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Description:
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The study of Romance languages can tell us a great deal about sentence
structure and its variation in general. Focusing on the dialects of Italy –
including the islands of Sardinia and Sicily – the authors explore three
thematic areas: the nominal domain, the verbal domain and the left
periphery of the clause. The book gives fresh attention to the dialects,
arguing that they offer an unprecedented degree of variation (not found,
for example, in Germanic languages). Analysing a host of new data, the
authors show how the dialects can be used as a test-bed for investigating
and challenging received ideas about language structure and change.
Coherent and wide-ranging, this is a vital resource for those working in
syntactic theory, historical linguistics, and Romance languages.
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