Unusual developments in Romance grammar

Timetable

Module aim (aims)

(1) transfer of information concerning the origin and the outcomes of selected grammatical changes in Romance

(2) sharpening students’ observation skills and their awareness of the driving forces of grammatical evolution

(3) transfer of knowledge concerning the ultimate effects of grammatical change and developing student’s analytic skills required to tackle their diversity

(4) providing a basis of an inquisitive approach to the history of Romance grammar

(5) spurring students on to conduct empirical tests in this domain, as well as developing skills that might prove helpful for an individual diachronic analysis

Pre-requisites in terms of knowledge, skills and social competences (where relevant)

General awareness of language problems and knowledge of descriptive grammar of another language (e.g. French) 

Syllabus

Week 1: Grammatical change from below (internally-motivated) vs. from above (internally-motivated)

Week 2: Generative vs functionalist approaches to language change

Week 3: Generative vs functionalist approaches to language change - follow up

Week 4: Restructuring in multi-verb sequences in French: cl-V_fin-V_inf > V_fin-cl-V_inf

Week 5: Romance descendants of the Latin homo homini reciprocal sequence

Week 6: Variable preverbal clitics in the history of European Portuguese

Week 7: Negative small clauses in Old Gascon

Week 8: Variable negative concord in Central Occitan and Montréal French

Week 9: Abruzzese rebirth of the [+human] indefinite to replace the <homo impersonal pronoun

Week 10: Divergent developments of the <aliquis (unus) indefinite in Portuguese and Spanish

Week 11: Spanish and Catalan mesoclisis - how were they different from their Portuguese counterpart?

Week 12: Appositive relative clauses in modern European Portuguese - cumbersome paths

Week 13: Non-canonical verbal paradigms: multiple forms filling a single cell in Italian verbal inflection

Week 14: How useful is case inflection? Old French molt / beaucoup and quant / combien

Week 15: Revision

Reading list

mandatory

Andersen, H. 2008. Grammaticalization in a speaker-oriented theory of change. In: Th. Eythórsson (ed.), Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory: The Rosendal Papers . Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 11–40.

Burnett, H. – M. Tremblay – H. Blondeau. 2015. The Variable Gram­mar of Negative Concord in Montréal French. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (21/2), 11-20.

Bybee, J. –  R. Torres Cacoullos. 2008. Phonological and Grammatical Variation in Exemplar Models. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 1(2), 399–413.

Gianollo, Ch. 2020. Evolution of Negative Dependencies. In: Déprez, V. – T. Espinal (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Negation. Oxford: Oxford Uni­veristy Press, 549-561.

Kroch, A. 2001. Syntactic Change. In: Baltin, M – Ch. Collins (eds.), The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory. Malden, Mass./Oxford: Blackwell, 699–729.

Larrivée, P. 2017. Negation and polarity. In: Dufter A. – E. Stark (eds.), Manual of Romance morphosyntax and syntax. Berlin: De Gruyter, 449–471.

Martins, Ana Maria. 2014. Syntactic change in Portuguese and Spanish. Divergent and parallel patterns of linguistic splitting. In: Amaral P. –  A.M. Carvalho (eds.), Portuguese-Spanish interfaces: Diachrony, synchrony and contact. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 35–64.

Ramat, Anna Giacalone, 2005. Persistence and renewal in the relative pronoun para­digm : The case of Italian. Folia Linguistica Historica 26(1-2), 115-138.

Roberts, I. 2007. Diachronic Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thornton, A. 2011. Overabundance (Multiple Forms Realizing the Same Cell): A Non-Canonical Phenomenon in Italian Verb Morphology. In: Maiden M. – J.-Ch. Smith – M. Goldbach – M.-O. Hinzelin (eds.), Morphological Autonomy. Perspectives From Romance Inflectional Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 358–381.

optional

Batllori, M – A. Rost. 2017. Orden de palabras y posición de los clíticos pronominales en las construcciones imperativas de la lenguas románicas medievales. Estudos Linguísticos e Literários 58, 155-185.

D'Alessandro, R. 2014. Death and contact-induced rebirth of impersonal pronouns. A case study. Probus, 26(2), 249-274.

Hirschbühler, P. – M. Labelle. 2000. Evolving Tober-Mussafia effects in the placement of French clitics. In: Dworkin S. – D. Wanner (eds.), New Approaches to Old Problems. Issues in Romance Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 165–182.

Luís, A. R., – G. Kaiser. 2016. Clitic Pronouns: Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax. In Wetzels W. L. –  S. Menuzzi –  J. Costa (eds.), The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 210–233.

Martins, A. M. 2016. A colocação dos pronomes clíticos em sincronia e diacronia. In: Martins A. M. – E. Carrilho (eds.), Manual de Linguística Portuguesa. Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 410–430.

Seiler, G. 2004. On three types of dialect variation and their implications for linguistic theory. Evidence from verb clusters in Swiss German dialects. In: Kortmann B. (Ed.), Dialectology meets Typology. Dialect Grammar from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 367–399.

Zwicky, A. M. – G. Pullum, G. 1983. Cliticization vs. Inflection. English n’t. Language 59(3), 502–513.