This book is a research monograph on impersonal si constructions (ISC) in Italian within the Minimalist program framework. The book offers a new point of view on ISCs, providing a new set of crucial data that were previously unknown, and pointing out many characteristics of ISCs that were overlooked before. It results in the introduction of additional means of syntactic analysis at the edge between narrow syntax and pragmatics.

Features the contributions that deal with various types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates, presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality, and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties.

'a truly authoritative short Italian grammar ... possibly the best concise account now available in any language' - The Times Literary Supplement 'a stimulating and scholarly introduction to Italian for the serious student. It contains a great deal of original material and the authors' unequivocal attitudes to the linguistic reality of modern Italy...make it important that it should be read and discussed by Italianists everywhere' - The Times Higher Education Supplement 'a major new contribution to the literature in English...it will be an essential part of the linguistic formation of every Italianist' - The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies Recently revised to bring it completed up-to-date, this book remains a unique source on the Italian language as it is actually spoken and written in Italy. The combination of historical perspective and contemporary grammar make it particularly useful for Italian linguistics.

Recent trends in syntax and morphology have shown the great importance of doing research on variation in closely related languages. This book centers on the study of the morphology and syntax of the two major Romance Languages spoken in Latin America from this perspective. The works presented here either compare Brazilian Portuguese with European Portuguese or compare Latin American Spanish and Peninsular Spanish, or simply compare Portuguese and its varieties with Spanish and its varieties. The chapters advance on a great variety of theoretical questions related to coordination, clitics , hyper-raising, infinitives, null objects, null subjects, hyper-raising, passives, quantifiers, pseudo-clefts, questions and distributed morphology. Finally, this book provides new empirical findings and enriches the descriptions made about Portuguese and Spanish Spoken in the Americas by providing new generalizations, new data and new statistical evidence that help better understand the nature of such variation. The studies contained in this book show a vast array of new phenomena in these young varieties, offering empirical and theoretical windows to language variation and change.

Split intransitivity has received a great deal of attention in theoretical linguistics since the formulation of the Unaccusative Hypothesis by David Perlmutter (1978). This book provides an in-depth investigation of split intransitivity as it occurs in Italian. The principal proposal is that the manifestations of split intransitivity in Italian, whilst being variously constrained by well-formedness conditions on the encoding of information structure, primarily derive from the tension between accusative (syntactic) and active (semantic) alignment. In contrast to approaches which consider the selection of the perfective operator to be the primary diagnostic of unaccusative or unergative syntax, this study identifies two morphosemantic domains in intransitive constructions on the basis of the analysis of a cluster of related phenomena (including agreement, argument suppression, ne -cliticization, past-participle behaviour, the morphosyntax of experiencer predicates and word order, as well as the selection of the perfective operator). Analysing the degree to which semantic, syntactic and discourse factors interact in determining each manifestation of split intransitivity, this work captures successfully the mismatches in the scope of the various diagnostics. Drawing upon insights provided by Role and Reference Grammar, and relying on corpus-based evidence and crossdialectal comparison, this study makes new empirical and theoretical contributions to the debate on split intransitivity. The book is accessible to linguists of all theoretical persuasions and will make stimulating reading for researchers and scholars in Italian and Romance linguistics, typology and theoretical linguistics.

Preliminary Material /Hagit Borer --Introduction /Hagit Borer --Three Issues in the Theory of Clitics: Case, Doubled NPs, and Extraction /Osvaldo A. Jaeggli --Clitics in Yoruba /Douglas Pulleyblank --On Chain Formation /Luigi Rizzi --On the Derivation of en-Clitics /W. Neil Elliott --Cliticization from NPs in Czech and Comparable Phenomena in French and Italian /Jindřich Toman --Pronominal Clitic Clusters and Templates /J. Simpson and M. Withgott --Syntactic Cliticization and Lexical Cliticization: The Case of Hebrew Dative Clitics /Hagit Borer and Yosef Grodzinsky --The Interpretation and Acquisition of Italian Impersonal SI /Nina Hyams --On Italian SI /Maria Rita Manzini --On Some Properties of French Clitic Se /Eric Wehrli --Clitics in American Sign Language /Judy Anne Kegl --The Pronominal “Copula” as Agreement Clitic /Edit Doron --Subject Clitics and the NOM-Drop Parameter /Ken Safir --References /Hagit Borer --Index /Hagit Borer.

Sumerian, probably the earliest attested language in human history, has no known cognates. Accordingly, many features of Sumerian grammar are still under discussion. Up to now research has focused primarily on questions of Sumerian phonology and morphology. In this present study the author concentrates on syntactic or pragmatic phenomena, especially on the referential properties of the nominal component of certain so-called compound verbs, the unaccusativity contrast, and the possibility of generic quantification in the double object construction.