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The obviation agreement effect: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 28, Lisbon
Abstract
This volume contains a selection of papers of the 28th Going Romance conference, which was organized by the Linguistics centers of Universidade de Lisboa and Universidade Nova de Lisboa in December 2014. It assembles the invited contributions by Alain Rouveret, Guido Mensching, Luigi Rizzi, and Roberta D’Alessandro, and eleven peer-reviewed papers that were presented at the conference or at the workshops on Constituent Order Variation, Crosslinguistic Microvariation in Language Acquisition, and Subordination in Old Romance.
The volume covers a wide range of topics in syntax and its interfaces, and brings to current linguistic theorizing new empirical grounding from Romance languages (including standard, diachronic or regional varieties of Asturian, Brazilian and European Portuguese, Catalan, French, Galician, Italian, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish).
This will be of interest to scholars in Romance and in general linguistics.
In the three decades of its existence, the annual Going Romance conference has turned out to be the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages where current theoretical ideas about language in general and about Romance languages in particular are exchanged. The twenty-ninth Going Romance conference was organized by the Radboud University and took place in December 2015 in Nijmegen. The present volume contains a selection of 18 peer-reviewed articles dealing with syntax, phonology, morphology, semantics and acquisition of the Romance languages. They represent the wide range of topics at the conference and the variety of research carried out on Romance languages within theoretical linguistics and will be of interest to scholars in Romance and in general linguistics.
The volumes Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ contain the selected papers of the Going Romance conferences, a major European annual discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages.
This volume assembles a significant number of selected papers that were presented at the 21st edition of Going Romance, which was organized by the Chair of Romance Linguistics of the University of Amsterdam in December 2007. The range of languages (both standard and non-standard varieties) analyzed in this volume is quite significant: Catalan, French, Italian, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. The volume is quite representative of the spread of the variety of research carried out nowadays on Romance languages within theoretical linguistics and shows the vitality of this research.
The use of ustedes instead of vosotros, in Spanish, and of voces instead of vos, in Portuguese, is similar in both these languages. These phenomena have arisen due to the simplification of plural forms of address, which express both formality and informality. However, not all the agreements of these forms are governed by a syntactic pattern; that is why we can find elements formed on third person plurals linked to others in second person plural. The data from the Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica (ALPI) show the situation of this process in both languages during the early part of the last century, and the factors that can influence it.
The set of person and number features necessary to characterize the pronominal paradigms of the world's languages is highly constrained, and their interaction is demonstrably systematic. We develop a geometric representation of morphosyntactic features which provides a principled explanation for the observed restrictions on these paradigms. The organization of this geometry represents the grammaticalization of fundamental cognitive categories, such as reference, plurality, and taxonomy. We motivate the geometry through the analysis of pronoun paradigms in a broad range of genetically distinct languages.* INTRODUCTION. It is generally accepted that syntactic and phonological representa- tions are formal in nature and highly structured. Morphology, however, is often seen as a gray area in which amorphous bundles of features connect phonology with syntax via a series of ad hoc correspondence rules. Yet it is clear from the pronoun and agreement paradigms of the world's languages that Universal Grammar provides a highly constrained set of morphological features, and moreover that these features are systematically and hierarchically organized.1 In this article we develop a structured representation of person and number features intended to predict the range and types of interactions among them. More specifically, we will motivate the claims in 1. (1) Claims a. The language faculty represents pronominal elements with a geometry of morphological features. b. The organization of this geometry is constrained and motivated by con- ceptual considerations. c. Crosslinguistic variation and paradigm-internal gaps and syncretisms are constrained by the hierarchical organization of features in the universal geometry.
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 Calabrese, Anna Cardinaletti, Guglielmo Cinque, Diana Cresti, Guiliana Giusti, Richard Kayne, Nicola Munaro, Mair Parry, Cecilia Poletto, Giampaolo Salvi, John Trumper, and Raffaella Zanuttini. The chapters in this book offer both novel analyses of familiar data, as well as analyses that are themselves altogether novel. The contributors — many of whom gathered much of the data themselves—offer insights into how Italian dialect data informs our understanding of such issues in syntactic theory as clausal structure, pronominal syntax, verbal morph-syntax, subject clitics, object clitics, interrogatives, imperatives, restructuring, and the syntax-semantics interface. This latest edition to the Comparative Syntax series will be of interest not only to researchers in Italian dialect and Romance syntax, but to scholars and advanced students interested in syntactic theory.
I will be concerned in this paper with the binding conditions — the structural requirements governing certain anaphoric relations. I will give particular attention to “Condition C” effects, and will argue that, contrary to a currently popular view, something like Condition C does indeed exist. That is, I will display a wide variety of facts motivating Condition C which cannot be handled by, for example, independently motivated pragmatic constraints (see Reinhart (1983) for extensive discussion of such constraints) or by core properties of the theory of “Linking” (Higginbotham (1983)). A number of the arguments will be seen to carry over to Condition B as well. [It is on these grounds, of course, rather than on logical or biological grounds, that I will attempt to motivate the “necessity” of binding conditions, as one can surely conceive of an organism, even an evolutionarily successful one, whose linguistic system allows, say, the binding of a pronoun within its governing category.] In the course of the discssion, it will become evident that a partial reformulation of Condition C is in order, but its basic nature as a structural constraint on binding will remain intact.
This book adopts the strong Minimalist thesis that grammar contains no rules or principles specifically designed to account for anaphors and pronouns. Lexically, anaphors have unvalued It-features, which need to be valued under Agree. This leads to the novel assumption that anaphors c-command their antecedents. This idea underlies the analysis of both simplex and complex reflexives. Simplex reflexives are merged in a configuration of inalienable possession, with the simplex reflexive c-commanding its antecedent inside a possessive small clause. Self-reflexives share the syntax of self-intensifiers and floating quantifiers, raising to a vP-adjoined position to c-command their antecedents. In contrast to anaphors, pronouns have lexically valued It-features. Postsyntactic lexical insertion accounts for absence of Principle B effects observed in many languages. The behaviour of pronouns and self-forms in snake-sentences is related to the nature of the Axpart projection of the locative preposition. Semantically, the difference between simplex and complex reflexives derives from the way they refer to spatiotemporal stages of their antecedents.
The status of the expression a gente (lit. the people) in European Portuguese is the topic of this paper. We revisit its classical analysis, treating it as a pronoun, and the explanation for the patterns of agreement it may trigger on the inflected verb. In particular, the paper addresses Taylor's (2009) argument against the pronominal status of a gente, and argues that it can be analyzed as a regular DP. We compare a gente with other pronouns, showing that there are more robust regularities than those described in Taylor's arguments, but adopt part of his analysis to accommodate the variable status of agreement patterns under a phase-based approach.
Dechaine and Wiltschko (2002) argue that, in English, 1st and 2nd person pronouns belong to a different syntactic category than 3rd person pronouns. One of their main arguments is the claim that English 1st and 2nd person pronouns cannot be used as bound variables, unlike 3rd person pronouns. In this squib, I discuss data showing that English 1st and 2nd person pronouns actually do allow bound variable interpretations
This article focuses on sequences of Romance clitics wherein a pronominal form is replaced by another clitic exponent, which is prima facie morphologically unmotivated. Bonet (1991) and Harris (1994) among others have argued that these synthetic clusters can be due to the insertion of an elsewhere clitic: a default, nonspecified item that is inserted as a last resort whenever the insertion of other clitics is ruled out. In this article, independent pieces of evidence gathered from Italian and Italian dialects are shown to support this hypothesis.
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This article argues that natural languages have two binding strategies that create two types of bound variable pronouns. Pronouns of the first type, which include local fake indexicals, reflexives, relative pronouns, and PRO, may be born with a "defective" feature set. They can acquire the features they are missing (if any) from verbal functional heads carrying standard λ-operators that bind them. Pronouns of the second type, which include long-distance fake indexicals, are born fully specified and receive their interpretations via context-shifting λ-operators (Cable 2005). Both binding strategies are freely available and not subject to syntactic constraints. Local anaphora emerges under the assumption that feature transmission and morphophonological spell-out are limited to small windows of operation, possibly the phases of Chomsky 2001. If pronouns can be born underspecified, we need an account of what the possible initial features of a pronoun can be and how it acquires the features it may be missing. The article develops such an account by deriving a space of possible paradigms for referential and bound variable pronouns from the semantics of pronominal features. The result is a theory of pronouns that predicts the typology and individual characteristics of both referential and bound variable pronouns.
In order to account for morphosyntactic microvariation, an approach based on silent elements provides an alternative (one that is more tightly tied to other aspects of syntax) to an approach based on syncretism: languages are not more or less syncretic, they just happen to have a certain distribution of empty morphemes. This chapter analyses cases of 3rd person clitics in French and Italian (on, ci), which, in addition to their impersonal use, are also used as 1st person plural pronouns. It proposes that these impersonal pronouns do not convey 1st person plural, but rather a silent WE pronoun present in the syntax does. The chapter analyzes which element (WE o impersonal clitic) is responsible for a variety of syntactic phenomena. © 2009 organization and editorial matter José M. Brucart, Anna Gavarró, and Jaume Solà © 2009 the chapters their various authors. All rights reserved.
Chomsky (1981: 188, 220; 1986a: 166) formulates the Binding Theory essentially as in (1).
(1) (A) An anaphor must be locally bound
(B) A pronoun must not be locally bound
(C) An R-expression must not be bound
The notion ‘bound’ is defined as ‘c-commanded by a co-referential element’. As for the notion ‘locally’, that of Chomsky (1986a) differs somewhat from that of Chomsky (1981), and much recent literature addresses the issue, especially in connection with the phenomenon of ‘Long Distance Anaphora’. (For relevant discussion see Burzio (1989c and references therein) and also Levinson, this volume.) For most of our purposes, it will be sufficient to assume Chomsky's (1981: 188) ‘within its [i.e. the anaphor's/pronoun‘s] governing category’, or even the formally simpler (though empirically less adequate) ‘within the same minimal clause’. The empirical effects of the Binding Theory in (1) can then be illustrated as in (2a, b, c) – instances of local binding, non-local binding, and no binding respectively. In each case the connecting line expresses intended co-reference, much as co-indexation in later examples. Each ungrammatical case is accounted for by the principle indicated in parentheses.
In this article, we argue that, under current conceptions of the architec-ture of the grammar, apparent wh-dependencies can, in principle, arise from either a movement or a base-generation strategy, where Agree establishes the syntactic connection in the latter case. The crucial diag-nostics are not locality effects, but identity effects. We implement the base-generation analysis using a small set of semantically interpretable features, together with a simple universal syntax-semantics correspon-dence. We show that parametric variation arises because of the differ-ent ways the features are bundled on functional heads. We further argue that it is the bundling of two features on a single lexical item, together with the correspondence that requires them to be interpreted apart, that is responsible for the displacement property of human lan-guages.
The principle of language that allows one to refer to a statue by using the name of the person the statue portrays (the statue rule) is generally taken to be a rule of pragmatics, well outside concerns of syntactic theory. However, there proves to be an interaction between binding theory and the statue rule, impossible if binding theory is syntactic and the statue rule is pragmatic. A number of possible solutions are explored that keep traditional binding theory intact; these all prove problematic. The solution to be developed extends the theory of binding of Jackendoff (1990a), in which binding is a relation among constituents of conceptual structure, and in which syntactic anaphora is the syntactic expression of such binding. A conceptual structure binding condition is proposed that accounts for the interaction of binding and the statue rule; this also accounts for several problematic cases normally taken to fall under syntactic binding theory.
This paper deals with the so-called Person Case Constraint (Bonet, E. 1991), a universal constraint blocking accusative clitics
and object agreement morphemes other than third person when a dative is inserted in the same clitic/agreement cluster. The
aim of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that the scope of the PCC is considerably broader than assumed in previous work,
and that neither its formulation in terms of person (1st/2nd vs. 3rd)-case (accusative vs. dative) restrictions nor its morphological
nature are part of the right descriptive generalization. We present evidence (i) that the PCC is triggered by the presence
of an animacy feature in the object’s agreement set; (ii) that it is not case dependent, also showing up in languages that
lack dative case; and (iii) that it is not morphologically bound. Second, we argue that the PCC, even if it is modified accordingly,
still puts together two different properties of the agreement system that should be set apart: (i) a cross-linguistic sensitivity
of object agreement to animacy and (ii) a similarly widespread restriction on multiple object agreement observed crosslinguistically.
These properties lead us to propose a new generalization, the Object Agreement Constraint (OAC): if the verbal complex encodes object agreement, no other argument can be licensed through verbal agreement.