Raffaella Zanuttini

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Yale University

In this article, we analyze the syntax of sentences such as Here is my daughter , which we refer to as presentatives. Presentatives turn out to have a wide range of properties that distinguish them sharply from ordinary declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives, and exclamatives. Drawing on recent work on the left periphery, we develop a novel acco...

In this paper we analyze a set of sentence final particles in Korean that express information on clause type and on the relation between speaker and addressee. Our focus is the latter type of information, known as speech style; we argue that it involves two distinct dimensions, hierarchy and formality. Hierarchy expresses the respective position of...

We discuss the existence of a set of previously unnoticed restrictions on indexicals. Specifically, some indexicals are ruled out and others cannot freely occur in two clause types that have directive force but are distinct from canonical imperatives. These restrictions suggest that these clause types are interpreted with respect to a context that...

This article explores geographical variation in a range of understudied dative constructions in American English. It shows that these constructions are found primarily in the South and that they permit numerous syntactic variations and permutations. However, not all sentences and constructions have an equal status. In particular, the authors find t...

In this paper, we present a detailed case study of a number of dative constructions that vary across speakers of American English. We show how geographical maps of acceptability judgments can be used to shed light on the syntactic structures underlying those judgments. Those structures can then be used to refine our understanding of syntax more gen...

Languages have several grammatical means of expressing the relation between speaker and addressee, including speech style particles, politeness pronouns, allocutive marking, and honorifics. Despite the similarity in the meaning they convey, these politeness markers fall into two distributional classes: some ('content-oriented markers of politeness'...

The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project approaches the empirical domain of North American English from the perspective of generative microcomparative syntax. In addition to eliciting judgments from speakers of particular varieties, we also conduct large-scale surveys, map the results of those surveys geographically, conduct statistical tests taking...

This article introduces the southern dative presentative, an understudied construction that varies across speakers of American English. The authors discuss similarities and differences between this construction and the better-studied personal dative construction and compare the Southern dative presentative with similar constructions cross-linguisti...

In this article we investigate the syntax of Italian emphatic replies in which a polarity particle is followed by an embedded clause introduced by the declarative complementizer che, which we label sì che/no che sentences. We propose that the relation between the polarity particle and the clause introduced by che is mediated by the presence of a nu...

This paper investigates the interpretive restrictions on the subjects of imperative, promissive, and exhortative sentences—what we call the “jussive” clause types. It argues that the data cannot be explained by a theory that appeals only to semantic and pragmatic factors, and that an account crucially involving syntax is required. We propose that j...

Singular and plural lexical subjects co-occur with verbal -s in Appalachian English, arguably a vestige of the person marking characterizing its ancestor variety, Older Scots. Reminiscent of the Insular Scandinavian languages that display robust person marking on verbs, Older Scots exhibits many of the syntactic properties familiar from languages l...

The sentential particle mo occurs in imperative and interrogative clauses in several Northern Italian dialects exhibiting puzzling distributional and interpretive differences. It is proposed that mo (which starts out in one of the IP layers) occurs in one of the CP layers; the distributional differences arise from the fact that different amounts of...

On the Centrality of Sentential NegationThe Syntactic Expression of Sentential Negation: A Crosslinguistic ViewThe Syntactic Category of Negative MarkersThe Phrase Structure Status of Negative MarkersFrom Particular Languages to Universal GrammarConclusion

One of the unique features of Korean is that it marks sentences used to promise with the same grammatical mechanism – a paradigm of sentence final particles – with which it marks other clause types, like declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives. In this paper we investigate this cross-linguistically rare type of PROMISSIVES and argue that they...

One of the unique features of Korean is that it marks sentences used to promise with the same grammatical mechanism – a paradigm of sentence final particles – with which it marks other clause types, like declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives. In this paper we investigate this cross linguistically rare type of promissives and argue that they...

Imperative subjects in English are puzzling in several respects: null subjects are possible with a definite interpretation, unlike in other clause types; quantificational subjects are often restricted to range over a set containing the addressee and exhibit binding possibilities not readily available to them in declaratives and interrogatives; and...

1. Introduction In the abstract of his target piece, Featherston states that ‘it is no longer tenable for syntactic theories to be constructed on the evidence of a single person's judgements’. In our commentary, we focus on this issue and on (what we perceive to be) Featherston's claims that individual speakers' judgments are intrinsically unreliab...

Presenting cutting-edge research in syntax and semantics, this important volume furthers theoretical claims in generative linguistics and represents a significant addition to present scholarship in the field. Leading scholars present crosslinguistic studies dealing with clausal architecture, negation, and tense and aspect, and the issue of whether...

This volume addresses issues in the syntax of a wide array of Italian dialects (including several Rhaeto-Romance varieties: Paduan, Sicilian, Bellunese, Piedmontese, Calabrian, and Italian itself). Edited by Christina Tortora, this collection consists of contributions from 12 of the leading scholars in the area of Italian dialect syntax (Andrea Cal...

One central issue in the theory of clause types is whether force is represented in the syntax. Based on data from English, Italian, and Paduan, we examine this question focusing on a less well-studied clause type, exclamatives. We argue that there is no particular element in syntax responsible for introducing force. Rather, there are two fundamenta...

In this contribution we consider a type of exclamative construction in English which shows an unusual pairing between syntactic form and semantic/pragmatic function. This is the nominal exclamative, illustrated in (1): (1) The strange things that he says!

Exclamative clauses exhibit a structural diversity which raises the question of whether they form a clause type in the sense of Sadock & Zwicky (1985). Based on data from English, Italian, and Paduan, we argue that the class of exclamatives is syntactically characterizable in terms of a pair of abstract syntactic properties. Moreover, we propose th...

In this descriptive report we outline the structural pattern of exclamative clauses in Paduan. Because of the close similarity between exclamative and interrogative clauses in this language, we begin by developing a number of tests which allow us to distin- guish these two clause types. We then present the range of exclamative structures. A variety...

Every human language has some syntactic means of distinguishing a negative from a non-negative sentence; in other words, every speaker ‘s syntactic competence provides a means to express sentential negation. This ability, however, may be expressed in different ways, as shown by the fact that individual languages employ different syntactic strategie...

Every human language has some syntactic means of distinguishing a negative from a non-negative sentence; in other words, every speaker ‘s syntactic competence provides a means to express sentential negation. This ability, however, may be expressed in different ways, as shown by the fact that individual languages employ different syntactic strategie...

Every human language has some syntactic means of distinguishing a negative from a non-negative sentence; in other words, every speaker ‘s syntactic competence provides a means to express sentential negation. This ability, however, may be expressed in different ways, as shown by the fact that individual languages employ different syntactic strategie...

Every human language has some syntactic means of distinguishing a negative from a non-negative sentence; in other words, every speaker ‘s syntactic competence provides a means to express sentential negation. This ability, however, may be expressed in different ways, as shown by the fact that individual languages employ different syntactic strategie...

The essays collected in this volume originate, directly or indirectly, from the Certificat de specialisation en theorie syntaxique et syntaxe comparative which was held at the University of Geneva in 1989-90. This program gave rise to a substantive body of research in comparative syntax which seemed to us original and coherent enough to justify a c...

Much recent work has focused on the issue of which functional categories are present in a sentential structure. Both Moro (1987) and Pollock (1989), independently and on the basis of quite different considerations, suggest that in Romance and in English the Infl node should be split into two components, a Tense Phrase and an Agreement Phrase. Kitag...

The two-stage theory of lexical production distinguishes the retrieval of lemmas from the subsequent retrieval of the forms of words. The information made available by lemma retrieval includes semantic and grammatical details that are specific to a particular word, but not the direct specification of its phonological or orthographic form. This theo...

OuhallaJamal, Functional categories and parametric variation. London & New York: Routledge, 1991. Pp. xi+240. - Volume 29 Issue 1 - Raffaella Zanuttini

1. Their paper also provides strong empirical evidence showing that, in these dialects, WH -extraction of a subject takes place from postverbal position not only in embedded clauses, but also in main clauses. 2. Having characterized Romance clitics as elements of type HEAD in terms of X-bar theory, Kayne succeeds in explaining restrictions on cliti...

Every natural language can express the negation of a proposition p. However, while the semantic result of negating p is uniform, the syntactic means employed to do so vary. This dissertation argues that, from the syntactic point of view, there is no unitary notion of negation. The negative markers employed by different languages, or even by the sam...

1. The scope of the work Taking a close look at minimally different linguistic varieties allows us to engage in an exercise in micro-comparative syntax: we keep the environment constant and focus on the variable under investigation. In this case, the variable under investigation is verbal -s and the two minimally different varieties are standard En...

Subject-verb agreement in stigmatized varieties of American English is typically taken to be a deviation from so-called standard English. In this paper, the non-standard distribution of verbal -s in Appalachian English is distinguished from the standard English pattern in a novel way, namely by appealing to the features encoded in the inflectional...