11: Benedetta Baldi and Leonardo M. Savoia: Micro-variation in imperatives: Enclisis and mesoclisis in Italian and Arbëresh varieties
- 12: Paola Benincà and Guglielmo Cinque: The syntax of Romance clitics and selective clitic climbing
- 13: Andrea Calabrese: The Latin passive morpheme /-r/ and its morphosyntactic similarity with Romance SI
- 14: Liliane Haegeman and Lieven Danckaert: Subject ellipsis and impersonal pronouns
- 15: Hilda Koopman: Some basic properties of Mandarin resultative clusters: A measure of progress
- 16: Ur Shlonsky: From Bantu subject-object reversal to inverted copular sentences: How “low” focalization and smuggling circumvent Relative Minimality violations
About the author
Giuliano Bocci is Associate Professor in General Linguistics at the University of Siena. His theoretical and experimental research focuses on formal syntax, prosody, and their interplay with information structure.
Daniele Botteri is Adjunct Professor of Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at the University of Siena where he earned his PhD in Cognitive Science in 2018. His research focuses on comparative syntax, language learning, and language teaching methodology.
Claudia Manetti was Adjunct Professor of Linguistics and a Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Siena until 2020, and is currently a secondary school teacher. Her research interests mainly focus on language acquisition, multilingualism, and language teaching.
Vincenzo Moscati is Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Experimental Linguistics at the University of Siena. He works in theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics, looking at language processing in adults, typically developing children, and children with Developmental Language Disorder.
Summary
This volume offers new perspectives on the tension between the rich patterns of language variation that emerge from comparative studies and the quest for simple theoretical primitives. The chapters analyze a wide range of phenomena, and relate them to fundamental questions of universality, linguistic variation, and learnability.
