First Published in 2002. The Italian phenomenon known as raddoppiamento sintattico, or sometimes raddoppiamento fonosintattico, has received a vast amount of attention. Long recognized in Italian grammar books, the process consists of the gemination of a word-initial consonant in certain environments. The word raddoppiamento means “doubling,” and it is deemed “syntactic” or “phonosyntactic” because the process spans word boundaries. This offers a synchronic and diachronic cross-dialectical study of this phenomenon.

This book investigates the nature of the relationship between phonology and syntax and proposes a theory of Minimal Indirect Reference that solves many classic problems relating to the topic.

This book provides an overview of the phonology of Italian. It covers the different levels of analysis from individual sounds up to the phrasal level. It focuses on the most widely dispersed features of the language reflecting its significant regional and social variation and its most prominent regionally restricted patterns. Martin Krämer provides a critical survey of the generative literature on Italian phonology. He reports on current debates in the field, considers their particular and general theoretical interest, and provides both syntheses and original analyses. His accounts of the main aspects and characteristics of Italian phonology are couched in the framework of Optimality Theory, but he keeps formal aspects and theory-internal matters to a minimum and separate from the presentation and description of the data. His exposition is thus fully accessible to students and researchers who are not familiar with or do not subscribe to the tenets of the theory. Individual chapters may thus serve as starting points for in-depth investigations into particular aspects of Italian phonology in whatever framework the reader chooses to employ. The Phonology of Italian is the first fully comprehensive account of its subject for many years. It will interest scholars and advanced students of Italian, Romance phonology, and phonology as a system.

Prosodic Phonology by Marina Nespor and Irene Vogel is now available again. "Nespor & Vogel 1986" is a citation classic - even after twenty years, it is still recognized as the standard resource on Prosodic Phonology. This groundbreaking work introduces all of the prosodic constituents (syllable, foot, word, clitic group, phonological phrase, intonational phrase and utterance) and provides evidence for each one from numerous languages. Prosodic Phonology also includes a chapter in which experimental psycholinguistic data support the proposed hierarchy. A perceptual study provides evidence that prosodic constituent structure - not syntactic constituent structure - predicts whether listeners are able to disambiguate different types of ambiguous sentences. A chapter on the phonology of poetic meter examines portions of Dante's Divine Comedy. It is demonstrated that the constituents proposed for spoken language also make interesting predictions about literary metrical patterns. Prosodic Phonology is an important reference not only for phonologists, but for all linguists interested in the issue of interfaces among the components of grammar. It is also a basic resource for psycholinguists and cognitive scientists working on linguistic perception and language acquisition.

This volume focuses on two main topics: comparative morphology (i.e. cross-linguistic analysis, including typology, dialectology and diachrony) and psycholinguistics (i.e. on-line processing, off-line experiments, child language). Since the psycholinguistic papers of this volume consistently refer to issues of grammatical theory and many of the contributions on morphological theory consider psycholinguistic questions, the topics are interconnected. Both inflectional and derivational morphology are dealt with. The volume spans a broad set of languages of the world, such as African, Amerindian, Arabic and Chukotko-Kamchatkan, in addition to the Indo-European languages. This volume differs from the other collective volumes on morphology both by the breadth of topics and by great integration of theoretical and methodological perspectives.

This collection brings together current research on a range of phenomena in French, Spanish, Occitan and Italian, that will be of interest to scholars and students of Romance and general linguistics. The volume includes 12 peer-reviewed articles, first presented at the 44th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), divided into three sections on syntax-semantics, morphosyntax, and bilingualism and language acquisition.