Subject: new books in syntax & morphology ( 3 titles )

negation and clausal structure : a comparative study of romance languages raffaella zanuttini , georgetown university ( oxford studies in comparative syntax ) " zanuttini 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 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 . september 1997 216 pp . ; 18 charts 0-19 - 508055 - 6 paper $ 39 . 95 oxford university press clause structure and word order in hebrew and arabic : an essay in comparative semitic syntax ur shlonsky , university of geneva ( oxford studies in comparative syntax ) shlonsky uses chomsky 's government and binding approach to examine clausal architecture and verb movement in hebrew and several varieties of arabic . he establishes a syntactic analysis of hebrew and then extends that analysis to certain aspects of arabic clausal syntax . through this comparative lens of hebrew , shlonsky hopes to resolve a number of problems in arabic syntax . his results generate some novel and important conclusions concerning the patterns of negations , verb movement , the nature of participles , and the gamut of positions available to clausal subjects in both languages . june 1997 304 pp . 0-19 - 510867 - 1 paper $ 45 . 00 0-19 - 510866 - 3 cloth $ 75 . 00 oxford university press tense and aspect : from semantics to morphosyntax alessandra giorgi , university of bergamo , italy , and fabio pianesi , institute for technology and scientific research ( irst ) , trento , italy ( oxford studies in comparative syntax ) this book examines the interactions between the morphosyntax and the semantic interpretation of tense and aspect in the germanic and romance languages . these languages diverge not only in their variety of tense and aspectual forms , but also in the distribution and interpretation of given forms . adopting noam chomsky 's minimalist framework , alessandra giorgi and fabio pianesi attempt to provide theoretical explanations for the observed patterns of form and meaning which link the morphosyntactic properties of languages in both universal and language-particular constraints on interpretation . december 1997 336 pp . 0-19 - 509193 - 0 paper $ 35 . 00 0-19 - 509192 - 2 cloth $ 85 . 00 oxford university press for more information about linguistics titles from oxford university press : e-mail : linguistics @ oup-usa . org or visit the oxford university press usa web site : http : / / www . oup-usa . org oxford university press usa
