Based on the quantitative analysis of a large corpus of Old and Middle High German prose texts, this volume provides a first extensive overview on the syntactic properties of coordination structures featuring the coordinators inti/und and joh in Old and Middle High German and discusses potential analyses in a generative framework. After introducing the main properties of coordination structures in Modern Standard German in Chapters 1 and 2, the results of the corpus study are presented in Chapters 3-6. Chapter 3 focuses on the coordinators inti/und and joh, showing that coordination structures with both coordinators already exhibit the same characteristic types of ellipsis as well as the same parallelism of the conjuncts as their Modern Standard German counterparts. Chapters 4-6 each discuss one major aspect of diachronic change: verbal agreement with conjoined subject-NPs (Chapter 4), the conditions regarding the omission of referential subject-pronouns in clausal or verbal coordination structures (Chapter 5) and so-called ‘inversion after und’ (Chapter 6). The volume thus provides a deeper understanding of the syntax of coordination structures in both a synchronic and diachronic perspective for researchers and students.

This book opens with Angelika Kratzer and Luigi Rizzi talking about contemporary issues, such as non-recursiveness of focus and the semantics of topics. The chapters climb down the spine from the left periphery to DP: the value of subjunctive across the history of German, expressive expressions in Brazilian Portuguese, left and right dislocation and the speaker’s perspective in Italian, Brazilian double subjects and left dislocated topic, long versus short wh-movement in Brazilian Portuguese and Quebec French, low adverbs and the raising of the verb in Brazilian Portuguese, ellipsis and null objects in Brazilian and European Portuguese, and bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese. The chapters propose original accounts for language variation and historical changes, most of them focusing on Brazilian Portuguese, a challenge to syntax and semantics. Thus, the volume contributes to Brazilian and Portuguese Linguistics, as well as to general and contemporary research on syntax and semantics of natural languages.

This volume contains revised versions of thirteen of the papers presented at the parasession, “New Solutions to Old Problems: Issues in Romance Historical Linguistics”, held as part of the 29th Linguistic Symposium on the Romance Languages (1999). These studies examine specific problems in Romance historical linguistics within the framework of new analytical approaches, many of which represent extensions into the diachronic realm of methodologies and theories originally formulated to explain aspects of synchronic phonology and syntax. Insights afforded by Principles and Parameters, the Minimalist Program, Optimality Theory, grammaticalization theory, and sociohistorical linguistics are used to elucidate such long-standing issues in traditional historical grammar as diphthongization in Hispano-Romance, syncope of intertonic vowels in Hispano- and Gallo-Romane, Romance lenition, the role of analogy in morphological change, word order, infinitival constructions, and the collocation of clitic object pronouns in Old French and Old Spanish.

The unifying topic of this volume is the role of information structure, broadly conceived, as it interacts with the other levels of linguistic description, syntax, morphology, prosody, semantics and pragmatics.

This handbook offers a thorough treatment of the science of linguistic annotation. Leaders in the field guide the reader through the process of modeling, creating an annotation language, building a corpus and evaluating it for correctness. Essential reading for both computer scientists and linguistic researchers.Linguistic annotation is an increasingly important activity in the field of computational linguistics because of its critical role in the development of language models for natural language processing applications. Part one of this book covers all phases of the linguistic annotation process, from annotation scheme design and choice of representation format through both the manual and automatic annotation process, evaluation, and iterative improvement of annotation accuracy. The second part of the book includes case studies of annotation projects across the spectrum of linguistic annotation types, including morpho-syntactic tagging, syntactic analyses, a range of semantic analyses (semantic roles, named entities, sentiment and opinion), time and event and spatial analyses, and discourse level analyses including discourse structure, co-reference, etc. Each case study addresses the various phases and processes discussed in the chapters of part one.

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The contents of the present volume will enhance our understanding of the diachrony of agreement systems and provide a useful starting point for future studies on this both fascinating and intricate field of research.