Grammatical Categories Variation in Romance Languages Manzini Savoia Hardback

Grammatical CategoriesVariation in Romance Languages\nAuthor(s): M. Rita Manzini, Leonardo M. Savoia\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521765190, 978-0521765190\nSynopsis\nGrammatical categories ([url] complementizer, negation, auxiliary, case) are some of the most important building blocks of syntax and morphology. Categorization therefore poses fundamental questions about grammatical structures and about the lexicon from which they are built. Adopting a 'lexicalist' stance, the authors argue that lexical items are not epiphenomena, but really represent the mapping of sound to meaning (and vice versa) that classical conceptions imply. Their rule-governed combination creates words, phrases and sentences - structured by the 'categories' that are the object of the present inquiry. They argue that the distinction between functional and non-functional categories, between content words and inflection.