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From local blocking to Cyclic Agree
Abstract
This volume brings together recent work on the formal and interpretational properties of determiners across a variety of typologically and geographically unrelated languages. It seeks to answer the core question of modern linguistic theory: Which properties of languages are universal and which are variable? In recent theorizing, much of language variation is argued to stem from differences in the properties of features associated with functional heads. As such, this volume can be viewed as a case study of one such category: the determiner (D). The contributions all investigate the status of D as a language universal by examining the language-specific syntactic and semantic properties associated with this category. This volume will appeal to researchers and students in syntax and semantics, as well as to those who have more a specific interest in determiners and noun phrases.
... In a Pan-Romance perspective, "partitive articles" are in complementary distribution with unambiguous, agglutinative plural markers (like -s in Spanish amigo-s, 'friend-s'), and lead to a mass reading of the respective nominal. We will argue that their existence is due to a (partial) diachronic loss of unambiguous number markers, that is, vocabulary items (vi) to express interpretable φ-features (number) on nouns and general agree requirements inside nominals (Stark 2008b;Mathieu 2009). We will follow Borer (2005, 93) in assuming identity for elements in complementary distribution across languages and argue that the de-element in Romance "partitive articles" realizes the same functional head as agglutinative plural morphemes. ...
... We would like to put forward the hypothesis that the (non-)existence of "partitive articles" and their complementary distribution with bare plural arguments is causally linked to the (non-)availability of a dedicated nominal plural morpheme (cf. Delfitto and Schroten 1991;Mathieu 2009;Carlier and Lamiroy 2014 for a similar descriptive generalization), that is, to morphosyntactic properties of nominal declension in Romance. ...
... Our Analysis Applying the analysis of indefinite (plural) nominals in Borer (2005) and Mathieu (2009Mathieu ( , 2014, for instance, to Spanish, we can analyze the Spanish plural -s as the overt exponent of Div°, in parallel to English (cf. Pomino 2016, 111). ...
... In a Pan-Romance perspective, "partitive articles" are in complementary distribution with unambiguous, agglutinative plural markers (like -s in Spanish amigo-s, 'friend-s'), and lead to a mass reading of the respective nominal. We will argue that their existence is due to a (partial) diachronic loss of unambiguous number markers, that is, vocabulary items (vi) to express interpretable φ-features (number) on nouns and general agree requirements inside nominals (Stark 2008b;Mathieu 2009). We will follow Borer (2005, 93) in assuming identity for elements in complementary distribution across languages and argue that the de-element in Romance "partitive articles" realizes the same functional head as agglutinative plural morphemes. ...
... We would like to put forward the hypothesis that the (non-)existence of "partitive articles" and their complementary distribution with bare plural arguments is causally linked to the (non-)availability of a dedicated nominal plural morpheme (cf. Delfitto and Schroten 1991;Mathieu 2009;Carlier and Lamiroy 2014 for a similar descriptive generalization), that is, to morphosyntactic properties of nominal declension in Romance. ...
... Our Analysis Applying the analysis of indefinite (plural) nominals in Borer (2005) and Mathieu (2009Mathieu ( , 2014, for instance, to Spanish, we can analyze the Spanish plural -s as the overt exponent of Div°, in parallel to English (cf. Pomino 2016, 111). ...
... As seen above (see the structure in (30)), in the standard case, a Probe bears uninterpretable features and searches its c-command domain for an active element bearing the interpretable counterparts of its unvalued features. In order to explain feature valuation in (31) In a relevant paper on this topic, Mathieu (2009) argues that the appearance of determiners in Old French from a determinerless language like Latin was caused diachronically by the loss of number marking on nouns. He relies on the existence of a functional head Num, which is associated with uninterpretable features that need to be checked. ...
... languages (Dobrovie-Sorin 2012). This microparameter is the outcome of historical development (Mathieu 2009(Mathieu , 2014; see also Section 4.2 below). Semantically, the feature Number conceived as a Realization relation (cf. ...
... This supports the hypothesis that in such marked cases the PLURALIZER is a modifier of n, as represented in (53) n PLURALIZER a FANT n j fant In this paper, we assume that these cases are marked because they are restricted to some varieties/languages and/or to certain structures. We suspect that these marked cases might be the effect of how each language/ variety underwent the diachronic change from Latin to Romance when the DP level was introduced (Mathieu 2009, Ledgeway 2012, among others). In fact, it might be the case that in this specific language change (that is, from a non-DP to a DP language), some old forms might have been maintained since they were not robust in the data for the children to overgeneralize the new pattern. ...
Inflectional languages, and Romance languages in particular, display morphological variation in plural marking within the nominal domain. While standard varieties show plural inflection on all the constituents within the DP, other varieties show this plural marking only on some of its constituents. We investigate a set of puzzling data and propose that Number in Romance is not a head, but an adjunct, an optional and bi‐valent morphosyntactic feature. We single out the hypothesis that, within the nominal domain, the pluralizer is in unmarked cases adjoined to D (i.e., a categorized d root), and in marked cases it is adjoined to a noun or an adjective (i.e., a categorized n/a root). We also discuss that instantiations of plural marking within the nominal domain should be conceived as the output of morphophonological concord, a post‐syntactic operation that is sensitive to c‐command.
... This issue is closely related to the problem of capturing the conditions on the use of bare nouns in Old French (Carlier and Goyens 1998, Mathieu 2009, Carlier and De Mulder 2010, Déchaine et al. 2018. Carlier and Goyens (1998) have shown that bare nouns are attested in a variety of uses, both with generic and existential interpretations, whether the NP has a definite or indefinite interpretation, with singular as well as plural count nouns, and with mass and abstract nouns. ...
... We then created logistic regression models predicting these variables as a function of time. 11 The rise of indefinite forms has been analysed in terms of determiners taking up the role of number marking, as number suffixes could no longer perform this role because of the phonological loss of word-final sibilants (Boucher 2005, Carlier 2007, Mathieu 2009) and given the assumption that every noun phrase has to contain a quantificational element (see the principle of Restricted Quantification Constraint of Delfitto and Schroten (1991)). The relevant phonological change, based on the frequency of omission of verb-final sibilants estimated by Simonenko et al. (2019), was still in an early stage at the end of the period in question. ...
jats:title>Abstract This article investigates the spread of the le / la / les -forms in the diachrony of French on the basis of large-scale corpora. It focuses on the issue of their “mixed” distribution viz. the observation that during a long period of time the le / la / les -forms in French do not pattern as either (anaphoric) demonstratives from which they originate (Late Latin ille ), nor as (uniqueness-based) definites, which they end up becoming in Modern French. We model the phenomenon as a competition between two grammars which ascribe different Logical Forms to the l -forms and test model predictions in contexts which differ with respect to whether they satisfy the relevant conditions for either demonstrative or definite semantics. We also suggest that this change was part of a larger change involving the spread of presupposition triggers within noun phrases. We show that our model correctly predicts the relative rates of determiner spread in various contexts.</jats:p
... A zero determiner in MF is not to be equated with indefiniteness. The spread of overt determiners was another change that progressed gradually over the medieval period (e.g., Simonenko & Carlier 2016), and in the earlier texts bare nouns occurred frequently in the contexts which in Modern French require a definite determiner, a demonstrative or a possessive pronoun (Mathieu 2009). ...
Over the last few decades, the widespread diffusion of digital technology has increased availability of primary textual sources, radically changing the everyday life of scholars in the humanities, who are now able to access, query and process a wealth of empirical evidence in ways not possible before. Also for ancient languages, corpora enhanced with increasingly complex layers of metalinguistic information, such as part-of-speech tagging and syntactic annotation (called 'treebanks') are now available. In particular, diachronic treebanks, which provide data for a language across several historical stages of a given language, allow for a new approach to diachronic studies of syntactic phenomena where scholars previously had to content themselves with empirical work on a much smaller scale. This volume brings together a set of papers that report research on various diachronic matters supported by evidence from diachronic treebanks. The contents of the papers cover a wide range of languages, including English, French, Russian, Old Church Slavonic, Latin and Ancient Greek. Originally published as special issue of Diachronica 35:3 (2018).
... A zero determiner in MF is not to be equated with indefiniteness. The spread of overt determiners was another change that progressed gradually over the medieval period (e.g., Simonenko & Carlier 2016), and in the earlier texts bare nouns occurred frequently in the contexts which in Modern French require a definite determiner, a demonstrative or a possessive pronoun (Mathieu 2009). ...
This paper presents a treebank-based study of the effect the text form (prose vs. verse) has on the course of two grammatical changes in Medieval French: the loss of null subjects and the loss of OV word order. By means of statistical analysis, we demonstrate that naive estimates of the spread of overt subjects and VO orders give the impression that there is a significant difference between the rates of development in prose vs. verse. By contrast, estimates based on an abstract grammar competition model which distinguishes between grammar-ambiguous surface forms (overt personal subjects, null subjects in coordination contexts) and grammar-unambiguous surface forms (overt expletive subjects, null subjects in non-coordination contexts) show prose-verse parallelism, prose having an earlier change onset, in line with traditional intuitions. At a more general level, these results suggest that the product of the interaction of a particular grammar with universal pragmatic laws is constant, which can be observed if the factors responsible for variation in grammatical choices are controlled for.
In Bregagliotto and Mesolcinese, two Lombard Alpine dialects, feminine plural agreement/concord is marked by the formative - n , a reflex of the third person plural verbal ending. In Bregagliotto, plural - n triggers mesoclisis of the feminine subject clitic in contexts of inversion, whereas in the noun phrase - n behaves as a second-position element marking plural feminine concord. Mesolcinese exhibits verbal gender agreement as the formative - n occurs on the inflected verb whenever a feminine plural subject or the feminine plural object clitic occurs; in feminine plural DPs, - n is attached to any element except the definite article. I argue that the Bregagliotto system emerged when - n was reanalysed as an adjunct pluraliser, whereas in Mesolcinese - n has been turned into a marker of morphophonological concord/agreement.
This paper focuses on the status of de in Romance indefinites, partitives and pseudopartitives. It argues that there is neither a ‘partitive article’ nor a ‘partitive preposition’ in syntax. De in Romance indefinites is the overt Spell‐Out of an abstract operator de that cancels the definiteness of articles and is responsible for indefiniteness. De in Romance partitives is the overt Spell‐Out of a relator head that takes a definite DP as complement and a QP in the specifier position. Finally, pseudopartitivity is shown to have crosslinguistic parallels with indefinites, and it is derived by postulating a mono‐projectional analysis in which a semilexical N selects for a de‐phrase, in exactly the same way that quantifiers and cardinals select for indefinite de‐phrases.
This contribution seeks to add to our knowledge on ‘partitive articles’ (like the French element du in Je bois du vin, ‘I drink (some) wine’) in a highly endangered language spoken in France, Switzerland and Italy, namely Francoprovençal. Based on recent fieldwork data (2017) from the Aosta Valley and data from the ALAVAL atlas project, we will discuss outliers in a geographical and syntactic perspective, i.e. occurrences of ‘partitive articles’ where they should not appear. This either because the regions and their respective varieties do not feature them according to the existing literature or because syntactic regularities known from Standard French do not admit them (under the scope of negation and after quantifying expressions). We will try to propose some explanations for the existence of these unexpected elements, both internal and external, i.e. via language contact, and argue more generally in favour of a more systematic consideration of rare elements in fieldwork data, which should not too readily be “explained away”.
In Bregagliotto and Mesolcinese, two Lombard Alpine dialects, feminine plural agreement/concord is marked by the formative - n , a reflex of the third person plural verbal ending. In Bregagliotto, plural - n triggers mesoclisis of the feminine subject clitic in contexts of inversion, whereas in the noun phrase - n behaves as a second-position element marking plural feminine concord. Mesolcinese exhibits verbal gender agreement as the formative - n occurs on the inflected verb whenever a feminine plural subject or the feminine plural object clitic occurs; in feminine plural DPs, - n is attached to any element except the definite article. I argue that the Bregagliotto system emerged when - n was reanalysed as an adjunct pluraliser, whereas in Mesolcinese - n has been turned into a marker of morphophonological concord/agreement.
The chapters in this book represent the theme of “bridges” – bridging research approaches and directions across languages, methodologies and disciplines. Alongside descriptive and theoretical studies, the contributions present experimental studies addressing issues in syntax, phonetics-phonology and sociolinguistics. And alongside investigations of linguistic phenomena in standard Romance language varieties, other investigations address less well-known and studied, minority and endangered varieties (e.g., Quebec French, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Galician, Catalan and Palenquero) from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Romance languages in contact with other languages and bilingualism, now also integral aspects of the field, are reflected in this volume as well, including less well-known cases of contemporary contact of Serbian with Romanian, and earlier contact of African languages with Spanish and Portuguese. This volume thus continues the decades long tradition of the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages of embracing cutting-edge developments in the field.
Speakers of York English (UK) use a zero article with definite singular nouns (e.g., “They used to follow Ø river”), which is impossible in Standard English. We probe the possibility that this form is a remnant from Old English, when there were no articles as they are currently found in Modern English, rather than a more contemporary development. We trace the diachronic trajectory of the zero article in historical-descriptive grammars and test social and linguistic constraints on its use in York English in a logistic regression analysis. The results show that information structure is a significant predictor of the zero article across all generations of the community and that the zero article is used in the same way as it was used as far back as Old English. However, it exhibits heightened usage among the older and younger generations, exhibiting a U-shaped curve. We suggest that this pattern demonstrates longitudinal maintenance of a conservative feature, which is suppressed in middle-age as the result of social pressures. In this way, this case study adds insight into the fate of dialect features in contemporary speech communities. It also highlights the importance of combining insights from different strands in linguistics for understanding the evolution of syntactic variants like the zero article.
The argument DP hypothesis, adopted by many syntactic analyses, claims that nominal arguments are introduced by a determiner (D), which may be covert or overt. While overt D is obligatory in Modern French (consistent with the argument DP hypothesis), it was not obligatory in earlier stages of French. We explore the factors that contributed to this change – including semantic class, syntactic function, number , and definiteness – focusing on a shift that occurred in the D-paradigm in two Anglo-Norman texts of the 12th century. Quantitative analysis (Goldvarb) yields two major findings. First, the effect of syntactic function remains constant: subject position favours overt D, but object position inhibits it. Second, there is a change in the effect of semantic class : count nouns increasingly favour overt D, but non-count (mass and abstract) nouns increasingly inhibit it. More generally, the gradual disappearance of bare Ns in French reflects the emergence of paradigmatically conditioned D.
Old French (OF) determiners (D), which are optional, show a three-way split between definite ( def ), indefinite( indf ), and expletive( expl) D. We develop a nano-syntactic analysis of these three paradigms, according to which the nominal spine is associated with a series of functional heads that include Number, Gender, D, and Kase. We test the predictions of the formal analysis with a quantitative analysis of corpus data from two 12 th century Anglo-Norman texts – Le voyage de saint Brendan ( B ) and Lais de Marie de France ( MdF ) – which indicates that over a 60-year span, there are changes in the distribution of D. This presents itself in three ways. First, a decline in expletive D in MdF correlates with an increase in the use of D with masculine ( m ) non-count nouns ( nNON-CT ) Second, while B lacks an overt indefinite plural ( pl ) D, MdF has one in the form of des . Third, with count nouns( nCT ), while feminine ( f ) nouns favour the absence of determiners in B , there is no gender effect in MdF . While the first two changes are predicted by the formal analysis, the third is not. More broadly, the results of our quantitative study provide a more nuanced picture of the factors that govern the distribution of D in OF: they confirm that – relative to conditioning the absence of D (D-drop) – definiteness, grammatical function, and number are stable factors, gender is not a stable factor, and word order does not play a significant role.
Bare singular nouns and null impersonals are two phenomena that exist alongside each other in a number of partial pro-drop languages. Prominent analyses of the coexistence of these properties argue for a null NP anaphora operation in this type of language. In this paper, I intend to show that this appproach is problematic when applied to Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and instead I offer an alternative analysis by claiming that a specific feature, which is in the process of disappearing from BP grammar, is responsible for these two properties. The absence of this feature results in nouns with cumulative reference and the disappearance of the clitic se, which is precisely the lexicalization of this feature. Thus, bare singular nouns and null impersonals are analyzed as a byproduct of this change and not as a reflection of a particular mechanism of anaphora present in some languages.
Children are extremely gifted in acquiring their native languages, but languages nevertheless change over time. Why does this paradox exist? In this study of creole languages, Enoch Aboh addresses this question, arguing that language acquisition requires contact between different linguistic sub-systems that feed into the hybrid grammars that learners develop. There is no qualitative difference between a child learning their language in a multilingual environment and a child raised in a monolingual environment. In both situations, children learn to master multiple linguistic sub-systems that are in contact and may be combined to produce new variants. These new variants are part of the inputs for subsequent learners. Contributing to the debate on language acquisition and change, Aboh shows that language learning is always imperfect: learners' motivation is not to replicate the target language faithfully but to develop a system close enough to the target that guarantees successful communication and group membership.
In this paper we claim that Bare Nominals in Brazilian Portuguese come in two shapes. Real BNs, by which we mean bare count nouns not specified for number and definiteness, correspond to NPs that can only occur as objects of a reduced class of predicates (namely, those that express a have-relation) and are interpreted as property-type expressions. Other BNs can be definite and, although not morphophonologically specified for number, they are DPs with null Determiners morphosyntactically specified for Number features and are interpreted as entity-type expressions. We base our analysis on the distribution and meaning of BNs, by comparing BrP with other Romance languages, mainly (Old and Modern) French on the one hand, and Spanish and Catalan on the other.
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