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The concept of ‘negative concord’ refers to the seemingly multiple exponence of semantically single negation as in You ain’t seen nothing yet. This book takes stock of what has been achieved since the notion was introduced in 1922 by Otto Jespersen and sets the agenda for future research, with an eye towards increased cross-fertilization between theoretical perspectives and methodological tools. Major issues include (i) How can formal and typological approaches complement each other in uncovering and accounting for cross-linguistic variation? (ii) How can corpus work steer theoretical analyses? (iii) What is the contribution of diachronic research to the theoretical debates?
First published in 1999. Small businesses now constitute the most dynamic element of growth in the emerging markets of the Central and Eastern European region. This book argues that the small and medium sized enterprise (SME) sector has contributed more to the growth of these countries in transition than have privatized state enterprises and the public sector. In 1989 most of the countries of Eastern and Central Europe were still under an economic system dominated by state-owned enterprises. Since then a process of liberalization has been unleashed to promote free market policies. This has involved programs of privatization and restructuring of public enterprises, as well as the promotion of...
This volume brings together a number of researchers working on generative syntax and semantics, language acquisition and phonology to explore various theoretical frameworks, ranging from generative grammar and formal semantics to more descriptive approaches. The contributions gathered here investigate various aspects in the syntax, semantics, phonology and acquisition of Romanian in comparison with other (mainly Romance) languages. The book will be of interest to linguists who are keen on keeping up with the latest advances in the field of Romance studies, as well as those whose research bears on languages such as Hungarian, German, and Maltese, among others.
This book examines the Romanian mihi est construction (Mi-e foame/frică, me.dat = is hunger/fear ‘I am hungry/ afraid’). While it disappeared from all other Romance languages to be replaced with a habeo structure, the mihi est pattern is in Romanian the most common way of expressing psychological or physiological states. By means of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, the book investigates the status of the core arguments of the mihi est structure, i.e. the dative experiencer and the nominative state noun, as well as its evolution throughout the centuries. The data analysis reveals that the dative experiencer syntactically behaves like nominative subjects, whereas the state noun shows predicate behavior. As for the evolution of the mihi est structure, the analysis shows a certain tendency toward innovation, since in present-day Romanian it can coerce nouns coming from other semantic fields into the construction’s psychological or physiological interpretation. Could this be another unique trait of Romanian, which causes it to seemingly go against the tendency of most Romance languages toward canonical marking of core arguments?
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium, DAARC 2011, held in Faro, Portugal, in October 2011. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computational resolution methodology and systems; language analysis and representation; and human processing and performance.
This paper presents a semantico-syntactic description of the noun phrase from a new perspective, that of the generative lexicon. The analysis proposed by the author highlights the advantages that this theory offers for refining the description of the noun phrase. The study demonstrates the way in which certain semantic structures within the head-noun or the dependents (as identified by the generative lexicon) explain certain phrase formations or constrain their scope. From this point of view, the paper delves into the way in which the semantics of the words within a noun phrase influence the syntax of the whole noun phrase. The result is a bold, well-defined and highly useful proposal for a comprehensive grammar of the noun phrase from a lexicalist-generativist perspective that could be extended to other phrases or syntactic configurations. The book will be a useful tool for linguists, researchers, teachers and students in philology who are interested in semantics. The usefulness of this field of investigation resides in the fact that it does not apply to a single language, but it can be applied to all existing languages.
Since its inception philosophical thought has been fixated by death. Death, as much as life, has been the unrelenting driving force behind some of history’s greatest thinkers. Yet, for Emil Cioran, a Romanian-French philosopher, even philosophy cannot attempt to understand nor contain the inevitable unknown. Considered to be an anti-philosopher, Cioran approached and reflected on the human experience with a despairing pessimism. His works are characterised by a brooding, fatalistic temperament that reveals and defines itself in his irony, black humour and inimitable style. Although Cioran’s later works have received much scholarly recognition, little attention has been paid to the texts ...
The book provides a comprehensive description and in-depth analysis of the major word order changes that took place in the clausal and the nominal domains in the transition from old to modern Romanian. The data are set in a comparative Romance perspective, with attention also paid to the impact of the Balkan Sprachbund and the influence of Old Church Slavonic. Alexandru Nicolae's analysis is based on a qualitative and quantitative examination of a large number of phenomena in a representative corpus of old Romanian texts. Some of these phenomena, such as scrambling, interpolation, discontinuous constituents, and variation in the position and linearization of DP-internal adjectival modifiers,...