Mcarme - Picallo

Autonomous University of Barcelona | UAB · Centre de Lingüística Teòrica

This paper intends to offer a general overview of the ideas that have been proposed in generative grammar in the last decade. The theoretical framework that supports them is summarized (the Principles and Parameters theory) and we explain some conceptual changes that the theory has undergone from its first formulation (known as the Government and B...

CP arguments have been argued to be Caseless and ϕ– featureless. Empirical evidence mainly drawn from Spanish suggests that this claim should be reconsidered. In this paper, I claim that clausal arguments and nominalized clauses have a ϕ content and Case specification. These types of arguments are therefore able to relate by agreement with a functi...

Null subject (pvo-drop) Romance languages have been claimed to merge a null expletive in SpecIP in sentences with postverbal subjects. In this paper, it is claimed that economy principles should ban null expletives from entering the numeration of sentences. It is suggested that the Extended Projection Principle is covertly satisfied in these cases....

Two types of pronominal elements may appear in Catalan nominal constructions: the possessive pronoun and the strong pronoun. These elements differ in distribution, syntactic behavior and denotative properties. This paper proposes that the alternation between possessive and strong pronouns in nominals is parallel to the alternation betweenpro and st...

In this paper, Diesing's (1992) proposal that indefinites can not uniformly be treated as variables or as quantifiers is defended. The empirical evidence for such a claim is based on the position of qualificative adjectives in Catalan indefinite determiner phrases. Qualificative adjectives appear prenominally if the indefinite is interpreted as spe...

In this paper it is argued that Catalan sequences of a (semi)-modal verb and an infinitive, which are traditionally known as RESTRUCTURING CONSTRUCTIONS, should be analyzed as base-generated monosentential complexes. It is claimed that in such complexes the infinitive verb, not the modal or the semi-modal, is the primary predicate determining the a...

Proefschrift City University of New York. Met lit.opg.

This study proposes a hypothesis on the syntactic f unction of formal gender and grammatical number and assesses the relation between these two syntactic features by showing that grammatical number can only be expressed in categories that are assigned a formal gender in the Romance languages. It is cla imed that gender and number are the uninterpre...