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Clitics and auxiliary choice in Italian dialects: Their relevance for the person ergativity split
... However, these speakers find this construction^nly for pragmatic reasons, and they get a strong contrast between reflexive piacere and reflexive preoccupare (which is strictly ungrammatical). Most current theories of si assume that the reflexive reading involves co-indexation of two arguments (Reinhart 1996, Manzini andSavoia 1998). The incompatibility of unaccusatives and unergatives with the reflexive reading is thus straightforward, because they have only one argument. ...
... The most straightforward solution would be to assume, with Reinhart (1996) and Manzini and Savoia (1998), that a reflexive reading requires an external argument, stative or active, and therefore ObjExp verbs cannot have this reading. However, this will leave the reflexive reading with piacere verbs unexplained. ...
... It seems that with active external arguments (that is, those generated at spec, v) the reflexive reading requires a true agent, not a causer. To account for that I will assume, following Reinhart (1996) and Manzini and Savoia (1998) that reflexive and inchoative si are essentially the same process, spelling out the external argument (reflexive) or the internal one (inchoative). I will further assume that si always picks the highest argument which is selected by the lexical verbs (or generated at a projection selected by the lexical verb -cf. ...
The thesis is concerned with the correlation between aspects of verbs' meaning and aspects of verbs' syntax. This research domain is known as "The syntax-lexicon interface". Previous work has established a strong correlation between the two. In this thesis, I focus on some cases where the correlation between meaning and syntax is not as simple as with standard verbs. Chapter one introduces the basic approaches to the syntax-lexicon interface, and establishes the approach of the thesis, as a predicate-based, aspectual approach. Chapter two gives an overview of the structure of the VP, the domain in the syntax which interfaces with the lexicon. I give an account of the interaction of the structure of the VP with specific verbs' meanings, with special reference to verb alternations. The next three chapters are case studies of special problematic cases: Chapter three deals with the problem of agents (i.e. wilful actors) vs. causers, which, although structurally indistinct, behave differently with respect to some syntactic phenomena. Chapter four examines the structure of complex, causative verbs; special attention is given to Hebrew causative verbs, where causativization applies more freely than in English. Chapter five discusses psychological verbs (i.e. verbs describing psychological states, such as frighten, amuse), which are known to exhibit different syntactic properties from those of standard verbs. Based on the behaviour of such verbs across six languages, I suggest a structure for psychological verbs based on the analogy with ditransitive verbs (cf. insult X and give x an insult). Also, I show that these verbs have special properties only on their stative reading, and that on their non-stative reading they behave like standard verbs. This establishes the role of stativity vs. non-stativity, as well as aspectual properties in general, in determining a verb's behaviour.
... Recall from our discussion of the relevant data in Section 1 that the structure converges with the volitional reading only. This kind of split between the two readings of θelo which is conditioned by person is reminiscent of split-ergativity patterns: in some ergative-absolutive systems, the presence of a 1st/2nd person subject acts as a switch to a nominative-accusative system (see Dixon 1994); on the other hand, in some nominative-accusative systems, such as certain Central Italian dialects, 1st/2nd person triggers the presence of the auxiliary be instead of have (Kayne 1993;Manzini & Savoia 1998). Drawing the parallelism with the above cases, we could say that non-volitional θelo behaves like the ergative counterpart of volitional θelo when it takes a na-complement. ...
... According to Benua and Borer (1996) the nominative-accusative vs. ergativeabsolutive distinction is the result of relatively different 'rankings' of the aspectual nodes that license arguments in the two systems: in the former, the head/phrase that derives the Event Originator (proto-typical Agent) is the primary one, while in the latter, the primary one is the head/phrase that licenses the Event Measurer (or Subjectof-Quantity, in Borer 2000). Based, to some extent, on a similar line of reasoning, Manzini and Savoia (1998) argue that the distinction under consideration is due to the different ways languages choose to lexicalise features that can be associated with thematic properties. In particular, in nominative-accusative languages, accusative case is theta-role sensitive, i.e. it lexicalises the prototypical Patient or Event Measurer, while nominative is indifferent to theta-roles and therefore can be associated with the Originator or the Event Measurer as in passives, unaccusatives, and so on. ...
... The split in (40) is reminiscent of patterns of auxiliary selection in Standard Italian and some Central Italian dialects discussed by Manzini and Savoia (1998). In these dialects, auxiliary selection is conditioned by the person specification and not by the thematic properties of the participle, as is the case in Standard Italian. ...
... In section 3 I will discuss a model based on clitic projections, as suggested by Manzini and Savoia's recent works (1997, 1998a-b, 1999a. Finally in section 4 I will draw a comparison between Italian and Tshiluba data, in order to account for the peculiar behaviour of locative phrases, an analysis which mirrors the one offered for direct and indirect objects in Cocchi (1999). ...
... In several recent works, , 1998a-b, 1999a claim that the VP-shell module proposed by Chomsky (1995Chomsky ( , 1998, is not adequate to account for the complex clitic patterns offered by Romance varieties. Therefore, adapting original suggestions of Sportiche (1992), these authors propose an alternative "Clitic shell" module, which consists in a series of clitic projections, headed by clitics themselves, situated between C° and I°, where each clitic realizes a specialized position. ...
... As a consequence, in Tshiluba ditransitive clauses with a locative complement we can have up to three object affixes. This situation mirrors what we find in some Romance languages like Italian, where we may also have the co-occurrence of locative, DO and IO clitics; hence we can analyse the Tshiluba data by means of the Clitic shell framework proposed by , 1998a-b, 1999a for Romance varieties. The different relative order of these elements observed in Tshiluba and Italian can be captured by means of a simple parameter regarding the positions lexicalized by the various elements, and in particular by the locative clitic / affix, which lexicalizes the aspectual position Loc° in Italian and the inflectional position D° in Tshiluba. ...
... According to Manzini & Savoia (1998, 1999, Manzini & Savoia (forthcoming) the positions illustrated in (2) are universally represented in DP structure and in the structure of the sentence. Furthermore, on the basis of the empirical evidence coming from Italian dialects and Albanian dialects spoken in Southern Italy, Manzini & Savoia (1998, 1999, Manzini & Savoia (forthcoming) assume that the hierarchical string of positions illustrated in (2) can repeat itself in the temporal domain immediately above I and above C: In this paper, I will argue that Albanian possessive constructions can be assigned the structure in (3), adopted by Manzini & Savoia (1998, 1999, Manzini & Savoia (forthcoming) for Italian possessive constructions. ...
... According to Manzini & Savoia (1998, 1999, Manzini & Savoia (forthcoming) the positions illustrated in (2) are universally represented in DP structure and in the structure of the sentence. Furthermore, on the basis of the empirical evidence coming from Italian dialects and Albanian dialects spoken in Southern Italy, Manzini & Savoia (1998, 1999, Manzini & Savoia (forthcoming) assume that the hierarchical string of positions illustrated in (2) can repeat itself in the temporal domain immediately above I and above C: In this paper, I will argue that Albanian possessive constructions can be assigned the structure in (3), adopted by Manzini & Savoia (1998, 1999, Manzini & Savoia (forthcoming) for Italian possessive constructions. In particular, I will assume that possessives are inflectional elements which lexicalize the inflectional head positions P and Q within the extended projection of the noun. ...
... According to Manzini & Savoia (1998, 1999, Manzini & Savoia (forthcoming) the positions illustrated in (2) are universally represented in DP structure and in the structure of the sentence. Furthermore, on the basis of the empirical evidence coming from Italian dialects and Albanian dialects spoken in Southern Italy, Manzini & Savoia (1998, 1999, Manzini & Savoia (forthcoming) assume that the hierarchical string of positions illustrated in (2) can repeat itself in the temporal domain immediately above I and above C: In this paper, I will argue that Albanian possessive constructions can be assigned the structure in (3), adopted by Manzini & Savoia (1998, 1999, Manzini & Savoia (forthcoming) for Italian possessive constructions. In particular, I will assume that possessives are inflectional elements which lexicalize the inflectional head positions P and Q within the extended projection of the noun. ...
... Though we have yet to consider 1st and 2nd person clitics in any detail, we briefly mentioned in presenting the inflectional clitic string in (7) that they are associated with the specialized feature P (Person). Following Manzini and Savoia (1998) we assume that P clitics are purely inflectional in nature, in the sense that they always realize the inflectional P position, rather than the aspectual positions. One argument in favor of this conclusion from Albanian dialects is represented by the fact that the Person clitic precedes the middle/reflexive one, cf. ...
... Indeed recall that while in Albanian or in English the auxiliary is always have, there are languages, such as many Italian dialects, in which auxiliaries take the form have or be according to the type of arguments present in the sentence and eventually realized in the clitic string (cf. Manzini and Savoia 1998). ...
In this article we shall review several phenomena relating to the placement of clitics in a number of arbëresh dialects, i.e. Albanian dialects spoken in Southern Italy. We shall be considering in particular four environments defined by the presence respectively of: a lexical verb; an auxiliary + participle construction; an imperative; a negative imperative. The structure of the subjunctive will also be reviewed in connection with our discussion of the negation system in these languages. As we shall see immediately below, there is considerable variation, both with respect to object clitics (section 1) and with respect to the u clitic associated with middle-reflexives (section 2). Within the empirical domain just defined several interesting generalizations emerge, such as the following: (i) Person and middle-reflexive clitics do not appear in enclisis in the 2pp imperative; (ii) 1pp clitics do not appear in mesoclisis; (iii) accusative and dative clitics do not appear in mesoclisis. There are furthermore certain respects in which two of dialects reviewed, namely those of Portocannone and S.Marzano differ from the generally attested situation: (iv) in the Portocannone dialect, all clitics appear in enclisis after the auxiliary; (v) in the S.Marzano dialect, accusative and dative clitics are doubled with the auxiliary, appearing both in enclisis and in proclisis, while the u clitic appears both in proclisis and in mesoclisis; (vi) in the S.Marzano dialect, accusative and dative clitics are doubled in the negative imperative, appearing both in enclisis and in proclisis, while the u clitic appears in mesoclisis. These facts will be discussed with a view to maintain a restrictive theory of variation (parametrization) in which the only open options are lexicalization ones.
... Indeed, in Slavic languages such 30 A number of authors have argued for a direct relationship between participial agreement and auxiliary selection, observing that in many standard Romance varieties we find participial agreement always and only on verbs that select a be auxiliary; Den Dikken (1994) and Iatridou et al. (2003) propose in different ways that auxiliary have and participial agreement morphology should be in complementary distribution. Besides the French facts in (32), however, in a number of Italian dialects we find selection of be and have determined by the person and number of the surface subject, but participial agreement still controlled only by fronted objects (Tuttle, 1986;Manzini and Savoia, 1998): that is, these languages have the participial agreement pattern of standard Italian, but select auxiliary be on the basis of entirely orthogonal factors. ...
... In person/number driven alternations, auxiliary have is generally associated with third person subjects, while be is associated with first and second persons: Tuttle (1986) cites this pattern as occurring in Piedmontese, and the dialects of Cori, Roiate/Zagarolo, and L'Aquila/Avezzano/Pescara; Turri (1973, cited by Kayne, 1993 reports the same for Novara; Manzini and Savoia (1998) In the Italian dialect described by Chiominto (1984), have's distribution is yet further re- Manzini and Savoia, 2007;Legendre, 2007a). ...
... With regard to object clitics, a similar 'clitic-internal' distinction is found based on the person feature. Specifically, uninterpretability of case and phi-features is associated with 3 rd person object clitics whereas 1 st and 2 nd person clitics are distinct in that the person feature in their case is interpretable (Tsimpli & Stavrakaki 1999, see also Manzini & Savoia 1998, Torrego 1998. ...
... In particular, according to minimalist suggestions, case is an uninterpretable feature and phi-features are interpretable on nouns. It is thus suggested that the phi-features appearing on the definite article (as well as the adjectives) are 'resumptive' in that they are the spell-out of an agreement relation between the elements in the extended nominal domain which form a dependency in the syntactic derivation (Manzini, 1998). As such, they lack interpretability at LF, but they are necessary for PF convergence (Suñer 2000). ...
... Though we have yet to consider 1st and 2nd person clitics in any detail, we briefly mentioned in presenting the inflectional clitic string in (7) that they are associated with the specialized feature P (Person). Following Manzini and Savoia (1998) we assume that P clitics are purely inflectional in nature, in the sense that they always realize the inflectional P position, rather than the aspectual positions. One argument in favor of this conclusion from Albanian dialects is represented by the fact that the Person clitic precedes the middle/reflexive one, cf. ...
... Indeed recall that while in Albanian or in English the auxiliary is always have, there are languages, such as many Italian dialects, in which auxiliaries take the form have or be according to the type of arguments present in the sentence and eventually realized in the clitic string (cf. Manzini and Savoia 1998). ...
arb?resh dialects, i. e. Albanian dialects spoken in Southern Italy. We shall be considering in particular four environments defined by the presence respectively of: a lexical verb; an auxiliary + participle construction; an imperative; a negative imperative. The structure of the subjunctive will also be reviewed in connection with our discussion of the negation system in these languages. As we shall see immediately below, there is considerable variation, both with respect to object clitics (section 1) and with respect to the u clitic associated with middle-reflexives (section 2). Within the empirical domain just defined several interesting generalizations emerge, such as the following:
... Then we are forced to attribute the two properties of v in Chomsky's 416 Manzini & Roussou (1995) system to two different heads. On the one hand we can postulate a head, v proper, associated with a D feature; accusative case will be a morphological reflex of the lexicalization of this feature (see Manzini and Savoia 1998 for a precise realization of this general idea). On the other hand, a higher V head will be tipically associated with the CAUSE predicate and its relation to the DP in [Spec, I] will correctly establish the argumental interpretation of the latter. ...
... In essence the number of argument positions and their properties are restricted by the number of primitive predicate types and their possible combinations. An alternative theory based on the idea that argument structure is aspectually characterized is argued for by Tenny (1994), Borer (1994), Salles (1997), Arad (1998); Manzini and Savoia (1998; forthcoming) go as far as denying the existence of VP-shells. We believe that this approach avoids the problems associated not only with standard theta-roles but also with lexical decomposition and is therefore to be preferred. ...
In this article, we point out some problems in the theory of A-movement and control within Principles and Parameters models, and specifically within the minimalist approach of Chomsky (1995). In order to overcome these problems, we motivate a departure from the standard transformational theory of A-movement. In particular, we argue that DPs are merged in the position where they surface, and from there they attract (an aspectual feature of) a predicate. On this basis, control can simply be construed as the special case in which the same DP attracts more than one predicate. Arbitrary control reduces to the attraction of a predicate by an operator in C. We show that the basic locality properties of control follow from an appropriate Scopal version of Chomsky's (1995) Minimal Link Condition and from Kayne's (1984) Connectedness, phrased as conditions on the Attract operation. Our approach has considerable advantages in standard cases of A-movement as well, deriving the distribution of reconstruction effects at LF as well as the blocking effects on phonosyntactic rules at PF.
... Proponents of (i) hold that 1/2PA are inherently discourse presupposed as they denote participants in the speech act, as opposed to 3PA, and are hence licensed outside vP. (Jelinek 1993, Nash 1995, Manzini and Savoia 1998. This idea that 1/2PA are special types of arguments, subject to special licensing conditions, is not restricted to ergative systems, and is promoted by Bianchi (2003) who claims that 1/2PA must be directly merged in a special ParticipantP in the left(er) field of the clause, between T and C. As ergative case is widely assumed to be assigned in vP, either as an inherent case (Woolford 2006, a.o.) or as a dependent case (Nash 2017, Baker 2014, the "high" discourserelated 1/2PA escape this marking. ...
In this volume scholars honor M. Rita Manzini for her contributions to the field of Generative Morphosyntax. The essays in this book celebrate her career by continuing to explore inter-area research in linguistics and by pursuing a broad comparative approach, investigating and comparing different languages and dialects.
... In particular, their "deficiency" is morphosyntactic as well as semantic and is contrasted with strong pronouns, which involve a richer structure with a functional layer associated with referentiality. Furthermore, in Tsimpli and Stavrakaki (1999) a distinction is drawn between first-and second-person clitics on one hand, and third-person object clitics on the other: third-person clitics are clusters of uninterpretable case and agreement features only, whereas first-and second-person clitics also bear an interpretable [person] feature (Manzini & Savoia, 1998). 3 Furthermore, Tsimpli and Stavrakaki (1999) suggest that accusative clitics differ from genitive possessive clitics in that the latter are theta-marked, and as such they bear interpretable features of referentiality. ...
... This is suggested as a candidate for reform by much recent literature, showing that 1 st and 2 nd person have an altogether different distribution from so-called 3 rd person (Davis 1999 on Salish, Dechaine 1999 on Algonquian). The contrast between 1 st /2 nd person and 3 rd person, i.e. between the speaker/ hearer and other referents, is in fact crucial for a series of grammatical processes, which include person splits in ergative Case assignment (Nash 1995 on Georgian) but also in Romance auxiliary choice (Kayne 1993, Cocchi 1995, Manzini and Savoia 1998. Leaving aside these more complex issues, it is evident that different distribution counts as a powerful argument in terms of distributional analysis for assigning separate categorial status to 1 st /2 nd person on the one hand and 3 rd person on the other 5 . ...
This chapter examines the theory that both morphological and syntactic structures are constructed from the same set of categories. Focusing on clitic variation across Romance dialects (specifically Italian and Swiss), it argues that it is necessary to redefine the standard morphological feature set (person, number, gender, case). It also suggests that both syntax and morphology should be based on syntactic categories such as nominal class, quantification, and definiteness, and not on the traditional f-features and Case. The chapter also considers plurals and datives, nominatives, Agree, nominal class and person, accusatives, and minimalism.
... One further set of clitic positions between C and the Or-Meas string is proposed by Manzini and Savoia 1998, forthcoming on the basis of data from Northern Italian dialects that systematically realize a subject clitic series, as well as an object clitic one. Detailed analyses of Northern Italian subject clitics have uncovered not only a fine grained feature system underlying, but also a clear syntactic hierarchy within this system (Poletto 1993). ...
The structure of the Macedonian sentence is characterized by a rich set of inflectional and modal elements, which in a normal declarative sentence appear before the lexical verb. These include the argumental clitics, the auxiliaries (to be or to have), the modal particles, the negation. In interrogative sentences we can additionally find the question particle li. Argumental clitics are articulated according to case and person specifications, as illustrated in the schema in (1). Case specifications distinguish accusative and dative for each person of the paradigm: (1) Accusative Dative 1 p s m e m i 2ps te ti 3psm/n go mu 3 p s f j a ì 1pp nè nì 2pp ve vi 3 p p g i i m R e f l e x i v e s e s i Argumental clitics and personal pronouns are the only nominal elements in the language which are inflected for case. As for the form se/si note that it is used as the reflexive in all persons of the paradigm; it is also used as the middle-passive morpheme.
... In addition to morphological evidence, the plausibility of this reanalysis scenario is reinforced by independent attestations of the fact that evolutions affecting perfects may be sensitive to speech act role distinctions. For example, the perfect auxiliary in some Central and Southern Italian dialects is be with 1st/2nd person subjects and have with 3rd person subjects, irrespective of the nature of the verb (Cocchi 1997, Manzini & Savoia 1998, Legendre 2006. Given the general semantic contrast between be-predication and have-predication, the fact that those dialects have selected be when the subject is a speech act participant and have with 3rd person subjects (and not the other way round) is in accordance with the functional explanation of the scenario hypothesized here for the emergence of assertor's involvement marking in Akhvakh. ...
... But primitive predicates cannot have a place outside the VP-shell, while aspectual categories can. The latter, and in particular the two categories Or for the Origin of the event and Meas for the Measure of the event, as in (1), have been used to characterize the clitic shell by Manzini and Savoia (1998). ...
Our starting point for the discussion will be a set of assumptions, motivated in section 1, which include the idea that clitics correspond to specialized categories, and are inserted directly into the positions where they surface. Such categories are ordered in a universal hierarchy. In sections 2-5, we shall show that within such a framework, it is possible to account for some basic facts about the clitic string without having recourse to anything but a minimalist syntactic component. In particular no use is made of a specialized morphological component nor of optimality-type comparisons between derivations/ representations. The main facts addressed include parametrization of the order of clitics (dative -accusative vs. accusative -dative), mutual exclusion of clitics (accusative and dative, object and subject) and the emergence of what are described in the literature as default clitics ('spurious' se) or as opaque forms.
... are-jealous of.3PL 'Every woman I meet thinks that they are jealous of us.' (= her and me) or 'Every woman I meet thinks that they are jealous of us.' (= me and someone) (Mavrogiorgos, 2009:36) 21 See also Manzini and Savoia (1998) for this claim and Nicol (2005) for a parallelization of syntactically non-erasable 1st and 2nd person features with the interpretable features that cannot be ''erased'' in Chomsky's (1995) terms. 22 An example of this IP would be: ...
This paper discusses the morphosyntactic properties of clitics that occur in [VP CLACC/GEN V] and [VP CLGEN CLACC V] idioms in two varieties of Modern Greek. Previous work on this type of idioms captures idiomaticity by proposing inactiveness of Agree and distinguishes between levels of idiosyncrasy by claiming that in Standard Modern Greek, these are determined by the gender morphology of the clitic, its case, and the transitivity status of the verb. We explore the insufficiency of these factors and suggest that the only relevant factor is the presence of semantically identifiable equivalents across domains of interpretation, that is, subparts of the idiom that carry similar meaning and/or reference in the idiomatic and the non-idiomatic interpretation of each idiom. Investigating idiomatic expressions in a second variety, Cypriot Greek, aims first to contribute to the cross-linguistic study of clitics in idioms by drawing a comparison between the two varieties and second, to shed light on aspects of Cypriot Greek syntax which, unlike Standard Modern Greek, has genitive-selecting monotransitive verbs that in certain cases are quite revealing on why gender, case, and transitivity cannot adequately define different levels of idiomaticity. Observing the semantic and syntactic behavior of these clitics in doubling and dislocation environments, it is argued that (i) there is nothing idiosyncratic in the derivation of idioms (all syntactic operations remain active and idiomaticity arises post-syntactically by mapping the computational outcome with entries in the Encyclopedia in a framework like Distributed Morphology) and (ii) there are no idiomaticity-specific morphosyntactic restrictions or featural combinations that preclude idiomaticity.
... In particular, their "deficiency" is morphosyntactic as well as semantic and is contrasted with strong pronouns, which involve a richer structure with a functional layer associated with referentiality. Furthermore, in Tsimpli and Stavrakaki (1999) a distinction is drawn between first-and second-person clitics on one hand, and third-person object clitics on the other: third-person clitics are clusters of uninterpretable case and agreement features only, whereas first-and second-person clitics also bear an interpretable [person] feature (Manzini & Savoia, 1998). 3 Furthermore, Tsimpli and Stavrakaki (1999) suggest that accusative clitics differ from genitive possessive clitics in that the latter are theta-marked, and as such they bear interpretable features of referentiality. ...
... As for 1 st and 2 nd person arguments, they crucially differ from so-called 3 rd person in that their reference is established directly by the universe of discourse, as speaker and hearer respectively; in this sense, we can refer to 1 st and 2 nd person elements as the P(erson) elements of the grammar. Manzini and Savoia (1998a) argue that while the relation of so-called 3 rd person to the event is mediated by their anchoring at the aspectual structure of the verb, this does not hold for P arguments. In other words it is only in the case of the so-called 3 rd person that we can properly speak of an internal argument (perhaps a Measure in aspectual terms), and not in the case of P elements. ...
In this paper we shall consider microvariation in the negation systems of Italian and Swiss dialects, with particular reference to Northern Italian ones. This domain of data has been made known within generative linguistics by Zanuttini (1991, 1997), whose conclusions are adopted by Cinque (1999) within his larger theory of adverbs and functional structure. Briefly, Zanuttini (1997) individuats four Neg categories within the sentential tree, namely Neg 1 which appears in the inflectional domain of the sentence and is lexicalized by negative clitics, and Neg 2 - Neg 4 which appear within the predicational domain and is lexicalized by negative adverbs. In what follows, we shall concentrate on negative adverbs, arguing that they do not belong to a specialized Neg category; nor are they specialized Adv(erbs), but rather nominal elements. We shall briefly indicate how these conclusions may extend to Adv(erbs) in general and argue that clitic negations are in turn nominal in nature. 1. Some basic data
... Current research on this empirical side of the auxiliary selection phenomenon is concentrated on identifying more precisely which factors are relevant in which languages (see, for example, Sorace 2000; Legendre 2007b and the works in Aranovich 2007). An increasingly important role in this is being played by lesser-known languages and historical or nonstandard varieties and dialects (see, for example, Pavlenko 1997; Manzini and Savoia 1998;Ledgeway 2000;Arregi 2004;McFadden and Alexiadou 2006;Avram and Hill 2007;Cennamo and Sorace 2007;Legendre 2007a). As already hinted at above, these frequently show behavior that differs in surprising and interesting ways from the more familiar standard languages. ...
Few syntactic phenomena are relevant to as many areas of linguistic theory as auxiliary selection – the alternation between auxiliaries in periphrastic constructions. Standing at the intersection between syntax, lexical and clausal semantics and morphology, it has been the subject of intense research since the late 1970s and has played a role in several important theoretical developments and debates. Auxiliary selection also poses a number of empirical questions. Even within a single language, the correct description of the alternation can be controversial, and the extensive cross-linguistic variation has turned out to be rather difficult to characterize in a systematic way. In this article, I give a survey of how our understanding of auxiliary selection has developed, both on the empirical and the theoretical side. I also include a brief discussion of work on how patterns of selection arise and change over time.
... In addition to morphological evidence, the plausibility of the reanalysis scenario put forward in section 5.2 is reinforced by independent attestations of the fact that evolutions affecting perfects may be sensitive to speech act roles distinctions. For example, the perfect auxiliary in some Central and Southern Italian dialects is be with 1st/2nd person subjects and have with 3rd person subjects, irrespective of the nature of the verb (Cocchi 1997, Manzini & Savoia 1998, Legendre 2006. Given the general semantic contrast between be-predication and have-predication, the fact that those dialects have selected be when the subject is a speech act participant and have with 3rd person subjects (and not the other way round) is in accordance with the functional explanation of the scenario hypothesized here for the emergence of assertor's involvement marking in Akhvakh. ...
... Obviously enough, the P category is lexicalized by 1 st and 2 nd person (non-subject) clitics. The observed behavior in Italian clitic systems (Manzini and Savoia 1998) supports the position already taken by typological approaches, which sharply differentiates the status of 1 st and 2 nd person (singular, and eventually plural) from that of the so-called 3 rd person. In our grammar, therefore, the total membership of the Person category is constituted by the speaker and the hearer, whose denotation is fixed directly by the universe of discourse, and by the sets including them. ...
Manzini and Savoia (1999, 2001, 2002, to appear) argue that the basic facts about the clitic string are best accounted for without having recourse to anything but a minimalist syntactic component, i.e. making no use of a specialized morphological component nor of optimality-type comparisons between derivations/ representations. In particular, they assume that clitics correspond to specialized inflectional categories, and are merged directly into the positions where they surface; such categories are furthermore ordered in a universal hierarchy, as we will detail below. The aim of the present paper is to consider datives in the light of this framework. We will conclude that there is no evidence for the category dative in the Romance dialects we shall consider, while in fact there is evidence for categorizations of so-called dative clitics as quantificational elements or as deictic elements (locatives). In all cases, the relevant categorization relies entirely on referential properties, or more generally on interpretive properties intrinsic to the lexical items involved, calling into question the traditional notion of Case itself.
This paper presents the results of an intensive research on the phenomenon of split intransitivity in Campanian varieties. In the first part it presents the phenomenon according to the different theoretical approaches considered, in order to analyse the considerable amount of data presented in the following sections. The second part is devoted to the central Campanian varieties, in which the data from the metropolitan area of Naples, Salerno and the hinterland are exposed. The peculiarity of the Acerno variety, which is more isolated than the others, leads to present the data of this variety separately. The last part presents the data from the south of the region, the Cilento, divided into two different areas, which are very different from a sociolinguistic point of view. For each dialectal area, an attempt is made to identify the internal parameters that characterise the variation in the choice of the auxiliary and, where necessary, the authors recourse to sociolinguistic variation or contact among different varieties that may have had an influence on the phenomenon.
We examine spontaneous production data from the dialect of Modern West Thracian Greek ( mwtg ) (the local dialect of Evros) with regard to a hypothesis of syntactic borrowing of verbal transitivity. We argue that mwtg allows omission of the direct object with specific reference, in contrast to Standard Modern Greek ( smg ) and other Modern Greek ( mg ) dialects (spoken in Greece), but similar to Turkish. Object omission in mwtg is possible only in contexts where smg and other mg dialects show obligatory use of the 3rd-person clitic. We argue that syntactic borrowing in the case of language contact follows the transfer with second language learners: the relevant elements that host uninterpretable features are used optionally. Moreover, the definite article, in contrast to the indefinite article, is also affected by language contact. The 3rd-person clitic and the definite article are affected by contact as uninterpretable clusters of features. We claim that interpretability plays a significant role in transitivity in cases of language contact.
Current theoretical approaches to language devote great attention to macro- and micro-variation and show an ever-increasing interest in minority languages. In this respect, few empirical domains are as rich and lively as the Italo-Romance languages, which together with Albanian were the main research domain of Leonardo M. Savoia. The volume covers areas as different as phonology, morphology, syntax and the lexicon. A broad range of Romance languages is considered, as well as Albanian, Greek and Hungarian, shedding new light on many classical topics. The first section focuses on morphosyntax, both in the narrow sense and with regard to its interfaces. The second section focuses on clitics and pronouns. The third section deals with a number of issues in phonology and syntax-phonology interface. The last section turns the reader’s attention beyond formal linguistics itself and examines variation in the light of neurosciences, pathology, historical linguistics, and political discourse.
Current theoretical approaches to language devote great attention to macro- and micro-variation and show an ever-increasing interest in minority languages. In this respect, few empirical domains are as rich and lively as the Italo-Romance languages, which together with Albanian were the main research domain of Leonardo M. Savoia. The volume covers areas as different as phonology, morphology, syntax and the lexicon. A broad range of Romance languages is considered, as well as Albanian, Greek and Hungarian, shedding new light on many classical topics. The first section focuses on morphosyntax, both in the narrow sense and with regard to its interfaces. The second section focuses on clitics and pronouns. The third section deals with a number of issues in phonology and syntax-phonology interface. The last section turns the reader’s attention beyond formal linguistics itself and examines variation in the light of neurosciences, pathology, historical linguistics and political discourse.
Many languages with ergative systems of case or agreement exhibit splits in their alignment. Viewpoint aspect is a common basis for such splits, with perfective aspect often associated with ergative alignment and imperfective with the absence of ergativity (Moravcsik 1978, Silverstein 1976). Recent work has argued that splits arise from properties of the imperfective that disrupt otherwise‐available mechanisms of ergative alignment (Laka 2006, Coon 2013a). This article argues rather that the perfective can be a source of ergative case, and specifically that ergative alignment in Hindi‐Urdu arises from the intersection of two different ways of expressing perfective aspect, each attested independently in other languages: the first is the use of oblique case to mark perfect or perfective subjects, while the second is a morphosyntactic sensitivity to transitivity, a hallmark of auxiliary selection in Germanic and Romance languages. The result is a more unified view of the morphosyntax of perfective aspect, though at the cost of a nonunified account of aspectually split ergativity.
This book offers a new perspective on natural language predicates by analyzing data from the Plains Cree language. Contrary to traditional understanding, Cree verbal complexes are syntactic constructs composed of morphemes as syntactic objects that are subject to structurally defined constraints, such as c-command. Tomio Hirose illustrates this in his study of vP syntax, event semantics, morphology-syntax mappings, unaccusativity, noun incorporation, and valency-reducing phenomena.
Romance languages divide into three classes, as far as perfective auxiliation is concerned: as well as languages showing a binary contrast (e.g., French) and languages showing no contrast (e.g., Spanish), several varieties exist in which auxiliation displays three-way choices. Previous research on Romance auxiliaries has failed to recognize this empirical fact due to its focus on auxiliaries as morpho-lexical items, rather than on auxiliation as a syntactic phenomenon. Building on the approach to Romance auxiliation of Perlmutter (1989), this article proposes an analysis of triple auxiliation systems, as well as of systems which display variation in auxiliation, either free or sensitive to verb person. The rise of these mixed systems, like all other recorded changes in Romance auxiliation, is interpreted as one of the manifestations of the retreat of Proto-Romance active/inactive alignment and of the shift back to a more consistent accusative/nominative orientation.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a novel account to ‘that-t’ phenomena, following minimalist assumptions. Taking subject extraction out of complement clauses (the ‘that-t’ effect) as the key case, it is argued that the licensing and identification parts of the ECP correspond to PF and LF requirements respectively. In particular, subject extraction over that yields ungrammaticality because in this case the Agr-features of T fail to be lexicalized; thus the CP phase contains features that have not been satisfied and the derivation crashes. C0 is taken to correspond to the realization of the feature content of T (plus Agr) in C, thus allowing for the lexicalization of Agr. The interpretation of Agr as a variable is determined in connection with the wh-phrase in the matrix Spec,CP via the operation Agree. To this end, I consider the relation between C and T, the one between C and Agr in non-extraction contexts as well (e.g. ‘pro-drop’ under V2), and also the parameterization of subject extraction as a by-product of the different ways of lexicalizing Agr and/or C. The proposed analysis succeeds in deriving the empirical effects of the ECP derivationally, without furthermore postulating extra technical devices such as proper head government and traces.
Résumé
Voici un survol des tendances depuis trente ans en syntaxe générative à propos des clitiques pronominaux. Perlmutter 1971 propose que des conditions de surface sont responsables de l’ordre interne des suites de clitiques et que l’absence de sujet obligatoire, en espagnol, serait liée à d’autres propriétés syntaxiques. Sont ensuite apparus : 1 o les analyses par transformations ; 2 o les débats entre déplacement et génération à la base, dus surtout aux données sur le redoublement clitique ; 3 o l’étude de liens potentiels entre l’existence d’arguments nuls et les clitiques pronominaux, menant à des traitements morphologiques ; 4 o l’application des travaux sur le rôle central des catégories fonctionnelles et des traits ; 5 o les analyses de la structure interne des clitiques par la géométrie des traits et les variantes notationnelles des schèmes morphologiques sous forme de contraintes optimalistes hiérarchisées.
This article explores the nature and role of the imperfective verb in Arabic. It argues that the imperfective verb is not specified for tense. It is only the default form that is resorted to whenever the verb does not carry temporal features. Syntactically, the lack of temporal features on the imperfective verb explains why, contra the perfective verb which carries past tense, it occurs lower than negation and displays the SV order in idioms. Morphologically, the default unmarked status of the imperfective is consistent with its central role in word formation. This role will be shown to be more pervasive than previously thought. This, in turn, allows for a unified analysis of nominal and verbal morphology. The implication then is that important parts of Arabic word formation are word based rather than root based.
The purpose of this article is to provide an explanatory account of the divide between enclisis and proclisis in pronominal clitic constructions in Romance and Semitic languages. The analysis is based on two fundamental assumptions: (i) clitics do not target designated prelabelled positions, but take maximal advantage of the available categorial structure; (ii) cliticization patterns are tightly dependent on the inflectional properties of the language, more specifically, on the feature content of the two functional categories, Infl and v. We show that the various asymmetries in clitic behavior can elegantly be explained in terms of the minimalist theory of movement, combined with certain formal hypotheses about the building of phrase structure and about the relation of morphology to syntax. Relying on certain ideas about uninterpretable features, Attract and Agree, we argue that cliticization patterns can be made to follow from the strategies made available by U.G. to check the uninterpretable feature of the category Infl and from the derivational origin of the tense and person-number features. A principle, the Unselective Attract Principle, is introduced according to which an uninterpretable feature is a potential attractor for all the features which are of the same type as the one which it selectively attracts. In Romance and in Semitic, clitic phi-sets are unselectively attracted by Infl. Two additional principles, the Priority Principle and the Single Licensing Condition, insure that at some point in the derivation a clitic can incorporate into Infl only if Infl doesn�t already host an attracted inflectional morpheme. This idea holds the key for the enclisis/proclisis divide. Enclisis, i.e. clitic incorporation into Infl, is disallowed in Romance finite clauses where the uninterpretable feature of Infl selectively attracts the person-number agreement phi-set; it is legitimate in Semitic and European Portuguese finite clauses in which the same feature is checked through Agree.
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