sintassi comparata dell ' accordo participiale ramanzo michele loporcaro sintassi comparata dell ' accordo participiale romanzo rosenberg & sellier , torino , 1998 isbn 88-7011 - 719 - 7 , 272 pages , lit . 65 . 000 address of the publisher : via andrea doria 14 , i-10123 torino grosenb @ tin . it ( credit cards accepted ) this book offers a comprehensive account of romance past participle ( pp ) agreement in verbal periphrastics , a much-debated topic in romance linguistics as well as in theoretical syntax . its main bulk consists of a systematic inventory of agreement systems throughout romance ( chs . 3 - 4 ) , which is unprecedented as to both empirical coverage and level of detail . beside the standard languages , dialects ( especially , but by no means exclusively , italo - romance ones ) are considered thoroughly , based in part on first-hand data . one of the basic points of this work is that no sensible account of pp agreement can be arrived at without in-depth consideration of dialect variation . more than sixty different systems are taken into account : for virtually all of them the discussion is not limited to selected syntactic constructions , but rather encompasses the whole set of verbal periphrastics ( both perfective and passive ) consisting of auxiliary + pp . among the agreement systems analyzed here several have not been previously described . the presentation of romance syntactic variation in chapters 3 and 4 is preceded by two introductory chapters and followed by three more theoretically oriented ones . ch . 1 deals with traditional accounts of pp agreement in romance linguistics and shows why a fresh look at the phenomena at issue is needed . ch . 2 introduces the aims and method of the present monograph , which is cast in the framework of relational grammar . after the assessment of dialect variation in pp agreement ( chs . 3 - 4 ) , ch . 5 shows that the analysis developed to account for it naturally projects onto diachrony . the steps through which pp agreement has evolved over time from latin to romance are shown to closely match the parametric options evidenced by synchronic geographic variation . ch . 6 compares the achievements of the present study with competing approaches to pp agreement developed within the principles and parameters approach ( or earlier versions of generative grammar ) . one of the main results of this comparison is the recognition of the fact that proposals put forward by generative grammarians - in spite of seeming differences , due to the theoretical machinery used - are very much in keeping with the descriptive tradition discussed ( and criticized ) in ch . 1 . ch . 6 also contains a discussion of pp agreement in the acquisition of italian as a first language . this domain of empirical data can be naturally unified with dialectal and diachronic variation under the approach developed here . ch . 7 finally synthesizes the results and elaborates on the internal articulation of the parametric conditions involved in pp agreement throughout romance varieties . the concluding table ( 29 ) displays in half a page all the syntactically relevant information that is both necessary and sufficient to exhaustively characterize pp agreement through space and time across romance . finally , a list of keywords for this book would have to include a number of related issues that must be dealt with in connection with pp agreement and which are in fact repeatedly touched upon in the seven chapters . among these , auxiliary selection and the contrast between agreement of pps and of adjectival predicates figure most prominently . other topics discussed range from the syntactic nature of clitics to the representation of reflexives , impersonal constructions , and existentials , to mention just a few . * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
