Variation in PPub Date : 2020-02-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190931247.001.0001
Jacopo Garzonio, Silvia Rossi
{"title":"Variation in P","authors":"Jacopo Garzonio, Silvia Rossi","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190931247.001.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190931247.001.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past thirty years, the generative framework has greatly contributed to the study of both the internal and external syntax of spatial adpositions, with the intent—among many other things—of giving a unitary account of their heterogeneous nature and behavior. Once the Cinderellas of grammar, prepositions have been extensively investigated in earlier research. The major result of these studies was to show that prepositional phrases have a complex internal structure, and that the grammatical encoding of locative meaning has its own place in UG. This volume constitutes the implementation and the ideal continuation of the seminal proposals in the generative tradition. The essays collected in the first part of the volume not only test these proposals against new (micro-)comparative data, but also shed new light on the relation between spatial expressions and other semantic relations like possession. The second part of the volume looks beyond spatial PPs, exploring the role of Ps not only in non-spatial environments such as comitatives, but also in more general phenomena like verbal affixation, ellipsis, and complementation.","PeriodicalId":266243,"journal":{"name":"Variation in P","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114156583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Variation in PPub Date : 2020-02-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190931247.003.0009
A. Sciullo, M. Nicolis, Stanca Somesfalean
{"title":"Comitative P","authors":"A. Sciullo, M. Nicolis, Stanca Somesfalean","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190931247.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190931247.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter investigates the diachronic development of the Italian comitative preposition con “with” and its pronominal complement. The authors verify the predictions of the Directional Asymmetry Principle, an independently motivated developmental universal, in the diachrony of Italian and argue that symmetry breaking reduces the choice between a valued and an unvalued variant of a functional feature associated with a functional head, here comitative P. As predicted by the hypothesis, this choice, which was available in earlier stages of Italian, is gradually reduced in Modern Italian. The authors relate variation in language to variation in evolutionary developmental biology. Because language variation is biologically grounded, and variation is a central concept in biology, a deeper understanding of linguistic diversity can be foreseen, that is, an understanding that goes beyond explanatory adequacy.","PeriodicalId":266243,"journal":{"name":"Variation in P","volume":"43 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114136009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}