The Rhaeto-Romance languages have been known as such to the linguistic community since the pioneering studies of Ascoli and Gartner over a century ago. There has never been a community of RR speakers based on a common history or polity and the various dialects are mutually unintelligible, but a unity, based on a number of common features, has been advanced. This book is the first general description of the Rhaeto-Romance languages to be written in English. It provides a critical examination of the phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax of the modern Rhaeto-Romance dialects within the broader perspective of Romance comparative linguistics.

Series Information:
Romance Linguistics

This book examines diachronic change and diversity in the morphosyntax of Romance varieties spoken in Italy. These varieties offer an especially fertile terrain for research into language change, because of both the richness of dialectal variation and the length of the period of textual attestation. While attention in the past has been focussed on the variation found in phonology, morphology, and vocabulary, this volume examines variation in morphosyntactic structures, covering a range of topics designed to exploit and explore the interaction of the geographical and historical dimensions of change. The opening chapter sets the scene for specialist and non-specialist readers alike, and establishes the conceptual and empirical background. There follow a series of case studies investigating the morphosyntax of verbal and (pro)nominal constructions and the organization of the clause. Data are drawn from the full range of Romance dialects spoken within the borders of modern Italy, ranging from Sicily and Sardinia through to Piedmont and Friuli. Some of the studies narrow the focus to a particular construction within a particular dialect; others broaden out to compare different patterns of evolution within different dialects. There is also diversity in the theoretical frameworks adopted by the various contributors. The book aims to take stock of both the current state of the field and the fruits of recent research, and to set out new results and new questions to help move forward the frontiers of that research. It will be a valuable resource not only for those specializing in the study of Italo-Romance varieties, but also for other Romanists and for those interested in exploring and understanding the mechanisms of morphosyntactic change more generally.

Mapping the Left Periphery, the fifth volume in "The Cartography of Syntactic Structures," is entirely devoted to the functional articulation of the so-called complementizer system, the highest part of sentence structure. The papers collected here identify, on the basis of substantial empirical evidence, new atoms of functional structure, which encode specific features that are typically expressed in the left periphery. The volume also submits the richly articulated CP structure to further crosslinguistic checking. The research presented here has led to the identification of new, important restrictions in the relative sequence of elements appearing in the left periphery.
With contributions from African languages, Chinese, Hungarian, Romance languages, and Italian dialects, Mapping the Left Periphery will be of interest to syntacticians working on comparative syntax, and more specifically on Romance grammar.