Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance 9783110311785

Table of contents :
Preface......Page 5
Acknowledgments......Page 7
Table of contents......Page 9
Grammatical interfaces in Romance languages: An introduction......Page 11
I. Sound and structure......Page 31
1. Surface sound and underlying structure: The phonetics-phonology interface......Page 33
2. Segmental phenomena and their interactions: Evidence for prosodic organization and the architecture of grammar......Page 51
3. Prosodic phonology and its interfaces......Page 85
4. Phonology and morphology in Optimality Theory......Page 115
5. Inflectional verb morphology......Page 159
II. Structure and meaning......Page 195
6. Meaning of words and meaning of sentences......Page 197
7. Morphology and semantics: Aspect and modality......Page 223
8. (In)definiteness, specificity, and differential object marking......Page 251
9. Agreement restrictions and agreement oddities......Page 277
10. Auxiliary selection......Page 305
III. Sound, structure, and meaning......Page 337
11. Subjects, null subjects, and expletives......Page 339
12. Object clitics......Page 373
13. Nominalizations......Page 401
14. Information structure, prosody, and word order......Page 429
15 VP and TP ellipsis: Sentential polarity and information structure......Page 467
16. Existential constructions......Page 497
IV. The role of the interfaces in language acquisition and change......Page 527
17. Acquiring multilingual phonologies (2L1, L2 and L3): Are the difficulties in the interfaces?......Page 529
18. Interfaces with syntax in language acquisition......Page 561
19. The role of the interfaces in syntactic change......Page 597
20. Interfacing interfaces: Quechua and Spanish in the Andes......Page 617
21. Grammaticalization and pragmaticalization......Page 645
22. Changes at the syntax-discourse interface......Page 669
Index......Page 693

Citation preview

Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance MRL 10

Manuals of Romance Linguistics Manuels de linguistique romane Manuali di linguistica romanza Manuales de lingüística románica

Edited by Günter Holtus and Fernando Sánchez Miret

Volume 10

Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance

Edited by Susann Fischer and Christoph Gabriel

ISBN 978-3-11-031178-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-031186-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039483-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. 6 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: © Marco2811/fotolia Typesetting: RoyalStandard, Hong Kong Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Manuals of Romance Linguistics The new international handbook series Manuals of Romance Linguistics (MRL) will offer an extensive, systematic and state-of-the-art overview of linguistic research in the entire field of present-day Romance Studies. MRL aims to update and expand the contents of the two major reference works available to date: Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik (LRL) (1988–2005, vol. 1–8) and Romanische Sprachgeschichte (RSG) (2003–2008, vol. 1–3). It will also seek to integrate new research trends as well as topics that have not yet been explored systematically. Given that a complete revision of LRL and RSG would not be feasible, at least not in a sensible timeframe, the MRL editors have opted for a modular approach that is much more flexible: The series will include approximately 60 volumes (each comprised of approx. 400–600 pages and 15–30 chapters). Each volume will focus on the most central aspects of its topic in a clear and structured manner. As a series, the volumes will cover the entire field of present-day Romance Linguistics, but they can also be used individually. Given that the work on individual MRL volumes will be nowhere near as time-consuming as that on a major reference work in the style of LRL, it will be much easier to take into account even the most recent trends and developments in linguistic research. MRL’s languages of publication are French, Spanish, Italian, English and, in exceptional cases, Portuguese. Each volume will consistently be written in only one of these languages. In each case, the choice of language will depend on the specific topic. English will be used for topics that are of more general relevance beyond the field of Romance Studies (for example Manual of Language Acquisition or Manual of Romance Languages in the Media). The focus of each volume will be either (1) on one specific language or (2) on one specific research field. Concerning volumes of the first type, each of the Romance languages – including Romance-based creoles – will be discussed in a separate volume. A particularly strong focus will be placed on the smaller languages (linguae minores) that other reference works have not treated extensively. MRL will comprise volumes on Friulian, Corsican, Galician, Vulgar Latin, among others, as well as a Manual of Judaeo-Romance Linguistics and Philology. Volumes of the second type will be devoted to the systematic presentation of all traditional and new fields of Romance Linguistics, with the research methods of Romance Linguistics being discussed in a separate volume. Dynamic new research fields and trends will yet again be of particular interest, because although they have become increasingly important in both research and teaching, older reference works have not dealt with them at all or touched upon them only tangentially. MRL will feature volumes dedicated to research fields such as Grammatical Interfaces, Youth Language Research,

VI

Manuals of Romance Linguistics

Urban Varieties, Computational Linguistics, Neurolinguistics, Sign Languages or Forensic Linguistics. Each volume will offer a structured and informative, easy-to-read overview of the history of research as well as of recent research trends. We are delighted that internationally-renowned colleagues from a variety of Romance-speaking countries and beyond have agreed to collaborate on this series and take on the editorship of individual MRL volumes. Thanks to the expertise of the volume editors responsible for the concept and structure of their volumes, as well as for the selection of suitable authors, MRL will not only summarize the current state of knowledge in Romance Linguistics, but will also present much new information and recent research results. As a whole, the MRL series will present a panorama of the discipline that is both extensive and up-to-date, providing interesting and relevant information and useful orientation for every reader, with detailed coverage of specific topics as well as general overviews of present-day Romance Linguistics. We believe that the series will offer a fresh, innovative approach, suited to adequately map the constant advancement of our discipline. Günter Holtus (Lohra/Göttingen) Fernando Sánchez Miret (Salamanca) July 2016

Acknowledgments Editing a manual is a collective effort. High standards can only be met by drawing on the expertise of various scholars from many different linguistic disciplines, be it as authors of the individual chapters or as reviewers and consultants. The editors would like to express their gratitude to the many individuals who generously offered their time and expertise to improve the quality of the present volume. The reviewers are listed in alphabetical order in the following: Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou, Theresa Biberauer, Joanna Błaszczak, Ute Bohnacker, Martin Elsig, Anamaria Fălăuş, Cristina Maria Moreira Flores, Chiara Gianollo, Klaus von Heusinger, Mary Kato, Imme Kuchenbrandt, Tanja Kupisch, Winfried Lechner, Susanne Lohrmann, Mihaela Marchis, Thomas McFadden, Trudel Meisenburg, Fabio Montermini, Andrea Pešková, Florian Schäfer, Horst Simon, Carola Trips, Chiara Truppi, Maria del Mar Vanrell, Tonjes Veenstra, Jorge Vega Vilanova, Xavier Villalba and Marina Zielke. Thanks are also due to the following colleagues who have commented on earlier versions of individual chapters: Mathieu Avanzi (chap. 3), Francesco Maria Ciconte (chap. 16), Cristina Flores (chap. 18), Jonas Granfeldt (chap. 18), Klaus Grübl (chap. 14), Marc-Olivier Hinzelin (chap. 18), Dalina Kallulli (chap. 8), Marie Labelle (chap. 6), Clàudia Pons-Moll (chap. 4), Thomas Scharinger (chap. 14) and Hiyon Yoo (chap. 3). Many thanks go to the following native speakers for discussing the linguistic examples in some of the chapters: Fabián Santiago Vargas (chap. 3); Elena Ciutescu (chap. 6); Roberta D’Alessandro, Susana Barros, Adriana Fasanella, Jordi Fortuny, José Cruz da Ângela, Norma Schifano, Carmen Ríos García and Juan Quintanilla (chap. 11); Júlio Matias, Mario Navarro, Jacopo Torregrossa and Jorge Vega Vilanova (chap. 12); Ariadna Benet, Nicholas Catasso and Benjamin Massot (chap. 14). We also wish to thank Frédéric Aumaître, Sarah Jobus, Birgitta Pees and Liefka Würdemann for their assistance with the final proof reading and the cross-checking of references as well as Kirsten Brock and Derek Fobair for checking the language and for proof-reading some of the chapters. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the De Gruyter editorial team, Christine Henschel and Ulrike Krauß, for the constant support we received during the editing process, and to the series editors, Günter Holtus and Fernando Sánchez Miret, who provided us with most valuable feedback from the very first sketch of the volume until the submission of its final version. Susann Fischer (Hamburg) and Christoph Gabriel (Mainz) May 2016

Table of contents Preface V Acknowledgments

VII

Susann Fischer and Christoph Gabriel Grammatical interfaces in Romance languages: An introduction

1

I

Sound and structure

1

José Ignacio Hualde and Ioana Chitoran Surface sound and underlying structure: The phonetics-phonology 23 interface

2

Marina Vigário Segmental phenomena and their interactions: Evidence for prosodic 41 organization and the architecture of grammar

3

Élisabeth Delais-Roussarie Prosodic phonology and its interfaces

4

Eulàlia Bonet and Maria-Rosa Lloret Phonology and morphology in Optimality Theory

5

Sascha Gaglia and Marc-Olivier Hinzelin 149 Inflectional verb morphology

75

105

II Structure and meaning 6

M. Teresa Espinal and Susagna Tubau Meaning of words and meaning of sentences

7

Eva-Maria Remberger Morphology and semantics: Aspect and modality

8

Luis López (In)definiteness, specificity, and differential object marking

9

Roberta D’Alessandro and Diego Pescarini Agreement restrictions and agreement oddities

Jaume Mateu Fontanals 295 10 Auxiliary selection

187

213

267

241

X

Table of contents

III Sound, structure, and meaning 11

Michelle Sheehan Subjects, null subjects, and expletives

329

Susann Fischer and Maria Goldbach 363 12 Object clitics Judith Meinschaefer 391 13 Nominalizations Andreas Dufter and Christoph Gabriel 14 Information structure, prosody, and word order

419

Ana Maria Martins 15 VP and TP ellipsis: Sentential polarity and information structure

457

Delia Bentley and Silvio Cruschina 487 16 Existential constructions

IV The role of the interfaces in language acquisition and change Conxita Lleó 17 Acquiring multilingual phonologies (2L1, L2 and L3): Are the difficulties in the 519 interfaces? Tanja Kupisch and Jason Rothman 18 Interfaces with syntax in language acquisition Esther Rinke 19 The role of the interfaces in syntactic change

551

587

Pieter Muysken and Antje Muntendam 20 Interfacing interfaces: Quechua and Spanish in the Andes Ulrich Detges and Richard Waltereit 21 Grammaticalization and pragmaticalization Kristine Eide 22 Changes at the syntax-discourse interface Index

683

635

659

607

Susann Fischer and Christoph Gabriel

Grammatical interfaces in Romance languages: An introduction Abstract: It has been known for a long time that different components of grammar interact in nontrivial ways. However, in modular theories of grammar, like generative grammar, it has been under debate what the actual extent of interaction is and how we can most appropriately represent this in grammatical theory. Keywords: grammaticalization, Neogrammarians, Prague Linguistic Circle, Government and Binding Theory, Minimalist Program, Derivation by Phase, Optimality Theory

1 Interfaces and the architecture of grammar It is a well-known fact that linguistics started out as a historical discipline. The main focus for many centuries was the investigation of how language, the parts of speech, develop, thus how languages change. Language change in general and especially grammaticalization, the development of new grammatical material from lexical material, involves not only a single component of the grammar, but cuts across components, with contributory changes taking place in phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Antoine Meillet is considered to be the first linguist to use the term “grammaticalization” in his article L’évolution des formes grammaticales and to define what is meant: “le passage d’un mot autonome au rôle d’élément grammatical” (‘the shift of an independent word to the status of a grammatical element’, Meillet 1912/1921, 131). However the idea that this kind of language change affects several components of grammar and that the interfaces between those components are relevant to explaining such changes is far older. Wilhelm von Humboldt in his lecture Über das Entstehen der grammatischen Formen und ihren Einfluß auf die Ideenentwicklung (‘On the genesis of grammatical forms and their influence on the evolution of ideas’, 1825) suggests that the grammatical structure of a language develops in four stages. He classifies these stages according to the strictness or freedom of word order (syntax) and the amount of grammatical material (morphology and phonology) used in expressing meaning (semantics; cf. von Humboldt 1825, 422–423), thus, in the interaction of the different components of grammar. Von Humboldt’s insights were subsequently summarized and further investigated by many prominent linguists, e.g. Franz Bopp, August Schleicher, and Georg von der Gabelentz to name only a few. Von der Gabelentz (1891/1901) is especially pathbreaking because he offers an explanation of why languages undergo changes and how components of grammar interact. He proposes that language change, i.e.

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grammaticalization, is the result of two competing forces, one being the tendency towards ease of articulation, the other the tendency towards distinctness: lazy pronunciation brings about sound changes that wear down words, therefore distinctions consequently become blurred. To regain distinctiveness, word order (the strict syntactic ordering of words) or new forms take over the approximate function of the old forms. Von der Gabelentz observes that the new forms that have stepped in to take over the function of the old ones are also subject to the same processes (semantic bleaching and phonetic reduction) and will again be replaced, thus proposing that language change is cyclic. Under this view not only do components of grammar interact in nontrivial ways, but words, i.e. the different parts of speech, shift back and forth across components. In the 20th century, Hodge (1970, 3) used the slogan “one man’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax”, which was taken up and reformulated by Givón (1971, 413) as “today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax”.1 Givón (1979, 109) suggests that the parts of speech are to be seen as being located on clines and as shifting between poles, such as child/adult, creole/standard, unplanned/planned, and pragmatic/syntactic, and furthermore suggests the following path: (1)

discourse > syntax > morphology > morphophonemics > zero

Grammaticalization theorists such as Lehmann (1982/2002), Kuryłowicz (1965/1975), Heine/Reh (1984), and Hopper/Traugott (1993), just to mention a few, have developed these ideas and, at the same time, draw on Meillet’s earlier insights (cf. also Heine/ Kuteva 2002 for an overview). Very much in the spirit of Givón, they refrain from making unnatural and ad hoc divisions between grammatical categories and modules and assume instead gradual transitions within a continuum between the two poles of grammar and lexicon,2 proposing a grammaticalization path. (2)

autonomous word > grammatical word > clitic > affix > Ø

Seen from this angle, grammaticalization may be defined as the diachronic process in the course of which a lexical item develops into a functional one, passing through several steps of development, by this cutting across components of grammar (↗21 Grammaticalization and pragmaticalization). Given that such processes take place

1 This idea also has its precursors in the late 19th century; cf. von der Gabelentz (1891/1901), who states that today’s affixes developed from full words (“Was heute Affixe sind, das waren früher selbständige Wörter”, 255). 20th century scholars like Hodge and Givón, however, refer not only to single parts of speech, but to whole grammatical components such as morphology and syntax. 2 This dichotomy might be seen as problematic, since function words, which are often derived from lexical ones, belong to the lexicon in the same way as their lexical precursors do (cf. Gabriel 2003 for further discussion).

Grammatical interfaces in Romance languages: An introduction

3

at any time and at different speeds, a given functional area can display items of different degrees of grammaticalization at any synchronic stage – on the assumption, of course, that we accept the well-known idealizations linked with the concept of synchrony since de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916/2013). An example of such a functional area is depicted in (3), where the various linguistic means that are used in contemporary French to express (spatial, temporal, or abstract) relations between two entities are situated on a four-point grammaticalization scale (roughly along the lines of Lehmann 1985, 46; cf. also Gabriel 2003).

Lexicon [1]

au lieu (de) durant

[2]

pendant sur dans à1 [3]

à2 [4]

Grammar

à la place (de)

(3)

The evolution of a functional item from a lexical one is characterized by certain concomitants, expressed in terms of grammaticalization parameters (cf. Lehmann 1982/2002, 108–159; 1985), such as declining phonetic and semantic integrity (i.e. phonetic erosion and loss of semantic features), a decrease in syntactic scope, and diminishing paradigmatic and syntagmatic variability of the element concerned. Taking this into account, it can be argued that the prepositional locution Fr. à la place de ‘instead of’ is syntactically less fixed and thus closer to the lexicon (stage [1], cf. 3, above) than the expression au lieu de (same meaning, stage [2]), since the former allows PP-internal modifications such as the substitution of the DP complement by a possessive determiner as in à ta place ‘instead of you’, which is ungrammatical in the case of au lieu de (yielding au lieu de toi, but not *à ton lieu). For the very same reason, Fr. durant ‘during’ (stage [2]), which may occur either pre- or postnominally (cf. durant toute sa vie or toute sa vie durant ‘during his/her whole life’), is considered less grammaticalized than pendant (same meaning, stage [3]), which only appears in prenominal position. The preposition Fr. à, finally, can be argued to occupy two different stages in (3): It may be used either as a meaningful item as in Fr. il habite à Lyon ‘he lives in Lyon’, where it may be substituted by other prepositional expressions as in Fr. il habite près de Lyon ‘he lives close to Lyon’ (à1, stage [3]), or as a case marking item as in Fr. il donne un cadeau à son frère ‘he gives a present to his brother’ (à2, stage [4]). Other examples from the history of Romance languages involve the evolution of personal pronouns and future tense marking. While Latin possesses a set of strong pronouns (e.g. Lat. ego1 S G .NO M ‘I’, me1 S G . AC C ‘me’), all Romance languages have developed a set of clitic object3 pronouns (e.g. Fr./Sp. me, It. mi), which need 3 In addition, French and some Northern Italian dialects have developed a series of clitic subject pronouns (e.g. Fr. je1 S G ), which contrast with their strong counterparts (moi1 S G ).

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to be considered both syntactically and phonologically weaker than their Latin counterparts: They cannot occur in isolation or in a stressed position, and they undergo systematic phonetic reduction processes such as vowel elision, at least in some of the Romance languages, among them French and Catalan (↗12 Object clitics). Loss of syntactic, phonological, and also semantic weight also characterizes the evolution of the Latin full verb HABERE ‘to have’ to the Vulgar Latin auxiliary, which forms part of the analytic construction given in (4b), which gradually replaced the synthetic Latin future form (4a), and subsequently further grammaticalized to the Romance future tense morpheme (4c). (4)

a.

Lat.

cantabo sing-1SG . FUT ‘I will sing’

b.

VLat.

cantare sing- INF

c.

Sp.

cantaré sing-1SG . FUT

habeo have-1SG . PRS

The idea of a close interaction of grammatical components plays an essential role not only in grammaticalization theory, but is also fundamental to much work done by members of the Prague Linguistic Circle: Vilém Mathesius (1929), for example, coined basic notions of information structure such as theme and rheme (↗14 Information structure, prosody, and word order, ↗22 Changes at the syntax-discourse interface) and explained the differences between English and Czech word order by resorting to the interplay between syntax, prosody (placement of sentential stress), and information structure. As he points out, the two languages differ in that Czech preferably marks a constituent as new information by means of word order variation (cf. the postverbal focused subject in 5a), while English mainly uses sentential (or: nuclear) stress (indicated through capitalizing, cf. 5b).

a.

‘Who wrote this letter?’ Tenhle dopis napsal this letter wrote

b.

DAD wrote this letter.

(5)

tatínek. dad

(Mathesius 1961/1975, 85)

Historical and typological approaches to language have been concerned with processes and continuous phenomena that cut across different components of grammar and have investigated the interfaces between these components. It thus seems correct to say that there has never been any doubt concerning the interaction of grammatical components (cf. Fischer 2010 for an extensive discussion on this matter).

Grammatical interfaces in Romance languages: An introduction

5

The first exception to this view, however, could be seen in the Neogrammarians’ (Otto Behagel, Berthold Delbrück, Hermann Paul etc.) approach to language change. They were the first to claim that the sound level is autonomous and independent of grammatical structure – or, to put it more precisely: that phonological rules, commonly referred to as Lautgesetze (‘sound laws’), can be formulated which make no reference to morphology, syntax, and semantics. In addition to the autonomy of the sound level they introduced the principle of the regularity of sound change, i.e. every sound in the same phonetic environment is affected in the same way. However, since the regularity of sound change produces morphological irregularities which interfere with the link between sound and meaning, the Neogrammarians introduced, as the second important process in language change, the process of analogy, in this way explaining morphological changes that followed sound changes and obvious exceptions to their proposed sound laws. A Romance example illustrating the interaction of Lautgesetz and analogy is given in (6). (6)

a.

Lat. A ˈ MARE Sg Pl

1 2 3

ˈ AMO A ˈ MAMUS ˈ AMAS A ˈ MATIS ˈ AMAT ˈ AMANT

b.

OFr. amer Sg Pl aim(e) amons aimes amez aime(t) aiment

c.

ModFr. Sg aime aimes aime

aimer Pl aimons aimez aiment

As can be seen in the Old French paradigm in (6b), Latin [a] regularly undergoes diphthongization ([a] > [aj]) in stressed open syllables before a nasal consonant, while its unstressed counterpart remains unchanged (cf. Anglade 1931, 12, 25–27). The regular application of this stress-dependent Lautgesetz thus yields an allomorphic verbal paradigm in Old French, hence morphological irregularity: While for the 1–3 Sg and 3 Pl forms, the stem is [aȷ ͂m-] (the adjacent nasal consonant triggers nasalization), it is [am-] for the 1 and 2 Pl forms (OFr. [am]ons, [am]ez). In Modern French (cf. 6c), the thematic vowel monophthongizes to [ɛ] (still written ai), and the paradigm is regularized through analogical shift of the 1 and 2 Pl forms (e.g. OFr. [a]mons > ModFr. [ɛ]mons). Thus, even though the phonological level is considered to be autonomous in a Neogrammarian view, the morphological component reacts to the changes in the phonological or phonetic component, and syntax reacts to changes concerning morphology and phonology. Early generative grammar can be seen as the first theory where the different components are considered as autonomous modules, independent of each other. In 1957, Noam Chomsky wrote Syntactic structures, a distillation of his dissertation The logical structure of linguistic theory (1955/1975), and therewith founded generative linguistics. His approach to linguistics has always aimed to understand why languages are structured the way they are and to formulate a grammar that is able to explain all sentences of a particular language, including constructions that hardly

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occur in naturalistic data, but are considered grammatical nonetheless, as well as those sentences that according to normative grammars are ungrammatical, e.g. examples of double negation like I ain’t no nice guy. In contrast to traditional linguistic approaches, generative grammar can be described as an explanatory theory in the tradition of Galileo and Newton. Instead of merely describing and classifying the different language systems, generative grammar aims at finding the rules that can generate all possible sentences (and de facto nothing but those sentences) of a specific language. In the 1950s, the social sciences were dominated by behaviourism, the school of John B. Watson and Burrhus F. Skinner. Terms like “know” and “think” were considered to be unscientific; terms like “mind” and “innate” were branded as being bad words. Science, it was argued, should concentrate on observable facts, and the relationship between a stimulus and a response is observable. Behaviour was studied by looking at rats pressing bars or dogs salivating when hearing a certain tone, and these were explained by laws of stimulus-response learning. On the basis of these results, Skinner (1957) developed the notion of operant conditioning – claiming that human beings operate on their environment. Chomsky criticized this view, arguing that the interesting aspects of social phenomena, including language, are psychological or cognitive. The fact that these phenomena are not directly observable should not hinder us from investigating them. On the contrary, linguists should concentrate on the study of mental grammar (Chomsky 1959). It is already in those years that he called attention to some fundamental facts about language and language acquisition: First, almost every sentence a person utters or understands is a new combination of words that is uttered for the first time in the history of the universe. Second, any native speaker of a language has an implicit knowledge about his/her language, i.e. s/he knows without a doubt which sentences are acceptable (grammatical) and which are unacceptable (ungrammatical). This holds for both word order (cf. 7a vs. b) and morphophonological phenomena such as cliticization (cf. 8). Third, sentences can be grammatically judged without the need to understand their semantics (cf. the examples in (9), below). And finally, every child learns to speak grammatically well-formed utterances in a fairly short time, without negative evidence and without receiving explicit instruction. (7)

Eng.

a.

Yesterday I went to the doctor.

b. *Yesterday went I to the doctor. (8)

Eng.

a.

Kim is the professor here.

b.

Kim’s the professor here.

c.

Kim is happier than Tim is.

d. *Kim is happier than Tim’s.

Grammatical interfaces in Romance languages: An introduction

7

There is no doubt that any speaker of English knows that (7a) is grammatically correct, while (7b) is not. One could argue that English pupils are taught in school that their mother tongue has a strict subject – verb – object order and therefore the subject always needs to precede the finite verb. However, the sentences in (8) are of a different kind. The subtlety of knowing which auxiliary can be reduced in informal speech is something that is not taught in school. Most of the speakers of English are not even aware of this difference; nevertheless, they know that the auxiliary is can be reduced in (8b), as opposed to (8d). But even more importantly for Chomsky’s argument: The same holds for the sentences in (9). (9)

Eng.

a.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Chomsky 1957, 15)

b. *Furiously sleep ideas green colorless. Every speaker of English will agree that sentence (9a) is grammatically correct and sentence (9b) is not, despite the fact that they most probably have never heard these sentences and that neither of the two sentences is semantically well formed. The examples in (9) are discussed in Chomsky’s Syntactic structures (1957, 15) and show that syntactic structure can be understood without referring to the semantic level. This discussion was basically the beginning of the generative view for many years that the different components of grammar are autonomous. This idea of strictly separated components of grammar is also fundamental to the classical generative Principles and Parameters (or: Government and Binding) paradigm (Chomsky 1981/ 1993), according to which the linear ordering of the constituents of a given sentence (surface structure) is derived from an underlying representation (deep structure) and subsequently interpreted by semantics on the one hand (so-called Logical Form, LF) and phonetics/phonology on the other (Phonetic Form, PF). This view of the architecture of grammar is expressed by means of the famous T- (or Y‑)model (cf. Chomsky 1981/1993, 17), as illustrated in (10) with the example of the French wh-insitu interrogative Pierre a vu qui? (‘Whom has Peter seen?’). (10)

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As can be seen in (10), both semantics (LF) and phonetics/phonology (PF) have access to the output of syntax, i.e. they simply process what is delivered by the syntactic component after all movement operations have applied (in the case of a wh-in-situ question, no syntactic movement applies, since the interrogative pronoun qui remains in its clause-final base position). Phonology and semantics only come into play when the computation of syntactic structure is completed. A generative framework that completely dispenses with the separation of grammatical components or modules is Optimality Theory (OT; cf. Prince/Smolensky 1993/ 2004). Within OT, the grammar of a given language is essentially understood as a language-specific hierarchy of violable constraints (rather than rules) according to which the output form is selected from among several competing input forms within an assumed evaluation process. These constraints can refer to all linguistic levels and thus be phonological, syntactic, or pragmatic in nature, among other things. An output form such as Sp. Vendió la casa Pablo ‘It was Pablo who sold the house’ (involving rightmost placement of the focused subject Pablo) is to be interpreted as the result of an evaluation process involving several competing input forms, among them, for example, Pablo vendió la casa ([F S]VO) and Vendió la casa Pablo (VO[F S]), and a constraint ranking with a high-ranked phonological constraint that requires clause-final position of nuclear stress. In such a view, the relationship of phonological and syntactic structure does not involve a “mapping” of essentially different subsystems of grammar (cf. e.g. Selkirk 1984), but combines them in a rather connectionist fashion. However, with the rising interest of generative linguistics in language change and language acquisition, it has been recognized that the different components of grammar interact in nontrivial ways. In fact, one of the most significant insights of recent years has been the understanding that the nature of the interfaces between the individual subsystems of grammar, i.e. Lexicon, (Morphology)4, Syntax, Phonology, and Semantics, is just as important as the mechanisms within the subsystems. Different theoretical frameworks have described and formalized the various interfaces differently and it has been under debate how many interfaces there actually are, what the actual extent of interaction is, and how we can most appropriately represent these in grammatical theory. Although no consensus has yet been reached, it seems to be clear that research regarding the nature of the interfaces is crucial for our understanding of language and the language faculty. In other words, understanding the interfaces shows us the restrictions on the relevance of the theory as a whole. Within the generative paradigm, the view of a strict autonomy of grammatical components has consequently been more and more undermined in the course of 4 The brackets indicate that in the original generative T- (or Y-)model, syntax has an interface with phonology and semantics, but not with morphology (cf. the graph in example 10, above), which simply does not exist as an autonomous component (cf. Jackendoff 1997; 2010).

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recent theoretical developments towards the so-called Minimalist Program (MP; cf. Chomsky 1995; 2000), according to which the four distinct levels of the classical Principles and Parameters approach (deep structure, surface structure, LF, and PF; cf. 10, repeated in 11a, for convenience) are abandoned in favour of a simplified model that only consists of two levels of representation, namely LF and PF (cf. 11b). (11)

a.

b.

According to minimalist assumptions, it is supposed that at a certain point of the derivation, called “spell-out”, the syntactic structure is delivered to PF, where phonological rules apply (cf. 11b). The interplay between PF (i.e. phonology) and the phrase structure building operations becomes relevant from Chomsky’s (2001) “Derivation by Phase” approach on, according to which it is assumed that the phrase marker is not delivered to PF as a whole, but in smaller chunks within several phases. As a consequence, the domain of the phonological component is not restricted to the application of phonological rules to the output of the whole sentence, but to several chunks that reach PF cyclically, with the result that the two components seem to interact with each other. In addition, head movement such as the raising of the verb from its VP-internal base position to a higher functional head (such as T) is no longer seen as “part of the narrow-syntactic computation but an operation of the phonological component” (Chomsky 2001, 37),5 an idea based on the assumption that the position of the inflected verb form in a given clause has no influence on its semantic interpretation (cf. Fr. Il [V regarde] [Adv souvent] la télé vs. Eng. He [Adv often] [V watches] TV). This allows the interpretation of verb movement as PF-syntax and has been applied to focus-induced word order variation (cf. Erteschik-Shir/Strahov 2004 on Germanic languages; Gabriel 2010 on Spanish, and ↗14 Information structure, prosody, and word order). Nowadays the term “interface” can be understood in different ways: as the connection between linguistics and other disciplines (e.g. philosophy, psychology, sociology), between the language faculty and other aspects of cognitive domains, i.e. external interfaces or nonlinguistic interfaces, specifically with the sensorymotor system at PF (e.g. prosody, phonetics) and with the conceptual-intentional

5 For a different view, cf. Lechner (2005), Matushansky (2006), and Roberts (2010), among many others.

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system at LF (e.g. pragmatics and discourse function), and, in a narrow interpretation, as the interaction between the core computational systems, i.e. internal interfaces between the subsystems of grammar (cf. the discussion in Ramchand/Reiss 2007 and Sorace 2011).

2 Interfaces in Romance languages: The structure of the volume This volume addresses problems at the cross-sections of one or more internal or external interfaces in a number of Romance languages. The individual chapters are by authors who have been working on specific Romance issues that touch upon more than one subsystem of grammar, i.e. problems that go beyond traditional domains of grammar and that cannot easily be accounted for within a modular conception of the linguistic system where the subsystems do not share information with each other. Some of the chapters seek to highlight the controversy of the ongoing debate and/or provide data from nonstandard languages, varieties of Romance that challenge the modular view even more, while others again define the conditions under which grammaticality at the interfaces can be achieved. The volume is intended to function as a state-of-the-art report on research in the field, but at the same time as a manual of Romance languages with special emphasis given to different linguistic phenomena specific to Romance languages. The volume consists of four main parts, addressing the various interfaces between the components of grammar: In a first step, we concentrate on the interdependencies between sound and the underlying structure (I. Sound and structure). The second part is devoted to the interrelations between semantics and structural form (II. Structure and meaning). The third part investigates the complex interplay between the three areas mentioned so far (III. Sound, structure, and meaning). The last part focuses on the acquisition and the evolution of interface phenomena in Romance languages, where especially external interfaces are of importance (IV. The role of the interfaces in language acquisition and change).

2.1 Sound and structure There is no doubt that sound and structure are interrelated to some extent: The phonetic surface of a language is a concrete and measurable manifestation of a language-specific phonology. Within the grammar of a given language, underlying phonological structures form a subsystem which differs in its categorical inventory and compositional principles from both morphology and syntax, but we know that each subsystem can hardly be described adequately without reference to the others.

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The chapters of this section are concerned with clarifying in what way the different domains are relevant for the generalizations of the other. In a Neogrammarian sense, phonology has been argued to be autonomous; however, investigations into the field have often argued that certain syntactic information is available to phonology, but no phonological information seems to be available to syntax. Generative syntax during the 1990s, though, did allow so-called “last resort” movements in order to protect phonologically weak elements – like enclitics – from appearing in sentenceinitial position (e.g. Cardinaletti/Roberts 2002), or posited PF filters to eliminate unwanted structures. In chapter 1, Surface sound and underlying structure: The phonetics-phonology interface, José Ignacio Hualde and Ioana Chitoran focus on the interdependencies of underlying phonological representation and phonetic surface form and discuss several consonantal and vocalic processes, such as lenition, fortification, and assimilation as well as reduction and coalescence, with examples from a large array of Romance varieties. The historical dimension is also referred to when appropriate. Chapter 2, Segmental phenomena and their interactions: Evidence for prosodic organization and the architecture of grammar, by Marina Vigário, is devoted to the interaction of segmental phonology with other components of grammar. In a first step, it is shown, based mainly on examples from Iberian varieties, how segmental phonology is closely intertwined with suprasegmental features and prosodic structure; in a second step, its interface with morphology and the lexicon is taken into account. Furthermore, specific segmental phenomena related to frequency effects and the phonological integration of loan words are discussed. In the third chapter, Élisabeth Delais-Roussarie focuses on Prosodic phonology and its interfaces, based on the assumption that, first, prosodic units are partly derived from the morphosyntactic and information structure of a given sentence and that, second, they constitute domains for the application of phonological phenomena. These are studied within the framework of Prosodic Phonology, which essentially accounts for the way phonology interacts with the other components of the grammar. After presenting the main features of Prosodic Phonology, the author explains, based on examples from various Romance languages and varieties, how the syntax-phonology mapping is formalized within this framework, with particular reference to the formation of prosodic phrases, and shows how prosody is constrained by information related to discourse. In chapter 4, Phonology and morphology in Optimality Theory, Eulàlia Bonet and Maria-Rosa Lloret address the intriguing question of whether or not a model such as Optimality Theory (OT), which essentially tackles phenomena at the phonologymorphology interface, should allow intermediate levels of representation. They address this pending issue by discussing a large array of phenomena from Romance varieties that challenge the parallel version of OT in order to contrast the additional mechanisms proposed to maintain parallelism (e.g. output-output and alignment constraints) with the analyses provided within different serial (stratal, derivational,

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or cyclic) versions of OT. The discussion of parallel and serial versions of OT forms the basis for an in-depth analysis of phonologically conditioned phenomena of allomorph selection in several Romance languages. The fifth and last chapter of the first part, Inflectional verb morphology, by Sascha Gaglia and Marc-Olivier Hinzelin, offers a selection of the most relevant phenomena in inflectional verb morphology, thereby focusing on issues that play a role at the morphology-phonology interface, such as stem allomorphy and syncretism, among other things. In addition, further instances of noncanonical morphology are discussed such as suppletion, periphrases, overabundance, and defectiveness. The authors finally discuss the assumption of an autonomous “morphomic” level, thus addressing the pending question of the autonomy of morphology.

2.2 Structure and meaning Part II, Structure and meaning, is concerned with the interface between the structure of words (morphology), the structure of sentences (syntax), and their meaning (semantics). Questions about how words’ morphological characteristics influence their syntactic distribution and/or semantic interpretation, how certain morphological markings change the semantic interpretation, and how syntactic distribution and specific positions of words/categories change the interpretation of sentences as a whole have been discussed vigorously within linguistics. In the chapters of this section issues are discussed that were at the centre of investigation long before the notion of interfaces and their interactions were introduced. The chapters have in common that they show how structure and interpretation interact and that correct analyses need to involve the subsystems as well as the interfaces. In chapter 6, Meaning of words and meaning of sentences, by Teresa Espinal and Susagna Tubau Muntaña, the question is addressed how the meanings of n-words contribute to the meaning of whole sentences. The chapter presents up-to-date data on the use and distribution of n-words in Spanish, Catalan, French, and Romanian, providing an analysis in terms of ±interpretable features and a semantic operator/ feature, and discussing the interface between syntax and interpretation. The authors argue that the semantic feature ensures that the n-words behave as polarity items, and that the syntactic feature guarantees their occurrence in negative concord structures. In this way they provide an interesting typology of n-words concerning the four Romance languages mentioned above, contributing to our general understanding of the interaction between semantic and syntactic lexical features on the one hand and syntactic operations on the other. Chapter 7, Morphology and semantics: Aspect and modality, by Eva-Maria Remberger, discusses the interpretative interrelations between modality, mood, aspect, and also tense in different Romance languages. The chapter pursues a cartographic approach, assuming that aspect (structural and aspectual verbal meaning, thus including lexical aspect, i.e. Aktionsart) is syntactically encoded within the vP domain – the domain

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of predication, and, semantically, the domain of the event situation. Modality under this view is encoded in a higher domain, namely the IP/TP, which is in close relation to the CP domain – the domain of contextual/illocutionary anchoring, sentence mood, and the speech situation. The intermediate functional domain connected to both aspect and modality is tense in the IP/TP. Thus this chapter shows how the interplay of aspect, tense, and modality is crucial for the discussion of interface phenomena, i.e. between morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics in general, and how this interaction can be accounted for in a cartographic account. Chapter 8, (In)definiteness, specificity, and differential object marking, by Luis López, investigates the interface of syntax and interpretation and provides evidence for the restrictions on semantic interpretation in certain syntactic environments. The chapter shows for a number of Romance languages that exhibit differential object marking (DOM) that in these languages a subset of direct objects is distinguished by means of a morphological marking or by syntactic placement. After pointing out the shortcomings of restricting DOM to, for example, animacy (a semantic feature), it is proposed that the phenomenon can be compared to scrambling in the Germanic languages, i.e. DOM and wide scope of indefinites entail scrambling. More specifically the author proposes that objects marked by DOM are composed by ‘function application’ (after type shifting), while objects without DOM are composed by means of ‘restrict’. Thus, syntactic configurations limit the range of possible semantic interpretations. In chapter 9, Agreement restrictions and agreement oddities, Roberta d’Alessandro and Diego Pescarini address exceptional agreement patterns, i.e. cases where the verb does not agree with the subject, where the morphological marking of the pronouns in clusters does not match their coding, and where the pre- or postnominal modifiers do not agree with the noun in the DP. The phenomenon of so-called mismatches or oddities regarding the Romance languages has been known for a very long time; Marcus Terentius Varro in his De lingua latina (47–49 BC ) already listed environments where the verb could only show a 3p agreement ending. This chapter provides an empirically rich overview by discussing the different restriction phenomena in the standard languages, as well as with respect to some Italian and Spanish varieties, by presenting the theoretical approaches in the literature of the last decades, and by examining which issues can be seen as settled and which ones deserve more consideration. Chapter 10, Auxiliary selection, by Jaume Mateu Fontanals, discusses the different factors to which auxiliary selection seems to be sensitive, including (in)transitivity, argument structure (unaccusativity vs. unergativity), lexical semantics, Aktionsart, tense, modality, clausal aspect, and subject person. The data examined in this chapter shows that an impressive range of variation is attested in the standard and nonstandard variations of Romance. After thoroughly discussing and contrasting the syntactic and semantic approaches that have been proposed so far, the author argues in favour of accounts that operate essentially at the interface between syntax and semantics.

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2.3 Sound, structure, and meaning Part III, Sound, structure, and meaning, addresses issues that are related to the syntax-phonology interface on the one hand and to the syntax-semantics interface on the other. It seems obvious that all languages can serve the same communicative needs. However the various languages use different linguistic means in order to meet these needs. One could say – and it has been suggested – that the standard and nonstandard variations of Romance languages are just paradigmatic examples of different diachronic stages and parameter settings (Uriagereka 1995), i.e. they only vary in which syntactic and semantic features are phonologically realized and which are not, and that this can account for the differences between the Romance languages. Nevertheless, without disagreeing with this view, we would like to add that an important additional aspect of the differences within and across the different Romance languages concerns the various ways in which the different subsystems interact. Thus, it is important how phonology/phonetics (the phonetic realization of syntactic and semantic features) interacts with syntax (the way structure is built up), but it is also important to understand how discourse function and information structure interact with the linking between syntax and semantics. The contributions of this section discuss in what way the interaction and linking between the different modules can best be captured and explained. In chapter 11, Subjects, null-subjects, and expletives, Michelle Sheehan investigates the interplay of overt phonological (morphological) realization and information structure in licensing null subjects. The author examines the behaviour of a variety of null-subject languages with respect to the two main minimalist approaches, i.e. in simplified terms, pro exists and pro does not exist. The two approaches make very different empirical predictions regarding the status of overt subjects in pre- and postverbal positions as well as the (non)existence of null expletives. On the basis of ten diagnostic tests (adverb placement, wide/narrow scope of preverbal subjects, binding of postverbal subjects, non-referential subjects, floating quantifiers, subject vs. topics, hortative contexts, basic word order, disambiguation, and parasitic gaps), it is shown that the Romance languages seem to fall into at least two groups: type (a) null-subject languages, in which either XP or X-movement can satisfy the EPP, i.e. verbal morphology seems to be pronominal, and type (b) nullsubject languages, in which some XP must always satisfy the EPP and null-subjects are deleted. Chapter 12, Object clitics, by Susann Fischer and Maria Goldbach, gives an overview of the classic criteria used to define clitics and discusses the specific properties shared by Romance object clitics, as well as some synchronic and diachronic differences, concerning for example doubling, climbing, mesocliticization, and opaque clusters, i.e. the person-case-constraint. By presenting some of the most prominent (classic) accounts as well as some recent approaches that have been proposed in order to account for the specific behaviour of Romance clitics, the chapter aims at

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presenting a state-of-the-art perspective on cliticization and its consequences for the interaction of the subsystems of grammar. In chapter 13, Nominalizations, Judith Meinschaefer provides a detailed overview of deverbal nominalizations across the Romance languages at the interface between morphology, syntax, and semantics. In the simplest cases, nouns can be derived from one-place predicates. In more complex cases, they derive from complex verbs and retain much of the syntactic and semantic complexity of their bases. The contribution focuses on two important questions: First, to what degree is the eventstructural and argument-structural complexity of the verbal domain visible in the nominal domain, and second, is the morphological complexity of deverbal nominalizations a reflex of their event-structural and argument-structural-complexity? With a focus on these two questions, the contribution presents the latest perspective on nominalization and its implications for the interfaces between morphology, syntax, and semantics. Chapter 14, Information structure, prosody, and word order, by Andreas Dufter and Christoph Gabriel, addresses the expression of information structure, based mainly on data from Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish, with special regard given to the syntax-phonology interface. After a critical overview of the basic notions of information structure, information-structurally induced word order variation in simple and complex sentences as well as clefting and dislocation structures and their prosodic realizations are discussed. Furthermore, the authors address the question of how free variation (or: optionality), as primarily occurs at the so-called ‘external’ interfaces, can be accounted for in formal models of grammar. The last part of the chapter is devoted to the role of interfaces in learner and contact varieties and in linguistic change. Chapter 15, VP and TP ellipsis: Sentential polarity and information structure, by Ana Maria Martins, focuses on two types of predicate ellipsis, namely verbal phrase ellipsis and tense phrase ellipsis, and is thus situated at the interface of syntax and discourse function. It is shown that there is a nontrivial correlation between the licensing of predicate-ellipsis and the polarity-encoding system of language-particular grammars, which explains the cross-linguistic variation concerning the availability of this phenomenon. Languages that license verbal phrase ellipsis display polar answering systems where the verb plays an important role (e.g. Portuguese, Galician, and Latin) and where these bare-verb answers constitute an unmarked, pervasive, and early acquired manifestation of the syntax-semantics and syntax-pragmaticsdiscourse interfaces. In languages where tense phrase ellipsis and verbal phrase ellipsis are licensed, these are not in free variation but implement different strategies regarding information structure. In chapter 16, Existential constructions, Delia Bentley and Silvio Cruschina discuss the major properties of existential constructions in a variety of different standard and nonstandard Romance languages. It is suggested that the argument structure and the predication of these constructions are distinct from those of locatives and

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possessives, which is testified by the morphosyntax of the Romance languages discussed. Under the view presented in this contribution, the noncanonical morphosyntactic properties of existentials, such as the postcopular position of the pivot and in some cases, the pivotʼs inability to control number agreement on the copula, can be explained by referring to aspects at the interfaces of morphosyntax with semantics and pragmatics (discourse).

2.4 The role of the interfaces in language acquisition and change The last part of the volume is concerned with the role external and internal interfaces play in language acquisition, language contact, and language change. Since Platzack’s (2001) paper it has often been shown that linguistic phenomena at the (external) interfaces are especially vulnerable in language acquisition (bilingual and second language acquisition) contexts. This view, known as the interface hypothesis (Sorace/Filiaci 2006), has influenced much research on the syntax-pragmaticsinformation structure interface and on the syntax-phonetics-prosody interface since its original formulation, and has recently been questioned (e.g. Domínguez 2013). Under a generative view language change is directly related to language acquisition, which is why this section consists of contributions on language acquisition and on (contact-induced) language change. All contributions however mainly explore the external interfaces and most of all the variables that contribute to the specific (or non-specific) vulnerability of these interfaces. In chapter 17, Acquiring multilingual phonologies (2L1, L2 and L3): Are the difficulties in the interfaces?, Conxita Lleó discusses various types of bilingual and multilingual phonological acquisition, namely the simultaneous acquisition of two first languages (2L1) and the sequential acquisition or learning of second (L2) or third languages (L3). Special attention is paid to 2L1 acquisition, which either leads to two rather balanced phonological competencies or to a biased relation of a stronger and a weaker competence, as is the case for so-called heritage languages (HL). The data referred to come mainly from Spanish as it is acquired in different bilingual settings, but phonological phenomena in the bilingual acquisition of other Romance languages are also taken into account, thereby addressing both the order and the speed of phonological acquisition as well as the question of how phenomena of (negative and positive) transfer can be represented in formal models of grammar. The author argues that the interface hypothesis is not the most explanatory one and proposes a new approach to bilingual development, based on the insights of Optimality Theory. Chapter 18, Interfaces with syntax in language acquisition, by Tanja Kupisch and Jason Rothman, provides an overview of empirical work on the acquisition of various Romance languages, focusing on the differences between the syntax-semantics and the syntax-discourse interfaces. Since the body of research across different acquisition settings and speaker types is very large, the article concentrates with respect

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to the syntax-semantics interface on adjectival position (pre- and postnominal) and concerning the syntax-discourse-pragmatics interface on null/overt subject and also article distribution. The authors point out that the association of particular phenomena with specific interfaces is problematic, as well as assume that internal interfaces are less problematic than the external ones. In chapter 19, The role of the interfaces in syntactic change, Esther Rinke is concerned with the role that the two interfaces standardly identified in Chomskyan linguistics – the articulatory-perceptual and the conceptual-intensional – play in the context of diachronic change. The contribution gives an overview of two generative approaches to syntactic change and recent work on the interaction between word order and information structure. Using these discussions as the basis of how the interfaces are implicated in change, the contribution also considers the relevance of acquisition to our understanding of syntactic change. Chapter 20, Interfacing interfaces: Quechua and Spanish in the Andes, by Pieter Muysken and Antje Muntendam, explores the phenomena that take place at different external and internal interfaces due to the contact between Quechua and Andean Spanish in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. Phenomena such as aspect and evidentiality in past tenses, null objects for definite and specific antecedents, and prosody in declarative sentences are studies at the syntax-morphology, syntax-pragmatics, and syntax-prosody interfaces. It is shown that Quechua mainly influences the conceptual organization of Andean Spanish. In contrast, focusing on relexification in Media Lengua, the lexicon-grammar interface is examined, where Spanish lexemes are organized according to the semantics, phonology, and morphosyntax of Quechua. In chapter 21, Grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, Ulrich Detges and Richard Waltereit discuss two diachronic processes, namely grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, that apply at internal and external interfaces. They argue that core grammar as well as discourse markers and modal particles are sedimented residues of argumentative moves designed to solve communicative problems. What these processes of sedimentation have in common is that they are driven by language use, more precisely by routinization. Routinization under this view is an aspect inherent to language use. Furthermore it is an interface phenomenon that affects all modules of grammar and aligns changes occurring within them. Thus, the changes triggered by routinization are driven by factors outside the subsystems of grammar, i.e. factors such as relevance of information, felicity of speech acts, and coherence in discourse – in other words, the external interface between syntax and pragmatics/ information structure. Chapter 22, Changes at the syntax-discourse interface, by Kristine Gunn Eide, finally, outlines the general correlations between information-structural categories such as topic and focus on the one hand and syntactic functions such as subject and object on the other, and discusses how the information-structural level of texts can be disentangled from syntax in historical data. Special attention is given to the

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change from V2-like structures as they occur in the medieval stages of Romance languages to the different ways of structuring information structure and syntax in the contemporary varieties. The focus is mainly on Portuguese, but examples from other Romance varieties are discussed as well.

3 Closing words In this short overview we have only touched upon some of the facets of and problems concerning the interfaces in grammatical theory, i.e. the interface debate in linguistics. We hope that it has been helpful for those readers who were not already familiar with the phenomena. It is also our hope that this review is a valuable lead-in to a volume that presents a state-of-the-art picture of the ongoing discussion, rendering this discussion clearer for those who are familiar with it, but at the same time introducing it in a user-friendly way to those who have never taken part in the dialogue before. We have selected the contributions to this volume for their relevance in Romance linguistics, and because of their combination of empirical data and theoretical insights. All of the contributors have been active participants in the ongoing debate. Enjoy!

4 References Anglade, Joseph (1931), Grammaire élémentaire de l’ancien français, 4e éd., Paris, Colin. Cardinaletti, Anna/Roberts, Ian (2002), “Clause Structure and X-Second”, in: Guglielmo Cinque (ed.), Functional structure in DP and IP. The cartography of syntactic structures, Volume 1, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 123–166. Chomsky, Noam (1955/1975), The logical structure of linguistic theory, PhD dissertation, Cambridge, MA, MIT. Reprint: New York, Plenum Press, 1975. Chomsky, Noam (1957), Syntactic structures (Ianua linguarum, Series minor 4), ’s‑Gravenhage, Mouton. Chomsky, Noam (1959), “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior”, Language 35, 26–58. Chomsky, Noam (1981/1993), Lectures on government and binding, Dordrecht, Foris, 1981. Second edition: Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 1993. Chomsky, Noam (1995), “Categories and transformations”, in: Noam Chomsky, The Minimalist program, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 219−394. Chomsky, Noam (2000), “Minimalist inquiries. The framework”, in: Roger Martin/David Michaels/ Juan Uriagereka (edd.), Step by step. Essays on Minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 89−155. Chomsky, Noam (2001), “Derivation by phase”, in: Michael J. Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale. A life in language, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1−52. Domínguez, Laura (2013), Understanding interfaces. Second language acquisition and first language attrition of Spanish subject realization and word order variation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins.

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Erteschik-Shir, Noemi/Strahov, Natala (2004), “Focus structure architecture and P-syntax”, Lingua 114, 301−323. Fischer, Susann (2010), Word-order change as a source of grammaticalisation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. von der Gabelentz, Georg (1891/1901), Die Sprachwissenschaft. Ihre Aufgabe, Methoden und bisherigen Ergebnisse, Leipzig, Weigel, 1891. Second, revised edition: Leipzig, Tauchnitz, 1901. Gabriel, Christoph (2003), “Relational elements in French. A minimalist approach to grammaticalization”, Linguistische Berichte 193, 3–32. Gabriel, Christoph (2010), “On focus, prosody, and word order in Argentinean Spanish. A minimalist OT account”, Revista Virtual de Estudos da Linguagem, Special issue 4 “Optimality-theoretic syntax”, 183−222. Givón, Talmy (1971), “Historical syntax and synchronic morphology. An archaeologist’s field trip”, Chicago Linguistic Society 7, 394–415. Givón, Talmy (1979), “From discourse to syntax. Grammar as a processing strategy”, in: Talmy Givón (ed.), Syntax and semantics, vol. 1: Discourse and syntax, New York, Academic Press, 81–112. Heine, Bernd/Kuteva, Tanja (2002), World lexicon of grammaticalization, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Heine, Bernd/Reh, Mechthild (1984), Patterns of grammaticalization in African languages (Arbeiten des Kölner Universalien-Projekts 47), Köln, Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität zu Köln. Hodge, Carlton T. (1970), “The linguistic cycle”, Language Sciences 13, 1–7. Hopper, Paul J./Traugott, Elizabeth C. (1993), Grammaticalization, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. von Humboldt, Wilhelm (1825), “Über das Entstehen der grammatischen Formen und ihren Einfluß auf die Ideenentwicklung”, in: Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin aus den Jahren 1822–1823, Berlin, Druckerei der Königlichen Akademie, 401–430. Jackendoff, Ray (1997), The architecture of the language faculty, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Jackendoff, Ray (2010), “The parallel architecture and its place in cognitive science. Foundations of language, brain”, in: Bernd Heine/Heiko Narrog (edd.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 645–668. Kuryłowicz, Jerzy (1965/1975), “The evolution of grammatical categories”, Diogenes 51, 55–71. Reprint: Kuryłowicz, Jerzy (1975), Esquisses linguistiques II, München, Fink, 55–71. Lechner, Winfried (2005), “Interpretative effects of head-movement”, Ms., University of Tübingen, http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000178 (06.05.2016). Lehmann, Christian (1982/2002), Thoughts on grammaticalization, München, Lincom, 1982. Second, revised edition (Arbeitspapiere des Seminars für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Erfurt 9): Erfurt, Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität, 2002, http://www.db-thueringen.de/ servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-2058/ASSidUE09.pdf (06.05.2016). Lehmann, Christian (1985), “The role of grammaticalization in linguistic typology”, in: Hansjakob Seiler/Gunter Brettschneider (edd.), Language invariants and mental operations. International interdisciplinary conference held at Gummersbach/Cologne, Germany, September 18–23, 1983, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 41–52. Mathesius, Vilém (1929), “Zur Satzperspektive im modernen Englisch”, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 29/155, 202–210. Mathesius, Vilém (1961/1975), A functional analysis of present day English on a general linguistic basis, ed. by Josef Vachek, transl. by Libuše Dušková, The Hague, Mouton, 1975. Original Czech edition: Obsahový rozbor současné angličtiny na základě obecně lingvistickém, Prague: ČSAV, 1961. Matushansky, Ora (2006), “Head movement in linguistic theory”, Linguistic Inquiry 37, 69–110.

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Meillet, Antoine (1912/1921), “L’évolution des formes grammaticales”, Scientia (Rivista di scienza) 12/XXVI, 384–400. Reprint: Meillet, Antoine (1921), Linguistique historique et linguistique générale, Paris, Champion, 130–148. Platzack, Christer (2001), “The vulnerable C-domain”, Brain and Language 77, 354–377. Prince, Alan/Smolensky, Paul (1993/2004), Optimality Theory. Constraint interaction in generative grammar, New Brunswick/Boulder, Rutgers University/University of Colorado, 1993, http:// roa.rutgers.edu/files/537-0802/537-0802-PRINCE-0-0.PDF (06.05.2016). Reprint: Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2004. Ramchand, Gillian/Reiss, Charles (2007), “Introduction”, in: Gillian Ramchand/Charles Reiss (edd.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1–14. Roberts, Ian (2010), Agreement and head movement. Clitics, incorporation, and defective goals, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. de Saussure, Ferdinand (1916/2013), Cours de linguistique générale, Paris, Payot, 1916. Peter Wunderli (ed.), Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale. Zweisprachige Ausgabe französisch-deutsch mit Einleitung, Anmerkungen und Kommentar, Tübingen, Narr, 2013. Selkirk, Elizabeth O. (1984), Phonology and syntax. The relation between sound and structure, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Skinner, Burrhus Frederic (1957), Verbal behavior, New York, Appleton-Century-Crafts. Sorace, Antonella (2011), “Pinning down the concept of ‘interface’ in bilingualism”, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1, 1–33. Sorace, Antonella/Filiaci, Francesca (2006), “Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian”, Second Language Research 22, 339–368. Uriagereka, Juan (1995), “Aspects of the syntax of clitic placement in Western Romance”, Linguistic Inquiry 26, 79–123. Varro, Marcus Terentius (1964), De lingua latina, ed. by Georg Goetz, Leipzig, Teubner, 1910. Reprint: Amsterdam, Hakkert, 1964.

I Sound and structure

José Ignacio Hualde and Ioana Chitoran

1 Surface sound and underlying structure: The phonetics-phonology interface Abstract: In this chapter we offer an overview of phenomena at the phoneticsphonology interface in the Romance languages. Processes affecting consonants and vowels are studied separately. Parallels with historical sound changes in the same or in another language are mentioned when relevant. Keywords: allophony, lenition, fortition, assimilation, neutralization, vowel reduction, vowel harmony, coda consonants, palatalization

1 Scope of this chapter This chapter on the phonetics-phonology interface focuses on phenomena that can be considered facts of pronunciation, including both postlexical or phrase-level phonological rules and conventionalized, language-specific, phonetic processes. We are thus excluding from our overview morphophonological (or lexical) phonological alternations, which will be dealt with in a different chapter. An example may be useful in order to clarify the set of phenomena that we are excluding from the scope of our discussion. In the Romance languages the evolution of mid vowels in stressed syllables (under different conditions) has created numerous morphophonological alternations, e.g. Sp. puedo/podemos ‘I/we can’, Fr. bois/buvons ‘I/we drink’, It. buono/bontà ‘good/goodness’, Rom. seară/seri ‘evening/s’, etc. The treatment of this type of alternation is different in different theoretical frameworks. In Generative Phonology, morphemes are given a single invariant form in the underlying representations of all words containing them. Accounting for these alternations is thus an important part of phonological analysis within this framework. Morphophonological rules account for the mapping between allomorphs of the same morpheme in different words. In a volume like the present one, however, these facts clearly belong to the phonology-morphology interface, rather than to the phonology-phonetics interface, and thus they will not be examined further in this chapter. Instead, in this chapter we will study both regular obligatory allophony, such as the spirantization of /b d ɡ/ in Spanish, e.g. /la bodeɡa/ [laβoˈðeɣa] ‘the tavern, shop’ (but not in Brazilian Portuguese [aboˈdeɡa]), and language-specific but optional, variable processes, such as the aspiration of /s/ in Spanish varieties and the spirantization of /p t k/ in Florentine Italian.

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The contemporary Romance languages differ substantially in their phonology and phonetics, although common processes are also found. Interestingly we often see that certain phenomena are recurrent. We wish to draw special attention to the fact that what is an active process at the phonetics-phonology interface in one language may mirror a completed sound change in another language. For instance, the variable aspiration and deletion of coda /s/ in many Spanish dialects ran its full course centuries ago in French, e.g. Sp. escuela [ehˈkwela] ~ [eˈkwela] ‘school’, cf. Fr. école. This view of the evolution of sound systems, with specific application to Romance, was first presented by Pierre Delattre in a 1946 paper explicitly entitled “Stages of Old French phonetic changes observed in Modern Spanish”. Delattre discusses 31 well-known sound changes of Old French for which an equivalent synchronic stage characterized by phonetic variation can be found in Modern Spanish. We will give just one example here. Glide strengthening in initial position takes place in French, with subsequent reduction to a fricative (cf. also section 2.4 below): Germanic [wadja] ‘wage’ > Gallo-Roman [ɡwaɟja] > Fr. [ɡaʒ]. A similar synchronic variation is encountered in Spanish, where huesos ‘bones’ is frequently pronounced [ˈɡwesos]. We refer the reader to Delattre (1946) for other examples of parallel sound changes in Old French and Modern Spanish. In the remainder of this chapter we classify phonetic/phonological phenomena by the nature of the segments that are affected and by their environment. For each main type of phenomenon we will consider the extent to which synchronically active processes at the phonetics-phonology interface find parallels in completed sound changes in the same or other Romance languages. Phenomena affecting consonants are considered before those that apply to vowels.

2 Consonants Consonants are often weakened in the intervocalic context and are subject to various neutralizations (in place, manner and/or voicing) in the coda. When in contact with front glides and vowels, palatalization is frequent. At the phonetic level, strengthening of consonants in phrase-initial position has been observed in several languages, and this phenomenon may be phonologized as word-initial fortition, although such conventionalized processes are relatively rare.

2.1 Intervocalic lenition The weakening of intervocalic consonants is a common phonological phenomenon that is abundantly attested in the synchronic and diachronic phonology of the Romance languages.

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The historical voicing (and further lenition) of intervocalic obstruents is one of the main features that serve to separate the Western Romance languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, etc.) from Eastern Romance (Italian, Romanian), cf. (1): (1)

Latin intervocalic /p t k/: Eastern vs. Western Romance Lat. It. Sp. Fr. SAPĒRE sapere saber savoir ‘to know’ VĪTA (M ) vita vida vie ‘life’ AMĪCA (M ) amica amiga amie ‘female friend’

The voicing of intervocalic obstruents, which must have started as an across-the-board postlexical rule of allophony (Weinrich 1958), eventually produced phonological recategorization word-internally in the Western Romance area. Voiced stops were subsequently weakened to different extents in different languages, along a common path of development, e.g. [t] > [d] > [ð] > 0. In French, word-internal intervocalic /d/ and /ɡ/ were eventually lost ([ˈvita] > [ˈvida] > [ˈviðə] > [ˈviə], [aˈmika] > [aˈmiɡa] > [aˈmiɣə] > [aˈmiə]) and the labial (from Latin P, B and V ) remains as /v/, so that there is no active rule of allophony in modern French. In Spanish and Catalan, on the other hand, the spirantization of /b d ɡ/ both inside words and across word boundaries is an essentially obligatory allophonic phenomenon and an important aspect of the phonology of these languages, e.g. Sp. dama [ˈdama] ‘lady’, but la dama [laˈðama] ‘the lady’. Unlike the phonological recategorization of voiceless obstruents in Western Romance, which affected exclusively postvocalic consonants, the allophonic spirantization of /b d ɡ/ applies after vowels, glides and most consonants in Catalan and most Spanish varieties, e.g. Sp. árbol [ˈaɾβol] ‘tree’. There are, nevertheless, Spanish dialects (spoken in parts of Central America and Colombia) where systematic spirantization is limited to the intervocalic context, e.g. cada [ˈkaða] ‘each’ but cardo [ˈkaɾdo] ‘thistle’ (cf. Carrasco/Hualde/Simonet 2012). In Brazilian Portuguese intervocalic voiced stops do not undergo systematic weakening. This is thus a major phonological difference between this language and Spanish: (2) sabe lado amiga

Sp. [ˈsaβe] [ˈlaðo] [aˈmiɣa]

BPor. [ˈsabi] [ˈladu] [aˈmiɡa]

‘s/he knows’ ‘side’ ‘female friend’

In European Portuguese the spirantization of /b d ɡ/ is found as a variable phenomenon in northern and central areas (cf. Mateus/d’Andrade 2000, 11, footnote 2). In the varieties of central and southern Italy, as well as Corsica and Sardinia, where Latin intervocalic /p t k/ did not undergo phonological recategorization,

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we find that, nevertheless, these consonants are often voiced and sometimes spirantized synchronically, both word-internally and across word boundaries, e.g. ho capito [oɡaˈbido] ‘I have understood’. In a recent study, Hualde/Nadeu (2011), over 50% of all tokens of intervocalic /p t k/ were found to be realized as fully voiced in a corpus of Rome Italian. Sardinian has a more systematic alternation, e.g. [ˈtɛrːa] ‘land’, [saˈðɛrːa] ‘the land’ (cf. e.g. Jones 1997). Less widespread voicing (and spirantization) of intervocalic /p t k/ is also found in some varieties of Spanish. Velar /k/ appears to be especially prone to reduction, e.g. Peninsular Sp. lo que te digo [loɣedeˈðiɣo] ‘that which I tell you’ (cf. Hualde/Simonet/Nadeu 2011; Torreira/ Ernestus 2011). In the case of Spanish, this is a ‘second round of voicing’ (Oftedal 1985) from a historical point of view, although continuity with the first round (without recategorization across word boundaries) cannot be excluded. Interestingly, European Portuguese appears to be undergoing the opposite process: partial devoicing of obstruents (Pape/Jesus 2011). Florentine Italian is well known for showing a different type of lenition of intervocalic /p t k/, where these segments are variably realized as voiceless fricatives, e.g. la tavola [laˈθavola] ‘the table’ (Canepari 1979, 214; Giannelli/Savoia 1978; 1979/1980; Cravens 1984; Marotta 2001; 2008; Sorianello 2001; Villafaña Dalcher 2006; 2008). The Western Romance intervocalic voicing sound change also affected singleton /s/ and other fricatives, e.g. PASSU ( M ) > Por. passo [ˈpasu] ‘step’ vs. CASA ( M ) > Por. casa [ˈkazɐ] ‘house’. As a synchronic variable across-the-board process, voicing of intervocalic fricatives is also found in those languages where stops voice in this context (cf. Torreira/Ernestus 2012 and Hualde/Prieto 2014 for Spanish as well as Nocchi/Schmid 2007 for Southern Italian). In the history of the Romance languages we find other processes of intervocalic weakening. In particular the Latin geminates, which are preserved in Italo-Romance, were systematically simplified in both Western Romance and Balkan Romance (e.g. CUPPA (M ) > Sp. copa, Rom. cupă vs. It. coppa; PECCATU (M ) > Sp. pecado, Rom. păcat vs. It. peccato), but these sound changes did not give rise to any robust synchronic alternations (excluding a few limited morphophonemic processes).1 When sequences of identical consonants arise across morphemes or words, sometimes they are reduced to the duration of a single consonant and sometimes they are preserved as geminates. In Spanish, consonants with full contact between the articulators, such as /l/ and /n/, preserve a single vs. geminate contrast more effectively than approximants and fricatives (e.g. come nueces ‘s/he eats walnuts’ vs. comen nueces ‘they eat walnuts’; inútil ‘hopeless’ vs. innoble; but /des-alaɾ/ ‘to

1 In Spanish and Catalan, geminate /n l r/ had a special evolution. In particular /ll/ and /nn/ became palatals. A related fact is the synchronic alternation that we find in cases like Sp. él ‘he’, ella ‘she’.

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remove the wings’ ~ /des-salaɾ/ ‘to remove the salt’; sabe solo ‘s/he knows only’ ~ sabes solo ‘you know only’; cf. Hualde 2005, 97–98). In French, schwa deletion may produce geminates, as in là-d(e)dans (cf. Walker 2001, 130). In some Romance languages intervocalic sonorants have also undergone weakening. Thus, in Portuguese intervocalic /n/ and /l/ delete, e.g. LŪNA (M ) > lua ‘moon’, COLŌRE ( M ) > cor ‘colour’, and in Romanian intervocalic /l/ becomes /r/, e.g. SŌLE (M ) > soare ‘sun’. This deletion of intervocalic consonant has produced some morphophonological alternations, e.g. Port. sol ‘sun’ vs. sois ‘suns’ < SŌLES , but again, nowadays we do not seem to find any systematic processes of intervocalic sonorant weakening at the phonology-phonetics interface.

2.2 Lenition/neutralization in the coda A number of phenomena may affect coda consonants, generally resulting in a reduced inventory compared to that found in the onset position. Common processes include place assimilation, cluster simplification, voice assimilation and complete assimilation.

2.2.1 Assimilation and weakening of coda obstruents Whereas, as already mentioned, the Latin geminates underwent simplification in both Western Romance and Balkan Romance, Italian has not only preserved the etymological geminate consonants but also developed new geminates. One important source of new geminates that must have already been present in Late Latin (Loporcaro 2011, 93) is the total assimilation of coda obstruents, e.g. AD CASA (M ) > [aˈkːasa] ‘to the house’, which is the origin of the phenomenon known as raddoppiamento (fono)sintattico (RS) or syntactic doubling in central and southern Italian. The synchronic status of RS is particularly interesting. Nowadays it is simply the case that an arbitrary set of function words trigger the gemination of word-initial consonants, since there is no longer any evidence for the word-final consonant that gave rise to the phenomenon; for example, in these Italian varieties, there is gemination of the word-initial consonant in a casa, but not in la casa. RS also takes place after oxytonic words, as in città [pː]iccola ‘small town’. Interestingly, word-initial consonants in the context of RS are protected from intervocalic weakening processes. Thus in Rome Italian, the word-initial stop may be voiced in la casa ‘the house’, but not in a casa ‘to the house’ or tre case ‘three houses’, where it geminates instead (cf. Loporcaro 1997, 1–2). Thus a seemingly low-level, probabilistic, phonetic phenomenon (intervocalic voicing) is blocked by a lexical feature (i.e. the fact that the preceding word belongs to the class of RS-triggering items). In Catalan, there is obligatory devoicing of word-final consonants, which produces many morphophonological alternations, e.g. amic/amica ‘friendM.SG/F.SG’.

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The treatment of coda /s/ requires particular attention. The loss of word-final /s/ in Eastern Romance is ultimately responsible for one of the most striking differences between Western and Eastern Romance, plural formation by the addition of /s/ vs. vowel change, e.g. Sp. libro/libros ‘book/books’ vs. It. libro/libri.2 This phenomenon affected only word-final consonants and is thus different from the weakening of /s/ in coda position (both word-internally and word-finally) that historically operated in French and is active in a large number of present-day Spanish varieties, with different degrees of incidence. In French, the process is no longer operative, so that coda /s/ in the lexical items where it has been preserved (e.g. espagnol ‘Spanish’) is no longer subject to weakening. Its only synchronic remnant can be seen in the phenomenon of liaison, whereby resyllabification as a syllable onset has allowed a word-final consonant to survive, as in, for example, les garçons [leɡaʁsɔ͂] ‘the boys’ vs. les enfants [leza͂fa͂] ‘the children’ (↗3 Prosodic phonology and its interfaces; ↗4 Phonology and morphology in Optimality Theory). Besides French liaison, the voicing of resyllabified word-final /s/ is found in both Catalan and Portuguese and was undoubtedly found in Old Spanish (as it still is in Judeo-Spanish). In standard European Portuguese and some Brazilian varieties the treatment of word-final /s/ is particularly complex. Coda /s/ is palatalized to [ ʃ ], but if it resyllabifies it is realized as [z], e.g. queres [ ʃ ] ‘you want’, queres algo [z] ‘you want something’ (Mateus/d’Andrade 2000, 12, 145; Perini 2002, 15). Thus, both the voicing and the place of articulation of word-final sibilants are conditioned by phrase-level phonology in these varieties of Portuguese. In Spanish dialects with aspiration and deletion of coda /s/ there are sometimes other associated phenomena. For instance, geminates may result from the assimilation of /s/ (and other consonants in the coda) to a following consonant as in Eastern Andalusian Sp. isla [ˈilːa] ‘island’, caspa [ˈkapːa] ‘dandruff’ (cf. Gerfen 2002). A recent phenomenon is the metathesis of the aspiration in Western Andalusian Spanish, e.g. costa [ˈkotʰa] ‘coast’ (cf. Torreira 2012; Ruch/Harrington 2014). In Eastern Andalusian, on the other hand, word-final /s/ is almost categorically deleted, but its underlying presence is manifested in the opening of the preceding vowels, e.g. paso [ˈpaso] vs. pasos [ˈpasɔ]; tiene [ˈtjene] ‘s/he has’ vs. tienes [ˈtjenɛ] ‘you have’, with possible vowel assimilation in the word domain (cf. e.g. Hernández-Campoy/ Trudgill 2002; Penny 2000, 122–126). For both the Canary Islands and Central America, it has been reported that after deleted /s/, voiced obstruents are realized as stops, so that, for instance, las vacas [laˈbːaka] ‘the cows’ may contrast with la vaca [laˈβaka] ‘the cow’ (cf. Amastae 1989; Dorta/Herrera 1993). 2 Generally speaking, in Western Romance, the plural of nouns continues the Latin accusative plural (e.g. ROSĀS , MŪRŌS ). The early loss of /‑s/ in these forms in Eastern Romance made them identical to the singular, so that only the nominative could mark the plural (e.g. ROSAE > It. rose ‘roses’, MŪRĪ > It. muri ‘walls’).

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In Romanian, weakening of coda consonants occurs only in a limited set of environments in spontaneous, casual speech. For instance, final stop clusters tend to be reduced before word-initial stops: a[kt] [d]e ~ a[kd]e ‘act of’, with an unreleased C1 and variable voicing assimilation in the two stops. A more systematic deletion affects the [l] of the masculine singular definite article, which is enclitic: omul de pe stradă ~ omu de pe stradă ‘the man in the street’. In casual speech [l] may delete even before a vowel-initial word: omul a plecat ~ omu a plecat ~ om[w] a plecat ‘the man left’, omul ăsta ~ omu ăsta ‘this man’ (Chitoran et al. 2014). This variation suggests the development of a more systematic, morphophonological change, whereby the marking of definiteness is transferred over to the vowel /u/. This vowel is the masculine singular desinence vowel. It only surfaces in cliticized forms (om-u-l ‘the man’, om-u-l-ui ‘to/of the man’) and in non-cliticized forms ending in a consonant cluster (patru ‘four’). 2.2.2 Coda nasal place neutralization and assimilation Most Romance languages show a smaller number of phonemic oppositions among nasals in the coda than syllable-initially. Spanish has three nasal phonemes /m n ɲ/ in syllable-initial position. In word-final position, on the other hand, there is only /n/, which before a pause is realized as [n] or [ŋ] depending on the dialect, e.g. pan /pan/ [pan] ~ [paŋ] ‘bread’. Nasals assimilate in place to following consonants, both word-internally and across word boundaries: so[m] pocos ‘they are few’, so[ŋ] grandes ‘they are big’. In Catalan, unlike in Spanish, there is no coda neutralization. The labial, alveolar and palatal nasal contrast word-finally, som ‘we are’, són ‘they are’, any /aɲ/ ‘year’, and, in addition, there is a fourth surface contrastive nasal in word-final (but not in syllable-initial) position, velar [ŋ], sang [saŋ] ‘blood’. However, the alveolar nasal assimilates to the place of articulation of a following consonant, producing contextual neutralization with the other nasal phonemes: só[m] petits ‘they are small’ neutralized with som petits ‘we are small’, but só[ŋ] grans ‘they are big’ vs. som grans ‘we are big’. Nasal place assimilation occurs in Romanian, as well. Romanian has two nasal phonemes /m n/. Word- or morpheme-final /n/ variably assimilates in place to a following stop, for example, the nasal in the preposition în [ɨn] ‘in’: î [ŋ] [k]asă ‘in the house’, î[m] [p]arc ‘in the park’. The same type of assimilatory coarticulation takes place when a final cluster is reduced and the nasal becomes adjacent to the following word-initial stop, e.g. sînt prieteni → sî[m] [p]rieteni ‘they are friends’, sînt pe drum → sî[m] [p]e drum ‘I am on the road’, sînt curat → sî[ŋ] [k]urat ‘I am clean’. In French, we find a quite different type of nasal assimilation, whereby oral stops become nasal in contact with a nasal consonant or vowel, e.g. et demie /edəmi/ → [enmi] ‘and a half’, bombe atomique /bɔ̃batomik/ → [bɔ̃matɔmik] ‘atomic bomb’ (Walker 2001, 135).

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2.2.3 Coda liquids The alveolar lateral /l/ may be “light” (with the dorsum in the position for a front vowel, cf. Proctor 2011), as in Spanish, French and Italian, or “dark” or velarized (with the dorsum in the position for a back vowel), as in Portuguese and Catalan. Relaxation of the apical constriction of a “clear” lateral produces [j] in varieties of Dominican Spanish, e.g. papel [paˈpej], whereas, if the lateral is “dark”, its weakening results in [w], as in Brazilian Portuguese, e.g. Brasil [braˈziw] vs. brasi[l]eiro ‘Brazilian’. In the diachrony of the Romance languages both types of vocalization are abundantly attested, e.g. MULTU (M ) > Por. muito ‘much’ (> Sp. mucho, with subsequent palatalization), ALTERU (M ) > *[awtro] > Por. outro ‘other’, Sp. otro, Fr. autre, CABALLOS > Old Fr. chevals > Fr. chevaux ‘horses’. The neutralization of lateral and rhotic liquids in the coda is also a common phenomenon, found, for instance, in Andalusian and Caribbean Spanish and in Rome Italian. In several Spanish varieties with liquid neutralization, coda liquids may assimilate to certain following consonants, e.g. carne [ˈkanːe] ‘meat’, pulga [ˈpuɡːa] ‘flea’.

2.3 Palatalization The palatalization of consonants in contact with glides and front vowels is widely attested as a sound change in Romance. Whereas Classical Latin lacked palatals and prepalatals altogether, a whole range of these consonants arose in Romance via palatalization phenomena, sometimes later developing into sibilants and other consonants, e.g. DĪCIT /diːkit/ > Rom. zice /ziʧe/ ‘s/he says’, VĪNEA (M ) > Port. vinha, Sp. viña, Cat. vinya, Fr. vigne, It. vigna ‘vine’, all with /ɲ/ (cf. Alkire/Rosen 2010 for a convenient summary of palatalization sound changes from Latin to Romance). Palatalization has its source in coarticulation, and most frequently affects coronals and dorsals, as in the examples just given, but in some Romance languages even labials have palatalized historically, e.g. SAPIAT > Old Fr. /sapʧə/ > [saʃ ] sache ‘(that) s/he know’, LŪPI > Rom. lupi [lupj] ‘wolves’. Universally, palatalization appears to follow a hierarchy of triggers [j] » [i] » [e]. Palatalization triggered by a (fronted) low vowel, as in French, e.g. CANTĀRE > Fr. chanter ‘to sing’, is less common. Similarly, the trigger usually follows, but palatalization by a preceding glide is found in developments like NOCTE (M ) > /noi ̯te/ > Sp. noche ‘night’. Historical palatalization has produced morphophonological alternations in many Romance languages, e.g. Fr. blanc/blanche ‘whiteM . S G / F. S G ’, It. amico/amici ‘friendM . S G / M . P L ’, Rom. stradă/străzi ‘streetS G / P L ’. As an active process of allophony, we find palatalization of /t/ and /d/ before /i/ in Brazilian Portuguese, e.g. tia [ʧia] ‘aunt’, dia [ʤia] ‘day’. The raising of word-final front vowels (e.g. sublime [sublimi]) results in palatalization before orthographic final , e.g. BP parte [ˈpahʧi] ‘part’, verde [ˈvehʤi] ‘green’.

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In Québec French, /t/ and /d/ are affricated to [ts] and [dz], respectively, before the high front vowels /i/ and /y/, e.g. petit [ptsi] ‘small’, tu [tsy] ‘you’. Recent sociolinguistic studies of urban continental French (cf. Lodge 2004; Fagyal 2010) document a type of palatalization/affrication that occurs before high front vowels and glides, but results in [ʧ, ʤ], as in Brazilian Portuguese, rather than the Quebec French [ts, dz]: y a [ʤy] monde ‘it’s crowded’, [ʧy] m’as [ʤi]t ‘you told me’. This phenomenon has been associated with the speech of working class youth of immigrant descent, but more recently has been reported in political discourse (cf. Trimaille 2008) and broadcast news (cf. Candea/Adda-Decker/Lamel 2013). The latter study, based on a large speech corpus, verifies that affrication occurs predominantly with the voiceless variant, before [j] and [i]. Some frequent examples are: moi[ʧj]é ‘half’, chré[ʧj]en ‘Christian’, poli[ʧi]que ‘politics’, exécu[ʧi]f ‘executive’. This tendency to palatalize dentals in contact with high front vowels in present-day French may be related to the high articulatory setting of its vowel system, as compared to, for instance, Spanish (Torreira/Ernestus 2011). Probably as a universal phenomenon of coarticulation, velars have a more fronted place of articulation in contact with front vowels than in contact with back vowels (car vs. key). The exaggeration of this coarticulation produces distinctively palatalized allophones, like in Chilean Spanish, e.g. mujer /muˈxer/ [muˈçer] ‘woman’. A common unconditioned weakening phenomenon repeatedly attested in the Romance family is the weakening of /ʧ/ to /ʃ/ and /ʤ/ to /ʒ/ (e.g. in the history of both Portuguese and French). Nowadays /ʧ/ is variably or systematically realized as [ ʃ ] in several Spanish varieties (Southern Andalusia, Northern Mexico, Panama, Chile).

2.4 Initial fortition As already mentioned, consonant fortition has been observed to occur at the phonetic level as a correlate of the phrase-initial position (Fougeron/Keating 1997). Interestingly, a correlate of emphatic stress in French is consonant gemination: quel [kː]rétin ‘what an idiot!’, c’est [fː]ormidable ‘it’s great!’ (cf. Walker 2001, 131). The phonologization of phrase-initial fortition (as word initial), however, appears to be rare. One example would be the fortition of rhotics in Spanish, where the trill occurs to the exclusion of the tap in word-initial position. Catalan also underwent fortition of word-initial /l/ (which later evolved to palatal /ʎ/, like word-internal geminate /lː/), and in Asturian/Leonese both word-initial /l/ and /n/ show this sound change, e.g. Cat. llop /ʎop/ ‘wolf’, Ast. llobu /ʎobu/ ‘wolf’, ñome /ɲome/ ‘name’, but this is no longer an active process in these languages. Word- and syllable-initial yod strengthened in Late Latin, generally converging with the results of /ɡ/ before a front vowel, e.g. IUNIU (M ) > Fr. juin, Port. junho, It. giugno ‘June’. In modern Spanish both syllable-initial [j] and [w] undergo optional fortition, e.g. yegua [ˈɟeɣwa] ‘mare’, huevo [ˈɡweβo] ‘egg’.

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3 Vowels Having considered the main phenomena affecting consonants, in this section we examine other processes that target vowels. We classify these processes in three major types: vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, vowel-to-vowel coarticulation and assimilation (including coalescence and harmony), and vowel epenthesis. As we have done for the consonants, productive synchronic processes will be considered in the light of completed sound changes of the same type.

3.1 Vowel reduction in unstressed syllables An important parameter of variation among the Romance languages is the extent to which unstressed vowels are reduced in their duration and centralized in their quality. Iberian Portuguese and Spanish offer a striking contrast in this respect. Even though these are two very closely related languages and their phonological syllable structure is rather similar, they have radically different rhythms. Whereas in Iberian Spanish differences in duration and vowel quality between stressed and unstressed vowels are relatively small, to the extent that it is difficult to identify systematic ways in which they differ in their quality (Nadeu 2014), in Iberian Portuguese, unstressed vowels are greatly reduced and often dropped, mirroring in many respects completed sound changes in a language like French. Although most Spanish varieties have very little reduction of unstressed vowels, the reduction in duration, devoicing and deletion of unstressed vowels in certain positions is a feature of both Mexican (Lope Blanch 1963) and Andean Spanish (Delforge 2008), e.g. cafecito [kafˈsito] ‘a little coffee’. A different type of reduction, with vowel raising, has been found in some varieties of Judeo-Spanish in contact with Slavic languages, such as that of Bulgaria, where both /a/ and /o/ raise in unstressed syllables (cf. Gabriel/Kireva 2014). This latter phenomenon finds a parallel in Central Catalan, where the seven-vowel system found in stressed syllables is reduced to /i ə u/ in most unstressed syllables, giving rise to many morphophonological alternations. Schwa deletion in French is a very complex phenomenon. It is systematic, which qualifies it as a lexical phenomenon, but it is also subject to phonetic, prosodic, dialectal, idiolectal, sociolinguistic, and stylistic constraints. It has been extensively studied and is still not fully understood. Alternating schwas occur word-internally (semaine [səmɛn] ~ [smɛn] ‘week’) and across word boundaries ( je ne sais pas [ʒənəsepa] ~ [ʒənsepa] ‘I don’t know’). The conclusion at this point is that schwa alternation is lexical and phonological (cf. Bürki/Ernestus/Frauenfelder 2010). Variants without schwa are reported in careful speech as well as in casual speech (Côté/Morrison 2007). Nevertheless, Bürki et al. (2011), based on the analysis of a large spoken corpus, conclude that schwa in connected speech also undergoes phonetic reduction typical of interface phenomena.

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In contrast with French, in Central Catalan, schwa, which replaces /a ɛ e/ in unstressed syllables (e.g. renta [ˈrentə] ‘s/he washes’, rentar [rənˈta] ‘to wash’), is a stable vowel and is not subject to deletion. A recurrent phenomenon in Romance is the raising of mid vowels in pretonic syllables. This phenomenon has the status of a regular sound change in standard Italian, e.g. SECŪRU (M ) > It. sicuro ‘safeM . S G ’, FENESTRA (M ) > It. finestra ‘window’ (Alkire/Rosen 2010, 80). In Brazilian Portuguese it is a variable rule, where variants with pretonic high vowels are seen as less formal (without being stigmatized), and are subject to a number of phonological conditions and lexical marking, e.g. perigo [e]~[i] ‘danger’, tomate [o]~[u] ‘tomato’, but verdade [e], *[i] ‘truth’ (Perini 2002, 37– 38). In Spanish and closely related dialects the phenomenon is nowadays stigmatized as “rural” and it is mostly found as an assimilatory phenomenon (cf. below), when the stressed vowel is high, e.g. comer [koˈmeɾ] ‘to eat’ vs. comería [kumiˈɾia] ‘I would eat’ (Penny 1978, 86). As for word-final unstressed syllables, the pan-Romance tendency is to have a smaller number of contrasts in this position than elsewhere. Thus Italian only has four word-final unstressed vowels /i e a o/, Spanish three (leaving aside a few exceptions) /e a o/, and Central Catalan also three /i ə u/. In several Spanish varieties, both in Spain and in Latin America, /e/ and /o/ tend to rise in this position. This is a stigmatized “rural” phenomenon in Spanish. In Brazilian Portuguese, on the other hand, this is a regular rule of pronunciation: mid vowels become high in unstressed word-final syllables, e.g. /ɡato(s)/ Sp. [ˈɡato(s)] vs. BP [ˈɡatu(s)] ‘cat(s)’. This raising process feeds palatalization, BP parte [pahʧi] ‘part’. Finally the devoicing of phrase-final (or word-final) vowels has different degrees of incidence or regularity in different Romance languages. Portuguese shows pervasive devoicing and deletion of word-final vowels and differs strikingly in this respect from Spanish. Phrase-final devoicing in French primarily affects high vowels and has been well documented and studied experimentally (cf. Fagyal/Moisset 1999; Smith 2003). It should be noted, however, that phrase-final devoicing is not considered an instance of vowel reduction in French, but rather a prosodic and discourse marker. Meunier/Espesser (2011) found that vowels in word-final syllables are less often reduced than preceding ones, in terms of duration and centralization. Similarly, Torreira/Ernestus (2011) show that in French phrase-medial devoicing shows characteristics of vowel reduction, such as shortening and increased coarticulation.

3.2 Vowel-to-vowel coarticulation 3.2.1 Vowel coalescence Vowel coalescence in Romanian occurs in restricted environments in spontaneous speech. We will consider the example of vowel-final function words, such as the

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prepositions pe ‘on’ and de ‘of’. Coalescence takes place between [e] and a following stressed [a] or [ʌ], but not with other vowels. The following are some representative examples from a casual style of speech: p[e] [a]sta ~ p[e̯a]sta / p[a]sta ‘on this oneF ’, p[e] [ʌ]sta ~ p[ʌ]sta ‘on this oneM ’. This type of coalescence does not seem to occur across lexical words, or at least it is not as salient. It should be noted that all the connected speech phenomena reported here still need to be studied experimentally, preferably in spontaneous speech corpora. In Spanish, sequences of vowels are reduced in connected speech (cf. e.g. Hualde 2005, 89–94). Unstressed high vowels glide in contact with other vowels, e.g. m[ja]migo ‘my friend’, t[wa]buelo ‘your grandfather’, and sequences containing non-high vowels may be reduced to a single syllable in various ways, including deletion, coalescence and gliding, e.g. te acuerdas [taˈkwerðas] ~ [tjaˈkwerðas] ‘you remember’ (cf. Hualde/Torreira/Simonet 2008 for experimental results). In Portuguese these phenomena of syllable coalescence are perhaps more systematic. Thus, for Brazilian Portuguese Perini (2002, 50) states that when both vowels across a word boundary are unstressed, /i/ and /u/ become glides before a non-identical vowel and in all other cases the first vowel is deleted, as in his examples bule amassado [ˈbuljamaˈsadu] ‘dented coffeepot’, casa enorme ‘huge house’ [ˈkazinɔhmi]. This situation seems to also obtain in European Portuguese (Mateus/d’Andrade 2000, 146; Vigário 2003, 104–114). Within words, the reduction to diphthongs of sequences where an unstressed mid vowel is followed by another vowel is widespread in Latin American Spanish, e.g. pelear [peˈljaɾ] ‘to fight’. The phenomenon is subject to lexical and phonological conditions that are still not well understood. For instance, /ea/ is much more readily reduced to [ja] in, for example, golpeamos ‘we strike’ than in leamos ‘we readS B J V ’.

3.2.2 Vowel assimilation and harmony-type effects A well-known vowel-to-vowel assimilation phenomenon in Italo-Romance is metaphony, which generally involves the raising or diphthongization of stressed vowels under the assimilatory effects of a word-final high vowel, e.g. /verde/ ‘greenS G ’ vs. /virdi/ ‘greenP L ’, /pɛde/ ‘foot’ vs. /pjɛdi/ ‘feet’. Metaphonic phenomena are found in both northern and southern Italo-Romance (cf. e.g. Maiden 1991), but not in standard Italian. Similar phenomena are also found in Asturian and Cantabrian dialects in northern Spain (e.g. in Lena Asturian /ɡata/ ‘she-cat’ vs. /ɡetu/ ‘he-cat’; cf. Neira Martínez 1955; Hualde 1989; 1998). Romanian morphophonology exhibits a process of diphthong/singleton alternation that fits the description of metaphony and has consequently been analyzed as such (cf. Chitoran 2002; Renwick 2012, including a comparative experimental study of Romanian and Italian). Such alternations can be found, for example, in nominal morphology in singular-plural forms (e.g. poartă [ˈpoartʌ] ~ porți [ˈportsj] ‘gate/

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gates’) and in verb morphology (e.g. treacă [ˈtreakʌ] ‘he/they pass(es)S B J V ’ – treci [ˈtreʧ j] ‘you passI ND ’). The stressed singleton vowel is conditioned by the high vowel in the following syllable, as in the classic case of metaphony, but also by the front vowel /e/: treacă [ˈtreakʌ] ‘he/they pass(es)S B J V ’ ~ trece [ˈtreʧe] ‘s/he passesI N D ’, deasă [ˈdeasʌ] ‘thickF. S G ’ ~ dese [ˈdese] ‘thickF. P L ’. These systematic synchronic alternations are the morphologized outcomes of a sound change involving vowel diphthongization under stress (SERA (M ) > Rom. seară [ˈsearʌ] ‘evening’); cf. Alkire/Rosen (2010) for a detailed account. A related phenomenon, the lowering of stressed mid vowels under the influence of final low vowels, is found in Portuguese, e.g. fam[o]so ‘famousM . S G ’ vs. fam[ɔ]sa ‘famousF. S G ’. In running speech, vowel-to-vowel coarticulation is attested variably in Romanian in forms such as bun[ʌ] ziua ~ bun[e] ziua ‘good day’ (greeting), uit[ʌ]-te ~ uit[e]-te ‘look!’. As these examples show, a final central vowel tends to be fronted before a front vowel in the following word. ‘To look’ is a reflexive verb of the first conjugation (a se uita), and should regularly form the imperative in [ʌ]. However, when the imperative of this verb is used without the reflexive pronoun, the form is exclusively uite! [ˈujte]. This can be attributed to lexicalization of the effects of coarticulation originally induced by the reflexive pronoun te. Vowel-to-vowel coarticulation can interact in Romanian with an effect of labial centralization, which is attested as a sound change, but is not known to be synchronically active. Historically, /e/ after a labial becomes central, unless the following vowel is front (Alkire/Rosen 2010, 258). This sound change explains forms such as *MĒLU > Rom. măr /mʌr/ ‘apple’ (cf. It. mela) vs. *MĒLE > Rom. mere /mere/ ‘apples’. It is not clear what the phonetic basis of labial centralization may be, but casual spontaneous speech seems to exhibit a surprisingly similar tendency. A preliminary experimental study of this phenomenon based on a large corpus is presented in Chitoran et al. (2016). We report here some examples typical of a very casual style of speech, involving the vowel of the preposition pe ‘on’, pe urmă ~ p[ʌ] urmă ‘after that’, pe el ~ [pʌjel] ‘himAC C ’, pe la mama ~ p[ʌ] la mama ‘at mother’s house’, pe seară ~ p[ʌ] seară ‘towards evening’, pe ziuă ~ p[ʌ] ziuă ‘during the day’, pe iarnă ~ p[ʌ] iarnă ‘during the winter’. Notice that vowel centralization in Romanian is heard before both back and front vowels; therefore it cannot be attributed to vowel-to-vowel coarticulation, at least not exclusively. However, vowel backing is attested independently, consistent with the vowel fronting presented earlier. We can see this in the behaviour of the preposition de ‘of’, where no labial is present, e.g. de unde ~ d[ʌ] unde ‘from where’. This is most commonly observed in a very casual pronunciation of the very colloquial phrase da de unde ~ da d[ʌ] unde ‘on the contrary’. Evidence that this centralization is due to vowel backing comes from its absence when the following vowel is front, e.g. de seară, *d[ʌ] seară, as in rochie de seară ‘evening dress’, de zi, *d[ʌ] zi ‘of the day’, de iarnă, *d[ʌ] iarnă ‘of the winter’.

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More extensive phenomena of vowel harmony, characterizing in some cases whole phonological word domains, have been described for Asturian/Cantabrian Ibero-Romance (cf. e.g. Hualde 1989), for some Italo-Romance varieties (cf. e.g. Nibert 1998; Mascaró 2011), for Valencian Catalan (Jiménez 1998) and, as mentioned above, for Eastern Andalusian/Murcian (cf. Hernández-Campoy/Trudgill 2002). The distribution of lower and higher mid vowels in Southern French is said to be dictated by the so-called loi de position ‘law of position’, i.e. high-mid vowels in open syllables, low-mid vowels in closed syllables. In other varieties of French the distribution is less predictable and depends in part on harmonic rules, e.g. bête [bɛt] ‘animal; silly’, but bêtise [betiz] ‘silliness’, where the vowel of the root raises under the influence of the high vowel /i/ in the following syllable (cf. Walker 2001, 54). Above, in section 3.1, we made reference to the raising of pretonic mid vowels, which is sometimes an assimilatory phenomenon conditioned by the presence of a stressed high vowel. The opposite assimilatory phenomenon, the lowering of pretonic mid vowels, is found in Portuguese. In pretonic syllables there is no contrast between /e/ and /ɛ/ or /o/ and /ɔ/. Normally, mid vowels are pronounced as midhigh [e], [o] and may even be raised to [i], [u]. However, we find pretonic [ɛ] when the stressed vowel is /ɛ/, as in Pelé [pɛˈlɛ], and [ɔ] when the stressed vowel is /ɔ/, as in bolota [bɔˈlɔtɐ] ‘acorn’ (cf. Perini 2002, 37).

3.3 Vowel epenthesis Perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of vowel epenthesis in Romance is the prosthesis of /e/ before word-initial /sC/ clusters. In Spanish and Catalan this is a synchronically active, obligatory rule of pronunciation, a phonotactic constraint that applies to borrowings exceptionlessly (e.g. Sp. estrés ‘stress’) and is observable in the second-language pronunciation of native speakers of these languages. For Ibero-Romance speakers sequences like [st-] and [est-] are not distinct (for experimental evidence, cf. Hallé et al. 2013), so that, for instance, the English words state and estate may perceptually be homophones. Portuguese has the same neutralization, but in varieties with palatalization of preconsonantal sibilants, deletion of the initial vowel is frequent in colloquial speech, e.g. espaço [ˈʃpasu] ‘space’ (Mateus/ d’Andrade 2000, 43). Vocalic prosthesis before word-initial /sC/ clusters is a phenomenon with a surprisingly long pedigree. French does not have this phonotactic constraint, but evolutions like SPATHA (M ) > Fr. épée ‘sword’, SPATIU (M ) > Fr. espace ‘space’, etc., show that it once did. At some historical point, however, /sC/-initial sequences became acceptable in French and words like statue started being incorporated into the lexicon without adaptation. At most, one can speak of a lexical morphophonological rule in French relating words like espace ‘space’ and spacieux ‘spaciousM . SG ’.

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A historically related phenomenon functioning as a phonotactic rule in word sequences is found in some conservative varieties of Italian that display alternations like strada ‘road’, in istrada ‘on the road’, scritto ‘written’, per iscritto ‘in writing’ (cf. Sampson 2010).

4 Conclusion We have provided a general overview of phonetic/phonological phenomena in Romance. We have chosen examples that we think are particularly common in the Romance languages or particularly interesting, since obvious reasons of space prevent us from being exhaustive in this chapter. An interesting fact, already noticed by Delattre (1946), is that, often, what appears as a variable process at the phoneticsphonology interface in one Romance language may mirror a completed sound change in another (e.g. syllable or word-final /s/ aspiration).

5 References Alkire, Ti/Rosen, Carol (2010), Romance languages. A historical introduction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Amastae, John (1989), “The intersection of s-aspiration/deletion and spirantization in Honduran Spanish”, Language Variation and Change 1, 169–183. Bürki, Audrey/Ernestus, Mirjam/Frauenfelder, Ulrich H. (2010), “Is there only one ‘fenêtre’ in the phonological lexicon? On-line evidence on the nature of phonological representations of pronunciation variants for French schwa words”, Journal of Memory and Language 62, 421–437. Bürki, Audrey/Fougeron, Cécile/Gendrot, Cédric/Frauenfelder, Ulrich H. (2011), “Phonetic reduction versus phonological deletion of French schwa. Some methodological issues”, Journal of Phonetics 39, 279–288. Candea, Maria/Adda-Decker, Martine/Lamel, Lori (2013), “Recent evolution of non-standard consonantal variants in French broadcast news”, in: Frédéric Bimbot/Christophe Cerisara/Cécile Fougeron/Guillaume Gravier/Lori Lamel/François Pellegrino/Pascal Perrier (edd.), Interspeech 2013. Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Lyon, France, August 25–29, 2013, 412–416, http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/ archive_papers/interspeech_2013/i13_0412.pdf (06.05.2016). Canepari, Luciano (1979), Introduzione alla fonetica, Torino, Einaudi. Carrasco, Patricio/Hualde, José Ignacio/Simonet, Miquel (2012), “Dialectal differences in Spanish voiced obstruent allophony. Costa Rican vs. Iberian Spanish”, Phonetica 69, 149–179. Chitoran, Ioana (2002), The phonology of Romanian. A constraint-based approach, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Chitoran, Ioana/Vasilescu, Ioana/Vieru, Bianca/Lamel, Lori (2014), “Analyzing linguistic variation in a Romanian speech corpus through ASR errors”, Paper presented at Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology (LARP) 7, Aix-en-Provence, 3–5 September 2014. Chitoran, Ioana/Vasilescu, Ioana/Vieru, Bianca/Lamel, Lori (2016), “Connected speech in Romanian. A window into the evolution of a sound system.” Talk presented at the 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 46), Stonybrook University, 31 March–3 April 2016.

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Côté, Marie-Hélène/Morrison, Geoffrey S. (2007), “The nature of the schwa/zero alternation in French clitics. Experimental and non-experimental evidence”, Journal of French Language Studies 17, 159–186. Cravens, Thomas (1984), “Intervocalic consonant weakening in a phonetic-based phonology. Foleyan hierarchies and the Gorgia Toscana”, Theoretical Linguistics 11, 269–310. Delattre, Pierre (1946), “Stages of Old French phonetic changes observed in Modern Spanish”, Publications of the Modern Language Association 61, 7–41. Delforge, Ann M. (2008), “Unstressed vowel reduction in Andean Spanish”, in: Laura Colantoni/ Jeffrey Steele (edd.), Selected proceedings of the 3rd conference on laboratory approaches to Spanish phonology, Somerville, Cascadilla, 107–124. Dorta, Josefa/Herrera, Juana (1993), “Experimento sobre la discriminación auditiva de las oclusivas tensas grancanarias”, Estudios de Fonética Experimental 5, 163–188. Fagyal, Zsuzsanna (2010), Accents de banlieue. Aspects prosodiques du français populaire en contact avec les langues de l’immigration, Paris, L’Harmattan. Fagyal, Zsuzsanna/Moisset, Christine (1999), “Sound change and articulatory release. Where and why are high vowels devoiced in Parisian French”, in: John J. Ohala/Yoko Hasegawa/Manjari Ohala/Daniel Glanville/Ashley C. Bailey (edd.), Proceedings of 14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, vol. 1, San Francisco, Berkeley, The University of California, 309–312. Fougeron, Cécile/Keating, Patricia A. (1997), “Articulatory strengthening at edges of prosodic domains”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 101, 3728–3740. Gabriel, Christoph/Kireva, Elena (2014), “Speech rhythm and vowel raising in Bulgarian JudeoSpanish”, in: Nick Campbell/Dafydd Gibbon/Daniel Hirst (edd.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2014, Dublin, Trinity College, 728–732. Gerfen, Chip (2002), “Andalusian codas”, Probus 14, 303–333. Giannelli, Luciano/Savoia, Leonardo M. (1978), “L’indebolimento consonantico in Toscana I”, Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia 2, 25–58. Giannelli, Luciano/Savoia, Leonardo M. (1979/1980), “L’indebolimento consonantico in Toscana II”, Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia 3/4, 39–101. Hallé, Pierre/Seguí, Juan/Domínguez, Alberto/Cuetos, Fernando/Isel, Frédéric/Shen, Weilin (2013), “Do smid and esmid sound the same? A cross-language comparison between Spanish and French listeners”, Paper presented at PPLC (Phonetics, Phonology, and Languages in Contact), 21–23 August 2013, Paris. Hernández-Campoy, Juan M./Trudgill, Peter (2002), “Functional compensation and Southern Peninsular Spanish /s/ loss”, Folia Linguistica Historica 23, 31–57. Hualde, José Ignacio (1989), “Autosegmental and metrical spreading in the vowel-harmony systems of northwestern Spain”, Linguistics 27, 773–805. Hualde, José Ignacio (1998), “Asturian and Cantabrian metaphony”, Rivista di Linguistica 10, 99– 108. Hualde, José Ignacio (2005), The sounds of Spanish, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Hualde, José Ignacio/Nadeu, Marianna (2011), “Lenition and phonemic overlap in Rome Italian”, Phonetica 68, 215–242. Hualde, José Ignacio/Prieto, Pilar (2014), “Lenition of intervocalic alveolar fricatives in Catalan and Spanish”, Phonetica 71, 109–127. Hualde, José Ignacio/Simonet, Miquel/Nadeu, Marianna (2011), “Consonant lenition and phonological recategorization”, Laboratory Phonology 2, 301–329. Hualde, José Ignacio/Torreira, Francisco/Simonet, Miquel (2008), “Postlexical contraction of nonhigh vowels in Spanish”, Lingua 118, 1906–1925. Jiménez, Jesús (1998), “Valencian vowel harmony”, Rivista di Linguistica 10, 137–161. Jones, Michael A. (1997), “Sardinian”, in: Martin Maiden/Mair Parry (edd.), The dialects of Italy, London, Routledge, 376–384.

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Lodge, R. Anthony (2004), A sociolinguistic history of Parisian French, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Lope Blanch, Juan (1963), “Sobre las vocales caedizas del español mexicano”, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 17, 1–20. Loporcaro, Michele (1997), L’origine del raddoppiamento fonosintattico. Saggio di fonologia diacronica romanza, Basel/Tübingen, Francke. Loporcaro, Michele (2011), “Syllable, segment and prosody”, in: Martin Maiden/John Charles Smith/ Adam Ledgeway (edd.), The Cambridge history of the Romance languages, vol. 1: Structures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 50–108. Maiden, Martin (1991), Interactive morphonology. Metaphony in Italy, London, Routledge. Marotta, Giovanna (2001), “Non solo spiranti. La ‘gorgia toscana’ nel parlato di Pisa”, L’Italia dialettale 62, 27–60. Marotta, Giovanna (2008), “Lenition in Tuscan Italian (Gorgia Toscana)”, in: Joaquim Brandão de Carvalho/Tobias Scheer/Philippe Ségéral (edd.), Lenition and fortition, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 235–272. Mascaró, Joan (2011), “An analysis of stress-dependent harmony in Servigliano”, Probus 23, 21–55. Mateus, Maria Helena/d’Andrade, Ernesto (2000), The phonology of Portuguese, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Meunier, Christine/Espesser, Robert (2011), “Vowel reduction in conversational speech in French. The role of lexical factors”, Journal of Phonetics 39, 271–278. Nadeu, Marianna (2014), “Stress- and speech rate-induced vowel quality variation in Catalan and Spanish”, Journal of Phonetics 46, 1–22. Neira Martínez, Jesús (1955), El habla de Lena, Oviedo, Diputación de Oviedo. Nibert, Holly (1998), “Processes of vowel harmony in the Servigliano dialect of Italian. A comparison of two non-linear proposals for the representation of vowel height”, Probus 10, 67–101. Nocchi, Nadia/Schmid, Stephan (2007), “Lenition of voiceless fricatives in two varieties of southern Italian”, in: Jürgen Trouvain (ed.), Proceedings of 16th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences, Saarbrücken, Universität des Saarlandes, 1497–1500. Oftedal, Magne (1985), Lenition in Celtic and in Insular Spanish. The second voicing of stops in Gran Canaria, Oslo, Universitetsforlaget. Pape, Daniel/Jesus, Luis M. T. (2011), “Devoicing of phonologically voiced obstruents. Is European Portuguese different from other Romance languages?”, in: Wai-Sum Lee/Eric Zee (edd.), Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2011, Hong Kong, China, 1566–1569, httpsː//www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2011/ OnlineProceedings/RegularSession/Pape/Pape.pdf (06.05.2016). Penny, Ralph (1978), Estudio estructural del habla de Tudanca, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Penny, Ralph (2000), Variation and change in Spanish, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Perini, Mário (2002), A reference grammar of modern Portuguese, New Haven/London, Yale University Press. Proctor, Michael (2011), “Towards a gestural characterization of liquids. Evidence from Spanish and Russian”, Laboratory Phonology 2, 451–485. Renwick, Margaret Elspeth Lambert (2012), Vowels of Romanian. Historical, phonological and phonetic studies, PhD Dissertation, Cornell University, http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/peggy/ Renwick_2012_Vowels-of-Romanian.pdf (06.05.2016). Ruch, Hanna/Harrington, Jonathan (2014), “Synchronic and diachronic factors in the change from pre-aspiration to post-aspiration in Andalusian Spanish”, Journal of Phonetics 45, 12–25. Sampson, Rodney (2010), Vowel prosthesis in Romance. A diachronic study, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Smith, Caroline (2003), “Vowel devoicing in contemporary French”, Journal of French Language Studies 13, 177–194.

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Sorianello, Patrizia (2001), “Un’analisi acustica della ‘gorgia’ fiorentina”, L’Italia dialettale 62, 61– 94. Torreira, Francisco (2012), “Investigating the nature of aspirated stops in Western Andalusian Spanish”, Journal of the International Phonetic Association 42, 49–63. Torreira, Francisco/Ernestus, Mirjam (2011), “Realization of voiceless stops and vowels in conversational French and Spanish”, Laboratory Phonology 2, 331–353. Torreira, Francisco/Ernestus, Mirjam (2012), “Weakening of intervocalic /s/ in the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish”, Phonetica 69, 124–148. Trimaille, Cyril (2008), “Who’s not palatalizing? Trying to understand the status of palatalized variants in French”, Paper presented at the 8th Conference of the HDLS (High Desert Linguistics Society Conference), Albuquerque, NM, 6–8 November 2008. Vigário, Marina (2003), The prosodic word in European Portuguese, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Villafaña Dalcher, Christina (2006), Consonant weakening in Florentine Italian. An acoustic study of gradient and variable sound change, PhD dissertation, Georgetown University. Villafaña Dalcher, Christina (2008), “Consonant weakening in Florentine Italian. A cross-disciplinary approach to gradient and variable sound change”, Language variation and change 20, 275– 316. Walker, Douglass (2001), French sound structure, Calgary, University of Calgary Press. Weinrich, Harald (1958), Phonologische Studien zur romanischen Sprachgeschichte, Münster, Aschendorff.

Marina Vigário

2 Segmental phenomena and their interactions: Evidence for prosodic organization and the architecture of grammar Abstract: Various areas of segmental phonology in the Romance languages are revealing about the architecture and functioning of grammar and phonological component. This chapter presents a selection of phenomena from different Romance languages, especially Ibero-Romance, that illustrate main interactions of segmental phonology with other parts of phonology (essentially, suprasegmental features and prosodic structure), as well as with morphology and the lexicon. Specific segmental phenomena related to word frequency and loan words are also discussed. Keywords: segmental process, suprasegmentals, prosodic domain, lexical process, post-lexical process

1 Introduction The diversity of types of segmental phenomena in the Romance languages is revealing about the architecture and functioning of grammar and the phonological component. In this chapter we review selected phenomena from different Romance languages that illustrate the main interactions of segmental phonology with non-segmental phonology and with other parts of grammar and that exhibit disparate properties, pointing to a typology of phonological processes. Although several languages are considered, we will intentionally allude to Portuguese and non-standard dialects data whenever possible. We will start by considering a number of segmental phenomena that are constrained by various types of suprasegmental information (section 2). We will then proceed with an illustration of processes that depend on the location of particular segments within a prosodic domain (section 3). Segmental processes that are not purely phonological, in the sense that they are not just sensitive to phonological information, are exemplified in section 4, where we inspect some of the interactions between segmental phonology and morphology and the lexicon, as well as the phonology of highly frequent words and loanwords. We conclude in section 5 with a summary of the main points addressed in this chapter. Acknowledgement: The author gratefully acknowledges the Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia de Portugal, FCT, project “Interactive atlas of the prosody of Portuguese”, PTDC/CLE-LIN/119787/2010).

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2 Segmental phenomena and suprasegmental information In many Romance languages, various processes illustrate the interaction between segmental and suprasegmental phonology. For instance, both the presence and the absence of word-level stress and higher levels of prominence, as well as tonal configurations constrain the realization of segments in multiple ways, as we will see in the next subsections.

2.1 Segmental phenomena in word-level stressed environments There are many segmental effects of word-level stress in Romance languages and dialects. The diphthongization of stressed vowels is one such phenomenon, widely found across the Romance area, with varying properties across languages and varieties (cf. Loporcaro 2011a for an overview). Different types of diphthongization affecting stressed vowels occurred early on in the formation of the Romance varieties. In some cases, diphthongization was contextually determined or sensitive to syllable structure, as in French, Florentine or Neapolitan (e.g. Loporcaro 2011a). This type of diphthongization is also active today in varieties of Portuguese spoken in Azores and Madeira and in small areas of mainland Portugal (Martins/ Vitorino 1989; Segura/Saramago 1999; 2001). Examples in (1), taken from Martins/ Vitorino (1989), illustrate the phonological conditioning of the process in Terceira (an island of the archipelago of Azores). The stressed vowel is either palatalized or velarized, depending on the place features of the preceding high vowel or glide, irrespective of any intervening consonants (1b–c). That the process does not apply if pretonic vowel is not high is shown in the examples in (1a). Finally, the data (1c) show that the phenomenon operates even if the conditioning pretonic vowel does not surface due to the (optional) extreme reduction of unstressed vowels. (1)

EPor. (Terceira) a. a casa é baixo

[ɐ ˈkazɐ] [ɛ ˈbaʃu]

‘the house’ ‘(it) is low’

b.

em casa por baixo estão fartas

[ĩ ˈkjazɐ] [puɾ ˈbwaʃ u] [ˈtɐ̃w ̃ ˈfwaɾtɐʃ ]

‘at home’ ‘under’ ‘(theyF) are tired’

c.

vitelo pevides comer

[vˈtjɛlu] [pˈvwidɨʃ ] [kˈmweɾ]

‘calfM ’ ‘kernel’ ‘to eat’

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In other cases, diphthongization depends on stress alone. This is the case of Spanish diphthongization, historically responsible for the widespread alternations found between [je we] and [e o] in stressed and unstressed positions, respectively (but cf. Loporcaro 2011a, 121 for the view that contextual conditioning may have preceded generalized diphthongization in Spanish). Pairs of morphologically related words are very common in Spanish, like puedo/podemos ‘(I/we) can’ and puerta/portero ‘door/doorkeeper’. Today this type of diphthongization can no longer be considered an active phonological rule in Spanish, and it seems more adequate to analyze these alternations assuming a lexical diphthong, that usually reduces (monophthongizes) in stressless position (but cf. the discussion in Albright/Andrade/Hayes 2001 and Eddington 2012). As has been widely noticed, although this type of alternations is very common in Spanish, there are also many exceptions to the reduction of the diphthong in stressless position, as in viejito ‘old man’ or arriesgar ‘to risk’ (Albright/ Andrade/Hayes 2001; Hualde 2005; Eddington 2012). Hualde (2005, 193–200) reports that derived words with specific suffixes are usually associated either with the reduction of the diphthong (as -al, like in dental/diente ‘dental/tooth’) or allow for both options (stressless syllables may exhibit both reduction and the diphthong), and evaluative suffixes do not usually trigger reduction of the diphthongs. Diphthongization triggered by stress alone is also found today in some dialects of European Portuguese (EPor), such as the varieties spoken in Oporto, Braga and other Northern regions of Portugal (e.g. Cintra 1971; Segura/Saramago 2001; Rodrigues 2002). The available descriptions report that only the mid vowels [e o] are affected (cf. the examples in 2, adapted from Segura/Saramago 2001 and Rodrigues 2002). (2)

EPor.

dor nervoso quente inocente

[ˈdwoɾ] [nɨɾˈβwozu] [ˈkjẽt] [inuˈsjẽt]

‘pain’ ‘nervous’ ‘hot’ ‘innocent’

flor jogo peso dizer

[ˈflwoɾ] [ˈʒwoɡu] [ˈpjezu] [diˈzjeɾ]

‘flower’ ‘game’ ‘weight’ ‘to say’

Rodrigues (2002) claims that the phenomenon found in the Northern dialects of Portuguese is best analyzed as an instance of spreading of the vocalic features from the nucleus of the stressed syllable onto the preceding onset position: when the nucleus is labial, the preceding consonant acquires a labial secondary articulation, and when it is palatal, the consonants’ secondary articulation is palatal as well. It is unclear how this analysis relates to accounts of diphthongization in other Romance languages, such as Chitoran’s (2002), who treats diphthongization in Romanian as an instance of lowering of stressed vowels, and who highlights the role of a constraint pressing vowels to lower when stressed. Interestingly enough, Rodrigues (2002) mentions that in the production data she collected the phenomenon is not found when a stressed [o] is part of a falling diphthong. In the spirit of Chitoran’s approach to the phenomenon, this may be seen as a consequence of the fact that

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the constraint that forces mid stressed vowels to surface as diphthongs is already satisfied when a basic falling diphthong is present. In the Portuguese dialects where it occurs, this type of diphthongization is an active, optional, regular process, and there are no signs of contextual segmental conditioning. Furthermore, preliminary observations of data collected in Oporto region (Ermesinde and Gião), from the ongoing project Interactive atlas of the prosody of Portuguese (Frota 2010–2015), suggest that not only word stress but also higher-level prominence may play a role in the definition of the context that favors diphthongization, as it seems that the phenomenon is found mainly in syllables bearing phrasal-level prominence (possibly, intonational phrase prominence). The examples in (3), as produced by two speakers of Ermesinde (Oporto), illustrate this. (3) EPor. a. Não vem, o teu avô? ‘Isn’t he coming, your grandpa?’

av[wo]

b. O João era mesmo ganancioso, [. . .] m[e]smo . . . ganaci[wo]so ‘João was really greedy, [. . .]’ To the best of our knowledge the prosodic conditions on this phenomenon remain unstudied to date. This kind of data may contribute to the understanding of possible sources for the genesis of diphthongization in Romance and in other languages as well, as aspects of the phonetics and phonology of syllables in intonational phrase nuclear position (e.g. final lengthening and pitch accent assignment) may, at least in some cases, play or have played a crucial role.1 A phenomenon that may relate to diphthongization is the lengthening of stressed vowels. In most if not all Romance languages longer duration is a major phonetic exponent of word stress, and more so in sentence nuclear position (e.g. Delgado-Martins 1977; Frota 2000 for EPor; Recasens 1986 for Catalan; Farnetani/ Kori 1990 for Italian; Ortega-Llebaria/Prieto 2007 for Spanish). Although in most of these languages lengthening has not phonologized in a certain sense (e.g. speakers are not aware of it and it is not further restricted by particular phonological conditions), phonologization has happened in Italian. Here, vowel lengthening depends not only on the presence of stress, but also on syllable structure, as it affects vowels in non-final open syllables only, as in p[ˈaː]pero ‘duck’ and tartar[ˈuː]ga ‘turtle’ vs. carib[ˈuː] ‘caribou’ (Nespor/Vogel 1986/2007, 131).2 Like other Romance languages, such as Catalan, the Standard variety of EPor lacks diphthongization of either sort, but exhibits other processes that depend on 1 Cf. Meyers (2012) for an account of word and syllable final devoicing (a phonological process also found in many languages) as the phonologization of phonetic properties that are usually present in utterance final position, with generalization to smaller prosodic domains. 2 According to Gabriel/Kireva (2014a), a similar kind of lengthening is also found in Argentinean Spanish, which emerged via transfer from Italian to (the contact variety) Argentinean Spanish.

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word-level stress, including /e/ centralization before palatals, illustrated in (4a) (Mateus 1975/1982, 34–35; Vigário 2003, 78–82), [j] insertion to break a hiatus when the first vowel (V1) is a /e/ in stressed position, as exemplified in (4b) (Mateus 1975/ 1982, 38–39; Vigário 2003, 78–82), or the so-called (verbal) vowel harmony (VH), a process that targets verbal root vowels in stressed position, which harmonize in height with the thematic vowel (TV) when it is followed by another vowel and deletes, as illustrated in (4c) (cf. the details and accounts within autosegmental and feature geometry framework in Wetzels 1991; Mateus/d’Andrade 2000, 81–86 and Matzenauer/Miranda 2005). (4) EPor. a. Stressed /e/ before palatal /e/ in unstressed position (vowel reduction) telha [ˈtɐʎɐ] telhado [tɨˈʎadu] ‘tile’ ‘roof’ b. Stressed hiatus passeio [pɐˈsɐju] ‘(I) walk’

unstressed hiatus (V1 semivocalization) passear [pɐˈsjaɾ] ‘to walk’

c. Stressed root vowel, TV deletion, VH applies devo [ˈdevu] (dev e + u) ‘(I) should’ deva [ˈdevɐ] (dev e + a) ‘(he) shouldSBJV.PRS’

Stressed root vowel, no TV deletion, VH does not apply deves [ˈdɛvɨʃ ] (dev e + s) ‘(you) should’ devem [ˈdɛvɐ̃ȷ ]̃ (dev e + m) ‘(they) should’

In some cases, not only the presence of word stress, but also a specific stress pattern may correlate with particular realizations of segments. There are three processes identified in Portuguese where segments’ quality depends on types of feet. One of these processes is Spondaic Lowering, which is a quite general rule (with some exceptions) that consists in the lowering of stressed mid vowels in words with penultimate stress ending in closed syllable, e.g. d[ˈɔ]cil ‘gentle’, but d[ˈo]ce ‘sweet’ (cf. Wetzels 1992; 2006/2007). It is worth mentioning that this rule, which is shared by both the Brazilian and the European varieties of Portuguese, may be responsible for the emergence of a low nasal round vowel in EPor, a vowel that is found nowhere else in the sound system of the language. In fact, its context is so restricted that, as far as we know, phonologists have failed to notice that [ɔ̃] may occur in EPor, in the words ontem ‘yesterday’ and anteontem ‘the day before yesterday’ (there is individual variation, but for the speakers who have this vowel, it is obligatory). The second rule, Dactylic Lowering, has the same result, and affects stressed vowels in proparoxytone words, e.g. esquel[ˈɛ]tico ‘skeletal’, but esquel[ˈe]to ‘skeleton’ (cf. Wetzels 2006/2007, 21–22). This is reminiscent to a process also found in Catalan whereby a mid vowel (/e/ or /o/) in stem final position is lowered (i.e. Cat. carb[ˈo] → carb[ˈɔ]nic, esf [ˈe]ra → esf [ˈɛ]ric, introduct[ˈo]r – introduct[ˈɔ]ri etc., cf. Mascaró 1976; 2002).

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Finally, the third phenomenon that may be observed only in words with a particular stress pattern applies nearly without exception in EPor. In this case, the lowering rule targets stressless non-high vowels, when they appear in paroxytone words, in word-final syllables closed by consonants other than -s, as in repórt[ɛ]r ‘journalist’ and séni[ɔ]r ‘senior’ (Vigário 2003, 85–89). Notice that in the latter case, reference to the unstressed status of the vowel, the (right edge of the) prosodic word and syllable composition is sufficient to describe the context of the rule and hence, here, reference to the foot seems unnecessary, synchronically. One may wonder why a particular stress pattern should impact on segments’ quality. As pointed out by Wetzels (1992), both Spondaic and Dactylic Lowering apply in contexts of exceptional stress distribution. And an exceptional stress pattern is also involved in the third type of lowering, which affects posttonic vowels in paroxyton words. In fact, as we will see further below, lowering of non-high stressless vowels in EPor seems to relate to exceptions to the application of more or less general phonological rules in other cases as well. Word stress may affect the realization of segments inside words, as in the cases mentioned above, but it can also span word sequences. This is the case of raddoppiamento sintattico, a well-known phenomenon whereby a word-initial consonant is lengthened if preceded by a word ending in a stressed vowel and followed by a non-nasal sonorant (e.g. Nespor/Vogel 1986/2007; Repetti 1991; Loporcaro 1997; Passino 2013, and references therein). The examples in (5), taken from Nespor/Vogel (1986/2007, 167), illustrate the application of this process. (5) It. a. Avrà t[ː]rovato il pescecane. ‘He must have found the shark.’ b. La gabbia è g[ː]ià c[ː]aduta. ‘The cage has already fallen.’ c. È appena passato con tre c[ː]ani. ‘He has just passed by with three dogs.’ Similarly, the realization of stressed elements may be affected by phonological material in adjacent words, as in the case of the progressive assimilatory diphthongization found in Terceira, mentioned above. As shown by the examples in (6), taken from Martins/Vitorino (1989, 333–334), the preceding high vowel or glide that will define the exact articulation of the glide to emerge and the target stressed syllable may belong to different words. (6) EPor. a. para ir dando > [pɐ i ˈðjɐ̃du]

‘in order to be giving’

>

[tɐ̃ j

ˈmjũtuʃ ]

‘(s/he) has many’

c. com os pés

>

[kuʃ

ˈpwɛʃ ]

‘with the feet’

d. sete escudos

> [ˈsɛt ʃˈkjuðuʃ ] ‘seven escudos’ (former Portuguese currency)

b. tem muitos

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2.2 Segmental phenomena in unstressed environments So far, we have seen examples of segmental processes that target word stressed positions. However, Romance languages also exhibit many segmental processes that crucially operate in unstressed environments. These include vowel reduction, semivocalization, vowel deletion and vowel merger. Vowel reduction/neutralization in stressless positions is responsible for many alternations in Romance languages vocalic systems. For example, in several Italian dialects the vowels /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ are only found in stressed position, as neutralization to [e] and [o] applies in unstressed position (e.g. Saltarelli 1970; Nespor/Vogel 1986/ 2007; Krämer 2009, and references therein). A partially similar pattern obtains in Brazilian Portuguese (BPor), where a distinction must be made between pretonic and posttonic positions (cf. 7; Câmara Jr. 1970; Wetzels 1992; Bisol/Magalhães 2004). (7) Stressless vowel system in BPor Pretonic position Posttonic position non-final [i] [u] [i] [u] [e] [o] [e] — [a] [a]

Posttonic final [i] [u] [a]

Vowel reduction in other Romance languages is however more extreme. This is the case of Catalan, with some variation across different dialects (e.g. Bonet/Lloret 1998, 32–39; Wheeler 2005, 52–77), and especially, of EPor, where non-high palatal vowels not only centralize but also raise, becoming [ɨ] instead of [ɐ] or [ə], as in Catalan. Specifically, in EPor, a tonic system with the vowels /i e ɛ a u o ɔ/ (and in specific contexts also [ɐ]) is reduced to [i ɨ ɐ u], both in pretonic and in posttonic position (in verbs, /i/ is also reduced to [ɨ] word-finally, but in non-verbs there are a number of words with exceptional stress pattern showing final [i], such as táxi ‘taxi’ or júri ‘jury’). Wetzels (1992) analyzes vowel neutralization in unstressed position in BPor within the framework of autosegmental phonology (Goldsmith 1976) and feature geometry à la Clements (1991). According to Wetzels, neutralization involves the delinking of aperture tiers (in the case of PB, [+open 3], which is under the Aperture node, together with [+open 1] and [+open 2]. Posttonically, labial vowels also undergo delinking of [+open 2], thus surfacing more reduced. For the neutralization of unstressed vowels in EPor, the same general approach to vowel reduction as delinking of [open] tiers may be adopted, but delinking is nevertheless in general more extreme (cf. also Bisol/Magalhães 2004 and Miglio 2005 for different proposals within Optimality Theory).3 3 Vowel reduction is also present in some varieties of Spanish, presumably due to language contact, as in Mexican Spanish (Lope Blanch 1963), Andean Spanish (Delforge 2008), and Bulgarian JudeoSpanish (Gabriel/Kireva 2014b).

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There are several remarkable issues related to vowel reduction in EPor. One of these refers to the contexts where VR does not apply, as there are quite a number of contexts where the absence of (full) VR is regular (Mateus/d’Andrade 2000, 134– 136; Vigário 2003, 67–72, 85–88, 92–99). These depend essentially on the prosodic position of stressless vowels (e.g. stressless vowels that are prosodic word initial, as well as in syllables closed by lateral or glide, and at the end of prosodic words that are non-final in a morphological compound, cf. Vigário 2003 and section 4.3, below, for details). The absence of VR may also be unpredictable, dependent of specific lexical items. As pointed out in Vigário (2003, 68–69), exceptions to VR are a property of words rather than morphemes, since the same morpheme may behave regularly with respect to VR or exhibit exceptional behavior, as the stem vowel in velhote [vɛˈʎɔt] ‘old man’ vs. velhice [vɨˈʎis] ‘oldness’ (cf. velho [ˈvɛʎu] ‘old’). True exceptions to VR always involve lowering in EPor or at least basic low vowels, as it seems that there are no cases of mid vowels /e o/ involved in true exceptions to VR. Thus, (i) although we cannot say that stressless vowels always undergo VR, we may state that in EPor the mid vowels [e o] are not found in unstressed position (unless in specific prosodic positions, where VR regularly does not apply, like in word initial position, as in ocupar ‘to occupy’, or when the vowel is part of an underlying diphthong, as in louvar ‘to pray’, or part of a syllable closed by lateral, as in moldar ‘to shape’); and (ii) exceptions to VR (which always surface as low), just like regular VR application (where raising affects mid and low vowels) implies the neutralization of mid and low vowels. As far as we know, these generalizations have not been noticed in previous work on EPor phonology. Two other common processes apply in the Romance languages only in unstressed environments: V1 semivocalization and vowel deletion. The first one consists of the gliding of the first of two vowels when the V1 is high, within and across words (e.g. Bisol 1992; 2003 for BPor; Hualde 1999 for Spanish; Frota 2000 for EPor; Cabré/Prieto 2005 for Catalan; Chitoran/Hualde 2007 for Romanian and several other Romance languages). The second process only applies regularly across words, although in particular morphological environments it is also found inside words (e.g. in verbs, the theme vowel deletes when it is followed by another vowel, as in am a + o > amo ‘I love’; a similar analysis is also proposed in Bermúdez-Otero 2006 for stem final vowels in derivational contexts in Spanish). One of the most interesting aspects of V1 semivocalization, vowel deletion, and also vowel merger, is the way these processes may be constrained by word and/or phrase-level prominence, as we will see in the next section.

2.3 Effects of word- and phrase-level prominence on segmental phenomena Segmental phenomena that target unstressed vowels are often sensitive to word- and phrase-level prominence.

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For example, in languages like Spanish and Romanian and within the word, distance relative to stress has been reported to affect the probability of V1 semivocalization in pretonic positions (Hualde 1999; Simonet 2005; Chitoran/Hualde 2007). Similarly, in Catalan word initial high vowels have been shown not to semivocalize if word stress closely follows (i.e. if it is no more than two syllables away, cf. Cabré/ Prieto 2004). Still inside words, in languages like BPor, EPor and Catalan high vowels followed by another vowel in posttonic position obligatorily surface as glides. In this group of languages, while semivocalization is in general optional pretonically, it is obligatory in postonic position, as in família ‘family’ (d’Andrade/Viana 1994; Frota 2000; Mateus/d’Andrade 2000; Cabré/Prieto 2004; Simonet 2005).4 When V1 and V2 belong to different words, phrase-level prominence may also determine whether semivocalization may apply or not. For instance, according to Frota (2000, 83–95) in EPor V2 stress blocks semivocalization under stress clash conditions, as in (8), where both Word 1 and Word 2 bear phonological phrase (ϕ) level prominence, and the two stressed syllables would be strictly adjacent if semivocalization applied (here, and where relevant in this chapter, capitalizing signals word-stressed syllables). (8)

EPor.

(O dançaRIno)ϕ (ama)ϕ (a bailaRIna RUssa)ϕ ‘The dancer loves the Russian chorus girl.’

*dançarin[w]ama

Like semivocalization, higher-level prominence may also constrain the application of vowel deletion across words. In her experimental work, involving acoustic analysis of read sentences created to control for various segmental and prosodic conditions, Frota (2000) found that different rhythmic configurations yield distinct results, depending on levels of stress under clash (namely phonological phrase and intonational phrase level prominence) and the location of phrasal heads (heads on the right or on the left of clashing stresses result in different deletion possibilities). Back vowel deletion, for instance, has the same general properties as semivocalization, except that it is blocked under more restrictive conditions of stress clash. This is illustrated in (9), where V1 is preceded by a vowel bearing phonological phrase 4 In EPor rising diphthongs usually result from the application of an optional process of semivocalization, and according to the results in Chitoran/Hualde (2007), who experimentally compared French, Spanish, Romanian, EPor and BPor in this respect, EPor speakers show a systematic tendency for producing hiatus rather than rising diphthongs. However, there are some regular instances of obligatory rising diphthongs, as in the sequence /jɔn/, surfacing as [jɔn] and [jun] in stressed and unstressed position, respectively (e.g. nacioNAL ‘national’, accioNAR ‘to activate’, aCCIOnas ‘(you) activate’). To our knowledge, this fact was not previously reported in the literature on EPor. Chitoran/Hualde (2007) propose that Portuguese is different from other Romance languages that show a greater tendency to resolving hiatus via V1 gliding, because it lacks the historical sources that created important amounts of rising diphthongs in other Romance languages (especially Spanish), which act as “attractors” to diphthongization.

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level prominence: in (9a) deletion is impossible because deletion would result in a stress clash at the level of the phonological phrase; in (9b) deletion optionally applies, since although V2 bears prosodic word (PW) level stress, it is not the head of its phonological phrase (adapted from Frota 2000, 87–88). (9) EPor. a. (o dançaRIno)ϕ (Ama)ϕ (a bailaRIna RUssa)ϕ b. (o bailaRIno)ϕ (ANda SEMpre)ϕ (de limuSIne PREta)ϕ

i.

s s s s (o dançaRIno)ϕ (Ama)ϕ (a bailaRIna RUssa)ϕ

*dançarin

ama

okbailarin

anda

ϕ-level prominence PW-level prominence

s w s ϕ-level prominence s s s PW-level prominence ii. (o bailaRIno)ϕ (ANda SEMpre)ϕ (de limuSIne PREta)ϕ

V1 deletion sensitivity to stress clash configurations and levels of phrasal prominence is attested, with some relevant differences, in other Romance languages as well, like Galician (Fernández Rei 2002, 130–151, 180–183), BPor (Tenani 2002, 193–195), and Catalan (Cabré/Prieto 2005). Notice that blocking of segmental rules is one of various possible ways of avoiding stress clash, which may also be achieved via stress retraction (as in Northern varieties of Italian, cf. Nespor/Vogel 1986/2007, section 6.3, and in BPor, as shown below), stress demotion (restricted to lower prosodic domains, according to Nespor/ Vogel 1989), and beat insertion, namely via vowel lengthening. The latter strategy operates in EPor when two clashing stresses are within the same phonological phrase, according to the experimental work conducted by Frota (2000). A sentence like (10), taken from Frota (2000, 128), illustrates the context where segmental lengthening is found in EPor as a way to avoid adjacent clashing stresses.5 (10)

EPor.

(O café[ː] LUso)ϕ contém cevada de boa qualidade. ‘The Lusitanian coffee contains barley of good quality.’

When across-words hiatus are formed of similar vowels, Romance languages may show a variety of different solutions. Without entering in too much detail, we highlight the following facts: (i) in EPor, hiatus formed by two unstressed central mid vowels [ɐ] usually merge in a single low [a], while word stress on V2 blocks vowel merger (Frota 2000, 82); (ii) in BPor the same vowels become a single one without concomitant vowel quality; here, both an analysis of vowel merger or of V1 deletion yields the same result; (iii) in very specific cases, stress on V1 does not block vowel

5 Unlike the large majority of segmental phenomena surveyed in this chapter, this type of lengthening is only observable with acoustic measurements, as it is beyond speakers awareness.

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merger (or V1 deletion) in BPor; an explanation for this is that stress shift applies in these cases as a strategy for stress clash resolution, and hence V1 is in fact unstressed, as shown in (11) (cf. Bisol 2003, 190). (11)

BPor.

soFÁ aZUL > sòfazúl

‘blue sofa’

Importantly, there is some indication that variation across (Romance) languages in hiatus tolerance may be explained, among other things, by the availability of different strategies to avoid stress clashes (cf. Frota 2000, 92–94 for EPor; Fernández Rei 2002, 141–142 for Galician). In general, only V1 may delete. However, some languages allow V2 deletion under particular conditions (Casali 1997). An interesting question that may be raised here is why some Romance languages allow V2 deletion (like Galician and Catalan, cf. Fernández Rei 2002, 143–151, and Cabré/Prieto 2005, respectively), while in others V2 deletion is strictly forbidden, regardless of the properties of the vowel sequences (as in EPor, cf. Frota 2000, 88–89). Casali (1997) and Cabré/Prieto (2005) analyze this type of deletion within OT framework: constraint rankings account for different possible outcomes, including variable rankings of position-sensitive faithfulness constraints that ensure that word initial segments are preserved or, by contrast, may be deleted. We should emphasize that stress effects in hiatus resolution phenomena across words are not restricted to clashing configurations. For example, a less common process of [j] insertion to break a hiatus across words is active in Northern varieties of EPor (cf. Lopo 1895; Segura 2013; Oliveira et al. 2014). Insertion applies between non-high central vowels [a ɐ ã ɐ̃], when V2 bears word-level stress, as illustrated in (12a). In a recent study based on speech collected in several Northern areas, Oliveira et al. (2014) found that higher-levels of prominence in V2 may also promote glide insertion. This can be illustrated by the sequence in (12b) where in six occurrences of the same phrase produced by several speakers in a map task, four show glide insertion in Ana_Alves (where Alves bears phonological phrase prominence), while none shows insertion in Moda_Alves (where Alves bears word- but not phrase-level prominence).6 (12)

EPor.

a.

a ÁRvore é amarela ‘the tree is yellow’

a[j]ÁRvore

b.

MOda Ana ALves (. . .) MOda_Ana; Ana[j]ALves ‘Moda Ana Alves’ (name of store)

6 In this map task two subjects of the same variety interact. Each of the subjects has a map with landmarks and a road. One of the subjects is asked to provide the directions for the other to reach a designated point in the map. The two maps are not exactly identical, and the mismatches create the motivation for naturalistic-like dialogs. This type of task is especially suitable to trigger spontaneous-like renditions of various sentence types, contrastive focus and the occurrence of specific words or expressions.

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Importantly, V1 may be stressless and not preceded by another stressed syllable, as in (12a). Hence, in this case glide insertion seems to be a strategy for preserving the integrity of word initial stressed V2, especially favored when V2 is the head of the prosodic domain containing both vowels. We may note that [j] insertion to break a hiatus is also found in some dialects of Galician, but the conditions for the process are very different (cf. Fernández Rei 2002, 246–253; Colina 1997a, section 3.2). Here, distinct vowels may be involved, stress on V2 is not required, and insertion seems to be active across words only when clitics are part of the word sequence.

2.4 Interactions between segmental and tonal phenomena Besides word stress and phrasal prominence, particular intonational contours may also impact on the realization of segments. For example, in EPor both schwa epenthesis at the right-edge of oxyton words ending in sonorant consonant (e.g. azul ‘blue’, mar ‘sea’ surfacing as [ɐˈzulɨ] and [ˈmaɾɨ], respectively) and blocking of nonback vowel deletion (brilhante ‘brilliant’, surfacing as [bɾiˈʎɐ̃tɨ], instead of [bɾiˈʎɐ̃t]), are common in word-final position of non-final intonational phrases, as well as at the right edge of yes-no questions and vocatives with calling contours (cf. Frota 2002; 2014). According to Frota (2014), what these various cases of word-final schwa realization have in common is the presence of complex tonal events (namely a pitch accent and a boundary tone) that require enough segmental space for their realization (in the case of intonational phrases ending in oxyton words, both the nuclear pitch accent and the boundary tone(s) would be realized on a single syllable, the final stressed one). Hence, schwa insertion or schwa deletion blocking ensures the realization of the segmental material required for tonal anchoring.7 We may notice that other strategies exist in Romance languages to deal with complex tunes-text accommodation, such as tonal truncation (as in Southern varieties of Italian, like Bari and Palermo Italian; cf. Grice et al. 2005), tonal compression (e.g. anticipation of tonal targets under tonal crowding coexists with tonal truncation in Neapolitan, cf. D’Imperio 2006) and final vowel lengthening, a possibility also available in EPor (Frota 2002; 2014) and in Logudorese Sardinian. In the latter language, post-tonic syllables of vocatives may be truncated and originate a monosyllable, in which case lengthening creates the space that is required for the realization of the vocative L+H* L* L% melody (cf. Vanrell et al. 2015, and references therein).8 7 Other reasons may, nevertheless, account for vowel insertion in similar contexts, since according to Cruz (2013), IP final epenthesis in a Southern dialect of European Portuguese, spoken in Alentejo, is also found in non-tonal crowding contexts, like in declarative utterance final position. 8 Recent investigation by Frota et al. (2016) has revealed variation in the strategies to deal with tonal crowding in varieties of Portuguese, some favoring the preservation of the segmental string and consequently exhibiting tone truncation and some preferring to maintain tones and changing the segmentals instead.

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2.5 Summary To sum up, in this section we have reviewed a number of phonological processes that apply in Romance languages showing some of the many interactions between segments and suprasegmental properties. In the following section we will exemplify how prosodic organization may also impact on the way segmental phenomena operate.

3 Segmental phenomena and prosodic structure It is well-known that segmental processes may also be constrained by prosodic structure, that is, some rules target specific segments or strings of segments in particular positions within specific prosodic domains. This also means that segmental phenomena may cue prosodic phrasing and are therefore one of the sources of evidence for the existence of a prosodic structure that is distinct in nature from morphological and syntactic structures (e.g. Selkirk 1984; Nespor/Vogel 1986/2007, and the synopsis in Vigário to appear a, b). In this section we will review work on some of the segmental processes that apply with reference to each of the prosodic domains in Romance languages, starting from the syllable, the lower constituent of the prosodic tree. Following a common trend in language, Romance languages allow for a restricted set of consonants in syllable final position, which usually includes coronal fricatives, nasal and lateral consonants and rhotics. There are several processes that affect consonants in this position. One such process is fricative voicing assimilation (e.g. O[ʒ] bon[ʒ] me[ ʃ ]tre[ ʃ ] ‘the good teachers’ (Portuguese), el[z] meu[z] mapes ‘my maps’ (Catalan)), which is found in all major linguistic areas of Romance, and is active word-internally as well as across words (e.g. Frota 2000, 53–74; Tenani 2002, 128– 135; Fernández Rei 2002, 57–87; Hualde 2005, 159–161; notice that from a phonetic point of view fricative voicing may show some variation, as noticed in Frota 2000, 54 for EPor, and Garcia 2013 for Colombian Spanish). The phonology of syllable-final laterals and nasal consonants varies more in the Romance space. For instance, word-internal nasal consonants surface as such in syllable-final position in most languages, but assimilate the point of articulation of the following consonant (e.g. Harris 1969; Hualde 2005 for Spanish; Krämer 2009 for Italian; Bonet/Lloret 1998 for Catalan); furthermore, point of articulation assimilation may also apply across words, e.g. so[m p]etits ‘(they) are small’, so[ŋ k]uatre ‘(they) are four’ in Majorcan Catalan (Prieto 2004, 254; cf. also Nespor/Vogel 1986/ 2007, 211–213 for Spanish). In Portuguese, by contrast, word-internal coda nasals nasalize the preceding vowel and delete (e.g. campo [ˈkɐ̃pu] ‘field’, respectively). d’Andrade/Kihm (1988) propose that in EPor a nasal in this context is an autosegment, i.e. a nasal feature that is not segmentally anchored, which associates to

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the preceding vocalic nucleus, yielding a nasal vowel. As these authors notice, nasalization is not, however, a purely phonological process in the sense that it is also conditioned by morphological and lexical factors (cf. also Vigário 2003, 74–78 and Sampson 1999 for an overview of the evolution of nasal segments in the Romance languages). In the case of alveolar laterals, similarly to English and unlike most other Romance languages (cf. Bullock 1995 for an overview), coronal laterals also show a particular realization in syllable-final position both in BPor and EPor. The two varieties do not treat the lateral in similar ways, however, as in BPor coda laterals surface as a velar glide [w], whereas in EPor the lateral is velarized, that is, it is realized with a velar secondary articulation (l-velarization is also found in Galician, although in more restricted contexts, cf. Álvarez/Xove 2002, 41; cf. also Mateus/ d’Andrade 2000, 137–141 for an analysis of the phonology of syllable-final consonants in Portuguese within the framework of autosegmental phonology and feature geometry). Note that only in EPor velarization behaves like a purely prosodic phenomenon, in the sense that it applies across-the-board, whenever its structural description is met, including in domains larger than the word. In BPor, by contrast, [w] obtains even when across word resyllabification removes /l/ from coda position (cf. 13a). /l/-velarization, but not nasalization in EPor or /l/-gliding in BPor, operates within a larger prosodic domain in EPor (the intonational phrase), as illustrated in (13b), where /l/ is velarized in Miguel, because there is an intonational phrase boundary that blocks resyllabification, unlike in mel ‘honey’, where due to resyllabification the lateral becomes syllable initial and hence the conditions for velarization are not met. (13)

a.

BPor.

Quanto a Migue[w], ele achou o me[w] agradáve[w].

b.

EPor.

Quanto a Migue[ɫ], achou o me[l] agradáve[ɫ]. ‘As to Miguel, (he) found the honey nice.’

Notice that there are also processes that affect segments in other syllabic positions, as in the case of r-strengthening in Spanish (Harris 1983; Nespor/Vogel 1986/2007, 81; Hualde 2005, 181–184) and in Portuguese (Mateus/d’Andrade 2000, 15–16; Vigário 2003, 89–91). Word-internal r-strengthening applies in these languages when /ɾ/ is preceded by a heterosyllabic consonant, in which case it surfaces as a trill, as in honra ‘honor’ in both languages (with a further change in point of articulation, in the case of Portuguese). Let us now turn to segmental processes that apply with reference to the prosodic word (PW). We shall illustrate PW-bound segmental rules with a PW-limit deletion rule in EPor and a process of vowel harmony bound by the PW domain in a variety of Piedmontese (spoken in the North of Italy).

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In EPor, schwas (corresponding to realizations of underlying /e/ and /ɛ/, as well as, more rarely, /i/ in unstressed position) regularly delete in prosodic word final position (except in the contexts where tonal crowding presses segmental material to emerge, as mentioned in section 2.4, above, and in particular metric configurations within a prosodic compound, as we will see further below). This process is very informative of the way clitics and other types of morphosyntactic objects are organized within prosodic words and prosodic word groups (Vigário 2003, 163–165; 2010). The data in (14) illustrate the main facts (‘x’ signals marked, infrequent realizations). Both (14a) and (14b) show the (nearly) obligatory application of [ɨ] deletion in PW-final position, whether or not a following word starts with a vowel. In (14c) [ɨ] deletion does not operate because the prefix re- ([ʁɨ]) is not a PW (the very presence of the reduced vowel [ɨ] shows the unstressed status of this prefix, which therefore cannot be a PW independent of its base). In (14d) encliticization of weak pronominal clitics to the preceding verb yields incorporation of the clitic into the PW that contains the verb; hence the verb-final vowel is no longer PW-final and deletion is impossible. In these cases, the hiatus is post-tonic and therefore gliding is obligatory (like in faMÍlia ‘family’ – cf. section 2.3, above), a fact that further supports the incorporation of enclitics into the preceding PW. The pattern in (14e) is similar to that in (14a–b), because clitic incorporation into the preceding PW causes clitic-final vowels to become PW-final, which is the context for [ɨ] deletion. Finally, examples (14f–g) show that clitics other than post-verbal weak pronouns do not cliticize to the preceding PW, and hence in (14f) the last vowel of that word deletes. Clitics in this position attach to the following PW instead, so that the final vowel of the clitic can no longer undergo PW-final vowel deletion (a reduction process that affects very frequent words, to which we return in subsection 4.3, below, accounts for optional deletion in this case). (14) Por. a. BEbe.

0 / x[ɨ]

PEle. ‘skin’

0 / x[ɨ]

b. BEbe aGOra! ‘DrinkI M P now!’

0 / x[j] / x[ɨ]

PEle ALva ‘white skin’

0 / x[j] / x[ɨ]

c. reavaliAR ‘reevaluate’

*0 / [i] / [j]

reutiliZAR ‘reuse’

*0 / [i] / [j]

d. BEbe-a! ‘Drink itF !’

*0 / [j]

PEde-o! ‘Ask it!’

*0 / [j]

e. VIU-me ONtem. 0 / x[j] / x[ɨ] ‘(S/he) saw-me yesterday’

PEço-te aGOra. ‘(I) beg-you now.’

0 / x[j] / x[ɨ]

f. PEde o LIvro. 0 / x[j] / x[ɨ] ‘(S/he) asks for the book’

SÓ HenRIque o DIsse. 0 / x[j] / x[ɨ] ‘Only Henrique said it.’

‘drinkI M P ’

GOSto de obserVAR. g. JÁ te ofereCI. 0 / [j] / x[ɨ] ‘(I) have already offered (it) to you.’ ‘(I) like watching.’

0 / [j] / x[ɨ]

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The second phenomenon we will consider here is vowel harmony in Piverone (a dialect of Piedmontese). According to Loporcaro (2000), vowel harmony in this dialect is a PW-bound process affecting word-final non-low vowels, which harmonize in height to the stressed vowel. This is illustrated in (15), taken from Loporcaro (2000, 164): non-low vowels surface as [e o] if preceded by a stressed low or mid-low vowel, and as [i u] if preceded by a stressed high or mid-high vowel (15a). The examples in (15b) show that enclitics incorporate into the preceding PW, since they pattern like PW-final elements. (15)

Piedmontese (Piverone) a. [ˈpɛre] ‘stones’ [ˈkanto] ‘(they) sing’ b.

[ˈda-me] [ˈmat-lo]

‘(s/he) gives me’ ‘(s/he) puts it’

[ˈbryti] [ˈtʃitu]

‘uglyF. P L ’ ‘silent’

[ˈmus-mi] [ˈpij-lu]

‘(s/he) shows me’ ‘(s/he) takes it’

Notice that processes like these may be crucial to determine how particular words (like clitics) and morphemes (like affixes) are prosodized (e.g. Peperkamp 1997; Vigário 2003). Another example of a process that has been used to this end is raddoppiamento sintattico (RS), mentioned in subsection 1.2 and section 3. Peperkamp (1997, 71–72) offers it as a diagnostic to the prosodic status of monosyllabic prefixes: Because monosyllabic prefixes do not trigger RS (as illustrated in 16a), they are argued not to bear word-level stress or form autonomous prosodic words (as tré in 16b). (16)

It.

a.

pre[ɡ]réci

‘pre-GreekM . P L ’

b.

tré [ɡː]réci

‘three Greeks’

(Other) segmental phenomena that apply with reference to the PW have been reported, for instance, in Nespor/Vogel (1986/2007) and Peperkamp (1997) for several dialects of Italian (but cf. Loporcaro 2000 for a critical view), Loporcaro (2000) for Algherese, Romanesco and Friulian, three Romance varieties spoken in Italy, Bisol (2000; 2004) and Schwindt (2008) for BPor, and Vigário (2003) for EPor. The next level of prosodic hierarchy that constrains segmental processes is the Prosodic Word Group (Vigário 2010), or, in other approaches, the Clitic Group or the Composite Group (Nespor/Vogel 1986/2007 and Vogel 2009, respectively). The behavior of word-final schwas in EPor illustrates the relevance of the PWG for the realization of segments. As we have seen above, schwas are usually deleted in prosodic word-final position. However, deletion is blocked within PWGs, when the target vowel is followed by a vowel bearing PWG prominence (Vigário 2010). This is illustrated in (17), where both the compound in (17a) and the abbreviation in (17b) are formed of more than one PW. The vowel that starts the rightmost PW bears PWG

Segmental phenomena and their interactions

57

prominence, blocking final e-deletion in the previous PW, and deletion applies between the first and the second PW of the abbreviation because the second PW is not the head of PWG. Word-final e-deletion in EPor may thus be understood as a domain-limit process (it applies at the right-edge of PW) that operates within a larger domain (the PWG). (17)

EPor.

grande-área RFM (erre-efe-eme)

[ˈɡɾɐ̃ ˈdjaɾjɐ] [ˈɛˈʀɛˈfjɛm]

‘penalty area’ (name of radio station)

Let us now consider segmental processes at the level of the phonological phrase. According to Féry (2004, 170–173), in French the gradient processes of obstruent voicing assimilation (e.g. bec de gaz ‘gas tap’ /kd/ → [ɡd]) and nasal-obstruent simplification (e.g. dinde de Noël ‘Christmas turkey’ /ɛ̃dd/ → [ɛ̃nd]) apply within the phonological phrase and are blocked across phonological phrase boundaries (at least when narrow focus is involved). In Romance languages, however, most commonly only the processes that are sensitive to word stress and phrasal prominence are conditioned by the phonological phrase. For example, raddoppiamento sintattico has been argued to apply within, but not across the phonological phrase (Nespor/ Vogel 1986/2007; notice nevertheless that according to Marotta 2011, the process may apply in higher levels as well). Similarly, in EPor vowel lengthening is a strategy for stress clash resolution available within, but not across phonological phrases, as we have seen before. Furthermore, sandhi processes that originate syllable loss, like those referred to in subsection 2.3, are also usually constrained by stress clash configurations involving phonological phrase prominence (Frota 2000; 2014). The Intonational Phrase, by contrast, is the domain for many other types of segmental processes that apply across words. Very often, they involve resyllabification, a phenomenon that is shared by all Romance languages, implicating syllable restructuring across words. Unlike in Germanic languages, where the domain of resyllabification is the prosodic word (e.g. Booij 1995, for Dutch), in the Romance languages it is the intonational phrase (e.g. Nespor/Vogel 1986/2007 for several languages, Frota 2000, 60–62 for EPor; Féry 2004 for French), or even a higher domain, such as the utterance. In fact, in her experimental work on Galician, Fernández Rei (2002) finds that sandhi processes such as fricative voicing and vowel deletion may apply across IP boundaries with no intervening pause, within the Utterance (with some interspeaker variation). This is illustrated in (18), taken from Fernández Rei (2002, 81–82): Fricative voicing optionally applies in (18a), where each sentence may be phrased within a single Utterance, but not in (18b), where both sentences form two distinct Utterances. (18)

Gal.

a.

Xá son maiorciños. Deixaos ir. ‘(They) are older now. Let them go’

b.

Comprou dous iates. Dáme un cigarro. ‘(He) bought two yachts. Give me a cigarette.’

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Furthermore, using a methodology similar to that of Frota (2000) and Fernández Rei (2002), Tenani (2002) finds that in BPor the processes involved in resyllabification (fricative voicing, tapping, vowel degemination, deletion and diphthongization, and syllable degemination) may in fact be unbound, as speakers resyllabify not only within and across IPs, but also across Utterances that do not qualify for restructuring into a single Utterance (with no intervening pause), as in (19) (from Tenani 2002, 178). (19)

Por.

O Pedro comprou pêssego. Alegaram falta de provas. ‘Pedro bought peaches. They have claimed lack of evidence.’ pêsse[ɡw a]legaram pêsse[ɡ a]legaram

What ultimately accounts for the variation across (Romance) languages in the prosodic domain for resyllabification is certainly an interesting, though not very much investigated topic (but cf. Kleinhenz 1997 for some suggestions). There are a number of much debated issues related to resyllabification other than its domain of application. For instance, a well-established fact seems to be the necessity of distinguishing between what one may consider basic syllabification, resyllabification in the lexicon and postlexical resyllabification. Notice that in OT accounts these distinctions may be accomplished without reference to the separation between lexical and post-lexical phonology, but they converge in the need of distinguishing between different types of processes related to the syllabification of segmental material (cf. e.g. Peperkamp 1997; Colina 1997b; Face 2002 for Spanish; Schwindt 2008 for BPor; Peperkamp 1997 and Cardinaletti/Repetti 2009 for Italian dialects). Among the most challenging questions posed by resyllabification is the status of lexical and post-lexical syllables and word boundaries. For example, it is well known that languages are usually affected by constraints that ban certain segments from word-initial position. Thus, like in other Romance languages, in EPor a number of segments cannot appear prosodic word initially, namely [ɨ ɾ ɲ ʎ] (from Vigário 2003, 159). However, resyllabification apparently results in words starting with forbidden segments. One approach to the issue suggested in Vigário (2003, 160) is to admit that phonotactic restrictions of this sort apply only at the lexical level, before word combination and resyllabification (cf. also Peperkamp 1997, 27–30 and references therein). Alternatively, Cardinaletti/Repetti (2009) propose that there are two syllable representations, which are not subject to the exact same requirements: word-level syllables, embedded under the prosodic word, and phrase-level syllables. For example, in a sequence like /l/ + /ɛ/ > [lɛ] ‘he is’ (from the Northern Italian dialect of Donceto), only [ɛ] is syllabified at the prosodic word-level, but at the phonological phrase level [lɛ] forms a (phrase-level) syllable. Duplicating syllable representations in this way is argued, for instance, to account for asymmetries found

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59

in several Romance languages between syllables that are possible at the word-level and marked or impossible resyllabifications involving prosodic words or clitic-host combinations. This is illustrated by the Spanish examples in (20), where resyllabification may apply only if it does not yield a complex onset or coda (although these are legal in the language as in, e.g., pueblo [pwe.βlo] ‘village’). (20)

Sp.

a.

club elegante

[klu.βe.le.ɣan.te]

‘elegant club’

b.

club lindo

[kluβ.lin.do], *[klu.βlin.do]

‘pretty club’

Under this approach, phrasal syllable boundaries and prosodic word boundaries do not have to match, and hence resyllabification (i.e. the formation of phrase-level syllables) does not imply prosodic word boundaries restructuring. Within the Romance space, French liaison presents a number of specific problems that have long attracted the attention of phonologists, in particular the origin of resyllabified consonants (cf. the literature review in Tranel 1995; Bybee 2001; Ngyen et al. 2009). In general it is assumed that when consonants are lexically anchored, word-final consonants always surface and no alternations emerge (as in seize ‘sixteen’). However, in the case of prenominal adjectives and when closed lexical classed are involved, either allomorphy (petit chat [pətiʃa] ‘little cat’, but petit ami [pətitami] ‘little friend’; les chats [leʃa] ‘the cats’, les amis [lezami] ‘the friends’) or floating consonants (requiring association to segmental and syllabic tiers in order to be realized, as when the following word starts in a vowel) account for the observed alternations. Evidence from speech perception studies in French suggest that wordfinal fixed and liaison consonants (e.g. seize élèves ‘sixteen pupils’ vs. des élèves ‘pupils’) have a different phonological status (cf. Ngyen et al. 2009, and the references therein for other work on the perception of liaison consonants in French).9

4 Non-general segmental phenomena: subphonological grammars or cophonologies and the lexicon Many of the processes mentioned in the previous sections are considered purely phonological, in the sense that they depend on phonological constraints alone. However, like in other languages, in Romance languages innumerous segmental

9 It is well-known furthermore that in French the so-called h aspiré words block liaison and enchaînement, despite the fact that they start phonetically with a vowel. We refer to Gabriel/Meisenburg (2009) for a review of the immense literature on this matter and for a recent analysis of the phenomenon within Optimality Theory.

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phenomena only apply in smaller areas of the lexicon or in particular morphosyntactic contexts. Additionally, in many cases specific lexical items or morphemes must be somehow lexically specified in order to be exempted from the application of a rather general process or, on the contrary, so as to exhibit a specific phonological behavior. In different frameworks, distinct theoretical apparatus have been devised to handle this type of phonological facts (cf. e.g. Inkelas/Orgun/Zoll 1997). Here, we will focus on various types of processes rather than on specific theoretical approaches to exceptions in phonology. We will briefly consider three distinct types of processes, which differ at least in their origin.

4.1 Processes that refer to morphological and lexical information Ever since the early days of generative phonology, processes referring to morphological information and/or with lexical exceptions have been widely documented in the Romance languages space (e.g. Harris 1969; Saltarelli 1970; Mateus 1975/1982; d’Andrade 1977). These rules are not purely phonological in the sense that for their application it is not sufficient that the phonological description of the rule is met, as they are restricted to certain morphological environments, they may have exceptions, and/or they are not sensitive to post-lexical information. Inflectional and derivational environments, as well as verb-clitic and clitic-clitic combinations, display an array of such segmental phenomena. Well-known illustrative examples from Portuguese of this type of phenomena are the realization of plurals ending in laterals and the realization of nasal feature (Morales-Front/Holt 1997; Vigário 2003, 74–76), and several processes of regular verbal inflection (Mateus 1975/1982; Mateus/d’Andrade 2000), the so-called processes of metaphony (in nouns and adjectives) and vowel harmony (in verbs) (Matzenauer/ Miranda 2005 and references therein). Among the processes with similar properties mentioned in the previous sections from other Romance languages are vowel/ diphthong alternations in Spanish (cf. Hualde 2005, 193–198; Eddington 2012, among others) and diphthongization in Romanian, which also involves the interaction of morphological and phonological constraints (Chitoran 2002), to mention but a couple of these processes in Romance. In some approaches, the properties of phonological rules are seen to point to a particular organization of grammar. Furthermore, identifying the locus in grammar that is relevant for a given phonological process or constraint may in fact have further implications for the phonological analysis. For example, as we have seen above, sound patterns may signal prosodic structure. However, this is true only if phonological units are prosodized in the same point in grammar where the particular phonological processes or relevant generalizations apply. We shall illustrate this with a couple of processes in different Romance languages involving verb-clitic combinations.

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61

In her proposal on the prosodization of clitics in various dialects of Italian, Peperkamp (1997) relies on the word stress patterns displayed by host-clitic combinations. For example, the fact that enclitics do not affect stress placement in Standard Italian, as in PORtamelo ‘Bring it to me!’ (bringI M P-me-it), is seen to show that post-verbal clitics do not incorporate into the host prosodic word in this language variety. However, Loporcaro (2000) and Vigário (2003, 333) point out that if stress placement in Standard Italian is a lexical process and pronominal clitics are syntactic words (and not affixes) which combine with their hosts post-lexically, the mere fact that verb-clitic combinations are not present at the lexical component of phonology accounts for the non-application of lexical phonological processes. Loporcaro (2000) further shows that, like in Standard Italian, in Algherese (a Catalan dialect spoken in Sardinia), pronominal clitics do not affect stress placement either. However, post-lexical processes, such as vowel epenthesis, reveal that in this dialect enclitics are indeed integrated within the host prosodic word. EPor data also show the same need for separating lexical from post-lexical phenomena when considering the prosodization of clitics (Vigário 2003, 162–164). For example, /e/ obligatorily centralizes in stressed position followed by a palatal high segment (coda fricatives are assumed to be lexically underspecified for place features and thus do not trigger the process, e.g. mesmo ‘even’ or vespa ‘wasp’). Although it has a few exceptions when /e/ is followed by fricatives (mexo ‘(I) touch’, rejo ‘(I) govern’), the rule is exceptionless when sonorants are involved (telha ‘tile’, tenho ‘(I) have’, areia ‘sand’, lei ‘law’). The fact that it has exceptions is a symptom that this is a lexical process. Crucially, when a stressed /e/ is followed by a sonorant palatal segment that belongs to an enclitic, it never centralizes. Notice that evidence from regular, postlexial phonological processes clearly shows that pronominal enclitics incorporate into the prosodic word of their host, as we have seen previously.10 Not only segmental and suprasegmental processes, but also other important phonological generalizations, such as the Three Syllables Stress Window, as well as phonotactic constraints, show the importance of distinguishing between lexical and 10 Enclitics in the varieties of Romance may interact with stress location in various ways (cf. e.g. Peperkamp 1997, 176–178; Ordóñez/Repetti 2006, among many others, and references therein). In most standard varieties, clitics do not affect word stress location. In some varieties, however, enclitics may bear stress, while the stress in the host is also maintained, as in Neapolitan (e.g. CÓNtaTÍle ‘tellIMP-youREFL-itF’). In addition, enclitics may also be totally integrated in the host prosodic word, contribute to the computation of stress location, and eventually bear the main stress of host-clitic combination, as in Lucanian, Gascon, Majorcan Catalan or Cheso Aragonese (cf. VÍnne ‘sellIMP’, vinnemMÍle ‘sellIMPme-it’, in Lucanian). In some cases, variation is also found in the same variety, as in Argentinean Spanish, where forms like ¡Preguntáselo! ‘Ask it to him!’ may alternate with ¡Preguntaseló!, in colloquial, mainly emphatic speech (cf. Gabriel/Rinke 2010; Colantoni/Cuervo 2013). The variation found in the way enclitics interact with prosodic word stress points to different types of prosodic integration of the clitic into the host PW and/or to differences in the point in grammar where the host-clitic combination obtains (at the lexical component or postlexically), and both facts may correlate with varying degrees of grammaticalization of the host-clitic combination.

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post-lexical phonology. It is well-known that there is a universal tendency for stress to fall within the three initial or final syllables of a phonological domain (e.g. van der Hulst 1996). On the basis of EPor data, Vigário (2003, 67) argues that this generalization can only be maintained if it is assumed that it operates at the lexical component. In fact, the incorporation of pronominal enclitics into the preceding verbal host may result in (extended) prosodic words with stress on the fourth or even the fifth to the last syllable of the word (21). (21)

EPor.

a.

abandonáramo-la [ɐ.bɐ̃.du.ˈna.ɾɐ.mu.lɐ] ‘(we) had abandon her’

b.

oferecíamo-no-lo [o.fɾɨ.ˈsi.ɐ.mu.nu.lu] ‘we used to offer it to ourselves’

In the same line, Loporcaro (2011b) observes that only post-lexical rules, such as schwa epenthesis, may originate prosodic words with stress before the antepenultimate syllable in Romance languages.11 Phonotactic restrictions in EPor banning prosodic word initial [ɲ ʎ ɾ] are also to be observed only in lexical phonology, since proclitic adjunction to prosodic words ( já lhe ofereci > já lhofereci ‘(I) have already offered-him’) and resyllabification (venho aqui > venhaqui ‘(I) come here’) may originate prosodic words starting with these forbidden segments (but cf. Cardinaletti/Repetti 2009 for an alternative account, as mentioned above). To conclude this section, we would like to point out that in some cases, it is difficult to determine whether a given pattern of segmental distribution is best analyzed as resulting from the application of phonological rules that operate in very restricted environments or via constraints ordering reflecting preference for a given allomorph over allomorphic competitors (cf. for example the discussion in Mascaró 2007 and Nevins 2011). Alternations may involve affixes, clitics and clitichost combinations, and other types of words as well. Examples of such alternations in Romance, analyzed from many different perspectives are copious, e.g. Italian pronominal clitics (Nespor/Vogel 1986/2007; Peperkamp 1997, and references therein) and inflected prepositions (Napoli/Nevins 1987), Catalan clitics (Bonet/Lloret 2005) and definite masculine article (Mascaró 2007), EPor pronominal clitics (Vigário 2003) and the plural morpheme in the nominal system (Mateus 1975/1982; Morales-Front/Holt 1997), French liaison allomorphy (Zwicky 1985; Tranel 1996; Perlmutter 1998), and the feminine definite article in Spanish (Zwicky 1985; Harris 1987).

11 It is well known that the third person plural morpheme in the present tenses may also cause stress to fall before the antepenultimate syllable of the word in Standard Italian (e.g. teléfonano ‘(they) phone’, cf. Peperkamp 1997, 194, and the references therein).

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63

4.2 Frequency effects on the realization of segments Word frequency may also affect segmental realization in several ways (e.g. Bybee/ Hopper 2001). This topic has attracted less attention in the realm of studies on the segmental phonology of Romance languages, although frequency is very often reported to affect the application of particular rules. Very frequent words seem to favor the application of idiosyncratic (reduction) processes. Vigário (2003, 303–309) notes that many reductions affecting highly frequent words in EPor result in the avoidance of marked phonological patterns, e.g. marked syllable structures, such as those with complex onsets (22a), complex nuclei (22b), complex rhymes (22c), and empty onsets (22c) as well as marked clitic formats, such as disyllabic clitics (cf. 22d). (22)

a.

CGV > CV CCV > CV VG > V

de arte com a grande em ao

[ˈdjaɾt] > [ˈdaɾt] [kwɐ] > [kɐ] [ˈɡɾɐ̃d] > [ˈɡɐ̃dɐ] [ɐ̃ ȷ ]̃ > [ẽ] [aw] > [ɔ]

‘of art’ ‘with theF ’ ‘big’ ‘in’ ‘to-theM ’

b.

CVC > CV CVGC > CVG

mesmo pois

[ˈmeʒmu] > [ˈmemu] [ˈpojʃ ] > [ˈpoj]

‘really’ ‘as’

c.

VCV > CV

avô avó até

[ɐˈvo] > [ˈvo] [ɐˈvɔ] > [ˈvɔ] [ɐˈtɛ] > [ˈtɛ]

‘grandpa’ ‘grandma’ ‘even’

d.

disyllabic > monosyllabic clitics para [pɐɾɐ] > [pɾɐ] > [pɐ] pelo [pelu] > [plu]

‘for’ ‘by-theM ’

In some cases, it seems that reductions of highly frequent words lexicalize, and both reduced and unreduced allomorphs coexist. However, it is not the case that these phenomena spread into other areas of the lexicon and eventually generalize as a pure phonological rule. Additionally, very frequent combinations of words also seem especially prone to lexicalize (e.g. Napoli/Nevins 1987 for Italian; Bybee 2001 for French; Vigário 2003, 317 for EPor). Finally, high frequency may also result in the preservation of irregularity (Bybee/Hopper 2001). For example, Bybee (2001) argues that in French, grammatical words like les ‘theP L ’ occurred frequently in positions where their final consonants were prevocalic (as in les enfants ‘theP L children’) and this is why they have allomorphs that exhibit the maintenance of the word final consonant in liaison contexts, whereas other words (like bois ‘forest’) completely lost it.

4.3 Loanword phonology Loanwords may pose a number of challenges to native phonological grammar. Only rather recently this area of phonology has been given some attention in Romance, in

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particular in languages where language-contact creates large-scale borrowings. This is the case of Eastern Catalan, a language very much exposed to Spanish borrowings. According to Cabré (2009), loanwords in Eastern Catalan have triggered a new phonology, especially patent in stressless vowel system. For Mascaró (2002, 110– 113) loanwords exhibit lexically specified exceptions to vowel reduction, while according to Cabré (2009), in addition to vowel reduction blockage, vowel harmony is also involved, consisting of the long distance assimilation of stressed mid vowels to a following [+ATR] mid vowel. As shown in examples in (23), taken from Cabré (2009, 268), instead of reducing to schwa, stressless vowels surface as [+ATR] (cf. 23a), and mid vowels are pronounced as close mid when followed by close mid vowels (cf. 23b). (23)

Cat.

a.

N[e]pal

Versall[e]s

C[o]lgat[e]

b.

p[e]st[o]

B[o]st[o]n

[o]sl[o]

Cabré (2009) proposes that these specific phonological patterns are used to identify loans within the lexicon. Like Eastern Catalan, EPor loanwords also tend to show non-native phonological behavior with respect to vowel reduction (VR). In this language, not only stressless vowels of borrowed words often escape VR but in addition, in these cases, stressless vowels usually surface as low. As we have seen in section 2, in EPor non-high stressless vowels not affected by VR are exceptional, and exceptions to VR that surface as low are by no means exclusive to loanwords, like lexical exceptions to VR that surface as low (cf. 24a), in several prosodic positions non-high stressless vowels are also realized as low [ɛ a ɔ], instead of [ɨ ɐ u], respectively), namely in prosodic word final positions in syllables closed by consonants different from ‑s (cf. 24b), at the right edge of prosodic words that are non-final within prosodic word groups, namely in morphological compounds (cf. 24c), or in truncated words (cf. 24d) (cf. Vigário 2003, 67–73). Interestingly enough, like in EPor, the absence of VR and [+ATR] realization in compounds and truncated forms are also found in Eastern Catalan (Cabré 2009, 273). (24)

EPor.

a.

r[ɛ]tórica ‘rhetoric’

el[ɛ]ctricidade ‘electricity’

pr[ɔ]curar ‘(to) search’

b.

tór[a]x ‘chest’

abdóm[ɛ]n ‘abdomen’

Vít[ɔ]r ‘Victor’

c.

mon[ɔ]-acentual ‘monoaccentual’

cin[ɛ]-radiografia ‘cine-radiography’

sóci[ɔ]-demográfico ‘socio-demographic’

d.

exp[ɔ] ‘expo’

eur[ɔ] ‘euro’

fot[ɔ] ‘photo’

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A constraint avoiding mid vowels in word-internal stressless positions could be seen to be responsible for this outcome in EPor, which would also be active in other areas of the lexicon where vowel reduction exceptionally does not apply. However, a piece of evidence suggests that lowering is not specific of stressless vowels. As we have seen in section 2, above, lowering also affects stressed vowels in Portuguese in words with marked stress patterns. Hence in this case, a constraint requiring nonhigh vowels to surface as low seems to actually signal exceptional, non-regular (in some cases, non-native) phonology (very much along the lines of Wetzels’ 1992 suggestions on Spondaic Lowering and Dactylic Lowering cited above). Importantly, EPor also offers evidence suggesting a division of labor between lowering and blocking of vowel reductions. In fact, in the cases illustrated in (24b–d), unreduced vowels in stressless positions also signal prosodic word right-edges. That what is relevant for cuing prosodic edges is the blocking of VR is shown by the realization of the vowels at the left-edge of prosodic words, which regularly escape full VR. Crucially, here lowering does not apply and hence in this position unstressed mid vowels may regularly surface in EPor (e.g. elegante ‘elegant’, where the initial vowel may be realized as [e] or [i], but not [ɨ] or [ɛ]). Pons-Moll (2012) also investigates the contexts for underapplication of vowel reduction in Majorcan Catalan. Besides some striking similarities with Eastern Catalan and EPor, her data show important commonalities between loanwords and learned words as well as other areas of the lexicon (Pons-Moll 2012 for the details). Loanword phonology has also been investigated in Italian. For example Repetti (2012) examines vowel epenthesis as a repair strategy to avoid marked or impossible structures in consonant-final loanwords in Italian, a language known for the scarcity of word final consonants (e.g. stop [ˈstɔppe], [ˈstɔppə] or [ˈstɔppə]). Here, the focus is on the phonology of the epenthetic vowel. Repetti shows that the vowels inserted in this context are phonologically inert (e.g. they do not interact with word stress), are influenced by phonetic and morphological factors, and are distinct in quality from the unmarked epenthetic vowel found in non-final position in the language, which is [i] (e.g. in [i]Svizzera ‘in Switzerland’). A feature common to the different phenomena seen above is that, whereas loanword adaptations occur as means of dealing with marked or illegal patterns in L1, often they still display marked or specific phonology.

5 Conclusion In this chapter we have examined grammatical factors that may affect the realization of segments in Romance languages. We have seen that the presence and absence of word-level stress and higher levels of prominence constrain the realization of segments in various ways. For example, diphthongization in many Romance languages, vowel lengthening in Italian and vowel harmony in Portuguese affect vowels

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in stressed position. Some segmental rules depend on particular stress patterns, like Spondaic Lowering and Dactylic Lowering in EPor and BPor. The interaction between word stress and segments realization may be observed inside words, as in the cases above, but it can also span words, as in the case of raddoppiamento sintattico in Italian, of progressive assimilatory diphthongization in the Portuguese dialect of Terceira (Azores) and of [j]-insertion to break a sequence of central vowels in Northern dialects of EPor. Segmental phenomena may also be sensitive to higherlevel prominence. This has been reported for several languages, including Catalan, Galician and Portuguese. Like word stress and higher-level prominence, the lack of stress may condition phonological processes as well. Most Romance languages exhibit neutralization of vowels as a result of varying degrees of reduction in stressless positions (e.g. Italian, BPor, Catalan, EPor). Similarly, semivocalization and vowel deletion as strategies to break hiatus are found across the Romance space (e.g. BPor, Catalan, EPor, Romanian, Spanish). In the latter case, processes are further conditioned, in varying ways, by the presence of word and higher-levels of prominence, since vowel deletion or semivocalization originating stress clash are often avoided. Other sources of language variation may relate to the ranking of faithfulness constraints in particular languages. For example, while in Catalan or BPor hiatus V2 is allowed to delete and semivocalize in some prosodic configurations, in general only V1 is the target of these processes. Besides word stress and phrasal prominence, also particular intonational contours may impact on segments realization. Schwa insertion or blocking of schwa deletion ensures the realization of the segmental material required for tonal anchoring in EPor, and a similar effect is obtained through lengthening in Logudorese Sardinian. Segmental processes may further be constrained by prosodic structure. Romance languages exhibit different types of processes that depend on the position of segments in every domain of the prosodic hierarchy. Most often, it seems that segmental phenomena in Romance languages are not bound by the phonological phrase, whereas segmental phenomena constrained by the position in the syllable, in the prosodic word, in the prosodic word group and in the intonational phrase are copious. Nevertheless, hiatus resolution processes (namely, vowel deletion and V1 semivocalization), which apply within the intonational phrase or a higher domain, are sensitive to phonological phrase prominence, i.e. they are blocked under stress-clash configurations (despite some variation in the definition of what creates stress-clash configurations in these languages; evidence for this type of sensitivity is found in languages like BPor, EPor, Galician, and Spanish). We have seen that segmental phenomena may signal prosodic structure in Romance languages. However, this is usually only the case of purely phonological processes. In fact, the realization of segments may also be constrained by nonphonological information. Segmental processes that depend on morphological or lexical information are abundant throughout Romance and have long been reported

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and analyzed under various perspectives. Specific phonology is also found in two other areas of the lexicon: loanwords and highly frequent words. Although these also seem domains for phonological generalizations, they appear to have attracted less attention in Romance. These several types of phenomena raise important research questions: (i) are segmental alternations that are not entirely regular best analyzed as resulting from the application of irregular phonological rules or constraint orderings, or from lexically listed allomorphy, instead, with concomitant ranking of constraints imposing a particular allomorph selection over allomorph competitors? (ii) What are the conditions for lexicalization and generalizations across the lexicon? (iii) Under what conditions loanwords resist full integration into the native language phonology and what effects non-integration may have on the phonological system as whole? Whatever model is adopted to account for segmental phenomena, it is clear that phonological processes have different properties. What is at stake is not the specific type of phenomena, but rather how general they are. While regular processes only refer to phonological information and are often optional and sensitive to conditions that obtain from word combinations, there are several types of less general phonological phenomena. Some are obligatory and word-bound, in which case they may be sensitive to morphological information and may have exceptions. Others are sensitive to rather superficial, phonetic information, including speech rate, appearance in prosodic positions that exhibit particular phonetics, such as phonetic lengthening or articulatory strengthening, and word frequency. The former type seems to be especially prone to also be sensitive to lexical items’ origin, as loanwords more often escape lexical, non-general phonological processes than pure phonological rules. The former also necessarily involves lexicalization, while the latter sometimes result in lexicalized, categorical alternations, but in other cases what we find seems to be phonetic, gradual, non-lexicalized alternations. Most Romance languages exhibit remarkable similarities in their segmental phonology, certainly partially because of their common Latin origin. For this reason, it is especially interesting to identify areas of divergence and to investigate the conditions for the emergence of phonological variation. Ultimately, we hope to have contributed in this chapter to show the fruitfulness of the comparative approach to Romance phonology.

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Passino, Diana (2013), “A unified account of consonant gemination in external sandhi in Italian. Raddoppiamento Sintattico and related phenomena”, The Linguistic Review 30, 313–346. Peperkamp, Sharon (1997), Prosodic words, The Hague, Holland Academic Graphics. Perlmutter, David (1998), “Interfaces. Explanations of allomorphy and the architecture of grammars”, in: Steven G. Lapointe/Diane K. Brentari/Patrick M. Farrell (edd.), Morphology and its relation to phonology and syntax, Stanford, CSLI, 307–338. Pons-Moll, Clàudia (2012), “Loanword phonology, lexical exceptions, morphologically driven underapplication and the nature of positionally biased constraints”, Catalan Journal of Linguistics 11, 128–166. Prieto, Pilar (2004), Fonètica i fonologia. Els sons del català, Barcelona, Edicions de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Recasens, Daniel (1986), Estudis de fonètica experimental del català oriental central, Barcelona, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat. Repetti, Lori (1991), “A moraic analysis of raddoppiamento fonosintattico”, Rivista di Linguistica 3, 307–330. Repetti, Lori (2012), “Consonant-final loanwords and epenthetic vowels in Italian”, Catalan Journal of Linguistics 11, 167–188. Rodrigues, Celeste (2002), “Questões de espraiamento em PE”, in: Maria Helena Mira Mateus/ Anabela Gonçalves/Clara Nunes Correia (edd.), Actas do XVII Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, Lisboa, APL, 419–432. Saltarelli, Mario (1970), A phonology of Italian in a generative grammar, The Hague, Mouton. Sampson, Rodney (1999), Nasal vowel evolution in Romance, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Schwindt, Luiz Carlos (2008), “Revisitando o estatuto prosódico e morfológico de palavras prefixadas do PB numa perspectiva de restrições”, Alfa 52, 391–404. Segura, M. Luísa (2013), “Variedades dialectais do Português Europeu”, in: Eduardo Raposo/ Fernanda B. Nascimento/M. Antónia Mota/Luísa Seguro/Amália Mendes (edd.), Gramática do Português, vol. 1, Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa, 85–142. Segura, M. Luísa/Saramago, João (1999), “Açores e Madeira. Autonomia e coesão dialectais”, in: Isabel Hub Faria (ed.), Lindley Cintra. Homenagem ao Homem, ao Mestre e ao Cidadão, Lisboa, Edições Cosmos/Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, 707–738. Segura, Luísa/Saramago, João (2001), “Variedades dialectais portuguesas”, in: Caminhos do Português. Exposição comemorativa do ano europeu das línguas (catálogo), Lisboa, Biblioteca Nacional, 221–237. Selkirk, Elizabeth O. (1984), Phonology and syntax. The relation between sound and structure, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Simonet, Miquel (2005), “Prosody and syllabification intuitions of [CiV] sequences in Spanish and Catalan”, in: Sónia Frota/Marina Vigário/M. João Freitas (edd.), Prosodies. With special reference to Iberian languages, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 247–267. Tenani, Luciani (2002), Domínios prosódicos no português, PhD dissertation, Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Tranel, Bernard (1995), “Current issues in French phonology. Liaison and position theories”, in: John Goldsmith (ed.), The handbook of phonological theory, Cambridge, MA, Blackwell, 798–816. Tranel, Bernard (1996), “French liaison and elision revisited. A unified account within Optimality Theory”, in: Claudia Parodi/Carlos Quicoli/Mario Saltarelli/María Luisa Zubizarreta (edd.), Aspects of Romance linguistics, Washington, Georgetown University Press, 433–455. Vanrell, Maria del Mar/Ballone, Francesc/Schirru, Carlo/Prieto, Pilar (2015), “Sardinian intonational phonology. Logudorese and Campidanese varieties”, in: Sónia Frota/Pilar Prieto (edd.), Intonation in Romance, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 317–349.

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Vigário, Marina (2003), The prosodic word in European Portuguese, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Vigário, Marina (2010), “Prosodic structure between the Prosodic Word and the Phonological Phrase. Recursive nodes or an independent domain?”, The Linguistic Review 27, 485–530. Vigário, Marina (to appear a), “Prosodic hierarchy”, in: Stefan J. Schierholz/Herbert Ernst Wiegand (edd.), Wörterbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft (WSK) Online, vol. 4: Phonetik und Phonologie, edd. T. Alan Hall/Bernd Pompino-Marschall, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, http://www.degruyter.com/view/db/wsk?format=ONMO (06.05.2016). Vigário, Marina (to appear b), “Prosodic phonology”, in: Stefan J. Schierholz/Herbert Ernst Wiegand (edd.), Wörterbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft (WSK) Online, vol. 4: Phonetik und Phonologie, edd. T. Alan Hall/Bernd Pompino-Marschall, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, http://www.degruyter.com/view/db/wsk?format=ONMO (06.05.2016). Vogel, Irene (2009), “The status of the Clitic Group”, in: Janet Grijzenhout/Barış Kabak (edd.), Phonological domains. Universals and deviations, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 15–46. Wetzels, Leo (1991), “Harmonização vocálica, truncamento, abaixamento e neutralização no sistema verbal do português. Uma análise auto-segmental”, Cadernos de Estudos Lingüísticos 21, 25–58. Wetzels, Leo (1992), “Mid vowel neutralization in Brazilian Portuguese”, Cadernos de Estudos Lingüísticos 23, 19–55. Wetzels, Leo (2006/2007), “Primary stress in Brazilian Portuguese and the quantity parameter”, Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 5/6, 9–58. Wheeler, Max W. (2005), The phonology of Catalan, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Zwicky, Arnold (1985), “Rules of allomorphy and phonology-syntax interactions”, Journal of Linguistics 21, 431–436.

Élisabeth Delais-Roussarie

3 Prosodic phonology and its interfaces Abstract: It is well established that the speech flow is organized into a prosodic constituent structure that differs from the morphosyntactic and information structure. Indeed, the prosodic units have two major characteristics: (i) they are partly derived from the morphosyntactic and information structure of the sentence to which they should give access, and (ii) they constitute domains for the application of phonological phenomena. They are studied in all their complexity within Prosodic Phonology, a framework that accounts for the way phonology interacts with the other components of the grammar. The aim of this chapter is threefold: (i) presenting the main features of Prosodic Phonology, this framework being crucial to study the way prosody interfaces with the other grammatical components; (ii) explaining how the syntaxphonology mapping has been formalized within this framework, in particular to account for prosodic phrase formation; and (iii) showing how prosody is constrained by information related to discourse. Keywords: prosodic structure, intonation, accentuation, syntax-phonology interface, prosodic phrasing

1 Introduction When one listens to someone talking or when one speaks, the speech flow is not a mere sequence of sounds. It is structured: the segments and syllables – i.e. the elements that compose the phonological representation associated with the linguistic elements of a sentence – are grouped into units of higher rank, which in turn can also come together to form larger ones. These units are organized into a hierarchical structure, the ‘prosodic structure’. The way an utterance is prosodically structured is often crucial for a good interpretation. Prosodic phrasing reflects for instance the attachment of syntactic adjuncts. In the French example (1), the adjunct la semaine dernière ‘last week’ may either be syntactically dependent from the first clause les enfants sont partis en vacances ‘the children went on holiday’ or from the second one j’ai gardé leur chat ‘I took care of their cat’. Prosodic phrasing allows distinguishing the two cases. In (1a), a prosodic break (#), which is realized by a pause and a continuation rise (H*H%) on the syllable ‑nière [njɛʁ], occurs at the end of the adjunct la semaine dernière, and the utterance is interpreted as ‘it is last week Acknowledgement: The author gratefully acknowledges the French National Research Agency/ General Commissariat for Investment (Agence nationale de la recherché, ANR/Commissariat général à l’investissement, CGI, Laboratoire d’excellence “Empirical Foundations of Language” Labex EFL, Université Paris Diderot).

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that the children went on holiday’. By contrast, in (1b), the pause and the continuation rise (H*H%) are associated with the syllable ‑cances [kɑ͂s], and the sentence means that ‘the children went on holiday, and that I took care of their cat last week’. (1) Fr. Les enfants sont partis en vacances – la semaine dernière – j’ai gardé leur chat. ‘The children went on holiday – last week – I took care of their cat.’ a. Les enfants sont partis en vacances la semaine dernière # H* H*H% j’ai gardé leur chat. b. Les enfants sont partis en vacances # H*H% la semaine dernière, j’ai gardé leur chat. H* (H-)

Figure 1a: Waveform, spectrogram, and F0 trace for example (1a)

Figure 1b: Waveform, spectrogram, and F0 trace for example (1b)

Prosodic phrasing often helps resolving syntactic ambiguity, as for PP attachment (cf. example 2 for Spanish). In (2a), the adjunct con much gusto ‘with great pleasure’

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is syntactically related to the first clause Los chicos se fueron a la playa ‘the children went to the beach’, whereas it is related to the second clause in (2b). The location of the pause, which is associated to a major prosodic boundary, is crucial. (2) Sp. a. Los chicos se fueron a la playa con mucho gusto # su madre se quedó en casa. ‘The children went to the beach with great pleasure, their mother stayed home’ b. Los chicos se fueron a la playa # con mucho gusto su madre se quedó en casa. ‘The children went to the beach. With great pleasure, their mother stayed home.’ Apart from revealing the morphosyntactic structure, prosodic phrasing often reflects information structure. In many languages, it has been argued that a prosodic boundary aligns with the right edge of the focus constituent (cf. e.g. Kanerva 1990 for Chichewa;1 Jun 1993 for Korean, and section 4). The segmentation into prosodic units is brought into light by the realization of a wide array of phonetic and phonological phenomena such as the realization of a pause (cf. Fig. 1a and 1b), the occurrence of an accent, or even the application of phonological processes that modify the segmental representation of the sentence. In European Portuguese (cf. Frota 2014), a word-final fricative is realized as a [z] when followed by a word-initial vowel within an intonational phrase (IP), but it is realized as a [ ʃ ] in IP final position; cf. the contrast between (3a) and (3b). (3) EPor. a. (a[z] aluna[z] obtiveram boa[z] avaliaçõe[ ʃ ])IP ‘The students have got good marks.’ b. (a[z] aluna[ ʃ ])IP (até onde sabemo[ ʃ ])IP (obtiveram boa[z] avaliaçõe[ ʃ ])IP ‘The students, as far as we know, have got good marks.’ (Frota 2014, 14) The aim of this chapter is to show that prosody is an interface phenomenon: prosodic as well as tonal and metrical patterns associated with an utterance are partly determined by morphosyntactic and information structure. The term ‘prosody’ refers here to three distinct phonological components: prosodic structure or phrasing, tonal patterns and metrical patterns (cf. e.g. Ladd 2008). Even if these elements may be highly intertwined (in particular in French, cf. Post 2011), they will be considered separately here, special attention being given to prosodic phrasing since the formation of prosodic phrases is constrained by morphosyntactic and informational features. The chapter is organized as follows. In section 2, the major characteristics and the theoretical assumptions on prosodic structure are presented. Section 3 focuses 1 Note that the results obtained in experimental study on Chichewa (Downing/Pompino-Marschall 2013) argue against the correlation between focus and phrasing.

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on the syntax-phonology interface, and more precisely on the mapping rules that account for prosodic phrase construction. The interface between prosody and discourse is addressed in section 4. Several examples taken from various Romance languages will be given throughout the chapter.

2 Prosodic structure: theoretical assumptions and phonological characteristics As already mentioned, among the three prosodic components, phrasing constitutes a crucial element in the interface between phonology and the other grammatical components. Indeed, the prosodic structure is the only structure to which phonology has access, the prosodic phrases being domains for the application of phonetic and phonological processes (cf. e.g. Selkirk 1981; 1984; 1986). The prosodic events, be they metrical or intonational, are thus analyzed with respect to prosodic phrases (cf. e.g. Pierrehumbert/Beckman 1988; Jun 1993).2 In this section, prosodic structure will be presented. We will insist on phenomena usually used as cue for prosodic phrasing.

2.1 Prosodic Structure Theory and the prosodic hierarchy In Prosodic Structure Theory, the phonological representation of a sentence consists of a hierarchically organized structure distinct from the morphosyntactic structure. The units of the prosodic hierarchy are considered as domains for the application of phonological phenomena, be they segmental, accentual or intonational. However, a distinction can be made between two approaches (cf. Frota 2012): in some studies (Selkirk 1981; 1984; 1986; Nespor/Vogel 1986/2007, among others), the prosodic units are defined according to their relation to the morphosyntactic structure, whereas in some others studies (Pierrehumbert/Beckman 1988; Jun 1993; Jun/Fougeron 2000; Jun 2005, among others), intonation plays a crucial role in the definition of the various units. The prosodic hierarchy is presented in (4).

2 Metrical patterns were sometimes analyzed with a grid without any reference to prosodic structure and to specific phrases (cf. e.g. Prince 1983; Selkirk 1984; Delais-Roussarie 2000). However it has been shown that an alternative analysis can be achieved by referring to prosodic structure (cf. e.g. Nespor/Vogel 1989).

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(4) Prosodic Hierarchy Intonational Phrase Phonological Phrase / Major phrase3 or Intermediate Phrase Phonological Phrase / Minor phrase or Accentual Phrase Prosodic Word Foot Syllable Despite the differences, which are partly visible in the names given to the various units, the hierarchy shares at least three main features: (i) Prosodic structure is distinct from syntactic structure. (ii) Prosodic constituents are hierarchically organized. (iii) No bracketing paradox may occur, i.e. the right edge of a phrase always aligns with the right edge of a lower level constituent. In addition, there may be some variation regarding the number of levels that are necessary above the word level (cf. Frota 2012 for discussion).4 Note also that some authors have used an integrated view, in which phonological processes affecting segments, intonation and prominence are all taken into account to define the various prosodic constituents (cf. Jun 1993; Frota 2000). Such an approach has the advantage of reinforcing the validity of a given level of structuring by avoiding circularity. Among the prosodic constituents, the syllable and the foot are phonological by nature (the foot, for instance, is defined according to metrical criteria). By contrast, the constituents above the word level are mostly defined relatively to the morphosyntactic and information structure, without being isomorphic to it (cf. section 3 and Selkirk 1986; Truckenbrodt 1999, among others). As for the internal structure of the prosodic hierarchy, it was argued that it should be strictly layered and thus conformed to the Strict Layer Hypothesis (Selkirk 1981; 1986; Nespor/Vogel 1986/2007). Since this hypothesis embodied four distinct principles, it has been factored out in Optimality Theory (5), cf. Selkirk (1995a). Four constraints relative to the well-formedness of the prosodic structure have been formulated (Selkirk 1995a).

3 According to Selkirk (1986), the Minor and Major Phrase are distinguished depending on the mapping parameters used to derive them. But it is not really clear whether both level of structuring are expected to occur in a single language. In French, for instance, what is called ‘phonological phrase’ by Post (2000a) is mostly equivalent to a Minor Phrase. 4 Some additional units have been added to the basic hierarchy. On a language specific basis, the mora has been inserted in Japanese (cf. Pierrehumbert/Beckman 1988). Above the word level, the name and number of constituents also vary: the Clitic Group is argued for by Nespor/Vogel (1986/ 2007); constituents such as the accentual phrase and the intermediate phrase are referred to in replacement of the Clitic Group and the Phonological Phrase (cf. Jun/Fougeron 2000 for French and Nibert 1999 for Spanish).

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(5) Constraints on Prosodic Structure (Selkirk 1995a, 443) No constituent Ci dominates a constituent Cj, j>i. LAYEREDNESS : Example: No syllable (σ) dominates a foot (Σ). HEADEDNESS :

Any constituent Ci must dominate a constituent of level Ci-1, except if Ci is a syllable (σ). Example: A phonological word (ω) must dominate a foot (Σ).

EXHAUSTIVITY:

No constituent Ci immediately dominates a constituent Cj, jB}), in this case {o>lo}. The faithfulness constraint P RIORITY (“Respect lexical priority (ordering) of allomorphs”; Bonet/Lloret/Mascaró 2007, 906; Mascaró 2007, 726) penalizes the insertion of the

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second allomorph (as in 13) unless markedness conditions force its appearance, which then surfaces as a TETU effect; cf. (14), below.8 The high ranking of the markedness sonority constraint penalizing heterosyllabic contacts between consonants and vowels (*C.V) ensures that, even though Galician admits onsetless syllables in certain contexts, cf. (13), intersyllabically they must be syllabified with a following vowel, cf. (14). The alignment constraint enforcing that morphological word edges coincide with syllable boundaries (A LIGN -L(MW,σ) (“The left edge of a morphological word (MW) must coincide with the left edge of a syllable (σ)”; Kikuchi 2006, 44) penalizes resyllabification between words; cf. its effects for allomorph selection in (14). (13)

Based on the fact that sequences of a continuant and a stop that arise from pronominal encliticization are maintained (e.g. visita[ɾ.m]e ‘to visit me’, vémo[s.t]e ‘we see you’), Kikuchi proposes that the deletion of -r and -s is due to the ranking of the markedness OCP constraint penalizing adjacent continuant consonants in prosodically close domains (OCP[+cont]) above the anti-deletion faithfulness constraint M AX-C (14b); deletion in morpheme internal position (merlo [ˈmeɾ.lo], *[ˈme.lo] ‘blackbird’) is banned by ranking the OCP constraint below I-C ONTIGUITY, which is the constraint that “rules out deletion of elements internal to the input string” – or “No Skipping” (McCarthy/Prince 1995, 371; cf. also Kenstowicz 1994). However, as noticed by Nevins (2011, 2365, 2373), in order to handle opacity the lateral allomorph has to be chosen at an intermediate stage before OCP[+cont] is decisive during the evaluation, with OCP[+cont] crucially ranked below M AX-C (14a). As shown in (15), a single step evaluation with the ranking proposed in Kikuchi (2006, 47) will lead to an ungrammatical result.

8 The classic example that illustrates the role of P RIORITY in unnatural allomorph choice is the definite article distribution displayed by Haitian creole, where the a allomorph appears after a stem ending in a vowel (papa-a ‘father-the’), but la appears after a stem ending in a consonant (liv-la ‘book-the’). This anti-markedness allomorph distribution is accounted for with the ordered set {a>la} and P RIORITY, benefitting a (as in [pa.pa.a]) unless right alignment of the stem with the syllable or *C.V causes the selection of la (as in [liv.la] vs. *[li.va], *[liv.a]) (Bonet/Lloret/Mascaró 2007, section 2). In our view, the role of the constraint B REVITY in i/gli and il/lo selection in Italian (cf. section 2.2) to benefit i and il, respectively, can be handled with the use of the ordered sets {i>ʎi} and {il>lo} and P RIORITY replacing B REVITY in the ranking.

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(14) Two-step derivation for /beɾ {o>lo} neno/: [ˈbe.lo.ˈne.no]

(15)

A parallel derivation for /beɾ {o>lo} neno/: [ˈbe.lo.ˈne.no]

The problem raised by Galician can also not be handled in serial OT models based on morphologically determined levels, like Stratal OT (cf. e.g. Bermúdez-Otero 2013), because the opacity issue arises within the same level or stratum; serial models like Harmonic Serialism (cf. e.g. McCarthy 2000), which allow only one change at a time in each evaluation step, would handle them adequately only if a different constraint ranking were allowed at different steps, an option usually not assumed in Harmonic Serialism. Note, however, that even with the concurrent use of serialism, alignment constraints and lexically ordered allomorphs, the analysis would fail to capture the following fact: the onsetless article allomorph is chosen after a word ending in -/n/, which resyllabifies as an (alveolar) onset with the article (e.g. comen o caldo /komen o kaldo/: [[ˈko.me.no]PW [ˈkal.do]PW] ‘they eat the broth’). Under the presumed ranking, A LIGN -L(MW,σ) will always promote the second allomorph (*[[ˈko.men.lo]PW

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[ˈkal.do]PW]). Following work by Álvarez Blanco (1983), Kikuchi (2006, 47) suggests the possibility that a third set of nasal allomorphs come into play (i.e. no(s), na(s)), which will induce coalescence of the adjacent nasals (/komen1n2o kaldo/: [[ˈko.me.n12o]PW [ˈkal.do]PW], where the subscript digits in [n12] indicate coalescence of the sequence /n1n2/).

3 Asymmetric surface relations and constraints on alignment In this section, in addition to further exemplifying PCA and discussing the limits of abstractness when positing inputs as well as the apparent need for serialism, we introduce alternative parallel ways to deal with these phenomena focusing on which elements can stand in correspondence. We first present the phenomenon of diphthongization in Spanish, which illustrates a case of opaque interaction that can be handled in serial terms as well as within the tenets of parallelism (section 3.1). We then draw attention to a case of overapplication of epenthesis in Catalan cliticization, where some effects derived from the phonology-morphology interaction are explained in the parallel model, with the use of alignment constraints, but cannot be captured in serial terms (section 3.2).

3.1 Diphthongization in Spanish The stress-driven alternation that affects mid-vowels in Spanish illustrates a wellknown paradox of cyclicity. Generally, pure vowels appear in unstressed position while diphthongs appear in stressed position (e.g. c[o]ntar ‘to tell’ – c[ˈwe]nto ‘tale/I tell’, n[e]gó ‘s/he denied’ – n[ˈje]go ‘I deny’), and it seems that diphthongization depends on stress position, but stress in turn is sensitive to diphthongization (i.e. syllable weight). The phenomenon is lexically idiosyncratic because the alternation coexists with non-alternating pure vowels (cf. m[o]ntó ‘s/he mounted’ – m[ˈo]nto ‘I mount’, p[e]gó ‘s/he hit (past)’ – p[ˈe]ga ‘s/he hits’) and non-alternating diphthongs (cf. frec[we]ntó ‘s/he frequented’ – frec[ˈwe]nta ‘s/he frequents’, v[je]nés ‘Viennese’ – V[ˈje]na ‘Vienna’). In the alternating cases, the presence of diphthongs in unstressed positions of certain derived words but not in others (c[we]ntecito ‘tale (diminutive)’ vs. c[o]ntable ‘tellable’) also raises the issue of locality in cyclic application. Traditional generative analyses derive the alternation from a unique underlying representation with the use of diacritic marks, empty skeletal slots and specific cyclic rule application (e.g. Harris 1969; 1985; Halle/Harris/Vergnaud 1991). Harris (1985), and along the same lines Halle/Harris/Vergnaud (1991), proposes an abstract

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representation containing single segmental units followed by an empty skeletal position (/oX/, /eX/). In stressed position, the skeletal slot is filled through the derivation by means of word-level ordered rules: /oX/, /eX/ turn into ‘oV̯ ’, ‘eV̯ ’ through diphthongization in stressed syllables, which then become ‘oe̯’, ‘ee̯’ by e-default insertion; ‘oe̯’, ‘ee̯’ are later adapted as ‘o̯e’, ‘e̯e’ due to adjustment in nuclearity (on the assumption that sonority prefers rising complex nuclei), and they finally surface as [we], [je] via glide formation. In unstressed position, the diphthongization rule does not apply; the skeletal slot remains empty and hence is eliminated at the end of the derivation. The presence of unexpected unstressed diphthongs in certain derived forms is captured through a different underlying morphological composition of words 〚c[o]nt-a-ble〛vs.〚 ( 〚c[we]nt〛‑ecito〛) in Harris (1969), which Halle/Harris/Vergnaud (1991) reanalyze as a difference in the kind of affixes the words contain:9 cyclic stem-level affixes (such as denominal ‑ble) or non-cyclic word-level affixes (such as evaluative ‑(ec)ito). Under this view, stem-level affixed words do not display diphthongization effects of first-cycle stress assignment because the diphthongization rule applies at the word level, after stress has shifted to the stem-level suffix 〚 ( 〚〚c[o]nt-[ˈa]〛SL-bl-e〛SL〛WL). At the word level, though, diphthongization is extrinsically ordered before stress reassignment; hence, the diphthongization effect of first-cycle stress assignment surfaces 〚 ( 〚c[we]nt〛SL-ec[ˈi]to〛WL ). Bermúdez-Otero (2006; 2013), in line with the observations made by, for example, Eddington (1996) and Albright/Andrade/Hayes (2001), argues that this cyclic approach, as well as its recasting in Distributed Morphology (Embick 2013), requires excessively powerful phonological devices that crucially subvert the concept of cyclic domain. He proposes instead a phonologically driven allomorphic approach within Stratal OT, with the use of allomorphy and presuming a specific morphological structure of words. Under his view, nominals and verbs have a stem formative meaningless morph added to the root to satisfy a morphomic constraint on stem well-formedness (a ‘morphome’ in terms of Aronoff 1994). Stem formatives (SF) include nominal word-markers (i.e. o-stems, a-stems, e/{e,Ø}-stems: cuent[o] ‘tale’, mes[a] ‘table’, immun[e] – immun[e]s ‘immune (singular – plural)’ / panØ – pan[e]s ‘bread(s)’), as well as verbal theme vowels (as in cont[ˈa]r ‘to tell’, cont[ˈa]ble ‘tellable’, respond[ˈe]r ‘to answer’, respond[ˈi]a ‘s/he answered’). The root plus the stem formative forms the inner stem; verbal inflected forms and most derivation are built at the stem level (16a), while evaluative derivation (e.g. cuentecit[o] ‘tale (diminutive)’) is formed at the word level (16b).

9 In these examples, hollow brackets notate morphological constituents and cyclic domains and, as usual, for phonetic transcriptions ordinary square brackets are used.

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a.

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Stem level (SL): Underived noun 〚Root – SF〛SL 〚cuent-o〛SL

b.

Verb inflection

〚〚Root – SF〛SL X〛SL 〚〚cont-a〛SL-r〛SL

Most derivation

〚〚Root – SF〛SL X – SF〛SL 〚〚cont-a〛SL-bl-e〛SL

Word level (WL): Evaluative 〚〚Root – SF〛SL X – SF〛WL 〚〚cuent-o〛SL-ecit-o〛WL

The key feature of Bermúdez-Otero’s analysis for diphthongization is that diphthongal allomorphy is a property of stems rather than of roots, which is a language-particular fact that must be encoded in the lexical entries of stems (Bermúdez-Otero 2013, 72). This implies that all root allomorphs are present at the stem level, whereas at the word level the only allomorph available is the stem-level output, which functions as the input of the word level. Additionally, the analysis requires (non-iterative) vowel deletion of unstressed stem-final vowels before suffixes beginning with another vowel, -ist-a〛‘taleregardless of its morphological affiliation (cf.〚cuent-o〛‘tale’ –〚 〚cuent-o〛 -ón〛‘cheeky’ –〚 〚respond-í〛 -a〛‘s/he teller’,〚 〚respond-e〛 -r〛‘to answer’ –〚 〚respond-e〛 answered’) (Bermúdez-Otero 2006, 280, section 2.1; 2013, 38–39). With these premises in mind, diphthongization turns out to be an instance of phonologically driven allomorph selection by output optimization. The lexicon supplies two listed allomorphs for alternating items (one containing a pure vowel and the other containing a diphthong). Both allomorphs are inserted at the stem level, insofar as this instruction is encoded for the lexical entries of stems. Hence, the outputs satisfy the faithfulness I DENTITY constraint whether they contain a diphthong (from the diphthongal input allomorph) or a pure vowel (from the pure vowel input allomorph; cf. examples 18–20). During evaluation, the diphthongs are preferred in stressed syllables (as a sonority effect of the constraint *P EAK Foot/e,o, which penalizes the pure vowels [e, o] in the peak node, i.e. the head, of a foot) on the assumption that diphthongs are more sonorous than pure vowels and hence are better suited as the head of a foot, i.e. the stressed syllable (Kenstowicz 1997, 162) (18), while pure mid-vowels occur elsewhere (driven by a context-free markedness constraint against complex nuclei: *C OMPLEX N UC ; cf. examples 19–20). For wordlevel affixes, however, the only input available is the nominal diphthong stem allomorph; therefore, I DENTITY discards the candidate without a diphthong (21). Bermúdez-Otero insightfully illustrates the analysis with the pair enc[o]ntrón ‘abrupt meeting’ (20) (stem-level derivation from the inner verbal stem〚{enkwentɾ, enkontɾ}-a〛; cf. enc[ˈwe]ntra ‘s/he meets’ in (18b) and enc[o]ntrar ‘to meet’ in 19) and

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enc[we]ntrón ‘meeting (augmentative)’ (21) (word-level derivation from the nominal stem〚eŋˈkwentɾ-o〛; cf. enc[ˈwe]ntro ‘meeting’ in 18a). For our purposes, we omit the analysis of stem-final vowel deletion and {e,Ø} stem-formative selection. (17)

Stem level (SL): Underived noun 〚{enkwentɾ,enkontɾ}-o〛SL [eŋˈkwentɾo]

(cf. 18a)

〚{enkwentɾ,enkontɾ}-a〛SL [eŋˈkwentɾa]

(cf. 18b)

〚〚{eŋˈkwentɾa,eŋˈkontɾa}〛SL-ɾ〛SL [eŋkonˈtɾaɾ]

(cf. 19)

〚〚{eŋˈkwentɾa,eŋˈkontɾa}〛SL-on-{e,Ø}〛SL [eŋkonˈtɾon]

(cf. 20)

Inflected verb

Deverbal

Word level (WL): Evaluative 〚〚eŋˈkwentɾ-o〛SL -on-{e,Ø}〛WL [eŋkwenˈtɾon]

(cf. 21)

(18) a. encuentro ‘meeting (noun)’

b. encuentra ‘s/he meets’

(19) encontrar ‘to meet’

(20) encontrón ‘abrupt meeting (deverbal)’10

10 In (20) *COMPLEX N UC is the decisive constraint because the two candidates fair evenly with respect to *P EAK Foot/e,o. The ranking *P EAK Foot/e,o » COMPLEX N UC is proven in the tableaux in (18).

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encuentrón ‘meeting (augmentative)’

The apparent dual behaviour of some denominal (non-evaluative) suffixes (e.g. ‑ista in c[we]ntista ‘taleteller’ – c[ˈwe]nto ‘tale’ vs. conc[e]rtista ‘concertist’ – conc[ˈje]rto ‘concert’) is accounted for by admitting that, although historically descended from the same root, some nominals have ended up having a single stem (with a diphthong) rather than two as verbal stems have (Bermúdez-Otero 2013, 78, 84). An alternative parallel analysis of diphthongization in Spanish is possible with output-output (OO) asymmetric correspondences (cf. e.g. McCarthy/Prince 1994; 1995; Benua 1995; 1997) and Kager’s (1999b, 282) specific notion of ‘base’ (cf. 22), based on Kager (1999a). We replicate Lloret/Mascaró’s (2006) analysis of the phenomenon of depalatalization in Spanish.11 (22) Definition of ‘base’ a. The base is a free-standing output form – a word. b. The base contains a subset of the grammatical features of the derived form. According to (22a), the base must always be an output itself, an existing word. According to (22b), the base must be compositionally related to the affixed word in a morphological and semantic sense, and must be in a proper subset relation

11 Depalatalization in Spanish (i.e. the non-occurrence of palatal nasals and laterals in word-final position) provided a classic argument for cyclic application within derivational phonology, as exemplified by the famous triplet desdé[n] ‘disdain’ – desde[n]es ‘disdains’ – desde[ɲ]es ‘you disdain (subjunctive)’ (Harris 1983). For historical reasons there are few cases with alternations in traditional words that provide evidence for a synchronic phenomenon of depalatalization. For this reason, some scholars claim that they are lexical remnants that should be treated in terms of allomorphy (e.g. Pensado 1997; Harris 1999; Eddington 2012), while others, from data drawn from old and recent loan adaptation, provide evidence for maintaining productive depalatalization (e.g. Lloret/Mascaró 2006). Within the former view, Bermúdez-Otero (2006) considers there not to be a synchronic relation between the nominal and the verbal stem of such items and hence assumes that nominal stems have a root ending in a coronal (/desden-{e,Ø}/SL in desdé[n], desde[n]es) whereas verbal stems contain a palatal-final root (/desdeɲ-a/SL in desde[ɲ]es). Alternatively, on the assumption that all forms derive from single palatal inputs, the alternation has been captured, in the parallel view, through OO correspondence relations, based on asymmetric (base-dependent) OO relations (cf. Lloret/Mascaró 2006, who refine Baković’s 1998; 2001 analysis) or symmetric OO relations (cf. Pons-Moll 2012, section 3.1.2, within the Optimal Paradigms model developed in McCarthy 2005). Kikuchi (1999) proposes instead a parallel OT analysis based on the Sympathy model proposed in McCarthy (1999), which uses additional machinery to enable the use of certain candidate outputs as inputs to mimic the reference to intermediate forms.

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with it. The morphological relations of a plural with respect to its singular base form and a diminutive with respect to its non-diminutive base form satisfy this subset relation. First, the number category does not change features but just adds the feature [PLURAL] in plurals and the plural is always formed over the shape of its singular base. The situation is different in masculine/feminine pairs, since even with the use of a single privative feature [FEMININE ] the masculine form is never a proper subset of the semantic features of the feminine form and the feminine is not always formed over the shape of its masculine counterpart (sol-o/a ‘aloneM / F ’). Evidence for the asymmetry between number and gender is found, for instance, in Greenberg (1963) and in Harris (1992); cf. Lloret/Mascaró (2006, 88) and Bermúdez-Otero (2013, section 2.4.2) for the specific case of Spanish. Furthermore, diminutives contain all morphosemantic features of their corresponding non-diminutive forms and have as base the free-standing non-diminutive word, as proven, among other facts, by allomorph selection: in general, ‑ecit in monosyllabic words but ‑(c)it in polysyllabic words, as in sol ‘sun’ – solecito (diminutive) vs. solo ‘alone (masculine singular)’ – solito (diminutive) (cf. e.g. Jaeggli 1980). The base identity constraint targeting the nuclei (I DENT B ASE (N UC )) together with the markedness constraints mentioned above (*P EAK Foot/e,o and *C OMPLEX N UC ) will do the job with the ranking given in (23). The tableaux in (24–27) illustrate the evaluation. (23) I DENT B ASE (N UC ) » *P EAK F O O T /e,o » *C OMPLEX N UC (24) Sp. encuentro ‘meeting (noun)’

(25) Sp. encontrar ‘to meet’

(26) Sp. encontrón ‘abrupt meeting (deverbal)’

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(27) Sp. encuentrón ‘meeting (augmentative)’

Under Kager’s (1999b) contained notion of ‘base’ presented in (22), the OO constraints only capture a restricted set of relations – as Stratal OT does – that adequately holds for plurals and evaluatives (including superlatives), and hence the criticism of cyclic views to OO approaches for the allowance of unrestricted access to the global environment (cf. e.g. Bermúdez-Otero 2006; 2013) does not hold true. A more intriguing presence of the diphthongal allomorph in unstressed position is the conjugation I verbs with the prefix a- ([a. . .ˈa-ɾ]), which are causatives derived from nouns and adjectives that Bermúdez-Otero (2013, 61) limits to change-ofstate verbs, as in av[je]jar ‘to make old’ vs. env[e]jecer ‘to become old’ (cf. v[ˈje]jo ‘old’ – v[e]jez ‘oldness’). There are not, however, many such cases and, in turn, other parallel denominal [a. . .ˈa-ɾ] derivations do not present diphthongal allomorphs in this unstressed position (e.g. as[e]rrar ‘cut with a saw’), although they exhibit the regular alternating pattern elsewhere (cf. s[ˈje]rra ‘saw’, diminutive s[je]rrecita – s[e]rrería ‘sawmill’). All in all, one cannot but conclude that the diphthongal [a. . .ˈa-ɾ] forms are better treated as instances of lexical idiosyncracy. In fact, as demonstrated in Eddington (1996; 2012) and Albright/Andrade/Hayes (2001), diphthongization shows more variation than expected in traditional words as well as in loans and nonce words, depending on the morphological and the phonological environments. The relevant morphological context is the type of affix, especially, as seen, in more productive affixation, namely: (i) diminutives, augmentatives and superlatives as well as the causative [a. . .á-r] construction derived from nouns and adjectives are typically associated with diphthongs; (ii) the nominal affixes ‑ero, ‑al and ‑(i)dad are less likely to occur with diphthongs (buñ[ˈwe]lo ‘fritter’ – buñ[o]lero ‘fritter maker’, but c[ˈwe]nto ‘tale’ – c[we]ntero ‘taleteller’); but (iii) the nominal affixes -oso and -ista do not show a significant preference for either diphthongs or pure vowels (c[ˈwe]nto – c[we]ntista ‘taleteller’ vs. conc[ˈje]rto ‘concert’ – conc[e]rtista ‘concertist’) (Eddington 1996). Albright/Andrade/Hayes (2001) suggest that in verbs conjugation class might have some influence too. As for the phonological environment, a decisive factor is the shape of the root in environments specific to front or back vowels (e.g. the [X__ɾɾ] context favours the presence of diphthongs in e roots but not in o roots: c[e]rrar ‘to close’ – c[ˈje]rro ‘I close’ vs. b[o]rrar ‘to erase’ – b[ˈo]rro ‘I erase’ and also in nonce words d[e]rrar – d[ˈje]rro vs. n[o]rrar – n[ˈo]rro) (Albright/Andrade/Hayes 2001). In order to capture the gradient productivity of diphthongization, Eddington (1996) proposes a treatment of the phenomenon within the tenets of the lexicon-based approach (e.g. Bybee 1985), while Albright/Andrade/Hayes (2001) model the data with a learning algorithm that

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predicts stochastic behaviour by rule pattern association. As noted by BermúdezOtero (2013, 64), the observation that native speakers have statistically based intuitions on diphthongization is compatible with the aforementioned OT analyses. On the whole, both the serial stratal analysis and the parallel paradigmatic one manage to hold up well, though the two approaches are conceptually different with respect to whether or not they use intermediate levels of representation.

3.2 Overapplication of epenthesis in Catalan cliticization The phonological behaviour of pronominal clitics in Catalan demonstrates that serial analyses cannot account for some apparent domain effects (Bonet/Lloret 2005). The facts are as follows. In the Catalan variety spoken in Barcelona, some pronominal clitics are underlyingly asyllabic (e.g. 1st person singular /m/, partitive /n/) while others have an underlying vowel (e.g. feminine /ə/ in 3rd person /l-ə/) (cf. e.g. Wheeler 1979; 2005; Viaplana 1980; Mascaró 1986; Bonet/Lloret 2003; 2005). In proclisis, asyllabic clitics surface with an initial epenthetic schwa (underlined in the examples) before a verb starting with a consonant for syllabic reasons (28a), but the epenthetic vowel appears after the clitic when the asyllabic clitic follows a verb ending in a consonant (28b). In combinations of more than one clitic, though, a schwa is always inserted between a clitic ending in a consonant and a clitic beginning with a consonant (29a), even when a licit consonantal contact would arise without epenthesis (29b) or when the surface form of the single clitic would solve the problem (29c). (28)

Cat.

a.

b.

(29)

Cat.

em tira /m#tiɾə/: ‘s/he throws (to) me’ cf. m’imita /m#imitə/: ‘s/he imitates me’

[əm.ˈtiɾə], *[mə.ˈtiɾə]

tirem-ne /tiɾɛm#n/: ‘let’s throw some’ cf. tira’m tiɾə#m/: ‘throw (to) me’

[ti.ˈɾɛm.nə], *[ti.ˈɾɛ.mən]

[mi.ˈmi.tə]

[ˈti.ɾəm]

a.

tira-me’n /tiɾə#m#n/: ‘throw some to me’

[ˈti.ɾə.mən]

b.

tira-me-la /tiɾə#m#lə/: ‘throw itF to me’ cf. fem-la /fɛm#lə/: ‘let us do itF ’

[ˈti.ɾə.mə.lə], *[ˈti.ɾəm.lə]

c.

[ˈfɛm.lə], *[ˈfɛ.mə.lə]

me la tira /m#lə#tiɾə/: [mə.lə.ˈti.ɾə], *[əm.lə.ˈti.ɾə] ‘s/he throws itF to me’ (cf. 28a)

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In parallel approaches to OT, alignment constraints have often been used to account for the position of clitics in the utterance. For our purposes, the constraint A LIGN (CL /VB ) will ensure adjacency in the contact of the clitics and the verb in proclisis and enclisis (30) (cf. Colina 1995; Jiménez/Todolí 1995; Jiménez 1997; Bonet/ Lloret 2002; 2003; 2005; Wheeler 2005). (30)

A LIGN (CL /VB ):

Align the left/right edge of a pronominal clitic with the right/left edge of a verb. (Bonet/Lloret 2005, 1308)

With single clitics, the peripheral effect of epenthesis is captured by ranking A LIGN (CL /VB ) below σ-S TRUC (a cover constraint for syllable well-formedness) and above *C ODA , O NSET and D EP-V (32); but for epenthesis not to overapply in the presence of licit codas, F INAL C (“Every Prosodic Word is consonant-final”; McCarthy/ Prince 1994, 357) has to be ranked between A LIGN (CL /VB ) and *C ODA (33).12 The fact that epenthesis is inserted in contexts in which it is not needed shows that D EP-V must be ranked very low (34). (31) σ-S TRUC » A LIGN ( CL / VB ) » F INAL C » *C ODA , O NSET » D EP-V (32)

(33)

12 In this variety of Catalan, the clitic (a function word) together with its host (a lexical word) constitute a prosodic word. Hence, F INAL C is violated when the clitic group, as a whole, ends in a vowel, as in all output candidates in (32a) or as in (33a) in *[ˈti.ɾə.mə] but not in [ˈti.ɾəm].

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(34)

In serial OT approaches, the work done by morphological alignment constraints in parallel approaches should be captured by the organization in cycles or strata and the possibility of constraint re-ranking at different steps of the evaluation. In these approaches, the faithfulness constraint O-C ONTIGUITY (which is the constraint that rules out insertion of elements internal to the input string – or “No Intrusion”; McCarthy/Prince 1995, 371; cf. also Kenstowicz 1994) has scope over the domain of each stratum, regardless of the internal morphological composition of that domain. Therefore, in the step that includes both the clitic and the verb O-C ONTIGUITY does the job of A LIGN ( CL / VB ) in parallel analyses, in so far as it penalizes the insertion of material between the adjacent string set up by this cycle or stratum. Assuming a strata-based analysis, with the structure (Cl Cl (Verb)) and ((Verb) Cl Cl) at the clitic group stratum, the ranking that better accounts for the cases belonging to this stratum is the one given in (35), where O-C ONTIGUITY occupies a lower position than its parallel A LIGN ( CL / VB ) counterpart in the ranking in (31). We now can account for some instances of overapplication (cf. 36a–b), but critically cannot explain peripherality of epenthesis with single proclitics as well (cf. 37a–b). (35) Clitic group stratum: σ-S TRUC » F INAL C » *C ODA , O NSET » O-C ONT, D EP-V

(36)

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(37)

In Bonet/Lloret (2005) other serial analyses in terms of strict cyclicity, (cl (cl (Verb))) and (((Verb) Cl) Cl), and adjacent independent domains, ((Cl Cl) (Verb)) and ((Verb) (Cl Cl)), are discussed and proved to also be unable to account for these data.

4 Symmetric surface relations In this section we illustrate, with data from insular Catalan, output-to-output relations for which no specific base (i.e. no leading form) can be identified.

4.1 Underapplication of vowel epenthesis in insular Catalan Insular Catalan, i.e. the varieties spoken on the Balearic Islands and in the city of Alghero on Sardinia, differs from all other varieties in having no inflectional affix for the 1st person singular present indicative (1PI): pas ‘I pass’, cant ‘I sing’. Null affixation is also seen in regular masculine singular nominals in all Catalan varieties (pas ‘step’, cant ‘song’). However, while 1PI tolerates final consonants that are not permitted elsewhere in the language (e.g. clusters violating the sonority sequencing principle: filtr ‘I filter’, ensofr ‘I sulfurate’), parallel nominal forms always surface with the final default vowel, [ə] in Balearic Catalan, [a] in Alghero Catalan ( filtr[ə] ‘filter’, sofr[ə] ‘sulfur’ in Balearic; filtr[a], sofr[a] in Alghero Catalan), which is considered to be epenthetic (/filtɾ/, /sofɾ/) (e.g. Mascaró 1978; Wheeler 1979; 2005; Lloret 2002; 2004a). Pre-OT approaches (Mascaró 1983; Dols 1993; Dols/Wheeler 1996) as well as some OT studies (Serra 1996; Dols 2000) base their analyses on the observation that the illicit consonantal endings of 1PI are possible onsets and hence relate their interpretation to this syllabic position. However, among other problems, onsetrelated analyses cannot offer a straightforward explanation for the overwhelming majority of coda phenomena that take place in these verbal forms, such as wordfinal obstruent devoicing (aca[p] ‘I finish’ vs. aca[b]a ‘s/he finishes’; o[pɾ] ‘I open’ vs. o[bɾ]ir ‘to open’) (Lloret 2003; 2004b). Under the assumption that these endings are codas, underapplication of epenthesis in 1PI is explained in terms of OO

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paradigmatic correspondences, either as a uniformity (analogical) effect (Lloret 2004a; Wheeler 2005, 269–275) or as a contrast (homophony-avoidance) effect (Pons-Moll 2007 and references therein). The uniformity view put forward in Lloret (2004a) bases the analysis on the notion of “Optimal Paradigms” (OP, cf. McCarthy 2005), whose function is to control the correspondence relation between the output stems of the inflected forms of an inflectional paradigm, where no clear base can be identified as attractor. OP establishes an OO symmetrical correspondence relation between each potential stem allomorph (marked with ʻ]ʼ in the tableaux below), and a set of OP intraparadigmatic faithfulness constraints governs stem allomorphy. In insular Catalan, the ranking of OP-D EP-V (penalizing members with inserted vowels) above the sonority sequencing principle (SSP) and (IO-)D EP-V rules out epenthesis in 1PI; in turn, the addition of the epenthetic vowel throughout the paradigm to satisfy uniformity in stems is penalized by the highly ranked *H IATUS (cf. 38, realizations are from Majorcan Catalan; epenthetic vowels appear underlined). (Arguments against treating the inserted schwa as part of the inflection are presented in Lloret 2004b). In the following tableaux, paradigms appear in angle brackets. (38)

Nouns, with a paradigm of two inflected forms (), undergo epenthesis because it levels the paradigms in the other direction (39): the candidate with epenthesis in both forms wins because all members of the paradigm need a vowel to satisfy the sonority constraint. The OP approach, hence, is able to correlate the phonologically different behaviour of verbs and nouns to the fundamental difference in length in their respective paradigms. (39)

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In turn, the contrast view builds the analysis upon the notion of ‘paradigmatic contrast’ (PC) (Kenstowicz 2002), whose function is to avoid identical phonetic forms in a paradigm. According to Pons-Moll’s (2007) analysis of Balearic Catalan, PC blocks epenthesis to avoid homophony between the 1st and 3rd person singular present indicative of conjugation I verbs, because the 3rd person displays an unstressed inflectional -a (-[ə]) morph that would coincide with the epenthetic schwa in 1PI (cf. 40a), where we only include the 1st and 3rd person singular for illustration).13 Notice, however, that homophony itself is not a fatal problem, since other tenses show identical 1st and 3rd person singular in their paradigms (e.g. filtri ‘I, s/he filter (subjunctive)’). In these cases, though, the endings are input inflectional morphs in both forms (e.g. present subjunctive ‑/i/ suffix), which are preserved by high-ranked faithfulness constraints protecting input morphs – and especially single-segment affixes – such as the general constraint R EALIZE M(ORPHEME ), interpreted in the spirit of PARSE M ORPH (“A morph must be realized in the output”; Akinlabi 1996, 247) in (40b). According to this analysis, epenthesis is required in both members of the nominal paradigm because PC is not decisive here and hence SSP must be satisfied (40c). (40)

All the examples given so far belong to conjugation I verbs. The few verbs of conjugations II and III that have illicit consonantal endings (obr- ‘open’, umpl- ‘fill’, corr- ‘run’) show variation. In this case, the facts from Alghero Catalan favour the

13 An anonymous reviewer mentions that analogy is assumed to have been the driving force for the levelling in Old French between 3PL , with a final schwa, and 1PL , which originally had no final schwa but became homophonous with 3PI . An important difference between the French case and the insular Catalan case is that the former involves morphological material (exponents of a given morpheme) while the latter involves a phonological phenomenon (insertion or not of an epenthetic vowel).

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OP proposal: in conjugation III, PI exhibits regular inflectional -i morphs except in 1PI (e.g. ), yet epenthesis in 1PI is banned. The data from most varieties of Balearic Catalan, in which all three singular PI forms lack a vocalic suffix, favour the OP approach too (e.g. ), although some varieties fit the contrast view better (i.e. ). The different behaviour between verbal forms, which allow final clusters with increasing sonority, and nominal forms, which surface with an epenthetic vowel in the same phonological context, cannot be dealt with in serial models of OT, which do not resort to OO constraints. They must assume instead that nominals do not have final epenthesis and that insular Catalan allows codas with increasing sonority.

4.2 Vowel reduction in Majorcan Catalan All dialects of Catalan have vowel reduction in unstressed position. In Majorcan Catalan (MC) /ɔ/ reduces to [o], and the non-high unrounded vowels /a/, /ɛ/, /e/ and /ə/ reduce to [ə] (cf. Mascaró 2002 for examples and discussion). However, in a complex set of cases [e] is found in unstressed position. Before addressing these exceptions to vowel reduction, let us see how vowel reduction can be accounted for within OT. Most analyses of vowel reduction in Catalan (Wheeler 2005; Lloret/Jiménez 2008; Pons-Moll 2011) are based on Crosswhite (1999; 2004). Vowel reduction is the result of the competition between prominence-related constraints and faithfulness to input vowel features. The combination of an accentual prominence scale and a vocalic prominence scale gives rise to the constraint ranking in (41) (Crosswhite 2004, (17)), where *–S TR is a shorthand for *U NSTRESSED. Under this ranking the vowel [ə] is the optimal vowel in unstressed position. (41) *–S TR a » *–S TR ɛ, ɔ » *–S TR e, o » *–S TR i, u » *–S TR ə As mentioned above, a fairly large number of words surface with unstressed [e]. Although it is not easy to find a systematic distribution for this exceptional presence of [e], some tendencies can be observed. As pointed out in Bibiloni (1998), the intervening factors are morphological relations, phonetic context, and Spanish L2 interference. An analysis of these factors is given in Pons-Moll (2011; cf. also references therein). Leaving aside the L2 interference, Pons-Moll (2011) proposes an OT account of the following two facts: (i) in nominal derivation (nouns and adjectives), [e] appears in the initial syllable of productive derivatives for which the base contains a syllable-initial stressed [ˈɛ] or [ˈe]; (ii) in verbal inflection, [e] appears in the initial syllable when the verbal paradigm contains, in the initial syllable, forms with [ˈe] (not with [ˈɛ], which always alternates with schwa). (42) provides examples

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in which one of the derivationally or inflectionally related words has a stressed vowel in the initial syllable. (42)

a.

Nominal derivatives: p[ˈe]ix ‘fish’, p[e]ixet ‘fish (dim.)’, but: p[ə]ixater ‘fisherman’ t[ˈɛ]rra ‘earth’, t[e]rreta ‘earth (dim.)’, but: t[ə]rrestre ‘terrestrial’

b.

Verbal inflection: p[ˈe]gues ‘(you) hit’, etc., p[e]gam ‘(we) hit’, p[e]garé ‘(I) will hit’, etc. cf.: x[ˈɛ]rres ‘(you) talk’, etc., but: x[ə]rram ‘(we) talk’, etc.

When the stem contains a stressed vowel in non-initial position, vowel reduction applies, as expected, when the vowel is unstressed (cf. pap[ˈe]r ‘paper’ and pap[ə]ret ‘small paper’, or cont[ˈe]sta ‘(s/he) answers’ and cont[ə]stam ‘(we) answer’). Pons-Moll (2011) resorts to McCarthy’s symmetric OP model to account for underapplication of vowel reduction in verbal inflection. For a verb like pegar ‘to hit’ OP constraints force all forms to end up having the same vowel in the first syllable, and this vowel is [e] instead of [ə], in both stressed and unstressed syllables, because the ranking proposed favours displaying [e] even in unstressed positions over having [ˈə] in stressed positions. Nominal derivatives are subject to asymmetric (base-dependent) OO constraints: a derivative like t[e]rreta ‘earth (dim.)’ has a surface [e] because it resembles the stressed [ˈɛ] of the base noun t[ˈɛ]rra ‘earth’ for the relevant features. The OO constraints proposed by Pons-Moll (2011) incorporate three additional notions within the same constraint: (i) reference to the initial syllable of the stem (the position in which underapplication of vowel reduction is found), (ii) reference to either paradigms or subparadigms, where the term ‘subparadigm’ is applied to productive derivation, and (iii) reference to a particular feature. For example, a form like *t[ə]rreta, with productive derivation, violates the constraint OO-S UBPAR I DENT I NITIAL S YLL S TEM (post) because the vowel in the initial syllable of the stem contains the feature [+posterior], while the base form t[ˈɛ]rra contains the feature [–posterior]; the grammatical form t[e]rreta does not violate this constraint. Contrariwise, a form like pap[ə]ret does not violate the constraint because the relevant vowel is not in the initial syllable of the stem. Turning to verbal forms, there are similar OP constraints, but in this case no reference to subparadigms is encoded. The fact that in verbal inflection underapplication is found only when the stressed vowel is [ˈe], while in derivation it is also found when the stressed vowel is [ˈɛ], is determined by the higher ranking of the constraint OPI DENT I NITIAL S YLL S TEM (ATR) ([ɛ] and [ə] being considered [–ATR]) and the lower ranking of OO-S UBPAR I DENT I NITIAL S YLL S TEM (ATR). This proposal accounts for most of the data but it does raise some questions, mostly related to the notion of ‘subparadigm’ applied to derivational morphology. With respect to inflectional morphology, subparadigms can easily be defined by

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referring to some inflectional feature or category (like [±plural]), but it is much more difficult to relate the concept to degrees of productivity (cf. also sections 3.1 and 4.1). Ohannesian/Pons (2009) compare and discuss the two types of subparadigmatic relations (i.e. inflectional and derivational) and propose, for the derivational type, a set of universally ranked Paradigm Cohesion constraints, but it is difficult to foresee how these constraints would interact with the ones proposed in Pons-Moll (2011). Another question is what can count as a productive suffix, independently of regular vowel reduction or underapplication of vowel reduction. To give an example of the difficulties that arise, according to Bibiloni (1998), a derived word like ventall ‘fan’ is pronounced with a stressless unreduced [e], as in its base v[ˈe]nt ‘wind’, in spite of the low productivity of the suffix -all, while a word like p[ə]drera ‘quarry’, with a base p[ˈe]dra ‘stone’, has regular vowel reduction in spite of the high productivity of the suffix -era. The only cases where underapplication of vowel reduction seems to be systematic is evaluative morphology. It could easily be argued that evaluative morphemes, and more especially diminutives, have a different structure than other word-building suffixes (cf., among many others, De Belder/Faust/Lampitelli 2014 and references therein), and their particular phonological behaviour could be a consequence of this difference (on gradient productivity effects in Spanish, cf. also section 3.1). A further issue to consider is to what extent the application of the notion of subparadigms to derivation can be reduced to the notion of ‘lexically indexed constraints’ (Pater 2000, among others). Under this type of approach, some constraints have a general version, let’s say CG, but also a restricted one, a lexically indexed constraint, CL, which applies only to a specified set of lexical items, XL, CL always being ranked higher than CG. Typically these lexically indexed constraints are said to be faithfulness constraints. In the case at hand one could imagine indexed constraints like I DENT I NITIAL S YLL S TEM (post)L (instead of OO-S UBPAR I DENT I NITIAL S YLLS TEM (post)), which would be IO constraints. Finally, it remains to be studied whether an OT serial analysis of these facts would be able to provide better insights on this type of phenomenon.

5 Resorting to blending of existing forms? In this section we review three phenomena that have been accounted for in several papers by Steriade by resorting to the notion of ‘lexical conservatism’. The first of them, section 5.1, concerns the French bel/beau allomorphy that was discussed in section 2.1. Here we review the analysis put forward in Steriade (1999a; 2001) and also the counteranalysis suggested in Bermúdez-Otero (to appear). In section 5.2 we sketch the analysis that Steriade puts forward for the Latin perfect (Steriade 2012) and for Romanian derivation (Steriade 2008). Finally, in section 5.3 we address the allomorphy found in imperatives with enclitics in Balearic dialects of Catalan.

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5.1 Bel/beau allomorphy in French again Steriade (1999a; 2001), inspired by Perlmutter (1998)’s work on ‘lexical sourcing’, brings into play the notion of ‘lexical conservatism’ in order to restrain the number of inputs by limiting the set of candidates to pre-existing output forms that share semantic and morphosyntactic properties. For the French case, the OO correspondence relation that controls the use of a consonant-final form is given in (43). (43) L EX-C]: The absolute final C in the target allomorph of morpheme μ has a correspondent C’ in some listed allomorph of μ and is featurally identical to C’. (Steriade 2001, 7) The paradigm of adjectives with a single listed stem allomorph, either with a final vowel (e.g. [ʒɔli]) or with a final consonant (e.g. [kɛl]), yields marked syllabifications, with hiatus (e.g. [ʒɔli] abbé) or with a closed syllable (e.g. [kɛl] mari), because the creation of an unprecedented form through the insertion or loss of phonological material is penalized first (cf. e.g. 44). However, the paradigm of adjectives with two listed stem allomorphs (e.g. [bɛl] and [bo]) can satisfy *H IATUS without the creation of phonologically novel forms by simply resorting to the use of the consonantfinal listed allomorph (cf. 45). (44)

Listed allomorphs: [ʒɔli]

(45)

Listed allomorphs: [bɛl], [bo]

As mentioned in section 2.1, in favour of the lexically listed output-stem approach, Steriade notices the fact that for many French speakers some liaison forms in the masculine contexts do not completely coincide with the output of the citation feminine form, but show the stem vowel of the masculine and the liaison consonant of the feminine; cf. [sot] éléphant in (46). (46)

Fr.

[so] mari ‘silly husband’ [sɔt] femme ‘silly woman’

[sɔt] ~ [sot] éléphant ‘silly elephantM ’ [sɔt] éléphante ‘silly elephantF ’

Split-base formations such as [sot] alternating with [sɔt] reveal that while the feminine consonant is always used to satisfy L EX-C], the masculine vowel may be used to partially encode the grammatical gender of the adjective in order to satisfy a lexical conservative constraint targeting the stressed vowel of the stem, which signals gender (L EX-‘V(gender)). A global condition on lexical conservatism of stressed syllables (Lex-‘σ) ranked above or below L EX-‘V(gender) leads to a pure conservative solution ([sɔt] éléphant) or to a blend solution ([sot] éléphant), respectively.

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Bermúdez-Otero (to appear) acknowledges the influence of independently existing (listed) output forms but argues against Steriade’s view and in favour of a serial approach. One of his main arguments is that Steriade has to resort to a specific constraint on salience to allow split bases in examples like [sot] éléphant ‘silly elephant (masculine)’ but to prevent blending in cases like [bel] abbé ‘beautiful abbot’, for which, through reranking of the relevant constraints, one should expect variation with *[bol] abbé, with the final [l] found in the feminine, a form that is never found. Another drawback is related to the resyllabification facts that were pointed out in (3) and (4) in section 2.1: while adjectives like petit(e) ‘small’ allow resyllabification in right dislocation, suppletive adjectives like [bɛl]–[bo] ‘nice’ do not. Steriade has to resort to specific constraints to account for this different behaviour. According to Bermúdez-Otero these problems do not arise in his Stratal OT analysis, which relies on the underlying form that the learner would posit for each item, which in turn gives rise to different surface allomorphs. Among the underlying representations he posits, following the basic aspects of the analysis in Wetzels (2002), are the ones that appear slightly adapted below. (47a) corresponds to invariable adjectives (a vowel-final adjective would have the same structure). The lexical item in (47b) (as well as the top one in 47c) has a floating segment. This segment can receive a skeletal slot either by docking to the next syllable in liaison environments or, when the item is feminine, by association to the feature [+fem] (Wetzels 1986). The item in (47c) has two allomorphs. When agreement takes place with a [+fem] noun, the lower allomorph is chosen; since the last consonant has an X slot, the condition in (48) is satisfied. When the item is not feminine the upper allomorph will be selected. The ‘S’ symbol that appears in (47c) represents allomorph selection prior to phonological evaluation. Finally (47d) also has two allomorphs, both of them without floating segments. The upper one is incompatible with feminine adjectives, which must obligatorily select the lower allomorph. The ‘P’ symbol indicates that when this incompatibility does not arise (that is, with masculine adjectives), the two allomorphs are available and the decision is left to the phonology. (47)

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Feminine suffix:

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[+fem] ↕ X

The fact that each lexical item can have a different behaviour with respect to liaison follows here from the lexical idiosyncracies of each lexical item and therefore does not present the problem that Steriade’s LEX constraints would face. The differences in realization in right dislocation environments also mentioned above follow here from the underlying representations in (47) and the condition in (48): resyllabification is only possible with consonants that do not have a skeletal slot at the word level. Finally, under the stratal approach, (apparent) blending is only possible if there is a single underlying representation and the differences in the output forms can be attributed to regular phonological processes. An ungrammatical split base formation *[bol] in sequences like *[bol] abbé (instead of the grammatical *[bɛl] abbé) cannot arise because there is no phonological process of [l]-insertion in French. However, a liaison output form [sot] ‘silly’, which differs from the citation forms [so] (masculine) and [sɔt] (feminine), can be derived because at the word level, mid vowels are generally realized as mid-low in closed syllables and as mid-high in open syllables (loi de position ‘law of position’). Under this view it follows that ‘blending’ will never arise with suppletive allomorphs. The approach sketched here raises at least a couple of issues. A minor one is that feminine adjectives all end up having a skeletal slot but through two different mechanisms: either the skeletal slot is present in the underlying representation or it is added by association to the feature [+fem]. The other, more important, worry is related to the different treatment given to the underlying representations in (47c) and (47d). In (47c) the presence of the feature [+fem] in one of the allomorphs is said to prevent the other allomorph from being selected in feminine environments, but in (47d) the presence of the feature [–fem] does not prevent the other allomorph from being selected in masculine environments. In spite of the labels ‘S’ and ‘P’, this different interpretation of the representations does not follow from anything; it’s a mere stipulation.

5.2 Allomorphy in the Latin perfect and Romanian derivation Mester (1994) brought up an interesting case of allomorphy found in the Latin perfect in an influential paper on prosodic minimality and maximality, when OT was not yet fully developed. He takes into consideration verbs of the Latin conjugation II and proposes that the distribution of the allomorphs -u and -s in the perfect is prosodically driven, -u being the allomorph chosen when no conflict arises. For verbs like monēre ‘warn (present infinitive)’, the 1st person singular perfect monuī is

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fully parsed with the default allomorph: [mo nu].14 However, a verb like augēre ‘enlargeIN F. P R S ’, must build the 1st person singular perfect with the more marked allomorph s, auksī, because it is the only one that allows perfect parsing: [auk] (cf. *[au]gu, with a trapped syllable).15 Embick (2010) argues that Mester’s global proposal wrongly predicts that when other suffixes are considered allomorph selection should vacillate depending on the prosodic structure of the whole word. For instance, one would expect to find *auguimus for the 1st plural perfect because it can be fully parsed into feet, [au][gui], while this is not the case for the grammatical form augsimus, [aug]si, which contains a trapped foot. Steriade (2012) addresses the allomorphy of the Latin perfect more broadly, taking into account all conjugations (not only the second one), all tenses with perfect aspect, and all types of allomorphy, not just the ‑u/‑s alternation. Among other things, she observes that, for any given verb, all perfect forms have a similar perfect stem (while there is a lot of variation across verbs). According to her, this similarity has to do with syllable count, not necessarily with segmental identity. Steriade’s crucial point is that although these phonological similarities are tied to morphosyntactically related forms, with one serving as base for the other, one is not contained in the other. This point can be illustrated with the relation between the verbal perfect and the perfect participle. (49) Lat.

a. b.

1SG perfect [scrip-s]-ī [hab-u]-ī

perfect participle [scrip-t]-us *scripitus [hab-it]-us *haptus

‘write’ ‘have’

In (49) the stem, enclosed in square brackets, ends up having the same number of syllables in both the perfect and the perfect participle. Different allomorphs are used but the allomorph chosen does not alter the syllable count. Notice that [scrip-s]-ī is not contained in [scrip-t]-us or vice versa. The constraint that controls syllable count is M AX V (P ERFECT ), which requires the perfect participle to have a vowel if the perfect stem contains one. Steriade also argues that the building of perfect forms is in turn influenced by non-perfect (infectum) forms. The complete direction of influence is infectum → perfect verbal forms → perfect participle. The fact that, as shown, there is no containment relation between forms excludes the possibility of a cyclic analysis or an analysis based on output-output correspondence of the sort argued for in Benua (1997). Steriade suggests that the selection of a base is related to type frequency. In the Latin case, the infectum has 16 different categories (combinations of mood, tense etc.), the perfect verbal forms six, and the perfect participle only two (participle and supine). A form with more categories can influence a form with fewer categories and 14 Square brackets indicate the edges of feet, while angle brackets mark extrametrical syllables. 15 In the examples from Latin the orthography is adapted phonologically when relevant.

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act as a base for that one. She further argues that this conception can be extended to the base-derivative relation, because the base also appears in the derivative, but not the other way around. Steriade (2008) discusses a case from Romanian to argue that inflection can determine phonological properties of derivation in ways similar to what we saw for Latin. Romanian has a productive phonological process of palatalization by which velar stops palatalize, only in derived environments, before a non-back vowel (K-Palatalization). In (50a) the presence of a palatal vocoid in the plural triggers palatalization, while in (50b) the selection of a non-palatal inflectional suffix does not trigger it: (50)

Rom.

a.

stângă [ˈstɨnɡ-ʌ] – stângi [ˈstɨndʒ-i ̯]

‘leftS G – P L ’

b.

foc [ˈfok] – focuri [ˈfok-uri ̯]

‘fireS G – P L ’

Steriade (2008) shows that the presence or absence of palatalization in inflection influences derivation in palatalizing contexts. If palatalized and non-palatalized roots alternate in inflection, the behaviour in derivation is as expected: for the adjective stângă ‘left’, which surfaces with a palatalized consonant in the plural, cf. (50a), in derivation the suffix ‑ist [‑ˈist] triggers palatalization while the suffix ‑aci [‑ˈatʃ ] doesn’t, cf. (51a). However, for the root meaning ‘fire’, in (50b), there is underapplication of palatalization in derivation: a velar consonant surfaces before a non-back vowel, cf. (51b). (51)

Rom.

a.

stângist [stɨnˈdʒ-ist] stângaci [stɨnˈg-atʃ ]

‘leftist’ ‘lefty’

b.

fochist [foˈk-ist], *[foˈtʃ-ist]

‘locomotive engineer’

The analysis proposed relies on the notion of derived lexicon; the generation of morphologically complex items is done in different passes through the grammar. In a first pass, inflected forms are generated; these are stored in the derived lexicon and are taken into account in the generation of morphologically derived words, through L EX P constraints. The relevant L EX P constraint for the cases at hand is I DENT L EX [αF] (where F stands for ‘feature’), defined below: (52)

I DENT L E X [αF]:

For any segment s in a subconstituent C of an expression under evaluation, if s is [αF] then s has an [αF] correspondent in a listed allomorph of C.

This constraint rules out candidates like *[foˈtʃ‑ist], because no listed allomorph has a palatal consonant. An additional point made by Steriade (2008) is that what counts for the presence or absence of palatalization in derivatives is not the potential

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capacity of palatalizing but the actual presence of palatalized consonants in inflected bases. A proper name like Franco [ˈfrank-o] has a derivative Franchist [franˈk-ist] ‘Franco supporter’ (*[franˈtʃ-ist]), without palatalization, because the plural of Franco does not exist; that means that the plural is not stored in the derived lexicon and therefore cannot serve as a base for derivatives. The facts analysed in Steriade (2008) pose a challenge for theories based on the cycle, such as Lexical Phonology and Morphology (Kiparsky 1982) and OT versions of it (like Kiparsky 2000), because a plural is not a subconstituent of a derived word and therefore should not be available when derivational suffixes are attached to the root. For a reinterpretation of the facts and an analysis in Stratal Phonology that crucially resorts to thematic elements, cf. Bermúdez-Otero (to appear).

5.3 Imperatives with enclitics in Catalan In Catalan, the 2nd person imperative of verbs of conjugations II and III does not have any overt inflectional morphology; it also lacks a theme vowel (except for conjugation IIIa verbs, which have an -eix increment). In most cases these verbal forms are a bare stem and end in a consonant or a glide. However, when pronominal enclitics are added, extra verbal material appears, which we will refer to as ‘accretion’. The accretion can be a single vowel or a longer sequence, depending on the dialect and the verb. The examples below, from Bonet/Torres-Tamarit (2010), illustrate some of the accretions (underlined) in two insular varieties of Catalan: Formenteran and Majorcan. In these two varieties enclisis also causes stress displacement.16 (53)

Cat.

prometre ‘to promise’ (conjugation II) bullir ‘to boil’ (conjugation III) in isolation with enclitics a. Majorcan [pɾoˈmət] [pɾomətəˈli] [ˈbuʎ] [buˈʎil] b.

Formenteran

[pɾuˈmət] [ˈbuʎ]

[pɾuməˈtəli] [buʎiˈɣəl]

‘promise (to him/her)!ʼ ‘boil(itM )!’ ‘promise(to him/her)!’ ‘boil(itM )!’

Bonet/Torres-Tamarit (2010; 2011) analyse these cases as the effect of a phonological constraint requiring a prosodic head foot that outranks OO constraints. The phonological constraints are slightly different in each variety, Majorcan requiring an iamb 16 Central Catalan also has an accretion in enclisis, which is always realized as a schwa. We do not discuss it in this section because it differs in two significant ways from the other two varieties: (i) the accretion does not appear systematically in enclisis and shows some idiolectal variation; (ii) enclisis does not cause stress shift. Cf. Bonet/Torres-Tamarit (2011) for a description and analysis of the data.

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and Formenteran, a moraic trochee. These two constraints, which are needed independently to account for stress shift, appear in (54). (54)

a.

b.

Majorcan Cat. I AMB ]:

Assign one violation mark for any V+CL sequence that lacks an iamb aligned at the right edge.

Formenteran Cat. Assign one violation mark for any V+CL sequence that μT ROCHEE ]: lacks a moraic trochee aligned at the right edge.

These phonological constraints would be violated if the accretion were not present (cf. Formenteran [pɾumə(ˈtəli)], with a well-formed moraic trochee, vs. *[pɾuˈmətli], which would have an ill-formed foot). Regular epenthesis is also ruled out by A LIGN ( CL / VB ), requiring adjacency between the verb and clitics; cf. section 3.2 and specifically (30). In Formenteran Catalan the verbal root plus the accretion coincides exactly with the inflectional stem found in the first and second person plural imperative. Adopting the notion of lexical conservatism in Steriade (1999a) and later work, Bonet/ Torres-Tamarit (2010) propose two C ORR L E X constraints. One of them, (55a), allows a correspondence relation to be established between the inflectional stem of the cliticized imperative and other listed forms of the imperative alone, but not with verbal forms belonging to other tenses. (55b) is a more specific version of the constraint that penalizes candidates which, in addition, have different person and number (φ) features: (55)

a.

C ORR L E X I NFL S TEM Imp (C ORR L EX I): Assign one violation mark for any inflectional stem of a pre-clitic imperative that does not have a correspondent in the inflectional stem of an imperative form (the base).

b.

C ORR L E X I NFL S TEM Imp-φ (C ORR L EX I-φ): Assign one violation mark for any inflectional stem of a pre-clitic imperative that does not have a correspondent in the inflectional stem of an imperative form with the same φ-features (the base).

The tableau in (56) illustrates the proposal. The relevant listed inflectional stems include those belonging to the imperative. The two first candidates have a correspondent in one of the two forms found in the imperative, but the last one has a correspondent in a different tense (which could be, for instance, the imperfective indicative). For this reason this last candidate violates the constraint C ORR L E X I NFL S TEM Imp. The only candidate that does not violate any of the C ORR L E X constraints violates the highly ranked phonological constraint; therefore it is ruled out.

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(56) Formenteran Cat. bull-la ‘boil itF !’ /buʎ#lə/: [buʎiˈɣə#lə] Listed output inflectional stems: [ˈbuʎi], [buʎiˈɣəj (m,w)]

The tableau in (56) does not include any candidates that are an unfaithful copy of one of the inflectional candidates. Such a candidate (for instance bu(ˈʎij lə)) would violate an OO-M AX constraint because two of the segments of the listed base ([buʎiˈɣəj (m,w)]) are not present in the candidate. In addition, the winning candidate has an inflectional stem that contains three segments more than the input; it violates IO-D EP. OO faithfulness constraints (OO-FAITH ) have a high ranking in Formenteran Catalan and are always satisfied (the relative ranking being OO-FAITH » IO-D EP ). However, the opposite relative ranking in Majorcan (IO-D EP » OO-FAITH ) is crucial for the selection of an accretion that is taken from other forms of the same tense, but which contains fewer segments. This point is illustrated in (57). All the forms of the imperative except for the 2nd person singular contain a velar segment [ɣ], but this segment is not present in the accretion of the winning candidate. (57) Majorcan Cat. resol-li ‘solve for him/her!’ /rəzɔl#li/: [rəzolə#ˈli] Some listed inflectional stems: [rəzˈɔli], [rəzolˈɣəj (m,w)]

The phenomenon described here is not easy to account for in a serial model of OT. One aspect to take into account is that in some cases the accretion can hardly be identified with a single morpheme. This is the case of the Formenteran sequence [iˈɣə], whose derivation was illustrated in (56). Another even more relevant aspect is that the appropriateness of the accretion can only be evaluated once it has been inserted and feet have been built. There is no justification for the presence of the accretion before the incorporation of clitics.

6 Conclusion In this chapter we have presented several phenomena from Romance languages that lie at the core of the phonology-morphology interface. We have discussed different OT analyses of these phenomena, focusing on a central debate in the theory, namely

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whether the interaction between the two components proceeds in a parallel or a serial fashion. Parallel accounts need to resort, in many cases, to output-output constraints to explain some of these interactions. Among serial OT models, two of them have been widely explored in the literature. Stratal OT incorporates seriality through morphologically ordered levels, but within each level evaluation is done in a parallel fashion; different levels can have different constraint rankings. Harmonic Serialism, instead, recovers the one-change-at-a-time procedure of classic generative phonology but using ranked constraints instead of rules, with a fixed ranking throughout the whole derivation. Some of the phenomena that have been reviewed here can be treated equally well within both the serial and the parallel views, while for other phenomena one view or the other seems better suited to handle the facts. It is difficult, therefore, to find a single approach that could account for all the phenomena in a satisfactory fashion and close the debate. More work needs to be done in the area of Romance linguistics to tilt the scales, and more attention should be paid to frequency effects, briefly discussed at the end of section 3.1. These effects are explored in models like stochastic Optimality Theory (Boersma/Hayes 2001, and others), in which a mechanism is proposed to compute the probability of outputs through the assignation of a numerical value to each constraint.

7 References Akinlabi, Akinbiyi (1996), “Featural affixation”, Journal of Linguistics 32, 239–289. Albright, Adam/Andrade, Argelia/Hayes, Bruce (2001), “Segmental environments of Spanish diphthongization”, in: Adam Albright/Taehong Cho (edd.), UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 7. Papers in phonology 5, 117–151. Álvarez Blanco, Rosario (1983), “O artigo en galego. Morfoloxía”, Verba. Anuario galego de filoloxía 10, 169–182. Aronoff, Mark (1994), Morphology by itself. Stems and inflectional classes, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Baković, Eric J. (1998), “Spanish codas and overapplication”, in: Armin Schwegler/Bernard Tranel/ Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria (edd.), Romance linguistics. Theoretical perspectives (Selected papers from the 27th linguistic symposium on Romance languages, 1997), Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 13–23. Baković, Eric J. (2001), “Nasal place neutralization in Spanish”, in: Michelle Minnick Fox/Alexander Williams/Elsi Kaiser (edd.), U. Penn working papers in linguistics 7.1: Proceedings of the 24th annual Penn linguistics colloquium, Philadelphia, PA, PWPL, 1–13. Benua, Laura (1995), “Identity effects in morphological truncation”, in: Jill Beckman/Laura Walsh Dickey/Suzanne Urbanczyk (edd.), University of Massachusetts occasional papers in linguistics 18. Papers in Optimality Theory, Amherst, MA, Graduate Linguistic Student Association, 77–136, http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/74-0000/74-0000-BENUA-0-0.PDF (06.05.2016). Benua, Laura (1997), Transderivational identity. Phonological relations between words, PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (published as Phonological relations between words, New York, Garland, 2000).

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Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo (2006), “Morphological structure and phonological domains in Spanish denominal derivation”, in: Fernando Martínez-Gil/Sonia Colina (edd.), Optimality-theoretic studies in Spanish phonology, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 278–311. Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo (2013), “The Spanish lexicon stores stems with theme vowels, not roots with inflectional class features”, Probus 25, 3–103. Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo (to appear), “Stratal phonology. Arguments for cyclic containment, morphological implications”, in: Andrew Spencer (ed.), The handbook of morphology, second edition, Oxford, Blackwell. Bertinetto, Pier Marco/Loporcaro, Michele (2005), “The sound pattern of Standard Italian, as compared with the varieties spoken in Florence, Milan and Rome”, Journal of the International Phonetic Association 35, 131–151. Bibiloni, Gabriel (1998), “La e àtona en el català de Mallorca”, in: Josep Massot i Muntaner (ed.), Estudis de llengua i literatura en honor de Joan Veny II, Barcelona, Universitat de Barcelona/ Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 533–539. Boersma, Paul/Hayes, Bruce (2001), “Empirical tests of the gradual learning algorithm”, Linguistic Inquiry 32, 45–86. Bonet, Eulàlia/Lloret, Maria-Rosa (2002), “OCP effects in Catalan cliticization”, Catalan Journal of Linguistics 1, 19–39. Bonet, Eulàlia/Lloret, Maria-Rosa (2003), “More on alignment as an alternative to domains. The syllabification of Catalan clitics”, Probus 17, 37–78. Bonet, Eulàlia/Lloret, Maria-Rosa (2005), “Against serial evaluation in Optimality Theory”, Lingua 115, 1303–1323. Bonet, Eulàlia/Lloret, Maria-Rosa/Mascaró, Joan (2003), “Phonology-morphology conflicts in gender allomorphy. A unified approach”, paper presented at the 26th Generative Linguistics in the Old World Colloquium, Lund University. Bonet, Eulàlia/Lloret, Maria-Rosa/Mascaró, Joan (2007), “Allomorph selection and lexical preferences”, Lingua 117, 903–927. Bonet, Eulàlia/Torres-Tamarit, Francesc (2010), “Allomorphy in pre-clitic imperatives in Formenteran Catalan. An output-based analysis”, in: Sonia Colina/Antxon Olarrea/Ana Maria Carvalho (edd.), Romance Linguistics 2009. Selected papers from the 39th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Tucson, Arizona, March 2009, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 337–351. Bonet, Eulàlia/Torres-Tamarit, Francesc (2011), “Les formes d’imperatiu seguides de clític. Un cas de conservadorisme lèxic”, in: Maria-Rosa Lloret/Clàudia Pons (edd.), Noves aproximacions a la fonologia i la morfologia del català (Col·lecció Symposia Philologica), Alacant, Institut Interuniversitari de Filologia Valenciana, 37–61. Burzio, Luigi (1996), “Surface constraints versus underlying representations”, in: Jacques Durand/ Bernard Laks (edd.), Current trends in phonology. Models and methods, Salford, European Studies Research Institute, 123–141. Burzio, Luigi (2002), “Surface-to-surface morphology. When your representations turn into constraints”, in: Paul Boucher (ed.), Many morphologies, Somerville, MA, Cascadilla Press, 142–177. Burzio, Luigi (2005), “Sources of paradigm uniformity”, in: Laura J. Downing/T. Alan Hall/Renate Raffelsiefen (edd.), Paradigms in phonological theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 65–106. Bybee, Joan (1985), Morphology, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Carstairs, Andrew (1987), Allomorphy in inflexion, London, Croom Helm. Carstairs, Andrew (1988), “Some implications of phonologically-conditioned suppletion”, in: Geert Booij/Jaap van Marle (edd.), Yearbook of morphology 1988, Dordrecht, Foris, 67–94. Chierchia, Gennaro (1986), “Length, syllabification, and the phonological cycle in Italian”, Journal of Italian Linguistics 8, 5–34.

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Sascha Gaglia and Marc-Olivier Hinzelin

5 Inflectional verb morphology Abstract: In this chapter, we shall present a selection of the most relevant phenomena in inflectional verb morphology, i.e. where a debate about their nature has significantly evolved: With respect to the morphology-phonology interface, i.e. morphophonology, we shall basically highlight stem allomorphy. Throughout this chapter, syncretism will play a major role as a prime example and recurrent theme, which elucidates the variety of interfaces pertaining to the inflection of verbs – as all important interfaces with morphology are involved: phonology, syntax, and semantics/ pragmatics. Other instances of non-canonical morphology discussed include suppletion, periphrases, overabundance, and defectiveness. Lastly, we shall address the notion of the autonomy of morphology, i.e. the assumption of an autonomous morphomic level. Keywords: defectiveness, grammaticalization, high-mid alternation, metaphony, palatalization, velar insertion, morphophonology, overabundance, periphrasis, suppletion, syncretism

1 Introduction The notion of interfaces relies crucially on the assumption of a modular structure of the mind in general and of the human language capacity in particular (cf. Chomsky 1980, 40–46, 59–65, 89–92). An important question that has to be discussed beforehand is what actually constitutes an interface phenomenon. The answer to this fundamental question is utterly theory-dependent: First, only in a theoretical framework which assumes a modular structure is this question meaningful at all.1 Second, if such a framework (e.g. generative grammar) is adopted, the answer depends largely on the internal division into modules, e.g. if one assumes that morphology is an autonomous module and, beyond that, possesses a morphomic level in the sense of Aronoff (1994), many phenomena that are possibly at the interface may be explained by invoking morphology alone, without any other module at the interface (cf. section 5). If, on the other hand, the existence of a separate morphology module is denied altogether, then, in consequence, there cannot exist any interface with it.2 If a theory 1 The non-modularity assumption is shared by frameworks like Cognitive Linguistics, Construction Grammar or Functional Grammar. For this reason, interfaces do not exist in these frameworks and they will not be discussed in this chapter. 2 In many generative approaches, syntax and morphology are lumped together as ‘grammar’ or ‘morphosyntax’, cf. section 3.

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assumes a separate morphology module in the first place, then this will be situated almost always at the center of the linguistic model and thus has direct and important ties to all other modules.3 These considerations will constitute the starting point for the present chapter. The morphology-phonology interface is the most obvious and the first one to be assessed in linguistic research historically. Trubetzkoy coined the term morphophonology (“morphonologie” in Trubetzkoy 1929) and provides one of the earliest and best-known examples of an explicit description of the inflectional morphology interface (cf. also Dressler 1985 and the debate on morphophonology in the contributions in Singh/Desrochers 1996). As mentioned above, many morphological phenomena are situated at several interfaces at the same time; syncretism has phonological, syntactic, and semantic/ pragmatic angles which are more or less prevalent depending on the case at hand. Furthermore, a notion like ‘morphosyntactic property’ can only be interpreted at several interfaces simultaneously: A property like ‘person/number’ is morphological and corresponds directly with syntax but has a pragmatic-semantic interpretation. Morphological features may thus be used by the syntax for agreement purposes (cf. section 3.1) and are decoded in semantics and pragmatics. Hence a phenomenon crucially invoking ‘morphosyntactic properties’ is per se at the interfaces with syntax (cf. section 3) and semantics/pragmatics (cf. section 4). Choosing the most relevant interface to house the discussion of the phenomenon proves to be a challenging decision. Weighing the different contributions from each module against each other turns out to be a rather intricate task, thus the final decision often remains quite an arbitrary one.4 Lastly, any account of interfaces with morphology inevitably needs to address the concept of ‘grammaticalization’: Linguistic entities participating in a grammaticalization process are always, by definition, at (several) interfaces. More so, they always end up in the morphology module following the “cline of grammaticality” (cf. Hopper/Traugott 2003, 7, 99–100) or “grammaticalization scale” (cf. Lehmann 1985, 44–45, 47). In the present chapter, a structuralist perspective (item-and-arrangement; cf. Hockett 1954) is sometimes taken as the basis for a segmentation into morphemes. A typical Romance verb form may thus be segmented into the following parts: The stem with the root (r) (or an already morphologically complex form in the case of

3 The modules themselves may be even subdivided further and ‘traditional’ interfaces may be perceived as separate modules themselves, cf. Zwicky (1983) for this “high modularity” approach in which he divides morphology into three separate modules: word formation, allomorphy, and morphophonemics (Zwicky 1983, 199, 206). 4 Although a sophisticated analysis of grammatical features along the lines of Kibort (2011) may eventually provide a definitive answer inside a framework adopted.

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derived verbs) and a theme vowel (thV) identifying the conjugation class as well as the desinence consisting of a tense/mood (TM) and a person/number suffix (PN):5 (1)

Sp.

habl r stem

+a + thV

+ ba + mos + TM + PN + desinence

(1PL IMPF. IND hablar ‘speak’)

2 Interfaces with phonology In this section, some of the most important interface analyses of morphophonological phenomena occurring within the conjugation systems of Romance languages will be presented and discussed. Therefore, we shall consider studies which assume at least a bi-modular process, i.e. involving inflectional morphology and phonology, even if these studies do not specifically refer to the concept of interfaces. The decisive criterion is, thus, the combination of inflectional features, principles, and/ or structures with phonological ones.

2.1 Morphophonology of segments We shall discuss vocalic phenomena (diphthongization, metaphony, mid-high alternation) and consonantal phenomena (palatalization, velar insertion) conveying stem allomorphy. Diphthongization of Lat. Ĕ and Ŏ occurs in most of the Romance languages (cf. Sánchez Miret 1998, among others). Regarding standard Italian, Pirrelli (2000, 87–88) claims that diphthongization in inflectional paradigms is purely morphological since it is lexically restricted and its distribution within verb paradigms is not regular; e.g., the paradigm dolere ‘hurt’ (2a) exhibits diphthongization in 2SG and 3SG of the present indicative.6 This would be phonologically predictable, since it affects 5 This applies to almost all Romance languages and Latin with the exception of French where no theme vowels are found (except in -ir-verbs) and the Latin 3rd (or consonant) conjugation without a theme vowel: This class is still found in Catalan, Occitan, French, Italian, Sardinian, Romansh, and Romanian but not in Spanish and Portuguese where it has fused with the Latin 2nd conjugation (Lausberg 21972, 184–186). Moreover, French has lost many person/number suffixes which are often preserved in spelling though. 6 From an autonomous morphological perspective (cf. section 5), standard Italian exhibits a fusion of two morphomic patterns within some paradigms: Velar insertion (cf. below) in the 1 SG is a reflex of the so-called U-pattern and blocks diphthongization which adheres the N-pattern (cf. Maiden 2005, 162–163, for fusion of morphomic patterns in some Romance varieties; an Italian verb completely adhering to the N-pattern is morire, compare (2b)). Instead, Spanish shows diphthongization in the 1SG of doler, i.e. duelo. Hence, no fusion has occurred in this verb in Spanish (other verbs like venir ‘come’ show a fusion of the morphomic patterns for diphthongization, the N-pattern, and for velar insertion, the L-pattern).

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only stressed open syllables, which is confirmed by the paradigm of morire (2b), exhibiting diphthongization also in the 1SG . However, for muovere ‘move’ (2c), diphthongization is observable in the stem throughout the PRS . IND and, therefore, also in unstressed syllables of the 1PL and 2PL (muoviamo, muovete). In these cells, stress is arrhizotonic, i.e. it occurs to the right of the root. The verb trovare ‘find’ (2d), opposingly, does not exhibit diphthongs anywhere in its paradigm: (2)

It.

a.

dolgo, duoli, duole, dogliamo, dolete, dolgono

b.

muoio, muori, muore, moriamo, morite, muoiono

c.

muovo, muovi, muove, muoviamo, muovete, muovono

d.

trovo, trovi, trova, troviamo, trovate, trovano

Diphthongization is undoubtfully morphologized in Romance languages (cf. Sánchez Miret 1998, among others). Nonetheless, the phenomenon has been analysed by claiming a contribution of the phonological component (cf. Sluyters 1990; Vogel 1993), especially within the framework of Lexical Phonology (cf. Kiparsky 1982; 1985). These analyses refer to Italian diphthongization as lexically restricted, but (morpho)phonologically predictable “once it is established that a verb does exhibit this phenomenon” (Vogel 1993, 226).7 E.g., Sluyters (1990) treats the diphthongization of /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ in Standard Italian as a cyclic rule (cf. also Sluyters 1988 for his cyclic approach to metaphony below) and, therefore, as the result of a complex morphophonological process which depends on the stressed syllable of a binary foot. European Spanish shows the following patterns for diphthongization. (3)

Sp.

a.

pienso, piensas, piensa, pensamos, pensáis, piensan (INF pensar ‘think’)

b.

duermo, duermes, duerme, dormimos, dormís, duermen (INF dormir ‘sleep’)

Harris (1978) gives a rule-based, cyclic analysis settled within Lexical Phonology (cf. also his numerous works on this issue cited therein), where he analyses diphthongization and high-mid vowel raising (cf. below) in Spanish verbs assuming the underlying diacritics [D] for the former and [HM] for the latter. These phonological diacritics are associated with the corresponding stems (i.e. root + theme vowel) to allow the processes phonologically to occur depending on their morphological contexts. In Harris’s attempts to explain stem variation, surface forms are derived from one single underlying stem representation. 7 Vogel (1993, 226) does not give a detailed analysis of diphthongization with respect to the interaction of phonology and morphology. She refers to it to corroborate her claims about velar insertion (cf. below).

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Hooper (1976) deals with stem variation, including diphthongization, by ‘morphophonemic’ rules, i.e. alternating surface forms are built upon underlying representations which are already marked in the lexicon for the alternation, i.e. containing a diphthong and a monophthong. E.g., following Hooper (1976, 159), the Spanish verb mentir ‘lie’ has the underlying representation /m{je/e/i}nt-/. The surface representation is then determined by the given morphological contexts.8 Hooper (1976, 45) refuses the cyclic proposal by Harris (1969). She argues that surface forms which exhibit diphthongs also in an unstressed position, e.g. adiestramos9 (‘drill/train-1PL PRS . IND ’), cannot be analysed in cyclic terms. From our point of view and with respect to the highly idiosyncratic behaviour of the phenomenon, Pirrelli’s (2000) paradigmatic account of Italian mentioned above is a feasible way to handle diphthongization since it treats diphthongization as autonomously morphological (cf. section 5). Instead, interface accounts like Harris (1978) and (to a lesser degree) Hooper (1976) obscure the strong morpho-lexical character of the phenomenon by referring to disjunct morphological contexts serving as triggers for morphophonological/-phonemic diphthongization. Moreover, Harris’s (1978) account is problematic because of the stipulation of a huge battery of ordered rules for deriving diphthongization from one underlying representation (cf. also the criticisms in Bybee/Pardo 1981, 942 who doubt the rule-based character of morphophonological/-phonemic alternations).10 Metaphony generally means raising and/or diphthongization of stressed vowels, originally triggered phonologically (or phonetically) by word-final high vowels, i.e. -U and -I (cf. Maiden 1991, among others). Like diphthongization, the phenomenon is also widespread in Romance languages and all non-high vowels can undergo metaphony in principle; although the raising of stressed -A- is scarce compared to the metaphony of mid vowels. In verb paradigms, the 2SG PRS . IND is historically affected by - I .11 One of the most studied metaphonic systems is the Neapolitan type, exhibiting raising of high mid vowels (i.e. etymological -Ē -/-Ō -) and diphthongization of low mid vowels (-Ĕ -/-Ŏ -); cf. the following examples for the paradigms corresponding to Italian mettere ‘put’ (4a), pensare ‘think’ (4b), rompere ‘destroy/damage’ (4c), muovere ‘move’ (4d): 8 Instead, a ‘morphophonological’ rule (e.g. in the sense of Lexical Phonology, cf. above) derives a surface form from an underlying representation by manipulating the underlying segment phonologically. 9 The stressed syllable is underlined. 10 An interesting account on Italian diphthongization has more recently been presented by van der Veer (2006) within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT; ↗4 Phonology and morphology in Optimality Theory). 11 Etymologically, the 2SG inflectional ending ‑I was only present in Latin 3rd/4th conjugation class verbs. Its presence outside these classes in Italo-Romance can either be attributed to phonological change or to analogy (analogical spreading to the 1st conjugation class is undoubtful, in any case). An in-depth discussion is provided by Maiden (1996).

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Neapolitan Metaphony (2SG )

No metaphony (3SG )

Etymological stressed V

a.

[ˈmittə]

[ˈmettə]

-Ē -

b.

[ˈpjensə]

[ˈpɛnsə]

-Ĕ -

c.

[ˈrumbə]

[ˈrombə]

-Ō -

d.

[ˈmwovə]

[ˈmɔvə]

-Ŏ -

In modern Romance varieties, metaphony is morphologized (cf. Tuttle 1985; Maiden 1991; Fanciullo 1988; 1994, among others).12 However, this does not imply that phonology is not at issue ‒ as can easily be deduced from the literature: many investigations on Romance metaphony, especially those in a generative context, concentrate on the phonological component of the phenomenon, claiming the features [(±)high] or [(±)ATR ]13/[(±)tense], or a combination thereof, to trigger it (cf. Frigeni 2002; Calabrese 2011 and his earlier articles on the issue; Gaglia 2012, among others). For constraining the phonological rule, morphological conditions are stated, e.g. by Calabrese (1985), among others. With respect to the architecture of grammar, these studies refer more or less explicitly to metaphony as an interface phenomenon. Sluyters (1988), for example, claims a cyclic rule (cf. also Sluyter’s approach on dipthongization, discussed above), following the principles of Lexical Phonology (cf. Kiparsky 1982; 1985), where metaphony can only occur phonologically across morpheme boundaries, i.e. if the triggering high vowel is an inflectional suffix.14 Similarly, Gaglia (2012) analyses metaphony with respect to verbs in a Campanian variety. He claims that metaphony in verb paradigms is morphophonological because the phenomenon is phonologically predictable and metaphonic stems do not extend analogically, i.e. metaphony occurs only in 2SG .15 However, due to the high degree of exceptions within nouns and adjectives, metaphony cannot be analysed as being purely phonological. Because of lexical restrictions, the author assumes a lexically marked diacritic for paradigms where metaphony is instantiated. An interaction between morphology and phonetics is proposed by Maiden (1991) who defines the phonetic alternations to be exploited by morphology especially concerning so called ‘hypermetaphony’, i.e. the contrast of low-mid and high vowels. For a critical overview of the most prominent analyses on metaphony, cf. especially Calabrese (2011). 12 An exception is Logudorese Sardinian, where metaphony is still phonological according to Loporcaro (2011, 130). 13 ATR = advanced tongue root. 14 Fanciullo (1994) sees a rather direct connection between alternating phonemes and their morphological environment and adopts, hence, an approach involving not a morphophonological but rather a morphophonemic procedure for metaphony in nouns (for a definition of ‘morphophonological’ vs. ‘morphophonemic’ cf. above with respect to Hooper 1976 and note 8, above). 15 For nouns and adjectives in the given dialect, Gaglia (2009; 2012) shows that metaphony can also be the result of morpho-lexical selection.

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A minor phenomenon, but to which considerable attention has been paid, is what Harris (1978) terms high-mid alternation in Spanish (cf. also Hooper 1976; Bybee/Pardo 1981). The phenomenon consists of alternations of high mid and high vowels in 3rd conjugation stems, e.g. servimos ‘serve-1PL PRS . IND ’ vs. sirvamos ‘serve-1PL PRS . SBJV ’. Some verbs show a threeway alternation because of diphthongization, i.e. -i-, -e- and -ie- (hirvamos ‘boil-1PL PRS . SBJV ’, hervimos ‘boil-1PL PRS . IND ’, hiervo ‘boil-1SG PRS . IND ’) and -u-, -o- and -ue- (muramos ‘die-1PL PRS . SBJV ’, morimos ‘die-1PL PRS . IND ’, muero ‘die-1PL PRS . IND ’; cf. Harris 1978, 44 who counts approx. 25 verbs of this type). Harris explains high-mid alternation as the raising of the underlying high-mid vowel via rule (cf. Harris 1978, 45). But like diphthongization (cf. above), high-mid vowel raising cannot be explained in pure phonological terms. According to Harris, the lexical diacritic [HM ] (= ‘high-mid’) associated with the target vowel triggers the alternation for verbs of the 3rd conjugation (given as [3conj] in the conditioning context; cf. above for Harris’s account on diphthongization and Hooper 1976, whose diphthongization analysis is consistent with her analysis of high-mid alternation in the same book). Our criticism of Harris’s (1978) proposal has already been spelled out regarding diphthongization where we have objected to the number of ordered phonological rules which Harris stipulates. Moreover, by Harris’s postulation of disjunct morphological contexts, the morpho-lexical character of the phenomena investigated is obscured (cf. also Bybee/Pardo 1981 for criticisms). Romance palatalization is a well-studied phenomenon from a diachronic as well as a synchronic perspective (cf. Väänänen 1963, §§95–100; Dressler 1985, 168– 181; Krämer 2009, 56–84; Loporcaro 2011, 143–150; Maiden 2011, to name just a few).16 Regarding verb inflection in modern Italian, two types of palatalization were especially investigated within interface accounts, i.e. [ɡ]/[k] alternating with the palatal affricate [(d)ʤ]/[(t)ʧ ] (leggere ‘read’ (5a), indurre ‘induce’ (5b)) and [sk] alternating with [ ʃʃ ] in paradigms displaying the augment (e.g. conoscere ‘know’, 5c). In the 1st conjugation, palatalization never occurs (e.g. pagare ‘pay’, 5d):17

16 Historically, the segmental contexts for palatalization were [i], affecting [ɡ]/[k] in all Romance varieties but Sardinian, as well as [e] with the exception of Sardinian and Vegliote; the outcomes were [ts]/[s], [ʧ ]/[ʃ ], [dz]/[z], [ʤ]/[ʒ]. In Gallo- and Raeto-Romance [ɡ]/[k] were affected by [a] (outcomes: [ʧ ]/[ ʃ ], [ʤ/ʒ]). The glide [j] affected all consonants in all Romance areas, leading to various outcomes (cf. the overview in Vincent 1988a, 40 also for examples). 17 Palatalization is historically attributed to the Latin 3rd (Italian 2nd) and 4th (Italian 3rd) conjugation (cf. Dressler 1985, 176).

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It.

a.

le[ɡɡ]o, le[dʤ]i, le[dʤ]e, le[dʤ]amo, le[dʤ]ete, le[ɡɡ]ono

b.

indu[k]o, indu[ʧ ]i, indu[ʧ ]e, indu[ʧ ]amo indu[ʧ ]ete, indu[k]ono

c.

cono[sk]o, cono[ ʃʃ ]i, cono[ ʃʃ ]e, cono[ ʃʃ ]amo, cono[ ʃʃ ]ete, cono[sk]ono

d.

pa[ɡ]o, pa[ɡ]i, pa[ɡ]iamo, pa[ɡ]ate, pa[ɡ]ano

In the subparadigms of the present indicative in (5a–c), palatalization occurs before the front vowels -i- and -e- – with one exception, i.e. 1PL . Here, the palatalized consonant is followed by /a/ (le[dʤ]amo, cono[ ʃʃ ]amo). At first glance, a phonological account would not be implausible since the 1PL suffix can underlyingly be analysed as the glide-initial phonological string /-jamo/, triggering palatalization. However, a pure phonological account of palatalization is not appropriate due to the following reasons: Firstly, and already mentioned, palatalization does not occur in the 1st conjugation although a front vowel follows the velar /ɡ/ in 2SG and 1PL (pa[ɡ]i, pa[ɡ]iamo, not *pa[ʤ]i, *pa[ʤ]amo).18 Secondly, palatalization also occurs in past participles in -uto (e.g. cono[ ʃʃ ]uto ‘know-PTCP ’), even though /u/ is not a front vowel. This means, that the levelling of palatalized stems must have occurred within the verb system (cf. Dressler 1985, 177). Therefore, palatalization in verb paradigms is often described in purely morphological terms (cf. Pirrelli 2000; Carstairs-McCarthy 2010, 149; Maiden 2011).19 Cf. the discussion in section 5 with respect to the autonomy of morphology. Nonetheless, the interaction between morphology and phonology has been at issue including palatalization, especially in studies settled in the framework of Optimality Theory and regarding Italian (e.g. Burzio 2004; Krämer 2009; ↗4 Phonology and morphology in Optimality Theory).20 Burzio (2004) analyses stem alternations (cf. below for velar insertion) in Italian verb inflection within an extended version of OT combining morphological with phonological constraints. He assumes that the participle cre[ ʃʃ ]uto is chosen as the optimal candidate against cre[sk]uto by ranking the phonological constraint ‘PALATALIZE ’ over ‘O(utput)O(utput)-FAITH (FULNESS ) (Infinite)’ dominating ‘I(nput)O(utput)-FAITH (FULNESS )’. OO-FAITH militates in favor of paradigm uniformity and, therefore, stem identity with the Infinitive, i.e. cre[ ʃʃ-], whereas IO-FAITH requires the identity of the input /kresk-/ and the output, but it is

18 Further evidence against an analysis in pure phonological terms is provided by Italian nominal inflection: Palatalization occurs only before plural -i (and not before -e), e.g. ami[k]o/ami[ʧ]i ‘friend (s)’ vs. ami[k]e ‘female friends’ (*ami[ʧ]e). Furthermore, the phenomenon is lexically restricted, e.g. bel[ɡ]a/bel[ʤ]i ‘Belgian-SG / M . PL ’ but colle[ɡ]a/colle[ɡ]i ‘colleague-SG / M . PL ’ (*colle[ʤ]i). 19 From an autonomous morphological perspective, the non-palatalized verb forms of Italian adhere to the U -pattern (cf. 5a–c). In Portuguese, however, the palatalized verb forms constitute the morphomic (L -)pattern (as mentioned in note 16 above, palatalization affects also consonants beside [ɡ]/[k]; here it is [n] for the verb vir ‘come’): venho, vens, vem, vimos, vindes, vêm (PRS . IND ) vs. venha, venhas, venha, venhamos, venhais, venham (PRS . SBJV ). 20 An OT-account on palatalization and velar insertion in Catalan has recently been provided by Querol i Cortiella (2009).

Inflectional verb morphology

157

outranked. Grounded in the standard version of OT, Krämer (2009, 73–84) proposes a similar solution. However, Krämer’s account is slightly more phonological in nature since it makes reference to phonological place features, i.e. [coronal] and [dorsal]. A minor group of Spanish verbs displays the presence of [ɡ k] within the root in the 1SG PRS . IND, and throughout PRS . SBJV, e.g. venir ‘come’ (6a), conocer ‘know’ (6b). For convenience and according to most of the literature in the field, we refer to it as velar insertion. (6)

Sp.

a.

vengo, vienes, viene, venimos, venís, vienen (PRS . IND ) venga, vengas, venga, vengamos, vengáis, vengan (PRS . SBJV )

b.

conoz[k]o, conoces, conoce, conocemos, conocéis, conocen (PRS . IND ) conoz[k]a, conoz[k]as, conoz[k]a, conoz[k]amos, conoz[k]áis, conoz[k]an (PRS . SBJV )

For the corresponding Italian verbs venire and conoscere, velar insertion occurs in the 1SG and 3SG PRS . IND, as well as in 1SG /2SG /3SG /3PL PRS . SBJV: (7)

It.

a.

vengo, vieni, viene, veniamo, venite, vengono (PRS . IND ) venga, venga, venga, veniamo, veniate, vengano (PRS . SBJV )

b.

conos[k]o, cono[ ʃʃ ]i, cono[ ʃʃ ]e, cono[ ʃʃ ]amo, cono[ ʃʃ ]ete, conos[k]ono (PRS . IND ) conos[k]a, conos[k]a, conos[k]a, cono[ ʃʃ ]amo, cono[ ʃʃ ]ate, conos[k]ano (PRS . SBJV )

Both types of velar insertion ([ɡ k]) exhibit the same linear as well as paradigmatic distribution. Their paradigmatic distribution is the reason why both may be treated as morphologically related to each other in terms of the L-/U-pattern (cf. Maiden e.g. 2011; cf. the discussion in section 5). Nonetheless, they are two different phenomena from a diachronic point of view: Verbs presenting -sc- within the root as (6b, 7b), may be attributed to spreading from Latin inchoative verbs which exhibited the augment -sc- (cf. section 4.3; cf. Schwarze 1999, among others). The insertion of /ɡ/, however, is at least partly related to phonology.21 In old Spanish, velar insertion is possibly built on the model of the verb decir ‘say’, exhibiting the velar in the 1SG PRS . IND and the subjunctive forms, i.e. digo, diga, etc. (according to Maiden 2011, 236). Insertion spread throughout Spanish afterwards, generally from verbs 21 For a purely phonological account, cf. Vennemann (1988, 52–53) who treats velar insertion as a syllable contact phenomenon where the glide [j] is strengthened, becoming the voiced velar plosive.

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with stem final /n/ (e.g. venir) into paradigms with stem final sonorants, e.g. doler ‘hurt’, salir ‘go out’, etc.). Moreover, the velar /ɡ/ was introduced in paradigms with a root final yod (< *GJ, *DJ ) in the 1SG , e.g. *AUDJO > oyo > oigo ‘hear-1SG ’, and throughout the present subjunctive forms (cf. Maiden 2011, 237). Similarly in Italian, the velar replaced regular alternants already created by yod, e.g. UENIO > old Tuscan vegno > Italian vengo (cf. Maiden 2011, 238; for a detailed diachronic analysis of velar insertion in Italian cf. also Spina 2007, 112–139). From a synchronic point of view, velar insertion with /ɡ/ requires as environment a following back vowel, i.e. /a/ or /o/ and a preceding coronal sonorant, i.e. /n l/ except /r/. But since it is not found before participles with the back vowel /u/, e.g. Italian venuto ‘come-PTCP ’ (*venguto; the same is true regarding insertion of /k/, e.g. It. cre[ ʃʃ ]uto ‘grow-PTCP ’, not *cre[sk]uto; cf. above), a pure phonological treatment (i.e. velar insertion before back vowels [u o a]) is not appropriate.22 Moreover, velar insertion is only encountered in a small group of verbs, as mentioned above, and never in the 1st conjugation, e.g. Italian cenare ‘have dinner’ completely lacks velar insertion in the given cells, i.e. ceno (*cengo 1SG ), cenano (*cengano 3PL).23 An account within Lexical Phonology would be the aforementioned study by Vogel (1993, 225–226). She claims that the derivation of non-velar stems occurs via deletion of the underlying velar in all environments except before ‑a and ‑o (for this reason, the velar is not inserted but is lexically present in Vogel’s account). We agree with Pirrelli (2000, 85) who plausibly objects that Vogel’s proposal is problematic because it does not only require deletion of the underlying velar before front vowels but an additional palatalization rule is required for verb stems of the type [tolɡ-] (tolgo ‘remove-1SG ’), [kolɡ-] (colgo ‘collect-1SG ’) deriving /l/ to [ʎʎ] before /i/ (togli ‘remove-2SG ’, cogli ‘collect-2SG ’).24 In his extended OT-approach already presented here with respect to palatalization, Burzio (2004) (cf. above) includes interaction with the phonological component by the implementation of a markedness constraint, expressed by a rule of entailment, which enables velar insertion to occur before back vowels, i.e. ‘-ɡ- ⇒ / _ [+back]’. But since the phenomenon cannot be analysed in pure phonological terms, as mentioned above, the phonological constraint is ranked in between 22 This is also confirmed by Bybee/Pardo (1981, 957) who conducted nonce-verb tests with speakers of Spanish (cf. also section 4.2). A statistical tendency of realizing velars before back vowels could not be found by the authors. 23 The subjunctive forms of cenare are neither affected by velar insertion because the suffixes of 1st conjugation class verbs only exhibit the initial front vowel in all cells, i.e. ‑i (ceni, ceni, ceni, ceniamo, ceniate, cenino). However, if velar insertion is purely phonological, then one would expect the theme vowel -a (a back vowel) to trigger velar insertion in 2PL present indicative as well – but this is not the case (cenate, *cengate). 24 A further derivational approach is Fanciullo (1998) who treats the insertion of /ɡ/ as velar ‘infix’ before back vowels (according to Malkiel 1974, 307) causing depalatalization of underlying /ʎ/ towards [l]. We refer to Pirrelli (2000, 181) and Maiden (2011, 241) for some important objections against Fanciullo’s account.

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159

two faithfulness constraints, i.e. ‘O(utput)O(utput)-FAITH (FULNESS ) (1,6 Indic.)’ and ‘I(nput)O(utput)-FAITH ( FULNESS ) ’. The former militates in favour of an output identity of the stems in 1SG and 3PL while the latter favors the identity of input and output.

2.2 Stress The following ways to account for main stress in Romance can usually be found: (i) phonological rules, (ii) (morpho-)lexical specification, and (iii) mapping morphological onto prosodic/phonological structures. According to this typology, the present section deals with (ii) and (iii) due to their involvement of interfaces. Main stress in classical Latin was prosodically predictable, i.e. it fell regularly on the heavy penult. If the penult was light, the antepenult had to be stressed. The modern Romance languages are, to a high degree (with some exceptions), still faithful to this so-called three syllable window but with the collapse of the quantitative vowel system in the evolution from classical Latin to proto-Romance, stress was no longer predictable from a phonological perspective (cf. Roca 1999 for a detailed overview regarding Romance languages as well as Vincent 1988b and Saltarelli 2000 for the development from Latin).25 This becomes very clear if we consider the following verb forms from standard Italian where stress placement varies from ultima even to preantepenultima: (8)

It.

a.

[mastiˈkɔ]

‘chew-3SG PRET. IND ’

(ult)

b.

[mastiˈkaːte]

‘chew-2PL PRS . IND ’

(penult)

c.

[ˈmastiko]

‘chew-1SG PRS . IND ’

(antepenult)

d.

[ˈmastikano]

‘chew-3PL PRS . IND ’

(preantepenult)

Hooper (1976, 23–31) suggests an analysis within Natural Generative Phonology which treats stress in Spanish verbs as morphologized (by referring to Harris 1969 who gives a purely phonological account). The rules governing stress assignment in Spanish verbs are directly associated with tense and with their relative positions to the stem in each subparadigm. Sluyters (1990) proposes a cyclic rule to account for Italian verb stress (cf. section 2.1 for Sluyter’s approaches to metaphony and diphthongization). E.g. in arrhizotonic verbs, stress is assigned to the last vowel of a derived verb stem, i.e. the theme vowel as for the imperfect forms parlavo (‘I spoke’), vendevo (‘I sold’),

25 Modern French is an exception since stress falls on the rightmost syllable of a rhythmic group and is, therefore, predictable. Individually, modern French may exhibit word-final schwa. However, schwa cannot be stressed.

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sentivo (‘I heard’), and in the corresponding preterite forms, e.g. parlai, vendei, sentii.26 Roca (1999) proposes the following, extraordinarily fine-grained account for Romance verb stress also making reference to many language-specific exceptions and depending on metrical parameters (extrametricality, syllable weight, binary foot construction, line conflation), as well as on morphological categories: (a) theme vowels are stressed for non-present tenses (‘Romance Verb Stress Rule’); (b) for the present tense, the singular forms and 3PL-form must be derived by the same stress algorithm as nouns, (c) in specific tenses, 1PL and 2PL must be stressed by a rule which assigns stress to the right of the theme vowel, e.g. imperfect indicative cantavamo, cantavate (‘1PL /2PL Accent Rule’), (d) for the future, the first vowel of the TMA-morpheme, specified with the lexical morphosemantic feature [+FUTURE ], is stressed (‘Future Accent Rule’ which also covers the conditional). Within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM), Oltra-Massuet/Arregi (2005) as well as Pomino (2008a; 2008b) derive stress in Spanish from functional syntactic heads which determine word structure and supply a metrical grid.27 In these accounts, stress is placed on the rightmost foot preceding the functional head ‘T’ (Tense). Where stress is further to the left with respect to ‘T’, a stress deletion rule is assumed to be responsible for retraction: e.g., partes ‘leave-2SG ’, since stress would otherwise be placed on the theme vowel by the stress algorithm, i.e. *partés (cf. Oltra-Massuet/Arregi 2005, 61). Central to the analyses mentioned here is the claim that each functional head (besides Agr) exhibits a position for a theme vowel. Evidence is derived by the authors from verbs with multiple theme vowels, e.g. Sp. cant-á-b-a-mos ‘sing-1PL IMPF. IND ’.28 From our perspective, this assumption leads to an undesirable consequence: e.g. cf. the conditional, where three theme vowels must by assumed (adapted according to the verb structure proposed by Oltra-Massuet/Arregi 2005, 54). Moreover, the functional head F (Future) is stipulated in addition to T:29 (9)

Sp.

√ cant

v

Th a

F r

Th í

T Ø

Th a

Agr mos

26 Sluyters (1990, 79) includes also the V-final stressed future forms to be captured by the rule. However, this is doubtful because one is forced to assume an underlying stem final empty vowel which has to be deleted in order to assign stress to the inflectional suffix (e.g. /venderV-/ + /ɔ/ becoming [vendeˈrɔ] venderò ‘I will sell’). 27 With respect to stress in Catalan cf. especially Oltra-Massuet (1999). 28 Moreover, Oltra-Massuet/Arregi (2005, 55) assume Fusion of T/Agr if “T is [–Pst]”. For clarification it must be said that stems are not assumed in DM, only roots. Stem alternations are, thus, always a consequence of morphophonological readjustment rules. 29 The functional head ‘v’ is especially relevant for (in)transitivity and case.

Inflectional verb morphology

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Meinschaefer (2011) combines a constraint-based (OT-)analysis incorporating McCarthy’s notion of “optimal paradigms” (cf. McCarthy 2005) in mapping the morphological onto a prosodic structure. She claims that stress in Spanish present and imperfect tenses is purely phonological. For Italian, where stress is phonologically irregular, she integrates constraints which make use of morphological notions and attributes a special role to the theme vowel. E.g. for arrhizotonic stress in 1PL /2PL PRS . IND she proposes a constraint which aligns “the left edge of every theme vowel [. . .] with the left edge of the head of the foot” (cf. Meinschaefer 2011, 59). This constraint dominates the purely prosodic constraints in the grammar. According to McCarthy (2005), she introduces a constraint for the 3PL , being identically stressed as the singular forms, militating in favor of paradigm uniformity, i.e. an optimal paradigm constraint (‘OPTIMAL-PARADIGM LEFT-ANCHOR-FOOT ’; cf. Meinschaefer 2011, 61). This constraint is also proposed by Meinschaefer with respect to the Spanish preterite, which cannot be purely analysed in prosodic terms.30

2.3 Phoneme loss and competition – morphological repercussions The origin of many syncretisms lies in sound change, e.g. the loss of consonants realizing person/number suffixes. This change is well-documented in the development from Latin to Ibero-Romance as the source of the 1SG =3SG syncretism observed in many tenses, e.g. (10) in Spanish. But once the sound change is established, phonology no longer plays a role in the functioning of syncretism, its interaction at other interfaces is described below (cf. sections 3.2 and 4.4). (10) Lat. CANTĀBAM /-ĀBAT > Sp. cantaba = cantaba ‘sing-1SG =3SG IMPF. IND ’ Suppletion may arise due to the lack of sufficient phonological substance after sound change as has been claimed for Latin īre (Darmesteter 1887, 162; Markun 1932, 89; FEW s.v. īre; Aski 1995, 408–409, 413): Already in Latin, it exhibits an extremely short one-phoneme stem (consisting of the root i- fused with the theme vowel -i-) with the monosyllabic forms īs and it – disyllabic eō and eunt would have become monosyllabic as well in Romance (Maiden 2004, 250 note 12). Most Romance languages have resorted to forms from other verbs in parts of the paradigm, most

30 Cf. also Krämer (2009, 188) for a constraint-based approach to Italian verb stress. The author claims default stress in the penultimate syllable, e.g. [kaˈde:ɾe] cadere ʻto fallʼ which is overridden by lexical stress on a given morpheme if the stress is not in the penultimate, e.g. [ˈɾideɾe] ridere ʻto laughʼ. The fact that the 3 PL present indicative is never stressed by default but always on the first root vowel is treated as a “paradigm effect” by Krämer (2009, 189).

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notably in the singular and 3PL present indicative, but sometimes (nearly) ousting the i-stem31 completely (cf. section 4.1). An uncertainty of the form to be produced by morphophonological rules may lead to defectiveness where competing morphological processes involving morphophonological rules exist, but also to overabundance by generating multiple forms for one paradigm cell (cf. section 3.3.3). Albright (2003, 13) discusses data from a production experiment on defectiveness in Spanish verbs and concludes: The overall picture that emerges is that the gaps that are listed in grammars lie at just one extreme of a gradient range of uncertainty that speakers feel when deciding whether or not to apply morphophonological alternations. This uncertainty is strongest when two factors collide: first, the word must be relatively infrequent or unfamiliar, so that the speaker is forced to synthesize a form. In addition, the lexicon must contain conflicting evidence about whether or not the alternation should apply.

Maiden/O’Neill (2010, 121), however, argue against the requirement of a morpho(phono)logical competition: Our interpretation of the Spanish and Portuguese data is that the primary motivation for defectiveness in them is likely to be preservation of the unique stem present in the etymological input of what are overwhelmingly loan words, for the most part restricted to learnèd vocabulary, to educated speakers and to elevated registers.

3 Interfaces with syntax This section describes interfaces with the syntax module, discusses a number of selected phenomena from the Romance languages, and highlights a sample of current theoretical analyses of these. In contrast to the preceding section on phonology interfaces, the interface with syntax has received considerably less attention which may partly be due to the practical problem of delimiting the two modules. As a sharp distinction between the two modules is notoriously difficult to draw, the question of the significance and the locus of the interface between morphology and syntax is one of the most challenging to address. Morpheme- vs. process- vs. wordbased models of morphology have been proposed (cf. Hockett 1954). Moreover, in some linguistic theories, morphology has even been denied an independent status from syntax and is subsumed under the more general and collective label ‘morphosyntax’ or it may be actually regarded as syntax below the word level, notably in many generative approaches (cf. the discussion in Hinzelin/Gaglia 2012, 2–3). From 31 In the French verb aller, the i-stem survives only in the future and conditional ir-stem, and in Catalan anar only as part of a hybrid anir-stem (cf. examples in section 4.1). Modern Italian andare shows no trace of the i-stem, old Tuscan gire has the typical present-indicative distribution of the two stems (Maiden 2004, 232).

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this perspective, linguistic processes commonly attributed to the morphology module are conceived as syntactic in nature and explained by genuinely syntactic operations like movement (e.g. affix hopping in verb inflection, cf. Chomsky 1957, 38–42, 113, here still named “Auxiliary Transformation”) or integrated into general phrase structure in the case of word formation (e.g. analysing the process of affixation as phrase structural, cf. Williams 1981, 246, or analysing compounds as syntactic phrases, cf., among others, Selkirk 1982; Lieber 1983; 1992). The Distributed Morphology approach is deeply rooted in this perspective on morphological phenomena.32 In these theories, there cannot exist a special interface with syntax as there is no morphology module separate from syntax to begin with (cf. Carstairs-McCarthy 2010 and Hinzelin/Gaglia 2012 for a critical discussion of this basic issue). Instead of this syntactic and morpheme-based conception, Anderson (1982), Aronoff (1994) and, more recently, Stewart/Stump (2007, 384) argue for a word-based conception where words are syntactic atoms and their internal structure is unavailable to syntax. We tend to follow the latter view for the conception of the interface.

3.1 Alignment of morphosyntactic properties Morphosyntactic properties are aligned with inflectional affixes: Person/number affixes have a direct correlate in syntax as they are morphological entities expressing a syntactic relation, i.e. usually the agreement between subject and verb as in (11). The subject-verb agreement in the Spanish examples is expressed by the absence of person/number marking (or a null morpheme) in the 3SG or the presence of the morpheme -n in the 3PL . (11)

Sp.

a.

El hombre canta.

‘the man sing-3SG ’

b.

Los hombres cantan.

‘the men sing-3PL ’

This correlation is one-to-one and direct, but need not always be the case as syncretism (cf. section 3.2) or fusional morphemes suggest as in (12). In cantó, the person/number morpheme is fused with the tense-mood morpheme, i.e. the portmanteau morpheme -ó expresses at the same time both the properties 3SG and preterite indicative. (12)

Sp.

a.

El hombre cantó.

‘the man sing-3SG PRET. IND ’

b.

Los hombres cantaron.

‘the men sing-3PL PRET. IND ’

32 Halle/Marantz (1993, 111–112) state: “We have called our approach Distributed Morphology (hereafter DM) to highlight the fact that the machinery of what traditionally has been called morphology is not concentrated in a single component of the grammar, but rather is distributed among several different components.”

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Morphosyntactic properties are aligned with stem allomorphs: Some morphosyntactic features seem to be aligned with a special stem allomorph in many Romance languages (for a discussion of a possible semantic explanation, cf. section 4.2).33 In Spanish and Portuguese irregular verbs, there is a special stem allomorph for the preterite (the Spanish indefinido) in all cells of this partial paradigm (among others; for the distribution, cf. Maiden 2001a; 2005). (13)

Sp.

hacer ‘make’ (preterite stem: hic-/hiz-) PRET. IND :

hice, hiciste, hizo, hicimos, hicisteis, hicieron

Nevertheless, this phenomenon (and many others) are better understood by taking the paradigm as a whole into account as the respective stem allomorphs show up in other cells of the paradigm as well (cf. section 2 for morphophonological processes behind stem allomorphy). In the case of the preterite allomorph, the past subjunctive, the pluperfect (in Portuguese only) and the future subjunctive (which is marginal in modern Spanish) are involved, displaying a typical distribution referred to as PYTA (perfecto y tiempos afines; cf. Maiden 2001a; 2005). As there is no commonly shared syntactic or semantic feature involved, the stem distribution may be analysed as being morphomic (in the sense of Aronoff 1994), i.e. autonomously morphological in nature (cf. also section 5; for a detailed discussion, cf. Maiden 2005).

3.2 Spread of syncretism and syntactic repercussions Syncretism is a prototypical example of a morphological phenomenon at the interface with syntax as suggested by the title of Baerman/Brown/Corbett’s (2005) seminal book The syntax-morphology interface: A study of syncretism. While rare in Latin verb paradigms, syncretism is commonplace in most Romance languages. Moderate syncretism is found in Ibero-Romance where 1SG and 3SG are usually syncretic in many tense/mood combinations throughout the paradigm, thus reducing the distinctions in form to five (its origin is discussed in section 2.3, its semantic/pragmatic implications in section 4.4): (14)

Sp.

hablaba

‘speak-1SG =3SG IMPF. IND ’

In some Gallo-Romance varieties (all Oïl dialects and Francoprovençal as well as some northern Occitan and some northern Italian varieties), syncretism is systemstructuring (Hinzelin 2012), often reducing the form distinctions to three, e.g. in the present indicative of French first-conjugation verbs: 33 Bybee (1985, 93) claims that inflectional splits may generally occur due to semantic reasons, i.e. along splits pertaining to aspect and, to a lesser extent, tense and mood (cf. the discussion in 4.2).

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Fr.

[paʁl]

‘speak-1SG =2SG =3SG =3PL ’;

[paʁˈlõ]

‘speak-1PL ’

[paʁˈle]

‘speak-2PL ’

165

Extensive syncretism, as found in Gallo-Romance verb paradigms, generally correlates with a frequent or obligatory use of subject pronouns. The use of clitic pronouns is obligatory in standard French as well as in Oïl, many Francoprovençal, and most northern Italian dialects (sometimes limited to a subset of grammatical persons, a phenomenon known as partial pro-drop, cf. Hinzelin/Kaiser 2012 and Heap 2000; 2002 – here ambiguously termed “split subject pronoun paradigms”). A frequent use of subject pronouns is also encountered in Caribbean Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese where sound change34 and/or the loss of dedicated forms of the paradigm35 have led to a reduced paradigm with respect to distinctive morphological markers. The loss of inflectional morphology frequently entails syntactic change to compensate for this lack of distinction by a syntactic element, a subject pronoun in this case.36 Person/number distinctions are thus expressed primarily by syntactic means.37 In the course of further language change, this pronoun is often reduced to a clitic and may be analysed even as an inflectional prefix in colloquial French (cf. e.g. Roberge 1990, 168–169; Auger 1993; Kaiser 2008; Culbertson 2010) and some northern Italian dialects (Brandi/Cordin 1989; Poletto 2000; Manzini/Savoia 2005), thereby completing the grammaticalization scale (cf. Lehmann 1985, 47; 1995, 39–42, 55; Meisenburg 2000). For the prominent position of clitics at the interface and the affix-vs.-clitic debate, ↗12 Object clitics. The loss of subject inversion and strict SVO-word order, which are also found in Brazilian Portuguese and Caribbean Spanish, are further syntactic changes which may be attributed, at least to some extent, to syncretism (Morales 1989; Hinzelin 2012).

34 In Andalusian and Caribbean Spanish, -s in coda position has been lost in most varieties leading to a syncretism of 2SG -forms (with the -s as 2SG - morpheme) with the 3SG . 35 E.g. the loss of dedicated verb forms for the 2SG , 1PL , and 2PL in Brazilian Portuguese, and for the 2PL in American Spanish in general (use of ustedes ‘you-PL (formal)’ with 3PL -agreement instead of vosotros ‘you-PL ’). In colloquial French, the expression of 1PL by the combination of the pronoun nous ‘we’ with a 1 PL -verb form, e.g. nous parlons, is supplanted by a construction employing the indefinite pronoun on ‘(some)one’ with 3SG -agreement, e.g. on parle, thus further reducing form distinctions to two. 36 A parallel development in nominal morphology can be found in the French determiner system: The (clitic) article has become obligatory in modern French as gender and number marking of consonant-initial nouns is reliably expressed by the article only. 37 This, as an anonymous reviewer points out, “can also be seen in the Italian subjunctive, where in a pronounless phrase (e.g. voglio che venga) the verb is interpreted by default as a 3SG , and the pronoun is obligatory in order to obtain another (e.g. 2SG ) interpretation (voglio che tu venga)”.

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3.3 Periphrases Grammatical functions may be expressed in two ways in languages: as a bound morpheme directly on the verb (i.e. synthetically) or through a separate word like an auxiliary verb (i.e. analytically/periphrastically). These analytic forms (or periphrastic constructions) are at the morphology-syntax interface as they express morphological properties by syntactic means (cf. Brown et al. 2012; Chumakina 2013; Sadler/ Spencer 2001). There is a long debate whether periphrastic forms are actually part of the morphological paradigm of a verb (Sadler/Spencer 2001; Ackerman/Stump 2004) or rather independent syntactic entities, interpreted compositionally, and with only a loose connection to the morphological domain inside morphosyntax, if any (this is usually the generative approach, cf. e.g. Giorgi/Pianesi 1997, 37–40). Again, this decision is theory-dependent and clear definitions of key terms like ‘morphological paradigm’ are needed. If the paradigm is “the set of all elements filling the cells defined by the inflectional categories that can be expressed for the lexeme” (Haspelmath 2000, 663), then “periphrastic forms are admitted as members of the paradigm, but at the price that the paradigm is no longer a purely morphological notion” (Haspelmath 2000, 663). Haspelmath (2000) distinguishes two kinds of periphrasis, suppletive and categorial. Whereas a suppletive periphrasis supplies forms that are deviating from the expected ones (hence its name and its connection to suppletion; cf. sections 2.3 and 4.1) and filling a gap38 (compare, e.g., the few analytic passive forms in Latin discussed below), a categorial periphrasis does not have this function but it simply “expresses a grammatical meaning in a multi-word construction” (Haspelmath 2000, 660). An example for this category are the analytic future forms discussed in section 3.3.1. Thus, the decision on the interpretation of periphrases depends to a large extent on the periphrasis under scrutiny: There is a gradual scale, on the one hand, with the combination of two largely independent verbs both contributing to the lexical meaning of the expression as a whole, and, on the other, highly grammaticalized periphrases where the participating inflected verb forms have lost all or most of their original meaning. To reach a decision, Cruschina (2013, 282–283) proposes that: [. . .] the degree of grammaticalization [. . .] must be considered as the main criterion for defining a morphological periphrasis, irrespective of whether synthesis competes with periphrasis as a mode of inflectional exponence. The more an analytic construction is grammaticalized, the more it becomes likely that it will be treated morphologically and will be subject to morphological rules and patterns of irregularity.

Olbertz (1998) divides Spanish constructions generally identified as periphrases into lexical, semi-auxiliary, and ‘true’ periphrastic constructions. The periphrases consist 38 Lexeme-specific gaps where no generally established periphrasis exists are labelled ‘defectiveness’ (cf. section 3.3.3).

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of the combination of two or more words, usually an auxiliary or modal verb, a preposition (optional), and a non-finite form of the main verb (infinitive, participle or gerund). Latin is a highly synthetic language (e.g. in perfect and future tense as well as in the passive; three different kinds of infinitives and participles are available), only very few forms are analytic. E.g. complex synthetic passive forms exist as in (16). But for the passives of the indicative and subjunctive of perfect (17), pluperfect, and future perfect, no synthetic forms are available (cf. Sadler/Spencer 2001; Vincent 2011). Romance languages use analytic structures for the passive in general (cf. section 3.3.2) as well as in many other tense/mood combinations, sometimes in competition with synthetic structures as in French and Spanish future tense (cf. section 3.3.1). (16)

Lat.

amābātur

‘love-3SG . PASS PST. IPFV. IND ’

(17)

Lat.

amātus est

‘love-PTCP + AUX-3SG PRS . IND ’ → 3SG PST. PFV PASS

3.3.1 Tense/mood/aspect: New Romance tenses The expression of tense, mood, and aspect (TMA) is situated at the interface of three modules, i.e. morphology with syntax and semantics. These concepts may be expressed morphologically by affixes or syntactically by the combination of words. Languages tend to make use of both devices for the expression of TMA-distinctions but often with a clear inclination for the one or the other. Latin TMA-verb morphology is predominantly synthetic in nature:39 (18)

Lat.

a.

amāverat ‘love-3SG PLPF. IND ’ (pluperfect)

b.

amāvisset ‘love-3SG PLPF. SBJV ’ (pluperfect subjunctive)

c.

amāverit ‘love-3SG FUT. PFV. IND ’ (future perfect)

As illustrated in the following sections, the Romance languages have replaced many Latin synthetic forms by periphrastic ones (Lausberg 21972, 13). Language change along the grammaticalization cline may lead to new synthetic forms, thus completing the cycle of periphrastic and synthetic forms (cf. below for future tense). Furthermore, there are numerous periphrases expressing different aspects as inceptive, progressive, etc. or tenses like recent past etc. (cf. Squartini 1998 for Romance in general; Olbertz 1998 for Spanish; Lehmann 1995, 133 for a discussion of the grammaticalization of periphrases in Portuguese). The lexical material used in these more syntactic periphrases differs considerably from language to language. 39 The diachronic origin of the formation of amāverat and amāverit is still quite transparent: the perfect stem takes inflected forms of the auxiliary ‘be’ as desinence. This development is similar to the evolution of the Romance synthetic future.

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The early Romance analytic future becomes synthetic. Latin uses a synthetic future: (19)

amābit ‘love-3SG FUT. IND ’

Lat.

This form has been lost in all Romance languages. In most Romance languages, a new synthetic future has evolved out of a vulgar Latin (and early Romance) periphrastic construction (Lausberg 2 1972, 228–231; Maiden 2011, 264–266):40 (20)

+ HABET ‘love-INF + have-3SG PRS . IND ’ > VLat. *amar-at > Sp./Pt. amará, Fr. aimera, Cat. amarà, It. amerà ‘love-3SG FUT. IND ’

Lat.

AMĀRE

This development has been used as a textbook example for grammaticalization in general (Hopper/Traugott 2003, 52–55; cf. also Roberts 1992). Modern analytic future formations are another way of expressing future tense, found in most Romance languages. This periphrastic future combines the motion verb ‘go’ with the infinitive in French and Portuguese or the preposition ‘to’ and the infinitive in Spanish: (21)

a.

Fr.

(il) va aimer ‘(he) go-3SG PRS . IND + love-INF ’

b.

Pt.

vou amar ‘go-3SG PRS . IND + love-INF ’

c.

Sp.

va a amar ‘go-3SG PRS . IND + P ‘to’ + love-INF ’

In Romanian, a further construction is used: a voi ‘want’ + INF (Lausberg 21972, 228; Iliescu/Popovici 2013, 236): (22)

Rom.

va cânta

or

o cânta

‘want-3SG PRS . IND + sing-INF ’

In other Romance languages, different constructions are encountered: dévere ‘must’ + a ‘to’ (P) + INF alongside àere ‘have’ + INF in Sardinian (Lausberg 21972, 228–229; Remberger 2006, 252–259), ‘come’ + P ‘to’ + INF in Sursilvan (Lausberg 21972, 228), and the present indicative with the adverb pouë ‘then’ in Valdôtain and Savoyard Francoprovençal (Hinzelin 2011b, 40–41). Another periphrastic tense is the perfect, formed with the auxiliary ‘have’ and the past participle; mainly with intransitive and reflexive verbs, French and Italian use ‘be’ + PTCP ( Vincent 1982). The use of the past participle in these constructions brings about a voice switch – the Latin past participle was passive (cf. above) – but the tense/aspect value is retained (Vincent 2011, 430).

40 In Romanian the periphrastic construction ‘want’ + INF is used (cf. below). Some southern Italian dialects have no dedicated future forms and use the present indicative to express future tense as well (Lausberg 21972, 227).

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Fr.

(il) a aimé

169

‘(he) have-3SG PRS . IND + love-PTCP ’

Whereas in most Romance languages a construction with the verb ‘go’ and the infinitive is used to refer to an event in the future (cf. above), in Catalan a periphrastic preterite has been coined using the same construction (cf. Squartini 1998, 189–192; Taylor 2011):41 (24)

va amar ‘go-3SG PRS . IND + love-INF ’

Cat.

In Sicilian, a similar construction expressing emphatic past but with both verbs inflected for present tense exists (Cruschina 2013, 279). The pluperfect is synthetic only in Portuguese (Spanish retains the forms but they now express the past subjunctive; old French used the forms for the perfect; cf. Lausberg 21972, 219–220). The other Romance languages use a periphrasis with the auxiliary ‘have’ in the imperfect and the past participle.

3.3.2 Voice The Latin synthetic passive (cf. section 3.3) has not survived in any Romance language, passive voice is expressed by periphrastic constructions instead: The construction with the reflexive clitic pronoun se/si can be used in the 3rd person with inanimate subjects (cf. Lausberg 21972, 239; Remberger 2006, 171–172; compare (25a)) or the auxiliary ‘be’ is combined with the past participle (cf. Lausberg 21972, 239–242; Remberger 2006, 159–167; Vincent 1982; compare (25b, 26a, b)). This last construction already existed in Latin (cf. section 3.3), but had a perfective interpretation. Romance passives are now ambiguous except in Spanish and Portuguese which express the difference by the choice of the auxiliary: ser denotes the dynamic passive (process), a state is expressed with estar (Lausberg 21972, 242; compare (27a, b)). Italian may distinguish the dynamic passive by the choice of the auxiliary venire ‘come’ (Lausberg 21972, 242; Remberger 2006, 185–187). Romansh uses only the combination of ‘come’ and the PTCP to express the passive (Lausberg 21972, 242). (25)

(26)

It.

a.

Questa macchina si costruisce in Italia. ‘this car REFL =construct-3SG PRS . IND in Italy’

b.

Questa macchina è costruita in Italia. ‘this car be-3SG PRS . IND construct-PTCP in Italy’

a.

Sp.

es amado ‘be-3SG PRS . IND + love-PTCP ’

b.

Fr.

(il) est aimé ‘(he) be-3SG PRS . IND + love-PTCP ’

41 This construction has replaced the synthetic one (e.g. amà) in spoken standard Catalan.

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Sp.

a.

la puerta es cerrada ‘the door be-3SG PRS . IND + close-PTCP ’

b.

la puerta está cerrada ‘the door be-3SG PRS . IND + close-PTCP ’

3.3.3 Defectiveness and overabundance in a syntactic perspective In defective paradigms, there are gaps for some paradigmatic cells. The missing forms may be substituted by a form of a modal verb and a non-finite form of the original verb, by a semantically related verb or a periphrasis. The periphrases used to express the meaning of the missing forms are occasional formations and cannot be grouped with other regular periphrastic forms of the verb discussed in section 3.3. Here, syntax may be used to fill an idiosyncratic gap in the paradigm of a verb which can often be attributed to morphophonological uncertainties (cf. section 2.3). (28)

Sp.

abolir ‘abolish’: 1SG —— (defective) → quiero abolir ‘want-1SG abolish-INF ’

Overabundance caused by the syntax exists if a language leaves a choice between a morphological (synthetic) and a syntactic (periphrastic/analytic) formation, as it is the case for the future tense in French, Spanish, and Portuguese (cf. section 3.3.1).

4 Interfaces with semantics and pragmatics In this section, we shall first focus on the morphophonological shape as well as on the distribution of stems and roots which can be associated to meaning (mainly with respect to person/number and to a lesser degree to tense; cf. sections 4.1–4.4). We reconsider certain observations already discussed in section 2. For a perspective on the morphology-semantics interface that considers tense/mood/aspect from the angle of formal semantics and logic, we refer to Becker (2010; 2013) among others (cf. more references therein) as we shall not address these issues in what follows. Regarding the morphology-pragmatics interface, we shall approach a phenomenon also related to person and number (cf. section 4.5).

4.1 Merger of different verbs as source of suppletion Verbs sharing some part of their meaning may merge into a single verb as evidenced by the origin of forms found in the verbs ‘go’ and ‘be’ in a number of Romance languages (29) (cf. Aski 1995; Hinzelin 2011a; Maiden 2004; Rudes 1980). This merger

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automatically leads to suppletion: the morphological paradigm displays stems coming from etymologically different verbs.42 In a next step of this fusion, even hybrid or intermediate forms may develop, blending the two stems to form a new one (30) (cf. Hinzelin 2011a). As a result, two distinct entities of the lexicon with partly overlapping semantics are united into a single new lexeme with completely unrelated stem alternants. The distribution of forms interacts here with lexical meaning, semantic and pragmatic principles like synonymy avoidance (cf. Maiden 2004, 228) or, more specifically, Clark’s Principle of Contrast (cf. Clark 1987; 1990).43 In many Romance languages, the paradigm of the verb ‘go’ integrates stems of two Latin verbs, ĪRE ‘go’ and VĀDERE ‘go (hastily)’, in Gallo-Romance and Catalan, additionally, AMBULĀRE ‘walk’ or *AMBITĀRE are found (cf. Hinzelin 2011a). Standard Italian has not retained any trace of Latin īre in andare. In Ibero-Romance, PYTA-cells (cf. section 3.1) typically exhibit the fu-stem which is taken from the (also suppletive) paradigm of Latin ESSE ‘be’. (29)

a.

Sp.

ir-INF, ido-PTCP, voy-1SG PRS . IND, vamos-1PL PRS . IND, vaya-1SG PRS . iba-1SG IMPF. IND, iré-1SG FUT. IND, fui-1SG PRET. IND

SBJV,

b.

Pt.

c.

Fr.

ir-INF, ido-PTCP, vou-1SG PRS . IND, vamos/imos-1PL PRS . IND, vá-1SG PRS . SBJV, ia-1sg IMPF. IND, irei-1SG FUT. IND, fui-1SG PRET. IND aller-INF, allé-PTCP, vais-1SG PRS . IND, allons-1PL PRS . IND, aille-1SG allais-1SG IMPF. IND, irai-1SG FUT. IND, allai-1SG PRET. IND

PRS . SBJV,

(30)

d.

Cat.

anar-INF, anat-PTCP, vaig-1SG PRS . IND, anem-1PL PRS . IND, vagi-1SG PRS . SBJV, anava-1SG IMPF. IND, aniré-1SG FUT. IND, aní-1SG PRET. IND

e.

It.

andare-INF, andato-PTCP, vado/vo-1SG PRS . IND, andiamo-1PL PRS . IND, vada-1SG PRS . SBJV, andavo-1SG IMPF. IND, andrò-1SG FUT. IND, andai-1SG PRET. IND

Cat.

future stem: anir- < an- (anar < *AMBITĀRE ) x ir- (< ĪRE )

4.2 Semantic alignment of stem distribution The relation between form and meaning may be explained in terms of iconicity. Iconicity in verbs is typically linked to suffixation: e.g., the present indicative does 42 Rudes (1980, 669) claims that already Latin īre “required the lexicalization of three separate stems”. These were replaced separately in later Romance “waves of suppletion”, the new forms are then “lexicalized as members of the conjugation of the irregular verb” (Rudes 1980, 670, 673). 43 Children acquiring their first language follow this pragmatic principle: “Every two forms contrast in meaning” (Clark 1987, 2).

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not exhibit tense/mood morphemes in Romance, while marked tenses and moods do. Zero suffixation of the singular verb forms in French present tense is a further example for iconicity with respect to person (cf. Kilani-Schoch/Dressler 2005, 146– 150).44 But also stem distribution may be aligned semantically: e.g., the Spanish irregular verb saber (‘know’) displays the stem sup- throughout the preterite (supe, supiste, etc.), while the present and imperfect exhibit the default stem sab-. The preterite stem differs from the present/imperfect stem with respect to markedness. The preterite stem represents iconicity since the semantically more marked tense is mirrored by a morphophonemically marked stem. This allomorphic difference also diagrams the (morpho)semantic relatedness between the given tenses according to Bybee (1985; 1988): the more similar two forms semantically are, the more morphophonemic similarity they will exhibit. Hence, two forms of the same tense tend to be more similar than two forms representing different tenses as is shown by the Spanish examples above. Bybee (1985, 93) claims that inflectional splits occur most likely with respect to aspect (most common), tense, and mood (less common).45 In Bybee/Pardo (1981) psycholinguistic evidence for the semantic alignment of stem distribution is provided by means of nonce-verb tests conducted with Spanish speakers. Semantic relations regarding person and number are also shown in Bybee/ Brewer (1980, 230). E.g., with respect to some dialects in Spain (the following examples are taken from the Asturian dialect of Lena), the authors suggest a split of the preterite paradigm along the categories ‘participant’ and ‘non-participant’, i.e. the category ‘participant’ exhibits the stressed vowel [e] coherently in the 1SG , 2SG , 1PL , 2PL (canté, cantéste, cantémos, cantésteis) whereas no coherence is observed with ‘non-participant’, i.e. 3SG and 3PL (cantó, cantáron). Iconicity is also a central notion within Natural Morphology (NM).46 E.g., KilaniSchoch/Dressler (2005, 146–150) claim that the relation between short and long stems in French verb conjugation is iconic (e.g. /fini/-/finis/ ‘finish’, /di/-/diz/ ‘say’, 44 Cf. Greenberg (1966/2005, 44), among others, who refers to zero marking of the 3SG in several languages. However, e.g. Dutch, German, English, and Latin are counterexamples since they use a person/number suffix in this cell of the paradigm. 45 For a critical discussion of Bybee’s (1985) assumptions and an interpretation of apparently inflectional splits in the light of the Autonomy of Morphology (cf. section 5), cf. Maiden (2004) and Hinzelin (2011a). 46 NM combines concepts of universal markedness and of natural phonology (cf. Wurzel 1984; Dressler et al. 1987, among others; cf. Dressler 2006a; 2006b for brief introductions). Its parameters on universal markedness refer to the morphology-phonology interface (segmentally and prosodically; e.g. the optimal shape of a word equals a metrical foot, the optimal shape of an affix one syllable; cf. Dressler 2006b, 540) as well as to the morphology-semantics interface (e.g. in terms of compositional meaning of an inflected and a derived form) and semiotics. With respect to Romance verb inflection, cf. especially Kilani-Schoch/Dressler (2005) who present a meticulous analysis of French. Accounts of Romance verb systems are also Dressler/Thornton (1991) and Spina (2007), among others, as well as Dressler et al. (2006) and other contributions in the same issue of Folia Linguistica dedicated to NM.

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/ba/-/bat/ ‘beat’, etc.), the latter being identical with the 3PL stem in Kilani-Schoch/ Dresslerʼs macroclass II. The alternation of short and long stems is generally observable in present, imperfect, and subjunctive forms (and to a lesser degree in the past participle and the preterite). The authors treat this alternation in terms of iconicity since the long stems can be interpreteted as marking the plural forms of the present indicative as well as all person forms of the subjunctive and the imperfect (cf. KilaniSchoch/Dressler 2005, 147 – also for exceptions). According to the authors, the iconicity of the French imperfect is also mirrored by the root allomorphs which are identical with the morphosemantically marked 1PL /2PL PRS . IND, e.g. buv- (vs. boi- in the paradigm of boire ‘drink’).

4.3 Loss of semantic distinctions In Latin, the verb augment -sc- was originally a derivational element marking inchoative (or inceptive) meaning, e.g. florēre (‘flower’) vs. florēscere (‘coming into bloom’). Later on, the augment becomes an inflectional formative (cf. especially Blaylock 1975 for a diatopic overview; cf. Maiden 2011 with respect to conjugation classes affected by the augment in the modern Romance languages. The latter also provides the most important references on the issue). For modern Romance languages, it is generally assumed that the augment is semantically empty (cf., among others, Harris 1988, 223; Maiden 2003b; 2005, 156–157; 2011, 249 and 710 note 39) and that the distribution of the augment was morphophonologically conditioned (cf. Zamboni 1982, 96, 118, note 27 for references cited from Blaylock 1975 regarding stress-based analyses). E.g. in Italian, the distribution of the augment provides a pattern where the word accent is realized on the theme vowel. Hence, in these paradigms, there is no longer a distinction between forms with rhizotonic and arrhizotonic stress. Zamboni (1982) prefers a functional-semantic analysis with respect to the Aktionsart and in terms of ‘transformativity’ (rather than of ‘inchoativity’) over a purely stress-based solution, arguing that the augment -sc- being incompatible with durativity (for an analysis of the augment *-idio, cf. Zamboni 1980). On the contrary, Maiden rejects a semantic approach (cf. Maiden 2003b), especially referring to Zamboniʼs analyses (cf. also Maiden 2011, 251, 710 note 49), as well as a treatment based on stress (cf. Maiden 2011, 249). Maiden (2003b, 13) argues with respect to -sc- that “[. . .] even if there are individual cases in which a meaning can be assigned to the augment, neither in modern Romance nor in those earlier stages [. . .] can any general meaning be allocated to it” (he argues similarly also with respect to -edj-).47 Instead, he makes an autonomously morphological claim, which we support, stating

47 With this respect, as already mentioned in section 2.1, Lat. -sc- spread from the augment also to the root of verbs which cannot be associated with inchoative meaning as in It. conoscere and Sp. conocer (cf., among others, Schwarze 1999).

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that the “attractive force” of the (morphomic) N-pattern was responsible for the paradigmatic distribution of the augments (cf. section 5).

4.4 Syncretism, defectiveness, and overabundance in a semantic/pragmatic perspective In a canonical perspective (Corbett 2007), semantic and pragmatic information should be mapped one-to-one to morphology: An inflectional affix is expected to flesh out the morphosyntactic properties obtained. In Stump’s Paradigm Function Morphology (PFM; cf. Stump 2001; 2002; 2006; Stewart/Stump 2007; a short introduction may be found in Hinzelin/Gaglia 2012), the Content-paradigm function is linked to the Form-paradigm function by rules. These rules of paradigm linkage are situated at the interface; mismatches are thus interface phenomena. Syncretism is such a mismatch: Different morphosyntactic values (semantic/ pragmatic information) like person/number are not expressed by different affixes, instead a single form has two different interpretations (cf. also section 3.2; Hinzelin 2012 provides a more in-depth discussion). The Form-paradigm fails to make a distinction present in the Content-paradigm: (31)

a.

Sp.

hablaba

‘speak-1SG =3SG IMPF. IND ’

b.

It.

parli

‘speak-1SG =2SG =3SG PRS . SBJV ’

c.

Fr.

[paʁl]

‘speak-1SG =2SG =3SG =3PL PRS . IND = PRS . SBJV ’

Another mismatch is defectiveness (cf. also sections 2.3 and 3.3.3), where no form is realized in the paradigm cell of the Form-paradigm. Verbs may be defective for semantic and pragmatic reasons (Baerman/Corbett 2010, 2–3, 8), e.g. impersonal verbs and weather verbs are only found in the 3SG as any other form is perceived as semantically and pragmatically odd as in (32). In this example, there is no morphological reason for the non-existence of this particular form. (32)

Sp.

*lluevo

‘rain-1SG PRS . IND ’

Overabundance (cf. also section 3.3.3) is the opposite phenomenon: Instead of the expected single form, there are “two or more forms realizing the same cell in an inflectional paradigm” (Thornton 2011, 360). A traditional and more general term for variation in form not restricted to morphology is ‘polymorphism’ (cf. Hinzelin 2011b, 41–42). The doublets may be sensitive to semantic features like [+human] and collocations, as they prove to be in the last two examples in (33) (Thornton 2011, 368).

Inflectional verb morphology

(33)

It.

a.

vado/vo

‘go-1SG PRS . IND ’

b.

faccio/fo

‘do-1SG PRS . IND ’

c.

devo/debbo

‘must-1SG PRS . IND ’

d.

sepolto/sepellito

‘bury-PTCP ’

e.

perso/perduto

‘lose-PTCP ’

175

4.5 Verb morphology and pragmatics Phenomena involving the interface between pragmatics and (inflectional) morphology are those that affect verb morphology with respect to the expression of discourse participants and politeness. We shall concentrate on the latter in this section (cf. section 4.2 for the participant vs. non-participant distinction in verb paradigms). A well-known case with a complex system of honorifics is Japanese. Regarding Romance languages, verb morphology is rather marginally involved within politeness systems (cf. Dressler/Merlini Barbaresi 1994, 58–72). They either use a 2PL pronominal form with the corresponding verb to refer to a singular addressee and to signal politeness/social distance (e.g. Fr. vous allez, archaic/regional It. voi andate ‘you go’) or 3SG (e.g. It. Lei va). In European Spanish, the pronoun of 2SG is tú and the politeness pronouns usted (SG ) and ustedes (PL) respectively, are combined with the verb forms of third person. Remember that Spanish, like Italian, is a pro-drop language and that politeness may be expressed also only by the verb desinence. In American Spanish, the picture is as follows: A variety exhibits either (i) tuteo, (ii) voseo or (iii) a mix of both (cf. Fontanella de Weinberg 1999 for an overview regarding usage and the diatopic distribution of the (sub)systems as well as, recently, de Jonge/Nieuwenhuijsen 2014 and the references therein; contributions to Spanish address systems from different linguistic angles, also including sociolinguistics, are provided in Hummel/Kluge/Vázquez Laslop 2010). In varieties exhibiting tuteo, the pronoun for singular addressee tú is combined with the corresponding verb form as it is the case for European Spanish. Regarding voseo, i.e. the etymological 2PL pronoun vos (< Lat. vōs) has ousted tú in 2SG and the verb form is distinct from 2SG in this cell of the paradigm; e.g. especially in Argentina, which is the most prominent case, showing the most homogeneous geographic distribution of voseo, and where the stress falls on the desinence (for an overview of the morphophonological differences between voseo-systems cf. Fontanella de Weinberg 1976); e.g. (vos) llegás ‘you arrive’.48 48 Politeness towards a singular addressee is always expressed by the use of usted and the corresponding verb form as in European Spanish. However, usted can also be used in intimate situations without any polite meaning in American Spanish, i.e. usted de cariño (affectionate usted, cf. Kany 21951, 93–95, also for a general view on the issue with respect to Latin America). The plural ustedes has been generalized to 2PL -reference and is no longer a politeness pronoun in American Spanish.

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In Chilean Spanish, the situation is far more complex and it belongs, thus, to the third category, exhibiting the co-occurrence of voseo and tuteo (cf. Torrejón 2010, among others) while voseo corresponds to less social distance and the use of usted in the singular usually to politeness, tuteo has an intermediate position. Syntactically the following sequence types consisting of an address pronoun and a verb form are possible (the corresponding infinitive is llegar; the meaning is ‘you arrive’): (tú) llegas (tuteo), (tú) llegái (tuteo + voseo), (vos) llegái (voseo), (vos) llegas (voseo + tuteo; according to Torrejón 2010 the existence of this type is doubtful in current speech). In Chilean Spanish, the choice of tuteo and voseo is pragmatically as well as sociolinguistically conditioned. However, the literature on Chilean voseo lacks studies that refer to the interface between pragmatics and morphology/ morphosyntax. In a first attempt, Gaglia (to appear) proposes an analysis politeness/ social distance by the means of a specific agreement feature. Work on this issue is still a desideratum in any case. A recent study on L1–acquisition of voseo and tuteo in Río de la Plata Spanish, referring especially to its verb morphology, is Moyna (2009).

5 The autonomy of morphology As already mentioned (cf. section 1), the interpretation of interface phenomena (or even their existence) very much depends on the researcher’s theoretical stance. The role of morphology as a separate module is a precondition for the existence of an interface. The conception of morphology as separate and, furthermore, possessing an autonomous morphomic level (Aronoff 1994) leads to a new analysis of many interface phenomena as purely morphological phenomena. These may have been phonological, semantic or syntactic in origin, but analyses of Romance verb morphology proposed by Maiden (e.g. 2005) suggest that this is very often no longer discernible: When the phonological condition that produced changes in the verb stem of e.g. L-/U-pattern verbs is no longer active, these changes can no longer be explained by phonological rules in a synchronic description. The alternation is now a purely morphological, i.e. morphomic, one. Descriptions that rely on phonological rules deriving allomorphy like Harris (1978) and Burzio (2004) would still see phonology (at the interface with morphology) at work. But proponents of a morphomic interpretation have found many counterexamples challenging the idea of active phonological rules still operating (Pirrelli 2000, 77–80, 178–184; Maiden 2001b; 2011, 241, 709 note 31). With respect to suppletion, Maiden (2004, 249) concludes: “We have seen that even where such alignments [of morphosyntactic properties] do occur they may be accidental, a function of purely morphological ‘fractures’ within paradigms, rather than of any morphosyntactic properties associated with them.”

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Hence, from the point of view of the autonomy of morphology, many interface phenomena described above are considered genuine and pure morphology involving Aronoffian ‘morphomes’ (cf. Hinzelin/Gaglia 2012 for a more detailed discussion of this issue and a number of examples as well as the notion of stem spaces in Bonami/Boyé 2002 and Montermini/Bonami 2013).

6 Conclusion and outlook We have highlighted a number of interface phenomena present in Romance verb inflection with an emphasis on stem allomorphy, syncretism, and periphrastic constructions. Throughout this chapter, it has been a striking observation how ill-defined the notion of “interface” and how theory-dependent the interpretation as an “interface phenomenon” is. Clearly, we are in dire need of a more precise definition of these terms. A promising topic for future research is the functioning of linguistic phenomena like syncretism which are situated at multiple interfaces. Is syncretism quintessentially an (autonomous) morphological phenomenon or is it primarily housed at the interfaces? An answer to these questions promises to provide new insights into the actual nature of ‘interfaces’ in general.

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Iliescu, Maria/Popovici, Victoria (2013), Rumänische Grammatik, Hamburg, Buske. de Jonge, Bob/Nieuwenhuijsen, Dorien (2014), “Forms of address”, in: José Ignacio Hualde/Antxon Ollarea/Erin O’Rourke (edd.), The handbook of Hispanic linguistics, Malden, Wiley-Blackwell, 247–262. Kaiser, Georg A. (2008), “Zur Grammatikalisierung der französischen Personalpronomina”, in: Elisabeth Stark/Roland Schmidt-Riese/Eva Stoll (edd.), Romanische Syntax im Wandel, Tübingen, Narr, 305–325. Kany, Charles E. (21951), American-Spanish syntax, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Kibort, Anna (2011), The feature of tense at the interface of morphology and semantics, in: Alexandra Galani/Glyn Hicks/George Tsoulas (edd.), Morphology and its interfaces, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 171–193. Kilani-Schoch, Marianne/Dressler, Wolfgang U. (2005), Morphologie naturelle et flexion du verbe français, Tübingen, Narr. Kiparsky, Paul (1982), “From Cyclic Phonology to Lexical Phonology”, in: Harry van der Hulst/Norval Smith (edd.), The structure of phonological representations, Dordrecht, Foris, 131–175. Kiparsky, Paul (1985), “Some consequences of Lexical Phonology”, Phonology Yearbook 2, 85–138. Krämer, Martin (2009), The phonology of Italian, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Lausberg, Heinrich (21972 [1962]), Romanische Sprachwissenschaft. III: Formenlehre, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Lehmann, Christian (1985), “The role of grammaticalization in linguistic typology”, in: Hansjakob Seiler/Gunter Brettschneider (edd.), Language invariants and mental operations. International interdisciplinary conference held at Gummersbach/Cologne, Germany, September 18–23, 1983, Tübingen, Narr, 41–52. Lehmann, Christian (1995), Thoughts on grammaticalization, München, Lincom. Lieber, Rochelle (1983), “Argument linking and compounds in English”, Linguistic Inquiry 14, 251– 285. Lieber, Rochelle (1992), Deconstructing morphology. Word formation in syntactic theory, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. Loporcaro, Michele (2011), “Phonological processes”, in: Martin Maiden/John Charles Smith/Adam Ledgeway (edd.), The Cambridge history of the Romance languages, vol. I: Structures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 109–154, 689–698. Maiden, Martin (1991), Interactive morphonology. Metaphony in Italy, London, Routledge. Maiden, Martin (1996), “On the Romance inflectional endings ‑i and ‑e”, Romance Philology 50, 147–181. Maiden, Martin (2001a), “A strange affinity. ‘Perfecto y tiempos afines’”, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78, 441–464. Maiden, Martin (2001b), “Di nuovo sulle alternanze ‘velari’ nel verbo italiano e spagnolo”, Cuadernos de filología italiana 8, 39–61. Maiden, Martin (2003a), “Il verbo italoromanzo. Verso una storia autenticamente morfologica”, in: Mathée Giacomo-Marcellesi/Alvaro Rocchetti (edd.), Il verbo italiano. Studi diacronici, sincronici, contrastivi, didattici. Atti del XXXV congresso internazionale di studi [della Società di Linguistica Italiana], Parigi, 20–22 settembre 2001, Roma, Bulzoni, 3–21. Maiden, Martin (2003b), “Verb augments and meaninglessness in Romance morphology”, Studi di Grammatica Italiana 22, 1–61. Maiden, Martin (2004), “When lexemes become allomorphs. On the genesis of suppletion”, Folia Linguistica 38, 227–256. Maiden, Martin (2005), “Morphological autonomy and diachrony”, in: Geert Booij/Jaap van Marle (edd.), Yearbook of Morphology 2004, Dordrecht, Springer, 137–175.

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Maiden, Martin (2011), “Morphophonological innovation”, in: Martin Maiden/John Charles Smith/ Adam Ledgeway (edd.), The Cambridge history of the Romance languages, vol. 1: Structures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 216–267, 706–713. Maiden, Martin/O’Neill, Paul (2010), “On morphomic defectiveness. Evidence from the Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula”, in: Matthew Baerman/Greville G. Corbett/Dunstan Brown (edd.), Defective paradigms. Missing forms and what they tell us, Oxford, The British Academy/ Oxford University Press, 103–124. Maiden, Martin/Smith, John Charles/Goldbach, Maria/Hinzelin, Marc-Olivier (edd.) (2011), Morphological autonomy. Perspectives from Romance inflectional morphology, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Maiden, Martin/Smith, John Charles/Ledgeway, Adam (edd.) (2011), The Cambridge history of the Romance languages, vol. 1: Structures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Malkiel, Yakov (1974), “New problems in Romance interfixation (I). The velar insert in the present tense (with an excursus on -zer/-zir verbs)”, Romance Philology 27, 304–355. Manzini, Maria Rita/Savoia, Leonardo Maria (2005), I dialetti italiani e romanci. Morfosintassi generativa, vol. 1: Introduzione – Il soggetto – La struttura del complementatore. Frasi interrogative, relative e aspetti della subordinazione, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso. Markun, Hans (1932), Ital. ‘ire’ und ‘andare’, Aarau, Sauerländer. McCarthy, John J. (2005), “Optimal paradigms”, in: Laura J. Downing/T. Alan Hall/Renate Raffelsiefen (edd.), Paradigms in phonological theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 170–210. Meinschaefer, Judith (2011), “Accentual patterns in Romance verb forms”, in: Martin Maiden/John Charles Smith/Maria Goldbach/Marc-Olivier Hinzelin (edd.), Morphological autonomy. Perspectives from Romance inflectional morphology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 51–69. Meisenburg, Trudel (2000), “Vom Wort zum Flexiv? Zu den französischen Pronominalklitika”, Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 110, 223–237. Montermini, Fabio/Bonami, Olivier (2013), “Stem spaces and predictability in verbal inflection”, Lingue e Linguaggio 12, 171–190. Morales, Amparo (1989), “Hacia un universal sintáctico del español del Caribe. El orden SVO”, Anuario de Lingüística Hispánica 5/6, 139–152. Moyna, Maria Irene (2009), “Child acquisition and language change. Voseo evolution in Río de la Plata Spanish”, in: Joseph Collentine/Maryellen García/Barbara Lafford/Francisco Marcos Marín (edd.), Selected proceedings of the 11th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, Somerville, Cascadilla, 131–142. Olbertz, Hella (1998), Verbal periphrases in a functional grammar of Spanish, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Oltra-Massuet, Maria Isabel (1999), “On the constituent structure of Catalan verbs”, in: Karlos Arregi/Benjamin Bruening/Cornelia Krause/Vivian Lin (edd.), Papers on morphology and syntax, cycle one (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 33), Cambridge, MA, MIT, 279–322. Oltra-Massuet, Maria Isabel/Arregi, Karlos (2005), “Stress-by-structure in Spanish”, Linguistic Inquiry 36, 43–84. Penny, Ralph J. (1994), “Continuity and innovation in Romance. Metaphony and mass-noun reference in Spain and Italy”, The Modern Language Review 89, 273–281. Pirrelli, Vito (2000), Paradigmi in morfologia. Un approccio interdisciplinare alla flessione verbale dell’italiano (Linguistica Computazionale, Supplemento ai vol. 17–20), Pisa/Roma, Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali. Poletto, Cecilia (2000), The higher functional field. Evidence from Northern Italian dialects, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Pomino, Natascha (2008a), Spanische Verbalflexion. Eine minimalistische Analyse im Rahmen der Distributed Morphology, Tübingen, Niemeyer.

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Pomino, Natascha (2008b), “Aspekte der Relation zwischen Syntax, Morphologie und Phonologie: Spanische Verbalflexion im Rahmen neuer generativer Annahmen”, in: Eva-Maria Remberger/ Guido Mensching (edd.), Romanistische Syntax – minimalistisch, Tübingen, Narr, 229–252. Querol i Cortiella, Laia (2009), Aspectes morfonològics en la morfologia verbal del català nordoccidental, PhD dissertation, Universitat de Barcelona. Quicoli, Antonio Carlos (1990), “Harmony, lowering and nasalization in Brazilian Portuguese”, Lingua 80, 295–331. Ramchand, Gillian/Reiss, Charles (edd.) (2007), The Oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Remberger, Eva-Maria (2006), Hilfsverben. Eine minimalistische Analyse am Beispiel des Italienischen und Sardischen, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Roberge, Yves (1990), The syntactic recoverability of null arguments, Kingston/Montreal, McGillQueen’s University Press. Roberts, Ian (1992), “A formal account of grammaticalisation in the history of Romance futures”, Folia Linguistica Historica 13, 219–258. Roca, Iggy (1999), “Stress in the Romance languages”, in: Harry van der Hulst (ed.), Word prosodic systems in the languages of Europe, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 659–811. Rudes, Blair A. (1980), “On the nature of verbal suppletion”, Linguistics 18, 655–676. Sadler, Louisa/Spencer, Andrew (2001), “Syntax as an exponent of morphological features”, in: Geert Booij/Jaap van Marle (edd.), Yearbook of Morphology 2000, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 71–96. Saltarelli, Mario (2000), “From Latin metre to Romance rhythm”, in: John Charles Smith/Delia Bentley (edd.), Historical linguistics 1995. Selected papers from the 12th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Manchester, August 1995, vol. 1, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 345–360. Sánchez Miret, Fernando (1998), La diptongación en las lenguas románicas, München, Lincom. Savoia, Leonardo/Maiden, Martin (1997), “Metaphony”, in: Martin Maiden/Mair Parry (edd.), The dialects of Italy, London, Routledge, 15–25. Schwarze, Christoph (1999), “Inflectional classes in Lexical Functional Morphology. Latin -sk- and its evolution”, in: Miriam Butt/Tracy Holloway King (edd.), Proceedings of the LFG ‘99 conference, Stanford, CSLI, http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/LFG/ 4/lfg99schwarze.pdf (06.05.2016). Selkirk, Elisabeth O. (1982), The syntax of words, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Singh, Rajendra/Desrochers, Richard (edd.) (1996), Trubetzkoy’s orphan. Proceedings of the Montréal roundtable on “Morphonology. Contemporary responses” (Montréal, 30 September–2 October 1994), Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Sluyters, Willebrord (1988), “Vowel harmony, rule formats and underspecification. The dialect of Francavilla-Fontana”, in: Harry van der Hulst/Norval Smith (edd.), Features, segmental structure and harmony processes, Dordrecht, Foris, 161–184. Sluyters, Willebrord (1990), “Length and stress revisited. A metrical account of diphthongization, vowel lengthening, consonant gemination and word final vowel epenthesis in modern Italian”, Probus 2, 65–102. Spina, Rossella (2007), L’evoluzione della coniugazione italoromanza, Catania, Ed.it. Squartini, Mario (1998), Verbal periphrases in Romance. Aspect, actionality, and grammaticalization, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Stewart, Thomas/Stump, Gregory (2007), “Paradigm function morphology and the morphologysyntax interface”, in: Gillian Ramchand/Charles Reiss (edd.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 383–421. Stump, Gregory T. (2001), Inflectional morphology. A theory of paradigm structure, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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Stump, Gregory T. (2002), “Morphological and syntactic paradigms. Arguments for a theory of paradigm linkage”, in: Geert Booij/Jaap van Marle (edd.), Yearbook of morphology 2001, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 147–180. Stump, Gregory T. (2006), “Heteroclisis and paradigm linkage”, Language 82, 279–322. Taylor, Catherine (2011), Periphrasis in Romance, in: Martin Maiden/John Charles Smith/Maria Goldbach/Marc-Olivier Hinzelin (edd.), Morphological autonomy. Perspectives from Romance inflectional morphology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 401–416. Thornton, Anna M. (2011), “Overabundance (multiple forms realizing the same cell). A non-canonical phenomenon in Italian verb morphology”, in: Martin Maiden/John Charles Smith/Maria Goldbach/ Marc-Olivier Hinzelin (edd.), Morphological autonomy. Perspectives from Romance inflectional morphology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 358–381. Torrejón, Alfredo (2010), El voseo en Chile. Una aproximación diacrónica, in: Martin Hummel/Bettina Kluge/María Eugenia Vázquez Laslop (edd.), Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico, México, D.F., Colegio de México/Graz, Karl-Franzens-Universität, 413–428. Trubetzkoy, Nikolai S. (1929), “Sur la ‘morphonologie’”, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 1, 85–88. Tuttle, Edward (1985), “Morphologization as redundancy in central Italian dialects”, Romance Philology 39, 35–43. Väänänen, Veikko (1963), Introduction au latin vulgaire, Paris, Klincksieck. van der Veer, Bart (2006), The Italian ‘mobile diphthongs’. A test case for experimental phonetics and phonological theory, PhD dissertation, Universiteit Leiden. Vennemann, Theo (1988), Preference laws for syllable structure and the explanation of sound change. With special reference to German, Germanic, Italian, and Latin, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Vincent, Nigel (1982), “The development of the auxiliaries ‘habere’ and ‘esse’ in Romance”, in: Nigel Vincent/Martin Harris (edd.), Studies in the Romance verb. Essays offered to Joe Cremona on the occasion of his 60th birthday, London, Croom Helm, 71–96. Vincent, Nigel (1988a), “Latin”, in: Martin Harris/Nigel Vincent (edd.), The Romance languages, London, Croom Helm, 26–78. Vincent, Nigel (1988b), “Non-linear phonology in diachronic perspective. Stress and word-structure in Latin and Italian”, in: Pier Marco Bertinetto/Michele Loporcaro (edd.), Certamen phonologicum. Papers from the 1987 Cortona phonology meeting, Torino, Rosenberg & Sellier, 421–432. Vincent, Nigel (2011), “Non-finite forms, periphrases, and autonomous morphology in Latin and Romance”, in: Martin Maiden/John Charles Smith/Maria Goldbach/Marc-Olivier Hinzelin (edd.), Morphological autonomy. Perspectives from Romance inflectional morphology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 417–435. Vogel, Irene (1993), “Verbs in Italian morphology”, in: Geert Booij/Jaap van Marle (edd.), Yearbook of morphology 1993, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 219–254. Williams, Edwin (1981), “On the notions ‘lexically related’ and ‘head of a word’”, Linguistic Inquiry 12, 245–274. Wurzel, Wolfgang (1984), Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit, Berlin, Akademie-Verlag. Zamboni, Alberto (1980), “Un problema di morfologia romanza. L’ampliamento verbale in ‘‑idio’, ‘‑izo’”, Quaderni Patavini di Linguistica 2, 171–188. Zamboni, Alberto (1982), “La morfologia verbale latina in +sc+ e la sua evoluzione romanza. Appunti per una nuova esplicativa”, Quaderni Patavini di Linguistica 3, 87–138. Zwicky, Arnold M. (1983), “An expanded view of morphology in the syntax-phonology interface”, in: Shirô Hattori/Kazuko Inoue/Tadao Shimomiya/Yoshio Nagashima (edd.), Proceedings of the XIIIth international congress of linguists, 29 August–4 September 1982, Tokyo, Tokyo, Gakushuin University, 198–208.

II Structure and meaning

M. Teresa Espinal and Susagna Tubau

6 Meaning of words and meaning of sentences Abstract: This article addresses the general question of what the meaning of words, namely n-words, is and how this meaning may contribute to the meaning of sentences. We hypothesize that this contribution is not conceptual, but is fundamentally underspecified. An underspecified value can be attributed both to an inherent semantic feature and to a syntactic feature. In the specific case of n-words, we postulate a semantic feature that guarantees their behaviour as polarity items, and a syntactic feature that guarantees their occurrence in Negative Concord structures. The Principle of Compositionality is guaranteed by checking both semantic features and syntactically uninterpretable ones. Keywords: underspecified meaning, compositionality, n-words, Romance languages

1 Introduction The question we will address in this chapter is what the meaning of words, more precisely the meaning of lexical roots, is and how their meaning may contribute to the meaning of sentences, mainly within a minimalist semantics approach. A widespread assumption within classic lexical semantics (Cruse 1986; Levin/ Pinker 1991; Geeraerts 2010, inter alia) is that the lexical meaning is conceptual, which suggests that, for each word, its lexically encoded (context-independent) meaning is associated with either a concept or a set of concepts organized in specific ways and relationships. An alternative view, within the philosophical realism tradition, is that words denote things in the world (Frege 1892; Tarski 1944; Davidson 1967). These two views may also be conceived as complementary: Words can be said to correspond to mental representations that represent entities in the world (Fodor 1983). The idea of a conceptualist approach, as pointed out by Carston (2012, 607–608) is that: “We use sentences to express/communicate thoughts (truthconditional contents) and we use words to express/communicate concepts, which are constituents of thoughts (hence contribute to truth-conditional contents).” However, as pointed out by this author, it is now quite widely accepted that the meaning Acknowledgement: This research has been funded by two research grants awarded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (FFI2014-52015-P), and by grants awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya to the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica (2014SGR-1013). The first author also acknowledges an ICREA Academia award.

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(or semantic content) that a word is used to express or communicate on an occasion of utterance is often distinct from the meaning it has as an expression type in a language system (that is, its standing or encoded meaning). This view is claimed to be shared by ‘contextualist’ philosophers of language, by some linguists, and by pragmaticists working within a cognitive framework such as Relevance Theory. Furthermore, as discussed by Carston (2012, 608), in spite of the fact that “word type meanings might be concepts, hence contentful entities that can be constituents of thought [. . .] there is an equally widely held view that word meanings are ‘underspecified’; that is, that they cannot contribute directly, without modification or transformation of some sort, to the thoughts/propositions that utterances in which they occur are used to express”. In this chapter we follow the latter approach, and we take seriously the idea that words, not only closed-class words (indexicals, determiners, quantifiers, prepositions, and other function words, such as connectives), but also open-class words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs), may not encode concepts or map directly to contentful entities, but rather come with meaning-relevant components that are underspecified with respect to content. It is our aim to investigate how this underspecification can be understood, how it can be formalized, and how it can interact with other meaning components at the time of composing the meaning of sentences. It should be pointed out that this view not only makes specific predictions with regard to the meaning of words, but it also has specific consequences for the way we understand how the various types of meanings of words combine and compose to build the meaning of sentences. In this respect, we will have to evaluate to what extent the Principle of Compositionality (PoC; Frege 1892; Werning/Hinzen/Machery 2012; Pelletier 2011) might be accommodated when the meaning of words is highly underspecified. The PoC, which has been largely assumed by philosophers and semanticists to be a universal mode of composition of the meaning of a complex expression (e.g. a sentence), postulates that this meaning is determined by or is a function of the meaning of its constituent words and the rules used to combine them. This principle has been presented in the literature in different forms, depending on the degree of determinism that is postulated from the lexical meaning of words and the syntactic structure in which these words appear. More precisely, strong conceptual compositionality has been postulated in those circumstances where a full conceptual meaning for words directly combines with either the conceptual or functional meaning of other words to build the conceptual representation of a sentence (Jackendoff 1972). Strong compositionality of meaning has also been postulated in those circumstances where a syntactic algebra is interpreted through a meaning-assignment m, a function from E(xpression) to M(odel), and the set of available meanings for the expressions of E in order to build a logical representation for an expression E. This is the view developed in formal semantics (Montague 1974). Within the Principles and Parameters model of Generative Grammar a syntactic level of representation has been postulated, namely the Logical Form (LF), which corresponds to the meaning of a sentence at

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the syntax-semantics interface, as determined by lexical items occurring in specific positions within a syntactic structure (May 1985; Higginbotham 1985; Hornstein 1995). The PoC has been supplemented in the theory of language by various operations and processes that aim at accounting for the meaning of expressions that do not directly compose following the schema of function application. In this chapter we will explore the relevance of the PoC under the view that postulates that the meaning of words is not genuinely conceptual and that, on the contrary, it is (syntactically or semantically) underspecified. If we assume that lexical items (i.e. roots), no matter whether they correspond to open-class or closed-class words, contribute indirectly to the meaning of sentences by providing syntactic or semantic features whose contents will be valued in context by some process of enrichment that can either take place at the syntax-semantics interface (by means of a grammatically driven operation) or beyond grammar (by some process of pragmatic adjustment), we will have to seriously investigate what sort of features are involved in an underspecified characterization, and decide whether they are purely semantic, syntactic, or both.1 Our working hypothesis is that an underspecified meaning can be attributed both to an inherent semantic feature and to a syntactic feature with which a lexical root merges during a derivation. This suggests that an underspecified meaning, caused either by an underspecified semantic feature or by an underspecified syntactic feature is fully interpreted only when this feature is checked by an abstract operator, usually in a local domain. As we will discuss, a way to solve the compositionality of meaning at the syntax-semantics interface is to rely on the grammatical operation of Agree and the Principle of C-command (cf. below). The idea we will explore is that lexical items with underspecified meanings have underspecified features that must be submitted to highly constrained grammatical operations that guarantee their syntactic well-formedness and interpretation before these items can be claimed to contribute to a more complex meaning (that is, to the meaning of sentences) and, therefore, satisfy the PoC.2 In the rest of this introduction (section 1.1) we will sketch the relevance of this approach at the time of building the contribution of various types of pronouns and complementizers to the meaning of complex sentences. In section 2 we will focus on the central topic of this chapter: the compositionality of the meaning of n(egative)words (Laka 1990) to the meaning of sentences. In order to achieve this goal, we will focus on their features, their distribution, and the formal requirements for building 1 To our knowledge the antecedents of a theory of underspecification in linguistics have their origin in studies in phonology (Jakobson 1984a; 1984b), but have been extended to synchronic studies of morphology and syntax (Lumsden 1992; Farkas 1990; Rooryck 1994), as well as to diachronic studies on lexical change (Martins 1998). 2 Beyond grammar, the enrichment of underdetermined meanings up to the comprehension of a thought is not regulated by the PoC, which applies within the grammatical domain, but is pragmatically regulated by nonlinguistic principles, such as the Principle of Relevance (Sperber/Wilson 1986/ 1995), which attempts to account for the interaction between linguistically encoded meaning and nonlinguistically accessible information.

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either a negative reading, distributed over multiple negative items (both in Strict and Non-Strict Negative Concord –NC– Romance languages), or a nonnegative reading (in interrogative, comparative, conditionals, and expletive contexts).3 In this section we will limit the data discussed to Catalan, French, Romanian, and Spanish.4

1.1 Pronouns and complementizers A classic example to illustrate the notion of underspecified meaning might be to consider the characterization of pronouns in relation to their distribution within a clausal structure. Traditional grammars already put forward the distinction between reflexive and third person clitics, which any native speaker of a language is supposed to be well aware of. For example, if we consider the following data from Spanish, a native speaker of this language realizes that, in spite of the fact that the occurrence of reflexive pronouns and the occurrence of third person clitics within sentences do show strong parallels, the meaning conveyed by the two types of pronouns is different, and also that this depends on the distribution and licensing conditions of formal features that characterize these linguistic objects. reprimen (a sí mismosi). (1) Sp. a. Los Hermanos Musulmanesi sei REFL repress to themselves the brothers Muslim ‘The Muslim Brothers repress themselves.’ reprimen. b. Los Hermanos Musulmanesi losj the brothers Muslim them repress ‘The Muslim Brothers repress them.’ c. Los Hermanos Musulmanesi afirman the brothers Muslim claim

que los jefes del ejército that the leaders of.the Army

reprimen (a sí mismosj). repress to Themselves ‘The Muslim Brothers claim that the army leaders repress themselves.’

sej

REFL

3 It should be remarked that in Romance a Double Negation (DN) reading (Horn 1989), by which a positive interpretation can be inferred from the co-occurrence of two or more negative expressions, is compositionally driven only under very restricted syntactic contexts: when two negative markers are distributed in a main and a subordinate clause and when a negative marker co-occurs with a negative prefix (cf. Bosque 1980; Sánchez 1999 for Spanish; and Solà 1973; Espinal 2002 for Catalan). In addition, recent studies show the possibility of DN interpretation at the syntax-prosody and prosody-gesture interfaces (cf. Espinal/Prieto 2011; Prieto et al. 2013; and Espinal et al. (2015) for studies on Catalan and Spanish), and with simple transitive sentences (cf. Déprez/Cheylus/Larrivée 2013 for French; Déprez et al. 2015 for Catalan). 4 Italian and European Portuguese are expected to work like Spanish (Zanuttini 1997; Matos 1999). Brazilian Portuguese is expected to work like Catalan (Teixeira de Sousa 2012). Cf. also de Swart (2010).

Meaning of words and meaning of sentences

d. Los Hermanos Musulmanesi afirman the brothers Muslim claim

191

que los jefes del ejército that the leaders of.the army

losi reprimen. them repress ‘The Muslim Brothers claim that the army leaders repress them.’ Identity of indices represents identity of reference, while disjoint indices represent disjoint reference. Thus, whereas in (1a) the reflexive is interpreted as sharing reference with the only possible nominal antecedent that occurs in subject position in the sentence, in (1c) the reflexive is interpreted as constraining identity of reference with the structurally most immediate nominal antecedent, that is, the subject of the subordinate clause. Similarly, whereas in (1b) the third person plural accusative clitic is interpreted as having disjoint reference with the only possible nominal antecedent that occurs in subject position in the sentence, in (1d) the same pronoun is interpreted as constraining disjoint reference with the structurally most immediate nominal antecedent that occurs in subject position of the subordinate clause (Chomsky 1981; Reinhart 1983). This structural constraint makes it possible for the clitic pronoun to be interpreted as coreferent with the subject of the main clause or to a third set of individuals (neither los Hermanos Musulmanes ‘Muslim brothers’ nor los jefes del ejército ‘the leaders of the army’). The question is: What is the meaning of a clitic pronoun that makes this possible? In accordance with a minimalist approach to semantics the most reasonable answer is that its meaning is grammatically underspecified, which makes it susceptible to some process of enrichment, either grammatically (when it is possible to postulate a formal checking relationship between the antecedent and the pronoun) or pragmatically (when this is not possible, but the pronoun still constrains the proposition expressed by providing instructions on the procedures required to find an appropriate referent for the pronoun; Wilson/Sperber 1993; Espinal 1996). Consider the lexical representations in (2).5 (2)

a.

se:

[REFLEX , uREF ]

b.

los:

[-IP, -IIP, +PL , -FEM , uREF ]

In these schemas [uREF ] stands for an uninterpretable reference formal feature, which means that the linguistic object that has this feature has no reference by itself; [uREF ] must be checked by an [iREF ] formal feature, which most characteristically characterizes proper names and definite descriptions of the sort exemplified in (1). For reflexive pronouns the formal condition is that the pronoun is dependent on 5 [REFLEX ] stands for reflexive, [uREF ] for uninterpretable reference, [-IP, -IIP ] for third person, [+PL] for plural, and [-FEM ] for masculine.

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an antecedent [iREF ] that is a constituent of the same clause and, furthermore, the antecedent must c-command the anaphor. For third person clitic pronouns the requirement is that the pronoun does not have its antecedent in the same clause; in other words, [uREF ] is not dependent on an antecedent that occurs in the same structural domain, but in a higher structure; again the antecedent must c-command the pronoun.6 Within the Principles and Parameters model of Generative Grammar (Chomsky 1981 and subsequent work) these constraints on anaphor and pronoun binding are subsumed within the well-known Binding Principles, the general idea being that a linguistic theory of pronoun interpretation needs to bring together the ability to distribute and restrict the meaning of these linguistic objects within clausal domains. A second phenomenon suitable to illustrate how a minimalist semantics approach can explain the contribution of word meaning to the meaning of sentences has to do with modality and syntax, and more specifically with the distribution and meaning of various moods and complementizers. Let us consider the data in (3). (3)

Cat.

a.

Desitjo que sigui hope.1SG that be.3SG . SUBJ ‘I hope s/he is punctual.’

puntual. punctual

b.

Em pregunto si serà puntual. if be.3SG . FUT Punctual me ask.1SG ‘I wonder whether s/he will be punctual.’

These examples illustrate a dependency relationship between the type of modal domain of the subordinate clause (subjunctive (SUBJ) vs. indicative (IND)), the type of complementizer introducing the subordinate clause (que ‘that’ vs. si ‘whether’), and the type of verb of the main clause of which the subordinate clause is an argument (modal vs. interrogative).7 These examples show that the modal flavour of a specific mood in the subordinate clause is indirectly dependent on the modal anchor provided by the complementizer that heads the object argument of the verb of the main clause (Rigau 1984; Quer 1998). This observation supports the line of research developed by Kratzer (1981; 2012; 2013) and Hacquard (2006), according to which a hypothesis is developed on the projection, restriction, and syntactic representation of modal domains: “different types of modals select different types of anchors” and “modal anchors should be provided by the arguments of their modals” (Kratzer

6 [uREF ] must be checked within grammar. When the antecedent is in a position not c-commanding the pronominal or in a previous discourse other principles beyond coindexing and c-command apply to guarantee the interpretation of the anaphora. Cf. also Reinhart (1983) for disjoint reference and noncoreference. 7 Furthermore, these examples show a temporal correlation between the Tense and Aspect of the subordinate clause and the ones specified in the main clause. We leave this topic aside.

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2013, 191). The dependency we are postulating for (3) can also be formalized in terms of underspecified features, as illustrated in (4). (4)

a.

Vmodal[iM O O D ]

[ que[uM O O D ]. . . V[uM O O D ]. . . ]

b.

Vinterr[iM O O D ]

[ si[uM O O D ] . . . V[uM O O D ] . . . ]

What these rough representations make explicit is that the mood of the subordinate clause is underspecified and is dependent on the type of complementizer head, which, in turn, is dependent on the mood specification triggered by the verb of the main clause. This suggests that the underspecified mood feature of the verb in the subordinate clause will be checked and interpreted under a grammatical relation of Agree, similar to the one required for the checking of uninterpretable formal features in the case of pronouns. To sum up, in these two examples we have briefly sketched that the meaning of pronouns, as well as the meaning of complementizers and moods, is neither conceptual nor straightforwardly referential, but is underspecified for some features. The way we understand this underspecification is that some features formally characterizing lexical items have a value that is context-dependent. In the two cases considered here these features are checked locally and they get an interpretable content via a formal relationship of Agree defined on the basis of the Principle of C-command. In the next section we will present in more detail how this sort of analysis allows us to account for the meaning of n-words and its contribution to the meaning of negative sentences in various NC languages. We will focus on how an account of the meaning of words in nonconceptual terms can be extended to explain the meaning contribution of n-words and even the contribution of negative markers. The challenge of the characterization we aim to achieve is how to account for the distribution and meaning of n-words, and the compositionality of their meaning in negative (concord) contexts as well as in nonnegative ones. The ingredients of this minimalist semantics approach are the following: (i) lexical items (or roots) may be defined by underspecified semantic or syntactic features, (ii) some syntactic operations guarantee the formal interpretability and instantiation of formal features at morphophonology, and (iii) some semantic operations guarantee the compositionality of meaning at LF.

2 The distribution and meaning of n-words 2.1 Definition and distribution of n-words N-words are indefinite expressions that may encode a negative meaning, as shown in (5a, b) for Spanish. Notice that the preverbal n-word in (5a) or the isolated

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n-word used as an answer in (5b) contribute a negative meaning either to the sentence (in (5a)) or to the fragment answer (in (5b)). (5)

Sp.

a.

Nadie ha llamado. nobody has called ‘Nobody called.’

b.

Q: ¿Quién ha who has ‘Who called?’ A:

llamado? called

Nadie. nobody ‘Nobody.’

N-words also seem to behave like polarity items (PIs), as shown in (6a–c) for Catalan.8 (6)

Cat.

a. *(No) he vist res. not have.1SG seen anything ‘I haven’t seen anything.’ b.

Has vist res? have.2SG seen anything ‘Have you seen anything?’

c.

Si veus res, avisa’m. if see.2SG anything warn.me ‘If you see anything, let me know.’

In this set of sentences the n-word needs to be licensed by a suitable operator (a sentential negation in (6a), an interrogative operator in (6b), and a conditional operator in (6c)). The term n-word, originally coined by Laka (1990), captures the fact that in Romance languages such as Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, most −but not all− lexical items that participate in NC structures are spelled with an initial n- (e.g. Spanish nadie ‘nobody/anybody,’ nada ‘nothing/anything’; Italian nessuno ‘nobody/

8 In Catalan n-words can also be used as fragment answers to questions, as illustrated in (5b) for Spanish. That is, res (lit. thing) is also legitimate as a fragment answer with a negative meaning ‘nothing’. It should be noted that in Spanish n-words are less likely to be found in polarity contexts (Bosque 1980; Sánchez 1999).

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anybody,’ niente ‘nothing/anything’; Portuguese ninguém ‘nobody/anybody,’ nada ‘nothing/anything’).9 A formal definition of n-word is given in (7). The property in (7a) is illustrated by (6a), while the property in (7b) is exemplified in (5b). (7)

An expression α is an n-word iff: (Giannakidou 2006, 328) a. α can be used in structures containing sentential negation or another α-expression yielding a reading equivalent to one logical negation; b.

α can provide a negative fragment answer.

NC is commonly defined as the possibility that n-words have to combine with several manifestations of negation, although negation is logically computed just once. That is, multiple occurrences of negative constituents express a single negation (Labov 1972; Muller 1991; van der Wouden 1994; Acquaviva 1996; 1997; Déprez 1997; Giannakidou 2000; de Swart/Sag 2002; Corblin/Tovena 2003; Floricic 2005; Corblin et al. 2004; Tubau 2008, among others). In NC languages, n-words –some of which are not spelled with an initial n- (e.g. French personne ‘nobody/anybody,’ rien ‘nothing/anything’; Catalan res ‘nothing/ anything,’ cap ‘no/any’)– need to be licensed, in negative contexts, by the sentential negative marker (SNM) (8a) or by another n-word in preverbal position (8b). Without an appropriate licenser the sequence is ungrammatical (8c). (8)

Sp.

a.

No ha visto nada. not has seen anything ‘S/he didn’t see anything.’

b.

Nadie ha visto nada. nobody has seen anything ‘Nobody saw anything.’

c. *Ha has

visto seen

nada. anything

While all NC languages require postverbal n-words to be licensed by a negative expression in negative contexts –either a SNM or a preverbal n-word– a crucial difference exists among them when preverbal n-words are taken into account: While

9 The initial n- is not an indication of negative morphology, though. Etymologically, the Spanish n-words nadie and nada can be traced back to a Latin adjective: (homines) natī ‘(men) born’ and (res) nata ‘(thing) born’.

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languages like Spanish and Italian are defined as having a system of NonStrict NC, languages like Romanian or Modern Greek have a system of Strict NC (Giannakidou 1998; 2000). In Non-Strict NC languages, the SNM is not compatible with n-words occurring preverbally if a single negation meaning is to be expressed. Conversely, in Strict NC languages, preverbal n-words and the SNM always co-occur. This is shown in (9) for Spanish (a typical Non-Strict NC language) and in (10) for Romanian (a typical Strict NC language). (9)

Sp.

(10) Rom.

Nadie (*no) ha visto nobody not has seen ‘Nobody saw anything.’ Nimeni *(nu) nobody not ‘Nobody calls.’

sună. calls

nada. anything

(Non-Strict NC)

(Strict NC)

Catalan is somewhat special with regard to the Strict vs. Non-Strict NC distinction, as for some speakers (including the authors of this chapter), the SNM can optionally co-occur with preverbal n-words with no difference in meaning. This is why the SNM no is in parentheses in (11). (11)

Cat.

Ningú (no) ha vist nobody not has seen ‘Nobody saw anything.’

res. anything

In the case of Standard French, n-words always co-occur with the negative scope marker ne, thus reproducing the pattern already illustrated in (10) for Romanian. This is shown in (12a). Example (12b) illustrates a postverbal n-word, a pattern similar to the one in (6a) for Catalan and (8a) for Spanish. (12)

Fr.

a.

Personne n’a nobody not.has ‘Nobody ate.’

mangé. eaten

b.

Jean n’a rien vu. Jean not.has anything seen ‘Jean didn’t see anything.’

However, if the SNM that combines with French n-words is pas, Double Negation (DN) arises, as shown in (13).

Meaning of words and meaning of sentences

(13)

Fr.

a.

Personne n’a pas mangé. nobody not.has not eaten ‘Nobody didn’t eat.’ (= Everybody ate)

b.

Jean n’a pas rien vu. Jean not.has not anything seen ‘Jean didn’t see nothing.’ (= Jean saw something)

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In short, what the examples above show is that n-words may obtain a final negative reading, as in (5a, b), participate in NC structures, as in (6a), (8)–(12), or convey a nonnegative meaning, as in (6b, c). In NC structures, the SNM is sometimes overt with preverbal n-words (in Strict NC languages, as in (10)), but sometimes it is not (in Non-Strict NC languages, as in (9)). Other times it is truly optional (as in (11)). In view of this variation it is our aim to disentangle (i) what exactly the contribution of n-words to the meaning of sentences is, (ii) what the feature specification of n-words is, and (iii) how the licensing of the features we will postulate in section 2.2 will guarantee the interpretation of n-words both in NC (Strict and Non-Strict) contexts and in nonnegative ones. In the next section, we argue that n-words can be formally characterized with reference to two main kinds of features: the semantic feature [+σ] (Chierchia 2006) and the syntactic feature [uNeg] (Zeijlstra 2004).10 This characterization will be required in order to discuss in section 3 how the meaning of n-words contributes to the meaning of sentences. Special emphasis will also be put on explaining how the semantic composition of negation crucially diverges in Strict and Non-Strict NC languages, and is dependent on the characterization of negative markers.

2.2 Underspecified meaning of PIs and n-words We claimed in relation to (6) that when n-words are postverbal they behave like PIs, which can be licensed both in negative and nonnegative contexts. PIs, as defined by Giannakidou (2000), are linguistic expressions that bear a semantic requirement with respect to the kinds of contexts in which they can appear. As stated in the 10 It was already argued in Tubau/Espinal (2012) that Catalan n-words, namely res ‘anything,’ being a PI, carry the semantic feature [+σ]. However, Labelle/Espinal (2014) is, to our knowledge, the first study that postulates a combination of the semantic feature [+σ] and the morphosyntactic feature [uNeg] to account for the diachronic changes that affected French negative expressions: The semantic feature is postulated to be responsible for the interpretation of an expression as a PI, and a morphosyntactic feature is postulated to be responsible for the n-word behaviour of an expression. See this study for the proposal that, independently of having an initial n- or not, words may change from less negative to more negative or vice versa, a process that is explained in terms of feature changes that affect lexical items one by one. Cf. also Déprez’s (2011) microparametric approach.

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definition in (14), PIs need to occur in contexts with a nonveridical operator, defined as in (15). (14)

A linguistic expression α is a polarity item iff: (Giannakidou 2000, 464) (i) the distribution of α is limited by sensitivity to some semantic property β of the context of appearance; and (ii) β is (non)veridicality.

(15)

(Non)veridicality (Zwarts 1995, 287) Let O be a monadic sentential operator. O is said to be veridical just in case Op ⇒ p is logically valid. If O is not veridical, then O is nonveridical. A nonveridical operator O is called a[nti]veridical iff Op ⇒ ~p is logically valid.11

If we consider again the data in (6), it should be noted that n-words in Romance may qualify as PIs, as they can be licensed by negation (an antiveridical operator, a subset of the nonveridical class of operators), as well as interrogative and conditional operators (both nonveridical).12 According to Chierchia (2006), the semantics of PIs makes them felicitous only in downward-entailing contexts (Ladusaw 1980), because they are scalar items that activate alternatives within smaller domains. That is, PIs must be interpreted within the largest relevant pragmatic context while also activating alternatives within smaller domains. Take, for instance, the PI any in a sentence like (16). (16) The students didn’t read any books. In (16), the relevant pragmatic context is not restricted to the books included in a course bibliography, for example, but it extends to a much larger set of books, namely all kinds one can think of. With respect to the activation of alternatives, the indefinite item any, in any books, implicates that the students did not read math books, poetry books, history books, and so on. Following work by Kadmon/Landman (1993), Krifka (1994), and Lahiri (1998), Chierchia (2006, 559) postulates a [+σ] feature to account for the fact that PIs induce the process of domain widening described above. Given that, as shown in (6a–c), Romance n-words behave like PIs, they can be assumed to be scalar terms that bear the semantic feature [+σ]. Thus, similar to any in (16), the n-word res ‘anything’ in a sentence like (6a) activates alternatives (e.g. a specific individual object, some-

11 We follow Giannakidou (1998) in substituting antiveridicality for Zwarts’s (1995) averidicality, since the meaning intended is ‘opposite to veridicality,’ not ‘without veridicality properties.’ 12 Not all Romance languages, however, show the same sort of distribution. For example, n-words in French and Romanian can only occur in negative contexts and cannot be used in other polar contexts such as conditional and interrogative sentences, for which other lexical items are required. Cf. the summary table below.

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thing, many things etc.) and introduces the implicature that res ‘anything’ is the pragmatically strongest alternative in this context (i.e. if I haven’t seen anything, then I haven’t seen something, I haven’t seen many things etc.). The [+σ] feature, associated with the scalar item, is uninterpretable and has to be checked in the syntactic representation of meaning by an interpretable abstract σ operator that can attach to negation as well as to other kinds of nonveridical operators, the idea being that the feature [+σ] linguistically encodes the need for an enriched interpretation (Chierchia 2006, 553–554). If the abstract σ operator attaches to a negative operator, the PI bearing a [+σ] feature will be interpreted as a Negative PI, while if the abstract σ operator attaches to a nonnegative operator the PI bearing a [+σ] feature will be interpreted as a Positive PI. Notice that a [+σ] feature is also found in PIs that are not n-words (i.e. that cannot be used as negative fragment answers), such as Catalan gaire ‘much’/ ‘many,’ French qui/quoi que ce soit (lit. who/what it may be) ‘anybody’/ ‘anything,’ Romanian cine știe ce (lit. who knows what) ‘much,’ and the Spanish postnominal indefinite (e.g. persona alguna, lit. person some, ‘anybody’), as shown in (17)–(20). (17) Cat.

a. *(No) he menjat gaire. not have.1SG eaten anything ‘I haven’t eaten much.’ b. Has menjat gaires pomes? have.2SG eaten many apples ‘Have you eaten many apples?’

(18) Fr.

a. Daniel *(n’)a *(pas) rencontré qui que ce soit. meet anybody Daniel NEG . has not ‘Daniel did not meet anybody.’ b. Si quoi que ce soit vous dérange faites-le nous savoir. if anything you bothers let.it us know ‘If anything bothers you, let us know.’ (adapted from Tovena/Déprez/Jayez 2004, 398)

(19) Rom. a. *(Nu) am mâncat cine știe ce la who knows what at not have.1SG eaten ‘I didn’t eat much at lunch.’

prânz. lunch

b. Dacă spui cine știe ce, le vei cauza probleme. if say.2SG who knows what them FUT make trouble ‘If you say anything, you will get them into trouble.’ (Elena Ciutescu, p.c.)

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(20)

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Sp.

a. *(No) he visto persona not have.1SG seen person ‘I haven’t seen anybody.’ b. ¿Quién ha dicho cosa who has said thing ‘Who said anything?’

alguna. some

alguna? some

These data show that PIs are dependent on a negative, interrogative or conditional operator, and we can formally represent this dependency by saying that PIs are encoded by a [+σ] semantic feature that must be c-commanded by an abstract σ operator adjoined to another operator in the C(omplementizer) domain, in NegP, or even in triggers of expletive negation (cf. below). For the set of examples given in (17) to (20) we postulate that the nonnegative reading is compositionally driven after an operation of checking between a PI semantically characterized with an inherent [+σ] feature that encodes enrichment and an Opσ, under local conditions that can be formally represented as in (21). In (21) Opσ c-commands the linguistic item specified [+σ], where Op is negative ((17a), (18a), (19a), (20a)), interrogative ((17b), (20b)), or conditional ((18b), (19b)), and the operator freezes the enrichment constraints encoded by [+σ]. (21)

Opσ. . .PI[+σ]

In this chapter we put forward the hypothesis that the [+σ] feature is also inherent in the French negative marker ne, which has been claimed to be a scope marker when it occurs as part of a negative dependency (Godard 2004).13 We entertain the idea that French ne indicates that the SNM pas has sentential scope, which means that ne itself is not a SNM but a mere marker of the limits of the scope of sentential negation. Since the real SNM pas acts as the negative operator in Standard French, a sentence such as (22a) is assigned the structure in (22b), which represents the freezing operation of a [+σ] feature by means of a σ operator attached to pas. In the possible situation in which pas is not explicit, a covert abstract σ operator must be attached to an expletive negation trigger, as in (23).14 Both (22b) and (23b) contain the ingredients to license the negative marker ne.

13 Ne is argued to be a PI in Zeijlstra (2009). 14 For references on the topic of expletive negation, cf. Jespersen (1917); Vendryès (1950); Bosque (1980); Martin (1984); Muller (1991); Espinal (1991; 1992; 2007); Horn (2010), among others.

Meaning of words and meaning of sentences

(22)

(23)

Fr.

Fr.

a.

Jean ne mange Jean NEG eats ‘Jean doesn’t eat.’

b.

[TP Jeani [NegP pasσ [Neg◦ ne[+σ]] [vP ti mange]]]

a.

Je crains qu’ il ne I fear that he NEG ‘I’m afraid he will come.’

b.

[TP je [vP crainsσ [CP que [TP ili [NegP ne[+σ] [vP ti vienne]]]]]]

201

pas. not

vienne. comeS B J V

We also postulate that Romanian, being a Strict NC language, also requires that nu is not a SNM, but a mere marker of the limits of the scope of sentential negation. In accordance with this hypothesis, our analysis for a sentence such as (24a) points at the presence of a covert abstract negative operator that takes sentential scope, to which the σ operator that binds the PI nu is adjoined. The relevant structure for this sentence is given in (24b). (24)

Rom.

a.

Elena nu sună. Elena NEG calls ‘Elena doesn’t call.’

b.

[TP Elenai [NegP Op¬σ [Neg◦ nu[+σ]] [vP ti sună]]]

So far it has been shown that PIs and negative heads like French ne and Romanian nu can be polar and, thus, bear a [+σ] feature. We would now like to extend this hypothesis to so-called expletive negation markers. In particular, we would like to postulate the [+σ] feature as part of the semantic make-up of expletive no ‘not’ in those languages that allow the presence of an overt negative marker that does not modify the truth value of the proposition in which it appears.15 In cases of expletive negation, as shown in (25) and (26) for Catalan and Spanish, respectively, no does not logically negate the proposition, but induces one to consider domains of states of affairs broader than what one would otherwise have considered within the scope of negation (Espinal 2007). Expletive negation is associated with linguistic expressions that constrain the nonveridicality of the context: nonaffirmative verbs (doubt),

15 Expletive, pleonastic or paratactic negation is more residual in some languages than in others. This is the case of Spanish in comparison to Catalan.

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adversative predicates (be surprised), negative prepositions (without), temporal propositions (before), comparatives and superlatives etc. (Horn 2013). The consideration of a broader domain leads to a stronger and more informative proposition. (25) Cat. Gasta més ell en tres mesos que (no (pas)) tu en spends more he in three months than not you in tot l’any. all the.year ‘He spends more money in three months than you in a year.’ (Espinal 1991, 42) (26)

Sp.

Preferiría prefer+COND.1SG

salir go-out

con with

vosotros you

que than

(no) not

estarme be.me

en casa todo el fin de semana. at home whole the weekend ‘I would rather go out with you than stay at home the whole weekend.’ (Espinal 1997, 76) In these examples, similarly to what we have just proposed for the French example in (23a), the expletive no behaves like a PI dependent on the comparative degree adverb més ‘more, better’ or the comparative verb preferir ‘to prefer,’ to which an abstract σ operator is adjoined. It should be noted that expletive no cannot be sensitive to an interrogative or conditional operator because of its strong negative PI status (Zwarts 1981; Hoeksema 2012). In contrast to PIs in general, n-words behave most characteristically like Negative PIs (i.e. they are licensed in the context of a c-commanding negative operator, and are therefore dependent on an antiveridical operator; (6a), (8a)). However, they are also allowed as isolated fragment answers and in preverbal position. Thus, the Romance n-words that we introduced in section 2.1 do not seem to behave like PIs in all contexts. Furthermore, “the fact that n-words may occur as fragment answers with a negative reading makes them look like genuine negative quantifiers, but this is not compatible with the fact that they do not yield a double negation reading when they are used in combination with the sentential negation marker or another n-word” (Labelle/Espinal 2014, 199). N-words have a double-sided behaviour: They are PIs on some occasions, but are interpreted negatively in isolation and in preverbal position. In the model outlined here, this means that these lexical items (roots) bear an inherent semantic feature ([+σ]) that needs to be licensed at the level of abstract meaning representation (e.g. LF), which makes them PIs. However, during the course of the derivation these lexical items can also acquire a negative syntactic feature that will need to be checked in the syntax for a NC reading to be legitimated. The negative feature that

Meaning of words and meaning of sentences

203

n-words have been claimed to be associated with in negative contexts is defined as uninterpretable (henceforth [uNeg]) (Zeijlstra 2004; Biberauer/Zeijlstra 2012), as n-words are assumed to be semantically nonnegative, but syntactically active to participate in NC structures. We assume that n-words start as roots defined [+σ], and that in the course of the derivation these roots can merge with a [uNeg] feature to build a complex item, as in (27).16 Such an operation is optional and arguably takes place to ensure that a NC relationship with an [iNeg] constituent can be established. (27)

Being uninterpretable, a [uNeg] formal feature needs to be checked by an interpretable matching feature, [iNeg]. The relation between these two is one of Agree, namely Reverse / Inverse Agree, as defined in (28), the main characteristic of which is that “the goal may have an uninterpretable feature checked against a higher probe” (Zeijlstra 2012, 491).17 (28)

[Reverse / Inverse] Agree (Zeijlstra 2012, 514) α can Agree with β iff: a. α carries at least one uninterpretable feature and β carries a matching interpretable feature b.

β c-commands α

c.

β is the closest goal to α

16 We thus assume that the [uNeg] feature is not inherent to lexical items in all languages (as it is in Zeijlstra 2004; Labelle/Espinal 2014), but is part of syntax in some of them. Since pure PIs cannot stand on their own as negative fragment answers, we assume that the merge operation represented in (27) is not a possibility with these kinds of elements (e.g. Catalan gaire, Spanish persona alguna), which are considered to be weak PIs. In addition, (27) does not take place in French and Romanian, where n-words are inherently endowed with a [uNeg] feature and no [+σ]. This explains why n-words cannot occur in nonnegative contexts in these languages. 17 The classic definition of Agree (Chomsky 2000; 2001) is the one in (i). Notice that the crucial difference is the c-command relation between α and β (i.e. the probe and the goal). (i) Agree (Zeijlstra 2012, 493; after Chomsky 2000; 2001) α can agree with β iff: α carries at least one unvalued and uninterpretable feature and β carries a matching interpretable and valued feature α c-commands β β is the closest goal to α β bears an unvalued uninterpretable feature

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3 The contribution of n-words in NC contexts Let us see how the definition in (28) allows us to explain the NC data we presented in the previous section. In Non-Strict NC languages like Spanish, the SNM no is assumed to carry an interpretable negative feature, [iNeg], and can, hence, check the [uNeg] feature of n-words by c-commanding them. The relevant configuration for an example like No ha visto nada (lit. ‘not has seen anything’ (8a)) is given in (29a). In turn, No ha visto nada en ningún cajón (lit. ‘not has seen anything in any drawer’), represented in (29b), illustrates that it is possible for more than one n-word to establish an Agree relationship with a licenser equipped with an [iNeg] feature. Syntactically, this is a case of multiple Agree (Hiraiwa 2011; Zeijlstra 2004), where one probe (the negative operator) agrees with more than one goal (the two n-words). Semantically, multiple Agree results in the combination of several expressions of negation into just one, hence facilitating the NC reading of the SNM and the postverbal n-words. (29)

Sp.

a.

[NegP [Neg◦ noσ] [vP ha visto nada[+σ]] [iNeg]

b.

[uNeg]

[NegP [Neg◦ noσ] [vP ha visto nada[+σ] en ningún[+σ] cajón]] [iNeg]

[uNeg]

[uNeg]

The overt SNM is not the only lexical item that can bear an [iNeg] feature, though. Recall that, as illustrated in (9) above, preverbal n-words in Non-Strict NC languages are predicted not to be able to co-occur with the SNM (Nadie (*no) ha visto nada, lit. nobody not has seen anything). How is the [uNeg] feature of the n-word in preverbal position checked? And, more importantly, how is the negative reading of this sentence compositionally driven, then? In other words, what is the licenser of the preverbal n-word? According to Zeijlstra (2004), the presence of uninterpretable negative features triggers the presence of a Last Resort abstract negative operator, Op¬[iNeg], which performs the checking operation, and ultimately guarantees a compositional interpretation. This is shown in (30), the structure corresponding to sentence (8b), which shows that both preverbal and postverbal n-words are underspecified for a negative feature, and therefore for their participation in a NC relationship. (30)

Sp.

[NegP Op¬σ nadie[+σ]i [vP ti ha visto nada[+σ]]] [iNeg]

[uNeg]

[uNeg]

As already mentioned, Spanish –like Italian and European Portuguese– is a NonStrict NC language, and therefore, the structure in (30) –for a sentence with preverbal and postverbal n-words– does not contain an overt SNM.

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205

The structures in (29a, b) and (30) should be contrasted with the ones postulated for French, where ne cannot merge with a [uNeg] feature.18 In (31a) –the syntactic structure for the French sentence Jean n’a rien vu in (12b above)– ne is licensed by the semantic σ operator adjoined to a covert Op¬ triggered by the n-word rien, and rien is checked by the syntactic feature [iNeg] that defines Op¬. On the other hand, in (31b) above –the syntactic structure for the French sentence Jean n’a pas rien vu in (13b) above– combining the SNM pas with the French n-word rien yields DN. Within the framework we are developing, we follow Zeijlstra (2009) in assuming that pas is a logical negative operator Op¬ that cannot bear the syntactic feature [iNeg]. Hence, it crucially contributes to the semantics of the sentence by introducing an instance of logical negation, but cannot participate in an Agree relationship with lexical items characterized with the feature [uNeg] (cf. footnote 16). The prediction is that pas does not participate in NC structures.19 The presence of the [uNeg] feature in the n-word triggers the insertion of a Last Resort Op¬[iNeg] that guarantees a successful checking of the uninterpretable feature, but also has an important consequence with regard to how the meaning of the sentence is composed: Pas, which is logically negative (i.e. Op¬), and the rescue operator (i.e. Op¬[iNeg]) cancel each other out, hence yielding a DN reading. (31)

Fr.

a.

[TP Jean [NegP Op¬σ [Neg◦ ne[+σ]] [vP a rien vu]]] [iNeg]

b.

[uNeg]

[TP Jean [NegP Op¬ [NegP pasσ [Neg◦ ne[+σ]] [vP a rien vu]]]] [iNeg]

[uNeg]

In Strict NC languages like Romanian, the presence of an n-word with a [uNeg] feature also triggers the insertion of a Last Resort Op¬[iNeg] that Agrees with the (various) [uNeg] feature(s) present in the sentence. We suggested in (24b) that the negative marker nu fulfils a similar function to French ne, namely signalling that it is a scope marker of sentential negation. Unlike French ne, however, nu can merge with a syntactic [uNeg] feature, which makes it possible for an Agree checking relationship to be established. This surfaces as Strict NC, as shown in (32a), which corresponds to (10) above, but it may also be postulated for postverbal n-words, as represented in (32b), corresponding to the sentence Nu sună nimeni (lit. not calls anybody, ‘Nobody calls’). 18 An argument in support of this claim is offered by *Jean ne mange. This sequence is ungrammatical because ne, which is specified as [+σ] but not as [uNeg], cannot trigger the insertion of a licensing Op¬[iNeg]. Only n-words, specified as [uNeg], can trigger the Last Resort operator. In short, it seems that in French the features [+σ] and [uNeg] do not merge in syntax. 19 As one of the reviewers pointed out, the situation is different in Québécois French, where pas can co-occur with n-words yielding a NC reading (Déprez 1997). In our analysis for this dialect of French pas is specified as [uNeg] and hence it is licensed by means of a Last Resort Op¬[iNeg].

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Rom.

a.

[NegP Op¬σ nimenii [Neg◦ nu[+σ]] [vP ti sună]] [iNeg]

b.

[uNeg]

[uNeg]

[NegP Op¬σ [Neg◦ nu[+σ]] [vP sună nimeni]] [iNeg]

[uNeg]

[uNeg]

Finally, let us consider the contribution of n-words and no in NC contexts in Catalan, a language that is described as allowing an optional no after preverbal n-words. Catalan differs from Romanian in not having a Strict NC variety: There are no speakers for whom after a preverbal n-word no is obligatory, but still the combination n-word followed by no is a possibility. We explain the data in (6a) and (11) above in the following way: (33)

Cat.

a.

[NegP [Neg◦ noσ] [vP he vist res[+σ]]] [iNeg]

b.

[uNeg]

[NegP Op¬σ ningú[+σ]i [Neg◦ no[+σ]] [vP ti ha vist res[+σ]]] [iNeg] [uNeg]

[uNeg]

[uNeg]

Whereas in (33a) the obligatory SNM is specified with an inherent [iNeg] syntactic feature, which allows checking of the [uNeg] feature on res, in (33b) the optional no is merely a PI, an expletive form similar to the one exemplified in the comparative contexts illustrated in (25) and (26). In (33b) the items that participate in a NC relation, ningú, no, and res, all acquire [uNeg] during the course of the derivation, a feature that matches with a c-commanding [iNeg] formal feature that characterizes a covert Op¬.20 An overall picture of what has been discussed in this chapter regarding the contribution of PIs, n-words, and the negative marker to the meaning of sentences in Spanish, Catalan, French, and Romanian is summarized in the following table. To summarize, we suggest that [iNeg] and [+σ] are formal features that are inherent to some lexical items. While [iNeg] is syntactic and defines a word as inherently negative, [+σ] is a semantic feature associated with PIs and expletive negation. Unlike what has been proposed in the literature, we take the feature [uNeg] to be an inherent formal feature in French and Romanian, but a feature to which a root can merge in syntax to build an n-word in Spanish and Catalan. [uNeg] can be merged to lexical items carrying a [+σ] feature, resulting in the requirement that an Agree syntactic relationship is compulsory. In the case of n-words, the [+σ] feature

20 We would like to hypothesize that the optionality of Catalan no in (33b) vs. the obligatoriness of Romanian nu in (32a) has nothing to do with expletiveness, since they are both characterized as [+σ], but with the fact that in Catalan, but not in Romanian, expletive no has a homophonous negative no. Cf. the table below.

Meaning of words and meaning of sentences

Spanish

Catalan

French

Romanian

Polarity items

N-words

Negative marker

[+σ] (e.g. persona alguna)

[+σ], [uNeg] (e.g. nadie, nada)

Two homophones: 1. no[iNeg] (used in single negation and Non-Strict NC structures) 2. no[+σ] (expletive negation). Residual

[+σ] (e.g. gaire)

[+σ] (e.g. qui/quoi que ce soit)

[+σ] (e.g. cine știe ce)

[+σ], [uNeg] (e.g. ningú, res)

Two homophones: 1. no[iNeg] (used in single negation and Non-Strict NC) 2. no[+σ] (used in expletive negation)

[uNeg] (e.g. personne, rien)

1. pas. Semantic negation, Op¬ (used in single negation) 2. ne[+σ] (used in expletive negation and as a scope marker of sentential negation)

[uNeg] (e.g. nimeni, nimic)

nu[+σ]

207

Can [uNeg] associate with a negative marker with [+σ]?

No.

Yes. It results in no[+σ],[uNeg] (used in what look like Strict NC structures).

No.

Yes. It results in nu[+σ],[uNeg] (used in single negation and Strict NC structures).

accounts for the possibility for them to occur in nonnegative contexts, while the combination of [+σ] and [uNeg] accounts for their ability to participate in NC structures. [+σ] requires an operator σ that freezes the PI, and [uNeg] requires a checking [iNeg] feature that guarantees a NC interpretation. In both cases the relation is one of c-command.

4 Conclusions We started this chapter asking what the meaning of words is and how they contribute to the meaning of sentences, and we introduced the hypothesis that the contribution of words to the meaning of sentences is not conceptual, but underspecified. An underspecified meaning can be attributed both to an inherent semantic

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feature and to a syntactic feature with which a lexical item might merge during a derivation. The Principle of Compositionality is guaranteed by checking both semantic features and uninterpretable syntactic features. This is how underspecification can be understood and formalized within a minimal approach to the compositionality of meaning. PIs are defined as being [+σ]. A prediction that is borne out from this characterization is that PIs are predicted not to occur in preverbal position in declarative clauses, because there is no operator to which the σ operator can attach. We have considered two classes of n-words: those that can only appear in negative contexts (e.g. the situation in French and Romanian), which are endowed with a [uNeg] feature, and those that may appear in nonnegative as well as in negative contexts (e.g. the situation in Catalan and Spanish), which are items inherently defined with a [+σ] feature that can merge with a [uNeg] feature in the course of the derivation. We predict that languages that have n-words of the former group have an independent set of lexical items that encode a [+σ] feature. This prediction is also borne out when we consider French and Romanian. With regard to negative markers the situation we have described is the following. In the case of French pas is a SNM that encodes logical negation (i.e. Op¬); this characterization predicts that this item cannot participate in NC structures because for this to be possible a syntactic correspondence between items characterized [uNeg] and an item characterized [iNeg] is required. By contrast, French ne is a scope marker defined [+σ]; this characterization predicts that it can be used in nonnegative (e.g. expletive) contexts. However, it cannot merge with a [uNeg] feature and trigger the insertion of a Last Resort Op¬[iNeg] that negates the clause. Rather, ne is licensed by expletive negation triggers or, in negative contexts, by pas. Otherwise, the Op¬[iNeg] is triggered by an n-word specified as [uNeg]. Unlike French ne, Romanian nu is specified as [+σ] and can merge with a [uNeg] feature to guarantee a single negation or NC reading. Spanish has two homophonous lexical items: (i) no1, defined [iNeg], which is a SNM that is required to bind postverbal n-words, as expected in a Non-Strict NC language, and (ii) no2, defined [+σ], which is residual in expletive negation contexts. Catalan also has two homophonous lexical items: (i) no1, defined [iNeg], which is a SNM that is required to bind postverbal n-words, as expected in a Non-Strict NC language, and (ii) no2, defined [+σ]. The difference between Spanish and Catalan is that in Catalan the possibility of expletive negation is much more productive than in Spanish. Moreover, no2 can merge with [uNeg] in what look like Strict NC contexts, similar to Romanian, although in Catalan but not in Romanian no2 is optional. This different use of no2 in the two languages predicts that those Catalan speakers with a scarce use of expletive negation are those that generally prefer Non-Strict NC structures, whereas those Catalan speakers with a broad use of expletive negation are those that generally prefer what look like Strict NC structures. We leave it for future research to investigate more extensively whether it is the case that those languages

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209

that show a higher use of expletive negation readings correlate with those languages that allow negative readings in what look like Strict NC contexts, and whether the fact that Catalan no2 is optional, but Romanian nu is not, in spite of both being characterized as [+σ], is due to the coexistence of a SNM no1 only in the former language.

5 References Acquaviva, Paolo (1996), “The logical form of negative concord”, University of Venice Working Papers in Linguistics 6, 1–29. Acquaviva, Paolo (1997), The logical form of negation. A study of operator-variable Structures in Syntax, New York, Garland. Biberauer, Theresa/Zeijlstra, Hedde (2012), “Negative concord in Afrikaans. Filling a typological gap”, Journal of Semantics 29, 345–371. Bosque, Ignacio (1980), Sobre la negación, Madrid, Ediciones Cátedra. Carston, Robyn (2012), “Word meaning and concept expressed”, The Linguistic Review 29, 607–623. Chierchia, Gennaro (2006), “Broaden your views. Implicatures of domain widening and the ‘logicality’ of language”, Linguistic Inquiry 37, 535–590. Chomsky, Noam (1981), Lectures on Government and Binding, Dordrecht, Foris. Chomsky, Noam (2000), “Minimalist inquiries. The framework”, in: Roger Martin/David Michaels/ Juan Uriagereka (edd.), Step by step. Essays on Minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 89–155. Chomsky, Noam (2001), “Derivation by phase”, in: Michael Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale. A life in language, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1–52. Corblin, Francis/Déprez, Viviane/de Swart, Henriëtte/Tovena, Lucia (2004), “Negative concord”, in: Francis Corblin/Henriëtte de Swart (edd.), Handbook of French semantics, Stanford, CSLI, 417– 452. Corblin, Francis/Tovena, Lucia (2003), “L’expression de la négation dans les langues romanes”, in: Danièle Godard (ed.), Les langues romanes. Problèmes de la phrase simple, Paris, CNRS, 281– 343. Cruse, David (1986), Lexical semantics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Davidson, Donald (1967), “Truth and meaning”, Synthese 17, 304–323. Déprez, Viviane (1997), “Two types of negative concord”, Probus 9, 103–143. Déprez, Viviane (2011), “Atoms of negation. An outside-in micro-parametric approach to negative concord”, in: Pierre Larrivée/Richard P. Ingham (edd.), The evolution of negation. Beyond the Jespersen Cycle, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 221–272. Déprez, Viviane/Cheylus, Anne/Larrivée, Pierre (2013), “When and how is NC preferred. An experimental approach”, Paper presented at the 19 e Congrès International des Linguistes, Genève. Déprez, Viviane/Tubau, Susagna/Cheylus, Anne/Espinal, M. Teresa (2015), “Double negation in a negative concord language. An experimental investigation”, Lingua 163, 75–107. Espinal, M. Teresa (1991), “On expletive negation. Some remarks with regard to Catalan”, Linguisticae Investigationes 15, 41–65. Espinal, M. Teresa (1992), “Expletive negation and logical absorption”, The Linguistic Review 9, 338–358. Espinal, M. Teresa (1996), “On the semantic content of lexical items within linguistic theory”, Linguistics 34, 109–131. Espinal, M. Teresa (1997), “Non-negative negation and wh-exclamatives”, in: Danielle Forget/Paul Hirschbühler/France Martineau/María Luisa Rivero (edd.), Negation and polarity, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 75–93.

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Espinal, M. Teresa (2002), “La negació”, in: Joan Solà/Maria Rosa Lloret/Joan Mascaró/Manuel Pérez-Saldanya (edd.), Gramàtica del Català Contemporani, vol. 3, Barcelona, Empúries, 2727– 2797. Espinal, M. Teresa (2007), “Licensing expletive negation and negative concord in Catalan and Spanish”, in: Franck Floricic (ed.), La négation dans les langues romanes, Linguistica e Investigationes Supplementa 26, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 49–74. Espinal, M. Teresa/Prieto, Pilar (2011), “Intonational encoding of double negation in Catalan”, Journal of Pragmatics 43, 2392–2410. Espinal, M. Teresa/Tubau, Susagna/Borràs-Comes, Joan/Prieto, Pilar (2015), “Double negation in Catalan and Spanish. Interaction between syntax and prosody”, in: Pierre Larrivée/Chungmin Lee (edd.), Negation and polarity. Cognitive and experimental perspectives, Berlin, Springer, 145–176. Farkas, Donka (1990), “Two cases of underspecification in morphology”, Linguistic Inquiry 21, 539– 550. Floricic, Franck (2005), “La négation dans les langues romanes”, Lalies 25, 163–194, Actes des Sessions de Littérature et Linguistique (Aussois, 23–28 août 2004), Paris, Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure. Fodor, Jerry A. (1983), Modularity of mind. An essay on faculty psychology, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Frege, Gottlob (1892), “Über Sinn und Bedeutung”, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100, 25–50. Geeraerts, Dirk (2010), Theories of lexical semantics, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Giannakidou, Anastasia (1998), Polarity sensitivity as (non)veridical dependency, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Giannakidou, Anastasia (2000), “Negative. . .concord?”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18, 457–523. Giannakidou, Anastasia (2006), “N-words and negative concord”, in: Martin Everaert/Henk van Riemsdijk (edd.), The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, vol. 3, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 327–391. Godard, Danièle (2004), “French negative dependency”, in: Francis Corblin/Henriëtte de Swart (edd.), Handbook of French Semantics, Stanford, CSLI, 351–390. Hacquard, Valentine (2006), Aspects and modality, PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Higginbotham, James (1985), “On semantics”, Linguistic Inquiry 16, 547–594. Hiraiwa, Ken (2011), “Multiple Agree and the defective intervention constraint in Japanese”, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 40, 67–80. Hoeksema, Jack (2012), “On the natural history of negative polarity items”, Linguistic Analysis 38, 3–33. Horn, Laurence R. (1989), A natural history of negation, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Horn, Laurence R. (2010), “Multiple negation in English and other languages”, in: Laurence R. Horn (ed.), The expression of negation, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 111–148. Horn, Laurence R. (2013), “Revisiting the licensing question. Some negative (and positive) results”, Paper held at the 19e Congrès International des Linguistes, Genève. Hornstein, Norbert (1995), Logical Form. From GB to Minimalism, Oxford, Blackwell. Jackendoff, Ray S. (1972), Semantic interpretation in Generative Grammar, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Jakobson, Roman (1984a), “The structure of Russian case forms”, in: Linda Waugh/Morris Halle (edd.), Russian and Slavic grammar. Studies 1931–1981, Berlin/New York, de Gruyter, 105–133. Jakobson, Roman (1984b), “The structure of the Russian verb”, in: Linda Waugh/Morris Halle (edd.), Russian and Slavic grammar. Studies 1931–1981, Berlin/New York, de Gruyter, 1–14. Jespersen, Otto (1917), Negation in English and other languages, Copenhagen, Høst.

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Kadmon, Nirit/Landman, Fred (1993), “Any”, Linguistics and Philosophy 16, 353–422. Kratzer, Angelika (1981), “The notional category of modality”, in: Hans-Jürgen Eikmeyer/Hannes Rieser (edd.), Words, worlds, and contexts, Berlin/New York, de Gruyter, 38-74. Kratzer, Angelika (2012), Modals and conditionals, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Kratzer, Angelika (2013), “Modality for the 21st century”, in: Stephen R. Anderson/Jacques Moeschler/ Fabienne Reboul (edd.), L’interface language-cognition. The language-cognition interface, Genève/Paris, Droz, 179–199. Krifka, Manfred (1994), “The semantics and pragmatics of weak and strong polarity items in assertions”, in: Mandy Harvey/Lynn Santelmann (edd.), Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory IV, Ithaca, Cornell University, 195–219. Labelle, Marie/Espinal, M. Teresa (2014), “Diachronic changes in negative expressions. The case of French”, Lingua 145, 194–225. Labov, William (1972), “Negative attraction and negative concord in English grammar”, Language 48, 773–818. Ladusaw, William (1980), Polarity sensitivity as inherent scope relations, New York, Garland. Lahiri, Utpal (1998), “Focus and negative polarity in Hindi”, Natural Language Semantics 6, 57–123. Laka, Itziar (1990), Negation in syntax. On the nature of functional categories and projections, PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Levin, Beth/Pinker, Stephen (edd.) (1991), Lexical and conceptual semantics, Cambridge, MA, Blackwell. Lumsden, John S. (1992), “Underspecification in grammar and natural gender”, Linguistic Inquiry 23, 469–486. Martin, Robert (1984), “Pour une approche sémantico-logique du ne dit ‘explétif’”, Revue de Linguistique Romane 48, 99–120. Martins, Ana Maria (1998), “On the need of underspecified features in syntax. Polarity as a case study”, GLOW Newsletter 40, 46–47. Matos, Gabriela (1999), “Negative concord and the scope of negation”, Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics 7, 175–190. May, Robert (1985), Logical Form. Its structure and derivation, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Montague, Richard (1974), Formal philosophy. Selected papers of Richard Montague, ed. Richmond H. Thomason, New Haven, Yale University Press. Muller, Claude (1991), La négation en français. Syntaxe, sémantique et éléments de comparaison avec les autres langues romanes, Genève, Droz. Pelletier, Francis Jeffrey (2011), “Compositionality”, Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics, doi: 10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0044 (Annotated Bibliography on “Compositionality”, Oxford Bibliographies Online). Prieto, Pilar/Borràs-Comes, Joan/Tubau, Susagna/Espinal, M. Teresa (2013), “Prosody and gesture constrain the interpretation of double negation”, Lingua 131, 136–150. Quer, Josep (1998), Mood at the interface, PhD dissertation, Universiteit Utrecht. Reinhart, Tanya (1983), Anaphora and semantic interpretation, London, Croom Helm. Rigau, Gemma (1984), “De com si no és conjunció i d’altres elements interrogatius”, in: Estudis Gramaticals. Working Papers in Linguistics, Bellaterra, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 249–278. Rooryck, Johan (1994), “On two types of underspecification. Towards a feature theory shared by syntax and phonology”, Probus 6, 207–233. Sánchez, Cristina (1999), “La negación”, in: Ignacio Bosque/Violeta Demonte (edd.), Nueva Gramática Descriptiva de la Lengua Española, vol. 2, Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 2561–2634. Solà, Joan (1973), “La negació”, in: Estudis de sintaxi catalana, vol. 2, Barcelona, Edicions 62, 87– 118.

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Sperber, Dan/Wilson, Deirdre (1986/1995), Relevance. Communication and cognition, Oxford, Blackwell. de Swart, Henriëtte (2010), Expression and interpretation of negation. An OT typology, Dordrecht, Springer. de Swart, Henriëtte/Sag, Ivan (2002), “Negation and negative concord in Romance”, Linguistics and Philosophy 25, 373–417. Tarski, Alfred (1944), “The semantic conception of truth and the foundations of semantics”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4, 341–375. Teixeira de Sousa, Lílian (2012), Sintaxe e interpretação de negativas sentenciais no Português Brasileiro, PhD dissertation, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas. Tovena, Lucia/Déprez, Viviane/Jayez, Jacques (2004), “Polarity sensitive items”, in: Francis Corblin/ Henriëtte de Swart (edd.), Handbook of French Semantics, Stanford, CSLI, 391–416. Tubau, Susagna (2008), Negative concord in English and Romance: syntax-morphology interface conditions on the expression of negation, PhD dissertation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and University of Amsterdam. Tubau, Susagna/Espinal, M. Teresa (2012), “Doble negació dins l’oració simple en català”, Estudis Romànics 34, 145–164. Vendryès, Joseph (1950), “Sur la négation abusive”, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 46, 1–18. Werning, Markus/Hinzen, Wolfram/Machery, Édouard (edd.) (2012), The Oxford handbook of compositionality, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Wilson, Deirdre/Sperber, Dan (1993), “Linguistic form and relevance”, Lingua 90, 1–25. van der Wouden, Ton (1994), Negative contexts, PhD dissertation, University of Groningen. Zanuttini, Raffaella (1997), Negation and clausal structure. A comparative study of Romance languages, New York, Oxford University Press. Zeijlstra, Hedde (2004), Sentential negation and negative concord, PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam. Zeijlstra, Hedde (2009), On French negation, Ms. University of Amsterdam, http://ling.auf.net/ lingbuzz/000885 (23.07.2015). Zeijlstra, Hedde (2012), “There is only one way to agree”, The Linguistic Review 29, 491–539. Zwarts, Frans (1981), “Negatief polaire uitdrukkingen I”, GLOT 4, 35–133. Zwarts, Frans (1995), “Nonveridical contexts”, Linguistic Analysis 25, 286–312.

Eva-Maria Remberger

7 Morphology and semantics: Aspect and modality Abstract: This chapter investigates the morphosyntactic and interpretive interactions between modality, mood, aspect and tense in Romance. I present an overview on common definitions of aspect, tense, mood and modality, applying these notions to the tense-aspect system and the exponents of mood and modality in Romance. To illustrate the interaction of grammatical levels (lexicon – morphosyntax – semantics – discourse) at the interfaces, a series of case studies from Romance are discussed: First, aspectual interactions regarding the stage-level/individual-level distinction; second, mood and modal meaning at the interface; and, third, the interactions of tense, aspect, and modality, and the shifted interpretations they produce. Keywords: aspect, mood, modality, tense, deixis, stage-level, individual-level, time relations, sequence of tense, interpretative shift

1 Introduction The main focus of this chapter is the interaction between structure and meaning in the field of two primarily semantic notions, aspect and modality. Aspect is a grammatical category related to temporal contour. It cannot be studied, at least not as a phenomenon relevant to interfaces, without taking into consideration the grammatical category of tense and its interpretive correlates. This is true to an even greater extent for Romance, where aspect scarcely exists as a stand-alone morphological category of verbs. Modality is a grammatical category through which a speaker can refer to possible worlds. It may have an exponent in Romance verbal morphology, namely mood, but it can also be encoded by other linguistic means. This chapter investigates the morphosyntactic and interpretive interactions between modality, mood, aspect, and tense in Romance.1 In section 2, I present an overview of common definitions of aspect (cf. section 2.1), tense (cf. section 2.2), and mood and modality (cf. section 2.3), applying these notions to the tense-aspect

1 Several recent publications have dealt with the subject at issue here (cf. Hogeweg/de Hoop/ Malchukov 2009) as have papers in edited volumes, e.g. Filip (2011), Hacquard (2011), Maienborn (2011), Smith (2012), Binnick (2012), Hamm/Bott (2014), and particularly Depraetere (2012), and Zagona (2012a; 2012b). Zagona (2012a; 2012b) are both based on a generative framework and Zagona (2012a) in particular can be read as a complement to the present article.

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system and the exponents of mood and modality in Romance. Section 3 presents some case studies of interface phenomena between aspect, tense, and mood and modality which provide a good illustration of the interplay of morphosyntactic means, semantic encoding, and pragmatic interpretation.

2 Definitions 2.1 Aspect2 In Comrie (1976, 3, 5), aspect is described as “different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation”.3 Aspect is a “temporal sub-system” as is tense, i.e. tense and aspect are “complementary domains” (cf. Smith 2012, 2581, 2605): While tense locates events in time with respect to the speech event, aspect defines their temporal quality. Aspect describes the internal temporal contour of the event situation expressed by the predication of a clause at the time that the speaker takes as the point of reference (cf. also the notion of viewpoint aspect in Smith 1997). Thus, in some models of the linguistic expression of time, aspect has been described as a second temporal relation (e.g. Giorgi/Pianesi 1997; Demirdache/Uribe-Etxebarria 2000, based on Reichenbach 1947 and Vikner 1985). Essential for the description of aspectual meaning is the notion of an event argument, as introduced by Davidson (1967).4 Events are referential objects in the world and have spatiotemporal properties (Partee 1973).5 A relevant distinction in the theory of aspect is that between lexical aspect (or Aktionsart) and grammatical aspect, expressed by verbal morphology (as in the well-known aspectual system of the Slavonic languages) or by verbal periphrases (more common in Romance):

2 A useful overview of different theories of aspect is given in the lecture notes by Bhatt/Pancheva (2005). 3 This definition is based on Holt (1943). 4 Davidson’s (1967) ‘event argument’ has also been expressed as ‘situation’ (Comrie 1985) or ‘eventuality’ (Bach 1986). Both terms are used in order to avoid the notion of ‘event’, which did not initially include states (Davidson 1967 only considered activities). The notion of eventuality or situation is instead intended to include (temporal) states. For the concept of event in its Neo-Davidsonian interpretation, cf. Maienborn (2011) for discussion; for event structure cf. also Rothstein (2004). 5 Other approaches interpret the encoding of time by using operators that apply to interpretation indices (starting from Prior 1967; Dowty 1979; Montague 1973; also Enç 1987; Guéron/Hoekstra 1995; Lohnstein 22011). For several reasons, the referential approach to tense and temporal interpretation has proven to be more appropriate, in particular in the generative framework (for some of these reasons, cf. the overview in Zagona 2012a, 748–753).

Morphology and semantics: Aspect and modality

(1)

215

Lexical and grammatical aspect a. Lexical aspect6 refers to the internal temporal contour of the event as provided by the lexical properties and the argument structure inherent to the predicate. b.

Grammatical aspect7 externally modifies or extends the temporal properties of the event in the situation the speaker refers to (usually) by grammatical means.

With reference to lexical aspect, Vendler (1967) distinguishes four classes of verbs, characterized by combinations of the aspectual features [±dynamic], [±telic], and [±durative]:8 (2)

a.

states [-dynamic, -telic, +durative], e.g. Fr. posséder ‘to own’, are not dynamic, have no end point and are characterized by duration. If the state P holds for an event situation, it also holds for every subinterval of this situation.

b.

activities [+dynamic, -telic, +durative], e.g. Fr. danser ‘to dance’, are dynamic (their subject is agentive), they last and do not have an inherent end point. If the activity P holds for an event, P is true also for every subinterval of this event.

c.

accomplishments [+dynamic, +telic, +durative], e.g. Fr. faire un gâteau ‘to bake a cake’, are dynamic (agentive) and telic, and before the end point is reached there is a phase of duration. Since the event of an accomplishment P is inhomogeneous, it cannot be subdivided into subintervals for each of which P holds.

d.

achievements [+dynamic, +telic, -durative], e.g. Fr. arriver ‘to arrive’, are dynamic and have a punctual end point which is not preceded by duration. Thus for an achievement P the subinterval property does not hold.

The classical tests to distinguish verb classes from each other proposed by Vendler (1967) and illustrated by Dowty (1979, 51–56) are as follows:9

6 Also called Aktionsart, situation aspect (Smith 1997; 2012), inner aspect, or aspectual class (Dowty 1979). 7 Also called viewpoint aspect (Smith 1997; 2012), or outer aspect. 8 Another feature would be [±homogeneous], which is dependent on the subdivisibility property and usually has the opposite value to [±telic]. Instead of [±durative] we also find its counterpart [±punctual]. 9 This is a selection; for details, cf. also Walková (2012), who gives a critical survey of Dowty’s (1979) tests.

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(3)

States do not allow progressive aspect: Sp. *Juana está poseyendo un coche azul. ‘*J. is owning a blue car.’

(4)

Activities allow durative adverbials: It. Gianni ballava per un ora. ‘G. danced for one hour.’

(5)

Accomplishments and achievements allow telic/completive adverbials: a. Fr. Pierre a fait un gâteau en une heure. ‘P. baked a cake in one hour.’ b.

(6)

Por.

A Maria chegou em duas horas. ‘M. arrived in two hours.’

Achievements allow punctual adverbials: Rom. Ana a ajuns chiar în acea clipă. ‘A. arrived exactly at that moment.’

That lexical aspect is tightly connected to argument structure is immediately clear from the illustration of accomplishments, which, at least in Romance, usually come with a complement (cf. the direct object un gâteau in (2c) and (5a)). However, it is not only the presence of a complement that is relevant to a verbʼs class distinction; its semantic properties are too. Some verbs, the so-called incremental theme predicates, can be interpreted as an activity (i.e. [+telic]) or an accomplishment (i.e. [-telic]), depending on the referential properties of the complement DP. If the DP is cumulative, we have an activity (7a); if it is quantized, the aspect class changes into an accomplishment (7b).10 The role of the reference type of nominals and quantification in the temporal constitution of events has been extensively studied in the work of Krifka (1989; 1992; 1998), where he has shown that there is a similarity between nominal and verbal expressions insofar as they can be subdivided into parts. Nominal expressions are cumulative when they can be divided into equal subparts (as is the case for mass nouns or bare plurals like des gâteaux, cf. 7a); otherwise they are quantized (like le gâteau d’anniversaire, cf. 7b, or also deux gâteaux ‘two cakes’). This is referred to as the quantizing property. Verbal expressions encode events which either can be subdivided into subintervals (the subinterval property, as described above in 2a, b for states and activities), or cannot be subdivided in this way (cf. 2c, d for accomplishments and achievements). Smith also includes a fifth verb class, different from achievements, namely semelfactives like Fr. cesser ‘to stop’, i.e. “single-stage atelic events” (Smith 1997, 220). Furthermore, nonargumental elements, e.g. adverbs or adverbials, can also influence 10 As for French, cf. in particular Smith (1997, ch. 9, 193–222).

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class membership as in (7c), where the adverbial de repente ‘suddenly’ changes the state verb saber ‘to know’ into an achievement (cf. Zagona 2012b, 356; Smith 1997). It. starnutire ‘to sneeze’, an achievement (or semelfactive), can be turned into an activity of sneezing by an adverbial encoding duration like per tre ore ‘for three hours’ (7d): (7)

a.

Fr.

faire des gâteaux

‘to bake cakes’

b.

Fr.

faire le gâteau d’anniversaire

‘to bake the birthday cake’

c.

Sp.

saber algo de repente

‘suddenly (=get to) know something’

d.

It.

Gianni ha starnutito per tre ore.

‘G. sneezed for three hours.’

The distinction between verb class attribution and grammatical aspect is characterized by different types of coercion, as (7d) shows, where the VP is interpreted as an iteration of events (a plurality of punctual events which can be described as a single activity-event).11 Coercion phenomena also depend on the vagueness of linguistic expressions (such as the aspectual neutrality of the present tense in French, Italian, and Romanian), and have sometimes been analyzed as type shifting phenomena.12 In any case, aspectual interpretation is compositional and involves the lexicon,13 the event and argument structure, the referential properties, as well as morphosyntactic marking (grammatical aspect). States must be further distinguished into two types (cf. Maienborn 2003 and the references therein), which roughly correspond to the distinction between stage-level and individual-level predicates (analyzed by Kratzer 1995 but with earlier origins in Milsark 1974 and Carlson 1977): (8)

Stage-level (SL) and individual-level (IL) predicates a. SL-predicates hold at a specific reference time and thus appear as temporally bound (e.g. Fr. se situer ‘to be situated’). b.

IL-predicates are inherent to the element to which they refer and are not temporally bound to a specific reference time, thus holding generically (e.g. Fr. posséder ‘to own’, savoir ‘to know’).

11 Cf. Maienborn (2011, 824); cf. also Bertinetto (1986) for a study of Italian in this respect. 12 That is, aspect shift or hidden coercion operators (Zucchi 1998; de Swart 2011). 13 At this point, approaches to lexical decomposition must be mentioned, cf. Jackendoff (1990), where a lexical entry like Fr. tuer/It. uccidere/Sp. matar is decomposed into semantic-aspectual subcomponents, which represent aspectual primitives: [Event ACT([Entity x], CAUSE [BECOME [NOT [ALIVE([Entity y])]]])]; cf. also Pustejovsky’s (1991; 1995) lexical event structure and Parsons’ (1990) approach, which includes the aspectually relevant links between thematic roles and their arguments.

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Kratzer (1995) assumes that IL-predicates have no event variable, whereas others follow the neo-Davidsonian approach that all predicates have event arguments.14 However, the distinction between SL and IL is not only lexical but also depends on the properties of the reference time for which the situation holds: If the reference time is specific (existentially quantified), the SL-reading obtains; if it is generic (generically quantified), the IL-reading arises (cf. section 3.1 for further discussion in a case study).15 Verb classes can then be further manipulated not only by the presence and by the properties of complements, but also by grammatical aspect (or aspect proper).16 Grammatical aspect interacts with tense, since both involve the reference time, i.e. the time the speaker refers to (cf. the discussion in section 2.2). Typical semantic interpretations of grammatical aspect in Romance concern perfectivity vs. imperfectivity, with the latter being able to encode further specifications such as the progressive (9a), continuative (9b), habitual etc. (cf. Comrie 1976); other aspectual notions are prospectivity or imminentiality (9c): (9)

a.

progressive, e.g. Sp. estoy comiendo ‘I’m eating’

b.

continuative, e.g. It. i prezzi andavano aumentando ‘the prices were increasing (continuously/step by step)’

c.

imminential, e.g. Fr. aller faire quelque chose, Sp. ir a hacer algo ‘to be going to do something’

Generative approaches to aspect sometimes reformulate the traditional aspectual values through a specification of time-relational notions (cf. Demirdache/UribeEtxebarria 2000; Giorgi/Pianesi 1997; Iatridou 2000; Zagona 2012a; 2012b). Others, like Smith (1997; 2012), strictly separate tense and aspect as two independent systems.

2.2 Tense Unlike aspect, tense is deictic, in the sense that in order to be interpreted it needs a direct reference to the language external world. In terms of semantic approaches to tense and its interpretation in the sense of time, two main proposals have been put 14 Cf. e.g. Chierchia (1995), who distinguishes location-dependent and location-independent events (cf. Maienborn 2011, 817). 15 The literature on this distinction is vast and growing; cf. e.g. the references in Maienborn (2003). For copula selection in Romance, which is dependent on this distinction, cf. also González-Vilbazo/ Remberger (2005; 2007), among many others. 16 When a state verb like Sp. saber appears in the indefinido, the synthetic past characterized by perfective grammatical aspect, a shift from state to (inchoative) achievement similar to (7c) occurs (cf. also Bhatt/Pancheva 2005, 27; de Swart 2011, 591).

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forward: In the tense operator approach, logic tense operators were introduced as part of the formal language describing the evaluation of the truth conditions of a proposition (Prior 1967; Montague 1973). However, times do not always show operator-like (scopal) behaviour: Times can be referred to and the occurrence of tenses in natural language is restricted to a finite inventory; furthermore, they are context-dependent, which would contradict their relevance at the level of truth conditions alone (Zagona 2012a, 749–751). For the purposes of this paper, only the time-relational approach will be examined, since it has proved more suitable for the modelling of the correlations of tense with aspect and modality. This approach analyzes times as argument-like, referential entities. Generative theory relies basically on the time-relational approach proposed by Reichenbach (1947): (10) Times a. E = event time, the time of the event or situation b. R = reference time, the time the speaker refers to, which can be made explicit by temporal adverbials c. S = speech time, the time of the utterance These times can be temporally ordered either in a relation of precedence (marked by the underscore) or in a relation of simultaneity (marked by the comma): (11)

Time relations (cf. Reichenbach 1947) S,E,R (present), E,R_S (imperfect), S_R,E (future), E_R,S (perfect),

E_R_S (pluperfect),

E_S_R, S,E_R, S_E_R (anterior future)

Vikner (1985) splits Reichenbach’s monolithic time relations into two separate relations, one between the event time and the reference time (E/R) and one between the reference time and the speech time (R/S), thus yielding two independent and only indirectly related time relations (which also gives a more reasonable representation of the various interpretations of an anterior future): (12) T1 / T2 a. [S,R]/[R,E] (present):

Sp. Juan come/está comiendo manzanas.

b. [R_S]/[R,E] (past):

Sp. Juan comía/comió manzanas.

c. [S_R]/[R,E] (future):

Sp. Juan comerá manzanas.

d. [S,R]/[E_R] (perfect):

Sp. Juan ha comido manzanas.

e. [R_S]/[E_R] (pluperfect):

Sp. Juan había comido manzanas.

f. [S_R]/[E_R] (anterior future): Sp. Juan habrá comido manzanas. ‘J. eats/is eating, ate, will eat, has eaten, had eaten, will have eaten apples.’

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The perfect here is understood as a past event situation which is still relevant in the present, as is the case for Spanish; what is called perfect tense in Romance is not always used with the meaning of a perfect in this sense: The Italian compound perfect, the passato prossimo, in (13a), for example, clearly has the meaning of past, as in the representation in (12b) (the reference time is five years in the past relative to S). Spanish would choose the indefinido in this case (13b): (13)

a.

It.

Ho visto questo ritratto cinque anni fa.

b.

Sp.

Vi este retrato hace cinco años. ‘I saw this portrait five years ago’

However, all Romance languages have a distinction between a perfective and an imperfective past (cf. Sp. comía vs. comió in 12b). Spanish also has a grammaticalized generic reference time for the present (cf. the encoding of states or habitual events), whereas for a specific reference time the progressive periphrasis must be used (cf. also Bertinetto/Delfitto 1996; Squartini 1998, as well as the discussion in section 3.1). The list in (12) is not exhaustive; cf. e.g. the combination of [S,R]/[R_E], which would be a representation of a prospective future (or aspect) like (14a), or periphrases like the surcomposé (cf. Grevisse/Goosse 152011, 1090–1092; De Saussure/Sthioul 2012) in French (14b): (14)

Fr.

a.

Je vais manger quelque chose. ‘I’m going to eat something.’

b.

J’ai été parti. [I have.1SG be.PTCP leave.PTCP ]

Subsequent work based on the two time relations, like Klein (1994), Giorgi/Pianesi (1997), and Demirdache/Uribe-Etxebarria (2000; 2007; 2008), has sometimes distinguished between a syntactically higher T-relation (=T1) and a lower one (=T2), which has more aspectual than tense features.17 However, as can be seen in particular in (12a) and (12b), where Spanish has more than one verbal form encoding not only temporal but also different aspectual values, the temporal system according to Reichenbach (1947) and Vikner (1985) alone is not sufficient to unambiguously distinguish these aspectual values. Independently of whether we assume that the referential time is an argument proper or just a featural encoding of tense in the corresponding syntactic categories, the time-relational approach has been successfully adopted for the modelling of the interaction of the morphosyntax of tense and the interpretation of time. The role of a temporal anchor (the anchoring principle; cf. Enç 1987, 642), located in the

17 The relevant terminology varies here: Klein (1994) distinguishes between Time of Utterance, Topic Time, and Time of the Situation; Demirdache/Uribe-Etxebarria (2000; 2007; 2008) call them Utterance Time, Assertion Time, and Event Time.

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CP-domain, is also essential in this respect. This temporal anchor either provides the deictic reference of the speaker’s temporal coordinates or allows a temporally nonindependent clause to be temporally and referentially anchored (in the sense of Enç 1987) to a root clause. Direct and indirect tense relations also play a role in complex (biclausal) sentences, where sequence of tense (henceforth SOT) phenomena can be observed (cf. section 3.2 for a case study). As we have already seen, tense and aspect in Romance are not distinct morphological categories, as they are in Slavonic, but are marked syncretically in verbal inflection. The main aspectual distinction is that between imperfective and perfective. There are simple and compound tenses and a series of innovative verbal periphrases with aspectual values (GO-, COME-, STAND-, HOLD-, BE-, HAVE-periphrases). With regard to the simple tenses, the present and the imperfect express imperfective aspect. The simple future, meanwhile, which is sometimes interpreted not as a tense but as a modal category (or, at least, a category of uncertainty; cf. also Smith 2012, 259118), is neutral with respect to (im)perfectivity (at least in French, Italian, and Romanian). Compound tenses, i.e. the perfect, the pluperfect,19 and the anterior future, built with an auxiliary verb and the participle in most Romance languages, express perfective aspect. Most Romance languages also have a synthetic perfective past, like the Spanish indefinido, the Italian passato remoto, the French passé simple, the Portuguese pretérito perfeito simple, and the Romanian perfect simplu, all of which express perfective aspect.20 These tenses are derived from the old Latin perfect, which was used for both the values which now in some Romance languages are expressed by two different tenses: the time relation [R_S]/[R,E] (+perfective), for which in standard Spanish the synthetic perfect is used, and [S,R]/[E_R] (+perfective), which is now encoded by the compound perfect. This means that the Spanish indefinido encodes perfectivity in the past, whereas the compound perfect, the perfecto compuesto, encodes perfectivity that still holds in the present. In Romanian, French, and Italian (but not Southern Italian), however, the compound perfect can be used for both time relations, with the old synthetic perfect restricted to a purely literary register. Turning to the present tense, it must be noted that Spanish is quite strict in distinguishing a present tense which must obligatorily come with an unbound or generic reference time (15a) from a periphrastic aspectual construction with a specific reference time (15b) (cf. also the case study in section 3.1). This is less strict in Italian 18 Cf. also Lyons (1977, 677) quoted by Smith (2012): “Futurity is never a purely temporal concept; it necessarily includes an element of prediction or some related notion.” 19 In all Romance languages except Romanian the pluperfect is a compound tense; in Portuguese, there is a compound as well as a synthetic pluperfect, but the latter is only used in literary texts (cf. Gärtner 1998, 27). 20 In Catalan there is a synthetic and a more commonly used analytic preterite with auxiliary GO + infinitive; cf. Perea (2002, 630–631, 640–641).

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(among other languages), which also has this periphrasis (15c; cf. also section 3.1), but is more flexible in the use of the present tense: (15)

a.

Sp.

Juan come mucho.

‘(In general) J. eats a lot.’

b.

Sp.

Juan está comiendo.

‘J. is eating (right now).’

c.

It.

Gianni sta mangiando.

‘G. is eating (right now).’

The gerund in Romance usually encodes imperfectivity, whereas the participle may encode perfectivity (but see the present passive). The infinitive is only indirectly tense related, since it has an underspecified first T-relation (cf. also Remberger 2006, 126–128). Thus a present infinitive can get a simultaneous, but also a posterior (future-oriented) reading (this is relevant for the discussion of modal expressions that embed an infinitive; cf. the case studies in section 3.3). A compound infinitive with the participle encodes anteriority and perfectivity. The substitute for the infinitive in Romanian, the subjunctive, is also temporally dependent and has a nonanterior and an anterior form.

2.3 Modality and mood Mood and modal systems are described in Palmer (²1990; ²2001) as “two ways in which languages grammatically deal with an overall category of modality” (Palmer ²2001, 4), but not all languages offer both possible ways. Mood is a morphosyntactic category that is not present in all languages but does clearly feature in Romance and has several values: the indicative (the default), the subjunctive, the conditional (cf. fn. 25), the (second person sg. and pl.) imperative, and some rarer values such as the presumptive in Romanian (cf. Squartini 2005; Academia Română 2008, 373–378; Pană Dindelegan 2013, 53–55). In Portner’s (2009, 1) words, modality is “the linguistic phenomenon whereby grammar allows one to say things about, or on the basis of, situations which need not be real”. In formal semantics, this is illustrated by the concept of sets of (possible) worlds. Modality semantically and pragmatically modifies a proposition by introducing sets of worlds which can, but need not, include the actual world. The subset of worlds where the proposition is held to be true is represented as a set of world variables bound by a quantifier. Modality in Romance can be encoded by morphological mood (↗5 Inflectional verb morphology), but also by functional and lexical means like modal verbs, modal adverbs and particles, modal nouns and adjectives, and other modal expressions. Based on Kratzer’s seminal work on modality and its description in possible worlds semantics (cf. Kratzer 1977; 1981; 1991), the following basic elements have been identified as the semantic “ingredients of modality” (cf. Remberger 2010;

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2011): First, modality consists of a modal relation or modal force (cf. Hacquard 2011), which can be a relation of possibility or necessity.21 Possibility can be described as existential quantification over a set of possible worlds, i.e. for at least one possible world w the proposition is held to be true. Necessity universally quantifies over a set of possible worlds, i.e. in all of them p is true. Another ingredient of modality is the conversational background against which the modal relation is evaluated. Conversational backgrounds, also called modal bases, are context-dependent sets of worlds. Modal bases of the type “as far as what is known” lead to an epistemic modal interpretation, while typical conversational backgrounds like “as far as what is needed, as far as what is feasible” lead to deontic (=root) interpretations of modality. Conversational backgrounds and modal bases are a means to formally describe the high context sensitivity of modally modified propositions. (16) It.

Piero deve lavorare molto. ‘P. has to/must work a lot.’

In (16) the modal relation is necessity and the conversational background can either include worlds containing rules, responsibilities, or prescriptive norms controlling Piero’s work, or it can represent the knowledge world that tells us, for instance, that somebody looking tired like Piero probably works a lot (for further discussion, cf. also the case studies in section 3.3). Depending on the conversational background the interpretation is either deontic (root) or epistemic. There is often an implicit source22 for the modal relation, and sometimes an explicit one, possibly linked to the modal base. An explicit source is most obvious for intensional verbs like Fr. vouloir/It. volere/Sp. querer, with the subject being the source of modality (cf. the case studies in section 3.3, where this observation becomes particularly relevant). Implicit sources of modality are more frequent, and might include a generic arbitrary reference or some referent retrievable only in the context, possibly the speaker. Finally, there is a target over which modality takes scope, usually a proposition. Another grammatical category, often subsumed under modality (e.g. by Palmer ²1990; ²2001) is evidentiality. Evidentiality is usually defined as the indication of the source of the information that the speaker gives in his assertion (Aikhenvald 2004). Evidentiality can be direct (speaker’s own experience), indirect (hearsay, reported), or inferential (deduced knowledge) (cf. Willett 1988; Palmer ²2001). The latter subtype overlaps with epistemic modality insofar as the epistemic state of the speaker is at stake. So with both epistemic modality and inferential evidentiality, the evaluation of the proposition is based on the conversational background of knowledge

21 For more fine-grained distinctions, cf. Palmer (21990; 22001) and also Depraetere (2012). 22 The notion of a ‘modal source’ was introduced by Calbert (1975).

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worlds (of the speaker), but only modality is concerned with quantification over these worlds (for a case study concerning the shift of an imperfect tense to indirect evidentiality, cf. section 3.2). With regard to mood, the indicative is selected in assertions. The indicative establishes referentiality (cf. Zafiu 2013, 43) and, as discussed above, indicates that the proposition must be evaluated against a world representing the reality according to the speaker. The subjunctive, in contrast, seems to be an indicator of the fact that (i) the proposition must be interpreted independently of the speaker’s world model (the conversational background anchored to the speaker),23 and (ii) it must be interpreted dependently on other world models/modal bases (irrealis, emotive, potential etc.) that are introduced by the context, usually by a subordinating verb. In main clauses, the nonindicative moods usually introduce models of wish worlds (the optative), of (past or present) counterfactual worlds (the conditional), or of future worlds requiring the action of the hearer or the discourse participants (the imperative, the exhortative; cf. also Bosque 2012, 377). However, in contrast to the subordinate context, these models are always anchored to the speaker. Some groups of lexical items and particular sets of grammatical contexts select clauses in the subjunctive depending on modal operators in a broad sense. Which functional or lexical category introduces “states of affairs conceived through the angle of some evaluation, possibility, necessity, emotion, intention, causation, and other nonfactual or nonvericonditional [semantics]” is determined languagespecifically in the lexicon (cf. Bosque 2012, 379) and thus varies among Romance languages. Intensional verbs are quite stable crosslinguistically in that they obligatorily select the subjunctive.24 For other lexical classes this is not so clear: In Italian, for example, an epistemic verb such as credere ‘to believe’ selects the subjunctive, but in modern colloquial use it appears with the indicative (cf. Wandruszka 1991, 434), while in the other Romance languages examples such as Spanish creer ‘to believe’ usually take the indicative unless negated or in interrogative contexts (Bosque 2012, 379). Moreover, in French, Spanish, and Italian, epistemic verbs of uncertainty like ‘to doubt’ (Fr. douter, It. dubitare, Sp. dudar) usually take the subjunctive, but Romanian a se îndoi (cf. Zafiu 2013, 45) does not. The conditional as a form of the verbal paradigm can have the temporal futurein-the-past reading (exemplified later in section 3.2, 25) and thus is often treated

23 The notion of ‘world model’ was introduced by Farkas (1992) and Giannakidou (1998) and further formalized by Quer (1998). Models are part of the context (thus comparable to the conversational background) of an utterance and are anchored to individuals (Giannakidou 1998). 24 When there is subject identity, the infinitive is selected in all Romance languages but Romanian. The phenomenon whereby the pronominal subject of an embedded clause must be different in reference from the subject of the main clause in sentences like It. vuole che parta ‘He wants him to leave’ (cf. Fr. *je veux que je parte, Ruwet 1984) has been called the Obviation Effect.

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basically as a tense,25 although it manifests itself in a present and a past form. Furthermore, it has modal meaning in conditional constructions where the verbal form of the conditional introduces possible worlds (in the present or in the past) but some propositions belonging to these possible worlds (which can be expressed by an if-clause, e.g. It. canterei se potessi ‘I would sing if I could’26) logically restrict the truth of the proposition. Syntactically, morphological mood has either been located in the TP-domain, since it is connected to finiteness, or somewhere between the TP and the CP (cf. Zagona 2012b). In some constructions with verbal forms marked by the subjunctive, by the conditional, and in particular by the imperative, verb movement takes place. With respect to finiteness, there seems to be a hierarchy or gradually decreasing scale between finiteness and nonfiniteness, depending on mood morphology (cf. also Remberger 2006, 119). In finite subjunctive subordinate clauses, the Romanian subjunctive introduced by să is a finite form but – unusually in Romance – it also appears in obviation contexts, i.e. where the other Romance languages would insert an infinitive (which is rare in Romanian27). Nonfinite but inflected subordinate clauses are found in Portuguese and Sardinian, which have an inflected infinitive (derived from the Latin imperfective subjunctive).

25 The conditional mood represents a Romance innovation, as there was no conditional in Latin. It is synthetic in the present (except in Romanian), but is historically derived from a periphrasis which designated future-in-the-past. Bosque (2012) treats the conditional as a tense; Zagona also calls it a tense, but a tense encoding a modal feature, cf. Zagona (2012b, 365); in French, it is treated as a – past or present – tense form of the indicative, cf. Grevisse/Goosse (152011, 1027); in Italian, the conditional is classified as a mood, cf. Renzi/Salvi/Cardinaletti (1995); it is considered a mood in Portuguese by Gärtner (1998), but not by Mateus et al. (1983, 149, fn. 152); cf. Zafiu (2013, 51), where she refers to Thieroff (2010), who typologically distinguishes between two types of conditionals, the ‘Eastern conditional’, which is a mood proper, and the ‘Western conditional’, which he and others consider a tense. In Romanian, the conditional is periphrastic (e.g. aș vedea/aș fi văzut ‘I would see/I would have seen’). Only the Romanian conditional is a morphological mood proper, since it does not have the temporal future-in-the-past reading of the other Romance languages – in fact, it is also called condiţional-optativ. The optative meaning is derived from the conditional meaning, e.g. Rom. aș veni și eu ‘I would come, too’ > ‘I wished I could come, too (if some outer conditions obtain)’. 26 Note that in Standard Italian the protasis is in the past subjunctive and only the main clause is in the verbal form of the conditional. 27 Thus, in contexts where there is subject identity between the main and embedded clause, the Romanian subjunctive bears the function that other Romance languages encode with the infinitive (e.g. Rom. vreau să merg acasă ‘I want that I go home’ for ‘I want to go home’); cf. fn. 24. The subjunctive is in general (with the exception of some highly frequent verbs) inflectionally visible only in the third person. However, the Romanian subjunctive is always introduced by the subjunctive particle să (i.e. the subjunctive is always marked; the particle must be adjacent to the verbal form, separated from it only by clitics or negation).

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Modality is located either in the TP- or in the CP-domain, depending on the language-specific encoding of modality, modal bases, and syntactic movement operations (cf. Cinque’s 1999 hierarchy of modal heads). As several studies have shown (e.g. Picallo 1990; Laca 2005; 2006, and many others), epistemic modality is located higher than root modality; cf. the following examples: (17) Sp. a. Este material debe poder resistir temperaturas muy altas, ¿no? ‘This material is probably able to resist very high temperatures, isn’t it?’ b. ‘It’s inferable from the extant information that this material is able to resist very high temperatures.’/ ‘In all worlds which are compatible with the speaker’s beliefs this material is able to resist very high temperatures.’ c. *root modality > epistemic modality

(following Laca 2006, 116)

(18) Cat. a. En Pere deu poder tocar el piano. (Picallo 1990, 294) ‘P. is probably able to play the piano.’ b. *En Pere pot deure tocar el piano. The first modal in (17a), debe, can only be interpreted related to an epistemic conversational background (17b). The modal verb deure in Catalan in (18) does not allow a deontic interpretation (for deontic necessity the verb haver de would have to be used; cf. Picallo 1990), thus in (18a) it comes first and is interpreted epistemically, whereas in (18b), in second position, it is uninterpretable. In combinations with two modals, the higher model must always be interpreted epistemically.

3 Interface phenomena: Romance case studies A first case study of the interaction of different grammatical levels is the IL- vs. SLdistinction (cf. section 3.1). The second set of case studies relate to mood at the interface (cf. Quer’s 1998 title) and its interplay with modal interpretation, two issues that are particularly relevant in the Romance languages, since they have complex mood systems (cf. section 3.2). Finally, I will present studies concerning the interaction of aspect, tense, and modality and the different types of interpretative shifts that arise depending on grammatical as well as contextual factors. These are particularly revealing for Romance, where modal verbs (in contrast to English) still fully inflect (cf. section 3.3).

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3.1 Aspect at the interface: the stage-level vs. individual-level distinction It has been stated that the distinction between SL- and IL-predicates is related to the speaker’s view of the reference time and is therefore an aspectual distinction. However, there are predicates in the lexicon that are semantically more appropriate for IL-readings and others that are more appropriate for SL-readings.28 Nevertheless, the lexical aspectual property can be further manipulated by other modules of the grammar. In Spanish, the SL/IL-distinction is grammaticalized in the choice between two copula verbs:29 Copulative constructions with the Spanish copula ser are ILconstructions, while with the copula estar they represent SL-constructions. ILconstructions hold for an unbound/generic reference time, whereas SL-constructions refer to a specific reference time. Example (19) shows that typically IL-predicates can be coerced to SL-predicates and vice versa: (19) Sp. a. ¡Qué inteligente que estás hoy! [inteligente is typically IL] ‘In what an intelligent manner you are behaving today!’ [SL-reading] b. Soy triste de tanto estarlo. ‘I’m a sad person for always feeling sad.’

[triste is typically SL] [IL-reading & SL-reading]

Inteligente in (19a) is typically an inherent property of individuals whereas triste normally designates a temporary state. Nevertheless, grammatical aspect (i.e. the aspectual copula selection) can change the prototypical lexical aspect.30 The interesting point here is that grammar can intervene at different levels to make a construction SL or IL. First, as mentioned previously, lexical aspect can intervene: Some predicates tend to be SL (adjectives like Sp. borracho ‘drunk’, cansado ‘tired’ etc.), while others are inherently IL (adjectives like Sp. inteligente ‘intelligent’, rubio ‘blond’ etc.). The copula estar has the property of introducing a specificity feature for the reference time of the clause, whereas with ser the reference time remains unspecified (or generic). Apart from the lexical level, grammatical aspect for SL-interpretations can be produced in many Romance languages through verbal periphrases such as gerund periphrases: (20) It.

Michele sta mangiando. / Sard. Michele est manikende.

Sp. Miguel está comiendo.

/ Cat.

En Miquel està menjant. ‘M. is eating.’

28 Nouns are never SL-interpretable, as opposed to adjectives, which can be both. 29 As it is, with a slight variation in the selectional criteria, in Portuguese and Catalan; cf. GonzálezVilbazo/Remberger (2007). 30 Cf. the coercion phenomena illustrated in de Swart (2011), especially the use of the so-called “active be” in English, which can be seen as parallel to the use of estar in (19a).

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Whether these constructions encode an additional aspectual value or not depends on the language at issue. In Spanish, for example, this periphrasis has an additional interpretative value of duration, which can be bound, and it can thus appear in perfective tenses, whereas in (Modern) Italian the gerund periphrasis does not have a durative value and can appear only in imperfective tenses (cf. Bertinetto/Delfitto 1996; Squartini 1998; also Remberger 2006, 216–226 and 272–280 for a formalization of Italian and Sardinian data): (21)

Sp. It.

Miguel ha estado comiendo. ‘M. has been eating (for some time).’ *Michele è stato mangiando.

Furthermore, we also find examples of the interaction between grammatical and lexical aspect, such as the perfective-imperfective distinction and the IL/SL-property in this example: (22)

Sp.

a.

El portero del equipo era/*fue chileno. ‘The goal keeper was Chilean.’

[chileno is typically IL] [IL-interpretation]

b.

El portero del equipo fue chileno hasta que renunció a su nacionalidad [. . .] [SL-interpretation] ‘The goal keeper was Chilean until he renounced his citizenship. . .’ (cf. Zagona 2012b, 352, from De Miguel 1999)

Chileno is a typical IL-predicate and thus combines well with an imperfective ILcopula (ser) in the past. For a perfective form of the IL-copula a special context is required to make the clause acceptable. If the pragmatic context allows an ILpredicate to be combined with a perfective past reading so that the reference time from the speaker’s viewpoint can no longer be generic (since it is temporally bound), a SL-reading arises: Here, the inherent property of being Chilean becomes a temporal property which can be subject to change (i.e. the event is coerced from a state to a (terminative) achievement).

3.2 Mood and tense at the interface: subjunctive alternation, SOT, and free indirect discourse In complex sentences involving subordination, interface phenomena connected to the interplay between mood and tense (categories that express different degrees of finiteness) and other domains of grammar become relevant. The exchange of grammatical information between embedded and root clause and the interpretation of the embedded component with respect to the speaker coordinates will be discussed in reference to three phenomena: the interpretational effects of mood alternation in embedded relative clauses, SOT phenomena in complement clauses, and the

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use of imperfective verb forms in order to mark free indirect discourse, which is apparently no longer a morphosyntactically embedded context, but is somehow semantically selected. For these interface phenomena, the notion of world models as introduced by Farkas (1992) and Giannakidou (1998) and discussed by Quer (1998) (cf. also fn. 23) will be essential. In his work on mood at the interface, Quer (1998) conceives mood morphology as a grammatical means to manipulate world models. The main focus of his study is the function of the subjunctive in Romance (his data are principally from Catalan and sometimes from Spanish). In Romance, with some intralinguistic variation, the selection of subjunctive forms can be lexically conditioned (e.g. for the complements of certain intensional verbs), semantically conditioned (expressions of two different interpretations), or conditioned by operator scope (as in the case of negation or in interrogatives). There are several configurations where either the subjunctive or the indicative can be chosen: (23) Cat. a. El degà no creu [que els estudiants es mereixinsubjunctive un premi]. ‘The dean doesn’t believe that the students merit a prize.’ b. El degà no creu [que els estudiants es mereixenindicative un premi]. ‘The dean doesn’t believe (the fact) that the students merit a prize.’ Following Quer (1998), in (23a) the subjunctive facilitates an interpretation where the content of the embedded clause is independent from an evaluation against the world model of the common ground (the realistic world model according to the epistemic knowledge of the speaker). It is particularly the presence of the indicative, the referential mood, which in (23b) causes an additional model back-shift from a model of believe-worlds related to the subject of the embedding verb to the model of epistemic knowledge anchored to the speaker. The indicative, even when embedded, is able to refer to the speech context of the main clause. This causes the embedded proposition to be interpreted as true according to the epistemic model anchored to the speaker in (23b), whereas it is false according to the epistemic model anchored to the subject of the embedding verb; in (23a), with an embedded subjunctive, there is no such direct link to the speaker’s world model. Thus, even if morphological mood does not have a functional meaning on its own, it has interpretative effects in combination with other modules of the grammar, namely the insertion of semantic operators of modality as well as negation (as is the case in (23)) and interrogation. Another well-known example showing the alternation of subjunctive and indicative with an interpretative effect is the following: (24)

Sp.

a.

Juan busca (a) una secretaria que sepasubjunctive inglés. [P px] ‘J. is looking for a secretary who should know English.’

b.

Juan busca *(a) una secretaria que sabeindicative inglés. [px P] ‘J. is looking for a (certain) secretary who knows English.’

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Here, in (24a) the subjunctive in the restrictive relative clause gives us the so-called de dicto reading, i.e. the indefinite DP which is the object of the intensional verb buscar ‘to look for’ is not specific and arbitrary (therefore Differential Object Marking by the preposition a is not obligatory; cf. (↗8 (In)definiteness, specificity, and differential object marking). The referent of secretaria ‘secretary’ only exists in those worlds in which the subject’s (i.e. Juan’s) desire of finding one is fulfilled (existential quantification px within the scope of the intensional operator of the predicate P buscar ‘to look for’). In example (24b), on the other hand, the indicative directly links the indefinite DP (which is obligatorily marked by the preposition) to the world model of the common ground of the root clause (the so-called de re reading), i.e. the interpretation of the DP is existentially quantified and it has a specific reference, since it is outside the scope of the intensional verb buscar ‘to look for’. The alternation between subjunctive and indicative has a specific interpretative effect, namely that, with the indicative, the argument is outside the scope of the operator and thus is directly connected to the speaker coordinates, in order to establish referentiality. If the intensional operator is within the scope of the embedding verb, no specific reading of the indefinite DP is instantiated and the finite form of the embedded verb is morphophonologically realized as a subjunctive form. As shown above (cf. section 2.2), tenses and the interpretation of times and the relations between them need to be anchored: Main clauses are anchored in the speech context, while embedded clauses usually take the event or the reference time of the main clause as their anchor (cf. Enç 1987). The SOT phenomena are a natural expression of this dependency: They clearly show that tenses can have relative (anterior, posterior, simultaneous) as well as absolute (past, present, future) values; they also show that the instantiation of temporal reference is usually established via the root clause. (25) Sp. a. Juan dice que José cantaráfuture a las tres. (Zagona 2012b, 358) ‘J. says that J. will sing at 3 o’clock.’ b. Juan dijo que José cantaríafuture-in-the-past a las tres. ‘J. said that J. would sing at 3 o’clock.’ In (25), the temporal connection (the time relation) between the root and embedded clauses is one of posteriority, i.e. the time interpretation of the embedded clause is posterior to that of the root clause. In (25a), the posteriority relation is clearly represented by the deictic future tense (cantará). In (25b), the same relation must be expressed by the conditional, because the main verb encodes a past perfective tense (dijo, in the indefinido). The tense of the embedded clause thus must follow SOT and to express the posteriority relation it needs to shift the future (the deictic expression for posteriority) to a relative future in the past, i.e. the conditional.31 31 The conditional in this case is a morphophonological tense proper, since it encodes [S_R]/[R,E] but independently of a main clause [R_S]/[R,E] (cf. section 2.2).

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If the temporal relation between root and embedded clause is simultaneous, this means that, morphophonologically, the same deictic tense has to appear in both clauses. Thus (26) is grammatical and (29) below is ungrammatical. Even if there is an explicit deictic reference time relative to S in the embedded proposition, like anterior ieri, simultaneous oggi, or posterior domani, the tense in the embedded clause must follow the SOT rules: (26) It. Gianni sperava che Maria partissepast.subjunctive ierianterior/oggisimultaneous/ domaniposterior.32 ‘G. hoped that Mary would leave yesterday/today/tomorrow.’ (Giorgi 2010, 34) However, an embedded tense is able to establish temporal reference directly, depending on the type of clause (adjunct clauses, relative clauses, complement clauses) and the language at issue. In the so-called double access reading (cf. Abusch 1997) an embedded tense (the first time relation), again in the indicative, can be directly anchored in the discourse: (27) a. It.

Gianni ha detto che Maria èpresent incinta. ‘G. said that M. is pregnant.’

b. Sp. María dijo que Pedro estápresent enfermo. ‘M. said that P. is ill.’

(Giorgi 2010, 13)

(Zagona 2012b, 367)

In (27), from Italian and Spanish, the main clause is in the past and the embedded clause is in the present tense: The time-relational interpretation of the present tense in the subordinate clause, if not explicitly specified otherwise by a temporal adverbial, is directly (deictically) anchored (D-anchored following Demirdache/UribeEtxebarria 2007; 2008) to the time of the speech act S (28a), and it is indirectly (anaphorically) anchored (A-anchoring following Demirdache/Uribe-Etxebarria 2007) via the event time of the root clause Eroot (i.e. the time of the speaking event of Gianni/ María) (28b). That is, for (27b) both (28a) and (28b) hold: (28) a. Rroot_S/Rroot,Eroot – S,Rsubordinate/Rsubordinate,Esubordinate

AND

b. Rroot_S/Rroot,Eroot – Eroot,Rsubordinate/Rsubordinate,Esubordinate The difference in meaning is that the ill person was ill at the time the subject of the main clause was speaking (28b), and that the person is also ill at the speech time (28a). In examples like the following from Giorgi (2010, 34), the Italian verb sperare

32 The verbal form is in the subjunctive since It. sperare is a verb that lexically induces mood.

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‘to hope’ introduces a new evaluation model (of hopes, anchored to the subject of the main verb). In this case, there is no double access reading available and it is impossible to embed a present tense subjunctive (like parta) under a past tense subjunctive (the correct version is (26) with partisse): (29) It.

*Gianni sperava che Maria partapresent.subjunctive .

In Romanian, the double access reading with an embedded indicative (complement) clause is not obligatory with the present, i.e. in a sentence like (30) the embedded present tense can be deictic or anaphoric to the matrix tense: It can mean just (28b) but not necessarily (28a) (Giorgi 2010, 13; Zafiu 2013, 63). (30) Rom. Ion a zis că Maria epresent însărcinată. ‘I. said that M. is pregnant.’ Therefore, in Romanian the embedded present tense does not need to be used deictically, whereas in Italian and Spanish it does. In order to exclude (28b) for Italian or Spanish, the embedded tense must follow the SOT rules and be realized in the imperfective: (31) a. It.

Gianni ha detto che Maria eraimperfect incinta. ‘G. said that M. was pregnant.’

b. Sp. María dijo que Pedro estabaimperfect enfermo. ‘M. said that P. was ill.’ This is, in principle, also possible in Romanian, but represents the marked option (cf. Zafiu 2013, 64: the imperfect is necessarily deictic33): (32) Rom. Ion a zis că Maria eraimperfect însărcinată. ‘I. said that M. was pregnant.’ Thus, languages vary in this respect and not all languages obligatorily follow SOT. Another phenomenon that is prominent in many Romance languages is the use of the imperfect to mark reported discourse, which is introduced without a subordinating verb of saying: (33) Fr. Brigitte ouvrit la porte du petit salon et nous appela: ne voulionsimperfectnous pas un peu de thé? Cela nous réchaufferait aprés cette course. ‘B. opened the door of the small parlour and called to us: wouldn’t we like some tea? It would warm us up after this run.’ (Grevisse/Goosse 152011, 543) 33 In Spanish and Italian, an embedded clause in the imperfect can also have a double access reading (Zagona 2012b, 368).

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This phenomenon, called free indirect discourse, shows a shift from tense to evidentiality. The morphological tense of the imperfective (i.e. the verbal form voulionsnous) is not interpreted as the realization of an aspectual time relation ([R_S]/[R,E], (+imperfective)), but it marks a world model of reported speech that has not been explicitly introduced by a lexical verb of saying. The anchor to which the model is connected must be retrieved in the context (in this case it is Brigitte). Note, again, that the verbal form réchaufferait is in the conditional, since it is connected to the model of reported speech in a posteriority relation, but the reference time, which must also be retrieved in the context, is before the actual speech time.34 The tense phenomena observable in free indirect discourse obey the same SOT rules as in indirect speech, where an explicit and tensed verb selects a complement clause.35 A related phenomenon is the intentional (conative) reading of the imperfect (Zagona 2012b, 363): (34) Sp. Hasta ayer, íbamosimperfect a la playa de vacaciones pero hoy Pepa dijo que no hay dinero para eso. ‘Until yesterday we were going to the beach on holiday [= we planned to go] but today P. says that there is no money for that.’ Here too, the use of the imperfect signals the shift to a model of evaluation other than the one connected to the speaker’s coordinates: The verbal form íbamos signals an eventuality in the past, but the imperfective aspect in combination with a verbal phrase which is not inherently a state or a process (ir a la playa ‘to go to the beach’ is [+telic]; it is an accomplishment) changes the eventuality expressed into an imperfective eventuality, and the conative interpretation that the accomplishment was not completed therefore arises. The effect is due to the presence of a (past) world model of intentions anchored to the speaker and his/her group.36

3.3 The interaction of aspect, tense, and modality: conditional shift, modal shift, actuality shift, future shift This section examines the following phenomena: the conditional shift for an otherwise uninterpretable reading, the deontic/root vs. epistemic interpretation of modals, 34 Again, here, the conditional is the expression of a tense proper, a future in the past. 35 However, there is an essential difference between indirect speech and free indirect discourse: In the latter discourse markers (referring not to the speaker but to the anchor retrievable in the discourse) and other deictic expressions are permitted. 36 Another non-tense-reading of the imperfect is its use as a form of politeness with modal verbs of volition, e.g. Rom. voiam să vă întreb ceva ‘I wanted to ask you something’ (Zafiu 2013, 61). Moreover, in many Romance dialects and varieties, not only the subjunctive and the conditional, but also the imperfect can express counterfactuality, i.e. the introduction of a set of irrealis worlds.

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the so-called implicative reading or actuality shift of modal interpretation (cf. Quer 1998; Hacquard 2006; Laca 2006), and the use of the future tense as a device to express epistemic modality. Root modality is future oriented, or, at least, nonanterior (cf. Quer 1998; also Remberger 2010, for the interplay of tense and volitionality). As a result, a modal verb embedding an anterior time relation might result in ungrammaticality: (35) a. It. *Gianni vuole aver lavorato. ‘G. wants to have worked.’ b. Sp. *María quiere haber asistido a la reunión. (Laca 2006, 120) ‘M. wants to have assisted at the meeting.’ Example (35) is ungrammatical because the modal verbs It. volere/Sp. querer ‘to want’ are restricted by a nonanteriority condition, i.e. the model of wish worlds anchored to the subject excludes past worlds, since past worlds are epistemically stable (cf. Laca 2006), i.e. they are truth-conditionally evaluable.37 However, the situation changes if the verb introducing modality is marked by mood morphology indicating the introduction of a further alternative world model, namely a model of conditional or irrealis worlds (excluding the actual world, the realistic model): (36) a. It.

Gianni vorrebbeconditional aver lavorato. ‘G. would like to have worked.’

b. Sp. Quisiera/querríaconditional haber llegado a tiempo. (Laca 2006, 119) ‘S/he would have liked/would like to have arrived in time.’ This also neutralizes the epistemic stability of the past encoded in the embedded sentence, since it is now in the scope of a modal operator; the sentence is therefore grammatical as a result of the conditional shift. However, with modal verbs where the source of modality is not explicit (other than volitional WANT), the modal relation can shift from a deontic/root to an epistemic modal base. This modal shift is a well-known effect present in more than just the Romance languages. In (37a), the modal reading is the deontic (root) reading, but in (37b), with a complex embedded infinitive, which encodes anteriority (the second time relation [E_R], or, aspectually speaking, perfectivity), an epistemic and posterior reading appears: (37) Cat. a. En Jordi no ha pogut sortir. [root reading] ‘J. was not able to go out.’

(Picallo 1990, 287)

b. En Jordi pot no haver sortit. [epistemic reading] ‘J. could not have gone out.’ 37 Note that the parallel construction in German is not ungrammatical since in German volitional modality can shift to an evidential reading; cf. Remberger (2010; 2011).

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However, the model shift from deonticity to epistemicity not only arises with embedded perfective aspect. The same happens if the embedded clause is marked as SL:38 (38) Sp. Juan puede estar comiendo. ‘J. might be eating.’

[epistemic reading]

Furthermore, there are still many examples where the reading remains ambiguous (especially with IL-verbs) and can only be established by the temporal reference retrievable in the context (cf. the ambiguous ex. (16) in section 2.3).39 As in the conditional shift, the tense and the aspectual features of the modal can also give rise to interpretative effects:40 (39) Cat. Va voler que el seu fill estudiés Belles Artes. (Quer 1998, 50, fn. 48) ‘S/he wanted her/his son to study fine arts (and he did).’ (40) It. Lizzie ha voluto parlare a Darcy, #ma non gli ha parlato. (Hacquard 2006) ‘L. wanted to (and did) talk to D., #but she didn’t talk to him.’ In (39) and (40) the modal verb is in the compound/periphrastic perfect and thus encodes a perfective reference time in the past. The modal base, the model of wishes according to the volition of the subject of the main verb, contains nonanterior worlds. Nevertheless the aspectual marking of the main volitional verb makes the embedded proposition true not only in the worlds that are included in the volitional model connected to the subject, but also according to the realistic world model anchored to the epistemic knowledge of the speaker. This might be explained by the fact that the volitional model also contains nonposterior, simultaneous worlds, and simultaneity with an event marked as perfective at the reference time gives rise to an interpretation in which the embedded proposition belongs to the actual world (the actuality shift; cf. Hacquard 200641). Thus, it would be strange to continue a sentence like (40) with an afterthought that explicitly negates the realization of the modalized proposition in the actual world.42 38 Cf. Depraetere (2012, 1011–1012) for English. 39 To be exact, the examples with embedded perfective infinitives could, in principle, also have a deontic/root reading, especially with explicit temporal adverbials referring to a posterior reference time and thus coercing a future-oriented but perfective modal meaning. However, the epistemic reading is the most natural when no other context is given. 40 This is a difference between Romance and English, since in the latter modals are grammaticalized auxiliaries which do not inflect (only some modals have past forms, often with a specialized interpretation). 41 The imperfect instead allows, but not necessarily forces, a “failed attempt” reading. 42 In Romanian a vrut (3SG compound perfect of WANT) has no actuality implication, but a putut (3SG compound perfect of CAN) and a trebuit (impersonal compound perfect of MUST) have.

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The last shift to be discussed here is the epistemic interpretation of the future. It has been noted that there is an “asymmetry between a fixed past and an open future” (cf. Kaufmann/Condoravdi/Harizanov 2005, 99) – the future is always metaphysically uncertain (cf. also Copley 2002 and fn. 18). The future as well as the future in the past (the anterior future) can have an epistemic interpretation. A model of future “realistic” worlds (where the future is epistemically unstable) is easily substituted by a model referring to present epistemically anchored, but existentially quantified worlds: (41) a. It.

Saranno le tre.

‘It may be three o’clock.’

b. Sp. Serán las tres. (42) a. It.

Sarà stato il postino.

‘It may have been the postman.’

b. Sp. Habrá sido el cartero. In the simple future tense there is usually no modal relation. However, an epistemic meaning arises when the time-relational interpretation shifts from [S,R]/[R_E] to [S,R]/[R,E] and the future event is no longer interpreted as being located after the reference time and speech time, but is understood as simultaneous with the speech situation. This goes hand in hand with a shift from a temporal interpretation to an interpretation that evaluates the proposition against the model of epistemic knowledge of the speaker and quantifies over it: In at least one of the worlds compatible with the epistemic knowledge of the speaker it is true that p.43 In Romanian, where the future is not synthetic, various kinds of (more or less colloquial) future periphrases have developed, and these also often have an epistemic reading. A particular case is the so-called presumptive in (43) (cf. also Squartini 2005), which is a mood originating in a future periphrasis. (43) Rom. a. Acum o fi dormind/va fi dormind, că nu văd lumină. ‘(S)he may/might be sleeping now, as I can’t see any light.’ b. O fi rezolvat toate problemele, că pare mulțumit. ‘He may/might have solved all his problems, as he looks satisfied.’ (cf. Zafiu 2013, 54) The Romanian presumptive is an analytic form consisting of a verb form derived from ‘want’ (o, va) and either an infinitive or fi plus gerund (cf. Mihoc 2014, 65; Fălăuș 2014, 109). Its meaning has become epistemic or evidential (cf. Squartini 2005; Pană Dindelegan 2013). 43 Of course, another well-known change in interpretation, not only in Romance, is the opposite development, i.e. the grammaticalization of modal verbs into future auxiliaries or markers (cf. Fleischmann 1982; Bybee/Perkins/Pagliuca 1994, ch. 7), where an element expressing futureoriented modal meaning becomes a future tense marker.

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Luis López

8 (In)definiteness, specificity, and differential object marking Abstract: A number of Romance languages exhibit Differential Object Marking, a phenomenon in which a subset of direct objects is distinguished by means of a morphological mark or syntactic displacement. It has long been known that this mark correlates with semantic or pragmatic features such as specificity and topicality, which makes it an ideal playground to investigate the interfaces between syntax and interpretation. This chapter argues that DOM, in fact, provides interesting evidence for a particular theory of the role that syntactic configuration plays in semantic interpretation. Keywords: definiteness, indefiniteness, DOM, specificity, scrambling

1 Introduction Spanish, Romanian, and many other languages share the property that their objects may appear in two morphological shapes. In Spanish, some direct objects are preceded by a morpheme that surfaces as a: (1) Sp. a. Busco a un estudiante. seek.1SG DOM a student ‘I’m looking for a student.’ b. Busco un estudiante. seek.1SG a student ‘I’m looking for a student.’ Likewise, Romanian direct objects can be preceded by pe (and when that happens, the pe object is often doubled by a clitic): (2) Rom. a. Îl

caut pe un student. seek.1SG DOM a student ‘I’m looking for a student.’ CL . ACC

b. Caut un student. Seek.1SG a student ‘I’m looking for a student.’

(Mardale 2004, 64)

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The term Differential Object Marking (DOM) refers to this property. Traditionally studied in a language-by-language basis, after the work of Bossong (1985) it dawned on linguists that DOM is a phenomenon that can be found in hundreds of languages – and later typological research has expanded the data-base even more, cf. Iemmolo to appear for an overview). DOM can be expressed, as in the examples above, by means of a morpheme that derives diachronically from a preposition, but also by morphological case (Persian, Hindi, Inuit languages, Turkish), suppletive determiners (Maori) or agreement or clitics on the verb (Bantu family). If we adopt an abstract view of grammar that merges the traditional areas of morphology and syntax, the phenomenon of Scrambling (German, Dutch) is also a form of DOM, to the extent that a subset of objects behaves grammatically in a distinct manner. Even more interestingly, syntactic and semantic features associated with DOM appear in clusters in unrelated languages, which suggests that DOM can provide a door of entry toward an understanding of the features that make up the human faculty of language (López 2012). The Romance language family provides a healthy range of DOM phenomena. The best known cases are those of Spanish and Romanian, languages in which the usage of DOM extends to several types of DPs and on which there is an abundant literature (cf. Fábregas 2013 for a recent overview with focus on Spanish). DOM also appears in Catalan, Portuguese, Sardinian, Sicilian, Corsican and a number of Italian dialects. It even shows up sporadically in regional, non-standard forms of French and Italian, languages supposedly lacking DOM altogether (Iemmolo to appear). In these language varieties the distribution of DOM is considerably more restricted than in Spanish and Romanian. For instance, DOM in the variety of standard Catalan that appears in normative grammars only affects pronouns (cf. Escandell-Vidal 2009 for an overview of DOM in Catalan) and in Abruzzese only first and second pronouns (D’Alessandro 2012). In other varieties, DOM extends to definite DPs in dislocated position and in Sicilian it reaches any definite DP (but no indefinites). An extra requirement of animacy is present in almost all varieties. The goal of most DOM literature is to provide a simple, one-line statement that describes the distribution of DOM in a language. This goal is feasible in a language with limited DOM, but it is considerably harder to achieve in Spanish or Romanian. For instance, one can suggest the following generalization: (i) “marked objects are animate in Spanish, unmarked objects are inanimate” and take this to be the main rule of DOM in Spanish. Animacy is indeed a factor in Spanish DOM, as shown by the contrast between (3a) and (3b). But it can’t be the end of the story. (3c) shows that an animate object is not necessarily marked and (3d) shows that an inanimate one may: (3) Sp. a. Vio a un chico. saw.3SG DOM a boy ‘S/he saw a boy.’ b. *Vio a una mesa. table saw.3SG DOM a ‘S/he saw a table.’

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c. Vio un chico. saw.3SG a boy ‘S/he saw a boy.’ d. El camino sigue al río. The road follows DOM .the river ‘The road follows the river.’ Linguists have been aware of the difficulties in defining the distribution of DOM in a language like Spanish, and so they have taken two paths. One path is to make the statement vague enough that almost anything goes and find ad hoc accounts for contradictory evidence. Continuing with our example (3), the persistent linguist could say that in (3c) the object is de-animated while in (3d) it is en-animated (analyses that involve fluctuating definitions of animacy have, in fact, been proposed). It should be obvious that this strategy eventually leads to a cul-de sac. Along the same lines, the recent DOM literature also shows attempts at broader, cross-linguistic analyses, such as Aissen (2003), Dalrymple/Nikolaeva (2011), De Swart (2007), Iemmolo (to appear), Naess (2007), among others. Individually and as a group they have helped broaden the database considerably and they have provided insights into DOM as well as other topics. Just like the one-language specialists, these works try to account for the DOM phenomena within one generalization: Aissen and De Swart discuss specificity/definiteness and animacy within an OT framework, Naess discusses affectedness while Dalrymple/Nikolaeva and Iemmolo argue that Topicality is at the root of DOM. Given the difficulty of accounting for DOM in even one language, it is not surprising to find that these cross-linguistic investigations exert some considerable idealization of data (a perfectly acceptable strategy in science, in any case, as long as we are aware of it). A second, possibly more realistic strategy to describe DOM is to divide the problem in smaller pieces, accepting that each piece of the problem has its own analysis and that the analyses are related, at best, by a family resemblance. For instance, one could posit something like the following statement: (ii) “inanimate objects are marked if the external argument is not an agent/causer” as a statement added to (i). This additional clause takes care of (3d). This looks like a more promising path, even if less glamorous. It seems that our faculty of language – our Universal Grammar, if you will – includes DOM as a possible ingredient of a natural language. Once the grammar of a language adopts DOM, the usage may expand or contract along one of a number of significant linguistic features, most notably: animacy, theta structure, (in)definiteness, affectedness and information structure. Moreover, the features that trigger DOM may act in isolation or might be combined. And, as is often the case in morpho-syntax, there are patterns that seem circumscribed to very small sub-sets of the lexicon. An independent line of research on DOM explores the properties of this construction to the extent that it can shed light on specific theoretical debates. In particular,

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the grammatical availability of DOM in (1) and (2) turns out to be crucial data for our understanding of the connection between morphology, syntax and semantics. Within this line of research, there is already a wealth of work focusing on Spanish and Romanian: von Heusinger (2002), von Heusinger/Onea (2008), Leonetti (2004), López (2012), Rodríguez-Mondoñedo (2007), Torrego (1998). Although this approach is very recent, I think it is fair to say that it has made important contributions to our understanding of some theoretical problems and, in particular, to the syntaxsemantics interface. The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the factors that affect the distribution of DOM in the Romance languages. Sections 3 and 4 present a summary of López (2012), submitted as an example of how the data of Romance DOM can provide insight to our understanding of the syntax-semantics interface. Section 5 presents the conclusions.

2 DOM factors in Romance We can divide the factors that affect DOM in three classes: (i) features of the object, (ii) features of the verb and (iii) features of the configuration.

2.1 Features of the object The factors involving the object in DOM phenomena have been studied quite extensively in many different languages. They can be summarized in three types of features: animacy, topicality and specificity. Moreover, as mentioned above, there are some varieties that accept DOM only on pronouns or a subset of pronouns. Let’s consider these categories in turn. We start with animacy: most forms of DOM in Romance affect only animate objects. This can be seen in the following contrast: (4) Sp. a. *Juan vio a todas las mesas. the tables Juan saw.3SG DOM all b. Juan vio todas las mesas. ‘Juan saw all the tables.’ There are only two types of exceptions. In Spanish, DOM on inanimate objects is possible when a constellation of conditions get together: the external argument is also inanimate and the verb assigns theme theta-roles (or, in any case, neither agentive nor experiencer) to both arguments (cf. García 2007 for a recent analysis):

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(5) Sp. El camino sigue al río. (=3b) The road follows DOM .the river ‘The road follows the river.’ The other type of exception to the animacy generalization comes from Balearic Catalan (Escandell-Vidal 2009). In this language, dislocated objects are marked even if they are inanimate. This can be seen in the following example (Escandell-Vidal 2009, 846): (6) Cat. Colliu-les a les peres, que ja són madures pick.IMP-Cl.ACC . PL DOM the pears that already are ripe ‘Pick the pears, for they are ripe.’ This segues quite naturally into the second factor: Topicality (cf. Laca 1995; Leonetti 2004; Iemmolo 2010; to appear). Following these authors, we take Topicality to be a term that embraces an aboutness dimension as well as a discourse-anaphoric dimension: we can take the Topic of a sentence to be a constituent that refers back to an antecedent in the previous discourse and fleshes out what the sentence is about. In the Romance tradition, it is often claimed that dislocated constituents are topics (cf. Vallduví 1992). It has been pointed out that dislocated objects accept DOM even in language varieties that do not normally accept it (Northern Italian, Standard Italian). The following pair of Italian examples is taken from Iemmolo (to appear): (7) It. a. A me, non mi convince questo. DOM me NEG me convince.3SG this ‘This does not convince me.’ b. *Non mi convince a me questo. Likewise, language varieties in which DOM is optional for a type of DP might regard it as obligatory when the object is dislocated. Dislocation is taken by Laca and Iemmolo as a sure indication of topicality and therefore a connection between topicality and DOM can be established via dislocation. Moreover, the diachronic studies of Iemmolo seem to indicate that for a number of Romance languages DOM began as a morpheme associated with dislocations which later spread to other uses. Finally, specificity is the DOM feature that has been explored in most depth, no doubt because it plays such an important role in contemporary linguistic theory: specificity effects in existential sentences, specific readings of scrambled objects, specificity in connection with telicity etc. Every discussion of specificity begins with the same complaint: there is no agreement on what it means. It would be presumptuous of me to try and provide a solution to the problem so I will content myself

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with an intuitive presentation (but cf. von Heusinger 2011 for a more detailed discussion). Consider the following example: (8) Mary is looking for a hammer. Mary may be the owner of a hammer and she may be looking for the hammer she lost. This hammer would be specific. Or she might be in a hardware store and looking to buy a hammer: that would be an unspecific hammer. Using specificity as a tool, we can separate two types of determiners with respect to their relationship with DOM (and always keeping animacy constant) in Spanish and Romanian. Determiners whose meaning entails specificity require DOM. In this category we have: each, every, most, some/many/few of the – Milsark’s (1974) “strong determiners”. Proper names and definite pronouns, which are specific by nature, also require DOM. Here are some examples of obligatory DOM in Spanish:1 (9) Sp. a. Juan me eligió a/*Ø mí. Juan Cl.1 chose.3SG DOM me ‘Juan chose me.’ b. Elegimos a/*Ø Miguel. Chose.1PL DOM Miguel ‘We chose Miguel.’ c. María ama a/*Ø todos los gatos. the cats Maria loves DOM all ‘Maria loves every cat.’ Determiners whose meaning does not entail specificity allow DOM. In this category fall Milsark’s “weak determiners”: a, some, many and numerals, provided that they are not constituents of a partitive construction. The presence of DOM with indefinite determiners allows for (but does not force) a specific reading for the DP. The absence of DOM makes this specific reading impossible. The following examples are Romanian (cf. 2): (10) Rom. a. Caut un student. seek.1SG a student ‘I’m looking for a student.’ b. Îl caut pe un student. Cl.ACC seek.1SG DOM a student ‘I’m looking for a student.’ (Mardale 2004, 64) 1 The “a/*Ø” formula means: obligatory a. The “a/Ø” formula means: optional a.

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The presence or absence of DOM on the object has additional effects on scope, which are discussed in section 3. Finally, as mentioned above, some Romance varieties accept DOM only on pronouns. Catalan (at least, the standard quasi prescriptive variety that appears in traditional descriptive grammars) accepts DOM only on pronouns: (11) Cat. a. Jo el vaig veure a ell. DOM him I CL .3 PST.1SG see ‘I saw him.’ b. Jo vaig veure la Maria. the Maria I PST.1SG see ‘I saw Mary.’ c. *Jo vaig veure a la Maria DOM the Maria I PST.1SG see In Abruzzese, only first and second person pronouns accept DOM (D’Alessandro 2012): (12) Abruzzese a. So vistə a tte. Be.1SG seen DOM you ‘I have seen you.’ b. *So vistə a jissə / a Marije. Be.1SG seen DOM them DOM Marije ‘I have seen them / Marije.’ Aissen (2003) regards the Catalan case as exemplifying the relevance of the specificity scale for DOM. Her idea is that noun phrases can be regarded to stand on a specificity scale such as the following: pronouns > proper names > definite noun phrases > indefinite noun phrases. According to Aissen, DOM distributes along this scale from left to right. D’Alessandro, on the other hand, ties the Abruzzese DOM with a broader investigation into the role of morphosyntactic features in microparametric variation.

2.2 Features of the verb The role of the verb in DOM has only been discussed on the wake of Torrego (1998) and remains, to this date, less understood than the role of the object. Moreover, all the Romance literature that I am aware of discusses only Spanish and so my discussion will also be limited to this language (outside of Romance, Kiparsky’s 1998 discussion of Finnish stands out, as well as Naess 2007).

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Torrego’s findings can be summarized as follows: several types of verbs select for obligatory DOM associated to the type of complement that they select or the type of event they denote. Consider first the affectedness variable: if a verb affects its complement (i.e.: exerts a permanent change on it), DOM becomes obligatory. Affectedness has also been investigated in a diachronic study of DOM in Spanish by von Heusinger/Kaiser (2011). In this respect, one can compare Sp. golpear ‘to hit’ with Sp. ver ‘to see’:2 (13) Sp. a. Tú golpearías a/*Ø un niño. you hit.COND.2SG DOM a child ‘You would hit a child.’ b. Tú verías a/Ø you see.COND.2SG DOM ‘You would see a child.’

un niño. a child

A second variable is humanness. Some verbs select for an obligatory human complement: to greet, to convince, to murder.3 These verbs also require DOM on the indefinite: (14) Sp. Tú asesinarías a/*Ø un miembro del congreso. you murder.COND.2SG DOM a member of.the congress ‘You would murder a member of congress.’ Relatedly, psych verbs also seem to prefer a marked object: (15) Sp. Tú admirarías a/*Ø un miembro del congreso. you admire.COND.2SG DOM a member of.the congress ‘You would admire a member of congress. Finally, Torrego (1998) argues that the Aktionsart of the verb is crucial to understand the DOM phenomena. Roughly put, telic verbs require DOM while atelic verbs are only compatible with it. For those verbs that could go one way or another, a

2 Notice that in these and the following examples I use a conditional form. The use of the conditional is meant to favor a non-specific reading for the complement and make sure that the specificity variable does not cloud the conclusion. Likewise, since the third person in Spanish ends in /a/, I switch to the second person, which ends in /s/, to make sure that the DOM morpheme is fully audible. 3 Although saludar ‘greet’ is in its normal use a verb that takes a human as an object, one can also see other metaphorical uses of the verb in which one greets the sun or the spring season. In these cases, DOM is also obligatory, which raises some questions that I will not be able to properly address in this paper. Thanks to Susann Fischer for pointing out the problem with this class of verb.

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marked object makes the predicate telic, an unmarked object makes it atelic. This can be seen in the following example: (16) Sp. Tú esconderías a/Ø un prisionero durante dos años. for two years you hide.COND.2SG DOM a prisoner ‘You would hide a prisoner for two years.’ According to Torrego, the version without DOM is an activity without an end point. Only the version with a marked object indicates an end point to the action of hiding – in effect, changing the Aktionsart from activity to achievement.

2.3 Configuration Finally, there are some syntactic configurations that require the presence of DOM in Romanian and Spanish (as well as other languages outside the Romance family). They are discussed in more detail in section 4.2, but here let’s just note the following example: (17) Sp. Tú considerarías a/*Ø un estudiante inteligente. intelligent you consider.COND.2SG DOM a student ‘You would consider a student intelligent.’ In small clauses like (17), the constituent that seems to bear the grammatical relation direct object (as shown by routine tests such as passivization and pronominalization) is not a complement of the verb – it is in fact an argument of the small clause predicate. This property is what makes DOM obligatory here, as I show below.

3 Scope and DOM: configuration and the modes of semantic composition The presence or absence of a morphological marking on an indefinite object dramatically affects its scope possibilities in Spanish and Romanian (as well as other unrelated languages such as Turkish, Persian, Hindi and Kiswahili, that I know of). It has been known since the 1980s that the scope of indefinites presents a challenge for the standard views of the syntax-semantics interface, which revolve around the notion that quantifier scope can be predicted using syntactic c-command and Quantifier Raising, as I explain below. López (2012) argues that the DOM facts, together with some recent developments in semantic theory, shed light on the empirical problems and lead to a new understanding of the interface. Sections 3 and 4 summarize some of the results of López (2012).

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Section 3.1 presents the canonical view of quantifier scope and the challenges presented by indefinite objects, section 2 discusses the scope of indefinite objects in DOM languages, section 3.3 shows that marked objects scramble and section 3.4 connects all three strands: scope, DOM and scrambling.

3.1 The syntax-semantics interface The classical formal semantics that grew out of the works of Richard Montague and Barbara Partee assumes one mode of semantic composition, called Function Application (FA), which has the following structure: (18) λx [P(x)](a) → P(a) Generative grammar incorporated formal semantics and proposed a simple hypothesis to approach the translation of syntactic structures onto semantic structures: the c-command configuration gets translated as scope. If x c-commands y, then x has scope over y. However, there are apparent mismatches, such as the one shown in (19): (19) a. Some man loves every cat. b. ∃ > ∀ ∀>∃ As shown in (19b), the universal quantifier may take scope over the existential one, giving rise to a reading in which for every cat there is some man or other that loves it. But ‘every cat’ does not, on the face of it, c-command ‘some man’. This empirical problem is solved by means of an inaudible syntactic operation (although very much audible in Hungarian and many other languages) called Quantifier Raising (QR). QR adjoins the quantifier to TP (May 1985, i.m.a.): (20) [TP every cat [TP some man [VP t loves t ]]] Thus, with a helping hand from QR, classic generative grammar was able to maintain the idea that there is a direct mapping of syntax to semantics. However, indefinite NPs remain an empirical problem for the framework sketched above. The problems come from their unusual scope properties and the phenomenon of specificity. I focus now on scope. Indefinite NPs can have a very wide scope beyond the limits of what QR can allow. Consider the following sentence:

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(21) a. If Bert invites a philosopher, Lud will be upset. b. → > ∃ ∃>→ This sentence allows a wide scope for ‘a philosopher’, with a reading that can be paraphrased as follows: “there is a philosopher such that, if Bert invites him, Lud will be upset”. But in order to obtain this reading via QR, the indefinite would have to move outside of a conditional clause, which is a strong island for movement. Indefinite NPs can also have an obligatory narrow scope. This is exemplified in the following Persian example (from Karimi 2003, 111): (22) Persian a. Kimea ye ketâb na-xarid. Kimea a book NEG .compró ‘Kimea didn’t buy a book.’ b. ¬ > ∃ *∃ > ¬ As indicated, this sentence means that Kimea did not buy any books. It does not mean that there is a book that Kimea did not buy, although the second reading could easily be obtained by QR. Notice that ye ketâb is not a negative polarity item. Thus, the question that this sort of example poses is the following: If QR is available in the grammar, why is it that some indefinite NPs cannot use it and obtain wide scopes? And, even more intriguingly, why is it that the indefinites that take obligatory narrow scope are always object indefinites? Let’s start with the first problem: indefinites with wide scope. In an influential article, Reinhart (1997) argues that indefinites can be interpreted by means of choice functions. The starting point is the assumption that indefinite NPs are predicates of type , denoting sets of entities. A choice function applies on an indefinite NP and chooses an element from the set, with the result that the type of the indefinite is raised to , ready to combine with a predicate by Function Application. The function must be closed by an existential quantifier. This existential quantifier can be located in any syntactic position without respecting syntactic islands, which gives rise to the possibility of wide scopes. Thus, sentence (23a) can have the logical form (23b): (23) a. If Bert invites a philosopher, Lud will be upset. b. ∃f CH(f) ∧ Bert invites f(philosopher) → Lud will be upset The logical form in (23b) can be paraphrased as follows: ‘there is (a choice function that picks) a philosopher such that if Bert invites the philosopher picked by the function Lud will be upset.’

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Notice that in Reinhart’s approach to wide scopes, the scope of an indefinite NP is independent of its syntactic position. The connection between syntax and semantics becomes less direct than in the classic approach. Let’s consider now the second problem: some indefinite objects have obligatory narrow scope. The literature on this topic has grown substantially in recent years and I can’t present an overview in these pages. Instead, I adopt without argument Chung/Ladusaw’s (2004) approach. Their point of departure is again that indefinite NPs are of type . Lexical verbs are also of type and consequently cannot combine with indefinites by means of Function Application. Chung/Ladusaw propose that indefinite objects and lexical verbs may combine by Restrict, a mode of semantic composition in which the indefinite NP does not saturate the predicate – rather, it behaves like a modifier. The resulting predicate is then immediately closed by an existential quantifier. Consider (24) as an example. We are focusing on the semantic composition of the VP ‘buys a book’. The output of applying Restrict to ‘buy’ and ‘a book’ is the conjunct shown in (24b). (24c) shows existential closure of the two variables. The resulting LF could be paraphrased as ‘there is an x such that x has the properties of being bought and being a book:’ (24) a. Mary [VP buys a book] b. RESTRICT (λx [ buy’(x)], book’) → λx [buy’(x) ∧ book’(x)] c. ∃x [buy’(x) ∧ book’(x)] One semantic effect of this immediate closure is that an indefinite object composed by Restrict can only have narrow scope. Notice that Chung/Ladusaw (2004) takes another step in divorcing syntax from semantics. This is because application of Restrict depends on the type of noun phrase that we have, not on the syntactic position where it is found. In theory at least, an indefinite noun phrase could be in any syntactic position, be composed by Restrict and therefore take a narrow scope over anything else in the clause.

3.2 The scope of the marked and the unmarked object In Spanish and Romanian (and other languages) the indefinite marked object has all the properties of an indefinite NP subjected to a choice function while an unmarked object looks like it has been composed by Restrict. The marked object may take wide scope beyond any islands, as can be seen in the following examples: (25) Sp. a. Todo hombre amó a una mujer. ‘Every man loved DOM a woman.’ =for every man x there was a woman y such that x loved y =there was a woman x such that every man y loved x

∀> ∃ ∃>∀

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b. La mayoría de los hombres amó a una mujer. ‘Most men loved DOM a woman.’ ∃ > Most / Most > ∃ c. Juan no amó a una mujer. ‘Juan didn’t love DOM a woman.’ ≠there is no x, x a woman, such that Juan loved x. *¬ > ∃ =there was a woman x such that Juan didn’t love x. ∃ > ¬ d. Juan no amó a ninguna mujer. ‘Juan didn’t love DOM any woman.’ ‘Juan didn’t love any woman.’ *∃ > ¬ / ¬ > ∃ e. Si Lud invita a un filósofo, Bert se ofenderá. ‘If Lud invites DOM a philosopher, Bert will be upset.’ =Bert doesn’t want any philosophers at the party →>∃ =there is a philosopher that Bert doesn’t want invited ∃ > → The examples (25a) and (25b) show that Spanish DOM can have wider or narrower scope with respect to other quantifiers. (25c) shows that Spanish DOM has wide scope over negation if the determiner is un/a. But DOM is compatible with a narrow scope with respect to negation too, as shown in (23d). In (23d), the negative word ningun- must take narrow scope and must also be prefixed by DOM. Finally, (23e) shows that a marked object in Spanish may take scope outside a conditional island. The ease with which marked objects in Spanish can take a variety of scopes suggests that their interpretation is mediated by choice functions. Romanian pe indefinite objects have the same properties as Spanish a indefinite objects. For instance, they can take scope over a conditional island: (26) Rom. a. Dacă Bert invită pe un filozof, Lud se va supăra. If Bert invites DOM a philosopher Lud CL AUX . FUT annoy ‘If Bert invites a philosopher, Lud will be annoyed.’ b. → > ∃ ∃>→ The examples in (25) contrast with those in (27), with an unmarked object. Wide scope is impossible in these examples: (27) Sp. a. Todo hombre amó una mujer. ‘Every man loved a woman.’ =for every man x there is a woman y such that x loves y ∀ > ∃ ≠there was a woman x such that every man y loved x *∃ > ∀

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b. La mayoría de los hombres amó una mujer. *∃ > Most / Most > ∃ ‘Most men loved a woman.’ c. Juan no amó una mujer. ‘Juan didn’t love a woman.’ =there is no x, x a woman such that Juan loved x ≠there was a woman x such that Juan didn’t love x

¬>∃ *∃ > ¬

d. Juan no amó ninguna mujer. ‘Juan didn’t love a woman.’ e. Si Lud invita un filósofo, Bert se ofenderá. ‘If Lud invites a philosopher, Bert will be ofended.’ =Bert doesn’t want philosopers at the party →>∃ ≠there is a philosopher that Bert doesn’t want invited. *∃ > → Likewise, the Romanian indefinite object without pe cannot take wide scope. (28) contrasts with (26): (28) Rom. a. Dacă Bert invită un filozof, Lud se va supăra. if Bert invites a philosopher Lud CL AUX . FUT annoy ‘If Bert invites a philosopher, Lud will be annoyed.’ b. → > ∃ *∃ > → The obligatory narrow scope of unmarked objects tells us that they must be composed by Restrict. The last conclusion allows us to address an old empirical problem regarding the distribution of DOM. It has often been noticed that existential verbs do not tolerate DOM: (29) Sp. a. Hay

un señor en el jardín. a gentleman in the garden ‘There is a gentleman in the garden.’ HAVE

b. *Hay a un señor en el jardín. This has often been taken to derive from the supposed specificity property of DOM: if marked objects are specific and existential predicates do not admit specific objects, it follows that existential predicates cannot have marked objects. However, the first premise of the argument is false: marked objects are not necessarily specific. This can be seen in the following examples:

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(30) Sp. a. Estoy buscando a un señor en el jardín. a gentleman in the garden be.1SG searching DOM ‘I am looking for a gentleman in the garden.’ estoy buscando a nadie. be.1SG searching DOM anyone ‘I am not looking for anyone.’

b. No

NEG

In (30a) it is not necessarily the case that the gentleman that I am looking for is specific. In (30b), nadie is unambiguously non-specific. DOM makes specificity possible but does not force it. But then, why is (29b) ungrammatical? I argue that the ungrammaticality of (29b) depends on the mode of semantic composition associated with existentials. Let’s take it seriously that an existential predicate in fact involves the conjunction of two predicates, as is standard in predicate logic and formal semantics: (31) ∃x gentleman(x) ∧ in the garden(x) If the noun phrase of an existential must be a predicate, it follows that it can’t be subjected to choice functions because choice functions raise the type of the indefinite to that of an entity . Since marked objects are of type , it follows that marked objects can’t be components of an existential predicate.

3.3 Syntax of DOM Classical c-command tests reveal that the marked object is in a hierarchically higher position than the unmarked object, which I take to indicate that marked objects undergo a Scrambling operation (but cf. Leonetti 2004 for a different take on similar data). The Scrambling we are referring to here is very short. It can only be perceived in relation to the indirect object. Consider the following example: (32)

Context: What did the enemies do? They delivered X to Y, but . . . Sp. Los enemigos no entregaron a sui hijo a/Ø ningúni prisionero. prisoner The enemies NEG entregaron DAT his son DOM any ‘The enemies delivered no prisoner to his son.’

The NP ningún prisionero ‘no prisoner’ can be marked. Interestingly, the presence or absence of DOM alters the range of possible interpretations for this sentence. When the object is marked, it is possible to obtain a quantifier-variable interpretation for ‘sons’ and ‘prisoners’. This interpretation could be paraphrased as ‘the enemies

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didn’t deliver John to John’s son, the enemies didn’t deliver Mary to Mary’s son, the enemies didn’t deliver Pat to Pat’s son, etc.’ Under the common assumption that quantifier-variable interpretations require c-command configurations, it follows that marked objects c-command indirect objects. The unmarked object does not allow for a quantifier-variable interpretation: the only interpretation available is something like ‘the enemies didn’t deliver his son any prisoners’. This tells us that the unmarked object does not c-command the indirect object. Notice that the structural difference is not reflected in the word order: the left-to-right linearization of complements in Spanish seems to be fairly independent from structure. Anaphora binding confirms the higher position of the marked object. Consider the following examples: (33) Sp. a. María le entregó a Juan un hombre. ‘Maria delivered a man to Juan.’ b. *María le entregó a sí mismo un hombre. a man Maria CL . DAT delivered DAT REFL c. María le entregó a sí mismo a un hombre. DOM a man Maria CL . DAT delivered DAT REFL ‘María delivered a man to himself.’ Take (33a) as the baseline example, a regular ditransitive (here the morpheme a is a dative marker, not the DOM marker). (33b) shows that an unmarked object cannot bind an indirect object reflexive. (33c) shows that a marked object can. The marked direct object does not scramble very high (unless some other operation, such as dislocation, affects it). In fact, the marked object does not c-command an external argument, even if the latter remains in situ: (34) Sp. Ayer no castigó su padre a ningún niño. child yesterday NEG punished.3SG his father DOM no ‘Yesterday his father punished no child.’ It is very difficult to interpret example (34) as involving a pairing of children and fathers. Thus, the scrambling that DOM gives rise to is very short, since it stays below the initial merge position of the external argument. Once again, the properties of marked and unmarked objects in Romanian parallel point by point those of Spanish: the marked object c-commands the indirect object, the unmarked object does not: (35) Rom. Duşmanii nu l-au cedat pe niciun prizonier fiului lui. enemies.DEF NEG CL . ACC -AUX yielded DOM NEG a prisoner son.DEF. DAT his ‘The enemies yielded no prisoner to his son.’

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Moreover, Romanian provides an extra piece of evidence for scrambling because in this language the left-to-right order of complements reflects structure. Unmarked objects show up to the right of indirect objects, while marked objects are located preferably to the left of indirect objects. cedat fiului lui pe niciun prizonier (36) Rom. ? Duşmanii nu l-au enemies.DEF NEG CLACC -AUX yielded son.DEF. DAT his DOM NEG a prisoner (37) Rom. Duşmanii nu i-au cedat fiului lui un prizonier. enemies.DEF NEG CLDAT-AUX yielded son.DEF. DAT his a prisoner ‘The enemies yielded no prisoner to his son.’ The configurational difference between the marked and unmarked object in Spanish and Romanian can be shown graphically: (38) [vP EA v [αP OB(DOM) IO α [VP V OB]]] The structure represented in (38) includes a number of structural hypotheses, some commonly assumed in generative grammar, others less so. The only crucial hypothesis for this work is the relative c-command relations of the arguments in the clause. The external argument c-commands the other arguments (unless the latter are dislocated, not discussed here). The marked object c-commands the indirect object while the latter c-commands the unmarked object. Moreover, (38) posits the presence in the structure of a functional head that here noncommittally I refer to as α. α introduces the indirect object and offers a spec for the marked object. It is related to the applicative heads that have been discussed in the literature since Marantz (1993) as well as the Inner Aspect of Travis (1992; 2010), although a detailed consideration goes beyond the limits of this chapter.

3.4 Scrambling and semantic composition From the previous two sections we can extract two conclusions: (39) a. The marked object (i) undergoes a Scrambling operation and (ii) is composed semantically by Function Application (after type-shifting.) b. The unmarked object (i) stays in Compl,V and (ii) is composed semantically by Restrict.

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It is tempting to link the two contrastive properties of direct objects. Thus, I submit the following hypothesis: (40) [vP EA v [αP OB(DOM) IO α [VP V OB]]] ↑ FA

↑ Restrict

The question now is: why is it that DPs found in the VP are composed by Restrict? And why is it that DPs outside of the VP are interpreted by Function Application? In the following, I borrow and freely adapt some ideas sketched in Carlson (2003). Let’s assume the model includes a set E of eventualities and every lexical verb denotes a member of this set (i.e.: a type of event). Let’s further assume that this denotation must be kept for every projection of the lexical verb and the resulting VP also denotes a member of E. We additionally maintain the assumption that indefinite NPs are predicates: thus, we have a set P of predicates and indefinite NPs denote members of this set. Within these conditions, Restrict is allowed as a mode of semantic composition within the VP. That is because Restrict limits itself to increasing the specificity of the eventuality that the verb refers to. But Function Application is not permitted within the VP because it alters the type of the constituent it composes with. Since within the VP one can only combine and element of E with an element of P, it follows that individuals and generalized quantifiers do not have a denotation within the VP and therefore must raise to a VP-external position. Among the phrases that must move we find the indefinite NPs that have been type-shifted from type to type by means of a choice function.

3.5 Conclusion Recall that both Reinhart (1997) and Chung/Ladusaw (2004) have the effect of making the syntax-semantics mapping opaque because they connect the scope of indefinites to semantic operations or modes of semantic composition regardless of syntactic configuration. The proposal sketched in these pages recovers a predictable syntax-semantics mapping because there is a connection between syntactic position and the mode of semantic composition and, consequently, the range of indefinite scopes.

4 Extensions and predictions In this section I develop further the ideas introduced in section 3 and explore some empirical consequences.

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4.1 The structure of marked and unmarked objects Linguists working on a variety of languages have noticed that a subset of indefinite direct objects bear a combination of two properties: (i) they can only take narrow scope and (ii) they are found either adjacent to the verb or fully integrated in the morphological structure of the main clause predicate. Cf. for instance Massam (2001) on Palauan, Dayal (2011) on Hindi, Karimi (2003; 2005) on Persian, van Geenhoven (1998) on West Greenlandic. These authors have utilized the concept of (pseudo)incorporation to account for this phenomenon. Let’s assume that unmarked objects in Spanish are pseudo-incorporated into the lexical verb. There are several ways to implement this idea technically, here I propose one that seems attractive. Unmarked nominals are relatively small, maybe consisting only of a Number head that takes an NP as an argument and provides a label for the resulting structure. Marked objects include a determiner that selects a Number Phrase as well as a K head that selects the determiner. The K head is the one that, under appropriate conditions, may spell out as DOM: (41) a. Marked object:

K[DP[NumP[NP]]]

b. Unmarked object: Num[NP] Further, let’s take K to be a phase head in the sense of Chomsky (2000), while the smaller Number Phrase is not. An immediate consequence of this assumption is that the unmarked object transfers to the interpretative mechanisms together with the verb while the marked object is transferred independently. I suggest that the syntactic and semantic effects of incorporation are a direct consequence of the simultaneous transfer of verb and object. I already suggested that K may spell out as DOM. It seems quite natural to take K to be the syntactic category that is associated with the choice function in the semantics: (42)

K also takes generalized quantifiers and definite DPs as complement. In these cases, K is simply a formal feature without a semantic function. Let’s briefly turn to specificity. We have seen that specificity is a property of marked objects. Bearing the function f is also a property of marked objects. It seems

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very reasonable to regard specificity also as a (optional) property of f (as proposed by von Heusinger 2002). Let me now show a prediction that derives from these assumptions. Brugè/ Brugger (1996) show that bare plurals are incompatible with DOM in Spanish (in fact, I have found out that the same restriction holds of the other languages I have investigated): (43) Sp. a. Juan vio futbolistas en el Camp Nou. ‘Juan saw footballers in the Camp Nou.’ b. *Juan vio a futbolistas en el Camp Nou. If, as Martí (2008) argues, bare plurals consist of a Number Phrase, it follows that bare plurals cannot be marked. More consequences ensue: since bare plurals are unmarked indefinites, they have to be predicates and must be composed by Restrict. If they are composed by Restrict, they can only take narrow scope. This prediction holds. Example (44) only has the reading in which Juan saw no footballers; it does not have the reading according to which there are some footballers he did not see: (44) Sp. a. Juan no vio futbolistas en el Camp Nou. ‘Juan didn’t see footballers in the Camp Nou.’ b. ¬ > ∃ *∃ > ¬ Within the set of hypotheses that constitute generative grammar, the motivation for incorporation and scrambling is Case Theory. As Baker (1988) argues, incorporation satisfies the Case Filter. We can implement this idea by assuming that the object can incorporate into V and V incorporates into v where the [assign accusative] feature is lodged. Since the incorporated object is contained within v, the need of Case is satisfied without further ado. KP does not incorporate. Why does it scramble to Spec,ɑ? Let’s assume that Case assignment is carried out in a strictly local configuration, what used to be called government. If so, KP needs to raise to Spec,ɑ to be governed by v.

4.2 Configurational DOM As mentioned in section 2.3, certain configurations require DOM even on their indefinite objects, regardless of any other properties of these objects (once again, keeping animacy constant). These configurations can be understood as having the following property in common: the grammatical object of the matrix predicate

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is not a complement of the predicate. Some of these grammatical objects are constituents of the clause that is the complement of the main predicate. In broad terms, they can be described with this schema: (45) V [XP OB(DOM) . . .] The following are some Spanish examples: (46) Small clauses Sp. El profesor considera a/*Ø un estudiante inteligente. the profesor considers DOM a student intelligent ‘The professor considers a student intelligent’ (47) Causatives Sp. María hizo llegar tarde a/*Ø un niño. Maria made.3SG arrive late DOM a child ‘Maria made a child arrive late.’ (48) Permissives Sp. María dejó llegar tarde a/*Ø un niño. Maria let.3SG arrive late DOM a child ‘Maria let a child arrive late.’ (49) Predicates of perception Sp. María vio llegar tarde a/*Ø un niño. Maria saw.3SG arrive late DOM a child ‘Maria saw a child arrive late.’ Here are some Romanian examples:4 (50) Small clauses Rom. Ion (îl) consideră pe/*Ø student tîmpit student stupid John CL . ACC considers ‘John considers a/the student stupid.’ (51) Small clauses Rom. Obama (l)-a numit pe/*Ø senator ministr-ul sănătăţi-i senator secretary.DEF health.GEN Obama CLACC . AUX named ‘Obama designated a senator health secretary.’ 4 In Romanian, there is no clause union proper. Instead, we have subjunctive clauses, which raise some complications that we will have to ignore for the purposes of this short paper. The same goes for object control, discussed below.

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The fourth type of object that requires DOM is an object control. The following is an example: (52) Sp. El maestro forzó a/*Ø un niño a hacer los deberes. the homework the teacher forced DOM a child to do ‘The teacher forced a child to do his homework.’ As in the previous cases, in this sort of structure the object is not the complement of the main predicate. Instead, it has to be located in a specifier position so that it can control into the infinitival complement: (53) [VP Obji [V’ V [CP PROi . . .]]] Thus, the common property shared by these instances of obligatory DOM is that the object is not merged initially as a complement of the lexical verb. And this follows directly from the proposal outlined above. These objects cannot incorporate into the lexical verb because only objects in complement position can do so (Baker 1988, i.m.a.). Since they can’t incorporate, their unvalued Case feature leads them to scramble. And unscrambled animate objects are marked.

5 Conclusions I started the chapter by presenting some of the variety of DOM phenomena that are encountered in the Romance languages. In particular, I showed how features of the object, the verb and the configuration itself impinge on the possibility of DOM. Then I moved on to a discussion of how DOM on indefinite objects affects scope in Spanish and Romanian. To summarize, marked objects can take wide scope beyond islands while unmarked objects can only take narrow scope. Using traditional binding tests, I also showed that marked objects are located in a higher syntactic position than unmarked objects. This triple correlation between morphology, syntax and semantics is what makes DOM an exemplary grammatical interface phenomenon. Next, I used the scope properties of marked and unmarked objects as a springboard from which to revisit the classical theory of the syntax-semantics mapping. As developed in the May’s seminal work (May 1985), this classical theory is based on two features: Function Application as the mode of semantic composition for noun phrases and a direct correspondence between c-command and scope. I proposed an analysis in which the mode of semantic composition of an indefinite noun phrase depends on its position in the syntactic tree: Restrict (as defined in Chung/Ladusaw 2004) for objects inside the VP, Function Application (after type-shifting) for objects

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outside the VP. The different modes of composition yield different semantic representations and different scope possibilities. A happy result of this approach is that we reestablish a predictive approach to the syntax-semantics interface.

6 References Aissen, Judith (2003), “Differential object marking. Iconicity vs. economy”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 21, 435–483. Baker, Mark (1988), Incorporation, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Bleam, Tonia (2005), “The role of semantic type on differential object marking”, Belgian Journal of Linguistics 19, 3–27. Bossong, Georg (1985), Empirische Universalienforschung. Differentielle Objektmarkierung in den neuiranischen Sprachen, Tübingen, Narr. Brugè, Laura (2000), Categorie funzionali del nome nelle lingue romanze, Milan, Cisalpino. Brugè, Laura/Brugger, Gerhard (1996), “On the accusative a in Spanish”, Probus 8, 1–51. Carlson, Greg (2003), “Weak indefinites”, in: Martine Coene/Yves D’Hulst (edd.), From NP to DP. On the syntax and pragma-semantics of noun phrases 1, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 195–210. Chiriacescu, Sofiana (2009), “Indefinite NPs and PE-marking in Romanian”, Ms., University of Stuttgart. Chomsky, Noam (2000), “Minimalist inquiries. The framework”, in: Roger Martin/David Michaels/ Juan Uriagereka (edd.), Step by step. Essays on Minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 89–156. Chung, Sandra/Ladusaw, William (2004), Restriction and saturation, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. D’Alessandro, Roberta (2012), Merging probes. A typology of person-driven, differential object marking, Ms., University of Leiden. Dalrymple, Mary/Nikolaeva, Irina (2011), Objects and information structure, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Dayal, Veneeta (2011), “Hindi pseudo incorporation”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 29, 123–167. De Hoop, Helen (1996), Case configuration and noun phrase interpretation, New York, Garland. De Swart, Peter (2007), Cross-linguistic variation in object marking, Utrecht, LOT. Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen (1994), The syntax of Romanian, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Enç, Mürvet (1991), “The semantics of specificity”, Linguistic Inquiry 22, 1–25. Escandell-Vidal, Victoria (2009), “Differential object marking and topicality. The case of Balearic Catalan”, Studies in Language 33, 832–884. Fábregas, Antonio (2013), “Differential object marking in Spanish. State of the art”, Borealis. An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 2, 1–80. García, Marco (2007), “Differential object marking with inanimate objects”, in: Georg A. Kaiser/ Manuel Leonetti (edd.), Proceedings of the workshop “Definiteness, specificity and animacy in Ibero- Romance languages”, Arbeitspapier 122, Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Konstanz, 63–84. van Geenhoven, Veerle (1998), Semantic incorporation and indefinite descriptions, Stanford, CA, CSLI. Ghomeshi, Jila (2008), “Markedness and bare nouns in Persian”, in: Simin Karimi/Vida Samiian/ Donald Stilo (edd.), Aspects of Iranian linguistics, New Castle upon Tyne, UK, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 85–111.

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von Heusinger, Klaus (2002), “Specificity and definiteness in sentence and discourse structure”, Journal of Semantics 19, 245–274. von Heusinger, Klaus (2011), “Specificity”, in: Klaus von Heusinger/Claudia Maienborn/Paul Portner (edd.), Semantics. An international handbook of natural language meaning, vol. 2, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 1025–1058. von Heusinger, Klaus/Chiriacescu, Sofiana (2009), “Definite ‘Bare’ Nouns and pe-Marking in Romanian”, in: Maria T. Espinal/Manuel Leonetti/Louise McNally (edd.), Proceedings of the IV Nereus International Workshop “Definiteness and DP structure in Romance languages”, Arbeitspapier 124, Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Konstanz, 63–82. von Heusinger, Klaus/Kaiser, Georg (2011), “Affectedness and differential object marking in Spanish”, Morphology 21, 593–617. von Heusinger, Klaus/Onea, Edgar (2008), “Triggering and blocking effects in the diachronic development of DOM in Romanian”, Probus 20, 71–116. Iemmolo, Giorgio (2010), “Topicality and differential object marking”, Studies in Language 34, 239– 272. Iemmolo, Giorgio (to appear), Differential object marking, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Karimi, Simin (2003), “Object positions, specificity and scrambling”, in: Simin Karimi (ed.), Word order and scrambling, Oxford, Blackwell, 91–125. Karimi, Simin (2005), A minimalist approach to scrambling, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Kiparsky, Paul (1998), “Partitive case and aspect”, in: Miariam Butt/Wilhelm Geuder (edd.), The projection of arguments. Lexical and syntactic constraints, Stanford, CA, CSLI, 265–308. Klein, Udo (2007), “Clitic doubling and differential object marking in Romanian”, Ms., University of Stuttgart. Laca, Brenda (1995), “Sobre el uso del acusativo preposicional en español”, in: Carmen Pensado (ed.), El complemento directo preposicional, Madrid, Visor Libros, 61–91. Leonetti, Manuel (2004), “Specificity and differential object marking in Spanish”, Catalan Journal of Linguistics 3, 75–114. López, Luis (2012), Indefinite objects. Scrambling, choice functions and differential marking, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Marantz, Alec (1993), “Implications of asymmetries in double object constructions”, in: Sam A. Mchombo (ed.), Theoretical aspects of Bantu grammar, Stanford, CA, CSLI, 113–151. Mardale, Alexandru (2004), “Sur l’object direct prépositionnel en roumain”, in: Actes des VIIèmes RJC ED268 langage et langues, Paris, Paris III, 62–67. Martí, Luisa (2008), “The semantics of plural indefinite noun phrases in Spanish and Portuguese”, Natural Language Semantics 16, 1–37. Massam, Diane (2001), “Pseudo noun incorporation in Niuean”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 19, 153–197. May, Robert (1985), Logical form, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. McNally, Louise (2004), “Bare plurals in Spanish are interpreted as properties”, Catalan Journal of Linguistics 3, 115–133. Milsark, Gary (1974), Existential sentences in English, PhD dissertation, Cambridge, MA, MIT. Naess, Ashild (2007), Prototypical transitivity, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Pensado, Carmen (1995), “El complemento directo preposicional. Estado de la cuestión y bibliografía comentada”, in: Carmen Pensado (ed.), El complemento directo preposicional, Madrid, Visor, 11–59. Reinhart, Tanya (1997), “Quantifier scope. How labor is divided between QR and choice functions”, Linguistics and Philosophy 20, 335–397.

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Ritter, Elizabeth (1991), “Two functional categories in noun phrases. Evidence from Modern Hebrew”, in: Susan Rothstein (ed.), Syntax and semantics 26, perspectives on phrase structure: heads and licensing, New York, Academic Press, 37–62. Ritter, Elizabeth/Rosen, Sarah T. (2001), “The interpretive value of object splits”, Language Sciences 23, 425–451. Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, Miguel (2007), The syntax of objects. Agree and differential object marking, PhD dissertation, University of Connecticut. Torrego, Ester (1998), The dependencies of objects, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Torrego, Ester (1999), “El complemento directo preposicional”, in: Ignacio Bosque/Violeta Demonte (edd.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, vol. 2, Madrid, Espasa Calpe/Real Academia Española de la Lengua, 1779–1806. Travis, Lisa (1992), “Inner aspect and the structure of VP”, Cahiers Linguistique de l’UQAM 1, 130– 146. Travis, Lisa (2010), Inner aspect, Dordrecht, Springer. Vallduví, Enric (1992), The informational component, New York, Garland.

Roberta D’Alessandro and Diego Pescarini

9 Agreement restrictions and agreement oddities Abstract: Romance languages mostly exhibit uniform agreement patterns: The finite verb shows full agreement with the subject, the modifiers agree with the head of the noun phrase, and past participles agree with promoted and clitic objects in those Romance languages that display participial agreement. There are however some exceptional agreement patterns in Romance, which will be examined here. This chapter is divided into three main parts. The first concerns agreement restrictions (or oddities) on Romance pronouns and pronominal clusters, the second examines some agreement facts in verb/argument structures, and the third one targets agreement restrictions/oddities within the DP. Keywords: agreement, agreement restrictions, PCC, impersonal si, anti-agreement effects

1 Introduction – Agreement in Romance Romance languages mostly exhibit uniform agreement patterns: The finite verb shows full agreement with the subject, the modifiers agree with the head of their noun phrase, and past participles agree with promoted objects in those Romance languages that display participial agreement. There are however some exceptional cases, i.e. constructions featuring unexpected patterns that are not found elsewhere in Romance. This chapter deals with such irregularities, which have been referred to as ‘constraints’ on agreement (for instance by Bonet 1991), agreement ‘restrictions’ (D’Alessandro/Fischer/Hrafnbjargarson 2008), ‘eccentric’ agreement (Hale 2002; Bobaljik/Branigan 2006), ‘anti-agreement’ (Ouhalla 1993), ‘exceptional’ agreement (Zwicky 1986), agreement ‘displacement’ (Bright 1957; Harris 1981), and agreement ‘mismatch’ (Corbett 1990). In the rest of the chapter, we will use the neutral terms ‘restrictions’ for those cases in which the occurrence of one element restricts or limits the occurrence of another, and ‘oddity’ for an unexpected agreement pattern that is not caused by any element involved but holds for the construction as a whole. This chapter is divided into three main parts. The first concerns agreement restrictions on pronouns and pronominal clusters, the second looks at some agreement facts in verb/argument structures, and the third one examines agreement restrictions/oddities within the DP.

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The first and the second part inevitably overlap: A pronoun can be an argument, thus restrictions on verb/argument agreement will also concern pronouns when we are dealing with a pronominal argument. We have nevertheless decided to keep the two sections separate, with the intention of giving more emphasis to one aspect or the other: If it seems that the pronominal nature is central to the restriction, then the phenomenon will be listed under ‘pronominal restrictions’. If it is instead the construction itself that appears to be responsible for bringing in the restriction, and this restriction/oddity also targets full DPs, the phenomenon will be filed under ‘argumental restrictions’. We have tried to provide an overview of the better-known agreement phenomena in Romance. Some have been studied for several years, in which case we have reproduced the main theoretical insights into the constructions and the most widely received analyses. Some other phenomena, on the other hand, are understudied, or almost unknown. We have decided to include these phenomena too, and to report what is known, in an attempt to draw a picture of agreement restrictions and oddities in Romance that is as accurate and inclusive as possible.

2 Agreement restrictions with pronouns This section deals with agreement restrictions involving pronouns. Before moving on to the various constructions under investigation, some general remarks are in order. First, pronouns in Romance usually encode number and person information. Gender information is restricted to 3rd person pronouns. Case was lost on full DPs in most Romance languages, with the exception of Romanian, which retains a direct/oblique distinction, and of some southern Italian varieties and again Romanian, which have a dedicated marker for vocative. However, all Romance languages have retained case distinctions on pronouns. Case in fact proves to be a crucial factor in determining some restrictions on pronominal clusters. In this section, we consider restrictions involving pronouns that do not affect the corresponding full DPs. We start by examining one of the most widely studied restrictions, the so-called PCC (Person Case Constraint), first analysed by Bonet (1991). We then turn to agreement restrictions on courtesy pronouns, which to our knowledge have not been addressed by any study so far. We continue with some PCC-like restrictions in causative constructions, which are much less well known and less widely studied. Lastly, we examine a different sort of restriction, which is not caused by the pronominal nature of the element involved in it, but does involve a pronominal element: impersonal si/se in Romance. This pronoun, when used impersonally or as an impersonal passive construction, only allows a 3rd person internal argument (Cinque 1988; D’Alessandro 2004; 2007).

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2.1 The PCC in Italo-Romance varieties, Italian, Romanian, and French dialects Almost none of the Romance languages allow combinations of a 3rd person dative clitic and a 1st/2nd person accusative clitic. (1)

It. *Giorgio gli ti ha presentato. Giorgio to.him= you= has introduced ‘Giorgio introduced you to him.’

The restriction holds even if the dative clitic stands for a nonargumental dative1 (e.g. benefactive/malefactive adjuncts or datives of inalienable possession), or when it is the complement of a preposition as in the following example. (2)

It. *Non mi gli posso not me= to.him= can-1SG ‘I cannot sit next to him.’

sedere sit

accanto. near

The PCC holds even if the 3rd person dative is reflexive, as in (3). Notice that the same clitic combination is fine if the reflexive clitic stands for the direct object as in (3): (3)

It.

a. *Giorgio ti si è comprato Giorgio you= for.himself= is bought ‘Giorgio bought you as his slave.’ b.

come as

Giorgio ti si è presentato come Giorgio to.you= himself= is introduced as ‘Giorgio introduced himself to you as a doctor.’

schiavo. slave

dottore. doctor

Bonet (1991, 192) notices that true 1st/2nd person reflexives are better tolerated than inherent reflexives, i.e. reflexive clitics marking a particular set of unaccusative verbs deriving from transitive ones; cf. Reinhart/Reuland (1993), among others. vaig recomanar (jo mateix) ahir. (4) Cat. ??A en Pere, me li yesterday to the Pere, me= to.him= go-1.SG recommend (I self) ‘I recommended myself to him (Pere) yesterday.’ 1 An anonymous reviewer points out that bene-/malefactives are not always adjuncts and that consequently a different label should be used such as ‘applicative datives’ or ‘free adjunct datives’ in order to distinguish them from true ‘nonargumental datives’ – e.g. ethical datives – which cannot even be expressed as full DPs/PPs. We are using the term ‘nonargumental’ in a very descriptive way to refer to nonobligatory complements.

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Ethical datives tend to escape the restriction (Perlmutter 1971; Rouveret/Vergnaud 1980, 169–171; Bonet 1991, 197). (5)

Cat.

No me li diguis not to.me= to.him/her= tell.SUBJ ‘Don’t tell him/her lies (on me).’

mentides. lies

The acceptability of combinations of 1st/2nd person clitics is subject to crosslinguistic variation. In some languages, like Spanish or French (Bonet 1991), these combinations are reported to be completely ungrammatical (although there is no full consensus; cf. Nicol 2005), while in other languages, like Italian, some clusters are in fact very marginal, but still interpretable, at least when both elements are singular (we will see that combinations of plural clitics are generally more degraded than those formed by singular pronouns). ‘me to you / you to me’

(6) It. a.

%Mario

mi

ti

ha

presentato.

b.

??Mario

mi

vi

ha

presentato/i. ‘me to you-PL / you-PL to me’

c.

??Mario

ti

ci

ha

presentato/i. ‘you to us / us to you’

d.

*?Mario

vi

ci

ha

presentati.

‘you-PL to us’

Mario cl= cl= has introduced Romanian exhibits a different pattern, as some of the above combinations are not subject to the PCC (Săvescu 2007). In proclisis, Romanian allows combinations including a second person singular accusative clitic, as in (7), and, to a lesser extent, a first person singular accusative clitic, as in (8). (7)

(8)

Rom.

Rom.

a.

Mi tea prezentat Ion la to.me= you= has introduced John at ‘John introduced you to me at the party.’

b.

I teau recomandat ieri. to.him/her= you= has recommended yesterday ‘They recommended you to him yesterday.’

a. *Ţi ma prezentat Ion la to.you= me= has introduced John at ‘John introduced me to you at the party.’ b.

%I

petrecere. party.

petrecere. party

m- au recomandat ieri. to.him/her me has recommended yesterday. ‘They recommended me to him yesterday.’

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Proclitic combinations are ungrammatical when the 3rd person dative clitic is reflexive, as in (9a), or when 1st/2nd person clitics are plural, as in (9b): (9)

Rom.

a. *Maria si m/te a luat drept sclav. Mary herself= me/you= has taken as slave ‘Mary has taken me/you to be her slave (for herself).’ b.

*/?? Ni

v a recomandat to.us= you.PL = has recommended ‘Mary has introduced you.PL to us.’

Maria. Mary

Combinations of singular enclitics, conversely, are always permitted. This is consistent with the above observation that clusters of plural clitics are more degraded than the others, although Nevins/Săvescu (2010) argue for an alternative explanation elaborating on the hypothesis that singular clitics in Romanian are not subject to the PCC – but only in enclisis – because they are not case-syncretic. Lastly, there are varieties in which the PCC does not hold. This is the case in several southern Italian dialects, such as that spoken in Arielli, where all the above clitic combinations are in fact allowed: (10)

Ariellese

a.

Giorgə ji t’ a prisindatə. Giorgio to.him= you= has introduced ‘Giorgio introduced you to him.’

b.

Ni mmi ji pozzə not me= to.him= can-1SG ‘I cannot sit near him.’

c.

Giorgə ti z’ a Giorgio you= for.himself= has ‘Giorgio bought you as his slave.’

assəttà sit

m’baccə. near

‘ccattatə bought

pi for

sservə. slave

The above data mean that, descriptively speaking, the PCC is a constellation of restrictions, some of which are subject to linguistic variation, rather than a single constraint. This said, there is no consensus on the nature of the restriction. Functionalist accounts observe that PCC combinations correspond to infrequent argument configurations (Haspelmath 2004), but it is not clear to us how to demonstrate that the constraint results from frequency effects and not the other way around. Moreover, it is somewhat unclear why the PCC targets combinations of clitic pronouns, while strong pronouns – which are expected to occur with the same low frequency – are unconstrained. Formal accounts differ as to whether the constraint is morphological or syntactic in nature. Morphological accounts argue that the constraint does not follow from syntactic principles (ultimately, from Agree-like procedures, Chomsky 2001), but

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from an extra-syntactic (say, morphological) filter preventing certain clitic pronouns or agreement affixes from co-occurring (Perlmutter 1971). In this view (cf. Bonet 1991; 1995, among others), the constraint filters certain feature bundles at the syntax-PF interface; this hypothesis explains why certain combinations of clitic pronouns or agreement markers are subject to the constraint although the corresponding featural configuration is legible at the syntax-LF interface. Alternatively, it is argued that the constraint follows from an agreement restriction (lato sensu) which occurs as a consequence of a multiple Agree configuration (Anagnostopoulou 2003; Adger/Harbour 2007; Nevins 2007, among others) or is due to a minimality restriction (Bianchi 2006; Săvescu 2007). Anagnostopoulou (2005) argues that the PCC arises as two goals compete to check the same features against a single probe. In a nutshell, let us suppose that both objects have to check against a head endowed with an uninterpretable feature F: If the indirect object checks F, the direct object cannot enter an Agree relation with the same probe and consequently the derivation ends up crashing. Conversely, if the indirect object does not check the feature F, the sentence is grammatical as the direct object is allowed to enter the Agree relation. According to this kind of explanation, the PCC ultimately resides on the featural specification of each element: F clitics trigger the PCC, while non-F clitics (hence, 3rd person accusative clitics) can occur in any clitic combination. The fact that the constraint is subject to crosslinguistic variation (cf. above) may be problematic for accounts that suggest that the restriction follows directly from a basic mechanism of Narrow Syntax. To overcome the objection, we can either argue that crosslinguistic variation depends on the featural specifications of each item (i.e. on whether or not the clitic bears a valued/interpretable feature F) or, following Nevins (2007), one may argue that the agree relation is parameterized: F stands for a constellation of binary features and, given a specific feature (e.g. [participant]), the probe can search for a single value (positive, negative, or contrastive) of that specific feature. Bianchi (2006) departs from a multiple Agree analysis and argues instead for an explanation based on Rizzi’s Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990). She proposes that each clitic pronoun is in a dependency relation with a Person head in the CP layer. Since such Person projections are rigidly ordered in a cartographic-like fashion, the dependency relations in a ditransitive construction may either cross each other as in (11a) or one may be nested into the other as in (11b). In the latter configuration, Relativized Minimality is violated as the lower clitic enters a dependency with the higher PersonP rather than with the nearest one: (11)

a.

Person1P

Person2P

...

clitic

clitic

b. *Person1P

Person2P

...

clitic

clitic

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The Romance languages differ further with respect to strategies of PCC avoidance. In Ibero-Romance, for instance, the PCC is avoided by replacing the dative clitic with a strong pronoun, which is not mandatorily focused in these cases (Bonet 1991, 204). For instance, in (12a), a PCC environment, the dative clitic can be replaced by a nonfocused strong pronoun, while in (12b), where the PCC does not hold, the strong dative pronoun is mandatorily focused (focus is represented conventionally with capital letters):2 (12)

Sp.

a.

Me (*le) recomendaron a (*to.him) recommended.they to ‘They recommended me to him.’

él/ÉL. him

b.

Lo recomendaron a *él/ÉL. it/him recommended.they to him ‘They recommended it/him to him.’

Another strategy for avoiding PCC violations is the substitution of the 3rd person dative clitic with a locative exponent. This pattern is allowed in Barceloní Catalan (Bonet 1991, 209; 2008), French (Rezac 2010), and, marginally, in Italian (Pescarini 2010). In the following Catalan example, for instance, the substitution of the 3rd person dative clitic li with the locative item hi seems to overcome the PCC: (13)

Cat.

A en Pere m’ hi/*li va to the Pere me there/*to.him go.3SG ‘Josep recommended me to him (Pere).’

recomanar recommend

en the

Josep. Josep

Another controversial aspect is the type of feature(s) triggering the constraint. As the name suggests, the PCC is often regarded as a restriction on Person and Case: Abstracting away from crosslinguistic variation, the core restriction is that which prevents clitic combinations in which the accusative pronoun is [+participant]. Further research, however, has revealed that the PCC might be a constraint on animacy-related features and that person features are involved insofar as they are related to animacy: In particular, 1st/2nd person pronouns are intrinsically animate and, in many (but not all) Romance languages, the 3rd person dative clitic has become a [+human] pronoun. In French, Catalan, and Italian, for instance, only human referents can be pronominalized by the dative clitic, as in (14), while the locative clitic is used to reference nonhuman datives, as in (14) (Rigau 1982; Bonet 2008). 2 In other languages, however, the restriction in (12b) is not attested as 3rd person strong pronouns can co-occur with another focused element even in combination with a 3rd person accusative clitic: (i) MATTIA l’ ha raccomandato a lui. Mattia him= has recommended to him ‘Mattia recommended it/him to him.’

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It.

a.

Gli dedico molto tempo to.him= dedicate-1SG much time ‘I dedicate much time to him (Carlo).’

b. *Gli/ci dedico molto tempo to.it= dedicate-1SG much time ‘I dedicate much time to it (soccer).’

a Carlo. (to Carlo)

al calcio. (to soccer)

The fact that the dative clitic is restricted to human referents is, historically speaking, a puzzle. In fact, third person dative clitics – like third person accusative clitics – derive from the Latin demonstrative ILLE ‘that’, which in origin did not exhibit any animacy-related restriction. This means that the above restriction emerged as soon as the dative determiner ILLI (S ) became a clitic pronoun, but to the best of our knowledge no proposal has been put forward in the recent literature that could explain a development of this type (cf. Pescarini 2015 for a tentative analysis based on the parallelism between Romance cliticization and English double object constructions). The hypothesis that the PCC is an animacy restriction may shed light on the contrast in (14): Since the locative clitic is not endowed with an animacy-related feature, it is not subject to the PCC even if it exceptionally stands for a 3rd person animate. Not in all Romance languages, however, are 3rd person dative clitics restricted to human referents. In Ibero-Romance, for instance, the 3rd person clitic le(s) may stand for an inanimate noun (notably, this is allowed in a language that displays no locative clitics like It. ci, Fr. y, or Cat. hi, which are normally used to pronominalize inanimate datives). Even if they reference an animate element, however, 3rd person datives are subject to the PCC, cf. (15) (Ormazabal/Romero 2007), although Bonet (2008) observes that the ungrammaticality of (15) persists even if the dative clitic is omitted, as in (16). The ungrammaticality of (15) must therefore follow from some orthogonal constraint. (15)

Sp. *Te le pongo a ti (de pata) you= to.it= I.put a you (as leg) ‘I assemble you as a leg of the table.’

(16)

Sp. *Te pongo a ti (de pata) a you= I.put a you (as leg) to ‘I assemble you as a leg of the table.’

la the

a to

la the

mesa. table

mesa. table

Further evidence for an animacy-based analysis of the PCC comes from Leista Spanish, namely those Ibero-Romance dialects in which the dative clitic le (pl. les) may stand for human direct objects. In these varieties, the clitic le is subject to the PCC even if it stands for the direct object: As shown in (17), the le meaning ‘him’ cannot combine with a 1st/2nd person dative clitic. In this environment, Leista speakers must retreat to the exponent lo, as in (17) (Ormazabal/Romero 2007).

Agreement restrictions and agreement oddities

(17)

Sp.

275

a. *Te le di. to.you= him= give-PST.1SG ‘I give him to you.’ b.

Te lo di. to.you= it= give-PST.1SG ‘I give it to you.’

Things become even more complicated in dialects of French and Italian where the 3rd person dative clitic is always expressed by the locative clitic (e.g. Fr. y instead of lui/leur ‘to him/her/them’) as a consequence of historical changes that made the etymological 3rd person dative clitic form fall out of use (Calabrese 1994). The dative/locative syncretism affects the PCC in two opposite ways: It may prevent the PCC, i.e. the 3rd person dative clitic is free to occur with a 1st/2nd person clitic (Rezac 2011), or the PCC may be extended to the locative clitic, i.e. the dative/ locative clitic cannot occur with 1st/2nd person clitics even when it has a locative interpretation. For instance, in certain northern Italian dialects like Vicentino the locative clitic ghe, which is syncretic with the 3rd person dative clitic, is free to combine with 1st/2nd person singular pronouns, while the combinations with plural clitics are – again – more degraded. (18)

Ventino

??ne

us=

ghe there=

porta brings

Carlo. Carlo

b. ??ve you.PL =

ghe there=

porta brings

Carlo. Carlo

a.

2.2 PCC-like effects in causative constructions In various Romance languages, the causee can occur as either a dative complement or as a PP headed by the preposition da (It.), par (Fr.) etc. (Kayne 1975). For the sake of consistency, many of the following data are from Italian, but the same holds for other Romance languages. (19)

It.

a.

Micol fa pettinare Giulia a Giulia to Micol make-3SG comb ‘Micol makes Carlo comb Giulia’s hair.’

Carlo. Carlo

b.

Micol fa pettinare Giulia da Giulia by Micol make-3SG comb ‘Micol makes Carlo comb Giulia’s hair.’

Carlo. Carlo

Unlike the a-causee, the da-phrase cannot be resumed by a dative clitic:

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Roberta D’Alessandro and Diego Pescarini

It.

a.

A Carlo, Micol gli fa Micol to.himi= make-3SG to Carloi ‘Micol makes Carlo comb Giulia’s hair.’

pettinare comb

Giulia. Giulia

b. *Da Carlo, Micol gli fa by Carloi Micol to.himi= make-3SG ‘Micol makes Carlo comb Giulia’s hair.’

pettinare comb

Giulia. Giulia

What is of interest here is that dative causees, regardless of their clitic or phrasal status, trigger a sort of PCC: In fact, 1st/2nd person clitic pronouns cannot co-occur with the a-causee, while they can occur when the causee is introduced by the preposition da; cf. (21a) vs. (21b). As in the canonical PCC pattern, 3rd person clitics, by contrast, are always unconstrained; cf. (22a) vs. (22b). (21)

(22)

It.

It.

a. *Micol Micol

mi me=

pettinare comb

a to

Carlo. Carlo

b.

Micol mi fa pettinare Micol me= make-3SG comb ‘Micol makes Carlo comb my hair.’

da by

Carlo. Carlo

a.

Micol Micol

pettinare comb

a to

Carlo. Carlo

b.

Micol la fa pettinare Micol her= make-3SG comb ‘Micol makes Carlo comb her hair.’

da by

Carlo. Carlo

la her=

fa make-3SG

fa make-3SG

The restriction in (21) is sometimes referred to as the Fancy Constraint (Postal 1989) and has received far less attention than the canonical PCC. In fact, the link between the PCC and the Fancy Constraint is far from straightforward. Besides the fact that the former, unlike the latter, targets only clitic combinations, they differ with respect to the behaviour of reflexives. In fact, the Fancy Constraint targets every type of reflexive clitic, including 3rd person, while 3rd person direct objects are not subject to the PCC, regardless of whether or not they are reflexives: (23)

It.

Si fa visitare da(/*a) to/*from him/her-self= make-3SG visit ‘He/she makes Linda visit him/her.’

Linda. Linda

Moreover, causative environments allow us to observe how two dative arguments (namely, the causee and the indirect object) do co-occur. Speakers allow sentences in which the causee is clitic and the indirect object is phrasal, as in (24a), while the opposite configuration is rejected, namely, phrasal causee and clitic indirect object, cf. (24b), unless the causee is expressed by a PP as in (24b’):

Agreement restrictions and agreement oddities

(24)

It.

Le faccio telefonare to.her= make-1SG phone ‘I make her phone Carlo.’

a to

Carlo. Carlo

b. *Le faccio telefonare to.her= make-1SG phone ‘I make Carlo phone her.’

a to

Carlo. Carlo

a.

b’.

Le faccio telefonare to.her= make-1SG phone ‘I make Carlo phone her.’

da from

277

Carlo. Carlo

When both arguments are 3rd person clitics, the sentence is ungrammatical if both clitics climb; cf. (25a) vs. (25b) (Kayne 1975, 297): (25)

Fr.

a. *Elle she b.

me me=

Elle me she me=

lui to.him

présentera, introduce-FUT.3SG

présentera introduce-FUT.3SG

à to

lui. him

Double dative constructions are allowed if and only if the causee is 1st/2nd person and the indirect object is 3rd person. The acceptability of such combinations is subject to crosslinguistic variation: They are not allowed in Italian and Spanish, while some Italian dialects and French are more liberal (on French, cf. Strozer 1976, 171; Rezac 2010). Notice that the acceptability does not depend on the linear order of clitics. The following set of examples from French and Italian dialects shows that the restriction holds regardless of the linear order of pronouns. (26) Fr.

Vicentino

a. Je vais te le lui faire donner. I= go to.you.CAUSEE = it.DO = to.him.IO = make give b. Te ghe lo fasso portare. to.you.CAUSEE = to.him.IO = it.DO = I.make bring

S. Val., Abr.3 c. jə tə lu faccə purtà. to.him.IO = to.you.CAUSEE = it.DO = I.make bring ‘I make you bring it to him.’

2.3 Courtesy forms Courtesy forms are normally used to avoid direct reference to the hearer. In Italian, either 3rd person feminine pronouns or 2nd person plural pronouns may be used 3 Southern Italian dialect of San Valentino in Abruzzo Citeriore.

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as courtesy forms. With respect to the PCC, courtesy forms behave like 2nd person clitics, regardless of their apparent 3rd person morphology: (27)

It. *Giorgio glie l’ ha Giorgio to.him= her(‘you’)= has ‘Giorgio introduced you to him.’

presentata. introduced

Courtesy forms exhibit a rather puzzling pattern of agreement. They normally exhibit grammatical agreement with the inflected verb, but semantic agreement with other constituents such as adjectives or past participles. Hence, if the hearer is masculine, adjectives and participles will display the masculine singular ending regardless of the morphology of the courtesy pronoun: (28)

It.

Lei è simpatico. she(‘you’) is nice-M . SG ‘You are nice.’

(29)

It.

Voi siete simpatico. you.PL are nice-M . SG ‘You.SG are nice.’

If the courtesy form is an object clitic, however, the honorific systems of Italian diverge as the 3rd person feminine singular courtesy form always exhibits grammatical agreement: (30)

It.

L’ ho vist -a/*-o her(=you) I.have seen-F. SG /*M . SG ‘I have often seen you here.’

(31)

It.

Vi ho vist-o/-a you.PL = I.have seen-M . SG /F. SG ‘I have often seen you.SG here.’

spesso often

spesso often

qui. here

qui. here

To sum up, with respect to the PCC, courtesy forms behave like 2nd person singular pronouns: They cannot co-occur with a dative clitic even if they are morphologically 3rd person. Furthermore, courtesy forms display a puzzling mismatch between grammatical and semantic agreement when the courtesy form agrees with a nominal element (a predicative adjective or the past participle): Normally agreement is controlled by the referent save for the clitic la, which triggers grammatical feminine agreement (on further grammatical/semantic gender mismatches, cf. section 4.2).

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2.4 Impersonal si/se constructions in Italian, Spanish, and Romanian The se/si pronoun in Romance has several uses: It can be used as a reflexive (in which case it displays a fully-fledged paradigm), as an inchoative, as an aspectual marker, and as an impersonal ‘subject’. It is the agreement patterns of the last of these that interests us here, in sentences like (32): (32)

It.

Si vedono molte automobili in questo in this si= see.3PL many.F. PL car.F. PL ‘One sees many cars in this neighbourhood.’

quartiere. neighbourhood

The exact status of si in (32) is much debated, but it is not strictly relevant here. What matters is that in these constructions there is quirky agreement between the finite verb and the internal argument (in the case of the example, both automobili and vedono are plural), which bears nominative. This construction can only have a 3rd person internal argument (Burzio 1986; Cinque 1988). A 1st or 2nd person pronoun is banned. (33)

It. *Vi si vedono in you.PL = si= see.3PL on ‘One can see you on TV.’

televisione. TV

Note that there is a parallel construction in which the internal argument does not agree with the finite verb and carries accusative case. This construction is illustrated in (34) and does not present the person restriction. (34)

It.

Lo/vi si vede. it/you= si= sees.3SG ‘One sees him/you.PL .’

In (34) the internal argument carries accusative, and the verb is inflected as 3rd person singular. This has led many linguists (most notably, Cinque 1988) to assume that si has a different status, i.e. argumental or nonargumental, in agreeing vs. nonagreeing constructions, respectively. If si is argumental, it withdraws the external theta-role and blocks accusative, thus making it impossible for the object to receive Accusative case. For the Case filter, the object will then need to agree with the inflectional head T. Cinque does not discuss the agreement restriction in detail. If si is not argumental, accusative can be assigned to the object. A further complication arises when observing the difference between impersonal si constructions with unaccusative verbs, which show plural agreement on the

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predicative adjective or on the past participle, and impersonal si constructions with unergative verbs, which show default masculine singular agreement instead. (35)

It.

Si è arrivat-i. si= is.3.SG arrived-M . PL ‘One has arrived/we have arrived.’

(36)

It.

Si è lavorat-o. si= is.3.SG worked-M . SG ‘One has worked/we have worked.’

An easy way to account for the singular/plural alternation on the participle would be to consider si as argumental in each of these constructions. In (35), as the verb is unaccusative, si can be the internal argument. In (36), with an unergative verb, si is an external argument. The obvious question then is why we do not see plural agreement on the auxiliary in (35). In sentences with a bona fide pronominal argument, like for instance loro, we see agreement on both the auxiliary and the participle, as illustrated in (37). (37)

It.

Loro sono they are.3.PL ‘They arrived.’

arrivat-i. arrived-M . PL

This leaves us with a dilemma: If impersonal si is argumental, why do agreement paradigms arise like those seen above? If it is not, then what exactly is it? And, for the purposes of the present chapter: Why does si trigger agreement restrictions on Nominative objects and only partial agreement on the auxiliary? Different answers have been provided to these questions over the years. Cinque (1988), as summarized above, has proposed a different argumental status for the two sis in the two constructions. In one case si is a quasi-argument which cannot absorb accusative; hence, accusative is assigned normally to the internal argument. In the object-agreeing constructions, instead, si is an argument that creates a semi-passive construction by absorbing the external theta role and blocking accusative assignment, in compliance with Burzio’s generalisation. Given that accusative cannot be assigned to the internal argument, this must take nominative. The agreement restriction is due to the arbitrary nature of si. According to D’Alessandro (2004; 2007), si does not have two different statuses, nor does it absorb or block Case in any way. Si is a 3rd person pronoun, bearing a 3rd person feature as well as an unvalued number. This pronoun incorporates on the T head, hence valuing the verb as 3rd person. The constructions in which agreement takes place between T and the internal argument are similar to Icelandic quirky dative constructions: Si is in any case an external argument, but T is not a

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fully transitive head. Si is 3rd person, and it is incorporated on T; T agrees with the internal argument to get its features valued. At this point, a condition on multiple agreement applies (the condition proposed by Anagnostopoulou 2003 and discussed in 2.1. for the PCC), licensing only the internal argument that hosts the same person feature as si (namely, 3rd). A different feature specification would cause a feature mismatch on the T head, with consequent derivation crash. The inclusive reading that emerges in sentences like (35) or (36) is due to a semantic/pragmatic feature, parasitic on person, which is directly linked to the Speech Act projection. The inclusive reading (i.e. the ‘we’ reading) is shown to be determined by event boundedness, and to be available with all verb classes (contra Cinque 1988). The same multiple agreement restriction holds, as mentioned, in Icelandic quirky dative constructions as well as in Spanish olvidarse constructions, which cannot have an inner argument other than 3rd person. Thus, the agreement restriction arises according to D’Alessandro because of the syntactic structure in which si occurs, not because of its different status. The two constructions, with and without object agreement, are structurally different in that one denotes a bounded event and one does not. Where there is a bounded event, an inner aspectual head is present in the v field. The mismatch between the singular auxiliary and the plural participle illustrated in (35) is again due to the fact that si is a 3rd person pronoun that incorporates on T, valuing it as 3rd person singular. Number remains unvalued, and it is marked as default at lexical insertion as a Match of two unvalued features. In unaccusatives, the past participle probes si, which is merged as an internal argument, because of the fact that v is not a phase head in unaccusatives. The plural value is assigned to the participle by [arb] feature, which once again gets valued by the referents of the Speech Act. The construction always has an inclusive reading, as also noted by Cinque (1988).

3 Agreement restrictions with arguments 3.1 Anti-agreement effects with postverbal and/or dislocated subjects in Tuscan and Ligurian A number of Romance dialects, most notably those spoken in central Italy, have been reported to display a curious agreement effect. This effect, which we will call anti-agreement, as it is reminiscent of a similar phenomenon found in Arabic and Berber, consists in a lack of agreement with subjects in postverbal position (Corbett 1979; Brandi/Cordin 1989; Fassi Fehri 1993; Saccon 1993).

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This agreement pattern is discussed Saccon (1993) and Cardinaletti (1997) from a formal syntactic point of view. Cardinaletti reports, for the variety of Anconetano, sentences like (38), where we see full agreement between the subject and the finite verb only if the subject is preverbal. (38) Anconetano a. Questo, lo fa sempre i bambini. this.ACC it does always the children.NOM b. *Questo, i bambini lo fa this.ACC the children.NOM it-ACC does

sempre. always

c. Questo, i bambini lo fanno sempre. this.ACC the children.NOM it-ACC do always In (38), we see that full agreement takes place when the subject is in its canonical preverbal position. If the subject i bambini is in postverbal position, the finite verb will show a default 3rd singular ending. Saccon and Cardinaletti both analyse this construction along the same lines, namely by arguing that full agreement only takes place when the subject is VP-internal or in canonical Spec,TP position. When the subject is extraposed, the verb agrees with a pro which forms a chain with the overt subject for case assignment. Recently these data have been brought to the centre of syntactic debate by Noam Chomsky, who, in a series of talks about labelling, as well as in a paper (Chomsky 2013), has argued that anti-agreement can be attributed to a labelling issue. Chomsky mentions Rizzi’s observation regarding the fact that in an XP YP configuration (i.e. when the subject is in Spec,TP in traditional terms) agreement must always be full. For further speculations on this, cf. D’Alessandro (2013).

3.2 Inflected infinitives in Portuguese and Sardinian Romance languages display head movement of the finite verb to T, the head hosting tense and agreement.4 Infinitives are not inflected for number and person in Romance. This means that they are generally assumed not to move to T. There are however some well-known exceptions: European Portuguese (Por.), and to some extent Brazilian Portuguese, Galician, and Sardinian, all have inflected infinitives of the form illustrated in (39) for Portuguese:5 4 In previous stages of generative syntax, this head was split into an I/T head and an AgrS head, the former encoding tense/aspectual information, the second proper φ-agreement information. Before then, I or Infl was considered to host an agreement feature (Agr) and a tense feature (T), the latter assigning Nominative to the subject under government (later, simply in a specifier-head configuration). 5 It has been shown that, although Romance infinitives do not move to T, they move to some intermediate position between V and T. For a detailed overview of the position occupied by infinitive as well as finite verbs in Romance, cf. Ledgeway/Lombardi (2005) and Ledgeway (2012).

Agreement restrictions and agreement oddities

(39)

Por.

283

a.

(para) eu falar

(for) I to-speak-1.SG

b.

(para) tu falares

(for) you to-speak-2.SG

c.

(para) ela falar

(for) she to-speak-3.SG

d.

(para) nós falarmos

(for) we to-speak-1.PL

e.

(para) vocês falarem

(for) you to-speak-2.PL

f.

(para) elas falarem

(for) they to-speak-3.PL (from Madeira 1994, 180)

Inflected infinitives can occur with overt as well as null referential subjects, and are mainly licensed in embedded clauses (Raposo 1987; Madeira 1994; Ambar 1994; Sitaridou 2002; Mensching 2000), in infinitival subject clauses, or in adjuncts headed by a preposition. The following example, taken from Raposo’s (1987) influential work, exemplifies some of the contexts in which inflected infinitives appear in EP. (40) Sp. a. Será difícil [eles aprovarem a proposta]. be.FUT.3SG difficult they.3PL approve.INF.3PL the proposal ‘It will be difficult for them to approve the proposal.’ b. *Será

difícil

[eles

aprovar___ a proposta]. (adapted from Raposo 1987, 86)

Raposo’s analysis accounts for the presence of inflection on an infinitive (which does not have Tense) by adopting a model whereby tense and agreement are separate features on Infl, and by proposing that they can be specified independently. A head specified as [+T] is usually able to assign Nominative. A head specified as [+Agr] can assign case, when T is not finite, only when Agr is itself marked for case. Take for example (40). Its structure is as in (41): (41)

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In (41), the subject infinitive [eles aprovar a proposta] is extraposed and coindexed with pro in Spec,Infl2. Since Infl2 is specified as [+T], it can assign Nominative case to pro. The case of pro is then “passed” to the InflP with which it forms a CHAIN . From InflP, Nominative percolates down to its head Infl, and hence to +Agr. At this point, this Infl head with no +T can assign Nominative to eles in its specifier. The basic idea of having Nominative assigned by noninflected T in some languages, or in some specific constructions, is also adopted by Mensching (2000) and Ledgeway (2000), for Sardinian and some southern Italian dialects, respectively. Whether a [–T] head can or cannot assign Nominative is considered to be a parameter. Inflected infinitives, as we have seen, are mainly restricted to embedded clauses. Not all verb types can license an inflected infinitive, however. Madeira (1994) provides a list of possible contexts for inflected infinitives in Portuguese, which are licensed as complements to declarative/epistemic predicates, complements to factive predicates, complements to perception verbs, and complements to causative predicates. As we have seen in the case of (40), they can also appear in infinitival subject clauses, and in adjunct clauses introduced by a preposition. Finally, observe that overt subjects can be licensed in some contexts by infinitives in Romance. We will not address this issue here as it is not directly relevant to agreement facts, given that we do not see inflection. The reader is referred to Ledgeway (2000) and Mensching (2000) for an overview of these constructions.

3.3 Agreement mismatch marking and omnivorous agreement in Abruzzese Finite verbs in Romance do not show gender agreement. The variety spoken in Ripatransone (Ascoli Piceno, Ripano henceforth), however, does. This variety has a fully-fledged paradigm for masculine and feminine finite verbs, as exemplified in (42). (42) Ripano a. I’ ridu (‘I laugh’-M . SG ) tu ridu (‘you laugh’-M . SG ) issu ridu (‘he laughs’-M . SG ) noja ridemi voja rideti issi ridi c. i’so risu (‘I have laughed-M . SG ) tu sci risu issu e risu noja semi risi voja seti risi

b. ìa ride (‘I laugh’-F. SG ) tu ride (‘you laugh’-F. SG ) esse ride noja ridema voja rideta essa ride d. ìa so rise (‘I have laughed’-F. SG ) tu si rise esse e rise noja sema risa voja seta risa (Rossi 2008, 3)

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Interestingly, Ripano also displays agreement mismatch marking in transitive constructions: If the arguments of the verb have different gender or number specifications, the finite verb (and often the auxiliary) will exhibit a special agreement mismatch marker, namely -ə: (43)

Ripano

a.

Babbu dicə dad-M . SG says-3RDSG . N ‘Dad tells the truth.’

le the-F. SG

vərità. truth-F. SG (Mancini 1988, 107)

b.

So magnatə lu pani. the-M . SG bread-roll-M . SG am eaten-N ‘I(F ) have eaten the bread roll.’

These patterns have not been widely studied. D’Alessandro (2016) proposes that these mismatches are due to the fact that v in this variety is a complex probe, which is made up of two probes SHARING their features (Ouali 2008). Each of the two vs targets one argument. Given a requirement on uniformity of agreement, of the sort proposed by Anagnostopoulou (2003; 2005) and already discussed for the PCC, the two vs will have to show the same agreement ending. If this uniformity is not granted, because the two arguments have different featural specifications, the agreement ending of the verb will be a mismatch marker. The same complex v structure is found, according to D’Alessandro, in neighbouring dialects. In particular, the dialect spoken in Arielli shows omnivorous number (D’Alessandro/Roberts 2010; D’Alessandro/Ledgeway 2010; D’Alessandro 2016): The finite verb (and the auxiliary) will agree with whichever argument is plural. Plural agreement is thus selected whenever plural appears on any argument of a transitive (or even a ditransitive) verb, as exemplified in (44). (44) Ariellese a. Giuwannə a pittatə nu murə. have-3 painted-PP. SG a.SG wall-M John-SG ‘John has painted a wall.’ [sg SUBJ – sg OBJ] b. Giuwannə a pittitə ddu murə. have-3 painted-PP. PL two walls-M John-SG ‘John has painted two walls.’ [sg SUBJ – pl OBJ] c. Giuwannə e Mmarijə a pittitə nu murə. John and Mary-PL have-3 painted-PP. PL a.SG wall-M ‘John and Mary have painted a wall.’ [pl SUBJ – sg OBJ] d. Giuwannə e Mmarijə a pittitə ddu murə. John and Mary-PL have-3 painted-PP. PL two walls-M ‘John and Mary have painted two walls.’ [pl SUBJ – pl OBJ] (D’Alessandro/Roberts 2010, 45)

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Here, as in Ripano, the complex v targets both arguments. If one of the two arguments is specified as plural, the agreement ending inserted in this case will be plural.

4 Agreement restrictions within the DP 4.1 Agreement asymmetries In various Romance languages, DP-internal agreement is asymmetric: Agreement is mandatory with postnominal modifiers, while prenominal modifiers lack agreement. Rhaeto-Romance varieties, for instance, exhibit a pattern of partial agreement which Haiman/Benincà (1992, 219–222) term the ‘Ladin lazy agreement rule’. In some Central Ladin varieties only the element in DP-final position exhibits feminine plural morphology, expressed by the suffix -es. The leftmost elements of the DP, by contrast, never display feminine plural endings. This is exemplified in the following examples from a dialect spoken in the Fassa Valley (Rasom 2008): (45)

Fassa Valley

l-a cès-es the-F. SG house-F. PL ‘the houses’

With adjectives, the possible patterns are as follows: With a prenominal adjective, the plural ending occurs only on the noun; with a postnominal adjective, the plural ending occurs either on the adjective or on both the noun and the adjective. (46)

Fassa Valley

a.

la pìcola cès-es the-F. SG small-F. SG house-F. PL ‘the houses, which are all small’

b.

la cèsa-F. SG pìcol-es small-F. PL the-F. SG house ‘those houses that are small’

c.

la cès-es pìcol-es the-F. SG house-F. PL small-F. PL ‘the houses, which are all small’

Observe that (46c), where the adjective and the noun agree in number, has the same restrictive interpretation as (46a) with the prenominal adjective. This led Rasom (2008) to argue that the differences between (46a) and (46b) in terms of agreement morphology and interpretation follow from two different syntactic sources of adjectives (Cinque 2010): Attributive adjectives are generated as reduced relative clauses

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above appositive adjectives. Furthermore, she argues that Number is encoded in a dedicated projection close to the noun and that number features spread within the DP: (47) [DP . . . [Reduced Relative

Clause

A

. . . [AP A . . . [Num {pl}

[NP N

The hypothesis is that, in Ladin, number spreads downwards, i.e. an adjective will exhibit number inflection if the noun moves above it. The problematic example is therefore (46b) in which the noun preceding the adjective does not display plural -es. According to Rasom, the exceptionality of this pattern depends on the clausal nature of attributive adjectives. With attributive adjectives, the noun acts as the antecedent of the (reduced) relative clause, while the adjective occupies a predicative position inside the clause. As such, the NP is not required to move to Spec,NumP (and, consequently, to exhibit number morphology), while the adjective is free to agree in number under clausal agreement, which is not subject to the same restriction of DP-internal agreement/concord. Another pattern of lazy agreement is shown in Ibero-Romance with feminine nouns (e.g. agua ‘water’) which, when singular, select for a masculine article (arguably, the phenomenon originated from a dissimilation rule as normally happens before words beginning with a). (48)

standard Sp.

el/*la agua

In some dialects, however, the lack of agreement has been extended to other prenominal modifiers: (49)

dialects of Sp.

a.

el the.M

nuevo new.M

arma weapon.F

secreta secret.F

b.

el the.M

mismo same.M

agua water.F

parecerá will.seem

fría cold.F

Cardinaletti/Giusti (2011; 2015) deal with another asymmetric pattern displayed by some Italo-Romance dialects. It concerns three nominal modifiers: the partitive article del ‘of the’, the distal demonstrative quel (‘that’), and the adjective bel ‘nice’. In Italian, as well as in several Italo-Romance varieties, their endings coincide with the form of the definite article. Like the definite article, the endings of del, bel, and quel are subject to context-determined allomorphy (e.g. M . SG dello, bello, quello occur before words beginning with sC; del, bel, quel before other Cs; del’, bell’, quell’ before Vs).

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M . SG

F. SG

M . PL

F. PL

a.

Partitive article

de-l/lo

de-lla

de-i/gli

de-lle

b.

Adjective

be-l/llo

be-lla

be-i/gli

be-lle

c.

Demonstrative

que-l/llo

que-lla

que-i/gli

que-lle

(50) It.

Furthermore, in Anconetano (a central Italian dialect), the plural ending -i can be dropped giving rise to the forms de’, be’, and que’. When dei/quei and bei co-occur, the possible patterns of i-dropping are the following: a) both is occur, b) the higher is dropped, or c) both are dropped. Otherwise, if only the intermediate i is dropped, the sequence becomes ungrammatical, cf. (51d/52d). Descriptively, -i can only spread bottom-up. (51)

Anconetano

a.

dei

bei

fioli

b.

de’

bei

fioli

c.

de’

be’

fioli

d. *dei be’ fioli some nice boys ‘some nice boys’ (52)

Anconetano

a.

quei

bei

fioli

b.

que’

bei

fioli

c.

que’

be’

fioli

d. *quei be’ fioli those nice boys ‘those nice boys’ To account for bottom-up effects, Cardinaletti/Giusti argue that DP-internal agreement follows from a peculiar feature sharing mechanism (Giusti 2008) due to the combination of two basic operations: projection (bottom-up feature sharing across the functional spine of the DP) and concord (i.e. feature sharing between a head and its specifier). Bottom-up agreement is therefore due to the combination of projection along the structure of the DP and concord between a functional head F° and the modifier hosted in its specifier. (53)

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Moreover, Cardinaletti/Giusti argue that de-, be-, and que- are inflectionless elements: Their “endings” are therefore the spell-out of the head F°, whose φ features are projected from below. Not all the asymmetries attested in Romance, however, are consistent with bottom-up effects. Asturian, for instance, exhibits a mixed pattern in which gender spreads to prenominal elements while mass/count agreement spreads postnominally: Prenominal adjectives always display masculine/feminine agreement (e.g. -u/a), while postnominal adjectives exhibit mass/count agreement (e.g. -o/u): (54)

(55)

Asturian

Asturian

fierru

a.

duru

ferruñosu

M, COUNT

b.

duru fierro ferruñoso hard iron rusty ‘hard rusty iron’

a.

guapa

manzana

madura

F, COUNT

b.

guapa manzana good apple ‘good ripe apple’

maduro ripe

F, MASS

M, MASS

This shows that gender features spread bottom-up, while mass/count features seem to spread top-down. Another case of top-down agreement is exhibited by a number of southern Italian varieties, where prenominal modifiers (determiners and some adjectives) show overt agreement endings, while the endings of the noun and its postnominal modifiers are subject to centralization (namely, -a/e/i/o/u > -ə): (56)

Southern It.

a.

‘o the

bellu nice

ciorə flower

b.

‘o the

ciorə flower

bellə nice

The fact that both bottom-up and top-down asymmetries are found in Romance (sometimes in the same language, as in the case of Asturian) has led to the postulation of different types of feature sharing operations such as agree vs. projection/ concord. Furthermore, on the basis of these data, different ‘layers’ of agreement may be postulated (cf. also Ackema/Neeleman 2012), i.e. a syntactic mechanism responsible for postnominal concord, usually via specifier-head agreement (Guasti/ Rizzi 2002), and a postsyntactic one wherein agreement is obtained by means of output constraints (cf. Samek-Lodovici 2002 on clausal agreement; Bonet/Mascaró 2011; Bonet 2013; Bonet/Lloret/Mascaró 2015).

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4.2 Gender agreement restrictions in conjoint DPs in French Sleeman/Ihsane (2013) deal with gender agreement in French with nouns displaying a conflict between grammatical and semantic gender (namely, sex) such as enfant ‘child’, professeur ‘teacher, professor’, sentinelle ‘sentinel’ etc. These nouns may reference either masculine or feminine individuals. In the latter case, grammatical gender always controls agreement inside the strict DP, while semantic gender may control agreement outside the strict DP. Take for instance a noun like professeur ‘teacher, professor’, which triggers masculine agreement even if it refers to a female as in (57). (57) Fr. le bon professeur the.M good.M teacher.M However, DP-external agreement, as in the case of a predicative adjective, must be feminine, i.e. it must agree with the semantic sex rather than with the grammatical gender: (58) Fr. Mon ancien professeur de français était toujours content-*(e) my.M former.M professor of French was always satisfied-F de mon travail. of my work ‘My former French teacher was always satisfied with my work.’ The authors argue that grammatical gender is a grammatical uninterpretable feature (Zamparelli 2008, among others) which is encoded separately from semantic gender. On the separation between semantic and grammatical gender there are several possible views. Kramer (2009) argues for a morphological analysis in which nouns are formed through the combination of a nominalizing head n with a categoryneutral root √ (Marantz 1997; 2001). Semantic gender is encoded by n and, if n lacks gender, the agreeing gender is the grammatical one, encoded on the root. Sleeman/ Ihsane, conversely, adopt a syntactic view in which the extended DP contains a Gender projection GenP encoding semantic gender, while grammatical gender is encoded by the NP.

5 Summary In this chapter we have dealt with a series of prima facie irregularities regarding the realization of agreement endings and the distribution of pronominal elements.

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Two sections are devoted to clausal agreement: one focusing on mutual exclusion patterns between pronouns and the other addressing patterns of agreement between a verbal form and one or more nominal forms. The last section has taken DP agreement into consideration. In the first section we summarized data and analyses concerning the distribution of (clitic) pronouns. In fact, Romance clitics cannot occur freely as their combinations are subject to systematic gaps. Besides the canonical PCC (which is subject to a certain degree of crosslinguistic variation), we observed the behaviour of clitic combinations in causative constructions, the syntax of honorific systems, and the agreement possibilities of impersonal si/se. The second section deals with verbal agreement: We focused on languages lacking agreement on finite forms (such as central Italian dialects) and, conversely, languages showing person agreement on nonfinite forms (e.g. European Portuguese and Sardinian). Lastly, we mentioned cases of varieties like Ripano, in which verbal morphology exhibits gender agreement. The third section is about DP agreement/concord. We observed that the Romance languages show both top-down and bottom-up effects, i.e. either prenominal or postnominal modifiers may fail to agree with the noun on a language-specific basis. We submitted the hypothesis that this might be due to the existence of various kinds of feature-sharing operations within the DP, possibly applying in different stages of the derivation. Lastly, we observed patterns of DP-external agreement in cases of a mismatch between semantic and grammatical gender.

6 References Ackema, Peter/Neeleman, Ad (2012), “Agreement weakening at PF. A reply to Benmamoun and Lorimor”, Linguistic Inquiry 43, 75–96. Adger, David/Harbour, Daniel (2007), “Syntax and syncretisms of the person case constraint”, Syntax 10, 2–37. Ambar, Manuela (1994), “Aux-to-Comp and lexical restrictions on verb movement”, in: Guglielmo Cinque/Jan Koster/Jean-Yves Pollock/Luigi Rizzi/Raffaella Zanuttini (edd.), Paths towards universal grammar, Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 1–24. Anagnostopoulou, Elena (2003), The syntax of ditransitives. Evidence from clitics, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Anagnostopoulou, Elena (2005), “Strong and weak person restrictions. A feature checking analysis”, in: Laurie Heggie/Francisco Ordóñez (edd.), Clitic and affix combinations, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 199–235. Bianchi, Valentina (2006), “On the syntax of personal arguments”, Lingua 116, 2023–2067. Bobaljik, Jonathan David/Branigan, Phil (2006), “Eccentric agreement and multiple case checking”, in: Alana Johns/Diana Massam/Juvenal Ndayiragije (edd.), Ergativity. Emerging issues, Dordrecht, Springer, 47–77. Bonet, Eulàlia (1991), Morphology after syntax. Pronominal clitics in Romance, PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Bonet, Eulàlia (1995), “Feature structure of Romance clitics”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 13, 607–647. Bonet, Eulàlia (2008), “The person-case constraint and repair strategies”, in: Roberta D’Alessandro/ Susann Fischer/Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson (edd.), Agreement restrictions, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 103–128. Bonet, Eulàlia (2013), “Agreement in two steps (at least)”, in: Ora Matushansky (ed.), Distributed morphology today: morphemes for Morris Halle, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 167–184. Bonet, Eulàlia/Lloret, Maria-Rosa/Mascaró, Joan (2015), “The prenominal allomorphy syndrome”, in: Eulalia Bonet/Maria-Rosa Lloret/Joan Mascaró (edd.), Understanding allomorphy. Perspectives from Optimality Theory, London, Equinox, 4–55. Bonet, Eulàlia/Mascaró, Joan (2011), Asimetrías de concordancia en el SD. El rasgo de masa en asturiano, Ms. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Brandi, Luciana/Cordin, Patrizia (1989), “Two Italian dialects and the null subject parameter”, in: Osvaldo Jaeggli/Ken Safir (edd.), The null subject parameter, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 111–142. Bright, William (1957), The Karok language, Berkeley, University of California Press. Burzio, Luigi (1986), Italian syntax. A Government and Binding approach, Dordrecht, Reidel. Calabrese, Andrea (1994), “Syncretism phenomena in the clitic systems of Italian and Sardinian dialects and the notion or morphological change”, in: Jill N. Beckman, (ed.), Proceedings of NELS 25, vol. 2, Amherst (Mass.), GLSA, 151–174. Cardinaletti, Anna (1997), “Subjects and clause structure”, in: Liliane Haegeman (ed.), The new comparative syntax, London, Longman, 33–63. Cardinaletti, Anna/Giusti, Giuliana (2011), “L’opzionalità alle interfacce sintassi – morfologia – fonologia”, in: Daniela Veronesi/Giovanna Massariello Merzagora/Serena Dal Maso (edd.), I luoghi della traduzione. Le interfacce, Società di Linguistica italiana, Roma, Bulzoni, vol. SLI 54, 865–879. Cardinaletti, Anna/Giusti, Giuliana (2015), “Cartography and optional feature realization in the nominal expression”, in: Urs Shlonsky (ed.), Beyond functional sequence. The cartography of syntactic structures, vol. 10, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, 151–172. Chomsky, Noam (2001), “Derivation by phase”, in: Michael Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: A life in language, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1–50. Chomsky, Noam (2013), “Problems of projection”, Lingua 130, 33–49. Cinque, Guglielmo (1988), “On si constructions and the theory of arb”, Linguistic Inquiry 19, 521– 582. Cinque, Guglielmo (2010), The syntax of adjectives. A comparative study, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Corbett, Greville (1979), “The agreement hierarchy”, Journal of Linguistics 15, 203–224. Corbett, Greville (1990), Agreement, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. D’Alessandro, Roberta (2004), Impersonal ‘si’ constructions, PhD dissertation, University of Stuttgart. D’Alessandro, Roberta (2007), Impersonal ‘si’ constructions. Agreement and interpretation, Berlin/ New York, Mouton de Gruyter. D’Alessandro, Roberta (2013), Merging Probes. Ms, Leiden University, http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/ 001771 (17.03.2016). D’Alessandro, Roberta (2016), “When you have too many features. Auxiliaries, agreement and clitics in Italian varieties”, Ms., Leiden University, submitted. D’Alessandro, Roberta/Fischer, Susann/Hrafnbjargarson, Gunnar H. (edd.) (2008), Agreement restrictions, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter. D’Alessandro, Roberta/Ledgeway, Adam (2010), “The Abruzzese T-v system. Feature spreading and the double auxiliary construction”, in: Roberta D’Alessandro/Adam Ledgeway/Ian Roberts, Syntactic variation. The dialects of Italy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 201–209. D’Alessandro, Roberta/Roberts, Ian (2010), “Past participle agreement in Abruzzese. Split auxiliary selection and the null-subject parameter”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28, 41–72.

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Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader (1993), Issues in the structure of Arabic clauses and words, Dordrecht, Kluwer. Giusti, Giuliana (2008), “Agreement and concord in nominal expressions”, in: Cécile De Cat/ Katherine Demuth (edd.), The Bantu-Romance connection, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 201–238. Guasti, Teresa/Rizzi, Luigi (2002), “Agreement and tense as distinct syntactic positions. Evidence from acquisition”, in: Guglielmo Cinque (ed.), The structure of DP and IP. The cartography of syntactic structures, vol. 1, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 167–194. Haiman, John/Benincà, Paola (1992), The Rhaeto-Romance languages, London, Routledge. Hale, Ken (2002), “Eccentric agreement”, in: Beatriz Fernández/Pablo Albizu (edd.), Kasu eta Komunztaduraren gainean [On case and agreement], Vitoria-Gasteiz, Euskal Herriko Unibetsitatea, 15–48. Harris, Roy (1981), The language myth, London, Duckworth. Haspelmath, Martin (2004), “Explaining the ditransitive person-role constraint. A usage-based account”, Constructions 2/2004, 1–71. Kayne, Richard (1975), French syntax: the transformational cycle. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Kramer, Ruth (2009), Definite markers, phi features and agreement. A morphosyntactic investigation of the Amharic DP, PhD dissertation, University of California. Ledgeway, Adam (2000), A comparative syntax of the dialects of southern Italy. A Minimalist approach, Oxford, Blackwell. Ledgeway, Adam (2012), From Latin to Romance. Morphosyntactic typology and change, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Ledgeway, Adam/Lombardi, Alessandra (2005), “Verb movement, adverbs and clitic positions in Romance”, Probus 17, 79–113. Madeira, Anam (1994), “On the Portuguese inflected infinitive”, UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 6, 179–203. Mancini, Anna Maria (1988), “Le caratteristiche morfosintattiche del dialetto di Ripatransone (AP), alla luce di nuove ricerche”, Quaderni di proposte e ricerche 6, 3–28. Marantz, Alec (1997), “No escape from syntax. Don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon”, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 4.2, 201–225. Marantz, Alex (2001), “Words”, 20th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics Paper held at, USC, February 2001. Mensching, Guido (2000), Infinitive constructions with specified subjects. A syntactic analysis of the Romance languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Nevins, Andrew (2007), “The representation of third person and its consequences for person-case effects”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 25, 273–313. Nevins, Andrew/Săvescu, Oana (2010), “An apparent number case constraint in Romanian. The role of syncretism”, in: Karlos Arregi/Zsuzsanna Fagyal/Silvina Montrul/Annie Tremblay (edd.), Romance Linguistics 2008, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 185–203. Nicol, Fabrice (2005), “Romance clitic clusters. On diachronic changes and cross-linguistic contrasts”, in: Laurie Heggie/Francisco Ordóñez (edd.), Clitic and affix combinations, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 141–197. Ouali, Hamid (2008), “On C-to-T phi-feature transfer”, in: Roberta D’Alessandro/Susann Fischer/ Gunnar H. Hrafnbjargarson (edd.), Agreement restrictions, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 159– 180. Ormazabal, Javier/Romero, Juan (2007), “The object agreement constraint”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 25, 315–347. Ouhalla, Jamal (1993), “Subject extraction, negation and the anti-agreement effect”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 11, 477–518.

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Perlmutter, David (1971), Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax, New York, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Pescarini, Diego (2010), “Elsewhere in Romance. Evidence from clitic clusters”, Linguistic Inquiry 41, 427–444. Pescarini, Diego (2015), “A note on Italian datives”, in: Maria Grazia Busà/Sara Gesuato (edd.), Studi in onore di Alberto Mioni, Padova, CLEUP, 491–501. Postal, Paul (1989), Masked inversion in French, Chicago, IL, The University of Chicago Press. Raposo, Eduardo (1987), “Case Theory and Infl-to-Comp. The inflected infinitive in European Portuguese”, Linguistic Inquiry 18, 85–109. Rasom, Sabrina (2008), Lazy concord in the central Ladin feminine DP. A case Study on the interaction between morphosyntax and semantics, PhD dissertation, Università degli Studi di Padova. Reinhart, Tanya/Reuland, Eric (1993), “Reflexivity”, Linguistic Inquiry 24, 657–720. Rezac, Milan (2010), “On the unifiability of repairs of the person case constraint. French, Basque, Georgian, and Chinook”, Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca “Julio de Urquijo”, Special issue of XLIII, 1–2 (Ricardo Etxepare/Ricardo Gómez/Joseba A. Lakarra (edd.), Beñat Oihartzabali Gorazarre. Festschrift for Beñat Oyharçabal), 769–790. Rezac, Milan (2011), Phi-features and the modular architecture of language, Dordrecht, Springer. Rigau, Gemma (1982), “Inanimate indirect objects in Catalan”, Linguistic Inquiry 13, 146–150. Rizzi, Luigi (1990), Relativized minimality, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Rossi, Alfredo (2008), Dizionario del dialetto ripano, Monteprandone, Linea Grafica. Rouveret, Alain/Vergnaud, Jean-Roger (1980), “Specifying reference to the subject. French causatives and conditions on representations”, Linguistic Inquiry 11, 97–202. Saccon, Gabriella (1993), Postverbal subjects, PhD dissertation, Harvard University. Samek-Lodovici, Vieri (2002), “Agreement impoverishment under subject inversion. A crosslinguistic analysis”, Linguistische Berichte 11 (Gisbert Fanselow/Caroline Féry (edd.), Resolving conflicts in grammar), 49–82. Săvescu, Oana (2007), “Challenging the person case constraint. Evidence from Romanian”, in: José Camacho/Nydia Flores-Ferrán/Liliana Sánchez/Viviane Déprez/María José Cabrera (edd.), Romance Linguistics 2006. Selected Papers from the 36th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 261–275. Sitaridou, Ioanna (2002), The synchrony and diachrony of Romance infinitives with nominative subjects, PhD dissertation, University of Manchester. Sleeman, Petra/Ihsane, Tabea (2013), “Gender mismatches, locality and feature checking”, Ms. University of Amsterdam and University of Geneva. Strozer, Judith (1976), Clitics in Spanish, PhD dissertation, UCLA. Zamparelli, Roberto (2008), “Bare predicate nominals in Romance languages”, in: Henrik Høeg Müller/Alex Klinge (edd.), Essays on nominal determination, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 101–130. Zwicky, Arnold M. (1986), “German adjective agreement in GPSG”, Linguistics 24, 957–990.

Jaume Mateu Fontanals

10 Auxiliary selection Abstract: Auxiliary selection is a complex interface phenomenon that has been claimed to be sensitive to factors ranging from (in)transitivity, argument structure (cf. unaccusativity vs. unergativity), lexical semantics, and Aktionsart to tense, modality, clausal aspect, and subject person. Such a variety of factors has led different authors to approach this topic from a syntactic perspective or from a semantic one. There are also a few authors who have argued for a unified analysis of the morphosyntactic and the semantic factors involved in auxiliary selection. Indeed, there appears to be an impressive range of variation attested in Romance languages in terms of how the selection works and what it is sensitive to. In this chapter, I give a survey of the different auxiliary splits attested in Romance languages (section 1) and then provide an overview of some relevant syntactic and semantic approaches (section 2). The conclusion is that the two theoretical perspectives are not to be regarded as incompatible. Although I concentrate on the synchronic aspects of auxiliary selection in Romance, some diachronic issues are also taken into account (section 3). Finally, this chapter contains some concluding remarks (section 4). Keywords: auxiliary selection, auxiliary splits, unaccusativity, argument structure, lexicon-syntax interface

1 The empirical evidence As is well known, in Romance languages like Italian and French (or in Germanic languages like German or Dutch), there is an important division or split in the formation of compound forms of verbs: Transitive verbs and some intransitive verbs select auxiliary HAVE (e.g. It. avere, Fr. avoir), while other intransitive verbs select auxiliary BE (e.g. It. essere, Fr. être). Consider some relevant examples from Italian: transitive verbs like vedere ‘see’ or salutare ‘greet’ in (1), intransitive verbs like lavorare ‘work’, ballare ‘dance’ or rintoccare ‘ring’ in (2), and intransitive verbs like arrivare ‘arrive’, arrossire ‘blush’ or esistere ‘exist’ in (3). (1) It. a. Gianni ha visto Maria. Gianni has seen Maria ‘Gianni saw Maria.’ b. Gianni l’ha vista. Gianni her.has seen.F. SG ‘Gianni saw her.’ Acknowledgement: This work has been supported by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2014-56968-C4-1-P) and from the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014 SGR-1013).

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c. Gianni li ha salutati. Gianni them.M . PL has greeted.M . PL ‘Gianni greeted them.’ (2) It. a. Gianni ha lavorato molto. Gianni has worked a-lot ‘Gianni worked a lot.’ b. Gianni ha ballato per ore. Gianni has danced for hours ‘Gianni danced for hours.’ c. La campana ha rintoccato the bell has tolled ‘The bell rang.’ (3) It. a. Maria è arrivata. Maria is arrived.F.SG ‘Maria arrived.’ b. Maria è arrossita. Maria is blushed.F.SG ‘Maria blushed.’ c. L’unicorno è esistito. the unicorn is existed.M .SG ‘The unicorn existed.’ Transitive verbs consistently select HAVE in Italian, whereby there is no variation in this respect.1 In striking contrast to this, there appears to be great variation involved with the intransitive verbs: For example, as pointed out by traditional grammarians like Battaglia/Pernicone (1987, 186), “per i tempi composti nella forma attiva dei verbi intransitivi, non si possono dare norme sicure: alcuni prendono avere, altri essere, e l’insegnamento può venire solo dall’uso, dalla lettura dei buoni scrittori, dalla consultazione del vocabolario”2. In the following sections other factors and splits are presented that have been claimed to be relevant to auxiliary selection in Romance: lexicosemantic and lexicoaspectual factors (section 1.1), reflexives (section 1.2), subject person (section 1.3), and tense, clausal aspect, and modality (section 1.4). 1 As we will see below, in some Italian dialects where the auxiliary split is sensitive to other factors (e.g. person and number of the subject), BE (It. essere) can also be found with transitive verbs. 2 “For the compound tenses in the active form of intransitive verbs, one cannot provide absolute rules: some take HAVE , others BE , and only usage, the reading of good authors, and the consultation of the dictionary can teach one how to use them.”

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1.1 Lexicosemantic and lexicoaspectual factors In spite of the abovementioned quote, certain intuitive patterns have been claimed to emerge when dealing with intransitive verbs: Basically, It. essere ‘be’ is selected with the predicates where the subject is a theme that undergoes a change of location (3a) or a change of state (3b) or where the subject is a static theme (3c), whereas It. avere ‘have’ is selected with the predicates that do not express a directed change but rather an action or internal process (be it agentive, cf. 2a and 2b, or not, cf. 2c). HAVE selection with intransitive verbs is often associated with agentivity in the literature, but examples like (2c) or (4) make it clear that this association is not accurate enough. This notwithstanding, an interaction between agentivity and auxiliary selection has been claimed to be involved in contrasts like the one exemplified in (5), drawn from Sorace (2000). (4) It. Maria {è caduta / *ha caduto} apposta. on-purpose Maria is fallen.F.SG / has fallen ‘Maria fell on purpose.’ (5) It. a. Il pilota {ha / ?è} atterrato sulla pista di emergenza. the pilot has / is landed on-the runway of emergency ‘The pilot landed on the emergency runway.’ b. Lʼaereo {?ha / è} atterrato sulla pista di emergenza. the plane has / is landed on-the runway of emergency ‘The plane landed on the emergency runway.’ However, as we will see below, it is the internal creation process (Hale/Keyser 2002; Mateu 2002), rather than agentivity, that determines the structural meaning of the intransitive verbs that select avere: That is, what is semantically construed as relevant in (5a) is not the change of location/state of the pilot but rather the action carried out by him (i.e. making a landing), whereas what is semantically construed as relevant in (5b) is the result of the process. Similarly, the following examples in (6) show that agentivity per se does not determine auxiliary selection since that notion could in principle be applied not only to (6a) but also to (6b). (6) It. a. Gianni ha corso (per ore). Gianni has run for hours ‘Gianni ran (for hours).’ b. Gianni è corso a casa (in tre minuti). Gianni is run.M .SG to home in three minutes ‘Gianni ran home (in three minutes).’

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A paradigmatic contrast like the one exemplified in (6) has often been taken to show the relevance of Aktionsart (i.e. lexical aspect) in BE -selection: The addition of a telic PP in (6b) determines essere selection. As is well known, telicity has been argued to be an aspectual notion that turns out to be crucially relevant when determining BE -selection with intransitive verbs (e.g. cf. Zaenen 1993; Sorace 2000, or van Hout 2004). Similarly, the addition of a reflexive pronoun (It. si) to a verb like It. bruciare ‘burn’ changes its Aktionsart: The atelic reading in (7a) is associated with avere, whereas the telic one in (7b), which is claimed to be determined by the addition of the reflexive, is associated with essere (cf. Sorace 2000; 2004; Jezek 2003). Similar facts are also discussed by Labelle (1990; 1992) for French (e.g. cf. (8)). As pointed out by Labelle (1990, 309), “the intransitive construction states what the subject does. So, one can say it focusses on the process itself. In contrast, the reflexive construction states what is happening to the object. Thus, it focusses on the result of the process”. (7) It. a. La carne ha bruciato (per alcuni minuti). the meat has burned for some minutes ‘Meat has burned for some minutes.’ b. La carne si è bruciata (#per alcuni minuti). some minutes the meat SI is burned.F.SG for (8) Fr. a. Le poulet a cuit pendant 3 heures. the chicken has cooked for 3 hours b. Le poulet s’es cuit en exactement 3 heures. the chicken REFL .is cooked.M .SG in exactly 3 hours Nonetheless, the relevance of telicity at the lexicon-syntax interface has been called into question. For example, Levin/Rappaport Hovav (1995) point out that there are atelic intransitive verbs that select BE , contrary to what is predicted by telicity-based approaches to BE -selection: For example, indefinite change of state verbs select essere in Italian (and zijn ‘be’ in Dutch); cf. (9a) and (9b).3 In spite of this, the aspectual approach can be claimed to account for the fact that these verbs in French do not select être, but avoir; cf. (9c).

3 Indefinite change of state verbs are also referred to in the literature on aspect as “degree achievements” (cf. Dowty 1979 and Bertinetto/Squartini 1995).

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a. Maria è cresciuta / ??ha cresciuto molto quest’anno. a lot this year Maria is grown.F.SG / has grown

Dutch b. Haar baby is / *heeft deze maand enorm gegroeid. her baby is / has this month enormous grown Fr.

c. Marie a grandi / *est grandie depuis l’an dernier. Marie has grown / is grown.F.SG since the year last

Furthermore, telicity-based approaches to BE -selection run into nontrivial problems when dealing with stative verbs. Although these approaches could be said to account for the fact that stative verbs in French select avoir, once again their predictions are not borne out in Italian; cf. (10a) and (10b). (10) Fr. a. Les dinosaurs ont existé. the dinosaurs have existed It.

b. I dinosauri sono esistiti. the dinosaurs are existed.M .PL

Moreover, dative psychological verbs of the piacere class (cf. e.g. Belletti/Rizzi 1988) also offer potential counterexamples to aspectual approaches to auxiliary selection; e.g. cf. (11). (11) It.

a. Questo film mi è piaciuto molto. this film me.DAT is pleased.M .SG a-lot

Dutch b. Dat is mij bevallen / tegengevallen. that is me.DAT pleased / disappointed Finally, the existence of (admittedly exceptional) telic intransitive verbs that select in Romance languages is also problematic for aspectual approaches to auxiliary selection. For example, consider the English examples in (12), which involve verbs of birthing (Hale/Keyser 1993). The existence of these verbs is especially relevant when dealing with auxiliary selection in French, where être has been argued to be mainly related to telicity (cf. e.g. Sorace 2000): Atelic intransitive verbs typically select avoir in French (cf. 9c and 10a), which is consistent with the claim that telicity is relevant in this Romance language. However, despite their telicity, intransitive verbs like Fr. pouliner ‘to foal’ do not select être but avoir (13a). Avere is also selected for this class of verbs in Italian (p.c. Paolo Lorusso); cf. (13b).

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(12) a. The mare foaled {in / ??for} two hours. b. The cow calved {in / ??for} two hours. (13) Fr. a. La the

jument {a pouliné / *est poulinée} en / ??pendant mare has foaled / is foaled.F.SG in / for

deux heures. two hours ‘The mare foaled in/??for two hours.’ It. b. La giumenta {ha figliato / ??è figliata} in / ??per the mare has foaled / is foaled.F.SG in / for due ore. two hours ‘The mare foaled in/??for two hours.’ All in all, the challenge to be drawn from the present discussion on the relevance of thematic properties (e.g. agentivity) or aspectual properties (e.g. telicity) in auxiliary selection in Romance is how one should cope with (i) the apparently contradictory facts briefly reviewed above (e.g. telicity is (ir)relevant to auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs) and (ii) the nontrivial crosslinguistic differences involved. We will come back to this issue in section 2.

1.2 Reflexives As is well known, the presence of the reflexive element (It. si) correlates with the selection of essere quite systematically, as shown in some relevant examples in (14) through (17). For example, consider the following readings associated with si: reflexive in (14), anticausative in (15), impersonal in (16), or passive in (17). (14) It. a. Gianni si è pettinato. Gianni SI is combed.M .SG ‘Gianni combed himself.’ b. Gianni e Carlo si sono guardati. Gianni and Carlo SI are looked.M .PL ‘Gianni and Carlo looked at each other.’ c. Gianni si è comprato una macchina. Gianni SI is bought.M .SG a car ‘Gianni bought himself a car.’

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(15) It. a. Il bicchiere si è rotto. (cf. Gianni ha rotto il bicchiere) the glass SI is broken.M .SG ‘The glass broke.’ b. Maria si è svegliata. (cf. Gianni ha svegliato Maria) Maria SI is woken.F.SG ‘Maria woke up.’ c. Maria si è arrabbiata. (cf. *Gianni ha arrabbiato Maria) Maria SI is angered.F.SG ‘Maria got angry.’ (16) It. a. Li si è salutati. them.ACC SI is greeted.M .PL ‘One has greeted them.’ b. Si è andati al mare. SI is gone.M .PL to.the sea ‘One went to the seaside.’ c. Si è camminato molto ieri. SI is walked a-lot yesterday ‘One walked a lot yesterday.’ (17) It. Le camicie si sono lavate a secco. the shirts SI are washed.F.PL to dry ‘The shirts have been dry-cleaned.’ Some comments are in order. First, it is important to point out that the presence of reflexive si is not incompatible with an accusative object, i.e. with a transitive construction (e.g. cf. the reflexive construction in (14c) and the impersonal one in (16a)). So it appears that the notions of transitivity and voice (Manzini/Savoia 2011, 197, gloss si as a “middle-passive” marker) cannot be collapsed; for example, (16a) is not an intransitive construction, even though it has been said to be “middle” (e.g. cf. Manzini/Savoia 2011, 198). Second, it is also interesting to note that many authors have related BE -selection in the reflexive reading (e.g. (14a)) to the fact that the pronoun si is a clitic. The fact that the auxiliary selected in the Germanic counterpart of (14a) is not BE but HAVE is often attributed to the fact that Ger. sich or Dutch zich have nonclitic status. For example, according to Reinhart/Siloni (2005), the different auxiliary selection with It. si and Dutch zich is due to their different clitic vs. nonclitic status, respectively (cf. also Haider/Rindler-Schjerve 1987). However, Manzini/Savoia (2011, 198–200) show that this proposal is not correct. For example, these Italian linguists point

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out that in Romance varieties such as Soazza, the pronoun found in reflexive, anticausative, or impersonal constructions has a clitic status (s), but this clitic does not influence auxiliary selection.4 For example, as can be seen in the following data drawn from Manzini/Savoia (2011, 199), in Soazza auxiliary selection in impersonal constructions (e.g. cf. (18a–b) with (16b–c)) is determined by verb class (cf. (19)). (18) Soazza a. S a sempro dormit ben. SI has always slept well ‘One has always slept well.’ b. S e sempro rivo tart. SI is always arrived late ‘One has always arrived late.’ (19) a. O dormit. I.have slept ‘I have slept.’ b. Som {rivo / rivada}. I.am arrived.M .SG / arrived.F.SG ‘I have arrived.’ Manzini/Savoia (2011, 200) also point out that “Soazza has the same perfect participle agreement system as standard Italian, even if the auxiliary is have, for instance in

4 Cf. also Kayne (1993) and Cennamo/Sorace (2007) for discussion of some Italo-Romance varieties (e.g. Paduan) which allow HAVE with reflexive clitics. Interestingly, Cennamo/Sorace (2007) show that for those speakers of Paduan who accept both auxiliaries in anticausative constructions, the alternation may reflect different semantic conditions. According to them, “the auxiliary HAVE in (ia) would be appropriate if the event resulted from an external Causer, whereas BE would be used if no external Causer is implied (ib) and the door opened by itself, or by virtue of an inanimate (and unexpressed) causer (e.g. the wind). This is clearly shown in (ii)” (p. 90). (i) Paduan a. La porta se ga verto de colpo. the door SI has opened suddenly ‘The door has suddenly opened.’ b. La porta se ze verta de colpo. the door SI is opened. F. SG suddenly (ii) Paduan a. Go provà metare la ciave ma la porta no se ga verto. I.have tried put.INF the key but the door not SI has opened ‘I tried to put the key in but the door didn’t open’ (i.e. I did not manage to open it). b. Go provà metare la ciave ma la porta no *se ze verta. I.have tried put.INF the key but the door not SI is opened.F. SG

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the reflexive in (20). In other words, perfect participle agreement is entirely independent of the selection of have and be” [emphasis mine]. Cf. also Loporcaro (1998) for further discussion. (20) Soazza El/la s a lavo / lavada. he/she SI has washed.M .SG / washed.F.SG ‘He/she has washed himself/herself.’ In contrast, in Standard Italian avere is only allowed in reflexive constructions when a reflexive clause is constructed with the nonclitic version se stesso in place of the clitic si; cf. (21) with (14a). (21) It. Gianni ha pettinato se stesso. Gianni has combed himself ‘Gianni combed himself.’

1.3 Person-based splits Another pattern of the have vs. be split found in some (nonstandard) Italian dialects is the one which opposes the 1st and 2nd person with be to the 3rd person with have (cf. Kayne 1993; Cocchi 1994; 1995; D’Alessandro/Roberts 2010; Manzini/Savoia 2011). This classic split, which is the most common one, is oblivious to both verbal class and reflexive marker si. For example, cf. the following data in (22), drawn from a dialect of Neapolitan (Ledgeway 2000). (22) Neapolitan a. So’visto a Ciro. / So arrevato. ACC . Ciro / am arrived am.seen ‘I have seen Ciro. / I have arrived.’ b. Ha visto a Ciro. / Ha arrevato. has seen ACC . Ciro / has arrived ‘He has seen Ciro. / He has arrived.’ It is important to point out that there is no intrinsic association of be with 1st and 2nd person and of have with 3rd person. In fact, as pointed out by Manzini/Savoia (2011, 202), some varieties present a different pattern, which is less robustly attested, i.e. the 1st and 2nd person are associated with have, while the 3rd is associated with be, as in Morcone (Campania).

1.4 Tense, clausal aspect, and modality splits Auxiliary selection according to tense is also well attested in the Italian dialects. For example, as pointed out by Ledgeway (2000, 202f.), in the dialect of San Leucio del

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Sannio, HAVE has generalized in the present perfect to all verb classes (the passive excluded); e.g. cf. (23a) and (23b). In contrast, in the pluperfect, BE is the universal auxiliary with all verb classes; e.g. cf. (24a) and (24b). (23) San Leucio a. Eggio (*so’) fatto tutto quello which have.PRS .1SG be.PRS .1SG done all ch’eggio pututo. that have.PRS .1SG be.able.PTCP ‘I have done all that I could.’ b. Iti (*siti) venuto priesto? early have.PRS .2PL be.PRS .2PL come ‘Did you arrive early?’ (24) San Leucio a. Illu era (*aveva) venuto priesto. early he be.PST.3SG have.PST.3SG come ‘He had come early.’ b. Erem’ (*avevamo) auta dice quello be.PST.1PL have.PST.1PL must.PTCP say that che dicevono loro. which say.PST.3PL they ‘We had had to say what they said.’ Tense splits found in some Italo-Romance dialects often interact with sensitivity to person and number. Manzini/Savoia (2005) make the important observation that the majority of dialects which show person-driven auxiliary selection in the present perfect do not show it in the pluperfect or in counterfactual tenses, either HAVE or BE being consistently found here (cf. e.g. Tuttle 1986; Ledgeway 2000 and D’Alessandro/ Roberts 2010 for further discussion). Splits according to clausal aspect are also well attested and can be exemplified with the contrast in (25) from Romanian, drawn from Dragomirescu/Nicolae (2009). These linguists show that this contrast can be explained from an aspectual point of view: The regular HAVE variant expresses a completed action, an action which took place in the past. In contrast, the BE variant expresses an action which started in the past and may continue at the moment of the utterance. In particular, these authors point out that the former means ‘John left at a certain moment and maybe he came back’, whereas the latter means ‘John left at a certain moment and he definitely has not returned yet.’ (25) Rom. Ion {a / e} plecat. Ion has / is left ‘Ion left.’

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It seems then that the auxiliary selection in (25) depends on which kind of perfect is being expressed, i.e. the Experiential Perfect or the Perfect of Result (cf. e.g. Iatridou/Anagnostopoulou/Pancheva 2003; McFadden 2007; McFadden/Alexiadou 2010). According to McFadden (2007), “the Experiential Perfect describes an eventuality which occurred previous to some reference time (which is equivalent to the speech time in a present perfect), often an experience that the subject has had. The Perfect of Result, on the other hand, describes a state holding at the reference time, which is the result of the underlying eventuality described by the VP”. For example, I have been sick before expresses an Experiential Perfect, whereas I have lost my cellphone (Could you help me find it?) expresses a Perfect of Result. A similar pattern is also found in Quebec French, as shown in (26) (from Manente 2009): (26) Quebec Fr. a. Jean a arrivé / parti / entré à huit heures. Jean has arrived / left / entered at eight hours b. Jean est arrivé (= là) / parti (= absent) / entré (= dedans). Jean is arrived (= there) / left (= absent) / entered (= inside) The use of BE in Romanian (25) and in Quebec French in (26b) can be related to the stative resultative interpretation that McFadden/Alexiadou (2010) attribute to Earlier English I am come. For example, the contrast in (27) given by Manente (2009, 43) can be accounted for on the basis that BE is related to a perfect-of-result reading where the target state holds of the subject, as in Earlier English. (27) Quebec Fr. Maintenant qu’il {*a / est} arrivé chez lui, now that.he has / is arrived at.his.house, il ne voudra plus jamais ressortir. he not want.FUT any longer exit Finally, modality has also been shown to play a role in auxiliary selection in Romance languages like Romanian and Old Neapolitan. For example, Avram/Hall (2007) show that HAVE is the regular auxiliary for perfects in Romanian, except in irrealis clauses, where BE is used instead (cf. 28a). In contrast, as shown by Ledgeway (2003), the opposite pattern is found in Old Neapolitan, where HAVE was favoured over BE in irrealis clauses (cf. 28b). But cf. Cennamo (2002) for some relevant qualifications. (28) Rom.

a. Ar fi plecat. would.3SG be left ‘S/he would have left.’

ONeapolitan b. Se illo avesse arrivato in Grecia, . . . if he had.3SG arrived in Greece ‘If he had arrived in Greece, . . .’

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To conclude, we have seen that auxiliary selection in Romance languages is a complex interface phenomenon that is sensitive to factors ranging from (in)transitivity, lexical semantics, and Aktionsart to subject person, tense, clausal aspect, and modality (cf. also McFadden 2007 for a recent review). For reasons of space, in this section I have only been able to provide an outline of the existing variation and comment on the most important factors on the basis of some relevant examples.

2 Theoretical approaches In this section, we will see that the different factors reviewed above have led different authors to approach auxiliary selection from syntactic perspectives (e.g. cf. Burzio 1986; Perlmutter 1989; Kayne 1993; Hoekstra 1994, among many others) or from semantic ones (e.g. cf. Shannon 1990; Centineo 1996; Sorace 2000; Aranovich 2003; Bentley/Eythórsson 2003, among many others). Furthermore, there are a few descriptive attempts where a unified account of the morphosyntactic and semantic factors involved in auxiliary selection has been pursued (e.g. cf. Legendre/Sorace’s 2003 and Legendre’s 2007 O(ptimality)T(heory)-based accounts). In this section, I provide an overview of some relevant theoretical approaches –of course, a review of all syntactic and semantic approaches is impossible– and I will concentrate on showing where both perspectives, the syntactic and the semantic one, can be reconciled. Since both syntactic and semantic factors have been shown to be involved in the analysis of the complex phenomenon of auxiliary selection in Romance, it seems to be natural to try to find an interface strategy that allows one to incorporate the insights from both perspectives. Crucially, when dealing with the semantic factors, we will see that purely conceptual ones are not involved in auxiliary selection but only those that encode “structural meaning”, a domain that is not oblivious to syntax (cf. e.g. Hoekstra 1999; Mateu 2002 for some relevant discussion).

2.1 Syntactic approaches The starting point of many syntactic analyses of auxiliary selection is the so-called Unaccusative Hypothesis, initially formulated by Perlmutter (1978) in the Relational Grammar framework and later developed by Burzio (1981; 1986) in the Government and Binding framework. According to this hypothesis, intransitive verbs (or clauses; cf. Perlmutter 1978) divide up into two classes on the basis of which status is assigned to their argument: The argument of unergatives is just like the subject of transitives, whereas the argument of unaccusatives is more like an object in important respects, though it may look like a subject on the surface. Burzio (1981; 1986) attributes to them two different D(eep)-structure configurations. Unergative verbs

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like It. lavorare ‘to work’, telefonare ‘to phone’, dormire ‘to sleep’, giocare ‘to play’ etc. occur in the syntactic frame in (29a), while unaccusative verbs like It. venire ‘to come’, uscire ‘to go out’, salire ‘to go up’, morire ‘to die’ etc. enter into the configuration in (29b), where [NP e] expresses an empty NP subject. There is an important single split represented in (29): Unergatives have an external argument (i.e. the NP is external to VP), while unaccusatives have their argument internal to VP. (29) a. [NP [VP V]] b. [[NP e] [VP V NP]] Perlmutter (1978) and Burzio (1981; 1986) argue that the grammatical behaviour of unaccusative verbs (clauses), which can be defined through characteristics such as BE -selection in Dutch or in Italian, ne-cliticization in Italian or their lack of impersonal passivization in Dutch, can be explained in a uniform way by postulating an underlying structure in which their surface subject originates in an internal argument position (cf. 29b). Burzio points out that the pattern of auxiliary selection in Italian is parallel to that of the distribution of ne-cliticization, and that it reflects the different D(eep)structure configurations of unaccusative verbs (cf. 29b) vs. unergative ones (cf. 29a). Unaccusative verbs select the auxiliary essere, while nonunaccusatives (i.e. both unergatives and transitives) select the auxiliary avere. Burzio (1986, 30) points out that “ne-cliticization is possible with respect to all and only direct objects” and defines unaccusative verbs as those verbs whose subject can be substituted for the direct object clitic ne. Two related facts are then accounted for: First, the contrast between unergatives (e.g. telefonare ‘to phone’) in (30a) and unaccusatives (e.g. arrivare ‘to arrive’) in (30b) (NB: Burzio renamed Perlmutter’s unaccusatives as “ergatives”) and, in addition, the parallelism between the unaccusative subject in (30b) and the transitive object in (30c). As expected, ne-cliticization fails with unaccusative verbs if the pronominalized NP is in subject position (cf. 30d). Finally, as pointed out by Perlmutter, it seems more convenient to use “unaccusative” as applied to structures (or clauses) rather than to verbs; for example, the passive construction can also be analysed as unaccusative (cf. (30f) and (30b)). (30) It. a. *Ne

hanno telefonato tre. (cf. Hanno telefonato tre ragazze) have.3PL phoned three (cf. have.3PL phoned three girls) ‘Three of them have phoned.’

PART. CL

b. Ne

sono arrivate tre. (cf. Sono arrivate tre ragazze) are.3PL arrived.F. PL three (cf. are.3PL arrived.PL three girls) ‘Three of them have arrived.’ PART. CL

c. Ne

hanno comprato tre. (cf. Hanno comprato tre macchine) have.3PL bought three (cf. have.3PL bought three cars) ‘They have bought three of them.’ PART. CL

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d. *Tre ne sono arrivate. three PART.CL are.3PL arrived ‘Three of them have arrived.’ e. *Tre ne hanno {comprato due macchine / telefonato}. two cars / phoned three PART.CL have.3PL bought ‘Three of them have {bought two cars / telephoned}.’ f. Ne

saranno comprate molte (di macchine). be.FUT.3PL bought.F. PL many (of cars) ‘Many of them will be bought.’ PART. CL

Burzio (1986, 55–56) formulates the rule in (31) for essere assignment as follows: (31) The auxiliary will be realized as essere when a binding relation exists between the subject and a nominal contiguous to the verb (where ‘a nominal contiguous to the verb’ is a nominal which is either part of the verb morphology, i.e. a clitic, or a direct object). Although impressive, Burzio’s syntactic account based on distributional arguments and on binding principles has been said to present some shortcomings (cf. e.g. Centineo 1996 for a critical review). For reasons of space, next I will concentrate on Burzio’s important correlation between essere selection and ne-cliticization, which has been called into question in the literature. Consider the relevant examples in (32b) and (32d), taken from Lonzi (1985) and also revisited by Levin/Rappaport Hovav (1995, 276–277, ex. (106)–(107)). These data have been claimed to be counterexamples to Burzio’s (1986) claim that ergative (i.e. unaccusative) verbs are the only monadic verbs that admit ne-cliticization of their argument. Following Lonzi (1985), Levin/Rappaport Hovav (1995, 275) point out that “a variety of verbs that take the auxiliary avere ‘have’ do permit ne-cliticization, but only when they are found in a simple tense; ne-cliticization is not possible when these verbs are found in a complex tense in which the auxiliary is expressed”. (32) It. a. *Di ragazze, ne hanno lavorato molte nelle fabbriche di Shanghai. of girls, PART. CL . have.3PL worked many in.the factories of Shanghai b. Di ragazze, ne lavorano molte nelle fabbriche di Shanghai. PART. CL . work.3PL . many in.the factories of Shanghai of girls, ‘There are many girls working in the factories of Shanghai.’ c. *Di ragazzi, ne hanno russato molti nel corridoio del treno. PART. CL have.3PL snored many in.the corridor of.the train of boys d. Di ragazzi, ne russavano molti nel corridoio del treno. PART. CL snored many in.the corridor of.the train of boys, ‘There were many boys snoring in the corridor of the train.’

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Levin/Rappaport Hovav (1995, 277) conclude that “phenomena said to involve ‘surface unaccusativity’ (. . .) are not unaccusative diagnostics strictly speaking, but rather to a large extent receive their explanation from discourse considerations” (cf. also Lonzi 1985 and Maling/Calabrese/Sprouse 1994 for similar remarks). In particular, they point out that “unergative verbs are found in this construction under circumstances similar to those that sanction the appearance of English unergative verbs in locative inversion –that is, in contexts where the verb describes a characteristic activity or process of the entity it is predicated of” (p. 276).5 This said, it is important to realize that Levin/Rappaport Hovav’s (1995) discourse-based observation does not account for the fact that avere-selection is not allowed in the examples in (32a) and (32c). Such a restriction is not found in the Romance languages that have lost auxiliary selection; for example, HAVE is possible in their Catalan counterparts (e.g. cf. 33).6 (33) Cat. a. De dones, a les fàbriques, n’hi {treballen / of women, in the factories, PART. LOC . work.3PL / han treballat} moltes. have.3PL worked many ‘There are many women working/who have worked in the factories.’ b. N’hi

{treballen / han treballat} moltes. PART. LOC . CL work.3PL / have worked many ‘Many work/have worked there.’

One could claim that Levin/Rappaport Hovav’s (1995) remark on Italian only holds for imperfective tenses, since these can be regarded as the idoneous ones for expressing habitual activities. However, the following triplet from Centineo (1996, 230–231, fn. 6) shows that this is not the case, since in the so-called passato remoto (lit. ‘remote past’) these alleged unergative verbs are also compatible with necliticization; cf. (34c). (34) It. a. Ce ne nuota tanta di gente, in quella piscina. pool there PART.CL swims much of people in that ‘Lots of people swim in that swimming pool.’ 5 But cf. Culicover/Levine (2001) for a critical review of Levin/Rappaport Hovav’s (1995) discoursebased analysis of locative inversion. According to the former, the traditional unaccusative diagnostic provided by locative inversion must again be accepted once this unaccusative construction is separated from heavy NP inversion constructions with unergative verbs. 6 The locative marker hi ‘there’ is obligatory in this existential construction (cf. Rigau 1997; Mateu/ Rigau 2002). (i) Cat. *En PART. CL

{treballen / han treballat} moltes. work.3PL / have worked many

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b. ??Ce ne ha nuotato molta di gente in quella piscina. much of people in that pool there PART.CL has swum c. Ce ne nuotò molta di gente in quella piscina. pool there PART.CL swam much of people in that ‘Lots of people swam in that swimming pool.’ The ungrammaticality of (32a,c) and (34b) is actually predicted by Burzio’s (1986) correlation between ne-cliticization and unaccusativity. Indeed, there is some evidence that points to the fact that the constructions in (32) and (34) are unaccusative. Avere would not then be the expected auxiliary in (34b) if the Italian existential construction in (34) turns out to be unaccusative. In this sense, notice Centineo’s (1996, 231, fn. 6) remark: “[It] must also be added that some of the native speakers consulted about these data attempted to use essere as the auxiliary for (iv)” (= 34b). Indeed, assuming that the construction in (34b) is unaccusative, one wonders why essere-selection was only “attempted”. This requires further research. Furthermore, as pointed out by Rigau (1997) and Mateu/Rigau (2002), a Romance language like Catalan also offers an interesting piece of evidence for the unaccusative status of existential constructions. A well-known crosslinguistic generalization is that bare NP plurals cannot be postverbal subjects of unergative verbs in free inversion contexts (e.g. cf. 35b) but are only possible as postverbal subjects of unaccusatives (e.g. cf. Cat. Vénen joves, lit. ‘Come boys’, i.e. ‘There come boys’) or as direct objects of transitive verbs (e.g. Cat. Les drogues maten joves ‘Drugs kill boys’). Given this, the existential construction in (35c) should be unaccusative. As expected, the postverbal bare subject in (35c) is pronominalized by partitive ne; cf. (35d). (35) Cat. a. Els joves canten. the boys sing.3PL b. *Canten joves. sing.3PL boys c. (En aquesta coral) hi canten joves. in this choir LOC .CL sing.3PL . boys ‘There are boys singing (in this choir).’ d. (En aquesta coral), (de joves) n’hi canten molts. in this choir of boys PART.CL . LOC .CL sing.3PL many ‘There are many boys singing (in this choir).’ Such a syntactic flexibility or “elasticity” is not expected under a lexicalist account à la Levin/Rappaport Hovav (1995), who, following Lonzi (1985), argue that some Italian examples similar to (35c) and (35d) are not unaccusative. However, following

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Torrego (1989), Rigau (1997) argues that the unaccusativity of the existential construction in (35c) or (35d) is possible because of the presence of the obligatory locative marker hi ‘there’. Similarly, as is well known (cf. e.g. Hoekstra 1999; Sorace 2000, and Mateu/Rigau 2002), the presence of a directional PP like into the hall has been shown to be crucial in the explanation of why the constructions in (36b) and (37b) are unaccusative (cf. e.g. BE -selection in (37b)). The German data in (37) are adapted from Sorace (2000, 876, ex. (40)). (36) a. They danced (for hours). b. They danced into the hall. (37) Ger. a. Hans und Rita haben getanzt. Hans and Rita have danced ‘Hans and Rita danced.’ b. Hans und Rita sind *(in den Saal) getanzt. Hans and Rita are into the hall danced ‘Hans and Rita danced into the hall.’ As pointed out by Rigau (1997) and Mateu/Rigau (2002), an even clearer piece of evidence for the unaccusativity of the existential constructions in (35c) and (35d) can be found in the Northwestern variety of Catalan, where there is no agreement between the indefinite argument joves ‘boys’ and the verb; cf. (38b). Indeed, the lack of agreement in (38b) would be unexpected if the bare plural NP were the subject/external argument of an unergative verb/construction (cf. the unaccusativity of the example in (39b)). (38) NW Cat. a. Els joves canten. the boys sing.3PL b. (En aquesta coral) hi canta joves. in this choir LOC .CL sings boys c. (En aquesta coral), (de joves) n’hi canta molts. PART. CL . LOC . CL sings many in this choir of boys (39) Central Cat. a. Vénen (els) joves. come.3PL (the) boys NW Cat.

b. Ve joves. comes boys

Drawing on Hale/Keyser’s (1993) configurational theory of argument structure, Mateu/ Rigau (2002) claim that the syntactic analysis of the agentive unergative structure in

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(35a) or (38a) is the one depicted in (40a), whereas that of the existential unaccusative structure in (35c) or (38b) is the one shown in (40b). (40) a. [vP Els joves [v DO √CANT-]] b. [vP [v √CANT- HAVE (=BE + PrepC C R )] [P P hi [PrepC C R joves]]]

Following Hale/Keyser (1993; 2002), the formation of unergatives can be argued to involve conflation of a nominal (or a simple root, e.g. √CANT- ‘s[o]ng’),7 which occupies the complement position in (40a), with a null light verb (e.g. an agentive DO ); cf. sing – DO song. The formation of the unaccusative argument structure in (40b) is quite different: A null possessive light verb HAVE , which is conceived of as the result of conflating a null P with the more basic light verb BE (cf. Kayne 1993 and Rigau 1997, among others, for the proposal that HAVE = BE + Prep), subcategorizes for a Small-Clauselike PP as complement: The Preposition that expresses a Central Coincidence Relation (PC C R ) in (40b), which is crucial when dealing with possessive relations (cf. Hale 1986 and Hale/Keyser 2002, chap. 7, among others), is conceived of as a birelational element that relates a possessor (hi ‘there’)8 with a possessee ( joves ‘boys’).9

7 Conflation is understood as a local operation whereby the phonological matrix of a head is transmitted to its phonologically defective sister head (cf. Hale/Keyser 2002 for more discussion). Thus, for instance, in (40a) the phonological matrix of the root √cant conflates into its phonologically defective (null) sister node v, giving rise to the verb cantar. 8 Cf. Mateu/Rigau (2002) for the claim that the locative clitic hi ‘there’ acts as an impersonalizer in (40b). As predicted, Nominative case is then impossible in unaccusative existential constructions, e.g. *Hi ha(n) ells ‘there are theynom’ (cf. Rigau 1997 for more relevant discussion). 9 In (i) are some examples of the haver-hi construction; cf. Fr. Il y a; Sp. Hay; Cat. Hi ha. For some prominent syntactic analyses of this existential construction, cf. Hoekstra/Mulder (1990); Moro (1997); and Rigau (1997), among others. The main difference between the examples in (i) and the ones in (ii) is that the latter involve an additional conflation of the root √CANT- with the null light verb HAVE (cf. (40b)). (i) Central Cat. a. (En aquesta coral) hi han joves {que canten cantant}. in this choir LOC . CL have.3PL boys who sing.3PL / singing b. (En aquesta coral) hi ha joves {que canten / cantant}. in this choir LOC . CL has boys who sing.3PL / singing ‘There are boys singing in this choir.’ (ii) Central Cat. a. (En aquesta coral) hi canten joves. in this choir LOC . CL sing.3PL boys NW Cat.

b. (En aquesta coral) hi canta joves. boys in this choir LOC . CL sings ‘There are boys singing in this choir.’

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As shown by Mateu/Rigau (2002), the conflation of √CANT- with HAVE depicted in (40b) is similar to that of √DANCE - with GO involved in the unaccusative structure of The boys danced into the kitchen, analysed in (41) (cf. e.g. Hoekstra 1999 for the claim that the unaccusative construction in (41) involves a Small Clause Result (SCR) as complement of the verb). Both (40b) and (41) are unaccusative argument structures, i.e. there is no argument occupying the specifier position of v, the one that corresponds to the external argument of unergatives or transitives.10 (41) [vP [v √DANCE GO ] [S C R /P P the boys into the kitchen]] With this background in mind, it seems natural to consider the Italian examples in (42), which are counterparts of the Catalan existential constructions analysed above, as unaccusative structures. Following the present syntactic analysis of similar data from Catalan (see above), one can then assume that the clauses/structures (as in Perlmutter 1978, rather than the verbs, as in Burzio) in (42) are unaccusative; cf. the syntactic analysis in (43a), which involves an obligatory Small-Clause-like PP and a conflation process similar to the one shown in (41). That is to say, in (43a) a root designating an event (√LAVOR ‘work’) is conflated with a null light unaccusative verb BE , which subcategorizes for a Small Clause whose inner predicate has a locative nature.11 10 It is often said that a Romance language like Italian also shows a similar polysemy (e.g. cf. (ia)– (ib)), but at the same time it is clear that it lacks the regular Germanic polysemy, as shown in (ic); cf. e.g. Mateu (2002) and Mateu/Rigau (2010) for further discussion. (i) It. a. Gianni ha {corso / ballato} per molte ore. Gianni has run / danced for many hours b. Gianni è corso via / Gianni è corso alla cucina. Gianni is run away / Gianni is run to.the kitchen ‘Gianni ran away. / Gianni ran to the kitchen.’ c. *Gianni è ballato via. / *Gianni è ballato alla cucina. Gianni is danced away / Gianni is danced to.the kitchen ‘Gianni danced away. / Gianni danced to the kitchen.’ 11 In fact, things turn out to be more complex. For example, the data in (i), taken from Maling/ Calabrese/Sprouse (1994), do not involve any surface locative PP. However Maling/Calabrese/ Sprouse (1994, 5) point out that (ib) is possible only on a very specific reading –namely, many people are calling in one specific place relevant to the speaker. A similar comment could be argued to be appropriate for (ia). Alternatively, temporal phrases like domani ‘tomorrow’ in (ia) or la domenica ‘on Sunday’ in (ib) can be claimed to play an important role as well. The relevant conclusion seems to be that a spatiotemporal element is compulsory in the syntactic structure in order to license these existential constructions. (i) It. a. Domani ne parleranno molti. tomorrow NE will.speak.3PL many b. Ne telefonano molti, di tifosi, la domenica! NE phone.3PL many of fans on Sunday

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(42) It. a. Di ragazze, ne lavorano molte nelle fabbriche di Shanghai. PART. CL work.3PL many in.the factories of Shanghai of girls, b. Di ragazzi, ne russavano molti nel corridoio del treno. of boys, PART. CL snored many in.the corridor of.the train (43) a. [vP [v √LAVOR- BE ] [P P/S C molte ragazze [P ’ nelle fabbriche di Shanghai]]] b. There are many girls in the factories of Shanghai who are working. Given the unaccusative structure in (43a), which lacks an external argument occupying the specifier position of the v(erbal) head, avere-selection is expected to be blocked. As noted, this result is compatible with (and actually predicted by) Burzio’s (1986) classic analysis. However, as noted above, since the existential construction in (43a) is unaccusative, one wonders why essere-selection is not possible. This requires further research. To conclude, some important theoretical assumptions have been made in this section: Unaccusativity (and argument structure, in general) is not a property of verbs, as argued by proponents of projectionism, but rather of constructions/structures, as argued by proponents of neoconstructionism/constructivism (cf. Marantz 2013 and Mateu 2014 for recent relevant discussion of these two theories of the lexicon-syntax interface). Furthermore, the simpler syntactic structures shown in (44) have developed into the more complex ones represented in (45) thanks to the important work by Hale/Keyser (1993; 2002) and Hoekstra (1988; 1999), among others. (44) a. [NP b. [NP

[VP V NP]] [VP V]]

c. [[NP e] [VP V NP]] (45) a. [vP NP [v’ V C AUS E / DO [S C /P P NP Pred]]] (transitive structure) b. [vP NP [v’ V D O NP]] c. [vP

(unergative structure)

[v’ V B E ( C O M E ) [S C /P P NP Pred]]] (unaccusative structure)

Given the syntactic argument structures in (45), the relevant question with respect to auxiliary selection is why HAVE is associated with (45a) and (45b), whereas BE is associated with (45c). Hoekstra (1999, 82) points out that the starting point of this endeavour is the observation that the verb BE is similar to unaccusatives in a way in which the verb HAVE is similar to transitives and unergatives. Notice in passing that Hale/Keyser (1993; 2002) do provide an explicit relation of unergativity with transitivity by claiming that unergatives are underlying transitives as well (cf. Hale/ Keyser’s unergative structure in 45b with the classic one in 44b). According to Hoekstra (1994; 1999), the crucial difference between HAVE and BE is that the former brings in a transitivity feature. There is a debate in the syntactic

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approaches to auxiliary selection as to what the exact nature of this feature is. According to Hoekstra (1999, 82), the representation of a HAVE -perfect tense construction would be something like [BE [Participial Phrase . . . TF. . .]], with TF (short for “transitivity feature”; Kayne (1993) suggests it is a determiner/preposition; den Dikken (1994) and Hoekstra (1994) assume it is a preposition, Mahajan (1994) a case-marker) raising to BE , which overtly appears as HAVE . In this sense, there is in fact no selection, but rather the difference between HAVE and BE results from a different make-up of the internal structure of the participial complement of BE . Cf. also Ledgeway (2000) and Manzini/Savoia (2011), after Kayne (1993), for some important syntactic proposals that try to integrate the different morphosyntactic factors involved in the complex phenomenon of auxiliary selection in Italian dialects (cf. section 1).

2.2 Semantic approaches The proponents of semantic approaches to auxiliary selection often concentrate on distinctions based on thematic and aspectual properties (cf. section 1.1); e.g. cf. Shannon (1990; 1995), Van Valin (1990), Zaenen (1993), Centineo (1996), Lieber/ Baayen (1997), Sorace (2000; 2004), Aranovich (2003), Bentley/Eythórsson (2003), and Stolova (2007), among others. The most influential semantic approach to auxiliary selection in Romance is the one pioneered by Antonella Sorace and her colleagues, who take the systematic linguistic variation to suggest that unaccusativity is determined by a semantic notion whose components are organized along a (proto)typicality scale ranging from core to periphery. Sorace (2000; 2004) argues that a more nuanced descriptive approach than a simple two-way split is needed in order to account for the attested variation. In particular, Sorace (2000; 2004) shows that in Italian some intransitive verbs (e.g. the ones in 46a–b and 46k) select an auxiliary more categorically than other verbs do (e.g. the ones in 46c through 46j). The former are called ‘core verbs’, while the latter are ‘noncore verbs’.12 (46) It. a. Gianni è / *ha arrivato. Gianni is / has arrived b. Gianni è / *ha morto. Gianni is / has died c. La pianta è fiorita / ha fiorito due volte quest’anno the plant is blossomed.F. SG / has blossomed twice this year 12 It is interesting to point out that similar ideas can already be found in the literature on auxiliary selection in Germanic languages. For example, consider Shannon’s (1990, 476) proposal: “[in German and Dutch] verbs closely approximating the transitive prototype take HAVE , whereas clear mutatives take BE . However, the farther away from the prototypical extremes we get, the more room for variation we find.”

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d. I miei nonni sono sopravvissuti / ?hanno the my grandparents are survived.M . PL / have sopravvissuto al terremoto. survived to-the earthquake e. La guerra è durata / ?ha durato a lungo. the war is lasted.F. SG / has lasted for long f. I dinosauri sono esistiti / ??hanno the dinosaurs are existed.M . PL / have esistito 65 milioni di anni fa. existed 65 million of years ago g. Il nuovo ballo brasiliano è / ha attecchito anche in Italia. the new dance Brazilian is / has taken-root also in Italy h. La campana ha rintoccato / ?è rintoccata. the bell has tolled / is tolled.F. SG i. Maria ha corso / è corsa velocemente. Maria has run / is run.F. SG fast j. È corsa / ?ha corso voce che Maria si sposa. is run.F. SG / has run rumor that Maria REFL marries k. Gianni ha lavorato / *è lavorato. Gianni has worked / is worked

As shown by Sorace, both native and nonnative speakers of Italian can have more doubts when establishing auxiliary selection grammaticality judgements of nonprototypical intransitive verbs (e.g. verbs of appearance and existence) than when establishing those of prototypical verbs (e.g. verbs of telic change of location/state). In (47) the relevant Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (ASH) is depicted, as argued for by Sorace (2000, 863; 2004) and Keller/Sorace (2003). It basically embodies two main factors: telicity and agentivity.13 (47) Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (ASH) CHANGE OF LOCATION

selects BE

– least variation

CHANGE OF STATE CONTINUATION OF A PRE - EXISTING STATE EXISTENCE OF STATE UNCONTROLLED PROCESS CONTROLLED PROCESS (MOTIONAL) CONTROLLED PROCESS (NONMOTIONAL)

selects HAVE – least variation

13 Zaenen (1993) and van Hout (2004), among others, also argue that telicity is the main semantic notion that is characteristic of unaccusative verbs in Dutch.

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In particular, Keller/Sorace (2003, 60f.) explain the ASH as follows: verbs at the BE end of the ASH are core unaccusatives and denote telic change; verbs at the HAVE end are core unergatives and denote agentive activity in which the subject is unaffected. Intermediate verbs between the two extremes incorporate telicity and agentivity to lesser degrees, and tend to have a less specified (basically stative) event structure (. . .). Core verbs are those on which native grammaticality judgments are maximally consistent, and are acquired early by both first and second language learners. In contrast, intermediate verbs are subject to crosslinguistic differences and exhibit gradient auxiliary selection preferences.

Sorace claims that the crosslinguistic variation depends on the location of the relevant cut-off point along the ‘Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy’ (ASH) in (47). For example, the main cut-off point in Italian can be empirically claimed to be drawn between the lexical semantic class expressing ‘existence of state’ and the one expressing ‘uncontrolled process’, whereas the main cut-off point in French can be drawn between telic changes and the rest of the lexical semantic classes, as shown in (48). (48) CHANGE OF LOCATION

selects BE – least variation

TELIC CHANGE OF STATE

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - “cut-off point” (French) ATELIC CHANGE OF STATE CONTINUATION OF A PRE - EXISTING STATE EXISTENCE OF STATE

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - “cut-off point” (Italian) UNCONTROLLED PROCESS CONTROLLED PROCESS (MOTIONAL) CONTROLLED PROCESS (NONMOTIONAL)

selects HAVE – least variation

Sorace’s (2000) work on the ASH has influenced other accounts of auxiliary selection like the semantic one put forward by Bentley/Eythórsson (2003) and the O(ptimality) T(heory) proposal by Legendre/Sorace (2003). This OT account is especially valuable since these authors try to argue for a unified analysis of the morphosyntactic ingredients (e.g. the reflexive clitic) and the semantic factors (e.g. telicity, stativity or control) involved in auxiliary selection in French. In order to deal with the systematic être selection in reflexive constructions the authors posit a constraint against linking morphosyntactic reflexives as unergatives. This crucially outranks all the semantic constraints, ensuring that reflexives will always select être, no matter what their semantics. Despite their descriptive insights, the formal limits on the semantic ingredients involved in auxiliary selection are not provided by Sorace (2000; 2004) nor by Legendre/Sorace (2003). In the next section this issue will be examined by using a syntactic theory of the structural meaning that is systematically associated with the

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argument structure configurations (cf. e.g. Hale/Keyser 1993; Mateu 2002; Hoekstra 1999 or Marantz 2013 for the relevance of syntax when dealing with the ‘structural meaning’ and its irrelevance when dealing with the ‘idiosyncratic/conceptual/ encyclopaedic meaning’).

2.3 A syntactic approach to the structural meaning of unergativity and unaccusativity Despite Sorace’s (2000; 2004) descriptive merits, it is not clear from her approach what the formal constraints are that led her to posit seven or eight (but not eleven or twenty) lexical semantic classes of verbs when dealing with the auxiliary selection problem.14 Mateu (2002) argues that his syntactic approach to thematic structure, which is based on the ones put forward by Hale/Keyser (1993) and Hoekstra (1988; 1999), can provide one with some formal constraints concerning the ingredients of structural meaning involved in Sorace’s Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy: Meaning components like process, on the one hand, and change or existence, on the other, are the relevant ingredients at the syntax-semantics interface precisely because these notions can be argued to be filtered into the abstract relational semantics associated with the unergative and unaccusative syntactic argument structures in (49a) and (49b), respectively. (49) a. [X1 Z1 [X1 X1[±R] Y1]] b.

(Unergative argument structure)

[X1 X1[±T] [X2 Z2 [X2 X2[±r] Y2]]] (Unaccusative argument structure)

In (49a) the [+R] feature encodes an agentive/volitional immediate cause function (cf. Levin/Rappaport Hovav 1995), while the [-R] feature subsumes the nonagentive one. The nonrelational elements Z1 and Y1 are interpreted as Originator/Causer and Incremental Theme, respectively. Y1 is the created object that can typically be conflated into the unergative verbal head X1 (cf. Hale/Keyser 1993; 2002; Mateu 2002). In (49b), in contrast, an eventive head X1 subcategorizes for a birelational noneventive head X2 , which relates two nonrelational elements, Z2 and Y2 . The T(ransition) features, [+T] and [-T], which are associated with the unaccusative verbal head X1 in (49b), encode the CHANGE and BE semantic functions, respectively. Moreover, the [+r] and [-r] features correlate with Hale/Keyserʼs (1993; 2002) terminal coincidence

14 Sorace (2000, 861) is aware of this nontrivial problem: “(. . .) there are some important questions that I do not attempt to address. First, the reader will not find an explanation of why particular semantic components are more crucial to the selection of particular auxiliaries than others.”

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relation and central coincidence relation, respectively:15 The birelational element X2 relates two nonrelational elements Z2 and Y2 , Figure and Ground, respectively (Talmy 2000). Importantly, the relational features [T] and [R] are configurational (or derivative) in the sense that they can be read off from the mere syntactic argument structure, i.e. X1 is the very same eventive head in both (49a) and (49b). It is just the case that this head is realized as [R] (‘source/immediate cause’) if there is an external argument (Z1 in (49a)); otherwise, it is realized as [T] (‘transition’), as in (49b). In contrast to the lack of formal constraints involved in Sorace’s (2000; 2004) lexical semantic classes (their number is not formally limited), Mateu (2002; 2009) argues that the possible combinations of relational semantic features that can be drawn from the syntactic argument structures in (49) turn out to be formally limited or reduced to the ones in (50):16 (50) a. [[+T] [+r]] (cf. telic change of {location/state}) b. [[+T] [-r]] (cf. atelic change of {location/state}) c. [[-T] [-r]]

(cf. {continuation of a pre-existing state / existence of state})

d. [-R]

(cf. nonvolitional internal cause)

e. [+R]

(cf. volitional internal cause)

The relational semantic features in (50) can be associated with the syntactic argument structures depicted in (51), where the most relevant ‘cut-off points’ in Romance languages like French or Italian have been represented (Mateu 2002). (51)

a. b. c.

[X1 X1[+T] [X2 Z2 [X2 X2[+r] Y2]]] ----------------------------[X1 X1[+T] [X2 Z2 [X2 X2[-r] Y2]]]

selects BE cut-off point (French)

cut-off point (Italian)

d.

[X1 X1[-T] [X2 Z2 [X2 X2[-r] Y2]]] ----------------------------[X1 Z1 [X1 X1[-R] Y1]]

e.

[X1 Z1 [X1 X1[+R] Y1]]

selects HAVE

15 Cf. Hale (1986) for relevant discussion on the semantic notions associated with {terminal/central} coincidence relations. Basically, a terminal coincidence relation involves a coincidence between one edge or terminus of the theme’s path and the place, whereas a central relation involves a coincidence between the centre of the theme and the centre of the place. 16 Mateu (2002) claims that the [[-T] [+r]] combination can be excluded in virtue of the semantic fact that the unaccusatives involving [+r](esultative) are always associated with a positive Transition (i.e. [+T]). Alternatively, this combination could be assigned to stative constructions that take a result phrase as complement: e.g., Lat. abesse ‘be away’. In contrast, [[+T] [-r]] accounts for Sorace’s (2000) indefinite change of state verbs (i.e. Dowtyʼs 1979 ‘degree achievements’); e.g. cf. It. Gianni è cresciuto molto quest’anno ‘Gianni has grown a lot this year’.

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3 Some diachronic issues In this section, I will not deal, for reasons of space, with the issue of how perfect systems with auxiliary splits were created in Romance languages (cf. e.g. Vincent 1982; Cennamo 2008; Ledgeway 2012). Rather I will make some brief remarks on how the auxiliary selection has subsequently been lost in some Romance languages (e.g. in Catalan and Spanish).17 For example, in Mateu (2009) the following descriptive generalization was drawn: The intransitive verbs that exhibit gradient auxiliary selection preference in Contemporary Italian (Sorace 2000; 2004) typically coincide with the ones that earlier lost the BE auxiliary in both Old Catalan (Batlle 2002) and Old Spanish (Aranovich 2003).18 Drawing on data from these two sources,19 Mateu (2009) points out that it cannot be a mere coincidence that in both Old Catalan and Old Spanish verbs of existence and appearance20 were among the first ones to admit the HAVE auxiliary, the rest of the unaccusative verbs being more reluctant to accept it. As shown above, Sorace (2000; 2004) shows that intransitive verbs of existence and appearance show gradience in Italian. In contrast, core or prototypical unaccusatives, the ones expressing change of location, do not show any gradient variation at all. However, by looking at more data from Old Catalan, Mateu/Massanell i Messalles (2014) conclude that, as far the diachronic process of auxiliary selection in this language is concerned, there are not “core verbs” but rather “core constructions”. Core constructions are the last ones that were affected by the relevant grammatical change. These authors show that it seems plausible to take subject-of-result structures whose DP subject is definite and typically preverbal (e.g. OCat. El cavaller és 17 Concerning Catalan, it is interesting to point out that ésser (BE ) still remains as a perfect auxiliary in some dialectal varieties: mainly Balearic, Rossellonian, and Alguerese (cf. Batlle’s 2002 appendix). 18 For example, cf. Aranovich (2003, 5–6): “A quick glance at the verbs (. . .) reveals that the degree of affectedness of the subject is a factor in the displacement of ser by haber as the perfect auxiliary. At one end of the continuum are the subjects of stative verbs of existence and appearance like quedar ‘remain’. The subjects of these verbs do not suffer any changes in state or location, hence they are not affected in any way by the event. This is the first class to lose its ability to select ser. At the opposite end are subjects of verbs of directed motion and verbs of change of state. These subjects are affected since they are in a new location or state as a consequence of the event. These classes are the last ones for which haber displaces ser as the perfect auxiliary of choice. In between these two extremes are verbs of manner of motion like correr ‘run’, and dynamic verbs of existence and appearance like desaparecer ‘disappear’. (. . .) The chronology of split auxiliary selection in Spanish, then, falls under the generalization that the less affected the subject, the earlier a verb lost its ability to select auxiliary ser.” 19 Unfortunately, Sorace’s (2000) important work on gradience in auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs was mentioned neither by Batlle (2002) nor by Aranovich (2003). 20 Levin/Rappaport Hovav (1995, 282) include remain, endure, come, and exist within this class. Come is also classified by Levin/Rappaport Hovav (1995, 281) within the class of “verbs of inherently directed motion”.

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arribat, lit. ‘The knight is arrived’) as the “core” ones, whereas existential structures whose NP is indefinite and typically postverbal (e.g. OCat. Ha arribat correu, lit. ‘Has arrived mail’, i.e. ‘There arrived mail’)21 can be regarded as “noncore” constructions and are then predicted to be the first ones affected by the relevant grammatical change. Mateu/Massanell i Messalles (2014) show that variation is not found in core constructions (i.e. subject-of-result structures, e.g. OCat. El cavaller {és/*ha} arribat ‘lit. The knight {is/*has} arrived’) until the very latest stages of the diachronic process of auxiliary substitution, whereas noncore constructions (e.g. existential structures like OCat. {Ha/és} arribat correu, lit. ‘Has/is arrived mail’, i.e. ‘There arrived mail’) do present variation long before this process is reaching its final stages. It seems then that the following descriptive generalization holds for Old Catalan: Subject-ofresult constructions systematically involve BE -selection, whereas existential constructions often involve HAVE -selection (though BE -selection is also attested). Indeed, it is important to point out that this fact is compatible with Keller/Sorace’s (2003, 60) conception of “intermediacy” if (and only if ) we replace “verbs” by “constructions”, i.e. “[i]ntermediate [constructions] between the two extremes incorporate telicity and agentivity to lesser degrees, and tend to have a less specified (basically stative) event structure”. As predicted, existential constructions in Old Catalan like the ones where HAVE is typically selected are atelic and more stative than subject-of-result constructions. Importantly, Mateu/Massanell i Messalles’s (2014) claim that the fact that in Old Catalan even Sorace’s (2000) core unaccusative verbs like venir ‘come’, entrar ‘enter’, anar ‘go’, arribar ‘arrive’ or eixir ‘exit’ can enter into an existential argument structure where HAVE is typically selected can be accommodated in (neo)constructionist approaches to the lexicon-syntax interface (e.g. Marantz 2013) in a more appropriate way than in projectionist approaches (e.g. Levin/Rappaport Hovav 1995).22

4 Concluding remarks Auxiliary selection in Romance languages is a complex interface phenomenon that has been shown to be sensitive to factors ranging from (in)transitivity, argument structure (cf. unaccusativity vs. unergativity), lexical semantics, and Aktionsart 21 Cf. also Rosemeyer (2014) for the relevance of (in)definiteness in auxiliary selection in Old Spanish. 22 Recall, however, that, according to Sorace (2000; 2004), core unaccusative verbs like It. venire ‘come’ or arrivare ‘arrive’ are predicted to select only BE , no matter what the quantificational nature of their subject is; e.g. cf. It. *Ha arrivato posta vs. È arrivata posta ‘There arrived mail’. As pointed out by Sorace, proponents of projectionism can account for this situation (and the lack of elasticity of core verbs; e.g. cf. It. *Gianni ha venuto/morto/. . . ‘Gianni has come/died/. . .’) in a more appropriate way.

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to subject person, tense, and modality. Such a variety of involved factors has led different authors to approach auxiliary selection from a syntactic perspective (cf. e.g. Burzio 1986; Perlmutter 1989; Kayne 1993; Hoekstra 1994; Ledgeway 2000) or from a semantic one (cf. e.g. Centineo 1996; Sorace 2000; 2004; Bentley/Eythórsson 2003; Aranovich 2003). Syntactosemantic approaches where unaccusativity is semantically determined but syntactically represented can also be found in the literature (cf. e.g. Perlmutter 1978; Cennamo 2002). For reasons of space, in this chapter I have concentrated on offering an overview of some relevant syntactic and semantic approaches to auxiliary selection in Romance and have concluded that the two perspectives are not incompatible. Future research is needed to see if the resulting unifying perspective can accommodate the morphosyntactic factors reviewed in section 1 (cf. e.g. Legendre/Sorace’s 2003 and Legendre’s 2007 OT-based accounts for a unified analysis of the morphosyntactic and semantic factors involved in auxiliary selection). Assuming an important theoretical distinction between syntactically nontransparent conceptual content and syntactically transparent semantic construal (cf. e.g. Mateu 2002; 2009; Marantz 2013), Sorace’s (2000; 2004) Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy can be shown to be accounted for in terms of syntactic representations that encode structural meaning (vs. the idiosyncratic meaning, which is encoded by the conceptual root). One relevant theoretical consequence is that there are no unaccusative verbs but rather unaccusative structures/constructions that encode relational meaning. Such a view does not exclude the fact that some roots (which encode conceptual content) tend to be lexically associated to some specific syntactic constructions (which encode structural meaning). (Neo)constructionist approaches to auxiliary selection can also be claimed to be more compatible with those accounts that posit the intervention of “nonlexical” level factors (cf. e.g. Ledgeway 2000; 2003; Manzini/Savoia 2011) and with those accounts that allow both the integration of so-called “core unergative verbs” (e.g. It. lavorare ‘to work’) into unaccusative structures (e.g. It. Di ragazze, ne lavorano molte nelle fabbriche di Shanghai ‘There are many girls in the factories of Shanghai who are working’) and the integration of so-called “core unaccusative verbs” (e.g. OCat. arribar ‘to arrive’) into existential constructions where HAVE is typically selected (e.g. OCat. Ha arribat correu, lit. ‘Has arrived mail’). Indeed, insertion of roots into syntactic argument structures is not as free as some radical proponents of (neo)constructionism would predict (e.g. Old Catalan venir ‘come’ cannot be associated to an unergative argument structure; cf. also footnote 22) but is much freer than proponents of projectionist approaches to the lexicon-syntax interface predict. Quite probably, the proper account(s) of auxiliary selection in Romance languages, i.e. the one(s) that turn(s) out be successful in connecting both the thematic/Aktionsart factors with the “nonlexical” ones (e.g. person, tense, clausal aspect, and modality), will have to find the right balance between these two approaches to the lexicon-syntax interface.

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5 References Aranovich, Raúl (2003), “The semantics of auxiliary selection in Old Spanish”, Studies in Language 27, 1–37. Avram, Larisa/Hall, Virginia (2007), “An irrealis BE auxiliary in Romanian”, in: Raúl Aranovich (ed.), Split auxiliary systems. A cross-linguistic perspective, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 47–64. Batlle, Mar (2002), L’expressió dels temps compostos en la veu mitjana i la passiva pronominal. El procés de substitució de l’auxiliar ésser per haver, Barcelona, Institut d’Estudis Catalans/ Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat. Battaglia, Salvatore/Pernicone, Vincenzo (1987), Grammatica italiana, Torino, Loescher. Belletti, Adriana/Rizzi, Luigi (1988), “Psych verbs and theta theory”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6, 291–352. Bentley, D elia/Eythórsson, Thórhallur (2003), “Auxiliary selection and the semantics of unaccusativity”, Lingua 114, 447–471. Bertinetto, Pier M./Squartini, Mario (1995), “An attempt at defining the class of ‘gradual completion verbs’”, in: Pier M. Bertinetto (ed.), Temporal reference, aspect and actionality, Torino, Rosenberg and Sellier, 11–26. Burzio, Luigi (1981), Intransitive verbs and Italian auxiliaries, PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Burzio, Luigi (1986), Italian syntax, Dordrecht, Reidel. Cennamo, Michela (2002), “La selezione degli ausiliari perfettivi in napoletano antico. Fenomeno sintattico o sintattico-semantico?”, Archivio Glottologico Italiano 87, 175–222. Cennamo, Michela (2008), “The rise and development of analytic perfects in Italo-Romance”, in: Thórhallur Eythórsson (ed.), Grammatical change and linguistic theory. The Rosendal Papers, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 115–142. Cennamo, Michela/Sorace, Antonella (2007), “Auxiliary selection and split intransitivity in Paduan”, in: Raúl Aranovich (ed.), Split auxiliary systems. A cross-linguistic perspective, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 65–99. Centineo, Giulia (1996), “A lexical theory of auxiliary selection in Italian”, Probus 8, 223–271. Cocchi, Gloria (1994), “An explanation of the split in the choice of perfect auxiliaries”, Probus 6, 87– 102. Cocchi, Gloria (1995), La selezione dell’ausiliare, Padua, Unipress. Culicover, Peter W./Levine, Robert D. (2001), “Stylistic inversion in English. A reconsideration”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 19, 283–310. D’Alessandro, Roberta/Roberts, Ian (2010), “Past participle agreement in Abruzzese. Split auxiliary selection and the null-subject parameter”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28, 41–72. Dikken, Marcel den (1994), “Auxiliaries and participles”, Proceedings of the Northeastern Linguistics Society (NELS) 24, 65–79. Dowty, David (1979), Word meaning and Montague Grammar, Dordrecht, Reidel. Dragomirescu, Adina/Nicolae, Alexandru (2009), Relics of auxiliary selection in Romanian, Ms. Iorgu Iordan-Al.Rosetti Institute for Linguistics/University of Bucharest. Haider, Hubert/Rindler-Schjerve, Rosita (1987), “The parameter of auxiliary selection. Italian-German contrasts”, Linguistics 25, 1029–1055. Hale, Kenneth L. (1986), “Notes on world view and semantic categories. Some Warlpiri examples”, in: Peter Muysken/Henk Van Riemsdijk (edd.), Features and projections, Dordrecht, Foris, 233– 254. Hale, Kenneth L./Keyser, Samuel J. (1993), “On argument structure and the lexical expression of syntactic relations”, in: Kenneth L. Hale/Samuel J. Keyser (edd.), A view from Building 20. Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 53–109.

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Hale, Kenneth L./Keyser, Samuel J. (2002), Prolegomenon to a theory of argument structure, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Hoekstra, Teun (1988), “Small clause results”, Lingua 74, 101–139. Hoekstra, Teun (1994), “HAVE as BE plus or minus”, in: Guglielmo Cinque (ed.), Festschrift for Richard Kayne, Washington, Georgetown University Press, 199–215. Hoekstra, Teun (1999), “Auxiliary selection in Dutch”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 17, 67–84. Hoekstra, Teun/Mulder, René H. (1990), “Unergatives as copular verbs. Locational and existential predication”, The Linguistic Review 7, 1–79. van Hout, Angeliek (2004), “Unaccusativity as telicity checking”, in: Artemis Alexiadou/Elena Anagnostopoulou/Martin Everaert (edd.), The unaccusativity puzzle. Explorations of the syntaxlexicon interface, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 60–83. Iatridou, Sabine/Anagnostopoulou, Elena/Pancheva, Roumyana (2003), “Observations about the form and meaning of the perfect”, in: Artemis Alexiadou/Monika Rathert/Arnim von Stechow (edd.), Perfect explorations, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 153–204. Jezek, Elisabetta (2003), Classi di verbi tra semantica e sintassi, Pisa, ETS. Kayne, Richard (1993), “Toward a modular theory of auxiliary selection”, Studia Linguistica 47, 3–31. Keller, Frank/Sorace, Antonella (2003), “Gradient auxiliary selection and impersonal passivization in German. An experimental investigation”, Journal of Linguistics 39, 57–108. Labelle, Marie (1990), “Unaccusatives and pseudo-unaccusatives in French”, Proceedings of the Northeastern Linguistics Society (NELS) 20, 303–317. Labelle, Marie (1992), “Change of state and valency”, Journal of Linguistics 28, 375–414. Ledgeway, Adam (2000), A comparative syntax of the dialects of southern Italy. A minimalist approach, London, Blackwell. Ledgeway, Adam (2003), “The distribution of the perfective auxiliary avere in Early Neapolitan. Split intransitivity conditioned by modal factors”, Archivo Glottologico Italiano 88, 29–71. Ledgeway, Adam (2012), From Latin to Romance. Morphosyntactic typology and change, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Legendre, Géraldine (2007), “Optimizing auxiliary selection in Romance”, in: Raúl Aranovich (ed.), Split auxiliary systems. A cross-linguistic perspective, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 145–180. Legendre, Géraldine/Sorace, Antonella (2003), “Split intransitivity in French. An optimality-theoretic perspective”, in: Danièle Godard (ed.), Les langues romanes. Problèmes de la phrase simple, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 185–234. Levin, Beth/Rappaport Hovav, Malka (1995), Unaccusativity. At the syntax-lexical semantics interface, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Lieber, Rochelle/Baayen, Harald (1997), “A semantic principle of auxiliary selection in Dutch”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 15, 789–845. Lonzi, Lidia (1985), “Pertinenza della struttura tema-rema per l’analisi sintattica”, in: Harro Stammerjohann (ed.), Theme-rheme in Italian, Tübingen, Narr, 99–120. Loporcaro, Michele (1998), Sintassi comparata dell’accordo participiale romanzo, Torino, Rosenberg and Sellier. Mahajan, Anoop (1994), “The ergativity parameter. Have and Be alternation, word order and split ergativity”, Proceedings of the Northeastern Linguistics Society (NELS) 24, 317–331. Maling, Joan/Calabrese, Andrea/Sprouse, Rex A. (1994), “‘Domani ne parleranno molti’. The Independence of ne-cliticization and essere-selection in Italian”, Ms., Brandeis University, Harvard University, Indiana University. Manente, Mara (2009), L’aspect, les auxiliaires “être” et “avoir” et l’hypothèse inaccusative dans une perspective comparative français/italien, PhD dissertation, Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia, http://arcaold.unive.it/handle/10278/965 (20.11.2015).

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Manzini, Maria Rita/Savoia, Leonardo Maria (2005), I dialetti italiani e romanci. Morfosintassi generativa, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso. Manzini, Maria Rita/Savoia, Leonardo Maria (2011), Grammatical categories. Variation in Romance languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Marantz, Alec (2013), “Verbal argument structure. Events and participants”, Lingua 130, 152–168. Mateu, Jaume (2002), Argument structure. Relational construal at the syntax-semantics interface, PhD dissertation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, http://hdl.handle.net/10803/4828 (20.11.2015). Mateu, Jaume (2009), “Gradience and auxiliary selection in Old Catalan and Old Spanish”, in: Paola Crisma/Giuseppe Longobardi (edd.), Historical syntax and linguistic theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 176–193. Mateu, Jaume (2014), “Argument structure”, in: Andrew Carnie/Dan Siddiqi/Yosuke Sato (edd.), The Routledge Handbook of Syntax, New York, Routledge, 24–41. Mateu, Jaume/Massanell i Messalles, Mar (2014), “A constructional approach to auxiliary selection. Evidence from existential constructions”, in: Rolf Kailuweit/Malte Rosemeyer (edd.), Auxiliary selection revisited. Gradience and gradualness, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 183–211. Mateu, Jaume/Rigau, Gemma (2002), “A minimalist account of conflation processes. Parametric variation at the lexicon-syntax interface”, in: Artemis Alexiadou (ed.), Theoretical approaches to universals, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 211–236. Mateu, Jaume/Rigau, Gemma (2010), “Verb-particle constructions in Romance. A lexical-syntactic account”, Probus 22, 241–269. McFadden, Thomas (2007), “Auxiliary selection”, Language and Linguistics Compass 1, 674–708. McFadden, Thomas/Alexiadou, Artemis (2010), “Perfects, resultatives, and auxiliaries in Earlier English”, Linguistic Inquiry 41, 389–425. Moro, Andrea (1997), The raising of predicates. Predicative noun phrases and the theory of clause structure, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Perlmutter, David (1978), “Impersonal passives and the unaccusative hypothesis”, in: Jeri J. Jaeger/ Anthony C. Woodbury/Farrell Ackerman/Christine Chiarello/Orin D. Gensler/John Kingston/Eve E. Sweetser/Henry Thompson/Kenneth W. Whistler (edd.), Proceedings of the fourth annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, Berkeley, CA, Berkeley Linguistics Society, 157–189. Perlmutter, David (1989), “Multi-attachment and the unaccusative hypothesis. The perfect auxiliary in Italian”, Probus 1, 63–119. Reinhart, Tanya/Siloni, Tal (2005), “The lexicon-syntax parameter. Reflexivization and other arity operations”, Linguistic Inquiry 36, 389–436. Rigau, Gemma (1997), “Locative sentences and related constructions in Catalan. Ésser / haver alternation”, in: Amaya Mendikoetxea/Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria (edd.), Theoretical issues at the morphology-syntax interface, Bilbao, Donosti-San Sebastián, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Gipuzkoa Foru Aldundia, 395–421. Rosemeyer, Malte (2014), Auxiliary selection. Gradience, gradualness, and conservation, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins. Shannon, Thomas (1990), “The unaccusative hypothesis and the history of the perfect auxiliary in Germanic and Romance”, in: Henning Andersen/Konrad Koerner (edd.), Historical Linguistics 1987. Papers from the 8th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 461–488. Shannon, Thomas (1995), “Toward a cognitive explanation of perfect auxiliary variation. Some modal and aspectual effects in the history of Germanic”, American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures 7, 129–163. Sorace, Antonella (2000), “Gradients in auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs”, Language 76, 859–890.

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Sorace, Antonella (2004), “Gradience at the lexicon-syntax interface. Evidence from auxiliary selection and implications for unaccusativity”, in: Artemis Alexiadou/Elena Anagnostopoulou/Martin Everaert (edd.), The unaccusativity puzzle. Explorations of the syntax-lexicon interface, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 243–268. Stolova, Natalya I. (2007), “Italian split intransitivity and image schemas”, Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 5, 77–106. Talmy, Leonard (2000), Toward a cognitive semantics. Typology and process in concept structuring, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Torrego, Esther (1989), “Unergative-unaccusative alternations in Spanish”, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 10, 253–272. Tuttle, Edward F. (1986), “The spread of esse as a universal auxiliary in Central Italo-Romance”, Medioevo Romanzo 11, 229–287. Van Valin Jr, Robert D. (1990), “Semantic parameters of split intransitivity”, Language 66, 221–260. Vincent, Nigel (1982), “The development of the auxiliaries habere and esse in Romance”, in: Nigel Vincent/Martin Harris (edd.), Studies in the Romance verb, London, Croom Helm, 71–96. Zaenen, Annie (1993), “Unaccusativity in Dutch. Integrating syntax and lexical semantics”, in: James Pustejovsky (ed.), Semantics and the lexicon, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 129–161.

III Sound, structure, and meaning

Michelle Sheehan

11 Subjects, null subjects, and expletives Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of the status of overt and null subjects in Spanish, Catalan, European Portuguese and Italian. The two main Minimalist approaches to null subjects imply that either: (a) the verbal morphology in null subject languages (NSLs) is pronominal (Barbosa 1995; Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou 1998); or (b) a pronominal, which in some circumstances can be null, functions as the subject in these languages (Sheehan 2006; Roberts 2010a, amongst others). Crucially, these two approaches make very different empirical predictions regarding the status of overt subjects in pre- and postverbal position as well as the (non-)existence of null expletives, the exploration of which forms the basis of this chapter. Interestingly, it seems that while an (a)-type approach is more apt for some Romance NSLs, others require a (b)-type analysis. The role of the interfaces with morphology and information structure in licensing null subjects is also discussed. Keywords: pro-drop, A-bar, morphology, information structure, inversion, null subjects, dislocation, expletives

1 Introduction Many of the “national” Romance languages have been characterized as pro-drop or null subject languages (NSLs) because they allow pronominal subjects to remain implicit/null in the correct information-structure context. Consider, for example, the following examples from Italian, Spanish, European Portuguese (Por.) and Catalan, compared with French and English, which are standardly held to be non-NSLs:1 (1)

a.

It.

Canti sing.2SG

bene. well

b.

Sp.

Cantas sing.2SG

bien. well

c.

Por.

Cantas sing.2SG

bem. well

Acknowledgement: The writing of this paper was funded by the European Research Council Advanced Grant No. 269752 “Rethinking Comparative Syntax”. 1 The licensing of 1st/2nd-person null subjects behaves differently from the licensing of 3rd-person null subjects. For discussion of 3rd-person null subjects and their need to be linked to a topic antecedent cf. Frascarelli (2007).

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d.

Cat.

Cantes bé. sing.2SG well ‘You sing well.’

e.

Fr. *(Tu) you

chantes sing.2SG

f.

Fr. *(You) sing well.

bien. well

While this basic property fairly obviously holds at a descriptive level, the correct analysis of null subjects has remained elusive. One of the difficulties involves the apparent role of the interfaces with information structure and morphology in the licensing of Romance null subjects, raising some challenges for modular theories of syntax. Moreover, other surface effects which have been connected to the availability of null subjects such as ‘free inversion’ and the violation of the that-trace filter also seem to be sensitive to prosodic factors, further complicating the modular view (cf. Zubizarreta 1998 and Kandybowicz 2006 respectively). In this chapter we review the main analyses of NSLs within Government and Binding (GB) and Minimalism in relation to a number of Romance languages and examine the empirical predictions of these approaches in terms of the distribution and status of null/overt subjects/ expletives in these languages. The structure of the chapter is as follows. Section 2 considers the main analyses of NSLs in GB and Minimalism, making clear how their empirical predictions differ and how they tackle the syntax-morphology interface. Section 3 considers the distribution and status of overt subjects in a number of Romance NSLs and the implications for the Minimalist analyses expounded in section 2. Section 4 briefly considers the status of inversion and the (non-)existence of null expletives in Romance null subject languages. Finally section 5 concludes and raises some issues for future research.

2 Analyses of Romance null subjects 2.1 Null subjects in Government and Binding Theory In GB Theory, Rizzi’s influential analysis of NSLs involves pro, an empty pronominal which needs to be both: (2)

a.

licensed by Xy0

b.

identified by binding from features on the local head Xy0. (Rizzi 1982; 1986)

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If a given head Xy0 licenses pro then null (expletive) subjects will be available in a position local to Xy0, but the interpretation of pro (as referential or quasi-argumental) will depend on the extent to which pro is also identified (by rich agreement morphology on Xy0). This provides a fine-grained typology of NSLs, based on the properties of finite I in a given language (Rizzi 1986): (3)

a.

Full NSL: both referential and non-referential pro (proref and proexpl) are identified – e.g. Italian, Spanish, Greek

b.

Semi NSL Type I: only null non-referential pro, i.e. quasi-argumental and non-argumental expletives are identified – e.g. Icelandic, Yiddish

c.

Semi NSL Type II: only null non-argumental pro, but not referential or quasi-argumental pro is identified – e.g. Dutch, German

d.

Non-NSL: pro is not licensed at all – e.g. English, French

The typology in (3) concerns the properties of finite I across languages. The prediction, though, is that even within a given language, heads might potentially differ with respect to their ability to license/identify pro. Thus as Rizzi (1986) shows, Italian has different heads which behave like each of the finite ‘I’s in (3a–d) in their licensing/ identification possibilities. In finite clauses in Italian, pro is licensed and identified as referential by rich agreement on I, as per (3a): (4)

It.

a.

Ritengo [che pro sia be.SBJV.3SG believe.1SG that ‘I believe that (he) is nice.’

simpatico]. nice

b.

Ritengo [che pro sia be.SBJV.3SG believe.1SG that ‘I believe that (it) is too late for S.’

troppo too

c.

Ritengo [che pro sia be.SBJV.3SG believe.1SG that ‘I believe that (it) is likely that S.’

probabile che S]. probable that S (adapted from Rizzi 1986, 541)

tardi late

per for

S]. S

In Italian non-finite Aux-to-Comp complements (discussed by Rizzi 1982, 127–129), pro is licensed in Italian, but only quasi-argumental pro (the subject of weather predicates) can be identified:2 2 The subject of weather predicates is taken to be quasi-argumental because, amongst other things, it can control PRO: (i) It rained after PRO having snowed.

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It.

a. *Ritengo [essere pro believe.1SG be.INF ‘I believe to be (he) nice.’

simpatico]. nice

b.

Ritengo [essere pro troppo too believe.1SG be.INF ‘I believe to be (it) too late for S.’

tardi late

c.

Ritengo [essere pro probabile probable believe.1SG be.INF ‘I believe to be (it) likely that S.’

per S]. for S

che S]. that S (adapted from Rizzi 1986, 542)

In Italian small clauses, pro is licensed, but neither referential nor quasi-argumental pro can be identified. All that is possible is expletive pro, which does not require licensing: (6)

It.

a. *Ritengo believe.1SG

[pro

simpatico]. nice

b. *Ritengo believe.1SG

[pro

troppo too

c.

tarde late

Ritengo [pro probabile believe.1SG probable ‘I believe it likely that S.’

per for

che that

S]. S

S]. S (adapted from Rizzi 1986, 542)

Finally, Rizzi shows that in Italian Control clauses, introduced by di ‘of’, pro is not even licensed (because of the lack of Case) and only PRO (a null subject with very different properties) is possible:3 (7)

It.

a.

proi

ritengo [di PROi believe.1SG of ‘I believe that I am nice.’

b. *proi

ritengo [di proj believe.1SG of ‘I believe him to be nice.’

essere be.INF

essere be.INF

c. *Ritengo [di pro essere troppo be.INF too believe.1SG of ‘I believe it to be too late for S.’

simpatico]. nice

simpatico]. nice

tardi late

per for

S]. S

3 Note, however, that in French/English pro fails to be licensed even in contents where Case is otherwise available, so, while pro requires Case (like all DPs), it also requires licensing of a more specific nature.

Subjects, null subjects, and expletives

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d. *Ritengo [di pro essere probabile che S]. be.INF probable that S believe.1SG of ‘I believe it to be likely that S.’ (adapted from Rizzi 1986, 541s) These facts can be taken as evidence that (i) the availability of null subjects must be relativized to specific heads in a given language and (ii) there are different kinds of null subjects (referential, quasi-argumental and expletive), the availability of which in a given language is also relativized to specific contexts. Note that these facts rule out a purely lexical approach to NSLs whereby pro is simply made available or not in the lexicon of a given language, as well as macro-parametric accounts where an entire language permits null subjects across the board. Rather, on Rizzi’s view, pro is universally available in natural languages but its distribution is constrained by (2). One of the key issues with this approach is the question of morphological richness and its connection to identification. In finite clauses, Italian (like to a slightly lesser extent Spanish varieties and Portuguese) has a rich morphological paradigm in that all person/number combinations are differentiated: (8)

Rich agreement: Italian present tense paradigm, regular ‑are verb singular plural 1st canto cantiamo 2nd canti cantate 3rd canta cantano

Formally, Rizzi (1986, 543) claims that pro can be referential only if it is licensed for both person and number, as is clearly the case with the subjects of finite I, given (8). In (5), on the other hand, non-finite I in Aux-to-Comp contexts is not specified for person, but is abstractly specified for number, and so only a quasi-argumental reading is possible. The difference between (5) and (6) is that, in (6), pro is not theta-marked by the licensing head and so no identification at all is possible. In the absence of any identification for person or number only an expletive interpretation is possible. The following table summarises: Table 1: feature specification of pro. Interpretation of pro

person

number

Referential pro Quasi-argumental pro Expletive pro

+ – –

+ + –

A potential weakness with this proposal is that syntactic specification for a given feature and morphological realisation of that feature do not always go hand in hand. Thus Agr in Aux-to-Comp contexts is only abstractly specified for number, as

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no number inflection is present morphologically. This fact can be considered an advantage or a flaw depending on how modular a view of syntax one wants to maintain. On the plus side, positing syntactic features which only partially overlap with morphological realisation maintains an autonomous syntactic component. On the downside, though, the empirical predictions of such a model are weaker. What independent evidence is there that Agr in Aux-to-Comp contexts bears a number specification except for the licensing of quasi-argumental pro? Another question is why the presence of +person always implies the presence of +number. Why is it not possible for a head to be +person only? Would this be sufficient to license referential pro? Following work by Perlmutter (1971) and Taraldsen (1980), Rizzi (1982) further proposes that several additional surface effects follow from the licensing and identification of referential pro: (9)

Obligatorily null expletive/quasi-argumental subjects It. (*egli / ciò) sta piovendo. it / this is.3SG raining ‘It’s raining.’

(10)

Apparent violations of the that-trace filter It. Chi credi che partirà? who think.2SG that come.FUT.3SG ‘Who do you think (*that) will come.’

(11)

Free inversion in simple clauses It. Ha telefonato Gianni. has.3SG telephoned Gianni ‘Gianni rang.’

The Rizzian approach to NSLs provides an elegant and explanatory account of (9–11). The obligatory availability of null expletives/quasi-argumental pro where referential pro is identified follows (a) from the licensing/identification distinction (for pro to be identified it must also be licensed) and (b) because (+person, +number) morphology rich enough to identify pro as referential will automatically be rich enough to identify quasi-argumental pro (as +number). The possibility of free inversion is due, in turn, to the availability of a null expletive which satisfies the subject requirement (the EPP), precluding the need for subject movement to Spec,IP. The that-trace filter is then avoided by extracting the subject from its (governed) post-verbal position (12), something which is also possible in Englishtype languages with overt expletives (13): (12)

It.

che pro partirà Chii credi come.FUT.3SG who think.2SG that ‘Who do you think (*that) will come.’

ti?

Subjects, null subjects, and expletives

335

(13) Whati did you say that there was ti in the box? Crucially, Rizzi (1982) further argues that Italian covert movement is subject to the that-trace filter, following work on French by Kayne (1981). As such, it is not that the that-trace filter is itself parameterised, but rather that it is avoided in Italian and other NSLs because of the availability of pro and a postverbal A-position. All in all, then, Rizzi’s account of NSLs is highly elegant and in the context of GB theory provides an explanatory account of the properties of Romance NSLs as well as the means for a fine-grained typology of null arguments across and within languages. Questions remain, however, concerning the nature of the syntaxmorphology interface, notably the nature of the specifications for +person/number and how/why exactly these serve to license the various kinds of pro.

2.2 Null subjects in minimalism In the content of the Minimalist Program MP, Rizzi’s analysis is, however, problematic on conceptual grounds because (i) the availability of an entity such as pro which, when it enters the derivation lacks content at both the LF and PF interface is highly suspect; (ii) licensing relies crucially on government, a stipulative language-specific relation which is rejected in Minimalist approaches; and (iii) the mechanism of identification cannot easily be restated in terms of the Minimalist operation Agree (cf. Holmberg 2005). Agree involves the valuation of uninterpretable features [uF] by interpretable features [iF] in a Probe-Goal configuration (Chomsky 1993): (14) Probe[uF] . . .Goal[iF] Holmberg notes that there are two possible ways to restate Rizzi’s (1982; 1986) theory of identification in terms of Agree: A. The agreement morphology on I is interpretable (cf. Barbosa 1995; Alexiadou/ Anagnostopoulou 1998). B. The agreement morphology on I is uninterpretable and valued by interpretable Ф-features originating on the null pronominal (cf. Holmberg 2005; Sheehan 2006; Roberts 2010a). In simplified terms, either: (a) pro does not exist, or (b) pro is an “ordinary” pronoun which simply lacks a PF realization. The third option, most similar to Rizzi’s proposal, whereby pro bears only uninterpretable Ф-features, which are valued by interpretable features on I, is not theoretically viable. This is because pronouns are arguably just bundles of Ф-features with a PF representation (Ritter 1995). A null pronoun without interpretable Ф-features would therefore be uninterpretable at both the PF and LF interfaces.

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Crucially, A and B (above) assume different things about the syntax-morphology interface and make subtly different empirical predictions. It is the aim of this chapter to examine these in some detail. We first consider these competing analyses before testing them in sections 3 and 4.

2.2.1 Interpretable agreement morphology Following Jelinek (1984) and Barbosa (1995), Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou (1998) propose that the verbal agreement morphology (Agr) in a rich agreement language “includes a nominal element ([+D, +interpretable phi-features, potentially +Case])” (Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou 1998, 516). Thus Agr in NSLs like Greek and Spanish has “exactly the same status as pronouns in the English paradigm” (ibid.) and Agr is stored as a lexical item in the lexicon, of category D. There are two different interpretations of this proposal, however, depending on whether Agr can also absorb theta-roles (ibid. section 6.3): A.1 (15), and A.2 (16):4 A.1 A.2

Agr can absorb theta-roles – we don’t need pro at all. Agr cannot absorb theta-roles – we still need referential pro in thematic positions

(15)

A.1.

(16)

A.2.

In both (15) and (16), v+V+AgrD movement to T serves to satisfy the EPP (subject requirement), precluding the need for an expletive in Spec,TP because of (17). (17)

Parameterised mode of EPP-checking: Move/merge XP vs. move/merge X0. (Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou 1998)

5

4 For various reasons, the inflectional head of the sentence which was referred to as I in the GB era is now usually referred to as T. I adopt the Minimalist terminology here, though it is of no real consequence. 5 Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou (1998) actually argue that (17) is a parameter associated with AgrP, rather than TP, with a separate parameter determining the availability of Spec,TP as a subject position. We simplify matters somewhat here for ease of exposition.

Subjects, null subjects, and expletives

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In A.1 (15), roughly equivalent to Jelinek’s (1984) account of Walpiri, we also eliminate the need for a referential pro in Spec,vP as Agr absorbs the relevant thetarole, whereas in A.2 (16), the more conservative position taken by Alexiadou/ Anagnostopoulou (1998) and Barbosa (1995; 2009), referential pro remains in Spec,vP (cf. Jelinek 1984 for related discussion). These two approaches therefore make different predictions with respect to the status of overt pre- and postverbal subjects. According to A.1, any overt subject will be dislocated in an A-bar position as there is no A-position for overt subjects (with the exception of the pronominal suffix Agr). According to A.2, however, overt subjects can be base-generated or moved to a preverbal A-bar position or remain in a postverbal A-position in spec vP. In the latter case, obligatory verb movement to T will result in the only A-position for overt subjects being postverbal. Both A.1 and A.2 thus have the apparent advantage of explaining the general absence of overt expletives in NSLs because verb movement to T serves to satisfy the EPP in both cases (but cf. section 4 below). It is not clear, however, that they can account for the more fine-grained distinction between the availability of quasiargumental and referential pro in the range of contexts discussed by Rizzi. Nonetheless, their proposal has the advantage of offering an elegant account of the NSP which attributes it to the status of Agr in a given language: whereas, in an NSL, Agr is an independent lexical entry, in non-NSLs, verbs are stored along with their inflections in the lexicon. Under A.2, which is the approach actually adopted by Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou (1998), the Rizzian connection between free inversion and (expletive) null subjects is also maintained: both arise as surface effects where movement of a verbal complex into the inflectional domain serves to satisfy the EPP. In terms of the syntax-morphology interface, Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou (1998) explicitly state that their analysis is syntactic: what counts for the setting of the NSP are the syntactic effects they discuss, with morphological richness being an additional (optional) morphological surface manifestation of this syntactic parameter.

2.2.2 Uninterpretable agreement morphology A version of B, whereby the agreement morphology in NSLs bears uninterpretable phi-features is explored by Roberts (2010a), Sheehan (2006; 2010) and Saab (to appear): the idea being that the uninterpretable Ф-features on T are valued by the interpretable Ф-features of the pronominal/DP subject, as in non-NSLs like English and French. Where the subject is pronominal, though, the idea is that it can then be deleted at PF if certain conditions hold (going back, broadly speaking, to the analysis of Perlmutter 1971). Here I give a hybrid version of this account, drawing on the above proposals. Following Roberts (2010a), assume that T bears an uninterpretable D feature [uD] in NSLs as the narrow syntactic correlate of rich agreement. Assume, further, that pronouns are just D heads bearing phi- and Case features and

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that nominative Case is an uninterpretable Tense feature (following Pesetsky/Torrego 2001). If these things hold then pronouns, unlike other arguments, will constitute ‘defective goals’ in Roberts’ (2010a) terms: once T has probed and agreed with a pronoun, the features of said pronoun will constitute a proper subset of the features of T. Consider the following Spanish example by way of illustration: (18)

Once T has agreed with the 1sg subject its phi-features and uD feature are valued, as is the subject’s [uT] (Case) feature. As such, the valued features of T form a superset of the valued features of the subject. Although LF cares which of these features are interpretable and which are not, PF arguably does not as morphology commonly spells out uninterpretable valued features. There are then two options regarding the EPP in such a system: B.1 T lacks an EPP feature – the subject is incorporated into T B.2 T bears an EPP feature – the subject raises to Spec,TP If T lacks an EPP feature (B.1) then the valued features [1s T, D] on T form a chain at PF with [1s T, D] on the pronoun and the latter is deleted by virtue of being the lowest link in said chain (in the same way that chain reduction happens more generally – cf. Nunes 1999). This is formally equivalent to cliticisation in Roberts’ (2010a) terms, with the subject agreement functioning as a syntactic clitic. Such a system is basically equivalent to A.2 discussed above (i.e. the system proposed by Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou 1998) with the added advantage that it permits the elimination of referential pro. In both cases (A.2 and B.1) the postverbal position is the only A-position. Alternatively, under B.2, T bears an EPP feature which attracts the subject to its specifier. (19)

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This gives rise to a three-link chain at PF containing the two copies of the subject plus the intermediate verbal inflection. The question here is why it is that this three-link chain leads to deletion of the highest and lowest copies of the subject and leaves only those features on T to be spelled out. A potential answer to this comes from the fact that the features [1s T, D] form part of a larger bundle of features on T which in the partly fusional morphology of Romance languages must be spelled out by a morpheme which realises also mood and tense features. It is not possible, then, to delete the intermediate copy of [1s T, D] as this would result in a combination of features with no morphological exponent in the language. As such, unusually, the intermediate copy in the chain is privileged and both the highest and lowest copies deleted (for economy reasons) (cf. also Nunes 1999 and Saab to appear for discussion). An additional prediction of this approach is that where a pronominal subject bears additional focus/topic features it cannot be deleted. This accounts for the special discourse interpretation associated with overt pronouns in null subject languages. This B.2 approach makes very different predictions regarding the distribution and status of overt subjects in Romance NSLs, and indeed has much in common with Rizzi’s original analysis of null subjects. Where the goal is a full DP, additional features will mean that it fails to be a defective goal, and so will not be deleted. As T still bears an EPP feature (*), by hypothesis, there will be two potential A-positions for such subjects in Romance NSLs: Spec,TP and Spec,vP. The default position of overt subjects will be Spec,TP, but Spec,vP is expected to be available wherever the EPP is satisfied in some other way. As with analysis A.2/B.1, verb movement to T will make Spec,vP a postverbal position. Crucially, though, while preverbal subjects can occupy an A-position (20), it will also be possible for them to occupy an A-bar position, either as a base-generated CLLD topic (21) or via A-bar movement from a preverbal position (cf. also Camacho 2013). (20)

(21)

Analysis B also retains a slightly loose account of the link between rich agreement and referential null subjects: the presence of [uD] is taken to be connected to the presence of rich agreement because of acquisition pressures, but, as with Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou (1998) account, it would presumably be possible to

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detect this feature via the other syntactic effects of the NSP.6 Several further questions remain. For one, how can this kind of approach deal with the difference between licensing and identification argued to be necessary by Rizzi? Moreover, how can this approach also explain the distribution of null expletive and quasiargumental subjects? One possible way to account for the differing distribution of expletive and quasiargumental null subjects both across and within languages, is to posit differing structures for referential, quasi-argumental and expletive pronouns along the following lines (cf. also Déchaine/Wiltschko 2002): (22)

a.

Referential pronouns = [DP D [nP n [ΦP Φ ]]]

b.

Quasi-argumental pronouns = [nP n [ΦP Φ ]]

c.

Expletive pronouns = [ΦP Φ ] or even some subset of phi-features

If referential pronouns are DPs, they will only be deleted where T bears a [uD] feature. If, in such contexts, T also bears a [un] feature then Rizzi’s typology and implications can be maintained: quasi-argumental pronouns will only be able to delete where a probe bears a [un] feature, expletives, however, as pure ΦPs will be able to delete even where the probe bears no additional nominal features. The various contexts discussed above for Italian where only expletive null subjects are licensed or where expletive and quasi-argumental but not referential subjects are licensed will equate to the presence of [uD] or [un] features on the probe (with the same questions about independent falsifiability). The discussion thus far has focused on the mechanism equivalent to identification of null subjects: in a sense the [uD] feature “identifies” a referential null subject in permitting its deletion, [un] does the same for a quasi-argumental and [uΦ] is sufficient to do this for expletive subjects. We still need some mechanism equivalent to licensing in order to explain why, in some languages with agreement morphology, even expletive subjects cannot be deleted (e.g. English, French). Following Roberts/ Roussou (2001), Holmberg (2005) and Landau (2007) the licensing of null subjects (i.e. the availability of deletion independently of the features of the probe) can be attributed to an additional parameter determining whether a given EPP feature must be satisfied at PF or not: (23) The EPP associated with a head H holds/does not hold at PF. 6 An anonymous reviewer asks me to specify what this implies for languages which lack agreement morphology but which nonetheless have null subjects (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Mauritian Creole). Crucially, the null subjects exhibited by these kinds of languages have different properties to the null subjects of null subject languages with rich agreement, suggesting that they require an entirely different analysis (cf. Huang 1989; Adone 1994; Tomioka 2003; Neeleman/Szendrői 2007; Takahashi 2008; Şener/Takahashi 2010; Barbosa 2013, amongst others, but also Duguine 2014 for the opposite view).

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Clearly only languages in which finite T has a negative setting for (23) will permit deletion of subject pronouns, regardless of the features of T. In a language like English, therefore, where (23) has a positive setting, even expletives must remain overt even where they agree with T.

3 The status of overt subjects Recall the different predictions of the Minimalist analyses regarding overt lexical subjects: Table 2: Predictions of the three analyses regarding overt subjects in NSLs.

Preverbal subject Postverbal subject

A.1

A.2/B.1

B.2

A-bar position A-bar position

A-bar position A-position

A-bar/A-position A-position

A number of different kinds of tests can be used to tease apart these predictions. I assume that DPs which are base-generated in a left-peripheral A-bar position are clitic left dislocated (CLLD) and thus predicted to share the properties of other CLLD arguments (occurring in virtually any subordinate clause, displaying obligatory connectivity effects, always taking wide scope over TP-internal elements, failing to license parasitic gaps, being impossible with non-referential DPs and being island-sensitive – cf. Cinque 1990).7 Of course, the possibility remains, in analyses A.2/B.1 and B.2, that preverbal A-bar subjects may be derived rather than basegenerated, a point to which we return below. The status of overt subjects in Romance NSLs has been the subject of much heated debate and, given the brevity of this chapter, it will not be possible to provide a comprehensive overview of the literature. Instead, we focus on some of the most cited and/or compelling arguments in favour of the three distinct positions.

3.1 Test 1: Adverb placement Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou give potential evidence for A.1/A.2 from the placement of adverbs in NSLs. They claim that, in NSLs, adverbs can intervene between the

7 Cinque (1990) claims that CLLD is sensitive only to strong and not weak islands, but as López (2009, 6) shows, once indefinites are extracted, a sensitivity to weak islands also emerges.

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verb and the subject, whereas this is not the case in non-NSLs. Compare Spanish with French (a non-NSL):8 (24)

Sp.

Juan ya quiere irse. Juan already want.3SG go=SELF.CL ‘Juan already wants to leave.’

(25)

Fr.

Jean {*déjà} veux {déjà} Jean already want.3SG already ‘Jean already wants to leave.’

s’en aller. SELF.CL =PART =go

A potential explanation for this contrast is that, in Spanish, all preverbal subjects occupy an A-bar position above Spec,TP, whereas in French all preverbal subjects occupy Spec,TP. If it is assumed that adverbs cannot adjoin to the X-bar level, then the contrast in (24)–(25) follows naturally: there is simply no position for the adjunct in French (25). It is not so clear, however, that this contrast can be attributed to the NSP per se. While Portuguese patterns with Spanish, Italian, an NSL, patterns with French in this respect:9 (26)

It.

Maria {*già} vuole {già} Maria already want.3SG already ‘Maria already wants to leave.’

andarsene. go=SELF.CL =PART

An alternative explanation is that the French/Italian vs. Spanish/Portuguese contrast is due to differences in verb movement in the two groups of languages (Emonds 1978; Pollock 1989; Belletti 1990, 39–42; Cinque 1999; Schifano to appear). If the verb raises higher in modern Italian/French than in Spanish/Portuguese then this explains the contrast in adverb placement possibilities. As such, these facts cannot be taken to clearly support any of A.1, A.2/B.1 or B.2.

3.2 Test 2: Wide/narrow scope of preverbal subjects Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou also give evidence which seems to support A.1 from the scope of quantificational preverbal subjects, which, they claim, always take wide scope with respect to object quantifiers. Consider the following evidence from Greek: 8 Note, however, that Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou do not actually cite Spanish examples like this but rather cases where a fronted adverbial competes with the subject for the preverbal position (cf. Zubizarreta 1998). They do, however, discuss Greek examples equivalent to (23) to illustrate the same point. 9 Although, as an anonymous reviewer notes, in operatic registers of Italian, già often does occur before the finite verb, as in Spanish.

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(27)

kapios fititis stihiothetise kathe arthro. some student filed every article ‘Some (particular) student filed every single article.’ (wide scope only) (Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou 1998, 505)

Greek

Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou (1998) note that, in this respect, preverbal subjects pattern with CLLD objects in Greek: (28)

Greek

kapjo pedi to eksetase kathe kathigitis. some child CL . ACC examined every professor ‘Some child is such that every professor examined that child.’ (wide scope only) (Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou 1998, 505)

This contrasts, interestingly, with the behaviour of postverbal subjects, which, according to Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou (1998), have ambiguous wide/narrow scope in Greek: (29)

Greek

stihiothetise filed

kapios some

fititis student

kathe every

arthro. article

a.

‘Every article was filed by some student (or other).’

b.

‘Some (particular) student filed every single article.’ (Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou 1998, 505)

These facts are actually problematic for both A.1 and A.2. Under A.1, both pre- and postverbal subjects occupy A-bar positions. A.2 also allows for the possibility that preverbal subjects are A-bar moved from a postverbal A-position (cf. Barbosa 1995). Given standard assumptions about A-bar movement, this means that at least some preverbal subjects would be able to reconstruct into a postverbal A-position, receiving ambiguous scope as in (29). The contrasts in question are also obviously problematic for analysis B, which would allow the possibility of a preverbal A-position for subjects, which would also permit optional reconstruction (Fox 1999). The facts themselves are less than clear in Romance NSLs, where the quantifiers used seem to affect which scope is preferred. Consider the following Spanish examples from Suñer (2002): (30)

Sp.

Algún some

estudiante student

sacó took.3SG

prestados lent.PL

todos all

a.

?? ‘All the books were borrowed by some student.’ (narrow scope subject)

b.

‘Some (particular) student borrowed all the books.’ (wide scope subject)

los the

libros. books

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Sp.

Algún some

estudiante student

sacó took.3SG

prestado lent

cada each

libro. book

a.

‘Each book was borrowed by some student (or other).’ (narrow scope subject)

b.

‘Some (particular) student borrowed each book.’ (wide scope subject)

Similarly ambiguous examples can be created in Italian (as noted by Alexiadou/ Anagnostopoulou 1998, 511, fn 22, attributed to Jean-Yves Pollock), and Portuguese (cf. Sheehan 2006, chapter 2). More clear cut is the behaviour of the indefinite subjects of intransitive verbs headed by the indefinite article in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Catalan, as noted by Barbosa (1995, 36). Whereas in English and French, such preverbal subjects are ambiguous in their scope, in Romance NSLs they seem to get an obligatorily ‘strong’ (wide scope) reading: (32) A letter of recommendation is required. (33)

Fr.

Une lettre de recommendation est a letter of recommendation is ‘A letter of recommendation is required.’

(34)

Cat. #Una a

(35)

Cat.

carta letter

de of

recomanació reccomendation

és is

requise. required

necessari. required

És necessari una carta de recomanació. is required a letter of reccomendation ‘A letter of recommendation is required.’ (examples from Barbosa 1995, 36s., also in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian)

Taken in isolation, these contrasts again seem to suggest that all preverbal subjects are CLLD, favouring A.1 over A.2/B.1 or B.2. There are several potential complicating factors, however, which make these data slightly suspect. Firstly, it is well known that indefinites behave differently from other quantifiers. Secondly, while the French example involves a passive, the Catalan examples do not. Thirdly, this effect seems to be restricted to (some) intransitive verbs. In transitive contexts (and indeed with some intransitive verbs), both weak and strong readings are available in preverbal position (cf. Pinto 1994; 1997, 202 on Italian):

Subjects, null subjects, and expletives

(36)

Sp.

Un plato les a dish CL . DAT ‘A (single) dish was ‘All the guests were

345

fue servido a todos los huéspedes. was served to all the guests served to all the guests.’ served with a (possibly different) dish.’

The interpretation of quantificational subjects in Romance NSLs is therefore puzzling but does not seem to provide conclusive evidence for or against any of A.1, A.2/B.1 or B.2. Further careful comparative research is clearly required in this domain.

3.3 Test 3: Binding of postverbal subjects Data from binding is often cited in favour of the view that only the postverbal subject position in Romance NSLs is an A-position. If solid, then this would be strong evidence in favour of A.2/B.1 and against A.1 and B.2. Montalbetti (1986) notes that preverbal overt pronouns in NSLs cannot be bound (cf. also Rigau 1988 on Catalan), and this is consistent with the fact that they have a special discourse status. Solà (1992), citing Rosselló (1986), further notes, however, that postverbal subjects in Catalan behave differently and can be bound:10 (37) Cat.

Tots els estudiants1 es pensen que ells1 aprovaran. all the students self= think.3PL that they passed a. All the students believe that they as a group will pass. (mutually encouraging) b. *For all the students it is true that x thinks x will pass. (egotistical)

(38) Cat.

que guanyaran ells1. Tots els jugadors1 estan convençuts all the players are.3PL persuaded.PL that win.FUT.3PL they a. All the players believe that they as a team will win. (football) b. For all the players it is true that x thinks x will win. (tennis) (Solà 1992, 290)

A similar effect also holds in Portuguese (Barbosa 1995), Spanish, and Italian (Sheehan 2006), illustrated here for Italian: (39)

It. *Nessuno1 ha detto che lui1 l’avrebbe nobody has said that he it=would.have.3SG ‘Nobody said that he would have done it.’

fatto. done

10 An anonymous reviewer notes that (37) actually sounds ungrammatical to him/her.

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It.

Nessuno1 ha detto che l’avrebbe nobody has said that it=would.have.3SG ‘Nobody said that he would have done it.’

fatto done

lui1. he

Further data from preverbal foci suggest, however, that this is actually a difference between topics vs. foci, whereby topics resist binding (cf. Barbosa 1995; Sheehan 2006): (41)

Sp.

(42) It.

Nadie dijo que tan solo él quisiera nobody said that only he want.SBJV.3SG ‘Nobody said that only he would like an apple.’

una an

manzana. apple

Nessuno1 ha detto che soltanto lui1 l’avrebbe fatto. nobody has said that only he it=would.have.3SG done ‘Nobody said that only he would have done it.’

As such, it appears that the possibility of binding overt pronouns correlates with their information structure as foci, presumably because overt topics signal a change of topic (disjoint reference). As such, these facts may not bear on the issue of an A-position for pronominal subjects, and provide no conclusive evidence either for or against any of A.1, A.2 or B.

3.4 Test 4: Non-referential subjects If all preverbal subjects are CLLD, then the naïve prediction is that non-referential preverbal subjects will not be possible, because CLLD objects, as noted above, cannot be non-referential. In this connection, Solà (1992) notes that bare indefinite/ negative quantifiers often cannot be preverbal subjects in Catalan, Spanish or Italian: (43)

It. *Studenti sono arrivati. students are.3PL arrived ‘Students have arrived.’

(44)

It. *Niente è successo. nothing is happened ‘Nothing has happened.’

(Solà 1992, 272)

This effect is limited to certain intransitive verbs, however, and negative quantifiers, at least, can surface preverbally with transitive predicates in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese:

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Subjects, null subjects, and expletives

(45)

Sp.

Nadie quiere ser político. nobody want.3SG be.INF politician ‘Nobody wants to be a politician.’

Examples such as (45) seem to pose a problem for analysis A.1.11 For analysis A.2, however, the possibility remains that such examples involve A-bar movement of the QP from a postverbal A-position, as Barbosa (1995) proposes, rather than base generation. In fact, Barbosa (1995; 1996; 2009) gives evidence from clitic placement in Portuguese to this effect. A preverbal quantifier, whether a subject or object, triggers proclisis in Portuguese, whereas a preverbal non-quantificational subject (or topic) triggers enclisis in matrix clauses. Matters are more complex in embedded clauses, however, where clitics are generally proclitic. As such, these data are potentially consistent with analysis A.2/B.1. They are also potentially consistent with analysis B.2, according to which the negative subject in (45) might occupy either a preverbal A-position or derived A-bar position, though this would leave the Portuguese clitic facts unexplained.

3.5 Test 5: Floating quantifiers Data from Cardinaletti (1997) and Sheehan (2006), (citing Rizzi 1982 and Burzio 1986) concerning the distribution of floating quantifiers in Romance NSLs suggests that not all preverbal subjects can be CLLD. Consider the following data from Spanish, which suggests that preverbal subjects allow quantifiers to be stranded in Spec,vP: (46)

Sp.

a.

b.

[Todos all [Los the

c. *Se SE

d.

los the

chicos] boys han have.3PL

chicos] boys se SE

se SE

han have.3PL

han have.3PL

comprado bought

SE

un a

coche. car

todos all

un a

coche. car

comprado bought

todos all

un a

han comprado todos un have.3PL bought all a ‘All the boys bought themselves a car.’ Se

comprado bought

coche car

[los the

chicos]. boys

coche. car

In order for the quantifier to be stranded in Spec,vP in examples like (46b), preverbal subjects would have to be (at least optionally) derived via A- or A-bar movement from a post-verbal A-position. This is consistent with A.2/B.1 or B.2 but again not A.1. Interestingly, post-verbal subjects do not share this property (46c), while null 11 Though cf. Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou (1998), Camacho (2013) for a critique of this argument.

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subjects do (46d). This is taken as evidence by Rizzi (1982) that pro occupies a preverbal position, which is consistent only with B.2, if correct.

3.6 Test 6: Subjects vs. topics Goodall (2001) notes that, in Spanish, clauses with fronted topics are islands for extraction, whereas clauses with preverbal subjects are not (at least for many speakers):12 (47) Sp. a. *A quién crees [que el premio se lo dieron]? CL . DAT CL . ACC gave.3PL to whom think.2.SG that the prize (Lit. ‘Who do you think that the prize they gave it to?’) b. A quién crees [que Juan le dio el premio]? to whom think.2.SG that Juan CL . DAT gave.3SG the prize ‘Who do you think that Juan gave the prize to?’ (Goodall 2001, 201) This seems to provide further evidence that not all preverbal subjects can occupy a CLLD position. In Catalan and Portuguese, the same contrast holds:13 (48) Cat. a. *A qui creus que el premi el van_donar? to whom think.2SG that the prize CL . ACC = gave.3PL b. A qui creus que en Joan va_donar el premi? to whom think.2SG that the Joan gave.3SG the prize ‘Who do you think that Juan gave the prize to?’ (49)

Por.

a. *A to

quem whom

no in.the

ano year

achas think.2SG

que that

o the

prémio prize

o CL . ACC

deram gave.3PL

passado]? last

b. A quem achas que o Rei deu o prémio to whom think.2SG that the king gave.3SG the prize no ano passado? in.the last year ‘Who do you think that the King gave the prize to last year?’ 12 Some speakers report this effect to be slightly weaker than that reported by Goodall but nonetheless find a contrast of the right kind. 13 A reviewer points out that the Spanish example in (47) has clitic doubling of the dative argument, whereas the Catalan example in (48) does not. For the speaker I consulted, however, clitic doubling of datives is strongly dispreferred, whereas it is often preferred in Spanish and is sometimes obligatory in Spanish with true datives (cf. Curvo 2003).

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Italian, too, displays the same contrast, though the topic island effect is much less robust: (50) It. a. ?A chi credi [che il premio lo abbiano dato]? CL . ACC have.SBJV.3PL given to whom think.2SG that the prize b. A chi credi [que Gianni abbia dato il premio]? to whom think.2SG that Gianni has.SBJV.3SG given the prize ‘Who do you think that Juan gave the prize to?’ These examples provide strong support that not all preverbal subjects can be CLLD, posing a serious problem for A.1. Indeed, assuming that (i) all derived preverbal subjects are foci and (ii) there can be only one focus per clause, such examples suggest that at least some preverbal subjects can occupy an A-position in all the Romance NSLs under discussion, favouring analysis B.2.

3.7 Test 7: Hortative contexts Another piece of evidence in favour of the view that not all preverbal subjects can be CLLD, hence against A.1, comes from the position of subjects in hortative constructions in Spanish (cf. Villa-García 2012). As Demonte/Fernández-Soriano (2009) show, CLLD elements in Spanish hortative constructions always precede que: (51)

Sp.

a.

El tenedor, ¡que lo cojan! the fork, that it take.SBJV.3PL ‘The fork, let them take it.’

b. *¡Que that

el the

tenedor fork

lo it

cojan! take.SBJV.3PL

(Villa-García 2012, 152)

The pattern is different with subjects, which can either precede or follow que, suggesting that preverbal subjects can either be CLLD or not: (52)

Sp.

a.

b.

Antonio, ¡que no lo vea! Antonio that NEG it see.SBJV.3SG ‘Antonio, may he not see it.’ ¡Que Antonio no lo that Antonio NEG it ‘May Antonio not see it.’

(Villa-García 2012, 155)

vea! see.SBJV.3SG (Demonte/Fernández-Soriano 2009, 39)

The same effect holds in Italian (Villa-García, citing Ledgeway 2005) and Catalan. As Villa-García notes, these facts seem to show that not all preverbal subjects can be CLLD in these languages. Depending on the structure of the left periphery, they might also be taken as evidence that some preverbal subjects occupy Spec,TP.

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Whether Spec,TP is an A-position in Romance NSLs, however, is somewhat controversial (cf. Zubizarreta 1998; Gallego 2007 for the claim that Spec,TP is an A-bar position in Spanish).

3.8 Test 8: Basic word order Thus far, the various diagnostics discussed strongly militate against an analysis along the lines of A.1 for any of the main Romance NSLs. It is more difficult, however, to decide between A.2/B.1 and B.2, with the possibility remaining that both analyses are correct for a subset of languages. One potential piece of evidence that some preverbal subjects occupy an A-position, hence in favour of B.2, comes from basic word order facts. The three analyses make different predictions concerning the basic word order in NSLs: A.1 No ‘basic’ subject position A.2/B.1 VS(O) basic word order (subject base generated in Spec,vP) B.2 SV(O) basic word order All else being equal, as long as the object does not move and V raises past the subject to the T-domain, A.2/B.1 predicts a basic VS(O) word order whereas B.2 predicts SV(O), because S is attracted past the verb to Spec,TP. Although it is difficult to determine what the basic order of a language is, the consensus following Chomsky (1971) and Jackendoff (1972) is that basic word order corresponds to ‘wide focus’ sentences which are felicitous answers to questions like ‘what happened?’.14 In many transitive/ditransitive contexts in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, SVO is the word order generally required: (53)

It.

a.

Cos’ è successo? what is happened ‘What happened?’

b.

Gianni ha dato un libro Gianni has given a book ‘Gianni gave a book to Maria.’

a to

Maria. Maria

c. *Ha dato Gianni un libro has given Gianni a book ‘Gianni gave a book to Maria.’

a to

Maria. Maria

d. #Ha dato un libro a Maria has given a book to Maria ‘Gianni gave a book to Maria.’

Gianni. Gianni

14 But cf. Solà (1992) and Camacho (2013) for a critique of this view.

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Indeed, Hulk/Pollock (2001, 3) claim that “[t]here is a consensus among both traditional and generative grammarians that the canonical surface word order of the Romance languages is subject-verb-object”. If true, this would fall out naturally from a type B.2 analysis, but be mysterious under type A.1 and A.2/B.1 analyses. In fact, as A.1 allows for no subject A-position, it makes unclear predictions about basic word order. Things are not actually so clear cut, however. In fact, for all of the languages under discussion, opposing views have been presented regarding the status of SVO order: cf. Costa/Duarte (2002); Costa (2004) vs. Barbosa (1995; 2009) on Portuguese; Suñer (2002) vs. Leonetti (2008; 2014) on Spanish; Rizzi (1997); Cardinaletti (1997) vs. Moro (1997); Manzini/Savoia (2002) on Italian; and Forcadell (2013) vs. Vallduví (1993) on Catalan. As Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou (1998) note, Spanish like Greek allows VSO orders (unlike Italian and Catalan) in certain out of the blue contexts (cf. Zubizarreta 1998, chapter 3; Gallego 2013): (54)

Sp.

a. ¿Qué what b.

Sp.

a. ¿Qué what b.

pasado? happened

Juan ha ganado la Juan has won the ‘Juan won the lottery.’

b’. ??Ha has (55)

ha has

ganado won

Juan Juan

pasó happened.3SG

la the

lotería. lottery

lotería. lottery

ayer? yesterday

Ayer ganó Juan la Yesterday won.3SG Juan the ‘Yesterday Juan won the lottery.’

lotería. lottery

For some speakers, though, it seems that VSO orders are only fully felicitous in Spanish where some other XP surfaces preverbally (Zubizarreta 1998; Sheehan 2010).15 If this is the case then such orders do not provide very strong evidence against a type B.2 and in favour of a type A.2/B.1 analysis. For those speakers who allow VSO orders without any preverbal XP, however, such orders might be taken as evidence for an analysis along the lines of A.2/B.1. There appears to be variation across varieties in this respect. It is a much-discussed fact that Italian and Catalan, 15 Interestingly, the addition of que ‘that’ to (54b’) renders it much more acceptable. Cf. Etxepare (2010); Demonte/Fernández-Soriano (2013) on the status of quotative que.

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unlike Spanish, do not appear to permit VSO orders with DP objects (cf. Belletti/ Shlonsky 1995; Gallego 2013). Portuguese does allow VSO orders but not, it seems, in out of the blue contexts (Costa 2004). Intransitive predicates paint a very different picture. In all of Catalan, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at least some intransitive verbs permit VS as well as SV order in out of the blue contexts (cf. Pinto 1994; 1997; Adger 1996; Zubizarreta 1998; Sheehan 2006; Corr 2012, amongst others). Consider the following from Portuguese: (56)

Por.

a.

O que é que the what is that ‘What happened?’

b.

Chegou arrived.3SG

c.

A avó chegou. the grandmother arrived.3SG ‘Grandmother arrived’

a the

foi? was

avó. grandmother

(Corr 2012, 16)

There is microparametric variation across these languages with respect to which predicates permit inversion of this kind, in all cases, though, it seems that inversion of the subject gives rise to a special ‘deictic’ interpretation (cf. Pinto 1994; 1997). Thus while (56c) simply states that grandmother has arrived somewhere, (56b) implies that she has arrived at the place where the speaker is. Crucially, this distinction does not track the unaccusative/unergative distinction. There are unaccusative verbs which typically disallow inversion in Spanish (change of state verbs like ‘to blush’) and unergatives which typically allow it (‘to call’, ‘to contribute’). According to Pinto (1994; 1997), in such contexts, it is a covert PP which satisfies the EPP in such contexts, permitting subject inversion. As predicted, where an equivalent overt PP remains postverbal, the subject must generally raise in Italian and Portuguese, and to a lesser extent Spanish (cf. Sheehan 2006; Corr 2012): (57)

Por.

Entrou entered.PST.3SG

o the

Nuno Nuno

(*no in.the

cinema). cinema

As such, even “free inversion” cannot be taken as strong evidence for a type A.2/B.1 analysis, as the distribution of postverbal subjects is actually fairly constrained. It is also not immediately accounted for by a type B.2 analysis, however, though the possibility remains that it instantiates a kind of locative inversion, whereby movement of a deictic PP mitigates the need for subject movement to Spec,TP (cf. Pinto 1994; 1997). We return to this issue in section 4.

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3.9 Test 9: Disambiguation In Romance NSLs, it is generally accepted that overt pronouns are usually used only for emphasis (Rigau 1988). The majority of overt pronouns, then, serve a special discourse function as A-bar foci or topics (including switch reference topics). Nevertheless it has been claimed that some overt pronouns do function as true A-subjects in Romance NSLs (cf. also section 3.1.3). Cardinaletti (1997) has shown that where verb forms are ambiguous in Italian, pro-drop is limited to certain persons. In the present subjunctive of Italian, 1st, 2nd and 3rd person singular verb endings are all syncretic. Whereas 1st and 3rd person permit pro-drop, 2nd person requires an overt pronoun: (58)

It.

Che possa riuscirci non è chiaro. that can.SBJV manage=there not is clear ‘It isn’t clear that I/*you/he can manage it.’

(59)

It.

Che tu possa riuscirci that you can.SBJV manage=there ‘It isn’t clear that you can manage it.’

non not

è is

chiaro. clear

Interestingly, this effect seems to hold not only in out of the blue contexts but even where there is a contextually salient 2SG antecedent (Luigi Rizzi, p.c.): (60)

It.

So know.1SG

che that

hai have.2SG

provato tried

ma but

non not

è is

facile easy

che that

*(tu) possa riuscirci. you can manage=there ‘I know that you’ve tried but it’s not going to be easy for you to manage it.’ The overt preverbal subject tu in (60) does not function as a topic or a focus, but rather serves to add essential morphological information to the underspecified verb form. Cole (2000) argues that a similar effect holds more generally of Romance NSLs, wherever morphological ambiguity of this kind arises. Consider, for example, the contrast between (61) and (62): (61) Sp. María y yo llegamos a casa. Encontré las llaves. . . Maria and I arrived.1PL at home found.1SG the keys. . . (62) Sp. María y yo llegamos a casa. *(Yo/ella) tenía las llaves. . . Maria and I arrived.1PL at home had.1SG /3SG the keys (Cole 2000)

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In both (61) and (62), the 1SG pronoun yo is equally contextually salient. However, in (62), as opposed to (61), the following verb is morphologically ambiguous, requiring an overt subject to be used. Cole claims where agreement identification fails, NSLs have recourse to discourse pro-drop strategies (i.e. they look for a single salient discourse topic), and where these fail, require an overt subject. In such contexts, then, the overt preverbal pronoun seems to serve purely a disambiguating function rather than behaving like an A-bar topic or focus. These facts raise some issues for the Minimalist analyses discussed in section 2. According to A.1 and A.2/B.1, it is not possible for an overt preverbal subject to occupy an A-position, making examples like (60) potentially problematic. Analysis B.2, however, leaves open the possibility that deletion might fail in certain contexts leaving an overt pronoun in Spec,TP. The mechanism whereby deletion fails, of course, needs to be specified. Does the probe lack person features in such contexts or is the [uD] feature missing only in part of the paradigm?

3.10 Test 10: Parasitic gaps Thus far, then, the diagnostics clearly disfavour A.1 and some arguably show a preference for B.2 over A.2/B.1 across the Romance NSLs under discussion. The data from parasitic gaps, however, suggests that while B.2 is the correct account for some NSLs (Italian), some (minimally revised) version of A.2/B.1 may be the correct account for others (Spanish, Portuguese, and perhaps Catalan). Consider the predictions of the three approaches vis-à-vis the licensing of parasitic gaps. According to standard assumptions, parasitic gaps are only licensed where an A-bar moved XP c-commands a parasitic gap but its trace does not (Kayne 1983). Putting to one side the correct analysis of parasitic gaps (but cf. Nunes 1999), based on this description, the three approaches make the following predictions: A.1 A.2/B.1 B.2

preverbal subjects will not license parasitic gaps as they are always basegenerated preverbal subjects may license parasitic gaps as they can be A-bar moved from a low postverbal A-position preverbal subjects will not license parasitic gaps as A-bar subjects are moved through a preverbal A-position which c-commands the adverbial.

To our knowledge, these predictions have not previously been tested in Romance NSLs. Now consider the following facts from Spanish. Example (63) shows that an in-situ object does not license a parasitic gap: (63)

Sp. *Archivaste filed.2SG

el the

documento document

sin without

abrir. open.INF

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Example (64) shows that a wh-moved object does license a parasitic gap: (64)

Sp. ¿Qué documento archivaste sin abrir? what document filed.2SG without open.INF ‘What document did you file without opening?’

Now consider the preverbal subject of a passive. The fact that (65)–(66) are acceptable suggests that preverbal subjects can be derived via A-bar movement from a post-verbal position without having to move through Spec,TP, as predicted by A.2/B.1: (65)

Sp. ?El documento fue archivado sin the document was filed without ‘The document was filed without opening.’

abrir. open.INF

(66)

Sp. ?Ningún documento fue archivado sin no document was filed without ‘No document was filed without opening.’

abrir. open.INF

Interestingly, while Portuguese and perhaps Catalan seem to pattern like Spanish in this respect, Italian seems to behave differently, with preverbal subjects failing to license parasitic gaps: (67) It. *Hai archiviato il documento senza aprire. have.2SG filed the document without open.INF (68) It. ?Quale documento hai archiviato senza aprire? without open.INF which document have.2SG filed ‘Which document did you file without opening?’ (69) It. *Il documento è stato archiviato senza (prima) aprire. the document is been filed without first open.INF (70) It. *Nessun documento è stato archiviato senza (prima) aprire. no document is been filed without first open.INF The implication of these facts seems to be that in Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese, preverbal subjects can be moved directly from a postverbal A-position without transiting through Spec,TP, whereas in Italian they cannot. This is consistent with the claim that in Italian preverbal subjects always need to raise to/through a preverbal A-position (as in analysis B.2), whereas in the other languages, they do not (as in analysis A.2/B.1).

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A problem remains for the facts discussed in sections 3.1.6–3.1.8, however, which seem to suggest that preverbal subjects can occupy a preverbal A-position also in Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese. One possible way of resolving this problem is to revise analysis A.2 slightly so that subjects can, but need not raise to Spec,TP to satisfy the EPP. If Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan permit the EPP to be satisfied by either a head or phrase, a DP subject in Spec,vP, whether overt or null is actually equidistant from T with its head complex V+v+AgrD. It is plausible then, that either movement of V+v+AgrD to T or movement of DP to Spec,TP can satisfy the EPP in Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese. Where the DP raises, the verb also raises to T for purely morphological reasons and the result is an SVO order with a preverbal A-subject. Where the subject fails to raise, however, V+v+AgrD movement serves to satisfy the EPP and the result is also grammatical. The equidistance of V+v+AgrD and Spec,vP from T makes both options available. In these terms, Italian would differ from these languages in requiring the EPP to be satisfied by an XP (cf. Alexiadou 2006 on further differences between Italian and Spanish). Although this analysis of Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan may seem unparsimonious, something along these lines seems to be necessitated by the diagnostics discussed above. Of course such an account raises many questions which cannot be addressed here for reasons of space, notably regarding the status of postverbal narrowly focused subjects. We return briefly to issues of word order in section 4.

3.11 Summary of results Although there are gaps in the data and certain inconsistencies arise across the ten tests discussed above, the data seem to show overwhelmingly that an analysis along the lines of A.1 cannot be correct: preverbal subjects are not all CLLD in Romance NSLs. Analyses A.2 and B fare better. In Italian the data, particularly from parasitic gaps, seem to suggest that B is correct, as derived preverbal subjects appear to raise obligatorily to/through Spec,TP. In Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan matters are more complex. It seems that subjects can occupy a preverbal A-position, but can also raise directly from a post-verbal A-position to a preverbal A-bar position, licensing parasitic gaps, at least for some speakers. This suggests that a revised version of A.2 is necessary for these languages whereby the EPP can be satisfied by either XP or head-movement.

4 On inversion and expletive pro When discussing subject-verb inversion in Romance NSLs, it is important to control for information structure. As discussed in section 3.1.8, the basic word order in many Romance languages seems to be SVO with transitives (with some apparent exceptions in Spanish). With intransitives, VS is often possible in out-of-the-blue contexts,

Subjects, null subjects, and expletives

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but there is semantic evidence that such orders involve a kind of locative inversion with a covert PP. Where the subject is narrowly focused (in answer to “who did Y?” questions), however, inverted V(O)S orders become more generally possible in Romance NSLs, and there is a question of how this relates to the analyses under discussion. Unfortunately, a discussion of this marked inversion is beyond the scope of this chapter (cf. Sheehan 2010). An important remaining question concerns the (non-)existence of covert expletives in Romance NSLs. Expletive pro formed a crucial part of Rizzi’s (1982; 1986) classic analysis but has become suspect in the Minimalist context. As Alexiadou/ Anagnostopoulou (1998) note, expletive pro has no PF interpretation and the apparent lack of definiteness effects in VS(O) orders in NSLs suggests that it also lacks an LF interpretation. A.1 and A.2/B.1 are thus apparently attractive in avoiding the need for null expletives.16 Interestingly, though, while the standard wisdom is certainly that Romance null subject languages lack definiteness effects of the English type, in certain controlled contexts, a kind of definiteness effect occurs. First consider existential constructions, as discussed by Leonetti (2008) and Fischer (2013). Spanish displays a definiteness effect in such contexts and Leonetti (2008) argues convincingly that where a locative PP is included inside VP, the effect is also observed in Italian and to some extent in Catalan: (71)

It.

??C’è LOC =is

la the

statua di Michelangelo in Piazza della Signoria. statue of Michelangelo in Piazza della Signoria (Fischer 2013, 13)

A similar effect can be observed with unaccusative verbs in some Romance languages. While it is true that the inverted subjects of unaccusatives fail to display a straightforward definiteness effect in Romance null subject languages (Fischer 2013), this is as expected if this inversion is triggered by locative inversion, which is not subject to definiteness effects (cf. Pinto 1994 and 1997 on Romance and Freeze 1992 on the connection between locatives and existentials). In out-of-the-blue utterances, however, with unaccusative verbs and overt postverbal PPs, a definiteness effect is attested in Portuguese and Italian, though not, apparently, in Spanish. In such contexts only indefinite subjects seem to be possible in a postverbal position (Sheehan 2006; 2010; Corr 2012):

16 What have been called “overt expletives” are attested in some Romance varieties (cf. Toribio 1996; Hinzelin/Kaiser 2007 on Caribbean Spanish; Carrilho 2005 on colloquial EP; Uriagereka 1995 on Galician; Maiden/Parry 1997 on Corsican, Sicilian, Neapolitan and Campanian; and Kaiser 2006, for an overview). In most cases, however, restrictions on the distribution of overt expletives in Romance NSLs make them look more like discourse particles than true expletives, but cf. Hinzelin/ Kaiser (2012) on Occitan varieties on the Francoprovençal border.

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(72)

Michelle Sheehan

Por.

a.

O que é que the what is that ‘What happened?’

aconteceu? happened.3SG

b.

Chegou alguém ao arrived.3SG someone to-the ‘Someone arrived at school.’

b’. *Chegou o João ao arrived.3SG the João to-the ‘João arrived at school.’

colégio. school

colégio. school

This follows if, where an overt PP remains postverbal, the subject must raise to Spec,TP all else being equal. The contrast between (72b) and (72b’) suggests that a null expletive can satisfy the EPP in such contexts, permitting indefinite subjects to remain low. The fact that Spanish seems to lack this effect (Corr 2012) whereas Italian appears to have something similar (Belletti 1988) suggests that further parameterization is required here, particularly given the differences between existential and unaccusative contexts.

5 Conclusions This chapter has examined the behaviour of some Romance NSLs in the context of GB and the Minimalist Program, arguing that they fall into at least two groups. Though the data are complex and many questions remain, it would appear that Spanish behaves like a variant of a type A.2/B.1 language in which either XP or X-movement can satisfy the EPP. Italian, on the other hand, appears to be a type B.2 language in which some XP must always satisfy the EPP and null subjects are simply deleted. Interestingly, many of the analyses of NSLs face the same issue concerning the syntax-morphology interface. While it is recognized that rich agreement morphology seems to be involved in the licensing of null subjects in these languages (cf. especially 3.1.9), there is only ever a loose connection between the syntactic feature which is responsible for null subjects and its surface morphological manifestation. It is hoped that future research will serve to (i) resolve the issues surrounding some of the diagnostics discussed above and (ii) discover new diagnostics which illustrate more clearly how the various Romance NSLs should be syntactically distinguished.

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Rizzi, Luigi (1997), “The fine structure of the left periphery”, in: Liliane Haegeman (ed.), Elements of grammar, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 281–337. Roberts, Ian (2010a), “A deletion analysis of null subjects”, in: Theresa Biberauer/Anders Holmberg/ Ian Roberts/Michelle Sheehan, Parametric variation. Null subjects in Minimalist theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 58–87. Roberts, Ian (2010b), Agreement and head movement. Clitics, incorporation, and defective goals, Cambridge, MA/London, MIT Press. Roberts, Ian/Holmberg, Anders (2010), “Introduction. Parameters in Minimalist theory”, in: Theresa Biberauer/Anders Holmberg/Ian Roberts/Michelle Sheehan (edd.), Parametric variation. Null subjects in Minimalist theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1–57. Roberts, Ian/Roussou, Anna (2001), “The EPP as a condition on the tense dependency”, in: Peter Svenonius (ed.), Subjects, expletives and the EPP, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 125–157. Rosselló, Joana (1986), Gramàtica, configuracions i referència. Per una teoria alternativa el PROdrop romànic, PhD dissertation, Universitat de Barcelona. Saab, Andrés (to appear), “On the notion of partial (non-) pro-drop in Romance”, in: Mary A. Kato/ Francisco Ordóñez (edd.), The morphosyntax of Portuguese and Spanish in Latin America, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Schifano, Norma (to appear), “Le lingue romanze. Verso una cartografia del movimento del verbo”, in: Éva Buchi/Jean-Paul Chauveau/Jean-Marie Pierrel (edd.), Actes du XXVIIe Congrès international de linguistique et de philologie romanes, Strasbourg, Société de linguistique romane/ ÉliPhi. Şener, Serkan/Takahashi, Daiko (2010), “Ellipsis of arguments in Japanese and Turkish”, Nanzan Linguistics 6, 79–99. Sheehan, Michelle (2006), The EPP and null subjects in Romance, PhD dissertation, Newcastle University. Sheehan, Michelle (2010), “‘Free’ inversion in Romance and the null subject parameter”, in: Theresa Biberauer/Anders Holmberg/Ian Roberts/Michelle Sheehan (edd.), Parametric variation. Null subjects in Minimalist theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 231–262. Solà, Jaume (1992), Agreement and subjects, PhD dissertation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Suñer, Margarita (2002), “The lexical preverbal subject in a Romance null subject language. Where art thou?”, in: Rafael Núñez-Cedeño/Luis López/Richard Cameron (edd.), A Romance perspective on language knowledge and use, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 341–357. Takahashi, Daiko (2008), “Noun phrase ellipsis”, in: Shigeru Miyagawa/Mamoro Saito (edd.), The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, New York, Oxford University Press, 394–422. Taraldsen, Knut (1980), “On the NIC, vacuous application, and the that-trace filter”, Paper presented at Indiana Linguistics Club. Tomioka, Satoshi (2003), “The semantics of Japanese null pronouns and its cross-linguistics implications”, in: Kerstin Schwabe/Susanne Winkler (edd.), The interfaces. Deriving and interpreting omitted structures, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 321–339. Toribio, Almeida Jacqueline (1996), “Dialectal variation in the licensing of null referential and expletive subjects”, Paper presented at Aspects of Romance linguistics. Selected papers from the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages XXIV, Washington. Uriagereka, Juan (1995), “An F position in Western Romance”, in: Katalin É. Kiss (ed.), Discourse configurational languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 153–175. Vallduví, Enric (1993), “Catalan as VOS. Evidence from information packaging”, in: William Ashby/ Marianne Mithun (edd.), Linguistic perspectives on the Romance languages, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 335–350. Villa-García, Julio (2012), “Spanish subjects can be subjects. Acquisitional and empirical evidence”, Iberia 4:1, 124–169. Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa (1998), Prosody, focus, and word order, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Susann Fischer and Maria Goldbach

12 Object clitics Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of the phonological, morphological, semantic, and syntactic properties of Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish object clitic pronouns, before discussing some of the most prominent generative approaches that have been suggested in order to explain the distribution and behaviour of object clitics in Romance. Since this overview can of course not be exhaustive, the chapter seeks to present the main questions that have been asked and the main difficulties the approaches have been confronted with. The discussion focuses on the fact that various components of grammar – syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics – and the interfaces between these, are involved in describing and analysing Romance clitics. Keywords: base-generation, movement hypothesis, distributed morphology, PersonCase-Constraint, clitic climbing, clitic doubling, mesocliticization, interpolation

1 Introduction Clitics have always posed a great challenge for linguistic research. Even before Jacob Wackernagel published his extensive examination of the syntactic behaviour of certain word-like elements in ancient Indo-European languages in 1892, the phenomenon had been recognized (cf. Tobler 1875; Mussafia 1888). For more than a hundred years now clitics have been a source of controversy in linguistic theory. Especially within generative grammar, clitics have been a very prominent topic of research. The tremendous interest in this topic might be due to the fact that the status of clitics, as elements which exhibit properties of fully fledged words, but which lack the independence usually associated with words, is particularly challenging for modular theories of grammar, in that clitics clearly operate at multiple levels of representation. The main point of disagreement among the different analyses has been the extent to which the various components of grammar – syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics – are involved, and the type of interaction that is required in determining the position, linear order, and interpretation of clitics. What seems to be clear after these many years of interest is the fact that clitics seem to be more easily defined by what they are not than by what they are, as a comprehensive theory of clitics is still not available. Given the vast amount of Acknowledgement: The first author would like to acknowledge the DFG grant FI 875/2-1 “Clitic doubling across Romance” for financial support of her research.

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literature on clitics (cf. e.g. the articles and all the references in van Riemsdijk 1999, as well as the bibliography for the period 1892–1992 in Nevis et al. 1994), what follows cannot be an exhaustive overview of clitics and cliticization; instead, we will restrict ourselves to object clitic pronouns1 in Romance. After a brief general overview of the classic criteria used to define clitics and the specific properties shared by Romance object clitics, we will discuss some synchronic and diachronic differences. This will be followed by a short overview of the most prominent (classic) theories and a few recent approaches that have been proposed in order to account for the specific behaviour of Romance clitics.

2 General definition The origin of the word clitic (derived from Greek κλίνειν ‘lean, incline’) reflects, first of all, a prosodic conception: In essence, the term describes forms that do not define a phonological word domain by themselves, but only in conjunction with the appropriate lexical material, i.e. a clitic must attach to another prosodic word in order to be pronounced. Typically clitics are function words, such as modal particles (e.g. interrogative particles), conjunctions, complementizers, determiners,2 or auxiliary verbs. The traditional observation that clitics always supply grammatical rather than lexical information has led to the assumption that any functional category, but no lexical category, can in principle be a clitic. In fact, it has been shown that there are no good examples of clitic main verbs, clitic nouns, or clitic adjectives (cf. Sadock 1991, 112; Spencer/Luís 2012). Historically, clitics generally develop from fully fledged words and frequently develop into inflectional affixes (cf. Givón 1979; Zwicky 1985; Wandruszka 1992). In Zwicky (1977) a first overview and an attempt to give a definition of different forms of these elements is carried out, and a classification into simple clitics, special clitics, and bound words is proposed. Zwicky (1985) gives up the notion of bound words3 and defines the difference between simple and special clitics in that simple clitics are mere reduced phonological forms whereas special clitics have a different form and a different syntax compared to the full form (cf. also Anderson 2005). 1 We will restrict ourselves to object clitics and not treat subject clitics in this chapter because of space limitations. Please refer to Rizzi (1986), Kaiser (1992), Sportiche (1999a), Poletto (1995; 1999), Goria (2004), Manzini (2015), among many others, for extensive discussions concerning subject clitics in Romance languages. 2 In the generative literature pronominals are treated as determiners (DPs or Ds). 3 In Zwicky (1977) bound words are words which do not correspond to a full form, but which nevertheless need a host and are in some cases restricted to a particular sentence position, such as Latin ‑que ‘and’. In Zwicky (1985) the bound words are more or less subsumed under the notion special clitics. Nevertheless, it seems that the notion of boundness is less clear-cut. Take for example the English article the: it cannot occur on its own, nor can it be considered a syntactic constituent without a following noun. Nevertheless this determiner is commonly not considered to be a clitic.

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Under the broad notion of cliticization as mere reduction in phonological form most languages – very possibly, all except those of the most isolating type – have clitics. As for English, the contracted equivalents ’m, n’t, ’s etc. of the full forms him, not, has etc. can be seen as clitics. (1)

Eng.

a.

I can’t stand’m.4

c.

*I can’t m’stand

b.

I can’t stand him.

d.

*I can’t him stand

The form of the simple clitics (to use Zwicky’s term) seems to be dictated by phonology and can thus be affected by speech rate, level of formality, and the like (cf. Prinz 1991). The clitic in (1a) can be replaced by the full form as in (1b) and does not seem to have a special syntax compared to the full form (cf. 1c, d), i.e. the clitics preserve the linear order of their noncliticized counterparts. The bulk of the work on clitics however has targeted special clitics (cf. Nevis et al. 1994). In Zwicky’s (1977; 1985) view, special clitics are those that are not derived from full form equivalents by phonological reduction processes, and therefore, do not depend on factors such as speech rate. Special clitics act as variants of stressed full forms and show a special syntax: In the following Catalan (2), French (3), and Spanish (4) examples, the pronominal clitic cannot be replaced by a full form (d), and the full form cannot be replaced by a clitic (c), i.e. both the full form and the clitic occupy a different syntactic position (this holds for all Romance varieties except for Brazilian Portuguese). (2) Cat. a. La Mercè va veure en Joan. PST see the Joan the M. b. La Mercè el va veure. the M. him PST seen c. *La Mercè va veure-lo.5 d. *La Mercè en Joan va veure. (3) Fr. a. Zoé a vu Pierre. Z. has seen P. b. Zoé l’a vu. Z. him’has seen c. *Zoé a vu le. d. *Zoé Pierre a vu. 4 Throughout this chapter clitic elements are set in bold. 5 Since the 19th century Catalan clitics consistently change their form depending on whether they are in a pre- or postverbal position (Fischer 2002; 2006).

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(4) Sp. a. María ha visto a Juan. M. has seen to J. b. María lo ha visto. M. him has seen c. *María ha visto lo. d. *María a Juan ha visto. Looking at simple clitics, the interface between morphology and phonology seems to be affected, whereas with special clitics the interfaces between syntax, morphology, and phonology are addressed. Different authors have proposed different criteria to clarify the status of clitics. Kayne (1975), working on French pronominal clitics, is mainly concerned with establishing a coherent syntactic movement theory of clitics in which general constraints would do most of the work in explaining the major properties of the French clitics. Since the French (like the other Romance) clitics do not preserve the linear order of their full counterparts, he proposes criteria to distinguish clitics from full forms and full phrases, whereas Zwicky (1977) and Zwicky/Pullum (1983), working within the field of morphology and often working on polysynthetic languages, are mainly interested in distinguishing clitics from affixes.6 In contrast to the approaches which stress the differences between clitics and words and clitics and affixes, Klavans (1982), building on Zwicky (1977), considers their similarities and proposes that clitics could universally be accounted for by assuming that they are phrasal affixes, i.e. clitics operate on the phrase level, whereas affixes operate on the word level. In Klavans’ (1982; 1985) view, three different parameters are responsible for the distribution of clitics: (i) initial/final with respect to their domain, (ii) before/after the peripheral constituent of their domain, and (iii) left/right regarding attachments to their hosts. When all combinations of these three parameters are considered, the result is that the clitic can appear anywhere in a sentence except for initially or finally, i.e. eight different positions are possible according to which eight different clitic types are assigned. Empirical evidence for this theory has not been found in total, since some clitics seem to avoid some of the proposed positions whereas others appear in places where they are, according to Klavans (1982), unexpected. Looking at Romance clitics, Klavans’ proposal in its strict form needs to be dismissed: first, because Modern Romance clitics sometimes precede and sometimes follow their host verb, depending on whether the latter is finite or nonfinite, and second, regarding all Old Romance languages and Modern European Portuguese, clitics could/can precede and follow the finite verb. In Klavans’ 6 There are many more authors who have proposed criteria to define the notion clitic, but nowadays Kayne’s (1975) and Zwicky’s (1977) work is still considered the most influential.

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taxonomy the enclitics and proclitics, although both pronominal in character, would be analysed as belonging to different clitic types, which is a serious drawback. Klavans (1985, 103) herself admits that the Romance type of verbal clitics pose a problem for her theory in its strict form. Although some authors have nourished the idea that Romance clitics are better analysed as agreement affixes (cf. section 4), Romance clitics nevertheless display the typical properties and behaviour that have been assigned to clitic elements in general.

3 Properties of Romance object clitics Romance clitics display peculiar behaviour regarding all grammatical modules: they display a deficient phonology, an anomalous syntax and morphology (Anderson 2005, 33), and a specific semantics.7 A survey of the different properties in Romance will be given in the following.

3.1 Phonological properties The phonological properties that are usually discussed with respect to clitics in general, i.e. the lack of stress and their prosodic status (cf. Selkirk 1996; Halpern 1995), are also important for Romance clitics. Clitic pronouns lack stress, while strong pronouns bear stress (cf. Kuchenbrandt 2009 for an extensive discussion on the prosodic properties of French and Spanish clitics). The following examples from French, Italian and Spanish form minimal pairs and clearly show that also the Romance clitics lack word stress. In Catalan and Portuguese the vowels in unstressed environment even need to be reduced. (5) Cat. a. te [tə] ‘you’

vs. te [ˈtɛ] ‘tea’

Fr.

b. la [la] ‘her’

vs. là [ˈla] ‘there’

It.

c. la [la] ‘her’

vs. là [ˈla] ‘there’

Por. d. se [sɯ] REFL vs. sé [ˈse] ‘cathedral’ Sp.

e. te [te] ‘you’

vs. té [ˈte] ‘tea’

Cardinaletti (2015, 598) goes one step further in arguing that clitic pronouns do not form a single phonological word with their host since the process of s-sonorization which is found word-internally in intervocalic contexts (as in It. re[z]istere (‘resist’), and It. ca[z]a ‘house’ does not take place between a proclitic and the verb (e.g. It. lo [so] / lo *[z]o) ‘I know it’ and neither with enclitics (e.g. It. mettendo[s]i / 7 Cf. also Kuchenbrandt (2009) for an overview of the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic characteristics of French and Spanish clitics.

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*mettendo[z]i ‘put.GER . REFL ’). The process of s-sonorization in Castilian Spanish does apply in the context of a following voiced consonant as in mi[z]mo ‘same’ (cf. Hualde 2005) and in contact varieties of Spanish also in intervocalic contexts (e.g. Ecuadorian Spanish lo[z] otros ‘the others’) (Lipski 1989; Chappell 2011; Hualde/ Prieto 2014). As attested by the examples above s-sonorization applies across wordboundaries in Spanish which also holds true for Catalan (e.g. do[z] ami[ɡz] íntims ‘two close friends’) and French (e.g. le[z] hommes ‘the men’). Thus this test seems to work for Italian clitics but not for Spanish, Catalan or French clitics.

3.2 Morphological properties The morphological properties of clitics that are most often discussed are their reduced morphological form compared to the full forms, the opaque forms, the person-caserestriction when appearing in a cluster, and their phi-8 and case features. Clitics are monosyllabic words, while strong pronouns can be bi- or even trisyllabic. Since, for instance, in French clitic pronouns are homophonous with strong pronouns (nous ‘us’, vous ‘you.PL ’), the generalization has been formulated that clitic pronouns are equal to or smaller than their strong counterparts: clitic ≤ strong (cf. Cardinaletti/Starke 1999, 174). This holds true for Romance object clitics. (6) Cat. a. el/lo ‘him’ vs. ell ‘he’ / a ell ‘to him’ Fr.

b. le ‘him’

vs. il ‘he’ / à lui ‘to him’

It.

c. lo ‘him’

vs. egli, lui ‘he’ / di lui ‘of him’

Por. d. o ‘him’ Sp.

e. lo ‘him’

vs. ele ‘he’ / a ele ‘to him’ vs. él ‘he’ / de él ‘of him’

In Romance and other languages combinations of clitic pronouns, so-called clitic clusters, often trigger opaque forms which have been shown to always coincide with clitics that independently coexist in the language (Perlmutter 1970; 1971; Bonet 1995; Gerlach 2002; Cardinaletti 2008). See the following examples (7), in which in a combination of a 3sg accusative and 3sg dative clitic, the dative is substituted by the locative hi (a), the pronoun ci (b), and the reflexive se (c): (7) Cat. a. lo ACC .3SG

It.

Sp.

+ li DAT.3SG

b. si 3SG

+ si

c. le

+ lo

DAT.3SG

REFL

ACC .3SG

→ l’hi ACC .3SG ’LOC

→ ci si LOC . REFL

→ se lo REFL . ACC . 3SG

8 Phi-features in generative syntax are the grammatical features of person, number, and gender.

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Furthermore, both types of the person-case-constraint (PPC) can be attested (8), which sometimes leads to a mismatch between overt morphological marking and the syntactic-semantic interpretation. (8) PCC a. Strong Version In a combination of a weak direct object and an indirect object [of clitics, agreement markers, or weak pronouns] the direct object has to be third person. b.

Weak Version In a combination of a weak direct object and an indirect object, if there is a third person it has to be the direct object. (Bonet 2008, 104)

French, for example, shows the strong version (9) and Spanish (10), Italian (11), and Catalan (12) show the weak version of the PCC. (9) Fr. a. *Roger te nous /nous t’avait recommandés. DAT.2SG ACC .1PL /ACC .1PL DAT.2SG ’had recommended R. ‘Roger had recommended us to you.’ b. Roger nous avait recommandés à toi. ACC .1PL had recommended to DAT.2SG R. ‘Roger had recommended us to you.’ Example (9a) shows that combinations of first and second person clitics are judged ungrammatical. The only way to utter this sentence is to use a strong pronoun (9b) instead of the clitic (cf. Perlmutter 1970, 222). Spanish, Italian, and Catalan allow combinations of first and second persons, but whenever a third person indirect clitic is included the sentence is ungrammatical. In order to overcome this constraint Spanish (10) and Italian (11) use a strong pronoun, whereas Catalan uses the locative clitic hi (12) (for more examples and a discussion of other types of agreement restrictions, cf. Fischer 2011; and ↗9 Agreement restrictions and agreement oddities). (10) Sp. a. Te

me

presentaste. introduced ‘You introduced yourself to me.’

ACC .2SG

b. *Me

DAT.1SG

presentaron. ACC .1SG DAT.3SG introduced

c. Me

le

presentaron a él. introduced to him ‘They introduced me to him.’

ACC .1SG

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(11) It. a.

Mi

ti

ACC .1SG

DAT.2SG

presantarono. introduced ‘They introduced me to you.’ gli

b. *Mi ACC .1SG

DAT.3SG

presentarono. introduced

c. Mi

presentarono a lui. ACC .1SG introduced to him ‘They introduced me to him.’

(12) Cat. a. Te

m’ha recomanat en Miquel. ACC .2SG DAT.1SG has recommended the M. ‘Miquel has recommended me to you.’

b. *Me

li

ACC .1SG

DAT.3SG

ha recomanat en Miquel. has recommended the M.

c. M’hi ha recomanat en Miquel. ACC .1SG ’LOC 9 has recommended the M. ‘Miquel has recommended me to him.’ It is a well-known fact that full noun phrases in Romance do not display morphological case; clitic pronouns however exhibit case distinction, namely accusative (e.g. Italian/Spanish lo), dative (e.g. Italian/Spanish gli/le), partitive (e.g. Italian/ Catalan ne/en), and with a locative interpretation (e.g. Italian/Catalan/French ci/hi/y). Concerning grammatical features, it has been shown that Romance clitics encode different phi-features (cf. Bonet 1995; Fischer 2002; Cardinaletti 2008). Consider the following feature matrix for Spanish (Table 1). Table 1: The Spanish feature matrix (cf. Halle/Marantz 1994, 280) 3p

ACC

DAT

2p

M

F

SG

lo

la

te

me

PL

los

las

os

nos

SG

le

PL

les

M

1p F

M

F

same as ACC REFL

SG

se PL

9 Rigau (1982) has suggested that the clitic hi can be used as a locative clitic, but also as an inanimate dative. For a similar approach, cf. Hualde (1992), who gives a brief description of hi and other clitics which can have different uses.

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What can be seen in Table 1 is that 3p is represented by , ACC . M by , ACC . F by , dative by , and plural by , deriving the forms lo, la, los, las for the different accusative clitics and le, les for the dative clitics.

3.3 Syntactic properties Syntactically, clitics have often been argued to be deficient in that they cannot be modified, coordinated, contrastively stressed, or occur in isolation, and in that they cannot appear in the same position as their strong equivalents. Romance object clitics show all of these properties: they obligatorily appear in a position next to the verb, a position which is not available to full DPs or full pronouns (recall example 2). They are not allowed to appear in isolation (13), which includes that they cannot appear at a peripheral position in a sentence where they are separated by a prosodic break (14). (13) Cat. a. Qui who

coneix knows

la the

Núria? N.

Ella/*La. she/ her

Fr.

b. Qui connait Zoé ?/Zoé, elle connait qui ? Lui/*La.

It.

c. Chi conosce, Fiammetta?

Lui/*Lo.

Por. d. Quem é que a Joana conhece?

Ele/*O.

Sp.

A él/*A lo.

e. ¿A quién conoce María?

(14) Cat. a. A ell/*El, la Núria el coneix. Fr.

b. Lui/*La, Zoé la connait.

It.

c. Lui/*Lo, Fiammetta lo conosce.

Por. d. É ele/*O que a Joana conhece. Sp.

e. A él/*A lo, María lo conoce.

Furthermore, Romance clitics can neither be modified (15), nor conjoined (16), nor contrastively focused (17): (15) Cat. a. La Núria la coneix solament a ella/*la. Fr.

b. Zoé ne connait qu’elle/*que la.

It.

c. Fiammetta conosce solo lei/*la.

Por. d. A Joana conhece só ele /*o. Sp.

e. María la conoce solamente a ella/*la.

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(16) Cat. a. La Núria els coneix a ella i a ell/*La Núria [la i lo] coneix. Fr.

b. Zoé connait [il et elle]/*Zoé [le et la] connait.

It.

c. Fiammetta conosce [lui e lei]/*Fiammetta [lo e la] conosce.

Por. d. A Joana conhece ele e ela /*A Joana conhece [o e a]. Sp.

e. María los conoce a [ella y a él]/*María [lo y la] conoce.

(17) Cat. a. La Núria el coneix a ELL, no a ella/*La Núria EL coneix, no a ella. Fr.

b. Zoé connait LUI, y pas elle/*Zoé LE connait, et pas elle.

It.

c. Fiammetta conosce LUI, non lei/*F. LO conosce, non lei.

Por. d. A Joana conhece ELE, mas não ela /*A Joana O conhece, não ela. Sp.

e. María lo conoce a ÉL, no a ella/*María LO conoce, no a ella.

3.4 Semantic properties The semantics of clitics have often been called upon in order to motivate the high position in the phrase-structure, i.e. the position in the front of the sentence. As for the motivation for this position, an idea has been proposed that links clitics to specificity/referentiality (Martins 1994; Uriagereka 1995; Fischer 2002; Roberts 2010, among many others). As referential/specific elements, they refer to something already mentioned in the discourse (18). It has been proposed that TP (the place where the finite verb is located in Romance) is the border for specificity, which can be deduced if it is accepted that all predicates have a Davidsonian event argument, and that this is also true of nouns, even noneventive ones (Higginbotham 1987). Specificity is just an element taking wide scope with respect to the Davidsonian event operator in the sentence; in other terms, a DP is specific if and only if its event variable is not bound by the event operator, being instead bound by the discourse (Herburger 1994). Thus clitics must move out of the vP/VP (cf. section 4). (18) Cat. a. Speaker A: Jo conec en Joan. I know the J. Speaker B: Sí, jo el conec també. yes I him know too Fr.

b. Speaker A: Moi, je connais Pierre. Speaker B: Oui, je le connais aussi.

It.

c. Speaker A: Io conosco Fiammetta. Speaker B: Anch’io la conosco.

Por. d. Speaker A: Eu conheço a Joana. Speaker B: Eu também a conheço. Sp.

e. Speaker A: Yo (lo) conozco a Jorge. Speaker B: Sí, yo lo conozco también.

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Another fact worth mentioning is that clitics can refer to both human and nonhuman entities, whereas strong pronouns can only refer to human entities (19). Ethical datives can only be represented by clitics and never by full pronouns (20). (19) Fr.

a. [Le nouveau livre de Éric Laurent]i il me plait beaucoup de lei lire. the new book of E. L. it me pleases a lot it read ‘It pleases me a lot to read the new book of Éric Laurent.’ b. *[Le livre de Éric Laurent] i . . . je ne veux pas parler de luii the book of E. L. I not want not speak of it

Sp. a. [El nuevo libro de Carlos Ruiz Zafón] i . . . me gustaría leerloi b. *[El libro de Carlos Ruiz Zafón] . . . no quiero hablar de él. (20) Cat. a. Aquell nen no em menja res. that child not me eat nothing Lit. ‘This child doesn’t eat anything for me.’ It.

b. Mi è nato un bambino. me is born a child Bible English. ‘Unto me was born a child’

What has become evident in this discussion of the different properties is the fact that the individual properties apply on more than one level, for example the PCC seems to be a morphological and a syntactic effect, and the same holds for contrastive focus, which is plainly phonological but also syntactic. This clearly shows that the interfaces at the different modules of grammar are important for the analysis of clitics.

3.5 Clitic climbing, clitic doubling, mesocliticization, and interpolation In addition to the properties that are shared by the clitics of the different modern Romance languages, we also find language-specific characteristics: for instance, clitic climbing is attested in Spanish, Italian, European Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan, but not in French. Clitic doubling is attested for Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, and Catalan, but not for Standard Italian and Standard French.10 Interpolation, postverbal clitics with finite verbs, and mesocliticization are found in European Portuguese but not in any of the other modern Romance languages. 10 French and Italian allow doubling of quantifiers and full pronouns. However, indirect objects cannot be doubled in the standard written varieties (Fischer/Rinke 2013).

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However, starting out, the Romance languages were not as diverse as they are now (cf. Wanner 1987; Kuchenbrandt 2009; Hinzelin 2007); instead the O(ld) Romance languages shared many of the abovementioned characteristics and they all displayed postverbal clitics with finite verbs. Cf. the examples in (21), all taken from Fischer (2002, 35–36). (21) OCat. a. e donà-la per muller a l’emperador de Castela and gave-her as wife to the emperor of Castille OFr.

b. et demande li and ask him

OIt.

c. offerse-gliene due marchi di guadagno offered-him-of.it two marks of interest

OPor. d. perguntou-lhe e disse-lhe asked-him and told-him OSp.

e. e fizo-lo traer preso and made-him bring prisoners

The fact that Old Romance clitics appear following the finite verb has been argued to be an effect of the Tobler-Mussafia law, which states that unstressed object pronouns cannot stand in absolute initial position, thus due to a phonological constraint. However, Fischer (2002) and Hinzelin (2007) have found object clitics in embedded sentences, which shows that there must be an additional factor allowing/forcing clitics in a postverbal position (22), especially since sentences can be attested which show exactly the same words but in a different linear order (23). Cf. the following examples from Old Catalan. (22) OCat. . . . qui per justícia seguex-se la fi per què . . . who for justice follows-ref the purpose for that ‘. . . who – out of justice – follows the purpose for which. . .’ (Fischer 2002, 177) (23) OCat. a. I. jorn se sdevench que lo ermità splugave one day ref happened that the hermit scrutinized son cilici, his penitential robe, ‘And it came to pass that the hermit scrutinized his penitential robe,’

Object clitics

b. I. one

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jorn sdevench-se que I. juheu vench a aquell day happened-ref that a Jew came to that

sant hom, holy man, ‘And it came to pass that a Jew came to that holy man,’ (Fischer 2002, 178) In modern Romance, postverbal clitics with finite verbs are still allowed in European Portuguese (24), however never in embedded sentences, in contrast to interpolation (25a) (where an item, in (25a) the negation não, can split the clitic-verb unit) and mesocliticization (25b).11 (24) Por. a. Ele conhece-me. he knows-me ‘He knows me.’ (25) Por. a. O João pediu que o não acordassem. the J. asked that him not should wake up ‘João asked them not to wake him up.’ (Mateus et al. 2003, 866) b. Se me fizesse essa pergunta, recusar-me-ia a responder. if me made this question, refuse-me-would to answer ‘If s/he asked this question, I would refuse to answer.’ (Mateus et al. 2003, 865) In (25b) me is the ethical dative object clitic occurring before the conditional inflectional ending , thus the clitic is located between the verb and the verbal inflection, which is called mesocliticization. Interpolation and mesocliticization are also attested in Old Romance. Cf. the following examples of interpolation, the separation of the clitic-verb sequence, in Old Portuguese (26), Old French (27), and Old Spanish (28) (cf. Fischer 2002, 40–42). (26) OPor. E sse and if

pela uentujra uos alguen enbargar by chance you someone blocks

a dita vya . . . the said vineyard ‘And if by chance someone blocks the vineyard from you. . .’ (Antt, Chelas, 1294) 11 All examples from the Old Romance languages have been assembled by Fischer (2002) and are cited here accordingly; however some of these examples have been taken from different authors (Kaiser 1992; Martins 1994; Wanner 1987 etc.).

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(27) OFr. Ke il te plus face aorer . . . that he you more make ? ‘That he lets you ? . . .’ (La vie de Saint Eustache, Paris, 1928) (28) OSp. pero que lo non fallamos en toda la estoria . . . but that it not find in all the story ‘but we do not find it in the whole history . . .’ (Alfonso X, Estoria de España II/11) Interpolation has not been attested in Old Italian or in Old Catalan (Fischer 2002), however Old Catalan (30) shows mesocliticization exactly like Old Portuguese (29) and Old Spanish (31) (Fischer 2002, 44-48). (29) OPor. e vós sabè-lo-edes . . . and you know-it-will ‘and you will know it . . .’

(Cantigas d’Escarnho, 66,34)

(30) OCat. E seguir-vos he ab .LXXX. cavalers, and follow-you have with LXXX cavaliers, ‘I will follow you with eighty cavaliers,’ (31) OSp. dezir lo hedes al rey? tell it will to.the king ‘will you tell it to the king?’

(Desclot 77,13)

(Libro del caballero Zifar 124)

A further peculiarity of the Romance languages concerns clitic climbing. Most scholars working on clitic climbing see it as a sort of optional movement which may, but need not, apply (cf. Rizzi 1982; Roberts 1997; and Rooryck 2000 for an overview). As for the modern Romance languages which display this phenomenon, the optionality of the clitic to climb to the verb or stay with the infinitival verb is considered to have already been available in the Old Romance languages: “patterns such as Yo quiero comerlo and Yo lo quiero comer ‘I want to eat it’ are attested from the earliest documents” (Rivero 1991, 241). The modern Romance languages displaying clitic climbing with causative as well as with modal verbs are Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan. In contrast to other Romance languages, modern French only admits clitic climbing with causative verbs; with modal verbs the clitic has to remain with the infinitive. In the Old Romance languages clitic climbing is also attested for French. However, clitic climbing was not optional in the medieval languages; on the contrary it was obligatory (cf. Pearce 1990; Fischer 2002). Cf. the Old French example with a modal verb (32) and the Old Catalan examples with a causative (33a) and a modal verb (33b). In all instances of a causative or modal verb in Old French and Old Catalan, the clitic had to climb to the finite verb (cf. Fischer 2002, 42–43).

Object clitics

(32) OFr. Mes ele ne la pot veoir . . . but she not her can see ‘But she cannot see her . . .’

377

(La Chastelaine de Vergi, 729)

(33) OCat. a. . . . e sia plaer de Déu que.ls vos fa comensar, and is pleasure of God that.they you make begin ‘. . . and it is God’s pleasure that makes you begin,’ (Llull, 79,10) b. Fort ho volria saber strong it want know ‘Urgently I would like to know it’

(Metge, 73,2)

The last characteristic we need to look at before discussing the proposed analyses is clitic doubling. Clitic doubling is understood as a construction in which a clitic co-occurs with a full DP in argument position and shares with it one syntactic and one semantic function. It is different from left and right dislocation, since dislocation necessarily involves a prosodic break whereas this is not true for doubling structures (Jaeggli 1986; Gabriel/Rinke 2010). This is illustrated in (34), an example from Spanish, where le and a Juan denote the same referent without a prosodic break being involved. (34) Sp. Le dimos el libro a Juan. him.DAT gave.1PL the book to Juan ‘We gave the book to Juan.’ Clitic doubling is obligatory with full pronouns and optional with indirect objects in Catalan, Portuguese, Romanian (35), and Spanish (34) (Fernández Soriano 1999; Iliescu/Popovici 2013; Fischer/Rinke 2013). In the Old Romance languages clitic doubling was not yet a coherent characteristic (Gabriel/Rinke 2010). It did appear with full pronouns (36), but even with full pronouns it was still optional (37) (cf. Fischer 2002, 44–45). (35) Cat.

Por.

a. Li dono el llibre a en Joan. him give the book to the J. b. Dei-lhe o livro à Maria. gave-her the book to M.

Rom. c. I-am dat o carte Mariei. her-have given a book to M. (36) OCat. Prec-vos que m’ojats tots a mi un poc. ask-you that me’listen all to me a bit ‘I ask that you all listen to me a while.’

(Metge, 18,5)

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(37) OCat. a. . . .e tan amarg és a mi que . . . and so bitter is to me that ‘. . . and it is so bitter for me that . . .’ OSp.

(Martorell, 31,26)

salir. b. al logar onde dios mando ami to.the place where god ordered to.me exit ‘to the place where God had ordered me to get out.’ (General Estoria Part I.65r)

The characteristics presented in this section have often been used as arguments in favour of or against various theoretical approaches to cliticization in Romance. Thus in the next section a brief overview of some prominent generative approaches is given.

4 Cliticization in generative grammar The questions that have not only received different answers in the various versions of the generative model (Government-Binding (GB), cf. Chomsky 1981; Minimalist Program, cf. Chomsky 1995; 2001 etc.),12 but also within the same version of the model, address the status of clitics as heads or phrases, the relationship between clitics and the corresponding (canonical) nonclitic position, and what functional category hosts the clitic element.

4.1 The movement hypothesis The recognition of two morphologically and syntactically distinct series of Romance pronouns, i.e. clitic and strong pronouns, has influenced all subsequent research on pronouns. Kayne’s (1975) fundamental contribution to the theory of clitics in generative grammar consists in the proposal that cliticization is a movement rule. One simple motivation for his analysis is the apparent complementary distribution between clitics and their associated full DPs. Kayne (1975) proposes that Romance clitics are base-generated in the object position of the verb, where full DPs are also generated, and are subsequently moved to a position left-adjoined to the verb (38).

12 It should be mentioned that contributions to the theory of clitics are found in most of the frameworks of generative-inspired formal grammar, including Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) (for example Grimshaw 1982), Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) (for example Monachesi 1999), and of course Optimality Theory (OT) (cf. Gerlach 2002; Grimshaw 2001). However, in this chapter we will concentrate on the transformational theorizing, where most of the leading questions have been asked.

Object clitics

(38)

Cat. La Mercè [v eli [ the Mercè him

v

379

veu ] ] [NP ti] sees

One type of evidence Kayne (1975) uses in order to corroborate his conclusions is the blocking effects of intervening subjects on (some type of) clitic placement. A sentence like (39) is ungrammatical in that it implies movement of the dative clitic leur from its base-generated complement position across the (inverted) embedded subject Lucille, thus suggesting a Specified Subject Condition effect. (39) Fr. Le directeur *leur a fait répondre Lucille. the director them.DAT has made answer.INF L. ‘The director made Lucille answer *them.’ (Kayne 1975, 301) More direct evidence in favour of a movement analysis comes from the locality effects displayed by clitic placement, which are typical of movement operations: for example extraction from a PP or out of an adverbial prepositional phrase, or extraction out of a noun phrase whose highest specifier is filled with a demonstrative. Such data strongly suggest that movement is involved. The same holds for stranding under clitic placement (cf. Cardinaletti/Starke 1999 for an extensive discussion on this matter) (40–41): (40) Cat. a. Has vingut amb la Maria? have.2SG come with the Maria ‘Did you come with Maria?’ b. *Qui has vingut amb? who have.2SG come with (41) Cat. a. En Joan ha vingut amb ella. the Joan have.3SG come with her ‘Joan has come with her.’ b. *En Joan li ha vingut amb. the Joan her have.3SG come with A further argument in favour of such an analysis has always been seen in the fact that some Romance languages trigger past-participle agreement; for instance, Catalan, Italian, and French participles may (or must, depending on the variety) agree with their accusative direct object when they precede the participle (42). (42) Cat. a. La Mercè ha vist les nenes. the Mercè has.3SG seen the girls ‘Mercè has seen the girls.’

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b. La Mercè les ha vistes. the Mercè them.F. PL has.3SG seen.F. PL ‘La Mercè has seen them.’ Under a movement analysis these data are easily accounted for if, as Kayne (1989) suggests, there is an intermediate specifier (of the participial morphology) through which the moved object may or must move. Furthermore, clitic climbing is another set of data that clearly shows that whatever hypothesis one prefers in order to explain the Romance object clitic, at least some constraints on their placement are to be interpreted in terms of conditions on movement. The beginning of the movement hypothesis can be seen as an attempt to deny that clitics have any special properties other than their obvious phonological ones and to account for their distribution by independently necessary syntactic principles on movement. Within GB theory, clitics were regarded as categories. Depending on the analysis adopted they were sometimes considered heads (X°), e.g. Kayne (1975; 1991), or phrases (XPs), e.g. Platzack (1995), which were displaced. Consequently, a trace was no longer a copy but a category with properties which are potentially distinct from those of the moved element. Chomsky (1993) proposes that movement is not displacement but copying of a category into another position, with subsequent deletion of one of the copies in PF. Chomsky (1995) outlines a theory where movement applies to features instead of whole categories. On moving to the checking domain of F, F’ may have to pied-pipe minimally a word, sometimes a phrase. Feature movement theory can be combined with the copy theory (at least this seems to be what Chomsky 1995 has in mind), i.e. chain reduction deletes copies creating the appearance of movement. Movement is triggered then by a formal feature F of a functional category which needs checking, and therefore attracts a feature F’ to the checking domain of F. F’ together with the features that have been pied-piped are copied into the checking domain of F. The overt vs. covert movement (LF-movement) distinction is a matter of whether the features are spelled out upstairs or downstairs. Strong features trigger overt movement whereas weak features only trigger movement after spell-out, i.e. covert at LF. With respect to clitic movement, this means that in order for the clitic to move, it has to be attracted by a formal feature on one of the functional categories which needs to be checked. In later approaches in the Minimalist Program, a difference between interpretable/uninterpretable and valued/unvalued features was proposed (Chomsky 2000 and subsequent work). In Roberts (2010) clitics are viewed as minimal/maximal categories that move by head-movement and as such have a semantic effect (cf. Roberts 2010; Lechner 2005). Clitics enter an Agree relation to value their probe’s features. This Agree relation however is seen as incorporation by which the clitic’s features are copied onto the probe. The most important aspect of the copying of the features of the clitic is that valuing the features of the probe exhausts the content of

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the goal. Therefore the operation is not distinguishable from the copying involved in movement. According to Roberts (2010, 60) in the case of incorporation Agree and Move/Internal Merge are formally indistinguishable. Since clitics have interpretable phi-features, they can value the uninterpretable phi-features of v*. The idea that v*min is a phase then explains why once all its features have been valued (and deleted, where necessary), it is sent to the interfaces as a unit (v*min+Dmin/max). At every stage of the generative framework a great deal of work has been devoted to determining the concrete landing site of the clitics. Most of the work has converged on the idea that this is a functional category at the left periphery of the clause between C and T. Although the various proposals offer different explanations of what the exact functional category is, there is a general consensus that this category serves as an interface between syntax and discourse (cf. Raposo/Uriagereka 2008). Thus, whatever triggers clitic movement seems to be a cluster of syntactic and semantic constraints.

4.2 The base-generation hypothesis The attempt to capture the generalization that clitics and DPs display complementary distribution is directly contradicted by the phenomenon of clitic doubling (recall examples (34) and (35)). In early GB studies clitic doubling constructions were seen as the major argument in favour of a base-generation analysis of clitics. The phenomenon of clitic doubling was first discussed by Strozer (1976) and Rivas (1977), who point out that in some constructions in Spanish in contrast to French and Italian clitic objects co-occur with nonclitic objects; for example full pronouns are always doubled and indirect objects may be doubled by a clitic pronoun in Spanish as well as in the Catalan sentences above. They judge the data to be direct proof against a movement analysis and propose instead that the clitics in question are base-generated in their surface position. According to such analyses, the pronominal clitic in the VP is generated to the left of the verb, while the coindexed DP is generated in the object position, as required by the selecting verb. This idea has been further developed in Jaeggli (1982; 1986) and Borer (1984), who give a more detailed proposal in that the clitic is generated in a special position, neither A nor A’ (next to the verb), and that the A-position related to the clitic is occupied either by the empty pronominal pro or by a lexical noun. (43)

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The presence of the complex Cl-V under V reflects the affix-like status of the clitic in this kind of analysis. Borer (1984) considers clitics spell-out features of the V projecting the VP; for Jaeggli (1986) they are syntactic affixes forming a V with the V they attach to. The theoretically interesting question is how it can be that the clitic and the full NP share one theta-role and one Case between them. One possible explanation is given by Jaeggli (1982) and Borer (1984), who assume that the complement DP position is an argument position, which is theta-marked by the verb. In this analysis the presence of a full DP depends on whether the clitic absorbs the Case which the verb assigns. Jaeggli (1982) suggests parameterizing the ability of the clitic to absorb Case and proposes that in French and Italian the clitic obligatorily absorbs the accusative or dative Case of the verb and an DP cannot appear, whereas in Spanish the clitic absorbs Case only optionally, and leaves open the possibility of having a lexical DP that would receive Case from the verb, in exactly the same way as if the clitic were not present. Jaeggli (1986) suggests an analysis in which the preposition, which is obligatory in Spanish clitic doubling constructions, doesn’t itself assign Case, but rather transmits the Case assigned by the verb, thus combining Kayne’s generalization that in clitic doubling constructions a Case marker is present on the doubled DP with Borer’s proposal (1984) that the clitic absorbs the spell-out or morphological realization of the verb’s Case feature. Jaeggli (1986) assumes a process of Case matching rather than Case assignment, under which the Case assigner, the verb, is matched with either a recipient or a transmitter of Case (here the preposition a). However, Uriagereka (1995), Suñer (1988; 2006), and Fischer/Rinke (2013) show that in quite a lot of doubling constructions no preposition is present. Thus, what seems to be the problem if we adopt the movement hypothesis for the Romance languages is the fact that in, for example, Spanish and Catalan, indirect object DPs can be doubled by a clitic, and that in Romanian and some varieties of South American Spanish indirect as well as direct object clitics are doubled. There seems to be no easy solution: if we adopt the base-generation approach, we cannot explain why the relation between the clitic and the corresponding full phrase position is subject to locality constraints in much the same way as other movement processes are; on the other hand, if we adopt the movement hypothesis, we are able to explain the locality constraints, but get into trouble because of the clitic doubling phenomenon, which is a phenomenon that applies at the interface of syntax and semantics (cf. Fischer/Navarro/Vega 2016).

4.3 Reconciling the approaches while accounting for the diverse behaviour Developments in syntactic theory, such as the proliferation of functional projections (Pollock 1989; Poletto 1999; Cardinaletti 2015), the typology of A- and A’-positions, or the approach of movement as triggered by morphosyntactic features, have led to

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a reconciliation of the base-generation and movement approaches to cliticization. Several scholars have proposed a combined base-generation and movement approach to clitics (cf. Sportiche 1999b; Uriagereka 1995). For instance, Sportiche (1999b) argues that clitics are heads in the extended projection of V while the doubled DP is generated in a VP-internal argument position and undergoes movement to or through the clitic position at some stage in the derivation. Unlike Sportiche (1999b) however, Uriagereka (1995) claims that clitics are determiners, i.e. heads in the extended projection of N, while doubled DPs are in the specifier position of a complex DP headed by the doubling clitic, which undergoes movement to its surface site. This implies that the nature of the determiners in a language determines whether this language can or cannot have clitic doubling, i.e. clitic doubling is present in a language if the determiners can be the head of a complex DP. Camacho Taboada (2006) suggests that in languages which use clitic doubling, clitics are base-generated in a functional projection whereas in languages without doubling clitics are D-heads which are moved to a functional position. In all the approaches mentioned here, clitics have the same syntax across languages. A different approach rejects a homogeneous account of clitics in languages. Gabriel/Müller (2005) suggest that 1st and 2nd person and nonreflexive forms of 3rd person clitics are generated in and subsequently moved from the complement position, whereas reflexive se is base-generated with the verb. Bleam (1999) and Anagnostopoulou (2003) regard the clitic’s syntax as being defragmented. Bleam (1999) argues that accusative clitics are determiners and dative clitics are inflections, which is taken up by Déchaine/Wiltschko (2002), who propose that doubling clitics come in two guises: D-clitics and phi-clitics. In this approach D-clitics trigger semantic effects while phi-clitics are purely syntactic markers. Anagnostopoulou (2003, 14) then relates the phi-features to double object constructions, where they are seen as matching/doubling the features of the objects. In this approach clitic doubling is then accounted for via overt feature movement with a PF reflex (Anagnostopoulou 2003, 214). In current research, the operation long distance AGREE is discussed regarding cliticization and/or clitic doubling (Preminger 2008). In these discussions cliticization is regarded as a form of agreement that mirrors subject-verb agreement, implying that clitics are a purely syntactic phenomenon and that the semantic factors that make, for instance, doubling possible are of minor importance and basically depend on the doubled DP and not on the clitic.

4.4 The distributed morphology approach The ideas of distributed morphology (DM) arose in the early nineties of the last century, mainly inspired by Bonet (1991) and more concisely published in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory as Bonet (1995). The starting point of DM-considerations

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was Romance object clitics and especially object clitic sequences (opaque clitic clusters such as in section 3.2, example (7)). But soon afterwards these concepts were adapted to inflectional morphology (cf. Halle/Marantz 1994; Noyer 1997; Bobaljik 2000, and more recently Halle/Marantz 2008; ↗5 Inflectional verb morphology). According to, for example, Embick/Noyer (2001), syntactic structure is derived without phonological material; rather it is built up exclusively on the basis of abstract morphosyntactic features, and the morphological processes are distributed over the syntactic structure. In other words, syntax computes the terminal nodes by Merge and Move and only after this is finished are phonological features added. Within DM, terminal nodes are thus complexes of semantic and syntactic features that systematically lack all phonological features. The phonological features are supplied on a postsyntactic level, namely morphological structure, by the insertion of vocabulary items into the terminal nodes. The procedure of vocabulary insertion operates according to underspecification and the elsewhere-condition (cf. Kiparsky 1982). This means that in the component of the lexicon, the morphosyntactic features of the vocabulary items are stored not fully specified with respect to their insertion conditions. Let us illustrate this concept on the basis of the Spanish clitic combination se lo, resulting from dative singular le preceding accusative singular masculine lo. According to Bonet (1995), the vocabulary insertion conditions for these clitic object pronouns are the following (44).13 (44) le ↔ {clitic {argument, third person {oblique}}} lo ↔ {clitic {argument, third person}} se ↔ {clitic {argument}} It is evident that se is the least specified of the three object clitics in (44) while le is the most specified. The double-headed arrow ‘↔’ in the lexical insertion conditions means: The item can only be inserted into a terminal node in the context of the syntactic feature structure specification on the right side of the arrow. Thus, the clitic le can only be inserted when the terminal node of the syntactic structure is specified for {clitic {argument, third person {oblique}}}. According to the elsewhere-condition no other clitic can be inserted, since the most specific item must always be inserted before a less specific item comes into play. But then, the question remains as to what happens to the syntactic structure in examples such as (45) (compare Bonet 1995)? (45) Sp. A Pedro, el premio, se lo (*le lo, *lo le) dieron ayer. to P. the prize him it gave.3PL yesterday

13 Bonet (1991; 1995) uses a tree structure, but the bracket illustration in (44) is equivalent to Bonet’s tree structure.

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More plausibly, the terminal node in the syntactic structure must be specified as in (46), since we don’t get any reflexive reading, which is the function of se outside of clitic clusters. (46) {clitic {argument, third person {oblique}}} {clitic {argument, third person}} The idea of Bonet (1995) is that surface filters operate on the syntactic structures in the morphological component. Due to these filters, morphological operations may apply in the morphological component. One such operation is for example impoverishment, i.e. impoverishing the syntactic feature structure of the terminal node. (47)

Thus, in a syntactic structure such as in (47), a filter cuts the features {third person {oblique}} from the terminal node. This means that the lexical insertion conditions of le are no longer met and as a consequence the less specific se must be inserted. These impoverishment operations are morphological adaptions of proposals in the phonology of feature geometry concerning sound deletion operations (cf. Clements 1985; Halle 1995). One advantage of Bonet’s DM approach to opaque clitic sequences is that the syntactic component can be kept constant and the surface structure of the clitic sequences results from a language-specific morphological filter. Her proposal rather convincingly explains opaque clitic sequences in different languages. Goldbach (2007) adopts Bonet’s DM-model for all sequences in French preverbal clitic clusters, and Fischer (2002; 2006) explains the allomorphy of Old Catalan clitics and the change concerning the form of the clitics regarding the pre- vs. postverbal position within a DM-model. Thus, clitics are moved to a surface position, and there vocabulary insertion derives the clusters. Nevertheless, so far none of the proposals has been able to explain the object clitics of all Romance languages and neither all the divergent behaviour.

5 Conclusion As far as we can see, the linguistic community has not reached a consensus on the theoretical treatment of object clitics, not even in the Romance languages. The current state of research on the topic is far from accounting for broadly accepted generalities, not even in the relatively homogeneous group of Romance object

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clitics. The debate concerning movement vs. base-generation, adjunction, or their affix character is still open to further contribution. We think that one has to accept that while object clitics do have quite generalizable properties in several respects, it is also the case that grammars tolerate morphosyntactic islands of diachronically inherited detritus, such as the interpolation examples illustrated in (24) and (25) in section 3.5 (you can think of (21), (22) and (23b), postverbal clitics with finite verbs, in these terms as well). As concerns cliticization in general, it has become clear from the above discussion on Romance clitics that even if we adopt a DM-approach and treat morphology as divided between syntax and phonology, we still have to admit that clitic placement and distribution depend on syntactic and phonological constraints. Furthermore, some phenomena related to cliticization can clearly not be explained by syntactic operations only, but seem to be better analysed in terms of the syntax/ morphology as well as syntax/semantic interfaces. One such phenomenon is clearly clitic doubling, where doubling depends on the interaction of syntax (Acc/Dat, full pronoun etc.), word order in general and additionally on the semantics (specificity, definiteness, and animacy) of the doubled DP involved.

6 References Anagnostopoulou, Elena (2003), The syntax of ditransitives. Evidence from Clitics, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Anderson, Stephen R. (2005), Aspects of a theory of clitics, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Bleam, Tonia (1999), Leísta Spanish and the syntax of clitic doubling, PhD dissertation, University of Delaware. Bobaljik, Jonathan D. (2000), “The ins and outs of contextual allomorphy”, in: Kleanthes Grohmann/ Caro Struijke (edd.), University of Maryland Working Papers in Linguistics 10, 35–71. Bonet, Eulàlia (1991), Morphology after syntax. Pronominal clitics in Romance, PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bonet, Eulàlia (1995), “Feature structure of Romance clitics”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 13, 607–647. Bonet, Eulàlia (2008), “The person-case constraint. A morphological approach”, in: Roberta D’Alessandro/Susann Fischer/Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson (edd.), Agreement restrictions, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 103–128. Borer, Hagit (1984), Parametric syntax. Case studies in Semitic and Romance languages, Dordrecht, Foris. Camacho Taboada, María Victoria (2006), La arquitectura de la gramática. Los clíticos pronominales románicos y eslavos, Sevilla, Universidad de Sevilla. Cardinaletti, Anna (2008), “On different types of clitic clusters”, in: Cécile de Cat/Katherine Demuth (edd.), The Bantu-Romance connection, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 41–82. Cardinaletti, Anna (2015), “Syntactic effects of cliticization”, in: Tibor Kiss/Artemis Alexiadou (edd.), Syntax – theory and analysis. An international handbook, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 595–653.

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Cardinaletti, Anna/Starke, Michael (1999), “The typology of structural deficiency. A case study of the three classes of pronouns”, in: Henk van Riemsdijk (ed.), Clitics in the languages of Europe, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 145–234. Chappell, Whitney (2011), “Intervocalic voicing of /s/ in Ecuadorian Spanish”, in: Jim Michnowicz/ Robin Dodsworth (edd.), Selected proceedings of the 5th workshop on Spanish sociolinguistics, Somerville, MA, Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 57–64. Chomsky, Noam (1981), Lectures on government and binding, Dordrecht, Foris. Chomsky, Noam (1993), “A Minimalist Program for linguistic theory”, in: Kenneth Hale/Samuel J. Keyser (edd.), The view from building 20, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1–52. Chomsky, Noam (1995), The Minimalist Program, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam (2000), “Minimalist inquiries. The framework”, in: Roger Martin/David Michaels/ Juan Uriagereka (edd.), Step by step, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 89–155. Chomsky, Noam (2001), “Derivation by phase”, in: Michael J. Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: A life in Language, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1–52. Clements, George N. (1985), “The geometry of phonological features”, Phonology Yearbook 2, 225– 252. Déchaine, Rose-Marie/Wiltschko, Martina (2002), “Decomposing pronouns”, Linguistic Inquiry 33, 409–442. Embick, David/Noyer, Rolf (2001), “Movement operations after syntax”, Linguistic Inquiry 32:4, 555– 596. Fernández Soriano, Olga (1999), “El pronombre personal. Formas y distribuciones. Pronombres átonos y tónicos”, in: Ignacio Bosque/Violeta Demonte (edd.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, Madrid, Espasa, 1209–1274. Fischer, Susann (2002), The Catalan clitic system. A diachronic perspective on its syntax and phonology, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Fischer, Susann (2006), “Degrammaticalization or the historical distribution of the epenthetic vowel”, in: Claus D. Pusch (ed.), The grammar of Catalan pronouns. Variation – evolution – function, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Katalanistik 5, 1–27. Fischer, Susann (2011), “Some notes on the rise of mismatches”, in: Natascha Pomino/Elisabeth Stark (edd.), Mismatches in Romance, Arbeitspapier 125, Konstanz, Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Konstanz, 113–127. Fischer, Susann/Navarro, Mario/Vega, Jorge (2016), “The clitic doubling cycle. A diachronic reconstruction”, Paper held at the 26th Colloquium on Generative Grammar, Cáceres 13.–14. April 2016. Fischer, Susann/Rinke, Esther (2013), “Explaining the variability in clitic doubling across Romance. A diachronic account”, Linguistische Berichte 236, 455–472. Gabriel, Christoph/Müller, Natascha (2005), “Zu den romanischen Pronominalklitika. Kategorialer Status und syntaktische Derivation”, in: Georg Kaiser (ed.), Deutsche Romanistik – generativ, Tübingen, Narr, 161–180. Gabriel, Christoph/Rinke, Esther (2010), “Information packaging and the rise of clitic-doubling in the history of Spanish”, in: Gisella Ferraresi/Rosemarie Lühr (edd.), Diachronic studies on information structure. Language acquisition and change, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 63–86. Gerlach, Birgit (2002), Clitics between syntax and lexicon, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Givón, Talmy (1979), “From discourse to syntax. Grammar as a processing strategy”, in: Syntax and semantics, vol. 1: Discourse and syntax, ed. Talmy Givón, New York, Academic Press, 81–112. Goldbach, Maria (2007), “The distributed morphology of object clitics in modern French”, Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 26:1, 41–81. Goria, Cecilia (2004), Subject clitics in the Northern Italian dialects, Dordrecht, Kluwer.

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Grimshaw, Jane, (1982), “On the lexical representation of Romance reflexive clitics”, in: Joan Bresnan (ed.), The mental representation of grammatical relations, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 87–148. Grimshaw, Jane (2001), “Optimal clitic positions and the lexicon in Romance clitic systems”, in: Geraldine Légendre/Jane Grimshaw/Sten Vikner (edd.), Optimality Theoretic Syntax, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 205–240. Halle, Morris (1995), “Feature geometry and feature spreading”, Linguistic Inquiry 26:1, 1–46. Halle, Morris/Marantz, Alec (1994), “Some key features of distributed morphology”, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 21, 275–288. Halle, Morris/Marantz, Alec (2008), “Clarifying ‘blur’. Paradigms, defaults, and inflectional classes”, in: Asaf Bachrach/Andrew Nevins (edd.), Inflectional identity, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 55–72. Halpern, Aaron (1995), On the placement and morphology of clitics, Stanford, CA, CSLI Publications. Herburger, Elena (1994), “Focus and the LF of NP Quantification”, in: Proceedings of Salt III, Ithaca/ New York, Cornell University Press, 77–96. Higginbotham, James (1987), “Indefiniteness and Predication”, in: Eric Reuland/Alice G. B. ter Meulen (edd.), The representations of (in)definiteness, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 43–70. Hinzelin, Marc (2007), Die Stellung der klitischen Objektpronomina in den romanischen Sprachen. Diachronie, Perspektive und Korpusstudie zum Okzitanischen sowie zum Katalanischen und Französischen, Tübingen, Narr. Hualde, José Ignacio (1992), Catalan, London, Routledge. Hualde, José Ignacio (2005), The sounds of Spanish, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Hualde, José Ignacio/Prieto, Pilar (2014), “Lenition of intervocalic alveolar fricatives in Catalan and Spanish”, Phonetica 71:2, 109–127. Iliescu, Maria/Popovici, Victoria (2013), Rumänische Grammatik, Hamburg, Buske. Jaeggli, Osvaldo A. (1982), Topics in Romance syntax, Dordrecht, Foris. Jaeggli, Osvaldo A. (1986), “Three issues in the theory of clitics. Case, doubled NPs, and extraction”, in: Hagit Borer (ed.), The syntax of pronominal clitics, Orlando, Academic Press, 15–42. Kaiser, Georg (1992), Die klitischen Personalpronomen im Französischen und Portugiesischen. Eine synchronische und diachronische Analyse, Frankfurt, Vervuert. Kayne, S. Richard (1975), French syntax. The transformational cycle, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kayne, S. Richard (1989), “Facets of Romance past participle agreement”, in: Paola Benincà (ed.), Dialect variations and the theory of grammar, Dordrecht, Foris, 85–104. Kayne, S. Richard, (1991), “Romance Clitics, Verb Movement, and PRO”, Linguistic Inquiry 22, 647– 686. Kiparsky, Paul (1982), “Lexical phonology and morphology”, in: In-Seok Yang (ed.), Linguistics in the morning calm, Seoul, Hanshin, 3–91. Klavans, Judith (1982), Some problems in a theory of clitics, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Linguistic Club. Klavans, Judith (1985), “The independence of syntax and phonology in cliticization”, Language 61, 95–120. Kuchenbrandt, Imme (2009), Prosodische Aspekte in der Entwicklung der spanischen und französischen Klitika, PhD dissertation, Universität Hamburg. Lechner, Winfried (2005), “Interpretative effects of head-movement”, Ms., University of Tübingen, http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000178 (02.02.2016). Lipski, John (1989), “/s/-voicing in Ecuadorian Spanish. Patterns and principles of consonantal modification”, Lingua 79, 49–71.

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Manzini, Rita (2015), “On the substantive primitives of morphosyntax and their parametric notion. Northern Italian subject clitics”, in: Marc van Oostendorp/Henk van Riemsdijk (edd.), Representing structure in phonology and syntax. Berlin/Boston, Mouton de Gruyter, 167–194. Martins, Ana Maria (1994), Clíticos na história do português, PhD dissertation, Universidade de Lisboa. Mateus, Maria H. M./Brito, Ana Maria/Duarte, Inês/Hub Faria, Isabel (2003), Gramática da língua portuguesa, Lisboa, Caminho. Monachesi, Paola (1999), A lexical approach to Italian cliticization, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Mussafia, Adolf (1888), “Enclisi o proclisi del pronome personale atono quale oggetto”, Romania 27, 145–146. Nevis, Joel A./Joseph, Brian D./Wanner, Dieter/Zwicky, Arnold. M. (edd.) (1994), Clitics. A comprehensive bibliography 1892–1991, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Noyer, Rolf (1997), Features, positions, and affixes in autonomous morphological structure, New York/London, Garland. Pearce, Elizabeth, (1990), Parameters in Old French syntax. Infinitival complements, Dordrecht, Kluwer. Perlmutter, David M. (1970), “Surface structure constraints in syntax”, Linguistic Inquiry 1:2, 187– 255. Perlmutter, David M. (1971), Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax, New York, Rinehart and Winston. Platzack, Christer (1995), “The loss of verb second in English and French”, in: Adrian Battye/Ian Roberts (edd.), Clause structure and language change, New York, Oxford University Press, 200–226. Poletto, Cecilia (1995), “The diachronic development of subject clitics in North Eastern dialects”, in: Adrian Battye/Ian Roberts (edd.), Clause structure and language change, New York, Oxford University Press, 295–324. Poletto, Cecilia (1999), “The internal structure of AgrS and subject clitics”, in: Henk van Riemsdijk (ed.), Clitics in the languages of Europe, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 581–620. Pollock, Jean-Yves (1989), “Verb movement, universal grammar, and the structure of IP”, Linguistic Inquiry 20, 365–424. Preminger, Omer (2008), Breaking agreements. Distinguishing agreement and clitic doubling by their failures, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Prinz, Michael (1991), Klitisierung im Deutschen und Neugriechischen. Eine lexikalisch-phonologische Studie, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Raposo, Eduardo P./Uriagereka, Juan (2008), “Clitic placement in Western Iberian”, in: Guglielmo Cinque/Richard S. Kayne (edd.), The Oxford handbook of comparative syntax, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 639–697. Riemsdijk, Henk van (ed.) (1999), Clitics in the languages of europe, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Rigau, Gemma (1982), “Inanimate indirect objects in Catalan”, Linguistic Inquiry 13, 146–150. Rivas, Alberto (1977), A theory of clitics, PhD dissertation, MIT. Rivero, María Luisa (1991), “Clitic and NP climbing in Old Spanish”, in: Héctor Campos/Fernando Martínez-Gil (edd.), Current studies in Spanish linguistics, Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 241–282. Rizzi, Luigi (1982), Issues in Italian syntax, Dordrecht, Foris. Rizzi, Luigi (1986), “On the status of subject clitics in Romance”, in: Osvaldo Jaeggli/Carmen SilvaCorvalán (edd.), Studies in Romance linguistics, Dordrecht, Foris, 391–419. Roberge, Yves (1990), The syntactic recoverability of null arguments, Kingston/Montreal, McGillQueen’s University Press.

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Roberts, Ian (1997), “Restructuring, head movement and locality”, Linguistic Inquiry 28, 423–460. Roberts, Ian (2010), Agreement and head movement, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Rooryck, Johan (2000), Configurations of sentential complementation. Perspectives from Romance languages, London, Routledge. Sadock, Jerrold, M. (1991), Autolexical syntax, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Selkirk, Elisabeth O. (1996), “The prosodic structure of function words”, in: James L. Morgan/Katherine Demuth (edd.), Signal to syntax. Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition, New York, Erlbaum, 187–213. Spencer, Andrew/Luís, Ana R. (2012), Clitics. An introduction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Sportiche, Dominique (1999a), “Subject clitics in French and Romance inversion and clitic doubling”, in: Kyle Johnson/Ian Roberts (edd.), Beyond principles and parameters. Essays in memory of Osvaldo Jaeggli, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 189–221. Sportiche, Dominique (1999b), “Pronominal clitic dependencies”, in: Henk van Riemsdijk (ed.), Clitics in the languages of Europe, Berlin/New York, Mouton, 679–708. Strozer, Judith (1976), Clitics in Spanish, PhD dissertation, UCLA. Suñer, Margarita (1988), “The role of agreement in clitic-doubled constructions”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6, 391–434. Suñer, Margarita (2006), “Left dislocations with and without epithets”, Probus 18, 127–158. Tobler, Adolf (1912 [1875]), “Besprechung von J. Le Coultre, De l’ordre des mots dans Chrétien de Troyes”, in: Vermischte Beiträge zur französischen Grammatik 5, Leipzig, Hirzel, 395–414. Uriagereka, Juan (1995), “Aspects of the syntax of clitic placement in Western Romance”, Linguistic Inquiry 26:1, 79–123. Wackernagel, Jakob, (1892), “Über ein Gesetz der indogermanischen Wortstellung”, Indogermanische Forschungen 1, 333–436. Wandruszka, Ulrich (1992), “Zur Suffixpräferenz. Prolegomena zu einer Theorie der morphologischen Abgeschlossenheit”, Papiere zur Linguistik 46, 3–27. Wanner, Dieter (1987), The development of Romance clitic pronouns. From Latin to Old Romance, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Zwicky, Arnold (1977), “On clitics”, in: Wolfgang U. Dressler/Oskar E. Pfeiffer (edd.), Phonologica, Akten der dritten internationalen Phonologie-Tagung, Wien, 1.–4. Sept. 1976, Innsbruck, Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, 29–39. Zwicky, Arnold (1985), “Clitics and particles”, Language 61, 283–305. Zwicky, Arnold/Pullum, Geoffrey (1983), “Cliticization vs. inflection. English n’t”, Language 59, 503– 513.

Judith Meinschaefer

13 Nominalizations Abstract: Nominalizations are complex words, which, under a classic view of the architecture of the language faculty, belong to the domain of word structure, or morphology. In the simplest cases, nouns can be derived from one-place predicates, like adjectives and intransitive verbs. In more complex cases, they derive from complex verbs and retain much of the syntactic and semantic complexity of their bases. Two fundamental questions have been at the core of the study of nominalization: First, which aspects of the event-structural and of the argument-structural complexity seen in the verbal domain are visible in the nominal domain, and which aspects are not? Second, how does the morphological complexity of nominalizations relate to their event- and argument-structural complexity? With a focus on these two questions, the present article aims at presenting a state-of-the-art perspective on nominalization and its implications for the interfaces between morphology, syntax, and semantics, with specific reference to Romance languages. Keywords: nominalization, deverbal noun, event structure, argument structure, morphology

1 Introduction Nominalization, and in particular deverbal nominalization, has served as a test case for the theoretical modelling of the interfaces between modules of the language faculty from early generative linguistics onwards (e.g. Lees 1966; Chomsky 1970). Nominalizations are complex words, which, under a classic view of the architecture of the language faculty, fall into the domain of word structure, or morphology. At the same time, being derived from verbs, which may be considered the core elements of sentences and which determine many aspects of sentential syntax and interpretation, deverbal nominalizations exhibit much of the same syntactic and semantic complexity, an explanation of which lies in the scope of syntax and semantics. The study of nominalization thus presupposes – and fosters – an understanding of the interaction of morphology, syntax, and semantics. Two basic questions have been at the core of the study of nominalization: First, which aspects of the event-structural and of the argument-structural complexity seen in the verbal domain are visible in the nominal domain? Second, how does the morphological complexity of nominalizations relate to their event- and argumentstructural complexity? The present article aims to present a state-of-the-art perspective on these two questions, with specific reference to Romance languages. In doing so,

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we focus on deverbal nominalizations, (1a), leaving aside deadjectival nominalizations, (1b). (1)

a.

Smoke obstructs the view – the obstruction of the view by smoke

b.

The teacher is ill – the illness of the teacher, the teacher’s illness

Among deverbal nominalizations, two types may be distinguished: nouns referring to events, (2a), and nouns referring to participants of events, (2b). The latter may or may not have an event-related semantics (cf. McIntyre 2014; Roy/Soare 2014; Alexiadou/Schäfer 2010; Bowers 2011; Baker/Vinokurova 2009 for recent studies). (2)

teach English to foreigners a.

the teaching of English to foreigners

b.

a teacher of English to foreigners

In the following, we focus on deverbal nominalizations with event readings. Two major topics to be dealt with are the event structure and the argument structure of deverbal nouns. Another important issue relates to the varying degree of verbality or nominality that may be found in different types of nominalizations, which in previous studies has often been taken as evidence for the syntactic as opposed to the morphological, or lexical, derivation of one or the other type. Before addressing these core topics, we start with an overview of the various event-related readings presented by nominalizations and of the distributional criteria by means of which they can be distinguished. Although studying the implications of nominalization for a theory of linguistic interfaces unavoidably entails certain theoretical commitments as to how the linguistic modules interact, we aim, so far as possible, at a theory-neutral discussion. Still, an important issue is whether morphology works piece-based, arranging morphemes into complex words, or process-based, deriving complex lexemes from base lexemes. Given that much of the research on nominalization of the last two decades has been framed within Distributed Morphology, a piece-based approach in which nominalizations appear as complex syntactic structures containing a verbal base, we shall adopt the terminology of that approach, without endorsing any deeper theoretical commitments. The article is structured as follows. Section 2 illustrates the array of event-related readings presented by nominalizations. In section 3, a typology of syntactically varying nominalization structures is introduced, some of which have verbal properties, while others have a purely nominal nature. Section 4 addresses the question of how verbal event structure and aspectual structure appear in nominalizations; their argument-structural complexity will be dealt with in section 5.

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2 Readings of nominalizations 2.1 Different types of event nouns Of crucial importance to the discussion of nominalization and its challenges for the interface between morphology, syntax, and semantics is a distinction introduced by Grimshaw (1990), who shows that deverbal nouns present systematic differences related to event and argument structure properties. She introduces a distinction between complex event nouns (CEN ), simple event nouns (SEN ), and result nouns (RN ). Only the first share with their base verbs the property of taking arguments. The three classes can be distinguished on the basis of various properties. CEN and SEN pattern together in referring to events, and are thus compatible with predicates like take place, (3a, b), while RN , referring to concrete or abstract objects, are not, (3c). SEN and RN , on the other hand, pattern together in not having an argument structure, (3b, c), while CEN inherit the argument structure of their base nouns, cf. (3a). (3)

Fr.

a.

Complex event noun (CEN ) L’examination des dossiers par le conseil a eu lieu hier. ‘The examination of the files by the board took place yesterday.’

b.

Simple event noun (SEN ) Plusieurs examens ont eu lieu hier. ‘Various exams took place yesterday.’

c.

Object/result noun (RN ) *Tous ces examens sur la table ont eu lieu hier. ‘All these exams on the table took place yesterday.’

As to the distinction between CEN and SEN , an item’s having or not having a complex event structure and argument structure has often been claimed to be associated with various distributional differences, such as the compatibility with different types of determiners and the availability of pluralization, (4a, b), as well as with the compatibility of the singular noun with modifiers referring to event structure, (5a, b). (4)

Fr. a.

b.

CEN : Only definite article, no pluralization possible ?*{Plusieurs + ces + des} utilisations du service par des mineurs ont eu lieu. ‘{Various + these + some} uses of the service by minors took place.’ SEN : Different types of determiners and pluralization {Plusieurs + ces + des} examens ont eu lieu hier. ‘{Various + these + some} exams took place yesterday.’

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Fr. a.

b.

CEN : Modification referring to event structure is possible L’examination continuelle des dossiers par le conseil est importante. ‘The continuous examination of the files by the board is important.’ SEN : Modification referring to event structure is impossible *L’accident fréquent/continuel sur cette route effraie tout le monde. ‘The frequent/continuous accident on this road frightens everyone.’

The distinction between CEN and SEN is not always straightforward, and a given deverbal noun often can have both readings. More recent research has shown that, for example, whether a CEN allows pluralization or not depends, among other things, on its aspectual properties (Mourelatos 1978; Roodenburg 2010; Iordăchioaia/Soare 2009; 2008; Alexiadou/Iordăchioaia/Soare 2008). Other classifications have been proposed, as well. Sleeman/Brito (2010a; 2010b) draw a distinction between five types of deverbal nominalizations; Borer (2003; 2013), in contrast, abstracts away from the difference between complex and simple event nouns, focusing on the distinction between argument-taking event nouns and result nouns that lack argument structure (cf. also Alexiadou 2010a; Roy/Soare 2011a; 2011b).

2.2 More fine-grained semantic distinctions In addition to event-related readings, deverbal nouns can have a variety of other interpretations (e.g. Melloni 2006; 2012; Ježek 2007): Among other things, they can denote the object resulting from the event referred to by the base verb, (6a), the means by which this event is brought about, (6b), or a state resulting from the event, (6c). One of the central questions addressed in research on this topic has been whether it is possible to predict the availability of different readings of the deverbal noun from the meaning of the base verb (Ježek/Melloni 2009; Melloni 2010; Bisetto/ Melloni 2005). (6)

Readings of Italian result nominals

(examples from Melloni 2006)

a.

Result object

La costruzione è crollata inaspettatamente. ‘The construction collapsed unexpectedly.’

b.

Means

L’argentatura di questo anello è molto sottile. ‘The silver-plating of this ring is very thin.’

c.

State

Occorre rimuovere l’ostruzione di questa valvola. ‘It is necessary to remove the obstruction of this valve.’

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Another strand of research, in which Romance languages have figured less prominently, has been concerned with the contribution of the context of the utterance to the interpretation of deverbal nouns, with the aim of identifying distributional diagnostics that allow unambiguous differentiation between the different readings (cf. in particular Ehrich/Rapp 2000; cf. also Roßdeutscher/Kamp 2010; Hamm/ Kamp/Van Lambalgen 2006; Brandtner/von Heusinger 2010; Dölling 2013).

3 Lexical and syntactic nominalization Since the publication of Chomsky’s (1970) “Remarks on Nominalization”, much research has focused on the distinction between syntactically derived nominalizations, (7a), and nominalizations that are derived lexically from a verbal base, (7b). On this view, nominalizations sharing most of their syntactic and semantic properties with their verbal bases, such as taking a direct object, are derived in the syntax, while, roughly speaking, those which differ semantically and syntactically from their base verbs (presenting differences that go beyond the mere contrast in having the outward distribution of a verb vs. of a noun) are taken to be derived in the lexicon. (7)

English syntactic and lexical nominalizations; examples from Chomsky (1970) a.

John’s refusing the offer

b.

John’s refusal of the offer

Chomsky points out three differences between lexical and syntactic nominalization, as exemplified by the English examples in (7): (i) Syntactic nominalization is fully productive, while lexical nominalization may be blocked in certain cases; (ii) the semantic relation between base and syntactic nominalization is regular, while that between a lexical nominalization and its base may be idiosyncratic; and (iii) the internal structure of a syntactic nominalization may be clause-like, while that of a lexical nominalization is nominal. Most approaches that distinguish between lexical and syntactic derivation are, however, not entirely clear with respect to how and where exactly the dividing line between syntactic and lexical nominalizations is to be drawn (cf. Kornfilt/Whitman 2011a for a discussion). Under the assumption that all morphological derivation is carried out in the syntax (as in Distributed Morphology), the distinction between lexical and syntactic nominalization reemerges as one relating to functional structure, with syntactic nominalizations presenting more complex functional structure than lexical nominalizations (Harley/Noyer 1997; 1998; Alexiadou 2001). Taking seriously Chomsky’s (1970, 185) view that “the proper balance between various components of the grammar is entirely an empirical issue”, so that “we have no a priori insight into the trading relation between the various parts”, in what follows we retain his distinction between syntactic and lexical

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nominalization, discussing ‘syntactically’ derived nominalization in this section, and focusing on ‘lexically’ derived nominalizations in following sections. Romance nominalized infinitives (with the exception of French and Romanian, cf. below), as opposed to lexically derived deverbal nouns, present a case of syntactic nominalization. As shown by Alexiadou/Iordăchioaia/Schäfer (2011), drawing on Romanian and Spanish data, Romance nominalized infinitives come in different types, which are distinguished by a number of syntactic differences that may be related to the locus at which nominalization of a verbal projection takes place in the syntactic configuration.

3.1 Iberoromance and Italian The Spanish infinitive, when preceded by a determiner, allows nominal uses, with (8b) or without (8a) a complement, as well as fully verbal uses, followed by a direct object DP (8c) or even by a (pronominal) subject DP (8d) (Plann 1981; Hernanz Carbó 1999; Demonte/Varela Ortega 1997; 1998; Yoon/Bonet-Farran 1991; Miguel 1996; Hare 2001; Fábregas/Varela Ortega 2006). (8)

Nominalized infinitives Sp.

a.

[El vestir y calzar (de las mujeres)] era lo más importante. ‘Clothing and putting on shoes was the most important thing.’

b.

Se escucha [el lento abrir de una cerradura]. ‘One hears the slow opening of a lock.’

c.

Fue fácil y rápido [el aprobar nuestra participación en este proyecto]. ‘Approving our participation in this project was easy and quick.’

d.

Nos favorece [el pertenecer nosotros al municipio]. ‘Our belonging to the municipality favours us.’

Verbal and nominal uses may be distinguished with regard to a variety of properties, not all of which are exemplified here: optionality vs. obligatoriness of complements, cf. (8a) as opposed to (8b), compatibility with case-marked complements vs. prepositional complements, (8c, d) as opposed to (8b), modification by adverbials vs. adjectives, compatibility with clitic pronouns and auxiliaries, and the acceptability of plurals. Let us briefly mention that Spanish even allows nominalization of finite clauses, (9). (9)

Sp.

El que tú vengas no me importa. the that you come does not matter to me ‘That you come does not matter to me.’

(Plann 1981, 204)

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Italian basically allows the same constructions as the Spanish nominalized infinitive, (10) (Salvi 1985; Zucchi 1993), though certain differences have been claimed to exist between the two languages (Szilágyi 2009; Pérez Vázquez 2002). (10)

Nominalized infinitives It.

(examples from Salvi 1985, 247)

a.

l’avviarsi lento del treno ‘the slow starting of the train’

b.

l’aver-gli Giorgio sempre Giorgio always the have.INF-him.DAT ‘Giorgio’s always having conceded to him’

dato given

ragione right

3.2 French French allows purely verbal infinitives, as in (11a), and purely nominal infinitives, as in (11b), but no event-denoting nominal infinitives that have argument structure, as in (11c) (Kerleroux 1990; George 1976; Umbreit 2014; Sleeman 2010; Marzo/Umbreit 2013). (11)

Fr.

a.

Je l’ai entendu parler très bien l’italien. ‘I have heard him speak Italian very well.’

b.

Le déjeuner a eu lieu à midi. ‘Lunch took place at noon.’

c. *le rire des faiblesses d’autrui ‘laughing about other persons’ weaknesses’ Old French, however, had nominal infinitival constructions similar to those attested in Spanish (Sleeman 2010; Buridant 2005; 2008; Kerleroux 1990; Schaefer 1911), where an argument of the infinitive could be realized as a prepositional complement, (12a, b), or as a direct object, (12c). (12)

Examples from Schaefer (1911) OFr.

a.

li trembler del leün ‘the trembling of the lion’

b.

a l’eschevir del seiremant ‘at the taking of the oath’

c.

au conter le duel qu’ele fist ‘at the telling of the sorrow she had’

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Infinitives preceded by determiners are attested in documents of the 12th century, with their frequency decreasing from the 13th century onwards (Schaefer 1911). From the 16th century onwards, infinitives preceded by determiners do not have argument structure; only infinitives of the type le boire ‘the drink’, le dîner ‘the dinner’, le manger ‘the food’ are attested (Ewert 21949, 183; Kukenheim 1967, 78; Schaefer 1911). Unlike in Spanish, neither in Old nor in Middle French are any examples attested for nominal infinitives with an overt subject (Mensching 2000, 20). To date, the reasons for the ungrammaticality of event-denoting nominalized infinitives in French, and more generally, for the differences presented by Romance languages with regard to the availability of more or fewer verbal nominalization structures remain unclear.

3.3 Romanian Romanian is like French in not allowing nominalized infinitives with a verbal internal structure. The infinitive can be verbal, or nominal, as in (13), but in the latter case it cannot assign nominative or accusative case and it allows only adjectival, but no adverbial modification (Soare/Mardale 2007; Cornilescu et al. 2013; Cornilescu 1999; 2001; 2004). (13)

Infinitive Rom. Cumpărarea casei a fost inutilă. house.the.GEN was useless buy.INF.the ‘The buying of the house was useless.’

(Cornilescu 1999, 213)

However, Romanian differs from French in that the nominalized infinitive can denote events and does have argument structure, realizing its arguments in the same way as lexical nominalizations. Note that Old Romanian, like Old French, allowed nominalized infinitives to occur with direct objects, (14). (14)

ORom.

tăierea capul cut.INF.the head.the.ACC ‘the cutting his head off’

lui he.GEN (Soare 2007, 177)

Differently from other Romance languages, Romanian presents syntactic nominalizations of a second verbal category, the supine, morphologically a past participle (Soare 2007), which is like the Spanish nominalized infinitive in being either verbal, (15a), or nominal, (15b). The nominal supine allows adverbial modification, (15c).

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(15)

Supine Rom. a.

Am de cules căpşuni. have.1SG to collect.SUP strawberries ‘I have to collect strawberries’

399

(Soare 2007)

b.

Cumpăratul casei a fost inutilă. useless buy.SUP.the house.the.GEN was ‘The buying of the house was useless.’ (Cornilescu 1999, 213)

c.

cititul constant al ziarelor read.SUP.the constantly of journals.GEN ‘the constant reading of journals’ (Alexiadou/Iordăchioaia/Schäfer 2011, 27)

3.4 Summary Drawing on current versions of minimalist syntax, the parametric variation found in Romance nominalization structures has been related to differences in functional structure, in particular to the presence vs. absence of verbal functional nodes like tense and aspect and of nominal functional nodes like number and classifier (encoding the mass/count distinction) (Alexiadou/Iordăchioaia/Schäfer 2011). A challenge for future research is to explain why certain languages have more restricted or less restricted possibilities to form syntactic nominalizations than others, that is, why some languages allow more complex combinations of verbal and nominal functional structures than others. Similarly, the surprising fact that the combination of nominal and verbal functional structure within a single projection is possible, while being subject to rather severe restrictions, calls for an explanation (Kornfilt/Whitman 2011a). Finally, a point that has not been addressed here is the fact that nominalized infinitives and deverbal nouns derived by affixation typically present referential and distributional differences like those exemplified in (16), as first pointed out by Vendler (1967). A possible explanation might draw on the intuition that more strongly verbal nominalizations tend to denote facts, while more nominal nominalizations tend to denote events (van Lambalgen/Hamm 2005; Asher 1993; Bücking 2012). (16)

Sp.

a.

El {establecer una + establecimiento de una} relación es improbable. ‘Establishing a relation + the establishment of a relation is improbable.’

b.

El {?*establecer una + establecimiento de una} relación era gradual. ‘Establishing a relation + the establishment of a relation was gradual.’

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4 Event structure and aspectual structure The present study focuses on event-denoting nominalizations, that is, nominalization structures that refer to the unfolding of an event in time. In section 2 above, it has already been noted that reference to events in the nominal domain occurs in two variants: Nouns can have a complex event structure (as is the case for CEN ), or they can be simple event nouns (SEN ). In what follows, we take a closer look at the eventrelated properties of deverbal nouns. Two dimensions of the temporal structure of events are relevant in this regard: First, the temporal complexity of the event itself, for example whether it comprises more than one subevent or not, and whether it implies a result state or not; second, the focusing or defocusing of other time-related aspects of the event, for instance whether it is seen as unfolding in time, as completed, as incipient, or as occurring repeatedly or habitually.

4.1 Complex event structures That there is a correlation between the presence or absence of a nominalizing affix and the temporal complexity of the event denoted by a deverbal noun has often been noted. In particular, it has been claimed that only if there is an overt nominalizer can the derived noun have complex event structure (Smith 1972; Grimshaw 1990; Alexiadou/Grimshaw 2008; but cf. Fábregas 2014; Newmeyer 2009; Harley 2009 for counterevidence). Interpretational differences between nouns with, (17a), and without, (17b, c), a nominalizer are illustrated below. (17)

Fr. a. Il a accroché les véhicules à la queue du convoi. ‘He bumped into the cars at the tail of the convoy.’ On a assisté à l’{accrochage + *accroc} progressif des véhicules à la queue du convoi. ‘We witnessed the progressive bumping into the cars at the tail of the convoy.’ b.

Un clou a accroché son pantalon. ‘A nail snagged his trousers.’ *L’accroc à/de son pantalon s’est produit hier. ‘The snag of his trousers happened yesterday.’ Il y a un {accroc + *accrochage} à son pantalon. ‘There is a snag in his trousers.’

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c.

401

Ce film accroche les spectateurs dès le début. ‘This film hooks the viewers right from the beginning.’ *L’accroche du spectateur doit se produire immédiatement. ‘The hook of the viewers must happen immediately.’ L’accroche du film paraît conventionnelle. ‘The trailer of the film seems conventional.’

In recent research, a fine-grained view of the syntactic dimension of event structure has gained ground, following research on the syntax-semantics interface by Ramchand (2008) and others. A crucial development has been the integration of a decompositional representation of event structure into syntactic tree configurations, so that interactions between the morphosyntactic structure of a nominalization and its event-structural interpretation can be more directly represented. One hypothesis that has been pursued in this framework assumes that nominalizing affixes relate to different subconfigurations of such syntactic-semantic tree structures (Fábregas 2010; Sleeman/Brito 2010a). Thus, deverbal nouns can lexicalize the full array of the three subcomponents of vP, that is, the initiation (initP), process (procP), and result (resP) components, cf. (18), or they can lexicalize only individual subcomponents, cf. (19) and (20); examples adapted from Sleeman/Brito (2010a). (18)

Lexicalization of initP, procP, and resP Por. A construção do campo de jogos para entreter as crianças trouxe benefícios para a comunidade. ‘The building of the playground to entertain the children benefitted the community.’ (Sleeman/Brito 2010a, 212)

(19)

Lexicalization of procP Por. A construção do campo está parada há um ano. ‘The building of the playground stopped a year ago.’

(20)

Lexicalization of resP Por. A obstrução é persistente. ‘The obstruction persists.’

4.2 Nominal and verbal aspect As to the second dimension, i.e. the focusing or defocusing of other time-related aspects of the event, it has long been noted that there is a nominal correlate to verbal aspect (Mourelatos 1978), that is, countability. Questions relating to the possibility of pluralizing event-denoting nouns are to be seen in this context, as well

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(Mourelatos 1978; Roodenburg 2010; Iordăchioaia/Soare 2008; 2009; Alexiadou/ Iordăchioaia/Soare 2008). It has been proposed by Jackendoff (1991) and others that both verbal and nominal aspect can be subsumed under the broader term ‘boundedness’. Before continuing the discussion of aspect, let us briefly note that what is meant by verbal aspect is sometimes event-structural complexity as discussed in the previous paragraphs, but this term may also refer to grammatical aspect as found, for example, in Slavic languages. Here we follow Smith (1997), who distinguishes between lexical aspect or Aktionsart on the one hand, that is, whether a verb phrase denotes, for instance, a state or an accomplishment, and viewpoint aspect on the other, that is, whether the event denoted by a verb phrase is seen as, for example, being in progress (imperfective aspect), as being completed (perfective aspect), or as occurring repeatedly (iterative aspect). Having said this, it should also be pointed out that there are complex interactions between both levels, in particular in the nominal domain. Note also that in languages with a rich verbal aspectual system, such as Russian and Polish, aspectual markers can occur inside nominalizations (Rozwadowska 2000). The same is true for Romance ‘syntactic’ nominalizations, such as the Spanish or Italian infinitive, which can occur in the form have + past participle; cf. (10) above. A frequently made claim is that deverbal nouns inherit the aspectual features of their base verbs (Mourelatos 1978; Brinton 1995; 2008; Fábregas/Marín 2011; Fábregas/ Marín/McNally 2012; Haas/Huyghe/Marín 2008; Haas/Huyghe 2010; Meinschaefer 2005a). Hence, deverbal nouns derived from unbounded, i.e. atelic, verbal bases are unbounded themselves, i.e. mass nouns, cf. (21), while nouns derived from bounded, i.e. telic, verbs are bounded, i.e. count nouns, (22). Some of the distributional criteria for detecting boundedness in the nominal domain used in the following are adapted from Haas/Huyghe/Marín (2008). (21)

(22)

Fr.

Fr.

a.

Max a patiné {pendant deux heures + *en deux heures}. ‘Max skated {for two hours + in two hours}.’

b.

Max a fait {du patinage + *plusieurs patinages}. ‘Max did {some skating + various skatings}.’

a.

Le service secret a mis deux mois à assassiner le président. ‘It took the secret service two months to assassinate the president.’

b.

On a vu beaucoup {*d’assassinat + d’assassinats}. ‘We saw {much murder + many murders}.’

At the same time, it has often been pointed out that the ‘Aspect Preservation Hypothesis’ does not always hold, so that, for instance, nouns derived from atelic, and thus unbounded, activity verbs, (23a), may refer to individualized instances of an event and may be countable, (23c).

Nominalizations

(23)

Fr.

a.

On a débattu cette question pendant des heures. ‘We debated this question for hours.’

b.

Il y a eu beaucoup de débat sur cette question. ‘There was much debate on this question.’

c.

Plusieurs débats sur cette question sont en cours. ‘Various debates on this question are going on.’

403

Note that the deverbal noun débat has no overt affix. That the event-structural properties of such nouns appear to be special has already been pointed out in section 4.1. This and similar observations have led researchers to assume that nominalizing affixes may function as aspect markers, coming with their own aspectual specification, or lacking such a specification (cf. e.g. van Hout 1991; Engelhardt 2000; Siegel 1998; cf. Alexiadou 2010b for an overview; Ferrari-Bridgers 2006 for a case study on Italian). Aspectual properties of a few representative affixes are considered in the following paragraph. Before we do that, a caveat is in order: To date, there is consensus that at least three factors interact to determine the aspectual interpretation of a deverbal noun: Not only the aspect of the nominalizing affix, but also that of the base verb, as well as the ‘boundedness’ of the arguments of the nominalization and temporal specifications introduced by the finite verb of the matrix clause containing the nominalization are relevant in this respect (Meinschaefer 2005a; Heinold 2011). For this reason, disentangling the aspectual contribution of individual nominalizing affixes has turned out to be a difficult task.

4.3 The contribution of the affix One of the clearest examples for the hypothesis that nominalizing affixes are aspectual markers is the Italian affix ‑ata, which serves to build the past participle as well as event-denoting deverbal nouns (Ippolito 1999; Gaeta 2000; Acquaviva 2005), as in (24). According to Gaeta (2000), when affixed to a root denoting an unbounded activity, ‑ata derives a noun referring to an individualized and bounded portion of this activity. Others take it that the ‑t‑ in ‑a‑t‑a spells out the aspectual feature perfective, which is why it can be inserted into participial as well as nominalized structures (Ippolito 1999). (24)

It.

a.

Paolo ha nuotato per due hore. ‘Paul has swum for two hours.’

b.

Una nuotata in piscina rilassa i muscoli. ‘A swim in the pool relaxes the muscles.’

(Gaeta 2000)

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A similar claim has been made for the French affix -ée, which likewise occurs in both participles and nominalizations (Ferret/Villoing 2012; Ferret/Soare/Villoing 2010), (25). It seems, however, that matters are less clear for this affix as compared to It. -ata. (25)

Examples adapted from Ferret/Soare/Villoing (2010) Fr.

a.

chevaucher pendant deux heures ‘to ride for two hours’

b.

le jour de la chevauchée, une chevauchée de deux heures ‘the day of the ride, a two-hour ride’

A substantial amount of research has been devoted to the French affixes ‑age and ‑ment (Ferret/Soare/Villoing 2010; Ferret/Villoing 2012; Martin 2010; Uth 2008a; Kelling 2001, to cite only a few recent studies). If the opposition between both affixes is to be seen in terms of (lexical or viewpoint) aspect, it might be said that ‑ment nominalizes the change of state, i.e. resP in Ramchand’s (2008) model, cf. previous section, while ‑age nominalizes the causing process, i.e. initP (Uth 2008a), or that ‑ment is perfective, while -age is imperfective (Uth 2008b; Bally 1965; Dubois 1962). Others have maintained that the semantic contribution of these affixes is multidimensional, comprising aspectual, event-structural, and argument-structural features (Martin 2010). Aspectual distinctions have likewise been an important topic in research on Romanian nominalizations. According to Cornilescu (2001), the Romanian nominalized infinitive is telic, while the supine is atelic. Others have argued that only the supine carries an aspectual specification, be it imperfective or pluractional, while the infinitive is not specified for aspect, but for number, which is one reason why it can be productively pluralized (Iordăchioaia/Soare 2008; Alexiadou/Iordăchioaia/Soare 2008; 2010).

4.4 Summary Much progress has been made in the study of the event structure of nominalizations over the last two decades; yet, a wide array of empirical, methodological, and theoretical questions remain unanswered. As to the empirical domain, the contribution of nominalizing affixes is well understood for a few clear cases like Italian -ata, but for others of the many competing nominalizers found in Romance languages matters are less clear. Likewise, restrictions on the combination of affixes and verbal bases that may be traced back to incompatibility of their aspectual specifications have hardly been studied from a systematic perspective. Some of the reasons for this lie in methodological obstacles to studying the aspectual dimension of nominalization: While much research has been carried out on distributional criteria for verbal

Nominalizations

405

aspect, starting with the seminal work of Vendler (1957), to date there is no consensus about which tests are valid for determining the dimensions of nominal aspect that go beyond mere countability. Furthermore, it is notoriously difficult to disentangle the aspectual contribution of the affix, of the verbal base, and of the matrix predicate under which an event-denoting nominal is embedded. More systematic research needs to be carried out to achieve a better understanding of this complex interaction. Finally, on a theoretical level endo-skeletal analyses of the functional structure of noun phrases have been developed in the last two decades from which many of the above-made observations follow. Yet, to date we do not know much about why the observed restrictions on the event structure of nominals hold. Are they simply due to the – somewhat accidental – specifications of individual functional elements, i.e. nominalizers, or are there more general differences between nouns and verbs constraining interpretation? Furthermore, much remains to be said about the role of lexical-semantic (or ‘encyclopedic’) information tied to verbal bases in determining the interpretation of nominalizations.

5 Argument structure in nominalizations Another interesting aspect of the syntax of verbal lexemes is that they have the potential to bind arguments, thereby determining much of the syntactic structure of a sentence. Hence, nouns that are derived from verbs not only ‘inherit’ event structure, but they may also inherit verbal argument structure. This holds at least for complex event nouns (CEN ); cf. section 2.1. Controversies in the literature on argument-taking deverbal nouns relate to, first, how much of the verbal argument structure is inherited by the noun and, second, how argument realization in deverbal nouns differs from that in verbs. As to the first question, it has often been claimed that only CEN have an argument structure comparable to that of a verb, while SEN and result nouns have no arguments (Grimshaw 1990). More recent approaches assume, however, that a bipartite distinction between argument-taking nouns, which are always event-denoting, and noneventive nouns without argument structure is not only sufficient, but also preferable for conceptual reasons in a framework in which nominalization as well as argument structure result from syntactic structure rather than from lexical specification (Borer 2003; 2012; 2013). Note also that ‘syntactic’ nominalizations, as discussed in section 3, do not always differ from verbs with respect to argument realization, depending on the amount of verbal or nominal structure they have available. Therefore, the discussion in the present section is focused on ‘lexically’ derived deverbal nouns.

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5.1 Parallels and differences Let us start by pointing out a basic parallelism, attested at least in languages like English, between the subject and object of verbs like destroy, cf. (26a) and (27a), and the prenominal and the postnominal possessor position of event-denoting deverbal nouns like destruction, cf. (26b) and (27b) (Chomsky 1970; Cinque 1980). In English, the prenominal possessor is marked with the genitive marker ’s, and the postnominal possessor is realized as a prepositional phrase headed by of. In the examples given in (26–27), the subject bears the thematic role agent and the object may be classified as a theme. In contrast to Germanic, the Romance DP does not allow noun phrases as prenominal possessors; prenominal realization of the argument corresponding to the verbal subject is thus restricted to an anaphoric (possessive) determiner, cf. (27b). (26)

(27)

Eng.

a.

The enemy destroys the city.

b.

The enemy’s destruction of the city is still going on.

a.

L’armée détruit la ville.

b.

Sa destruction de la ville est en cours.

Fr.

Despite the apparent parallelism in (26a)/(27a) and (26b)/(27b), the agent argument of a deverbal noun can easily be omitted, (28a), just as in a verbal passive, while the same does not hold for the theme argument. Another unexpected observation is that in nominals, but not in verbs, all arguments can be omitted under certain conditions, even if the nominal has an eventive interpretation, (28b). (28)

Fr.

a.

La destruction de la ville (par l’armée) est en cours. ‘The destruction of the city by the army is still going on.’

b.

La transmission a eu lieu jeudi dernier. ‘The transmission took place last Thursday.’

As has often been noticed, nouns do not assign (structural) case; hence, their arguments are preceded by prepositions that serve as case markers. Differently from most other Romance languages, complements of Romanian nominalizations surface as genitive-marked DPs, though they can also be mapped to prepositional phrases, cf. (29), adapted from Iordăchioaia (2008, 76). (29)

Rom.

demolarea de cartiere vechi / demolish.INF.the of quarters old ‘the demolition of old quarters’

cartierelor vechi quarters.GEN old

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If only one participant is realized syntactically, be it linked to the postnominal or to the prenominal possessor position, it is interpreted as a theme, cf. (30a)–(30a’), and it cannot be interpreted as an agent, cf. (30b)–(30b’), at least not for a deverbal noun like destruction. (30)

Fr.

a.

la destruction de la villeT HE M E ‘the destruction of the city’

b. *la destruction de l’arméeAG E NT ‘the destruction of the army’

a’.

saT HE M E destruction ‘its destruction’

b’. *saAG E NT destruction ‘its destruction’

Various explanations of these facts have been proposed in the literature. In earlier lexicalist approaches, it was postulated that derivation of an argument-taking noun from a verb suppresses the external argument of the predicate denoted by that verb, similar to passive formation (Grimshaw 1990; Picallo 1991), an assumption which since has been shown to be empirically inadequate (Iordăchioaia 2008; Alexiadou 2009; Markantonatou 1995; Meinschaefer 2003). Another strand of research, starting from the assumption that the argument structure of an expression emerges from the syntactic structure in which it is embedded, has claimed that (event-denoting, argument-taking) deverbal nouns are unable to project an agent argument because their syntactic structure does not contain agent-projecting functional material, similarly to unaccusative verbs (Marantz 1997; Alexiadou 2001, 112; Cornilescu 2004). More recent studies have concentrated on the interaction between various functional projections in the verbal and nominal syntactic domain and on the interpretational and argument-structural differences between various types of nominalizations, arriving at a more differentiated picture (Sleeman/Brito 2010a; 2010b; Alexiadou/ Iordăchioaia/Schäfer 2011; Kornfilt/Whitman 2011b).

5.2 Nouns derived from different verbal bases To be sure, argument realization in deverbal nouns is a complex matter, depending to a large degree on the semantic and syntactic properties of the base verb. In what follows the basic generalizations will be laid out. Trivially, intransitive verbs may project their sole argument as a postnominal or prenominal possessor; this holds for unaccusative and unergative verbs alike; cf. (31)–(32). (31)

Unaccusative verb Fr.

a.

Tintin observe l’arrivée fréquente de nouveaux concurrents. ‘Tintin watches the frequent arrival of new competitors.’

b.

Tintin observe leur arrivée à la gare. ‘Tintin watches their arrival at the station.’

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Judith Meinschaefer

Unergative verb Fr.

a.

L’aboiement continuel d’un chien peut être une source de conflit. ‘The continuous barking of a dog can be a source of conflict.’

b.

Son aboiement continuel pendant la nuit me gêne. ‘Its continuous barking during the night disturbs me.’

Telic transitive verbs, like détruire ‘destroy’, map the theme argument to the postnominal, (33a), or prenominal, (33b), possessor, while the agent argument is either mapped to an (optional) prepositional phrase headed by par ‘by’, (33a–b), or to the prenominal possessor, (33c); note, however, that, as mentioned above, the realization of the agent is only possible if the theme argument is overtly realized, too. (33)

Fr.

L’armée détruit la ville. ‘The army destroys the city.’ a.

La destruction *(de la ville) (par l’armée) est en cours. ‘The destruction (of the city) (by the army) is still going on.’

b.

Sa destruction (par l’armée) est en cours. ‘Its destruction (by the army) is still going on.’

c.

SaAG E N T destruction *(de la villeT H E M E ) est en cours. ‘ItsAG E N T destruction (of the cityT H E M E ) is still going on.’

Within the Romance family, some variation may be observed with respect to which preposition may introduce which type of argument. While in French – as well as in Spanish, Italian, and English (Jaeggli 1986; Rappaport Hovav 1983; Grimshaw 1990) – an experiencer argument cannot be mapped to a prepositional phrase headed by par ‘by’ (Kupferman 2000), this is possible in Romanian (Iordăchioaia 2008, 79); cf. (34). As shown by Alexiadou and collaborators (Alexiadou/Cano/Iordăchioaia/ Martin/Schäfer 2011; Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou/Schäfer 2009), not only lexical properties of the preposition are relevant in this respect, but also structural properties of different kinds of nominalizations. (34)

a.

Fr.

le mépris du peuple *par la classe politique ‘the contempt of the people by the political class’

b.

Rom.

dispreţuirea maselor de către clasa politică class political despise.INF.the people.GEN by ‘the contempt of the political class towards the people’ (example from Iordăchioaia 2008, 79)

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Atelic transitive verbs, like attaquer ‘attack’, show a slightly different pattern of argument realization. As shown in (35a–b), they share the (33a) and (33c) pattern of destruction-nominals, but realization of the theme argument is optional even if the agent is mapped to the prenominal possessor. In addition, they allow mapping of the agent to the postnominal possessor, (35c), with optional realization of the theme argument as a prepositional phrase headed by varying prepositions, depending on the verb’s semantics. (35)

Fr.

L’armée attaque la forteresse. ‘The army attacks the fort.’ a.

L’attaque *(de la forteresse) (par l’armée) est en cours. ‘The attack (of the fort) by the army is going on.’

b.

Leur attaque (de/contre la forteresse) est en cours. ‘Their attack (of/against the fort) is going on.’

c.

L’attaque de l’armée (contre la forteresse) est en cours. ‘The attack of the army (against the fort) is going on.’

Psychological verbs such as regretter ‘regret’, i.e. subject-experiencer verbs, map their arguments similarly to atelic transitive verbs, (36), with the exception that the experiencer argument cannot be realized by a PP headed by par ‘by’, at least not in French; cf. above. (36)

Fr.

Tintin regrette cette faute. ‘Tintin regrets this mistake.’ a.

Le regret de cette faute (*par Tintin) témoigne de sa compassion. ‘The regret of this mistake (by Tintin) gives evidence of his compassion.’

b.

Son regret (de/pour cette faute) témoigne de sa compassion. ‘His regret (of/for this mistake) gives evidence of his compassion.’

c.

Le regret de Tintin (pour cette faute) témoigne de sa compassion. ‘The regret of Tintin (for this mistake) gives evidence of his compassion.’

Finally, ditransitive verbs show a still more complex pattern. In a structure without a prenominal possessor, (37a), the theme argument appears as the postnominal possessor (i.e. in a prepositional phrase headed by de ‘of’); the recipient is, as in the verbal construction, introduced by the preposition à ‘to’ and the agent may optionally be realized as a PP headed by par ‘by’. The prenominal possessor can realize all three arguments, theme, (37b), recipient, (37c), as well as agent, (37d),

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but neither the recipient nor the agent can be mapped to the postnominal de-phrase, (37e)–(37f). (37) Fr. Le présidentAG E N T attribue la responsabilitéT HE M E au ministreR E C I P I E N T . ‘The president assigns the responsibility to the minister.’ a. L’attribution de la responsabilité au ministre (par le président) a eu lieu hier. ‘The assignment of the responsibility to the minister by the president took place yesterday.’ b. SonTH E M E attribution au ministre (par le président) a eu lieu hier. c. SonR E C I P I E N T attribution de la responsabilité (par le président) a eu lieu hier. d. SonAG E N T attribution de la responsabilité au ministre a eu lieu hier. d’. Le jury a justifié sonAG E N T attribution du premier prix à la râpe à parmesan . . .’1 ‘The jury justified their assignment of the first prize to the Parmesan grater . . .’ e. *Son T HE M E attribution du ministreR E C I P I E NT par le président f. *Son T HE M E attribution du présidentAG E N T au ministre

5.3 Summary Though much progress has been made during the last decade concerning the analysis of patterns of argument-taking nominals within exo-skeletal approaches, in particular with respect to the realization of an agent, to the argument structure of psychological verbs (Fábregas/Marín/McNally 2012; Meinschaefer 2003) as well as with regard to argument realization in particular kinds of deverbal nominalizations, like affixless nouns (Fábregas 2012; 2014) or agent nouns (McIntyre 2014; Roy/ Soare 2012; 2014; Bowers 2011; Alexiadou/Schäfer 2010; Baker/Vinokurova 2009), a systematic perspective on the full array of argument mapping in nominalizations has been conceived of only from the perspective of lexicalist, endo-skeletal approaches; cf. Markantonatou (1995) for Greek, Stiebels (1999) for Nahuatl, Laczkó (2000; 2010) for Hungarian, and Meinschaefer (2005b) for Romance. An analysis of the observations laid out above in an exo-skeletal approach to argument structure remains to be developed. Open research questions relate to a more fine-grained analysis of the influence of the semantics of the base verb and of the nominalizing affix on argument realization, as well as to the factors that allow nominalizations to surface without overt realization of a given argument, with the ultimate aim of explaining the systematic argument-structural differences between verbs and their nominalizations. 1 http://www.lenouvelliste.ch/fr/dossiers/detail/pages/articles/index.php?idIndex=2159&idContent= 466124&idArticle=466206

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6 Conclusion On a descriptive level, the present article has aimed at giving an overview of the variety of interpretations attested for deverbal nominalizations, of the large array of nominalized structures, ranging from genuinely nominal to fully verbal structures, and of their distribution in various Romance languages, as well as of the parallels and differences between verbs and deverbal nouns with respect to event and argument structure. We hope to have shown that the topic at hand has wide-ranging implications for a theory of the interfaces between morphology, syntax, and semantics, i.e. of the interaction of modules concerned with form and with meaning. Syntax must derive the (widely varying) syntactic distribution of nominalizations, morphology must account for the contribution of different affixes, and semantics must capture event- and argument-structural as well as sortal properties (i.e. reference to objects, events, facts, or propositions) of nominalizations. A theory of the interfaces between each module, finally, must explain how representations on each of the three levels constrain each other. In other words, it must derive attested deverbal nominalizations with a given form and a given interpretation while avoiding overgeneralization, it must account for the observed syntactic and semantic parallels and differences between verbs and nominalizations, and it must explain how these are determined by specific nominalizers. Despite the considerable progress that has been made during the last two decades, it seems that a long way still needs to be travelled to attain such a theory.

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Andreas Dufter and Christoph Gabriel

14 Information structure, prosody, and word order Abstract: This chapter addresses the expression of information structure in Romance languages, based on data from mainly Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. Special regard is given to the syntax-phonology interface. After a critical survey of basic terms, we investigate information-structurally induced word order variation in simple and complex sentences, including clefting and dislocations, as well as the prosodic realizations of the respective structures. In addition, we discuss the intriguing issue of optionality or free variation, as predominantly occurs at the so-called ‘external’ interfaces, as well as its role in learner and contact varieties and in linguistic change. Keywords: word order, information structure, topic, hanging topic, focus, contrast, left periphery, dislocation, cleft sentences, pseudo-cleft sentences, intonation, optionality, second language acquisition, language change

1 Information structure and its dimensions Ever since the beginnings of modern grammatical scholarship, intuitions about the relevance of information structure for understanding the syntactic and prosodic organization of languages have been pervasive. Within the Prague Linguistic Circle (Pražský lingvistický kroužek), Mathesius (1929) first described what could be called a conspiracy in English syntax to establish a clear distinction between the theme (Satzthema) and what is predicated about it (rheme or Satzaussage). The central notions of theme and rheme have been refined in a large number of subsequent publications in order to account for this “Functional Sentence Perspective” by linguists inspired by Prague structuralism. Over time, however, it became increasingly clear that the simple dichotomy of theme and rheme would not suffice for describing many of the observable regularities and tendencies. One attempt at overcoming some of the shortcomings of the classic dichotomous view was to redefine theme and rheme as scalar notions, and to introduce the concept of “Communicative Acknowledgement: The second author gratefully acknowledges the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, project H9 “The intonation of Spanish in Argentina”, Collaborative Research Center 538 “Multilingualism”, 2008–2011) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, project “Multilingual development: A longitudinal perspective”, Research Cluster on Language Education and Multilingualism, 2014–2019).

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Dynamism” (Firbas 1971), according to which sentential utterances tend to be linearly arranged along a cline from most thematic to most rhematic elements. The prevailing view today, however, seems to be that information structure is best analyzed in nongradient terms, and that the Prague School notions theme and rheme suffer from conflating different dimensions of information structure, which need to be distinguished on both theoretical and empirical grounds. The first of these dimensions is commonly referred to as topic–comment, with topicality at the sentence level being understood as “pragmatic aboutness” (Reinhart 1981, 53). In linguistic communication, all parties involved are constantly updating what they take to be mutually shared knowledge and assumptions. Formal philosophy of language and semantics have developed sophisticated theories of this so-called Common Ground, which contains not only sets of propositions but also discourse referents. According to Reinhart, new information in discourse typically gets associated to such a discourse referent, and it is this ‘storage address’ of the Common Ground that is determined by the topic constituent of a sentence. Typically, though not invariably, every sentence contains one and only one topical element, although there are some sentential utterances without a constituent in topic function: (1)

Sp.

A: ¿Qué pasó? ‘What happened?’ B:

Hubo un terremoto. ‘There was an earthquake.’

C:

Provocó centenas de muertos. ‘It caused hundreds of casualties.’

Most linguists would probably agree that speaker B in (1) is not making a statement about an earthquake in his answer. Rather, the answer is about the current state of affairs by introducing the earthquake as a new referent in discourse. In order to account for this, it has been suggested to analyze the entire sentence Hubo un terremoto as a comment about the topic situation at the time of utterance. Sentential utterances lacking a topic argument in their semantic representation are often called thetic in the literature and may exhibit special word orders (cf. 2.1). By contrast, the statement added by speaker C in (1) does have a topic argument, even if this is not overtly expressed. C’s utterance makes a comment about the discourse referent introduced previously by B, viz. the earthquake. In Spanish, subjects which take up previously introduced discourse referents without risk of ambiguity tend to – or even need to – be left unexpressed. As will become clearer in the course of this chapter, topics are privileged candidates for being encoded as subjects in Romance languages. Conversely, sentences containing nontopical subjects can be argued to constitute a marked state of affairs in the mapping of information-structural categories onto syntactic functions. In syntactic representation, the abbreviation pro is used to express phonetically empty, but semantically active “null subjects”. We follow standard practice and indicate relations of coreference or binding of quantified variables

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by adding identical subscripts. The contrast between the thetic character of B’s reply and the nonthetic or categorical nature of C’s follow-up statement can then be captured as in (2): (2)

Sp.

a.

[Hubo [un terremoto.]i]Comment

b.

[proi]Topic [provocó centenas de muertos.]Comment

While so far we have been using topic as a concept at the level of sentences, there are also somewhat more liberal uses of the term (Chafe 1976; cf. Jacobs 2001 for an overview). In particular, spatial and temporal adverbials which serve as a kind of “frame setter” for a sentence or for a longer stretch of discourse have been designated as “frame topics”, “scenic topics”, or “topics”, for short. In (3), the three discourse-initial adverbials progressively specify the situational context. Nonetheless, it is clearly the writer, Victor Hugo, which is to be selected as the “storage address” for the proposition. Therefore, it seems preferable not to conflate sentential aboutness topics and frame setters from the outset, even if a number of similarities may well be observable in the encoding strategies of both types. (3)

Fr.

En 1815, juin, à la nouvelle de la bataille de Waterloo, je fis une quarantaine de vers commençant ainsi [. . .] ‘In 1815, in June, at the news of the battle of Waterloo, I made some forty verses which began like this [. . .]’ (V. Hugo, FRANTEXT)

We next turn to a second dimension generally recognized in current approaches to information structure, viz. focus–background. The term “focus” was widely disseminated in both formalist and functionalist strands of linguistic inquiry after having been used in influential works such as Halliday (1967/1968), Chomsky (1971), and Jackendoff (1972). Perhaps the most successful formal semantic theory of focus was developed by Rooth (1985). We will not be able to present Rooth’s formal account here, but the central assumption is simply that focus “indicates the presence of alternatives that are relevant for the interpretation of linguistic expressions” (Krifka 2008, 247). Such alternatives may refer either to the form of an expression (i.e. in metalinguistic corrections) or to its denotation, yielding a set of alternative propositions. Elaborating upon ideas first presented in Jackendoff (1972), Rooth represents focus as a feature in syntactic representation. In a parallel fashion to other featuredriven operations in syntax, focus features may project (Selkirk 1984), i.e. percolate upwards whenever the denotations of larger constituents are to be evaluated against the background of alternatives. An immediate consequence of focus projection is that in the absence of sufficient contextual information, the intended domain of focus may not be unequivocally determinable. Consider (4):

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Sp.

Julio fue a un concierto con la hija de María. with the daughter of María Julio go.3SG . PST to a concert ‘Julio went to a concert with María’s daughter.’

This sentence can be produced in order to tell the hearer that it was María’s daughter who accompanied Julio to a concert, and not, say, Ana’s. In this case, only María (or arguably, de María) would be targeted by focus. In other contexts of utterance, however, it could also be uttered to counter an alternative assumption that Julio went to a concert with somebody else, perhaps a male friend of his, or that he went there alone. Under such an interpretation, the domain of focus would be the phrase con la hija de María. A third possibility would be that the speaker wishes to inform the hearer about Julio’s cultural activity more generally, possibly in a context in which the hearer believes that Julio stays at home whenever he can. In this case, focus would project to the entire verb phrase, fue a un concierto con la hija de María. As the reader may already have figured out, additional scenarios for assigning focus to different domains are not hard to come up with. In any event, focus can be narrow, possibly restricted to single words, or wide, the default configuration being focus on the entire verb phrase including objects and, possibly, adjuncts (Drubig 2003). Given this indeterminacy of focus–background partitions in sentences presented in isolation, focus structure has frequently been investigated within at least a minimal context, such as question-answer pairs. In (5a) and (5b), for example, the propositional content expressed by B’s answers is the same. However, the focus segment differs as a consequence of the different questions formulated by A. (5)

Fr.

a.

b.

A:

Qui a mangé le croissant ? ‘Who ate the croissant?’

B:

PierreFocus Pierre

A:

Qu’est-ce que Pierre a mangé ? ‘What did Pierre eat?’

B:

[Il a mangé]Background [le croissant.]Focus ‘He ate the croissant.’

[l’a mangé.]Background ‘Pierre ate it.’ it has eaten

The reader will have noticed that topical discourse referents are more naturally rendered by a clitic pronoun (l’ and il), and that the background parts of the answers would likely be omitted altogether in conversation. In addition, we may note that the backgrounded part of the sentence need not coincide with any syntactic constituent, as can be seen in (5b), where the subject and the verb are both backgrounded, and only the direct object is in focus. Both background and comment appear to be defined only negatively, as those parts of the sentence which do not pertain to the domains of focus and topic, respectively. In fact, focus and topic may even occur sentence-internally, thereby splitting up background and comment domains, as

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423

happens with the comment in (5a). For convenience, we repeat both answer sentences of (5) in (6): (6)

Fr.

a.

PierreFocus [l’a mangé.]Background PierreComment l’Topic [a mangé.]Comment

b.

[Il a mangé]Background [le croissant.]Focus [Il]Topic [a mangé le croissant.]Comment

More generally, examples such as (6) clearly show that focus–background and topic–comment constitute independent dimensions. A sentential subpart may be part of the topic or of the focus or belong to neither of the two domains; cf. a mangé in (6a, b). An interesting question is whether there can also be sentential subparts which belong to both the topic and the focus domain simultaneously. Following Krifka/Musan (2012, 30), we maintain that topic and focus are not incompatible, and that overlaps are particularly salient in the case of topics which enter in a relation of contrast within their context of occurrence. In speaker B’s answer in (7), the stressed syllables of signor ‘Mr.’ and signora ‘Mrs.’ are likely to receive special prosodic highlighting (henceforth indicated by capitalization): (7)

It.

A:

Vengono i Rossi alla festa? ‘Are the Rossis coming to the party?’

B:

[[Il siGNOR]Focus Rossi]Topic deve lavorare, ma [[la siGNOra]Focus Rossi]Topic vuole venire. ‘MR. Rossi has to work, but MRS. Rossi wants to come.’

As (7) makes clear, focus domains can be located inside topic domains in so-called contrastive topics (Krifka 2008). It also demonstrates that there can be more than one focus within a single clause, since a fuller annotation of B’s answer in (7) needs to take into account the focus determined by the question that A had asked: (8)

It.

[[Il siGNOR]Focus Rossi]Topic [deve lavorare,]Focus ma [[la siGNOra]Focus Rossi]Topic [vuole venire.]Focus

It is commonly admitted that clauses typically have exactly one focus domain, but that additional foci are permitted in cases such as (8). However, foci differ from topics in that at least one focus is expected to be present in every sentence (Jackendoff 2002, 411), as long as principles of rational cooperation in linguistic communication can be assumed to be adhered to. Another observation worth pointing out is that the contrast between the two subject determiner phrases (DPs) – or noun phrases (NP), in more traditional parlance – in (8) is signalled precisely by accenting the identical phonological parts,

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and not the determiners and gender-marked noun endings which constitute the actual locus of distinction. Contrast, therefore, cannot be expressed in just any way, by putting special accentual emphasis on whichever elements one wishes to oppose to each other.1 Rather, the expression of contrast is narrowly constrained by grammar, with contrast constituting a subtype of focus. Contrastive focus (or identificational focus, as it is sometimes also called) would then constitute the marked counterpart to noncontrastive focus, which is often referred to as informational (or neutral) focus. To be sure, the exact place of contrast relations in semantics, pragmatics, and information structure remains debated, and there are also quite a few arguments to defend the claim that “contrast is a matter of degree, not an either-or category” (Callies 2009, 47).2 In many recent surveys of information structure, a third dimension is added to those of topic–comment and focus–background, viz. givenness. This dimension applies first of all to linguistic expressions denoting discourse referents within their context of occurrence, although it may be extended to evaluate the status of entire propositions. However, unlike the other two dimensions, givenness needs to be conceived of as a nonbinary notion in order to be useful for linguistic generalizations across languages. Several proposals of so-called “Givenness Hierarchies” are currently available on the market, among them those by Prince (1992) and Gundel/ Hedberg/Zacharski (1993), to mention but two important references. Differences of detail notwithstanding, the upshot of these hierarchies is that the givenness of a linguistic expression needs to take into account not only the presence of a corresponding discourse referent (or proposition) in the Common Ground, but also the degree of cognitive activation and contextual saliency of this discourse referent at the moment when the expression is produced. Givenness constitutes an instrumental concept for explaining the choice among different ways of referring – such as (in)definite noun phrases, or accented, clitic, and null pronouns – which speakers and writers tend to make in surprisingly systematic ways. Categories of givenness have also been invoked in order to distinguish between different types of topics, with different syntactic and prosodic behaviour. Drawing on data from German and Italian, Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl (2007) seek to establish a distinction between aboutness topics, contrastive topics, and familiar topics, which are given or at least easily accessible, often continuing an aboutness topic which has been introduced in the previous discourse. 1 It must be noted, however, that metalinguistic or corrective focus, which targets the form of linguistic expressions and not their denotations, tends to be able to be expressed on almost any syllable within an utterance, even those which otherwise reject accent such as the subject clitics on and je in Fr. enfin non, ce n’est pas ON, c’est JE ‘well, no, it is not ‘one’, it is ‘I’’ (Perec, FRANTEXT). 2 Another elusive notion which has been linked to focus by several authors is emphasis. One reason for this association is that emphatic foci may be intonationally marked in the same way as contrastive ones. However, while it is certainly true that explicit contrast can create emphatic effects, emphasis may also arise in contexts in which no contrast is manifest.

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In other respects, however, givenness may be of secondary importance for the interfaces we are concerned with. Strictly speaking, givenness may even be argued not to contribute to information structure at the sentential level at all. Rather, it is fundamental for determining the information status of individual expressions at the level of discourse. In the remainder of the chapter, we will therefore restrict our attention to topic–comment and focus–background structures and their interaction with syntax and prosody. The reader will have noticed that we have refrained so far from associating any invariant correlates of linguistic form such as designated syntactic positions or intonational contours with one of the dimensions of information structure. We have opted to do so for two principal reasons. Firstly, definitions of information-structural notions which make crucial reference to aspects of linguistic form can easily lead to circular argumentation: If focus is identified by virtue of accentual prominences, these must, of course, no longer be ‘explained’ as exponents of focus, as sometimes happens. Secondly, Romance languages boast an impressive range of strategies to express propositional contents in optimal ways given topic–comment and focus– background structures. These strategies not only operate at the levels of syntax and prosody, but may also rely on morphological and lexical means. In particular, all Romance languages offer some explicit markers of topic status; cf. e.g. Fr. quant à, It. rispetto a ‘as for’, and a variety of focus particles, with additive or restrictive semantic import, such as Sp. también ‘also’, incluso ‘even’, or solo ‘only’. In the remainder of this chapter, all we can attempt is an overview of at least some of the principal repercussions of the topic–comment and focus–background dimensions on syntactic and prosodic form.

2 Simple clauses With respect to the linear ordering of constituents in simple clauses, all Romance varieties qualify as basic SVO languages (Ledgeway 2012, 69; for a concise overview in contrast with Latin, cf. Kaiser 2014, 215–231).3 Albeit to varying degrees, they all present deviations from the canonical word order which either follow from grammatical factors such as unaccusativity or depend on information structure (cf. 2.1 for details). The basic SVO word order reflects the unmarked ordering of information-structural categories (e.g. the topic being followed by the comment or the presupposition preceding the focus), as well as the position of phrasal prominence (nuclear stress), which regularly is assigned to the right-most constituent of the 3 For a different position, cf. Costa (2001, 92), who mentions some varieties of Spanish that prefer VSO in unmarked contexts.

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Intonation Phrase (IP). Given the obligatory coincidence of focus and prominence, a nonfinal focused constituent either leads to reordering of constituents (conceived of as syntactic movement in generative approaches, cf. 2.1) or yields prosodically marked structures (exhibiting nonfinal nuclear stress). To account for the reordering of constituents as occurs in information-structurally triggered word order variation, several models have been proposed. Within derivational frameworks, seminal work has been done by Rizzi (1997), who proposed an articulated CP structure, based on evidence from Italian. This proposal led to the assumption of several functional categories located in the higher (i.e. CP) region of syntactic structure and has become established in linguistic theory as the so-called cartographic approach. Rizzi’s (1997, 295–300) basic model, sketched in (9), starts out from a split up of the traditional C node into distinct functional categories serving as landing sites for topicalized and focused material. The asterisk (*) indicates that the Topic Phrase (TopP) is recursive, i.e. that several phrases qualifying as topics may occur at the left edge of a sentence, while only one focused constituent (located in the specifier of FocP) is permitted. (9)

According to this model, which has been revised and refined in subsequent work (cf. Rizzi 2001; 2004a; 2004b; cf. Bocci 2013 and Torregrossa 2012 for discussion), both structures involving left-dislocated material (cf. the examples 10a, b and 3.1 for further discussion)4 and constructions with fronted focus constituents (10c) can be derived by assuming movement to some landing site in the so-called left periphery.

4 Note that also right dislocation has been argued to involve an articulated CP structure as in (9); cf. Cecchetto (1999), who argues that right dislocation involves movement of the dislocated constituent to a left-peripheral TopP and subsequent movement of the whole TP to a higher TopP in the clause. For an alternative analysis, cf. López (2009, 18), who assumes that right-dislocated material is structurally lower and left-adjoined to vP.

427

Information structure, prosody, and word order

(10) a. It. Credo

che domani TopP

QUESto a Gianni

gli

FocP

TP

TopP

dovremmo dare.

I think that tomorrow THIS to Gianni him we-must ‘I think that tomorrow we have to give THIS to Gianni.’

give

b. It. Credo che domani a Gianni QUESto gli dovremmo dare. TopP FocP TP vTopP c. Sp. La

manZAna comió María (y no la pera).

FocP

TP

the apple ate María (and not the pear). ‘María ate the APPle (and not the pear).’ However, when taking a closer look at, for example, Spanish, it turns out that the assumed articulated CP does not adequately account for all of the Romance languages and that more economical solutions, involving fewer functional categories, might be more appropriate in some cases (cf. 2.3). In the remainder of this section, we concentrate on information-structurally induced word order variation in simple declarative clauses, first turning to the position of focused subjects and direct objects (2.1, 2.2), before discussing the special conditions of focus fronting and the relevant analyses in general (2.3). Different information-structural readings related to one and the same linear ordering will not be dealt with in the following. For the optional marking of different focus domains in information-structurally ambiguous clauses (cf. example 4, above) by insertion of a prosodic boundary, ↗3 Prosodic phonology and its interfaces.

2.1 Focused subjects As is well known, Romance languages make use of both syntactic and prosodic means to signal information-structural categories such as focus in simple declaratives. Within the Romance family, Spanish presents a comparably high degree of syntactic variability. In what follows we first turn to the position of narrowly focused subjects ([F S]) in Spanish, before highlighting the main differences and similarities with other Romance languages. In Spanish [F S] may either appear preverbally in its canonical position, i.e. [F S]VO or [F S]V, as in (11), or clause-finally, i.e. VO[F S] or V[F S], as in (12).5 While the latter structures are produced with a neutral F0 contour (i.e. presenting regular tonal declination and right-most phrasal stress), the former involve shifting of the 5 In addition, some varieties of Spanish allow V[F S]O, where the focused subject appears in postverbal position, but not clause-finally (cf. Costa 2001, 92).

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nuclear accent to the left edge of the Intonation Phrase (IP) and usually display postfocal deaccentuation, i.e. the focal constituent is followed by a low flat F0 contour. Within formal frameworks it has been claimed that focused constituents compulsorily occur in IP-final position, at least with a neutral focus interpretation (Costa 2001; Gutiérrez-Bravo 2006; Samek-Lodovici 2001; 2009; Zubizarreta 1998). In Zubizarreta’s (1998) Minimalist approach, for instance, VO[F S] is derived via raising of the verbal complex [V+v comió] to T (yielding V[F S]O in a first step) and subsequent left-adjunction of the VP (containing only the object la manzana) to vP. Movement operations such as these are triggered by information-structural features (e.g. [±Focus]), which are assigned to the individual syntactic nodes, and apply to avoid prosodically marked structures such as (11a, b). These instances of so-called p-movement (“prosodically motivated movement”) are assumed to obligatorily apply in order to achieve IP-final placement of the focused subject, at least when neutral focus interpretation is at play. Seen from this angle, (11a, b) are considered ungrammatical with neutral focus (*[F S]VO, *[F S]Cl-V), but possible with a contrastive interpretation (√[Fc S]VO, √[Fc S]Cl-V); (12a, b), by contrast, are said to be felicitous for both focus interpretations (√VO[F/Fc S], √Cl-V[F/Fc S]).6 (11)

(12)

Sp.

Sp.

¿Quién comió la manzana? ‘Who ate the apple?’ (→ F)

Julia comió la manzana. ‘Julia ate the apple.’ (→ Fc)

a.

(IP MaRÍa comió la manzana.) *[F S]VO

No. (IP MaRÍa comió la manzana.) √[Fc S]VO

b.

(IP MaRÍa la comió.) *[F S]Cl-V

No. (IP MaRÍa la comió.) √[Fc S]Cl-V

a.

(IP Comió la manzana MaRÍa.) √VO[F S]

No. (IP Comió la manzana MaRÍa.) √VO[Fc S]

b.

(IP La comió MaRÍa.) √Cl-V[F S]

No. (IP La comió MaRÍa.) √Cl-V[Fc S]

This also holds for classical optimality-theoretic (OT) approaches (e.g. Costa 2001; Gutiérrez-Bravo 2006; Samek-Lodovici 2001), according to which constructions with nonfinal focus are ruled out due to violation of a high-ranked constraint such as the NSR (“Nuclear stress rule”), requiring right-most nuclear stress. In contrast to this view, scholars who work on the prosody of focus commonly assume that the IP-initial subject position is not restricted to a contrastive interpretation (e.g. Cabrera Abreu/García Lecumberri 2003; Face 2001; Hualde 2002; Toledo 1989). These studies, 6 Note, however, that VOS rarely occurs in naturalistic data; cf. the examples in (14), below, and section 4 for further discussion.

Information structure, prosody, and word order

429

however, rely on corpora of read speech, including [F S]VO structures, which a priori excludes the occurrence of syntactic variability in the data analyzed. A schematized representation of the F0 contour of (11a), involving insertion of a low intermediate phrasal boundary (L-) at the right edge of the in situ focused subject (marked with an L+H* pitch accent7) and postfocal deaccentuation, is given in (13). (13)

The assumption that in situ focus is not restricted to a contrastive interpretation has been corroborated by empirical work, based on elicited and spontaneous data from several Spanish varieties, among them Peninsular Spanish (Feldhausen/Vanrell 2014; Heidinger 2015; Vanrell/Fernández Soriano 2013), Argentinean Spanish (Gabriel 2010), Mexican Spanish (Hoot 2012; 2014; Uth 2014), and Andean Spanish (Muntendam 2013).8 All things considered, the distribution of pre- vs. postverbal [F S] can be summarized as follows: Speakers of Spanish cross-dialectally prefer preverbally focused subjects in clauses with a full object DP (11a, repeated as 14a), while the postverbal position is favoured when the object is realized as a clitic (12b, repeated as 14b) and in constructions with unaccusative (14c) and unergative (14d) verbs. Note that with unaccusative verbs the postverbal subject position is also preferred in thetic sentences (14e). (14)

Sp.

a.

[F MaRÍa] comió la manzana.

b.

La comió [F MaRÍa].

c.

Llegaron [F Julia y MaRÍa].

‘Julia and María arrived.’

d.

Estornudó [F un mariNEro].

‘A sailor sneezed.’

e.

[F Salió el sol].

‘The sun came out.’

The majority of Romance languages, among them Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian, largely pattern with Spanish as concerns the use of V[F S]. As in Spanish, subjects 7 The shape of pitch accents varies across dialects (Prieto/Roseano 2010). While in most varieties, among them Castilian Spanish, nonfinal nuclear stress is signalled through a rising F0 movement in the tonic syllable with the peak located at its end (L+H*; cf. 13), it surfaces as a rise and fall within the limits of the accented syllable in Argentinean Spanish (L+H*+L; cf. Feldhausen et al. 2011). 8 Cf. Gabriel (2007) for a cross-varietal perspective and Olarrea (2012) for an overview. For the expression of contrastive focus in Spanish and Catalan, cf. Adli (2011).

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preferably occur in postverbal position with unaccusative verbs, irrespective of whether the sentence conveys a thetic interpretation (15a, 16a, 17a) or the subject is narrowly focused (15b, 16b, 17b). (15)

It.

a.

[F È arrivato CARlo]. ‘Carlo arrived.’

b.

È arrivato [F CARlo].

(16)

Por.

a.

[F Chegaram as FÉrias.] ‘The holidays came.’

b.

Chegaram [F as FÉrias].

(17)

Rom.

a.

[F A venit ION]! ‘Ion has come!’

b.

A venit [F ION]! (Pană Dindelegan 2013, 549)

Again as in Spanish, focused subjects tend to appear postverbally with clitic objects in several Western (18a, b) and Eastern Romance languages (18c, d). (18)

a.

EPor.

Esse bolo, comemo-lo [F NÓS]. ‘This cake, WE eat it.’ (Hundertmark-Santos Martins 21998, 363)

b.

Cat.

Qui va agafar el llapis? ‘Who took the pencil?’ El va agafar [F en JoAN]. ‘JoAN took it.’

c.

It.

Lo ha comprato [F VeROnica], il giornale. ‘VeROnica bought it, the newspaper.’

d.

Rom.

(Bocci 2013, 31)

Cine a vărsat laptele? ‘Who has spilt the milk?’ Pare să-l fi vărsat [F MaRIa]. seems that- CL . ACC be spilt. PTCP Maria ‘It seems that Maria has spilt it.’ (Marchis Moreno/Petersen 2014)

In terms of frequency, however, interesting differences have been reported, with spoken Peninsular Spanish resorting to VS significantly more often than written Peninsular Spanish or (spoken and written) Portuguese (Meyer-Hermann 1989). Romanian, especially in older stages of its documented history, has also been observed to display a particularly high number of VS orders, most noticeably so in main clauses, and has even been analyzed as underlyingly VSO in some generative work (Dobrovie-Sorin 1994; cf. Pană Dindelegan 2013, 124–125, for a succinct summary of the discussion). In (European) Portuguese and Italian, as opposed to Spanish, postverbal subjects are at best marginally acceptable in constructions with the object realized as a lexical DP. Consider (19): (19)

a.

b.

EPor.

It.

? Partiu a janela [F o PAUlo]. ‘PAUlo broke the window.’ ? Spinge l’arbitro [F RoNALdo]. ‘RoNALdo shoves the referee.’

(Costa 2001, 94)

(Belletti 2001, 71)

Information structure, prosody, and word order

431

However, Italian allows VO[F S] when the linear stretch consisting of V and the object expresses a typical action in a given extra-linguistic context such as the placing of the ball on the penalty spot in a soccer game. Consider (20): (20)

It.

Mette la palla sul dischetto del rigore [F RoNALdo]. ‘RoNALdo puts the ball on the penalty spot.’

(Belletti 2001, 71)

French, finally, differs from the other Romance languages in that VS is restricted to very few cases: It is felicitous with unaccusative verbs (21a, b) and in passive constructions (21c), and marginally possible with locative inversion (21d), but severely constrained in transitive constructions (cf. 21e, f); cases such as (21g) tend to have a formal or archaic flavour. (21)

Fr.

a.

Il est arrivé quelques personnes. ‘Some people arrived.’

b.

Entrent des étudiants et des soldats. ‘Students and soldiers enter.’ (A. de Musset, Lorenzaccio, Act V, Scene 6)

c.

Il a été trouvé un ordinateur portable et un smartphone. ‘A notebook and a smartphone were found.’

d.

Là étaient entassés des livres. ‘Books were piled up there.’

e.

*Il a mangé la pomme [F MaRIE]. ‘MaRIE ate the apple.’

f.

*Il l’a mangée [F MaRIE]. ‘MaRIE ate it.’

g.

Rendront un devoir les élèves qui ont raté l’examen de chimie. lit. ‘Will hand in an assignment the pupils who have failed the chemistry exam.’ (Lahousse 2006, 432)

Furthermore, so-called “bad” subjects (Beaver/Francez/Levinson 2005) occur postverbally in existential constructions, albeit with a definiteness effect, e.g. Fr. Il y a des/*les solutions ‘There are (*the) solutions’; ↗16 Existential constructions. Note that due to the non-pro-drop property of French, the subject position must be filled by either the expletive pronoun il (21a, c) or a locative adverb (21d), except for in cases such as (21b) and (21g), a configuration dubbed “focus VS” in Lahousse (2006). The impossibility of (21e, f) is compensated for by an intensified use of in situ focus (cf. 5a) and clefted structures (cf. section 3.2).

2.2 Focused direct objects As opposed to the case of the focused subject, French patterns with the other Romance languages in admitting reversal of the canonical ordering of direct and indirect objects in clauses with a ditransitive verb when the direct object is in focus;

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consider the French examples in (22). The same holds for the ordering of a direct object and an adjoined or argumental PP (as shown in (23) and (24) for Italian and Catalan, respectively). (22)

(23)

(24)

Fr.

It.

Cat.

a.

Il a offert [F un LIvre] à son frère. ‘He gave a BOOK to his brother.’

b.

Il a offert à son frère [F un LIvre].

a.

Ha comprato [F delle MEle] nel mercato. ‘He bought APPles at the market.’

b.

Ha comprato nel mercato [F delle MEle].

a.

Vaig posar [F tots els LLIbres] sobre la taula. ‘I put all the BOOKS on the table.’

b.

Vaig posar sobre la taula [F tots el LLIbres].

The case of fronted focused objects, i.e. objects appearing in clause-initial position, will be dealt with in section 2.3.

2.3 Focus fronting Spanish also allows preposing of focused objects ([F La manZAna] comió María; cf. example (10c)), which is restricted, according to at least some authors (e.g. Zubizarreta 1998; 1999), to a contrastive interpretation. However, it has been shown in empirical work that [F O]VS also occurs with a neutral focus interpretation (at least in Argentinean Spanish; Gabriel 2010). Since in Spanish focus fronting excludes the intervening of further constituents between the fronted XP and the verb across varieties, these constructions can be derived without having recourse to Rizzi’s (1997) complex left periphery (cf. section 2).9 A more economical derivation involves the assumption of a syncretic T category (as proposed by Zubizarreta 1998, 100 in her noncartographic approach), which allows its specifier position to be filled with constituents of different syntactic status, among them the subject (25a), objects (25b), or adjoined constituents such as locative PPs (25c).10 9 For a different proposal, according to which the fronted focused object is located in a left-peripheral FocP, cf. Reglero (2004, 163) and the analysis sketched in (10c), above. 10 “A discourse-based functional feature [. . .] may combine with the feature T(ense), giving rise to the syncretic categories T/‘topic,’ T/‘focus,’ T/‘emphasis’” (Zubizarreta 1998, 100), which is, according to her model, restricted to the contrastive interpretation of focus. Note that the examples given in (25) can be derived in the same way with a nonfocal interpretation of the clause-initial constituent, as in Zubizarreta’s (1998, 101) original example [En este bar]Topic escribió T/“topic” Max su primera novela.

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Sp.

433

a.

[TP [F MaRÍa][T’ comió T/“focus” la manzana]]. ‘MaRÍa ate the apple.’

b.

[TP [F La manZAna][T’ comió T/“focus” [vP María]]]. ‘María ate the APPle.’

c.

[TP [F En este BAR][T’ escribió T/“focus” [vP Max su primera novela]]]. ‘In this BAR, Max wrote his first novel.’ (cf. Zubizarreta 1998, 101)

Note that the F0 contour of the examples given in (25) involves shifting of the nuclear accent to the left edge of the Intonation Phrase (IP) and is thus essentially the same as the one schematically represented in (13). As shown in example (26a), fronted objects in Spanish may also occur in embedded clauses and with a leftdislocated topic. This speaks in favour of a reduced left periphery of the structures given in (9) above, involving only a recursive TopP*, intertwined between C and TP as sketched in (26b): (26)

Sp.

a.

. . . que a sus padres [TP [F menTIras siempre les cuenta (y no la verdad). (cf. Casielles-Suárez 2004, 83) lit. ‘. . . that to her parents LIES she always tells to them (and not the truth).’

b.

In Italian, by contrast, constituents of different syntactic and information-structural status may intervene between the verb and a fronted focal constituent (cf. 10a, above), which largely justifies the complex structure proposed by Rizzi (1997). In French, finally, fronted focal constituents other than the subject are by and large restricted to more formal registers (27a), while clefting is preferred in colloquial speech (27b; cf. section 3.2), although, admittedly, exceptions with nominal fronted direct objects do occur (27c). (27)

Fr.

a.

[F À JEAN] j’ai donné €20. ‘To JEAN, I gave 20 euros.’

b.

C’est à JEAN que j’ai donné €20. ‘It is JEAN to whom I gave 20 euros.’

c.

Des tomates t’achètes. lit. ‘Tomatoes you (must) buy.’

(Rowlett 2006, 182)

(Stark 1997, 24, note 117)

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Fronted topics, by contrast, may occur in French across registers (e.g. [Marie]Topic, [ce livre]Topic, elle l’a déjà lu ‘Marie, this book, she has already read it’), which suggests that the complete version of Rizzi’s (1997) model only applies to certain registers, while in colloquial French the fine structure of the left periphery seems to be reduced as sketched in (28). (28) [Force [TopP* [FinP [TP [vP]]]]] In the following section we turn to complex structures beyond the format of the simple clause.

3 Beyond the simple clause The grammatical options of altering the canonical SVO constituent ordering in Romance languages are by no means restricted to postverbal subjects (VS) and preverbal objects (OV). In fact, one might even be surprised about the privileged status accorded to SVO in much grammatical theorizing, from the eighteenth-century French grammarians’ praise of SVO as the ordre logique to linguistic typology and so-called antisymmetric approaches in generative syntax. To be fair, however, we need to point out that the characterization of Romance languages as being of the SVO type deserves to be qualified in more than one respect. Firstly, SVO is ‘canonical’, ‘unmarked’, ‘basic’ etc. – i.e. privileged on theoretical grounds – only in sentences which feature both a subject and a direct object argument and in which both of these arguments are lexical DPs. Pronominal arguments behave differently in several respects, and some peculiar characteristics can also be observed with clausal complements. With the advent of corpus linguistics, it has increasingly become clear that utterances such as The man builds a house, ubiquitous in grammatical descriptions, turn out to be rare beasts in real life. This discovery has inspired an entire tradition of research which seeks to pinpoint and account for the strong cross-linguistic tendency to avoid rather than to prefer sentences which contain both a lexical subject and a lexical object. Statistical observations have been made in a number of languages and have given rise to what has come to be known as the theory of “Preferred Argument Structure” (du Bois 2003). Interestingly, many of the key findings within this theory, such as the preference for discourse-new referents to occur in object rather than in subject position, also pattern nicely with observations about preferred information structure, such as the preference for clause-final domains of information focus. A second limitation of much work conducted within word order typology is its exclusive reliance on sentences of the declarative type, whereas nondeclaratives –

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interrogative, exclamative, imperative, and optative sentences – have attracted much less attention. The same may not be true to the same extent for generative syntax, where at least interrogatives and exclamatives seem to have enjoyed a better fate as objects of syntactic investigation since Chomsky first introduced the concept of whmovement. While the fronting of wh-expressions to a left-peripheral position is widespread throughout Romance, a number of cross-linguistic differences have been observed. Moreover, even within a given language, variation looms large. In French, for instance, the choice between an in situ and fronted ex situ position of wh-expressions, while not completely arbitrary, appears to be constrained by syntactic, lexical, semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic determinants in highly complex ways (cf. Déprez/Syrett/Kawahara 2013, and references cited therein). A minimal illustration is provided in (29): (29)

Fr.

a.

Tu you

arrives arrive.2SG

à quelle heure ? at which hour

b.

À quelle heure

tu

c.

À quelle heure

est-ce que

arrives ? tu

arrives ?

QUESTION

‘At what time do you arrive?’ Reasons of space preclude a fuller discussion of these and other syntactic variants, but even the most sophisticated analyses will ultimately need to acknowledge the existence of at least some areas of indeterminacy in the choice between in situ and ex situ positions of wh-expressions, and in the presence or absence of the interrogative morpheme est-ce que. In Rizzi’s (1997) account, ex situ fronted wh-expressions were assumed to be hosted by the left-peripheral Focus Phrase (FocP), but subsequent cartographic refinements have argued for a designated Interrogative Phrase. Whatever landing site for fronted wh-expressions one wishes to assume, it may not be a trivial task to explain, in a noncircular way, the differential propensity of focus or some other feature to attract wh-expressions to the left periphery in cases such as (29b, c), but not in (29a). Similar complications arise with fronted wh-expressions in exclamatives, which are akin to interrogatives in several respects. It remains controversial whether the fronting of wh-expressions in this sentence type is due to a wh-feature or to a separate exclamative feature attracted to ForceP, or perhaps to a combination of both (cf. Villalba 2008 for discussion). Finally, in Spanish and Portuguese, interrogatives and exclamatives often trigger obligatory VS orderings, while in French VS is, again, considerably more constrained in these cases. In any event, nondeclarative sentences pose interesting challenges for those interested in interface issues, and make it even clearer that the characterization of

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Romance as SVO constitutes what has been called a ‘deep’ typological insight, since at the surface level of discourse, it is all but obvious. The remainder of this section will deal with two syntactic configurations, viz. dislocations and clefts, in which propositional contents are encoded in structures which exceed the minimal clausal format.

3.1 Left and right dislocations In sentences involving dislocations (or detachments), called phrases segmentées in the older French descriptive tradition, a constituent surfaces in a position external to the core clause, in which it is typically resumed by some anaphoric element, such as a pronominal or adverbial clitic. The examples in (30) all feature a subject nominal which is dislocated to the left of the sentence: (30)

a.

Eng.

John, he saved us.

b.

Fr.

Jean, il nous a sauvés.

c.

It.

Gianni, ci ha salvati.

d.

Sp.

Juan, nos salvó.

Cases such as those in (30) are often referred to as Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) in the syntactic literature. In written Italian and Spanish, the presence of a comma often provides the sole justification for classifying sentences such as (30c, d) as involving subject dislocation. Indeed, the existence of a special subclass of leftdislocated subjects in null subject languages has been put into question more than once. However, there have also been proponents of the opposite view, according to which all preverbal overt subjects in such languages need to be analyzed syntactically as left-dislocated (Villa-García 2013). For French, it has also been argued that some instances of ‘doubled’ pronominal subjects such as moi(,) je, lit. ‘me, I’ have become grammaticalized – and prosodically integrated – in spoken French to such an extent that an analysis on a par with other types of dislocation may no longer be adequate (cf. Detges 2013; Gabriel/ Rinke 2010). Indeed, the time-honoured idea of French subject clitics having evolved into agreement prefixes is continuously being revived and restated, albeit under varying terminological guises (Culbertson 2010; cf. Kaiser 2008 for discussion). While diachronically, such an evolution is indeed a recurring scenario, the prefix analysis runs into considerable problems since elements such as Fr. je ‘I’ behave differently from typical affixes in many respects. In particular, they cannot be combined with most indefinite quantified DPs and continue to appear optionally with other types of lexical subjects:

Information structure, prosody, and word order

(31)

Fr.

a. *Des

b.

INDEF. PL

amis friends

ils 3PL

sont venus. have come

Mes my

amis friends

(ils) 3PL

sont venus. have come

437

This stands in sharp contrast to verbal agreement affixes in languages which undisputedly possess them, where the verbal affix must be realized in any sentence, regardless of the type of subject. To be fair, it should be added that in some varieties of French, grammaticalization appears to be somewhat more advanced. A wellknown case is the Northern French dialect of Picardy, where preverbal agreement morphemes can co-occur with quantified subjects: (32)

Picard

a.

Tout l’monne i s’a rbéyè. everybody 3SG REFL has regard.PST- PTCP ‘All looked at each other.’

b.

Parsonne i n’poroait mie vnir ll’értcheure. nobody 3SG NEG could NEG come him look-for ‘Nobody could come and get him.’ (Auger 2003, 387)

While the status of tout l’monne ‘everybody’ and of parsonne ‘nobody’ in (32) as leftdislocated or syntactically integrated may indeed be controversial, most varieties of French, including informal spoken ones, continue to exhibit ‘classic’ configurations of subject left dislocation according to standard diagnostics (cf. de Cat 2007). Dislocation may also target other constituents besides subjects, including direct and indirect objects as well as prepositional complements. In (33), some illustrative examples are offered from Italian. Notice that the indirect (33b) and prepositional dislocated complements (33c) are case-marked or introduced by a preposition in the same way as they would have been in a canonical clause: (33)

It.

a.

[I giornali]i, Giorgio lii compra alla stazione. ‘The newspapers, Giorgio buys them at the station.’

b.

[A Giacomo]i, Maddalena glii regalerà un orsacchiotto. ‘To Giacomo, Maddalena will offer him a teddy bear.’

c.

[In America]i, Alice cii andrà l’anno prossimo. ‘To America, Alice will go there next year.’ (Benincà/Salvi/Frison 2001, 144)

Dislocations may also occur to the right of the core clause in Romance languages (34), although in terms of frequency dislocations to the left appear to prevail over right dislocations. Moreover, dislocation can apply more than once within a given sentence, cf. (35):

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(34)

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Cat.

Por.

Elsi va regalar a la biblioteca, [els llibres.]i ‘S/he offered them to the library, the books.’

(Vallduví 2008, 1236)

[A nós]i, [essa proposta]j, o João noi-laj fez há poucos minutos. ‘To us, this proposal, João made it a few minutes ago.’ (Mateus et al. 72003, 495)

A second major type of dislocation besides CLLD is known as Hanging Topic Left Dislocation (HTLD), or nominativus pendens. Unlike with CLLD, dislocated elements in HTLD are never marked for case. In languages with morphological case on nouns, HTLD also differs from CLLD in that within the core clause a coindexed strong pronoun or nominal expression may, but need not, occur: (36) a. Fr. Le métro, j’adore ce moyen de transport. the underground I love this means of transport ‘The underground, I love this means of transport.’ [a esa sinvergüenza.]i b. Sp. Maríai, hace tiempo que no veo María does time that NEG see.1SG to that shameless ‘María, I haven’t seen that shameless woman in a long time.’ (López 2009, 4) sabe jugar al tenis. c. Sp. Maríai, ellai sí María she indeed know.3SG play at-the tennis ‘María, she can play tennis.’

(López 2009, 4)

Hanging Topics can only occur to the left of their core clause, never to the right, which again sets them apart from dislocated elements with a clause-internal anaphoric clitic. Finally, many languages, such as Italian and possibly Spanish, permit only one Hanging Topic to the left of the clause, whereas Clitic (Left) Dislocation can be applied iteratively, as we have seen above. In terms of information structure, there is a general consensus that dislocated elements, both with clitic resumption and ‘hanging’ ones, are to be viewed as topics. This explains the widespread restriction against dislocating indefinite and quantified phrases, since typically, neither of these can serve to direct the hearer or reader to a mental storage address, cf. example (1). It also fits nicely with the option of having more than one dislocated element within one sentence, since sentences can have more than one topic, especially so if these pertain to different subtypes. We saw in section 1 that Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl (2007) distinguish between shifting topics, contrastive topics, and familiar topics. Their claim is that each of these subtypes may not occur just anywhere within Rizzi’s (1997) cartography of the left periphery, but that dislocated shifting topics have to precede contrastive topics, which in turn precede familiar topics. Even in cases of multiple dislocations, there is at most one dislocated aboutness topic according to Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl (2007), which ensures

Information structure, prosody, and word order

439

a unique storage address for the new propositional content. Investigating information-structural differences between left and right dislocation in spoken French, Ashby (1988) finds that both types may encode shifting and contrastive topics, but that statistically at least, right-dislocated elements tend to rank higher on givenness hierarchies than left-dislocated ones. The principal motivations for resorting to either left or right dislocation turn out to be related to the organization of discourse rather than to the structuring of information within the sentence. Basically, utterances involving left dislocations preferably occur at the beginning of turns, whereas right dislocations can act as ‘fillers’, avoiding silent pauses in running speech, or as a signal that the speaker has finished her or his turn. Prosodically, dislocated elements can be singled out from their core clause by a separate Intonation Phrase (IP; cf. Feldhausen 2014, 24–28, for an overview) or at least an intermediate phrasal (ip) boundary (cf. Frota/Prieto 2015, 395). A number of different boundary tones are available in different varieties of Romance. For Italian, Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl (2007) argue for different intonational patterns which are associated with each of their three types of left-dislocated topics. For Catalan, Feldhausen (2010) shows that while left-dislocated elements are obligatorily separated by a boundary tone at the right edge, no such intonational separation needs to be made at the left edge, for example in sentences in which a matrix clause and a complementizer precede an embedded clause headed by a left-dislocated element. Prosody can thus become crucial for differentiating between clause-external, i.e. dislocated, and clause-internal ‘canonical’ preverbal subjects in null subject languages. It should be added, however, that in data from spontaneous French speech, a significant number of instances of left dislocation have been observed without any prosodic boundary intervening between the dislocated element and the core clause (Avanzi 2011).

3.2 Cleft sentences The term “cleft sentence” designates a class of complex syntactic structures which express a simple propositional content in a biclausal format, by ‘singling out’ (“cleaving”) one major syntactic constituent. This clefted constituent surfaces in a matrix copular clause, while the residual open proposition is encoded in a subordinate clause. In (37), some examples of cleft sentences are provided: (37)

a.

Eng.

It was John who saved us.

b.

Fr.

C’est Jean qui nous a sauvés.

c.

It.

È stato Gianni che ci ha salvato.

d.

Sp.

Fue Juan el que nos salvó.

(Borges, CORDE)

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As can be seen in (37a, b), English and French resort to a cleft pronoun (it and ce, respectively) in order to satisfy the overt subject requirement. By contrast, Italian and Spanish, being null subject languages, do not need (and in fact, do not accept) such nonreferential subjects. Besides these so-called it- or c’est-clefts, there is a second major subtype, exemplified in (38), in which the clefted constituent follows the subordinate clause: (38)

a.

Eng.

Who saved us was John.

b.

Fr.

Celui qui nous a sauvés, c’est Jean.

c.

It.

Chi ci ha salvati è stato Gianni.

d.

Sp.

El que nos salvó fue Juan.

At least in terms of truth-conditions and illocutionary force, the sentences in (38), often referred to as wh- or pseudo-clefts, can be considered equivalent to the variants in (37). These two types of cleft sentences arguably constitute the two fundamental types and occur in all registers, both written and spoken, of most Romance varieties. However, they by no means exhaust the inventory of cleft sentence formats. Especially in informal spoken discourse, French also offers a cleft with existential or presentational y avoir instead of the standard copula être, cf. (39). Italian and Portuguese have clefts with infinitival subordinate clauses, cf. (40) and (41), and many null subject varieties with comparatively flexible word order also permit it-cleft structures in which the clefted constituent precedes the copula in the matrix clause, as in (42): (39)

Fr.

Il y a Pierre aussi qui a été sauvé. lit. ‘There is also Pierre who was saved.’

(40)

It.

È stato Matteo a venirci a trovare in maggio. lit. ‘It was Matteo to come to visit us in May.’

(41)

EPor.

(42)

Sp.

(Roggia 2006, 223)

. . . que seja o Senhor Comissário L. a estar presente esta manhã ‘that it is Commissioner L. who is here this morning’ (EUROPARL; cited in Dufter 2009, 89) Juan fue el que nos salvó. ‘Juan was the one who saved us.’

In some varieties of American Spanish and in Brazilian Portuguese, there is yet another syntactic format which has often been analyzed as belonging to the family of cleft structures, viz. sentences containing ser focalizador ‘focalizing to be’ or “semiclefts” (cf. Méndez Vallejo 2009; 2015; Sedano 1990 for Venezuelan, Colombian, and Dominican Spanish, respectively; Resenes 2014 for Brazilian Portuguese). In all

Information structure, prosody, and word order

441

of the American Spanish varieties investigated in these studies, question-answer sequences constitute one of the contexts which particularly favour the occurrence of semi-clefts, cf. (43). By contrast, in Brazilian Portuguese semi-clefts are by and large restricted to contrastive focus according to Resenes (2014, 24): (43)

AmSp.

A: ¿Dónde nevó ayer? where snow.3SG . PST yesterday ‘Where did it snow yesterday?’ B:

(44)

BPor.

Nevó ayer fue en Berlín. snow.3SG . PST yesterday be.3SG . PST in Berlin ‘It was in Berlin where it snowed yesterday.’ (Méndez Vallejo 2009, 15)

O João comprou foi the João buy.3SG . PST be.3SG . PST ‘It was a car that João bought.’

um carro. a car (Resenes 2014, 18)

These semi-clefts have often been analyzed as reduced pseudo-clefts, i.e. as a more advanced stage in a grammaticalization path leading from compositional syntactic means of expressing focus to focus particles. However, a variety of observations can be made which cast serious doubt on the validity of such a syntactic account (cf. Bosque 1999). Both semi-clefts and pseudo-clefts turn out to be syntactically more constrained than Romance counterparts to it-clefts. In particular, clefting of oblique arguments and adjuncts tends to be avoided or even results in ungrammaticality within pseudo-clefts (45), whereas it-cleft structures accept a wider range of clefted constituents (46): (45)

(46)

a.

Eng.

??/*That we survived is thanks to John.

b.

Fr.

*Que nous avons survécu est grâce à Jean.

c.

It.

??/*Che siamo sopravvissuti è grazie a Gianni.

d.

Sp.

??/*Que hemos sobrevivido es gracias a Juan.

a.

Eng.

It is thanks to John that we survived.

b.

Fr.

C’est grâce à Jean que nous avons survécu.

c.

It.

È grazie a Gianni che siamo sopravvissuti.

d.

Sp.

Es gracias a Juan que hemos sobrevivido.

In both formalist and functionalist accounts, information structure has always loomed large in accounting for the existence of clefted sentential variants: According to conventional wisdom, cleft sentences exist in order to put focus on the clefted

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constituent. Conversely, the open proposition expressed by the subordinate clause is held to be backgrounded information. Since nuclear prosodic prominences preferably occur within the focus domain, they should invariably target the clefted constituent. According to many functionally oriented lines of reasoning, it is precisely the capacity of cleft sentences to unequivocally mark narrow focus on single constituents which motivates the use of these marked biclausal variants. The reasoning underlying such argumentation is, of course, that ceteris paribus simple clauses should be used whenever possible, and that less economical, ‘costly’ biclausal cleft structures should not be used ‘beyond necessity’. Despite its initial attractions, any linguistic account which relegates clefting to the substitutes’ bench of focus marking devices turns out to be deficient in several respects. To begin with, it will have nothing to say about the factors guiding the choice between different cleft formats, e.g. in the case of clefted subjects and objects. If it is true that both it-clefts and pseudo-clefts serve the very same informationstructural goal, we are led to expect them to occur in free variation (cf. section 4). Indeed, back in the heyday of transformational grammar, Akmajian boldly asserted that it-clefts and pseudo-clefts “are synonymous, share the same presuppositions, answer the same questions, and in general [. . .] can be used interchangeably” (1970, 149). Even if true, the question would be why languages should offer both formats in the first place, given the rarity of synonymy observed throughout linguistic descriptions. In fact, however, counterexamples are not hard to come up with. In (47), only the French c’est-cleft, but not the pseudo-cleft, is grammatical. In (48), the opposite situation obtains: (47)

(48)

Fr.

Fr.

a.

C’est après toi que je passe. ‘It is after you that I pass.’

b.

??Celui après qui je passe, c’est toi.

a.

Ce qui compte, c’est qu’il se décide. ‘What counts is that he takes a decision.’

b.

*C’est qu’il se décide qui compte.

(Duras, FRANTEXT)

Restrictions of space preclude an analysis of the complex array of factors which one needs to take into account in order to assess the licensing and the degree of naturalness of different types of clefts in Romance languages. As a first approximation, we may say that it-clefts are preferred with shorter constituents such as pro-forms, whereas pseudo-clefts more readily accommodate longer, in particular clausal, elements in the cleft position. In this respect, it has often been observed that there is a class of it-clefts, often with short anaphoric clefted elements, in which this clefted element is more naturally interpreted as a topic than as a focus, cf. (49):

Information structure, prosody, and word order

(49)

It.

443

È da questa famiglia che Sansa pensa di aver ereditato «una grande severità morale», ma anche l’apertura intellettuale che è tipica dei luoghi, come l’Istria, che sono «un incrocio di popoli». (Bertolotto, cited in Berretta 2002, 20) ‘It is from this family that Sansa thinks he has inherited « a great moral severity », but also an intellectual open-mindedness which is typical of places, like Istria, that are a crossroad of peoples.’

In some cases, the it-cleft format serves to establish a cohesive link rather than single out a focus or a sentential or frame topic. French and Portuguese are generally held to be particularly fond of this kind of “cleft connector” or “topic-comment cleft”, although they are found in other Romance varieties as well. Some of these structures, for example the one in (50), have become so deeply entrenched that they have more or less ousted their monoclausal counterparts (Blanche-Benveniste 2006): (50)

Fr.

a.

C’est pour ça que j’ai hésité. ‘That’s why I hesitated.’

b.

??Pour ça, j’ai hésité.

(ELICOP Corpus Tours 003)

Modern French boasts yet another type of information-structural configuration in its it-cleft sentences, as already observed by Müller-Hauser (1943, 214–215). According to this author, in typical occurrences of sentences such as (51), it is the entire sentence which is in focus: (51)

Fr.

C’est mon ami qui sera content. lit. ‘It is my friend who will be happy.’

(Müller-Hauser 1943, 214)

Although all-focus clefts are considerably less frequent than both focus-background and topic-comment clefts, they arguably deserve to be recognized as an informationstructural type on their own. Independent evidence for positing different subtypes of it-clefts comes from prosody. With respect to clefts and pseudo-clefts in Italian, Frascarelli/Ramaglia (2013) find considerable differences in intonational contours on clefted constituents in their corpus of spontaneous speech recorded in the region of Rome. Their data suggest that noncontrastive foci in focus-background clefts tend not to exhibit salient accentual prominence, since syntax alone suffices to convey the interpretational correlates of information focus, most notably exhaustivity. The intonation of the initial subordinate clause of pseudo-clefts, in turn, reflects intonational differences associated with different subtypes of topics. Just as in other types of sentences, low tones mark familiar topics, rising tones new aboutness topics, and high tones contrastive topics. For French, Mertens (2012) finds clear differences between focusbackground clefts, where the clefted constituent ends on a terminal contour and the subordinate clause is produced with a low flat ‘appendix’ intonation, and topiccomment and all-focus clefts, in which intonational prominences are found both on

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the clefted constituent and within the subordinate part. In these clefts, the intonational appendix is either absent or limited to a subpart of the subordinate clause, thus contributing to the expression of focus-background structure. According to Mertens, the information structure of spoken French it-clefts cannot be read off from syntactic form alone, since syntactic and prosodic organization provide independent contributions to the pragmatic profiling of the propositional content.11 What this amounts to, then, is that the mappings between information structure, prosody, and syntax in Romance languages turn out to be considerably more complex than run-of-the-mill treatments of clefts as focus constructions would lead us to expect. Clearly, clefts in which the focus domain does not coincide with the clefted constituent do occur, and may even predominate over their stressed-focus cleft counterparts in terms of frequency (cf. Mertens 2012 for spontaneous spoken French). Traditional views which seek to dismiss these cases as ‘noncanonical’ instances of “pragmatic accommodation” or “exploitation” (Lambrecht 2001, 485) may thus stand in need of revision. Universalist functionalist accounts may face additional difficulties when confronted with cross-linguistic variation and historical change. Within Romance, cleft constructions, both of the it-cleft and of the pseudo-cleft type, exhibit considerable differences in distribution and frequency across time and space. While they are attested in Latin since the preclassical period, their occurrence remains rather sporadic except in authors such as Plautus or Petronius, whose literary works arguably reflect spoken registers at least to some extent (Löfstedt 1966). As Löfstedt shows, two types of expressions appear to constitute privileged targets for clefting, viz. interrogatives and demonstratives. In light of this, the traditional reasoning according to which clefts remained relatively rare in Latin because they were simply unnecessary fails to convince, as the coexistence of the variants in (52a, b) strongly suggests: (52)

Lat.

a.

b.

Quis est qui me vocat? who be.3SG who me call.3SG ‘Who is it who is calling me?’

(Plautus, Mercator 808, LLT-A)

Quis me revocat? who me call-back.3SG ‘Who calls me back?’

(Plautus, Mercator 474, LLT-A)

In the documented history of Romance, clefts have occurred, albeit infrequently, since the earliest times. They are reported to have been on the rise in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese (cf. Dufter 2009; Roggia 2006; Rouquier 2014, and references cited in these works). The odd one out seems to be Romanian, where it-cleft structures are reported to be absent from the language, and pseudo-clefts appear to be a recent, “learned” innovation (Pană Dindelegan 2013, 539 and 574). Overall, clefts 11 For Argentinean Spanish, cf. the empirical study presented in Pešková (2015, 192–194) based on a ten-hour corpus of spontaneous speech. She found a vast array of tonal realizations of subject pronouns with different information-structural functions occurring in clefted and nonclefted clauses.

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tend to be especially popular in Modern French and Portuguese, followed by Italian, and Spanish (de Cesare et al. 2014; Dufter 2009). Rather than merely constituting a last resort focus strategy, cleft sentences fulfil a variety of functions, at the levels of sentence semantics, pragmatics, and discourse.

4 Variation, optionality, and change As shown in section 2.1 with the example of pre- and postverbal focused subjects in Spanish, which are likely to appear in preverbal position in constructions with a lexical DP object (i.e. rather [F S]VO than VO[F S], cf. (11a/14a)), but are preferably located clause-finally when the object is realized as a verb-dependent clitic (i.e. Cl+V[F S] rather than [F S]Cl+V], cf. (12b/14b)), cases of grammatical variability are commonly characterized by the fact that speakers have a strong preference for one of two (or more) possible forms in a given context. However, this does not mean that the coexisting, but dispreferred, forms can be considered strictly ungrammatical. Consequently, any model of grammar must account for “true optionality” (to use the term coined by Müller 2003, 293) or free variation (cf. the discussion in Dufter/ Fleischer/Seiler 2009), i.e. variability that cannot be explained by attributing competing forms to different pragmatic/information-structural readings or to different register grammars. Note that “true optionality” is more likely to come into play when the so-called external interfaces are concerned, for example when information structure interacts with the different components of grammar, and that it hardly occurs in the domains of so-called core grammar, for instance with regard to the basic ordering of object and verb in neutral contexts. Consider the examples given in (53): While SVO with rightmost nuclear stress as in (53a) may be considered the only licit form in neutral contexts in Spanish, the same surface ordering with the nuclear accent shifted to the left edge of the clause (11a, repeated as 53b) is illformed in the same information-structural condition, since it unequivocally conveys narrow focus on the subject. VOS (which is acceptable with narrow focus on the object; cf. example 12a in section 2.1) is inappropriate in the given context (53c), and SOV, finally, is unacceptable in a simple clause, regardless of the position of nuclear stress (53d). ‘What happened?’

(53) Sp.

a.

√ (IP María comió la manZAna.)

√SVO

b.

* (IP MaRÍa comió la manzana.)

*SVO

c.

* (IP Comió la manzana MaRÍa.)

*VOS

d.

comió.)12

*SOV

* (IP María la manzana

12 Apart from the cases of information-structurally triggered word order variation, free variation occurs in the realm of overt subject pronoun realization in Romance pro-drop languages (cf. Pešková 2015, 172–195, for an overview with particular regard to Argentinean Spanish).

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Note, however, that SOV (53d) might occur in a complex clause involving left dislocation of the (given) subject (cf. 3.1) and a fronted focused object as in [TopP María, [TP la manZAna [T’ comió]]], which is prosodically realized with an intermediate (H-) phrasal boundary after María and sentential stress located on the object. The use of OV in neutral contexts as occurs in varieties of Andean Spanish will be dealt with later in this section. Classical derivational and constraint-based approaches can fruitfully account for obvious cases such as the ones depicted in (53) (cf. section 2.1), but run into problems when true optionality is at play, i.e. when one of the possible structures is preferred by the speakers, but the competing one is not considered ungrammatical either. A framework that allows for integrating these “fuzzy areas” of acceptability in a model of grammar is Stochastic OT (Boersma/Hayes 2001). According to this approach, a constraint ranking is not conceived of as a fixed hierarchy, yielding one (and only one) surface output, but instead consists in a variable ordering on a so-called “continuous ranking scale” (CRS) from which the actual constraint ranking is derived at the moment of the evaluation of a given set of candidates. Different from classical OT, constraints may overlap on the CRS, which means that a given constraint ranking A » B (‘A dominates B’) can be reversed as B » A (‘B dominates A’). Different degrees of overlap allow for expressing individual speakers’ preferences for the competing forms. In addition, it is assumed that the positions of the constraints may be readjusted in accordance with the input the speaker receives, which permits the model to account for possible changes in adult speakers’ grammars. The overlapping constraint model has been applied to various domains of focusinduced word order variation in Romance (cf. Feldhausen/Vanrell 2014 and Gabriel 2010 for Spanish; Gabriel 2007 for a cross-Romance perspective). In (54), we give a schematic representation of a CRS accounting for the pre- and postverbal position of [F S] in Italian (upper panel) and Spanish (lower panel), proposed by Gabriel (2007, 300) based on elicited production data. (54)

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For both languages, STRESS FOCUS (which requires that the nuclear stress be located on the focused constituent) dominates all of the other constraints involved here. This accounts for the fact that no mismatch of phrasal stress and focus is tolerated in either language regardless of the linear ordering. The preference in both Italian and Spanish for postverbal [F S] in constructions with clitic objects is accounted for by assuming a partial overlap of ALIGN FOCUS RIGHT (AFR, which rules out structures with nonrightmost focus) and FULL INTERPRETATION (FI), a constraint requiring that any element merged in the structure be fully interpreted with respect to its conceptual content (Grimshaw/Samek-Lodovici 1998, 194). If the actual ranking derived from the CRS is AFR » FI (cf. partial ranking (a) in (54), upper panel), the (unmarked) ordering (18c) It. Lo ha comprato [F VeROnica] is produced by the speaker. If, by contrast, AFR is dominated by FI (i.e. FI » AFR, cf. (b)), the more marked, but nevertheless grammatical form It. [F VeROnica] lo ha comprato is selected as the optimal candidate. Note that the constraint ranking for Spanish (lower panel in (54)) differs from the one proposed for Italian in that it involves an additional overlap of STAYOBJECT (which militates against movement of the object) and AFR. This accounts for the fact that in Spanish VO[F S] is freely available (albeit not preferred), while in Italian this ordering is restricted to very special cases such as the example given in (20). A further field which is crucially characterized by co-occurrence of competing forms in empirical data is the acquisition of word order variation in foreign language learners. It has been shown for several Romance languages, among them Italian and Spanish, that L2 speakers have serious problems with syntactic variability (for Italian, cf. Belletti/Leonini 2004; Bettoni/di Biase 2011; for Spanish, cf. Domínguez 2013; Hertel 2003; Lozano 2006; Zubizarreta/Nava 2011; cf. White 2009 for an overview). In general, L2 learners are more likely to acquire cases of word order variation that depend on lexical factors (e.g. the postverbal position of the subject in constructions with unaccusative verbs, cf. (14c, d), (15) and (16), above) than to cope with information-structurally/pragmatically driven syntactic variability. Interestingly enough, this also holds for speakers of so-called heritage languages (cf. Montrul 2016; Valdés 2000): As has been shown by Hoot (2012), heritage speakers of Mexican Spanish who live in an English speaking environment show certain insecurities regarding the use of V[F S], probably due to convergence with English, which is the surrounding and their dominant language. Observations such as these speak in favour of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace/Filiaci 2006), according to which phenomena related to the interaction of grammar with other cognitive domains are hard to acquire and more likely to undergo changes than “structures that do not involve this interface” (Sorace 2011, 1; for a discussion of the Interface Hypothesis with respect to heritage speakers, cf. Montrul/Polinsky 2011; ↗18 Interfaces with syntax in language acquisition). The vulnerability of phenomena linked to the external interfaces also becomes obvious when looking at situations of language contact other than the special case

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of heritage speakers: Regarding the use of preverbal objects in Spanish, it has been shown by Ocampo/Klee (1995), Muysken (2006), and Muntendam (2013), among others, that bilingual speakers of Quechua (OV) and Spanish (VO) tend to overuse the OV ordering (which is restricted to focused objects in other Spanish varieties, cf. 10c/25b) and produce sentences with preposed objects even in neutral contexts. Consider the example given in (55). (55)

Sp.

‘What was he doing?’ [F La casa estaba barriendo.] ‘He was sweeping the house.’

(Muysken 2006, 151)

It is worthwhile pointing out that in such contact-induced cases of grammatical change speakers do not just copy a rule from one language to the other (which would have resulted in complete replacement of VO by OV in the case of Spanish in contact with Quechua), but rather change the information-structural/pragmatic conditions in which a given structure is considered acceptable. Using a term coined by Hopper/Traugott (1993, 87), this can be interpreted as a case of “pragmatic bleaching”, since the marked linear ordering OV is reanalyzed as a less marked syntactic structure. Taking a wider perspective, the very same might have happened during the evolution of the Romance languages (all of them underlyingly VO) from Latin: Although the basic word order of Latin is OV, several instances of VO can be found in pragmatically/information-structurally marked contexts (cf. Rinke 2007, 102–109, for an overview). Somewhat unexpectedly perhaps, considerable differences in the relative frequencies of basic word orders can be found, even within texts of similar genre and date of composition (Linde 1923). Since the comedies of Plautus, an author active in the third and early second century BC, (S)VO has always been solidly documented, especially so in main clauses and in literary representations of popular spoken registers (Adams 1976). To complicate the picture even further, frontings of nonsubject topics and foci, or of subparts thereof, occur widely across text types and registers, so that some scholars have argued that Latin offers an articulated left functional periphery in much the same way that Romance languages do (Ledgeway 2011, 425–428). These complications notwithstanding, at some point in the (pre)history of Romance, reanalysis must have taken place, when children acquiring their mother tongue were confronted with a sufficient amount of VO structures in the input to conceive of these structures as unmarked (cf. Sőrés/MarchelloNizia 2005; ↗22 Changes at the syntax-discourse interface).

5 Summary and outlook In this chapter we provided a critical overview of basic information-structural terms (section 1), before addressing the question of how information packaging is expressed by the different modules of grammar in Romance languages. Starting out from simple

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clauses (section 2), we discussed the syntactic and prosodic properties of complex constructions, with special emphasis given to left and right dislocations as well as to cleft sentences (section 3). In a last step, we extended the discussion to the intriguing question of how free variation (optionality) and its role in learner and contact varieties as well as in linguistic change may be accounted for in a model of grammar (section 4). Two main findings result from the closer examination of the interaction of the syntactic and phonological components of grammar in the expression of information-structural categories across Romance varieties: First, free variation is likely to occur in empirical data when the external interfaces are involved, as is the case for the interplay of information structure with the different modules of grammar. Second, there is hardly a one-to-one mapping between given informationstructural categories and specific linguistic means of expression. Human language as is reflected in natural data is rather characterized by certain fuzzy areas of grammaticality/acceptability, albeit with clear tendencies in usage. This suggests that the study of information structure and its expression in the various Romance varieties will continue to benefit from in-depth empirical investigation, involving both elicited and naturalistic, spontaneous material.

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Rizzi, Luigi (1997), “The fine structure of the left periphery”, in: Liliane M. Haegeman (ed.), Elements of grammar. Handbook of generative syntax, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 281−337. Rizzi, Luigi (2001), “On the position ‘int(errogative)’ in the left periphery of the clause”, in: Guglielmo Cinque/Giampaolo Salvi (edd.), Current issues in Italian Syntax. Essays offered to Lorenzo Renzi, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 287–296. Rizzi, Luigi (2004a), “Locality and left periphery”, in: Adriana Belletti (ed.), Structures and beyond. The cartography of syntactic structures, vol. 3, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 223–251. Rizzi, Luigi (2004b), “On the form of chains. Criterial positions and ECP effects”, Ms., University of Siena, http://www.ciscl.unisi.it/pubblicazioni.htm (06.05.2016). Roggia, Carlo E. (2006), “Costruzioni marcate tra scritto e parlato. La frase scissa”, Cenobio 55, 222–230. Rooth, Mats (1985), Association with focus, PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Rowlett, Paul (2006), The syntax of French, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Rouquier, Magali (2014), L’émergence des constructions clivées, pseudo-clivées et liées en français, Paris, Garnier. Samek-Lodovici, Vieri (2001), “Crosslinguistic typologies in optimality theory”, in: Géraldine Legendre/ Jane Grimshaw/Sten Vikner (edd.), Optimality-theoretic syntax, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 315–354. Samek-Lodovici, Vieri (2009), “Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses”, in: Andreas Dufter/ Daniel Jacob (edd.), Focus and background in Romance languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 333–357. Sedano, Mercedes (1990), Hendidas y otras construcciones con ser en el habla de Caracas, Caracas, Universidad Central de Venezuela. Selkirk, Elizabeth O. (1984), Phonology and syntax. The relation between sound and structure, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Sorace, Antonella (2011), “Pinning down the concept of ‘interface’ in bilingualism”, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1, 1–33. Sorace, Antonella/Filiaci, Francesca (2006), “Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian”, Second Language Research 22, 339–368. Sőrés, Anna/Marchello-Nizia, Christiane (2005), “Typologie diachronique: une nouvelle hypothèse pour le changement de type ‘OV’ > ‘VO’”, in: Gilbert Lazard/Claire Moyse-Faurie (edd.), Linguistique typologique, Lille, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 261–288. Stark, Elisabeth (1997), Voranstellungsstrukturen und ‘topic’-Markierung im Französischen. Mit einem Ausblick auf das Italienische, Tübingen, Narr. Toledo, Guillermo A. (1989), “Señales prosódicas del foco”, Revista Argentina de Lingüística 5, 205– 230. Torregrossa, Jacopo (2012), Encoding topic, focus and contrast. Informational notions at the interfaces, PhD dissertation, University of Verona. Uth, Melanie (2014), “Spanish preverbal subjects in contexts of narrow information focus. Noncontrastive focalization or epistemic-evidental marking?”, Grazer Linguistische Studien 81, 87–104. Valdés, Guadaloupe (2000), “Teaching heritage languages. An introduction for Slavic-languageteaching professionals”, in: Olga Kagan/Benjamin Rifkin (edd.), Learning and teaching of Slavic languages and cultures. Toward the 21st century, Bloomington, IN, Slavica, 375–403. Vallduví, Enric (2008), “L’oració com a unitat informativa”, in: Joan Solà/Maria-Rosa Lloret/Joan Mascarò/Manuel Pérez Saldanya (edd.), Gramàtica del català contemporani, vol. 1, Barcelona, Empúries, 1221–1279. Vanrell, Maria del Mar/Fernández Soriano, Olga (2013), “Variation at the interfaces in IberoRomance”, Catalan Journal of Linguistics 12, 253–282.

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Villa-García, Julio (2013), “On the status of preverbal subjects in Spanish. Evidence for a dedicated subject position”, in: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 42), http://www38.homepage.villanova.edu/julio.villa-garcia/Villa-GarciaNELS.pdf (06.05.2016). Villalba, Xavier (2008), “Exclamatives. A thematic guide with many questions and few answers”, Catalan Journal of Linguistics 7, 9–40. White, Lydia (2009), “Grammatical theory. Interfaces and L2 knowledge”, in: William C. Ritchie/Tej K. Bhatia (edd.), The new handbook of second language acquisition, Bingley, Emerald, 49–68. Zubizarreta, María Luisa (1998), Prosody, focus, and word order, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Zubizarreta, María Luisa (1999), “Las funciones informativas. Tema y foco”, in: Ignacio Bosque/ Violeta Demonte (edd.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, vol. 3: Entre la oración y el discurso. Morfología, Madrid, Espasa, 4215–4244. Zubizarreta, María Luisa/Nava, Emily (2011), “Encoding discourse-based meaning. Prosody vs. syntax. Implications for second language acquisition”, Lingua 121, 652–669.

Ana Maria Martins

15 VP and TP ellipsis: Sentential polarity and information structure Abstract: This paper focuses on two types of predicate ellipsis, namely Verbal Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), also known in the literature as verb-stranding ellipsis, and Tense Phrase Ellipsis (TPE), also called stripping or polarity ellipsis. It suggests that the polarity-encoding functional category ΣP is involved in the licensing of both types of predicate ellipsis, but only VPE requires that the verb be morphosyntactically associated with the Σ-head. The more restrictive licensing conditions imposed on VPE, relative to TPE, explain its more restricted distribution across languages. At the same time, it allows us to account for the correlation between the availability of VPE and a particular type of (typologically rarer) answering system in which the bare verb constitutes the unmarked pattern of minimal polar affirmative answer. The paper then concentrates on comparing VP and TP ellipsis in one of the few Romance languages where both types of predicate ellipsis are allowed, viz. European Portuguese, and describes their different articulation with discourse and information structure. The fact that VPE and TPE might not be in free variation in European Portuguese is shown to be a consequence of the different information structure of the elliptical clause in each type of ellipsis. VPE is an instance of single focus (which can be assigned to different constituents) and is subject to a parallelism constraint on contrastive topic structures (Kertz 2013); TPE features double focus, on the polarity word and on the constituent preceding it. Keywords: VP ellipsis, TP ellipsis, polarity, answering system, information structure, topic, focus

1 Introduction1 This chapter deals with two types of predicate ellipsis, namely VP Ellipsis (VPE) and TP Ellipsis (TPE, here restricted to what has been known in the literature as stripping or polarity ellipsis). The chapter comprises five sections. In section 2, it is shown that languages that allow VPE and languages that bar it display different patterns of the polar answering system. In the languages with VPE the verb by itself may express confirmation or denial, behaving as a polar word in specific pragmatic contexts. Hence, observing the role of VPE in the domain of polar answering systems reveals 1 Research for this work was funded by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within the project WOChWEL (PTDC/CLE-LIN/121707/2010).

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something about the interface between syntax and semantics/pragmatics. A number of empirical arguments from different languages are put forth in section 2 to support the idea that VPE and the grammatical expression of polarity in the context of answering systems are closely related. Section 3 deals with the different distributions of VPE and TPE across languages. Goldberg (2005) has made the observation that VPE (which she calls V-stranding VP ellipsis) is typologically rare. Also in the Romance area VPE is severely restricted in its distribution while TPE is widespread across the Romance languages. It is suggested that the solution to this puzzling contrast is to be found in the relation between VP/TP ellipsis and the grammatical encoding of sentential polarity. The crosslinguistic variation with respect to the availability of VPE would depend on the interaction between clause structure and the ± V-relatedness of the polarity-encoding head Sigma (Σ) – also named Pol(arity). Specifically it will be asserted that only languages displaying verb movement to Σ, or some alternative strategy leading to merger between Σ and the verb, license VPE. As for TPE, different authors have proposed that it is licensed by ΣP, under the condition that its Spec, its head, or both be filled with polarity particles. However, crucially, licensing of TPE does not require that Σ and the verb merge together, and this seems to be the reason why TPE is more widespread across languages than VPE. Section 4 focuses on a language that licenses both VPE and TPE, namely European Portuguese (EPor.), and describes some cases where the two types of ellipsis are not in free variation. The relevant facts have gone unnoticed in the literature and are discussed here by bringing information structure into consideration. Thus section 4 deals with syntax-discourse interface phenomena starting from the observation of specific grammaticality contrasts between VPE and TPE. The relevant contrasts will be explained as a consequence of the different information structure of the elliptical clauses in VPE and TPE. The former is an instance of single focus (that can be assigned to different constituents); the latter features double focus on both the polarity word and the constituent preceding it. Section 5 concludes the paper. Ellipsis in natural language is an extensive and extremely complex topic. In this chapter I will be approaching only a few specific aspects of the subject and will refer to the literature that provides the information needed to contextualize the issues under discussion. In particular, I will disregard the variation in size of the ellipsis site in VPE verbal complexes, will not go into a detailed characterization of the set of syntactic contexts where VPE, on the one hand, and TPE, on the other, can occur, and I will not deal with subordination structures (cf., on these matters, Matos 1992; 2003; 2013). Moreover, I will implicitly assume that VPE and TPE represent fully articulated syntactic structures whose silent components arise as a result of postsyntactic phonological deletion, although this is a matter of debate in the literature. Cf. Merchant (2004; 2013b), van Craenenbroeck/Merchant (2013), and Gengel (2013) for an up-to-date, thorough review of the topic and bibliographies.

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2 VPE and polarity: The interface between syntax and semantics/pragmatics Farkas/Bruce (2010) develop a model of conversational update conceived to deal with different types of reactions to assertions/polar questions and concomitantly capture the interplay between pragmatics and the grammatical expression of polarity. The model distinguishes between initiating assertions and responding assertions. The former are associated with absolute polarity features only, while the latter also bear relative polarity features (cf. Pope 1976 for a comparable proposal). In the system devised by Farkas/Bruce (2010), the absolute polarity features are [+] and [–], roughly corresponding to aff(irmation)/neg(ation) in current syntactic literature. The relative polarity features, on the other hand, are [same] and [reverse], giving rise to confirmations and reversals/denials. The relevant set of features is represented in Table 1. The examples in (1) and (2) below, taken from Farkas/Bruce (2010), illustrate the available combinations of relative and absolute polarity features in responding moves, which are either reactions to assertions or reactions to polar questions. Table 1: Absolute and relative polarity features, Farkas/Bruce (2010) Absolute polarity features: [ + ] [–] Relative polarity features: [same] [reverse]

(1) Anne: Sam is home. / Is Sam home? Ben: Yes, he is. [same, +] (positive confirming assertion) Connie: No, he isn’t. [reverse, –] (negative reversing assertion) (2) Anne: Sam is not home. / Is Sam not home? Ben: Yes, he is. [reverse, +] (positive reversing assertion) Connie: No, he isn’t. [same, –] (negative confirming assertion) The model of polarity features displayed in Table 1 is particularly useful in describing the answering systems of the world’s languages. When we compare the different Romance languages on this basis, it becomes clear that VPE is a central ingredient of the answering systems of the languages that license this particular type of predicate ellipsis. The relevant contrast becomes clear when we compare, for example, Portuguese and Spanish. Bare verb answers constitute the unmarked type of minimal affirmative answer in Portuguese, as illustrated in (3), but are not allowed

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in Spanish, as exemplified in (4).2 Spanish resorts to the affirmative polarity word sí, whose counterpart in Portuguese is also available as an alternative to the bare verb to express confirmations, but not to express reversals/denials, as shown by the contrast between (3-B-c) and (5-B-c). Only the verb can play that role in Portuguese, as shown by (5-B-b), to be contrasted with Spanish (6-B-b). Note that in Spanish (6-B-c) the affirmative word by itself can express denial (given the right intonation). Moreover, when the verb appears in an extended answer, the presence of the object clitic is obligatory, signalling that VPE is impossible.3 With respect to the facts illustrated in (3) to (6), Galician patterns with Portuguese whereas Catalan, Italian, French, and Romanian pattern with Spanish. That is to say, Portuguese and Galician license VPE and centrally resort to it in order to express reactions to assertions and polar questions. Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and French, on the other hand, cannot license VPE and use other strategies to organize their answering systems. (3) Por. [A] a. O João {comprou / tinha comprado} um carro? a car the João bought.3SG / had bought ‘Did João buy a car?’ / ‘Had João bought a car?’ [B] b. Comprou. / Tinha. (positive confirming assertion) bought.3SG had.3SG c. Sim. (positive confirming assertion) yes ‘Yes, {he did/he had}.’

2 The investigation of Santos (2009) on ellipsis, syntax, and discourse in the acquisition of European Portuguese shows that children produce VPE as answers to yes-no questions from a very early age. This fact confirms that the connection between VPE and the polar answering system is a central property of the Portuguese grammar. 3 In Portuguese the counterpart of Spanish (6-B-c) displays VPE, as exemplified in (i). Although the presence of object clitics in the answer to (i-A) would not make it truly ungrammatical, it would be strongly unnatural. (i) Por. [A]

[B]

a.

O João comprou o carro à filha? to-the daughter the João bought.3SG the car ‘Did João buy her daughter a car?’

b. Sim, yes

comprou. bought.3SG

c. #Sim, comprou-lho. yes bought.3SG -her-DAT-it-ACC ‘Yes, he did.’

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(4) Sp. [A] a. Juan se {compró / ha comprado} un coche? a car Juan SE bought.3SG / has bought [B] b. *Compró. / *Ha. bought.3SG has c. Sí. (positive confirming assertion) yes ‘Yes, {he did/he had}.’ (5) Por. [A] a. O João não comprou o carro, pois não? the João not bought.3SG the car POIS NEG ‘João didn’t buy a car (did he?)’ [B] b. Comprou. (positive reversing assertion) bought.3SG c. *Sim. yes ‘Yes, he did.’ (6) Sp. [A] a. Juan no se compró el coche, ¿verdad? true Juan not SE bought.3SG the car [B] b. *Compró. bought.3SG c. {Sí. / Sí, se lo compró.} (positive reversing assertion) yes/ yes SE it bought ‘Yes, he did.’ In responding assertions, verb reduplication is ordinarily used in European Portuguese and Galician to express emphatic affirmation as denial (cf. 7-B-a), a pattern not allowed in most Romance languages. Spanish, Catalan, and Italian, in contrast, display the sí que strategy, which is not a grammatical option in Portuguese (cf. 7-B-b). VPE is a necessary ingredient to make emphatic verb reduplication available, although it is not sufficient. In fact, European and Brazilian Portuguese both have VPE but only the former allows emphatic verb reduplication. The European Portuguese sentences with verb reduplication, like (7-B-a), display an overall rising intonation (with no prosodic break) and are monosentential structures, not repetitions involving two adjoined sentences. Cf. Martins (2007; 2013) for the relevant facts and discussion.4 4 Martins (2013) takes the exclusive features of responding assertions, that is, relative polarity features, to be grammatically encoded in the CP domain, whereas absolute polarity features are encoded in ƩP, the topmost functional projection in the IP domain. Thus the two sets of features are independently expressed by different functional heads, and all combinations of features from

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(7)

[A]

[You didn’t read this book, did you?]

Por. [B] a. Li (esse livro) li. (overall rising intonation) read-PST that book read-PST Sp.

b. Sí

que lo leí. that it read ‘Yes, I did read it.’

AFF

The availability of VPE is therefore closely tied to a specific type of polar answering system that supports structures with limited distribution across languages. In the Romance languages with VPE, the verb (associated with the functional head Σ) expresses the positive value of absolute polarity features in both contexts of confirmation and contexts of reversal/denial. In order to further clarify the connection between polarity and the type of ellipsis phenomena discussed in this paper, it will now be shown that language-internally the availability of VPE may be constrained in such a way that polar contrasts are clearly involved. Data from Cape Verdean, Hungarian, and Galician will be considered. Cape Verdean, a Portuguese-based creole language, allows VPE in answers to yes-no questions but disallows it in coordination environments. Thus the elliptic replies in (8) and (9) are the unmarked option for polar answers in Cape Verdean, in contrast with the ungrammaticality of the sentences in (9), which display VPE under coordination (Costa/Martins/Pratas 2012). Example (9) shows the deletion of both complements of the ditransitive verb da ‘give’, making clear that we are actually dealing with VPE, not with instances of null objects.5 Empirically, the grammaticality contrast between (8-B)/(9-B) and (10) seems unexpected since both polar questionanswer pairs and coordination structures are typical licensing contexts for VPE in the languages that allow it, like English and European Portuguese. Actually, the Cape Verdean facts reveal that the distinction between initiating assertions and responding assertions, as proposed by Farkas/Bruce (2010), may be relevant for VPE and a source of variation across languages in this domain. different sets are available. Moreover, it is hypothesized that whenever C bears relative polarity features either C or Ʃ must be phonologically realized, and thus have lexical content at some stage in the derivation. That is to say, relative polarity features induce, by hypothesis, a strong property (understood as a requirement for phonological realization) associated with at least one of the polarity-encoding heads, resulting in strong C or strong Ʃ (C* or Ʃ*, in the notation of Roberts 2001; 2004; Roberts/Roussou 2003). In minimal polar answers either C or Ʃ get phonologically expressed (e.g. in European Portuguese sim ‘yes’ answers lexicalize C while bare verb answers lexicalize Ʃ). The third logical option is attributing the strong/PF property to C and Ʃ, which must then both be given phonological content. On syntactic grounds, this third option can, in principle, be freely implemented but it is expected to result in pragmatically adequate utterances only when the relevant structures bear the relative polarity feature [reverse] and, in particular, are reversals of a previous assertion, thus expressing emphatic polarity. 5 As shown in Pratas (2002), null objects in Cape Verdean are restricted to reflexive contexts.

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(8) Cape Verdean [A] Bu kunpra kel livru li? you buy that book here ‘Did you buy this book?’ [B] a. Sin, N kunpra. yes I buy ‘Yes, I did.’ b. Nau, N ka kunpra. no I NEG buy ‘No, I didn’t.’ (9) Cape Verdean [A] Bu da Manel livrus? you give Manel books ‘Did you give Manel the books?’ [B] a. Sin, N da. yes, I give ‘Yes, I did.’ b. Nau, N ka da. no I NEG give ‘No, I didn’t.’ (10) Cape Verdean a. *Bu kunpra un livru nobu y Maria tanbé kunpra. you buy one book new and Maria also buy ‘You bought a new book and Maria did too.’ b. *Juau ka odja Manel y Maria tanbé ka see Manel and Maria also NEG Juau NEG ‘Juau didn’t see Manel and Maria didn’t either.’ c. *Bu ka kunpra un livru nobu mas buy one book new but you NEG ‘You didn’t buy a new book but Maria did.’

odja. see

Maria kunpra. Maria buy

Hungarian is genetically and typologically unrelated to Cape Verdean. Nevertheless, a variety of Hungarian described by Lipták (2013) displays exactly the same type of contrast that can be observed in Cape Verdean. In the relevant Hungarian dialect, the polar answers in (11) and (12),6 a typical polarity-focus context, license VPE, but the asyndetic coordination contexts in (13) do not. As shown by Lipták (2013), two different dialects are actually found in Hungarian, one of which behaves like

6 Examples taken from Lipták (2013, 73, 85).

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Portuguese in licensing VPE under polar answers or coordination while the other behaves like Cape Verdean in licensing VPE in a similarly restricted manner. The author analyses Hungarian “V-stranding in polarity contexts” as “vP ellipsis, licensed at a distance by Pol0 ” (cf. Aelbrecht 2010). An analysis of the same kind can account for VPE in Portuguese and other languages (cf. section 3).7 (11) Hungarian [A] János ˈmeg hívta a szomszédokat (?) Janós VM invited the neighbours.ACC ‘Janós invited the neighbours. / Did Janós invite the neighbours?’ [B] Igen, ˈmeg hívta. yes VM invited ‘Yes, he did.’ (12) Hungarian [A] János ˈnem hívta meg a szomszédokat (?) Janós not invited VM the neighbours.ACC ‘Janós did not invite the neighbours. Did János not invite the neighbours?’ [B] De, ˈmeg hívta. DE VM invited ‘He did.’ (13) Hungarian a. (*) János meg hívta a szomszédokat. Mari is meg hívta. János VM invited the neighbours.ACC Mari also VM invited ‘János invited the neighbours. Mari also did.’ b. (*) János meg evett egy banánt. Mari is meg evett. János VM ate a banana.ACC Mari also VM ate ‘János ate a banana. Mari also did.’ (*) Tegnap találkozott János és Mari. Ma is találkozott. János and Mari today also met.3SG yesterday met.3SG ‘Yesterday János and Mari met. Today they also did.’ Finally, Galician seems to display a pattern similar to Cape Verdean and the relevant dialect of Hungarian for some speakers, whereas other speakers show the symmetric pattern also found in Portuguese (with coordination and question-answer contexts behaving similarly). For all speakers of Galician, bare verb answers to yes-no questions constitute an unmarked option for positive confirmations and reversals, just like in Portuguese. However, in coordination contexts, younger Galician speakers disfavour VPE, so

7 In examples (11)–(13), the abbreviation VM stands for verbal modifier.

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even if (14a) is considered possible, it is classified as unusual, and (14b), with the verbal complement realized by the third person accusative clitic, is preferred. There seems to be a change in progress in Galician, with younger speakers restricting the licensing of VPE to polar answers.8 Hence, Portuguese and Galician may behave in exactly opposite ways relative to the preference for (14a) or (14b), depending on the Galician dialect under consideration. In fact, the counterpart of (14b) in Portuguese is possible but quite odd. (14) Gal. a. (#) Eu ainda non vira ese filme, pero Xoán xa vira/pero Xoán víra. I yet not saw that movie but Xoán already saw/but Xoán saw b.

Eu ainda non vira ese filme, pero Xoán xa o vira/pero Xoán vírao. I yet not saw that movie but Xoán already it saw/but Xoán saw-it ‘I haven’t seen that movie yet, but Xoán (already) has.’

As a general conclusion to this section, it is relevant to underline that there seems to be a correlation across languages between the availability of VPE and a particular configuration of the polar answering system, which can be observed well beyond the Romance area (cf. Jones 1999 for Welsh; Holmberg 2001; 2003a; 2003b; 2007 for Finnish; Vennemann 2009 and Holmberg 2013 for English). In the languages with VPE – a syntactic pattern involving silent constituents – both the semantics of positive polarity and the pragmatics of confirmation and denial can be expressed by the verb in articulation with the functional architecture of the clause.9 This observation opens an avenue for future investigations exploring in a detailed way the polar answering systems of particular languages or groups of languages and their relation to certain types of ellipsis, as well as other properties of grammatical systems. Because saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ arises very early in language acquisition, all that it implies with respect to mastering the functional structure of the clause and other dimensions of grammar may well have a decisive influence on the subsequent acquisition of other linguistic capabilities.

3 An integrated analysis for VPE and TPE: Why is VPE typologically rarer? The key assumption in this section is that the functional category Σ (Laka 1990), which encodes polarity, lies behind linguistic variation across languages and grammatical structures in regard to VPE (Martins 1994; 2006; 2013; Costa/Martins/Pratas 8 I am indebted to Rosario Álvarez, Henrique Monteagudo, and Marta Negro for their input on the Galician data, although I am unable to do justice here to all their valuable insights. 9 Polar verbal answers may involve TP ellipsis, but still verbal answers seem to arise as an unmarked option only in languages that also allow VP ellipsis. Cf. Holmberg (2001; 2003a; 2003b) for Finnish; Kato (2012) and Costa/Martins/Pratas (2012) for Brazilian Portuguese.

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2012). It is also assumed that beyond the configurations that obligatorily involve Σ, the presence/absence of Σ in clause structure, its lower or higher position, and its ±V-relatedness are matters of parametric variation across languages and across structures within a single language.10 The term ‘V-relatedness’ is used in a descriptive pre-theoretical way to refer to the occurrence/absence of V-movement with respect to a particular functional category.11 As happens with V-relatedness in other functional categories, this is subject to parametric variation. As such, V is attracted to Σ in Portuguese (moving there or merging with it under adjacency), but not in Spanish or Catalan, for example. Bearing these ingredients in mind, Table 2 (adapted from Costa/Martins/Pratas 2012) illustrates how the restricted availability of VPE across languages may be derived. The central idea is that only merger between V and Σ (be it syntactic or postsyntactic) can license VPE. Table 2: VPE in Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Cape Verdean, and English

Portuguese

Spanish, Catalan

VPE is licensed?

Yes

ΣP is projected?

Cape Verdean

English

No

Yes but restricted to polar answers

Yes but restricted to AUX verbs

Yes

Yes

Yes in polar answers only

Yes

Position of ΣP

above TP

above TP

below TP

below TP

V merges with Σ? (verb movement or morphological merger under adjacency)

Yes

No

Yes in polar answers only

Yes with AUX verbs only

Some clarifications with respect to Table 2 are in order. As for the structural position of ΣP in English, I am following Laka (1990) in placing ΣP below TP, whereas in Romance ΣP dominates TP (on Cape Verdean, cf. Costa/Martins/Pratas 2012). What should become clear from the comparison offered in Table 2 is that the absence or restricted allowance of VPE correlates with the absence or limited availability of merger between V and Σ (resulting from V-movement to Σ or some alternative strategy). So, in Cape Verdean, for example, VPE is not licensed when Σ is not projected, thus there is no place for merger between the verb and Σ. In English, on the other hand, 10 But note that Laka (1990) takes the presence of ΣP in answers to yes-no questions as an invariant feature of natural language. 11 It will not be discussed in this paper how to deal with crosslinguistic variation with respect to Vmovement under a theoretical perspective.

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the availability of merger between a verbal head and Σ is limited to AUX verbs.12 It is crucial, in this context, that Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan all display verb movement to T, which shows that T(ense) is not the functional category behind the variation exhibited by these languages relative to VPE (but cf. Cyrino/Matos 2005 and Rouveret 2012 for a different view).13 As for the licensing of TP ellipsis, it has been proposed by different authors that TPE in Romance languages is licensed by ΣP, under the condition that its Spec, its head, or both be filled with polarity particles (cf. Matos 1992 for Portuguese; López 1999; Vicente 2006; 2010 for Spanish; Busquets 2006 for Catalan; Amanda 2009 for French, among others).14 Also Lipták (2013) makes a similar proposal to account for TPE in Hungarian. The representation in (15) below is taken from Busquets (2006) and illustrates the intended licensing configuration for TPE.15 The different polarity particles usually exclude each other.16

12 English and Cape Verdean differ as to the strategy implemented to license the V-related Σ-head: Cape Verdean has V-to-Σ, English has Σ-to-T with the modal auxiliaries and V-to-Σ-to-T with the auxiliaries have and be (respectively, perfective and progressive/passive). The difference might be a consequence of the distinct nature of English auxiliaries and Cape Verdean TMA markers. VPE is restricted to auxiliaries in English, because only these move out (or are merged out) of the VP domain. Cf. Lobeck (1995), Merchant (2001), among others. 13 Cyrino/Matos (2005) take the Licensing Condition of VPE to be (i) below, and the relevant functional heads to be T(ense) and Asp(ect). Differences between languages depend on the nature of Asp, which may or may not be a licenser and may or may not block licensing by T. (i) In VP ellipsis the elliptical verbal predicate is licensed under local c-command by the lexically filled functional head with V-features that merges with it. In English and Portuguese, Asp is [+predicative] and an extension of vP (i.e. an extended vP projection). Therefore AspP does not count as an intervener between T and vP and VPE is allowed. Rouveret’s (2012) account of VPE relies on Chomsky’s theory of phases. The author proposes that only phase heads can license VPE and specifically takes v to be the licenser. As for the contrast between languages that display VPE and those that do not, Rouveret (2012) defends the idea that in the former the uninterpretable [tense] feature of the phase head v is valued phase-internally, at the v-level, whereas in the latter it is not. This is because Tense is featurally represented on the v head only in the languages that license VPE (a morphosyntactic factor underlying language diversity). The effect of the presence of [tense] on v is that (finite) inflected forms are morphologically/ featurally complete when the vP phase is completed. Rouveret (2012) concludes that the morphosyntactic dimension must be part of any account of VPE. Cf. also Rouveret (1989) and Johnson (2013). 14 For a different type of TP ellipsis, referred to as Modal Ellipsis or Null Complement Anaphora (NCA), cf. Dagnac (2010) for French, Spanish, and Italian, Brucart (1999) for Spanish, Depiante (2000; 2001) for Spanish and Italian, and Cyrino/Matos (2006) and Gonçalves/Matos (2009) for Portuguese. Cf. also Saab (2008; 2010) for a thorough discussion of TPE and references. 15 In the languages where ΣP is low in the functional architecture of the clause, being projected below TP, like in English and Cape Verdean, TP ellipsis is of course not licensed by the Σ-head, but instead presumably by C (cf. Aelbrecht 2010 for references and discussion). 16 However a doubly filled ΣP is not excluded, as shown by the availability of também não (‘also not’) in Portuguese, for example.

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(15)

Because TP ellipsis, in opposition to VPE, does not depend on the V-relatedness of Σ in a particular language, it displays more relaxed licensing requirements and a broader availability across languages. Examples (16) and (17) below illustrate the contrast between Portuguese, a language that displays both types of predicate ellipsis, and Catalan, which disallows VPE but permits TPE. In both languages (as more generally in Romance) the verb moves to T, therefore the verb is deleted under TP ellipsis but realized under VP ellipsis, which allows us to clearly distinguish between the manifestations of the two types of predicate ellipsis. In the examples below, Portuguese in contrast to Catalan permits the ellipsis site in the second member of the coordination structure to include or exclude the verb, because it allows both TP ellipsis (where the verb in T is deleted) and VP ellipsis (where the verb in T is phonologically realized). Spanish patterns with Catalan, so that the contrast exemplified below between Catalan and Portuguese also holds between Spanish and Portuguese. (16) Por.

a. Bach é difícil de interpretar e Mozart também. Bach is hard to play, and Mozart also.

(TPE ok)

b. Bach é difícil de interpretar e Mozart também é. (VPE ok) Bach is hard to play and Mozart also is. ‘Bach is hard to play, and Mozart (is) too.’ (17) Cat. a. Bach és difícil d’interpretar, i Mozart també. Bach is hard to.play, and Mozart also ‘Bach is hard to play, and Mozart (is) too.’ b. *Bach és difícil d’interpretar, i Mozart també Bach is hard to.play and Mozart too

(TPE ok)

es. (VPE *) is

For VPE to be licensed in (16b), the verb must merge with Σ (the V-relatedness property), which is the case in Portuguese but not in Catalan and most Romance languages. Thus (16b) is a well-formed sentence in Portuguese, but (17b) is ungrammatical in Catalan.

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4 Some contrasts between VPE and TPE in European Portuguese: The interface between syntax and discourse The current section will be focused on a language that allows both VPE and TPE, concretely European Portuguese. The analysis proposed in the previous section, linking the licensing of both types of predicate ellipsis to the functional projection ƩP, might lead us to think that VPE in European Portuguese is just a particular instance of TPE where the verb escapes the ellipsis site by moving to Ʃ (a grammatical option excluded in most Romance languages). However, it will now be shown that VPE and TPE do not always alternate freely, as soon as coordination contexts are carefully observed. The facts to be described will be derived from the proposal that VPE and TPE do not share the same properties relative to information structure. So while in (16), repeated below as (18), both VPE and TPE are possible, pairs like (19) and (20) illustrate those cases where only one of the constructions is used. The contrasts can be accounted for building on work by Kertz (2010) and Matos (1992). (18) Por. a. Bach é difícil de interpretar e Mozart também. Bach is hard to play, and Mozart also

(TPE ok)

b. Bach é difícil de interpretar e Mozart também Bach is hard to play and Mozart also ‘Bach is hard to play, and Mozart (is) too.’

é. (VPE ok) is

(19) Por: a. Gosto de molhar a cabeça mas o guarda-chuva não.17 (TPE ok) the head but the umbrella NEG like.1SG to wet b.*Gosto de molhar a cabeça mas o guarda-chuva não gosto. the head but the umbrella not like like.1SG to wet ‘I do not mind getting my hair wet, but I don’t want to get my umbrella wet.ʼ (VPE *)18 (20) Por. a. Nada se sabe do João, mas a Maria sabe. (VPE ok) nothing SE knows of-the João but the Maria knows (SE = impersonal subject clitic) b.*Nada se sabe do João, mas a Maria sim. (TPE *) nothing SE knows of-the João but the Maria AFF (SE = impersonal subject clitic) ‘People don’t know anything about João, but Maria does.’ 17 The sentence was ironically uttered by a European Portuguese speaker in a situation where it was lightly raining and she had an umbrella but would not open it. 18 Cf. example (27a), below, and the comment on the possible marginal interpretation for that sentence.

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4.1 VP ellipsis: A topic-comment parallelism constraint on contrastive topic structures Kertz (2013) shows that antecedent mismatch effects found in VPE can be predicted based on the information structure of the clause containing the ellipsis. Specifically, she proposes the information-structural constraint in (21) in order to solve the puzzle posed by the paradigm in (22). While the contrast between (22a) and (22b) suggests that voice mismatch is behind the difference in acceptability between the two sentences, the full acceptability of (22c) undermines this line of reasoning.19 (21)

The contrasting arguments which ‘anchor’ a contrastive topic relation must be realized as sentence-level topics.

(22) a. The driver reported the incident, and the pedestrian did too. [report the incident] b. #The incident was reported by the driver, and the pedestrian did too. [report the incident] c. The incident was reported by the driver, although he didn’t really need to. [report the incident] Positing a constraint that enforces topic-comment parallelism in contrastive topic structures, Kertz’s analysis goes as follows.20 Sentence (22a) satisfies the constraint in (21) since the contrasting arguments “the driver” and “the pedestrian” are each the topic of their own clause. In (22b), on the other hand, although “the driver” and “the pedestrian” are still in a contrasting relation, “the driver” in the antecedent clause is not a topic, so that the relevant information-structural constraint is violated. What about (22c)? Here you have a structure without contrasting arguments (which is typically the case in VPE structures with coreferential subjects). So there is no contrastive topic in the clause displaying ellipsis, with the result that the constraint in (21) is irrelevant (i.e. it applies vacuously) and the sentence is well formed. Kertz (2013) also shows that when there is a contrastive topic in the VPE-clause it bears focus stress while otherwise focus stress falls on the auxiliary verb, as exemplified in (23).

19 On the issue of voice mismatch in VPE, cf. Sag (1976) and Merchant (2013a). 20 Kertz (2013) takes (21) to be a soft constraint subject to variation (e.g. among speakers) in the extent to which its application is enforced or violable. The intuition underlying (21) and discussion of the relevant cases is already found in earlier works such as Kehler (2000), Kim/Runner (2009; 2011), Konietzko/Winkler (2010), and Tanaka (2011).

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(23) a. The driver reported the incident, and [the pedestrian]F did too. b. The incident was reported by the driver, although he didn’t really [need]F to. Bearing in mind the insights of Kertz (2013), who deals with VPE in English, I will now consider VPE structures in European Portuguese and show that they fully confirm the workings of the constraint proposed by Kertz.21 Hence, information structure gives us the conceptual tools to understand why VPE is sometimes excluded and contributes to clarifying the role played by ellipsis at the interface between syntax and discourse. When the required parallelism between the topic-comment configurations of the two conjuncts of coordination structures is fulfilled, structures with VPE are well formed no matter whether the topic is the subject or a dislocated object, as shown in (24) and (25), respectively. Otherwise, ill-formed structures may arise, as in (26), whose ungrammaticality is to be compared with the grammaticality of (25). In the well-formed sentences shown in (24) and (25), focus stress is assigned to the contrastive topic, which is semantically an aboutness topic but informationally, due to contrastiveness, the most prominent constituent in its clause. (24) Por. a. As roseiras têm sido regadas todos os the rose-bushes have been watered all the dias e [as árvores]F também têm. days and the trees also have ‘The rose bushes have been watered every day, and the fruit trees have too.’ b. O marido tinha oferecido flores à Maria the husband had offered flowers to-the Maria também tinha. e [a mãe]F and the mother also had ‘Her husband had offered flowers to Maria, and her mother had too.’ c. O João leva sempre os filhos à escola the João takes always the kids to-the school e [o Pedro]F também leva. and the Pedro also takes ‘João always drives his kids to school, and Pedro does too.’

21 All the Portuguese data offered in this section are based on my own judgements. Since Kertz’s constraint in (21) is considered to be violable, it is conceivable that the sharp grammaticality contrasts that I will be discussing here may not be shared in the same way by all Portuguese speakers.

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(25) Por. a. As roseiras, o jardineiro tinha regado e the rose-bushes the gardener had watered and [as àrvores]F também tinha. the trees also had ‘The rose bushes, the gardener watered, and the fruit trees, he did too.’ b. Livros, o Pedro tem oferecido à Maria books the Pedro has offered to-the Maria mas [romances/flores]F não tem. but novels/flowers not has ‘Books, Pedro has been offering to Maria, but novels/flowers, he has not.’ c. À escola, ele leva sempre os filhos e to-the school he takes always the kids and [à natação]F também leva. to-the swimming also takes ‘To school, he always drives his kids, and to swimming, he does too.’ (26) Por. a. *?O jardineiro tinha regado as roseiras e as the gardener had watered the rose-bushes and the árvores também tinha. trees also had ‘The gardener had watered the rose bushes and also the fruit trees.’ b. *O Pedro tem oferecido livros à Maria mas the Pedro has offered books to-the Maria but romances/flores não tem. novels/flowers not has ‘Pedro has been offering books to Maria, but not novels/flowers.’ c. *?O João leva sempre os filhos à escola e the João takes always the kids to-the school and à natação também leva. to-the swimming also takes ‘João always drives his kids to school and to swimming too.’ A further example of the relevant contrast is given in (27). The only interpretation marginally available for (27a) is the schizophrenic one where my liking for movies disappears on Sundays.22 Such interpretative oddity is not found in (27b), where the information-structural constraint enunciated in (21) above is satisfied. 22 Under the ‘schizophrenic’ interpretation, the sentence is presumably a case of Null Complement Anaphora, not VPE. (Cf. Hankamer/Sag 1976; Brucart 1999; Depiante 2000; 2001; Cyrino/Matos 2006; Gonçalves/Matos 2009.)

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(27) Por. a. #Gosto de ir ao cinema mas ao domingo não gosto. like.1SG of going to the cinema but on Sunday not like.1SG ‘I love the movies but not on Sundays.’ b. Ao sábado, gosto de ir ao cinema mas ao on Saturday like.1SG of going to-the cinema but on domingo não gosto. Sunday not like.1SG ‘I like going to the movies on Saturdays but not on Sundays.’ VPE structures are instances of single (prosodic) focus. When the subjects of the two conjoined clauses are referentially disjoint, they are interpreted as contrastive topics that bear focus prominence. When the subjects of the two conjoined clauses are coreferential and there is no topicalized object or modifier, the structures do not form a contrastive topic. In such cases, focus prominence falls on a (non-repeated) auxiliary or modifier, as exemplified in (28) and (29), respectively. In the absence of a contrastive topic, Kertz’s condition enunciated in (21) above applies vacuously and VPE is available, as the well-formedness of the sentences in (28) and (29) shows.23 (28) Por. a. Ele está sempre a dar-lhe chocolates, mas [não pode]F dar. he is always to give-him chocolates but not can give ‘He is always buying him chocolates, but he should not.’ b. Ela não tem tomado o xarope todos os dias, mas [deveria]F tomar. she not has taken the medicine all the days but should take ‘She is not taking her medicine every day, but she should.’

c. Ele rega as roseiras todos os dias e [tem]F de regar. he waters the rose-bushes all the days and has to water ‘He waters the rose bushes every day, and he has to.’ d. Ainda não vendemos a casa nem o carro, mas [vamos]F vender. the house nor the car but go-1PL sell yet not sell-1PL ‘We haven’t sold our apartment and car yet, but we will.’ (29) Por. a. Tenho estado em casa do meu filho, mas [amanhã]F não estou. have-1SG been in house of-the my son but tomorrow not am ‘I’ve been staying with my son, but tomorrow I will not.’ b. Ele leva o filho à escola mas não leva [sempre]F. he takes the son to-the school but not takes always ‘He usually drives his son to school, but he doesn’t always.’ 23 In verbal answers to yes-no questions there are no cases of mismatched ellipsis because in the context of polar question-answer pairs there are no contrastive topics to which the topic-comment parallelism constraint would apply.

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That TPE is not constrained by similar information-structural conditions to VPE is shown in (31) and (32). The examples demonstrate that TPE is possible (cf. examples (b)) where VPE is excluded or marginal (cf. examples (a), repeated from above). In the next subsection it will be proposed that TPE creates a double-focus structure, with both the polar word and the constituent preceding it (in the clause containing the ellipsis) being assigned focus. Because TPE is not associated with a topiccomment structure, it always escapes the topic-comment parallelism constraint on contrastive topic structures as formulated by Kertz (2013). (30) Por. a. *?O jardineiro tinha regado as roseiras e as the gardener had watered the rose bushes and the

árvores também tinha. (VPE) trees also had b. O jardineiro tinha regado as roseiras e as the gardener had watered the rose bushes and the árvores também. (TPE) trees also ‘The gardener had watered the rose bushes and also the fruit trees.’ (31) Por. a. *O Pedro tem oferecido livros à Maria mas the Pedro has offered books to-the Maria but romances/flores não tem. (VPE) novels/flowers not has b. O Pedro tem oferecido livros à Maria mas the Pedro has offered books to-the Maria but romances/flores não. (TPE) novels/flowers NEG ‘Pedro has been giving Maria books, but not novels/flowers.’ (32) Por. a. *?O João leva sempre os filhos à escola e the João takes always the kids to-the school and à natação também leva. (VPE) to-the swimming also takes b. O João leva sempre os filhos à escola e the João takes always the kids to-the school and à natação também. (TPE) to-the swimming also ‘João always drives his kids to school and to swimming too.’

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4.2 TP ellipsis: The disjoint reference condition on contrasted constituents Let us start by observing some pairs of sentences showing exclusion of TPE in contrast with the availability of VPE. The common denominator of all the examples seems to be that there is some referential overlapping between the non-polar constituents contrasted in the relevant structures, namely: the universal quantifier or generic impersonal subject and Maria in (33) and (34), the first person plural subject and Pedro in (35) and (36), and the compound subject Maria and Afonso and Maria in (37). (33) Por. a. Ninguém gosta do João, mas a Maria gosta. (VPE) nobody likes of-the João but the Maria likes b. *?Ninguém gosta do João, mas a Maria sim. (TPE) nobody likes of-the João but the Maria AFF ‘Nobody likes João, but Maria does.’ (34) Por. a. Nada se sabe do João, mas a Maria sabe. (VPE) nothing SE knows of-the João but the Maria knows (SE = impersonal subject clitic) b. *Nada se sabe do João, mas a Maria sim. (TPE) nothing SE knows of-the João but the Maria AFF (SE = impersonal subject clitic) ‘People don’t know anything about João, but Maria does.’ (35) Por. a. A gente gosta do João na nossa turma, mas o we like of-the João in-the our class but the Pedro não gosta. (TPE) Pedro not likes b. *?A gente gosta do João na nossa turma, mas o we like of-the João in-the our class but the Pedro não. (VPE) Pedro NEG ‘We (do) like João in our class, but Pedro does not.’ (Pedro is one of us) (36) Por. a. A gente gosta do João na nossa turma, e o we like of-the João in-the our class and the Pedro também gosta. (VPE) Pedro also likes

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b. *A gente gosta do João na nossa turma, e o we like of-the João in-the our class and the Pedro também. (TPE) Pedro also ‘We (do) like João in our class and Pedro does too.’ (Pedro is one of us)

o Afonso não tiveram um filho, (37) Por. a. A Mariai e the Maria and the Afonso not had a child mas a Mariai teve. (VPE) but the Maria had o Afonso não tiveram um filho, b. *A Mariai e the Maria and the Afonso not had a child mas a Mariai sim. (TPE) but the Maria AFF ‘Maria and Afonso didn’t have a child (with each other) but Maria did.’ As soon as the referential overlapping is undone, the TPE structures become acceptable, as illustrated in (38). (38) Por. a. Ninguém gosta do João, mas os gatos sim. nobody likes of-the João but the cats AFF ‘Nobody likes João, but cats do.’ b. A gente gosta do João na nossa turma, e o we like of-the João in-the our class and the professor também. professor also ‘We (do) like João in our class and the professor does too.’ c. A Maria e o Afonso não tiveram um filho, mas the Maria and the Afonso not had a child but a Joana sim. the Joana AFF ‘Maria and Afonso didn’t have a child but Joana did.’ We can thus formulate the following descriptive generalization (which does not apply to VPE, as the examples (a) in (33) to (37) above demonstrate): (39) Disjoint reference constraint The (non-polar) constituents contrasted in TPE structures cannot display overlapping reference in a set-subset relation.

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Matos (1992, and subsequent work) defends the thesis that in TPE the initial constituent of the elliptic clause is a contrastive focus, not a contrastive topic. The distinct information structure of VPE and TPE may thus be behind the empirical contrasts described in the current section. It may in turn account for the fact that while VPE must obey the topic-comment parallelism constraint enunciated in (21) above, TPE must instead obey a condition on disjoint reference between the two contrasted (non-polar) constituents, of which the one in the ellipsis clause is a contrastive focus. Therefore, it can be hypothesized that the (non-polar) contrastive focus in TPE has the property of requiring maximal contrast/distinctiveness in the sense that it cannot be a subset of the denotation of its correlate in the antecedent clause. This is so even when the contrasting terms are not arguments, like in (40) and (41) below, where disjoint temporal reference between the temporal modifiers is required in order to obtain legitimate TPE structures. Example (41) also shows, once more, the different behaviour of TPE and VPE in this respect.24 (40) Por. a. *Ouço sempre as notícias mas hoje não. but today NEG heard.1SG always the news ‘I always listen to the news but today I did not.’ b. Ouvi ontem as notícias, mas hoje não. but today NEG heard.1SG yesterday the news ‘I listened to the news yesterday but not today.’ (41) Por. Temos ouvido as notícias todos os dias mas all the days but have.1PL heard the news hoje/ontem não *(ouvimos). today/yesterday NEG *(heard.1PL) ‘We have been listening to the news every day, but today/yesterday we did not.’ Since the polarity particle in TPE also establishes a contrastive relation with the correlate polar features of the antecedent clause (be it under polar sameness or polar reversal), the information structure of TPE appears to be an instance of double focus, differently from the single focus structure of VPE (where, moreover, the constituent bearing focal stress is an aboutness contrastive topic): (42) Por. a. Eu não tenho regado as árvores e [o jardineiro]T-F I not have watered the trees and the gardener também não tem. also not has 24 The VPE counterpart of (40a) is fully grammatical: (i) Ouço sempre as notícias mas hoje não ouvi. but today not heard.PST.1SG heard.PRS .1SG always the news ‘I always listen to the news but today I did not.’

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b. Eu não tenho regado as árvores e [o jardineiro]F I not have watered the trees and the gardener [também não]F. NEG also ‘I haven’t watered the fruit trees and the gardener hasn’t either.’ In the double-focus structure displayed by TPE, as exemplified in (42b), the initial focus constituent has moved to a dedicated focus position in the left-periphery of the clause containing the ellipsis, while the polarity constituent is focalized in situ, i.e. in the domain of ΣP, where it is externally merged (cf. (15) above). So, although sentential polarity is a central ingredient of both VPE and TPE structures, only in the latter does focal stress fall on the polarity constituent. Moreover, although both VPE and TPE display leftward movement of a constituent that in this way escapes ellipsis, becomes contrastive, and attracts focus stress, only in VPE is this contrastive constituent a topic. Last but not least, VPE structures can be built without a contrastive topic (cf. (23b), (28) and (29) above) whereas in TPE the contrastive (non-polar) focus is an obligatory part of the construction. A syntactic test can be used to confirm that the left-peripheral constituent in VPE is a topic whereas in TPE it is a focus. The test consists in forcing into the relevant position a constituent that resists left-dislocation/topicalization but can undergo focus-movement, such as the negative quantifier nunca ‘never’ in (43) or the adverb sempre ‘always’ in (44).25 As expected, the sentences displaying TPE are perfectly fine but the sentences displaying VPE are excluded or marginal.26 Sentence (44b) is marginally acceptable, perhaps because it can be interpreted as equivalent to (44c). Recall that the configuration topic-comment is not obligatory for VPE (cf. (28) and (29) above). Anyway, the marginality of (44b) indicates that the focus constituent in VPE sentences like (28) and (29) above and (44c) below does not normally undergo focus-movement to the sentential left-periphery. (43) Por. a. Algumas vezes não faz os trabalhos de casa, mas sometimes not does the works of home but NUNCA não. (TPE) NEG never

25 That nunca ‘never’ and sempre ‘always’ cannot be topics is confirmed by the way they interact with clitic placement in European Portuguese. The words nunca and sempre obligatorily trigger proclisis in finite clauses, while topics are only compatible with enclisis. 26 On the distinction between English-type topicalization and focus-movement in European Portuguese, cf. Costa/Martins (2011).

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b. *Algumas vezes não faz os trabalhos de casa, mas sometimes not does the works of home but NUNCA não faz. (VPE) never not does ‘Sometimes she doesn’t do her homework, but it is not the case that she never does.’ (44) Por. a. Normalmente cozinho, mas sempre não. usually cook.1SG but always NEG b. ??Normalmente cozinho, mas sempre não cozinho. usually cook.1SG but always not cook.1SG c. Normalmente cozinho, mas não cozinho sempre. usually cook.1SG but not cook.1SG always ‘I usually cook, but not always.’ Gapping is another type of predicate ellipsis where the two constituents that escape the ellipsis site bear focus stress (but polarity is not under focus). It can be analysed as an instance of IP deletion, after extraction from the ellipsis site of the two constituents that will be assigned focus stress, the leftmost being a contrastive topic, the other a contrastive focus (cf. Gengel 2013, and references therein). As expected under the analysis of gapping as IP ellipsis, it is available across the Romance languages like TPE, and is not restricted in its distribution like VPE (cf. Abeillée/ Bîlbîie/Mouret 2014; Matos 1992; Brucart 1999).27 On the other hand, if the initial constituent of the gapped clause is a topic, the approach to VPE and TPE explored in this paper makes us expect that it is not subject to the disjoint reference condition on contrasted constituents that applies to TPE, cf. (39), above. The examples of gapping offered in (45) seem to confirm this prediction (as the contrasted subjects have overlapping reference). The gapping structures in (45) are to be compared with the TPE structures in (35)–(37) above. (45) Por. a. A gente detesta o professor de biologia e o Pedro não we hate the professor of biology and the Pedro not só o professor de biologia mas também o de inglês. only the professor of biology but also the of English ‘We hate the biology professor and Pedro hates not only the biology professor but also the English professor.’ (Pedro is one of us)

27 It has been observed within other language families as well that gapping is found in languages that do not permit VP ellipsis. Cf. Farudi (2013) on Farsi.

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b. A gente gosta do professor de biologia mas o we like of-the professor of biology but the Pedro só do professor de inglês. Pedro only of-the professor of English ‘We like the biology professor but Pedro only likes the English professor.’ (Pedro is one of us) c. O João e a Maria não têm filhos, nem a the João and the Maria not have children nor the Maria sobrinhos. Maria nephews ‘João and Maria don’t have children and Maria doesn’t have nephews either.’ The disjoint reference condition on contrasted constituents might thus help to distinguish between different positions within the clausal left-periphery targeted by constituents extracted from the domain to which ellipsis applies.28

4.3 A brief note on Spanish and Catalan Laka (1990) analyses the leftward constituent in Spanish TP ellipsis as a contrastive focus. López (1995; 2000) and López/Winkler (2000), however, put forward empirical evidence supporting the claim that in Spanish the remnant of TPE is always a contrastive topic, not a focus. If their analysis is right and Matos’ (1992) analysis of the remnant of TPE in Portuguese as a contrastive focus is also right, then the interface between syntax and discourse varies across languages where TPE is concerned. A hypothesis comes to mind with respect to this discernible contrast between Spanish and Portuguese. The fact that two closely related types of predicate ellipsis coexist in Portuguese, i.e. VPE and TPE, may have led to a ‘specialization’ of the ways in which each type of elliptic structure interfaces with discourse. Since Spanish only has TPE, a different configuration of the interplay between

28 Data such as (i) below suggest that gapping may exceptionally allow two foci (recall that nunca ‘never’ cannot be a topic). This possibility only arises when the focus constituent surfacing in second position is associated with a focus-marker, like só ‘only’ in (ia). In the absence of the focus-marker, the sentence becomes ungrammatical, as shown in (ib). (i) Por. a. Algumas vezes não fazem os trabalhos de casa, mas NUNCA só o Pedro. but never only the Pedro sometimes not do.3PL the works of home b. *Algumas vezes não fazem os trabalhos de casa, mas NUNCA o Pedro. but never the Pedro sometimes not do.3PL the works of home ‘Sometimes they don’t do their homework, but it is only Pedro that never does.’

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syntax and discourse arises in the relevant cases. This is of course pure speculation, but identifies an issue that deserves to be explored.29 The difference between Portuguese and Spanish relative to the information status of the remnant of TPE (whatever accounts for it) might explain an additional contrast between the two languages, in regard to which Catalan aligns with Spanish. One of the reviewers has pointed out that the disjoint reference constraint formulated in (39) above does not apply to Catalan and Spanish, as the examples in (46) and (47) below indicate. My tentative suggestion is that the disjoint reference constraint only applies to double-focus structures, such as Portuguese TPE.30 Example (48) shows once more the contrast that arises in Portuguese between VPE and TPE because only the former escapes the disjoint reference constraint. So, (48) is fine when the verb surfaces in the elliptical clause, which corresponds to an instance of VPE. But the presence of the affirmative word sim leads instead to ungrammaticality because it instantiates TPE, which must respect the disjoint reference constraint. (46) Cat. Aquí tothom treballa vuit hores. I, per tant, tu també. here everybody works eight hours and hence you also ‘Here everybody works eight hours, and so do you.’ (47) Sp. Nadie se creyó su historia, pero María sí. nobody SE believed his/her story but María AFF ‘Nobody believed his/her story, but María did.’ (48) Por. Ninguém acreditou na história dele, mas a Maria {acreditou/*sim}. nobody believed in-the story of-he, but the Maria believed/*AFF ‘Nobody believed his story, but Maria did.’ The contrast between (47) and (48) indicates that the interface between syntax and discourse in regard to TPE is not similarly activated in Portuguese and Spanish. If this is a consequence of Portuguese having both VPE and TPE whereas Spanish has only TPE, as suggested above, it is expected that Catalan patterns with Spanish, not with Portuguese. Example (46) points precisely in that direction.

29 The relevant contrast between Portuguese and Spanish may also be a consequence of the fact that left-peripheral topics and foci display partially different grammatical properties in the two languages (cf. Costa/Martins 2011). 30 A note of caution is needed in this respect, though. It might also be the case that the disjoint reference constraint, like the topic-comment constraint (Kertz 2013), is a soft constraint subject to interspeaker variation in Spanish/Catalan and Portuguese as well. This possibility cannot be discarded at this point because all the data discussed in this section are based on one speaker’s intuitions (including the Catalan and Spanish data offered by the anonymous reviewer).

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5 Conclusion This paper points out the existence of nontrivial correlations between the licensing of predicate ellipsis, in particular VP and TP ellipsis, and the polarity-encoding system of language-particular grammars, motivating in this way the observed crosslinguistic variation with respect to the availability of VP ellipsis. Languages that license VP ellipsis display polar answering systems where the verb plays an important role. In Portuguese and Galician bare-verb answers express positive confirmation or denial and constitute an unmarked, pervasive, and very early acquired manifestation of the interfaces syntax-semantics and syntax-pragmatics/discourse. Furthermore the paper shows that when TP ellipsis and VP ellipsis are both licensed within the same language, they implement different discourse strategies in regard to information structure. The paper points to some empirical contrasts that have gone unnoticed in previous work on ellipsis in European Portuguese and seeks to provide an explanation for them. Comparing pairs of sentences displaying minimally contrasting ellipsis structures seems to be a productive direction to pursue further. The type of descriptive generalizations that can be achieved in this way may then support investigation on naturally occurring ellipsis in discourse, which must however be pursued in a constrained way that clearly identifies and controls the factors under observation.

6 References Abeillée, Anne/Bîlbîie, Gabriela/Mouret, François (2014), “A Romance perspective on gapping constructions”, in: Hans C. Boas/Francisco Gonzálvez-García (edd.), Romance perspectives on construction grammar, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 227–265. Aelbrecht, Lobke (2010), The syntactic licensing of ellipsis, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Amanda, Morris (2009), Polarity ellipsis and negative stripping, MA Thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz. Brucart, José María (1999), “La elipsis”, in: Ignacio Bosque/Violeta Demonte (edd.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, vol. 2, Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 2787–2863. Busquets, Joan (2006), “Stripping vs. VP-ellipsis in Catalan. What is deleted and when”, Probus 18, 159–187. Costa, João/Martins, Ana Maria (2011), “On focus-movement in European Portuguese”, Probus 23, 217–245. Costa, João/Martins, Ana Maria/Pratas, Fernanda (2012), “VP ellipsis. New evidence from Capeverdean Creole”, in: Irene Franco/Sara Lusini/Andrès Saab (edd.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2010. Selected papers from “Going Romance”, Leiden 2010, vol. 4, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 155–175. Cyrino, Sonia/Matos, Gabriela (2005), “Local licensers and recovering in VP ellipsis”, Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 4:2, 79–112. Cyrino, Sonia/Matos, Gabriela (2006), “Null complement anaphora in Romance. Deep or surface anaphora?”, in: Jenny Doetjes/Paz González (edd.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2004. Selected papers from “Going Romance”, Leiden, 9–11 December 2004, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 95–120.

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Dagnac, Anne (2010), “Modal ellipsis in French, Spanish and Italian. Evidence for a TP-deletion analysis”, in: Karlos Arregi/Zsuzsanna Fagyal/Silvina A. Montrul/Annie Tremblay (edd.), Romance Linguistics 2008. Interactions in Romance. Selected papers from the 38th Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Urbana-Champaign, April 2008, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 157–170. Depiante, Marcela (2000), The syntax of deep and surface anaphora. A study of null complement anaphora and stripping/bare argument ellipsis, PhD dissertation, University of Connecticut, Storrs. Depiante, Marcela (2001), “On null complement anaphora in Spanish and Italian”, Probus 13, 193– 221. Farkas, Donka F./Bruce, Kim B. (2010), “On reacting to assertions and polar questions”, Journal of Semantics 27, 81–118. Farudi, Annahita (2013), Gapping in Farsi. A crosslinguistic investigation, PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Gengel, Kirsten (2013), Pseudogapping and ellipsis, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Goldberg, Lotus Madelyn (2005), Verb-stranding VP ellipsis. A cross-linguistic study, PhD dissertation, McGill University. Gonçalves, Anabela/Matos, Gabriela (2009), “Ellipsis and restructuring in European Portuguese”, in: Enoch O. Aboh/Elisabeth van der Linden/Petra Sleeman (edd.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory. Selected papers from “Going Romance”, Amsterdam 2007, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 109–129. Hankamer, Jorge/Sag, Ivan A. (1976), “Deep and surface anaphora”, Linguistic Inquiry 7, 391–428. Holmberg, Anders (2001), “The syntax of yes and no in Finnish”, Studia Linguistica 55, 140–174. Holmberg, Anders (2003a), “Questions, answers, polarity and head movement in Germanic and Finnish”, in: Anne Dahl/Kristina Bentzen/Peter Svenonius (edd.), Proceedings of the 19th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics = Nordlyd, University of Tomsø Working Papers on Language and Linguistics, vol. 31, 88–115. Holmberg, Anders (2003b), “Yes/no questions and the relation between tense and polarity in English and Finnish”, in: Pierre Pica (ed.), Linguistic Variation Yearbook 3, 43–68. Holmberg, Anders (2007), “Null subjects and polarity focus”, Studia Linguistica 61, 212–236. Holmberg, Anders (2013), “The syntax of answers to polar questions in English and Swedish”, Lingua 128, 31–50. Johnson, Meredith (2013), “Verb phrase ellipsis and v: evidence from Hocąk”, LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts. http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/ExtendedAbs/ article/view/774/551 (30.06.2016). Jones, Bob Morris (1999), The Welsh answering system, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Kato, Mary A. (2012), “Polar positive answers in Brazilian Portuguese”, Paper presented at the 43rd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 43), CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Kehler, Andrew (2000), “Coherence and the resolution of ellipsis”, Linguistics and Philosophy 23, 533–575. Kertz, Laura (2010), Ellipsis reconsidered, PhD dissertation, University of California, San Diego. Kertz, Laura (2013), “Verb phrase ellipsis. The view from information structure”, Language 89, 390– 428. Kim, Christina/Runner, Jeffrey T. (2009), “Strict identity, coherence, and parallelism in VP ellipsis”, Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 19, 275–287, http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/SALT/article/view/2535 (06.06.2015). Kim, Christina/Runner, Jeffrey T. (2011), “Discourse structure and syntactic parallelism in VP ellipsis”, University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics. Processing Linguistic Structure 38, 75–102.

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Konietzko, Andreas/Winkler, Susanne (2010), “Contrastive ellipsis. Mapping between syntax and information structure”, Lingua 120, 1436–1457. Laka, Itziar (1990), Negation in syntax. On the nature of functional categories and projections, PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lipták, Anikó (2013), “The syntax of emphatic positive polarity in Hungarian. Evidence from ellipsis”, Lingua 128, 72–94. Lobeck, Anne (1995), Ellipsis. Functional heads, licensing and identification, Oxford, Oxford University Press. López, Luis F. (1995), Polarity and predicate anaphora, PhD dissertation, Cornell University. López, Luis (1999), “VP-ellipsis in Spanish and English and the features of Aux”, Probus 11, 263– 297. López, Luis (2000), “Ellipsis and discourse-linking”, Lingua 110, 183–213. López, Luis/Winkler, Susanne (2000), “Focus and topic in VP-anaphora constructions”, Linguistics 38, 623–664. Martins, Ana Maria (1994), “Enclisis, VP-deletion and the nature of Sigma”, Probus 6, 173–205. Martins, Ana Maria (2006), “Emphatic affirmation and polarity. Contrasting European Portuguese with Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan and Galician”, in: Jenny Doetjes/Paz González (edd.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2004. Selected papers from “Going Romance”, Leiden, 9–11 December 2004, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 197–223. Martins, Ana Maria (2007), “Double realization of verbal copies in European Portuguese emphatic affirmation”, in: Norbert Corver/Jairo Nunes (edd.), The copy theory of movement, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 77–118. Martins, Ana Maria (2013), “Emphatic polarity in European Portuguese and beyond”, Lingua 128, 95–123. Matos, Gabriela (1992), Construções de elipse do predicado em português – SV nulo e despojamento, PhD dissertation, Universidade de Lisboa. Matos, Gabriela (2003), “Construções elípticas”, Gramática da língua portuguesa, Lisboa, Caminho, 869–913. Matos, Gabriela (2013), “Elipse”, in: Eduardo Buzaglo Paiva Raposo/Maria Fernanda Bacelar do Nascimento/Maria Antónia Coelho da Mota/Luísa Segura/Amália Mendes (edd.), Gramática do Português, Lisboa, Gulbenkian, 2351–2407. Merchant, Jason (2001), The syntax of silence, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Merchant, Jason (2004), “Fragments and ellipsis”, Linguistics and Philosophy 27, 661–738. Merchant, Jason (2013a), “Voice and ellipsis”, Linguistic Inquiry 44, 77–108. Merchant, Jason (2013b), Ellipsis. A survey of analytical approaches, Ms. University of Chicago, http://home.uchicago.edu/merchant/publications.html (06.06.2015). Pope, Emily Norwood (1976), Questions and answers in English, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter. Pratas, Fernanda (2002), O sistema pronominal do caboverdiano (variante de Santiago). Questões de gramática, MA Thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Roberts, Ian (2001), “Language Change and Learnability”, in: Stefano Bertolo (ed.), Language acquisition and learnability, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 81–125. Roberts, Ian (2004), “The C-system in Brythonic Celtic languages, V2, and the EPP”, in: Luigi Rizzi (ed.), The structure of CP and IP. The cartography of syntactic structures, vol. 2, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 297–296. Roberts, Ian/Roussou, Anna (2003), A Minimalist approach to grammaticalization, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Rouveret, Alain (1989), “Cliticisation et temps en portugais européen”, Revue des Langues Romanes 93:2, 337–371.

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Rouveret, Alain (2012), “VP ellipsis, phases and the syntax of morphology”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 30, 897–963. Saab, Andrès (2008), Hacia una teoría de la identidad parcial en la elipsis, PhD dissertation, Universidad Nacional de Comahue. Saab, Andrès (2010), “Spanish TP-ellipsis and the theory of island repair”, Probus 22, 73–116. Sag, Ivan A. (1976), Deletion and logical form, PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Santos, Ana Lúcia (2009), Minimal answers. Ellipsis, syntax and discourse in the acquisition of European Portuguese, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Tanaka, Hidekazu (2011), “Voice mismatch and syntactic identity”, Linguistic Inquiry 42, 470–490. Van Craenenbroeck, Jeroen/Merchant, Jason (2013), “Ellipsis phenomena”, in: Marcel den Dikken (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of generative syntax, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 701–745. Vennemann, Theo (2009), “Celtic influence in English? Yes and no”, English Language and Linguistics 13:2, 309–334. Vicente, Luis (2006), “Short negative replies in Spanish”, Linguistics in the Netherlands 23:1, 199– 211. Vicente, Luis (2010), “On the syntax of adversative coordination”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28, 381–415.

Delia Bentley and Silvio Cruschina

16 Existential constructions Abstract: In this chapter we analyse the main characteristics of Romance existential constructions, placing particular emphasis on the interfaces of morphosyntax with semantics and discourse. Starting with a description of the primary types of existential construction attested in Romance, we claim that, regardless of the superficial variation in the morphosyntactic features of these types, existentials share a predicative structure whereby the pivot is the predicate of an abstract argument expressing the spatial and temporal coordinates of the existential proposition. This predicative structure is unique to existentials and does not characterize other related constructions, namely locatives and possessives. The morphosyntactic properties of existentials, such as the post-copular position of the pivot and number agreement on the copula, or lack thereof, are captured in terms of the intersection of morphosyntax with semantics and discourse. Keywords: existential construction, interface, locative, possessive, definiteness, focus, specificity

1 Introduction Existential sentences pose a classic puzzle for the syntax-semantics interface. Crosslinguistically, not all languages have a recognizable existential syntax, so that existentials have often been reduced to locative structures (with a basic semantic or cognitive set of properties in common with possessives). When looking more carefully at the semantic and pragmatic conditions that license existentials, however, the reductionist approach meets several challenges. It would therefore be impossible to understand the syntax of this construction without making reference to its interfaces with semantics and pragmatics. In this chapter we analyse the main characteristics of the existential constructions found in Romance with particular attention to the interfaces of morphosyntax with semantics and discourse. We claim that existentials differ from other related constructions, namely locatives and possessives, at the intersection of these different levels of analysis. The differences include not only word order distinctions, but also the special semantic and pragmatic properties of the nominal element(s) involved in the existential predication, which have a direct impact on the morphosyntax of the construction.

Acknowledgement: The authors are indebted to the sponsor of the research reported in this article, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant AH/HO32509/1, cf. http://existentials.humanities. manchester.ac.uk/).

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Since Lyons (1967) the relation between existence, location, and possession has been investigated from different perspectives. The existing analyses range from the assumption that independent linguistic constructions express these notions (La Fauci/ Loporcaro 1993; 1997) to the claim that the relevant constructions are syntactically related and derived from a common underlying structure (cf. e.g. Freeze 1992; 2001). Starting with a description of the range of variation concerning the primary components of Romance existential sentences (i.e. copula, proform, and agreement), we argue that, regardless of the superficial morphosyntactic variation attested, all existential types share fundamental structural properties, which are explained in terms of the interface of their morphosyntax with predication and argument structure. We explain the similarities between existentials, locatives, and possessives as the result of a parallel process of grammaticalization plus reanalysis, which affected late Latin and early Romance possessive and locative structures, resulting in the emergence of Romance existential constructions. In contrast, the distinguishing attributes of Romance existentials are the consequences of persistent properties continuing the original existential construction of Latin. Regardless of the superficial variation, Romance existentials share a predicative structure whereby the pivot (i.e. the post-copular DP) is the predicate of an abstract and, in some cases, null argument expressing the spatial and temporal coordinates of the existential proposition. The existential pivot does not bear a thematic role or macrorole, hence its behaviour as a “bad” subject (Beaver/Francez/Levinson 2005; Bentley 2013) or as an “atypical” direct object (Lambrecht 2000), according to its historical source construction, locative or possessive. The morphosyntactic properties of existential constructions, such as the postcopular position of the pivot and number agreement on the copula, or lack thereof, are determined by the interfaces of morphosyntax with discourse and semantics. In particular, we take the lack of specificity and the focal discourse role of the pivot to be the principal interface properties. These provide us with appropriate criteria to distinguish between genuine and spurious existentials, the latter being inverse and deictic locatives, as well as presentational there-sentences (Cruschina 2012a).

2 Patterns of variation in Romance Crosslinguistically, the only obligatory component of the existential construction is the pivot, namely the DP denoting the entity or the individual about which the existential proposition expresses existence or presence in a context (Francez 2007; McNally 2011, 1830). Even though they are not essential components, additional elements such as a copula, a clitic proform (cf. Italian ci), and an additional temporal or locative phrase (i.e. the coda) are also found in the existential construction (Bentley/ Ciconte/Cruschina 2013a). The presence of the copula, in turn, can be concomitant with

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the lack or presence of number agreement with the post-copular pivot. Copula, proform, and agreement are at the core of the patterns of variation attested in the Romance existential constructions. (1) (Expletive) (proform) (copula) pivot (coda) (2) a. Eng.

There are some books on the table. EXP/PF COPULA PIVOT CODA

b. It.

Ci sono dei libri sul tavolo. PF be.3PL some books on-the table

c. Fr.

Il

a des livres sur la table. EXP PF have.3SG some books on the table

d. Sp.

Hay unos libros sobre la mesa. the table have.3SG - PF some books on

y

e. Rom. Sunt nişte cărţi pe masă. be.3PL some books on table An expletive element in subject position may also be required in some varieties, and this expletive may coincide with the proform as in English (2a), or may be a distinct element as in French (2c).

2.1 The existential copula Romance existentials differ from their Latin counterpart in several ways (Bentley/ Ciconte 2016). First of all, the Latin existential copula is ESSE , whilst the modern Romance languages exhibit the outcome of one of four copulas: ESSE , HABERE , STARE or TENERE .1 In Romanian (3a), Italian, Corsican, Friulian, Romansh, Ladin (3b), and most Campidanese Sardinian varieties, as well as northern, central, and southern Italo-Romance (3c), existential sentences feature the copula ESSE . The same copula is also found in Nuorese and Logudorese Sardinian dialects, although solely in conjunction with definite DPs. In Catalan this copula is only found with personal pronoun pivots.

1 Latin fieri can be read existentially in some contexts (Miserior mulier me nec fiet nec fuit ‘There will not be, nor was there ever, a more miserable woman than me’, Plautus, Mercator, iv, 700), while habere emerges in the existential constructions of late Latin, with a nominative or an accusative pivot (In Hebraeo. . . non habet hunc numerum ‘In Hebrew… this number does not exist’, Cennamo 2011, 178; Bentley/Ciconte 2016; Ciconte 2015).

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(3) a. Rom. În această fructă sunt multe seminţe. in this fruit be.3PL many seeds ‘There are many seeds in this fruit.’ Ampezzan, Ladin b. l èa tanta zente. it was many people ‘There were many people.’

(Haiman/Benincà 1992, 168)

c. Sicilian Ci sunnu napuacu di carusi nt’ a chiazza ranni. PF be.3PL some of children in the square big ‘There are children playing in the main square.’ Existentials with indefinite pivots exhibit HABERE in Spanish, Asturian, Galician, European Portuguese, and Logudorese and Nuorese Sardinian (4a). The copula HABERE is also found in Catalan (4b), although not with personal pronouns, in which case ESSE is selected,2 and in French and some Salentino and Calabrian dialects, both with definite and indefinite pivots, including personal pronouns. The copula STARE is typical of some central and upper southern Italo-Romance dialects (4c). (4) a. Asturian Nun hai nengún motivu pa tantu xaréu. not has-PF any reason for such racket ‘There’s no reason for such a racket.’ b. Cat.

A la reunió hi havia el president. at the meeting PF had.3SG the president ‘The president was at the meeting.’

(Rigau 1997, 396)

Quarto, Naples c. Cə sta n’ ommə forə a porta. PF stay.3SG a man outside the door ‘There’s a man by the door.’

2.2 The clitic proform The second major difference between a great deal of the modern Romance languages and Latin is the presence of a clitic proform, which is an innovation of early Romance.3 In those Romance varieties where an existential proform is present, this is morphologically identical to the locative clitic, suggesting that historically it 2 Cf. Rigau (1997) for the different behaviour of Algherese, the Catalan dialect spoken in Alghero, Sardinia. 3 For the etymological sources of the proforms in modern Romance, cf. Badía Margarit (1951, 266), Wagner (1960, 624), Rohlfs (1969, 899), Maiden (1995, 167), Blasco Ferrer (2003), and Benincà (2007).

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derived from a locative adverb (Blasco Ferrer 2003). With respect to the existential proform, the modern Romance languages can broadly be divided into two types: those which exhibit a proform (exemplified in 3c and 4a–c, above) and those which do not. The proform is absent in Romanian (3a), Ladin (3b), Friulian (5a), some Venetan dialects (in the provinces of Treviso and Belluno), a number of southern and extreme southern Italo-Romance dialects (5b, c), and European and Brazilian Portuguese (5d). (5) San Giorgio della Richinvelda, Friulian a. a ’soŋ dai ’fruːs. SBJ.CL be.3PL some children ‘There are some children.’

(Manzini/Savoia 2005, vol. 3, 42)

Polignano, Puglia b. Stè na chəcèjnə jind’ a tuttə i casərə. to all the houses stay.3SG a kitchen in ‘There is a kitchen in every house.’ Soleto, Puglia c. Intru a sta frutta ave tanti samenti. in to this fruit have.3SG many seeds ‘In this fruit there are many seeds.’ BPor. d. Tem duas soluções para esse problema. have.3SG two solutions for this problem ‘There are two solutions for this problem.’ In Spanish, Galician, and Asturian a lexicalized proform appears solely on the present tense of the existential copula HABERE . Contrast the example in (6a), with present-tense ha-i, lit. have.3SG - PF ( cf. 4a), with (6b), in the past tense, with no proform. (6) Galician a. Non hai ningún problema. problem not have.3SG -PF any ‘There’s no problem.’ b. Había un presidente na reunión. have.IMPF.3SG a president in-the meeting ‘There was a president in the meeting.’

2.3 The agreement patterns In some Romance languages pivots appear to be subjects by virtue of their control of agreement on the copula. However, the unmarked post-copular position of pivots

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signals a primary difference with respect to standard subjects, whose canonical position is generally Spec/IP (↗11 Subjects, null subjects, and expletives). A further property which differentiates the existential pivot from a canonical subject, in some Romance languages, is the failure to control finite agreement on the copula.4 In general, three agreement patterns characterize Romance existentials (Bentley 2013): consistent agreement, invariant lack of agreement, and differential agreement. The first pattern is found in the majority of Friulian dialects (Haiman/Benincà 1992; cf. 5a), Italian (7a), a number of central and southern Italo-Romance dialects (3c, 4c), Corsican, most Campidanese and some Nuorese Sardinian dialects, and Romanian (3a). Invariant lack of agreement is found in French (7b), Ladin and some Romansh dialects (Manzini/Savoia 2005, vol. 3, 40–42), some extreme southern Italo-Romance dialects of Calabria and Puglia (7c), and Brazilian Portuguese (5d). (7) a. It. Ci sono molti semi in questa frutta. PF be.3PL many seeds in this fruit b. Fr. Il

y

SBJ. CL PF

a plusiers pépins dans ce fruit. have.3SG several seeds in this fruit

Soleto, Puglia c. Intru a sta frutta ave tanti samenti. in to this fruit have.3SG many seeds ‘There are many seeds in this fruit.’ Differential agreement is found in Ibero-Romance, Nuorese, Logudorese and archaic Campidanese Sardinian, Gallo-Italian, Venetan, and some central Italo-Romance dialects. This agreement pattern is sensitive to a specificity scale ranging from first and second person pronouns, which are maximally specific, or uniquely individuated within the discourse context (Benveniste 1966, 230), to non-specific noun phrases (cf. Bentley 2013, who draws on Enç 1991 for specificity). Crucially, in any given language, non-specific (indefinite) pivots only control agreement if specific (definite) pivots are also agreement controllers. Thus, only first and second person pronominal pivots trigger agreement on the existential copula in the Nuorese Sardinian dialect of Orgosolo.5

4 By finite agreement we mean number agreement, since the third person copula of structures like (5c) can be argued to agree with the pivot in person (Manzini/Savoia 2005, vol. 3, 34). 5 This pattern is also found in some Venetan dialects. Note that the examples in (8) illustrate a particular type of existential sentence, known as contextualized existentials. This type requires a special pragmatic context with direct implications for what is ultimately predicated (i.e. the availabilty of a specific entity or individual for a purpose or to perform a task). Despite these particular characteristics, availability existentials are to be analysed as true existentials, and not as locatives (cf. Abbott 1992; 1993; Bentley 2013; Bentley/Ciconte/Cruschina 2015).

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(8) Orgosolo, Nuorese a. Maria no est sola. Bi so eo / bi ses tue / PF be.2SG you Mary not be.3SG alone PF be.1SG I bi semos nois / b’ at issos. PF be.1PL we PF have.3SG they ‘Mary is not alone. There’s me. / you. / us. / them.’ b. Non podimos isparzire: b’ at sos pitzinnos. PF have.3SG the children not can.1PL divorce ‘We cannot divorce: there’re the children.’ c. Ista attentu! In custa frutta b’ at medas semenes. stay.IMP careful in this fruit PF have.3SG many seeds ‘Be careful! There are many seeds in this fruit.’ In Catalan and a number of Tuscan dialects (for example, Florentine), only pronominal pivots, regardless of grammatical person, trigger agreement on the existential copula. For the other patterns of differential agreement attested in the Romance languages, cf. Bentley (2013). The morphosyntactic variation discussed in this section is summarized in Table 1. Table 1: Patterns of variation in Romance existentials PROFORM

COPULA

AGREEMENT

LANGUAGES

+

ESSE

+

Italian and some central and southern Italo-Romance dialects; Sardinian (in Nuorese and Logudorese only with definite DPs); Catalan (with personal pronouns)

+

ESSE

–

Northern Italo-Romance dialects and Tuscan (+agr with 1st/2nd or 1st/2nd/3rd pronouns)

–

ESSE

+

Romanian, some Friulian dialects

–

ESSE

–

Northern Venetan dialects (+agr with 1st/2nd pronouns), Ladin, Romansh

–

HABERE

–

Spanish, Asturian, Galician and European Portuguese (indefinite DPs); Salentino and Calabrian dialects (also with definite DPs and personal pronouns)

+

HABERE

–

Sardinian (indefinite DPs); Catalan (not with personal pronouns); French, some Calabrian dialects (also with definite DPs and personal pronouns)

+

HABERE

+

Some central Catalan dialects (not with personal pronouns), Celle di San Vito (Puglia)

–

TENERE

–

Brazilian Portuguese

+

STARE

+

Central and upper southern Italo-Romance dialects

–

STARE

+

Capri and some Pugliese dialects

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As shown in Table 1, the agreement patterns are closely related to the type of copula selected: existentials with STARE always exhibit number agreement with the pivot, and copula HABERE does not normally agree with the pivot, whereas ESSE appears in both agreeing and non-agreeing patterns. Cases of agreement with HABERE have been reported for the Francoprovençal dialect spoken in Celle di San Vito, Puglia (Manzini/Savoia 2005, vol. 3, 66), and for central Catalan dialects (Rigau 1997). In addition, in several varieties of Spanish, existentials are undergoing grammatical change, whereby haber agrees with the sole nominal constituent of the construction (cf. Rodríguez Mondoñedo 2006; Brown/Rivas 2012, and references therein).

3 Argument realization: Existentials vis-à-vis locatives and possessives Following recent claims about existentials (cf. e.g. Zamparelli 2000; Hazout 2004; Francez 2007; Cruschina 2012a), we assume that existential sentences are copular constructions whereby the pivot functions as the predicate of an abstract contextually determined argument, which in some languages is manifested by an (etymologically locative) proform. However, in the light of the patterns of variation described in the previous section, this assumption must be refined, and needs to be defended against the apparent structural divergence found across Romance. Crosslinguistically, different structures are claimed to be available to express existentiality (cf. Lyons 1967; Clark 1978; Freeze 1992; 2001; Koch 2012). This holds true for Romance as well: morphosyntactic resemblances to or partial overlapping with either locative or possessive constructions are undeniable. Compare, for example, the copulas in the locatives and the possessives in (9a–d) with those in the existential sentences in (2) above (cf. also the proform in 9c): (9) a. Eng.

The books are on the table

b. Rom. Cărţile sunt pe masă. books be.3PL on table ‘The books are on the table.’ c. It.

(C’) ha dei libri (sul tavolo). have.3SG some books on-the table

PF

d. Fr.

Il a des livres (sur la table). he have.3SG some books on the table ‘He has some books on the table.’

A close connection between existentials and locatives has often been noted in the literature (Clark 1978), and some scholars have interpreted this connection in terms of derivation from the same underlying structure (cf. e.g. Freeze 1992). Others have acknowledged a degree of similarity, while keeping the two constructions apart

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(Cruschina 2012a; 2014). In addition, in some Romance varieties featuring existentials with copula HABERE , the pivot would seem to test out as a direct object (Suñer 1982; Rigau 1994; 1997; Manzini/Savoia 2005, vol. 3, 69–70; Cruschina 2015a; cf. below), suggesting a connection with possessive sentences (Freeze 1992; 2001). In this section, we claim that, despite many similarities, existential constructions are to be distinguished from both locative and possessive sentences on semantic and morphosyntactic grounds (for comparable claims, cf. La Fauci/Loporcaro 1993; 1997; Moro 1997; Francez 2007; 2009; Koontz-Garboden 2009; Cruschina 2012a; 2015a; Koch 2012; Bentley 2015a, among others). Our account is based on the idea that a process of grammaticalization and then reanalysis operated diachronically on late Latin and early Romance possessive and locative structures. These are potential sources for the emergence of existential constructions (Creissels 2013), and indeed this happened in the history of Romance. Synchronically, however, existentials are not derived from the same underlying structure as the other two constructions. An existential construction obviously existed before the Romance innovations took place. Presumably, in Classical Latin existentials and locatives were undistinguishable on the surface: both constructions resorted to copula be and typically involved a locative phrase, but word order might have played a role in discriminating between the two meanings (cf. Devine/Stephens 2006, 150–153, and Ciconte 2015 for further discussion). With respect to the relation between existentials and possessives, it should be noted that in several Romance languages, including French, Occitan, and some Sardinian and extreme-southern Italo-Romance dialects, the same copula (i.e. a form derived from HABERE or TENERE ) heads both existential and possessive copular sentences, pointing to an apparent formal identity between the two constructions. In Ibero-Romance and in some Salentino dialects, in contrast, the copula HABERE is only used in existential constructions (10a, b), whereas possessive sentences exhibit an outcome of TENERE (11a, b). A full assimilation of existentials with possessive sentences is therefore untenable. (10) Soleto, Salento, Puglia a. Ave doi cristiani alla porta. have.3SG two people at-the door b. Sp. Hay dos personas en la puerta at the door have.3SG -PF two people ‘There are two people at the door.’ (11) Soleto, Salento, Puglia a. Tenene na machina russa. red have.3PL a car b. Sp. Tienen un coche rojo. red have.3PL a car ‘They have a red car.’

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That existentials must be distinguished from locatives is strongly suggested by the fact that, despite the frequent homophony with the locative clitic in the same language, the existential proform does not normally have deictic value. It is generally acknowledged that the truth value of an existential does not depend on the location of the utterance, as would be expected if the existential proform were deictic (Keenan 1987; Francez 2007, 11–13). For example, the truth of the existential in (12) does not depend on where the sentence is uttered. (12) Torre Anunziata, Campania (Nun) ce stannə buciə bone e buciə malamentə. PF stay.3PL lies good and lies bad not ‘There are (no) good lies and bad lies.’ Moreover, if the existential proform had the same locative function as the locative clitic, it should then be incompatible with a coreferential locative phrase occurring within the core of the same clause, because such co-occurrence would yield an offensive case of clitic doubling (La Fauci/Loporcaro 1997). A locative resumptive clitic is only grammatical with a dislocated locative PP (13a), but not with a focal one (13b) (e.g. in the answer to the question Where did you go yesterday? or What did you do yesterday?). On the contrary, the existential proform never gives rise to clitic doubling effects (14), which are in fact not tolerated in the majority of the Romance languages (cf. Cruschina 2012a; 2015b for further discussion and examples).6 (13) It. a. Ci sono andato ieri, a Roma. PF be.1SG gone yesterday to Rome ‘I went to Rome yesterday.’ b. (*Ci) sono andato a Roma. PF be.1SG gone to Rome ‘I went to Rome.’ 6 Clitic resumption should not be confused with clitic doubling. The former refers to the presence of a clitic co-referential with a dislocated topic constituent, while the latter indicates the co-occurrence of the clitic with the corresponding core-internal constituent. Although it is generally barred in Romance, clitic doubling is admitted to varying extents in Spanish and Romanian: (i) a. Rom.

L-am văzut pe Ion ieri. him-have.1SG seen ACC Ion yesterday ‘I saw Ion yesterday.’

b. Rioplatense Sp. La oían a la niña. her heard.3PL ACC the girl ‘They heard the girl.’ This phenomenon is claimed to be absent in the other Romance languages, but it is actually possible with personal pronouns and/or with dative arguments in several varieties (Jaeggli 1982; 1986; Benincà 1988; 2001; Dobrovie-Sorin 1990; 1994; Torrego 1998; Kayne 2000, ch. 9; Anagnostopoulou 2006).

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(14) a. It. Ci sono molti fiori in giardino. PF be.3PL many flowers in garden a beaucoup de fleurs dans le jardin. have.3SG many of flowers in the garden ‘There are many flowers in the garden.’

b. Fr. Il

y

SBJ. CL PF

The existential proform is therefore not locative, and Romance existentials are not locative constructions, in that they involve no locative predicate. In fact, the postcopular pivot is argued to be the predicate of the existential construction (La Fauci/ Loporcaro 1993; 1997; Francez 2007), while the non-referential proform can be considered to be a pro-argument spelling out an abstract argument which provides the spatiotemporal coordinates of the existential predication (Cruschina 2012a, and Bentley/Ciconte/Cruschina 2015, drawing on Francez 2007). In accordance with this analysis, the function of the existential proform is comparable to that of the proform which is found in possessive copular constructions. Indeed, a recurrent feature of HABERE possessives is that the possessive copula hosts an etymologically locative clitic, which may be identical to the existential proform in the corresponding varieties (15) (cf. also (9c) above) (cf. La Fauci/Loporcaro 1993; 1997; Moro 1998; Benincà 2007; Bentley/Ciconte 2016). (15) Mendrisiotto, Ticino a. I gh’ annu l sò da fá. SBJ. CL CL have.3PL the POSS to do ‘They have their things to do.’ Nuorese b. Non b’ amus mákkina. not CL have.1PL car ‘We have no car.’

(Lurà 1987, 142)

(Jones 1993, 59)

Colloquial Italian c. C’ ho tre figli. CL have.1SG three children ‘I have three children.’ In line with the analysis of the existential proform as a pro-argument providing the spatiotemporal coordinates of the existential predication, this clitic can be seen as the marker of an abstract argument which locates the possessive predication in space and time (Benincà 2007, 42). If the differences examined above lead us to the conclusion that the constructions under discussion are different, their grammatical similarities are just as undeniable. We claim that, historically, the existential constructions of most Romance languages

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derive from the reanalysis of either a locative or a possessive structure.7 In some early vernacular texts, existential constructions derived from locatives and possessives are simultaneously attested (Ciconte 2010; 2015). One prevailed over the other at a later stage. Accordingly, the partial overlap and the apparent analogies should be regarded as the natural reflexes of a persistent historical continuity with respect to the source construction or, in other cases, as the result of incomplete grammaticalization. Strong evidence that the proform is locative when it first emerges is provided by early Tuscan, where the proform occurs in strict complementary distribution with a locative phrase (Ciconte 2008; 2009). In (16a) the locative proform anaphorically resumes a locative phrase mentioned in the previous sentence; in (16b), instead, the locative complement appears within the same sentence, and the proform is therefore absent. (16) Early Tuscan a. Mia dama vi sarà, e saravvi tanta buona gente. my lady PF be.FUT.3SG and be.FUT.3SG - PF much good people ‘My lady will be there, and many good people will also be there.’ (Novellino, LXIV ) b. Era una Guasca in Cipri. be.PST.3SG a Gascony-woman in Cyprus ‘There was a woman from Gascony in Cyprus.’

(Novellino, LI )

The proform then grammaticalizes, losing its locative function, and is thus reanalysed as the spell-out of the abstract spatiotemporal argument of the existential predication, witness its co-occurrence with a locative phrase within the clause. An early example from Sicilian, a language where this change predates the fourteenth century, is provided here (Ciconte 2011). (17) Old Sicilian Chi fu in Sicilia grandi fami. PF be.PST.3SG in Sicily big hunger ‘There was much hunger in Sicily.’

(Conquesta, XVIII , 3)

The process of grammaticalization involving the existential proform is not complete in all the Romance languages. Assuming, as we do, that the existential proform of modern Romance is by default non-referential as a result of the grammaticalization

7 The obvious exceptions are the languages with agreeing ESSE and no proform, such as Romanian and some Friulian dialects (cf. Table 1), which continue the existential construction of Latin (Erant omnino itinera duo ‘There were only two routes’, Caesar, De Bello Gallico, I, 6).

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of a locative adverbial (Ciconte 2010; Cruschina 2012a), this change has not affected all proforms. Existential proforms preserving a deictic value are found in lesserknown Romance languages (Bentley 2011). To begin with, in southern Italo-Romance dialects with the sole existential copula STARE , the proform may be required in negated existentials and in wh-questions, though not in other domains. This correlation is found in Campanian (18A,B) and, with respect to negation, in Pugliese (19A,B). (18) Capri, Campania

A: Che *(cə) sta nta chella stanza? stay.3SG in that room what PF ‘What’s in that room?’ B: Nə *(cə) sta nisciunə. stay.3SG nobody not PF ‘There is nobody.’

(19) Polignano, Puglia A: Ci stè jində a chella camera? to that room who stay.3SG in ‘Who is in that room?’ B: Non *(cə) stè nisciéunə. stay.3SG nobody not PF ‘There is nobody.’ In negated existentials like (18B) and (19B), an abstract or referential location is obligatorily spelled out by the proform, in accordance with Partee/Borschev’s (2002) claim that negated existentials must presuppose a location. A similar analysis can be proposed for (18A), as witnessed by the fact that the proform is only obligatory if the wh-phrase substitutes for the pivot. If the wh-phrase is an adjunct meaning ‘where’, on the other hand, the proform is optional, since in this case the location is not presupposed, but rather it is in focus. Secondly, in some Sardinian dialects, a deictically neutral proform (bi in Logudorese dialects, (n)ci in Campidanese dialects) alternates with a deictically marked proform: (n)che is speaker-oriented in Logudorese, whereas ddoi denotes distance from the speaker in Campidanese (Bentley 2011). In terms of Vanelli’s (1972) theory of deixis, Campidanese Sardinian ddoi/ddui ‘there’ and Logudorese Sardinian (n)che ‘here’ are negatively and positively marked, respectively, with regard to the deictic centre of discourse, i.e. the speaker. An example with Logudorese Sardinian (n)che ‘here’ is (20a), where (n)che alternates freely with the deictically neutral proform bi. In (20b), (n)che is not a grammatical option, as it cannot combine with a locative phrase indicating distance from the speaker.

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(20) Benetutti, Logudorese a. In custa istrada (n)ch’ / b’ at carchi domo. PF PF have.3SG some house in that road ‘In this road there are some houses.’ b. In cussa istrada *(n)che / bi sun sas cresias de Santu PF PF be.3PL the churches of Saint in that road Juanne e de Sant’ Antoni. John and of Saint Anthony ‘In that road there are the churches of Saint John and of Saint Anthony.’ Significantly, despite the deictic function of (n)che, the construction exemplified in (20a) contrasts with locatives (and with inverse locatives, cf. section 5) in that it does not predicate location, as suggested by the fact that this example is felicitous in the context of the question What is there in this road?, but not in the context of Where are the houses?. Clearly, this construction is a genuine existential, whereby a location which is a stage topic (Erteschik-Shir 1997) is overtly resumed by the proform. The evidence in (18) to (20) suggests that the process of grammaticalization of a locative adverb which resulted in the non-referentiality of the existential proform has not come to completion throughout Romance.8 Similarly, elements of continuity with the source construction are found in HABERE existentials in some Romance languages, where the pivot would appear to test out as a direct object. We refer to Suñer (1982) for Spanish, Rigau (1994; 1997) for Catalan, Manzini/Savoia (2005, vol. 3, 69–70) for Calabrian, and Avelar (2009, 160) for the claim that in Brazilian Portuguese “existential constructions with ter have inherited the internal structure of possessive sentences”. The object properties of the existential pivot are clearly evident in the Salentino and Calabrian dialects,

8 Interestingly, in some Campidanese Sardinian varieties, the deictic proform ddoi/ddui has evolved into an optional evidential strategy, which indicates the lack of a visual source of information. (i) Villacidro, Campidanese a. Innoi nc’ / *ddoi e(st) sa nì, dd’ appu bida deu. PF be.3SG the snow it have.1SG seen.PTCP. F I here PF ‘There is snow here, I have seen it.’ b. A cantu at how.much dd’ appu it have.1SG ‘It appears that

paridi in gui ddoi e(st) sa nì, ma deu no be.3SG the snow but I not appear.3SG in there PF bida. seen.PTCP. F there is snow there, but I have not seen it.’

Further such evidential strategies, encoded by ddoi/ddui in concomitance with the copula HABERE , are reported in Bentley (2011).

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where definite pivots show Differential Object Marking (DOM)9 (cf. 21a) and are resumed by an object clitic when dislocated or implicit in the sentence (cf. 21b). (21) Reggio Calabria, Calabria a. Ndavi a to soru nt’ a cucina. ACC your sister in the kitchen has ‘Your sister is in the kitchen.’ Soleto, Puglia b. Ave stranieri intra stu paese? Sì, l’ ave. has foreigners in this village yes them has ‘Are there foreigners in this village? Yes, there are.’ Moreover, the existential constructions of these dialects consistently lack agreement, as expected in constructions where the DP is syntactically a direct object. As already mentioned, we claim that these traces of incomplete grammaticalization and residual properties inherited from the source construction must be related to a process of grammaticalization plus reanalysis that has affected the argument structure and the predication of locative and possessive constructions. This change and the syntax of the resulting existential constructions are discussed in more detail in the next section.

4 Argument structure and predication in existentials In the previous section we saw that existential structures are comparable to locatives and possessives but are crucially different from them in morphosyntactic terms. The existential proform has grammaticalized to various extents, and the pivot exhibits subject behaviour, object behaviour, or mixed behaviour (cf. Lambrecht 2000). Possessives and locatives are bi-argumental predications that can roughly be represented as in (22a), where y stands for the possessor or the location, respectively. As a consequence of a process of reanalysis, y is interpreted as a null argument which functions as an impersonal abstract theme or subject of predication (22b).10

9 In these dialects DOM is realized by means of the prepositional marker a, in accordance with specific properties of the object DP, such as animacy and definiteness, and reflecting specific properties of the verb (Bossong 1998; Leonetti 2004; 2008b; von Heusinger/Kaiser 2007; Creissels 2013). Salentino dialects only show DOM with first and second person pronouns, while in Calabrian dialects DOM also obtains with third person pronouns, with definite DPs and, in some varieties, with indefinite specific DPs. 10 We adopt Van Valin’s (2005) principles for the semantic representation of predicates, although we modify Van Valin’s representations of possessives, following Bentley (2015a).

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(22) a. I. be-with' (y, x) → II. ~ be-with' (Ø, x) b. I. be-Loc' (y, x)

→ II. ~ be-Loc' (Ø, x)

The idea that possessive relations can be reduced to locative relations may be at the basis of the parallel reanalysis that the two structures have undergone as equally possible sources for the emergence of the existential construction. Indeed, the assumption that possessors are a special kind of location has existed for several decades, and is found in several theories of argument encoding (Jackendoff 1972; 1983; 1990; Croft 1990; Foley/Van Valin 1984, 53). A subsequent step then involves the reanalysis of the two participants within the existential construction, which, as a result, are no longer actants or arguments of a predicate. (23) III. be' (Ø, [x']) The pivot of the existential construction, the only overt participant x, is typically low in referentiality and semantically constitutes a generalized quantifier (cf. Francez 2007 for details) with no lexical entailments. It thus has no thematic role or macrorole, hence its behaviour as a “bad” subject (Bentley 2013, building upon Beaver/ Francez/Levinson 2005) or as an “atypical” object. Being a generalized quantifier, the pivot is a property, and hence it serves as the predicate (x') of the existential proposition. The predicate x' is a property of the null argument Ø, which is an abstract participant that provides the contextual domain or the spatiotemporal coordinates of the predication.11 This analysis of the null argument may be directly connected to the claim that, unlike locatives proper, existential statements presuppose a location (cf. Partee/Borschev 2002; 2007).12 From a structural viewpoint, we argue that the null argument of existentials sits in SubjP, namely, the functional projection identified by Cardinaletti (1997; 2004) for the semantic role of ‘subject of the predication’ (cf. also Calabrese 1986; Saccon 1993). This is the subject projection which typically hosts quirky dative and locative subjects, and which, most importantly, is not grammatically linked to nominative Case and φ-features.13 Even though SubjP is generally not overtly realized in existen11 Following Moro (1997), we assume that when a locative PP is present in the existential sentence, this is an adjunct. From an information-structure viewpoint, the locative PP may or may not be part of the focus domain. 12 We believe that this analysis of the null argument would be perfectly compatible with other similar notions intuitively analogous to a location or a spatiotemporal argument, such as Erteschik-Shir’s (1997) stage topic and Kratzer’s (1995) event argument (cf. also Hazout 2004 and Kallulli 2008). This null argument may also be equivalent to the null locative argument identified in unaccusative constructions (Benincà 1988; Saccon 1993; Pinto 1997; Tortora 1997; 2001; Sheehan 2006; 2010; ↗11 Subjects, null-subjects, and expletives; cf. also Rigau 1997). 13 For the structural mechanisms responsible for the agreement between the copula and the predicate pivot cf. Hazout (2004), although his account does not deal with the range of agreement variation which we discuss further below.

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tials, it can be filled with an overt locative phrase as argued, for example, for ter existentials in Brazilian Portuguese by Avelar (2009). (24) BPor. No centro da cidade tinha um engarrafamento enorme. traffic jam big in-the centre of-the city had.3SG a ‘There was a big traffic jam in downtown.’ (Avelar 2009, 169) Irrespective of their diachronic source, existentials therefore share an abstract null argument, which in turn derives from the reanalysis of the higher argument of the original construction. Structurally, this common property is encoded in the upper part of the syntactic representation, namely, in the projection SubjP. In the structure, on the other hand, the pivot is generated in the predicate slot of a small clause (Hazout 2004; Cruschina 2012a). This analysis can also be extended to the HABERE existential constructions that codify the pivot as a direct object. Presumably, however, HABERE existentials do not comprise a small clause, but rather a VP complement of the possessive copula. Insofar as the (direct object) pivot is the only meaningful component of the VP, its function as predicate may be fully envisaged. Our analysis of existentials may be reminiscent of Freeze’s (1992; 2001) account, where it is maintained that crosslinguistic similarities between existentials, locatives and possessives must be interpreted in terms of derivation from the same underlying structure. An important difference, however, distinguishes our analysis from Freeze’s, as well as from other accounts based on the idea that the process giving rise to existential sentences applies at a level of linguistic representation, and, specifically, in the syntax (cf. e.g. Rigau 1997). In our view, the existential construction is a synchronically independent structure, which, in a great deal of the Romance languages, has developed diachronically out of the other related constructions, but which differs from these as a result of the grammaticalization of the locative proform and the reanalysis of the predication and the argument structure of the construction. The resemblances to the source construction are simply the remaining traces of a partial or incomplete process of grammaticalization, or else the direct consequence of structural continuity, especially with respect to those grammatical properties that have not been affected by reanalysis. Subsequent processes of reanalysis or grammatical change can affect the existential construction with respect to these residual properties. This is what has happened, or is currently happening, in the existential construction with HABERE in central Catalan dialects (Rigau 1997, 403) and in several varieties of Spanish (Rodríguez Mondoñedo 2006, 329; Brown/Rivas 2012, 321, and references therein), where the pivot can now control agreement. (25) Central Catalan a. Hi han els estudiants. PF have.PRS .3PL the students

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Dialectal Spanish b. Hubieron fiestas en todos los pueblos menos en ése. the towns except in that have.PST.3PL celebrations in all ‘There were celebrations in all towns except in that one.’ c. Habían algunos libros de sintaxis en mi cuarto. books of syntax in my room have.IMPF.3PL some ‘There were some books about syntax in my room.’ In these Spanish dialects, haber agrees with the sole nominal phrase of the existential construction, in an agreement pattern that coexists alongside the standard and more generalized invariant lack of agreement (cf. section 2). This phenomenon, known as ‘personalization of haber’ in the sociolinguistic literature (Silva-Corvalán 2001), is very widespread in Latin American Spanish, where the coexistence of the alternative non-agreeing pattern is thought to be a consequence of prescriptivism. In contrast, lack of agreement is predominant in Peninsular Spanish, even though agreement is attested in non-standard varieties (cf. Fernández-Soriano/TáboasBaylin 1999, among many others). It has been noted that agreement with Spanish existential haber is restricted to tenses other than the present hay. FernándezSoriano (1999, 133) suggests that the morpheme -y (a residual of the old locative clitic) on the verb stem in fact “blocks the attachment of any morpheme”. However, some dialects with a predominant agreement pattern allow the plural morpheme -n to be suffixed to the present-tense form hay [ˈaj], which thus becomes haen [ˈaen] or hayan [ˈajan] (cf. Kany 1951, 257 for rural Argentinean; Lapesa 1980, §133 for substandard Venezuelan; Montes 1982, 384 for Colombian Antioqueño, cited in Rodríguez Mondoñedo 2006, 356; cf. also Fernández-Soriano/Táboas-Baylin 1999, 1758). Interestingly, the first person plural form habemos is also found in agreeing existentials (cf. Fernández-Soriano/Táboas-Baylin 1999, 1758; Rodríguez Mondoñedo 2006, 355). Some scholars have analysed this change as the result of the reanalysis of the pivot as subject (Waltereit/Detges 2008; Brown/Rivas 2012). Others claim that the ability of the pivot to control agreement does not make the pivot a subject (Rodríguez Mondoñedo 2006). According to our analysis, the contrast between invariant and agreeing haber can be claimed to manifest a change from a structure with a VP complement of the possessive copula whose only meaningful component is the pivot (invariant haber) to a structure with a small clause (agreeing haber), where the pivot can control agreement on a par with the pivot of ‘be’ existentials in other Romance languages.

5 The interfaces with discourse and semantics In the previous section we argued that a distinct semantics must be posited for the existential construction in contrast with locative and possessive structures.

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The different argument structure and predication are key to understanding the morphosyntactic properties of the pivot: its possible characterization as agreement controller, its formal marking as either subject or object of the sentence, and the Definiteness Effect. These properties, in turn, together with the pragmatic function and the discourse status of the pivot, help us to detect the real nature of the construction as a whole, allowing us to distinguish between genuine existentials and pseudo-existentials, that is, locatives in disguise. Not only the pivot, then, but also the whole construction requires a constant reference to the interfaces to explain the interconnections among the syntax, semantics, and the pragmatics of existentials in a principled way. The role and the function of the proform may also shed light on the convergence of all these properties. As is well known, the Romance languages do not rule out definite pivots (cf. e.g. Fischer 2013), although some seemingly existential sentences with a definite pivot are in fact locative structures (cf. below). The Romance languages thus challenge the existing theories of the Definiteness Effect, which assume that definite pivots are rejected crosslinguistically. The contrast between the languages which do not admit definite pivots, on the one hand, and the Romance languages, in which definites do occur in post-copular position, on the other, primarily depends on discourse and semantic constraints on subjects and foci in Romance (Bentley 2013; 2015b). The two main behavioural properties of pivots which are to be associated with interface requirements, and which identify them as non-canonical subjects, are their syntactic position and, in some cases, their inability to control agreement. The former property depends on the encoding of discourse structure, in particular the general tendency towards the post-verbal placement of focal constituents in Romance. The discourse and pragmatic function of existentials is to introduce a new referent into the discourse world of the interlocutors (Lambrecht 1994; Ward/ Birner 1995; McNally 1992). Being in focus, the pivot occupies the position typically associated with foci in Romance, namely, the post-copular position (↗11 Subjects, null subjects, and expletives, ↗14 Information structure, prosody, and word order).14 As for the control of number agreement on the copula, we pointed out above that in a group of Romance languages only specific pivots, or a subclass of specifics (first and second, or first, second, and third person pronominal pivots), are treated as controllers (cf. Table 1). Assuming that the control of number agreement is a subject-hood diagnostic (cf. Bentley 2013; 2015b for discussion of this point, and Marten/van der Wal 2014 for comparative Bantu evidence), specificity turns out to be the interface property which determines the encoding of the pivot as a subject in the mentioned group of dialects. 14 A slightly different position is defended in Fischer (2013) with particular respect to Catalan. In particular, Fischer explains the grammaticality of post-copular definites in Modern Catalan HABERE existentials in terms of the establishment of VOS order, which enables the post-copular DP –and hence the pivot– to occur in positions in which it can receive topic or narrow-focus interpretations.

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Contrast the examples in (26), with a plural pivot which fails to control agreement on the finite copula, with the examples in (27) involving a second person singular pivot which, instead, agrees with the copula. This opposition holds irrespective of the presence (26a,b, 27a,b) or absence (26c, 27c) of a proform, and regardless of whether the lack or presence of agreement shows on the copula (26a), on the selected subject clitic (26b,c), or on both (27). (26) Florence, Tuscany a. In questa frutta c’ è tanti semi. in this fruit PF be.3SG many seeds Grosio, Lombardy b. Inde stu fruciàm al gh’ é tänti suménzi. SBJ. CL . M . SG PF be.3SG many seeds in this fruit Belluno, Veneto c. Te sti frutti qua l’ é tanti semi. in these fruits here SBJ.CL . M . SG be.3SG many seeds ‘There are many seeds in this fruit/these fruits.’ (27) Florence, Tuscany a. La Maria la unn’ è sola. Tu ci sei te. the Mary SBJ.CL not is alone SBJ.CL . 2SG PF be.2SG you Grosio, Lombardy b. Maria l’ è miga de per le. Te gh’ es ti. Mary SBJ.CL is not of for her SBJ.CL . 2SG PF be.2SG you Belluno, Veneto c. Maria no la é sola. Te sé ti. Mary not SBJ.CL is alone SBJ.CL . 2SG be.2SG you ‘Mary is not alone. You are there./You will be there.’ The Logudorese Sardinian evidence in (28) exemplifies the Romance languages in which all specifics control agreement, while non-specifics do not. (28) Bono, Sardinia a. B’ at piseddas. PF has girls ‘There are girls.’ b. Bi sun sas piseddas. PF are the girls ‘There are the girls.’

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The differential treatment of existential pivots in terms of the control of number agreement indicates that different degrees of specificity count towards subject-hood across Romance (Bentley 2013), but at the same time it shows that the morphosyntactic properties of existentials interact with the information structure and discourse properties of the pivot. This is particularly evident with personal pronouns, which encode discourse referents that are active and identifiable with respect to the mental state and knowledge of the speaker or the hearer (cf. Saccon 1993, where their discourse features are defined in terms of presupposition). Another discourse property of existential pivots which interacts with their realization as controllers of number agreement is split focus in partitive structures. Bentley/Ciconte/Cruschina (2013b) found that Italo-Romance existential pivots which are split into a focal quantifier and its topical complement may not control agreement even in languages which otherwise exhibit invariant agreement in existentials. Specifically, in some languages, agreement is optional in these structures (29B), whereas in other languages it is banned (30B). (29) Mussomeli, Sicily A: Talia quanti ova ci su nt’ u frigoriferu. see how-many eggs PF be.3PL in the fridge ‘See how many eggs there are in the fridge.’ B: Mi pari ca ci nn’ è / su ùattu. be.3PL eight me seem.3SG that PF of-them be.3SG ‘Eggs, I think that there are eight (of them).’ (30) San Tommaso, Calabria A: Vide quant’ ova ce su ntr’ o frigoriferu. see how-many eggs PF be.3PL in the fridge ‘See how many eggs there are in the fridge.’ B: Mi pare ca ci nd’ è / *su uattu. be.3PL eight me seem.3SG that PF of-them be.3SG ‘Eggs, I think that there are eight (of them).’ As already observed, exceptions to the Definiteness Effect are therefore possible in Romance. Nonetheless, we need to distinguish contextualized existentials, which predicate the availability of a specific entity or individual for a purpose or a task which is salient in the given discourse context (cf. 27) (Abbott 1992; 1993; Bentley 2015a), from putative existential constructions with definite post-copular DPs which should in fact be understood as inverse locatives (Cruschina 2012a; Bentley/Ciconte/ Cruschina 2015). In addition, it must be noted that the occurrence of inverse locatives is only possible in those Romance languages that make use of the same copula in both existential and canonical locative structures. Hence, the Ibero-Romance languages that employ estar in locative sentences do not in fact show structures identifiable as inverse locatives, and are free from ambiguities of this sort.

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By inverse locative we mean a locative copular construction in which the locative predicate occurs in pre-copular position in the form of a pro-predicate locative resumptive clitic. The inverse word order is motivated purely by information structure. Since the predicate is already active in the discourse, the locative phrase must be either dislocated or omitted. A locative resumptive clitic, coreferential with the locative phrase, restores it within the sentence. The definite DP, on the other hand, is the comment of the construction, and it thus takes the unmarked position associated with the focus discourse role, namely, the post-copular position.15 The inverse locative in (31a) has a detached topical locative predicate, which is anaphorically or cataphorically resumed by pro-predicative pre-copular ci, and a focal noun phrase argument in post-copular position. Inverse locatives like this are semantically equivalent to the corresponding canonical locative predications (31b), but display a reverse information structure: the DP is a topic in the canonical locative predication but a focal argument in the inverse locative (this structure corresponds to Lambrecht’s 1994 argument focus). In contrast, the locative PP is part of the focus in the canonical locative predication (exhibiting a sentence- or predicatefocus structure, whereby the focus domain extends over the predicate or the entire sentence), but a topical, dislocated constituent in the inverse locative. Sentence (31c) exemplifies a subtype of inverse locatives with a similar predication and information structure, namely, deictic locatives. Deictic locatives differ from inverse locatives only with respect to the type of reference encoded by the pro-predicative ci, which expresses a default deictic value. This makes reference to the speaker’s proximal physical space.16 15 According to Moro (1997), all Italian ci sentences are inverse copular constructions formed by a copula and a small clause. The predicate of this structure is the clitic ci, which is generated as the predicative element of the small clause, and then raised to a pre-copular position (being a clitic, it adjoins to the verb), while the argument remains in post-copular position. The result is inverse, or predicate-subject, word order. Following Cruschina (2012a), we take the pro-predicative analysis of ci only to be valid for inverse and deictic locatives (for deictic locatives, cf. below), but not for existential sentences, where it is the pivot that is generated as the predicate. 16 The Romance languages which allow non-contrastive narrow focus in pre-copular position admit a pre-copular argument in the counterparts of the Italian structures under discussion. This is shown in (ia–b): (i) Modica, Sicily a. Ta suòru c’ è, ntâ cucina. your sister PF be.3SG in-the kitchen ‘Your sister is in the kitchen.’ b. Talìa! Maria c’ è! look.IMP Mary PF be.3SG ‘Look! Mary is (t)here.’ By non-contrastive focus we mean focus which expresses new information without operating on predicted or stated alternatives (Molnár 2002; Cruschina 2012b). These data confirm that inverse locatives and deictic locatives involve an argument-focus structure, namely, an information-structure configuration in which the focus only covers an argument of the predicate.

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(31) It. a. (In cucinai,) ci’ è Maria, (in cucinai ). (inverse locative) in kitchen PF be.3SG Maria in kitchen ‘Maria is (in the kitchen).’ b. Maria è in cucina. (canonical locative predication) Maria be.3SG in kitchen ‘Maria is in the kitchen.’ c. Guarda! C’ è Maria. (deictic locative) look.IMP PF be.3SG Maria ‘Look! Mary is here.’ If neither the locative nor the contextualized reading arises in a copular sentence with a post-copular definite DP, the result is ungrammatical (Bentley 2013). We need only mention the marginality of existential constructions in which the pivot is a definite description of an entity which does not have physical realization (Zamparelli 2000, 69). (32) a.

It. Ci sono (*?le) due soluzioni di questa equazione. PF be.3PL the two solutions of this equation

b. Fr. Il

y

a (*les) deux solutions à ce problème. have.3SG the two solutions to this problem ‘There are (*the) two solutions to this equation.’

SBJ. CL PF

Presentational (pseudo-existential) sentences are another copular construction featuring definite DPs which are superficially very similar to existentials, but involve different information structure and predication relations (Lambrecht 1994; 2000; 2001; 2002; Leonetti 2008a, 141; Cruschina 2012a; Villalba 2013; Bentley/Ciconte/ Cruschina 2015). (33) a. It. Ci sono i miei genitori malati. PF be.3PL the my parents ill ‘My parents are ill.’ b. Fr. Y

a le téléphone qui sonne. have.3SG the phone which ring.3SG ‘The phone is ringing.’ PF

Lula, Sardinia c. B’ este su direttore ch’ est arrennegato oje. PF be.3SG the director who be.3SG angry today ‘The director is angry today.’

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Lecce, Puglia d. Maria, nc’ è sirda a lu telefunu. Respunni! answer.IMP Mary PF be.3SG father-your at the phone ‘Mary, your father is on the phone. Pick up!’ (34) Cat. Hi ha la Maria molt enfadada. / al telèfon. / que espera. PF have.3SG the Maria very angry / to-the phone / that waits ‘Mary is very angry./at the phone./waiting.’ Presentational sentences never predicate the existence or the location of the referent introduced, unless an explicit locative meaning is independently expressed in the sentence by a locative phrase. The basic communicative function of such sentences is to introduce a referent into the discourse with the purpose of making it available for a subsequent predication (cf. Lambrecht 1994, 177). Unlike existentials proper, presentational existentials involve secondary predication or the report of an event (hence the alternative name of ‘eventive existentials’ in Leonetti 2008a and Villalba 2013). The predicate of a presentational sentence can be a clause, most typically a pseudo-relative clause (Lambrecht 2002; Casalicchio 2013), an adjective, or a locative phrase (cf. 33, 34). The crucial difference between a canonical predication and presentational existentials has to do with information structure and the extension of the focus. In canonical predications the sentence-initial subject tends to be interpreted as a topic, namely, as an element already present in the discourse and active in the minds of the discourse participants. The presentational construction, instead, ensures the inclusion of all constituents within the focus domain of the sentence. Note that the DP referent will still function as the topic of the following comment, but only in a relational sense: Referentially, this referent is introduced into the discourse for the first time, and is thus not yet active in the conversation.17 Under this view, the cluster ‘proform + copula’ in presentational existentials should be analysed as a lexical device to introduce sentence-focus statements.

6 Conclusion The evidence from Romance existential constructions suggests that the argument structure and the predication of these constructions are distinct from those of locatives and possessives proper, but not unrelated to them, as testified by the morphosyntax of these languages from a diachronic and synchronic perspective. A predicative pivot and a spatiotemporal (null) argument must be assumed to be key 17 For the distinction between the referential and the relational level of information structure, cf. Cruschina (2012b, 10–12).

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features which are shared by all the different types of existential construction attested in Romance. The non-canonical morphosyntactic properties of Romance existentials, in particular the post-copular position of the pivot and, in some cases, its inability to control number agreement on the copula, are to be explained with reference to aspects of the interfaces of morphosyntax with discourse and semantics, which are subject to crossdialectal and crosslinguistic variation.

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Tortora, Christina (1997), The syntax and semantics of the weak locative, PhD dissertation, University of Delaware. Tortora, Christina (2001), “Evidence for a null locative in Italian”, in: Guglielmo Cinque/Giampaolo Salvi (edd.), Current studies in Italian syntax. Essays offered to Lorenzo Renzi, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 313–326. Van Valin, Robert, Jr. (2005), Exploring the syntax-semantics interface, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Vanelli, Laura (1972), La deissi in italiano, Padua, Unipress. Villalba, Xavier (2013), “Eventive existentials in Catalan and the topic-focus articulation”, Italian Journal of Linguistics 25, 147–173. Wagner, Max Leopold (1960), Dizionario etimologico sardo, vol. 1, Heidelberg, Winter. Waltereit, Richard/Detges, Ulrich (2008), “Syntactic change from within and from without syntax. A usage-based analysis”, in: Richard Waltereit/Ulrich Detges (edd.), The paradox of grammatical change. Perspectives from Romance, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 13–30. Ward, Gregory/Birner, Betty (1995), “Definiteness and the English existential”, Language 71, 722– 742. Zamparelli, Roberto (2000), Layers in the determiner phrase, New York/London, Garland.

IV The role of the interfaces in language acquisition and change

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17 Acquiring multilingual phonologies (2L1, L2 and L3): Are the difficulties in the interfaces? Abstract: This chapter discusses various types of bilingual and multilingual phonological acquisition, namely simultaneous (2L1), sequential (L2), as well as L3. The main focus is on 2L1, which can lead to two balanced competences or to a strong and a weak competence, as in the case of a so-called heritage language (HL). Special emphasis is devoted to the acquisition of Spanish in diverse bilingual settings, but phonological phenomena in the bilingual acquisition of other languages will be reported, too, which show language interaction. This may affect the order of acquisition, the speed (leading to acceleration or delay), and even the grammatical representation (involving negative transfer). In search of an explanation for these different outcomes of interaction, it is argued that in phonology the Interface Hypothesis is not the most explanatory hypothesis. A new approach to bilingual development, based on OT is proposed. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the main hypotheses related to L2 and L3 acquisition. Keywords: acquisition, bilingual (simultaneous and sequential), heritage language (HL), language interaction, multilingual, phonology

1 Bilingualism and Multilingualism The focus of this chapter is on the phonological acquisition of language and the role that alleged interface phenomena play in that process. The language that an infant is exposed to is acquired first: It is the first language or L1. In fact, being exposed to one single language from birth is the exception rather than the rule. A typical situation is to be exposed to several languages from birth, generally two, which both are first languages (2L1). In this chapter monolingual L1 acquisition will only be tangentially dealt with, to set the ground on which simultaneous 2L1 acquisition will be described. It has profusely been shown that the languages in a 2L1 condition develop ‘differentiated’ phonological systems (cf. e.g. Paradis 2001). However, the two languages are in contact, and there is interaction between them. In order Acknowledgement: The author gratefully acknowledges the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for its support of the Collaborative Research Center 538 on “Multilingualism” (1999–2011), which included the project E3 “Prosodic constraints to the phonological and morphological development in bilingual language acquisition”.

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to find out the degree of linguistic interaction of such contact conditions, we will compare the outcome of 2L1 acquisition with the acquisition of each language in a monolingual condition. Our main focus is on 2L1. There are various types of simultaneous 2L1 acquisition, e.g. with two balanced competences or a strong and a weak language competence (Schlyter 1993; 2001; Montrul 2006; 2009). The latter is considered a heritage language (HL) in the NorthAmerican tradition, and this terminology is being extended to Europe, too. Many examples of HL phonological phenomena will be reported from the literature, which show much cross-language interaction, with a clear influence of the strong on the weak language. Such influence is not as common into the reverse direction (from the weak to the strong language). Besides the situations just described, a second language (L2) can be acquired after L1 acquisition has already taken place, either totally or partially. This process is widely called Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and can be referred to adults (aL2) or to children who begin being exposed to the L2 sequentially (cL2), although the literature does not have a concrete definition about the age at which the exposure to another language qualifies as cL2 (cf. e.g. Meisel 2008; 2009; Unsworth/ Blom 2010). The common situation of adults learning another language can also be characterized as Second Language Learning (SLL) or Foreign Language Learning (FLL). Whereas 2L1 and cL2 are generally understood as being acquired naturally, from the oral input that children get from the environment, SLL and FLL usually involve formal teaching and written input.1 In the last years a new field on language acquisition has emerged, which deals with so-called third languages or L3. An L3 can appear both in the context of a (simultaneous) bilingual speaker, who after having acquired 2L1 is exposed to an L3, or in the context of a sequential bilingual, who after L1 and L2 learns an L3. Research on L3 assumes that there will be interaction in the language contact situation in relation to L3, the main question here being whether L1 or L2 will be the most influential language.

2 On simultaneous bilingual acquisition of Romance and Germanic In this section, attention will be directed towards the HL Spanish for bilingual children growing up in the US, thus acquiring English as the strong language, in cases described in the literature; and towards children acquiring Spanish as the HL and German as the strong language, from data of a bilingual project carried out in

1 Linguists from the Chomskyan tradition often distinguish between acquisition of an L1 and learning of an L2. The term SLA, though, is widely used, generally not implying such a distinction.

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Hamburg, Germany.2 The phenomena reported show different types of crosslanguage influence, with different outcomes (Paradis/Genesee 1996). The influence can be negligible, just leading to a different order of acquisition, as e.g. production of monosyllabic prosodic words, which monolingual Spanish children produce after trisyllables have been acquired, whereas German-Spanish bilinguals produce them in Spanish before acquiring trisyllables (Lleó 2006b). Such a difference is not noticeable later on, when the child grows out of it. The influence can also be a positive one, leading to acceleration, as e.g. consonantal codas are produced sooner and more frequently by German-Spanish bilinguals in Spanish than by Spanish monolinguals (Lleó et al. 2003). It can also be a negative influence that leads to a slight delay, as e.g. in the production of unfooted syllables (Lleó 2002) or to much delay, often involving negative transfer, as in the case of spirantization (Lleó/Rakow 2005; Lleó submitted). The section will also include a brief consideration of other Romance languages − French or Italian − acquired simultaneously with either English or German.

2.1 Some aspects of the simultaneous acquisition of Spanish and English As it is generally the case in language acquisition research, most work has been done on the English language. Nonetheless, in the field of bilingualism and multilingualism, there are many studies of English being acquired with Spanish. They will be reviewed in this subsection. The first studies dealing with bilingual acquisition of phonology, like Contreras/ Saporta (1971), set out to finding evidence in favour of or against the hypothesis that the bilingual child at first has one single phonological system for both languages (cf. Vihman 1985; Vogel 1975). The view that the two languages of the bilingual child are represented in one single phonological system was prevalent until about 1980, when Redlinger/Park (1980) and Ingram (1981/1982) adhered to the view that separation of the two systems was in place from the beginning of acquisition. The issue of one single system has reappeared, as e.g. in Schnitzer/Krasinski (1994), who studied a bilingual child aged 1;1−3;9 (years;months). On the basis of consonantal acquisition, they report a single phonological system until age 2;0, whereas later on they find evidence for two distinct systems, albeit with “interference of one language in the other” (585). In another study of an English-Spanish bilingual child aged 1;6−4;6, no unitary system is found in the area of vowels, but rather clear evidence

2 The corpus PhonBLA of the project “Prosodic constraints on phonological and morphological development in bilingual first language acquisition” is available, together with other corpora, e.g. the monolingual corpus PAIDUS, from the Hamburger Zentrum für Sprachkorpora (HZSK), cf. www. corpora.uni-hamburg.de/sfb538/de_overview.html.

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for the separation of the two phonological systems from a very early age, and minimal interference later on (Schnitzer/Krasinski 1996). Deuchar/Clark (1996) analyzed the VOT in English and Spanish of a bilingual child, Manuela, at ages 1;7, 1;11 and 2;3. Manuela produced an adult-like voicing contrast in English at 2;3, but not in Spanish; this difference is taken by the authors as evidence that the child is developing two separate systems. The authors note the use of some long-lag for Spanish voiceless stops.3 Goldstein/Washington (2001) have analyzed the properties of both the Spanish and the English produced by 12 normally developing 4-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals (ages 4;0 to 4;11). There were no significant differences between the two languages as regards correct percentages of consonants (for voicing, place and manner of articulation) or percentages of occurrence of phonological processes (cluster reduction, coda deletion, as well as substitution processes like stopping or liquid simplification). However, differences were found between bilingual and monolingual Spanish, especially regarding spirants, the flap and the trill, with a relatively high number of substitutions for /ɾ/ and /r/. These sounds, especially the trill, are acquired late by monolingual Spanish children, and for these bilinguals it took even longer. By contrast, the English /ɹ/ was produced very accurately. Interestingly, bilingual children apply less coda deletion than monolinguals. Regarding spirants, the authors postulate that “many of the bilingual children had not acquired the allophonic rule that governs [their] production” (159). In the study of 3- to 4years-old monolingual Spanish children by Goldstein/Iglesias (1996) spirants were already mastered, with the exception of [ð]. With regard to rhythm, Spanish, together with most Romance languages, is a syllable-timed language, whereas English and German, together with other Germanic languages, are stress-timed. On the basis of this difference, Bunta/Ingram (2007) investigated rhythm in the productions of 10 Spanish monolinguals, 10 English monolinguals and 10 English-Spanish bilinguals, all of them aged 4;0 to 5;2. The monolinguals were introduced into the study as controls for the bilinguals. The method applied was Grabe/Low’s (2002, 519–520) Pairwise Variability Index (PVI), which measures the “level of variability” between adjacent intervals; these are vocalic or consonantal (i.e. intervocalic). It is predicted that syllable-timed languages have low interval variability, whereas stressed-timed languages should show high variability indices. For the monolingual children, results show that the older ones (aged 4;6 to 5;2) as well as the younger ones (aged approximately 4;0 to 4;5) have different PVIs depending on the language, the variability values for Spanish being lower than the German values. Bunta/Ingram (2007) found a statistically significant difference between the PVIs of the two languages of English-Spanish bilingual 3 Spanish distinguishes short-lag (voiceless) and pre-voicing (voiced), whereas English distinguishes long-lag (voiceless) and short-lag (voiced). Thus, Manuela’s use of long-lag in Spanish is not targetlike, and seems to be transferred from English.

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children. They also found a statistically significant difference between the vocalic PVIs of bilingual English as compared with monolingual English, the latter being more variable; intervocalic PVIs did not exhibit such a difference. Bunta/Ingram (2007, 1010) assume that it is not possible to determine whether the syllable-timing bias of their English-Spanish bilinguals “was due to markedness or Spanish dominance”. Intonation, in particular under bilingualism, has been somehow neglected up to recent times. An interesting study of the effects of intonation in migration and consequent bilingualism has focused on the interrogative intonation produced in the Cuban variety of Spanish spoken in Miami (Alvord 2010). Spanish declaratives and yes-no questions can be identical as far as word order is concerned, being only distinguished by intonation: declaratives have a falling final contour and yes-no questions a rising one. Yes-no questions have a rising final contour in American English, too. However, the Cuban variety is known for having a falling contour in both cases. Participants were 25 Cuban women living in Miami, divided in three groups. Results show that group 1 (born in Cuba and emigrated to the US after becoming 11 years old) preferred the Cuban falling contour, whereas group 2 (born in the US or arrived there before the age of 6) had a strong preference for the rising pattern. Interestingly, group 3 (born in the US to at least one parent of group 2), hardly produced any questions with rising intonation. This group corresponds to 2L1 and the result was unexpected, because they are proficient in both languages, and even have a preference for English. The author claims that this result excludes diachronic change, because in such a case, group 3 would have produced as many rising contours as group 2, and speculates that the result obtained may be related to affirming their group identity, i.e. their Cuban identity. Another factor relevant to the participants’ linguistic behaviour is the language spoken at work and with friends. Another line of research has set out to develop adequate measurements of phonological development, first monolingual, and lately bilingual, as well. They all draw upon so-called whole-word measurements (Ingram 2002), the crucial ones being PMLU (Phonological Mean Length of Utterance) and PWP (Phonological Word Proximity); the latter shows the distance between target and child phonology. Ingram’s original measures have been applied to bilingual data involving Spanish, e.g. in Bunta et al. (2009). The authors argue that “both the PMLU and the Proximity measures are fairly broad and robust, and, therefore, are not designed as finegrained phonological measures” (2009, 158). A selection of measurements has also been applied by Hase/Ingram/Bunta (2010) to 2- and 3-years-old monolingual Spanish speaking children. Arias/Lleó (2013) found some difficulties when trying to apply the measures to German-Spanish bilinguals. They thus expanded whole-word measurements, to make them adaptable to different languages, and to different developmental paths, with special focus on German-Spanish bilingual children. These new expanded measures capture Ingram’s spirit, but at the same time trying to do justice to the segmental and prosodic development of monolinguals and

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bilinguals, which will allow to consider the two languages of the bilinguals on an equal basis. One of the latest proposals in this area of assessing the phonology of bilinguals is Ingram/Dubasik (2011), which keeps Ingram’s (2002) PMLU and PWP, along a large array of further measurements, involving some overlap.

2.2 Cross-language segmental interaction between German and Spanish Studies that have considered Spanish in contact with German have noted much interaction between the two phonological systems. Going back to Paradis/Genesee (1996), the types of interaction proposed by them are: delay, acceleration, and transfer (cf. section 2, above). Delay4 has especially been found in the case of marked categories, like long vowels in German or pre-voicing in Spanish, although the delay of the former is short-lived, whereas that of the latter seems to be more persistent (cf. Rakow/Lleó 2008). Acceleration appears in the acquisition of codas in Spanish by German-Spanish bilinguals (cf. below). In Kehoe/Lleó/Rakow’s (2004) study of VOT by three German-Spanish bilingual children from age 2;0 to 3;0, long-lag stops were found in the Spanish data of some of the bilingual children. This should be ascribed to transfer, given that there are no long-lag stops in monolingual Spanish. Other areas of segmental phonology, which have been studied on the basis of German-Spanish bilinguals and consequent interaction are spirantization5 (cf. Lleó/Rakow 2005; Lleó submitted, and Figure 1), and place assimilation of nasals (cf. Lleó/Rakow 2006; Lleó submitted), both of them leading to delay and negative transfer. Similarities have also been found between the HL and an L2, as shown by the following data on spirantization. Whereas monolingual children produced very high percentages of target-like spirants at ages 2;6, 2;7 and 3;0 (Figure 1, left diagram), bilingual children hardly produced any spirants in Spanish at age 3;0 (Figure 1, middle diagram). These data point to more similarities between the HL and L2 than between the HL and L1, on the basis of percentages of target-like production (cf. Zampini 1997 for L2). However, at age 5;0 two of the bilinguals produce high percentages of spirants (Figure 1, right diagram). Given the results at 5;0, we could also see the values at 3;0 as delay. But considering that German does not have a general post-lexical process of spirantization, the way that Spanish has it (Wiese 1996, 206–209), and that producing voiced stops for spirants is a target-deviant pronunciation in Spanish, the bilingual situation at 3;0 should be described as involving negative transfer. This is only one possible outcome of language interaction. As pointed out above (section 2), acceleration has also been found in the Spanish acquisition of codas, or 4 Delay, especially if long-lasting, leaves a gap that is generally filled with transfer. 5 Process by which the voiced stops /b d ɡ/ are produced as the approximants [β ð ɣ] in certain contexts, namely after a vowel or another continuant segment.

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Figure 1: Production (in %) of the spirants [β] (black columns) and [ð] (grey columns) by monolingual Spanish children (left diagram), by younger German-Spanish bilingual children (middle diagram), and by older bilingual children (right diagram).

Figure 2: Coda production (in %) by monolingual German and Spanish children (upper diagram) and by German-Spanish bilingual children (lower diagram), adapted from Lleó et al. (2003, 201, 209).

better, acquisition of closed syllables, under influence of German.6 Figure 2 exemplifies this effect, namely that in Spanish bilingual children’s codas develop sooner than those of Spanish monolinguals: The upper diagram shows mean percentages of target-like closed syllables produced by a group of three monolingual German and another group of three monolingual Spanish children. The columns for the Spanish monolinguals show slow acquisition: at 2;4 they still do not reach 50% of coda 6 In Lleó (2003) and Lleó et al. (2003), the coda positions rather than the codas per se were quantified. Participants were German-Spanish simultaneous bilinguals.

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Figure 3: Vowel length in three monolingual German children’s production, reprinted from (Kehoe/Lleó 2003).

Figure 4: Vowel length in three German-Spanish bilingual children’s production, adapted from (Kehoe 2002).

production. Figure 2 (lower diagram) displays the percentages of target-like closed syllables produced by a group of five bilingual children in German and in Spanish. The Figure shows that although the German values are generally higher than the Spanish ones, the Spanish percentages of bilinguals are at all points higher than those of monolinguals. That is, the German-Spanish bilinguals acquire codas in Spanish faster than the monolinguals (50% of coda production is achieved at 1;9). Around age 2;0, t-tests resulted in statistically significant differences between monolinguals and bilinguals in Spanish (cf. Lleó et al. 2003). The effects presented in Figures 1 and 2 are two extremes of a series of interactional phenomena. Again, on the basis of Paradis/Genesee’s (1996) proposal, delay may appear, too, but not necessarily involving transfer or long-lasting consequences. For instance, vowel length in German is acquired more slowly by bilinguals than by German monolinguals, but the delay is overcome at age 3;0 or shortly thereafter. Figure 3 shows that monolingual German children already produce a distinction between short and long vowels up to age 2;0, and at age 2;3 to 2;6 the difference is target-like, i.e. it amounts to more than 100 ms, as in the case of adults. Figure 4 shows that at this same age (2;3 to 2;6) the bilinguals hardly begin to distinguish short and long vowels, which they will produce target-like at about age 3;0. This can thus be considered a short delay.

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2.3 Cross-language prosodic interaction between German and Spanish In the prosodic domain, truncation of unfooted (also referred to as weak or pre-tonic) syllables, which Spanish monolinguals overcome very soon, led to a short delay in bilinguals (Lleó 2002). On the other hand, consonantal clusters and diphthongs do not seem to be negatively or positively affected in bilingualism (Kehoe et al. 2008). Intonation has produced many studies, which have shown that there is hardly any delay in the bilingual condition, except for the pre-nuclear pitch accent of Spanish declaratives (Lleó/Rakow/Kehoe 2004), as well as scaling and alignment in the intonation of interrogatives (Lleó/Rakow 2011). Stress has been studied in Arias/Lleó (2009). The authors find evidence that German monolinguals analyze iambic words (e.g. /ka.ˈput/ ‘broken’) as comprising an unfooted syllable followed by a moraic trochee ([ka] is an unfooted syllable attached to the word, not within the moraic foot [put]), whereas Spanish monolinguals analyze iambic words as quantity insensitive iambs (that is, /me.ˈlon/ ‘melon’ is analyzed as one iambic foot). The bilinguals show some interaction between both systems in their development, but do not show any specific effect. Kehoe/Lleó/Rakow (2011) analyzed rhythm in the productions of three monolingual Spanish children and three monolingual German children at age 3;0. The analysis was based on PVIs (PVI-V or variability of vocalic intervals, and PVI-C or variability of intervocalic intervals; cf. section 2.1). As predicted, the authors found that both vocalic and intervocalic PVIs concentrate in the low values of the scale for the Spanish children, whereas variability indexes are much larger in the utterances of the three German children. The analysis of the bilingual data shows a higher degree of variability in Spanish than it is the case for monolinguals, i.e. the rhythmic pattern of bilingual Spanish resembles the stress-timed pattern. Interestingly, in an extension of this study to Spanish-German bilinguals growing up in Spain, the rhythmic pattern of bilingual German differs from monolingual German, resembling the syllable-timed pattern. These joint results on the one hand show some influence of German onto Spanish in Germany, which can be considered short delay. On the other hand, they point into the direction of the majority language as the decisive factor for predicting the direction of interaction.

2.4 Acquisition of French or Italian in contact with English or German There are other situations of contact between a Romance and a Germanic language, as e.g. French or Italian in contact with English or German. However, research on the phonological acquisition of such 2L1 is not as abundant as research on the acquisition of Spanish in contact. Two topics have attracted the attention of researchers: liaison in French and VOT both in French and Italian.

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In French, word-final consonants − the most frequent ones being /-s/, /-t/ and /-n/ − are not produced, except in the case that they are followed by a vowel-initial word. For instance, petit ‘little’ is produced [pəti] in isolation, but [pətit] when followed by enfant ‘child’ in [pətitɑ͂fɑ͂]. By the so-called liaison, the final /t/ of petit is produced as the onset of the initial syllable of enfant. Given that liaison implies a miss-match between the left edges of syllables and words, its acquisition is believed to pose a difficult challenge to children as well as to adults. In fact, several authors have reported parsing errors, consisting in the variable production of e.g. ours ‘bear’ as [nuʁ], [zuʁ] or [luʁ] (Chevrot/Dugua/Fayol 2005; 2009; Dugua 2006). Chevrot/ Dugua/Fayol (2005; 2009), on the basis of a usage-based framework, propose a three-step model for the acquisition of liaison: First, children miss-align words and base their productions on ‘chunks’ that incorporate the most frequent liaison consonants to roots, as in the example of ours mentioned above. In the second stage, children know how to produce liaison with typical liaison words like un, les, deux, etc. The third stage is characterized by a liaison template that can be extended to newly acquired words. Nicoladis/Paradis (2011), also building their approach on a usage-based model, observed the productions of 25 French-English bilingual children (12 simultaneous or 2L1 and 13 sequential: 7 English and 6 French cL2) and 6 monolinguals aged from 3;1 to 5;7 years-old. Liaison frames were separated into frequent (those beginning with un and deux) and infrequent (beginning with un petit and beaucoup de). The proportion of target-like liaison varied a lot, and could be traced back to the size of the child’s vocabulary more accurately than to the child’s age: Children with larger French vocabularies produced more liaison. The comparison between bilinguals and monolinguals resulted in some significant differences, but only in relation to the infrequent frames. Not many studies deal with final attainment by different types of learners. One of them has brought the VOT of English and French voiceless stops into focus. VOT constitutes an appropriate area of research, given the differences between French and English, which may lead to cross-language interaction. Recall (subsections 2.1 and 2.2, above) that voiceless stops in English are long-lag, but in French they are short-lag, as in Spanish. Fowler et al. (2008) set out to quantify the VOT outcome in the relevant contact situation. For that purpose 78 university students (mean age: 25.6 years) were selected as participants, divided into four groups: monolingual English, monolingual French, English-French simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) and sequential bilinguals with French as cL2. Production of words with initial /p t k/ by the various groups showed that the French VOTs of 2L1 speakers were significantly longer than those of French monolinguals, and even longer in French as cL2. English VOT was shorter in 2L1 than in English monolinguals, and even shorter in English as cL2. These findings corroborate the ultimate influence of long-lag into the French of 2L1s and of short-lag into the English of the same 2L1 participants.

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Kupisch et al. (2014) report on judgments on foreign accent of three groups of speakers: 20 monolinguals (L1ers of French, German or Italian), 20 second-language speakers of French, Italian or German (with another one of these languages as L1), who had been exposed to the L2 before 11 years of age (cL2ers of French, Italian or German), and 38 German-French or German-Italian simultaneous bilinguals (2L1ers). Findings show that the majority language (i.e. the strong language) is spoken without foreign accent, whereas L2ers speak with variable foreign accents; the weak language (HL) has an intermediate position between L1 and L2.

3 Searching for explanatory factors of interaction In the literature on language acquisition the Interface Hypothesis has been proposed to account for cases of cross-linguistic interaction (cf. Montrul 2006; 2009; Rothman 2009; Sorace 2004; Tsimpli/Sorace 2006; Sorace/Serratrice 2009; White 2009) in the simultaneous acquisition of 2L1s, and especially in the acquisition of an L2.

3.1 The Interface Hypothesis of bilingualism According to this hypothesis, it is at the interfaces that bilingual children and L2 learners have more difficulties to acquire language, and they may get results that deviate from those of monolinguals. In other words, if incomplete acquisition takes place, this is probably to appear at some interface, as i.e. between syntax and semantics, or syntax and pragmatics. Topics related to interfaces have generally been about grammar domains outside of phonology. An example of a domain vulnerable to negative influence is the use of subject pronouns in Spanish or Italian, which relates to syntax and discourse, as it is only under change of topic that nullsubject languages allow for the explicit use of the personal pronoun. A distinction is made in this model between internal interfaces, involving two internal components of the grammar, like syntax and semantics, and external interfaces, involving one component of the grammar (e.g. syntax) and an area that is external to the grammar (e.g. pragmatics, by which discourse features like topic change are meant). Proponents of the Interface Hypothesis generally claim that bilingual children and L2 speakers have more difficulties when dealing with the external interfaces (but cf. White 2011, who questions this claim). This hypothesis should thus be tested in the Phonology. To accomplish this, the interfaces responsible for sound production must be defined. This will be done in the following subsections.

3.2 Interfaces in phonology Following the definition given above, no less than seven interfaces can be identified: segments and lexemes, segments and prosodic positions, phonemes and phones,

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phonology and morphology, prosody (i.e. prosodic targets: pitch, intensity, duration) and syntax, prosody and semantics, prosody and pragmatics.

3.2.1 Phonemes and lexemes As soon as a lexicon is built, independently of the number of words it contains, a phonological representation, on the one hand, and a semantic representation, on the other hand, must be stored in the child’s brain, no matter how rudimentary these may be (Fikkert/Levelt 2008). The format of these representations at the very beginning of language acquisition is still open to debate (cf. discussions about early phonological representations in the nineteen seventies and eighties, e.g. in Kiparsky/ Menn 1977). During the first months of word production by the child, phonological representations seem to be rather incomplete, based on underspecification or global properties more than on strictly segmented phonemes. From a certain point in time, during the second year of word production, the phonological representation of words takes place around categorial segments, i.e. phonemes. From this time point on, we can say that the child has phonological representations that resemble those of the target language. If we follow e.g. Sorace/Serratrice (2009, 197) in distinguishing two types of interfaces, an internal to denote a component that links “(a) sub-modules of language” and an external, to denote another component that links “(b) language and non-linguistic cognitive systems (cf. Chomsky 1995; Jackendoff 2002; among others),” obviously the relation between phonemes (with their phonetic features) and lexemes (with their semantic features) constitutes the basic interface of language, belonging to the first type or internal interface. This first interface was also recognized in the structuralist tradition, as the first articulation of language (Martinet 1960; cf. section 4, below). At a very early stage of language acquisition, research on speech perception has shown that the association of segments and meanings is coarse and incomplete at first: The phonetic features defining a segment are only partially there, as it has been reported many times that pseudo-words recently learned in the lab are not distinguishable for voicing or place of articulation by the child at about 10 months of age (Pater/Stager/Werker 2004). Later on, the child is capable of distinguishing all phonetic features associated to a word. On the semantic side, something similar happens, as it has been reported that very young children may call all men “daddy” or various four-legged animals like horses, cows or dogs are called by one of these nouns, which implies that the sets of nominal semantic features are yet incomplete. White (2009, 56–57) subsumes this interface under the external “articulatoryperceptual system mediated by PF” (or Phonetic Form), and points out to a noticeable lack of research in this L2 area. Relevant work here is Brown (2000) who “examines how the L2er’s L1 phonological representations inhibit or facilitate perception of L2

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speech sounds”. In short, “L2 speech perception is constrained by the L1 feature inventory”. This would explain the difficulties of Japanese L2ers of English to perceive /l/ and /ɾ/, “because Japanese lacks the coronal feature which distinguishes between them”.

3.2.2 Segments and prosodic positions Phonology is not only comprised of segments or phonemes. In speech, segments are connected on the basis of prosody, building syllables that participate in the organization established by the Prosodic Hierarchy (Nespor/Vogel 1986/2007), thus building metrical feet, prosodic words and prosodic phrases. Some aspects of prosody belong to the lexicon, notably prosodic-word structure (along with syllable structure, foot structure and stress), but prosody is in fact split between the lexicon and the principles that govern connecting words into speech, namely the prosodic organization of intonation and rhythm, by means of pitch, amplitude and duration. The non-linear-phonology approach, with its two levels − the structural level or skeleton, and the segments (also referred to as melody) − has clarified the distinction between segmental phonology (i.e. segments and features) and prosodic positions, with their supra-segmental properties. Here lies a second interface, not generally considered as such in the literature: the interface between segments and their prosodic positions and properties (notably, positions in the skeleton), which has been treated in the literature on L1 acquisition, with varying intensity (cf. Goad/ Rose 2003). Whereas syllabic positions have received much attention, prosodicword positions have been described less often, and treatment is still less frequent along the phonological phrase and the intonation phrase (cf. Kehoe 2013 for an exhaustive overview of prosody in child language research). The topic requires further research, because it relates to aspects of child language that pose many complex questions, as e.g. treatment of consonantal codas, reduction of clusters, reduction of diphthongs, stressed vs. unstressed positions, truncation of unstressed syllables, assimilation of consonantal features within the word and across words, etc. Much literature has been devoted to these topics, also in the Romance languages, but there are still many open questions.7 In recent times this dichotomy has given way to the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (Goad/White 2006), which predicts that functional categories (e.g. tense inflection)

7 To briefly illustrate this paragraph, limited by reasons of space, let us consider consonant clusters, as in Sp. tres ‘three’ or diphthongs, as in Sp. puedo ‘(I) can.’ The cluster /tɾ/ is comprised of two (consonantal) segments, which fill one prosodic position, namely the syllabic Onset; the diphthong /we/ is comprised of two (vocalic) segments, which fill the position of the syllabic Nucleus. At the beginning of word production, segmental complexity clashes with structural prosodic simplicity, and this leads to omission of one segment in each case.

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will be difficult for the L2 learner in case it is expressed by means of a certain prosodic category, which is not instantiated in his/her L1. For instance, Mandarin does not have prosodic-word adjunction, and this will interfere with the production of regular tense agreement in English, which is expressed by adjunction (Goad/White 2006). This hypothesis is attractive, but not many analyses based on it have been worked out yet. A simple example in this area could be looked for in speakers of a language like Hawaiian, with CV syllables and no codas. This should lead to difficulties for learners of an L2 that expresses inflection by means of codas, as it is the case in English. Suffixes may pose great difficulties in L2, but unfortunately there do not seem to be systematic findings from the point of view of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis.

3.2.3 Phonemes and phones or phonology and phonetics L1 acquisition research has taken a conventional look on phonology, according to which certain interfaces are taken into consideration, even though generally they are not referred to as interfaces: between segmental phonology and phonetics, i.e. between the underlying representation (in phonemes or features) and its surface sounds (phones or allophones). Spirantization in Spanish offers a relevant example. In classical generative phonology, it is defined as an allophonic process that converts underlying voiced obstruents, non-defined for continuancy, or defined as default [cont(inuant)] /b d ɡ/, into approximants or spirants [β ð ɣ] after a [+cont] segment, be it a vowel or a consonant. Elsewhere, e.g. after a nasal, they are produced as stops: [b d ɡ]. In child language, the [cont] segment constituting the context for spirantization is a vowel,8 as in dedo ‘finger’, produced [deðo], where the vowel /e/ constitutes the context for the spirant [ð]. As we have seen above, children acquiring L1 Spanish produce target-like spirants very soon, even sooner than at the ages shown in Figure 1 (Lleó/Rakow 2005; Lleó submitted). However, German-Spanish bilingual children growing up in Germany have very low percentages of spirants at age 3;0. L1 speakers of a language without spirants need quite a long time and training to be able to produce Spanish spirants (Zampini 1997). On the other hand, L1 speakers of Spanish often produce spirants instead of voiced stops in L2 German or English (Lleó/Vogel 2004). However, not all cases of such an interface lead to transfer, as the interface between Phonology and Phonetics is all over, in the sense that there is always an underlying form associated to a phonetic realization, but this does not mean that the bilingual will have difficulties or will need a long time (involving delay) to acquire it. More than the interface, the phonetic duality of the resulting segments ([−cont] and [+cont]) is what seems to require time and effort, that is, having to 8 The reason is that very young Spanish children mainly produce CV type of syllables.

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choose between the stop and the continuant, and to choose the right allophone in the right context.

3.2.4 Segmental phonology and morphology In the same way that certain segments are associated to lexemes, other segments are associated to functional morphemes. For instance, in Spanish /s/ at the end of a noun is associated to plurality, either alone, as in casaS G vs. casasP L or as part of the ‑es plural allomorph as in florS G vs. floresP L . The segment /s/ may also appear in contexts not associated to plurality, as, e.g., the last segment of the proper name Carlos ‘Charles’. This interface, although it is parallel to the one in 3.2.1 and could thus be subsumed under 3.2.1 (segments are associated to morphemes that either have lexical or functional import), may pose difficulties to bilinguals, especially in L2, depending on the degree of (ir)regularity of word formation. Thus, in Spanish, as shown in Lleó (2006a), as soon as the bilingual child is capable of producing /s/ in coda position, s/he can produce the plural endings target-like. Another domain of Spanish morphology that is acquired soon is the correspondence between final /‑o/ and masculine gender, and between final /‑a/ and feminine gender. However, there are exceptions to such a generalization, which lead to mistakes especially in L2, where L2ers may incorrectly refer to problema with the feminine gender.9 This area poses many more difficulties in German, where there are several allomorphs for the plural morpheme, as e.g. Sg. Woche ‘week’, Tag ‘day’, Zeitung ‘journal’, Kaffee ‘coffee’ vs. Pl. Wochen, Tage, Zeitungen, Kaffees, where one single plural morpheme, plurality, has following allomorphs: {‑n, ‑e, ‑en, ‑s}, and a few others. Obviously, difficulties arise from the missing systematic correspondence in German between phonemes and morphemes.

3.2.5 Prosody and syntax and/or pragmatics Prosodic categories, i.e. pitch, intensity or amplitude, and duration, or so-called prosodic parameters are relevant to intonation research. These parameters are associated in certain ways depending on the specific language, and such associations are in their turn related to syllables and/or to vowels. Clearly, vowels but not consonants can be carriers of such prosodic features. These associations are acquired very soon by monolinguals as well as by bilinguals, although bilinguals may show some delay in certain respects (Lleó/Rakow 2011). 9 Harris (1991, 32) analyzes grammatical gender in Spanish as comprised of an “inner core” (“suffix -o is invariably attached to masculine stems and the affix -a is invariably attached to feminine stems”) and an “outer core” (words that end in a consonant or may “have [e] for syllabicity”, e.g. padreM ‘father’ or madreF ‘mother’, without correlation to gender. Finally, “the residue contains all words not in the core,” like e.g. problema.

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Intonation constitutes a module of phonology directly associated to syntax and to pragmatics. For instance, a declarative sentence has a different intonation contour (or different pitch accents in the AM model of intonation), as compared to an interrogative sentence. And within interrogative sentences, a yes-no question has a different intonation than a wh-question. On the one hand, all these types of sentences are being organized in the syntax. On the other hand, declarative and interrogative sentences may involve a negative presupposition or some other component, regulated by pragmatics, and the latter be associated to different intonation patterns. No delay has been reported on the side of bilinguals regarding the association of meaning and intonation targets. Certain meanings and subtleties are not yet acquired e.g. at about 3;0, but this seems to be true both for monolinguals and bilinguals; for instance, most interrogatives produced at age 3;0 are neutral ones (but see a few more cases of short delay in section 2.3, above, like scaling and alignment in bilinguals’ interrogatives).

4 Interfaces vs. internal factors to explain phonological cross-language interaction Given the various outcomes of cross-language interaction presented in section 2 above, notably negative transfer, as well as delay and acceleration, an explanation was looked for in the interfaces, which seemed to be a successful explanatory tool in bilingualism, outside of phonology (Argyri/Sorace 2007; Hulk/Müller 2000; Sorace 2005; Sorace/Serratrice 2009; ↗18 Interfaces with syntax in language acquisition). However, in section 3.2 we have shown that interfaces are numerous in relation to phonology, but still, they do not always lead to difficulties in bilingualism. Interfaces can be related to a positive influence between the languages of a bilingual, but also to a negative influence or to no influence at all. The impression emerges that as far as the sound aspect of language is concerned, interfaces are all over (this was captured by de Saussure’s 1916/2013 linguistic sign and notably by Martinet’s 1960 double articulation du langage ‘double articulation of language’). Nevertheless, the attempt to characterize vulnerable areas of phonology as belonging to some interface is not promising, because there are interface phenomena that do not appear to be vulnerable, and vulnerable areas not in the interface, as we will see in section 5 (cf. White 2011 for a similar conclusion).

4.1 Phonological phenomena and their outcomes in bilingualism Tables 1 and 2 (left column) contain some selected phenomena documented in research on German-Spanish bilingual acquisition of phonology, and also described in sections 2.2 and 2.3 above. The middle column shows the effect each phenomenon

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Table 1: Spanish segmental phenomena in the bilingual context, their resulting effect in interaction with German, and relevant interface in each case. Phenomena of Spanish SEGMENTS

Effect

Interfaces

Closed syllables/codas Voiced stops Article position Vowels Diphthongs Consonant clusters /-s/ Plural Unfooted syllables Short VOT Article segments Pre-voicing Spirants Assimilated Nasals

acceleration acceleration acceleration no effect no effect no effect no effect short delay variation/delay delay long delay with transfer long delay with transfer delay with transfer

3.2.2 Segment-prosodic position 3.2.3 Segment-allophone 3.2.4 Prosodic positions-morphology 3.2.3 Segment-phone 3.2.2 Segment-prosodic position 3.2.2 Segment-prosodic position 3.2.4 Segment-morpheme 3.2.2 Segment-prosodic position 3.2.3 Segment-phone 3.2.4 Segments-morphology 3.2.3 Segment-phone 3.2.3 Segment-allophone 3.2.4 Segment-allomorph

Table 2: Spanish supra-segmental phenomena in the bilingual context, their resulting effect in interaction with German, and relevant interface in each case. Phenomena of Spanish SUPRA-SEGMENTALS

Effect

Interfaces

Declarative intonation Question intonation Pre-nuclear pitch accent Scaling Alignment Rhythm Resyllabification

no effect no effect delay delay delay delay with transfer delay with transfer

3.2.5 Prosody-syntax-pragmatics 3.2.5 Prosody-syntax-pragmatics 3.2.5 Prosody-syntax 3.2.5 Prosody-pragmatics 3.2.2 Segments-prosody 3.2.2 Segments-prosody (intervals) 3.2.2 Syllables-words

has on acquisition: a positive effect (acceleration), no effect, a negative effect (short delay or long delay), a grammatical effect (transfer). The rightmost column indicates the various types of relevant interfaces, from the set presented in section 3.2; the subsection number is provided in each line. Table 1 focuses on segmental and Table 2 on prosodic phenomena. The order of listing of phenomena is stipulated by the effects defined in the middle column. These are aligned from positive to negative, that is, acceleration – no effect – short delay – long delay – delay with transfer.

4.2 External and internal factors In the search for an explanation of vulnerability in phonology, some internal and external language factors can be identified. Among external factors, generally the

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following are included: age, mother’s language, father’s language, dominant/weak language, input quality, attitude of the speaker, etc. These factors are not relevant here, because the data analyzed have been produced by very young children under similar external conditions: The children were all born in Hamburg (Germany) from a Spanish mother (from Central Spain), who spoke Spanish to the child, and a German father (from Northern Germany), who spoke in German at home.10 Input quantity is generally smaller in a bilingual situation, because the two languages have to share the available time. Input quality refers e.g. to accented speech, as to the situation in which one parent is not a native speaker of one of the languages of the bilingual child, but does nevertheless use it when communicating with the child. Finally, the HL, being only spoken at home, generally has less chance to develop than the dominant majority language (Silva-Corvalán 2003), especially from the time when the child begins to attend school or a day-care center (generally monolingual). From a questionnaire to the parents, and through regular visits to the home, we could establish that exposure to both languages, Spanish and German, was comparable for all four children, and that input type was very similar, too. The two languages were quite balanced, but given that the larger social environment was practically monolingual German, after a period of slight dominance of Spanish (the mother being the main input provider at first), all children went into a slight dominance of German. This could be confirmed by the recordings we made with parallel bilingual children growing up in Madrid, where Spanish was slightly more dominant. Finally, the children being so young, they do not seem to hold any relevant sociolinguistic attitudes. In the literature on bilingual phonological acquisition, numerous cases of crosslanguage interaction, notably in situations with a dominant and a weak language or heritage language (HL), have been observed.11 Considering such studies more closely, it is plausible to attribute the influence of the dominant language onto the HL to internal factors, especially to the complexity of a category of the HL. Following internal factors are taken into consideration: complexity, uniformity, markedness and frequency. The complexity of a category can be exemplified by cases in which the HL has two allophones for one phoneme, whereas the dominant language has one single phone for an equivalent phoneme, e.g. in the case of Spanish spirantization, presented in section 2.2 above. The acquisition of this phenomenon experiences a long delay, with substitution of the stop production of German for the approximant production of Spanish. The outcome is negative transfer. Another cause for negative

10 The mothers spoke standard Peninsular Spanish, except in one case, in which she spoke the Chilean standard variety. 11 Patuto (2012) and Patuto/Repetto/Müller (2011) have argued that the most balanced condition is the one leading to interaction. This claim is based on scarce data, and as it will be seen all along this chapter, it does not appear to be tenable in phonology.

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transfer should be looked for in the tendency towards uniformity, which avoids allomorphy, i.e. variation of form corresponding to a single morpheme. Other analyses find the reason for cross-language interaction within markedness, whose role has received an important impulse in Optimality Theory (OT; cf. section 5, below). Finally, frequency is understood in relation to some category or phenomenon that appears very often or not, as e.g. coda consonants are very frequent in English, even more frequent in German, but not as frequent in Catalan, even less frequent in Spanish, and very infrequent in French or Italian. Especially in those cases in which both languages of the bilingual have a certain category12 in their inventory, if this is very frequent in one of the languages, acceleration may emerge in the other language; this has been exemplified with coda production in Spanish by GermanSpanish bilinguals. On the contrary, categories that exist only in one of the languages of the bilingual may lead to several forms of delay, from a short delay to a long delay, with or without negative transfer. Lleó/Cortés (2013) have tried to order these internal factors – complexity (allophony), uniformity (allomorphy), markedness and frequency – from those that have more to less impact in bilingual acquisition, and have come up with following order: frequency > markedness > uniformity (the latter factor subsumes complexity, as well). How about the interfaces? Can they take over some of the weight of internal factors? In section 3.2, we have isolated seven interfaces. However, it does not seem to be the case that interfaces are equally relevant in bilingual phonological acquisition. Since research on the acquisition of the phonology of a HL has come to the conclusion that categories and phenomena to be acquired can lead to various results in the sense that there can be delay and transfer from the dominant language to the HL, and also acceleration, different interfaces should have different weight regarding the influence between the languages of the bilingual. Thus, one possible venue would be to weigh the strength of all interfaces comparatively. However, since certain interfaces do not seem to lead to influence, and certain types of influence do not seem to involve interfaces, we should try to look elsewhere for the factors that induce influence, and an adequate place to start with could be the internal factors.

5 The search for explanatory factors goes on In Lleó (2008) an attempt was also made to find some grounding for the various types of interaction. It was speculated that additive categories (appearing in both languages) may be acquired as in the monolingual case or even lead to acceleration. Non-additive categories (appearing in one of the languages only) lead to a short

12 I am using “category” in a loose sense, from categorial units like phonemes or closed syllables, to processes like spirantization.

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delay, whereas subtractive categories (present in one of the languages only, and alternating in terms of allophony or allomorphy with another category also pertaining to the other language) lead to a long-lasting delay, but only in the case that the language with the subtractive category is not enhanced in the environment, i.e. it is not the majority language (↗18 Interfaces with syntax in language acquisition). The latter type of delay, also related to transfer, appears, for example, in the acquisition of spirants. These are substantially delayed, but only in Germany, where Spanish is not the language of the environment. In Spain, Spanish-German bilinguals do not show any delay regarding the acquisition of spirants (Lleó submitted). Although these labels are useful, and contribute to the understanding of some of the outcomes of interaction, they are only labels. What we need is some mechanism that explains when and why in the process of acquiring two languages simultaneously, language contact leads the child to positive or negative influence, or to no influence. The mechanism involved is stochastic learning, as proposed in certain versions of OT (Boersma/Hayes 2001; Boersma/Levelt 2000; Prince/Smolensky 2004; Tesar/Smolensky 1998). By now it is common knowledge that Grammar in OT is a hierarchy of constraints ordered from more to less outranking. It is also known that at the beginning of acquisition, markedness constraints are outranking, whereas faithfulness constraints are not so powerful (cf. Gnanadesikan 1995, among others). Thus, constraint reranking must take place, if the target language requires some markedness constraints to be outranked by faithfulness constraints. Let us see what constraints are involved in the phenomena presented in sections 2.2 and 2.3, and what the outcome of language contact is, on the basis of constraints.

5.1 Development of syllable structure according to OT: acceleration The occurrence of codas in a language involves the N O C ODA constraint. This is a markedness constraint disallowing codas, which is violated whenever a coda is produced, as e.g. when the final /-l/ of Spanish sol ‘sun’ or the final /-n/ of Spanish pan ‘bread’ is produced. At the beginning of acquisition, markedness constraints are outranking (Gnanadesikan 1995), but as the number of codas produced by the child increases, the NO CODA constraint must be demoted. In the case of the GermanSpanish bilingual child, there are codas in both languages, especially in German, where closed syllables constitute more than 60% of target syllables. That means that the NO CODA constraint is being constantly violated, and this will lead the German-Spanish bilingual child to demoting it sooner than the Spanish monolingual child does. Violation of NO CODA occurs more often in the German-Spanish bilingual than in the Spanish monolingual condition, and thus leads to acceleration. The occurrence of coda consonants involves segments and prosodic positions, which constitute an interface (described in subsection 3.2.2, above). This interface, though, does not have any negative effect; on the contrary, it leads to acceleration.

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5.2 Development of spirantization according to OT: Negative transfer Very young children produce stops before fricatives. Thus, they abide by the constraint against [+cont], which is dominant at first, and remains dominant in the German grammar. In the Spanish grammar, because of spirantization, this markedness constraint is soon demoted in relation to voiced obstruents, allowing the constraint regulating assimilation of [cont] to emerge. The German grammar has the hierarchy (1) » (2), whereas the Spanish grammar has the hierarchy (2) » (1). (1) NO [+obstruent, +cont]: No continuant obstruents (2) AGREE [cont]: after a vowel (or a [+cont] segment), a voiced obstruent is [+cont] At some point the German grammar must also demote (1), because German contains many continuant obstruents, namely /f v s z ʃ x/. However, spirants are not yet produced by the bilingual children, because once words are connected and appear in various phonetic contexts, the effects of a constraint against variation of form emerge. This means that in the German grammar constraint (3) outranks (2), and this same order is implemented by the bilingual children in their Spanish, too. Later on, when children’s Spanish production abides by the Spanish grammar, (2) should outrank (3). The German hierarchy is shown in (4), and the Spanish hierarchy in (5). (3)

UNIFORM EXPONENCE (UE): Minimize the differences in the realization of a lexical item (morpheme, stem, affix, word).13

(4) German: UE » AGREE [cont] (5)

Spanish: AGREE [cont] » UE

Note that in classical generative phonology this same phenomenon was analyzed as due to the fact that underlying segments bearing the feature [-continuant], i.e. stops, are stored with the feature specified, as in German, instead of being underspecified, as in Spanish (Harris 1984; Mascaró 1984). Specification of the segments prevents assimilation. However, this analysis compels us to specifying stops as [−cont], which according to most theories is the default value for stops, and should not be specified. The OT analysis seems thus more adequate.

5.3 Development of segments: Delay In some cases included in Table 1, delay was involved in relation to certain difficult or marked segments, which require quite a long time to be acquired in the monolingual condition. These segments, if not available in the other language, require 13 Adapted from Kenstowicz (1995).

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even longer in the bilingual condition. The constraint involved is a negative constraint, like (6) and (7). (6) NO /r/ (7) NO PRE -VOICED STOPS Both, the Spanish vibrant /r/ and pre-voiced stops are acquired late. The segment /r/ is generally not acquired before 3;0, and pre-voiced stops even later, at about 4;0. Having constraints like (6) or (7) only violated by one of the languages – since these segments exist in Spanish but not in German – brings delay, because the evidence against such constraints is not as frequent as in the Spanish monolingual condition. Something similar happens in relation to long vowels in German, which are prevented by a constraint like (8). (8) NO LONG VOWELS The evidence of the target language against this constraint leads the monolingual child to producing long vowels at about 2;6. However, in the bilingual condition, because the evidence against this constraint comes only from one language, the bilingual child needs some more time (about half a year) than monolinguals to master long vowels.

5.4 Interaction with no effect Finally, there are cases of language contact that produce no visible effects when the bilingual and monolingual conditions are compared. On the one hand, the vowels of Spanish are mastered very soon both by monolinguals and bilinguals. They constitute the set of 5 cardinal vowels /i e a o u/, and are thus unmarked. On the other hand, consonant clusters seem to have no special effect in the bilingual condition, either. That is, clusters are marked, and take relatively long to be acquired – up to about 2;6 to 3;0 years of age, or later. This is the case for both, monolingual Spanish as well as German-Spanish bilinguals.

5.5 Summarizing outcomes of cross-language interaction For the cases we have just considered, an adequate way to account for crosslanguage influence may consist in organizing the outcomes along a scale from positive to negative influence, relating each step to the effect of specific internal factors:

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Table 3: Cross-language interaction from language A to the acquisition of phenomenon P of language B and internal factors14.

↓

POSITIVE EFFECT (acceleration: SP codas)

P is marked, occurs in both languages, and is very frequent in language A

NO EFFECT (SP vowels, clusters)

P is non-marked; if marked, should occur with similar frequency in A and B

(SHORT) NEGATIVE EFFECT (short delay: SP unfooted syllables/ GE vowel length) (LONG) NEGATIVE EFFECT (TRANSFER: SP spirants)

↓

P only occurs in language A; if P occurs in both languages, low frequency P violates uniformity and only occurs in language B

As the order in Table 3 shows, markedness and frequency are the crucial criteria in case of positive influence, no influence and temporary negative influence. In case of negative transfer, uniformity or the avoidance of variation seems to be the most explanatory criterion, together with frequency. That is, 2L1 children with a weak language, as well as L2 speakers, show a bias to avoiding variation. If the weak language has two words or two expression alternatives, where the strong language has one single form, the child will prefer one single way of expressing this in the weak language, and the choice will be in favour of the form that resembles that of the strong language. Based on Kenstowicz (1995), I refer to it as the Uniformity Hypothesis. This hypothesis, which explains why the percentages of spirantization are so low in the HL Spanish, is also eligible to explain the high percentage of subject pronoun production in the Spanish or Italian of HL speakers and L2 speakers (Sorace/Serratrice 2009).

6 The acquisition of cL2 and aL2 Research on the acquisition of a second language (L2) began within structuralism, guided by a straightforward hypothesis, known as the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH): “We assume that the student who comes in contact with a foreign language will find some features of it quite easy and others extremely difficult. Those elements that are similar to his native language will be simple for him, and those elements that are different will be difficult” (Lado 1957, 2). This hypothesis has proven not to be adequate, because often those L2 categories that resemble L1 are the ones that pose more difficulties. This finding is expressed in the Speech Learning Model 14 Language A corresponds to the strong or majority language, and language B to the weak language or HL. In the examples considered, generally B is the language that shows the effect, except with respect to (German) vowel length.

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(SLM) proposed by Flege (1987; 1992), according to which category formation (CF) becomes less likely as L1 categories develop. Thus, the main hypothesis of the model is the Equivalence Hypothesis, which predicts that as L1 categories become more robust through childhood, they are “more powerful attractors” for L2 speech sounds (Baker et al. 2002), and thus sounds that are close to L1 categories are more difficult to acquire than sounds that differ in L2 and L1. One of the most discussed hypotheses in L2 research is that of the “critical age,” which predicts that L1 is faithfully acquired provided that AoA (Age of Onset of Acquisition) is not beyond a certain limit. Otherwise, acquisition might not be complete, and the learner will speak with a foreign accent. Such accentedness is one of the criteria that generally differentiates L1 and L2. However, the most important differences relate to the types of knowledge acquired in L1 vs. L2, which are believed to be of a different nature, and to be stored differently in the brain. At what age the critical period ends is not clear. The original proposal by Lenneberg (1967) posited too late an age, namely puberty. Nowadays, some authors posit the age of 6 or 7 years, or earlier, about 4 years (Meisel 2008; 2009). In fact, it has been suggested that for phonology, the critical age might end even earlier, and given the facts described in relation to a HL, it seems that amount and intensity of input might also play an important role for the child to develop a non-accented language in 2L1. Although both languages can be equally developed, in some cases, the language not supported by the larger social environment may be acquired in an incomplete, or even in a deviant way. In the domain of phonology, in the case of exposure to two languages from birth (2L1), the “other” language, the one not supported by the environment outside of the family, may develop under the influence of the majority language (spoken outside of the family), manifesting transfer phenomena at a very early age (Lleó submitted). These transfer effects, which in the case of Phonology generally lead to accentedness, may subsist during adulthood, as well (Fowler et al. 2008; Kupisch et al. 2014). Some authors have shown that the line between L1 and L2 is not abrupt, but that it extends on a continuum (Abrahamsson/Hyltenstam 2009; Flege 1992; 1999). As shown in section 2, research on VOT values of L2 learners of a language that shows different values from those of L1 tend to produce compromise values, mid-way between those of L1 and L2, especially if an L1 speaker of long-lag voiceless stops is a learner of an L2 with short-lag stops, or vice-versa (Flege/Port 1981). Assuming that there is an age, at which L1 ceases to be and goes into L2, if the learner of L2 is very young, we consider the acquisition as cL2. Otherwise, it is aL2 (cf. section 1, above). Research on cL2 is in general not very abundant, and when we go into phonology, it is scarce. For instance, Baker et al. (2008) found that adults were more likely than children to perceive vowels of L2 English through L1 Korean categories. In vowel production, Korean children did better than adults, but results of vowel perception were similar. This only partially confirms their Interaction Hypothesis, according to which “the older the L2 learner, the less likely s/he is able

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to establish new vowel categories” (Baker et al. 2008, 317). For some research involving Spanish as the L1 and German as the L2, cf. Lleó/Vogel (2004). For the reverse, German L1 and Spanish L2, cf. Saceda/Lleó (2011), where similar areas to those of section 2.2 and 2.3 above, have been investigated. Here, similar research questions as those of 2L1 are posed, in the sense that the Interface Hypothesis is certainly applicable to the contact of L1 and L2. Especially the notion of negative transfer is often found in the acquisition of L2. And, as in the case of a HL, the best description of the L2 data is delivered by OT. According to this theory, transfer is the substitution of some part of the constraint hierarchy of L1 for the hierarchy of L2.

7 The acquisition of L3 phonology Research on the acquisition of L3 has grown out of the research on L2 acquisition. Because the latter has documented much interaction or influence from the L1 into the L2, research on L3 has posited hypotheses related to the influence of both L1 and L2 into L3: what language, L1 or L2, exerts a stronger influence onto L3? Another aspect that has attracted the attention of researchers is whether typological similarity between L3 and one of the two other languages known to the learner of L3 might exert the strongest influence into L3. Llama/Cardoso/Collins (2010) have asked these questions on the basis of data from 22 learners of Spanish as L3, out of which 11 were L1 speakers of English with French as L2, and 11 were L1 speakers of French with English as L2. Results show that L1 has some influence on L3, but it is especially L2 which has most influence, particularly at the beginning of L3 acquisition, independently of typology. Thus, in the domain of VOT, the L3 Spanish showed some compromise values with the French values (that in the target language are similar to the Spanish ones), approaching the English values. In order to clarify the role of typological distance, by including in the study a typologically distant language like Chinese, Gabriel/Stahnke/Thulke (2015) set out to ascertaining whether German L1 and Chinese-German 2L1 may have a positive influence on the acquisition of the speech rhythm of English L2; this should be the case, especially when compared to L1 speakers of Chinese. Recall from sections 2.1 and 2.3 above, that German and English are stress-timed languages, whereas French is syllable-timed, and so is Chinese. The authors also hypothesized that Chinese L1 and Chinese-German 2L1 should have a positive influence on the acquisition of the speech rhythm of French L3, especially when compared to L1 German speakers. The analyses were done by calculating so-called VarcoV, which is a rate-normalized equivalent of the vocalic PVIs (White/Mattys 2007), and calculating the %V (syllabletimed has a higher %V than stress-timed; Ramus/Nespor/Mehler 1999). The study was carried out with high school students, aged 14 to 18 years old. The expectations were fulfilled by the results: L2 English was more syllable-timed when spoken by

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L1 Chinese, and was more target-like if spoken by L1 German learners. Something similar was the case for L2/L3 French: The rhythmic values for French were closer to stress-timed values if spoken by L1 German, and were more target-like if spoken by L1 Chinese learners. Thus, results show that, in spite of the typological distance between certain parameters of the languages involved, rhythm seems to be sensitive to specific cross-language measurements like %V and VarcoV. Some authors have proposed the Cumulative-Enhancement Model for language acquisition, which postulates that the whole linguistic knowledge previously acquired will have an influence on subsequent languages (Flynn/Foley/Vinnitskaya 2004). Regarding the reverse direction of cross-linguistic influence, i.e. the effects of L3 learning on the phonologies of L1 and L2, cf. Cabrelli Amaro (2016).

8 Conclusion This chapter aimed at displaying research on first language acquisition, second language acquisition and acquisition of further languages, in the domain of phonology. The main focus has been on the simultaneous acquisition of two languages from birth, and the outcomes of language contact in multilingual conditions. In those situations involving a dominant and a weak or heritage language, the latter may receive influence from the former. This influence can be positive (e.g. acceleration of a certain phenomenon, like the acquisition of codas in the Spanish of GermanSpanish bilinguals) or negative (e.g. delay and negative transfer, as in the case of voiced stops replacing Spanish spirants [β ð ɣ] also in the Spanish of GermanSpanish bilinguals. Attempts to predict and explain the outcomes of language contact go from internal and/or external factors to the interfaces, findings being still incomplete. It is shown that in the phonological domain, especial attention should be devoted to internal factors like markedness, uniformity and frequency. It is proposed that the model that can best account for the phonological development in the bilingual condition is Optimality Theory. The chapter ends with references to the acquisition of some aspects of a third language.

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Tanja Kupisch and Jason Rothman

18 Interfaces with syntax in language acquisition Abstract: We introduce empirical work on Romance language acquisition with respect to the interfaces of syntax with other modules of grammar (internal interfaces) and other domains of cognition (external interfaces). We do so by choosing specific phenomena within the following interfaces: syntax-morphology, syntax-semantics and syntax-pragmatics. In the domain of syntax-morphology we focus on grammatical gender, with respect to the syntax-semantics interface we focus on adjectival placement (pre- and post-nominal) and with regard to the syntax-discourse/pragmatics interface we review work on the null/overt subject distribution. Finally, we summarize research on articles, suggesting that articles represent a multiple interface. We provide examples from different types of learners and across the four major Romance languages French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. While our central goal is to summarize and generalize across major findings, we will also point to potential problems concerning the interface approach, e.g. the association of particular phenomena with a specific interface and the assumption that internal interfaces are less problematic than external ones. Keywords: internal interface, external interface, gender, adjective placement, null subjects, pro-drop parameter, articles, determiners, L1 acquisition, 2L1 acquisition, L2 acquisition, eL2 acquisition, heritage speakers

1 Introduction The goal of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the breadth of empirical work on Romance language acquisition with respect to the interfaces of syntax with other modules of grammar (i.e. internal interfaces) and other domains of cognition (i.e. external interfaces). Given this goal and the reality of space limitations, this chapter cannot be exhaustive. We cover all interfaces across different types of learners and across the four Romance languages French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, but we chose specific grammatical properties as examples. The work we will focus on as examples is divided across the following interfaces: syntax-morphology, syntaxsemantics and syntax-pragmatics. In the domain of syntax-morphology we focus on grammatical inflection, and specifically grammatical gender. As for the syntaxsemantics interface, we focus on adjectival position (pre- and post-nominal) and its semantic consequences. With regard to the syntax-discourse/pragmatics interface we will review the work on null/overt subject distribution. Finally, we will present

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studies on articles, suggesting that articles might be seen as representing a multiple interface. It is fitting to start with working definitions of what we mean by the labels and constructs we use. L1 herein refers to child monolingual acquisition (cf. Guasti 2002; Snyder 2007 for review). 2L1 refers to simultaneous acquisition of two first languages, which means naturalistic exposure to two languages from ages zero until the age of 3 (cf. Serratrice 2013 for review). eL2 refers to child second language acquisition by which we are referring to an age of onset of exposure to the second language after the age of 3-4 when the first language has already developed significantly. The distinction between 2L1 and eL2 is made in light of evidence that the latter, despite their young age at the outset of acquisition, display unique patterns diverging from those of monolingual and 2L1 learners (cf. Haznedar 2013 for review as well as Meisel 2009; 2011). Adult L2 learners (henceforth L2ers) refer to the cases of additive or sequential bilingualism when first significant exposure to the L2 occurs after the age of 12, whether or not such exposure in naturalistic or primarily via classroom instruction (cf. White 2003; Slabakova 2013 for review). Finally, heritage speaker bilinguals are the adult outcomes of eL2 or 2L1 acquisition within a specific environment (Montrul 2008; Rothman 2009a). A heritage language is imparted naturalistically from birth either exclusively (the case of eL2 where the L2 is the majority societal language) or simultaneously (the case of 2L1 acquisition). Yet is not the language of the greater society and often becomes the speaker’s weaker language in adulthood. In our survey, we exclude the domain of L3 research.

1.1 What do we mean by an interface? Simply put, an interface is the abstraction of where in the space of linguistic computation two sub-systems integrate information. We understand this in terms of formal linguistic (generative) theory, where interfaces have existed, whether by that label or another, since its earliest inceptions. We assume, following a modular view of the mind, that language comprises one domain-specific module, i.e. a grammar (e.g. Chomsky 1957; Fodor 1983; Pinker 1994). Grammar consists of a lexicon and a computational system, connected to each other by means of several internal systems. These internal systems represent the primitive functions of language: lexical inventories (the lexicon and morphology), meaning (semantics), sound (phonology) and the properties that link their correlation (syntax). When different modules of the grammar interface with each other, these are considered “grammar-internal”. In addition, the grammar also mediates between sounds and meaning and other not linguistically specific areas of cognition, i.e. “grammar-external” domains, specifically with the articulatory–perceptual system at PF and with the conceptual-intentional system at LF (cf. Figure 1).

Interfaces with syntax in language acquisition

Articulatoryperceptual system

PF

Lexicon and computational system

LF

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Conceptual-intentional system

Figure 1: Grammar and interfaces (adapted from White 2009, 51).

The notion of interfaces is completely in line with modularity if one assumes that information is simply shared across domains, while integration of information does not alter the sub-module itself. Furthermore, information structure and conceptual structure may delimit linguistic output and sub-modules interact at various levels to encode and decode language.

1.2 Why are interfaces relevant for language acquisition? In recent years, articulated models schematizing various sub-modules and their interactions have been put forward and applied in language acquisition studies (cf. e.g. Rothman/Slabakova 2011; White 2009; 2011; Rothman/Guijarro-Fuentes 2012 for discussion). One major interest for generative acquisitionists has been to explain why learners have problems even when UG access can be demonstrated. In particular, the question is whether failure to acquire certain structures, prolonged acquisition stages or persistent cross-linguistic influence can be attributed to integrating linguistic information at the interfaces. The appeal of interfaces applied in language acquisition is not to be understated for several intersecting reasons. As acquisitionists, we are charged with describing and then explaining the initial states, developmental stages and ultimate attainment in all the populations we study. Beyond the classical logical problem of acquisition (e.g. Pinker 1994), there is also the developmental problem (e.g. Hyams 1988), which reminds us to explain why language acquisition unfolds the way it does. The added complexity of information integration, e.g. mapping syntactic function to morphophonological material, integrating contextual cues, mapping prosodic contours to syntactic structure, might prove more or less difficult in the developing grammars of various populations (e.g. child vs. adult; monolingual vs. bilingual) for independent reasons. Such reasons could be that more than one language is present in a single mind or that learners have started to acquire a language at different ages. Indeed, core properties of grammar – the closest things to actual narrow syntactic properties – develop first in all instances of language acquisition (monolingual and bilingual, child and adult alike). Examples include head-directionality and basic word order, which already highlights the special nature of interfaces (cf. Tsimpli 2014 for extensive review). Our goal herein is not to be evaluative with respect to any specific theory, model or set of hypotheses per se, but rather to contextualize the backdrop for understanding the work we will review below. The important point is that it is easy to understand the appeal of considering interfaces in formal linguistic acquisition studies.

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Considering interfaces in acquisition also creates parsimony between the trends of formal linguistic theory on which we rely and formal approaches to language acquisition. Furthermore, embracing the role that interfaces play in patterns of acquisition embraces the reality of how language actually works within the mind. As stated above, the work on interfaces in language acquisition is now quite considerable and it is no exaggeration to say that studies involving Romance languages have substantially contributed to this general program.

1.3 The Interface Hypothesis A strong proposal in generative acquisition research is that not all interfaces are equal, as highlighted by Sorace’s (2011; 2012) Interface Hypothesis. According to the Interface Hypothesis, one effect of bilingualism is an increased processing/resource allocation burden that differentially affects internal and external interfaces. External interfaces are most affected because the relevant integration of information obtains between one (or more) linguistic sub-module(s) and a system that is not domainspecifically linguistic. In other words, phenomena at the external interfaces are particularly vulnerable, i.e. acquired comparatively late, prone to errors, incomplete acquisition and language loss (attrition). Testing the Interface Hypothesis embodies several important empirical questions that have been a focus of the field in recent years. Of course, the idea of syntactic choices being delimited by the discourse context in language acquisition had been around for decades, but it had not necessarily been contextualized in “interface” terms. Since the early 2000s there has been substantial work related to the syntax-discourse interface, specifically on the acquisition of the null subject parameter and related properties in the acquisition of Romance, which eventually gave rise to the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace/Filiaci 2006; Belletti/ Bennati/Sorace 2007). Although there is some disagreement on what exactly an “external interface” is, whether it involves discourse or pragmatics (as well as what these terms mean, cf. Rothman/Slabakova 2011), there is a general agreement of “vulnerability” in this area (cf. Hulk/Müller 2000; Platzack 2001 for ideas predating the Interface Hypothesis; cf. White 2009 for an excellent summary). In the remainder of this chapter, we review a selection of the literature as detailed above that underscores the importance of the contribution Romance languages have made. We start by summarizing research on grammatical gender in section 2, move on to adjective placement (section 3) and the null subject parameter (section 4) and finally deal with articles in section 5. In each section we provide a short description of the phenomenon before summarizing relevant work in the acquisition of Romance. We have labelled our phenomena according to the interfaces they are typically attributed to, but we will also allude to cases where these labels are disputable.

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2 The morphology-syntax interface 2.1 Gender Gender is a parametrized feature, present in all Romance languages. It is an invariable lexical property of the noun. Other elements, e.g. determiners and adjectives, are gender marked because they are in a syntactic relation with the noun. The attribution of nominal gender is referred to as gender assignment; gender marking of other elements is referred to as gender agreement or concord. Assignment. Gender assignment in the Romance languages is not random. The four Romance languages discussed here have formal (phonological and morphological) and semantic rules for gender assignment. They vary in the degree to which they employ these rules, but generally formal rules are predominant. For example, in Italian ~70% of all noun tokens end in ‑a or in ‑o in the singular and are feminine or masculine respectively (e.g. muccaF ‘cow’, gattoM ‘cat’), thus providing unambiguous formal assignment cues. Portuguese and Spanish are similar to Italian, but French is comparably less transparent. In French, associations of noun endings with particular genders represent probabilistic tendencies with various degrees of reliability. For example, nasal endings are typically associated with masculine gender (e.g. painM ‘bread’, vinM ‘wine’, cheminM ‘path’ etc.), the suffixes ‑elle, ‑ette are typically associated with feminine gender (vaiselleF ‘dishes’, fourchetteF ‘fork’). Languages are masculine ( françaisM ‘French’, espagnolM ‘Spanish’), while sciences tend to be feminine (chimieF ‘chemistry’, linguistiqueF ‘linguistics’). The described tendencies have psycholinguistic validity because experiments with nonce words have shown that monolingual children and adults assign gender accordingly (Tucker/Lambert/Rigault 1977; Karmiloff-Smith 1979). In all languages, some nouns constitute exceptions to assignment patterns (e.g. Fr. mainF ‘hand’, It. radioF ‘radio’), and the number of such exceptions is higher in French than in the other three Romance languages. Agreement. While nouns have inherent gender, other elements receive gender through agreement with the head noun. Depending on the language, this may include determiners (e.g. articles, demonstratives, interrogative pronouns), adjectives and past participles, e.g. It. le F mucche F nere F, leF ho visteF (‘the cows black them have-I seen’). Compared to the other Romance languages, gender agreement in less often realized in French, and especially in spoken French. For instance, plural DPs are not gender marked (les chatsM ‘the cats’ vs. les vachesF ‘the cows’) and 2/3 of all adjectives have no audible gender agreement (e.g. leM chatM noire vs. laF vacheF noire ‘the black cat vs. the black cow’). Beyond concord, gender marking also involves knowing which morphological forms are associated with each gender, e.g. It. gattoM neroM vs. muccaF neraF. The two processes of (i) concord and (ii) choosing the correct morphological form are related to two different levels, syntax on the one

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hand and phonological form (PF) on the other. Learners vary in how well they acquire the PF-related mechanisms, e.g. the mappings between syntax-semanticsphonology. The learning task. At first sight, gender acquisition may appear to be a matter of learning lexical and syntactic properties that are reflected in morphology. At a closer look, more is involved. The acquisition of gender involves (i) understanding that gender is an inherent property of the noun; (ii) learning which gender is associated with each individual noun; (iii) discovering that some elements are in a syntactic agreement relation with the noun (and which ones); (iv) learning what morphological forms must be used. To complicate issues even further, in French there is no one to one-correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. For instance, the French word for ‘pretty’ is spelled differently depending on whether it agrees with a masculine or with a feminine noun ( joliM garçonM ‘pretty boy’ vs. jolieF filleF ‘pretty girl’), but the difference is not audible. Such mismatches may have consequences for L2 learners with formal instruction.

2.2 Gender in L1 and 2L1 learners Studies with monolingual children indicate that the acquisition of gender in the Romance languages is relatively problem-free and that children rely on morphophonological cues from a very early age (e.g. Tucker/Lambert/Rigault 1977; KarmiloffSmith 1979; Clark 1985; Pérez Pereira 1991; Kupisch/Müller/Cantone 2002; Corrêa/ Name 2003). Longitudinal studies show error rates below 5% for monolinguals aged 2–3 years; cf. Pizzuto/Caselli (1992), Chini (1995) for Italian and Kupisch/ Müller/Cantone (2002) for a comparison of Italian and French. The production of “proto-morphemic devices” provides evidence that children start acquiring gender even before age 2 (Bottari/Cipriani/Chilosi 1993/1994). Proto-morphemic devices are placeholders for target morphemes which tend to represent the target-vowel, e.g. [a] (=la) mela ‘the apple’ vs. [i] (=il) pane ‘the bread’. Children’s use of such forms suggests that they pay attention to the phonological properties relevant for gender marking from very early on. Studies with children under the age of 3 are often based on naturalistic data, where the most frequent gender marked element is the article. This explains why the article is often chosen as a diagnostics of (in)correct gender marking, but it comes with the problem that we do not know whether the article form reflects gender assignment or concord (we therefore chose to use the neutral term gender marking here). Another problem is that child data are often not directly comparable to adult data, because the latter tend to be collected in experimental settings in which learners are faced with less frequent nouns, long distance agreement and the arguably more challenging experimental situation.

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2L1 children too show correct gender marking and sensitivity to gender cues from a very early age, but sometimes with slightly more errors than age-matched monolinguals. Kuchenbrandt (2005, 1260) reports ~90% accuracy in the Spanish of German-Spanish children aged 2;1–2;3, similar to monolingual Spanish children. For two German-Italian children below age 3, Kupisch/Müller/Cantone (2002) show accuracy above 95% during the period of inconsistent article use, and 98% during the period of consistent article use, only minimally higher than monolinguals. Similar results were reported for German-French bilingual children (Müller 1990; 1999). For Swedish-French bilinguals, error rates in French range around 6–8% at ages 3–4 (Granfeldt 2005). Interestingly, children often have problems with nouns that do not follow general assignment patterns, producing e.g. *leM mamanF ‘the mother’, *leM mainF ‘the hand’ (Müller 1999, 378–379; Kupisch/Müller/Cantone 2002, 138), *unM radioF ‘a radio’ (Granfeldt 2003, 217–220). Such errors suggest that they have acquired formal assignment patterns and overuse them, even with nouns that are frequent and semantically transparent, such as maman. Article-noun mismatches are relatively more frequent in cases of strongly unbalanced bilinguals (Granfeldt/Schlyter/Kihlstedt 2007), although they need not result in qualitative differences between L1 and 2L1 development (Kupisch/Müller/Cantone 2002). There are minor differences between L1 and 2L1 children, perhaps unrelated to grammatical gender per se. Since children rely on phonological properties for gender assignment (and article use more generally, cf. section 5), a delayed phonological development – due to influence of a simultaneously acquired language – might have implications for gender marking (Kuchenbrandt 2005; 2008; ↗17 Acquiring multilingual phonologies (2L1, L2 and L3): Are the difficulties in the interfaces?).

2.3 Gender in adult early bilinguals In contrast to early 2L1 acquisition, studies with adult 2L1ers claimed that gender marking can be subject to incomplete acquisition, i.e. deviance from monolinguallike end state grammars. Montrul/Foote/Perpiñán (2008) compared gender agreement in HSs of Spanish in grammaticality judgment and elicitation tasks, showing that they had more problems than monolingual controls. By contrast, subsequent studies on gender with adult HSs showed that accuracy depends on what exactly is measured. Kupisch/Akpinar/Stöhr (2013) investigated gender marking in 2L1 minority speakers of French and 2L1 majority speakers of French, using an oral acceptability judgment task (henceforth AJT) and picturebased elicitation. In both tasks, the target structures involved article-noun sequences in combination with adjectives (e.g. la fille triste ‘the sad girl’). In the analysis, the authors distinguished gender assignment from gender agreement. Articles were taken to be indicators of gender assignment and adjectives indicators of gender agreement. This way, it was possible to determine whether learners were successful

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in marking correct agreement between article and adjective even when choosing an article that did not match the gender of the noun. For instance, laF chatM griseF would count as wrong assignment but correct concord. In the task, learners were purposely confronted with conflicting gender cues. For example, one noun item in the task was sentinelle ‘nightguard’, which is grammatically feminine (in line with the morphological rule that nouns in ‑elle are feminine), but the nightguard was contextualized as a male person. The results of this study showed that all bilinguals scored above 95% in agreement, while having more problems in assignment, especially when nouns involved conflicting gender cues. Hence, gender may appear to be a vulnerable category if one considers gender marking ‘as a whole’, but, zooming closer, it becomes clear that it is lexical proficiency that creates problems rather than the syntactic mechanism of agreement. Bianchi (2013) reports similar results for Italian, comparing gender marking on articles and past participles in a study of adult German-Italian 2L1ers from Italy and 2L1ers from Germany. The 2L1ers in Italy performed monolingual-like across the board. By contrast, the 2L1ers in Germany were relatively more accurate when realizing concord between the past participle and the article, while having problems choosing the appropriate article. This was especially true for nouns ending in ‑e, which provide no gender cue (e.g. il denteM ‘the tooth’), and nouns which contradict assignment rules (e.g. masculine nouns ending in ‑a like il cobraM ‘the cobra’). Thus, the results from adult 2L1s are generally consistent with data from developing bilinguals, revealing that gender agreement is unproblematic in 2L1 acquisition. Furthermore, target-deviant gender marking may be due to the fact that certain, perhaps less familiar nouns provide no gender cues or conflicting ones.

2.4 Gender in adult L2ers In the literature on French it has been widely argued that gender marking causes persistent problems for adult L2ers, especially when the learners’ L1(s) do not mark gender; for L2 French cf. Carroll (1989) and Hawkins/Franceschina (2004) (both L1 English), Bartning (2000) and Granfeldt (2005) (both L1 Swedish), Dewaele/Véronique (2001) (L1 Dutch), and Meisel (2009) (child L2ers, L1 German). Based on a review of relevant data on French, Carroll (1989) argued that Anglophone L2ers of French (adults and late immersion students) have great difficulty learning to properly produce French gender marking. She assumes that the absence of gender marking in their L1 determines the (im)possibility of representing the gender feature of nouns in the L2, and if the inherent gender feature of the noun cannot be acquired, this has implications for gender agreement as well. Similarly, Hawkins/Franceschina (2004) argue that L2ers cannot acquire gender in the L2 if their L1 does not have it, but in their view it is a matter of representing the features relevant for syntactic

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agreement. Both Carroll (1989) and Hawkins/Franceschina (2004) assume fundamental differences between L1 and L2 acquisition. Acquiring gender seems comparatively less problematic for L2 Spanish and L2 Italian learners, but even here researchers differ in the interpretation of their data: Montrul/Foote/Perpiñán (2008) speak of incomplete acquisition, while White et al. (2004) maintain that gender is fully represented in the L2 grammar but for specific reasons it cannot be spelled out correctly. Data from Bianchi (2013) and Kupisch/Akpinar/Stöhr (2013) show that L2ers of French and Italian at an advanced level perform monolingual-like with gender agreement, while assignment may create problems, which parallels the case of 2L1ers, as reported above. A series of recent neurolinguistic studies have shown that adult L2 learners at high levels of proficiency process gender agreement just like monolinguals. These studies are especially interesting in light of the issues raised by Kupisch and colleagues separating gender “assignment” from “agreement” and with respect to various L2 theories. Full accessibility to UG accounts (e.g. Schwartz/Sprouse 1996; White 2003) predict that the lexical (interpretable) gender features associated with the head noun and the formal (interpretable) features related to agreement across the DP are acquirable for adults, whereas others claim that the latter are unacquirable (Tsimpli/ Dimitrakopoulou’s 2007 “Interpretability Hypothesis”). The Interpretability Hypothesis claims that L2 learners use compensatory strategies, predicting better performance in gender assignment due to lexically based strategies. That is, one could interpret the imbalance in agreement and assignment as an inability to acquire the uninterpretable gender features in adulthood (favoring the Interpretability Hypothesis) or simply understand it as a dearth in lexical proficiency at any given time in L2 development continuum. The question of whether the problem with lexically assigned gender is related to lexical proficiency at any given stage of acquisition or an inability to acquire the gender feature is still unresolved. Fortunately, Event Related Potential (ERP) studies can adjudicate between these L2 theories since syntactic violations and phonological rhyme matching elicit distinct ERP signatures, the former eliciting a P600 effect and the latter an N400 effect. Gabriele/Fiorentino/ Alemán Bañón (2013) and Alemán Bañón/Fiorentino (2014) provide evidence from a cross-sectional study on gender assignment/agreement in adult L2 Spanish, strongly suggesting that advanced English-native advanced L2 learners of Spanish can acquire both gender assignment and agreement. Comparing groups of beginning and advanced proficiency levels they showed that the advanced learners elicited a P600 for gender violations. Given that a N400 was not elicited, they concluded that compensatory strategies could not explain the results, that ERP evidence speaks in favor of full UG accessibility and that native-like processing in this domain is attainable through time and exposure to the L2. Most recently, Alemán Bañón/Miller/Rothman (2015) show very similar results to the above studies, this time using morphologically opaque nouns and modulating markedness, whereby advanced L2ers reliably show a P600 like native speakers.

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2.5 Summary Many studies on different learner populations indicate that gender is unproblematic in the acquisition of Romance. Children, both L1 and 2L1, acquire formal assignment rules prior to the age of 3, and the two populations commit the same types of developmental errors, suggesting that in spite of delays they undergo a qualitatively similar process. On the other hand, there are also studies pointing to problems with gender marking, e.g., when compared to other aspects of morphology in French, such as person and tense marking (Thordardóttir, to appear). Disagreement on whether gender is problematic or not is best reflected in research on adult L2ers and the long-lasting debate on whether or not L2ers can ever master gender in a fully native-like fashion. The different views – even among researchers working on the same language (e.g. French) – may hinge on various factors. (i) Gender systems are not equally transparent across languages and not everyone tested the same language; (ii) Experimental and naturalistic are likely to produce different results; (iii) Comparing across studies implies comparing learners with different linguistic backgrounds; (iv) Studies differ in whether they analyzed gender marking on the article, the adjective or both. So, first, when comparing across Romance languages, which individual gender markings appear to be acquired (early, late, never) may be a matter of their frequency, transparency and salience, independently from the syntactic mechanism of agreement. Second, how monolingual-like learners appear to be is a matter of their linguistic background and the method by which they were tested. What does this mean with regard to interfaces? As pointed out by Gaglia/ Hinzelin (↗5 Inflectional verb morphology), scholars do not even agree that there is an independent morphology module, which makes the assumed existence of a syntax-morphology interface framework-dependent. Therefore, even if results from gender appear to substantiate that internal interfaces are comparatively unproblematic in acquisition, this has to be taken with a grain of salt.

3 The syntax-semantics interface 3.1 Adjective placement In cases where adjective placement in the Romance languages has been described in interface terms, it has been associated with the syntax-semantics interface (e.g. White 2011; Rothman et al. 2010), since some adjectives in the Romance languages have variable order and differ in meaning depending on whether they precede or follow the noun. In all Romance languages the canonical position for adjectives is after the noun, but some adjectives can appear before the noun as well. It is often said that the adjective in the postnominal position keeps its literal meaning. For instance, grand refers to size in (1a), while expressing a value in (1b).

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Fr.

a.

Napoléon n’ était pas un Napoleon NEG was not a ‘Napoleon was not a tall man.’

homme man

b.

Van Gogh était un grand artiste. Van Gogh was a big artist ‘Van Gogh was a great artist.’

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While adjectives denoting size are typical in having variable positions and allowing for value-interpretations, adjectives referring to colors and nationalities appear after the noun with hardly any exception (e.g. Fr. maison rouge vs. *rouge maison ‘red house’). Thus, membership in particular semantic classes is relevant for placement options. If adjectives are part of fixed expressions, their position may or may not comply with general rules of adjective placement. For example, alto in the Italian expression in alta montagna ‘in the high mountains’ refers height (as compared to It. alto ufficiale ‘high officer’ where it refers to rank), but it nevertheless appears prenominally. Although adjective placement tends to be seen as a phenomenon at the syntaxsemantics interface, discourse context can be relevant too. For example, Italian povero ‘poor’ can be used to express pity for someone or that someone has few belongings (cf. 2a vs. 2b). (2) It. a. Ha ereditato ma è rimasto orfano. Questo has.he inherited but is remained orphan this povero ragazzo mi fa pena. poor boy me makes pain ‘He has inherited but he remained an orphan. I’m sorry for this poor boy.’ b. Non può comprare nemmeno una pizza. È un ragazzo povero. not can buy not even a pizza is.he a boy poor ‘He cannot even buy a pizza. He’s a poor boy.’ In syntactic accounts, it is commonly assumed that adjectives are base generated between the determiner and the noun, and that the postnominal order is derived by noun-movement across the adjective (Cinque 2010). However, some adjectives can be dislocated for stylistic reasons. In these cases, the syntactic derivation might involve the left periphery of the DP, where the DP is linked to discourse (Giusti 2006). The learning task. Although adjective placement is typically associated with the syntax-semantics interface, it must be acknowledged that using adjectives in the right position involves more, namely (i) determining the semantics classes adjectives and the positioning options for these classes; (ii) determining the meaning associated with each position, (iii) becoming aware that the meanings depend on

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discourse; (iv) learning exceptions, as in fixed expressions and stylistic options. Multilingual learners may have to learn in addition that their target languages have different rules for adjective placement.

3.2 Adjective placement in L1 and 2L1 learners Research on the acquisition of adjective placement in L1 children is comparatively scarce. Cardinaletti/Giusti (2010) reported that L1 Italian children start using a variety of different adjective types before age 3;0 placing them appropriately before or after the noun. Developmental studies on 2L1 children acquiring a Germanic and a Romance language simultaneously show they tend to use adjectives prenominally in the Germanic language and pre- or postnominally in the Romance language, just like monolinguals. However, compared to monolinguals, placement errors occur more often and for a longer period of time. Volterra/Taeschner (1978) were the first to report cross-linguistic influence in the use of adjectives in bilingual children. In fact, drawing on data from two German-Italian 2L1 children (age 2–3 years), they interpreted the occurrence of Adj+N structures in Italian and N+Adj structures in German as evidence in favor of a fused grammar. For a variety of good reasons, their conclusion was later deemed problematic. For example, mixed and monolingual utterances were not considered separately, it was unclear who spoke to the child and whether the adjectives were used as in the predicative or attributive function. Nonetheless, Volterra/Taeschner (1978) were probably right in pointing out that adjective placement is a potentially problematic domain in the 2L1 acquisition of a Romance and a Germanic language. For the past 15 years, research on 2L1 acquisition has tried to systematically predict under which linguistic and extralinguistic conditions cross-linguistic influence occurs. One of the linguistic prerequisites is that one language has two syntactic options (e.g. X and Y), of which only one (e.g. X) is shared by the other. The option that is shared will be overused at the expense of the one existing in only one language (Döpke 1998; Hulk/Müller 2000). The account makes straightforward predictions for adjective placement in a Romance-Germanic context, as discussed by Nicoladis (2006). Nicoladis studied elicited production data in the two languages of EnglishFrench bilinguals (ages 3;3–5;1) and monolinguals in Canada. As expected, the 2L1s produced more reversals of post-nominal adjectives than the L1 children, e.g. *un rayé éléphant ‘a striped elephant’, and reversals were more frequent in French than in English. Interestingly, however, the 2L1 children overused the postnominal position more frequently than the prenominal position, producing strings like une personne grande ‘a big person’, contrary to the assumption that bilingual children overuse the structure existing in both languages. By contrast, Rizzi et al. (2013) showed for German-French bilingual children (aged 1;6 to 5;4) that placement errors were equally frequent in prenominal (60/922 = 6.5%) and postnominal positions

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(8/135 = 5.9%). Similarly, Bernardini (2003) found overuse of prenominal adjectives in a child who acquired Italian as the weaker language and Swedish – language with prenominal adjectives – as his stronger language. Note that children in the latter two studies grew up in a national environment where only the Germanic language was spoken, which may explain their stronger inclination to overuse prenominal adjectives.

3.3 Adjective placement in adult early bilinguals Similar to 2L1 children, adult 2L1s may use adjectives differently from monolinguals, especially in their minority language. Kupisch (2014) employed an oral AJT with German-Italian 2L1s, comparing speakers in Italy with speakers in Germany. The experiment included 42 sentences testing adjective placement, including adjectives which never occur prenominally (e.g. verde ‘green’, inglese ‘English’) and adjectives with variable positions (e.g. grande ‘big/great’). The speakers’ task, under limited response time, was to read and listen to the sentences, judge them, and repeat or correct them depending on their judgment. Some sentences were contextualized and the position of the adjective hinged on the correct interpretation of that context. Results indicated that learners had more problems using adjectives with variable positions correctly (e.g. grande) than adjectives that are consistently postnominal (e.g. verde). The percentage of correct responses was 97.4% for the 2L1s from Italy and 82.6% for the 2L1s from Germany. Since the speakers from Italy had more exposure to Italian and used the language more often, the results suggest that input quantity and quality determine acquisition outcomes. Interestingly, when producing adjective-noun strings in the wrong order, the learners were more likely to overuse postnominal adjectives. This result is consistent with Nicoladis’ (2006) findings, while contradicting the idea that what is present in both languages will be overused. Kupisch (2014) further studied adjective placement in the spontaneous speech of the same speakers, finding that placement errors were close to absent (less than 1.5% in more than 1200 adjectives). In a similar study on French with German-French 2L1s (Kupisch et al. 2014), speakers from Germany performed with a mean of 90% accuracy and speakers from France with 98% accuracy. The few cases where the bilinguals did not perform monolingual-like mostly involved fixed expressions. Unlike in previous studies, the minority speakers had attended schools in the minority language, which might explain their comparatively high accuracy.

3.4 Adjective placement in L2 acquisition Coppieters (1987) tested near-native L2ers of French, using a metalinguistic task in which L2ers were asked to articulate the meanings of sentences with pre- or postnominal adjectives. The L2ers often failed to articulate the subtle differences in

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meaning between prenominal and postnominal adjectives. These results could be taken to suggest they had a problem with the interface between word order (a syntactic property) and interpretation (a semantic property). However, Coppieters did not contextualize the sentences, although, as we illustrated in (2) above, context can be essential for adjective meaning. Indeed, Anderson (2008) and Rothman et al. (2010) came to different results using different tasks when testing L2 French and Spanish speakers. Anderson employed a grammaticality judgment task with contextualized utterances, and Rothman et al. (2010) used a semantic interpretation tasks in which the L2ers had to select one of two possible interpretations. In both studies, the L2ers were comparatively more successful in using and interpreting adjectives.

3.5 Summary Adjective placement appears to be more vulnerable in bilingual leaners than in monolinguals. However, the observed error patterns do not provide a uniform picture. Some studies report overuse of the prenominal position, others of the postnominal position, and deviance from monolinguals varies with learner types and methods. As with grammatical gender, there is an open debate on whether L2ers can acquire monolingual-like proficiency. So what does the empirical evidence tell us about interface issues? The question is hard to answer. (i) Adjective placement is primarily a matter of the syntax-semantics interface, but not exclusively. Variability, lexical knowledge and discourse factors play an additional role. So attributing the phenomenon to an internal interface (exclusively) is not without problems. (ii) Existing studies vary in the type of data collection (e.g. isolated vs. contextualized test sentences, naturalistic vs. experimental data). (iii) There are barely any direct comparisons of adjective placement with other phenomena based on the same learners and methods. Thus, for this phenomenon comparatively vulnerability and the associated interface need to be investigated further.

4 The syntax-pragmatics interface 4.1 Pronominal subjects in Romance languages The minimal universal structure of a sentence requires two elements: subject and predicate. We assume that the obligatory nature of subjects is a principle of grammar. However, whether or not subjects have to be morphophonologically expressed is a parameterized property, covered under the Null Subject Parameter (NSP), also known as pro-Drop Parameter (e.g. Rizzi 1982; Jaeggli/Safir 1989; Alexiadou/ Anagnostopoulou 1998; Camacho 2013). Since all human languages have overt pronominal subjects, the setting of this parameter regards whether or not a language

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can also license null pronominal subjects and, in case it does, what the linguistic representational properties are that result in such licensing. Not all null subject languages have the same underlying representation. For example, the licensing of null subjects can be a syntactic reflex of rich verbal morphological agreement, as in Romance languages, or they can be licensed pragmatically in languages that have little or no verbal agreement, as in Chinese. The Romance language family is particularly interesting since there is substantial variation, ranging from French – not allowing null subjects – to Brazilian Portuguese –undergoing diachronic change towards losing its null subject grammar – to Italian, European Portuguese and Spanish, which are null subject languages in a classic sense. Brazilian Portuguese stands out from the other Romance null subject languages in that its verbal morphology, which is assumed to be linked to the licensing of null subjects of the Romance type, is greatly reduced (Holmberg/Nayudu/Sheehan 2009). It marks only three grammatical persons overtly in the standard, and as little as two in colloquial dialects, and there is a general preference for overt subjects, perhaps as a result of the aforementioned. There are also numerous Northern Italian dialects whose status as null subject languages has been subject to debate and, typically, these dialects display more syncretism in their verb morphology than Standard Italian. For ease of exposition, we will simplify and claim that despite subtle differences Italian, European Portuguese and Spanish are essentially the same whereby the null subject is the default. In these languages, overt subjects arise for specific discourse functions such as [+contrastive focus] and [+topic shift], and they are superfluous and pragmatically infelicitous outside of these specific discourse contexts. For example, in (3) below, given that contrasting between “you” and “Marta” is inherent, only (3a) is felicitous, despite the fact that the second person morphology on the verb hagas already disambiguates between 2nd and 3rd person reference. Contrastive focus requires overt subjects; thus (3b), though grammatical, sounds pragmatically odd. Note that in both (3a) and (3b) the subject of the matrix verb does not overtly appear. It would in fact be equally pragmatically odd for it to overtly appear since the verbal morphology clarifies the reference antecedent and there is no apparent discourse function to warrant its use. (3) Sp. a. Quiero que lo hagas TÚ y no Marta. want.I that it do you and not Marta. b. ?Quiero que lo hagas __ y no Marta. want.I that it do __ and not Marta. ‘I want you to do it and not Marta.’ The learning task. Complete knowledge of pronominal subjects in null subject languages implies acquiring the syntax of a language that licenses null subjects as well as knowing the distribution of overt and null subjects in this language. In the

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framework we are adopting, other properties which are linked to the NSP as part of the clustering of properties should come ‘for free’, i.e., with the right setting of the parameter, for example, that expletive subjects are obligatorily null.

4.2 Pronominal subject distribution in L1 and 2L1 In first language acquisition, children produce null subjects irrespective of whether or not the target adult grammar is a null-subject grammar. In fact, at very young ages sentence production is minimal and sentences without subjects (e.g. eat apple) are common. That is, even French and English children omit subjects initially and progressively less over time. This same pattern is also true of L1 children of null subject grammars such as Spanish, European Portuguese and Italian, where null subjects are 100% and decrease to reflect the adult pragmatic distribution over time (e.g. Austin et al. 1997; Grinstead 2004). Hyams (1986) and Hyams/Wexler (1993) explained this by assuming that all children start as a default with the positive setting of the NSP. Valian (1991) and Rizzi (1994; 2002) question this, however, pointing out that children of Romance languages like Spanish, Italian and Portuguese produce much higher rates of null subjects, roughly 70%, as compared to English speaking children at around 30%. Rizzi further points out that the contexts in which Romance children produce null subjects are different, including subjects of matrix inflected verbs in embedded and interrogative clauses, whereas English and French children largely produce null subjects with root infinitives and very rarely when the verb is inflected. As mentioned, the first stage of acquisition for Spanish children involves close to 100% use of null subjects, at least in 3rd person contexts, and decreases over time. According to Grinstead (2004), this change is directly proportional with the availability of the CP field, which according to some theories can be related to the development of pragmatic competence. In his data examining production of Spanish and Catalan, Grinstead shows a correlation with the emergence of overt subjects used pragmatically appropriately with other CP dependent structures. Bel (2001; 2003) also investigated data from child Spanish, showing upwards of 30% of overt subject use from early on with essentially no increase or decrease over time. Similarly, Guasti (1993/1994) and Valian/Eisenberg (1996) showed for Italian and European Portuguese that null subjects have roughly the same frequency and distribution as in the adult grammars, occurring in both root and subordinate clauses. From the available sources it is clear that L1 children acquire the distribution of pronominal subjects quite early and this seems to be true of all relevant Romance languages. There is also evidence that dialectal variation is attuned to by the child, as reflected in diverging developmental patterns when the adult baseline grammar is different. Ticio (2002) examined data of a Puerto Rican L1 Spanish child, a dialect

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of Spanish that like Brazilian Portuguese has been undergoing progressive weakening of its morphological agreement paradigms. Unlike the Spanish children studied by Grinstead (2004), this Puerto Rican child never goes through a stage of 100% null subjects. However, the data also are distinct from Bel’s (2001; 2003), who showed a 30% use of overt subjects in her subject’s Spanish. Instead, Ticio reports an 18% use of overt subjects in the first stage. While we do not know of any comparable L1 Brazilian Portuguese data, we might predict that differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese would also obtain, even more drastically than what Ticio (2002) shows for dialectal variation in Spanish, given the even greater use of overt subjects in Brazilian Portuguese and its more pronounced weakening of verb morphology as compared to Caribbean Spanish. There is some evidence that 2L1 children have more problems than L1 children in acquiring the properties pertaining to the NSP. Paradis/Navarro (2003) examine the production of Manuela, a 2L1 speaker exposed to Cuban Spanish and English. Compared to L1 Spanish children, Manuela used more overt subjects in Spanish from the earliest stage, and postverbal subjects were absent from her speech. Moreover, 32% of Manuela’s overt subjects were infelicitous in the given discourse context, which contrasts sharply from the under 10% of pragmatic oddness reported in Grinstead (2004) and Ticio (2002) (the latter for Puerto Rican Spanish). Thus, the fact that Manuela was exposed to Cuban Spanish would not explain everything. Based on these differences, Paradis/Navarro (2003) concluded that the syntax of Manuela was different from that of monolingual L1 children and subject to cross-linguistic influence from English. Work by Serratrice (2007) supports that subject use is affected by cross-linguistic influence. In her study, Italian L1 children were far less likely than 2L1 English-Italian children to accept an overt third person pronoun as co-referential with a subject antecedent. Sorace’s (2011 inter alia) claim that there should be protracted development in 2L1 acquisition at the syntax-pragmatics interface was based in particular on data pertaining to the null subject property. Paradis/Navarro (2003) and Serratrice (2007) had shown evidence for this already, but Sorace’s claim is not based on crosslinguistic influence per se, although it does not preclude an effect of language pairing either. Rather, differences between bilinguals and monolinguals are seen as a more general consequence of bilingualism. For processing reasons, more overt subjects in pragmatically odd environments and/or unexpected anaphoric resolution with overt subjects should obtain in all bilinguals even if both languages are null subject grammars (Sorace/Serratrice 2009; Sorace 2011). This claim is, however, not necessarily defensible in light of Basque-Spanish 2L1 data. Ezeizabarrena (2002) shows that Basque-Spanish 2L1 children develop equally to monolinguals with respect to subjects in both their languages, so a delay when both languages are null subject languages does not always obtain. Ezeizabarrena’s study shows that protracted development at the syntax-discourse interface is a not a necessary consequence of 2L1 development, which asks us to consider, at least in tandem, other variables that

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conspire to explain the apparent greater vulnerability of this interface with some 2L1 pairings as compared to others.

4.3 Pronominal subjects in adult early bilinguals Montrul (2004) investigated the syntax of pronominal subjects and its discourse integration with Mexican-American heritage speakers of Spanish. Her study shows that heritage speakers have no issues with the syntax of null subjects, omitting subjects in the same contexts as monolinguals. However, their use of subjects was pragmatically marked, as they used them in contexts in which monolinguals would drop the subject. Montrul suggests that the heritage speakers’ expanded domain of overt pronoun use might reflect an influence from English. It is an open question as to what the sources are for the noted difference, as it is possible that the patterns shown by heritage speakers are not actually influence from English at all but reflect a different distribution in the input that is provided to them by speakers who are likely undergoing attrition themselves. In other words, their sources of primary linguistic data are immigrants who are themselves increasingly bilingual, as suggested by Sorace (2004) in her reply to Montrul’s article (cf. Rothman 2007; Pires/Rothman 2009).

4.4 Pronominal subjects in L2 acquisition The Null Subject Parameter is perhaps the most widely studied domain in adult L2 Romance language acquisition. Seminal studies from the beginning of generative SLA clearly include those examining the (re)-setting of this parameter (e.g. White 1985; 1986; Muñoz Liceras 1989; Hilles 1986; Phinney 1987). Studies looked at adult L2ers of Spanish who were natives of English and French as well as Spanish natives acquiring English. These studies showed consistently that speakers of non pro-drop languages were able to acquire the null subject property relatively easily, whereas speakers starting with a null subject grammar had more difficulties un-learning null subject licensing. Muñoz Liceras (1989) also showed successful acquisition of the null subject property in L2 Spanish, but her learners failed to demonstrate full knowledge of the parameter’s claimed cluster of properties (Rizzi 1982), such as the lack of that-trace effects and subject-verb inversion, leading her to claim that the clustering effect of parametric learning did not pertain to adult L2ers (but cf. Rothman/Iverson 2007a; 2007b for an alternative view). Throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, other domains of grammar relating to the syntax-semantics and the syntax-discourse interfaces and pronominal subjects were tested in L2 Spanish. Pérez-Leroux/Glass (1999) tested learners’ knowledge of the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) (Montalbetti 1984), a claimed universal syntaxsemantics restriction that precludes bound variable interpretations in languages that have null-subjects only, which can been seen in (4) and (5).

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(4) a. The girli thinks that shei/j is tall. b. Each girli thinks shei/j is tall. (5) Sp. a. La the b. La the

chicai cree que girl thinks that

ellai/j she

que proi/j es chicai cree girl thinks that is

que c. Cada chicai cree each girl thinks that

es is alta. tall

ella*i/j es she is

d. Cada chicai cree que proi/j es each girl thinks that is

alta. tall

alta. tall

alta. tall

In English, the OPC does not apply, and so the embedded pronoun she in (4a) and (4b) can be either co-referential with the matrix subject ‘the girl/each girl’ or take disjoint reference, referring to some other girl. In the Spanish examples in (5), both interpretations are available for (5a) and (5b) since the matrix subject – the DP – is not a variable expression. In (5c), by contrast, the matrix subject, being a quantified DP, is a variable expression and thus co-reference between the overt embedded subject in (5c) and the matrix variable expression is precluded by the OPC. Only a disjoint reference is possible. However, (5d) is ambiguous to the same extent as (5a) and (5b) because the OPC only constrains bound variable interpretations for overt subjects. It is prudent to note that there is nothing pragmatic about the OPC. In other words, its restrictions are not dependent on context per se, but rather the syntactic environment. In a contextualized translation task, Pérez-Leroux/Glass (1999) showed that even intermediate learners of Spanish avoided supplying overt subjects in bound variable contexts – where the context pushes co-reference and the matrix subject of the embedded pronoun is a variable, quantified DP (as in 5c) or wh-element – and advanced learners performed completely like native speakers. This would mean that in translating sentences like (4b) above, learners rarely used an overt pronoun in the embedded clause and certainly highly significantly less than in their translations of sentences like (4a). Rothman/Iverson (2007a; 2007b), using a different methodology, showed the same results in both naturalistic and classroom L2ers of intermediate and advanced proficiency levels. Lozano (2002) also demonstrated success in OPC restrictions in L2 Spanish, but a lack of similar success levels in the pragmatic distribution of null and overt subjects in the same learners. Lozano’s (2002) study is one of the earliest examining directly the L2 acquisition of discourse conditions of the distribution of pronominal subjects in Romance. It revealed that knowing the syntax of subjects (i.e. whether or not the target language is a null subject language)

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and even the syntax-semantic restrictions on their use (e.g. knowledge of the OPC) did not entail full knowledge of the discourse felicity conditions on their distribution. Later work on pronominal subjects in L2 Romance (e.g. Sorace/Filiaci 2006; Belletti/Bennati/Sorace 2007) played a substantial role when Sorace (2011) formulated the Interface Hypothesis. Sorace and colleagues tested near native speakers of L2 Italian, showing that despite sophisticated knowledge of the syntax, L2ers were significantly different from Italian natives, producing more overt subject pronouns in environments of topic-maintenance where they are unexpected. Challenging the Interface Hypothesis, Rothman (2007; 2009b) showed that although the syntax of the NSP is acquired before related discourse constraints on subject distribution, advanced L2ers of Spanish could perform with no differences to monolinguals. Differently from Sorace and colleagues’ work, Rothman focused on null vs. overt subjects in contrastive focus environments as compared to neutral environments (cf. example 3 above, cf. also Madeira/Xavier/Crispim (2012) for similar results in L2 European Portuguese). In sum, it seems that developmentally speaking there is a delay of syntax-discourse interface properties, but such a delay does not result inevitably in residual optionality.

4.5 Summary It is clear from the large body of research across all groups of language acquirers that the syntax-discourse/pragmatics interface, as exemplified by the NSP, conveys difficulties and delays across all learner groups, perhaps more than other interfaces, as argued by the Interface Hypothesis (Serratrice et al. 2009; Sorace 2011). However, indicators of comparative difficulty, e.g. rates of pragmatically inappropriate subject pronouns, very much depend on who is tested and by what methods. Again, without data from one the same population tested in different interfaces and using similar data types (e.g. naturalistic or experimental data), we should be wary of coming to final conclusions.

5 Multiple interfaces 5.1 Articles use In the acquisition literature, articles have often been associated with the syntaxsemantics interface (Serratrice et al. 2009; Montrul/Ionin 2010) because their presence vs. absence can be used to encode differences in meaning. For example, I like the cats differs from I like cats in referring to a specific group of cats (specific reference) as opposed to cats in general (generic reference). However, it would be inappropriate to leave it at that. Articles are morphemes which, depending on the language,

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may encode also formal functions such as gender (cf. section 2), number and case. Whether an article is used or omitted may depend on the syntactic function of the DP it is part of (subject vs. object, predicate vs. argument). Furthermore, there has been influential work on how prosodic aspects determine article development in L1 and L2 acquisition (e.g. Lleó/Demuth 1999; Goad/White 2009), as well as work on the discourse functions of articles (e.g. Hickmann/Hendriks 1999; Kupisch 2007; Rozendaal 2008). It is hence fair to say that, more than the other phenomena considered so far, articles represent a multiple interface. This does of course not preclude the possibility that specific aspects of article use can be studied in isolation, as pointed out above for gender marking. Closely connected to its multiple interface nature is the plurifunctionality of articles, illustrated in (6) for the Italian indefinite singular article. In (6a), the DP refers to a specific cat; nonetheless the DP is ‘indefinite’ because this cat is deemed to be unknown to the addressee. In (6b), the referent has not even been individuated or ‘specified’ by the speaker, thus being non-specific. In (6c), again, no specific individual has been singled out, but the referent can be considered definite because it can be presupposed that the generic category, i.e. the abstract category of ‘cats’, is familiar to the addressee. (6) It. a. Ho un gatto, che si chiama Carlo. ‘I have a cat, whose name is Carlo.’

(specific, indefinite)

b. Un giorno avrò un gatto, ma non so quale. (non-specific, indefinite) ‘One day I will have a cat but I don’t know which one.’ c. Un gatto è un animale a quattro zampe. ‘A cat is an animal with four paws.’

(non-specific, definite/generic)

The Romance languages have both definite and indefinite articles, and these are mostly marked for gender and number. The grammaticalization of articles in the Romance languages is comparatively advanced, as witnessed by the fact that articles are obligatory except in a small number of well-defined contexts (Longobardi 1994; Chierchia 1998). Compared to the Germanic family, the Romance languages have indefinite plural articles (e.g. It. Mangio delle patate ‘I eat (of the) potatoes’), although they are not obligatory to the same degree across these languages. Another particularity of the Romance languages is the obligatoriness of articles with generic DPs in the plural (e.g. I gatti dormono molto ‘Cats sleep a lot’). Portuguese and Italian further require articles before possessive pronouns, e.g. It. il mio gatto and Ptg. o meu gato ‘(the) my cat’ and both languages allow articles before proper names; French and Spanish permit no articles in comparable contexts. When it comes to ‘bare nouns’, i.e. nouns without articles, French is considered to the most restrictive language (Roodenburg 2005) and Portuguese the least restrictive one,

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allowing bare nouns even with generic plural DPs (Munn/Schmitt 1999). Most Romance languages are subject to dialectal variation, e.g. across the Italian varieties or between European and Brazilian Portuguese. The learning task. Articles are morphological elements with numerous functions. The learning task in Romance involves at least (i) discovering that the target-language has articles, which may be facilitated or inhibited by the prosodic properties of articles and previously learnt languages; (ii) determine their formal functions (gender and number marking) and use the associated morphological forms; (iii) determine the syntactic dimensions along which article use varies; (iv) understand the semantic and discourse functions of articles; (v) awareness of dialectal variation. Although these different dimensions may be studied in tasks that try to isolate them, cumulative difficulties may nonetheless arise. For example, learners may fail to provide a semantically appropriate article, because they concentrate on other aspects of article use, e.g. correct gender marking.

5.2 Articles in L1 and 2L1 learners Article acquisition is a well-documented phenomenon in the early speech of children acquiring a Romance language. Extant research has been concerned with omissions in obligatory contexts, morphologically, semantically or pragmatically correct article choice, or a combination thereof. Here, we leave the morphological aspect aside (cf. section 2). L1 acquisition of articles may involve the following stages: (ii) a bare-noun stage when nouns occur without determiners, (ii) a stage with proto-articles, (iii) a variation stage where bare nouns and nouns with determiners co-occur, and (iv) a target stage where nouns are used with determiners whenever required. The proto-article stage is deemed typical of Romance-learning children (e.g. Bottari/Cipriani/Chilosi 1993/1994; Lleó/Demuth 1999; cf. also section 2), though not excluded for Germanic either. Italian- and French-learning children use their first articles around 1;6 and no later than age 2;0 (cf. Pizzuto/Caselli 1992; Antelmi 1997 for Italian; Bassano/ Maillochon/Mottet 2008; Bassano et al. 2013a; van der Velde/Jakubowicz/Rigaut 2002 for French). For Italian, Bottari/Cipriani/Chilosi (1993/1994, 340) observed protoarticles (“fillers”, “placeholders” or “proto-morphemic devices”) from age 1;8 onwards. As mentioned in section 2, these are phonologically reduced forms, consisting of a single vowel − either a neutral (central) one or the target vowel, e.g. [ə] cane, [ɐ] cane or [i] cane instead of il cane ‘the dog’. Given that such fillers mark the syntactic position of articles, their occurrence suggests that the children’s morphological development lags behind their syntactic development. As for order of appearance, definite and indefinite articles tend to appear before other determiners like possessives and demonstratives, but there are individual exceptions (e.g. Bassano/Maillochon/

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Mottet 2008; Bassano et al. 2013b). Based on cross-sectional data from French children in three age groups (1;8, 2;6 and 3;3), Bassano/Maillochon/Mottet (2008) further found that articles appeared earlier with monosyllabic nouns than with multisyllabic ones. L1 children generally cease to omit articles in obligatory contexts before they turn 3;0 and most work on children acquiring a Romance report that they do so even earlier around 2;6 (cf. Pizzuto/Caselli 1992; Caselli et al. 1993; Kupisch 2007 for Italian; Guasti et al. 2004 for Catalan). A substantial amount of work has tried to show that how fast children converge on their target system depends on the properties of the target language. It was argued that children acquiring a Romance language omit determiners less frequently than children acquiring other languages and cease to omit them with a lower Mean Length of Utterances (MLU) and at earlier ages as compared to children acquiring Germanic languages (Chierchia/Guasti/ Gualmini 1999; Lleó/Demuth 1999; Lleó 2001; Guasti et al. 2004; Kupisch 2007; Rozendaal/Baker 2008; Bassano et al. 2013a; 2013b). There is no consensus what causes these differences. The most influential accounts were based on semantics (Chierchia 1998) and prosody (Lleó/Demuth 1999). However, the semantic account has been subject to criticism, because it treats all Romance and all Germanic languages as if they were alike. In fact, there is substantial variation within these families, concerning both the target systems and their acquisition (cf. Bohnacker 1997; Kupisch et al. 2009). Studies on 2L1 children have mostly dealt with children acquiring Romance and Germanic languages simultaneously. These children follow the same developmental paths as monolingual children, but there may be delays in the production of Romance articles (e.g. Granfeldt 2000; Hulk 2004) or acceleration in their production of Germanic articles (Kupisch 2007). Given some overlap in the conditions of article use in Germanic and Romance, cross-linguistic influence has been more intensively studied in the contexts where the two language families exhibit contrasts. In the plural, Romance definite DPs are ambiguous between a specific and a generic reading (7b). By contrast, Germanic plural definites tend to have a specific reading (7a), while expressing the generic reading through bare nominals (7c), which, in turn, are ungrammatical in Romance (cf. 7d). (7)

a. b.

Engl. It.

The I

sunflowers girasoli

c. d.

Engl. Sunflowers It. *Girasoli

are sono

are sono

yellow. gialli.

yellow. gialli.

[+specific, -generic] [+specific, +generic] [-specific, + generic]

Since generic DPs are infrequent in spontaneous speech, most relevant data comes from experiments. In contexts like (7a, b), L1 children favor a generic interpretation, even in languages like English that do not allow this interpretation (cf. PérezLeroux et al. 2004 for Spanish and English, Kupisch/Pierantozzi 2010 for German

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and Italian). Over time, English children learn that only the specific reading is available for such DPs in their target language. As for 2L1 acquisition, German-Italian children at primary school age were shown to be more inclined to interpret Italian sentences like (7b) as specific compared to monolingual Italian children at comparable ages (Kupisch/Pierantozzi 2010). In an AJT, Italian-English school children were less likely than monolingual Italian children to correct ungrammatical generic sentences lacking the article like in (7d) (Serratrice et al. 2009). In summary, 2L1 studies witness cross-linguistic influence in production, interpretation and acceptability judgments. A number of studies also looked at the emergence of discourse functions of articles, such as naming/labelling and identifying. The data from children acquiring Romance languages mirrors that of English-learning children. Generally, they use articles in different functions from early on, starting with the labelling and identifying function. One of the more difficult functions is the use of the indefinite article to signal that a referent is unknown to the addressee of the utterance, as in (6a). Here, children often overuse definite articles, committing so-called “egocentric errors”, which means that they fail to take their listener’s view into account (cf. KarmiloffSmith 1979 for French, Kupisch 2006 for German-French and German-Italian bilinguals, Rozendaal 2008 for a comparison of Dutch, English and French children). There is further evidence that young children’s determiner use is related to general discourse factors. For instance, determiner use tends to be more frequent with given (vs. new) referents and with referents present in the nonlinguistic context (vs. absent ones) (cf. Bassano et al. 2013b for a longitudinal study of six French children at 1;8, 2;6 and 3;3).

5.3 Articles in adult early bilinguals Montrul/Ionin (2010) and Kupisch (2012) tested the ability of heritage speakers of Spanish and Italian to use articles with specific and generic plural DPs of the type in (7b), using AJTs and truth value judgments tasks (TVJTs). In the latter, learners were for instance presented with sentences of the type Los elefantes tienen colmillos de marfil ‘(The) Elephants have ivory tusks’. The relevant question is whether children would judge the sentence as true even when they are faced with elephants without ivory tusks. Under the influence of English, learners might be more inclined to interpret the sentence as having specific reference, thus judging the sentence as “false” in a context where elephants without ivory are presented. The reason is that definite plural subjects in English only allow the specific interpretation, as in (7a). In an AJT, the same learners had to judge the acceptability of generic nouns without a plural article, which are ungrammatical in Spanish but whose literal translations are fine in English (cf. 7c and 7d). They often accepted inappropriate plural subjects lacking the article. In Kupisch’s (2012) study, the

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heritage speakers performed more similar to L1 Italian speakers in the TVJT than in the AJT, suggesting advantages in tasks which are more intuition based as compared to tasks which are more similar to an L2 learning context, such as grammaticality judgments. In a study with adult 2L1 speakers of French using the exact same design, Barton (2015) showed ceiling performance. However, her 2L1 learners – though growing up in Germany – had attended French schools, which may explain why they looked more similar to monolinguals. Furthermore, 2L1s who speak a Romance language as their majority language, perform just like monolinguals. This indicates that the extra-linguistic environment and the type of schooling play an essential role for how monolingual-like learners will end up being.

5.4 Articles in L2 acquisition Article use is notoriously difficult for L2ers whose L1 does not have articles, such as Korean, Russian or Turkish. We know that L2ers misuse, overuse or omit articles for various reasons, including problems relating to how the [±definiteness] feature is represented in the interlanguage grammar. For example Ionin/Ko/Wexler (2004) proposed that L2ers whose L1s lack articles fluctuate between definiteness and specificity, i.e. the features that govern article choice. Tsimpli/Mastropavlou (2007) suggested that there will be permanent morphosyntactic deficits in cases where the L2 instantiates an uninterpretable definiteness feature that is inexistent in the L1. Trenkic (2007) attributed problems with article use to persistent pragmatic problems. Goad/White (2009) argued that L1 prosodic representations may be transferred to the L2, and these representations may be such that independently of the issue of definiteness L2 cannot be pronounced or is done inconsistently. On the other hand, there is also research showing that even the most subtle semantic contrasts can be acquired at advanced stages of acquisition. In the following, we will once more concentrate on the difference between specific and generic readings, because most studies on L2 Romance have investigated learners whose L1 was either German or English, and for whom this distinction represents a major area of difficulty. Ionin/Montrul (2009; 2010) investigated L1 transfer in Spanish learners of English in specific and generic plural DPs. The conditions were similar to those outlined above for adult early bilinguals. While Spanish L2ers at intermediate levels showed L1 transfer, more advanced learners recovered from L1 transfer, interpreting definite and bare plurals in a target-like way (cf. Ionin/Ko/Wexler 2014 for a similar study on Brazilian Portuguese highlighting the role register and/or input and Kupisch 2012 for L2 Italian). In a slightly different type of study, Slabakova (2006) examined the interpretation of bare and definite plurals by L1 English learners of L2 Italian. One semantic contrast between English and Italian is that while English bare NPs can have either a generic (all) or an existential (some) meaning, e.g. for sentences like “White elephants will undergo the final judgment tomorrow at 5”. Italian, by contrast, has

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only an existential interpretation, i.e. “Some white elephants will undergo the final judgment tomorrow at 5”. Another semantic contrast relates to sentences such as “Large cats think very highly of themselves”. In English, the sentence can have a kind reading, meaning that every large cat has a high opinion of all large cats as a species. The English sentence can also have a distributive reading, i.e. that each individual large cat has a high opinion of itself only, but they may not think highly of the species in general. In Italian only the distributive reading is available. A written TVJT revealed that the L2 Italian learners at advanced levels performed like Italian native controls, suggesting that with advanced proficiency, L2ers can acquire extremely subtle meaning differences. Cuza et al. (2013) provided similar results for L1 English learners of L2 Spanish at the advanced levels of proficiency.

5.5 Summary Summarizing, L1 research indicated that articles appear very early in the speech of Romance learning children, i.e. before age 2;0. Although L1 learners use articles from early on, some article functions are acquired comparatively late, e.g. the generic function and the specific indefinite use of the indefinite article. 2L1 learners seem to pattern with L1 learners but they may show delays and increased difficulty or acceleration and facilitation, depending on the language combination and their relative proficiency. L2 learners can acquire even the most subtle aspects of article use if they are advanced enough, and heritage speakers have similar problems as L2ers, but their performance may be task dependent. What does this mean with respect to interfaces? It is first of all remarkable that a phenomenon as complex as articles can be acquired at all and that article have not figured as prominently in the interface literature as the null subject parameter. It has indeed been argued in a comparison of the same groups of Italian-English learners that articles (syntaxsemantics interface) are less vulnerable than subject pronouns (syntax-discourse interface) (Sorace/Serratrice 2009), but there are also studies with adult heritage speakers, showing that they do not use articles akin to monolinguals (Montrul/Ionin 2010; Kupisch 2012). Again, how complex a phenomenon appears to be in an acquisition study depends at least partially on the group of selected learners and the chosen design.

6 Conclusions Research pertaining to interface conditioned properties in language acquisition dates back longer than the term itself, and research on the acquisition of Romance languages has contributed substantially to our understanding of interfaces. Nevertheless, we feel that we are not yet in a position to claim, at last not based on acquisition data, that one or the other interface is more or less vulnerable in acquisition. It

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is even possible that there are types of cross-language interaction that are independent of interfaces, as argued by Lleó (↗17 Acquiring multilingual phonologies (2L1, L2 and L3): Are the difficulties in the interfaces?). We have pointed out that it is not always possible to discuss particular phenomena in terms of a single interface and our impression is that theorists and acquisitionists are increasingly acknowledging this fact. Although it used to be the case that certain properties were considered as pertaining to only one particular interface, recent studies have begun to examine the effects of multiple interface integration on language development and language production. In this contribution, we have presented articles as a multiple interface, but we could have found reasons to do the same for the other phenomena we presented. For instance, one could claim that the presence of an overt pronoun to mark focus in Romance languages also invokes the phonological interface, since focus involves differences in prosodic contours. Similarly, we described grammatical gender as a phenomenon interfacing with morphology, but we also pointed out that gender assignment may depend on the phonological properties of the noun. Of course, the dynamic nature of domains that evoke multiple interfaces add complexity both for empirical testing and the processing load in all learner types, and these complexities might manifest differently in performance and competence in various populations. In this same vein, although there are striking parallels between learner populations in acquisition and development, such parallels do not imply that all learners behave alike with respect to all or even a majority of particular properties. As White (2011) points out, not all properties pertaining to specific interfaces are equally difficult to acquire, and it does not seem to be the case that a neat divide between internal and external interfaces correctly predicts which properties be subject to protracted development, emerging optionality and/or residual optionality. Success and failure across different studies may depend more on methodological differences than anything else. For example, heritage speakers are more likely to succeed in oral tasks than L2ers, while L2ers, in turn, might outperform heritage speakers in written grammaticality judgment tasks. Therefore, the claim that one interface is more vulnerable than the other should be based on comparison of the same populations of speakers, tested with the same methods. So far, very few studies have done so, which makes it hard to substantiate any claims about the relative vulnerability of interfaces. What we do know for sure from the multitude of studies is that integration of information (linguistic and/or other) is not always straightforward and can interact with other variables to show differences in development and ultimate attainment across monolinguals and bilinguals. It seems rather uncontroversial that narrow syntax phenomena, i.e. the rare occasions where a property does not (substantially) interact with anything else, e.g. adjective placement in German, are relatively unproblematic in acquisition. Moreover, while acknowledging that the nature of interfaces is highly theory-dependent, we believe that the many studies reviewed in this chapter – including the many more that space and our narrow foci did not allow

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us to review directly – have shown that studies in the acquisition of Romance languages have made considerable contributions to the general research programs interested in linguistic interfaces.

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Esther Rinke

19 The role of the interfaces in syntactic change Abstract: This contribution deals with the role of the interfaces in the modelling of diachronic change. I discuss this issue exemplarily by referring to three approaches to syntactic change that have particularly highlighted the role of the interfaces: i) Longobardi’s (2001) Inertial Theory, ii) Roberts/Roussou’s (2003) theory of grammaticalization, and iii) studies of the diachronic interaction between word order and information structure. Although the three examples differ from each other with respect to the exact role they attribute to the interfaces in syntactic change, they agree that syntactic change cannot be considered in isolation. Keywords: syntactic change, Inertial Theory, grammaticalization, information structure, determiners, word order variation, verb second

1 Introduction Syntactic change refers to changes in the way linguistic entities (or lexical items) are combined in a particular language. This implies that explanatory theories of syntactic change crucially depend on the theory of syntax they are based on. Because this chapter focusses on the role of the interfaces in syntactic change by way of some exemplary proposals, it regards syntactic change from the generative perspective developed within the Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995; 2001) which explicitly attributes an important role to the interfaces. According to Minimalist assumptions (Chomsky 1995; 2001), the syntactic component of the grammar combines entities previously selected from the lexicon (numeration) into complex structures (phrases/sentences). Because syntactic structures have a phonological form and a semantic interpretation, they have to be built in a way that conforms to the requirements of the articulatory-phonetic and conceptual-intentional interfaces. In addition, the lexical items involved in the syntactic computation have phonetic, semantic, and syntactic features which determine the way they are combined in syntax and which also can change over time. Therefore, the architecture of the human language faculty and the mechanisms behind computation – at least from the perspective of generative grammar – demand that models of syntactic change make reference to the syntax-phonology and syntax-semantics-pragmatics interfaces as well as to the feature specification of lexical items because linguistic variation over time has to be explained in the same way as synchronic variation between grammatical systems.

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In the original principles and parameters (P&P) framework (Chomsky 1981/ 1993), syntactic variation was defined in terms of different parametric options provided by Universal Grammar (UG), such as e.g. the null subject parameter (Rizzi 1982; 1986) or the head parameter (Travis 1984). Although the P&P model has had “an extraordinary impact on synchronic and diachronic comparative syntax, and has been able to increase and sharpen our understanding of cross-linguistic uniformity” (Picallo 2014, 2), a number of principles and parameters proposed revealed problems concerning their descriptive or explanatory adequacy. In order to overcome the shortcomings of the traditional notion of parameters in the P&P framework, the Minimalist Program considers the syntactic computational system itself to be invariant and reduces variation to the feature specification of functional categories in the lexicon (‘lexical parametrization hypothesis’; Chomsky 1995 based on an original proposal by Borer 1984).1 For diachronic change, this means that “there can be no such thing as lexicon-independent syntactic change. . .”, as has recently been argued by Biberauer/Walkden (2015, 3).2 In the framework of the Minimalist Program, the focus has shifted to the study of microparametric differences, Kayne (2000; 2005).3 On the other hand, Baker (2008) suggests “that a system in which all syntactic variation is ascribed solely to microparametric differences in the make-up of functional heads, as assumed under the so-called Borer-Chomsky Conjecture, cannot account for actually attested patterns of variation” (Baker 2008, 351). Instead, syntactic variation is understood as reflecting the interaction of microand macroparameters (cf. also Roberts 2011). Syntactic change as syntactic variation over time is closely related to language learning (Paul 1880/1920), particularly in childhood (Lightfoot 1991). Given the fact that it is rather unlikely that adults change their internal grammatical system radically once they have acquired it (Meisel 2011; Meisel/Elsig/Rinke 2013),4 it is 1 There has been a debate whether parameters should at all be assumed in the modern generative framework and in which way they should be properly defined. Cf. the discussion in Newmeyer (2004; 2005); Roberts/Holmberg (2005); Biberauer (2008); Picallo (2014). 2 Cf. also Walkden (2012). 3 “[. . .] the technique of examining a large number of very closely related languages promises to provide a broad understanding of parameters at their finest-grained (microparameters) [. . .]” (Kayne 2000, xiii). 4 Variationist models of language change assume that adults may change their patterns of language use during their lifespan (Labov 1994). Adult speakers may, for instance, modify their patterns of language use according to the age group they belong to (age grading) or adopt a generational change initiated by younger speakers (lifespan changes, Sankoff 2005). However, in contrast to syntactic change as discussed from a generative perspective, such changes crucially refer to variable patterns of language use which represent the research object within the framework of the theory of language variation and change which does not distinguish in a principled fashion between language change affecting the grammatical knowledge of the speakers and change affecting the way in which this knowledge is put to use. Nevertheless, the generative model of change and the variationist concept of generational change share an important assumption, namely that the linguistic knowledge of the individual stabilizes at a certain time after childhood (Labov 2001, 448, 502; cf. Meisel/Elsig/Rinke 2013).

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assumed that syntactic change happens in the course of first language acquisition when the grammar is transmitted from one generation to the next (Andersen 1973; Lightfoot 1991). However, given the fact that first language acquisition is a deterministic process and usually successful, the “logical problem of language change” arises (Clark/Roberts 1993; Niyogi/Berwick 1995; Brandner/Ferraresi 1996): If children generally sucessfully acquire their first language on the basis of the input provided by the previous generation, which presumably conforms to their internal grammar, how can syntactic change ever happen at all? Niyogi/Berwick (1995) and Yang (2002) have developed dynamic models of language acquisition and change based on hypothesis testing. In short, the diachronic model is this: individual children attempt to attain their caretaker target grammar. After a finite number of examples, some are successful, but others may misconverge. The next generation will therefore no longer be linguistically homogeneous (Niyogi/Berwick 1995, 2).

Another possibility is that syntactic changes are driven by syntax-external forces, for example by modifications in the phonological and/or semantic component, which represent changes in the primary linguistic experience and may have consequences for the acquisition of parametric properties. It could be that changes at the interfaces weaken the evidence for the acquisition of certain parametric options. If it is assumed that syntactic variation across languages can be captured on the basis of micro-/macro-parametric choices which are related to the feature specification of functional heads, then syntactic change occurs when these choices change and the I-grammar of the individual speaker is different from that of the previous generation(s). In this paper, I will discuss three prominent approaches that highlight the role of the interfaces in syntactic change. The first example is Longobardi’s (2001) Inertial Theory. The author suggests that “linguistic change proper [. . .] may only originate as an interface phenomenon, in the sense of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program, perhaps just for reasons concerning the relation between language and the external world (pressures from the conceptual and articulatory-perceptual systems)” (Longobardi 2001, 278). Longobardi assumes that syntactic change is never isolated but is always caused by prior changes in the phonological and/or semantic component. Secondly, I will discuss Roberts/Roussou’s (2003) theory of grammaticalization. The authors agree with Longobardi (2001) with respect to the assumption that “no purely syntactic change is possible” (Roberts/Roussou 2003, 7). They assume that grammaticalization, which they classify as ‘upward’ reanalysis, always has interface effects such as phonological weakening or semantic bleaching. It may be then, that functional elements fall below certain threshold values for phonological and semantic content even when they have interface properties. This idea may also contribute to an account of why grammatical systems vary and change, since the crucial PF information is presented in a ‘weak’ form (Roberts/Roussou 2003, 29).

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A third example that I will discuss concerns the investigation of the interface between word order and information structure in diachronic studies. In recent years, the interaction of syntax and semantics-pragmatics has received a growing interest in synchronic as well as diachronic linguistics (e.g. Batllori/Hernanz 2011; Bech/ Eide 2014; Jacob/Dufter 2009; Ferraresi/Lühr 2010; Frey 2005; Hinterhölzl/Petrova 2009; Meurman-Solin/López-Couso/Los 2009; Rinke/Meisel 2009; Zimmermann/ Féry 2010 among many others). It is by now generally accepted that the study of word order changes cannot focus on syntax only but also has to consider the information-structural organization of the sentences in a language at a certain point in time. In the remainder of this paper I will discuss the three proposals in detail. I will argue that although some of the assumptions might not stand up to close examination, the role of the interfaces in explaining syntactic change cannot be ignored.

2 Inertial Theory (Longobardi 2001) Longobardi’s (2001) theory of diachronic change builds on the notion of “inertia” proposed by Keenan (1994; 2002). Keenan (2002) assumes two general, not necessarily linguistic, forces driving language change: a) decay and b) inertia. By “decay” he understands the principle that “things wear out”, exemplified by phonological reduction that obscures morphological boundaries or the weakening of demonstratives into definite articles. By “inertia” the author means that “[t]hings stay as they are unless acted upon by an outside force or Decay” (Keenan 2002, 342). One example of an outside force driving language change would be vocabulary borrowing leading to paradigmatic reorganization. In Longobardi’s (2001) proposal, inertia primarily refers to the syntactic component, stating that “syntax, by itself, is diachronically inert”. Longobardi claims that there is no such thing as imperfect learning, spontaneous innovation, or convergence and he claims that syntactic change always needs an explanation. He assumes that change in the syntax should only take place as a predictable reaction by a deterministic core of the language acquisition device to different primary linguistic data or to a change in more superficial components of grammar, like for example the phonological and semantic matrices of lexical items which are not constrained in the same way. With respect to the etymology of French chez (‘by’, ‘at’) from Lat. CASA(M) (‘house’), Longobardi (2001) identifies two puzzling facts that call for an explanation: first, the irregular sound change from CASA(M) > chies/chiese > chez/*chèse, and second, the categorial change from N to P with an abstract locative meaning, which is non-existent in other Romance languages. The two changes are explained on the basis of the following assumption: Romance languages implement a UGoption which leads to a construction like the Semitic construct state. Nouns such as

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the forms for house “casa” can rise from N to D. N-to-D-movement is exemplified by means of the following examples, where the noun precedes an element higher than N in the internal structure of the DP (a possessive, a genitive attribute and a proper name expressing as possessor): (1)

casa mia (Italian, Longobardi 2001, 281), in casa il conte (colloquial speech of Pisa and Florence, Pascali 1964 reported in Longobardi 2001, 284), Ca’ Garzoni (Northern Italian dialects, Longobardi 2001, 285); en casa/ca’ Pedro (Spanish, Longobardi 2001, 287); etc.

Longobardi (2001) assumes that the etymology of chez is derived from this older construct state, in which the noun has moved to D. Therefore, the phonological reduction appears to be a regular process: because the construct noun has raised to the functional head D, stress is placed on the following articleless genitive DP (e.g. mia, il conte, Garzoni in example (1)). The syntactic change is caused by the loss of unambiguous evidence for a nominal category chies in French: The reduced form of the noun does not occur in object or subject position and is not accompanied by any determiner or possessive element. Given this lack of evidence for the nominal status of chies and provided that there is an acquisition principle “minimize feature content” that opts for the minimal feature content possible (P = –N, –V/–N = +N, –V), chies loses the value [+N], is reanalysed as a preposition and receives an abstract locative meaning. Longobardi (2001) concludes that [. . .] syntactic change does not exist as a primitive (the Inertial Theory) but can be reduced to independent changes in the phonological or semantic interfaces of individual lexical items; hopefully, the latter will ultimately be traced, in many cases, to extragrammatical causal factors (interference; social changes, etc.) (Longobardi 2001, 299).

Longobardi (2001) provides a convincing scenario concerning the etymology of French chez. However, the question arises whether the evolution of Lat. CASA(M) to French chez is a suitable example for parametric change. This depends, e.g. on the more general question whether chez or spatial prepositions in general should be treated as lexical or functional categories (cf. Cinque/Rizzi 2010). Longobardi treats chez as a functional category but leaves open how the change in the feature specification of this preposition represents an example of syntactic change in the sense of a reorganization of the grammatical system. Longobardi’s Inertial Theory naturally evokes the question why syntax should be a priori more inert than phonology and semantics? The author does not explicitly discuss this question. Walkden (2012, 897) argues that Inertial Theory is problematic from the perspective of the Minimalist Program: “Under this view, there is no variation across the human species in the syntactic component of the language faculty, and hence no such thing, strictly speaking, as ‘syntactic change’. Instead all change traditionally classed as syntactic is simply lexical change, specifically change in the

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formal features of (functional) lexical items.” This is the approach to variation introduced by Borer (1984) and dubbed the ‘Borer-Chomsky Conjecture’ (BCC) by Baker (2008, 353). However, statements (1–2) do not support this view of the provenance of the Inertial Theory: if it were hypothesized that there were no such thing as ‘syntactic’ change, the suggestion that such change does not occur ‘unless caused’, and that it may originate as an interface phenomenon (preceded by semantic and/or morphophonological change), would be entirely redundant. From the perspective of first language acquisition, Inertial Theory is not unproblematic. If we assume that syntactic changes happen in the course of first language acquisition and only occur when they are caused by previous phonological or semantic changes, we imply that syntactic properties of a language are (exclusively) acquired on the basis of phonological and semantic evidence. However, Longobardi (2001) also admits that other changes in the primary linguistic data (e.g. the absence of a certain structure) can lead to change.

3 Grammaticalization theory (Roberts/Roussou 2003) Roberts/Roussou (2003) propose a theory of grammaticalization that is also embedded in the theoretical framework of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995; 2001). The authors aim to account for different phenomena of grammaticalization as well as to integrate central insights already accumulated in the typological literature (Hopper/ Traugott 1993; Lehmann 1985; Heine/Kuteva 2002), like, for instance, the existence of diachronic pathways. Concerning the role of the interfaces in processes of diachronic change, Roberts/Roussou (2003, 7) agree with Longobardi (2001) that “no purely syntactic change is possible”. Nevertheless, they distinguish between two types of syntactic change: ‘upward’ and ‘downward’ reanalysis. ‘Downward’ reanalysis is related to the loss of movement to a higher functional position (e.g. loss of V-to-I, loss of V2, etc.), whereas grammaticalization, i.e. the creation of new functional material, is identified as successive ‘upward’ reanalysis. Crucially, Roberts/Roussou (2003, 208) claim that downward changes have no interface effects whereas grammaticalization always does. What Roberts/Roussou (2003) mean by ‘interface effects’ is already present in Meillet’s (1912/1921) original definition of grammaticalization as “L’affaiblissement du sens et l’affaiblissement de la forme” (‘the weakening of the sense and the weakening of the form’): Tandis que l’analogie peut renouveler le détail des formes, mais laisse le plus souvent intact le plan d’ensemble du système existant, la ‘grammaticalisation’ de certains mots crée des formes neuves, introduit des catégories qui n’avaient pas d’expression linguistique, transforme l’ensemble du système. . . . L’affaiblissement du sens et l’affaiblissement de la forme [ER] des mots accessoires vont de pair; quand l’un et l’autre sont assez avancés, le mot accessoire peut finir par ne plus être qu’un élément privé de sens propre, joint à un mot principal pour en marquer le rôle grammatical. Le changement d’un mot en élément grammatical est accompli (Meillet 1912/1921, 139).

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Grammaticalization not only refers to the evolution of a grammatical category from a lexical element but also to the development of new functional categories from other functional material. One example is the evolution of the Romance articles from the Latin determiner ille (Giusti 2001; Harris 1978; 1980; Lyons 1999; Renzi 1976; 1992; 1993; Selig 1992; Tekavčić 1972; Vincent 1997). (2) Lat.

Masculine (Nom) ille/illi (Acc) illum/illos Fr. le/les Ita. il/i Por. o/os

Feminine Neuter illa/illae illud/illa illam/illas illud/illa la/les la/le a/as

(Roberts/Roussou 2003, 133)

The evolution of the Romance articles from Latin demonstratives has two dimensions. The first dimension is the phonological weakening of ille > le and the loss of feature content: demonstratives have a [+definite] feature and a feature specific to demonstratives [+dem] (Lyons 1999) or [+deictic] (Giusti 2001). In the course of grammaticalization, the [+dem] / [+deictic] feature is lost. The second dimension is the loss of syntactic movement. According to Giusti (2001) and Roberts/Roussou (2003), demonstratives move to Spec,DP (3a), whereas the definite article is directly merged in D (3b). (3) a.

b.

(Roberts/Roussou 2003, 135) Therefore, the change from the demonstrative ille to the French article le involves move > merge reanalysis. Giusti (2001) assumes that the loss of case morphology on nouns in Latin caused the changes because Latin nominal case morphology could trigger N-to-D movement and make the D-N-chain visible. With its loss, this visibility is implemented by merge of an article in D.5 As shown by this example, the grammaticalization of demonstratives leads to the creation of the new functional category “article” (D°-head). According to Roberts/Roussou (2003), the formal correlate of grammaticalization is the creation of a new exponent in a higher functional head. Based on the assumption that exponents of functional heads are inherently deficient with respect to the interfaces (IDH = Interface Deficiency Hypothesis), the interface effects mentioned above consist 5 This argumentation is in line with van Gelderen’s (2004) Head Preference Principle and her work on cyclic reanalysis (van Gelderen 2009).

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in phonological reduction (to a prosodically subminimal unit) and semantic bleaching (where descriptive content is cut out, and only logical content is left). According to Roberts/Roussou (2003), the resulting structure is characterized by the loss of feature syncretism and movement and is therefore structurally simpler. The conservative nature of the language acquirer favours a simplified structure and avoids syncretisms because an ideal situation would be a one-to-one mapping of items and features. With respect to the example above the question arises how the category of demonstratives (moving to Spec,DP) could be retained in Romance if the language acquirer always opts for the simpler structure with less syncretism. What was actually lost, was the deictic feature/value [+Dem] of some demonstratives in the lexicon which led to the emergence of a new category D. If this change relates to the loss of descriptive content depends on the question whether [+Dem] in fact represents descriptive content (as assumed by Giusti 2001) or instead some kind of “functional load”. Roberts/Roussou (2003) conclude that their approach explains three main issues concerning the diachronic phenomenon of grammaticalization: i) the ubiquity of grammaticalization, ii) the conflict between the descriptive generalization that there exist diachronic pathways in grammaticalization and an explanatory account that assumes that parameters “create a space of variation in which individual grammatical systems are distributed” (Roberts/Roussou 2003, 209), and iii) the inventory and nature of functional categories. With respect to the first aspect, the authors assume that “grammaticalization is so common because it represents a natural form of endogenous change” (Roberts/ Roussou 2003, 194). Endogenous – in contrast to exogenous – changes are purely internally caused (e.g. by instabilities in the system). The authors do not explicitly explain why they think that the fact that grammaticalization is not externally caused explains why it is a common phenomenon. The reason is probably that it is understood as a process of structural simplification (‘avoid feature syncretism’) favoured in the process of language acquisition. With respect to the second point the authors propose the markedness hierarchy in (4): (4) F*Move/Merge > F*Move > F*Merge > F 6 This hierarchy implies that the realization F*Move/Merge is the most marked option because it involves two phonological matrices and the features that trigger movement; F*Move is more marked relative to F*Merge, and F*Merge relative to F. The authors (Roberts/Roussou 2003, 210) assume that in the absence of overt and robust cues, 6 The hierarchy refers to different ways a functional feature F can be realized: F (no PF realization is required); F*Merge (the feature is realized by Merge), F*Move (the feature is realized by movement), F*Move/Merge (the feature is realized by movement and merge).

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the language acquirer opts for the less marked option and acquires a less marked parameter value, with F as the default. The idea is that this mechanism in combination with the assumption of a universal hierarchy of functional nodes explains why grammaticalization follows diachronic pathways. Nevertheless, there are some open questions that call for a satisfactory answer: First, why does the language acquirer not always and automatically opt for the simplest and unmarked option/default once the morphological cue has become obscure? This means with respect to our example: Why do we observe a change from move > merge instead of the choice of the simplest option (“F”)? If the language acquirer favours a simplified structure and avoids syncretisms it is unclear why grammaticalization can be a process of successive upward reanalysis. One could deduce that remaining morphological marking still favours the “Merge”-option. However, the assumption of a direct link between morphological marking and the acquisition of syntactic structure seems too strong (Fischer 2007; 2010), and what kind of morphological marking should it be in the case of articles? Second, there are intermediate steps in the development of the Romance article system that cannot be captured by the markedness hierarchy. It has been shown by many authors (e.g. Posner 1996; Vincent 1997; Selig 1992; Rinke 2010; Kupisch/Rinke 2011 among others), that the definite article in Old Romance was initially not used as a marker of definiteness but as a marker of specificity or as a topic-marker, gradually developing into a marker of definiteness. It is not clear to me, how this diachronic pathway could be captured in Roberts/Roussou’s (2003) model of grammaticalization. Concerning problem iii, the inventory and nature of functional categories, the authors assume that they are defective at the interfaces (IDH, cf. above). To sum up, as in Longobardi’s (2001) Inertial Theory, the interfaces play a central role in Roberts/Roussou’s (2003) grammaticalization theory. However, there are also differences between the two approaches. Although Roberts/Roussou (2003, 7) claim that “no purely syntactic change is possible”, they distinguish between ‘upward’ and ‘downward’ reanalysis. The crucial difference between both types of reanalysis is that ‘downward’ reanalysis (e.g. the loss of the V2-parameter) has no interface effects whereas ‘upward’ reanalysis (grammaticalization) always does (Roberts/Roussou 2003, 208). Although the authors claim that “grammaticalization is a regular case of parameter change not fundamentally different from other such changes” (Roberts/ Roussou 2003, 2), there seems to be a crucial difference: “regular cases” of parametric changes such as the loss of V2, the loss of V-to-T movement, or the change from an OV- to a VO-grammar are not related to interface effects and represent in this sense “purely syntactic changes”. There is another difference between Inertial Theory and grammaticalization theory: in Longobardi’s approach, changes at the interfaces are the cause of syntactic changes. In Roberts and Roussou’s approach, it is less clear whether the changes at the interfaces cause the syntactic change or whether they are effects of it. On the

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one hand, it is assumed that phonological weakening and semantic bleaching are “interface effects” of grammaticalization. On the other hand, phonological weakening and semantic bleaching can also be understood as causing ‘upward reanalysis’ because they weaken the evidence for example for movement for the language acquirer.

4 Word order change and information structure The increasing interest of studies on diachronic change in the interface between syntax and semantics/pragmatics is reflected in the growing number of publications on the topic (e.g. Batllori/Hernanz 2011; Bech/Eide 2014; Ferraresi/Lühr 2010; Hinterhölzl/Petrova 2009; Meurman-Solin/López-Couso/Los 2009). Word order variation in synchrony may be caused by two (interacting) factors: a) syntactic restrictions in a given language, or b) information structure. The distinction becomes clear when we compare postverbal subjects in German and Portuguese (5a–b). (5) a. Ger. Gestern hat der Student ein Buch ausgeliehen. yesterday has the student a book borrowed ‘Yesterday, the student borrowed a book.’ b. Por. Ontem emprestou um livro o estudante. yesterday borrowed a book the student ‘Yesterday, the student borrowed a book.’ In German, the postverbal position of the subject is caused by the verb-second property (V2). This parametric option requires that only one constituent can occur in preverbal position. Hence, the subject has to appear postverbally whenever another preverbal constituent occupies the sentence-initial position. With respect to information structure, the word order adverb-verb-subject (as well as subjectverb-adverb) can be uttered in a neutral context (as an answer to the question “What happened?”) but also in a context where the subject represents the information focus of the sentence (“Who borrowed a book?”). Which information-structural interpretation is chosen depends primarily on the prosody of the sentence. Portuguese – similarly to the other Romance languages – differs in two respects from German: First, the alternative word order adverb-subject-verb is available in Portuguese (“Ontem o estudante emprestou um livro.”) and second, the postverbal placement of the subject in (5b) implies an information-structural interpretation of the subject as the information focus of the sentence. Sentence (5b) represents an appropriate answer to the question “Who borrowed a book?” but not to the question “What happened?”

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The difference between German and Portuguese illustrated here is highly relevant for diachrony if we want to determine and analyse the exact nature of word order changes. However, as stated by Bech/Eide (2014, 3), “In diachronic linguistics, we do not have access to such prosodic features, nor can we access a speaker’s evaluation of what is important or what the sentence is about through construed contexts . . .” (cf. also Ferraresi/Lühr 2010, 1). The only possibility to access information structure in historical texts consists in analysing “the contexts in which the utterances appear, using methods which have already been described and tested for modern languages, and further adapted for older language stages” (Bech/Eide 2014, 3). In principle, there are two sources which can be used to determine the information status of sentence units in historical texts: first, the textual context of the sentences and second, universal tendencies concerning the interaction of syntax and information structure. With respect to the first point, the textual context allows us to determine whether a referent has been previously mentioned in the text or whether it is newly introduced (given vs. new information). Concerning universal tendencies, we can take into account that subjects have a tendency to be topics, whereas objects tend to be the information focus of the sentence. Topics tend to be realized by definite noun phrases, whereas indefinite noun phrases generally represent new information/information focus. The generalizations deduced from the historical texts have to be compared to what we know about the interaction of word order and information structure in the modern languages. I will illustrate these points in turn by referring to my own work on word order change in the history of Portuguese (Rinke 2007; 2009). There are studies on word order variation in thirteenth century Old Portuguese (OPor.) that classify OPor. as a verb-second language (Ribeiro 1995; Salvi 2001; 2004). Although Ribeiro (1995, 126) notices that OPor. shows exceptions to the V2restriction, the author claims that OPor. was “verb second in the technical sense, a system in which C° has the feature [+Agr]”. In the text analysed by Ribeiro (1995)7, the number of apparent V2-clauses is very high: 31 out of 57 main clauses show XP-V-(S) order and only 15 sentences S-V-(C) order. However, the first group also includes null subject sentences, in which the exact position of the subject constituent cannot a priori be defined as being postverbal. In an extensive corpus study (cf. Rinke 2007; 2009), based on 93 juridical documents from the second half of the thirteenth to the first half of the fourteenth century, I showed that out of 776 main clauses, only 41 (5.3%) show typical verb-second order (XP-V-S), the most frequent word order pattern being sentences with a preverbal subject (SVO = 196, 25.3%). Crucially, verb initial clauses with and without a realized subject and verb-third sentences which are not compatible with a V2-grammar are well attested in the

7 Dialógos de São Gregório (before 1385).

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data base (V1: (15 with a postverbal subject and 182 with a null subject) = 197 (25.4%); V3: 173 (22.3%)). This distribution of word order patterns gives rise to doubts concerning a characterization of OPor. in terms of a V2 grammar because verbsecond placement is neither obligatory nor frequent (cf. Kaiser 2002, Rinke 2007; 2009, Martins/Cardoso/Pereira 2015). (6) OPor. a. o qual casal a d(i)ta dona Mayor uẽegas this house the aforementioned Dona Mayor Vegas por sua alma e en remijmẽto d(e) seus pecados for her soul and in repentance of her sins mando ao d(i)to Most(eir)o. ordered to.the aforementioned monastery ‘The aforementioned Dona Mayor Vegas handed this house over to the aforementioned monastery for the good of her soul and in repentance of her sins.’ (Martins 2001, 143, Doc. 20, Noroeste [Mosteiro de S. Salvador de Moreira], year 1282) maenfestam(os) & conoszem(os) q(ue) rezibem(os) de uos b. & and manifest & acknowledge that received form you por p(re)zu do sobred(i)to h(er)dam(en)tu dozentus for price of-the aforementioned manor two hundred & cinq(u)aenta s(oldo)s. . . , and fifty soldos ‘And we manifest and acknowledge that we received from you the price of two hundred and fifty Soldos for the aforementioned manor.’ The occurrence of declarative V3- (6a) and V1-clauses (6b) is incompatible with the ‘classic’ definition of Germanic V2 (XP movement of only one constituent to Spec,CP followed by verb movement to C, Den Besten 1983). However, as shown by Martins/ Cardoso/Pereira (2015), it is also incompatible with alternative accounts of verb second in Old Romance as proposed in the cartographic framework (cf. Benincà 2006; Poletto 2014). Based on Benincà/Poletto (2004) Martins/Cardoso/Pereira (2015) assume that in Old Portuguese, the left periphery consists of a topic field which is followed by a focus field. (7)

[Topic field [Focus field [IP]]]

According to Martins/Cardoso/Pereira (2015) Old Portuguese cannot be analysed in terms of a verb-second language with verb movement to the lower focus field, as

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was proposed by Benincà (2006) and Poletto (2014) for Old Italian, because Old Portuguese systematically shows several constituents to the right of the focus field (8). Hence, the finite verb cannot be in the head of a focus projection. (8) OPor. ainda vos oje muito pesar averrá still you-DAT today much sorrow will-come ‘much sorrow will come to you today’ (Arthurian novel: Demanda do Santo Graal, 13th century, Martins/Cardoso/Pereira 2015, 6) But if OPor. cannot be characterized as a verb-second language, how can we show that post-verbal subjects occur under the same conditions as in modern Portuguese? As already mentioned, inversion in modern Portuguese is information-structurally determined. In modern Portuguese, a postverbal subject either represents the information focus of a sentence with a topic-comment division (9a) (cf. Ambar 1992; Martins 1994; Costa 1998; 2004) or is part of a thetic sentence (no topic comment division; cf. example (9b) taken from Martins 1994). In both cases, the subject represents “new information”: the subject is either part of the comment or the whole sentence represents new information. (9) Por. a. Quem comeu o bolo? ‘Who ate the cake?’ Comeu o João. ate the John ‘JOHN ate (it)./It was John who ate it.’ b. Está lá um gato no jardim. is there a cat in-the garden ‘There is a cat in the garden.’

(Ambar 1992, 185)

(Martins 1994, 393)

Given the fact that question-answer pairs and speakers’ intuitions are not available in the study of medieval texts, we have to determine the information-structural status of post-verbal subjects on the basis of the criteria mentioned above. If we take into account the textual embedding of the sentences with postverbal subjects, we can identify the main contexts as descriptions of situations (thetic sentences) and the introduction of new referents. (10) OPor. a. Regnaua ĩ Leom e ĩ Castella & na Andaluzia rey dom Affonso. governed in Leon and in Castile and in Andalusia king Dom Affonso ‘There governed in Leon and in Castile and in Andalusia King Affonso.’ (Maia 1986, 75, Doc. 25, Lugo, year 1278)

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b. ẽ Lixbõa p(er)dant(e) Affonso ean(e)s . . . pareceuhũ a p(ro)c(ur)açõ in Lisbon in front of Affonso Eanes appeared a procuration da Condesa donna Tareyia ssanchis . . . of-the Condessa Dona Tareyia Sanchis . . . ‘In Lisbon in front of Affonso Eanes . . . appeared a procuration of the Condessa Dona Tareya Sanchis. . .’ (Martins 2001, 397, Doc. 147, Lisboa (Chelas), year 1306) c. Context: Conuzuda cousa seya a q(u)antos esta carta virẽ como eu dona Tereyga Uasquez . . . rezebyo de uos, dõ Domj~go P(ere)z, abade, & do (con)uẽto do moosteyro de Santa Maria de Ssobrado de Galjza pra téér de uos & por uos en mja vida tã ssolamẽte a uossa g(r)ana de Queyroga cõ todas ssuas p(er)tenẽzas & cõ aquel casar q(ue) uos eu dy en t(er)ra de Caldelas en lugar que dizẽ Ljmjares. ‘Everybody reading this letter should know that I, Dona Teresa Vasques . . . received from you, Dom Domingo Perez, abbot, and from the convent of the monastery of Santa Maria of Sobrado in Galicia, in order to keep it from you and for you my whole life, your farm in Queyroga with all its accompanying lands and with that house that I gave to you in the region of Caldelas, in a place which is called Limiares.’ Sentence: O q(u)al casar rezebio o uosso frade frey the this house received the your brother brother Johã Ssauaschaez por jur de uos. Johão Sanchez for promise of you ‘Your brother Johão Sanchez received that house due to your promise. . .’ (Maia 1986, 76, Doc. 026, Lugo, year 1281) Sentence (10a) is a typical thetic sentence that provides a description of a situation not of a referent. Sentence (10b) reports on the appearance of a procuration (uma procuraҫão), which had not yet been mentioned in the preceding context. In (10c), the object noun phrase O q(u)al casar (‘this house’) is introduced in the context and represents the topic of sentence, whereas the subject o uosso frade frey Johã Ssauaschaez (‘your brother João Sanchez’) is part of the comment and provides new information. Concerning universal tendencies, it can be observed that i) all instances of indefinite subjects are attested in post-verbal position, indicating a non-topic (or information focus) interpretation related to this position, and ii) the vast majority of definite subjects occur in preverbal position, indicating that this position is correlated with a topic interpretation. Summarizing the evidence presented so far,

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the existing clues regarding information structure speak in favour of the hypothesis that the postverbal placement of subjects in OPor. was information-structurally determined in a similar way to in modern Portuguese. In addition, postverbal subjects systematically occur to the right of short adverbs like (sempre), which mark the left edge of the vP. Hence, it may be assumed that they occupy Spec,vP: more senp(re) un (11) OPor. & esta grana sobredjta and this dairy-farm aforementioned inhabits always one nosso frade por jur do mosteyro; our brother for right of-the monastery ‘And this dairy farm will always be inhabited by one of our brothers with the right of the monastery.’ (Maia 1986, 76, Doc. 026, Lugo, year 1281) In conclusion, studies on word order variation should include considerations concerning the interface between syntax and information structure in order to determine whether the grammar of a given language has changed at all and – if yes – what exactly has changed. Although it is easily conceivable, I do not want to imply that a reorganization of information structure always represents a cause or an effect of word order change. However, given the fact that word order variation in synchrony reflects the complex interplay of syntax with the semantic-pragmatic interface, both have to be taken into consideration when accounting for word order changes in diachrony. It has to be admitted that it is not a trivial task to uncover the interaction of information structure and word order in the diachronic texts, because the evidence we have is rather indirect or only related to tendencies instead of categorical distinctions. In addition, the information-structural notions we use are sometimes not well defined because they may overlap and discourse-based notions are intertwined with sentence-based notions (which should de facto be preferred). In addition, the question of whether Old Portuguese or other Old Romance languages are verb second languages depends of course on the current analysis and definition of “verb-second” (cf. Holmberg 2015 for a comprehensive overview). According to Holmberg (2015), the V2 property is made up of two components: a) A functional head in the left periphery attracts the finite verb and b) this functional head wants a constituent moved to its specifier position (“generalized EPP feature”). As argued by Holmberg, this does not prevent V3-orders derived by external merge. In any case, V3-placement should be exceptional and the verb has to be adjacent to the moved constituent and cannot be separated from it by two or more other constituents as exemplified in (8).

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5 Discussion and conclusion The discussion of the three proposals has shown that we cannot ignore the interfaces if we want to identify syntactic change and account for it. This already follows from the linguistic model the proposals are based on: According to Minimalist assumptions (Chomsky 1995; 2001), the syntactic component combines linguistic units in such a way that they satisfy the conditions that hold on the interface levels, i.e. the articulatory-perceptual and conceptual-intentional interfaces. It follows that parametric syntactic variation is not inherent to the syntactic component itself (the computational procedure CHL ) but derives from different feature matrices of functional categories in the lexicon. Based on these assumptions, the approaches of Longobardi (2001) and Roberts/ Roussou (2003) aim to explain two observations that are well known in historical linguistics: first, that syntax is diachronically relatively stable, and second, that grammaticalization is always related to phonological weakening and semantic bleaching. However, it turns out that the assumption is too strong that “syntactic change does not exist as a primitive (the Inertial Theory) but can be reduced to independent changes in the phonological or semantic interfaces of individual lexical items” (Longobardi 2001, 299), or that “no purely syntactic change is possible” (Roberts/Roussou 2003, 7). As pointed out by Walkden (2012) it is even problematic from the perspective of the Minimalist Program, to assume that syntactic change exists independently of lexical changes. The discussion in this chapter has brought into focus that syntactic change has to be modelled in the same way as synchronic variation in syntax (Roberts/Roussou 2003). Therefore, functional categories play a central role. Following Borer (1984), synchronic parametric variation is reduced to the feature specification of functional categories. Therefore, syntactic change happens when the feature specification of functional categories changes over time or when new functional categories arise (Roberts/Roussou 2003). Given the fact that functional categories are characterized by phonological and semantic features (in addition to formal features), it is plausible to assume that phonological and semantic changes can lead to diachronic parametric change (Longobardi 2001). In addition, phonological weakening and semantic bleaching can lead to the creation of new functional material because functional categories are generally phonologically weak and lack descriptive content (Selkirk 1996; Roberts/ Roussou 2003). General assumptions about the makeup of the human language faculty and observations from actual syntactic changes and grammaticalization processes suggest that the interfaces play a central role and have to be taken into consideration if we want to explain how and why grammars change over time and whether we are really faced with parametric change. However, we cannot conclude that syntactic change

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is always driven by prior changes at the interfaces. In order to provide realistic scenarios of syntactic change our assumptions have to be compatible with our models of synchronic variation and with what we know about first language acquisition.

6 References Alexiadou, Artemis/Haegeman, Liliane/Stavrou, Melita (2008), Noun phrase in the generative perspective, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Ambar, Manuela (1992), Para uma sintaxe da inversão sujeito-verbo em português, Lisboa, Colibri. Andersen, Henning (1973), “Abductive and deductive change”, Language 49, 765–793. Baker, Mark (2008), “The macroparameter in a mircoparametric world”, in: Teresa Biberauer (ed.), The limits of syntactic variation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 351–373. Batllori, Montserrat/Hernanz, Maria-Lluïsa (edd.) (2011), Generative diachronic syntax. Word order and information structure (special issue of Catalan Journal of Linguistics 10). Bech, Kirstin/Eide, Kristine Gunn (2014), Information structure and syntactic change in Germanic and Romance Languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Benincà, Paola (2006), “A detailed map of the left periphery of medieval Romance”, in: Raffaella Zanuttini/Héctor Campos/Elena Herburger/Paul H. Portner (edd.), Negation, tense and clausal architecture, cross-linguistic investigation, Washington D.C., Georgetown University Press, 53– 86. Benincà, Paola/Poletto, Cecilia (2004), “Topic, focus and V2. Defining the CP sublayers”, in: Luigi Rizzi (ed.), The structure of CP and IP, New York/Oxford, Oxford University Press, 52–75. den Besten, Hans (1983), “On the interaction of root transformations and lexical deletive rules”, in: Werner Abraham (ed.), On the formal syntax of West Germania. Papers from the 3rd Groningen Grammar Talks, Groningen January 1981, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 47–131. Biberauer, Teresa (ed.) (2008), The limits of syntactic variation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Biberauer, Teresa/Walkden, George (edd.) (2015), Syntax over time, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Borer, Hagit (1984), Parametric syntax, Dordrecht, Foris. Brandner, Ellen/Ferraresi, Gisella (1996), “Introduction”, in: Ellen Brandner/Gisella Ferraresi (edd.), Language change and generative grammar, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 7–21. Chomsky, Noam (1981/1993), Lectures on Government and Binding, Dordrecht, Foris, 1981. Second edition: Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 1993. Chomsky, Noam (1995), The Minimalist Program, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam (2001), “Derivation by phase”, in: Michael J. Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale. A life in language, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1–52. Cinque, Guglielmo/Rizzi, Luigi (edd.) (2010), Mapping spatial PPs. The cartography of syntactic structures, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Clahsen, Harald (1982), Spracherwerb in der Kindheit. Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklung der Syntax bei Kleinkindern, Tübingen, Narr. Clahsen, Harald (1991), Child language and developmental dyphasia. Linguistic studies of the acquisition of German, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Clark, Robin/Roberts, Ian (1993), “A computational model of language learnability and language change”, Linguistic Inquiry 24, 299–345. Costa, João (1998), Word order variation. A constraint-based approach, The Hague, Holland Academic Graphics. Costa, João (2004), Subject positions and interfaces. The case of European Portuguese, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter.

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Ferraresi, Gisella/Lühr, Rosemarie (edd.) (2010), Diachronic studies on information structure. Language acquisition and change, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Fischer, Susann (2007), “Syntactic change. A Minimalist approach to grammaticalization. Review of Ian Roberts and Anna Roussou (2003)”, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 129, 169–176. Fischer, Susann (2010), Word order change as a source of grammaticalisation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Frey, Werner (2005), “Zur Syntax der linken Peripherie im Deutschen”, in: Franz Josef D’Avis (ed.), Deutsche Syntax. Empirie und Theorie, Göteborg, Göteborger Germanistische Forschungen, 147–171. van Gelderen, Elly (2004), Grammaticalization as economy, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. van Gelderen, Elly (ed.) (2009), Cyclical change, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Giusti, Giuliana (2001), “The birth of a functional category. From Latin ILLE to the Romance article and personal pronoun”, in: Guglielmo Cinque/Giampaolo Salvi (edd.), Current studies in Italian syntax. Essays offered to Lorenzo Renzi, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 157–171. Harris, Martin (1978), The evolution of French syntax. A comparative approach, London, Longman. Harris, Martin (1980), “The marking of definiteness in Romance”, in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Historical morphology, The Hague, Mouton, 141–156. Heine, Bernd/Kuteva, Tanja (2002), World lexicon of grammaticalization, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Hinterhölzl, Roland/Petrova, Svetlana (edd.) (2009), Information structure and language change. New approaches to word order variation in Germanic, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Holmberg, Anders (2015), “Verb second”, in: Tibor Kiss/Artemis Alexiadou (edd.), Syntax – theory and analysis. An international handbook of contemporary research, vol. 1., Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 342–383. Hopper, Paul J./Traugott, Elizabeth C. (1993), Grammaticalization, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Jacob, Daniel/Dufter, Andreas (edd.) (2009), Focus and background in Romance languages, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins. Kaiser, Georg A. (2002), Verbstellung und Verbstellungswandel in den romanischen Sprachen, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Kayne, Richard S. (2000), Parameters and universals, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Kayne, Richard S. (2005), “Some notes on comparative syntax, with special reference to English and French”, in: Guglielmo Cinque/Richard S. Kayne (edd.), The Oxford handbook of comparative syntax, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 3–69. Keenan, Edward L. (1994), Creating anaphors. An historical study of the English reflexive pronouns, Ms., University of California at Los Angeles. Keenan, Edward L. (2002), “Explaining the creation of reflexive pronouns in English”, in: Donka Minkova/Robert P. Stockwell (edd.), Studies in the history of the English language. A millennial perspective, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 325–354. Kupisch, Tanja/Rinke, Esther (2011), “The diachronic development of article – possessor complementarity in the history of Italian and Portuguese”, in: Peter Siemund (ed.), Linguistic universals and language variation, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 92–127. Labov, William (1994), Principles of linguistic change, vol. 1: Internal factors, Oxford, Blackwell. Labov, William (2001), Principles of linguistic change, vol. 2: Social factors, Oxford, Blackwell. Lehmann, Christian (1985), “Grammaticalization. Synchronic variation and diachronic change”, Lingua e stile 20, 303–318. Lightfoot, David (1991), How to set parameters. Arguments from language change, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

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Lightfoot, David (1997), “Catastrophic change and learning theory”, Lingua 100, 171–192. Longobardi, Giuseppe (2001), “Formal syntax, diachronic Minimalism and etymology. The history of French chez”, Linguistic Inquiry 32, 275–302. Lyons, Christopher (1999), Definiteness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Maia, Clarinda de Azevedo (1986), História do galego-português, Coimbra, INIC. Martins, Ana Maria (1994), Clíticos na história do português, PhD dissertaion, Universidade de Lisboa. Martins, Ana Maria (2001), Documentos portugueses do Noroeste e da região de Lisboa. Da produção primitiva ao século XVI, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda. Martins, Ana Maria/ Cardoso, Aida/Pereira, Sandra (2015), “What counts as evidence against the V2-status of earlier stages of a language?”, Paper held at DIGS 2015. Meillet, Antoine (1912/1921), “L’évolution des formes grammaticales”, Scientia (Rivista di scienza) 12/XXVI, 384–400. Reprint: Meillet, Antoine (1921), Linguistique historique et linguistique générale, Paris, Champion, 130–148. Meisel, Jürgen M. (2011), “Bilingual language acquisition and theories of diachronic change. Bilingualism as cause and effect of grammatical change”, Bilingualism. Language and Cognition 14, 121–145. Meisel, Jürgen M./Elsig, Martin/Rinke, Esther (2013), Language acquisition and change. A morphosyntactic perspective, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Meurman-Solin, Anneli/López-Couso, María José/Los, Bettelou (edd.) (2009), Information structure and syntactic change in the history of English, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Newmeyer, Frederick J. (2004), “Against a parameter setting approach to typological variation”, Linguistic Variation Yearbook 4, 181–234. Newmeyer, Frederick J. (2005), Possible and probable languages. A generative perspective on linguistic typology, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Niyogi, Partha/Berwick, Robert C. (1995), The logical problem of language change, Technical Report AI Memo, 1516, MIT AI Laboratory. Paul, Hermann (1880/1920), Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, 5. Auflage, 1920, Halle, Niemeyer, (91975, Tübingen, Niemeyer). Picallo, Carme M. (ed.) (2014), Linguistic variation in a Minimalist framework, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Poletto, Cecilia (2014), Word order in Old Italian, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press. Posner, Rebecca (1996), The Romance languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Renzi, Lorenzo (1976), “Grammatica e storia dell’articolo italiano”, Studi di grammatica italiana 5, 5–42. Renzi, Lorenzo (1992), “Le développement de l’article en roman”, Revue roumaine de linguistique 37, 161–176. Renzi, Lorenzo (1993), “Vestiges de la flexion casuelle dans les langues romanes”, in: Gerold Hilty (ed.), Actes du XX e congrès international de linguistique et philologie romanes, vol. 2, Bern, Francke, 672–667. Ribeiro, Ilza (1995), “Evidence for a verb-second phase in Old Portuguese”, in: Adrian Battye/Ian Roberts (edd.), Clause structure and language change, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 110– 139. Rinke, Esther (2007), Syntaktische Variation aus synchronischer und diachronischer Perspektive. Die Entwicklung der Wortstellung im Portugiesischen, Frankfurt/Madrid, Vervuert. Rinke, Esther (2009), “Verb-placement in Old Portuguese”, in: Andreas Dufter/Daniel Jacob (edd.), Focus and background in Romance languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 309–332. Rinke, Esther (2010), “A combinação de artigo definido e pronome possessivo na história do Português”, Estudos de Lingüística Galega 2, 121–139.

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Rinke, Esther/Meisel, Jürgen M. (2009), “Subject-inversion in Old French. Syntax and information structure”, in: Georg A. Kaiser/Eva M. Remberger (edd.), Proceedings of the workshop ‘Nullsubjects, expletives, and locatives in Romance’, Konstanz, Universität Konstanz, Konstanzer Arbeitspapiere des Fachbereichs Sprachwissenschaft 123, 93–130. Rizzi, Luigi (1982), Issues in Italian syntax, Dordrecht, Foris. Rizzi, Luigi (1986), “Null objects in Italian and the theory of pro”, Linguistic Inquiry 17, 501–557. Roberts, Ian (2011), “Microparameters, macroparameters and markedness”, paper held at the conference Subjects in diachrony at the University of Regensburg 2011. Roberts, Ian/Holmberg, Anders (2005), “On the role of parameters in universal grammar. A reply to Newmeyer”, in: Hans Broekhuis/Norbert Corver/Riny Huybregts/Ursula Kleinhenz/Jan Koster (edd.), Organizing grammar. Linguistic studies in honor of Henk van Riemsdijk, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 538–553. Roberts, Ian/Roussou, Anna (2003), Syntactic change. A Minimalist approach to grammaticalisation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Salvi, Giampaolo (2001), “The two sentence structures of early Romance”, in: Guglielmo Cinque/ Giampaolo Salvi (edd.), Current studies in Italian syntax, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 297–312. Salvi, Giampaolo (2004), La formazione della struttura di frase romanza. Ordine delle parole e clitici dal latino alle lingue romanze antiche, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Sankoff, Gillian (2005), “Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies in sociolinguistics”, in: Ulrich Ammon/Norbert Dittmar/Klaus J. Mattheier/Peter Trudgill (edd.), An international handbook of the science of language and society, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 1003–1013. Selig, Maria (1992), Die Entwicklung der Nominaldeterminanten im Spätlatein, Tübingen, Narr. Selkirk, Elisabeth (1996), “The prosodic structure of function words”, in: James L. Morgan/Katherine Demuth (edd.), Signal to syntax. Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition, Mahwah, NJ, Erlbaum, 187–213. Tekavčić, Pavao (1972), Grammatica storica dell’italiano, vol. 2: Morfosintassi. Bologna, il Mulino. Travis, Lisa (1984), Parameters and effects of word order variation, PhD Dissertation, MIT. Vincent, Nigel (1997), “The emergence of the D-system in Romance”, in: Ans van Kemenade/Nigel Vincent (edd.), Parameters of morphosyntactic change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 149–169. Walkden, George (2012), “Against inertia”, Lingua 122, 891–901. Yang, Charles D. (2002), Knowledge and learning in natural language, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Zimmermann, Malte/Féry, Caroline (edd.) (2010), Information structure. Theoretical, typological, and experimental perspectives, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Pieter Muysken and Antje Muntendam

20 Interfacing interfaces: Quechua and Spanish in the Andes Abstract: This paper discusses the interaction between different varieties of Andean Spanish and the Quechuan languages, in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. It touches upon interfaces from several perspectives: the syntax-morphology interface, the syntaxpragmatics interface, the syntax-prosody interface, and the lexicon-grammar interface. The syntax-morphology, syntax-pragmatics and syntax-prosody interfaces are studied with respect to aspect and evidentiality, null objects, and information structure. The lexicon-grammar interface is illustrated with the phenomenon of relexification. Keywords: tense/aspect, evidentiality, focus, word order, prosody, lexicon, language contact, Andean Spanish, Quechua, Media Lengua

1 Introduction In this paper we will approach the issue of interfaces from several perspectives: the syntax-morphology interface, the syntax-pragmatics interface, the syntax-prosody interface, and the lexicon-grammar interface. The empirical domain analysed will be the interaction between different varieties of Andean Spanish1 (AS) and the Quechuan (Q) languages, in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. The syntax-morphology, syntax-pragmatics, and syntax-prosody interfaces will be studied with respect to aspect and evidentiality, null objects, and information structure in Andean Spanish.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the Centre for Language Studies (CLS) (Radboud University Nijmegen), the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and the ERC project ‘Traces of Contact’ (grant number 230310), the Dissertation Travel Grant (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), the Spanish, Italian and Portuguese Summer Research Fellowship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), the Tinker Field Research Grant (University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign), Letterenfonds (Leiden University), and Leids Universiteits Internationaal Studie Fonds. We are grateful to the members of the communities of Conchacalla and Marquesbamba near Cuzco (Peru), Tarata and Huayculí (Bolivia), Juncal (Ecuador) and of San Andrés Pilalo near Salcedo (Ecuador) for their help in providing and helping to analyse the linguistic data. Antje Muntendam is primarily responsible for section 4, Pieter Muysken for section 5. The other sections are under joint authorship. 1 In this paper, the term “Andean Spanish” is used to refer to the Spanish spoken by QuechuaSpanish bilinguals.

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The lexicon-grammar interface will be illustrated through the very challenging phenomenon of relexification in Media Lengua (ML). Speaking more broadly, the aim of the paper is to show linguistic outcomes of contact between Quechua and Spanish in the Andes. In particular, we will show how Quechua has influenced the conceptual organization of Spanish, and how Spanish has influenced the Quechua lexicon. The paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we discuss contact scenarios, hierarchies and the interface model we use as a background for the discussions on Andean Spanish and Media Lengua. Section 3 gives an overview of Quechua, Spanish and the interaction of the two language varieties in the Andes. In section 4, the syntax-morphology, syntax-pragmatics and syntax-prosody interfaces in Andean Spanish are discussed. Section 5 discusses the lexicon-grammar interface in Media Lengua. Finally, section 6 presents some conclusions and avenues for further research.

2 Interfacing interfaces: Contact scenarios, hierarchies, and interface models 2.1 Contact scenarios Before turning to our presentation of empirical data from various grammatical domains, we would like to mention some of the contact scenarios relevant to the Andean setting. The term “contact scenario” refers to the organized fashion in which multilingual speakers use their different languages and in which cross-linguistic influence takes place. In the Andean setting, three scenarios are most relevant: maintenance, shift, and convergence (cf. also Thomason/Kaufman 1988). In the maintenance scenario, the Quechua language is maintained by the speakers, but undergoes influence from the prestige language Spanish (Figure 1):

Figure 1: Maintenance.

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In the shift scenario, speakers gradually abandon Quechua and start speaking Spanish, possibly with elements from Quechua (Figure 2):

Figure 2: Shift.

In the convergence scenario, Quechua and Spanish coexist, and may exert various types of mutual influence (Figure 3):

Figure 3: Convergence.

Altogether, the social reality of the Andes is such that Spanish is the dominant language over Quechua, and hence asymmetrical scenarios such as maintenance and shift are key to understanding the changes that the languages have undergone. In each scenario, potentially the type of cross-linguistic influence differs considerably. This will be the subject of the next section.

2.2 Hierarchies The study of cross-linguistic influence needs to take into account that (a) the type of cross-linguistic influence may be dependent on the scenario involved; (b) there are proposals for different degrees of “stability” and “borrowability” (dating back originally to the work by Whitney 1881; for Quechua/Spanish contact cf. e.g. van Hout/Muysken 1994); (c) often a distinction is made between “outer form” (von Humboldt’s 1836 term), roughly corresponding to “matter” or MAT (Matras/Sakel’s 2007 terminology) borrowing, and “inner form” (von Humboldt), roughly corresponding to “pattern” or PAT (Matras/Sakel) borrowing. The term “inner form” covers the internal intellectual organization of language, and refers to the abstract syntax, the semantics, and the conceptual organization,

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while “outer form” covers the outward manifestation of this organization, the morphology, the words, the sounds, and the surface word order. The notion of “matter” corresponds to morpho-phonological matter: the immediately perceived parts of an utterance. The “matter”/“pattern” distinction is not fully identical to the “inner form”/“outer form” distinction, in that surface word order is “outer form” but “pattern”. In broad terms, however, the parallel distinctions are quite useful and often refer to the same thing. “Matter” covers most of the elements in the less intense contact categories 1–3 in the “borrowing hierarchy” of Thomason/Kaufman (1988) (Figure 4). Thomason/Kaufman (1988) distinguish between borrowing in situations of language maintenance and interference through shift. According to these authors, in situations of language maintenance, content words are borrowed first. With more intense contact, there is also structural borrowing, in particular borrowing of phonological and syntactic features. Inflectional morphology is more resistant to borrowing, and is only borrowed in situations of widespread and long-term bilingualism (cf. the hierarchy in Figure 4). Interference through shift, on the other hand, is characterized by structural interference (i.e. transfer of phonological and syntactic features) rather than lexical interference.

Category

intensity

elements transfered

casual intense

content words function words minor phonological features lexical semantic features adpositions derivational suffixes phonemes word order distinctive features in phonology inflectional morphology significant typological disruption phonetic changes

1 2

3

4

5

Figure 4: Thomason/Kaufman’s (1988) borrowing hierarchy.

Several of the elements in categories 4 and 5 of Thomason/Kaufman’s (1988) borrowing hierarchy correspond to “pattern” in Matras/Sakel (2007). Matras/Sakel’s (2007) distinction is based on what is transferred from one language to another − MAT or PAT. These authors stress the importance of similar patterns in the languages in contact. Similar to Thomason/Kaufman (1988), Matras/Sakel (2007) take into account sociolinguistic factors, such as the status of the languages involved and the degree of bilingualism. In particular, they argue that PAT borrowing occurs frequently from the dominated language to the dominating language and in situations with a high degree of bilingualism.

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Neither the matter/pattern distinction nor the borrowability hierarchy corresponds directly to van Coetsem’s (1995) stability hierarchy in language contact, in its totality, although the example of less stable “contentive words” versus more stable “articulatory habits” can be fitted into the Thomason/Kaufman hierarchy, where “contentive words” (category 1) are easier to borrow than “articulatory habits” (categories 4/5).

More stable

……………

Less stable

Less constituents More structured Closed list More automatic Less conscious

More constituents Less structured Open list Less automatic More conscious

e.g. articulatory habits

e.g. contentive words

Figure 5: Van Coetsem’s (1995) stability hierarchy.

Van Coetsem (1988; 2000) makes a distinction between borrowing and imposition, which is similar to Thomason/Kaufman’s (1988) dichotomy, but importantly, van Coetsem (1988; 1995; 2000) stresses the speakers’ agentivity. In his proposal, borrowing is characterized by recipient language agentivity, that is, speakers of the recipient language integrate features of the source language in their language. Imposition, on the other hand, involves source language agentivity; that is, speakers of the source language transfer features of their language into the recipient language. Imposition is thus similar to Thomason/Kaufman’s (1988) interference through shift. Both proposals agree that in imposition (van Coetsem) or interference through shift (Thomason/Kaufman) there is a transfer of structural features rather than of lexical features, whereas in borrowing, which is typically associated with language maintenance, lexical elements are borrowed before structural (i.e. phonological and syntactic) features. It is clear that the model proposed by van Coetsem relies on psycholinguistic explanations (though not very well articulated ones), where Thomason/ Kaufman’s model is embedded in a social framework. Figure 6 shows a model for some of the interactions between Quechua and Spanish varieties. The model also shows the cross-linguistic influence from Quechua into Spanish and vice versa. As we will discuss below, the influence from Spanish into Quechua mostly concerns the lexicon, whereas the influence from Quechua into Spanish primarily involves the conceptual organization of Andean Spanish (e.g. information structure, aspect and evidentiality). The syntactic patterns of the two languages remain relatively unaffected.

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Figure 6: Model for the interfaces inside and between Quechua and Spanish varieties.

2.3 Interface models In recent studies in second language acquisition and bilingualism the focus has been on cross-linguistic influence at the interfaces. The term “interfaces” here refers to the mapping between different components of grammar or the different levels of representation. Broadly speaking, interface phenomena are phenomena that belong to more than one linguistic domain and require information from different domains or components for their interpretation. A distinction is often made between internal and external interfaces, as shown in Figure 7. The different components of the core grammar interact with each other, giving rise to the internal interfaces, e.g. the syntax-semantics interface, the syntax-morphology interface and the morphologyphonology interface. The components of the core grammar also interface with the external context or discourse, leading to external interfaces such as the syntaxdiscourse or syntax-pragmatics interface.

Figure 7: Internal and external interfaces (based on White 2009).

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It has been argued that interfaces are more sensitive to cross-linguistic influence than features that involve only one linguistic component. That is, learners or bilinguals experience difficulties integrating information from the different components. According to the original Interface Hypothesis (e.g. Sorace 2005), interfaces in general are more vulnerable to cross-linguistic influence than “narrow” syntax. This hypothesis was originally proposed based on studies with near-native speakers, and was subsequently supported by studies in L1 attrition and bilingual L1 acquisition. The Interface Hypothesis was later revised because it was considered to be too general. According to the revised Interface Hypothesis (Sorace/Filiaci 2006; Sorace/ Serratrice 2009; Sorace 2011; Tsimpli/Sorace 2006), the external interfaces are more vulnerable than the internal ones. In particular, it has been argued that the syntaxdiscourse interface causes more difficulties than the internal interfaces. Recently the revised Interface Hypothesis also has received some criticism. For instance, White (2011) argues that not all phenomena involving the syntax-discourse interface are problematic. She compares several studies on interfaces and shows that the results depend on the language and the specific phenomenon under study. She argues that there is a need for studies of different phenomena at the interfaces and a need for alternative explanations. It is also clear that the Interface Hypothesis needs to be elaborated more fully to account for lexical phenomena, as we will argue in section 5 below. So far there has been no attempt to link models such as the one proposed by van Coetsem (1988; 1995; 2000) to the Interface Hypothesis, and indeed it is not easy to do so, since they stem from very different traditions (structuralist and generative, respectively). Stretching it just a bit, one may say that the notion of agentivity may come close to the more internal components of the language system, the more tightly organized part. It is easy to see where they would not overlap, however, and a more detailed study of all the specific cases that van Coetsem wanted to cover in his model would be needed. In this paper we discuss cross-linguistic influence at several interfaces. In particular, we focus on the syntax-morphology interface, the syntax-pragmatics interface and the syntax-prosody interface in Andean Spanish, and the grammarlexicon interface in Media Lengua. Although the interface hypotheses predict crosslinguistic influence at the interfaces, they do not predict the nature of the crosslinguistic influence. That is, interface models cannot account for the difference between the types of cross-linguistic influence we observe in the direction from Quechua to Spanish and the ones we see in the direction from Spanish to Quechua.

3 Quechua and Spanish and their interaction Quechua is the name of a language family (roughly with the internal differentiation and time depth of the Romance languages) rather than of a specific language. Members of the family have speakers from southern Colombia to northern Chile

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and Argentina, with substantial speaker groups in the Andean regions and adjacent Amazonian foothills of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. In all these countries Spanish is now the dominant language. Contact between the two language groups now has a history of almost 500 years (the conquest of the Inca empire by Pizarro and his band of soldiers took place in 1532), and is profoundly asymmetrical, both socially and linguistically. On the social side, both the Colonial and the Republican periods in the history of the Andean countries have witnessed the progressive weakening of the role of the indigenous languages and the concomitant strengthening of Spanish, both at the level of populations, leading to processes of shifts, and of domains of usage, with the progressive functional reduction of Quechuan languages. Looking at it from the linguistic perspective, different varieties of Andean Spanish have emerged, in part showing Quechuan and Aymaran substrate influence; it has been argued that this influence mostly involves information structure, aspect and evidentiality, phrasal expressions, and lexical semantic organization. In turn, Spanish has had an important impact on the different Quechua varieties. Most obviously, the vocabulary inventories have been affected, but we also find cases of productive borrowed morphology, lexical phonology, and clausal subordination, through the borrowing of conjunctions. Speaking broadly, Quechua has affected the conceptual organization of Spanish, and Spanish the Quechua lexicon. To use Matras/Sakel’s (2007) terminology, Quechua has borrowed MAT (matter) from Spanish, and Spanish has borrowed PAT (pattern) from Quechua. In addition, various types of “mixed” varieties have emerged, mostly outside of the “core” Quechuan area of Peru, showing different ways in which the two languages interact. Here we will focus on mixed varieties in Ecuador. Typologically, Quechua and Andean Spanish differ from each other in various ways. In Table 1, we present some of the main features of both language groups. These features can be illustrated with examples of all three varieties described. (Andean) Spanish has five vowels /a e i o u/, whereas Quechua has three vowels /a i u/. Cuzco Quechua optionally has /e/ and /o/, which are used before or after the uvular consonant /q/, as in orqo ‘mountain’. In Ecuadorian Quechua /e/ and /o/ only occur in Spanish loanwords. Spanish has syllable structure (C)CVC, whereas Quechua has CVC. In Quechua, lexical primary stress falls on the penultimate syllable, with the exception of some emphatic expressions, such as añañáw! ‘how beautiful!’. (Andean) Spanish and Quechua also differ regarding the consonant inventory. An important difference concerns the stops and fricatives; (Andean) Spanish has voiced and voiceless stops and fricatives, whereas Cuzco Quechua has simple stops, aspirated stops, and ejective stops. Ecuadorian Quechua has simple stops and aspirated stops, but no ejective stops. A noticeable difference regarding word classes is that (Andean) Spanish has prepositions, whereas Quechua does not. (Andean) Spanish and Quechua also differ considerably in their morphology. (Andean) Spanish is mostly suffixal, as in plural

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Table 1: Systematic overview of Quechua and Spanish properties (Andean) Spanish

Cuzco Quechua

Ecuadorian Quechua

Vowels

5

3 (+ optionally 2)

3 + 2 in loans

Syllable structure

(C)CVC

CVC

Obstruents

Stops Fricatives

Simple stops Aspirated stops Ejective stops

Word classes

N, A, V, P

V, N/A, Adv

Morphology

Mostly suffixal, fusional in the verb paradigms

Suffixal and agglutinative, in a complex verbal system, some nominal compounding

Subordination

Gerunds Past participles Infinitives Finite complements

Nominalizations Switch reference adverbial clauses Finite adjunct clauses

Nominalizations Switch reference adverbial clauses

Person / number / gender

3 persons, 2 numbers, 2 genders

4 persons, 2 numbers, no gender

3 persons, 2 numbers, no gender

Argument marking

Word order, prepositions, clitics

Case marking, verbal reference marking

Nominal word order

P Det Num N/A Poss-ed GEN Poss-or

Det Num A N-Case Poss-or-GEN Poss-ed-PERSON

Clausal word order

SVO/VSO

SOV, scrambling in main clauses

Information structure

Word order, intonation, clausal particles

Word order, topic marker, evidential focus markers, clausal clitics

Simple stops Aspirated stops

Det Num A N-Case Poss-or-GEN Poss-ed

marking on nouns: casa-s, house-PL , ‘houses’. In the verb paradigms Spanish is also fusional, as for instance in the past tense forms. The ending of compr-é ‘I bought’ expresses both past tense and perfective aspect, and that of compr-aba ‘I bought’ marks past tense and imperfective aspect. Quechua has a rich morphology: it is suffixal and agglutinative, and it has a complex verbal system, in which derivative suffixes, inflectional suffixes and independent suffixes (e.g. evidential markers) are attached to a root. Nominal compounding also exists, as in yachay wasi ‘school’ (lit. ‘to learn house’). Quechua and (Andean) Spanish furthermore differ with respect to subordination strategies. In (Andean) Spanish subordinate clauses can be formed by gerunds, past participles, infinitives and finite complements. Quechua uses nominalizations, as in (1). Moreover, Quechua has a system of switch reference: that is, the suffix ‑spa is used for same-subject clauses (2), whereas the suffix ‑pti is used for different subject

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clauses (3). Cuzco Quechua also has finite adjunct clauses, as in (4), but Ecuadorian Quechua does not. Finally, Quechua also uses adverbial clauses, as for instance clauses marked with the suffix ‑kama (5). (1) Hamu-na-n-ta yacha-ni. come-NMLZ-3SG -ACC know-1SG ‘I know he will come.’

(Lefebvre/Muysken 1988, 58)

(2) Miku-spa-n lloqsi-ra. eat-SS -3POSS leave-PST ‘He left when he had eaten.’ (3) Muna-pti-yki ri-saq. want-DS -2POSS go-FUT.1SG ‘I will go if you want.’ (4) Warmi hamu-sha-n chay-ta, riku-ni. woman come-PROG -3SG that-ACC see-1SG ‘I see that the woman is coming.’ (5) Suya-saq hamu-na-n-kama. wait-FUT.1SG come- NMLZ-3POSS - LIM ‘I will wait until he comes.’ Both (Andean) Spanish and Quechua use person and number marking. However, Cuzco Quechua distinguishes four persons, unlike (Andean) Spanish and Ecuadorian Quechua, which distinguish three persons. Specifically, Cuzco Quechua makes a distinction between first person plural inclusive (i.e. ‘we, including the hearer’) and first person plural exclusive (i.e. ‘we, excluding the hearer’), in addition to second and third person. Another difference between Quechua and (Andean) Spanish is that Quechua does not have gender marking, whereas (Andean) Spanish does. Regarding argument marking, (Andean) Spanish relies heavily on word order and does not use case marking, with some exceptions: it uses the preposition a to mark indirect objects and human specific direct objects. Furthermore, different clitics are used to mark direct and indirect objects. Quechua uses morphological case marking: nominative case is unmarked, whereas accusative and oblique cases are morphologically marked. In Quechua, arguments can also be marked on the verb, as in (6), where both the subject and the object are marked on the verb: (6) Riku-wa-nku. see-1OBJ-3PL ‘They see me.’

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(Andean) Spanish and Quechua also differ with respect to nominal word order. In (Andean) Spanish, the order is P Det Num N/A, whereas in Quechua it is Det Num A N-Case. Regarding the marking of possession, in (Andean) Spanish the possessed precedes the possessor, as in la casa de Juan, the house of Juan, ‘Juan’s house’. In Quechua, however, the possessed follows the possessor, which is marked with genitive case. In Cuzco Quechua, person is also marked on the possessed (7a), but in Ecuadorian Quechua it is not (7b): (7) a. Juan-pa wasi-n. (Cuzco Quechua) Juan-GEN house-3POSS ‘Juan’s house.’ b. Juan-pak wasi. (Ecuadorian Quechua) Juan-GEN house. ‘Juan’s house.’ Regarding clausal word order, the basic word order of Spanish is SVO or VSO, whereas in Quechua it is SOV (although different word orders are possible in main clauses). To express information structure, Spanish mainly uses word order and intonation, whereas Quechua uses word order, a topic marker (‑qa), evidential focus markers (e.g. ‑mi/-m), and clausal clitics such as ‑puni ‘certainly’ and ‑raq ‘still’. As will be shown below, these typological differences between Spanish and Quechua have given rise to cross-linguistic influence at the interfaces.

4 The syntax-morphology, syntax-pragmatics, and syntax-prosody interfaces: Andean Spanish 4.1 The syntax-morphology interface: Andean Spanish Several studies have shown an influence from Quechua into Andean Spanish at the syntax-morphology, or the syntax-morphology-discourse interface. Sánchez (2004) has shown that Andean Spanish past tenses have acquired evidential meanings under the influence of Quechua. In non-Andean Spanish, past tense forms are marked for aspect. Specifically, the past perfective form compr-é ‘I bought’ is marked for past tense and perfective aspect, that is, this form is used for discrete events that have a beginning and an end. The past imperfective form compr-aba ‘I bought’, on the other hand, is marked for past tense and imperfective aspect: this form is used to describe unbounded events, which do not have a specific beginning and end. Moreover, in narratives the past perfective form is used for foregrounding, and the past imperfective form for backgrounding. The past imperfective form has some additional meanings, such as a mirative meaning.

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Quechua differs from Spanish in that past tense forms in this language are associated with evidential meanings, indicating the source of information. Specifically, the reportative past tense morpheme ‑sqa is used to describe events that are not witnessed by the speaker (8). This past tense often co-occurs with the evidential marker ‑si/-s, which expresses hearsay information. The past tense marked with ‑sqa can also have a mirative meaning. (8) Manku Qhapaq-qa Titiqaqa qucha-manta-s lluqsimu-sqa. emerge-3PST. REPORT Manku Qhapaq-TOP Titikaka lake-ABL- EVI ‘Manku Qhapaq emerged from the Titicaca Lake.’ (Cusihuamán 2001, 161, as cited in Sánchez 2004, 149) Sánchez (2004) studied the use of past tense forms in the Spanish narratives of Quechua-Spanish bilingual children (10–16 years) and a control group of monolingual children.2 Her results showed that the bilingual children used more past imperfective and pluperfect forms in Spanish than the monolingual children. Moreover, these forms were associated with evidential meanings. Specifically, past imperfective and pluperfect forms had a reportative interpretation, indicating that the events were not witnessed. Other forms, such as the present perfect, were used to describe attested information and for foregrounding. These results are consistent with Escobar (1997) and Klee/Ocampo (1995), who also showed a reportative meaning for the pluperfect in Andean Spanish. In standard Spanish, the pluperfect only has a temporal meaning, indicating that an event happened before another event. Sánchez (2004) interprets the results as evidence for the Functional Convergence Hypothesis, according to which “convergence . . . takes place when the languages have partially similar matrices of features associated with the same functional category. Frequent activation of the two matrices triggers convergence in features” (Sánchez 2004, 150). The forms in Spanish and Quechua share some features: in particular in both languages the forms have a tense feature, and there is a past tense form with a mirative meaning. However, the Spanish and Quechua forms differ with respect to aspect and evidentiality. Sánchez (2004) argues that the Quechua evidentiality features are frequently activated and mapped onto the Andean Spanish past tense forms. This study thus shows how Quechua has influenced the conceptual organization of Andean Spanish: the past tense forms have not changed. The meanings of Quechua evidentials, which are system-internal and involve the morphology-semantics interface, are mapped onto the Andean Spanish past tense forms, which involve the syntax-morphology-pragmatics interface. Although the author does not use the term “interface”, she argues that this phenomenon involves syntax, morphology, semantics and discourse. 2 Sánchez (2004) also studied the Quechua narratives of these children, but here the discussion is limited to Spanish.

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Another phenomenon that shows Quechua influence at the syntax-morphology interface is the use of the form está queriendo + infinitive with a desiderative or imminent meaning in Andean Spanish, as in está queriendo comer with the meaning ‘he wants to/is about to eat’ (Sánchez 2006). Spanish and Quechua differ with respect to the expression of progressive aspect and modality. In Quechua, the suffix ‑yka expresses progressive aspect, as in (9): (9) Miku-yka-n. eat-PROG -3SG ‘He/she is eating.’ In Spanish, progressive aspect is expressed through the use of the periphrastic form estar + gerund (10): (10) Está comiendo. be-3SG eat-GER ‘He is eating.’ Regarding modality, in Quechua the morpheme ‑naya is used to express a desiderative or imminent meaning (11): (11) Miku-naya-n. eat-DES -3SG ‘He/she wants to/is about to eat.’ In Spanish, volition is expressed with the auxiliary modal verb querer + infinitive (quiere comer ‘he wants to eat’). Importantly, the verb querer in Spanish does not have an imminent meaning. In Quechua, the desiderative suffix and the progressive suffix can be combined, as in (12), where ‑naya expresses volition and an imminent action and ‑yka conveys progressive aspect. (12) Miku-naya-yka-n. eat-DES - PROG -3SG ‘He wants to/is about to eat.’ In Spanish, the verb querer generally does not appear in periphrases with progressive aspect, that is, the form está queriendo + infinitive is infrequent. Sánchez (2006) did an analysis of the use of está queriendo + infinitive in the Spanish narratives of 30 bilingual children and 25 monolingual children. The results showed that the form está queriendo + infinitive occurred in the Spanish narratives of 69.9% of the bilingual children, and not in the monolingual children. This form had an

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imminent or desiderative aspectual meaning in Andean Spanish. Sánchez (2006) explains this as functional interference from Quechua into Spanish. In this case, there is a syntactic change in Andean Spanish, but importantly, the morphological form in Andean Spanish has not changed: that is, the Quechua desiderative and progressive morphemes are not transferred into Andean Spanish, but rather their meanings are mapped onto Andean Spanish forms. According to Sánchez (2006), this phenomenon involves syntax, morphology and discourse. Another phenomenon that shows an influence from Quechua into Andean Spanish is the use of the dative clitic le for direct objects with masculine and feminine antecedents (Sánchez 2003). Standard Spanish has distinct direct object clitics for masculine and feminine antecedents. The indirect object clitic le, on the other hand, is not specified for gender. In a study on the use of clitics by bilingual and monolingual children, Sánchez (2003) showed that bilingual children use the indirect object clitic le for direct objects with masculine and feminine antecedents. That is, these children opt for a form that is gender-neutral. The children in the monolingual control group used some le, but also lo. Sánchez (2003) attributes the use of le by the bilingual children to an influence from Quechua, which does not mark gender. She interprets this phenomenon as an instance of convergence, in which the two languages become similar. Importantly, the organization of Quechua is mapped onto Andean Spanish.

4.2 The syntax-pragmatics interface: Andean Spanish Several studies have shown an influence from Quechua into Andean Spanish at the syntax-pragmatics interface. One characteristic of Andean Spanish involving the syntax-pragmatics interface is the use of null objects with definite antecedents (Camacho/Paredes/Sánchez 1997; Escobar 1990; 2000; Sánchez 1998; 1999; 2003). Camacho/Paredes/Sánchez (1997) did a study on null objects in the Andean Spanish of Peru, and showed that null objects in Andean Spanish have different properties from those in standard Spanish. In standard Spanish, null objects are only possible with antecedents that are indefinite and non-specific, whereas in Andean Spanish null objects can also have definite and specific antecedents, as in (13): (13) a. ¿Mata a la ovejaI ? kill-3SG to the sheep ‘Does he/she kill the sheep?’ b. Mata [e]i. kill-3SG ‘He/she kills it.’

(Camacho/Paredes/Sánchez 1997, 57)

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Null objects in Andean Spanish can thus occur with a wider range of antecedents than in standard Spanish and are not as restricted. Camacho/Paredes/Sánchez (1997) attribute the use of definite null objects in Andean Spanish to an influence from Quechua, which also allows null objects with definite and specific antecedents. In a follow-up study, Sánchez (2003) analysed the use of null objects in narratives by bilingual and monolingual children. The results showed that null objects with definite antecedents were more frequent in the narratives of bilingual children than in those of monolingual children. Moreover, Sánchez (2003) showed that the null objects in these narratives had the same discourse properties as in Quechua. Specifically, null objects were used as continuing topics and as deictic pronouns, that is, they were used to refer to antecedents that appeared in the pictures that were used for the picture-based story-retelling task, but that did not occur in the previous discourse. Sánchez’s (2003) findings thus show that discourse properties of null objects in Quechua are transferred to Andean Spanish. Another phenomenon involving the syntax-pragmatics interface concerns Andean Spanish word order. Several studies have shown that in Andean Spanish OV orders are relatively frequent (Camacho 1999; Escobar 2000; Muysken 1984; Ocampo/Klee 1995). This phenomenon has been attributed to an (indirect) influence from Quechua, which has basic word order SOV. Muysken (1984) and Camacho (1999) furthermore argued that these OV orders are the result of object movement, which is also available in other varieties of Spanish. Based on data from Bolivia and Ecuador, Muntendam (2009; 2013) studied what exactly has been transferred from Quechua into Andean Spanish word order, that is, whether the transfer from Quechua to Andean Spanish is syntactic or pragmatic in nature. In non-Andean Spanish, alternative word orders are possible for discoursepragmatic reasons. Importantly, focused elements can be displaced to the left periphery of the sentence, as in focus fronting, giving rise to OV orders. Muntendam (2009; 2013) attempted to tease apart syntactic from pragmatic transfer by studying two strictly syntactic properties of focus (weak crossover and long distance movement) and the use of different word orders. To study syntactic transfer from Quechua into Andean Spanish, Muntendam (2009; 2013) designed sentence-judgment tasks on the most relevant syntactic properties of focus fronting in Spanish: weak crossover and long distance movement. Weak crossover concerns co-reference restrictions of pronouns. An example of weak crossover in questions in English is given in (14), in which the possessive pronoun his in the subject noun phrase is co-indexed with the moved wh-phrase (who). This type of sentence generally leads to weak ungrammaticality, that is, it is only marginally possible for the pronoun his to refer to the same person as who. (14) ?? Whoi did hisi mother seei t i? The task used in Muntendam (2009; 2013) involving weak crossover in questions and sentences with focus fronting showed that sentences such as the ones in (15)–(16), in

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which a quantifier phrase crosses a co-referenced pronoun, lead to weak crossover in Spanish and Andean Spanish, but not in Quechua. Specifically, 83.3% of the non-Andean Spanish participants and 66.7% of the Andean Spanish participants in Muntendam’s study did not accept weak crossover in questions, as in (15a). Moreover, 100% of the non-Andean Spanish participants and 73.3% of the Andean Spanish participants did not accept weak crossover in sentences with focus fronting, as in (15b). The corresponding Quechua sentences in (17) were accepted by all participants. sui madre a la escuela ti? (15) a. ?? ¿[ A qué niño]i trae to which child bring-3SG his mother to the school ‘Which child does his mother bring to school?’ sui madre a la escuela ti . b. ?? [F A cada niño]i trae to every child bring-3SG his mother to the school ‘His mother brings each child to school.’ (16) a. [Mayqen wawa-ta-taq] mama-n apa-mu-chka-n which child-ACC - Q mother-3POSS bring- DIR- PROG -3SG yachay wasi-man? 3 school-ALL ‘Which child does his mother bring to school?’ apa-mu-chka-n yachay wasi-man. b. [F Sapa wawa-ta] mama-n each child-ACC mother-3POSS bring- DIR- PROG -3SG school-ALL ‘His mother brings each child to school.’ The task on long distance movement showed that Andean Spanish and non-Andean Spanish allow long distance movement of the object (17) and the subject (18), whereas this variety of Quechua does not, cf. (19) and (20). In particular, 50% of the Andean Spanish and non-Andean Spanish speakers accepted long distance movement of the object, whereas 25% of the non-Andean Spanish participants and 33.3% of the Andean Spanish participants accepted long distance movement of the subject. None of the participants allowed long distance movement in Quechua. la mujer [C P que lleva el hombre ti ]. (17) [F Las llamas]i cree the llamas think-3SG the woman that drive-3SG the man ‘The woman thinks the man drives the llamas.’

3 The examples appear without focus markers, because they are not used in the variety of Bolivian Quechua studied here. In Ecuador, all sentences were presented with and without focus markers.

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(18) [F El niño]i cree el maestro [C P que lee el libro ti]. that read-3SG the book the child think-3SG the teacher ‘The teacher thinks the boy reads the book.’ (19) *[F Llama-s-ta]i warmi yuya-n [runa ti qati-sqa-n-ta]. drive- NMLZ-3POSS -ACC llama- PL-ACC woman think-3SG man ‘The woman thinks the man drives the lamas.’ (20) *[F Qhari wawa-ta]i yacha-chi-q yuya-n [ti liwru ñawi-sqa-n-ta]. learn- CAUS -AG think-3SG book read- NMLZ-3POSS -ACC boy-ACC ‘The teacher thinks the boy reads the book.’ The data on weak crossover and long distance movement show that syntactically, Andean Spanish patterns with non-Andean Spanish and not with Quechua, indicating that there is no syntactic transfer from Quechua into Andean Spanish with respect to these properties. To study the pragmatics of focus, Muntendam (2009; 2013) analyse naturalistic data and used a task with question-answer pairs. The analysis of the naturalistic data showed that the order OV was more frequent in Andean Spanish than in Argentinian Spanish (based on Ocampo’s 1994 study), a variety that is not in contact with Quechua: in particular, 18.5% of all sentences with a verb and an object in Andean Spanish had the order OV, whereas only 7.9% of the Argentinian Spanish sentences were OV. This difference between Andean Spanish and Argentinian Spanish was statistically significant ( χ2(1, N = 54) = 40.79, p < .0001). The task involving question-answer pairs showed that OV word orders were more frequent in Quechua and Andean Spanish than in non-Andean Spanish, confirming previous studies. Moreover, in Quechua and Andean Spanish these orders were accepted in answer to a range of wh-questions, not only in answer to whquestions eliciting focus on the object. This indicates that while in non-Andean Spanish OV orders are correlated with focus, in Quechua and Andean Spanish the use of these orders is not as restricted. Support for this finding comes also from the use of OV in answer to wh-questions eliciting focus on the object in the naturalistic data. Interestingly, the order SOV was not frequent in the Andean Spanish data. This is consistent with Muysken (1984), who did not find SOV in his data either. Based on these findings, Muntendam (2009; 2013) concluded that the transfer from Quechua to Andean Spanish is restricted to the pragmatic domain. That is, syntactically, Andean Spanish has the same properties as non-Andean Spanish, but pragmatically it patterns with Quechua in allowing OV orders in more contexts than in non-Andean Spanish. Therefore, this study also shows how Quechua has influenced the semantic-pragmatic meanings of Andean Spanish.

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In sum, the studies discussed so far show how Quechua has influenced the conceptual organization of Andean Spanish at the interfaces: that is, the conceptual organization (semantics and pragmatics) of Andean Spanish has become more similar to that of Quechua. In Matras/Sakel’s (2007) terminology, these studies show how Andean Spanish has borrowed PAT from Quechua. That is, Quechua has influenced the mapping of semantic-pragmatic meanings onto syntax and morphology in Andean Spanish. In some cases, there is a change in syntax, but importantly Andean Spanish has not borrowed Quechua morphology in the cases discussed here.

4.3 The syntax-prosody interface: Andean Spanish There have been relatively few studies on the syntax-prosody interface in Andean Spanish. The existing studies (Muntendam/Torreira 2016; O’Rourke 2005; 2012; van Rijswijk/Muntendam 2012) suggest an influence from Quechua in Andean Spanish prosody. In Spanish, focus is said to be encoded in prosody (in addition to syntax), whereas in Quechua focus is encoded in morphology and syntax but not in prosody. O’Rourke (2005; 2012) studied the prosody of declarative sentences with SVO order in different varieties of Peruvian Spanish, based on a reading task. Specifically, she compared the use of prosody to encode broad and contrastive focus by monolingual speakers from Lima and monolingual and bilingual speakers from Cuzco. Her analysis focused on the use of peak height and peak alignment to distinguish between broad focus and contrastive focus on the subject. The results showed that some bilingual speakers from Cuzco used fewer prosodic features to encode focus than monolingual speakers from Lima. Specifically, most of the speakers from Lima used differences in peak alignment and peak height to distinguish broad focus from contrastive focus on the subject, as in some other varieties of Spanish (e.g. Peninsular Spanish). That is, these speakers used late peak alignment for non-final words in broad focus and early peak alignment for non-final words in contrastive focus. Furthermore, contrastive focus was sometimes associated with a higher peak on the focused word and lower post-focal peaks. There was more variability within the group of monolingual and bilingual speakers from Cuzco. In the Spanish spoken by some Cuzco speakers, peaks were aligned early in both focus conditions, indicating that differences in peak alignment were not used to distinguish broad focus and contrastive focus. Early peak alignment could be due to an influence from Quechua, which also has early peak alignment. In addition, the peak on the focused word was sometimes lower in contrastive focus than in broad focus, unlike in the Spanish spoken by speakers from Lima. O’Rourke (2005; 2012) tentatively concluded that monolingual speakers from Lima and monolingual and bilingual speakers from Cuzco differ with respect to the encoding of contrastive focus in Spanish.

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Muntendam/Torreira (2016) used an interactive elicitation task that did not involve reading to study the use of prosody to encode broad and contrastive focus in Peninsular Spanish, Andean Spanish and Quechua (for Andean Spanish, cf. also van Rijswijk/Muntendam 2012). This study focused specifically on noun phrases with a noun and an adjective, as in toro verde ‘green bull’. Within noun phrases syntactic and morphological strategies cannot be used to encode focus, that is, only prosodic strategies are available to distinguish broad focus and contrastive focus. The study included three conditions: broad focus, contrastive focus on the noun (non-final position in Spanish), and contrastive focus on the adjective (final position in Spanish). The intonation contours used in the three conditions were examined, as well as F0, duration and intensity. The results revealed no systematic correspondence between different intonation contours and focus type. Moreover, the phonetic marking of contrastive focus was infrequent and limited to the final word, which was the adjective in Spanish. Interestingly, Muntendam/Torreira observed two contours for Andean Spanish that were not observed in Peninsular Spanish, but that were found in Quechua, suggesting prosodic transfer from Quechua to Andean Spanish. These two contours were used for all focus conditions in both languages. In the prosodic domain, Andean Spanish thus seems to also have borrowed PAT from Quechua.

4.4 Summary The studies discussed above showed examples of cross-linguistic influence in a shift scenario in which speakers adopt characteristics from Quechua in their Spanish. Above we focused on studies that showed an influence from Quechua in Spanish at the syntax-morphology interface, the syntax-pragmatics interface, and the syntaxprosody interface. These studies together indicate that not only the external syntaxdiscourse interface is affected (as predicted by the revised Interface hypothesis), but for instance also the internal syntax-morphology interface.4 Although the interface hypotheses correctly predict that interfaces are vulnerable to cross-linguistic influence, they do not specify what exactly is affected at the interfaces. Von Humboldt’s distinction between “outer form” and “inner form” and Matras/ Sakel’s (2007) distinction between “matter” and “pattern” are useful in this respect. Interestingly, in these case studies, Quechua morphology or matter is not transferred to Andean Spanish; rather, it is the conceptual organization of Quechua that is mapped onto Andean Spanish. In other words, Andean Spanish PAT is affected by Quechua in this situation of intense language contact.

4 In this paper, the discussion is limited to interface phenomena. That is not to say that all Quechua-influenced characteristics of Andean Spanish involve interfaces.

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5 The lexicon-grammar interface: Media Lengua This section will focus on the lexicon-grammar interface in ML, a set of varieties of Quechua relexified with Spanish phonological shapes spoken in highland Ecuador. Muysken (1980) presents some data on varieties of ML spoken near Saraguro (Loja) and Cañar (Cañar), while Muysken (1981; 1997; 2013) presents material from field notes and recordings made outside of Salcedo (Cotopaxi). More recently, various varieties of ML have been documented and studied in Imbabura (cf. below). All Quechuan varieties are characterized by intrusions from Spanish. These take a number of forms: – Spanish lexical loans, including entire phrases, such as a las cuatro ‘at four o’clock’; – Increasing but variable use of the mid vowels e and o and of some non-Quechua consonants in loans; – Discourse markers (‘tonces ‘then’), conjunctions (si ‘if’), and adpositions (hasta ‘until’) from Spanish; – Suffixes from Spanish, like ‑itu/‑ita ‘diminutive’, and together with that some nominal gender distinctions; – The increasing use of Spanish word order, notably placing elements in postverbal position; – Alternational code-switching, where short fragments from the two languages are juxtaposed. All these features also occur in ML, but ML has some unique special other features. These are: (a) not only some lexical items are taken from Spanish, but almost all; (b) what is taken from Spanish is not a full item, but a lexical shape. To understand the phenomenon of relexification better, consider an English expression used by a French person as in (21b). The French source expression is (21a), in which the subcategorization of the French verb (as in 21a) is imposed on the English expression, which has English morpho-syntax. This is a lexical calque. Relexification takes the role of French one step further, as in (unattested) (21c), where not just French verb subcategorization, but also French word order and word endings are imposed on English roots. (21) a. Tu me manqu-es. (French) 2SG 1SG .OBJ miss-2SG ‘I miss you.’ b. You miss me. 2SG miss 1SG .OBJ ‘I miss you.’

(English as spoken by a French person)

c. You me miss-es. 2SG 1SG .OBJ miss-2SG ‘I miss you.’

(English relexifying French)

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The result of relexification can be seen in the following fragment from an autobiographical narrative, reproduced from a transcript in Muysken (2013). The Spanish roots are underlined, and it can be seen that there are no Quechua roots. Spanish roots are pronounced with Quechua phonology (the vowels are adapted and fácil becomes /p’asil/). All affixes are Quechua, with the exception of the plural ‑s in alguno-s ‘some-PL ’. Verb forms have become regularized, using a matching form from Spanish, such as kiri‑ ‘want’ (Spanish querer, quiero ‘I want’, quiere ‘he/she wants). (22) No, no sintanakun kazabi. Algunoslla sí. no no sinta-naku-n kaza-bi alguno-s-lla sí house-LOC some-PL- DEL yes no NEG sit-REC -3SG ‘They do not stay here. Only some do.’ (23) Algunoswalla sintan. Así no undimun ina kirikkunalla. alguno-s-wa-lla sinta-n así no undi-mun i-na kiri-k-kuna-lla thus NEG where-ALL go-NMLZ want-AG - PL- DEL some-PL- DIM - DEL sit-3 ‘Only some stay, those that do not want to go anywhere.’ (24) Ahíga, akibiga trabaxobish no bweno undi p’asil artu ganana abin. ahí-ga aki-bi-ga trabaxo-bish no bweno undi p’asil artu NEG good where easy much thus-TOP here-LOC -TOP work-ADD gana-na abi-n earn-NMLZ EXI -3SG ‘So, here work, there is no good way to easily earn a lot of money.’ The grammar is Quechua, and some of it is quite complex, as in the headless relative clause including an infinitival complement in (23), reproduced here as (25): (25) [[no [undi-mun i-na] kiri-k]-kuna-lla] NEG where-DIR go-NMLZ want-AG - PL - DEL ‘those that do not want to go anywhere’ A similar complex structure is (24) in (26): (26) [no bweno [undi p’asil artu gana-na] abi-n] NEG good where easy much earn-NMLZ EXI -3SG ‘there is no good way to easily earn a lot of money’ An important feature is that, where we can see it, the semantic organization of many of the lexemes is Quechua rather than Spanish. Thus the ML word sinta- ‘stay’ means ‘be seated’ in Spanish, but relates to the Quechua meaning complex of the word

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tiya‑ ‘be seated, stay, be located in, live in, exist’. Through the ‘stay’ meaning of tiya‑ the ML word sinta‑ was selected. Of course in other cases there is little difference between the languages. The ML word kaza for ‘house’ (from Spanish casa) would correspond to the word wasi in Quechua, and indeed this is more like a Quechua house (straw roof) than like a Spanish house (tiled roof), but this semantic extension to fit new circumstances would hold for straight loans in other varieties as well. It should also be mentioned that there are also cases where there is no relexification in the strict sense. The Quechua verb tiya‑ ‘be seated’ has evolved and in part been grammaticalized in many Quechua varieties first into a locative, and then into an impersonal existential verb. In the latter meaning it is often but variably relexified not as sinta‑, as in (22) and (23), but as abi‑. This is the regularized form of the Spanish impersonal existential verb hay ‘there is’ / había ‘there was’, from haber ‘have’, to be sure. Shappeck (2011) has returned to the Salcedo area around 2010 and encountered a more complex set of bilingual mixture patterns, among which relexification was not the dominant one anymore. It could well be that around 2010 ML in the original form had all but disappeared in the Salcedo area. When I visited around 2000, the community where I had worked had been almost completely been “eaten up” by the growing urban center, and the speakers I had worked with had moved elsewhere in Ecuador. In the meanwhile, Gómez-Rendón (2005) has recorded and documented ML in the communities Angla, Casco Valenzuela and El Topo in Imbabura province, and Stewart (2011; 2012; 2013) has further worked on a ML variety in Pijal (Imbabura), not very far from where Gómez-Rendón worked. Together all the Ecuadorian varieties span a stretch of 1000 kilometers or more. Three arguments speak against there being a direct spread of ML over this territory. (a) There is considerable dialect variation in the Q varieties spoken in these areas and all ML correspond to the local Q varieties in their phonology and morphology. (b) Most intermediate Q communities are not aware that ML exists. (c) Specific different “solutions” to the matching problem in relexification are found in different places; e.g. the verb ri- may be relexified as i‑ in Salcedo and as anda‑ in Saraguro. The major argument for assuming a single ML that spread is that the phenomenon is only found in Ecuador, and not in Peru or Bolivia. It is tempting to speculate on this but there is no real explanation which is not post-hoc, such as that in Peru Quechua is more tied up with a specific ethnicity, while in Ecuador it is more of a colonial caste identity marker. The complexity of the interfaces of the lexicon with the grammar can be illustrated with an example such as (27):

Interfacing interfaces: Quechua and Spanish in the Andes

(27) awa nuwabishka awa nuwabi-shka water NEG . EXIS - PST. REPORT

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‘There turns out to be no water.’ ML

yaku illa-shka water NEG . EXIS - PST. REPORT

Q

(agua) no ha.habido (agua) water NEG PST. REPORT. EXIS water

AS

(Resulta que) no hay agua. (turns.out that) NEG EXIS water

S

This ML form illustrates the interfaces of the lexicon with different components of the grammar (cf. Figure 8). Quechua phonology is imposed on the Spanish form resulting in the use of only three vowels, and the insertion of a glide between /u/ and /a/, since nuwabi‑ is a single word, corresponding with the Quechua negative existential illa‑. Quechua morphology is imposed on the Spanish form in that all verbs have been regularized and receive Quechua verbal endings. Quechua syntax is imposed on the Spanish form in that the existential verb has the existing entity as its grammatical subject, which has to occur pre-verbally. In standard Spanish the existing entity is post-verbal, while in Andean Spanish it can be post-verbal but also occur in initial position (cf. Muysken 1984, and section 4). Quechua semantics is imposed on the Spanish form in that the existential verb receives the perfective aspectual ending, often interpreted as mirative or narrative.

Figure 8: The interfaces involved in a Media Lengua expression.

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The lexicon can be seen as a prima facie site for interaction at the interface, since in the lexicon different components of grammar intersect. Relexification is perhaps the most extreme case of interaction in the lexicon, but it is clear that many types of cross-linguistic influence involve items of the lexicon in some way. Thus it is perhaps the most vulnerable interface of all.

6 Integration, conclusions, and avenues for further research In this paper we have studied cross-linguistic influence at the syntax-morphology interface, the syntax-pragmatics interface and the syntax-prosody interface in Andean Spanish and the lexicon-grammar interface in Media Lengua. The studies on the syntax-morphology, syntax-pragmatics and syntax-prosody interfaces in Andean Spanish showed that Quechua has mainly affected the conceptual organization of Andean Spanish, that is, Quechua morphological forms are not borrowed into Andean Spanish, but rather Quechua meanings are mapped onto Andean Spanish forms. In particular, we have seen that aspect and evidentiality, the use of null objects, and information structure in Andean Spanish are affected by Quechua. The influence from Spanish into Media Lengua mainly concerns the lexicon, as shown in section 5. In accordance with the second language acquisition and bilingualism literature on interfaces, the interfaces in Quechua-Spanish language contact have been shown to be vulnerable to cross-linguistic influence. However, the studies we discussed show that not only the external interfaces are sensitive to cross-linguistic influence but also the internal ones, particularly in a situation of long-term language contact. Given that we limited the discussion to cross-linguistic influence at the interfaces, we cannot evaluate the original interface hypothesis according to which interfaces in general are more sensitive to cross-linguistic influence. The interface hypotheses predict cross-linguistic influence at the interfaces, but they do not address the exact nature of cross-linguistic influence. To some extent, the direction and types of cross-linguistic influence found in the Andes concur with predictions for different contact scenarios and the hierarchies proposed in the literature. The shift from Quechua to Spanish in the Andes co-occurs with a Quechua influence in Andean Spanish. In the situation where Quechua is maintained, it is influenced by the prestige-language Spanish. As shown above, the Quechua influence in Andean Spanish concerns mostly the conceptual organization of the language, whereas the Spanish influence in Media Lengua involves mostly the lexicon, as it interacts with the various components of grammar.

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Further research is needed to understand the interplay between different factors that lead to the different linguistic outcomes of Quechua-Spanish language contact in different areas.

7 References Camacho, José (1999), “From SOV to SVO. The grammar of interlanguage word order”, Second Language Research 15, 115–132. Camacho, José/Paredes, Liliana/Sánchez, Liliana (1997), “Null objects in bilingual Andean Spanish”, in: Elizabeth Hughes/Mary Hughes/Annabel Greenhill (edd.), BUCLD 21. Proceedings of the 21st annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Somerville, MA, Cascadilla Press, 56–66. van Coetsem, Frans (1988), Loan phonology and the two transfer types in language contact, Dordrecht, Foris. van Coetsem, Frans (1995), “Outlining a model of the transmission phenomenon in language contact”, Leuvense bijdragen/Leuven contributions in linguistics and philology. Tijdschrift voor Germaanse filologie 84, 63–85. van Coetsem, Frans (2000), A general and unified theory of the transmission process in language contact, Heidelberg, Winter. Escobar, Anna María (1990), Los bilingües y el castellano en el Perú, Lima, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Escobar, Anna María (1997), “Contrastive and innovative uses of the present perfect and the preterite in Spanish in contact with Quechua”, Hispania 80, 859–870. Escobar, Anna María (2000), Contacto social y lingüístico. El español en contacto con el quechua en el Perú, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial. Gómez-Rendón, Jorge (2005), “La Media Lengua de Imbabura”, in: Hella Olbertz/Pieter Muysken (edd.), Encuentros y conflictos. Bilingüismo y contacto de lenguas en el mundo andino, Madrid, Iberoamericana, 39–58. van Hout, Roeland/Muysken, Pieter (1994), “Modeling lexical borrowability”, Language Variation and Change 6, 39–62. von Humboldt, Wilhelm (1836), “Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts“, in: Wilhelm von Humboldts gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, Berlin, Reimer. Klee, Carol/Ocampo, Alicia (1995), “The expression of past reference in Spanish narratives of SpanishQuechua bilingual speakers”, in: Carmen Silva-Corvalán (ed.), Spanish in four continents. Studies in language contact and bilingualism, Washington D.C., Georgetown University Press, 52–70. Lefebvre, Claire/Muysken, Pieter (1988), Mixed categories. Nominalizations in Quechua, Dordrecht, Kluwer. Matras, Yaron/Sakel, Jeanette (2007), Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective, Berlin/ New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Muntendam, Antje (2009), Linguistic transfer in Andean Spanish. Syntax or pragmatics? PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Muntendam, Antje (2013), “On the nature of crosslinguistic transfer. A case study of Andean Spanish”, Bilingualism. Language and Cognition 16, 111–131. Muntendam, Antje/Torreira, Francisco (2016), “Focus and prosody in Spanish and Quechua. Insights from an interactive task”, in: Meghan E. Armstrong/Nicholas Henriksen/Maria del Mar Vanrell (edd.), Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance. Approaches across linguistic subfields, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 69–90.

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Muysken, Pieter (1979), “La mezcla entre quechua y castellano”, Lexis 3, 41–56. Muysken, Pieter (1980), “Sources for the study of Amerindian contact vernaculars in Ecuador”, Amsterdam Creole Studies 3, 66–82. Muysken, Pieter (1981), “Halfway between Quechua and Spanish. The case for relexification”, in: Albert Valdman/Arnold Highfield (edd.), Historicity and variation in Creole studies, Ann Arbor, Karoma, 57–78. Muysken, Pieter (1984), “The Spanish that Quechua speakers learn. L2 learning as norm-governed behavior”, in: Roger Anderson (ed.), Second languages. A crosslinguistic perspective, Rowley, MA, Newbury House, 101–119. Muysken, Pieter (1997), “Media Lengua”, in: Sarah Thomason (ed.), Contact languages. A wider perspective, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 365–426. Muysken, Pieter (2013), “Media Lengua”, in: Susanne Michaelis/Philippe Maurer/Magnus Huber/ Martin Haspelmath (edd.), The atlas of pidgin and creole language structures, vol. 3, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 143–148. Ocampo, Francisco (1994), “The word order of two-constituent constructions in spoken Spanish”, in: Pamela Downing/Michael Noonan (edd.), Word order in discourse, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 425–447. Ocampo, Francisco/Klee, Carol (1995), “Spanish OV/VO word-order variation in Spanish-Quechua bilingual speakers”, in: Carmen Silva-Corvalán (ed.), Spanish in four continents. Studies in language contact and bilingualism, Washington D.C., Georgetown University Press, 71–82. O’Rourke, Erin (2005), Intonation and language contact. A case study of two varieties of Peruvian Spanish, PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. O’Rourke, Erin (2012), “The realization of contrastive focus on Peruvian Spanish intonation”, Lingua 122, 494–510. van Rijswijk, Remy/Muntendam, Antje (2012), “The prosody of focus in the Spanish of QuechuaSpanish bilinguals. A case study on noun phrases”, International Journal of Bilingualism, DOI: 10.1177/1367006912456103. Sánchez, Liliana (1998), “Why do bilingual Spanish and Spanish in contact varieties drop definite objects?”, in: Antonella Sorace/Caroline Heycock/Richard Shillcock (edd.), Proceedings of the GALA 97 Conference on Knowledge and Representation, Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Press, 148–153. Sánchez, Liliana (1999), “Null objects and D0 features in contact Spanish”, in: Jean-Marc Authier/ Barbara Bullock/Lisa Reed (edd.), Formal perspectives on Romance linguistics, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 228–242. Sánchez, Liliana (2003), Quechua-Spanish bilingualism. Interference and convergence in functional categories, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Sánchez, Liliana (2004), “Functional convergence in the tense, evidentiality and aspectual systems of Quechua-Spanish bilinguals”, Bilingualism. Language and Cognition 7, 147–162. Sánchez, Liliana (2006), “Kechwa and Spanish bilingual grammars. Testing hypotheses on functional interference and convergence”, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 9, 535–556. Shappeck, Marco (2011), Quichua-Spanish language contact in Salcedo, Ecuador. Revisiting Media Lengua syncretic language practices, PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. Sorace, Antonella (2005), “Selective optionality in language development”, in: Leonie Cornips/Karen P. Corrigan (edd.), Syntax and variation. Reconciling the biological and the social, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 55–80. Sorace, Antonella (2011), “Pinning down the concept of ‘interface’ in bilingualism”, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1, 1–33.

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Sorace, Antonella/Filiaci, Francesca (2006), “Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian”, Second Language Research 22, 339–368. Sorace, Antonella/Serratrice, Ludovica (2009), “Internal and external interfaces in bilingual language development. Beyond structural overlap”, International Journal of Bilingualism 13, 195–210. Stewart, Jesse (2011), A brief descriptive grammar of Pijal Media Lengua and an acoustic vowel space analysis of Pijal Media Lengua and Imbabura Quichua, MA thesis, University of Manitoba. Stewart, Jesse (2012), “An acoustic vowel space analysis of Pijal Media Lengua and Imbabura Quichua”, in: Paula Caxaj (ed.), Actes du congrès annuel de l’Association canadienne de linguistique. 2012/Proceedings of the 2012 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, Toronto, University of Toronto, 15 pages, http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cla-acl/ actes2012/Stewart_2012.pdf (01.07.2016). Stewart, Jesse (2013), Cuentos y tradiciones de Pijal. Relatados en Media Lengua/Stories and traditions from Pijal. Told in Media Lengua, Create Space, Amazon. Thomason, Sarah G./Kaufman, Terrence (1988), Language contact, creolization and genetic linguistics, Berkeley, University of California Press. Tsimpli, Ianthi Maria/Sorace, Antonella (2006), “Differentiating interfaces. L2 performance in syntaxsemantics and syntax-discourse phenomena”, in: David Bamman/Tatiana Magnitskaia/Colleen Zaller (edd.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual BUCLD, Somerville, MA, Cascadilla Press, 653– 664. White, Lydia (2009), Language acquisition at the interfaces. Some hardy perennials and new varieties, Paper presented at the University of Iowa, April 2009. White, Lydia (2011), “Second language acquisition at the interfaces”, Lingua 121, 577–590. Whitney, William D. (1881), “On mixture in language”, Transactions of the American Philosophical Association 12, 1–26.

Abbreviations used in glosses ABL ACC ADD AG ALL CAUS DEL DES DIM DIR DS EVI EXIS FUT GEN INF INT

ablative accusative additive agentive allative causative delimitative desiderative diminutive directional different subject evidential existential future genitive infinitive intensifier

limitative locative NEG negation NMLZ nominalizer OBJ object PL plural POSS possessive PROG progressive PST past Q question REC reciprocal REPORT reportative SG singular SS same subject TOP topic LIM

LOC

Ulrich Detges and Richard Waltereit

21 Grammaticalization and pragmaticalization Abstract: Grammaticalization and “pragmaticalization” are standardly viewed as unidirectional changes that break down into a set of aligned changes occurring in all the usually recognized modules of grammar (for grammaticalization, cf. Lehmann 2002 [1982]). We argue that core grammar as well as discourse markers and modal particles are sedimented residues of argumentative moves designed to solve different kinds of communicative problems. What these processes of sedimentation have in common is that they all are driven by language usage and that their outcomes bear the linguistic marks of routinization. On the one hand, routinization is thus an aspect inherent to language use. On the other hand, it is an interface phenomenon that affects all modules of grammar and aligns the changes occurring within them in the course of grammaticalization and/or “pragmaticalization”. Keywords: argumentative schemas, core grammar, discourse markers, Lehmann’s parameters, modal particles, routinization, tense

1 Interfaces in grammaticalization While a clear definition of grammaticalization as well as its delimitation from “pragmaticalization” are still open issues (cf. below, 2), a near-universally accepted framework is Lehmann’s (2002 [1982], 108pp.) parameter model. As a starting point, we will therefore discuss its relationship with the concept of interface. Lehmann’s contention is that grammaticalization is a type of unidirectional language change that breaks down into a set of aligned changes occurring in various modules of grammar. What binds these changes together is a gradual loss of autonomy of the item and increasing dependence on a host word or construction. paradigmatic

syntagmatic

Weight

integrity

scope

Cohesion

paradigmaticity

bondedness

Variability

paradigmatic variability

syntagmatic variability

Figure 1: Lehmann’s (2002 [1982]) parameters of grammaticalization.

For Lehmann, autonomy consists of three dimensions: weight, cohesion, and variability. Loss of autonomy amounts to loss in weight, increase in cohesion, and reduction in

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variability. These dimensions apply to both the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axis, thus resulting in six parameters of change. 1) Integrity refers to the phonological shape and the semantic substance of a sign. Grammaticalization reduces these. For example, Latin habere, originally a polysyllabic lexical verb meaning ‘to possess’, has turned into a monosyllabic future morpheme in Western Romance (French ‑ai, Spanish ‑é, Italian ‑ò). It is often invoked as an example of both phonological erosion and impoverishment of semantic content. 2) Scope refers to status and extent of the constructions with which the sign in question can combine. Scope shrinks as grammaticalization proceeds. Thus, whereas Latin habere had scope over complements that could be recursively expanded and could hence be of great complexity, the future morpheme as its diachronic successor is strictly limited to verb stems. 3) Bondedness refers to the degree of syntagmatic cohesion of the item in question with other signs. Thus, the Western Romance future marker, originally an auxiliary verb (Old Spanish mostrar (lo) hé ‘I shall show (it)’) has become a bound morpheme (Spanish mostraré). Moreover, in highly frequent verbs in particular, this morpheme shows an even greater degree of fusion, e.g. in French je pourrai ‘I will be able to’ (instead of je *pouvoirai), Spanish diré ‘I shall say’ (instead of deciré), Italian sarò ‘I will be’ (instead of *esserò). Additionally, in the first person of all verbs, the future morpheme has fused with the person marker (‑ai, ‑é, ‑ò, respectively). 4) Paradigmaticity is the extent to which a sign is integrated into a set of recurring alternations. Clearly, the future morpheme is member of the set of verbal tensemorphemes. Furthermore, due to the syntagmatic fusion with the first person morpheme (cf. above, bondedness), it has also become, at least in the first person, a member of the paradigm of agreement markers. 5) Paradigmatic variability refers to the options a speaker has in using a given sign. Whereas a speaker wishing to express possession in Latin can draw from a varied set of lexical items and periphrases, the modern Romance speaker wishing to refer to a future event will by default choose the grammaticalized future morpheme. 6) Syntagmatic variability refers to the range of options a speaker has in placing the item relative to the host. Whereas in Latin, there are few constraints in placing the full verb habere relative to its complement, in modern Romance the future tense morpheme is invariably placed at the right of the verb stem. Old Spanish and Modern Portuguese represent an intermediate stage. Here, the future marker always follows the verb, but it is still possible to place clitics in between (e.g. Old Spanish mostrar lo hé ‘I shall show it’ alongside mostraré ‘I shall show’, Modern Portuguese di-lo-ei ‘I will say it’ alongside direi ‘I will say’).

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From this brief discussion, it has become clear that grammaticalization can involve change in all of the usually recognized modules of language, i.e. phonetics/phonology and semantics (paradigmatic weight), syntax (in particular scope, bondedness and syntagmatic variability) and morphology (especially bondedness, paradigmaticity and paradigmatic variability). However, Lehmann’s (2002 [1982]) model has little to say about the respective roles of those modules in grammaticalization (and accordingly, about the interfaces that exist between them). The model is a taxonomy aimed at comparing empirically observable grammatical properties, either of a single given construction throughout the different stages of its history or of two or more constructions of a given language at a given moment in time. The widely accepted driving force behind these parameters of change is routinization (Haiman 1994; Haspelmath 1998). Routinization makes a linguistic sign more frequent, and progressively rules out alternatives and choices (Detges/Waltereit 2002), thereby constraining the sign’s paradigmatic and syntagmatic variability. At the same time, it detracts from the sign’s phonetic and semantic strength. Routinization is not a feature of language itself – it is rooted in language use. We therefore claim that grammaticalization, viewed as a series of parallel changes within the different modules of language, is driven by usage. In order to fully understand grammaticalization, we have to answer one question in particular: Why (and how) should language use make the evolution of routines a recurrent (and maybe necessary) type of process? Before returning to this question in Section 3, we wish to make a few remarks on grammaticalization and its relation to other types of language change, such as “pragmaticalization”.

2 Grammaticalization and “pragmaticalization” Originally, the term “grammaticalization” was used to refer to the evolution of core grammatical items, such as tense markers, negation, determiners, agreement markers, or case markers. Some authors, however, have included discourse markers and modal particles in the remit of grammaticalization (Diewald 2012). In order to refine this broad notion, the term “pragmaticalization” has been coined to refer to the rise of discourse markers and other “pragmatic” particles (Erman/Kotsinas 1993). As we will argue in the following, even this more fine-grained view is too vague to yield meaningful generalizations. This becomes clear when looking at the outcomes of these processes, i.e. grammaticalization in the narrow sense as well as the different types of “pragmaticalization”. a) Grammatical elements. Grammatical items in the narrow sense, like case- and agreement markers etc., structure conceptual content within the proposition. Other grammatical forms (e.g. determiners and tense) specify relations between linguistic items and their real-world and/or cognitive counterparts. The latter function includes construing inferences about the reality/validity of the mental images thus evoked (e.g. (un)specificity or (non)factuality). In the following, we will restrict the term “grammaticalization” to the type of diachronic process that

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brings about grammatical elements in the narrow sense just outlined. We do not imply, though, that all grammatical items are results of grammaticalization processes. Rather, we view grammaticalization as a type of language change that complies with Lehmann’s (2002 [1982]) parameters, i.e. change whereby a given linguistic item becomes increasingly dependent on a host content form. This stipulation excludes other types of intra-grammatical change, such as analogy or reanalysis (cf. Haspelmath 1998; Detges/Waltereit 2002). b) Modal particles. Modal particles such as French quand même in (1) have scope over speech acts; unlike grammatical elements in the narrow sense, they finetune illocutions. Thus, Waltereit (2004) argues that the French particle quand même in positive polarity assertions implies that the assertion’s negative counterpart has been activated in previous discourse. Example (1) implies that the expectation of a contrasting proposition ‘Speaker hasn’t slept’ has been activated: (1)

c)

Fr.

J’ai quand même dormi. ‘I have been sleeping, after all.’

With quand même, the assertion (as an illocutionary act) is further characterized as countering an expectation to the contrary. By contrast, j’ai dormi ‘I have been sleeping’ without quand même has no such requirement. Thus, quand même fine-tunes the illocution, rather than the propositional content of the sentence. In sections 3.2 and 3.3 below, we will see that diachronically, this type of function is typically brought about by change different from grammaticalization in Lehmann’s (2002 [1982]) sense. Discourse markers. According to Fraser’s classical (1999) definition, discourse markers guide inferences regarding the coherence relations between two stretches of discourse. A case in point is (2), where alors ‘so’ indicates that the proposal q “why not take the bicycle?” is a conclusion naturally following from the state of affairs p “(there is) no snow”. (2)

Fr.

Pas de neige ?p Alors, pourquoi ne pas prendre le vélo ?q ‘No snow?p So, why not take our bicycles?q’

The first part of (2), pas de neige ? ‘no snow?’, is an echo question which references a state of affairs ‘(there is) no snow’ previously asserted by the hearer. Its function in (2) is to indicate surprise or even disbelief. Discourse markers have scope over text segments. In principle, such a segment can consist of any number of propositions. Conversely, as we can see in (2) pas de neige ?, text segments can also be items below the sentence level. Accordingly, the degree of syntactic integration of discourse markers into sentence structure is relatively low (although there is considerable variation). Normally, the discourse marker is placed at the beginning or at the end of the sentence introducing the second text segment (Fraser 1999, 938). In French, postposition of the marker – pourquoi ne pas prendre le vélo, alors ? – is also an option.

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As has become clear from our previous discussion, grammatical items, modal particles and discourse markers have scope over entities with very different status. Grammatical items range over elements within the proposition, generally content-words or grammatical constructions with content meaning. Cases in point are predicates, subjects, direct or indirect objects, noun phrases, etc. Accordingly, grammatical items are morphologically or syntactically integrated into their respective host unit. Modal particles, in turn, have scope over illocutions. Recall that the carrier of the illocution is the sentence as a whole. In strictly syntactic terms, modal particles therefore have scope over the sentence as a whole, and, consequently, are integrated into it. The sentence, in turn, is headed by the finite verb. Thus, the “natural” position of modal particles is next to the finite verb. Discourse markers, finally, have scope over (pairs of) text segments. As the extent of text segments is independent of grammatical criteria, the scope of discourse markers is highly variable (Hansen 1998a), ranging from segments below sentence level to long sequences of sentences. Thus, their scope is potentially the widest of all three classes of items discussed. The comparison between modal particles and discourse markers shows that the term “pragmaticalization” is misleading for two reasons. Firstly, it rests on the (somewhat superficial) observation that the respective function of both classes is vaguely “pragmatic”, while at the same time abstracting away from considerable differences (Diewald 2013). Secondly, it presupposes that the grammatical processes which bring about both types of elements are sufficiently similar to group them together while at the same time excluding grammaticalization in the narrow sense. As we shall see in section 3, this is hardly the case. Lehmann’s (2002 [1982]) parameters were originally formulated to characterize the evolution of grammatical items in the narrow sense. Attempts to also apply them to modal particles and discourse markers have been unsuccessful – especially for the parameters of scope and bondedness (Waltereit 2002, 1005; Eckardt 2006). Our comparison of grammatical elements, modal particles, and discourse markers makes it clear why this is so. Whereas in the course of their diachronic evolution, grammatical elements narrow their scope, the scope of modal particles and even more so that of discourse markers progressively widens. The differences in bondedness are a direct consequence of this. Only grammatical items can become bound morphemes, since only grammatical items can have hosts with word status. By contrast, the hosts of modal particles and discourse markers are higher-level units of speech, i.e. speech acts and text segments. Do these differences mean that the three classes of items have nothing in common and that the intuition behind “pragmaticalization” is wrong? Clearly, the answer is no. As pointed out in Section 1, the driving force behind Lehmann’s parameters is routinization. Now, from a strictly synchronic point of view, not only grammatical items in the narrow sense, but also modal particles and discourse markers represent (different types of) procedural routines. Diachronically, the evolution of modal particles as well as of discourse markers can be viewed as progressive routinization. This would explain that the diachronic trajectory of modal particles

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and discourse markers may partly conform to Lehmann’s parameters, in particular for semantic impoverishment (Auer/Günthner 2005) and phonological erosion (e.g. Spanish diay < de ahí cf. Quesada 1996, French ‘fin < enfin ‘finally, in the end’ < en ‘in’ + fin ‘end’) as well as for loss of syntactic variability (cf. above). Rather than expressing the differences between grammaticalization and “pragmaticalization” in terms of Lehmann’s parameters, though, we would like to shift the focus to the nature of the processes themselves. Specifically, we suggest framing them in terms of routinization. Why should routinization occur in the first place, and why should there be different kinds of routinization?

3 Three types of routinization We will now discuss pathways of routinization resulting in a core grammatical item, a modal particle, and a discourse marker, respectively. These pathways are prototypical, rather than being categorically defined, thus allowing for intermediate cases.

3.1 Core grammar: Tense Tense clearly is a core grammatical category. It is obligatory and its exponents are bound morphemes or auxiliary verbs. These are attached to the verb, the lexical constituent highest in the structure of the proposition. From a purely structural point of view, though, it is not the lexical verb as such that is the head of sentence, but, according to many theories of grammar, it is verb inflection which turns the lexical verb into a (finite) predicate. The mainstream view of the function of tense is that it serves to indicate time (cf. e.g. Comrie 1985). Upon reflection, this is quite puzzling. What is it about marking time that explains the central position of tense in the structural makeup of the sentence? The problem becomes even more puzzling once we compare tense with other means of expressing time, such as temporal adverbs. These are never obligatory, and they occupy a peripheral position in the sentence structure. They can combine with other expressions to form temporal adjuncts with precise temporal reference. By contrast, temporal reference via tense is vague. Moreover, tense markers are rarely diachronically related to temporal adverbs (Bybee/Perkins/Pagliuca 1994). One category that is closely associated with tense, though, is mood. Synchronically, mood and tense are mostly expressed cumulatively (e.g. English if I had. . . , French que je chante ‘I would sing’ etc.). Moreover, tense is diachronically related to mood in multiple ways. Now, mood clearly has to do with the validity of propositions. The indicative, as the unmarked mood, makes no restrictions as to the validity of the proposition, whereas other moods (subjunctive, conditional, etc.) express reservations in this respect. The close morphological and diachronic link between tense and mood would thus suggest that tense is in fact not only about temporal reference as such, but also about the validity of propositions (cf. e.g. Klein 1994). Drawing on previous work by Detges (1999; 2000; 2001; 2006),

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we will show that the routinization processes behind tense markers are motivated by strategies of validating the relevance of propositions for the moment of speech. Future markers emerge diachronically from a relatively small set of source concepts (Bybee/Perkins/Pagliuca 1994). Most prominent among these are verbs denoting movement (e.g. French aller or Spanish ir ‘to go’), volition (e.g. Middle French vouloir and Old Spanish querer), obligation (e.g. Sardinian deppere, Middle French devoir, Vulgar Latin habere + infinitive), and destination (e.g. Spanish estar para and estar por, or Middle French être pour, literally ‘to be for’ but really meaning ‘to be about to do sth’). A further source-domain is ongoingness, as expressed by progressive constructions. Finally, certain languages, such as spoken French (Ludwig 1988), spoken High German and spoken Standard Italian (Koch 1995) simply use their present tense to also refer to the future. Individual constructions can represent combinations of these sources. Thus, the English near future marker to be going to do sth can be traced back to a verb of movement used in a progressive construction, thereby also representing ongoingness. It is well known that the grammaticalization of future markers is polygenetic change, that is, parallel change affecting many unrelated languages in many different parts of the world at different times. Some authors (e.g. Heine 1993, 85; 1997, 6; cf. also Kuteva 1995; 2001) have tried to explain this finding by the privileged cognitive status of the respective source domains. However, we will propose a quite different explanation here. Emerging future markers are linked to usage in the first person singular. This has been shown to hold true for Middle French (s’en) aller faire qc. ‘to be going to do sth’ (Gougenheim 1971 [1929]; Wilmet 1970) as well as for Modern Spanish ir a ‘to be going to’ (Söll 1968). Another striking feature of the grammaticalization of future markers (and, in fact, of tense markers in general, cf. below) is that, without exception, they go back to source constructions in the present tense. This is often transparent in the respective auxiliary. (I) am (going to), (je) vais, voy and habeo – in spite of being part of a complex construction denoting the future – are homonyms of the present tense forms of the lexical source. Now, why would speakers combine first-person present-tense constructions of movement, volition, obligation and/or ongoingness with other lexical verbs, thereby triggering the grammaticalization of a new future marker? It seems reasonable to assume that the change first occurs in future-oriented speech acts, such as commissives (promises, threats, announcements, etc.). Commissives are characterized by speaker self-obligation to carry out a certain action in the future. The standardly assumed felicity condition for commissives is the speaker’s sincere intention to do what he or she promises, threatens or announces to do, thereby underpinning his or her self-obligation. Accordingly, the chances of success of a commissive speech act can be significantly improved if the speaker can efficiently validate his or her determination to carry out the projected action. In order to do this, speakers have at their disposition argumentative routines, i.e. simple but convincing ways of efficiently construing the imminence of a future action. Thus, instead of saying “I hereby promise to do my homework as soon as possible”, speakers could argue “Sure, I’ll

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do my homework – I am already on my way”, thereby using an ongoing movement. Alternatively, the speaker could say “I really have the intention/the wish/the urge to do my homework” (volition), or “Yeah, I really have to start now” (obligation), or simply “But I am already doing it” (ongoingness), “I already do it” (present tense). All these stereotypical routines invoke some ingredient of the current situation to validate the speaker’s intention. Put more simply, these techniques are designed to make the hearer believe that the future has already begun. These argumentative routines are inherently subjective and intersubjective (for these notions, cf. Traugott 2014). Moreover, they are not necessarily linguistic in nature. They are commonplace patterns of efficiently construing recurrent types of situations. Thus, they may have cultural, transcultural or even universal status. However, they acquire linguistic status once speakers of a given language start realizing them by means of specialized linguistic expressions with sufficient frequency (“sedimentation”, Hopper 1998; Günthner 2011). Grammar is the outcome of routines targeted at addressing recurrent tasks in communication. For future markers, the original task is to stress the speaker’s sincerity about his or her own future action (I am going to do sth). In later stages, the routine that has emerged from these contexts will be transferred to any kind of future proposition, yielding, e.g., impersonal constructions such as it is going to rain (Detges 1999). The principle underlying both the argumentative stereotypes and the resulting linguistic routines is summed up in (3). (3)

In order to validate a future state of affairs, put forward facts which are already visible and/or valid at the moment of speech and which make it plausible that the future state of affairs will come true.

On this view, new future constructions do not come into existence because there is a linguistic need for them. Rather, grammaticalization takes place because speakers constantly create new routines of validating future actions, regardless of how many future markers already exist in their language. Grammaticalization is a “push”-, not a “pull”-process. Thus, in the grammars of many languages, there is an oversupply of grammatical constructions. Put more simply, grammaticalization systematically leads to synchronic variation (Bybee/Perkins/Pagliuca 1994). Of course, the various future markers of a given language rarely have exactly the same meaning. “Young” future markers, which are the outcome of principle (3), are normally firmly anchored in the moment of speech, i.e. they refer to imminent future events or to future events with present relevance (Fleischman 1982). “Older”, canonical future markers, by contrast, do not exhibit such restrictions – they can refer to any future event. However, in certain cases, a “young” future marker can turn into an unmarked expression of the future, thereby ousting the old canonical exponent. An already grammatical, but somehow marked construction, turning into an unmarked expression of the future, is secondary grammaticalization, i.e. a grammatical sign becoming more grammatical. Why would such a change take place? In spoken French, the

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periphrastic GO-future is about to lose its special features and is turning into an unmarked future construction. That this process is not yet finished can be observed in the following example (Ludwig 1988, 127), taken from an interview with the former French minister of agriculture, Monique Pelletier. (4) Fr.Ce texte a déjà été examiné à l’Assemblée, il l’est en ce moment au Sénat, et je vous quitterai tout à l’heure pour ce fameux article treize qui est celui qui va donner aux femmes d’agriculteurs les droits qu’elles attendent je crois depuis des années. ‘This text has already been discussed in parliament, it is currently with the Senate, and I shall leave you in a moment for this famous article 13 which is the one that is going to grant the farmers’ wives the rights for which I think they have been waiting for years.’ Example (4) contains two future constructions, the canonical form (je vous) quitterai tout à l’heure ‘I shall leave you in a moment’ and the periphrastic GO-construction qui va donner aux femmes d’agriculteurs les droits [. . .] ‘which is going to grant farmers’ wives the rights [. . .].’ Curiously, it is the first of the two states of affairs which, in spite of referring to an imminent future, is coded in the canonical form, while the second one, which refers to an uncertain and maybe even remote future, is marked by the GO-future. Principle (3’), a variant of principle (3), provides an explanation for this. (3’) All other things being equal, non-present (i.e. future and past) states of affairs which are anchored in the moment of speech appear more valid and more relevant than states of affairs without this feature. Of the two future states of affairs in (4), the second one qui va donner aux femmes d’agriculteurs les droits [. . .] ‘which is going to grant farmers’ wives the rights [. . .]’ clearly is the claim which matters most to the speaker. Accordingly, he or she backs this stand in favour of his or her law-project by using the periphrastic construction, which – in Ludwig’s (1988) terms – is more assertive than the canonical future. This feature may explain the latter’s tendency to increasingly replace the canonical form in spoken French. In Canadian French, where this long-term change went unchecked by prescriptive pressure for more than two centuries, the generalization of the periphrastic form is more advanced than in European Standard French. Here, the canonical future is confined to contexts of negation (Dörper 1990, 109), where there is less need of validation. Perfects emerge from resultative constructions. Thus, the Romance analytic perfect, which has acquired different grammatical values in the Romance languages (Harris 1982), originally expressed the current result of a past action, e.g. Latin coctum habeo ‘I have cooked now’, ‘I’m done cooking’. As a resultative, it combined preferentially with telic verbs, i.e. verbs denoting events with inherent resultant states.

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Change from resultative (i.e. aspectual) to temporal meaning is reflected by instances where the construction is used with atelic verbs (cf. Detges 2006, 64). A case in point is (5), taken from the Song of Roland (11th century). (5)

OFr.

Jo vos ai mult servit ‘I have (already) served you a lot.’

(Song of Roland 3492)

In the immediate context of (5), the speaker is preparing the ground for asking the addressee a favour in return for his past services. He could have chosen to use the passé simple here, the canonical past tense marker of Old French. However, in accordance with principle (3’), he prefers the resultative construction, which is more strongly anchored in the moment of speech, since it is this form which best serves his immediate argumentative purposes. Thus, principle (3’) explains why the resultative construction, originally restricted to telic states of affairs, is extended here to also include an atelic verb. However, with atelic verbs, the construction’s interpretation is ambiguous. On the one hand, it can still be read as some kind of resultative, denoting an abstract current “result”, i.e. the accumulated weight of the speaker’s past services. On the other hand, as an atelic verb, its most plausible interpretation is that of a series of iterative events of serving, extending from the past to the moment of speech (Detges 2000). On the latter view, the passé composé in (5) expresses a form of a past-tense meaning. Principle (3’) also explains secondary grammaticalization in later stages in the development of perfects. In Modern French and in present-day German, but not in Spanish and Modern English, the analytical perfect can be used with narrative events. In both Spanish and English, the analytical perfects are restricted to past events with current relevance. (6) Two types of analytical perfects a. Eng. *First, he has opened the door, then he has seen Mary, and then . . . b. Sp.

*Primero, ha abierto la puerta, entonces ha visto a María, y después. . .

c. Fr.

D’abord, il a ouvert la porte, ensuite, il a vu Marie, et alors . . .

d. Ger. Zuerst hat er die Tür geöffnet, dann hat er Maria gesehen, und dann. . . The French passé compose did have current relevance, but lost it by the 18th century (Berschin/Felixberger/Goebl 1978, 151–153, cf. also Harris 1982). This change is commonly assumed to originate in the ‘hot-news strategy’ (Schwenter 1994). Thus, in (7), taken from a radio news item in present-day English, the speaker chooses not to use the simple past, because in line with principle (3’), the present perfect makes the news appear fresher and hence more relevant to the listener.

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The “hot-news” technique in English Rock Musician Frank Zappa has died. A family spokesman reported that the entertainer passed away at his home Saturday after a long bout with coloncancer. (cf. Schwenter 1994, 103)

In English, the “hot-news” perfect is a rhetorical technique, specific to journalistic style. In (7) it is only the news headline which is coded in the present perfect – thereby complying with the restriction that this tense must not be used with the narrative event sequences themselves. Detges (2004) has shown that in spoken Peninsular Spanish, this restriction is sometimes not observed anymore. Repeated use of this technique can make the analytic perfect lose its current relevance (another instance of secondary grammaticalization). According to Schwenter (1994), this process is on its way in certain varieties of spoken Peninsular Spanish. We have seen that tense markers do not arise from a need to refer to time as such. Rather, they are the by-product of techniques aimed at validating the relevance of non-present states of affairs for the moment of speech (invited inferencing, cf. Traugott/Dasher 2002, 34–40). States of affairs can be ordered on a hierarchy of relevance. Current states of affairs, valid (and sometimes even visible) at the moment of speech, have the highest degree of relevance. Here, techniques of validation are least necessary. This would explain why present tense markers are synchronically unmarked (i.e. often marked as zero) and why diachronically they are relatively stable. Second in the hierarchy of relevance are past events; they may be invisible at the moment of speech, but still be relevant for the current situation. Lowest in the hierarchy of relevance is the future. Like past events, future states of affairs are invalid at the moment of speech, but there may already be visible/valid evidence for a future event to take place (e.g. the determination of the speaker etc.). Past events have already taken place and thus are factual – future events are yet to take place and are nonfactual. Consequently, future states of affairs are the class of events most in need of validation. For this reason, future markers are diachronically least stable (Ultan 1978). Thus, in Romance, the cantare habeo future replaced cantabo, the synthetic future of Latin, but is itself being replaced in various Romance languages by a GO-future. This means that in these languages, the second grammaticalization cycle is almost completed. By contrast, past tense markers evolve at a much slower pace. Here it is only the first cycle which is coming to completion in French, Italian and, to a much lesser degree (cf. above), also in Spanish. Our look at the diachrony of tense markers also explains the structural properties of tense as a grammatical category (cf. above). Just like mood, tense is a category that reflects speakers’ attitudes concerning the validity of states of affairs. In a diachronic perspective, tense markers are routines of validating the relevance of (non-present) states of affairs for the moment of speech. As pointed out above, this is a recurrent task in communication. Now, since the state of affairs is semantically encapsulated in the verb, the latter will be in the scope of the validation routine. As

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validation routines, tense markers are applied to each state of affairs individually, so that eventually, tense, unlike adverbs, is an obligatory grammatical category. While the validation routines start in the first person singular and are originally linked to specific speech acts, they eventually lose their motivation and spread to other grammatical persons, thus creating paradigmatic consistency. Essentially, core grammar is the unintentional outcome of argumentative moves reflecting speakers’ hypotheses about the relevance of propositions (or parts thereof) for the moment of speech.

3.2 Modal particles Unlike core grammar items, modal particles are not widely attested cross-linguistically. They are often cited as characteristic of continental Germanic languages, but much less so of Romance. French, though, does have some modal particles, among others bien (Hansen 1998b; Detges/Waltereit 2009) and quand même (Waltereit 2001; 2004). As pointed out above, modal particles fine-tune illocutionary type and preparatory conditions of the speech act. Thus, the German modal particle ja, when used with assertions, implies that the truth of the proposition is known to the hearer. This sets it apart from standard assertions, which imply on the grounds of conversational relevance that their truth may not be already known (Waltereit 2001). (8)

Ger.

Das kennen wir ja. ‘We know this anyway.’

Modal particles share some formal characteristics: They are unstressed; they have homophonous stressed counterparts, often adverbs; and they are placed close to the finite verb. Moreover, the homophonous counterparts can often be used as one-word utterances. For the French particle quand même, the first and third of these properties are shown in (9); the second one in (10); and the fourth one in (11). (9)

Fr.

Y a pas à dire, ça sert quand même d’avoir bossé dans un garage [. . .]. ‘Clearly, it does help having worked in a garage.’

(10)

Fr.

Il était malade, mais il est venu quand même. ‘He was sick, but he turned up anyway.’

(11)

Fr.

A:

T’as attrapé des poissons aujourd’hui ? ‘Did you catch any fish today?’

B:

56 en deux heures ! ‘56 in two hours!’

B:

Ah oui quand même ! ‘Oh, wow!’

These characteristics give us some clues as to the function of modal particles and of their diachronic rise. Both the adverbial usage and the one-word utterance are stages

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in their diachronic trajectory (Waltereit 2004). When used as one-word utterances as in (11), the counterparts of modal particles are normally answers to questions. This points towards the dialogic nature of modal particles. The diachrony of modal particles is much less researched than that of core grammatical elements. Diachronic research on Germanic modal particles has focused on change of their syntactic position and semantic impoverishment (Abraham 1991; Autenrieth 2002). There is very little cross-linguistic work on the diachrony of modal particles, and thus little in the way of established generalizations. We will therefore discuss a case study on Romance modal particles, namely French bien, which is an adverb ‘well’ and a modal particle with functions at the illocutionary level (cf. Detges/Waltereit 2009). Moreover, it can be used as one-word sentence, expressing assent. (12)

Fr.

C’est bien la première fois que ça m’arrive! ‘That is the first time that this happens to me!’

(Hansen 1998b, 111)

As a modal particle, French bien is conventionally restricted to particular speech-act types. It occurs in assertions as in (12) as well as in yes-no questions. In the following, we will concentrate on assertions. In these, bien is used to refute a negative expectation, i.e. in (12) it refutes the proposition ‘This is not the first time that this happens to you’, explicitly uttered or activated in the context (Hansen 1998b). This is nicely captured in the notion of polyphony. According to the theory of polyphony (Ducrot 1984; Iten 1999), some lexical items encode dialogical ‘controversies’ between various ‘voices’ (énonciateurs, E), each of which may be associated with a conversation participant, that is, the actual speaker him/herself (locuteur, L) and others (e.g. the hearer). In this model, an assertion with bien evokes two énonciateurs, E1 and E2. One of these, E2, associated with the speaker L, denies the viewpoint of another énonciateur (E1). (13)

Polyphonous bien Fr.

a.

[E1: Ce n’est pas la première fois que vous êtes en retard.] ‘This is not the first time you are late!’

b.

L/E2: C’est bien la première fois que je suis en retard. ‘This is the first time I am late!’

In (13), the first énonciateur E1 evoked by bien negates the propositional content of the utterance (13a), before E2, associated with the speaker’s point of view (13b), refutes E1’s negation. Moreover, bien systematically implies that E2 “wins out” over E1. In short, bien signals the speaker’s refutation of a negation coming from another point of view.

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This makes it clear what is “modal” about modal particles. According to Givón’s (1995, 114) interactional redefinition of modality, categories of epistemic modality such as assertion, negation, irrealis assertion and presupposition not only make reference to the degree of subjective certainty on the part of the speaker. Above all, they reflect the extent to which the speaker anticipates his or her utterance to be (un)controversial for the hearer. The modal particle bien makes reference to strong counter-expectation on the part of the hearer. It is therefore an instantiation of interactional modality (cf. Hansen 1998b). It seems to us that this applies to modal particles in general. They crucially refer to participants’ stance towards speech acts. To that extent, modal particles are inherently polyphonous. The modal particle bien has been in use since Old French. It goes back to adverbial bien ‘well’. Like in Modern French, the latter served to express a positive evaluation, but could also be used as a degree adverb meaning ‘a lot, very much, to a large extent’, as exemplified in (14). (14)

OFr.

Ne sevent pas ne ne sont bien certain. ‘They do not know and aren’t very sure.’ (Ami et Amile 3119, c.1200, BFM)

We assume that the bridging contexts, where adverbial bien ‘a lot’ changed into the modal particle, were of the type (15). In these contexts, the degree adverb is used to argue against strong counter-expectation on the part of the hearer: (15)

From adverb to modal particle: bridging context OFr.

Et mesires Pierres respondi: “Ba!”, fist il, “de n’avés vous oï comment Troies le grant fu destruite ne par quel tor? – Ba ouil!”, fisent li Blak et li Commain, “nous l’avons bien oï dire.” ‘And Mylord Pierre answered: “Ba”, he said, “haven’t you heard about how Troy the great was destroyed and in which way this happened?” “Of course”, said Blak and Commain, “we did hear a lot about it.”’ (Robert de Clari, La Conquête de Constantinople, CVI 31, 1203, BFM)

From today’s perspective, bien in (15) could either be the modal particle or the homophonous adverb ‘a lot, to a large extent’. Construed as an adverb, it is used in (15) as part of a strategy of scalar argumentation. It serves to effectively counter a denial. In the dialogical context (15), L2 (Blak and Commain) refute the foregoing negation by L1 (mesires Pierre). Contrary to L1’s claim that the proposition p does not obtain, they contend that p not only does hold, but that it even holds to a large extent. The argumentative move underlying the rise of the modal particle bien invokes the blueprint of a dialogue:

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(16)

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L1: p is not the case. L2: p is the case to a large extent!

(15) is typical of Old French uses of bien insofar as the latter often appears together with verbs of knowledge (savoir ‘to know’) or verbs of perception (oir ‘to hear’, entendre ‘to listen’ and voir ‘to see’) expressing states of knowledge, as nous l’avons bien oï dire ‘we did hear a lot about it’. In these contexts, bien underscores the speaker’s belief that his knowledge is valid despite an expectation to the contrary. The template (16) invokes a scale as in (17). Thus, the relation of bien and negation is not simply a syntagmatic one (use of bien prototypically follows negation contexts). Bien and negation are also in paradigmatic relation, as they represent opposing endpoints on a scale of validity of p. (17)

a.

p is not the case

b.

p is the case

c.

p is the case to a large extent!

Now we can describe the relationship between the diachronic motivation of the change and the synchronic function of modal particles. Diachronically, the modal particle bien arises from a dispute about the validity of an assertion concerning proposition p. The synchronic residue of this is a polyphonous element which encodes speakers’ assumptions about the hearer’s attitude towards the validity of that assertion. What generalizations can we draw from this case-study? What seems to be typical of modal particles is that they are routines which arise from argumentative moves concerning the felicity of speech acts. Speech acts have scope over entire sentences, rather than constituents or words. Thus, modal particles, as the outcomes of those routines, do not fuse with any single words or constituents. This sets them apart from core grammatical elements. As they are narrowly integrated into sentencestructure, modal particles form a tightly structured paradigm (Diewald 2013). However, since not every speech act needs additional fine-tuning, modal particles, unlike core grammatical categories, are never obligatory.

3.3 Discourse markers Discourse markers, like core grammatical items, but unlike modal particles, are widely attested cross-linguistically. As pointed out in the introduction, they indicate the function of a chunk of discourse, of variable length, within a wider stretch of text. As such, their scope is highly variable and determined by discourse structure,

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rather than grammatical structure. Discourse markers in contemporary Romance languages are drawn from a large variety of word classes. These include adverbs (French alors, Spanish bien), conjunctions (Italian ma), adjectives (Spanish bueno), and verbs, in particular imperatives (Italian guarda, Sp. oye, French voyez). Our case study is the Spanish discourse marker bien (a cognate of the French modal particle bien). In the literature on bien in contemporary Spanish, this discourse marker is often treated in conjunction with its near-synonym bueno (cf. Martín Zorraquino/Portolés 1999). Both items have in common that they are used at places where discourse coherence is fragile. In such contexts, bien does not signal approval of the previous speaker’s argumentation, as it would as an adverbial meaning ‘well’. Rather, it serves to close a topic addressed in the foregoing contribution. At the same time, it can be used to introduce a new topic. By using bien, the speaker signals that this switch takes place in a maximally cooperative fashion. This has been captured nicely by Serrano (1999, 121), who points out that both bien and bueno are devices for “negotiating” coherence. Thus, bien and bueno can even be used when the speaker disagrees with the previous speaker: Estoy harto pagado con el honor de servirte – dijo el astuto juglar. ‘I’m abundantly paid with the honor of serve you, said the cunning minstrel.’ Don Enrique: Bien, dejemos lisonjas que tú no crees ni yo tampoco; toma esas monedas. ‘Well, let’s leave the flatteries that neither me nor you believe; take these coins.’ (Larra, Doncel, 1834, CORDE)

(18) Ferrus:

In (18) bien indicates that the second speaker – who apparently disapproves of the first speaker’s proposal – wishes to put aside the entire topic while at the same time continuing a cooperative exchange. This analysis is in line with Hansen’s (1995; 1998a) account of the French discourse marker bon. According to her, bon is prototypically used to override the effect of some “undesirable” element in discourse or in the situation. This notion covers a variety of phenomena, including risks for discourse coherence. Now, what is the diachronic relation between the adverb bien ‘good, well’ and the homophonous discourse marker? The adverb bien ‘good, well’ is the source lexeme for a variety of linguistic expressions of different grammatical status. Many of these have in common that superficially positive evaluation is used for argumentation. One diachronic outcome of argumentation with adverbial bien is the formula está bien / bien está ‘it is good’. Originally, by virtue of its literal meaning, bien está expresses a positive evaluation, cf. (19):

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(19)

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Positive evaluation [. . .] aquellos niños que mueren, si mueren bautizados, bien está [. . .]. [. . .] those children who die, if they die baptized, it’s good.’ (San Vicente Ferrer, Serm., 1411, CORDE)

A natural reason for positive evaluation is the completion of a state of affairs to the speaker’s satisfaction. Thus, está bien / bien está ‘it is good’ expresses that the speaker considers an ongoing state of affairs as completed and that he wants it to stop. In example (20), this effect is doubled by basta ‘enough’. (20)

Completion Y trujeron ocho mil hombres de los pueblos y contáronlos y mostráronselos a Guzmán: “Basta; bien está.” ‘And they brought 8000 men from the villages, counted them and showed them to Guzmán: “Enough, it is good.”’ (Anonymous, Relación, c. 1541, CORDE)

Está bien / bien está in the sense ‘enough, it is good’ can be an efficient rhetorical device to conceal disagreement. In example (21), the second speaker (Constanza) diplomatically invites Simón, a stutterer, to stop reading aloud. (21) Concealed disagreement Simón: Ave María, gra. . . gra. . . tia ple. . . plena Do. . . Domi. . . nus te. . . tecum, benedi. ‘Hail Mary, fu. . . full of gra. . . grace. . . May the Lo. . . Lord be with you.’ Constanza: No leas más; bien está, porque el natural defecto no es culpa en ti. ‘Stop reading, it’s good, because that natural defect [i.e., your stutter] is not of your fault.’ (Lope de Vega, La niñez del Padre Rojas, 1598, CORDE) In this sense, bien está is sometimes used as part of an argumentative move “bien está p (más bien) q” ‘let’s stop doing p and (rather) start doing q’. In the following passage, Sulco cuts off the conversation and orders his servants to apprehend Leno. This brusque change of activity is introduced by bien está. (22)

Change of activity Sulco: ¿Y qué hazíades vos en mi pagiza? ‘And what were you doing in my haystack?’ Leno: Señor, entréme huyendo de un cabo de guayta. ‘Sir, I came in because I was fleeing from a sentinel officer.’

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Sulco:

Ora bien está. Átenle al brocal de aquel pozo y no le den de comer bocado hasta que venga quien le conozca. ‘It’s good / that’s enough now. Tie him to this well and don’t give him anything to eat until someone comes who knows him.’ (Lope de Rueda, Pasos, 1535, CORDE)

Accordingly, apart from positive evaluation, i.e. its literal meaning, the formula bien está has developed two main contexts of use, namely implicit disagreement and change of activity. Bien as a discourse marker has travelled an analogous pathway of diachronic change The crucial difference to bien está is that the latter may refer to any joint human activity, whereas bien as a discourse marker is specialized in the joint construction of discourse, cf. (18). This comparison brings to light another important property of discourse markers. Strictly speaking, discourse markers are just a subset of the routines human agents have at their disposal for the coordination of their joint activities. The same applies to other discourse markers such as now as in (23), which serves to introduce a new topic into the discourse. (23)

Now as a discourse marker Now the Acharnians are famous for their skill in slinging. (Jowett, tr., Thucydides Peloponnesian Wars, 1881, OED)

Its source lexeme, the time adverbial now, can likewise be used to announce new referents or new events, introducing an abrupt change in the sequence of activities projected by the participants: (24)

Temporal now And now, ladies and gentlemen, listen to this. (www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/podcast/transcripts/ouch_podcast6_ transcript.rtf)

Further cases in point are look and listen, which as discourse markers draw the attention of the hearer to the upcoming stretch of discourse, cf. (25). As free imperatives, however, they can be used to make the listeners aware of all kinds of suitable linguistic or extra-linguistic stimuli (cf. Brinton 2001; Waltereit 2002), cf. (26): (25)

Look as a discourse marker Look, we don’t have to sit here. We could go down to the beach. (Sime, Hunters Point, 1973, OED)

(26)

Look as a free imperative ‘Looka here, folkses,’ Jim Presley exclaimed. ‘Wese a half hour behind schedule.’ (Hurston, Mules & Men, 1935, OED)

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Further examples are French tiens ‘look’, Italian guarda ‘look’, Spanish mira ‘look’ and Portuguese olha ‘look’. Our analysis explains why imperative verb forms are an important diachronic source of discourse markers (Dostie 2004): after all, imperatives are conventionally specialized in coordinating activities. Conversation is a locally managed activity (Sacks/Schegloff/Jefferson 1974). After every move, the participants have to decide anew upon the question: “What are we going to do next?” Discourse markers of the type examined in this section are the routinized residue of negotiations about the next move. Since they have scope over discourse segments, discourse markers are only loosely integrated into syntactic structure; normally, they appear in the left or right periphery of the sentence which introduces the segment specified. Sometimes, they are integrated into peripheral positions within the sentence structure, for example as conjunctions and sentence adverbs. In other cases, they appear outside the sentence proper, mainly in the left or (more rarely) in the right periphery, as do bien, now and look in our examples (18), (23), (25). The potentially very wide and variable scope of discourse markers as well as their relative lack of syntactic integration explain why they do not fuse with words or constituents within the sentence. The reason for this is not quite the same as with modal particles, which are very well integrated into sentence structure, but just not enough to fuse with a given word or a syntactic construction.

4 Conclusion As we have shown, grammaticalization and “pragmaticalization” can be viewed as routinization of argumentative moves designed to solve different kinds of communicative problems. Core grammar, we have argued, is the routinized residue of argumentative moves concerning the relevance of (parts of) propositions. Modal particles, by contrast, are the residue of argumentation concerning the felicity of speech acts; and finally, discourse markers emerge from argumentative moves referring to the continuation of discourse-building. What these diachronic processes have in common is that they all are driven by language usage and that their outcomes bear the linguistic marks of routinization. For grammaticalization in the narrow sense, these have been captured by Lehmann’s (2002 [1982]) parameters. For the emergence of modal particles and of discourse markers, however, deviations from Lehmann’s (2002 [1982]) model are systematic in that they are inherently linked to the function of the respective routine. Moreover, we have argued that both from a synchronic and a diachronic point of view, the notion of “pragmaticalization” is not useful since it obscures the differences between modal particles and discourse markers while at the same time failing to capture the parallels that exist with respect to grammaticalization in the narrow sense.

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What do the three types of routinization have to do with the modules of language and the interfaces that exist between them? We have argued that the triggers for change are recurrent communicative functions. High frequency, in turn, leads to routinization of these items. Routinization, we would argue, is an aspect inherent to language use that affects all modules of grammar. First of all, at the semanticsdiscourse interface, the original inference wrapped up in the respective argumentative move turns into the new procedural function of the linguistic item. Secondly, at the syntax-discourse interface, the item undergoes reanalysis (Detges/Waltereit 2002). It loses its original syntactic compositionality. In generative approaches, this stage is cast as base-generation (“Merge”) as opposed to movement (van Gelderen 2008). By definition, routines are outside the focus of attention; at the interface between discourse and prosody / phonetics, the direct effect of this is loss of stress and a subsequent loss in phonetic substance. In generative approaches, this is captured by the notion that functional categories are “defective” at the interfaces. However, we would argue that grammaticalization as well as “pragmaticalization” are not triggered by change in a specific module of language or by language-internal economy principles, as has been put forward by many authors within and without Generative Grammar (Roberts/Roussou 2003; Longobardi 2001, criticized in Walkden 2012; van Gelderen 2008 and Fischer 2010). Rather, the concurrent changes are driven by overarching factors outside grammar proper. These are critical for successful communication: relevance of information, felicity of speech acts, and coherence of discourse. A final word on who the protagonists of these changes are. There is a longstanding debate in linguistics on whether grammatical change is instigated by young children, by adults, or through language contact. Our focus on (different types of) argumentative routines implies that grammaticalization and “pragmaticalization” are driven by fully competent (adult) language users. Reanalysis of these routines as grammatical items, however, may be brought about by language acquisition (Clark/Roberts 1993). Likewise, what is replicated in language contact (Heine/ Kuteva 2005) needn’t be grammatical items as such (cf. also Labov 2007). Rather, what is borrowed are argumentative routines (Detges 2004) that spread for their rhetoric efficiency.

5 References Abraham, Werner (1991), “The grammaticization of the German modal particles”, in: Elizabeth Closs Traugott/Bernd Heine (edd.), Approaches to grammaticalization, vol. 2: Types of grammatical markers, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 331–380. Auer, Peter/Günthner, Susanne (2005), “Die Entstehung von Diskursmarkern im Deutschen – ein Fall von Grammatikalisierung?”, in: Torsten Leuschner/Tanja Mortelmans/Sarah de Groodt (edd.), Grammatikalisierung im Deutschen, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 335–362.

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Kristine Eide

22 Changes at the syntax-discourse interface Abstract: This chapter outlines the general correlations between topics, given information and subjects on the one hand and focus, new information and objects on the other hand and discusses how information structure can be disentangled from syntax in historical texts. A description of how these concepts pan out in the Romance languages, focuses on the change from V2-like structures in the medieval stages of the languages to the different ways of structuring information structure and syntax in the modern languages. Finally, some of the changes are described in more detail. The chapter does not aim at giving a comprehensive description of all Romance languages and dialects, but rather an overview of some of the changes that have taken place at the interfaces between syntax and information structure, with examples mainly from Portuguese. Keywords: information structure, topic and focus, verb second, syntactic change, discourse configurations, left periphery

1 Introduction In the Romance languages, information structure has a semantic-pragmatic, a syntactic and a prosodic component, as described in the previous chapters (↗3 Prosodic phonology and its interfaces; ↗14 Information structure, prosody, and word order). In historical linguistics, all these components become less accessible due to the lack of native speakers. While older texts provide examples of sentences that are syntactically well formed as well as semantically and pragmatically well chosen, the traditional question-answer pairs that are used to tease out the grammaticality of utterances in specific contexts through the judgment of native speakers cannot be reproduced. Nor do we have access to the prosody normally connected to information structure, such as such as the placement of nuclear stress, the shape of pitch accents as well as the distribution and form of prosodic boundaries (phrasing). The study of information structure in historical linguistics therefore relies heavily on (i) what information we can extract from the context of a written text and (ii) assumptions we hold on information structure and its interaction with syntax based on studies of modern languages. In linguistics in general, and in historical linguistics in particular, it is essential to distinguish between relational and referential information structure (cf. Gundel 1988). Referential information structure refers to the relation between referents and

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the context, as manifested in such terms as givenness and newness. Relational information structure refers to the relation between sentence parts, primarily the distinction between topic, focus and background. The study of information structure and its interaction with syntax therefore comprises two information structural components. One is the ordering of the words in a sentence according to the referential status of a referent, and the other to the relational structure of the sentence itself. For modern languages, we typically make use of question-answer pairs in order to establish the syntax-informational structure interfaces. In the Portuguese example given in (1), the whole sentence is new information, in (2) the information focus is the direct object while subject and verb are given, in (3) the subject constitutes the new information and the object and the verb are old. The focused material is indicated by square brackets and the subscripted indices F (focus); the position of nuclear (or: sentential) stress is signaled by capitalizing the respective syllable. (1) Por. Que aconteceu? ‘What happened?’

[F O João comeu o BOlo]. ‘John ate the cake.’

(2) Por. Que comeu o João? ‘What did John eat?’

O João comeu [F o BOlo]. ‘John ate the cake.’

(3) Por. Quem comeu o bolo? O bolo comeu [F o JOÃO]. ‘Who ate the cake?’ ‘John ate the cake.’ Referential information structure can be teased out from older texts through the context. If a referent has been mentioned in the preceding text, it is regarded as given, if it has not, it is regarded as new. In (4), the subject a mermaid is new information, whereas in the continuation of the story (5) she is old or given, since this pronoun refers to the aforementioned mermaid who is being picked up again. As for Neptune in (5), this referent has a status somewhere in between given and new. While Neptune is being introduced for the first time in this text, and hence qualifies as new information, it is also a well-known Roman god, which, in some circles at least, is part of a general, shared knowledge of the world.1

1 There are several intermediate information structural categories on the given-new axis, such as generally accessible information (God, the sun etc.) and inferred referents, such as body parts (all people have hands). In this chapter, I will mainly use the core categories old and new. For an overview of the information structural categories used in the ISWOC (Information Structure and Word Order Change in Romance and Germanic languages) and PROIEL (Pragmatic resources in Old IndoEuropean Languages) projects cf. Haug/Eckhoff/Welo (2014). Other information structure annotation schemes, such as the Pentaset in Nijmegen, described in Komen et al. (2014) have used different intermediate categories. The different annotation schemes seem to yield mostly the same results with regard to the given-new categories (cf. Taylor/Pintzuk 2014).

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(4) Suddenly, a mermaid emerged from the seaweed. (5)

She was looking for Neptune.

Relational information structure is more complex, not only because of the unclear notions of topic and focus, but also since the identification of the topic-focus partition often relies on prosodic features to which we have no direct access in ancient texts. Topics are traditionally defined as “what the sentence is about” (Hockett 1958, 201) and Focus, as “the information in the sentence that is assumed by the speaker not to be shared by him and the hearer” (Jackendoff 1972, 230). In its relational sense, focus has been defined as “the semantic component of a pragmatically structured proposition whereby the assertion differs from the presupposition” (Lambrecht 1994, 213).2 There is a correlation between topics, subjects and given information on the one hand and (information) focus, objects and new information on the other: Subjects are likely to be given information and hence topics, objects are likely to be foci and new information. This correlation is not absolute, however, since topical subjects may contain new information and objects can be old information and topics. In historical linguistics these correlations are nevertheless useful for finding the main patterns of how information structure interacts with syntax. Additionally, the information structure of a sentence, whether we are looking at the referential or the relational type, is strongly connected to prosody. Information focus, which is typically relational, will carry the most prominent stress in an unmarked sentence (nuclear stress). Elements that are contrastive focus or topics may have their own particular phonetic expression in modern languages (↗3 Prosodic phonology and its interfaces; ↗14 Information structure, prosody, and word order), a feature which seems to be universal (Gundel 1988), and we assume that this was true for Old Romance as well. This assumption is important to consider in the study of texts, and of older texts in particular. In modern written texts, prosodic prominence is conventionally marked through italics or capital letters. A writer without access to this type of typographical marking is likely to use word order to mark contrastivity in the written language even though both prosodic prominence and word order can express contrastivity in the spoken language. Changes in prosody, sentence intonation and/or syntax will therefore affect the organization of information structure and vice versa. A change from an SOV language, such as Latin, to SVO languages, such as the Romance languages, comprises not only syntactic changes but also prosodic changes (neutral sentence stress will fall on the canonical object position) and therefore changes at the syntax-information structure interface. The question then is what factors drive such a change and how does a change in one of these factors affect the others? 2 In Lambrecht’s terms, “Focus, like Topic, is a relational pragmatic category” (1994, 209).

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In section 2 I will outline the major changes that have taken place in Romance word order at the syntax/information structure interface, and in section 3, I will present some case studies of changes that have taken place. But first, I will give an outline of the information structure in Old Romance and its interplay with syntax.

2 Old and modern Romance syntax and information structure In the two following subsections, I use the characteristics of the left and the right periphery in Modern Romance as a point of reference for the description of Old Romance and the changes that have taken place. The most prominent change at the syntax-information structural interface is the position of subjects. Subjects with no particular information value (i.e. they are neither topics nor foci) go from occurring postverbally, directly after the verb, to appear in the canonical preverbal position. As for objects, all the old Romance languages are VO languages3, with corresponding clause final information focus configuration. Like modern Romance languages, focused objects can also occur in other positions, but usually with a contrastive, emphatic value. Additionally, some older varieties seemed to allow information focus in positions that are not generally allowed today.

2.1 ‘Verb second’ and the pragmatic notions associated with the left periphery in Old Romance On their way from Latin to the modern varieties, the Romance languages have passed through a stage characterized by numerous verb-subject inversions of the following type, where a sentence-initial XP is immediately followed by the verb, which in turn is followed by the subject, as in (6–8): (6) OFr. (13th century, Eustace, VIII, 14) le deable qui t’a longuement deceu. Or [V as] [S tu] vencu deceiveP T C P Now have you defeatP T C P the devil who you-has long ‘Now you have defeated the devil who has deceived you for a long time.’ (7) OPor. (13th/14th century, VS, Fol.125r) tal pẽna [V merecem] [S os matadores e os cõsentidores] such punishment deserve the killers and the accomplices ‘Such punishment is what murderers and their accomplices deserve.’ 3 Although, cf. also Zaring (2011) for Early Old French as an OV language, Bossong (2006) for VSO in Early Old Spanish, Cruschina (2011) for Early Sardinian.

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(8) OSp. (12th century, EE, I Fol 3r) libro. Tod esto [V cuenta] [S moysen] en este sobredicho all this tell Moses in this above-sayP TC P book ‘Moses recounts all this in the above-mentioned book.’ This pattern has been attributed to a common V2 structure in the Old Romance languages, a hypothesis which has been more successful in explaining the structures of some languages than others and which is highly disputed.4 The main question seems to be whether XVS structures are syntactically driven, or if this word order can be derived from information structure alone. All Old Romance languages allow V3 and V1 orders, although some languages to a greater extent than others (cf. Sitaridou 2012 for a quantitative comparison between Old French, Old Spanish, Old Portuguese and Old Occitan). In this chapter, I will not delve further into the discussion as to whether the Old Romance languages should be classified as V2 languages or not, but focus on the information-structural properties of the arguments in different syntactic positions, starting with descriptions of the left periphery in modern Romance. To account for the syntactic possibilities of modern Romance, several cartographic approaches have been proposed for the left periphery of these languages. The left periphery of modern Italian has been outlined in the following manner by Rizzi (1997, 297; ↗14 Information structure, prosody, and word order): (9)

[ForceP [TopP* [FocP [TopP* [FinP [IP . . .

The syntactic projections in this hierarchy are somewhat related to informationstructural properties. Each syntactic projection is identified through its own syntactic reflexes further down in the structure. Rizzi’s structure in (9) has been modified by Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl (2007) to identify three different types of topics for Italian (10), each associated with a particular intonation.5 These types occur in hierarchical order:

4 For a V2 classification of Old Romance in general, cf. Salvi (2004) and Benincà (2006), for the opposite view, cf. e.g. Kaiser (2002) and Sitaridou (2012). For language specific V2 classifications cf. among others Thurneysen (1892), Adams (1989), Vance (1997), Cardinaletti/Roberts (2002) for Old French; Ribeiro (1995) for Old Portuguese; Galves/Galves (1995) for Classical Portuguese; Fontana (1997) for Old Spanish; Poletto (2014) for Old Italian. Against a V2 hypothesis: Fischer (2002; 2010) for Old Catalan; Petrova/Rinke (2014) for Old French; Fiéis (2003), Rinke (2009) for Old Portuguese; Eide (2010) for Classical Portuguese; Sitaridou (2011) for Old Spanish. 5 According to Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl (2007), all topic constituents in Italian are made prominent through pitch accents: a shift topic introduces a new topic or changes the topic and has an L*+H contour, contrastive topics have an H* contour, while familiar, or continuous, topics have an L* contour; cf. also Pešková (2015, 229–235).

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(10) Shifting topic[+aboutness] > contrastive topic > familiar topic (Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl 2007, 89) Shifting topics in this hierarchy are clitic left dislocated topics (CLLD) as in (11)–(13). While most Romance languages have a preverbal corresponding clitic in this structure, the clitic in the Portuguese example (13) is enclitic to the verb. (11) It.

Il tuo libro, lo ho letto. the your book, it have1S G read ‘Your book, I have read (it).’

(12) Sp.

Estos libros, Juan los leyó ayer. these books Juan them read.3SG yesterday ‘These books are the ones Juan read yesterday.’

(13) Por. O boloi, comeu-oi o João. the cake ate-it the John ‘The cake, John ate it.’ Typical of Portuguese is also topicalization without the resumptive clitic, as in (14). Whether the clitic is resumptive as in (13) or not, as in (15), the clitic pronoun follows the verb. (14) Por. O bolo comeu o João. the cake ate the John ‘JOHN ate the cake’ (15) Por. A prenda deu-lhe o Paulo. the present gave-him the Paulo ‘PAUL gave him the present.’ Various types of foci have also been identified. Apart from information focus, which was described in the introduction, there is also contrastive focus as well as what is sometimes referred to as evaluative exclamatives and verum focus. Contrastive focus fronting is typical of Romance languages such as Italian, Rumanian, Catalan and Spanish (Barbosa 2000, 33), but very restricted in Portuguese where there is variation as to the acceptance of example (16b) as grammatical (Costa/Martins 2011, 218). In cases of contrastive focus, a clitic will precede the verb. In (16a, b), the contrastive focus is marked by capital letters. (16) a. It.

IL TUO LIBRO ho letto (, non il suo). YOURBOOK I have read (not his)

(Rizzi 1997, 286)

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b. Por. A PRENDA lhe trouxe o Pedro. the present to-him brought the Pedro ‘Peter brought him the PRESENT.’ (Someone else brought the wine.) There is some similarity between contrastive focus and the so-called evaluative exclamatives, such as in (17a, b). This type of fronted element has sometimes been referred to as focus, but it does not share the other properties of a fronted contrastive focus (Costa/Martins 2011). It displays the same clitic placement, but unlike fronted, contrastive foci, evaluative exclamatives allow both pre- and postverbal subjects, and they cannot be interpreted as cleft sentences. (17) Por. a. Muito whiskey [S o capitão] [V bebeu!] much whiskey the captain drank ‘The captain drank a lot of Whiskey!’ b. Muito whiskey [V bebeu] [S o capitão!] Much whiskey drank the captain ‘The captain drank a lot of Whiskey!’

(Costa/Martins 2011, 228)

Turning now to Old Romance, Rizzi’s (1997) hierarchy of the left periphery has been modified by Benincà (2006, 55) as in (18). (18) ForceP > FrameP > TopP > FocP > FinP In this hierarchy, elements in FrameP and TopP are base generated while elements in FocP are operator moved. Topics can only occur to the left of FocP. FrameP typically includes hanging topics and scene setting adverbs, while clitic left dislocated topics and list topics are in TopP. Clitic resumption of a DP in FrameP does not have case matching with the DP.6 Leaving aside the distinction between FrameP and TopP, the following scheme captures the correspondence between the syntactic projections and clitic positions, where # marks the clause boundary, or, in generative terms, what is base generated and what is moved. The positions in the hierarchy are reflected in the syntax of the clitics in the following way: (19) a. TopXPi # b.

V-Cli

# FocXP Cl V

c. TopXPi # FocXP Cli V 6 Hanging topics are typical of direct speech, and hence not so common in older texts. The following example is from (European) Portuguese: A Maria, encontrei ontem aquele amigo dela que faz cinema. yesterday that friend of-her who make3S G cinema The Maria met1S G Mary, yesterday I met that friend of hers who makes films. (Duarte 1987, 73)

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According to Benincà, the FocP in (18) contains “emphatic or unmarked focus, a ‘relevant’ theme or an anaphoric theme. They do not seem pragmatically marked, as in modern Italian and other modern Romance languages” (Benincà 2006, 65).7 Typically, short adverbs, like OFr si ‘so’, lors ‘then’ and ainz ‘rather’, as well as preposed objects without resumptive clitics, occur here. It is particularly in this respect, that the FocP does not correspond to the denomination of the projection, rather it can be understood as a syntactic position with specific syntactic reflexes. An element in FocP is followed by proclisis (20)–(21). (20) OPor. (14th century, CGE, 5.Fol 4a) poserom nome [FocP assi] lhe thus to-him put3P L . P S T name ‘thus they gave him name’ (21) OFr. (13th century, Tristan, 1b, 23, p. 40) te fais je, biaus amis. [FocP Tel don] such favour to-you make1S G I, good friend ‘I bestow upon you this favor, good friend.’ An XP in TopP or higher, is followed by enclisis. An object in TopP, unlike one in FocP will thus have a resumptive clitic which is enclitic to the verb (22): (22) OSp. (12th century, EE, Fol 5v) e alosi que nolo querien fazer mataualosi. and to-those who not-it want do kill-them ‘And those who did not want to do it, they killed.’ If, however, the FocP is occupied by another element, proclisis follows (23): (23) OFlorentine (12th century, Novellino, Benincà 2006, 73) sai Pregoti che mi dichi come queste cosei tu lei how these things you them know2S G pray1S G .you that to-me tell ‘I pray you that you tell me how you know these things.’ While relational information structure is often linked to syntactic positions or projections, such as topic phrase and focus phrase, the pragmatic content of these projections may vary from language to language. For example, a focus position in the left periphery may be restricted to contrastive focus or it may also include information focus (cf. ↗14 Information structure, prosody, and word order). The information value 7 But cf. Remberger (2010) on information focus in the left periphery in modern Sardinian.

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hierarchies of the left periphery of Old Spanish and Old Portuguese have been outlined as in (24) and (25), and display similar, but not entirely equal patterns to the one proposed by Benincà (2006): (24) Spanish (Sitaridou 2011, 178) ForceP > TopP > FocusPContrastive > FinP > FocusPinfo > TP > vP (25) Portuguese (Martins 2011, 141) Comp > topic > focus > clitic > scrambled/interpolated XPs > verb The differences we observe are as follows: (i) preverbal information focus (FocusPinfo) is allowed in Old Spanish (as well as some dialects of Old Italian, cf. Poletto 2014, 9– 10), Cruschina (2011), whereas Old Portuguese does not allow this.8 (ii) In Old Portuguese there is evidence for a non-focused preverbal scrambling position such as (26) where elements are placed between the clitic (me) and the verb (disse). According to Martins (2011), this position is reserved for elements which need to avoid a sentencefinal focus stress, in order to create the proper focus configurations in a sentence. (26) OPor. (13/14th century, VS, Fol.77v) depois que me o sancto bispo Nono estas cousas disse bishop Nono these things sayP S T after that meC L . DAT the holy ‘After the holy bishop Nono had said these things to me . . .’

8 Although according to Martins (2011), the interpolated XPs in (25) are neutral with regard to information structure, and “a majority of the relevant SOV sentences found in Old Portuguese texts undoubtedly convey broad information focus” (151). However, the examples of interpolated DPs in Martins (2011) do not correspond to new information pure and simple, but are often deictic and/or old information. Adjectives and participles which are found interpolated seem to correspond more to an emphatic reading, typical of stylistic fronting as argued by Fischer (2010) for French, Catalan and Spanish. Consider the following example, where the interpolated element is neither old in the sense that it has been mentioned before in the text nor backgrounded, but where the speaker refers to something the Lord has done for him in a dream and hence part of a shared knowledge. Both the quantifier tantas as well as the gratitude which is expressed in this address to God, point to emphatic fronting more than anything else. OPor. (13/14th century, VS Fol.125r) me tantas Gram piedade fezeste[s] sobre mỹ senhor e me Lord and to-me so_manyPL . F big mercy do2S G . P S T on penas e tantas tribulaçõoes mostrastes punishmentPL . F and so_manyPL . F afflictionPL . F show2S G . PS T e de todas me livrastes. and from allPL . F to-me deliver2SG . PST ‘Great mercy did you bestow upon me, my Lord, and many were the punishments and so much affliction which you showed me, and you freed me from them all.’

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This type of scrambling to a preverbal position is not found to the same extent in the other Romance languages, and even though there are cases of interpolation in Old Spanish as well, they are far less frequent and more restricted with regard to the type of element that can occur (cf. Castillo Lluch 1996, 305). Another difference between the proposed hierarchies, is that while the focus position proposed by Benincà (2006) and by Martins (2011), includes contrastive focus, Sitaridou (2011) proposes two different focus projections in Old Spanish, one for contrastive and one for information focus, exemplified in (27). (27) OSp. (13th century, EE, Fol. 3v) [S brutho] [O Bretanna] poblo Britain populated Brutus ‘Brutus settled Britain.’ The object of this sentence, Bretanna, is a new referent which is being introduced in the text. However, the interpretation of it as simply new information is not unproblematic: In addition to being a proper name of a place one might consider generally known, even at the time the text was written, it can also have a list interpretation, since the previous text lists different places in Europe and who populated them. The information value of the constituents in (26) and of the interpolated elements described by Martins (2011) is still not quite adequately described, and the absence of clitics in (27) leave us with little to go by in terms of syntactic clues. The syntactic projections TopP and FocP do not necessarily correspond to the relational or referential information structure of a given sentence.

2.2 The middle field and the right periphery Information focus, which is connected to the introduction of new referents and which has a prosodic prominence in the sentence, usually, but not always, corresponds to the VO configuration and is thus sentence-final in the modern Romance languages. This was also the case in Old Romance, with the exceptions mentioned in the previous section. Again, while the correlation between new information and focus stress is not a necessary one, the sentence-final position has been argued to carry the unmarked sentence stress (cf. Martins 2011), although this seems to be a stronger rule in some languages than others. In a study of a parallel Old Portuguese and an Old Spanish text (Eide 2014), even though information focus appears at the end of the sentence, examples where the two texts display different word orders, Old Portuguese consistently arranges the arguments according to information focus at the very end of the sentence, whereas Spanish does not. One reason could be that in Old Portuguese, focus fronting was restricted to contrastivity, discourse-linked elements and, seemingly to emphatic focus. Old Spanish on the other hand allowed for new information

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to occur in preverbal position, with the same syntactic reflexes as that of contrastive focus (cf. Sitaridou 2011). This can be observed in examples from a parallel corpus from Eide (2014). The subject las montannas e los mares / os mares es as serras in (28) and the object estorias in (29) are both new information9, and while they are preposed in the Spanish text, in the Portuguese version they occur sentence-final. (28) a. OSp. (12th century, EE, Fol. 7v) los mares] la [V cercan] assi cuemo [S las montannas e thus as the mountains and the seas it surround3P L ‘like the mountains and the seas surround it’ b. OPor. (14th century, CGE, Tit.12, Fol. 9c) [S os mares e as serras] assy como a [V cercã] thus like it surround3P L the seas and the hills ‘like the seas and the hills surround it’ (29) a. OSp. (12th century, EE, Fol. 4v) e deste fablaron todos los sabios que [O estorias [V fizieron] make3P L . P S T and of-this speak3P L . P S T allP L the wise who storyP L ‘and of this (man) spoke all the wise men who wrote stories’ b. OPor. (14th century, CGE, Tit 5 Fol. 4b) e deste fallarom todos os sabedores and of-this speak3P L . P S T allP L the wise que [V composeron] [O estorias] who compose3P L . P S T storyP L ‘and of this (man) spoke all the wise men who wrote stories’ Old Romance languages thus allowed for a variety of word orders. From the point of view of information structure, cross-linguistically, there was a topic-comment structure, with sentence-final information focus, very much like in modern Romance languages. However, some syntactic changes correlate with changes in information structure. While SVO orders were common, the most prominent difference from the modern languages was the number of subject-verb inversions: Subjects occurred post-verbally in contexts that would not be allowed today. With regards to referential information structure, subjects that contained old information could occur post-

9 Note that a DP can serve to introduce a new referent in a story. The context of (28) is as follows: Depues que rocas esto ouo fecho. començo de uenir aparte doccident. fasta que llego a espanna e andudola toda enderredor assi cuemo las montannas e los mares la cercan. / Despois que el rey Rotas esto fez, veosse viindo de terra en terra ataa que chegou em Espanha e andou toda a terra em redor assy como a cercã os mares e as serras. ‘After Rocas had done this, he turned westwards until he reached Spain. He followed it / the mountains and coastline all the way around it’ (lit. ‘He went all the way around it (Spain), like the seas and the hills surround it.’).

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verbally in an XVSX position, either signaling that they were non-topical (cf. Rinke 2009; Petrova/Rinke 2014) as in (30) and (31) or that they were contrastive. (30) OFr. (13th century, Eustace, VI, 1) lors descendi Placidas de la Montaigne then descend3SG . P S T Placidas from the mountain ‘then Placidas descended from the mountain’ (31) OPor. (14th century, CGE, Tit. 2 Fol. 2b) e porẽ destroy Deus as suas maas entẽçõões and therefore destroy3S G . P S T God theP L . F POSS . PL . F illP L . F intentions e conffondehos ẽna linguagen and confound3 S G . P S T- them in-theF speech ‘and for this reason God destroyed their ill intentions and confounded them in the speech’ As for subjects in V(O)S orders, they were mostly new information as shown in the following examples. (32) OPor. (14th century, CGE, Tit. 4 Fol. 3d) Ainda hi ha outra terra a que chamam Luçena Lucena even there is other land to which call3P L e [V poseron]lhe assi [O nome] [S hũas gẽtesnew and put3P L . P S T-to-them thus name some peoples que a poboarom a que chamarõ Luxius] which it populated to whom called Luxius ‘There is also another land, which is called Lucena, and some peoples who populated it, who were called Luxius, gave name to it (the land). (33) OSp. (13th century, General Estoria, Fol. 73v) Andados sessaenta annos de la trasmigracion [V mato] [O al Reyold ciro] yearP L from the move kill3S G . P S T to-the king Cyrus goP T C P. P L sixty [S thamarisnew reyna de las Messagetas o amazanas.] Thamaria Queen of the Messagetas or Amazons. ‘Sixty years after the move, Thamaris, Queen of the Messagetas or the Amazons, killed King Cyrus.’ The changes that took place from Old to Modern Romance can be summarized in Table 1, which shows the general patterns of the change in information structure, although there is language specific variation which is not captured by this table.

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Table 1: Information structural value of subject and object arguments in Old and Modern Romance. The table shows general developments; not all languages allow all word orders. Cf. footnotes for further specifications.

Word order

Old Romance subject value

VSO10

old/new disambiguating subject pronouns ‘non-topical’ subjects

VOS

new

SVO

old (new12) topic

SOV

old topic

OSV

old (rare)

OVS

new (old when contrastive) contrastive/narrow focus

Modern Romance subject value

Old Romance object value

Modern Romance object value

new

new (old11 ) information focus

new (old11) information focus

New

old/new

old (new)

topic or non-topic disambiguation

new (old)

new (old)

N/A

non-focus14

N/A

old/new13

topic new (old when contrastive) contrastive focus

old (new15) topic/deictic/ contrastive focus

old (new16) topic/deictic/ contrastive focus

10 For Early Old Spanish (Bossong 2006), Early Sardinian (Cruschina 2011) and early Modern Romanian (Alboiu/Hill/Sitaridou 2015) VSO appears to be the canonical word order, and available in other varieties of Old Romance, such as Old Catalan (Fischer 2010). VSO is available in Modern Spanish (Zubizarreta 1998), where VS is more frequent than in the other Romance languages (Bossong 2006). Portuguese (Costa 2004) and Romanian (Motapanyane 1989) also allow for VSO, while this word order is not good in Italian (Belletti 2004) and Catalan (Vallduví 2002). 11 Old when scrambled as in VSOXP. 12 New information in languages that allowed for new information preverbally. 13 Recent empirical work on focus and prosody in Spanish has shown that narrow (information) focus on the subject is acceptable, or even preferred, with SVO order, at least in some varieties of Spanish (cf. Gabriel 2010 and Hoot 2014 for Argentinean and Mexican Spanish, respectively). In Modern Brazilian Portuguese, too, SVO is a felicitous word order for narrow focus on the subject; compare (BPor.) [F O laDRÃO] levou o seu laptop vs. (EPor.) Levou o seu laptop [F O laDRÃO] ‘The THIEF took your laptop’ (Kato/Ribeiro 2009, 127). In other Romance languages, narrow information focus on the subject is preferably rendered by a cleft (as in French) or by sentence-final positioning of the subject (↗14 Information structure, prosody, and word order). 14 This is the case in Portuguese. 15 Old Spanish (Sitaridou 2011), Old Italian (Poletto 2014), Old Romance in general: “The hypothesis that the Focus field can host various kinds of Foci is very relevant for medieval Romance languages. This part of the structure appears to be more easily activated in medieval languages than in modern Italian, so that we find there not only emphatic focus or wh-elements but also less marked elements (an identificational, informational, or unmarked focus; an anaphoric operator; or even elements with the pragmatic characteristics of a topic ‘put into relief’)” (Benincà 2006, 56). 16 Modern Sardinian has new information focus in the left periphery (cf. Remberger 2010).

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Schematically, the information value of the postverbal subject changed from allowing old, non-contrastive information to not allowing old non-contrastive information. Preverbal subjects, which were mainly old information and topics, contain new information in the modern languages. During the centuries that passed from the evidence we have through medieval texts until the modern Romance languages, most traces of these V2-like structures were lost. While Italian, Spanish and Portuguese have a word order which is partially structured by information structure, French on the other hand has developed a strict SV order and uses cleft sentences as a means of marking narrow focus on the subject, where the other languages may use word order configurations. On the other hand, French also displays instances of focus-induced word order variation in double object constructions, ↗14 Information structure, prosody, and word order. Summing up, the two main developments that have occurred are: – Information focus in the left periphery has stronger restrictions in the modern languages. New information objects are sentence-final, unless they are accompanied by other pragmatic notions such as contrast or topicality. – Postverbal subjects are no longer background information/non-topic.

3 Case studies The changes that have been described at the syntax-information structural interface are the result of a comparison between Old and Modern Romance languages. More detailed studies of how the changes took place have been described for some of the changes in language specific studies. In the following, two such changes will be outlined in a more detailed manner.17

3.1 Objects and focus: The loss of IP scrambling in Portuguese18 As was outlined in section 2, clitics are used as a diagnostic for identifying syntactic positions in the left periphery. Simplifying the hierarchies proposed by Benincà (2006) and others, the structure of the left periphery and the position of clitics can be summed up in the following scheme, where # marks a clause boundary. Whatever is before # is outside the clause, or, in generative terms, base generated, and whatever is after #, is within the clause, or, in generative terms, operator moved. Clitics 17 There are other case studies, such as Muller (2009) for cleft sentences in Middle French and Gabriel/ Rinke (2010) on the evolution of clitic doubling and the way this is guided by information structure in Old Spanish. 18 Old Portuguese roughly refers to Portuguese until the beginning of the 16th century, Classical Portuguese from 16th–18th century, Modern Portuguese from the 19th century onwards.

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(Cl) are found pre- and post-verbally (34), and preverbal clitics are either adjacent to the verb as in (35) and (36), or may occur with an interpolated XP between the clitic and the verb as in (37). (34) Topici # Verb-Cli

(left-dislocated topic)

(35) Focus Cl19 V

(focus movement)

(36) Topici # Focus Cli V

(left dislocation + focus movement)

(37) XP Cl XP V

(interpolation)

As previously described, enclisis is used to identify a topic position, proclisis is used to identify a (contrastive) focus, but the information structural value of the interpolated XP in (36) is somewhat uncertain. This structure is not very common and especially not with full DPs, in Old Romance, with the exception of Old Portuguese, where examples such as (38) are not infrequent. (38) OPor. (13th century [1296], CHP, 055 Notarial text from Extremadura, Martins 2002, 234) vy͂a] enbargar Sse pela uẽtujra [Cl uos] [S alguẽ] [O a dita if by-the chance youDAT someone the sayP T C P vineyard blocks ‘if by chance someone blocks the aforementioned vineyard from you’ In Old Portuguese, SOV orders frequently occurred in subordinate clauses,20 unlike Modern Portuguese, where SOV is the only word order which is not felicitous except when the subject and the object are left dislocated. Martins (2011), attributes this word order to the same type of ‘avoid focus’ scrambling that has been described within an OT framework for Modern European Portuguese (Costa 2004). When the object is in this position, it escapes the neutral sentence nuclear stress. The primary function of information scrambling is thus to give a sentence the proper informationstructural configuration. In Modern Portuguese, the contextually given object in (39) is situated to the left of the sentence adverb bem ‘well’, avoiding sentence-final stress, whereas the new object in (40) is sentence-final and receives nuclear stress. (39) Context: ‘How is John’s French?’ O João fala francês bem. ‘John speaks French well.’

19 This is not a resumptive clitic as in (24) and (33), but typically a reflexive or a dative clitic. 20 According to Martins (2011, 145), the low frequency of scrambling to a preverbal position in main clauses is due to the verb moving to a higher position than the scrambled object.

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(40) Context: ‘What language does John speak well?’ O João fala bem francês. ‘John speaks well French.’

(Costa 2004, 40–41)

Arguments that are not focus will avoid the sentence-final focus stress. Given the correlation between new information and focus, new information is likely to be sentence-final, and old information is likely to avoid this position. Additionally, scrambling of an indefinite object gives it a specific interpretation (42): (41) Frite bem um quilo de batatas. ‘Fry well (=thoroughly) one kilo of potatoes.’ (42) Frite um quilo de batatas bem. ‘Fry one kilo of potatoes well (=thoroughly). (Fry the other kilo of potatoes less.)’

(Cardoso 2010, 145)

The same ‘avoid focus’ tactic was available in Old Portuguese (cf. Martins 2011), but with two landing positions for the scrambled XPs, one preverbal (middle scrambling/ IP-scrambling) which is not found in Modern Portuguese, rendering the SOV order (43), one postverbal, but not sentence-final, as in the SVO sentence in (44). (43) OPor. (14th century, CGE, Tit. 6, Fol. 5a) quando Hercoles esto ouvyo when Hercules this hear3S G . P S T ‘when Hercules heard this’ (44) OPor. (13th/14th century, VS Fol.127v) e os dyaboos logo cercarõ a alma immediately surround3P L . P S T theF soul and theP L . M devilP L de todallas partes from all-theF sideP L ‘and the devilsold immediately surrounded the soulold from all sides’ According to Martins (2002), this preverbal ‘avoid focus’ position was lost in the transition from Old to Classical Portuguese (around the 16th century). Syntactically, it was situated immediately before the verb, as can be observed in sentences with proclisis, where the object occurred between the clitic and the verb. There were seemingly no constraints as to what type of element could occur in this position, since there are examples of interpolation with all types of arguments and with no restrictions on constituent orders since both Cl-SOV and Cl-OSV are found. Martins argues that this type of movement can be analyzed as movement to multiple specifier positions allowed in AgrS (Martins 2002, 240). The loss of SOV can be seen as

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a simplification of the clausal architecture, which ceases to allow for multiple specifiers in AgrS. The loss of such a position entailed that the word order SOV was no longer acceptable in Classical Portuguese and objects that are merely old information avoid the sentence final focus position by scrambling to a postverbal position, without the option to go higher. Preverbal objects are thus either topicalized or contrastive, not simply ‘non-focused’, as Martins argued was the case in Old Portuguese. This syntactic simplification consolidated the frequency of the SVO order and left Portuguese with only one option for defocussing.

3.2 Topics and subjects One important fact to consider is that the development from VS to SV was not necessarily a linear development where subjects gradually became more and more preverbal. In fact, in the history of Portuguese, Schellert (1958) shows a rise in postverbal subjects from the oldest texts to 16th century texts, and it is in the 16th century texts we find the largest proportion of post verbal subjects in the history of this language. The percentage of post verbal subjects dropped again from the 17th to the middle of the 18th century (de Sousa 2004). In Old Portuguese, as in the other Romance languages, the position of the subject was determined by its information value along the lines we have described earlier, with postverbal contrastive or disambiguating subjects, and in thetic sentences, however most instances of VS orders can be accounted for by unaccusativity (cf. Fiéis 2003). While transitive and unergative verbs have subjects that are external arguments to the verb, subjects of unaccusative verbs are internal arguments to the verb (Levin/Rappaport Hovav 1995), and hence, being more object-like, more likely to appear in post verbal position in a VO language. In Modern Portuguese, new information subjects are found in both the SV and the VS configuration with unaccusative verbs in broad focus sentences (45). (45)

Context: ‘What happened?’ EPor. a. Chegou o João. come3S G . P S T the John b. O João chegou. the John come3S G . P S T ‘John came.’

(Costa 2004, 108)

Subjects of unaccusative verbs do not comply with the general correlation subject – topic – given information, since unaccusative verbs are often used to introduce new referents in a story. In a discourse-driven language, with sentence-final information focus, such subjects are therefore likely to remain in their base position below the

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verb for two reasons: (i) Their object-like status in the argument structure may make them behave more like objects; (ii) their information status as ‘new’ will keep them in a sentence-final position. When preverbal, new information subjects of unaccusative verbs become unmarked, their position cannot be discourse driven, but must result from a syntactically driven SV order. In Modern Portuguese, we find preverbal subjects in thetic sentences as well as subjects that contain new information appearing in a preverbal position purely on syntactic grounds. Subjects that contained old information could appear both pre-and post-verbally, while subjects that contained new information remained in a position below the verb. Typically, this involved thetic or event-reporting sentences, i.e. sentences without a topic (cf. Petrova/Rinke 2014) and sentences with unaccusative verbs (cf. Fiéis 2003 for Old Portuguese; Eide 2010 for Classical Portuguese). Contrastive subjects were usually postverbal, while the contrastive focus position in the left periphery was used mainly for non-subject arguments (cf. Eide/Sitaridou 2014). This pattern is not unlike the pattern we find in Modern Portuguese, with the following exceptions: (i) Old information subjects do not occur post-verbally in Modern Portuguese (except when contrastive), (ii) the preverbal ‘avoid focus’ position described in section 3.1 has been lost. The structure of contrastive sentences remains more or less the same (OVS order for some speakers, cf. example 16), topics are still left-peripheral and objects scramble to avoid focus stress, but remain in an ‘avoid focus’ position below the verb. While the subject position was predominantly preverbal in Old Portuguese, and VS orders were found with unaccusative verbs (cf. Fiéis 2003), contrastive or disambiguating subjects, and in thetic sentences, VS was much more frequent in Classical Portuguese, regardless of the verb class. With regard to the referential information structure, Classical Portuguese, like Old Portuguese, allowed old information subjects to occur post verbally, although it is not clear whether the same restrictions regarding theticity applied or, if VS could be the result of the V2 structure in Classical Portuguese proposed by Galves/Galves (1995). Galves/de Sousa (2005) propose that preverbal subjects in Classical Portuguese were either contrastive topics (similar to list interpretations) and generated outside the clause, forming their own intonational phrase as in (46a), or they moved to a topic/focus position within the clause as in (46b), where the exact information value of the Topic-Focus is not clear. (46) Classical Portuguese a. [sContrastive Topic] # Verb-Cl b. # [sTopic-Focus] Cl Verb In other words, the subjects in the examples cited by Galves/de Sousa (2005) such as (47), express explicit contrast (‘X did A, but Y did B’), and the prosodic prominence normally associated with contrastive focus is not necessarily present.

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(47) Classical Portuguese (17th century, Padre António Vieira, Sermões p. 74, Galves/de Sousa 2005, 136) porque as figuras vão-se e o teatro fica Because the characters go3P L-REFL and the theatre stay3S G ‘because the characters leave and the theatre remains’ A transition from a TVX structure to an SVO structure implies a reanalysis of the preverbal topic position to a canonical subject position. A reanalysis of this kind seems logical, given the correlation between topics, subjects and old information, although in a pro-drop language such as Portuguese, subject topics are usually phonetically null (pro) and hence without phonological form. Eide (2010) argues that phonological weakening can also apply to informationstructural markers and that this was the case when the topic position was reanalyzed. Topics are elusive, not only pragmatically in the sense that it is often difficult to determine whether a preverbal constituent is indeed a topic or a subject in a thetic sentence, but also with regard to phonological realization, as Frota’s (2000) study of Modern Portuguese exemplifies. In modern Portuguese, topics have a distinct prosodic realization, which affects vowel articulation and sandhi phenomena. However, the degree of realization of topic pronunciation varies, not only from speaker to speaker; speakers themselves are inconsistent in topic pronunciation within one and the same context. It is therefore not implausible that some variation occurred in Classical Portuguese and that preverbal subject topics were reinterpreted as being located in the canonical subject position. In this respect, subjects of unaccusative verbs provide a particularly interesting view on the reanalysis that has taken place. While transitive and unergative verbs have subjects that are external arguments to the verb, subjects of unaccusative verbs are internal arguments to the verb (Levin/ Rappaport Hovav 1995), and hence, more object-like. While there is usually agreement between the unaccusative verb and the subject, in the modern Romance languages there is a correlation between placement, auxiliary selection and the ability to form absolute constructions and unaccusative verbs. While a transitive SVO sentence as in (48) can sporadically be found in Old Portuguese when both subject and object contain new information, the subjects of unaccusative verbs were found below the verb (49, 50), except when they were topics (51) or contrastive. This is not unexpected, given the object-like status of the argument of unaccusative verbs. (48) OPor. (14th century, CGE, Tit. 11, Fol. 8b) e os homẽẽs bõõs da terra temyansse good of-the land fear3P L . P S T. I P FV- R E F L and theP L men da sua morte of-the his death ‘And the good men of the country feared for his death.’

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(49) OPor. (14th century, CGE, Tit. 12, Fol. 10a) e ficaron ally aqueles dous seus filhos and remain3P L . P S T there thoseP L two hisP L sons ‘and his two sons remained there’ (50) OPor. (13th/14th century, VS, Fol. 129r) e pella boca della sayam muy grandes chamas de fogo flameP L of fire and from-theF mouth of-her come3P L . P S T very bigP L ‘and large flames came from her mouth’ (51) OPor. (13th/14th century, VS, Fol. 124v) quãdo a minha alma sayo do corpo soul leave3S G . P S T from-theM body when theF myF ‘when my soul left my body’ Unaccusatives changed their information-structural pattern from (52) to (53): (52) Stopic/contr V V Sold/non-topic XP V (XP) Snew (53) Sold/new V V Snew In a study of unaccusative verbs only, we see the same increase in preverbal subjects and enclisis/proclisis variation as the one reported by Galves/de Sousa (2005), but the unaccusatives with old information subjects become preverbal earlier, and at a faster rate than subjects that are new information. The modern SV structure is then a result of a two-step development, where (i) is the consolidation of the preverbal topic position being reanalyzed as a designated subject position and (ii) the object-like subjects of unaccusative verbs seemingly lose some of these object-like properties and are reanalyzed as ‘true subjects’ in the transition from Classical to Modern Portuguese.21 Both the changes described here, start off with two alternative positions for the same information structural value. In the case of Portuguese defocusing, there were two positions in Old Portuguese, one preverbal and one post-verbal, and only the scrambled, post-verbal position remains. In the case of topics several options existed (and still exist) for the expression of aboutness-topics. One of these positions, the one directly before the verb, became the canonical subject position, where even new information subjects of unaccusative verbs occur in the modern language. 21 The emerging SVO pattern where the subject is preverbal for purely syntactic reasons, may also have influenced the SVO order in contrastive/corrective sentences, which, according to Costa (2004), is the preferred one in European Portuguese.

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4 Conclusion In this chapter, I have pointed out some of the main challenges connected to the study of information structure and its interaction with syntax in older texts. In particular, I have pointed to some difficulties around the classification of constituents according to information structural categories. The main changes seem to affect the subject positions. Modern Romance languages have SV as the canonical subject position, albeit to varying degrees. While French has SV with very few exceptions, languages like Italian, Portuguese and Spanish still have information structurally governed VS. Even in these languages, there seems to be a tendency towards a more syntactically governed SV position, given the Spanish varieties, which not only allow, but also prefer, narrow focus on the preverbal subject and the Portuguese subjects of unaccusative verbs which are also found more frequently in the SV configuration than they were 200 years ago. As for objects, very few modern Romance languages report preverbal information focus, unlike what has been described for the older varieties.

5 References 5.1 Research studies Adams, Marianne (1989), “Verb second effects in Medieval French”, in: Carl Kirschner/Janet de Cesaris (edd.), Studies in Romance linguistics. Selected papers from the Seventeenth Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 1–31. Alboiu, Gabriela/Hill, Virginia/Sitaridou, Ioanna (2015), “Discourse Driven V-to-C in Early Modern Romanian”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 33, 1057–1088. Barbosa, Pilar (2000), “Clitics. A window into the null-subject property”, in: João Costa (ed.), Portuguese syntax. Comparative studies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 31–93. Belletti, Adriana (2004), “Aspects of the low IP area”, in: Luigi Rizzi (ed.), The Structure of CP and IP, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 16–51. Benincà, Paola (2006), “A detailed map of the left periphery of Medieval Romance”, in: Raffaella Zanuttini/Héctor Campos/Elena Herburger/Paul Portner (edd.), Cross-linguistic research in syntax and semantics. Negation, tense, and clausal architecture, Washington, Georgetown University Press, 53–86. Bossong, Georg (2006), “La sintaxis de las glosas emilianenses en una perspectiva tipológica”, in: José Jesús Bustos Tovar/José Luis Girón Alconchel (edd.), Actas del VI Congreso Internacional de Historia de la lengua española, Madrid, Arco libros, 529–543. Cardinaletti, Anna/Roberts, Ian (2002), “Clause structure and X-Second”, in: Guglielmo Cinque (ed.), Functional Structure in DP and IP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, vol. 1, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 123–166. Cardoso, Maria Adriana P. (2010), Variation and change in the syntax of relative Clauses. New evidence from Portuguese, PhD dissertation, Universidade de Lisboa, repositorio.ul.pt/bitstream/ 10451/3001/1/ulsd60104_td.pdf (06.05.2016).

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Castillo Lluch, Mónica (1996), La posición del pronombre átono en la prosa hispánica medieval, PhD dissertation, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid/Université de Paris 8, http://www.uam.es/ personal_pdi/filoyletras/javel/MonicaCastillo-Tesis.pdf (06.05.2016). Costa, João (2004), Subject positions and interfaces. The case of European Portuguese, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Costa, João/Martins, Ana Maria (2011), “On focus movement in European Portuguese”, Probus 23, 217–245. Cruschina, Silvio (2011), “Focalization and word order in Old Italo-Romance”, Catalan Journal of Linguistics 10, 95–132. Duarte, Inês (1987), A construção de topicalização na gramática do português. Regência, ligação e condições sobre movimento, PhD dissertation, Universidade de Lisboa. Eide, Kristine (2010), “Prosody, information structure and word order changes in Portuguese”, in: Gisella Ferraresi/Rosemarie Lühr (edd.), Diachronic studies on information structure. Language acquisition and change, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 143–159. Eide, Kristine (2014), “Studying word order differences in a historical parallel corpus. An example from Old Spanish and Old Portuguese”, in: Signe Ebeling/Atle Grønn/Kjetil Rå Hauge/Diana Santos (edd.), Corpus-based Studies in Contrastive Linguistics (Oslo Studies in Language 6.1), Oslo, University of Oslo Library, 181–199, https://www.journals.uio.no/index.php/osla/article/ view/693/813 (01.07.2016). Eide, Kristine/Sitaridou, Ioanna (2014), “Contrastivity and information structure in the old IberoRomance languages”, in: Kristin Bech/Kristine Eide (edd.), Information structure and syntactic change in Germanic and Romance languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 377–412. Fiéis, Maria Alexandra (2003), Ordem de palavras, transitividade e inacusatividade. Reflexão teórica e análise do Português dos séculos XIII a XVI, PhD dissertation, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Fischer, Susann (2002), “Verb movement, clitic placement and language change”, in: Artemis Alexiadou/Susann Fischer/Melita Stanvrou (edd.), Papers from the workshop “Language change from a generative perspective”, Potsdam, University of Potsdam, 65–102. Fischer, Susann (2010), Word-order change as a source of grammaticalisation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Fontana, Josep M. (1997), “On the integration of second position phenomena”, in: Ans van Kemenade/ Nigel Vincent (edd.), Parameters of morphosyntactic change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 207–249. Frascarelli, Mara/Hinterhölzl, Roland (2007), “Types of topics in German and Italian”, in: Kerstin Schwabe/Susanne Winkler (edd.), On information structure, meaning and form. Generalizations across languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 87–116. Frota, Sónia (2000), Prosody and focus in European Portuguese. Phonological phrasing and intonation, New York, Garland. Gabriel, Christoph (2010), “On Focus, prosody, and word order in Argentinean Spanish. A minimalist OT account”, Revista Virtual de Estudos da Linguagem, Special issue 4 “Optimality-theoretic syntax”, 183−222. Gabriel, Christoph/Rinke, Esther (2010), “Information packaging and the rise of clitic-doubling in the history of Spanish”, in: Gisella Ferraresi/Rosemarie Lühr (edd.), Diachronic studies on information structure. Language acquisition and change, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 63–86. Galves, António/Galves, Charlotte (1995), “A case study of prosody driven language change. From ClP to EP”, Ms. Universidade Estadual de Campinas, http://www.tycho.iel.unicamp.br/~tycho/ prfpml/fase1/papers/lang_change.pdf (06.05.2016). Galves, Charlotte/de Sousa, Maria Clara Paixão (2005), “Clitic Placement and the Position of Subjects in the History of European Portuguese”, in: Twan Geerts/Ivo van Ginneken/Haike Jacobs (edd.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2003. Selected papers from “Going Romance” 2003, Nijmegen, 20–22 November, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 97–113.

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Gundel, Jeanette K. (1988), “Universals of topic-comment structure”, in: Michael Hammond/Edith Moravcsik/Jessica Wirth (edd.), Studies in syntactic typology, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 209–239. Haug, Dag T. T./Eckhoff, Hanne Martine/Welo, Eirik (2014), “The theoretical foundations of givenness annotation”, in: Kristin Bech/Kristine Eide (edd.), Information structure and syntactic change in Germanic and Romance languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 17–52. Hockett, Charles F. (1958), A Course in modern linguistics, New York, Macmillan. Hoot, Bradley (2014), “Narrow presentational focus in Mexican Spanish. Experimental evidence”, Probus (ahead-of-print), DOI: 10.1515/probus-2014-0004 (06.05.2016), 31 p. Jackendoff, Ray (1972), Semantic interpretation in generative grammar, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Kaiser, Georg A. (2002), Verbstellung und Verbstellungswandel in den romanischen Sprachen, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Kato, Mary Aizawa/Ribeiro, Ilza (2009), “Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese”, in: Andreas Dufter/Daniel Jacob (edd.), Focus and background in Romance languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 123–154. Komen, Erwin R./Hebing, Rosanne/van Kemenade, Ans M. C./Los, Bettelou (2014), “Quantifying information structure change in English”, in: Kristin Bech/Kristine Eide (edd.), Information structure and syntactic change in Germanic and Romance languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 81–110. Lambrecht, Knud (1994), Information structure and sentence form. Topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse referents, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Levin, Beth/Rappaport Hovav, Malka (1995), Unaccusativity at the syntax-lexical semantics interface, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Martins, Ana Maria (2002), “The loss of IP-scrambling in Portuguese”, in: David Lightfoot (ed.), Syntactic effects of morphological change, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 232–248. Martins, Ana Maria (2011), “Scrambling and information focus in Old and contemporary Portuguese”, Catalan Journal of Linguistics 10, 133–158. Motapanyane, Virginia (1989), “La position du sujet dans une langue à l’ordre SVO/VSO”, Rivista di grammatica generativa 14, 75–103. Muller, Claude (2009), “Major constituent order, information packaging and narrative structure in two Middle French texts”, in: Andreas Dufter/Daniel Jacob (edd.), Focus and background in Romance languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 239–279. Pešková, Andrea (2015), Sujetos pronominales en el español porteño. Implicaciones pragmáticas en la interfaz sintáctico-fonológica, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Petrova, Svetlana/Rinke, Esther (2014), “Formal properties of event-reporting sentences in Old High German and Old French”, in: Kristin Bech/Kristine Eide (edd.), Information structure and syntactic change in Germanic and Romance languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 271–294. Poletto, Cecilia (2014), Word order in Old Italian, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Remberger, Eva-Maria (2010), “Left-peripheral interactions in Sardinian”, Lingua 120, 555–581. Ribeiro, Ilza (1995), “Evidence for a verb-second phrase in Old Portuguese”, in: Adrian Battye/Ian Roberts (edd.), Clause structure and language change, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 110– 139. Rinke, Esther (2009), “Verb placement in Old Portuguese”, in: Andreas Dufter/Daniel Jacob (edd.), Focus and background in Romance languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 309–332. Rizzi, Luigi (1997), “The fine structure of the left periphery”, in: Liliane Haegeman (ed.), Elements of grammar. A handbook in generative syntax, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 281–337. Salvi, Giampaolo (2004), La formazione della struttura di frase romanza. Ordine delle parole e clitici dal latino alle lingue romanze antiche, Tübingen, Niemeyer.

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Schellert, Dietrich (1958), Syntax und Stilistik der Subjektstellung im Portugiesischen, Bonn, Romanisches Seminar an der Universität Bonn. Sitaridou, Ioanna (2011), “Word order and information structure in Old Spanish”, Catalan Journal of Linguistics 10, 159–184. Sitaridou, Ioanna (2012), “A comparative study of word order in Old Romance”, Folia Linguistica 46, 553–604. de Sousa, Maria Clara Paixão (2004), Língua barroca. Sintaxe e história do português dos seiscentos, PhD dissertation, Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Taylor, Ann/ Pintzuk, Susan (2014), “Testing the theory. Information structure in Old English”, in: Kristin Bech/Kristine Eide (edd.), Information structure and syntactic change in Germanic and Romance languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 53–78. Thurneysen, Rudolf (1892), “Zur Stellung des Verbums im Altfranzösischen”, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 16, 289–307. Vallduví, Enric (2002), “L’oració com a unitat informativa”, in: Joan Solà/Maria-Rosa Lloret/Joan Mascaró/Manuel Pérez Saldanya (edd.), Gramàtica del català contemporani, vol. 2, Barcelona, Empúries, 1221–1279. Vance, Barbara (1997), Syntactic change in Medieval French. Verb-second and null subjects, Dordrecht, Kluwer. Zaring, Laurie (2011), “On the nature of OV and VO order in Old French”, Lingua 121, 1831–1852. Zubizarreta, María Luisa (1998), Prosody, focus, and word order, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

5.2 Text references CGE = Crónica geral de Espanha de 1344, Séc. 14, Luís Filipe Lindley Cintra (ed.), Lisboa, Academia Portuguesa da História, 1951. CHP = Textos Notariais (1275–1278), in: Ana Maria Martins (ed.) (1994), Clíticos na história do português. Apêndice documental, vol. 2, PhD dissertation, Universidade de Lisboa. Edição digitalizada cedida pela editora. EE = The electronic texts of the prose works of Alfonso X, el Sabio, Lloyd Kasten/John Nitti/Wilhemina Jonxis-Henkemans (edd.), Madison, Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1997 (CD-ROM). Eustache = La vie de Saint Eustace. Version en prose française du XIIIe siècle, Jessie Murray (ed.), Paris, Champion, 1929. Tristan = Le roman de Tristan en prose, Renée L. Curtis (ed.), Cambridge, Brewer, 1985. VS = Vidas de santos de um manuscrito Alcobacense, Séc. 13/14 (cópias do séc. 15). (Colecção mística de Fr. Hilário da Lourinhã, Cod. Alc. CCLXVI/ANTT 2274), Ivo Castro (ed.), Lisboa, Centro de Estudos Geográficos, 1985.

Index 2L1 (cf.: bilinguals) Abruzzese 242, 247, 284–286 accentual phrase 79, 85 acceptability judgment task (AJT) 557, 563, 574–575 acquisition ↗ 17; ↗18 – early second language (eL2) acquisition 551, 552 – first language (L1) acquisition 176, 519–521, 531, 532, 551, 544, 566–568, 572, 589, 592, 603 – L2 speakers 447, 529, 541 – Second Language Acquisition (SLA) 16, 419, 520, 543, 544, 551, 552, 559, 563, 564, 568–571, 575, 576, 612, 630 – Second Language Learning (SLL) 520 adjective placement 551, 554, 560–564, 577 affectedness 243, 248, 320 Agree (operation) 189, 193, 203–206, 271, 272, 335, 380, 381 – multiple Agree 204, 272, 281 agreement 13, 16, 134, 150, 163, 165, 176, 242, 245, 267–291, 302, 303, 311, 321, 331, 333, 335–341, 354, 358, 367, 369, 379, 383, 436, 437, 487, 488, 489, 491–494, 501–507, 511, 532, 555–559, 565, 567, 636, 637, 677 – anti-agreement 267, 281–282 – lazy agreement 286–287 – omnivorous agreement 284–286 – (agreement) restrictions 13, 267–291, 369 – rich agreement 331, 333, 336, 337, 339, 340, 358 AJT (cf.: acceptability judgment task) Aktionsart 12, 13, 173, 214, 215, 248, 249, 295, 298, 306, 321–322, 402 Algherese (Alghero Catalan, cf.: Catalan) Alghero Catalan (cf.: Catalan) alignment 115, 163, 164, 171–173, 176, 527, 534, 535 – peak alignment 624 (cf. also: intonation) alignment constraints 11, 87, 88, 90–92, 94, 105, 106, 114–127

allomorphy 12, 59, 62, 67, 105–119, 121, 128, 132–138, 149–151, 164, 176–177, 287, 385, 537–538 allophony 23, 25, 30, 537, 538 American Spanish (cf.: Spanish) analogy 5, 129, 153, 638 Andalusian Spanish (cf.: Spanish) Andean Spanish (cf.: Spanish) animacy 13, 242–246, 260, 273, 274, 386, 501 answering system 15, 457–460, 462, 465, 482 Arabic 281 architecture of grammar 1–10, 41–73, 81, 154 argument 192, 214, 219, 220, 253, 254, 249, 256, 257, 259, 268, 271, 276–286, 306– 308, 311, 319, 338, 348, 377, 382, 383, 384, 393, 403, 420, 432, 434, 441, 470, 477, 487, 494–501, 508, 571, 615, 616, 663, 668, 671, 674, 675, 677 – argument structure 13, 15, 215–217, 267, 295, 311–314, 318, 319, 321, 322, 391–394, 397, 398, 404, 405–411, 434, 488, 501– 505, 510, 676 – argument-like 219 – event argument 214, 218, 372, 502 – non-argument 331 – null argument 335, 488, 501, 502, 503, 510 – quasi-argument 280, 331–334, 340 article 17, 29, 62, 105, 107, 108, 110–117, 165, 287, 288, 344, 364, 393, 535, 556, 557, 558, 560, 571–576, 593, 595 (cf. also: determiner) aspect 12, 13, 17, 136, 164, 167–169, 170, 172, 192, 213–237, 257, 298, 399, 402, 404, 607, 611, 614, 607, 618, 620 – clausal aspect 13, 295, 296, 303–306, 322 – grammatical aspect 214–218, 227, 402 – imperfective aspect (cf.: imperfect) – iterative aspect (cf.: iterative) – lexical aspect 12, 214–216, 227, 228, 298, 402 – nominal aspect 401–403, 405 – perfective aspect (cf.: perfect) – progressive aspect 216, 619 – verbal aspect 401–403 assimilation 11, 23, 27–29, 32, 34–36, 53, 57, 64, 495, 524, 531, 539 Asturian 31, 34, 36, 172, 289, 490, 491, 493

684

Index

Balearic Catalan (cf.: Catalan) Barceloní Catalan (cf. Catalan) bare plural 216, 260, 311, 575 basic word order (cf.: word order) Basque 567 Berber 281 bilingualism 519–521, 523, 527, 529, 534, 535, 552, 554, 567, 610, 612, 630 bilinguals 521–529, 533, 534, 537, 538, 540, 544, 552, 557, 558, 562, 563, 567, 568 574, 575, 577, 607, 613 – 2L1 (bilinguals) 16, 519–552, 556–560, 562, 563, 566–568, 572–576 Binding Theory 14, 192, 256, 308, 330–335, 345, 346, 420 (cf. also: Government and Binding (GB) Theory) – binding principles 192, 308, 330 – binding tests 262 blending 132–140, 171 boundedness 281, 402, 403 Brazilian Portuguese 23, 25, 30, 31, 33, 34, 47–51, 54, 56, 58, 66, 82, 95, 96, 165, 190, 282, 365, 440, 441, 461, 465, 491–493, 500, 503, 565, 567, 572, 575, 671 c-command 189, 192, 193, 200, 202–204, 206, 207, 249, 250, 255–257, 262, 354, 467 Campidanese 489, 492, 499, 500 Cape Verdean (Creole) 462–464, 466, 467 Caribbean Spanish (cf.: Spanish) case constraint (cf.: person case constraint) Catalan ↗1–13, ↗18, ↗19, ↗20, ↗21 – Alghero Catalan 56, 61, 127, 129, 490 – Balearic Catalan 127, 129, 130, 245 – Barceloní Catalan 124, 273 – Formenteran Catalan 138–140 – Majorcan Catalan 53, 61, 65, 128, 130–132, 138–140 – Old Catalan 320–322, 374, 376–378, 385, 663, 671 – Valencian Catalan 36 causative (construction) 123, 261, 268, 275– 277, 284, 291, 376 – anticausative 300, 302 Chichewa 77 Chilean Spanish (cf.: Spanish) Chinese 340, 543, 544, 565 choice function 251–253, 255, 258, 259

Classical Portuguese (cf.: European Portuguese) clausal aspect (cf.: aspect) cleft sentences 419, 439–445, 449, 665, 672 – pseudo-cleft sentences 419, 440–444 clitic 14, 52, 55, 56, 61–63, 124, 125, 139, 140, 165, 190, 225, 242, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274–278, 291, 302, 347, 363–386, 424, 446, 460, 615, 616, 617, 620, 636, 665, 666, 668, 672, 673 – clitic climbing 14, 277, 363, 373–378, 380 – clitic doubling 348, 363, 373–378, 381–383, 386, 496, 672 – clitic left dislocation (CLLD) 339, 341, 343, 344, 346–349, 356, 436, 438, 664 – clitic proform 488, 490, 491 – enclitic, 11, 29, 55, 56, 61, 62, 80, 114, 115, 132, 138–140, 271, 367, 664, 666 – mesocliticization 14, 363, 373–378 – proclitic 62, 80, 126, 271, 347, 367 CLLD (cf.: clitic) coda consonants 23, 27, 29, 537, 538 compositionality 187–189, 193, 208, 654 concord 193, 287–289, 291, 555, 556, 558 – negative concord, 12, 187, 190 conflation 160, 312, 313 copula 16, 218, 227, 228, 439, 440, 487–495, 497, 499, 500, 502–511 Corsican 242, 357, 489, 492 countability 401, 405 courtesy form 278, 278 – courtesy pronoun 268, 278 covert expletive (cf.: expletive) Cuban Spanish (cf.: Spanish) Czech 4 definiteness 29, 241–265, 321, 357, 386, 431, 487, 501, 505, 507, 575, 595 (cf. also: indefiniteness) deictic 218, 221, 230–233, 352, 496, 499, 500, 508, 593, 594, 621, 667, 671 – deictic locative (cf.: locative) deixis 213, 499 derived environment 105, 106, 137 determiner 3, 165, 188, 242, 246, 253, 259, 274, 289, 315, 364, 383, 393, 396, 398, 406, 423, 424, 551, 555, 561, 572–574, 587, 591, 593, 637 (cf. also: article) deverbal noun 391–396, 399–403, 405–407, 411

Index

Differential Object Marking (DOM) ↗8, 13, 230, 501 diphthongization 5, 34, 35, 42–44, 46, 49, 58, 60, 65, 66, 105, 117–119, 121, 123, 124, 151–153, 155, 159 discourse markers 17, 33, 233, 626, 635, 637– 640, 649–653 dislocation 15, 109, 134, 135, 245, 256, 329, 377, 419, 426, 436–439, 446, 449, 478, 673 Distributed Morphology (DM) 118, 160, 163, 363, 383–385, 392, 395 DM (cf.: Distributed Morphology) DOM (cf.: Differential Object Marking) Dutch 57, 172, 242, 295, 298, 299, 301, 307, 315, 316, 331, 558, 574 Early Old French (cf.: French) Early Old Spanish (cf.: Spanish) Early Tuscan (cf.: Tuscan) English ↗1–5, ↗7, ↗18, ↗20, ↗21 eL2 acquisition (cf.: acquisition) epenthesis 32, 36, 52, 61, 62, 65, 105, 106, 117, 124–130, 139 epistemic modality (cf.: modality) EPP (cf.: Extended Projection Principle) ergatives 307, 308 (cf. also: unaccusatives) European Portuguese ↗1–3, ↗5–9, ↗11, ↗12, ↗14–17 – Classical Portuguese 663, 672, 674–677 – Old Portuguese 374–376, 597–599, 601, 662, 663, 666–670, 672–678 event 169, 214–220, 228, 230, 231, 235, 236, 248, 258, 281, 302, 312, 320, 372, 392, 394, 397, 399, 407, 510, 617, 618, 636, 642–646, 652, 676 – event argument (cf.: argument) – event noun 393, 394, 400, 405 – event operator 372 – event situation 13, 214, 215, 219, 220 – event structure 214, 217, 317, 321, 391–394, 400–405 – event time 219, 220, 231 – event variable 218, 372 – noneventive 318, 372, 405 evidentiality (cf.: modality) existentials 16, 255, 357, 487–505, 507, 509– 511 – pseudo-existentials 505

685

expletive 190, 200–202, 206–209, 329–358, 431, 489, 566 – covert expletive 357 – expletive negation 200, 201, 206–209 Extended Projection Principle (EPP) 14, 334, 336–340, 352, 356, 358, 601 faithfulness 51, 66, 105, 106, 109, 111, 114, 115, 119, 126, 128–130, 132, 140, 159, 538 Farsi 479 features 4, 8, 17, 51, 57, 77, 85, 95–96, 99, 273, 339, 349, 350, 353–354, 356–357, 371– 372, 373, 421–435, 441–448, 457, 458, 463, 470–471, 473–474, 477–481, 499, 502, 505, 507–508, 510, 565, 570, 577, 596–600, 602, 615, 617, 621–625, 660– 669, 671, 672–675, 676, 678 – interpretable feature 12, 203, 272, 335, 559 – negative feature 202, 204 – phi-features 139, 289, 335–338, 340, 368, 370, 381, 383, 502 – semantic feature 3, 12–14, 122, 164, 174, 187, 189, 197, 198, 200, 201, 206, 208, 242, 319, 530, 602, 610 – syntactic feature 12, 164, 187, 189, 193, 197, 202, 205, 206, 208, 334, 358, 384, 385, 587, 610, 611 – uninterpretable feature 203, 205, 272, 290, 335 Finnish 247, 465 FLL (cf.: Foreign Language Learning) floating quantifiers 14, 347, 348 focus (information structure) 4, 8, 17, 51, 57, 77, 85, 95–96, 99, 273, 339, 349, 350, 353–354, 356–357, 371–372, 373, 421– 435, 441–448, 457, 458, 463, 470–471, 473–474, 477–481, 499, 502, 505, 507– 508, 510, 565, 570, 577, 596–600, 602, 615, 617, 621–625, 660–669, 671, 672– 675, 676, 678 – broad focus 624, 625, 675 – contrastive focus 51, 371, 373, 424, 429, 441, 477, 479, 480, 508, 565, 570, 624, 625, 661, 664–666, 668, 669, 671, 673, 676 – focus-background 95, 421–425, 443, 444 – focus fronting 432–434, 621, 622, 664, 668 – focus projection 421, 599, 668

686

Index

– narrow focus 57, 442, 445, 505, 508, 671, 672, 679 Foreign Language Learning (FLL) 447, 520 Formenteran Catalan (cf.: Catalan) fortition 23, 24, 31 Francoprovençal 164, 165, 168, 357, 494 free inversion 310, 330, 334, 337, 352 French ↗1–22 – Early Old French 662 – Middle French 398, 641, 672 – Old French 5, 24, 129, 169, 374–377, 397, 398, 644, 648, 649, 662, 663, 666, 670 – Québec French 31, 305 frequency effects 11, 63, 141, 271 Friulian 56, 489, 491–493, 498 function application 13, 189, 250–252, 257, 258, 262 Galician 15, 50–52, 54, 57, 66, 105, 108, 114– 116, 282, 357, 460–462, 464, 465, 482, 490, 491, 493 GB (cf.: Government and Binding Theory) gender 122, 133, 165, 268, 278, 284, 285, 289, 290, 368, 424, 533, 551, 555–560, 571, 572, 615, 616, 620, 626 – gender agreement 284, 290, 291, 555– 559 – gender assignment 555–557, 559, 577 – gender mismatches 278 – grammatical gender 133, 278, 290, 291, 533, 551–560, 564, 577 – semantic gender 278, 290 generic DP 571–573 German 172, 234, 242, 295, 301, 311, 315, 331, 424, 520–529, 532–541, 543, 544, 557, 558, 562, 563, 573–577, 596, 597, 641, 644, 646 globalist model 105 Government and Binding (GB) Theory 1, 7, 306, 330–336, 358, 378, 380, 381 (cf. also: Binding Theory) grammatical aspect (cf.: aspect) grammaticalization 1–4, 17, 61, 149, 150, 165– 168, 236, 437, 441, 488, 495, 498, 500, 501, 503, 571, 587, 589, 592–596, 602, 635–657 – grammaticalization parameters 3 Greek 196, 331, 336, 342, 343, 351, 364, 410

hanging topic (cf.: topic) harmonic serialism 116, 141 Haitian Creole 115 heritage speaker 447, 448, 551, 552, 568, 574– 576, 578 Hindi 242, 249, 259 hortative 14, 224, 349, 350 humanness 248 Hungarian 250, 410, 462–464, 467 Icelandic 280, 281, 331 IL (cf.: individual-level) imperfect 159–161, 169, 172, 173, 219, 221, 224, 232, 233, 235, 590 imperfective 139, 218, 220, 221, 225, 228, 229, 232, 233, 309, 402, 404, 615, 617, 618 imperfectivity 218, 222 impersonal (construction) 174, 235, 267, 268, 279–281, 291, 300–302, 307, 312, 469, 475, 501, 628, 642 incorporation 55, 62, 140, 259, 260, 380, 381 – (pseudo)incorporation, 259 indefiniteness 13, 230, 241–265, 321 (cf. also: definiteness) individual-level (IL) 213, 217, 218, 226–228, 235 Inertial Theory 587, 589, 590–592, 595, 602 infinitive 135, 156, 167, 168, 169, 176, 221, 222, 224, 225, 234, 235, 236, 282–284, 376, 396, 397, 398, 399, 402, 404, 566, 615, 619, 641 inflected infinitive 225, 282–284 information structure 4, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 75, 77, 79, 92, 95–96, 243, 329, 330, 346, 356, 419–425, 434, 438, 441, 444, 445, 449, 457, 458, 469–471, 477, 482, 502, 505, 507–510, 553, 587, 590, 596–602, 607, 611, 614, 615, 617, 630, 659, 659, 660, 661, 662–672, 676, 679 internal grammar 589 interpolation 363, 373–378, 386, 668, 673, 674 intonation 52, 75, 78, 79, 80, 84, 85, 95, 96, 97, 98, 109, 420, 426, 428–429, 433, 439, 443, 460–462, 523, 527, 531, 533, 534, 535, 615, 617, 625, 661, 663 intonational phrase (IP) 44, 49, 52, 54, 57, 58, 66, 77, 79–86, 89, 426, 428, 433, 439, 445, 676

Index

Inuit languages 242 inverse locative (cf.: locative) IP (cf.: intonational phrase) Italian ↗1–19, ↗21–22 – Old Italian 111, 374, 376, 599, 663, 667, 671 Italo-Romance dialects (Northern ItaloRomance dialects, Central Italo-Romance dialects, Southern Italo-Romance dialects) 297, 304, 490, 491, 492, 492, 493, 495, 499 iterative 119, 402, 438, 644 Japanese 79, 175, 340, 531 Judeo-Spanish (cf.: Spanish) Kiswahili 249 Korean 77, 542, 575 L1 (cf.: acquisition) L2 speakers (cf.: acquisition) Ladin 286, 287, 489, 490–493 language change 1, 2, 5, 8, 16–18, 165, 167, 419, 588–590, 635, 637, 638 language contact 16, 47, 64, 447, 520, 538, 540, 544, 607, 611, 614, 625, 630, 631, 654 Latin 3–5, 15, 25–28, 30, 31, 67, 132, 135–138, 151, 153, 155, 157, 159, 161, 164, 166–169, 171–173, 195, 221, 225, 274, 364, 425, 444, 448, 488–490, 495, 498, 593, 636, 641, 643, 645, 661, 662 left periphery 349, 381, 419, 426, 432–435, 438, 478, 480, 561, 598, 601, 621, 659, 662, 663, 665–667, 671, 672, 676 Lehmann’s parameters 3, 635, 637–640, 653 (cf. also: grammaticalization parameters) lenition 11, 23–30 lexical 1–3, 12, 13, 23, 27, 28, 32–34, 36, 41, 43, 48, 54, 58–62, 64, 66, 67, 81, 85, 106–109, 114, 119, 121, 123, 125, 132–135, 153–155, 159–161, 166, 167, 171, 187–189, 191, 193, 194, 197, 198, 202–206, 208, 218, 222, 224, 227, 233, 252, 258, 259, 262, 281, 295, 306, 317–319, 321, 333, 336, 341, 364, 378, 381, 382, 384, 385, 392, 395–399, 405, 425, 430, 434–436, 445, 447, 462, 502, 510, 524, 533, 539, 552, 558, 559, 564, 587, 588, 590–593, 602, 610, 611, 613, 614, 626, 636, 640, 641, 647

687

lexicalization 35, 67, 171, 401 lexical aspect 12, 214–216, 227, 228, 298, 402 lexical conservatism 132, 133, 139 lexical decomposition 217 lexical entry 217, 337 lexical event structure 217 lexical morphology 138 Lexical Phonology 58, 62, 138, 152–154, 158, 614 lexical process 41, 61, 524 lexical properties 215, 408 lexicon 2, 3, 8, 11, 17, 36, 41, 58, 59–65, 67, 107, 112, 119, 123, 137, 153, 162, 171, 213, 217, 224, 227, 243, 295, 298, 314, 321, 322, 333, 336, 337, 384, 395, 530, 531, 552, 553, 587, 588, 594, 602, 607, 608, 611, 614, 626–630 liaison 28, 59, 62, 63, 86, 105, 107–111, 133– 135, 527, 528 loanword 41, 63–65, 67, 614 locative (item, exponent, construction) 273– 275, 309, 311–313, 357, 368, 369, 370, 431, 432, 487, 488, 490, 491, 494–505, 507–510, 590, 591, 628 – deictic locative 488, 508, 509 – inverse locative 500, 507–509 – locative inversion 309, 352, 357, 431 – locative nature 313 – locative syncretism 275 Logudorese 52, 66, 154, 489, 490, 492, 493, 499, 500, 506 Maori 242 Majorcan Catalan (cf.: Catalan) markedness 107, 109, 115, 119, 122, 158, 172, 523, 536–539, 541, 544, 559, 594, 595 Mauritian Creole 340 Media Lengua 17, 607, 608, 613, 626, 629, 630 mesocliticization (cf.: clitic) Middle French (cf.: French) Minimalist Program (MP) 1, 9, 335, 358, 378, 380, 588, 589, 591, 592, 602 modal 17, 167, 170, 192, 213, 221–226, 233– 236, 364, 376, 467, 619, 635, 637–640, 646–650, 653 modality 12, 13, 96–98, 192, 213–236, 295, 296, 303–306, 322, 619, 648 – epistemic modality 223, 226, 234, 648

688

Index

– evidentiality 17, 223, 224, 233, 607, 611, 614, 618, 630 – modal particles 640, 646–650 – root modality 226, 234 – volitional modality 234 mood 12, 13, 136, 151, 163, 164, 167, 170, 172, 192, 193, 213, 214, 222–226, 228–234, 236, 339, 640, 645 – morphological mood 222, 225, 229 MP (cf.: Minimalist Program) multiple Agree (cf.: Agree) Nahuatl 410 Neapolitan 42, 52, 61, 153, 154, 303, 305, 357 – Old Neapolitan 305 negative concord (cf.: concord) negative feature (cf.: features) n(egative)-word 12, 187, 193–208 neutralization 23, 24, 27–30, 36, 47, 48, 66, 84 nominal inflection 156 non-argument (cf.: argument) NSP (cf.: null-subject parameter) null object (cf.: object) null subject (cf.: subject) null-subject parameter (NSP) 337, 340, 342, 554, 551, 564, 566, 567, 568, 570, 576, 588 Nuorese 489, 490, 492, 493, 497 object 55, 190, 192, 214, 241–263, 272, 274, 276, 280, 307, 310, 343, 346, 352, 363– 386, 393, 398, 411, 422, 427, 430–435, 437, 442, 447, 448, 462, 597, 616, 620, 639, 659, 661, 662, 666, 672, 672–676, 679 – null object 17, 462, 607, 620, 621, 630 – object control 261, 262 Occitan 108, 151, 164, 357, 495 – Old Occitan 663 Old Catalan (cf.: Catalan) Old French (cf.: French) Old Neapolitan (cf.: Neapolitan) Old Occitan (cf.: Occitan) Old Portuguese (cf.: European Portuguese) Old Romanian (cf.: Romanian) Old Sicilian (cf.: Sicilian) Old Spanish (cf.: Spanish)

Old Tuscan (cf.: Tuscan) OO (cf.: output-output) opacity 106, 114–116 Optimality Theory (OT) 8, 11, 12, 16, 28, 47, 51, 58, 59, 87, 90–92, 94, 105–141, 153, 156– 158, 161, 243, 317, 322, 378, 428, 446, 519, 537–539, 543, 573 – stochastic OT 92, 141, 446 – stratal OT 116, 118, 123, 134, 141 optionality 15, 206, 376, 396, 419, 445–449, 570, 577 OT (cf.: Optimality Theory) output-output (OO) (constraints, correspondences, faithfulness) 11, 106, 121–123, 127, 128, 130–133, 136, 138, 140, 141, 156 (cf. also: Optimality Theory (OT )) palatalization 23, 24, 30, 31, 33, 36, 105, 137, 138, 149, 151, 155, 156, 158 paradigm 5, 105, 128–133, 151–156, 158, 161, 162, 164–166, 170–176, 224, 279, 280, 284, 333, 336, 354, 470, 567, 615, 636, 649 parallelism, parallelist, parallel 11, 105, 107, 117, 457, 470–474, 477 parasitic gap 14, 341, 354–356 participant 172, 175, 224, 272, 273, 392, 407, 502, 510, 652, 653 participle 136, 156, 158, 167–169, 173, 221, 222, 267, 278, 280, 281, 302, 303, 379, 398, 402–404, 555, 558, 615, 667 past (tense) 17, 164, 167, 169, 218, 220, 221, 224, 225, 228, 230–236, 304, 309, 491, 615, 617, 618, 643–645 PCC (cf.: Person Case Constraint) peak alignment (cf.: alignment) perception predicates 261, 284, 649 perfect 135–138, 164, 167, 168, 169, 219–221, 231, 235, 302–305, 320, 618, 643–645 perfective 169, 218, 220, 221, 228, 230, 235, 402–404, 467, 615, 617, 629 perfectivity 218, 221, 222, 234 periphrases 12, 149, 166–170, 214, 220, 221, 227, 236, 619, 636 permissives 261 Persian 242, 249, 251, 259 (cf. also: Farsi) Person Case Constraint (PCC) 14, 267, 268– 278, 281, 285, 291, 363, 369, 373 phi-features (cf.: features)

Index

phonological constraints 59, 60, 89–92, 94, 138, 139, 156, 158, 374, 386 phonological phrase 49–51, 57, 58, 66, 79, 81, 82, 84, 86–90, 95, 531 phonological weakening 589, 593, 596, 602, 677 phrasing 80–99 – (prosodic) phrasing 53, 75–78, 80, 81, 83, 93, 95, 659 pluperfect 164, 167, 169, 219, 221, 304, 618 pluralization 393, 394 polarity 15, 194, 457–482 polarity item 12, 187, 194, 198, 207, 251 Polish 402 polyphony 647 Portuguese (cf.: European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese) possessive 3, 16, 312, 406, 487, 488, 494– 504, 510, 571, 572, 591, 621 post-lexical process 41, 61, 524 pragmatics 10, 13, 15–17, 149, 150, 170–176, 363, 424, 445, 458, 459–465, 482, 487, 505, 529, 530, 533–535, 551, 554, 564– 570, 587, 590, 596, 607, 608, 612, 613, 617–625, 630 predicate 15, 202, 215–218, 227, 228, 230, 249, 251, 252, 254, 255, 258–262, 284, 297, 313, 331, 346, 352, 372, 391, 393, 405, 407, 457, 459, 467–469, 479, 480, 482, 487, 488, 494, 497, 500–503, 508, 510, 564, 571, 639, 640 present 62, 135, 156, 158, 160–162, 164, 168, 169, 171–173, 217, 219–222, 224, 225, 230–232, 304, 305, 333, 353, 491, 504, 618, 641, 642, 644, 645 presentational (sentences) 440, 488, 509, 510 pro (cf.: subject) PRO (cf.: subject) pro-drop parameter (cf.: null-subject parameter (NSP)) productivity 123, 132 prominence 42, 44, 48–52, 56, 57, 65, 66, 79, 130, 425, 426, 442, 443, 473, 661, 668, 676 prosodic hierarchy 56, 66, 78–80, 531 prosodic structure 11, 41, 53–60, 66, 75, 77– 95, 99, 136, 161 Prosodic Structure Theory 78–80, 95 prosody 4, 9, 11, 15–17, 41, 44, 75, 77, 78, 80, 92, 95–99, 106, 190, 419–456, 505, 530,

689

531, 533–535, 573, 596, 607, 608, 613, 617, 624, 625, 630, 654, 659, 661, 663, 666, 671, 672 pseudo-cleft sentences (cf.: cleft sentences) psych verbs 248 Puerto Rican Spanish (cf.: Spanish) QR (quantifier raising, cf.: quantification) quantification 216, 223, 224, 230 – quantificational 321, 342, 345, 347 – quantifier 14, 188, 202, 222, 249–253, 255, 256, 259, 259, 342–344, 347, 373, 475, 478, 502, 507, 622, 667 – quantifier raising (QR) 249, 250, 251 – quantity 527, 536, 563 quasi-argument (cf.: argument) Québec French (cf.: French) Quechua 17, 448, 607–631 raddoppiamento (fono)sintattico 27, 46, 56, 57, 66, 112 reanalysis 448, 488, 495, 498, 501–504, 589, 592, 593, 595, 596, 638, 654, 677 reference – direct reference 218, 277 – disjoint reference 191, 192, 346, 475–481, 569 reference time (cf. time) referential 14, 193, 214, 216, 217, 219, 220, 229, 283, 331–334, 336–341, 346–347, 372, 399, 475, 476, 496–499, 510, 567, 569, 659, 660, 661, 668, 669, 676 referentiality 224, 230, 372, 500, 502 reflexive 35, 168, 169, 190, 191, 256, 269, 271, 276, 279, 298, 300–303, 317, 368, 383, 385, 462, 673 relexification 17, 607, 608, 626–628, 630 resyllabification 28, 54, 57, 58, 59, 62, 109, 115, 134, 135, 535 rich agreement (cf. agreement) Romanian 12, 15, 25, 27, 29, 33–35, 43, 48, 49, 60, 66, 105, 132, 135–138, 151, 168, 190, 196, 198, 199, 201, 203, 205–209, 217, 221, 222, 224, 225, 232, 235, 236, 241, 242, 244, 246, 249, 252–254, 256, 257, 261, 262, 268, 269–275, 279–281, 304, 305, 373, 377, 382, 396, 398–399, 404, 406, 408, 420, 429, 430, 444, 460, 489, 491–493, 496, 498, 671

690

Index

– Old Romanian 398 Romansh 151, 169, 489, 492, 493 root modality 226, 234 Russian 402, 575 Sardinian 26, 52, 66, 151, 154, 155, 168, 225, 228, 242, 282–284, 291, 489, 490, 492, 493, 495, 499, 500, 506, 641, 662, 666, 671 scalar argumentation 648–649 scope 3, 13, 126, 196, 200, 201, 205, 207, 208, 223, 229, 230, 234, 247, 249–255, 258– 260, 262, 263, 341–345, 357, 372, 635– 639, 645, 649, 653 scrambling 13, 241, 242, 250, 255–257, 260, 615, 667, 668, 672–675 Second Language Acquisition (SLA) (cf.: acquisition) Second Language Learning (SLL) (cf.: acquisition) segmental phonology 11, 41, 63, 67, 524, 531– 533 semantic bleaching 2, 589, 594, 596, 602 sentential negative marker 195 sequence of tense (SOT) (cf.: tense) Sicilian 169, 242, 357, 490, 498 – Old Sicilian 498 SLA (cf.: acquisition) SLL (cf.: acquisition) small clause 249, 261, 312, 313, 332, 503, 504, 508 SOT (cf.: tense) Spanish ↗1–22 – American Spanish 34, 165, 175, 382, 440– 441, 504 – Andalusian Spanish 28, 30, 165 – Andean Spanish 17, 32, 47, 429, 446, 607, 608, 611, 613–625, 629–631 – Caribbean Spanish 30, 165, 357, 567 – Chilean Spanish 31, 176 – Cuban Spanish 523, 567 – Early Old Spanish 662, 671 – Judeo-Spanish 28, 32, 47 – Puerto Rican Spanish 566, 567 – Old Spanish 28, 320, 321, 374–378, 636, 641, 662, 663, 667–672 specificity 13, 227, 230, 241–263, 372, 386, 487, 488, 492, 505, 507, 575, 595, 637 speech event 214

speech rate 67, 85, 98, 365 speech rhythm 543 speech time (cf. time) stage-level (SL) 213, 217, 218, 227, 228, 235 stem formative 118, 120 stochastic OT (cf.: Optimality Theory (OT)) stratal OT (cf.: Optimality Theory (OT)) structural meaning 297, 306, 317–320, 322 subject 14, 51, 169, 281–284, 310, 320, 329– 359, 491, 492, 502, 505, 551, 564–570, 574, 596, 597, 599–601, 639, 659, 661, 662, 665, 669–672, 675–679 – null subject 14, 329–359, 420, 492, 502, 505, 551, 565–568 (cf. also: pro) – pro 14, 282, 284, 329–359, 381, 420, 442, 445, 497, 677 (cf.: also null subject) – PRO 331, 332 – pronominal subject, subject pronoun 3, 165, 224, 329–359, 396, 436, 444, 445, 529, 541, 564–570, 576, 671 subject person 13, 295, 296, 306, 322 subparadigm 131, 132, 156, 159 supine 136, 398, 399, 404 suppletion 12, 107, 149, 161, 166, 170, 171, 176 suprasegmentals 11, 41–46, 53, 61, 81, 83 Swedish 557, 558, 563 syntactic change 17, 165, 587–606, 620, 659, 661, 669 syntax-phonology mapping 11, 86–89, 90, 92 telicity 245, 298–300, 316, 317, 321 temporal (cf. time) tense 3, 4, 12, 13, 136, 139, 140, 151, 154, 159, 160, 163, 164, 167–170, 172, 192, 213, 214, 217–222, 224–226, 228–236, 282, 283, 295, 296, 303–306, 308, 309, 315, 322, 333, 338, 339, 399, 457, 467, 504, 617 – sequence of tense (SOT) 213, 221, 228–233 – tense-aspect system 213 – tense operator 219 that-trace filter, that-trace effect 330, 334, 335, 568 theme vowel 48, 118, 138, 151, 152, 158–161, 173 time – anterior time 234 – aspectual time 233 – event time 219, 220, 231

Index

– reference time 217–221, 227, 228, 230, 231, 233, 235, 236, 305 – speech time 219, 231, 233, 236, 305 – time relational 218–220, 231, 236 temporal 3, 98, 99, 192, 213–217, 219–222, 224, 225, 228, 230, 231, 235, 236, 313, 400, 403, 421, 477, 487, 488, 497, 498, 502, 510, 618, 640, 644, 652 topic 14, 17, 98, 220, 245, 329, 339, 346–349, 353, 354, 419–426, 432, 434, 438, 439, 442, 443, 448, 457, 458, 470–474, 477– 481, 496, 500, 502, 505, 507, 508, 510, 529, 565, 570, 595, 597–600, 615, 617, 621, 661, 650, 652, 659–667, 669, 671– 673, 675–679 – hanging topic 438, 665 – topic shift, 565 – topicality 241, 243–245, 420, 672 – topic-comment parallelism 470–474, 477 TP ellipsis 15, 457–482 transitivity 13, 160, 295, 301, 306, 314, 315, 321 truth value judgment task 574–576 Turkish 242, 249, 575 Tuscan 281, 282, 493 – Early Tuscan 498 – Old Tuscan 158, 162 unaccusatives 269, 279–281, 306–322, 352, 357, 407, 429–431, 447, 502, 675–678 unaccusativity 13, 295, 309–311, 314, 315, 318, 319, 321, 322, 425, 675 underspecified meaning 187, 189, 190, 197– 203, 207

691

unergatives 280, 306, 307, 309, 311–314, 317, 318, 322, 352, 407, 408, 429, 675, 677 unergativity 13, 295, 314, 318, 319, 321 Valencian Catalan (cf.: Catalan) V2 (cf.: verb second) verb second (V2) 587, 596–599, 601, 659, 662–668, 672, 676 verbal functional structure 399 verbal inflection 60, 119, 130, 131, 149–177, 221, 339, 375 verbal properties 392 veridical, nonveridical 198, 199, 201, 202 volitional modality 234, 235 vowel harmony 23, 36, 45, 54, 56, 60, 64, 65 vowel raising 32, 152, 155 vowel reduction 23, 32, 33, 45, 47, 48, 64, 65, 105, 130–132 VP ellipsis 457–486 weak determiners 246 Welsh 465 word order 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 14, 15, 17, 92, 95, 165, 256, 350–352, 356, 386, 419–455, 487, 495, 505, 508, 523, 553, 564, 587, 590, 596–601, 607, 610, 615–617, 621, 626, 659, 660, 661–663, 666, 671, 672, 673, 675 – basic word order 14, 350–353, 356, 448, 552, 617, 621 word stress 44–46, 49, 50, 52, 57, 61, 65, 66, 367 Yiddish 331