Linguistic Variation: Structure and Interpretation
Abstract
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.
The contrast between languages such as Italian that allow subjects of tensed sentences to be null (i.e., pro-drop languages) and those like French that do not (i.e., non-pro-drop languages) is a classic issue for comparative syntactic research. Nevertheless, while several studies have been dedicated to pro-drop languages, distinguishing across different types, subject omission in non-pro-drop languages is generally misjudged as a marginal or substandard phenomenon. However, a more careful examination reveals that the occurrence of Null Subjects (NSs) in non-pro-drop languages is associated with distinct semantic and discourse imports. Based on a systematic corpus analysis, this work will confirm that NSs do occur in Colloquial French, especially in the case of expletive subjects. Furthermore, evidence will be provided for a crucial connection between subject omission, expletive types, and the morpho-syntactic categories of person/number for argument pronouns. This pilot work can thus open new perspectives for future research.
In this work, we analyze the narrow focus strategies in the written Italian of university students. Although prosodic prominence is a characterizing feature of focus—functionally more important than morphosyntactic marking, according to some authors—we assume that prosody is essential for language comprehension and hence, in the written modality, focus prosody is assigned by the reader on the basis of the morphosyntactic cues that mark focus. The data on which we base our analysis are selected from two existing corpora, containing more formal and less formal monological texts produced by students attending university throughout Italy. The investigation brings to light a similar pattern, as well as some differences, between the two sub-corpora examined. Besides a widespread use of focus particles, and the virtual absence of the O(S)V strategy, we noticed many instances of focalization inside the copular domain, particularly in the more formal sub-corpus. This pattern is discussed in relation to some of the relevant literature and the nature of the texts examined.
Romance free choice items (FCIs) are frequently pointed out as resulting from the grammaticalization of the relative determiner qual ‘which’ and an element derived from a volition verb, such as querer ‘want’. Contrary to other Romance FCIs, Portuguese qualquer ‘any’ remains understudied, therefore motivating the current research. In this article, I investigate the syntax and semantics of qualquer, from a diachronic perspective, based on examples extracted from 13th and 14th century texts. Analysis of contexts of occurrence of qualquer showed that, in Old Portuguese, the elements qual and quer could combine in different configurations, corresponding to different structures. On the one hand, the relative determiner qual could combine with a form of the volition verb in ever free relative clauses. On the other hand, qual and quer were also combined in appositive relative clauses, which seem to be at the core of postnominal qualquer. However, similar to what is argued for Old Spanish, qualquer was also a quantifier-like element, occurring in prenominal position and giving rise to universal interpretations. The different origins of prenominal and postnominal qualquer may help explain the different readings in contemporary data.
In traditional linguistics, pronouns are divided into two classes: those that can bear word stress, coined "strong", "full" or "tonal", and those that cannot, coined "weak", "clitic", or "atonal". However, in the last decades, research on this topic has shown that items generally labeled as clitics are far more complex. Somewhere between words and affixes, these hybrid linguistic entities challenge both description and modeling. As for Romanian, the debate on weak (i.e., clitic) pronouns has been dominated by the question of their categorial status: are these items clitics or affixes? In this article, I present and scrutinize different approaches that support the claim that there are differences between proclitics and enclitics, i.e., between clitics occurring before vs. after the verb; this includes not only positional, but also featural differences. I identify various types of ambiguities in Romanian that could lead to improper data interpretation, and, based on an analysis of syllabicity-the most salient feature of Romanian weak pronouns-I refute claims for treating clitics in preverbal position differently than in postverbal position. Furthermore, using evidence from both historical data and data pertaining to language varieties, I show regularities in the Romanian weak pronoun system, bringing evidence against the claim that Romanian weak pronouns show a great deal of idiosyncrasies.
Existing evidence suggests that the parser avoids positing a movement dependency if the grammar does not require doing so. By investigating the processing of two syntactic ambiguities that have not been the subject of processing studies before, we provide more conclusive evidence for this parsing bias in two Romance languages: French and Italian. In two acceptability‐judgment experiments and two self‐paced‐reading studies, we found that sentences that involved a filler–gap dependency (indirect questions in Italian and free relatives in French) were dispreferred compared to sentences involving the same lexical material but no filler–gap dependency (declarative complement clauses in both languages). Crucially, the filler–gap dependency was not dispreferred when there was no available competitor. We conclude by discussing the relevance of these results for syntactic theory, in particular for the questionable status of Merge over Move as a grammatical principle.
This book explores the nature of finiteness, one of most commonly used notions in descriptive and theoretical linguistics but possibly one of the least understood. Scholars representing a variety of theoretical positions seek to clarify what it is and to establish its usefulness and limitations. In doing so they reveal cross-linguistically valid correlations between subject licensing, subject agreement, tense, syntactic opacity, and independent clausehood; show how these properties are associated with finiteness; and discuss what this means for the content of the category. The issues explored include how different grammatical theories represent finiteness; whether the finite/nonfinite distinction is universal; whether there are degrees of finiteness; whether the syntactic notion of finiteness has a semantic corollary; whether and how finiteness is subject to change; and how finiteness features in language acquisition. Irina Nikolaeva opens the book by describing the history of finiteness and its place in current thinking and research. She then introduces the chapters of the book, comparing the authors’ perspectives and showing what they have in common. The book is then divided into four parts. Part I considers the role finiteness plays in formal syntactic theories and Part II its deployment in functional theories and as the subject of research in typology. Parts III and IV look respectively at the finite/nonfinite opposition in individual languages and at the role finiteness plays in linguistic change and linguistic development. The book is written and structured to appeal to scholars and students of syntax and general linguistics at graduate level and above.
In this thesis I explore opaque interactions of Merge and Agree in order to gain insights into the nature of elementary operations and their mode of application (simultaneous vs. sequential, extrinsic vs. intrinsic ordering). I investigate a configuration in which the Cycle does not predict an order among operations, i.e. in which a single head triggers both Merge and Agree. I argue (i) for more fine-grained elementary operations, in particular for a distinction between different types of Merge because they can apply at different stages of the derivation relative to Agree, and (ii) for extrinsic ordering of the operation-inducing features on a head. I investigate the configuration in which a single head triggers more than one operation because the Cycle is too weak to make any predictions about the order of operations. The effect in (i) becomes visible when Merge is interleaved with Agree: Empirical evidence suggests that Merge can apply both before and after Agree within a single language because it can feed / bleed Agree and also counter-feed / -bleed Agree: Merge > Agree > Merge. This symmetric order cannot be derived if, as assumed in recent literature in transparent interactions, there is a language-specific parameter that simply orders Merge relative to Agree. Based on the order where Agree “splits up” the Merge operation I show that we need to distinguish between final and intermediate movement steps (two types of internal Merge), external vs. internal Merge, and movement type-specific final and intermediate movement steps. The first distinction is motivated for interactions of Merge with upward and downward Agree. The empirical basis are reflexes of movement, which I take to be the result of a feeding interaction of Agree and internal Merge. I identify four patterns of reflexes and argue that variation is best analysed as a consequence of reordering of operations on a head: Movement steps that apply before Agree can feed or bleed Agree; those that apply after Agree have the opposite effect, i.e. they counter-feed/-bleed Agree. The ordering approach presents the first uniform analysis of these patterns; in addition, it can account for multiple reflexes and optionality of reflexes. I argue against alternative enriched representations analyses of opacity for empirical and conceptual reasons (incompatibility with Minimalist assumptions and modern theories of movement). Given that the approach crucially relies on timing (only a single operation can apply at any given stage of the derivation), it provides strong evidence for a strictly derivational model of grammar. In addition, I argue on the basis of the cross-linguistic variation that (i) final and intermediate movement steps in a long movement dependency are triggered by different features, (ii) that long movement always applies successive-cyclically even if we do not see a reflex of movement in all intermediate landing sites, (iii) that Agree applies in the syntax and is not a post-syntactic operation, and (iv) that the timing of edge feature discharge must be more flexible than proposed in the literature.
Sardinian varieties display stress shifts under cliticization with imperative and
gerund verb forms. Stress placement is related to the type and number of clitics
associated to the verbal host. Up to three enclitics are acceptable. They can be clitic
personal pronouns, as well as locative and partitive clitics. From a typological point
of view, three different stress shift patterns are attested in Sardinian varieties. The
first one is from Campidanese Sardinian, the second one from Logudorese-Nuorese
Sardinian, whereas the last one is from the transitional area between Logudorese-
Nuorese and Campidanese Sardinian. In the case of clitic clusters, all Sardinian
varieties act in the same way: stress shifts to the penultimate syllable of the host +
clitic(s) sequence. A good degree of variation is available in the case of adjunction
of a single clitic. Thus, while in Logudorese-Nuorese Sardinian, a single clitic has no
effect on the stress of its verbal host, the other Sardinian varieties display two different
stress shift patterns. In Campidanese Sardinian, the stress shifts to the final syllable
of the sequence with 1st and 2nd person clitic pronouns, while with 3rd person clitics
(non-reflexive) and partitive and locative clitics, the stress is placed on the penultimate
syllable. In the transitional area, single clitics (of any category) cause the same stress
shift placement as in the case of clitic clusters (to the penultimate syllable). All
combinations of clitics will be taken into account in order to determine the conditions
under which a stress shift may be observed across Sardinian varieties.
In most Romance languages clitics are stress neutral: when they attach to a host, they have no effect on stress placement: this is the
case of Italian and Spanish. However, a small group of Romance
languages is exceptional in this respect, e.g., Neapolitan and some
Catalan, Occitan and Lucanian varieties. Sardinian is among them.
Sardinian varieties display stress shift under cliticization in the imperative and gerund forms. Differences can be found across these
varieties with respect to stress placement (Lai 2016). Here we will
focus on the behaviour of Nuorese Sardinian, a variety from the
central-northern area of the island of Sardinia. We will show that
Sardinian varieties are unique in the Romance domain because they
display stress shift not only with enclitics but also with proclitics.
This is evidence for the proposal that Sardinian clitic clusters (both
in enclisis and proclisis) constitute a prosodic word of their own.
Positional Effects in Sardinian Muta cum Liquida is a work of historical linguistics that deals with the phenomena that affect muta cum liquida clusters from Old Sardinian to modern Sardinian dialects, namely lenition, liquid deletion, and various metatheses. A multidisciplinary approach has been adopted that involves dialectological, philological, and theoretical perspectives. Attention has been paid to both the areal distribution of the various phenomena and their presence in six ancient Sardinian collections dating from the 11th to the 14th centuries. The database was then analyzed within the CVCV model (Lowenstamm 1996, Scheer 2004), a theoretical approach that explains structural changes as a result of the positional effects determined by government and licensing.
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.
Particles are words that do not change their form through inflection and do not fit easily into the established system of parts of speech. Examples include the negative particle “not,” the infinitival particle “to” (as in “to go”), and do and let in “do tell me” and “let’s go.” Particles investigates the constraints on the distribution and placement of verbal particles. A proper understanding of these constraints yields insight into the structure of various secondary predicative constructions. Starting out from a detailed analysis of complex particle constructions, den Dikken brings forth accounts of triadic constructions and Dative Shift, and the relationship between dative and transitive causative constructions--all of them built on the basic structural template proposed from complex particle constructions. Drawing on data from Norwegian, English, Dutch, German, West Flemish, and other languages, this book will interest a wide audience of students and specialists.
Phi-features, such as person, number, and gender, present a rare opportunity for syntacticians, morphologists and semanticists to collaborate on a research enterprise in which they all have an equal stake and which they all approach with data and insights from their own fields. This volume is the first to attempt to bring together these different strands and styles of research. It presents the core questions, major results, and new directions of this emergent area of linguistic theory and shows how Phi Theory casts light on the nature of interfaces and the structure of the grammar. The book will interest scholars and students of all aspects of linguistic theory at graduate level and above.
As any quick survey of the syntactic literature will show, there are almost as many different views of ergativity as there are so-called ergative languages (languages whose basic clause structure instantiates an ergative case-marking or agreement pattern). While ergativity is sometimes referred to as a typological characteristic of languages, research on the phenomenon has made it more and more clear that (a) languages do not fall clearly into one or the other of the ergative/absolutive vs. nominative/accusative categories and (b) ergative characteristics are not consistent from language to language. This volume contributes to both the theoretical and descriptive literature on ergativity and adds results from experimental investigations of ergativity. The chapters cover overview approaches within generative, typological, and functional paradigms, as well as approaches to the core morpho-syntactic building blocks of an ergative construction (absolutive case and licensing, and ergative case and licensing); common related constructions (anti-passive); common related properties (split-ergativity, syntactic vs. morphological ergativity, word order, the interaction of agreement patterns and ergativity); and extensions and permutations of ergativity (nominalizations, voice systems). While the editors all work within the generative framework and investigate the syntactic properties of ergativity through fieldwork, and many of the chapters represent similar research, there are also chapters representing different frameworks (functional, typological) and different approaches (experimental, diachronic). The theoretical chapters touch on many different languages representing a wide range of language families, and there are sixteen case studies that are more descriptive in nature, attesting to both the pervasiveness and diversity of ergative patterns.
Grammatical categories (e.g. complementizer, negation, auxiliary, case) are some of the most important building blocks of syntax and morphology. Categorization therefore poses fundamental questions about grammatical structures and about the lexicon from which they are built. Adopting a 'lexicalist' stance, the authors argue that lexical items are not epiphenomena, but really represent the mapping of sound to meaning (and vice versa) that classical conceptions imply. Their rule-governed combination creates words, phrases and sentences - structured by the 'categories' that are the object of the present inquiry. They argue that the distinction between functional and non-functional categories, between content words and inflections, is not as deeply rooted in grammar as is often thought. In their argumentation they lay the emphasis on empirical evidence, drawn mainly from dialectal variation in the Romance languages, as well as from Albanian.
This book contains a peer-reviewed selection of papers presented at the 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 46) that took place in April 2016 at Stony Brook University (SUNY), New York. The most current research and debates on bilingualism, historical linguistics, morphology, phonology, semantics, sociolinguistics, and syntax can be found in its pages. This collection will be of interest to Romance linguists and general linguists as well.
A new approach to grammar and meaning of relational nouns is presented along with its empirical consequences.
In A Syntax of Substance, David Adger proposes a new approach to phrase structure that eschews functional heads and labels structures exocentrically. His proposal simultaneously simplifies the syntactic system and restricts the range of possible structures, ruling out the ubiquitous (remnant) roll-up derivations and forcing a separation of arguments from their apparent heads. This new system has a number of empirical consequences, which Adger explores in the domain of relational nominals across different language families, including Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Polynesian, and Semitic. He shows that the relationality of such nouns as hand, edge, or mother—which seem to have as part of their meaning a relation between substances—is actually part of the syntactic representation in which they are used rather than an inherent part of their meaning. This empirical outcome follows directly from the new syntactic system, as does a novel analysis of PP complements to nouns and possessors. Given this, he argues that nouns can, in general, be thought of as simply specifications of substance, differentiating them from true predicates.
A Syntax of Substance offers an innovative contribution to debates in theoretical syntax about the nature of syntactic representations and how they connect to semantic interpretation and linear order.
A proposal for a radical new view of case morphology, supported by a detailed investigation of some of the thorniest topics in Russian grammar.
In this book, David Pesetsky argues that the peculiarities of Russian nominal phrases provide significant clues concerning the syntactic side of morphological case. Pesetsky argues against the traditional view that case categories such as nominative or genitive have a special status in the grammar of human languages. Supporting his argument with a detailed analysis of a complex array of morpho-syntactic phenomena in the Russian noun phrase (with brief excursions to other languages), he proposes instead that the case categories are just part-of-speech features copied as morphology from head to dependent as syntactic structure is built.
Pesetsky presents a careful investigation of one of the thorniest topics in Russian grammar, the morpho-syntax of noun phrases with numerals (including those traditionally called the paucals). He argues that these bewilderingly complex facts can be explained if case categories are viewed simply as parts of speech, assigned as morphology. Pesetsky's analysis is notable for offering a new theoretical perspective on some of the most puzzling areas of Russian grammar, a highly original account of nominal case that significantly affects our understanding of an important property of language.
This monograph sets out to derive the effects of standard constraints on displacement like the Minimal Link Condition (MLC) and the Condition on Extraction Domain (CED) from more basic principles in a minimalist approach. Assuming that movement via phase edges is possible only in the presence of edge features on phase heads, simple restrictions can be introduced on when such edge features can be inserted derivationally. The resulting system is shown to correctly predict MLC/CED effects (including certain exceptions, like intervention without c-command and melting). In addition, it derives operator-island effects, a restriction on extraction from verb-second clauses, and island repair by ellipsis. The approach presupposes that syntactic operations apply in a fixed order: Timing emerges as crucial. Thus, the book provides new arguments for a strictly derivational organization of syntax. Accordingly, it should be of interest not only to all syntacticians working on islands, but more generally to all scholars interested in the overall organization of grammar.
This book presents an experimental and theoretical investigation of the interplay between information structure, word order alternations, and prosody in Italian. Left/right dislocations, focus fronting, and other reordering phenomena are analyzed, taking into account their morphosyntactic and prosodic properties. It is argued that a restricted set of discourse-related properties are inserted in the numeration as formal features. These discourse-related features drive the syntactic derivation and the formation of the prosodic representation in compliance with the T-model of grammar. Based on the cartographic approach, this study proposes a model of the syntax–prosody interface in which the phonological computation of prosody is fed by syntactically encoded properties of information structure. However, this computation is also governed by structural requirements intrinsic to the phonological domain, and thus, a bijective relation between information structure and prosodic representation is not guaranteed. The monograph will be of interest to any linguist concerned with syntax, information structure, and prosody.
An argument that patterns of allomorphy reveal that morphology and phonology behave in a way that provides evidence for a Localist theory of grammar.
In Localism versus Globalism in Morphology and Phonology, David Embick offers the first detailed examination of morphology and phonology from a phase-cyclic point of view (that is, one that takes into account recent developments in Distributed Morphology and the Minimalist program) and the only recent detailed treatment of allomorphy, a phenomenon that is central to understanding how the grammar of human language works. In addition to making new theoretical proposals about morphology and phonology in terms of a cyclic theory, Embick addresses a schism in the field between phonological theories such as Optimality Theory and other (mostly syntactic) theories such as those associated with the Minimalist program. He presents sustained empirical arguments that the Localist view of grammar associated with the Minimalist program (and Distributed Morphology in particular) is correct, and that the Globalism espoused by many forms of Optimality Theory is incorrect. In the “derivational versus nonderivational” debate in linguistic theory, Embick's arguments come down squarely on the derivational side.
Determining how to make empirical comparisons between such large positions, and the different frameworks that embody them, is at the heart of the book. Embick argues that patterns of allomorphy implicate general questions about locality and specific questions about the manner in which (morpho)syntax relates to (morpho)phonology. Allomorphy thus provides a crucial test case for comparing Localist and Globalist approaches to grammar.
One of the main discoveries of generative syntax is that long‐distance extraction proceeds in a successive‐cyclic manner, in that these dependencies are comprised of a sequence of local extraction steps. This article provides support for this general picture by presenting novel parsing evidence for intermediate landing sites created by successive‐cyclic movement, and it uses this parsing evidence to investigate the distribution of intermediate gaps. The central findings of this article are that (i) there is evidence that successive‐cyclic movement targets the edge of CPs and that (ii) there is no comparable evidence for an intermediate landing site at vP edges. These findings are fully consistent with the classical view of successive cyclicity, according to which only finite‐clause edges host intermediate landing sites. In the context of phase theory, these results receive a straightforward explanation if CPs are phases but vPs are not. The processing evidence presented here thus provides a novel diagnostic for the distribution of phases and new evidence for their active role in online sentence processing.
The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. © 1998 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co., D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.
This article concentrates on nominal possessives (John’s friend) rather than on verbal possessives (John has a friend). In John’s friend, John is the possessor, and friend describes the entity possessed (the possessee). Nominal possessives constitute a major construction type in the languages of the world. In contrast with a sortal noun (e.g., person), friend is a (two-place) relational noun: a person counts as a friend only in virtue of standing in a particular relationship with another individual. Relational nouns are an important element in the study of possessives because the content of a possessive typically, perhaps characteristically, depends on the content of a relational nominal. Possessives provide particularly compelling support for type shifting as a general principle of syntactic and semantic composition. Possessives also inform debates involving definiteness, binding, and a wide variety of other semantic phenomena.