This volume is a collection of selected papers originally presented at the XVIth Colloquium on Generative Grammar that was held at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. All the papers deal with current issues within the generative framework, mostly paying attention to phenomena pertaining to the syntax-semantics interface. The major concerns are coreference relations, modals and modality, and focus/ellipsis. More specifically, the contributions present research findings from different languages, often adopting a comparative perspective, and include studies on sub-extraction from subjects and objects; on obviation and Control structures; on specificity and Weak Crossover effects; and on reconstruction without movement, as well as papers that address the scopal interactions between tense/aspect and modals; the syntactic and semantic properties of different types of left-periphery operators; and the role focus plays in elliptical constructions.

This volume is a collection of selected papers originally presented at the XVIth Colloquium on Generative Grammar that was held at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. All the papers deal with current issues within the generative framework, mostly paying attention to phenomena pertaining to the syntax-semantics interface. The major concerns are coreference relations, modals and modality, and focus/ellipsis. More specifically, the contributions present research findings from different languages, often adopting a comparative perspective, and include studies on sub-extraction from subjects and objects; on obviation and Control structures; on specificity and Weak Crossover effects; and on reconstruction without movement, as well as papers that address the scopal interactions between tense/aspect and modals; the syntactic and semantic properties of different types of left-periphery operators; and the role focus plays in elliptical constructions.

This volume explores phenomena which come under the heading of epistemic modalities and evidentiality in more or less well-known languages (Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, Hungarian, Tibetan, Lakandon and Yucatec Maya, Arwak-Chibchan Kogi and Ika). It reveals cross-linguistic variations in the structuring of these vast fields of enquiry and clearly demonstrates the relevance and interplay of multiple factors involved in the analysis of these two conceptual domains. Although the contributions present diverging descriptive traditions, they are nonetheless within the broad domain of functional-typological linguistics and give access to distinct yet comparable approaches. They all converge around a number of key issues: modal verbs; the relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality; the relationship of modal notions with some tense and aspect notions; the notions of (inter)subjectivity, commitment and (dis)engagement; the prosodic variation of modal adverbs, the diachronic connections between negation and evidential markers, the connection with mirativity. The volume is of interest to linguists and advanced graduate students working in general and theoretical linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, cognition, and typology.

Over the past several decades, linguistic theorizing of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM), along with a strongly growing body of crosslinguistic studies, has revealed complexity in the data that challenges traditional distinctions and treatments of these categories. Mood, Aspect, Modality Revisited argues that it’s time to revisit our conventional assumptions and reconsider our foundational questions: What exactly is a linguistic category? What kinds of categories do labels such as “subjunctive,” “imperative,” “future,” and “modality” truly refer to? In short, how categorical are categories? Current literature assumes a straightforward link between grammatical category and semantic function, and descriptions of well-studied languages have cultivated a sense of predictability in patterns over time. As the editors and contributors of Mood, Aspect, Modality Revisited prove, however, this predictability and stability vanish in the study of lesser-known patterns and languages. The ten provocative essays gathered here present fascinating cutting-edge research demonstrating that the traditional grammatical distinctions are ultimately fluid—and perhaps even illusory. Developing groundbreaking and highly original theories, the contributors in this volume seek to unravel more general, fundamental principles of TAM that can help us better understand the nature of linguistic representations.

This monograph presents a morpho-syntactic investigation on modality, aspect, and negation by concentrating on Persian, and is designed to contribute to theoretical linguistics and the study of Iranian languages. The analysis is based on the Minimalist program. This research challenges the idea that the syntactic structure maps on the semantic interpretation or vice versa. The discussion presented in this monograph shows that the syntactic structure of Persian modals is uniform no matter if the modals are interpreted as having root or epistemic readings. Although it is claimed that modals are raising constructions in different languages, modals in Persian, which does not have subject-raising constructions, show a different syntactic behavior. Furthermore, the structural analysis of the interaction of Persian modals and negation shows that because of the scope interaction of negation and modals, the syntactic structure of modals with respect to negation mostly corresponds to the semantic interpretation of modals.

The volumes "Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory: Selected papers from Going Romance " contain the selected papers of the Going Romance conferences, a major European annual discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages.This volume assembles a significant number of selected papers that were presented at the 21st edition of Going Romance, which was organized by the Chair of Romance Linguistics of the University of Amsterdam in December 2007. The range of languages (both standard and non-standard varieties) analyzed in this volume is quite significant: Catalan, French, Italian, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. The volume is quite representative of the spread of the variety of research carried out nowadays on Romance languages within theoretical linguistics and shows the vitality of this research."

Against the background of the past half century s typological and generative work on comparative syntax, this volume brings together 16 papers considering what we have learned and may still be able to learn about the nature and extent of syntactic variation. More specifically, it offers a multi-perspective critique of the Principles and Parameters approach to syntactic variation, evaluating the merits and shortcomings of the pre-Minimalist phase of this enterprise and considering and illustrating the possibilities opened up by recent empirical and theoretical advances. Contributions focus on four central topics: firstly, the question of the locus of variation, whether the attested variation may plausibly be understood in parametric terms and, if so, what form such parameters might take; secondly, the fate of one of the most prominent early parameters, the Null Subject Parameter; thirdly, the matter of parametric clusters more generally; and finally, acquisition issues.