Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book provides the first ever large-scale comparative treatment of there sentences (there copula NP), in over 100 Italo-Romance and Sardinian dialects spoken in Italy. It comprises detailed discussions of focus structure, predication and argument realization, definiteness effects, and the linking between semantics and syntax in there sentences, advancing novel proposals in each case. The authors test influential hypotheses on existential constructions against first-hand dialect evidence; they argue that existential and locative there sentences differ in focus structure and semantics, even though they display similar morphosyntactic features. The volume also provides the historical background of Romance there sentences, relying on the findings of the analysis of a substantial corpus of early Italo-Romance vernacular texts. Couched in the framework of Role and Reference Grammar, the discussion fully engages with the vast available literature on existentials and locatives, thus being of interest to linguists of any theoretical persuasion. Through the investigation of existentials and locatives, the volume addresses key issues in linguistic theory, while offering an invaluable source of data for research on the Romance languages and a model in fieldwork-based microvariational analysis.

Delia Bentley holds an MA and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Manchester, where she is currently Professor of Romance Linguistics. Her main research interests are the interfaces between discourse, semantics, and syntax; the history of Italian; and Italian and Romance linguistics and dialectology. From 2010 to 2014 she was Principal Investigator on a major AHRC-funded research project entitled Existential Constructions: An Investigation into the Italo-Romance Dialects, on which this book is based. Her publications include Split Intransitivity in Italian (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006) and, co-edited with J.C. Smith, Historical Linguistics 1995. Volume 1: General Issues and non-Germanic Languages. Selected papers from the 12th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (Benjamins, 2000). Francesco Maria Ciconte is Assistant Professor of Italian Linguistics at the University of Puerto Rico. His PhD, from the University of Manchester in 2010, investigates the existential constructions of the early Italo-Romance varieties; the results presented in his thesis were published in an article that was awarded the 6th Robins Prize of the Philological Society. From 2011 to 2013 he worked as a Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project Existential Constructions: An Investigation into the Italo-Romance Dialects. Silvio Cruschina is Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Vienna. His PhD (Cambridge, 2009) was on the interaction between syntax and pragmatics, and on the correspondences between word order alternations and interpretive effects in Romance, within a cartographic approach to syntactic structures. From 2011 to 2013 he was a Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project Existential Constructions: An Investigation into the Italo-Romance Dialects. His publications include Discourse-Related Features and Functional Projections (OUP, 2012), and, co-edited with Martin Maiden and J. C. Smith, The Boundaries of Pure Morphology: Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives (OUP, 2013).