The Bantu-Romance Connection: A Comparative Investigation of Verbal Agreement, DPs, and Information Structure

by De Cat, Cecile; Demuth, Katherine

• ISBN13: 9789027255143
• ISBN10: 9027255148
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-09-15
• Publisher: John Benjamins Pub Co

Summary

This landmark volume is the first work specifically designed to explore the extent to which striking surface morpho-syntactic similarities between Bantu and Romance languages actually represent similar syntactic structures. In particular, it explores the timely and much debated issues of verbal morphology and agreement, the structure of DPs, and word order/information structure, with the goal of providing a better understanding of the structure of the different languages investigated, and the implications this holds for syntactic theory more generally. All of the papers draw on data from both Bantu and Romance languages, providing a framework for much-needed further comparative research on the nature of linguistic structure, its diversity and constraints, and the implications this has for learnability/acquisition. The volume also provides an important precedent for incorporating insights from Bantu linguistic structure into mainstream of syntax research.

Table of Contents

Concepts of structural underspecification in Bantu and Romance	p. 3
On different types of clitic clusters	p. 41
Pronominal object markers in Bantu and Romance	p. 83
The Bantu-Romance connection in verb movement and verbal inflectional morphology	p. 111
DP in Bantu and Romance	p. 131
On the interpretability of [phi]-features	p. 167
Agreement and concord in nominal expressions	p. 201
A unified syntactic analysis of Italian and Luganda nouns	p. 239
The fine structure of the topic field	p. 261
Focus at the interface : evidence from Romance and Bantu	p. 293
Agreement in thetic VS sentences in Bantu and Romance	p. 323
Index of languages	p. 351
General index	p. 353
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