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.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the syntactic variation of the dialects of Spanish. More precisely, it covers Spanish theoretical syntax that takes as its data source non-standard grammatical phenomena. Approaching the syntactic variation of Spanish dialects opens a door not only to the intricacies of the language, but also to a set of challenges of linguistic theory itself, including language variation, language contact, bilingualism, and diglossia. The volume is divided into two main sections, the first focusing on Iberian Spanish and the second on Latin American Spanish. Chapters cover a wide range of syntactic constructions and phenomena, such as clitics, agreement, subordination, differential object marking, expletives, predication, doubling, word order, and subjects. This volume constitutes a milestone in the study of syntactic variation, setting the stage for future work not only in vernacular Spanish, but all languages.

This collection of papers investigates two specific linguistic phenomena from the point of view of first- and second-language acquisition. While observations on the acquisition of scrambling or pronominal clitics can be found in the literature, up until the recent past they were sparse and often buried in other issues. This volume fills a long-existing gap in providing a collection of articles which focus on language acquisition but at the same time address the overarching syntactic issues involved (for example, the X-bar status of clitics, base-generation vs. movement accounts of scrambling). This volume contains an overview of L1 (and, in one case, L2) acquisition data from a number of different languages including Bernese, Swiss, German, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish, as well as from several theoretical points of view with these two clause-internal processes at its center. These language acquisition data are considered to be crucial in the validation of analyses of these specific linguistic phenomena in adult grammars. The contributions in this volume include the earliest thoughts in this vein and, for this reason, should be viewed as a starting point for discussions within theoretical linguistics and language acquisition alike.

This book is a compilation of articles on different aspects of Spanish grammar in the areas of current theoretical syntax and semantics. The issue brings together scholars working on some formal aspects of Spanish predicative complementation (e.g., dequeísmo), neuter demonstrative pronouns, the subject of Psych verbs, the nature of non-verbal predication, and the internal structure of the Determiner Phrase (DP), cf. gender variation, among other topics. Linguists and philologists with interests in Spanish and/or in other Romance languages are the main target audience. The book will appeal also to researchers and students specializing in generative grammar, semantics and in the syntax/semantics interface. It will also be of interest to historical linguists and dialectologists addressing theoretical/formal issues (cf. Afro-Bolivian Spanish). The research in this book points to a cohesiveness in Spanish linguistics that lies in the integration of up-to-date empirically-based linguistic research with current theoretical assumptions on the nature of syntax and semantics.

In this invited volume, experts in Spanish linguistics who subscribe to the Chomskyian thory of Universal Grammar, along with the editors, approach the general applicability of this model from the perspectives of their subdisciplines: language acquisition, syntax, semantics, phonology, and morphology. Their research points to the verification of the Chomskyian linguistic theory as a general framework for explaining phenomena in language acquistion and use—and, more generally, to the possible development of a model of mind based on linguistic theory. Current Studies in Spanish Linguistics will interest all specialists in Spanish and theoretical linguistics, as well as those interested in cognitive science, psychology, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence.

The scholarly articles included in this volume represent significant contributions to the fields of formal and descriptive syntax, conversational analysis and speech act theory, as well as language development and bilingualism. Taken together, these studies adopt a variety of methodological techniques—ranging from grammaticality judgments to corpus-based analysis to experimental approaches—to offer rich insights into different aspects of Ibero-Romance grammar. The volume consists of three parts, organized in accordance with the topics treated in the chapters they comprise. Part I focuses on structural patterns, Part II analyzes pragmatic ones, and Part III investigates the acquisition of linguistic aspects found in the speech of L1, L2 and heritage speakers. The authors address these issues by relying on empirically rooted linguistic approaches to data collection, which are coupled with current theoretical assumptions on the nature of sentence structure, discourse dynamics and language acquisition. The volume will be of interest to anyone researching or studying Hispanic and Ibero-Romance linguistics.

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.