This book studies the properties of imperative clauses in the context of a theory of Universal Grammar. The analysis, based on data from a wide range of languages, accounts for patterns in the interaction of imperative mood with phenomena like negation, restrictions on grammatical subjects, and the possibility of embedding imperative clauses.

This book examines the cross-linguistic expression of changes of location or state, taking as a starting point Talmy's typological generalization that classifies languages as either 'satellite-framed' or 'verb-framed'. In verb-framed languages, such as those of the Romance family, the information about the predicate is encoded by the verb. Satellite-framed languages, on the other hand, can be further subdivided into weak satellite-framed languages, in which theinformation is expressed by a prefix on the verb, and strong satellite-framed languages, in which it is expressed by a preposition. In this volume, Víctor Acedo-Matellán explores the similarities betweenLatin and Slavic in their expression of events of transition: neither allows the expression of complex adjectival resultative constructions and both express the result state or location of a complex transition through prefixes. They are therefore analysed as weak satellite-framed languages, along with Ancient Greek and some varieties of Mandarin Chinese, and stand in contrast to strong satellite-framed languages such as English, the Germanic languages in general, and Finno-Ugric. This variationis explained in terms of the morphological properties of the head expressing transition, Path, which is argued to be prefixal in weak but not in strong satellite-framed languages. On the other hand,in verb-framed languages like Romance, Path is strictly adjacent to the eventive head v. The analysis is couched in a neo-constructionist approach to argument structure, which accounts for the verbal elasticity shown by Latin, and a Distributed Morphology approach to the syntax-morphology interface.

This volume examines several aspects of the syntax of imperative clauses in English and in a variety of other Germanic languages in the context of the challenge that apparent optional movement poses for the Minimalist Programme.

The imperative clause is one of three major sentence types that have been found to be universal across the languages of the world. Compared to declaratives and interrogatives, the imperative type has received comparatively less attention. Using compelling empirical evidence, this cutting-edge study presents a new linguistic theory of imperatives.

The legendary Greek figure Orpheus was said to have possessed magical powers capable of moving all living and inanimate things through the sound of his lyre and voice. Over time, the Orphic theme has come to indicate the power of music to unsettle, subvert, and ultimately bring down oppressive realities in order to liberate the soul and expand human life without limits. The liberating effect of music has been a particularly important theme in twentieth-century African American literature. The nine original essays in Black Orpheus examines the Orphic theme in the fiction of such African American writers as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Nathaniel Mackey, Sherley Anne Williams, Ann Petry, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. The authors discussed in this volume depict music as a mystical, shamanistic, and spiritual power that can miraculously transform the realities of the soul and of the world. Here, the musician uses his or her music as a weapon to shield and protect his or her spirituality. Written by scholars of English, music, women's studies, American studies, cultural theory, and black and Africana studies, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection ultimately explore the thematic, linguistic structural presence of music in twentieth-century African American fiction.

Research on left periphery phenomena has increased in the last 20 years, resulting in consistent studies from a wide range of languages and a fruitful debate on the functional projections within the CP system. Throughout these years, important contributions have been made on Brazilian Portuguese, especially on wh-interrogative sentences, focalization, topicalization and relative clauses. As for exclamative and imperative sentences, however, there is a considerable research gap in all grammatical levels. Regarding interrogatives, semantic and prosodic studies are still lacking (as well as research on the acquisition and processing of these constructions). This collected volume fills some of those gaps, gathering studies on wh-exclamatives, imperatives and wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese which approach syntactical, semantical and prosodic aspects of these constructions through a rich and unregistered set of data. They also deliver novel acquisition and diachronic data that will further both the comprehension of Brazilian Portuguese grammar and the ongoing discussions on left periphery phenomena.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book explores a key issue in linguistic theory, the systematic variation in form between semantic equivalents across languages. Two contrasting views of the role of lexical meaning in the analysis of such variation can be found in the literature: (i) uniformity, whereby lexical meaning is universal, and variation arises from idiosyncratic differences in the inventory and phonological shape of language-particular functional material, and (ii) transparency, whereby systematic variation in form arises from systematic variation in the meaning of basic lexical items. In this volume, Itamar Francez and Andrew Koontz-Garboden contrast these views as applied to the empirical domain of property concept sentences - sentences expressing adjectival predication and their translational equivalents across languages. They demonstrate that property concept sentences vary systematically between possessive and predicative form, and propose a transparentist analysis of this variation that links it to the lexical denotations of basic property concept lexemes. At the heart of the analysis are qualities: mass-like model theoretic objects that closely resemble scales. The authors contrast their transparentist analysis with uniformitarian alternatives, demonstrating its theoretical and empirical advantages. They then show that the proposed theory of qualities can account for interesting and novel observations in two central domains of grammatical theory: the theory of syntactic categories, and the theory of mass nouns. The overall results highlight the importance of the lexicon as a locus of generalizations about the limits of crosslinguistic variation.