The Verbal Domain

This volume features cutting-edge research from leading authorities on the nature and structure of the verbal domain and the complexity of the Verb Phrase (VP). The book is divided into three parts, representing the areas in which contemporary debate on the verbal domain is most active. The first part focuses on the V head, and includes four chapters discussing the setup of verbal roots, their syntax, and their interaction with other functional heads such as Voice and v. Chapters in the second part discuss the need to postulate a Voice head in the structure of a clause, and whether Voice is different from v. Voice was originally intended as the head hosting the external argument in its specifier, as well as transitivity. This section explores its relationship with ＂syntactic＂ voice, i.e. the alternation between actives and passives. Part three is dedicated to event structure, inner aspect, and Aktionsart. It tackles issues such as the one-to-one relation between argument
structure and event structure, and whether there can be minimal structural units at the basis of the derivation of any sort of XP, including the VP.

Roberta D’Alessandro is Professor at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, and Chair of Syntax and Language Variation at the same university; she is also an external member of the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She specializes in syntactic microvariation in Italo-Romance, the syntax-PF interface, and syntactic change in contact. She is co-editor of the Open Generative Grammar series published by Language Science Press, and editor-in-chief of Brill’s Grammars and Sketches of the World’s Languages/Romance series.

Irene Franco is a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Romance Languages and Literature at Goethe Universitat Frankfurt, and is currently working on a project on quantification in Old Italian. Her main research interests are morphosyntactic diachronic change and variation, as well as comparative (Germanic-Romance) syntax. Her work has appeared in Isogloss, Rivista di Grammatica Generativa, and MIT Working Papers, and in edited volumes from OUP and John Benjamins.

Angel J. Gallego is Professor Agregat at the Departamento de Filologia Espanyola of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and a member of the Centre de Linguistica Teorica. His principal research interests and publications are in the areas of formal syntax and parametric variation (especially within Romance languages). He has published in journals such as Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Probus, and Theoretical Linguistics, and he is the author of Phase Theory (John Benjamins, 2010), and the editor of Phases. Developing the Framework (Mouton de Gruyter, 2012).