John Charles Smith - Böcker

This volume brings together contributions from leading specialists in syntax and morphology to explore the complex relation between periphrasis and inflexion from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. The chapters draw on data from across the Romance language family, including standard and regional varieties and dialects. The relation between periphrasis and inflexion raises questions for both syntax and morphology, and understanding the phenomena involved requires cooperation across these sub-domains. For example, the components that express many periphrases can be interrupted by other words in a way that is common in syntax but not in morphology, and in some contexts, a periphrastic form may be semantically equivalent to a single-word inflected form, with which it arguably forms part of a paradigmatic set. Patterns of this kind are found across Romance, albeit with significant local differences. Moreover, diachrony is essential in understanding these phenomena, and the rich historical documentation available for Romance allows an in-depth exploration of the changes and variation involved, as different members of the family may instantiate different stages of development. Studying these changes also raises important questions about the relation between attested and reconstructed patterns. Although the empirical focus of the volume is on the Romance languages, the analyses and conclusions presented shed light on the development and nature of similar structures in other language families and provide valuable insights relevant to linguistic theory more broadly.

This book is about the nature of morphology and its place in the structure of grammar. Drawing on a wide range of aspects of Romance inflectional morphology, leading scholars present detailed arguments for the autonomy of morphology, ie morphology has phenomena and mechanisms of its own that are not reducible to syntax or phonology. But which principles and rules govern this independent component and which phenomena can be described or explicated by the mechanisms of the morphemic level? In shedding light on these questions, this volume constitutes a major contribution to Romance historical morphology in particular, and to our understanding of the nature and importance of morphomic structure in language change in general.

This book brings together leading international scholars to consider whether in some languages there are phenomena which are unique to morphology, determined neither by phonology or syntax. Central to these phenomena is the notion of the 'morphome', conceived by Mark Aronoff in 1994 as a function, itself lacking form and meaning but which serves systematically to relate them. The classic examples of morphomes are determined neither phonologically or morphosyntactically, and appear to be an autonomous property of the synchronic organization of morphological paradigms. The nature of the morphome is a problematic and much debated issue at the centre of current research in morphology, partly because it is defined negatively as what remains after all attempts to assign putatively morphomic phenomena to phonological or morphosyntactic conditioning have been exhausted. However, morphomic phenomena generally originate in some kind of morphosyntactic or phonological conditioning which has been lost while their effects have endured. Quite often, vestiges of the original conditioning environment persist, and the boundary between the morphomic and extramorphological conditioning may become problematic. In a series of pioneering explorations of the diachrony of morphomes The Boundaries of Pure Morphology throws important new light on the nature of the morphome and the boundary - seen from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives - between what is and is not genuinely autonomous in morphology. Its findings will be of central interest to morphologists of all theoretical stripes as well as to all those concerned to understand the precise nature of linguistic diachrony.

This Cambridge History is the most comprehensive survey of the history of the Romance languages ever published in English. It engages with new and original topics that reflect wider-ranging comparative concerns, such as the relation between diachrony and synchrony, morphosyntactic typology, pragmatic change, the structure of written Romance, and lexical stability. Volume 1 is organized around the two key recurrent themes of persistence (structural inheritance and continuity from Latin) and innovation (structural change and loss in Romance). An important and novel aspect of the volume is that it accords persistence in Romance a focus in its own right rather than treating it simply as the background to the study of change. In addition, it explores the patterns of innovation (including loss) at all linguistic levels. The result is a rich structural history which marries together data and theory to produce new perspectives on the structural evolution of the Romance languages.