This volume features fourteen papers by leading specialists on various aspects of historical morpho-syntax in the Ibero-Romance languages. In these papers, fine-grained analyses are developed to capture the richness of undiscussed or —often— previously unknown data. Comparative across the (Ibero-)Romance languages and diverse in terms of the approaches considered, ranging from cognitive-functionalist to generativist to variationist, they combine in this volume to showcase the merits of different, yet complementary, perspectives in understanding linguistic variation and language change. The gamut of phenomena scrutinised varies from morpho-phonological puzzles and word-formation to syntax and interface-related phenomena to, as a coda, methodological suggestions for future research in old Ibero-Romance; thus making it ideal reading for scholars and postgraduate students alike.

"This book examines how speakers of Ibero-Romance 'do things' with conversational units of language, paying particular attention to what they do with utterance-oriented elements such as vocatives, interjections, and particles; and to what they do with illocutionary complementisers, items attested cross-linguistically which look like, but do not behave like, subordinators. Taking the behaviour of conversation-oriented units of language as a window into the indexical nature of language, it argues that these items provide insight into how language-as-grammar builds the universe of discourse. By identifying the underlying unity in how different Ibero-Romance languages, alongside their Romance cousins and Latin ancestors, use grammar to refer-i.e. to connect our inner world to the one outside-, the book's empirical arguments are underpinned by the philosophical position that the architecture of grammar is also the architecture of thought. The book thus brings together the recent flurry of work seeking to incorporate aspects of the context of the utterance into the syntax, a line of enquiry broadly founded on empirical considerations, with the pursuit of explanatory adequacy via a so-called 'un-Cartesian' grammar of reference. In so doing, it formalises the intuition that language users do things not with words, but with grammar. The book brings new insight to the comparative morphosyntax of (Ibero-)Romance, particularly in its diatopic, diastrastic, and diamesic dimensions, and showcases the utility of careful descriptive work on this language family in advancing our empirical and conceptual understanding of the organisation of grammar"--

This dissertation is a historical examination of the distribution patterns of copulae, specifically ser, estar, and haber/haver, within the context of Ibero-Romance languages. Employing a multidimensional qualitative approach, the study conducts an in-depth analysis of their usage across various grammatical structures, encompassing sentences, phrases, and clauses. The theoretical framework primarily adopts a functional perspective centred around information structure and information status whilst also incorporating semantics, morphology, and syntax considerations. The investigation strategically focuses on the Castilian (Spanish), Portuguese, Catalan, and Aragonese languages. Chapter one is an inductive exploration of influential syntax, semantics, and pragmatics studies, establishing the theoretical foundations underpinning subsequent data analysis. Chapter two initiates with a brief discussion on existential and locative constructions in Latin, followed by a qualitative analysis of early Castilian and early Portuguese samples. Chapter three parallels the structure of chapter two by presenting data from early Catalan and early Aragonese. Throughout chapters two and three, relevant theoretical notions, including those previously introduced in chapter one, are integrated into the discussion. Finally, chapter four expands upon previous observations and proposals, offering avenues for further investigation and consolidating the principal conclusions derived from the preceding chapters. This research advances the field of Romance linguistics by conducting a re-evaluation of the taxonomy concerning locative and existential constructions within the framework of Ibero-Romance languages. Our argument asserts that despite their apparent differences in informational status, these constructions inherently share a common underlying informational structure and historical foundation. Moreover, we propose that the disappearance of the proform in Western Ibero-Romance catalysed a significant transformation in the usage of copulae for expressing existence and location in modern varieties. As a result, we identify three distinct categories: 1) General Presence, 2) Stage-level, and 3) Locative Presence, which present a novel model for the unification of presence expression.

This dissertation is a historical examination of the distribution patterns of copulae, specifically ser, estar, and haber/haver, within the context of Ibero-Romance languages. Employing a multidimensional qualitative approach, the study conducts an in-depth analysis of their usage across various grammatical structures, encompassing sentences, phrases, and clauses. The theoretical framework primarily adopts a functional perspective centred around information structure and information status whilst also incorporating semantics, morphology, and syntax considerations. The investigation strategically focuses on the Castilian (Spanish), Portuguese, Catalan, and Aragonese languages. Chapter one is an inductive exploration of influential syntax, semantics, and pragmatics studies, establishing the theoretical foundations underpinning subsequent data analysis. Chapter two initiates with a brief discussion on existential and locative constructions in Latin, followed by a qualitative analysis of early Castilian and early Portuguese samples. Chapter three parallels the structure of chapter two by presenting data from early Catalan and early Aragonese. Throughout chapters two and three, relevant theoretical notions, including those previously introduced in chapter one, are integrated into the discussion. Finally, chapter four expands upon previous observations and proposals, offering avenues for further investigation and consolidating the principal conclusions derived from the preceding chapters. This research advances the field of Romance linguistics by conducting a re-evaluation of the taxonomy concerning locative and existential constructions within the framework of Ibero-Romance languages. Our argument asserts that despite their apparent differences in informational status, these constructions inherently share a common underlying informational structure and historical foundation. Moreover, we propose that the disappearance of the proform in Western Ibero-Romance catalysed a significant transformation in the usage of copulae for expressing existence and location in modern varieties. As a result, we identify three distinct categories: 1) General Presence, 2) Stage-level, and 3) Locative Presence, which present a novel model for the unification of presence expression.

This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.

German and Dutch verb constructions show a rich array of syntactic phenomena that have so far been underexposed in the literature, despite the fact that they have proved to be a source of substantial problems in theoretical grammar. The cross-linguistic study of verb constructions and complementation has been dominated by views deriving from English or, for that matter, Latin. The German and Dutch complementation systems, however, feature several important properties that are missing from English but occur in many other languages. Well-known but only partially understood examples are clause-final verb clusters and the so-called Third Construction. In the present book, these and related phenomena are addressed by leading representatives of various schools of linguistic thought, in particular Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), Generative Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG), Performance Grammar, and Semantic Syntax. By bringing together the diverse theoretical analyses into one volume, the editors hope to stimulate comparative evaluations of the formalisms.

Every language includes layers of lexical and grammatical elements that entered it at different times in the more or less distant past. Hence, for periods preceding our earliest historical documentation, linguistic stratigraphy the systematic study of such layers may yield information about the prehistory of a given tradition of speaking in a variety of ways. For instance, irregular phonological reflexes may be evidence of the convergence of diverse dialects in the formation of a language, and layers of material from different source languages may form a record of changing cultural contacts in the past. In this volume are discussed past problems and current advances in the stratigraphy of Indo-European, African, Southeast Asian, Australian, Oceanic, Japanese, and Meso-American languages.