Nigel Vincent

The University of Manchester · Linguistics & English Language

This chapter offers a brief overview of how Martin Maiden’s theoretical interests and empirical foci have developed over the course of his career, starting with his early work on metaphony and moving through to his central engagement with the concept of the morphome. We consider the way his explorations of the structure and history of Romance infle...

This volume brings together contributions from leading specialists in syntax and morphology to explore the complex relation between periphrasis and inflexion from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. The chapters draw on data from across the Romance language family, including standard and regional varieties and dialects. The relation betwe...

In the literature on semantic and categorial change French chez and Mainland Scandinavian hos are often cited together as parallel examples of locative prepositions deriving from nouns referring to the concept ‘house’. In this paper we compare in detail the philological records and the more recent development of the two items as well as that of the...

The way words can be passed from language to language is a topic that has aroused both scholarly and popular interest for centuries. In this chapter we examine two case-histories involving items that move from one language to another and then back again several centuries later. We track the etymological trails and consider the implications of such...

This book offers a wide-ranging array of case studies on variation and change in Gallo-Romance grammar. Both standard and non-standard Gallo-Romance data have the potential to be of enormous value to studies of morphosyntactic variation and change, yet, as the volume demonstrates, non-standard and comparative Gallo-Romance data has often been lacki...

This paper explores the ways in which a single Latin construction, the accusative and infinitive (AcI), has been replaced in different Romance languages. The parallel correspondence architecture of LFG provides an account which is more illuminating and theoretically more economical than that available to approaches which mediate all aspects of gram...

Introducing a collection of papers on suppletion looked at from a diachronic angle, this paper surveys questions that have been asked (or should be) and answers that have been considered, in this issue and elsewhere, about how, why, where, and when suppletion originates, with particular lexical items and morphological categories; what happens to su...

Categories, Constructions, and Change in English Syntax - edited by Nuria Yáñez-Bouza October 2019

The relatedness of non-finite constructions and evidentiality has been observed in various European languages. Passive matrix verbs plus infinitive in English, the corresponding though less productive pattern in Dutch, reportive passives in Danish, and evidential participial constructions in Lithuanian have all received attention in the literature....

The relatedness of non-finite constructions and evidentiality has been observed in various European languages. Passive matrix verbs plus infinitive in English, the corresponding though less productive pattern in Dutch, reportive passives in Danish, and evidential participial constructions in Lithuanian have all received attention in the literature....

In this chapter we consider the structure of nominal expressions (NEs) in Romance. We examine in turn the sub-systems of articles, quantifiers, possessives and demonstratives and investigate the way they combine and interact. The perspective is for the most part synchronic and focuses on the modern languages with occasional reference being made to...

IntroductionLexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) is frequently referred to as a theory but, as Bresnan, Asudeh, Toivonen and Wechsler (2015: 39) put it: ‘the formal model of LFG is not a syntactic theory in the linguistic sense. Rather, it is an architecture for syntactic theory. Within this architecture, there is a wide range of possible syntactic the...

Grammaticalization as standardly conceived is a change whereby an item develops from a lexical to a grammatical or functional meaning, or from being less to more grammatical. In this article we show that this can only be part of the story; for a full account we need to understand the syntactic structures into which grammaticalizing elements fit and...

Italy constitutes a fertile terrain for research into language change, both because of the richness of the dialectal variation and because of the length of the period of textual attestation. Such diversity has long been the staple of research in general and Romance historical phonology, morphology, and lexis, but much less attention has been devote...

Italy constitutes a fertile terrain for research into language change, both because of the richness of the dialectal variation and because of the length of the period of textual attestation. Such diversity has long been the staple of research in general and Romance historical phonology, morphology, and lexis, but much less attention has been devote...

This article seeks in the first instance to identify and exemplify the various senses in which the term "conative" has been used in the descriptive and theoretical literature. It then goes on to elucidate, where possible, the connections between these uses, and to examine the history of the term. The study concludes with some reflections on the sta...

This chapter considers the place of 'pure' morphology in the analysis of periphrastic members of paradigms, making particular reference to the Latin participles in -urus, -tus, and -ns and their subsequent history in Romance. We conclude that in most cases, even at late historical stages, a compositional analysis is available if the right theoretic...

This paper provides a brief report of the workshop convened and chaired at LFG09 by the author under the title 'Blurring Component Boundaries: Levels of analysis or growth of information?'. The purpose of the workshop was to introduce the LFG community to the system developed by Ruth Kempson and a number of co-workers under the name Dynamic Syntax...

Within X-bar theory prepositions are standardly taken to constitute one of the core lexical categories along with verbs nouns, and adjectives definable by the features [+/- V, +/- N]. Synchronically, however they share properties with both lexical and functional categories, while diachronically they are usually the outcome of processes of grammatic...

The relation between changes in (inflectional) morphology and consequences thereof in the syntax has been a perennial issue in historical linguistics. The relation between the loss of in-flections and the fixing word order on the one hand, and widely attested instances of change such that content words grammaticalise to morphological elements on th...

How to model the relation between inflection and syntax has been a perennial topic of debate. Broadly speaking, there have been two general classes of solution. The first assimilates morphology to syntax, drawing on the descriptive categories and constructs appropriate to the latter — zeros/empty categories, movement rules, X-bar projections, etc —...

ChapallazMarguerite, The pronunciation of Italian: a practical introduction. (Pp. xv + 244. Bell & Hyman, London, 1979.) CanepariLuciano, Italiano standard e pronunce regionali. (Pp. 190. 2 cassettes. CLEUP, Padua, 1980.) - Volume 12 Issue 1 - Nigel Vincent

MartinetAndré & WalterHenriette, Dictionnaire de la prononciation française dans son usage réel. Paris: France-Expansion, 1973. Pp. 932. WalterHenriette, La dynamique des phonèmes dans le lexique français contemporain. Paris: France-Expansion, 1976. Pp. 481. - Volume 13 Issue 2 - Nigel Vincent

The first thesis concerning phonological representations enunciated by Anderson and Jones (henceforth A&J)(1974: 8) is ‘that phonological representations are more highly structured than the standard theory would claim’, where the level of structure with which they are particularly concerned is that of bracketing into syllables. The principles in te...

AnttilaRaimo, An introduction to historical and comparative linguistics. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972. Pp. xi + 438. - Volume 11 Issue 2 - Nigel Vincent

StockwellRobert P. & MacaulayRonald K. S. (eds), Linguistic change and generative theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972. Pp. xvii + 301. - Volume 10 Issue 1 - Nigel Vincent

Can an adjective have an object? Traditional grammar says no (Huddleston & Pullum 2001: 527), and in similar vein Principles & Parameters Case Theory relies on the inability of nouns and adjectives to assign objective case to explain the distribution of English of (Chomsky 1981: 50-1). Compare too the theory of categories proposed by Jackendoff (19...

Synchronically suppletion represents an extreme of morphophonemic non-productivity (Melcuk 1994: 342). Stem alternants, affixes or even whole grammatical words show no rule-governed connections and must simply be lexically listed. Diachronically such a state of affairs may be arrived at in two different ways: (i) through sound changes or analogies...

In some theoretical approaches, grammatical relations are assumed to be defined structurally, so that the crucial clue to the grammatical relation of an element is its position in the tree. Lexical Functional Grammar, in contrast, does not assume a universal one-to-one mapping between structural position and grammatical relation — though grammatica...