The Bantu-Romance Connection
A comparative investigation of verbal agreement, DPs, and information structure
1st Edition
Published on 26. September 2008
XIX, 355 pages
978-90-272-9067-0 (ISBN)
Description
This landmark volume is the first work specifically designed to explore the extent to which striking surface morpho-syntactic similarities between Bantu and Romance languages actually represent similar syntactic structures. In particular, it explores the timely and much debated issues of verbal morphology and agreement, the structure of DPs, and word order/information structure, with the goal of providing a better understanding of the structure of the different languages investigated, and the implications this holds for syntactic theory more generally. All of the papers draw on data from both Bantu and Romance languages, providing a framework for much-needed further comparative research on the nature of linguistic structure, its diversity and constraints, and the implications this has for learnability/acquisition. The volume also provides an important precedent for incorporating insights from Bantu linguistic structure into mainstream of syntax research.
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Cecile de Cat | Katherine Demuth
The Bantu-Romance Connection
A comparative investigation of verbal agreement, DPs, and information structure
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09/2008
John Benjamins Publishing Co
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Content
- The Bantu-Romance Connection
- Editorial page
- Title page
- LCC data
- Table of contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I: Clitics and agreement
- Part II: The structure of DPs
- Part III: Information structure
- References
- Part I. Clitics and agreement
- Concepts of structural underspeci cation in Bantu and Romance
- 1. Introduction
- 1.1 Romance-Bantu similarities on the left and right periphery
- 2. The dynamics of language processing
- 2.1 Lexical information provided by verbs
- 2.2 Context-dependence and lexical speci cations for pronouns
- 2.3 The dynamics of long-distance dependency
- 2.4 Constructing trees in tandem
- 2.5 Scrambling and locality constraints on structural under-speci cation
- 3. Left and right periphery effects in Bantu
- 4. Inducing locally un xed nodes: Otjiherero subject markers
- 5. Passive and locative inversion
- 6. Reflections and directions for the future
- References
- On different types of clitic clusters*
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Cluster internal restrictions
- 3. On a case-approach to clitic clusters
- 3.1 On the apparent special status of Italian glielo
- 3.2 Mi ti combinations
- 4. Many different types of clitic clusters in Italian
- 4.1 Type 1: Unrestricted clusters with vowel change
- 4.2 Type 2: Unrestricted clusters with no vowel change
- 4.3 Type 3: Combinations which are only possible in proclitic position
- 4.4 Type 4 and 5: Combinations which are independently impossible in enclitic position
- 4.5 Summary
- 5. Ingredients for the analysis
- 5.1 The representation of clitic clusters in antisymmetry
- 5.2 Proclisis vs. enclisis
- 5.3 Vowel change
- 5.4 On the replacement of le by gli
- 5.5 An aside on orthographic conventions
- 5.6 On person and number feature checking
- 5.7 Clitic climbing and two clitic positions inside the clause
- 5.8 On the clitic (cluster) derivation
- 6. On the derivation of the different types of clusters
- 6.1 Type 1 clusters with io - do clitics
- 6.2 Type 1 and Type 2 clusters with locative ci
- 6.3 Another Type 2 cluster with locative ci
- 6.4 Clusters with impersonal si
- 6.5 Type 3 clusters with reflexive si
- 7. On the mi gli constraint
- 8. Conclusion
- References
- Pronominal object markers in Bantu and Romance*
- 1. The Bantu-Romance connexion
- 2. Object markers in French
- 3. Object markers in Bantu
- 4. Are Romance clitics and Bantu object markers amenable to a unified analysis?
- 5. Conclusion
- References
- The Bantu-Romance connection in verb movement and verbal inflectional morphology
- 1. Introduction
- 2. WH interrogatives in Bantu and Romance
- 3. Verbal inflectional morphology in Bantu and Romance
- 4. Formal structure and V-movement in verbal inflectional morphology in Bantu and Romance
- 5. Formal structure and V-movement in WH-extraction strategies in Bantu and Romance
- 6. Fusion in verbal inflectional morphology in Bantu and Romance
- 7. Summary and theoretical implications
- References
- Part 2. The structure of DPs
- DP in Bantu and Romance
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Words and morphemes
- 2. 1 Noun Class as grammatical gender
- 2.2 Noun Class and derivation
- 2.2.1 epresenting Class
- 2.2.2 he zero-affixation analysis
- 2.3 Discussion
- 2.4 Locatives
- 2.5 Discussion
- 3. Word order and phrase structure in DP
- 3.1 The noun-raising approach
- 3.2 Modifier order in Cinque (20 5)
- 3.3 An alternative
- 3.4 Discussion
- 3.5 Romance DPs
- 4. Agreement in DP
- 5. Conclusion
- References
- On the interpretability of f-features*
- 1. Introduction
- 1.1 Preliminary issues
- 2. f-features
- 3. Person
- 4. Gender
- 4.1 The Gender of Nouns
- 4.2 Gender in the absence of overt nouns
- 5. Number
- 5.1 Pure syntactic agreement
- 5.2 Coordination cases
- 5.3 Semantic agreement
- 6. Conclusions and further work
- References
- Agreement and Concord in Nominal Expressions
- 1. Aims and structure of the paper
- 2. Two different structural relations
- 3. Agree and EPP in the NE
- 3.1 The ordering of pronominal and full-NE possessors
- 3.2 Person features are weak in Bantu and Romance NEs
- 3.3 Hebrew construct state and Romanian possessive constructions
- 4. Agree vs. Concord
- 5. Concord
- 5.1 Prefixes and genitival articles
- 5.2 Pre-prefixes and double definiteness
- 6. Conclusions
- References
- A unified syntactic analysis of Italian and Luganda nouns
- 1. Theoretical framework and proposal
- 2. Italian gender and Luganda class systems and the nature of the feature [n]
- 2.1 Italian nominal system
- 2.2 Luganda
- 3. Gender and class as n-marked Features
- 3.1 De-nominal noun formation
- 3.2 De-adjectival noun formation
- 3.3 De-verbal noun formation
- 4. The syntactic representation of simple nouns
- 4.1 The Framework
- 4.2 The analysis
- 4.3 Phrasal movement versus head movement
- 4.4 Movement vs. parametric variation
- 5. Conclusion
- References
- Part 3. Information structure
- The fine structure of the topic field
- 1. Discourse categories at the interface
- 2. Discourse categories and syntactic properties
- 3. Discourse categories, tonal events and the cartographic Approach
- 4. The fine structure of the topic field
- 5. Topics, preverbal subjects and minimality effects
- 6. The interface interpretation of postverbal subjects
- 7. Clitic-resumed Topics vs. "Marginalized" Objects
- 8. Conclusions
- References
- Focus at the interface
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Syntactic approaches to focus vs. interface views
- 3. Focus in Romance
- 3.1 Focus as a syntactic primitive?
- 3.2 Subject-verb inversion cross-linguistically
- 3.3 (Focus-)Inversion is sensitive to locality
- 3.4 Possessives in Portuguese and Italian
- 3.5 Partial conclusion
- 4. Focus in Bantu
- 4.1 Anchor 53
- 4.1.1 onjoint-disjoint forms and focus
- 4.1.2 urther evidence against a syntactic focus position in Bantu
- 4.2 A prosodic account of focus
- 4.3 In-situ focus
- 5. The Romance-Bantu conspiracy
- 6. Conclusions
- References
- Agreement in thetic VS sentences in Bantu and Romance*
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Expression of theticity
- 2.1 Detopicalization
- 2.2 Romance and Bantu thetics
- 2.3 Two types of agreement
- 2.4 Conjoint-Disjoint distinction
- 3. Possible analyses
- 3.1 Agree/uf requires Move/EPP
- 3.2 Direction of agreement vs. case dependency
- 4. Pronominal vs. grammatical agreement marker
- 4.1 Sesotho (type 1) pronominal agreement
- 4.2 Makhuwa (type 2) grammatical agreement
- 4.3 Remarks on an analysis of agreement in Italian dialects
- 5. Conclusion
- References
- Index of languages
- General index
- The series Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today
