A Handbook of Slavic Clitics


Book Description

Clitics are grammatical elements that are treated as independent words in syntax but form a phonological unit with the word that precedes or follows it. This volume brings together the facts about clitics in the Slavic languages, where they have become a focal points of recent research. The authors draw relevant generalizations across the Slavic languages and highlight the importance of these phenomena for linguistic theory.




Serbian Clitics


Book Description

Clitics, those “funny little words” like English contracted future tense and pluperfect tense/conditional mood markers (’ll and ’d) or French pronominal objects (le ‘him’, la ‘her’, lui ‘to him/her’, etc.), have long been a source of fascination for linguists. Lacking an inherent stress that characterizes “well-behaved” words, clitics prosodically depend on a stressed sentence element, called their host, which makes them look and, in some contexts, behave like affixes (parts of words). Some clitics, Serbian second-position clitics being the case in point, also obey stringent linear ordering rules, different from those holding for fully-fledged sentence elements. This monograph offers a comprehensive formalized description of second-position clitics in standard Serbian from the viewpoint of the Meaning-Text theory, an approach relying on syntactic dependencies and oriented towards speech production, which sets it apart from most contemporary frameworks. It will be of interest for general linguists, Slavists, and advanced learners of Serbian.




The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax


Book Description

Its twenty-one commissioned chapters serve two functions: they provide a general and theoretical introduction to comparative syntax, its methodology, and its relation to other domains of linguistic inquiry; and they also provide a systematic selection of the best comparative work being done today on those language groups and families where substantial progress has been achieved." "This volume will be an essential resource for scholars and students in formal linguistics."--Jacket.




Old Church Slavonic Grammar


Book Description

No detailed description available for "Old Church Slavonic Grammar".




Challenging Clitics


Book Description

Challenging Clitics deals with multiple sides of cliticisation from different theoretical frameworks and with data from a number of different languages. Unlike many other books on clitics where clitics are considered from a mere syntactical point of view, this book also discusses the acquisition of clitics; the role of the PF in cliticisation; the morphophonological aspects of cliticisation; and historical change – to name but a few of the approaches presented. As such this collection presents cutting edge theoretical considerations as well as new data on clitics. Taken together, the contributions in this volume not only provide insight into the extremely complex nature of clitics, but also into derivations and structures in language that go beyond the study of clitics themselves.




Clitic Phenomena in European Languages


Book Description

This book is concerned with a number of central issues in the theory of clitics, a topic that has become much debated in recent years. Mainly written within a recent generative framework, its contrastive approach discusses these issues against the background of a number of European languages, among which the Balkan Slavic languages figure prominently. The question as to whether clitics are to be located in the syntax or in the phonology or in both is addressed in articles by Boškovič, Progovac and Franks, who also provides a thorough introductory essay to the volume. There are detailed studies on clitic behavior in Greek relative clauses (Alexiadou and Anagnostopolou), Bulgarian and English DPs (Dimitrova-Vulchanova), the various Romance languages (Franco), Slovene (Golden and Milojevič Sheppard), Albanian and Greek (Kallulli) and Macedonian (Tomič). Finally, the book contains a discourse-related description of clitic doubling in Balkan Slavic languages (Schick). The book should be of interest to any scholar, theoretical or descriptive, whose research touches upon the central phenomenon of cliticisation.




Clitic and Affix Combinations


Book Description

In this volume, the relationship between clitics and affixes and their combinatorial properties has led to a serious discussion of the interface between syntax, morphology, semantics, and phonology that draws on a variety of theoretical perspectives (e.g., HPSG , Optimality Theory, Minimalism). Clitic/affix phenomena provide a rich range of data, not only for the identification of an affix vs. clitic, but also for the best way to explain ordering constraints, some of which are contradictory. A range of languages are considered, including Romance and Slavic languages, as well as Turkish, Greek, Icelandic, Korean, and Passamaquoddy. Moreover, several articles consider dialectal microparameterization, notably in Spanish, French, and Occitan. This volume thus reflects current debate on issues such as clitic ordering constraints, the relationship of clitics to inalienable possession and the left periphery, and templatic approaches to affixes vs. clitics while examining a broad range of languages.




Clitics in Phonology, Morphology and Syntax


Book Description

This book contains fourteen articles that reflect current ideas on the phonology, morphology, and syntax of clitics. It covers the forms and functions of clitics in various typologically diverse languages and presents data from, e.g. European Portuguese, Macedonian, and Yoruba. It extensively deals with the prosodic structure of clitics, their morphological status, clitic placement, and clitic doubling. The form and behavior of clitics with respect to tonal phenomena and in verse are discussed in two articles (Akinlabi & Liberman, Reindl & Franks). Other articles address the prosodic representation of clitics in Irish (Green), the differences in the acquisition of clitics and strong pronouns in Catalan (Escobar & Gavarro), the similarities between clitics and affixes or words in Romance and Bantu languages (Cocchi, Crysmann, Monachesi, Ortman & Popescu), the semantics of clitics in the Greek DP and in Spanish doubling (Alexiadou & Stavrou, Uriagereka), and complex problems concerning verbal clitics in Romanian and Balkan languages (Legendre, Spencer, Tomic).




Developments in the Acquisition of Clitics


Book Description

The present volume presents new theoretical and empirical findings on the acquisition and development of clitics in and across different languages. It features ten chapters that largely emerged from the CYCL1A Workshop on the Acquisition of Clitics held in Nicosia, Cyprus, in May 2012. These chapters explore issues pertaining to the first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition of clitic pronouns. There is an emphasis on Greek, with the first four chapters discussing mono- and bilingual acquisition of clitics in Cypriot Greek and the next two chapters on Standard Modern Greek. Three contributions focus on Albanian, Serbo-Croatian, and European Portuguese, respectively. The last chapter of this volume is an invited contribution by Ken Wexler on the Unique Checking Constraint as an explanation of clitic omission in normal and SLI development. This volume will constitute a valuable reference guide for current work on the acquisition of clitic pronouns.




Clitic Doubling in the Balkan Languages


Book Description

This volume is a collection of articles on clitic doubling, a phenomenon that has preoccupied generative linguists since the 1980s, when its theoretical importance was noted. Clitic doubling is prevalent in the Balkan languages. However, generative studies initially dealt with its properties in Romance languages, with the Balkan patterns coming increasingly into focus. Since the mid-nineties, these patterns presented a variety of challenges to the generalisations reached on the basis of Romance, while also raising new research questions. The volume deals among other things with the following aspects of the phenomenon: its extension within and outside the Balkan Sprachbund and the observed variation; its realizational possibilities and the constraints on the status of the doubled DP (direct or indirect object, pronominal or non-pronominal); its semantics (definite, specific, presupposed, neither) and pragmatics (topic or not, D-linked or not); its temporal and locational genesis; the relationship between the clitic and its associate.