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Illocutionary complementisers and utterance syntax: how to do things with Ibero-Romance
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Description: This book asks what happens when ostensibly clause-external phenomena such as vocatives, interjections and particles exhibit grammatical behaviours; and, conversely, what happens when exclusively grammatical items (specifically, subordinating complementisers) come to be used as conversational signposts, losing their canonical function (i.e. subordination) along the way. Put differently, this book asks where the limits of syntactic structure lie, framed within a line of enquiry christened utterance syntax. It argues that these items provide insight into how language participates in world-building, and shows how speakers of Ibero-Romance languages ‘do things’ with grammar. By identifying the underlying unity in how different Ibero-Romance languages—alongside their Romance cousins and Latin ancestors—use grammar to build a bridge between their inner thoughts and the extensional world, the book aligns itself with the philosophical position that the mind is (necessarily) grammatical, insofar as the human ability to refer—i.e. to connect our inner world to the one outside—is mediated through the architecture of grammar. The book thus brings together the recent flurry of work seeking to incorporate aspects of the context of the utterance into the syntax, a line of enquiry broadly founded on empirical considerations, with the pursuit of explanatory adequacy via a so-called ‘unCartesian’ grammar of reference. In so doing, it brings new insight to the comparative morphosyntax of (Ibero-)Romance, particularly in its diatopic, diastrastic, and diamesic dimensions, and showcases the utility of careful descriptive work on this language family in advancing our empirical and conceptual understanding of the organisation of grammar. Keywords: Ibero-Romance; utterance syntax; complementisers; speech act syntax; comparative syntax; unCartesian linguistics; grammar of reference; grammar-discourse interface; left periphery; functional structure; verb movement