This book deals with Albanian, including the dialects spoken in Southern Italy, and with the Aromanian spoken in Southern Albania. These languages are set in the context of current generative research on syntax, morphology, language variation and contact – yielding insights into key morphosyntactic notions of case, agreement, complementation, and into phenomena such as Differential Object Marking, the Person Case Constraint, linkers and control.

This volume offers new perspectives on the tension between the rich patterns of language variation that emerge from comparative studies and the quest for simple theoretical primitives. The chapters explore the debate between Cartography and Minimalism: on the one hand, the need for detailed and articulated descriptions of the clausal architecture, and on the other, the endeavor to reduce the theoretical apparatus to fundamental computational mechanisms. The first part of the book begins with a reflection on the goals of modern linguistic theory, and investigates the principles of human language, in an effort to subsume the regularities of particular grammars under a small set of morphosyntactic and semantic primitives. The second part examines the clausal structure - both the CP-layer and the IP-layer - from a comparative perspective, which directly relates to the fundamental questions of universality, linguistic variation, and learnability addressed in the first part of the book. With chapters written by world-leading linguists who analyze a wide range of old and new phenomena, the volume will be a valuable resource for researchers and students interested in theoretical linguistics and language development.

In this volume scholars honor M. Rita Manzini for her contributions to the field of Generative Morphosyntax. The essays in this book celebrate her career by continuing to explore inter-area research in linguistics and by pursuing a broad comparative approach, investigating and comparing different languages and dialects.

Verbal Pseudo-Coordination (as in English ‘go and get’) has been described for a number of individual languages, but this is the first edited volume to emphasize this topic from a comparative perspective, and in connection to Multiple Agreement Constructions more generally. The chapters include detailed analyses of Romance, Germanic, Slavic and other languages. These contributions show important cross-linguistic similarities in these constructions, as well as their diversity, providing insights into areas such as the morphology-syntax and syntax-semantics interfaces, dialectal variation and language contact. This volume establishes Pseudo-Coordination as a descriptively important and theoretically challenging cross-linguistic phenomenon among Multiple Agreement Constructions and will be of interest to specialists in individual languages as well as typologists and theoreticians, serving as a foundation to promote continued research.

The latest volume of OLINCO proceedings is a selected set of sixteen papers that grew from presentations at OLINCO 2023 - the international Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium held at Palacký University in June 2021. The papers collected here are unified by the topic of the colloquium: Language Use and Linguistic Structure, in that they all, in one way or the other, address the central questions of the study of human language. They all use standard scientific methodology and theory and solidly researched empirical evidence in favor of formalized structural representations of the language system.

This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the origins, development, and stabilization of differential object marking (DOM) in Romanian. DOM, a means by which a grammar distinguishes between objects based on semantic features such as animacy or definiteness, has been a fruitful area of research in syntax, historical linguistics, and typology. In this volume, Virginia Hill and Alexandru Mardale demonstrate that Romanian DOM reflects a typological mix of Balkan and Romance patterns, and is in fact composed of three distinct mechanisms. Their analysis of these mechanisms reveals that DOM triggers in Romanian are located in the nominal domain, in contrast to languages such as Spanish, where they are located in the verbal domain. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted in the volume sheds light on existing typologies of DOM, particularly in relation to the variation observed in the merging location of the DOM particle and of the doubling pronominal clitic.

The book deals in detail with previously understudied language contact settings in the Balkans (South East Europe) that present a continuum between ethnic and linguistic separation and symbiosis among groups of people. The studies in this volume achieve several aims: they critically assess the Balkan Sprachbund theory; they analyse general contact theories against the background of new, original, representative field and historical Greek, Albanian, Romance, Slavic and Judesmo data; they employ and contribute to recent methods of research on linguistic convergence in bilingual societies; they propose new general assessments of extra- and intralinguistic factors of Balkanization over the centuries; and they outline prospects for future research. The factors relevant to contact scenarios and linguistic change in the Balkans are identified and typologized through models such as those related to a balanced or unbalanced (socio)linguistic situation.