Anna-Maria de Cesare - Böcker

The volume describes the frequency, the forms and the functions of different cleft construction types across two language families: the Romance languages (with discussion of Italian, French and Spanish data) and the Germanic languages (with focus on English, German, Swiss German and Danish).

Word classes are linguistic categories serving as basis in the description of the vocabulary and grammar of natural languages. While important publications are regularly devoted to their definition, identification, and classification, in the field of Romance linguistics we lack a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of the current research. This Manual offers an updated and detailed discussion of all relevant aspects related to word classes in the Romance languages. In the first part, word classes are discussed from both a theoretical and historical point of view. The second part of the volume takes as its point of departure single word classes, described transversally in all the main Romance languages, while the third observes the relevant word classes from the point of view of specific Romance(-based) varieties. The fourth part explores Romance word classes at the interface of grammar and other fields of research. The Manual is intended as a reference work for all scholars and students interested in the description of both the standard, major Romance languages and the smaller, lesser described Romance(-based) varieties.

This volume aims at offering an up-to-date survey on non-canonical word orders and their interplay with information structure and discourse organization. The contributions analyze different non-canonical syntactic structures (fronting, inversion, dislocations, and cleft constructions), focusing on Italian alone or on Italian in a contrastive perspective with one or more Romance (French, Romanian, Portuguese, Spanish) and/or Germanic (English and German) languages. The authors tackle the main issue of the volume from a variety of perspectives and by relying on different theoretical frameworks. At the same time, they all offer a fine-grained description of the structures analyzed on the basis of a solid empirical foundation.