Marc-Olivier Hinzelin - Böcker

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 volume provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research on classification models and the typology of the Romance languages. It combines language area surveys with a selection of relevant structural issues, conveying theoretical foundations and research methods as well as topics in language contact and the variational typology of Romance languages.The typological accounts consider a wide range of theoretical frameworks and approaches, relating key features of the Romance language family and its subgroups to the major tendencies found across the world’s languages. The authors of the 27 chapters are specialists in their respective fields offering substantive and balanced accounts of the wider research context.The combination of perspectives from comparative Romance linguistics and typological linguistics within the multidisciplinary coverage of issues in classification, structural typology, language contact and variation makes this Manual of Romance Linguistics an essential guide to current research trends in those fields. It is written for both scholars and students of Romance linguistics and everyone interested in comparative and typological linguistics.

Recent years have witnessed a (re)surfacing of interest on the interaction of morphology and syntax. For many grammatical phenomena, it is not easy to draw a dividing line between syntactic and morphological structure. This has led to the assumption that syntax is the module responsible not only for deriving syntactically complex phrases but also for deriving morphologically complex items, both in inflection and word formation. There are however also good reasons to think that syntax is not involved in all morphological processes and that there are consistent areas of morphology that are independent from syntactic processes. This book presents a collection of papers where phenomena from Romance languages and varieties are analysed under contrasting views on how morphology and syntax interact. All the contributions follow the aim to investigate what the analysed phenomena tell us about their structural make‐up and the grammatical processes involved.