TY  - BOOK
AU  - Bentley, Delia
AU  - Ciconte, Francesco Maria
AU  - Cruschina, Silvio
AB  - This volume provides the first ever large-scale comparative treatment of there sentences (there copula NP), reporting the results of a survey of Italo-Romance and Sardinian dialects of Italy. The volume comprises detailed discussions of focus structure, predication and argument realization, the definiteness effects, and the linking from semantics to syntax in there sentences, advancing novel proposals in each case. The testing of influential hypotheses on existential constructions against first-hand dialect evidence leads the book to argue that existential and locative there sentences differ in focus structure and semantics, although their not being predicate focus constructions and the non-canonicality of the predicate—which is typically referential—is reflected in their shared morphosyntactic features. The hypothesis that the pivot is the predicate of the existential construction is adopted in the analysis, although a distinction is drawn between referential and non-referential pivots, which explains variation in pivot behaviour in morphosyntax. 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.
DO  - 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198745266.001.0001
ID  - OAPEN ID: 606709
ID  - OAPEN ID: OCN: 931531096
KW  - sardinian
KW  - there-sentences
KW  - existential
KW  - role and reference grammar
KW  - locative
KW  - italo-romance
KW  - microvariation
KW  - dialects
KW  - romance
KW  - Clitic
KW  - Copula (linguistics)
KW  - Noun phrase
KW  - Predicate (grammar)
KW  - Pro-form
L1  - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/568710ea-fe77-4007-ba69-ae396b684220/606709.pdf
LA  - English
LK  - http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/32739
PB  - Oxford University Press
PP  - Oxford, UK
PY  - 2015
SN  - 9780198745266
TI  - Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italynull
ER  - 
