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September 12, 2006
Abstract
In the tradition of Generative Grammar, several authors have explained the impossibility of vp -Ellipsis for Romance Languages following the hypothesis that vp -Ellipsis in these languages is not licensed by the head of infl as it is in English. It has been pointed out that in French, for instance, vp -Ellipsis is expressed by Stripping. The idea that Romance languages show tp -Ellipsis or tp -Deletion has emerged recently. In this paper I intend to demonstrate that, concerning Catalan, three related constructions, namely Stripping, negative-contrasting constructions and tp -Ellipsis are independent and clearly specified. This evidence will come from the analysis of the so-called information packaging . I'm going to argue that there are two different interpretative processes. On the one hand, Stripping and negative-contrasting constructions are under the control of focus by means of parallel foci in the former, and contrastive foci in the latter. On the other hand, tp -Ellipsis constructions are not constrained by the information packaging, although this notion might help to disambiguate the target in certain cases. Finally, we observe that the polarity particles are expressions whose function is to select the appropriate antecedent in the three cases we are concerned here.
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This paper examines the syntax of the indefinite pronoun nome in Eastern Abruzzese. Nome is syntactically intriguing as it appears in a subject position which is not available to other NPs. Moreover, it does not have any corresponding form in any other Italian dialect, except for Sardinian and some Marchigiano varieties. We first show that nome is a clitic subject, more precisely a weak pronoun subject in the sense of Cardinaletti and Starke (1999). Then, we draw a tentative sketch for the syntactic word patterns in EA. We argue that the properties and the behavior of nome support those views that recognize the need for specialized subject positions (Cardinaletti 1997, 2004).
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The aim of this paper is two-fold: on the one hand, its purpose is to show that Stylistic Fronting was very productive in Old French; on the other, its rationale is the introduction of a novel hypothesis according to which Stylistically Fronted elements in Old French target a special Topic phrase. This phrase is labelled TopicP+ to distinguish it from TopicP, the position where topicalized elements in V2 structures raise to in Old French. The special topic position accessed by Stylistic Fronting is motivated by the main pattern emerging from a series of carefully studied Old French texts: two elements can undergo SF at the same time, but the two elements cannot both be XPs or both be heads. It is further demonstrated that the subject gap constraint that accompanies Stylistic Fronting in Modern Insular Scandinavian languages is also relevant for Old French and that the most natural way to account for it is to suppose that Stylistically Fronted XPs move through (rather than into, cf. Holmberg 2000) the specifier of Spec-TP. This is made to follow from the fact that TP in Old French is a (strong) phase. The account relies on the splitting of the EPP between two features, [P] and [D], and on the idea that these features may not necessarily come packaged as a bundle. [P] can appear on one head while [D] surfaces on another, with [P] depending on [D]. In the second part of the paper, an explanation is given as to why Stylistic Fronting disappeared from French grammar: the hypothesis put forward is that once verbal agreement lost its pronominal properties, the EPP could no longer undergo feature fission and spread its features on distinct heads, since the mechanism by which the [D] feature on T 0 is checked by the verb's agreement is a necessary condition for the occurrence of Stylistic Fronting.
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The development of a special 1s pres ind marker /-j/ for the four forms so ‘to be’, do ‘to give’, vo ‘to go’, and estó ‘to be, stand’ between the 13th and the 16th centuries requires reevaluation, continuing the study by Gago-Jover (1997) and taking advantage of the new availability of extensive data bases (ADMYTE/HSMS, Corpus del español, CORDE). Understanding analogy as the essential theoretical construct for morphological change and considering the entire Romance domain, the etymological source for this marker /-j/ is argued to be a local analogy of so to its 1s preterit /'fuj/. This solution can account for the attested chronology of the change (so »soy significantly predates the other changes). Two largely independent regional developments in Castilian and Leonese provide contrasting multi-stage diffusion patterns for affecting the closed subset of the four 1s pres ind verb forms. The received opinion that /-j/ derives from the Medieval Spanish locative adverb (h)y ‘there’, must be discarded (Lloyd 1987, Penny 2002); other proposed solutions may have codetermined the change, but remain marginal. The study contributes to the debate on the architecture of morphology in linguistic theory, to the need for philological critique in dealing with historical texts, and to the elucidation of a long-standing problem of Spanish historical morphology.
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