This book deals with split intransitivity in Italian, providing an in-depth investigation of the selection of the perfective operator, experiencer predicates, si-constructions, agreement, ne-cliticization, past-participle behaviour and word order. The author proposes that the manifestations of split intransitivity in Italian, whilst being variously constrained by well-formedness conditions on the encoding of information structure, primarily derive from the tension between accusative and active alignment. Drawing upon insights provided by Role and Reference Grammar, and relying on...

'Markedness' is a central notion in linguistic theory. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive survey of markedness relations across various grammatical categories, in a sample of closely-related speech varieties. It is based on a sample of over 100 dialects of Romani, collected and processed via the Romani Morpho-Syntax (RMS) Database - a comparative grammatical outline in electronic form, constructed by the authors between 2000-2004. Romani dialects provide an exciting sample of language change phenomena: they are oral languages, which have been separated and dispersed from some...

This book is the first cross-linguistic study of clausal negation based on an extensive and systematic language sample. It examines the ways in which negation is expressed in the languages of the world from a new perspective and proposes a typological classification based on the structural differences between affirmative and negative clauses, the main types being symmetric and asymmetric negation. Cross-linguistic frequencies and correlations are also examined. It is argued that functional motivations of the different types of negation can be found in the functional differences between...

This is the first book-length functional-typologically inspired crosslinguistic study of comitatives and related categories such as the instrumental. On the basis of data drawn from 400 languages world-wide (covering all major phyla and areas), the authors test and revise a variety of general linguistic hypotheses about the grammar and cognitive foundations of comitatives. General linguists with an interest in case, functional typologists, grammaticalisation researchers and experts of markedness issues will value this book as an important contribution to their respective fields of interest.

Cross-linguistic studies on relative constructions in European languages are often centred on standard varieties as described in reference grammars. This volume breaks with the tradition in that it investigates relative constructions in non-standard varieties from a multidisciplinary perspective and addresses a crucial question: what does Europe's typological panorama actually look like?

This monograph is intended as a reference book on Detachment Constructions (DECs) in the Information Structuring of oral and spoken languages. Focusing on DECs in a textual perspective, the book is an innovative contribution to the knowledge of oral and spoken languages, some of them widespread (Indo-European), others less taught (Finno-Ugric).

Complementizers may be defined as conjunctions that have the function of identifying clauses as complements. In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that they have additional functions. Some of these functions are semantic in the sense that they represent conventional contributions to the meanings of the complements. The present book puts a focus to these semantic complementizer functions.