The authors bridge the gap between the semantic and syntactic properties of verb tense and aspect, and suggest a unified account of tense and aspect using Chomsky's Principles and Parameters Framework. They compare tense and aspect systems in Romance languages with Germanic ones.

This book examines the interactions between the morphosyntax and the semantic interpretation of tense and aspect in the Germanic and Romance languages. These languages diverge not only in their variety of tense and aspectual forms, but also in the distribution and interpretation of given forms. Adopting Noam Chomsky's minimalist framework, Alessandra Giorgi and Fabio Pianesi attempt to provide theoretical explanations for the observed patterns of form and meaning which link the morphosyntactic properties of languages in both universal and language-particular constraints on...

Alessandra Giorgi and Giuseppe Longobardi's important study of the argument structure of lexical projections, in particular of noun phrases, makes substantial advances in this relatively neglected area. Working within a Government and Binding framework, the authors present strong new arguments in favor of the existence of empty categories, and evidence for the correct understanding of word order parameters and of Chomsky's Projection Principle. In particular, they elaborate and discuss a number of tests intended to define under which lexical and syntactic conditions an empty prenominal...

Alessandra Giorgi and Giuseppe Longobardi's important study of the argument structure of lexical projections, in particular of noun phrases, makes substantial advances in this relatively neglected area. Working within a Government and Binding framework, the authors present strong new arguments in favor of the existence of empty categories, and evidence for the correct understanding of word order parameters and of Chomsky's Projection Principle. In particular, they elaborate and discuss a number of tests intended to define under which lexical and syntactic conditions an empty prenominal...

This book considers the semantic and syntactic nature of indexicals - linguistic expressions, as in I, you, this, that, yesterday, tomorrow, whose reference shifts from utterance to utterance.There is a long-standing controversy as to whether the semantic reference point is already present as syntactic material or whether it is introduced post-syntactically by semantic rules of interpretation. Alessandra Giorgi resolves this controversy through an empirically grounded exploration of temporal indexicality, arguing that the speaker's temporal location is specified in the syntactic structure....