Negation and Clausal Structure: A Comparative Study of Romance Languages (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax) - Hardcover

Zanuttini, Raffaella

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195080548 ISBN 13: 9780195080544

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Every human language has some syntactic means of distinguishing a negative from a non-negative sentence; in other words, every speaker's syntactic competence provides a means to express sentential negation. This ability, however, may be expressed in different ways, as shown by the fact that individual languages employ different syntactic strategies for the expression of the same semantic function of negating a sentence.

Zanuttini's goal here is to characterize the range of such variation by comparing the different syntactic means for expressing sentential negation exhibited by the members of one language family--the Romance languages--and by reducing the differences we witness to a constrained set of choices available to the particular grammars of these languages. This sort of analysis is a first step towards the ultimate goal of determining and understanding what limits there are on the syntactic options that universal grammar imposes on the expression of sentential negation.

About this title

About the Author

Raffaella Zanuttini is at Georgetown University.

Review

"Zunuttini is absolutely at the cutting edge of research both in Romance languages and in theoretical syntax....A significant contribution to the field."--Donna Jo Napoli, Swarthmore College

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195080548
• ISBN 13: 9780195080544
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 216