Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax
 9783110376937

Table of contents :
Manuals of Romance Linguistics......Page 5
Table of Contents......Page 7
Abbreviations......Page 11
1. Introduction......Page 17
2. Subjects......Page 43
3. Objects......Page 105
4. Argument structure and argument structure alternations......Page 170
5. Clitic pronouns......Page 199
6. Voice and voice alternations......Page 246
7. Auxiliaries......Page 288
8. Causative and perception verbs......Page 315
9. Copular and existential constructions......Page 348
10. Infinitival clauses......Page 385
11. Tense, aspect, mood......Page 413
12. Negation and polarity......Page 465
13. Dislocations and framings......Page 488
14. Focus Fronting......Page 518
15. Cleft constructions......Page 552
16. Interrogatives......Page 585
17. Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives......Page 619
18. Coordination and correlatives......Page 663
19. Gender and number......Page 707
20. Determination and quantification......Page 743
21. Adjectival and genitival modification......Page 787
22. Relative clauses......Page 820
23. Syntheticity and Analyticity......Page 855
24. Basic constituent orders......Page 903
List of Contributors......Page 949
Index......Page 957

Citation preview

Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax MRL 17

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 17

Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax Edited by Andreas Dufter and Elisabeth Stark

ISBN 978-3-11-037693-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-037708-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039342-2 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. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: jürgen ullrich typosatz, Nördlingen 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, Urban Varieties, Computational Linguistics, Neurolinguistics, Sign Languages or Forensic Linguistics.  









VI

Manuals of Romance 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 2017

Table of Contents Abbreviations

1

XI

Andreas Dufter and Elisabeth Stark Introduction 1

The verbal domain 2

Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins Subjects 27

3

Ioanna Sitaridou Objects 89

4

Richard Waltereit Argument structure and argument structure alternations

5

David Heap, Michèle Oliviéri and Katerina Palasis Clitic pronouns 183

6

Patricia Cabredo Hofherr Voice and voice alternations

7

Géraldine Legendre Auxiliaries 272

8

Marie Labelle Causative and perception verbs

9

Delia Bentley Copular and existential constructions

230

299

The clausal and sentential domains

10

Guido Mensching Infinitival clauses

11

Jan Lindschouw Tense, aspect, mood

369

397

332

154

VIII

Table of Contents

12

Pierre Larrivée Negation and polarity

13

Mara Frascarelli Dislocations and framings

14

Silvio Cruschina and Eva-Maria Remberger Focus Fronting 502

15

Anna-Maria De Cesare Cleft constructions 536

16

Olga Kellert Interrogatives

17

Xavier Villalba Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives

18

Cristina Sánchez López Coordination and correlatives

449

472

569

603

647

The nominal domain 19

Natascha Pomino Gender and number

20

Nigel Vincent Determination and quantification

21

Antonio Fábregas Adjectival and genitival modification

22

Cecilia Poletto and Emanuela Sanfelici Relative clauses 804

691

727

771

Table of Contents

Typological aspects 23

Adam Ledgeway Syntheticity and Analyticity

24

Manuel Leonetti Basic constituent orders

List of Contributors Index

941

933

839

887

IX

Abbreviations * # ? = > ∅ 1 2 3 A A’-position ABL ACC AC C

AcI AD Adv Ag Agr AmSp. AN

AP APP L

Arg. ART AR T

ASIt Ast. A-Topic AUG AUX

BC BPt. C Cal. Cat. CA US CAUS

CC CCl CD CG ch. CL

CLF CLLD ClP Clpro CLRD CollFr.

ungrammatical or unattested semantically and/or pragmatically inappropriate dubious form or usage cliticized to becomes null element first person second person third person adjective non-argument position ablative accusative accusativus cum infinitivo Anno Domini adverb Agent Agreement American Spanish animate adjectival phrase applicative Aragonese article Atlante Sintattico d’Italia Asturian aboutness-shift topic augmentative auxiliary Before Christ Brazilian Portuguese complementizer Calabrian Catalan causative cleft constituent, clitic climbing cleft clause clitic doubling common ground chapter clitic classifier clitic left dislocation classifier phrase clitic pronoun clitic right dislocation Colloquial French

DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-204

XII

COM COMP R COMP COND

Conj ConjP ContrP COP

Cors. CP C-Topic D DA T

DE DE F DEF DE M DEM DE T DET DIM DIST

Div DM DO DOC DOM DomSp. DP E ECM ED Eng. Enga. EPP EPt. EQ ESp. EXPL F(EM) FF FI FinP Foc FocP FP FPr. FR Fr. Friul. FUT

Gal.

Abbreviations

comitative comparative complementizer conditional conjunction conjunction phrase contrastive phrase copula Corsican complementizer phrase contrastive topic determiner dative Definiteness Effect definite demonstrative determiner diminutive distal divider Distributed Morphology direct object double object construction differential object marking Dominican Spanish determiner phrase eastern exceptional case marking ethic(al) dative English Engadinese extended projection principle European Portuguese echo question European Spanish expletive form feminine focus fronting faire-infinitive finiteness phrase focus focus phrase force phrase, faire-par Franco-Provençal free relative French Friulian future tense Galician

Abbreviations

GE N

Gen GenP Ger. GP Grk. Gsc. G-Topic HPSG HT I IL IMP IMPERS IMPF IND INDF INF

Infl IO IP IPA IPFV

IS It. L1 L2 Lad. Lat. LF LFG LIP corpus L-movement LOC

LPP L-Topic M ( ASC ) Maj.Cat. MidFr. Mil. ModFr. ModIt. ModSp. MRK

N Nap. NE NE G NEG NE UT NEUT

genitive gender gender phrase German Ground Phrase Greek Gascon familiar/given topic Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar hanging topic inflection individual-level imperative impersonal imperfect indicative indefinite infinitive inflection indirect object inflectional phrase International Phonetic Alphabet imperfective information structure Italian first language (acquired) second language (learned) Ladin Latin logical form Lexical-Functional Grammar corpus Lessico Italiano Parlato linearization-movement locative left-peripheral position limiting topic masculine Majorcan Catalan Middle French Milanese Modern French Modern Italian Modern Spanish marker noun, northern Neapolitan nominal expression negator neuter

XIII

XIV

NID NM

NNSL NOD NOM

NP NPI NSL NSP Num NumP n-word O OBL

OCat. Occ. OFr. OGsc. OLeo. OIt. ONap. OOcc. OPrv. OPt. OSp. OTsc. OVto. P PAR T PAS S

Pat PCC PEJ PF PFV

Pic. Pie. PL

PO POSS

PP PPI PRE D

pro PRO PROarb PROG

PRON PROX

Abbreviations

northern Italian dialect neutro de/di materia non null subject language northern Occitan dialect nominative noun phrase Negative Polarity Item null subject language null subject parameter number number phrase negative word object oblique Old Catalan Occitan Old French Old Gascon Old Leonese Old Italian Old Neapolitan Old Occitan Old Provençal Old Portuguese Old Spanish Old Tuscan Old Venetan preposition partitive passive Patient Person-Case Constraint pejorative existential pro-form perfective Picard Piedmontese plural prepositional object possessive prepositional phrase Positive Polarity Item predicative phonologically null subject pronoun in finite clauses phonologically null subject pronoun in non-finite clauses PRO with arbitrary reference progressive pronoun proximal

Abbreviations

PRS PRT PS T PST

Pt. PTC P PTCP

Q Q-FR QP REFL

REL RelC Rom. RtR. S SBJV

SCI SC L SG

ShiftP SI Sic. SL Sp. Spec Srd. StFr. SUB SUPERL

Surs. T TAM Top TopP TP UTAH V v V2 VP vP Vto. W WCO WMP X XP

present preterite past tense Portuguese participle quantifier, question marker question with a free relative structure quantifier phrase reflexive relativizer relative clause Romanian Rhaeto-Romance subject, southern subjunctive subject-clitic inversion subject clitic singular aboutness-shift phrase subject-DP inversion Sicilian stage-level Spanish specifier Sardinian Standard French subject superlative Sursilvan tense tense, aspect, mood topic topic phrase tense phrase Uniform Theta Assignment Hypothesis verb light verb, highest head of the vP shell verb second verb phrase light verb phrase, highest functional projection below TP Venetan western weak crossover WordMarkerPhrase unspecified head element unspecified phrasal category

XV

Andreas Dufter and Elisabeth Stark

1 Introduction Abstract: This chapter seeks to situate the contents of the volume within the larger context of comparative Romance linguistics, and with respect to cross-linguistic and theory-driven investigations into morphosyntax and syntax at large. To this end, the chapter will survey a selection of comparative Romance reference works and venture some remarks about Romance linguistics as a discipline. It will then take stock of some basic notions and widely accepted tenets of syntax and morphosyntax, before providing an overview of the structure and the contents of the volume. Finally, a number of acknowledgements will be made.  

Keywords: Romance linguistics, syntax, morphosyntax, syntactic categories, syntactic relations, constituency, dependency, null subject parameter, left periphery, grammaticalization  

1 Comparative Romance morphosyntax and syntax: remarks on the development of a discipline Romance languages and dialects are obviously related, yet differ from each other in a plethora of ways. In the transition from Late Latin to the medieval varieties dubbed volgari or romances, linguistic change set these emerging Romance vernaculars apart from Latin, and yielded significant diversification within the Romancespeaking territories. This diachronic development has come to be known as Ausgliederung ‘fragmentation’ since Walther von Wartburg’s seminal study (Wartburg 1936). It affected not only phonology and the lexicon, but also, and perhaps most interestingly, “core” aspects of grammatical systems, and in particular morphosyntax and syntax. Ever since their earliest attestations, the varieties of Romance have demonstrably continued to evolve, and grammatical change has been ongoing and fostered grammatical variation. Of course, geographical and social differentiation may not come as a surprise in languages boasting large communities of speakers on different continents, such as Spanish, Portuguese and French. However, morphosyntactic and syntactic variation is equally pervasive in Italian and Romanian, and in regional languages such as Catalan and Sardinian, to give but two examples. At the same time, variation has traditionally been frowned upon by prescriptive grammarians and other language observers. At least since the early modern period, and in particular since the invention of the printing press, processes of standardization have been operative. Typically at least, the protagonists of standardization aimed at reducing variability in grammar, prescribing “correct” variants and condemning all DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-001

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Andreas Dufter and Elisabeth Stark

others. Nonetheless, the outcome of standardization has never been complete homogeneity. Rather, the situation of Romance languages in modern times is characterized by a co-existence of standard varieties, local and regional vernaculars, and emergent regional standard varieties, such as Regional Southern French. The implications for comparative Romance linguistics are clear enough: Ideally at least, it needs to investigate both variation between the individual Romance languages, i.e., cross-linguistic or “macro”-variation, and variation within individual Romance languages, i.e., regional (“diatopic”) and socio-stylistic (“diastratic” and “diaphasic”) “micro”-variation. Such comprehensive coverage of variation certainly constitutes a daunting task for a handbook on comparative Romance linguistics. Back in the nineteenth century, the founding fathers of the discipline already needed several hundred pages of text for their reference works, at a time when systematic dialectological investigations were in their infancy, and other types of micro-variation barely taken into consideration: Friedrich Diez published his famous Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen (1836–1839) in three volumes, focusing on Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Occitan. Some fifty years later, Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke presented another four-volume Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen (1890–1902). Meyer-Lübke’s grammar provides an admirably clear and informative account which reflected the theoretical advances of historical and comparative linguistics in the wake of the Neogrammarians (see also Swiggers 2014). The twentieth century, by contrast, is largely characterized by a relative scarcity of reference works devoted to the Romance language family as a whole. Mention should be made in this context of overviews such as Bourciez’s Éléments de linguistique romane (51967, 11910), Lausberg’s Romanische Sprachwissenschaft (3 vol., 1956– 1962) or Robert A. Hall Jr.’s Comparative Romance Grammar (3 vol., 1974–1983). While all these books offer structuralist accounts of phonology and morphology, they fail to describe morphosyntax and syntax in a systematic fashion. Other standard references, such as the widely cited volume The Romance Languages (Harris/Vincent 1988), provide a collection of portraits of individual languages rather than a panRomance perspective on the similarities and differences in their grammatical organization. To be fair, it must be acknowledged that a significant number of monographs and collected volumes on specific topics of comparative Romance grammar have been published since Lausberg’s and Hall’s times.1 All these publications attest to the fertility of investigating close linguistic relatives. Many of them offer fresh data and original analyses, often with important implications for grammatical theory at large.  



1 See, among others, the monographs by Thun (1986), Wanner (1987), Zanuttini (1997), Squartini (1998), Mensching (2000), Cruschina (2011), and Manzini/Savoia (2011), and volumes edited by Dahmen et al. (1998), Hulk/Pollock (2001), Stark/Wandruszka (2003), Kaiser (2005), Remberger/Mensching (2008), Stark/Schmidt-Riese/Stoll (2008), Dufter/Jacob (2009; 2011), and De Cesare/Garassino (2016).

Introduction

3

However, it would probably be misguided to try and consult these volumes as introductory surveys of some subfield of the discipline. At the same time, grammars of individual Romance languages and language varieties abound (see Dufter 2010 for a short overview of synchronic descriptive grammars in the Romania, and Seilheimer 2014 for historical grammars). As is to be expected, these grammars differ considerably in their theoretical ambition, empirical scope, and target audience. Some of them put a strong focus on syntactic theory, often within the generative framework,2 whereas other authoritative grammars, albeit theoretically informed, may be more easily accessible to a larger readership.3 Against the backdrop of such increasing specialization, and an ever-increasing diversity of theoretical backgrounds and research agendas, an uneasy feeling was gaining ground that Romance linguistics as a discipline might be threatened by fragmentation (see contributions to Dahmen et al. 2006). This is, however, but one of the reasons why the encyclopedic Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik (LRL, 8 vol., 1988–2005), edited by Günter Holtus, Michael Metzeltin and Christian Schmitt, may well be considered a landmark publication: As a timely state-of-the-art reference work, it has offered orientation and guidance to a whole generation of scholars interested in Romance languages and dialects, from both synchronic and diachronic vantage points. As far as comparative Romance morphosyntax and syntax are concerned, the LRL boasts two chapters (Oesterreicher 1996a,b), which offer an informed, accessible and admirably comprehensive overview in only 83 pages of text. More generally, the LRL has also served to update the field as a discipline, to reaffirm its aims and scope, and to reinstate the importance of studying “minor” varieties such as Astur-Leonese, Corsican or Friulian. No less than seventeen Romance languages are recognized by the LRL and described, albeit with varying degrees of precision, one by one. As a consequence, four of the eight volumes are devoted to the presentation of individual languages (and their dialects), while only three adopt more general linguistic and comparative perspectives (and volume 8 comprises a number of indices). The languages of publication are German and the major Romance languages, a fact which

2 See, in particular, the influential monographs by Kayne (1975), Jones (1996) and Rowlett (2007) on French, Rizzi (1982), Burzio (1986), Cinque (1995) and Samek-Lodovici (2015) on Italian, Jones (1993) on Sardinian, Zagona (2002) on Spanish, Gupton (2014) on Galician, Costa (2004) on European Portuguese, and Dobrovie-Sorin (1993) and Dobrovie-Sorin/Giurgea (2013) on Romanian. 3 For academic purposes, key references include Wilmet (52010), Riegel/Pellat/Rioul (52014) and Grevisse (162016) for French, Renzi/Salvi/Cardinaletti (1988–1995) and Serianni (1988) for Italian, Fernández Ramírez (1951; 1985–1987), Bosque/Demonte (1999) and RAE/ASALE (2009) for Spanish, Castilho (2010), Raposo et al. (2013) and Cunha/Cintra (62014) for Portuguese, Álvarez/Xove (2002) for Galician, Wheeler/Yates/Dols (1999) and Solà Cortassa et al. (2002) for Catalan, and Guţu Romalo (2005) and Pană Dindelegan (2013) for Romanian. In addition, there is a wealth of grammars written to fit the practical needs of language teaching, in particular second language learning. For reasons of space, we will only mention Mosegaard Hansen (2016) for French, Maiden/Robustelli (2000) for Italian, Butt/Benjamin (52011) for Spanish, and Hutchinson/Lloyd (22003) for Portuguese.

4

Andreas Dufter and Elisabeth Stark

regrettably might have hindered somewhat the accessibility of the LRL in linguistics at large. For historical Romance linguistics, the three-volume handbook Romanische Sprachgeschichte (RSG, Ernst et al. 2003–2008), published by De Gruyter, offers an impressive array of chapters, with a strong focus on external aspects of language use and language standardization in a historical perspective. Several of the chapters are devoted to the Romance language family as a whole, a few in volume 3 also address morphosyntactic and syntactic questions, though never in a comparative perspective. And, again, a majority of articles are written in German, the rest in either French, Italian, or Spanish. For those who do not read all of these languages, the two volumes of the Cambridge History of the Romance Languages (Maiden/Smith/Ledgeway 2011/2013) may come in handy. This reference work adopts a comparative, pan-Romance perspective in all chapters. It thereby succeeds in providing an up-to-date survey of the field, not least so in its chapters on morphosyntactic and syntactic change, and persistence. Finally, the most recent addition to the list of reference works is the Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages (Ledgeway/Maiden 2016). In one single large volume, this handbook contains chapters on individual Romance language varieties as well as comparative overviews, several of them pertaining to the domains of morphosyntax and syntax. All in all, then, one might very well assume that those seeking an accessible overview of some key topics in Romance morphosyntax and syntax will manage to find something in existing grammars, handbooks and, possibly, other published sources. Why add yet another manual to the set of existing reference works? To begin with, we strongly believe that Romance morphosyntax and syntax deserve – at the very least – a handbook volume of their own, comprising some 930 pages and 24 chapters, as happens to be the case with the volume at hand. There are probably many arguments to defend this point of view, but one of them is that over the last decades, grammatical descriptions of Romance varieties, including historical stages of the language and historical as well as present-day dialects, have had a significant impact on (morpho)syntactic theory at large. Conversely, theoretical and typological (morpho)syntax has inspired and guided new research into Romance varieties. In-depth investigations of older language stages have deepened our understanding of the mechanisms of grammatical change.4 On a synchronic level, investigations into the syntax of dialects and other “vernacular” varieties supposedly un-

4 Representative publications include Klausenburger (2000), Salvi (2004) and Ledgeway (2012) for new theoretical perspectives on grammatical change from Latin into Romance, Arteaga (2013) on Old French, Jensen (1986; 1990) on Old Occitan and Old French, Salvi/Renzi (2010), Benincà/Ledgeway/ Vincent (2014) and Poletto (2014) on Old Italian, Fischer (2010) on Old Catalan, Kato/Ordóñez (2016) on the evolution of Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, and Pană Dindelegan (2016) on Old Romanian.

Introduction

5

affected by normative pressure have loomed large over the last few decades. This seems to hold in particular for Italo-Romance, where research activities have been vibrant, typically within the generative approach.5 In Europe, the Going Romance conference series has become a prominent annual venue. In a similar vein, the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages constitutes an established conference series in North American academia in which issues pertaining to Romance morphosyntax and syntax have always enjoyed a prominent place. Such conferences are emblematic of the cross-fertilization of grammatical theory, new descriptive accounts of Romance varieties, and new methods of data collection, including sociolinguistic and experimental ones. Both the Going Romance and the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages conferences regularly lead to publications of selected papers in edited volumes, published by John Benjamins. While it is true that a significant number of articles collected in these volumes concentrate on only one variety of Romance, the very fact that the entire family of Romance languages and dialects is accepted as an object of linguistic investigation may be taken as indicative of a shared interest in maintaining Romance linguistics as a discipline. In addition, there are a number of renowned journals such as Probus or Revue Romane which are exclusively devoted to the linguistic study of all Romance language varieties. Conferences and academic journals such as those mentioned have significantly promoted comparative investigations into Romance grammar, at a time when institutionalized academia would be more likely to encourage compartmentalized research agendas. The time is thus ripe, we would venture to say, to account for the results of this renewed interest, and for the new insights gathered in recent research, in an accessible handbook format. As linguists working in Romance departments, however, we sometimes feel that there continues to exist something like a “cultural gap” between, on the one side, theoretically minded linguists, of both formalist and functionalist persuasions, and, on the other side, scholars trained in the time-honored philological traditions of research into Romance languages and dialects. It may not be much of an overstatement to say that for each side, there exist separate conferences, networks, book series and journals. Given this, it is perhaps not coincidental that academic publishers such as De Gruyter provide separate catalogs for linguistics and for Romance studies. As editors, it was our ambition to compile a volume that would contribute towards bridging this cultural gap. Therefore, we would be delighted if the volume were of interest for both sides, and possibly for researchers working in neighboring fields. In addition, our contention is that it should be of use not only for established scholars, but also for younger researchers, including graduate and advanced undergraduate students.

5 See, in particular, Poletto (1993; 2000) on Northern Italian dialects, Ledgeway (2009) on Old Neapolitan, and Tortora (2003), Manzini/Savoia (2005) and D’Alessandro/Ledgeway/Roberts (2010) on Italian dialects in general.

6

Andreas Dufter and Elisabeth Stark

We endeavor to suggest, then, that this Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax is timely for a variety of reasons. From Diez’ Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen to Ledgeway/Maiden’s Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, reference works need to cover much more than “just” morphosyntax and syntax. To the best of our knowledge, these fields have never received exclusive attention in a singlevolume handbook. Even those whose own research interests lie outside the areas of morphosyntax and syntax would probably admit that a total of 83 pages (Oesterreicher 1996a,b) in a volume of several thousands of pages such as the Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik is not a particularly fair share. While the Romanische Sprachgeschichte and the Cambridge History of the Romance Languages arguably fare somewhat better, they are by design limited to the historical dimension. Similarly, the Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages dedicates only about a fourth of its chapters to topics in Romance morphosyntax and syntax. In all likelihood, however, it is limitations of space rather than a presumed scarcity of interesting issues which preclude a more full-fledged presentation of these fields. As we said, those seeking information about individual language varieties of Romance have at their disposal a range of reference grammars, varying in their degree of theoretical sophistication and in the quantity of empirical observations they present. However, for those in search of overviews about cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal differences, and grammatical features characterizing the Romance language family as a whole, the Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax might be a welcome addition. It seeks to provide both theoretically informed and empirically grounded surveys of topics which have figured prominently in the field (see Sections 2 and 3). In addition to the “big five” in Romance linguistics, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, many chapters offer a variety of data from “smaller” languages, and from regional and local dialects. In light of all this, it may not come as a surprise that this handbook is somewhat hefty, probably more so than many other volumes within the Manuals of Romance Linguistics book series. In order to be accessible to a wide readership, all chapters are written in English. Furthermore, English glosses and/or translations of examples from Romance language varieties are offered throughout. Albeit with various degrees of detail, glosses generally follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules (www.eva. mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php). All authors were encouraged to avoid framework-internal discussions, overly technical jargon, and abbreviations which may not be familiar to a non-expert readership. In any event, the reader will find a list of abbreviations used at the beginning of the volume, and an index of linguistic terms, languages and dialects at the end. In the next section, we will introduce some fundamental notions of syntax and morphosyntax, before giving an overview of the structure and the contents of the volume in Section 3.

7

Introduction

2 Syntax and morphosyntax: some basic notions Both syntax and morphosyntax are ambiguous terms, designating, first, components (or “levels” or “modules”) of linguistic organization and, second, those subdisciplines of linguistics which investigate these levels. In line with standard assumptions about the organization of language, we take syntax to be the component of linguistic systems that defines the set of grammatical arrangements of words, and of certain meaningful subparts of them such as inflectional morphemes. These words and morphemes combine into larger units of grammar such as phrases, up to the level of clauses and sentences. More specifically, syntax as a discipline investigates, first of all, grouping relations (constituency) and ordering relations (linearization). An insight dating back to antiquity is that words may profitably be categorized into a small number of so-called word classes (also called “parts of speech”, echoing the Latin term partes orationis, in much of the older tradition). Linguistic typology has impressively shown that the inventory of word classes differs substantially across languages, and some formal accounts of morphology such as Distributed Morphology (Halle/Marantz 1993) even assume word classes to be syntactic products just like phrases. Yet probably no one would deny that at least on a descriptive level, nouns (N), verbs (V), adjectives (A) and possibly adverbs (Adv) may constitute fundamental lexical categories in Romance and Germanic languages. To these, we may add functional categories such as (at least some) prepositions (P), determiners (D), i.e., articles and their likes, and complementizers (C) such as Fr./Sp./Pt. que, It. che ‘that’ heading various types of subordinate clauses. Following Stowell (1981) and Williams (1981), the expression of morphosyntactic features of verbs is categorized as Inflection (I) or Tense (T), respectively. All lexical categories (N, V, A, Adv) and all functional categories (D, P, C, I, T) project, i.e., they can form the nuclei, or heads, of larger syntactic units. These larger syntactic units are formed according to a small set of abstract cross-categorial building principles, which became famous under the name of X-bar Theory (see Lasnik/Lohndal 2013, 41–47 for a concise overview). Without entering into details, we will only recall that those larger syntactic units which, intuitively, appear to be relatively complete and autonomous, are referred to as phrases. Phrasal categories, and their respective category symbols, are determined by their heads: Nouns head noun phrases (or NPs, for short), verbs head verb phrases (VPs), and so forth. A noun such as Fr. maison ‘house’, for example, can head a complex noun phrase of the type grande maison de Pierre ‘big house of Pierre’, with grande and de Pierre acting as adjectival and genitival modifiers of their head noun (see ↗21 Adjectival and genitival modification). Nominal groups introduced by a determiner, such as la grande maison de Pierre ‘Pierre’s big house’, lit. ‘the big house of Pierre’ are categorized as determiner phrases (DPs) in languages in which the presence of such a determiner before an NP is (near-)categorical in argument position (see ↗20 Determination and quantification). Moving on from NPs, DPs and VPs to the level of (simple) sentences, these have been analyzed as projections of their verbal  



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inflection or, alternatively, of their tense features (IPs or TPs). Finally, subordinate clauses such as que Pierre a une grande maison ‘that Pierre has a big house’ have been argued to be headed by their subordinating complementizer, thereby forming complementizer phrases (CPs). Taken together, lexical and functional categories and their projections constitute the set of syntactic categories of a language. Many, if not most syntacticians would probably subscribe to the principle according to which syntactic structure is strictly binary, i.e., every complex syntactic unit contains exactly two immediate constituents. It needs to be acknowledged, though, that binarity is not always self-evident, especially in cases of (symmetric) coordination such as Fr. Pierre et Marie ‘Pierre and Marie’ (see ↗18 Coordination and correlatives). Besides syntactic categories, traditional as well as many contemporary versions of syntactic theory make reference to a second set of notions, known as syntactic functions or, in other work, as grammatical relations. Many of these notions are familiar since primary school: subjects, objects, predicates and, possibly, adverbials may well seem concepts so obvious to the average language user that, so one might think, little needs to be said about them. On closer scrutiny, however, several issues connected to the exact definition of syntactic functions, as well as to their theoretical status and usefulness for language description, turn out to be anything but trivial (see ↗2 Subjects; ↗3 Objects). More generally, it can easily be shown that syntactic units which co-occur within a larger syntactic constituent enter into different types of relationships. Perhaps the most conspicuous type is dependency, a relation in which one unit renders obligatory the presence of another unit within the larger syntactic context. Other types may involve morphological categories with syntactic relevance, i.e., so-called morphosyntactic relations. In this volume, morphosyntax is understood not as the set union of morphology and syntax, but as the interface of grammar in which the components of morphology and syntax interact. There are reasons to believe that morphology constitutes a component of grammar in its own right, and not just a kind of word-internal syntax, as some researchers have maintained (see Selkirk 1982). Simplifying somewhat, we may say that morphosyntax typically makes reference to categories of inflectional morphology, such as person, number, gender, case, tense, aspect, and mood. The flip side of this conception of morphosyntax is that word formation, including compounding and derivation, does not fall within its purview, even if, at times, the boundaries between compositional, derivational and inflectional morphology may appear to be somewhat blurred (see Scalise 1988; Spencer 2000; Gisborne 2014). A relationship encompassing the domains of inflectional morphology and syntax is government, a concept going back to ancient grammarians and that aims to capture the insight that certain features of grammatical form, such as case features, can be unilaterally “imposed” by a co-constituent which in turn does not possess these features. A related, but distinct, type of relationship is agreement. Syntactic units are said to stand in a relationship of agreement when there is a systematic interdepen 



Introduction

9

dence with respect to grammatical features shared by both units. The example in (1) may serve as a simple illustration: (1) Fr. Pierre a déjà pardonné à son to his Pierre have.3SG already forgiven ‘Pierre has already forgiven his neighbor.’

voisin. neighbor

In (1), the presence of à son voisin is rendered obligatory by the choice of the verb pardonner ‘forgive’, since Pierre a déjà pardonné constitutes an incomplete, ungrammatical sentence. À son voisin is therefore dependent upon the verb. More specifically, this verb imposes that the constituent expressing who is being forgiven be introduced by the preposition à. In other words, pardonner governs à-marking (arguably a kind of syntactic dative marking) of the “sinner argument.” Finally, the finite auxiliary verb a ‘has’ is marked as third person singular, thereby agreeing in person and number with the “forgiver argument” Pierre.6 Yet another relationship concept which has become influential, especially for the study of dependency relations between verbs and their complements, is valency (Tesnière 1959; ↗4 Argument structure and argument structure alternations). While the exact definition of valency may differ somewhat between different authors, it seems to be commonly accepted that valency is a complex notion, which combines syntactic dependency and government with semantic and pragmatic facets of interrelatedness between a verb (or valency-bearing noun or adjective) and its dependent clause-mates. The notion of valency has occupied center stage in a predominantly European-based tradition of Dependency Grammar (see contributions to Ágel et al. 2003/2006; see Perini 2015 for a recent book-length account based on data from Brazilian Portuguese). By emphasizing the role of lexical information in clause structure, valency-based approaches may also be assimilated to theories advocating a continuum between grammar and the lexicon. This holds true in particular for a family of theories referred to as Construction Grammar (see Hoffmann/Trousdale 2013). Here again, the exact definition of what technically constitutes a construction varies between authors. In any event, constructions are “conventionalized pairings between meaning and form” (Goldberg 2006, 3), can be syntactically complex and display formal and/or semantic and pragmatic properties which are not fully predictable on the basis of their component parts alone. The identification of such constructions thus challenges, it has been claimed, the principle of compositionality according to which the meaning of complex

6 To be sure, a more comprehensive analysis of (1) would need to recognize additional types of interconstituent relations, such as the interpretation of the possessive son as referring back to Pierre. This type of relationships, known as binding, will not be addressed in this manual. Many scholars argue that binding is not exclusively syntactic in nature, but an interface phenomenon, extending beyond syntax into discourse semantics and pragmatics in complex ways. The interested reader is referred to Büring (2005) and references cited therein.

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linguistic signs, and in particular complex syntactic units, can be systematically computed from the meaning of the word forms it contains. By the same token, constructions have been argued to constitute counter-evidence to any linguistic framework which holds that the lexicon and the grammar of a language can be separated into distinct modules. Instead, proponents of Construction Grammar, in one form or another, maintain that the continuum between the lexicon and grammar in language calls for a non-modular, holistic theory of linguistic systems. Despite its initial attraction, Construction Grammar has not been exempt from criticism either (see Adger 2013). To begin with, no commonly accepted operational definition seems to exist of what exactly counts as a construction in a given language and what does not. Second, while compositionality may indeed not hold in many cases of complex word formation, the number of demonstrably non-compositional constructions in syntax is perhaps less impressive than one might think. More often than not, proponents of Construction Grammar resort to a modest number of set examples from English, such as the famous case of let alone (Fillmore/Kay/O’Connor 1988).7 Third, even if there are good reasons to attribute the status of construction to a given complex syntactic unit, this should be a starting point rather than an endpoint for linguistic analysis. Adding a complex unit to the list of constructions does not explain why this unit features just those idiosyncratic properties it features and not others. Nonetheless, the concept of construction may indeed have diagnostic and descriptive value, especially in cases of complex constructions which do appear to be hard nuts for compositional analyses to crack, such as clefts and pseudo-clefts (see ↗15 Cleft constructions). In one form or another, however, many of the contributions to this manual are indebted to concepts of Generative Grammar. Since Chomsky’s seminal earlier publications (see, e.g., Chomsky 1957; 1965) to Government-Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981) and the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), Generative Grammar has witnessed an astonishing success in linguistics departments all over the globe, but also given rise to much debate, and radical criticism, especially from linguists and psychologists investigating the interplay of language and cognition. This is not the place to engage in theoretical discussion about the architecture of grammar. In our opinion, Generative Grammar has indeed provided a wealth of new insights into the structure of Romance languages and dialects. All we can do here, given space limitations, is to mention a few topics in which research conducted within the generative framework has contributed towards a deeper understanding of syntax, and comparative Romance syntax in particular. To begin with, much work has been done, before and after the advent of generative syntax, on unexpressed or “null” subjects in finite clauses. Their differential

7 Recently, however, Romance languages have gained ground in Construction Grammar; see Bouveret/Legallois (2012), Boas/Gonzálvez-García (2014), and several contributions to Yoon/Gries (2016).

11

Introduction

availability in Romance varieties, the interpretational restrictions associated to them, and the division of labor between morphology, syntax, and the lexicon in the expression of subjects have inspired various kinds of cross-linguistic and typological generalizations. While it is true that ambitious earlier claims about a categorical “pro-drop” or “null subject” parameter (Burzio 1986; Rizzi 1986) have not withheld empirical scrutiny, research aimed at refining the notion of null subject languages has considerably fostered our knowledge about the extent, and the limits, of co-variation between inflectional morphology and syntax (see contributions to Biberauer et al. 2010; Zimmermann 2014; ↗2 Subjects). Second, the identification of unaccusative verbs, dating back to Perlmutter (1978), has become highly influential in coming to grips with the interplay of subject positions, semantic roles of subjects, the availability of passive and other impersonal constructions, auxiliary selection, and past participle agreement (Loporcaro 1998; ↗2 Subjects; ↗6 Voice and voice alternations; ↗7 Auxiliaries). Moving on from subjects to objects, a third research topic in which Romance languages have played a prominent role is object and adverbial clitics. Their placement, their sequencing and their co-occurrence, in some varieties, with co-indexed non-clitic objects and adverbials, have figured prominently in generative work at least since Kayne (1975) and Rizzi (1982) (↗5 Clitic pronouns). Positions adjacent to the verb are also available for certain other, non-clitic adverbials, and for negating elements. There are, however, certain differences between languages such as English and French, when it comes to the ordering of auxiliaries, preverbal negation, adverbials such as already or its French counterpart déjà, and non-finite verbal forms such as past participles or infinitives. Such ordering properties led Pollock (1989) to propose a more articulate structure for the functional category of Inflection. This “Split Inflection Hypothesis” set the scene for a fourth topic of investigation, the relative order of verbs and adjacent syntactic units, in particular object clitics, non-clitic adverbs and negators. Following up on this, Cinque (1999) developed a particularly elaborate syntactic proposal in order to account for the different positions available for different types of adverbs. His analysis is based to a significant extent on data from Italian and French. Very soon, research went beyond clauses with simple finite verbs to investigate linearization with complex verbal predicates and infinitival verbs (↗8 Causative and perception verbs; ↗10 Infinitival clauses). Fifth, we should mention wh-movement, that is, the analysis of clauses which are introduced by a wh-element as being derived by long-distance movement. This analysis, originally developed by Ross (1967) and Chomsky (1977), has been instrumental in gaining a better understanding of the regularities, and constraints, observable in Romance wh-interrogatives and relative clauses (see ↗16 Interrogatives; ↗22 Relative clauses). Finally, data from Italian and French have also been adduced as evidence for splitting up the clause-initial complementizer position into what has come to be known as the “fine structure of the left periphery” since Rizzi (1997). By introducing additional  



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functional structure above IP, the left periphery can accommodate elements related to illocutionary force by virtue of a Force Phrase (ForceP), such as Sp. ojalá and Pt. oxalá ‘hopefully’. More generally, the establishment of a “cartography” of syntactic structure at the left edges of syntactic units such as clauses and sentences has fostered research into the syntax of non-declaratives (see ↗16 Interrogatives; ↗17 Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives). By the same token, syntactic cartography has also invited new reflections on the impact of information structure on syntactic linearization. The provision of recursively available Topic projections (TopP), and of a (non-recursive) Focus projection (FocP), provide new avenues of research into preverbal constituents exhibiting focus or topic properties (see ↗13 Dislocations and framings; ↗14 Focus Fronting). Again, Romance languages and dialects have played a prominent role in cartographic approaches to syntax (see in particular, contributions to Cinque 2002; 2006; Belletti 2004; Rizzi 2004; Benincà/Munaro 2011; Brugé et al. 2012; Shlonsky 2015). At the same time, alternative, less articulate models of syntactic structure have also been proposed on the basis of data from Romance. In particular, it has been argued that prosodic structure needs to be taken into account in order to account for the relationship between information structure and constituent orders in the left periphery of sentences (see, Zubizarreta 1998; 2009 for Spanish, and Costa 2009 for Portuguese). At least to some extent, the chapters in the present volume bear witness to the diversity of approaches. In the next section, we will outline the overall structure of the volume and briefly introduce the chapters one by one.  

3 Structure, contents and leitmotifs of the volume The volume at hand consists of five parts. Following this introduction (Part I, Chapter 1), it features chapters on topics related to the verbal domain (Part II, Chapters 2–9), the syntax of clauses and sentences (Part III, Chapters 10–18), and the nominal domain (Part IV, Chapters 19–22), before ending with two chapters on more general, typological aspects (Part V, Chapters 23–24). By verbal domain, we are referring to a syntactic domain that roughly corresponds to the Tense Phrase (TP) in generative approaches, and to the French notion of proposition and equivalent notions in other Romance languages. As might be expected, Part II comprises chapters devoted to subjects and object complements of verbs (chapters 2 and 3, respectively). Several formal subtypes of verbal arguments are distinguished. In addition, dependency relations, including valency and government, as well as argument drop, agreement regularities and differential object marking (DOM) are discussed. Argument structures and argument structure alternations, and their semantic effects, are presented in chapter 4. As already mentioned, clitic pronouns have always attracted particular interest among Romance linguists. Their inventories and placement properties form the subject of chapter 5. In chapter 6, the syntactic expression of semantic arguments in passive and related constructions is

13

Introduction

investigated, and a number of semantic and information-structural properties of such voice alternations are addressed. Auxiliary verbs, their inventories in Romance languages and dialects, the complex interplay of factors determining the choice of auxiliaries in analytic perfect tenses, and past participle agreement regularities are treated in chapter 7. Chapter 8 then provides information about the syntactic peculiarities of causative and perception verb constructions, which can display both monoclausal and biclausal properties. Part II concludes with chapter 9, on copular and existential constructions, which feature a gamut of different syntactic formats, each of which associated with specific interpretational characteristics. As already mentioned, Part III scrutinizes the clausal and sentential domains, i.e., issues related to what is called phrase in French, or Complementizer Phrase (CP) in generative terms. In particular, several of the chapters in this part zoom in on phenomena related to the left periphery in the sense of Rizzi (1997) and his followers. The part opens with chapter 10 on infinitival clauses, both in syntactically embedded contexts and as independent sentential units. Following up on this, chapter 11 moves on to finite clauses and surveys the morphosyntactic categories of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM). In Romance languages at least, these TAM categories turn out to be intimately related. We chose to discuss these categories in Part III rather than in Part II because at the level of morphosyntax and syntax, TAM features of a clause may entertain a range of grammatical and semantic relations with those of other clauses, thereby interacting at levels higher than their respective proposition or TP. Given that TAM systems in Romance have constituted a hotspot of grammatical research for many decades, the chapter will inevitably not be able to do full justice to all the findings in all varieties of Romance, focusing instead to a large extent on French, Italian, and Spanish. Next, chapter 12 presents basic facts about the expression of negation in Romance languages, surveying the range of negative word items (or “n-words”, for short) and Negative Polarity Items (“NPIs”). By NPI, we are referring to linguistic expressions such as English at all which, while not carrying negative semantics by themselves, are typically restricted to environments under the scope of negation or other contexts of “scale reversal”. The chapter tackles cross-linguistic differences in the expression of negation in Romance from both diachronic and typological angles, by introducing the concept of the Jespersen Cycle, a showcase of grammaticalization theory (see below). Different types of displacements to the left periphery are introduced and analyzed in chapters 13 and 14. Chapter 13 first investigates phenomena known as clitic left dislocations (CLLDs, for short), such as in Fr. Mon voisin, il a toujours été comme ça (lit. ‘My neighbor, he has always been like that’), before examining other types of “displacements” (or External Merge) in which constituents are analyzed as occurring outside the “core clause”. Simplifying somewhat, we may say that dislocations and their likes tend to target constituents with topic properties, whereas a different set of rules and constraints applies for the fronting of focused constituents to a left-peripheral position. The distribution of focus fronting, and the interpretational characteristics associated to it, form the subject matter of chapter 14.  



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Information structure has also been argued to motivate the existence of biclausal syntactic formats such as Fr. C’est mon voisin qui est venu ‘It is my neighbor who came’ and Ce qu’il lui faut, c’est de l’argent ‘What he needs is money’. These structures, known as clefts and pseudo-clefts, respectively, and some of their syntactic variants, form the topic of chapter 15. The next two chapters shift the focus from information structure to illocutionary force and its relation to syntax in sentence types such as interrogatives (chapter 16), exclamatives, imperatives, and optatives (chapter 17). Last but not least, chapter 18 studies coordination, distinguishing between copulative, disjunctive, and adversative semantic types, and correlative constructions such as Fr. Plus on mange, plus on a faim ‘The more you eat, the hungrier you get’. Coordinated constituents and correlative clause pairs present interesting theoretical challenges to syntactic theory, many of which are addressed in the course of the chapter. The four chapters which make up Part IV explore aspects of the nominal domain in Romance, i.e., the morphosyntax and syntax of determiner phrases (DPs) according to the standard generative view. To begin with, chapter 19 describes the categories of gender and number, and the morphosyntactic relations in which they engage. In particular, the chapter details types of nominal plural marking found within the Romance family, and develops a syntactic take on gender and number in DPs. Next, chapter 20 studies different subclasses of determiners and quantifiers, surveying their diachronic sources and their syntagmatic potential in modern Romance languages. The two remaining chapters of Part IV explore various types of adnominal modifiers, from adjectival and genitival ones (chapter 21) to relative clauses (chapter 22). Chapter 21 pays particular attention to issues of linearization, making reference to semantically grounded ordering principles wherever appropriate. Chapter 22, in turn, presents paradigms of relativizing elements found in Romance, and formulates a number of generalizations about categories of relativizers, agreement facts, and the presence or absence of resumptive elements inside the relative clause. Finally, the two chapters in Part V seek to provide a broader typological perspective on the panoply of observations and findings presented in Parts II, III and IV. Chapter 23 investigates the division of labor between morphology and syntax, in other words, the degrees of analyticity (syntactic coding) or syntheticity (morphological coding) found in Romance languages, and in their common ancestor Latin. Most notably perhaps, this chapter critically assesses standard assumptions of a continuous diachronic evolution towards innovative analytic modes of expressing grammatical categories. The upshot of this discussion is that the changes observed can be more insightfully related to a change in the relative ordering of heads and their modifiers than to some inherent grammatical “drift” away from inflectional markings. To conclude the volume, the relative orderings of major constituents, i.e., subjects, verbs and objects, are discussed in chapter 24. As is well-known, subject–verb–object (SVO) orders constitute the unmarked case in Romance declaratives featuring both a lexical subject and a lexical object. However, other arrangements do occur, albeit with language-specific restrictions. Specifically, the chapter investigates the constraints on  







15

Introduction

OV and VS orders, capitalizing on information structure and discourse structure as determinants of variation in the linear arrangement of major constituents. While this tour d’horizon may seem ambitious, the volume at hand cannot pretend to offer comprehensive coverage of all topics worthy of a chapter-length treatment.8 In many ways, both the structure of the volume and the choice of contents reflect our indebtedness to Oesterreicher’s (1996a,b) chapters on comparative Romance morphosyntax and syntax in the Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik (see Section 1). In line with Oesterreicher (1996a), we maintain that any analysis of morphosyntactic categories in Romance languages needs to take into account the following areas of semantics and pragmatics: reference to discourse participants (↗2 Subjects; ↗3 Objects), semantic roles (↗4 Argument structure and argument structure alternations; ↗21 Adjectival and genitival modification), deixis, definiteness, and quantity (↗20 Determination and quantification), temporal reference, aspectual perspectivization, and modality (↗11 Tense, aspect, mood; ↗17 Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives). The way we conceive of syntax, in turn, is guided by Oesterreicher (1996b). Syntactic encoding implies a selection and combination of lexical and grammatical items. At the clausal and sentential levels, certain linear arrangements of major constituents qualify as unmarked and “basic” (↗24 Basic constituent orders), under a given mapping of semantic arguments onto syntactic roles determined by argument structure and grammatical voice (↗4 Argument structure and argument structure alternations; ↗6 Voice and voice alternations). Additional provisions must be made to account for the syntax of clauses featuring complex, non-finite and/or negated verbal predicates (↗8 Causative and perception verbs; ↗10 Infinitival clauses; ↗12 Negation and polarity), and predicates involving copular verbs (↗9 Copular and existential constructions). The impact of information structure on syntax is particularly evident in “non-basic” sentence variants, e.g. those involving “displacement” outside the core clause, fronting to the left clausal periphery, and splitting up clauses into biclausal cleft structures (↗13 Dislocations and framings; ↗14 Focus Fronting; ↗15 Cleft constructions). Syntactic movement operations are arguably also at play in clauses and sentences headed by interrogative, exclamative or relative items (↗16 Interrogatives; ↗17 Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives; ↗22 Relative clauses). It follows that issues related to the interfaces that syntax entertains with both semantics and information structure recur throughout many chapters. However, the volume cannot attempt systematic descriptions of these interfaces. Instead, we refer the interested reader to the Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance (Fischer/ Gabriel 2016), another volume from the Manuals of Romance Linguistics series.  





8 In particular, one may regret the absence of chapters specifically dedicated to adverbs and adverbial modification, both within the verbal and in “higher” clause and sentence level domains. Other lacunae we need to acknowledge include prepositional phrases, finite subordination and non-finite clausal units other than infinitival clauses, such as participial and gerundial constructions, as well as a chapter specifically dedicated to agreement facts.

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A second leitmotiv which cross-cuts the volume at hand is diachrony. Chapter 6, for example, devotes an entire section to the re-organization of grammatical voice from Latin to Early Romance. In a similar vein, chapter 7 starts out with an outline of the uses of Latin HABERE ‘have’ and ESSE ‘be’ and their historical evolution as auxiliaries from Latin to Romance, before taking stock of auxiliary systems found in modern Romance languages and dialects. Auxiliarization is a subcase of grammaticalization, a cover term to designate grammatical changes in which individual linguistic units, and sequences of them, evolve from autonomous lexical and syntactic codings towards less variable, and ultimately rigid grammatical and morphological structures. The literature on grammaticalization is vast (see Narrog/Heine 2011; Detges/Waltereit 2016 for concise overviews). The grammatical changes observed in the evolution from Latin to Romance have always occupied center stage in the field, a fact almost inevitably reflected in this volume. Chapter 12, on negation, likewise insists on longterm diachronic trends, and on cyclical change instantiated by the famous “Jespersen Cycle”, going from simple to reinforced and back to simple expressions of negation (for cyclical change in general, see Gelderen 2009; 2011; 2016). Chapter 18, on coordination, traces the historical fate of formal coordinating devices from Latin into Romance, and chapter 19 and 20 do the same for categories and exponents of gender and number, and for Romance determiners and their Latin sources, respectively. Finally, diachrony looms large in chapters 23 and 24. Both chapters offer a survey of changes in inflectional morphology and syntax, and some critical remarks on traditional attempts at explaining why these changes occurred. Again, however, we need to emphasize that exhaustive coverage of historical Romance morphosyntax and syntax is beyond the scope of a single-volume handbook which is dedicated to the modern Romance varieties in the first place. Last not least, the micro- and macro-variation observable within Romance has always been a privileged object of study for morphologists and syntacticians with an interest in linguistic typology (see Iliescu 2003; Jacob 2003; Ramat/Ricca 2016). Therefore, typological parameters and classifications constitute a third recurrent theme of this volume. In particular, a number of Romance linguists have argued for systematic correlations between different grammatical properties, with the ultimate aim of establishing more holistic types, and a typologically insightful classification of Romance varieties. Perhaps the most far-reaching claims were formulated by Körner (1987), who postulated the existence of two fundamental syntactic types in Romance, viz., “accusative” or “de-languages” such as French, and “ergative” or “a-languages” such as Spanish. In order to substantiate his claim, Körner adduces a range of phenomena which, ideally at least, should serve to establish the proposed dichotomy: In contrast to de-languages, a-languages exhibit differential object marking (DOM; see Bossong 1991; 1998; ↗3 Objects), clitic doubling (↗3 Objects; ↗5 Clitic pronouns), datives as agents of embedded infinitives (↗8 Causative and perception verbs; ↗10 Infinitival clauses), and inflected infinitives (↗10 Infinitival clauses). De-languages, in turn, are characterized by “partitive” articles (↗20 Determination and quantification), and past

17

Introduction

participle agreement in compound tenses (↗3 Objects; ↗7 Auxiliaries). Proposals such as Körner’s are certainly inspiring. Having said that, many chapters in this volume show that the actual range of syntactic variation between Romance varieties is considerably greater, especially when not only standard varieties, but also dialects are taken into account. Over the last decades, a number of more modest, but at the same time more “robust” correlative generalizations have been formulated, and explanatory accounts have been proposed. On a more general level, the advancement of typological research has also given rise to reflections about whether or not there is such a thing as a global “Romance type”. Posner (1996, 35) dismisses phonetic and phonological features as defining “Romanceness” and surmises that the best candidate for identifying a specifically Romance type of languages might be the lexicon. Indeed, a substantial number of lexical items are “shared” by many, or even all Romance languages. At the same time, many of these very same lexical items have also been borrowed into other languages, such as Albanian, Basque, and English. In morphosyntax and syntax, by contrast, a set of features does seem to exist which makes up a “typically Romance” language. This feature set should probably include binary systems of nominal gender (↗19 Gender and number; see Loporcaro forthcoming for a full-fledged account), certain recurring distributions of allomorphs in verb paradigms (cf. the notion of “N-pattern” in Maiden 2016), the grammaticalization of the definite article stemming from a Latin demonstrative (ILLE or IPSE ), as well as items of the “functional lexicon”, such as other types of determiners, clitics and full pronouns (↗5 Clitic pronouns; ↗20 Determination and quantification; see Posner 1996, 35–96 for a more comprehensive discussion). A number of chapters in this volume offer such global typological perspectives on Romance, by comparing features of Romance morphosyntax and syntax with those found in languages beyond the Romance language family. As we said at the beginning, Romance languages are obviously related – yet pinpointing their grammatical relatedness in typological terms will probably remain an intriguing enterprise for generations of linguists to come.  

4 Acknowledgements First of all, we would like to thank the directors of the Manuals of Romance Linguistics series, Günter Holtus and Fernando Sánchez Miret, for having had the courage and the vigor to launch and to direct such an important publishing project, and for having accepted our proposal for this volume. Second, special gratitude is due to the De Gruyter publishing house, especially to Ulrike Krauß and Gabrielle Cornefert. Without their professional guidance through the various stages of the publishing process, their encouragement and patience, this volume would not have been able to appear in an (almost) timely fashion.

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Third, we are deeply indebted to all our colleagues who were willing to act as internal or external reviewers of the chapter manuscripts, the latter group including Aria Adli, Nicholas Catasso, Georg A. Kaiser, Álvaro S. Octavio de Toledo, Javier Rodríguez Molina, Malte Rosemeyer and Armin Schwegler. Their constructive criticism has been instrumental in eliminating mistakes, clarifying many points, and optimizing the structure of the chapters and the presentation of contents. Fourth, the revised versions of the chapter manuscripts had to be proofread and prepared for submission to the publisher. Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet deserves special mention for her excellent proofreading as a native speaker of English and linguist. Benjamin Meisnitzer, as well as Dumitru Chihaï and Aurelia Merlan were of great help with some of the Portuguese and Romanian examples, respectively. In addition, literally thousands of linguistic examples and references had to be checked, and the formatting of examples, glosses and bibliographical entries had to be harmonized according to stylesheet guidelines. All this would have been simply impossible without the unconditional help of our teams in Zurich and Munich over the past two and a half years. We feel privileged in being able to rely on such great young linguists. Thank you so much, Mathieu Avanzi, Lena Baunaz, Larissa Binder, Jan Davatz, Daniela Gabler, Isabel Geiger, David Gerards, Teresa Gruber, Klaus Grübl, Benjamin Massot, Joan Miralles, Aurélia Robert-Tissot and Thomas Scharinger. Fifth, several of the contributors to this volume wish to acknowledge help from colleagues and/or financial support. We reproduce these acknowledgements here following the ordering of chapters in the volume: Chapter 8 (Marie Labelle): We thank Aroldo Leal de Andrade, Maria Teresa Espinal, Paul Hirschbühler, Anne Rochette, and the reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this paper. Chapter 12 (Pierre Larrivée): I am grateful to the editors of this volume, who kindly forced me to think about the issue in a pan-Romance way. This could not have been done without the input of Elena Albu, Carmen Avram, Montse Batllori and Benjamin Fagard, and that of the anonymous reviewers, who I warmly thank without however forgetting to evoke the usual disclaimers. Chapter 14 (Silvio Cruschina & Eva-Maria Remberger): We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this volume for valuable comments and remarks. Chapter 17 (Xavier Villalba): This work has been supported by grants FFI201452015 and 2014SGR1013, awarded to the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica of the UAB. Chapter 20 (Nigel Vincent): I am grateful to Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden as well as to the editors of this volume and to Aurelia Merlan for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. Needless to say responsibility for any remaining errors of fact or interpretation is mine alone. Chapter 21 (Antonio Fábregas): We are grateful to Elisabeth Stark, João Costa, Sandra Ronai, Ana Maria Brito, Francesca Masini, Tammer Castro, Marie Laurence Knittel, Edwige Dugas, Maria Pilar Colomina, Peter Svenonius and one anonymous  





Introduction

19

reviewer for comments and suggestions on previous versions of this chapter. All disclaimers apply. Chapter 22 (Cecilia Poletto & Emanuela Sanfelici): We thank Elisabeth Stark and the audience of the Relativsätze Forschergruppe Linguistik Kolloquium at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, for their helpful feedback. For the concerns of the Italian academy, Emanuela Sanfelici takes responsibility for Sections 2, 3, and 4, whereas Cecilia Poletto takes responsibility for Sections 1 and 5. Chapter 24 (Manuel Leonetti): The investigation presented in this chapter corresponds to two research projects funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (“Semántica procedimental y contenido explícito III” – SPYCE III, FFI2012-31785; “La interfaz Semántica / Pragmática y la resolución de conflictos interpretativos” – SPIRIM, FFI2015-63497-P). I am grateful to Elisabeth Stark, Andreas Dufter and an anonymous reviewer for their useful comments and suggestions. Thanks are due also to Vicky Escandell-Vidal for her help with Catalan data and to João Costa for providing me with published materials on Portuguese word order. Last but not least, our heartfelt gratitude goes to our much regretted academic maestro, Wulf Oesterreicher. Without his dedication to his students, research assistants and colleagues, without the unfailing support we received over many years, and without his enthusiasm for, and encyclopedic familiarity with Romance linguistics we would probably not have had the chance to end up as editors of a Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax. It is to him that this volume is dedicated.  

5 References Adger, David (2013), Constructions and grammatical explanation: comments on Goldberg, Mind and Language 28, 466–478. Ágel, Vilmos, et al. (edd.) (2003/2006), Dependency and Valency. An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, 2 vol., Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Álvarez, Rosario/Xove, Xosé (2002), Gramática da lingua galega, Vigo, Galaxia. Arteaga, Deborah L. (ed.) (2013), Research on Old French: The State of the Art, Dordrecht, Springer. Belletti, Adriana (ed.) (2004), Structures and Beyond. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures Volume 3, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Benincà, Paola/Ledgeway, Adam/Vincent, Nigel (edd.) (2014), Diachrony and Dialects. Grammatical Change in the Dialects of Italy, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Benincà, Paola/Munaro, Nicola (edd.) (2011), Mapping the Left Periphery. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures Volume 5, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Biberauer, Theresa, et al. (edd.) (2010), Parametric Variation. Null Subjects in Minimalist Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Boas, Hans C./Gonzálvez-García, Francisco (edd.) (2014), Romance Perspectives on Construction Grammar, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Bosque, Ignacio/Demonte, Violeta (edd.) (1999), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, 3 vol., Madrid, Espasa Calpe.  

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Bossong, Georg (1991), Differential object marking in Romance and beyond, in: Douglas Kibbee/ Dieter Wanner (edd.), New Analyses in Romance Linguistics, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 143–170. Bossong, Georg (1998), Le marquage différentiel de l’objet dans les langues de l’Europe, in: Jack Feuillet (ed.), Actance et valence dans les langues de l’Europe, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 193–258. Bourciez, Édouard (51967, 11910), Éléments de linguistique romane, Paris, Klincksieck. Bouveret, Myriam/Legallois, Dominique (edd.) (2012), Constructions in French, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Brugé, Laura, et al. (edd.) (2012), Functional Heads. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures Volume 7, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Büring, Daniel (2005), Binding Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Burzio, Luigi (1986), Italian Syntax. A Government-Binding Approach, Dordrecht, Reidel. Butt, John B./Benjamin, Carmen (52011, 11988), A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish, London, Arnold. Castilho, Ataliba Teixeira de (2010), Nova gramática do português brasileiro, São Paulo, Contexto. Chomsky, Noam (1957), Syntactic Structures, The Hague, Mouton. Chomsky, Noam (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam (1977), On “wh”-movement, in: Peter W. Culicover/Thomas Wasow/Adrian Akmajian (edd.), Formal Syntax, New York, Academic Press, 71–132. Chomsky, Noam (1981), Lectures on Government and Binding, Dordrecht, Foris. Chomsky, Noam (1995), The Minimalist Program, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Cinque, Guglielmo (1995), Italian Syntax and Universal Grammar, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Cinque, Guglielmo (1999), Adverbs and Functional Heads. A Cross-linguistic Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Cinque, Guglielmo (ed.) (2002), Functional Structure in DP and IP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures Volume 1, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Cinque, Guglielmo (ed.) (2006), Restructuring and Functional Heads. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures Volume 4, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Costa, João (2004), Subject Positions and Interfaces. The Case of European Portuguese, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Costa, João (2009), A focus-binding conspiracy. Left-to-right merge, scrambling and binary structure in European Portuguese, in: Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (ed.), Alternatives to Cartography, Berlin/ New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 87–108. Cruschina, Silvio (2011), Discourse-related Features and Functional Projections, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Cunha, Celso/Cintra, Luís F. L. (62014), Nova gramática do português contemporâneo, Rio de Janeiro, Lexikon. Dahmen, Wolfgang, et al. (edd.) (1998), Neuere Beschreibungsmethoden der Syntax romanischer Sprachen, Tübingen, Narr. Dahmen, Wolfgang, et al. (edd.) (2006), Was kann eine vergleichende romanische Sprachwissenschaft heute (noch) leisten? Romanistisches Kolloquium XX, Tübingen, Narr. D’Alessandro, Roberta/Ledgeway, Adam/Roberts, Ian (edd.) (2010), Syntactic Variation: The Dialects of Italy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. De Cesare, Anna-Maria/Garassino, Davide (edd.) (2016), Current Issues in Italian, Romance and Germanic Non-canonical Word Orders. Syntax – Information Structure – Discourse Organization, Frankfurt etc., Lang.

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Detges, Ulrich/Waltereit, Richard (2016), Grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, in: Susann Fischer/Christoph Gabriel (edd.), Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance (Manuals of Romance Linguistics 10), Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 635–657. Diez, Friedrich (1836–1839), Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen, 3 vol., Bonn, Weber. Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen (1993), The Syntax of Romanian. Comparative Studies in Romance, Berlin/ New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen/Giurgea, Ion (2013), A Reference Grammar of Romanian, vol. 1: The Noun Phrase, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Dufter, Andreas (2010), Grammatik und Grammatikographie in der Romania, in: Dudenredaktion/ Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache/Mechthild Habermann (edd.), Grammatik wozu? Vom Nutzen des Grammatikwissens in Alltag und Schule, Mannheim, Bibliographisches Institut, 390–404. Dufter, Andreas/Jacob, Daniel (edd.) (2009), Focus and Background in Romance Languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Dufter, Andreas/Jacob, Daniel (edd.) (2011), Syntaxe, structure informationnelle et organisation du discours dans les langues romanes, Frankfurt etc., Lang. Ernst, Gerhard, et al. (edd.) (2003–2008), Romanische Sprachgeschichte. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Geschichte der romanischen Sprachen und ihrer Erforschung, 3 vol., Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Fernández Ramírez, Salvador (1951), Gramática española. Los sonidos, el nombre y el pronombre, Madrid, Revista de Occidente. Fernández Ramírez, Salvador (1985–1987), Gramática española, 5 vol., Madrid, Arco Libros. Fillmore, Charles J./Kay, Paul/O’Connor, Mary Catherine (1988), Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: the case of “let alone”, Language 64, 501–538. Fischer, Susann (2010), Word-Order Change as a Source of Grammaticalisation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Fischer, Susann/Gabriel, Christoph (edd.) (2016), Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance (Manuals of Romance Linguistics 10), Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter. Gelderen, Elly van (ed.) (2009), Cyclical Change, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Gelderen, Elly van (2011), The Linguistic Cycle. Language Change and the Language Faculty, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Gelderen, Elly van (ed.) (2016), Cyclical Change Continued, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Gisborne, Nikolas (2014), The word and syntax, in: John R. Taylor (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Word, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 196–220. Goldberg, Adele (2006), Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Grevisse, Maurice (162016, 11936), Le bon usage: grammaire française, refondue par André Goosse, Paris, Duculot. Gupton, Timothy (2014), The Syntax–Information Structure Interface. Clausal Word Order and the Left Periphery in Galician, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter. Guţu Romalo, Valeria (ed.) (2005), Gramatica limbii române, 2 vol., București, Ed. Academiei Române. Hall Jr., Robert A. (1974–1983), Comparative Romance Grammar, 3 vol., New York, Elsevier. Halle, Morris/Marantz, Alex (1993), Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection, in: Kenneth Hale/Samuel J. Keyser (edd.), The View from Building 20. Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 111–176. Harris, Martin/Vincent, Nigel (edd.) (1988), The Romance Languages, London/New York, Routledge. Hoffmann, Thomas/Trousdale, Graeme (edd.) (2013), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Holtus, Günter/Metzeltin, Michael/Schmitt, Christian (edd.) (1988–2005), Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, 8 vol., Tübingen, Niemeyer.

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Hulk, Aafke C. J./Pollock, Jean-Yves (edd.) (2001), Subject Inversion and the Theory of Universal Grammar, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Hutchinson, Amélia P./Lloyd, Janet (22003, 11996), Portuguese. An Essential Grammar, London/New York, Routledge. Iliescu, Maria (2003), La typologie des langues romanes. État de la question, in: Fernando Sánchez Miret (ed.), Actas del XXIII Congreso Internacional de Lingüística y Filología Románica, vol. 1, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 61–81. Jacob, Daniel (2003), Prinzipien der Typologie und der sprachinternen Klassifikation der romanischen Sprachen, in: Gerhard Ernst et al. (edd.), Romanische Sprachgeschichte. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Geschichte der romanischen Sprachen und ihrer Erforschung, vol. 1, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 137–155. Jensen, Frede (1986), The Syntax of Medieval Occitan, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Jensen, Frede (1990), Old French and Comparative Gallo-Romance Syntax, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Jones, Michael Allan (1993), Sardinian Syntax, London/New York, Routledge. Jones, Michael Allan (1996), Foundations of French Syntax, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kaiser, Georg A. (ed.) (2005), Deutsche Romanistik – generativ, Tübingen, Narr. Kato, Mary A./Ordóñez, Francisco (edd.) (2016), The Morphosyntax of Portuguese and Spanish in Latin America, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Kayne, Richard (1975), French Syntax: The Transformational Cycle, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Klausenburger, Jürgen (2000), Grammaticalization. Studies in Latin and Romance Morphosyntax, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Körner, Karl-Hermann (1987), Korrelative Sprachtypologie. Die zwei Typen romanischer Syntax, Stuttgart, Steiner. Lasnik, Howard/Lohndal, Terje (2013), Brief overview of the history of generative syntax, in: Marcel den Dikken (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 26–60. Lausberg, Heinrich (1956–1962), Romanische Sprachwissenschaft, 3 vol., Berlin, De Gruyter. Ledgeway, Adam (2009), Grammatica diacronica del napoletano, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Ledgeway, Adam (2012), From Latin to Romance. Morphosyntactic Typology and Change, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Ledgeway, Adam/Maiden, Martin (edd.) (2016), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Loporcaro, Michele (1998), Sintassi comparata dell’accordo participiale romanzo, Torino, Rosenberg & Sellier. Loporcaro, Michele (forthcoming), Gender from Latin to Romance: History, Geography, Typology, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Maiden, Martin (2016), Morphomes, in: Adam Ledgeway/Martin Maiden (edd.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 708–721. Maiden, Martin/Robustelli, Cecilia (2000), A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian, London, Arnold. Maiden, Martin/Smith, John Charles/Ledgeway, Adam (edd.) (2011/2013), The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, 2 vol., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Manzini, M. Rita/Savoia, Leonardo M. (2005), I dialetti italiani e romanci. Morfosintassi generativa, 3 vol., Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso. Manzini, M. Rita/Savoia, Leonardo M. (2011), Grammatical Categories: Variation in Romance, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Mensching, Guido (2000), Infinitive Constructions with Specified Subjects: A Syntactic Analysis of the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1890–1902), Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen, 4 vol., Leipzig, Reisland.  



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Mosegaard Hansen, Maj-Britt (2016), The Structure of Modern Standard French. A Student Grammar, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Narrog, Heike/Heine, Bernd (edd.) (2011), The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Oesterreicher, Wulf (1996a), Gemeinromanische Tendenzen V. Morphosyntax, in: Günter Holtus/ Michael Metzeltin/Christian Schmitt (edd.), Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, vol. 2.1, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 273–309. Oesterreicher, Wulf (1996b), Gemeinromanische Tendenzen VI. Syntax, in: Günter Holtus/Michael Metzeltin/Christian Schmitt (edd.), Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, vol. 2.1, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 309–355. Pană Dindelegan, Gabriela (ed.) (2013), The Grammar of Romanian, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Pană Dindelegan, Gabriela (ed.) (2016), Syntax of Old Romanian, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Perini, Mário A. (2015), Describing Verb Valency. Practical and Theoretical Issues, Cham etc., Springer. Perlmutter, David M. (1978), Impersonal passives and the unaccusativity hypothesis, in: Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, CA, Berkeley Linguistics Society, 157–189. Poletto, Cecilia (1993), La sintassi dei pronomi soggetto nei dialetti settentrionali, Padova, Unipress. Poletto, Cecilia (2000), The Higher Functional Field. Evidence from Northern Italian Dialects, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Poletto, Cecilia (2014), Word Order in Old Italian, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Pollock, Jean-Yves (1989), Verb movement, Universal Grammar, and the structure of IP, Linguistic Inquiry 20, 365–424. Posner, Rebecca (1996), The Romance Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. RAE/ASALE = Real Academia Española/Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2009), Nueva gramática de la lengua española, 3 vol., Madrid, Espasa Calpe. Ramat, Paolo/Ricca, Davide (2016), Romance: A typological approach, in: Adam Ledgeway/Martin Maiden (edd.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 50–62. Raposo, Eduardo, et al. (edd.) (2013), Gramática do português, 2 vol., Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Remberger, Eva-Maria/Mensching, Guido (edd.) (2008), Romanistische Syntax – minimalistisch, Tübingen, Narr. Renzi, Lorenzo/Salvi, Giampaolo/Cardinaletti, Anna (edd.) (1988–1995), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, 3 vol., Bologna, il Mulino. Riegel, Martin/Pellat, Jean-Christophe/Rioul, René (52014, 11994), Grammaire méthodique du français, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. 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. Rizzi, Luigi (1997), The fine structure of the left periphery, in: Liliane Haegeman (ed.), Elements of Grammar. A Handbook of Generative Syntax, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 281–337. Rizzi, Luigi (ed.) (2004), The Structure of CP and IP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures Volume 2, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Ross, John Robert (1967), Constraints on Variables in Syntax, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Ph.D. dissertation. Rowlett, Paul (2007), The Syntax of French, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Salvi, Giampaolo (2004), La formazione della struttura di frase romanza. Ordine delle parole e clitici dal latino alle lingue romanze antiche, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Salvi, Giampaolo/Renzi, Lorenzo (edd.) (2010), Grammatica dell’italiano antico, Bologna, il Mulino. Samek-Lodovici, Vieri (2015), The Interaction of Focus, Givenness, and Prosody: A Study of Italian Clause Structure, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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The verbal domain

Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

2 Subjects Abstract: This chapter deals with two main topics: constituent order (focusing on the interaction between subject positions and interpretation), and null subjects. Both issues relate to case, agreement and expletives. The chapter discusses what motivates and licenses verb-subject orders in Romance non-wh sentences and identifies focalization, theticity and non-degree exclamatives as unifying factors across Romance languages. Focalization of the subject derives VOS order, whereas theticity and nondegree exclamatives display VSO order. On the topic of null subjects, the chapter offers a critical review of the assumption of a pro-drop parameter (also called the Null Subject Parameter) for Romance, considering different types of null subject languages (consistent and partial pro-drop languages). It provides evidence that the pro-drop parameter cannot be maintained as originally formulated since the richness of grammatical variation between Romance languages requires a more intricate, fine-grained parametrization.  

Keywords: verb-subject order, null subjects, focus, theticity, exclamatives, case, agreement, pro-drop  

1 Introduction While it is generally agreed that in many languages subjects constitute a core element of grammar, there is no general agreement on how to define them in and across languages and linguistic theories (cf. Keenan 1976; Van Kampen 2005; Falk 2006).1 However, Romance languages are not among the languages that make the notion of “subject” particularly difficult to handle, especially if one defines “subject” on morphosyntactic grounds. In this chapter,2 we will make the simple assumption that Nominative Case and verbal agreement identify subjects in Romance languages, which typologically belong to the Nominative-Accusative type (cf. WALS 98A; 99A; 100A), and will then deal with apparent difficulties. We will further assume that every (well-formed) sentence has a subject, which in most Romance languages may be

1 Keenan (1976) discusses the behavior of arguments in a number of typologically diverse languages in order to identify the “universal” properties of subjects. Among the criteria that he proposes for identifying the subjects of basic sentences in any language are morphological case, subject-verb agreement, controlling, reflexivization and omission on identity in second conjuncts and in controlled infinitives. 2 The authors’ names at the beginning of this chapter appear in alphabetical order. The first author is primarily responsible for Sections 4 and 5, the second author for Sections 1, 2, 3 and 6.  

DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-002



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overtly realized or null (as shown in (1) below, where Standard French contrasts with the other languages in disallowing a null subject).3 Sentences displaying the Subject-Verb (SV) order, as exemplified in (1), show clear instances of Nominative, agreeing subjects. Hence in (1a-f) the verb displays plural inflection because the DP-subject is plural. Moreover, both full DPs and null subjects (the latter signaled with ‘pro’) can be replaced with a Nominative pronoun under a substitution test. (1) a.

Pt.

{As crianças/pro/eles} já voltaram da escola. the children/–/they already returned-3PL from-the school b. Sp. {Los niños/pro/ellos} ya han regresado de from the children/–/they already have-3PL returned la escuela. the-school c. Cat. {Els nens/pro/ells} ja han tornat de l’escola. the children/–/they already have-3PL returned from the-school d. It. {I bambini/pro/loro} già sono tornati da scuola. the children/–/they already are-3PL returned from-the school e. Rom. {Copiii/pro/ei} deja s-au ȋntors de la returned from children-the/–/they already REFL = have-3PL şcoală. school f. Fr. {Les enfants/*pro/ils} sont déjà rentrés de l’école. the children/*–/they are-3PL already returned from the-school ‘The children have already got back from school.’

Postverbal subjects may behave exactly like preverbal ones as for case assignment and subject-verb agreement, as shown by the VS sentences in (2).4 Further evidence for the subjecthood of the postverbal constituents is provided by their ability to bind anaphoric se, control the subject of an infinitival clause and identify the reference of a null subject in the second member of a coordinate structure (cf. Keenan 1976), as illustrated in (3-B). French does not usually allow the type of VS sentences exemplified in (2).

3 European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese differ from each other in regard to word order flexibility and the pro-drop property, as will be discussed in the ensuing sections. In (1a) and (2a), “Portuguese” stands for European Portuguese. 4 The Case and agreement properties exhibited by ordinary subjects in Romance languages are inherited from Latin, which also licensed null subjects and displayed the alternation between SV and VS orders (cf. Bolkestein 1995; Devine/Stephens 2006; Pinkster 1990; 2015). Some of the Romance languages lost the null subject property and severely constrained the availability of postverbal subjects as a result of diachronic change.

Subjects

(2) a.

29

Pt.

Já chegaram {os rapazes/eles}. the boys/they already arrived-3PL b. Sp. Ya han llegado {los chicos/ellos}. arrived the boys/they already have-3PL c. Cat. Ja han arribat {els nois/ells}. arrived the boys/they already have-3PL d. It. Già sono arrivati {i ragazzi/loro}. arrived the boys/they already are-3PL e. Rom. Deja au ajuns {băieții/ei}. arrived boys-the/they already have-3PL ‘The boys have already arrived.’

(3) Pt. A:

B:

Elas não se riram. not REFL laughed-3PL they-F ‘They (the girls) did not laugh.’ elesi sem PROi disfarçar Riram-sei without disguise-INF laughed-3PL =REFL they-M e proi não pediram desculpa. apology and not asked-3PL ‘But they (the boys) laughed without hiding it and did not apologize.’

However, the postverbal constituent that surfaces in sentences with monoargumental verbs does not always behave as in (2) and (3) above. So in (4) below, the verb does not agree with the postverbal constituent (cf. (4a–b)) or agrees only partially (cf. (4c), where there is agreement in number but not in person),5 and may not control the subject of an infinitival clause, as in (4d), to be contrasted with (4e). The Brazilian Portuguese (BPt.) examples in (4a–b) are taken from Kato/Martins (2016); the French example in (4c) is taken from Bonami/Godard/Marandin (1999), and the European Portuguese (EPt.) examples in (4d–e) are taken from Carrilho (2003). (4) a.

Spoken BPt.

Chegou os arrived-3SG the ‘The eggs arrived.’

ovos. eggs

5 The French pattern of agreement in (4c) differs from what is found in other languages. Thus in European Portuguese, for example, first person plural agreement is available in a similar sentence whereas third person plural is not: (i) Pt. o prédio onde habitávamos /*habitavam a Maria e eu the Maria and I the building where lived-1PL / lived-3PL ‘the building where Maria and I lived’

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Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

b. Spoken BPt.

c.

Fr.

d. Dialectal EPt.

e.

Dialectal EPt.

Telefonou uns clientes. some clients called-3SG ‘Some clients called.’ l’immeuble où habitaient/*habitions Marie Marie the-building where lived-3PL /lived-1PL et moi and I ‘the building where Marie and I lived’ PROi dizer Chegou [muitas crianças]i (*sem without PRO say-INF arrived-3SG many children uma palavra). a word PROi dizer Chegaram [as crianças]i (sem without PRO say- INF arrived-3PL the children uma palavra). a word ‘The/many children arrived without saying anything.’

The postverbal constituents in (4) have been designated in the literature as “objectivized subjects” (Lambrecht 2000), “accusative subjects” (Bonami/Godard/Marandin 1999) or just “objects” (Carrilho 2003) depending on the theoretical framework that supports the analyses of the different authors. But for theory-neutral, descriptive purposes, the postverbal constituents in (4) are also often referred to in the literature just as “subjects”, which allows us to make the link between them and their correlates in an SV sentence. The structures in (4) will be part of the present chapter. We will discuss how they satisfy the requirement that all sentences have a subject, and clarify the contrast between (3) and (4) in this respect. This will lead to introducing the notion of expletive subject, which may be covert, as in (4a) above, or overt as in (5) below. The sentences in (5) also show that expletives may be of different types and so induce different agreement patterns. (5)

Fr. a.

b.

Il

est arrivé des milliers de personnes. EXPL is arrived ART . INDF - PL thousands of people ‘There arrived thousands of people.’ Ce sont des milliers de réfugiés qui EXPL are ART . INDF - PL thousands of refugees who frappent à la porte de l’Europe. knock at the door of the-Europe ‘There are thousands of refugees knocking at the door of Europe.’

All Romance languages used to be pro-drop languages, allowing both null referential subjects and null expletives, a property inherited from Latin. In the course of time,

Subjects

31

French6 lost the ability to license null subjects and Brazilian Portuguese severely restricted their availability. The varying behavior of current Romance languages with respect to the pro-drop property as well as their differences relative to the kinds of expletives they license have effects on word order. It is commonly said that pro-drop Romance languages allow “free” subject-verb inversion, while non-pro-drop Romance languages have lost such word order flexibility. In this chapter we intend to show that these claims are overly simplistic and highly debatable. The chapter is organized in five sections besides this introduction. Section 2 discusses the word order alternation SV/VS in Romance, with a special focus on the interpretive effects of the verb-subject order (i.e. VOS and VSO) in simple noninterrogative clauses, across Romance languages. It will include three subsections, respectively on focalization (2.1), theticity (2.2) and non-degree exclamatives (2.3). Section 3 considers morphological subject marking in Romance, focusing on nominative case, subject-verb agreement, and their interplay with ordering and expletives. Section 4 offers a critical review of the assumption of a pro-drop parameter for Romance, considering different types of null subject languages (consistent and partial pro-drop languages), different types of null subjects available in Romance languages, and a brief glance at the diachronic change in the availability of null subjects in Romance languages. Section 5 covers some of the properties usually linked to null subject languages, in particular the “optionality” of dropping referential subjects and the availability of subject extraction from embedded domains. Finally, Section 6 will offer a brief general summary of the chapter.  





2 Word order (SV/VS) This section addresses the topic of constituent order, essentially focusing on the different types of subject-verb inversion that are found across Romance languages (↗24 Basic constituent orders). We use here the term inversion to refer to the order verb-subject because it is widespread in the literature. It may not be descriptively correct for Romanian and Spanish, if the basic/unmarked constituent order in Romanian is VSO (cf. Dobrovie-Sorin 1994; Motapanyane 1994; Alboiu 2002) and in Spanish both SVO and VSO (cf. Zubizarreta 1998; 1999; Zagona 2005 vs Vanrell Bosch/Fernández Soriano 2013). For discussion of the topic of basic constituent orders, see ↗24 Basic constituent orders. We will not tackle it here. Nor will we deal with subject-verb inversion in topicalization, (contrastive) focus movement and wh-structures, since the issues related to these constructions will be addressed in later chapters in this volume (↗13 Dislocations and framings; ↗14 Focus  

6 But cf. Zimmermann (2014) who argues that French was a non-pro-drop language from the beginning.

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Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

Fronting; ↗15 Cleft constructions; ↗17 Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives). Finally, we will in general disregard word order in subordinate clauses, due to space limitations.7 Across Romance languages, main clause preverbal subjects are preferably interpreted as topics whenever VS is an alternative available option for constituent order.8 Thus a common feature of VS sentences is the non-topichood of their subject. But VS structures are not a unitary phenomenon. In this section we will consider three different kinds of motivation for VS configurations, namely: (i) narrow focus or informational prominence on the subject; (ii) theticity, in the sense of Kuroda (1965; 1972; 1992; 2005), and (iii) particular instances of non-degree exclamatives. In root sentences with transitive verbs, focalization of the subject derives VOS, whereas thetic sentences and non-degree exclamatives display VSO order.

2.1 Inversion as focalization In answers to wh-questions where the subject bears narrow focus, three syntactic patterns can be found in Romance languages, as exemplified below in (6) to (8).9 Patterns I and II display VS order, hence place the subject in the sentence-final position where the (unmarked) sentence nuclear stress falls (Zubizarreta 1998; 1999; Costa 1998; 2004; Costa/Silva 2006; among others). SV order is only found in the rarer pattern III, which involves marked prosodic prominence on the preverbal subject.  

Pattern I – Simple VS (European Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian) (6) a.

EPt./Sp.

Q: Quem faz o jantar? / ¿Quién hace la cena? who makes the dinner / who makes the dinner ‘Who will cook dinner?’ A: Faz o Pedro. / La hace Pedro. makes the Pedro / it makes Pedro ‘Pedro will.’

7 On VS order in Spanish relative clauses, see Gutiérrez-Bravo (2005). On VS order in French subordinate clauses, see Lahousse (2003; 2006b; 2011). 8 We are not implying that preverbal subjects in Romance pro-drop languages are necessarily leftdislocated. On this highly debated controversial proposal, see Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou (2001), Alexiadou (2006), Barbosa (1995; 2000; 2006; 2009), Cardinaletti (1997a; 2004; 2014), Corr (2012), Costa (1998; 2001a; 2004), Ordóñez (2000), Sheehan (2006; 2010), among others. 9 Cf. Alboiu (1999; 2002), Ambar (1992), Belletti (2001; 2004; 2005), Bonami/Godard/Marandin (1999), Costa (1998; 2004), Costa/Silva (2006), Dufter (2008), Kampers-Mahne et al. (2004), Kato (2000), Kato/ Martins (2016), Lahousse (2003; 2006a; 2011), Marandin (2011), Mensching/Weingart (2009), Rizzi (1997), Ordóñez (1997; 1999; 2007a, 2007b), Zubizarreta (1998; 1999), among others.

Subjects

b. It.

Q: Chi {è partito / who is left / ‘Who left/spoke?’ A: {È partito / ha is left / has ‘Gianni did.’

ha has

33

parlato}? spoken

parlato} spoken

Gianni. Gianni

Pattern II – VS in “reduced” clefts (Brazilian Portuguese, French)10 (7) a.

BPt.

b. Fr.

Q: Quem (é que) cozinha o jantar? who is that cooks the dinner jantar. A: É o Alex que cozinha o the dinner is the Alex that cooks Q: Qui prépare le dîner? who prepares the dinner le prépare. A: C’est Alex qui prepares it-is Alex that it ‘Who cooks dinner? It is Alex / Alex does.’

Pattern III – SV, with (marked) prosodic prominence on the subject (Brazilian Portuguese)11 (8) BPt.

Q: Quem que comeu o meu who that ate the my A: O Ruben comeu. the Ruben ate ‘Who ate my cake? Ruben did.’

bolo? cake?

Pattern I, displaying simple VS, is the most widespread across Romance languages. The subject becomes prominent by receiving the sentence nuclear stress, in compliance with the information structure requirement that focus be prominent. Alternative strategies arise in the languages that have restrictions regarding the type of verbs that license VS order, namely non-pro-drop French and partial pro-drop Brazilian Portuguese (cf. Section 4). However, Brazilian Portuguese allows the order VS in answers to wh-questions if the verb is of the unaccusative type (like cair in (9a)), in contrast with

10 Pattern II is also available in European Portuguese, but pattern I is the most common option in this language. 11 According to Belletti (2005), pattern III is not a preferred option in French, but it is admitted by some speakers. Pattern III is the regular pattern in English.

34

Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

transitive verbs (like ver in (9b)), or unergatives, which exclude Pattern I (cf. Kato/ Martins 2016).12 (9) a.

BPt.

b. BPt.

Q: Quem caiu? who fell ‘Who fell?’ A: Caiu uma criança. fell a child ‘A child fell.’ Q: Quem foi que viu who was that saw ‘Who saw a cat?’ A: *Viu uma criança. saw a child ‘A child did.’

um a

gato? cat?

We may therefore conclude that all Romance languages use the strategy of placing the subject in sentence final position in order to give it focal prominence (be it through Pattern I or Pattern II), within the limits that independent grammatical constraints define. When the subject is focus, the order SV in answers to wh-questions is excluded by all the Romance languages that generally display Pattern I. This is because if placed preverbally the subject will be interpreted as topic, not as focus, leading to an infelicitous information structure configuration. The pragmatic oddity of SV in the relevant discourse context is exemplified in (10) below (cf. Alboiu 2002). Moreover, examples (11) and (12) show that SV sentences can be ungrammatical when contextual factors require narrow focus to fall on the subject (cf. Belletti 2001). (10)

Q: A:

[Who has come home?] Rom. a. A venit acasă mama. AUX - 3SG come home mother-the b. # Mama a venit acasă. mother-the AUX - 3SG come home EPt. c. Veio a mãe. came the mother d. #A mãe veio. the mother came VS: ‘Mother did.’ SV: ‘Mother, (I know that) she did …’

12 French displays unaccusative inversion, like Brazilian Portuguese, but differently from Brazilian Portuguese does not allow null expletive subjects.

Subjects

(11) a.

It. Q: A:

b. EPt.Q: A:

(12) a.

It. Q: A:

b. Sp. Q: A:

35

Pronto, chi parla? hello who speaks Parla Gianni / *Gianni parla. speaks Gianni / Gianni speaks Quem fala? who speaks Fala o Gabriel / *O Gabriel fala. speaks the Gabriel / the Gabriel speaks ‘(Hello,) who is speaking? It is Gianni/Gabriel.’ Chi è? who is a. Sono io. am I b. *Io sono. I am ¿Quién és? who is a. Soy yo. am I b. *Yo soy. I am ‘Who is it? It’s me.’

A sentence-final subject need not be narrow focus. It can display informational prominence within a broad focus sentence, whether such prominence is associated with contrast or not, as exemplified in (13) and (14). (13) EPt.

Q: O que é que foi? the what is that was ‘What was it?’ A: a. {Pousou / está pousada} no plátano uma águia. landed / is landed in-the maple-tree an eagle ‘An eagle has landed in the maple tree.’ b. Vêm de férias connosco para o Brasil to the Brazil come-3PL on vacation with us os teus pais (não o teu filho). the your parents (not the your son) ‘Your parents (not your son) will come with us to Brazil on vacation.’

36

Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

(14) EPt.

Levantou-se no mar uma grande tempestade (não rose-SE in-the sea a big storm (not tsunami). tsunami) ‘A big storm (not a tsunami) rose out of the sea.’

um a

In a very restricted way, French also uses the sentence-final position to give informational prominence to the subject in VOS sentences. Sentences (15a–b) illustrate the type of VS structures referred to in the literature as “heavy subject NP inversion” (Bonami/Godard/Marandin 1999), “elaborative inversion” (Kampers-Mahne et al. 2004) or “focus VS” (Lahousse 2006a). According to Lahousse (2006a; 2007) and Lahousse/Lamiroy (2012), from which the examples in (15) are taken, the order VOS appears in French mostly in administrative and legal texts (maybe as an “archaic” survival) and is only licensed when the sentence-final subject has an exhaustive identification reading. (15) Fr. a.

Recevront un bulletin de vote les étudiants et card of vote the students and receive-FUT -3PL a le personnel académique. the staff academic ‘Students as well as academic staff will receive a ballot paper.’ b. Paieront une amende tous les automobilistes en infraction. fine all the drivers in infraction pay-FUT -3PL a ‘All drivers in breach of the law will pay a fine.’

Quotative inversion can also be analyzed as an instance of informational highlighting of the subject (cf. Matos 2013). So can locative inversion, depending on the discourse context. In both cases differences between Romance languages may not align with the split between pro-drop and non-pro-drop languages. For instance, inversion in quotatives is mandatory in both pro-drop European Portuguese and non-pro-drop “formal standard” French (Bonami/Godard 2008), while it is optional in partial pro-drop Brazilian Portuguese (Kato/Martins 2016). As for locative inversion, a constraint on verb-initial sentences separates Italian from other pro-drop languages, such as European Portuguese. Italian is subject to the V1 constraint with certain verbs (Pinto 1997; Belletti 2001; Corr 2012), whereas European Portuguese is not.13 In the European

13 The examples in (i) below are from Pinto (1997, 157). The Italian sentences marked as # are perfectly fine in European Portuguese. (i) It. a. In questo palazzo ha vissuto Dante. in this palace has lived Dante b. #Ha vissuto in questo palazzo Dante. has lived in this palace Dante

Subjects

37

Portuguese sentences in (16), the subject bears informational prominence in sentencefinal position, no matter whether the locative argument precedes or follows the verb. Recall that informational prominence is not restricted to narrow focus. (16) EPt.

Q: a.

O que é que estás a fazer aqui? here the what is that are-2SG to do ‘What are you doing here?’ b. Quem vive neste prédio tão degradado? who lives in-this building so degraded ‘Who lives in this dilapidated building?’ A: c. Aqui/ neste prédio vive a minha filha. here/ in-this building lives the my daughter d. Vive aqui/ neste prédio a minha filha. lives here/ in-this building the my daughter ‘My daughter lives in this building.’

The fact that locative inversion may be used as a strategy to assign informational prominence to the subject is confirmed precisely by the VOS order it sanctions in languages that otherwise disallow VOS in the same contexts. Italian and Brazilian Portuguese, which are a case in point, make use of this syntactic strategy to license subject-verb inversion with transitive (and some unergative) verbs.14 Moreover, both languages optionally allow the locative or spatio-temporal constituent to be a null deictic expression (cf. Pinto 1997; Belletti 2001; Pilati 2002; Kato/Martins 2016). The Brazilian Portuguese sentences in (17), taken from Pilati (2002), are to be compared with the Italian sentence in (18), taken from Belletti (2001). Crucially, all sentences display VOS order. (17) BPt.

c.

a.

Tem a palavra a senadora Heloísa Helena. has the word the senator Heloisa Helena ‘Senator Heloísa Helena has the floor.’ b. Abre o placar o time do Palmeiras. opens the match the team of-the Palmeiras ‘The Palmeiras team opens the match.’

#Ha vissuto Dante in questo palazzo. has lived Dante in this palace ‘Dante lived in this palace.’ 14 Cf. the following observation by Lahousse (2008, footnote 21) in a paper where she discusses French “nominal inversion” and proposes to unify “locative inversion” and “unaccusative inversion“: “Indeed, the contrastive focalization of the subject is one of the factors that favor nominal inversion in contexts where it is otherwise not allowed”. Cf. also Lahousse (2006b).

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Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

c.

(18) It.

Ergue o braço o raises the arm the ‘The judge raises his arm.’

juiz. judge

Mette la palla sul dischetto del puts the ball on-the point of-the ‘Ronaldo puts the ball on the penalty spot.’

rigore Ronaldo. penalty Ronaldo

In answers to wh-questions, the VOS order regularly arises in some Romance languages if the verb is transitive, the object is overtly realized and the subject is narrow information focus, as exemplified in (19) and (20) below. Only when both the subject and the object bear narrow focus, as in example (21), does VSO become available.15 But Romance languages appear to behave in diverse ways with respect to the naturalness of phonologically expressing the object in VOS answer-sentences. Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian are the Romance languages that most easily allow VOS, in contrast with Italian, Catalan and Brazilian Portuguese (cf. Wandruszka 1982; Costa 1998; Zubizarreta 1998; 1999; Alboiu 1999; 2002; Belletti 2001; Lahousse/Lamiroy 2012; Vanrell Bosch/Fernández Soriano 2013; Kato/Martins 2016). (19) Rom.

Q: Cine a venit acasă? who has come home? ‘Who came home?’ A: a. A venit acasă mama. AUX - 3SG come home mother-the b. #A venit mama acasă. AUX - 3SG come mother-the home ‘Mother did.’

15 Quotative inversion also displays VSO, because in the relevant syntactic configuration both verbal arguments fall under focus: (i) EPt. Q: O que aconteceu? – perguntou o leão à girafa. the what happened? – asked the lion to-the giraffe ‘What happened? – the lion asked the giraffe.’ Moreover, VSO order emerges as an exception when independent grammatical constraints block VOS, as discussed by Costa/Silva (2006). In (ii) below, binding requirements ban the subject from the sentence-final position. (ii) EPt. A: Quem recebeu os livros? who received the books? seui livro. B: a. Recebeu [cada autor]i o received each author the his book b. *Recebeu o seui livro [cada autor]i. received the his book each author ‘Who received the books? – Each authori received hisi book.’

Subjects

(20) EPt.

Q: Quem pagou a dívida? who paid the debt ‘Who has paid its debt?’ A: Pagou a dívida a Grécia. paid the debt the Greece ‘Greece has paid its debt.’

(21) EPt.

Q: Quem encontrou o quê? who found the what ‘Who has found what?’ A: Encontrou o João o anel found the João the ring ‘João has found Maria’s ring.’

da of-the

39

Maria. Maria

2.2 Inversion as theticity Kuroda’s (1965; 1972; 1992) work on Japanese introduced in the linguistics literature the conceptual distinction between sentences expressing thetic judgments and sentences expressing categorical judgments. Other authors have discussed roughly similar dichotomies while using different terminology. For instance: presentational/declarative (Suñer 1982, for Spanish); sentence-focus/predicate-focus (Lambrecht 1994 and 2000, for English and French); presentation/predication (Guéron 1980, for English); existential/declarative (Babby 1980, for Russian). Kuroda (2005) puts forth the terms predicational/descriptive as equivalents to categorical/thetic, but the latter have well-established usage and are less ambiguous than most of the alternative terminologies. Moreover, the term theticity was coined from thetic and gained space in the linguistics literature (cf. Sasse 1987; 1995; 1996; 2006; Lambrecht 1994; 2000; Matras/Sasse 1995; Leonetti 2014). In what follows “thetic sentence” will be used as a shorthand for “sentence that conveys a thetic judgment” and the same for “categorical sentence”. Sentences expressing a categorical judgment attribute a property to an entity, which may be codified as the subject or the topic of the sentence.16 In Romance languages, the unmarked order for simple declarative sentences of the categorical, or predicational, type is SV(O). A “thetic” sentence, on the other hand, describes a situation as a whole, in which no single entity is assigned a topic status or given any type of informational highlighting.17 The preferred order for the thetic, or descriptive,

16 In Kuroda’s terminology, topic is defined in semantic terms, not in pragmatic/discourse-theory terms. An aboutness relation is at the core of the concept topic, i.e. subject of predication, which must be “familiar” or “recognizable” or “presupposed” or “part of the common ground”, but need not be ‘old information’. 17 Thetic sentences are all-new, “broad focus” sentences.  

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Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

type can be VS(O).18 That is to say, subject-verb inversion can be used as a syntactic strategy to make a sentence unambiguously thetic, since it marks the subject as nontopic. Romance languages in general use it, but within the limits imposed on each of them by syntactic constraints on subject-verb inversion. In the languages with stronger limitations to the availability of VS order, alternative strategies may be used to grammatically express the thetic/categorical dichotomy, as will be clarified below. Cross-linguistically, a number of syntactic and semantic factors may facilitate or block the VS order in sentences expressing a thetic judgment. Monoargumental predicates, especially unaccusative verbs, indefinite subjects and, to a lesser extent, also oblique complements and object clitics are among the facilitating factors. Hence in French the VS order associated with theticity has been christened unaccusative inversion (Marandin 2001; Lahousse 2006a), because it is mainly licensed by unaccusative verbs. Also in Brazilian Portuguese unaccusative inversion constitutes the core of the VS order found in thetic sentences (a matter to which we will return). But, again, it would be simplistic to assume that non-pro-drop French and partial pro-drop Brazilian Portuguese group together against a cohesive group of pro-drop languages. Leonetti (2014) discusses data from Spanish, Catalan and Italian, three standard prodrop languages, and concludes for a non-uniform behavior with respect to the availability of subject-verb inversion to express theticity: “VSX is interpreted as a single informational unit, without internal partitions (topic-comment, focus-background); this typically results in a thetic, wide focus interpretation, related to a stage topic. Languages like Italian and Catalan reject the processing of marked orders as non-partitioned units, which rules out VSX. More permissive languages, like Spanish, allow for the absence of partitions in marked orders.” (Leonetti 2014, 37)

Leonetti’s (2014) comparative investigation deals with restrictions on subject-verb inversion in sentences involving two-argument predicates, which, as we said above, do not constitute a facilitating factor for thetic inversion. Italian and Catalan thus seem to usually require monoargumental predicates to permit the relevant type of VS order (cf., for Italian, Wandruszka 1982; Benincà 1988; Sornicola 1994; 1995; Belletti 2001; and, for Catalan, Solà 1992; Vallduví 2002; Ordóñez 2007a; 2007b). On the other hand, Romanian (Ulrich 1985) and European Portuguese (Martins 1994; 2010; Kato/ Martins 2016) are like Spanish in permitting the VSO order more easily.19 In the remainder of this section, we will first exemplify VS order in thetic sentences using data from European Portuguese. Then, we will comment on the languages with more

18 Kuroda (2005) refers to sentences expressing categorical judgments as topicalized sentences in a semantic sense, i.e. they are predications of the form conforming to classical Aristotelian logic, hence involve an aboutness relation. Sentences expressing thetic judgments, on the other hand, are nontopicalized because they are not predications. 19 We use here “O” in the broad sense of Larson (1988; 1990). Hence in this chapter “O” corresponds to Leonetti’s (2014) “X”.  

Subjects

41

restricted syntactic availability of VS order and show how they mark the thetic/ categorical distinction. Sentence (22) exemplifies the VS order with the copulative verb estar, or the unaccusative entrar, and a locative argument. The type of predicate and the prepositional object argument are both facilitating factors for VS (cf. Leonetti 2015 for copular sentences). The subject can be a definite or an indefinite DP without any effect on the grammaticality of the sentence and its thetic interpretation.20 In the situation described in (22), the speaker is concerned about the cat. Hence the/a dog is not given discourse prominence, which it would acquire in the corresponding SVO sentence. That is to say, the VSO sentence in (22) is a non-topicalized sentence whereas an SVO sentence would have the subject as the aboutness topic of which the property of being in the garden is predicated. In the SVO sentence, a (non-specific) indefinite subject (i.e. a dog) would be odd, in contrast to the definite one (the dog), due to semantic/ pragmatic constraints on what can be an appropriate aboutness topic.21  

(22) EPt.

Não deixes sair o gato. {Está/entrou} {o/um} is/entered the/a not let-2SG go-out the cat cão no jardim. dog in-the garden ‘Don’t let the cat out. The/a dog has come into the garden.’

The transitive verb morder, that can take an accusative or a dative object without changing its meaning, is used in (23) to show that the accusative object puts stronger limitations on VSO than the dative. This is the reason why there is a contrast of grammaticality between the sentences in (23B-a) and (23B-b). Cliticization of the accusative complement can rescue the ungrammatical sentence (23B-a), as illustrated in (23B-c). (23) EPt.

A: Porque é que estás a chorar? why is that are-2SG to cry ‘Why are you crying?’ B: a. *Mordeu um cão o nosso gato. (pointing to the cat) bit a dog the our cat b. Mordeu um cão ao nosso gato. (pointing to the cat) bit a dog to-the our cat

20 As for the inexistence of definiteness effects in unaccusative inversion, see Corr (2012). 21 Cf. Dobrovie-Sorin (1994), Motapanyane (1994), and Alboiu (2002) with regard to the semantic restrictions displayed by preverbal subjects in Romanian (in contrast to postverbal subjects), which leads the authors to claim that VSO is the basic/unmarked word order in Romanian and preverbal subjects are always topicalized/left-dislocated.

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Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

c.

Mordeu-o/lhe bit-it-ACC /him-DAT ‘A dog bit our cat.’

um a

cão. dog

(pointing to the cat)

It is not the case, however, that direct transitive verbs with a full DP object totally ban the availability of the VSO order, as shown in (24a). The sentence is a particular instantiation of the so-called narrative inversion, which also makes VS easily available to unergative verbs.22 The matrix clauses in (24) display the verb in the imperfect indicative and are articulated with an adverbial subordinate clause that locates the situation described by the VS(O) root clause in the speaker’s perceptual field. (24) EPt.

a.

Subia o bombeiro as escadas quando when climbed-IMPF the firefighter the stairs o homem se atirou da janela. REFL threw from-the window the man ‘The firefighter was climbing the stairs when the man threw himself out of the window.’ b. Diz que não dorme, mas ontem quando says that not sleeps but yesterday when cheguei a casa dormia ele a bom dormir. he to good sleep arrived.1SG at home slept ‘He says that he doesn’t sleep, but yesterday when I arrived home he was lying fast asleep.’

With unaccusative and some other typically mono-argumental verbs, the alternation between SV and VS can be optional and dependent only on the speaker’s attitude or communicative intentions, as exemplified in (25) with the verb telefonar ‘contact by phone’. But this is not always the case, as shown in (26), where the discourse/ pragmatic context induces topical salience on the subject, which induces the SV order. Furthermore, the fact that with verbs like telefonar (‘call’) or chegar (‘arrive’) the VS order is speaker-oriented, in the sense that the goal of the call or of the motion must be the (location of the) speaker (cf. Tortora 1997; 2001; Cardinaletti 2004; Martins 2010; Martins/Costa, 2016), contributes also to the ungrammaticality of (26B–b).

22 But unergative verbs are less restrictive than direct transitive verbs concerning VS order associated with theticity. One further example with dormir ‘sleep’ is given below. (i) EPt. A: Mas se não havia camas, como é que fizeram? but if not had beds how is that did-3PL ‘But if there weren’t any beds, how did you manage?’ B: Dormiu o bébé no sofá e {eu dormi / dormi eu} no chão. slept the baby on-the sofa and I slept / slept I on-the floor ‘The baby slept on the sofa and I slept on the floor.’

Subjects

43

(25) EPt.

a.

A mãe telefonou. Queria falar contigo. the mother called wanted talk-INF with-you b. Telefonou a mãe. Queria falar contigo. called the mother wanted talk-INF with-you ‘Mother called. She wanted to talk with you.’

(26) EPt.

A: A mãe ainda não telefonou para a clínica? the mother yet not called to the clinic ‘Hasn’t mother called the medical center yet?’ B: a. A mãe telefonou mas ainda não tinham o the mother called but yet not had-3PL the resultado dos exames. result of-the exams b. *Telefonou a mãe mas ainda não tinham called the mother but yet not had-3PL o resultado dos exames. the result of-the exams ‘Mother called, but they haven’t got the results of the (medical) exams yet.’

As said above, French and Brazilian Portuguese do not display the flexibility of European Portuguese concerning the availability of subject-verb inversion. In French, VS order is still an option in declarative sentences mostly with unaccusative verbs, as exemplified in (27). But French displays a strong restriction on verb-initial sentences, possibly associated with its non-pro-drop nature (thus with the lack of a null expletive subject that may license the structural position(s) where the subject moves in SV, but not unaccusative VS, sentences). Temporal and locative adverbs license unnaccusative inversion hypothetically by filling the position that in the canonical SV order would be licensed by the subject (see (27a–c)). French unaccusative inversion also often appears in subordinate (adverbial, relative, complement, cleft) clauses (see (27d)).23 23 See Lahousse (2003; 2004; 2008) on verb-initial sentences. The sentences in (i)–(ii) are taken from Lahousse (2008) and exemplify so-called absolute inversion. Lahousse (2008) suggests that “nominal inversion” in French is always licensed by an overt or covert stage topic, and unifies under her analysis what Bonami/Godard/Marandin (1999) consider two different types of inversion, namely “accusative inversion” and “locative inversion”. In all the attestations of absolute inversion collected by Lahousse (2008), “the event denoted by the absolute inversion construction immediately follows the event in the previous context; it denotes the occurrence of a new event or moment, or the appearance of a new person with respect to the immediately preceding spatio-temporal context” (Lahousse 2008, §56). The author thus concludes that “absolute inversion occurs in a context where the content of a covert stage topic can be recovered from the discourse context” (Lahousse 2008, §56).

44

(27) Fr.

Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

a.

Alors arriva Jean. then arrived Jean ‘Then, Jean arrived.’ (Lahousse 2006a) b. Odilon se leva soi-disant pour allumer la light the Odilon REFL got-up supposedly to terrasse. Dehors tombait une pluie venteuse (…) terrace outside fell a rain windy ‘Odilon got up, supposedly to turn on the terrace lights. Outside the rain fell and the wind blew.’ (Queffelec, Lahousse 2008) c. Le silence se fit. Alors sont entrés deux REFL emerged then are entered two the silence hommes. men ‘Silence fell. Then, two men entered.’ (Marandin 2001) d. Dès que se lève le soleil, le coq chante. the rooster sings since that REFL rises the sun ‘As soon as the sun rises, the rooster crows!’ (Bonami/Godard/Marandin 1999)

Uncommonly, VS order can be found in French with transitive verbs, but only if the object is a clitic, as illustrated in (28) with an example taken from Lahousse (2006a). More often, French (especially spoken French) resorts to a presentational cleft structure as a syntactic strategy to place the subject-constituent of the corresponding SVO sentence in postverbal position (↗15 Cleft constructions). Lambrecht (1988; 2000) amply discusses the use of the (il) y a clefts illustrated in (29)–(30) as a means to convey thetic judgments. These clefts are interpretatively equivalent to simple VS clauses in the Romance languages that license VS(O) more extensively than French.

Fr. Elle sonne. Arrive une infirmière: “Ah! Mais madame, ce n’est pas l’heure.” Lit. ‘She rings. Arrives a nurse.’ ‘She rings. A nurse arrives: “Oh! But madam, it’s not time yet.” ’ (Dolto) (ii) Fr. Cecilia avec son violon, Marco avec sa clarinette, ils sourient, nous font signe avec leurs instruments, de loin… Flottements… Accords… Tout le monde s’assoit… Arrive le chef d’orchestre, Eliahu Inbal, un Israélien… Lit. ‘Arrives the conductor, Eliahu Inbal, an Israeli…’ ‘Cecilia with her violin, Marco with his clarinet, smiling, bob their instruments at us, far away… Stirrings… Tuning… Everyone sits down… The conductor, Eliahu Inbal, an Israeli, arrives.’ (Sollers) (i)

Subjects

45

(28) Fr.

La morne champagne du nord (…), dont les quais the dreary country of-the north (…) whose the quays semblent plus larges et plus vides qu’ ailleurs, seem more wide and more empty than elsewhere quand les déserte la foule des champs de courses. when them deserts the crowd of-the race-track ‘The dreary north country (…), whose quays, when the race-track crowd leaves them, seem wider and emptier than those anywhere else.’ (Gracq, Lahousse 2006a)

(29) Fr.

a.

(30) Fr.

a.

Y a Jean qui a téléphoné. there has Jean who has called ‘Jean called.’ b. Il y a le téléphone qui sonne. it there has the phone which rings ‘The phone is ringing.’ c. J’ai une voiture qui est en panne. I-have a car that is in breakdown ‘My car broke down.’ (Lambrecht 2000, 653) Il y a mes voisins qui crient et j’entends it there has my neighbors that yell and I-hear tout. everything ‘My neighbors yell and I hear everything.’ b. Dimanche après-midi, je rentre en voiture avec mon sunday after-noon I return by car with my oncle, j’arrive à l’appart, il y a mon uncle I-arrive at the-apartment it there has my voisin qui est en train de réparer la porte … neighbor who is in the-middle of repair the door ‘Sunday afternoon, I drive back with my uncle, I arrive at the apartment, there’s my neighbor who is repairing the door…’ (Google search, 23-06-2015)

Brazilian Portuguese freely permits VS sentences with unaccusative verbs and some other monoargumental verbs, such as telefonar (‘call’), as exemplified in (31). Hence VS sentences can be used to express theticity. Because Brazilian Portuguese licenses null expletives, it does not require an overt constituent to precede the verb.

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Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

(31) BPt.

{Chegou / chegaram} três cartas pra você.24 arrived-3SG / arrived-3PL three letters for you ‘There arrived three letters for you.’ b. Nasceu o bebê de Kate Middleton. is-born the baby of Kate Middleton ‘Kate Middleston’s baby is born.’ c. Desapareceu o IPhone da minha bolsa. disappeared the IPhone from-the my purse ‘My IPhone disappeared from my purse.’ d. Telefonou uns clientes. some clients called-3SG ‘Some clients called.’

a.

But Brazilian Portuguese can also resort to a different strategy to signal the distinction between thetic and categorical sentences, which maintains constant the SVO order. In this case, the subject of the categorical sentence is syntactically marked as the topic through subject doubling, as exemplified in (32a). Parallel structures are also found in French (see (32b); cf. Lambrecht 1981; 1994; Stark 1997; 1999), which like Brazilian Portuguese puts stronger constraints on VS orders than other Romance languages.25 (32) BPt.

Fr.

a.

Os policiais, eles chegaram de moto the policemen they arrived-3PL on motorcycle ‘The police arrived on motorcycles and armed.’ b. Les policiers, ils en ont contre the policemen they of-it have against ‘The police, they have something against us.’ (Google search, 25-02-2016)

e armados. and armed nous. us

2.3 Inversion in non-degree exclamatives Marked VSO order is a characteristic feature of different types of non-degree exclamatives in Romance languages (↗17 Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives), as will be briefly illustrated in the present section. Degree exclamatives involve some gradable property and often take the shape of wh-clauses. Unlike degree exclamatives, non-degree exclamatives do not include a 24 Third person singular agreement is the ordinary option in spoken Brazilian Portuguese, but third person plural is found in written Brazilian Portuguese. 25 Cf. Berlinck (1996; 2000), Britto (1998; 2000), Kato (2000), Kato/Martins (2016) for further discussion of VS order in Brazilian Portuguese.

Subjects

47

wh-operator. Structurally, non-degree exclamatives are compatible with comparative structures and do not impose limitations on the occurrence of ordinary negation, unlike wh-exclamatives (Gutiérrez-Rexach/Andueza 2011; Andueza 2011; Martins 2013). Semantically, while degree exclamatives comment on properties and express the speaker’s emotive attitude towards their amount, extent or intensity, non-degree exclamatives comment upon a fact (or state of affairs) and express the speaker’s emotive attitude towards its unexpectedness. As Gutiérrez-Rexach/Andueza (2011, 294) phrase it: “[T]he content of an exclamative construction can be either a fact or a property, and the discourse contribution is the speaker’s emotional attitude towards it. The difference between what we have called propositional [i.e. non-degree] exclamatives and degree exclamatives relies in the trigger of the associated emotional attitude: an unexpected fact, in the case of propositional exclamatives, and the high or extreme degree of a property, in the case of degree exclamatives.”  

The topic of non-degree exclamatives and its interaction with constituent order (especially, subject position) is insufficiently covered in the literature and is definitely in need of further investigation and insight. Here we will briefly address it by considering two particular types of VSO exclamative sentences, each found in a different language and apparently displaying quite different syntax. First we will identify coordination exclamatives in European Portuguese (cf. Martins 2013), then the Romanian Subject Pronoun Inversion Construction (SPIC), also a type of VSO nondegree exclamative (cf. Hill 2006). Despite apparent dissimilarities, there is a significant common feature in the analyses of European Portuguese coordination exclamatives and Romanian SPICs, proposed respectively by Martins (2013) and Hill (2006). In both analyses the sentential left-periphery is activated and the verb moves to a position in the CP field in order to license functional features with a pragmatic import, which has consequences for word order besides the interpretive effect of conveying the speaker’s emotive attitude.26

26 In European Portuguese coordination exclamatives, coordination provides a configuration for comparison/contrast between two propositions and so makes explicit the unexpectedness relation that supports the speaker’s emotive reaction in non-degree exclamatives. But other types of VSO nondegree exclamatives exist in European Portuguese which do not require the contribution of coordination, as exemplified below. (i) EPt. A: A comunicação correu tão mal. the presentation went so badly ‘The presentation went so badly.’ B: Dizes tu (que correu mal)! say you (that went badly) ‘That’s what you say!!’ (implied: it was not a bad presentation) (ii) EPt. Agora perdeu a Maria a carteira! (Já não bastava now lost the Maria the wallet still not sufficed

48

Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

European Portuguese coordination exclamatives are illustrated in (33) and (34) below. They are indicative structures, show non-recursive coordination (expressed by e ‘and’) and display VSO order in the first member of the coordinate structure (normally with adjacency between the verb and the subject). Interpretatively, they add to the propositional content of the sentence an implicit evaluative/emotive comment conveying a speaker’s attitude of disapproval towards the described state of affairs. They share with wh-exclamatives the factivity property (cf. Grimshaw 1979; Portner/Zanuttini 2000; Zanuttini/Portner 2003; Gutiérrez-Rexach/Andueza 2011; Martins 2013). (33) EPt.

a.

Convidei eu a Maria para jantar e ela não invited I the Maria for dinner and she not apareceu! appeared ‘I invited Maria for dinner and she didn’t show up!’ / ‘Although I invited Maria for dinner, she didn’t show up!’ (Implied: She should have shown up! or I shouldn’t have invited her!) b. Leu o miúdo os livros todos e o professor read the kid the books all and the professor dá-lhe esta nota! gives-him this grade ‘The kid read everything and the teacher gave him this (low) grade!’ / ‘Although the kid read everything, the teacher gave him this (low) grade!’ (Implied: The teacher should have given the kid a better grade! or There was no need to read everything after all!)

(34) EPt.

a.

Convidei eu toda a gente para jantar e afinal invited I all the people for dinner and after-all ainda não recebi o ordenado! yet not received the salary ‘I invited everybody for dinner but I still haven’t received my salary!’ (Implied: I shouldn’t have invited everybody for dinner!)

o João ter perdido ontem o casaco.) yesterday the jacket the João have-INF lost ‘Now, Maria has lost her wallet! (As if it wasn’t enough that João lost his jacket yesterday.)’

Subjects

49

b. Não fomos nós ao jardim zoológico e esteve not went we to-the garden zoological and was um dia de sol! a day of sun ‘We didn’t go to the zoo and after all it was a sunny day!’ (Implied: We should have gone to the zoo!) The VSO order in the first conjunct introduces the counterexpectational flavor characteristic of these coordination exclamatives and anticipates the contrast between the two propositions. The sentences in (33) specifically convey an unexpected result relation, and their implied evaluative/emotive comment targets preferentially the second conjunct, although it may equally well target the first one. The sentences in (34), on the other hand, convey an unexpected time-coincidence relation and their implied evaluative/emotive comment targets the first conjunct. The Romanian Subject Pronoun Inversion Construction (SPIC) is exemplified in (35) and (36) below. SPICs involve strong emphasis on the verb and display a subject pronoun that obligatorily follows and is adjacent to the verb. In SPICs a full DP subject may co-occur with the subject pronoun, as exemplified in (35), but its presence is not obligatory, as shown in (36). Moreover, the full-fledged DP may precede or follow the verb. In contrast to regular root clauses, the interpretation of SPICs “is speaker oriented” (Hill 2006, 157), i.e. “the peculiar intonation and word order of SPICS yield an interpretation of threat or reassurance that cannot be obtained from regular root clauses” (Hill 2006, 160).  

(35) Rom.

nu- i săracă DESCOPERĂ eai Mariai mereu adevărul, că discovers she Maria always truth-the that not is poor la minte! at mind ‘Maria will always discover the truth, because she’s not mentally challenged!’

(36) Rom.

ŞTIE ea tot! knows she everything ‘She knows everything!’

Hill’s (2006) analysis for SPICs departs from Cornilescu (2000) and demonstrates that SPICs are not instances of Subject Clitic Inversion as found in French. Crucially, according to Hill (2006), clitic doubling and overt clitic left dislocation chains are not available for subjects in Romanian declarative clauses: “This restriction follows from the status of the subject pronoun, which cannot act as a clitic or agreement marker doubling DP/NP subjects, in the way weak French pronouns do” (Hill 2006, 161).

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Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

2.4 Conclusion Inversion is never free and all Romance languages, be they pro-drop or non-pro-drop, use it in quite similar instances. Variation is a matter of grammatical constraints that do not affect the discourse/pragmatically-induced general tendencies described in this section. The order VS signals narrow-focus on the subject (or focus-prominence on the subject in wide focus sentences), but it also signals sentences with a thetic interpretation (i.e. sentences that exclude an aboutness topic). Romance languages use the word order device to disambiguate information-structural configurations and the categorical/thetic opposition whenever possible. With monoargumental verbs, the order VS emerges in both cases. But with transitive verbs, focus on the subject derives VOS whereas theticity derives VSO. Variation between Romance languages results from independent syntactic differences. Particular constructions, such as some types of non-degree exclamatives, may also involve VSO, as the result of the verb requiring a high position in clause structure (cf. Hill 2006; Martins 2013).  

3 Case and agreement SV sentences, as exemplified in (37), generally display Nominative, agreeing subjects. Nominative Case here is overtly signaled by the personal pronoun eles/ellos/ells/loro/ ei/ils (they-NOM ) and the agreement pattern is expressed by the third person plural morpheme on the verb since the subject is also third person plural. Postverbal subjects may behave exactly like preverbal ones in regard to case marking and subject-verb agreement, as shown by the VS sentences in (38). Nominative case and verbal agreement thus appear as the morphological hallmarks of subjecthood in Romance languages.27

27 The hypothesis that non-canonical, oblique subjects (comparable to Icelandic “quirky subjects”) can be found in Romance languages will not be addressed in this chapter (see, in support of this hypothesis, González 1988; Masullo 1993; Fernández Soriano 1999; 2000; Rivero/Geber 2003; Rivero 2004; Schäffer 2008; Fischer 2010; Fernández Soriano/Mendikoetxea 2013; and, against it, GutiérrezBravo 2006). Hence, the italicized constituents in sentences (i)–(iv) below, which the authors from which the examples are taken classify as dative subjects, will not be discussed here. On the proposal that Brazilian Portuguese displays agreeing locative prepositional subjects as a diachronic outcome of contact with Bantu languages, see Avelar/Cyrino (2008), Avelar/Cyrino/Galves (2009), Avelar/Galves (2013) and references therein. (i) Sp. A Juan no le gustan las rubias. like-3PPLL the blondes to Juan not him-DAT ‘Juan doesn’t like blondes.’ (González 1988) (ii) Sp. En Madrid nieva. in Madrid snows ‘It is snowing in Madrid.’ (Fernández Soriano 1999)

Subjects

(37) a. b. c. d. e.

f.

(38) a. b. c. d. e.

51

Pt.

{As crianças/pro/eles} já voltaram da escola. the children/–/they already returned-3PL from-the school Sp. {Los niños/pro/ellos} ya han regresado de la escuela. the children/–/they already have-3PL returned from the school Cat. {Els nens/pro/ells} ja han tornat de l’escola. the children/–/they already have-3PL returned from the-school It. {I bambini/pro/loro} già sono tornati da scuola. the children/–/they already are-3PL returned from-the school Rom. {Copiii/pro/ei} deja s-au ȋntors de la children-the/–/they already REFL -have-3PL returned from şcoală. school Fr. Les enfants/*pro/ils} sont déjà rentrés de l’école. the children/*–/they are-3PL already returned from the-school ‘The children have already got back from school.’ Pt.

Já chegaram {os rapazes/eles}. already arrived-3PL the boys/they Sp. Ya han llegado {los chicos/ellos}. already have-3PL arrived the boys/they Cat. Ja han arribat {els nois/ells}. already have-3PL arrived the boys/they It. Già sono arrivati {i ragazzi/loro}. arrived the boys/they already are-3PL Rom. Deja au ajuns {băieții/ei}. already have-3PL arrived boys-the/they ‘The boys have already arrived.’

As said in Section 1, further evidence for the subjecthood of the postverbal constituents is provided by their ability to bind anaphoric se, control the subject of an adjunct infinitival clause and identify the reference of a null subject in the second member of a coordinate structure, which again groups postverbal subjects together with preverbal ones, as illustrated in (39-B).

(iii)

Sp.

(iv)

Sp.

A Juan le pasa algo. / Aquí pasa happens something / here happens to Juan him-DAT ‘Something is going on with Juan/here.’ (Fernández Soriano 1999) A Pedro se le quemó la comida. burned the food to Pedro se him-DAT ‘Pedro has (unintentionally) burned the food.’ (Fernández Soriano/Mendikoetxea 2013)

algo. something

52

Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

(39) Pt. A:

B:

Elas não se riram. REFL laughed-3PL they-F not ‘They (the girls) did not laugh.’ elesi sem PROi disfarçar e Riram-sei and laughed-3PL =REFL they-M without PRO disguise-INF desculpa. proi não pediram not asked-3PL apology ‘But they (the boys) laughed without hiding it and did not apologize.’

However, the postverbal constituent that corresponds to the subject-constituent of an SV sentence does not always behave as in (38) and (39) above. So in (40a–c) below, the monoargumental verb does not agree with the postverbal DP, which also does not bear Nominative Case, as demonstrated by the exclusion of the Nominative pronoun eles ‘they’ in (40a) and (40c). Moreover, as shown in (40d) versus (40e), the verb in the non-agreeing sentence (40d) may not control the subject of the adjunct infinitival clause.28 However, the postverbal DP retains the same semantic relation with the verb as in the corresponding SV sentence. Hence it behaves as a logical subject but not as a morphosyntactic subject, which supports Lambrecht’s (2000) designation of the relevant nominal constituents as “objectivized subjects”. (40) a. Spoken BPt.

b. Dialectal EPt.

Já chegou os convidados / *eles. *they-NOM already arrived-3SG the guests / ‘The guests have already arrived.’ (Google Search, 01-09-2015) Chegou as cadeiras. / Fechou muitas fábricas. closed-3SG many factories arrived-3SG the chairs /

28 Dialectal European Portuguese data extracted from the corpus CORDIAL-SIN (http://www.clul. ulisboa.pt/en/11-resources/314-cordial-sin-corpus-2) are provided by Carrilho (2003) and Cardoso/ Carrilho/Pereira (2011). A few examples are given below. (i) Dialectal EPt. Nunca mais apareceu esses cardumes aqui fish-schools here never more appeared-3SG those ‘Those fish schools never appeared here again.’ (CORDIAL-SIN, Vila Praia de Âncora) (ii) Dialectal EPt. Veio aqui (…) umas máquinas SG here some machines came-3SG ‘Some machines came here.’ (CORDIAL-SIN, Porto Santo) (iii) Dialectal EPt. Já tem pousado lá até aviões de emergência. there even planes of emergency already has-3SG landed ‘Even emergency planes have already landed there.’ (CORDIAL-SIN, Perafita)

Subjects

c. Dialectal EPt.

d. Dialectal EPt.

e. Dialectal EPt.

53

‘The chairs arrived. / Many factories have closed.’ (Costa 2001b, 8) *Chegou eles. / Chegaram eles. arrived-3SG they-NOM / arrived-3PL they-NOM ‘They have arrived.’ PROi Chegou [muitas crianças]i (*sem arrived-3SG many children without PRO dizer uma palavra). word say-INF a PROi dizer Chegaram [as crianças]i (sem without PRO say-INF arrived-3PL the children uma palavra). a word ‘The/many children arrived without saying anything.’ (Carrilho 2003, 175)

The European Portuguese tripartite paradigm in (41) below, displaying respectively a SV, a VS and a VX sentence (where X is an “objectivized subject” in the sense of Lambrecht), has a clear correlate in the French paradigm in (42). As French is not a null subject language, the French paradigm makes it clear that the VX sentence (c) (in contrast to the SV and the VS sentences) is an impersonal construction with an expletive pronoun as morphosyntactic subject. That X is not a grammatical subject (although its semantic relation to the verb is the same as that of S in the examples (a)–(b)) is further confirmed by its inability to control the subject of the adjunct infinitival clause in (43b), in contrast to (43a) but similarly to (40d). We may thus conclude that the only difference between the two paradigms resides in the fact that European Portuguese, like most Romance languages, has null expletive pronouns while French has overt ones.29 (41) EPt.

a.

As cadeiras chegaram. the chairs arrived-3PL b. Chegaram as cadeiras. the chairs arrived-3PL

29 French impersonal constructions like (42c) usually display unaccusative verbs, although they are also possible under certain conditions with unergative verbs, as illustrated in (i) – see Cummins (2000), Carlier/Sarda (2010), and references therein. In European Portuguese, non-agreeing VX sentences like (41c) are also mostly found with unaccusative verbs. See Cardoso/Carrilho/Pereira (2011) for empirical evidence and discussion. (i) Fr. Il nageait des enfants dans la piscine. EXPL swam-3S G ART . INDF - PL children in the pool ‘There were children swimming in the pool.’

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Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

c.

(42) Fr.

a.

(43) Fr.

a.

Chegou as cadeiras. the chairs arrived-3SG ‘The chairs arrived.’

Les tanks fascistes arrivèrent. the tanks fascists arrived-3PL ‘The fascist tanks arrived.’ b. Alors arrivèrent les tanks fascistes. (A. Malraux) tanks fascists then arrived-3PL the ‘Then came the fascist tanks.’ c. Il arriva des voitures de munitions. EXPL arrived-3SG ART . INDF - PL cars of ammunition ‘Ammunition cars arrived.’ (Erckmann-Cartier) (Examples taken from Carlier/Sarda 2010, 2063) huer [ces Alors survinrent pour PROi la PRO her-ACC jeer-INF those then came-3PL to adorent un crucifié. (M. Barrès) hommes]i qui men who worship a crucified huer [ces b. *Alors il survint pour PROi la PRO her jeer those then it came-3SG to adorent un crucifié. hommes]i qui men who worship a crucified ‘Then those men who worship a crucified man came to jeer at her.’ (Examples taken from Carlier/Sarda 2010, 2063)

Besides the expletive pronoun il, French also displays the expletive pronoun ce, which behaves differently from il relative to case and agreement properties (cf. Cardinaletti 1997b). As exemplified in (44), the verb does not agree with the expletive ce (compare (44a) with (42c)) and concomitantly ce allows the postverbal constituent in (44b) to be assigned Nominative case. (44) Fr.

a.

Ce

sont mes parents. are-3PL my parents ‘They are my parents.’ b. Les stars du défilé Chanel, ce sont the stars of-the défilé Chanel EXPL are-3PL ‘They are the (real) stars of the Chanel fashion show.’ (Google search, 01-09-2015) EXPL

elles. they-F . NOM

Overt expletives are therefore of different types, which allows us to hypothesize that covert expletives may also be of different kinds. Under the assumption that all

Subjects

55

sentences have a subject and a designated structural position for it (the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) of Chomsky 1982), the VS sentences in (38) above can be analyzed as containing a caseless, non-agreeing null expletive that licenses the preverbal subject position of SVO languages (see Corr 2012, for an updated overview of different perspectives on this issue). Variation between Romance languages in the availability of sentences departing from the canonical SV order may therefore be accounted for as a consequence of the types of expletives they license (overt/covert, with/without person-number features, with/without case, locative/non-locative, etc. – cf. ↗5 Clitic pronouns; ↗9 Copular and existential constructions). Besides lexical differences (i.e. (un)availability of a particular type of expletive), structural differences may also play a role (i.e. which positions in clause structure are accessible to particular types of subjects), which would explain, for example, why Romance null subject languages do not behave alike with respect to the (un)constrained availability of verb-initial sentences (cf. Sections 2.1 and 2.2; cf. ↗24 Basic constituent orders. See on these matters, among others, Cardinaletti (1997a; 2004; 2014), Tortora (1997; 2001), Mensching/Weingart (2009; 2016), Biberauer et al. (2010), Corr (2012), and references therein). Under Cardinaletti’s (2004) approach to subjecthood, three different structural positions for preverbal subjects are identified as part of the Infl domain: [SubjP [E P P P [AgrSP [VP SVO]]]]. SubjP bears a “subject-of-predication” feature (which attracts the aboutness topic subject of SVO categorical sentences, but not the nontopic subject of VSO thetic sentences), the EPP-related position requires filling of its specifier and AgrSP carries case and agreement features that must be checked. The three subject positions within the Infl domain are assumed to be universal, but languages differ on (i) how the EPP is satisfied (e.g. Spec,EPP P can be filled by a null expletive in null subject languages, whereas non null subject languages do not allow for a true (overt) expletive to occur in that same position, since agreeing expletives occur in AgrSP), (ii) how case and agreement features are checked (e.g. overt movement of the subject to the preverbal position can be triggered by the need to check case and agreement features in non null subject languages, whereas in null subject languages movement of the subject to the preverbal position can only be motivated by the need to check either the EPP or the subject-of-predication feature), (iii) how the mapping between syntactic structure and categorical/thetic interpretations is achieved (e.g. when a null “location-goal argument” selected by an unaccusative verb fills Spec,EPP P, null subject languages display thetic VS sentences, but non null subject languages typically display thetic SV sentences; the contrast arises because in the latter the subject moves to Spec,AgrSP to check case and agreement features while in the former these features can be checked long distance). At this point we may wonder why French, in spite of being a language that does not license null expletives, allows inversion without overt expletives. Recall from footnote (22) above that Lahousse (2008) proposes to unify “unaccusative inversion” and “locative inversion” (Bonami/Godard/Marandin 1999) under the label “nominal inversion” and analyzes this type of subject-verb inversion as involving a stage topic  





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Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

(cf. Gundel 1989; Erteschik-Shir 1997; 1999). The presence of the stage topic may constitute an alternative strategy to the regular licensing of the preverbal subject position in French, a speculation that allows different implementations (cf. Lahousse 2012; Mensching/Weingart 2016; Leonetti 2014). Moreover the stage topic may be covert, resulting in “absolute nominal inversion”, as illustrated in (i) in footnote 22, repeated here as (45). Cf. the availability of Topic-drop in non-pro-drop languages (Abeillé/Godard/Sabio 2008; Robert-Tissot 2015), which also creates an unexpected pattern in languages that essentially require an overt subject.  

(45) Fr.

Elle sonne. Arrive une infirmière: “Ah! Mais madame, ce n’est pas l’heure.” Lit. ‘She rings. Arrives a nurse.’ ‘She rings. A nurse arrives: “Oh! But madam, it’s not time yet.”’ (Dolto. Example taken from Lahousse 2008)

4 Null subjects As mentioned above, the ancestor of Romance languages, Latin, was a consistent null subject language, that is, a language with rich verbal agreement where referential subjects could be omitted in finite clauses.30 Most Romance languages (Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian, Sardinian and Occitan) maintain this property, although there are differences between Latin and Modern Romance Languages in the distribution of overt subjects (Palermo 1997). Some Romance varieties, however, have undergone a grammatical change and are no longer null subject languages (French and Romansh dialects, cf. Kaiser/Hack 2010). Others seem to have become only partial null subject languages, behaving as split pro-drop or semi prodrop languages (some Italian dialects, some Occitan and Franco-Provençal dialects, Brazilian Portuguese and Dominican Spanish). Each one of these partial null subject languages, as we will see, shows different restrictions on null subjects (Duarte 1995; Poletto 2006; Kaiser/Oliviéri 2012; Camacho 2013; among others). The type of overt pronominal form that occurs in subject position is not the same in all Romance languages. Some languages have strong subject pronouns (Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Romanian, Italian); others have also weak pronouns (French, Northern Italian dialects) that in some cases function as (phonological) clitic pronouns and in others as agreement markers (see Cardinaletti/Starke 1999, and ↗5 Clitic pronouns, for the criteria that distinguish strong pronouns from weak and clitic pronouns). Although the morphosyntactic status of subject pronouns is very clear in some languages, in other cases, the status of subject pronouns has undergone an extensive debate, in particular the status of weak pronouns as subject clitics or  

30 As we will see below, not all null subject languages have rich agreement.

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57

agreement markers. The nature of weak subject pronouns (including in Standard French and in Colloquial French) and their diachronic path are discussed in ↗5 Clitic pronouns. In this section, we will just mention the phenomena that are relevant for the discussion on null subjects, in particular what concerns the emergence of subject clitics in languages where null subjects were syntactically more restricted in Old Romance (Vanelli/Renzi/Benincà 1985–1986; Poletto 2006; among others).

4.1 The pro-drop parameter and consistent pro-drop languages Traditional analyses for null subjects attribute this language variation property to a binary parameter known in the literature as the Null Subject Parameter or pro-drop Parameter (e.g. Chomsky 1981; 1982; Rizzi 1982; Jaeggli/Safir 1989; Barbosa 1995), which distinguishes languages such as Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Catalan or Romanian from languages such as French or Swiss Romansh (e.g. Kaiser 2009): (46) a. b. c d. e.

Pt. (Ele) fala português. It. (Lui) parla italiano. Sp. (Él) habla español. Cat. (Ell) parla català. Rom. (El) vorbeşte româneşte. ‘He speaks Portuguese/Italian/Spanish/Catalan/Romanian.’

(47) a. Fr. *(Il) parle français. b. Romansh (Sursilvan) *(El) tschontscha romontsch. ‘He speaks French/Romansh.’ A cluster of properties was initially attributed to pro-drop languages (Chomsky 1981), including: i) rich verbal agreement; ii) so called free inversion; and iii) lack of thattrace effects, i.e. the possibility to move a subject from an embedded clause introduced by a complementizer.31  

31 Lack of overt expletives is usually also associated with pro-drop languages. There are languages that require overt argumental subjects but lack overt expletives (e.g. Capeverdean, Costa/Pratas 2013), but unexpectedly there are some null subject languages (such as non-standard varieties of European Portuguese) that allow overt expletives, although their status is arguably different from the one found in non-pro-drop languages (Carrilho 2005; 2008). In fact, overt expletives found in non-standard varieties of European Portuguese are different from expletive subjects found in English and French: they can co-occur with subjects and they can precede a wh-constituent. Carrilho (2005) argues that they are better analyzed as discourse particles that mark specific illocutionary values. We can also find partial null subject languages (such as Northern Occitan dialects) that have expletive subject clitics (see ↗5 Clitic pronouns).

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Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, which are considered consistent pro-drop languages, all have a rich verbal system, with at least four (usually five) person distinctions in all tenses: Table 1: Verbal paradigms of some Romance languages (simple present of the verb ‘to sing’) Portuguese

Spanish

Italian

Catalan

Romanian

1SG canto

canto

canto

canto

cânt

2SG cantas

cantas

canti

cantes

cânţi

3SG canta

canta

canta

canta

cântă

1PL

cantamos

cantamos

cantiamo

cantem

cântăm

2PL

cantais/cantam

cantáis/cantan

cantate

canteu

cântaţi

3PL

cantam

cantan

cantano

canten

cântă

French, however, in its spoken form, has lost most person distinctions (e.g. Riegel/ Pellat/Rioul 42009): (48) Fr.

je chante I sing tu chantes you-SG sing il chante he sings

[ʃɑ͂ t] [ʃɑ͂ t] [ʃɑ͂ t]

on chante we sing vous chantez you-PL sing ils chantent they sing

[ʃɑ͂ t] [ʃɑ͂ te] [ʃɑ͂ t]

Although there are differences in writing, in the spoken modality, for most verbs there is no person distinction in the singular and the verb form is identical to the third person plural, as is illustrated for the simple present of the verb ‘to sing’ in (48). For the first person plural, although the standard form nous chantons ‘we sing’ has a different ending, the colloquial form on ‘we’ is similar to the third person singular. Therefore, in colloquial speech, only the second person plural has a different ending. The loss of person distinctions has been signaled as a possible cause for the loss of null subjects in the history of French. While an explanation resorting to the weakness of morphological distinctions may be valid for the transition to the Modern language, several authors have shown that changes in subject expression from Old French to Middle French correlate instead with word order changes (Adams 1987; Vance 1989; Roberts 2014; Prévost 2015) (see Section 4.6). Furthermore, there is an asymmetry in subject drop between subordinate clauses and main clauses in Old French: null subjects are much rarer in subordinate clauses than in main clauses. This

Subjects

59

challenges an explanation that relates subject drop to morphological richness (Schøsler 2002; Zimmermann 2014).32 Consider now “free inversion”. Although it is true that pro-drop languages allow postverbal subjects more easily than non-pro-drop languages, exemplified by English and French in (49), as we have seen in Section 2, inversion in pro-drop Romance languages (cf. 50) cannot be considered “free”. Rather, it is conditioned by discourse factors and limited to some specific syntactic configurations. It is also not the case that non-pro-drop languages totally lack subject-verb inversion (see Section 2 and references therein for French). (49) a. Eng. b. Fr.

Who has phoned? /*Has phoned John. Qui a téléphoné? / *A téléphoné Jean.

(50) a. b. c. d. e.

Quem telefonou? / Telefonou o João. ¿Quién ha llamado?/ Ha llamado Juan. Chi ha chiamato? / Ha chiamato Gianni. Qui ha trucat? / Ha trucat en Joan. Cine a sunat? / A sunat Ioan.

Pt. Sp. It. Cat. Rom.

The third property, lack of that-trace effects, refers to the ability to move an embedded subject out of a finite clause introduced by a complementizer. This property has been related to the fact that pro-drop languages can move their subject from a postverbal position, whereas non-pro-drop languages cannot (Rizzi 1982). Portuguese and Italian, for instance, allow subject extraction out of an embedded finite clause headed by a complementizer (51), whereas French disallows this type of movement, although for some speakers the structure is possible with qui introducing the embedded clause – see (52b) vs (52c) (cf. e.g. Rizzi/Shlonsky 2007): (51) a. b. c. d. e.

Pt. It. Cat. Sp. Rom.

(52) a. Eng. b. Fr. b’. Fr.

Quem pensas que __ escreveu este poema? Chi pensi che __ abbia scritto questo poema? Qui creus que __ va escriure aquest poema? ¿Quién crees que __ escribió este poema? Cine crezi că __ a scris acest poem? *Who do you think that __ has written this poem? *Qui crois-tu qu’ __ a écrit ce poème? Qui crois-tu qui a écrit ce poème?

32 Notice that we can still find some cases of null subjects in sixteenth-century French texts, that some authors relate to the enunciative context (Taddei 2013).

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This cluster of properties as a characteristic of pro-drop languages was shown, however, to be too strong: typologically, not all languages that allow subject omission display these properties (Gilligan 1987). We will come back to these phenomena in Section 5. Although the classical distinction between pro-drop and non-pro-drop languages as a binary specification easily explained contrasts between French and the other main European Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian), it soon became clear that it did not account adequately for other systems. Soon, it was found that this typological division was too simplistic, considering not only data from languages from other language families (Chinese, Finnish), but also data from Romance dialects (Biberauer et al. 2010). Some Romance varieties, in fact, show a less clear-cut system, null subjects being restricted to some morpho-syntactic contexts.33 We will first consider Romance varieties that only allow subject dropping in some grammatical persons (Section 4.2) and then varieties where the null subject seems to be restricted to some syntactic environments (Section 4.3). We will then consider special cases of subject omission in French, a language that usually does not allow pro-drop (Section 4.4). An interim summary is offered in Section 4.5. Finally, in Section 4.6, we will briefly mention possible correlations between loss of pro-drop in French and northern Italian varieties, changes in word order and the type of licensing of pro.

4.2 Partial pro-drop languages: “split pro-drop” languages Although standard European Romance languages are relatively well behaved as far as the traditional dichotomy between pro-drop and non-pro-drop languages is concerned, there are several Romance dialects that show a split pattern of subject omission and properties that are unexpected in consistent pro-drop languages. As mentioned in several studies, there are Romance dialects that exhibit mixed patterns of pro-drop: null subjects are licensed only in some persons of the paradigm. These mixed patterns have been found in some Occitan dialects from transition areas (Oliviéri 2004; 2009; 2011; Kaiser/Oliviéri/Palasis 2013), in some Franco-Provençal dialects (Olszyna-Marzys 1964; Heap 2000; Diémoz 2007; Hinzelin/Kaiser 2012; among others) and in some Italian dialects (mostly northern Italian dialects) (Manzini/Savoia 2002; Poletto 2006; Savoia/Manzini 2010; among others). Diachronically, some of these partial pro-drop systems seem to have originated from medieval

33 Languages like Chinese correspond to another type of null subject language. In this case, there is no verbal agreement morphology and null subjects seem to be licensed by discourse conditions (Huang 1984; Jaeggli/Safir 1989; Sigurðsson 2011). No Romance language follows this pattern, although some authors have considered that Brazilian Portuguese has properties typical of a “discourse-oriented language” (Negrão/Viotti 2000).

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61

systems where pro-drop was allowed, but only under specific syntactic conditions (Vanelli/Renzi/Benincà 1985–1986), and they share the property of having weak subject pronouns (see Section 4.6). We illustrate some of the paradigms with data from some northern Occitan dialects reported in Oliviéri et al. (2015): Table 2: Verbal paradigms and obligatory subject pronouns of the verb ‘to be’ in some northern Occitan dialects Le Mont-Dore

Tayac

Eymoutiers

Coussac-Bonneval

1SG

s’e

sɛj

jo se

s’e

2SG

t s’e

tœ se

te se

ty se

3SG

‘e

ew ej

ej

u ‘e

1PL

sɑ̃

sɔ̃

ŋ

nu sũ

nu s’ũ

2PL



vuzaw se

vu se

vu s’e

sɔ̃

ŋ



s’ũ

3PL

zi sɔ̃

Data from Northern Italian dialects point in the same direction. Since there is a very rich diversity of paradigms (Brandi/Cordin 1989; Poletto 2006; Savoia/Manzini 2010; among others), we cannot mention them all. We will just illustrate some cases, to show that the presence of the clitic subject can be required only in some grammatical persons. We illustrate some of the paradigms with data from the northern Italian dialect Venetian, taken from Poletto (2006, 179) and with data from Trentino and Fiorentino, taken from Brandi/Cordin (1989, 113). Table 3: Verbal paradigms and obligatory subject pronouns of some Italian dialects Venetian

Fiorentino

Trentino

‘to eat’

‘to speak’

‘to speak’

1SG

magno

(e) parlo

parlo

2SG

ti magni

tu parli

te parli

3SG

el magna

e/la parla

el/la parla

1PL

magnemo

si parla

parlem

2PL

magnè

vu parlate

parlé

3PL

i magna

e/le parlano

i/le parla

In the first case, there is no clitic in first person singular and first and second person plural, but subject clitics are required in second and third person singular and third

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person plural. In the case of Fiorentino, only the first person singular is optional. As for Trentino, the pronoun is required only in second and third person singular and in third person plural. These Italian dialects thus show asymmetrical pro-drop (Poletto 2006), that is, they only allow null subjects in some grammatical persons. The systems are somewhat complex, since the split does not correlate simply with verbal morphology and is not clearly divided between first and second vs third person. To account for these systems, a finer-grained feature specification in terms of binary features [+/- speaker] and [+/- hearer] or some other kind of feature specification seems to be necessary (Poletto 2006; Oliviéri/Lai/Heap 2017). The status of subject pronouns (clitics) in northern Italian varieties is controversial. In many cases, it has been argued that subject clitics are really agreement markers (Brandi/Cordin 1989; Manzini/Savoia 1997; among others). If so, these varieties would be another type of pro-drop language. Several facts point to the status of the subject constituents as functional morphemes (syntactic clitics) and not pronouns: i) subject clitics co-occur with a DP subject; ii) subject clitics are obligatorily present in coordination contexts; iii) subject clitics co-occur with a quantified subject (Rizzi 1986; Brandi/Cordin 1989). Rizzi (1986) and Brandi/Cordin (1989), for instance, show that subject pronouns in Trentino and Fiorentino are obligatory even in the presence of a full subject (53) or a strong pronoun (54), they can occur with a quantified subject (55), subject-verb inversion is possible with all kinds of verbs with an expletive clitic in preverbal position (56), and the pronoun is obligatory in coordination structures (57). They therefore argue that those dialects are also pro-drop languages that mark agreement in some persons both by verbal ending and by a preverbal morpheme. (53) Fiorentino

a.

La Maria *(la) parla. the Maria she speaks b. *(La) parla. she speaks ‘Maria/she speaks.’

(54) a. Fiorentino b. Trentino

(55) a. Fiorentino b. Trentino

Te tu parli. you you speak Ti te parli. you you speak ‘You speak.’ Nessuno gl’ha detto Nisun l’ha dit nobody he-has said ‘Nobody said anything.’

nulla. niente. nothing

Subjects

(56) Fiorentino

a.

(57) Fiorentino

*La canta e she sings and (Rizzi 1986, 406)

63

Gl’è venuto la Maria. it-is come the Maria ‘Maria has come.’ b. Gl’ha telefonato delle ragazze. it-has phoned some girls ‘Some girls have phoned.’ (Brandi/Cordin 1989, 113, 115 and 118) balla. dances

The Romance dialectal systems are quite diverse and complex and we cannot consider them all in detail. However, the cases we mentioned are sufficient to illustrate that there can be pro-drop languages that obey different restrictions in the persons that license null subjects.34 These Romance dialects force us to reconsider a pure binary distinction for the Null Subject Parameter (even though we have to take into account the special status of the subject pronouns as agreement markers in many of these varieties). They also provide evidence against a direct association between rich agreement and pro-drop.35

34 As we will see below (Sections 4.3 and 4.6), there are also differences concerning the syntactic contexts where null subjects are allowed in different kinds of null subject languages. 35 Another type of evidence for lack of a direct association between agreement and pro-drop comes from some Portuguese inflected infinitival structures where subjects are not licensed in spite of overt person agreement – see (i) below and Raposo (1989) – and from non-inflected non-finite structures from several Romance languages, such as so-called personal infinitives and adverbial gerunds, that license null subjects and full subjects – see (ii) and Brito (1984), Fernández Lagunilla (1987), Lobo (1995). (i) EPt. a. Obriguei as crianças a (*elas) lavar(em) os dentes. forced.1SG the children to (*they) wash.INF (3PL ) the teeth ‘I forced the children to brush their teeth.’ b. A mãe observou as crianças a (*elas) brincar(em). the mother observed the children to (*they) play.INF (3PL ) ‘The mother observed the children playing.’ (ii) a. Sp. Al llegar Juan, se assustó. RE FL scared to-the arrive Juan ‘When Juan arrived, he got scared.’ b. Pt. Estando as crianças doentes, temos de ficar em casa. home being the children sick have.1PL to stay at ‘As the children are sick, we have to stay home.’

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4.3 Another type of partial pro-drop languages: “semi pro-drop” languages Another type of partial pro-drop language (or “semi pro-drop” language) corresponds to Brazilian Portuguese. Many authors have argued that this Portuguese variety is undergoing a progressive loss of pro-drop. Most studies relate this gradual change to impoverished morphology (cf. Duarte 1995; 2000). In fact, Spoken Brazilian Portuguese has an impoverished verbal system, partially induced by changes in the pronominal system, that lead to spreading third person morphological marking to other persons (Duarte 2000, 19). (58) BPt.

eu I você you- SG ele/ela he/she

amo love-1SG ama love-3SG ama loves-3SG

a gente the people vocês you-PL eles/elas they

ama love-3SG ‘we love’ amam love-3PL amam love-3PL

Duarte (1995; 2000) observes a progressive tendency to use more full pronouns in theatre plays written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The loss is more substantive with first and second persons and more gradual with third persons (Duarte 1995), an expected fact if the loss of null subjects is directly linked to impoverished morphology. In consistent null subject languages, such as Italian, Spanish or European Portuguese, null pronouns are the unmarked option and there is a “division of labor” between null and full pronouns. Although several factors may play a role,36 third person null pronouns usually recover a subject antecedent or a salient topic (59a) and third person full pronouns recover preferentially a non-subject antecedent or signal focus or contrast on the subject (59b)37 (Montalbetti 1984; Brito 1991; Carminati 2002; Lobo 2013; among others).

36 These are preferences and not categorical judgements. Several factors play a role in the overt or null realization of the pronoun, including information structure (in particular the type of topic marked by the pronoun), animacy restrictions or pragmatic constraints (see Alonso-Ovalle et al. 2002; Luegi 2012; Pešková 2014; among others). For first and second person, there may be different constraints and there can also be effects of grammaticalized structures (see Posio 2013). 37 There seems to be, though, some crosslinguistic variation in the tendencies found in different prodrop languages (Filiaci/Sorace/Carreiras 2013).

Subjects

(59) EPt.

a.

O chefei disse ao amigoj que proi the boss told to-the friend that descansar. rest amigoj que elej b. O chefei disse ao the boss told to-the friend that he descansar. rest ‘The boss told his friend that he needed to rest.’

65

precisava de needed to

precisava de needed to

In Brazilian Portuguese, the use of full pronouns is found in unexpected contexts for consistent null subject languages. Corpus data shows that the proportion of overt pronouns relatively to null pronouns is higher in Brazilian Portuguese than in other pro-drop Romance varieties and in European Portuguese in particular, and that full pronouns occur in unmarked contexts, unlike consistent pro-drop languages (Barbosa/Duarte/Kato 2005). In Brazilian Portuguese, thus, a full pronoun does not show the same obviation effects as in consistent pro-drop languages. A full pronoun can recover either the subject or another constituent, as shown in (60). Besides, overt pronouns can easily recover inanimate antecedents (Duarte 2000, 22), as exemplified in (61). (60) BPt.

(61) BPt.

disse à Rosaj que elai/j A Anai the Ana told to-the Rosa that she de descansar. of rest ‘Ana told Rosa that she needed to rest.’ que elei tem b. [O povo brasileiro]i acha the people Brazilian thinks that he has grave doença. bad disease ‘Brazilian people think that they are seriously ill.’ (Duarte 1993, apud Costa/Pratas 2013)

a.

precisava needed

uma a

A casa virou um filme quando ela teve de ir abaixo. the house became a movie when it-F had to go down ‘The house became a movie when it had to be demolished.’

Furthermore, third person null subjects in Brazilian Portuguese have a more limited distribution than in European Portuguese, as they can only recover a c-commanding antecedent in the closest clause (62). In European Portuguese, as in consistent null subject languages, third person null subjects can recover a more distant antecedent (63a), a non c-commanding antecedent (63b), or lack a clausal antecedent as in (64).

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(62) BPt.

*A Lúcia conheceu alguns garotos na festa e ∅ the Lúcia met some boys at.the party and acharam ela bonita. found her pretty b. A Lúcia conheceu alguns garotos na festa e eles the Lúcia met some boys at.the party and they acharam ela bonita. found her pretty ‘Lúcia met some boys at the party and (they) found her beautyful.’ (Negrão/Viotti 2000, 110)

a.

(63) EPt./??BPt. a. Amália queria que os amigos dissessem que pro era Amália wanted that the friends said that was fadista. fado-singer ‘Amália wanted her friends to say that she was a fado singer.’ b. O médico disse à Ana que pro estava grávida. the doctor told to.the Ana that was pregnant ‘The doctor told Ana that she was pregnant.’ (64) a. EPt./??BPt. O chefe está atrasado. Acho que the boss is late think-1SG that b. EPt./BPt. O chefe está atrasado. Acho que the boss is late think-1SG that ‘The boss is late. I think he missed his train.’

pro perdeu o lost the

comboio. train

ele he

comboio. train

perdeu o lost the

Additionally, in Brazilian Portuguese subjects are frequently doubled by a full pronoun (Duarte 2000), as mentioned in Section 2.2 and illustrated in (65). This is unexpected in consistent null subject languages.  

(65) a. BPt.

A Clarinha ela cozinha que é uma the Clarinha she cooks that is a ‘Clarinha can cook wonderfully.’ (Duarte 2000, 28) b. Spoken Fr. Paul, il est pas encore arrivé. Paul he has not yet arrived ‘Paul has not arrived yet.’

maravilha. marvel

Subjects

67

On the basis of these facts, some authors have argued that null subjects in Brazilian Portuguese behave as variables or as deleted topics (Negrão/Müller 1996; Negrão/ Viotti 2000; Modesto 2000; 2008). Others analyze embedded referential null subjects as deleted copies of a movement chain (Ferreira 2000; 2004; 2009; Rodrigues 2002; 2004). For others (Silva 2000), there can be different types of null subjects in Brazilian Portuguese, including variable null subjects and anaphoric null subjects. The exact status of null subjects in Brazilian Portuguese is a complex matter that still deserves further investigation. On the other hand, Brazilian Portuguese has been progressively restricting the contexts of subject-verb inversion (Duarte 2000), setting it apart from consistent null subject languages, such as Italian, Spanish and European Portuguese. Holmberg/Nayudu/Sheehan (2009) attribute an additional property to this kind of partial null subject languages: the ability to have null arbitrary subjects. In this respect, Brazilian Portuguese resembles Finnish and diverges from European Portuguese, as exemplified in (66). (66) BPt.

EPt.

a.

É assim que faz o doce. is this.way that makes the sweet ‘This is how one makes the dessert.’ b. Nesse hotel não pode entrar na piscina bêbado. in.this hotel NEG can enter in.the swimming-pool drunk ‘In this hotel it is not permitted to use the swimming pool when drunk.’ (Rodrigues 2004, 72) c. É assim que *(se) faz o doce. is this.way that SE-IMPERS makes the sweet ‘This is how one makes the dessert.’ d. Nesse hotel não *(se) pode entrar na SE-IMPERS can enter in.the in.this hotel NEG piscina bêbado. swimming-pool drunk ‘In this hotel it is not permitted to use the swimming pool when drunk.’

Thus, although Brazilian Portuguese still has null subjects, it does not manifest the typical properties of a consistent null subject language.38

38 Dominican Spanish seems to be undergoing similar changes, with a higher use of overt pronouns than in other Spanish varieties and use of full pronouns in unmarked contexts, not directly related to rich agreement paradigms (Toribio 2000). Toribio (2000) argues that there is a linguistic change in progress and speakers of Dominican Spanish acquire two grammatical systems with different parametric specifications.

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Some authors consider that Brazilian Portuguese is at an intermediate stage in the change from a null subject language to a non null subject language, similar to an ancient stage of French (e.g. Kato 1999). But there is reason to believe that the changes that Old French has undergone are not of the same type as the changes that occurred in Brazilian Portuguese, as argued by Roberts (2014). First, while changes in French were triggered mostly by changes in word order, changes in Brazilian Portuguese were triggered arguably by strong syncretism in the verbal paradigm due to a change in the pronominal system.39 Second, while the loss of null subjects in Old French correlates with the development of a system of weak pronouns (Vanelli/Renzi/Benincà 1985–1986; Poletto 2006), the same does not happen (at least not so clearly) in Brazilian Portuguese.40 There is arguably a reduced form of the strong pronoun você ‘you (SG )’ to a weak form cê (Kato 1999; among others), but the same reduction does not affect other personal pronouns. Costa/Duarte/Silva (2006) show that subject doubling structures in Brazilian Portuguese do not have the typical properties of left dislocation: doubling may occur in contexts where the subject cannot be a topic, as in (67a), and there are instances of doubling with quantified subjects that cannot be topicalized, as shown by the contrast between (67b) and (67c). (67) BPt./*EPt. a. Beginning of phone-call: O Edmilson, ele ’tá? the Edmilson he is?

39 European Portuguese also shows some changes in the pronominal system, but to a lesser extent: in the central and southern varieties, the second plural pronoun vós [you-PPLL ] is no longer used and has been replaced by vocês, which triggers third person plural agreement; for first person plural there is variation between nós ‘we’, which triggers first person plural verbal agreement, and a gente ‘the people’, which triggers third person singular verbal agreement (and for some speakers first person plural), but a gente is clearly socially marked as belonging to a non-standard or colloquial register. For second person singular, as in Italian, the familiar form tu [you-SG ] coexists with polite forms of address that trigger third person singular verbal agreement. 40 Kato (2000) makes the following generalization: languages with non-homophonous forms for subjects (nominative) and for stressed forms are non-pro-drop languages: “if the strong form is not nominative, then the language is [-null-subject]” (Kato 2000, 233). However, as Kato recognizes, the inverse is not necessarily true. Kato’s idea is that loss of null subjects and loss of subject inversion are a consequence of a change in the pronominal system: weak subject pronouns make the projection of the subject preverbal position obligatory, unlike in null subject languages. However, there are some problems with her account, since French subject pronouns are undoubtedly different from English subject pronouns: English subject pronouns can be coordinated, focused and separated from the verb (by an adverb, for instance), contrarily to French subject pronouns. The first behave as strong forms and the latter as weak forms. Also the phenomenon of subject doubling is much more frequent in French than in English, which suggests that subject pronouns have a different status in each language.

Subjects

‘Is Edmilson there?’ (Costa/Galves 2002, apud Costa/Duarte/Silva 2006) b. Cada criança ela leva seu livro para a each child she takes her book to the ‘Each child takes her book to school.’ c. *Cada criança, eu vi em sua escola. each child I saw at her school (Silva 2004, apud Costa/Duarte/Silva 2006)

69

escola. school

The authors also show that subject doubling in Brazilian Portuguese and in French have different properties and a different frequency: in Standard French doubling only occurs when the subject is a topic and it is not possible with a quantified subject; in Brazilian Portuguese, however, as the examples above illustrate, doubling may occur with quantified subjects (67b) and non-topical subjects (67a).41 Although the issue is debatable, it seems that Brazilian Portuguese (and possibly Dominican Spanish) is a partial null subject language different from the northern Occitan and northern Italian dialects.

4.4 Other types of subject omission When we look at some registers of French, we might think that null subjects may also be an option in this language: (68) Fr.

a.

M’ accompagne au Mercure. me accompanies to.the Mercure ‘S/he accompanies me to the Mercure.’ b. Revient à l’ affaire Alb … Me demande si … returns to the business Alb … me asks if … ‘S/he returns to the Alb business. S/he asks me if …’ (Léautaud, P. Le Fléau, Journal particulier, 1917–1930, 69–70, 20.3, apud Haegeman 2013, 90)

However, this type of subject omission (which can also be found in English) has been shown to be of a different kind. Subject omission in French (a non-pro-drop language) is clearly limited to some registers (it is christened as “diary-drop” by some authors) and is subject to specific syntactic constraints: i) there is no omission in embedded 41 In Standard French doubling seems to be a type of topicalization, where the topic is doubled by the subject pronoun (De Cat 2005). In non-standard varieties of French, however, sometimes called “Français avancé” (‘Advanced French’), doubling may be closer to the Brazilian Portuguese construction (Zribi-Hertz 1994).

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clauses, as illustrated in (69); ii) there is no omission in clauses with a left dislocated constituent, as shown in (70), although we can find examples with initial adjuncts, as (71). Because this kind of subject omission is excluded from typical embedded domains, it has been considered a root phenomenon resulting from the possibility of having a truncated clause (Haegeman 2013). (69) Fr.

Maman lui dit que Mommy him tells that ‘Mommy tells him that I am ill.’

*(je) *(I)

suis am

(70) Fr.

Son frère, *(il/elle) l’ accompagne au his/her brother, *(he/she) him accompanies to.the ‘S/he accompanies his/her brother to the bistro.’ (Haegeman 2013, 94)

(71) Fr.

a.

malade. ill

bistro. bistro

puis __ se colle à moi et me tend sa bouche. me and me offers her mouth then __ REFL clings to ‘Then, she clings to me and offers me her mouth.’ (Léautaud 1933, 31, apud Haegeman 2013, 95) b. De nouveau ___ me tend sa bouche. again ___ me offers her mouth ‘She offers me her mouth again.’ (Léautaud 1933, 31, apud Haegeman 2013, 95) c. Tout de suite ___ m’ a parlé de ma visite my visit immediately ___ me have.3SG talked of chez elle dimanche. at her Sunday ‘Immediately she talks to me about my visit to her on Sunday.’ (Léautaud 1933, 45, apud Haegeman 2013, 95)

Zimmermann/Kaiser (2014) mention another context where subject omission is frequent in spoken Colloquial French. The authors observe that beside cases of subject omission restricted to a subset of epistemic verbs (connaître, croire), as in (72a), expletive subjects are frequently omitted in colloquial spoken French, as exemplified in (72b). The authors show that, although the phenomenon can also be found in embedded clauses, such as (73), it is more frequent in root contexts. (72) Fr.

a.

connais pas know.1SG not ‘I don’t know.’ (Gadet 21997, 70, apud Zimmermann/Kaiser 2014)

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b. faut voir see.INF must.3SG ‘We’ll see.’ (Gaatone 1976, 245, fn. 1, apud Zimmermann/Kaiser 2014)  

(73) Fr.

Quand faut y aller faut y aller. when must.3SG there go.INF must.3SG there go.INF ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!’ (movie title, French translation for the Italian movie Nati con la camicia, apud Zimmermann/Kaiser 2014)

Zimmermann/Kaiser (2014) establish a parallelism between the phenomenon exemplified in (72)–(73) and data from older stages of the language, and they argue that expletive omission in Colloquial French seems to be a continuation of a grammatical trait of Medieval French. Culbertson/Legendre (2014), however, have a different view on the null expletives of Colloquial French. Based on experimental data, the authors show that omission of expletives is accepted at different rates for different kinds of expletives and for different kinds of verbs: non-argumental expletives are more likely to be omitted than quasi-argumental expletives (such as subjects of weather verbs), and expletive drop is more likely to occur with modal verbs than with non-modal verbs. Differently from Zimmerman/Kaiser (2014), they argue that this is an innovation of Colloquial French, related to the grammaticalization of the subject clitics as agreement markers (for further details on the status of subject pronouns in different varieties of French, see ↗5 Clitic pronouns; for a comparison between the French data in (69)–(73) above and subject deletion in non-pro-drop English, see Horsey 1998; Nariyama 2004; Weir 2009; Holmberg 2010; Stark/Robert-Tissot forthcoming).

4.5 Typology of Romance (non) null subject languages – summary Summarizing, we can thus conclude that Romance languages provide interesting evidence in favor of a more refined typology of null subject languages, particularly when we take into account dialectal varieties. The typology of languages with respect to null subjects must take into account not only “rich” agreement morphology on the verb, but also different kinds of subjects with respect to argumental status (expletive/ argumental), person features and anaphoric properties: i) consistent null subject languages – null subjects allowed in all contexts (referential, expletive, all persons) [Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, Occitan, Romanian] ii) partial (split) null subject languages – null subjects only allowed in some persons (and/or tenses) [some northern Occitan dialects, Franco-Provençal and northern Italian dialects]

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iii) partial (semi) pro-drop languages – null expletives but limited use of referential null pronouns, that seem to behave as bound variables or copies of movement [Brazilian Portuguese] iv) non-pro-drop languages – null subjects forbidden [French] (but with marginal cases of subject omission in Colloquial French)

4.6 Loss of null subjects and pro-drop licensing What has caused the loss of null subjects in some Romance varieties? Some studies have established a correlation between the morphosyntactic status of subject pronouns in Romance languages, word order restrictions in the medieval languages and the Null Subject Parameter (Vanelli/Renzi/Benincà 1985–1986). According to several authors (Vanelli/Renzi/Benincà 1985–1986; Roberts 1993; Poletto 2006), the availability of null subjects was more restricted in medieval French and in the medieval Northern Italian dialects than in the medieval Ibero-Romance languages. The languages with a more restricted system of null subjects were, according to the same authors, verb second (V2) languages, that is, languages where verbs occupied the second position in the clause and could be preceded by objects, adverbs or subjects, as illustrated by (74) from Medieval French. In those languages, null subjects were mainly attested in postverbal environments, as in (75). In these varieties licensing of null subjects seems to be restricted to this syntactic context (Vanelli/ Renzi/Benincà 1985–1986; Roberts 1993; Poletto 2006). (For other perspectives on Old French word order and the loss of null subjects, see Rinke/Meisel (2009), Meisel/ Elsig/Rinke (2013), Zimmermann (2014), and references therein.) (74) Fr.

a.

Autre chose ne pot li rois trouver. another thing not can the king find.INF ‘The king cannot find anything else.’ (M. Artu, apud Vanelli/Renzi/Benincà 1985–1986, 53) b. Et ton nom revoel ge savoir and your name want I know.INF ‘And I want to know your name.’ (Erec, apud Vanelli/Renzi/Benincà 1985–1986, 53)

(75) Fr.

Sire, nouveles vos sei __ dire del from.the Sir news you know.1SG __ say ‘Sir, I can tell you news of the tournament.’ (M. Artu, apud Vanelli/Renzi/Benincà 1985–1986, 53)

tornoiement. tournament

The loss of null subjects or the change into asymmetric pro-drop systems would thus correlate with changes in word order, with the consequent inability to license subjects

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in the proper syntactic configuration (Roberts 2014; Poletto 2006). Furthermore, this change has been argued to correlate with the development of a system of weak subject pronouns, that in some cases (some northern Italian dialects and some colloquial varieties of French) then evolved into agreement markers (see ↗5 Clitic pronouns). In the medieval Ibero-Romance varieties, in contrast, null subjects were freer and could also be licensed in preverbal position. In these varieties, null subjects were maintained according to the Latin system and subject pronouns kept their status as strong pronouns (see ↗5 Clitic pronouns, and Vanelli/Renzi/Benincà 1985–1986). The case of Brazilian Portuguese seems to be different. In this variety, the raising in frequency of overt subject pronouns does not seem to follow from a change in word order and in the type of licensing of null subjects. It seems to be instead a consequence of changes in the pronominal system that induced a reduction in person distinctions in the verbal paradigm (Roberts 2014), although as we have seen it is difficult to establish a direct link between impoverished morphology and the use of overt pronouns (Negrão/Viotti 2000). There seem to be indeed different kinds of partial null subject languages (Biberauer et al. 2010). So from the simple binary distinction established in the 1980s between pro-drop languages, like Spanish or Italian, and non-pro-drop languages, like French or English, we have now come to a system that must consider fine-grained distinctions between different types of licensing of null subjects and different types of null subjects.

5 Reconsidering properties of null subject languages As mentioned above, traditional accounts of the Null Subject Parameter established a correlation between different properties: i) optional omission of pronominal subjects; ii) ‘free subject inversion’; and iii) lack of that-trace effects (Rizzi 1982). This correlation, however, seems to be too strong (cf. Gilligan 1987). In this section, we will reconsider some of these properties and some problems for the traditional view. See Section 2 above in regard to ‘free subject inversion’.

5.1 Are null subjects optional? Although in consistent null subject languages overt pronouns are judged optional, in reality null subjects and full pronouns do not alternate freely (Montalbetti 1984; Rigau 1988; Calabrese 1980; Lobo 1995; 2013; Carminati 2002; Camacho 2013; among others). There are contexts where overt pronouns are obligatory, contexts where they are forbidden and contexts where the use of a null pronoun or of an overt pronoun induces different readings, without any changes in verbal agreement. Whenever the subject is focused or contrasted, it has to be phonetically realized, as shown in (76):

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Maria Lobo and Ana Maria Martins

It. Pt. Sp. Rom.

Chi è arrivato? / Quem chegou? / ¿Quién llegó? / Cine a ajuns? / who (has/is) arrived / ‘Who arrived? / I did.’

Sono arrivato *(io). Cheguei *(eu). Llegué *(yo). Am ajuns *(eu). (am/have) arrived(1SG ) *(I)

Conversely, when the subject is a bound variable it is usually omitted (Montalbetti 1984): (77) a. b. c. d.

It. Pt. Sp. Rom.

Ogni bambinoi pensava che lui*i / proi avrebbe vinto. / proi ia ganhar. Cada meninoi achava que ele*i / proi iba a ganar. Cada niñoi pensaba que él*i / proi va câştiga. Fiecare copili credea că el*i ‘Each childi thought that hei would win.’

In other contexts, such as indicative complement clauses, like (78), or adverbial clauses, like (79), null subjects are preferred for coreferential readings and full pronouns are preferred for disjoint readings: (78) a. b. c. d.

It. Pt. Sp. Rom.

Il pittorei ha detto al meccanicoj che proi/luij non poteva venire. O pintori disse ao mecânicoj que proi/elej não podia vir. El pintori dijo al mecánicoj que proi/élj no podía venir. Pictoruli i-a spus mecaniculuij că proi/elj nu poate să vină. ‘The painteri told the mechanicj that hei/j could not come.’

(79) a. b. c. d.

It. Pt. Sp. Rom.

Il pittorei ha sorriso al meccanicoj quando proi/luij è arrivato. O pintori sorriu ao mecânicoj quando proi/elej entrou. El pintori sonrió al mecánicoj cuando proi/élj entró. Pictoruli i-a zâmbit mecaniculuij când proi/elj a intrat. ‘The painteri smiled to the mechanicj when hei/j came in.’

In languages that do not allow null subjects, a subject pronoun is obligatory in these contexts and it has an ambiguous interpretation: (80) Fr. a. b. c.

Chaque enfanti croyait qu’*(ili/j) allait gagner. ‘Each childi thought that hei/j would win.’ Le peintrei a dit à l’ingénieurj qu’ *(ili/j) ne pourrait pas venir. ‘The painteri told the engineerj that hei/j could not come.’ Le peintrei a souri à l’ingénieurj quand *(ili/j) est entré. ‘The painteri smiled to the engineerj when hei/j came in.’

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So subject dropping in consistent null subject languages is not free. It is subject to specific discourse constraints.

5.2 Subject extraction and subject-verb inversion Another property that has been related to the null subject parameter is the ability to extract a subject from a finite subordinate clause introduced by a complementizer (see examples (6) and (7) in Section 4.1). According to Rizzi (1982), this property follows from the ability to extract subjects from a postverbal position. This would be possible in null subject languages, in which a null expletive may occur pre-verbally, but not in non-pro-drop languages. There are several arguments that support the hypothesis that subject extraction takes place from a postverbal position in null subject languages (Rizzi 1982; Burzio 1986; Rizzi/Shlonsky 2007). In Italian, for example, ne-cliticization is only possible when the clitic, which pronominalizes an NP complement of a quantifier, is moved from a postverbal position. As shown in (81a), ne-cliticization is possible with the internal argument of unaccusative verbs. However, when the internal argument occupies the preverbal position (81b), ne-cliticization is no longer possible. Crucially, when the internal argument undergoes wh-movement, as in (81c), ne-cliticization is possible. This suggests that the wh-subject is extracted from the postverbal position and not from the preverbal one: (81) Fr. a.

b.

c.

Ne sono cadute tre. of.them are fallen three ‘Three of them have fallen.’ *Tre ne sono cadute. three of.them are fallen ‘Three of them have fallen.’ Quante ne sono cadute? how.many of.them are fallen ‘How many of them have fallen?’

In French, a non null subject language, extraction of the subject out of a complement clause introduced by a complementizer is ungrammatical, but object extraction is possible (cf. (82a) vs (82b)):42

42 But see example (52b’) in section 4.1 and Rizzi/Shlonsky’s (2007) discussion on subject extraction in French.

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(82) Fr. a.

*Qui crois-tu que va gagner? who think.2SG -you that go win ‘Who do you think will win?’ Qui crois-tu que Paul va aider? who think.2SG -you that Paul go help ‘Who do you think that Paul will help?’

b.

In so-called impersonal constructions, with verbs that allow the subject to remain in a postverbal position and with an overt expletive in preverbal position (83), only the extraction of the postverbal position is grammatical (84): (83) Fr. a.

Il est arrivé trois filles. it is arrived three girls ‘There arrived three girls.’ Trois filles sont arrivées. three girls are arrived-F . PL ‘Three girls arrived.’

b.

(84) Fr. a.

Combien de fillesi crois-tu qu’ il how.many of girls think.2SG -you that it que __i *Combien de fillesi crois-tu how.many of girls think.2SG -you that ‘How many girls do you think have arrived?’

b.

est is sont are

arrivé __i? arrived arrivées? arrived.F . PL

However, consideration of data from different languages has shown that the correlation between subject inversion and subject extraction is not as straightforward as initially thought (Gilligan 1987; Nicolis 2008). Some languages seem to allow subject extraction but disallow postverbal subjects, at least with the properties described for consistent null subject languages. In the Romance languages, Brazilian Portuguese has been argued to be one of these languages (Chao 1981; Rizzi/Shlonsky 2007). As mentioned in Section 2, Brazilian Portuguese has a limited use of subject inversion and usually does not like subject inversion with verbs that are not unaccusative. It allows, however subject extraction from embedded contexts. Although it has a more restricted use of subject inversion than consistent null subject languages, Menuzzi (2000) shows that even in Brazilian Portuguese subject extraction takes place from a postverbal position. This is visible when a floating quantifier is left behind, as in (85). (85) BPt.

a.

Que rapazesi, which boys [todos __i ] de all of

o Paulo the Paulo Maria? Maria

desconfia que suspects that

gostem like

Subjects

b. *Que rapazesi, o Paulo desconfia que which boys the Paulo suspects that gostem de Maria? like of Maria ‘Which boys does Paul suspect all like Maria?’ (Menuzzi 2000, 29)

77

[todos __i ]j all

In fact, extraction from a subject position of an embedded clause introduced by a complementizer seems to be possible in a language that has null expletives, as happens in Brazilian Portuguese (Nicolis 2008; Rizzi/Shlonsky 2007). Similar effects are found in Capeverdean, a Portuguese-based Creole that has null expletives but a very limited use of null argumental subjects (Nicolis 2008; Costa/Pratas 2013). So even in languages where there is no ‘free subject inversion’, subject extraction seems to be possible provided that the language has null expletives, which is the case of Brazilian Portuguese.

5.3 Summary As we have seen, properties traditionally associated with null subject languages have to be weakened to a certain extent. In null subject languages: i) null subjects are allowed only in specific discourse conditions (Section 5.1); ii) lack of that-trace effects seems to be present even when the language does not have a wide use of subject-verb inversion, provided that it allows null expletives (Section 5.2); and as we have seen before subject inversion is not completely free (Section 2).

6 General summary This chapter covers central topics in the morphosyntax of subjects. Discussion throughout the paper is theory-informed but kept as theory-neutral as possible, and substantial cross-linguistic empirical evidence is offered. The cornerstones of the chapter are word order, in particular subject-verb inversion, and null subjects, both issues relating to case, agreement and expletives. The chapter seeks to understand and systematize what motivates and licenses VS orders in Romance non-wh sentences (i.e. VOS and VSO) and identifies focalization, theticity and non-degree exclamatives as central ingredients (across Romance languages). On the other hand, the chapter provides evidence that the Null Subject Parameter (NSP) cannot be maintained as originally formulated since the richness of grammatical variation between Romance languages requires a more intricate, fine-grained parametrization. Some assumptions of the NSP relating to word order are also untenable.  

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Suñer, Margarita (1982), Syntax and semantics of Spanish presentational sentences, Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press. Taddei, Edith (2013), Émergence de la servitude subjectale au XVIe siècle. Textes narratifs en prose (1504–1585), Paris, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, Ph.D. dissertation. Toribio, Almeida Jacqueline (2000), Setting parametric limits on dialectal variation in Spanish, Lingua 10, 315–341. Tortora, Christina (1997), The syntax and semantics of the weak locative, University of Delaware, Newark, Ph.D. dissertation. 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. Ulrich, Miorita (1985), Thetisch und Kategorisch, Tübingen, Narr. Vallduví, Enric (2002), L’oració com a unitat informativa, in: Joan Solà et al. (edd.), Gramàtica del català contemporani, Barcelona, Empúries, 1221–1279. Vance, Barbara Sue (1989), Null Subjects and syntactic change in Medieval French, Cornell University, Ph.D. dissertation. Vanelli, Laura/Renzi, Lorenzo/Benincà, Paola (1985–1986), Tipologia dei pronomi soggetto nelle lingue romanze, Quaderni Patavini di Linguistica 5, 49–66 [first published as Vanelli, Laura/ Renzi, Lorenzo/Benincà, Paola (1985), Typologie des pronoms sujets dans les langues romanes, in: Actes du XVIIème Congrès international de linguistique et philologie romanes (Aix-enProvence, 29 août-3 septembre 1983), III, Aix-en-Provence, Publications de l’Université de Provence, 163–176]. Van Kampen, Jacqueline (2005), Subjects and the (Extended) Projection Principle, in: Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edn, Oxford, Elsevier, 242–248. Vanrell Bosch, Maria del Mar/Fernández Soriano, Olga (2013), Variation at the Interfaces in IberoRomance. Catalan and Spanish prosody and word order, Catalan Journal of Linguistics 12, 1–30. WALS – Dryer, Matthew S./Haspelmath, Martin (edd.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, Leipzig, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info/ (14.06.2015). Wandruszka, Ulrich (1982), Studien zur italienischen Wortstellung, Tübingen, Narr. Weir, Andrew (2009), Subject pronoun drop in informal English, Richard M. Hogg Prize winning essay. http://www.isle-linguistics.org/resources/weir2009.pdf (accessed 28.08.2016). Zagona, Karen (2005), The Syntax of Spanish, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Zanuttini, Raffaella/Portner, Paul (2003), Exclamative clauses: at the syntax-semantics interface, Language 79, 39–81. Zimmermann, Michael (2014), Expletive and Referential Subject Pronouns in Medieval French, Berlin/ Boston, De Gruyter. Zimmermann, Michael/Kaiser, Georg A. (2014), On expletive subject pronoun drop in Colloquial French, Journal of French Language Studies 24, 107–126. Zribi-Hertz, Anne (1994), The syntax of nominative clitics in Standard and Advanced French, in: Guglielmo Cinque et al. (edd.), Paths Towards Universal Grammar, Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 453–472. 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, Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 4215–4244.

Ioanna Sitaridou

3 Objects Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of objects in Romance, presenting descriptions and proposals for formal analyses of particular Romance object(-related) properties, which reveal a great deal of variation. After having given some basic definitions and properties of objects in all languages, the chapter presents some “object markers” in a broad sense, which never coexist in a single variety, but which enable different subgroups of Romance languages to be distinguished – only Romanian, for example, has maintained morphological case distinctions for some lexical categories to date; most Romance varieties have developed Differential Object Marking (DOM) for a subset of DOs whose properties are (mainly) semantically defined, and Romance varieties can also mark DOs by (overt marking of) past participle agreement. The agreement triggering conditions differ across the varieties, but often agreement on the participle marks some kind of “special”, i.e., non canonical (= lexical, postverbal) DO. In contrast to most Romance varieties, Romanian does admit Double Object Constructions (DOC), and much variation is observed for clitic doubling and clitic climbing. Furthermore, object drop is frequently found in Romance varieties (especially for non-human and non-specific object referents), with Brazilian Portuguese also admitting object drop for definite, specific referents. Subject-object asymmetries are finally observed with respect to the distribution of bare nouns, wh-extraction asymmetries being confined to non-pro-drop languages such as French and some Rhaeto-Romance varieties.  





Keywords: object, unaccusativity, case, differential object marking, double object constructions, past participle agreement, (ethical) datives, clitic doubling, clitic climbing, null objects, subject-object asymmetries  

1 Definition In the generative framework, the grammatical function of an object can be defined in terms of theta-theory and subcategorization. Like all arguments, objects must be realized (excepting some particular cases, see Section 5) for the verbal expressions to be syntactically well-formed and semantically interpretable. In contrast to the subject argument, object arguments are part of the verbal complements. These are more closely related to the verbal meaning than the subject, whose presence largely depends on the formal property of the verb to be inflected. Hence, the complements “complete” the verbal utterance even if the latter is an infinitival construction and, therefore, lacks inflection; normally under the same conditions a subject would not be realised. Another distinction we have to make is the one between objects and other DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-003

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verbal complements: While circumstantial complements, for example, only have to satisfy the semantic requirements of the verb, the formal properties of the objects are defined by the verb itself. For instance, in (1) sur toi ‘on you’ is the prepositional object of the verb compter ‘count’. The preposition cannot be changed or omitted without shifting the verb’s meaning or resulting in ungrammaticality. This relation of the verb determining the formal relation of its object is referred to as government (i.e. the verb governs the object) or subcategorization (i.e. the verb subcategorizes for a certain type of object).  



(1)

Fr.

Je compte sur I count on ‘I count on you.’

toi. you

In (2) à l’école ‘to the school’ is also a complement of the verb aller ‘go’, since it is required in order for the sentence to be well-formed and interpretable. However, the circumstantial complement could also take the form of chez ma mère ‘to my mother’s place’, i.e. its formal properties are not imposed by the verb.  

(2)

Fr.

Je vais à l’ I go to the ‘I go to school.’

école. school

For Romance languages, we distinguish three types of objects: the direct object (DO), the indirect object (IO) and the prepositional object (PO). These are syntactic functions, which are to be kept apart from the semantic roles of objects and arguments in general (↗4 Argument structure and argument structure alternations). Verbs denote an event, action or state and determine which participants have to take part in the described event/action/state. The verb defines, first, the number of participants and, second, their semantic function, called the thematic role or theta role. Moreover, each theta role must be assigned to only one argument and each argument must receive only one theta role by the verb, a restriction which is referred to as the theta criterion or the theta filter (Chomsky 1981, 35). In the literature we find a variety of lists of semantic roles ranging from rather exhaustive ones (↗4 Argument structure and argument structure alternations, and references therein) to the bipartite distinction between the Proto-Agent and the ProtoPatient roles proposed by Dowty (1991). All arguments are endowed with thematic roles but there is in principle no one-toone mapping of a role with a specific syntactic function, nor with a specific morphological (visible) case or prepositional marker (see Section 2). This is the so-called “linking” problem (Maling 2001), namely the problem of explaining what the possible mappings between thematic roles, grammatical functions, and morphological case are. Independently of the morphological case, in the generative framework it is

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assumed that the objects as well as the subject bear Case1 whether it is morphologically realized or not. The nominative and the accusative case are associated with syntactic positions, namely the specifier of the Tense phrase (TP) and the specifier of the verb phrase (VP) respectively. As they are linked to a specific structural position, these two cases are called structural Cases, whereas the dative case is an inherent Case which is linked to a certain constituent rather than to a syntactic position. The structural Cases, nominative and accusative, identify the subject and the direct object. The indirect object usually receives inherent Case – be it active (uCase) or inactive (iCase) which in its purest form will be lexical case – or structural Case depending on cross-categorial and cross-linguistic variation; in fact, Torrego (1998) argued that Romance datives have both inherent Case and structural Case. Under the Uniform Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH) (Baker 1988), the thetaroles assigned by the predicate are also associated with a specific syntactic position. Thus, the Theme is assigned to the syntactic position of the specifier of VP, the Goal to the complement of VP and the Agent outside the VP, i.e. to the specifier of the functional verb phrase (little) vP. In Figure 1 we represent the structural positions that are linked with specific thematic roles and/or Cases.  

Figure 1: The association of Case and semantic role with structural positions

1 If spelt with a capital C, the Case is understood as abstract Case, not obligatorily morphologically marked.

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From these observations it follows that, if there is an Agent, it must be the subject of an active sentence, and the Agent is base-generated in Spec,vP (whereas a subject can also bear another role if there is no A GENT , e.g. E XPERIENCER ). We will also see that only transitive verbs can assign accusative Case.2 Let us consider the derivation of a ditransitive clause with a French example (see Figure 2). In recent versions of generative grammar (AGREE operation following Chomsky 2001), merged constituents have features whose values are either defined or undefined. Each constituent with an undefined value for a feature can act as a probe in a c-commanding relation, hence looking for a goal from which it can “copy” the missing feature values. If there is such a feature matching constituent, the probe and the goal agree and the goal may move. The movement is triggered by a so-called EPP-feature (Extended Projection Principle). For the sake of clarity, in the following figures, we will represent the AGREE operation using a simple arrow going from the probe to the goal. In Figure 2, the verb donner ‘give’ is first merged in the V° head where it assigns dative Case and the Beneficiary role to its complement Marie. Since Marie can be substituted by a dative clitic (see below for objecthood tests), it is the IO here and we consider the prepositional à as a dative marker rather than a preposition. The verb also assigns accusative case and the Theme role to the constituent in its specifier, le livre ‘the book’. The functional properties of the verb are defined by the little v° head. In our example, the verb is ditransitive which means that it must assign accusative Case as well as an Agent role. It is important to note that only if the verb assigns a role to the Spec,vP position can it also assign the accusative Case (so-called Burzio’s Generalization 1986). As already mentioned above, the property of showing a subject is linked to the finiteness of the verb, which is determined by the temporal head T°. In other words, the properties of the verb encoded in T° decide if the nominative Case will be assigned to the constituent in the Spec,vP, i.e. to the external argument. The EPP-feature of Spec,TP will then attract the nominative argument that has become mobile after the positive match with the probe of T°. When dealing with monotransitive and ditransitive verbs, the VP-internal argument is encoded as the DO and the complement of V°,3 and the goal/beneficiary, if any, as the IO or PO, respectively. The subject of the sentence is the so-called external argument which is base generated in Spec,vP, i.e. outside the lexical verbal domain VP. However, sometimes the internal argument, base generated in Spec,VP, is encoded as the subject in the Romance languages. This is the case with unaccusative verbs, which cannot assign accusative Case, and in passive constructions.  





2 The Romance languages are uniformly accusative languages with one notable exception, namely upper southern Italian varieties, as argued by D’Alessandro (2011). 3 Note that nouns may also take complements, which however differ from the complements of verbs.

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Figure 2: The structure of a French ditransitive sentence

(i) Unaccusative verbs: Intransitive verbs can be split in two categories: (a) intransitive verbs with external arguments (unergatives), e.g., John smiles; (b) intransitive verbs with internal arguments (unaccusatives), e.g., John dies. Thus, unaccusative verbs have only an internal argument merged as the specifier of VP. In the framework of Relational Grammar the unergative verbs have a subject, whereas unaccusative verbs have an object but no subject in the initial layer of grammatical relations (cf. Perlmutter’s 1978 Unaccusative Hypothesis). In the same vein, the subjects of unaccusative verbs do not receive the Agent role but rather the Patient or Theme role, a property that brings them closer to the DO of transitive verbs. Figure 3 illustrates the derivation of the unaccusative structure Jean arriva ‘Jean arrived’ in French. As already mentioned above, unaccusative verbs take an internal argument which is merged in Spec,VP. This argument receives its thematic role from the verb. However, since the verb is an unaccusative one, it cannot assign accusative Case to the argument. Following Burzio’s Generalization (see above), it cannot assign the Agent role either. However, since the verb is finite, the Spec,TP position, i.e. the subject position, is predestined to host an argument which receives the nominative Case. We can think of this position as having a probe which finds its target in the internal argument that needs to be assigned Case. The probe and the target match and since in French Spec,TP is endowed with an EPPfeature, the internal argument moves overtly to Spec,TP and surfaces as the sentence’s subject.  

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Figure 3: The derivation of a French unaccusative structure

In Figure 4 we show the derivation for the corresponding sentence Llegó Juan in Spanish. The computation is roughly the same, with the exception that in Spanish, the empty pronoun pro, unavailable in French, can satisfy the EPP-feature of Spec,TP. This leads to the different word order (↗24 Basic constituent orders): after AGREE, the internal argument receives nominative Case, but it can remain in situ.

Figure 4: The derivation of a Spanish unaccusative structure

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Thus, the unmarked verb-subject order with unaccusative verbs in most of the Romance languages is, in essence, the consequence of the fact that the subjects of these clauses are internal arguments which get promoted to subjects without, however, the need to move overtly to the subject position (unless there is an EPP requirement as is the case in French or Brazilian Portuguese). This can also be seen with a compound verb form including a past participle (3); here too, the subject follows the past participle. (3)

It.

È arrivat-a Maria. Maria is arrived-FSG ‘Maria has arrived.’

It can also be shown empirically that the subjects of unaccusative verbs behave like the objects of transitive verbs. ABERE / ESSE alternation, show In general, Romance languages which have the HHABERE participial agreement with the subject of unaccusative constructions (i.e. with ESSE auxiliary). Interestingly, they also show it to different degrees with the moved internal arguments of transitive clauses (direct objects): roughly stated, the participle will agree if the direct object precedes the verbal form. However, overall, the syntax of participles and auxiliaries in Romance is extremely complex, as we shall see in Section 2.3 and ↗7 Auxiliaries. Furthermore, INDE (or more commonly ne)-cliticization in French (en) and Italian (ne) can be used to show the identity of subjects of unaccusative verbs and direct objects of transitive ones. This has long been considered a split-intransitivity diagnostic (unergatives vs unaccusatives; cf. Belletti/Rizzi 1981; Burzio 1986) according to which ne – a proform of a quantified noun – can only originate from an internal argument. Consider (4a,b) and (4a’,b’): the internal argument of both the transitive and the unaccusative verb allows for the ne-cliticization by which the quantifier is stranded. In contrast, the external argument of an unergative verb cannot be pronominalized (4c,c’) with ne leaving the quantifier behind:  



(4)

It.

a.

Studi-o molti libri. study-1SG many books ‘I study/am studying many books.’ a’. Ne studi-o [molti tne]. NE study-1SG many ø ‘I study many (of them).’ b. Arriv-ano molt-e signore. ladies arrive-3PL many- FPL ‘Many ladies are arriving.’ b’. Ne arriv-ano [molt-e tne]. NE arrive-3PL many- FPL Ø ‘Many (of them) are arriving.’

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c.

Molti studenti legg-ono. many students read-3PL ‘Many students read/are reading.’ c’. *[Molti tne] ne legg-ono. NE read-3PL many Ø ‘Many (of them) read/are reading.’

(ii) Passive constructions: The second case in which the internal argument shows up as the subject is in passive constructions. The derivation of passive structures is quite similar to that of unaccusative constructions in that in both, the functional specifications of the verb (v°) prohibit the assignment of the Agent role and the accusative Case or vice-versa. Since in passive constructions the Agent remains implicit if not made explicit by a periphrasis with adjunct status, this thematic role is not assigned. In consequence, there cannot be an accusative Case in the sentence, even if there is an internal argument. The latter has to agree with the probe of Spec,TP in order to get Case, i.e. the nominative. So in passive constructions, too, we have a subject which originates from an internal argument and hence shares properties with the internal arguments of active transitive clauses (i.e. direct objects). Finally, there are also some object-like complements of psych verbs (see Belletti/ Rizzi 1987) that are underlyingly subject-like in that they denote Experiencers, a thematic role which is more often assigned to the subject. We see this, for example, with some Romance verbs meaning ‘like’: gustar in Modern Spanish (5), agradar in Modern Catalan, piacere in Modern Italian and PLACĒRE in Latin. The experiencer of these verbs receives dative Case (i. e. quirky subject), unlike Modern Portuguese and Modern French, in which the Experiencer of gostar and aimer, respectively, displays subject (nominative) morphological case. Historically, taking Spanish as an example, verbs inherited from Latin did not develop these structures with datives until Golden Age Spanish (6) (see Masullo 1993; Fernández Soriano 1999; Rigau 1999, among others).  



(5)

Sp.

A Juan le to Juan him.DAT ‘Juan likes coffee.’

gusta likes

el the

café. coffee

(6)

Golden Age Sp. para dar mayor claridad para que todo-s lo to COMP all-PL it.ACC to give.INF greater clarity gust-en y entiend-an taste-SBJV . 3PL and understand-SBJV . 3PL ‘so as to shed more light for everybody to savour and understand it’

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[Juan de Arfe y Villafañe (1585), Varia Conmensuración para la Escultura y la Arquitectura. (CORDE)] (Batllori Dillet/Gibert Sotelo/Pujol Payet 2016, 1) To sum up what has been said so far, we distinguish several types of arguments, of which only a subpart are called objects, namely those which depend closely on the verbal semantics and which are governed by the verb, i.e. whose formal properties are determined by the verb. Figure 5 gives an overview of the different types of constituents.  

Figure 5: Delimitation of the objects inside the argumental structure4

In terms of syntactic category, we find the following types of objects across Romance: (i) Nominal objects. The non-subject NPs must take a determiner (definite or indefinite) or a quantifier, except in some specific cases. Singular count nouns almost never occur without a determiner or a quantifier (apart from proper names). Only plural object NPs and mass nouns can occur without a determiner when they are not specified and/or not definite. However, French, Francoprovençal, many Occitan and northern Italian dialects (Stark 2016) do not allow such arguments to be bare, cf. (7a)

4 The indirect object in Figure 5 can also be analyzed as base-generated in Spec, ApplP in the theories which use applicative heads.

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and (7b), and show an indefinite determiner, traditionally called “partitive article” (glossed as PART in the examples). Standard Italian has this element as an optional marker for mass nouns, but Spanish has no morphological device to mark them, cf. (8a) and (9a). For indefinite plurals, both Italian and Spanish have an optional article with different semantic effects, cf. (8b) and (9b): (7)

Fr.

a.

J’ ai acheté *(du) vin. wine I have bought PART . MSG ‘I’ve bought (some) wine.’ b. J’ ai vu *(des) photos. photos I have seen PART . PL ‘I saw (some) photos.’

(8)

It.

a.

(9)

Sp.

a.

Ho comprato (del) vino. bought PART . MSG wine have.1SG ‘I bought (some) wine.’ b. Ho visto (delle) foto. photos have.1SG seen PART . FPL ‘I saw (some) photos.’ Compr-é vino. wine buy- PST . 1SG ‘I bought (some) wine.’ b. Vi (unas) ART . INDF . F . PL saw.1SG ‘I saw (some) photos.’

fotos. photos

Lexical IOS are either marked by a prepositional element, most commonly a, or their determiners/quantifiers or quantifiers show morphological dative case (in modern Romanian, see Section 2.1). (ii) Clitic pronouns. Nominal or phrasal objects in general can be substituted by anaphoric clitic pronouns in almost all Romance varieties (the Rhaeto-Romance variety of Sursilvan does not have clitic pronouns). Morphologically, the Romance object pronoun system is transparent to gender, number and, sometimes, Case. So, DO can be replaced by accusative clitics (except for leísmo in some Spanish varieties, ↗5 Clitic pronouns), and IO by dative clitics: (10)

Fr.

a.

Jean a donné le livre Jean has given the book ‘Jean has given the book to Marie.’

à to

Marie. Marie

Objects

b. Jean le lui Jean ACC . 3SG . M DAT . 3SG ‘Jean has given it to her.’

a has

99

donné. given

It is important to note that only IO can be replaced by a dative clitic (11), whereas prepositional objects can sometimes be replaced by so-called adverbial clitics (in the varieties which have them, i.e. mainly French, Italian, Catalan) (12) and sometimes a clitic substitution is not possible or only marginally acceptable with stranding prepositions or adverbs (13); this depends on the semantics of the object.  

(11)

It.

a.

Ho dato il libro a Giovanni. book to Giovanni have. 1SG given the ‘I’ve given the book to Giovanni.’ b. Gli ho dato il libro. DAT . 3SG have. 1SG given the book ‘I’ve given him the book.’

(12)

It.

a.

(13)

Fr.

a.

Pens-o al tuo compleanno. think- 1SG at.the your birthday ‘I’m thinking of your birthday.’ b. Ci pens-o. LOC think- 1SG ‘I’m thinking of it.’

Je compte sur toi. I count on you ‘I count on you.’ b. *J’ y/en compte. LOC / GEN count I’ dessus. c. ?Je compte I count above ‘I count on it.’

Note that the substitution by an adverbial clitic is not a test for objecthood of a prepositional complement, since circumstantial or predicative complements can also be replaced by adverbial clitics: (14)

a. b.

Fr. Je suis à It. Sono a I am at ‘I’m at home.’

la the

maison. casa. house

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c. d.

Fr. J’ y suis. It. Ci sono. LOC am I ‘I’m there.’

There is a further substitution possibility for quantified objects with ne-cliticization, as we have already seen above. For the positions and internal ordering of object clitics, see ↗5 Clitic pronouns. (iii) Clausal objects are quite common in Romance. The complement clauses are infinitival if the A GENT remains the same as in the main clause (these are so-called control constructions, see ↗10 Infinitival clauses): (15)

a. b.

It. Pens-o di aver=lo visto. have.INF = him.ACC seen think-1SG of Fr. Je pense l=avoir vu. I think him. ACC =have.INF seen ‘I think I saw him.’

In contrast, if the A GENT changes or is newly introduced, the complement clause will be finite (16) unless an inflected infinitive is selected in Portuguese (17) (which is the case also in Galician or Sardinian) or a personal infinitive in Spanish (also in Catalan, Brazilian Portuguese, Campidanese, Sicilian, see Sitaridou 2009b; among others): (16)

It.

Mi dispiace che abbi-a COMP have.SBJV . 2/3SG me.DAT displeases speso quei soldi per niente. spent that money for nothing ‘I’m sorry that you have/s/he has spent that money for nothing.’

(17)

Pt.

É perigoso eles brincar-em nos on.the is dangerous they.NOM play.INF .3PL ‘It’s dangerous for them to play on the tracks.’

trilhos. tracks

2 Object marking strategies In current generative thinking, a DO is viewed as a DP that receives structural Case by means of being in a particular structural configuration, namely by being generated in Spec,VP. This is in contrast with case being sanctioned by virtue of being in a relationship with a lexical head, for instance, a preposition that assigns inherent Case to its

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complement. As is well known, Romance languages have maintained only extremely limited morphological case marking, solely in the pronominal domain and on Romanian determiners and partially nouns, thus notably departing from Latin (see Section 2.1). However, there are still some overt object marking strategies available, such as Differential Object Marking (DOM) (see Section 2.2) and past participle agreement (see Section 2.3), which will be the subject of this section.

2.1 Case Latin displayed rich nominal case morphology (alongside number and gender distinctions), which by way of suspected phonological erosion simplified greatly, further aided by imperfect second language acquisition by the Roman-conquered population. Observing synchronic stages, one notes that Gallo-Romance and Rhaeto-Romance varieties maintained nominal case morphology until the thirteenth century, and Romanian to this day. Let us consider Old Gallo-Romance first. Both main groups of varieties spoken in the French territory, namely langue d’oïl, spoken in the north of France, and langue d’oc, spoken in the south of France, reduced the Latin case system from six cases to two, collapsing all non-nominative cases into a single one dubbed “oblique”5 —hence the binary “nominative-oblique” or cas sujet – cas régime system. For Old French, the masculine paradigm is shown in Table 1 (see Laubscher 1921; Plank 1979; Schøsler 1984; Pearce 1986; Arteaga 1995; van Reenen/Schøsler 2000; Gianollo 2009): Table 1: The masculine nominal paradigm in Old French Old French masculines

Singular

Plural

Nominative

murs/pere(s)/emperére(s) ‘wall/father/emperor’

mur-Ø/pere/emperëór ‘walls/fathers/emperors’

Oblique

mur-Ø/pere-Ø/emperëór-Ø ‘wall/father/emperor’

murs/peres/emperëórs ‘walls/fathers/emperors’

As we can see from table 1, Old French distinguished the nominative from the oblique case in masculine nouns, which derived from Latin second declension masculine nouns (murs ‘wall’). It is also reported that, due to analogy, many masculine nouns deriving from Latin third declension nouns (pere ‘father’, emperére ‘emperor’) also

5 The term is attested from the third century BC: ptoseis plagiai ‘slanting cases’ according to the Stoic Grammarians.

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acquired case distinctions (see Foulet 1919; Price 1998; Buridant 2000). However, case distinctions in the nominal paradigm of Old French are not only declension-sensitive, but also reflect gender. Consider Table 2: Table 2: The feminine nominal paradigm in Old French Old French feminines

Singular

Plural

Nominative

flor(s) ‘flower’

flors ‘flowers’

Oblique

flor ‘flower’

flors ‘flowers’

In the feminine, the nominative-oblique distinction very soon collapsed into a single form, namely the accusative one, especially for nouns ending in a vowel. For nouns ending in a consonant other than -s or -z [ts], like flor ‘flower’, an analogical -s is sometimes found. Finally, note that there is case and number syncretism, since nominative singular and oblique plural share the same form (as do oblique singular and nominative plural in the masculine). While a fair amount of syncretism was still evident in the already reduced case system, the most robust expression of case distinctions continued to be found in the paradigm of determiners (Detges 2009, 116). However, morphological case reduction became evident both in the masculine definite article and, most notably, in the feminine definite article —progressing to complete loss of case distinctions— since the forms available essentially distinguish only number and gender but not case. The definite article forms in Old French are shown in Table 3: Table 3: The Old French definite article Singular

Cases

Masculine

Feminine

Nominative

li

la

Oblique

le (lo/lou)

la

Cases

Masculine

Feminine

Nominative

li

les

Oblique

les

les

Plural

As for the distribution of the oblique forms, according to Foulet (1919), they were used: (i) after all complements to prepositions; (ii) for the DO; (iii) occasionally for the IO (e.g., Li nums Joiuse l’espée fut dunét ‘The name of Joyeuse was given to the sword’) in competition with à-phrases; (iv) with certain nouns, especially personal names and

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titles (Dieu, seigneur, roi, etc.); (v) as a possessive (li filz Marie ‘the son of Marie,’ la niece le duc ‘the duke’s niece’). This is abundantly attested in the Vulgar Latin documents of what is France today, although there was a growing tendency to use prepositions, e.g., de ‘from/of’ and a ‘to/of’, to mark possession; (vi) in adverbial functions (chascun jor ‘every day’, li chevaliers s’en part les granz galos ‘the knight sets off at a great gallop’); and (vii) in exclamations (quel pecié! ‘what a sin!’). A similar situation is found in Old Occitan, see Table 4: Table 4: The case paradigm of Old Occitan Old Occitan

Singular

Plural

Nominative

mólher (f)/dolors (m) ‘woman’/‘pain’

molhèrs/dolors ‘women’/‘pains’

Accusative

molhèr/dolor ‘woman’/‘pain’

molhèrs/dolors ‘women’/‘pains’

Likewise, Old Sursilvan (Rhaeto-Romance) shows retention of case morphology (Haiman/Benincà 1992, 142); however, only on adjectives, past participles and possessive pronouns, but crucially not on nouns, see Table 5: Table 5: The case paradigm in Old Sursilvan Old Sursilvan

Singular

Plural

Nominative

sauns ‘healthy’

sauni ‘healthy’

Accusative

saun ‘healthy’

sauns ‘healthy’

Finally, Modern Romanian distinguishes “Nominative-Accusative” case from “Genitive-Dative” case in feminine nouns and in many determiners, some of which are suffixed to nouns – see (18) for an illustration: (18)

Rom. a.

Capr-a a mâncat iarb-a. goat-NOM . FSG . the.NOM .F SG has eaten grass-ACC . FSG .the.ACC . FSG ‘The goat ate the grass.’ b. El i-a dat nişte iarb-ă capr-e-i. he DAT -has given some grass-ACC . FSG goat-DAT . FSG - the.DAT . FSG ‘He gave some grass to the goat.’

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Altogether, the case morphology developments, analysed diachronically from Vulgar Latin to various incipient stages in Romance, are among the most syntactically important. Traditionally, the loss of morphological case distinctions is generally thought to lead to rigidity of word order to compensate for the increase in ambiguity induced by the loss of case. This morphophonological change is, quite often, viewed as exogenous, namely the result of contact-induced change. Meillet (1928) considered the loss of case to be of cataclysmic proportions for the Romance languages, since for him, only intense language contact of the creolisation type could have led to such a dramatic loss of inflectional morphology: “En cessant d’être la langue d’une cité pour s’étendre à un empire le latin ne pouvait garder ses délicatesses et son originalité […] les oppositions ainsi marquées étaient trop fines pour être observées par des gens pour qui le latin n’était pas une langue maternelle et qui l’apprenaient avec une certaine grossièreté. On sait ce que sont devenues les langues européennes chez les esclaves transportés dans les colonies: les divers ‘créoles’, français, espagnol, hollandais, sont des langues où la grammaire est réduite à presque rien et d’où les nuances anciennes ont été supprimées.” (Meillet 1928, 236)

Contact aside, it is trivially assumed that the “free” word order of Latin was made possible thanks to a rich case system. However, “as Kiparsky (1996) has pointed out, rich case marking seems to be a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for word order freedom” (Kroch 2001,727). The issue has since remained highly controversial and touches upon the bigger issue of how morphology interacts with syntax; in particular, whether morphological case has syntactic effects (see Meillet 1949; Neeleman/Weerman 2009). Various proposals have been made through the years to address this, for instance Roberts (1997), Kiparsky (1997) and Neeleman/Weerman (1999). They have all in common that overt case marking allows for the DPs to move and, consequently, for a more flexible word order (for more details see ↗23 Syntheticity and Analyticity and ↗24 Basic constituent orders). A consequence of such analyses would be that Old French, for instance, which preserved the bi-casual system, would allow for a relatively flexible placement of the object (see Marchello-Nizia 1995). This is prima facie confirmed by the data, which show various permutations – consider object fronting in (19) (see also ↗14 Focus Fronting): (19)

OFr. Le fonoil-Ø maingoit on-s ate one-NOM . SG the fennel-ACC . MSG ‘The fennel, one ate in order to lose weight …’ (Méd 163v, 464) (Sitaridou 2012, 567)

por for

engraillier …. slim.INF

Interestingly, however, Sitaridou (2004; 2009a; 2012) has shown that Old French has a smaller number of fronted objects than Old Spanish, despite the latter having lost nominal morphological case prior to Old French.

Objects

105

Turning our attention now to pronominal objects, it is well-known that morphological case distinctions survive in the Modern Romance pronominal paradigm (with the exception of first and second person plural where cases have been syncretized except for Romanian). The gender distinction is only available for the third person for DO: Table 6: Direct object clitics in some Romance languages Direct object clitics SG

PL

1

2

3

1

2

3

Fr.

me

te

le/la

nous

vous

les

It.

mi

ti

lo/la

ci

vi

li/le

Sp.

me

te

lo/la

nos

os

los/las

Pt.

me

te

o/a

nos

vos

os/as

Rom.



te

îl/o

ne



îi/le

Table 7: Indirect object clitics in some Romance languages Indirect object clitics SG

PL

1

2

3

1

2

3

Fr.

me

te

lui

nous

vous

leur

It.

mi

ti

gli

ci

vi

loro

Sp.

me

te

le (se)

nos

os

les

Pt.

me

te

lhe

nos

vos

lhes

Rom.

îmi

îţi

îi

ne



le

Importantly, as the result of the rise of Romance clitic objects, we now observe strong word-order constraints being introduced, such as the Person-Case Constraint (herein PCC). PCC is a morphological condition against particular combinations of clitics marking the DO and the IO (Perlmutter 1971; Bonet 1991; 1994; Laka 1993; Adger/ Harbour 2007; Nevins 2007; Ormazabal/Romero 2007; Rezac 2011). This is illustrated below with data from French (20) and Catalan (21), which show that when accusative and dative clitics co-occur, the accusative clitic must be third person:

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Ioanna Sitaridou

(20)

Fr.

a.

On me le montr-er-a. me.DAT = it.ACC = show-FUT - 3SG one. NOM ‘They will show it to me.’ b. *On me lui montr-er-a. me.ACC = him.DAT = show-FUT - 3SG one.NOM ‘They will show me to him.’

(21)

Cat.

a.

En Josep, me ’l va recomanar the Josep me.DAT = him.ACC = goes recommend.INF la Mireia. the Mireia ‘She (Mireia) recommended him (Josep) to me.’ b. *A en Josep, me li va to the Josep.DAT me.ACC = him.DAT = goes recomanar la Mireia. the Mireia recommend.INF ‘She (Mireia) recommended me to him (Josep).’ (Bonet 1991, 178)

So, even if there is no clear cause and effect relationship between the loss of case marking and the loss of flexibility in the Romance languages, we will observe that alternative marking strategies have emerged for marking objects, for example fixed word order (cf. Section 3), Differential Object Marking and past participle agreement.

2.2 Differential Object Marking The Romance phenomenon of marking a certain type of DO with a preposition/ marker, attested crosslinguistically in a large range of languages, is a pattern generally known as Differential Object Marking (herein DOM), since Bossong (1985). Non-standard Catalan (Moll 1952; Badia i Margarit 1980; 1994; Bel 2002), Spanish (Lazard 1984; Bossong 1985; 1991; 1998; de Hoop 1992; Escandell-Vidal 2002; Aissen 2003a,b; Næss 2004a; de Swart 2007), Romanian (Niculescu 1965; Cornilescu 2000; Farkas/von Heusinger 2003; Mardale 2008; Stark 2011), Portuguese (Bossong 2008, but with considerable optionality), Sicilian (Iemmolo 2010), Sardinian (Bossong 1985; Jones 1995; Floricic 2003; Mensching 2005), non-standard varieties of Galician (Pensado 1995, 14–16; de Jong 1996, 53–93), Corsican (Neuburger/Stark 2014), and Neapolitan (Ledgeway 2000) all require DOM at least for strong specific human pronominal DOs. Gallo-Romance varieties, Standard Catalan, Standard Italian and most varieties of Rhaeto-Romance (with the exception of Engadine) do not.

Objects

107

According to Bossong (1985), Laca (1987; 2006), and Aissen (2003a,b), DOM is controlled by (the interaction of) different features, such as: (i) animacy, (ii) definiteness, (iii) specificity, (iv) topicality, and even (v) properties of the predicate, such as transitivity (Næss 2004b). There are some cross-linguistic similarities in the DOM systems in Romance, namely that strong personal pronouns are the first to be marked and the most resistant to diachronic change, i.e. also the last to lose the marker. This is also shown in Figure 6 where human pronouns are the most probable candidates to be marked by DOM, whereas inanimate non-specific indefinite NPs are not marked at all in the Romance languages. But, cross-linguistically, the Romance DOM-marking languages diverge as to which feature may well be more prominent. Within Ibero-Romance, for instance, animacy seems to be the most important one in Spanish (García García 2014), while for some varieties of Catalan it is definiteness and animacy, yet in Balearic Catalan it is topicality (Escandell-Vidal 2009). Contrastingly, in Romanian and Corsican, DOM is more sensitive to definiteness (Stark 2011; Neuburger/Stark 2014), although they do not otherwise pattern in exactly the same way. Generally speaking, the more an entity is considered to be animate, definite and specific, the more it becomes a candidate for bearing a DOM marker. Pronouns also seem to be more likely to be marked than lexical expressions.  

Figure 6: Interaction of animacy, referentiality and topicality for DOM (Aissen 2003b, 459)

Still, there is considerable variation, as the following examples illustrate. In the pronominal domain, strong human personal pronouns are marked with DOM (and clitic-doubled, in many varieties, at the same time, see Section 3.2) (22) even in languages like Portuguese in which DOM is at best optional (23). (22)

Rom. Lai him.ACC have.2SG ‘You invited him.’

invitat invited

*(pe) *(DOM )

el. him

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(23)

Ioanna Sitaridou

Pt.

Vej-o=te see-1SG = you.ACC ‘I see you.’

*(a)

ti. you

DOM

When the object is a universal human quantifier, DOM is optional in Catalan (24), but obligatory in Spanish (25) (and likewise in Romanian): (24)

Cat.

Hi he saludat there have.1SG greeted ‘There, I greeted everyone.’

(a) ( DOM )

(25)

Sp.

He saludado *(a) greated *(DOM ) have.1SG ‘I’ve greeted everyone.’

tothom. everyone

todos. everyone

For negative indefinite human pronouns, we also find varieties in which DOM is obligatory (e.g. Sardinian (26)) whereas it is generally optional e.g. in Portuguese (27) (Bossong 2008, 68): (26)

Srd. No

app-o bidu NEG have-1SG seen ‘I didn’t see anybody.’

(27)

Pt.

*(a) *(DOM )

Nunca odi-ei (a) DOM never hated-1SG ‘I never hated anyone.’

nesciune. nobody

ninguém. nobody

With proper nouns, humans are obligatorily marked in most of the varieties, but there is variation concerning non-human animates (e.g. pets). (28)

Sp.

Pedro mató *(a) Pedro killed *( DOM ) ‘Pedro killed Juan.’

Juan. Juan

Note that in Corsican, despite the referent of the proper name U Scupatu being [+human], the DOM marker, à, is not possible, as it is incompatible with the determiner (also with quantifiers or numerals), even if the latter is part of a proper noun (see Neuburger/Stark 2014): (29)

Cors. Cunniscit-i (*à) U Scupatu? (*DOM ) DET Scupatu know-2SG ‘Do you know the Scupatu [‘cracked’; nickname]?’ (Marcellesi 1986, 137)

Objects

109

Definite and/or specific human NPs are obligatorily marked e.g. in Spanish (30) and (31), usually used in Vallader Engadinese (32) (Bossong 2008, 186), but only optionally in certain cases in Sardinian (33) (Mardale 2008, 459). (30)

Sp.

No

he-mos visto *(a) have-1PL seen *( DOM ) ‘We haven’t seen his/her father.’

su his

NEG

(31)

Sp.

(32)

Enga. El salüda a l’ the he greets DOM ‘He greets the friend.’

(33)

Srd. An assessinatu (a) assassinated (DOM ) have.3PL ‘They have assassinated the King.’

padre. father

Busc-o *(a) una cocinera (que cook that look.for-1SG *( DOM ) a ‘I am looking for a cook who speaks English.’

sab-e inglés). know.IND -3SG English

ami. friend

su the

re. king

In contemporary Portuguese, DOM is largely restricted to human pronominals and Deus ‘God’, even if it was more widespread in the seventeenth century. But still, DOM is used with proper nouns or animate referents for emphatic or disambiguation purposes: (34)

Pt.

Nem João ama Maria nem Maria a João. Maria neither Maria DOM João nor João love.3SG ‘João does not love Maria and Maria does not love João either.’ (Bossong 2008, 68)

Also in the case of inanimate DO referents, DOM may serve as a disambiguation device (García García 2014). This becomes relevant whenever the subject and object referents are equal on the animacy scale: compare Spanish (35), with DOM, with Romanian (36), without, probably because morphological case-marking provides adequate disambiguation: (35)

Sp.

Los ácidos atacan the acids attack ‘Acids attack metals.’

*(a) *( DOM )

los the

metales. metals

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(36)

Ioanna Sitaridou

Rom. Metal-e-le atac-ă attack-3PL metal-N . PL - the. N . PL ‘Acids attack metals.’

aciz-i-i. acid-MPL - the. MPL

However, if in Spanish, the NP is left-dislocated, the marker becomes optional: (37)

Sp.

(A) la sacristía la traspasaba (DOM ) the vestry it.ACC passed sablazo de sol. stroke of sun ‘A strong shaft of sunlight pierced the vestry.’ (Mardale 2008, 451)

un a

buen good

In Romanian, DOM has spread to some deictic and anaphoric pronouns [+/–animate]. This may be linked to the quasi-automatic co-occurrence of clitic doubling and the DOM marker in this language (Roberts 2016; see also Section 3.2). (38)

Rom. Lam it.ACC - have.1SG ‘I saw this one.’

văzut seen

*(pe) *( DOM )

acesta. this

According to von Heusinger/Kaiser (2003; among others), DOM in Latin American Spanish is currently undergoing expansion to [–animate] DPs, as shown in (39), since the verbs ver and cosechar, respectively, allow for DOM with objects that are inanimate: (39)

a.

b.

Puerto Rican Sp. Vi-o a las sierras. mountains saw-3SG DOM the ‘S/he saw the mountains.’ Argentinian Sp. Cosecha-ron al maíz. harvested-3PL DOM . the corn ‘They harvested the corn.’

In sum, it is clear that there is no categorical cross-Romance valid rule constraining DOM to appear only with animate DOs. Naturally, because of the range of semanticsyntactic constraints on DOM, the phenomenon further interacts with other domains, for instance, restrictive relative clauses and specificity/mood: busco a una secretaria que sabe francés ‘I am looking for a secretary who knows French’ vs busco una secretaria que sepa francés ‘I am looking for any secretary who knows French’. Furthermore, the phenomenon is likely to diverge further in terms of triggers and the

Objects

111

nuances it expresses, as it has been evolving in distinct ways in each Romance DOMmarking language and variety since at least the Medieval stages (see e.g. Octavio de Toledo y Huerta 2007 for a diachronic development of DOM in Spanish; von Heusinger/Onea 2008 for the diachronic development of DOM in Romanian). The third marking strategy for objects we discuss in Section 2.3 is past participle agreement (see also ↗7 Auxiliaries).

2.3 Past participle agreement In the Romance languages, there is considerable variation in terms of past participle agreement (Cinque 1975; Perlmutter 1978; 1989; Rosen 1981; 1990; 1997; La Fauci 1988; 1989; Kayne 1989b; Loporcaro 1998; Belletti 2001; among others). However, we can make the generalisation that if there is agreement on the past participle, it is triggered by the internal argument, i.e. with DO or “object-like” subjects (internal arguments promoted to the subject position: unaccusative and passive constructions, see Section 1). In most cases, agreement correlates with movement of the internal argument out of its canonical position (Spec,VP), e.g. when it is cliticized or if it is encoded as the subject. In this vein, we could argue that past participle agreement is a morphosyntactic device to mark non-canonical internal arguments. As mentioned above, not all Romance varieties show agreement in the same structures. To start with, all Romance languages exhibit past participle agreement with passives, regardless of whether the variety displays HABERE / ESSE alternation, cf. e.g. (40) in Spanish which does not show agreement in active compound tenses.  

(40) Sp.

Últimamente son costruid-as/*-o built- F . PL /-MSG lately be.3PL ‘Lately, many houses have been built.’

much-as many-F . PL

cas-as. house-F . PL

While passive constructions trigger ESSE auxiliary in almost all Romance languages (at least the standard varieties), for unaccusative constructions there is more variation: some show auxiliary alternation whereas others have only one auxiliary for all active constructions. Even if the ESSE / HABERE alternation is not a necessary condition for past participle agreement, the varieties which show alternation (Italian, French, Majorcan Catalan, some varieties of Occitan) largely fall into the following pattern (however, if we include dialectal varieties, especially Italian dialects, the picture becomes much more complex): Past participle agreement is usually obligatory with: (i) Unaccusative verbs selecting ESSE (Italian, French, Catalan, southern Italian dialects (SIDs), northern Italian dialects (NIDs), Sardinian, Occitan):

112

(41)

Ioanna Sitaridou

Maj.Cat. L’ Anna és the Anna is ‘Anna has left.’

partid-a. left- FSG

The choice of the auxiliary ESSE itself however does not strictly correlate with participle agreement (see ↗7 Auxiliaries). (ii) DO pro- and enclitics (42), also in Absolute Small Clauses in Italian (43) (however, see Loporcaro 2008; 2010; D’Alessandro/Roberts 2010 for the rich variation found in Italo-Romance): (42)

It.

L’ ho have.1SG her.ACC . FSG ‘I have seen her.’

(43)

It.

Conosciut-a=la, known-FSG =her.ACC . FSG ‘Having known her …’ (Belletti 2010, 131)

(iii)

Reflexive/reciprocal clitic DOs (including the inherent reflexive/ergative si):

(44) It.

a.

vist-a/*-o. seen-FSG /*- MSG



Mi

sono guardat-a am watched-FSG ‘I looked at myself in the mirror.’ REFL . 1SG

allo to.the

specchio. mirror

In contrast to this rather clear picture, variation is found in many other respects. Importantly, the Romance languages that allow past participle agreement are differentiated with regards to whether they allow agreement with postverbal objects (A), whether they handle DOs and IOs differently (B) and which kind of preverbal objects trigger agreement (C–D): A. Availability of past participle agreement with a lexical DO in situ; on the one hand, Standard Italian (45) and Standard French (46) do not allow any agreement; on the other hand, Rouergat Occitan (47) and Friulian (48) optionally allow it (the former less optionally than the latter); and in Neapolitan (49) agreement is even obligatory: (45)

It.

Ho mangiat-*e/-o eaten-FPL /- MSG have.1SG ‘I have eaten two pears.’

due two

per-e. pear-FPL

Objects

(46)

Fr.

J’ ai écrit-Ø/*-es I have.1SG written-MSG /- F . PL ‘I wrote letters.’

des ART . INDF . PL

(47)

Occ. (Rouergat) Ai escrich-as e mandad-as and sent-F . PL have.1SG written- F . PL ‘I’ve written and sent those letters.’ (Stroh 2002, 9) Piero el a serâ-s / Piero he has shut-PL / ‘Piero has shut the windows.’ (Paoli 1997, 10)

(49)

addʒ-ə kɔttə / *kwottə have-1SG cooked.FSG / cooked.MSG ‘I’ve cooked the pasta.’ (Loporcaro 1998, 68–69)

Nap.

lettre-s. letter[ F ]- PL

aquel-as those-F . PL

(48) Friul.

serât shut

113

i the. PL

letr-as. letter-F . PL

barcôn-s. window-PL

a the. FSG

pastə. pasta.FSG

B. Italian allows past participle agreement even with indirect pronominal (reciprocal) objects (50a), whereas French does not (50b): (50)

a. b.

It. Si

sono scritt-e/*-o delle letter-e. REFL are.3PL written-FPL /- MSG ART . INDF .FPL letter-FPL Fr. Elles se sont écrit-Ø/*-es des lettre-s. ART . INDF .PL letter[F ]- PL they REFL are.3PL written- MSG /- F . PL ‘They wrote some letters to each other.’ / ‘They wrote each other some letters.’

C. Relativized objects: Standard Italian (like most Romance varieties) does not accept participle agreement across a relativized complement (51) (but this may well be different in very high registers and southern Italian dialects, see Salvi 2001), whereas in Standard French (52), this kind of agreement is required: (51)

It.

le per-e che ho COMP have.1SG the pear-FPL ‘the pears that I have eaten’

(52)

Fr.

les lettre-s que the. PL letter[F ]-PL COMP ‘the letters that I wrote’

j’ I

mangiat-o/?-e eaten- MSG / -FPL

ai have.1SG

écrit-es/*-Ø written- F . PL /- MSG

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D. Partitive clitics: Italian allows for both agreement and non-agreement with the ne clitic (53). In principle, French (54) does not require agreement with the en clitic, but Deprez (1998) and Riegel/Pellat/Rioul (21994) show that some speakers accept it when the DO referent is specific (54a), especially when its lexical expression precedes the verb (54b): (53)

It.

Io ne ho I PART have.1SG ‘I ate two (of them).’

(54)

Fr.

a.

mangiat-o/-i eaten-MSG /-MPL

due. two

Il en a pris-Ø deux. has taken-MSG two he PART ‘He has taken two (of them).’ a pris-es deux. b. ?Il en has taken- F . PL two he PART ‘He has taken two (of them).’ c. Des pomme-s il en a ART . INDF . PL apple[F ]- PL he PART has ‘Apples, he has taken two (of them).’

prises deux. taken- F . PL two

The Ibero-Romance languages, which have progressively ousted ESSE ( RE ) and generalized HABERE as the only perfect auxiliary (see ↗7 Auxiliaries), have developed an innovative auxiliary, namely tener (which is in ongoing competition with haber). This auxiliary triggers obligatory object-participle agreement in Spanish (55) and optional agreement in Portuguese and Galician (56): (55)

Sp.

Teng-o estudiad-as/*-o studied-F . PL /- MSG have-1SG ‘I have studied twenty lessons.’

veinte twenty

(56)

Gal. Teñ-o lid-o/-os have-1SG read.PST . PTCP -MSG /- MPL ‘I have read many books.’ (Santamarina 1974, 161)

leccion-es. lesson[F ]- PL

muit-os many-MPL

libr-os. book-MPL

The vast variety of past participle agreement possibilities in Romance is documented in Loporcaro (1998; 2010). Loporcaro proposes a Relational Grammar account to explain the conditions that have to be met in order to trigger agreement in different varieties. Its starting point is the simple fact that the argument which controls the agreement has to be a DO. This trigger condition is the most encompassing and corresponds probably to an initial state of a diachronic development. The diachronic evolution is also reflected by several Romance varieties which differ in how restrictive

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Objects

the trigger conditions for participial agreement have become. For instance, in Latin as well as in contemporary Neapolitan, all kinds of DO trigger agreement on the past participle. In Old French and Old Tuscan texts, there is variation showing the transition from the Latin state to posterior, more restrictive varieties. The emergent restrictive conditions can be divided into (i) incipit conditions, i.e., (semantic) conditions on the beginning of the computation (base structure); (ii) explicit conditions, i. e., conditions on the end of the computation by which the lexical unmarked DO is substituted by a more marked option of a DO, and (iii) global conditions, i.e. “conditions that have scope on the entire structural representation” (Loporcaro 2010, 231). Standard Italian, for example, is more restrictive compared to Neapolitan in that agreement in Italian is not triggered by in situ DO, but only by DOs which have undergone a transformation such as pronominalization. The most restrictive explicit condition can be found in Spanish, where the participle only agrees with subjects of passives, which are underlyingly DOs promoted to the subject position (see Section 1). The incipit semantic conditions on the other hand are most restrictive in French, where the DO must be the initial (semantic) object of the agreeing participle. This precludes agreement in causative constructions in French (57), but not in southern Italian dialects, where the auxiliary participle can show agreement (58) (Loporcaro 2010, 238–239):  



(57)

Fr.

Marie, ce garçon l’a Marie this boy her=has ‘Marie, this boy made her fall.’ (Loporcaro 2010, 237)

(58)

Calabrian (Catanzarese) a pittʃuliɖʐa ɔn l ava the[F ] little.girl[F ] not her= has.3SG ‘The little girl, he never made her cry.’ (Loporcaro 2010, 238)

fait/*-e made.MSG /- F . SG

ma ever

tomber. fall. INF

hatt-u/-a made-MSG /-FSG

tʃandʒira. cry.INF

Likewise, in Spanish and Portuguese the agreement on the causative past participle is preferred in passive causative constructions; the oddity of example (59a) is due to the unusual passive with causative constructions: (59)

Sp.

a.

??Esta casa ha This house.F has mi abuelo. my grandfather.

sido been.

hecha made.FSG

arreglar fix.INF

por by

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Ioanna Sitaridou

b. *Esta casa ha sido hecho made.MSG This house.F has been.MSG mi abuelo my grandfather. ‘This house has been fixed by my grandfather.’ (Loporcaro 1998, 159)

arreglar por fix.INF by

The combination of incipit and explicit conditions also leads to the well-known fact that French participles agree with DO reflexive constructions only, whereas Italian participles agree in all reflexive constructions, whether the reflexives are DOs or IOs (cf. (60a) vs (60b)). (60) a. b.

It. Maria si è lavat-a/-*o is washed- FSG /- MSG Maria REFL Fr. Marie s’ est lav-é/*-ee has washed-MSG / FSG Marie REFL ‘Maria/Marie washed her hands.’

le the les the

mani. hand.FPL mains. hand. FPL

Formal analyses of past participle agreement (see also ↗7 Auxiliaries) have also been proposed in generative frameworks. Kayne (1989b) suggests that past participle agreement is parallel to subject-verb agreement: it is mediated via an Agr[eement] phrase. He proposes that languages like French, which show past participle agreement, realise an AgrP to which clitics raise as phrases (to the Spec,AgrP) or through which relativized DOs in Standard French, which trigger past participle agreement, move, whereas languages like Spanish do not realize such a phrase. As for agreement with lexical DOs in situ, this must be accounted for by assuming some special mechanism, such as right dislocation with subsequent deletion of a DO clitic, as proposed by Kayne (1989b, 96). In other analyses, some other syntactic entity is postulated such as the abstract object pro in Spec,AgrOP in Egerland (1996, 86), also followed by Manzini/Savoia (2005, II, 561), triggering agreement with the past participle. However, such analyses account less well for Italo-Romance data. D’Alessandro/Roberts (2010) have shown that participial agreement in upper southern Italian varieties does not follow the aforementioned patterns in several significant ways, and offer a phase-based approach for the postsyntactic realization of generalized past participle agreement with internal arguments in these varieties. In sum, we can see that agreement is triggered by internal arguments which either are promoted to subjects or are cliticized and hence precede the verb. However, not all Romance varieties are equally sensitive to the triggering factors. In addition, there seems to be an interaction with auxiliary selection properties, i.e. the ESSE auxiliary favours agreement.  

Objects

117

3 Word order properties of objects In declarative unmarked sentences, the canonical word order in Romance is SVO; the subject precedes the DO as well as the IO. However, this is only true for lexical subjects, which have moved out of their base-generated position. Both Old and Modern Romance are known to allow for word order permutations (for a detailed discussion regarding under which syntactic and discourse conditions the permutations obtain, see ↗24 Basic constituent orders, ↗13 Dislocations and framings, and ↗14 Focus Fronting). In this section we consider (i) the syntax of double object constructions (DOCs); and (ii) how various clitic-related phenomena contribute to word order flexibility.

3.1 Ordering constraints in Double Object Constructions Traditionally, the Romance languages are considered not to have any double object constructions (herein DOC) (Kayne 1984) (61), i.e. free ordering of DO and IO and/or accusative encoding of the IO. English, in contrast, allows dative alternation (62a,b) whereby both surface orders (IO-DO and DO-IO) are licit. In Romance, the structural position of IO DPs is fixed relative to DOs. Mainly as a consequence of this fixed order, only the DO can be the subject of a passive structure (62e,f), contrary to English which also shows dative passives (62c,d).  

(61)

It.

(62)

Sp.

a.

Gianni ha dato un libro Gianni has given a book ‘Gianni has given a book to Maria.’ b. *Gianni ha dato a Maria Gianni has given to Maria *‘Gianni has given (to) Maria a book.’

a. b. c. d. e.

f.

a to

Maria. Maria

un a

libro. book

John gave the book to Mary. John gave Mary the book. The book was given to Mary. Mary was given the book. El libro fue dado a María. the book was given to María ‘The book was given to María.’ *María fue dad-a el libro. the.MSG book.MSG María was given- FSG ‘María was given the book.’

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The only exception among the Romance languages which lack dative alternations is Romanian (63), which has DOC (Diaconescu/Rivero 2007). This is rather unsurprising given that it has morphological case-marking, DOM and clitic doubling (CD) at its disposal to mark the syntactic function of all arguments. (63)

Rom. a.

Mihaela îi trimite Mari-e-i Mihaela her.DAT sends Maria-the.DAT . FSG scrisoare. letter ‘Mihaela sends Maria a letter.’ b. Mihaela îi trimite o scrisoare letter Mihaela her.DAT sends a Mari-e-i. Maria-the.DAT . FSG ‘Mihaela sends Maria a letter.’ (Diaconescu/Rivero 2007, 210)

o a

Some researchers have also defended the position that Spanish has DOC (Strozer 1976; Masullo 1993; Demonte 1995; Romero 1997; Cuervo 2003) as well as Portuguese (Torres Morais/Moreira Lima Salles 2010). According to Pineda (2013; 2014), the Spanish (64) and Catalan (65) constructions can be explained in a similar way to the ones in French (66) (with parallels in Italian), which thus all show evidence for DOC (because of weak crossover, i.e. possible coreferential readings of bound anaphoric elements in the DO and the binder in the IO, which thus precedes the DO on some level of representation):  

la estima de tratamiento devolvió [DO treatment returned the esteem of Maríai]. mismai] [IO a REFL . 3SG self to María la estima b. El tratamiento le devolvió [DO DAT . 3SG returned the esteem the treatment a Maríai]. de sí mismai] [IO REFL . 3SG self to María of ‘The treatment gave María back her self-esteem.’ (Demonte 1995, 10)

(64)

Sp.

a.

El the sí

(65)

Cat.

a.

El the si

l’ tractament va tornar [DO the treatment goes return.INF a la Mariai]. mateixai] [IO REFL . 3SG self to the Maria

estima esteem

de of

Objects

119

b. El tractament li va tornar [DO l’ return.INF the the treatment him.DAT goes la Mariai]. estima de si mateixai] [IO a self to the Maria esteem of REFL . 3SG ‘The treatment gave Maria back her self-esteem.’ (Pineda 2012, 2) (66)

Fr.

[chaque garçon]i. Marie a donné soni crayon à Marie has given his pencil to each boy ‘Marie gave each boy his pencil.’ sesi b. Jean a présenté [chaque institutrice]i à Jean has presented each teacher to his élèves. students ‘Jean introduced each teacher to her students.’ (Harley 2003, 62)

a.

Therefore, despite the fact that Spanish, French, and Catalan seemingly appear to lack dative alternation, (64)‒(66) are counterevidence to this claim, aligning them with English and Romanian. In order to explain the differences in final word order and the impossibility of promoting the IO to the subject position in Romance in contrast to English, Pineda (2014) assumes different case-assignment properties of the functional heads involved.

3.2 Object (Clitic) Doubling structures Clitic Doubling (CD) (see also ↗5 Clitic pronouns) is a construction in which a clitic co-occurs with a full DP in argument position, thereby forming a discontinuous constituent. CD has often been associated with three constructions that look very similar to it, namely Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD), Clitic Right Dislocation (CLRD) and Hanging Topic (HT). Even if all these constructions (less so in the case of the latter) involve the simultaneous occurrence of a clitic and a lexical or strong pronominal constituent which are coreferential, CD in a strict sense has to be kept separate from them (cf. Frascarelli 2000 for the interaction of CD with Information Structure; see ↗13 Dislocations and framings). The dislocated constituents of CLLD and HT are considered to be base-generated in the left periphery (CP) (Cinque 1990; Frascarelli 2000; Giorgi 2015) and the full DP of CLRD to the right of the verb is considered to be a dislocated phrase, resulting from rightward movement or base-generated adjunction followed by remnant movement (among other analyses). Hence, CLLD, HT and CLRD are all three dislocation structures, they are said to be either topic (e.g. Cardinaletti 2002; De Cat 2002) or background or contrast marking devices (e.g. Zwart 2001; Arregi  

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2003), and they often interact with prosody, obligatorily requiring an intonational break. In contrast to this, CD structures are analyzed as originating from one and the same base constituent which splits into two surface strings or, alternatively, the clitic is analyzed as an object-agreement marker on the verb, as will be discussed below. The doubled object remains in its canonical position, while the coreferential clitic attaches to the verb (cf. Uriagereka 1995; Sportiche 1996; among others). In the past, clitic doubling has been associated with the “prepositional” (IO and DOM) marking of an object. Kayne’s Generalization, formulated in Jaeggli (1982, 20), states that only a “prepositionally” marked NP can be doubled by a clitic. In fact, there is a preference for doubling DOM-marked objects and indirect objects in some varieties, but “prepositional” marking is not a necessary condition for CD in every Romance variety, as we will see below. The correlation between CD and DOM arises rather from the fact that both phenomena are triggered by similar semantic factors such as telicity, agentivity, and affectedness (Roberts 2016), or specificity, animacy, and topicality (Dragomirescu/Nicolae 2016, 922). According to Dragomirescu/Nicolae (2016), CD with DOs is found in Romanian (Hill 2013 and Diaconescu/Rivero 2007), Aromanian, standard and non standard Spanish as well as Rioplatense Spanish (Kayne 1994; Torrego 1995; Uriagereka 1995; Sportiche 1996; Belletti 1999; Cardinaletti 2002; Feldhausen 2010), central-southern Italian dialects and Rhaeto-Romance, thus in the varieties with DOM. Similarly to the variation found in DOM marking, CD distribution also differs across the Romance varieties allowing it. The most widespread doubling trigger is a strong pronominal human object. It is obligatory in Romance languages for a neutral (non-focused) reading of the DO, except in French (see Doetjes/Delais-Roussarie/Sleeman 2002 and De Cat 2002; 2007 for accounts of CD in Colloquial French), Standard Italian and Portuguese, where doubling leads obligatorily to a right-dislocation reading of the object. (67)

a.

Sp.

*(Lo) invit-é *(a) él. DOM him him.ACC invited-1SG b. Cat. *(El) vaig convidar a ell. invite.INF to him him.ACC go.1SG c. Rom. *(L-) am invitat (*pe) el. invited DOM him him.ACC have.1SG d. It. L’ ho invitato, lui. invited him him.ACC have.1SG e. Fr. Je l’ ai invité, lui. I him.ACC have.1SG invited him f. Pt. Convideio, a ele. to him invited. 1SG him.ACC ‘I invited him.’

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121

With DO which are proper nouns, lexical and also definite non-human objects, the picture is less uniform. In Rioplatense Spanish, but not in Peninsular Spanish, DOMmarking and CD usually co-occur hence allowing for doubling of animate DOs (68). In Chilean Spanish (69) and in Andean varieties, CD can appear optionally with an inanimate object without DOM-marking (69) (see Lipski 1994). Furthermore, CD appears obligatorily with clausal complements in Nicaraguan Spanish (70): (68)

Rioplatense Sp.

*(Lo) conozc-o know-1SG him.ACC ‘I know Juan.’ (Lipski 1994, 174)

a DOM

Juan. Juan

(69)

Chilean Sp.

(Lo) he leído it.ACC have.1SG read ‘I have read the book.’

el the

libro. book

(70)

Nicaraguan Sp.

*(Lo) tem-o que se COMP REFL . 3SG it.ACC fear-1SG ‘I fear that s/he’s going to die.’ (Lipski 1994, 292)

muer-a. die.SBJV - 3SG

Daco-Romanian behaves like Latin American Spanish in that DOM and CD are both either present or absent, whether the object be animate (71a) or inanimate (71b,c), while Aromanian has quasi-generalized CD of the DO, even without DOM (72) (Dragomirescu/Nicolae 2016): (71)

Rom. a.

*(L-) am văzut pe Ion. DOM Ion him. ACC have.1SG seen ‘I have seen Ion.’ b. Am citit*(o) pe asta. it.ACC DOM this have.1 SG read ‘I have read this one.’ c. Am văzut (*pe) altceva. DOM something.else have.1SG seen ‘I have seen something else.’ (Roberts 2016, 801)

(72)

Aromanian Rom.

?(lu) ávdu fiĉór-lu. Nuhear.1SG boy-the not him.ACC ‘I don’t hear the boy.’ (Dragomirescu/Nicolae 2016, 922)

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Ioanna Sitaridou

Neapolitan shows widespread CD with DOs, too, which also affects inanimate objects – similarly in Peruvian and Bolivian Spanish (Lipski 1994, 191):  

(73)

Nap.

Ll’ av-immo appilata’a 3SG . F . ACC have-1PL blocked- F ‘We have blocked the tap.’ (Roberts 2016, 801)

funtana. the tap

Turning our attention to CD of the IO, it occurs in Spanish, Catalan, Romanian, northern Italian dialects (Dragomirescu/Nicolae 2016, 923) and to a lesser extent in Portuguese. Again, the pronominal IO is the strongest trigger for CD: it is obligatorily doubled in Spanish, Catalan and Romanian. In Portuguese, CD is optional in these contexts, while in Italian and French (but not Colloquial French), it is ungrammatical. (74)

a. Sp. b. c. d.

e. f.

*(Le) di un regalo a él. gift to him him.DAT gave. 1SG a Cat. *(Li) vaig donar un regal a ell. give. INF a present to him him.DAT go.1SG Rom. *(I-) am dat lui un cadou. given him.DAT a present him.DAT have. 1SG Pt. Dei(lhe) um presente a ele. present to him gave.1SG him.DAT a ‘I gave him a gift.’ It. (*Gli) ho dato un regalo a lui. given a present to him him.DAT have. 1SG StFr. (CollFr. OK) Je (*lui) ai donné un cadeau à lui. given a present to him.DAT I him.DAT have. 1SG

Again, in (74c) we can observe that a prepositional marking is not necessary for CD to occur: the Romanian strong pronoun is transparent to the nominative/accusative vs dative/genitive case distinction, i.e. the dative is not marked with a prepositional element as in Spanish in (74a), and yet CD occurs. We observe the same phenomenon in (75c) below: Romanian dative/genitive proper names are accompanied by a casetransparent pronoun. With lexical IOs, we observe that CD is obligatory in Spanish and Catalan, whereas in Romanian it is optional. In Standard French, Italian and Portuguese, CD is not possible, the corresponding structures are dislocation structures. Colloquial French seems marginally to accept CD:  

Objects

(75)

123

a. Sp. b. c. d. e. f.

*(Le) di un regalo a Juan. present to Juan him.DAT gave. 1SG a Cat. *(Li) vaig donar un regal a en Joan. give. INF a present to the Joan him.DAT go.3SG Rom. (I)am dat un cadou lui Ion. a present him.DAT Ion him.DAT have. 1SG given CollFr. ?Je lui ai donné un cadeau à Jean. present to Jean I him.DAT have. 1SG given a Fr. Je lui ai donné un cadeau, à Jean. present to Jean I him.DAT have. 1SG given a Pt. Deilhe um presente, a=o João. him.DAT a present to=the João gave.1SG ‘I gave a present to Juan/Joan/Ion/Jean/João.’

As briefly mentioned above, one of the most prominent approaches to CD structures, proposed by Uriagereka (e.g. 1995), analyzes the doubled object as a complex element, containing both the lexical object (with the “prepositional” marker) and the doubling clitic when it is merged into the derivation. Then, the clitic moves out of this complex constituent but leaves behind the lexical object, yielding the linear structure with CD. Other approaches emphasize the fact that in some Romance varieties, CD seems to become obligatory. If this is really the case, the clitic could be interpreted as an object agreement marker on the verb in the sense of an objective conjugation (Koch 1993). This would also be the explanation for Colloquial French, but not Standard French, allowing CD: in the same vein as it is discussed for subject clitics in Colloquial French, object clitics seem to become agreement markers (↗2 Subjects, ↗5 Clitic pronouns).

3.3 Clitic Climbing Clitic Climbing (herein CC) is considered to be a hallmark of restructuring (or “clause union” phenomena, see also ↗5 Clitic pronouns). Emonds (1999, 291) offers the following definition of the phenomenon: “Clitics skip over non-finite complement verbs with null subjects, apparently optionally, and attach to a closed subset of higher governing verbs.” In the varieties in which CC is optional, it often occurs with a defined set of matrix verbs, the so-called restructuring verbs, namely: (i) Modals (76) It.

a.

Dev-o must-1SG

far=lo. do.INF = it.ACC

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Ioanna Sitaridou

b. Lo dev-o it.ACC must-1SG ‘I must do it.’

fare. do. INF

(ii) Aspectuals (77) Sp. a.

Estoy comiéndo=lo. am eating= it.ACC b. Lo estoy comiendo. eating it.ACC am ‘I am eating it.’

(iii) Volitionals (78) Sp. a. Quier-o comer=lo. eat.INF = it.ACC want-1SG b. Lo quier-o comer. eat.INF it.ACC want-1SG ‘I want to eat it.’ (iv) Causatives6 (79) Fr. a. *Jean a fait le= manger (à Paul). to Paul Jean has made it.ACC eat.INF b. Jean l’ a fait manger (à Paul). done eat.INF to Paul Jean it.ACC has ‘Jean made (Paul) eat it.’ c. Je le lui ai fait faire (à I it.ACC him. DAT have.1SG done do.INF to élève son devoir). student his homework ‘I made him (the student) do it (his homework).’

l’ the

Romance languages diverge as to whether they allow CC and under what circumstances. Since Cinque (2006, 31‒32), the following typology of languages with regard to CC is acknowledged: (i) varieties in which CC is mostly optional (e.g., Spanish, European Portuguese, Asturian); (ii) varieties with pervasive and obligatory CC (e.g., many central Italian varieties, Sardinian); (iii) varieties with little or no CC (e.g., French, Romanian, Brazilian Portuguese, many northern Italian varieties);

6 In French, CC is obligatory with causatives.

Objects

125

(iv) varieties with clitics which surface in several positions at the same time (e.g., Chilean Spanish, Neapolitan, certain Piedmontese varieties, certain Occitan varieties). Type (ii) languages have been the subject of many analyses (Cardinaletti/Shlonsky 2004; among others). Type (iii) varieties receive the explanation that either the null subject property has been relaxed (i.e., Brazilian Portuguese) (Cyrino 2008; 2010a; among others) or lost entirely (i.e., French) (Rochette 1988; Kayne 1989a; Martineau 1990): this would preclude the clitics climbing in order to avoid clitic clusters with the subject clitic. However, this view has been contested by Martins (2000) because although Spanish, Italian and European Portuguese did not undergo loss of null subjects, CC has still moved in the same direction, namely, narrowing the set of CC predicates. Martins accounts for this as a case of degrammaticalization, whereby the s(emantic)-selectional properties of the predicates are underspecified and progressively become specified, thus corresponding to a semantic strengthening of CC verbs. Another analysis is that infinitives are on the decline (i.e., Romanian) (Monachesi 1998) and, therefore, climbing cannot be triggered across biclausal domains. Type (iv) and type (i) varieties are even less well-understood. Regarding type (iv), consider (80) from Peruvian and Bolivian Spanish, and (81) from Occitan, where we attest the reduplication of clitics in contexts where they could appear in one position or the other:  





(80) a.

b.

(81)

Peruvian Sp. Me está castigándo=me. is punishing=me.ACC me.ACC ‘S/he is punishing me.’ Bolivian Sp. No la he podido conocer=la. NEG her. ACC = have.1SG been.able.to know.INF = her. ACC ‘I’ve not been able to meet her.’ (Lipski 1994, 191)

Occ. Lo vòl-i estripar=lo. want-1SG gut.INF =him. ACC him. ACC ‘I want to kill him (lit. to gut him).’ (Sauzet 2006, 1)

Within type (i) languages, namely those with optional clitic climbing, there is a certain degree of variation regarding the landing site on the higher verb(s), as can be seen comparing Spanish and Italian ((76) and (78) above) with Portuguese and Asturian: (82)

Pt.

a.

O João quer ver=me. the João wants see.INF = me.ACC ‘João wants to see me.’

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Ioanna Sitaridou

b. O João quer=me the João wants= me.ACC ‘João wants to see me.’ (83)

Ast.

ver. see.INF

a.

Quier ve=lu. want.3SG see=him.ACC b. Quier=lu ver. want.3SG = him.ACC see.INF ‘S/he wants to see him.’

The reason for this is that CC interacts with the proclisis/enclisis in these languages; the climbed clitics attach enclitically to the finite matrix verbs in Portuguese and Asturian, and proclitically in Spanish and Italian. Second, in type (i) languages, there is a high degree of variation regarding which matrix verbs allow an optional climbing, even in two closely cognate languages; for instance, (84a) is possible in both Standard Peninsular Spanish and Argentinean Spanish, whereas (84b) is not possible in Standard Peninsular Spanish, but is possible in Argentinean Spanish: (84) a.

b.

Argentinean Sp./ Standard Peninsular Sp. Seguramente, necesit-ar-án lavar =se surely need-FUT - 3PL wash.INF =3REFL ‘They will surely need to have their teeth cleaned.’ Argentinean Sp./*Standard Peninsular Sp. Seguramente, se necesit-ar-án lavar need-FUT - 3PL wash. INF surely 3REFL ‘They will surely need to have their teeth cleaned.’ (Sitaridou/Whimpanny/Ayres 2015, 279)

los the

los the

dientes. teeth

dientes. teeth

Sitaridou/Whimpanny/Ayres (2015) review a variety of accounts for optional CC, and note that the theories can be split into two approaches: internal and external motivation. Internal motivation implies the semantics of the matrix verb (Rizzi 1976; 1982; Aissen/Perlmutter 1983; Myhill 1988; Kayne 1989a; Davies 1995; Cinque 1999), the tense of the matrix verb (Gudmestad 2005; Sinnott/Smith 2007), the form of the nonfinite verb (Emonds 1999), preceding material (Keniston 1937; Ramsden 1963), various characteristics of the clitic pronoun,7 and the null-subject status of the language (Kayne 1989a; Roberts 1997). External factors include diatopic variation (Davies 1995; Sinnot/Smith 2007), diastratic variation (Gudmestad 2005) and diamesic variation

7 These characteristics include, in particular, animacy of the clitic (Leal de Andrade 2010), the person/ number of the clitic (Gudmestad 2005), and clitic clusters (Davies 1995).

Objects

127

(Davies 1995; Iglesias 2012). However, the main issue taken with all of these theories is that, while they are descriptive of the empirical findings, they fail to offer a sound explanation for the syntactic optionality. Sitaridou/Whimpanny/Ayres (2015) have recently argued that in Argentinean Spanish, and in type (i) languages more generally, the parameter setting makes a pool of variants (+CC/˗CC) (in the spirit of Adger 2014 and Adger/Smith 2007) available even on the level of a lexical head within the same category, e.g. poder behaving differently from deber despite both belonging to the modal verbal category. Crucially, these options do not yield interpretive effects, but are lexically triggered. The probability with which one of the clitic positions is selected in preference to the other is therefore claimed to depend, at least in part, on frequency of use (the higher frequency variants are more likely to be selected), behind which we expect to find a variety of sociolinguistic factors. It is suggested that nanoparametric variation responsible for CC optionality is quite unstable diachronically.

4 Object clitics: argumental vs free datives In Romance, pronominal object markers may replace (or double) object arguments. They are transparent to person, number and sometimes gender, as well as Case; they surface to the left of the finite verb in declarative sentences – with the notable exception of European Portuguese, Asturian and Old Romance. In Romance, object markers are traditionally treated as clitic pronouns (Kayne 1975; Zwicky 1977; Grevisse 162016), but the affixal approach (i.e. they are analyzed as affixes on the verb) is equally popular (Tesnière 1959, 85; Blanche-Benveniste 1975, 41; Borer 1986; Roberge/ Vinet 1989; Roberge 1990; Auger 1995; Miller/Sag 1997; Miller/Monachesi 2003). For a detailed discussion of the argumental vs affixal nature of object clitics, see ↗5 Clitic pronouns. Our objective in this section is to show how a certain category of dative clitics can be non-argumental; that is, they do not replace an argument of the verb, contrary to the other clitic pronouns. The “ethic(al) dative” (herein ED) is the traditional label for this special class of optional and non-argumental dative clitics (85), whose function and interpretation has often been described in various contradictory ways. Pragmatically, EDs are traditionally thought to convey affection: the speaker’s affectionate interest, the active involvement of the speaker, oblique involvement, or solidarity.  

(85)

Sp.

No

me come ED . 1SG eats ‘My son won’t eat.’ NEG

mi my

hijo. son

EDs are a real puzzle because: (i) they are distinct from recipients, benefactives and possessives, from both the syntactic and the semantic perspective; (ii) they cannot be straightforwardly accounted for by theta-theory and argument structure theory since

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Ioanna Sitaridou

it is not clear at all whether an ED forms part of the argument structure of any verb. On the other hand, even if EDs are independent of the s(emantic)-selectional properties of the verb, they are not compatible with every predicate; (iii) there is considerable variation in the grammaticality judgments on such constructions among native speakers. In what follows, we discuss the main properties of EDs in Romance (see Michelioudakis/Sitaridou 2009): (i) EDs are practically compatible with any type of predicate/argument structure, except passives (subject to variation, see Jouitteau/Rezac 2008, 98) (86), aspectuals (87), modals (88) or impersonals (89): A. Passives (86) Sp. *Los niños me fueron abrazad-os ED . 1SG be.PST .3PL hugged- MPL the kids ‘The kids were hugged by Juan.’ B. Aspectuals (87) Sp. *Me has empezado a ED . 1SG have.2SG started to ‘You started eating too much to my regret.’ C. Modals (88) Sp.

comer eat.INF

por by

Juan. Juan

demasiado. too.much

*Me deb-e casar= se. ED . 1SG must-3SG marry.INF = REFL ‘He must get married on me.’

D. Impersonals (89) Sp. *Me hay que ED . 1SG have.LOC COMP ‘You must work on/for me.’

trabajar. work.INF

Crucially, object clitics do not exhibit these kinds of restrictions. (ii) EDs cannot be interpreted as affected participants. Thus, EDs are distinct from IOs (either goals/recipients (90a) or sources (90b)), benefactives (90c), and malefactives (90d) in that the referent of the ED does not affect the truth conditions of the proposition or the model of the situation described at all. Instead, they express a (detached) evaluative attitude of a discourse participant (90e).

129

Objects

(90) Sp.

a.

Juan me ha dado un libro. (goals) a book Juan me.DAT has given ‘Juan gave me a book.’ b. Juan me ha tomado un libro. (sources) Juan me.DAT has taken a book ‘Juan took a book from me.’ c. Juan me ha comprado un libro. (benefactives) a book Juan me.DAT has bought ‘Juan bought me a book.’ d. Juan me ha destruido la carta antes de Juan me.DAT has destroyed the letter before of leer=la. (malefactives) read.INF = it. ACC ‘Juan destroyed the letter (to my detriment) before I read it.’ e. Juan me manchó su pantalón. (ED) ED . 1SG stained his trouser Juan ‘Juan stained his trousers to my regret.’

(iii) EDs are always pronominal. In particular, in Romance, they are exclusively realised as clitics and no (co-indexed) XP can appear in an A-position – i.e., the ED cannot be doubled with the full NP – although CLLD/CLRD is marginally acceptable. For instance, in Spanish, there can sometimes be a phrasal part present (91a), but, crucially, not instead of the ED clitic (91b).  

(91)

Sp.

a.

El niño, le estudi-ó mucho #a María. studied-3SG a.lot to María the child ED . 3SG b. *El niño __ estudi-ó mucho a María. a.lot to María the child __ studied- 3SG ‘To María’s delight, the child studied a lot.’ (Masullo 1992, 45)

(iv) EDs are different from possessive datives (i.e., genitive/dative clitics encoding possession – usually, but not necessarily, inalienable) which are commonly treated as a subset of EDs. However, it seems that while possessive datives pattern with IOs, benefactives/malefactives (in the sense of co-indexation with the possessor of the DO of a transitive verb (92)) and dative experiencers, EDs do not align with the abovementioned object clitics; therefore they are compatible with a possessive (93) in at least some Romance varieties such as Peruvian Spanish:  

(92)

Sp.

a.

duele hurt.3SG ‘I have a headache.’ Mei

POSSDAT . 1SG

lai the

cabezai. head

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Ioanna Sitaridou

b. *Mei

duele suj hurt.3SG his ?*lei c. ¿A quiéni POSSDAT . 3SG to whom ‘Who has a headache?’ ?*lei d. A Juani to Juan (POSSDAT . 3SG ) ‘Juan has a headache.’ POSSDAT . 1SG

(93)

Peruvian Sp.

cabezaj. head duele lai hurt.3SG the

cabezai? head

duele hurt.3SG

cabezai. head

lai the

¡Mei

ensucia-s tuj pantalónj! stain-2SG your trouser ‘You are staining your trousers (and I am somewhat inconvenienced)!’

ED . 1SG

(v) EDs cannot undergo wh-questioning nor, in fact, any kind of A'-movement (94) unlike other datives (95): (94)

Sp.

a.

Te=

he hecho una torta. (benefactive) have.1SG made a cake ‘I have made a cake for you.’ b. ¿A quién has hecho una torta? made a cake to whom have. 2SG ‘Who have you made a cake for?’ BENDAT . 2SG

(95)

Sp.

a.

Bésa=me a María. (ED) to María kiss.IMP = ED . 1SG ‘Kiss María for my sake.’ b. *¿De quién/ *a quién/ ?*para from whom/ to whom/ for quién has besado a María? María whom have.2SG kissed to ‘For whose sake did you kiss María?’

(vi) EDs cannot bind (into) the DO (96a,b) (and, in fact, as Borer/Grodzinsky 1986 observed, they cannot be co-indexed with any other argument), by apparently obviating Binding Principle A, unlike argumental datives (96c): (96)

Sp.

a.

¡Que

tej

mei

COMP

REFL . 2SG

ED . 1SG

cuid-e-s take.care-SBJV -2SG ‘Take care of yourself for my sake!’

a ti to you

mismoj! self

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Objects

b. *¡Que tej

cuid-e-s take.care-SBJV - 2SG ‘*Take care of myself for my sake!’ ha mostrado a mí mismoi Mei REFL . 1SG has showed to me self ‘He showed me myself in the mirror.’ COMP

c.

REFL . 2SG

mei

a mí to me

ED . 1SG

en in

el the

mismoi! self espejo. mirror

Once again we see that EDs do not align with the rest of Romance object clitics. (vii) EDs are marginally compatible with pronominal IO datives and IO-like benefactives/malefactives in active transitive contexts (but not with “free” benefactives/ malefactives): (97)

Fr.

Je te lui cass-er-ai I ED . 2SG him.DAT break-FUT - 1SG ‘(Be sure that) I will beat him up.’ (Kayne 1975, 170)

la the

figure. face

To summarize the structural properties discussed so far, consider Table 8: Table 8: Syntactic properties of Romance clitic datives contrasting IOs and EDs IO

ED

Affecting truth conditions



X

Phrasal / prepositional counterparts



X

Clitic doubling



X

Clitic left/right dislocation



%

wh-movement



X

Binding of the direct object



X

Co-occurrence with other datives

X



In terms of the semantics of EDs, Bonet (1991), Cuervo (2003), Adger/Harbour (2007), Jouitteau/Rezac (2008), Michelioudakis/Sitaridou (2009) and Boneh/Nash (2012) all agree that EDs are non-truth functional and, therefore, distinct from other types of datives. They encode the evaluative attitude of a discourse participant towards the proposition. Following Reinhart’s (2002) theta system, such a semantic role can be identified with the thematic cluster that Reinhart has theoretically postulated and termed as “sentient” ([+m(ental state)]). Thus, the cluster must be positively marked [+m] since the involvement of the referent of an ED is always conscious. Given that the

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participants referred to by EDs neither cause anything, nor are caused to suffer what the verb means, it follows that they are not specified for [cause change], i.e., Reinhart’s (2002) [+/˗c] feature. In structural terms, EDs are either analyzed as vP-adjuncts (Catsimali 1989) or are considered to be licensed by a (very high) Appl[icative] head whose Appl’s attachment site in, for example, transitive constructions, is the same as that of applicatives that introduce “free” benefactives/malefactives. Such a head would be just below T and above the highest argument-structure-related projection, say VoiceP or vP. However, what differentiates EDs from these truth-functional datives is the kind of Appl head licensing them and, more specifically, that the difference lies in Appl’s probe in each case, i.e., its uninterpretable features: argumental dative “experiencers” are ([+c+m]), while EDs are ([˗c+m]) (Michelioudakis/Sitaridou 2009). EDs may be further parameterized (Michelioudakis/Sitaridou 2009), depending on the actual discourse orientation of EDs in a given language. For example, Brazilian Portuguese (Bastos 2007) (98) and (many varieties of) Spanish (e.g., Peruvian Spanish) seem to have only speaker-oriented EDs, hence ED may bear [+Author]. In contrast to that, certain varieties of French, perhaps including Standard French, seem to favour hearer-oriented ethical clitics (99), hence there may be an ED specified as [(u)Hearer] in these varieties. Some other varieties allow both (100):  



(98)

BPt. Não. O João não me=/ *te= tava NEG ED . 1SG / ED . 2SG = be.IMPF . 3SG no the João vendendo a casa da Marta pra Maria! the house of-the Marta to Maria sell.PROG ‘No. João wasn’t selling Marta’s house to Maria on me!’

(99)

Fr.

Paul te=/ *me= fabrique une ED . 2SG =/ ED . 1SG = make.3SG a Paul vingt minutes. twenty minutes ‘Paul can make a table in 20 mins for anyone.’ (Leclère 1976; in Jouitteau/Rezac 2008, 106)

(100) Argentinian Sp.

table table

en in

Ya me/le camina. ED . 1SG / ED . 3SG walk.3SG already ‘She’s already walking to my/his/her delight.’ (adapted from Cuervo 2003, 27)

In sum, EDs have the same morphology as dative object clitics, but their syntactic properties are quite different: they do not qualify as internal arguments, but are rather used to expand the sphere of influence of a sentient participant (in the sense of Matushansky/Boneh/Nash/Slioussar 2017).

Objects

133

5 Object topic drop In addition to the pan-Romance object syntactic categories (Section 1), there is some divergence as to which varieties further allow a phonologically null representation of objects, and the type of objects that can be dropped in speech. Null objects have received a range of syntactic explanations, particularly with regard to the nature of this empty category, which can be viewed as an instance of topic drop, among other analyses. Raposo (1986), Rizzi (1986) and Roberge (1987) were among the first to notice the presence of phonetically unrealized internal arguments, cf. (101), (102) and (103), already common in Latin (104) (Luraghi 1997; Vincent 2000), in languages like European Portuguese (Raposo 1986; Costa/Lobo 2007), Brazilian Portuguese (Galves 1989; Farrell 1990; Kato 1993; Cyrino 1997; 2010b; 2013 and references therein), Italian (Schaeffer 1997) and French (Authier 1989; Schøsler 2000; Cummins/Roberge 2005; Lambrecht/Lemoine 2005; Donaldson 2012): (101) EPt. A Joana viu __ na tele television the Joana saw-3SG __ in.the ‘Joana saw __ (them) on the TV yesterday.’ (Raposo 1986, 373)

ontem. yesterday

(102) It.

II bel tempo invoglia __ a restare. stay.INF the nice weather induce.3SG __ to ‘The nice weather induces to stay.’ b. La buona musica riconcilia con se stessi. the good music reconcile.3SG with REFL . IMPS self ‘Good music reconciles with oneself.’ c. Questa musica rende __ allegri. happy this music render.3SG __ ‘This music renders happy.’ (Rizzi 1986, 507)

(103) Fr.

Wild Guns est un jeu wild guns is a game ‘Wild Guns is a game that destresses.’ (Larjavaara 2000, 88)

(104) Lat.

a.

A: No-v-isti-ne __ get.to.know-PST - 2SG - Q ‘Do you know the man?’

qui COMP

homin-em? man-ACC . MSG

défoule __ . destress.3SG __

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B: No-v-i __. __ get.to.know-PST - 1SG ‘I do.’ [Plautus, Bacchides 837] (Luraghi 2004, 242) Although null objects do not exist in Standard Peninsular Spanish, in many Spanish varieties (Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, Rioplatense Spanish) they are, indeed, common (Kany 1945; Campos 1986; Franco/Landa 1996; Sánchez 1998; Schwenter 2006), as (105) and (106) show: (105) Rioplatense Sp. A: Quere-mos el postre. the dessert want-1PL ‘We’d like some dessert.’ B: Ya __ traig-o. already __ bring-1SG ‘I’ll bring (it).’ (106) Bolivian Sp. A: (Aquí est-án los medicamentos.) the medicines here are-3PL ‘Here’s the medicine.’ B: ¿Cómo has traído __? brought __ how have.2SG ‘How did you bring (it)?’ (Lipski 1994, 191) Depending on the Spanish variety (Kany 1945), we often find that null objects alternate with clitics in root contexts (107), on a par with European Portuguese (108): (107) Latin American Sp. (varieties licensing null-objects) a. Fui a la tienda a comprar café pero to the shop to buy.INF coffee but went.1SG no tenían __. NEG have. IMPF . 3PL __ ‘I went to the store to buy coffee but they didn’t have (any).’ b. Fui a la tienda a comprar el periódico to the shop to buy.INF the newspaper went.1SG pero no lo tenían. NEG it.ACC have.IMPF . 3PL but

Objects

135

‘I went to the store to buy the newspaper but they didn’t have it.’ (Schwenter 2006, 27) (108) EPt. Tir-ei os óculos da gaveta e pus from.the drawer and put.PST . 1SG took-1SG the glasses pu=los no bolso. put.PST . 1SG =them.ACC in.the pocket ‘I took the glasses from the drawer and put them in my pocket.’ (Costa/Lobo 2007, 61)

__/ __/

Interestingly, most varieties of Spanish with null objects only allow them when the referent of the DO is non-specific and non-human (but not necessarily indefinite; cf. Campos 1986), cf. (109) – a condition that seems also to hold for both Italian and French: (109) Andean Sp.

A: ¿Viste a María? DOM María saw.2SG ‘Did you see María?’ B: *Vi __ . __ saw.1SG ‘Yes(, I did.)’

However, this does not seem to be the case in either European or Brazilian Portuguese (110) or Comelico ( a northeastern dialect of the province of Venice, cf. Paoli 2014): (110) EPt./BPt. A: O João comprou the João bought ‘Did João buy a car?’ B : Compr-ou __. bought-3SG __ ‘Yes(, he did.)’

um a

carro? car

(111) Comelico A: As =t vist Rosa? have.2SG you seen Rosa ‘Have you seen Rosa?’ B: Si, __ ei vistu. seen yes __ have.1SG ‘Yes, I saw __(her).’ (Paoli 2014, 148) At this stage, it becomes obvious that a typology of null objects may be hindered by: (i) the very syntax-discourse interface nature of the phenomenon which creates richer

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variation in the judgements; (ii) the crosslinguistic data which show no clear-cut generalization such as the existence of a null object parameter which would parallel the null subject parameter (although more recent research has actually shown that the picture here too is more complex; see for instance partial pro-drop languages – cf. ↗2 Subjects); (iii) competing syntactic analyses of null objects. In particular, the issue is whether the empty category is: (i) a null pronominal pro; or (ii) a null variable.8 The features of (i) are arbitrary and cannot be inherited by the discourse, thus the null object is bound by a sentence-internal argument. This is the case of Italian (112) where we see that there is no available discourse referent and where, therefore, it could be argued that the null object is pro and has to be licensed under agreement with a licensing head. Likewise for Brazilian Portuguese (113), which can only be acceptable under a pro analysis given that strong crossover effects are expected under a variable analysis which would, therefore, render (113) ungrammatical (despite the fact that it can be grammmatical in certain contexts at least): (112) It.

La buona musica riconcilia the good music reconcile ‘Good music reconciles with oneself.’ (following Rizzi 1986, 514)

__ __

disse que Maria não (113) BPt. Elei he said COMP Maria NEG ‘Hei said that Maria didn’t kiss (himi).’ (Cyrino 2000, 2)

con with

se REFL . IMPERS

beijou kissed

stessi. self

__i __

In the latter proposal, (ii), a null variable is bound/receives identity by a null or overt antecedent (namely, an Operator), for instance, an overtly realized Topic (see Huang 1984 for Chinese) or a discourse salient referent (also a Topic). Therefore, the interpretation of the null object in European Portuguese in (114) is coreferential with the HT, esse jogo, indicating that the null category could be generated as a variable. The same arguably holds for Spanish varieties featuring null objects (see Campos 1986), cf. (115). (114) EPt. Esse jogo, a Joana viu __ na that match the Joana saw-3SG __ to.the ‘That match, Joana saw (it) on TV yesterday.’ (Cyrino/Matos 2016, 298; following Duarte 1987)

TV TV

8 More recent approaches treat this kind of empty category as null constant (Rizzi 1994).

ontem. yesterday

Objects

137

(115) Quito Sp. Bueno yo te saco __. I you.DAT take.of __ good ‘Well, I’ll remove __ from you (=el vestido, ‘the dress’ being mentioned earlier in the discourse).’ (Suñer/Yépez 1988, 513) An important diagnostic for the pro versus the null variable analysis is the fact that null objects are ruled out in strong island contexts in European Portuguese (116) but are perfectly fine in Brazilian Portuguese (117), thus giving support to a pro analysis of Brazilian Portuguese null objects (although both strict and sloppy readings, as pointed out in Cyrino 2013, cannot be accounted for under a pro proposal): (116) EPt. a.

*Eu informei à polícia da possibilidade de I informed to.the police of.the possibility of no cofre o Manel ter guardado __k kept __ in.the safe the Manel have.INF da sala de jantar. of.the room of dining ‘I informed the police of the possibility of Manel having kept __(it) in the safe of the dining room.’ b. *O rapaz que troux-e __k mesmo agora da COMP brought-3SG __ same now of.the the boy pastelaria era o teu afilhado. pastry.shop was the your godson ‘The boy that brought __(it) just now from the pastry shop was your godson.’ (Raposo 1986, 381–382)

(117) BPt. a.

Eu informei à polícia da possibilidade de I informed to.the police of.the possibility of no cofre o Manuel ter guardado __k kept __ in.the safe the Manuel have.INF da sala de jantar. of.the room of dining ‘I informed the police of the possibility of Manuel having kept (it) in the safe of the dining room.’ b. O rapaz que troux-e __k agora mesmo da __ now same of.the the boy comp brought-3SG pastelaria era o teu afilhado. pastry.shop was the your godson ‘The boy that brought (it) just now from the pastry shop was your godson.’ (Cyrino 2000, 1)

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Moreover, a connection has been made between null objects and the availability of VP ellipsis with auxiliaries, modals and main verbs – the latter a case of V-stranding VP ellipsis (designating the lack of the phonological expression that includes the verbal complement of a verb or verbal sequence and, optionally, its adjunct), as in (118). According to Lopes/Cyrino (2016), they are both licensed by a lexicalized aspectual head, as a consequence of the loss of generalized verb movement in Brazilian Portuguese. (118) BPt. João comprou as maçãs no supermercado, mas João bought the apples in.the supermarket but Maria não comprou __. NEG bought __ Maria ‘João bought the apples in the supermarket, but Maria didn’t.’ Within a broader crosslinguistic context, however, the emerging typology is even more complex – as Cyrino’s (2013) categorization of available accounts shows – ranging from pro to variables to null objects being bundles of features which are not pronounced at PF, to object ellipsis as the result of V-stranding VP ellipsis, to Argument Ellipsis.

6 Object vs subject extraction asymmetries While in Romance, preverbal subjects are generally not allowed to be bare in contrast to objects (with the exception of French objects, see Section 2 and Chierchia 1998; Stark 2008; among others), objects and subjects behave symmetrically vis à vis other types of extractions. In most Romance varieties, we observe that both subject (119) and object wh-extractions (120) are possible from within embedded clauses. This is noteworthy since embedded subject extraction is often ungrammatical cross-linguistically: (119) a. Cat.

b. Sp.

Hi there va goes Ahí there te you.ACC

ha la noia que pens-o que think-1SG COMP has the girl that.REL conèixer. know.INF está la chica que cre-o believe-1SG is the girl that.REL conoci-ó. knew- 3SG

et you. ACC

(que) ( COMP )

Objects

c. It.

C’ è la ragazza che there is the girl that.REL abbi-a incontrato. met have.SBJV - 3SG ‘There’s the girl that I think met you.’

cred-o believe-1SG

139

ti you.ACC

(120) a. Sp.

Ahí está la chica que cre-o que conoc-iste. there is the girl that.REL think-1SG COMP knew-2SG b. It. C’ è la ragazza che cred-o (che) think-1SG COMP there is the girl that. REL tu abbi-a incontrato. you have.SBJV - 2SG met c. Rom. Iată fata pe care cred c=ai DOM that.REL believe.1SG COMP =have.2SG there girl întâlnit=o. met=her.ACC ‘There’s the girl that I think you met.’

As is expected syntactically, neither subject (121) nor object extractions (122) are possible from syntactic islands, although Spanish shows some marginal acceptability with regards to extraction from object islands (122a): (121) a. Sp.

*Ahí está la chica que me pregunt-o there is the girl that.REL REFL . 1SG ask-1SG cuándo te conoci-ó. knew-3SG when you.ACC b. It. *C’ è la ragazza che mi chied-o there is the girl that. REL REFL . 1SG = ask-1SG quando ti abbia incontrato. met when you.ACC = have.SBJV .3SG c. Rom. ??Iată fata care mă întreb când when there girl that.REL REFL . 1SG ask.1SG te=a întâlnit. met you.ACC =have.3SG ‘There’s the girl that I wonder when she met you.’

(122) a. Sp.

??Ahí está la chica que, there is the girl that.REL cuándo la conoc-iste. knew-2SG when her.ACC

me REFL .1SG

pregunt-o, ask-1SG

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b. It.

*C’ è la ragazza che mi chied-o ask- 1SG there is the girl that.REL REFL . 1SG quando tu l’ abbia incontrat-a. have.SBJV . 2SG met- FSG when you her.ACC c. Rom. ??Iată fata pe care mă întreb când DOM that. REL REFL . 1SG ask.1SG when there girl ai întâlnit=o. met= her.ACC have.2SG ‘There’s the girl that I wonder when you met her.’ Still, Rizzi/Shlonsky (2007) remark that there is an important extraction asymmetry between wh-objects and wh-subjects in French: while wh-object extraction is possible, wh-subject extraction is often ungrammatical (for adiscussion of extractions out of wh-clauses, see ↗22 Relative clauses; see also Starke 2001 and Baunaz 2011 for longdistance object-extractions in wh-in situ-constructions in French). The traditional explanation given for this asymmetry, with cross-linguistic validity, is that subject traces fail to be properly governed by a lexical head (123a).9 Crucially, objects can be properly governed, hence the grammaticality of (123b): (123) Fr.

a.

*Qui crois-tu que tqui va __ goes who believe=you COMP ‘Who do you believe that will win?’ b. Qui crois-tu que Paul va Paul goes who believe= you COMP ‘Who do you believe that Paul will help?’ (Rizzi/Shlonsky 2007, 119)

gagner? win.INF aider help.INF

tqui? __

To account for the asymmetry in (123) Rizzi/Shlonsky (2007) propose an analysis according to which the thematic subjects move to a position where they are “frozen”, i.e. they cannot move further. The idea is based on Rizzi’s (1996) Criterial Freezing, which states that an argument in an A'-position always moves there to satisfy a Criterion (= a particular scope-discourse interpretive property which is ensured by an obligatory position in the left periphery). Once the Criterion is satisfied (= the position reached), the argument cannot move further. Hence, thematic subjects move to Spec,SubjP, which is the position where the “subject Criterion” is checked (and the subject-predicate articulation is determined). However, Spanish and Italian do not seem to have this extraction asymmetry – compare (124) and (125) with French (123) above:  

9 According to Rizzi/Shlonsky (2007), the variant qui crois-tu qui va gagner? is acceptable at least for some speakers.

Objects

(124) Sp.

a.

(125) It.

a.

141

¿Quién cre-es que va a ganar? COMP goes to win. INF who believe-2SG ‘Who do you believe is going to win?’ b. ¿A quién cre-es que Pablo va a ayudar? Pablo goes to help.INF to who believe-2SG COMP ‘Who do you think Pablo is going to help?’ Chi cred-i che vinc-er-à? who believe-2SG COMP win-FUT - 3SG ‘Who do you believe is going to win?’ b. Chi cred-i che Paolo aiut-er-à? COMP Paolo help-FUT - 3SG who believe-2SG ‘Who do you think Paolo is going to help?’

As explained above, in the French example (123a) the subject has reached its licensing (criterial) position and, therefore, no further movement to a distinct, higher position is possible (Rizzi 2003). Crucially, in Spanish and Italian, by virtue of being null subject languages, the wh-subject can skip the subject position and obviate this freezing condition on movement: a null pronoun pro can be used to satisfy the subject criterion ((124a) and (125a)). French, however, is not a null subject language and, thus, cannot bypass this condition due to the lack of pro. A further difference between subjects and objects arises with regards to wh-movement of NP-internal arguments. Spanish diverges from French, Italian and Catalan in that specific object DPs introduced by the definite article constitute a domain from which extraction of certain types of elements is impossible (cf. (126a) vs (126b,c)). (126) a. Sp.

b. Fr.

c. It.

he visto [el retrato *Rembrandt, del quei COMP have. 1SG seen the portrait Rembrandt of.the de Aristóteles ti] of Aristotle ‘Rembrandt, whose portrait of Aristotle I have seen’ (Ormazabal 1992, 274) j’ ai vu [le portrait Rembrandt, donti the portrait Rembrandt of-whom I have.1SG seen d’ Aristote ti] of Aristotle ‘Rembrandt, of (by) whom I have seen the portrait of Aristotle’ Rembrandt, di cui ho visto il ritratto seen the portrait Rembrandt of who have.1SG di Aristotele … of Aristotle ‘Rembrandt, of (by) whom I have seen the portrait of Aristotle’

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Overall, we have seen some evidence for subject-object asymmetries in Romance. The divergence among the Romance languages regarding the extraction asymmetry between wh-objects and wh-subjects can be explained in terms of the null subject status of the respective language: in non null subject languages and varieties, an asymmetry arises.

7 Conclusions In this chapter, various aspects of, and phenomena relating to, Romance objects have been presented. There is considerable variation across this family of languages, be it in synchronic or diachronic terms. Concluding this discussion on Romance objects, we can retain the following major points: 1 Objects are arguments of the verb that receive a semantic role and are governed by the verb. They can be divided into direct objects (DO), indirect objects (IO), and prepositional objects (PO). Lexical DOs are defined by their structural position (in the specifier of VP under unmarked discourse conditions), whereas IOs and POs can be identified mainly by their thematic role and morphologic marking properties. 2 DOs are further associated with accusative Case and IOs with dative Case; lexical DOs and IOs can be substituted by clitic pronouns which are more transparent to Case. Only Romanian has maintained morphological case distinction for some lexical categories. Some Romance varieties have developed Differential Object Marking (DOM) for a subset of DOs whose properties are (mainly) semantically defined. Romance varieties can also mark DOs by an agreement feature on the past participle. The agreement triggering conditions differ across the varieties, but often agreement on the participle marks some kind of “special”, i.e., noncanonical DO. 3 Ordering constraints of pronominal objects can be observed. Typically, Romance has been deemed not to have the English type of Double Object Construction (DOC), although this is certainly not the case for Romanian, and may well be the case for a number of other Romance varieties depending on the analysis. Some varieties also show systematic clitic doubling, again with a (mainly) semantically defined subset of objects. However, IOs are more susceptible to be doubled than DOs. Finally, in the varieties with pronominal clitics, these can show up in different positions when the predicate consists of more than one verb, as in modal, aspectual, volitional, or causative constructions. The restrictions concerning clitic placement, e.g., on the inflected auxiliary verb rather than on the main verb (a phenomenon known as clitic climbing (CC)) range from little or no CC to obligatory CC or even the simultaneous occurrence of the clitic in two different positions. 4 Not all dative pronouns are argumental. Ethical datives (EDs) also exist in Romance, which are non-truth functional and, therefore, semantically distinct  

Objects

5

6

143

from argumental datives. The use of EDs is subject to diatopic and inter-speaker variation. Some Romance objects do not receive any phonological realization, especially those that are non-specific and non-human. There are a number of theories that aim to account for the variation witnessed, namely classifying the empty category either as pro, or as a null variable, or for specific varieties (namely Brazilian Portuguese), as an unpronounced feature bundle, or as various types of ellipses. Finally, Romance, in general, displays an object-subject asymmetry with regards to bare arguments in lexically non-governed positions. But objects and subjects behave symmetrically with respect to wh-extractions, the exceptions being French and some dialects of Rhaeto-Romance, i.e., non-pro-drop varieties.  

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Salvi, Giampaolo (22001), L’accordo, in: Lorenzo Renzi/Giampaolo Salvi/Anna Cardinaletti (edd.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol. 2, Bologna, il Mulino, 227–244. Sánchez, Liliana (1998), Unmarkedness: the source of null objects in Contact Spanish, Paper presented at 16th Conference on Spanish in the US, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Santamarina, Antonio (1974), El verbo gallego. Estudio basado en el Valle de Suarna, Santiago de Compostela, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela. Sauzet, Patrick (2006), Doubling phenomena in Occitan, Paper presented at the Workshop on Syntactic Doubling in European Dialects, Amsterdam, Meertens Institute. [www.dialectsyntax. org/mediawiki/images/4/43/Abstract_Sauzet.pdf] Schaeffer, Jeannette C. (1997), Direct object Scrambling in Dutch and Italian Child Language, University of California at Los Angeles, Ph.D. dissertation. Schøsler, Lene (1984), La déclinaison bicasuelle de l’ancien français: son rôle dans la syntaxe de la phrase, les causes de sa disparition, Odense, Odense University Press. Schøsler, Lene (2000), Le statut de la forme zéro du complément d’objet direct en français moderne, in: Hanne Leth Andersen/Anita Berit Hansen (edd.), Le français parlé: corpus et résultats. Actes du colloque international de l’Université de Copenhague du 29 au 30 Octobre 1998, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press, 105–129. Schwenter, Scott (2006), Null objects across South America, in: Timothy Face/Carol Klee (edd.), Selected Proceedings of the 8th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, Somerville, MA, Cascadilla Press, 23–36. Sinnott, Sarah/Smith, Ella (2007), ¿Subir o no subir? A look at clitic climbing in Spanish, Ms., The Ohio State University and Pikeville College. Sitaridou, Ioanna (2004), A corpus-based study of null subjects in Old French and Occitan, in: Claus D. Pusch/Johannes Kabatek/Wolfgang Raible (edd.), Romance Corpus Linguistics II. Corpora and Diachronic Linguistics, Tübingen, Narr, 359–374. Sitaridou, Ioanna (2009a), The structural underpinnings of (linear) OV in Old French, Paper presented at “Modelling Change: The paths of French”, Grands Travaux de Recherche Concertée, Université de Montréal. Sitaridou, Ioanna (2009b), On the emergence of personal infinitives in the history of Spanish, Diachronica 26, 36–64. Sitaridou, Ioanna (2012), A comparative study of word order in Old Romance, Folia Linguistica 46, 553–604. Sitaridou, Ioanna/Whimpanny, Helen/Ayres, Laura (2015), Variation and optionality in clitic climbing in Argentinean Spanish, Isogloss 1, 247–291. Sportiche, Dominique (1996), Clitic constructions, in: Johan Rooryck/Laurie Zaring (edd.), Phrase Structure and the Lexicon, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 213–276. Stark, Elisabeth (2008), The role of the plural system in Romance, in: Ulrich Detges/Richard Waltereit (edd.), The Paradox of Grammatical Change. Perspectives from Romance, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 57–84. Stark, Elisabeth (2011), Fonction et développement du marquage différentiel de l’objet direct en roumain, en comparaison avec l’espagnol péninsulaire, in: Société de Linguistique de Paris (ed.), L’évolution grammaticale à travers les langues romanes, Leuven, Peeters, 35–61. Stark, Elisabeth (2016), Nominal morphology and semantics – Where’s gender (and “partitive articles”) in Gallo-Romance?, in: Susann Fischer/Mario Navarro (edd.), Proceedings of the VII Nereus International Workshop “Clitic Doubling and other issues of the syntax/semantic interface in Romance DPs”, Konstanz, Universität Konstanz, 131–149. Starke, Michael (2001), Merge Dissolves into Move, Université de Genève, doctoral dissertation. Stroh, Hans (2002), L’accord du participe passé en Occitan rouergat et en français, Rodez, Grelh Roergàs.

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Strozer, Judith R. (1976), Clitics in Spanish, University of California at Los Angeles, Ph.D. dissertation. Suñer, Margarita/Yépez, María (1988), Null definite objects in Quiteño, Linguistic Inquiry 19, 511–519. Swart, Henriette de (2007), A cross-linguistic discourse analysis of the perfect, Journal of Pragmatics 39, 2273–2307. Tesnière, Lucien (1959), Éléments de syntaxe structurale, Paris, Klincksieck. Torrego, Esther (1995), On the nature of clitic doubling, in: Héctor Campos/Paula Kempchinsky (edd.), Evolution and Revolution in Linguistic Theory, Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 399–418. Torrego, Esther (1998), The Dependencies of Objects, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Torres Morais, Maria Aparecida/Lima Salles, Heloisa M. M. (2010), Parametric change in the grammatical encoding of indirect objects in Brazilian Portuguese, Probus 22, 181–209. Uriagereka, Juan (1995), Some aspects of the syntax of clitic placement in Western Romance, Linguistic Inquiry 26, 79–123. Vincent, Nigel (2000), Competition and correspondence in syntactic change: null arguments in Latin and Romance, in: Susan Pintzuk/George Tsoulas/Anthony Warner (edd.), Diachronic Syntax: Models and Mechanisms, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 25–50. Zwart, Jan-Wouter (2001), Syntactic and phonological verb movement, Syntax 4, 34–62. Zwicky, Arnold (1977), On Clitics, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Linguistics Club.

Richard Waltereit

4 Argument structure and argument structure alternations Abstract: This chapter discusses argument structure in Romance languages. After a brief review of some of the main issues that current descriptions of argument structure are faced with, and of some of the most prominent answers to address these issues (Section 1), I discuss the major types of grammatical relations in Romance relevant for argument selection, and the problem of identifying the valency of lexical items (Section 2). Section 3 is an excursus about the argument structure of nouns and adjectives. Section 4 is devoted to the main descriptive problem of argument structure in Romance (or any language or language family), namely the identification of linking patterns. Section 5 addresses argument alternations. Section 6 is a brief summary.  



Keywords: transitivity, valency, argument, semantic role, event structure  

1 What is argument structure? Historically, the notion of argument structure is grounded in the recognition that there are no consistent semantic correlates to grammatical relations (in particular, subjects and objects). Consider the following Italian examples, from Salvi (2001, 64‒66): (1)

It.

Giovanni profuma il Giovanni perfume.3SG the ‘Giovanni scents his dog.’

(2)

It.

Il sasso ruppe la the the rock smashed. 3SG ‘The rock smashed the window.’

finestra. window

(3)

It.

La pietra rotolò giù down the stone rolled.3SG ‘The stone rolled down the slope.’

per across

(4)

It.

Maria ha sentito heard Maria have.3SG ‘Maria heard Bergonzi sing.’

DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-004

suo his

cane. dog

cantare sing.INF

il the

Bergonzi. Bergonzi

pendio. slope

Argument structure and argument structure alternations

(5)

It.

Il giardino pullula di the garden abound.3SG of ‘The garden abounds with wasps.’

155

vespe. wasps

The semantic contribution made by the subject is very different in each of these sentences. In (1), it is an AGENT performing the action of ‘scenting’; in (2), it represents the INSTRUMENT of an action which implies an agent; in (3), it has a relatively passive role, often referred to as THEME or OB JECT ; in (4), it refers to the EXPERIENCE (as opposed to agency) of a sentient being; and in (5) it refers to a LOCATION . Despite this diversity, the syntax-semantics relationship in verbal arguments is far from arbitrary. An argument with a THEME role can be a subject as in (3), but THEME would also appear to characterize the direct objects il suo cane in (1) and la finestra in (2), and the prepositional phrase di vespe in (5). By contrast, in the non-subject arguments there does not seem to be any AGENT ; the AGENT role is represented only by a grammatical subject, whether in combination with a finite verb in (1) or a non-finite one in (4). Thus, the object is quite variable in its semantic role, though not as much as the subject. Oblique relations, though, i.e. grammatical relations other than subject and object, are less variable in their semantic import. Thus, grammatical relations such as subject, object etc. do not (fully) determine their semantic contribution; rather, a separate layer of information is involved – argument structure, a layer where a predicate (usually, a verb, but also nouns or adjectives) is described according to the number and type (semantic role, morphosyntactic properties) of its arguments. A number of approaches exist with respect to how this layer of information is organized, and how it interacts with the selection of grammatical relations, and with other components of grammatical information. An argument can be defined as an expression that completes the respective predicate semantically, is considered to be obligatory and receives a semantic role from the predicate. Although there is considerable overlap between the notion of argument and that of complement (= obligatory modifier of a head), they can be distinguished on the basis of the last criterion: whereas both denote obligatory elements, there are complements, but not arguments, without a semantic role (predicative complements). The question of how syntactic and semantic layers of predicates interact derives, in turn, from a more fundamental property of human language underlying the representation of events. Individual events are expressed by combining an event-type with a selection of designated participant-types. They reflect an underlying verbal “scene” (cf. Fillmore 1977). The event-types are predicates; their participants are arguments. Prototypically, predicates are verbs, and arguments are nouns or pronouns; but both can also be expressed by other word-classes (cf. Section 3). In other words, events are normally expressed by articulating several lexical items. This pattern is implied in the very concept of argument structure. Note that such an arrangement, whatever its specifics may be, involves a certain amount of typification and of analysis, where the event is broken down into identified component-types. The  



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choice of predicate implies categorization as a type of event, and the choice of argument implies categorization as a type of participant. Endeavours to characterize the semantic layer of predicates, and its interaction with the syntactic layer, have led to a number of types of theoretical constructs that address the following questions (Levin/Rappaport Hovav 2005; Croft 2012): i. Participant roles: How can the inventory of participant roles be characterized? ii. Event structure: How are events typified in the semantic layer of predicates? iii. How do participant roles map onto syntactic arguments? Note that answers to these questions interlock, since any attempt to characterize event structure will have an impact on how the participant roles slotting into these event structures are to be defined, and vice versa. The first approach to argument structure (Fillmore 1968; 1971) conceived of it as selection from a list of semantic argument-types. Many lists have been proposed; other than the argument-types mentioned at the beginning of this section, Fillmore (1971) included COUNTER - AGENT (the force or resistance against which the action is carried out), RESULT (the entity that comes into existence as a result of the action), SOURCE (the place from which something moves), and GOAL (the place to which something moves). Other proposals include, for example, FUNCTION (I used the stick as a club, cf. Comrie/Smith 1977, 29‒33), PURPOSE (He made a manger for the church play, cf. Jackendoff 1990, 184), or REPRESENTATION SOURCE (I photocopied the article, cf. Dowty 1991, 569). All lists have in common, though, that they are finite and relatively small (Croft 2012, 180). The list-model addresses the relative semantic indeterminacy of grammatical relations by implicitly assuming an analogy between a finite set of grammatical relations and an equally finite set, of comparable size, of semantic argument-types. One of the main research questions for the list model, then, is the mapping of semantic onto syntactic arguments, i.e. linking. Some of the key difficulties that have beset the debate are that several labels may be applicable to one syntactic argument, and, more importantly, that a semantic role-label may not always be found to be appropriate for a given syntactic argument. Underlying these difficulties is the issue that the role labels were construed as primitives (Croft 2012, 176). An interesting approach to this problem is offered by Koch (1981). He argued that role labels proposed in accounts of argument structure should be conceived of as abstractions over components of individual verb meanings. Koch’s model is distinctive in that he derives his role labels from the meaning of pro-verbs (verba vicaria) in the language under consideration, thus avoiding the potential circularity inherent in positing role-labels as primitives that are then used to analyse actual verb meanings. A variant of this line of thought can be seen in the macro-role approach (Van Valin 1999), where lower-level primitive roles are grouped into progressively more abstract higher-level roles. At the most abstract level, there are  

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157

only two macro-roles: ACTOR and UNDERGOER . Agency, or the lack thereof, guides the abstraction process. A partial alternative to the list-type model of argument structure are theories of event structure. Rather than categorizing events exclusively by the type of participant involved, this approach gives some weight to categorizing events by breaking them up into types of sub-events. This usually takes the form of assuming two tiers of meaning: one containing a small set of primitive predicates, including CAUSE, DO/ACT, BECOME (cf. Jackendoff 1990; Rappaport Hovav/Levin 1998), and another one containing a larger set of verbal “roots”. The combination of elements from the two tiers, via some form of logical calculus, yields actual verb meanings. For example, Spanish romper ‘to break’ can be decomposed into [[X ACT] CAUSE [Y BECOME ]] (Mateu 2012, 334). ACT, CAUSE, and BECOME are primitive predicates not specific to Spanish, whereas is a Spanish-specific root. Event decomposition puts the linking between syntactic arguments and semantic argument structure on a more principled footing than a mere list approach does, since the semantic arguments of the primitive predicates are matched with designated grammatical relations. This matching is either absolute (for each argument of the primitive predicate a designated grammatical relation, cf. Levin/Rappaport Hovav 2005, 146‒147), or relative (allowing for the interdependence of designation of grammatical relations, cf. Levin/Rappaport Hovav 2005, 147‒152). In any case, though, since the primitive predicates recur across a great number of verbs, the linking procedure should be more consistent than when operating with a list of rolelabels only. A potential weakness of this approach, of course, is that the primitive predicates will again need to be posited. Koch (1981) avoids some of these pitfalls by working with constituent predicates that are themselves verbs of the language and can be used as pro-verbs. For example, French demander ‘to ask’ is considered to contain, at the most general level of its event structure, the constituent verb y avoir ‘to occur’ ‘to exist’; at a slightly less general level the constituent verb se passer ‘to happen’; down to the more specific demander. A key reference in contemporary thinking about argument structure continues to be Dowty’s (1991) proto-role theory. It is an ingenious combination of the list and the event-structure approach, while avoiding some of the weaknesses of both. The key element here is entailment of contributing properties from predicates. Contributing properties of event participants are entailed from the predicate; these entailments are then grouped into one of two sets, the AGENT proto-role and the PATIENT proto-role (based on Dowty 1991, 572):  

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Table 1: Agent and patient proto-role contributing properties (Dowty 1991) Agent proto-role contributing properties

Patient proto-role contributing properties

volitional involvement in the event or state sentience causing an event or change of state in another participant movement relative to another participant existence independent of event

undergoes change of state incremental theme (affected object changes proportionally as event proceeds) causally affected by another participant stationary relative to another participant does not exist independently of event

A participant with a greater number of agent proto-role properties than with patient proto-role properties will be realized as a subject; in the opposite case it will be realized as an object (Dowty 1991, 576). Thus, there are agent and patient prototypes; crucially, this allows for some variability in subject vs object realization, and diachronic change, if predicates have an equal number of proto-agent and protopatient properties. We will return to this in Section 4.3. Dowty’s model is a major advance over the potentially circular role-list models; and the reference to predicate properties contains an element of event structure, while avoiding the rigidity of the two-tier event decomposition approach. A limitation of Dowty’s model, however, is that it applies only to those predicates, and by extension languages under consideration, that have a syntactic subject and a syntactic direct object (Croft 2012, 191). The growing importance of event structure in analysing the relation between grammatical relations and their semantic contribution (Croft 2012, 3) reflects a reversal of perspective. Whereas early research, beginning with Tesnière (1959), tended to be “semasiological” in that it sought generalizations over the semantic import of grammatical relations, researchers are increasingly adopting an “onomasiological” perspective where events are taken as the starting point and the linguistic realization of their participants as arguments of predicates (argument selection) is the focus of inquiry. Du Bois (2003, 27‒30) distinguishes distinct components in the overall process of argument selection: inclusion, linking, targeting, and realization. Inclusion specifies which participants of the event will be verbalized in the sentence. Targeting defines the grammatical roles that are available for association with event participants, that is, in the case of verbal predicates, subject, (prepositional) object, and so on. Linking matches, in a general way, function with grammatical relation. Realization spells out the matching of functions with roles for the specific predicate. Du Bois’ analytical dissection of argument selection shows that the process applies to the individual event, to the predicate as a lexical unit, as well as to patterns of selection and linking generalized over verbs. The selection process and the relationship between the individual and the patterns of the general level are referred to as argument structure.

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Argument structure and argument structure alternations

2 Argument structure and valency in Romance languages 2.1 Syntactic expressions of arguments A number of form-types (grammatical relations) are relevant for argument structure in Romance languages. Apart from subject (cf. ↗2 Subjects) and object, including indirect objects (cf. ↗3 Objects), the following are characteristic for Romance languages.

2.1.1 Prepositional objects “Prepositional object” is a cover term for prepositional phrases that are selected as arguments by their head not by virtue of occupying a designated structural position (cf. ↗3 Objects), but by virtue of the head subcategorizing for a preposition. Traditionally, the prepositional object covers all such phrases headed by a preposition, other than the preposition used for the indirect object. Note, however, that direct objects that carry a preposition as a result of Differential Object Marking (DOM) (cf. ↗3 Objects) are not prepositional objects. Some examples:  

(6)

Fr.

Je compte sur mes my. PL I count.1SG on ‘I’m counting on my friends.’

(7)

Sp.

Ese trabajo carece de this work lack.3SG of ‘This work lacks preparation.’

amis. friends

preparación. preparation

French à, while being the preposition (or case marker) that heads indirect objects, is considered able to head prepositional objects also (Kotschi 1981). The feature distinguishing à as head of an indirect object phrase from à as head of a prepositional object phrase is that for the prepositional object, the anaphor is the locative pronoun y or à plus a stressed strong pronoun (à lui/elle) (8a), whereas for the indirect object, the anaphor is the personal pronoun lui/elle (8b): (8)

Fr.

à sa ville natale; il y Pierre pense his town natal he Y Pierre think.3SG A ‘Pierre thinks of his hometown. He thinks of it.’ b. Pierre donne un cadeau à sa mère; il le lui Pierre give.3SG a present A his mother he it LUI ‘Pierre gives a present to his mother. He gives it to her.’ a.

pense. think.3SG donne. give.3SG

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2.1.2 Measure complements Measure complements are arguments that are not direct objects; i.e., they do not receive structural case merely by occupying a designated structural position (cf. ↗3 Objects). They share this characteristic with prepositional objects and indirect objects. However, unlike these, they are not PPs; rather, they are DPs or QPs. Unlike direct objects, they do not easily lend themselves to cliticization (9)–(10), although cliticization is not categorically impossible (11) (data from Smith 1992):  



los them.ACC

pesa. weigh.3SG

(9)

Sp.

?Cien kilos, Juan hundred kilos Juan ‘Juan weighs 100 kilos.’

(10)

Fr.

??Trois heures, ce concert les three hours this concert them.ACC ‘This concert will well last three hours.’

(11)

Fr.

Trois aunes? Ce drap les three ells this cloth them.ACC ‘Three ells? This cloth measured them.’

durera last.FUT . 3SG

a have.3SG

bien. well

mesuré. measured

As Smith (1992) shows, measure complements do not behave like objects, either, where causativization, passivization, and agreement (11) are concerned. As a further distinction, Rizzi (1990) demonstrates that they cannot be extracted from wh-islands, again unlike direct objects: (12)

a. b.

What did John wonder how to weigh? Apples. What did John wonder how to weigh? *200 pounds.

Smith (1992) suggests that in French, and in Romance more generally, the same contrast holds: (13)

Fr.

a.

Qu’est-ce qu’ il a décidé comment what he have.3SG decided how Des pommes. ART . PL . INDF apples ‘What did he decide how to weigh? Apples.’ b. Qu’est-ce qu’ il a décidé comment what he have.3SG decided how *Cent kilos. hundred kilos ‘What did he decide how to weigh? 100 kilos.’

peser? weigh.INF

peser? weigh.INF

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2.2 Distinguishing arguments from non-arguments As indicated in Section 1 above, early research into argument structure took lexical entries of verbs as the starting point, and sought to characterize the semantic contribution associated with their grammatical relations. When adopting this semasiological perspective, a natural question arises: what are the semantic roles associated with the respective grammatical relations that are actually required by a given verb at the level of its lexical entry? For example, in (14), it is quite straightforward to assume that the subject (je) is required as an AGENT by the lexical entry of remercier ‘to thank’. (14)

Fr.

Je vous remercie de tout of all I you.ACC . PL thank. 1SG ‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’

mon my

cœur. heart

However, can the same be said about the PP de tout mon cœur, even when generalizing over verb meanings? Of course, similar questions can be asked for just about any verb. This was the starting point for a long and distinguished research programme into valency, to use Tesnière’s (1959) term – how many grammatical relations, and of which type, come with a predicate? Historically, this research programme was pursued particularly vigorously in German Romance linguistics. In particular, it gave rise to valency dictionaries for a number of standard Romance languages: Busse/Dubost (1983) for French, Blumenthal/Rovere (1998) for Italian, Busse et al. (1995) for Portuguese, and Engel/Savin (1983) for Romanian. These dictionaries aim at itemizing the valency of the language’s verbal inventory items. Despite this, though, it has never been possible to settle the underlying question in any given clause, is a given phrase lexically selected by the predicate or not? in a principled way. A number of criteria as a means to answering this question have been discussed. The original valency criterion is obligatoriness, so that failure to verbalize a putative argument would result either in an ungrammatical utterance (15c,d) or in a reading where the non-verbalized argument is understood as implied (cf. (16c,d)). This contrasts with the optionality of non-arguments ((15a,b), (16a,b)): (15)

Sp.

a.

Ayer, el golpe destrozó el the yesterday the blow shattered.3SG ‘Yesterday, the blow shattered the vase.’ b. El golpe destrozó el jarrón. the vase the blow shattered.3SG ‘The blow shattered the vase.’ c. *Ayer, el golpe destrozó. yesterday the blow shattered.3SG ‘Yesterday, the blow shattered.’

jarrón. vase

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d. *El golpe destrozó. the blow shattered.3SG ‘The blow shattered.’ (16)

Sp.

a.

Pedro bebe una cerveza todos los Pedro drink.3SG a beer all.PL the ‘Pedro has a beer every day.’ b. Pedro bebe una cerveza. beer Pedro drink.3SG a ‘Pedro has a beer.’ c. Pedro bebe todos los días. the days Pedro drink.3SG all.PL ‘Pedro drinks every day (something/habitually).’ d. Pedro bebe. Pedro drink.3SG ‘Pedro drinks (something/habitually).’

días. days

Thus, it is claimed, Spanish destrozar ‘to destroy’ and beber ‘to drink’ are verbs with two arguments. The availability of a non-specific reading for a dropped complement/ argument as in (16d), though, makes obligatoriness a slightly less compelling criterion for argumenthood. After all, the non-specific reading implies that the argument is still there but not realized; this seems, at least in the first instance, to conflict with obligatoriness as essential to argumenthood. In addition, clauses with a dropped argument that would be unacceptable when considered in isolation may be perfectly acceptable in context (Koch/Oesterreicher 1990, 77): (17)

Fr.

une fumée pas possible CRAC je me gare, possible I myself stop.1SG a smoke NEG je soulève, ouh plus de moteur no.more of engine I raise.1SG ouh ‘an incredible cloud of smoke, I stop, I open [the hood], oh no engine any more’

The verb soulever ‘to raise’ would normally require a direct object; nevertheless, in this context, where it is used without one, it is understood that the car’s hood is the implied object, and the sentence is indeed acceptable. This makes obligatoriness a very unreliable criterion. Findings like this led Thompson/Hopper (2001) to question the very concept of argument structure. On the basis of frequency data, they argued that the co-occurrence of DPs and verbs in discourse is not so much guided by the selectional characteristics of lexical entries (as the notion of argument structure would suggest), but rather by speakers’ stored knowledge of surface patterns of collocation.

Argument structure and argument structure alternations

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The obligatoriness criterion construes argumenthood as very close in nature to complementhood. Complements are obligatory modifiers of syntactic heads. For example, pasteur in French son père est pasteur ‘his/her father is a minister’ is a predicative complement, without however being an argument (as it does not have a semantic role assigned). More narrowly, complements are sister nodes of heads. Another criterion for the distinction between arguments (and complements) and non-arguments is syntactic mobility. Adjuncts are said to be more flexible in their syntactic position than arguments/complements. Consider the event of thanking. It seems reasonable to assume that what somebody is thanked for is more specific to the event of thanking than the attitude of mind the thanking person has. This can correlate with a contrast in flexibility of position, cf. (18b) vs (18d): (18)

Fr.

a.

Je vous remercie de tout mon cœur. whole my heart I you.ACC . PL thank. 1SG of ‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’ b. De tout mon cœur, je vous remercie. of whole my heart I you.ACC . PL thank. 1SG ‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’ c. Je vous remercie d’ être venu. be.INF come. PTCP I you.ACC . PL thank. 1SG of ‘I thank you for coming.’ d. *D’ être venu, je vous remercie. I you.ACC . PL thank. 1SG of be.INF come. PTCP ‘I thank you for coming.’

We appear therefore to have established that what is being thanked for is an argument (d’être venu), whereas the attitude of mind adopted when thanking is an adjunct (de tout mon cœur). However, the criterion of syntactic flexibility is not wholly reliable, either. Sometimes what appear to be non-arguments cannot be pre-posed: (19)

Fr.

a.

Le poème se développe REFL develops the poem ‘The poem unfolds harmoniously.’ b. *Harmonieusement, le poème harmoniously the poem ‘The poem unfolds harmoniously.’

harmonieusement. harmoniously se REFL

développe. develops

Conversely, sometimes phrases that arguably are arguments may be pre-posed: (20)

Fr.

a.

J’ ai offert ce livre I have.1SG offered this book ‘I offered this book to my brother.’

à to

mon my

frère. brother

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b. A mon frère, j’ ai to my brother I have.1SG ‘I offered this book to my brother.’

offert offered

ce this

livre. book

More tests for argumenthood are reviewed in Jacobs (1994). The very fact that grammatical tests for argumenthood have been deemed unreliable affords one key insight: argumenthood is, ultimately, an intuitive notion that grammatical tests are merely trying to approximate; it reflects linguists’ intuition about what they see as integral to an event-type. By the same token, the valency of any given verb cannot be determined with certainty. In fact, Jacobs (1994) argues in his critical discussion of valency theory, in particular of its long quest for a hard-and-fast test of the argument/adjunct distinction, that grammatical criteria such as obligatoriness or syntactic flexibility cannot actually reveal argumenthood; rather, he suggests, they reflect an interpretation of what argumenthood means. The difficulties in establishing criteria for argumenthood, and for valency of individual verbs, ultimately stem from the tension, referred to in Section 1, that arises from matching generalized and typified patterns of language structure to unique events. Thus, one might say that diverging tests for argumenthood reflect competition between theories of argument structure. Indeed, the reversal of perspective from a more semasiological (taking surface forms as the starting point) to a more onomasiological perspective (taking events as starting points), alluded to in Section 1, has meant that current research is now much less concerned with establishing testable criteria for argumenthood.  

3 Argument structure of nouns and adjectives While verbs are specialized in the linguistic representation of events and are therefore the prototypical word class for argument structure, other word classes may also have an argument structure, in particular nouns and adjectives. By morphological derivation, many verbs can be turned into nouns: French laver ‘to wash’ > lavage ‘washing’; Italian elaborare ‘to elaborate’ > elaborazione ‘elaboration’. Also, nouns can refer to the event described in a verb without being in a relation of morphological derivation with them in the contemporary grammar of the language: French chute ‘fall’ – tomber ‘to fall’. These nouns are often called simple event nominals (Grimshaw 1990). With both nominalizations and simple event nominals, there can be a distinction between process and result readings. For example, Spanish aparcamiento can be both the ‘action of parking a car’ (21a) and the ‘car park’ (21b):

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Argument structure and argument structure alternations

(21)

Sp.

a.

Enrique no obtuvo su permiso de conducir got.3SG his license of drive. INF Enrique NEG porque falló en el aparcamiento. in the parking because failed. 3SG ‘Enrique did not get his driving license because he failed the parking test.’ b. Esperaban en el aparcamiento. the car.park waited.IPFV .3 PL in ‘They were waiting in the car park.’

Likewise, the French noun achat can refer to the purchase as a process (22a) and the item bought (22b): (22)

Fr.

a.

La saisie du code valide l’ achat. the purchase the input of.the code validate.3SG ‘Entering the PIN completes the purchase.’ b. Suzanne et Jean transportaient leurs achats their purchases Suzanne and Jean carried.IPVF .3PL en métro. in metro ‘Suzanne and Jean carried their purchases on the metro.’

There is a link between the action of parking and the place where this action happened, and there is a link between the action of buying and the merchandise bought: they belong respectively to the same scenes or frames (cf., e.g., Detges 2004). Nominalizations and event nominals can both have the same arguments as the verbs to which they are morphologically or conceptually related: (23)

Fr.

a.

Le téléphone était tombé sur le the the phone be.IPFV .3SG fallen.MSG on ‘The phone had fallen on the floor.’ b. la chute du téléphone sur le sol the fall of.the phone on the floor ‘The fall of the phone on the floor’

(24)

It.

a.

sol. floor

Abbiamo elaborato il programma dell’ evento. elaborated the programme of.the event have.1PL ‘We created the event’s programme.’ b. la nostra elaborazione del programma dell’ evento elaboration of.the programme of.the event the our.F ‘our creation of the event’s programme’

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What is the relationship between the argument structure of the verb and that of its corresponding event nominal or nominalization? According to the argument inheritance model (Grimshaw 1990; Olsen 1992; Harley 2009; among others), this relationship is a grammatical one, where morphological derivation involves, in some form, a transfer of the verb’s argument structure to the derived noun. Lieber/Baayen (1999, 176) distinguish a “loose” version of argument inheritance from a “strict” one. In the “loose” version, nominalizing affixes perform operations on the underlying verb’s argument structure, thus allowing for some variance between the underlying verb’s and the resulting nominalization’s argument structures. In the “strict” version, the underlying verb’s argument structure is copied either faithfully to the nominalization’s argument structure, or not at all. Detges (2004) argues that the apparent similarity in participants observed in e.g. (23a) and (23b), and (24a) and (24b) respectively, is not the result of a transfer of argument structure by way of grammatical operation (argument inheritance), but a side-effect of something else, namely that morphologically related words, and in fact the various readings of polysemous lexical items, refer to aspects of meaning that are related by virtue of being about the same scene (cf. Detges 2004, 33). An argument for this hypothesis is that nouns that are neither morphologically nor semantically related to a base verb can apparently take arguments in a similar way to those that are (cf. Detges 2004, 30‒31 for this point): (25)

Pt.

a.

o planeador desta the planner of.this ‘the planner of this house’ b. o arquitecto desta the architect of.this ‘the architect of this house’

casa house casa house

The verb planear ‘to plan’ denotes an event; the noun planeador is morphologically derived from it, and it can take an argument that is very similar to one the verb planear would take as in, say, planear uma casa ‘to plan a house’. Now, the morphologically simple noun arquitecto, similar in meaning to the noun planeador, can take what appears to be the same argument, even though it cannot conceivably have inherited this argument in a morphology-based grammatical process. In fact, it is common for nouns to take arguments of their own, in particular relational nouns (mother, colleague, etc.). Thus, the argument Detges is making is that the capacity of nouns to head dependent phrases is based on the conceptual scene they are profiled against, just as in fact with verbs, rather than being the result of a designated grammatical process of argument inheritance. A similar argument can be made about adjectives. Adjectives modify nouns and verbs (cf. ↗21 Adjectival and genitival modification). In turn, they can be the head of PPs and complement clauses (Noailly 1999):

Argument structure and argument structure alternations

(26)

Fr.

167

a.

une maison identique à une autre a house identical to a other ‘a house identical to another one’ b. désireux que tout se passe bien REFL goes well eager that everything ‘wishing that everything goes well’

As Noailly (1999, 70) points out, complement clauses governed by French adjectives, even if not headed by a preposition, behave syntactically not like direct objects, since their anaphor is the adjunct pronoun en, rather than the direct object pronoun le. Compare (27a) and (27b): (27)

Fr.

a.

Blaise est désireux que tout se passe bien. well Blaise is eager that everything REFL goes Il (en/*l’) est désireux. is eager he (EN /*it. ACC ) ‘Blaise is wishful for everything to go well. He is wishful of this.’ b. Blaise désire que tout se passe bien. REFL goes well Blaise wishes that everything Il (le/*en) désire. wishes He (it.ACC /EN ) ‘Blaise wishes that everything goes well. He wishes it.’

However, Noailly (1999, 73) also points out that the pronouns en and y can be anaphors of adjectival complements only if these adjectives are used in combination with copular verbs, as is indeed the case in (27a).

4 Linking in Romance languages We saw in Section 1 that the linguistic representation of events relies on generalized patterns of splitting events into predicates and arguments, where the surface expression of arguments (grammatical relations) and their function (semantic role) are paired. The pairing patterns are called the linking process. We will now look at some of the main issues of linking found in Romance languages.

4.1 The accusative linking type Typologically speaking, Romance languages belong, at the highest level of generalization, to the “accusative” linking-type. In this linking-type, verbs have obligatory subject arguments, which can host a large variety of semantic roles (cf. ↗2 Subjects).

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In particular, predicates with (28a) or without (28b) an AGENT role have a grammatical subject: (28)

Sp.

a.

Carlos trabajaba todos los all. PL the Carlos work. IPFV . 3SG ‘Carlos was working every day.’ b. Ana estaba en su piso. in her flat Ana be.IPFV . 3SG ‘Ana was in her flat.’

días. days

This is in contrast to another major high-level linking pattern found across languages, the “ergative” type. In this linking-type, most generally speaking, the “subject of an intransitive clause is treated in the same way as the object of a transitive clause, and different from transitive subject” (Dixon 1994, 1). One example for this is Basque: (29)

Basque

a.

Gizon-ak mutil-a ikusi.du. boy-ABS saw man-ERG ‘The man saw the boy.’ b. Gizon-a etorri da. has arrived man-ABS ‘The man has arrived.’

The default argument form-type is the absolutive case (mutila in (29a), gizona in (29b)). If the predicate has an agent, as in (29a), then this AGENT is encoded in the ergative form-type, while the other role is still encoded in the default “absolutive” argument type. Having said this, there is one distinctive feature that figures prominently in discussions about the top-level linking type that Romance languages belong to: past participle agreement. Past participle agreement can be seen as a form of object agreement: (30)

It.

(La sua decisione) Gianni l’ ha his. F decision. F Gianni it.F . ACC has the. F ‘Gianni has made his decision.’ (Loporcaro 2010a, 150)

presa. taken. F

In modern Romance standard languages, past participle agreement with the direct object obtains only in a subset of syntactically defined contexts (cf. Loporcaro 2010b for a detailed breakdown, including a pattern of implicational relations between these contexts). However, in some varieties, it obtains across the board, including with lexical direct objects in canonical post-verbal position, as in the following example from Neapolitan, from Loporcaro (2010b, 226):

169

Argument structure and argument structure alternations

(31)

Nap.

Addʒə kɔttə/ cooked.F have. 1SG ‘I cooked the pasta.’

*kwottə cooked.M

a the. F

pastə. pasta. F

In other varieties, it is optional in that context, as in Périgord Occitan (cf. Miremont 1976, 53; apud Loporcaro 2010b, 233): (32)

Périgord Occ.

Avem fach/ have.1PL made.M ‘We made peace.’

facha made. F .

la the. F

paz. peace. F

Also, La Fauci (1994) and Loporcaro (e.g. 2010a,b) assume that in Proto-Romance, past participle agreement of lexical direct object with transitive verbs was obligatory. This assumption crucially hinges on another assumption, though, namely that in Proto-Romance, the past participle in combination with transitive verbs had already been reanalysed from a resultative construction to a perfective tense (cf. ↗11 Tense, aspect, mood). Otherwise the past participle agreement would not reflect agreement with the verb (i.e., indicating object agreement), but merely agreement within the DP. See the following example from the Novellino (late 13th c.), from Loporcaro (2010b, 232):  

(33)

OIt.

se tu hai trovati o veduti or seen.MPL if you have.2SG found. MPL mattina di questi uccelli birds.MPL morning of these.MPL ‘if you found or saw such birds this morning’

in in

questa this

In other words, Neapolitan, as in (31), may simply be a particularly conservative Romance variety, while Périgord Occitan (32) has moved a little closer towards the present standard Romance pattern. La Fauci (1994) and Bentley (2006) see the object agreement inherent in past participle agreement as indicative of a partial departure from the accusative coding pattern during the transition from Latin to Romance. They cast their analyses in Relational Grammar terms. The “pure” accusative type does not grammatically reflect the semantic relatedness of direct objects of transitive verbs on the one hand, and subjects that are “middle” on the other hand (see ↗6 Voice and voice alternations). This was arguably the situation in Latin. In Relational Grammar, a “middle” construction has a surface subject that is also a direct object at some earlier stage in the structural derivation (La Fauci 1994, 41). Examples for “middle” constructions are passives and reflexive clauses. Past participle agreement, now, is shared by direct objects of transitive verbs and subjects of middle constructions, namely when the latter have a perfect auxiliary whose linguistic ancestor is Latin ESSE (La Fauci 1994,

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50). Past participle agreement (whether with the auxiliary H ABERE or with the auxiliary ESSE ) thus creates a link between transitive direct objects and middle subjects, and its assumed obligatoriness in Proto-Romance would indicate a partial shift from the accusative type towards the ergative type. The later retreat of direct object past participle agreement in most, though not all, Romance varieties is indicative of a reversal (albeit incomplete) of this shift, moving back towards the accusative type (La Fauci 1994). More broadly, Loporcaro (2011) argues that object agreement is only one example of active alignment in Romance, i.e., a grammatically encoded prominence of the AGENT (as opposed to not overtly distinguishing between unergative and unaccusative subjects, as is characteristic of accusative languages). As a further example, he cites perfect auxiliary choice. With pure accusative alignment, there would be only one perfect auxiliary. The choice between ESSE and HABERE auxiliaries in Romance languages, however, reflects a fine gradation between the unaccuative and the unergative type. In other words, active alignment is not as uncommon in Romance as the accusative linking-type would imply.  

4.2 Impersonal verbs One exception to the obligatoriness of the subject as implied by the accusative linking-type is impersonal verbs (cf. also ↗2 Subjects). Impersonal verbs can come with (34a) or without (34b) an expletive subject. (34)

a. Fr.

b. It.

Il pleut. it. EXPL rains ‘It rains.’ Nevica. snows ‘It snows.’

In some varieties, there are strong pronouns that can be used as expletive subjects, including in the null subject languages. (35a) is from Dominican Spanish (Henríquez Ureña 1940, 226–228; cited in Hinzelin/Kaiser 2006); whereas (35b) is from Colloquial French: (35)

a. DomSp.

b. Fr.

Ello hay maíz. it has maize ‘There is maize.’ Ça flotte. it floats ‘It is raining cats and dogs.’

Argument structure and argument structure alternations

171

Chomsky (1981) proposed that there are two types of impersonal pronouns (whether surfacing as an expletive subject or not): those that are neither referential nor occupying an argument position, and those that are not referential but occupy an argument position. The latter are also called quasi-arguments. Kaiser/Oliviéri/Palasis (2013) argue that this distinction is morphologically reflected in the Corrèze variety of northern Occitan: whereas the expletive pronoun ko is used with quasi-arguments (36a), there is no pronoun at all with entirely impersonal verbs (36b) (data from Kaiser/ Oliviéri/Palasis 2013): (36)

Occ. a.

kɔ pl'øj rains it.EXPL ‘it is raining’ b. s'ɛbl seems ‘it seems’

Kaiser/Oliviéri/Palasis (2013) also suggest that this morphological split between quasi-arguments and entirely impersonal verbs is, diachronically speaking, an intermediate stage, since in the neighbouring variety of Creuze Occitan, the pronoun ko has spread to a large number of those contexts that have no pronoun at all in Corrèze Occitan.

4.3 Transitivity As a generalization concerning linking in accusative languages, whenever a predicate has an overtly expressed AGENT , the agent will be the subject of the active clause. As suggested in Section 1, the subject is semantically the most flexible type of grammatical relation, followed by the direct object. The indirect object, most commonly, represents a BENEFICIARY role. Prepositional objects are often very transparent in their role-semantic meaning; more specifically, when this meaning reflects the lexical meaning of the preposition that heads the prepositional phrase. Not only are Romance languages accusative languages and have thus obligatory subjects (whether overtly expressed or pro), they also widely use the direct object in active transitive sentences irrespective of the latter’s semantic role, thus generalizing the subject-direct object pattern (syntactic transitivity). Geisler (1988, 27) pointed out that a number of Modern French verbs with a subject-direct object pattern had different form-types in previous stages of the language:  

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Table 2: Changes in transitivity in French (Geisler 1988) Old French

Modern French

Gloss

X me poise

je regrette X

‘I regret X’

X me loist

je peux faire X

‘I am at liberty to do X’

m’estuet faire X

je dois faire X

‘I need to do X’

Table 2 shows that in Old French, the EXPERIENCER role was encoded as indirect object (me ‘to me’); in Modern French, it is a subject (je ‘I’). Taken together, Modern French has a split linking pattern where the subject and direct object function are relatively unmotivated (i.e., they are compatible with a wide range of semantic roles), whereas indirect and prepositional objects are more transparent (i.e., they are compatible only with a small range of semantic roles). Where Spanish is concerned, Vázquez Rozas (2006) argues that that language continues to have a more motivated linking pattern, with a more systematic mapping of EXPERIENCER roles to indirect objects, thus eschewing the relative uniformity of the French-type subject-object structure. Some examples for this pattern (from Vázquez Rozas 2006, 80):  



(37)

Sp.

Me gustó me. DAT enjoyed.3SG ‘I liked the book.’

el the

libro. book

(38)

Sp.

A Miguel ya no le apetecía NEG him.DAT tempted.IPFV . 3SG to Miguel already al parchís. at.the Parcheesi ‘Miguel did not feel like playing Parcheesi anymore.’

jugar play.INF

However, when the experiencer participant has greater agency and the event is dynamic and telic, the subject-object coding pattern is preferred (examples from Vázquez Rozas 2006, 99): (39)

Sp.

a.

Intentó olvidar a María. forget.INF A María tried.3SG ‘S/he tried to forget María.’ b. *Intentó que se le olvidara REFL him.DAT forget. PST . SBJV . 3SG tried.3SG that ‘S/he tried to forget María.’

María. María

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Argument structure and argument structure alternations

More broadly, with the argument structure of “psych”-verbs like Spanish gustar ‘to enjoy’, there is a linking conflict that can be expressed in terms of Dowty’s (1991) proto-role entailments. Both the experiencer participant and the phenomenon participant have AGENT proto-role as well as PATIENT proto-role characteristics. The experiencer participant may have the AGENT proto-role properties of volitional involvement, sentience, and existence independent of the event. However, it also may have the PATIENT proto-role characteristics of being causally affected by another participant, undergoing a change of state, and being stationary relative to another participant. Conversely, the phenomenon participant may have the AGENT characteristics of causing an event and existence independent of the event; and it may have the PATIENT characteristics of not existing independently of the event, and undergoing a change of state. This conflict leads to a good deal of inter-linguistic variability in the matching of EXPERIENCER and PHENOMENON with the subject grammatical relation, even among closely related Romance languages (examples from a comparison of translations, Koch 2001): (40) Pt.

Mas gostava but enjoyed.3SG

mais dela more of.her.DAT

(41)

It.

Ma a me piaceva di più but to me.DAT pleased.IPFV . 3SG of more capelli liberi. free. PL hair. PL ‘But I liked her better with her hair loose.’

(42)

Fr.

J’ aime la I like.1SG the champêtre […] rustic

(43)

Cat.

M’ agrada la frescor dels me.DAT please.3SG the coolness of.the tranquil·litat campestre […] tranquillity rustic ‘I love cool forests and rustic tranquillity.’

fraîcheur coolness

des of.the

com os with the

bois woods

cabelos soltos. hair.PL loose.PL con with

et and

la the

boscos woods

i the

tranquillité tranquillity

i and

la the

The coding conflict can also be held responsible for diachronic change within languages. Latin inodiare ‘to hate’, with an EXPERIENCER subject, is the etymon of French ennuyer, Spanish enojar, and Italian annoiare ‘to be bored’, all of which have a PHENOMENON subject (Koch 2001, 74):

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(44) a. Fr. b. Sp. c. It.

Ce travail Este trabajo Questo lavoro this job ‘This job is boring.’

m’ me mi me.DAT

ennuie. enoja. annoia. bore.3SG

Romanian a plăcea ‘to please’ has a long-standing linking pattern with a PH ENOMENON subject (cf. Koch 2001, 75): (45)

Rom.

Îmi place muzica me.DAT please.3SG music.the ‘I like symphonic music’.

simfonică. symphonic

However, this verb also has a more recent use with an 2001, 75): (46)

Rom.

Eu nu te NEG you. ACC I ‘I don’t like you.’

EXPERIENCER

subject (cf. Koch

plac. please. 1SG

Similarly, but proceeding in the opposite direction, Spanish gustar had a transitive linking pattern with an experiencer subject (examples from Vázquez Rozas 2006, 110): (47)

Sp.

[…]

si ya no gustas que la discreción y if already NEG please.2SG that the discretion and sciencia de Tirsi y de Demón te alumbren enlight.SBJV .3PL science of Tirsi and of Damon you.ACC de la ceguedad en que estás […] of the blindness in that be. 2SG ‘if you don’t like it that the discretion and science of Tirsi and Damon enlighten your blindness’

It is only since the eighteenth century that Spanish has had the current pattern with the PHENOMENON subject (Vázquez Rozas 2006, 96).

5 Argument alternations Very often, verbs do not have just a single arrangement of arguments. Some of this is idiosyncratic polysemy or homonymy. For example, the French verb tirer ‘to pull, to draw’ allows the following constructions:

Argument structure and argument structure alternations

(48) Fr.

175

a.

Luc tire la sonnette d’ alarme. Luc pulls the bell of alarm ‘Luc sounds the alarm bell.’ b. Marie tire sur la cible. Marie shoots on the target ‘Marie shoots at the target.’

(48a) has a direct object, (48b) a prepositional object, and the two verbs have very different meanings. This kind of alternation is not repeated across French verbs, and it appears to be relatively idiosyncratic. Some alternations are not repeated across verbs of the same language, but the same or a similar type of alternation may recur in other languages. For example, across Romance languages, the verbs for ‘to rent’ and ‘to rent out’ allow, up to a point, a shuffling of the “tenant” and “landlord” roles (cf. Koch 1991): (49)

(50)

Fr.

It.

a.

Michel a loué un appartement. Michel has rented a flat ‘Michel has rented a flat.’ b. Bernard a loué un appartement à un Bernard has rented a flat to a ‘Bernard has rented out a flat to a student.’

étudiant. student

a.

Gianni ha affittato una casa in via Garibaldi. Gianni has rented a house in via Garibaldi ‘Gianni has rented a place in via Garibaldi.’ b. Affittavano la loro casa mentre stavano in stayed. IPFV . 3PL in rented.IPFV . 3PL the their house while Inghilterra. England ‘They rented out their flat while they stayed in England.’

More importantly though, there are relatively “generalized” patterns of variation recurring across many verbs in the language, where the difference in perspective on the same event described in Section 1, reflected in the choice of different verbs referring to the same scene, is replicated at a lower level by different argument patterns of the same verb. In other words, generalized alternation is rooted in the selectivity and perspective inherent in the verbalization of events. Generalized alternation, where it is available, reflects the frequency that the distinctions it implies have in conversation. For example, many French verbs allow variation along the following lines:  

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(51)

Richard Waltereit

Fr.

a.

La voiture sortait du garage. of.the garage the car go-out. IPFV . 3SG ‘The car left the garage.’ b. Marie a sorti sa voiture du garage. Marie has taken-out her car of.the garage ‘Marie drove out of the garage.’

(51a) and (51b) can represent the same event; whereas (51a) only implies an agent, though, that agent is made explicit in (51b). (51a) is the anticausative variant of (51b). An explanation for the fact that the anticausative alternation is so widespread can be sought in the communicative importance of distinguishing between events with an identified agent and those without one. In the following, some of the most well-known types of generalized alternation will be discussed.

5.1 Anticausatives Anticausatives are argument structure alternations in which the same verb has a transitive variant with an agent and a (transitive or intransitive) variant without an agent. The object of the transitive variant has the same semantic role as the subject of the anticausative variant. In Romance languages, anticausatives are of two main types: an intransitive unmarked (i.e., anticausativity is not signalled by a special morpheme) and a transitive reflexive one (cf. Oesterreicher 1992; Heidinger 2010). The unmarked anticausative is also an unaccusative verb, i.e., an intransitive verb whose single argument is not an AGENT (cf. ↗2 Subjects). The following pairs or triplets of examples show the transitive variant with the unmarked intransitive anticausative (52), the reflexive anticausative (53), or both (54).  



(52)

It.

a.

Luigi ha uscito la Maserati dal parcheggio. Luigi has taken-out the Maserati of.the car-park ‘Luigi drove the Maserati out of the car park.’ b. La Maserati è uscita dal parcheggio. the Maserati is left of.the car-park ‘The Maserati left the car park.’

(53)

Sp.

a.

La piedra rompió la ventana. the stone break.PST .3SG the window ‘The stone broke the window.’ b. La ventana se rompió. REFL break.PST .3SG the window ‘The window broke.’

Argument structure and argument structure alternations

(54)

Fr.

177

a.

Gérard a cassé la branche. Gérard has broken the branch ‘Gérard broke the branch.’ b. La branche a cassé. the branch has broken ‘The branch broke.’ c. La branche s’ est cassée. REFL is broken. F the branch. F ‘The branch broke.’

All Romance languages have the reflexive anticausative alternation. The unmarked anticausative alternation is quite common in French (54b), where the verbs allowing it are also known under the name of “symmetrical verbs” (Rothemberg 1974). Another name for verbs affected by this alternation are “ergative verbs”, inspired by the name for the ergative coding pattern as used in linguistic typology (cf. Comrie 1978; Plank 1979; Dixon 1994). Rothemberg (1974) lists more than 300 French verbs of this type. The alternation is not available across the board, though: (55)

Fr.

a.

Luc coupe le fromage. Luc cut.3SG the cheese ‘Luc cuts the cheese.’ b. *Le fromage coupe. the cheese cut.3SG ‘The cheese cuts.’

The unmarked anticausative is more restricted in the other Romance languages – there are only about 30 such verbs in Spanish (Kailuweit 2012). Heidinger (2010) found that in French, the reflexive anticausative began to compete with the unmarked one from the twelfth century as a synonymous alternative. Over the history of French, the relative frequency of the reflexive anticausative, as opposed to the unmarked anticausative, has greatly increased. While Heidinger found no hard-andfast rule governing the choice between unmarked causative and reflexive anticausative (both are available, in principle, in all the semantic verb classes he distinguishes), he notes that reflexive anticausatives are increasingly dominating in change-of-state verbs (e.g. durcir ‘to harden’, renouveler ‘to renew’, gonfler ‘to swell’) and with inanimate subjects. Geisler (1988, 31‒32) sees the apparently increasing reliance on reflexive anticausatives (as opposed to unmarked, intransitive anticausatives) as part of the broad diachronic trend towards the generalization of the transitive subject-object coding pattern. The idea here is that, as subjects in Modern French transitive clauses do not need to be as high in agency as in Old French, let alone Latin, they become available for the representation of less semantically transitive (Hopper/Thompson 1980) events. As a result, the subject-object coding

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pattern can accommodate events with just one participant, as anticausatives indeed are.

5.2 Locative alternations A number of French verbs allow alternations in the expression of the relation between ‘containers’ and ‘contents’: (56)

Fr.

a.

Ils chargent le bateau de charbon. the ship of coal they load.3PL ‘They load the ship with coal.’ b. Ils chargent du charbon sur le bateau. PART coal on the ship they load.3PL ‘They load coal onto the ship.’

In (56a), the direct object represents the “container”; in (56b), it represents the “content”. Other examples for this alternation are: (57)

(58)

Fr.

Fr.

a.

Max perce le mur de trous. Max drill.3SG the wall of holes ‘Max drills holes in the wall.’ b. Max perce des trous dans le the Max drill.3SG some holes in ‘Max drills holes in the wall.’

Léa incruste le métal d’ émail. metal of enamel Léa encrust.3SG the ‘Léa encrusts the metal with enamel.’ b. Léa incruste de l’ émail dans the enamel in Léa encrust.3SG of ‘Léa encrusts enamel on the metal.’

mur. wall

a.

le the

métal. metal

There is a holistic effect with the “container” direct object (the ‘b’ variant in (56)‒(58)): the “container” (the ship, the wall, the piece of metal) is wholly affected. That is, the ship is fully loaded, the wall has been penetrated, the piece of metal is fully encrusted. Note, however, that there is some leeway for variation left. In other words, the ship need not be loaded to maximum capacity; it is sufficient that it carries what can pragmatically be accepted as a “full load”. The verbs relevant to this alternation have an incremental theme (Dowty 1991), i.e., the degree of completion of the event is reflected in the extent to which the THEME object is affected. The loading process is half complete when half of the ship’s  

Argument structure and argument structure alternations

179

loading compartment is filled, and it is complete when the loading compartment is filled. The alternation ultimately reflects the close semantic relationship that exists between containers and their contents. This motivates a change in perspective for the otherwise same kind of event.

5.3 The “swarm”-alternation Another generalized alternation relying on the container-content relationship is the “swarm”-alternation, where arguments can switch between subject and a prepositional object: (59)

Fr.

a.

(60) Fr.

a.

(61)

a.

It.

Le ciel brille d’ étoiles. stars the sky shine.3SG of ‘The sky is glistening with stars.’ b. Les étoiles brillent au ciel. at.the sky the stars shine.3PL ‘Stars are glistening in the sky.’ La baignoire déborde d’ eau. water the bathtub overflow.3SG of ‘The bathtub is overflowing with water.’ b. L’ eau déborde de la baignoire. the bathtub the water overflow.3SG of ‘Water is overflowing from the bathtub.’ La casa risuona di voci allegre. happy. PL the house resound.3SG of voices ‘The house is resounding with happy voices.’ b. I canti risuonano nella casa. in.the house the songs resound.3PL ‘The singing is resounding in the house.’

There is much debate about the precise semantic requirements for a verb to be capable of this alternation (e.g., Levin/Rappaport Hovav 1995; Mayoral Hernández 2007; Hoeksema 2008). In particular, the relationship of this alternation to the locative alternation is not fully understood. Clearly it is not every containercontent relationship that can enter it; there are additional requirements that seem to make verbs of sound and light emission (e.g. resounding, glistening) particularly suitable. As with the locative alternation, there is a holistic effect in the “swarm”-alternation, which is strongest when the “container” is in the subject

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position. Unlike locative alternations, though, there is no incremental theme here.

6 Conclusion Argument structure is a focal point for the understanding of grammatical structure. Whereas it was mostly regarded as an interface between syntax and lexicon in the 1970s and 1980s, linguists now appreciate the richness of argument structure and the diversity of its ramifications that resists any easy categorization. In particular, what perhaps sets argument structure apart from other domains of grammatical description are the vast differences in granularity at which it operates – from high-level generalizations, that amount to typological differences between sets of languages, to very low-level ones that may apply to just one verb. Perhaps argument structure is the domain of grammar that most directly reflects extra-linguistic experience and information.

7 References Bentley, Delia (2006), Split Intransitivity in Italian, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Blumenthal, Peter/Rovere, Giovanni (1998), Wörterbuch der italienischen Verben. Konstruktionen, Bedeutungen, Übersetzungen, Stuttgart, Klett. Busse, Winfried/Dubost, Jean-Pierre (1983), Französisches Verblexikon. Die Konstruktion der Verben im Französischen, Stuttgart, Klett. Busse, Winfried, et al. (1995), Dicionário sintáctico de verbos portugueses, Coimbra, Almedina. Chomsky, Noam (1981), Lectures on Government and Binding, Dordrecht, Foris. Comrie, Bernard (1978), Ergativity, in: Winfred P. Lehmann (ed.), Syntactic Typology: Studies in the Phenomenology of Language, Austin, TX, University of Texas Press, 329–394. Comrie, Bernard/Smith, Norval (1977), Lingua Descriptive Studies: questionnaire, Lingua 42, 1–72. Croft, William (2012), Verbs. Aspect and Causal Structure, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Detges, Ulrich (2004), Argument inheritance as a metonymic effect, Metaphorik.de 6, http://www. metaphorik.de/sites/www.metaphorik.de/files/journal-pdf/06_2004_detges.pdf (28.04.2016). Dixon, Robert M. W. (1994), Ergativity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Dowty, David (1991), Thematic proto-roles and argument selection, Language 67, 547–619. Du Bois, John W. (2003), Argument structure. Grammar in use, in: John W. Du Bois/Lorraine E. Kumpf/ William J. Ashby (edd.), Preferred Argument Structure. Grammar as Architecture for Function, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 13–59. Engel, Ulrich, et al. (1983), Valenzlexikon Deutsch-Rumänisch. Dicţionar de valenţă german-român, Heidelberg, Groos. Fillmore, Charles J. (1968), The case for case, in: Emmon Bach/Robert T. Harms (edd.), Universals in Linguistic Theory, New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1–88. Fillmore, Charles J. (1971), Types of lexical information, in: Danny D. Steinberg/Leon A. Jakobovits (edd.), Semantics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 370–392.

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Fillmore, Charles J. (1977), Scenes-and-frames semantics, in: Antonio Zampolli (ed.), Linguistic Structures Processing, Amsterdam, North-Holland, 55–81. Geisler, Hans (1988), Das Verhältnis von semantischer und syntaktischer Transitivität im Französischen, Romanistisches Jahrbuch 39, 22–35. Grimshaw, Jane (1990), Argument Structure, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Harley, Heidi (2009), The morphology of nominalizations and the syntax of vP, in: Monika Rathert/ Anastasia Giannadikou (edd.), Quantification, Definiteness and Nominalization, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 320–342. Heidinger, Steffen (2010), French Anticausatives. A Diachronic Perspective, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Henríquez Ureña, Pedro (1940), El español en Santo Domingo, Santo Domingo, Editora Taller. Hinzelin, Marc-Olivier/Kaiser, Georg A. (2006), Das neutrale Pronomen “ello” im dominikanischen Spanisch und die Nullsubjekteigenschaft, Konstanz, Universität Konstanz. Hoeksema, Jack (2008), The swarm-alternation revisited, in: Erhard Hinrichs/John Nerbonne (edd.), Theory and Evidence in Semantics, Stanford, CA, CSLI, 53–80. Hopper, Paul J./Thompson, Sandra A. (1980), Transitivity in grammar and discourse, Language 56, 251–299. Jackendoff, Ray S. (1990), Semantic Structures, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Jacobs, Joachim (1994), Kontra Valenz, Trier, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Kailuweit, Rolf (2012), Construcciones anticausativas: el español comparado con el francés, in: Valeriano Bellosta von Colbe/Marco García García (edd.), Aspectualidad – transitividad – referencialidad. Las lenguas románicas en contraste, Frankfurt etc., Lang, 133–158. Kaiser, Georg A./Oliviéri, Michèle/Palasis, Katerina (2013), Impersonal constructions in Northern Occitan, in: Ernestina Carrilho et al. (edd.), Current Approaches to Limits and Areas in Dialectology, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 345–367. Koch, Peter (1981), Verb – Valenz – Verfügung. Zur Satzsemantik und Valenz französischer Verben am Beispiel der Verfügungs-Verben, Heidelberg, Winter. Koch, Peter (1991), Semantische Valenz, Polysemie und Bedeutungswandel bei romanischen Verben, in: Peter Koch/Thomas Krefeld (edd.), Connexiones Romanicae. Dependenz und Valenz in romanischen Sprachen, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 297–306. Koch, Peter (2001), As you like it. Les métataxes actancielles entre expérient et phénomène, in: Lene Schøsler (ed.), La valence, perspectives romanes et diachroniques, Stuttgart, Steiner, 59–81. Koch, Peter/Oesterreicher, Wulf (1990), Gesprochene Sprache in der Romania: Französisch, Italienisch, Spanisch, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Kotschi, Thomas (1981), Verbvalenz im Französischen, in: Thomas Kotschi (ed.), Beiträge zur Linguistik des Französischen, Tübingen, Narr, 80–122. La Fauci, Nunzio (1994), Objects and subjects in the formation of Romance morphosyntax, Bloomington, IL, Indiana University Linguistics Club. Levin, Beth/Rappaport Hovav, Malka (1995), Unaccusativity: At the Syntax-semantics Interface, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Levin, Beth/Rappaport Hovav, Malka (2005), Argument Realization, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Lieber, Rochelle/Baayen, Harald (1999), Nominalizations in a calculus of lexical semantic representations, in: Geert Booij/Jaap van Maarle (edd.), Yearbook of Morphology 1998, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 175–198. Loporcaro, Michele (2010a), Variation and change in morphology and syntax. Romance object agreement, in: Franz Rainer et al. (edd.), Variation and Change in Morphology. Selected papers from the 13th International Morphology Meeting, Vienna, February 2008, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 149–175.

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Loporcaro, Michele (2010b), The logic of past participle agreement, in: Roberta D’Alessandro/Adam Ledgeway/Ian Roberts (edd.), Syntactic Variation. The Dialects of Italy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 225–243. Loporcaro, Michele (2011), Two euroversals in a global perspective: auxiliation and alignment, in: Peter Siemund (ed.), Linguistic Universals and Language Variation, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter Mouton, 55–91. Mateu, Jaume (2012), Structure of the verb phrase, in: José Ignacio Hualde/Antxon Olarrea/Erin O’Rourke (edd.), The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, Oxford, Blackwell, 333–353. Mayoral Hernández, Roberto (2007), A variation study of verb types and subject position: Verbs of light and sound emission, in: José Camacho et al. (edd.), Romance Linguistics 2006. Selected Papers from the 36th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), New Brunswick, March–April 2006, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 213–226. Miremont, Pierre (1976), La syntaxe occitane du Périgord, Toulouse, Miremont. Noailly, Michèle (1999), L’adjectif en français, Paris, Ophrys. Oesterreicher, Wulf (1992), SE im Spanischen. Pseudoreflexivität, Diathese und Prototypikalität von semantischen Rollen, Romanistisches Jahrbuch 43, 237–260. Olsen, Susan (1992), Zur Grammatik des Wortes. Argumente zur Argumentvererbung, Linguistische Berichte 137, 3–32. Plank, Frans (ed.) (1979), Ergativity: Towards a Theory of Grammatical Relations, London, Academic Press. Rappaport Hovav, Malka/Levin, Beth (1998), Building verb meanings, in: Miriam Butt/Wilhelm Geuder (edd.), The Projection of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors, Stanford, CA, CSLI, 97–134. Rizzi, Luigi (1990), Relativized Minimality, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Rothemberg, Mira (1974), Les verbes à la fois transitifs et intransitifs en français contemporain, The Hague, Mouton. Salvi, Giampaolo (2001), La frase semplice, in: Lorenzo Renzi/Giampaolo Salvi/Anna Cardinaletti (edd.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol. 1, Bologna, il Mulino, 37–127. Smith, John Charles (1992), Circumstantial complements and direct objects in the Romance languages: configuration, case, and thematic structure, in: Iggy Roca (ed.), Thematic Structure. Its Role in Grammar, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 293–316. Tesnière, Lucien (1959), Éléments de syntaxe structurale, Paris, Klincksieck. Thompson, Sandra A./Hopper, Paul J. (2001), Transitivity, clause structure, and argument structure: evidence from conversation, in: Joan L. Bybee/Paul Hopper (edd.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 27–60. Van Valin, Robert D. (1999), Generalized semantic roles and the syntax-semantics interface, in: Francis Corblin/Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin/Jean-Marie Marandin (edd.), Empirical Issues in Formal Syntax and Semantics 2. Selected Papers from the Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris (CSSP 1997), The Hague, Thesus, 373–389. Vázquez Rozas, Victoria (2006), “Gustar”-type verbs, in: J. Clancy Clements/Jiyoung Yoon (edd.), Functional Approaches to Spanish Syntax. Lexical Semantics, Discourse and Transitivity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 80–114.

David Heap, Michèle Oliviéri and Katerina Palasis

5 Clitic pronouns Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of the rather heterogeneous category of pronominal clitics in a range of Romance languages from a morpho-syntactic perspective. We describe the shapes of Romance clitic paradigms, including distinctions of person, number, gender, case, and animacy, as well as markedness restrictions and syncretism. Different types of clisis, clitic placement, and alternations between proclisis and enclisis, as well as allomorphic variations and clitic clusters are all placed in their theoretical contexts. In addition to considering clitic ordering with finiteness and their distribution in different types of clauses, we examine the distinction between clitic / weak pronoun / strong pronoun and present a typology of Romance subject clitics, including expletives and partial subject paradigms.  

Keywords: clitic pronouns, object, subject, features, clitic clusters, templates, partial paradigms, gradual emergence  

1 What is a clitic pronoun? The modern term “clitic”1 is backformed from enclitic, from the Ancient Greek ενκλίνειν ‘to lean on’ used by the second century grammarian Apollonius Dyscolus to describe pronouns which in prosodic terms “lean” on the preceding item (Householder 1981). From a phonological point of view, a clitic is a linguistic item which lacks independent stress. Hence, it cannot be used in isolation and needs to be attached to a stressed element, i.e., its host, in order to appear in an utterance.2 Clitics and hosts can belong to different grammatical categories, e.g., determiners and nouns, respectively. Nevertheless, it is the category of pronominal clitics (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive/ablative/partitive and locative, as well as reflexive), which has mainly caught the attention of Romance philologists and linguists over the years (as reported in Nevis et al. 1994; Heap/Roberge 2001; Spencer/Luís 2012), and which is still highly debated at least in phonology (prosodic structure), morphology (affix or word), syntax (structure, placement, order, status), interfaces, language acquisition, and language change  

1 This chapter deals with clitic pronouns and, where applicable, negation clitics. Other clitics, such as determiners, are therefore left aside. See ↗12 for full details on “Negation and polarity” and ↗20 on “Determination and quantification”. 2 A clitic can however be stressed if it occurs in a position which requires stress (e.g., after French imperatives: prends-le ‘take it’), but in such cases the clitic bears group stress and does not supply a stress of its own. See Wanner (1987a, 418) for other examples of clitics which may receive stress in certain contexts, but do not supply their own stress to a phonological word. DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-005

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(Hopper/Traugott 1993; van Riemsdijk 1999; Gerlach/Grijzenhout 2000; Heggie/Ordóñez 2005; van Gelderen 2011; Grohmann/Neokleous 2015, among others). Romance clitic pronouns have also been investigated in various theoretical frameworks, e.g., in Distributed Morphology (Bonet 1995; Dobrovie-Sorin 1999; Goldbach 2007; Pescarini 2010; Sandalo/Galves 2013), in Generative Syntax (Kayne 1975; Rizzi 1986; Uriagereka 1995; Sportiche 1996; Belletti 1999), in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Miller 1992; Miller/Sag 1997), in Lexical-Functional Grammar (Luís/Sadler 2003), in Optimality Theory (Legendre 2000; Grimshaw 2001; Gerlach 2002), and in Paradigm Function Morphology (Bonami/Boyé 2007, among others). Romance philologists and linguists traditionally distinguish strong pronouns, which pattern syntactically with nominal phrases, from clitic pronouns, which have reduced phonological forms compared to the strong paradigm, and sometimes have distinct syntactic positions. One of the modern benchmarks in the study of clitichood was set by Kayne (1975), who formalized the fact that French object and subject clitics have “some special syntactic status” compared to strong pronouns and nominal phrases. Both series of clitics share a number of characteristics (Kayne 1975), which are often referred to in the literature. Although Kayne initially analyzed French, some of the properties can be extended across Romance languages (with rare exceptions, see Section 3.1), as illustrated for French and Spanish (1) where the clitics are ungrammatical without a verbal host: (1) a.

Definitional characteristics of clitic pronouns: Clitics cannot appear without a verb: i. Fr. Qui viendra avec nous? who come-FUT . 3SG with us ‘Who will come with us? ii. Sp. ¿A quién ven? to whom see-PRS . 3PL ‘Who do they see?

Moi. me Me.’ A mí. to me Me.’

/ /

*Je=. I=

/ /

*Me=. me=

b.

Nothing can take place between a clitic and its host (except another clitic): i. Fr. Jean / *Il=paraît=il, est fou. be-PRS . 3SG crazy Jean / he= seem-PRS . 3SG = it ‘Jean / He, so it seems, is crazy.’ ii. Sp. Lo=veo a veces / *Lo=a veces veo. times / him=at times see-PRS . 1SG him=see-PRS . 1SG at ‘I see him sometimes.’

c.

Clitics cannot be coordinated: i. Fr. Jean et lui / *il=partiront Jean and him / he=leave-FUT . 3PL ‘Jean and he will leave soon.’

bientôt. soon

Clitic pronouns

ii. Sp.

d.

*La=y Juan veo / *La=y / her=and her=and Juan see-PRS . 1SG ‘I see her and Juan. / I see her and him.’

185

lo=veo. him=see-PRS . 1SG

Clitics cannot receive contrastive stress: i. Fr. LUI / *IL=partira le premier. first him / he=leave-FUT . 3SG the ‘HE will leave first.’ ii. Sp. *LO=veo, pero no LA=veo. NEG her=see-PRS . 1SG him=see-PRS . 1SG but ‘I see HIM but I don’t see HER.’

The “special syntax” described in Kayne (1975) is also highlighted in Zwicky (1977). Zwicky defined “special clitics” as forms with a stressed counterpart, e.g., French me vs moi ‘me’, and a different syntax from the full counterpart, e.g., je connais Jean ‘I know Jean’ vs je le connais ‘I know him’.3 Zwicky (1977, 5) distinguished these “special clitics” from “simple clitics”, which are cliticized for stylistic reasons and do not have a specific syntax, e.g., he sees her vs he sees’r. Following Givón (1971), Zwicky (1977) considered special clitics as “remnants of an earlier system of simple clitics”, since object proclitics reflect earlier object-verb orders found for instance in French and Spanish.4 As illustrated above, the host of a clitic pronoun in modern Romance is always a verb, which can be finite or non-finite (Ramsden 1963; Wanner 1987b). Three possibilities for the clitic to attach to the verb are attested in modern Romance languages (see examples in (2)): (a) proclisis, when the clitic precedes its host, (b) enclisis, when the clitic follows its host, and (c) mesoclisis, when the clitic is inserted between its host and inflectional affixes.5 Described since the second century by the Greek grammarian Apollonius Dyscolus (cf. Householder 1981), pronominal enclisis was initially the dominant pattern in the early Indo-European and Romance languages (Wackernagel 1892; Meyer-Lübke 1897). Proclisis came later in the evolution of Romance languages from Latin, first as a competitor to enclisis, then as the dominant pattern with finite 3 Special clitics are mainly found in Romance and Slavic languages, according to Zwicky, though as a descriptive category, clitics can be found in many language families. 4 The third class described by Zwicky (1977) is that of “bound words”, which are clitic forms with no full counterparts, e.g., the Latin conjunction –que ‘and’. These forms necessarily cliticize to one word and form a semantic unit with the entire phrase or clause. 5 Among modern Romance languages, mesoclisis is specific to Portuguese (see Section 3.2), though it is more widely attested in Old Spanish and Old Catalan (Ramsden 1963). The term “proclitic” was coined during the nineteenth century by the German philologist Gottfried Hermann (Lambert 2001, 28). The term “clitic” is consensually attributed to Eugene A. Nida (1949, vii; as in Anderson 2005, 1). Romance languages do not display endoclitics (but see Zwicky 1977 and Harris 2002 for examples of endoclitics in Indonesian and Caucasian languages).

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verbs, except in European Portuguese, Galician and Asturian. Dating the transition remains controversial however, depending on the language under investigation.6 (2) a.

b.

c.

Types of clisis: Proclisis: Fr. Je=ne=te=le=donne pas.7 I=NEG =you.DAT =it.ACC =give-PRS . 1SG NEG ‘I do not give it to you.’ Enclisis: It. Voglio dar=ti un libro. give.INF =you.DAT a book want-PRS .1SG ‘I want to give you a book.’ Mesoclisis: EPt. Levar=vo=los=ia. take-INF =you.PL =them.ACC =COND . 1SG ‘I would take them to you.’

Another significant step in the study of clitics was introduced by Cardinaletti/Starke (1999), who defined clitics in opposition to two classes of pronouns, i.e., strong and weak pronouns, considering the standard bipartition strong vs clitic as “descriptively insufficient”, as illustrated in (3) (examples from Cardinaletti 1991).  

(3) a.

b.

c.

Cardinaletti/Starke’s (1999) tripartition of pronominal systems (It.): A strong paradigm: Non *a lui dirò mai *a lui tutto NEG to him say-FUT . 1SG never to him everything ‘I will never say everything to him.’ A weak paradigm: Non *loro= dirò mai =loro tutto NEG them.DAT = say-FUT . 1SG never =them.DAT everything ‘I will never say everything to them.’ A clitic paradigm: Non gli= dirò mai *=gli tutto NEG him.DAT = say-FUT . 1SG never =him.DAT everything ‘I will never say everything to him.’

a to

lui. him

*=loro. =them.DAT

*=gli. =him.DAT

6 For French, both the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries and the seventeenth century have been proposed (Meyer-Lübke 1897 vs Geisler 1982, as reported in Pusch 2001, 383), whereas the fourteenth century seems consensual for Occitan (Ronjat 1908), and the fifteenth century has been proposed for Spanish (Fontana 1993). 7 Since our approach here is morpho-syntactic rather than phonological, all the clitics cited are glossed showing cliticization to their syntactic hosts.

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187

The authors consider syntactic, morphological, phonological, and semantic characteristics throughout different languages (as recapitulated in Table 1), and rank the three classes of pronouns in terms of “structural deficiency”, i.e., missing functional projections (C the locus of referential features and Σ the locus of prosodic features). In this framework, (i) all languages display three classes of pronouns (but some are homophonous, e.g., il ‘he’ in French can be weak or clitic), (ii) there are always two classes of deficient pronouns (clitic and weak) vs one class of non-deficient pronouns (strong), and (iii) clitics are considered as “severely deficient” elements (lacking C and Σ) compared to weak pronouns, which are “mildly deficient” (lacking only Σ). The latter are intermediate elements and share some properties with clitics and others with strong pronouns, as shown in Table 1. The relevant pronoun is chosen following the “Minimize Structure” economy principle (Cardinaletti/Starke 1999, 198).  



Table 1: Cardinaletti/Starke’s (1999) classes of pronouns Classes

Strong

Weak

Clitic

Syntax

Phrase (XP)

Phrase (XP)

Head (X)

Missing projections

None

C

C and Σ

Position

Non derived

Derived

Derived

Distribution

+





Morphology

lui

8

≥ 9

il





il

Semantics

[+ human] [–expletive]

[± human] [±expletive]

[± human] [±expletive]

Restructuring10



+

+

Word-accent

+

+



Cardinaletti/Starke (1999) claim that their three-way distinction sheds light on a number of matters, such as the form of object enclitics in French imperatives, e.g., aide-moi ‘help me’, which are analyzed as weak pronouns in this framework, not strong ones. The authors also address doubling, and claim that doubling can only be clitic-doubling. Example (4b) shows that French preverbal subject pronouns can be analyzed as clitics in the variety of French which also requires repetition in coordination, but are analyzed as weak pronouns in other varieties.11

8 Refers to isolation, separation, and coordination, as exemplified in (1a), (1b) and (1c), respectively. 9 This characteristic is controversial. See our discussion in Section 2. 10 Refers to phonological processes such as liaison (e.g., Fr. elle[z] ont ‘they have’) and reduction phenomena, such as contraction (e.g., I saw ’ya). 11 French postverbal subject pronouns are also analyzed as clitics in this framework. A discrepancy between pre- and postverbal subject pronouns in French is also highlighted in Sportiche

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Doubling can only be clitic-doubling (Cardinaletti/Starke 1999): Northern Italian Dialect: strong + clitic Ela la=canta. she it.FEM =sing-PRS . 3SG ‘She sings.’ Colloquial French: NP + clitic Jean il=mange. John he=eat-PRS . 3SG ‘John eats.’

Doubling vs dislocation is also a topic of much debate in Romance languages (since e. g. Jaeggli 1982).12 Doubling is generally defined as the obligatory co-occurrence of a clitic and a co-referential nominal phrase or strong pronoun, as exemplified in (5a,b) with Spanish. This phenomenon is also observed in dialects of Spanish and in Romanian (Strozer 1976; Rivas 1977; Jaeggli 1986; Suñer 1988, and Borer 1984; Dobrovie-Sorin 1990, respectively), considered impossible in Italian (5c), and controversial in French (5d,e), where grammaticality depends to a large extent on the (standard vs colloquial) register used: (5) a.

b.

c.

d.

e.

Clitic doubling in Romance languages: una carta a ellai. Sp. Lei=mandé letter to her her.DAT =send-PRF . 1SG a ‘I sent a letter to her.’ (Fontana 1993, 44) Sp. *Mandé una carta a ella. a letter to her send-PRF . 1SG ‘I sent a letter to her.’ (Fontana 1993, 44) domani Giannii. It. *Loi=vedrò him=see-FUT .1SG tomorrow Gianni ‘I will see Gianni tomorrow.’ (Anagnostopoulou 2006, 524) Jeani. Fr. *Marie lei=voit Jean Marie him=see-PRS .3SG ‘Marie sees Jean.’ (Jaeggli 1986, 18) moii. Fr. Jean mei=connaît me Jean me=know- PRS .3SG ‘Jean knows me.’ (Kayne 2000, 164)

(1999) and Roberts (2010). The status of subject clitics in French is further discussed in Section 4.2.2. 12 This chapter will limit itself to doubling since dislocation is dealt with in ↗13 Dislocations and framings.

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The co-occurrence of the clitic with a co-referential constituent raises a number of questions with regard to movement or base-generation of the clitic, case-assignment, interpretational features of the nominal phrase/strong pronoun (specificity, animacy), and the morpho-syntactic status of the clitic (syntactic argument or agreement marker). A number of characteristics have therefore been put forward in order to disentangle these matters, among which the presence or not of a preposition preceding the nominal phrase/strong pronoun (known as “Kayne’s Generalization”, Kayne 1975),13 and the presence or not of an intonational break between the nominal phrase/strong pronoun and the clitic (Jaeggli 1986). Both arguments are discussed by Anagnostopoulou (2006), and Deshaies/Guilbault/Paradis (1993), Rossi (1999), and De Cat (2007), respectively. This introduction aimed at sketching the backdrop: clitics are heterogeneous, paradoxical and fascinating linguistic elements which have been examined by philologists and linguists for quite a while now and which are still the focus of many investigations. Let us now move forward, and get into the detail of more specific matters revolving around the morphology of clitics (Section 2), object clitics (Section 3), subject clitics (Section 4) and their interaction with negation (Section 5). Section 6 concludes this chapter on clitic pronouns.  





2 Clitic morphology As seen above, across Romance languages, pronominal paradigms distinguish strong (also called “stressed” or “disjunctive”) pronouns from clitic (“unstressed”, “conjunctive”) forms. Clitics often have distinct forms according to grammatical person, number, often case, sometimes gender and other features.

2.1 Case, person, and number Romanian is exceptional in having a fully parallel set of distinct dative and accusative clitics in all six persons, and two genders in the third singular, with minimal syncretism: third plural dative has the same form for masculine and feminine, otherwise all forms are distinct (Table 2):14 13 “Kayne’s Generalization” (Kayne 1975) states that clitic doubling is possible only when the coreferential constituent to the clitic is a prepositional phrase, e.g., Sp. loi vimos a éli ‘we saw him’. The generalization holds for direct objects in Spanish and Romanian, and indirect objects in French (e.g., Paul la luii présentera à Juani ‘Paul will introduce her to Juan’, Borer 1984, 40). The preposition assigns Case to the nominal phrase/strong pronoun, which is also assigned a theta role. The clitic is generated directly to the left of the verb, absorbs the Case assigned by the verb, but bears no theta role. It has no argument status. 14 Table 2 includes only clitic pronouns: like most Romance languages, Romanian also contrasts clitics with strong pronouns (in the nominative, there is no distinction).

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Table 2: Romanian clitic pronouns Accusative clitics

Dative clitics

P115



îmi (mi)16

P2

te

îţi (ţi)

P3m

îl

P3f

o

P4

ne

ne (ni)

P5



vă (vi / v-)

P6m

îl

P6f

le

îi (i)

le (li)

In most Romance languages (see below for French, Spanish and Italian), first and second person (singular and plural) clitics show syncretism for case. In (6) the clitics te (Spanish and French) and ti (Italian) have identical forms in each language, whether the clitic is an accusative or a dative one: (6)

a. Sp. b. It. c. Fr.

Cuando te=ve, te=habla. Quando ti=vede, ti=parla. 2SG . DAT =speak-PRS . 3. SG when 2SG . ACC =see-PRS . 3SG Quand elle te=voit, elle te=parle. when she 2SG . ACC =see-PRS . 3SG she 2SG . DAT =speak-PRS . 3. SG ‘When she sees you, she speaks to you.’

Along with Romanian, distinct dative and accusative forms are also found in some varieties of Rhaeto-Romance (Haiman 1988), and in Galician only for second person singular accusative te vs second person singular dative che. Otherwise, case distinctions only appear with third person (singular or plural) clitics. Table 3 illustrates this distinction in a paradigm where there is just a single series of strong pronouns with no case distinctions, a subject/object contrast among clitics in all persons except first and second plural, and distinct nominative, accusative and dative clitics in the third person singular and plural:

15 These tables number grammatical persons using P1 through P6, rather than using the corresponding glosses, to underline that 1PL forms are not really plurals of 1SG forms, etc. 16 Short forms of the dative clitics are used in contact with vowels and with certain verbal moods.

191

Clitic pronouns

Table 3: French personal pronoun paradigms17 Strong pronouns

Nominative clitics

P1

moi

je

me

P2

toi

tu

te

P3m

lui

il

P3f

Accusative clitics

le

elle nous

P5

vous eux

lui

la

P4

P6m

Dative clitics

ils

P6f

les

elles

leur

While the French paradigm shows a single strong pronoun for all cases, in all six grammatical persons, the Spanish (Table 4) and Italian (Table 5) paradigms have a subject/object contrast in some or all of the strong pronouns, and case distinctions among third person (singular and plural) clitics: Table 4: Spanish personal pronoun paradigms18 Strong subject pronouns

Strong object pronouns

Accusative clitics

Dative clitics

P1

yo



me

P2

tú (vos)19

ti (vos)

te

P3m

él

lo (le)

P3f

ella

la

P4

nosotros / nosotras

nos

P5

vosotros / vosotras

os

P6m

ellos

los

P6f

ellas

las

le

les

17 This table does not include the reflexive clitic se, nor the generic subject pronoun on, the locative y or the genitive-ablative-partitive en. 18 Table 4 does not include the clitics corresponding to the formal usted, ustedes, which share P3 and P6 forms respectively, nor the reflexive se. 19 The second person singular vos is regularly used in River Plate (Argentine, Uruguayan) and some Central American (Nicaraguan, Guatemalan) varieties of Spanish and sporadically in a few others, instead of tú, with distinct verbal morphology but an identical clitic form te.

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Table 5: Italian personal pronoun paradigms20 Strong subject pronouns

Strong object pronouns

Accusative clitics

P1. SG

io

me

mi (me)

P2

tu

te

ti (te)

P3m

egli/lui

lui

lo

gli (glie)

P3f

ella/lei

lei

la

le (glie)

P4

noi

ci (ce)

P5

voi

vi (ve)

Dative clitics

P6m

essi/loro

loro

li

loro/gli (glie)

P6f

esse/loro

loro

le

loro/gli (glie)

In addition to dative and accusative case marking in third person singular and plural clitics, a number of Romance languages have distinct clitics for genitive-partitive (French and Catalan en, Italian ne, Occitan n’en, Oliviéri 1991–1992) and for locative arguments and/or adjuncts (Italian vi, Catalan hi, French y). In French, Occitan and Catalan, genitive-partitive forms can also be used as ablatives, while in some Sardinian varieties there is a unique three-way distinction amongst these “adverbial” clitics: locative bi, genitive-ablative nde, and non-initial -nke, which could once only be ablative but became a general locative in other varieties (Lai 1996, 44). Ethical or non-argumental datives do not correspond to any argument of the verb in question, but rather express how a participant is involved in or affected by an action, as in (7) from Gasiglia (1984): (7)

Nissart (Occ.) Lou=mi=pènsi. it.ACC = me.DAT = think-PRS . 1SG ‘I think it over.’

Very common in Ibero-Romance, Occitan varieties and Italian, ethical datives are less frequent in French (where however they can be responsible for otherwise ungrammatical sequences, cf. Goldbach 2007). They can occur alone (8a) or grouped with other clitics as in (8b) from Hourcade (1986). In Galician two datives can occur in the same clause (8c):

20 Again, reflexives are omitted. The parenthetical forms correspond to a regular vowel alternation before sonorants (me, te, ce, ve) or to more colloquial alternate forms (glie, gli) rather than to paradigmatic differences in clitic forms.

193

Clitic pronouns

(8)

a. Sp.

b. Gsc.

c. Gal.

Me=apagaste la tele. the.F TV 1SG . DAT = shut.off-PST . 2SG ‘You shut the TV off on me.’ Que u= se= t= at= QUE it.M = himself.DAT = you.DAT = it.N = ‘He ate it all up on you.’ Non che=me=gustou nada. NEG 2SG . DAT =1SG . DAT =pleased nothing ‘I didn’t like anything.’

mingè eat-PST . 3SG

tot. all

Note that in (8b) there are two different clitics expressing it, the masculine u and the neuter at (see Section 2.2). Bastida (1976) and Smith (2001) characterize forms like (8c) as “datives of solidarity”.

2.2 Gender and animacy Across Romance, gender is never explicitly marked on participant clitics (first and second persons, singular and plural), regardless of whether they have masculine or feminine reference. In (9), the clitic can trigger feminine agreement with its intended referent, despite not showing any overt marking of a gender feature: (9)

a. Sp.

b. Fr.

Te=veo cansada. tired.FSG 2SG . ACC =see.PRS .1SG ‘You seem tired to me.’ (said to a person of feminine gender) On=me=croyait heureuse. happy. FSG one= 1. SG . ACC =believe.PST ‘People thought I was happy.’ (said by a person of feminine gender)

On the other hand, gender is widely marked in non-participant clitics, i.e., third persons singular and (less often) plural, particularly accusative forms (see French, Spanish and Italian paradigms above). These third person accusative forms are often identical to definite articles (typically descended from the same Latin etyma: ILLUM , ILLA , ILLOS , ILLAS ). Romanian is unique in having also distinct third person feminine forms for both singular and plural dative clitics (see Table 2 above). In other Romance languages, this is a common area of syncretism: French and Spanish have no gender distinctions among third person dative clitics, singular or plural, while Italian only has distinct gender forms in the third person singular objects. Many varieties of Colloquial French show syncretism by neutralizing 3F forms to 3M (Moignet 1965, 158). Since there is no systematic neuter gender in modern Romance in the sense of a third nominal class that parallels feminine and masculine for a group of  



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nouns,21 the mixed gender nouns in Italian, Romanian and Rhaeto-Romance take masculine agreement in the singular and feminine agreement in the plural, and therefore the corresponding clitics are either masculine or feminine, accordingly: no ‘neuter’ clitic is needed. Among Romance clitics, Catalan ho (and various equivalent forms in different Occitan dialects, see for instance (8b) above) used for non-lexical or clausal objects may be called “neuter” pronouns to distinguish them from other third singular feminine and masculine forms (10a); in other Romance languages, these functions are fulfilled by third singular masculine forms, as in (10b,c): (10)

a. Cat. b. Fr. c. Sp.

Això que dieu, ho faré. that what say-PRS .2PL it.NEUT do-FUT . 1SG Ce que vous dites, je= le=ferai. Lo que ustedes dicen, yo lo=haré. that what you.2PL say-PRS . 2PL I it.ACC =do-FUT . 1SG ‘What you say, I will do it.’

Another place where a clitic called “neuter” occurs is in Asturian, where there is indeed a systematic morphological feature which is distinct from feminine and masculine, not as a nominal class but as a morphological category. These so-called “neuters” are used to mark uncountable or “mass” readings of nouns, as opposed to count readings, which are necessarily either masculine or feminine. While not really a lexically “neuter” gender (despite the traditional term neutro de materia used in this area as well as for an analogous phenomenon in central Italian dialects, see Hall 1968; Haase 2000), non-countable reference in these varieties is used for antecedents that are understood to be part of a “mass”, as in (11a,b), rather than discrete countable individuals, as in (11c,d).22 (11)

Ast.

a.

El vino, vendemos=lo / sell- PRS .1PL =it.NEUT . ACC the.M wine ‘Wine, we sell it.’

*=lu. =it.M . ACC

21 Some Romance languages have traditionally used the term ‘neuter’ for nouns that have masculine MS G , le dita ‘the fingers’ agreement in the singular and feminine in the plural, e.g. It. il dito ‘the finger’ MSG FPL , Rom. loc ‘place’ MSG MS G , locuri ‘places’ FP L . Although in some cases these nouns are descended etymologically from Latin neuter nouns, they do not in fact form a distinct nominal class which is morphologically separate from masculine and feminine, and so they are in fact more accurately described as ‘mixed gender’. 22 These eastern Asturian data are drawn from Fernández-Ordóñez (2012, 82–83), but similar distinctions are found in other Asturian varieties.

Clitic pronouns

195

b. La lana, vendemos=lo / *=la. wool sell- PRS .1PL =it.NEUT . ACC =it.F . ACC the.F ‘Wool, we sell it.’ c. El coche, vendemos=lu / *=lo. sell-PRS .1PL =it.M . ACC =it.NEUT . ACC the.M car ‘The car, we sell it.’ d. La moto, vendemos=la / *=lo. motorbike, sell-PRS .1PL =it.F . ACC =it.NEUT . ACC the.F ‘The motorbike, we sell it.’ A mass/count distinction similar to the one in Asturian carries over into some Spanish varieties of Northern Spain, where loísta varieties use lo in “mass” or uncountable contexts analogous to (11a,b) above, regardless of gender (12a) or case (12b), see Heap (2002b) for a Feature Geometry analysis: (12)

Sp.

a.

La cerveza lo=tomamos con it. NEUT = drink-PRS .1PL with the.F beer ‘Beer, we drink it with tapas.’ b. Lo=añaden de todo hoy everything today it.NEUT =add-PRS . 3PL of ‘They add all sorts of things to it nowadays.’

tapas. tapas.PL día. day.

In such varieties of Spanish, le is no longer used only for dative contexts, but also in masculine accusative cases, where the object is definite and (archetypically) human: animate leísmo as in (13a) and (more rarely) inanimate leísmo (13b). Feminine accusative clitic la is used for dative contexts, or laísmo (13c): (13)

Sp.

a.

Le=conocí. him.DAT = meet-PST .1PL ‘I met him.’ b. Le=compramos. it.ACC = buy-PST .1PL ‘We bought it.’ c. La=di un her.DAT =give-PST . 1SG a.M ‘I gave her a gift.’

regalo. gift

Most speakers of Spanish varieties from Northern Spain accept (13a) with definite animate objects, especially humans, but the acceptance of (13b) with inanimates is much less widespread. It has been proposed by Kayne (1975) and Cardinaletti/Starke (1999) that while clitics can refer to inanimates (14b, Table 1), such readings are not so

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felicitous with strong pronouns (14a).23 What is however clear is that the feature [human] plays a role in for example the selection of French dative animate lui (14c) vs its inanimate counterpart y (14d): (14)

Fr.

pense plus qu’ à euxi. ?Ses livresi, il=ne to them his books he.NOM =NEG think-PRS .3SG only ‘His books, he can only think of them.’ partout, ton bouquini. b. On lei=lit one.NOM it.ACC =read-PRS .3SG everywhere your book ‘One reads it everywhere, your book.’ c. Son fils lui=ressemble. his son 3. SG . DAT =resemble-PRS .3SG ‘His son looks like him.’ d. Ça y=ressemble. that 3. SG . DAT =resemble-PRS .3SG ‘That looks like it.’

a.

A similar effect applies in Catalan for the selection of locative hi and dative li (Rigau 1982). Thus, the role of features relating to [+/– animate] or [+/– human] referents in clitic paradigms still needs further study.  

2.3 Syncretism and allomorphy As the above non-exhaustive sampling of forms makes clear, clitics potentially mark an accumulation of different morphological features: grammatical person-number, combined with case and gender. These combinations make for a high level of syncretism in clitic paradigms: as noted, gender is uniformly absent from first and second persons, and case is mostly absent. Masculine and feminine genders are typically marked in third person singular clitics, but not always in third person plural: gender marking is less likely in the marked (plural) number. As seen above, gender is also less likely to be marked with dative forms than with accusative forms. Syncretism is generally more likely in plurals, with shared forms predominating in first and second persons plural, in many paradigms. There is also a tendency in some areas (dialects of North Western Italy, Eastern Spain, and Valencian) for reflexive clitics to spread from third plural to second plural and first plural (Bonet 1991; Parry 1997; de Benito Moreno 2015), leading to an invariable reflexive clitic in some cases (e.g. Sursilvan RhaetoRomance, Haiman 1988).

23 This proposal is however controversial: see Dannell (1973) and Zribi-Hertz (2001) on French; Tasmowski/Reinheimer (2001) on Portuguese and Romanian.

Clitic pronouns

197

Allomorphic variation in clitic systems can be relatively trivial, as in the case of the morphophonological process (called elision or apocope in different philological traditions) whereby final vowels of clitics are dropped before a vowel initial host: (15)

Fr.

Elle me=parle et and she 1SG . DAT =speak-PRS .3SG ‘She speaks to me and she calls me.’

elle she

m’=appelle. 1SG . DAT = call-PRS . 3SG

This can be seen as a syllabification process that is not specific to clitic pronouns, since something similar happens with other stressless words, such as definite articles, in similar circumstances. Syllabic conditioning is carried even further in Catalan, where a given clitic can have up to four different forms: preceding a consonant, preceding a vowel, following a consonant or following a vowel (16).24 (16)

Cat.

a.

M=apropava a casa i em=vaig REFL . 1SG = approach-PST . 1SG to home and REFL . 1SG = AUX . PST . 1SG enutjar. angry ‘I was approaching home and I got angry.’ b. Puc apropar=me a casa. to home. can-PRS . 1SG approach=REFL . 1SG ‘I can get myself home.’ c. Apropa=m a casa. to home approach- IMP . SG =1SG ‘Take me home.’

Somewhat more complex is the case of Italian clitics ending in -i in the absence of other clitics (17), which regularly end in -e before certain other clitics (17b): (17)

It.

a.

Gianna mi=parla. Gianna me.DAT =speak-PRS . 3SG ‘Gianna speaks to me.’ b. Gianna me=lo=da. Gianna me.DAT =it.ACC =give-PRS . 3SG ‘Gianna gives it to me.’

The precise reasons that govern this vowel lowering are subject to some debate (see for example Pescarini 2011).

24 Bonet (2002, 954) suggests that these clitics are in fact underlyingly asyllabic, and that the schwa is supplied where needed as a default vowel in order to create licensed syllables.

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Because of multiple syncretisms and allomorphy, some Romance clitics can be quite ambiguous in reference, especially when in sequences or clusters (see below).

3 Object clitics 3.1 Typology of object clitics across Romance According to Wanner (1987a) almost all modern Romance languages have clitic pronoun systems that share (in varying degrees) two basic groups of properties: (i) stresslessness: “attachment in prosodic and segmental terms to some element(s) in the surrounding string, and unavailability for expressive purposes” (1987a, 415), and (ii) placement of the clitic with respect to the verb in its clause: “linearization of clitic and anchor according to some distribution key, cluster internal ordering restrictions, various types of co-occurrence limitations” (1987a, 415). The only (qualified) exceptions Wanner cites are Brazilian Portuguese (which appears to be replacing clitic object pronouns with non-emphatic strong forms) and Sursilvan Rhaeto-Romance (where clitic object pronouns have been completely replaced by strong forms). Creoles (sometimes called neo-Romance languages e.g., by Posner 1996) would be other exceptions, to the extent that they are viewed as part of the Romance family. So, object clitics can be broadly viewed as a characteristic property of most of the Romance family, though of course one shared by some other language families, whether geographically nearby or related, or more distant.  

3.2 Object clitic placement While the overwhelming trend in modern Romance is for pronominal clitics to appear as proclitics on finite verbs as in (18a,b,c), there are a few cases (European Portuguese, Galician, Asturian) where pronominal clitics can appear as enclitics to finite verbs in certain contexts, as in (18d). (18)

a. Sp. Ella te=ha b. Rom. Ea te=a c. Fr. Elle t=a she you.2SG . ACC = AUX - PRS . 3SG ‘She called you.’ d. EPt. Ela chamou=te. she call-PST . 3SG =you.SG . ACC ‘She called you.’

llamado. sunat. appelé. call- PTCP

Clitic pronouns

199

By having proclisis with infinitives (19a), French sets itself apart from other Romance languages, where enclisis is the norm (19b), whether negated or not (Hirschbühler/ Labelle 1994; 2001): (19)

a. Fr. b. Sp.

Tu peux le=faire you can-PRS . 2SG it=do-INF Puedes hacer=lo o or can-PRS . 2SG do-INF =it ‘You can do it or not do it.’

ou or no NEG

ne

pas

NEG

NEG

le=faire. it=do-INF

hacer=lo. do-INF =it

With multi-verb constructions, possible positions for clitics increase. Typically clitic pronouns can procliticize (or “raise”) to a higher finite verb or encliticize to the lower infinitive (20). With causatives as well, Spanish allows two positions (21), as do other Romance languages other than French. Standard French however allows only one position for clitics, leading to some potential ambiguity, (22): (20)

Sp.

a.

Me=lo=puedes hacer./ me. DAT = it.ACC = can-PRS 2SG do-INF / b. Puedes hacér=me=lo. do-INF =me. DAT = it.ACC can-PRS . 2SG ‘You can do it for me.’

(21)

Sp.

a.

(22)

Fr.

Tu peux me=le=faire peindre. you can-PRS . 2SG me. DAT = it.ACC = do-INF paint-INF ‘You can have it painted for me.’ / ‘You can have me paint it.’

Me=lo=puedes hacer pintar. me. DAT = I t.ACC = can- PRS .2SG do-INF paint-INF b. Puedes hacér=me=lo pintar. can-PRS . 2SG do-INF =me. DAT = it.ACC paint-INF ‘You can have it painted for me.’

Again, Modern Standard French is the exception in requiring the proclitic on the infinitive (23a), though earlier and regional varieties allow a clitic to “climb” to the higher verb (23b), and Standard French still displays “clitic climbing” to the higher verb in the case of causatives (23c), see ↗8 Causative and perception verbs, for more detail: (23)

a.

Modern Standard French Je peux le=faire. it.ACC = do-INF I can-PRS . 1SG

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b.

c.

Southern Regional French Je le=peux faire. do.INF I it.ACC = can-PRS . 1SG ‘I can do it.’ Modern Standard French Je le=lui=fais I it.ACC = him.DAT = make-PRS . 1SG ‘I make her/him write it (the book).’

écrire write.INF

(le livre). the book

In Occitan dialects, the constructions in (23a,b) are attested but the most frequent one has clitic climbing to above the finite verb, as in (24): (24)

Occ. Vous=lou=dève you.PL . DAT = it.ACC = must-PRS . 3SG ‘She/he must say it to you.’

dire. say-INF

In some languages, multiple verb constructions provide more possible sites for clitics to appear: (25)

Cat.

a.

Hi=vaig voler contribuir. LOC = AUX - PST . 1SG want-INF contribute-INF b. Vaig voler=hi contribuir. AUX - PST . 1SG want-INF = LOC contribute-INF c. Vaig voler contribuir=hi. AUX - PST . 1SG want-INF contribute-INF = LOC ‘I wanted to contribute to it.’

Positive imperatives regularly show enclisis (26a,b), while negative imperatives (in some situations these forms are actually subjunctives) usually show proclisis (26c,d), again with a few exceptions (26e): (26)

a. Sp. b. Fr.

c. Sp. d. Fr.

Di=lo! Dígan=lo! Digámos=lo! Dis=le! Dites=le! Disons=le! say-IMP . 2PL =it say-IMP . 1PL =it say-IMP . 2SG =it ‘Say it, let’s say it!’ No lo=digas! No lo=digamos! NEG it=say-IMP . 2SG NEG it=say-IMP . 1PL Ne le=dis pas! Ne le=disons NEG it=say-IMP . 2SG NEG NEG it=say-IMP . 1PL ‘Don’t say it, let’s not say it.’

pas! NEG

Clitic pronouns

e. Québécois, Colloquial French Dis=le pas! Disons=le NEG say-IMP . 1PL =it say-IMP . 2SG =it ‘Don’t say it, let’s not say it.’

201

pas! NEG

The Italian imperatives present a mixed case, with enclisis in affirmative imperatives as in French and Spanish above, but mixed proclisis and enclisis with negative imperatives (27):25 (27)

It.

a.

Non

dir=lo! Non say-INF =it NEG b. Non lo=dire! Non NEG it=say-INF NEG ‘Don’t say it, let’s not say it!’ NEG

diciamo=lo! say-IMP . 1PL =it lo=diciamo! it=say-IMP . 1PL

The normal position for clitics is of course “outside” finite verbal morphology, but in some vernacular varieties of Spanish, the formal imperative third person plural verbal morpheme -n can be found “doubled” after a clitic, as in (28a) and in some cases this “outside” -n can replace the normal verbal morpheme “inside” the clitic, as in (28b). (28)

Vernacular Sp.26

a.

Siénten=se-n! sit-IMP .3 PL = REFL -3 PL b. Siénte=se -n! sit-IMP = REFL -3. PL ‘Sit down!’ (plural)

vs

Sp.

siénten=se! sit-IMP .3 PL = REFL

This phenomenon is particularly common following se, but can also occur with other clitics in some varieties. Harris/Halle (2005) analyze such forms as ‘Kopy’ (28a) or Verbal Inflection Metathesis (28b), which in turn are seen as cases of either full or partial reduplication in a Distributed Morphology framework (see Halle/Marantz 1993). They do not however extend their account to cover cases where plural -n inflection occurs after pronouns which are encliticized to nonfinite forms such as infinitives (29a) or gerundives (29b) (Harris/Halle 2005, 213–214), although Pato/Heap (2012) show that in Spain the dialects which allow structures like (29a) are a subset of those which allow (28a,b):

25 There is also proclisis with formal affirmative imperatives Lo dica! Lo dicano!, but as Russi (2008, 64) points out, these can be considered subjunctive, i.e., finite forms. 26 As Harris/Halle (2005, 196, note 2), “Examples of this sort are documented in regions of Spain and every Latin American country as well as in dialects of contemporary Ladino (diaspora JudeoSpanish).”

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Vernacular Sp.27

a.

Quieren ver=me-n. want-PRS .3 PL see.INF =1 SG -3 PL ‘They want to see me.’ b. Están besándo=se-n. kissing=3REFL -3 PL are-3PL ‘They are kissing each other.’

These nonstandard Spanish constructions are somewhat reminiscent of cases of mesoclisis in European Portuguese, where one or more clitics can appear after a verb stem but before future or conditional morphology: (30)

EPt. Mostrar=t=o-emos. show.FUT =2SG . DAT = 3MSG . ACC - 1PL ‘We will show it to you.’

With compound tenses, on the whole, the overall trend follows the generalization of proclisis to the finite verb. (31)

a. Sp. b. It.

Lo=he L=ho it=have.1SG ‘I saw it.’

visto. visto. see.PTCP

In Standard French and Italian, proclitics are among the class of preverbal nominal objects which can trigger past participle agreement (see also ↗3 Objects, and ↗7 Auxiliaries).28  

(32)

a. Fr. b. It.

La pomme, je l=ai mise sur la table. I it=have.1SG put. PTCP . F on the.F table. the.F apple La mela, l=ho messa sulla tavola. it=have.1SG put. PTCP . F on-the.F table. the.F apple ‘The apple, I put it on the table.’

Romanian, where there is no participle agreement, follows the general pattern of clitics preceding the auxiliary, but with one idiosyncratic exception, the feminine singular object clitic, which instead follows the past participle:

27 Vernacular forms found in a number of Peninsular Spanish varieties (Pato/Heap 2012). 28 According to Tsakali/Anagnostopoulou (2008), there is a correlation between clitic doubling and agreement of past participles, such that if a language has clitic doubling, it lacks participle agreement, and if a language has participle agreement, it lacks clitic doubling. They propose that this correlation “provides the key to an understanding of the clitic doubling parameter” (2008, 322).

Clitic pronouns

(33)

203

Rom. a.

L=am văzut. see-PTCP 3MSG . ACC =have-PRS . 1SG ‘I saw him.’ b. Am văzut=o. see-PTCP = her. ACC have- PRS .1SG ‘I saw her.’

Piedmontese clitic “inversion” (Wanner 1987a; Parry 1997) provides another example of exceptional clitic placement in compound tenses (34a), as does clitic placement under negation in Albidona Calabrian (34b) (Manzini/Savoia 2008). (34)

a.

b.

Piedmontese Ha tirato=mi un sasso. throw-PTCP =me a stone. have-PRS . 3SG vs Italian Mi=ha tirato un sasso. throw-PTCP a stone. me=have-PRS . 3SG ‘S/he threw a stone at me.’ Calabrian [ ɔ llə=ddʒ u=βistə ] NEG him=have-PRS . 1SG him=see- PTCP ‘I have not seen him.’

French is also distinct from other Romance languages in having fixed-form presentational structures which are derived from verbal proclisis as in (35a), while the Spanish (35b) and Italian (35c) equivalents attest enclisis from earlier stages of the language: (35)

a. Fr.

b. Sp. c. It.

Me=voici. Me=voilà. me=here.is me=there.is ‘Here I am. There I am.’ He=me aquí. here.is=me here. Ecco=mi. here.is=me ‘Here I am.’

3.3 Clitic clusters When more than one pronoun is cliticized to the same verb, the clitics usually appear in a fixed order. In most cases, this fixed order is the same in both proclisis and enclisis, as in Spanish and Catalan (36a,b,c,d). In Standard French (36e,f) the order is

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reversed in enclisis, but not in Québec French and some varieties of Colloquial French (36g): (36)

a. Sp. b. Cat.

c. d.

e. f.

g.

Se=me=lo=ha podido llevar. Se=m=ho =va poder endur. REFL =me.DAT =it. ACC = AUX - 3SG can(-PTCP ) take.away-INF ‘S/he was able to take it away from me.’ Sp. Ha podido llevár=se=me=lo. Cat. Va poder endur=se=m=ho. AUX . 3SG can-(PTCP ) take.away-INF =REFL =me.DAT =it. ACC ‘S/he was able to take it away from me.’ Fr. Elle me=les=envoie. she me.DAT =them. ACC =send-PRS . 3SG Fr. Envoie=les=moi! send-IMP =them. ACC =me.DAT ‘She sends them to me. Send them to me!’ Québec French Envoie=moi=les! send-IMP =me.DAT =them. ACC ‘Send them to me!’

Since at least Perlmutter (1971), this (largely) fixed order has been described in terms of a morphological “template” with slots for each clitic or class of clitics. This approach corresponds to the recognition that the order of clitics in a cluster cannot be determined solely by syntactic roles, since it is typically sensitive to morphological features (person, number, etc.) as well. This leads to the template or “output condition on clitic pronouns” proposed by Perlmutter (1971, 45) for Spanish clitic pronouns, where II, I and III represent grammatical persons: (37)

Surface structure constraint for Spanish clitic pronouns: se II I III

As Perlmutter (1971, 51) shows, this template allows the sequences in (38) but filters out any sequence of clitics which is not ordered according to the template, as in (39): (38)

Sp.

a.

Se=me=le=perdió

el pasaporte al niño. the passport to.the boy ‘The boy’s passport went missing on me. / I lost the boy's passport.’ b. Nuestra finca, te=nos=la=robaste. farm you. DAT = us. DAT = it. F . ACC =robbed-2SG our. F ‘You stole our farm from us.’ REFL =me.DAT =it.M . DAT = lost-3SG

Clitic pronouns

c.

(39)

Sp.

Te=le=comiste el pan, pero a to you. DAT =him.DAT =ate-2SG the bread but no te=me=lo=comas. NEG you. DAT =me. DAT =it. ACC =eat-IMP ‘You ate his bread up, but don't eat mine up as well.’

205

mí me

a.

*Se=le=me=perdió el pasaporte al niño. REFL =it.M . DAT =me.DAT =lost-3SG the passport to.the boy ‘The boy’s passport went missing on me. / I lost the boy's passport.’ b. *Nuestra finca, la=te=nos=robaste. farm it.F . ACC =you.DAT =us.DAT =robbed-2SG our.F ‘You stole our farm from us.’ c. *Le=te=comiste el pan, pero a mí you. DAT =ate-2SG the bread but to me him.DAT = no lo=me=te=comas. NEG it. M . ACC =me.DAT =you. DAT =eat. IMP ‘You ate his bread up, but don’t eat mine up as well.’

In some cases, such as French and Occitan, case distinctions also play a role, but in all cases morphological features come into play as well. The equivalent template for French, from Perlmutter (1971, 57), relies on specific clitic forms, except for third person clitics, where reference to grammatical function (accusative vs dative in third person) is necessary: (40) French Template: Nominative ne

me/te/nous/vous/se

III

III

ACC

DAT

y

en

Note however that in some regional varieties of French, the order for third person clitics can differ from the standard one described in (40), and the order DAT - ACC is also attested, even if less frequent (see Avanzi/Stark 2016). Clusters of two third person clitics often present challenges for templates, as their order can vary, one or the other can be deleted, or the two can be combined into another opaque form, in regional French (Heap/Kaminskaïa 2001) as in other Romance varieties. In Occitan we find both orders: third person dative followed by third person accusative in some dialects, and third person accusative followed by third person dative in others. Often one or the other can be omitted. For Italian clitics, Vincent (1988, 291) gives the following relative order:

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Italian Template

1S G

3SG /PL ( DA T )

2PL

2SG

1PL

R EFL

3SG S G / PL

IM PERS

PA RT

mi

gli (m.) le (f)

vi

ti

ci

si

lo, la, li, le

si

ne

This template in fact requires a number of stipulations in interpretation (Wanner 1987a, 423–424). In addition, the third person plural clitic loro always follows verbal expressions (Wanner 1987a, 425), not clustering with other clitics. There have been decades of debate with arguments in favor of and opposed to a filter or template-based approach (summarized in Heap/Roberge 2001; see also Goldbach 2007 for a review and a Distributed Morphology treatment of French preverbal clitics using impoverishment and filters; and e.g. Heger 1966, Bossong 2003 for treatments of clitic objects in e.g. French, Spanish and Romanian as “object conjugation”). Templates have been criticized as purely descriptive devices which do not motivate clitic orders in any way, and do not predict why a given order should be allowed while others are filtered out. Alternative approaches which attempt to derive the order of clitic clusters from syntactic movements have never been entirely successful either (Kayne 1975; Uriagereka 1995; Heap/Roberge 2001). In the Optimality Theory framework, constraints of the A LIGN family have been used to describe possible clitic orderings (Grimshaw 2001; Gerlach 2002; Anderson 2005). But again, without underlying principles which explain why one order should be preferred or ranked higher than another, such mechanisms remain purely descriptive. Some authors have proposed that the internal order of clitic sequences reflects the relative morphological markedness of the pronoun’s internal featural makeup, from least to most specification (Harris 1995; Heap 2005), but this hypothesis has yet to be generalized and tested with a broad range of Romance clitic data. Other researchers (e.g. Sportiche 1996; Manzini/Savoia 2008) attempt to correlate clitic order with positions of different functional heads, but as in other cases these solutions are only partially satisfactory. When we consider the Romance languages as a whole, clitic clustering remains a puzzle: partial solutions appear promising in some areas but less than adequate in others. The robust generalization across the Romance family appears to be that the ordering of clusters cannot rely on syntactic information or on morphological features or specific phonological forms alone, but that clitic linearization must be able to access these different types of information at various times and in different ways. While the overwhelming majority of clitic clusters appear with fixed orders, a certain number of Spanish varieties allow vernacular orders (42a) to appear variably alongside standard orders (42b), just for a subset of clitics:

Clitic pronouns

(42)

a.

b.

Vernacular Spanish29 Si no riego, me=se=seca water- PRS . 1SG me. DAT =REFL =dries-PRS . 3SG if NEG Standard Spanish Si no riego, se=me=seca water- PRS .1SG REFL =me. DAT =dries- PRS .3SG if NEG ‘If I don’t irrigate, everything dries up on me.’

207

todo. all todo. all

Such variable orders occur in various vernacular varieties of Spanish and they affect a fairly small part of the clitic paradigm: just the order of the reflexive se with first singular and second singular clitics (se me / me se; se te / te se), but not for example with first plural and second plural clitics. These variable ordering data present serious challenges for syntactic movement, template or constraint-based accounts of clitic ordering, but an analysis using Feature Geometry allows for just the attested range of variation at least in these varieties (Heap 2005). Opacity is a related phenomenon which arises when a sequence of underlying clitics produces a surface form which cannot be directly derived from the input. The most well-known example is the so-called “spurious se” (Perlmutter 1971) in Spanish, where a third person dative le or les, when followed in a cluster by a third person accusative la, lo, las or los, surfaces as se: (43)

Sp.

a.

Les=doy las flores. the.F . PL flowers them.DAT . 3PL =give- PRS . 1SG Se=las=doy. REFL = them. ACC . F . PL = give- PRS . 1SG ‘I give the flowers to them. I give them to them.’ b. Las flores, a ellas, puedo flowers to them.F . PL can-PRS . 1SG the.F . PL dár=se=las pronto. give-INF = REFL = them.ACC . F . PL soon ‘The flowers, to them, I can give them to them soon.’

While it may be the most (in)famous instance, spurious se is certainly not the only case of opacity amongst Romance clitic clusters. In Italian the sequence reflexive si + impersonal si becomes ci si (Wanner 1987a). Bonet (1991, 88) offers a striking Catalan example of clitic opacity, in which the combination of the neuter object clitic ho (44a) and the ablative clitic en (44b) does not produce what might appear to be the

29 These “inverted” or variable sequences are documented in a number of nonstandard Peninsular Spanish varieties (Heap 2005), and they have also been reported in various South American varieties as well.

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combination of the two, *n’ho (44c) but rather a cluster of completely different clitics, a third person direct object and locative l’hi (44d). Similarly, Soto-Corominas (2017) examines sequences of clitics which are transparent in Standard Catalan, combining a second-person object clitic with an inherent reflexive as in (44e), but are opaque in vernacular Central Catalan, where the equivalent nonstandard cluster has the first person reflexive me (which is recoverable because it shares the φ-features of the coindexed subject) replaced by the default reflexive se as in (44f): (44) Cat.

a.

Això, ho=vaig treure de la caixa. this it.NEUT . ACC =AUX . 1SG take- INF from the.F box ‘This, I took it out of the box.’ b. De la caixa, en=vaig treure això. box ABL = AUX . 1SG take- INF this from the.F ‘Out of the box, I took this out.’ c. Això, de la caixa, *n=ho=vaig treure. box ABL =it.NEUT . ACC = AUX . 1SG take- INF this from the.F d. Això, de la caixa, l=hi= vaig treure. box, it.3= LOC =AUX . 1SG take- INF this from the.F ‘That, from the box, I took it out.’ e. Standard Cat. Te=m=acosto. 2SG =REFL . 1SG =approach-PRS . 1SG f. Central Cat. Se=t=acosto. REFL . 3=2SG =approach-PRS .1SG ‘I approach you.’

These sorts of data are among the evidence which leads Bonet to propose what has been called “Bonet’s generalization” about surface opaque clitic sequences more generally: (45)

Bonet’s generalization: “nontransparent output forms will have the same surface form as other clitics of the language instead of becoming an arbitrary phonological sequence.” (1991, 2–3)30

30 The few exceptions to this otherwise fairly robust generalization include the historical predecessor of the spurious se. In Old Spanish this combination surfaces as gelo, gela, gelos, gelas, where the first element ge- /ʒe/ does not correspond to anything else in the grammar (it is a phonetic reflex of the corresponding Latin pronoun ILL I ( S ) in this position, before another clitic). Significantly, this outlier form did not survive, but instead was replaced by se, another clitic existing in the system (not the result of any regular sound change), thus bringing it into line with Bonet’s generalization (see Heap 2005).

Clitic pronouns

209

In a number of Spanish dialects, the standard “spurious se” construction has vernacular variants in which the plural feature of an underlying indirect object surfaces instead of the direct object clitic los, despite its singular antecedent: (46)

Vernacular Spanish31 El libro, a los chicos, the book to the.M . PL boys ‘The book, to the boys, I give it.’

se=los=doy. REFL = them. M . PL = give-PRS . 1SG

Even more surprising, in a subset of these varieties it is not only the plural feature that can transfer from one clitic to another, but also the feminine gender: (47)

Vernacular Spanish El libro, a las chicas, the book to the.F . PL girls ‘The book, to the girls, I give it.’

se=las=doy. REFL =them.F . PL =give-PRS .1SG

Harris/Halle (2005) see phenomena like (46) and (47) as outside their Distributed Morphology analysis, since in this case the plural -s “moves” before Vocabulary Insertion, unlike the forms in (28a,b) above, which analyze as (fully or partially) reduplicative. In addition to the constraints mentioned so far, there exist in a number of Romance languages morpho-syntactic filters that bar certain sequences of clitics, such as the well-known person case or me lui constraint (e.g., Bonet 1994), which bans sequences where first or second person clitics precede a third person dative clitic (see also the French and Italian Templates in (40) and (41) above).

4 Subject clitics 4.1 Typology of subject clitics across Romance While all Romance languages display a full paradigm of strong pronouns (see Tables 3, 4, 5), most of them lack a full paradigm of clitic pronouns in subject position. Strong subject pronouns are usually optional and grammatical person is normally marked by the (rich) verbal morphology as shown in Table 6:32

31 See note 29. 32 Note that Swiss Rhaeto-Romance stands out here since (strong) subject pronouns are almost always obligatory although the language possesses quite strong verbal morphology (see Haiman 1988). These varieties reportedly also have inverted subject clitics or particles, especially in interrogation and other V2 contexts, that do not directly correspond to a preverbal particle in form or regularity. These elements

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Table 6: Present indicative of verb ‘to speak’, showing no obligatory subjects Italian

Spanish

Catalan

(European) Portuguese

Romanian

Nissart (Occitan dialect)

P1

parlo

hablo

parlo

falo

vorbesc

parli

P2

parli

hablas

parles

falas

vorbeşti

parles

P3

parla

habla

parla

fala

vorbeşte

parla

P4

parliamo

hablamos

parlem

falamos

vorbim

parlan/-èn

P5

parlate

habláis

parleu

falais

vorbiţi

parlas/-ès

P6

parlano

hablan

parlen

falam

vorbesc

parlon

As shown in ↗2 Subjects, the verbal endings in these languages seem to be sufficient to distinguish the persons, at least for this mood-tense (present indicative). Indeed, in other mood-tenses, such as the imperfect or the subjunctive, the verbal endings can display syncretisms and a strong subject pronoun can be inserted in the subject position in order to specify the person (e.g., It. che io parli, che tu parli, che egli/ella parli, Sp. que yo hable, que él/ella hable, EPt. que eu fale, que ele/ela fale, etc.). Moreover, the gender for P3 is not marked by the verbal ending and again, speakers can resort to a strong pronoun if they want to disambiguate the form (It. che egli/lui parli, che ella/lei parli). In the generative tradition, the observation that overt subject agreement morphology tends to correlate with the optionality of overt subject pronouns is attributed to Taraldsen’s Generalization (1980), though Chomsky (1981; 1982) is often cited as a source for the hypothesis of a Null Subject Parameter (see below). By contrast, other Romance languages, most notably Standard French, display a full paradigm of subject clitic pronouns (see Table 3). In Standard French, these elements are obligatory, unless a full referential nominal phrase or a strong referential pronoun occupies the subject position ((48a) vs (48b)). Consequently, (48c) without dislocation of the first subject, is ungrammatical in this system. (48) Fr.

a.

*(Il) parle. he speak-PRS . 3SG ‘He speaks.’ b. Tom / Lui / Le professeur Tom him the teacher ‘Tom/He/The teacher speaks.’

parle. speak-PRS . 3SG

are formally distinct from the preverbal subject clitics and cannot just be derived via syntactic inversion (Dieter Wanner, p.c.).

Clitic pronouns

c.

211

*Tom il parle. Tom he speak-PRS . 3SG ‘Tom he speaks.’

This division between languages that require the presence of a subject (either a pronoun or a noun phrase) and those that do not is postulated to reflect the “Null Subject Parameter” or “Pro-drop Parameter” said to distinguish “Non Null Subject Languages” (NNSL) like Standard French from “Null Subject Languages” (NSL) like Italian (Perlmutter 1971; Chomsky 1981; 1982; Rizzi 1982).33 Safir (1985), Wanner (1993) and Heap (2000) among others argue that the various properties this “parameter” is claimed to “bundle” together do not in fact constitute a unified grammatical phenomenon. The parameter is generally conceived of as binary. However both values can appear in the history of a given language (e.g., Adams 1987; Vance 1997; Kaiser 2009, for French). In such cases, transitions from one value to the other are obviously not sudden, and the progressive change can be evidenced by the intermediate stages represented by the dialects. In fact, apart from the clear-cut distinction between NSLs, located in the South of the Romance area, and NNSLs, in the North, a number of Romance systems display frequent subject pronouns but not for all persons, nor all moods or tenses or all syntactic contexts. Many scholars have studied the behavior of these varieties, notably of the Northern Italian Dialects (henceforth “NIDs”, see among others Renzi/Vanelli 1983; Rizzi 1986; Brandi/Cordin 1989; Renzi 1992; Poletto 1995; 1999; 2000; Manzini/Savoia 2005), the Northern Occitan Dialects (henceforth “NODs”, see Heap 2000; 2002a; Oliviéri 2010; 2011; Kaiser/Oliviéri/Palasis 2013; Oliviéri/Lai/Heap 2014; Oliviéri/Lai/Heap 2017) or Franco-Provençal (see Diémoz 2007; Hinzelin/Kaiser 2012), where different configurations are observed.34 Firstly, when broken down by the Person feature (P1 through P6), subject clitic paradigms can show from one to almost all clitics, as shown in Table 7.35

33 See ↗2 Subjects. 34 For a complete presentation of the Brazilian pronoun system, see ↗2 Subjects. 35 Unless otherwise indicated, all the examples in this section are from Manzini/Savoia (2005) and from the T HESOC database (Dalbera et al. 1992–).  



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Table 7: Subject paradigms in northern Italian Dialects (NIDs) and northern Occitan Dialects (NODs) NIDs

P1

NODs

Chioggia

Tende

Firenze

St-Sauves d’Auvergne

Vélines

St-Pardouxla-Rivière

to sleep

to sing

to sleep

to be

to be

to be

(e) 'dɔrmo

jo se

'dɔrmɔ

'kantu

sej te ʃɛʲ



P2

ti 'dɔrmi

ti 'kanta

tu d'dɔrmi

si

P3m

a 'dɔrme

aɻ 'kanta

e 'dɔrme

e

ej

ue

P3f

la 'dɔrme

a 'kanta

la 'dorme

e

ej

le

e si 'dɔrme

sɔ̃

sɔ̃

nu sũ

vu ddor'mihe

si

P4

dor'mimo

kan'tamu

P5

dor'mi

kan'tai

ty se

bu ʃej

vu se

P6m

i 'dɔrme

li 'kantaᵑ

e 'dɔrmano

sɔ̃

sɔ̃

i sũ

P6f

le 'dɔrme

le 'kantaᵑ

le 'dɔrmano

'sɔ̃

sɔ̃

la sũ

aɻ 'tʃou

e 'ɸjɔve

plɛɔ

kɔ plɔ

'pjɔve

it rains

kwɔ plø

Secondly, the data in Table 7 (last row) indicate that expletives can be present or not in meteorological constructions (Kaiser/Oliviéri/Palasis 2013; Oliviéri/Lai/Heap 2014). Thirdly, at least for NODs, the clitic has not yet become completely obligatory, hence the contrasts in (49), where forms with and without subject clitics coexist in the same grammar: (49)

a.

b.

Eyvirat [j=a'bite dɛ̃ la the I=live-PRS . 1SG in [aˈbite dɛ̃ la in the live-PRS . 1SG ‘I live in the next street.’ Bugeat [kɔ=ˈpløu] that=rain-PRS . 3SG [ˈpløu] rain-PRS . 3SG ‘It rains.’

ʁy 'a street ʁy'a street

a at da at

ku 'tɑ] side kuˈtɑ] side

Fourthly, in many NIDs, the subject clitic (50a) can or must double referential noun phrases like (50b) and indefinites (50c):

Clitic pronouns

(50)

a.

b.

c.

Pigna [eɾ u=ˈdɔɾme] him he=sleep-PRS . 3SG ‘He sleeps.’ Firenze [la mi fiʎˈʎola la=sˈtudja the my daughter she=study-PRS . 3SG ‘My daughter studies too much.’ Grizzo [niˈsun al=ˈveŋ] nobody he=come-PRS . 3SG ‘Nobody comes.’

213

ˈθrɔppo] too much

There are many research questions still to be investigated regarding partial subject paradigms, particularly in under-studied vernacular varieties, but it seems clear that reducing the presence or absence of subjects to a single binary parameter is not a descriptively adequate approach.

4.2 The status of subject clitics The question of the morpho-syntactic status of subject clitics is a longstanding one. Indeed, while the term “clitic” refers in principle to a phonological property, these elements can be analyzed as syntactic arguments (Kayne 1975; Rizzi 1986; De Cat 2005; Roberts 2010) or as morphological agreement markers (Roberge 1990; Auger 1995; Culbertson 2010).36 The debate is very vigorous, in particular with respect to French, where both analyses compete. Under the latter analysis, some authors consider French to have become a null subject language once again, with subject clitics reanalyzed as inflectional prefixes (Roberge 1990). Throughout the years, key studies on standard and dialectal systems have devised criteria in order to assess the morpho-syntactic status of these subject clitics (e.g. Kayne 1975; Zwicky/Pullum 1983; Rizzi 1986; Auger 1994; Poletto 2000, 15‒30). These properties are synthesized in Table 8:

36 See Section 4.3 on their emergence.

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Table 8: Criteria for the morpho-syntactic status of clitics Property

Tests

Syntactic argument

Morphological marker

(i)

Obligatory clitic

α: coordination β: doubling



+

(ii)

Fixed preverbal position

γ: interrogation



+

(iii)

No intervening elements between clitic and verb

δ: negation



+

Property (i) focuses on the contexts of appearance of the clitic, i.e., coordination (test α) and doubling (test β). An agreement marker, unlike a syntactic argument, should always appear in both these contexts. Property (ii) hinges upon the placement of the clitic with regard to the verb in interrogative structures (test γ). An agreement marker should remain preverbal, whatever the position of the verb. Finally, Property (iii) concentrates on the type of constituents found between the clitic and the verb. Only other agreement markers can intervene between the verb and an agreement marker, which excludes intervening negative markers (test δ). Recent research on micro-variation in Romance dialects and oral French helped shed new light on this controversial point, since it now appears that the status of the clitic is not the same in all the different systems.  



4.2.1 Dialects: NIDs and NODs Italian scholars generally agree that subject clitics in the various NIDs are morphological affixes or agreement markers in these languages (see among others Renzi/ Vanelli 1983; Rizzi 1986; Brandi/Cordin 1989; Renzi 1992; Poletto 1993; 1995; 2000; Manzini/Savoia 2005).37 More precisely, Poletto (1999; 2000) proposes that the subject clitics are different functional heads in the inflectional domain. The facts on which their conclusions rely are illustrated in (51), where the NIDs are submitted to the different tests listed above. The clitic is obligatorily present (tests α and β), even with an indefinite pronoun like nobody, it is always preverbal (test γ) and cannot be separated from the verb by the negative marker (test δ).

37 However, for an alternative analysis, see Cardinaletti/Repetti (2010).

Clitic pronouns

(51)

The NIDs (α) Obligatory clitic?: coordination Trento La=magna pan e *(la) beve bread and she drink-PRS . 3SG she=eat-PRS . 3SG ‘She eats bread and (she) drinks wine.’ (β) a.

b.

215

vin. wine (Poletto 1993)

Obligatory clitic?: doubling Fontanigorda [a=maˈria *(a)=ˈduɔrme] the=Maria she=sleep-PRS . 3SG ‘Mary sleeps.’ Pozzaglio [niˈsøn *(i)=ˈdorma] nobody he=sleep-PRS . 3SG ‘Nobody sleeps.’

(γ)

Fixed preverbal position?: interrogation Airole [ke ˈlibru ty=ˈvøi] what book you=want-PRS . 2SG ‘What book do you want?’

(δ)

Intervening elements between clitic and verb?: negative markers Longare [non te=ˈðɔrmi] NEG you=sleep-PRS . 2SG ‘You do not sleep.’

Contrastively, the same tests all turn out negative when applied to the NODs (see (52), details in Oliviéri 2015). Indeed, tests α and β show that clitic subjects can be omitted in coordinated structures and with referential subject noun phrases. Moreover, the clitic can be manipulated by a syntactic operation, since it is either preverbal or postverbal (test γ reveals that the two constructions alternate freely), and it can be separated from the verb by the negative marker in dialects which display a preverbal negative marker (test δ). (52)

The NODs (α) Obligatory clitic?: coordination a. Sencenac ju=me=sjˈet a ˈtawlɔ e I=REFL . 1. SG =sit-PRS . 1SG at table and

ju=eˈpɛre lo I=wait-PRS . 1SG the

ʃuˈpa] dinner

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b.

c.

d.

Faux-Mazuras [i=meˈsicie a ˈtablə e aˈtɛ̃ de la I=REFL . 1. SG =sit-PRS . 1SG at table and wait-PRS . 1SG the ‘I sit down at the table and I wait for the dinner.’ Sencenac [ty=riˈzja e paʁˈlaj tu lø tɛ̃ ] speak-PST . 2SG all the time you=laugh-PST . 2SG and Biras [ty=riˈʒja e pɛrˈlavi tu lø tɛ̃ ] speak-PST . 2SG all the time you=laugh-PST . 2SG and ‘You laughed and spoke all the time.’

(β)

Obligatory clitic?: doubling No occurrence of this construction has been found in the NODs.

(γ) a.

Fixed preverbal position?: interrogation La Chassagne [ki kø ty=sɛ] who that you=be-PRS . 2SG [ki sɛj=ty] who be-PRS . 2SG =you ‘Who are you?’ Faux-Mazuras [ˈkaw tɛ̃ fɛ=ko] what weather do- PRS . 3SG =that [ˈkau tɛ̃ ka=ˈfɛĕ] what weather that=do-PRS . 3SG ‘What is the weather like?’

b.

(δ) a.

b.

suˈpo] soup

Intervening elements between clitic and verb?: negative markers La Chassagne [i n=ɑ̃ saˈbɛ̃ ʁɛ] know-PRS .3 SG nothing he NEG =of-it ‘He does not know anything about that.’ Sorges [kɒ nø pˈlɔŭ pa] rain-PRS . 3SG NEG that NEG ‘It does not rain.’

Therefore, unlike the NIDs and despite the fact that they only constitute partial paradigms, the NODs’ subject clitics behave like syntactic arguments. The obvious variability of these elements’ status among languages leads us to reconsider the

Clitic pronouns

217

longstanding controversy about other languages like French, taking into account the different systems coexisting in this language.

4.2.2 The case of French The debate around the status of subject clitics in French is lively. A central problem arises from the fact that “French” does not constitute a uniform and unique system worldwide, but manifold systems incorrectly called just “French” in a simplifying way (in Quebec, Ontario, Switzerland, Belgium, various African countries, as well as in different regions of Metropolitan and Overseas France). It is thus not possible to establish a single status for these elements and so different analyses are proposed, depending on the variety considered. Another confusion concerns the French spoken in France, conflating Standard French and Colloquial French. Indeed, the two varieties do not behave identically, in particular with respect to subject clitics (Lambrecht 1981; Renzi 1992; Blanche-Benveniste 1994; 2003; Zribi-Hertz 1994; 2011; Auger 1995; Cabredo Hofherr 2004; Culbertson 2010; Roberts 2010; Massot 2010; Palasis 2013; 2015). Recent analyses lead to the diglossic hypothesis following Ferguson’s (1959) original work according to which speakers manage two distinct grammars when confronted with a diglossic situation (here between Colloquial and Standard French). Applying the above-mentioned tests to acquisition data, Palasis (2015) proposes that the subject clitics behave like agreement markers in the initial, colloquial grammar and like syntactic arguments in the second, standard grammar. Concerning criterion (i), the clitic is always present in Colloquial French in coordination (53a) and with a full nominal phrase (53b,c,d), while it is not in Standard French (53a’,b’,c’,d’). Moreover (53a) shows that the form of the third singular masculine clitic is not the same in both systems. In Standard French, it is always il, while in Colloquial French, there are two allomorphs: il before a vowel and i before a consonant. As a result, a sentence like *Tom il dort is definitively ungrammatical, since it would be either Tom i dort in Colloquial French or Tom, il dort in Standard French, with a left dislocation of the noun phrase Tom. (53)

Two Grammars: obligatory clitic? (α) Coordination I=dort et *(i)=rêve. a. CollFr.38 a’. StFr. Il=dort et (il)=rêve. he=sleep-PRS . 3SG and (he)=dream-PRS . 3SG ‘He sleeps and (he) dreams.’

38 The Colloquial French examples are from Palasis (2012).

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(β) Doubling b. CollFr. L’ escargot i=dort. the snail he=sleep-PRS . 3SG ‘The snail sleeps.’ c. CollFr. Lui i=s=appelle Raphaël. Raphaël him he=REFL . 3=call-PRS . 3SG ‘Him, his name is Raphael.’ d. CollFr. Personne i=m=l=a dit. tell-PTCP nobody he=me.DAT =it.ACC =has ‘Nobody told me that.’ b’. StFr. Il/Tom/Lui dort. he/Tom/him sleep-PRS . 3SG ‘He/Tom sleeps.’ c’. StFr. Tom/Lui, il=dort. Tom/him he=sleep-PRS . 3SG ‘Tom/him, he sleeps.’ d’. StFr. *Personne, il=dort. nobody he=sleep-PRS . 3SG ‘Nobody sleeps.’ The test γ for criterion (ii) shows the same contrast between Colloquial and Standard French, since the clitic is always preverbal in Colloquial French (54a), while it can be postverbal in Standard French (54b). (54)

Two Grammars: fixed preverbal position? (γ: interrogation) a. CollFr. Où elle=est where she-be-PRS . 3SG b. StFr. Où est-elle where be-PRS . 3SG =she ‘Where is the car?’

la the.F la the.F

voiture? car voiture? car

Finally, test δ for criterion (iii) reveals that there is no preverbal negative marker in Colloquial French, hence no intervening syntactic head between the clitic and the verb (55a). On the contrary, with the introduction of the preverbal ne in Standard French, the subject clitic can be separated from the verb and the third person singular masculine clitic displays the allomorph il although it is before a consonant (55b). (55) Two Grammars: intervening elements between clitic and verb? (δ: negation) a. CollFr. I=pleure plus. anymore he=cry-PRS . 3SG

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b. StFr.

Il=ne=pleure plus. anymore he=NEG =cry-PRS . 3SG ‘He does not cry anymore.’

All these tests reveal that if subject clitics are indeed syntactic arguments in Standard French, they behave as morphological agreement markers in Colloquial French, which is then a Null Subject Language. In this perspective, Quebec and Swiss French are then similar to Colloquial French (Roberge 1990; Auger 1995; Fonseca-Greber 2000), while Belgian French described in De Cat (2002; 2007) is more like Standard French. Related matters, such as the status of intervening object and adverbial clitics, interrogative and relative pronouns, are dealt with in Auger (1994) and Palasis (2015).

4.3 A progressive emergence Both dialectal and colloquial data of French varieties suggest evidence in favor of a diachronic change that leads progressively from a NSL (Latin) to a NNSL (French) then back to a NSL (Colloquial French), with intermediary stages. Thus, subject clitics in contemporary Romance languages are at different stages of the “cline of grammaticality” as described by Hopper/Traugott (1993), see also Lehman (1985): content item > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix (see Table 9). During this grammaticalization process, the personal pronoun – which is initially a full nominal phrase, a “personal substantive” according to Tesnière (1959), thus an argument – first becomes a phonological clitic and then acquires the status of a morphological agreement marker. The first step of this emergence might be in subordinate clauses (in the subjunctive mood) in the NIDs, where even NSLs like Italian or Spanish introduce a Table 9: The successive stages of subject clitic grammaticalization Languages

Full paradigm

Phonologically cliticized



Syntactic argument

stage 1

NSL (Italian, Southern Occitan, Spanish, …)

+

stage 2

NODs and Old French



+

+

stage 3

Standard French, Belgian French

+

+

+

stage 4

NIDs

–/+

+



stage 5

Colloquial French, Quebec French

+

+



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strong pronoun, or the meteorological subject ko in the NODs (Oliviéri/Lai/Heap 2017). Then the mechanism can spread to other contexts, and gradually generalize to constitute a (partial or full) paradigm, these elements becoming clitics. The last stage is illustrated by the change of status of the clitics, which can finally become verbal affixes or agreement markers. Additionally, in grammars displaying partial paradigms of subject clitics, the order of appearance of the clitics is also controversial. First, from the observation of NIDs, Renzi/Vanelli (1983) established the following generalization, where the subject clitics successively emerge depending on the verbal person (56): (56)

P2 > P3 > P6 > P5 > P4 > P1

However, this progression does not hold for other systems such as the NODs (where P3 or P1 can appear first) and it has been successively refined by Heap (2000; 2002a), Cabredo Hofherr (2004), Kaiser/Oliviéri/Palasis (2013) and Oliviéri (2010; 2011), the latter proposing an analysis based upon the progressive introduction of features (57) which incorporates observations of the acquisition of subject clitics in Colloquial French: (57)

[person] > [speaker] > [plural] > [feminine]

It appears then that this progression cannot be formulated in terms of the emergence of pronouns but rather the introduction of features based on distinctive oppositions (for an alternative analysis within a Feature Geometry framework, see also Oliviéri/ Lai/Heap 2017).

5 Clitics and negation Many Romance languages display preverbal negative markers. These preverbal markers can surface either alone, as in Italian, Spanish, Catalan, (European) Portuguese, Romanian, Galician, some Italian and Occitan dialects, and varieties of eastern Rhaeto-Romance, or along with a postverbal marker, as in Standard French and some Occitan (Oliviéri/Sauzet 2016) or Italian dialects (Zanuttini 1997). Interestingly, different relative orders are observed when these preverbal markers occur with preverbal subject and/or object clitics. Indeed, in some varieties preverbal negative markers precede all complement clitics (58a), whereas in others they follow them (58b) (Zanuttini 1997, 18‒19). Tasmowski/Reinheimer (2001, 328) further point out that (European) Portuguese also permits a clitic to be separated from its verbal host by the negation não which is considered a stressed form (58c).

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(58)

a. Sp.

Maria no se=lo=dio. REFL = 3SG . M . ACC =give-PST . 3SG Maria NEG ‘Maria did not give it to her/him/it/herself.’ b. Cairese (Northwestern Italy) U mi=n sent nent. NEG he me. ACC =NEG hear-PRS . 3SG ‘He does not hear me.’ c. EPt. Descubro uma coisa de que me=não a thing of which REFL . 1SG = NEG discover-PRS . 1SG lembrava já. anymore recall-PST . 1SG ‘I discover something which I no longer remembered.’

The linear order also varies according to person and type of clitic. Some negative markers precede all complement clitics, whereas others follow first- and secondperson complement clitics and reflexives (CL-1), but precede third-person, locative and partitive clitics (CL-2). Thus Zanuttini (1997, 21) suggests that complement clitics and preverbal negative markers each have two possible structural positions, i.e., Neg1 CL-1 Neg-2 CL-2. In this framework, the preverbal markers which can negate by themselves are always in the highest position (e.g., Italian non), whereas the others (“the weak negative markers”) can be in either Neg-1 or Neg-2 (e.g., French proclitic ne or Cairese enclitic n). The facts are equally intricate when it comes to languages which also display subject clitics, e.g., NIDs and French. On the one hand, the NID preverbal negative marker can surface either higher or lower than the subject clitic (Poletto 2000), as exemplified in (59). This relative position therefore became one of the tests (along with coordination and inversion, as mentioned in Section 4.2) that led Poletto (2000) to hypothesize four different positions for subject clitics, i.e., invariable and deictic clitics located in the CP field, and number and person clitics in the lower IP field.  



(59)

Ligurian (Cosseria) I=n=te=n=dan 3PL . NOM = NEG = 2SG . DAT = NEG = give-PRS . 3PL ‘They do not give you the book.’

nent NEG

u the

libru. book

Parry (1997, 251) points out that these multiple negative markers are also sensitive to person distinctions: the second negative marker only occurs with first person singular, second person singular and third person reflexive object clitics. On the other hand, French displays no optionality with regard to ordering, since the preverbal negative marker always follows the subject clitic and precedes the other clitics. Nevertheless, the presence or the absence of the preverbal negative marker has served for a while now (at least since Ashby 1977) as an uncontroversial indicator of

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the register/grammar a French speaker is using, and more recently as a more controversial indicator of the morpho-syntactic status of the subject clitic (details in Section 4.2.2).

6 Conclusion As should be clear from the (necessarily constrained) overview presented in this chapter, the term clitic covers a highly heterogeneous range of phenomena. Even limiting ourselves to just pronominal clitics, as we do here, it seems more useful to think of “clitic” as a descriptive cover term rather than a single, unified theoretical concept which can be rigorously defined (Wanner 1987b). That said, there are many strong trends and near-universals about clitic pronouns which are shared by almost all Romance languages. Recurring patterns in the forms of object clitic paradigms and their placement with respect to verbs are among the characteristics that give them all a recognizable Romance “family resemblance”. As with all trends (and language families) there are always outliers that do not follow overall patterns. Understanding how exceptional cases fit into the wider panorama of Romance clitic phenomena is one of the important functions of an overview such as this one, which endeavors to paint as detailed a portrait of clitic pronouns across Romance languages as space allows. It is precisely these exceptions and the variability of clitic pronouns which make them so important to the study of this language family. As an alternative to a single unified phenomenon defined by recurring patterns or parametric categories, we suggest that it is most helpful to view clitics and cliticization as a process (or a series of processes) in progress, with the grammars of individual varieties being situated at different points along a gradual cline.

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Oliviéri, Michèle/Lai, Jean-Pierre/Heap, David (2014), Meteorological subjects in transitional Northern Occitan dialects, Paper presented at the 44th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, Western University, 02.–04.05.2014. Oliviéri, Michèle/Lai, Jean-Pierre/Heap, David (2017), Partial subject paradigms and Feature Geometry in Northern Occitan dialects, in: Romance Linguistics 2014: Selected Proceedings of the 44th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), London, Ontario, May 2014, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 145–165. Oliviéri, Michèle/Sauzet, Patrick (2016), Southern Gallo-Romance (Occitan), in: Adam Ledgeway/ Martin Maiden (edd.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 319–349. Palasis, Katerina (2012), Romance French Child Corpus 1 (2;5–4;0), CHILDES, http://childes.talkbank. org/access/French/Palasis.html. Palasis, Katerina (2013), The case for diglossia: describing the emergence of two grammars in the early acquisition of metropolitan French, Journal of French Language Studies 23, 17– 35. Palasis, Katerina (2015), Subject clitics and preverbal negation in European French: variation, acquisition, diatopy and diachrony, Lingua 161, 125–143. Parry, M. Mair (1997), Preverbal negation and clitic ordering, with particular reference to a group of North-West Italian dialects, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 113, 243–270. Pato, Enrique/Heap, David (2012), Plurales anómalos en los dialectos y en la historia del español, in: Emilio Montero Cartelle (ed.), Actas del VIII Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española, Madrid, Arco Libros, 1765–1776. Perlmutter, David M. (1971), Deep and Surface Structure Constraints in Syntax, New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Pescarini, Diego (2010), Elsewhere in Romance: evidence from clitic clusters, Linguistic Inquiry 41, 427–444. Pescarini, Diego (2011), Romance clitics: cluster formation and allomorphy, in: Angella Ralli (ed.), On-Line Proceedings of the Eighth Mediterranean Morphology Meeting (MMM8), Cagliari, vol. 8, 223–235. Poletto, Cecilia (1993), La sintassi del soggetto nei dialetti italiani settentrionali, Padova, Unipress. Poletto, Cecilia (1995), The diachronic development of subject clitics in North Eastern Italian dialects, in: Adrian Battye/Ian Roberts (edd.), Clause Structure and Language Change, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 295–324. Poletto, Cecilia (1999), The internal structure of AgrS and subject clitics in the Northern Italian dialects, in: Henk van Riemsdijk (ed.), Clitics in the Languages of Europe, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 581–620. Poletto, Cecilia (2000), The Higher Functional Field: Evidence from Northern Italian Dialects, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Posner, Rebecca (1996), The Romance Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Pusch, Claus D. (2001), Prosthèse préclitique et morphogénèse. Le cas de l’énonciatif “e” en gascon, in: Claude Muller (ed.), Clitiques et cliticisation, Paris, Champion, 381–393. Ramsden, Herbert (1963), Weak-Pronoun Position in the Early Romance Languages, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Renzi, Lorenzo (1992), I pronomi soggetto in due varietà substandard: fiorentino e français avancé, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 108, 72–98. Renzi, Lorenzo/Vanelli, Laura (1983), I pronomi soggetto in alcune varietà romanze, Scritti linguistici in onore di G.B. Pellegrini, Pisa, Pacini, 42–56. 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.

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Patricia Cabredo Hofherr

6 Voice and voice alternations Abstract: In the transition from Latin to Early Romance the synthetic passive forms were lost, followed by a restructuring of the voice system. The reinterpretation of originally perfective passive forms as imperfective passive resulted in a periphrastic be-passive that was ambiguous between an imperfective and a perfective reading. This ambiguity favoured the rise of innovated passive auxiliaries that grammaticalised from verbs such as venire ‘come’, fieri ‘become’, facere ‘do’, or stare ‘stand’. In parallel, Romance languages generalised argument reduction processes using the weakened reflexive se/si (from Latin sibi) and developed pronominal agent-backgrounding strategies, based on third person plural and second person singular personal pronouns, the numeral one and the noun homo ‘man’.  

Keywords: voice, passive auxiliaries, reflexive passives, passives, impersonal constructions, middles, anticausatives  

1 Introduction This chapter examines the expression of voice-alternations across Romance. Voice is understood as a super-category expressing the degree of implication of an agent in an event, including reflexive and auxiliary passives, middles, anticausatives and pronominal agent-backgrounding strategies. In the transition from Late Latin to Early Romance, the system of Latin voice distinctions was fundamentally restructured. The imperfective synthetic passive forms like amatur ‘s/he is loved’ disappeared and the temporal interpretation of periphrastic forms combining a passive past participle and a present form of the auxiliary esse (amatus est) shifted from a perfective past passive to a present passive. In the wake of these changes, a variety of alternative expressions of passive and middle meaning arose in Romance, including alternative passive auxiliaries, the extension of the reflexive to mark anti-causatives, stative middles and eventive passives and pronominal agent-backgrounding strategies such as the impersonal third person plural and the French impersonal human pronoun on. Section 2 gives a summary of the changes in the voice system from Latin to Early Romance and the concomitant aspectual changes. Section 3 presents a range of passive periphrases found in Modern Romance. Section 4 examines valency changing uses of the reflexive se/si, including reflexive anticausatives, middles and passives and the later development of the reflexive impersonal. Section 5 reviews pronominal agentbackgrounding strategies: impersonal uses of the third person plural, generic second person singular, generic uses of un/uno and reflexes of the generic noun homo ‘man’. DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-006

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2 Restructuring of voice from Latin to Early Romance In Classical Latin the imperfective passive was expressed by synthetic forms containing a marker -R (1a) (-R-forms) while the perfective passive forms were periphrastic, combining an imperfective form of the auxiliary esse ‘be’ and a past participle (1b): (1)

Lat. a.

b.

Imperfective passive: present amatur ‘s/he is loved’ imperfective past amābātur ‘s/he was loved.IPFV ’ future amābitur ‘s/he will be loved’ Perfective passive: perfective past amatus est ‘s/he was loved.PFV ’ pluperfect amatus erat ‘s/he had been loved’ future perfect amatus erit ‘s/he will have been loved’

In the transition from Late Latin to Early Romance the -R-forms of the imperfective passive in (1a) disappeared. The originally perfective periphrastic passive forms with imperfective tenses on the auxiliary were reanalysed as imperfective (2a) and the auxiliary became compatible with perfective tenses (2b) (Cennamo 2006, 316). (2)

Restructured passive in Late Latin a. i. present: amatus love.PTCP ii. past imperfective: amatus love.PTCP b. past perfective: amatus love.PTCP

est be.PRS . IND . 3SG erat be.PST . IPFV . IND . 3SG fuit be. PST . PFV . IND . 3SG

In the innovated passive the temporal and aspectual values were marked on the auxiliary esse (Cennamo 2006; Salvi 2011, 350). As the -R-forms in Classical Latin were not exclusively passive, the repercussions of this change went beyond the passive paradigm. In addition to the passive use, the -R-forms had anticausative1 uses (3a) and marked verbs with non-agentive subjects (3b) (Cennamo 1998, 79; Salvi 2011, 345).2

1 Passive interpretations imply an agent (the door was opened/the ball was moved) while in the anticausative interpretation the event is presented as a spontaneous process without an implied agent (the door opened/the ball is moving) (see Haspelmath 1990, 33; Keenan/Dryer 2007, 352). 2 Unlike other functions of the -R-morpheme, the passive is marked by -R-forms in the texts until much later (see Wright 2014).

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Lat.

a.

Corrumpitur iam cena (Plaut. Pseud. 890) already dinner.NOM . SG spoil.IND . PRS . PASS . 3SG ‘Dinner is spoiling already.’ (Cennamo 1998, 80) b. convortor domum (Plaut. Stich. 402) home.ACC return.IND . PRS . PASS . 1SG ‘I return home.’ (Cennamo 1998, 79)

R-marked verbs with non-agentive subjects as in (3a,b) are related to the deponent verbs of Latin. Deponents have active semantics but only morphologically passive forms. The loss of the -R-form, characteristic of deponent verbs in the imperfective, led to two types of innovation in the verbal system. For some originally deponent verbs, the imperfective part of the paradigm was aligned on active verbs, while the perfective preserved the forms with the esse-auxiliary. This development is reflected in the use of être/essere as a perfect auxiliary in French and Italian (Vincent 1982). The resulting pattern of a be-auxiliary for verbs with a non-agentive subject then spread to non-deponent intransitive verbs (Banniard 1997). For other deponent verbs the non-agentive semantics came to be expressed by the reflexive pronoun resulting in inherent reflexives like Fr. s’évanouir ‘to faint’ and se souvenir ‘to remember’.

3 Periphrastic passives Following the loss of the synthetic middle/passive -R-form in Late Latin the auxiliary esse spread from the perfective tenses to the entire paradigm of the passive, giving rise to the be-passives still found across Romance (Section 3.1). The innovated forms with imperfective tenses on the auxiliary were ambiguous between the Classical Latin past perfective and the innovated analytic imperfective passive forms. As the copula esse had stative properties, eventive interpretations of the imperfective esse + past participle forms were disfavoured, however. This situation of aspectual ambiguity and inherent stativeness may have favoured the development of aspectually specialized passive periphrases combining past passive participles with passive auxiliaries such as Latin fieri ‘to become, to be done/ made’, facere ‘to do, to make’, venire ‘to come’ as markers of the passive voice (Cennamo 2006), auxiliaries that still exist in some Romance varieties. It is plausible that passive auxiliaries develop from a use as a quasi-copula (Giacalone Ramat/Sansò 2014; Sansò/Giacalone Ramat 2016 for venire ‘come’, andare ‘go’; Cennamo 2014 for facere ‘do’ and fieri ‘become’) (Section 3.2). Other passive auxiliaries arose from verbs meaning ‘want’ yielding deontic passives (Section 3.3), with reflexive causative verbs and with reflexive uses of the verb

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for see (Section 3.4) (see Keenan 1985, 257–261, for diachronic sources for passive auxiliaries).

3.1 Auxiliary be + past participle With the extension of the Late Latin *essere + passive participle to the imperfective forms of the passive paradigm, the originally perfect passive auxiliary became a passive auxiliary more generally. Where in Latin the tense information was contributed by the past participle and the aspectual information by the imperfective forms of the auxiliary, in the innovated be-passive tense and aspect information were both marked on the auxiliary, a change reflected in the appearance of perfective forms of *essere with the past participle, which were unattested in Latin (see (2), Cennamo 2006). Across Romance, the *essere + past participle construction gave rise to the bepassive, which is generally the most grammaticalised periphrastic passive. It was only in Balkan Romance that the be-passive did not survive, being reintroduced into Romanian from French only in the nineteenth century (Vincent 1988, 58).

3.1.1 Syntactic properties Across Romance, the passive auxiliary in the be + past participle construction has the same morphological paradigm as the copula be. The past participle has a passive function independently of the auxiliary be: it combines with the theme of the verb in its adnominal use (4) and in absolute participial uses (5). (4)

a. Fr. b. Cat.

un problème un problema a problem.MSG ‘a solved problem’

résolu solucionat solved.MSG

(5)

a. Fr. b. Cat.

une fois le problème résolu un cop solucionat solved.MSG one time (the problem. MSG ) ‘once the problem has been solved’

el problema (the problem.MSG )

The passive auxiliary be and the past participle are syntactically independent of each other, as manner adverbs can intervene between the participle and the auxiliary (6) (Abeillé/Godard 2000; on Catalan, see Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2123).

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a. Fr. Les livres lui sont rapidement b. It. I libri gli sono rapidamente c. Rom. Cărţile îi sunt rapid rapidly the books him.DAT are ‘The books are rapidly sent to him.’ (Abeillé/Godard 2000, 11)

envoyés. inviati. trimise. sent

In French, Italian and Romanian, passive participles and adjectives can be coordinated under a single verb be, supporting the hypothesis that passive auxiliary and copula be are identical ((7a,b), Abeillé/Godard 2000). (7)

a. Fr. b. It.

c. Sp.

Jean est convoqué par Marie et amoureux d’ elle. Giovanni è chiamato da Maria e innamorato di lei. J./G. is summoned by M. and in-love of her ‘Jean/Giovanni is summoned by Maria and in love with her.’ *Fue enfermizo y cuidado por una enfermera. and looked-after by a nurse be.PRF . 3SG sickly ‘He was sickly and looked after by a nurse.’

In Spanish, however, coordination of adjective and participle under the copula ser ‘be’ is not felicitous (7c). This may be related to the fact that Spanish has two semantically differentiated copulas, ser and estar (see ↗9 Copular and existential constructions). It is controversial in the Spanish grammatical tradition whether the passive auxiliary and copula ser should be analysed as the same lexical item synchronically (see Brucart 1990). In Romance, periphrastic be-passives are in general only possible for transitive verbs, excluding passives of intransitives3 (8) (see, for Spanish, Mendikoetxea 1999b, 1620; for Portuguese, Azevedo 2005, 119; for Catalan, Bartra Kaufmann 2002; for Italian, Rohlfs 1969, 127‒128; for Romanian, Dobrovie-Sorin 1994, 128), contrasting with the periphrastic passives in Germanic (9) (Vikner 1995):

3 Dobrovie-Sorin (1986) distinguishes IMPERSONAL PAS PASS SIVES IVES from PASSIVES PASS IVES OF INTRANSITIVE S . In impersonal passives the subject position is occupied by an expletive, possibly combined with a post-posed DP (i), while passives of intransitives contain no lexical DP (8a,b). Across Romance verbs with prototypical zero objects like eat behave like intransitives (8a,b) (Dobrovie-Sorin 1994). (i) Fr. Il a été abattu des arbres. EXPL has been felled DE T trees ‘Trees have been felled.’

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a. Fr. *Il b. Rom.

(9)

Ger. Gestern wurde gespielt/ AUX . PASS . PST . 3SG played yesterday ‘Yesterday playing/eating was going on.’

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a été joué. / *Il a été mangé. *A fost jucat. / *a fost mâncat. EXPL has been played EXPL has been eaten ‘It has been played. / It has been eaten.’ (Dobrovie-Sorin 1994, 128) gegessen. eaten

French, however, allows the passivisation of intransitive verbs if a subcategorized element is present (Zribi-Hertz 1982; Gaatone 1998): (10)

Fr.

a été abouti à un compromis has been arrived at a compromise ‘An acceptable compromise was arrived at.’

Il

EXPL

acceptable. acceptable

The be-passive constructions in Romance admit agentive phrases introduced by different prepositions (da in Italian, de (către) in Romanian and par in French, per in Catalan, por in Spanish and Portuguese): (11)

a. It. b. Fr.

La casa è stata La maison a été is/has been the house.FSG ‘The house was built by Gianni/Jean.’

costruita construite built.FSG

da par by

Gianni. Jean. G./J.

Certain predicates allow more than one form of the agent phrase (see, for Catalan, Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2132; for French, Carlier 2002, 54; for Latin, Cennamo 1998, 80): (12)

Fr.

Jean est surveillé de Jean is supervised DE ‘Jean is supervised of all/by all.’

tous/ all/

par PAR

tous. all

The acceptability of an agentive phrase may depend on the referential properties of the DP. For Italian reflexive passives, e.g., Sansò (2011) shows that agentive phrases with definite complements (by the king) were possible in Old Italian but were lost well before agentive phrases with generic or indefinite complements (by soldiers/by everyone). A similar preference for generic agentive complements is found in Modern Romance varieties (13): (13)

Fr.

?de Marie. Jean est surveillé de tous/ ?DE Marie Jean is supervised DE all/ ‘Jean is supervised by all/by Marie.’ (Carlier 2002, 54)

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3.1.2 Aspectual restrictions Be-passives are restricted to eventive verbs (see, for Spanish, Mendikoetxea 1999b, 1620; for Catalan, Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2137; for French, Lamiroy 1993; for Italian, Sansò 2011). In Italian, Spanish and Catalan, the periphrastic be-passive is preferred for perfective punctual events, while imperfective or habitual events are preferentially expressed by a reflexive passive (see, for Italian, Sansò 2011; for Spanish, Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1668; for Catalan, Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2139). Spanish ser-passives are subject to further aspectual restrictions. Firstly, when combined with telic verbs expressing events or changes of state, the ser-passive can only refer to single events (14a); with atelic transitives, ser-passives are limited to an iterative or habitual interpretation (14c) (Mendikoetxea 1999b, 1622‒1623). Secondly, the passives of telic verbs allow imperfective tenses on the auxiliary, but these forms are preferentially interpreted as iterative or habitual (14b); passives of atelic verbs are less acceptable with perfective tenses on the auxiliary (14d) (Mendikoetxea 1999b, 1617 and 1622‒1623). (14)

Sp.

a.

La puerta fue abierta. was.PFV . 3SG opened.FSG the door.FSG ‘The door was opened.’ (single event) b. La puerta es abierta por el portero todos los by the porter all the the door.FSG is opened.FSG días a las 7 de la mañana. days at the 7 of the morning ‘The door is opened by the porter every day at 7am.’ c. Antonio es/era (muy) estimado por todos. everyone Antonio is/was.IPFV . 3SG (much) appreciated by ‘Antonio is/was (much) appreciated by everyone.’ d. ?Antonio fue estimado. appreciated Antonio was.PFV . 3SG ‘Antonio was appreciated.’

This interaction between lexical and grammatical aspect goes beyond the periphrastic passive (Mendikoetxea 1999b, 1618): the active forms abre/abría ‘opens/opened. IMPFV ’ are used with an iterative interpretation, except for the narrative present and a similar use of the imperfective past, which allows punctual readings (15). (15)

Sp.

En ese momento el portero abre/ abría la puerta. in this moment the porter opens/ opened.IPFV the door ‘At this moment, the porter opens/was opening the door.’

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The aspectual restrictions on the be-passive in Italian, Catalan and Spanish cannot be reduced to competition with the reflexive passive. Firstly, the reflexive passive in Old Italian did not display a strong preference for imperfective or habitual contexts, unlike its Modern Italian counterpart (Sansò 2011). Secondly, French does not have an eventive passive use of the reflexive, but still shows aspectual restrictions for the être-passive (Lamiroy 1993; Carlier 2002). With a present or imperfective past auxiliary être the passive of a telic process tends to mark the resulting state (16a) or an iterative reading (16b). With the auxiliary in the passé simple and the passé composé, however, the be-passive of telic predicates is interpreted as a single event (16c). Atelic predicates such as aider ‘help’, in contrast, allow an eventive interpretation with a present passive auxiliary (16d) (Carlier 2002, 41–43). (16)

Fr.

a.

Le vin est servi/ était servi. the wine is served/ was.IPFV served ‘The wine is served/was served.’ b. Le vin est servi/ était servi par le the wine is served/ was. IPFV served by the ‘The wine is/was (usually) served by the sommelier.’ c. Le vin fut/ a été servi (par le served by the the wine was.PFV / has been ‘The wine was served (by the sommelier).’ d. Pierre est aidé par Marie. Pierre is helped by Marie ‘Pierre is helped by Marie.’ (Carlier 2002, 41–42)

sommelier. sommelier sommelier). sommelier

The following table summarises the interaction between lexical and grammatical aspect observed for be-passives in French and Spanish: Table 1: The interaction between lexical and grammatical aspect for be-passives in French and Spanish Grammatical aspect

Perfective

Imperfective

Lexically perfective/ telic

+ punctual passive + resultative Sp. (14a) Fr. (16c)

– punctual passive + iterated/habitual Sp. (14b) Fr. (16b)

Lexically imperfective/ atelic

+ punctual passive – resultative Sp. (14d)

– punctual passive Sp. (14c) Fr. (16d)

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Circumscribing the exact nature of the lexical and grammatical aspectual restrictions is difficult since the passive auxiliary is homophonous with the copula. Stative interpretations can therefore potentially be analysed as copula + adjectival participle constructions. In the Iberian Romance languages, the correlations are further complicated by the aspectual differentiation between the copulas ser and estar (see ↗9 Copular and existential constructions).  

3.2 Other passive auxiliaries Other passive auxiliaries in Romance have developed from verbs of movement or verbs of change. Unlike the passive be-auxiliary, these auxiliaries are generally subject to morpho-syntactic, semantic and/or lexical restrictions: (17)

Morpho-syntactic restrictions on the auxiliary a. compatible with compound tenses b. compatible with non-finite forms c. compatible with all persons d. compatible with the participial absolute construction

(18)

Lexical, syntactic and semantic restrictions a. deontic meaning component b. unexpectedness c. empathy of the speaker d. limitation to a closed class of verbs e. possibility of a by-phrase

The following sections examine passive auxiliaries other than be, with particular attention to the additional restrictions they are subject to.

3.2.1 Venire ‘to come’ Venire appears as a passive auxiliary in Italo-Romance (Giacalone Ramat 2000; Cennamo 2007; Sansò/Giacalone Ramat 2016), Rhaeto-Romance (Haiman/Benincà 1992, 95), Romanian (Dragomirescu/Nicolae 2014) and marginally in Catalan (Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2124). (19)

a. It.

La casa viene the house come.3SG ‘The house is being built.’

costruita. built

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b. Rom. Partea asta a feţei de masă vine part.DEF . FSG this POSS . ART . FSG tablecloth.DEF . GEN come.3SG festonată. hemmed.FSG ‘This part of the tablecloth must/should/would have to be hemmed.’ (Dragomirescu/Nicolae 2014, 72) Unlike the Italian venire-passive, the Romanian veni-passive imposes a modal deontic interpretation (Dragomirescu/Nicolae 2014, 75). The Italian venire-passive is preferred with telic predicates in imperfective contexts, since it is unambiguously eventive, unlike the aspectually ambiguous esserepassive (Giacalone Ramat/Sansò 2014). (20)

It.

In quel momento veniva chiuso il closed the in that moment came.IPFV . 3SG ‘At that moment the main door was being closed.’ [passive interpretation] (Giacalone Ramat/Sansò 2014, 22)

portone. main.door

The Italian venire-passive allows an agentive by-phrase introduced by da: (21)

It.

La casa venne distrutta came destroyed.FSG the house.FSG ‘The house was destroyed by the earthquake.’ (Giacalone Ramat 2000, 147)

dal terremoto. by-the earthquake

In standard Italian, the venire-passive is excluded from compound tenses (Giacalone Ramat 2000, 138) and in these contexts the compound forms of essere are used: (22)

It.

La casa è *venuta/ stata the house.FSG is come.FSG / been.FSG ‘The house was built by my father.’ (Giacalone Ramat 2000, 138)

costruita built.FSG

da by

mio padre. my father

3.2.2 Andare/ir/anar ‘to go’ Italian, Catalan and Spanish have passive uses of the verb go (andare/ir) + past participle. (23)

a. It.

Lo the

stipendio salary.MSG

va go.PRES . 3SG

speso spent. MSG

in in

libri. books

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b. Sp.

c. Cat.

i. ‘The salary must be spent on books.’ ii. ‘The salary is usually spent to buy books.’ (Giacalone Ramat 2000, 131) Van vendidas la mitad de las acciones. go.PRS . 3PL sold. FPL the half of the shares. FPL ‘Half of the shares have already been sold.’ (Yllera 1999, 3432, ex 175a) L’ ària del tenor va anar seguida of.the tenor goes go. INF followed. FSG the aria. FSG d’ aplaudiments. of applause.PL ‘The aria of the tenor was followed by applause.’ (Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2124)

The Spanish ir+past participle construction conveys a meaning comparable to the passive combined with the adverb ya ‘already’ (23b). This construction is incompatible with compound tenses or the imperative (Yllera 1999, 3432). In Catalan, the construction with anar + past participle is limited to verbs with locative semantics such as seguir ‘to follow’ (23c) or acompanyar ‘to accompany’ (Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2124). Italian has two andare + past participle constructions: a lexically restricted nonmodal passive and a deontic passive (Sansò/Giacalone Ramat 2016). The non-modal passive interpretation of andare + past participle in Italian (interpretation ii. of (23a)) is compatible with compound tenses and absolute constructions, but it is lexically limited to a closed class of verbs of disappearance, destruction and damage to the patient, such as perdere, smarrire, disperdere ‘to lose’, distruggere ‘to destroy’, spendere ‘to spend’, buttare ‘to throw away’ (Giacalone Ramat 2000, 146; Cennamo 2007). The deontic passive andare + past participle (interpretation (23a.i)) expresses an obligation corresponding to a passive embedded under a deontic auxiliary, as in the English translation of (24) (Giacalone Ramat 2000, 131). (24)

It.

Questo lavoro va finito goes finished.MSG this work. MSG ‘This work must be finished by tomorrow.’ (Giacalone Ramat 2000, 131)

entro until

domani. tomorrow

The deontic passive interpretation of andare + past participle is limited to the simple imperfective tenses and therefore morphosyntactically more restricted than the nonmodal passive construction. At the same time, the deontic andare-passive is lexically less restricted than the non-modal andare-passive, as it is not limited to verbs of loss and destruction (Giacalone Ramat 2000, 132):

Voice and voice alternations

(25)

It.

Questa lettera va scritta goes written.FSG this letter. FSG ‘This letter is to be written immediately.’

241

subito. immediately

The deontic and the non-modal andare + past participle constructions also contrast with respect to agent phrases. The deontic andare-passive allows generic agent phrases with the preposition da (e.g., da tutti gli aventi diritto ‘by anyone entitled to x’) but is degraded with specific agents (e.g., da Paolo ‘by Paolo’) (Sansò/Giacalone Ramat 2016, footnote 6). Agent phrases with da are impossible with non-modal andare (26) (Giacalone Ramat 2000, 147): (26)

It.

La casa andò distrutta *dal/ nel terremoto. the house. FSG went destroyed. FSG by.the/ in.the earthquake ‘The house was destroyed in the earthquake.’ (Giacalone Ramat 2000, 147)

3.2.3 Fieri ‘to become’/facere ‘to do’ In Early Romance other passive auxiliaries developed from Late Latin fieri ‘to become’ (27a) (Michaelis 1998; Cennamo 2006; 2007) and occasionally facere ‘to do’ (27b) (Cennamo forthcoming). (27)

a.

b.

Old Florentine Non ne fia mai nessuno ingannato. NEG CL . PART become. FUT . 3SG never nobody deceived ‘None of them will ever be deceived.’ (Trecentonovelle, Florence, 2nd half 14th c., Pernicone 1946, LXVII.85) (Cennamo 2007, 79) Old Logudorese Sardinian Mariane de Maroniu binkitu nonde fekit. not.thereof did.3SG Mariane of Maroniu defeat.PTCP . MSG ‘Mariane of Maroniu was not defeated.’ (11th–13th c., Cennamo forthcoming)

3.2.4 Resultar ‘to result’/salir ‘to come out’ Other auxiliaries that allow eventive passive interpretations are resultar ‘to result, to end up as’ and salir ‘to come out’ + past participle in Spanish expressing difficulty or surprise of the result (Yllera 1999, 3433).

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Sp.

Resultó/ salió elegido en in resulted.PFV / came.out.PFV elected ‘S/he ended up being elected to parliament.’ (Yllera 1999, 3433)

la the

asamblea. assembly

3.3 Stative passives Some Romance languages developed a stative resultative construction combining estar + past participle (see, for Spanish, Mendikoetxea 1999b, 1623–1625; Conti Jiménez 2004; Jurado Salinas 2000; for Catalan, Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2123; for Portuguese, Azevedo 2005, 120). It is controversial, however, whether this construction should be analysed as a passive or as a copular construction with an adjectival participle. (29)

a. Cat. b. Pt.

La casa està construïda. A casa está construída. house.FSG is built.FSG the. FSG ‘The house is built.’ (resultative)

3.4 Deontic passives In some Romance varieties, the deontic modal want (or need, a semantic equivalent of a trebui in Romanian) grammaticalised as a deontic passive auxiliary (30) (for the deontic andare-passive see Section 3.2.2). (30)

a. Friul. La çhosse la ul fate. 3FSG .NOM wants done.FSG the thing.FSG ‘This thing has to be done/it is necessary to do this thing.’ (Salvioni 1912, in Ledgeway 2000, 244) b. Vto. Sta roba a vol fata. 3FSG .NOM wants done.FSG this thing.FSG ‘This thing needs/has to be done.’ (Berizzi/Rossi 2011, 41) c. Rom. Articolele trebuiau citite. had-to.IPFV . 3PL read.PTCP . NEUTPL articles.DEF . NEUTPL . NOM ‘The articles had to be read.’ (Dragomirescu 2013, 198)

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Deontic passives can appear with an agentive by-phrase: (31)

a. Fossaltino Sta camisa a ghe vol lavada 3FSG .NOM CL . OBL wants washed.FSG this shirt.FSG da to mare. by your mother ‘This shirt has to be washed by your mother.’ (Berizzi/Rossi 2011, 47) b. Srd. Sa makkina keret accontzada dae unu meccánicu. wants fixed. FSG by a mechanic the car. FSG ‘The car has to be fixed by a mechanic.’ (Jones 1993, apud Remberger 2006, 259) c. Rom. Trebuie citit articolul de (către) (towards) needs read. PTCP . MSG article.DEF . MSG de cineva competent. someone competent ‘This article has to be read by someone competent.’ (Elena Soare, p. c.)

The deontic want-passives differ with respect to their morphosyntactic restrictions. The want + past participle in Basso Polesano is restricted to simple tenses (32a) rejecting compound tenses and non-finite verb forms (32b,c). Moreover, the construction generally only appears in the third person (32d) (Benincà/Poletto 1997). (32)

Basso Polesano a. El vole/ voeva/ voria/ vorà magnà. 3MSG . NOM wants/ wanted. IPFV / want.PRS . COND / want. FUT eaten ‘It has/had/would have/will have to be eaten.’ b. *El ga volesto magnà. has wanted eaten 3MSG . NOM ‘It has had to be eaten.’ c. *El podaria voler magnà./ *Volendo magnà, …. could want eaten./ wanting eaten 3MSG . NOM ‘It could have needed to be eaten./ Having to be eaten,…’ (Berizzi/Rossi 2011, 44) d. *Mi voio petenà / *Ti te voi petenà want combed/ you 2SG . NOM want combed 1SG . NOM ‘I need to be combed./You need to be combed.’ (Benincà/Poletto 1997, 102)

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In contrast, the deontic ghe vol-passive in Fossaltino allows compound (33a) and nonfinite tenses (33b,c) and combines with the first and second person (33d) (Berizzi/ Rossi 2011, 48). (33)

Fossaltino a. Sta roba a g=a voest fata. CL . 3FSG . NOM CL =has wanted done.FSG this thing. FSG ‘It has been necessary to do this thing.’ (compound tense) b. Voendo=ghe firmada sta carta, … signed this document wanting=CL ‘Being necessary to sign this document, …’ (present participle) c. Sta carta qua, a podaria voer=ghe here CL . 3FSG . NOM could want= CL this document. FSG firmada come no. as NEG signed. FSG ‘It could be necessary to sign this document or not.’ (infinitive) d. ?Noaltri/ voaltri ghe voen/ voè petenai. want.1PL / want.2PL combed.MPL we/ you.PL CL ‘We/you need to be combed.’ (Berizzi/Rossi 2011, 48–49)

The Romanian a trebui-passive allows simple ((30c) and (31c)), compound (34a,b) and non-finite tenses (34c). (34)

Rom. a.

Articolele au trebuit citite repede. articles.DEF . NEUTPL have need.PTCP read.PTCP . NEUTPL quickly ‘The articles had to be read quickly.’ b. Articolele ar fi trebuit citite articles.DEF . NEUTPL COND .3PL be.INF need.PTCP read.PTCP . NEUTPL ieri. yesterday ‘The articles should have been read yesterday.’ c. Articolul trebuind citit, l=am read.PTCP it.ACC -have.1SG article.DEF . MSG want.GER fotocopiat. photocopied.PTCP . MSG ‘The article having to be read, I copied it.’ (Elena Soare, p.c.)

The deontic passive constructions further vary with respect to the arguments targeted by promotion. Southern Italo-Romance allows dative passives with want as shown by the masculine singular agreement on the participle in (35a), while this

Voice and voice alternations

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construction is excluded in northern varieties and in standard Italian (Ledgeway 2000). (35)

a. Cosentino Mariu vo mannatu chira littera. that letter.FSG Mario wants sent.MSG ‘Mario wants to be sent that letter.’ (Ledgeway 2000, 236–237) b. It. *Mario vuole essere mandato/a la lettera. sent.MSG / FSG the letter.FSG Mario wants be.INF ‘Mario wants to be sent the letter.’ (Ledgeway 2000, 237)

Ledgeway (2000, 236–237) shows that the southern Italian varieties allowing dative passives with want vary with respect to the presence of the passive auxiliary essere (36) and the agreement pattern on the participle (37). While in the dialects of Northern Calabria and Salento the auxiliary essere is absent and the agreement on the participle is controlled by the underlying object, in the other dialects the passive auxiliary is required and the participle can be either in the default masculine singular form or show agreement with the underlying object (37), with changes in interpretation. (36)

a. Cosentino b. Nap.

Vo mannata chira littera. Vô esse mannata chella lettera. that letter.FSG wants (be.INF ) sent.FSG ‘That letter must be sent/needs sending.’ (Ledgeway 2000, 236)

(37)

Cosentino a. Mariu vo mannata chira that Mario wants sent. FSG ‘Mario wants that letter sent.’ b. Mariu vo mannatu chira that Mario wants sent.MSG ‘Mario wants to be sent that letter.’ (Ledgeway 2000, 236–237)

littera. letter.FSG littera. letter.FSG

3.5 Reflexive auxiliary passives A further source of passive auxiliaries are the reflexivised verb to see and, in French, the reflexivised causative faire. The passive construction based on the reflexive verb to see taking a past participle as complement is attested for a variety of Romance

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languages (see, for French, Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot 1981; for Italian, Giacalone Ramat 2016; for Portuguese, Lehmann/Pinto de Lima/Soares 2010): (38)

a. Fr. b. Cat.

Le pays s=est vu frappé par le cyclone. the country REFL =AUX . 3SG seen affected by the cyclone El país va veure=s afectat pel cicló. the country AUX see.INF =REFL affected by.the cyclone ‘The country found itself affected by the cyclone.’

In (38), the subjects are inanimate, excluding the perception reading of the verb to see. In Italian, the vedersi-passive is restricted to verbs affecting the subject, typically adversely (Giacalone Ramat 2016). Italian vedersi + participle and French se voir + participle have additional semantic content as they imply unexpectedness and empathy on the part of the speaker. French is the only Romance language that has a passive construction combining the reflexivised causative verb faire with an infinitival complement (39) (Labelle 2013, 236). (39)

Fr.

Jean s=est fait écraser (par CAUS run-over.INF (by Jean REFL = AUX . 3SG ‘Jean was run over /got himself run over by a car.’

une voiture). a car)

The se + faire passive no longer has causative meaning: The structural subject need not be human (40a) or responsible for the event (40b) (Kupferman 1995). (40) Fr.

a.

Son dernier livre s’est fait descendre REFL =AUX . 3SG CAUS descend.INF his last book par la critique. by the criticism ‘His last book was badly reviewed by the critics.’ b. Les trois touristes se sont fait surprendre REFL AUX . 3PL CAUS surprise.INF the three tourists par la marée montante. by the tide rising ‘The three tourists were caught by the rising tide.’

The se + faire passive and the reflexive + see passives in Italian and French differ from other passive auxiliaries in allowing the promotion of a dative object to subject position from an infinitival complement (see, for French, Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot 1981; Labelle 2013; for Italian, Giacalone Ramat 2016).

Voice and voice alternations

(41)

Fr.

247

Pierre s=est fait offrir un poste par Louise. CAUS offer a job by Louise Pierre REFL =AUX . 3SG ‘Pierre was offered a job by Louise.’ (Labelle 2013, 242) b. Le régisseur s=est vu décerner un prix. REFL = AUX .3 SG seen award.INF a prize the director ‘The director was awarded a prize.’

a.

4 Reflexives and argument reduction Cross-linguistically, reflexive constructions commonly give rise to anticausative, passive and impersonal constructions. (42)

Grammaticalisation: Reflexive > anticausative > passive > impersonal (Haspelmath 1990, 44; Kemmer 1993, 166)

Passive and anticausative uses of the reflexive se were attested in Late Latin (43a) and Archaic Latin (43b) and spread in the Early Romance languages. (43)

a. Lat.

Mala rotunda toto anno servare se possunt. apples round. PL all year keep REFL can.3PL ‘Round apples can be kept all year.’ (Palladius, 4th c.; Ernout/Thomas 1953, §234) b. Arc.Lat. eaeipsae se patinae fervefaciunt ilico REFL pans heat-up instantaneously these-self ‘The pans heat up automatically and instantaneously.’ (Plaut. Pseud. 831‒833, Cennamo 1998, 83)

By the end of the fourth century AD (Late Latin), reflexive anticausative marking had spread to practically all verbs (Cennamo 1998, 88). The passive reflexive interpretation was initially limited to inanimate patients and examples of passive se with human participants only arose later (Cennamo 1998, 95). The following sections examine four types of reflexive readings: (44) Sp.

a.

Anticausative: La casa se quemó. REFL burnt.PFV . 3SG the house ‘The house burnt down.’

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b. Middle: Este libro se lee fácilmente. REFL reads easily this book ‘This book is easy to read.’ c. Passive: Se tradujeron tres novelas. REFL translated.PFV . 3PL three novels ‘Three novels were translated.’ d. Impersonal: Se convocó a los alumnos. REFL summoned. PFV . 3SG A the students ‘The students were summoned/they summoned the students.’ Reflexive anticausatives (44a) differ from the other uses of the reflexive in that no agent is implied for the event. Stative middle reflexives ascribe a stative property to the subject DP and generally appear with a modifier (44b). In the literature different analyses of the range of uses of se/si in different Romance languages have been proposed. The status of se/si in the different constructions is a matter of considerable debate (see Dobrovie-Sorin 2005). The following sections summarise the main properties of reflexive anticausatives (Section 4.1), reflexive stative middles (Section 4.2), reflexive passives (Section 4.3) and impersonal reflexives (Section 4.4).  



4.1 Reflexive anticausatives Reflexive anticausatives are eventive but do not imply an agent ((45), (46a)).4 Inherent reflexives (45a) are a subclass of reflexive anticausatives that lack a transitive variant (compare (45b) and (46)).5 (45)

Sp.

a.

María se desmayó. fainted.PFV . 3SG María REFL ‘María fainted.’ (inherent reflexive) b. El florero se rompió. REFL broke.PFV . 3SG the vase ‘The vase broke.’

4 For a comparison of anticausatives with and without reflexives, see Zribi-Hertz (1987). 5 Many inherent reflexives have affected non-active subjects, patterning with middle verbs in other languages (Kemmer 1993, 152).

Voice and voice alternations

(46)

Sp.

María rompió María broke.PFV . 3SG ‘María broke the vases.’

los the

249

floreros. vases

Reflexive anticausatives and reflexive middles differ in their aspectual properties: reflexive anticausatives are eventive, appearing in the perfective and the progressive (47), while reflexive middles are stative and limited to present and imperfective forms (48). (47)

Sp.

(48) Sp.

El bosque se quemó/ se está quemando. REFL burnt.PFV . 3SG / REFL is burning the forest ‘The forest burnt down/is burning.’ (reflexive anticausative) En verano, los bosques se queman REFL burn. PRS . 3PL in summer the forests ‘In summer, forests burn easily.’ (reflexive middle)

fácilmente. easily

Unlike reflexive passives, reflexive anticausatives do not imply the presence of an agent or cause. Ambiguous forms can be disambiguated by adding modifiers like spontaneously, that exclude an implicit agent and consequently the passive reading (49); inversely, agentive adverbs and purpose clauses exclude an anticausative reading (50) (Labelle 1992; Mendikoetxea 1999b; Ackema/Schoorlemmer 2005). (49)

Sp.

La puerta se abrió REFL opened.PFV . 3SG the door ‘The door opened spontaneously.’

espontáneamente. spontaneously

(50)

Cat.

S=han destruït totes les proves intencionadament/ REFL =have.3PL destroyed all the proofs intentionally/ per enganyar els inspectors. to deceive the inspectors ‘All the evidence was destroyed intentionally/to deceive the inspectors.’ (Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2153)

Reflexive anticausatives and inherent reflexives (51) differ from middle, passive and impersonal reflexives in allowing first and second person subjects: (51)

a. Fr. b. Pt.

Tu

te

(you) (REFL .2SG ) ‘You complain.’

plains. Queixas complain.PRS .2SG

-te. (-REFL .2SG )

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4.2 Reflexive middles Reflexive middles have an implicit agent, allowing subject oriented adverbials like carefully (see, for Romanian, Cornilescu/Nicolae 2014, 330; for Spanish, Mendikoetxea 1999b), in contrast with reflexive anticausatives. Reflexive middles are stative and limited to habitual or generic contexts in which a property is attributed to the subject DP (52a) (see, for Italian, Salvi 2001, 108; for Spanish, Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1664– 1665; for French, Stefanini 1962; Zribi-Hertz 1982), thus contrasting with reflexive passives, which do not imply an inherent property of the subject DP (52b,c). (52)

Sp.

a.

Este libro se vende bien. REFL sells well this book ‘This book sells well.’ (middle, inherent property) b. Este libro se vende en todas partes. REFL sells in all parts this book ‘This book is sold everywhere.’ (passive, habitual event) c. Este cuadro se vendió ayer. REFL sell.PFV .3SG yesterday this painting ‘This painting was sold yesterday.’ (passive, single event)

Owing to their stative semantics, reflexive middles are limited to imperfective tenses (Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1663; see (47) and (48) above): (53)

Sp.

Ese coche se conducía/ conduce/ this car REFL drove. IMPFV / drives. PRS / ‘This car was/is/will be easy to drive.’

conducirá drive. FUT

bien. well

Reflexive middles often require adverbial modification (54a), negation (54b) or focus on the predicate (54c) to facilitate a stative interpretation (see, for French, Fellbaum/ Zribi-Hertz 1989; for Spanish, Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1665). (54)

Fr.

Ce fruit se mange facilement/ avec eats easily/ with this fruit REFL ‘This fruit is easy to eat/is eaten with one’s hands.’ b. Ce fruit ne se mange pas. REFL eats NEG this fruit NEG ‘This fruit is not edible.’ c. Ce fruit se mange. eats this fruit REFL ‘This fruit is edible.’

a.

les the

mains. hands

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In Spanish, reflexive middles differ from reflexive passives with respect to the interpretation of the subject. The implicit argument of the middle reflexive cannot be an experiencer (55a) (Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1656), while passive reflexives and impersonal reflexives also allow the demotion of experiencer (55b,c) (Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1661): (55)

Sp.

a.

*Las acelgas se detestan en el momento de REFL detest.3PL in the moment of the chard.PL probar=las por primera vez. for first time try. INF =them. ACC ‘One detests chard when trying it for the first time.’ b. Cuando se detestan las acelgas, se aborrecen REFL detest.3PL the chard.PL REFL abhor.3PL when también las espinacas. also the spinach. PL ‘When one detests chard one also abhors spinach.’ c. A los criminales se les detesta con intensidad. A the criminals REFL them.ACC detest. 3SG with intensity ‘One abhors criminals intensely.’ (Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1656 and 1661)

Stative reflexive middles only allow first and second person subjects in very marked contexts, contrasting with reflexive anticausatives (see (51)): (56)

Fr.

Je me range n’importe où, je me transporte anywhere I REFL . 1SG transport.1SG I REFL . 1SG stow.1SG facilement, je vous suis indispensable. am indispensable easily I you.PL . DAT ‘I can be stowed anywhere, I am easy to carry and I am indispensable for you.’ (suitcase speaking in an advertising) (Zribi-Hertz 1982, 365)

4.3 Reflexive passives Reflexive passives imply an agent and have an eventive interpretation, differing from reflexive anticausatives and reflexive middles respectively. The reflexive passive is attested in Old Italian, Old Spanish and Old Portuguese (see, for Old Italian, Salvi 2011; for Old Spanish, Lapesa 2000; for Old Portuguese, Naro 1976). The impersonal reflexive was a later innovation (see, for Italian, Giacalone Ramat/Sansò 2011, 199; for Spanish, Brown 1931; for Portuguese, Naro 1976, 781) that emerged in some Romance languages (e.g., Italian, Portuguese, Spanish) but not in others (e.g., French and Romanian, Dobrovie-Sorin 1998; 2005).

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The reflexive passive construction is characterized by the following properties: (57)

Reflexive passive a. The verb agrees with the patient DP. b. The patient DP is pronominalised by a subject pronoun.

Reflexive passives were initially only possible with transitive verbs (see, for Old Portuguese, Naro 1976; for Old Italian, Sansò 2011). Subsequently the construction extended to intransitive verbs. In Old Portuguese, Old Catalan and Old Italian, se-passives were possible with agent phrases (see, for Old Portuguese, Naro 1976; for Old Catalan, Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2155; for Old Italian, Sansò 2011): (58)

a. OPt.

b. OIt.

Como Josep se conheceu pelos irmãaos. REFL know.PFV .3SG by-the brothers how Josep ‘How Josep was recognized by his brothers.’ (Naro 1976, 789) …si debbiano chiamare da-la Compagnia due call. INF by-the company two …REFL should.3PL capitani … captains … ‘Two captains should be called by the company.’ (shortened from Sansò 2011, 228)

Of the Modern Romance languages only Modern Romanian freely allows agentive phrases with reflexive passives (Pountain 2000; Cornilescu/Nicolae 2014, 311 and 323): (59)

Rom. O asemenea cercetare s=a făcut the such research REFL =has done ‘Such research has been done by many scholars.’ (Pountain 2000, 15)

de DE

mulţi many

erudiţi. scholars

In Spanish reflexive passives with agentive phrases are found in literary and journalistic texts and limited to generic agents (Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1682–1684): (60) Sp.

firmó la paz por REFL sign.PFV .3SG the peace by ‘The peace was signed by the ambassadors.’ (Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1682)

Se

los the

embajadores. ambassadors

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In Catalan (Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2155), Italian (Sansò 2011), French (Melis 1992; Lamiroy 1993) and Portuguese (Martins 2005), reflexive passives no longer allow agentive phrases. In the Modern Romance languages reflexive passives are limited to the third person (see, for Portuguese, Naro 1976, 780; for Spanish, Mendikoetxea 2012, 478; for French, Zribi-Hertz 1982; for Italian, Salvi 2001, 116; for Romanian, Dragomirescu 2013, 203).6 Reflexive passives with animate patients are ambiguous between a reflexive/reciprocal reading and a passive reading. The preverbal animate DPs favour a reflexive/reciprocal interpretation, while post-verbal DPs favour a passive interpretation (see, for Spanish, Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1674; for Catalan, Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2153).7 In Spanish, reflexive passives contrast with ser-passives with respect to bare NP subjects (Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1675): only the se-passive allows bare post-verbal subjects (61b). (61)

Sp.

En el barco in the ship a. *fueron encontradas armas. weapons.FPL were.PFV .3 PL found.PTCP . FPL b. se encontraron armas. REFL found.PFV .3PL weapons.FPL ‘Weapons were found on the ship.’ (Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1675).

Mendikoetxea (1999b) attributes this contrast to a difference in topicality: the theme of the periphrastic passive is generally a topic, while reflexive passives correspond to active sentences with non-specific themes. In Spanish, the reflexive passive shows fewer aspectual restrictions than the periphrastic passive, and is consequently used more widely (Mendikoetxea 1999b, 1673). In Italian, punctual events are expressed by the periphrastic passive while habitual or iterated events are expressed with the reflexive passive (Sansò 2011). In Catalan, the reflexive passive is acceptable with iterated events (62a), but less so with punctual events (62b):

6 Nineteenth-century Romanian allowed first and second person reflexive passives (Cornilescu/Nicolae 2014): (i) Mă bat eu de către tine. REFL . 1SG beat I by you ‘I am beaten by you.’ (Iordache Golescu 1840, 150) (Cornilescu/Nicolae 2014, 311) 7 This is a simplification. Raposo/Uriagereka (1996) show that in Portuguese preverbal DPs in agreeing se-constructions can occupy a subject position or a topic position.

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Cat.

a.

S=han traduït força novel·les de X en REFL = have.3PL translated many novels by X in els últims anys. the last years ‘In the last few years many novels by X have been translated.’ b. *?La porta es va obrir perquè sortís REFL AUX . 3SG open.INF in-order go-out. SBJV the door el fum. the smoke ‘The door was opened to let the smoke out.’

Reflexive passives with first and second person reflexives are not interpreted as passives but as referential reflexives (63) (see, for Spanish, Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1640; for Catalan, Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2150; for Italian, Salvi 2001, 115; for Romanian, Cornilescu/Nicolae 2014, 335). (63)

Rom. Eu mă păcălesc repede. REFL . 1SG deceive quickly I ‘I deceive myself quickly.’ (referential reflexive) ‘I am easily deceived.’ (reflexive anticausative) (Cornilescu/Nicolae 2014, 336)

4.4 Reflexive impersonals The distinction between passive se/si and impersonal se/si is not drawn uniformly across the literature. Certain analyses take the difference between passive se/si and impersonal se/si to be a semantic distinction between object-oriented and agentoriented readings (cf. Cennamo 2014). Here the distinction is based on syntactic criteria. In the reflexive passive construction the verb agrees with the patient DP, the DP behaves like a grammatical subject and the reflexive marks argument reduction, like a passive morpheme. In the impersonal reflexive construction, in contrast, the DP patient behaves like a syntactic object, suggesting that the reflexive has been reanalysed as an impersonal subject clitic (Dobrovie-Sorin 1998; 2005; Salvi 2001, 117). Blevins (2003) shows that the possibility to combine with modals provides a further diagnostic distinguishing passives from impersonal verb forms: passives do not apply to modals, copulas and passive constructions, while impersonal verb forms and impersonal subjects routinely combine with modal verbs, copulas and auxiliary passives. For the reflexive in Romance, this test has to be applied with a transitive verb in the complement of the modal, since otherwise the reflexive on the modal verbs could be due to clitic climbing. So, while for Romance auxiliary passives there is a

Voice and voice alternations

255

clear contrast between passivising the modal or passivising the main predicate (64a,b), it is difficult to establish whether the reflexive se/si passivises the main predicate or the modal in (65a), as a passive se on the main predicate is possible (65b) and Romance has clitic climbing with modals (65c): (64)

(65)

Fr.

Sp.

a.

*Les pommes sont pu manger. eat.INF the apples are.3PL can.PTCP b. Les pommes ont pu être can.PTCP be. INF the apples have.3PL ‘It was possible to eat the apples.’

mangées. eaten.FPL

Las manzanas se pueden comer. the apples REFL can.3PL eat.INF b. Las manzanas pueden comer=se. eat.INF = REFL the apples can.3PL ‘The apples can be eaten.’ c. Lo puedo ver./ Puedo ver=lo. see.INF can.1SG see.INF = him. ACC him. ACC can.1SG ‘I can see him.’

a.

The following table summarises the diagnostics used to distinguish reflexive passives from reflexive impersonals in what follows. Table 2: Diagnostics distinguishing reflexive passives from reflexive impersonals Reflexive passive

Reflexive impersonal

+



+





+



+



+

∙ modals



+

∙ periphrastic passives



+

Patient DP has subject properties ∙ agreement with patient DP ∙ pronominalised by subject pronoun Patient DP has object properties ∙ pronominalised by object pronoun ∙ allows differential object marking Compatible with ∙ copulas

Notice that compatibility with intransitive verbs as in It. si dorme ‘REFL sleeps’ is not a reliable indicator of reanalysis of the reflexive as an impersonal subject (DobrovieSorin 1986 and 2005, §2.4) as in languages like German auxiliary passives can combine with intransitives (66) (Keenan/Dryer 2007).

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Ger. Nebenan wird gerade gesungen. AUX . 3SG just.now sung.PTCP next-door ‘Next door there is singing going on.’

As (67) shows, the Romanian reflexive construction systematically patterns with reflexive passives on the criteria in Table 2 (cf. Dobrovie-Sorin 1998; 2005) (67), while Italian si is compatible with all environments diagnostic of a reflexive impersonal (68). (67)

Rom. a.

se + no agreement with DP *În această universitate se predă ştiinţele REFL teaches studies.DET in this university umane. human ‘At this university they teach the humanities.’ b. se + accusative clitic: *(Ştiinţele umane) le se predă în REFL teaches in (studies.DET human) them.ACC această universitate. this university ‘The humanities, they teach them at this university.’ c. se + differential object marking pe: *În şcoala asta se pedepseşte pe elevi. this REFL punishes PE students in school.DET ‘In this school they punish the students.’ d. se + copula: *Nu se este niciodată mulţumit. NEG REFL is never content ‘One is never satisfied.’ e. se + auxiliary passive: *Adesea se este trădat de prieteni falşi. is betrayed by friends false frequently REFL ‘One is frequently betrayed by false friends.’ (Dobrovie-Sorin 2005, §2.3, (36) and (38))

(68)

It.

a.

si + no agreement with DP: In questa università si studia le studies the in this university REFL letterarie. literary.FPL ‘In this university one studies the humanities.’ (Belletti 1988)

materie subjects.FPL

Voice and voice alternations

b. si + accusative clitic: Li si vede. REFL sees them. M . ACC ‘One sees them.’ (Cennamo 2014, 73) c. si + copula: Non si è mai contenti. NEG REFL is ever satisfied. MPL ‘One is never satisfied.’ (Cinque 1988, 522) d. si + passive: Si è spesso trattati REFL is frequently treated.MPL ‘One is frequently treated badly.’ (Cinque 1988, 522)

257

male. badly

The diagnostics in Table 2 need not always line up neatly, however (see Salvi 2008 for Italian). Spanish reflexive constructions, e.g., are compatible with copulas, modals and passives and allow the patient DP to be an accusative clitic or carry differential object marking (Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1638–1639), while the agreement-less construction is not freely available. (69)

Sp.

También se les vio en la gala REFL them.ACC saw.3SG in the gala also solidaria Life Ball de Viena. solidary Life Ball of Vienna ‘They were also seen at the charity gala Life Ball in Vienna.’ b. En esta escuela se castiga a los alumnos. REFL punishes A the students in this school ‘In this school they punish the students.’ (Dobrovie-Sorin 2005, §2.3, (37)) c. Cuando se es tonto se es tonto. REFL is stupid REFL is stupid when ‘When one is stupid one is stupid.’ d. Se puede ser generoso. REFL can.3SG be generous ‘One can be generous.’ e. Es fácil simular una enfermedad cuando no a illness when NEG is easy simulate.INF se es examinado por especialistas expertos. REFL is examined by specialists experts a.

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‘It is easy to simulate an illness when one is not examined by expert specialists.’ The most acceptable examples of the reflexive without agreement in Spanish involve postverbal bare patient DPs and receive an interpretation reminiscent of a sign or an announcement (70a,b); definite and preverbal subjects are not felicitous without agreement (70c,d) (Mendikoetxea 1999a). (70)

Sp.

a.

Se

vende casas. sells houses ‘Houses sold/for sale.’ b. Se necesita aprendices. REFL needs apprentices ‘Apprentices needed.’ c. ?*Aquí se vende los mejores REFL sells the best here ‘Here are sold the best cars.’ (Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1677) d. *Los mejores coches se vende REFL sells the best cars ‘The best cars are sold here.’ (Mendikoetxea 1999a, 1678) REFL

coches. cars

aquí. here

Lack of agreement with the DP becomes acceptable in examples in which lexical material separates the agreeing verb from the patient DP: (71)

Sp.

Se

conoce en la mayoría de los casos los knows in the majority of the cases the nombres de los culpables. names of the culprits ‘In the majority of cases the names of the culprits are known.’ (Mendikoetxea 1999b, 1678) REFL

Other restrictions can be lexical: in Catalan impersonal reflexives are possible with the copulas ser and estar but not with semblar ‘to seem’ (Bartra Kaufmann 2002): (72)

Cat.

Si s=és amable (s=obtenen moltes coses). REFL = is nice (REFL =obtain.3PL many things) if ‘If one is nice (many things are obtained).’ b. Quan s=està cansat (no es pot menjar). (NEG REFL can. 3SG eat.INF ) When REFL = is tired ‘When one is tired (one cannot eat).’ a.

259

Voice and voice alternations

c.

*Quan se sembla ruc (s=obté el REFL seems donkey (REFL = obtains the when menyspreu de tothom). disdain of everyone) ‘When one seems a donkey (one is disdained by everyone).’ (Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2157)

In Italian passive and impersonal reflexives differ in their agreement properties: with the impersonal, the participle agreement is plural (73a) (Salvi 2001, 98), while with the passive reflexive, the participle agrees with the patient DP (73b). (73)

It.

a.

Si

è partiti all’ alba. is left. MPL at.the dawn ‘One left at dawn.’ (Cennamo 2014, 74) b. Si è evitata una tragedia. REFL is avoided. FSG a tragedy.FSG ‘A tragedy was avoided.’ (Sansò 2011, 221) REFL

In Italian, the combination of an impersonal si and a reflexive si or an inherent si is replaced by the sequence ci si (see Salvi 2001; Cennamo 2014, 76) (see ↗5 Clitic pronouns). The diagnostics discriminating passive and impersonal reflexives presented in Table 2 above are by no means uncontroversial. In particular, lack of agreement with the DP is not always considered a defining property of impersonal si (see, for Italian, D’Alessandro 2007; for Catalan, Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2161). In contrast, in Borgoromanese impersonal reflexives differ syntactically from passive and anticausative reflexives (Manzini/Savoia 2005): the anticausative and passive reflexives are postverbal (74a,b), while the impersonal reflexive appears preverbally on the discourse clitic a (74c).8  

(74)

Borgoromanese a. I’rumpu-si i pjati. SCL = break-REFL the plates ‘The plates break.’ (Manzini/Savoia 2005, 70)

8 For similar patterns in Piedmontese, see Parry (1998).

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Patricia Cabredo Hofherr

b.

c.

passive reflexive: Iø i vøŋgu=si sempri pasondu. going they SCL see.3PL = REFL always ‘They are always seen going …’ (Manzini/Savoia 2005, 71) impersonal reflexive: A=s môngia bej chilonsé. eats well here A= REFL ‘One eats well here.’ (Benincà/Tortora 2009, 19)

Cross-linguistically, there are arguments for a tripartite distinction between passives, impersonal verb forms and impersonal subjects, suggesting that the binary distinction between a reflexive passive morpheme and a homophonous impersonal subject clitic may be insufficient (Cabredo Hofherr forthcoming).

5 Agent backgrounding without argument reduction Apart from back-grounding devices operating on the verbal domain, Romance also has a number of pronominal agent backgrounding strategies that leave valency unchanged.

5.1 Impersonal third person plural Impersonal uses of the third person plural are limited to subjects (75a,b). Contexts with impersonal third person plural pronouns in oblique positions are only possible with an impersonal antecedent (75c) (Cabredo Hofherr 2006). (75)

Sp.

a.

En esta mina pro trabajan mucho. in this mine work.3PL a-lot ‘In this mine, they work a lot.’ b. #En esta mina el patrón les paga poco. little in this mine the boss them. ACC pays ‘In this mine, the boss pays them little.’ trabajan mucho y el patrón c. En esta mina proi and the boss in this mine work.3PL a-lot paga poco. lesi pays little. them.ACC ‘In this mine they work a lot and the boss pays them little.’

Voice and voice alternations

261

Third person plural impersonal subjects can have quasi-universal or quasi-existential interpretations, that can be paraphrased by someone (76), or people in general (77) respectively. Quasi-existential interpretations only arise with transitive and ergative verbs and are excluded with passives and unergatives (Cinque 1988). (76)

(77)

It.

It.

a.

Hanno bussato. have.3PL knocked ‘Someone knocked.’ b. Mi hanno rubato stolen me.DAT have ‘They stole my bike.’

In Francia mangiano in France eat.3PL ‘In France they eat snails.’

le the

la the

bici. bike

lumache. snails

Siewierska/Papastathi (2011, 585) show that third person plural forms of the verb say like (78) have to be treated separately, as they are possible in languages that do not use impersonal third person plural constructions elsewhere. (78)

a. Sp. b. Pt.

Dicen que … Dizem que … say.3PL that ‘They say that …’

In pro-drop languages like Italian, (European) Portuguese and Spanish, impersonal readings are excluded with lexical third person plural pronouns (79a,b). Brazilian Portuguese, however, is losing pro-drop (Modesto 2008, see ↗2 Subjects) and impersonal readings of third person plural pronouns show a split: the lexical pronoun is compatible with quasi-universal impersonals (80a) but not with quasi-existential impersonals ((80b) vs (80c)): (79)

Sp.

Ellos me han robado la bici. stolen the bike they me.DAT have.3PL Only: ‘They (previously mentioned) stole my bike.’ b. En Francia ellos comen caracoles. snails in France they eat.3PL Only: ‘In France they (previously mentioned) eat snails.’

a.

(80) BPt. a.

Na França, eles comem in.the France they eat.3PL ‘In France they eat snails.’

caracois. snails

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b. Roubaram minha bicicleta. my bike stole.PFV .3PL ‘They/someone stole my bike.’ c. Eles roubaram minha bicicleta. my bike they stole.PFV .3PL ‘They (previously mentioned) stole my bike.’

5.2 Generic second person singular Second person singular pronouns allow generic uses in all major Romance languages, corresponding to a reading roughly paraphrasable by people in general. Generic uses of the second person singular contrast with impersonal third person plural pronouns with respect to two properties. First, unlike impersonal third person plural pronouns (75b), generic uses of the second person singular can appear in non-subject positions in isolation (81). Secondly, in pro-drop languages, lexical second person singular pronouns allow a generic reading in certain contexts (82), while third person plural pronouns do not (79) (see, for Spanish, Hernanz 1990; for Catalan, Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2170). (81)

Sp.

En este hospital siempre te in this hospital always you.2SG .ACC ‘In this hospital they always treat you well.’

(82)

Sp.

Si tú dices eso en una reunión, la if you say this in a meeting the escandaliza. scandalize ‘If you say this in a meeting people are shocked.’ (Hernanz 1990, 157)

atienden take-care.3PL

gente people

bien. well

se REFL

5.3 Generic uno The generic use of the pronoun un/uno is possible in Spanish, Catalan and Italian (83), but excluded in French, Portuguese and Romanian. (83)

a. Sp. b. Cat. c. It.

Uno necesita agua Un necessita aigua Uno ha bisogno di acqua one needs (of) water ‘One needs water to survive.’

para per per to

sobrevivir. sobreviure. sopravvivere. survive.INF

263

Voice and voice alternations

Unlike the generic pronoun on in French, Occitan and Francoprovençal, in Spanish generic uno is also possible in non-subject positions. (84) Sp.

Somos viejos, y cuando uno es viejo, hacen con UNO is old do.3PL with are.1PL old.PL and when uno lo que quieren. UNO 3SG . MSG . ACC that want.3PL ‘We are old and when one is old they do with one what they want.’

The impersonal uses of un/uno in Spanish, Catalan and Italian differ with respect to their anaphoric properties: in Spanish, uno allows co-reference with a null pronoun or a second occurrence of uno (85a), in Catalan repetition of un is degraded, whereas in Italian only the null pronoun is possible. (85)

a. Sp. b. Cat. c. It.

Cuando uno está enfermo, (uno) quedarse en la cama. Quan un està malalt, (??un) quedar-se al llit. Quando uno è malato, (*uno) UNO is ill (UNO ) when restare a letto. stay in (the) bed ‘When one is ill, one should stay in bed.’

tiene

que

ha

de

deve MODAL .3SG

In Spanish and Catalan the impersonal un/uno allows gender-marking if the referents are limited to women (see, for Catalan, Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2174). (86)

Sp.

y cuando una está feliz o presiente que UNO . F is happy or feels that and when la felicidad está cerca, pues se mira en REFL looks in the happiness is near well los espejos sin ninguna reserva … the mirrors without any reserve ‘and when one is happy or feels that happiness is near, well one looks at oneself in the mirror without any inhibition.’ (Roberto Bolaño, Amuleto, Ediciones Anagrama 1999)

There is variation across dialects of Catalan: for some speakers the impersonal use of un is felt to be a calque from Spanish.

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5.4 Reflexes of HOMO Dedicated impersonal pronouns provide a further agent-backgrounding strategy. Synchronically, only French, Franco-Provençal and Occitan varieties have a dedicated impersonal pronoun on/om (see, for French, Nyrop 1925; for Franco-Provençal, Tintou 1973, 34; for Occitan, Weerenbeck 1943; Sauzet 2015), which developed from the Latin noun homo (Nyrop 1925, vol. 5: §368; Welton-Lair 1999). In Modern Occitan om is rarely used (cf. Meyer-Lübke 1899, 107; Comitat Sestian d’Estudis Occitans 1983, 59) and mostly appears with reflexive verbs and the copula that are incompatible with the otherwise widely used reflexive passive strategy (Sauzet 2015). In Catalan the impersonal pronoun hom is an archaic construction that is no longer used in Colloquial Catalan (cf. Bartra Kaufmann 2002, 2172–2173). D’Alessandro/Alexiadou (2006) document the pronoun nome in Abruzzese that was used until about 50 years ago, and recently reanalysed as a plural marker by younger speakers (D’Alessandro 2014). French on is a clitic pronoun: undergoing clitic inversion (87a), with a strong form soi (87b) (Nyrop 1925, 371). (87)

Fr.

a.

Peut-on y accéder? get-to.INF can.3SG -ON LOC ‘Can one get there?’ b. On n’ aime jamais vraiment que ON NEG loves never really but ‘One never really loves anyone but oneself.’

soi. REFL

Soi can only appear as a locally bound reflexive ((87b) vs (88a)) and is also used as the reflexive for the null subject of infinitives (PRO) (88b) (Zribi-Hertz 2008): (88) Fr.

a.

*Oni

s’=inquiète quand la police fait des ON REFL =worries when the police makes ART . INDF . PL enquêtes sur soii. REFL inquiries on Intended: ‘One worries when the police makes inquiries about oneself.’ Parler de soii] n’ est pas toujours évident. b. [PROi REFL NEG is NEG always obvious talk.INF of ‘Talking about oneself is not always easy.’

French on allows quasi-existential and quasi-universal readings (89a,b), contrasting with pronouns like Spanish uno that only allow quasi-universal uses (see (83) and (85a)).

Voice and voice alternations

(89)

Fr.

a.

265

On

a volé mon vélo. has stolen my bike ‘Someone stole my bike.’ b. En Espagne on mange tard. ON eats late in Spain ‘In Spain one eats/they eat late.’ ON

French on has further developed into a nominative first person plural pronoun. This use of on appears with third person singular verbal agreement but takes first person plural possessive pronouns (90a). A third person reflexive possessive does not have a first person plural reflexive interpretation (90b) (Cabredo Hofherr 2008; see Creissels 2008 for a discussion of binding properties of French on): (90) Fr.

a pris nos chaussures. has taken POSS . REFL . 1PL shoes ‘We took our shoes.’ b. On a pris ses chaussures. ON has taken POSS . 3PL shoes ‘Somebodyi took his*i/j shoes./ We took his shoes.’

a.

On ON

It is unclear whether on under its first person plural reading grammaticalised from the quasi-universal or the quasi-existential use of on (cf. Egerland 2010). Cross-linguistically, quasi-existential and first person plural readings are not correlated. Brazilian Portuguese a gente ‘people’ grammaticalised to a first person plural pronoun (Menuzzi 1999; Taylor 2009), but does not allow a quasi-existential reading (91). Inversely, German has quasi-universal and quasi-existential readings of man but no first person plural readings. (91)

BPt. *A gente me roubou minha me.DAT stole.PFV .3SG my the people.SG Not: ‘Somebody stole my bicyle.’ (compare to (89a)) (R. Bertucci, p.c.)

bicicleta. bike

Various older varieties of Romance display an impersonal use of homo, which was subsequently lost. According to Brown (1931, 272), Old Spanish had indefinite uses of omne. However, this use was not clearly different from the (definite or bare) noun (Kärde 1943, 14). Old Italian varieties had a pronoun uomo (Giacalone Ramat/Sansò 2007a,b; Egerland 2010) which contrasts with Modern French on in several respects. Firstly, Old Italian uomo can be modified by relative clauses and adjectives (Giacalone Ramat/ Sansò 2007a). Secondly, while on/man are taken up by on/man for co-reference (92b,c), uomo is always referred to by third person singular pronouns (92a) (Giacalone

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Ramat/Sansò 2007a). Finally, Egerland (2010) shows that Old Italian uomo was restricted to imperfective tenses and perfective tenses embedded in a generic context, suggesting that an episodic reading of uomo was not possible. (92)

a. OIt.

b. Ger. c. Fr.

ove che l’ uom vada, o stea, stays.SBJV where that the man goes.SBJV or e’ dee vivere onestamente live.INF honestly he must.3SG ‘Wherever “man” goes or stays, he must live honestly.’ (Pistole di Seneca, 21, Giacalone Ramat/Sansò 2007a, 110) Wenn man ein Kind ist, will man erwachsen sein. when MAN a child is wants MAN adult be Quand on est enfant, on veut être adulte. when ON is child ON want be adult ‘When one is a child one wants to be an adult.’

6 Conclusion The Early Romance languages lost the synthetic imperfective passive of Latin, and generalised the be + past participle construction to the entire passive paradigm. Due to the homophony between the copula and the new passive auxiliary, the resulting innovated be-passives were in principle aspectually ambiguous, but favoured stative interpretations in the imperfective. The Romance languages developed an array of aspectually unambiguous passive auxiliaries from different semi-auxiliaries and extended reflexive marking for anticausative, stative middle and passive interpretations. In some Romance languages, passive reflexives subsequently grammaticalised as impersonal reflexives. Furthermore, Romance languages allow impersonal uses of third person and second person pronouns and some Romance languages grammaticalised impersonal pronouns from the numeral one or the noun homo ‘man’.

7 References Abeillé, Anne/Godard, Danièle (2000), Varieties of ES SE in Romance languages, in: Dan Flickinger/ Andreas Kathol (edd.), Berkeley Formal Grammar Conference, Stanford, CA, CSLI, 2–22. Ackema, Peter/Schoorlemmer, Maaike (2005), Middles, in: Martin Everaert/Henk van Riemsdijk (edd.), The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, vol. 3, Oxford, Blackwell, 131–203. Azevedo, Milton M. (2005), Portuguese. A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Banniard, Michel (1997), Du latin aux langues romanes, Paris, Nathan. Bartra Kaufmann, Anna (2002), La passiva i les construccions que s’hi relacionen, in: Joan Solà et al. (edd.), Gramàtica del català contemporani, vol. 2, Barcelona, Empúries, 2111–2179.

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Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot, Hava (1981), À propos de la forme passive “se voir+Vinf”, Folia Linguistica 15, 387–407. Belletti, Adriana (1988), The Case of unaccusatives, Linguistic Inquiry 19, 1–34. Benincà, Paola/Poletto, Cecilia (1997), The diachronic development of a modal verb of necessity, in: Ans van Kemenade/Nigel Vincent (edd.), Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 94–118. Benincà, Paola/Tortora, Christina (2009), Towards a finer-grained theory of Italian participial clausal architecture, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 15, 17–26. Berizzi, Mariachiara/Rossi, Silvia (2011), Deontic “ghe vol” with past participle in some varieties of eastern Veneto, Quaderni di Lavoro ASIt 12, 41–62. Blevins, James (2003), Passives and impersonals, Journal of Linguistics 39, 473–520. Brown, Christopher Barrett (1931), The disappearance of indefinite “hombre” from Spanish, Language 7, 265–277. Brucart, José Maria (1990), Pasividad y atribución en español: un análisis generativo, in: Violeta Demonte/Beatriz Garza (edd.), Estudios de lingüística de España y México, Ciudad de México, UNAM/El Colegio de México, 179–208. Cabredo Hofherr, Patricia (2006), “Arbitrary” pro and the theory of pro-drop, in: Peter Ackema et al. (edd.), Arguments and Agreement, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 230–260. Cabredo Hofherr, Patricia (2008), Les pronoms impersonnels humains – syntaxe et interprétation, Modèles linguistiques 57, 35–56. Cabredo Hofherr, Patricia (forthcoming), Impersonal passives, in: Martin Everaert/Henk van Riemsdijk (edd.), The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, 2nd edn, Oxford, Blackwell. Carlier, Anne (2002), Les propriétés aspectuelles du passif, Cahiers Chronos 10, 41–63. Cennamo, Michela (1998), The loss of the voice dimension between Late Latin and Early Romance, in: Monika S. Schmid/Jennifer R. Austin/Dieter Stein (edd.), Historical linguistics 1997. Selected Papers from the XIII International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 77–100. Cennamo, Michela (2006), The rise and grammaticalization paths of Latin FIERI and FACERE as passive auxiliaries, in: Werner Abraham/Larisa Leisiö (edd.), Passivization and Typology, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 311–336. Cennamo, Michela (2007), Auxiliaries and serials between Late Latin and Early Romance, in: Delia Bentley/Adam Ledgeway (edd.), Sui Dialetti Italo-Romanzi. Saggi in onore di Nigel B. Vincent, The Italianist, Special Supplement, vol. 1, Cambridge, University of Cambridge, 63–87. Cennamo, Michela (2014), Passive and impersonal reflexives in the Italian dialects: Synchronic and diachronic aspects, in: Paola Benincà/Adam Ledgeway/Nigel Vincent (edd.), Diachrony and Dialects. Grammatical Change in the Dialects of Italy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 71–95. Cennamo, Michela (2016), Voice, in: Adam Ledgeway/Martin Maiden (edd.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 967–980. Cinque, Guglielmo (1988), On “si” constructions and the theory of “arb”, Linguistic Inquiry 19, 521–583. Comitat Sestian d’Estudis Occitans (1983), Grammaire du provençal rhodanien et maritime (graphie classique), La Calade/Aix-en-Provence, Edisud. Conti Jiménez, Carmen (2004), Construcciones pasivas con “estar”, Estudios de Lingüística 18, 21–44. Cornilescu, Alexandra/Nicolae, Alexandru (2014), The grammaticalization of a constraint on passive reflexive constructions in Romanian, in: Gabriela Pană Dindelegan/Rodica Zafiu/Adina Dragomirescu (edd.), Diachronic Variation in Romanian, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 309–362. Creissels, Denis (2008), Impersonal pronouns and coreference. The case of French “on”, Ms., Laboratoire DDL, Université de Lyon.

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7 Auxiliaries Abstract: The focus of this chapter is on the two perfect auxiliaries (Latin esse and habere), which emerged alongside inherited passive and copula esse out of the restructuring of the Classical Latin voice and aspectual systems. The two perfect auxiliaries created a pervasive split among intransitives in all Romance languages, at least at some stage in their diachronic development. Overall, the auxiliary split shows a high degree of synchronic complexity as well as a clear global diachronic trend towards eliminating inherited esse while retaining habere, a perfect auxiliary which qualifies as a Romance innovation. The auxiliary split has played a central role in the modern understanding of basic syntactic structure thanks to the Unaccusative Hypothesis and has deepened our understanding of the syntax/semantics interface. The present chapter is organized as follows. Section 1 gives an overview of the changes in the perfect auxiliary system from Latin to Early Romance and their main alternative explanations. Section 2 focuses on modern languages and dialects and the complex synchronic picture they offer. Section 3 considers the impact of the Unaccusative Hypothesis while Section 4 examines how the auxiliary split is best positioned at the syntax/semantics interface. Section 5 considers whether the traditional association of auxiliary selection with two other phenomena, past participle agreement and clitic climbing, withstands empirical scrutiny.  



Keywords: perfect auxiliaries, auxiliary split, diachrony, Unaccusative Hypothesis, syntax/semantics interface, past participle agreement, clitic climbing  

1 A brief diachronic perspective on auxiliary selection in Romance Romance languages are well-known for their auxiliary system on which a paradigm of periphrastic tenses is built. The perfect system in particular developed along two main paths – extending the use of esse (E) ‘be’ (restricted to deponents and past perfect passives in Classical Latin; see ↗6 Voice and voice alternations) to also serve as a perfect auxiliary on the one hand, and innovating with habere (A) ‘have’ as an alternate perfect auxiliary replacing the Classical Latin synthetic perfect tense in -vi on the other. Unique to Romance and Germanic languages, the spread of have-verbs as a perfect auxiliary may be related to the Carolingian scribal tradition of the Charlemagne Sprachbund (Drinka 2013). The emergence of the A periphrasis in Romance is traditionally held to have resulted from the reanalysis of an original aspectual periphrasis denoting a present DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-007

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state resulting from a past action in (1) to a temporal periphrasis, as proposed in Vincent (1982). See also Cennamo (2008). (1)

Lat.

In ea prouincia pecunias magnas collocatas in that province money.ACC big.ACC placed.ACC ‘They have large sums invested in that province.’ (Cicero, Oratio pro lege Manilia)

habent. have.3PL

The reinterpretation would have started with transitive verbs given their implied agent/experiencer. It would have exploited the inference that the possessor of the A auxiliary and the implied agent/experiencer of the participle could denote the same referent with verbs of cognition and perception (see Ledgeway 2012, 130–134 for further discussion). Left out of the reanalysis were morphologically active intransitive verbs selecting undergoer subjects to be absorbed into the preexisting semantically compatible periphrasis of deponents and passives with E. According to Adams (2013, 625) Latin periphrases involving habeo and a perfect participle were typically open to multiple interpretations, with a perfective interpretation emerging in Classical Latin (Cicero) with verbs of cognition, mental activity, and acquisition, followed by a wide range of ambiguous examples in the post-Ciceronian period. The perfective interpretation is available again in Late Latin (Gregory of Tours, sixth century) but continuity between the two periods cannot be assumed. Adams (2013, 646) concludes that there is no sign of grammaticalization within the Latin record. Buridant (2000) shows that the periphrasis was still somewhat ambiguous in twelfth-century Old French. The general explanation outlined above does not tie the development of the A periphrasis to the existing E periphrasis in Latin; rather it is intrinsic to A and its dual status as a verb of possession and an auxiliary. An alternative hypothesis is that the A periphrasis is integral to a global change towards a general realignment of grammatical functions already underway in Classical Latin (Ledgeway 2012, following La Fauci 1994; Adams 2013). Different alignments of grammatical functions traditionally characterize different case systems in the languages of the world. In particular, all subjects (S) (regardless of semantic agent or undergoer status or transitivity) bear nominative case while direct objects (DO) bear accusative case in nominative/accusative languages like English (S = he/she vs DO = him/her). In contrast, active/stative languages (e.g. Acehnese, cf. Durie 1987) display an intransitive split whereby the agentive argument (SA) of an ‘active’ verb like intransitive go bears the same case-related properties as the subject of transitive verbs in the language, while the undergoer argument (SO) of a ‘stative’ verb like intransitive change of state fall bears the same case-related properties as the object of transitive verbs. In the Latin perfectum a morphological active/stative alignment obtained, resulting in a split among syntactically intransitive verbs. The periphrastic ‘E + past participle’ morphology was characteristic of a subset of intransitives (passives and

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deponents, whose subject is an undergoer analyzed syntactically as an underlying direct object) while synthetic morphology (in -s- and -ui-) was characteristic of typically agentive intransitives. The rise of the A periphrasis can thus alternatively be seen as an analogical response to the E periphrasis within the perfect paradigm. The active/stative alignment was complete in Romance once the original E periphrasis was extended to intransitives with an undergoer argument/underlying direct object under the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978); see further discussion below. On this view the double periphrasis does not have its roots in the reinterpretation of the original resultative construction. A separate dimension of the split pertains to irrealis or counterfactual modality. In Old Romance varieties the new A periphrasis was used relatively more frequently in irrealis contexts compared to realis ones (e.g. Ledgeway 2003; Bentley 2006; Stolova 2006; Mateu/Massanell i Messalles 2015). According to Alexiadou (2015) the grammaticalization of A into a perfect tense marker, with E retaining a resultative interpretation in some Old Romance varieties, may have played a role in the eventual disappearance of E from the periphrastic tense system. This is echoed by Rosemeyer (2014) and Kailuweit (2015), who identify a resultative meaning for E versus an anterior meaning for A in the diachronic evolution of French auxiliary selection and in Old Spanish, respectively. Overall, these recent avenues of research promise to shed much needed light on the evolution of the Romance periphrastic tense system and they may challenge theoretical conclusions largely based on the modern varieties. As a general diachronic trend, the Romance auxiliary split system has been evolving since its emergence towards eliminating E as a perfect auxiliary altogether. For example, the gradual evolution of the split in the history of Spanish (Benzing 1931), Catalan (Batlle 2002), Portuguese,1 and Sicilian has resulted in the exclusive use of A, regardless of argument structure and reflexive/non-reflexive morphology. Table 1 documents the disappearance of E in Spanish by the seventeenth century, as analyzed by Aranovich (2003) in terms of lexico-semantic classes, based largely on observations by Benzing (1931).

1 Portuguese developed two new periphrastic auxiliaries in parallel until the fifteenth century, e.g. haver + past participle and ter + past participle, with ter ultimately replacing haver, except in the written form of the past perfect. Interestingly enough, Schmitt (2000) argues that the past perfect in Portuguese has the same temporal semantics as the present perfect in Italian with A (event time preceding reference time). In contrast the Portuguese present perfect with ter forces the iteration of the eventuality described.

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Table 1: Last attested occurrence of ser (E) in Spanish (Benzing 1931; Aranovich 2003) Spanish

13th c.

14th c.

Stative appearance/ existence

fincar ‘stay’ quedar ‘remain’ restar ‘remain’

holgar ‘rest’

Dynamic appearance/ existence

cuntir ‘happen’

Manner of motion

15th c.

16th c.

17th c.

aparecer ‘appear’ acaecer ‘happen’ desaparecer ‘disappear’ errar ‘wander’

correr ‘run’

caminar ‘walk’

Directed change of location

exir ‘leave’ viar ‘return’ desviar ‘change direction’

arribar ‘arrive’

descender ‘descend’ tornar ‘return’

venir ‘come’ pasar ‘go by’ ir ‘go’ llegar ‘arrive’ partir ‘depart’ caer ‘fall’ entrar ‘enter’ salir ‘leave’ huir ‘run away’ escapar ‘escape’ volver ‘return’ subir ‘climb’ avenir ‘reconcile’

Change of state

cenar ‘dine’ yantar ‘eat’

transir ‘die’

fallir ‘fail, die’ despertar ‘wake up’

fallecer ‘die’ finar ‘die’ fenecer ‘die’ adormir ‘fall asleep’ adormecer ‘fall asleep’ amanecer ‘dawn’ anochecer ‘grow dark’ acabar ‘finish’

nacer ‘be born’ crecer ‘grow’ morir ‘die’

Other Romance languages are following a similar path. This is the case in French, based on a comparison of auxiliary selection across dialectal varieties. In Standard Continental French, about 20 intransitive verbs denoting a change of location or state select E (Abeillé/Godard 2002; Grevisse 162016), as do all reflexive verbs regardless of argument structure. In North American varieties, Acadian French (e.g. Péronnet 1991;

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King/Nadasdi 2001) and Louisiana French (Smith 1994) near-categorically use A with all intransitive verbs and categorically with reflexives. (2)

Acadian Fr. a. Alle a sorti, alle a été trouver le capitaine. she has exited she has been find the captain ‘She has left; she went to find the captain.’ (Péronnet 1991, 89, (2a)) b. Les autres s’aviont pas aparçu de rien. of anything the others CL have NEG noticed ‘The others haven’t noticed anything.’ (Péronnet 1991, 91, (6c))

Montréal French is less diachronically advanced than other North American varieties, with all reflexives selecting E and about 5 verbs of change of location still favoring E over A (Sankoff/Thibault 1980). As shown in Table 2, the intransitive verbs still favoring E in Montréal French in the 1980s are a small subset of the change of location verbs selecting E in Standard Continental French.  

Table 2: E in Montréal French vs Standard Continental French Montréal French (Sankoff/Thibault 1980)

Standard Continental French (Abeillé/Godard 2002)

Verbs still favoring E

Verbs selecting E

aller ‘go’ revenir ‘come back’ venir ‘come’ entrer ‘enter’ arriver ‘arrive’

aller ‘go’ (r)entrer ‘(re)-enter’ arriver ‘arrive’ mourir ‘die’ décéder ‘die’ naître ‘be born’ apparaître ‘appear’ (re)sortir ‘go out (again)’

(re)venir ‘come (back)’ advenir ‘happen’ intervenir ‘intervene’ parvenir ‘get to’ survenir ‘happen’ (re)devenir ‘become (again)’ (re)descendre ‘go down (again)’

demeurer ‘remain’ rester ‘remain’ éclore ‘hatch’ (re)partir ‘leave (again)’ (re)tomber ‘fall (back)’ retourner ‘return’

Comparatively less common in Romance are varieties that make use of E across the board, including intransitives, reflexives, and transitives, e.g. the central Italian dialect of Terracina (Tuttle 1986). This complete elimination of A in Terracinese is quite recent – 1980s –, as can be seen from the first two columns of Table 3 in the next section. While this evolution is somewhat puzzling within Romance it fits the typological reality; some language families, e.g. Slavic, exclusively select E in periphrastic tenses (see Legendre 2007b for a comparative Romance-Slavic analysis).

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2 Auxiliary selection today: a complex synchronic reality Most Romance languages and dialects present today a complex system of splits based on a number of factors, including argument structure, reflexive/non-reflexive morphology, person/number, tense, mood, or lexico-semantic factors (telicity, agentivity, etc.), as well as combinations of these factors. These splits typically result in binary systems (E vs A) but triple auxiliation systems (E vs A vs free E/A variation) are also found in Italo-Romance dialects. Among binary systems are Romance languages and dialects in which A is used with transitive verbs, E when the verb carries reflexive morphology regardless of argument structure, as is the case, for example, in French, Italian, Piedmontese, and Provençal (Occitan), while retaining an E/A split with intransitive verbs. The Italian examples from Rosen (1984), who provides lists of A-selecting and E-selecting intransitive verbs, illustrate this well-known binary system. (3) It.

a. Mario ha difeso Luigi. (A) ‘Mario defended Luigi.’ b. Mario si è difeso. (E) ‘Mario defended himself.’ c. Mario ha esagerato. (A) ‘Mario exaggerated.’ d. La pressione è aumentata. (E) ‘The pressure increased.’

Other languages, including Sardinian, Corsican, Gascon (Occitan), Friulian (RhaetoRomance), have also retained the E/A split among reflexive-marked verbs, depending on the subtype of reflexive (transitive, ditransitive, inherent, of interest, etc.). The E/A split among reflexives is exemplified in (4) for Sardinian (Jones 1993). The reflexive of interest (e.g. ‘build oneself something’; see (4d)) selects A, the transitive reflexive (e.g. ‘wash oneself’) selects E (but A in the third person in Friulian), while the ditransitive reflexive (‘write oneself letters’) selects A in Sardinian but E in Corsican (Giancarli 2011). (4) Srd.

a.

Juanne s’est vistu in s’isprecu. Juanne REFL E.3SG seen in the mirror ‘Juanne saw himself in the mirror.’ (Jones 1993, 131, (137a))

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b. Sa janna s’est abberta. REFL E.3SG opened the door ‘The door opened.’ (Jones 1993, 131, (138)) c. Sas pitzinnas si sun faeddatas. REFL E.3PL talked the girls ‘The girls talked to one another’ (Jones 1993, 132, (144a)) d. Juanne s’at fraicatu una bella REFL A.3SG built a beautiful Juanne ‘Juanne built himself a beautiful house.’ (Jones 1993, 131, (140b)) e. Tonina s’ at fertu s’anca. the leg Tonina REFL A.3SG hurt ‘Tonina hurt her leg.’ (Jones 1993, 131, (141a))

domo. house

Rarer in Romance are tense-based and mood-based binary auxiliary splits. The former is found in the Neapolitan variety of Procida – A/present perfect (5a) vs E/pluperfect (5b) – as well as in Campanian varieties (Ledgeway 2000). (5) a. Procidano Hó visto a Ciro A.1SG . PRS seen at Ciro ‘I have seen Ciro arrive.’ b. Procidano Fove visto a Ciro E.1SG . PST seen at Ciro ‘I had seen Ciro arrive.’ (Ledgeway 2000, 186, (4a,b))

larrèveto. arrive.PTCP

larrèveto. arrive.PTCP

A mood-based split is operative in Romanian (Avram/Hill 2007): fi ‘E’ occurs in contexts with non-specific time frame (modal clauses) and irrealis interpretation, e.g. (6a,b), while am/ai/a ‘A’ appears in contexts with definite time setting (indicative clauses) and realis interpretation, e.g. (6b). However, the Romanian pattern seems unrelated to the trend in Old Romance varieties discussed above, where A was more common than E in irrealis contexts. (6) Rom. a. Îşi

doreşte să fi cumpărat wishes SA E bought ‘S/he wishes s/he had bought a house.’ (Avram/Hill 2007, 54, (9a))

REFL . DAT

o a

casă. house

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279

b. A murit înainte de a-şi fi cumpărat o casă. before of REFL . DAT E bought a house A.3SG died ‘He died before having bought himself a house.’ (Avram/Hill 2007, 54, (9f)) Most familiar among these binary systems – because of the role it has played in the formulation of the Unaccusative Hypothesis; see below – is the split among intransitives exemplified by Italian, French, Sardinian, and Paduan, which is grounded in lexico-semantic and aspectual factors (e.g. Sorace 2000; Legendre/Sorace 2003; Bentley/Eythórsson 2004; Cennamo/Sorace 2007; Legendre 2007a). Sorace (2000), for example, identifies ‘telic change’ at the core of verbs selecting E in Italian, French, and Sardinian (7) and ‘atelic non-motional activity’ at the core of verbs selecting A in these three languages (8). See further discussion in the next section. (7) a. It.

Paolo è/*ha venuto in ritardo. Paolo E /*A come late ‘Paolo came late.’ b. Fr. Ma soeur est arrivée/*a arrivé My sister E/*A arrived ‘My sister arrived yesterday.’ c. Srd. Maria est/*at arrivata a domo. Maria E/*A arrived at home ‘Maria arrived at home.’

hier. yesterday

(8) a. It.

I delegati hanno parlato/*sono parlati tutto il giorno. the delegates A/*E spoken all the day ‘The delegates spoke all day.’ b. Fr. Les délégués ont parlé/*sont parlés toute la nuit. the delegates A/*E spoken all the night ‘The delegates spoke all night.’ c. Srd. Los profesores ont faeddadu/*son faeddados totu su die. the professors A/*E spoken all the day ‘The professors spoke all day.’ (Legendre/Sorace 2003, 192–193, (6)–(8))

Italo-Romance dialects in general (plus some dialects of Catalonia, cf. Tuttle 1986) are known for the complexity of their person/number-based splits, e.g. Abruzzese (Tuttle 1986), Apulian (La Fauci/Loporcaro 1989), Sonnino, Morcone, Aliano, Giovinazzo, etc. (Manzini/Savoia 2007). In the Sardinian dialect Bornovese, the person-based split is found only among reflexive-marked verbs (La Fauci/Loporcaro 1989). The set of ItaloRomance dialects in Table 3 illustrates person-based variation in auxiliary selection that is independent of argument structure or any lexico-semantic factors. Among the

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varieties in Table 3 are triple auxiliation systems, e.g. in Castro dei Volsci and Lanciano dialects. Triple auxiliation systems also include the Apulian variety of Altamura (Loporcaro 2007).  

Table 3: Italo-Romance dialects (based on Tuttle 1986) Person/number 1 SG

2 SG

3 SG

1 PL

2 PL

3 PL

1980

E

E

E

E

E

E

1950

E

E

A

E

E

E

E

E

E

E

E

A

E

E

A

E

E

A

E

E

A

E

E

A

Castro dei Volsci

E/A

E

A

E/A

E

A

Lanciano

E/A

E

A

E/A

E/A

A

Introdacqua

A

E

A

A

A

A

Valle d’Orte

A

A

A

A

A

A

Terracina

Cori (LT) Roiate

Zagarolo

L’Aquila

Avezzano

Pescara

3 Auxiliary selection and the Unaccusative Hypothesis The theoretical import of the Romance auxiliary split is closely tied to the emergence of the Unaccusative Hypothesis or UH2 (Perlmutter 1978) according to which there are two types of intransitive verbs – unergative and unaccusative – associated with different underlying syntactic configurations of their single core argument – subject/ external argument or direct object/internal argument, respectively. In unaccusative structures, the underlying direct object surfaces as subject, due to an operation on grammatical relations (Perlmutter 1978; 1989) or movement motivated by Abstract Case considerations (Burzio 1986). In other words, unaccusatives receive a passivelike syntactic analysis.

2 Several early versions of the Unaccusative Hypothesis actually predate Perlmutter (1978), including Postal (1963) and Hall-Partee (1965). See Pullum (1988) on its history.

Auxiliaries

(9)

281

Intransitive structures underlyingly (implemented in configurational terms, e.g. Burzio 1986) a. Unergative: NP [VP V] b. Unaccusative: ___[VP V NP]

The syntactic distinction is grounded in the systematic, cross-linguistic patterning of unergative subjects with transitive subjects on the one hand, and unaccusative subjects with passive subjects or direct objects on the other. Italian, in particular, has long served as the poster child of the UH due to the overlap among several syntactic properties that have served as diagnostics for unergativity/unaccusativity. These include auxiliary selection (10), partitive ne cliticization (11), and participial constructions (12) (Burzio 1986; Perlmutter 1989). (10) It.

a. Molti studenti sono spariti. (E) ‘Many students disappeared.’ b. Molti studenti furono arrestati. (E) ‘Many students were arrested.’ c. Hanno lavorato molti studenti. (A) ‘Many students worked.’ d. Hanno fatto domanda molti studenti. (A) ‘Many students made an application.’

(11) It.

a. Ne arrivano molti. ‘Many of them arrived.’ b. Giovanni ne ha insultati due. ‘Giovanni insulted two of them.’ c. Ne furono arrestati molti. ‘Many of them were arrested.’ d. *Ne telefonano molti. ‘Many of them called.’ e. *Ne hanno fatto domanda molti. ‘Many of them made an application.’

(12) It.

a. Rimasto senza soldi, non sapevo cosa fare. ‘(Having) remained without money, I didn’t know what to do.’ b. Perduti i soldi, non c’era niente da fare. ‘The money (having) been lost, there was nothing to be done.’ c. *Gridato ai bambini, Giorgio è uscito. ‘(Having) shouted to the children, Giorgio left.’ d. *Scoperto lo sceicco la congiura, bisognava agire. ‘The sheik (having) discovered the plot, action had to be taken.’

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As shown in (10)–(12), these properties are uniquely shared by the subject of E-selecting intransitive verbs, and direct objects of transitives typically under passivization, but not by the subject of A-selecting intransitive verbs, and the subject of transitives (but see Mackenzie 2006 for evidence against this generalization). The fact that reflexive verbs, regardless of argument structure, select E, was also made to follow from the UH (Burzio 1986; Rosen 1988; Perlmutter 1989). The UH provides a syntactic basis for the A/E split in the form of an auxiliary selection rule, either tied directly to grammatical relation status, as in the original Relational Grammar proposal (Perlmutter 1978; 1989), or syntactic movement in its Government-Binding implementation (Burzio 1986). Alternatively, there is no auxiliary selection rule per se and the split A/E follows from a difference in syntactic representation for the auxiliaries themselves. Building on the alternation between two possessive structures in French, one associated with A (Jean a la voiture bleue ‘Jean has the blue car’) and the other with E (La voiture bleue est à Jean ‘The blue car is (=belongs) to Jean’), plus the idea that auxiliary A evolved from possessive have (Benveniste 1966), Kayne (1993) analyzes both auxiliaries A and E as allomorphs, resulting from a shared underlying syntactic structure with alternative derivations of the surface structure by syntactic movement. Growing evidence that auxiliary selection is sensitive to modality in many Romance varieties (e.g. Rosemeyer 2014; Alexiadou 2015) represents a challenge to any analysis of the A/E alternation in terms of allomorphy. Regardless of their implementation, all purely syntactic analyses leave open the question of whether the split is semantically determined or arbitrary, an important question that is examined separately below. Overall, despite the broad explanatory impact of the UH in generative syntax, further examination of auxiliary selection (and related phenomena) across Romance varieties, together with the complexities outlined above, have exposed a number of challenges to the original syntactic analysis. The consensus today is that neither subclass of intransitive verbs – unergatives and unaccusatives – can easily be characterized in a uniform way, due to the existence of verbs with variable behavior in auxiliary selection, mismatches among unaccusativity tests within a given language/ dialect, and mismatches for a given unaccusativity test across related languages/ dialects. Verbs may show variable behavior by appearing with either A or E in a given language/dialect. In Italian this is the case for many verbs, including those denoting a change of state, cf. (13) and (14), as well as stative verbs (15). A sub-classification within change of state verbs is proposed in Sorace (2000), which distinguishes change of condition verbs (e.g. morire ‘die’), which categorically select E in Italian, from verbs of appearance and happening (13), and indefinite change in a particular direction (14) which allow A to various extent. ??, ?* reflect graded grammaticality judgments. The preference strength for E in (13)–(15) is a function of the inherent telicity of the verb (Sorace 2000; Legendre/Sorace 2003).

Auxiliaries

(13) It.

283

Lo spettro è apparso/?*ha apparso nel castello. (E/?*A) ‘The ghost appeared in the castle.’

(14) It.

a. La temperature è salita/?*ha salito improvvisamente. (E/?*A) ‘The temperature suddenly rose.’ b. Mia figlia è cresciuta/?*ha cresciuto molto quest’anno. (E/?*A) ‘My daughter has grown a lot this year.’ c. I pomodori sono marciti/hanno marcito al sole. (E/A) ‘The tomatoes rotted in this sun.’

(15) It.

a. I primi mammiferi sono esistiti/??hanno esistito molti milioni di anni fa. (E/??A) ‘The first mammals existed many millions of years ago.’ b. La sua dichiarazione non è servita/?ha servito a nulla. (E/?A) ‘His declaration didn’t serve any purpose.’ c. Questo palazzo ha appartenuto/è appartenuto alla mia famiglia. (A/E) ‘This palace once belonged to my family.’

The original insight behind the UH was that it captures generalizations across two syntactic classes of verbs, which cut across several syntactic phenomena within a language, e.g. auxiliary selection, partitive cliticization, and participial constructions (Perlmutter 1989). While this is generally accepted for Italian, it is clearly not the case in French. Verbs deemed unaccusative by virtue of selecting E are only a small subset of unaccusative verbs determined on the basis of participial constructions in French (Legendre 1989; Legendre/Sorace 2003). The following examples capture the similar behavior of two verbs of change of condition (mourir ‘die’, bouillir ‘boil’) in participial constructions though they categorically select different perfect auxiliaries. (16) Fr.

a. Son père est mort d’une crise cardiaque. (E) ‘His father died of a heart attack.’ b. L’eau a déjà bouilli. (A) ‘The water already boiled.’

(17) Fr.

a. La personne morte hier soir sera enterrée demain matin. ‘The person who died last night will be buried tomorrow morning.’ b. Le père mort, les enfants vendirent la propriété familiale. ‘With the father dead, the children sold the family property.’ c. Mort d’une crise cardiaque à 20 ans, son frère n’avait pu reprendre la direction de la ferme familiale. ‘Dead of a heart attack at age 20, his brother was unable to take over the family farm.’

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(18) Fr.

Géraldine Legendre

a. L’eau bouillie sert à préparer le thé. ‘Boiled water is used to prepare tea.’ b. Une fois l’eau bouillie, il prépara le thé. ‘(Once) the water boiled, he prepared the tea.’ c. Une fois bouillie, l’eau sert à préparer le thé. ‘(Once) boiled, water can be used to prepare tea.’

Because participial constructions provide the very distribution that defines the UH, separating a subset of French intransitives and passives on the one hand (19) from a distinct subset of intransitives and transitives on the other (20), they can be used as a diagnostic to determine the broadest class of unaccusative verbs in French3 (Legendre 1989). (19) Fr.

a. La neige fondue, il mit ses skis de côté. ‘The snow (having) melted, he put his skis aside.’ b. Ses décisions critiquées par tous ses collègues, il décida de démissioner. ‘His decisions (being) disliked by all his colleagues, he decided to resign.’

(20) Fr.

a. *Ses ouvriers travaillé toute la matinée, il leur donna congé l’après-midi. ‘His workers (having) worked all morning long, he gave them the afternoon off.’ b. *Ses collègues critiqué toutes ses décisions, il décida de démissionner. ‘His colleagues (having) disliked all his decisions, he decided to resign.’

One consequence of establishing participial constructions as a reliable diagnostic test for unaccusativity in French is that a subset of reflexive verbs turn out to be unergative despite their selecting E (e.g. telic controlled processes including s’embraser ‘blaze up’, s’évaporer ‘evaporate’, s’étouffer ‘suffocate’ and psychological states, including se souvenir de ‘remember’, s’adonner à ‘take to’, se moquer de ‘laugh at’, etc.; cf. Legendre/Sorace 2003; see also Reinhart/Siloni 2004). Nor can selecting A, given (18), be construed as a diagnostic test for unergativity in French, contra Labelle (1992). Similarly, a subset of verbs selecting A are positively identified as unaccusative verbs in Spanish thanks to their occurrence in participial and bare NP subject constructions (Torrego 1989; Aranovich 2003).

3 Partitive cliticization does not fare much better than auxiliary selection in directly supporting the Unaccusative Hypothesis as it too fails to distinguish unaccusative from unergative verbs in French (Legendre 1989). So do other diagnostic tests proposed for French in the literature, including impersonal constructions (e.g., Labelle 1992; Cummins 1996) and unaccusative inversion (Marandin 2001). See Legendre/Sorace (2003) for further discussion.

Auxiliaries

285

Further comparison of French with Italian reveals mismatches between the two languages, which serves to exemplify the general issue of cross-linguistic mismatches among verbs. As shown in Table 4, only a subset of verbs with similar meanings that select E in Italian also select E in French. Table 4: Auxiliary selection in French and Italian (Legendre/Sorace 2003) Auxiliary

Verb classes (based on the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy; Sorace 2000)

French

Italian

E

E

Change of location: arriver/arrivare ‘arrive’, venir/venire ‘come’

E E/A E/A A

E E E E/A

Change of state a. Change of condition: mourir/morire ‘die’ b. Appearance: apparaître/apparire ‘appear’ c. Indefinite change in a particular direction: monter/salire ‘go up’, descendre/scendere ‘go down’ faner/appassire ‘fade’, empirer/peggiorare ‘worsen’  





A

E/A

Continuation of pre-existing state: durer/durare ‘last’

A A

E E/A

Existence of state: a. être/essere ‘be’ b. exister/esistere ‘exist’, suffire à/bastare ‘suffice’

A A A

A/E A A/E

Uncontrolled processes a. Emission: résonner/risuonare ‘resonate’ b. Bodily functions: suer/sudare ‘sweat’ c. Involuntary actions: trembler/tremare ‘tremble’  

A

A/E

Motional controlled processes: nager/nuotare ‘swim’

A

A

Non-motional controlled processes: travailler/lavorare ‘work’

In addition, French categorically selects A where Italian selects E or A, e.g. with verbs denoting motional controlled processes. In Italian, correre’s selection of E vs A depends on the presence of a stated goal, hence sentential aspect (Van Valin 1990). French courir selects A, regardless of whether a goal is specified or not. (21) a. It. b. Fr.

Il bambino è corso a scuola. (E) L’enfant a couru à l’école. (A) ‘The child ran to school.’

(22) a. It. b. Fr.

Il bambino ha corso nel giardino. (A) L’enfant a couru dans le jardin. (A) ‘The child ran in the garden.’

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Table 4, however, does not capture one further property that distinguishes Italian from French, that is the number of verbs in each subclass. This is particularly true of the class of change of state verbs, which mostly categorically select A in French (fondre ‘melt’, bouillir ‘boil’, sombrer ‘sink’, périr ‘perish’, geler ‘freeze’, sécher ‘dry’, noircir ‘blacken’, etc.). Very few verbs may optionally select E (apparaître/disparaître ‘appear/disappear’, monter ‘go up’, descendre ‘go down’) or categorically (mourir/ décéder ‘die’, naître ‘be born’, (re)devenir ‘become’). French and Italian do share an important auxiliary selection property. Reflexive verbs, regardless of argument structure and/or lexico-semantic class, categorically select E in both languages. Some reflexive verbs display the characteristic syntactic behavior of unergatives, as discussed above. This overall distribution supports the conclusion that in these two languages (at least) reflexive morpho-syntax overrides any other consideration in determining auxiliary selection (e.g. Legendre/Sorace 2003; Loporcaro 2015). To the extent that different reflexives involve distinct syntactic structures auxiliary selection cannot be reduced to semantic factors. Any account of the alternation must involve the interface between syntax and semantics. The UH profoundly changed the syntactic representations of the most basic types of sentences, those involving intransitive verbs. At the outset it did so largely on the basis of binary grammaticality judgment data. The on-going deepening of our understanding of the phenomena associated with auxiliary selection has benefited from other research methodologies, including analyses of large corpora, e.g. for Old Romance varieties (e.g. Rosemeyer 2014), as well as experimental investigations of online processing, neurological signature, L2 acquisition, and heritage language abilities (e.g. Keller/Sorace 2003; Montrul 2005; Bard/Frenck-Mestre/Sorace 2010). Together they have validated the claim that auxiliary selection in Romance displays both ‘gradualness’ (a slow diachronic process whereby a construction intrudes into the usage contexts of another) and ‘gradience’ or smaller/greater susceptibility to variable auxiliary selection behavior depending on (classes of) verbs, including satisfying unaccusativity diagnostics in a consistent way. These new sources of data have also confirmed the psychological reality of the basic binary distinction embodied in the UH (Sorace 2015).  

4 Auxiliary selection and the semantics question Overall, the simplicity and elegance of the UH stands in sharp contrast with the many, largely unsuccessful, attempts at formulating a solid and systematic semantic basis for such a syntactic distinction and establishing its cross-linguistic validity. The earliest formulations of the UH noted that the distinction is systematically related to certain semantic characteristics of the verb: ‘Agentivity’ tends to correlate with unergativity and ‘patienthood’ correlates with unaccusativity (Perlmutter 1978; Dowty 1991). Much subsequent research has shown, however, that the alignment

Auxiliaries

287

between syntactic and semantic properties is not 100%, nor is it as consistent as originally predicted (Rosen 1984). Some verbs with similar semantics show different syntactic behavior across languages: For example, ‘blush’ is unaccusative in Italian but unergative in French, on the basis of their auxiliary selection and appearance in participial constructions. Some verbs are classified as both unaccusative and unergative by the same diagnostic. Thus, Italian continuare and French paraître can take both auxiliaries E and A. Despite some views to the contrary (e.g. Van Valin 1990; Bentley/Eythórsson 2004; Bentley 2006), most theories maintain that a syntactic characterization of unaccusativity is necessary to account for phenomena not easily reducible to purely semantic explanations, such as the similarity between unaccusatives and passives, cliticization of the partitive clitic pronoun ne in Italian, auxiliary selection with reflexives, etc. It is therefore crucial to explain how lexical semantic, modal, and aspectual representations underlying individual verbs are mapped onto the binary syntactic representations defining the UH. Two alternative general approaches to the semantics-syntax mapping have tended to dominate the early theoretical landscape. According to the ‘projectionist’ approach (e.g. Levin/Rappaport Hovav 2005) the lexical semantics of a verb specifies the hierarchical classification of its arguments as internal or external argument, and that this in turn produces the syntactic behavior associated with unaccusativity or unergativity. In the model of Levin and Rappaport Hovav, four linking rules map lexical semantic components of verb meaning onto positions at argument structure. These rules are mostly ordered, with Rules (23a) and (23b) taking precedence over Rule (23c), which in turn takes precedence over Rule (23d). Levin/Rappaport Hovav (1995, 165–166) leave open the possibility that different languages might order the rules differently, but the rules themselves are deterministic. (23)

Linking rules (Levin/Rappaport Hovav 1995) a. Directed Change Linking Rule: The argument of the verb that corresponds to the entity undergoing the directed change described by that verb is its internal argument. b. Existence Linking Rule: The argument of a verb whose existence is asserted or denied is its direct internal argument. c. Immediate Cause Linking Rule: The argument of a verb that denotes the immediate cause of the eventuality described by that verb is its external argument. d. Default Linking Rule: An argument of a verb that does not fall under the scope of any of the other linking rules is its direct internal argument.

Within this approach, verbs with variable behavior have different meanings, and therefore different lexical semantic representations, each with its own regular argument structure realization. The proposed mapping rules, however, make problematic

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predictions for auxiliary selection in French. Rule (23a) incorrectly predicts that change of state verbs (externally caused brûler ‘burn’, geler ‘freeze’, pourrir ‘rot’, etc. and internally caused rougir ‘blush’, pâlir ‘become pale’) select E. Rule (23b) incorrectly predicts that verbs of existence, e.g. exister ‘exist’, durer ‘last’ select E. Rule (23d) incorrectly predicts that non-agentive manner of motion verbs, e.g. rouler ‘roll’, rebondir ‘bounce’, tournoyer ‘whirl’ also select E. More generally, confronted with the complexities of Romance auxiliary selection, the projectionist approach faces the challenge of accounting for variation without resorting to systematic duplication in the lexicon. Alternatives to the projectionist view can be collectively identified as ‘constructional’ approaches (e.g. McClure 1995; Cummins 1996; Van Hout 2000; Borer 2005). These models regard unaccusativity and unergativity not as lexical properties of verbs, but rather as clusters of properties derived from the syntactic configurations in which verbs appear, which in turn determine their aspectual interpretation. Since the lexical entries of verbs do not contain any specification of whether an argument is internal or external, any verb is free to enter into more than one syntactic configuration and consequently to receive multiple aspectual interpretations. Unlike the projectionist model, the constructional approach predicts flexibility in the syntactic realization of arguments, but at the price of overgeneration. Constraints on over-generation therefore have to be present at other levels (e.g. Cummins 1996; Van Hout 2000). A third alternative developed in Sorace (2000) takes an overall gradient perspective on auxiliary selection and proposes to distinguish core from more peripheral unaccusative and unergative verbs on a continuum dubbed the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (ASH). (24)

The Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (Sorace 2000) Change of location categorical E selection Change of state Continuation of state Existence of state Uncontrolled processes Motional processes Non-motional processes categorical A selection

The basic insights behind the ASH are the following: (a) Across languages, some verbs tend to show consistent unaccusative/unergative behavior, whereas others do not; (b) within languages, some verbs are invariably unaccusative/unergative regardless of context, whereas others exhibit variation. Based mostly on experiments testing native speakers’ intuitions about auxiliary selection in Italian, Paduan, Dutch, and German, unaccusative verbs tend to select E and unergative verbs tend to select A; (c) native intuitions on auxiliary choice are categorical and consistent for certain types of verb, but much less stable for other types. For example, native speakers have a very  



Auxiliaries

289

strong preference for E with change of location verbs, but express a weaker preference for the same auxiliary (or have no preference at all) with stative verbs. Sorace’s account of these systematic differences within the syntactic classes of unaccusative and unergative verbs is that there exists a hierarchy that distinguishes ‘core’ unaccusative and unergative monadic verbs from progressively more ‘peripheral’ verbs. This hierarchy, which is based on (potentially universal) aspectual parameters, places the notion of telic dynamic change at the core of unaccusativity and that of agentive non-motional activity at the core of unergativity. The extremes of the hierarchy thus consist of maximally distinct core verbs – verbs of change of location (e.g. arrivare/arriver ‘arrive’) and verbs of agentive non-motional activity (e.g. lavorare/travailler ‘work’) – which systematically display the greatest degree of consistency in auxiliary selection. In contrast, peripheral verb types between the extremes are susceptible to variation. Selection of E in French thus identifies only core unaccusative verbs. The ASH is a generalization that reveals different cut-off points for the unergative/unaccusative distinction e.g. in French and Italian. It does not automatically translate into a set of mapping rules referring to the verb classes in Table 4, for two main reasons. A single verb class may not map onto a single auxiliary – as in the case of change of state verbs in French. Furthermore classes do not by themselves reveal what is common to two verb classes selecting one and the same auxiliary. A solution explored in Legendre (2007a) is that the ASH arises from an optimization-based view of grammar whereby the verb classes listed in Table 4 and the hierarchy itself emerge from a competition among well-formedness constraints on mapping a given lexicosemantic or aspectual feature (e.g. telicity, direction, volitionality, etc.) onto E selection, plus one single constraint favoring the alternative auxiliary A. All constraints are soft and highly conflicting (and thus amount to preferences) but the ones that favor E are arranged into a fixed universal hierarchy, permitting different A/E cut-off points for different languages. For example, verbs denoting existence of state select different auxiliaries in the two languages: E in Italian vs A in French. In optimality-theoretic terms, such variation results from re-ranking the constraint favoring A among the hierarchy of constraints favoring E. See Legendre/Sorace (2003) for a brief presentation of the analysis and Legendre (2007a,b) for a full analysis. Among other things, the analysis is shown both to account for auxiliary selection developments in the history of Spanish (based on Aranovich 2003) and to predict a small typology of possible basic auxiliary selection systems in terms of constraint reranking. The overall approach is extended to account for person-based auxiliary selection in Italo-Romance dialects in Legendre (2010). An alternative, truly gradient, implementation of auxiliary selection in French in terms of lexico-semantic properties predates its optimality-theoretic implementation (Legendre/Miyata/Smolensky 1991). The essence of both approaches grounded in soft constraints is that the unaccusative/ unergative distinction is both syntactically encoded and semantically determined. They differ on how they handle the gradience of auxiliary selection.

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5 Related phenomena – Past participle agreement and clitic climbing Two other syntactic phenomena are often associated with Romance auxiliaries. One is past participle agreement, the other is clitic climbing (↗5 Clitic pronouns for the latter). Past participle agreement with perfect E is similar to that found with the E passive but agreement can be more complex as it may appear with A under certain conditions. (25) and (26) exemplify French (in canonical non-causative contexts). In the presence of E, the past participle agrees in gender and number with the undergoer subject (25). In the presence of A, the past participle agrees in gender and number with the direct object, subject to configurational restrictions. Postverbal les fenêtres does not trigger agreement on the past participle (26a) while its preverbal object clitic counterpart les or wh-counterpart que does (26b,c). (25) Fr.

(26) Fr.

a. Sa mère est morte pendant dead.F during his mother.F is ‘His mother died overnight.’ b. Sa mère s’est éteinte pendant his mother.F REFL is passed.F during ‘His mother passed away overnight.’

la nuit. the night la nuit. the night

a. Jean a peint les fenêtres. Jean a painted the window.F . PL ‘Jean painted the windows.’ b. Jean les a peintes. Jean them.F . PL has painted.F . PL ‘Jean painted them.’ c. les fenêtres qu’il a peintes has painted.F . PL the window.F . PL that he ‘the windows that he painted’

Overall, the past participle agreement paradigm has been characterized in Ledgeway (2012, 326–327) as a classic active/stative alignment in which agreement marks direct objects as well as passive and unaccusative subjects (DO, SO) but not unergative and transitive subjects (SA), reinforcing the diachronic tie to the active/stative split in auxiliary selection discussed in Section 1. There are counterexamples to this correlation though, e.g. in dialects of central and southern Italy. Kayne’s (1989; 1993) account of auxiliary selection in terms of allomorphy and a shared underlying syntactic structure for both auxiliaries is in fact largely designed to capture the basic past participle agreement pattern in Romance. Kayne’s analysis relies on base-generating the object clitic les in (26b) and the wh-phrase qu’ in (26c) in

Auxiliaries

291

postverbal position and moving them to adjoin to a high inflectional T head, triggering agreement on the participle as the clitic passes through an AgrOP projection. D’Alessandro/Roberts (2008; 2010) offer an updated analysis that is compatible with the Agree-based system of Chomsky (2001). Their basic claim is that the Agree relation is realized overtly only if the elements that are in such a relation belong to the same Spell-Out domain. The focus is on the contrast between say Standard Italian (or French) in which there is no participle agreement with the postverbal direct object or the preverbal subject in the presence of A, and Eastern Abruzzese where the past participle agrees with either a plural direct object in its original postverbal position (27a) or even a plural subject (27b). (27) Eastern Abruzzese a. Giuwanne a pittite ddu mure. walls Giovanni have.3SG painted.PL two ‘Giovanni has painted two walls.’ b. Giuwanne e Mmarije a pittite painted.PL Giovanni and Maria have.3SG ‘Giovanni and Maria have painted a wall.’

nu mure. a wall

D’Alessandro/Roberts’ analysis relies on a syntactic difference between the two varieties. In Standard Italian the participle occupies a higher position with the consequence that the participle and the direct object are not in the same Spell-Out domain. In Eastern Abruzzese the participle occupies a lower syntactic position and is thus within the Spell-Out domain of the direct object. A number of past participle agreement generalizations have been proposed in the literature, which are invalidated when Romance varieties beyond a few main languages are taken into consideration. External arguments may trigger participle agreement in Romance; for example, the past participle agrees in number with any plural argument in Eastern Abruzzese, as shown in (27). Contra Lois (1990) an A/E split is not a necessary condition for past participle agreement with A; for example, central Rhaeto-Romance Engadine dialects (Haiman/Benincà 2005), which have generalized A to transitives and reflexives, show agreement in gender and number with the subject. Vallader reflexives are exemplified in (28). Agreement is presumably with the subject rather than the preposed reflexive object, which exhibits no gender or number marking in the third person. (28) Rhaeto-Romance: Vallader a. εla s a lavá-da. washed.F . SG she REFL A ‘She washed herself.’

292

Géraldine Legendre

b. εl s a lava. REFL A washed he ‘He washed himself.’ Extensive analyses of Italo-Romance dialects, in particular, have led instead to the conclusion that past participle agreement is in fact independent of auxiliary selection (Manzini/Savoia 2005; 2007; Legendre 2010). Table 5: Auxiliary selection vs past participle agreement in Romance (sample based on Legendre 2010) Language/dialect/source

Auxiliary selection

Agreement

Piglio (Bentley 2003)

person split

with subject with A and E

Gerona Catalan (Badía Margarit 1962)

person split

none with either A or E

Eastern Abruzzese (D’Alessandro/Roberts 2010)

person split

with subject or object

French, Italian

verb class split

with subject with E and preverbal object with A

Introdacqua Old Neapolitan (Cennamo 2008)

verb class split

with subject with A and E

Cremonese (Rossini 1975)

verb class split

none with E

Old Italian, Occitan

verb class split

with object with A

Soazza (Tessin) (Manzini/Savoia 2005) verb class split

with subject with E (non-reflexives) with subject with A (reflexives)

Sonnino (Manzini/Savoia 2005)

person/verb class split with subject with E

Genzano (Bentley 2003)

person/verb class split with subject with A and E

Montecello Ionico (Manzini/Savoia 2005)

free variation A/E



Terracina (Tuttle 1986)

E only



Balear, Valenciano Catalan (Badía Margarit 1962)

A only

with object

Carmiano (Manzini/Savoia 2007)

A only

with subject and object

Calabrian (Pace 1993/1994)

A only

with subject in some varieties; with object in others

Spanish, Walloon, Calascibetta (Manzini/Savoia 2007)

A only



Engadine, Rhaeto-Romance (Loporcaro 1998; Haiman/ Benincà 2005)

A only

with subject in reflexives; with object clitics

Auxiliaries

293

As Table 5 shows, even a relatively small sample of Romance varieties highlights the fact that past participle agreement is present/absent across Romance along with any auxiliary selection pattern attested. Patterns are even more complex if non-canonical contexts, e.g. causatives and passives, are taken into consideration (Loporcaro 1998); in fact the internal argument of passive constructions triggers agreement also in Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and some French and Italian dialects, which otherwise show no past participle agreement. Particularly relevant to the debate is the contrast amongst varieties exclusively selecting A in active contexts between, say, Spanish, where A combines with an invariable participle form, while Carmiano (Apulia) illustrates A co-occurring with participle agreement in gender and number (Manzini/Savoia 2007, 193–194). In particular, (29a) illustrates the Carmiano combination of A with an unaccusative verb, agreeing with the subject, while (29b) illustrates A with an unergative verb with default singular agreement only. Participle agreement with the postverbal lexical object is illustrated in (29c). (29) Apulian (Carmiano) a. Addʒu/a/e/imu/iti/anε I.A/you-SG .A/he.A/we.A/you-PL .A/they.A ‘I/you-SG /he/we/you-PL /they have come.’ b. Addʒu/a/e/imu/iti/anε I.A/you-SG .A/he.A/we.A/you-PL .A/they.A ‘I/you-SG /he/we/you-PL /they have slept.’ c. E b’biʃti a t’tutti. he.A. seen.M . PL to all ‘He has seen everybody.’

i’nutu /i’nuti. come.M . SG /come.M . PL tur’mutu. slept.M . SG

But the pattern in question cannot be simply tied to A because Corsican reflexives show an agreement pattern which appears to be its counterpart with E. Reflexive unaccusatives with E in (30a) show plural agreement with a semantically plural si subject according to Giancarli (2015, 115–117) while reflexive unergatives with E show singular agreement. In light of the Carmiano pattern the latter may be best characterized as default singular agreement. What both varieties have in common then is that they use semantic agreement with unaccusatives but default agreement with unergatives. (30) Corsican a. Si hè andati. REFL E.3SG leave.PTCP . M . PL ‘One has left.’ (Giancarli 2015, 115, (30)) b. Si hè travagliatu. REFL E.3SG work.PTCP . M . SG ‘One has worked.’ (Giancarli 2015, 115, (29))

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Géraldine Legendre

The other syntactic phenomenon traditionally associated with auxiliaries in Romance is ‘clitic climbing’, exemplified for French in (31b), where the direct object clitic la/ l’ procliticizes to the auxiliary rather than the dependent verb it is an argument of. The generalization is that the host of the object clitic must be a finite verbal form, forcing the clitic to climb in periphrastic tenses. (31) Fr.

a. Paul Paul b. Paul Paul

la mange. it eats l’a mangée. it has eaten

Clitic climbing in periphrastic verb forms is subject to independent restrictions on the class of main auxiliary verbs, which permit it. In Italian, clitic climbing extends to modal auxiliaries (32a), which (Modern) French forbids. Overall, clitic climbing gives rise to complex predicates combining an auxiliary (tense, modal, aspectual, causative, perception etc.) and a non-finite verb (Abeillé/Godard 2010). Which auxiliary type allows/requires clitic climbing varies across Romance varieties and is lexically specified in each language – with French being more restrictive than most. The original analysis of Rizzi (1982) is that the contrast in (32) is due to the existence of a special restructuring rule for the non-finite complement which has the effect of erasing the clausal boundary between matrix and complement clauses, and ensures satisfaction of the Specified Subject Condition (SSC, Chomsky 1973), which would otherwise be violated in Italian. The effect of the SSC is that an object clitic cannot move across a null PRO subject, as is the case in French. Restructuring is a repair strategy, which voids the effect in Italian with the relevant (e.g. modal) auxiliaries, essentially turning the SSC into a violable structural constraint. (32) a. It. b. Fr.

Paolo la vuole mangiare. Pauli veut [PROi la manger]. ‘Paolo/Paul wants to eat it.’

A final observation concerns the interaction of auxiliary selection (E vs A) and restructuring, which does not appear to have a unique signature. In some Romance varieties (e.g. Italian, Occitan), restructuring triggers the generalization of the auxiliary selected by the dependent non-finite verb to the matrix auxiliary. For example, a non-finite dependent unaccusative verb triggers E while an unergative verb triggers A (Burzio 1986). In contrast, Neapolitan restructuring invariably triggers A, irrespective of the verb class of the dependent verb, according to Ledgeway (2000, 286, footnote 16). Little is known about the extent of variation in this syntactic domain across Romance languages and dialects, but the reported variation already underscores the relative independence of various constraints on phenomena traditionally associated with auxiliary selection in Romance.

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295

6 References Abeillé, Anne/Godard, Danièle (2002), The syntactic structure of French auxiliaries, Language 78, 404–452. Abeillé, Anne/Godard, Danièle (2010), Complex predicates in the Romance languages, in: Danièle Godard (ed.), Fundamental Issues in the Romance languages, Stanford, CA, CSLI, 107–170. Adams, James N. (2013), Social Variation and the Latin Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Alexiadou, Artemis (2015), On the irrealis effect on auxiliary selection, in: Rolf Kailuweit/Malte Rosemeyer (edd.), Auxiliary Selection Revisited. Gradience and Gradualness, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 123–144. Aranovich, Raúl (2003), The semantics of auxiliary selection in Old Spanish, Studies in Language 27, 1–37. Avram, Larisa/Hill, Virginia (2007), An irrealis BE auxiliary in Romanian, in: Raúl Aranovich (ed.), Split Auxiliary Systems: A Cross-linguistic Perspective, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 47–64. Badía Margarit, Antonio M. (1962), Gramática catalana, 2 vol., Madrid, Gredos. Bard, Ellen/Frenck-Mestre, Cheryl/Sorace, Antonella (2010), Processing auxiliary selection with Italian intransitive verbs, Linguistics 48, 325–362. 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. Bentley, Delia (2003), Sur la force d’une approche non-dérivationnelle de l’analyse linguistique: quelques données de l’italo-roman, Les Cahiers du CRISCO 13, 51–75. Bentley, Delia (2006), Split Intransitivity in Italian, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Bentley, Delia/Eythórsson, Thórhallur (2004), Auxiliary selection and the semantics of unaccusativity, Lingua 114, 447–471. Benveniste, Émile (1966), Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 1, Paris, Gallimard. Benzing, Joseph (1931), Zur Geschichte von “ser” als Hilfszeitwort bei den intransitiven Verben im Spanischen, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 51, 385–460. Borer, Hagit (2005), The Normal Course of Events, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Buridant, Claude (2000), Grammaire nouvelle de l’ancien français, Paris, Sedes. Burzio, Luigi (1986), Italian Syntax: A Government-Binding Approach, Dordrecht, Foris. 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: variation and lexical-aspectual constraints, in: Raúl Aranovich (ed.), Split Auxiliary Systems: A Cross-linguistic Perspective, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 65–99. Chomsky, Noam (1973), Conditions on transformations, in: Stephen Anderson/Paul Kiparsky (edd.), A Festschrift for Morris Halle, New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 232–286. Chomsky, Noam (2001), Derivation by phase, in: Michael Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: A Life in Language, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1–52. Cummins, Sarah (1996), Meaning and Mapping, University of Toronto, Ph.D. dissertation. D’Alessandro, Roberta/Roberts, Ian (2008), Movement and agreement in Italian – past participles and defective phases, Linguistic Inquiry 39, 477–491. D’Alessandro, Roberta/Roberts, Ian (2010), Past participle agreement in Abbruzzese: split auxiliary selection and the null subject parameter, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28, 41–72. Dowty, David (1991), Thematic proto-roles and argument selection, Language 67, 547–619.

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Drinka, Bridget (2013), Sources of auxiliation in the perfects of Europe, in: Hendrik de Smet/Lobke Ghesquière/Freek van der Velde (edd.), On Multiple Source Constructions in Language Change (Special Issue Studies in Language 37(3)), Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 599–644. Durie, Mark (1987), Grammatical relations in Acehnese, Studies in Language 11, 365–399. Giancarli, Pierre-Don (2011), Les auxiliaires “être” et “avoir”. Étude comparée: corse, français, acadien et anglais, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Giancarli, Pierre-Don (2015), Auxiliary selection with intransitive and reflexive verbs, in: Rolf Kailuweit/ Malte Rosemeyer (edd.), Auxiliary Selection Revisited. Gradience and Gradualness, Berlin/ Boston, De Gruyter, 79–120. Grevisse, Maurice (162016, 11936), Le bon usage: grammaire française, refondue par André Goosse, Paris, Duculot. Haiman, John/Benincà, Paola (edd.) (2005), The Rhaeto-Romance Languages, London/New York, Routledge. Hall-Partee, Barbara (1965), Subject and Object in Modern English, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Ph.D. dissertation. Jones, Michael Allan (1993), Sardinian Syntax, London/New York, Routledge. Kailuweit, Rolf (2015), BE or HAVE in Contemporary Standard French – residua of semantic motivation, in: Rolf Kailuweit/Malte Rosemeyer (edd.), Auxiliary Selection Revisited. Gradience and Gradualness, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 249–275. Kayne, Richard (1989), Facets of Romance past participle agreement, in: Paola Benincà (ed.), Dialect Variation and the Theory of Grammar, Dordrecht, Foris, 85–104. 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. King, Ruth/Nadasdi, Terry (2001), How auxiliaries be/have in Acadian French, in: Patricia Balcom/ Louise Beaulieu/Gisèle Chevalier (edd.), Papers from the Twenty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association, Moncton, Université de Moncton, 61–72. Labelle, Marie (1992), Change of state and valency, Linguistics 28, 375–414. La Fauci, Nunzio (1994), Objects and Subjects in the Formation of Romance Morphosyntax, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Linguistics Club. La Fauci, Nunzio/Loporcaro, Michele (1989), Passifs, avancements de l’objet indirect et formes verbales périphrastiques dans le dialecte d’Altamura (Pouilles), Rivista di Linguistica 1, 161–196. Ledgeway, Adam (2000), A Comparative Syntax of the Dialects of Southern Italy: A Minimalist Approach, Oxford, Blackwell. Ledgeway, Adam (2003), L’estensione dell’ausiliare perfettivo “avere” nell’antico napoletano: intransitività scissa condizionata da fattori modali, Archivo Glottologico Italiano 88, 29–71. Ledgeway, Adam (2012), From Latin to Romance. Morphosyntactic Typology and Change, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Legendre, Géraldine (1989), Unaccusativity in French, Lingua 79, 95–164. Legendre, Géraldine (2007a), Optimizing auxiliary selection in Romance, in: Raúl Aranovich (ed.), Split Auxiliary Systems: A Cross-linguistic Perspective, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 145–180. Legendre, Géraldine (2007b), On the typology of auxiliary selection, Lingua 117, 1522–1540. Legendre, Géraldine (2010), A formal typology of person-based auxiliary selection in Italo-Romance, in: Roberta D’Alessandro/Adam Ledgeway/Ian Roberts (edd.), Syntactic Variation: The Dialects of Italy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 186–200. Legendre, Géraldine/Miyata, Yoshiro/Smolensky, Paul (1991), Unifying syntactic and semantic approaches to unaccusativity: a connectionist approach, in: Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting

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of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. General Session and Parasession on the Grammar of Event Structure, Berkeley, CA, Berkeley Linguistics Society, 156–167. Legendre, Géraldine/Sorace, Antonella (2003), Auxiliaires et intransitivité en français et dans les langues romanes, in: Danièle Godard (ed.), Les langues romanes: problèmes de la phrase simple, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 185–233. Levin, Beth/Rappaport Hovav, Malka (1995), Unaccusativity. At the Syntax-Lexical Semantics Interface, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Levin, Beth/Rappaport Hovav, Malka (2005), Argument Realization, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Lois, Ximena (1990), Auxiliary selection and past participle agreement in Romance, Probus 2, 233–255. Loporcaro, Michele (1998), Sintassi comparata dell’accordo participiale romanzo, Torino, Rosenberg & Sellier. Loporcaro, Michele (2007), On triple auxiliation in Romance, Linguistics 45, 173–222. Loporcaro, Michele (2015), Perfective auxiliation with reflexives in Medieval Romance: syntactic vs semantic gradients, in: Rolf Kailuweit/Malte Rosemeyer (edd.), Auxiliary Selection Revisited. Gradience and Gradualness, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 43–77. Mackenzie, Ian (2006), Unaccusative Verbs in Romance Languages, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Manzini, M. Rita/Savoia, Leonardo M. (2005), I dialetti italiani e romanci: morfosintassi generativa, vol. 1, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso. Manzini, M. Rita/Savoia, Leonardo M. (2007), A Unification of Morphology and Syntax. Studies in Romance and Albanian Dialects, London/New York, Routledge. Marandin, Jean-Marie (2001), Unaccusative inversion in French, in: Yves D’hulst/Johan Rooryck/Jan Schroten (edd.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 1999, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 195–222. Mateu, Jaume/Massanell i Messalles, Mar (2015), 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. McClure, William (1995), Syntactic Projections of the Semantics of Aspect, Tokyo, Hitsujishobo. Montrul, Silvina (2005), Second language acquisition and first language loss in adult early bilinguals: exploring some differences and similarities, Second Language Research 21, 199–249. Pace, Anna (1993/1994), Ricerche di morfosintassi sui dialetti di Trebisacce e Castrovillari, Università della Calabria, Tesi di Laurea. Perlmutter, David M. (1978), Impersonal passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis, in: Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, Berkeley, CA, Berkeley Linguistics Society, 157–189. Perlmutter, David M. (1989), Multiattachment and the Unaccusative Hypothesis: the perfect auxiliary in Italian, Probus 1, 63–119. Péronnet, Louise (1991), Système des modalités verbales dans le parler acadien du sud-est du Nouveau-Brunswick, Journal of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association 13, 85–98. Postal, Paul (1963), Some syntactic rules in Mohawk, Yale University, Ph.D. dissertation. Pullum, Geoffrey (1988), Citation etiquette beyond thunderdome, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6, 579–588. Reinhart, Tanya/Siloni, Tal (2004), Against the unaccusative analysis of reflexives, in: Artemis Alexiadou/Elena Anagnostopoulou/Martin Everaert (edd.), The Unaccusativity Puzzle: Explorations of the Syntax-Lexicon Interface, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 159–180. Rizzi, Luigi (1982), Issues in Italian Syntax, Dordrecht, Foris.

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Rosemeyer, Malte (2014), Auxiliary Selection in Spanish. Gradience, Gradualness, and Conservation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Rosen, Carol (1984), The interface between semantic roles and initial grammatical relations, in: David M. Perlmutter/Carol Rosen (edd.), Studies in Relational Grammar 2, Chicago, IL, The University of Chicago Press, 38–77. Rosen, Carol (1988), The Relational Structure of Reflexive Clauses: Evidence from Italian, Oxford, Taylor & Francis. Rossini, Giorgio (1975), Capitoli di morfologia e sintassi del dialetto cremonese, Firenze, La Nuova Italia. Sankoff, Gillian/Thibault, Pierrette (1980), L’alternance entre les auxiliaires “avoir” et “être” en français parlé à Montréal, Langue Française 34, 81–108. Schmitt, Cristina (2000), Cross-linguistic variation and the present perfect: the case of Portuguese, ZAS Papers in Linguistics 16, 68–99. Smith, Jane (1994), A morphosyntactic analysis of the verb group in Cajun French, University of Washington, Ph.D. dissertation. Sorace, Antonella (2000), Gradients in auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs, Language 76, 859–890. Sorace, Antonella (2015), The cognitive complexity of auxiliary selection: from processing to grammaticality judgments, in: Rolf Kailuweit/Malte Rosemeyer (edd.), Auxiliary Selection Revisited. Gradience and Gradualness, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 23–42. Stolova, Natalya (2006), Split intransitivity in Old Spanish: irrealis and negation factors, Revue Roumaine de Linguistique 51, 301–320. Torrego, Esther (1989), Unergative-unaccusative alternations in Spanish, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 10, 253–272. Tuttle, Edward (1986), The spread of “esse” as universal auxiliary in central Italo-Romance, Medioevo Romanzo 11, 229–287. Van Hout, Angeliek (2000), Event semantics in the lexicon-syntax interface: verb frame alternations in Dutch and their acquisition, in: Carol Tenny/James Pustejowsky (edd.), Events as Grammatical Objects, Stanford, CA, CSLI, 239–282. Van Valin, Robert (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.

Marie Labelle

8 Causative and perception verbs Abstract: In Romance languages, causative and perception verbs are found in a biclausal Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) construction and in two monoclausal faire faire constructions, faire-infinitive (FI) and faire-par (FP). The present chapter describes these constructions and discusses the main avenues of analysis. Cross-linguistic differences are pointed out.  

Keywords: causative, perception verbs, complex predicate, exceptional case marking, raising-to-object  

1 Introduction This chapter surveys the main analyses of causative and perception verb constructions in Romance. We focus on the verbs and the Romance languages in Table 1. The French word in small capitals in the first column will be used as a label for the set of roughly equivalent words (e.g. FAIR E ={fer, faire, fare, fazer, mandar, hacer}). The Portuguese examples will be from European Portuguese. Table 1: Causative and perception verbs in the main Romance languages Catalan

French

Italian

Portuguese

Spanish

FA IRE ‘to cause’ (causative)

fer

faire

fare

fazer, mandar

hacer

LA ISSER

‘to let’ (permissive)

deixar

laisser

lasciare

deixar

dejar

VOIR ‘to see’ (perception)

veure

voir

vedere

ver

ver

We will first discuss a biclausal construction (Section 2), then two monoclausal faire faire constructions: faire-infinitive and faire-par (Section 3).

2 The biclausal construction In Romance languages other than Romanian, VOIR and other perception verbs may take an infinitival complement with a preverbal subject. Examples parallel to (1a) exist in Italian (Burzio 1986, 229), Portuguese (Bossaglia 2013, 221), and Catalan DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-008

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(Alsina 2002; Ciutescu 2013a,b). In Spanish, (1b), a, homonymous with the dative marker, introduces human direct objects (see ↗3 Objects). (1)

a. Fr.

b. Sp.

Jean a vu Marie réparer la voiture. Marie repair.INF the car Jean have.3SG seen ‘Jean saw Marie repair the car.’ Vimos a los niños cantar la canción. 1 DOM the children sing.INF the song see.PST .1PL ‘We saw the children sing the song.’ (Abeillé/Godard 2003, 134 (10a))

The subject of the embedded verb is accusative. It surfaces as an accusative clitic on the tensed verb, past participle agreement being triggered in languages where it applies (Mathieu 2003; Bentley 2006; Rowlett 2007). (2)

It.

Mario l’ ha vista have.3SG seen.F . SG Mario 3SG . ACC ‘Mario saw her wash the motorbike.’ (Bentley 2006, 220 (46b))

lavare wash.INF

il the

motorino. motorbike

The same construction exists with LAISSER in French, Portuguese, and Spanish, but is considered marginal in Italian (Burzio 1986, 229 and 287) and in Catalan (Alsina 2002, 2428). We will come back to FAIRE below. (3) Fr.

Nous laisserons les enfants aller we let.FUT . 1PL the children go.INF ‘We will let the children go the station.’

à la to the

gare. station

The standard account of (1) is in terms of Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) (e.g. Rowlett 2007). The infinitival complement is a complementizer-less clause (a Tense Phrase (TP)), and the main verb case-marks the embedded subject either directly, as in (4), or as a result of Raising-to-Object: the embedded subject moves to an object position in the main clause where it receives accusative Case (e.g. Postal 1974; Bošković 1997).2

1 The abbreviation DOM is used for the marker of differential object marking, e.g. a in Spanish. 2 Abeillé/Godard/Miller (1997) defend a control structure.

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(4) Jean a vu Maria réparer la voiture.

The construction is biclausal: a functional domain hosting object clitics (5), auxiliaries (6), and clausal negation (7) dominates the embedded verb. This property distinguishes this construction from faire faire (Section 3). With VOIR , auxiliaries and negation are not easily compatible with direct perception reports and have been claimed to be ungrammatical (Guasti 1993, 117; Gonçalves 1999), but auxiliaries are fine with intratextual uses (6b), and negation is not excluded (7b). When negation appears on the embedded verb, clitics remain on the infinitive.3 (5) a. Fr.

b. Sp.

(6) Fr.

Nous l’ avons vu [les manger]. seen 3PL . ACC eat.INF we 3SG . ACC have.1PL ‘We saw him eat them.’ Dejamos a los niños [cantar la canción.] / DOM the children sing.INF the song / let.1PL [cantarla]. sing.INF =3F . SG . ACC ‘We let the children sing the song. / sing it.’ (Abeillé/Godard 2003, 134 (10a)) a. Je vous laisse [être bercés par sa magie]. I 2PL .ACC let.1SG be.INF lulled by his magic ‘I let you be lulled by his magic.’ (L’Express, 27.12.2012) b. Nous avons vu [Jean être frappé we have.1PL seen Jean be.INF struck de stupeur à cette nouvelle.] with astonishment at this news ‘We saw (above) that Jean was shocked by this information.’

3 See Ciutescu (2013b) for examples of negation in other Romance languages.

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(7) Fr.

a. Je le laisse [ne pas les manger]. I 3M . ACC let.1SG NEG not 3PL . ACC eat.INF ‘I let him not eat them.’ b. J’ ai cru voir [Pierre ne pas I have.1SG believed see.INF Pierre NEG not s’ arrêter au feu rouge]. REFL stop.INF at.the light red ‘I think I have seen Pierre not stop at the red light.’ (Labelle 1996, 91 (26a))

Since the main verb assigns accusative Case to the embedded subject, we expect passivization to be possible. With VOIR , the passive is possible in Italian ( 8a) , but, although attested (8b), it tends to be rejected in French, unless the progressive expression en train de precedes the infinitive (Veland 1998; Miller/Lowrey 2003, 155).4 (8) a. It.

b. Fr.

Alcuni prigionieri furono visti fuggire. some prisoners were seen.M . PL flee.INF ‘A few prisoners were seen to flee.’ (Burzio 1986, 290 (146a)) Hurley et Grant ont été vus faire Hurley and Grant have.3PL been seen.M . PL do.INF des emplettes ensemble. ART . INDF . PL purchases together ‘Hurley and Grant were seen out shopping together.’ (Rowlett 2007, 779 (78a))

With FAIRE , the ECM construction exists in Portuguese, where it is preferred to faire faire, particularly when the infinitive is transitive (Gonçalves/Duarte 2001, 659; Soares da Silva 2012, 531; Bossaglia 2013, 224).5 (9) EPt. A Maria fez/mandou os miúdos ler esse the Maria made/ordered the children read.INF that ‘Maria made/ordered the children to read that book.’ (Soares da Silva 2012, 526 (7b))

livro. book

4 In European Portuguese, the passive involves an infinitival complement introduced by a, which has a gerundive meaning (Hornstein/Martins/Nunes 2008, 216, fn. 18). 5 In Portuguese, a distinct construction, preferred to ECM and faire faire in Brazil, involves an inflected infinitive agreing with a nominative subject (Raposo 1987). (i) EPt. A Maria viu/ fez/ mandou/ deixou [eles correrem]. the Maria saw/ made/ ordered/ let 3PL . NOM run.3P L ‘Maria saw/made/ordered/let them (to) run.’

Causative and perception verbs

303

In French, Italian, and Catalan, however, the embedded subject cannot intervene between the two verbs (10), but when it is cliticized, the construction – rejected by purists – is attested, particularly when the complement is negated (11), or when faire faire would yield an unacceptable sequence of clitics (12) (Hyman/Zimmer 1976; Rouveret/Vergnaud 1980, 130; Bailard 1982; Burzio 1986, 232–238; Reed 1991; Abeillé/ Godard/Miller 1997; Baschung/Desmets 2000; Gonçalves/Duarte 2001, 663). (10) Fr.

*Le professeur fera les enfants the professor make.FUT . 3SG the children lire le livre. the book read.INF ‘The professor will have the children read the book.’

(11) Fr.

a. Le professeur les fera the professor 3PL . ACC make.FUT . 3SG le lire. read.INF 3M . SG . ACC ‘The professor will have them read it.’ b. Le manque de temps les fait the lack of time 3PL .ACC make.3SG le lire. read.INF 3M . SG . ACC ‘Lack of time makes them not read it.’ (Abeillé/Godard/Miller 1997, 65–66, (9), (15))

(12) Fr.

a. *Elle nous vous fera she 1PL . ACC 2PL . ACC make.FUT . 3SG b. Elle nous fera vous she 1PL . ACC make.FUT . 3SG 2PL . ACC ‘She will have us scold you.’ (Abeillé/Godard 2003, 174 (76c))

ne NEG

pas not

gronder. scold.INF gronder. scold.INF

This ECM construction with FAIRE expresses direct causation (Bordelois 1974; Hyman/ Zimmer 1976; Reed 1992; Treviño 1994, 107), and imposes an agentive interpretation on the embedded subject, which may not be inanimate (Bailard 1982, 271; Authier/ Reed 1991; Bossaglia 2013, 225; Enghels/Roegiest 2013 on LAISSER ). Abeillé/Godard/ Miller (1997, 66) define direct causation as a relation where the causer is in a position of power allowing him to coerce the causee to do some action, and the causee has control over the realization of the action. As for Spanish, some speakers accept (13), analyzed as ECM by Ciutescu (2013a), but as involving a dative constituent by Torrego (2010).

304

(13) Sp.

Marie Labelle

La entrenadora hizo a la make.PST .3SG DOM / DAT the the trainer.F el ejercicio. the exercise ‘The trainer made the athlete repeat the exercise.’ (Torrego 2010, 448 (3))

atleta athlete

repetir repeat.INF

There is little evidence against an ECM analysis. Negation (14), auxiliaries (15) and object clitics (16) appear in the complement; the causee must be animate according to Torrego (2010),6 and the interpretation is one of direct causation (Treviño 1994). (14) Sp.

El jefe hizo a sus clientes no divulgar the boss make.PST .3SG DOM his clients not spread.INF la noticia. the news ‘The boss made his clients not spread the news.’ (Torrego 2010, 451 (9))

(15) Sp.

El jefe hizo a su hijo ser the boss make.PST .3SG DOM his son be.INF por su empleada. by his employee.F ‘The boss made his son be hired by his employee.’ (Torrego 2010, 454 (18))

(16) Sp.

Marta hizo a su hijo arreglarla. Marta make.PST .3SG DOM her son repair.INF =3SG . F . ACC ‘Marta made her son repair it.’ (Treviño 1994, 79 (17a))

contratado hired

Spanish speakers alternate between accusative and dative clitics for human causees, and it is the case here too (cf. Section 3.1). Passivization of FAIRE is possible in Italian (even though preverbal subjects are rejected), but not in the other Romance languages (Alsina 2002, 2434; Torrego 2010, 454; Tubino Blanco 2011, 230).

6 Some authors accept dative-marked inanimate causees (Franco/Landa 1995; Tubino Blanco 2011, 256).

Causative and perception verbs

(17) It.

Gianni fu fatto riparare Gianni be.PST .3SG make.PST .3SG repair.INF ‘Gianni was caused to repair the car.’ (Burzio 1986, 232 (9))

(18) Cat.

*L’ enginyer ha estat fet modificar the engineer have.3SG been made modify.INF ‘The engineer was caused to modify the design.’ (Alsina 2002, 2434)

305

la macchina. the car

el the

disseny. design

To summarize, the ECM construction is biclausal. The infinitival complement contains a functional domain hosting negation, auxiliaries and object clitics. The subject of the infinitive is accusative and it cliticizes onto the main verb. This sets the stage for a discussion of faire faire.

3 Monoclausal constructions: faire faire In his seminal study on French, Kayne (1975) distinguished two different faire faire constructions, faire-infinitive (FI) and faire-par (FP), a terminology that has been adopted since. Later studies showed that Kayne’s description applies to Catalan (Alsina 1993; 2002; Ciutescu 2013a), Italian (Burzio 1986), Portuguese (Gonçalves 1999), and Spanish (Bordelois 1974; Aissen 1979; Rosen 1990; Treviño 1994). The FI construction is discussed in Section 3.1, and FP in Section 3.2.

3.1 Faire-infinitive In the FI construction, the semantic subject of the infinitive is postverbal, and its case is determined by the transitivity of the verb: accusative with intransitive verbs (19), dative with transitive verbs (20).7 This case-marking pattern characterizes morphologically derived causatives in many languages (Comrie 1981; Baker 1988). (19) Fr.

Marie fit travailler Jean. Marie make.PST .3SG work.INF Jean ‘Marie made Jean work.’

7 In European Portuguese, transitive complements are not always accepted (Gonçalves 2001, 228; Gonçalves/Duarte 2001, 659). In Brazilian Portuguese, only intransitives are possible since the dative marker a has been lost.

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Marie Labelle

(20) Fr.

Marie fit réparer Marie make.PST .3SG repair.INF ‘Marie made Jean repair the car.’ (Guasti 2006b (3))

la voiture the car

à Jean. to Jean

FI is possible with LAISSER , VOIR and other perception verbs. (21) Fr.

a. Il a laissé partir son he have.3SG let leave.INF his ‘He let his friend leave.’ (Kayne 1975, 203 (3a)) b. J’ ai entendu dire cela à say.INF that to I have.1SG heard ‘I heard one of your friends say that.’ (Kayne 1975, 206 (12b))

amie. friend

un de tes one of your

amis. friends

In FI, the complement may contain neither clausal negation (22) nor auxiliaries (23) (Kayne 1975, 231; Bordelois 1988; Guasti 1993; 2006b; Gonçalves 1999, 340; Baschung/Desmets 2000, 221; Alsina 2002, 2432; Abeillé/Godard 2003, 143). (22) Fr.

(23) a. It.

b. Sp.

*Jean l’ y fait Jean 3SG . ACC LOC make.3SG ‘Jean makes him not go there.’

ne NEG

pas aller. not go.INF

*Marco farà aver pulito le toilette Marco make.FUT .3SG have.INF cleaned the toilets al generale. to.the general ‘Marco will make the general have cleaned the toilets.’ (Guasti 1993, 39 (53)) *Esto lo hizo ser fusilado. this 3SG . M . ACC make.PST .3SG be.INF shot ‘This made him be shot.’ (Bordelois 1988, 88 (73))

Moreover, the subject and objects of the infinitive cliticitize onto the main verb (24). The ECM construction corresponding to (24) is On le laissa la réparer ‘We let himA C C repair itA C C ’. With intransitive complements, there is ambiguity between ECM and FI because the clitic on FAIRE may represent a preverbal or postverbal causee.

Causative and perception verbs

(24) Fr.

On la lui we 3SG . F .ACC 3SG .DAT ‘We let him repair it.’

(25) Sp.

La hizo 3SG .F . ACC make.PST .3SG ‘He made it work.’

laissa let.PST .3SG

307

réparer. repair.INF

funcionar. function.INF

In Spanish, where both human direct objects and dative objects are marked with a, speakers alternate between accusative and dative clitics referring to human causees. This masks the difference between transitive and intransitive complements. (26) Sp.

a. El gitano lo /le hizo comprar the gipsy 3SG . M . ACC / 3SG . DAT make.PST .3SG buy.INF inventos. inventions ‘The gipsy made him buy his inventions.’ (Treviño 1994, 53 (52)) b. Pedro la /le hizo llorar. Pedro 3SG . F . ACC / 3SG . DAT make.PST .3SG cry.INF ‘Pedro made her cry.’

sus his

The difference between ECM (lo) and FI (le) explains (26a). But in (26b), la is standardly expected, whether the source is ECM or FI. Some speakers prefer the dative (le) regardless of the transitivity of the verb (Tubino Blanco 2011, 215). For speakers who alternate between lo/la and le, the crucial factor is directness of causation (Treviño 1994, 127; Enghels 2012). According to Moore (2010, 369) “if the embedded predicate is intransitive, and the causee is an IO instead of the expected DO, then the causation is indirect; if the embedded predicate is transitive and the causee is DO instead of the expected IO, then the causation is direct.” For French speakers who accept both ECM and FI with FAIRE , a dative causee (FI) has also been claimed to express a more indirect causation than an accusative one (ECM) (Hyman/Zimmer 1976; Reed 1992).8 The fact that clausal negation, auxiliaries, or object clitics do not appear in the complement shows that FI is monoclausal: there is no functional domain between FAIR E and the infinitive. FAIRE In single predicate accounts, there is only one lexical verb. Some authors posit that FAIRE and the infinitive form a compound verb, e.g. [V0 faire travailler] in (19) (e.g. Rowlett 2007). After merger of the argument structures of the two verbs, the subject

8 On L AISSER , VOIR , cf. Labelle (1996), Enghels (2009), Enghels /Roegiest (2013).

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and object arguments of the infinitive become objects of the compound verb (Zubizarreta 1985; Di Sciullo/Rosen 1991): (27) It.

fare ((x)) + leggere (e (y,z)) => fare leggere (e (x, y, z)) make read make-read (Di Sciullo/Rosen 1991, 28)

This explains the postverbal position of the causee and the fact that its case depends on the transitivity of the infinitive. Kayne (1975, 217) argued against a [V0 V0 V0] compound, however, because the two verbs may be separated (i) by subject and object enclitics (28); (ii) by adverbial expressions (29); (iii) in coordinated infinitival VPs (30): (28) Fr

a. Fera-t-il partir Marie? Marie make.FUT .3SG =3SG . NOM leave.INF ‘Will he have Marie leave?’ b. Fais-lui lire ce livre. make.IMP .2SG =3SG . DAT read.INF this book ‘Have him read this book.’ (Kayne 1975, 218 (38a), (39a))

(29) Fr.

Ils la feront sans they 3SG . F . ACC make.FUT .3PL without ‘They will no doubt make her cry.’ (Kayne 1975, 219 (45a))

(30) Fr.

Elle fera lire des livres et she make.FUT .3PL read.INF ART . INDF . PL books and boire du vin à la sœur de son meilleur ami. friend drink.INF PART 9 wine to the sister of her best ‘She will have her best friend’s sister read books and drink wine.’ (Kayne 1975, 219 (42a))

aucun any

doute doubt

pleurer. cry.INF

These arguments apply to the other Romance languages (Burzio 1986; Alsina 1993, 286; Guasti 1993, 35; Gonçalves 1999, 344 and 400), although in Spanish adverbs may not be intercalated (Aissen 1979, 65; Abeillé/Godard 2003, 154). A single predicate approach solving the separability problem is to treat FAIRE / LAISSER / VOIR as auxiliaries (Aissen 1979, 65; Abeillé/Godard 2003, 154; Tily/Sag 2006), and to merge them in the functional domain of the clause (Cardinaletti/Shlonsky

9

PART

is used for the so-called partitive article in French.

Causative and perception verbs

309

2004;10 Cinque 2006). However, contrary to auxiliaries, causative and perception verbs add an external argument to the base verb, and may add an adjunct. Therefore a bipredicative analysis, where FAIR E and the infinitive are independent lexical heads with their own argument structure, is to be preferred (Guasti 2006b). In a bipredicative account, FAIRE and the infinitive are generated under their own verbal projection, each contributing their arguments. The clause contains only one functional domain, above the higher vP. The embedded subject may be generated leftward (31), or rightward (Folli/Harley 2007, 207). (31) Gianni ha fatto riparare la macchina a Mario. ‘Gianni made Mario repair the car.’

In (31), both FAIRE and the infinitive project a subject. This accounts for an important characteristic of FI, not accounted for by single predicate accounts; the causee exhibits subject properties. Anaphors refer to the causee, and not to the subject of FAIR E (32), and subject-oriented expressions may refer to either subject (33) (for FAIRE French, see Kayne 1975, 214). (32) Fr.

a. Il fera parler ces jeunes fillesi he make.FUT .3SG speak.INF those young girls l’ une de l’ autrei. the one of the other ‘He’ll have those girls speak of one another.’ parler cette jeune fille b. *Ilsi feront speak.INF that young girl they make.FUT .3PL l’ un de l’ autrei. the one of the other ‘They’ll have that girl speak of each other.’ (Kayne 1975, 263 (168a), 266 (175a), 264 (171a))

10 For Cardinaletti/Shlonsky (2004), causative and perception verbs are “quasi-functional”.

310

(33) Cat.

Marie Labelle

He fet beure el vi a contracor a la Maria. have.1SG make.PST .3SG drink.INF the wine unwillingly to the Maria ‘I have made Maria drink the wine against her/my will.’ (Alsina 1993, 268 (112a), (85a))

In addition, the reflexive construction is ungrammatical, a fact that follows if the dative causee is an embedded subject blocking, in (34), the establishment of the chain [Maria … si … e]. (34) It.

è fatta [[accusare ei] *Mariai sii REFL be.3SG made accuse.INF Maria ‘Maria made Giovanni accuse herself.’ (Burzio 1986, 249 (46))

a to

Giovanni]. Giovanni

Treating a Giovanni as a dative complement of a compound verb fare-accusare would predict the grammaticality of (34), since a dative complement should not intervene in the relation between Maria, si, and the empty category. Moreover, if we causativize a subject control verb, the controller of the embedded PRO is the dative causee, not the sentence subject (Villalba 1992, 353 for Catalan). (35) It.

vista Ho fatto affermare di PROi aver=la have=3SG . F . ACC seen have.1SG made claim.INF of a Ugoi. to Ugo ‘I made Ugo claim to have seen her.’ (cf. Burzio 1986, 263 (73a))

The dative causee asymmetrically c-commands the object of the infinitive: it may bind an anaphoric expression within the infinitival verb phrase, but the converse is not possible11 (Zubizarreta 1985, 270; Burzio 1986, 263–265; Villalba 1992). This is predicted by (31) (Costantini 2010). (36) Cat.

a. No vaig fer castigar PST . 1SG make.INF punish.INF not professor a cap alumne. professor to no student ‘I made no student punish his teacher.’

el the

seu his

11 According to Gonçalves (1999, 390; 2002) this does not carry over to European Portuguese.

Causative and perception verbs

311

b. *No vaig fer castigar cap alumne PST . 1SG make. INF punish.INF no student not al seu professor. to.the his professor ‘I made his teacher punish no student.’ (Villalba 1992, 351 (12b), (13b)). Let us turn to the Case of the causee. Assuming that the structure creates a complex predicate, the standard account posits that, when the infinitive is transitive, the complex predicate treats the object of the infinitive as its first object and assigns it accusative Case. Since accusative cannot be assigned twice, the causee becomes the second object, marked by default as dative. If accusative Case has not been used for the object of the infinitive, it is assigned to the causee. This standard account requires answers to the following questions: How is the complex predicate formed if there is no verb compounding? Which head assigns accusative Case? Baker (1988, Section 4.3) proposed an analysis along the following lines. The verbal projection containing the direct object (if there is one) moves over its subject to be next to FAIRE , and the verbal complex formed by the two verbs case-marks the object or, if there is no object, the causee, under adjacency. (37) Fr.

Marie fit [[réparer la voiture] à Jean [réparer la voiture]]. (= (20))

A leftward movement of the infinitival verb or verbal projection over its subject has often been postulated to account for postverbal causees (e.g. Kayne 1975; Rouveret/ Vergnaud 1980; Burzio 1986; Rochette 1988, 227; Reed 1991; Gonçalves 1999, 401; 2002; Pitteroff/Campanini 2013). The necessity of adjacency for accusative Case assignment is demonstrated by (38): the causee is accusative if it is adjacent to the infinitive, but dative if it follows the PP (Villalba 1992; for examples similar to (38d) in other languages, see Kayne 1975, 210 fn. 9; Cannings/Moody 1978; Bailard 1982, 257; Manandise/Marin-CallejoManandise 1983; Burzio 1986, 252; Bordelois 1988, 68). (38) Cat.

a. Farem creure/confiar la Maria en l’atzar. b. *Farem creure/confiar a la Maria en l’atzar. make.FUT . 1PL believe. INF /rely.INF (to) the Maria in the chance c. *Farem creure/confiar en l’atzar la Maria. d. Farem creure/confiar en l’atzar a la Maria. make.FUT . 1PL believe. INF /rely. INF in the chance (to) the Maria ‘We shall make Maria believe in/rely on chance.’ (Villalba 1992, 364 (31)−(32))

312

Marie Labelle

In Italian, passivizing FAIRE affects the accusative causee (39a) and the object of the infinitive (39b). This indicates that FAIRE assigns Case to these DPs. An analysis in terms of a discontinuous complex predicate seems therefore required, given the adjacency requirement and the separability of the two verbs. (39) It.

a. In alcune occasioni è stato fatto piangere. in some occasions be.3SG been made cry.INF ‘A couple of times (the boy) was made to cry.’ (Frenda 2015, 431 (12)) b. La macchina sarà fatta riparare a Giovanni. the car be.FUT .3SG made repair.INF to Giovanni ‘The car will be made to be repaired by Giovanni.’ (Burzio 1986, 254 (57))

Unexpectedly, while equivalents of (39) exist in Catalan (Alsina 2002, 2434) and Portuguese (Gonçalves 2002), they are generally rejected in Spanish and French (Zubizarreta 1985, 284; Miller 1993, 274; Molinier 2005, 203–204). (40) Sp.

a. *La casa fue hecha construir a Casimiro. the house be.PST .3SG made construct.INF to Casimiro ‘The house was made to be constructed by Casimiro.’ (Zubizarreta 1985, 284 (92b)) b. *Bruno fue hecho trabajar /telefonear /saltar. Bruno be.PST .3SG made work.INF /telephone.INF /jump.INF ‘Bruno was made work/telephone/jump.

Moving the infinitive to the left explains why it precedes postverbal matrix subjects in Spanish (Ordóñez 2007) (41), and floated quantifiers stranded by the matrix subject in Catalan and in Italian (42) (but not in French). Notice that the adjacency between the infinitive and its object is disrupted in these examples. (41) Sp.

leer Ayer nos hizo yesterday 1PL make.PST .3SG read.INF ‘Yesterday Juan made us read the book.’ (Ordóñez 2007, 274 (72))

Juan el Juan the

(42) It.

facevano commentare I professorii the professors make.IMPF .3PL comment.INF quel libro a Ugo. that book to Ugo ‘All the professors made Ugo comment on that book.’ (Guasti 1993, 34 (32))

libro. book

tuttii all

Causative and perception verbs

313

Inspired by Baker’s (1988) analysis of suffixal causatives, Guasti (1993; 1996; 2006a,b) and Villalba (1994) account for such word orders by incorporating the infinitive into FAIR E . This creates a compound verb in syntax, while preserving the idea that the FAIRE lower vP contains a structural subject. (43) It.

[IP I professorij [v0 facevano commentarei]k [vP tuttij tk [vP ti quel libro a Ugo]]]. (Guasti 2006b (53))

The incorporation approach is not without problems, since the two verbs may be separated: (44) It.

I professori fanno spesso commentare tutti comment. INF all the professors make.3PL often il libro a Ugo. the book to Ugo ‘The professors all make Ugo often comment on the book.’ (Guasti 2006b (54))

In order to maintain an incorporation analysis, Guasti first incorporates the infinitive into FAIR E , then excorporates FAIR E from this verbal complex to move it to T. But the analysis wrongly predicts that the leftover infinitive will follow tutti: (45) I professori fanno spesso commentare tutti quel libro a Ugo

Baker (1988), for his part, postulates incorporation in Romance causatives, but at LF.

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Marie Labelle

Concerning the thematic role of the causee, it has been claimed to be a Patient of the complex predicate when it is accusative (Ackerman/Moore 1999; Gonçalves 2002), and a Goal or Benefactive/Malefactive complement when it is dative (Cannings/ Moody 1978; Morin 1978; Bailard 1982; Bordelois 1988; Guasti 1993; 1996; 2006b).12 A recent trend is to treat dative causees as introduced by an applicative head giving them a Benefactive/Malefactive role (Torrego 2010; Pitteroff/Campanini 2013).13 To explain why the causee has subject properties, it may be moved from its vP internal subject position to the applicative projection (46), perhaps to check dative case. Reorganization is required to get the final word order. (46) Fr.

à Marie [Appl Ø [vPMarie Jean fait [ApplP to Marie Marie Jean make.3SG ‘Jean makes Marie write a letter.’

écrire une lettre]]]. write.INF a letter

An important but largely ignored characteristic of FI is that dative complements do not cliticize. Kayne (1975) attributed the impossibility of cliticizing the dative complement of téléphoner in (47) to the presence of an embedded subject (leur fils),14 but other clitics are not blocked in the same context (Burzio 1986, 244). (47) Fr.

*Cela leur fera téléphoner that 3PL .DAT make.FUT .3SG telephone.INF ‘That will make their son telephone to them.’ (Kayne 1975, 288, (43))

leur their

(48) Fr.

On y fait jouer les enfants. one LOC make.3SG play.INF the children ‘We/they have the children play there.’

fils. son

It turns out that, in FI, a dative clitic is always interpreted as the causee. In sentences with two datives, when one of them is cliticized (49a) or extracted by wh-movement (49b), it can only be interpreted as the causee (Kayne 1975, 290; Aissen 1979, 162; Burzio 1986, 243; Alsina 1993, 235). When the two datives are fronted (49c), the sentence is unambiguous, the clitic is the causee and the wh-element, the dative object (Milner 1982, 160).15, 16

12 However, dative causees do not behave like indirect object controllers (e.g. Treviño 1994; López 2001; Moore 2010). 13 This idea is attributed to Ippolito in an unpublished paper (Folli/Harley 2007, 205). 14 For other languages, see Treviño (1994, 90), Gonçalves (1999, 330), Alsina (2002, 2429). 15 Such double dative sentences are not compatible with single predicate accounts. 16 Gonçalves (1999, 405; 2002) rejects double datives in European Portuguese.

Causative and perception verbs

(49) Fr.

a. Jean lui fait porter une lettre letter Jean 3SG .DAT make.3SG bring.INF a ‘Jean makes him take a letter to Marie.’ (Burzio 1986, 243 (35)) b. À qui Pierre fera-t-il to whom Pierre make.FUT . 3SG =3SG . M . NOM donner ce livre à Jean? give.INF that book to Jean ‘By whom will Pierre have that book given to Jean?’ (Alsina 1993, 235 (67)) c. À qui lui feras-tu to whom 3SG .DAT make.FUT . 2SG =2SG . NOM porter ces livres? those books bring.INF ‘To whom will you have him take those books?’ (Kayne 1975, 290 fn. 15)

315

à Marie. to Marie

Moreover, one may cliticize on FAIRE a dative causee and an accusative object (50a), but not an accusative causee and a dative object (the * reading of (50b)). In the FP construction in (51a), the clitics refer respectively to the theme and goal of the infinitive, and the causee is expressed in a by-phrase par le facteur. But in the parallel FI sentence (51b), the dative clitic cannot correspond to the goal and the dative constituent au facteur to the causee. (The accepted reading of (50b) is FP without a by-phrase.) (50) Fr.

a. Je la lui ai fait écrire. I 3SG . F . ACC 3SG .DAT have.1SG made write.INF ‘I had him/her write it.’ b. Je la lui ai fait téléphoner. I 3SG . F . ACC 3SG .DAT have.1SG made telephone.INF *‘I had herACC call him/herDAT.’ ‘I had it (=the news) telephoned to him/her (by someone).’

(51) Fr.

a. Cette lettre, je la lui ai fait this letter I 3SG . F . ACC 3SG .DAT have.1SG made par le facteur. by the mailman ‘This letter, I had it sent to him/her by the mailman.’ b. Cette lettre, je la lui ai fait this letter I 3SG . F . ACC 3SG .DAT have.1SG made au facteur. to.the mailman ‘This letter, I had him/her send it to the mailman.’

apporter bring.INF

apporter bring.INF

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These facts could support an applicative approach like (46) if dative clitics pass through the applicative projection, where they get interpreted as causees. Another topic of interest is the question of downstairs clitics. When the infinitival phrase is reflexive, the clitic SE ( si in Italian) does not appear on FAIRE , since its binder is the embedded and not the matrix subject. S E must appear on the infinitive in French, Spanish and Catalan, but it cannot do so in Italian or Portuguese (Kayne 1975, 403; Zubizarreta 1985; Rosen 1990, 28; Villalba 1992; Gonçalves 1999, 404). (52) Fr.

On a fait se raser we have.3SG made REFL shave.INF ‘We made Pierre shave himself.’ (Zubizarreta 1985, 274 (72a))

Pierre. Pierre

(53) It.

*Mario ha fatto accusar=si Mario have.3SG made accuse.INF = REFL ‘Mario made Piero accuse himself.’ (Zubizarreta 1985, 274 (72c))

Piero. Piero

In Italian, the reflexive interpretation is obtained via the non-clitic anaphor se stesso ‘himself’: (54) It.

Con le minacce, fecero accusare with the threats make.PST .3PL accuse.INF se stesso a Giovanni. himself to Giovanni ‘With threats, they made Giovanni accuse himself.’ (Burzio 1986, 264 (74))

When SE does not confer a reflexive interpretation, but marks semantically intransitive predicates, it is present in Spanish and absent in Italian, but it may be omitted in French (Enzinger 2010, 244) and in Catalan (Alsina 2002, 2436–2437).17 Catalan is more permissive: the French equivalent of (55d) would require SE . (55) a. Sp. b. It.

El viento hizo disipar=se las the wind make.PST .3SG dissipate.INF =SE the Il vento ha fatto dissipare le nubi. the wind have.3SG made dissipate.INF the clouds

nubes. clouds /*dissiparsi. /*dissipate=SE

17 In many languages, these ‘naturally reflexive verbs’ do not require a reflexive marker.

Causative and perception verbs

c. Fr.

d. Cat.

317

Le vent a fait (se) dissiper les nuages. the wind have.3SG made SE dissipate.INF the clouds ‘The wind made the clouds dissipate.’ (Zubizarreta 1985, 282 (89a) and 266 (57a)) Per què no li deixes rentar(?-se) les mans? let.2SG wash.INF =SE the hands why not 3SG .DAT ‘Why don’t you let him wash his hands?’ (Alsina 2002, 2436–2437)

Surprisingly, in Italian, when the main verb is VOIR instead of FAIRE , the reflexive clitic is allowed on the infinitive. (56) It.

Ho {visto /*fatto} svegliar=si have.1SG seen /made wake-up.INF =SE ‘I saw/*made the girl wake up.’ (Guasti 1993, 115)

la ragazza. the girl

Kayne (1975, 406) observed that the reflexivized verb behaves like an intransitive. In (57), the causee is accusative even though SE seems to lexicalize to the direct object. This behavior led to the hypothesis that reflexive SE is an intransitivizing verbal affix (Grimshaw 1982; Marantz 1984, 152; see Labelle 2008 for a criticism). (57) Fr.

a. La crainte du scandale a fait se the fear of.the scandal have.3SG made SE le frère du juge. the brother of.the judge b. *La crainte du scandale a fait se the fear of.the scandal have.3SG made SE au frère du juge. to.the brother of.the judge ‘Fear of scandal made the judge’s brother kill himself.’ (Kayne 1975, 407 (12))

tuer kill.INF

tuer kill.INF

It is probably not a coincidence that reflexive clitics are allowed on the infinitive precisely in languages where other clitics may remain downstairs. In Spanish and in Catalan, the objects of the infinitive may optionally remain downstairs (e.g. Bordelois 1988; Villalba 1992; 1994; Treviño 1994; Alsina 2002, 2433; Tubino Blanco 2011, 233). The resulting construction has features of ECM (downstairs clitics) and of FI (postverbal dative causee).

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El Joan va fer comprar-ne the Joan PST .3SG make.INF buy.INF =GEN ‘Joan made Maria buy some of it.’ (Villalba 1992, 361–362 (29))

a la to the

Maria. Maria

In French this is marginally possible when the causee is cliticized: (59) Fr.

Je lui ai fait le made 3SG .M . ACC I 3SG .DAT have.1SG ‘I made him read it.’ (Baschung/Desmets 2000, 214 (23a))

lire. read.INF

This construction merits an independent study. If (58)−(59) are monoclausal, object clitics do not always target the functional domain, but may attach directly to V (cf. Cardinaletti/Shlonsky 2004 for restructuring verbs). This would explain the postverbal dative causee, but not why, when passivizing the main verb affects an embedded object, a dative clitic may not remain on the infinitive: (60) Cat.

a. La medalla de la ciutat li va the medal of the city 3SG .DAT PST .3SG feta donar. made give.INF b. *La medalla de la ciutat va ser PST .3SG be.INF the medal of the city feta donar-li. made give.INF =3SG .DAT ‘The medal of the city was caused to be donated to him.’ (Alsina 2002, 2435)

ser be.INF

If downstairs clitics signal a biclausal structure, (60) follows (the promotion of the embedded object requires a monoclausal structure), but not (58)−(59), nor (61), an FP construction with a downstairs clitic: (61) Sp.

Hicieron examinar=lo por make.PST .3PL examine.INF = 3SG . M . ACC by ‘They had him examined by a specialist.’ (Treviño 1994, 48 (49a))

un a

especialista. specialist

To account for the optionality of clitic climbing, Villalba (1994) relies on two independent operations: clitic adjunction and verb incorporation. When clitic adjunction precedes verb incorporation, object clitics surface on the infinitive. When verb incorporation precedes clitic adjunction, object clitics surface to the left of the complex predicate.

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To summarize, the FI construction is monoclausal and bipredicative. The complement of FAIRE contains a structural subject whose case depends largely on the transitivity of the infinitive. The subject and objects of the infinitive normally cliticize on FAIRE ( excepted dative objects and reflexive clitics). There are crosslinguistic differences with respect to passivization and to the possibility of leaving clitics downstairs.

3.2 Faire-par In FP, the infinitival complement is a traditional VP, a constituent without external argument. The by-phrase is an optional adjunct. (62) Fr.

Elle fera [VP manger cette that she make.FUT .3SG eat.INF ‘She’ll have that apple eaten by Jean.’ (Kayne 1975, 235 (89a))

pomme (PP par apple by

Jean)]. Jean

In support of a VP complementation, it can be shown that the logical subject of the FP complement is not syntactically active. While in passives, the expression in a byphrase can control a null subject in an adjunct (63a), this is impossible in FP (63b) (Guasti 1993; 2006b). (63) It.

a. Questo edificio fu costruito (da Gaudìi) per PROi this building be.PST .3SG built by Gaudi to ottenere un premio. prize obtain.INF a ‘This building was built (by Gaudì) to obtain a prize.’ (Guasti 2006b (37a)) ha fatto attaccare i b. Il comandantei made attack.INF the the commanding.officer have.3SG PROi/*j avvisare nemici dal generale Custerj senza enemies by.the General Custer without inform.INF il governo. the government. ‘Without informing the government, the commanding officer made General Custer attack the enemies.’ (Guasti 1993, 100 (23))

The relation between causer and causee is more indirect in FP than in FI (Kayne 1975, 239–242). Hyman/Zimmer (1976, 199) observed that in (64a), the speaker’s objective is to affect the general, but in (64b), it is to get the toilets cleaned. The difference follows

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if au Général in (64a) is an applied object with a Malefactive role (cf. 46), but (64b) contains only a bare VP. (64) Fr.

a. J’ ai fait [vP [VP nettoyer les clean.INF the I have.1SG made au Général]. to.the General ‘I made the General clean the toilets.’ les b. J’ ai fait [VP nettoyer clean.INF the I have.1SG made (par le Général)]. by the General ‘I had the toilets cleaned (by the General).’

toilettes] toilets

toilettes toilets

The causee in a by-phrase does not have subject properties and it does not c-command into the VP. No phrase anaphoric to the causee is possible in FP, contrary to FI (Kayne 1975, 236; Zubizarreta 1985; Burzio 1986, 250; Alsina 1993, 268; Folli/Harley 2007, 199). (65) Fr.

Elles ont fait peindre they have.3PL made paint.INF ‘They made Jean paint his house.’ (Zubizarreta 1985, 270 (47))

saj maison his house

à Jeanj. /*par Jeanj. to Jean /by Jean

The label faire-par is not optimal, since par ‘by’ is not always possible. Thus, a VP complementation is a logical option for complements lacking an external argument: unaccusative (66) (Burzio 1986, 228; Alsina 1993, 212; Guasti 2006b), or impersonal verbs (67), with which a by-phrase is impossible. (66) Fr.

On le fera one 3SG . M . ACC make.FUT .3SG ‘Someone will make him come.’

(67) Fr.

Cela a fait pleuvoir. that have.3SG made rain.INF ‘That made it rain.’ (Rouveret/Vergnaud 1980, 128 (108))

venir. come.INF

Moreover, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan speakers tend to reject sentences with a by-phrase, but accept them without it (Gonçalves 1999, 318; Moore 2010, 373; Espinal p.c.; Alsina 2002, 2430 for VOIR ). FP is monoclausal: the complement may contain neither auxiliaries nor clausal negation (68), and there is clitic climbing of the objects of the infinitive (69):

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(68) Fr.

(69) Fr.

a. *Elle fera être bue cette that she make.FUT .3SG be.INF drunk par son chien. by her dog ‘She will have that water be drunk by her dog.’ (Kayne 1975, 25 (142)) b. *Elle la fera ne pas NEG not she 3SG . F . ACC make.FUT .3SG par son chien. by her dog ‘She will have it not be drunk by her dog.’ Marie l’ a faite Marie 3SG . ACC have.3SG made ‘Marie had it repaired by Jean.’

réparer repair.INF

eau water

boire drink.INF

par by

Jean. Jean

Contrary to FI, there is no constraint on cliticizing dative objects (see also (51a)): (70) It.

Glii fecero [VP sparare addosso ei da un upon by an 3SG .DAT make.PST .3PL fire.INF ‘They had him fired upon (by an agent).’ (Burzio 1986, 270–271 (92b))

agente]. agent

If accusative Case is assigned by a head introducing an external argument (Burzio 1986; Wurmbrand 2001; Pesetsky/Torrego 2011; Shimamura/Wurmbrand 2015), it must be assigned by FAIRE in, for instance, (62) and (66), since the VP does not contain an external argument. Indeed, the passive is possible in the various Romance languages (Burzio 1986, 254; Alsina 1993, 275; Rowlett 2007, 782; Tubino Blanco 2010, 337), except Portuguese (Gonçalves/Duarte 2001, 660). (71) Sp.

El edificio será hecho construir {por made build.INF {by the building be.FUT .3SG por los obreros}. by the workers} ‘The building will be made to be built {by the king/ by the workers}.’ (Tubino Blanco 2010, 337 (32))

el the

rey/ king/

The by-phrase may express the causer or the causee in Spanish (71), Catalan and Italian (Burzio 1986, 254; Alsina 1993, 275; Tubino Blanco 2010, 337), but in French, only the causee interpretation is possible.

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In Spanish (72) and in French, the passive of FP is not always accepted, however (Kayne 1975, 244; Zubizarreta 1985; Rosen 1990, 28; Bouvier 2000; Rowlett 2007), and in Italian, it is ungrammatical with VOIR . It is unclear why the passive is not always possible. (72) Sp.

*Esos pasajes fueron hechos leer read.INF these passages be.PST .3PL made ‘These passages were made to be read (by Juan).’ (Rosen 1990, 28 (16c))

(por (by

(73) It.

La macchina fu {fatta /*vista} riparare repair.INF the car be.PST .3PL {made /seen} ‘The car was made/seen to be repaired (by Ugo).’ (modified from Guasti 1993, 116 (5))

Juan). Juan)

(da by

Ugo). Ugo

Although FP does not contain a passive auxiliary, when the complement is transitive, there are similarities with the passive. Some verbs with locative direct objects, which may not passivize, do not appear in FP although they are possible in FI (Kayne 1975, 247): (74) Fr.

a. Jean quittera ma maison demain. my house tomorrow Jean leave.FUT .3SG ‘Jean will leave my house tomorrow.’ b. *Ma maison sera quittée par Jean demain. left by Jean tomorrow my house be.FUT .3SG c. Je ferai quitter ma maison {à Jean /*par Jean} demain. I make.FUT .1SG leave.INF my house {to Jean /by Jean} tomorrow ‘I’ll have Jean leave my house tomorrow.’ (Kayne 1975, 237 (103)–(105))

French verbs that form a passive in de occur in a faire … de construction: (75) Fr.

a. Marie est haïe de tout le monde. Marie be.3SG hated of all the people ‘Marie is hated by everybody.’ b. Marie est arrivée à se faire haïr to SE make.INF hate.INF Marie be.3SG arrived de tout le monde. of all the people ‘Marie managed to get herself hated by everybody.’ (Kayne 1975, 238 (109))

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In addition, non-passivizable idioms do not occur in FP. The Italian expression fare un tubo ‘make a tube’ has an idiomatic reading ‘achieve something’ that disappears in the passive. This reading is possible in FI, but not in FP (Burzio 1986, 265; Folli/Harley 2007; Alsina 1993, 194 for Catalan). (76) It.

a. Marco non ha fatto fare Marco NOT have.3SG made make.INF ‘Marco didn’t let Maria achieve anything.’ b. Marco non ha fatto fare Marco NOT have.3SG made make.INF ‘Marco didn’t have a tube made (by Maria).’ (Folli/Harley 2007, 200 (6)–(7))

un tubo a tube

a to

Maria. Maria

un tubo a tube

(da by

Maria). Maria

(76b) allows us to conclude that null causee sentences are instances of FP, contrary to Moore’s (2010) suggestion that they are ambiguous between FP and FI with an arbitrary null subject. If the version of (76b) without a by-phrase were ambiguous, the idiomatic reading should be available. This reasoning leads us to analyze (77) as an instance of FP, even though the by-phrase is impossible (Zubizarreta 1985, 264; Alsina 1993; 2002, 2430): (77) Cat.

En aquella escola fan treballar molt (*pels alumnes). in that school make.3PL work.INF much by.the students ‘In that school they make {(people)/*students} work a lot.’ (Alsina 1993, 208 (40))

The distribution of the by-phrase is slightly different in FP and in passives. Perception and psychological verbs form a passive with a by-phrase, but the by-phrase is usually rejected in FP (Alsina 1993; Guasti 2006b). (78) Cat.

a. La ciutat va ser vista pels turistes. PST .3SG be.INF seen by.the tourists the city ‘The city was seen by the tourists.’ b. He fet veure la ciutat (*pels turistes). by.the tourists have.1SG made see.INF the city ‘I had the city seen by the tourists.’ (Alsina 1993, 202 (34)–(35))

Alsina (1993, 194) and Guasti (2006b) argue that, in FP, the by-phrase is licensed when the infinitive has an object affected by the action.18 Folli/Harley (2007), for

18 For Guasti (2006b), this is a condition on the suppression of the external argument.

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their part, propose that, in FP, (79).

FAIRE

selects a nominal complement, VPNom in

(79) Gianni ha fatto riparare la macchina da Mario. (Folli/Harley 2007, 208 (16b))

It has been claimed that the by-phrase in nominals introduces only an Agent whereas the passive by-phrase introduces the verb’s external argument whatever its thematic role.19 Therefore, a structure like (79) would explain why, neither in (80a) nor in (80b)/(78b), a by-phrase can introduce the external argument, which is not an Agent, but an Experiencer: (80) Sp.

a. *la vista de la ciudad por los turistas the sight of the city by the tourists b. *Hizo ver la ciudad por los turistas. by the tourists make.PST . 3SG see.INF the city ‘He made the city seen by the tourists.’ (Bordelois 1988, 89 (81) and (83))

Casting doubts on the nominal analysis is the fact that some Experiencer subjects may be realized with a by-phrase: (81) Cat.

Finalment, la Maria s’ ha fet finally the Maria SE have.3SG made seus alumnes. her students ‘Finally, Maria got her students to love her.’ (Alsina 1993, 207 (42a))

19 See Bruening (2013) for a critical review and an interesting analysis.

estimar love.INF

pels by.the

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Serious problems with (79) arise when one tries to spell out what a nominal VP is. If V is nominalized, that is, inserted under a D node, its objects should be introduced by de ‘of’ as in nominals (e.g. Fr. l’arrivée de Pierre ‘the arrival of Pierre’). If nominalization takes place at the phrasal level, by inserting VP under DP, this DP should be opaque. FAIRE should case-mark it and not the object of the infinitive, passivizing FAIR E should affect the whole DP, and clitic climbing out of DP should be excluded. FAIRE Moreover, a nominal complement should not allow a reflexive pronoun on FAIRE to be associated with a position within the DP; but (82) shows that the reflexive construction is possible in FP (Burzio 1986, 249; Bordelois 1988, 74 fn. 12; Alsina 1993, 193; 2002, 2436; Tubino Blanco 2010, 344) – whereas FI excludes it, as we saw in (34). (82) It.

fatta [accusare ei (da Mariai sii è accuse.INF (by Maria SE be.3SG made ‘Maria made herself be accused by Giovanni.’ (Burzio 1986, 249 (46))

Giovanni)]. Giovanni)

In particular, the passive se faire construction is not explained by a nominal complement. In that construction, attested in French but not in the other Romance languages, the subject of se faire is associated with an empty position within the infinitival complement, accusative (83) or dative (84). The meaning is passive-like. (83) Fr.

Les habitants se sont fait surprendre pendant leur their the inhabitants SE be.3PL made surprise.INF during sommeil par l’ éruption du volcan. sleep by the eruption of.the volcano ‘The inhabitants were taken by surprise during their sleep by the eruption of the volcano.’ (Labelle 2013, 238 (7))

(84) Fr.

Pendant qu’ il était dans le coma, Paul s’ est the coma Paul SE be.3SG while that he be.IMPF .3SG in fait voler sa montre. made steal.INF his watch. ‘While he was in a coma, Paul had his watch stolen.’ (Washio 1995, 104 (63))

Labelle (2013) argued that there is no causative component of meaning, and no implicit causer in that construction. Since dative objects do not move to subject position in Romance, she proposed an analysis framed within Distributed Morphology that may be summarized as follows. Despite appearances, FAIRE is not a causative operator. It lexicalizes a CHANGE OF STATE verbal head meaning approximately come-to-be. The causative meaning of faire faire results from the introduction by Active Voice of an

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external argument interpreted as the causer of the change of state (85). In passive se faire, SE heads a Non-Active Voice head that (i) prevents the merge of an external argument and (ii) selects an open predicate whose subject merges in the specifier of Non-ActiveVoice. The meaning of (86) is that Paul comes to be offered a position. (85) Fr.

[VoiceP LouiseCause Voice+Act [vP [VP √FAI - V [ V P offrir un poste LouiseCause (come-to-be) offer a position à Paul.]]]] to Paul

(86) Fr.

[VoiceP Paul [Voice–Act se] [VP √FAI - V Paul (come-to-be) (Labelle 2013, (39)–(40))

[ V P offrir un poste x]]] offer a position

This analysis changes our perspective on causative constructions.20 To summarize, FP is a monoclausal construction whose complement is a subjectless VP. There is clitic climbing of the embedded objects, including datives. Passivizing and reflexivizing FAIRE affects the internal argument of the infinitive. There are constraints on the use of the by-phrase.

4 Conclusion This chapter focused on three infinitival constructions involving causative and perception verbs. A summary of the characteristics of these three constructions is presented in Table 2. In a nutshell, the ECM construction is biclausal. The subject of the infinitive is marked accusative by the main verb, and the infinitival complement may contain a number of inflectional projections (auxiliaries, negation, object clitics). In the FI and FP constructions, the infinitival complement does not contain negation or auxiliaries, and clitics usually appear on the main verb. We argued that these constructions are monoclausal but bipredicative. The difference between the two is that in FI the complement contains a subject, but in FP it is a bare VP. In FI, the causee is usually accusative if the infinitive is intransitive, and dative if the infinitive is transitive. In FP, the external argument of the infinitive, if there is one, may be expressed in a by-phrase under certain conditions.

20 Se voir also has a passive interpretation (e.g. Gaatone 1998, 70; François 2000): (i) Fr. Il s’ est vu chasser de son pays par les autorités. he SE be.3SG seen throw.out of his country by the authorities ‘He was thrown out of his country by the authorities.’ Labelle (2003) suggested that (i) involves a bleached version of voir expressing a cognitive experience undergone by its subject (Lit. ‘He saw himself be thrown out …’).

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Table 2: Summary of the main properties of the ECM, FI and FP constructions Faire faire ECM

FI

FP

Clausal structure

Biclausal

Monoclausal

Monoclausal

Domain

TP

vP

VP

• Position:

Preverbal

Postverbal



• Case:

Accusative

Accusative (intr. V) or dative (tr. V)

Optional by-phrase (where possible)

Object clitic climbing

No

Yes (except datives, reflexives)

Yes

Passivizing the main verb affects

Embedded subject

Embedded subject or object

Embedded object

Reflexive on the main verb



*



Reflexive on the infinitive



(cross-linguistic variation)

*

External argument of the infinitive

Many aspects of the constructions remain poorly understood. Among the unsolved problems are questions regarding case-assignment, cross-linguistic differences in passivization and reflexivization, and downstairs clitics. We hope to have succeeded in providing the reader with a relatively clear picture of the main aspects of the constructions, and a desire to solve some of the problems identified.

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López, Luis (2001), The causee and the theory of bare phrase structure, in: Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach/ Luis Silva-Villar (edd.), Current Issues in Spanish Syntax and Semantics, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 221–241. Manandise, Daniel/Marin-Callejo-Manandise, Esmeralda (1983), Bad news about the “faire”-construction in French, Coyote Papers 4, 129–139. Marantz, Alec P. (1984), On the Nature of Grammatical Relations, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Martins, Ana Maria (1999), On the origin of the Portuguese inflected infinitive: a new perspective on an enduring debate, in: Laurel J. Brinton (ed.), Historical Linguistics 1999: Selected Papers from the 14th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Vancouver, 9–13 August 1999, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 207–222. Mathieu, Éric (2003), French object agreement with verbs of perception, in: William E. Griffin (ed.), The Role of Agreement in Natural Language: TLS 5 Proceedings, Texas Linguistics Forum 53, 85–94. Miller, D. Gary (1993), Complex Verb Formation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Miller, Philip/Lowrey, Brian (2003), La complémentation des verbes de perception en anglais et en français, in: Philip Miller/Anne Zribi-Hertz (edd.), Essais sur la grammaire comparée du français et de l’anglais, Paris, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 133–190. Milner, Jean-Claude (1982), Ordres et raisons de langue, Paris, Seuil. Molinier, Christian (2005), Sur les constructions causatives figées du français, Linx 53, 197–216. Moore, John C. (2010), Object controlled restructuring in Spanish, in: Donna B. Gerdts/John C. Moore/ Maria Polinsky (edd.), Hypothesis A/Hypothesis B: Linguistic Explorations in Honor of David M. Perlmutter, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 361–381. Morin, Jean-Yves (1978), Une théorie interprétative des causatives en français, Lingvisticæ Investigationes 2, 363–417. Ordóñez, Francisco (2007), Cartography of postverbal subjects in Spanish and Catalan, in: Sergio Baauw/Frank Drijkoningen/Manuela Pinto (edd.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2005: Selected papers from “Going Romance”, Utrecht, 8–10 December 2005, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 259–280. Pesetsky, David/Torrego, Esther (2011), Case, in: Cedric Boeckx (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 52–72. Pitteroff, Marcel/Campanini, Cinzia (2013), Variation in analytic causative constructions: a view on German and Romance, Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 16, 209–230. Postal, Paul (1974), On Raising, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Raposo, Eduardo (1987), Case theory and Infl-to-Comp: The inflected infinitive in European Portuguese, Linguistic Inquiry 18, 85–109. Reed, Lisa (1991), The thematic and syntactic structure of French causatives, Probus 3, 317–360. Reed, Lisa (1992), On clitic case alternations in French causatives, in: Paul Hirschbühler/Konrad Koerner (edd.), Romance Languages and Modern Linguistic Theory, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 205–223. Rivero, María Luisa (1991), Exceptional Case Marking effects in Rumanian subjunctive complements, in: Dieter Wanner/Douglas A. Kibbee (edd.), New Analyses in Romance Languages, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 273–298. Rochette, Anne (1988), Semantic and syntactic aspects of Romance sentential complementation, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Ph.D. dissertation. Rosen, Sara T. (1990), Argument Structure and Complex Predicates, New York, Garland. Rouveret, Alain/Vergnaud, Jean-Roger (1980), Specifying reference to the subject: French causatives and conditions on representations, Linguistic Inquiry 11, 97–202. Rowlett, Paul (2007), Cinque’s functional verbs in French, Language Sciences 29, 755–786.  

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Shimamura, Koji/Wurmbrand, Susi (2015), The features of the voice domain: actives, passives, and restructuring, Ms., University of Connecticut. https://www.academia.edu/10345288/ The_features_of_the_voice_domain_actives_passives_and_restructuring (28.03.2015). Soares da Silva, Augusto (2012), Stages of grammaticalization of causative verbs and constructions in Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian, Folia Linguistica 46, 513–552. Tily, Harry/Sag, Ivan A. (2006), A unified analysis of French causatives, in: Stefan Müller (ed.), Proceedings of the HPSG06 Conference, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia (held in Varna), Stanford, CA, CSLI, 339–359. Tomić, Olga Mišeska (2006), Balkan Sprachbund Morpho-syntactic Features, Dordrecht, Springer. Torrego, Esther (2010), Variability and the case patterns of causative formation in Romance and its implications, Linguistic Inquiry 41, 445–470. Treviño, Estela (1994), Las causativas del español con complemento infinitivo, México, Colegio de México. Tubino Blanco, Mercedes (2010), Contrasting causatives: A minimalist approach, University of Arizona, Ph.D. dissertation. Tubino Blanco, Mercedes (2011), Causatives in Minimalism, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Veland, Reidar (1998), Une construction dite ne pas exister en français moderne: le passif suivi d’un infinitif nu, Journal of French Language Studies 8, 97–113. Villalba, Xavier (1992), Case, incorporation, and economy: An approach to causative constructions, Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics 2, 345–389. Villalba, Xavier (1994), Clitic climbing in causative constructions, Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics 3, 123–152. Washio, Ryuichi (1995), Interpreting Voice: A Case Study in Lexical Semantics, Tokyo, Kaitakusha. Wurmbrand, Susi (2001), Infinitives: Restructuring and Clause Structure, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter. Zubizarreta, María Luisa (1985), The relation between morphophonology and morphosyntax: the case of Romance causatives, Linguistic Inquiry 16, 247–289.

Delia Bentley

9 Copular and existential constructions Abstract: This chapter discusses copular and existential constructions, starting from the assumption that the common property of these structures is that they have a nonverbal predicate. We introduce an inventory of Romance copulas and of semantically and syntactically different copular constructions, and we consider the syntax, morphosyntax and semantics of the complement of these structures. After providing a definition of existential construction, we examine the variation in copula agreement, the relationship between locative and existential predications, the Definiteness Effects and some information-structure properties of copular constructions.  

Keywords: copula, agreement, copular construction, existential construction, locative construction, specifying, identifying, ascriptive  

1 Introduction This chapter deals with copular and existential constructions. In the analyses that are adopted below, the property shared by these structures is that they have a non-verbal predicate. This is exemplified by the post-copular noun phrases in the following examples. (1)

It.

a. L’opzione A era la risposta the option A be.IMPF . 3SG the answer ‘Option A was the best answer.’ b. C’era una risposta migliore. PF be.IMPF . 3SG a answer better ‘There was a better answer.’

migliore.1 best

Apart from some negligible exceptions to be mentioned in due course, the constructions under investigation also exhibit a copula. However, we do not subsume existential structures under the generic label of copular construction because of their noncanonical morphosyntax, which is the manifestation of distinctive semantic and syntactic properties. In particular, Romance existentials do not have a canonical subject in pre-copular position, and their copula may host an etymologically locative

1 In the glosses we use the Leipzig abbreviations (https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/ glossing-rules.php), with the following additions: SCL = subject clitic; EXP L = expletive form; IMPF = imperfect; IMPS = impersonal; PF = existential proform. DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-009

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clitic (see ci in (1b)), which we call the existential proform. The latter is not found in all the Romance languages, as shown by the following European Portuguese example. (2)

EPt. (Nesta fruta) há muitas sementes. in.this fruit have.3SG many seeds ‘(In this fruit) there are many seeds.’

Unlike existentials, copular constructions have a canonical subject. The contrast between existential and copular constructions in Romance can thus provisionally be represented as in Table 1. Table 1: Copular and existential constructions Copular constructions

Existential constructions

subject + copula + non-verbal predicate

(proform+) copula + non-verbal predicate

The chapter introduces an inventory of Romance copulas and of semantically and syntactically different copular constructions. It also considers the syntax, morphosyntax and semantics of the complement of copular constructions; the variation in copula agreement; the relationship between locative and existential copular predications; the Definiteness Effects and information-structure related properties of the structures under investigation. After providing definitions for the various types of copular construction to be analyzed in the chapter (Section 2.1), we deal with their typology and syntax (Section 2.2), and then we discuss the Romance copulas (Section 2.3). In Section 3, we define existential constructions and introduce the relevant terminology (Section 3.1), we discuss the typology and syntax of existentials in Romance (Section 3.2), and, lastly, we address the issue of the Definiteness Effects (Section 3.3).

2 Copular constructions 2.1 Definitions We define copular constructions as structures with a subject, a copula and a nonverbal predicate. The copula spells out subject agreement features, alongside tense, aspect and mood (see ses ‘you.are’ in (3a)). It is thus obligatory in Romance, an exception being found in Romance-based creoles, which do not tend to exhibit a copula in the present tense if the predicate is an adjective (Green 1988, 454–457), cf. (3b).

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(3) a. Nuorese Srd.

Ses kuntentu. be.IND .2SG happy ‘You are happy.’ Li gwo. he big ‘He is big.’ (Green 1988, 455)

b. Haitian Creole

There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing copulas from other verbs that combine with non-verbal predicates (Hoekstra/Mulder 1990, 2; FernándezLeborans 1999, 2359–2365). We place emphasis on copular constructions where the copula has zero valency, although in some cases it may have an aspectual function or impose selectional restrictions on its complement. Observe in passing that some verbs have copulative uses, i.e., can combine with non-verbal predicates, but can also subcategorize arguments of their own. An example of this is Spanish seguir ‘follow, continue’, which marks continuous aspect when it combines with a non-verbal predicate (cf. (4a,b)), but can also be a predicate with arguments of its own (cf. (4c)).  

(4) Sp.

a. Juan sigue enfermo. Juan continue.3SG ill ‘Juan is still ill/continues to be ill.’ b. Ahí sigue. there continue.3SG ‘S/he is still there.’ c. Juan sigue el ejemplo de Juan follow.3SG the example of ‘Juan follows his father’s example.’

su padre. his father

We consider three principal types of copular construction: predicative, specifying and identifying ones. Table 2: Principal types of copular constructions Copular constructions

Predicative

Specifying

Identifying

We define predicative constructions as copular structures that assign a property, a location or a possessor to an individual or an entity. Therefore, we further divide them into the subtypes illustrated in Table 3.

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Table 3: Principal subtypes of predicative copular constructions

Predicative constructions

Ascriptive

Locative

Possessive

We call ascriptive (Huddleston 2002, 266) the copular constructions that ascribe a property to an individual or an entity. This property can be expressed by a nonreferential noun, an adjective or an adverb in post-copular position (cf. (5a)), exception being made for focalisation and topicalisation strategies which have limited grammaticality across the Romance languages (cf. (5b)). (5) a. Fr.

Il est un bon médecin. good doctor he be.3SG a ‘He is a good doctor.’ b. Rom. Vinovat numai Ion este. Ion be.3SG guilty.NOM . M . SG only ‘Only Ion is guilty.’ (Dragomirescu 2013b, 165–166)

A second subtype of predicative copular constructions is the one that Feuillet (1998a, 673) calls situatif ‘situating’. This is a structure that assigns a spatial or temporal location to an individual or an entity, and we therefore call it locative. (6) Cat.

a. Les tovalloles són al calaix. the towels be.3PL at.the drawer ‘The towels are in the drawer.’ b. La cursa serà demà. tomorrow the race be.FUT . 3SG ‘The race will be tomorrow.’

A third subtype of predicative construction is the possessive one, which assigns a possessor to a possessed entity. (7) Fr.

À qui est ce livre? to whom be.3SG this book ‘Whose book is this?’

Differently from predicative copular constructions, specifying ones are structures that define a variable, spelled out by a noun phrase in pre-copular position, and specify its value with a noun phrase in post-copular position (Huddleston 2002, 266).

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El culpable soy the culprit be.1SG ‘I am the culprit.’

yo. I

Lastly, identifying copular constructions are copular structures that predicate a relation of identity between two individuals or entities described by two referential noun phrases. (9) It.

Quell’uomo è il collega con that man be.3SG the colleague with ‘That man is the colleague I work with.’

cui whom

lavoro. work.1SG

Although specifying constructions can be said to be inverse identifying constructions (Fernández-Leborans 1999, 2398; see also Moro 1997, 24–25), we keep these two types apart because they have different discourse and syntactic properties. In the next section, we analyze in more depth the constructions defined above, providing syntactic criteria to distinguish between predicative copular structures from the other two types of copular construction.

2.2 Romance copular constructions: typology and syntax The modern Romance languages exhibit unmarked subject-predicate word order in predicative copular constructions.2 While the predicand is a referential subject in subject position, the predicate is a post-copular adjectival, nominal, prepositional or adverbial phrase. (10) Cat.

a. En Tomeu és alt, ros, i fort de cames. and strong of legs the Tomeu be.3SG tall fair ‘Tomeu is tall, fair, and strong-legged.’ b. La Marta era mestra d’ escola. the Marta be. IMPF . 3SG teacher of school ‘Marta was a primary school teacher.’ c. Aquestes bicicletes són dels veïns. of.the neighbours these bicycles be.3SG ‘These bicycles belong to the neighbours.’ (Wheeler/Yates/Dols 1999, 522–525)

2 We refer to Dryer (²2007, 253–258) for a discussion of the complexities involved in the identification of basic or unmarked word orders in a language. By unmarked, in this context, we mean the word order that marks structures characterized by a topic vs (non-contrastive) comment bipartition.

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(11) It.

Gianni sta bene. Gianni stay.3SG well ‘Gianni is well.’

In ascriptive predicative constructions, the post-copular phrase describes a property of the subject-referent. This can be an underived property (cf. (10a)) or a result state (cf. (12)) (Dixon 1982, 50). While underived properties are intrinsic properties of an individual or an entity, result states ensue from a prior event giving rise to them. (12) Cat.

El gerro està trencat. broken the jug be.3SG ‘The jug is (in the state of being) broken.’ (Wheeler/Yates/Dols 1999, 526)

The post-copular phrase can be considered to be a predicative complement, i.e., a grammatically and semantically distinct complement of the verb expressing a semantic predicate (Huddleston 2002, 252). Typically, predicative complements only combine with a restricted class of verbs (Huddleston 2002, 260), and indeed in ascriptive constructions we can only find a limited number of verbs (‘be’, ‘become’, ‘remain’). Case testifies to the status of the complement of ascriptive constructions as a subject predicative complement. Indeed, in Latin, it takes nominative case (cf. (13)), and this is also the case with Romanian. The adjectival phrase of ascriptive constructions furthermore agrees in gender and number with the subject (cf. (14a)), and so does the post-copular noun phrase, when the head noun varies for gender (cf. (14b)).  

(13) Lat.

Rosa pulchra beautiful.NOM . FSG rose.NOM . FSG ‘The rose is beautiful.’

est. be.3SG

(14) Rom. a. Ana este frumoasă. Ana be.3SG beautiful. NOM . FSG ‘Ana is beautiful.’ b. Ana este profesoară. Ana be.3SG teacher. NOM . FSG ‘Ana is a teacher.’ (Dragomirescu 2013b, 160) Vestiges of nominative case are also found in ascriptive constructions in Surselvan (Rhaeto-Romance), where an originally nominative masculine singular ending -s is now found on adjectives in predicative – though not attributive – function (Haiman 1988, 366–367; Haiman/Benincà 1992, 206–207).

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(15) Sursilvan

/il um ej bun-s/ the man be.3SG good-PRED ‘The man is good.’ (Haiman 1988, 367)

The locative noun phrase which follows the copula in locative predicative constructions is also a predicative complement, since it is a distinct complement of the copula, whose semantic function of assigning a location to the subject-referent is comparable to that of assigning a property (Huddleston 2002, 257). (16) It.

Il mio ufficio è in centro. the POSS office be.3SG in centre ‘My office is in the city centre.’

Possessive copular constructions are comparable to locative ones, with the oblique possessor classifying as a predicative complement, insofar as it assigns a possessor to the subject-referent, it is a complement of V (be), and it only combines with a limited group of verbs (‘be’, or ‘become’, ‘remain’). (17) Rom. Casa este a Anei. house. DEF . NOM be.3SG POSS . ART . FSG Ana.GEN ‘The house is Ana’s.’ (Dragomirescu 2013b, 163) Specifying copular constructions specify a value for a given variable and, by contrast with predicative constructions, have default predicate-subject word order. The subject status of the post-verbal phrase is testified by its control of the finite – i.e., person and number – agreement features on the copula (cf. (18a)), as well as the ungrammaticality of extraction of an embedded constituent from this position (cf. (18b)) (Salvi 1991, 168–169; Moro 1997, 23–30; Fernández-Leborans 1999, 2415). The predicate-subject order reflects the discourse status of the post-verbal phrase, which is the comment or focus, i.e., the part of the assertion that is disclosed when the sentence is uttered. (In the translations of the examples, small caps indicate focus.)  



(18) It.

a. Il suo tesoro più prezioso sono due POSS treasure most precious be.3PL two the figli della sorella. children of.the sister W O CHILDREN OF HER SISTER ’ S are her most precious treasure.’ ‘T WO

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b. *Di quale sorella pensi che il suo the POSS of which sister think.2SG that tesoro più prezioso siano due figlİ? children treasure more precious be.SBJV .3PL two ‘Of which sister do you think that her most precious treasure are two children?’ In French the copula seemingly agrees in number with the post-verbal phrase if it agrees with the pre-verbal one (cf. (19a)). Otherwise, the predicative phrase is dislocated, in which case the copula can agree with a neuter subject pronoun (ce) or with the post-copular phrase (cf. (19b)). (19) Fr.

a. Mes plus chères amies sont Marie et Aurélie. my most dear friends be.3PL Marie and Aurélie ‘M ARIE AND A URÉLIE are my dearest friends.’ b. Son problème le plus grave, c’ est / POSS problem the most serious CL be.3SG ce sont ses dettes. CL be.3PL POSS debts ‘H IS / HER DEBTS are his / her most serious problem.’

The Romance languages that allow non-contrastive focus in a pre-verbal position can exhibit subject-copula order in specifying copular constructions. (20) Sic.

U fissa si’ tu the idiot be.2SG you ‘Y OU are the idiot.’

/

tu si’. you be.2SG

There is a range of syntactic tests to tell apart predicative constructions from specifying ones. In a number of Romance languages (Spanish, Catalan, French, Occitan, see Wheeler 1988, 271, Italo-Romance, etc.), the complement of predicative copular constructions can be replaced by a pro-predicative pronoun (cf. (21a,b)), while the postverbal noun phrase of specifying constructions cannot (cf. (22a,b)). This test is not available in Romanian (Dragomirescu 2013b, 162). (21) It.

a. Anna è insegnante. Anna be.3SG teacher ‘Anna is a teacher.’ b. Anna lo è. Anna it be.3SG ‘Anna is it.’

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a. L’ insegnante di matematica è Anna. Anna the teacher of maths be.3SG ‘A NNA is the maths teacher.’ b. *L’ insegnante di matematica lo è. the teacher of maths it be.3SG ‘The maths teacher is it.’ [intended reading: … is Anna]

The complement of predicative constructions can also be clefted and relativized (Salvi 1991, 168) (cf. (23a)), whilst the post-copular phrase of specifying constructions cannot (cf. (23b)). (23) It.

a. È la mia insegnante di matematica che of maths that is the POSS teacher Anna è sempre stata. always been Anna be.3SG ‘It is my maths teacher that Anna has always been.’ b. *È Anna che la mia insegnante di POSS teacher of is Anna that the matematica è sempre stata. always been maths be.3SG

Furthermore, extraction of an embedded constituent from the post-copular position of predicative constructions is grammatical (cf. (24a,b)), while, as was pointed out above, this is not the case with specifying constructions (cf. (18b)). This suggests that, in specifying constructions only, the post-copular position is taken by the subject. (24) It.

a. Quel collegao di mio marito è un amico a friend that colleague of POSS husband is di mia sorella. of my sister ‘That colleague of my husband’s is a friend of my sister’s.’ b. Di chi pensi che quel collega di colleague of of who think.2SG that that mio marito sia un amico? POSS husband be.SBJV . 3SG a friend ‘Whose friend do you think that colleague of my husband’s is?’

Bosque (1993) and Fernández-Leborans (1999, 2381–2382) also note that only the subject of predicative constructions can have cataphoric reference in Spanish.

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(25) Sp.

El __i del casino era un presidentei president the of.the casino be.IMPF .3 SG a ‘That of the casino was a charismatic president.’

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carismático. charismatic

Identifying copular constructions establish a relation of identity between two referential expressions. They have subject-predicate order and are not easily distinguished from predicative copular sentences. However, if the post-copular noun phrase is highly specific, in the sense that it is co-referential with an established discourse referent (Enç 1991), or otherwise modified by a restrictive relative clause (Salvi 1991, 166; Fernández-Leborans 1999, 2371–2375), the construction lends itself to being analyzed as identifying.3 (26) Sp.

It.

a. Si yo fuese tú… if I be.IMPF . SBJV .3 SG you ‘If I were you…’ b. Gianni è lo zio di mio marito che abita my husband REL live.3SG Gianni be.3SG the uncle of a New York. in New York ‘Gianni is the uncle of my husband who lives in New York.’

In addition, identifying constructions reject progressive aspect and imperative mood. (27) Sp.

a. *Pedro está siendo el Pedro be.3SG be.PROG the ‘Pedro is being Malena’s brother.’ b. *No seas el hermano NEG be.SBJV .2 SG the brother ‘Don’t be Malena’s brother.’

hermano de Malena. brother of Malena de Malena. of Malena

In Chomskyan frameworks, the predicative complement of copular constructions has been claimed to be part of a Small Clause, which, in turn, is a sister of the copula V (be) (see, e.g., Hoekstra/Mulder 1990). (28) S [NPi [VP V(be) [SC ti XP]]] The pre-copular NP is the argument of the XP in the Small Clause, from which it moves to the subject position. This analysis correctly treats the post-copular XP as the

3 Some accounts of identifying constructions claim that these must have a pronominal deictic subject (cf. Roy 2009, 50–51, and references therein).

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predicate, rather than an object in the sister of V position, reflecting also the failure for the copula to assign an external theta role (Hoekstra/Mulder 1990, 2, 10). As for specifying copular constructions, which have their subject in post-copular position, Moro (1997, 35) proposes that these are inverse copular constructions in which it is the predicate that moves out of the Small Clause in the sister of V position to reach the SpecIP position.4 This analysis is extended to ci- ‘there’ constructions in Italian, as will be seen in Section 3. Here we also provide an example of the treatment of copular constructions in Van Valin’s (2005) framework, which captures linguistic structure in terms of the discourse-semantics-syntax linking. In this analysis, the argumental and, respectively, predicative status of the two non-verbal phrases is shown in the semantics. (29) a. b.

This man is my brother. be' (this man, [my brother'])

In the semantic representation in (29b), be' is not the copula, but rather the marker of the predicative relation between the two non-verbal phrases. The pre-copular phrase takes an argument position and bears the thematic role assigned by the predicate. The post-copular phrase takes a predicative position, as indicated by its occurrence within square brackets, describing a property of the argument. In syntax, the predicative phrase is mapped to the Nucleus, which is the syntactic locus of the predicate. The pre-copular argument takes the immediately pre-nuclear position, which is the default subject position in SVO languages. (30) [Clause [Core This man [Nucleus is my brother]]] The same semantic analysis captures specifying constructions, their different word order being motivated in terms of the role of discourse in the linking. In particular, the argument takes the immediately post-nuclear position in syntax, i.e., the default position of focal subjects in SVO languages that allow subject-verb inversion.  

2.3 The Romance copulas In classical Latin, the principal copula of predicative copular constructions is ESSE ‘be’. While FIERI is primarily attested in the sense of ‘become’, STARE ‘stand’ as a copula is marginal (Bentley/Ciconte 2016). Indeed, STARE has two principal meanings in Classical Latin, ‘stand’1, with animate subjects, in the sense of ‘being in an upright position’, and ‘stand’2, with inanimate subjects, in the sense of ‘being situated’, and

4 Observe that Moro (1997) does not use the term “specifying” for these constructions.

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‘stay’ (Pountain 1982, 144; see also Peral Ribeiro 1958, 149–150). Possessives can be formed with ESSE ‘be’ or HABERE ‘have’, the latter becoming predominant in Late Latin.5 HABERE ‘have’ is then replaced by TENERE ‘hold’ in some Italo-Romance and Ibero-Romance languages. In the transition to Romance, the copula STARE progressively loses its original meaning ‘stand’1, and is more frequently attested in ascriptive and locative structures. Although STARE is found in Old Provençal (Blasco Ferrer 2003, 57–58), this verb is not as successful as a copula in early Gallo-Romance as it is in early Ibero-Romance and Italo-Romance (Pountain 1982, 146–159). The past participle of STARE is, however, part of the paradigm of ESSE in a number of Romance languages (French été, Provençal and Catalan estat, Italian stato, Rhaeto-Romance štaus, stat, etc.; see Peral Ribeiro 1958, 153–159). In Modern Ibero-Romance, including Catalan, and in Southern Italo-Romance, 6 ESSE and STARE alternate in predicative copular constructions. This alternation can be analyzed in terms of the individual-level vs stage-level contrast. Thus, copular constructions with ESSE can be said to describe inherent properties of individuals, while copular constructions with STARE describe stages or contingent properties (Carlson 1977; Kratzer 1995). (31) Sp.

a. Juan es aburrido. Juan be.3SG boring ‘Juan is boring.’ b. Juan está enfermo. Juan be.3SG ill ‘Juan is ill.’

Another influential view is that the ser/estar alternation in Spanish is aspectually determined, although there is no agreement on whether estar selects predicates that indicate perfectivity or change of state (Camacho 2015, 174). Importantly, it is not clear whether the alternation can be reduced to a single principle (Leonetti/Pérez-Jiménez/Gumiel-Molina 2015). Leonetti (2015) offers an explanation of the contrast between ser and estar that relies on the interplay of lexical aspect with focus structure. He claims that Spanish predications with estar are linked to a contextually salient circumstance or situation (see also Maienborn 2005). This explains why such predications are found in VSX order, since this order is indicative of wide focus, where a contingent event or state is predicated of a contextually salient

5 We will only discuss HABE RE as a copula of existential constructions, since its status as a predicate or HABE RE as a a copula in possessive constructions is not uncontroversial. For an analysis of possessive HABERE non-predicative verb that inherits its argument see La Fauci/Loporcaro (1997). 6 This alternation is virtually unknown to a number of Italo-Romance dialects (Gallo-Italian in the North, Sicilian in the extreme South, etc.), French and Romanian. For some very limited evidence of it in Italian and Romanian, we refer to Bentley/Ciconte (2016).

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circumstance or situation. Ser, on the other hand, is normally incompatible with VSX order, since it is the copula of individual-level predicates. We provide some evidence of the ESSE /STARE alternation here. In Spanish, an adjective following estar cannot be construed as a classificatory or inherent property of the subject referent (Pountain 1982, 141). The same holds true of adjectives following estar in European Portuguese, although this copula is claimed to figure more scarcely in Portuguese than in Spanish (Peral Ribeiro 1958, 175–176). Similar considerations are valid for Galician and Catalan. (32) a. Sp.

María es española/ está cansada/ está be.3SG tired be.3SG María be.3SG Spanish comprometida. engaged b. Gal. Maria é española/ está cansa/ está be.3SG tired be.3SG Maria be.3SG Spanish comprometida. engaged c. Majorcan Cat. Na Maria és espanyola/ està cansada/ Spanish be.3SG tired the Mary be.3SG està promesa. be.3SG engaged ‘Maria is Spanish/tired/engaged.’

Such alternations suggest that ESSE and STARE can select for different classes of lexical predicates as their complement (see Leonetti/Pérez-Jiménez/Gumiel-Molina 2015 for in-depth discussion of this issue). E SSE and STARE alternate with some adjectival predicates, in which case the meaning of the construction changes accordingly: Sp. ser/estar borracho ‘be a drunk/be drunk’, ser/estar pálido ‘have white complexion/be (become) pale’, ser/estar listo ‘be intelligent/be ready’, ser/estar guapo ‘be goodlooking/look good’, etc. The compatibility of estar with some individual-level predicates is explained by Leonetti (2015) in terms of an evidential construal, which links the predication to a source, for example a person’s experience, thus relativizing the predication and providing the contextually salient situation required by estar. (33) Sp.

John Goodman está genial en John Goodman be. 3SG great in ‘John Goodman is great in that film.’

esa película. that film

We should add that STARE does not figure in specifying or identifying constructions, as shown in (34a) and (34b), respectively.

Copular and existential constructions

La Presidenta es / *está ella. be.3SG she the President be.3SG ‘S HE is the President.’ b. Gal. Este é / *está o doutor que be.3SG the doctor who this be.3SG curou. healed ‘This is the doctor who healed me.’

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(34) a. Sp.

me me

A challenge for the account of the ESSE -vs-STARE alternation in terms of the stage-level vs individual-level dichotomy is posed by the occurrence of the latter copula in predications indicating permanent location in Spanish and Galician, though not Catalan. (Valencian does exhibit estar in copular expressions of location and time, see Wheeler/Yates/Dols 1999, 523). (35) a. Sp.

La casa que se quemó está cerca. be.3SG close the house which REFL burnt b. Gal. A casa que ardeu está preto daquí. of.here the house which burnt be.3SG close c. Majorcan Cat. Sa casa que se va cremar REFL AUX burn the house which és aquí prop. be.3SG here close ‘The house which burnt down is nearby.’

Notably, predications of origin require ESSE in Spanish, in accordance with the alleged restriction to individual-level predicates. (36) Sp.

Soy de Madrid. from Madrid be.1SG ‘I am from Madrid.’

In European Portuguese, ser indicates permanent position, whereas estar indicates temporary position (Willis ²1971; Feuillet 1998a, 695). In this language ficar ‘be situated’ is another copula of predicative copular constructions which indicate permanent position.7

7 For the EESSE SSE / STARE alternation in southern Italo-Romance we refer to Ledgeway (2008; 2009, 648– 658). For a more detailed treatment of the copulas of locative copular predications in other Romance languages we refer to Bentley/Ciconte (2016).

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While ESSE is the auxiliary of the verbal passive, the copula STARE figures with adjectival passives, where it co-occurs with adjectival participles expressing result states (Dixon 1982, 50). This copular construction with STARE is not only found in Ibero-Romance (cf. (37a)), but also in southern Italo-Romance (cf. (37b)). (37) a. Cat.

El gerro està trencat. broken the jug be.3SG ‘The jug is broken.’ (Wheeler/Yates/Dols 1999, 526) b. Nap. Stiveve nu poco vìppeto. little drunk be.PST . 2PL a ‘You were a little drunk.’ (Bentley/Ledgeway 2014, 78)

In addition to resultative copular constructions with STARE , Romance exhibits a number of inchoative or resultative constructions with copulative verbs followed by an adjectival phrase (e.g., Fr. se faire, (re)tomber, tourner, EPt. ficar, Sp. acabar, meter (se), quedar(se), volver(se), Cat. quedar(-se), posar(-se), It. restare, rimanere, Rom. a deveni, a se face ‘become’). In addition, there is a continuative type (Sp. seguir, Fr. rester, It. restare, rimanere, Rom. a rămâne ‘continue, remain’). In these structures, the verb can be said solely to contribute an aspectual meaning to the construction, whilst the subject is the argument of the non-verbal predicate phrase, in agreement with the analyses discussed in Section 2.2. (38) a. Fr.

Elle est tombée malade. ill she be.3SG fall.PTCP . F ‘She got ill.’ b. Pt. Fiquei assombrado ao ouvir as notícias. become.PST .1SG astonished at.the hear.INF the news ‘I was astonished to hear the news.’ c. Rom. Ei au rămas prieteni. friends they have.3PL remain.PTCP ‘They have remained friends.’ (Dragomirescu 2013a, 80)

3 Existential constructions 3.1 Definitions and relevant terminology Drawing upon McNally (2011, 1830), we define Romance existential constructions as copular structures with specialized or non-canonical morphosyntax which describe existence or presence (or lack thereof) in a contextual domain. Observe the contrast between (39a) and (39b). Whereas the existential construction in (39a) exhibits the proform-plus-copula cluster and the marked V(be)-NP order, the copular construction

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in (39b) has a canonical subject in pre-copular position and no proform. In addition, the content of (39a) can only be understood with reference to an implicit spatiotemporal context, whereas the content of (39b) is not limited to an implicit domain. The latter observation also holds true of the sentence with the lexeme EXIST in (39c). (39) It.

a. Non

è caffè be.3SG coffee ‘There is no good coffee.’ b. Il caffè non è be.3SG the coffee NEG ‘The coffee is not good.’ c. Il caffè buono non NEG the coffee good ‘Good coffee does not exist.’ NEG

c’

PF

buono. good buono. good esiste. exist.3SG

Rather than postulating an unexpressed predicate of existence in existential constructions, we follow Francez (2007; 2010) in analyzing the post-copular non-verbal phrase of these structures as their predicate and in treating their contextual domain as an implicit – or semantically unspecified – argument (see also Cruschina 2012; 2015; Bentley 2015a,b). In accordance with this analysis, existentials contrast with the other types of copular construction in terms of their argument structure, as well as their overt morphosyntax, and, thus, Table 1 from Section 1 can be revised as follows. Table 4: Copular and existential constructions (revised) Copular constructions

specified argument + non-verbal predicate subject + copula + non-verbal predicate

Existential constructions

implicit argument + non-verbal predicate (proform +) copula + non-verbal predicate

The components of the existential construction are normally referred to with the following terminology. (40) (PP = coda +) (expletive +) (proform +) copula + XP = pivot (+ PP = coda) The coda is a prepositional phrase, which can occur in pre- or post-copular position (see in sa früta ‘in this fruit’ in (41));8 the expletive is a non-referential and non-argumental subject pronoun (Fr. il, Ligurian u, etc.); the existential proform is a putatively locative

8 We analyze putatively existential constructions with an adjectival coda (e.g., There are firemen available) as pseudo-existential presentational constructions. These will be briefly discussed below.

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clitic hosted by the copula (Cat. hi, Fr. y, It. ci, Ligurian i, etc.). Finally, the pivot (terminology from Milsark 1974; 1977) is the post-copular noun phrase. (41) Rocchetta Cairo, Ligurian

In sa früta chì u i in this fruit here EXPL PF tante smenze. many seeds ‘In this fruit there are many seeds.’

è be.3SG

Cross-linguistically, the pivot is the only obligatory component, and hence the defining feature, of the existential construction. Whilst the copula is a pan-Romance feature of the construction, the other components listed above are not, a point to which we return in Section 3.2. Enumerative or contextualized existentials (Abbott 1992; 1993; see also Rando/ Napoli 1978) are existential constructions by the definition provided above, their peculiarity being that they express a proposition about the presence or availability of an individual or an entity in a context that is explicit and pre-determined in discourse. In these structures, the pivot is only new and relevant in relation to the given context. While being focal, i.e., introduced as part of the assertion, it can however already be known to the hearer.  

(42) Salentino Apulian

Pe stu problema m’ eri dittu for this problem to.me were said ca avia a tie. that have.IMPF . 3SG ACC you ‘For this problem you had said to me that you would be available.’

One needs instead differentiate between existentials proper and pseudo-existential presentational constructions (Cruschina 2012; 2015; see also Berruto 1986; Leonetti 2008; Villalba 2013), which consist of a post-copular noun phrase and a following adjectival/prepositional phrase or pseudo-relative clause. (43) Nuorese Srd. B’est su direttore (ch’ est) PF be.3SG the director who be.3SG arrennegato oje. angry today Menzus a non brullare. NEG joke.INF better to ‘T HE DIRECTOR IS ANGRY TODAY . We’d better not mess about.’

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These sentences only differ in information structure terms from their counterparts without a copula and a relative pronoun. The post-copular noun phrase is not a predicate here, but rather an argument, which is marked as part of the focus by the copula-NP word order, whereas the following phrase serves as the predicate of the construction.

3.2 Romance existential constructions: typology and syntax The existential proform is exhibited by many Romance languages: northern ItaloIC / ILLIC / IBI / ILLI , Benincà 2007), Logudorese/Nuorese bi, Italian Romance gh(e) (< j < HHIC vi (< IBI , Wagner 1960, 610; Blasco Ferrer 2003, 61), Italian ci (< ECCE HIC , Rohlfs 1969, 249; or HINCE , Maiden 1995, 167), Catalan hi (< IBI , Badía Margarit 1951, 266), French y, Provençal i (< IBI , HIC , Blasco Ferrer 2003, 61), Aragonese en (< HINC , Blasco Ferrer 2003, 61), Logudorese/Nuorese/Campidanese (n)che, (n)ci (< HINC ( E ), Wagner 1960, 624), Italo-Romance nd(i), ne (< INDE , Maiden 1995, 167). (44) a. Fr.

Il

y

EXPL

PF

a have. 3SG

plusieurs several

pépins seeds

dans ce in this

fruit. fruit b. It. Ci sono molti semi in questa frutta. PF be.3PL many seeds in this fruit c. Genoa, Ligurian In sta früta u gh’ é EXPL PF be.3SG in this fruit tanti ossi. many seeds ‘There are many seeds in this fruit.’ The proform is not found in Romanian, which maintains the Latin existential pattern,9 European and Brazilian Portuguese, as well as a number of Friulian, Venetan, and southern Italo-Romance dialects. (45) a. Rom. În in b. EPt.

acest fruct sunt multe many this fruit be.3PL Nesta fruta há muitas many in.this fruit have.3SG c. BPt. Tem muitos caroços nessa fruta. many seeds in.this fruit have.3SG

seminţe. seeds sementes. seeds

9 Although the copula HABE RE surfaces in concomitance with negation in this language (see Lombard 1994, 273).

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d. Belluno, Venetian Te sti fruti qua l’ é tanti be.3SG many in these fruits here SCL semi. seeds e. Genzano, Lucanian Entə a sta frottə stannə inside to this fruit be.3PL tanta semə. many seeds. ‘In this fruit there are many seeds.’ In Ibero-Romance, the proform is either missing or lexicalized as part of present tense forms of the paradigm of the copula H ABERE (European Spanish, Galician, Asturian). Thus, the final segment of present tense ha-i in Galician derives from a locative clitic (Blasco Ferrer 2003; Benincà 2007; cf. (46a)), and it is absent both from the imperfect tense of the same copula (cf. (46c)) and from the present tense of non-copular ‘have’ (cf. (46b)). Catalan does exhibit the proform hi (cf. (46d)). (46) a. Gal. Non ha-i ningún problema. NEG have.3SG -PF any problem ‘There’s no problem.’ b. Gal. Ha de estar canso. be.INF tired have.3SG of ‘He must be tired.’ c. Gal. Había un presidente na reunión. president in.the meeting have.IMPF .3SG a ‘There was a President in the meeting.’ d. Cat. Hi havia un estudiant a la reunió. PF have.IMPF . 3SG a student at the meeting ‘There was a student at the meeting.’ Although the existential proform does not normally have a deictic function, deictic existential proforms have been found in Logudorese and Campidanese Sardinian dialects (Bentley 2011). Thus, ddoi is a distal proform in the dialect of Villacidro, and, as a consequence, it does not combine with a locative phrase indicating proximity to the speaker. (47) Campidanese Srd. In *custa/cussa (v)ia ddoi at PF have.3SG in this that road unas cantus domus. some houses ‘In this/that road there are some houses.’

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Ddoi has also acquired the function of an evidential strategy, marking the content of the existential proposition as reported information (Bentley 2011). Those among the Romance languages that do not license phonologically null subjects require an expletive subject in existentials (Fr. il, cf. (48a)). Many northern Italo-Romance dialects require a non-agreeing subject clitic in these structures; see Ligurian u, in (48b), which is the third person singular masculine form of the subject clitic in this dialect (Forner 1997, 250). Some such dialects exhibit the form a, which does not have canonical subject-clitic properties (Benincà 1994; Bernini 2012, cf. (48c)). Finally, some Friulian dialects require copula-pivot agreement, exhibiting an agreeing subject clitic in existentials (Benincà 1997, 123; Vanelli 1987, 184). (In the glosses we indicate all non-agreeing clitics in subject position as EXPL . ) (48) a. Fr.

Il

n’

y

EXPL

NEG

PF

a have.3SG

‘There is no hope.’ b. Rocchetta Cairo, Ligurian U

pas NEG

d’ espoir. of hope

è der pòsc-t per be.3SG some space for di otre cà int es paìs chì. some other houses in this village here ‘There is space for other houses in this village.’ A gh’ è di pac ind’el EXPL PF be.3SG some parcels in the magasì. storehouse ‘There are some parcels in the storehouse.’ EXPL

c. Bergamo, Lombard

i

PF

As for the copulas, ESSE is the sole agreeing or non-agreeing copula in a number of Romance languages (cf. (45a) and, respectively, (48c)). An exception to the pattern with no agreement is found in existentials with pivots that are personal pronouns, since these systematically control agreement on the copula ESSE , though variation is found in the third person. (49) Genoa, Ligurian

Maria Maria Ghe

l’

é no sola. be.3SG NEG alone semu nui atri. PF be. 1PL we others Ghe sun gli atri. PF be. 3PL the others. ‘Maria is not alone (in life). There’s us/them.’ SCL . 3SG

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H ABERE ‘have’ can be considered to have been a proper existential copula since Late Latin (Zamboni 2000, 106). It is attested as a sole copula or in alternation with ESSE or STARE . It is normally a non-agreeing copula (cf. (45b)), although it does exhibit person and number agreement with the pivot in the Franco-Provençal dialect spoken in Celle di San Vito, Puglia (Manzini/Savoia 2005, vol. 3, 66), central Catalan dialects (Rigau 1997), and several varieties of European and Latin American Spanish (Rodríguez Mondoñedo 2006; Brown/Rivas 2012). S TARE is usually an agreeing copula (cf. (45f)), although number agreement is optional in the Abruzzese (ItaloRomance) dialect of Castiglione Messer Marino (Bentley/Ciconte/Cruschina 2015, 177). Spoken Brazilian Portuguese has the invariant, third person singular, copula tem ‘hold/have.3SG ’ (cf. (45c)), while, in higher registers, STARE alternates with HABERE . We discuss agreement in Section 3.3. In Table 5 (drawn from Bentley/ Cruschina 2016) we provide a synopsis of the patterns discussed so far, abstracting away from expletives. Table 5: Patterns of variation in Romance existentials Proform

Copula

Agreement Languages

+

esse

+

Italian and some central and southern Italo-Romance dialects; Corsican; Sardinian (in most Nuorese and Logudorese varieties only with definite pivot); 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 pivot); Salentino and Calabrian dialects (also with definite pivots, including personal pronouns).

+

habere



Sardinian (indefinite pivots); Catalan (not with personal pronouns); French, some Calabrian dialects (also with definite pivots, including 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 Apulian dialects.

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In many Romance languages pronominal pivots take nominative case.10 This is expected when the pivot is also the controller of finite agreement on the copula (cf. (50a)), thus behaving as a post-verbal subject. Observe, however, that in Spoken Brazilian Portuguese, the invariant copula tem ‘have.3SG /hold.3SG ’ co-occurs with nominative pronominal pivots (cf. (50b)). Contrastingly, the southern Italo-Romance dialects with invariant HABERE as their sole copula unambiguously mark the pivot with accusative case, as testified by differential object marking (Sornicola 1997; Bossong 1998, among others) (cf. (50c)). (50) a. Isernia, Molisan

N’



NEG

REFL

preoccupà ca worry that

cə PF

stenghə i. 1SG . NOM be.1SG ‘Do not worry: there’s me.’ b. Spoken BPt. Tem eu. 1SG . NOM hold.3SG ‘There’s me.’ c. Salentino Apulian Ave a mie. ACC I have.3SG ‘There’s me.’ In semantics, the pivot is the predicate of existential sentences (La Fauci/Loporcaro 1993; 1997; Zamparelli 2000; Francez 2007; Cornilescu 2009; Cruschina 2012; Bentley 2015b,c), since it is the only component of the construction that is specified semantically, as well as the provider of the implicit argument. This argument is semantically required to make sense of the existential construction, as was pointed out in the discussion of (39a), and hence part of the semantic valence of the predicate. Important evidence in support of the analysis of the pivot as a predicate is found in some southern Italo-Romance dialects that exhibit adjectival pivots (cf. (51a)). Existentials are thus comparable to ascriptive constructions (cf. (51b)), allowance being made for the implicit status of their argument. The pivot is a predicative complement of this argument. (51) S. Tommaso, Calabrian

a. A Torinu c’ è togu. PF be.3SG nice.ADJ at Turin ‘There is niceness in Turin.’ b. Torinu è toga. nice.ADJ Turin be.3SG ‘Turin is nice.’

10 In French and northern Italo-Romance dialects disjunctive pronouns are unmarked for case (Vanelli 1987; Parry 2005, 161).

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In syntax, the pivot ought, therefore, to take a predicative position. A major challenge for syntactic theory is then the fact that, in a number of languages, the pivot controls finite agreement (see Table 5), which is normally a behavioural property of subjects. This challenge has been tackled in various ways. In Relational Grammar (La Fauci/ Loporcaro 1993; 1997), the pivot is, at the same time, the predicate and the argument of the existential construction. In the non-derivational framework introduced in Section 2.2, the pivot takes a predicative position in both semantics and syntax, while serving as the controller of finite agreement in semantics-syntax linking in languages that require a semantically specified controller (Bentley 2015b). Lastly, in a Small Clause analysis, the pivot takes the predicative position (Hazout 2004; Cruschina 2012), while the copula exhibits third singular agreement when it agrees with an expletive in the canonical subject position SpecIP. Otherwise, the copula agrees with the pivot as the only constituent within its domain endowed with agreement features, directly or through feature inheritance to the subject position. (We return to this analysis below.) Since there are existentials without a coda (e.g., There is one even prime number, McNally 2011, 1830), the latter must be considered to be an optional modifier of the predication. In syntax, the coda can be assumed to be an adjunct (Leonetti 2008; Francez 2009). However, some analyses of existentials place the pivot in the subject position of a Small Clause, with the coda as its predicate (Safir 1985, 96). HABERE existentials with accusative pivots have been analyzed as transitive constructions with the pivot in object position (Suñer 1982; Rigau 1997; Manzini/Savoia 2005, vol. 3, 69–70; Bentley/Cruschina 2016). It should be pointed out, however, that there is no synchronic evidence for transitive HABER E , in languages with this existential copula, for example a number of dialects spoken in Salento (Italy). In addition, when HABERE alternates with ESSE as the copula of existential constructions, the pivot is not assigned accusative case, as testified by the absence of prepositional accusative marking in (52a), which contrasts with (52b). (52) Orgosolo, Nuorese Srd. a. Maria no est sola. B’at alone PF have.3SG Maria NEG be.3SG Carminu. Carminu ‘Maria is not alone. There’s Carminu.’ b. Apo vidu a Carminu. Carminu have.1SG seen ACC ‘I have seen Carminu.’ Any transitive analysis of HABERE existentials must capture the lack of accusative marking in structures like (52a). According to a well-established scholarly tradition, existentials are locatives (Freeze 1992; see also Lyons 1967; Clark 1978). Following Cruschina (2012; 2015) and

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Bentley (2015a,b), we contrast Romance existentials with a seemingly identical structure that is instead to be analyzed as a locative predicative copular construction with a topical locative predicate and a focal noun-phrase argument. This construction is exemplified in (53a), which is comparable with the existential sentence in (53b). (53) Turin, Piedmontese a. (Còs j è sota ’l let?) what PF be.3SG under.to the bed A j è le pantofle. EXPL there be.3SG the slippers ‘What’s under the bed? T HE SLIPPERS (are under the bed).’ b. (Còs j è për fé dël bòsch?) what PF be.3SG for do of.the fire A j’ è dij mòbil. EXPL PF be.3SG some furnit.PL ‘What is there to make a bonfire? There is some furniture.’ The structure in (53a), which we refer to as inverse locative construction, has a ‘there’ word in Romance languages that have an existential proform, requires VS order, and lacks number agreement between the copula and the post-copular noun phrase in the languages that also lack such agreement in existentials. Nonetheless, Cruschina (2012; 2015) and Bentley (2015a,b) argue that, despite appearances, this construction differs from existentials in both syntactic and semantic terms. Their claim is based on the following evidence. First, some Romance languages do not exhibit a proform in existentials (cf. (54a)), whilst they require a locative adverb in inverse locatives (cf. (54b)). (54) EPt. a. Há os teus pais. POSS parents have.3SG the ‘There are your parents (your parents are available for a purpose).’ b. Estão ali os teus pais. there the POSS parents be.3PL ‘Y OUR PARENTS are there.’ Second, Leonetti’s (2008) Coda Constraint, which states that the presence of a locative coda within the VP blocks the insertion of a definite noun phrase, brings to light a difference between locatives and existentials. (The comma in (55b) indicates a prosodic and syntactic break.) (55) Cat.

a. ??Hi havia there have.IMPF . 3SG

el the

degà Dean

a la at the

reunió. meeting

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b. Hi havia el degà, there have.IMPF . 3SG the Dean ‘T HE D EAN was at the meeting.’

a la at the

reunió. meeting

The ‘there’-word of inverse locatives is a locative clitic that resumes a locative predicate. Since resumptive clitics can only resume topics, this ‘there’-word cannot double a focal locative phrase. This is why (55a), unlike (55b), is not a well-formed sentence: only in (55b) does the pro-predicative clitic resume the topical and dislocated locative predicate. By contrast with the ‘there’-word of (55a,b), the existential proform in (56) is not locative, and hence it can co-occur with a locative coda within the same syntactic and prosodic domain. (56) Cat.

Hi

havia un estudiant a la have.PST . 3SG a student at the ‘There was a student at the meeting.’ PF

reunió. meeting

Third, drawing upon Jones (1993) and Leonetti (2008), Cruschina (2015) notes that pro-predicative ‘there’ is incompatible with a locative wh-word (cf. (57a)), whereas the same is not true of the existential proform (cf. (57b)). (57) Logudorese Srd. a. Inue (*bi) son sos duos sindigos? the two mayors where there be.3PL ‘Where are the two mayors?’ b. Inue b’ at duos sindigos? have.3PL two mayors where PF ‘Where is it that there are two mayors?’ Again, this evidence suggests that only the ‘there’-word of inverse locatives is locative, and hence cannot resume the focal locative wh-word, whereas the existential proform is not locative. Inverse locatives (cf. (58a)) are locative copular constructions in semantic terms, since they predicate location, though they differ from the locative predicative copular constructions analyzed in Section 2.2 in information structure and syntax. (58) It.

a. Ci sono i bambini, in giardino. PF be.3PL the children in garden ‘T HE CHILDREN are in the garden.’ b. I bambini sono in giardino. in garden the children be.3PL ‘The children ARE IN THE GARDEN .’

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In information structure, the locative predicate of inverse locatives is topical, while the noun phrase argument is focal. In syntax, the latter noun phrase normally figures post-verbally, i.e., in the default position of foci, while the predicate is dislocated or silent, but obligatorily resumed by locative ‘there’ in a number of Romance languages, for example Italian (cf. (58a)). Contrastingly, in locative predicative constructions the argument is topical and pre-verbal, while the locative predicate is focal and postverbal (cf. (58b)). Recall now that, in Section 2.2, it was mentioned in passing that Moro (1997) extends his inverse Small Clause analysis of specifying copular constructions to ci ‘there’ sentences in Italian. Cruschina (2012; 2015) proposes that this inverse analysis solely ought to be adopted for inverse locatives, and not for existentials. The syntactic contrast between existentials and inverse locatives can thus be captured as follows.  



(59) a. Existential Small Clause: [ci NP] b. Inverse locative Small Clause: [NP ci] Ci is the morphosyntactic spell-out of the implicit argument in existentials, where the post-copular noun phrase is the predicate, and of the topical locative predicate in inverse locatives, where the post-copular noun phrase is the argument. Since it is a clitic, ci raises to the Inflection in both cases. The post-copular position of the noun phrase is explained by its focal status in discourse, whereas the comparable agreement patterns that are found in existentials and inverse locatives are captured with reference to properties of this noun phrase (Bentley 2015b,c). We discuss this point in Section 3.3.

3.3 The Definiteness Effects (DE) Although the Romance languages do not exhibit the same evidence for the DE as English (Milsark 1974; 1977), since definites are admitted quite freely in there-sentences, in-depth analysis brings to light two kinds of morphosyntactic evidence for the DE. First, a definite post-copular noun phrase cannot be followed by the coda within the same prosodic unit in inverse locatives (see Leonetti’s 2008 Coda Constraint discussed in Section 3.2). Second, a wide number of Romance languages differentiate between definite and indefinite post-copular noun phrases in there sentences by means of copula selection and/or agreement (Jones 1993; La Fauci/Loporcaro 1993; 1997; Bentley 2011; 2013; 2015c). (60) Bono, Logudorese Srd. a. B’ at piseddas. PF have.3SG girls ‘There are girls.’

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b. Bi sun sas piseddas. PF be.3PL the girls ‘T HE GIRLS are (t)here/There are the girls.’ The contrast between English and Romance depends on differences in the interface of focus structure and syntax in these languages (cf. Bentley 2015c and references therein). While English allows any position in the clause to be marked as focal by means of the main pitch accent (Ladd 1996), the Romance languages do not. The default panRomance focal position is a post-verbal position, which explains the post-copular position of the noun phrase in copular constructions where this is focal, including those with post-copular definites. The Romance there-sentences with definite post-copular noun phrases have been claimed to be inverse locatives (Moro 1997; Zamparelli 2000; Remberger 2009; Cruschina 2012, among others). This hypothesis captures the prosodic and syntactic constraints on the coda, in that if the pro-predicative proform is a resumptive locative pronoun, it is predicted not to be allowed as a clitic double of a locative phrase within the same syntactic and prosodic domain (cf. (55a)). In this hypothesis, the contrast between English and Romance reduces to the lack of inverse locatives in the former language, where focal definites figure in pre-verbal position. The locative analysis of copular constructions like (60b), however, does not capture the case of contextualized existentials, i.e., genuine existentials with a definite pivot. The structure in (60b) could indeed be construed as a contextualized existential in an appropriate context: for example, a context in which we ask who is available to help. Thus, this analysis does not offer a rationale for the differential marking of definite and indefinite noun phrases in post-copular position in theresentences. There are three principal patterns of agreement in Romance there-sentences: generalized lack of finite number agreement between the copula and the post-copular noun phrase (type i, cf. (61a,b)), differential agreement (type ii, cf. (62a,b)), and generalized agreement (type iii, cf. (63a,b)).  

(61) Fr.

a. Nous ne NEG we il y

pouvons pas divorcer: can.1PL NEG divorce.INF a les enfants. EXPL PF have.3SG the children ‘We cannot divorce: there are the children.’ b. Il y a plusieurs pépins dans ce EXPL PF have. 3SG several seeds in this fruit. fruit ‘There are several seeds in this fruit.’

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podimus bessire fora ‘e can go.out out of pare: bi sun sos piseddos. be.3PL the children couple PF ‘We cannot divorce: there are the children.’ b. In custa frutta b’ at PF have.3SG in this fruit medas semenes. many seeds ‘There are many seeds in this fruit.’

(62) Bono, Logudorese Srd. a. Non NEG

(63) It.

a. Non

possiamo divorziare: ci sono i can divorce PF be.3PL the bambini. children ‘We cannot divorce: there are the children.’ b. In questa frutta ci sono molti semi. many seeds in this fruit PF be.3PL ‘There are many seeds in this fruit.’ NEG

Building upon Beaver/Francez/Levinson (2005), Bentley (2013) claims that these facts witness the cross-linguistic variation in subject canonicality, i.e., the variation in the properties that count towards subjecthood across languages. Finite agreement is a behavioral property of the subject. Type-(i) languages (cf. (61a,b)) do not treat the post-copular noun phrase as a subject because they avoid non-topical subjects (see Lambrecht 1986 with reference to French).11 As for type-(ii) languages (cf. (62a,b)), these treat a subclass of post-copular noun phrases as controllers of finite agreement. The subclass of controllers can be defined in terms of specificity, normally spelled out by definiteness, this being a property of subjects cross-linguistically (Enç 1991; Beaver/Francez/Levinson 2005). The subclasses of specifics that behave as controllers vary across Romance as shown in Table 6, which is adjusted from Bentley (2013).  

11 There are also type-(i) languages that do not treat existential pivots as controllers, while admitting verb-subject inversion – and agreement – in non-copular constructions with a focal subject. This is the case with the Salentino dialects that mark the existential pivot with accusative case (see Section 3.2, e.g. (50c)). In this case the failure for the existential pivot to control agreement has been accounted for with reference to its predicative function (Bentley 2015c).

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Table 6: Specificity of post-copular NP and its control of finite agreement Specificity of post-copular NP

Language-specific control threshold (agreement obtains with classes above threshold)

← French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese Specifics: 1st, 2nd personal pronoun ← Gallo-Italian, Nuorese Sardinian (Orgosolo) st

nd

rd

Specifics: 1 , 2 , 3 personal pronoun ← Catalan, Florentine, Gallo-Italian 12

Specifics: identity (Enç 1991)

← Spanish Specifics: identity, inclusion (Enç 1991) ← Logudorese Sardinian Non-specifics ← Italian, Romanian, Friulian

Finally, in type-(iii) languages, all post-copular noun phrases in there-sentences are controllers (cf. (63a,b)). In this case, a controller endowed with its agreement features is required regardless of its semantic and pragmatic properties. While the morphosyntactic behavior of the existential pivot as a controller of number agreement varies across Romance alongside subject canonicality, the semantic rationale of the DE can be assumed to be invariant across languages. It is nonsensical to predicate the existence of an individual or an entity whose existence is already established in discourse, as is the case with specifics (Enç 1991). Indeed, definite existential pivots are only found in contextualized existentials, which predicate the presence of a specific individual or entity in a pre-determined and salient context. To return to copula and agreement alternations, on the one hand, the copula and agreement alternations mark the language-specific subject canonicality threshold (cf. (61) to (63) and Table 6) with the consequence that existentials and inverse locatives exhibit the same copula selection and agreement patterns. This is shown in (64) (cf. (60b)), which can not only be construed as an inverse locative, but also, in an appropriate context, as a contextualized existential.

12 Following Enç (1991), specificity in the sense of identity with a previously introduced discourse referent is to be distinguished from specificity in the sense of inclusion in such a referent.

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(64) Bono, Logudorese Srd. Bi sun sas piseddas. PF be.3PL the girls ‘There are the girls.’ [Intended reading: ‘The girls are available for a purpose.’] On the other hand, these alternations can differentiate between locatives and existentials, as is clear in varieties of European Portuguese that only select agreeing STARE in inverse locatives (cf. (54a,b)). (65) EPt. a. Estão ali os teus pais. be.3PL there the POSS parents ‘Y OUR PARENTS are there.’ b. Há os teus pais. have.3SG the POSS parents ‘There are your parents.’ [Intended reading: ‘Your parents are available for a purpose.’] In these varieties the existential pivot must be assumed to fail to control agreement because semantically it is a predicate, and not an argument, and thus it is not realized as a subject in syntax.

4 Conclusion Copular and existential constructions have one property in common, namely a nonverbal predicate. While copular constructions have a specified argument and canonical morphosyntax, Romance existentials have an implicit argument and non-canonical morphosyntax. We have introduced an inventory of semantically and syntactically different copular constructions: predicative, specifying and identifying. Within the predicative type, we have further distinguished between ascriptive, locative and possessive structures. We have discussed the Romance copulas, paying particular attention to the ESSE vs STARE alternation in Modern Ibero-Romance and southern Italo-Romance. In addition, we have considered the syntax, morphosyntax and semantics of the complement of copular constructions. With reference to Romance existentials, we have examined the presence or absence of a proform, the selection of the copula, whether the latter agrees with the post-copular noun phrase, and the definiteness restrictions on this noun phrase. Finally, we have considered some information-structure properties of copular constructions.

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5 References Abbott, Barbara (1992), Definiteness, existentials, and the “list” interpretation, in: Chris Barker/David Dowty (edd.), Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory II, Columbus, OH, The Ohio State University, 1–16. Abbott, Barbara (1993), A pragmatic account of the definiteness effect in existential sentences, Journal of Pragmatics 19, 39–55. Badía Margarit, Antonio M. (1951), Gramática histórica catalana, Barcelona, Editorial Noguer. Beaver, David/Francez, Itamar/Levinson, Dmitry (2005), Bad subject: (Non-)canonicality and NP distribution in existentials, in: Effi Georgala/Jonathan Howell (edd.), Proceedings of Semantic and Linguistic Theory XV, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 19–43. Benincà, Paola (1994), Il clitico “a” nel dialetto padovano, in: Paola Benincà, La variazione sintattica: studi di dialettologia romanza, Bologna, il Mulino, 15–27. Benincà, Paola (1997), Sentence word order, in: Martin Maiden/Mair M. Parry (edd.), The Dialects of Italy, London/New York, Routledge, 123–130. Benincà, Paola (2007), Clitici e ausiliari: “gh ò, z é”, in: Delia Bentley/Adam Ledgeway (edd.), Sui dialetti italoromanzi. Saggi in onore di Nigel B. Vincent (The Italianist 27, Special Supplement 1), King’s Lynn, Biddles, 27–47. Bentley, Delia (2011), Sui costrutti esistenziali sardi. Effetti di definitezza, deissi, evidenzialità, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 127, 111–140. Bentley, Delia (2013), Subject canonicality and definiteness effects in Romance “there” sentences, Language 89, 675–712. Bentley, Delia (2015a), Existentials and locatives in Romance dialects of Italy: an introduction, in: Delia Bentley/Francesco Maria Ciconte/Silvio Cruschina, Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1–42. Bentley, Delia (2015b), Predication and argument realization, in: Delia Bentley/Francesco Maria Ciconte/Silvio Cruschina, Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 99–160. Bentley, Delia (2015c), Definiteness effects and linking, in: Delia Bentley/Francesco Maria Ciconte/ Silvio Cruschina, Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 161–216. Bentley, Delia/Ciconte, Francesco M. (2016), Copular and existential constructions, in: Adam Ledgeway/Martin Maiden (edd.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 847–859. Bentley, Delia/Ciconte, Francesco Maria/Cruschina, Silvio (2015), Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Bentley, Delia/Cruschina, Silvio (2016), Existential constructions, in: Susann Fischer/Christoph Gabriel (edd.), Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 487–516. Bentley, Delia/Ledgeway, Adam (2014), “Manciati siti?” Les constructions moyennes avec les participes résultatifs-statifs en italien et dans les variétés italo-romanes méridionales, Langages 194, 63–80. Bernini, Giuliano (2012), Il clitico a nell'italo-romanzo settentrionale: osservazioni metodologiche, in: Vincenzo Orioles (ed.), Per Roberto Gusmani. Linguistica storica e teorica. Studi in ricordo, Udine, Forum, 269–282. Berruto, Gaetano (1986), Un tratto sintattico dell’italiano parlato: il “c’è” presentativo, in: Klaus Lichem/Edith Mara/Susanne Knaller (edd.), Parallela 2. Aspetti della sintassi dell’italiano contemporaneo, Tübingen, Narr, 61–73. Blasco Ferrer, Eduardo (2003), Tipologia delle presentative romanze e morfosintassi storica. Fr. “c’est” e prov. “-i” (estai, fai, plai), Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 119, 51–90.

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The clausal and sentential domains

Guido Mensching

10 Infinitival clauses Abstract: This chapter surveys the range of infinitival clause types that exists in Romance languages, both in embedded and non-embedded contexts. It then discusses the status of left peripheral prepositional elements, which will be roughly divided into complementizers and real prepositions. A larger part is dedicated to the subject of infinitive constructions, including basic aspects of the theory of control that are necessary for the interpretation of silent (covert) subjects, and the different types of lexically expressed (overt) subjects. The latter are so-called raising constructions and accusative-and-infinitive constructions, which exist besides the characteristic property of many Romance languages to license an overt nominative subject in infinitive clauses. Finally, some remarks will be made on the internal structure of infinitive clauses, including the notion of restructuring. The examples are mostly taken from French, Italian, and Spanish, but other languages (Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, and Romanian) are also discussed. The general aim of the chapter is to show the basic typology of Romance infinitive constructions, highlighting the aspects that are common to most or even all Romance languages, but also pointing out the “parameters” of cross-linguistic variation.  

Keywords: infinitive, subordination, complementizers, raising constructions, accusative and infinitive, exceptional case marking, control, PRO, subjects, restructuring  

1 Introduction Infinitival clauses are clauses whose verb is in the infinitive, such as the bracketed parts of (1): (1)

a. It. b. Sp. c. Fr.

Pietro mi ha detto [di lavare la macchina]. ‘Pietro told me to wash the car.’ [Para ver la película] necesitas una entrada. ‘In order to see the film, you need a ticket.’ Je veux [ne pas le faire]. ‘I am willing not to do it.’ (Rowlett 2007, 162)

These are also called infinitive constructions in a broad sense, whereas infinitive constructions in a narrow sense include infinitives that do not project a clause of their own (monoclausal structures). The latter – which lie mostly beyond the scope of this chapter – are typically certain auxiliary constructions that involve infinitives instead of other non-finite forms such as participles. Thus, the examples in (2) are monoclausal: DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-010

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(2)

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a. Fr.

Pierre va arriver demain. ‘Pierre will arrive tomorrow.’ b. Sp. Juan va a comprar un coche. ‘Juan will buy a car.’ c. Srd. As a mandigare sa peta. ‘You will eat the meat.’ d. Cat. En Josep va veure la Maria. ‘Josep has seen Maria.’

A valid test for identifying a monoclausal structure is the insertion of negation, i.e., for (2a–d), Fr. *va ne pas arriver, Sp. *va a no comprar, Srd. *as a non mandigare, Cat. *va no veure are ungrammatical (here, the negator(s) must obligatorily accompany the inflected verb). This test is positive for the examples in (1), as is exemplified in (1c), which motivates the assumption of a biclausal status; similarly, for (1a) it is possible to say di non lavare la macchina, and, for (1b), para no ver la película. I will return to this issue in Section 5 within the context of “restructuring”. The lack of an explicit subject is held to be a characteristic property of infinitive constructions. Some well-known exceptions in many languages have classically been interpreted as “accusative-and-infinitive” constructions, in which the subject of the infinitive is in the accusative case. In languages such as English or German, nominative subjects can only appear outside the infinitive clause in so-called raising constructions, and a similar behavior can be observed for French. But almost all other Romance languages permit nominative subjects inside the infinitive clause in certain language-specific environments (cf. Section 4.2.3). The infinitive itself is usually uninflected, which is mostly thought to be a reflex of the fact that infinitives lack agreement with the subject and a tense of their own, i.e., tense is either absent or dependent on the main verb. However, Portuguese/ Galician and Sardinian have infinitives that are inflected for subject agreement (a possibility also documented in Old Neapolitan and Old Leonese), cf. Maurer (1968), Loporcaro (1986), Jones (1992), Mensching (2000), Scida (2004), among many others. There are also examples of infinitives that clearly have a tense of their own, although this is never overtly marked on the infinitive, such as the so-called historical infinitive (cf. Section 2.2). It must be noted that in Romanian and many southern Italian dialects, some infinitive constructions have been supplanted by finite constructions containing a subjunctive, a phenomenon that I will not discuss in this chapter. In what follows, I first provide an overview of the types of dependent (embedded) and independent (non-embedded) Romance infinitive clauses (Section 2). A separate section (Section 3) is dedicated to the left peripheral “prepositions” that often introduce infinitive clauses. I then turn to implicit and explicit subjects (Section 4) and finally to some aspects of the internal structure of infinitive clauses and the phenomenon of restructuring (Section 5). I will mostly use examples from French, Italian, and Spanish, but will also consider Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, and Romanian.  



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2 Types of infinitive clauses 2.1 Dependent infinitive clauses Most infinitive clauses do not occur in isolation, but in some way or another depend on a matrix clause containing a finite verb or – as we shall see at the end of this subsection – are embedded in a noun phrase. One common type is generally known as “complement clauses”, which represent an argument of a verb and are thus also referred to as “argumental clauses”. Its most important subtypes are object clauses and subject clauses. For these and other types, presented in more detail below, cf., e.g., Hernanz (1999, 2269–2303) and Salvi/Skytte (2001, 497–553). Argumental infinitive clauses often represent the direct object of a clause, as in (1a,c) in Section 1. Many other examples will be seen in the rest of this chapter. Infinitival object clauses are not always declarative clauses, but can also be indirect interrogatives, with an interrogative element at the left edge of the infinitive clause (as in Fr. Il ne savait plus où aller ‘He no longer knew where to go’, which can be translated almost word for word into other Romance languages). Infinitival object clauses do not necessarily represent a direct object; they often follow the preposition selected by a certain verb, and thus function as prepositional objects, as shown in (3): (3) a. Fr. b. Sp. c. It.

Il s’agissait de [tout faire sans bruit]. ‘It was a matter of doing everything without noise.’ Mi marido sueña con [hacer un viaje al Caribe]. ‘My husband dreams of making a trip to the Caribbean.’ Ti ricordi di [essere stato qui l’anno scorso]? ‘Do you remember having been here last year?’

Similarly, infinitive clauses can be complements of relational nouns as in (4), or adjectives as in (5), where the preposition is the same as the one these items usually select: (4) a. Fr. b. It. c. Sp.

(5) a. Fr. b. It.

une inclination à [trop travailler] ‘a tendency to work too much’ la paura di [sbagliare tutto] ‘the fear of doing everything wrong’ la consecuencia de [haber bebido demasiado] ‘the consequence of having drunk too much’ Je suis content/heureux de [vous aider]. ‘I am glad/happy to help you.’ Sono pronto/disposto [a partire subito]. ‘I am ready to leave at once.’

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c. Sp.

Estoy listo para [presentarme al examen]. ‘I am ready to attend the exam.’

In the examples in (6), the infinitive clause appears as a subject: (6) a. Fr. b. Sp. c. It.

[Voyager en avion] est plus bon marché aujourd’hui. ‘Traveling by plane is cheaper nowadays.’ [Fumar en un espacio público] significa hacer daño a los demás. ‘Smoking in a public space means harming others.’ [Mangiare i gelati] piace ai bambini. ‘Children like to eat ice-cream.’ (Manzini 2001, 493)

Subject clauses often appear after the main verb, in a kind of impersonal construction (cf. (17) and (19) in Section 3). Note that infinitival subject clauses in Spanish show a tendency to use the definite article el (a construction that will be further discussed below), so that (6b) can be reformulated as El fumar en un espacio público. . . (cf. Hernanz 1999, 2274). However, this seems to be a general tendency of subject clauses in Spanish, and speakers may prefer to use the article even in finite subject clauses (El que tú fumes. . .). Infinitive clauses are also used as predicative expressions; see the examples in (7). These must not be confused with subject clauses (for the elements de, di that appear in (7), cf. Section 3): (7) a. Fr. b. Sp. c. It.

Le plus important est [de rester en bonne santé]. ‘The most important thing is to stay healthy.’ La idea era [de hacerlo yo]. ‘The idea was that I should do it.’ La sua meta era [di risolvere questo problema]. ‘His goal was to solve this problem.’

Another big group comprises infinitive clauses that are not arguments but adjuncts, mostly corresponding to adverbial clauses (cf. Hernanz 1999, 2304–2332; Salvi/Skytte 2001, 553–557). Whereas finite adverbial clauses are headed by conjunctions, infinitival adverbial clauses are usually introduced by prepositions: (8) a. Fr. b. It.

Je sais tout cela [sans avoir lu des milliers de livres]. ‘I know all this without having read thousands of books.’ Ho chiesto le vacanze [per farti piacere]. ‘I asked for vacations in order to do you a favor.’ (Salvi/Skytte 2001, 483)

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[Pese a estar enferma], irá a clase. ‘In spite of being ill, she will go to her classes.’ (Hernanz 1999, 2323)

Infinitival relative clauses usually express possibility, which can be seen in the English translations in (9a,b) (Jones 1996, 512–513): (9) a. Fr.

b. It.

c. Sp.

Je cherche un prêtre [à qui me confesser]. ‘I am looking for a priest to whom I can confess.’ (Jones 1996, 512) Ho trovato un amico [con cui andare in vacanza]. ‘I have found a friend with whom I can go on vacation.’ (Salvi/Skytte 2001, 483) No tengo nada [que ponerme]. ‘I have nothing to wear.’ (Hernanz 1999, 2297)

Note that, in French and Italian, relative pronouns are used only after prepositions, as shown in (9a,b), although French à and Italian da also license infinitival relative clauses without a relative pronoun (un livre à lire, un libro da leggere); these items probably have the status of complementizers (cf. Section 3). As (9c) shows, Spanish allows the relative element que without a preposition (for prepositional relative clauses in Spanish, cf. Hernanz 1999, 2299–2303). A final remark must be made for infinitive constructions that are embedded in NPs (or DPs in modern generative frameworks), usually with the masculine definite article, as in (10): (10) a. Sp.

b. It.

[NP/DP El [compartir las penas]] siempre es un consuelo. ‘To share the sorrow is always a consolation.’ (Hernanz 1999, 2205) [NP/DP Il suo [non voler firmare]] ci aveva scocciati. ‘The fact that he does not want to sign had bothered us.’ (Bottari 1992, 73)

The clausal status of the infinitive clause is confirmed for (10b) by the presence of negation; for further criteria and discussion cf. Bottari (1992), Hernanz (1999, 2203– 2208) and Mensching (2000, 62 and 215). Such constructions are often found in subject positions, but in principle they can occupy all positions that a NP (or DP) can have. Note that infinitives with a clausal status embedded in nominal constituents are not available in all Romance languages (e.g., French lacks this construction).

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2.2 Independent infinitive clauses (root infinitive clauses) As we have seen, infinitives typically occur together with a finite verb, which is found either in the same clause (see the monoclausal infinitive structures illustrated in (2)), or in a matrix clause on which the infinitive clause depends in some way or another as in the cases described in 2.1. However, there are several constructions in which an infinitive can occur as the only verb in a clause, so that they must be considered as infinitival main clauses (also called root infinitive clauses). Consider the following extract from a French novel, contained in a passage written in free indirect speech: (11) Que devenir maintenant? Se lever tous les matins, se coucher tous les soirs. Ne plus attendre Durande, ne plus la voir partir, ne plus la voir revenir. Qu’est-ce qu’un reste d’existence sans but? Boire, manger, et puis? ‘What could he do now? Rise every morning: go to sleep every night. Never more to await the coming of the Durande; to see her get under way, or steer again into the port. What was a remainder of existence without object? To drink, to eat, and then?’ (V. Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer, quoted in Lombard 1936, 178; translation by W. Moy Thomas (Hugo 1866, 88–89)) Note that the infinitive clauses in this passage have no definite temporal reference, but describe hypothetical actions or states. This construction is called “descriptive infinitive” in the literature and must be distinguished from the “narrative infinitive”, traditionally known as “historical infinitive” (cf., e.g., Hernanz 1999, 2341; Mensching 2000, 97–98; Salvi 2001). The narrative infinitive is illustrated in the examples in (12): (12) a. Fr.

b. It.

Et [tous de rire], et [la conversation de se mettre docilement sur un autre sujet]. ‘And (then) they all laughed, and the conversation compliably changed to another subject.’ (Lombard 1936, 82) E [noi tutti a ridere], che si voleva mettere la pancia in terra. ‘And (then) we all laughed, so as to be convulsed with laughter.’ (Il Gattopardo; cf. Fava 2001, 53)

From a structural point of view, these infinitival root clauses are different from those in (11) in having an overt subject followed by a prepositional element. The latter has been considered in the literature as being connected to the fact that such infinitive constructions are clearly marked for tense (cf., e.g., Mensching 2000, 98–99); in fact, they mark a punctual occurrence in the past (similar to a passé simple), with an additional ingressive aspect. Other infinitival root clauses that can frequently be found in Romance languages mark non-declarative illocutions (exclamations, questions, orders), cf. Hernanz (1999, 2335–2342).

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3 “Bare” infinitives vs introduced infinitives In languages such as English and German, a common distinction is that between bare and introduced infinitives (go vs to go/gehen vs zu gehen). The introductory items in these languages (to/zu) are often interpreted as belonging to the inflectional system (e.g., Chomsky 1981; von Stechow/Sternefeld 1988). By contrast, in Romance languages, the infinitival inflection seems to be solely represented by the morpheme {r (+vowel)}, giving rise to endings such as -er, -re etc. in French, or -ar(e), -ir(e), -er(e) in other Romance languages. Prepositional elements are either left peripheral elements (complementizers) of the infinitive clause or elements outside the infinitive clause proper (belonging to a higher PP), as we will see below. Romanian is the only language that behaves differently, since infinitives have lost their ending (so-called “long infinitives” like plecare ‘departure’ are nouns, not verbs, cf. Dobrovie-Sorin 1993, 82). Instead, the infinitive has no clear ending. Interestingly, it is most frequently accompanied by the element a, which appears adjacent to the infinitive and can be combined with a preposition to its left: (13) Rom. Este important [a avea un loc de muncă stabil]. ‘It is important to have a permanent job.’ The exact status of the element a, which resembles Germanic to/zu, is controversial; for discussion cf. Dobrovie-Sorin (1993, 82–89). An issue that is of concern for all Romance languages is how to interpret the element de in (13) and de/di in (7) of Section 2.1. This has been widely discussed in the literature (cf. Rizzi 1982; Kayne 1984; Jones 1996, 59–60; Mensching 2000, 62–65; Salvi/Skytte 2001, 522–524, 529–530, among many others). The fact that the prepositional elements in (14a) and (14b) below do not have the same status can be seen if we substitute the infinitive construction for a (pro)nominal element, as shown in (15a,b): (14) It.

a. Mi ha detto di venire alle 10. ‘He told me to come at 10 o’clock.’ b. Sono contento di venire. ‘I am glad to come.’

(15) It.

a. Mi ha detto (*di) questo. ‘He told me this.’ b. Sono contento *(di) questo. ‘I am glad about this.’

The element di that introduces the infinitive clauses in (14) is ungrammatical in (15a), whereas it is obligatory in (15b). In a generative framework, these facts are interpreted

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as follows: the item di in (14a) is a complementizer (analogous to che in a finite complement clause), whereas it is a preposition in (14b), in this case selected by the adjective contento (cf. Section 2.1). Similar tests can be used for other languages and for other items (mostly à/a), which also appear sometimes as complementizers. The syntactic environments of infinitival complementizers are not uniform across the Romance languages, although some cases can be identified in which all Romance languages behave in a similar way. Thus, the complementizer de/di usually appears in the predicative infinitive construction, as can be seen in the examples in (7) in Section 2.1 above, as well as in infinitival complement clauses to abstract nouns in cases in which the noun does not lexically select a preposition of its own (i.e., unlike the cases in (4) of Section 2.1):  

(16) a. It.

b. Sp.

c. Fr.

Il fenomeno [di aggrapparsi è tipico dei piccoli di scimmia]. ‘The phenomenon of clutching at one another is typical of baby monkeys.’ (Salvi/Skytte 2001, 545) El juez dio la orden [de detener al agresor]. ‘The judge gave the order to arrest the aggressor.’ (Hernanz 1999, 2280) J’adore le fait [de pouvoir nager dans la mer]. ‘I love the fact of being able to swim in the sea.’

A similar behavior can be seen with certain adjectives (cf. Hernanz 1999, 2285). Complementizers in subject or in object clauses are seldom found in Spanish, whereas in Italian and French they frequently appear, but do not behave in a uniform way. In subject clauses, complementizers normally appear only when the subject clause is postverbal. In this case, the complementizer de is obligatory in French, whereas in Italian the presence of di depends on the superordinate predicate, as shown in (17). The Italian examples stem from Salvi/Skytte (2001, 538–540): (17) a. Fr. a.’ It. b. Fr. b.’ It. c. Fr. c.’ It. d. Fr. d.’ It.

Il est impossible [d’y croire]. È impossibile [crederci]. ‘This is impossible to believe.’ Il te conviendra [de répéter l’exercice précédent]. Ti converrà [ripetere l’esercizio precedente]. ‘It will be better for you if you repeat the previous exercise.’ Il arrivait souvent [de rencontrer des mendiants en bas]. Succedeva spesso [di incontrare mendicanti sotto casa]. ‘It often happened that beggars were found downstairs.’ Cela ne l’intéresse pas [de le savoir]. Non gli interessa [(di) saperlo]. ‘S/he is not interested in knowing this.’

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In Italian, the complementizer is normally absent when the infinitive clause is the subject of essere+adjective as in (17a’). With some unaccusative predicates, di is absent, as in (17b’), with others it is obligatory, as in (17c’), and with still others it is optional, as in (17d’). In Italian infinitival object clauses, the complementizer di shows up when the infinitive clause is selected by one of the numerous verbs of saying and mental activity (cf. Salvi/Skytte 2001, 524–525; cf. the examples (1a) and (14a)). In French, the complementizer de appears in infinitive clauses of other verbs, whereas de is usually missing after verbs of saying and mental activity. Cf. (18a) vs (18b) – in the latter, the same verb does not mean ‘to say’, but ‘to request; to order’ (cf. Jones 1996, 416; Spanish behaves in a similar way): (18) Fr.

a. Pierre dit [avoir lu ce livre]. ‘Pierre says he has read this book.’ b. Pierre nous dit [de lire ce livre]. ‘Pierre tells us to read this book.’

Elements other than di/de, including à/a (and Italian da, Spanish por) are often real prepositions selected by the superordinate verb, noun, or adjective (cf. (3b), (4a), (5b,c)). However, some cases may be identified in which such items might rather be regarded as complementizers. Some examples for à are given below. (19) a. Fr. b. Sp. c. It.

Il me reste [à vous remercier]. (Jones 1996, 456) ‘I still have to thank you.’ Queda [por ver si es verdad]. ‘It remains to be seen if it is true.’ Ho continuato [a farlo]. ‘I have continued doing it.’ (similarly in the other languages)

(19a,b) are cases of an infinitival subject clause after intrinsically impersonal verbs, in which French shows some isolated cases of à as a complementizer (Jones 1996, 456). More frequent are cases of object clauses such as those in (19c), with some specific (mostly aspectual) verbs; cf. Salvi/Skytte (2001, 530–531) for some other semantically determined groups, to which the verbs meaning ‘to teach’ and ‘to learn’ seem to belong in most Romance languages.

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4 The subject of infinitives 4.1 Silent subjects In infinitive clauses, the subject is mostly not expressed, but must be assumed to exist on a semantic/logical level, which can be seen in a sentence such as (20): (20) Fr.

Pierre a promis à Marie [de venir avec elle au cinéma]. ‘Pierre has promised Marie to go with her to the movies.’

Each of the two verbs in this sentence assigns a subject theta role (AGENT in the case of promettre, and THEME / PATIENT in the case of the unaccusative verb venir). However, only the subject theta role of promettre is expressed (Pierre), whereas that of venir is not expressed, although the speaker/hearer of (20) knows that it also corresponds to Pierre. Although, at least in some cases, there might be other ways of formalization, in what follows I adopt the generative view of a silent (implicit/covert/phonologically empty) subject of the infinitive. In the generative tradition, this subject is a kind of empty pronoun called PRO (in capital letters, i.e., “big” PRO, to distinguish it from “small” pro, the null subject that is typically found in most Romance languages in utterances such as Sp./It./Pt. canto ‘I sing’). The sentence in (20) is thus represented as in (21):  

(21) Fr.

Pierrei a promis à Mariej [de PROi venir avec ellej au cinéma].

The index (i) is the same for Pierre and PRO, meaning that both refer to the same entity in the extra-linguistic world. In a sentence such as (21), we say that the subject of the matrix clause “controls” PRO. Control by a matrix subject is a mostly semantically determined property of certain verbs. Apart from promettre and its counterparts in other languages, other subject control predicates are those meaning ‘to want’, ‘to hope’, ‘to regret’, ‘to threaten’ (cf. Jones 1996, 412–413; Manzini 2001, 486–488; cf. Hernanz 1999, 2216 for a much longer list, including also adjectival predicates). With other verbs, PRO is obligatorily controlled by an object (“object control verbs”, cf. Manzini 2001, 488–495; Hernanz 1999, 2216–2218). The group of object control verbs, logically, only comprises verbs that select another complement besides the infinitive clause (for adjectival predicates, cf. Manzini 2001, 493–495). The controller can be a direct object as in (22a) or an indirect object as in (22b): (22) It.

a. Giannii ha aiutato la vicinaj [a PROj portare le borse della spesa]. ‘Gianni helped the neighbor to carry the shopping bags.’ b. Giannii chiese a Pieroj [di PROj non fumare]. ‘Gianni asked Piero not to smoke.’

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Apart from aiutare and its other Romance equivalents, this group comprises, among others, predicates that express an order, a request or a prohibition, as well as those meaning ‘to counsel’, ‘to incite someone to do something’ (such as Sp. empujar, impulsar, inducir, cf. Hernanz 1999, 2217; It. istigare, spingere; Fr. inciter, pousser etc.). A special subgroup of object control verbs contains verbs expressing affection that select an indirect object corresponding to an EXPERIENCER theta role, mostly meaning something like ‘to please’ or its contrary (Sp. gustar, agradar, encantar/repugnar; It. piacere/(di)spiacere, Fr. plaire/déplaire, dégoûter). In this case, it is the experiencer that must control PRO. The verbs illustrated in (23) and some others can be used without expressing the RECIPIENT theta role: (23) a. Fr.

b. Sp.

Les pompiers ont ordonné [d’évacuer l’immeuble]. ‘The firemen gave the order to evacuate the building.’ (Jones 1996, 418) Su maestra enseña [a hablar correctamente]. ‘Her teacher teaches to speak correctly.’ (Hernanz 1999, 2215)

Most scholars seem to agree that, here, PRO is controlled by an implicit dative object of the main clause (cf. Rizzi 1986), which must be identified within the context of the utterance. Thus, for (23a), once it is clear that the firemen’s order was directed to the inhabitants of the building, the subject of the infinitive must also refer to the same group of people. (23b) is a general statement, the most logical interpretation of which is that the teacher teaches her pupils (and not, say, her colleagues or people in general); thus the subject of the infinitive hablar must also be the pupils. We can formalize this by using an empty object (Ø), which is obligatorily coindexed with PRO, so only the semantic content of Ø needs to be retrieved from the context: (24) a. Fr. b. Sp.

Les pompiersi ont ordonné Øj [d’ PROj évacuer l’immeuble]. ‘The firemen gave the order to evacuate the building.’ Su maestrai enseña Øj [a PROj hablar correctamente]. ‘Her teacher teaches to speak correctly.’

For further discussion, cf. Jones (1996, 416–420), Hernanz (1999, 2224–2229) and Manzini (2001, 490–491). The cases we have seen so far are cases of obligatory control. The literature on control (cf. Landau 2013 for a recent overview) distinguishes two other cases: nonobligatory or optional control, and arbitrary control. Arbitrary control means that PRO has a meaning like ‘one’ or ‘people in general’ (PROarb). The concept of obligatory vs optional control is discussed controversially in the literature (cf., e.g., Williams 1980; Koster 1987, 109–119; Haegeman 1994, 277; Manzini/Roussou 2000). In any case, it is

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important to note that obligatory control structures involve coindexing of PRO in a narrow syntactic domain, with a unique argument, usually of a matrix verb. In optional control structures, PRO can be coindexed with an element in the same sentence (without any specific locality conditions and not necessarily with an argument of the matrix clause). Alternatively, PRO can either be coindexed with an element of the broader textual context, or it is not coindexed at all (PROarb). Cases of optional control are typical in adjunct clauses (for possible cases of obligatory control, cf. Manzini 2001, 496). Here, although it is often the case that PRO is coindexed with an argument of the matrix clause, as in (25a), this is not necessarily the case, as (25b) shows: (25) Sp.

a. [Al llegar PROi a Paris], Juliai se quedó desilusionada. ‘On arriving in Paris, Julia was disappointed.’ b. [Al llegar PROi a Paris], [NP los sueños [PP de Julia i]] se desvanecieron. ‘On arriving in Paris, Julia’s dreams vanished.’ (Hernanz 1999, 2221).

In the following examples, we see that PRO, in the same basic structure (a temporal adjunct clause), can either be coindexed with a subject or an object of the matrix clause: (26) It.

a. Giannii è partito [prima di PROi salutare Maria]. ‘Gianni left before saying good-bye to Maria.’ (Manzini 2001, 496) b. Glii è passato di mente [dopo PROi aver salutato Maria]. ‘He forgot about it after having said good-bye to Maria.’

Infinitival subject clauses behave in a similar way: (27) It.

a. [PROi Fumare] nuoce ai bambinii. ‘Smoking is harmful for children.’ (Manzini 2001, 491) b. [PRO#i Fumare durante la gravidanza] nuoce ai bambinii. ‘Smoking during pregnancy is harmful for children.’ (Manzini 2001, 491) c. [PROarb Fumare] è pericoloso. ‘Smoking is dangerous.’

(27a) shows that (apart from interpretations such as PROarb or coindexing with an element of the context), PRO can be controlled by the indirect object of the verb nuocere, whereas in (27b), this reading does not seem to be acceptable (for reasons of world knowledge), and the most probable reading determined by pragmatics is that PRO refers to the pregnant mother, who is not overtly expressed in the sentence (Manzini 2001, 491; cf. also Hernanz 1999, 2227–2229). By contrast, in (27c), an

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arbitrary interpretation of PRO is the most probable interpretation. Even clearer cases of arbitrary control in subject clauses are those in (28): (28) a. Sp. b. Fr.

Más vale [PROarb prevenir] que [PROarb curar]. ‘Prevention is better than a cure.’ (Hernanz 1999, 2222) Il est intéressant de [PROarb lire les autobiographies]. ‘It is interesting to read autobiographies.’ (Jones 1996, 417)

For further discussion of subject clauses, cf. Hernanz (1999, 2224–2227).

4.2 Overt subjects Despite the typical property of infinitive constructions of having a silent subject, there are several cases of overt subjects, which, as far as the Romance languages are concerned, can be divided into three main types: accusative-and-infinitive constructions, raising constructions and constructions with nominative subjects within the infinitive clause. Whereas the two former are typologically quite widespread (and can thus also be found in English or German), the latter seem rather to be a characteristic property of many Romance languages. Note that there are still other cases of (apparently) overt subjects such as the one in (29): (29) Fr.

Je te promets [d’aller moi(-même) te défendre au tribunal]. ‘I promise to go and defend you in court myself.’

The expression moi(-même) in the infinitive clause is a so-called emphatic pronoun (cf. Ronat 1979). This type of subject or subject-like expression seems to be possible in all Romance languages, and virtually in all contexts in which PRO occurs; in fact, the verb promettre selects an infinitive clause with obligatory subject control (cf. 4.1). Emphatic pronouns have been argued to be bound by PRO (thus: d’ PROi aller [moimême]i . . .), e.g., by Burzio (1986, 110–115), or to be overt counterparts of PRO (Cardinaletti 1999; Mensching 2000, 59–62; Alonso-Ovalle/D’Introno 2001; for a recent discussion cf. Herbeck 2015). In any case, these elements occur in a subset of the environments that I have described for PRO in Section 4.1 and will therefore not be discussed in what follows. The basis for understanding the constructions presented in 4.2.1–4.2.3 is the idea of generative grammar that infinitive clauses cannot license nominative case, a fact that is true for many languages, including English or German. Thus, sentences such as *I want [he to come] or *It seems [he to be angry] are ungrammatical. The accusative-and-infinitive and raising constructions that will be described in 4.2.1 and 4.2.2 are thus seen as devices to make such sentences grammatical, either by choosing a case other than nominative or by removing the nominative subject from the infinitive

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clause. Although the generalization that infinitives cannot have nominative subjects is not true for most Romance languages, we shall see in Section 4.2.3 that such subjects cannot occur in all syntactic environments.

4.2.1 Accusative-and-infinitive constructions (exceptional case marking) The term accusative-and-infinitive comes from the grammar of Latin and designates an infinitive clause with a subject in the accusative case. In Romance languages, nouns do not have a morphological accusative case, but at least some pronouns do. A Romance construction that is often considered as an accusative-and-infinitive structure is that in (30): (30) Fr.

a. Je vois Jean venir. ‘I see Jean coming.’ b. Je le vois venir. ‘I see him coming.’

If Jean in (30a) is substituted by a clitic as in (30b), it takes the accusative form le (cf. Section 5 for an explanation of why the clitic appears on the matrix verb; also note that, in the Spanish equivalent of (30a), the accusative would be identified by the differential object marker a). The analysis of such structures as an infinitive construction with an explicit subject is based on the assumption that verbs of perception have only one argument besides the subject, which can either be a noun phrase as in Je vois Jean/l’homme or a clause (either finite or non-finite). The structure of (30a) is thus as in (31): (31) Fr.

Je vois [Jean venir].

Since voir is a transitive verb, it usually assigns accusative case to its nominal complement. Here, the complement is phrasal, and a reasonable assumption is that the accusative case is “exceptionally” assigned to the subject of the infinitive instead. In generative grammar, this mechanism is called exceptional case marking (ECM). An analysis along these lines, which is favored here (cf. Ciutescu 2013 for some recent support), can be found, e.g., in Guasti (1989), Belletti (1990), Hernanz (1999), Mensching (2000), but is far from being uncontroversial. For other kinds of analyses, cf., e.g., Hernanz (1999, 2236–2241) and Salvi/Skytte (2001, 509–511). This kind of construction is found mostly with verbs of perception, e.g., French voir, regarder, écouter, sentir, apercevoir (Jones 1996, 430), Italian intendere, sentire, udire, vedere, ascoltare, avvertire, ascoltare, guardare (Salvi/Skytte 2001), Spanish ver, oír, escuchar, sentir, mirar, observar (Hernanz 1999, 2241). There are some non-perception verbs that can select this construction, the most important ones being those

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meaning ‘to let (someone do something)’, i.e., Fr. laisser, Sp. dejar, It. lasciare. The construction at issue allows, in principle, both a preverbal and a postverbal subject:  

(32) a. Fr. a.’ Fr. b. It. b.’ It. c. Sp. c.’ Sp.

Paul a vu/laissé [Marie danser]. (cf. Jones 1996, 431) Paul a vu/laissé [danser Marie]. (cf. Jones 1996, 430) Paolo ha visto/lasciato [Maria ballare]. Paolo ha visto/lasciato [ballare Maria]. Pablo ha visto/dejado [a María bailar]. Pablo ha visto/dejado [bailar a María]. ‘Paul/Paolo/Pablo has seen/let Marie/Maria/María dance.’

However, when the infinitive is a transitive verb with a direct object, a postverbal subject is no longer possible in French and Italian; instead the subject of the infinitive appears as a dative after the direct object, as shown in (33) (the Spanish facts are more intricate and possibly dialect specific, cf. Moore 2014). (33) a. Fr. a.’ Fr. a.” Fr. b. It. b.’ It. b.” It.

Paul a entendu/laissé [Marie raconter cette histoire]. *Paul a entendu/laissé [raconter Marie cette histoire]. Paul a entendu/laissé [raconter cette histoire à Marie]. Paolo ha sentito/lasciato [Maria raccontare questa storia]. *Paolo ha sentito/lasciato [raccontare Maria questa storia]. Paolo ha sentito/lasciato [raccontare questa storia a Maria]. ‘Paul/Paolo has heard/let Marie/Maria tell this story.’

These facts have received different interpretations in the literature (cf. Mensching 2000, 69–72). The most reasonable solution seems to be that, when the infinitive is adjacent to the matrix verb, the sequence matrix verb+infinitive is reinterpreted (or “restructured”, cf. Section 5) as one verbal unit that selects a direct object, with an (optional) dative representing the original subject of the infinitive (Belletti 1990, 136; Guasti 1996; Hernanz 1999, 2249–2264; Mensching 1999, among others). The impossibility of negation illustrated in (34b), when the subject is postinfinitival, may be explained by the same mechanism, or, alternatively by assuming that these verbs can either select a clause (as in (34a), or a reduced structure (e.g., a VP, cf., e.g., Labelle 1996; Mensching 2000, 70–72; Ciutescu 2013): (34) Fr.

a. J’ai vu [Pierre ne pas chanter]. b. *J’ai vu [ne pas chanter Pierre]. (Labelle 1996)

Typically, the causative construction with verbs meaning to ‘make someone do something’ does not allow the preverbal position of the subject in French and Italian (Jones 1996, 431; Salvi/Skytte 2001, 501–502; for exceptions with quantifiers cf. Mensching 2000, 70; and for other languages cf. Jones 1993, 273 (Sardinian); Mensching 1999

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(Catalan)). For these Romance languages, we can therefore say that the processes or structures such as complex predicate formation or the selection of a reduced/nonclausal structure are obligatory with the relevant causative verbs and optional with perception verbs. Spanish is different, because a preverbal subject is allowed with hacer, although this is a marked option (Hernanz 1999, 2248 and 2256–2257). The verbs meaning ‘to let someone do something’ (cf. above) do not behave in a uniform way, in the sense that, language-specifically, they pattern with the causative verbs, either completely, partially, or not at all. Differently from older stages of several Romance languages (cf. Mensching/ Popovici 1997; Mensching 1999; 2000), accusative-and-infinitive constructions after declarative, epistemic and volitional verbs as well as in postverbal subject clauses selected by impersonal verbs are possible in almost none of the present day Romance languages. A potential explanation is that, in Modern Romance languages, such clauses have a more complex clause structure, which, in fact, often shows an overt complementizer, as we have seen in Section 3. If the mentioned predicate types always select complementizer phrases (CPs), we can assume that the complementizer or the CP border somehow blocks external case assignment (for an additional argument stemming from certain cases in French and Italian, in which a clitic or an interrogative pronoun representing the subject of the infinitive can appear in the matrix clause, cf. Kayne 1981; Rizzi 1982; Mensching 2000, 72). An exception is Occitan (cf. Camproux 1958, 273–283; Sauzet 1989; Mensching 2000, 33–34), as is shown in the following examples (for arguments in favor of an analysis of the subjects in these examples as accusatives, cf. Mensching 2000, 176–177): (35) Occ. a. Se ditz [aqueles òmes èsser braves]. ‘It is said that these men are wild.’ (Sauzet 1989, 248) b. Calguèt [los òmes anar trabalhar]. ‘It was necessary that the men go to work.’ (Sauzet 1989, 247) To explain this, we can either assume that the predicates at issue select a somehow reduced clause structure (an IP in generative terms) or that, in Occitan, a CP does not block ECM (for another account, cf. Sauzet 1989).

4.2.2 Raising constructions The examples in (36) represent a special construction that occurs with some matrix verbs that do not assign a subject theta role, either by principle, such as verbs meaning ‘to seem’, or in special, non-personal readings of some verbs, such as French risquer:

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a. Oscar semble [s’évanouir/écrire]. ‘Oscar seems to faint/to write.’ (Rooryck 1988, 1) b. La pierre risque [de tomber]. ‘The stone is in danger of falling.’ (Rooryck 1988, 1)

Here, the subject of the main clause corresponds to a theta role of the infinitive clause (cf. paraphrases with finite clauses such as ‘It seems that Oscar is fainting.’/‘There is a risk that the stone will fall.’). This is called a “subject raising” construction because of the standard generative analysis sketched in (37): (37) __ semble [Oscar s’évanouir] → Oscar semble [ __ s’évanouir] ↑_____________| Because of the impossibility of nominative subjects in French infinitive clauses (or, for other Romance languages, their limited availability, cf. Section 4.2.3), the subject must be extracted (“raised”) to the subject position of the matrix verb, which is, in fact, available, as the verbs at issue do not select a subject theta role. Examples of raising predicates in French are sembler, être censé, être susceptible, faillir (Jones 1996, 421– 430), in Italian sembrare, (ap)parere, risultare (Salvi/Skytte 2001, 544), in Spanish parecer, semejar, resultar (Hernanz 1999, 2234). Raising constructions have also been assumed for some modal verbs, in particular those meaning ‘may’, especially in the sense of ‘to be possible’ (Fr. pouvoir, It. potere, Sp. poder) and ‘must’ (Fr. devoir, It. dovere, Sp. deber), as well as for verbs meaning ‘to begin’, ‘to stop’, ‘to continue’ (Kayne 1975, 254–260; Hernanz 1999, 2230; Salvi/Skytte 2001, 544, among many others; these analyses are not uncontroversial, cf. Fábregas 2014 for a recent discussion). One of the several tests for showing that a verb is a raising verb and not a control verb is illustrated in (38) (from Salvi/Skytte 2001, 543): (38) It.

a. Il governo deve [annientare la mafia]. ‘The government must destroy the Mafia.’ a.’ La mafia deve [essere annientata dal governo]. ‘The Mafia must be destroyed by the government.’ b. Il governo vuole [annientare la mafia]. ‘The government wants to destroy the Mafia.’ b.’ La mafia vuole [essere annientata dal governo]. ‘The Mafia wants to be destroyed by the government.’

Whereas (38a) and (38a’) are synonymous, (38b) and (38b’) are not. If dovere is a raising verb, and volere a control verb, the underlying structures can be represented as follows: (39) It.

a. Il governoi deve [ __i annientare la mafiaj]. a.’ La mafiaj deve [ __j essere annientata dal governoi].

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b. Il governoi vuole [PROi annientare la mafiaj]. b.’ La mafiaj vuole [PROj essere annientata dal governoi]. Recall that, in an active clause and a corresponding passive clause, the theta roles AGENT and THEME / PATIENT remain the same; thus, the infinitive clauses in (39a,a’) must be synonymous: in a raising construction, the apparent subject of the matrix verb is, in reality, the subject of the infinitive clause, which has just changed its position. The theta role is therefore still the one that was assigned by the infinitive (recall that raising verbs do not assign a subject theta role themselves). But in a control construction, there are two subjects, an overt one, which receives its theta role from the matrix verb, and a silent subject (PRO) that receives its theta role from the infinitive. In (39b), the one who wants to destroy is the government, which – via coindexation with PRO – is also the agent of the verb; by contrast, in (39b’) it is the Mafia who wants the action to be performed, and at the same time, the Mafia is the patient of the infinitive. Subject raising constructions must not be confused with so-called object gap constructions (Jones 1996, 332–334): (40) Fr.

Ces livres sont difficiles à trouver. ‘These books are difficult to find.’

Here, the subject corresponds to a raised direct object of the infinitive clause, whose subject (either PROarb, or PRO) is controlled by an implicit EXPERIENCER argument of difficile (cf. Section 4.1), as argued by Jones (1996, 332–334): (41) Ces livres sont difficiles Øi [PROi à trouver __ ]. ↑__________________________________| For other languages and discussion, cf. Hernanz (1999, 2300) and Salvi/Skytte (2001, 552–553).

4.2.3 Clause internal nominative subjects Almost all Romance languages, except for French and most varieties of Occitan (but cf. Mensching 2000, 34, 124 and 176 for Gascon) allow nominative subjects in certain environments; this is known as the “personal infinitive” construction. The most common configurations show the subject obligatorily in a postverbal position. There are basically two different types to be distinguished (cf. Mensching 2000), illustrated in (42) and (43) (I have deliberately chosen pronouns that clearly show the nominative case; however all these constructions are also possible with full NPs/DPs):

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La commissione ritiene [aver io superato l’esame]. ‘The commission thinks that I have passed the exam.’ (Giorgi/Pianesi 2004, 193)

(43) a. Sp.

[Ir yo a la facultad mañana] va a ser imposible. ‘For me to go to the Faculty tomorrow will be impossible.’ (Demonte 1977, 185) b. Cat. El millor seria [anar-hi jo també]. ‘The best thing would be for me to go there, too.’ (Mensching 1998) c. Srd. At segadu sos pratos [pro non mandigare(s) tue]. ‘He broke the plates in order for you not to eat.’ (Blasco Ferrer 1986) d. Rom. Am plecat [înainte de a ajunge ea]. ‘I arrived before she came.’ (Dobrovie-Sorin 1993, 89)

The type in (42) is the so called “Aux-to-Comp” construction (Rizzi 1982) and is stylistically restricted to literary and formal registers of Standard Italian. It is only possible with infinitival clauses that contain the auxiliaries avere and essere, which are located in clause-initial position, immediately followed by the subject. The auxiliary is held to occupy the complementizer position, which would be filled with di in the corresponding control structure (cf. Section 3). Older stages of Tuscan Italian and related varieties also knew the structure in (43) (cf. Mensching 2000), which does not have these restrictions, and which is still grammatical in other Romance languages. The languages that license the structure illustrated in (43) include Sardinian, which (except for Campidanese varieties) can optionally use the inflected infinitive as seen in (43c). As the examples show, these constructions can occur without an auxiliary. If an auxiliary is present, the subject usually follows the participle (for the marked option of placing the subject after the auxiliary in Spanish, cf. Fernández Lagunilla 1987; Mensching 2000, 128 and 221–222): (44) Sp.

[De haberse ido Juan], no habría andado lejos. ‘If Juan had left, he wouldn’t have walked far.’ (Mensching 2000, 113)

Although the examples in (42) to (44) might suggest that personal infinitives could be restricted to unaccusative verbs, this is not the case, cf. (45): (45) Sp.

El hecho [de abrir Julia la puerta] mereció un premio. ‘The fact that Julia opened the door merited a prize.’ (Fernández Lagunilla/Anula Rebollo 1995, 193; quoted in Hernanz 1999, 2268)

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It is clear that the “classical” generative case theory, according to which only a finite inflectional head (containing tense and agreement features) can assign nominative case, does not hold for these languages. Most analyses (e.g., Rizzi 1982; Jones 1992; 1993; Dobrovie-Sorin 1993; Mensching 1999; 2000; Sitaridou 2002) argue that an incomplete inflectional head (Infl° in generative grammar) or impoverished tense and/ or agreement features can license nominative case, but not in its canonical preverbal position (note that this generalization is comparable to the typological notion of semisubjects, cf. Mensching 2000, 13–14). For an early and a modern minimalist account, cf., respectively, Mensching (2000, 179–198), and Sitaridou (2002). Whereas Aux-to-Comp can only occur in infinitival complement clauses after epistemic and declarative predicates and in final and causal adverbial clauses introduced by per, the construction illustrated in (43) to (45) is typically not found in object clauses (except for Sardinian, cf. Jones 1993, 252–253), but appears in subject clauses as in (43a,b) and in infinitival clauses that are complements of nouns (as in (45)). However, the most common environment is that in adverbial infinitive clauses (cf. (43c,d) and (44)). It can also appear in infinitival root clauses (cf. Hernanz 1999, 2226), except for the historical infinitive, which has a preverbal subject as explained in Section 2.2. The absence of the structure in object clauses seems to be related to the issues of transparency briefly addressed in Sections 4.2.1 and 4.2.2, e.g., in the sense that a penetration of control or (accusative) case-assigning properties of the matrix verb into the infinitive clause would interfere with the presence of an independent subject of the infinitive or the nominative assignment mechanism. The penetration of such properties from the matrix clause to the infinitive clause can be blocked by overt complementizers in Sardinian, which obligatorily show up in this language, hence the possibility to license nominative subjects in some types of infinitival object clauses (cf. Sitaridou 2002 for discussion and a theory). The system of Portuguese and Galician is different from that illustrated in (42) to (45), as the subject of the infinitive preferably appears in a preverbal position. It seems that the distribution of preverbal and postverbal subjects in Portuguese and Galician infinitive clauses is nearly the same as in finite clauses (cf. Mensching 2000, 155–157), with the exception of object clauses selected by declarative and epistemic verbs. The latter show a pattern that is very similar to that of the Italian Aux-to-Comp construction in (42) and may possibly be subsumed under the latter (cf. Raposo 1987; Madeira 1994; cf. Mensching 2000, 89–91 and 157–162 for discussion). Here are some Portuguese examples with preverbal subjects, which normally go along with the inflected infinitive: (46) EPt. a. Incomoda-me a circunstância [de estas pessoas não viverem mais na cidade]. ‘The fact that these people do not live any longer in the city bothers me.’ (Mensching 2000, 103)

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b. Lamentou [essas actividades serem úteis para o país]. ‘He deplored the fact that these activities were useful for the country.’ (Mensching 2000, 159) c. Eu espero [até tu acabares o livro]. ‘I wait until you finish the book.’ (Madeira 1994, 180) With respect to the licensing mechanisms of nominative case, it is obvious that, here, the overtly visible agreement features on the infinitive play a crucial role, as already assumed by Raposo 1987 (for further discussion, cf., e.g., Mensching 2000; Sitaridou 2002). However, this correlation of the licensing of preverbal subjects and the existence of inflected infinitives cannot be generalized, since Sardinian has the latter property without permitting preverbal subjects (cf. above), whereas Sicilian also licenses preverbal subjects without having inflected infinitives (cf. Mensching 2000, 30–31, 102–106 and 173–176). The Portuguese inflected infinitive in connection with specified subjects shows some further interesting properties. For example, the structure in (46) is also licensed after verbs of perception, as an alternative to the ECM construction of Section 4.2.1. Thus, (47a) shows a nominative subject with an inflected infinitive, whereas (47b) shows an accusative subject marked by ECM, crucially with a non-inflected infinitive (Hornstein/Martins/Nunes 2006). The case properties can be seen with the tests involving clitic and non-clitic pronouns in (48): (47) EPt. a. A Maria viu [os meninos saírem]. b. A Maria viu [os meninos sair]. ‘Maria saw the boys leave.’ (Hornstein/Martins/Nunes 2006, 99) (48) EPt. a. A Maria viu-te sair. b. A Maria viu tu saíres. c. *A Maria viu-te saíres. ‘Maria saw you leave.’ (Hornstein/Martins/Nunes 2006, 99) Another interesting fact that follows from the ability of inflected infinitives to assign nominative case is the possibility of the subject of inflected infinitives after raising verbs to stay in the matrix clause (Raposo 1987; Mensching 2000, 74 and 158; for further discussion and some complications, cf. Martins/Nunes 2006).

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5 The internal structure of infinitive clauses and restructuring Some final words are in order concerning the internal structure of Romance infinitive clauses, including the concept of restructuring. We have already seen in Sections 3 and 4 that infinitive constructions may vary with respect to their clausal status, e.g., in the sense that they may be complementizer phrases (CPs) or not, or, in some cases, maybe not clauses at all (e.g., if they are just VPs). Another aspect to be considered is word order. In French, infinitives of lexical verbs (as other non-finite verb forms) usually occupy a rather low position in the clause (in generative terms below the inflectional head Infl°/Tense°; cf. Pollock 1989), as can be seen in (49a,b), where the infinitive is located after the negation and the adverb presque, respectively: (49) Fr.

a. [Ne pas posséder de voiture en banlieue] rend la vie difficile. ‘Not having a car in the suburbs makes life difficult.’ (Pollock 1989, 374) b. [Presque oublier son nom], ça n’arrive pas fréquemment. ‘It does not happen frequently to almost forget one’s name.’ (Pollock 1989, 374)

A low position of the infinitive has also been assumed for Romanian (cf. Motapanyane 1989), under the hypothesis that a (cf. Section 3) occupies the Infl° node in a nu vorbi ‘not to speak’ (but cf. Dobrovie-Sorin 1993, 85–97). To determine the position of the infinitive, it has been claimed that the different position of clitics in different Romance languages may be indicators of different verb positions (cf. Kayne 1991). I will not elaborate on this here but just show the different clitic positions with respect to the verb and negation for some languages: (50) a. b. c. d. e.

Fr. Rom. Srd. It. Sp.

[ne rien lui donner] [a nu-i da nimic] [non li dare nudda] [non dargli niente] [no darle nada] ‘not to give him anything’

The clitic is preverbal in French, Romanian and Sardinian and postverbal in Italian and Spanish. Differently from Romanian and Sardinian, in French most elements that undergo negative concord are placed after the negative head and before the clitic. In (50), the clitics are proclitic or enclitic to the infinitive, as is expected in a biclausal infinitive structure. However, clitics that belong to the infinitive can also appear attached to the matrix verb. This phenomenon is called “clitic climbing” (cf.

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Rooryck 2000, ch. 5, for a theoretical overview), and is often taken as evidence for a very reduced or even a monoclausal structure. Clitic climbing typically occurs with modal verbs. Concerning this property, the Romance languages can be divided into three groups: languages in which clitic climbing is (a) obligatory, (b) not possible, (c) optional. Sardinian and French are examples of (a) and (b), respectively:  



(51) a. Srd. Juanne lu cheret/potet/ischit/devet [fákere]. a.’ Srd. *Juanne cheret/potet/ischit/devet [lu fákere]. (Jones 1993, 142) b. Fr. *Jean le veut/peut/sait/doit [faire]. b.’ Fr. Jean veut/peut/sait/doit [le faire]. ‘Juanne/Jean wants/can/must do it.’ In Sardinian, but not in French, the bracketed constituent in (51) would therefore be a VP rather than a clause (Jones 1993, 142–145). Independent evidence for this is the fact that negation cannot occur inside the infinitive construction in Sardinian (Jones 1993, 143, cf. *Juanne podet non bénnere vs Fr. Jean peut ne pas venir, meaning ‘It is possible that Jean won’t come’). Spanish and Italian are examples for (c), i.e., clitic climbing can optionally occur:  

(52) a. Sp. a.’ Sp.

Juan puede [hacerlo]. ‘Juan can do it.’ Juan lo quiere [hacer]. ‘Juan wants to do it.’

b. It. b.’ It.

Gianni può [farlo]. ‘Gianni can do it.’ Gianni lo vuole [fare]. ‘Gianni wants to do it.’

This phenomenon is referred to as “restructuring”. There is a whole range of different approaches (for an overview, cf., e.g., Wurmbrand 2001), so I follow here the simplified account by Salvi/Skytte (2001), which can illustrate the basic idea of “restructuring”. For (52), take a version with a full NP or a demonstrative such as (53): (53) Sp.

Juan puede [hacer este trabajo/esto]. ‘Juan can do this work/this.’

The bracketing here indicates a biclausal structure. Another interpretation of the same clause (the “restructured” variant) is the monoclausal one in (54), where the modal verb and the infinitive are taken to be grouped together: (54) Sp.

Juan [puede hacer] este trabajo/esto.

Variant (54) functions as if the modal plus the infinitive were only one verb, so, logically the clitic must attach to this complex and not to the infinitive alone. There is no consensus in the literature on whether (53) and (54) are independent constructions

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or whether they are derived from each other. As is to be expected, the infinitive of the restructured variant cannot be negated (Salvi/Skytte 2001, 516). The matrix predicates that license restructuring in Romance are, generally speaking, a subgroup of those predicates that have been classified as control and raising predicates (cf. Sections 4.1 and 4.2.2). Apart from modal verbs, they also comprise aspectual verbs such as those meaning ‘to begin’ and ‘to stop’ (also in Sardininan, cf. Jones 1993, 149) as well as motion verbs such as It. andare a fare qualcosa (Salvi/ Skytte 2001, 514 and 516; Wurmbrand 2001, 7). The exact distribution is, however, language-specific. As we have seen in Section 4.2.1, the verbs that license accusative-and-infinitive constructions may be added to the list of restructuring verbs under certain interpretations. As for clitic climbing, in accusative-and-infinitive constructions, it is usually the subject of the infinitive and not an object that undergoes this operation, as has been seen in (30) in Section 4.2.1. Since a clitic has to attach to the next higher verb (i.e., to its left), a clitic representing a subject cannot be attached to an infinitive (which is located lower than the subject). Thus, unlike (52), in such cases, we do not have two options (cf. Sp. Te veo llegar/*Veo llegarte ‘I see you coming’).  

6 Conclusions Infinitive constructions are very productive in Romance languages and appear in a variety of syntactic configurations. In this chapter, we have mostly been concerned with infinitive constructions in a narrow sense, i.e., those that have a clausal status and usually appear subordinated to a matrix clause. As I have shown in Section 2, such constructions appear in several syntactic functions that are common to all Romance languages, such as subject clauses, object clauses, predicative clauses and clauses that depend on verbs, adjectives and nouns that select a preposition, where the infinitive clause is embedded in the corresponding prepositional phrase ([PP P [INF . CLAUSE ]]). This structure is also frequently found with non-selected prepositions, thus forming adverbial subclauses of time, cause, manner, etc. Finally, most Romance languages (but crucially not French) also permit infinitive clauses to be introduced by a determiner, and in particular, the definite article, thus forming structures of the type [NP/DP D [INF . CLAUSE ]], an option that is particularly frequent in Spanish, but also in Portuguese and Catalan. Romanian only permits the infinitive in a subset of the environments mentioned, having substituted some types of infinitive constructions by finite constructions. The infinitive itself is morphologically marked by a suffix {-r (+vowel)}, with the exception of Romanian, which lacks this morpheme and uses the preposed (unbound) morpheme {a}, which seems to have a similar status as English to. While these morphemes are usually unspecified for personal features and tense, Portuguese and Sardinian allow the suffix to be inflected for person and number, a typologically  

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marked option. Infinitive clauses of all Romance languages display a strong tendency to be preceded by some left peripheral element, i.e., when they are not embedded in a PP or a determined NP/DP, they are often introduced by a kind of default preposition (mostly de/di), which is interpreted as a complementizer in the generative tradition (cf. Section 3). This is regularly the case with predicative infinitive clauses and rightattached subject clauses, whereas left-attached subject clauses lack this property and non-prepositional object clauses vary language-specifically. Summarizing some of the insights of Section 4.1, we might say that, similar to other languages, Romance languages use infinitive constructions instead of finite constructions for a kind of economy reason; i.e., when the tense and the subject of the infinitive clause are recoverable from the syntactic or textual context, an infinitive clause permits a more compact way of expression than a finite clause: the subject is not expressed even in a non null subject language like French, and there is no agreement and tense morphology. Such an approach, however, would only partially explain the choice of an infinitive clause, as is evidenced by the presence of overt subjects in some constructions and the inflected infinitive in some languages. In any case, the recovery of the tense of the infinitive (which we have not considered in this chapter) and of the reference of the non-expressed subject is not arbitrary but follows some rules that are not specific to Romance. The silent subject of infinitive clauses is of a special type, called PRO in the generative literature, and the recovery of its content is governed by rules of “control”, which are probably universal. In Section 4.2 we considered those cases in which the subject of the infinitive is overtly expressed. These include a series of constructions that can be found in many non-Romance languages, too, such as subject raising and accusative-and-infinitive structures. The latter are found with verbs of perception and permission as well as with causative verbs in almost all Romance languages, although there is some language-specific variation with respect to word order and to the predicates that select this structure. A characteristic Romance type of structure found in all Romance languages except for Gallo-Romance (French and Occitan) shows nominative subjects in infinitive clauses, which mostly occur post-verbally, i.e., to the right of the infinitive. Finally, Section 5 was dedicated to the internal structure of the infinitive clause. We have seen that we can distinguish Romance languages in which the infinitive itself is located very low in the clause structure (French, and maybe Romanian and Portuguese) versus others in which it is in a higher position (Spanish, Italian), as can be seen with tests using adverbs, negation, and clitics. Clitics and negation are realized within the infinitive clause, but can be raised to the matrix verb. With modal verbs, most Romance languages freely allow this phenomenon (called “restructuring”), which is, however, absent from French, whereas it is obligatory in Sardinian. Thus, Romance infinitive constructions can be said to be generated from an inventory of properties that is common to all Romance languages, but are, however, not distributed in a uniform way. As is the case with other domains of language, on  





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one hand, we often find a deviant behavior of French versus the “southern” Romance languages. On the other hand, with respect to a series of phenomena, it is rather the peripheries of the Romania (Romanian, Sardinian, and sometimes Portuguese) that diverge from more “central” languages (Spanish, Italian, French). The “parameters of variation” are often more fine-grained than could be presented here. Nevertheless I hope to have provided an overview that can serve as a basis for more in-depth studies in the domain of Romance infinitive constructions.

7 References Alonso-Ovalle, Luis/D’Introno, Francesco (2001), Full and null pronouns in Spanish: the zero pronoun hypothesis, in: Héctor Campos et al. (edd.), Hispanic Linguistics at the Turn of the Millennium, Somerville, MA, Cascadilla Press, 189–210. Belletti, Adriana (1990), Generalized Verb Movement, Torino, Rosenberg & Sellier. Blasco Ferrer, Eduardo (1986), La lingua sarda contemporanea. Grammatica del logudorese e del campidanese. Norma e varietà dell’uso. Sintesi storica, Cagliari, Edizioni della Torre. Bottari, Piero (1992), Structural representations of the Italian nominal infinitive, in: Elisabetta Fava (ed.), Proceedings of the XVII Meeting of Generative Grammar, Trieste 22–24 February 1991, Torino, Rosenberg & Sellier, 71–96. Burzio, Luigi (1986), Italian Syntax. A Government-Binding Approach, Dordrecht, Reidel. Camproux, Charles (1958), Étude syntaxique des parlers gévaudanais, Montpellier, Presses Universitaires de France. Cardinaletti, Anna (1999), Italian emphatic pronouns are postverbal subjects, University of Venice Working Papers in Linguistics 9, 59–92. Chomsky, Noam (1981), Lectures on Government and Binding, Dordrecht, Foris. Ciutescu, Elena (2013), Remarks on the infinitival subject of perception verb complements: evidence for two syntactic configurations, Revue roumaine de linguistique 58, 299–312. Demonte, Violeta (1977), La subordinación sustantiva, Madrid, Cátedra. Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen (1993), The Syntax of Romanian. Comparative Studies in Romance, Berlin/ New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Fábregas, Antonio (2014), A guide to subjunctive and modals in Spanish: questions and analyses, Borealis. An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 3, 1–94. [DOI 10.7557/1.3.2.3064] Fava, Elisabetta (2001), Tipi di frasi principali. Il tipo dichiarativo, in: Lorenzo Renzi/Giampaolo Salvi/ Anna Cardinaletti (edd.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, new edition, vol. 3, Bologna, il Mulino, 49–53, 55–69. Fernández Lagunilla, Marina (1987), Los infinitivos con sujetos léxicos en español, in: Violeta Demonte/Marina Fernández Lagunilla (edd.), Sintaxis de las lenguas románicas, Madrid, El Arquero, 125–147. Fernández Lagunilla, Marina/Anula Rebollo, Alberto (1995), Sintaxis y cognición, Madrid, Síntesis. Giorgi, Alessandra/Pianesi, Fabio (2004), Complementizer deletion in Italian, in: Luigi Rizzi (ed.), The Structure of CP and IP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures Volume 2, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 190–210. Guasti, Maria Teresa (1989), Romance infinitive complements of perception verbs, MIT Working Papers in Lingustics 11, 31–45. Guasti, Maria Teresa (1996), Semantic restrictions on Romance causatives and the incorporation approach, Linguistic Inquiry 27, 294–313.

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Haegeman, Liliane (1994), Introduction to Government and Binding Theory, 2nd edn, Oxford, Blackwell. Herbeck, Peter (2015), Overt PRO in Romance, in: Rachel Klassen/Juana M. Liceras/Elena Valenzuela (edd.), Hispanic Linguistics at the Crossroads: Theoretical Linguistics, Language Acquisition and Language Contact, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 25–48. Hernanz Carbó, María L. (1999), El infinitivo, in: Ignacio Bosque/Violeta Demonte (edd.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, vol. 2, Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 2197–2356. Hornstein, Norbert/Martins, Ana Maria/Nunes, Jairo (2006), Infinitival complements of perception and causative verbs: a case study on agreement and intervention effects in English and European Portuguese, University of Maryland Working Papers in Linguistics 14, 81–110. Hugo, Victor (1866), Toilers of the Sea, authorized English translation by W. Moy Thomas, vol. 2, London, Sampson Low, Son & Marston. Jones, Michael Allan (1992), Infinitives with specified subjects in Sardinian, in: Christiane Laeufer/ Terrell A. Morgan (edd.), Theoretical Analyses in Romance Linguistics. Selected Papers from the Nineteenth Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL XIX), The Ohio State University, 21–23 April 1989, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 295–309. Jones, Michael Allan (1993), Sardinian Syntax, London/New York, Routledge. Jones, Michael Allan (1996), Foundations of French Syntax, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kayne, Richard (1975), French Syntax: The Transformational Cycle, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Kayne, Richard (1981), On certain differences between French and English, Linguistic Inquiry 12, 349–371. Kayne, Richard (1984), Connectedness and Binary Branching, Dordrecht, Foris. Kayne, Richard (1991), Romance clitics, verb movement, and PRO, Linguistic Inquiry 22, 647–686. Koster, Jan (1987), Domains and Dynasties, Dordrecht, Foris. Labelle, Marie (1996), Remarques sur les verbes de perception et la sous-catégorisation, Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 25, 83–106. Landau, Idan (2013), Control in Generative Grammar: A Research Companion, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Lombard, Alf (1936), L’infinitif de narration dans les langues romanes. Études de syntaxe historique, Uppsala, Almqvist & Wiksell/Leipzig, Harassowitz. Loporcaro, Michele (1986), L’infinito coniugato nell’Italia centromeridionale: ipotesi genetica e ricostruzione storica, L’Italia Dialettale 49, 173–240. Madeira, Ana Maria (1994), On the Portuguese inflected infinitive, UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 6, 179–203. Manzini, M. Rita (2001), Il soggetto delle frasi argomentali all’infinito, in: Lorenzo Renzi/Giampaolo Salvi/Anna Cardinaletti (edd.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, new edition, vol. 2, Bologna, il Mulino, 485–497. Manzini, M. Rita/Roussou, Anna (2000), A minimalist theory of A-movement and control, Lingua 110, 409–447. Martins, Ana Maria/Nunes, Jairo (2006), Raising issues in Brazilian and European Portuguese, Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 4, 53–77. Maurer, Theodoro E. (1968), O infinito flexionado português – estudo histórico-descritivo, São Paulo, Ed. Nacional/Ed. da Univ. de São Paulo. Mensching, Guido (1998), Infinitivo con sujeto léxico en la historia de la lengua española, in: Claudio García Turza/Fabián González Bachiller/José Javier Mangado Martínez (edd.), Actas del IV Congreso Internacional de Historia de La Lengua Española, La Rioja, Universidad de La Rioja, 597–610. Mensching, Guido (1999), Infinitivkonstruktionen mit explizitem Subjekt im Katalanischen, in: HansIngo Radatz/Rolf Kailuweit (edd.), Katalanisch: Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachkultur, Frankfurt, Vervuert, 191–217.

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Mensching, Guido (2000), Infinitive Constructions with Specified Subjects: A Syntactic Analysis of the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Mensching, Guido/Popovici, Victoria (1997), Constructions infinitives à sujet explicite en roumain, Studii şi cercetări lingvistice 48, 219–243. Moore, John C. (2014), Reduced Constructions in Spanish, London/New York, Routledge. Motapanyane, Virginia (1989), La position du sujet dans une langue à l’ordre SVO/VSO, Rivista di grammatica generativa 14, 75–103. Pollock, Jean-Yves (1989), Verb movement, Universal Grammar, and the structure of IP, Linguistic Inquiry 20, 365–424. Raposo, Eduardo (1987), Case theory and Infl-to-Comp: the inflected infinitive in European Portuguese, Linguistic Inquiry 18, 85–109. 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. Ronat, Mitsou (1979), Pronoms topiques et pronoms distinctifs, Langue française 44, 106–128. Rooryck, Johan (1988), Montée et contrôle: une nouvelle analyse, Le français moderne 58, 1–28. Rooryck, Johan (2000), Configurations of Sentential Complementation: Perspectives from Romance Languages, London/New York, Routledge. Rowlett, Paul (2007), The Syntax of French, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Salvi, Giampaolo (2001), Tipi di frasi principali. Il tipo dichiarativo. L’infinito, in: Lorenzo Renzi/ Giampaolo Salvi/Anna Cardinaletti (edd.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, new edition, vol. 3, Bologna, il Mulino, 53–55. Salvi, Giampaolo/Skytte, Gunver (2001), Frasi subordinate all’infinito, in: Lorenzo Renzi/Giampaolo Salvi/Anna Cardinaletti (edd.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, new edition, vol. 2, Bologna, il Mulino, 483–485, 497–569. Sauzet, Patrick (1989), Topicalisation et prolepse en occitan, Revue des langues romanes 93, 235–273. Scida, Emily E. (2004), The Inflected Infinitive in Romance Languages, London/New York, Routledge. Sitaridou, Ioanna (2002), The Synchrony and Diachrony of Romance Infinitives with Nominative Subjects, University of Manchester, doctoral dissertation. Stechow, Arnim von/Sternefeld, Wolfgang (1988), Bausteine syntaktischen Wissens, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag. Williams, Edwin (1980), Predication, Linguistic Inquiry 15, 203–238. Wurmbrand, Susanne (2001), Infinitives: Restructuring and Clause Structure, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter.

Jan Lindschouw

11 Tense, aspect, mood Abstract: This chapter reviews the most typical uses of tense, aspect and mood in Romance languages. Our discussion will concentrate on French, Italian and Spanish since these languages can be considered to form a continuum with French being the most innovative and Spanish the most conservative language in relation to their common source, Latin. The main focus is on regularities across the Romance languages, but important variations are also discussed. The chapter is divided into four parts. The first part deals with the tense system with special emphasis on the analytic and synthetic future and past forms and their relationship. The second part focuses on the aspectual opposition between the imperfect and the preterite and their interaction with lexical aspect (Aktionsart). The third part considers different mood forms, especially the opposition between the indicative and the subjunctive and their uses in different types of subordinate clauses. The last part discusses the use of tense and mood in reported speech (the so-called consecutio temporum).  

Keywords: tense, analytic forms, synthetic forms, aspect, lexical aspect, mood, (non-) assertion, temporal/modal use of the conditional, reported speech, continuum of development  

1 Introduction This chapter treats the complex area of tense, aspect and mood choices in Romance languages. General trends will be exemplified in French, Spanish and Italian throughout the chapter; the remaining Romance languages will be referred to only when important divergences appear. Comments on variation between dialects and registers of these languages will also be mentioned where relevant. It has generally been acknowledged that Romance languages form a continuum between more conservative, and normally “less grammaticalised”, languages and more innovative and normally “more grammaticalised” languages when compared to their common source, Latin; see Table 1, where the languages on the left side are more conservative and those on the right more innovative (Loengarov 2006, 23):1

1 It should be mentioned that there exists another (and rather old) classification of Romance languages with respect to their geographical position in Europe: languages situated at the center are more innovative than those situated at the periphery. This classification, especially based on studies of the lexicon (Bartoli 1925; 1945), will however not be dealt with in this contribution. DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-011

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Table 1: Continuum of development within the Romance languages Sardinian

Portuguese

Spanish

Catalan

Italian

French

Rhaeto-Romance

According to this table, French is one of the more innovative Romance languages, Spanish one of the more conservative (together with Sardinian and Portuguese), while Italian occupies an intermediate position.2 This distribution has been established on the basis of studies at different levels of analysis, for instance on the phonological level (Delattre 1966) and the morphosyntactic level with respect to the partitive article (Lamiroy 1993), prepositions (Lamiroy 2001), auxiliaries (Lamiroy 1994; 1999) and the so-called non-lexical dative (Lamiroy 2003, 419–422). In addition, the continuum is based on studies of the finite verb system, which is relevant to the tense-aspect-mood system. Squartini/Bertinetto (2000) speak of an aoristic drift of the compound, i.e. analytic, perfect, which is more advanced in innovative than in conservative Romance languages. The analytic perfect has almost entirely replaced the synthetic perfect in Modern French, at least in spoken and informal written French, while in Modern Spanish the two forms are employed for different purposes, the synthetic perfect being used for remote past events and the analytic perfect for present relevance. However, in some Spanish varieties, especially in Alicante and Madrid, a similar aoristic drift is beginning to appear (see Schwenter 1994 and Schwenter/Torres Cacoullos 2008). In Modern Italian, an intermediate case can – roughly speaking – be observed, because the two forms, at least in southern Italian dialects, are used to designate different past events as in Spanish, but at the same time the analytic perfect is gradually replacing the synthetic perfect when referring to remote past events, at least in northern Italian spoken dialects (see Section 2.2). As to the mood system, the studies by Boysen (1966), Harris (1974) and Loengarov (2006) also confirm the continuum shown in Table 1. Harris (1974) demonstrated that the subjunctive called potential, which existed only in main clauses in Latin to indicate reservation and uncertainty, has been replaced in Modern French by the conditional belonging to the indicative paradigm. In Modern Spanish, on the other hand, Harris observed that the conditional still alternates to some extent with the potential subjunctive as in Old French. Furthermore, on the basis of a large text corpus, Loengarov (2006, 183–338) studied the alternation between the indicative and the subjunctive mood in complement clauses embedded under a predicate of opinion, volition and communication in French, Spanish, Italian and Romanian. He observed two opposite tendencies in these languages: either the  

2 Romanian has not been included in this continuum since – to our knowledge – few systematic studies of the Romanian system compared to the other Romance languages have been conducted. As stated by Loengarov (2006, 338), Romanian has traditionally been le parent pauvre ‘the poor relation’ when it comes to systematic linguistic studies of this language. See, however, the contributions to Pană Dindelegan (2013), and references cited therein.

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alternation indicative/subjunctive is semantically-pragmatically motivated or the modal alternation shows a tendency to disappear or is not triggered by a semantic/ pragmatic principle. According to Loengarov, the degree to which these tendencies are present in the observed languages is in accordance with the proposed continuum. Modern Spanish is the Romance language that most frequently exploits the semanticpragmatic potential offered by the mood system, whereas Modern French uses it least frequently. Italian occupies an intermediate position (see Section 4.2). However, the proposed continuum of Romance languages is not entirely convincing and has given rise to criticism. Loengarov (2006, 23) himself states that the system is too general and that the place attributed to a language on the continuum is highly dependent on the language phenomenon taken into consideration. For instance, as far as the use of auxiliaries in compound tenses is concerned, Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese are much more innovative than Italian and French. In fact, French and Italian have two auxiliaries être/essere ‘to be’ and avoir/avere ‘to have’, while Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese have only one auxiliary (haber, haver and ter ‘to have’). In Old Spanish, two auxiliaries haber and ser ‘to be’ coexisted, but ser has gradually been superseded by haber as auxiliary (Lamiroy 1999, 33–34; Rosemeyer 2014). A similar development seems to have taken place in Catalan (Loengarov 2006, 24) and in Portuguese (Mattoso Câmara 41985, 168; see also Squartini/Bertinetto 2000, 428; ↗7 Auxiliaries). The distribution of the two forms of the future system in Romance languages is another weakness of the proposed continuum. In French and Spanish, the two future tenses, the analytic and the synthetic future, have the same semantic distribution: the analytic future expresses two semantic values, a future action linked to the moment of utterance and a future action with no connection to the moment of utterance. By contrast, the synthetic future has a single value only, a future action with no connection to the moment of utterance. Furthermore, they seem to have undergone the same linguistic development at more or less the same rate (Aaron 2006; Lindschouw 2011b; 2012) (see Section 2.1). In spite of these important limitations, the continuum has its clear advantages. One could argue that language comparisons constitute a means of verifying changes that have occurred in genetically related languages. If a change in language x is also observed at an earlier stage of language y, there is a great probability that the observed changes have not occurred accidentally, but are due to a general evolutionary tendency common to both languages. Another advantage of this approach is that it enables the linguist to predict future changes in the more conservative languages. Finally, it offers the researcher a holistic overview which enables us to better understand differences and similarities between the Romance languages with respect to their common source, Latin. As a consequence of the fact that French can to a large extent be considered more innovative than Italian and Spanish, reference will sometimes be made to Old French in cases where Modern French differs considerably from Modern Italian and Spanish, but where Old French corresponds to stages observed in Modern Italian and/or

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Spanish. Since this article primarily adopts a synchronic perspective, no systematic reference will be made, however, to Old Spanish and Italian, even though important work has been conducted within these fields (see for instance Company Company 2006; 2009; 2014 for diachronic data on Spanish, and Salvi/Renzi 2010 for diachronic data on Italian). The first part of this chapter deals with the tense system of Romance languages. In this section, special attention will be devoted to the synthetic and analytic future tense categories (which are not equally distributed across the Romance languages), though topics such as simple and compound past tense categories, pluperfect, past anterior and analytic pluperfect categories will also be considered. In the second part, an outline of aspectual distinctions will be provided before the complex interplay between these distinctions and lexical aspect, the so-called Aktionsart, is addressed. The third section is devoted to the mood system, more specifically to the use of the subjunctive and conditional forms. Special attention will be paid to different lexical and grammatical triggers of the subjunctive mood in Romance languages in the different types of clauses in which the subjunctive mood appears, i.e. nominal, relative and adverbial clauses. In the last section, the use of tense and mood in reported speech, more specifically the use of the consecutio temporum, will be discussed.  

2 Tense in Romance languages To give a complete overview of the tense system in the Romance languages would be an almost insurmountable task. This section will focus primarily on the relation between synthetic and analytic future tense categories, which reveal interesting similarities and differences across the Romance languages. Section 2.1 will be devoted to the synthetic and analytic future tense categories, while Section 2.2 will treat the interplay between simple (synthetic) and compound (analytic) past tense categories. Finally, Section 2.3 will deal with past tense categories such as the pluperfect, the past anterior and the analytic pluperfect, i.e. surcomposé categories.3  

3 Throughout this article, reference will be made to foreign language standard reference grammars of French, Spanish and Italian, especially in order to provide illustrative examples. This is for practical reasons, because these grammars follow to a large extent the same structure and are based on the same organisational principles (Butt/Benjamin 1994 and Maiden/Robustelli 2000 are even published in the same book series), which easily allows for comparisons between the Romance languages. We are perfectly aware that there are numerous normative and descriptive grammars for each Romance language, for instance Grevisse (162016) for French, Bosque/Demonte (1999), RAE/ASALE (2009) for Spanish and Salvi/Vanelli (1992) for Italian. Reference will sometimes be made to several of these grammars throughout the article, especially to Salvi/Vanelli (1992) and to relevant chapters in Bosque/ Demonte (1999).

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2.1 Synthetic and analytic future tenses The majority of Romance languages have two future tense categories, a synthetic and an analytic future. The synthetic form consists of the infinitive and reduced endings of the verb to have inflected in the present indicative: Fr. je parlerai (< parler + ai), Sp. hablaré (< hablar + é), It. parlerò (< parlare + ò) ‘I will speak’. According to Fleischman (1982, 52), the fusion of the two linguistic elements took place in Vulgar Latin. The analytic form is composed of an auxiliary verb in the present tense signifying ‘to go’ and the infinitive of the main verb: Fr. je vais parler, Sp. voy a hablar, It. vado a parlare ‘I am going to speak’. The difference between these tenses has generally been described as being connected with the moment of the speaker’s utterance. While the analytic future establishes a close link between the future action and the moment of utterance, the synthetic future indicates an action in the future which is not linked to the moment of utterance (Fleischman 1982, 87; Togeby 1982, 396; Schrott 1997, 26–40; 2001, 160; Confais 2002; Lindschouw 2011b). This semantic opposition is illustrated in examples (1)–(6), where the future adverb Fr. un jour/Sp. un día/It. un giorno ‘one day’ in (1)–(3) clearly localizes the action in the future, whereas the future action is motivated by the moment of utterance in (4)–(6): examples (4)–(5) can only be uttered in a context where the woman referred to is actually pregnant, and example (6), taken from an Italian oral text corpus, refers to a forthcoming party: (1)

Fr.

Un jour, Laure aura un enfant. ‘One day Laure will have a baby.’4

(2)

Sp.

Un día, Laura tendrá un hijo. ‘One day Laura will have a baby.’

(3) It.

Un giorno, Laura avrà un bambino. ‘One day Laura will have a baby.’

(4) Fr.

Tu as appris la nouvelle? Laure va avoir un enfant. ‘Have you heard the news? Laure is going to have a baby.’

(5) Sp.

¿Te has enterado de la noticia? Laura va a tener un niño. ‘Have you heard the news? Laura is going to have a baby.’

4 Examples in this chapter are either invented or taken from reference grammars or research articles. In the latter case, a reference is provided for each example.

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Bastava ricordarsi che / la festa comincia a mezzogiorno / ma va a finire la notte […]. (C-ORAL-ROM, ifammn03; Hansen/Strudsholm 2006, 212) ‘It is sufficient to remember that the party begins at midday, but will continue until the night.’

A number of formal markers help identify the values of the two future tenses. For instance, adverbs of futurity, as in (1)–(3), clearly show that the future action is not linked to the moment of utterance, but is assumed to take place at some point in the future. In contrast, formal markers of “close futurity” could be adverbs or adverbial expressions of the present (e.g. maintenant ‘now’, ce soir5 ‘tonight’), demonstratives, imperatives and locative adverbs of proximity (for instance French ici ‘here’) (cf. Lindschouw 2011b, 65–70). The future system of the Romance languages has undergone important changes since the Middle Ages. In French, the synthetic future has been attested since the first written text in French, Les Serments de Strasbourg, from 842; until the eighteenth century it was the dominant future tense with a double semantic value: a future action linked to the moment of utterance and a future action disconnected from the moment of utterance. The first attested occurrences of the French analytic construction date back to the fifteenth century, where it was used for future actions linked to the moment of utterance, but it was not until the eighteenth century that it really began to compete with the synthetic future. In Modern French, the analytic future has replaced parts of the notional domain of the synthetic future. Although the synthetic future was used with two distinct semantic values in Middle French, it is primarily used with a single value in Modern French: a future action with no link to the moment of utterance. By contrast, the analytic future has increased its notional domain passing from a single value in the fifteenth century to two values in Modern French (a future action linked to the moment of utterance and a future action disconnected from this point) (cf. Lindschouw 2011b; 2012). The evolution of the Spanish future system is very similar to the development of its French counterpart. According to Lyons (1978, 227), the synthetic future was already attested in the first vernacular text, the Glosas Emilianenses from the eleventh century, but the analytic future did not appear in Spanish until the end of the Middle Ages and did not increase in frequency until the nineteenth century (cf. Aaron 2006, 124 and 136–137). Thus, the dissemination of the analytic future in Spanish appears to have taken place much later than that in French. However, Aaron (2006) shows that

5 Fr. ce soir and its equivalent forms (cet après-midi ‘this afternoon’, cette nuit ‘this night’, etc.) can be considered an adverbial expression of the present because of the presence of the deictic determiner ce, which establishes a link to the time of utterance.

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the same evolution as the one observed in French affects the future system of Spanish, because historically the synthetic future is being superseded by the analytic future. The situation in Italian is interesting compared to the other two Romance languages, because it is debatable whether Italian actually possesses an analytic future tense. Maiden/Robustelli (2000, 290) mention that andare a + infinitive only indicates actual motion (7), but an interpretation of (close) futurity would be “practically nonsense”: (7) It.

Vado a comprare il giornale. ‘I’m on my way to buy a paper.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 290)

However, Bazzanella (1994, 109) observes that the use of andare a ‘to go to’ + infinitive to indicate futurity is on the increase in Modern Italian, especially in the oral medium. Strudsholm (2005, 277–279) and Hansen/Strudsholm (2006, 197) have documented that andare a + infinitive was grammaticalised as a periphrasis of temporality as early as the thirteenth century. However, the synthetic future, as in other Romance languages, is attested in texts dating back to the Middle Ages. According to Rohlfs (1969), this form was introduced in Central and Northern Italy (see also Squartini 2003, 325 for attestations of the synthetic future in Old Italian). Many synchronic and diachronic grammars do not even mention the analytic future in Italian, but only devote space to the synthetic future (Soave 1805, 49–50; Rohlfs 1969, 52–54 and 331–338; Bertinetto 1986; Salvi/Vanelli 1992; Squartini 2001; 2003). Even though certain grammars accept the existence of an analytic future tense in Italian, especially in oral varieties, it should be mentioned that its frequency is very limited.6 As in many other languages, the Italian present tense very often expresses future actions (8), and it even seems that this is the neutral marker of futurity, at least when preceded or followed by an adverbial expression of futurity. This is not a purely Italian phenomenon, but is also widely attested in other Romance languages, for instance French (9) and Spanish (10):7 (8) It.

Poi, quando se n’è andato, gli si possono fare gli sberleffi dietro. ‘Then, when he’s gone, we’ll be able to make faces at him behind his back.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 288)

6 In a comparative study on the use of future tense forms in French and Italian, Hansen/Strudsholm (2006, 202) show that the periphrasis andare a + infinitive to express futurity is found only in 1.2% of the occurrences, while the synthetic future is used in 25.1% and the present tense in 73.7%. 7 This analysis holds for all Romance languages that possess a morphological marker of futurity. However, in an interlinguistic perspective, it would be more appropriate to define the present tense as the neutral marker of non-past, since many languages do not have a morphological marker of futurity (see Dahl 1985).

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(9) Fr.

Un jour pourtant le hasard l’amène à se risquer dehors sans ses cothurnes. (Tournier, Le Vent Paraclet 1977, 185; FRANTEXT) ‘One day however fate will lead him to venture outside without his buskins.’

(10) Sp.

Vamos a España el año que viene. ‘We’re going to Spain next year.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 218)

The Romance languages also possess another analytic future often referred to as the future perfect or the compound future. This form consists of an auxiliary verb (‘to have’ or ‘to be’) in the simple (synthetic) future and the past participle of the main verb. This form expresses a point in time later than the present but before some reference point in the future: (11) It.

Avremo raccolto tutti i dati fra qualche ora. ‘We will have gathered all the data in a few hours’ time.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 286)

(12) Sp.

Vendrá a las cinco. Entonces habré comido. ‘He will come at five o’clock. Then I will have eaten.’ (Jensen 1990, 100)

(13) Fr.

Marie est en train de manger un pamplemousse. Je crois qu’elle l’aura terminé avant notre départ. ‘Marie is eating a grapefruit. I think she will have finished it before our departure.’

So far, only pure temporal uses of future tenses have been considered, but it should be mentioned that future tenses can also be used for modal purposes. In these cases, they do not refer to a reference point in the future, but rather to the present (synthetic future) or the recent past (perfect or compound future). When used modally, future tenses can be used for commands (cf. (14)–(15)) and suppositions (cf. (16)–(17)): (14) Sp.

No matarás. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 218)

(15) Fr.

Si Monsieur Blasselle téléphone, vous lui direz qu’il me rappelle. ‘If Mr Blasselle calls, please ask him to call me back.’

(16) It.

Saranno le otto. ‘It’s probably 8 o’clock.’

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(17) Fr.

405

C’est fade. Le cuisinier aura oublié de saler. ‘It’s tasteless. The cook must have forgotten to add salt.’

2.2 Simple and compound past tenses The Romance languages in principle have three ways of expressing events pertaining to the past: the imperfect (Fr. je parlais, Sp. hablaba, It. parlavo ‘I spoke’) (18), the preterite (Fr. je parlai , Sp. hablé, It. parlai ‘I spoke’) (19) and the perfect (Fr. j’ai parlé, Sp. he hablado, It. ho parlato ‘I have spoken’) (20), the first two being non-compound (or synthetic) and the last one compound (or analytic): (18) Fr.

Pierre jouait au foot tous les jeudis. ‘Pierre played football every Thursday.’

(19) Fr.

Pierre rencontra Pauline la semaine passée. ‘Pierre met Pauline last week.’

(20) Fr.

Pierre a rencontré Pauline hier. ‘Pierre met Pauline yesterday.’

The alternation between the two synthetic past forms, the imperfect and the preterite, is normally considered an aspectual alternation, referring to the internal lapse of time on the past axis, i.e. whether the past event is considered completed or ongoing. This opposition will be dealt with in Section 3 on aspectual distinctions. The present section will focus primarily on the alternation between the preterite (19) and the perfect (20), which are not equally distributed across the Romance languages, dialects and registers in spite of their formal similarities. Generally speaking, the alternation between these two forms can be considered the mirror image of the one existing between the analytic and the synthetic future, in that the perfect is in principle used for past events linked to the moment of utterance (just like the analytic future on the future axis) whereas the preterite is used for past events not related to the moment of utterance (just like the synthetic future on the future axis). This value is often referred to as an aoristic value (Comrie 1976, 62). In order to bring out the referential similarity with the future axis, in the rest of this paper the perfect will be referred to as the analytic past tense and the preterite as the synthetic past tense. The definition of the two past tenses applies to the situation in French, where the deictic temporal adverb hier ‘yesterday’ in (20) creates a link between the analytic past tense (the passé composé) and the moment of utterance, because the encounter with Pauline is still felt as relevant with respect to the speaker’s present time. By contrast, the synthetic past tense (the passé simple) does not establish such a psychological link between the past and the present, which is confirmed by the presence of the  

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adverb la semaine passée ‘last week’ in (19). However, this is a rather simplified description, since in Modern French, the analytic past is very often used analogously with the synthetic past, i.e. to designate past events with no connection to the moment of utterance as in (21). In oral varieties and in informal written texts, this is almost always the case, while in formal written texts the semantic opposition between the two forms is maintained. It can therefore be concluded that the synthetic past in French, in addition to its temporal value, is a stylistic marker of formality (cf. Söll 1974):  

(21) Fr.

Pierre a rencontré Pauline la semaine passée. ‘Pierre met Pauline last week.’

The distributional difference between the two past tenses in French is the result of the development of the past system in French (cf. Lindschouw 2013). In the sixteenth century, the distribution of the two past tenses resembled the situation illustrated in (19) and (20): the analytic past was used to designate past events linked to the moment of utterance, whereas the synthetic past was especially used for past events with no connection to this point of reference. However, this distribution did not remain stable. In the eighteenth century, the analytic past began to supersede the notional domain of the synthetic past in that this form was now also capable of expressing past events that were not linked to the moment of utterance (Caron/Liu 1999; Lindschouw 2013, 106). This tendency was reinforced in Modern French to the extent that the analytic past is today considered the neutral marker of the past as it can be used for past actions that are both linked and not linked to the moment of utterance, whereas the synthetic past can be used only for past events with no connection to the moment of utterance. At the same time, the synthetic past has become restricted to literary and argumentative text genres, while the analytic past is used in a wide range of text genres, oral as well as written, formal as well as informal (cf. Lindschouw 2013, 109–112). The distribution of the analytic and the synthetic past confirms the continuum of development shown in Table 1, as French in this respect can be considered the most innovative language, Spanish the most conservative, while Italian is placed between the two. In fact, the situation in Modern Spanish to a large degree resembles that of French in the sixteenth century. The Spanish analytic past (the perfecto) is generally used for events whose effects are still relevant to the present, as in (22), whereas the synthetic past (the pretérito) is used for past events with no connection to the present, as in (23) (cf. Butt/Benjamin 1994, 211 and 223–224): (22) Sp.

Alguien ha fumado un cigarillo aquí. Huelo el humo. ‘Someone’s smoked a cigarette here. I can smell the smoke.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 224)

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Primero fui carpintero, después fui taxista, y después fui domador de leones. ‘First I was a carpenter, then I was a taxi driver and then I was a lion tamer.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 211)

It should however be mentioned that in Latin American Spanish, all completed actions, whether they are linked or not to the moment of utterance, tend to be expressed by the synthetic past, more so in some regions than others. According to Butt/Benjamin (1994, 225), this solution is especially favoured in informal styles: (24) AmSp.

¿Todavía no llegó tu padre? ‘Hasn’t your father come yet? (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 225)

Italian can be said to be in between French and Spanish with respect to the distribution of the synthetic and analytic past forms. There is a clear geographical distribution between these two forms. In northern Italian dialects, the situation to a large extent resembles that of Modern French, because the analytic past (the passato prossimo) has replaced the synthetic past (the passato remoto) in contexts where no link is established between the moment of utterance and the past, especially in spoken varieties. By contrast, in dialects of the extreme south, the situation resembles that of Latin American Spanish, with extensive use of the synthetic past. A difference in the use of the two forms still exists in spoken Tuscan and in most dialects of Central and Southern Italy, as well as in literary and journalistic texts and high-register spoken Italian (cf. Salvi/Vanelli 1992, 57–58; Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 299). In these cases, the analytic past indicates an action that is still relevant to the present (25), as opposed to the synthetic past (26): (25) It.

Stamattina i ragazzi hanno marinato la scuola per andare al mare. ‘This morning the boys played truant to go to the seaside.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 300)

(26) It.

Guidò per due ore e poi fece una pausa. ‘He drove for two hours and then had a break.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 295)

Finally, it should be mentioned that several Romance languages also possess periphrastic constructions which indicate past actions directly linked to the moment of utterance. The most frequent case is the French periphrasis venir de + infinitive (27) and its Spanish equivalent acabar de + infinitive (28), often referred to as the recent past when the main verb is used in the present tense:

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(27) Fr.

Je ne vais pas au supermarché avec toi: je viens de faire les courses. ‘I will not go to the supermarket with you. I have just done my shopping.’

(28) Sp.

No voy al supermercado contigo. Acabo de hacer las compras. ‘I will not go to the supermarket with you. I have just done my shopping.’

Recent past forms are in principle semantically identical to the analytic past but are always used for events which have recently been completed with respect to the present. This value can be explained in terms of the semantic components of the verbal periphrasis (Fr. venir de signifies ‘come from’ and Sp. acabar ‘finish, accomplish’). These periphrastic constructions can also be used for an event situated at a point in time prior to some reference point in the past, thus as a variant of the pluperfect, when the auxiliary verb occurs in a past tense (see Section 2.3 and ↗7 Auxiliaries).

2.3 Pluperfect, past anterior and analytic pluperfect tenses The Romance languages possess a number of analytic verbal forms which express the occurrence of an event at a point in time prior to some reference point in the past. In all Romance languages the pluperfect is by far the unmarked form (29)–(31) and consists of an auxiliary verb (equivalent to to have and/or to be) in the imperfect tense and the past participle of the main verb (Fr. j’avais parlé, Sp. había hablado, It. avevo parlato ‘I had spoken’): (29) Fr.

Pierre se rappelait le jour où il était tombé amoureux pour la première fois. ‘Pierre remembered the day when he fell in love for the first time.’

(30) Sp.

Sabíamos que ya había vendido el coche. ‘We knew that he had already sold the car.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 227)

(31) It.

Maria ha ritrovato le chiavi che aveva perso. ‘Maria has found the keys which she had lost.’

Frequently, the reference point according to which the pluperfect is situated is marked by a simple (synthetic) past form, in (29)–(30) by the imperfect.

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In addition, the Romance languages possess different stylistic and marked variants to express an event that preceded some past event. Above all, the past anterior should be mentioned. Like the pluperfect, it is an analytic form consisting of an auxiliary verb in the preterite followed by the past participle (Fr. j’eus parlé, Sp. hube hablado, It. ebbi parlato ‘I had spoken’): (32) Fr.

Dès que Marie l’eut appelé, elle se soulagea. ‘As soon as Marie had called him, she felt better.’

(33) Sp.

Se marchó apenas hubo comido. ‘He left as soon as he had eaten.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 228)

(34) It.

Appena lo ebbe riconosciuto, andò ad abbracciarlo. ‘As soon as s/he had recognized him, s/he went to embrace him.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 294)

This tense is a perfective pluperfect and expresses an event completed just before a following past event, as in (32)–(34). As all examples show, it is very often used in temporal clauses (dès que in (32), apenas in (33) and appena in (34), all corresponding to as soon as in English). Since the auxiliary verb of the subordinate clause is in the preterite, the verb in the main clause is very often also in the preterite to mark the reference point according to which the past anterior is situated (Fr. se soulagea ‘felt better’, Sp. se marchó ‘left’ and It. andò ‘went’). However, this form – especially in French – can also be used in main clauses in order to designate a past action that was quickly accomplished. In this case, the past anterior is not combined with the preterite, but is used as the only verb of the utterance: (35) Fr.

Elle eut vite dépensé sa fortune. ‘She had quickly spent her fortune.’

The past anterior is a highly marked tense in the Romance languages and is confined to literary and other formal text genres, but is extremely rare in speech (cf. Salvi/ Vanelli 1992, 58; Cartagena 1999, 2951; Mosegaard Hansen 1999a, 48; Rodríguez Molina/Octavio de Toledo 2008). French has an equivalent to the past anterior, called le passé surcomposé ‘the overcompound past’, consisting of an auxiliary verb in the analytic past (the passé composé) and the past participle of the main verb (j’ai eu parlé, lit. ‘I have had spoken’). According to Melchior (2012, 67–68), this form also exists in other Romance languages, especially in several Italian dialects as well as in Occitan and Catalan. This form is generally used in the same syntactic environments and with the same semantic constraints as the past anterior:

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(36) Fr.

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Dès que j’ai eu traversé la rue, je lui ai dit merci. ‘As soon as I had crossed the road, I thanked him.’

As shown in examples (32)–(34), a morphological parallel exists between the past anterior used in the temporal clause and the preterite in the main clause. A similar parallel can be observed in the case of the passé surcomposé, because this form is very often used in combination with the passé composé in the main clause, as can be seen in (36). Whereas the use of the past anterior is confined to formal text genres and styles, the use of the passé surcomposé is restricted to informal text genres and styles, in the same way as the analytic past (the passé composé) has replaced the synthetic past (the passé simple) in oral varieties and informal text genres in French (see Section 2.2 above). According to Borel (2017, 198), the first occurrences of the passé surcomposé in French can be found in the twelfth century. In Modern French, this form has two different uses: a general use, where it replaces the past anterior in informal text genres, and a regional use, which can be observed in the south-eastern part of France, especially in the regional French of the Franco-Provençal linguistic area. The general use is confined to the above-mentioned syntactic environments, contrary to the regional use whose semantic and syntactic domain is much more widespread: (37) Fr.

[…] moi j’ai eu cassé les clopes de mes parents. ‘[…] I have had destroyed all my parents’s smokes.’ (Interview, cited in Borel 2017, 191)

Last but not least, it should be mentioned that in several Romance languages, periphrastic constructions can also be used to express the occurrence of an event at a point in time prior to some reference point in the past. The French and Spanish periphrasis venir de + infinitive and acabar de + infinitive, when combined with the auxiliary verb in a past tense (typically the imperfect tense), can be used in this way: (38) Fr.

Pierre venait de faire les courses, quand sa femme l’appela. ‘Pierre had just done his shopping when his wife called him.’

(39) Sp.

Pedro acabó/acababa de hacer las compras, cuando su mujer lo llamó. ‘Pedro had just done his shopping when his wife called him.’

3 Aspect in Romance languages The preceding section dealt with temporal differences on the past and the future axis with respect to the moment of utterance. This section will concentrate exclusively on the past, but from an aspectual perspective. As shown in Section 2.2, Romance

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languages have three ways of expressing events pertaining to the past: the imperfect (Fr. je parlais, Sp. hablaba, It. parlavo ‘I spoke’), the preterite (Fr. je parlai, Sp. hablé, It. parlai ‘I spoke’) and the perfect (Fr. j’ai parlé, Sp. he hablado, It. ho parlato ‘I have spoken’). In the vast majority of Romance languages, the difference between the imperfect and the preterite is not a temporal but an aspectual opposition, referring to the internal lapse of time on the past axis, i.e. whether the past event is considered completed or ongoing. In those languages and varieties where the perfect is used synonymously with the preterite (i.e. French and northern Italian), the former should also be regarded as an aspectual rather than a temporal form. Since the preterite cannot be used in this way in all Romance languages, we shall focus here on the alternation between the imperfect and the preterite. Like tense and mood, aspect is a morphological category in the Romance languages. However, aspect also exists as a lexical category, called Aktionsart, which interacts with the morphological category in a complex way. The interplay between these two categories will be discussed after the general tendencies of verbal aspect have been considered. Generally speaking, the aspectual past system is probably the domain within the finite verb system where most consistency is observed across the Romance languages. Broadly speaking, the principle underlying the difference between the preterite – or the aorist (Comrie 1976, 62) – and the imperfective is that the latter indicates an action or event in the past viewed without regard to its temporal limits. In other words, the action or event is considered “from within”, where it can be divided into phases, and the beginning and the conclusion of the event are not taken into consideration by the speaker or the writer. By contrast, the preterite views the past action or event “from the outside” as a completed and indivisible unit, focusing on its external, temporal limits (cf. Salvi/Vanelli 1992, 56–57; Butt/Benjamin 1994, 211–214; Mosegaard Hansen 1999b, 57; Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 295). As a consequence of these general values, the imperfect expresses durative and incomplete (imperfective) events in the past and establishes the background of an event by describing and characterising it; sometimes it indicates habitual or iterative events. In contrast, the preterite marks the perfective aspect by referring to actions or events which were completed in the past. Sometimes, however, the speaker or writer may choose to focus only on the starting point of the past event (inchoative, ingressive or inceptive use, cf. Comrie 1976, 19) (see Section 3.3) or its conclusion. Because of its ability to express completed events, the preterite can be considered the dynamic aspect, which very often indicates successive events and thereby brings about the action of a story, whereas the imperfect presents the circumstances of the situation, habits and states of long duration as in the following extract, where the preterite is abbreviated (p) and the imperfect (i):  



(40) Fr.

M. Dupont se leva (p) de bonne heure. Il fit (p) sa toilette, s’habilla (p) et prit (p) son petit déjeuner. Il écouta (p) les informations à la radio. Puis il mit (p) son manteau (– il faisait (i) très froid –) et il sortit (p). Les magasins s’ouvraient (i). Les voitures klaxonnaient (i) de partout. Le vent soufflait (i)

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dans les arbres. M. Dupont monta (p) dans l’autobus. D’habitude, il prenait (i) sa voiture, mais elle était (i) en panne ce jour-là. ‘Mr Dupont got up early. He washed, dressed and had breakfast. He listened to the news on the radio. Then he put on his coat (– it was very cold –) and he left. The stores were opening. Cars were honking everywhere. The wind blew in the trees. Mr Dupont got on the bus. Usually he took his car, but that day it had broken down.’ (Mosegaard Hansen 1999b, 65) It is worth noting that it is not the length of the event that determines the use of the preterite and the imperfective. The preterite can designate actions of very long duration (41) and the imperfect actions which only took a few seconds (42): (41) Sp.

Los dinosaurios reinaron sobre la tierra durante millones de años. ‘The dinosaurs reigned on Earth for millions of years.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 212)

(42) Fr.

Le terroriste fut pris de panique: la bombe explosait. ‘The terrorist was panic-stricken: the bomb exploded.’ (Mosegaard Hansen 1999b, 58)

The aspectual distinction in Romance languages is not subject to the same syntactic and lexical constraints as the mood system (see Section 4) and can appear more freely in both main and subordinate clauses. Therefore, it should be stressed that the choice of the imperfect vs the preterite is not dictated by the nature of the past event itself, but simply by the way the speaker or writer chooses to view that event. In principle, any past event can be expressed using either possibility, but the way in which the past event is perceived may differ. When the preterite is used, the speaker or writer indicates that the action was completed (43), as opposed to the imperfect (44): (43) Sp.

Tuve que hablar con ella. ‘I had to talk to her [and did].’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 216)

(44) Sp.

Tenía que hablar con ella. ‘I had to talk to her [and may or may not have done].’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 216)

However, there are certain semantic and lexical triggers in the Romance languages which to some extent determine which aspectual form should be used. In Section 3.1, the influence of adverbs and adverbial expressions on the aspectual choice is considered and in Section 3.2 the use of the imperfect and the preterite in subordinate

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clauses is discussed. It is worth mentioning that these triggers are used in accordance with the aspectual values of the two past forms, so they are not to be regarded as exceptions. The conventions can be broken if the context allows for it and the speaker or the writer does not want to focus on the default value.

3.1 Adverbs, adverbial expressions and aspectual choice Temporal adverbs and expressions are particularly interesting with regard to aspect, because tense and aspect are closely linked to each other. In fact, the preterite and the imperfect, apart from being aspectual forms, are also temporal forms. Thus temporal adverbs and adverbial expressions may have an affinity with certain aspectual categories. Their individual inherent semantics normally allows them to combine with one of the aspectual forms, but many temporal adverbs do not show any preference for one of the two forms. This section will only focus on those temporal adverbs and adverbial expressions that normally combine with one of the two aspectual forms.

3.1.1 Temporal adverbs and adverbial expressions normally combined with the imperfect Adverbs and adverbial expressions linked to the present time such as Fr. maintenant, Sp. ahora, It. adesso ‘now’ and Fr. aujourd’hui, Sp. hoy, It. oggi ‘today’, when used in a past context, have a preference for the imperfect aspect,8 since the present is fundamentally an imperfective tense like the imperfect (Mosegaard Hansen 1999b, 67): (45) Fr.

Maintenant, Paul rentrait. ‘Now Paul came back.’

(46) Sp.

Ahora, Pablo volvía de Roma. ‘Now Pablo came back from Rome.’

Adverbs and adverbial expressions designating ongoing actions also very often combine with the imperfect aspect when used for past events. Examples of such adverbs

8 Notice however that in Latin American Spanish adverbs like ahora and hoy can easily be combined with the preterite: Ahora ya vino Pedro ‘Now Pedro came’, Hoy se regresó Juan de Acapulco ‘Today Juan came back from Acapulco’.

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are Fr. déjà, Sp. ya, It. già ‘already’, Fr. encore, toujours, Sp. todavía, It. ancora ‘still’. This combination shows that the imperfect can be used to indicate a durative action: (47) Fr.

Paul mangeait déjà quand nous entrâmes. ‘Paul was already eating when we entered.’

(48) It.

Mentr’egli ancora parlava, entrò un altro e disse […] ‘While he was still speaking, another person came in and said […]’

Finally, adverbs and adverbial expressions of iterativity and indefinite repetition very often combine with the imperfect. This is in accordance with one of the other core values of this form, more precisely the habitual aspect mentioned above. Examples of such expressions are Fr. rarement, Sp. raramente ‘rarely’, Fr. souvent, Sp. a menudo, It. spesso ‘often’, Fr. de temps en temps, Sp. de vez en cuando, It. ogni tanto ‘from time to time’, Fr. trois fois par semaine, Sp. tres veces por semana, It. tre volte per settimana ‘three times a week’, etc.: (49) Fr.

Marc allait au centre de musculation trois fois par semaine. ‘Marc went to the gym three times a week.’

(50) Sp.

De cuando en cuando se asomaba y veía al niño inmóvil. ‘Now and then s/he appeared and saw the immobile child.’ (Jensen 2008, 161)

3.1.2 Temporal adverbs and adverbial expressions normally combined with the preterite Adverbs and adverbial expressions of limitation such as Fr. pendant deux heures ‘during two hours’, un instant ‘a moment’, toute la journée ‘the whole day’, Sp. dos años ‘two years’, en una hora ‘in one hour’, It. tutta la vita ‘the whole life’, per molti anni ‘for many years’, tra … e ‘from … to’, etc. tend to be used with the perfective aspect, because these indicate that the action has been completed: (51) Fr.

Marie lut le journal pendant une heure. ‘Marie read the newspaper for one hour.’

(52) Sp.

La ETA tuvo menos actividad durante el régimen de Franco que al instalarse la democracia. ‘ETA [Basque terrorist group] was less active during the Franco regime than when democracy was introduced.’ (Vargas Llosa; Butt/Benjamin 1994, 212)

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Elvira Sellerio amministrò la RAI tra il ’93 e il ’94. ‘Elvira Sellerio ran the RAI between ’93 and ’94.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 296)

Even though the imperfect aspect is generally favoured with adverbs and adverbial expressions of iterativity (see Section 3.1.1), the preterite is preferred if the expression indicates limited repetition such as Fr. trois fois/It. tre volte ‘three times’, Fr. plusieurs fois/Sp. repetidas veces ‘several times’, cinco veces ‘five times’, etc.: (54) Sp.

Los releí varias veces/cinco veces. ‘I read them several times/five times.’ (Jensen 2008, 161)

(55) It.

Il gallo cantò tre volte. ‘The cock crowed three times.’

3.1.3 Co-occurrence of temporal adverbs and adverbial expressions The above-mentioned cases can all be considered as ideal ones, in the sense that there is only one temporal adverb or adverbial expression in the utterance. However, more complex cases occur where two or more temporal adverbs and adverbial expressions of different types are combined. This creates a genuine conflict between them with respect to aspectual choice. It is not unusual for an iterative adverbial expression as tous les jours ‘every day’ in (56) and de joven ‘when he was young’ in (57), favouring the imperfect, to be combined with a limitative expression such as trois fois ‘three times’ in (56) and en una hora ‘in an hour’ in (57), favouring the preterite. It is always the most extensively used adverb and adverbial expression, i.e. the expression whose scope affects the other, that determines the aspectual choice. In (56) and (57), the iterative adverbial expressions prevail over the limitative expressions and thus favour the imperfect aspect. In (58), the opposite is the case. Here the scope of the limitative adverbial expression per molti anni ‘for many years’ affects the iterative expressions ogni giorno ‘every day’ and thus determines the use of the preterite prese ‘took’:  

(56) Fr.

Tous les jours, Marie promenait le chien trois fois. ‘Every day, Marie walked the dog three times.’

(57) Sp.

De joven, Juan corría 15 km en una hora. ‘When Juan was young, he could run 15 km in an hour.’ (Jensen 2008, 162)

(58) It.

Per molti anni Maria prese il treno ogni giorno per andare al lavoro. ‘For many years, Maria took the train every day to go to work.’

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3.2 Subordinate clauses and aspectual choice When the verb of the main clause is in a past tense, the default aspectual form of the subordinate clause is the imperfect, which establishes the background of an event as shown at the beginning of Section 3, even though the preterite is by no means impossible. This section will focus on aspectual choice in different types of subordinate clauses.

3.2.1 Complement clauses Complement clauses generally combine with the imperfect when the verb of the main clause is in the past. Such constructions normally express simultaneity between main and subordinate clause, which explains the use of the imperfect: (59) Fr.

Marianne se rendit compte que Pierre la trompait. ‘Marianne realized that Pierre was having an affair.’

(60) Sp.

María dijo que Juan planeaba un viaje a Cuba. ‘María said that Juan was planning a trip to Cuba.’ (Carrasco Gutiérrez 1999, 3078)

If the speaker or the writer stresses the completion of an event in the past, the preterite may be used, for instance after certain event-introducing impersonal constructions employed in the preterite. This is because both verbs describe the same punctual event: (61) Fr.

Il arriva qu’on lui vola trois melons. ‘It happened that three melons were stolen from him.’ (Pedersen/Spang-Hanssen/Vikner 1994, 348)

(62) It.

Succedè che si ammalò sua sorella. ‘It happened that his/her sister became ill.’

3.2.2 Relative clauses Relative clauses are frequently in the imperfect when the verb of the main clause is used in a past tense (↗22 Relative clauses). This is especially true of restrictive relative clauses: (63) Fr.

Elle aperçut le navire qui avançait lentement. ‘She saw the ship that moved slowly forward.’

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Yo tenía un coche que gastaba poco. ‘I had a car that was economical.’

However, restrictive relative clauses may be combined with the preterite if the nominal consisting of the antecedent and its relative clause designate a bounded temporal interval or refer to a temporally bounded state of affairs: (65) Fr.

La période qui suivit fut pour Rambert […] la plus difficile. ‘The period that followed was the most difficult for Rambert.’ (Camus; Pedersen/Spang-Hanssen/Vikner 1994, 349)

(66) Sp.

Le encantó la alegría con que le recibieron. ‘He was delighted with the pleasure with which they received him.’ (Jensen 1990, 53)

Since non-restrictive relative clauses are not subordinated in the traditional sense of the word, but are more similar to main clauses, they are not subject to the same aspectual restrictions. Consequently, they can easily be combined with the preterite if the speaker or the writer wants to present the event as having been accomplished: (67) Fr.

Il aperçut Mireille, qui lui sourit. ‘He saw Mireille, who [then] smiled at him.’

(68) It.

Chiamò un taxi, che poi arrivò. ‘S/he called a taxi, which then arrived.’

3.2.3 Adverbial clauses Aspectual choice in adverbial clauses is to a large extent determined by the semantic value of the clause. In temporal clauses, both the preterite and the imperfect can be used. In temporal clauses introduced by Fr. quand, lorsque/Sp. cuando/It. quando ‘when’, the preterite can be used, and if the imperfect is used in the main clause, the state of affairs referred to in the main clause constitutes the background against which the action in the preterite of the temporal clause is seen: (69) Fr.

Nous mangions, quand Pierre rentra. ‘We were eating when Pierre came home.’

(70) Sp.

Cuando Pedro volvió, estábamos comiendo. ‘When Pedro came home, we were eating.’

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If the imperfect is used after these temporal subordinators, it indicates habitual aspect and is normally combined with the imperfect in the main clause: (71) Fr.

Nous mangions, quand Pierre rentrait. ‘We were always eating when Pierre came home.’

(72) Sp.

Cuando Pedro volvía, estábamos comiendo. ‘When Pedro came home, we were always eating.’

After temporal subordinators such as Fr. comme, Sp. como, It. come, Fr. alors que, pendant que, tandis que, Sp. mientras (que), It. mentre ‘while, as’, the imperfect is the preferred aspectual form, since such subordinators present the event as ongoing and incomplete: (73) Fr.

Pierre restait sur le canapé, alors que Marie travaillait dur. ‘Pierre remained on the sofa, while Marie was working hard.’

(74) It.

Mentre guidava gli venne in mente un’idea. ‘As he drove an idea came to him.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 296)

Temporal subordinators such as Fr. dès que, aussitôt que, Sp. en cuanto, It. non appena ‘as soon as’, Fr. tant, Sp. en tanto, finché ‘as long as’ may be combined with both aspectual forms following the general tendencies. Thus the preterite is used for accomplished actions, while the imperfect is used to indicate iterativity: (75) Fr.

Dès que Marie le vit, elle se mit à sourire. ‘As soon as Marie saw him, she began to smile.’

(76) Sp.

En cuanto hacía sol, se ponían a jugar al fútbol en los parques. ‘As soon as the sun shone, they began to play football in the parks.’

Many instances of causal, comparative and concessive clauses arguably express background information.9 Therefore they are very often combined with the imperfect, and with subjunctive forms in concessive clauses. However, Spanish allows for variation between the indicative preterite and the indicative imperfect in concessive

9 Notice that at least causal clauses introduced by Fr. parce que, or its congeners in other Romance languages, do seem to be able to receive focus, cf. causal clauses under the scope of focus-bearing adverbs, cf. Fr. C’est seulement parce que … que ….

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clauses (78), which shows once again that French opts for syntactic and semantic specialisation, while Spanish accepts variation: (77) Fr.

Marc faisait beaucoup de sport, puisqu’il voulait être en bonne forme physique. ‘Marc did a lot of sport, since he wanted to be in good physical shape.’

(78) Sp.

Aunque sabía/supo que era imposible, Manolo lo intentó. ‘Even though Manolo knew it was impossible, he tried to do it.’

Consecutive clauses are often combined with the preterite if the main clause is also in the preterite. In such cases, two successive actions are mentioned, where the second one is the result of the first one: (79) Fr.

Pierre travailla si dur qu’il s’évanouit. ‘Pierre worked so hard that he fainted.’

(80) It.

Rise e parlò così forte che l’istruttore sentí e si avvicinò a noi. ‘S/he laughed and talked so loudly that the instructor heard it and approached us.’

3.3 Lexical aspect (Aktionsart) In the preceding sections, aspect was defined as a semantic category expressed through two distinct grammatical forms: the preterite and the imperfect, which indicate respectively the perfective and the imperfective aspect. Nevertheless, aspect is not only confined to morphological past categories but is also manifested in the lexical choice of the verb. This type of aspect is normally referred to as lexical aspect or Aktionsart. In principle, two types of lexical aspect can be identified: telic vs atelic aspect (cf. Comrie 1976, 44–48). Telic aspect indicates a situation which has a terminal point; cf. the etymology of the term telic, which is derived from Ancient Greek telos ‘goal’. In (82), the verb déménager ‘to move’ implies the idea of such a terminal point, because once this point has been reached, the situation has changed. In contrast, atelic aspect does not imply an idea of a terminal point that has to be reached. It refers to situations which can in principle last forever, as in (81), where the verb habiter ‘to live’ refers to an actual ongoing situation which may continue in the future: (81) Fr.

Pierre habite à Paris. ‘Pierre lives in Paris.’

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Pierre a déménagé sur Paris. ‘Pierre has moved to Paris.’

However, it is too simplified to consider Aktionsart a category restricted uniquely to lexical verbs. As stressed by Comrie (1976, 44–48), de Miguel (1999, 2985) and Mosegaard Hansen (1999b, 59–60), the whole verbal constellation, including complements, adverbs, negations, etc., has to be taken into consideration when the type of lexical aspect is to be defined. Example (83) indicates an atelic situation, since the verb fumar ‘to smoke’ used without an object does not imply the idea of a limit and will consequently be interpreted as habitual. In (84), however, the direct object consisting of a count noun used in the singular changes the lexical aspect into a clear telic situation, because the limit is reached when Pedro has finished smoking his cigarette. On the other hand, in (85) the plural form of the object turns the lexical aspect “back” into an atelic (and thus habitual) situation, because it is not specified whether the limit of smoking cigarettes will be reached: (83) Sp.

Pedro fuma. ‘Pedro smokes.’

(84) Sp.

Pedro fuma un cigarrillo. ‘Pedro is smoking a cigarette.’

(85) Sp.

Pedro fuma cigarrillos. ‘Pedro smokes cigarettes.’

While the verbal constellation (lexical aspect) designates a specific type of situation (telic vs atelic), verbal aspect considers this situation from a specific point of view (perfective vs imperfective). Very often, however, lexical and verbal aspect interact in such a way that telic verbal constellations are used with the preterite (86) and atelic verbal constellations with the imperfect (87): (86) Sp.

Pedro fumó un cigarillo. ‘Pedro smoked a cigarette.’

(87) Sp.

Pedro fumaba cigarrillos. ‘Pedro smoked cigarettes.’

As a consequence of the fact that the imperfect indicates ongoing actions, this form can be used in combination with an atelic verbal constellation to describe an action which took place and still continued in the past. This usage occurs especially in combination with temporal expressions such as Fr. depuis, Sp. desde hacía, It. da ‘since’, Fr. il y a, voici, voilà, cela fait ‘for’ + time specification:

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(88) Fr.

Pierre habitait à Paris depuis trois ans. ‘Pierre had lived in Paris for three years.’

(89) Sp.

Desde hacía tiempo veía que las cosas no funcionaban bien en algunos ayuntamientos. ‘For some time I had been realizing that things were not functioning well in some town councils.’ (Jensen 2008, 159)

(90) It.

Luigi cantava allora da tre ore. ‘Luigi had been singing at that point for three hours.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 292)

In combination with a telic verbal constellation, the pluperfect is normally used instead of the imperfect after such adverbial expressions, since these actions cannot continue: (91) Fr.

Pierre et Marie ne s’étaient pas vus depuis trois ans. ‘Pierre and Marie had not seen each other for three years.’

(92) Sp.

Sus padres habían muerto hacía diez años. ‘His parents had died ten years earlier.’ (Jensen 2008, 159)

(93) It.

Anche Mike, che aveva perso suo padre da poco quando ci innamorammo, continuava a ripetermi che mi mandava Dio per colmare quel vuoto. ‘Mike too, who had lost his father only recently when we fell in love, was always telling me that God sent me to fill the void.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 292)

On the present axis, the present tense can be used in a similar fashion to the imperfect in combination with atelic verbal constellations after the above-mentioned temporal expressions, while the analytic past (the perfect) is preferred in combination with telic verbal constellations. This supports the semantic affinity between the present and the imperfect. However, lexical and verbal aspect need not necessarily be combined. Thus, atelic verbal constellations may be combined with the preterite if the speaker wishes to underline that the action was completed in the past (94). Similarly, telic verbal constellations may be combined with the imperfect if the speaker insists on the duration of the action in the past (95):

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(94) Sp.

Ayer, Pedro fumó cigarrillos. ‘Yesterday, Pedro smoked cigarettes.’

(95) Sp.

Pedro fumaba un cigarrillo. ‘Pedro smoked a cigarette.’

When lexical aspect and verbal aspect are combined, specific meanings of verbal aspectual categories may sometimes emerge. When telic verbal constellations such as Fr. mourir, Sp. morir, It. morire ‘to die’, Fr. oublier, Sp. olvidar, It. dimenticare ‘to forget’, Fr. étouffer, Sp. ahogar, It. soffocare ‘to suffocate’ are used in the imperfect, they indicate an action which was about to happen, but never occurred. In French grammars, this use of the imperfect is often referred to as l’imparfait de conatu ‘tentative imperfect’ (cf. Togeby 1982, 326; Pedersen/Spang-Hanssen/Vikner 1994, 341): (96) Fr.

Pierre mourait de faim. ‘Pierre was nearly starving.’

(97) Sp.

Se ahogaba. Tuvo que salir. ‘S/he was nearly suffocating. S/he had to leave.’ (Jensen 2008, 154)

Telic verbal constellations and the imperfect are also sometimes combined, especially in newspapers, in order to produce a dramatically drawn-out effect of punctual events. This use is often referred to as the picturesque imperfect (Togeby 1982, 342; Pedersen/Spang-Hanssen/Vikner 1994, 342; Jensen 2008, 158) or narrative imperfect (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 298). Such usage achieves the effect of projecting the reader/hearer inside the past event, focusing on the unfolding of the event rather than on its completion: (98) Sp.

Un cuarto de hora después […] dos grapos asesinaban a un policía armado. ‘A quarter of an hour later two members of GRAPO murdered an armed policeman.’ (El País; Butt/Benjamin 1994, 215)

(99) It.

Il ragazzo affermava che lui e l’ex-fidanzata si vedevano anche dopo essersi lasciati. ‘The boy stated that he and his ex-girlfriend saw each other even after separating.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 298)

By contrast, when specific atelic verbal constellations such as Fr. avoir, Sp. tener, It. avere ‘to have’, Fr. être, Sp. ser, It. essere ‘to be’, Fr. savoir, Sp. saber, conocer, It.

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sapere ‘to know’ are combined with the preterite, the focus is directed towards the beginning of the event in the past. This usage is often referred to as inchoative, ingressive or inceptive (Comrie 1976, 19; Togeby 1982, 319; Pedersen/Spang-Hanssen/Vikner 1994, 342). Compare the difference in meaning between the preterite in (100) and (102) and the imperfect in (101) and (103): (100) Fr. En apprenant la nouvelle, elle fut triste. ‘When she heard the news, she became sad.’ (101) Fr. Comme petite elle était triste. ‘As a child, she was sad.’ (102) Sp. Tuve la impresión de que […] ‘I got the impression that […]’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 213) (103) Sp. Tenía la impresión de que […] ‘I had the impression that […]’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 213)

4 Mood in Romance languages The last morphosyntactic category that finite verbs in the Romance languages can be marked for, apart from agreement features, is mood. Mood is closely linked to modality. Modality can be defined as an abstract semantic-functional category which includes the speaker’s subjective attitudes and opinions (cf. Palmer 2001; Becker/ Remberger 2010, 1). These could be values such as obligation, probability and possibility (cf. Bybee/Perkins/Pagliuca 1994, 176). In contrast, mood can be considered a morphological surface phenomenon of modal categories (cf. Ridruejo 1999, 3215; Becker/Remberger 2010, 1). Traditionally speaking, mood in the Romance languages comprises three morphosyntactic categories: the imperative, the indicative and the subjunctive. Some scholars debate whether the conditional should be included in the mood paradigm or in the tense paradigm, because it shares semantic properties both with tense and with mood (see Section 4.1). The category of mood is very interesting in a cross-Romance perspective, because even though the Romance languages share some common features, there is significant variation across the different Romance languages. The proposed continuum in Table 1 seems to a large extent to be confirmed by data from the mood system. As shown by Loengarov (2006), Modern Spanish is the Romance language that most frequently exploits the semantic and pragmatic potential of mood distinctions, whereas in Modern French, mood choices are most often grammatically determined. Italian occupies an intermediate position. In this section, the different mood categories outlined above will be examined in detail, focusing particularly on the conditional and the subjunctive moods. In contrast, the imperative

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will not be considered in this chapter (see, however, ↗17 Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives).

4.1 The conditional All Romance languages possess a conditional form, which has both a synthetic and an analytic variant, just like the future (see Section 2.1). The synthetic variant of the conditional, usually referred to as the present conditional (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 286–287), has the same morphological basis as the synthetic future, at least in French and Spanish, because it is formed by the infinitive and reduced endings of the verb to have. By contrast to the synthetic future, whose reduced endings of this verb are inflected according to the paradigm of the present indicative, those of the conditional are inflected in the imperfect indicative: Fr. je parlerais (< parler + ais), Sp. hablaría (< hablar + ía) ‘I would speak’. In Italian, the verb stem of the conditional is also the infinitive, but endings other than those of the verb avere ‘to have’ in the imperfect are attached to the verb stem: parlerei (< parlare + ei) ‘I would speak’. The analytic variant of the conditional, usually referred to as the past conditional, consists of an auxiliary verb, equivalent to English to have or to be, and the past participle of the main verb: Fr. j’aurais parlé, Sp. habría hablado, It. avrei parlato ‘I would have spoken’. Furthermore, the Romance languages possess various types of verbal periphrases whose semantic values are close to that of the conditional. One type is the French and Spanish verbal construction consisting of the verb to go used in the imperfect + (a) + the infinitive of the main verb: Fr. j’allais parler, Sp. iba a hablar ‘I was going to speak’. This form can be considered the past variant of the analytic future je vais parler and voy a hablar ‘I am going to speak’, which was discussed in Section 2.1. These periphrastic conditional forms will not be dealt with here (↗7 Auxiliaries). It has been widely debated whether the conditional is fundamentally a modal or a temporal form. In this chapter, we will not try to answer that question, because it simply seems unanswerable, but only note that the conditional possesses both values, which will be further developed in what follows.

4.1.1 Temporal use When the present conditional is used with a temporal value, it expresses future in the past, i.e. futurity viewed from a position at some point in the past. Thus it can be considered a transposition of an utterance originally expressed in the future, according to the consecutio temporum. Compare (104) with (105) and (106) with (107):  

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(104) Fr. Il arrivera demain. ‘He will arrive tomorrow.’ (105) Fr. Il affirma qu’il arriverait le lendemain. ‘He said that he would come the next day.’ (106) Sp. Lo hará mañana. ‘He will do it tomorrow.’ (107) Sp. Dijo que lo haría al día siguiente. ‘He said that he would do it the next day.’ This use is highly frequent in subordinate clauses, especially in complement clauses of verba dicendi (affirma and dijo ‘said’ in (105) and (106)) or verba sentiendi (croyait, pensaba ‘thought’) in the past. However, it also occurs in main clauses in the style indirect libre ‘free indirect style’ in which the verb of saying or opinion is implicit, which results in the utterance being situated between direct and indirect speech, a technique which is highly frequent in literary works (108). The respective implicit verb can always be inserted to mark the point of time in the past according to which the conditional expresses futurity (109): (108) Fr. L’espoir s’effaça: elle n’arriverait jamais à Gien. ‘Hope faded: She would never get to Gien.’ (Sartre; Pedersen/Spang-Hanssen/Vikner 1994, 367) (109) Fr. L’espoir s’effaça. Il pensa qu’elle n’arriverait jamais à Gien. ‘Hope faded. He thought that she would never get to Gien.’ The past conditional is used in a similar fashion, but whereas the equivalent of the present conditional on the present axis is the synthetic future, the equivalent of the past conditional is the perfect or compound future (see Section 2.1), as in (110). Thus, the past conditional expresses a future action seen from the past which would have occurred before another future action (111): (110) Sp. Vendrá a las cinco. Entonces habré comido. ‘He will come at five o’clock. By then I will have finished eating.’ (Jensen 1990, 100) (111) Sp. Dijo que vendría a las cinco. Entonces habría comido. ‘He said that he would come at five o’clock. By then I would have finished eating.’

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Italian, however, differs with respect to the expression of the future in the past. In contrast to French and Spanish, the present conditional is no longer used for that purpose but instead we find the past conditional: (112) It.

Poi mi resi conto che sarebbe venuto poco dopo. ‘Then I realized that he would come soon.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 287)

However, at earlier stages of Italian, the present conditional could be used for expressing future in the past like in Modern French and Spanish. This usage is for instance documented in the works of the Italian poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873).

4.1.2 Modal use Contrary to the temporal use, the modal use of the present and past conditional is normally found in main clauses. In this context, the conditional does not express futurity in relation to a point in time in the past, but designates actions relevant for the present time (present conditional) or the past (the past conditional). Semantically, the conditional in this use is closely linked to the subjunctive mood, in the sense that both express non-assertion (Hooper 1975; Korzen 1999; 2003; Pérez Saldanya 1999; Confais 2002; Haverkate 2002; Jensen 2008; Lindschouw 2011a) (see Section 4.2). More specifically, the conditional refers to epistemic modality such as uncertainty and doubt. Modally, the conditional can be used to indicate hypotheses of various types and rumours. The hypothetical value of the conditional is most common because it comprises several subcategories. A hypothetical construction is prototypically represented by a superordinate clause (called the apodosis) and a subordinate clause (called the protasis), specifying the conditions under which the hypothesis may hold true. When used hypothetically, the conditional appears in the apodosis (in the respective standard varieties), whereas the protasis is specified by a conditional clause (113), another conditional expression (114) or is implicit (115): (113) It.

Se avessimo preso il treno delle otto, saremmo già a Napoli. ‘If we’d taken the 8 o’clock train, we’d already be in Naples.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 397)

(114) Fr. Sans sa femme, Hervé serait complètement perdu. ‘Without his wife, Hervé would be completely lost.’ (Mosegaard Hansen 1999a, 51)

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(115) Sp. Sería una locura ponerlo en marcha sin aceite. ‘It would be crazy to start it up with no oil.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 220) For the use of mood and the conditional in different types of conditional clauses, we refer to Section 4.2.3. Included in the hypothetical use of the conditional are occurrences often referred to as politeness (116) and lexicalized expressions such as on dirait (’it seems’; (117)). Note that these uses can always be accompanied by a conditional clause: (116) Sp. ¿Tendrías un minuto antes de irte? Me gustaría hablar contigo [si tienes tiempo]. ‘Do you have one minute before you leave? I would like to talk to you [if you have time].’ (117) Fr. Tu es sûr que Fabrice n’a que 35 ans? On dirait un vieux [si l’on se fiait à son apparence]. ‘Are you sure that Fabrice is only 35 years old? One might believe he was an old man [if one relied on his appearance].’ (Mosegaard Hansen 1999a, 51) It should however be stressed that vernacular varieties generally show a tendency to replace the conditional by the imperfect, especially, though not necessarily, in combination with conditional clauses. Note, however, that this tendency is not accepted in formal styles: (118) Sp. Desde luego, si yo fuera hombre, no me casaba […] ‘Obviously, if I were a man, I wouldn’t marry […]’ (Goytisolo; Butt/Benjamin 1994, 338) (119) It.

Pronto, mi scusi, volevo sapere quando aprirà la mostra a Palazzo Reale. ‘Hello, excuse me, I wanted to know when the exhibition at Palazzo Reale will open.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 397)

The second modal use of the conditional is often referred to as the conditionnel journalistique ‘journalistic conditional’ (French), condizionale di dissociazione ‘conditional of dissociation’ (Italian), condicional de rumor ‘conditional of rumour’ or condicional epistémico de atribución ‘epistemic conditional of attribution’ (Spanish) (cf. Kronning 2015, 507). The conditional is here used for rumours or unsubstantiated reports and is often found in journalism (hence its French name). This use is frequent in French and

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Italian, but in Spanish varieties, especially European Spanish, it is rare and disapproved of by grammarians because it is considered as a borrowing from French (Butt/ Benjamin 1994, 220): (120) Sp. […] la desaparición de los etarras estaría motivada por cuestiones de seguridad. ‘[…] security reasons are said to be the motive for the disappearance of the ETA members.’ (ABC; Butt/Benjamin 1994, 220) (121) Fr. Selon le Monde, le président serait gravement souffrant. ‘According to le Monde, the president is said to be seriously ill.’

4.2 The indicative vs the subjunctive The remaining mood forms are the indicative (here illustrated by the present indicative): Fr. je vends, Sp./It. vendo ‘I sell’ vs the subjunctive: Fr. je vende, Sp./It. venda ‘I sell’. They are traditionally treated together, because they are considered as pairs where the speaker or the writer has to make a choice between one of the two forms. In the research literature, it is much debated to what extent the choice between the two moods correlates with a semantic or pragmatic difference in meaning and to what extent it is determined by grammatical constraints. Several researchers consider the subjunctive, especially in French, a linguistic fossil or a survival from Latin which has lost its proper semantic value and for that reason has become amodal and is only triggered by certain lexical or syntactic elements (Bally 1944; Foulet 1968; Prebensen 2002). Others consider the subjunctive the mode of subordination (de Boer 1947; Harris 1974; Touratier 1996, 171–176), which is reflected etymologically in the French and Spanish names of the form: le subjonctif, el subjuntivo (derived from Latin subjunctivus ‘attached under’). However, the vast majority of researchers acknowledge that the subjunctive mood is not just a semantically and functionally empty category governed by the syntactic environment, but expresses a proper semantic content. Many values have been proposed in the course of time, some more fortunate than others. Some researchers state that the subjunctive is the mode of subjectivity in contrast to the indicative, which is the mode of objectivity (van der Molen 1923; Le Bidois/Le Bidois 1935), others that the subjunctive expresses doubt and uncertain statements, whereas the indicative conveys real statements (Clédat 1896; Soltmann 1914; Brunot 1922). Others again consider the mood alternation in truth-functional terms. According to Martin (1992), the indicative belongs to le monde de ce qui est ‘the world of what is’ and the subjunctive to le monde possible ‘the possible world’ and le monde contrefactuel ‘the counterfactual world’. In a similar vein, Moignet (1959), drawing on Guillaume’s (1929) chronogenetic theory,

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considers the indicative the mode of actualisation and the subjunctive the mode of non-actualisation or virtuality. Unfortunately, considerations of space do not allow us to examine all these approaches in detail, but we refer to Lindschouw (2011a, 25– 65) for a critical review. However, what characterises the vast majority of all these approaches is that they incorrectly confine the subjunctive mood to the notion of unreality, doubt or hypothesis, and generally ignore that the subjunctive very often expresses the opposite value: factuality or reality. Therefore, a twofold view needs to be adopted in order to account for the semantic and functional properties of the subjunctive in Romance languages. Such a view is offered by the theory of assertion (Hooper 1975; Korzen 1999; 2003; Pérez Saldanya 1999; Confais 2002; Haverkate 2002; Jensen 2008; Lindschouw 2011a) according to which the indicative mood presents the information of the clause as asserted (conveying new or rhematic information), while the subjunctive mood presents the information as non-asserted (see already Gsell/Wandruszka 1986). The notion of non-assertion contains two opposite values: unreal and presupposed (i.e. known or thematic) information. The distribution of mood in this chapter will be examined from the perspective of the (non-)assertion criterion. As the indicative is here considered the unmarked mood,10 according to the tradition, the focus here will be on the contexts in which the subjunctive appears or alternates with the indicative. Since the subjunctive generally appears in subordinate clauses, this chapter will be confined to the use of the subjunctive in the three main classes of subordinate clauses: complement, relative and adverbial clauses. Admittedly, the subjunctive also occurs in main clauses, but here its use is very similar to that of imperatives and optatives (↗17 Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives).  

4.2.1 Mood choice in complement clauses Complement clauses are by far the most interesting to examine because of the interplay between the indicative and the subjunctive in these clauses. However, it should be mentioned that in indirect interrogative clauses in Italian, the subjunctive tends to occur after verbs of knowing, especially, but not exclusively, in negative contexts. According to Maiden/Robustelli (2000, 331), the force of the subjunctive is to downplay the importance of the actual answer to the indirect question, often because the speaker or writer does not know the actual answer: (122) It.

Dovranno dargli le loro carte d’identità perché non sa come si chiamino.

10 However, the opposite approach, according to which the subjunctive is the unmarked mood, has also been proposed by Korzen (1999; 2003).

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‘They will have to give him their identity cards, because he doesn’t know what their names are.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 331) In French, the use of the indicative is the preferred mode in indirect interrogative clauses. The same holds true for Spanish but the subjunctive is sometimes found in Mexican varieties. In Old French and Old Spanish, the subjunctive was also possible in (in-)direct interrogative clauses (Buridant 2000, 333; Company Company 2006), but the subjunctive has been replaced by the indicative in Modern French and Spanish. In complement clauses, certain lexical elements in the main clause tend to trigger the use of the indicative or the subjunctive in the Romance languages. However, syntactic factors may also determine the choice of mood. This is especially the case when the complement clause is placed before the main verb, in which case the subjunctive is the favoured mood, because the content of the complement clause contains known or presupposed information (see (123) and (124)). If the complement clause is placed after the verb, then the indicative is the preferred mood because the content is asserted (125): (123) Fr. Que Pierre ne vienne pas à la réunion est certain. ‘That Pierre will not come to the meeting is certain.’ (124) It.

Che il fumo noccia alla salute è incontestabile. ‘[The notion] that smoking damages your health is indisputable.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 324)

(125) Fr. Il est certain que Pierre viendra à la réunion. ‘It is certain that Pierre will come to the meeting.’ Apart from these cases, the mood choice generally relies on certain lexical elements which trigger one of the two moods. Thus, in non-factive contexts, i.e. after verbs and expressions of volition, desire, ordering, hoping, etc., the subjunctive is normally found. In these cases, the subjunctive expresses that the proposition encoded does not yet hold true at the moment of utterance:  

(126) Sp. Quiero que estudies más. ‘I want you to study more.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 220) (127) It.

Importa che tu ci sia durante il congresso. ‘It’s important that you should be there during the congress.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 316)

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In the Romance languages, the subjunctive is also the preferred mood after verbs or expressions of emotion and value judgements. In all of these cases, the subjunctive signals that the content of the subordinate clause is presupposed: (128) Fr. Je suis content que tu ailles mieux. ‘I am happy that you are better.’ (129) Sp. Me molesta que te quejes tanto. ‘It annoys me that you complain so much.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 249) After verbs and expressions of belief and opinion, there is variation in mood choice across the Romance languages. Such expressions are always followed by the subjunctive in Italian, at least in formal registers. The use of the subjunctive after these expressions can be compared to the preceding one, as the content of the subordinate clause of these verbs is not asserted either: (130) It.

Io ho sempre pensato / creduto che si dovesse risolvere la questione comunista. ‘I’ve always thought that one should resolve the communist question.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 325)

However, in French and Spanish, the indicative is the favoured mood when the verb of belief or opinion is in an affirmative form ((131), (133)),11 whereas the subjunctive is the preferred mood, at least in formal registers, when the verb is negated (132) or used in an interrogative context (134). In these cases, the subjunctive expresses uncertainty or doubt again, because the speaker or writer does not know for sure whether the content of the subordinate clause is true: (131) Fr. Je pense que Pierre a raison. ‘I think that Pierre is right.’ (132) Fr. Je ne pense pas que Pierre ait raison. ‘I do not think that Pierre is right.’ (133) Sp. Creo que Dios existe. ‘I believe that God exists.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 257)

11 In Old French, however, the subjunctive was also possible after such expressions used in the affirmative form (Buridant 2000, 337). Thus, in this respect, Modern Italian reflects an older usage of French.

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(134) Sp. ¿Usted cree que pueda ayudar? ‘Do you really think that this can help?’ Statements of doubt are semantically linked to these cases. Consequently, such statements are usually followed by the subjunctive when in an affirmative form (135). When expressions of doubt are negated, they are usually followed by the indicative if they mean ‘to be sure that’, but the subjunctive is still possible (136): (135) Fr. Je doute qu’il soit capable de le faire. ‘I doubt whether he is capable of doing it.’ (136) Sp. No dudo que vendrá/venga. ‘I don’t doubt he’ll come.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 253) Apart from the above-mentioned cases, which trigger either of the two moods, there are also cases in all Romance languages where the indicative and the subjunctive are used to convey different meanings. After verbs of saying, the indicative is used to assert new information (137), while the subjunctive is used to give an order, i.e. it is used with an unreal value (138):  

(137) Fr. Il a dit que Pierre nous rendra visite cet après-midi. ‘He said that Pierre will visit us this afternoon.’ (138) It.

Sa cosa le sta dicendo: che si sbrighi a salutare la madre. ‘She knows what she’s saying to her [telling her she should do]: that she should hurry up and greet her mother.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 316)

On a general level, it can be said that Modern Spanish, and to some degree Modern Italian, most frequently use the different semantic-pragmatic properties offered by the mood system, whereas Modern French uses them least frequently, because the mood system has been grammaticalised in French to such an extent that the cases of mood alternation have become less frequent than at earlier stages (Buridant 2000, 333–354; Loengarov 2006; Lindschouw 2011a). Take for instance the Spanish verb explicar ‘to explain’, which can be followed by both moods. This verb usually takes the subjunctive (139), except when an assertive meaning (‘to state’ or ‘to say’) is intended (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 257–258) (140): (139) Sp. Esto explica que las mutaciones de la literatura estén estrechamente ligadas a las innovaciones técnicas. ‘This explains how changes in literature are intimately linked to technical innovations.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 257)

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(140) Sp. Manuel explicó que había estado enfermo. ‘Manuel explained that he had been ill.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 258). A similar case can be observed in Italian with verbs of happening (succedere ‘happen’, capitare ‘arrive’, avvenire ‘occur’, accadere ‘happen’). Such verbs are usually followed by the subjunctive when they designate possibility (141) and the indicative when they assert the content of the complement clause as a fact (142) (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 333): (141) It.

Capitava spesso che avesse qualche amico a casa. ‘He was often liable to have a few friends at home.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 333)

(142) It.

Capitò che c’erano due cavalli già pronti. ‘What happened was that there were two horses there already.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 333)

In contrast, French would normally resort to subjunctive mood in this context, and not allow for mood alternation.

4.2.2 Mood choice in relative clauses In relative clauses (↗22 Relative clauses), various subtypes may be distinguished in which mood choice may take place. In restrictive relative clauses, the mood selection can be used to indicate whether the antecedent is referential or not. When the indicative is used, the speaker or writer asserts that a certain antecedent actually exists, whereas the subjunctive signals non-referentiality of the antecedent: (143) Fr. Je cherche une maison qui a/ait une vue splendide sur la mer. ‘I am looking for a house which has a splendid view of the sea.’ (144) It.

Paolo cercava uno studente che sapesse/sapeva il giapponese. ‘Paolo was looking for a student who knew Japanese.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 321)

If the antecedent is under the scope of negation or an n-word (↗12 Negation and polarity), the verb in the relative clause is usually in the subjunctive, at least in the most elevated registers of the Romance languages:

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(145) Sp. No hay nadie que sepa tocar más de un violín a la vez. ‘There is no one who can play more than one violin at once.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 269) (146) It.

Non c’erano studenti che sapessero il giapponese. ‘There weren’t any students who knew Japanese.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 322)

In relative clauses after superlatives, the Romance languages show considerable variation with respect to mood. French has generalised the subjunctive as the obligatory mood in these contexts (147). By contrast, in Spanish and Italian, the indicative is the unmarked mood (148) while the subjunctive is employed to stress highest degree or uniqueness (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 322), often in combination with an adverb such as It. mai, Sp. nunca or jamás ‘ever’ (149): (147) Fr. C’est la femme la plus intelligente que je connaisse. ‘She is the most intelligent woman that I know.’ (148) Sp. Eres la chica más inteligente que he conocido. ‘You’re the most intelligent girl I’ve met.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 269) (149) Sp. Eres la chica más inteligente que haya existido nunca/ jamás. ‘You’re the most intelligent girl that has ever existed.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 269) Finally, in Romance languages there are relative constructions with a free-choice element corresponding to whatever, anyone who, anywhere that, etc. They are almost exclusively followed by the subjunctive, at least in formal, written registers: (150) Fr. Quoi que tu fasses, tu ne réussiras jamais à cet examen. ‘Whatever you do, you will never pass this exam.’ (151) It.

Dovunque voi andiate, loro vi seguiranno. ‘Wherever you go, they’ll follow you.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 321)

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4.2.3 Mood choice in adverbial clauses Mood choice in adverbial clauses greatly depends on the various semantic subtypes into which these clauses can be divided (temporal, causal, conditional, etc.). In this section, we will therefore examine mood alternation in the most important subtypes of adverbial clauses. Temporal clauses show variation across the Romance languages. In French, the use of the indicative seems to a large extent to have become the favoured mood for almost every temporal subordinator (152), while Spanish and Italian allow for mood variation. The subjunctive is used for future events, which are normally presented as non-asserted because they have not yet occurred at the moment of utterance (153), while the indicative is used for past, present or iterative events (154). Note however that in Italian only the imperfect subjunctive may be used to indicate future in the past after most temporal subordinators, especially in formal and written registers (cf. Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 288): (152) Fr. Pierre partira quand Sophie sera de retour. ‘Pierre will leave when Sophie is back.’ (153) Sp. Cuando Pedro venga, iremos de compras. ‘When Pedro comes, we will go shopping.’ (154) Sp. Cuando Pedro vino, fuimos de compras. ‘When Pedro came, we went shopping.’ However, some mood specialisation is also observed across the Romance languages. After subordinators meaning ‘before’, cf. Fr. avant que, Sp. antes de que, It. prima che, the subjunctive is obligatory (155). In French, this is also the case after jusqu’à ce que ‘until’ (156). All these subordinators signal non-asserted situations as the content of the subordinate clause occurs after the content of the main clause, and therefore the subjunctive is the natural choice: (155) It.

Te lo daranno prima che tu parta. ‘They’ll give it to you before you leave.’

(156) Fr. Pierre travaille jusqu’à ce Marie revienne. ‘Pierre will work until Marie returns.’ With respect to subordinators meaning ‘after’, such as Fr. après que, Sp. después de que and It. dopo ché, there is significant variation across the Romance languages. The canonical mood after these subordinators is the indicative, because they assert the content as a fact. According to Soutet (2000, 100), this is the required mood in

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normative French, and in Spanish and Italian the indicative is most often used when the temporal clause refers to past or iterative events (Borrego/Gómez Asencio/Prieto 1985, 139; Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 332). However, at least in French and Spanish, the subjunctive is possible after these subordinators, but it is regarded as informal in French (157), whereas it is an indicator of an elevated style in Spanish (158), which is often found in newspapers (Pérez Saldanya 1999, 3314). Nevertheless, the subjunctive can be said to present the information as presupposed, because the content of the subordinate clause occurs before the content in the main clause and is thus supposed to be known by the speaker: (157) Fr. Pierre commence à faire la cuisine après que Marie soit revenue. ‘Pierre starts cooking after Marie has returned.’ (158) Sp. Pedro deja de leer después de que María haya vuelto a casa. ‘Pedro stops reading after María has come home.’ After causal subordinators, the indicative is the unmarked mood in all Romance languages, both after conjunctions introducing clauses which provide an explanation (cf. Fr. parce que, Sp. porque, It. perché ‘because’, see (159)) and after conjunctions introducing justifications (Fr. puisque, comme, étant donné que, Sp. puesto que, ya que, como, It. poiché, giacché, dato che ‘since’, see (160)). However, the subjunctive is found in French, Spanish and Italian when the causal relation between the main and the subordinate clause is negated (161): (159) It.

Ti ho chiamato perché ho bisogno di te. ‘I called you because I need your help.’ (Salvi/Vanelli 1992, 164)

(160) Sp. Ya que Pedro ha venido, nos quedamos todos en casa. ‘Because Pedro has come, we all stay at home.’ (161) Fr. Pierre est sorti avec Sophie, non qu’il soit amoureux d’elle. ‘Pierre went out with Sophie, (but) not because he is in love with her (but for another reason).’ After subordinators of result and aim, mood can distinguish between these values in Spanish and Italian, whereas French to a large degree has restricted each of the moods to different subordinators. Thus, after subordinators such as Sp. de modo/ manera/forma que and It. in maniera/modo che and così che, the indicative indicates result (‘so that’) (162) whereas the subjunctive indicates aim (‘in order that’) (163), corresponding to an opposition between assertion and non-assertion:

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(162) Sp. Lo hizo de modo que nadie se enteró. ‘He did it so no one realized.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 261) (163) Sp. Lo hizo de modo que nadie se enterase/enterara. ‘He did it so no one would realize.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 261) After conjunctions such as de forme/sorte/manière que, French in principle has the same possibility, but a large corpus analysis reveals that in practice this possibility is almost non-existent (Lindschouw 2002). Instead French has specialised the mood choice to different subordinators in such a way that pour que, afin que and de façon/ manière à ce que indicate aim ‘in order to’ and are usually followed by the subjunctive (164) and de sorte que, si bien que as well as consecutive constructions, such as those formed by Fr. si/tant/tellement … que ‘so … that’, indicate result and are followed by the indicative (165): (164) Fr. Je t’ai dit d’inviter Pierre pour qu’il soit content. ‘I told you to invite Pierre in order to make him happy.’ (165) Fr. Pierre est si travailleur qu’il est incapable de jamais s’arrêter. ‘Pierre is so hard-working that he can’t ever stop.’ Similar subordinators also exist in Spanish and Italian with the same mood specialisation as in French. In contrast to French, however, Spanish and Italian use mood alternation much more frequently in such subordinate clauses in order to signal differences in meaning. Conditional clauses can be divided into two different subtypes, those which are always followed by the subjunctive and those which allow for mood alternation. The first subtype comprises the majority of conditional subordinators such as Fr. à supposer que, à condition que, pour peu que, à moins que, Sp. con (tal) de que, siempre que, a condición de que, a menos que, It. purché, a condizione che, sempre che, a meno che ‘provided that, on condition that, unless’. These subordinators are all accompanied by the subjunctive in Romance languages, because the content of the subordinate clause is presented as uncertain: (166) Sp. Te convido a cenar con tal (de) que me dejes escoger el restaurante. ‘I’ll buy you dinner provided you let me choose the restaurant.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 264) (167) It.

Penso che abbiamo finito, a meno che Andreina non voglia intervenire ancora. ‘I think we’ve finished, unless Andreina wants to say something further.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 318)

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The second subtype, consisting of canonical subordinators of condition meaning ‘if’, is the most complex type, because here an interesting interplay between the indicative and the subjunctive is observed across the Romance languages as can be seen in Table 2: Table 2: Overview of canonical conditional clause types in French, Spanish and Italian (based on Kronning 2009, 14) Type of hypothesis

French

Spanish

Italian

“Real”

Si + present indicative + future indicative

Si + present indicative + future indicative

1) Se + present indicative + future indicative 2) Se + future indicative + future indicative

Potential / Unreal

Se + imperfect Si + imperfect indicative Si + imperfect + present conditional subjunctive12 + present subjunctive + present conditional conditional

Unreal

Si + pluperfect indicative + past conditional

1) Si + pluperfect Se + pluperfect subjunctive + past subjunctive + past conditional conditional 2) Si + pluperfect subjunctive + pluperfect subjunctive

As the table shows, three types of conditional constructions can be identified. The first type, referred to as a “real”-hypothesis, expresses a hypothesis about a present state of affairs which is likely to be fulfilled in the future. The finite predicate in the conditional clause is in the present or future indicative, and the predicate of the superordinate clause in the future indicative. The use of the future indicative in the conditional clause is only possible in Italian and is restricted to formal usage (169): (168) Fr. Si Pierre ne vient pas, je serai très mécontent. ‘If Pierre does not show up, I will be very annoyed.’ (169) It.

Se non si sarà costituito entro il 4 luglio, verrà arrestato. ‘If he hasn’t turned himself in by 4 July, he’ll be arrested.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 396)

12 Note that Spanish has two imperfect subjunctive forms, which are used interchangeably: forms in -ra (hubiera) and -se (hubiese) ‘had’.

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The second type of hypothesis is called potential or unreal. Potential refers to remote conditions relating to the present or the future (170), whereas the unreal relates to unfulfilled conditions in the present (171). In all three languages the present conditional13 is used in the main clause, and in French the finite predicate in the conditional clause is in the imperfect indicative (170), but in the imperfect subjunctive in Italian and Spanish (171): (170) Fr. Si Pierre venait, je serais très content. ‘If Pierre showed up, I would be very happy.’ (171) Sp. Si fueras más simpático, tendrías ese regalo. ‘If you were more friendly, you would have that gift.’ The third type of hypothesis is also referred to as unreal, but in contrast to the preceding type, this type primarily refers to counterfactual states of affairs in the past (or possibly in the future). The verb in the conditional clause therefore appears in the pluperfect indicative (French) (172) or subjunctive (Spanish and Italian), and the verb of the superordinate clause in the past conditional (173). In Spanish, the pluperfect subjunctive may also be used instead of the past conditional in the superordinate clause (173): (172) Fr. Si Pierre n’était pas venu hier, j’aurais été très mécontent. ‘If Pierre had not shown up yesterday, I would have been very annoyed.’ (173) Sp. Si él hubiera/hubiese tenido dinero, hubiera/habría saldado la cuenta. ‘If he’d had money he’d have settled the bill.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 337) Semantically, it is clear that the use of the subjunctive in all these cases expresses non-assertion, more specifically unreality, because the more unreal the hypothesis is, the more frequent the use of the subjunctive. However, the indicative in the corresponding constructions in French also marks non-asserted content. That both moods have the same semantic value seems a little surprising, but this is probably due to the evolution of French. In Old and Middle French, the subjunctive was the preferred mood to express potential and unreal conditions, but the indicative has gradually replaced the subjunctive in conditionals (cf. Buridant 2000, 627–630). As far as Modern Spanish and Italian is concerned, Borrego/Gómez Asencio/Prieto (1985, 162), Pérez Saldanya (1999, 3306) and Maiden/Robustelli (2000, 398) observe that in

13 In all these cases the conditional, whether past or present, is used with a modal and not a temporal value (see Section 4.1.2).

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spoken varieties, it is not uncommon to find the indicative instead of the subjunctive in these contexts. Thus it is not inconceivable that in the course of time the indicative will replace the subjunctive in Spanish and Italian. In concessive clauses, mood alternation can be used to signal differences in meaning. This is particularly evident in Spanish because after subordinators such as aunque, a pesar de que and pese a que ‘although’, the indicative can be used to assert the content of the concessive clause (174), while the subjunctive can be used with a non-assertive value, either to present the content as unreal information (175) or as known or presupposed information (176): (174) Sp. Manolo compra la finca, aunque su padre se opone. ‘Manolo is buying the estate even though his father is against it.’ (175) Sp. Manolo comprará la finca aunque su padre se oponga. ‘Manolo will buy the estate even if his father is against it.’ (176) Sp. Aunque Carlos tenga 80 años le encanta bailar. ‘Although Carlos is 80 years old, he loves dancing.’ In French and Italian, on the other hand, mood alternation has become restricted to a subset of subordinators. Thus, the subjunctive is the preferred mood after conjunctions such as Fr. bien que, quoique, It. benché, sebbene ‘even though’, which all present the content of the concessive clause as presupposed (177), while the indicative is the only possible mood after Fr. même si and It. anche se ‘even if, even though’ (178): (177) Fr. Paul est parti bien que/quoique Mireille soit revenue. ‘Paul left even though Mireille had returned.’ (178) Fr. Nous ferons une partie de campagne même s’il pleut. ‘We will go for a picnic even if it rains.’ At least as far as French is concerned, mood has become increasingly fixed over time. In the sixteenth century, the French concessive system to a large extent resembled that of Modern Spanish, but in the following centuries a specialisation of the mood system took place (cf. Lindschouw 2011a). Subordinators of manner (Fr. sans que, Sp. sin que, It. senza che ‘without’, Fr. comme si, Sp. como si, It. come se ‘as if’) are almost exclusively followed by the subjunctive, which presents the content as counterfactual. It is interesting to note that comme si in French is always followed by the imperfect indicative (180), while its Spanish and Italian counterparts trigger the imperfect subjunctive (181):

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(179) It.

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Sono uscita senza che mi vedessero. ‘I got out without them seeing me.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 328)

(180) Fr. Elle se comporte comme si elle avait quinze ans. ‘She behaves as if she were fifteen years old.’ (181) Sp. Me miró como si no me viera/viese. ‘She looked at me as if she couldn’t see me.’ (Butt/Benjamin 1994, 262)

5 Tense and mood in reported speech The preceding sections have dealt with the different uses of tense, aspect and mood in the Romance languages. During this review, the use of tense and mood in reported speech has only been treated indirectly, but no systematic overview of tense and mood in reported speech has been provided. This section will try to do so, although such an overview risks being too simplistic. Reported speech, the phenomenon when a person reports what another person has said often through a verb of saying, can be presented either with respect to the speaker’s present or the past. However, since tense is a deictic category (Comrie 1985), the different tenses in the reported parts change when the point of reference shifts from the present to the past according to the model presented in Table 3. Note that the model only accounts for temporal and not for modal uses of the forms: Table 3: Overview of indicative tenses in reported speech Reported speech (introduced by a verb in the present)

Reported speech (introduced by a verb in the past)

Present →

Imperfect

Synthetic future →

Present conditional

Analytic future →

Analytic conditional

Compound future →

Past conditional

Perfect, preterite, imperfect →

Pluperfect

According to Table 3, the present tense will be replaced by the imperfect when the point of reference is in the past (see examples (59) and (60) above). This is due to the semantic overlap between these two tenses, since both forms can indicate ongoing actions (see Section 3.3). The synthetic future will normally be replaced by the present conditional ((182)–(183)), the analytic future (Fr. je vais parler, Sp. voy a hablar) by the

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so-called analytic conditional (j’allais parler, iba a hablar), the compound future by the past conditional ((184)–(185)) and finally the perfect, the preterite and the imperfect by the pluperfect ((186)–(187)). This phenomenon is usually referred to as the consecutio temporum: (182) Fr. Il affirme qu’elle parlera avec sa mère. ‘He says that she will talk to his mother.’ (183) Fr. Il affirma qu’elle parlerait avec sa mère. ‘He said that she would talk to his mother.’ (184) It.

Dice che nel 2020 avrà vissuto dieci anni in Italia. ‘S/he says that in 2020 s/he will have lived in Italy for 10 years.’

(185) It.

Disse che nel 2020 avrebbe vissuto dieci anni in Italia. ‘S/he said that in 2020 s/he would have lived in Italy for 10 years.’

(186) Sp. Juan dice que ayer María vendió su entrada. ‘Juan says that María sold her ticket yesterday.’ (187) Sp. Juan dijo que el día precedente María había vendido su entrada. ‘Juan said that María had sold her ticket the preceding day.’ In principle, a similar relationship between the present and the past axis holds for the subjunctive mood. However, the mood paradigm features a less differentiated inventory of tenses compared to the indicative paradigm (Table 4): Table 4: Overview of subjunctive tenses in reported speech Reported speech (introduced by a verb in the present)

Reported speech (introduced by a verb in the past)

Present subjunctive →

Imperfect subjunctive

Perfect subjunctive →

Pluperfect subjunctive

First of all, the table reveals that from a temporal point of view, the mood paradigm is reduced as compared with the indicative paradigm. The most striking difference is that the subjunctive paradigm does not possess a future tense. Thus, if speakers or writers want to indicate a future act in the subjunctive, they have to use the present indicative. This is most clearly seen in Spanish and Italian where the present subjunctive in tense clauses is explicitly used for marking futurity (see example (153) above). However, it should be stressed that in Portuguese the future subjunctive does

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exist and is used to refer to actions that may take place in the future, for instance after quando ‘when’ and se ‘if’: (188) Pt. Não entraremos se falarmos assim. ‘We will not get in if we speak like that.’ Spanish also possesses a future subjunctive, but in peninsular Spanish it is obsolete except in legal documents and a few literary variants of fixed phrases like sea lo que fuere ‘whatever it may be’, venga lo que viniere ‘come what may’ (cf. Butt/Benjamin 1994, 272). However, it is quite common in Latin American newspaper style in some regions, for instance in Argentina (cf. Butt/Benjamin 1994, 272). According to Table 4, if the present subjunctive is used in a subordinate clause after a matrix verb in the present, it will be changed to the imperfect subjunctive when the matrix verb shifts to the past ((189) and (190)). Similarly, the perfect subjunctive will be changed to the pluperfect subjunctive ((191) and (192)): (189) It.

Non credo che venga. ‘I don’t think he’s coming.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 333)

(190) It.

Non credevo che venisse. ‘I didn’t think he was coming.’ (Maiden/Robustelli 2000, 333)

(191) Sp. Me sorprende que hayan protestado. ‘I am surprised that they have protested.’ (192) Sp. Me sorprendía que hubieran/hubiesen protestado. ‘I was surprised that they had protested.’ In principle, Table 4 also applies to French, especially in formal, written text genres, but as shown by Jeppesen Kragh (2010), during the twentieth century the subjunctive paradigm in French was further reduced as compared with the indicative paradigm found in the other Romance languages. In fact, it has been reduced to such an extent that the present subjunctive has replaced the imperfect subjunctive (193) and the perfect subjunctive the pluperfect subjunctive (194) in spoken varieties and informal written text genres: (193) Fr. Elle avait peur qu’il ne le fasse. ‘She was afraid that he would do it.’ (194) Fr. Elle ordonna qu’il soit retourné avant 8 heures. ‘She ordered him to return before 8 o’clock.’

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Interestingly, Jeppesen Kragh (2010, 107) and Carrasco Gutiérrez (1999, 3090) observe similar cases in Latin American Spanish (especially in Bolivia and Ecuador) where the present and perfect subjunctive are used instead of the imperfect and pluperfect subjunctive after a matrix verb in the past. Even though the general tendency in Spanish is to respect the consecutio temporum for the subjunctive paradigm in accordance with the co-occurrence regularities in Table 4, these examples could possibly signal that a similar reduction of the subjunctive paradigm will take place in (Latin American) Spanish.

6 Conclusion This chapter has reviewed the general uses of tense, aspect and mood in the Romance languages focussing specifically on French, Spanish and Italian. It is interesting to note that all three categories present much regularity across the Romance languages, which is surprising, because historically these languages have developed in different directions and at different paces with respect to their common source, Latin. It seems that the aspectual system presents the highest degree of cross-linguistic systematicity whereas the mood and past tense systems exhibit much more variation. In fact, a comparison of the mood system reveals that French diverges most from Latin, because in most cases it no longer uses mood alternation to differentiate the meaning of the matrix verb or the subordinate clause, but has instead generalised the indicative and the subjunctive to different subordinators. By contrast, Spanish can be said to be one of the Romance languages that least diverges from Latin, because it much more frequently uses mood alternation to signal differences in meaning. This also holds true for Italian, but here we find a higher degree of mood specialisation than in Spanish. As a consequence, Italian can be said to occupy an intermediate place between French and Spanish. As to the past tense system, the analytic perfect has almost entirely replaced the synthetic perfect in Modern French, at least in spoken and informal written French, while in Modern Spanish the two forms are employed for different purposes. In Modern Italian, an intermediate case can be observed, because the two forms, at least in southern Italian dialects, are used to designate different past events as in Spanish, but at the same time the analytic perfect is gradually replacing the synthetic perfect when referring to remote past events, at least in northern Italian spoken dialects. However, the proposed continuum in Table 1 is not confirmed by all the data examined in this chapter. For instance, as shown in Section 2.1, the evolution that has affected the future system in French and Spanish is more or less parallel, so here it would be difficult to claim that Spanish is more conservative than French. Consequently, the proposed continuum is useful as a general guideline that can explain some but not all differences across the Romance languages, both with respect to the tense, aspect and mood system and with respect to other morphological and syntactic domains of these languages.

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Comrie, Bernard (1976), Aspect, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Comrie, Bernard (1985), Tense, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Confais, Jean-Paul (2002, 11990), Temps, mode, aspect. Les approches des morphèmes verbaux et leurs problèmes à l’exemple du français et de l’allemand, Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail. Dahl, Östen (1985), Tense and Aspect Systems, Oxford, Blackwell. De Boer, Cornelis (1947), Syntaxe du français moderne, Leiden, Universitaire Pers Leiden. Delattre, Pierre (1966, 11946), Stages of Old French phonetic changes observed in Modern Spanish, in: Pierre Delattre, Studies in French and Comparative Phonetics. Selected Papers in French and English, London/The Hague/Paris, Mouton & Co, 175–205. De Miguel, Elena (1999), El aspecto léxico, in: Ignacio Bosque/Violeta Demonte (edd.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, vol. 2, Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 2977–3060. Fleischman, Suzanne (1982), The Future in Thought and Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Foulet, Lucien (1968, 11919), Petite syntaxe de l’ancien français, Paris, Champion. FRANTEXT = Base textuelle Frantext, http://www.frantext.fr/ (15.05.2015). Grevisse, Maurice (162016, 11936), Le bon usage: grammaire française, refondue par André Goosse, Paris, Duculot. Gsell, Otto/Wandruszka, Ulrich (1986), Der romanische Konjunktiv, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Guillaume, Gustave (1929), Temps et verbe. Théorie des aspects, des modes et des temps, Paris, Champion. Hansen, Anita B./Strudsholm, Erling (2006), Morphological and periphrastic future in French and Italian spoken language: parallel tendencies?, in: Hanne Leth Andersen/Merete Birkelund/MajBritt Mosegaard Hansen (edd.), La linguistique au cœur: valence verbale, grammaticalisation et corpus; mélanges offerts à Lene Schøsler à l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire, Odense, University Press of Southern Denmark, 189–218. Harris, Martin (1974), The subjunctive mood as a changing category in Romance, in: John M. Anderson/Charles Jones (edd.), Historical Linguistics, vol. 2, Amsterdam/Oxford, North-Holland, 169–188. Haverkate, Henk (2002), The Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Spanish Mood, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins. Hooper, Joan B. (1975), On assertive predicates, Syntax and Semantics 4, 91–124. Jensen, Kjær (1990), Spansk basisgrammatik, Copenhagen, Akademisk forlag. Jensen, Kjær (2008), Ny spansk grammatik, Copenhagen, Akademisk forlag. Jeppesen Kragh, Kirsten (2010), Le remplacement de l’imparfait du subjonctif par le présent du subjonctif considéré dans une perspective de grammaticalisation, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press. Korzen, Hanne (1999), Principper for opstillingen af modus i kompletivsætninger på fransk, in: Carl Bache/Lars Heltoft/Michael Herslund (edd.), Ny forskning i grammatik 6, Odense, Odense Universitetsforlag, 181–203. Korzen, Hanne (2003), Subjonctif, indicatif et assertion ou: Comment expliquer le mode dans les subordonnées complétives?, in: Merete Birkelund/Gerhard Boysen/Poul Søren Kjærsgaard (edd.), Aspects de la modalité, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 113–129. Kronning, Hans (2009), Constructions conditionnelles et attitude épistémique en français, en italien et en espagnol, Syntaxe & Sémantique–Rhénania 10, 13–32. Kronning, Hans (2015), El condicional epistémico “de atribución” en francés, italiano y español: aspectos diafásicos, diatópicos y diacrónicos, in: Kirsten Jeppesen Kragh/Jan Lindschouw (edd.), Les variations diasystématiques et leurs interdépendances dans les langues romanes, Strasbourg, Éditions de linguistique et de philologie, 507–519.

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Lamiroy, Béatrice (1993), La dichotomie synchronie – diachronie et la typologie des langues romanes, in: Gerold Hilty (ed.), Actes du XXe Congrès International de Linguistique et Philologie Romanes, vol. 3, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 211–221. Lamiroy, Béatrice (1994), Les syntagmes nominaux et la question de l’auxiliarité, Langages 115, 64–75. Lamiroy, Béatrice (1999), Auxiliaires, langues romanes et grammaticalisation, Langages 135, 33–45. Lamiroy, Béatrice (2001), La préposition en français et en espagnol: une question de grammaticalisation?, Langages 143, 91–105. Lamiroy, Béatrice (2003), Grammaticalisation et comparaison de langues, Verbum 25, 409–429. Le Bidois, Georges/Le Bidois, Robert (1935), Syntaxe du français moderne, Paris, Picard. Lindschouw, Jan (2002), Konjunktiv på fransk og spansk, et spørgsmål om assertion? Undersøgelse af en konjunktivteori appliceret på franske og spanske adverbielle ledsætninger, Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen. Lindschouw, Jan (2011a), Étude des modes dans le système concessif en français du 16e au 20e siècle et en espagnol moderne. Évolution, assertion et grammaticalisation, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press. Lindschouw, Jan (2011b), L’évolution du système du futur du moyen français au français moderne: la réorganisation comme un cas de régrammation, Revue de Linguistique Romane 74, 51–97. Lindschouw, Jan (2012), Évolution du système du futur entre langues conservatrices et innovatrices, in: Bernard Combettes et al. (edd.), Le changement en français. Études de linguistique diachronique, Bern, Lang, 225–245. Lindschouw, Jan (2013), Passé simple et passé composé dans l’histoire du français. Changement paradigmatique, réorganisation et régrammation, Revue de Linguistique Romane 77, 87–119. Loengarov, Alexander (2006), L’alternance indicatif/subjonctif dans les langues romanes. Motivation sémantico-pragmatique et grammaticalisation, Leuven, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Ph.D. dissertation. Lyons, Christopher G. (1978), A look into the Spanish future, Lingua 46, 225–244. Maiden, Martin/Robustelli, Cecilia (2000), A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian, London, Arnold. Martin, Robert (1992, 11983), Pour une logique du sens, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Mattoso Câmara, Joaquim (41985, 11975), História e estrutura da língua portuguesa, Rio de Janeiro, Padrão. Melchior, Luca (2012), Tra esperienzialità e iteratività: il “passé surcomposé à valeur spéciale” in francese (e in altri idiomi romanzi), Revue de Linguistique Romane 76, 65–98. Moignet, Gérard (1959), Essai sur le mode subjonctif en latin postclassique et en ancien français, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Mosegaard Hansen, Maj-Britt (1999a), Aspekt, in: Ole Kongsdal Jensen (ed.), Suppleringshæfte til Pedersen, Spang-Hanssen & Vikner: Fransk grammatik, Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen, 33–56. Mosegaard Hansen, Maj-Britt (1999b), Tempus, in: Ole Kongsdal Jensen (ed.), Suppleringshæfte til Pedersen, Spang-Hanssen & Vikner: Fransk grammatik, Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen, 57–72. Palmer, Frank R. (2001, 11986), Mood and Modality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Pană Dindelegan, Gabriela (ed.) (2013), The Grammar of Romanian, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Pedersen, John/Spang-Hanssen, Ebbe/Vikner, Carl (1994, 11980), Fransk grammatik, Copenhagen, Akademisk forlag. Pérez Saldanya, Manuel (1999), El modo en las subordinadas relativas y adverbiales, in: Ignacio Bosque/Violeta Demonte (edd.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, vol. 2, Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 3253–3322.

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Pierre Larrivée

12 Negation and polarity Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the behaviour of negation in Romance. The adopted perspective is that variation between languages is explained by diachronic tendencies. The principle diachronic motif in the evolution of clausal negation marking is the Jespersen Cycle. This evolution cycle goes from clausal negation being initially marked by an item in preverbal position, that is doubled by a post-verbal item, which with the loss of its preverbal counterpart remains the sole exponent of negation. The pattern is used to compare and contrast clausal negation in the main Romance languages, and the probable causes for similarities and divergences are evoked. The comparison is extended to n-words equivalent to no one and nothing, that are contrasted to Negative Polarity Items such as anyone and a single thing. The presentation clarifies the criteria for the differential status of items and constructions. The recurrence of these statuses can be understood as stages of diachronic processes to illuminate typological convergence.  

Keywords: negation, polarity, Romance languages, Jespersen Cycle  

1 Introduction The reflexes of negation in Romance languages is a fitting illustration of the motto that language diversity follows from historical evolution (Greenberg 1978), as championed by Talmy Givón: “[…] diachrony has the most direct causal bearing on the shape of any particular language, and thus on the diversity of human languages” (Givón 2009, 41).

Evolution tendencies thus provide a unique opportunity to realise the ultimate goal of linguistics, which is to identify the finite set of mechanisms accounting for the practically infinite number of linguistic productions. Therefore, a contribution to understanding the mechanisms of language can be brought by studying the historical and contemporary regularities in a well-documented language family like Romance, as currently argued by e.g. Benjamin Fagard (e.g. 2011). This concerns both internal determinism about language structure and social issues such as language contact (as with the question of the influence of neighbouring Slavic languages on some of the distinct aspects of Romanian; or the borrowing and/or support relation between Piemontese and French, on which Molinelli 1988). The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the grammar of negation in Romance languages, with indications of the main theoretical issues they raise. The theoretical dimension is approached with a view to highlighting the probable causes of DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-012

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the phenomena as identified in current research, and to identifying gaps to be filled by future research. A detailed presentation of each theory or a focus on theory-internal discussions is not to be found in this overview, as a long volume would not suffice to present the technical debates and controversies.1 The chapter first presents the main realisations of clausal negation, with a discussion of special contexts of use (imperatives and interrogatives), following which other phenomena relating to negative operators (negative focus, contrastive negation, constituent negation) are evoked. The case of n-words equivalent to no one and nothing is then reviewed before the multiple exponence of negation in the same clause as negative concord or double negation is approached. N-words are in the final section contrasted to Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) such as anyone and a single thing. The thread is the negative value of items and how it is arrived at. The focus is on the principal languages of the Romance family – Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and French. That French figures prominently is expected not only because of the specialism of this author, but because as the “more advanced” on historical change paths of the major Romance languages (cf. Carlier/de Mulder/Lamiroy 2012), the language gives us particular insights into the processes at play. Particular generalisations are the occasion to integrate data from even “more advanced” varieties – Catalan, Quebec French and French-based creoles. The sources used are mainly recent studies and grammars (Muller 1991; Rowlett 1998 and Larrivée 2004 for French; Maiden/Robustelli 2000 and Parry 2013 for Italian; de Sousa 2011 for Portuguese; Pountain/Kattan-Ibarra 2004 for Spanish; Ionescu 2004 and Pană Dindelegan 2013 for Romanian), often written in English that thus converge to the current set of research questions raised in international linguistics. Using descriptive work avoids getting into technical debates for which partially representative data may be elicited. The next section is concerned with negative operators constructed with a clause.

2 Clausal negation in Romance I have suggested above that the goal of linguistics is to find mechanisms that underlie all languages and make them possible. That is why of course linguists are particularly interested in syntax,2 which comprises a set of categories that must be selected, as

1 The approach used here is not in contradiction with theoretical models that can illuminate the diversity of data. While there is not as of yet a general overview of the intricacies of the multifarious current theoretical debates raised by the grammar of negation, Zeijlstra (2004) and de Swart (2010) are probably good places to start, and a perusal of Longobardi (2014) might be useful for Romance; for an introduction to the linguistic issues relating to negation, and particularly its interpretation, the opus magnum remains Horn (2001). 2 There are other ways of course to express the negation of a clause than with an adverb like not: among these, one finds different minimising collocations such as rude English like hell (Like hell he said

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opposed to the lexicon where items may or may not occur. In any language production, a category like clausal negation is bound to crop up,3 whereas members of a lexical category may be rare in certain contexts. Are there any regularities as to the behaviour of clausal negation in Romance? In order to make sense of the main patterns on Romance clausal negation, it is useful to refer to patterns of diachronic evolution.

2.1 Clausal negation The evolution of negation is known for its recurrent pattern across languages. The observation for which Otto Jespersen is credited (by Dahl 1979, 88; but for other ancestors, see van der Auwera 2009) is that the pattern takes the shape of a cycle. “The history of negative expressions in various languages makes us witness the following curious fluctuation: the original negative adverb is first weakened, then found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally through some additional word, and this in its turn may be felt as the negative proper and may then in course of time be subject to the same development as the original word” (Jespersen 1917, 4).

This is illustrated by Jespersen with three idealised sequences meaning ‘I don’t say’ from different periods of French. (1)

Stage 1 Early French Jeo ne dis. 1SG NEG 1 say.PRS .1SG

(2)

Stage 2 Middle French Je ne dis pas. 1SG NEG 1 say.PRS .1SG NEG 2

anything, i.e. he didn’t); British English fuck (as in Arctic Monkeys’ lyrics I left my message, but did he fuck get back to me, i.e. he didn’t; Sailor 2014, signalled by Larry Horn); Fr. mon cul ‘my ass’, cf. Mon cul que je vais lui dire! ‘No way I’m gonna tell him!’; Cat. I un ou ‘and an egg’, cf. A: La Maria treballa molt. B: I un ou (que la Maria treballa molt). ‘A: Maria works a lot. B: Like hell (is Maria working a lot).’; EPt. uma ova ‘a fish’s roe’, cf. Ele viveu sempre em Paris uma ova. ‘No way he always lived in Paris.’, see Martins 2014; Rom. pe dracu’ ‘like hell’, Vine pe dracu’! ‘Like hell he’s coming!’. For these and others, see Larrivée (2004, 51–52). 3 Although as pointed out by a reviewer, negation is marked with respect to assertion, in more ways than one; in terms of frequency, the tendency in various corpora is that one clause in ten is negative.  



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(3) Stage 3 Contemporary vernacular French Je dis pas. 1SG say.PRS .1SG NEG 2 The post-verbal marker is found in preverbal position in French-based Creoles to start a new cycle: (4) New stage 1 a. Contemporary Louisiana French Mo pa di. NEG 1 say. PRS . 1SG 1SG b. Haitian Mwen pa di. NEG 1 say. PRS . 1SG 1SG The cycle that Jespersen has in mind is clearly from his examples an evolution in the position of the negator with respect to the verb. The stages involved have been divided up in different ways (cf. van der Auwera 2009), but we can functionally proceed with the traditional trinity. Stage 1 is illustrated by the ancestor of Romance languages that is Latin. (5) Non loquor. NEG 1 speak.PRS . 1SG The default Latin clausal negative is non, which as every textbook asserts is the accretion of oinŏm ‘a thing’ to the inherited Indo-European negative particle *ne. Unaugmented ne also persists in Latin, but in a restricted set of environments expressing unrealised events (e.g. wishes, desires, orders; cf. Fruyt 2008). The same default NEG 1 pattern has been handed down to other major contemporary Romance languages here illustrated by the sentences in (6). (6) Stage 1 It. (Io) non parlo. EPt. (Eu) não falo. Sp. (Yo) no hablo. Rom. (Eu) nu vorbesc. ‘I’m not speaking.’ This pattern is also found in Creoles (4) (for a detailed survey of the realisations of and NEG 2, see Zanuttini 1997, chapters 2 and 3). When part of a rich preverbal clitic zone, NEG 1 may be realised as fused with the following clitic or even verb: the

NEG 1

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latter is illustrated by the well-known Latin Noli me tangere (with noli representing the fusion of the negative and voli ‘want-IMP ’).4 The fusion with the clitic is also found in Old French (cf. Ingham 2014), and attested by Venetian and Romanian: (7) a. Vto.

Nol

dorme gnente. sleep. PRS . 3SG nothing ‘He doesn’t sleep at all.’ (Parry 2013, 91; citing Garzonio/Poletto 2009) Ea nu-l putea citi. NEG 1. 3SG . ACC can. IMPRF . 3SG read- INF she ‘She could not read it.’ (Pană Dindelegan 2013, 561) NEG 1. 3SG . NOM

b. Rom.

Always eager to set itself apart from others, French in its contemporary normative varieties illustrates Stage 2, conjoining NEG 1 and NEG 2. (8) Stage 2 Je ne parle 1SG . NOM NEG 1 speak. PRS . 1SG ‘I’m not speaking.’

pas. NEG 2

Stage 3, with only the NEG 2 remaining, is the dominant marking in most registers of contemporary vernacular European French and Quebec French, as well as in western Lombard5 (cf. Lindblom 2013). (9) Stage 3 Je 1SG . NOM

parle speak. PRS . 1SG

pas. NEG 2

An addition to Stage 3 is required by data from Brazilian Portuguese and some varieties of Italian where a sentence final negator adds to the NEG 2 and/or NEG 1 (also reported in Dominican Spanish).  

4 A reviewer indicates that this is an idealisation, in as much as one can question whether voli is really attested as an imperative form in Latin. Classical Latin has velle and nolle, but paradigms may have gaps. 5 Benjamin Fagard is suggesting that Stage 3 characterises many varieties of vernacular Italian where mica can be used as sole clausal negator, although the examples he cites suggest that it may be used both as postverbal (Stage 3) or preverbal marker (Stage 1). Likewise, Brazilian Portuguese can have não as sole clausal negator in sentence final position, according to a reviewer. Obviously more needs to be said about this by future research.

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(10) Vto. No

la go miga 3SG . F . ACC have. PRS . 1SG NEG 2 ‘I really did not eat it.’ (Poletto 2008, 59)

NEG 1

magnada eat. PTCP

(11) BPt. O João num vai ao cinema go.PRS . 3SG to-the cinema the João NEG 1 ‘João won’t go to the cinema.’ (Sousa 2011, 91)

NO! NEG 3

(não). (NEG 3)

This case reminiscent of Afrikaans6 is clearly different from the Quebec French case where pas follows immediately the verb without another negative appearing at the end of the sentence (hence the ungrammaticality of anything like J’ai pas parlé à Marie pas, lit. ‘I didn’t speak to Marie not’). This three (and a half) stage division may give way to misunderstandings that call for clarifications. On the one hand, these stages are not necessarily exclusive in a language (variety). This is clearly spelled out by Parry (2013, 79): “These three structural types do not correlate with homogeneous geographical areas, since two or even three types may coexist in the same dialect, as is to be expected in the case of gradual syntactic evolution. In transitional areas in particular, microvariation involves two or even all NE G 1 is three strategies, as in dialects of the Val Bormida (cf. Parry 1997), where NE G 2 prevails, but NEG found in irrealis clauses and in structures such as n . . . âtr ‘only’, while NEG 3 favours two main contexts: (a) with the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ (frequent as perfective auxiliaries) and (b) in the presence of preverbal complement clitics, particularly nasal ones.”

On this basis, we could put a challenge to future research by asserting that there is no language variety that uses one and only one stage for the marking of clausal negation. But equally, we could propose that only one structure belonging therefore to only one of these stages will be the default, or unmarked, clausal negative in any language variety. Clearly, in Val Bormida, “NEG 2 prevails”, that is, it is the default expression of negation. The default marking of a category is the most frequent one, used in the majority of contexts without restrictions, and is therefore especially found in out-of-the-blue main clauses, which is what Miestamo (2005) calls “standard negation”. Another potential misunderstanding arises with Stage 2. That stage may imply different statuses for NEG 2. As many including myself have pointed out, NEG 2 is initially a Negative Polarity Item. That is, it is used in negative contexts like French du tout, Italian per niente, and Romanian deloc, all translated by at all, but does not itself

6 In which a final negative marker is found as in Brazilian Portuguese. a. Ons is nie beïndruk nie. is not impressed NE G 1PL ‘We are not impressed.’ For differences between the two markings, see Biberauer/Cyrino (2009).

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have negative force at all.7 In other words, we could distinguish two sub-stages as below, where pas is initially a NPI before becoming a negative in its own right. (2’) Stage 2.1 Je ne

dis

pas. NPI

dis

pas. NEG 2

NEG 1

Stage 2.2 Je ne NEG 1

The connection between NEG 2 and negative polarity is claimed by Poletto (2008) to account for the positions occupied by the different markers. These positions would correspond to their etymological origins. Items in NEG 1 are claimed to derive from scalar items – not a thing being the origin of non; NEG 2 items are historically minimisers, as illustrated by the evocation of a small thing by mica ‘crumb’; NEG 3 is where existentials such as niente ‘nothing’ are found; NEG 4 as in the final no in (10) are focused items. But even negative import on the part of NEG 2 does not guarantee default status. Relying on Lindblom (2013), NEG 2 can be an optional addition to a default negator in NEG 1: This would be the case of Catalan, Italian and Venetian (cf. Lindblom 2013, 22). Default 8 NEG 2 with optional addition of NEG 1 is cited as characteristic of Aranese, western Lombard, and French (presumably the contemporary vernacular variety illustrated in (3) and (9)). There are occasional examples of equilibrium in the status of the two negatives of Stage 2, both NEG 1 and NEG 2 being required, as is the case in Ladin (see (23)) and some primary French dialects (for example ne…mie in the Vosges). The comparison that Lindblom makes as to percentages of Stage 1 vs Stage 2 languages in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) and in her extended sample of Romance languages is informative. Obligatory NEG 2 is massively overrepresented in Romance (30.8% of the sample vs 12.8% in WALS); conversely, NEG 1 is underrepresented at 15.4% vs 39.5% in WALS. Comparability characterises obligatory NEG 1 + NEG 2, at 7.3% in the sample vs 8.6% in WALS.  

7 This should not be confused with actual clausal negators that do not have negative import as it happens in two different types of contexts: subordinate contexts of the “expletive” type (complements of comparatives, of some correlatives such as too + Adj, and of doubt and fear predicates; Il est trop con pour ne pas le faire, lit. ‘He’s too stupid not to do it’, meaning ‘too stupid to do it’ and not ‘too stupid not to do it’); and interrogative and exclamative contexts, where negation associates to a pragmatic implicature (suggestion of a positive answer in N’avez-vous pas dit quelque chose? or Didn’t you say something? and selection of a high degree value in C’est le plus efficace qu’il y a pas! and Boy, didn’t he get it done!. See among very many, Horn (2010) on the former and Espinal (2000) on the latter. Because these readings are bound to particular contexts, they cannot be adduced as arguments that the marker in question is not negative. 8 “In fact, it is Aranese Occitan, as well as Pallarès”, as pointed out to me by Montse Batllori, who cites Ares Llop (2013) on the matter.

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This helicopter survey raises the unavoidable question: What is the cause for this forward movement from NEG 1 to NEG 2, and from Stage 1 to Stage 3? Many hypotheses have been proposed. Jespersen advocates phonetic weakening of NEG 1, as can be seen from his quote above. This is not believed to be probable, since some varieties have had ne for a long time while others have lost it early on (cf. Posner 1985, 188). The suggestion that I have explored on the basis of Posner that ne in French would be lost because it is part of a clitic cluster that tends to be phonetically reduced (cf. Larrivée 2014a) awaits further empirical confirmation. The change in word order from Latin SOV to Romance SVO would be the impetus for the emergence of NEG 2. The rationale for this is that languages seek to be symmetrical, and that negation should follow the verb when the object does. This typological proposal predicts that Stage 2 should be arrived at by all Romance languages, and that languages could go from Stage 2 to Stage 1 as they do to Stage 3 at the same rate as word order goes from SOV to SVO or from SVO to SOV. This is not the case, as the cyclic evolution of clausal negation marking by and large goes forward. The expression of NEG 1 is followed by that of a NEG 2. When the development is documented, the second item is first a NPI, then a marked negative, before turning into a default negative. What leads an item along the way is the object of recent proposals. The passage of NEG 2 to default negative from marked negative is characterised by the marked item loosing its marked pragmatic value. This is what is argued for French by Hansen/Visconti (2009), although the data is not entirely conclusive (cf. Larrivée 2010). Italian and Portuguese NEG 2 which is not a default negator retains a clear pragmatic value of activation (Hansen/Visconti 2009; Schwenter 2005). The loss of NEG 1 cannot be easily assessed in a language family that largely maintains it except for French. The loss of French ne is a sustained object of debates, between those that contend that it has always been a stylistic marker of informality (or at least since the seventeenth century, cf. Dufter/Stark 2007) and those who argue that it is a change in progress (cf. Ashby 2001). Looking at the data from Martineau (2011), we have to conclude that both are right: ne has been declining for at least a couple of centuries, with a definite stylistic value, and increasingly so in the last half century. We need to add that this cycle is in no way an obligation: standard Italian can use mica as NEG 2, but has not as of yet adopted a Stage 2 marking of negation (which is why presumably mica retains a pragmatic value). It is not clear why some languages move, and why others do not. One hypothesis is that change is brought about by language contact (see the introduction of Willis/Lucas/Breitbarth 2013). But when it moves, the cycle moves forward. In fact, I know of no language that goes backward, and certainly no Romance language. I speculate that the reason for this is the evolution of negative items themselves: since they start life as Negative Polarity Items, and since Negative Polarity Items almost always follow the negator that licenses them, NEG 2 (and NEG 3) will follow their predecessor: new cycles observed in Creole as illustrated by (4) may be blamed on absence of verb raising in

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those varieties. It’s because negatives overwhelmingly come from NPIs that the marking of clausal negation changes, and changes in a largely determined linear order. It is useful to note various contexts that come to bear of the marking of clausal negatives. What I have in mind are the constraints imposed by imperatives and infinitives. Negative imperatives are marked in a special way in some Romance languages. Italian is well-known for its asymmetry between the positive imperative and the negative one that uses the form of the infinitive, as Romanian does.9 (12) It.

Parla! speak.IMP . 2SG ‘Speak!’

(13) It.

a. *Non parla! NEG 1 speak.IMP . 2SG b. Non parlare! NEG 1 speak. INF ‘Don’t speak!’

Another illustration of this asymmetry is provided by Spanish and Portuguese imperatives that use subjunctive-like forms here rather than the straight imperative. (14) Sp.

¡Habla! ‘Speak!’

(15) Sp.

a. *¡No habla! NEG 1 speak. IMP . 2SG b. ¡No hables! NEG 1 speak. SBJV . 2SG ‘Don’t speak!’

9 With a twist, pointed out to me by Elena Albu: whereas the negation of the positive imperative uses the infinitive form in the second person singular (Nu dormi!, ‘Don’t sleep!’), in the second person plural, the imperative form is used (Nu dormiţi!). A reviewer points out that dormi is indeed different in the singular positive and negative imperative, but that the difference is found in the accentuation on the first syllable in the positive imperative, and on the second in the infinitive and negative imperative. Because this is not made visible by orthography, the suggestion is to use a cânta ‘sing’, with nu cânta ‘don’t sing!’ in the negative imperative and cântă in the positive imperative. The plural form in either is cântaţi.

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The asymmetry in French is expressed by the behaviour of clitic pronouns, which are post-verbal in the affirmative imperative and pre-verbal in the negative when ne is used10 – a case also found in Romanian.11 (16) Fr.

a. *Le dis! say. IMP . 2SG 3SG . ACC b. Dis-le! say. IMP . 2SG = 3SG . ACC ‘Say it!’

(17) Fr.

a. (Ne) le ( NEG 1) 3SG . ACC b. *Ne disNEG 1 say. IMP . 2SG ‘Don’t say it!’

dis say. IMP . 2SG le 3SG . ACC

pas! NEG 2 pas! NEG 2

The difficult relation between imperatives and negation, which seems to have led to specific prohibitive negations to be developed across languages (cf. van der Auwera 2010), has been proposed to depend on a typological generalisation by Zeijlstra (2004). The generalisation is that languages with a truly negative NEG 1 cannot have a negative imperative. That would be because the high NEG 1 acts as a barrier to the movement of the verb on the way to the higher position where imperative value is checked. Thus, there is no true imperative in Italian and Spanish. A true imperative is found in European French because ne is not truly negative, and in Quebec French too because ne is not a default negative. It is not clear that this is the final word on the question: a language that has an uncontroversially semantically negative NEG 1 like Haitian seems to allow true negative imperatives. (18) Haitian Creole

Chita la! ‘Sit there!’

(19) Haitian Creole

Pas chita la! ‘Don’t sit there!’

Infinitives generally allow negation all right, but negated infinitives can formally differ from other verb forms. Instead of clausal negative nu, Romanian uses ne with

10 When ne is not used, both Dis-le pas and Le dis pas are possible, but the latter has an archaic ring (although one reviewer disagrees with this qualification), and the former is the only version found in e.g. Quebec French where NEG 1 has all but disappeared. 11 Elena Albu, p.c.

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infinitive and with non-finite gerunds and supines (Pană Dindelegan 2013, 559). French has seen NEG 2 gradually place itself before the infinitive since the seventeenth century (cf. Hirschbühler/Labelle 1994), but never before a verbal participle. Future research still has to establish whether this is due to the structure of negation or of the infinitive. The various markings of clausal negation can thus be made sense of through a historical cycle. We now move to related phenomena.

2.2 Around clausal negatives The previous section has reviewed the reflexes of clausal negation and the largely historical causes for the pattern that shapes its marking. But not all negatives are clausal in influence, they can also be constituent negations. The term has been applied with some terminological variation to other cases (as noted in the introduction of Willis/Lucas/Breitbarth 2013, 6), an ambiguity on which I seize to introduce phenomena related to clausal negation. One is pragmatic focus. This is the case of a clausal negation where the predicate can be inferred to be the case but for one element in its scope. With Il n’a pas parlé à tous les délégués ‘He didn’t speak to all the delegates’, while speaking to all delegates is not the case, inference is normally invited that communication occurred with at least some delegates. There is little linguistic variation to this general cross-linguistic phenomenon that relates to quantifiers such as all and various complements, except as to particular lexicalisations (as in French tous ‘all’ vs chacun ‘each’, the latter being more rarely focused). These quantifiers are interesting cross-linguistically and for Romance because they provide examples of infringements to the isomorphy principle. Reverse focus of the type Tout ce qui brille n’est pas or ‘All that glitters is not gold’ meaning ‘not all’ is very much a feature of conventional, formal language. When it is not infringed, the isomorphy principle is that negation precedes the item it focuses on; an item that precedes the negative is not focused by it. Being well supported by acquisitional studies (e.g. Gualmini 2004), as well as by vernacular language production studies (Tottie/Neukom-Hermann 2010), the principle can be illustrated by the contrast between Seulement Jean n’est pas venu implying ‘Only Jean wasn’t there’ and its isomorphic version Il n’est pas venu seulement Jean communicating ‘There wasn’t only Jean’. Further illustration is provided by the following minimal pair from Italian cited by Maiden/Robustelli (2000, 404): Non molti sono venuti. ‘Not many have come.’ b. Molti non sono venuti. ‘Many have not come.’

(20) a.

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And the vernacular French alternation: Ils sont tous pas venus. ‘They all didn’t come.’ b. Ils sont pas tous venus. ‘They didn’t all come.’

(21) a.

Displaying comparable conventionality responsible for cross-linguistic variation is the interaction of negation with modals, of the type that differentiates mustn’t and needn’t, where the first is generally a prohibition and the later a denial of obligation (cf. Han 2001). Similar variation is found in Portuguese poder ‘can’ and dever ‘must’, the later only having a futuristic prediction in the negative equivalent to shouldn’t (cf. Oliveira 2000), and with French obligation devoir and falloir, where only the former allows denial of obligation in some contexts. These readings have to be learned, as do certain variations in Neg-Raising. This is when a negation in the main clause can be paraphrased by a negation in the subordinate (cf. Collins/Postal 2013). Most languages would be expected to have Je ne crois pas qu’il soit parti meaning Je crois qu’il n’est pas parti, with some amount of variation as to which verbs allow it and which do not.12 Another phenomenon that has been (wrongly) branded constituent negation is contrastive negation, of the form Il a invité Jeff, mais pas Mutt (see Toosarvandani 2013 for the syntax and semantics of these and other contrastive configurations). The contrastive negation of a particular clausal constituent is realised in Italian (Maiden/ Robustelli 2000, 403–409), Romanian (Pană Dindelegan 2013, 238) and Spanish (Pountain/Kattan-Ibarra 2004, 192) by a mobile NEG 1 and in French by the equally versatile NEG 2: the example from Maiden/Robustelli (2000, 404) is Vogliono comprare non un appartamento, ma una villa! ‘They want to buy not a flat but a villa!’. Indeed, contrastive negation can only be expressed by a fully negative item. For instance, French pas is not found on its own in contrastive contexts before it becomes the default negative in the seventeenth century. Thus, the Latin postverbal item haud which specialised in contrastive roles (cf. Salvi 2011, 355) can be inferred to have been a fully-fledged negative. The fact that the expression of negation concerns a constituent does not mean that only constituent scope is expressed. Constituent scope is in contrast to clausal scope in that the fully negative item relates to a notion exclusive of the predication. The following can all suggest that somebody is indeed working, although without achieving intended results.

12 Here, I could add something about different pragmatic effects of negation like descriptive and metalinguistic, but these display even less variation across languages, so I will not.

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Il travaille pour rien. (Egli) lavora per nulla. (Él) trabaja para nada. ‘He works for nothing.’

All negative items can be constituent negatives, apart from NEG 1 clitics such as French ne since as a clitic it relates exclusively to the verb. Such use is a further test of the negative status of an item, as no other element in a sentence such as Il vit pas très loin ‘He lives not very far’ can be identified as the source of negation (although some types of pragmatic uses such as metalinguistic negation cannot be expressed by constituent negation). It is a stable manifestation across languages in its occurrence with fairly formulaic (speak to no one, stare at nothing), typically adjoined phrases (work for nothing, moan for no reason) (cf. Kato 2000), although in fact more information is needed about the actual behaviour of those fairly rare configurations in usage. The point to remember about constituent, contrastive and focus effects is that they are features of fully negative items. These criteria are important to keep in mind as we move on to n-words, the status of which is still under discussion.

2.3 N-words Apart from the NEG 1, NEG 2, NEG 3 markers of clausal negation, other items can reject the actualisation of a clause. They distinguish themselves by belonging to ontological categories that add to the sole meaning of negation, as illustrated by the following minimal pair from Ladin (Lindblom 2013, 11) and by Table 1. (23) Nos ne on 1PL NEG 1 have.PRS .1PL ‘We didn’t see.’

nia

vedù. see.PST . PTCP

NEG 2

(24) Nos ne on vedù 1PL NEG 1 have.PRS .1PL see.PST . PTCP ‘We haven’t seen anything.’

nia. nothing

Table 1: N-words in major Romance languages EPt.

Sp.

‘not much’

não … muito no … muy/ mucho

‘not anymore’

ja não; ja não … mais

no … más

Cat.

Fr.

It.

Rom.

no molt

guère

non molto

nu … prea

no … més

plus

non più

nu … mai

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Table 1 (continued) EPt.

Sp.

Cat.

Fr.

It.

Rom.

‘not at all’

de modo nenhum

no … (para) nada

no … gens; no … pas

pas du tout; non … mica point

nicidecum; deloc

‘never’

nunca; jamaís

nunca

mai

jamais

mai

niciodată

‘no-where’

em lugar nenhum; nenhures

en ninguna parte

enlloc

nulle part

da nessuna parte

niciunde; nicăieri

‘in no way’

de maneira alguma; nenhuma

de ningún modo

de cap manera

en aucune manière

in nessun modo

nicicum; în niciun caz ‘in no case’; în niciun fel ‘in no way’

‘no one’

ninguém

nadie

ningú

personne

nessuno

nimeni

‘nothing’

nada

nada

res

rien

niente

nimic

‘none’

nenhuma

ninguno

cap

aucun

nessun (determiner); nessuno (pronoun)

niciun (determiner); niciunul (pronoun)

Not all these expressions have the same status: expressed by words or by formulaic sequences, some forms only partly overlap (French point does not always obviously function as not at all, assuming it is still currently used by most speakers), and it is to be noted that some cells are not attested across the family as in negation for cause (which would take the place of non-existent *nowhy).13 It would be worthwhile to include in this table the different markers for coordination, but the work on the question is still patchy, and we must refer the interested reader to Bîlbîie (2008). Romance languages are part of the 28.5% of languages that have n-words according to Van Alsenoy’s (2014) large typological sample. The name n-word by which they go is a descriptive label reflecting the fact that many Romance and Germanic items of the sort start with the initial n of the Indo-European negative. It is an attempt at neutrality in the vigorous debate as to whether they are really semantically negative

13 A reviewer points out that the prepositional phrase introduced by sans could do the trick in sans raison ‘without’. Of course, the equivalents of without are not on the same footing as n-words, since on the one hand they do not associate to an ontological category such as animate, time and place, and on the other, they do not entertain clausal scope (cf. Fr. Léa est partie sans sa valise ‘Lea left without her suitcase’ cannot mean that Lea didn’t leave).

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(see Mathieu 2001 for a review of the arguments based on French but transferable) or whether they inherit their seemingly negative value from something else (among very many, Zeijlstra 2004). The source of the debate is the fact that unlike in normative varieties of Germanic languages, Romance n-words engage in joint uses (cf. Corblin/ Tovena 2001). It is often repeated that Negative Concord is not something that Latin indulged in, but this view has been revised by specialists (cf. Salvi 2011). A sentence such as (25) is decidedly striking for the speaker of a language that would allow one and only one n-word, but as many indefinites as one likes as illustrated by the English translation. (25) Fr. (After the difficult last meeting) Personne n’a plus jamais rien dit à personne. ‘Nobody ever said anything much to anyone anymore.’ It is thus tempting to treat the concording items as indefinites of the negative polarity type. One more reason to equate n-words to non-negative indefinites is the shape of Negative Concord in some Romance languages. French and Romanian are strict Negative Concord languages, the n-words requiring NEG 1 in normative varieties whether they be pre- or post-verbal. Non-strict Negative Concord is displayed by normative varieties of Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. N-words in these languages call for NEG 1 only when they follow the verb, which can be preceded by only one negative element, be it the n-word or the NEG 1. Non-strict Negative Concord is illustrated by the following examples in Italian. (26) a. Non parla nessuno. b. *Nessuno non parla. c. Nessuno parla. ‘Nobody is speaking.’ This is of course reminiscent of the fact that Negative Polarity Items generally do not precede clausal negation in SVO languages like English (*Anyone isn’t speaking), and seem one more reason to treat n-words as Negative Polarity Items and not as fullyfledged negatives. There are several reasons to doubt this however. One major difference is that Negative Concord by which several items express one clausal negation is a clausebound affair (cf. Larrivée 2004; Pană Dindelegan 2013, 563). Referring to (25), all concording n-words are in the same clause. N-words in different clauses could not enter in a concord relationship: *Je ne crois qu’il ait parlé à personne is very odd indeed (outside specific denial contexts possibly). Yet, Negative Polarity Items need not be in the same clause as their negative licensor: Je ne crois pas qu’il ait parlé à qui que ce soit is fine. Other major differences come from the ability of n-words to give rise to a negative meaning on their own. We mentioned in the previous section negative

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contrast (to which we can associate coordinations of the type It’s now or never), and constituent negation (see (22)). To this can be added Double Negation effects to which n-words can give rise. Across Romance languages, the equivalent of Nobody is nothing can mean that everybody has some worth (see e.g. Espinal et al. 2015). Now, it is true that there is considerable disagreement regarding Romanian which is repeatedly reported to be adverse to Double Negation readings (cf. Fălăuş 2007), something to explore in future research. Romance is therefore a fairly cohesive family in its adhesion to Negative Concord, a remarkable fact given that only 19% of the world’s languages adopt it (Van Alsenoy 2014). Like many syntactic phenomena, Negative Concord is often believed to apply uniformly to a language and all its negative markers. This is what is suggested by the labels “Negative Concord Language” and “Double Negation Language”. These labels do not account for the fact that within a language, there is considerable variation as to which items (tend to) engage in NC and which hardly do or not at all. Such variation within a language is documented by Agostini/Schwenter (2015) for Brazilian Portuguese, and Burnett/Tremblay (2014) for Quebec French. My favourite illustration of this comes from Martinique Creole, where according to Déprez (2011, 235–237), concord of person ‘nobody’ with NEG 1 pa is compulsory, whereas jamm ‘never’ is optionally14 used with it. This may be why no clear pattern is attested as to the evolution of Negative Concord, and languages and their varieties oscillate between majority strict and non-strict behaviours (for Italian moving from one to the other, see Parry 2013). It is nonetheless true that Romance n-words come from Negative Polarity Items. Why the change occurs is not completely understood, beyond the common sense view that indefinites used with negation may become restricted to “negative contexts”. Déprez suggests that the emergence of compulsory articles in French is what moves personne and rien from Negative Polarity Items to negatives. As Labelle/Espinal (2014) show, however, there were fully negative n-words in French before then, and there are bare-noun languages with n-words. My contribution to the debate has been to suggest that what moves Negative Polarity Items to n-word status is a preponderant use as strong polarity items (with sentence negation and with without, cf. Larrivée 2014b). The suggestion is that in strong polarity contexts indefinite items are ambiguous between Negative Polarity Items and n-words. The question that remains is why changing Negative Polarity Items would come to be used preponderantly in those strong polarity contexts. To confuse matters further, the evolution from indefinites, to weak polarity, to strong polarity, to n-word is not as driven as clausal negators, as reverse evolutions are attested (cf. Labelle/Espinal 2014; Larrivée 2014c documents the case of nesun). What is more, most n-words maintain some polarity uses (cf. Martins 2000; 2014). Finally, the role of pragmatics is not as generalised for n-words

14 The reviewer indicates that while possible, this joint use is in fact rare.

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as it is for clausal negation, although interesting patterns of development are identified for languages like Catalan by Batllori (2015). The relation between these and n-words makes it appropriate to say a few words about Negative Polarity Items in the next and final section.

2.4 Negative and positive polarity N-words can be contrasted to Negative Polarity Items. These items are those whose distribution or interpretation depends on negative and negative-like contexts. The definition of what contexts are “negative-like” and how this is to be defined has been the object of considerable attention from researchers (see the overview by Giannakidou 2013). Whatever the right definition may be, the characteristics found in Romance languages fit the general pattern: NPIs unlike n-words need not appear in the same clause as a negator, they do not generally induce a negative reading on their own (in a fragment answer or in a coordination), and therefore fail the tests of constituent and contrast negation. This is illustrated below by French quoi que ce soit ‘anything’. The first sequence illustrates the type of distance dependency that is not found with n-words. (27) Fr. Je ne crois pas qu’il ait dit quoi que ce soit. ‘I don’t think that he said anything.’ Outside restricted contexts in certain languages (Catalan, Quebec French; cf. Larrivée 2004, 131–132), n-words do concord with other clause-mate negatives, whereas NPIs have no such restrictions. The following examples show that NPIs unlike n-words do not introduce a negative meaning. They cannot convey that nothing was said in fragment answers, coordination, contrast and constituent negation. (28) Fr. - Qu’a-t-il dit? ‘What did he say?’ - ?*Quoi que ce soit. ‘Anything.’ ‘*Nothing.’ (29) Fr. Qu’il ait dit cela ou quoi que ce soit d’autre, c’est pareil. ‘Whether he said this or anything else, it’s all the same.’ *‘Whether he said this or nothing, it’s all the same.’ (30) Fr. Il l’aurait dit pour quoi que ce soit au monde. ‘He would have said it for anything in the world.’ *‘He would have said it for no reason.’

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(31) Fr. ?*Il a dit cela et du tout autre chose. ‘He said this and at all something else.’ *‘He said that and not anything else.’ The behaviour of NPIs varies according to the extent of their distribution. It is customary now to distinguish strong NPIs that occur with clausal negation and under the command of without and weak NPIs that occur in a larger set of contexts including questions and conditionals. The first type can be illustrated by Quebec French pantoute, a variety of at all that morphologically integrates NEG 2 pas and that yet cannot function as a clausal negator on its own.15 (32) Quebec Fr.

Il l’a *(pas) dit pantoute. ‘He didn’t say it at all.’

(33) Quebec Fr.

*Est-ce qu’il l’a dit pantoute? ‘Did he say it at all?’

This contrasts with quoi que ce soit which has a much more extended distribution to be found with the questions and conditionals typical of weak NPIs. (34) Fr. Est-ce qu’il a dit quoi que ce soit? ‘Did he say anything?’ (35) Fr. S’il dit quoi que ce soit, appelez-moi. ‘If he says anything, call me.’ The space occupied by any tends to be frequently taken in Romance languages by n-words if one is to lend credence to the literature. As mentioned in the previous section, most Romance n-words maintain some polarity uses if only in formulaic sequences (French si jamais meaning ‘if ever’ and not ‘if never’). But NPIs are attested in each language: (36) a. b. c. d.

Fr. It. Pt. Rom.

Jean n’a pas dit une seule chose. Gianni non ha detto alcun che. O João não diz nem uma palavra. Ion nu a spus un singur cuvânt.

15 The only way in which this marker differs from NPIs is that it can introduce a negative answer on its own. The attentive reader will have noticed that Rom. deloc is in the same ambivalent situation. This may be a live illustration of the historical evolution of NPIs into n-words.

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Juan no ha dicho ni una palabra. ‘Jean/Gianni/João/Ion/Juan didn't say anything.’

(37) a. Fr. Jean n’a pas dit la moindre chose. b. It. Gianni non ha detto la minima cosa. c. Rom. El nu a spus nici măcar un cuvânt. ‘Jean/Gianni/He didn't say anything.’ These illustrate the fact that NPIs can be formed by a minimiser (a single thing; it seems that these can be immediately preposed by negation ni in Spanish, nem in Portuguese, and nici in Romanian), a superlative (the least bit), to which we might want to add wh like French quoi que ce soit and Italian qualsiasi (on which Chierchia 2013), and ontological categories like Old French rien ‘thing’ (Haspelmath 1997). It is not clear that Positive Polarity Items (PPIs) – the counterpart of NPIs, expressions that cannot appear in the immediate scope of descriptive, non presuppositional negation – are illustrated in a particularly interesting way in Romance. The reason for this is that PPIs do not constitute an obvious natural class in the way Negative Polarity Items do. Looking at the contributions of Floricic/Lambert-Brétière (2010), one gets the impression that various categories such as existential expressions (*not sometimes) and variously deictic elements including newly occurring events (*There doesn’t come John) have more to do with incompatibilities with (families of) expressions than with general interpretative reflexes. Although they do not seem to have been the object of extensive comparative studies, Romance polarity items are a diverse and lively bunch, that contribute to the shape of n-words and therefore to the system of clausal negation. We now turn to a summary of the main conclusions from this piece.

3 Conclusions This piece has shown that negation is a fairly cohesive phenomenon in Romance languages. These illustrate the principle of historical evolutions by which successive clausal negators emerge in post-verbal position because they come from polarity items that must follow their licensing negation. N-words are equally shown to come from polarity items, and the principles that they obey remain to be elucidated in greater details, for which the distinction between weak and strong contexts may prove instrumental. Nonetheless, one advance is the ability to adduce a series of criteria to establish which items have a definite negative value and which do not. A general issue is to determine whether as it seems negation displays more apparent variation than wh-items, or determiners. The role of Negative Polarity Items in renewing negative expression, and the “expressive” dimension of NPIs may be the commanding factor under Haspelmath’s general principle of extravagance (“talk in

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such a way that you are noticed”; 1999, 1055), which may not suitably apply to other functional categories. There is an interpersonal dimension to negation that there is not to determiners and conjunctions. This clearly calls for empirical substantiation by future research.

4 References Agostini, Tainara/Schwenter, Scott (2015), Variability in Negative Concord in Brazilian Portuguese, poster presented at the Buckeye Language Network Symposium, March 2015, Ohio State University. Ashby, William (2001), Un nouveau regard sur la chute du “ne” en français parlé tourangeau: s’agit-il d’un changement en cours?, Journal of French Language Studies 11, 1–22. Batllori, Montserrat (2015), The significance of formal features in language change theory and the evolution of minimizers, in: Pierre Larrivée/Chungmin Lee (edd.), Negation and Polarity. Experimental Perspectives, Cham, Springer, 347–377. Biberauer, Theresa/Cyrino, Sonia (2009), Appearances are deceptive: Jespersen’s Cycle from the perspective of the Romania Nova and Romance-based creoles, Paper presented at Going Romance 23, University of Nice. Bîlbîie, Gabriela (2008), A syntactic account of Romanian correlative coordination from a Romance perspective, in: Stefan Müller (ed.), Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Stanford, CA, CSLI, 25–45. Burnett, Heather/Tremblay, Mireille (2014), Variability and gradience in spoken Montréal French negative concord: typological and methodological implications, Ms. Carlier, Anne/de Mulder, Walter/Lamiroy, Béatrice (2012), The pace of grammaticalization in a typological perspective, Folia Linguistica 2, 1–15. Chierchia, Gennaro (2013), Logic in Grammar. Polarity, Free Choice, and Intervention, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Collins, Chris/Postal, Paul (2013), Classical NEG Raising, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Corblin, Francis/Tovena, Lucia M. (2001), On the multiple expression of negation in Romance, in: Yves D’hulst/Johan Rooryck/Jan Schroten (edd.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 87–115. Dahl, Östen (1979), Typology of sentence negation, Linguistics 17, 79–106. Déprez, Viviane (2011), Atoms of negation. An outside-in micro-parametric approach to negative concord, in: Pierre Larrivée/Richard Ingham (edd.), The Evolution of Negation. Beyond the Jespersen Cycle, Berlin/New York, de Gruyter, 209–272. Dufter, Andreas/Stark, Elisabeth (2007), La linguistique variationnelle et les changements linguistiques “mal compris”: le cas du “ne” de négation, in: Bernard Combettes/Christiane MarchelloNizia (edd.), Études sur le changement linguistique en français, Nancy, Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 115–128. Espinal, Maria Teresa (2000), Expletive negation, Negative Concord and feature checking, Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics 8, 47–69. Espinal, Maria Teresa, et al. (2015), Double negation in Catalan and Spanish. Interaction between syntax and prosody, in: Pierre Larrivée/Chungmin Lee (edd.), Negation and Polarity. Experimental Perspectives, Cham, Springer, 145–176. Fagard, Benjamin (2011), Conjonctions et grammaticalisation: le cas des langues romanes, in: Jacques François/Sophie Prévost (edd.), L’évolution grammaticale à travers les langues romanes, Paris, Société de Linguistique de Paris, 79–102.

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Fălăuş, Anamaria (2007), Negative concord and double negation. The Romanian puzzle, in: José Camacho et al. (edd.), Romance Linguistics 2006, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 135– 148. Floricic, Franck/Lambert-Brétière, Renée (edd.) (2010), La négation et les énoncés non susceptibles d’être niés, Paris, CNRS. Fruyt, Michèle (2008), Négation et grammaticalisation en latin, De Lingua Latina 1, http://www.parissorbonne.fr/fr/spip.php?rubrique2315 Garzonio, Jacopo/Poletto, Cecilia (2009), Quantifiers as negative markers in Italian dialects, in: Jeroen van Craenenbroeck/Johan Rooryck (edd.), Yearbook of Linguistic Variation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 127–152. Giannakidou, Anastasia (2013), Negative and positive polarity items. Licensing, compositionality and variation, in: Claudia Maienborn/Klaus von Heusinger/Paul Portner (edd.), Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, vol. 2, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 1660–1712. Givón, Talmy (2009), The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity. Diachrony, Ontogeny, Neuro-cognition, Evolution, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Greenberg, Joseph H. (1978), Diachrony, synchrony, and language universals, in: Joseph H. Greenberg/Charles A. Ferguson/Edith A. Moravcsik (edd.), Universals of Human Language. Method and Theory, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 62–91. Gualmini, Andrea (2004), Some knowledge children don’t lack, Linguistics 42, 957–982. Han, Ferdinand de (2001), The Interaction of Modality and Negation. A Typological Study, London/New York, Routledge. Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard/Visconti, Jacqueline (2009), On the diachrony of “reinforced” negation in French and Italian, in: Corinne Rossari/Claudia Ricci/Adriana Spiridon (edd.), Grammaticalization and Pragmatics. Facts, Approaches, Theoretical Issues, Bingley, Emerald, 137–171. Haspelmath, Martin (1997), Indefinite Pronouns, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Haspelmath, Martin (1999), Why is grammaticalization irreversible?, Linguistics 37, 1043–1068. Hirschbühler, Paul/Labelle, Marie (1994), Changes in verb position in French negative infinitival clauses, Language Variation and Change 6, 149–178. Horn, Laurence R. (2001), A Natural History of Negation, Stanford, CA, CSLI. Horn, Laurence R. (2010), Multiple negation in English and other languages, in: Laurence R. Horn (ed.), The Expression of Negation, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 11–148. Ingham, Richard (2014), Old French negation, the Tobler/Mussafia law, and V2, Lingua 147, 25–39. Ionescu, Emil (2004), Understanding Romanian Negation. Syntactic and Semantic Approaches in a Declarative Perspective, Bucureşti, Editura Universității din București. Jespersen, Otto (1917), Negation in English and Other Languages, Copenhagen, Høst & Søn. Kato, Yasuhiko (2000), Interpretative asymmetries of negation, in: Laurence R. Horn/Yasuhiko Kato (edd.), Negation and Polarity: Syntactic and Semantic Perspectives, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 62–87. Labelle, Marie/Espinal, Maria Teresa (2014), Diachronic changes in negative expressions: the case of French, Lingua 145, 194–225. Larrivée, Pierre (2004), L’association négative: depuis la syntaxe jusqu’à l’interprétation, Genève, Droz. Larrivée, Pierre (2010), The pragmatic motifs of the Jespersen cycle. Default, activation and the history of negation in French, Lingua 120, 2240–2258. Larrivée, Pierre (2014a), Reanalysis of negatives as polarity markers? The last 400 years of decline of the French preverbal negative clitic, Lingua 147, 40–49. Larrivée, Pierre (2014b), Pathways of evolution of n-words: functions, features and bridging contexts, Paper presented at the workshop Negation: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Barcelona, December 18–19, 2014.

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Larrivée, Pierre (2014c), L’unidirectionalité irréversible du changement linguistique comme conséquence de l’acquisition? Le cas d’expressions négatives déliquescentes en français ancien, 4e Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française, SHS Web of Conferences 8, 297–311. Lindblom, Camilla (2013), Negation in Romance languages. A micro-typological study on negation, Stockholms Universiteit, BA thesis. Llop, Ares (2013), La negació en pallarès: sintaxi de l’adverbi “cap”, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, MA thesis. Longobardi, Giuseppe (2014), The case of Romance negation. Theory and experiment in parametric minimalism, in: Rob Pensalfini/Myfany Turpin/Diana Guillemin (edd.), Language Description Informed by Theory, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 217–262. Maiden, Martin/Robustelli, Cecilia (2000), A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian, London/New York, Routledge. Martineau, France (2011), “Ne”-absence in declarative and yes/no-interrogative contexts. Some patterns of change, in: Pierre Larrivée/Richard Ingham (edd.), The Evolution of Negation. Beyond the Jespersen Cycle, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 179–208. Martins, Ana Maria (2000), Polarity items in Romance. Underspecification and lexical change, in: Susan Pintzuk/George Tsoulas/Anthony Warner (edd.), Diachronic Syntax. Models and Mechanisms, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 191–219. Martins, Ana Maria (2014), How much syntax is there in metalinguistic negation?, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 32, 635–672. Mathieu, Éric (2001), On the nature of French n-words, UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 13, 319–352. Miestamo, Matti (2005), Standard Negation. The Negation of Declarative Verbal Main Clauses in a Typological Perspective, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Molinelli, Piera (1988), Fenomeni della negazione dal latino all’italiano, Firenze, La Nuova Italia. Muller, Claude (1991), La négation en français. Syntaxe, sémantique et éléments de comparaison avec les autres langues romanes, Genève, Droz. Oliveira, Fátima (2000), Some issues about the Portuguese modals “dever” and “poder”, Belgian Journal of Linguistics 14 [= Johan van der Auwera/Patrick Dendale (edd.), Modal Verbs in Germanic and Romance Languages], 167–184. Pană Dindelegan, Gabriela (2013), The Grammar of Romanian, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Parry, Mair (1997), Clitic ordering in the dialects of the Ligurian-Piedmontese border, with particular reference to the preverbal negative, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 113, 243–271. Parry, Mair (2013), Negation in the history of Italo-Romance, in: David Willis/Christopher Lucas/Anne Breitbarth (edd.), The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, vol. 1: Case Studies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 77–118. Poletto, Cecilia (2008), On negative doubling, Quaderni di lavoro ASIT 1, 57–84. Posner, Rebecca (1985), Post-verbal negation in non-standard French: a historical and comparative view, Romance Philology 39, 170–197. Pountain, Christopher/Kattan-Ibarra, Juan (2004), Modern Spanish Grammar. A Practical Guide, London/New York, Routledge. Rowlett, Paul (1998), Sentential Negation in French, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Sailor, Craig (2014), Polarity-driven inversion in British English and beyond, Ms., University of Groningen. Salvi, Giampaolo (2011), Morphosyntactic persistence, in: Martin Maiden/John Charles Smith/Adam Ledgeway (edd.), The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, vol. 1: Structures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 318–381. Schwenter, Scott A. (2005), The pragmatics of negation in Brazilian Portuguese, Lingua 115, 1427–1456.

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Sousa, Lílian Teixeira de (2011), Sentential negation in Brazilian Portuguese, Journal LIPP 1, 89–103. Swart, Henriëtte de (2010), Expression and Interpretation of Negation. An OT Typology, Dordrecht, Springer. Toosarvandani, Maziar (2013), Corrective but coordinates clauses not always but sometimes, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 31, 827–863. Tottie, Gunnel/Neukom-Hermann, Anja (2010), Quantifier-negation interaction in English. A corpus linguistic study of “all … not” constructions, in: Laurence R. Horn (ed.), The Expression of Negation, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 149–185. Van Alsenoy, Lauren (2014), A typology of negative quantifiers: the Jespersen cycle and negative absorption, Universiteit Antwerpen, doctoral dissertation. van der Auwera, Johan (2009), The Jespersen cycles, in: Elly van Gelderen (ed.), Cyclical Change, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 35–71. van der Auwera, Johan (2010), Prohibition: constructions and markers, in: Dingfang Shu/Ken Turner (edd.), Contrasting Meaning in Languages of the East and West, Tübingen, Narr, 443–475. Willis, David/Lucas, Christopher/Breitbarth, Anne (edd.) (2013), The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, vol. 1: Case Studies, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Zanuttini, Raffaella (1997), Negation and Clausal Structure. A Comparative Study of Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Zeijlstra, Hedde (2004), Sentential negation and Negative Concord, University of Amsterdam, doctoral dissertation.

Mara Frascarelli

13 Dislocations and framings Abstract: This chapter provides a formal and pragmatic characterization of dislocation and framing, based on a comparative analysis of Romance languages. Given their shared quality as non-operator A΄-dependencies, dislocated constituents and framesetters are both treated as instances of topicalization and distinguished in terms of “sentence topics” and “limiting topics”, respectively. A typology of topics is then proposed, showing the correlation between discourse functions, prosodic properties and dedicated positions in the C-domain. In particular, sentence and limiting topics are illustrated and confronted for their intonational contours, morpho-syntactic properties (such as reconstruction, minimality and WCO effects), derivation, position in the functional array and role in the conversational dynamics. Attention is also paid to clitic resumption and a comparison with another type of dislocation, namely marginalization, is proposed. Based on naturalistic data and interpretive judgments, evidence is provided that framing must be kept distinct from dislocation and forms an independent discourse category.  

Keywords: dislocation, framing, A-Topic, C-Topic, G-Topic, L-Topic, aboutness, given(ness), contrast, A΄-position, clitic resumption, reconstruction, interface, locality  

1 Theoretical background It is generally agreed that the terms “dislocation” and “framing” refer to a number of constructions involving long-distance dependencies1 (cf. Kaplan/Zaenen 1989; Lasnik/Saito 1992, among others) between a topicalized constituent and (a position within) the rest of the sentence.2 We will therefore refer to these displaced constituents as

1 Within the Generative framework, the term “dependency” is used to indicate the structural relation of a moved constituent with its original, merge site. In particular, A΄-dependencies include dislocations to a non-argument position (generally, the C-domain) as in relative clauses, wh-questions, Focus and Topic constructions. Since Cinque’s (1990) seminal work, A΄-dependencies have been the object of several studies, showing a crucial difference between Operator-like constituents (subject to syntactic constraints such as islands and crossing effects) and non-Operators, whose dislocation is generally associated with the resumptive strategy (cf., among many others, Mahajan 1990; Lasnik/Saito 1992; Chomsky 1995; Miyagawa 2004; Sauerland 2004; Rizzi 2006). 2 Long-distance dependencies (also called “unbounded distance constructions”) typically include topicalization, focus fronting, wh-questions, cleft constructions, relative clauses and scrambling phenomena. Two examples are given below (a wh-question and a relative clause, respectively), in which [e] indicates the original gap: DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-013

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“topics”. Following Cinque (1990), we assume that this type of dislocation implies a non-operator dependency in languages with a resumptive strategy.3 In the literature different types of topics have been proposed and analyzed, and the very definition of “topic” is far from univocal, both in the functional and in the formal literature (see Gundel/Fretheim 2004; Roberts 2011 for general discussion). In this chapter we will deal with topics whose domain is the clause (so-called sentence topics, Section 2.1)4 and frame-setters (defined as limiting topics, Section 2.4), aiming to provide a multi-layered characterization of their common and distinctive properties. Sentence topics can be outlined in terms of their relation to the preceding discourse context (Vallduví 1992), or in terms of their updating effect, leading to a new context. As for the first point, topics are relationally given (i.e., independent of the following predication) and usually constitute discourse-given information. On the other hand, topics implementing an updating effect are not necessarily discoursegiven and two alternative views have emerged within formal semantics and pragmatics. According to the first view, the topic is a salient entity which the associated sentence is about (Reinhart 1981; Lambrecht 1994; Portner/Yabushita 1998; Zubizarreta 1998). Technically, the discourse context comprises a structured repository of shared information, i.e., of propositions publicly accepted by the participants. The discourse referent denoted by a sentence topic constitutes the “address” under which the proposition conveyed by the assertion will be stored. This means that the proposition expressed by (1a) is stored as information about Lou Reed, while the proposition in (1b) is stored under the address of David Bowie:  



(1)

a. [Lou Reed]Topic met David Bowie in 1971. b. [David Bowie]Topic met Lou Reed in 1971.

In the second view, the topic is related to (or can be identified with) the Question Under Discussion at a given point of the conversation (von Fintel 1994; Roberts 1996; Büring 1997; 2003). In particular, Büring (2003) analyzes the contrastive topics in (2B) as elements “breaking down” the question (2A) into two alternative subquestions (3i– ii), differing in the topic-marked subject position. This yields a strategy of “incremental answering”: (2)

A: What do your siblings do? B: [My brother] is a doctor, and [my sister] is a lawyer.

(i) Who did Bill claim that Mary had seen [e]? (ii) The boy that I thought you met [e] yesterday. 3 Evidence for this claim will be illustrated and discussed in Section 2.3 with examples from Italian, French, Spanish and Romanian. 4 Hence, discourse topics (Reinhart 1981) will not be considered.

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(3) i. What does your sister do? ii. What does your brother do? It follows from either view that the topic is different from a fronted focus (another case of A΄-dependency; cf. footnote 1) and cannot be interpreted within its domain since (i) in the topic-as-entity view, the topic constitutes the address for assessment and storage of the propositional content of the assertion, while the focus is interpreted within the propositional content itself, and (ii) in the topic-as-question view, the focus generates a set of alternative propositions, and the topic generates from this a set of alternative questions. A different type of topicalization is implemented by elements providing a frame for the following sentence, an operation which has been differently approached in the literature as well (cf., among others, Chafe’s 1976 “Chinese style” topics, Lambrecht’s 1994 “scene-setting” topics and Krifka’s 2007 “frame-setting” topics). Unlike sentence topics, a frame-setter does not represent an entity about which some information is provided (a “file card”), but has the function of limiting the truth-conditional validity of the sentence it is associated with (within some particular domain). In Chafe’s (1976) words:  

“What [these] topics appear to do is to limit the applicability of the main predication to a certain restricted domain. [. . .] the topic sets a spatial, temporal, or individual frame work within which the main predication holds” (Chafe 1976, 50).

Revisiting Chafe’s definition, Krifka (2007, 36) underlines that statements like (4B) below “certainly should not be entered under a file card about the health situation”. Rather, its function is to select a set of alternative frames so as to delimit the domain of application of the asserted proposition,5 possibly contrasting a given frame with alternative ones (as in (5)): (4) A: How is John? B: {Healthwise/As for his health}, he is [FINE]Foc. (5) A: How is business going for Daimler-Chrysler? B: [In GERmany]Frame the prospects are [GOOD]Foc, but [in AMErica]Frame they are [losing MOney]Foc. Based on these considerations, Krifka (2007) connects frame-setters to contrastive topics, a proposal that represents an important point of discussion since it creates a

5 “They choose one out of a set of frames and state that the proposition holds within this frame” (Krifka 2007, 36).

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“bridge” between sentence and limiting topics (i.e., between dislocation and framing). This subject will be resumed and discussed in Section 2.4. From an analytical viewpoint, topicalization has been traditionally approached from either a functional or a formal perspective. Within the former, dislocation phenomena are analyzed from a communication-oriented perspective (cf. Givón 1983; Halliday 1985; Lambrecht 1987; Dik 1989; van Dijk 2007), while within the latter the prevailing view has been that different levels of linguistic analysis correspond to modules which are encapsulated from one another (and, in generative models, sequentially ordered). Because of the assumed encapsulation, the main emphasis has been on truth-conditional content, separated from “meaning-in-context”. However, recent analyses on information-structural phenomena have shown that the discourse context affects other aspects of linguistic expressions, besides enriching the truthconditional content. As formal linguists have begun to systematically explore such phenomena, the picture of modular encapsulation has been called into question and competing proposals have emerged aiming at an integrated analysis of discourse categories within a theory of formal grammar. This is the approach adopted in the present chapter.  

2 An information-structural classification of topics Like focus (cf. Kiss 1998; Krifka 2007; ↗14 Focus Fronting), the category of topic includes different subtypes, characterized by specific discourse functions and formal properties. As discourse functions are assumed to be encoded in the form of syntactic features (cf. Cinque/Rizzi 2010, among others), a crucial association is established between discourse categories and syntactic phenomena. An illustration of the relevant typology is therefore necessary for a comprehensive information-structural characterization of topics in different Romance languages.

2.1 An interface classification for topic sub-types As is known, in Romance languages dislocation is generally associated to clitic resumption for all discourse functions and the dislocated constituent is generally realized either in the left (CLLD) or in the right (CLRD) periphery of the sentence. However, not all discourse functions can be implemented in both peripheries. A major difference between CLLD and CLRD is that only the former can implement a shift or a contrast (Bianchi/Frascarelli 2010). Consider for instance the Italian examples (6a,b), in which Gianni and Marco are contrasted in the left and in the right periphery of the sentence, respectively:

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Leo ha due figli… ‘Leo has two sons…’ lok incontra spesso, a. [Gianni]k pro Gianni (he) DO . CL meet.3SG often non loj vede mai. [Marco]j pro DO . CL see.3SG never Marco (he) NEG ‘…Gianni, he often meets while Marco, he never sees.’ b. #pro lok incontra spesso, [Gianni]k, pro non loj vede mai, [Marco]j.6

In this respect, recent analyses have shown that CLLD can realize any type of topic in diverse languages, while the discourse functions associated to CLRD are more restricted (cf. Frascarelli 2007; Bianchi/Frascarelli 2010). Specifically, Frascarelli/ Hinterhölzl (2007) propose a typology of CLLD and CLRD topics, based on the systematic correlation between the formal properties of (different types of) topics and their function in the discourse, which is encoded in a strict hierarchy in the C-domain:7 (7) [ForceP

[ShiftP

[GP

[ContrP

[FocP

[FamP

[FinP

]]]]]]]8

2.1.1 The Aboutness-shift Topic (A-Topic) The A-Topic connects Reinhart’s (1981) aboutness (“what the sentence is about”) with the property of being newly introduced or reintroduced to propose a shift in the discourse. Assuming with Reinhart that the Common Ground (CG) is not an unordered set of propositions, but is divided into subsets of propositions (“file cards”) that are stored under defining entries, the A-Topic can be defined as the entry identifying the file card under which the proposition expressed in the sentence is stored: (8) It. Sempre a parlare di Leo! [Tua sorella]A-Top, come sta? ‘Always talking about Leo! Your sister, how is she doing?’

6 The symbol “#” indicates that the relevant sentence is inappropriate in the relevant discourse context, though grammatical from a morpho-syntactic point of view. 7 Cross-linguistic evidence for the relevant association (for different types of topics) has been provided for a number of diverse languages, such as German (Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl 2007), Somali (Frascarelli/ Puglielli 2009), English (Bianchi/Frascarelli 2010) and Spanish (Frascarelli/Jiménez-Fernández in press). 8 The Ground Phrase (GP) projection (cf. Poletto/Pollock 2004) indicates a functional projection in the C-domain that is targeted by sentential (background/presupposed) constituents. This is, for instance, the target of IP movement in CLRD constructions (cf. Section 3.3).

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According to Krifka (2001, 25), topic selection is a speech act itself. Specifically, it is “an initiating speech act that requires a subsequent speech act, like an assertion, question, command, or curse about the entity that was selected”. This means that topic selection is a conversational move and, as such, this operation is restricted to clauses endowed with illocutionary force (cf. Section 2.2, below). Syntactically, the A-Topic is merged in the highest topic position in the C-domain (i.e., ShiftP in (7)). From an intonational viewpoint, it is associated with the complex L*+H tone, that is to say, the topic shift is signaled by a rise in the F0 contour that is aligned with the tonic vowel in its full extension (for details, cf. Frascarelli 2007, Section 3.1).  

2.1.2 The Contrastive Topic (C-Topic) C-Topics induce alternatives in the discourse which have no impact on the Focus value of the sentence (cf. Büring 2003). In particular, C-Topic marking is used to “break down” a complex proposition into a conjunction of simpler ones in which a predicate applies separately to each member of a salient set (cf. Bianchi/Frascarelli 2010, 72). This is illustrated in the Italian example below, which involves a dialogue between speaker A and speaker B: (9) A: Dove vanno i tuoi figli in vacanza? ‘Where will your children go on holiday?’ B: [Leo]C-Top andrà all’estero con gli amici, [Mario]C-Top viene con noi al mare. ‘Leo will go abroad with his friends, Mario is coming with us to the seaside.’ C-Topics provide an instruction to the interlocutor, but do not constitute, in themselves, independent conversational moves (cf. Section 2.2, below). C-Topics are located lower than A-Topics in the C-domain, in a functional projection dedicated to Contrast (ContrP in (7)) “where either a topic is merged in or a focus can move to” (Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl 2007, 101). From a phonological viewpoint, C-Topics are characterized by a high tone that is aligned on the tonic vowel (H*).

2.1.3 The Familiar/Given Topic (G-Topic) G-Topics refer to given information in the discourse, which is somehow salient to the conversation. Being given information, G-Topics can be considered as D-linked constituents (Pesetsky 1987), either in a “strong” or in a “familiar/weak” sense (cf. Heim 1982; Roberts 2011), and can be used either for topic continuity (“maintenance”) with respect to the current A-Topic (this is the case of so-called Aboutness G-Topics), or to mention a constituent that is part of the background but was not proposed as an

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A-Topic in the previous context (Background G-Topics). Consider for instance the following passage9 and, in particular, the underlined sentence at the end: (10) It. [i gladiatori]k entravano nell’arena, prok sfilavano, prok salutavano gli spettatori e prok salutavano soprattutto l’imperatore, poi prok si recavano davanti alla tribuna […] e c’era l’arena che era praticamente un tavolato di legno sul quale veniva buttata della sabbia e [su questa]G-Top, [lorok]G-Top, [i gladiatori k]G-Top, lottavano. ‘The gladiators entered the arena, [they] marched, [they] greeted the public and especially hailed the emperor, then [they] used to go in front of the gallery […] and there was the arena, which was practically a wooden stage covered with sand and on this they – the gladiators – used to fight.’ As is clear, the pronoun loro and the DP i gladiatori are used to resume (and maintain) the current A-Topic (introduced at the beginning of this passage and heading a long chain of null subjects, cf. Frascarelli 2007; in press). Hence, they qualify as Aboutness G-Topics. On the other hand, the left-dislocated PP su questa refers to the arena: an entity that was previously introduced in the text, but not proposed as an A-Topic. It thus qualifies as a Background G-Topic. G-Topics are associated with a low tone (L*) independent of their specific function and occupy the lowest topic position in the hierarchy given in (7). Unlike A- and C-Topics, they can be multiple (as is shown in (10) above) and can be realized in the right periphery of the sentence, as is shown in the following French example (from Blasco-Dulbecco 1999): (11) Fr. Je continuais à courir je n’avais pas vu la voiture donc euh – bon moi quand je l’ai vue, [la voiture]G-Top, c’était déjà un peu trop tard. ‘I kept on running, I had not seen the car, so, erm – well, when I saw it, the car, it was already a bit too late.’ All types of topics can combine (according to the hierarchy given in (7)). Sentences (12) and (13) show the combination between an A-Topic and a C-Topic in Italian and French (Larsson 1979), respectively:

9 Naturalistic data for Italian are drawn from Bonvino’s (2006) corpus of analysis (unless otherwise indicated), composed of 100 minutes of conversations among friends and interviews with students (from which a total of 173 sentences have been extracted).

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(12) It. [Io]A-Top [una cosa che ho trovato positiva]C-Top I one thing that have.1SG found positive è stata la comprensione. been the comprehension be.3SG ‘As for me, what I considered positive was the comprehension part.’ (13) Fr. [Mes parents]A-Top [la liberté sexuelle et tout ça]C-Top my parents the freedom sexual and all that ils en ont horreur. they PART .CL have.3PL horror ‘As for my parents, they hate sexual freedom and the like.’ As is clear, the speaker (12) and the speaker’s parents (13) are “what the sentence is about”, while the following Topics induce alternatives in the discourse, creating the expectation that something negative was also found by the speaker in (12) and that the parents in (13) did not hate other things (i.e., cases of so-called “partial” C-Topics; cf. Büring 2003). A- and C-Topics can also combine with G-Topics. Consider (14) and (15) below, in which the dislocated constituents following the A-Topics are clearly part of the discourse context (as Background G-Topics):  

(14) It. […] l’inglese risultava facendolo da solo più interessante […] avevo mai fatto [io]A-Top [inglese]G-Top – premetto – non l’ I English premise.1SG not DO . CL had.1SG never done ‘[…] through self-learning English appeared more interesting to me […] as for me – premise – I had never studied English before.’ [l’analyse]C-Top il nous l’ avait donnée. (15) Fr. [le prof]A-Top IO . CL . 1PL DO . CL had.3SG given.F the professor the analysis he ‘The professor had given us the [mentioned] analysis.’ (Barnes 1985) Different types of topics also have different requirements with respect to illocutionary force and can have an impact on conversational dynamics. Further characterization is thus needed.

2.2 Dislocation, framing and conversational dynamics Working on Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl’s (2007) typology, Bianchi/Frascarelli (2010) showed that discourse categories have different functions in conversational dynamics. In particular, evidence was provided that, if a discourse category triggers an

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update of the discourse context, it must occur in clauses endowed with context update potential.10 This observation, supported by comparative data, led the authors to formulate the following interface condition: (16) Interface Root Restriction (Bianchi/Frascarelli 2010, rule 41) Information structure phenomena that affect the conversational dynamics (CG management) must occur in clauses endowed with illocutionary force that implement a conversational move.11 Assuming that topic selection is a speech act itself (cf. Section 2.1.1) and based on the analysis of spoken corpora and interpretive judgments with informants, Bianchi/ Frascarelli (2010) conclude that: (a) The A-Topic implements a conversational move. It pertains to the dimension of the CG management (i) and, as such, is restricted to root clauses and subordinate clauses endowed with context update potential (“root-like” embedded clauses, cf. among others Emonds 2004; Heycock 2006); (b) C-Topics are not restricted to root clauses. Nevertheless, the meaning of clauses containing C-Topics must remain at the propositional level. Therefore they can be found under bridge verbs,12 but not in adverbial clauses, since the latter do not express any proposition; (c) G-Topics do not instantiate a conversational move since givenness is calculated on the basis of the CG content; hence, they do not depend on illocutionary force and can be found in any type of subordinate clause. Negative evidence for the association between A-Topics and illocutionary force is provided by the fact that they never occur under factive/volitional verbs in the corpora 10 The association between discourse phenomena and illocutionary force has been widely discussed in the literature. Due to space limitations, the interested reader is referred to scholars and studies mentioned in this section (cf. in particular footnote 12). 11 Following Krifka (2007), two dimensions of the CG are assumed, namely the CG content and the CG management. The CG content is the truth-conditional information accumulated up to a given point in the conversation. The CG management includes (i) the sequence of conversational moves (assertions, questions, etc.) performed by the speech act participants, which require illocutionary force, and (ii) the instructions that help the interlocutor determine the way in which the CG content develops and is organized (but do not constitute, in themselves, independent conversational moves). 12 The “bridge” term traditionally refers to verbs allowing for long-distance dependencies (i.e., verbs of saying and opinion, such as say and think, whose complement clauses do not form a “barrier” for movement; on this notion, cf. footnote 28 below). In investigations dedicated to root phenomena, complements of bridge verbs play a major role since they have a “quasi-root” character, that is to say, they allow for the realization of root operations such as Topicalization, Locative inversion and VP preposing, while this is not possible in complements of factive or volitional verbs (cf., among others, Gärtner 2001; Haegeman 2002; Emonds 2004; Meinunger 2004; Heycock 2006; Bianchi/Frascarelli 2010).  

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examined, while this option is attested for C-Topics. Positive evidence can be provided by a language like English, confronting Left Dislocation (implementing A-Topics) with Topicalization (used to realize C-Topics).13 Consider the “minimal pairs” in (17) and (18) (tested with informants in Bianchi/Frascarelli 2010): (17) a. *I am glad that this unrewarding job, she has finally decided to give it up. b. okI am glad that this unrewarding job, she has finally decided to give up and her children, she can follow more tightly. (18) a. *I hope that the past he will forget it soon, so as to bravely face the future. b. okI hope that the past he will forget, and the future he will face bravely. As is shown, the shifting function associated with Left Dislocation cannot be realized under a factive (17a) or a volitional verb (18a), since the former introduces presupposed information and the latter a wish (hence, the embedded clauses are not endowed with context update potential). On the other hand, the grammaticality of (17b) and (18b) shows that illocutionary force is not a requirement for C-Topics. Evidence that G-Topics do not instantiate a conversational move (and can be thus realized in any clausal type) can be immediately shown through the realization of Topics in adverbial clauses in English (cf. (19), from Haegeman 2004) and French (cf. (20), from Blasco-Dulbecco 1999): (19) *If these exams you don’t pass (them), you won’t get the degree. (20) a.

On

peut aussi bien regarder la télé quand can.3SG also watch.INF the TV when les livres on ne les aime pas. the books IMPERS NEG DO . CL love.3SG not ‘You can always watch TV when you don’t like reading.’ b. *On peut aussi bien regarder la télé les livres quand on ne les aime pas. IMPERS

Sentence (19) shows that neither Left Dislocation nor Topicalization can be realized in conditional clauses. On the contrary, CLLD is possible in French adverbial clauses, but only in the low C-domain (cf. (20a,b)), showing that the relevant constituent is neither an A- nor a C-Topic.

13 Remember that in Romance languages, all types of topics are realized by means of clitic resumption. It is therefore difficult to provide formal evidence without taking into account the prosodic properties of the dislocated constituents. This is the reason why English examples are used in this case.

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2.3 Major syntactic properties: a comparative overview Since pronominal resumption generally excludes an Operator-like quality for the dislocated constituent, CLLD is often argued to be a different type of A΄-dependency (as is argued in Cinque’s 1990 seminal work). Cinque’s (1990) arguments are based on syntactic diagnostics showing that CLLD is not sensitive to weak islands, does not license parasitic gaps and does not show Weak Crossover (WCO) effects (contrary to Operator-like constituents).14 The author’s claim is supported by comparative Romance data. Let us first consider (in)sensitivity to weak islands: (21) a.

It.

b. Fr.

c.

Sp.

La macchina, mi stupisco se Leo la REFL surprise.1SG if Leo DO . CL . F the car riparerà. fix.FUT . 3SG La voiture, ça m’ étonnerait si Leo DO . CL surprise.COND .3SG if Leo the car it répare. fix.3SG El coche, me sorprendería si Leo lo Leo DO . CL the car DO . CL surprise.COND .3SG if arreglara. fix. PST . SBJV . 3SG ‘I will be surprised if Leo fixes the car.’

la DO . CL . F

14 For these properties, the CLLD/CLRD should not be confused with Hanging Topics (cf. Benincà 2001). Indeed, Hanging Topics (HT) are not preceded by prepositions, they are obligatorily resumed (also by tonic pronouns) and can never start a Topic-chain for the interpretation of null subjects (cf. Frascarelli 2007). Furthermore, a HT is not sensitive to strong islands showing that its derivation must be kept distinct from CLLD (for discussion and proposals, see Frascarelli 2000; Boeckx/Grohmann 2005; Cinque/Rizzi 2010). Consider for instance the following contrast in Italian (Frascarelli 2000) and French (Larsson 1979): andata via senza parlargli. (CLLD) (i) a. *A Luigi, Maria è away without talk.INF - IO . CL to Luigi Maria be.3SG gone b. Luigi, Maria è andata via senza parlargli. (HT) problème-là, je connais l’homme (ii) a. *À ce to that problem-there I know.1S G the man qui y a trouvé une solution. (CLLD) have.3SG found a solution who LOC . CL Ce problème-là, je connais l’homme qui y a trouvé une solution. (HT) b.

Dislocations and framings

d. Rom. Pe PR

Maria, Maria

voi FUT . 1SG

fi be

uimit dacă Leo surprised if Leo

483

o DO . CL

va

saluta. FUT . 3SG greet ‘I will be surprised if Leo greets Maria.’15 As is shown, in Romance languages an object can be left-dislocated and resumed by a clitic sitting inside a weak island without affecting grammaticality. This possibility is also maintained for indefinite DPs, independently of the presence of a partitive clitic (as is shown in (22c), pace López 2009): (22) a.

It.

b. Fr.

c.

Sp.

Di bugie, mi vergogno di averne dette REFL shame.1SG of have.INF . PART . CL told of lies molte nella mia vita. many in.the my life Des mensonges, j’ai honte d’ en of lies I have.1SG shame of PART . CL avoir dit beaucoup dans ma vie. many in my life have.INF told Mentiras, me avergüenzo de haber dicho muchas REFL shame.1SG of have.INF told many lies en mi vida. in my life ‘I am ashamed to have told many lies in my life.’

Another piece of evidence concerns the impossibility to license parasitic gaps (23) and the lack of WCO effects – an opposite behavior with respect to Operators like Foci. This property is attested for all the Romance languages under examination. For the sake of space, WCO effects are only shown in Italian and French (24): (23) a.

It.

Maria, l’ hanno invitata Maria DO . CL . F have.3PL invited.F conoscerla / *conoscere [e]. know.INF .DO . CL . F know.INF

alla at.the

festa party

senza without

15 In Romanian DO dislocation requires the presence of a “dummy” preposition (pe), which is restricted to [+human] objects. This is the reason why we could not use the same sentence. Specifically, [–human] DO topics must be preceded by a locution similar to as for: În legătură cu maşina, voi fi uimit dacă Gianni o va repara. (i) Sentence (i) is grammatical, supporting the present analysis. Nevertheless it was important to show that grammaticality is not dependent on the presence of such a locution.

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Mara Frascarelli

b. Fr.

Marie, ils l’ Maria they DO . CL . F fête sans *(la) party without DO . CL . F c. Sp. María, la han María DO . CL . F have.3PL conocer*(la). know.INF .DO . CL . F d. Rom. Pe Maria, au PREP Maria have.3PL fără a *(o) DO . CL without of (24) a.

It.

b. Fr.

ont have.3PL connaître. know.INF invitado invited

invitée invited.F

à at

a at

fiesta party

invitat-o invited-DO . CL cunoaşte. know.INF

la the

la the

sin without

la serbare at.the party

Giannik, suak madre lo ha Gianni his mother DO . CL have.3SG *G IANNI k suak madre ha sempre apprezzato. Jeank, sak mère l’ a Jean his mother DO . CL have.3SG *C’est J EAN k que sak mère a toujours apprécié.

sempre always

apprezzato. appreciated

toujours apprécié. always appreciated

A final piece of evidence comes from reconstruction. Interpretive judgments prove that CLLD constituents are not reconstructed in argument position (i.e., where the coindexed clitic is merged). Consider (25):  

(25) It. La propria*i/k foto, Leok non sa chii the own picture Leo not know.3SG who l’ ha vista. DO . CL . F have.3SG seen.F ‘The picture of himself, Leo does not know who saw it.’ The anaphora interpretation in (25) suggests that the Topic (la propria foto) is interpreted in a position that is c-commanded by Leo, but not by chi (cf. Frascarelli 2008). In this respect, Zubizarreta (1998) proposes that CLLD constituents are reconstructed to some intermediate position between the position of the preverbal subject and that of the postverbal subject. Zubizarreta takes this position to be Clitic Phrase, while López (2009) proposes the outer Spec of vP. In this line of analysis, but assuming the typology of Topics illustrated in Section 2, Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl (2016) compare G-Topics and scrambled constituents in German, providing crucial evidence that (non-shifting, non-contrastive) G-Topics in Italian are interpreted in a position in the split-IP area which is the same position to which scrambled constituents are moved (on the existence of “low periphery” above the VP, cf. Belletti 2004; on the split-IP hypothesis, cf. Cinque

Dislocations and framings

485

1999; on a movement analysis of G-Topics, cf. also Jiménez-Fernández/Miyagawa 2014).16 Based on an online survey, the authors thus claim that the Topics in the Italian examples (26) and (27) can only receive the (a) interpretation: (26) Qualcuno lo ha presentato ad ogni ospite, il suo vicino di tavolo. a. OK‘Somebody introduced his own neighbour to every guest.’ b. *?‘Somebody introduced each of the guests to their neighbour.’ (27) Il suo vicino di tavolo, qualcuno lo ha presentato ad ogni ospite. a. OK‘Somebody introduced his own neighbour to every guest.’ b. *?‘Somebody introduced each of the guests to their neighbour.’ The same interpretive result is obtained in the other Romance languages examined. This means that in sentences like in (28) the possessive (su/son/său) can only be bound by the indefinite (quantified) subject (and not by the indirect object): (28) a.

Sp.

(A) suk/*i compañero de mesa, alguienk lo ha presentado [a cada invitado]i. Sonk/*i voisin de table, quelqu’unk l’a présenté [à chaque hôte]i. b. Fr. c. Rom. Pe vecinul săuk/*i de masă, cinevak/ l-a prezentat [fiecărui oaspete]i.

This cross-linguistic evidence provides strong support for an approach in which Romance Topics are sitting in an A΄-position and represent a different type of A΄-dependency with respect to Operators. Let us turn now to the analysis of limiting topics (henceforth, L-Topics), an additional type of dislocation, whose discourse and formal properties partially overlap with C-Topics, but cannot be reduced to them.

2.4 Limiting Topics: a formal perspective of “frame-setters” As discussed in Section 1, Krifka (2007) relates frame-setters to contrastive topics insofar as they imply that “there are other aspects for which other predications might hold” (Krifka 2007, 37). Specifically, the author argues that: “[contrastive topics and frame-setters] express that, for the communicative needs at the current point of discourse, the current contribution only gives a limited or incomplete answer. With contrastive topics, the current CG management contains the expectation that information about a more comprehensive, or distinct, entity is given […]. With frame setters, the current CG management contains the expectation that information of a different, e.g. more comprehensive, type is

16 Hence, a crucial syntactic distinction is proposed with respect to A-Topics and C-Topics, which are merged in the C-domain and do not reconstruct (cf. Bianchi/Frascarelli 2010).

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given, and the frame setter indicates that the information actually provided is restricted to the particular dimension specified.”

According to this theory, the only difference between C-Topics and L-Topics (framesetters) is the (different) elements composing the relevant set of alternatives: entities vs types/domains, respectively. Based on this crucial similarity, the expectation is that C- and L-Topics should share (some) major formal properties. This prediction seems to be borne out by prosodic data. Based on a recent interface investigation (Carella 2015), evidence is provided that the intonational contour of L-Topics in the left periphery of the sentence is exactly the H* tone attested for C-Topics. Carella also identified three main “framing domains”, namely Time, Space and Field: L-Topics frame the predication within one of these, creating the expectation that the information provided in the following assertion is not valid for other discourse domains (as C-Topics do for entities). Consider the following Italian examples: (29) [Una volta capito il sistema]Time, impieghi nemmeno cinque minuti. ‘[When the system is understood], it takes less than five minutes.’ (30) [Nella radio]Space, chiaramente, sono tutti professionisti. ‘[At the radio station], clearly, they are all professionals.’ (31) L’ipnosi è utilissima per tirar fuori delle cose che, [a livello di coscienza]Field, non verrebbero mai fuori. ‘Hypnosis is very useful to bring out things that [consciously] would never come out.’ Given the attested similarity between L- and C-Topics, the expectation is that an L-Topic in the left periphery should follow an A-Topic, as C-Topics do. This expectation is also borne out by corpus analysis, as is shown below from Italian ((32), from Bonvino’s 2006 corpus) and French ((33), from Larsson 1979): (32) Nel primo c’era la traduzione in italiano a sinistra dello schermo – c’erano tutti i vari sistemi per avere informazioni in più e l’ avevo capito insomma. [io]A-Top [lì]Space non DO . CL have.PST .1SG understood in short I there not ‘In the first [case] there was the Italian translation on the left side of the screen – you could find different ways to get additional information and I could not understand it [there], that’s it.’ (33) [le voleur]A-Top the thief

[quand when

il it

est arrivé, be.3SG arrived

ton your

chien]Time dog

Dislocations and framings

487

eh bien il n’ a pas bronché. not stumbled well he NEG have.3SG ‘The thief, [when your dog arrived], he didn’t budge.’ Example (33) is particularly interesting, because it also shows that a clausal L-Topic can contain a (right-dislocated) G-Topic (ton chien). This is in line with Bianchi/ Frascarelli’s (2010) claim that G-Topics can be realized in any clausal type, including adverbials (cf. Section 2.2, above). Despite the similarities, however, the analysis of data also shows that the limiting function cannot be considered as a particular type of C-Topic. Additional formal and interpretive properties are attested that require its classification in a separate category. Specifically, while C-Topics can only be realized in the left periphery of the sentence (cf. (9a,b), above), the limiting function can also be expressed in the form of a right-dislocated constituent: [Silkek]G-Top (34) It. prok è un po’ pesantona is a bit dreary Silke ‘Silke is kind of dreary [in that kind of things].’

[per ‘ste cose]Field for these things

(35) It. E senti, [il computerk]A-Top invece era la the and listen the computer instead be.PST . 3SG utilizzavi [nel laboratorio PC]Space? prima volta che lk’ first time that it.CL use.PST . 2SG [ in-the PC laboratory] ‘And listen: the computer, on the other hand, was it the first time that you used it [in the PC lab]?’ Interestingly, right-hand L-Topics are realized with a low tone (L*), consistent with the intonation of right-dislocated constituents. This shows that L-Topics are not necessarily contrastive. As a matter of fact, right-dislocated L-Topics always convey given/background information and often resume referents previously proposed as topics: these are typical functions of G-Topics (cf. Section 2.1.3). Finally notice that right-hand L-Topics can also combine with other types of Topics. Specifically the frame-setter follows a (right-hand) G-Topic in (34) while the spatial restriction combines with an A-Topic in (35). As for their morpho-syntactic properties, Carella’s (2015) study shows that different phrasal types can be associated to this discourse function, with a preference for PPs (51%) and AdvPs (25.2%) and that, unlike A-, C- and G-Topics, L-Topics are very rarely resumed, even if a relevant clitic is available.17 Indeed, while clitic resumption

17 This is the case of spatial frame-setters. On the other hand, clitics are generally not available in Italian for Field and Time framing expressions.

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Mara Frascarelli

is statistically the preferred option for dislocated indirect objects (cf. Frascarelli 2000), connecting an L-Topic with a clitic is generally excluded. Compare the dislocation of the locative argument in the naturalistic Italian sentence (36), with the “modeled” example (37), in which the same PP is used as a spatial frame: (36) [Io]C-Topic [a Casal de’ Pazzi]G-Topic non ci CL . LOC I to Casal de’ Pazzi not ‘I am not going to Casal de’ Pazzi quarter.’

arrivo. arrive.1SG

(37) [A Casal de’ Pazzi]Space il traffico (*ci) sembra scorrevole. CL . LOC seem.3SG moving at Casal de’ Pazzi the traffic ‘At Casal de’ Pazzi, the traffic flow seems good.’ The presence of a resumptive clitic in (37) yields ungrammatical results, which is a crucial difference with respect to A-, C- and G-Topics. Finally, interpretive judgements prove that L-Topics are not reconstructed, regardless of their (left-/right-dislocated) position. Drawing on Haegeman/Greco’s (2016) inspiring analysis of frame-setters in West Flemish, we tested the interpretation of sentences like in (38) below with Italian, Spanish and French informants (for the sake of space, only the Italian example is provided): (38) Context: Marco e Tess si sono conosciuti nel dicembre del 2000… ‘Marco and Tess met in December 2000…’ a. Hanno deciso di sposarsi tre mesi più tardi. have. 3PL decided of getting married three months later b. [Tre mesi più tardi]Time, hanno deciso di sposarsi. c. Hanno deciso di sposarsi, [tre mesi più tardi]Time. ‘They decided to get married three months later.’ Informants’ judgments attest quite consistently that in (38a) the in situ (temporal) adjunct can modify either the time of the wedding or the time of the decision. On the contrary, both in (38b) and in (38c) the L-Topic refers only to the time of decision (i.e., it cannot modify the low event time). This result perfectly parallels Haegeman/Greco’s (2016) comparative analysis of initial temporal adjuncts in V2 and non-V2 constructions, respectively. In line with their conclusion, we argue that L-Topics are basegenerated in the C-domain.18  

18 This is final evidence that L-Topics do not have a twofold nature, depending on their position (as suggested by an anonymous reviewer), since their formal properties never totally overlap with any other type of topic. Similarities with G- or C-Topics might be better attributed to a “combination of features” (cf. Frascarelli/Ramaglia 2013).

Dislocations and framings

489

We can therefore conclude that the L-Topic represents a distinct type of dislocated constituent, which is merged in the C-domain in the scope of A-Topics, with specific properties and functions. The possibility of a right-dislocated realization suggests that this position should be lower than the GP projection (cf. footnote 8; additional details in Section 3.3 below). The hierarchy given in (7) can be thus integrated as in (39):19 (39) [ForceP [ShiftP [GP [FrameP [ContrP [FocP

[FamP

[FinP ]]]]]]]]20

This means that frame-setting cannot be considered a conversational move. Rather, L-Topics seem to implement an instruction for the hearer: they are used to help the interlocutor develop the CG content, organizing the information provided within the relevant domain of application (for which the speaker only commits). Hence, they belong to the dimension of CG management (ii) (cf. footnote 11).

19 In their detailed analysis on West Flemish data, Haegeman/Greco (2016) argue instead for an “external position” of frame-setters (considered as independent speech acts) and propose a FrameP projection dominating the C-domain. Their argument is mainly based on the fact that frame-setters do not necessarily trigger V2 phenomena and are followed by a prosodic break. The authors thus propose that a frame-setter is associated with the following (main) clause and may be either interpreted “as part of the propositional content of it or as an independent referent related to the main assertion through the discourse”. Naturalistic data like in (32) and (33) show however that an external position for framesetters cannot be maintained for Romance languages. Furthermore, L-Topics can be right-dislocated and can precede any clausal type (including adverbial and relative clauses). It is therefore difficult to assume that a speech act can be associated to a non-propositional content or even to an event modifier. Finally, note that in a language like English, in which linear order is more severely restricted than in Romance languages, C-Topics (realized through Topicalization) can be (marginally) preceded by a frame-setter (i), while a left-dislocated A-Topic cannot (ii): (i) (ii)

??

[When he is hungry]Temp [beans]C-Topic he can eat, but [peas]C-Topic he always rejects. *[When he is hungry]Temp [John]A-Topic, you can see he’s very nervous.

This further supports the hypothesis that L-Topics are distinct discourse categories, located in an intermediate position between ShiftP and ContrP. 20 No co-occurrence of L- and C-Topics can be found in Carella’s (2015) investigation. Nevertheless we assume a higher position for FrameP based on the consideration that in a language like English C-Topics must be lower than a frame-setter: (i) (ii)

??

[When he is hungry]Temp [beans]C-Topic he can eat, but [peas]C-Topic he always rejects. *[Beans]C-Topic [when he is hungry]Temp he can eat, but [peas]C-Topic he always rejects.

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Mara Frascarelli

3 More on the formal and pragmatic properties of dislocations 3.1 Clitic resumption and subject dislocation Based on the analysis of 1320 tokens extracted from the LIP corpus,21 Frascarelli (2000) showed that any type of syntactic function can be subject to dislocation, either in the left or in the right periphery of the sentence, cf. Table 1: Table 1: Dislocations sorted by syntactic function and clitic resumption

CLLD no clitic CLRD no clitic

DO

IO

O BL 22

669 (70.8 %)

129 (13.7 %)

133 (15.5 %)

0

15

55

280 (72.0 %)

60 (15.5 %)

49 (12.5 %)

7

1

4

Table 1 shows that CLLD is far more frequent than CLRD (931 vs 389 tokens): an expected result considering that right-dislocated constituents can only perform the G-Topic function, while all discourse functions are available in the left periphery.23 It could be objected that the relevant statistics are biased by the lack of subject dislocation and that any table of this kind would look very different in a language like French, since subject dislocation is very rare. I don’t know of any systematic study of this kind on French spoken corpora. Nevertheless, the left dislocation of the subject, usually assumed to introduce a new topic, resumed by a clitic pronoun and forming a separate prosodic unit with respect to the sentence (De Cat 2007; Masutti 2014) is well attested in the literature. Indeed, since the end of the nineteenth century, linguists have reported an increase in left-dislocated subjects in spoken French and recent empirical studies have shown that up to 80% of nominal subjects co-occur with a resumptive clitic (Kaiser 1992). Hence, subject dislocations are considered totally natural in French to introduce a Topic (cf. (40) and (41), from Larsson 1979 and Hirschbühler 1975, respectively), to instantiate C-Topics (cf. (42), from Aragon, Traité

21 The LIP corpus (De Mauro et al. 1993) is composed of 469 texts of conversations recorded in Florence, Milan, Naples and Rome. 22 The term Obl[ique] refers to all types of prepositional complements. 23 Table 1 also shows that clitic resumption is not a mere “option” (pace Benincà/Salvi/Frison 1988): clitic pronouns are obligatory in the case of left-dislocated direct objects and attested in most cases (whenever available) for all complements.

Dislocations and framings

491

du style), or to resume background information (cf. (43), from Larsson 1979, and (33) above): (40) Ce garçon, this boy pas.

de ses parents, il ne se souvient SUBJ . CL NEG REFL remember.3SG of his parents

NEG

‘This boy does not remember his parents.’ (41) Jean Jean en

des livres, je sais bien I know.1SG well of.PL books a volé beaucoup. PART . CL have.3SG stolen many ‘I know well that Jean has stolen many books.’

qu’ il that SUBJ . CL

(42) Moi, je piétine. SUBJ . CL trample-on.1SG me La syntaxe, elle est piétinée. SUBJ .CL be.3SG trampled-on the syntax ‘I crush (things). Syntax is crushed.’ (43) Ils feront encore une fois fortune quand a time fortune when they make.FUT .3PL again la guerre, elle reviendra, la prochaine. SUBJ . CL come-back.FUT .3SG the next the war ‘They will make money once more when the next war comes.’ Frascarelli (2000) did not discuss subject dislocation since Florentine was the only variety examined in which subject clitics can be found. For the purposes of the present discussion, it can be interesting to show that subject dislocation is not so rare in that variety either (especially in the right periphery of the sentence): Table 2: Dislocations in the Florentine variety SUBJ

DO

IO

OBL

CLLD

31 (11 %)

174 (61 %)

46 (16 %)

34 (12 %)

CLRD

53 (34 %)

65 (42 %)

20 (13 %)

18 (11 %)

The following Italian examples illustrate that the dislocated subjects can be located high in the C-domain (i.e., before a wh-constituent, as in (44)), or low (embedded in a conditional clause, as in (45)):  

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Mara Frascarelli

(44) La conchiglia [del Comunale] che the shell of.the Municipality what ‘What is the Shell of the City?’

l’

è? be.3SG

SUBJ . CL

(45) Se la società la fosse costituita da donne cioè were.3SG formed by women that-is if the society SUBJ . CL le donne le fossero i maschietti SUBJ . CL . PL were.3PL the men the women che vanno a lavorare. to work.INF who go.3PL ‘If society were formed [i.e., led] by women, that is to say, if women were the men going to work.’  

3.2 Clitic-resumed right dislocation vs marginalization While clitic-resumption is obligatory for left-peripheral DO topics, it seems to be optional for right-dislocated objects in Italian. Consider the following example, in which the right-dislocated DO follows a (focused) postverbal subject: LUI [la (46) Dovrebbe avere should.3SG have.INF he the ‘He should have the deposit slip.’

distinta]. deposit slip

Given the present analysis, in which dislocated constituents are located in the C-domain (as a “different type of A΄-dependency”, cf. Section 2.3 above) and connected with a clitic pronoun merged in argument position, optionality cannot be maintained for clitic resumption: its absence must be considered as the outcome of a different underlying structure. This has been extensively discussed in recent studies, in which non clitic-resumed dislocated constituents were analyzed in terms of marginalized objects (cf. Antinucci/Cinque 1977; Frascarelli 2000; 2008; Cardinaletti 2001; 2002). In particular, Frascarelli (2000; 2008) proposes that marginalized objects are generated in argument position and moved to an A΄-position (i.e., a non-argument, functional projection) in the low split-IP area (i.e., the position in which G-Topics are merged, cf. the discussion in Section 2.3, before examples (26) and (27)). The VP is then subject to “remnant movement”24 to a position higher than the marginalized constituent.  



24 This is the term generally used to refer to the movement of a “remnant category”, in that it contains only a subset of the elements it contained at an earlier stage of the derivation. Typically, this movement is subject to certain constraints, such as the Freezing condition (banning movement out of moved constituents; for details cf. Roberts 2012).

Dislocations and framings

493

This analysis predicts that marginalized objects are reconstructed within VP for interpretation, contrary to CLRD G-Topics. This prediction is borne out by interpretive judgments. In Section 2.3 we saw that in an Italian sentence like (26) – repeated below as (47) – only subject binding is possible. On the contrary, in the case of a marginalized constituent (like (48)) both readings are available: (47) Qualcuno lo ha presentato ad ogni ospite, il suo vicino di tavolo. a. OK‘Somebody introduced his own neighbour to every guest.’ b. *?‘Somebody introduced each of the guests to their neighbour.’ (48) Qualcuno ha presentato AD OGNI OSPITE , il suo vicino di tavolo. a. OK‘Somebody introduced his own neighbour to EVERY GUEST . ’ b. OK‘Somebody introduced EACH OF THE GUESTS to their neighbour.’ This is evidence that the marginalized object in (48) is merged within the VP and reconstructed there for interpretation, while the CLRD topic in (47) is merged in a position that is not in the scope of the quantified indirect object. To conclude, clitic-resumption is not “optional” for dislocated constituents: CLLD/CLRD and marginalization are distinct constructions, with different syntactic properties and different discourse functions.25

3.3 Clitic-resumed right dislocation and island effects According to the most recent analyses in the generative framework, it is generally agreed that right-hand topics are derived through IP-remnant movement to a dedicated functional projection in the C-domain (cf. Frascarelli 2000; Cardinaletti 2001; 2002). Following Poletto/Pollock’s (2004) suggestion, this position has been identified in the Ground Phrase (GP) projection that is located in a projection higher than FamP and FocP (see Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl 2007 for details):

25 In this respect, incidentally note that the afterthought function requires CLRD, excluding marginalized objects: (i) It. A: So che hai visto Luigi ieri. ‘I learnt that you met Luigi yesterday.’ B: Sì, e *(l’) ho trovato proprio bene, Luigi. well Luigi yes and DO .CL have.1SG found really ‘I did, and he is doing very well, Luigi.’

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Apart from theoretical considerations discarding rightward operations (see Kayne 1994), this analysis can provide an explanation for some formal and discourse properties of right-hand topics. First of all, CLRD constituents are not subject (or are weakly sensitive) to strong islands, unlike left-dislocated topics (cf. footnote 14). Consider the following asymmetries, both in Italian ((50) and (51), from Frascarelli 2000) and French ((52) and (53), from Blasco-Dulbecco 1999): *A Leok, conosco [DP molta gente [CP che [IP glik vuole that IO . CL want.3SG to Leo know.1SG many people parlare]]]. talk.INF b. Conosco molta gente che glik vuole parlare, a Leok. ‘I know many people that want to talk to Leo.’

(50) a.

(51) a.

*Con Giannik disapprovo [DP l’idea [CP di of with Gianni disapprove.1SG the idea in giro]]]. [IP andarcik go.INF .CL . COM around b. Disapprovo l’idea di andarcik in giro, con Giannik. ‘I disapprove the idea of going around with Gianni.’ *Cette histoirek [DP la personne [CP qui [IP lk’ a this story the person who DO . CL have.3SG racontée]]] n’ est pas digne de confiance. NEG be.3SG not worthy of trust told b. La personne qui lk’a racontée, cette histoirek n’est pas digne de confiance. ‘The person who told this story is not trustworthy.’

(52) a.

à peine [CP de *Cette voiturek [IP je venais of this car I come.PST . 1SG just [IP lk’ acheter]]]. DO . CL buy.INF b. Je venais à peine de lk’acheter, cette voiturek. ‘I had just bought that car.’

(53) a.

Dislocations and framings

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As we can see, while CLLD is excluded in the presence of a strong island (a relative clause in (50) and (52), a complex DP in (51) and an adjunct clause in (53)), CLRD is considered grammatical in these contexts (irrespective of the argument role and syntactic function of the associated clitic pronoun). This seems to show that complex DPs and relative clauses qualify as “barriers” only for left-dislocated constituents,26 an asymmetry that remains an open issue. On the other hand, the derivation in (49) can provide an immediate explanation. As a matter of fact, if we assume that right-dislocation is derived though IP-remnant movement to the local GP projection, the relation between a right-dislocated constituent and a clitic does not pass any barrier (i.e., neither a DP nor a CP). Consider the derivation of (51b) in (54) below:  

(54) [IP pro disapprovo [DP [D’ l’ [NP idea [CP di [GP [IP andarcik in giro] [FamP con Giannik] tIP ]]]]]] Additional evidence for the derivation in (49) and the local quality of right-hand topics is provided by the fact that G-Topics are clause-bound (55a), unlike leftdislocated topics (55b): (55) a.

*Non lok compri perché ne hai tanti, DO . CL buy. 2SG because PART . CL have.2SG so-many not il cappellok? the hat ‘You are not buying that hat because you have so many of them?’ ho portato al negozio b. Il cappellok, ti DO 2SG . CL have. 1SG taken to-the shop the hat comprassi! perché lok because DO . CL buy.SBJV . 2SG ‘I took you to this shop so that you could buy that hat.’

26 In his seminal work Cinque (1990) argues that some syntactic constructions represent a “Barrier for Binding” relation, similarly to what happens in movement operations, and provides the following definition: (i) Every maximal projection that is not Ɵ-marked by a [+V] category in the canonical direction is a barrier for binding. In the Minimalist framework the notion of barrier is subsumed within minimalist conditions, hence the notion of barrier for binding should also be reinterpreted in terms of Locality requirements (cf. Culicover/Wilkins 1984; Manzini 1992; Chomsky 1995). Nevertheless Cinque’s formulation is proposed here since it provides an easy and immediate diagnostic tool for the purposes of the present discussion.

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Notice that, since CLRD constituents are G-Topics by definition, the relevant C-domain can also be a subordinate clause of any type. Consequently, Locality is always strictly maintained. The derivation illustrated in (49) can also provide a syntactic explanation for the fact that G-Topics serve a twofold function, namely (i) maintenance of the current A-Topic (Aboutness-G-Topics), and (ii) resumption/introduction of given/familiar information for a D-linking function (Background G-Topics; cf. Section 2.1.3). As a matter of fact, while a left-hand topic has the rest of the sentence in its scope (consistent with its aboutness/shifting function), after IP-inversion a right-hand topic is itself in the scope of the sentence and is thus discourse-semantically restricted by it. Consider, for instance, the following naturalistic Italian example: questione che il tempok non te point that the time NEG IO . CL . 2SG lk’ho dato, io te lk’ho dato, DO . CL have.1SG given I IO . CL . 2SG DO . CL have.1SG given ‘The point is not that I didn’t give you time, I did give you time.’

(56) Non NEG

è be.3SG

il tempok. the time

In (56) the constituent il tempo is first proposed as “what the sentence is about” in the left periphery of the sentence, and then repeated as a CLRD in the second sentence, so as to maintain (and enhance the salience of) the relevant A-Topic.

3.4 Reconstruction, Minimality and Locality effects As is extensively argued in the literature, anti-reconstruction (cf. Section 2.3) and Minimality effects27 show that clitic-resumed dislocated constituents are merged in the C-domain according to a Locality requirement. We saw in Section 2.3 that the dislocated anaphora in a sentence like (25) – repeated below as (57) – is not reconstructed in the scope of the wh-phrase chi and can only be interpreted in a position that is c-commanded by the DP Leo:

27 The notion of (Relativized) Minimality (Rizzi 1990) accounts for the fact that the core of syntactic processes is inherently local (in the sense that such processes are bound to apply within limited structural domains), though natural language expressions are potentially unbounded in length and depth of embedding. In particular, Minimality (or, in more recent terms, the Minimal Link Condition, Chomsky 1995) capitalizes on operations in which α is moved across an element β having certain characteristics in common with α and, as such, β “intervenes” in the chain created by α (yielding ungrammatical results).

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(57) La propria*i/k foto, Leok non sa chii the own picture Leo NEG know.3SG who l’ha vista. DO . CL have.3SG seen.F ‘The picture of himself, Leo does not know who saw it.’ On the other hand, the relevant anaphora can only be interpreted as coreferent with the wh-constituent chi when realized in situ: (58) Leok non sa [CP chii ha visto una foto di se stessoi/*k]. ‘Leo does not know who saw a picture of himself.’ This is expected in a theory in which CLLD constituents do not move from a VP-internal position, but are merged in the local C-domain of the coreferent clitic pronoun: (59) [la propria*i/k foto]j Leok non sa [j [chii [lj’ha vista ]]] This means that when a topic moves to a superordinate C-domain (as in (57)), it is reconstructed for interpretation in its original A΄-position. This analysis also explains the absence of Minimality effects between topics and syntactic Operators, as is shown in the following examples from Italian (60) and French (61): la famigliak DOVE lak lasci? E and the family where DO . CL leave.2SG ‘As for your family, where do you leave it?’ ha fatta? b. La richiestak CHI glielk’ the request who IO . CL -DO .CL have.3SG done.F ‘Who made this request on his behalf?’ M IN INÀ À che cik ha confuso le idee. c. A noik è to us be.3SG Minà that IO . CL . 1PL have.3SG confounded the ideas ‘As for us, it was Minà who confounded our ideas.’ daresti quella posizione? d. Per meritoField A CHI position for merit to whom would.give.2SG that ‘Based on merit, to whom would you give that position?’ (Frascarelli 2000)

(60) a.

(61) a.

Je I il he

lui IO . CL lak DO .CL

ai demandé have.1SG asked louerait. rent.COND . 3SG

cette chambrek to whom this room

À QUI

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b. Je lui ai demandé cette chambrek À QUI il lak louerait. ‘ I asked him who he would rent this room to.’ (Blasco-Dulbecco 1999) Examples (60) and (61) show that both CLLD constituents and L-Topics can co-occur with Foci and wh-constituents, in either order (consistent with the hierarchy in (39)). This means that Operator movement does not intervene in the relation between a dislocated constituent and the position in which it is interpreted. This provides final evidence that topic constituents implement different types of A΄-dependencies.

4 Conclusions In this chapter a detailed analysis of dislocation and frame-setters has been provided, in different Romance languages and from a multi-layered perspective. The examination of formal and discourse properties has shown that – despite some important similarities – frame-setters must be kept distinct from dislocated constituents and form an independent category. Specifically, the dislocation of sentence topics is mainly connected with the definition of information-structural features concerning aboutness, contrast and givenness in the discourse; on the other hand, L-Topics convey an instruction for the interlocutor on how to delimit the validity of the asserted proposition and organize the propositional content, an operation that seems to depend on a previous definition of the address under which sentential information must be stored (i.e., the definition of the current A-Topic).  

5 References Antinucci, Francesco/Cinque, Guglielmo (1977), Sull’ordine delle parole in italiano. L’emarginazione, Studi di Grammatica Italiana 6, 121–146. Barnes, Betsy K. (1985), The Pragmatics of Left Detachment in Spoken Standard French, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins. Belletti, Adriana (2004), Aspects of the low IP area, in: Luigi Rizzi (ed.), The Structure of CP and IP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures Volume 2, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 16–51. Benincà, Paola (2001), The position of Topic and Focus in the left periphery, in: Guglielmo Cinque/ Giampaolo Salvi (edd.), Current Studies in Italian Syntax. Essays Offered to Lorenzo Renzi, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 39–64. Benincà, Paola/Salvi, Giampaolo/Frison, Lorenza (1988), L’ordine degli elementi della frase e le costruzioni marcate, in: Lorenzo Renzi (ed.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol. 1, Bologna, il Mulino, 115–225. Bianchi, Valentina/Frascarelli, Mara (2010), Is Topic a root phenomenon?, Iberia: An International Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 2, 43–88. Blasco-Dulbecco, Mylène (1999), Les dislocations en français contemporain, Paris, Champion. Boeckx, Cedric/Grohmann, Kleanthes (2005), Left Dislocation in Germanic, in: Werner Abraham (ed.), Focus on Germanic Typology, Berlin, Akademie-Verlag, 131–144.

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Bonvino, Elisabetta (2006), Le sujet postverbal en italien parlé: syntaxe, zones et intonation, Paris, Ophrys. Büring, Daniel (1997), The Meaning of Topic and Focus: The 59th Street Bridge Accent, London/New York, Routledge. Büring, Daniel (2003), On D-trees, beans and B-accents, Linguistics and Philosophy 26, 511–545. Cardinaletti, Anna (2001), A second thought on “emarginazione”. Destressing vs right dislocation, in: Guglielmo Cinque/Giampaolo Salvi (edd.), Current Studies in Italian Syntax. Essays Offered to Lorenzo Renzi, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 117–135. Cardinaletti, Anna (2002), Against optional and zero clitics. Right dislocation vs marginalization, Studia Linguistica 56, 29–57. Carella, Giorgio (2015), Il Topic limitativo: frames & scene setting, Università di Roma Tre, MA thesis. Chafe, Wallace (1976), Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics and point of view, in: Charles Li (ed.), Subject and Topic, New York, Academic Press, 25–55. Chomsky, Noam (1995), The Minimalist Program, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Cinque, Guglielmo (1990), Types of A’-dependencies, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Cinque, Guglielmo (1999), Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-linguistic Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Cinque, Guglielmo/Rizzi, Luigi (2010), The cartography of syntactic structures, in: Bernd Heine/ Heiko Narrog (edd.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 51–65. Culicover, Peter W./Wilkins, Wendy K. (1984), Locality in Linguistic Theory, New York/London, Academic Press. De Cat, Cécile (2007), French Dislocation: Interpretation, Syntax, Acquisition, Oxford, Oxford University Press. De Mauro, Tullio, et al. (edd.) (1993), Lessico di frequenza dell’italiano parlato, Milano, Etaslibri. Dik, Simon C. (1989), The Theory of Functional Grammar. Part I: The Structure of the Clause, Dordrecht, Foris. É. Kiss, Katalin (1998), Identificational focus versus information focus, Language 74, 245–273. Emonds, Joseph (2004), Unspecified categories as the key to root constructions, in: David Adger/ Cécile De Cat/Georges Tsoulas (edd.), Peripheries: Syntactic Edges and their Effects, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 75–120. Fintel, Kai von (1994), Restrictions on Quantifier Domains, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Ph.D. dissertation. Frascarelli, Mara (2000), The Syntax-Phonology Interface in Focus and Topic Constructions in Italian, Dordrecht, Kluwer. Frascarelli, Mara (2007), Subjects, topics and the interpretation of referential “pro”. An interface approach to the linking of (null) pronouns, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 25, 691–734. Frascarelli, Mara (2008), The fine structure of the topic field, in: Cécile De Cat/Katherine Demuth (edd.), The Bantu-Romance Connection. A Comparative Investigation of Verbal Agreement, DPs, and Information Structure, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 261–292. Frascarelli, Mara (in press), The interpretation of “pro” in consistent and partial NS languages. A comparative interface analysis, in: Ermenegildo Bidese/Federica Cognola (edd.), Understanding pro-drop. A Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Frascarelli, Mara/Hinterhölzl, Roland (2007), Types of topics in German and Italian, in: Susanne Winkler/Kerstin Schwabe (edd.), On Information Structure, Meaning and Form, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 87–116. Frascarelli, Mara/Hinterhölzl, Roland (2016), German scrambling meets Italian right dislocation, Paper presented at the 42° Incontro di Grammatica Generativa, Lecce, Università del Salento.

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Frascarelli, Mara/Jiménez-Fernández, Ángel (in press), Subextraction at the discourse-grammar interface: a featural approach to island effects, in: Elena Castroviejo Miró/Olga Fernández Soriano (edd.), 24CGG in Honor of Violeta Demonte, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Frascarelli, Mara/Puglielli, Annarita (2009), Position, function and interpretation of topics in Somali, in: Lunella Mereu (ed.), Information Structure and its Interfaces, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 325–348. Frascarelli, Mara/Ramaglia, Francesca (2013), “Phasing” contrast at the interfaces. A feature-compositional approach to topics, in: Victoria Camacho-Taboada et al. (edd.), Information Structure and Agreement, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 55–81. Gärtner, Hans-Martin (2001), Are there V2 relative clauses in German?, Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 3, 97–141. Givón, Talmy (ed.) (1983), Topic Continuity in Discourse. A Quantitative Cross-language Study, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Gundel, Jeanette K./Fretheim, Thorsten (2004), Topic and focus, in: Laurence Horn/Gregory Ward (edd.), The Handbook of Pragmatics, Oxford, Blackwell, 175–196. Haegeman, Liliane (2002), Anchoring to speaker, adverbial clauses and the structure of CP, Georgetown University Working Papers in Theoretical Linguistics 2, 117–180. Haegeman, Liliane (2004), Topicalization, ClLD and the left periphery, ZAS Papers in Linguistics 35, 157–192. Haegeman, Liliane/Greco, Ciro (2016), V>2, Paper presented at Rethinking Verb Second, March 22–24, University of Cambridge. Halliday, Michael Alexander K. (1985), An Introduction to Functional Grammar, London, Arnold. Heim, Irene (1982), The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases, Cambridge, MA, MIT, Ph.D. dissertation. Heycock, Caroline (2006), Embedded root phenomena, in: Martin Everaert/Henk van Riemsdijk (edd.), The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, vol. 2, Oxford, Blackwell, 174–209. Hirschbühler, Paul (1975), On the source of lefthand NPs in French, Linguistic Inquiry 6, 155–165. Jiménez-Fernández, Ángel L./Miyagawa, Shigeru (2014), A feature-inheritance approach to root phenomena and parametric variation, Lingua 145, 275–302. Kaiser, Georg A. (1992), Die klitischen Personalpronomina im Französischen und Portugiesischen. Eine synchronische und diachronische Analyse, Frankfurt, Vervuert. Kaplan, Ronald M./Zaenen, Annie (1989), Long-distance dependencies, constituent structure, and functional uncertainty, in: Mark Baltin/Antony Kroch (edd.), Alternative Conceptions of Phrase Structure, Chicago, IL, The University of Chicago Press, 17–42. Kayne, Richard (1994), The Antisymmetry of Syntax, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Krifka, Manfred (2001), Quantifying into question acts, Natural Language Semantics 9, 1–40. Krifka, Manfred (2007), Basic notions of information structure, in: Caroline Féry/Gisbert Fanselow/ Manfred Krifka (edd.), Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure 6, Potsdam, Universitätsverlag, 13–55. Lambrecht, Knud A. (1987), On the status of SVO sentences in French discourse, in: Russel S. Tomlin (ed.), Coherence and Grounding in Discourse, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 217–261. Lambrecht, Knud (1994), Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus and the Mental Representation of Discourse Referents, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Larsson, Eva (1979), La dislocation en français. Étude de syntaxe générative, Lund, Gleerup. Lasnik, Howard/Saito, Mamoru (1992), Move alpha: Conditions on its Application and Output, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. López, Luis (2009), A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Mahajan, Anoop (1990), The A/A’ Distinction and Movement Theory, Cambridge, MA, MIT, Ph.D. dissertation.

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Manzini, M. Rita (1992), Locality. A Theory and Some of its Empirical Consequences, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Masutti, Vania (2014), A syntactic analysis for French liaison, Rivista di Grammatica Generativa 36, 216–237. Meinunger, André (2004), Verb position, verbal mood and the anchoring (potential) of sentences, in: Horst Lohnstein/Susanne Trissler (edd.), The Syntax and Semantics of the Left Periphery, Berlin/ New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 313–341. Miyagawa, Shigeru (2004), The nature of weak islands, Ms., MIT. Pesetsky, David (1987), “Wh-in-situ”: movement and unselective binding, in: Eric Reuland/Alice ter Meulen (edd.), The Representation of (In)Definiteness, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 98–129. Poletto, Cecilia/Pollock, Jean-Yves (2004), On the left periphery of some Romance “wh”-questions, in: Luigi Rizzi (ed.), The Structure of CP and IP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures Volume 2, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 251–296. Portner, Paul/Yabushita, Katsuhiko (1998), The semantics and pragmatics of topic phrases, Linguistics and Philosophy 21, 117–157. Reinhart, Tanya (1981), Pragmatics and linguistics: an analysis of sentence topics, Philosophica 27, 53–94. Rizzi, Luigi (1990), Relativized Minimality, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Rizzi, Luigi (2006), On the form of chains: criterial positions and ECP effects, in: Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng/ Norbert Corver (edd.), WH-movement: Moving On, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 97–133. Roberts, Craige (1996), Information structure: towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics, Semantics and Pragmatics 5, 1–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.6 Roberts, Craige (2011), Topics, in: Claudia Maienborn/Klaus von Heusinger/Paul Portner (edd.), Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, vol. 2, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 1908–1934. Roberts, Ian (2012), Head Movement in the Minimalist Program, in: Cedric Boeckx (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 195–219. [DOI: 10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199549368.013.0009] Sauerland, Uli (2004), The interpretation of traces, Natural Language Semantics 12, 63–124. Vallduví, Enric (1992), The Informational Component, New York, Garland. Van Dijk, Teun A. (2007), Discourse Studies, New Delhi, Sage Benchmark Series. Zubizarreta, María Luisa (1998), Prosody, Focus, and Word Order, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Silvio Cruschina and Eva-Maria Remberger

14 Focus Fronting Abstract: This chapter presents an overview of the formal and functional aspects of Focus Fronting (FF), namely, the marked constituent order characterized by a clauseinitial focused element. The major syntactic properties of this construction will be initially described with reference to the seminal work by Rizzi (1997). More data from the different patterns found in Romance will then be discussed in detail and in a comparative perspective, paying particular attention to the range of constituents that are amenable to undergo FF and to the distributional restrictions imposed by semantics and discourse. The necessity of distinguishing between different types of focus pointed out in recent proposals will then be assessed: information focus, contrastive (or corrective) focus, and mirative focus are distinct focus types, whose properties and characteristics are essential to understand not only the multifaceted interpretations and functions of FF, but also the significant similarities and differences encountered in different varieties of Romance. Some observations on the syntax and semantics of FF in interrogative and in exclamative clauses will conclude the chapter.  

Keywords: Focus Fronting, quantificational movement, information focus, contrastive focus, mirative focus, verum focus, quantifier fronting, exclamative, interrogative, negation, adjacency  

1 Introduction In the majority of Romance languages the focal constituent of a sentence can be fronted to the beginning of the clause, to a preverbal position. This syntactic operation must be distinguished from similar displacement operations such as dislocations and framings (↗13 Dislocations and framings) both on the basis of their grammatical properties and in terms of their geographical distribution and interpretive specialization. While topicalization and dislocation phenomena appear to be present rather homogenously within the Romance-speaking territory, and to behave uniformly with respect to their interpretation, Focus Fronting (henceforth, FF) exhibits a greater degree of variation concerning not only diatopic distribution, but also interpretation and specific syntactic properties. These differences, however, are not radical or strong enough to prevent us from treating FF as a pan-Romance phenomenon. First of all, ordinarily, all Romance languages tend to place the focal constituent of the sentence in a postverbal position (cf. (1a)) – with the possible exception of Sardinian and Sicilian in specific sentence types and with some kinds of constituent (cf. Cruschina 2012; 2016; Remberger 2014 for an overview). FF (cf. (1b)) is therefore not the normal way to syntactically highlight the focus constituent of a sentence: DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-014

Focus Fronting

(1)

Sp.

503

a. Invitaron a Esteban. ACC Esteban invite. PST . 3PL ‘They invited Esteban.’ b. A Esteban invitaron. ACC Esteban invite.PST . 3PL ‘It was Esteban that they invited.’

This chapter is devoted to the process of FF and to the focal constituents that undergo FF. Being instances of narrow focus, however, fronted foci have characteristics in common with postverbal foci. Irrespective of the position, either postverbal or preverbal, focus is in fact syntactically marked in Romance,1 and this syntactic marking is constantly accompanied by the basic properties that are characteristic of focus (cf. ↗15 Cleft constructions, for clefts, another focus marking construction). Prosodically, the focus constituent bears the main prosodic prominence of the sentence.2 Semantically, “focus indicates the presence of alternatives that are relevant for the interpretation of linguistic expressions” (Krifka 2007, 18; see also Rooth 1985; 1992).3 From a pragmatic viewpoint, the focus corresponds to the constituent of the sentence to which the speaker intends to direct the attention of his/her hearer(s) by uttering such a sentence (see Erteschik-Shir 1997, 11, among others). FF is thus a marked syntactic operation that does not depend on focalization per se (postverbal focalization would serve the same function), but it is rather contingent upon the presence of additional or concomitant requirements. The question to be addressed is therefore: What are the special additional properties that trigger and characterize FF in Romance? Moreover, syntactically, FF behaves uniformly as an instance of quantificational A'-Movement of the operator-variable type (cf. Section 2.1), whereby a constituent moves to the specifier of a dedicated Focus projection (FocP) in the left periphery of the clause binding a trace (t) in its base position (Rizzi 1997; cf. (2)4 and the illustration in (3)). This movement operation leads to a partition of the clause into a focus part and

1 That postverbal focalization is also a syntactically marked construction becomes particularly evident in those cases in which the focus constituent is not the object of the clause, as in contexts of subject inversion (cf. Belletti 2004). Belletti shows that, even when the linear order coincides with the base word order of the constituents, there are reasons to believe that the focus occupies a dedicated functional position. 2 In the examples, the focus constituent carrying main prosodic prominence is marked in bold. 3 When FF is associated with the function of expressing surprise or unexpectedness (cf. Section 3.3), the presence of a focal set of alternatives might not be so obvious or immediate. Following Bianchi/ Bocci/Cruschina (2015; 2016), however, we maintain that the interpretation of these cases is also built on a set of focus alternatives, which is essential to generate the surprise or unexpectedness import. 4 Given that a is not a preposition but an accusative case marker, we labeled the constituent a Esteban as DP, rather than PP. This is indeed a simplification since a is generally analysed as the head of a functional projection above (or within) the DP (cf. Torrego 1998; López 2012 and Fábregas 2013 for more detailed discussion).

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a background, which corresponds to the complement of a focal head (Foc0) and, linearly, to the post-focal material.5 (2)

[FocP [DP A Esteban]i [Foc0 [FinP invitaron ti]]

(3)

As FF is a marked word order that depends on the information structure of the sentence, on the discourse dynamics and, as will be shown, on the speaker’s evaluation, it is typical of colloquial and spoken language. It is therefore less often found in narrative texts. The situation seems to have been different in Old Romance, where FF was commonly found in written texts and was associated with less restricted interpretations, presumably – and arguably – in conjunction with a V2 syntax.6 5 The Focus-Background partition is traditionally thought of in terms of a new-old information dichotomy, whereby the focus conveys new information and the background corresponds to given or presupposed information. As we will see (cf. Section 3), this distinction generally holds true in Romance, too, especially in the well-known cases of FF (with information and contrastive focus), but it is not always the case that in all sentences hosting FF the background is given. The notion of background should here be understood as the part of the sentence that stays constant within the set of focus alternatives (cf. Krifka 2007), which typically, but not necessarily, corresponds to given information. 6 In this chapter we will mainly deal with Modern Romance. For Old Romance, the reader is referred to Skårup (1975), Benincà (1983/1984; 1995; 2006; 2010), Vanelli (1986; 1999), Adams (1987), Fontana (1993; 1997), Roberts (1993), Ribeiro (1995), Torres Morais (1995), Vance (1997), Salvi (2000; 2001; 2004; 2011), Batllori/Iglésias/Martins (2005), Ledgeway (2007; 2008; 2011), Fernández-Ordóñez (2009), Franco (2009), Cruschina (2011), Sitaridou (2011), among many others. For the apparent lack of V2 in Old Sardinian, cf. Lombardi (2007) and Wolfe (2015). So-called Stylistic Fronting is another construction involving fronting that has been investigated in reference to Old Romance languages (cf. Franco 2009; Fischer 2010; 2014, among others), but also to Modern (written, stylistically marked) varieties (cf., e.g., Cardinaletti 2003). Stylistic Fronting is generally understood as a process by which a constituent other than the subject appears in front of the finite verb. This process seems to be (or at least to have been) operative in several languages, but the question of whether it is motivated by structural properties or is

Focus Fronting

505

In the next section, a more detailed overview of the syntactic properties of FF will be provided, discussing in particular those characteristics that distinguish it from dislocation, the types of constituent that can be fronted, and its syntactic distribution. Section 3 will be devoted to the special interpretations and contexts that license FF, dealing with the variation across focus types. Finally, in Section 4, the effects of FF will be considered with respect to different sentence types, primarily exclamatives and interrogatives.

2 Syntax In this section we consider the syntax of FF. We will first show that FF is a type of operator movement. The variation within Romance concerning the categorical and functional status of the elements which are allowed to be moved under FF is then illustrated. Finally, further potential syntactic constraints of FF (restrictions on positive polarity, adjacency conditions, and the root vs embedded distinction) are discussed.

2.1 FF is quantificational A'-movement The most prominent syntactic properties that distinguish FF from other displacement operations such as topic dislocation (cf. ↗13 Dislocations and framings) are the following: (4) a. FF is unique (whereas topic movement can be recursive). b. FF usually does not show clitic resumption (which is often obligatory with topic movement).7 c. FF competes with wh-fronting: FF and wh-fronting are therefore incompatible with each other (whereas topics and wh-fronting can co-occur). d. FF shows so-called weak crossover effects (whereas topics do not). e. Bare quantifiers can be focus-fronted (but they cannot be left dislocated by topic dislocation).8

to be connected to information-structure notions remains open (cf. Fischer 2010, ch. 4). The answer to this question may well be different depending on the specific language, showing that Stylistic Fronting is not a uniform phenomenon after all. 7 In Romanian it is possible to find clitic resumption with FF (cf. also (29b)): (i) Pe Petre l-a arestat poliția (nu pe Ion). AC C Peter CL -have. 3SG arrested police. DEF (not ACC Ion) This is due to the properties of Romanian clitics which are obligatory whenever they are coindexed with a noun phrase that is marked by the feature [+specific] (Dobrovie-Sorin 1990; 1994; cf. also footnote 15 on Galician). 8 An exception might be bare quantifiers that function as contrastive topics (cf. Giurgea 2011; Giurgea/ Remberger 2011; see also Section 2.3, examples (12) and (13)).

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These properties have been discussed by Rizzi (1997) in his seminal paper which marked the beginning of the Split-CP-approach, i.e. the subdivision of the complementizer domain in the left sentence periphery into an ordered layer of syntactic positions with their corresponding functional tasks. In his analysis, the Focus Phrase, the target of FF, is embedded between recursive Topic Phrases (TopP), which are above a Finiteness Projection (FinP, which can host infinitive introducing complementizers like It. di or Sp. de) and below a Force Phrase (ForceP, which encodes the sentence type). The syntactic properties of the FF mentioned in (4) are illustrated in (5):  

(5) It.

hanno invitato ti tj. a. *Stefanoi alla mostraj Stefano to-the exhibition have. 3PL invited (non Gianni alla festa). not Gianni to-the party b. *Stefanoi li’hanno invitato ti (non Gianni). CL -have. 3PL invited not Gianni Stefano c. *Alla festai chij hanno invitato ti tj (non a cena)? not to dinner to-the party who have. 3PL invited (non Maria). d. *Stefanoi suoi padre ha invitato ti not Maria Stefano his father have. 3SG invited e. Nessunoi hanno invitato ti. nobody have. 3PL invited ‘They invited nobody.’

All these properties show that focus involves quantificational movement with an operator that binds a variable. Sentence (5a) is ungrammatical because FF of two focus constituents produces an “interpretative clash” due to the fact that the complement of the focus, i.e. the presupposition, can only convey given information and cannot therefore host another occurrence of focus (Rizzi 1997, 297). In (5b) neither the clitic nor the trace qualifies as a variable, so the contrastive focus Stefano has no variable to bind. In (5c) the focalized constituent Stefano and the question operator chi compete for the same position (i.e. Spec/Foc) and cannot thus co-occur. In (5d) the variable associated with the focus fronted constituent, meant to be the direct object of the verb, cannot bind the anaphor suo. Finally, (5e) is well-formed since the fronted bare quantifier nessuno binds a variable as needed. All these properties confirm that FF, in contrast to topic dislocation, is a kind of quantificational movement and that the trace left behind in the original position of the fronted constituent cannot be but a variable bound by the focus operator.  



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2.2 Constituents that can be fronted The Romance languages vary with respect to the range of focus constituents that can be fronted. Whereas most of the Romance languages allow constituent fronting of most commonly DPs and PPs (both arguments and adjuncts), cf. (6), only some of them, such as Sardinian and Sicilian, also allow fronting of predicates in copula constructions, cf. (7) (see Duarte/Matos 2000; Cruschina/Remberger 2009; Leonetti/ Escandell-Vidal 2009; Costa/Martins 2011, 221; Cruschina 2012; Giurgea/Remberger 2012a,b):9 L’acqua mi sono scordato (di comprare)! (DP) forgotten to buy the water me be.1SG ‘I forgot (to buy) the water!’ (Cruschina 2012, 121) b. Sp. Con la iglesia hemos topado. (PP) with the church have. 1PL bumped ‘We came across the church.’ (Leonetti/Escandell-Vidal 2009, 164) c. Rom. Multe greșeli a făcut. (DP) many mistakes have. 3SG made ‘He made many mistakes.’ (Giurgea/Remberger 2012a, 75) d. EPt. A todos o leram eles. (PP) CL read.PST . 3PL they to all ‘They read it to all.’ (Duarte/Matos 2000, 119) e. Srd. E gai faeddant de a isse cue giosso. (Adv) of ACC him here down and like-this talk.3PL ‘And they talk like this about him down here.’ (Conrad/Falconi 2002, 47)

(6) a. It.

Troppu bedda jè a figglia di Mariu! (AP) very nice be.3SG the daughter of Mariu ‘Mariu’s daughter is very beautiful!’ (Cruschina/Remberger 2009, 122) b. Srd. Tattaresu fiat. (AP) from.Sassari be. PST . 3SG ‘He was from Sassari.’ (Mensching/Remberger 2010, 262) c. Sp. Sevillano soy. (AP) from.Sevilla be. 1SG ‘I’m from Sevilla.’ (Leonetti/Escandell-Vidal 2009, 163)

(7) a. Sic.

9 Quantifiers and quantified constituents are very amenable to FF. We will discuss Quantifier Fronting in Section 3.3.

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Nominal and adjectival predicates can also be fronted in Italian and in other Romance languages, although such a syntactic configuration proves felicitous predominantly in marked contexts (e.g. contrastive or surprising) or with a limited number of adjectives (cf. Section 4.2). Exceptions are some regional varieties, like the regional Italian in Sardinian, where this phenomenon is so widespread that it has become a shibboleth for Sardinian speakers (cf. Loi Corvetto 1984). Much more restrictive, in contrast, is the fronting of verbal predicates: whereas Sicilian tends to allow FF only marginally for infinitives (cf. Cruschina/Remberger 2009; Cruschina 2012), Sardinian allows fronting of all kinds of verbal predicates, infinitives, participles and gerunds (cf. Remberger 2010; Mensching/Remberger 2010): (8) Sic.

a. Nesciri voli. want.3SG go-out.INF ‘S/he wants to go out.’ b. *Mangiatu (assà) aju! eaten too-much have.1SG (Cruschina/Remberger 2009, 122)

(9) Srd. a. E bastare diat. and suffice. INF should.3SG ‘And it should be enough!’ (Pittau 1991, 141) b. Emmo, comporatu l’appo. CL -have.1SG yes bought ‘Yes, I have bought it.’ (Jones 1993, 355) c. Mandatu sa líttera appo. sent the letter have.1SG ‘I’ve sent the letter.’ (Jones 1993, 338) d. Eh, mundende so, … be.1SG eh clean.GER ‘Eh, I’m cleaning,…’ (Archivi del Sud 1996, 28) The fact that in Sicilian, fronting of an infinite verb is not allowed for participles and gerunds has been traced back to properties particular to Sicilian verbal morphosyntax, not to the general availability of FF (cf. Cruschina/Remberger 2009).10 In (9c) we can also see that what is fronted is the whole VP and not only part of it, i.e. FF is a  

10 In Yucatecan Spanish a particular kind of verbal predicate fronting is found, where the verb is fronted as an infinitive (i.e. head movement) whereas finiteness is expressed by dummy (= noncausative) ‘do’ (cf. Gutiérrez-Bravo/Sobrino/Uth (forthcoming). (i) Yucatecan Sp. Ellos, venir hicieron acá en Yucatán. do.P ST . 3PL here in Yucatán they come.INF ‘They, they CAME here to Yucatán.’  

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clear instance of constituent movement (cf. Jones 1993), although sometimes it looks very much like head movement.11 We conclude this section with a remark on FF in French and in European Portuguese. It has been observed that the left peripheral focus position targeted by FF does not seem to be active in French (Rizzi 1997, 286; Zubizarreta 2001, 184) and that clefts would be used for the same functions (Belletti 2005) (↗15 Cleft constructions). In the next sections, however, we will see that FF is not entirely absent in French, even though it is in fact subject to stronger register and contextual constraints (cf. Sections 3.1 and 3.3). Similarly, postverbal focalization (also known as focus in situ) is the general syntactic strategy employed to mark focus in European Portuguese (Duarte 1987; 1997; Raposo 1994; Uriagereka 1995; Costa 1998; 2000; Ambar 1999; Barbosa 2000; 2001), to the extent that it has been assumed that this language does not permit FF, not even in contrastive contexts. Costa/Martins (2011) clarify this point and show that contrastive FF is not categorically rejected by all speakers, and that the existence of two groups of speakers has to be acknowledged: one accepting it and the other one judging it ungrammatical or marginal. Moreover, other types of non-contrastive FF are available in European Portuguese (cf. Section 3.3).

2.3 Further syntactic constraints on FF In Romance FF is generally restricted to positive polarity, so that the combination of negative polarity and FF in the same clause results in what has been called “focus clash” by Floricic (2009) (cf. also Remberger 2010): (10) Srd. a. *Compresu understood b. *Innoghe here

no not no not

m’as? me have.2SG istas? stay.2SG (Floricic 2009, 134)

This kind of FF gives rise to a contrastive reading, and seems to originate from a situation of language contact between Yucatecan Spanish and the local Mayan language, which also exhibits a comparable construction (but see Mirto 2009 for a similar construction in Sicilian). The high occurrence of FF in the Spanish spoken in the Basque Country can also be attributed to language contact and to the influence of Basque, a language with a dedicated preverbal focus position (Urrutia 1995; Ortiz de Urbina 1999; Gómez Seibane 2012; Vanrell/Fernández-Soriano 2013). 11 Cf. Remberger (2010) for some examples where only the verbal head has been moved, presumably because of the heaviness of the remaining part of the VP. Stylistic Fronting, which involves predicates and participles, may also be described as a kind of head-movement (cf. footnote 6 and references therein).

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Both FF and negation are per se focal and therefore interfere with each other. In current theory, this incompatibility can be explained in terms of intervention effects violating Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990; 2004), that is, a constraint on movement preventing a constituent endowed with some feature from moving past another constituent bearing the same feature. Exceptions are possible when the focus performs a contrastive or corrective function: (11) Sp.

Estudiantes coreanas no conoce Andrés Andrés students Korean not know.3SG (pero sí japonesas y vietnamitas). but yes Japanese and Vietnamese ‘Andrés doesn’t know Korean students (but he does know Japanese and Vietnamese students).’ (Escandell-Vidal/Leonetti 2011, 254)

The incompatibility with negation is thus relaxed with contrastive or corrective focus (cf. Section 3.1, cf. also (21a)) meeting the contextual conditions with respect to the antecedent, but holds firmly in the other contexts (cf. Sections 3.2 and 3.3).12 Further exceptions are present in the literature, especially in the discussion with respect to verum focus (Leonetti/Escandell-Vidal 2009; Escandell-Vidal/Leonetti 2011). These are cases characterized by the preposing of a quantifier and by an effect of emphasis on the truth value of the proposition (cf. Section 3.3). In Spanish, Catalan and Italian there seems to be a split: indefinite quantifiers encoding weaker claims like ‘some, somebody, something’ can only appear in a positive environment, whereas stronger quantifiers like ‘all’ or ‘much, many’ are allowed with negation:13 (12) Sp.

a. Algo (*no) debe saber. something not must.3SG know ‘He must know something.’ (Leonetti/Escandell-Vidal 2009, 198)

12 In Yucatecan Spanish, a contrastively fronted focus constituent can be (constituent) negated (cf. Gutiérrez-Bravo/Sobrino/Uth (forthcoming). (i) Yucatecan Sp. No Domingo de Ramos llovió, el otro. the other not Palm Sunday rain. PST . 3SG ‘It didn’t rain on Palm Sunday, but on the other Sunday.’ 13 Giurgea (2011) and Giurgea/Remberger (2011) show that fronted indefinite quantifiers must correspond to the weakest claim in a series of alternatives. The speaker asserts that this claim is certainly true or highly probable, contrasting it with stronger claims for which the truth value is unknown. Under negation, entailments are reversed. Therefore, under negation, we find ‘all’ and ‘many’ as fronted quantifiers; ‘something’, which under negation becomes the strong claim in the series, cannot be fronted in negative sentences.

Focus Fronting

b. *Con poco no se conforma REFL . CL agree.3SG with little not (Escandell-Vidal/Leonetti 2011, 253)

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(13) a. Sp.

Mucho no has estudiado. a-lot not have.2SG studied ‘You haven’t studied a lot.’ (Escandell-Vidal/Leonetti 2011, 259) b. Rom. Chiar totul nu știe. even everything not know.3SG ‘He doesn’t know everything.’ (Giurgea/Remberger 2011, 2) c. Cat. Molts diners no han costat, aquestes arracades. these earrings a-lot-of money not have.3PL cost ‘They didn’t cost a lot of money, these earrings.’ (Batllori/Hernanz 2015, 291)

Giurgea (2011) and Giurgea/Remberger (2011) show, however, that in these examples the fronted quantifiers must be interpreted as contrastive topics, in line with Arregi’s (2003) property topics: since property topics are not referential they cannot be doubled by a clitic.14 These are thus not genuine instances of FF. A further constraint is visible in most, but not all constructions with FF: There is an adjacency requirement between the fronted focus constituent and the finite verb – including possible proclitic elements, of course (Zubizarreta 1998; Bentley 2007; Costa/Martins 2011, 224; Cruschina 2012, 104–110): (14) a. Srd. Troppu grassu (*Juanne) est (Juanne). Juanne too fat Juanne be.3SG ‘ Juanne is too fat.’ (Jones 1993, 19) b. Sic. A virità (*a mè niputi) cci rissi. the truth to my nephew DAT . CL say.PST . 1SG ‘I told (my nephew) the truth.’ (Bentley 2007, 53) c. Sp. Con María (*Pedro) habló (Pedro) (y no con Marta). Pedro and not with Marta with María Pedro talk.PST . 3SG ‘Pedro talked to María (, not to Marta).’ (Zubizarreta 1998, 103) d. Gal. *Nada Xoan lle debe aos suos amigos. to-the his friends nothing Xoan DAT . CL owe.3SG ‘Xoan owes nothing to his friends.’ (Gupton 2014, 197)

14 Since they are not narrow foci, the fronted constituents in (12) and (13) have not been marked in bold.

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This constraint seems to be sensitive to the type of focus. In Italian (cf. Rizzi 1997), Catalan (Vallduví 1992a,b; 1995, 131–132), Galician (Gupton 2014, 200), Sardinian and Sicilian (Cruschina/Remberger 2009) a constituent can intervene between the focus and the finite verb only with a contrastive focus: Questo Gianni ti dirà this Gianni to-you say.FUT . 3SG (, non quello che pensavi). not that what think.IMPRF . 2SG ‘Gianni will say this to you (, not what you thought).’ (Rizzi 1997, 299) b. Cat. Al fuster la mare va donar les claus. the keys to-the carpenter the mother go.3SG give ‘Mother gave the keys to the carpenter.’ (Vallduví 1995, 131) c. Gal. A cenoria o coello comeuna (e non a mazá).15 the carrot the rabbit eat.PST .3SG - CL and not the apple ‘The rabbit ate the carrot (and not the apple).’ (Gupton 2014, 200)

(15) a. It.

It must be noted, however, that not all native speakers accept a disruption of the focus-verb adjacency in contrastive contexts (cf. Benincà/Poletto 2004 for Italian). The adjacency requirement, by contrast, seems to be stronger in Spanish, in that it holds firmly irrespective of the focus type and does not seem subject to speaker variation (Zubizarreta 1998; 1999; among others).16 Another area of variation is the asymmetry between root and embedded clauses. Following Rizzi (1997), there is a Focus projection in both main clause (16a) and embedded clause (16b): (16) It.

a. Domani, questo, a Gianni, gli dovreste dire. tomorrow this to Gianni him must.COND . 2PL say ‘Tomorrow you should say this to Gianni.’ b. Credo che domani, questo, a Gianni, this to Gianni believe.1SG that tomorrow gli dovremmo dire. DAT . CL must.COND . 1PL say

15 Apparently, also in Galician focus fronted objects can be clitic doubled; however, the clitic na here is in enclisis to the finite verb comeu, which would suggest that the fronted constituent is not in the nuclear clause; for reasons of space, we refer to the discussion in Gupton (2014, 200–203). 16 Non null subject languages such as French and Brazilian Portuguese allow for pronominal subjects to intervene between the fronted focus and the finite verb (cf. (30a,b) and (31b), (32a,b), respectively).

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‘I believe that tomorrow we should say this to Gianni.’ ((16b) from Rizzi 1997, 295–296) However, it has been observed that the availability of FF in embedded clauses is also sensitive to the type of focus. Non-contrastive FF appears to be limited to root contexts only: (17) Sic.

a. Dissi ca na macchina s’accattà, REFL . CL buy.PST . 3SG say.PST . 3SG that a car no un muturinu. not a moped ‘He said he bought a car, not a moped.’ b. *Dissi ca na macchina s’accattà. REFL . CL buy.PST . 3SG say.PST . 3SG that a car c. Na machina dissi ca s’accattà. that REFL . CL buy.PST . 3SG a car say.PST . 3SG ‘He said he bought a car.’ (Cruschina 2012, 74–75)

A contrastively focus fronted constituent can appear in an embedded clause (cf. (17a)), whereas a non-contrastive focus, when fronted, must move to the left periphery of the main clause (17c) and cannot appear in the left periphery of the embedded clause (17b). This has led to the assumption that there is more than one focus position in the left periphery, depending on the different semantic properties of the focus construction involved (Cruschina 2006; 2010; 2012; Cruschina/Remberger 2009).

3 Interpretation Since variation in the interpretation of focus also seems to have syntactic consequences for FF, this section is devoted to the different semantic types of focus.17 Most Romance languages have FF with contrastive focus (Section 3.1), whereas FF with information focus is possible only in a limited set of varieties (Section 3.2). Furthermore, non-contrastive FF is often related to additional interpretative flavours which are highly context-dependent (Section 3.3).

17 Different types of focus are also associated with different prosodic patterns; for an overview and for references, see Bocci (2013) and Poletto/Bocci (2016).

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3.1 Contrastive focus Semantically, focus marks the presence of alternatives in the context of the utterance. These alternatives can represent an open set, as for example in the question focus opened by a wh-operator and the variable it binds, but the alternative can also be more restricted. This distinction is at the basis of the identification of different focus types with distinct grammatical properties. É. Kiss (1998), for instance, distinguishes between pure information focus, which fills in a value for the variable, and identificational (or exhaustive) focus, which additionally encodes that the focus value is unique and that the predicate does not hold for other relevant alternatives in the context. In Hungarian, only the latter type of focus can be fronted (cf. also Brody 1990). As we have seen above, in Romance, the distinction between information focus and contrastive focus is also syntactically relevant. Contrastive focus signals that there is just one alternative present in the discourse, namely, the alternative being corrected (cf. (18)). It would therefore be more appropriate to speak of “corrective focus” (nevertheless, we keep the name contrastive focus, since it is the common designator in research literature for this phenomenon): (18) Sp.

a. Invitaron a Luca a la fiesta. ACC Luca to the party invite. PST . 3PL ‘They invited Luca to the party.’ b. No, a Esteban invitaron. ACC Esteban invite.PST . 3PL no ‘No, they invited Esteban.’

There seems to be a general consensus that the interpretive effect associated with FF in Romance is contrast. According to this assumption, the focus of a sentence can only be fronted when it bears a contrastive interpretation (cf. Rizzi 1997; Frascarelli 2000; Belletti 2004 for Italian; Zubizarreta 1998; 1999; Zagona 2002 for Spanish; Motapanyane 1998; Alboiu 2002 for Romanian; Quer 2002 for Catalan), making contrast an essential requirement for FF in Romance (cf. López 2009). Two clarifications about this general assumption are however in order. First, contrastive focus can (19a) but need not (19b) be fronted: (19) Rom. a. Pe Ion am văzut, ACC Ion have.1SG seen b. Am văzut pe Ion, have.1SG seen ACC Ion ‘I saw Ion, not Maria.’

nu pe Maria. not ACC Maria nu pe Maria. not ACC Maria

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The question of whether this is a case of true optionality or if there still is an additional nuance to fronted contrastive focus has not yet been resolved.18 Second, a great deal of variation exists in Romance, so that other types of focus can actually be fronted depending on the specific variety. We will examine FF with information and with mirative fronting in the next sections; here we return to the generalization that contrastive FF is found in all Romance languages. As already mentioned (cf. Section 2.2), French usually resorts to a cleft construction for focussing functions (cf. (20b)), even for contrastive purposes (cf. Belletti 2005): (20) Fr.

a. ?Pierre ils ont arrêté (pas Jean). not Jean Pierre they have.3PL arrested b. C’est Pierre qu’ils ont arrêté (pas Jean). who they have.3PL arrested NEG Jean it be.3SG Pierre ‘Pierre was arrested, not Jean.’

Similarly, European Portuguese makes use of postverbal focalization. However, FF is in fact also accepted by many French speakers, especially in a colloquial spoken register (cf. (21a); see Stempel 1981; De Cat 2007). In European Portuguese, by contrast, the acceptability of sentences with contrastive FF as in (21b) is subject to speaker variation (cf. Costa/Martins 2011, 225). We will discuss other cases in Section 3.3.  

18 According to López (2009, 56–57) “focus-in-situ is insufficient to establish a contrast”: an explicit negation or negative expression rejecting the antecedent is necessary at the beginning of the corrective or contrastive statement: ONTE XT : You gave the winner a T-shirt. (i) It. C ONTEXT A: No. Abbiamo dato al vincitore una MEDAGLIA. B: #?Abbiamo dato al vincitore una MEDAGLIA. C: Una MEDAGLIA abbiamo dato al vincitore. ‘(No.) We gave the winner a medal.’ This observation, however, does not match the experimental findings discussed in Bianchi/Bocci (2012). Note that, in contrast to preverbal focus, postverbal focus is always ambiguous, insofar as the exact locus of the partition into focus and background is neither syntactically nor prosodically univocally marked. With postverbal focus, the extension of the focus is thus difficult to determine: does the focus lie on the most embedded constituent as an instance of narrow focus or on the whole clause as wide focus? This has been taken as an argument for the assumption that FF is a means of disambiguating narrow focus (e.g. Vanelli 1999, 241–243; Brunetti 2009). This does not mean that preverbal and postverbal foci are always two equivalent syntactic options: FF is in fact only possible with certain types of focus, depending on additional interpretive imports (e.g. contrast/correction, mirativity) and on the specific variety. However, even when FF is possible, movement remains optional (cf. (19)). This optionality has been explained as the possibility of two alternative Spell-outs, either the highest or the lowest copy of the movement chain, as independently proposed in other studies (cf. Bianchi/Bocci 2012).

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Rien d’autre, je n’aime pas. nothing of other I NEG like.1SG not ‘There’s nothing else I don’t like.’ (De Cat 2007, 2–3) b. EPt. Estes livros todos me ofereceu a Maria. these books all me gave the Maria ‘It’s all these books that Maria gave to me.’ (Costa/Martins 2011, 225)

(21) a. Fr.

3.2 Information focus In the general literature on focalization, narrow focus is generally elicited in answers to wh-questions, where the focus structure is imposed by a question-answer congruence criterion, that is, the requirement that the extension of the focus in an appropriate answer be determined by the focus structure of the semantics of the question it answers (cf., e.g., Halliday 1967; Roberts 1996; Schwarzschild 1999). This type of focus is named information focus, since it provides the sought information and evokes a set of alternatives which is either open or contextually restricted, with no direct contrast with explicit alternatives. In most Romance languages, information focus cannot be fronted (cf. (22a)), but typically occurs in a postverbal position (22b): (22) Sp.

a. ¿Qué compraste? what buy.PST . 2SG ‘What did you buy?’ b. #Una bicicleta compré. a bicycle buy.PST . 1SG c. Compré una bicicleta. buy.PST . 1SG a bicycle ‘I bought a bicycle.’

In this context, FF can be accepted only if it is associated with a special interpretation of the answer, such as one expressing surprise or unexpectedness (Section 3.3). Exceptions to this generalization are, again, Sardinian and Sicilian, where FF can occur in apparently neutral answers to wh-questions (23) (cf. Cruschina/ Remberger 2009): (23) Sic.

[Chi ci dasti a Mario? what DAT . CL give.PST . 2SG to Mario ‘What did you give to Mario?’ ] a. Un libbru ci detti. DAT . CL give. PST . 1SG a book

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b. Ci detti un libbru (a Mario). DAT .CL give.PST . 1SG a book to Mario ‘I gave him a book (to Mario).’ (Cruschina/Remberger 2009, 121) Information focus in answers to questions is also judged as grammatical in other Romance varieties such as Asturian (24) (Viejo Fernández 2008) and some varieties of Catalan (25) (Vanrell/Fernández-Soriano 2013), although it is yet to be assessed by more careful scrutiny whether a special emphasis signalling additional interpretive properties (cf. Section 3.3) is necessary to obtain FF in these contexts: (24) Ast.

A: ¿Qué comió Miguel? what eat.PST . 3SG Miguel ‘What did Miguel eat?’ B: Les pataques comió Miguel. the potatoes eat.PST . 3SG Miguel ‘Miguel ate potatoes.’ (Viejo Fernández 2008, 255)

(25) Central Cat.

a. A qui va enviar la carta, el mariner? the letter the sailor to who go. 3SG send ‘Who did the sailor send the letter to?’ b. A la dama va enviar la carta el mariner. the sailor to the lady go. 3SG send the letter ‘The sailor sent it to the lady.’ (Vanrell/Fernández-Soriano 2013, 261)

Remember from Section 2.2 that Sardinian allows for predicate fronting. In this Romance language, predicate FF can occur both in a yes/no-question and in the corresponding answer, resulting in typical question-answer pairs like the following: (26) Srd. a. Comporatu l’as? Emmo, comporatu l’appo. CL - have.2SG yes bought CL - have.1SG bought ‘Did you buy it? Yes I bought it.’ b. Maláidu ses? Emmo, maláidu so. / No, istraccu so. ill be.1SG no tired be.1SG ill be.2SG yes ‘Are you ill? Yes, I’m ill. / No, I’m tired.’ (Jones 1993, 355) In (26a) the question focus and the information focus of the answer are on a participle; in (26b) it is on a predicative adjective. Since in a yes/no-question the focus alternatives opened by the question operator consist in the positive and negative truth value of the proposition questioned, FF of the predicate here results in a secondary effect, namely, emphasis on the truth value itself. Secondary effects such as the so-called verum focus

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(cf. Höhle 1992) for non-contrastive focus are discussed in the next section, while further details on FF in interrogative sentences will be given in Section 4.1.

3.3 Mirative FF and other types of fronting In the previous sections, we saw that in Romance FF is typically associated with a contrastive interpretation. Only in a small handful of varieties such as Sardinian and Sicilian is FF also possible with information focus. Yet, other Romance languages show that contrast is not a necessary condition for FF: several examples of noncontrastive FF are reported in the literature (cf. Zafiu 2013, 571–572 for Romanian; Kato/Raposo 1996 for Brazilian Portuguese; Ledgeway 2009a, 784–790 and 2009b on southern Italian dialects; Paoli 2010 on some northern Italian dialects; Viejo Fernández 2008, 255 for Asturian; Sauzet 1989 for Occitan; Vanrell/Fernández-Soriano 2013 for some varieties of Spanish and Catalan; Jiménez-Fernández 2015 for Spanish): (27) Rom. a. Oameni pricepuţi au şi ei. people skilled have. 3PL also they ‘They too have skilled people.’ b. Ceaţă s-ar putea să fie. REFL - AUX . COND . 3SG can.INF SBJV be.SBJV . 3SG fog ‘Fog there might be.’ (Zafiu 2013, 571) Non-contrastive focus, nevertheless, is not necessarily information focus. The fronting construction has often been associated with an emphatic interpretation whereby the fronting of the focal constituent creates a value of unexpectedness and surprise (Cruschina 2006; 2010; Brunetti 2009; Paoli 2010). Cruschina (2012) labels “mirative fronting” this type of FF related to new information which is particularly surprising or unexpected.19 The mirative interpretation is very common in Sicilian and Sardinian (Cruschina 2012; Jones 2013), but it is also a wide-spread focussing effect of Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Romanian, Brazilian Portuguese and, possibly, other Romance languages (Cruschina 2012; Bianchi 2013; Jiménez-Fernández 2015; Bianchi/Bocci/ Cruschina 2015; Cruschina/Giurgea/Remberger 2015). (28) a. It.

Non ci posso credere! Due bottiglie CL can.1SG believe two bottles not ‘I can’t believe it! We drank two bottles!’ (Cruschina 2012, 120)

ci siamo bevuti! be.1PL drunk

REFL

19 For the notion of mirativity within a typological perspective, see DeLancey (1997; 2001) and Aikhenvald (2004; 2012).

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519

¡Por Dios, dos botellas se han bebido! REFL have.3PL drunk for God two bottles ‘My God! They have drunk up two bottles!’ (Jiménez-Fernández 2015, 50)

Some preliminary cross-linguistic evidence from other Romance languages confirms that FF is possible not only with contrastive focus, but also with mirative focus (cf. (29) and (30)): (29) Rom. a. Două luni mi-a luat să scriu acest articol! two months me-have.3SG taken SBJV write.1SG this paper ‘It took me two months to write this paper! (Cruschina/Giurgea/Remberger 2015, 258) b. Pe servitoare au acuzat-o de acel furt! ACC servant have.3PL accused-CL of that theft ‘They accused the servant of that theft!’ (30) BPt. a. Imagina só! imagine only Por essa bestinha da Júlia ele foi se apaixonar! for that animal of.the Júlia he went REFL fall-in-love ‘Just imagine! He fell in love with that idiot of Júlia!’ b. É inacreditável! Por um corte de cabelo, 60 reáis ele me pediu! is incredible for a cut of hair 60 reáis he me asked-for ‘It’s incredible! For a haircut, he charged me 60 reáis!’ Despite the general idea that FF is very limited in French (cf. Section 2.2 and Section 3.1), in the corpus-based studies by Sabio (1995; 2006) and by Abeillé/Godard/Sabio (2008; 2009), cases of FF similar to our mirative focus have been described: (31) Fr.

a. Tu as beaucoup fumé? smoked you have. 2SG a-lot ‘Did you smoke a lot?’ b. Deux cigarettes j’ai fumé. smoked two cigarettes I have. 1SG ‘Two cigarettes, I smoked.’ (Sabio 2006, 175)

(32) Fr.

a. Tu sais ce qui est arrivé? you know that what be.3SG arrived ‘Do you know what happened?

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Le candidat du patron, ils ont refusé! the candidate of.the boss they have.3PL refused They refused the boss’s candidate!’ b. Trois heures, il avait de retard, le train! of delay the train three hours it have.IMPF . 3SG ‘The train was delayed by three hours!’ (Abeillé/Godard/Sabio 2008, examples (10), (19)) Bianchi/Bocci/Cruschina (2015; 2016) provide an analysis of mirative fronting in terms of association with the conventional implicature that there is at least one focus alternative proposition which is more likely than the asserted proposition with respect to a contextually relevant modal base and a stereotypical ordering source. It is this comparative likelihood of alternative propositions that gives rise to an effect of surprise and unexpectedness.20 This implicature is built on a focus structure, to be understood in terms of a focal set of alternative propositions: the traditional newgiven partition is then not necessarily guaranteed in these contexts. In those varieties that make a syntactic distinction between contrastive focus and information focus (Cruschina/Remberger 2009; Cruschina 2012; Remberger 2014) (cf. Section 2.3), mirative focus patterns with information focus in that it requires adjacency to the verb and is most typically found in root clauses. An important property characterizes mirative focus and distinguishes it from other types of focus: under the appropriate discourse and contextual conditions, mirative fronting can occur in out-of-the-blue contexts (cf. (33)) and in answers to questions that would normally trigger a sentence-focus reply (e.g., ‘What happened?’) (cf. the French example (32a) above): A machina m’arrubbaru! the car me-steal.PST . 3PL ‘They stole my car!’ (Cruschina 2012, 71) b. Srd. Unu figumoriscu at mandigadu Giuanne! a prickly.pear have.3SG eaten Giuanne ‘Giuanne has eaten a prickly-pear!’ (Jones 2013, 81)

(33) a. Sic.

This confirms that with mirative focus the background of the focus structure is not necessarily given, and that FF is not always concomitant to the givenness of the postfocal material as assumed, for instance, in Samek-Lodovici (2006; 2015), giving

20 A similar analysis has been proposed for contrastive/corrective focus, according to which contrastive FF is grammatically associated with the conventional implicature that there is one alternative proposition, already introduced in the context, which is incompatible with the proposition expressed in the corrective reply. Cf. Frey (2010) for the idea that German A'-movement is also associated with a conventional implicature with an emphatic effect.

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the impression that we are dealing with all-focus utterances (cf. Bianchi/Bocci/Cruschina 2015). Another fronting structure that is not directly aimed at the focalization of the fronted constituent as the sentential element conveying new and noteworthy information, but that seems to convey a special meaning at the level of the sentence involves verum focus. Leonetti/Escandell-Vidal (2009; 2010) describe this structure in Spanish (cf. (34)), arguing that it corresponds to a syntactic fronting operation that yields focus on the polarity and truth value of the sentence: thus, it does not involve narrow focus on the fronted constituent (↗24 Basic constituent orders). A similar analysis has been applied to some instances of Sardinian FF, especially to predicate fronting both in yes/no-questions and in declaratives (cf. (35), see Jones 1993; 2013; Escandell-Vidal/ Leonetti 2009; Leonetti 2009; Mensching/Remberger 2010; Remberger 2010; 2014; Giurgea/Remberger 2012b; 2014): (34) Sp.

Mucho dinero debe tener. a-lot-of money must.3SG have ‘He really must have a lot of money.’ (Leonetti 2009, 84)

(35) Srd. Bene meda! Fatu l’at. well a-lot done CL -have.3SG ‘Very well! He did it.’ (Conrad/Falconi 2002, 51) Verum focus shares with mirative focus an emphatic or evaluative interpretation that encompasses the whole utterance, but the mechanism that brings about this interpretive effect is rather different: even though the surprise and unexpected effect covers the asserted proposition against a set of focal alternatives, the focus is still on the fronted constituent with mirative fronting, which in fact bears the main prosodic prominence; with verum FF, by contrast, the emphatic interpretation stems from the focalization on the polarity of the sentence (cf. also Section 2.3).21 In the relevant literature on European Portuguese a fronting construction with an evaluative and emphatic interpretation similar to mirative fronting has long been the subject of discussion, even though somewhat controversially. On the one hand, this fronting structure has been assimilated to quantifier fronting (Costa 1998; Barbosa 2000; 2001). On the other, Raposo (1994; 1995; 2000) argues that this fronting structure is a type of syntactically marked focalization that involves focus movement

21 Not all cases of predicate fronting in Sardinian should be interpreted as instances of verum focus. FF of the predicate can also be interpreted as an instance of narrow focus on the predicate itself (instead of focus on the polarity of the sentence): in this case, the actual interpretation (information, contrastive or mirative focus) will depend on the context and on the sentence type (cf. (26) above and Section 4.1). In (35), the predicate is the dummy/generic verb ‘do’ which is quite difficult to be interpreted as a narrow focus amongst the background of other verbal alternatives.

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and that it should be included as such in the group of affective constructions that trigger proclisis in Portuguese (see also Raposo/Uriagereka 1996). A different characterization is given in Ambar (1999), where it is called “evaluative construction” and is defined as a kind of fronting that involves the speaker’s evaluation of a given state of affairs, thus giving rise to an exclamative aspect (see Section 4.2). It is generally bound to gradable and scalar lexical items, including – but not exclusively – quantifiers: (36) EPt. a. Muitos livros lhe ofereceu o Pedro! DAT . CL offer.PST . 3SG the Pedro many books ‘Pedro gave him many books!’ b. Linda casa lhe comprou o pai! the father beautiful house DAT . CL buy.PST . 3SG ‘His father bought him a beautiful house!’ (Ambar 1999, 42) Building on Ambar’s work, Martins (2012) and Martins/Costa (2014) name these structures “evaluative exclamatives” and draw a direct comparison with the other fronting structures available in Portuguese and in other Romance languages (see also Costa/Martins 2011). By virtue of their lexical semantics, quantifiers and quantified phrases are very prone to focalization operations, and FF is not an exception, insomuch as quantifier fronting is apparently more common than the other types of FF.22 However, the question remains open of whether quantifier fronting should be analysed as an independent phenomenon or whether it rather falls, depending on the specific interpretation, within one of the types of FF discussed above. The focus of the sentence can also undergo movement to the left periphery of the sentence when it is associated with a focalizing adverb such as the Romance equivalents of only, also, (not) even. These adverbs are per se focal, in that they associate with a narrow focus and operate on a set of focal alternatives (cf., e.g., Rooth 1985; Herburger 2000; Krifka 2006). With these adverbs, however, FF is often licensed by an additional mirative value (Cruschina 2012, 123), although it is yet to be determined whether this value is a necessary condition for fronting or whether other interpretations are possible. Finally, we mention “anaphoric (or resumptive) preposing” as a further type of fronting that has been listed among the FF constructions available in Romance, or that at least resembles FF in some respects. With anaphoric preposing, clitic resump-

22 See, among others, Vallduví (1992c), Raposo (1994), Raposo/Uriagereka (1996), Costa (1998) and Barbosa (2000; 2001) for Portuguese, Benincà (1988), Cinque (1990), Poletto (2000) and Damonte/ Poletto (2010) for Italian and Italian dialects; Zubizarreta (1998) and Leonetti/Escandell-Vidal (2009) for Spanish, Vallduví (1992c) for Catalan, Alboiu (2002) and Cornilescu (2004) for Romanian; see also Quer (2002), Brunetti (2009), Cruschina (2012) and Remberger (2014).

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tion of the fronted constituent is not possible, the fronted element must be adjacent to the triggering verb, and no other constituent can occur in the same sentence: (37) It.

La stessa proposta fece poi il partito di maggioranza. the same proposal make.PST . 3SG then the party of majority ‘The majority party then made the same proposal.’ (Cardinaletti 2009, 6)

(38) Sp.

Dije que terminaría el libro, the book say.PST .1SG that finish. COND . 1SG y el libro he terminado. and the book have. 1SG finished ‘I said that I would finish the book, and finish the book I did.’ (Leonetti/Escandell-Vidal 2009, 172)

(39) Fr.

Tu l’as pas vu une seule fois aux informations, you CL -have.2SG not seen one single time to-the informations pas une fois tu l’as vu. not one time you CL -have.2SG seen ‘You didn’t see it once on TV, not once did you see it.’ (Abeillé/Godard/Sabio 2009, 138)

Unlike other typical FF constructions, here the referent denoted by the fronted constituent or, in some cases, the whole proposition content is already given in the immediately preceding context. Definite DPs, demonstratives, lexical items meaning ‘same’ (i.e. identifying anaphora), or the mere repetition of a phrase typically carry out this anaphoric function (Benincà 1988; Cinque 1990; Benincà/Poletto 2004; Sabio 2006; Abeillé/Godard/Sabio 2009; Cardinaletti 2009; Leonetti 2009; Leonetti/Escandell-Vidal 2009). Since it mostly occurs in sentences that only contain given information, anaphoric preposing does not readily yield the typical pragmatic binary partition of sentences with FF, although we may think of it as a confirmation or a reassertion against negative expectations, which, as in the mirative case, exploits the set of focal alternative propositions generated by FF.23  

23 The Italian example in (37) might actually instantiate a different structure from that illustrated by other examples. While the Spanish and French sentence could be assimilated to cases of mirative FF, despite the anaphoricity, in the Italian example the fronted constituent does not bear the emphatic interpretation and intonation typical of mirative fronting (and therefore it is not marked in bold), and it is in fact a construction that is found in the written, as opposed to spoken language.

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4 Focus Fronting and sentence types Despite their recurrent emphatic or exclamatory nuances, sentences with FF are in fact declarative clauses where the syntactically marked focal structure, together with the concomitant special interpretive effects, adds up to an assertion. This, however, does not mean that FF is excluded from other sentence types such as interrogatives and exclamatives proper.24 In this section the differences between FF in declarative and exclamative clauses will be examined, and some remarks on the values of FF in interrogative sentences will be discussed. Only constituent fronting of the type discussed in the previous sections will be taken into account; for the movement of whphrases in interrogatives and in exclamatives, the reader is referred to the relevant chapters (↗16 Interrogatives, ↗17 Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives).

4.1 Interrogatives With reference to some Romance varieties, e.g. Sardinian and Sicilian, FF is traditionally described as very frequent with yes/no-questions and exclamative sentences. We will deal with exclamatives in the next section, while here we will concentrate on the availability and on the interpretations associated with yes/no-interrogatives hosting FF. On the whole, it seems that the availability of interrogative FF in a given language is directly related to the types of focus that are possible in that language. Contrastive FF is generally excluded on obvious grounds: it cannot be used in questions to contrast or correct a previous question or assertion. This means that interrogative FF is only possible in those varieties that admit information focus and mirative focus: the same interpretation will be at play, with the fronted focus being in the scope of the interrogative operator either to simply seek new information (with information focus) or, more commonly, to emphasize that the new information sought is surprising and unexpected (mirative focus; cf. Bianchi/Bocci/Cruschina 2015; 2016; Bianchi/Cruschina 2016):25 (40) a. Rom. La voi s-au întâmplat toate astea? at you.PL REFL -have.3PL happened all these ‘Is it (really) by you that all these things happened?’

24 FF appears to be incompatible with imperatives, irrespective of the focus type. We will therefore not discuss this sentence type further. For a possible explanation of this ban, see Frascarelli/JiménezFernández (2014). 25 In the English translations we have added the adverb ‘really’ between brackets to render both the neutral (without ‘really’) and the surprise (with ‘really’) interpretation. Only the context, and presumably the intonation, would disambiguate between the two. We thank Ion Giurgea for the Romanian example.

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Marina hanno invitato? invited Marina have.3PL ‘Did they (really) invite Marina?’ (Bianchi/Bocci/Cruschina 2016, 19)

In some cases the fronting of the focus constituent in yes/no-questions may give rise to an interpretation of “double checking”, when FF triggers the presupposition that one of the alternative propositions is true (Bianchi/Cruschina 2016; cf. the examples in (41)26): (41) Sic.

sula sì? INT alone be.2SG ‘Are you (really) alone?’ b. Chi au comuni aviva a jiri? INT to-the town-hall have.IMPF . 3SG to go.INF ‘Was it the town-hall that he had to go to?’ (Bianchi/Cruschina 2016, 62)

a. Chi

In Sicilian, predicate fronting in yes/no-questions (cf. (41a)) sounds unmarked and is often preferred to the version with postverbal focus (Cruschina 2012, 61–64). Bianchi/ Cruschina (2016) attempt to account for this by proposing that at least certain predicates, such as e.g. ‘alone’ in (41a), are “such that in most contexts their only salient alternative is their complement, corresponding to the negation of the predicate itself (i.e., ‘not alone’)”. With such a set of alternatives, the double-checking presupposition trivially gives rise to the perception of unmarkedness of FF in these particular examples. In yes/no-questions, FF may also be used to focalize the polarity of the sentence, as in the cases of predicate fronting in Sardinian reported in (26) (cf. Giurgea/ Remberger 2012b; see also footnote 21).27  

26 In the examples in (41), chi is an interrogative particle. See Cruschina (2012, ch. 5) and Bianchi/ Cruschina (2016, §4.3) for more details. 27 Whether Sardinian predicate fronting in yes/no-questions should be analysed as an instance of verum focus (on the sentential polarity) or narrow focus (on the fronted predicate) remains open to debate: the narrow-focus analysis is favoured by the observation that, when a yes/no-question hosts a fronted element, be it the predicate or any other constituent, “the speaker does not simply want to know whether his assertion or the one with the opposite polarity is correct, but also what the value of the focus is in case his assertion is not correct” (Brunetti 2009, 62). Note that, under the narrow-focus analysis suggested in Bianchi/Cruschina (2016), according to which predicate FF could be analysed as a mechanism that yields a contrast with the complement set of the predicate itself, i.e. its negation, the interpretive result would nonetheless be very similar, if not entirely identical, to verum focus.  

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4.2 Exclamatives An import of surprise and unexpectedness similar to the one that obtains in mirative fronting is also commonly associated with exclamative utterances. For this reason sentences with FF are sometimes mistaken for exclamative sentences that emphasize the speaker’s emotional reaction to the proposition expressed in the clause. The distinction between proper exclamatives and declarative sentences with FF – especially, mirative FF – may in fact prove blurred, but on a more careful scrutiny, it becomes clear that they must be distinguished (cf. Mensching/Remberger 2010, 267; Cruschina 2012; Bianchi/Bocci/Cruschina 2015; 2016; Cruschina/Giurgea/Remberger 2015). Exclamatives are typically “presuppositional” or “factive” (cf. Michaelis 2001; Zanuttini/Portner 2003, among others). According to Rett (2011), moreover, exclamatives always have a degree interpretation and denote a property of degrees. Two basic differences distinguish (mirative) FF from exclamatives: first, contrary to exclamatives, the propositional content of a declarative clause with mirative FF is not presupposed but asserted; second, the surprise and unexpected interpretation does not necessarily derive from a degree interpretation associated with a gradable property expressed by the focus phrase. Yet, in some Romance languages, particularly in Romanian, FF is found also in genuine exclamative sentences: (42) Rom. a. Frumoasă maşină şi-a mai cumpărat! CL . REFL .DAT -have.3SG more bought beautiful car ‘What a beautiful car s/he bought!’/‘Is it beautiful, the car s/he bought!’ (Cruschina/Giurgea/Remberger 2015, 258) b. (Da’) Repede mai merge! (but) fast more walk.3SG ‘(How) fast s/he’s walking!’ (Cruschina/Giurgea/Remberger 2015, 265) This type of exclamative FF is restricted to scalar elements (adverbs or adjectives followed by a noun), and has both a presupposed propositional content and a degree interpretation at the basis of the surprise meaning: what is surprising is not the denotation of the focal constituent, but the degree of a property. They additionally exhibit syntactic and prosodic properties that clearly distinguish them from declarative FF (cf. Giurgea 2014; Cruschina/Giurgea/Remberger 2015). The exclamative structures found in European Portuguese (cf. (36)) and discussed in Section 3.3 should presumably also be analysed as belonging to this type of exclamative FF. In other Romance languages, by contrast, exclamative FF seems to be limited to a small number of evaluative adjectives (e.g. Sp. bonito ‘pretty’, menudo ‘small, trivial’, valiente ‘brave, great’) or to special exclamative particles (e.g. Sp. vaya) followed by a noun, very often – but not always – with an ironical or rhetorical

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meaning (Hernanz 2001; Octavio de Toledo y Huerta 2002; Leonetti 2009; Andueza 2011; Escandell-Vidal/Leonetti 2014; Tirado Camarena 2016): (43) Sp.

¡Bonita fiesta me organizaste! nice party me organize.PST .2SG ‘What a nice party you organized for me!’ (Andueza 2011, 128)

(44) Sp.

¡Vaya coche (que) te has comprado! wow/damn car that you.DAT have.2SG bought ‘Wow, what a car you bought!’ (Tirado Camarena 2016, 463)

5 Conclusions Despite some differences with respect to adjacency to the verb and to the types of constituent that can be fronted, syntactically, FF shows across Romance a defined set of properties that clearly distinguish it from other displacement phenomena. The distribution of FF and the relative cross-linguistic variation appears to be sensitive to focus types. Equally, the semantic and pragmatic characterization supports the assumption that several types of focus must be distinguished. As for its function, FF relates to a clear partition of the sentence into a new-information focus part and a given background only with information and contrastive FF. With mirative FF, by contrast, the background does not have to be given, leading to the impression that we are dealing with all-new sentences. In such cases, even in the absence of a typical new vs old articulation of the sentence, we still have a focus structure that gives rise to a set of alternatives and that is necessary to correctly interpret the utterance. In some contexts, the interpretive differences between the three kinds of focus may appear somewhat faint, and the boundaries between one type of focus and the others may prove rather blurry and not clear-cut. One may thus wonder whether such distinctions should be confined to a pragmatic, rather than to a grammatical level, being for instance the result of contextual, modality or “stance” effects. Against this view, however, it has been shown that the different types of focus exhibit a distinct syntactic and prosodic behaviour (cf. Cruschina/Remberger 2009; Cruschina 2012; Bocci 2013; Bianchi/Bocci/Cruschina 2015; 2016). At the same time, independently of the kind of focus at issue, prosodically, semantically and pragmatically, FF systematically displays the basic properties that are characteristic of narrow focus, and that may help us set apart FF from other types of fronting which do not involve narrow focus on the fronted constituent (e.g. verum focus fronting and anaphoric fronting).

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Anna-Maria De Cesare

15 Cleft constructions Abstract: This chapter is devoted to the cleft constructions documented in Romance languages, both in European and non-European varieties of Romance. The first part of the chapter provides a definition of clefts, based on the morpho-syntactic, semantic and functional properties of these constructions, presents the different types of clefts available in the Romance languages and highlights the factors explaining their systemic, geographic and discourse variation. The second section focuses on the morpho-syntactic description of the three main building blocks of clefts: the expletive pronoun opening the clefts of some Romance varieties, the copula and the relativizer. The third section of the chapter addresses the ways clefts are accounted for in formally and functionally-oriented studies, respectively. Finally, the last part of the chapter identifies some open research questions on cleft constructions to solve in the future.  

Keywords: cleft constructions, expletive pronoun, copula, complementizer, relativizer, focus, compositionality, European Romance varieties, American Romance varieties  

1 Cleft constructions in Romance: definition, types, and parameters of variation 1.1 Romance cleft constructions: general definition The term cleft constructions refers to a class of syntactic structures that subsumes a rich inventory of forms (cf. Section 1.2.1) sharing basic syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. The following definition, based on Lambrecht (2001, 467), De Cesare/ Garassino (2015) and Wehr (2016), holds for the prototypical manifestations of clefts: “A cleft construction is a biclausal sentence structure, consisting of a copular clause and a relative(-like) clause. Semantically, clefts are specificational constructions associated with an exhaustive interpretation. Pragmatically, clefts can play a variety of functions, which are mostly related to focusing.”

The main properties of cleft constructions mentioned in this definition can be illustrated on the basis of the French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese cleft sentences given in (1), but are valid for other Romance varieties, as well as for other types of clefts.1

1 The examples provided in this chapter are taken either from the existing literature (maintaining, whenever there are some, the typographical marks indicating the accented/focused part of the cleft) or DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-015

Cleft constructions

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a. Fr. C’est Stella qui lit Kant. b. It. È Stella che legge Kant. c. Sp. Es Stella quien lee a Kant. d. EPt. É a Stella quem lê Kant. e. BPt. É Stella quem lê Kant. ‘It is Stella that/who reads Kant.’

From a structural point of view, Romance clefts involve the same, fixed building blocks (as we shall see on the basis of examples (5) to (7), not necessarily in the order featured in the cleft sentences). At the highest level, they are composed of two clauses: a copular clause (Fr. c’est Stella ‘it is Stella’) and a subordinate clause (Fr. qui lit Kant ‘that/who reads Kant’). The copular clause involves a copula (COP) and a cleft constituent (CC); the subordinate clause, which will be called cleft clause (CCl), is opened by an important component of clefts, which we will refer to as the relativizer (REL). In the copular clauses of the examples given in (1), Fr. est/It. è/Sp. es/Pt. é is the COP and (a) Stella is the CC; the CCl of these clefts is opened by the REL Fr. qui/It. che/Sp. quien/Pt. quem. In non-pro-drop Romance languages, such as French, clefts also involve a non-referential subject clitic pronoun (Clpro). In (1), this clitic is realized as ce (Eng. it).2 From a semantic point of view, clefts express the same propositional content as non-cleft, monoclausal sentences (i.e., in examples (1), as Stella {lit/legge/lee/lê} Kant ‘Stella reads Kant’), while having a specificational (also called identificational) meaning. In other words, clefts specify a value for a variable (someone reads Kant and this someone is Stella). Moreover, the content expressed in the CCl is presupposed. Clefts are also typically associated to an exhaustive interpretation, i.e. they convey the idea that only the information expressed by the CC is valid in the context of occurrence (in (1), the fact that Stella and nobody else reads Kant). This exhaustive component of clefts is best captured as a conventionalized conversational implicature, as it can be cancelled and reinforced (cf. De Cesare/Garassino 2015 for a detailed discussion). As far as their function is concerned, clefts are primarily associated with focusing. Their focusing function is clear when the CC (in (1) Stella) has a contrastive or corrective reading (in ex. (1), it is Stella and not Eva or someone else that reads Kant; cf. also ex. (18) from Section 1.2.2). We can consider that clefts have a focusing function also in the cases in which the CC provides the most relevant piece of  



from other sources. These sources are specified in parentheses after the example. Examples with no reference to a source have to be interpreted as invented by the author of this chapter. For reasons of space, authentic examples are presented with a minimal context. 2 The terminology used in the current literature to identify the building blocks of clefts varies quite significantly, in particular depending on the theoretical framework adopted. Although the labels used in this chapter are far from being theory-neutral – cf. in particular the terms cleft constituent and cleft clause, which are tightly connected to the idea that cleft constructions are the result of a cleaving operation (on this issue, cf. Section 3) –, we mean to use them in a theory-neutral way.

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information in an open proposition, i.e. when the cleft has a variable-identifying function (for an illustration, see (19) in Section 1.2.2). Additionally, clefts have also been associated to an emphatic function. In this case, the CC is simply highlighted through the cleaving mechanism as a result of being considered important in the ongoing discourse (cf. Wehr 2011 and 2016 for a discussion). Clefts have a wide-range of structural lookalikes (for a discussion on French, cf., e.g., Clech-Darbon/Rebuschi/Rialland 1999; Katz 2000, 260–263; Wehr 2011, 195–197). Consider the different structural interpretations of the example in (2), taken from ClechDarbon/Rebuschi/Rialland (1999, 84). In a context such as (3A), the structure given in (3B) is a real cleft, while in a context such as (4A), we have a different syntactic structure in (4B). The differences between the structures in (3B) and (4B) concern the status of the pronoun (it is non-referential in clefts, but referential in non-clefts) and the CCl (it is a special kind of relative clause in clefts, while it might be a restrictive relative clause in non-clefts, as is the case in (4B); on the nature of the CCl, cf. Section 2.3).  

(2)

Fr.

C’est le petit qui est tombé dans l’escalier. ‘It’s the little boy that fell down the stairs.’

(3) Fr.

A: Ta fille est tombée dans l’escalier? B. Non, c’est le petit qui est tombé dans l’escalier. ‘A: Did your daughter fall down the stairs? B: No, it’s the little boy that fell down the stairs.’

(4) Fr.

A: Qui c’est ce gamin? B: C’est le petit qui est tombé dans l’escalier. ‘A: Who is that kid? B: He’s the little boy who fell down the stairs.’

1.2 Romance cleft constructions: defining the extension of the class 1.2.1 Romance cleft types The term cleft constructions refers to a set of syntactic structures that subsumes a variety of forms sharing all or most of the basic structural, semantic and pragmatic properties identified in Section 1.1. The most widely used taxonomy of clefts is based on Lambrecht (2001), which is primarily rooted in the morpho-syntactic features of clefts, in particular the position of the CCl with respect to the copular clause and the form of the REL introducing the CCl (cf. Section 2.3). However, mention should be made of other taxonomic proposals, such as the one based on the position that the CC occupies in the cleft construction, i.e. on it being initial, medial or final (cf. Sedano  

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1995a; De Cesare 2014; Gutiérrez Ordóñez 2015; for a taxonomy of clefts based on both the form of the REL and the position of the CC, see Wehr 2015). The existence of different types of clefts has also been backed by taking into account prosodic cues (cf., e.g., Scarano 2003 and Panunzi 2009 on Italian clefts and pseudo-clefts; ClechDarbon/Rebuschi/Rialland 1999 and Mertens 2012 on French clefts). Table 1 provides an overview of the cleft types available in Romance languages. As will be described in more detail below, we distinguish four main types of clefts (I–III, V), found in most of the Romance languages; two additional types of clefts (IV, VI), documented in a restricted number of Romance languages; and an additional group of four clefts (VII–X), found again in most of the Romance languages, which deviate most from the definition given in Section 1.1. Table 1: Cleft types in Romance languages Cleft types

Romance languages

I Cleft sentences

most Romance languages

II Pseudo-clefts

most Romance languages

III Reverse pseudo-clefts

most Romance languages

IV Implicit clefts Implicit inverted clefts

Italian, Portuguese Italian

V Spurious temporal clefts

most Romance languages

VI Reduced pseudo-clefts or Focalizing-ser clefts

non-European varieties (BPt., AmSp.)

VII Interrogative clefts

most Romance languages

VIII Pseudo-conditional clefts

most Romance languages

IX Presentational clefts

most Romance languages

X Inferential clefts

most Romance languages

The three basic types of clefts (illustrated in (5) to (7)), which correspond fully to the definition provided in Section 1.1, are cleft sentences (It. frasi scisse, Fr. phrases clivées, Sp. oraciones hendidas, Pt. frases clivadas), pseudo-cleft sentences (It. frasi pseudoscisse, Fr. phrases pseudo-clivées, Sp. oraciones seudo-hendidas, Pt. frases pseudo-clivadas) and reverse pseudo-cleft sentences (It. frasi pseudoscisse inverse, Fr. phrases pseudo-clivées inversées, Sp. oraciones semi-hendidas inversas, Pt. frases pseudo-clivadas invertidas).3 These three types of clefts differ from a morpho-syntactic

3 The Romance labels given in parenthesis (calqued on English) refer to the properties of English clefts, which have special features (such as the presence of a Clpro in the copular clause of cleft

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point of view. While cleft sentences and reverse pseudo-cleft sentences present the copular clause before the relative(-like) one (CCl), the reverse is true for pseudo-cleft sentences. In turn, cleft sentences differ from both pseudo-cleft and reverse pseudocleft sentences on the basis of the status of the REL: in clefts, we generally find a complementizer; in (reverse) pseudo-clefts, a free relative-like pronoun (for a detailed description of the RELs used in cleft sentences, cf. Section 2.3). (5) Cleft sentences It. È Stella che legge Kant. ‘It is Stella who reads Kant.’ (6) Pseudo-cleft sentences It. Quella che legge Kant è Stella. ‘The one who reads Kant is Stella.’ (7) Reverse pseudo-cleft sentences I t. S TELLA è quella che legge Kant. ‘S TELLA is the one who reads Kant.’ There is a very rich literature on these three types of clefts in the Romance languages (cf., e.g., Lambrecht 2001 and 2004 in particular on French; Melo e Abreu 2001 and Reichmann 2005 on Portuguese; Roggia 2009 on Italian; Moreno Cabrera 1983; 1999; Di Tullio 1990; Guitart 2013; Gutiérrez Ordóñez 2015 on Spanish; Wienen 2006 on Spanish and French4). All in all, however, Romance cleft sentences are much better described than reverse pseudo-clefts, which are far less common (on Italian reverse pseudo-clefts, considered to be rare in particular in written texts, cf. Berretta 2002 and Garassino 2014b as well as the discussion in Wehr 2016). While the three main types of clefts described above are found in most of the Romance languages, other types of clefts are attested only in a few Romance varieties or even in a single one. One type of cleft that has so far been considered to be restricted to

sentences; for a description of the differences between Italian and English, cf. Garassino 2014a and De Cesare et al. 2016, Part II, Section 1.3). Adopting these labels is therefore problematic (for a discussion on this issue, cf., e.g., Moreno Cabrera 1983 and Guitart 2013 on Spanish; De Cesare 2014 on French, Italian and Spanish). 4 These three types of clefts (as well as the ones identified below) have also been studied extensively in the American Romance varieties (cf., e.g., Sedano 1990 on pseudo-clefts and related constructions in Venezuelan Spanish; Toribio 2002 on clefts in Dominican Spanish; Ribeiro/Côrtes Junior 2009 on clefts and pseudo-clefts in Brazilian Portuguese). By contrast, studies on clefts in non-European varieties of French seem rather scarce. Studies on clefts in other, mostly minor Romance European varieties are also scarce (but see Videsott 2016; for some examples of clefts, e.g., in the northern Italian dialects, cf. Metzeltin 1989; on Catalan, cf. in particular Sedano 1995b; 1996). For a thorough description of the formal and functional properties of cleft sentences in the Bergamasco dialect, cf. Valentini (2012; 2016a).

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some Romance languages is the so-called implicit or infinitive cleft sentence (It. scisse implicite and Sp. hendidas de infinitivo, coined respectively by Berretta 1994, 92 and Sedano 1996, 127), in which the CCl is realized in the form of an infinitive clause (cf. Roggia 2009, 33–34 on Italian; cf. Reichmann 2005, 233–234 on Portuguese). While implicit cleft sentences present the CCl after the copular clause, as in (8), there is another realization of this cleft, with the CCl preceding it, as in (9). These clefts are called implicit inverted cleft sentences (It. frasi scisse implicite inverse, previously labelled frasi pseudo-scisse ‘pseudo-cleft sentences’; for a description of this type, cf. Berretta 1994 and De Cesare 2005). Further details on the implicit/infinitive cleft sentences in which the CCl occurs after the copular clause are given in Section 2.3.4. (8) Implicit cleft sentences It. È Stella a leggere Kant. is Stella to read.INF Kant ‘It is Stella who reads Kant.’ (9) Implicit inverted cleft sentences It. A leggere Kant è Stella. to read.INF Kant is Stella ‘The one who reads Kant is Stella.’ An additional type of cleft, found at least in Italian and French, is the so-called spurious temporal cleft sentence (It. frase scissa spuria), illustrated in (10) and (11). It is a special type of temporal cleft conveying durative meaning (cf. Benincà 1978 and Valentini 2016b). (10) Spurious temporal cleft sentences It. Sono tre ore che ti aspetto. three hours that you wait.1SG be.3PL ‘I have been waiting for you for three hours.’ (11) Fr.

Ça fait /Il y a trois heures that make3.SG /it there has three hours ‘I have been waiting for you for three hours.’

que je t’attends. that I you wait.1SG

In non-European Romance varieties, specifically in Brazilian Portuguese and in American Spanish (cf. Mioto 2012), we find another – geographically and socially marked – type of cleft (this cleft is also attested in European Portuguese, cf. Melo e Abreu 2001), illustrated in (12) and (13). This form of cleft resembles a reduced pseudo-cleft in which the CC (um cafezinho in (12), en Francia in (13)) occurs at the end of the construction. In the literature on Portuguese, this type of cleft is called reduced pseudo-cleft sentence (pseudo-clivada reduzida; cf. Reichmann 2005, 79–81 on the

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basis of Kato et al. 1997) or semi-pseudo-cleft (semi-pseudoclivada in Melo e Abreu 2001), while the literature on American Spanish refers to it as focalizing-ser cleft sentence (on the basis of the term ser focalizador used in Sedano 1988; 1990; Albor 1986 calls it ‘ser intensivo’) or as short cleft (hendidas escuetas in Guitart 2013, 101). (12) Reduced pseudo-cleft sentences BPt. Eu quero é um cafezinho. I want.1SG be.3SG a coffee ‘What I want is a coffee.’ (Kato et al. 1997, 309) (13) Focalizing-ser cleft sentences AmSp. Él estudió fue en Francia. in France he study.PST . 3SG be.PST . 3SG ‘Where he studied was in France.’ (Toribio 2002, 138) These short clefts have recently been studied quite extensively (from a syntactic, functional, sociolinguistic and historical point of view) and in a wide array of American Spanish varieties, in particular in Colombia (Albor 1986; Pato 2010; Méndez Vallejo 2012), Venezuela (Sedano 1988; 1990; 2014) and the Dominican Republic (Toribio 2002; Méndez Vallejo 2015). One debated issue is whether clefts such as (12) and (13) are reduced forms of pseudo-clefts (cf. Casteleiro 1979 for European Portuguese), i.e., whether (12) is linked to O que eu quero é um cafezinho ‘What I want is a coffee’ (Reichmann 2005, 79), or are derived in other ways, e.g., by inserting the invariable focus marker ser after the verb of a canonical sentence, as eu quero [é] um cafezinho in (12).5 In addition to the three main types of clefts mentioned above, four other important structures similar to clefts can be distinguished, which do not correspond in the same way to the definition provided in Section 1.1 (for a discussion, cf. Roggia 2009): interrogative clefts (cf., e.g., Roggia 2009, 52–60 on Italian chi è che / dov’è che / com’è che, etc.; Di Tullio 2010 on Spanish; for a syntactic characterization of interrogative clefts in standard French and in the northern Italian dialects, cf. Munaro/ Pollock 2005); pseudo-conditional clefts (cf. Roggia 2009, 38–40 on Italian scisse pseudo-condizionali; Gutiérrez Ordóñez 2015 on Spanish ecuandicionales); presentational clefts (cf., e.g., Lambrecht 1988 on French clefts opened by il y a ‘there is’, voilà ‘here’ and j’ai ‘I have’; Venier 2002 and De Cesare 2007 on Italian clefts opened by c’è ‘there is’ and ho ‘I have’); and inferential clefts (cf. Pusch 2006 on French and other Romance languages; Roggia 2009, 61–67 on Italian (non) è che; Fernández Leborans 1992 on Spanish es que ‘it’s that’; Guil 1994 on Italian and Spanish; Atayan/Wienen  

5 For a discussion related to Spanish, cf. Guitart (2013, 101–103); and to Portuguese, Reichmann (2005, 79–81) on the basis of Yoshino (2002), who argues against the view that these reduced clefts are pseudo-clefts with an omitted palavra-Q ‘wh-phrase’.

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543

2014 on French c’est que ‘it’s that’ and its equivalents in Italian and Spanish). Below are examples of the four types of structures in French and Italian. (14) Interrogative cleft sentences a. Fr. C’est où que tu l’as vue? ‘Where is it that you saw her?’ b. It. Chi è che l’ha vista? ‘Who is it who saw her?’ (15) Pseudo-conditional cleft sentences a. Fr. Si Stella n’a pas le temps, c’est de sa faute. b. It. Se Stella non ha tempo, è colpa sua. ‘If Stella doesn’t have time, it’s her fault.’ (16) Presentational cleft sentences a. Fr. Il y a Stella qui lit Kant. b. It. C’è Stella che legge Kant. ‘There is Stella that reads Kant.’ (17) Inferential cleft sentences a. Fr. C’est que Stella lit Kant. b. It. È che Stella legge Kant. ‘It’s that Stella reads Kant.’ The clefts illustrated in (14) to (17) differ in various ways (i.e. from a morpho-syntactic, semantic and pragmatic point of view) from the three main types of clefts described earlier. From a morpho-syntactic point of view, interrogative clefts such as the ones given in (14) involve a CC realized as an interrogative pronoun; in Italian, as shown in (14b), an interrogative CC must occur before the copula (It. *È chi che l’ha vista?, lit. ‘[It] is who that saw her?’); pseudo-conditional clefts such as the structures in (15) are a special kind of pseudo-cleft whose existence is motivated by the lack of a semantically appropriate relative wh-pronoun (Lambrecht 2001, 498): *Pourquoi Stella n’a pas le temps, c’est de sa faute, lit. ‘*Why Stella does not have time, it’s her fault’. Presentational clefts, such as the ones in (16), involve a different verb in the first clause (see Fr. y avoir and It. esserci ‘to be there, exist’). The last type of structure, the so-called inferential cleft (illustrated in (17)), is the most deviant one with respect to real clefts and as a result is considered to be a borderline case of cleft (see Pusch 2006), or even a construction that does not belong to the group of cleft constructions (Roggia 2009). This structure is in fact a pseudocomplex construction: it consists of a copular clause in which the copula (preceded by a non-referential clitic pronoun in non-pro-drop languages such as French) is directly followed by a completive clause introduced by a REL that looks like a complementizer  

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but is in fact a true relative pronoun (on the different forms of RELs, cf. Section 2.3). This means that inferential clefts do not involve any CC, even in the apparent cases in which we find an adverbial between the copula and the complement clause, as in Fr. c’est donc/peut-être/surtout que Stella est partie ‘it’s thus/perhaps/mainly that Stella left’. In these cases, we find precisely the subcategories of adverbials that cannot function as CC in real clefts: conjuncts such as donc ‘thus’; disjuncts such as peut-être ‘perhaps’; and focusing adverbs such as surtout ‘mainly’ (on the forms of adverbials that can be found in clefts, see De Cesare/Garassino in press).

1.2.2 Linking the form of clefts to their functions The wide array of Romance cleft types described on the basis of their formal properties can be related to the wide array of functions Romance clefts perform in discourse. This view is defended in particular in studies adopting a constructional approach to clefts, such as Lambrecht (2001) and Katz (2000) (for a critical discussion of this assumption, cf. Dufter 2006). Since the functions of clefts are highly dependent on the discourse in which these constructions occur, and the description of these functions is tightly connected to the theoretical framework adopted, we find that functionally-oriented descriptions and accounts of clefts vary at least as much as their formal counterparts. Thus simplifying to a great extent, the two most important functions performed by clefts cross-linguistically are the contrastive-corrective function and the new information or variableidentifying function (these labels are borrowed from Katz 2000, 263–267), illustrated in the French examples (18) and (19), respectively: (18) A: J’ai entendu dire que Stella lit Kant. B: Non, c’est Eva qui lit Kant. ‘A: I heard that Stella reads Kant. B: No, it’s Eva who reads Kant.’ (19) A: Qui est-ce qui lit Kant? B: C’est Stella qui lit Kant. ‘A: Who reads Kant? B: It’s Stella who reads Kant.’ From a discourse point of view, clefts are important cohesive devices, functioning as links between different portions of a text (cf. Wienen 2006 on Spanish and French adverbial clefts). The cohesive function of clefts can be captured in more detail by considering the information properties of the main cleft components (CC and CCl). Several levels of information structure can be analyzed: their focus-background partition (cf., e.g., Dufter 2009); the status of the CC and CCl in terms of their activation

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state in the memory of the reader/hearer and/or of their recoverability from the previous discourse and discourse situation (cf., e.g., De Cesare 2005; Roggia 2009; Wehr 2011; Garassino 2014a,b). The literature has described in great detail the ways clefts are connected to the previous discourse (less often the role they play in structuring the subsequent part of the text). The cohesive function of clefts, as described by studies rooted in text linguistics and conversational analysis (cf., e.g., the studies of Herslund 2005; Baranzini 2014; Jacob 2015 and De Cesare et al. 2016; as well as Müller 2007, De Stefani 2008 and BlancheBenveniste 2010), can be illustrated on the basis of examples (20) and (21). The discourse function of the cleft in (20), with an anaphoric pronoun as CC (It. questo ‘this’), is to link the content of the cleft to the previous discourse, while introducing new information in the CCL. Syntactic structures such as (21), also involving an anaphoric expression (It. per questo ‘for this reason’), display a similar type of cohesive function, which simply occurs at a higher level of text structuring: between two parts of a paragraph. The dividing line between a cleft and a discourse connective is not easy to grasp on the basis of morphosyntactic features (for a discussion of this issue on the basis of the semantic and pragmatic properties of the CC, see Berretta 2002 and Lahousse/Lamiroy 2015 on Fr. ainsi ‘so/thus’). (20) It.

Marcela Serrano: “Le donne hanno vinto, è questo che fa paura.” ‘Marcela Serrano: “Women won, this is what people are afraid of.”’ (repubblica.it, 25.05.2016)

(21) It.

Schmidt è [. . .] un ingegnere col pallino degli affari, che da Sun Microsystems è passato a Novell, dove ha potuto assaggiare la sconfitta al termine di un lungo braccio di ferro col gigante e concorrente Microsoft. E forse è anche per questo che non solo è stato chiamato a guidare Google, ma a far parte del consiglio di amministrazione di Apple nell’agosto del 2006. ‘Schmidt is [. . .] an engineer who has a bent for business, moving from Sun Microsystems to Novell, where he could sense defeat at the end of a long arm wrestling with the rival giant Microsoft. It is perhaps also for this reason that he was appointed not only to head Google but also to be part of the Apple board of governors in August 2006.’ (Garassino 2014a, 123)

1.3 Romance cleft constructions: accounting for their variation With the exception of Romanian (cf. Löfstedt 1966, 256, note 5), clefts are well attested and described in the main contemporary varieties of European Romance languages.6

6 Although they are considered to be rare, clefts are already attested in older stages of Romance languages as well as in Latin (cf. Löfstedt 1966, 260–261). For details on the form, evolution and spread

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Amongst the most detailed and comprehensive descriptions of clefts in at least three Romance languages, we can mention Metzeltin (1989; 2010), Sornicola (1988), Sedano (1995b; 1996), Dufter (2009), De Cesare et al. (2014; 2016), as well as Wehr (2015; 2016). Clefts are sometimes considered to be typical of the Romance languages (Löfstedt 1966, 276–277), but are by no means exclusive of this language family.7 Moreover, within the Romance languages, clefts are often considered to be a distinctive feature of French (cf., e.g., Léard 1992). Within the standard Romance languages, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese clefts differ with respect to their frequency, form and functions (cf. the morpho-syntactic features of clefts in Section 2). This variation is explained on the basis of three parameters, generally considered in isolation: their form, their geographic/areal distribution and their uses in different text types. The first parameter explaining the variation of clefts in the Romance languages is the so-called compensation mechanism principle (associated with Jespersen 1937, but already found in von Wartburg 21940 to explain the fact that French displays more clefts than Italian), which stipulates that the degree to which the cleft system is developed and used in a language (in terms of both the formal types available and their frequency) is directly correlated to the degree of freedom with which this language can reorder its main sentence constituents (cf. Lambrecht 2001; Lahousse/ Lamiroy 2012). Following this line of reasoning, we would thus expect to find more clefts in French than in Spanish and Italian because French has a much more rigid word order than the other two Romance languages. Corpus-based studies show that this is indeed the case, cf. Roggia (2008) on the basis of a comparable corpus of spoken French and Italian, where it is shown that spoken French employs three times more clefts than spoken Italian; cf. also Van den Steen (2005) on the basis of a corpus of translations from French to Spanish, as well as Dufter (2009) on the basis of a parallel corpus of parliament proceedings. Language contact phenomena, taking place across Romance (and non-Romance) languages, also play an important role in explaining variation in the frequency and form of Romance clefts (for the potential influence of English on the frequency, forms and functions of contemporary Italian clefts, cf. De Cesare 2012 and De Cesare et al. 2016, 462–472).8 In fact, the compensation mechanism principle has been challenged

of Romance clefts, as well as their relation to Latin clefts, we refer to Wehr (2015). For a discussion of the history of clefts in single Romance languages, cf., e.g., Muller (2003), Dufter (2008a), Wehr (2012) and Rouquier (2014) on French; D’Achille/Proietti/Viviani (2005) as well as Roggia (2012) on Italian; Helfrich (2003), Dufter (2008b; 2010) on Spanish; Kato/Ribeiro (2009) on Portuguese. 7 Clefts are also found in the Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian) and the Celtic languages (Irish, Welsh). For a description of their formal properties, cf. Smits (1989). 8 The catalytic role played by eighteenth-century French in the spread of Italian clefts, in particular of certain types of them, such as cleft sentences with a CC realized as an argument PP, is often mentioned (cf. D’Achille/Proietti/Viviani 2005; Roggia 2012).

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by a series of studies advocating areal language contact and geographic distribution as the main factor explaining variation within the Romance linguistic domain. The most important piece of evidence supporting this hypothesis is the surprisingly high frequency of Portuguese clefts in relation to its free word order, which is interpreted as the result of areal contact and possibly Celtic substratum (cf. Filppula 2009 and Wehr 2015; for a critical discussion, cf. Sornicola 1991). In light of the differences in particular between Portuguese, Spanish and French, the areal contact hypothesis put forward in the literature claims that the frequency of clefts declines from Western to Eastern Europe (cf. Wehr 2015; cf. also Miller 2006 for a similar proposal, including the Germanic and Slavic languages). However, this decline is not a gradual one, as there is no continuum in the use of clefts in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian. Rather, it can be observed only between the two extreme ends of the geographic distribution of the Romance languages, “with French and Portuguese at the Western Atlantic edge of Europe on one side and Romanian on the other side” (Wehr 2015, 198). According to this view, clefts are much more vital constructions in Portuguese and French than in Romanian, where clefts are considered to be rather infrequent and poorly developed in terms of their form (for a corpus-based description of Romanian clefts, cf. Wehr 2016). Romanian clefts such as (22) are considered to be rare. The idea that Romanian does not use clefts as pervasively for instance as French can be confirmed by considering the functional properties of Romanian clefts. As shown in the question-answer pairs given in (23) and (24), a Romanian cleft such as (22) clearly favors a contrastive-corrective reading, arising in (23), rather than a variable-identifying one. To a neutral question such as the one expressed in (24), the most natural answer has the form of a monoclausal (i.e. non-clefted) sentence.  

(22) Rom. El e acela care a spus adevărul. ‘It is him (the one) who told the truth.’ (Metzeltin 2010, 109) (23) Rom. Q: Cine a spus adevărul? Tu? A: Nu, nu eu, el e acela care a spus adevărul. ‘Q: Who told the truth? You? A: No, not me, it’s him who told the truth.’ (24) Rom. Q: Cine a spus adevărul? A: Maria (a spus adevărul). ‘Q: Who told the truth? A: Maria (told the truth).’ Recent corpus-based research assessing the frequency of clefts in written Italian, French and Spanish shows that there is in fact no big gap in the use of Italian and French cleft sentences, at least as far as journalistic prose is concerned (cf. the results

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in De Cesare et al. 2014 and 2016). A third parameter should thus be taken into account when explaining the different frequencies of clefts in the Romance languages: their distribution in different text types, registers and genres. From the data at hand, it seems that there is a significant gap between spoken French and spoken Italian, but less so between written French and written Italian (cf. De Cesare et al. 2016 found 61 clefts per 100,000 words in written French and 41 in Italian). That Romance clefts vary in their frequency of use in relation to different communicative situations is clear when we consider the fact that clefts are not frequently used in text messaging written in French (cf. Stark 2014). As far as the form of clefts is concerned, there are certain types of clefts that are typical of the oral code, such as interrogative clefts illustrated in (14) above (cf. Reichmann 2005, 235–236; De Cesare et al. 2016), while others are clearly more typical of written and formal language varieties. In Italian, for instance, implicit cleft sentences (È stata Stella a leggere Kant ‘It’s Stella who read Kant’) occur more often in written texts. From the data at hand, it seems that they are at least twice as frequent in written texts (cf. the data provided in De Cesare et al. 2016, 514; see also Berretta 1994, 92 and Roggia 2009, 70).

2 The form of Romance clefts In this section, the building blocks of clefts are described in more detail, mainly on the basis of European varieties of French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese: attention will be paid to the clitic pronoun opening, e.g., French clefts (Section 2.1), the copula (Section 2.2) and the relativizer (Section 2.3).

2.1 The clitic pronoun (Clpro) As mentioned in Section 1.1, non-pro-drop Romance languages require the presence of a non-referential clitic pronoun in the copular clause (Clpro). Amongst the Romance languages considered in this section, only French clefts need an overt Clpro, which is generally realized as ce (25).9 French clefts thus resemble Germanic clefts (cf.

9 There is no agreement in the literature on the syntactic status of CLpro. It is often described as a demonstrative pronoun (cf., e.g., Metzeltin 2010, 118), albeit considered at the same time by some to be non-referential (cf. Wehr 2011, 198). For Belletti (2015, 48), CLpro (such as Fr. ce) is not “a well-behaved expletive”, but a special dummy expletive and specifically a quasi-argumental subject. It differs from pure expletive clitics (Fr. il) on the basis of its form: in French, it coincides with ce and not with il; thus, clefts involve a pronoun that is more referential and argumental than the pure expletive. Further crosslinguistic evidence on the referential/argumental status of CLpro can be observed in some Germanic languages (Reeve 2011). Under V2, German es ‘it’ is obligatory only in clefts.

Cleft constructions

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E. It is Stella that plays with matches; Ger. Es ist Stella, die mit Streichhölzern spielt). It should be observed that the Clpro generally occurs before COP, as in (25), but its occurrence after COP is also possible, as in clefts opened by an epistemic adverbial, such as peut-être ‘maybe’ in (26). (25) Fr.

C’est/*Est Stella qui joue avec les allumettes. ‘It is/*Is Stella that plays with matches.’

(26) Fr.

Peut-être est-ce lui qui m’a d’abord envoyé en Asie. ‘Maybe it’s him that first sent me to Asia.’ (Dufter 2006, 35)

In French clefts, other Clpro are possible. While ce cannot be replaced by other pronouns, such as the expletive il and ça/cela (cf. Dufter 2006, 34), the latter two pronouns seem to be in complementary distribution with ce (Katz 2000, 254, note 1). The Clpro ce is used when the COP (based on the verb être ‘to be’) is realized as a synthetic verb form; by contrast, ça/cela are found when COP is realized as an analytic verb form, as in (27), where COP is in the passé composé, or in (28) and (29), where we find the analytic form of the futur proche, involving the verb aller + infinitive. On the use of il, cf. Section 2.3.4. (27) Tous ceux qui revenaient, ça [*ce] a été eux qui ont été les précurseurs de l’évolution politique. ‘All the people who came back, it was them that were the precursors of political evolution.’ (example from Boswell 2006, Le communisme rural en France, p. 217) (28) Tu vas voir que ça/*ce va être elle qui va être choisie. ‘You will see that she’s the one who will be chosen.’ (29) ça va être ça qui est embêtant ouais ‘that’s what is going to be annoying yes’ (corpus ESLO, JX490, ESLO2_ITI_1151)

2.2 The copula (COP) The copular clause of prototypical Romance cleft sentences involves an overt copula (in short COP) based on the verb ‘to be’ (Fr. être, It. essere, Sp. and Pt. ser). In Italian (30), Spanish (31) and Portuguese (32) cleft sentences, COP generally agrees in person and number with the CC (cf. Sornicola 1988). This behavior thus suggests that in clefts with no obligatory subject in the form of an expletive pronoun in the copular clause it is the CC, and not the Clpro as in French clefts, that functions as

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the subject of COP. In Italian clefts, we observe agreement with COP not only when the CC functions as subject of the verb of the CCl, as in (30), but also when it functions as its direct object (33), or even as a temporal adjunct (34) in the case of durative clefts (cf. Section 1.2.1). (30) It.

Sono io che devo parlar piano. ‘I’m the one who needs to speak softly.’ (Berretta 1994, 90)

(31) Sp.

Soy yo la que ha sido acusada. ‘I’m the one who’s been accused.’ (Di Tullio 22006, 487)

(32) Pt.

Sou eu que peço. ‘I’m the one who asks.’ (Metzeltin 2010, 116)

(33) It.

Sono le noci che Stella non mangia. ‘It’s nuts that Stella doesn’t eat.’

(34) It.

Sono due ore che ti aspetto. ‘I have been waiting for you for two hours.’

In contrast to Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, in French clefts COP tends to be invariable (cf. already Müller-Hauser 1943, 213; cf. also Wehr 2011, 198), as it does not agree in person with the CC (it is always in the third person singular, cf. *ce suis moi qui suis venu, lit. ‘it am I who came’, ‘I am the one who came’; cited in Dufter 2006, 36) and agreement in number is optional in some contexts, such as with the cleft pronoun eux (35). In French, number agreement between COP and CC is considered to be typical, if not exclusive, of the standard variety (Dufter 2008a, 34).10 (35) Fr.

a. C’est lui qui vient. ‘It’s he coming.’

/ b. C’est eux qui viennent. / ‘It’s they coming.’

In Italian cleft sentences, lack of agreement between COP and CC can also occur, but this phenomenon is rarer than in French cleft sentences. In Italian, there is lack of agreement when the CC functions as direct object (cf. Roggia 2009, 30), such as, e.g., voi in (36):11

10 While it was common to find French clefts such as ce suis je qui… / ce es tu qui… etc., with COP agreeing in person and number with the CC up to later Middle French, the form c’est seems to have become standard in the sixteenth century (cf. Dufter 2008a, 34 and Wehr 2015). 11 In this case, as in the case of French (see (35b)), lack of agreement between COP and CC is a matter of register, as can be observed on the basis of the following example cited in Metzeltin (2010, 111): “Me ne andai che la maestra gridava ‘Sono tutti bastardi’ e ‘È i nostri soldi che vogliono […]’ ” ‘I left while the

Cleft constructions

(36) It.

Siete /È voi be.3SG you.PL be.2PL ‘It’s you that Stella saw.’

che that

Stella Stella

ha has

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visto. seen

While COP always agrees with the CC in person and number in Portuguese cleft sentences (this is true for European as well as for Brazilian Portuguese; cf. Kato et al. 1997, 342), it is invariable in Portuguese reverse pseudo-clefts (Metzeltin 2010, 118). In Portuguese clefts with the CC occurring at the beginning of the structure, as in (37), the copula is frozen in the form é ‘is’ (on this form, involved in the particle-like expression é que, cf., e.g., Reichmann 2005, 128–132): (37) Pt.

Estes é que eu these be.3SG that I ‘These are what I like.’

gosto. like

Based on the above-mentioned evidence, the COP involved in French and Portuguese cleft sentences/reverse pseudo-clefts is more restricted than the COP of Italian and Spanish cleft sentences. In French, COP has lost most of its morphological variability. This is also true of the grammatical features expressing tense, aspect and mood (cf. Müller-Hauser 1943, 213; Dufter 2006, 35; 2008a, 35). No matter what the grammatical features of the verb of the subordinate clause are, the COP involved in French cleft sentences tends to occur in the indicative present, considered the default realization of this form (Dufter 2008a, 35). The other tense, aspect and mood features – such as the imparfait in (38) or the conditionnel – are possible, but marginal (Adam 2013, 38; cf. Wienen 2006, 325–326 for examples with COP in the imparfait, conditionnel as well as with the passé simple and futur). Analytic forms of COP also occasionally occur, as seen in (27). (38) Fr.

c’est à croire que c’était lui qui écrivait ‘one would think that it was him who was writing’ (corpus ESLO; DC738, ESLO1_ENT_057)

2.3 The relativizer (REL) One of the most important building blocks of clefts is the relativizer (in short REL) opening the CCl. The standard varieties of the Romance languages considered in this

teacher was shouting “They are all bastards” and “It’s our money that they want […]” ’ (Cesare Pavese, La luna e i falò; the cleft is in italics).

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chapter involve a variety of overt RELs. The following examples, from spoken Florentine and vernacular French, respectively, show that in some Romance varieties REL can also be missing. In French, this possibility seems to be restricted to presentational clefts and involves the presence of an overt pronoun in the slot that should be occupied by the REL in the CCl (cf. elle in (40)). (39) It.

l’è lui / l’ha presa ‘it’s him [who] took it’ (Scarano 2003, 187)

(40) Fr.

a. j’ai ma mère elle I have.1SG my mother she b. y a ma mère mother there have.3SG my ‘My mother is sick.’

est malade be.3SG sick elle est malade she be.3SG sick

The paradigm of RELs occurring in clefts is of central theoretical importance in at least two respects. First, it is on the basis of the forms of REL and their grammatical status that different types of clefts are identified (cf., e.g., Smits 1989 for the Romance languages studied in this chapter, Di Tullio 22006 for Spanish, and the discussion in Sedano 1995a and De Cesare 2014). Second, based on the grammatical and semantic information encoded by RELs in clefts, different groups of Romance languages are identified (cf. Sedano 1995b; 1996 for discussion). In what follows, we describe the paradigm of RELs used in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese cleft sentences by distinguishing three types of RELs (cf. Smits 1989): (i) complementizers (or particles); (ii) free relative pronouns; (iii) relative adverbs (↗22 Relative clauses).

2.3.1 Clefts with a complementizer Clefts involving a complementizer are found in all standard Romance languages, albeit with different frequencies and syntactic functions. In French, Italian and Portuguese, the most common form of REL is the complementizer que/che. In French, que is in complementary distribution with qui: the latter is used when the CC functions as subject of the CCl (43); the former in all the other cases (cf. (41), with an indirect object, and (42), with a locative adjunct); this is an important difference with respect to the paradigm of “real” relative pronouns and particles used in French (↗22 Relative clauses). (41) Fr.

C’est à moi que vous avez l’audace de parler ainsi. ‘It’s to me that you dare to speak like that.’ (Müller-Hauser 1943, 209)

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(42) Fr.

C’est ici que je suis née. ‘It’s here that I was born.’

(43) Fr.

C’est mon ami qui décide. ‘It’s my friend who decides.’ (Müller-Hauser 1943, 207)

In Italian, in contrast to French, the REL che can be used in all the syntactic functions performed by the CC in the CCl: subject (44), indirect object (45) or adjunct (46). In Portuguese, we find the same situation as in Italian: que can be used when the CC functions as subject (47), prepositional object (48) and adjunct (49) in the CCl (cf. Sedano 1995b, 359). (44) It.

È Giorgio che è arrivato ieri. ‘It’s Giorgio that arrived yesterday.’ (Frison 1988, 208)

(45) It.

È a Giorgio che darò un libro. ‘It’s to Giorgio that I will give a book.’ (Frison 1988, 210)

(46) It.

Era là che la mamma andava a spigolare. ‘It was there that the mother was gleaning.’ (Sedano 1995b, 359)

(47) Pt.

Fui eu que pedi. ‘It was me who asked.’ (Metzeltin 2010, 116)

(48) Pt.

Foi com ela que ele casou. ‘It’s with her that he married.’ (Metzeltin 2010, 117)

(49) Pt.

E foi assim que Camões se casó con la princesa. ‘And it was like this that/That’s the way Camões married the princess.’ (Sedano 1996, 141)

Spanish clefts with que are more complex to describe, especially from a sociolinguistic point of view. It is widely believed that Sp. que-clefts cannot be used in standard European Spanish (cf. Moreno Cabrera 1983, 458), but are only possible in American varieties of Spanish (Di Tullio 22006, 487). According to Wienen (2006, 258 and 265), que-clefts are particularly frequent in Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela and Chile; for other studies on these clefts, cf., e.g., Sedano (1998) and Bentivoglio/De Stefano/ Sedano (1999). Que is used in particular when the CC functions as adjunct, i.e. is an optional sentence constituent; in this case, it can be realized as a PP (as por estas razones ‘for these reasons’ in (50)) or an AdvP (así ‘in this way’ in (51)). By contrast, as shown in (52), the use of “bare” que is blocked in clefts having as CC an NP functioning as object, i.e. as argument, of the main verb of the CCL (cf. Di Tullio 22006, 487).  



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(50) Sp.

Es por estas razones […] que deseo enfatizar la importancia […] (CREA, Press, El Salvador Hoy, 06. 04. 1997; Wienen 2006, 276) ‘It’s for these reasons […] that I wish to stress the importance […]’

(51) Sp.

Fue así que se crearon las denominadas “audiencias” […]. ‘It was in this way that the so-called “appellate courts” were created.’ (CREA, political text from Mexico; Wienen 2006, 301)

(52) Sp.

*fue la torta que comió Juan ‘it was the cake that Juan ate’ (Di Tullio 22006, 487)

At the same time, que-clefts are claimed to be panhispanic constructions (Dufter 2010, 275), varying strongly in their geographic distribution. While it is true that these clefts are typical of American varieties of Spanish, they are also documented in contemporary peninsular Spanish. In European Spanish, similarly to what we observe for American varieties, que-clefts are used only when the CC functions as adjunct (see es por eso que in (53); cf. again Dufter 2010, 273 and 275; cf. also Wienen 2006, 264). Overall, European Spanish que-clefts are rare because they have been – and still are – stigmatized by the norm (Dufter 2010; Di Tullio/Kailuweit 2012; Armstrong/Mackenzie 2013, 87). (53) Es por eso que ante una situación de estrés, lo mejor que podemos hacer es tratar de que nuestra alimentación sea lo más variada y abundante posible. ‘It is for this reason that / That’s why prior to a stress situation, the best thing we can do is to make sure that our nutrition will be as diverse and abundant as possible.’ (CREA, Ardila, La alimentación del niño antes de nacer, Spain 1986; Wienen 2006, 266)

2.3.2 Clefts with a free relative pronoun In Spanish clefts, the most widely used forms of RELs are the free relative pronouns quien and el que/la que/lo que etc. (see (54)–(55)). By contrast, the same pronouns in the other Romance languages, i.e., Fr. ce que/ce qui, It. chi/quello che/ciò che and Pt. quem/o que (see (56)–(60), are either not attested or much more marginal than in Spanish (cf. Sedano 1995b; 1996; De Cesare et al. 2014, 70; 2016; for a discussion of examples such as (57) and (58) as being structures that differ from clefts, cf. Wehr 2015).  

(54) Sp.

Fue Colón quien descubrió América. ‘It was Columbus who discovered America.’

Cleft constructions

(55) Sp.

Fue Colón el que descubrió América. ‘It was Columbus who discovered America.’ (Dufter 2010, 257)

(56) It.

??È il presidente chi ha parlato per primo. ‘It is the president who spoke first.’ (Roggia 2009, 38)

(57) It.

È il brivido del volo ciò che li eccita. ‘It is the thrill of flying that excites them.’ (Roggia 2009, 19)

(58) It.

È Maria quella che passeggia di notte. ‘It is Maria the one that is strolling at night.’ (Roggia 2009, 19)

(59) Pt.

Era uma mulher quem assobiava. ‘It was a woman who was whistling.’ (Sedano 1996, 135)

(60) Pt.

?É o meu pelotão o que faz os resultados mais palpáveis. ‘It’s my peloton that gets the most palpable results.’ (Sedano 1996, 132)

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2.3.3 Clefts with a relative adverb In Spanish clefts with a CC conveying information about space, time and manner (see (61)–(63), respectively), the REL has the form of a relative adverb. Sp. donde, cuando, como are again more frequently used than Fr. où (largely restricted to the formulaic expression c’est là où), It. quando, dove, come and Pt. quando, onde, como (cf. Sedano 1995b; 1996; De Cesare 2014, 39). In French (64), Italian (65) and Portuguese (66), cleft sentences with an adjunct CC conveying information about space, time and manner normally involve the complementizer que/che (cf. Section 2.3.1 for examples). (61) Sp.

Fue en ese lugar donde lo sorprendió el perseguidor. ‘It was in that place where the pursuer caught him.’ (Sedano 1996, 129)

(62) Sp.

Es por la tarde cuando se va. ‘It’s in the evening that [when] s/he’s leaving.’ (Moreno Cabrera 1983, 455)

(63) Sp.

Es descaradamente como lo hace. ‘It’s shamelessly how s/he does it.’ (Moreno Cabrera 1983, 455)

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(64) Fr.

c’est cette maison là-bas où on a habité si longtemps ‘it’s this house over there where we lived such a long time’ (Blanche-Benveniste 2000, 60)

(65) It.



in casa dove lavoro meglio. ‘It’s at home where I work best.’ (Roggia 2009, 19)

(66) Pt.

Era muito cedo quando vieram os homens de Proença. ‘It was very early when the men from Proença came.’ (Metzeltin 2010, 117)

2.3.4 Other forms opening the CCl Another form opening the CCl of clefts should be mentioned in relation to Italian and Portuguese, namely the preposition a (cf. Section 1.2.1). Clefts with a CCl introduced by the preposition a are called implicit clefts or infinitive clefts because the verb of the subordinate clause appears in a non-finite form (↗10 Infinitival clauses). In this construction, the tense, aspect and mood features are thus expressed by COP (an indepth morpho-syntactic description of these clefts can be found in Frison 1988, 201– 206). Another idiosyncratic feature of implicit clefts is that they require the CC to function as the subject of the CCl. (67) It.

È stata Stella a telefonarmi. Stella to phone.INF .me be.3SG been ‘It was Stella who called me.’

(68) Pt.

Não serão Angola nem Cuba a interromper o processo de negociação. ‘It will be neither Angola nor Cuba that will interrupt the negotiation process.’ (O Comércio do Porto; Metzeltin 2010, 117)

Implicit clefts are generally held to be an exclusive feature of Italian and Portuguese (note that they are rare in Brazilian Portuguese; cf. Reichmann 2005; Sedano 1995b; 1996).12 However, they are also attested in some northern Italian dialects, such as Bergamasco (cf. l’ìa stàc lö a liberala ‘it was him to free her’; cf. Valentini 2012; 2016a). Moreover, it has been claimed that implicit clefts can be found in French, too (cf. Metzeltin 2010; Sedano 1995b; 1996). The examples provided to show the existence of

12 From the empirical data at hand, it also seems that implicit clefts are more common in Italian than in European Portuguese (cf. Sedano 1995b, 356; 1996, 133). Reichmann (2005, 233) found only 14 occurrences of this type of cleft in four novels written in the twentieth century.

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these clefts in French are given in (69) and (70). Upon closer scrutiny, however, these clefts show deviant features with respect to both canonical French clefts and Italian and Portuguese implicit clefts. The structure in (69) is introduced by the pronoun ils and not with the expletive CLpro ce (although COP is realized as a synthetic form of the verb être; on the form of COP and the distribution of these two pronouns in clefts, see Section 2.1, in particular footnote 9); it is also not clear here if ils functions as a pure expletive, i.e. does not have any referential meaning. In turn, the structure in (70) can only convey a deontic meaning, as shown in the explicit cleft given in (71), which includes the verb devoir ‘must’. Moreover, the structure given in (70) cannot easily be de-clefted (*à vous ‘to you’ + finite verb form of agir). Taken together, all these deviant features cast some serious doubts on the hypothesis according to which there are implicit clefts in French, too.  

(69) Fr.

Ils sont près de 800,000 chrétiens en Irak […] à fêter aujourd’hui la résurrection du Christ. ‘They are nearly 800,000 Christians in Iraq celebrating Christ’s resurrection today.’ (Le journal du Dimanche 2003; Metzeltin 2010, 114)

(70) Fr.

c’est à vous d’agir ‘it is up to you to act’ (Sedano 1996, 127)

(71) Fr.

c’est vous qui devez agir ‘it’s you that must act’ (Sedano 1996, 127)

3 Syntactic and pragmatic accounts of clefts This section is devoted to the ways in which clefts are accounted for in formally and functionally-oriented studies (Sections 3.1 and 3.2, respectively). Simplifying to some extent, there are two accounts of clefts: according to the generative literature, clefts are constructions derived from basic, underlying structures; by contrast, in functionally-oriented approaches, clefts are basic constructions in which CC and REL function as a special kind of morpho-syntactic focus marker or, more generally, pragmatic marker.

3.1 Clefts as derived constructions The main idea defended in the generative literature is that clefts are syntactic structures involving an extraposition mechanism, obtained by moving (at least) the CC from a base position located lower in the structure. The underlying structure to be

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posited and the type of movement(s) involved are subject to discussion. Following the proposal made for English in Akmajian (1970), Romance cleft sentences were first accounted for as deriving from pseudo-cleft sentences (cf. Casteleiro 1979 on Portuguese). Today, this account has largely been abandoned. What is currently under debate is whether the Clpro is an expletive or, alternatively, a kind of definite determiner heading a discontinuous DP (cf. Belletti 2012; 2015; see also Hedberg 2000; Han/Hedberg 2008; Reeve 2011; 2012; Frascarelli/Ramaglia 2014 for discussion). In recent studies (cf., e.g., Belletti 2015), the type of derivation proposed to account for cleft sentences also depends on the functional properties of clefts. Specifically, it has been proposed that subject cleft sentences (Fr. C’est Stella qui lit Kant. ‘It is Stella that reads Kant.’), which can be contrastive-corrective or express new information (i.e. be used in the variable-identifying focus interpretation; these two functions are illustrated in (18) and (19) in Section 1.2.2), are derived differently with respect to cleft sentences involving another type of CC, such as an object or an adjunct (as in It. È a scuola che Stella legge Kant ‘It’s at school that Stella reads Kant’), which can only be interpreted as contrastive-corrective. Additionally, on the basis of Italian (cf. Sleeman 2013), a special derivation has been proposed to account for the form of implicit clefts (such as It. È stata Stella a leggere Kant ‘It was Stella who read Kant’). The cartographic analysis of cleft sentences accounts for the informational properties of clefts by distinguishing different structures and related computations. According to Belletti (2012; 2015), there are two main insights in the cartographic proposal explaining the discourse functions of clefts: (i) the clausal structure contains two different Focus positions, namely a high left peripheral one dedicated to expressing corrective/contrastive focalization and a low vP-peripheral one dedicated to hosting new information focus constituents; (ii) COP is the fundamental atom of clefts, as it makes the two Focus positions available. In both types of clefts, COP selects a complement having the form of a reduced CP, realized as a “small clause”. This small clause lacks the highest ForceP layer (cf. (72) and (73)), as well as the higher Topic position. The Focus position in the left periphery of the CP is thus the highest head of the small clause complement of COP. Moreover, the reduced CP complement of clefts includes a position labeled “Pred”, to make explicit that there is a predication relation holding within the small clause. The interpretation of clefts can be further explained on the basis of the derivation posited in Belletti (2015) (for further refinements of this proposal, cf. Section 3 of Belletti 2015). In object/non-subject clefts and in contrastive-corrective subject ones, the CC targets the left peripheral Focus position in the complement of COP, as shown in (72) for a cleft such as It. È a Stella che leggo Kant. ‘It’s to Stella that I read Kant’. Note that, in (72), the design of the small clause complement of clefts is simplified.  



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______________________________________ ↓ ǀ (72) … COP [CP Force … [FocP/contr-corr … [PredP … Pred [FinP che [TP S … … O(/PP)]]]] By contrast, in new information subject clefts, the subject is interpreted in the same vP position as the new information post-verbal subject in null subject languages (such as in the Italian VS structure Canta Stella, lit. ‘Sings Stella’, i.e., ‘Stella is singing’). The main derivation steps of this cleft are schematized in (73) for the French cleft C’est Stella qui lit Kant:  

_________________ ________________ ↓ ↓ ǀ ǀ (73) [TP Ce T [FocP/newinfo [vP être [CP Force … [PredP [Stella] Pred [FinP qui [ – lit Kant]]]]]]] ↑________________________________ǀ

3.2 Clefts as basic constructions An alternative idea to the one presented in Section 3.1, defended among others by Katz (2000) and Lambrecht (2001; 2004) in a Construction Grammar approach, as well as by Blanche-Benveniste (2002) and Wehr (2011) (all these studies mainly on the basis of French; but cf. Roggia 2009 on Italian), is that clefts are basic linguistic units. In other words, in clefts such as (74) and (75), the CC Stella/à l’école occurs in situ (cf. Wehr 2011, 198). (74) Fr.

C’est Stella qui lit Kant. ‘It’s Stella who/that reads Kant.’

(75) Fr.

C’est à l’école que Stella lit Kant. ‘It’s at school that Stella reads Kant.’

In this proposal, the grammaticalized and non-compositional features of the building blocks of clefts – COP, CCl and REL – are highlighted to show that the function of clefts (in particular of specific types of clefts, such as the ones with a CC functioning as adjunct in the CCL; cf. (78) and (79) below) cannot be easily predicted compositionally, on the basis of the properties of their component parts (for a different view on this hypothesis on the basis of French clefts, we refer to Dufter 2006; for observations based on Italian clefts, cf. Panunzi 2009 and Roggia 2009, 27–31). As far as COP is concerned, it tends to be morphologically invariable, in particular in French (cf. Section 2.2). In its invariable form (Fr. est, but cf. also Pt. é), COP bears the grammatical features ‘third singular present indicative’. On the basis of these features, French COP is described formally as a sort of verbe auxiliaire ‘auxiliary verb’ or verbe de dispositif ‘device verb’, differing from the verb of the subordinate clause, which is a verbe constructeur ‘construction verb’ (Blanche-Benveniste 2002, 108–109).

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From a functional point of view, COP is considered to be a focusing operator (“opérateur de focalisation” in Blanche-Benveniste 2002, 108) or a morphosyntactic focus marker (Lambrecht 2001, 470). As for the CCl, two main aspects showing non-compositional features are discussed (cf., e.g., Wienen 2006, 82): its grammatical status and the form of its introducer (REL). Numerous studies on Romance clefts have shown that the CCl involved in a cleft is not interpretable outside the cleft. In other words, it is neither a restrictive nor an appositive relative clause (in the Italian literature, the CCl involved in a cleft is considered to be a pseudo-relative, even in the non-prototypical cases in which the CC does not function as the subject of the CCl; on these issues, cf. Panunzi 2009, 1124 and Roggia 2009). Furthermore, the REL involved in clefts tends to be realized as a complementizer (Fr. and Pt. que, It. che), as shown in (76) in opposition to (77), which is fairly neutral as to the syntactic functions associated to the CC in the CCl (cf. Section 2.3): (76) Fr.

C’est à la femme que j’ai parlé. ‘It is to the woman that I spoke.’

(77) Fr.

C’est la femme à laquelle j’ai parlé. ‘It is the woman to whom I spoke.’

Further evidence showing the advanced grammaticalization degree – or, according to an alternative view, pragmaticalization degree (cf. Adam 2013, 44) – of certain types of clefts is the fact that they cannot be “de-clefted” (cf. Wienen 2006, 29–30). This is true in particular of clefts on adverbials, such as Fr. c’est pour cela/ça que, c’est pour cette raison que and c’est là que (described in Wienen 2006, 334–346): (78) Fr.

C’est pour ça qu’il veut expliquer les clivées. ‘That’s why he wants to explain clefts.’

(79) Fr.

?Il veut expliquer les clivées pour ça. ‘He wants to explain clefts for that.’ (Lambrecht 2001, 501)

In light of the grammaticalized and non-compositional features of French cleft sentences, the structure c’est … que/qui has been analyzed as a discontinuous morpheme with pragmatic value (cf. Wehr 2011, 198) and specifically as a discontinuous focalizing morpheme. By the same token, Pt. é que in clefts such as Os HOLANDESES é que me preocupam ‘It’s the Dutch that worry me’ (cited in Wehr 2015, 203) – which is much more advanced in its grammaticalization degree than Fr. c’est … que/qui – is described as a continuous focalization morpheme (Wehr 2015). Interestingly, Spanish cleft sentences are hardly discussed in these accounts, perhaps because they are considered to be less grammaticalized (cf. Metzeltin 1989, 200–201) and their meaning and function to be more easily derivable compositionally (Vázquez-Larruscaín 2014).

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4 Concluding remarks: future research on cleft constructions Despite the great wealth of studies on Romance clefts produced in the last three decades, a clear picture of the forms, frequency and functions of these constructions in the Romance languages at large – even in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese – is currently missing. Several general areas related to Romance clefts still ought to be better investigated. A first issue that needs to be better understood is related to the taxonomy of clefts. There is currently no general consensus on the extension of the class of cleft constructions and on the morpho-syntactic link between all the cleft types that can be subsumed in this broad syntactic, semantic and functional category. In order to achieve a better understanding of taxonomy-related issues, we need to provide indepth descriptions in particular of the morpho-syntactic features of all the different cleft types. A thorough understanding of some of the morpho-syntactic idiosyncrasies of clefts can be achieved only by taking into account another aspect that is currently under-researched: the origin and use of clefts in older stages of the Romance languages. We currently know very little about the forms of clefts used in Italian between the fourteenth and the twentieth century. Specifically, we need to throw light on the origin of Italian and Portuguese implicit clefts. We also need more empirical studies on Romance clefts mapping their geographical distribution. On the basis of the current research, we know that there are significant differences in the availability and use of clefts across the Romance languages: this is true not only between cleft use in European varieties and cleft use documented in other areas of the world, such as the Americas, but also between clefts documented in the European standard and non-standard varieties. However, we still lack studies on the use of clefts in specific Romance varieties. Crucially lacking are, e.g., widescale empirical studies on French clefts used outside of France and on clefts used in smaller Romance varieties, such as Sicilian, Neapolitan, Rumantsch Grischun etc. Similarly, we still need to better understand the discourse distribution of clefts in the Romance languages. Finally, the description and explanation of the use of clefts pose a number of important methodological problems. The factors underlying the use of clefts both intra- and cross-linguistically are many and they are heterogeneous. Understanding the weight of these factors is a great challenge in the current linguistic research (for a multifactorial analysis explaining the use of Italian and English clefts, cf. Garassino 2016).  

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Sleeman, Petra (2013), Italian clefts and the licensing of infinitival subject relatives, in: Katharina Hartmann/Tonjes Veenstra (edd.), Cleft Structures, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 319–342. Smits, Rik J. C. (1989), Eurogrammar. The Relative and Cleft Constructions of the Germanic and Romance Languages, Dordrecht, Foris. Sornicola, Rosanna (1988), “It”-clefts and “wh”-clefts: two awkward sentence types, Journal of Linguistics 24, 343–379. Sornicola, Rosanna (1991), Origine e diffusione della frase scissa nelle lingue romanze, in: Dieter Kremer (ed.), Actes du XVIIIe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes (Université de Trèves 1986), vol. 3, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 43–54. Stark, Elisabeth (2014), Frequency, form and function of cleft constructions in the Swiss SMS Corpus, in: Anna-Maria De Cesare (ed.), Frequency, Form and Function of Cleft Constructions. Contrastive, Corpus-based Studies, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 325–344. Toribio, Almeida Jacqueline (2002), Focus on clefts in Dominican Spanish, in: James F. Lee/Kimberly L. Geeslin/J. Clancy Clements (edd.), Structure, Meaning and Acquisition in Spanish. Papers from the 4th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, Somerville, MA, Cascadilla, 130–146. Valentini, Ada (2012), Per una tipologia della struttura informativa: il caso delle frasi scisse in un dialetto italo-romanzo, Linguistica e Filologia 32, 75–117. Valentini, Ada (2016a), L’apporto dei dati dialettali a una tipologia della struttura informativa: il caso delle frasi scisse in un dialetto italo-romanzo, in: Adam Ledgeway/Michela Cennamo/Guido Mensching (edd.), Actes du XXVIIe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes, Section 4: Syntaxe, Nancy, ATILF, 501–512. Valentini, Ada (2016b), “Signor Presidente, sono due anni che aspettiamo”: la scissa durativa italiana in un confronto interlinguistico sul corpus multilingue EUROPARL, in: Anna-Maria De Cesare/ Davide Garassino (edd.), Current Issues in Italian, Romance and Germanic Non-canonical Word Orders. Syntax – Information Structure – Discourse Organization, Frankfurt etc., Lang, 205–226. Van den Steen, Katleen (2005), Cleft constructions in French and Spanish, in: Nicole Delbecque/Johan van der Auwera/Dirk Geeraerts (edd.), Perspectives on Variation: Sociolinguistic, Historical, Comparative, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 275–290. Vázquez-Larruscaín, Miguel (2014), La conexión entre la forma y la función en las construcciones hendidas del español como expresiones de foco (y tópico) contrastivo, Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 3, 299–322. http://dx.doi.org/10.7557/1.3.2.3128 Venier, Federica (2002), Presentatività. Sulle tracce di una nozione, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso. Videsott, Ruth (2016), La frase scissa come strategia di focalizzazione nelle lingue romanze. Alcune riflessioni a partire dalle traduzioni dei Vangeli in ladino dolomitico, in: Federico Vicario (ed.), Ad Limina Alpium. VI Colloquium retoromanistich (Cormons, dai 2 ai 4 di Otubar dal 2014), Udine, Società Filologica Friulana, 523–546. Wartburg, Walther von (21940), La posizione della lingua italiana, Firenze, Sansoni. [11936, La posizione della lingua italiana nel mondo neolatino, Leipzig, Keller.] Wehr, Barbara (2011), La phrase clivée en français: problèmes de description, in: Andreas Dufter/ Daniel Jacob (edd.), Syntaxe, structure informationnelle et organisation du discours dans les langues romanes, Frankfurt etc., Lang, 189–214. Wehr, Barbara (2012), Phrase clivée et phrase à copule identificationnelle en ancien français: problèmes de délimitation, in: Barbara Wehr/Frédéric Nicolosi (edd.), Historische Pragmatik und Syntax / Pragmatique historique et syntaxe. Akten der gleichnamigen Sektion des XXXI. Romanistentags (Bonn, 27.09.–01.10.2009), Frankfurt etc., Lang, 289–318. Wehr, Barbara (2015), Cleft constructions from a typological perspective, in: Sabine Diao-Klaeger/ Britta Thörle (edd.), Linguistique interactionnelle contrastive. Grammaire et interaction dans les langues romanes, Tübingen, Stauffenburg, 191–221.  

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Wehr, Barbara (2016), Some remarks on different classifications of cleft constructions and their areal distribution, in: Anna-Maria De Cesare/Davide Garassino (edd.), Current Issues in Italian, Romance and Germanic Non-canonical Word Orders. Syntax – Information Structure – Discourse Organization, Frankfurt etc., Lang, 147–179. Wienen, Ursula (2006), Zur Übersetzbarkeit markierter Kohäsionsformen. Eine funktionale Studie zum Kontinuum von Spaltadverbialen und Spaltkonnektoren im Spanischen, Französischen und Deutschen, Frankfurt etc., Lang. Yoshino, Tomoko (2002), Aspectos da sintaxe e semântica da construção pseudoclivada reduzida no português brasileiro, Sophia linguistica 49, 121–143.

Olga Kellert

16 Interrogatives Abstract: This chapter investigates interrogative sentences found in Romance languages and their varieties and discusses structural analyses for polar and constituent questions in main and embedded contexts. It also addresses topics such as basic constituent order in interrogatives, especially the order of subjects with respect to verbs, wh-movement and the licensing of wh-in situ in simple and multiple interrogative sentences. This chapter will also discuss est-ce que-questions in French and a similar type in Portuguese as well as complementizer questions in Italo-Romance varieties. The data are mostly from spoken and written corpora of French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, but we will also discuss other languages and varieties.  

Keywords: subject-verb-inversion, wh-movement and wh-in situ, multiple wh-interrogatives, est-ce que-questions, embedded questions, complementizer questions  

1 Introduction Interrogatives are sentences used to ask a question.1 There are two major kinds of questions: yes/no-questions (or polar questions) and constituent questions (also known as wh2-questions). The former type may be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the latter with an answer that refers to the wh-element: (1)

Polar questions a. It. Vieni? ‘Are you coming?’ b. Fr. Est-ce que tu viens? ‘Are you coming?’

(2)

Wh-questions a. It. Quando vieni? ‘When will you come?’ b. Fr. Quand est-ce que tu viens? ‘When will you come?’

Both types of questions have in common that they are embeddable under question predicates (e.g. verbs like know, ask, etc.). Embedded polar questions are introduced by a special complementizer such as It. se, Pt. se, whereas wh-questions are introduced by a wh-constituent:

1 Throughout this chapter, the terms interrogatives and questions are used interchangeably. 2 wh stands for wh-elements such as what, who, etc. DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-016

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(3) Embedded polar questions a. It. Non so se viene. ‘I don’t know whether (s)he is coming.’ b. Pt. Não sei se tu conheces. ‘I don’t know whether you know.’ (4) Embedded wh-questions a. It. Non so che cosa hanno fatto. b. Sp. No sé lo que hicieron.

‘I don’t know what they did.’ ‘I don’t know what they did.’

We can already note some differences in embedded wh-questions within Romance languages in (4). In Spanish but not in Italian embedded questions are expressed through a free relative clause lo que.3 We will investigate the free relative syntax of embedded questions in Romance in more detail in Section 6 (cf. also ↗22 Relative clauses). Section 2 will provide an overview of different types of subject-verb-inversions in Romance languages, especially in French, which shows a much larger inventory than other Romance languages. Section 3 will present wh-questions in which the whelement remains in its original postverbal position (so-called wh-in situ questions). Section 4 will address the question of whether all Romance languages allow multiple wh-interrogatives that contain more than one wh-element in one interrogative sentence (e.g. Who did what?). Section 5 discusses est-ce que-questions in French and a similar type in Portuguese (wh-é que-questions) and complementizer questions in Italo-Romance varieties. Section 6 discusses embedded questions.4

2 Subject-verb inversion in interrogatives In this section, we will mainly focus on subject-verb inversion in interrogatives in Romance. There are at least two different types of inversion that depend on whether

3 According to some linguists, relatives headed by a pronoun like Sp. lo are called semi-free relatives (cf. Ojea 2013 and the literature cited therein). Free relatives instead are usually headless relatives, e.g. Sp. tienes quien te haga las tareas. ‘You have someone who does homework for you.’ 4 As the function of this chapter is to give an overview of different types of interrogatives, it was not possible to conduct in-depth empirical research on every interrogative type and every Romance language. We mainly consulted the literature on different interrogative types in the main Romance languages, but also checked some hypotheses from the literature with our data that were taken from the corpus C-ORAL-ROM (henceforth COR), which contains a set of corpora of spontaneous spoken language for French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish (cf. Cresti/Moneglia 2005 for details). We also asked native speakers for their judgements on grammaticality (Spanish speakers from Toledo, Italian speakers from Carrara, French speakers from Dijon, and Portuguese speakers from Lisbon) in case we did not find any data on a particular question in the corpus or in the literature.

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the subject is a (clitic) pronoun or a full nominal or determiner phrase (NP/DP). As French shows much more variation with respect to inversion, we will start our description with French and then investigate how much variation exists in other Romance languages.

2.1 Inversions in French Subject pronouns are clitics in French that may undergo inversion in interrogatives, i.e. the clitic pronoun is placed after the finite verb as in (5) (cf. Rizzi/Roberts 1989; Roberts 1993; Friedemann 1997; for pronominal inversion in vernacular Quebec French see Elsig 2009). One crucial difference between Subject-Clitic Inversion (SCI) and full Subject-DP Inversion (SI)5 is the fact that the subject is placed between the finite verb and the participle in SCI and after the participle in SI (Rizzi/Roberts 1989, among others):  

(5) a. Quel film a-t-il vu? which film has-he seen b. Quel film a vu Jean? which film has seen Jean ‘Which film did he/Jean see?’

(SCI) (SI)

The full subject can optionally appear in SCI before the finite verb but after the whelement as in (6). This special type of SCI is known as Complex Inversion (cf. Rizzi/ Roberts 1989): (6) a. Marie est-elle venue? ‘Did Marie come?’ b. Quel film Jean a-t-il vu? ‘Which film did Jean see?’

(Complex Inversion in polar questions) (Complex Inversion in wh-questions)

Complex Inversion should be differentiated from interrogatives with left dislocated subjects, which are placed before the wh-element and not after it; compare (6) and (7):

5 Subject Inversion in French is sometimes called stylistic inversion according to Kayne/Pollock (2001). It also comprises cases of inversion in non-interrogative contexts such as relative clauses (Fr. l’homme à qui a téléphoné ton ami ‘the man whom your friend called’, cf. Kayne/Pollock 2001, 107). However, it is still unclear whether SI in interrogatives is a subcase of stylistic inversion. As Lahousse (2011) has shown, French stylistic inversion is only licensed with broad focus or thetic contexts, e.g. Quand arriva la tante, cela se fit tout naturellement. ‘When the aunt arrived, everything went very well.’ Further research is necessary to determine whether the same restrictions apply to the subject in SI in interrogatives.

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(7) a. Et Jean, quel film a-t-il vu? (SCI with a left-dislocated subject) ‘And Jean, which film did he see?’ b. Les vieux, que gagnent-ils? [COR, fnatco02] ‘The old ones, how much do they get?’ Another difference between SCI and SI is related to the non-embeddedness of SCI. The finite verb is placed in the second position in SCI in main but not in embedded interrogatives (cf. the so-called verb second (V2) effect reported in Rizzi/Roberts 1989 and Hulk 1993, among others). In embedded clauses, the subject clitic pronoun must change its place from the postverbal to the pre-verbal one as shown in (8), whereas the full DP can be realized in the postverbal position in main and embedded sentences in (9) (cf. Rizzi/Roberts 1989): (8) a. Quand partira-t-il? (SCI in main interrogatives) ‘When will he leave?’ b. Je me demande quand il partira. (no SCI in embedded interrogatives) ‘I wonder when he will leave.’ (9) a. Quand partira ce garçon? (SI in main interrogatives) ‘When will that boy leave?’ b. Je me demande quand partira ce garçon. (SI in embedded interrogatives) ‘I wonder when that boy will leave.’ Due to the V2 effect and the main clause asymmetry in SCI in French, some linguists have analyzed SCI on a par with German interrogatives that show the same main clause asymmetry with V2 (cf. Rizzi/Roberts 1989; Roberts 1993). However, there are other proposals that do not follow this line of analysis (cf. Hulk 1993; Friedemann 1997; Cardinaletti 2004). According to some linguists, the wh-element is placed in the subject position (= Spec,TP) and the subject clitic pronoun is just a morphological realization of verb finiteness (= T°) (cf. Friedemann 1997 for French; Barbosa 2001 for Spanish SI where the wh-element is assumed to replace the subject and this triggers SI in wh-interrogatives): (10)

SpecTP

Quand T° est-il venu? ‘When did he come?’

Under the analysis in (10) where the subject position is already occupied by the whelement, it remains an open question which position the full subject occupies in Complex Inversion in (6). Under the assumption that sentences have only one subject position per clause, it follows that the full subject must be dislocated and placed in an adjunct position:

Interrogatives

(11)

SpecTP

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Quand AdjunctJean T° est-il venu? ‘When did Jean come?’

However, this analysis is problematic given that dislocated subjects usually appear before the wh-element and not after it and that they have a different resumptive pronoun (cf. Jones 1996, 474–475): (12) a. Pourquoi cela te gène-t-il? b. Cela, pourquoi ça te gène? ‘Why does that bother you?’ In order to solve this problem, some linguists have assumed a much more complex structure in which subject pronouns and full DP subjects have different positions and the subject DP is placed in a designated subject position SubjP (cf. e.g. Cardinaletti 2004, 139). According to Cardinaletti (2004), subject pronouns in French (e.g. il in (13)) are weak pronouns that are located in Spec,TP (= AgrSP in Cardinaletti’s terms) in assertive sentences. The weak pronoun can adjoin to Subj° and the verb adjoins to it in Complex Inversion: (13) [CP Quand [SubjP Pierre/lui Subj° ai-t-ilk [AgrSP tk ti [VP téléphoné?]]]] ‘When did Pierre/he call?’ (Cardinaletti 2004, 139) Let us now consider SI in French (cf. (5)). SI should be distinguished from interrogatives with right dislocation of subjects. Note that the right-dislocated subject is often separated from the rest of the clause phonologically, as is indicated by the break \ before the subject in (14): (14) a. Vous avez combien de salariés \ vous? [COR, fmedts02] ‘How many employees have you got [you]?’ b. Vous utilisez la radio \ vous? [COR, fmedts04] ‘Do you use the radio [you]?’ In embedded clauses, the right-dislocated subject is coreferential with the subject in the matrix or in the embedded clause: (15) mais comment tu veux que ça marche toi [COR, ffamcv01] ‘but how do you want it to work [you]’ (16) que voulez-vous que je fasse moi? Je vais être obligée… [COR, fmedin02] ‘what do you want me to do [me]? I will be obliged…’

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The non-local realization of the right-dislocated subject in (15) and the intonational break in (14) indicate that right-dislocated subjects must be analyzed clause-externally and thus without any syntactic function inside the interrogative clause. Some notes on the diaphasic markedness of SCI and SI are in order here. It is a very well-known fact that all the types of subject-verb inversion presented above belong to an elevated register of French or français soutenu (cf. Bonnesen/Meisel 2005; Grevisse 162016).6 Indeed, our corpus search on spoken French in COR confirms this observation. We found 82 occurrences of SCI of which 90% were used in official contexts such as interviews or reports (indicated by the source fnat in COR): (17) a. Comment dirais-je? [COR, fnatte03] ‘How shall I put it?’ (SCI) b. Les vieux, que gagnent-ils? [COR, fnatco02] ‘The old ones, what do they get? (SCI with a left-dislocated subject) c. Mais pour qui cette sonnerie était-elle bruyante? [COR, fnatla03] ‘But who found that ringing noisy?’ (Complex Inversion) The other 10% of occurrences were used in monologues produced by (retired) teachers or a student interviewer from Morocco. The most common types of interrogatives employed in colloquial spoken French or français avancé that lacks SCI and complex inversion (cf. Zribi-Hertz 1994) are est-ce que-questions and wh-in situ questions which we will address below in Section 5. To sum up: French shows different types of inversions, SCI and SI, which should be differentiated from dislocated subjects, which are usually not integrated into the interrogative clause.

2.2 Inversions in other Romance languages Subject-verb inversion does not occur very often in interrogatives of other Romance languages, because they do not obligatorily realize subjects (so-called pro-drop languages) and thus subject-verb inversion does not appear (a property known for pro-drop languages, cf. ↗2 Subjects): (18) Sp.

¿Adónde vas? to-where go-2SG ‘Where are you going?’

6 In Zribi-Hertz’ (1994) terms clitic inversions belong to Standard French (français standard) in contrast to advanced French (français avancé) that lacks any kind of clitic inversion. Her notion of advanced French corresponds more or less to colloquial spoken French in the sense of informal use of French, cf. Koch/Oesterreicher (2011).

Interrogatives

(19) It.

Dove vai? where go-2SG ‘Where are you going?’

(20) Pt.

Onde é que eram? where is that be-IPFV -3PL ‘Where were they?’

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(21) Rom. Ce ai făcut aseară? what have-2SG done tonight ‘What did you do tonight?’ However, if the subject is realized for some reason (e.g. information-structural reasons; cf. Belletti 2001 for Italian; López 2009 for Spanish and Catalan), it usually appears postverbally after the finite verb (or the participle), irrespective of its status as a pronoun or full DP. These cases of subject inversion are often referred to as Free Inversion in the literature (cf. Roberts 1993, among others):7 (22) It.

Ma di che cosa parla il libro? [CORIS] ‘But what is the book [talking] about?’

(23) Sp.

a. Julio le llama a Chiqui. / ¿Cómo le llama Julio a Chiqui? [COR, efamcv08] ‘Julio calls Chiqui. / How does Julio call Chiqui?’ b. ¿Qué pido yo? … ¿Qué pide el Chema? [COR, efammn05] ‘What do I order? What does Chema order?’

(24) Pt.

a. quem sou eu? [COR, pnatco02] ‘Who am I?’ b. Mas eles acabaram ou acabaste tu? [COR, ptelpv06] ‘But did they stop or did you stop?’

The postverbal subject can have different information-structural statuses, namely given or focused. The subject in (23a) is given because it has been already introduced previously into the discourse, whereas it is (contrastively) focused in (23b) and (24b) (↗24 Basic constituent orders). As to the preverbal subject, native speakers and the literature agree on the fact that a full DP subject cannot be placed preverbally, i.e. before the finite verb and after  

7 Note that Italian seems to have more restrictions than Spanish with respect to postverbal subject placement with direct and indirect objects (cf. Belletti 2001).

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the wh-element (cf. Barbosa 2001; Belletti 2001). Note that this differs from French, where the preverbal subject is accepted in colloquial registers (cf. Section 2.4): (25) Sp.

*¿Dónde el niño come?

(26) Sp.

¿Dónde come el niño? ‘Where does the boy eat?’

(27) It.

*Quando la tua ragazza viene?

(28) It.

Quando viene la tua ragazza? ‘When does your girlfriend come?’

However, this is different with subject (clitic) pronouns in Florentine (cf. Brandi/ Cordin 1989 on the clitic status of subject pronouns in Florentine), which are placed preverbally (cf. also Ordóñez/Olarrea 2006 for a similar observation in Caribbean Spanish): (29) O lei/icché l’ha fatto / l’Elisabetta? Icché la fa / all’università? ‘What did Elisabetta do? What does she do at the university?’ [COR, ifamcv13] One possible explanation for the observation that subject (weak or clitic) pronouns but not full DP subjects can be placed preverbally between the wh-element and the finite verb is related to the information-structural status of the latter but not of the former. Preverbal full DP subjects in questions usually have the function of a topic and are placed in a designated topic position (cf. Rizzi 1997; ↗13 Dislocations and framings, among others), whereas weak or clitic subject pronouns do not have this function and usually occur adjacent to the verb (i.e. specifier of a finite clause, cf. also Cardinaletti 2004). Note that this restriction does not hold for strong pronouns that can have a topic function (e.g. a contrastive topic interpretation as in (30) for It. tu ‘you’):  

(30) It.

Allora che cosa facciamo? – Non lo so, tu cosa vuoi fare? ‘Well, what shall we do? – I don’t know, what do you want to do?’

Subject-verb inversion in Romance languages other than French is not a main clause phenomenon, because it appears also in embedded questions and it is the only grammatical option there in contrast to embedded clauses with a preverbal subject (but cf. SCI in French reported in Section 2.1): (31) Sp.

Tu madre pregunta dónde come el niño. ‘Your mother asks where the boy eats.’

Interrogatives

(32) Sp.

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*Tu madre pregunta dónde el niño come.

It has been reported in the literature that subject-verb inversion can have pragmatic effects on the interpretation of the question in that the speaker believes that the opposite proposition is true in (34) (i.e. ‘that Juan drinks’) (cf. Han/Romero 2004 for details).  

‘Does Juan not drink?’

(33) Sp.

¿Juan no bebe?

(34) Sp.

¿No bebe Juan? ‘Doesn’t Juan drink?’ (Han/Romero 2004)

(neutral) (biased question)

To sum up: subject-verb inversion is obligatory in +/- embedded sentences in other Romance languages than French if the subject is realized overtly for informationstructural reasons. Otherwise, no subject is expressed. This restriction holds for full subjects but not for weak or clitic pronouns. The inversion can have an effect on the interpretation of the question, which is understood as biased.

2.3 Interrogatives with preverbal subjects In spoken French, we find other types of interrogatives that do not show any subject inversion at all (cf. also Bonnesen/Meisel 2005, 44 for this type). In such cases, the subject is found in preverbal subject position before the finite verb and after the whelement (cf. Culbertson 2010 on subject clitics in spoken French as agreement markers): (35) a. Mais attendez là \ De quel amour on parle? [COR, ffamcv01] ‘But wait, what sort of love are we talking about?’ b. Ça vous convient ça? ça [/] ça vous plaît? [COR, ffamcv01] ‘That suits you? Do you like it?’ c. Où il est passé? [COR, fnatps01] ‘Where has he gone?’ Preverbal full DP subjects can also appear in main and embedded interrogatives in spoken French: (36) a. Quand ce garçon partira? ‘When will that boy leave?’ b. Je me demande quand ce garçon partira. ‘I wonder when that boy will leave.’

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In other Romance languages, however, we find a different type of preverbal subjects which are realized before the wh-interrogative and have the function of a topic as in (30) (cf. ↗13 Dislocations and framings) which can be followed by an intonational break / as in (37b): (37) a. Sp. b. Pt.

¿Tú qué quieres? ¿Solo o con leche? [COR, efamcv14] ‘What do you want? Black or with milk?’ E ela / como reagiu? [COR, pfamcv01] ‘And her, how did she react?’

This type also exists in French interrogatives. However, in this case, a resumptive pronoun must be realized in the subject position (e.g. ce in (38) or tu in (39)): (38) Mais ton truc à toi / c’est quoi? [COR, ffamcv01] ‘But your thing, what is it?’ (39) Toi tu y vas quel soir? [COR, ffamcv02] ‘Which evening will you go there?’

2.4 Summary We have looked at different word order possibilities in interrogatives in Romance languages. Subject-verb inversion is present in all the Romance languages discussed here, although French shows different types of subject-verb inversion that depend on the status of the subject as pronoun or as full DP. The crucial difference between the two groups of languages (French vs the rest) is related to the root phenomenon of the subject clitic inversion (SCI), whereas the inversion of the full DP subject can also be found in embedded questions.

3 Wh-in situ 3.1 In root interrogatives There are languages in which the wh-element occurs in the initial position of the interrogative sentence and languages in which the wh-element remains in the position where definite or nominal arguments are usually found, so-called wh-in situ-languages (cf. Chang 1995). French interrogatives allow both versions: +/- wh-in situ in interrogatives (cf. Behnstedt 1973; Obenauer 1994, 300; Cheng/Rooryck 2000; Mathieu 2004; Adli 2006):

Interrogatives

(40) Qu’ est-ce que tu fais what est-ce que you do ‘What do you do (for a living)?’

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dans la vie? in the life

(41) Tu fais quoi dans la vie? you do what in the life ‘What do you do (for a living)?’ Wh-in situ-questions in French are less often used in written registers than questions with subject-verb inversion (cf. Coveney 2002; Adli 2006; Myers 2007, among others). They can be uttered in out-of-the-blue contexts and they can have a negative answer (cf. Mathieu 2004; but see Chang 1995; Baunaz/Patin 2012). Imagine a context in which A has not seen B for ages and utters (41) without presupposing that B has a job. B can indeed answer that he has none (cf. Mathieu 2004). Wh-in situ-questions behave structurally like declarative sentences with the only difference that they contain a wh-element instead of a nominal argument. This is why other types of interrogatives that are structurally different from declarative sentences (e.g. questions with SCI or est-ce que-questions, cf. Section 5.1) do not allow any whelement in situ: (42) a. Qui est-ce que tu as vu? (est-ce que-questions) b. *Est-ce que tu as vu qui? ‘Who did you see?’ (43) a. Qui as-tu vu? (SCI) b. *As-tu vu qui? ‘Who did you see?’ Moreover, wh-in situ-questions are not grammatical if the wh-element is a subject: (44) a. Qui dort? b. *Dort qui? ‘Who is asleep?’ The ungrammatical question in (44b) suggests that the basic position of subjects is preverbal and not postverbal (but see Belletti 2001). It has been assumed in the literature that wh-elements that ask about reasons (e.g. pourquoi) cannot appear postverbally (Aoun 1985, 24–25).8 Our corpus of spoken

8 However, Aoun (1985) shows that whenever pourquoi is interpreted as asking about a purpose, it can remain in situ.

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French shows that these wh-elements are possible in situ with an echo-like interpretation, i.e. the speaker asks a question which he answers himself (cf. the response given by the speaker himself in (45):  

(45) Les éleveurs n’avaient pas le droit de lâcher leurs porcs pourquoi? – Parce qu’il fallait réserver… [COR, ffammn02] ‘The farmers didn’t have the right to abandon their pigs why? – Because they had to reserve…’ However, when pourquoi is used in genuine questions, native speakers judge the questions with wh-in situ much less acceptable than the ex-situ variant: (46) Context: Marie had an argument with her brother. She meets Jean, her boy-friend, the following day and tells him about the argument with her brother. Jean asks: a. Pourquoi vous vous êtes engueulés? why you you are argued b. ??Vous vous êtes engueulés pourquoi? you you are argued why ‘Why did you argue?’ This finding confirms Aoun’s (1985) observation about the restriction with pourquoi. It must be noted though that if the wh-constituent is not a pronoun but a complex phrase like à cause de quoi (lit. ‘for reason of what’), the in situ variant is judged more natural in the context of (46): (47) Vous vous êtes engueulés à cause you you are argued for reason ‘Why did you argue?’

de quoi? of what

One possible explanation for the data presented (cf. (45)–(47)) is that wh-in situ is only acceptable if the wh-element is an argument or the modifier of the verb as is the case with non-causal pourquoi and causal à cause de quoi. However, this explanation needs to be tested independently of wh-in situ in future research. The use of wh-in situ-questions is much more restricted in other Romance languages such as Italian, Spanish and European Portuguese (but apparently not in Brazilian Portuguese which uses wh-in situ in genuine questions according to Grolla 2000; Mioto 2001; Kato/Mioto 2005; Kato 2013, among others). These languages usually use the wh-ex situ strategy in questions described above in (40) (‘What do you do for a living?’):

Interrogatives

(48) a. It. b. Sp. c. Pt.

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A: (Che) cosa fai nella vita? B: Studio. ‘I’m studying.’ A: ¿Qué haces como trabajo? B: Soy médico. ‘I’m a doctor.’ A: O que é que faz na vida? B: Sou professor. ‘I’m a teacher.’

In languages with a restricted use of wh-in situ, this question type is usually only possible in Echo Questions (EQs), which can be used to ask the interlocutor to repeat an expression previously mentioned in the discourse (cf. Reis 2012 for a definition of EQs): (49) a. It. b. Sp.

A: Sto facendo una pizza. B: Facendo COSA? ‘I’m preparing a pizza.’ ‘Preparing WHAT?’ A: Que no lo haces por coquetería. ‘You don’t do it to be coquettish.’ (lit. ‘that you don’t do it for coquetry’) B: ¿Que no lo hago POR QUÉ? ‘That I don’t do it FOR WHAT?’

EQs are syntactically different from wh-in situ-questions. Wh-in situ in EQs can be associated to a single word inside a syntactic constituent, whereas the wh-in situ in non-EQs must have scope over the complete nominal constituent (cf. also Reis 2012): (50) Pt.

É uma QUÊ? ‘It is a WHAT?’ [COR, pnatpe01]

Moreover, EQs can appear in any clause type (e.g. in imperatives, cf. also Reis 2012): (51) It.

Non dirmi questo. – Non dirti COSA? ‘Don’t tell me this. – Don’t tell you WHAT?’

However, wh-in situ-questions in these languages do not only have an echo-function in the strict sense (cf. Reis 2012), but can also have other functions. They can be used to refer to an indefinite (uma coisa ‘a thing’, in (52)) already introduced into the discourse (cf. also Oushiro 2011 for Brazilian Portuguese wh-in situ-questions): (52) Pt.

A: Era capaz adorava poder fazer as malas // ir-me embora // e ir começar a fazer uma coisa totalmente diferente //… ‘I was able to, I loved being able to make handbags… I’ll go away… and start doing a completely different thing…’ B: totalmente diferente é o quê? [COR, pfamdl02] ‘completely different means what?’

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Moreover, they can be used in contexts in which wh-questions presuppose a positive answer (cf. also Baunaz/Patin 2012, who argue for the same restriction in wh-in situquestions in French): (53) Pt.

O elevador tem alguns problemas // o que é que eu faço? Falo com quem? Com o … [COR, pmedin02] ‘The elevator has got some problems… what should I do now? Who do I talk to? To …’

We cannot address all the functions of wh-in situ in Romance languages that have a restrictive use of wh-in situ in questions, but it suffices to say that wh-in situ is always linked to the previous discourse. Another question type in which wh-in situ is employed in all the languages under discussion is multiple interrogatives (cf. also Section 4): (54) a. It. b. Fr. c. Sp.

Chi ha fatto cosa? Qui a fait quoi? ¿Quién es quién?

‘Who did what?’ ‘Who did what?’ ‘Who is who?’

As to the frequency of wh-in situ in Romance languages, it is much lower compared to other wh-question types (e.g. wh-é que-questions in Portuguese as described in Section 5, wh-ex-situ questions in Spanish and Italian) (cf. also Myers 2007 for French): (55) a. Sp. b. Pt. c. It.

More frequent ¿Qué haces? O que é que tu achas? Che cosa fai? ‘What do you do?’

vs vs vs

Less frequent ¿Haces qué? Tu achas o quê? Fai che cosa? ‘You do WHAT?’

To sum up: French wh-in-situ-questions behave differently with respect to other Romance languages, because they can appear in out-of-the-blue sentences and information seeking questions. Other Romance languages allow wh-in situ in echo (like) questions and in multiple interrogatives.

3.2 Restrictions on wh-in situ There are some restrictions on wh-in situ according to which the wh-element should not follow a quantified, negational or focused element as shown for French in (56a):

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(56) a. *Personne n’a acheté quoi? ‘No one has bought what?’ b. Qu’est-ce que personne n’a acheté? ‘What didn’t anyone buy?’ (Hamlaoui 2010, 352) The judgements in (56a) reflect Intervention Effects (cf. Zubizarreta 2003; Rizzi 2004; Beck 2006; Hamlaoui 2010). Intervention Effects arise when an element with certain characteristics intervenes between the source and the target of movement (cf. Rizzi 2004, among many others): (57) … X … intervener … Y …

Intervention Effects in wh-questions come about when an intervener (usually a (negative) quantifier such as everyone, no one or a focus element) blocks an agreement relation or scope relation between the wh-in situ-element and a question operator Q (cf. (58); Rizzi 2004; Beck 2006, among many others): (58) * Q

Personne No one

n’ NEG

a acheté has bought

quoi? what

It is still a matter of debate on which linguistic level Intervention Effects should be described and explained (cf. Kellert 2015 for a discussion of different approaches). It has been shown by many linguists more recently that Intervention Effects can be dispensed with in certain contexts, e.g. EQs or discourse linked questions. These are questions that refer to a set of already known individuals, e.g. ‘Which of these colours do you like? This one or that one?’ (cf. Starke 2001; Adli 2006; Hamlaoui 2010). This observation seems to indicate that Intervention Effects cannot be described on a purely syntactic level (cf. Rizzi 2004), but must be analyzed on an interface level between syntax, semantics and pragmatics (cf. Beck 2006; Kellert 2015).

3.3 Wh-in situ in embedded interrogatives? The licensing of wh-in situ in French embedded sentences is still a matter of debate in the literature (cf. Bošković 1998; Cheng/Rooryck 2000 vs Starke 2001; Adli 2006; Oiry 2011). According to Bošković (1998) and Cheng/Rooryck (2000), wh-in situ is ungrammatical in embedded clauses:

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(59) *Marie pense que Jean a acheté quoi? ‘Marie thinks that Jean bought what?’ (Cheng/Rooryck 2000) However, wh-in situ is possible in embedded clauses if the matrix predicate is a bridge verb, such as vouloir ‘want’, penser ‘think’ or croire ‘believe’, and undergoes agreement with a second person pronoun which refers to the addressee (cf. also Starke 2001; Adli 2006; Oiry 2011): (60) Tu veux qu’elle fasse quoi?

‘What do you want her to do?’

(61) Tu penses qu’il fait quoi?

‘What do you think he does?’

Native speakers, indeed, do not accept wh-in situ in embedded questions in (59), but they accept them inside a complement clause of a bridge verb as in (61). This restriction may indicate that the matrix clause tu penses que is analyzed as a ‘light’ clause that has primarily a discourse function, namely to introduce an interrogative sentence (e.g. dis-moi): (62) Dis-moi, il fait quoi ton mari? ‘Tell me, what does your husband do?’ Note that bridge verbs do not really embed wh-in situ-questions from a semantic point of view (although they do it syntactically due to the subjunctive triggered by the matrix verb vouloir in (64)), because we can deny the truth of an embedded clause as in (63), but not the truth of an interrogative clause (either embedded or not embedded under a bridge verb): (63) Marie ne sait pas ce qu’elle veut. C’est pas vrai. Elle le sait bien. ‘Marie doesn’t know what she wants. That’s not true. She really does know.’ (64) Tu veux qu’elle fasse quoi, Marie? # C’est pas vrai. / # Je ne le veux pas. ‘What do you want Marie to do? That’s not true. I don’t want it.’ Another explanation for the data was proposed by Oiry (2011). She assumes that the wh-in situ and the wh-fronted element in the following clauses are the same construction with the only difference that in the former case the wh-element remains in the argument position and in the latter case it does not: (65) a. Tu veux qu’elle fasse quoi, Marie? b. Qu’est-ce que tu veux qu’elle fasse, Marie? ‘What do you want Marie to do?’

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In other Romance languages the wh-element is usually placed before the bridge verb (cf. (66)), otherwise it has an echo interpretation as with wh-in situ in matrix sentences (cf. (67)): (66) Sp.

¿Qué quieres que haga? [COR, efamcv10] ‘What do you want him/her to do?’

(67) Sp.

¿Quieres que haga qué? (echo interpretation) ‘You want him/her to do WHAT?’

The difference in meaning between French and other Romance languages with respect to wh-in situ in embedded questions suggests that Oiry’s (2011) analysis is on the right track and that wh-in situ has a much wider use in French.

4 Multiple wh-interrogatives In this section, we will discuss interrogative sentences with multiple wh-elements (cf. Déprez 2003 and Gazdik 2011 for French; Frascarelli 2000 and Grasso 2007 for Italian; Kellert 2015 for Italian and French; Matos/Brito 2012 for Spanish; Sell 2008 for Brazilian Portuguese): (68) Multiple interrogatives a. Fr. Qui fait quoi? b. It. Chi abita dove? c. Sp. ¿Quién es quién? d. Pt. Quem quer o quê? e. BPt. Quem comprou o quê?

‘Who does what?’ ‘Who lives where?’ ‘Who is who?’ ‘Who wants what?’ ‘Who bought what?’

In French, multiple wh-elements can also be found in situ (cf. also Gazdik 2011, 259): (69) Je dois quoi à qui?

‘I owe what to whom?’

(70) Je peux faire quoi pour qui?

‘I can do what for whom?’

In Romanian they appear ex situ as in other Baltic and Slavic languages (Rudin 1988): (71) Rom. Cine ce ar who what would ‘Who would eat what?’

mânca? eat

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Multiple interrogatives have a very restricted use (cf. Krifka 2001). They usually have a pair-list reading, i.e. the question induces multiple answers of the following kind according to which every person is assigned a floor number in (72) or some food in (73):  

(72) It.

Chi abita dove? ‘Who lives where?’ – Maria abita al 3° piano, Sara al 2°, Carlo e Giulio al 1°. ‘Maria lives on the third floor, Sara on the second, Carlo and Giulio on the first.’

(73) Sp.

A ver, dime: ¿Quién ha traído qué? ‘Tell me:Who brought what?’ – Isabel ha traído el pastel de cerezas; Luis y Ana, el pavo; tu madre la ensalada… ‘Isabel brought the cherry cake, Luis and Ana the turkey, your mother the salad…’ (RAE/ASALE 2009, 3172)

However, it is also possible to get a single pair answer in multiple interrogatives, which is usually triggered by certain predicates that exclude the truth of multiple pairs (cf. Krifka 2001): (74) Sp.

¿Quién criticó a quién, María a José? ‘Who criticized who, María José?’

Kellert (2015) identified another reading of multiple interrogatives. Multiple interrogatives can also have a negative biased reading according to which the speaker denies the existential presupposition of the question: (75) Fr.

Qui aurait pu faire quoi sous son administration sans risquer sa peau ou sa liberté? (http://www.20min.ch/ro/news/monde/story/10172850) ‘Who could have done what under his government without risking his life?’ (Denial of the existential presupposition: ‘No one could have done anything.’)

(76) It.

… ma di questi tempi, chi può aiutare chi? (CORIS) ‘Nowadays, who can help whom?’ (Denial of the existential presupposition: ‘No one can help anyone.’)

To sum up: multiple interrogatives include one wh-element ex situ and one in situ in most Romance languages. In French both wh-items can be used in situ. In Romanian, both wh-items must occur ex situ. Multiple interrogatives can have different readings: (i) pair-list reading, (ii) single pair reading, (iii) negative bias reading.

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5 Other types of interrogatives 5.1 Est-ce que-questions in French In order to understand this type of questions, we will first discuss clefted questions, which are the basis of the diachronic development of est-ce que-questions (cf. Kunstmann 1990; Dufter 2008; Le Goffic 2010, 285; ↗15 Cleft constructions, among others). Clefted questions have a more complex structure than simple interrogative sentences because they contain a sentence with the copula verb be, Fr. être, It. essere, Sp. ser and a relative-like or complementizer clause (cf. Lambrecht 1996; Doetjes/Rebuschi/ Rialland 2004; Hamlaoui 2007; Shlonsky 2008): (77) Clefted interrogatives a. Fr. C’est à qui que tu as parlé à la soirée de Bertrand? ‘Who were you talking to at Bertrand’s party?’ (lit. ‘It is to whom that you were talking at Bertrand’s party?’) b. It. Cos’è che ti piace? ‘What do you like?’ (lit. ‘What is it that you like?’) c. Sp. ¿Cómo es que se llama? [COR, efammn01] ‘What’s his name?’ (lit. ‘How is it that he is called?’) Est-ce que-questions such as Fr. Est-ce que tu viens? ‘Are you coming?’ can also be described as questions with a copula verb est, a subject clitic pronoun ce and a complementizer que that introduces a finite clause (tu viens). However, they should be treated in a different way from clefted questions for phonological, semantic, morphosyntactic and frequency-based reasons (cf. Le Goffic 2010, 285; Kellert 2015). We will just present some of the differences mentioned. One difference is phonological. Clefted questions contain two phonological units that are identical to syntactic units (the first unit corresponds to the clause containing the copula verb and the second unit is the relative or complement clause). These units are delimited by the phonological boundary mark // (cf. Doetjes/Rebuschi/Rialland 2004; Hamlaoui 2007).9 By contrast est-ce que-questions are associated with one phonological unit only (cf. Pustka 2011, 135): (78) Mais en fait c’est qui // qui t’a parlé du “Cuba libre” // [COR, ftelpv09] ‘But in fact, who is it that told you about Cuba libre?’

9 Note that clefts may realize different information structures, i.e. focus-background or all-focus structure (cf. Mertens 2012).  

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(79) Qu’est-ce qui a donc / valu à Beaulieu // ce grand honneur? ‘To what did Beaulieu owe this great honour?’ (Pustka 2011, 135) Clefted questions usually do not allow multiple interrogatives, i.e. one wh-element inside the copula clause and the other one inside the relative clause. Est-ce quequestions or simple wh-questions can be used with multiple interrogatives (cf. Lambrecht 1996; Gazdik 2011; Kellert 2015):  

(80) *C’est quoi que tu as donné à qui? Lit. ‘It’s what that you gave to who?’ (81) Qu’est-ce que tu as donné à qui? ‘What did you give to who?’ (Gazdik 2011, 65) According to Gazdik (2011, 65), multiple wh-interrogatives in (81) usually have a pairlist reading (e.g.‘You gave Mary a book, Peter a cigar, etc.’). The observation that multiple interrogatives are allowed in est-ce que-questions with a pair-list reading but not in wh-clefts indicates that the two question types must be analyzed differently. Wh-clefts have probably a more complex structure than est-ce que-questions (cf. Kellert 2015). The latter type can arguably be analyzed monoclausally as one interrogative clause in which est-ce que acts as a lexicalized element which should not be decomposed into smaller morpho-syntactic units (cf. also Rooryck 1994). According to this analysis, est-ce que-questions correspond syntactically to wh-questions without est-ce que. In this case, est-ce que can be considered as a lexicalized functional head (arguably a functional head that carries the feature of an interrogative clause like C° or a functional head that carries a focus feature Foc°) (cf. also Costa/Duarte 2001 for a similar analysis of wh-é-que-questions in Portuguese): (82) [Spec, CP Comment C° est-ce que [TP tu l’as fait]]? = one single clause ‘How did you do it?’ Est-ce que-questions can appear in a wider range of contexts than clefted questions. Clefted questions cannot be uttered in out-of-the-blue-contexts as is shown in (84). They presuppose instead that something must have been mentioned in the previous discourse, i.e. the clefted question in (83) must follow some prior discourse about going out tonight:  

(83) Context: Marie tells Pierre about her plans of going out tonight. Pierre: C’est quoi que tu fais ce soir? Lit. ‘What is it that you are doing tonight?’

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(84) Out-of-the-blue context: Marie and Pierre see each other in the street: Pierre: Salut Marie! # C’est quoi que tu fais ce soir? ‘Hi Marie! # What is it that you are doing tonight?’ Munaro/Pollock (2005) argue that complex wh-phrases are impossible as subjects in est-ce que-questions: (85) *Quelle which

fille girl

est-ce qui est-ce qui

est venue? is come

The restriction in (85) poses a problem for the monoclausal analysis in (82) according to which est-ce que is analyzed as a simple question particle, because simple interrogatives do not show the same restriction: (86) Quelle fille est venue? ‘Which girl has come?’ However, est-ce que-questions are not wh-clefts either, because wh-clefts do not show the same restriction with complex wh-phrases as subjects. French speakers judge whclefts with complex wh-phrases as subjects as more acceptable than comparable estce que questions (cf. (85)): (87) C’est quelle fille qui est venue? ‘Which girl is it that has come?’ Apparently, est-ce que is still on its way to lexicalization into a non-decomposable question particle. However, est-ce que-questions are not clefted questions either, as our data have shown in this section.

5.2 Wh-é que-questions in Portuguese This type of question is very similar to est-ce que-questions in French (cf. Costa/Duarte 2001 and Kato 2015 for this type in European and Brazilian Portuguese, respectively):10

10 Note, however, that est-ce que is much more frequent in yes/no-questions in French than é-que in Portuguese as our corpus search in C-ORAL-ROM showed (French: 150 occurrences vs 195 wh-est-ce que-questions; Portuguese: 0 occurrences in yes/no-questions vs 531 wh-é-que-questions). Our Portuguese speakers confirmed our corpus search and the absence of é-que in yes/no-questions as the low acceptability of é-que in (i) in contrast to (ii) shows. (i) ?? É que o seu pai está aqui? is that the his father is here (intended: ‘Is his father here?’)

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(88) O que é que tu achas? [COR, pfamcv01] ‘What is it that you think?’ (89) Quem é que vai? Quem é que não vai? [COR, pfamdl09] ‘Who is it that goes? Who is it that doesn’t go?’ (90) Uma propina fixa ou como é que é? [COR, pfammn19] ‘A fixed charge, how is it possible?’ According to our corpus, wh-é que-questions usually contain a lexical verb and not a copula verb inside the complement clause (e.g. achas in (88)). Otherwise, a simple wh-interrogative is used without any complementizer clause (but see (90) for exceptions): (91) O que é isto? [COR, pmedrt02]

‘What is this?’

(92) Não sei o que é. [COR, pnatpe01]

‘I don’t know what it is.’

As in French, the copula verb is restricted to the third person singular present indicative é and there is no variability in number and tense as we would expect if the copula were not fixed: (93) Quem é que era o Mateus? [COR, pfamdl03] ‘Who is it that was Mateus?’ (94) Que relações é que tu tens? [COR, pfammn13] ‘What relations is it that you have?’ If the wh-phrase were a predicate of the copula it would agree with it, contrary to (94). This observation suggests that wh-elements are arguments of the lexical verb inside the complement clause, which supports the monoclausal analysis of this type (cf. Section 5.1 and Costa/Duarte 2001 for a monoclausal analysis of wh-é-que questions in Portuguese). The type of wh-é-que in Portuguese is the most frequent one in contrast to wh-in situ-questions in COR (5 wh-in situ-questions with quem ‘who’ vs 29 quem é quequestions, 531 wh-é que-questions vs 30 wh-in situ-questions).

(ii)

O sei pai está the his father is ‘Is his father here?’

aqui?/ here/

O pai the father

dele of-him

está is

aqui? here

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This question type allows multiple interrogatives in Portuguese according to Vaz’ (2013) experimental study based on adults and children (cf. also est-ce que-questions in Section 5.1): (95) Quem é que está a pintar o quê? who is that is to paint what ‘Who is drawing what?’ Resposta esperada: Pai – parede, Menino – cadeira. ‘Expected answer: the father is drawing the wall, the boy is drawing the chair.’ (Vaz 2013) The fact that multiple interrogatives are possible in this type corroborates again the analysis according to which this type of question should be analyzed differently from wh-clefts (cf. Section 5.1 for the same conclusion).

5.3 Complementizer questions in Italo-Romance In a wide range of central and southern Italian dialects, yes/no-questions may be introduced by the declarative complementizer che ‘that’ or its equivalents in the respective variety: (96) Florentine visto Mario? (O)11 che tu-l’hai o that you-him-have seen Mario ‘Have you seen Mario?’ (Garzonio 2004, 1) Rohlfs (1969) noted that this phenomenon is particularly frequent in northern Tuscany but that it also appears in the southern Italian Salento area where che is represented by its dialectal forms ce and cə. According to his brief analysis, in which che is labeled as an interrogative particle, yes/no-questions headed by the complementizer can either be uttered as a type of non-standard question to which no answer is expected (i.e. a question that bears a special semantic interpretation, cf. Obenauer 2004 for special questions) or as a standard yes/no-question (cf. Rohlfs 1969, 157–158). The complementizer che thus does not contribute to the specific meaning of the question (cf. also recent work that confirms this generalization in Damonte/Garzonio 2008, 105; Cruschina 2012, 183, 192–193). A more detailed analysis of yes/no-questions introduced by che is provided by the work of Damonte/Garzonio (2008) on Florentine,  

11 The particle o can optionally occur in complementizer questions as well as wh-questions in Tuscan dialects (cf. Garzonio 2004 for Florentine; Kellert/Lauschus 2016, for other Tuscan varieties).

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Cruschina (2012) on Sicilian chi (equivalent to Tuscan che), and Lusini (2013) on Sienese. According to Cruschina (2012, 183), one has to think of chi (and che respectively) as a “complementizer in the extended sense”, i.e. “an instance of a complementizer or complementizer-like element in root clauses” with a specific function that “may be defined as interrogative complementizer similar to English if and Romance si/se for embedded clauses”. As for Sicilian, chi is optional, frequently used in short questions and it does not induce any kind of special interpretation on the question (cf. Cruschina 2012, 183, 192–193). As the work of Prieto/Rigau (2007) on Catalan shows, yes/no-questions may be headed by que in central Catalan, which proves to be equivalent to Italian che:  

(97) Central Cat. Que plou? that rains ‘Is it raining?’ (Prieto/Rigau 2007) However, the complementizer que does not appear in questions with tags in Catalan (cf. Cuenca 1997; Prieto/Rigau 2007): (98) a. Barcelonese Vindràs, oi? b. Tarragonese Vindràs, no? ‘You’re coming, aren’t you?’ If que in Catalan has been grammaticalized into a question particle as has been proposed by some authors for Italian che (cf. Rohlfs 1969; Lusini 2013, among others), it remains an open question why it cannot be used in questions with tags in (98). If we analyze the interrogative que in (97) as a complementizer with a wider use than a standard declarative complementizer, we should expect it to behave in a similar way to declarative complementizer clauses in general, i.e. it should be restricted to finite clauses and not appear in elliptical or infinitival questions. These restrictions must be tested systematically in future research. Another interesting case of polar questions exists in Sardinian where root polar questions may be expressed through a question particle a (probably < lat. AUT ) (cf. Jones 1993; Mensching 2015, among others):  

(99) a. A benis istasera? b. A la faghes, custa faina? (Mensching 2015, 8)

‘Are you coming this evening?’ ‘Will you do this work?’

Questions with the particle a can be found in the Logudorese and Nuorese varieties of Sardinian (cf. Jones 1993; Mensching 2015, among others). They are usually interpreted as invitations (e.g. ‘Would you like to come this evening?’ as in (99a)), offers,

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requests, etc. (cf. Jones 1993; Mensching 2015 for a demonstration of the special question character of questions with a). Moreover, they are incompatible with whquestions as in (100a), focus fronting (100b) and predicate fronting as in (100c) (cf. Jones 1993; Mensching 2015 for further restrictions): (100) a. *Cun chie a ses bènnidu? (intended: ‘With whom have you come?’) b. *A su duttore as vistu? a the doctor have-2SG seen (intended: ‘Did you see the doctor?’) c. *A telefonatu at Juanne? a phoned have-3SG Juanne (intended: ‘Did Juanne call?’) A detailed analysis of all the restrictions reported in the literature is beyond the scope of this section (cf. Mensching 2008 and 2015; Remberger 2010, among others), but given the data above, the particle a could be analyzed as a focus particle which licenses a focus operator in the left periphery and thus blocks movement of other types of focus movement (wh-movement and focus fronting) (cf. Mensching 2015).

6 Embedded questions This section deals with embedded questions in Romance languages and varieties. As we already mentioned in Section 1, some Romance languages like French and Spanish have free relatives (FRs) in embedded interrogatives, i.e. they contain some definite element inside the embedded interrogative, e.g. a definite pronoun, Sp. lo ‘it/the’, or a demonstrative (clitic) pronoun, Fr. ce ‘this’, and the complementizer que. Main interrogatives, however, have simply a wh-element (ex situ or in situ):  

(101) Fr.

a. Qu’est-ce que tu veux? Tu veux quoi? (wh-ex situ, wh-in situ) ‘What is it that you want? You want what?’ b. Je ne sais pas ce que tu veux. (FR) ‘I don’t know [that] what you want.’

FRs can be embedded under question predicates such as Sp. saber/Fr. savoir ‘know’ and non-question predicates such as Sp. gustar/Fr. aimer ‘like’ (cf. Caponigro 2003): (102) a. Sp. b. Fr.

No me gusta lo que te gusta. Je n’aime pas ce que tu aimes. ‘I don’t like [that] what you like.’

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No sé lo que te gusta. Je ne sais pas ce que tu aimes. ‘I don’t know [that] what you like.’

(103) a. Sp. b. Fr.

In Italian, however, FRs are not used under question predicates: (104) It.

a. Non mi piace quello che ti piace. ‘I don’t like [that] what you like.’ b. Non so che (cosa) ti piace. ‘I don’t know what you like.’

Questions with an FR structure (henceforth Q-FRs) are restricted to special arguments of the verb, i.e. they must contain a gap in the complement position of the embedded clause (represented by “_” in (105b)):  

(105) Fr.

a. Tu veux quoi? ‘What do you want?’ b. Je ne sais pas ce que tu veux _. (FR) ‘I don’t know [that] what you want.’

Note that Portuguese and other Romance varieties such as Francoprovençal, Florentine, Galician and Judeo-Spanish show FR structures not only in embedded sentences but also in main questions: (106) a. Florentine

b.

c.

d.

e.

(’un lo so) icché c’era ‘I don’t know what it was./What was it?’ [COR, ifamcv10] FPr. (Val d’Aosta) Sèn que fièn sta nite? this that do-we this evening ‘What are we going to do this evening?’ (Diémoz 2007, 24) Gal. O que é o galego? the that is the galego ‘What is Galician?’ (http://pgl.gal/o-galego-e-a-lusofonia) Judeo-Sp. ¿Loqué estás diciendo? the.what are-you saying ‘What are you saying? (Schmid/Bürki 2000, 175) Pt. (Não sei) o que é. ‘I don’t know what it is.’

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The following table illustrates that Romance languages showing Q-FRs can be divided into two groups. The first group (Group 1) uses Q-FRs only as indirect questions, whereas the second group (Group 2) uses them also as direct questions (cf. Table 1, line 1, e.g. (105b) and (106e)). Q-FRs in Group 2 can be infinitival (cf. line 2, e.g. (107)) and allow wh-in situ (cf. line 3, e.g. (108)): (107) Infinitival questions a. Fr. *Je sais ce que faire. vs ‘I know what to do.’ b. Sp. *No sé lo qué hacer. vs ‘I don’t know what to do.’

Je sais quoi faire. No sé qué hacer.

(108) wh-in situ a. Pt. Fazem o quê? ‘We will do what?’ [COR, ptelpv07] b. Fr. *Faire ce que? do this that They can also co-occur with ellipsis (cf. line 4, e.g. (109)) and a second complementizer (cf. line 5, e.g. (110)): (109) Elliptical a. Judeo-Sp. b. Fr.

¿Loqué? *Ce que?

‘What?’ ‘What?’

(110) Second complementizer a. Pt. O que que é isso? b. Sp. No sé lo que (*que) es.

‘What is it?’ ‘I don’t know what it is.’

The properties mentioned above are not present in Q-FRs of Group 1. However, both groups can coordinate Q-FRs with ordinary wh-questions (cf. line 6, e.g. (111)): (111) Coordination a. Sp. No sé ni lo que come, not know neither what eats ni cuánto come, tampoco me importa. nor how-much eats neither me is-important ‘I don’t know [that] what and how much s/he eats and I don’t care.’ b. Fr. Je ne sais pas ce qu’ elle mange not what she eats I NEG . CL know et en quelle quantité. and in which quantity ‘I don’t know [that] what and how much she eats.’

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Table 1: Q-FRs in Romance Fr. ce que/ce qui

Sp. lo que

Pt. o que

Judeo-Sp. loké12 Florentine icchè

Group 1

Group 2

1

direct Qs





+

+

+

2

infinitival Qs





+

+

+

3

wh-in situ





+

4

ellipsis





+

5

second Comp





+

6

coordination

+

+

+

+ +

+ +

+

+

The definite marker lo/ce and the element que in French and Spanish do not behave like ordinary wh-elements that contain the feature [+wh] (cf. Group 1, Table 1) and therefore cannot be positioned in situ, be extracted, be modified, etc.: (112) Fr. ce que / Sp. lo que ‘the that’ (Group 1) The definite element and que/che have been lexicalized into a single wh-element in Portuguese, Judeo-Spanish and Florentine (cf. Group 2, Table 1), thus behaving like ordinary wh-elements that can be used in situ, in infinitival questions, etc. We represent this property by the feature [+wh]: (113) Pt. o que/Florentine icché/Judeo-Sp. loké ‘what’ [+wh] (Group 2) The open question is how the string ce que/lo que should be analyzed: (i) compositionally as two elements ce + que/lo + que or (ii) non-compositionally as a single element (e.g. as a complex complementizer or a pronoun). In the former case, the question arises whether the two elements constitute two different phrases (e.g. a Determiner Phrase (DP) modified by a CP) (cf. Poletto/Sanfelici submitted). Given the possibility of coordination (cf. Table 1, line 6) and the principle stating that only constituents of equal syntactic status can be coordinated, we must conclude that Q-FRs have the same syntactic status as ordinary questions in Spanish and French (i.e. CPs). This conclusion is crucial because it excludes an analysis according to which Q-FRs are analyzed as complex DPs in which the string Sp. lo que and Fr. ce que is analyzed compositionally (i.e. the pronoun lo/ce is a determiner and que a complementizer):  



12 All Judeo-Spanish examples are taken from Schmid/Bürki (2000).

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Interrogatives

(114) a. Sp. b. Fr.

No sé [DP lo [CP que quiero]]. (impossible analysis) ‘I don’t know [the that] I want.’ Je ne sais pas [DP ce [CP que je veux]]. (impossible analysis) ‘I don’t know [the that] I want.’

Another problem for a DP-analysis of Q-FRs is the fact that question predicates usually do not embed DPs (I wonder what you like vs *I wonder it). We therefore assume that Q-FRs in Spanish are a special kind of complementizer clauses (CPs) that are interpreted as interrogatives without containing a wh-pronoun with a wh-feature. Lo has a definite feature instead and undergoes some operator movement to the left periphery of the clause in order to trigger the question interpretation as a set of alternatives, e.g. {I don’t know if I want to go out with friends, if I want to eat, if I want…} (cf. Beck 2006 for question denotation): (115) Sp.

No sé [CP lok[+D E F ] que quiero tk]. (Spanish Q-FRs) ‘I don’t know [the that] I want.’

As for French, we assume that ce que has been lexicalized into a complementizer due to the clitic status of ce which makes a phonological unit with que. According to this analysis, ce que has become an allomorph of the complementizer que. Q-FR would thus contain a non-overtly realized verbal argument with the meaning of the whpronoun ‘what’ without the wh-feature which ordinary wh-pronouns (e.g. quoi, qui, quand) have: (116) Fr.

Je ne sais pas [CP Ø [+D O ] = ‘what’ C° (ce que) je veux]

According to this analysis, many facts discussed above about Q-FRs in French (i.e. the lack of wh-in situ, multiple interrogatives, etc.) should be explained due to the nonovert realization of the verbal argument and the missing wh-feature. To sum up: we discussed Q-FRs in Romance and proposed to differentiate between two groups of languages. In one group Q-FRs behave very similarly to ordinary wh-questions and should be analyzed in a unified way (cf. Portuguese, etc.). In another group Q-FRs behave differently from ordinary wh-questions (cf. Spanish and French) and thus need a different analysis. We showed that a DP-analysis of Q-FRs is problematic for various reasons. We proposed to analyze Fr. ce que as a lexicalized complementizer and Sp. lo que compositionally as lo + que. French and Spanish Q-FRs represent ordinary wh-questions (i.e. interrogative complementizer clauses or CPs) with the only difference that they do not contain a wh-feature.  



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7 Summary The differences and common properties of the studied languages are summarized in Table 2. Table 2: Summary Fr.

Sp./Judeo-Sp. It./Florentine

Pt./Gal.

SCI/Complex Inversion

+







SI

+

+

+

+

Wh + preverbal subject

+ (colloquial)







Topical subject + wh

+

+

+

+

Wh-in situ without echo-like interpretation

+







Wh-in situ embedded under bridge verbs

+







Multiple interrogatives

+

+

+

+

Q-FRs in embedded clauses

+

+

+ Florentine

+

Q-FRs in main clauses





+ Florentine

+

Grammaticalized clefts in questions

+ (est–ce que)





+ (é–que)

Wh-clefts

+

+

+

+

Complementizer questions





– + Florentine



Table 2 shows that the Romance languages discussed in this chapter share common properties. They all have SI, multiple questions, topical subjects and wh-clefts. However, they also show dissimilarities, and French is definitely the most atypical Romance language with respect to the phenomena we have looked at in this chapter, e.g. SCI/Complex Inversion, preverbal subjects, wh-in situ (under bridge verbs), est-ce que-questions. One important observation is that varieties of a particular Romance language can have more in common with another Romance language than with their roofing language (e.g. Q-FRs in main clauses or complementizer questions in Italian dialects and Catalan varieties).

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8 References Adli, Aria (2006), French wh-in-situ questions and syntactic optionality: Evidence from three data types, Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 25, 163–203. Aoun, Joseph E. (1985), A Grammar of Anaphora, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Barbosa, Pilar (2001), On inversion in “wh”-questions in Romance, in: Aafke Hulk/Jean-Yves Pollock (edd.), Subject Inversion in Romance and the Theory of Universal Grammar, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 20–59. Baunaz, Lena/Patin, Cédric (2012), Quand la prosodie et la sémantique vont de pair, le cas des mots“qu” en français, in: Louis de Saussure/Alain Rihs (edd.), Études de sémantique et pragmatique françaises, Bern, Lang, 357–378. Beck, Sigrid (2006), Intervention effects follow from focus interpretation, Natural Language Semantics 14, 1–56. Behnstedt, Peter (1973), “Viens-tu? Est-ce que tu viens? Tu viens?” Formen und Strukturen des direkten Fragesatzes im Französischen, Tübingen, Narr. Belletti, Adriana (2001), “Inversion” as focalization, in: Aafke Hulk/Jean-Yves Pollock (edd.), Subject Inversion in Romance and the Theory of Universal Grammar, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 60–90. Bonnesen, Matthias/Meisel, Jürgen M. (2005), Die “Subjekt-Verb-Inversion” in Interrogativkonstruktionen des gesprochenen Französisch: zum Problem der syntaktischen Variation, in: Georg A. Kaiser (ed.), Deutsche Romanistik – generativ, Tübingen, Narr, 31–48. Bošković, Željko (1998), LF movement and the Minimalist Program, in: Pius. N. Tmanji/Kiyomi Kusumoto (edd.), Proceedings of NELS 28, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, GLSA Publications, 43–51. Brandi, Luciana/Cordin, Patrizia (1989), Two Italian dialects and the Null Subject Parameter, in: Osvaldo Jaeggli/Kenneth J. Safir (edd.), The Null Subject Parameter, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 111–142. Caponigro, Ivano (2003), Free Not to Ask: on the semantics of free relatives and wh-words crosslinguistically, University of California at Los Angeles, Ph.D. dissertation. Cardinaletti, Anna (2004), Toward a cartography of subject positions, in: Luigi Rizzi (ed.), The Structure of CP and IP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures Volume 2, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 115–154. Chang, Lisa (1995), “Wh-in situ” phenomena in French, University of British Columbia, MA thesis. Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen/Rooryck, Johan (2000), Licensing wh-in-situ, Syntax 3, 1–19. COR = C-ORAL-ROM = Cresti, Emanuela/Moneglia, Massimo (edd.) (2005), C-ORAL-ROM. Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance Languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. CORIS = Corpus di italiano scritto. Centro Interfacoltà di linguistica teorica e applicata, Università di Bologna (2001). http://corpus.cilta.unibo.it:8080/coris_ita.html (01.01.2011). Costa, João/Duarte, Inês (2001), Cleft strategies in European Portuguese. A unified approach, Paper presented at the 11th Colloquium on Generative Grammar, Zaragoza, Spain, 04.–06.04.2001. Coveney, Aidan (2002), Variability in Spoken French. A Sociolinguistic Study of Interrogation and Negation, Bristol, Elm Bank. Cresti, Emanuela/Moneglia, Massimo (edd.) (2005), C-ORAL-ROM. Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance Languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Cruschina, Silvio (2012), Discourse-related Features and Functional Projections, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Cuenca, Maria Josep (1997), Form-use mappings for tag questions, in: Wolf-Andreas Liebert/Gisela Redeker/Linda Waugh (edd.), Discourse and Perspective in Cognitive Linguistics, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 3–19.  

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Culbertson, Jennifer (2010), Convergent evidence for categorical change in French: from subject clitic to agreement marker, Language 86, 85–132. Damonte, Federico/Garzonio, Jacopo (2008), Per una tipologia delle particelle interrogative nei dialetti Italiani, Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia 32, 97–111. Déprez, Viviane (2003), Concordance négative, syntaxe des mots-N et variation dialectale, Cahiers de Linguistique Française 25, 97–118. Diémoz, Federica (2007), Morphologie et syntaxe des pronoms personnels sujets dans les parlers francoprovençaux de la Vallée d’Aoste, Tübingen, Francke. Doetjes, Jenny/Rebuschi, Georges/Rialland, Annie (2004), Cleft sentences, in: Francis Corblin/Henriëtte de Swart (edd.), Handbook of French Semantics, Stanford, CA, CSLI, 529–552. Dufter, Andreas (2008), On explaining the rise of “c’est”-clefts in French, in: Ulrich Detges/Richard Waltereit (edd.), The Paradox of Grammatical Change: Perspectives from Romance, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 31–56. Elsig, Martin (2009), Grammatical Variation Across Space and Time: The French Interrogative System, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Frascarelli, Mara (2000), The Syntax-Phonology Interface in Focus and Topic Constructions in Italian, Dordrecht, Kluwer. Friedemann, Marc-Ariel (1997), Sujets syntaxiques, Bern, Lang. Garzonio, Jacopo (2004), Interrogative types and left periphery: some data from the Fiorentino dialect, Quaderni di lavoro dell’ASIS 4, 1–19. Gazdik, Anna (2011), Multiple Questions in French and Hungarian. A Lexical-Functional Analysis with Special Emphasis on the Syntax-Discourse Interface, Université Paris-Diderot, doctoral dissertation. Grasso, Daniele (2007), Innovazioni sintattiche in italiano alla luce della nozione di calco, Université de Genève, doctoral dissertation. Grevisse, Maurice (162016, 11936), Le bon usage: grammaire française, refondue par André Goosse, Paris, Duculot. Grolla, Elaine (2000), A Aquisição da Periferia Esquerda da Sentença em Português Brasileiro, IEL/ Unicamp, Campinas, SP, Dissertação de Mestrado. Hamlaoui, Fatima (2007), French cleft sentences and the syntax-phonology interface, in: Milica Radišić (ed.), Actes du Congrès annuel de l’Association canadienne de linguistique (ACL) 2007, University of Saskatchewan. http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~cla-acl/actes2007/Hamlaoui.pdf Hamlaoui, Fatima (2010), Anti-givenness, prosodic structure and “intervention effects”, The Linguistic Review 27, 347–364. Han, Chung-Hye/Romero, Maribel (2004), On negative yes/no questions, Linguistics and Philosophy 27, 609–658. Hulk, Aafke (1993), Residual V2 and licensing of functional features, Probus 5, 127–154. Jones, Michael Allan (1993), Sardinian Syntax, London/New York, Routledge. Jones, Michael Allan (1996), Foundations of French Syntax, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kato, Mary A. (2013), Deriving “wh-in-situ” through movement in Brazilian Portuguese, in: Victoria Camacho-Taboada et al. (edd.), Information Structure and Agreement, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 175–192. Kato, Mary A. (2015), Variation in syntax: two case studies on Brazilian Portuguese, in: Aria Adli/Marco García García/Göz Kaufmann (edd.), Variation in Language: System- and Usage-based Approaches, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 91–110. Kato, Mary A./Mioto, Carlos (2005), A multi-evidence study of European and Brazilian Portuguese whquestions, in: Stephan Kepser/Marga Reis (edd.), Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical and Computational Perspectives, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 307–328.

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Xavier Villalba

17 Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives Abstract: We provide a summary of the main syntactic features of exclamative, imperative, and optative sentential modality across Romance. It is shown that in order to isolate a coherent set of defining grammatical properties for each category, it is important to distinguish between form and function. Exclamatives involve a high range of syntactic variation, particularly in the list of exclamative words, subject-verb inversion, and the presence of a complementizer and/or expletive negation. In contrast, they are homogenous in having speaker orientation and expressing a high degree of a property. Imperatives, which typically involve orders and requests, are quite similar across Romance in restricting the presence of the subject to contrastive uses and in preferring enclisis, but they differ substantially in negated orders, where Romance languages and dialects resort to different forms from the verbal paradigm. Finally, optatives, which express desires, are typically found in the subjunctive and either they are introduced by a complementizer or they involve verb movement to a left peripheral position, yielding subject-verb inversion and enclisis.  

Keywords: exclamative, imperative, optative, illocutionary force, sentential modality, mood  

When dealing with exclamatives, imperatives and optatives, the first point that must be addressed is a methodological one, which involves the distinction between speech act and sentence type, namely between the use of an utterance and its form. When using an utterance, we distinguish different levels, but the most important for our purposes is the illocutionary force, namely the speaker’s intention underlying a speech act (informing, commanding, asking, expressing surprise, etc.). This communicative aspect is conventionally associated to specific linguistic forms in most languages, so that, for example, we inform with declarative sentences, command with imperative sentences, ask with interrogative sentences, and express surprise with exclamative sentences. Hence, sentence modality/force/type is a formal mark of the illocutionary force of an utterance (Searle/Vanderveken 1985, ch. 1). However, this correspondence is not perfect. On the one hand, to be sure, all the utterances in (1) and (2) involve directive speech acts (commands), but only the ones in (1) would be considered genuine imperative sentences from a formal point of view, for they involve a distinctive imperative mood: (1)

a. Occ. Fai ton trebalh! your work do.IMP .2SG ‘Do your work!’ (Teulat 1976, 70)

DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-017

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b. Rom. Vino tu la mine, eu n-am timp! I NEG -have.1SG time come.IMP .2SG you to me ‘Come to me, I have no time!’ (Beyrer/Bochmann/Bronsert 1987, 240; cited in Becker 2010b) (2)

a. Occ. Te cal far ton trebalh! to.you.SG need.3SG do.INF your work ‘You must do your work!’ (Teulat 1976, 70) b. Rom. Să nu faci asta! that.MOD not make.SBJV .2SG this ‘Don’t do this!’ (Gönczöl-Davies 2008, 113)

In contrast to the imperative mood in (1), the directive utterances in (2a) and (2b) resort to an indicative modal verb and the subjunctive mood, respectively. On the other hand, even though both (3a) and (3b) contain exclamative sentences, only (3a) would count as an expressive speech act (an exclamation), for by definition, subordinate sentences lack illocutionary force: (3) a. It.

b. Sp.

Quanti libri ha scritto! how.many.PL books have.3SG write.PTPC ‘How many books s/he has written!’ (Benincà 1995, ex. (38a)) Ya sabes qué aficionado es what affectionate be. 3SG already know.2SG Pedro a los mariscos. seafood.PL Pedro to the.PL ‘You know how much Pedro likes seafood.’ (Alonso-Cortés 1999, ex. (46))

In this chapter, we will study the main formal properties of the three sentence types, exclamatives, imperatives, and optatives, which prototypically encode exclamations, commands, and wishes, respectively. Notwithstanding, this survey will not exhaust the full range of linguistic features attached to them, which would involve intonational and pragmatic aspects. Hence, the reader is referred to the following literature for a broader perspective. For speech acts, besides the classical work by Searle (Searle 1969; 1979), König/Siemund (2007), Sadock (2008) and Kissine (2012) are good recent introductions. As far as exclamations are concerned, Michaelis (2001) is still a valuable source, which can be updated with Castroviejo (2008) and Rett (2011). Finally, even though imperative and particularly optative sentences have received much less attention, the reader can consult Portner (2007), Aikhenvald (2010), Grosz (2012), and Zanuttini/Pak/Portner (2012).

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1 Exclamatives The formal diversity of exclamative sentences and their interface position halfway between syntax, semantics and pragmatics has been a major challenge to any attempt to offer a clear-cut definition. Indeed, most efforts have been devoted to arguing that exclamatives are a different semantic type from interrogatives. In this enterprise, Dale Elliott (1971; 1974) deserves initial credit for designing a series of tests to determine the exclamative character of English sentences in close contrast with interrogative sentences. However, since then, regardless of much effort, we have not achieved a clear consensus on what defines the exclamative sentence type, besides the recognition of certain “ingredients” (see Villalba 2008 for a summary of the main issues). In this section we will present the main features that help identify prototypical exclamative sentences in the Romance landscape. We will begin by describing their most salient syntactic characteristics, and then we will consider their semantics and pragmatics.

1.1 Syntax The syntax of exclamative sentences has long been considered a mere appendix to that of interrogatives, partly because they share a large number of features. Consider, for instance, the following minimal pair, where the exclamative sentence in (4a) is formally identical to the interrogative version in (4b): (4) Sp.

a. ¡Cuántas amigas tiene Claudio!1 how.many.F friend.F .PL have. 3SG Claudio ‘Claudio has so many (girl) friends!’ (Francom 2012, ex. (19ª)) b. ¿Cuántas amigas tiene Claudio? friend.F .PL have. 3SG Claudio how.many.F ‘How many (girl) friends does Claudio have?’

In this pair, only the intonation helps us distinguish the exclamative from the interrogative. Yet, on closer scrutiny, exclamative sentences can be distinguished from interrogatives in at least four main syntactic features: the range and choice of specialized words, the extent of subject-verb inversion, the presence of an expletive complementizer, and the presence and value of negation. We consider each feature in some detail in what follows.

1 Unlike the rest of Romance languages, Spanish and Galician mark interrogative and exclamative sentences with both an opening and a closing mark.

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1.1.1 Exclamative wh-words The set of exclamative wh-words is half shared with interrogatives, half particular. In this section, we will concentrate on the most typical exclamative words across Romance. It is a common practice among grammarians to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative exclamatives. Qualitative exclamatives quantify over a degree of a property, as in the following examples, where the speaker exclaims over the degree of beauty of the children (5a), or the special qualities of the music that the hearer is listening to (5b). (5) a. Rom. Ce frumoşi sunt copii! children.DEF . NOM what beautiful be.3PL ‘How beautiful children are!’ (Magda et al. 2013, (62b)) b. Friul. Ce musiche che tu scoltis. what music that you.SG listen.2SG ‘What music you are listening to!’ (Roseano/Vanrell/Prieto Vives 2015, 126) A highly characteristic degree exclamative construction involves a wh-word that modifies an adjective in situ: (6) a. It.

b. Cat.

Come/Quanto sarà stanco! tired how/how.much be.FUT . 3SG ‘How tired she will be!’ (Benincà 1995, 138) Com és de car aquest vi! wine how be. 3SG of expensive this ‘How expensive this wine is!’ (Villalba 2003, fn. 5)

The pattern without any mark on the adjective that we find in the Italian example (6a) is also found in French, Romanian and American varieties of Spanish, whereas the one with a particle de in the Catalan example (6b) extends to Peninsular Spanish. In contrast, quantitative exclamatives quantify over the cardinality of a set (the number of books in (7a)) or the degree of intensity of an action (the time spent dancing in (7b)). (7) a. Occ. Quantas de gents avètz perdut en people have.2PL lose.PTPC in how.many.F . PL of guèrra! war ‘How many people you have lost in war!’ (Alibèrt 2000, 7)

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¡Cuánto/Cómo bailamos en la fiesta! the.F party how.much/how dance.PST . 1PL in ‘We danced so much at the party!’ (Campos 2012, ex. (19b))

Most wh-exclamatives can appear in elliptical constructions such as the following: (8) a. Fr.

b. Cat.

Ah! Quelle bonne surprise! oh which.F good.F surprise ‘Oh! What a nice surprise!’ (Delatour et al. 2004, 196) Quina idea tan fantàstica! so wonderful.F which.F idea ‘What a wonderful idea!’ (Castroviejo 2008, ex. (10b))

In all these cases, one interprets a stereotypical predication or one which is salient in the communicative context: for instance, “what a nice surprise you gave me” in (8a) and “what a wonderful idea you had” in (8b). What is controversial is whether these exclamatives are derived from a full sentence by means of deletion or whether they should be considered fragments. See Vinet (1991), Castroviejo (2008) and Munaro (2016), for discussion. A final subset of wh-exclamatives comprises cases where the exclamative force is totally or partially encoded by a complementizer-like particle: (9) a. Cat.

b. Fr.

Que n’és de ximple, aquest paio! foolish this guy that PART -be. 3SG of ‘How foolish this guy is!’ (Villalba 2003, ex. (41a)) Ce ténor, qu’il chante bien! this tenor that-he sing.3SG well ‘How well this tenor sings!’ (Delatour et al. 2004, 194)

The element marking the exclamative type in (9) is formally identical to the complementizer found in subordinate clauses and in optative sentences (see Section 3.1.2). Moreover, across Romance we find non-wh-markers. On the one hand, nominal exclamatives are extremely common, particularly in Spanish, where the neuter article lo may modify adjectives (10a): (10) Sp.

a. ¡Lo alto que es Gasol! that be. 3SG Gasol the.NEUT tall ‘How tall Gasol is!’ (Escandell-Vidal 2012, ex. (35b)) b. ¡Los libros que has leído! the.M . PL books that have.2SG read.PTPC ‘You have read so many books!’ (Gutiérrez-Rexach 2008, ex. (30))

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It.

c. La torta che ha portato! that have.3SG bring.PTPC the.F cake ‘The cake that s/he brought!’ (Benincà 1995, ex. (32e))

On the other hand, some languages have developed more specialized markers. For example, Galician vaia lit. ‘go.IMP . 2SG ’ or Spanish menudo lit. ‘small’ are evaluative modifiers of the noun, unlike wh-words, which quantify over a property or a set:2 (11) a. Gal. ¡Vaia mozo estás feito! make.PTPC wow boy be.2SG ‘What a young man you are!’ (Álvarez/Regueira/Monteagudo 1986, 291–293) b. Sp. ¡Vaya/menudo auto que te compraste! wow/which car that you.REFL buy.PST . 2SG ‘You got yourself some car!’ (Campos 2012, ex. (23)) Even though semantically different, these exclamative words pattern similarly to whwords from a syntactic point of view: they must move to the left periphery of the sentence and trigger subject-verb inversion. See Bosque (2017) for discussion. A different kind is formed by emphatic polarity items such as Occ. bè lit. ‘well’, Sp. bien lit. ‘well’ and sí (que) lit. ‘yes that’, and Cat. bé/ben lit. ‘well’ and sí (que) lit. ‘yes that’: (12) a. Occ. B’ès tu bèstia, animaut! animal well-be.2SG you beast ‘What a brute you are, you animal!’ (Fossat 2006, 162) b. Sp. ¡Sí que tiene María prisa! yes that have.3SG María hurry ‘María sure is in a hurry!’ (Bosque 2017, ex. (41a)) These constructions focalize on the polarity of the sentence in order to intensify the assertion and display the typical subject-verb inversion pattern of focalizations (see Hernanz 2010 for a proposal in the cartographic framework).

2 The translation of these words is particularly difficult, for they involve an expressive meaning rather than a lexical one. Hence, the reader is advised to take the translations cum grano salis.

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1.1.2 Subject-verb inversion In Romance languages, we find two basic word order patterns in exclamatives (↗24 Basic constituent orders). On the one hand, French retains the subject-verb order, in sharp contrast with interrogatives (↗16 Interrogatives). Compare the interrogative in (13) with the exclamative in (14):  

(13) Fr.

Comment t’appelles-tu? how 2SG . REFL -name.2SG -you.SG ‘What is your name?’ (Delatour et al. 2004, 227)

(14) Fr.

Bonjour Henri! Comme tu as grandi! good.day Henri how you have.2SG grow.up.PTPC ‘Good morning, Henri! How you have grown!’ (Delatour et al. 2004, 195)

This pattern seems to be the only grammatical possibility in Portuguese as well, according to the examples provided by Brito/Duarte/Matos (62003), which always involve preverbal subjects: (15) Pt.

Que linda que ela é! what pretty that she be. 3SG ‘How pretty she is!’ (Brito/Duarte/Matos 62003, ex. (30a))

On the other hand, a group of Ibero-Romance languages, like Catalan, Galician or Spanish, show obligatory inversion with exclamatives, just as with interrogatives: (16) a. Cat.

Que intel·ligent que és el Pere! how intelligent that be. 3SG the Pere ‘How intelligent Pere is!’ (Villalba 2008, ex. (58)) b. Gal. ¡Que de sorte ten esta muller! what of luck have.3SG this.F woman ‘How lucky this woman is!’ (Álvarez/Regueira/Monteagudo 1986, 291) c. Sp. *¡Qué cosas la soprano dice! what things the.F soprano say.3SG c’. Sp. ¡Qué cosas dice la soprano! the.F soprano what things say.3SG ‘What things the soprano says!’ (Hernanz 2010, ex. (75))

Finally, Italian displays a mixed behavior regarding inversion in exclamatives:

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(17) It. a.

b.

Che bel romanzo (che) ha scritto, what beautiful novel that have. 3SG write.PTPC Umberto! Umberto ? Che bel romanzo che Umberto ha what beautiful novel that Umberto have. 3SG scritto! write.PTPC ‘What a beautiful novel Umberto has written!’ (Benincà/Salvi/Frison 1988, ex. (48))

This contrast with respect to subject-verb inversion seems to correlate with a contrast in the position of the exclamative word with respect to left-dislocated constituents. Whereas languages forcing inversion must place dislocated constituents in front of the wh-word (18), standard Italian and northern Italian varieties cannot (19): (18) Cat.

a. A la teva germana quin llibre més maco que which book more nice that to the.F your.F sister li han regalat! to.her have.3. PL give. PTPC b. *Quin llibre més maco a la teva germana que that which book more nice to the.F your.F sister li han regalat! to.her have.3. PL give. PTPC ‘To your sister, what a nice book they have given!’

(19) It.

a. ??A tua sorella, che bel libro ha to your.F sister what nice book have. 3SG regalato Giorgio! Giorgio give.PTPC ‘To your sister, what a nice book Giorgio gave her as a gift!’ (Benincà/Salvi/Frison 1988, ex. (51)) b. Che bel posto, a Giorgio, che (gli) hanno what nice place to Giorgio that him have.3PL assegnato! assign.PTPC ‘What a good place they assigned to Giorgio!’ (Benincà 2001, ex. (61))

The explanation for this contrast is unclear. Since Rizzi (1997), it is assumed that topics may precede and follow interrogative wh-words, but only follow relative whwords. However, little has been said about wh-exclamatives. If we assimilate the

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behavior of wh-interrogatives and exclamatives, one would conclude that languages like Catalan only allow dislocates in the highest position, yielding the order in (18a). See Villalba (2016) for discussion. Before ending the section, let us consider a special exclamative construction involving a non-verbal subject-predicate structure (see Vinet 1991; Munaro 2016): (20) a.

Fr. Étonnante, cette histoire! story astonishing this.F ‘Astonishing, this story!’ (Vinet 1991, ex. (1a)) b. Sp. ¡Un tirano, tu jefe! a tyrant your boss ‘A tyrant, your boss!’ (Hernanz/Suñer 1999, ex. (21a))

Some authors suggest that this nonverbal exclamative is the reduction of a full exclamative sentence (Benincà 1995; Munaro 2016): (21) It.

a. (Che) avvincente, (che è) what enthralling that be. 3SG ‘(How) enthralling, this novel (is)!’ b. (Che) invadente, (che è) what intrusive that be. 3SG ‘(How) intrusive, your friend (is)!’ (Munaro 2016, ex. (12a,b))

questo this il the

romanzo! novel

tuo your

amico! friend

However, unlike sentential exclamatives, this construction requires that the predicate denote a permanent property, as the following examples show: (22) a.

Fr. *Disponible, cette infirmière! available this.F nurse ‘Available, this nurse!’ (Vinet 1991, ex. (30a)) b. Sp. *¡Cansado, tu jefe! tired your boss ‘Tired, your boss!’ (Hernanz/Suñer 1999, ex. (33a))

Moreover, the predicate must involve an evaluative meaning linked to the attitude of the speaker. This can be seen in the following contrast: (23) Fr.

a. *Une linguiste, cette femme! linguist this.F woman a.F Lit. ‘A linguist, this woman.’ (Vinet 1991, ex. (14a))

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b. Une linguiste étrange, cette femme! linguist strange this.F woman a.F ‘A strange linguist, this woman!’ (Vinet 1991, ex. (15a)) Whereas the purely descriptive linguiste ‘linguist’ yields an ungrammatical result, the noun modified with the evaluative adjective étrange ‘strange’ is fine.

1.1.3 Force marker In several Romance languages, exclamative sentences may show an exclamative force marker next to the wh-word, which is homophonous with the complementizer. (24) a.

Pt. Que inteligente que ele é! what intelligent that he be. 3SG ‘How intelligent he is!’ (Brito/Duarte/Matos 62003, ex. (34a)) b. Gal. ¡As cousas que contou! that explain.PST . 3SG the.F . PL things ‘The things that s/he explained!’ (Álvarez/Regueira/Monteagudo 1986, 292)

The distribution of this que marker is quite complex. On the one hand, it is obligatory with definite non wh-exclamatives: (25) a.

Gal. ¡As cousas que contou! that explain.PST . 3SG the.F . PL things ‘The things that s/he explained!’ (Álvarez/Regueira/Monteagudo 1986, 292) b. Sp. ¡Las tonterías que dices! the.F . PL nonsenses that say.2SG ‘You are talking such nonsense!’ (Francom 2012, ex. (22a)) c. Sp. ¡Lo inteligentes que son esas chicas! intelligent.PL that be.3PL those.F girls the.NEUT ‘Those girls are so intelligent!’ (Francom 2012, ex. (6a))

On the other hand, with wh-exclamatives much variation is found, although grammars suggest some tendencies. For instance, according to Brito/Duarte/Matos (62003), in Portuguese, quantitative wh-exclamatives do not allow the exclamative marker: (26) Pt.

a. Quantos how.many.PL

quadros paintings

ele he

pintou paint.PST . 3SG

a vida inteira! to life full.F

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‘How many paintings he painted during his whole life!ʼ (Brito/Duarte/Matos 62003, ex. (33b)) b. Quantos disparates ela diz! she say.PST . 3SG how.many.PL nonsenses ‘How many stupid things she said!’ (Brito/Duarte/Matos 62003, ex. (31a)) In contrast, qualitative wh-exclamatives, particularly those involving an existential or locative predicate, typically require the marker: (27) Pt.

a. Que inteligente *(que) ele é! what intelligent that he be. 3SG ‘How intelligent he is!’ b. Que casa simpática *(que) ele tem! he have. 3SG what house friendly.F that ‘What a friendly house he has!’ (Brito/Duarte/Matos 62003, ex. (34a,c))

For Spanish, Campos (2012, 404–405) suggests that the tendency is toward complementizer omission in formal contexts, both with quantitative and qualitative whexclamatives, but with some degree of optionality in colloquial speech. This seems to be also the case in Galician, according to Álvarez/Xove (2002, 188), who mostly report examples without the marker: (28) Gal. ¡Que traxe trae! what suit bring.3SG ‘What a suit s/he wears!’ (Álvarez/Xove 2002, 188) For Italian, Benincà (1995) reports that the force marker is optional in the standard variety, but much variation is found across dialects. For instance, in the Padovan variety, the complementizer is regularly required (Benincà 1996; Zanuttini/Portner 2000): (29) Che libro che te lezi! what book that you.REFL read.2SG ‘What a book you are reading!’ (Benincà 1996, ex. (16)) This complementizer seems to be a widespread feature in the main wh-exclamatives and wh-interrogatives in northern Italian dialects (see Benincà ²2006, 127 and Chinellato 2009).

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1.1.4 Negation Since Otto Jespersen’s Philosophy of Grammar (1992, 322), it is a well-known fact that negation works quite differently in exclamatives compared to other sentence-types (see Espinal 1997; Portner/Zanuttini 2000; Zanuttini/Portner 2003; Villalba 2004; 2008; González-Rodríguez 2008; Gutiérrez-Rexach/Andueza 2011; Delfitto/Fiorin 2014). On the one hand, in most exclamative sentences negation becomes an instance of expletive negation (↗12 Negation and polarity): (30) a. Rom. Ce n-a spus! what NEG -have. 3SG say.PTPC ‘What s/he said!’ (Magda et al. 2013, ex. (40b)) b. Pt. Que problemas ele não teve de NEG have.PST . 3SG of what problem.PL he ‘How many problems he had to face!’ (Brito/Duarte/Matos 62003, ex. (33a))

enfrentar! face.INF

The negation in the previous examples does not result in a negative proposition, but in a positive one, as the translations make clear. Moreover, as Espinal (1997) remarked for Spanish, expletive negation cannot license negative polarity items (NPIs; ↗12 Negation and polarity), and it is compatible with positive polarity items. Note the following example, where the NPI nadie ‘nobody’ cannot be licensed, but its positive counterpart alguien ‘somebody’ can:  

(31) Sp.

¡Qué barbaridades no cometería *nadie/alguien NEG commit.COND . 3SG nobody/somebody what atrocities ‘What atrocities *nobody like that/such a person would commit!’ (Espinal 1997, exs. (5a)/(6c))

así! like

Even though nadie requires the negation when it appears postverbally (No vimos a nadie ‘We saw nobody’ vs *Vimos a nadie ‘We saw nobody’), it is clear that the negative marker in (31) cannot fulfill this licensing. One can safely conclude, then, that the negative marker no in these examples is expletive. Yet, as originally discussed by Villalba (2004), examples of wholesale negative exclamative sentences do exist: (32) a. Cat.

Quants llibres que no hauries books that NEG have.COND . 2SG how.many.PL d’haver llegit! of-have.INF read.PTPC ‘How many books you shouldn’t have read!’ (Castroviejo 2006, 11)

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Quanti libri non ha letto Gianni! books NEG have. 3SG read.PTPC Gianni how.many.PL ‘What a lot of books Gianni hasn’t read!’ (Delfitto/Fiorin 2014, ex. (21))

These are all cases of quantitative exclamatives. When we move to degree exclamatives, the possibility of standard negation is severely limited or even unavailable (see González-Rodríguez 2008 for discussion): (33) Sp.

*¡Cómo no la quiere! NEG CL . ACC .3SG . F love.3SG how ‘How much he does not love her!’ (González-Rodríguez 2008, ex. (7b))

According to González-Rodríguez (2008), the high degree quantification over the property denoted by the predicate (in the example, the verb quiere ‘loves’) is incompatible with the properties of negation.

1.2 Semantics and pragmatics of exclamatives In classical Speech Act Theory (Searle 1969; 1979), speech acts are analyzed regarding a set of conditions or rules involved in the production of a felicitous speech act: – propositional content conditions – preparatory conditions – sincerity condition – essential condition Villalba (2008) argues that the propositional content conditions should include the basic features we expect for most exclamatives, namely that (i) the speaker expresses the proposition that p in the utterance of T, and (ii) by expressing that p, the speaker conveys an emotional attitude towards a certain state of affairs or degree. Typically, exclamatives are speaker oriented (see 1.2.1), so no preparatory condition is necessary, and the sincerity condition goes without saying, for the speaker is committed to the truth of the proposition involved and of the emotional attitude expressed.3 Finally,

3 Obviously, speakers can flout the sincerity condition, and produce a rhetorical exclamative, as in the following example, where the speaker resorts to irony to convey the opposite of the literal meaning, that is “you are not very clever”. (i) Sp. ¡(Qué) listo eres tú! what clever are you ‘You are very smart!’ (Andueza 2011, 125)

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Villalba argues that the essential condition incorporates some version of the extension condition, ensuring that a certain state of affairs or degree exists that surpasses the speaker’s expectations, and causes the speaker’s emotional reaction (see Section 1.2.2). Let us consider the speaker orientation and the high degree aspects in some detail.

1.2.1 Speaker orientation Exclamatives prototypically express the attitude of the speaker toward a certain fact. This feature allows us to understand the much-discussed factive nature of exclamatives. As Grimshaw (1979) argued, exclamatives presuppose the truth of the proposition that they denote, as in the following examples: (34) a. It.

b. Cat.

Quanti esami ha superato Gianni! pass.PTPC Gianni how.many.PL exams have. 3SG ‘How many exams Gianni has passed!’ → Gianni has passed many exams. (Munaro 2016, ex. (1b)) Que covard que és! what coward that be. 3SG ‘What a coward he is!’ → He is a coward. (Castroviejo 2008, ex. (28))

Since their content is presupposed, Grimshaw (1979) argues that exclamatives cannot serve as answers to questions, as in the following example: (35) Fr.

A: Paul est-il beau? Paul be. 3SG -he handsome ‘Is Paul handsome?’ (Marandin 2008, ex. (3)) B: #Comme il est beau! how he be. 3SG handsome ‘How handsome he is!’

The key point is the incompatibility between the requirement by the question that asserted new information be provided and the presupposed nature of the content provided by the exclamative. Compare (35) with the felicitous question-assertion pair: (36) Fr.

A: Paul est-il beau? handsome Paul be. 3SG -he ‘Is Paul handsome?’ (Marandin 2008, ex. (3))

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B: Il est très beau. he be. 3SG quite handsome ‘He is quite handsome.’ (36b) is not an exclamative sentence, but a declarative one, which asserts the content of the proposition, and is, thus, a proper answer to the question in (36a). Moreover, Castroviejo (2008) and Marandin (2008) remark that the direct commitment of the speaker to the truth of the proposition explains certain restrictions. For instance, the requirement that the predicate selecting the exclamative sentence involve a direct relation between speaker and the fact denoted by the proposition. Hence, (a) is fine, whereas (b) and (c), where the relation is indirect, are not: (37) Fr.

a. Il a entendu comme elle chantait she sing.IMPF . 3SG he have. 3SG hear.PTPC how bien. well ‘He heard how well she sang.’ b. *Il a entendu dire comme elle how she he have. 3SG hear.PTPC say.INF chantait bien. sing.IMPF . 3SG well ‘He heard it said how well she sang.’ c. *Il en a conclu/déduit conclude.PTPC /deduce.PTPC he CL . PART have. 3SG comme elle chantait bien. how she sing.IMPF . 3SG well ‘He concluded/deduced how well she sang.’ (Marandin 2008, ex. (15))

The crucial point is direct evidence. In the first case, the subject of the main clause is a direct experiencer of the event denoted by the exclamative sentence, but s/he is not either in (37b) – a second hand report – or in (37c) – a deduction. To close the section, note that besides factivity, the speaker-oriented nature of exclamatives makes them incompatible with perspective markers (see Marandin 2008): (38) Fr.

*Selon moi /*D’après Marie, qu’il est beau! according me of-from Marie what-he be. 3SG handsome ‘According to me/In Marie’s opinion, how handsome he is!’ (Marandin 2008, ex. (6))

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Since the exclamative is inherently speaker-oriented, it does not admit the expression of any point of view; even if it is a first person pronoun.

1.2.2 High degree We have seen that exclamative sentences are particularly fitted for expressing exclamations, namely speech acts transmitting the speaker’s heightened attitude toward a certain state of affairs (see Zanuttini/Portner 2003; Castroviejo 2008; Gutiérrez-Rexach 2008; Villalba 2008; Rett 2011). The prototypical case is degree wh-exclamatives, which relate an individual with an extreme point in the scale denoted by a property, as the following examples illustrate: (39) a. Fr.

b. Cat.

c. Sp.

Comme tu es bête! how you be.2SG stupid ‘How very stupid you are!’ (Beyssade 2013, ex. (8b)) Que ingenu que ets! how naïve that be.2SG ‘How naïve you are!’ (Castroviejo 2008, ex. (12b)) ¡Cuán/Qué inteligente es Belén! Belén how/what intelligent be.3SG ‘Belén is so intelligent!’ (Campos 2012, ex. (19c))

Here, the subject of the sentence is related to a extreme position in the scale denoted by the predicative adjectives bête ‘stupid’, ingenu ‘naïve’ and inteligente ‘intelligent’, respectively. As several authors have remarked (Castroviejo 2008; González-Rodríguez 2008; Gutiérrez-Rexach 2008; Villalba 2008), besides being extreme, the degree involved in an exclamative must be unexpected for the speaker. This unexpectedness, which is at the basis of the typical surprise flavor associated with exclamatives, explains why such constructions are incompatible with continuations relativizing this degree: (40) Sp.

a. ¡Qué caro ha sido el billete a Boston! to Boston what expensive have. 3SG be.PTPC the ticket b. #Aunque no tanto como el de Toronto. NEG so.much as the of Toronto although ‘How expensive the ticket to Boston was, #though not as much as that to Toronto!’ (González-Rodríguez 2008, 116)

The high degree reading is not so obvious in qualitative exclamatives like the following (see Section 1.1.1):

Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives

(41) a. It.

b. Sp.

619

Che cosa ha fatto Gianni! Gianni what thing have. 3SG do.PTPC ‘What Gianni has done!’ (Delfitto/Fiorin 2014, ex. (14)) ¡Vaya/menudo auto que te compraste!’ wow/little car that you.REFL buy.PST . 2SG ‘You got yourself some car!’ (Campos 2012, ex. (23a))

Yet, as discussed by Zanuttini/Portner (2003), even in these cases a scale of expectedness is involved, so that the exclamative sentence necessarily involves a meaning of unexpectedness for the speaker regarding the placement in the relevant scale of the thing that Gianni has done in (41a) or the kind of car in (41b).

2 Imperatives The imperative mood is the canonical means for conveying commands and requests, as in the following examples: (42) a. Fr.

Viens ici! come.IMP . 2SG here ‘Come here!’ (Mulder 2010, ex. (9)) b. AmSp. Tú siéntate aquí y ustedes you.SG sit.IMP . 2SG -you.REFL here and you.PL allí. there ‘You sit here and you (the rest) over there!’ (Campos 2012, ex. (37c)) c. Gal. Ide para a casa. the.F house go.IMP . 2PL for ‘Go home!’ (Álvarez/Regueira/Monteagudo 1986, 362)

This special illocutionary function helps us explain the very particular restrictions that apply on the morphology, syntax and semantics/pragmatics of this mood.

2.1 Morphology As a rule, the only proper imperative forms are the second singular and second plural persons, which were the only two forms in the classical Latin paradigm, with the addition of the inclusive first plural person. However, unlike Latin, most Romance languages and dialects display no morphologically distinct imperative forms, but borrow them from other tenses. The most common imperative pattern is identical to the

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present indicative, as in Catalan, French and Occitan. For instance, in French most verbs do not show any difference between the imperative and the present indicative (Table 1): Table 1: French imperative forms, identical to present indicative Fr. faire ‘do’

2SG

1PL

2PL

present indicative

fais

faisons

faites

imperative

fais

faisons

faites

When the present indicative second person singular form ends – in the written modality – in -es, the -s in the corresponding imperative form is dropped. Hence, the present indicative parles ‘(you.SG ) speak’ contrasts with the imperative parle ‘speak (you.SG )’. Orally, the two forms are homophonous in most contexts. However, note that the -s is present and realized as [z] when the imperative is followed by an oblique clitic y or en. So we have the imperative va ‘go (you.SG )’, but vas-y ‘go (you.SG )’ (see Delatour et al. 2004, 145–146). Indeed, the few French verbs that do have specialized forms for the imperative are mostly of the auxiliary/modal type: avoir ‘have’, être ‘be’, savoir ‘know’, and vouloir ‘want’. Take for instance the case of vouloir: Table 2: Specialized imperative forms of Fr. vouloir ‘want’ Fr. vouloir ‘want’

present indicative present subjunctive imperative

2SG

1PL

2PL

veux

voulons

voulez

veuilles

voulions

vouliez

veuille

voulons/veuillons

veuillez

Occitan imperative 2SG is identical to the present indicative 3SG , as one can easily see when comparing the paradigms of each tense in Table 3 and Table 4: Table 3: Occitan present indicative forms Occ.

parlar ‘to speak’

bastir ‘to build’

sentir ‘to feel’

batre ‘to bat’

1SG

parli

bastissi

senti

bati

2SG

parlas

bastisses

sentes

bates

3SG

parla

bastís

sent

bat

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Table 3 (continued) Occ.

parlar ‘to speak’

bastir ‘to build’

sentir ‘to feel’

batre ‘to bat’

1PL

parlam

bastissèm

sentèm

batèm

2PL

parlatz

bastissètz

sentètz

batètz

3PL

parlan

bastisson

senton

baton

parlar ‘to speak’

bastir ‘to build’

sentir ‘to feel’

batre ‘to bat’

2SG

parla

bastís

sent

bat

2PL

parlatz

bastissètz

sentètz

batètz

Table 4: Occitan imperative forms Occ.

As is also the case in French, there are specific forms for the 2SG imperative of a handful of irregular verbs: anar ‘to go’ > vai ‘(you(SG )) go’, dire ‘to say’ > diga ‘(you(SG )) say’, faire ‘to do’ > fai ‘(you(SG )) do’, venir ‘to come’ > vèni ‘(you(SG )) come’. Catalan reproduces the pattern of Occitan: the second person forms of the imperative are identical to the third person singular and second person plural present indicative, respectively (see Table 5 and Table 6): Table 5: Catalan present indicative forms Cat.

cantar ‘to sing’

servir ‘to serve’

sentir ‘to feel’

batre ‘to bat’

1SG

canto

serveixo

sento

bato

2SG

cantes

serveixes

sents

bats

3SG

canta

serveix

sent

bat

1PL

cantem

servim

sentim

batem

2PL

canteu

serviu

sentiu

bateu

3PL

canten

serveixen

senten

baten

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Table 6: Catalan imperative forms Cat.

cantar ‘to sing’

servir ‘to serve’

sentir ‘to feel’

batre ‘to bat’

2SG

canta

serveix

sent

bat

2PL

canteu

serviu

sentiu

bateu

As in French and Occitan, only a handful of verbs show a distinctive second person singular imperative, like venir ‘to come’ or ésser ‘to be’: vine ‘(you(SG )) come!’ (cf. present indicative third person singular ve ‘s/he comes’), sigues ‘(you(SG )) be!’ (cf. present indicative third person singular és ‘s/he is’). European Spanish differs from this pattern in the second person plural, which displays a distinctive form: Table 7: European Spanish present indicative forms ESp.

cantar ‘to sing’

servir ‘to serve’

comer ‘to eat’

1SG

canto

sirvo

como

2SG

cantas

sirves

comes

3SG

canta

sirve

come

1PL

cantamos

servimos

comemos

2PL

cantáis

servís

coméis

3PL

cantan

sirven

comen

cantar ‘to sing’

servir ‘to serve’

comer ‘to eat’

2SG

canta

sirve

come

2PL

cantad

servid

comed

Table 8: European Spanish imperative forms ESp.

American Spanish shows a slightly different pattern, for it does not have the second person plural form vosotros ‘you’, but the formal third person plural ustedes ‘you’ (see Campos 2012 and Taavitsainen/Jucker 2012 for discussion). Hence, all American Spanish varieties display syncretism in second and third person plural forms, and a complex pattern for the second person singular, as shown in Table 9 and in Table 10:  

Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives

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Table 9: American Spanish present indicative forms AmSp.

cantar ‘to sing’

servir ‘to serve’

comer ‘to eat’

1SG

canto

sirvo

como

2SG

(tú) cantas/ (vos) cantás

(tú) sirves/ (vos) servís

(tú) comes/ (vos) comés

3SG

canta

sirve

come

1PL

cantamos

servimos

comemos

2PL

(ustedes) cantan

(ustedes) sirven

(ustedes) comen

3PL

cantan

sirven

comen

cantar ‘to sing’

servir ‘to serve’

comer ‘to eat’

2SG

canta (tú)/ cantá (vos)

sirve (tú)/ serví (vos)

come (tú)/ comé (vos)

2PL

canten (ustedes)

sirvan (ustedes)

coman (ustedes)

Table 10: American Spanish imperative forms AmSp.

As is common across Romance, some irregular forms are also found, e.g. the third person present indicative forms tiene ‘has’, viene ‘comes’ or hace ‘makes’ contrast with the imperative second person singular forms ten ‘have (you.SG )’, ven ‘come (you.SG )’ or haz ‘make (you.SG )’ (see Pérez Saldanya 2012, 243). Note also that Spanish can form a plural imperative by means of the infinitive: (43) Sp.

a. ¡Sujetarse fuerte! / ¡Sujetaos hold.IMP - REFL . 2PL hold.INF -3REFL strong ‘Hold yourself strong!’ b. ¡A comer! / ¡Comed! eat.IMP . 2PL to eat.INF ‘Eat!’ (adapted from Garrido 1999, 3911)

fuerte! strong

Romanian grounds the imperative on the present indicative. The second person plural imperative is identical to the corresponding form of the present indicative, while the second person singular imperative is identical to second person singular present indicative in conjugation classes 5, 8, 9, 10 and 11, and to third person singular in

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Table 11: Romanian imperative paradigm Rom.

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

a pleca

a vira

a coborî

a acoperi

a fugi

a iubi

‘to go’

‘to turn’

‘to go down’

‘to cover’

‘to run’

‘to love’

imperative 2SG

Pleacă!

Virează!

Coboară!

Acoperă!

Fugi!

Iubește!

imperative 2P L

Plecaţi!

Viraţi!

Coborâţi!

Acoperiţi!

Fugiţi!

Iubiţi!

(7)

(8)

(9)

(10)

(11)

a urî

a cădea

a trece

a merge

a frige

‘to hate’

‘to fall’

‘to pass’

‘to go’

‘to fry’

imperative 2SG

Urăște!

Cazi!

Treci!

Mergi!

Frigi!

imperative 2P L

Urâţi!

Cădeţi!

Treceţi!

Mergeţi!

Frigeţi!

infinitive

Rom.

infinitive

conjugation classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7, and any verb ending in -ie. The whole paradigm is displayed in Table 11. Finally, for Sardinian, Romanello/Repetti (2014) describe a paradigm which shows a special imperative form for second person singular and plural, clearly distinct from the indicative (Table 12). Table 12: Sardinian imperative paradigm (Siliqua variety; cf. Romanello/Repetti 2014, ex. (7)) Srd.

indicative

imperative

2SG

tsérri-aza ‘you(SG ) call’

tsérrj-a ‘call you(SG )!’

2PL

tserri-áizi ‘you(PL ) call’

tserri-ái ‘call you(PL )!’

Besides these core patterns in the formation of the imperative, one should note that other strategies exist for forming directive speech acts with different degrees of commitment. For instance, the future tense is found in some varieties as a more polite request than the imperative, as in the following examples from Ecuatorian American Spanish and a Catalan variety spoken in the middle northeast of Catalonia: (44) a.

AmSp. ¡Traerásmelo la semana que viene! that come.3SG bring.FUT . 2SG -me-it the.F week ‘Bring it to me next week!’ (Campos 2012, ex. (40a))

Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives

b. Cat.

625

Pensaràs-hi, eh? think.FUT . 2SG -LOC right ‘Think about it, right?’ (Pérez Saldanya 2008, ex. (115a))

Although unrelated from a diachronic perspective, these uses resemble the Latin future (or second) imperative (see Panhuis 2006, 117).

2.2 Syntax The three most conspicuous features of the syntax of imperatives concern the (non) expression of the subject, the incompatibility of the forms of positive imperatives with negation, and the placement of clitics. We consider each in a separate subsection in what follows.

2.2.1 Subjects Since commands or requests, which are the prototypical function of imperatives, are linked to the current context of utterance, and particularly to the hearer(s), the expression of the subject is impossible, even in a non null subject language like French or Brazilian Portuguese (see Dobrovie-Sorin 1983 and Zanuttini/Pak/Portner 2012): (45) a. Fr.

b. Pt.

Passe-moi le pain! the bread pass.IMP . 2SG - me ‘Hand me the bread!’ (Delatour et al. 2004, 83) Ponha uma chávena de arroz numa panela cupful of rice in-a.F pan put.IMP . 2SG a e cubra-o de água. of water and cover.IMP . 2SG -it ‘Put a cupful of rice in a pan and cover it with water.’ (Hutchinson/Lloyd 2003, 148)

However, strong pronouns are required when a contrast is intended, as in the following examples: (46) a. Sp.

b. It.

¡A: Cállate! B: ¡Cállate shut.up.IMP . 2SG . REFL shut.up.IMP . 2SG .REFL A: ‘Shut up! B: You shut up!’ (Garrido 1999, ex. (55)) Esci tu da questa stanza (non io). I go.out.IMP . 2SG you of this.F room not

tú! you.SG

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c. Pt.

‘You go out of this room (, not me)!’ (Salvi/Borgato 1995, ex. (38)) A: Empresta-me o livro. B: Empresta-me-o lend.2SG -me-it lend.2SG -me the book ‘A: Lend me the book. B: You lend it to me!’ (Brito/Duarte/Matos 62003, ex. (58))

tu. you.SG

Note that the hearer-oriented nature of directive speech acts also affects the imperative verbal paradigm, which is basically restricted to second person singular and plural, as we have seen in Section 2.1.

2.2.2 Negation In principle, the expression of prohibitions should be naturally expressed by means of negative imperatives; yet, as studied by Zanuttini (1997) and Poletto/Zanuttini (2003), very few Romance varieties show distinct negative imperative forms, the clearest case being Rhaeto-Romance (the Badiotto variety): (47) Rhaeto-Romance (Badiotto) a. Lî-l ma/mo/pö/pa! read.IMP . 2SG -it PRT ‘Read it! (2SG )’ b. Lié-l ma/mo/pö/pa! read.IMP . 2PL -it PRT ‘Read it! (2PL )’ (Poletto/Zanuttini 2003, ex. (1)) (48) Rhaeto-Romance (Badiotto) a. No (ma) l lî! PRT it read.IMP . 2SG not ‘Don’t read it!’ b. No (ma) l liét! PRT it read.IMP . 2PL not (Poletto/Zanuttini 2003, ex. (7)) As Haiman/Benincà (1992, 85) remark, the Sursilvan variety is transparent in forming the negative imperative: it simply adds the negative particle buka before or after the positive imperative form:

Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives

(49) Rhaeto-Romance (Sursilvan) a. /kanta/ sing.IMP . 2SG ‘Sing!’ b. /buka kanta/ or NEG sing.IMP . 2SG ‘Don’t sing!’ (familiar) c. /buka kantei/ or neg sing.IMP . 2PL ‘Don’t sing!’ (plural or polite) (Haiman/Benincà 1992, 85)

627

/kanta buka/ sing.IMP . 2SG NEG /kantei buka/ sing.IMP . 2PL NEG

In the variety from Cortina d’Ampezzo, the negative imperative is only found in the singular, the plural resorting to a suppletive subjunctive: (50) a.

Laóra tu. work.IMP . 2SG you.SG ‘You work!’ b. No laóra. NEG work.IMP . 2SG ‘Don’t work!’ (Zanuttini 1997, 150)

(51) a.

Lourà vos. work.IMP . 2PL you.PL ‘You work!’ b. *No lourà. NEG work.IMP . 2PL ‘Don’t work!’ c. No louràde. NEG work.SBJV . 2PL ‘Don’t work!’ (Zanuttini 1997, 150)

Indeed most Romance languages resort to suppletive forms to avoid negated imperatives, the most common being those from the present subjunctive:

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Table 13: Positive and negative imperatives in four Romance languages imperative

negation + present subjunctive

Cat.

Menja!

No mengis!

Occ.

Manja!

Manges pas!4

Come!

Não comas!

¡Come!

¡No comas!

‘Eat! (2 SG )’

‘Don’t eat! (2 SG )’

Pt. Sp.

5

This is also the pattern in some varieties of Sardinian, such as the one in Siliqua (Romanello/Repetti 2014, ex. (8)): Table 14: Positive and negative imperatives in Sardinian (Siliqua variety) Srd.

positive imperative

negative imperative

suppletive negative imperative

2SG

Tserrj-a! ‘Call!’

*Nɔ tserrj-a! ‘Don’t call!’

Nɔ tserri-isti! ‘Don’t call!’

2PL

Tserri-ai! ‘Call!’

*Nɔ tserri-ai! ‘Don’t call!’

Nɔ tserri-eizi! ‘Don’t call!’

In Italian and Romanian, the negative imperative is formed with the infinitive in the second person singular and with the present indicative in the second person plural (see Salvi/Borgato 1995 and Becker 2010b, respectively): Table 15: Positive and negative imperatives in Italian It. cantare ‘to sing’

positive imperative

negative imperative

2SG

Canta!

Non cantare!

2PL

Cantate!

Non cantate!

4 Negative imperatives in Occitan are formed with the negative particle pas: Vengas pas ‘Don’t come!’, Anes pas enlòc ‘Don’t go anywhere!’ (Alibèrt 2000, 332). 5 As discussed in Section 2.1, Spanish has an infinitival alternative to the plural imperative (¡Comer! ‘Eat’). This form allows a negated version alternating with the subjunctive form: ¡No comer! ‘Don’t eat’ (cf. subjunctive ¡No comáis! ‘Don’t eat’). See Garrido (1999, 3911).

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629

Table 16: Positive and negative imperatives in Romanian Rom. a vira ‘to turn’

positive imperative

negative imperative

2SG

Virează!

Nu vira!

2PL

Viraţi!

Nu viraţi!

Finally, in French, negative directives simply add the negation to the positive version, which is based on the present indicative, except for clitic placement (see next subsection): (52) Fr.

a. Attention! Ne touchez pas à ça. NEG touch.2PL NEG to this attention ‘Careful! Don’t touch that!’ (Delatour et al. 2004, 146) b. Ne t’assieds pas! NEG you.REFL - sit. 2SG NEG ‘Don’t sit down!’ (Delatour et al. 2004, 83)

Zanuttini (1997) suggests that this homogenous paradigm is a consequence of the fact that the preverbal negative marker is a clitic and that the core negative category is the postverbal pas. However, the same could be said about Occitan, which notwithstanding shows a mixed paradigm similar to that of Ibero-Romance languages.

2.2.3 Clitic placement It is a well-known generalization that imperatives force enclisis uniformly across Romance (see Rooryck 1992 and ↗5 Clitic pronouns): (53) a. It.

Ditemi il suo nome una buona volta! tell.IMP . 2SG -me the his name a.F good.F time ‘Tell me his name right now!’ (Salvi/Borgato 1995, ex. (2a)) b. Pt. Controla-te! control.IMP . 2SG -you.REFL ‘Control yourself!’ (Brito/Duarte/Matos 62003, ex. (35b)) c. Rom. Dă-mi-o! give.IMP . 2SG -me-it ‘Give it to me!’ (Gönczöl-Davies 2008)

This fact has standardly been assumed to be a result of the movement of the verb to a high position in the complementizer area (see Rivero 1994; Rivero/Terzi 1995). One can thus predict that negative directives, which lack imperative morphology, should

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behave differently, namely they should display proclisis. In other words, true imperatives are argued to move to some high position related to mood, whereas suppletive forms stay in a lower position within the sentence. This prediction is borne out by languages like French, Romanian, Spanish or Catalan, where clitics always appear between the negation and the verb in negative directives: (54) a. Fr.

Ne

me donne pas de conseils, mais aide-moi! NEG me give.2SG NEG of advices but help.IMP . 2SG -me ‘Don’t give me advice, but help me!’ (Delatour et al. 2004, 276) b. Rom. Nu li-l trimiteţi! NEG them-it send.SBJV . 2SG ‘Don’t send it to them!’ (Gönczöl-Davies 2008)

However, the analysis does not extend easily to languages like Italian, which allows both proclisis and enclisis (examples from Kayne 1991, see also Zanuttini 1997, ex. (119), for similar examples in other northern Italian varieties): (55) It.

a. Non

lo fate! it do-IMP . 2SG ‘Don’t do it!’ b. Non farlo! NEG do.INF -it ‘Don’t do it!’ NEG

Non

fatelo! do-IMP . 2SG -it ‘Don’t do it!’ Non lo fare! NEG it do.INF ‘Don’t do it!’

NEG

In these cases, the above-mentioned analysis of enclisis should allow for a lower movement of the verb across the clitic, but to a position below negation. See also Section 3.1.3 below on enclisis in optatives.

2.3 Semantics and pragmatics Imperatives fall under the directive category of speech acts, which are characterized, in classical Speech Act Theory (Searle 1975), as attempts by the speaker to have something done by the hearer, with varied degrees of commitment. We have exemplified the prototypical uses as commands and requests, but they can also fulfil many other functions, which we summarize in what follows. First, they can express advice and instructions (for instance in recipes): (56) Fr.

a. Contente-toi donc de hence of be.content.IMP .2SG -you.REFL ‘Be content with your own good looks.’

ta your

joliesse. prettiness

Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives

631

b. Faites tremper les haricots rouges une nuit. red.PL one night make.IMP . 2PL soak.INF the.PL bean.PL Puis mettez-les dans une casserole. in a.F pan then put.IMP . 2PL -them ‘Soak the red beans overnight. Then put them in a pan.’ (Offord 2006, 166) This sense of advice, mixed with encouragement, is very common in first person plural forms, which are highly conventionalized: (57) a. Cat.

Som-hi! be.IMP . 1PL - LOC ‘Let’s go!’ b. Fr. Dépêchons-nous! hurry.up.IMP . 1PL -1PL .REFL ‘Hurry up!’ (Delatour et al. 2004, 146) c. Rom. Să plecăm! that.MOD leave.SBJV . 1PL ‘Let’s go!’ (Becker 2010b, ex. (11))

When the meaning involves advice, imperatives usually alternate with infinitives in several languages (↗10 Infinitival clauses), for infinitives are typically more polite forms: (58) a. Fr.

Laver les pommes, les éplucher puis peel.INF then wash.INF the.PL apple.PL them.F les faire cuire au four pendant trente thirty them.F make.INF cook.INF in-the oven during minutes. minutes ‘Wash the apples, peel them, then cook them in the oven for thirty minutes.’ (Delatour et al. 2004, 151) b. Sp. ¡A bailar! to dance.INF ‘Come dance!’ (Campos 2012, ex. (43a)) c. Rom. A nu se păstra la cald! heat to not self keep.INF in ‘Not to be kept in warm temperatures.’ (Gönczöl-Davies 2008, 121)

In the case of Romanian, this sort of more polite command is introduced by a complementizer and expressed by the subjunctive:

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(59)

Rom. Să nu întârzii! retard.SBJV . 2SG that.MOD NEG ‘Don’t be late!’ (Gönczöl-Davies 2008, 113)

Besides advice and instructions, imperative sentences can also convey invitations in informal contexts: (60) a. Fr.

b. Cat.

Il n’y a plus de places au fond he NEG - LOC have. 3SG more of seat.PL at-the back de la salle; venez donc vous asseoir hence you.PL sit of the.F room come.IMP . 2PL devant! in-front ‘There are no more seats at the back of the room; so come and sit at the front.’ (Delatour et al. 2004, 168) Queda’t a sopar amb nosaltres. with we stay.IMP . 2SG . you.REFL to dinner ‘Stay for dinner with us.’

Another very productive use of imperative clauses occurs in coordinations, where the imperative in the first conjunct poses a condition, and the second conjunct contains a threat or promise in the future (↗18 Coordination and correlatives): (61) a. Fr.

b. Cat.

Détruisez ce temple, et en trois jours and in three days destroy.IMP . 2PL this temple je le relèverai. I it rebuild.FUT . 1SG ‘If you destroy this temple, I will rebuild it in three days.’ (Grevisse 162016, §407) Espera i veuràs qui és. wait.IMP . 2SG and see.FUT . 2SG who be. 3SG ‘If you wait, you’ll see who it is.’ (Quer 2010, ex. (2))

Finally, imperatives may alternate with optatives (see Section 3) in expressing wishes: (62) Fr.

a. Dormez bien! sleep.IMP . 2PL well ‘Sleep well!’ b. Soyez heureux! be.IMP . 2PL happy ‘Be happy!’ (Grevisse 162016, §408)

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633

Indeed, the boundary between a command and a wish blurs in certain cases, such as indirect orders or requests to a third party. This is illustrated by the following examples, where the meaning is directive rather than desiderative: (63) It.

a. C’è LOC -be. 3SG

un a

signore sir

che that

vorrebbe want.COND . 3SG

parlarle. speak.INF -her.DAT ‘There is a man who would like to talk to you.’ (adapted from Salvi/Borgato 1995, ex. (10)) b. Che entri (pure)! that enter.SBJV . 3SG then ‘Let her/him come in (then)!’ (64) Fr.

(65) Sp.

a. Qu’ils entrent! enter.SBJV . 3PL that-they.M . PL ‘Show them in!’ (Grevisse 162016, §407) b. Que personne ne sorte! NEG leave.SBJV . 3SG that nobody ‘Nobody is leaving!’ (Grevisse 162016, §407) Que hagan el menor error, y los that make.SBJV . 3SG the least mistake and them denuncio. report.PRS . 1SG ‘Let them commit the slightest mistake, and I’ll report them.’ (Laca 2010, fn. 9)

Note, particularly, the equivalence between the Spanish subjunctive construction in (65) and the sentences with imperatives in (61): both encode a conditional meaning, the only difference being in the mood in the first conjunct.

3 Optatives Optative sentences express the speaker’s wish, hope or regret that some fact may hold, with different degrees of confidence (see Grosz 2012 and Zanuttini/Pak/Portner 2012 for a general theoretical analysis). Consider some examples: (66) a. Fr.

Vive le roi! live.SBJV . 3SG the king ‘Long live the king! (Mulder 2010, ex. (15))

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b. Pt.

Talvez nos formemos ambos em Direito! both in Law perhaps us be-educated.1PL ‘We might both become jurists.’ (Becker 2010a, ex. (2)) c. Sp. Ojalá estuvieran/estén en casa. hopefully be.IMPF . SBJV . 3PL /be.PRS . SBJV . 3PL in house ‘I wish they were/I hope they are at home.’ (Laca 2010, ex. (4)) d. Rom. Să fii fericit! that.MOD be.SBJV . 2SG happy ‘May you be happy!’ (Magda et al. 2013, ex. (41c)) In the following subsections, we will consider the different formal and interpretive features of the optative modality.

3.1 Syntax The syntax of optatives is prototypically defined by three features: the subjunctive mood, a limited range of specialized and non-specialized introducers, and the lack of obligatory inversion (in contrast with imperatives). We discuss each feature in the following sections.

3.1.1 Subjunctive mood One distinctive feature of optative sentences across Romance is the resort to the subjunctive mood, for this mood, which is commonly associated with the irrealis and other nonfactual situations, nicely fits the expression of wishes or desires: (67) a. It.

Che Dio t’assista! that God you-help.SBJV . 3SG ‘May God help you!’ (Borgato/Renzi 1995, 160) b. Pt. Oxalá façam boa viagem. if.only make.SBJV . 3PL good.F journey. ‘I hope you have a good journey.’ (Hutchinson/Lloyd 2003, 190) c. Rom. Să ne vedem sănătoşi. healthy that.MOD us see.1PL ‘I hope we will remain in good health.’ (Becker 2010b, ex. (5)) d. Fr. Que ton séjour ici soit agréable! stay here be.SBJV . 3SG pleasant That your.SG ‘May your stay here be pleasant!’ (Mulder 2010, ex. (16))

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Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives

e. Sp.

¡Así lo hubiera arrollado ese tren! run-over. PTPC that train so him have.SBJV . IMPF . 3SG ‘I wish that train had run over him!’ (Campos 2012, ex. (54b))

However, besides the general irrealis meaning associated with the subjunctive mood, different nuances are associated to different tenses, an important point that we discuss in Section 3.2 below (cf. also ↗11 Tense, aspect, mood). Even though the subjunctive is the norm in optative constructions across Romance, other moods are also found. One conspicuous example is Romanian, which along with the subjunctive, shows a specialized verbal form (optative-conditional) for expressing wishes, which as remarked by Becker (2010b), is invading many contexts where the subjunctive was traditionally used (see Magda et al. 2013, ch. 2.1 for a detailed description):  

(68) Rom. a. Aș

bea o bere. drink a beer ‘I would like to drink a beer.’ (Gönczöl-Davies 2008, 115) b. Aş fi mâncat mai mult. COND . 1SG be ate more much ‘I would have liked to eat more.’ (Becker 2010b, ex. (8)) COND . 1SG

Note that the optative-conditional allows for the same difference in certainty noted for subjunctives: (68a) expresses a probable fact, whereas (68b) is clearly counterfactual.

3.1.2 Introducers In most cases, optative sentences are headed by the conjunction that typically introduces subordinate finite clauses: (69) a. Pt.

b. Sp.

c. Fr.

d. It.

Que o leve o diabo! that him bring.SBJV . 3SG the devil ‘To hell with him!’ (Becker 2010a, 183) ¡Que empiece la fiesta! that begin.SBJV . 3SG the.F party ‘Let the party begin!’ (Bosque 2012, 377) Que le meilleur gagne! that the best win. SBJV . 3SG ‘May the best man win!’ (Delatour et al. 2004, 137) (Che) Dio ti benedica! that God you.ACC .SG bless. SBJV . 3SG ‘God bless you!’ (Squartini 2010, ex. (29a))

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However, in some languages and dialects, one can find a specialized modal complementizer. The most conspicuous case is Romanian, which contrasts the default complementizer că ‘that’ and the modalized one să ‘that.MOD ’: (70) Rom. a. Cred că ai dreptate. believe.1SG that have.2SG right ‘I believe that you are right.’ b. Nu cred să fi greşit. not believe.1SG that.MOD be.INF wrong ‘I do not believe that I am wrong.’ (Becker 2010b, ex. (21)–(22)) Consequently, the optative construction selects să ‘that.MOD ’ (see also (67c) above): (71) Rom.

Să fi aşteptat în casa ta. that.MOD be.INF wait.PTCP in house your ‘If only you had waited in your house!’ (Cf. Beyrer/Bochmann/Bronsert 1987, 245; cited in Becker 2010b)

This behavior is reproduced in southern Italian varieties, where besides ka (Italian che), forms like ku or mu are found for optatives (see Ammann/van der Auwera 2004, who consider this phenomenon a balkanism): (72) a. Puglian Ku fáttsa ćće bbóle! do.SBJV . 3SG what want.3SG that.MOD ‘Let him do what he wants!’ (Stehl 1988, 707; cited in Ammann/van der Auwera 2004, 304) b. Cal. Mu ti via ammazatu! you.SG see.SBJV . 1SG kill.PTPC that.MOD ‘May I see you killed!’ (Rohlfs 1954, 79; cited in Ammann/van der Auwera 2004, 304) It is also common to find specific forms reinforcing the wish meaning, as we have illustrated in many of the preceding examples, and in the following ones, where the reinforcer is in italics for ease of reference: (73) a. It.

b. Sp.

Magari/Almeno Carlo venisse in orario! if.only/at.least Carlo come.SBJV . IMPF . 3SG in timetable ‘If only Carlo arrived in time!’ (Borgato/Renzi 1995, ex. (16a)) ¡Así/Ojalá te mueras! so/if-only REFL .2SG die.SBJV . 2SG ‘I hope you die!’ (adapted from Campos 2012, ex. (2e))

Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives

c. Cat.

d. Pt.

Tant de bo nevi! much of good snow.SBJV . 3SG ‘I wish it would snow.’ (Quer 2010, ex. (4a)) Quem dera eu tivesse have.IMPF . SBJV . 1SG who give.PST . PFV . 3SG I ‘I wish I had money!’ (Hutchinson/Lloyd 2003, 235)

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dinheiro! money

Most of these markers involve lexicalized uses of adverbs or adverbial expressions which originally had no optative meaning, such as It. magari and almeno, Sp. así or Cat. tant de bo. In contrast, Sp. ojalá ‘if only’ (and Pt. oxalá) is a transformation of the Hispanic Arabic law šá lláh ‘if it pleases God’, and has an optative meaning only, just like the frozen rhetorical question Pt. quem dera. Moreover, most of the optative expressions in (73) can occur isolated, as interjections: It. magari, Sp. ojalá, Cat. tant de bo, Pt. quem dera.

3.1.3 Subject-verb inversion While the use of introducers is a very common feature of optatives, we find several constructions without the complementizer, but with obligatory subject-verb inversion: (74) a. Pt.

Malditas (sejam) as segundas-feiras! damned.F . PL be.SBJV . 3SG the.F . PL second-days ‘Damned (be) Mondays!’ (Brito/Duarte/Matos 62003, ex. (14b)) b. Srd. Benniu esserepo! be.IMPF . SBJV . 1SG come.PTPC ‘I would have come!’ (Cruschina 2012, ex. (28a)) c. Rom. Lua-l-ar dracul! take.INF - him- AUX . COND . 3SG devil.DEF ‘May he go to hell!’ (lit. ‘May the devil take him!’) (Magda et al. 2013, ex. (41d)) d. Occ. Visca jo cinquanta ans e mai! years and more live.SBJV . 1SG I fifty ‘May I live more than fifty years!’ (Alibèrt 2000, 338) e. Sp. ¡Mueran los dictadores! die.SBJV . 3PL the.PL dictators ‘May all dictators die!’ (Campos 2012, ex. (50b))

Besides subject-verb inversion, these optative sentences typically show enclisis, as in the Romanian example (74c) above, and in the following clear Portuguese minimal pair:

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(75) Pt.

a. Acabem-se todas as guerras! end.SBJV . 3PL - REFL all.F . PL the. F . PL wars b. *Todas as guerras se acabem! the.F . PL wars REFL end.SBJV . 3PL all.F . PL ‘May all wars end!’ (Brito/Duarte/Matos 62003, ex. (7b) and (8b))

When the fronted verb is in a perfective form, the construction obtains a conditional counterfactual interpretation, as in the following examples:6 (76) a. It.

b. Cat.

c. Sp.

Fosse Gianni arrivato in tempo! time be.IMPF . SBJV . 3SG Gianni arrive.PTCP in ‘If only Gianni had arrived in time!’ (Munaro 2010, fn. 6) Haguessis trucat abans. before have.PST . SBJV . 2SG call.PTCP ‘You should have called earlier.’ (Quer 2010, ex. (5)) Hubieras venido antes. have.PST . SBJV . 2SG come.PTCP before ‘I wish you had been here before.’ (Bosque 2012, 377)

These sentences are typically interpreted as conditionals lacking an explicit protasis, so they might be analyzed on a par with sentences like the following: (77)

It.

Se ieri fosse stato qui, if yesterday be.IMPF . SBJV . 3SG be.PTCP here avremmo finito. have.COND . 1PL finish.PTCP ‘If s/he had been here yesterday, we would have finished it.’ (Squartini 2010, ex. (6))

This idea seems to derive support from optatives with a conditional complementizer like the following Romanian examples: (78) Rom. a. De-am if- COND . 1PL

avea în car have.INF in cart

o cergă a horse-cloth

mică! little

6 This construction may have a relation, at least in Spanish, to retrospective imperatives (Bosque 1980): (i) ¡Haber venido antes! earlier! have.INF come.PT PC ‘You should have come earlier!’

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‘I wish we had a little horse-cloth in the cart.’ (Cf. Beyrer/Bochmann/Bronsert 1987, 244; cited in Becker 2010b, ex. (7)) b. De-ar fi reușit! be. COND . 3SG have.INF succeed.PTPC ‘If only he had succeeded!’ (Gönczöl-Davies 2008, 117) Finally, note that in Romanian, some formulas with the optative-conditional also show fronting of an infinitive across the auxiliary and the clitic. (79) Rom.

Vedea-te-aş mort! see-you-COND . 2SG dead ‘I’d like to see you dead!’

Just as for enclisis in imperative sentences (see Section 2.2.3), the subject-verb inversion strategy can be assumed to be a result of the movement of the verb to a high position in the complementizer area (see Rivero 1994; Rivero/Terzi 1995; Han 2000). Support for this idea follows from the complementary distribution between inversion and the presence of the complementizer, which suggests that the verb and the complementizer compete for the same position in the left periphery of the sentence.

3.2 Semantics and pragmatics Optatives are commonly analyzed as a particular semantic modality, namely bouletic, which can be modeled by means of a relation between an individual and two different worlds, the actual one and a possible world where the desires of the individual are satisfied. For example, the following sentence would be true if and only if the person referred to in (80) does the required thing in every world in which the speaker’s desires in the actual world are satisfied (see Portner 2009, 36; Kratzer 2012, ch. 2). (80) Occ.

O vòlga far! it want.SBJV . 3SG do.INF ‘May he do it!’ (Teulat 1976, 70)

This basic modal approach fits in nicely with the nuances which can be obtained by means of different tenses, particularly involving the different degrees of certainty the speaker has regarding the fulfilment of the wish. Hence, the present subjunctive prototypically expresses a probable situation:

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(81) a. Pt.

b. Sp.

Oxalá ele seja feliz! hopefully he be.SBJV . 3SG happy ‘May he be happy!’ (Brito/Duarte/Matos 62003, ex. (6d)) Ojalá estén en casa hopefully be.SBJV . 3PL in house ‘I wish they were at home.’ (Laca 2010, ex. (4))

In contrast, the imperfect subjunctive occurs in sentences expressing propositions denoting very uncertain states of affairs: (82) a. It.

b. Pt.

c. Cat.

Magari arrivasse! if.only arrive.IMPF . SBJV . 3SG ‘I wish s/he would come!’ (Borgato/Renzi 1995, ex. (7)) Quem dera eu tivesse dinheiro! what give.PST . PFV . 3SG I have.IMPF . SBJV . 1SG money ‘I wish I had money!’ (Hutchinson/Lloyd 2003, 235) Tant de bo plogués! so of good rain.IMPF . SBJV . 3SG ‘If only it would rain!’

Finally, when the optative expresses a regret regarding an accomplished fact (counterfactual optative), the perfect subjunctive is the norm: (83) a. It.

Magari fosse arrivato ieri! if.only be.IMPF . SBJV . 3SG arrive.PTCP yesterday ‘If only he had arrived yesterday!’ (Borgato/Renzi 1995, ex. (6)) b. Rom. Să fi aşteptat în casa ta. that.MOD be.INF wait.PTCP in house your ‘If only you had waited in your house!’ (Cf. Becker 2010b, ex. (6)) c. Friul. Ti vess-jo dit la veretàt! truth you have.PST . SBJV . 1SG - NOM . 1SG say.PTPC the.F ‘If only I had told you the truth!’ (Benincà 1989; cited in Munaro 2010, ex. (11))

In the sentences in (83), the speaker clearly presupposes that the event referred to did not happen, just as in counterfactual conditionals (↗11 Tense, aspect, mood). One can derive the difference between these two types on the grounds of the possible worlds involved: whereas in non-counterfactual optatives there is a set of possible worlds compatible with the actual world where the desire is fulfilled, in counterfactual ones, there is no compatible world fulfilling this desire.

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Indeed, this distinction is inherent to desires, according to Searle (1983; 2005) (cf. Kissine 2012). As Searle remarks, desires don’t have restrictions on the content expressed, which represents a situation that the agent finds desirable at any time, past, present or future (in contrast to prototypical directives, which are linked to future situations). Hence, from the point of view of the commitment it imposes on the addressee, optatives can be considered a weaker directive speech act, namely one in which there is a weak imposition on the hearer. Therefore, the optative is in many cases a polite way to ask people to do something; see (84a), which is a more polite request than the imperative in (84b): (84) Rom. a. Să-mi dai o a that.MOD -me give.SBJV . 2SG b. Dă-mi o carte! give.IMP . 2SG -me a book ‘Give me a book!’ (Magda et al. 2013, ex. (42a,b))

carte! book

To close the section, consider the conventional use of many optative constructions across Romance as ritual formulas or invectives: (85) a. Fr.

b. Sp.

Qu’ils reposent en paix! in peace that-they rest.SBJV . 3PL ‘May they rest in peace.’ (Grevisse 162016, §408) ¡Vivan los novios! the.PL bride-and-groom live.SBJV . 3PL ‘Hooray for the bride and groom!’ (Bosque 2012, 377)

These are fixed expressions specifically suited for particular situations. For instance, (85a) is appropriate at a funeral, and (85b) at a wedding. On formulaic language, Wray (2013) is a good source.

4 Conclusions In this chapter, we have provided a summary of the main (morpho)syntactic features of exclamative, imperative, and optative modality across Romance, paying particular attention to the relation between form and function. Hence, we have shown that a specific illocutionary force, say a command, can be conveyed by different grammatical means besides the prototypical imperative mood: subjunctive mood, infinitives or even future tense. As far as exclamatives are concerned, it has been shown that they are homogenous at the semantic and pragmatic level: they are speaker-oriented and express an

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unexpectedly high degree of a property. In contrast, they display much variation in the range of available exclamative words, the obligatoriness of subject-verb inversion, and the presence of a complementizer and/or expletive negation. Imperatives, which typically are found to express orders and requests, have been shown to be quite similar across Romance in restricting the presence of the subject to contrastive uses and in preferring enclisis, but they differ substantially in negated contexts, where Romance languages and dialects resort to different forms of the verbal paradigm. Finally, optatives, which express desires, are typically found with subjunctive verb forms and are either introduced by a complementizer or involve verb movement to a left peripheral position, yielding subject-verb inversion and enclisis. These properties have been shown to be quite consistent across the Romance landscape.

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Benincà, Paola/Salvi, Giampaolo/Frison, Lorenza (1988), L’ordine delle parole e le costruzioni marcate, in: Lorenzo Renzi (ed.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol. 1, Bologna, il Mulino, 115–225. Beyrer, Arthur/Bochmann, Klaus/Bronsert, Siegfried (1987), Grammatik der rumänischen Sprache der Gegenwart, Leipzig, Verlag Enzyklopädie. Beyssade, Claire (2013), Back to uniqueness presupposition, Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 42, 123–137. Borgato, Gianluigi/Renzi, Lorenzo (1995), Il tipo ottativo, in: Lorenzo Renzi/Giampaolo Salvi/Anna Cardinaletti (edd.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol. 3, Bologna, il Mulino, 159–164. Bosque, Ignacio (1980), Retrospective imperatives, Linguistic Inquiry 11, 415–419. Bosque, Ignacio (2012), Mood: indicative vs subjunctive, in: José Ignacio Hualde/Antxon Olarrea/Erin O’Rourke (edd.), The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, Oxford, Blackwell, 373–394. Bosque, Ignacio (2017), Spanish exclamatives in perspective: a survey of properties, classes, and current theoretical issues, in: Ignacio Bosque (ed.), Advances in the Analysis of Spanish Exclamatives, Columbus, OH, Ohio State University Press, 1–52. Brito, Ana Maria/Duarte, Inês/Matos, Gabriela (62003), Estrutura da frase simples e tipos de frases, in: Maria Helena Mateus et al. (edd.), Gramática da língua portuguesa, Lisboa, Editorial Caminho, 433–506. Campos, Héctor (2012), The simple sentence, in: José Ignacio Hualde/Antxon Olarrea/Erin O’Rourke (edd.), The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, Oxford, Blackwell, 395–422. Castroviejo, Elena (2006), “Wh”-exclamatives in Catalan, Universitat de Barcelona, unpublished doctoral dissertation. Castroviejo, Elena (2008), Deconstructing exclamations, Catalan Journal of Linguistics 7, 41–90. Chinellato, Paolo (2009), Strutture esclamative nell’italiano regionale del Veneto, in: Anna Cardinaletti/Nicola Munaro (edd.), Italiano, italiani regionali e dialetti, Milano, Angeli, 55–68. Cruschina, Silvio (2012), Discourse-related Features and Functional Projections, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Delatour, Yvonne, et al. (2004), Nouvelle grammaire du français, Paris, Hachette. Delfitto, Denis/Fiorin, Gaetano (2014), Exclamatives: issues of syntax, logical form and interpretation, Lingua 152, 1–20. Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen (1983), Le sujet de l’impératif, Histoire Épistémologie Langage 5, 129–134. Elliott, Dale (1971), The grammar of emotive and exclamatory sentences in English, Ohio State Working Papers in Linguistics 8, 8–110. Elliott, Dale (1974), Toward a grammar of exclamations, Foundations of Language 10, 41–53. Escandell-Vidal, M. Victoria (2012), Speech acts, in: José Ignacio Hualde/Antxon Olarrea/Erin O’Rourke (edd.), The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, Oxford, Blackwell, 629–652. Espinal, M. Teresa (1997), Non-negative negation and “wh”-exclamatives, in: Danielle Forget et al. (edd.), Negation and Polarity: Syntax and Semantics, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 75–93. Fossat, Jean-Louis (2006), Les “petits mots” énonciatifs gascons: Le cas de “bè” énonciatif, Cahiers de grammaire 30, 159–174. Francom, Jerid (2012), “Wh”-movement: interrogatives, exclamatives, and relatives, in: José Ignacio Hualde/Antxon Olarrea/Erin O’Rourke (edd.), The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, Oxford, Blackwell, 533–556. Garrido, Joaquín (1999), Los actos de habla. Las oraciones imperativas, in: Ignacio Bosque/Violeta Demonte (edd.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, vol. 3, Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 3879–3928. Gönczöl-Davies, Ramona (2008), Romanian. An Essential Grammar, London/New York, Routledge.

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Cristina Sánchez López

18 Coordination and correlatives Abstract: This chapter discusses coordination and correlatives in Romance languages, distinguishing between copulative, disjunctive and adversative coordination. The chapter begins by presenting each of these types of coordination, providing relevant definitions and introducing and characterizing the main coordination devices in Romance languages. In these sections, the terminological and conceptual boundaries between types of coordination are made explicit. The chapter goes on to discuss some fundamental formal and semantic aspects of coordination. Finally, some additional remarks about the limits of coordination are offered, with a focus on the relationship between correlatives and other parallel structures.  

Keywords: coordination, correlative constructions, conjunction, disjunction, adversative coordination, Coordinate Structure Constraint, ellipsis, gapping, fragments, sluicing  

1 Coordination and coordinating elements 1.1 Definition and types of coordinated constructions Coordinated constructions are complex structures that combine two or more constituents of the same type without altering the relation they have with the syntactic context. The main properties defining coordination involve both the nature of coordinated constituents and the properties of the formal devices for coordination. The coordinated constituents are constrained by a general symmetry requirement: they must receive the same syntactic function and thematic role. This condition guarantees that each of the coordinated conjuncts can individually occur in the same position as the coordinated structure. The symmetry requirement excludes coordinated structures where the coordination of likes is not satisfied: conjuncts cannot receive different functional marks (1a), cannot belong to different categories if this categorial difference does not allow them to have the same function (1b), and cannot receive different thematic roles (1c): (1)

Sp.

a. Nosotros y we and b. La casa y the house and c. *El portero the porter

DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-018

{vosotros /*de vosotros} vamos al cine. go.1PL to-the cinema {you.PL / of you.PL } {los alrededores /*allí} estaban llenos de gente. {the surroundings / there} were.3PL full of people y la llave abrieron la puerta. and the key opened.3PL the door

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Coordination most usually involves the combination of elements of the same syntactic category. However, categorial identity is not a prerequisite per se for coordination, but a condition that guarantees the functional identity of the coordinated constituents.1 That is why the coordination of elements of different categories is possible if they can be functionally similar (2a); on the other hand, formally equal constituents cannot be coordinated if they cannot be interpreted as functionally equivalent (2b): (2)

a. Fr.

b. Sp.

un souriceau [tout jeune et qui n’avait rien vu] a mouse all young and who NEG had nothing seen (Jean de la Fontaine, Le cochet, le chat, et le souriceau) *María pregunta si él enviará María asks whether he will-send [a su hijo o a Madrid]. to his son or to Madrid

The most usual coordination devices are coordinating conjunctions, which are functional items with no lexical meaning. All Romance languages have coordinating conjunctions with similar properties.2 They differ from subordinating conjunctions in that they lack subcategorization requirements, and, therefore, can bind constituents from almost any category (see Section 2.1 below). They differ also from subordinating conjunctions in the strict linearization requirement of coordinated constituents. All Romance conjunctions must be placed between the coordinated conjuncts, and no other order is possible: (3) Sp.

a. Pedro y Juan van al cine. ‘Pedro and Juan go to the movies.’ b. *Y Juan, Pedro van al cine.

The strict linearization requirement is related to the fact that coordinated constructions do not allow the displacement of any of their elements, which is known as Ross’ (1967) Coordinate Structure Constraint, according to which no one of the conjuncts 1 Pullum/Zwicky (1986) call it the “Law of Coordination of likes” (see Camacho 2003, 4). This condition is recognized by Dik (1968) under different names focusing on either category or function of conjoined elements: category identity (Schachter 1977, 89), equifunctionality (Franchini 1986), functional identity (Rojo 1975, 193). Among the general studies dedicated to coordination, see Lakoff (1971), Lang (1984), van Oirsow (1987), Johannessen (1998), Progovac (1998) and Solías Arís (1998). Payne (1985), Haspelmath (2004; 2007) and Rousseau (2007) present a cross-linguistic overview. 2 Detailed descriptions of coordination exist for all the Romance languages: Jiménez Juliá (1986; 1995), Acín Villa (1993), Camacho (1999; 2003) for Spanish, Antoine (1959/1962) and Hobaek Haff (1987) for French, Matos (2003) for Portuguese, Scorretti (1988) for Italian, Cuenca (1988) and Serra i Alegre (2002) for Catalan, Cojocaru (2003) and Irimia (2008) for Romanian, among many others. See also Coseriu (1968) and Mauri (2008) for a comparative perspective.

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can be involved in certain syntactic processes such as extraction of interrogative words: (4) Sp.

a. ¿Quién who b. *¿Quién who

dice says dice says

María María María María

que ____ viene? that comes que [ ___ y Juan ] viene? that and Juan comes

Obeying the Coordinate Structure Constraint and the linearization requirement is sometimes taken as the decisive criterion for coordinate status.

1.2 The formal devices for coordination: conjunctions and correlatives Coordinating conjunctions form a limited paradigm of functional elements, which can be classified according to different criteria, both formal and semantic. According to the semantic relation they establish between the coordinated conjuncts, the conjunctions can be classified into three major types: copulative conjunctions have an additive meaning, so that the conjoined structure is interpreted as the sum of the coordinated elements; disjunctive conjunctions propose a choice between the coordinated elements, which are presented as alternatives; and adversative conjunctions express a contrast between the coordinated elements. From the point of view of their formal composition, coordinating conjunctions can be simple or correlative. Correlative conjunctions form a discontinuous expression such that the first member of the correlation requires the second one; correlative coordinators can have two or more identical elements (for example, Fr. et…et ‘both… and’, Sp. ni…ni ‘neither…nor’) or two or more different elements (for example, Rom. atât…cât şi ‘both…and’). Finally, conjunctions can be classified according to the number of elements they can bind: binary coordination has only two members and multiple coordination has more than two. For many scholars, multiple coordination involves the recursion of binary coordination (Kayne 1994; Matos 1995), which reduces the difference between binary vs multiple coordination to the difference between recursive vs non-recursive coordination. Table 1 contains the main coordinating conjunctions in Romance languages.

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Table 1: Main coordinating conjunctions in Romance languages

simple

Pt. Gal. Sp. Cat. Fr. Occ. Cors. It. Rom.

correlative

Pt. Gal. Sp. Cat. Fr. It. Rom.

copulative

disjunctive

adversative

e, nem e, nin y (e), ni i, ni et, ni e, ni è, ed e, né și, nici

ou, que o o o ou o o o sau, ori

mas, senão mais, pero, senón pero, mas, sino però, sinó mais mai ma ma, però dar, însă, iar, ci

tanto… como, ou…ou, ora…ora, quer… nem…nem quer; seja...seja ou…ou, que…que, tanto…como/a, xa…xa nin…nin tanto…como/cuanto, o…o, ya…ya, ora…ora, bien…bien, sea … sea ni…ni o…o, bé…bé, tant…com, ara…ara, sia…sia ni…ni ou…ou, soit…soit et…et, ni…ni e…e, tanto… quanto/ o…o, sia…sia, sia…che come/che, né…né, sau…sau, ori…ori, și…și, fie…fie nici…nici, atât…cât şi

At first sight, this paradigm exhibits an extraordinary formal homogeneity: all the languages have forms derived from the same Latin items, or have created new forms with the same formal pattern. On the one hand, the reorganization of the Latin system of coordination caused the loss of numerous conjunctions such as the postpositive conjunctions -que ‘and’ and -vel ‘or’,3 the coordinating conjunctions ac, atque ‘and’, and the adversative conjunctions sed, at, autem, tamen, vero, verum, nisi ‘but’. The small number of Latin conjunctions inherited by Romance languages includes the two coordinating copulative conjunctions et ‘and’ and nec ‘neither, nor’ and disjunctive aut ‘either, or’. These forms are pan-Romanic, since even Romanian used the form e ‘and’ in Old Romanian and preserves the form au ‘or’ in dialectal varieties (cf. Sala 2005, 139). The Romanian divergent form și ‘and’ proceeds from the Latin adverb sic ‘this way’ used as a reinforcement of et, whereas disjunctive sau ‘or’ proceeds from

3 Stassen (2001) shows that postposed copulative conjunctions tend to correlate strongly with OV order, whereas VO order correlates with preposed coordination. The evolution of word order from Latin to Romance and the disappearance of Latin -que and -vel seem to confirm this relationship (↗23 Syntheticity and Analyticity, ↗24 Basic constituent orders).  

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Lat. sic+aut (cf. Sala 2005, 140);4 the origin of ori ‘or’ is unclear. Descendants of Lat. aut ‘or’, nec ‘nor’ and sive/seu ‘or’ can enter in correlations with two conjunctions in all Romance languages; conversely, the inheritors of Latin et ‘and’ have preserved the possibility of entering in correlations only in French and Italian (et…et, e…e ‘both… and’); all the Ibero-Romance varieties lack the possibility of building correlations with e and y (*e…e, *y…y). Romanian has enriched the original inventory of simple and correlative new conjunctions with the forms și ‘and’ and ori ‘or’; both can enter in correlations, cf. și…și ‘both…and’, ori…ori ‘either…or’. On the other hand, Romance languages have created some new coordination devices from the same common sources. The Latin adversative conjunction sed ‘but’ disappeared and was replaced by conjunctions derived from magis ‘more’ in almost all Romance languages: Sp. mas, Fr. mais, It. ma, Gal. mais. In addition, some new composed forms were created to express adversative coordination: on the one hand, the forms derived from the preposition per ‘by’ plus the demonstrative hoc ‘that’ (Sp. pero, It. però, Cat. però, Gal. pero);5 on the other hand, the forms derived from the conjunction si ‘if’ plus the negation non ‘not’ (Sp. sino, Gal. senón, Pt. senão, Fr. sinon, Cat. sinó). Romanian has specific adversative forms: dar, însă, iar, ci, of Latin origin but unclear etymology.6 For the expression of copulative coordination, all Romance languages but French have a new correlative conjunctive construction formed by the grammaticalization of an equality comparative structure: Sp. and Pt. tanto…como,7 Cat. tant…com, Gal. tanto…como/a,8 It. tanto…quanto/come/che and Rom. atât…cât şi (see Section 5). In Romanian and Italian, the new form co-exists with the correlative formed by the repetition of the simple copulative conjunction, which is, instead, the unique copulative correlative in French. The solution for copulative correlatives in Romance languages clearly differentiates the Ibero-Romance languages (which have only the new  

4 Torrego (2009, 463) considers that sau ‘or’ proceeds from Latin adversative sive/seu, which disappeared in the rest of the Romance languages. See Torrens Álvarez (2014) on the history of the reinforced disjunctive conjunction et + aut in Old Spanish. 5 Spanish aunque ‘although’ displays an adversative meaning and can be equivalent to pero ‘but’. See Camacho (1999, §41.4.1) and Flamenco García (1999), and references therein. 6 For a general overview of the evolution of coordination from Latin to Romance, see Meyer-Lübke (1890–1906, §§530–570), Meillet (1958 [1915]), Coseriu (1968) and Orlandini/Poccetti (2007). The historical aspects of specific languages can be found in Espinosa Elorza (2007; 2014), Garachana (2014), Iglesias (2014) for Spanish, Giacalone Ramat/Mauri (2008) and Salvi/Renzi (2010) for Italian, and Manea (2012) for Romanian. 7 In Spanish, the correlative tanto…cuanto ‘both…and’ can be used like a coordinative, although it is less common than tanto…como (cf. RAE/ASALE 2009). The correlative así…como ‘both…and’ is another, archaic form of coordinating correlation, cf. así en la tierra como en el cielo ‘both on earth and in heaven’. 8 According to Álvarez/Xove (2002, 152) coma is the form preferred before personal pronouns, conjunctions and tenseless verbal forms; in any other context, coma and como are both possible.

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correlation) from French (which has only the old form), leaving Italian and Romanian, which exhibit both solutions, in between. This picture is represented in Table 2. Table 2: Copulative correlatives in Romance languages TYPE I Fr.

TYPE II It., Rom.

TYPE III Sp., Pt., Cat., Gal.

Fr. et…et

It. e…e, Rom. și…și





It. tanto…come It. tanto…quanto It. tanto…que Rom. atât…cât şi

Sp./Pt. tanto…como, Sp. tanto…cuanto, Cat. tant…com, Gal. tanto…como/a

Finally, all Romance languages have created new disjunctive correlations by the grammaticalization of some adverbial and verbal forms. This is the case for distributive correlations formed by the grammaticalization of temporal adverbs, such as Pt. and Sp. ora (< ahora ‘now’), Cat. ara ‘now’ and Gal. xa, Sp. ya ‘already’, modal adverbs such as Sp. bien, Cat. bé ‘well’, and verbs such as Sp. sea, It. sia, Rom. fie ‘be.SBJV . 3SG ’ and Pt. quier ‘want.SBJV . 3SG ’ and seja ‘be.SBJV . 3SG ’. In all these cases, the forms lost their original meaning and syntactic selection features to become formal markers of disjunctive coordination. Coordinating conjunctions must be distinguished from connectors or adverbial expressions whose meaning approaches the meaning of coordination but whose formal properties are very different. This is the case of adverbs with a contrastive meaning, such as Pt. porém, Sp. sin embargo, It. peraltro, Fr. cependant. Despite their adversative-like meaning, they exhibit formal properties that are different from adversative coordinative conjunctions: conjunctions occupy a fixed position inside the coordinated structure and must precede the second coordinated element, whereas connectors can occupy several positions, even parenthetical (5a); two conjunctions cannot occur in the same structural position, whereas connectors can co-occur with other conjunctions and connectors (5b); adverbial connectors typically link sentences and cannot link smaller constituents, whereas conjunctions can link both sentences and phrasal constituents (5c): (5) Sp.

a. Ella es lista. Su hermana, {*pero / sin embargo}, es más guapa. ‘She is clever. Her sister {*but / however} is more pretty.’ b. Él trabaja y {*pero / sin embargo} gana poco dinero. ‘He works and {*but / however} earns little money.’ c. un jefe amable {pero / *sin embargo} estricto ‘a nice boss {but / *however} strict’

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Formal properties allow us to include elements that traditionally have been considered coordinating conjunctions in the class of adverbial connectors. The main adverbial connectors related to coordination are the following: (i) Contrastive adverbial connectors: Pt. porém, todavia, contudo, entretanto, no entanto; Sp. sin embargo, no obstante, con todo; It. però, tuttavia; Fr. cependant; Cat. amb tot, així i tot, tanmateix. (ii) Explicative adverbial connectors: Pt. pois, que, porque, porquanto; Sp. pues; It. poi, cioè; Rom. căci. (iii) Consecutive or conclusive adverbial connectors: Pt. logo, pois (postponed), assim, portanto, por isso, por conseguinte, por consequência; Sp. luego, conque, por consiguiente, en consecuencia; It. quindi, perciò, dunque; Fr. donc; Rom. deci, așadar, prin urmare, în concluzie; Cors. però, paro. Even if some of these elements could be considered conjunctions, and not adverbial connectors, it is controversial whether they establish a coordinate or a subordinate relation. I will adopt a restrictive point of view and will reduce coordination to the three major types: adversative, copulative and disjunctive. In spite of the differences between coordinating conjunctions and adverbial expressions, it is possible for the same item to belong to both categories: Italian però behaves as an adversative adverbial expression in (6a), where it co-occurs with a copulative conjunction; Catalan però is an adverb with concessive meaning if it appears in a parenthetical position (6b); Romanian și ‘and’ is not only a copulative conjunction, but also an adverb of reinforcement or addition meaning ‘too, also’ (6c); the Spanish negative conjunction ni can behave as a negative polarity item meaning ‘not even’, and reinforce the negative meaning of the sentence (6d): (6) a. It.

Mario gioca bene e però perde. Mario plays well and nevertheless loses (Scorretti 1988, 231) b. Cat. Vaig dir-ho; sàpigues, però, que jo volia callar. I said it know however that I wanted be-quiet.INF c. Rom. Prietenii mei se duc în România de Crăciun. REFL go to Romania by Christmas friends my Mă duc și eu cu ei! REFL go too I with them d. Sp. El nuevo despacho no tiene ni teléfono. the new office not has not-even telephone

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1.3 Asyndesis Asyndesis (also called asyndeton or juxtaposition) is the linking of two or more elements of the same type without an overt coordinator. It typically arises in multiple coordination, see (7), where more than two elements are coordinated. The conjunction only appears in the last pair but it must be semantically recovered in each union, so that all the elements are interpreted as being conjoined in the same disjunctive or additive way. The conjunction can also be present in all the unions, resulting in an emphatic value: (7) Sp.

a. El jardinero plantó rosas, (y ) margaritas, (y) claveles y peonías. ‘The gardener planted roses (and) daisies (and) carnations and peonies.’ b. Ella no lee, (ni) escribe ni habla italiano. ‘She neither reads, (nor) writes nor speaks Italian.’ c. Su familia irá a la playa, (o) a la montaña o al campo. ‘His family will go to the beach, (or) to the mountain or to the countryside.’

The juxtaposition of two or more elements without any conjunction has been considered a form of asyndetic coordination as well. Juxtaposition usually links sentences (8a), but it can also involve sub-sentential elements, especially if they form part of an enumeration (8b): (8) Sp.

a. María va al cine, Pedro juega fútbol con sus amigos. ‘Maria goes to the movies, Pedro plays football with his friends.’ b. Él compró varias cosas para la cena: carne, pan, chocolate, vino. ‘He bought several things for dinner: meat, bread, chocolate, wine.’

It is controversial whether these structures can be considered coordinated constructions. Certainly, a conjunction could be inserted between the juxtaposed elements but there are essential interpretive differences between sequences with and without such a conjunction. On the one hand, any semantic relation between the two sentences in (8a) can be recognized, and all the three conjunctions y ‘and’, o ‘or’ and pero ‘but’ could possibly be recovered. However, the adversative conjunction cannot be absent in coordination in other cases, as in María es perezosa *(pero) ella es bastante lista ‘María is lazy but she is quite clever’. On the other hand, only the additive reading is available for (8b) although both a copulative y ‘and’ and a disjunctive o ‘or’ could be inserted. These facts suggest that the semantic relation between the juxtaposed elements is not due to the recoverability of a silent conjunction but it is inferred from the meaning of the linked elements. From a formal point of view, juxtaposed elements behave differently from coordinated elements as well: coordinated sentences can form an interrogative utterance

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but juxtaposed sentences cannot (9); similarly, juxtaposed elements cannot enter into subordination, as shown in the contrast of (10) from Matos (2003, 562), which suggests that a covert conjunction would not satisfy the disjunctive structure required by the context: (9) Sp.

a. ¿María va al cine y Pedro queda en casa? ‘Does María go to the movies and does Pedro stay at home?’ b. *¿María va al cine, Pedro queda en casa? ‘Does María go to the movies, does Pedro stay at home?’

(10) Pt.

a. Mudar para informática, continuar o curso de medicina são, entreoutras, alternativas que a Ana constantemente equaciona. ‘Moving to Computer Science, continuing the course of medicine, are, among others, alternatives that Ana often compares.’ b. *A Ana não sabe se há de mudar para informática, continuar o curso de medicina. Lit. ‘Ana does not know whether she must move to Computer Science, continue the course of medicine.’

Finally, Haspelmath (2007, 7) observes that the juxtaposition of subclausal elements rarely occurs with arguments, and “occurs mostly with modifying phrases, such as adverbials and adjectives”, as in (11). Nevertheless, the contrast in (12) suggests that asyndetic union involves some kind of non-exhaustive enumeration of semantically equivalent elements. When this meaning cannot be inferred, the asyndeton is impossible, as in (12a); contrarily, when the enumerative meaning can be inferred, the asyndeton is possible, as in (12b): (11) Fr.

Dans quel philtre, dans quel vin, dans quelle tisane noierons-nous ce vieil ennemi? ‘In which love potion, in which wine, in which herbal tea shall we drown this old enemy? (Baudelaire; quoted with English translation in Haspelmath 2007, 7)

(12) Fr.

a. On peut trouver son nouveau livre dans cette bibliothèque *(ou) dans la librairie du quartier. ‘One can find his new book in this library or in the bookstore of the neighborhood.’ b. On peut trouver son nouveau livre dans cette bibliothèque, dans la librairie du quartier, au supermarché, c’est-à-dire, partout. ‘One can find his new book in this library, in the bookstore of the neighborhood, at the supermarket, that is, anywhere.’

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These facts suggest that, although juxtaposition and coordination are restricted by a parallelism or symmetry requirement, their formal and semantic properties substantially differ in a way that should be taken into account and closely examined.

2 The nature of coordinated elements 2.1 Coordinable constituents Coordinating conjunctions barely restrict the category of the coordinated elements. Only adversative conjunctions impose restrictions on the category of the coordinated elements, since they do not link referential expressions, such as pronouns, NPs and DPs;9 these restrictions do not apply to adversative conjunctions under the scope of a negation (see Section 3.2 bellow): (13) Fr.

a. *Jean mais son père sont Jean but his father are b. Je n’ai pas vu Jean not seen Jean I NEG have ‘I did not see Jean but his father.’

venus. arrived mais son père. but his father

Coordination can link similar phrases of all grammatical categories in all the Romance languages: clauses headed by a complementizer – CPs – (14a); finite sentences – TPs – (14b) and verb phrases – VPs – (14c); coordination of adjectival phrases, adverbial phrases, prepositional phrases and nominal phrases is, as expected, also possible:10 (14) a. Pt.

Ele disse [ou [CP que resolvia pessoalmente o assunto] ou [CP que chamava um electricista para o resolver]], já não me lembro bem!

9 These restrictions extend to noun-like expressions, for example, deictic adverbs such as Sp. aquí ‘here’, entonces ‘then’, así ‘so’. 10 A noun phrase formed by coordination has person and number features, which are made visible by agreement with other words. In all Romance languages, the same person features hierarchy 1st > 2nd > 3rd operates: if several pronouns are coordinated, the verb exhibits the feature of the first pronoun in the hierarchy (cf. Fält 1972; Camacho 2003): (i) Sp. a. Él, tú y yo {sabemos/*sabéis/*saben} algo. P L /know.3PL } something he you and I {know.1PL /know.2PL b. Él, ella y tú {*sabemos/sabéis/*saben} algo. P L /know.3PL } something he she and you {know.1PL /know.2PL c. Él y ella {*sabemos/*sabéis/saben} algo. P L /know.3PL } something he and she {know.1PL /know.2PL

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b. Sp.

c. Fr.

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‘He said either that he solved the problem by himself or that he called an electrician to solve it, I don’t remember well!’ Quiere que [[TP su madre esté con él] y [TP su padre vaya con su hermano]]. ‘He wants his mother to stay with him and his father to go with his brother.’ Certaines gens [[vP s’abstiennent] ou [vP expriment un vote de protestation]]. ‘Certain people abstain or express a protest vote.’

Simple conjunctions – but not correlatives, see Section 5 – can link heads and intermediate projections of every lexical category: nouns (15a), verbs (15b), adjectives (15c), etc. This kind of coordination is usually interpreted as natural coordination, that is, coordination of elements that “habitually go together and can be said to form some conventionalized whole” (Stassen 2000, 8) or “conceptual unit” (Mithun 1988, 332): 11, 12 (15) a. Sp. b. Fr. c. It.

el [[N dueño] y [N señor]] de todas estas tierras ‘the owner and lord of all these territories’ Il [[V lavait] et [V rangeait]] ses chaussettes. ‘He washed and put away his socks.’ una [[A vasta ] e [A silenziosa]] biblioteca ‘a vast and silent library’

Coordination of functional words is more restricted than coordination of lexical items. In all Romance languages, it is possible to coordinate determiners (16a), prepositions (16b) and auxiliaries (16c); nevertheless, the conditions under which the coordination is possible are very strict and include a close semantic relation by which the conjuncts form a kind of conceptual unit: (16) a. Sp.

Se quedarán allí [dos o tres] días. ‘They will remain there two or three days.’

11 Malkiel (1959) used the term “binomial” to refer to this kind of coordinated elements. Natural conjunction differs from accidental conjunction (Wälchli 2005). 12 The coordination of identical elements – most usually nouns and verbs – has an intensive or quantitative value: (i) Sp. a. En otoño llueve y llueve. ‘In autumn, it rains and rains.’ b. Debes leer libros, libros y más libros. ‘You must read books, books, and more books.’

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b. It. c. Sp.

l’autostrada [da e per] Milano ‘the motorway from and to Milan’ Ella ni puede ni debe venir. ‘She neither can nor must come.’

Finally, coordination of elements smaller than words is possible, as shown in (17), but it is constrained by strict semantic, morphological and phonological conditions (see Bosque 1987; Moortgat 1987; Artstein 2005): (17) Sp.

a. acuerdos [pre o post] electorales ‘pre or post electoral agreements’ b. Dilo [lisa y llana]-mente. say.IMP .it plain and simple-ADV

The analysis of coordination of elements smaller than a phrase is controversial. Some authors consider that coordination is possible at the level of words and parts of words (Bosque 1987; Moortgat 1987; Camacho 2003; Artstein 2005; Abeillé 2006), but some others consider that lexical – and morphological – coordination can be reduced to phrasal coordination plus ellipsis (see Section 3.1).

2.2 Asymmetric coordination The parallelism requirement of coordination seems not to be satisfied in some cases, which can be subsumed under the name of asymmetric coordination. Two types of asymmetry can be distinguished: formal asymmetry occurs when the coordinating conjunction introduces an element without any parallel antecedent in the preceding context; semantic asymmetry occurs when coordination links parallel elements that are interpreted as if they were under a subordination relation. All the Romance languages have both types of asymmetric coordination, which produces special coordinated constructions that do not differ cross-linguistically. Semantically asymmetric coordination most usually involves sentences between which a relation of semantic dependency is established. This relation can be temporal, as in the examples in (18), because of the inference produced by the iconic nature of linear order (what is first said occurs first); the sentences cannot be reversed without reversing the temporal relation: (18) Sp.

a. Se puso el sombrero y salió de la casa. ‘He put his hat on and went out of the house.’ b. Salió de la casa y se puso el sombrero. ‘He went out of the house and put his hat on.’

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If the sentences contain static predicates, it can be inferred that the first coordinated sentence is the cause and the second is the consequence, as in (19); reversal is not possible in this case: (19) Sp.

a. Estaba cansado y se fue a dormir. ‘He was tired and went to bed.’ b. *Se fue a dormir y estaba cansado. ‘He went to bed and was tired.’

Finally, an asymmetric conditional relationship can be inferred between sentences coordinated by both copulative and disjunctive conjunctions. Copulative coordination is pragmatically associated with the inference that the condition is positive (20a), whereas in disjunctive coordination the condition is interpreted as negative (20b). The following Portuguese examples from Matos (2003) illustrate this pattern, which exists in all Romance languages (see, for example, Croitor 2014):13 (20) Pt.

a. Vestes esse casaco e transpiras! ‘You wear that jacket and you sweat!’ = Se vestes esse casaco, transpiras. = ‘If you wear that jacket, you sweat.’ b. Ou comes a sopa ou zango-me! ‘You eat the soup or I get angry!’ = Se não comes a sopa, zango-me. = ‘If you don’t eat the soup, I get angry.’

The coordination is formally asymmetric when the second coordinated element does not have a parallel similar constituent in the preceding context. Several cases can be distinguished. Firstly, asymmetric coordination occurs at the discourse level both in fragments and sentences. Fragments are non-sentential constituents, used most commonly in answers.14 All the copulative, disjunctive and adversative simple conjunc-

13 Camacho (1999, 2643) observes that the first conjunct behaves syntactically as if it was a conditional licensing polarity item such as el mínimo NP, which is not licensed by imperatives: (i) Sp. a. Haz el mínimo gesto y verás. smallest gesture and see.FUT . 2S G do.IMP the ‘Make the smallest gesture and you will see.’ b. Si haces el mínimo gesto, verás. ‘If you make the smallest gesture, you will see.’ c. *Haz el mínimo gesto. do.IMP the smallest gesture 14 Fragments are typical of spoken language. In general, all the types of asymmetric coordination examined in this section are by and large restricted to spoken varieties.

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tions can introduce fragments, in order to add some information (21a), to introduce new alternatives (21b) or counter-expected content (21c). This fact has been considered proof that coordinate conjunctions form a constituent with the second coordinated element (but not with the first), since the capacity of being a fragment is a property of syntactic constituents: (21) Sp.

[Context: A: María es una secretaria muy eficaz. ‘María is a very efficient secretary.’] a. B: Y una buena amiga. ‘And a good friend.’ b. B: O, más bien, una empleada modelo. ‘Or rather a model employee.’ c. B: Pero una persona muy antipática. ‘But a very unfriendly person.’

On the other hand, simple coordinating conjunctions can be used at the very beginning of the discourse to open a speech turn or start a reply. In this case, they introduce a sentence and behave as discourse markers. Secondly, asymmetric coordination occurs at the sentential level when a conjunction introduces a sub-clausal constituent that does not have a parallel element in the same sentence. Most Romance languages share this kind of asymmetric coordination, which is illustrated in the examples in (22): (22) a. Cat. b. Sp. c. Fr.

He comprat pomes, i a bon preu. ‘I bought apples, and at a good price.’ Ha trabajado y mucho. ‘He has worked, and a lot.’ Reagan a triomphé, mais de Carter, ce qui apparaît déjà comme ayant été le plus facile. ‘Reagan has won, but against Carter, which seems to be easiest.’ (Hobaek Haff 1987, 190)

The conjunctions have a focal value: they focalize the conjoined element, which contrasts with possible alternatives. In asymmetric coordination, the second conjunct can occupy a parenthetical position. This property relates it with parenthetical coordination, exemplified in (23). Recall that the coordinated element has a parallel antecedent in the previous context, but does not form a constituent with it since they are separated by a pause or even by a larger sequence (which is called discontinuous or deferred coordination, see McCawley 1982 and Reinhart 1991): (23) a. Fr.

Pierre n’a rien fait ni moi. ‘Pierre did not do anything neither me.’

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Na próxima semana vamos de feiras para o Algarve, ou na seguinte. ‘Next week, we will go on holidays to the Algarve, or the following.’

When asymmetric coordination involves a polarity item, as in (23a), it has been considered a special case of ellipsis similar to the ellipsis of a verbal phrase, which some scholars call stripping (see Vicente 2006 and Depiante/Vicente 2009): (24) a. Sp. b. Pt.

Ana vio la casa, pero no vio el coche. Ana saw the house, but not the car Ele foi ao Brasil este ano, e não foi ela. he went to-the Brazil this year and not she

The so-called comitative construction consists in a kind of asymmetric coordination of two conjuncts via a preposition. This construction exists in some American varieties of Spanish: a prepositional phrase introduced by the preposition con ‘with’ is interpreted as if it was coordinated with the subject; the prepositional phrase usually precedes the sentence and, crucially, triggers plural agreement of the verb (McNally 1993; Camacho 2000; Arrizabalaga 2010); agreement is actually the main formal argument to recognize comitative coordination:15 (25) Sp.

Con Juan vamos a los to the with Juan go.1PL ‘Juan and I go to the concerts.’

conciertos. concerts

According to Tesnière 1951 (cited in Haspelmath 2007, 34), many dialects of northwestern France have an asyndetic construction with copulative meaning. This construction consists in a plural nominal phrase with two nouns, such that the first includes the second: nous deux Jean ‘Jean and I’ (lit. ‘we two Jean’). This construction is semantically asymmetric, since it does not form a sum expression of the conjoined elements, but expresses that the second is included in the first.

3 The formal analysis of coordination 3.1 Binarist vs non binarist analyses The symmetric properties of coordination have intrigued syntactic analyses trying to formalize the internal structure of coordinated phrases. Two main lines of analysis must be distinguished.

15 See Colaço (2004) on comitative coordination in Portuguese.

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a) Coordinated structures are exocentric and conjunctions are not heads. This line of analysis considers that the coordinated constructions do not have a head, and result in the union of two or more elements without establishing any hierarchy between them. The status of the conjunction is that of a nexus or link, with the same structural level as the coordinated elements. This analysis starts from Dik (1968) and has been assumed in frameworks such as Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard/Sag 1994), Lexical-Functional Grammar (Bresnan 2000) and Categorial Grammar (Bayer 1996; Steedman 2000). Leaving aside some formal details, this analysis can be schematized as in (26), where Conj represents any coordinating conjunction and XP any phrase. This analysis captures the intuition that coordinated phrases behave like each of the coordinated elements: (26) [XP XP

Conj

XP]

b) Coordinated structures are endocentric and conjunctions are heads. This line of analysis has been developed under the framework of Generative Grammar since the late 1980s (Munn 1993; Bosque 1994; Kayne 1994; Johannessen 1998; Camacho 2003, among others). According to this view, the structure of coordinated phrases is always binary and conforms to the general structural representation of phrases: the conjunction is a head that takes a complement and a specifier. The relation between the coordinated elements is asymmetric, since the conjunction and its second term form a phrasal unit:16 (27) [Conjunction Phrase XP [Conj’ Conj [ XP ]]] A first line of defense for the binarist analysis comes from the asymmetries between the coordinated terms. Coordinating conjunctions block case assignment by an external head (Goodall 1987, 47–48), and the second term cannot surface in oblique form but must do so in the unmarked, nominative form:17 (28) Sp.

a. para for / para / for

mí me.OBL mí me.OBL

/ para él y / for he.NOM and y él and he.NOM

yo I.NOM

16 Munn (1993; 2000) proposes that only the second conjunct of a coordinate structure is a ConjP and that it is adjoined to the first conjunct; Progovac (1998) proposes that all conjuncts are ConjPs and that they are adjoined to an empty head. Cf. Schachter (1977) for a binarist analysis of coordination avant la lettre. He argues that a closer relation between the second coordinated elements exists. 17 In general, Spanish avoids asymmetric coordination and opts for coordinating two PPs in all the cases, cf. para él y para mí ‘for him and for me’, para mí y para él ‘for me and for him’, etc.

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b. *para él for he.NOM

y mí and I.OBL

/ *para / for

yo I.NOM

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y él and he.NOM

The conjunction has a closer relation with the second conjunct than with the first one; this explains that fragments (cf. (21) above) and asymmetric coordination (cf. (22) and (23) above) never result in a sequence formed by the first coordinated element plus the conjunction (Johannessen 1998).18 Another piece of evidence for this analysis comes from the features provided by the conjunction, which result in the coordinate structure not having the same properties as any of the coordinated elements. In Spanish, bare nouns cannot occupy subject positions, but conjoined ones can, showing that the conjunction must be present at the level of the derivation where the thematic relations hold (cf. Bosque 1996): (29) Sp.

a. *Hijo permaneció poco tiempo de visita. son stayed little time of visit b. Madre e hijo permanecieron poco tiempo de visita. mother and son stayed little time of visit

However, the binarist analysis of coordination must face the question of which type of heads conjunctions are. The lack of selectional requirements for coordinated terms and the fact that the coordinated structure shares the same syntactic properties as the coordinated elements can only be explained by considering that conjunctions are underspecified heads, which behave as if they were transparent for categorial features. This is the proposal of Camacho (2003) for copulative coordination. Exocentric analyses do not face this problem because they consider that conjunctions have no nuclear status and, therefore, they cannot contribute to the construction’s category. Exocentric analyses accept coordinated structures with more than two members at the same structural level, so that a phrase like Juan y María y Luis would have a structure similar to that of (30) (Ross 1967, 88–92; Dik 1968; Jackendoff 1977, 51; Franchini 1986 among others). By contrast, binarist analyses consider that coordinations with more than two members are coordinate structures containing two conjuncts, one of which is a coordinate structure (see Kayne 1994, 57 and Johannessen 1998, ch. 4.6). In an endocentric approach, the two possible readings for the phrase Juan y María y Luis would be due to a structural ambiguity, represented in (31); in an exocentric approach, the two possible readings would be semantic but not syntactic:

18 In Johannessen’s (1998) analysis, the Latin enclitic conjunctions -que ‘and’ and -vel ‘or’ can be explained as the result of a head movement (cf. Populi provinciaeque liberatae sunt. ‘The people and the provinces were liberated.’).

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(31) a. [ConjP Juan [Conj’ y [ConjP María [Conj’ y Pedro]]]] b. [ConjP [ConjP Juan [Conj’ y María]] [Conj’ y Pedro]] Finally, correlations are somewhat problematic for the binarist approach. As Borsley (2005, 473–474) notes, phrases with initial conjunction like et Paul et Marie ‘both Paul and Marie’ are a challenge for analyses that consider conjunctions to be heads, but follow naturally from an analysis that considers them as adjuncts to XP, like that of Sag et al. (1985): (32) [DP [DP Conj DP ] [DP Conj DP]] However, the exocentric analysis does not capture the differences between simple and correlative conjunctions. As we will see below, the second has semantic properties that the first lacks. Several authors attribute these differences to the role the first conjunction plays in the structure (Bosque 1994; Sánchez López 1995; de Vries 2005, among others), which is argued to be related to a specific head.

3.2 Coordination and ellipsis The relationship between coordination and ellipsis is important for two related reasons: on the one hand, ellipsis has been a way to explain some unexpected cases of coordination; on the other, the parallelism requirement for coordinated elements is a necessary condition for ellipsis. Ellipsis is a grammatical process that results in gaps in a sentence, which have no phonetic realization but contribute to the interpretation. Ellipsis can be verbal (if it involves the verb or the verb plus some complements) or nominal (if it involves a noun or a noun plus some complements). The most important requirement for ellipsis is parallelism, and coordinated structures fulfil this requirement, so that coordination links parallel phrases and ellipsis deletes the common material. However, not all cases of ellipsis are specific of coordinated structures. Coordination is a necessary condition for the cases of ellipsis known as gapping and coordination reduction. Both gapping and coordination reduction occur inside a coordinated construction, where one of the conjoined terms is a sequence of elements that do not form a syntactic constituent outside coordination, that is, coordination handles sequences that would not be constituents in any other case as true constituents. On the other hand, in both gapping and coordination reduction, some silent

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material must be recovered in one of the conjuncts from the other conjunct in order to fully interpret the sentence. It is the nature of the silent material that must be recovered that differentiates gapping from coordination reduction: gapping always involves verbal ellipsis, whereas coordination reduction can involve either verbal or nominal ellipsis. The examples in (33) illustrate some canonical cases of Gapping. In all of them, the second conjunct of coordination lacks a verb that is recovered from the first conjunct. They have been analyzed as the result of the ellipsis of the verb (or the ellipsis of the verb plus some arguments) in the second conjunct. The ellipsis is only possible if some remnant remains, whether an argument (33a) or an adjunct (33b). The remnant material has a contrastive interpretation: remnants before the gap are interpreted as contrastive topics and remnants after the gap are interpreted as contrastive focus.19 (33) Sp.

a. Él toca el violín y ella toca el piano. he plays the violin and she the piano b. Él toca el violin desde pequeño he plays the violin since small desde el pasado año. y ella toca el violín and she since the past year ‘He has played the violin since he was young and she for the past year.’

The examples in (34) illustrate some canonical cases of Coordination Reduction, where coordination links two conjuncts that are not usually constituents: in (34a), each coordinated element contains two arguments; in (34b), each conjunct contains a subject plus a verb, leaving the direct object outside the coordination. All the material after the conjunction is interpreted as contrastive focus. (34) a. Sp.

Juan Juan y and

compró bought [a Pedro to Pedro

[[a María un libro] to María a book una pluma]]. a pen

19 Brucart/MacDonald (2012) observe that the gap can be transitively interpreted in a series of three verbs, where the first provides the content for the second two (Él toca el violin, ella el saxo y su hijo la trompeta. ‘He plays the violin, she the saxo and their son the trumpet.’). The gap can also contain material that is discontinuously arranged in the antecedent, as in the Catalan example L’Enric regalà a la Maria un disc de Krahe i el Miquel regalà a la Neus un llibre de Monzó, where the indirect objects precede the direct objects. Brucart (1987) and Coppock (2001) propose that the remnant right-adjoins higher in the structure, allowing for the target of deletion to form a unitary constituent.

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b. Sp. c. Fr.

[[María adora] y [Juan odia]] las películas de terror. María loves and Juan hates the movies of horror Le président [[apprécie ] et [approuve votre proposition]]. the president appreciates and approves of your proposal

An analysis in terms of ellipsis would face the problem that the gap must be recovered anaphorically in some cases and cataphorically in some others: (35) a. Sp. b. Sp. c. Fr.

Juan [[VP compró a María un libro] y [VP compró a Pedro una pluma]]. [[IP María adora las películas de terror ] y [IP Juan odia las películas de terror]]. Le président [[VP apprécie votre proposition] et [VP approuve votre proposition]].

Some alternative analyses without ellipsis have been proposed for both gapping and coordination reduction. On the one hand, a movement analysis has been proposed for coordination reduction, according to which the gaps are not the result of ellipsis but of the movement of some constituent to the right, by Right Node Rising or Sideward Movement (Nunes/Uriagereka 2000; Nunes 2001; Fernández Salgueiro 2008), or by an Across-the-board Movement (Goodall 1987; Johnson 2009): (36) a. Sp. b. Fr.

[[IP María adora __i ] y [IP Juan odia __i]] las películas de terrori. Le président [[VP apprécie ___i ] et [VP approuve __i]] votre propositioni.

Movement analyses are not unproblematic. Brucart/MacDonald (2012) observe that the subject arising from the first conjunct in gapping constructions violates the Coordinate Structure Constraint (Ross 1967) and the Across the Board rule application (Williams 1978), since its counterpart in the second conjunct is not involved in any movement operation. Similarly, Abeillé (2006, 12) points out that this analysis faces the problem of moving elements that cannot be moved in any other circumstances; for example, prepositional phrases are islands for extraction in all Romance languages – hence the ungrammaticality of (37a) –, and therefore the example in (37b) should be ungrammatical if movement is involved. Abeillé also notes that the two conjuncts can have different polarities, and the second one licenses the polarity of the shared element; the ungrammaticality of (38b) is due to the fact that de flexion casuelle is a negative polarity item; since (38a) is grammatical, an analysis that moves the NPI from the first conjunct is not possible: (37) Fr.

a. *Quelle propositioni which proposition

Marie votera-t-elle Marie vote.FUT . 3SG -she

contre __i? against

Coordination and correlatives

b. Marie votera Marie vote.FUT . 3SG et Paul votera and Paul vote.FUT . 3SG (38) Fr.

pour for contre against

votre your

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proposition. proposition

a. Il y a des langues it there have.3SG ART . INDEF . PL languages et des langues qui ont __i which have.3PL and ART . INDEF . PL languages qui n’ont pas de flexion casuellei. which NEG have.3PL not of inflection case b. *Il y a des langues it there have.3SG ART . INDEF . PL languages qui ont de flexion casuelle. of inflection case which have.3PL

Construction-based approaches of gapping assume that neither movement nor deletion is involved, but only semantic reconstruction of ellipsis. Abeillé/Bîlbîie/Mouret (2014) propose this kind of analysis for gapping in Romance languages, focusing on French and Romanian. It is controversial whether coordination is a sufficient or a necessary condition for other cases of ellipsis, such as TP ellipsis and Sluicing. TP ellipsis consists in the ellipsis of the verbal phrase after a polarity item, as illustrated in (39a,b). López (1999) shows that TP ellipsis in Spanish includes parallel and contrastive requirements with respect to the antecedent: on the one hand, the relation between the elided material and its antecedent must be paratactic, so that TP ellipsis is not possible in subordinated contexts;20 on the other hand, the element preceding the polarity item must be interpreted as a topic (see Depiante 2004; Saab 2010 among others). (39) Sp.

a. Juan Juan pero but

no not Alex Alex

invitó a María a la invited to María to the sí invitó a María a la fiesta. yes

fiesta, party,

20 Ellipsis after a polarity item can only occur in a subordination context if the antecedent and the clause containing the gap are in a coordinate relation and the subordinating predicate is an assertive predicate (ia); TP ellipsis is not possible in any other subordinate context (ib): (i) Sp. a. Luis está preocupado pero yo creo que María no está preocupada. Luis is worried but I think that María not b. *Luis va a la fiesta si María no va a la fiesta. Luis goes to the party if María not

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b. A María la to María her

vieron saw.3PL

pero but

a Luisa to Luisa

no la vieron. not

Finally, Sluicing is a special case of TP ellipsis, which occurs after a wh-phrase (40a) or after certain auxiliary verbs, such as modal, aspectual or causative verbs (40b). Sluicing differs from general cases of TP-ellipsis in that it is possible not only in coordinated constructions, but also in subordinate clauses (40c) (see Ross 1967; Depiante 2001; Merchant 2001, among others): (40) Sp.

a. Ana ha salido, pero yo no sé con quién ha salido. ‘Ana has gone out, but I do not know with whom.’ b. Él intentó entrar en el edificio, pero no pudo entrar. ‘He tried to enter into the building but he could not.’ c. Tocar el piano es fácil si sabes cómo tocar el piano. ‘To play the piano is easy if you know how.’

4 Semantic aspects of coordination 4.1 The interpretation of copulative coordination The additive meaning of copulative conjunctions makes the coordinated phrase denote a conjunct or sum, which exhibits quantificational properties similar to that of plurals. The fact that a conjoined phrase denotes a plural is formally seen by plural agreement with the verb (Ella y él son amigos. ‘She and he are friends.’) and pronouns (El cuadro y la mesa los vendimos a buen precio. ‘The picture and the table, we sold them at a good price.’).21

21 Exceptions are due to interpretive reasons, not all of which are well known. It has been noted (RAE/ ASALE 2009, 337m) that in Spanish a coordinated subject can optionally have a singular verb if it is interpreted as only one thing (ia,b), that is, if they are interpreted as “natural coordination” (see Section 2.1 above). This reading is mandatory if two or more nouns are coordinated under the same determiner (ic). This pattern arises in most Romance languages, cf. the Portuguese example in (ii): (i) Sp. a. El optimismo y la euforia de los primeros momentos {había / habían} pasado. ‘The optimism and the euphoria of the first moments {had.3SG / had.3PL } gone away.’ b. Le {faltaba / faltaban} tiempo y paciencia. time and patience him {lacked. 3SG / lacked. 3PL } ‘He was lacking time and patience.’ c. Su jefe y amigo {saludó / *saludaron } efusivamente. his boss and friend greeted.3SG / greeted.3PL effusively ‘His boss and friend greeted warmly.’

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Like pluralities, conjoined structures can be interpreted collectively, distributively or cumulatively. In collective readings, the plurality behaves as a group, to which the predicate is attributed as a unit. Coordination interpreted collectively can be found with arguments of symmetric predicates (41a) and predicates that select a plurality (41b): (41) Sp.

a. Juan y Pedro {son hermanos / se parecen}. ‘Juan and Pedro {are brothers / are alike}.’ b. Las circunstancias reunieron al padre y al hijo. ‘The circumstances reunited the father and the son.’

A distributive reading consists in interpreting the conjunct as a reunion of individuals such that each of them separately participates in a separate event. The sentences that contain a coordinate phrase with distributive reading are logically equivalent to the coordination of two sentences: The sentence Él y ella estudian música ‘He and she study music’ is equivalent to ‘He studies music and she studies music’. A cumulative reading arises when the sum of events is equal to or bigger than the sum of individuals, but no exact correspondence between individuals and events is established. The sentence Juan, Pedro y María cantaron, bailaron y bebieron ‘Juan, Pedro and María sang, danced and drank’ can receive a cumulative reading, meaning that each person participated in at least one of the tasks. A cumulative reading requires the correspondence between two sums, which can be obtained from a coordinated predicate, as in the preceding example. Symmetric predicates, such as parecerse ‘to look alike’, do not allow for a cumulative reading because they denote transitive relations (that is, if A looks like B, and B looks like C, then A looks like C), and therefore the cumulative reading would be equivalent to the collective one. Similarly, singular non-symmetric predicates do not license cumulative readings because all the individuals must be involved in a single event, and therefore the distributive and cumulative reading would overlap: (42) Sp.

a. María, Pedro y Juan se parecen. (collective, #distributive, #cumulative) ‘María, Pedro and Juan are alike.’

(ii)

a. O meu companheiro e velho amigo está sempre disposto a ajudar-me. ‘My companion and old friend is always ready to help me.’ b. A pomba e o ramo de oliveira é o símbolo da paz. ‘The dove and the olive branch is the symbol of peace.’

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b. María, Pedro y Juan vinieron. (#collective, distributive, #cumulative) ‘María, Pedro and Juan came.’ Correlative conjunctions are always distributive. They are, therefore, incompatible with symmetric predicates and cannot license cumulative readings.22 (43) a. Fr. b. Sp.

*Et Jean et Marie se ressemblent beaucoup. Lit. ‘Both Jean and Marie are much alike.’ *Ni mi hermano ni mi sobrino se encontraron en el metro. Lit. ‘Neither my brother nor my niece met in the metro.’ (Camacho 1999, 2681)

Coordinated preverbal subjects require plural agreement with both collective and distributive predicates (44a); by contrast, postverbal subjects are compatible with singular verbs if the predicate is distributive (44b) but require plural agreement if the predicate enforces a collective reading (44c) (cf. Camacho 1999 for Spanish and Matos 2003, 586–588 for Portuguese):23 (44) Sp.

a. Un director y su ayudante a director and his assistant b. {Vino / vinieron} {came.3SG / came.3PL } c. {*Vino / vinieron} {came.3SG / came.3PL }

{vinieron / *vino} ayer. yesterday {came.3PL / came.3SG } un director y su ayudante ayer. a director and his assistant yesterday un director y su ayudante juntos. a director and his assistant together

22 The Spanish comitative construction is always distributive, too. The sentence in (ia) is not acceptable because the symmetric predicate parecerse ‘resemble’ requires a collective reading since it denotes only one event whose argument is the conjunct obtained from the sum of Juan and I. By contrast, the sentence in (ib) is possible because the coordination receives a distributive reading, since the predicate ir al cine ‘go to the movies’ can be interpreted as denoting two singular events for each Juan and I. (i) a. #Con Juan nos parecemos. RE FL . 1PL are-alike with Juan ‘Juan and I are alike.’ (expected, but impossible reading) b. Con Juan vamos al cine. to-the movies with Juan go.1P L ‘Juan and I go to the movies.’ 23 Singular agreement with postverbal coordinated subjects has been analyzed as the result of coordinate reduction (see Section 3.2 above), cf. Colaço (1999) for Portuguese, Camacho (2003) and Vicente (2010b) for Spanish.

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Distributive and collective readings can be made explicit in several ways: the adverb respectively and floating pronouns can mark distributivity expressing the exhaustive correspondence between two conjuncts, one of them being a conjoined construction (Milner 1987; Sánchez López 1995; 1997): (45) Sp.

a. Sara, Pedro y Juan comen piruletas, bombones y caramelos respectivamente. ‘Sara, Pedro and Juan eat lollipops, chocolates and candies respectively.’ b. Sus padres son él de Madrid y ella de Barcelona. ‘Their parents are he from Madrid and she from Barcelona.’

4.2 The interpretation of disjunctive coordination Disjunction coordinates elements that alternate, so the coordinated elements are interpreted as options between which choice is possible or necessary. Unlike copulative coordination, disjunctive coordination does not produce a sum, so it is incompatible with predicates that are symmetric and denote properties of sums; that’s why *Juan o Luis son hermanos ‘Juan or Luis are brothers’ is unacceptable. Therefore, the interpretation of disjunctive coordination is always distributive and involves a propositional reading. In other words, the options opposed by the coordinations imply the same number of propositions. That is why the sentence Iré al cine o al teatro ‘I will go to the movies or to the theater’ is interpreted as if it implies two alternatives, meaning ‘I will go to the movies or I will go to the theater’. Two readings are possible for disjunctive coordination. In the exclusive reading, the options are mutually incompatible and the choice between them is obligatory. The exclusive reading is usually interpreted as an exhaustive enumeration of the possible options that excludes any other possibility. Correlatives formed with o…o are always interpreted as exclusive disjunctives. The exclusive reading allows singular agreement both with preverbal and with postverbal subjects (cf. Jiménez Juliá 1995): (46) Sp.

a. Juan o Pedro {ganará / ganarán} Juan or Pedro {win. FUT . 3SG / win. FUT .3PL } b. {Ganará / ??ganarán} el concurso the contest {win. FUT . 3SG / win. FUT . 3PL } c. {Ganará / * ganarán} el concurso the contest {win. FUT . 3SG / will win.3PL }

el concurso. the contest Juan o Pedro. Juan or Pedro o Juan o Pedro. either Juan or Pedro

The simple conjunction o can admit this reading as well. However, it is more usual to interpret the simple conjunction as inclusive. In the inclusive reading, the options are not mutually excluded, so that it would be possible for several of the coordinated

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members to satisfy the predicate. The inclusive reading can be interpreted as an open list of options, some of which can be explicitly mentioned and others can be inferred, as in the Spanish sentence Para la cena, prepararemos carne o pescado o frutas o tortillas… ‘For dinner, we will prepare meat, or fish, or fruits, or omelettes…’. In the inclusive reading the semantics of disjunctive coordination resembles that of copulative coordination. In generic and modal contexts, they have a similar interpretation and, consequently, can alternate, as in Sp. Puedes usar el lápiz {y/o} la pluma indistintamente ‘You can use the pen and/or the pencil’. The disjunction can receive a metalinguistic interpretation when the alternative consists in two ways of denominating the same thing. Metalinguistic disjunction can be used to explain the meaning of an expression as in (47), or to offer an alternative expression. Italian has the complex word ovvero ‘or rather’ to express this meaning:24 (47) a. Cat. b. It.

el Paleolític o l’edat de la pedra tallada ‘the Paleolithic or the age of the carved stone’ l’Irlanda o / ovvero l’Isola verde ‘Ireland or the green island’

When combined with exact numerals, disjunction behaves like an approximative device and expresses an imprecise amount somewhere between the two values expressed, as in Había veinte o treinta personas allí ‘There were between twenty and thirty people there’. All Romance languages have disjunctive correlatives formed with elements different from the simple disjunctive conjunction. Some correlative constructions are formed by the grammaticalization of adverbs (cf. Sp. ora…ora, ya…ya, bien…bien; Pt. ora…ora; Gal. xa…xa; Cat. ara…ara; bé…bé, Rom. ori…ori). Others are formed by the grammaticalization of verbal forms (cf. Sp. sea…sea, Pt. seja…seja, Fr. soit…soit, It. sia…sia, sia…che, Rom. fie…fie). These forms cannot be used as simple conjunctions. They mostly link sentences and verbal predicates, but they can also conjoin other phrases. They introduce alternatives that do not coincide temporally, and, in this sense, are mutually excluded. Traditional grammarians denominate these correlations as ‘distributive’. The status of this construction is controversial: it is not copulative because no addition is inferred, but the coordinated elements are not simply excluded, rather, they are said to occur alternatively at different times. This kind of coordination seems to express temporal alternation in particular.

24 Italian ovvero ‘or’ cannot occur in a sequence if this cannot be interpreted in a metalinguistic way: (i) Voglio comprare un dizionario {o/oppure /*ovvero} una grammatica. ‘I want to buy a dictionary or a grammar book.’

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4.3 Coordination and negation All Romance languages have a negative conjunction derived from Latin nec ‘and not’. This conjunction coordinates two or more elements under the scope of a negation. It can be interpreted in two ways: (48)

a. b.

NEG [A & B] [NEG A ] & [NEG B]

The negation of a disjunctive phrase is logically equivalent to the coordination of two negated propositions. That is, No come manzanas o peras ‘He does not eat apples or pears’ is logically equivalent to No come manzanas y no come peras ‘He does not eat apples and he does not eat pears’. This is the reason why ni can be interpreted in some cases as the negation of the disjunctive o (cf. Fält 1972, 48): Nadie compra ni vende ‘Nobody buys nor sells’ means the same as Nadie compra o vende ‘Nobody buys or sells’ and Nadie compra y nadie vende ‘Nobody buys and nobody sells’. Payne (1985) uses the term rejection to designate negative coordination, implying that it is neither a type of conjunction nor a type of disjunction. The correlative ni…ni always has a distributive reading, so it is not compatible with symmetric predicates: *Ni Juan ni Pedro se parecen uno a otro ‘Neither Juan nor Pedro resemble each other’ (Bosque 1994; see also Coseriu 1968 and Franchini 1986). The differences between the Romance descendants of Latin nec correlate with the cross-linguistic differences in the grammar of negation (↗12 Negation and polarity). Languages with double negation, such as French, always require that the negative ne precedes the verb (49a); the double negation excludes the use of pas (49b) but simple negation does not (49c). By contrast, in Spanish the negative no is necessary when ni follows the verb (50a), but not when it precedes it (50b): (49) Fr.

a. Il ne préparait ni ne dirigeait les attentats. prepared nor NEG directed the attacks he NEG b. Il n’aime pas les chrétiens, not the Christians he NEG loves ni les juifs, ni les musulmans. nor the Jews nor the Muslims c. Il n’aime ni les chrétiens, neither the Christians he NEG loves ni les juifs, ni les musulmans. nor the Jews nor the Muslims

(50) Sp.

a. Él ni ha escrito he neither has written

una novela a novel

ni quiere escribirla. nor wants write.INF .it

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b. Ni neither

el padre the father

ni la madre nor the mother

conocen a su hijo bien. know to their son well

4.4 Adversative coordination Adversative coordination expresses contrast and opposition between two terms. From the formal point of view, adversative coordination is always binary, since it cannot relate more than two coordinated elements. It is always expressed by a simple conjunction, since there are no adversative correlations. In addition, adversative coordination has more selectional restrictions than copulative and disjunctive coordination, and these restrictions are related to the kind of opposition it establishes. Adversative coordination has two basic meanings: a contrastive meaning and a corrective meaning. The contrastive meaning consists in the opposition of two ideas that are expected to be incompatible, so that the second term of coordination is a somewhat unexpected continuation of the first one, cf. (51). The corrective meaning consists in the substitution of a negated previous term, which is somehow erroneous, by another one that must be interpreted as the right one. This meaning arises in negative contexts, when the first member of the adversative coordination is under the scope of a negation, cf. (52): (51) a. Sp. b. Fr.

Ella estaba muy cansada, pero decidió trabajar un poco más. Elle était très fatiguée, mais a décidé de travailler un peu plus. ‘She was very tired, but decided to work a little more.’

(52) a. Sp. b. Fr.

Ella no escribía para conseguir fama, sino para divertirse. Elle n’écrivait pas pour obtenir la gloire, mais pour s’amuser. ‘She did not write to get fame, but for fun.’

The contrastive meaning in (51) derives from the opposition between the inference obtained from the first part of the coordination (since she was tired, one would expect her to stop working) and the second part of the coordination (she decided to work a little more). The second coordinated element does not deny the first, but the expectation inferred from it. By contrast, the corrective meaning in (52) does imply the denial of the first member of the coordination, which is substituted by the second one. In some languages, these two meanings are expressed by the same conjunction, cf. Fr. mais and It. ma. Other languages have specific conjunctions for each meaning. This is the case for Ibero-Romance languages, which have forms involving the negation no for denial (Sp. and Cat. sino, Gal. senón, Pt. senão), and for Romanian, which uses the form ci. In addition to contrastive and corrective meanings, adversative coordinators can have an oppositive meaning. Oppositive coordinators are used when there is a contrast

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between the two coordinated terms, without there being any conflicting expectations. Most Romance languages can use either copulative conjunction or adversative conjunction to express this meaning. Only Romanian seems to have specific devices to express this kind of contrast. The Romanian conjunction iar ‘but/and’ is used to link sentences and clearly has an adversative meaning. According to Cojocaru (2003), the difference between și and iar is that the latter integrates and equates two elements, whereas the former integrates and contrasts two elements simultaneously, which are usually sentences; the adversative conjunctions dar/însă differ from iar in that in the latter case the second proposition is interpreted as counter-expected:25 (53) Rom. a. Dan împodobește pomul Dan decorates the-tree b. Dan împodobește pomul, Dan decorates the-tree c. Ți-am explicat you.DAT -have.1SG explained

și Maria îl ajută. and Maria him.ACC helps iar Maria gătește. whereas Maria is-cooking de ce, dar tu nu înțelegi. why but you not understand

It is possible to distinguish three different systems of adversative conjunctions in Romance languages (see Table 3 below). The first system has different adversative conjunctions for each of the three main adversative meanings. Only Romanian represents this type.26 The second type has two different conjunctions, one for opposition

25 Cojocaru (2003) points out that in normal usage, there is a tendency to use iar instead of și when relating two actions expressed by clauses, even if the contrast is not very strong (in other words, there is a tendency for iar to accept copulative meaning). 26 Spanish mientras (que) and Italian mentre ‘whereas’ can be used to express the opposition between two sentences. The coordinative use of Italian mentre has been noted by Scorretti (1988, 238–239); mentre alternates with copulative e ‘and’ (i). The Spanish temporal conjunction mientras (que) can be used with adversative meaning to express opposition as well, as in (iia); in this case it can alternate with both the copulative and the adversative conjunctions; if the denial of an expectation is involved, only pero is possible (iib): (i) It. I ragazzi sono pieni di qualità: Mario è bravissimo in matematica, Clara sa suonare magnificamente, mentre/e Alessandro, il più piccolo, ha il bernoccolo delle lingue. ‘The kids are full of qualities: Mario is very good at mathematics, Clara can play magnificently, while Alessandro, the youngest one, has the gift of tongues.’ (ii) Sp. a. Tú fuiste al teatro ayer you went to-the theater yesterday {mientras que /y /pero} yo iré mañana. whereas and but I will-go tomorrow b. Yo te explico por qué, why I you.DAT explain

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and contrast, and the other for correction; all Ibero-Romance languages belong to this type. Finally, all central Romance languages – Italian, French, and the minor surrounding language varieties – have only one conjunction to express all the semantic possibilities of adversative coordination. Table 3: Adversative conjunctions in Romance languages

Rom. Sp. Pt. Cat. Gal. Fr. It. Occ. Cors.

oppositive

contrastive

corrective

iar

dar / însă

ci

pero, mas mas però mais, pero (però, eppure)

sino senão sinó senón mais ma mai ma

(bensì) (bensì, bè sì)

Both Romanian and the Ibero-Romance languages have different conjunctions for contrastive and corrective uses. In Romanian dar/însă ‘but’ contrast two entirely independent elements (54a), whereas ci ‘but’ is used to underline the opposition between the focus of a previous negation and the second conjunct introduced by the conjunction; the previous negation can precede the verb (54b) or be attached to the first conjunct, as in (54c) (cf. Irimia 2008): (54) Rom. a. Eu îmi petrec Crăciunul în România, {dar/însă} aș fi vrut să mă duc în Franța. ‘I spend Christmas in Romania but I would like to go to France.’

{*mientras que /pero } tú no lo entiendes. whereas but you not it.ACC understand However, mentre and mientras (que) cannot be considered coordinate conjunctions, since the clauses they introduce can precede the other conjunct, which is not possible for full coordinate conjunctions: (iii) a. It. {Mentre /*Ma} Alessandro è bravissimo in matematica, whereas /but Alessandro is very-good in maths Clara sa suonare magnificamente. Clara can play magnificently b. Sp. {Mientras que /*Pero} tú fuiste al teatro ayer, whereas but you went to-the theater yesterday yo iré mañana. I will-go tomorrow

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b. Eu nu-mi petrec Crăciunul în România, ci mă duc în Franța. ‘I do not spend Christmas in Romania, but I go to France.’ c. Vin nu mâine, ci poimâine. I-come not today but tomorrow ‘I will not come today but tomorrow.’ The same contrast exists in Ibero-Romance languages between contrastive and corrective conjunctions. However, Spanish, Catalan and Galician differ from Romanian and Portuguese in that the corrective conjunction must be followed by the complementizer que ‘that’ when the coordinated element is a clause containing a finite verb (55): (55) Sp.

a. No not sino but b. No not sino but

pasaré las Navidades I-will-spend the Christmas *(que) iré a Francia. that I-will-go to France pasaré las Navidades I-will-spend the Christmas (*que) en Francia. that in France

en España, in Spain

en España, in Spain

Italian occupies a special place in this respect. It belongs to the second type because it has one main adversative conjunction for both contrastive and corrective meaning, that is ma ‘but’. However, it also has a range of adversative conjunctions that have only one use: però and eppure only have a contrastive meaning (56a), whereas bensì only has a corrective meaning (56b). In addition, però differs from the other adversative forms in that it can behave as an adverbial expression, and co-occur with another conjunction (cf. examples of (5) above).27 (56) It.

a. Ana non è meno Ana not is less {ma / bensì / però / eppure} più intelligente di Carlo. {but} more intelligent than Carlo b. Siamo usciti con Mario, we-are gone-out with Mario {ma / *bensì/ però/ ?eppure} senza Francesca. {but} without Francesca

27 Spanish pero was an adverb in Old Spanish and it continues to be used as an adverb in some present-day American varieties (RAE/ASALE 2009, 31.10u). Cf. Manoliu-Manea (2014) for the use of Rom. iar ‘but’ as an adverb. Descendants of Lat. per hoc ‘by that’ and si non ‘if not’ without adversative meaning exist in some Romance languages: Fr. sinon ‘if not’ has a conditional negative semantics. Cors. però and paro ‘therefore’ have consecutive meaning.

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The contrastive meaning of adversative conjunctions has an argumentative basis. The coordinated elements contrast because the content of the second conjunct – or some content inferred from it – is different or opposite to some content inferred from the first coordinated element. The Spanish sentence Trabaja duro pero es feliz ‘He works hard but he is happy’ means that the fact of being happy contrasts with the expected consequence of the first conjoined element, considering that working hard is not a favorable circumstance for being happy. Such an inference is not based on the lexical meaning of the sentence but on cultural knowledge, shared information or individual beliefs of speakers. The argumentative nature of adversative coordination is responsible for the restrictions on the items it can link. Unlike copulative and disjunctive coordination, adversative conjunctions do not link items such as prepositions, determiners or individual morphemes if no argumentative relation can be established between these items. Nominal phrases cannot be contrasted unless they contain a quantifier: (57) Sp.

a. *Juan pero Ana admiran sus películas. Juan but Ana admire his movies b. Todos sus alumnos pero ninguno de sus vecinos all his students but none of his neighbors admiran sus películas. admire his movies

Corrective coordination is not based on argumentative relations. Negation is the unique semantic and formal prerequisite for the adversative coordination to be interpreted as corrective, since the first coordinated element must be in the scope of a negation. Several formal properties follow from this. Corrective conjunctions can link any category, from nominal phrases to prepositions (58a) and morphemic sub-parts of words (58b). In addition, a first conjunct agreement effect arises (compare with the examples of (46) above) (58c) (cf. Vicente 2010a): (58) Sp.

a. Él no vive de sino para su trabajo. ‘He does not live of but for his work.’ b. Los acuerdos no fueron pre sino postelectorales. ‘The agreements were not pre but postelectoral.’ c. No {llegó / *llegaron } el jefe sino sus empleados. his employees not {came.3SG / came.3PL } the boss but

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5 The limits of coordination: correlative coordination and other kinds of correlative constructions In the previous sections, some differences between simple coordination and correlatives appeared: correlatives conjoin maximal projections, but not words; copulative correlatives have only distributive readings; disjunctive correlatives have only exclusive readings. In addition, correlatives cannot enter under the scope of interrogation or imperatives (cf. Bîlbîie 2008): (59) It.

a. *O mangia o fa i compiti! ‘Either eat or do the homework!’ b. *O chi verrà o dove andremo? Lit. ‘Either who will come or where will we go?’

Correlatives obey a prosodic and discourse-related constraint by which each conjunct is emphasized and forms an intonational phrase. At the same time, the relation involved in the double constituent obligatorily receives a contrastive interpretation. Correlatives can have a symmetric or an asymmetric structure. All the Romance disjunctive correlatives are symmetric, as well as the copulative correlatives of French et…et ‘both…and’ and Romanian și…și ‘both…and’. All the main Romance languages, excepting French, have asymmetric correlatives meaning ‘both…and’, which have been created from the formal structure of an equality comparison. The asymmetric copulative correlative involves, firstly, the forms Sp./Pt./Gal./It. tanto, Cat. tant, Rom. atât preceding the first conjunct and, secondly, Sp./Pt./Gal. como, Cat. com, It. come, Sp. cuanto, It. quanto, Rom. cât şi or It. che, preceding the second and subsequent conjuncts.28 These items are also used in comparisons of equality, meaning ‘as

28 The correlative tanto…como/cuanto usually results in a binary coordination in Spanish; a threeterm coordination such as ??Tanto María como su madre como su hermana ‘both María and her mother and her sister’ appears deviant. Each one of the terms of the binary correlative coordination can be a coordinated element (ia), but the correlation cannot be a term in another coordinate structure (ib): (i) a. [tanto él] [como [su jefe y sus empleados]] both he and his boss and his employees (RAE/ASALE 2009, 2411) b. *[[tanto él] [como su jefe]] [y sus empleados]] both he and his boss and his employees According to Matos (2003, 563), tanto…como can link more than two coordinated members in Portuguese; this possibility exists also in Italian and requires that the second correlative element be the same for all the elements (ii) (Scorretti 1988, 249): (ii) Tanto Andrea, quanto Mario, quanto/*che/*come Giovanni sono rimasti completamente sconvolti. ‘Both Andrea, and Mario and Giovanni remained completely disturbed.’

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(many/much) … as’. In comparatives, the items tanto/tant/atât are demonstratives of quantity and cuanto/cât are relatives of quantity. Both have number and gender features when preceding a noun, whereas the items como/come/che are invariable conjunctions. The copulative correlative arises when the comparative structure loses the comparative meaning and acquires a copulative meaning; likewise, the comparative structure loses the agreement features and becomes an invariable form. In some cases, the structure can be ambiguous: (60) Sp.

Ana adora tanto leer novelas como escribir relatos cortos. a. Comparative reading: ‘Ana loves to read novels as much as to write short stories.’ b. Copulative reading: ‘Ana loves both to read novels and to write short stories.’

No ambiguity results when the related elements are nominal phrases, since tanto/ tant/atât agree with the noun in comparison (61a) but are invariable in coordination (61a’). In Spanish, the comparative tanto takes the short form tan when preceding adjectives and adverbs (61b), so that no ambiguity arises if the long form is used with these categories (61b’): (61) Sp.

a. Él tiene tantos libros como plumas. ‘He has as many books as pens.’ a.’ Él tiene tanto libros como plumas. ‘He has both books and pens.’ b. Ana es tan lista como guapa. ‘Ana is as clever as pretty.’ b.’ Ana es tanto lista como guapa. ‘Ana is both clever and pretty.’

The formal analysis of correlatives is controversial. On the one hand, it has been proposed that the two items in correlatives are conjunctions, but this analysis is at odds with the endocentric analysis of coordination. On the other hand, it has been proposed that only the second item of the correlation is a conjunction, whereas the first element is a focus particle (see Bîlbîie 2008, who applies this analysis to Romance symmetric correlatives, focusing on Romanian și…și ‘both…and’). It is very remarkable that the formal devices to express copulative correlatives in most Romance languages coincide with the ones used to build comparative correlatives. These constructions express a correlation between two progressions or ordering and, crucially, involve comparative items of superiority or inferiority. Most Romance languages use the comparative correlative tanto/tant/atât…cuanto/quanto/cât to introduce two sentences with a comparison item meaning ‘more’ or ‘less’. In (62), the crucial elements of the comparative correlatives are in boldface:

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Cuanto más leo, tanto más aprendo. how-much more read so-much more learn ‘The more I read, the more I learn.’ b. It. Fuma tanto più spesso smoke.3SG so-much more often quanto più ha da lavorare. how-much more have.3SG to work.INF ‘The more he has to work, the more often he smokes.’ c. Cat. Quant major és l’honor, how-much bigger is the honor tant major és la càrrega. so-much bigger is the career ‘The greater the honor, the bigger the career.’ d. Rom. Cu cât mașina merge mai repede, with how-much car-the goes more fast cu atât motorul face zgomot mai puternic. with so-much engine-the makes noise more strong ‘The faster the car goes, the louder the noise made by the engine is.’ (Cornilescu/Giurgea 2013, 456) e. Pt. Quanto mais trabalhador fores, how-much more hardworking be.FUT . SBJV . 2SG melhor aluno serás. better student be.FUT . 2SG ‘The harder you work, the better you will be as a student.’

(62) a. Sp.

Despite the formal similarity between comparative correlatives and copulative correlatives with tanto/tant/atât… cuanto/como/che/cât, these structures cannot be considered coordinated structures. Comparative correlatives can exhibit agreement and the order of the related elements can be reversed, which is not possible for coordination: (63) Sp.

a. Tanto más aprendo cuanto más leo. ‘I learn more the more I read.’ a.’ Cuanto más leo tanto más aprendo. ‘The more I read, the more I learn.’ b. tanto Juan como su padre / *como su padre, tanto Juan ‘both Juan and his father’ / lit. ‘and his father, both Juan’

In addition, substantial evidence has been adduced in favor of the subordinated status of the sentence introduced by cuanto/quanto/quant/cât (see Sánchez López 2010; 2014 for Spanish; Cornilescu/Giurgea 2013 for Romanian; Brito/Matos 2003 for Portuguese). The only parallel between copulative coordinates and comparative correlatives is that both are built on the basic structure of a comparison of equality.

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Comparative correlatives are subordinate structures that maintain the semantics and syntax of comparison, where the correlatives tanto/tant/atât and cuanto/quanto/ quant/cât are the differentials of the degree items meaning ‘more’ and ‘less’ (cf. Sánchez López 2010). Copulative correlatives are coordination structures where the forms tanto/tant/atât and cuanto/quanto/quant/cât/che/come/como constitute fixed forms without comparative meaning. Unlike most Romance languages, French comparative correlatives lack the formal structure of a comparison of equality and have, instead, the form of asyndetic coordination:29 (64) Fr.

a. Plus tu lis, plus tu comprends. ‘The more you read, the more you understand.’ b. Plus il écrit de livres, plus il devient célèbre. ‘The more books he writes, the more famous he becomes.’

In two main respects, the correlatives in (64) resemble coordinate phrases: they lack a subordinating item and the two clauses are both semantically and formally parallel. However, the semantic relation between the two sentences is asymmetric, since the first sentence is interpreted as a condition for the second one, and they are not reversible. If these sentences are in fact coordinated, they should be considered as a semantically asymmetric coordination (see Section 1.4 above).

6 Conclusion Coordination is expressed in Romance languages by means of both simple conjunctions and correlatives. The core system of formal devices to express coordination is very homogeneous within Romance. All Romance languages have forms derived from the Latin forms et ‘and’, aut ‘or’ and nec ‘neither’, and only Romanian has different forms, whose origins are controversial. All the Romance languages have a negative correlation, as well as disjunctive correlatives, formed by the repetition of simple conjunctions, or by the repetition of some lexicalized forms derived from verbs or adverbs. The two main areas of variation can be identified in the copulative correlatives and in adversative coordination. The first main difference between Romance languages concerns the form of the copulative correlatives. The creation of a copulative correlative from the comparative

29 French resembles English, which uses the correlatives the more/less…the more/less in comparative correlatives. The absence of subordinating elements and the parallel structure between both the correlatives and the clauses they introduce have been interpreted as evidence that comparative correlatives do not involve subordination but coordination; see Culicover/Jackendoff (1977), among many others.

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construction of equality, on the one hand, and the preservation of the correlation that consists in the repetition of the same copulative conjunction, on the other, radically differentiate Ibero-Romance languages from French, while Italian and Romanian have both solutions. This main point of variation correlates with the differences explained in Section 5 about comparative correlatives. The other main point of variation lies in the system of adversative coordination. The three meanings that adversative coordination can receive, viz., opposition, contrast and correction, are expressed differently in the Romance languages: all the central Romance languages – Italian, French, and regional languages and varieties of Italo-Romance and Gallo-Romance – have only one conjunction to express all the three meanings; the occidental peripheral varieties – all Ibero-Romance languages – have two conjunctions, one for the corrective meaning, and the other for the oppositive and the contrastive meanings. Only Romanian, the easternmost variety of Romance, has different adversative conjunctions for each of the three main adversative meanings. Despite the differences in the form of conjunctions and correlatives among the Romance languages, their semantic and syntactic properties are very similar. Coordination with simple conjunctions turns out to be much less constrained than coordination with correlatives: correlatives only link phrases, whereas simple conjunctions can link both phrases and smaller elements. Asymmetric coordination and ellipsis are possible in structures coordinated by means of simple conjunctions; as expected, correlatives always yield symmetric coordination. From the semantic point of view, simple conjunctions are compatible with both distributive and collective readings of coordination, whereas correlatives are systematically associated to distributive readings.

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Lakoff, Robin (1971), If’s, and’s and but’s about conjunction, in: Charles L. Fillmore/D. Terence Langendoen (edd.), Studies in Linguistic Semantics, New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 114–149. Lang, Ewald (1984), The Semantics of Coordination, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. López, Luis (1999), VP-ellipsis in English and Spanish and the features of auxiliaries, Probus 11, 263–297. Malkiel, Yakov (1959), Studies in irreversible binomials, Lingua 8, 113–160. Manea, Dana (2012), Conjuncția, in: Gheorghe Chivu et al. (edd.), Studii de istorie a limbii române: morfosintaxa limbii literare în sec. al XIX-lea şi al XX-lea, Bucuresți, Editura Academiei Române, 641–654. Manoliu-Manea, Maria (2014), Split grammaticalization: Romanian “iar”, adverb or conjunction, Philologica Jassyensia 10, 97–104. Matos, Gabriela (1995), Estruturas binárias e monocêntricas em sintaxe: algumas observações sobre a coordenação de projeções máximas, in: Actas do X Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, Lisboa, APL e Colibri, 301–315. Matos, Gabriela (2003), Estruturas de coordenação, in: Maria Helena Mira Mateus et al. (edd.), Gramática da Língua Portuguesa, Lisboa, Caminho, 549–593. Mauri, Caterina (2008), Coordination Relations in the Languages of Europe and Beyond, Berlin/ New York, De Gruyter. McCawley, James D. (1982), Parentheticals and discontinuous constituent structure, Linguistic Inquiry 13, 91–106. McNally, Louise (1993), Comitative coordination: a case study in group formation, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 11, 347–379. Meillet, Antoine (1958 [1915]), Le renouvellement des conjonctions, reprinted in: Antoine Meillet (1958), Linguistique historique et linguistique générale, Paris, Champion, 159– 174, originally published (1915) in: Annuaire de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études 48, 9–28. Merchant, Jason (2001), The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, Islands and the Theory of Ellipsis, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1890–1906), Grammaire des langues romanes, 4 vol., Paris, Welter. Milner, Jean-Claude (1987), Interpretive chains, floating quantifiers and exhaustive interpretation, in: Carol Neidle/Rafael A. Núñez Cedeño (edd.), Studies in Romance Languages, Dordrecht, Foris, 181–202. Mithun, Marianne (1988), The grammaticization of coordination, in: John Haiman/Sandra Thompson (edd.), Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 331–359. Moortgat, Michael (1987), Compositionality and the syntax of words, in: Jeroen Groenendijk/Dick de Jongh/Martin J. B. Stokhof (edd.), Foundations of Pragmatics and Lexical Semantics, Dordrecht, Foris, 41–62. Munn, Alan (1993), Topics in the Syntax and Semantics of Coordination, University of Maryland, Ph.D. dissertation. Munn, Alan (2000), Three types of coordination asymmetries, in: Kerstin Schwabe/Ning Zhang (edd.), Ellipsis in Conjunction, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1–22. Nunes, Jairo (2001), Sideward movement, Linguistic Inquiry 32, 303–344. Nunes, Jairo/Uriagereka, Juan (2000), Cyclicity and extraction domains, Syntax 3, 20–43. Oirsow, Robert van (1987), The Syntax of Coordination, London, Croom Helm. Orlandini, Anna/Poccetti, Paolo (2007), Les opérateurs de coordination et les connecteurs en latin et dans d’autres langues de la méditerranée ancienne, in: André Rousseau et al. (edd.), La coordination, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 189–224.

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Payne, John R. (1985), Complex phrases and complex sentences, in: Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description: Complex Constructions, vol. 2, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 3–41. Pollard, Carl/Sag, Ivan A. (1994), Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Chicago, IL, The University of Chicago Press. Progovac, Ljiljana (1998), Structure for coordination (I and II), GLOT International 3, 3–9. Pullum, Geoffrey/Zwicky, Arnold (1986), Phonological resolution of syntactic feature conflict, Language 62, 751–773. RAE/ASALE (2009) = Real Academia Española/Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, Nueva gramática de la lengua española, 3 vol., Madrid, Espasa Calpe. Reinhart, Tanya (1991), Elliptic conjunctions – non quantificational LF, in: Aka Kasher (ed.), The Chomskyan Turn, Oxford, Blackwell, 360–384. Rojo, Guillermo (1975), Sobre la coordinación de adjetivos en la frase nominal y cuestiones conexas, Verba 2, 193–224. Ross, John (1967), Constraints on Variables in Syntax, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Ph.D. dissertation. Rousseau, André (2007), La coordination: approche méthodologique, critique et raisonnée des questions essentielles, in: André Rousseau et al. (edd.), La coordination, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 17–60. Saab, Andrés (2010), Silent interactions: Spanish TP-ellipsis and the theory of island repair, Probus 22, 73–116. Sag, Ivan A., et al. (1985), Coordination and how to distinguish categories, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3, 117–171. Sala, Marius (2005), From Latin to Romanian: the Historical Development of Romanian in a Comparative Romance Context, Mississippi, University of Mississippi. Salvi, Giampaolo/Renzi, Lorenzo (edd.) (2010), Grammatica dell’italiano antico, Bologna, il Mulino. Sánchez López, Cristina (1995), On the distributive reading of coordinate phrases, Probus 7, 181– 196. Sánchez López, Cristina (1997), Sobre la interpretación distributiva de los sintagmas coordinados, in: Natàlia Català/María Bargalló (edd.), Proceedings of the IV Colloquium on Generative Grammar (Tarragona, 15.–18.03.1994), Tarragona, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 307–338. Sánchez López, Cristina (2010), Scalarité et corrélation: syntaxe et sémantique des corrélatives comparatives en espagnol, in: Pascale Hadermann/Olga Inkova (edd.), Approches de la scalarité, Genève, Droz, 135–168. Sánchez López, Cristina (2014), The left periphery of Spanish comparative correlatives, in: Andreas Dufter/Álvaro S. Octavio de Toledo (edd.), Left Sentence Peripheries in Spanish: Diachronic, Variationist and Comparative Perspectives, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 155–184. Schachter, Paul (1977), Constraints on coordination, Language 53, 86–103. Scorretti, Mauro (1988), Le strutture coordinate, in: Lorenzo Renzi (ed.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol. 1, Bologna, il Mulino, 227–273. Serra i Alegre, Enric (2002), La coordinació, in: Joan Solà et al. (edd.), Gramàtica del català contemporani, vol. 3, Barcelona, Empúries, 2181–2245. Solías Arís, María Teresa (1998), Coordinación sintáctica, Valladolid, Universidad de Valladolid. Stassen, Leon (2000), AND -languages and WITH -languages, Linguistic Typology 4, 1–54. Stassen, Leon (2001), Some universal characteristics of noun phrase conjunction, in: Frans Plank (ed.), Noun Phrase Structure in the Languages of Europe, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 761– 820. Steedman, Mark (2000), The Syntactic Process, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Tesnière, Lucien (1951), Le duel sylleptique en français et en slave, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 47, 57–63.

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19 Gender and number Abstract: This chapter discusses several issues concerning the morphosyntax of gender and number of Romance within the nominal group with a special focus on the morphological gender and number marking on nouns. Issues concerning gender are treated in Section 2, whereas Section 3 is dedicated to number marking in Romance. Finally, Section 4 discusses the assumption of the two functional projections inside Romance nominals, GenP and NumP.  

Keywords: gender, number, mass, neutro de materia, agreement  

1 Introduction The grammatical features of person, gender and number – which are proper to nouns and especially to pronouns – are often subsumed under the cover term phi-features. With respect to how agreement involving these phi-features is structurally established, Baker (2008) revealed a fundamental difference between person on the one hand, and number and gender on the other: within the Determiner Phrase (DP) there is no person agreement, but only agreement (or concord) in gender and number between the head noun and its modifiers (e.g. determiner, adjective). In this chapter we will concentrate on gender and number and will discuss some “peculiar” cases where DP-internal agreement does not take place in the expected way. Gender is treated in Section 2, whereas Section 3 is dedicated to number marking in Romance. The final Section 4 briefly discusses the assumption of the two functional projections inside Romance nominals, GenP and NumP.

2 Nominal gender in Romance Gender is a (lexico-)grammatical category dividing nouns into classes. In some languages, the different gender classes may be marked on the noun itself as well as on agreeing elements. In other languages, including the Romance ones, there is no (unambiguous) gender marking on the noun, gender classes are rather exclusively determined in terms of agreement, i.e. gender is exclusively a feature of agreement (cf. Hockett 1958; Corbett 1991). Moreover, on nouns denoting inanimate objects gender is completely arbitrary and stands in no relation to natural (or biological) gender and in a small number of masculine-feminine pairs gender distinction is rather related to denotational differences concerning size, shape or function (cf. Section 2.3). The parts of speech in Romance affected by gender agreement are determiners, pronouns,  

DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-019

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quantifiers, adjectives, passive participles and (in some Romance languages) past participles. Section 2.1 gives a cursory overview of the morphological markings of Romance nouns and of how they have evolved from (Vulgar) Latin. This is taken as the starting point for clarifying the relation between gender, declension class and inflectional noun endings. Section 2.2 is devoted to the phenomenon of mass marking or mass agreement in some Ibero-Romance and Italo-Romance varieties known as neutro de/ di materia. Section 2.3 discusses the genus alternans of Romanian (and other languages) where a third gender, i.e. neuter, seems to be present, while Section 2.4 is dedicated to gender mismatches, i.e. to those cases where a noun can trigger either grammatical/syntactic and/or semantic agreement. Section 2.5 presents some issues concerning gender in personal pronouns and Section 2.6 shows that syntactic locality seems to play a role in gender agreement.  



2.1 Gender, declension class and noun endings As is well-known, Latin neuter nouns were insufficiently distinctive in form from masculine (and feminine) nouns and, as standardly assumed, this caused the change from the Latin three-gender system to the Romance two-gender system (cf. Sections 2.2 and 2.3 for surviving neuters). Simplifying the diachronic facts, we can sketch the evolution as follows (cf. e.g. Alkire/Rosen 2010; Rudder 2012): leaving aside those well-known exceptions where the neuter plural form (e.g. folia ‘sheets’, ligna ‘(pieces of) wood’) was reinterpreted as feminine singular, Latin neuter nouns (e.g. vinum ‘wine’) were generally absorbed into the masculine gender (e.g. lupus ‘wolf’) as the modern languages developed. Some Romance languages mark this type of nowadays masculine nouns with /-o/ or /-u/ (e.g. Sp. vino / lobo, It. vino / lupo, Pt. vinho / lobo where -o is realized as [-u], Srd. binu / lupu and Asturian vinu / llobu), while the same nouns appear without morphological ending in other Romance languages: e.g. Cat. vi / llop, Fr. vin [vɛ͂ ] / loup [lu], Occ. vin / lop, Rom. vin / lup, Ladin (Fassa) vin / lọuf and Romansh (Puter, Upper Engadin) vin / luf. The picture is somewhat different for Latin nouns of the a-declension, e.g. petram ‘stone’: Nearly all Romance languages have continued to mark these feminine nouns with /-a/ (e.g. Sp. piedra, It. pietra, Srd. preda, BPt. pedra, Ladin (Fassa) pera, Romansh (Puter) pẹidra) or a weakened vowel (e.g. EPt. pedra [-ɐ], Cat. pedra [-ə] and Rom. piatră [-ə]). One well-known exception is French where feminine pierre [pjɛʀ] ‘stone’ has no (overt) ending, just like masculine loup and vin. Finally, Latin nouns with an accusative ending -em (e.g. feminine artem ‘art’ or masculine salem ‘salt’) show different outcomes in Romance languages: they end in a consonant in French (cf. art [aʀ] and sel [sɛl]) and Catalan (cf. art and sal), whereas they generally retain the final vowel -e in Standard Italian (cf. arte and sale). Instead, in Spanish and Portuguese final -e was sometimes deleted (especially after a dental or alveolar  





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consonant, cf. sal) and retained in other cases (cf. arte). With respect to the gender of these nouns, one can observe a switch either from masculine to feminine (e.g. Latin masculine salem > feminine sal in Spanish and Catalan) or from feminine to masculine (e.g. Latin feminine artem > masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural in Spanish). In Romanian feminine sare remained in the e-declension, whereas artă ([-ə]) belongs nowadays to the ă-declension. The result of this development is that the Romance languages show some correlation between the form of a noun and its gender. This correlation is however not perfect. With some exceptions, Spanish nouns ending in -o are prototypically masculine, while most nouns ending in -a are feminine (cf. Table 1). For nouns ending in (epenthetic) -e or Ø there is no relation at all to gender, they can be either masculine or feminine or both. Something similar holds also for Italian (cf. Table 2): only nouns showing the alternation singular -a vs plural -e can unambiguously be associated with gender. In all other cases there is no one-to-one correspondence between the nominal ending and gender, although there are some tendencies or preferences (cf. Section 2.2 for special cases). This is also true for Romanian (cf. Table 3): each declension class contains nouns from more than one gender (cf. e.g. Dobrovie-Sorin/Giurgea 2013, §16, for more details). In sum, gender has to be defined through the alternating forms of the agreeing elements and it is not systematically reflected in the morphology of the noun itself (cf. Corbett 1991). There are thus no suffixes which add gender information to the noun; in accordance with the declension class feature the noun rather receives a corresponding word marker (cf. Harris 1991). The nominal morphology of Romance languages shows a clear distinction between gender and inflectional (or declensional) classes. Furthermore, agreement involves gender, and never declension class (cf. Sp. la madre contenta ‘the happy mother’ vs *le madre contente). Table 1: Spanish gender classes (cf. Harris 1991)

MASC FEM MASC / FEM

I -o

II -a

III -e/Ø

hijo mano el/la testigo

día hija el/la turista

padre, sol madre, col el/la cónyuge

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Table 2: Italian gender classes (Dressler/Thornton 1996; D’Achille/Thornton 2003; Acquaviva 2008)

MASC

I

donna donne

SG PL

II

libro libri

mano mani

fiore fiori

chiave chiavi

PL

poeta poeti

ala ali

SG

uovo

SG PL

III

SG PL

IV V

SG

MASC / FEM

FEM

testimone testimoni

uova

PL

Table 3: Romanian gender classes (incomplete; Bateman/Polinsky 2010 based on Graur/Avram/ Vasiliu 1966, 81–82) I

II



-u/-w

-j/-Cj

-C

FEM

casă ‘house’







sare ‘salt’

MASC

tată ‘father’

codru ‘forest’ bou ‘ox’

tei ‘lime tree’ ochi ‘eye’

nuc ‘walnut tree’

soare ‘sun’

lucru ‘thing’ cadou ‘gift’

pai ‘straw’ ochi ‘fried egg’

amurg ‘dusk'

nume ‘name’

NEUT

III

In French, gender may still be explicit on the noun, although in a different way to other Romance languages. Some French nouns (and adjectives) have a so-called ‘floating’ (or latent) word-final consonant which remains covert in the masculine (e.g. chat [ʃa] ‘(male) cat’) while it surfaces in the feminine (e.g. chatte [ʃat] ‘(female) cat’). Lowenstamm (2012) argues that some French nominal roots are selected by a feminine profile which opens a CV-slot on the templatic tier: [Fem CV]. If this element is present, the word-final consonant of the nominal root surfaces as it is linked to the C-slot of [Fem CV]. The absence of [Fem CV], which represents the masculine profile, causes the floating consonant not to be overtly realized as it cannot be associated with a

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corresponding C-slot. However, similar to Spanish and Italian, there is no one-to-one correspondence between gender and a certain profile: the masculine or feminine profile of a noun can correlate with masculine or feminine gender (cf. (1a,b)) but does not necessarily do so (cf. (1c,d)) (Lowenstamm 2012, 390–393). (1)

a. Masculine profile and masculine gender, e.g. le vent ‘the wind’ CV tier C V | | Segmental tier v ã t → [vã]  



b. Feminine profile and feminine gender, e.g. la brasse ‘the breaststroke’ CV tier C V C V [Fem C V] | | | Segmental tier b ʀ a s → [bʀas]  





c. Masculine profile and feminine gender, e.g. la dent ‘the tooth’ CV tier C V | | Segmental tier d ã t → [dã]  



d. Feminine profile and masculine gender, e.g. le canot ‘the large dinghy’ CV tier C V C V [Fem C V] | | | | Segmental tier k a n o t → [kanot]  







2.2 Neutro de/di materia Some Ibero-Romance varieties (especially Central and Eastern Asturian and some Cantabric varieties, cf. e.g. Fernández-Ordóñez 2009, 44) as well as some centralsouthern Italo-Romance varieties (e.g. dialects of Campania, western Abruzzo, Basilicata and northern Puglia) have a set of mass/collective or rather non-individuated nouns which generally stem from Latin neuters and which show a special behaviour. In Central Asturian, for example, within masculine nouns the semantic distinction between individuation (or “count”, i.e. individual, countable entities; cf. e.g. Otheguy 1978 and Harley/Ritter 2002a,b for the concept of individuation) and non-individuation (or “mass”, i.e. uncountable substances) is morphologically marked on the respective noun (cf. (2a,b)). The form ending in -o is called neutro de materia (also neo-neutro) in Romance linguistics: neutro ‘neuter’, because (masculine and feminine) gender is not expressed, and de materia ‘of material’, because in most cases the noun is a “material name”. Furthermore, the adjective in (2a) agrees in gender with the noun and appears correspondingly as blencu ‘white’, whereas in (2b,c), where the  



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intended referent is non-individuated, there is no gender agreement, but rather what traditionally is called mass (neuter) agreement (cf. e.g. Hualde 1992; Corbett 2004; Fernández-Ordóñez 2009). (2)

Central Asturian: Neutro de materia (NM ) [individuated] a. [ el pilu blencu ]DP DET . M . SG hair.M . SG white.M . SG ‘the (single) white hair’ [non-individuated] b. [ el pelo blanco ]DP DET .M . SG hair.M . NM white.NM ‘(the) white hair’ ye blanco [non-individuated] c. [ el pelo ]DP DET . M . SG hair.M . NM be.3SG white.NM ‘the hair is white’ (Neira Martínez 1955; Cano González 1992; Hualde 1992)

In contrast, the definite article or determiner as well as other prenominal elements do not show any formal variation. The examples in (3) show that the prenominal adjective does not enter into mass agreement, although the reading of the DP is nonindividuated and although the adjective has per se a specific form for the neutro de materia. These examples suggest that there exists a morphosyntactic prenominal/ postnominal agreement asymmetry, since independently of the conceptualization individuated vs non-individuated, there is always gender agreement in the prenominal DP-domain in Central Asturian. However, postnominally and DP-externally, we find mass agreement if the referent of the DP is conceived as non-individuated, and gender agreement if it is individuated. (3)

a. buena/*bueno leche good.F . SG /*good.NM milk(F ).SG ‘good milk’ (Fernández-Ordóñez 2009, 45) b. duru/*duro fierro hard.M . SG /*hard.NM iron(M ).NM ‘hard iron’ (Arias Cabal 1999)

Example (2a) further shows that the masculine ending -u triggers metaphony in the noun as well as in the adjective. This kind of metaphony is not a purely phonological phenomenon but rather a morphophonological one. A high vowel does not trigger per se raising of another vowel, and metaphony occurs solely if the high vowel (here MASC -u) is an inflectional ending that stands in opposition to a mid-vowel (here NM -o) (cf. e.g. Neira Martínez 1982; Dyck 1995; Campos Astorkiza 2007; cf. Maiden 1991 for Italian; cf. e.g. Krefeld 1999 for a critical discussion).

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The concrete manifestation of mass marking varies considerably from one Romance variety to another. In what follows, we will quickly present the three types discussed in Kučerová/Moro (2011) for Italo-Romance varieties. Varieties of the first type allow mass marking via morphological augmentation accompanied sometimes by morphological alternation on pronouns, nouns and/or determiners (cf. (4)). (4)

a. Demonstrative (Servigliano, Marche) MASC (SG ) kwíst-u kwíss-u kwíll-u FEM (SG ) kwést-a kwéss-a kwíll-a NM kwést-o kwéss-o kwíll-o ‘this’ ‘that’ ‘that (over there)’ b. Nouns (Borgorose, Lazio) MASC (SG ) /ferr-u/ vs NM /fɛrr-o/ ‘iron implement’ ‘iron’ c. Definite article (Servigliano) MASC (SG ) l-u vs NM l-o (Kučerová/Moro 2011, 3)

The varieties of the other two types have generally no inflectional affixes for nominal categories due to neutralization of the atonic final consonant (which surfaces usually as [ə]). Thus, mass marking is achieved via other means. In (5a), mass comes to be expressed by different forms of the determiner (cf. e.g. Penny 1994 for more examples), while in (5b) the masculine definite article has the same form as the article in the non-individuated DP, but in the latter case, the initial consonant of the noun is lengthened (= raddoppiamento sintattico). (5)

i líbbrə ‘the book’ MASC ( SG ) u pá:nə b. Puglia ‘the loaf’ (Maiden 2011 and Kučerová/Moro 2011, 5)

a. Celano, Abruzzo

MASC ( SG )

vs

NM

vs

NM

lə pépə ‘the pepper’ u ppá:nə ‘the bread’

2.3 Genus alternans or ambigeneric nouns Traditional grammars classify Romanian nouns into three genders, although the nominal system does not overtly express this three-way gender distinction. With respect to the marking of the noun, there is an overlap between neuter and masculine in the II declension or an overlap of all genders in the III declension (cf. Table 3). Thus, neuter nouns are defined as a separate class exclusively due to their agreement properties which shows the peculiarity illustrated in Table 4: neuter nouns require masculine modifiers in the singular and feminine ones in the plural.

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Table 4: Noun-adjective agreement in Romanian (Bateman/Polinsky 2010, 43) SG

PL

MASC

trandafir frumos beautiful.M . SG rose.M . SG ‘beautiful rose’

trandafiri frumoşi rose.M . PL PL beautiful.M . PL ‘beautiful roses’

NEUTER

palton frumos beautiful.M . SG coat.N . SG ‘beautiful coat’

paltoane frumoase coat.N . PL beautiful.F . PL ‘beautiful coats’

FEM

casă frumoasă beautiful.M . SG house.F . SG ‘beautiful house’

case frumoase house.F . PL beautiful.M . PL ‘beautiful houses’

There is a vivid discussion in the literature as to whether Romanian has to be analyzed as a three-gender-system or a two-gender-system. And among those who assume a three-gender-system there is no consensus as to whether there is a continuation of the Latin neuter or whether the Romanian neuter is the reintroduction of a third gender (cf. Bateman/Polinsky 2010). Due to space, we will simply sketch two possibilities. According to Corbett (1991), Romanian gender can be described as a mapping relation between three controller genders (= gender of the noun) and two target genders (= gender of the nominal modifiers), cf. Figure 1. More precisely, controller gender I (= masculine) triggers target agreement in -i with plural adjectives, whereas controller gender III (= neuter) triggers target agreement in -e.  

Figure 1: Gender mapping (Rom.) (Corbett 1991, 152)

Another possibility is, however, to assume that the so-called neuter nouns are not specified for gender and that elements that agree with such nouns show the default gender form, i.e. masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural (cf. e.g. German where feminine die ‘the’ is also the default in the plural) (cf. Dobrovie-Sorin/Giurgea 2013 for more details). No matter which solution one is willing to accept, it is necessary to distinguish between three nominal agreement classes and the inflectional markers of “gender” (two in the singular and two in the plural). In Italian, too, there are a certain number of (ambigeneric) nouns which show genus alternans, although this phenomenon differs from the Romanian case. First, the  

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Gender and number

Italian nouns at issue trigger feminine plural agreement in addition to the regular masculine plural in -i and they may have three different forms (an exception is e.g. uovo vs uova/*uovi ‘egg(s)’): one in -o (e.g. braccio ‘arm’), one in -i (e.g. bracci ‘arms (of objects)’) and one in -a (e.g. braccia ‘arms (of the body)’). The forms in -a – a conservation of the Latin neuter plural ending – are referred to as collective plurals in descriptive grammars due to their respective semantics. The collective reading is however not always available (cf. e.g. uova) (cf. Acquaviva 2002; 2008; Ojeda 2005; Loporcaro/Paciaroni 2011). The most important contrast with Romanian is however that, according to Acquaviva (2008), Italian feminine plural nouns in -a are special cases lying outside the productive, standard techniques of plural formation, i.e. they are lexical plurals. In this context we want to mention also some Spanish nouns of the type huevo ‘egg’ ~ hueva ‘fish roe’, leño ‘log’ ~ leña ‘firewood’, río ‘river’ ~ ría ‘estuary’ where, as in Italian, the feminine forms often have a collective meaning and which also go back to Latin neuter nouns that ended in singular -um vs plural -a. The o/a-distinction was, however, subsequently extended to other nouns giving birth to a small number of masculine-feminine pairs (e.g. Sp. cesto ‘hamper’ vs cesta ‘(small) basket’ and barco ‘ship’ vs barca ‘(small) boat’) where gender distinction is related to denotational differences in size, shape or function. Finally, in French, there are a handful of nouns that also alternate their gender depending on number. French délice ‘delight’ and orgue ‘organ’ are, for example, masculine in the singular, whereas they are feminine in the plural (cf. un délice vs les belles/*beaux délices). In contrast, hymne ‘hymn’ is feminine in the singular but masculine in the plural (cf. les hymnes nationaux/*nationales) without any semantic effects. French amour ‘love’ behaves similarly to délice and orgue showing however more variation, since there are also masculine occurrences of the plural form, and there are even archaic, literary and sub-standard feminine uses of the singular (cf. Grevisse 162016, §471).  

2.4 Gender mismatches There are a number of nouns, so-called hybrid controllers, that can control different gender (number and person) agreement depending on their meaning (= semantic agreement in the sense of Corbett 1979). With respect to gender, animate nouns are in the centre of attention as they denote referents with biological sex, which can be in conflict with grammatical gender. It is not only interesting that, for example, a feminine noun can control masculine agreement (if the DP has a male referent), but also that the agreement mismatch seems to be restricted to some specific syntactic contexts. In (6), taken from Spanish, the adnominal adjective suprema agrees grammatically with the head noun, whereas DP-external elements show semantic agreement. For these cases, Corbett (1979) introduces an agreement hierarchy (cf. attribu-

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tive > predicate > relative pronoun > personal pronoun) and argues that the probability or likelihood of the agreement target showing semantic instead of grammatical agreement increases from left to right. More precisely, if a target allows both grammatical and semantic agreement, then all other elements to its right will also be able to show semantic agreement. (6)

Majestad suprema, el cual está muy DOM POSS Majesty(F ).SG high.F .SG pro.REL .M . SG be.3SG very contento aquí en Valencia, le recibieron con muchos happy.M . SG here in Valencia 3SG . DAT receive.PST .3PL with many.M . PL aplausos. applause(M ).PL ‘They received his Supreme Majesty, who is very happy here in Valencia, with much applause.’ (Corbett 1979, 208–209)

A

su

As shown by Ihsane/Sleeman (2016), apart from restricting gender mismatches to certain domains, it is also necessary to specify in greater detail the category of animate nouns that do or do not require syntactic/grammatical agreement. In French, in one and the same syntactic context, semantic agreement is sometimes blocked (cf. (7a)), whereas it is the only possibility in other ones: in (7b) the DP-external pronoun has to agree semantically with the DP which denotes a female referent. In other DPexternal contexts, however, a certain noun may trigger optionally either syntactic or semantic agreement (cf. (8b)), while other nouns (cf. (8a)) demand obligatorily syntactic agreement (cf. Ihsane/Sleeman 2016). (7)

(8)

sentinelle] arriva. Elle / *Il avait une longue a. [La long the.F sentinel( F ) arrived she / he had a ‘The sentinel arrived. He had a long beard.’ professeur] de français. Elle b. Voilà [mon ancien She here.is my.M former.M professor( M ) of French. s’ appelle Mme Lagarde. REFL is.called Mrs Lagarde ‘Here is my former French teacher. Her name is Mrs Lagarde.’

barbe. beard / *Il / he

a. [De toutes les sentinelles], seule la plus petite / *le the sentinels.F only.F the.F more short.F / the.M of all.F plus petit a réussi à passer. more short.M has manged to pass ‘Of all the sentinels, only the shortest one managed to pass.’

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b. [De tous les mannequins], seul la plus jeune / le the models.M only the.F more young / the.M of all.M plus jeune – Melanie – parle bien l’ anglais. more young Melanie speaks well the English ‘Among all the models, only the youngest one – Melanie – speaks English well.’ Compared to Spanish and Italian, French differs especially with respect to nouns like e.g. directeur where, even though they have a corresponding feminine form (cf. la directrice), the masculine noun can still refer to both sexes and trigger either grammatical or semantic agreement outside the DP. In Spanish, for example, la abogada está contenta as well as la abogado está contenta is perfectly possible, whereas *el abogado está contenta is ungrammatical (cf. Ihsane/Sleeman 2016).

2.5 Gender in personal pronouns As is well known, English has a so-called natural gender system for third person singular personal pronouns: with minor exceptions (e.g. ships, certain animals), he refers to male persons, she to female ones and it to non-persons. Such a system is, for example, unfamiliar to French, essentially because il ‘he’ and elle ‘she’ are not strictly animate pronouns and their gender is not (exclusively) related to natural gender: they can correspond to the sex of their referents, but they can also correspond to the gender of their nominal antecedent, cf. Notre tablei est unique et ellei s’intègre parfaitement dans notre maison ‘Our table is unique and it fits perfectly into our house’. Things are different in Standard Italian where we find a relatively large inventory for third person subject pronouns (cf. Table 5). The masculine pronouns egli and esso (which are rather restricted to written and formal registers) are in complementary distribution in the sense that egli refers to persons, whereas esso has predominantly non-human referents. The corresponding feminine forms, ella and essa, behave differently in this respect: while ella (if used at all) has human reference, essa is possible for humans and non-humans alike. The colloquial pronouns lui and lei are prototypically used with reference to humans and thus linked to natural gender. However, they additionally admit reference to animals and sometimes even to things. According to Maiden/Robustelli (2013), in the latter case, it seems however that a certain degree of personification plays a crucial role (cf. Vado nella correntei, mi ci lascio prendere e leii mi porta da sola nell’acqua alta ‘I go into the stream, I let myself be carried away, and it takes me by itself into deep water’, Maiden/Robustelli 2013, 118). Nonetheless, it is more common in Italian to use a demonstrative pronoun rather than the personal pronoun when referring to non-humans.

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Table 5: Italian personal pronouns M ASC

persons

animals

things

FEM

persons

animals

things

lui egli esso

+ + –

+ – +

(+/–) – +

lei ella essa

+ + +

+ – +

(+/–) – +

Spanish has, beside masculine él ‘he’ and feminine ella ‘she’, a third personal pronoun in the singular which is often termed neuter: ello. This pronoun is however not comparable to English it: Spanish ello can only be used anaphorically (note however that there are no neuter nouns in Spanish), whereas English it can also be used as deictic pronoun. Furthermore, as shown e.g. in Pomino/Stark (2009), Spanish pronominal neuters refer in general to propositions or to abstract ‘non-locatable’ and uncountable concepts, and not simply to non-persons or sexless things. In contrast to Spanish, Romanian does not have a special “neuter” form for reference to propositions; it uses instead either a demonstrative (e.g. genderless asta ‘this’, aia ‘that’ which are formally identical to the feminine singular, but differ from the latter with respect to their syntactic behavior, cf. Giurgea 2010, 232) or sometimes the feminine accusative weak pronoun o, e.g. Am spus-oC L . 3. F . S G . A C C ‘I said it!’ (Dobrovie-Sorin/ Giurgea 2013, 232–233). In sum, in Spanish, neither él/ella ‘he/she’ (or ellos ‘they’/ellas ‘they (only females)’) nor ello can refer to non-persons or things, cf. *Compré una mesai. Elloi/ellai es de diseño italiano. ‘I have bought a table. It/*She has an Italian design.’ (Fernández-Soriano 1999, 1230). Yet, if the personal pronouns are objects of a preposition, they can also refer to non-persons or things in Spanish (and Portuguese), cf. Se pasa todo el día con él en la mano (él = smart phone) ‘He spent almost all day with it in his hand’. Interestingly, this is typically not possible in Italian and French where a demonstrative would be used instead. Another peculiarity of the pronominal system concerning gender is that the nominative and prepositional case forms of first and second plural pronouns are marked for gender in Spanish (as well as in other Romance languages, e.g. Galician and Occitan, but no longer in Catalan), whereas the corresponding singular forms are unmarked for gender: Sp. yo (PREP + mí) vs nosotros/nosotras and tú (PREP + ti) vs vosotros/vosotras. From a diachronic point of view, the apparent gender marking in these pronouns goes back to a former gender agreement between the pronoun nos or vos and the adjective altros/altras ‘others(M / F )’. The resulting pronouns of this combination are thus bi-morphemic and gender and person appear on different morphemes. Furthermore, one has to distinguish between gender marking on the pronoun itself and the agreement that it triggers: even though Spanish yo is invariable in gender, it can trigger either feminine or masculine agreement ((Yo) soy español/española ‘I am Spanish(M / F )’). Something similar is also true for the personal pronouns in the other Romance languages: for instance, the French pronoun nous itself is invariable, but it

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can trigger feminine agreement when referring to exclusively feminine referents, e.g. Nous sommes heureuses ‘We(F ) are happy(F )’.

2.6 Lack of gender agreement within the DP In this subsection we will briefly discuss a Bolivian Spanish variety, Afro-Yungueño, which shows that syntactic locality seems to play a role in gender agreement. According to Lipski (2006), one main characteristic of Afro-Yungueño is that there are many instances where the nominal modifiers do not agree in gender (or number) with the corresponding head noun. Interestingly, Lipski (2006) noticed that whenever the postnominal adjective agrees in gender with the head noun, all prenominal elements do as well. Instead, prenominal elements may agree in gender with the noun, whereas the postnominal adjective does not. That is, out of the four logically available possibilities in (9), only the first three are attested. (9)

a. una curva curve.(F ) a.F b. una curva curve.(F ) a.F c. un curva curve.(F ) a.M d. *un curva curve.(F ) a.M ‘a large curve’

ancha large.F ancho large.M ancho large.M ancha large.F

In a corpus analysis, Gutiérrez-Rexach/Sessarego (2011) show additionally that the different agreement patterns are to be associated to different generations and that gender agreement seems to develop cross-generationally in a systematic way: speakers aged 60–80 years show gender agreement only on the prenominal adjective and on weak quantifiers, whereas those aged 40–60 years allow gender agreement on all prenominal elements. This shows that the speakers have different locality constraints on agreement in the prenominal domain. Finally, the youngest group, those aged 20–40 years, show gender agreement also with postnominal adjectives.

Figure 2: Cross-generational development of gender agreement

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3 Nominal number in Romance The first part of this section discusses briefly the traditional classification of Romance languages into eastern and western Romance and shows that this East-West-Split is considerably blurred nowadays. Section 3.2 is dedicated to how number is marked within the DP in Romance, whereas Section 3.3 considers the relation between nominal semantics and nominal number. Finally, Section 3.4 gives, based on Borer (2005), a semantic-syntactic interpretation of the typology introduced in Section 3.3.  

3.1 The Romance East-West-Split The morphological marking of number (cf. Geckeler 1986 for an overview) is a wellstudied domain of Romance linguistics, among other things because it was traditionally used as the main criterion for classifying Romance languages and varieties into western Romance with a predominantly sigmatic plural and eastern Romance with a non-sigmatic or vocalic plural marking (cf. e.g. Meyer-Lübke 1894, 41–42; von Wartburg 1950 for this traditional view): (10)

a. Morphological augmentation in western Romance: Standard Spanish / Standard Portuguese casa vs casa-s, Catalan casa [kazə] vs case-s [kazəs], Romansh chasa vs chasa-s, Sardinian domo vs domo-s, Occitan ostal vs ostal-s and orthographic French maison vs maison-s ‘house’ vs ‘houses’ b. Morphological alternation in eastern Romance: Standard Italian casa vs case, Sicilian casa vs casi and Romanian casă vs case ‘house’ vs ‘houses’

Those Romance varieties which use the addition of a plural affix to the singular form as marking strategy continue, as traditionally assumed, the Latin accusative paradigm (cf. Lat. casam vs casas ‘house(s)’). With respect to the eastern Romance plural marking strategy – especially with the Italian oppositions -e vs -i (monte vs monti ‘hill (s)’) and -a vs -e (casa vs case ‘house(s)’) – there is however a vivid debate in the literature regarding its etymology and the nature of the respective marking. The most widely held view is that the respective plural forms go back to Latin nominative plural forms (cf. e.g. Densusianu 1938; Rohlfs 1968). The basic argument is that due to the loss of word-final -m and -s, the singular and plural forms have become homophonic in the accusative, and that, in order to restore the “necessary” number distinction, nominative plural forms found their way into the respective paradigm (cf. Maiden 1996; D’hulst 2006 for more details). Other linguists have proposed in contrast a less functionalist explanation based on (morpho)phonological arguments. They derive the eastern Romance plural forms from the accusative plural forms (e.g. -as > -es > -e and

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-es > -is > -i), just like the singular ones and the western Romance ones (cf. e.g. Aebischer 1960; 1961; Lausberg 1965; Tekavčić 1980). This briefly sketched discussion has gained new interest due to more recent investigations. D’hulst (2006) argues, for example, that the typological East-West-Split is only a surface effect and that all Romance languages use morphological augmentation as a marking strategy on a more abstract level. In some varieties -s surfaces as a segment (e.g. in Spanish), while in others (e.g. in Italian) it spreads a subset of its articulatory features (i.e. the feature [coronal]) to the preceding vowel and causes the vocalic change at issue. Arguments in favour of this phonetic feature spreading come from the observation that a similar influence of final -s onto a preceding vowel can be revealed in some monosyllabic words (e.g. Lat. nos ‘we’ and pos(t) ‘after, later’ > It. noi and poi, but Sp. nos ‘us’ and pues ‘so’) and in some verbal forms (e.g. Lat. amas ‘you love’ > It. ami, but Sp. amas). This hypothesis does not only provide a unique analysis for all Romance languages, it also allows the assumption that singulars are morphologically unmarked for number even in languages like Italian and Romanian. The East-West-Split is nowadays further blurred due to a general high degree of “sigmaphobia” (cf. Geckeler 1976) in Romance languages. Some varieties assumed to be of the western type have (partially) lost the sigmatic plural marking. Here we have to distinguish at least two main types. In the eastern varieties of Andalusian Spanish (cf. (11)) as well as in other Spanish varieties, aspiration or deletion of final /s/ correlates, for example, with opening or lengthening of the preceding vowel and/or with devoicing of a following consonant (cf. Navarro Tomás 1939; Alonso/Zamora Vicente/Canellada de Zamora 1950; Alvar et al. 1970; Zamora Vicente 1970; Lapesa 1980).  

(11)

a. Opening:

campo vs campo-s (Lapesa 1980, 572 and 581) [kampo] [kampɔ] b. Lengthening: casa vs casa-s (Lapesa 1980, 572) [kasa] [kasa:] c. Devoicing: la bota vs las botas [laβota] [laφota] d. Presence of final -e: árbol [aɾbɔ] vs árbol-es [aɾbɔlɛ] sol [sɔ] vs sol-es [sɔlɛ] (Hernández Campoy/Trudgill 2002 for the variety of Murcia; cf. also Lapesa 1980, 582)

The examples in (12) show, however, that “deletion” or rather non-appearance of plural-/s/ without any kind of (phonetic) compensation is also attested in many Romance varieties with significant consequences for the morphosyntax of the DP: number agreement and/or number marking within the DP no longer corresponds to the Standard Romance type.

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(12)

a. Rivera Spanish (Uruguay) Lo[h] camiñonØØ llegan el sábado. DET . M . PL truck arrive.3.PL DET . M . SG Saturday ‘The trucks arrive on Saturday.’ (Carvalho 2006, 163) b. Afro-Bolivian Spanish lu personaØ mayóØØ DET . PL person.F adult ‘the older people’ (Lipski 2010, 126) c. Brazilian Portuguese (São Paulo) Depois que as mulherØØ chegaram todo mundo entrou. arrived.3. PL all world came-in after that DET . F . PL woman ‘After the women arrived, everybody went in.’ (Carvalho 2006, 162) d. Angola Vernacular Portuguese tem muitas mulherØØ have.3.SG many.F . PL woman ‘He has many women.’ (Inverno 2006, 2)

Another interesting case in this context is French. Even though the nouns in (13) are orthographically marked by plural -s, there is no phonic difference between the singular and the plural form of the noun. Number comes to be expressed in (13a) only through vocalic marking which resides on the determiner. The examples in (13b,c) show further that, besides plural marking through vowel alternation, French has some residue of the sigmatic plural marking which appears however only in certain liaison contexts (i.e. only before a vowel).  

(13)

a. le rêve [ləʀɛv] ‘the dream’ b. l’amie [lami] ‘my (female) friend’ c. ma belle amie [mabɛlami] ‘my beautiful (female) friend’

vs

vs

vs

les rêves [leʀɛv] ‘the dreams’ les amies [lezami] ‘my (female) friends’ mes belles amies [mebɛlzami] ‘my beautiful (female) friends’

There is a striking difference between the “new” French vocalic plurals and the “ancient” Italian and Romanian vocalic plural: in Standard Italian the vocalic plural is repeated through agreement on all possible DP elements (la mia bella amica ‘my beautiful (female) friend’ vs le mie belle amiche ‘my beautiful (female) friends’), whereas in French, number agreement is generally reduced to the prenominal domain and vocalic plural marking is only possible with a reduced number of exclusively functional elements (e.g. the “contracted article” du [dy] vs des [de], the demonstra-

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tives M . SG . ce/cet [sə]/[sɛt] and F . SG . cette [sɛt] vs PL . ces [se] as well as the possessives M . SG . mon [mɔ̃ ] and F . SG . ma/mon [ma]/[mɔ̃ ] vs PL . mes [me]). This has led some linguists to assume that French has predominantly a phrasal plural marking system (similar to Basque), or in the sense of Dryer (1989, 872–874), that French has plural words as articles. Interestingly, French patterns with the varieties exemplified in (12) in that plural is marked (nearly) exclusively on the highest functional element within the DP, i.e. the determiner. This is also true for other Romance languages, e.g. for some Occitan dialects. Sauzet (2012) shows, based on Occitan dialects, that the evolution of vocalic plural marking on the determiner is directly conditioned by the loss of -s on the noun. However, according to him, iterated plural marking within the DP and the plural marking strategy (sigmatic or not) seem to be two independent phenomena as the following examples show.  

Table 6: Occitan plural marking (Sauzet 2012, 181–182) sigmatic

non-sigmatic

iterated

las cabras [las k'aβɾɔs] ‘the goats’ (Lengadocian)

las chabras [la: tsaβɾ'a:] ‘the goats’ (Limousin)

non-iterated (unique)

las crabas [las kɾ'aβə] ‘the goats’ (Les Esseintes)

lei cabras [lej k'abɾo] ‘the goats’ (Provençal)

3.2 Number marking within the DP As far as plural marking within the DP is concerned, Romance languages and varieties can be grouped into different types (cf. Pomino 2012). In Standard Spanish, Standard Italian and Standard Portuguese all elements able to inflect for number are morphologically marked for plural in a plural DP. There are however other Romance languages and varieties which allow multiple but not canonical plural marking within the DP. Leaving apart those well-known French irregular examples (e.g. cheval vs chevaux ‘horse(s)’), the main characteristic of the varieties in (14) is the fact that the noun never inflects for number, not even in numeral-noun constructions. (14)

a. Maritime Provencal l-i sièis fih-o DET -PL six girl-F ‘the six girls’ (Frédéric Mistral, Memòri e raconte)

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b. Fr. mes deux filles [me dø fij] girl.F my.PL two ‘my two girls’ c. Walloon deûs cints omes [dœ́ : sɛ̃ :z òm] two hundred man.M ‘two hundred men’ (Remacle 1952, 272)

(cf. singular ma fille [ma fij])

(cf. singular èn ome [òm])

Due to the impossibility of marking plural on the noun within a plural DP, number is always expressed formally on the determiner in these varieties (cf. Bouchard 2002 for French). The examples under (15) further show that there is, again, a prenominalpostnominal-asymmetry within the DP in the sense that prenominal adjectives, but never postnominal adjectives, bear a plural marker. For French, it has to be noted that the plural marking on prenominal adjectives is overt only in liaison contexts (exceptions are those adjectives showing a /al/-/o/-alternation – e.g. loyal vs loyaux – which appear however preferably in postnominal position). In contrast to French, plural marking on feminine adjectives is always overt in Walloon: the ending for feminine plural adjectives is -ès which is realized as [è] (IPA [ɛ]) before a noun beginning with a consonant and as [èz] (IPA [ɛz]) before a following vowel-initial noun. The “plural-s” on the noun is instead purely orthographic; it is never pronounced (cf. Remacle 1952; Bernstein 1991; 1993; Bouchard 2002). (15)

Maritime Provencal a. l-ei bèll-ei fih-o girl-F . SG the-PL beautiful- PL ‘the beautiful girls’ b. l-ei fih-o bell-o beautiful-F . SG the-PL girl-F . SG ‘the beautiful girls’ (Blanchet 1999, 89) Fr. c. les savantsA{italiensN [le savɑ͂ -z italȷ͂ɛ] (cf. *[lesavɑ͂ |italȷ͂ɛ]) the. M . PL wise.M - PL Italian.M . SG ‘the wise Italians’ d. les savantsN | italiensA [le savɑ͂ italȷ͂ɛ] (cf. ??[lesavɑ͂ zitalȷ͂ɛ]) the. M . PL savant.M . SG Italian.M . SG ‘the Italian savants’ (cf. Selkirk 1972, 235)

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Walloon e. d-ès grant-ès djins [d-è grã:t-è ǧẽ] (without liaison) DET . PART - F . PL big-F . PL person.F . SG ‘big persons’ f. d-ès grant-ès âwes [d-è grã:t-èz a:w] (with liaison) DET . PART - F . PL big-F . PL goose.F . SG ‘big geese’ (Remacle 1952, 137; only prenominal adjectives) (cf. singular grande mâhon ‘big house’ [grã:tma:hõ]) In many other Romance languages and varieties, plural is marked only once within the DP. In some varieties (cf. (16)–(17)) it is always the determiner that bears the single plural marker, whereas in other varieties (cf. (18)) it is one DP element which bears the plural marker, but never the determiner. The difference between the Afro-Yungueño example and the Italo-Romance ones is that in the latter lack of plural agreement is restricted exclusively to feminine DPs (cf. Pomino 2012 for an interpretation of this fact). (16)

Afro-Yungueño l-u-h guagua jóven DET - M - PL children.M . SG young.M . SG ‘the young children’ (Lipski 2007, 183)

(17)

Bedizzano a. kiʎ-a 'brav-a 'dɔnn-a DEM . PL - F good-F . SG woman-F . SG b. kiʎ-a 'dɔnn-a 'brav-a DEM . PL - F woman-F . SG good-F . SG ‘those good women’ (Manzini/Savoia 2005, 620)

(18)

Villafranca a. l-a bȩ̄ l-i̯-a skarpa DET -F . SG nice-PL - F shoe-F . SG ‘the nice shoes’ b. l-a skarp-i̯-a nọ̄ v-a DET -F . SG shoe-PL - F new-F . SG ‘the new shoes’ (Loporcaro 1994, 37)

Also in the Ladin variety Fassano lack of plural agreement is restricted to feminine DPs but Fassano belongs to still another type. In constructions with prenominal adjectives (cf. (19a)), only the noun is marked for plural, whereas in constructions

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with a postnominal adjective, it is always the adjective that bears the plural marker. The noun can either be marked or unmarked. This goes, however, hand in hand with syntactic and semantic differences: in (19b) the adjective stands in direct modification with the noun (i.e. it is non-predicational and modifies the noun directly) and receives a non-restrictive interpretation, whereas in (19c) there is a relation of indirect modification between N and A (i.e. A modifies N indirectly, meaning that it forms part of a reduced relative clause) and the adjective has a restrictive reading (cf. Chiocchetti 2003; Cinque 2005; Rasom 2008). Note that we have again a prenominal-postnominal asymmetry in that prenominal elements are, as a general rule, never marked for plural.  



(19)

a. l-a

pìcol-a cès-es small-F . SG house-F . PL b. l-a cès-es pìcol-es DET -F . SG house-F . PL small-F . PL c. l-a cès-a pìcol-es DET -F . SG house-F . SG small-F . PL ‘the small houses’ (Rasom 2008, 19; cf. also Chiocchetti 2003) DEM -F . SG

The data from Brazilian Portuguese with respect to plural marking within the DP are especially intriguing, because several possibilities are attested. There are nevertheless certain tendencies and preferences: all elements in the prenominal DP domain show a very high rate of plural marking, while all postnominal elements disfavour it. For the head noun itself, it favours overt plural marking only if it is the leftmost element of the DP, otherwise it is not marked for plural (cf. Naro/Scherre Pereira 2000; Scherre Pereira 2001; Carvalho 2006). Thus, although the examples in (20) are not exclusive, they illustrate the preferred pattern of plural marking within the DP. (20)

a. a-s nov-a-s alun-a pupil- F . SG the. F - PL new-F - PL b. a-s alun-a nov-a new- F . SG the. F - PL pupil- F . SG ‘the new (female) pupil’ (plural) c. Tenho cinquenta ê um an-o. (not an-o-s) and one year-M . SG have.1SG fifty ‘I am fifty one years old.’ (Naro/Scherre Pereira 2000; Scherre Pereira 2001)

Finally, in another Romance variety, North-eastern Central Catalan, not only morphological and syntactic aspects, but also phonological aspects are considered responsible for the non-realization of the plural marker within the DP. Bonet/Lloret/Mascaró (2015) state that the consonant s is not realized on DP-elements if s is a plural

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morpheme, if s stands between two consonants and if it is attached onto a prenominal DP element. Thus, in (21a) the determiner and the prenominal adjective appear without a plural marker, because they are in prenominal position and the plural marker would be in an interconsonantal position. In contrast, if plural-s appears before a vowel-initial element as in (21b), it is overtly realized. The example (21c) shows that the noun and the postnominal adjective are marked for plural, whereas example (21d) illustrates that the non-realization of s is restricted to plural-s: the s on fals ‘false’ is not a plural morpheme, but part of the root. (21)

a. el

bon vin-s good.M . SG wine.M -PL ‘the good wines’ b. el-s antic-s amic-s DET .M - PL old.M - PL friend.M -PL ‘the old friends’ c. el vin-s blanc-s DET .M . SG wine.M -PL white.M - PL ‘the white wines’ d. un fals conseller counselor.M . SG one false.M . SG ‘a/one false counselor’ (Bonet/Lloret/Mascaró 2015) DET .M . SG

3.3 Nominal number: some general typological considerations Rijkhoff (2002a,b) in his typological study distinguishes different noun types, which he motivates considering the behaviour of the respective nouns in numeral-nouncombinations. As illustrated in (22), languages vary, on the one hand, with respect to whether the noun can be combined directly with a numeral greater than one or must be combined with a classifier in order to be counted, and, on the other hand, with respect to whether or not the noun appears in its plural or non-singular form (cf. also Wiese 1997; Rijkhoff 2002a,b; Ortmann 2004; Acquaviva 2005). (22)

a. b. c. d.

numeral numeral numeral numeral

+ classifier + classifier

+ + + +

noun noun noun nouns

+ plural marker

+ plural marker

English as well as some Romance languages belong to the type schematized in (22a). When a noun referring to a discrete or individuated entity is combined with a numeral greater than one, plural number has to be obligatorily marked on the noun whenever reference is made to more than one entity (cf. (23)). According to Rijkhoff, this is due

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to the fact that in these languages the absence of an overt plural marker within a DP is interpreted automatically as singular number. This kind of nouns is named singular object nouns by Rijkhoff (2002a,b). (23) a. Eng. three b. Sp. tres Pt. três It. tre three c. Rom. trei three

cats gatos gatos gatti cat(M ).PL pisici cat(F ).PL

/ *cat / *gato / *gato / *gatto cat(M ).SG / *pisică cat(F ).SG

Another characteristic of singular object nouns is that they cannot be used as bare singulars within a DP. Instead, in the case of singular reference, the DP must contain at least an indefinite determiner: (24) a. Eng. I am looking for a/*Ø b. Sp. Busco un/*Ø It. Cerco un/*Ø a search.1.SG c. Rom. Caut o/*Ø a search.1.SG

book libro libro book(M ).SG carte book(F ).SG

about de di of de of

linguistics. lingüística. linguistica. linguistics lingvistică. linguistics

There are however differences between English and Romance. As shown by Chierchia (1998a,b), bare plural subjects are excluded in Romance (e.g. Sp. *Castores son animales nocturnos. vs Beavers are nocturnal animals.), because bare plural nouns are of the type (i.e. they are basically predicates) and NPs can only be arguments if D is projected. In contrast, in Chinese for example, NPs are essentially argumental (i.e. type ) and can thus occur freely without a determiner. English is between these two poles in allowing both predicate and argument NPs (cf. Chierchia’s Nominal Mapping Parameter). Nevertheless, under certain conditions (e.g. as object of a preposition, as postverbal subject of unaccusatives and as direct objects) bare plurals are possible as arguments in some Romance languages, but whenever the DP denotes plural entities, the noun has to be overtly marked for plural:  



(25) a. Sp. b. It.

En aquel entonces aún jugaban Ø niños en la calle. ‘At that time children were still playing in the street.’ In ogni strada del paese giocavano Ø bambini. ‘Children were playing in every street of the village.’

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This stands in contrast to mass nouns, which can appear bare within a DP, i.e. without determiner and without a plural marker: e.g. Sp. Busco vino tinto ‘I am looking for red wine’ (cf. Stark 2008a,b for more details). In this case the noun does not denote a singular discrete spatial entity, but a non-individuated one. The indefinite determiner, which expresses unambiguously individuation and singularity, can, of course, combine with vino tinto (e.g. Voy a beber un vino tinto ‘I am having a red wine’), but then the use of the indefinite article indicates that the DP refers to a certain individuated unit (e.g. a glass of wine). Yet, not all Romance languages and varieties can be straightforwardly classified as belonging clearly to the type (22a), because in some varieties the head noun appears as a general rule in its non-plural form in numeral-noun combinations. Thus, especially the varieties in (14), (20) and those in (26) seem to belong, at least at first glance, to the type schematized in (22b). However, one of the main characteristics of languages of the latter type is that they do have a plural marker for the noun in their morphological inventory (see below), although the noun remains unmarked for plural in numeral-noun combinations. In contrast, this is not generally true for the Romance varieties mentioned. With the exception of Brazilian Portuguese, they simply do not have a plural morpheme to mark the respective noun. Thus, the reason why the noun appears unmarked for plural in numeral-noun constructions is due to the reduced inventory of morphological markers. Thus, it is very likely that the proposed typological classification is simply not applicable to these varieties.  

(26)

a. Afro-Yungueño un-o-s quince mul-a DET -M - PL fifteen mule-F . SG ‘some fifteen mules’ (Lipski 2006, 103) b. Filattiera do brav-a dɔn-a woman-F . SG two good-F . SG ‘two good women’ (Manzini/Savoia 2005, 619)

In contrast, Hungarian is clearly a language of type (22b) where count nouns can be directly combined with a numeral without the need for a classifier or a plural marker (cf. (27)). In Hungarian-like languages, plural marking is assumed to be “variable” in the sense that they have a plural marker in their morphological inventory and its presence is generally obligatory when reference is made to pluralities (without a numeral), but it is as a general rule absent when the noun is modified by a numeral or certain quantifiers that already express plurality (cf. Ortmann 2000, 251–252). Nouns showing these properties are called set nouns by Rijkhoff (2002a).

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öt hajó five ship.SG ‘five ships’

vs

*öt five

hajó-k ship-PL

According to Rijkhoff (2002a,b), the unmarked form of set nouns may be used to refer to a set that may contain any number of entities, i.e. a singleton set (= one entity or a singular individual) or a collective set (= more than one entity or plural individuals). That is, set nouns are “number-neutral” in the sense that in absence of a plural (or collective) marker they are neither associated with singularity nor with plurality (cf. also Acquaviva 2005). Interestingly, the morphological marking of a collective set is avoided, if it is redundant. Thus, Hungarian does not only leave the head noun in the unmarked form when combined with a numeral but it also does not display plural agreement between the noun and its modifiers (cf. Ortmann 2004, 243). Moreover, set noun languages allow bare nouns in constructions where singular object noun languages require either a plural marker on the noun or an indefinite determiner (cf. (28)). In this context it is important to mention that Brazilian Portuguese, apart from showing lack of plural agreement within the DP (cf. (20)), is one (or maybe the only) Romance language that has productive bare singulars (cf. e.g. Schmitt/Munn 1999): e.g. BPt. comprei livro ‘I have bought a book’ vs Sp. *compré libro. It is thus very likely that it is already or is becoming a language of the Hungarian-type.  

(28)

Hungarian Spanish a. Van alma? a’. ¿Hay manzanas/*manzana? COP .3SG apple have.3SG apple.PL /*apple.SG ‘Are there apples?’ (de Groot 2009) b. Mari könyv-et olvas. b’. María está leyendo *(un) libro. María be.3SG read.cont a book Mari book-acc read.3SG .1F Mari/María is reading a book.’

Finally, type (22c) embraces all those languages where nouns cannot be immediately combined with numerals. Instead, they have to be individualized by a nominal classifier in order to be countable while the noun itself is not marked for number (cf. Greenberg 1974; Lyons 1977, 462; Bisang 1999, 115), cf. the Thai example in (29). Rijkhoff (2002a,b) assumes that these so-called sort nouns have the semantics of conceptual labels: the noun does not include in its lexical meaning the notion of spatial discreteness, individuation, boundedness or shape (Hundius/Kölver 1983, 166). Yet, only spatially bounded entities can be counted directly and, thus, a classifier or rather an individualizer (Lyons 1977, 462) is needed before such nouns can be modified by a numeral.

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(29)

715

pèt hâa tua duck five CLF:body ‘five ducks’ (Gandour et al. 1984, 455 and 466; cited in Rijkhoff 2002a, 133)

However, according to Borer (2005) (cf. Section 3.4), “[…] all nouns, in all languages, are mass, and are in need of being portioned out, in some sense, before they can interact with the ‘count’ system” (Borer 2005, 93). That is, all nouns in all languages have to be individualized before they can be counted. Different languages simply use different means for individuation. Individuation is thus not an inherent property of some nouns, it is rather the syntactic structure which tells us how to interpret the corresponding DP. This becomes especially evident through the idea of the universal grinder (Pelletier 1975) which transforms any well-contoured, discrete object into a mass. An often cited example in this context is given in what follows where dog is conceived as [–individuated] and appears consequently as bare singular: I went to the site of the traffic accident, and there was dog lying all over the road (for the distinction between count and mass cf. e.g. Pelletier 1975; 2012; Krifka 1989; 1995; Borer 2005; Stark 2008a,b; Massam 2012).

3.4 A semantic-syntactic interpretation of the above typology As indicated above, according to Borer (2005, 108), all noun denotations, in all languages, are in the absence of any (grammatical) specification ultimately mass, and they all need to be individualized in order to get a count reading. That is, individuation is not part of the lexical semantics of nouns and it does not depend on the denotation of the noun whether a language has classifiers or plural morphology. As exemplified in Figure 3, in order to be counted, a noun is rather individualized by selecting the functional category Div° (= divider). Once this portioning out has taken place, the corresponding noun can be counted or quantified by the functional category which Borer symbolizes as rhombus. Note that the counter phrase or quantifier phrase can also select a NP as complement (cf. Figure 4). But, in this case, the structure leads to a mass interpretation.

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Figure 3: Individuated DPs (modified from Borer 2005, 96)

Figure 4: Non-individuated (= mass) DPs (modified from Borer 2005, 97)

For Borer (2005), languages may differ with respect to how the corresponding syntactic structure is realized morphophonologically. Languages employ different means for individuation, i.e. they have different ways of realizing the dividing and counting  

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function. In Spanish (cf. Figure 5), the exponent of the divider-head (Div°) is the plural suffix -s; furthermore, #° (= the counter-head) is realized, for example, by the numeral dos. In contrast, in Hungarian, the numeral öt fulfils, according to Borer, the dividingor individuation-function as well as the counting function; it is a portmanteau morpheme or a cumulative exponent. Thus, even though Hungarian has a plural/ collective suffix in its morphological inventory, it cannot be inserted in this case, because Div° is already realized by another exponent. And finally, Div° can be realized by a classifier which, being a free form in the sense of Bloomfield, must not be bound by the noun through N-movement (cf. the Armenian example in Figure 5 yergu had hovanoc ‘two (classifier) umbrella’; Borer 2005, 94–95).  

Figure 5: Numeral-noun-combinations

In sum, the individuation function can be expressed either by an affix, by a numeral or by a classifier – Pomino (2016) argues that Div° may also be realized by a clitic-like element which may not appear in its base position. In this analysis classifiers are seen parallel to plural morphology and have thus the same syntactic position, i.e. there is no need for two separate phrases as e.g. Num(ber)P(hrase) and Cl(assifier)P(hrase). As  

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will be shown in what follows, Borer’s functional category Div° can be linked to a certain extent to the NumP discussed in other studies.

4 NumP and GenP as DP-internal categories Since the early nineties inflectional morphology has played an important role in syntax because several functional heads encoding inflectional features and/or the corresponding affixes were introduced into the verbal and nominal domain and movement operations were associated with rich inflection (cf. Pollock 1989; Cinque 1999). Within the nominal domain, several studies have argued in favour of the existence of functional projections between the lexical head N° and the functional head D° (cf. Carstens 1991; Delfitto/Schroten 1991; Picallo 1991; Ritter 1991; Valois 1991; Bernstein 1993; Cinque 1999; Giusti 2002). Ritter (1991) argues that in order to explain the differences between two genitive constructions in Hebrew one has to postulate an intermediate projection which is the locus of the number feature. Furthermore, for Ritter (1991), the affixation of the plural marker on the noun is parallel to the affixation of tense and agreement affixes on the verb. In Standard Spanish, for example, the inflectional suffix -s attaches thus to the stem in syntax as a consequence of head movement: [DP D° [NumP gatoi-s [NP ti ]]]. At the same time, based on the parallelism between CP and DP, Picallo (1991) postulates for Catalan the existence of a Gen(der)Phrase in addition to NumP. The basic motivation is the fact that Catalan nominals have a final vowel (= a gender morpheme for Picallo 1991) which parallels the theme vowels of Romance verbs. GenP is taken to be the complement of Num° and successive cyclic movement of N° to Gen° and Num° results in affixations of the corresponding gender and number morphemes, cf. Figure 6. Bernstein (1993) argues (based on Harris 1991) that the declension class of Romance nominals with its corresponding word marker does not always represent gender and replaces Picallo’s GenP with a projection labelled WordMarkerPhrase (WMP). The derivation remains however essentially the same: the noun stem moves and picks up its inflectional affixes.

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Figure 6: Sp./Pt. gatos ‘cats’ and Cat. gates ‘female cats’

This derivation suffers from several shortcomings which cannot be treated here in detail for reasons of space (cf. e.g. Alexiadou 2004 for arguments against GenP and WMP and Picallo 2008 for partial revision of her former analysis). We only wish to highlight here that the above analysis is not directly applicable to other Romance languages and requires additional assumptions or modification. For instance, as mentioned before, some Romance languages have (at least superficially) a cumulative exponent for gender (or declension class) and number. Consequently, it seems as if the nominal stem does not pick up first its word marker and afterwards its number marker. Or, if it does, an additional rule has to transform the two elements into one surface form. Additionally, there is a third group of Romance languages where apparently neither word marker (or gender) nor number has a morphological exponent in the phonic representation of nouns. Apparently, French does not provide any morphological evidence for the existence of Num° and WM° (or Gen°) (cf. however Lowenstamm 2012). That is, inflectional morphology cannot straightforwardly be taken as an argument for the existence of syntactic functional heads. And finally, there are some Italo-Romance varieties (e.g. the one of Villafranca) where a word marker and a number exponent can be identified just like in Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan. The arrangement of the corresponding affixes is however inverted: in skarp-i ̯-a ‘shoes’ the number exponent precedes the word marker (cf. Loporcaro 1994; Manzini/Savoia 2005; Taraldsen 2009; cf. however also Maffei Bellucci 1977, 91, who assumes that /i̯a/ is a cumulative exponent).

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Furthermore, unlike gender, number is generally considered an interpretable feature which makes a clear semantic contribution to the interpretation of nominals. The assumption of a corresponding NumP seems thus motivated under this point of view. But what type of information does the word marker (or gender) add to the interpretation of the nominal expression? Neither grammatical gender nor declension class is relevant for the semantic interpretation, i.e. they have as a general rule no semantic effect (cf. the exceptions mentioned in Section 2.3 and also some names of trees vs the names of the corresponding fruit, e.g. Sp. manzano ~ manzana and It. melo ~ mela ‘apple tree’ vs ‘apple’) and they are therefore not functional elements heading their own projection. Gender and declension class are rather inherent features of (most) N° (nouns with human referents may be an exception, cf. e.g. Harris 1991; Alexiadou 2004; Picallo 2008). To sum up, there is still no consensus in the literature as to how many functional projections are needed between N° and D° (cf. e.g. Alexiadou 2004 for a discussion) and as to how variation among the different Romance languages and varieties can be explained. Furthermore, the relation between semantic gender and grammatical gender is still in the centre of some recent analyses: we saw in Section 2.4 that both types of features are relevant for grammar, because both can be involved in agreement. Ihsane/Sleeman (2016) locate semantic gender (which is interpretable) in the feature bundle under n° (the nominalizing head), whereas grammatical gender (which is uninterpretable) is an (inherent) feature on roots or N°.  



5 Conclusion This cursory overview of gender and number in Romance shows that we are dealing with two grammatical categories that still deserve detailed discussion. In particular, the syntactic encoding site of these phi-features, their involvement in (lack of) agreement and the relation between rich inflection and syntactic movement are topics that should still be discussed on empirical and theoretical grounds. Two other properties that have been detected in this chapter based on Romance languages and varieties are the prenominal-postnominal asymmetry within the DP and different locality constraints on agreement, at least in the prenominal domain. The prenominal-postnominal asymmetry is however scarcely considered in the discussion on DP-internal agreement and on the architecture of the DP in general.

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Lipski, John M. (2010), Depleted plural marking in two Afro-Hispanic dialects: separating inheritance from innovation, Language Variation and Change 22, 105–148. Loporcaro, Michele (1994), Sull’analisi del plurale femminile “la dǫni ̯a” ‘le donne’ nei dialetti della Lunigiana, L’Italia Dialettale 57, 35–42. Loporcaro, Michele/Paciaroni, Tania (2011), Four gender-systems in Indo-European, Folia Linguistica 45, 389–434. Lowenstamm, Jean (2012), Feminine and gender, or why the “Feminine” profile of French nouns has nothing to do with gender, in: Eugeniusz Cyran/Henryk Kardela/Bogdan Szymanek (edd.), Linguistic Inspirations. Edmund Gussmann in memoriam, Lublin, Wydawnictwo Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, 371–406. Lyons, John (1977), Semantics, 2 vol., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Maffei Bellucci, Patrizia (1977), Lunigiana, Pisa, Pacini. Maiden, Martin (1991), Interactive Morphonology: Metaphony in Italy, London/New York, Routledge. Maiden, Martin (1996), On the Romance inflectional endings “-i” and “-e”, Romance Philology 50, 147–182. Maiden, Martin (2011), Morphological persistence, in: John Charles Smith/Martin Maiden/Adam Ledgeway (edd.), The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, vol. 1: Structures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 155–215. Maiden, Martin/Robustelli, Cecilia (2013), A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian, 2nd edn, London/ New York, Routledge. Manzini, M. Rita/Savoia, Leonardo M. (2005), I dialetti italiani e romanci. Morfosintassi generativa, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso. Massam, Diane (2012) (ed.), Count and Mass across Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1894), Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei dialetti toscani, Torino, Loescher. Naro, Anthony J./Scherre Pereira, Maria Marta (2000), Variable concord in Portuguese: the situation in Brazil and Portugal, in: John H. McWhorter (ed.), Language Change and Language Contact in Pidgins and Creoles, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 235–255. Navarro Tomás, Tomás (1939), Desdoblamiento de fonemas vocálicos, Revista de Filología Hispánica 1, 165–167. Neira Martínez, Jesús (1955), El habla de Lena, Oviedo, Diputación de Oviedo [reprinted 2005]. Neira Martínez, Jesús (1982), Bables y castellano en Asturias, Madrid, Silverio Cañadas. Ojeda, Almerindo E. (2005), The paradox of mass plurals, in: Salikoko Mufwene/Elaine J. Francis/ Rebecca S. Wheeler (edd.), Polymorphous Linguistics, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 389–410. Ortmann, Albert (2000), Where plural refuses to agree: feature unification and morphological economy, Acta Linguistica Hungarica 47, 249–288. Ortmann, Albert (2004), A factorial typology of number marking in noun phrases: the tension between Economy and Faithfulness, in: Gereon Müller/Lutz Gunkel/Gisela Zifonun (edd.), Explorations in Nominal Inflections, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 229–267. Otheguy, Ricardo (1978), A semantic analysis of the difference between “el/la” and “lo”, in: Margarita Suñer (ed.), Studies in Romance Linguistics, Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 241–257. Pelletier, Francis J. (1975), Non-singular reference: some preliminaries, Philosophia 5, 451–465. Pelletier, Francis J. (2012), Lexical nouns are both +MASS and +COUNT, but they are neither +MASS nor +COUNT, in: Diane Massam (ed.), Count and Mass across Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 9–26. Penny, Ralph (1994), Continuity and innovation in Romance: metaphony and mass-noun reference in Spain and Italy, The Modern Language Review 89, 273–281. Picallo, M. Carme (1991), Nominals and nominalization in Catalan, Probus 3, 279–316.  

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Picallo, M. Carme (2008), Gender and number in Romance, Lingue e Linguaggio 7, 47–66. Pollock, Jean-Yves (1989), Verb movement, Universal Grammar and the structure of IP, Linguistic Inquiry 20, 365–424. Pomino, Natascha (2012), Partial or complete lack of plural agreement: the role of morphology, in: Sascha Gaglia/Marc-Olivier Hinzelin (edd.), Inflection and Word Formation in Romance Languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 201–229. Pomino, Natascha (2016), On the clitic status of the plural marker in phonic French, in: Susann Fischer/Mario Navarro (edd.), Proceeding of the VII NEREUS International Workshop: Clitic doubling and other issues of the syntax/semantic interface in Romance DPs, Konstanz, Universität Konstanz, 105–130. Pomino, Natascha/Stark, Elisabeth (2009), Adnominal adjectives. Where morphology seemingly meets semantics, in: M. Teresa Espinal/Manuel Leonetti/Louise McNally (edd.), Proceedings of the IV Nereus International Workshop: Definiteness and DP Structure in Romance Languages, Konstanz, Universität Konstanz, 113–136. Rasom, Sabrina (2008), Lazy Concord in the Central Ladin Feminine Plural DP: A Case Study on the Interaction between Morphosyntax and Semantics, Padova, Università degli Studi di Padova, doctoral dissertation. Remacle, Louis (1952), Syntaxe du parler wallon de La Gleize. Tome I: Noms et articles – adjectifs et pronoms, Paris, Les Belles Lettres. Rijkhoff, Jan (2002a), Verbs and nouns from a cross-linguistic perspective, Rivista di Linguistica 14, 115–147. Rijkhoff, Jan (2002b), The Noun Phrase, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Ritter, Elisabeth (1991), Two functional categories in noun phrases: evidence from Modern Hebrew, in: Susan D. Rothstein (ed.), Perspective on Phrase Structure: Heads and Licensing, San Diego, CA, Academic Press, 37–62. Rohlfs, Gerhard (1968), Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, Torino, Einaudi. Rudder, Joshua (2012), The grammar of Romance. A comparative introduction to Vulgar Latin & the Romance languages, s.l. s.n. Sauzet, Patrick (2012), Occitan plurals, in: Sascha Gaglia/Marc-Olivier Hinzelin (edd.), Inflection and Word Formation in Romance Languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 178–200. Scherre Pereira, Maria M. (2001), Major linguistic patterns in noun phrase agreement in Brazilian Portuguese, in: Rosa Bianca Finazzi/Paola Tornagli (edd.), Cinquanta’anni di ricerche linguistiche: problemi, risultati e prospettive per il terzo millennio. Atti dell’IX Convegno Internazionale di Linguisti, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 461–473. Schmitt, Cristina/Munn, Alan (1999), Against the nominal mapping parameter: bare nouns in Brazilian Portuguese, Proceedings of NELS 29, 339–353. Selkirk, Elisabeth O. (1972), The Phrase Phonology of English and French, Cambridge, MA, Ph.D. dissertation. Stark, Elisabeth (2008a), The role of the plural system in Romance, in: Ulrich Detges/Richard Waltereit (edd.), The Paradox of Grammatical Change. Perspectives from Romance, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 57–84. Stark, Elisabeth (2008b), Typological correlations in nominal determination in Romance, in: Henrik Høeg Müller/Alex Klinge (edd.), Essays on Nominal Determination. From Morphology to Discourse Management, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 45–61. Taraldsen, Knut Tarald (2009), Lexicalizing number and gender in Colonnata, Ms., University of Tromsø. http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000884 (22.03.2016). Tekavčić, Pavao (1980), Grammatica storica dell’italiano, Bologna, il Mulino.

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Valois, Daniel (1991), The internal syntax of DP and adjective placement in French and English, Proceedings of NELS 21, 367–382. Wartburg, Walther von (1950), Die Ausgliederung der romanischen Sprachräume, Bern, Francke. Wiese, Heike (1997), Zahl und Numerale. Eine Untersuchung zur Korrelation konzeptueller und sprachlicher Strukturen, Berlin, Akademie-Verlag. Zamora Vicente, Alonso (1970), Dialectología española, Madrid, Gredos.

Nigel Vincent

20 Determination and quantification Abstract: In this chapter we consider the structure of nominal expressions (NEs) in Romance. We examine in turn the sub-systems of articles, quantifiers, possessives and demonstratives and investigate the way they combine and interact. The perspective is for the most part synchronic and focuses on the modern languages with occasional reference being made to earlier stages and to Latin. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the mechanisms of change involved in producing the modern systems. Variations between the individual languages in respect of stress, cooccurrence, linear order, and configurationality are discussed and different theoretical approaches to modelling this variation are reviewed.  

Keywords: nominal expressions, articles, quantifiers, possessives, demonstratives, Latin, Romance  

1 Introduction This chapter deals with a range of items – articles, possessives, quantifiers and demonstratives – which, when taken together with a noun or in some instances by themselves, make up what in traditional grammars are called noun phrases (NPs) and what in some strands of the recent theoretical literature have come to be known as determiner phrases (DPs). We will come in due course to the arguments for and against these different categorizations but in order to avoid prejudging the issue we will follow the lead of Giusti (2015) and in the first instance use the general cover term “nominal expression (NE)”. What the items considered here have in common is that one or more of them is in most circumstances required in order to complete an NE. Unlike in Latin, it is only in a limited set of contexts that a bare common noun is grammatical in the modern Romance languages. In this respect, then, the broad class of determiners differs from adjectives and relative clauses, which are optional extras within an NE, and items whose presence depends on the semantic and communicative goals of the speaker or writer rather than on the core syntactic structure of the language. That said, there are of course structural constraints on the positions of these latter items within the NE, but those will not be addressed here (see instead ↗21 Adjectival and genitival modification and ↗22 Relative clauses). Variation across the Romance systems of determiners and quantifiers can be detected in respect of stress, co-occurrence, linear order, and configurationality (on this last see ↗23 Syntheticity and Analyticity). Thus, Romanian differs from its sister languages in having a definite article which follows rather than precedes a noun or adjective (Rom. lupul (bătrân) or bătrânul lup ‘the (old) wolf’ beside Pt. o (velho)  

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lobo); a number of southern and central Italian dialects have unstressed enclitic possessives in certain contexts while elsewhere we have a proclitic possessive (Subiaco moyema ‘my wife’ beside Sp. mi mujer); in Italian a possessive may combine with a definite article while in French it may not (It. il tuo libro ‘your book’ beside Fr. *le ton livre). In the course of our discussion we will pay particular attention to such dimensions of differentiation. It goes without saying that limits of space mean that we will not be able to provide full details on all the local variants across the full range of the family’s languages and dialects, for which instead the reader will be referred to the specialist descriptive and historical literature as well as to reference works such as Ledgeway/Maiden (2016).1 The chapter is organized as follows: in Sections 2 to 5 we consider in turn each of the main sub-categories of determiner, seeking to draw out both the similarities and differences in the way the systems of individual languages and dialects are structured and making occasional reference to older stages of the languages where these are sufficiently well attested and where they bear witness to significant structural differences from the situations found in the modern languages. In passing we will provide the Latin etyma for the forms under discussion, but we reserve discussion of diachronic trends and comparison with the Latin origins for the final Section 6, where we aim to give a brief account of some of the mechanisms involved in the emergence of the modern Romance systems of determination and quantification, and address the debates that have arisen in this connection.

2 Articles and definiteness All the Romance languages have items labelled in traditional grammars as articles. The definite articles are in most cases descended from forms of the Latin distal deictic 2 ILLE , whence Fr. le/la/les, Sp. el/lo/la/los/las, Pt. o/a/os/as and equivalents in other languages. By contrast Sardinian su/sa/sos/sas derive from forms of the Latin marker of emphasis IPSE , as does the so-called article salat in some varieties of Catalan. What are called indefinite articles on the other hand can all be traced back to the Latin inflected numeral UNUS , - A , - UM ‘one’. Some representative examples and uses are displayed in (1):

1 In citing examples from the standard languages we will not in general give references, but for lesser known varieties or where a particular analysis or interpretation is under discussion we will cite the source. 2 Here and throughout, when we wish to refer to a Latin lexeme we will use the standard citation form ILL E – and reserve mention of particular members of its paradigm for when this – hence in this instance ILLE is germane to the explanation of a specific item, for example Fr. le < ILLUM but la < ILLAM .

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a. It.

Paolo ha comprato un libro. INDEF . MSG book.MSG Paolo have.PRS . 3SG buy.PTCP ‘Paolo has bought a book.’ b. Sp. entre el hotel y la playa and DEF . FSG beach.FSG between DEF . MSG hotel.MSG ‘between the hotel and the beach’ de sas berbekes est maláida. c. Srd.3 Una be.PRS . 3SG sick.FSG one.FSG of DEF . FPL sheep.FPL ‘One of the sheep is sick.’ d. Pt. A Maria comprou o vestido de DEF . FSG Maria buy.PST . 3SG DEF . MSG dress. MSG of ‘Maria bought the silk dress.’ e. Fr. Les chats n’ont pas peur des DEF . PL cat.MPL NEG . have.PRS . 3PL fear of.DEF ‘Cats aren’t afraid of spiders.’ f. Cat. una cantant força famosa pels seus INDEF . FSG singer.FSG very famous.FSG for.DEF . MPL her.MPL ‘a singer very famous for her records’ g. Rom. Cartea este pe masă. table.FSG book.FSG . DEF be.PRS . 3SG on ‘The book is on the table.’

seda. silk.FSG araignées. spider.FPL discos record.MPL

So far, so apparently straightforward. But the traditional terminology here suggests an equivalence in categorial status and semantic content which is belied by both the diachronic and the typological evidence. Not only are there a variety of etymological sources for these items, but they have different chronological profiles within the transition from Latin to Romance. This staggered development is consistent with the broader picture of the place of articles within the languages of the world. The crosslinguistic studies by Dryer (2013a,b) reveal that in addition to 198 languages which, like Latin, have neither a definite nor an indefinite article, there are 45 which have an indefinite article but no contraposed definite item and 98 in which the opposite situation obtains and there is a definite but no indefinite article. There are in addition 112 in which the numeral ‘one’ is used as an indefinite article and 69 in which a demonstrative also serves as a definite article. Semantically too there is a difference. While definiteness relates to the familiarity or identifiability of the item in question for the speaker and hearer, and in this respect shares properties with the

3 There is no single standardized form of Sardinian, and there are many regional differences, particularly between the principal southern variety, Campidanese, and northern varieties such as Logudorese and Nuorese. For the most part these concern the phonological realization of the items under discussion in this chapter rather than their morpho-syntactic behavior. Where relevant we will flag up such differences, but in general we will follow Jones (1993) and cite the Nuorese forms.

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meaning conveyed by a demonstrative, an indefinite article combines both reference to the newness of an item in context and its cardinality (for discussion, see Lyons 1999, ch. 1). The commonly used binary feature [± DEF ] thus misrepresents the true state of affairs, and, as we shall see, a number of current approaches choose instead to assign definite and indefinite articles to different positions in the architecture of the NE. As is evident in the above examples, the articles encode the gender of the noun to which they attach, for the most part distinguishing gender in both the singular and the plural. French is an exception here in that the plural form les neutralizes the gender contrast discernible in the singular: la plume ‘the pen (F )’, le papier ‘the paper (M )’ vs les plumes ‘the pens’ and les papiers ‘the papers’. A similar neutralization of the gender contrast in the plural is also found for example in the Campidanese dialect of Sardinian su (MSG ), sa (FSG ) and is (MPL & FPL ). There are also variations determined by the phonological context. Thus, the final vowel of the article is elided in French if the following word begins with a vowel: l’ami ‘the male friend’ vs l’amie ‘the female friend’. Similarly in Italian we have l’amico ‘the male friend’ vs l’amica ‘the female friend’. In Italian on the other hand the usual form of the masculine singular article before consonant initial words is il as in il toro ‘the bull’ with the variant lo only occurring before words that begin with the cluster sC as in lo squalo ‘the shark’. The plurals are respectively i and gli: i tori ‘the bulls’ and gli squali ‘the sharks’. By contrast, the singular form el in Spanish is used with all masculine nouns and has a correspondingly unique plural los. Catalan has a similar singular masculine el but here the plural is els. A special feature of Spanish is that the form el is also used before feminine nouns or adjectives beginning with stressed [a] but in that case the corresponding plural is las. What these few examples demonstrate is that, under the umbrella of a shared origin from the same set of Latin forms, there exists a wide range of local diversity in the detailed realization rules. Another dimension of morpho-phonological variation concerns the so-called “articulated prepositions” evidenced in Fr. des in (1e) and Cat. pels in (1f). This is the phenomenon whereby some prepositions have coalesced with the definite, or less commonly the indefinite, article. Once again there is considerable variation in the outcomes; the prepositions involved and the resulting phonological forms vary both from language to language and over time. Thus, the ‘for’ preposition per in Catalan unites with the masculine plural article els to yield pels but the corresponding French items pour les do not combine, neither do the Modern Italian items per i and per gli but the forms pei and pegli are attested in earlier stages of the language. On occasion the combinations yield special phonological effects as when French de + le becomes du, or in the Portuguese forms pelo(s), pela(s) the article’s etymological initial l-, which has been lost in the plain series o/a/os/as, resurfaces. And in both Italian and Portuguese the combination of in plus article causes the loss of the initial vowel leading to forms such as It. nel(lo), nella, negli and Pt. definite no(s), na(s) and indefinite num/nuns/numa(s).  

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Among these patterns, the combination of the ‘of’ preposition with an article is of particular interest. In (1e) we see the transparent use in which the de of the expression avoir peur de ‘to be afraid of’ combines with the plural article les to yield the composite form des. The same form appears in (2) but with a different function: (2)

Fr. Je mange des chocolats / du I eat.PRS . 1SG DES chocolate.PL DU ‘I eat chocolates/chocolate every day.’

chocolat tous les jours. chocolate.SG all.PL DEF . PL day.PL

Here the expressions des chocolats and du chocolat indicate respectively an unspecified number or quantity of chocolate(s), and the sentences would be ungrammatical if the forms des/du, the so-called partitive articles, were not present. Notice too that this form is required even if the head noun is a word which already has a quantificational reading, as in (3): (3) Fr. Des centaines de personnes se sont recueillies à Paris. DES hundreds of people REFL be.PRS . 3PL gather.PTCP - FPL in Paris ‘Hundreds of people gathered in Paris.’ Here the expression des centaines serves to indicate an indeterminate quantity and the sentence would be ungrammatical if des were omitted, whereas Italian centinaia di persone or Spanish centenas de personas would be unproblematic without further grammatical support. If the noun in question is preceded by an adjective or is the object of a negated verb the prescriptive tradition requires simply de without an associated article as in (4) and (5), although even here in colloquial usage the articulated form is also found: (4) Fr. De très nombreux dispositifs ont allégé le coût. DE very numerous device.PL have.PRS . 3PL reduce.PTCP DEF . MSG cost.MSG ‘Numerous devices have reduced the cost.’ (5) Fr. Hier je n’ai pas mangé yesterday I NEG .have.PRS . 1SG eat.PTCP ‘Yesterday I didn’t eat any chocolate(s).’

de DE

chocolat(s). chocolate (PL )

Analogous uses of the partitive article are not generally attested elsewhere in Romance, with the exception of Italian.4 Maiden/Robustelli (2000, 76), drawing on Korzen (1996), discuss the examples in (6):

4 There is a pattern in Romanian involving the preposition din ‘from, out of’ (< Lat. DE IN ) which at first sight appears to have a similar function: iau din pâine ‘I take of-the bread’ (Pană Dindelegan 2013, 285),

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a. C’è dell’ acqua there-be.PRS . 3SG of.DEF . FSG water.FSG ‘ There’s (some) water in the bottle.’ b. Ci sono delle mosche there-be.PRS . 3PL of.DEF . FPL fly.FPL ‘ There are (some) flies in the bottle.’

dentro la inside DEF . FSG

bottiglia. bottle.FSG

dentro la inside DEF . FSG

bottiglia. bottle.FSG

As they note, there are regional differences in that northern speakers tend to prefer the version with the partitive article and southern speakers the one with zero. This in turn corresponds with the dialect division; Gallo-Italian dialects in general and Tuscan make use of the partitive article whereas other central and southern dialects do not (Rohlfs 1965–1969, §423). This regional variation has been correlated by Körner (1987, ch. 1) with the availability of so-called ‘differential object marking’ (DOM) of the kind seen in Spanish vi a María ‘I saw María’ as opposed to vi el coche ‘I saw the car’. Languages with DOM such as Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and southern Italian dialects do not make use of the partitive article, whereas those like French, Occitan, standard Italian and northern Italian dialects have the partitive but not DOM (see Stark 2008b for a development of this line of argument). However, Maiden/Robustelli (2000) note that there is also a potential semantic contrast between the general property dice (delle) bugie ‘he tells lies/he’s a liar’ and the specific reading which is only available when the partitive is included dice delle bugie ‘he’s telling lies (on this occasion)’. The difference is that in French it is virtually impossible for an NE to occur unaccompanied by an article of some kind in any position unless it be in fixed expressions such as avoir peur ‘be afraid’, se faire jour ‘become clear’ or when the NE is in predicate (or more generally a non-argumental) position – for example Pierre est professeur ‘Pierre is a teacher’ – whereas in the other languages this restriction holds only with respect to the subject of the sentence. This constraint in French is of relatively recent origin. Earlier stages of the language are more in line with what is found elsewhere in Romance, as can be seen in the Old French examples in (7) (Buridant 2000, 109–112) and the Middle and Renaissance French ones in (8) (see also Carlier 2013), where (8b) demonstrates in addition that the structure in question can be a modified NE such as establissemenz au pueple and not simply a single noun: (7) OFr. a. Deus, reis de glorie … cel e terre fesis God king of glory heaven and earth make.PST . 2SG ‘ God, king of glory, who made heaven and earth’ (Guillaume 804–805)

but the meaning here is closer to a true partitive ‘I take some of the bread’ and contrasts with iau pâine ‘I take bread’ (Martin Maiden, p.c.).

Determination and quantification

b. Loi est establissemenz au institution to-DEF law be.PRS . 3SG ‘The law is an institution for the people.’ (Gratien D2 C1) (8) MFr.

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a. Gargamelle … se porta à manger REFL bear.PST . 3SG to eat.INF Gargamelle ‘ Gargamelle took to eating tripe.’ (Rabelais, Gargantua 4) b. À Chartreux, aussi Celestins À mendiants et aux devotes … Je crye à toutes gens merciz! ‘To the Carthusians and also the Celestines, to beggars and to the devout … I shout to everyone thanks!’ (François Villon, Ballade)

trippes tripe.PL

On the basis of this historical profile, Harris (1977; 1980) argues that the Modern French language has reached a stage in which the reflexes of ILLE have come to serve for the most part as noun-class/number markers, and as such obligatorily accompany the noun unless another item like an indefinite article can fulfill the same function, while the role of marking definiteness is instead taken over by ce (in origin itself a demonstrative – see Section 4 below) when it is not complemented by the deictic enclitic particles -ci and -là. A not dissimilar conclusion within a very different technical framework follows from the analysis of what is called the l-pronoun in Déchaine/Wiltschko (2002). They argue for a three-way distinction between pro-DP, pro-NP and an intermediate category which they label pro-φP. French en and Italian ne are examples of pro-NP since these items refer to the noun alone without its determiner as in j’en ai mangé trois/ne ho mangiati tre ‘I have eaten three of them’. French le and cognate forms in the other Romance languages can refer to either a preceding argument or a predicate, the latter exemplified in Marie est contente et Pierre l’est aussi ‘Marie is happy and so is Pierre’, evidence, it is argued, for the conclusion that the l-pronoun is not pro-DP but is instead of the category pro-φP, and does not simply mark definiteness as such. It is thus in a different category from definite pronouns and by extension from definite articles such as English the or German der/die/das. In the domain of indefiniteness, it is clear then that the alternative to the obligatory use of the so-called partitive article in French is a bare noun (or more accurately a ‘bare NE’ since the nouns in such constructions can be modified by adjectives as in (9d) for example):

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(9) a. It.

Gianni mangiava biscotti e beveva latte. Gianni eat. IMPF . 3SG biscuits.PL and drink.IMPF . 3SG milk.SG ‘ Gianni was eating biscuits and drinking milk.’ b. Sp. Este manuscrito contiene errores. this manuscript contain.PRS . 3SG mistake.PL ‘ This manuscript contains mistakes.’ c. Rom. Vine furtună. come.PRS . 3SG storm.SG ‘ There’s a storm coming.’ d. Sp. Olas gigantescas batían contra las rocas. beat.IMPF . 3PL against DEF . FPL rock.FPL wave.FPL huge.FPL ‘ Huge waves beat against the rocks.’ e. Sp. Manzanas y peras colgaban de sus árboles. apple.FPL and pear.FPL hang.IMPF . 3PL from his.MPL tree.MPL ‘ Apples and pears were hanging from his trees.’ f. Pt. Mãe e filha caíram num in-INDEF . MSG mother.FSG and daughter.FSG fall.PST . 3PL silêncio prolongado. silence.MSG prolonged.MSG ‘ Mother and daughter fell into a prolonged silence.’

There are variations within the family with respect to the acceptability of these patterns. Thus, the type in (9a,b) is grammatical across the board, except, as we have seen, in French; the type (9c) with a bare singular common noun is special to Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese (cf. (10a)); (9d) is grammatical as long as the preverbal noun is modified. Examples (9e,f) are taken from Märzhäuser (2013) and show that the Romance languages are admitting a wider cross-linguistic category of co-ordinated NEs, which are article-free when the nouns form a natural or ‘stereotypical’ grouping. For more detailed exemplification and cross-linguistic comparison of bare NEs, see Dobrovie-Sorin/Laca (2010) and Kabatek/Wall (2013). As these studies show, when it comes to analyzing these structures, we need to recognize three different sub-types: bare mass singulars, bare plurals and bare count singulars. Amongst all these it is bare singulars which have the most restricted set of contexts, for the most part only occurring in certain prepositional phrases such as It. in chiesa ‘in church’ or systematically in all prepositional phrases in Romanian with an unmodified noun as in pe masă ‘on the table’ in (1g), in the incorporated and often lexicalised type avoir peur mentioned above, and in negated sentences such as (5). The exception here is Brazilian Portuguese, where the distribution of bare count singulars is parallel to that of bare mass and plurals. The examples in (10) are from Dobrovie-Sorin/Laca (2010, 259):

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735

a. Aqui passa trem. here pass.PRS . 3SG train.SG ‘ Trains pass here.’ b. Tigre ferido é perigoso. wounded.MSG be.PRS . 3SG dangerous.MSG tiger.MSG ‘ A wounded tiger is dangerous.’ c. Criança briga uma com a outra. argue.PRS . 3SG one.FSG with DEF . FSG other.FSG child.FSG ‘ Children argue with each other.’

Note in particular that these bare singulars occur in subject position, can be accompanied by adjectives and can control reciprocals, properties which distinguish them from bare singulars in other Romance languages and which they share instead with bare plurals and mass nouns. By contrast, a class which might a priori be expected to be bare is that of proper nouns, which in most contexts in and of themselves identify a unique referent. A determiner would seemingly only be required if there is doubt as to which person is being referred to as in It. il Giorgio di cui parlavamo ‘the Giorgio we were talking about’. Alternatively, a definite article might be the means by which a common noun is turned into a name and becomes frozen in place names as in Le Havre, A Coruña, La Spezia, Sacosta and the like. Nonetheless, the Romance languages differ considerably in their use of articles with personal and place names. Thus, European Portuguese usually requires an article before a first name as in a Susana but not before a family name, while in Brazilian Portuguese the article is generally not used with names of any kind. In standard Spanish the use of articles with first names is frowned on, though it is common in some regional varieties such as Chilean (Butt/Benjamin 1994, §3.2.21). In Catalan by contrast there are special forms of the definite article for use with first names: en Joan and na Maria, though outside the Balearics, the norm is now la Maria, and increasingly also el Joan. Standard Italian does not have an article before a first name but does before the surname of notables such as l’Ariosto and l’Alighieri (but not *il Dante since this is his first name). At the same time, within Italy, as noted in Rohlfs (1965–1969, §653), there is a remarkable degree of dialect variation with the article only before female first names in Tuscan, only male names in Trentino and both in Lombard and in Salentino. A different way of giving expression to the distinction between mass and count singulars is to be seen in what are somewhat misleadingly called ‘neuter’ articles attested in some central and southern Italian dialects. Here we find oppositions such as Umbrian lu ferru ‘the iron tool’ vs lo fɛrro ‘iron’ and Neapolitan ’o pane ‘the loaf’ vs ’o ppane ‘bread’. Such contrasts show up in a variety of ways: different forms of the article, changes in vowel quality or presence vs absence of initial consonant doubling. These are all in different respects reflexes of the original neuter demonstrative ILLUD (Maiden 1995, 248) or *ILLOK (Ledgeway 2012, 105), which was the appropriate form in

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combination with Latin neuter nouns with mass meaning such as vinum ‘wine’ and ferrum ‘iron’ but which was then extended to other originally masculine nouns such as panis ‘bread’. As Ledgeway notes, in these dialects the mass form of the article is now used productively in combination with adjectives – e.g. Nap. ’o ttriste literally ‘DEF . MASS sad’ hence ‘sadness’ – and as a way of nominalizing infinitives – e.g. Nap. ’o mmagna ‘eating’ – and in neologisms such as Nap. ’o rrap ‘rap music’. Spanish too has a distinction between lo, the reflex of the neuter, and the masculine el, as can be seen in instances like lo importante es que diga la verdad ‘the important thing is that s/he tells the truth’, lo nunca visto en Estados Unidos ‘what has never been seen in the USA’. As Pomino/Stark (2009) and Stark/Pomino (2010) demonstrate, the true value of this so-called ‘neuter’ definite article (and also the corresponding demonstratives esto, eso, aquello) in Modern Spanish is an undefined and undelimited mass, as opposed to the masculine or feminine articles which indicate an individuated entity. Thus lo absoluto indicates absoluteness in general, while el absoluto refers to the specific philosophical concept of the absolute as elaborated by Hegel. Analogous structures are found in Catalan and Portuguese but the article here is not formally distinct from the masculine. All the languages we have considered thus far share the property that the article precedes the other constituents of the NE and is itself only preceded by universal quantifiers such as tout, tutto, todo ‘all’ (see Section 3). In Romanian, by contrast, the markers of definiteness, while still deriving from forms of Latin ILLE , are enclitic to the nouns and adjectives with which they are in construction.5 The following table (based on Pană Dindelegan 2013, 255) illustrates for the three representative nouns elev (M ) ‘pupil’, fată (F ) ‘girl’, caiet (NEUT ) ‘notebook’:6 Table 1: Plain and definite forms of the Romanian noun masculine

plain

feminine

neuter

SG

PL

SG

PL

SG

PL

NOM / ACC

elev

elev-i

fat-ă

fet-e

caiet

caiet-e

GEN / DAT

elev

elev-i

fet-e

fet-e

caiet

caiet-e

5 As Adam Ledgeway reminds me (p.c.), a notable exception here is the genitive/dative singular lui, which is proclitic to male proper names (and to non-indigenous female ones, and in Colloquial Romanian to indigenous female proper names), cf. casa bărbatului / femeii ‘the house of the man/ woman’ vs casa lui Ion / lui Deborah (?lui Ana, for standard Anei). 6 Formally what is called the neuter identifies nouns which have masculine inflection in the singular and feminine inflection in the plural. Whether such ambigenericity requires the recognition of a separate neuter gender is a matter of controversy (see Maiden 2016b, for discussion and a proposal), but resolution of this question is not crucial to what follows.

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Table 1 (continued) masculine

definite

feminine

neuter

SG

PL

SG

PL

SG

PL

NOM / ACC

elev-ul

elev-ii

fat-a

fet-ele

caiet-ul

caiet-ele

GEN / DAT

elev-ului

elev-ilor

fet-ei

fet-elor

caiet-ului

caiet-elor

Some examples are: (11) Rom. a. Străzile Bucureştiului street.NOM . FPL . DEF Bucharest. GEN . DEF ‘ The streets of Bucharest are crowded.’ b. Cartea este pe book.NOM . FSG . DEF be.PRS . 3SG on ‘The book is on the round table.’ c. cuvintele frumoase beautiful.FPL word.FPL . DEF ‘the beautiful words’ d. frumoasele cuvinte beautiful.FPL . DEF word.FPL ‘the beautiful words’

sunt aglomerate. be.PRS . 3PL crowded.FPL masa table.ACC . FSG . DEF

rotundă. round. FSG

In an example like (11a) the form străzile corresponds in meaning to the French les rues or Sardinian is caminus but it is not simply a question of the position, pre- and post-nominal, of the articles in the different languages. Whereas in the other Romance languages, the article can be separated from the noun by adjectives and other modifiers as in French les très bons garçons ‘the very good boys’ or Italian il tuo interessantissimo libro ‘your very interesting book’, in Romanian the article is enclitic to either the noun, as in (11c), or the adjective, as in (11d), depending on which comes first within the NE, but it cannot be detached from its host word. In this last respect, it behaves like a verbal or nominal desinence, and hence a number of scholars have proposed that what we have in the modern language, rather than an article in the traditional sense, is a definite declension for nouns.7 In developing their version of this analysis Manzini/Savoia (2011, §8.2) draw a parallel with a similar pattern in Albanian. More generally, this property which, as we have said, makes Romanian unique amongst the Romance languages is shared with other

7 One piece of evidence in this respect is the fact that the presence of the article can cause the lexical accent to shift to the final syllable in a small class of ‘neuter’ nouns, e.g. ràdio vs radiòul (Adam Ledgeway, p.c.).

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languages of the region including Bulgarian, Macedonian and Albanian, and is one of the features of the Balkan Sprachbund first described by the Danish scholar Kristian Sandfeld (1930). Support for this view also comes from the existence of one of the types of what Pană Dindelegan (2013, 381–389) calls polydefiniteness, as exemplified in (12a,b) [= her (202a,b)], and (12c) (courtesy of Martin Maiden), where both the adjective and the noun bear the definiteness inflection: (12) Rom. a. săracul băiatul ăla boy.MSG . DEF that pitiable.MSG . DEF ‘that poor boy’ b. muncitorul ăla vrednicul that hardworking.MSG . DEF worker. MSG . DEF ‘ that hardworking worker’ c. ăla micul aia mica little.FSG that little.MSG that ‘ that little boy/girl’ (colloquial/affectionate) This structure is described as being characteristic of ‘spoken, non-literary Romanian’ and is only attested when the NE contains a postnominal demonstrative; in other contexts, as we have noted, the definiteness marker attaches to the noun or the adjective but not both. The principles governing the distribution of definiteness have changed over time. Cornilescu/Nicolae (2011) cite the example (13a) [= their (2)] from the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century writer Dimitrie Cantemir, where definiteness is marked on the head noun cuvintele, and contrast it with their modern Romanian rendering in (13b), in which the definiteness marker attaches to the first word in the NE, the adjective ticăloasele. (13) Rom. a. Spre ticăloase cuvintele mele auzul îți pleacă. to vicious.FPL words.FPL .DEF my.FPL .DEF hearing turn.IMP . 2SG ‘Lend your ears to my vicious words.’ b. Spre ticăloasele cuvinte ale mele auzul îți pleacă. This pattern is attested from the earliest Romanian texts in the sixteenth century through until the middle of the eighteenth century. Before leaving Romanian, we should mention the freestanding definiteness marker cel (< Lat. ecce + forms of ille).8 The details of this item’s distribution are complex –  

8 To keep matters simple we will only cite here examples in the nominative or accusative singular but this item has a full paradigm (cei, cea, cele, celui, celei, celor) and can accompany a noun or an adjective in all grammatical contexts.

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see Pană Dindelegan (2013, 309–318) for a full account – but two main uses can be distinguished: freestanding as in (14a,b) and as part of the double definiteness construction in (14c,d). (14) Rom. a. cele mai deștepte fete CEL . FPL more smart.FPL girl.FPL ‘ the smartest girls’ b. cele două fete din Michigan CEL . FPL two girl.FPL from Michigan ‘the two girls from Michigan’ c. cerul cel albastru CEL . MSG blue.MSG sky.MSG . DEF ‘ the blue sky’ d. fetele cele mai deștepte CEL . FPL more smart.FPL girl.FPL . DEF ‘ the smartest girls’ The pattern in (14a,b) is typologically similar to, though diachronically distinct from, what is found elsewhere in Romance with a definite article occurring in initial position in the NE where it can only be preceded by a quantifier like toți ‘all’, and constitutes the only way that a numeral can be combined with a definite article. By contrast the nearest typological correspondent to (14c,d) lies elsewhere in the Balkans and provides further evidence for the regional Sprachbund. All the data we have considered so far, with the exception of the Sardinian example (1c), involve definite articles that derive from Latin ILLE . By contrast, all varieties of Sardinian are consistent in having articles deriving from IPSE , the only difference being that in Campidanese the singular gender contrast su/sa is neutralised in a single form is (due to loss of the unstressed final syllable from *issos/issas) instead of the forms sos/sas and us/as found elsewhere on the island. There is historical evidence that forms derived from IPSE had a much wider distribution across the southern part of the Romance speaking territory (Aebischer 1948, 189–193). The example in (15), from the thirteenth century Cantar de Mio Cid, is frequently cited for the way it shows a contrast between es (< IPSUM ) dia ‘the day’ and la (< ILLAM ) noch ‘the night’ (although Lapesa 1961 considers es here still to have the force of a demonstrative): (15)

es

dia es salido DEF . MSG day.MSG be.PRS . 3SG go.out.PTCP . MSG e la noch entrada es and DEF . FSG night.FSG enter.PTCP . FSG be.PRS . 3SG ‘ the day has gone and the night has come’ (Cid 1699)

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The co-existence of articles or proto-articles (what Aebischer 1948 calls ‘articloids’) derived from both IPSE and ILLE is reported for early Spanish and Catalan by Lapesa (1961) and documented in detail by Emiliano (2003, 319–330) for the eleventh- and twelfth century Latin texts from Portugal which make up the Liber Fidei. Traces of such articles can be found in proper names even in regions where the IPSE - based form has been lost. Thus Fouché (1924, 69) cites Roussillonnais patronymics such as Saporta and Despuig and place names like Valcebollera (< Val ça Bollera) and Escatllars (< Es Catllars). Of particular note in this context are the Catalan dialects in the Balearics and a small part of the Costa Brava, in which not only does the IPSE -based article salat survive to this day but it is in contrast with one based on ILLE . The unmarked form of the article is derived from IPSE : es gat ‘the cat’, es gats ‘the cats’, sa teva amiga ‘your girlfriend’, ses llengües ‘the languages’. However, when there is a unique referent the ILLE -based article is used as in el cel ‘the sky’, el Rei ‘the king’ and the like, and hence contrasts such as that between s’església ‘the church (building)’ and l’Església ‘the (Catholic) Church’, or between ses lleis ‘the laws’ and la llei ‘the Law (as an institution)’ (for more examples, discussion and references, see Ledgeway 2012, 100–105). Such uses reflect ILLE ’s original deictic and identifying function and parallel the contrast noted above between individuated el absoluto and general lo absoluto. Having considered definites in some detail, let us now briefly turn our attention to indefinites. Here there is much greater uniformity across the family, with all languages having a prenominal indefinite article derived from the Latin numeral UNUS which, like the numbers duo ‘two’ and tres ‘three’ in that language, is inflected in agreement with the case and gender of the accompanying noun: unam mulierem ‘one woman.ACC . FSG ’ , duabus civitatibus ‘two cities.ABL . FPL ’ , tria verba ‘three words.NOM / ACC . NPL ’ . The following table sets out some representative examples from across the family: Table 2: Romance indefinite articles masculine

feminine

Galician

un rapazo ‘a boy’ un libro ‘a book’

unha rapaza ‘a girl’ unha ponte ‘a bridge’

Spanish

un niño ‘a boy’ un puente ‘a bridge’

una niña ‘a girl’ una casa ‘a house’

Occitan

un drolle ‘a boy’ un pont ‘a bridge’

una drolla ‘a girl’ una casa ‘a house’

French

un garçon ‘a boy’ un pont ‘a bridge’

une jeune fille ‘a girl’ une maison ‘a house’

Friulian

un fantat ‘a boy’ un puint ‘a bridge’

une fantate ‘a girl’ une cjase ‘a house’

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Table 2 (continued) masculine

feminine

Sardinian

unu pitzinnu ‘a boy’ unu ponte ‘a bridge’

una pitzinna ‘a girl’ una domu ‘a house’

Romanian9

un băiat ‘a boy’ un pod ‘a bridge’

o fată ‘a girl’ o punte ‘a footbridge’

In general the Romance languages fall into the category identified by Dryer (2013b) in which the indefinite article is formally indistinguishable from the numeral ‘one’. An exception is to be found in some dialects of Ladin, where the article has undergone loss of the initial vowel but the numeral has retained the full form, hence Badiot n, na beside on, una and Gardena n/ŋ, na beside uŋ and una. Moreover, in these dialects the two may co-occur as in the examples below (from Haiman/Benincà 1992, 152): (16) Lad. a. Daøna na skwadra esoŋ pasa team.F be.PRS . 1PL pass.PTCP from.one.F INDEF . F ‘From one team we grew to three.’ [Badiot] b. l’ɛrt kuntsɛtuala, una na rama dl DEF -art.F conceptual.F one.F INDEF . F branch.F of-DEF ‘ conceptual art, one branch of visual art’

a trɛj. to three ɛrt visiva art visual

In addition to the singular form, in most Romance languages the plural indefinite article occurs as a quantifier. Exceptions here are Italian (and Italo-Romance dialects more generally) and Modern French.10 Representative examples are given in (17) (cf. also Ledgeway 2012, 82–84). (17) a. Pt.

b. Sp.

c. Cat.

Vi uns colegas no INDEF . MPL colleague.MPL in.DEF . MSG see.PST . 1SG ‘ I saw some colleagues in the cinema.’ El terremoto duró unos 25 DEF . MSG earthquake.MSG last.PST . 3SG INDEF . MPL 25 ‘The earthquake lasted some 25 seconds.’ uns famosos professors INDEF . MPL famous.MPL professor.MPL ‘some famous professors’

cinema. cinema.MSG segundos. second.MPL

9 As expected, the Romanian indefinite article also inflects for case: un. M . NOM / ACC , unui. M . GEN / DAT , o. F . NOM / ACC , unei.F . GEN / DAT . 10 In French and Italian a plural pronominal use is however found in the expressions les uns … les autres and gli uni … gli altri ‘some … others’.

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d. Srd.

unas

vinti twenty ‘ some twenty sheep’ INDEF . FPL

berbekes sheep.FPL

In Romanian the story is complicated by the fact that unstressed nominative/accusative plural forms of un are not available, though much the same meaning is conveyed by the independent quantifier niște (< nu știu ce ‘I don’t know what’), and hence niște femei ‘some women’ beside casele unor femei ‘the houses of some women’. By contrast if stress is placed on the quantifier then unii is possible: Unii studenți n-au citit cartea ‘SOME students haven’t read the book’. It is noteworthy that these ‘indefinite’ forms are not only plural but also incorporate the definiteness marking: uni-i, une-le, as do forms like altul ‘another’ and un altul ‘another one’. In Romanian too the approximate meaning seen in (17b,d) is not available. In short, the precise nuances expressed by the plural indefinite article based on the numeral ‘one’ vary between the languages but in general we can discern three categories of meaning: a) to indicate a single entity made up of separate parts as in Sp. unas escaleras ‘a flight of stairs’, OFr. unes montaignes ‘a mountain range’; OOcc. uns gauz grans ‘a large forest’ (Jensen 1994, 77); b) to indicate an unspecified, usually small, number (as in (17a,c)); c) (with numerals) to express approximation, as in (17b,d). In Campidanese Sardinian this is restricted to co-occurrence with a numeral or numerical expression: unus centu ‘approx. 100’ (cf. Fr. une centaine, It. un centinaio), teniat unus bintannus ‘he was about 20 years old’. The historical profile is of particular interest here. In the case of French, although the plural indefinite article is not available in the modern language, Buridant (2000, 115– 117) adduces numerous examples from Old French. He notes, however, that they all fall into our first meaning category and identify a fixed set, though sometimes of indeterminate size, going from a pair to a general kind. The following illustrates this point: (18) OFr. a. Il avoit … unes grandes joues INDEF . FPL large.FPL cheek.FPL he have.IMPF . 3SG et un grandisme nes plat. very large.MSG nose.MSG flat.MSG and INDEF . MSG ‘ He had large cheeks and a very large flat nose.’ (Aucassin et Nicolette XXIV, 13) b. Ce sont unes bestes de moult grant force. there be.PRS . 3PL INDEF . FPL animal.FPL of very great strength ‘These are animals of very great strength.’ [Buridant translates: ‘C’est une espèce d’animaux très forts.’, ‘This is a kind of very strong animal.’]

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It is noteworthy that example (18b) is from a twelfth century translation by Gervais of Tilbury of a Latin original, since in Latin the plural of UNUS is found with nouns which are grammatically plural but referentially singular as in Terence An. 674 ex unis geminas mihi conficis nuptias ‘instead of one marriage you’ll make me two’.11 It is possible therefore that the Old French construction represents an extension and generalization of this Latin type and hence a separate diachronic development from the quantificational uses exemplified in (17). In similar vein, Jensen (1994, 76–77) reports a number of examples from Old Occitan, and comments that only rarely do they have an indefinite quantificational sense. That we have two distinct developments here is also consistent with the findings of Pountain (forthcoming), who identifies what he calls “a veritable explosion” in the use of unos/as as a quantifier in Spanish from the sixteenth century onwards, noting at the same time that the majority of Spanish examples before the sixteenth century involve a contrast between unos/as and otros/as of the kind that, as we have noted, occurs across the whole family without exception and which has medieval Latin precedents in the use of uni … alteri (and compare Stark 2006 on the use of uni in Old Tuscan/Italian). More generally, when it comes to the expression of indefiniteness with plural NEs, there is a great range of different quantifiers and quantificational expressions, as we will see in Section 3. Nor should we forget the use of a bare noun as discussed above. The question which now arises is how to model the patterns we have described. In traditional grammar and in earlier versions of generative syntax, the constituent made up of a noun plus determiners (and further optional modifiers such as adjectives and relative clauses) was labelled a noun phrase (NP) and it was taken for granted that the noun was the head (for an excellent review of the background and the traditional arguments, see Matthews 2007, ch. 4). Support for this line of analysis comes from the fact that the noun is, for semantic reasons, considered obligatory whereas the article is an extra, appropriate, as we have seen, in some but not all grammatical contexts. It is the semantic value of the noun which determines the core external relations with governing elements such as verbs and prepositions. By contrast articles have traditionally been seen as accompanying the noun and, like possessives and demonstratives, serving to identify its reference. In current thought this view still holds sway within the framework of HPSG, where determiners fall under the general category of “marker” (Pollard/Sag 1994, 44–45, 363–373). Allegranza (1998) adopts this approach in his account of the Italian NP, and the theoretical implications are developed in more detail in van Eynde (2006), albeit in relation to Dutch rather than Romance. While staying within the framework of HPSG, Abeillé et 11 The other Latin usage is when UNUS adds the force of ‘only’ or ‘just’ as in Plautus Trin 167 ruri dum sum ego unos sex dies, which means not ‘some six days’ but ‘just six days’, and Caesar BG 4.7 sese unis Suebis concedere ‘they gave way only to the Swabians’, but this does not seem to be continued into later Latin let alone into Romance.

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al. (2006) introduce the alternative concept of ‘weak’ head, defined as an item which counts as a head with respect to the items it dominates but which yields its head value to that of the item with which it combines. A related notion is the concept of a nonprojecting feature developed within Lexical-Functional Grammar and explored in the context of the historical development of NEs in Börjars/Harries/Vincent (2016). Whichever of these non-derivational approaches is adopted, however, the crucial consequence is that the string [Det + N] remains nominal for the purposes of external government and selection. Analyses in this vein are the direct opposite of what is envisaged within the DP hypothesis, according to which the D(et) is the head and takes the noun as its complement, so that the whole is a DP and not an NP. On this view an expression such as Portuguese os lobos ‘the wolves’ has the structure [DP [D os] [NP lobos]], and there is a fundamental distinction between functional heads like D and lexical heads like N. Once we accept the idea that a grammatical property like definiteness is to be located in a functional head such as D, the way is open to postulate further functional heads corresponding to other functional features. Thus, if we assume with Danon (2010), as seems right, that definiteness is a monovalent feature rather than a binary one, there is no intrinsic reason for the feature(s) associated with the indefinite article to occupy the same head as the definite article. Lyons (1999, 300) suggests that the indefinite article occupies a distinct Cardinality head positioned below D but above NumP. Various other nominal functional heads have been proposed in the literature. Thus, Picallo (2008) argues for a CLASS (ifier) head immediately above the noun and below Num as a way of linking Romance gender to the systems of more or less semantically transparent noun classes found particularly but not only in Bantu languages. In similar vein, Stark (2008a) argues for a head Pl(ural), distinct from and structurally lower than Num, in order to account for the correlations we have observed between the behaviour of bare plurals and mass nouns. While her account develops a precise semantics that is associated with this new head, this is not always the case. In general, within Minimalism, heads are syntactic and not semantic entities, and they are postulated to explain distributional patterns as much as semantic interpretation. This is sometimes reflected in the category names. Thus, in their account of Romanian NEs Cornilescu/Nicolae (2011) introduce a new category of ArtP, and an unnamed FP which dominates the string [FP [AP frumosul] F [NP trandafir]] ‘beautiful. DEF rose’. Moreover, within this approach there has to be frequent recourse to movement and to null heads (as for example the null F in the preceding example), since the overall architecture of the heads is assumed to be universally given. Hence in Longobardi’s account of Italian, the relation between il mio Gianni and Gianni mio, both meaning ‘my Gianni’ is achieved by assuming the latter to start out with a null D head [DP Ø [NP mio Gianni]], and requiring the proper name Gianni to move into the D position in surface syntax. Longobardi adduces further support for this account from the position of adjectives with proper nouns. Thus in the following sentence L’antica

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Roma/Roma antica/La Roma antica fu la città più importante del Mediterraneo ‘Ancient Rome was the most important city in the Mediterranean’, any of the three possibilities indicated are acceptable but the sequence *antica Roma, where Roma has not moved to occupy the D position, is ungrammatical. By contrast, non-derivational approaches such as HPSG state the equivalence directly in the semantics and generate the syntactic configurations independently on a language-by-language basis (Allegranza 1998). For Longobardi the requirement that structures like Gianni mio contain a null D derives from the desire to maintain the generalization that only DPs can be arguments, as in (19b), as distinct from the predicational use in (19a), a structural contrast which has parallels across the whole family (Longobardi 1994, 618–619, ex. (19)). (19) It.

a. Gianni è medico (*che si cura davvero dei suoi pazienti). (who really cares for his patients) Gianni be.PRS . 3SG doctor ‘Gianni is a doctor.’ b. Gianni è un medico (che si cura davvero dei suoi pazienti). Gianni be.PRS . 3SG INDEF . MSG doctor (who really cares for his patients) ‘Gianni is a doctor who really cares for his patients.’

Building on this contrast, Bernstein (2008) argues that there is indeed a core semantic feature that unites all uses of what she calls the l-article in Romance, but that it is not definiteness but third person. Her argument rests in part on the parallels between NEs with a personal pronoun such as noi stranieri ‘we foreigners’, which determines first person plural agreement in a following verb, beside gli stranieri ‘the foreigners’, which triggers third person agreement. In addition, personal pronouns share with DPs the property of being referential. This proposal in turn requires us to consider the person features as being, like definiteness and indefiniteness, monovalent and independently characterisable in contrast to the view, classically advanced by Benveniste (1946/1966), that third is the unmarked person. We return to the NP vs DP debate in Section 6 below in the context of a more detailed consideration of the diachronic development of the Romance article systems.

3 Quantifiers Our discussion of the reflexes of Latin UNUS in the previous Section demonstrated that there is a close link between items that serve to identify a specific element in context (articles) and those which refer to the number or quantity of such elements (quantifiers). Given the closeness of this link it comes as no surprise to find that many of the quantificational expressions in Romance have etymologies which incor-

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porate the numeral ‘one’ as the following table shows (forms not involving in italics).

UNUS

are

Table 3: Some Romance quantifiers one

some

all/every

each

no/none

Portuguese

um

algum

todo

cada

nenhum

Spanish

uno

alguno

todo

cada

ninguno

Catalan

un

algun

tot

cada

(niun)

Sardinian

unu

argunu

toto

cada

nisçunu

Occitan

un

(qualque)

tot

cada

degun

French

un

(quelque)

tout

chaque

aucun

Italian

uno

alcuno

tutto

ciascuno

nessuno

Romanian

un

vreun

tot

fiecare

niciun

The fact that ‘one’ can be modified in this way calls attention to an important difference between quantifiers and the other categories considered in this chapter. Whereas the latter constitute closed classes, quantifiers, as Giusti (2015, ch. 4) reminds us, are in principle an open class since any numeral can be considered to quantify the noun which it accompanies, and quantificational expressions such as It. almeno la metà ‘at least half’, Fr. presque tous ‘almost all’, Sp. un par de ‘a couple’ and their equivalents abound and have their own internal structure. Since any attempt to cover the full syntax of quantificational expressions will take us too far astray, we will concentrate our attention here on items that express the core quantificational meanings represented in Table 3. However, the fact there is such a wide range of internal structure to quantificational expressions justifies the postulation of a quantifier phrase (QP) as an independent constituent. We return to the issue of where the QP is to be located within the overall structure of NEs below, but before doing so we look in a little more detail at the individual formations. The existential quantifiers in the main involve one of two elements: AL -, which originally meant ‘other’, but already in Latin was prefixed to quantificational expressions such as aliquis ‘some’ and alicubi ‘somewhere’; or QUALIS ‘which’. The latter occurs by itself as a quantified determiner or in combination with UNUS to yield a pronominal: Fr. quelqu’un or It. qualcuno ‘someone’, whereas with the former the numeral is incorporated into the determiner: compare Fr. quelques amis with Sp. algunos amigos ‘some friends’. The same alternation between forms built with and without UNUS can be seen with the distributive quantifiers. While the majority of the Romance languages make use of the indeclinable cada/chaque, in origin a borrowing from Greek κατά ‘each’, as for example Pt. cada dia, Fr. chaque jour ‘each day’, Italian  

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only has the compound form ciascuno (and the more formal caduno) as in ciascuno studente ‘each student’, ciascuna città ‘each town’, which can also function pronominally: ciascuno deve firmare la lettera ‘each one must sign the letter’. Another diachronic source of quantifiers is adjectives meaning ‘different, varied’, from which they are distinguished by syntactic position. Thus contrast the pairs in (20) and (21): (20) It.

(21) Sp.

a. Oggi devo fare do.INF today must.PRS . 1SG ‘Today I have to do several things.’ b. Oggi devo fare do.INF today must.PRS . 1SG ‘Today I have to do different things.’

diverse different.FPL cose thing.FPL

a. en varias partes del in various.FPL part.FPL of.DEF . MSG ‘in several parts of the country’ b. en partes varias del in part.FPL various.FPL of.DEF . MSG ‘in different parts of the country’

cose. thing.FPL diverse. different.FPL

país country.MSG país country.MSG

These items also co-occur with certain singular mass nouns as It. da diverso tempo ‘for some time’. In the case of reflexes of CERTUS ‘certain’, this has led to a potential contrast with the indefinite article, as noted by Ledgeway (2012, 86–88). Not only does the adjective in quantifier function precede the noun but in Italian, a language in which articles precede possessives, so do the adjective-derived quantifiers. (22) It.

a. diversi miei colleghi b. certi tuoi amici c. varie sue proposte

‘several of my colleagues’ ‘some of your friends’ ‘several of his/her proposals’

Negative quantifiers are for the most part not surprisingly constructed out of a reflex of UNUS prefixed by a negative marker as Cat. ningun, Rom. niciun < NEQUE UNUM , sometimes with an emphatic pronominal as in It. nessuno < NE IPSE UNUM . In contexts where there is a governing negative marker, these items may alternate with the positive term, so that for example It. non ho alcuna idea and non ho nessuna idea both mean ‘I have no idea’. In the case of French this has caused the etymologically positive item aucun (cognate with It. alcuno or Sp. alguno) to have in the modern language a negative value even in subject position: Aucun n’est prophète chez soi ‘noone is a prophet in his own country’ (see ↗12 Negation and polarity). A positive value in a similar context is however attested in Old French (cited from Buridant 2000, 180):

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(23) OFr.

Grant big ne

peor ai que aucun homme man fear have.1SG that some vos ait ci veü venir. NEG you.ACC have. SBJV .3SG here see.PTCP come.INF ‘I am very afraid that someone might have seen you come here.’ [Le roman de Tristan 188–189]

An item that has undergone a similar development is the literary and Old Italian veruno < VERE UNUM ( Ramat 1996, his example (26)): (24) It.

E’ vi sarebbe tanto caldo che veruno vi Conj there be.COND . 3SG so-much hot that no-one there potrebbe campare. can.COND . 3SG live.INF ‘It would be so hot there that no-one would be able to live.’ [Marco Polo, Il Milione]

The expression of universal quantification in Romance merits special attention in two respects, first because of a significant semantic shift in the Latin item TOTUS which lies behind the principal Romance exponents of this category, and second because the syntax of the latter differs from that of the other types of quantification we have so far considered. While Latin distinguished between TOTUS as a universal quantifier for mass and singular NEs, that is to say the equivalent of English the whole or German ganz, and OMNIS for universal quantification over sets (Pinkster 2015, §11.38), the latter has by and large fallen away and the reflexes of TOTUS have assumed both functions. The direction of this shift is consistent with the cross-linguistic patterns identified by Haspelmath (1995) and, as Martzloff (2014) demonstrates, it was already well underway in late Latin. The exception here is Italian, which has beside tutto/-a/-i/-e the indeclinable ogni ‘every’ (< OMNIS ), which however is restricted to a distributive function in construction with singular count NEs: ogni studente ‘every student’, ogni giorno ‘every day’. There is too the associated pronominal ognuno ‘everyone’ and a number of fixed expressions (Rohlfs 1965–1969, §500). The reflexes of TOTUS , by contrast, serve as an all-purpose universal quantifier and can combine with both singular and plural nouns. There are two syntactic properties which mark this item out. In the first place it co-occurs with and precedes the definite article, as in the representative examples in (25): (25) a. b. c. d.

Sp. Ast. Mil. Rom.

toda la noche ‘all night’; todos los cinco ‘all five of them’ tol año ‘all year long’; tolos dies ‘every day’ tutt Milan ‘all Milan’; tutta la cà ‘the whole house’ tot zahărul ‘all the sugar’; toți frații ‘all the brothers’

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It can also occur without the definite article if it combines with a proper noun, as here tutt Milan, or with an item that is inherently definite such as a demonstrative: It. tutti questi colleghi ‘all these colleagues’ or in generics such as Fr. tout citoyen est censé connaître la loi ‘every citizen is considered to know the law’. In the case of possessives, it depends on whether the language in question independently requires an article (see Section 5 below), thus contrast French tous mes amis and Italian tutti i miei amici ‘all my friends’. The second distinctive feature of these items is that they can ‘float’, that is to say occupy a position within the verbal group and syntactically separated from the item they quantify as in the examples in (26): (26) a. Sp.

Los

estudiantes dicen todos que el examen fue fácil. student.MPL say.PRS . 3PL all.MPL that the exam was easy ‘The students all say that the exam was easy.’ Os alunos leram cada um duas revistas. DEF . MPL pupil. MPL read.PST . 3PL each one.MSG two magazine.FPL ‘The students each read two magazines.’ DEF . MPL

b. Pt.

A floated quantifier can only be linked to a full NE in subject position, but it can refer back to a clitic direct or indirect object with which it could not otherwise combine: (27) a. Fr.

Ils

sont venus tous. be.PRS . 3PL come.PTCP . MPL all.MPL ‘They all came.’ b. Fr. Pierre leur a parlé toutes. Pierre PRO . 3PL . DAT have.PRS . 3SG speak.PTCP all.FPL ‘Pierre spoke to them all.’ c. Srd. Juanne los at tottu lessos. PRO . 3MPL . ACC have.PRS . 3SG all.INV read.PTCP . MPL Juanne ‘Juanne has read them all.’ PRO . 3MPL

A special subcase of universal quantification is ‘both’. Here some Romance languages have preserved a reflex of Latin AMBO , either by itself as Sp. and Pt. ambos and Rom. ambii or in combination with the word for ‘two’ as It. ambedue and Rom. amândoi. In others a new formation involving ‘all’ and ‘two’ has been created as with French tous/ toutes les deux and Srd. totesdus, and these have in some languages been extended to other lower numerals hence Srd. totestres, Rom. tustrei ‘all three’, tuspatru ‘all four’ (though these two rare in the modern language). In some languages too formations of the latter type exist along with the former, hence It. tutti e due beside ambedue and in Sp. and Pt. los dos beside ambos. These items can also ‘float’:

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(28) a. Sp.

Mis vecinos recibieron ambos una carta. my.MPL neighbour.MPL receive.PST . 3PL both.MPL INDEF . FSG letter.FSG ‘My neighbours both received a letter.’ b. Rom. Copiii au venit amândoi. child.MPL . DEF have.PRS . 3PL come.PTCP both.MPL ‘The children both came.’

The ability to be dislocated in this way is further evidence that the quantifier constitutes a phrasal element in its own right since such syntactic movements are not in general available to word-level items. The key question then is: where is such a QP to be located, and more particularly how can we account for the fact that some quantifiers in some languages seem to occupy the same slot as other determiners, while others, notably the universal quantifiers, co-occur with and precede them? One solution is to distinguish the classes of quantifiers in terms of their complements. More specifically, a floating quantifier like tout/todo/tutto takes a DP complement while an item like chaque or ogni takes an NP, and movement rules are then sensitive to this distinction. The structures for the near minimal pair in Italian tutti gli studenti ‘all the students’ and ogni studente ‘every student’ would then be as in (29): (29) It.

a. [D/QP b. [D/QP

[QP tutti] [D/Q ogni]

[DP[D gli] [NP studenti]]] [NP studente]]

There is a further debate as to whether it is the QP which floats or, in more recent accounts, the complement DP which raises and ‘strands’ the QP in a lower position. We will not go into details here. For discussion and references with respect to one language, see Baunaz (2011).

4 Deixis and demonstratives In the classic definition of Levinson (1983, 54) deixis ‘concerns the ways in which languages encode or grammaticalise features of the context of utterance or the speech event’. This includes a wide range of phenomena which are linked to the participants in the speech event, the social relations between them and the temporal and spatial co-ordinates of the event. Here we focus on the expression of spatial and textual deixis, since it is in this domain that the phenomenon enters the determiner systems through the grammatical category of demonstratives. Broadly speaking, within Romance these fall into two types: two-term or binary systems, which contrast a proximal deictic (‘near the speaker’) and a distal one (‘away from the speaker’) and three-term or ternary systems in which the terms match the grammatical persons: ‘near the speaker’, ‘near the addressee’ and ‘away from both speaker and addres-

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see’.12 Typical examples of the former are Romanian, which contrasts acest ‘this’ (< Lat. ACCE + ISTE ) and acel ‘that’ (< Lat. ACCE + ILLE ), and It. questo ‘this’ (< Lat. ECCU + ISTE ) vs quello ‘that’ (< Lat. ECCU + ILLE ). Ternary systems include Sp. este (< ISTE ) vs ese (< IPSE ) 13 vs aquel (< ACCU + ILLE ) and North Umbrian quisto vs tisto (< TIBI TIB I + ISTE ) vs quillo. Over time it is not uncommon for a ternary system to reduce to a binary one. In such situations the distal deictic is usually retained but which of the speaker or addressee related items survives can vary. Thus, while European Portuguese has the three terms este vs esse vs aquele, in spoken Brazilian Portuguese the distinction between este and esse has to all intents and purposes disappeared, and the two are used interchangeably, with the more common form being what was in origin the addressee-related term esse. By contrast, of the three terms which make up the Old Neapolitan system, the addressee-related chissu is the recessive member and a binary contrast between chistu ‘this’ and chillu ‘that’ characterises the modern language (Ledgeway 2009, §5.1.4). A similar development is the loss of the marked second person deictic codesto (< ECCU TIBI ISTE ) from all but the most formal registers of Italian although it is well attested in Early Florentine, from which the modern standard language evolved. In Catalan, Wheeler (1988, 178) notes that the ternary system found in older texts and in the modern normative standard is preserved in the spoken language only in Valencian, which contrasts este vs eixe vs aquell. Other dialects have reduced to a two-term system but with variation as to whether it is the first person (aquest) or the second (in its reinforced variant aqueix) which survives. A very different pattern is reported for some varieties of Modern Sardinian by Blasco Ferrer (1984, §63.1), who observes that the older three term system kustu vs kussu vs kuḍḍu has been replaced by a binary opposition kustu vs kussu, with the etymological distal falling into disuse and the addressee-related form extending its function. A special case is French. In Old French there was a binary system cest (< ECCE + ISTE ) vs cel (ECCE + ILLE ), but the effect of phonetic change was to reduce these both to ce before words beginning with a consonant. At the same time the plural of both was ces, so that in effect there comes into being a system with one item ce (MSG ), cette (FSG ), ces (PL ), and with optional enclitic particles -ci (proximal) and -là (distal) available should the need arise for a distinction to be made. Harris (1977) takes the argument a stage further and proposes that, since there is very little difference between a single unmarked demonstrative and a definite article, in Modern French the true definiteness marker is in fact ce while the reflexes of ILLE for the most part serve instead to

12 For a more refined sub-division of possible systems, see Ledgeway/Smith (2016) and for greater detail concerning demonstratives and deixis in Romance see the contributions to Jungbluth/Da Milano (edd.) (2015). 13 The formal differences here are due to whether the Latin items IS TE , IPSE , ILLE were prefixed with the reinforcing particle ECCE / EC CU / AC CE / ACC U in one or other of its variants and the consequent phonological effects. On the pragmatic differences between the plain and reinforced forms of the demonstrative, see Ranson (2005).

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signal nominal gender classes and number. A contrasting view is espoused in the work of Georges Kleiber, who treats definiteness as scalar and determined not only by the grammatical items used but also by context; see in this connection his study of OFr. cist/cil (Kleiber 1987) and for the modern language De Mulder/Carlier (2006). In addition to the number of paradigmatic options within the demonstrative systems of the various Romance languages, there are also syntagmatic contrasts, and it is notable that these parametric differences do not always align. Thus in both binary Romanian and ternary Spanish the demonstrative may both precede and follow the noun, as in (30) and (31). By contrast, neither binary French nor ternary Neapolitan permit the demonstrative to follow the noun. (30) Rom. a. Acest/acel băiat vine. this/that.MSG boy.MSG come. PRS . 3SG b. Băiatul acesta/acela vine. boy. DEF . MSG this/that.MSG come. PRS . 3SG ‘This/that boy comes.’ (31) Sp.

a. Este/ese niño this/that.MSG boy.MSG b. El niño DEF . MSG boy.MSG ‘This/that boy comes.’

viene. come. PRS . 3SG este/ese this/that.MSG

viene. come. PRS . 3SG

If the demonstrative precedes the noun then it serves at the same time to mark definiteness and the definite article/suffix is excluded; however if the demonstrative follows then the noun needs to be marked for definiteness. That said, there are still differences. Thus, Romanian has the added requirement that the postnominal demonstrative must be immediately adjacent to the definite-marked noun,14 whereas in Spanish an adjective may intervene: la falda corta esta ‘this short skirt’, el libro viejo este suyo ‘this old book of his’. We should also note that the pairs in (30) and (31) are not synonymous. The postnominal demonstrative implies that the person or thing referred to is well known or is topical in the discourse. In Ibero-Romance there is the further pragmatic implicature that the individual is being referred to pejoratively or sarcastically as with Sp. la mujer esa ‘that woman (who keeps annoying us)’. Another dimension of difference within the family concerns the co-occurrence of demonstratives and possessives. The Spanish example above shows that in that language both can occur postnominally, in which case the order must be Dem > Poss:

14 Cornilescu/Nicolae (2011) note that this constraint operated differently in Old Romanian citing examples like pă ticălosul pământŭ acesta ‘on wretched.DEF earth this’ and nenorocitele acestea vremi ‘unfortunate.DE F these times’ from the seventeenth century chronicler Radu Greceanu.

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el libro este suyo/*suyo este. Prenominally, however, possessives and demonstratives are mutually exclusive as they are also in French: ce livre/este libro ‘this book’ and mon livre/mi libro ‘my book’ but not *ce mon livre/este mi libro. In Italian or Portuguese on the other hand such combinations are entirely normal as in It. questo mio libro and Pt. este meu livro. The generalization here is that if a prenominal possessive requires a determiner, then a demonstrative can fill that role just as a definite or indefinite article can (see Section 5 below), but otherwise the cluster Dem + Poss is excluded. How then are these properties to be integrated into the representation of Romance NEs? The patterns we have just been discussing suggest that prenominal demonstratives have the distribution of determiners but postnominal demonstratives behave like adjectives, and in a model which recognizes the existence of the category DP, prenominal demonstratives can readily be assigned to the D position across the family as a whole. The question then arises as to how the prenominal demonstrative is related to the postnominal uses we have considered above. On one view the connection is purely semantic: the same item occurs in two syntactic positions that happen to have partially overlapping semantic properties. Since this is also what is often said about the connections between pre- and post-nominal occurrences of adjectives in the Romance languages, on this account demonstratives are only exceptional in so far as their prenominal position is that of the determiner, which is not a position open to adjectives, or at least only to those adjectives like Sp. varios and It. diversi which, as we have seen, have grammaticalized into quantifiers. There may too be differences in form as in Romanian, where the reduced forms ăsta, ăla, etc. can only be postnominal whereas the full forms may occupy either the pre- or the post-nominal slot. However, within derivational frameworks in which semantic properties are always mediated through the syntax, this kind of analysis will always seem suspect, as indeed it does to Brugé (2002) and Giusti (2015). They argue instead for an account which builds on the proposals by Cinque (1994) for a universal cartographic sequence of heads within the DP, and in which the demonstrative occupies the specifier position of a low Dem head located beneath all other adjectival heads and just above the NP. In consequence, if the N raises above Dem it leads to the surface order [ … N …Dem], but if both N and Dem are raised we get the desired surface configuration [DPDem [ NP]].

5 Possessives All the Romance languages have possessive adjectives and/or determiners which derive from Latin as exemplified in the following table (for reasons of space we cite only the masculine singular forms):15

15 There are of course other ways of expressing possession, in particular with the ‘of’ preposition plus the possessor, but we will not consider those structures here. We will also mention only in passing the

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Table 4: Latin and Romance possessives Lat.

Pt.

Sp.

Cat.

Occ.

Fr.

Srd.

Surs.

Lad.

It.

Rom.

meus

meu

mi

meu

mon

mon

meu

mes

mi

mio

meu

tuus

teu

tu

teu

ton

ton

tuo

tes



tuo

tău

suus

seu

su

seu

son

son

suo

ses



suo

său

noster

nosso

nuestro nostre

nòstre

notre

nostru

nɔs

nɔʃ

nostro nostru

vester

vosso

vuestro vostre

vòstre

votre

vostru

vɔs

vɔʃ

vostro vostru

su

lor

leur

issoro

lur



loro

suus/eius seu

llur

lor

One formal difference lies in the exponence of third person possession. In Latin there was a single item suus/-a/-um, built on the stem of the reflexive pronoun se and which marked co-reference with a third person subject regardless of number. This was in complementary distribution with eius, the genitive singular of the anaphoric pronoun is, which marked possession by a non-subject third person (Mari 2016 and references therein). Thus, in (32) suamque filiam ‘his daughter’ and suamque uxorem ‘his wife’ refer back to the main clause subject of videt (Charmides) while eius matrem ‘her mother’ refers back to the daughter, the subject of the embedded accusative and infinitive. (32) Lat.

uidetque ipse . . . suamque filiam see.PRS . 3SG - and EMPH . NOM .3 MSG POSS . ACC .3 FSG - and daughter.ACC . FSG esse adultam uirginem simul girl.ACC . FSG at the same time be.INF adult. ACC . FSG eius matrem suamque uxorem PRO . GEN .3 SG mother.ACC . FSG POSS . ACC .3 FSG - and wife.ACC . FSG mortuam dead.ACC . FSG ‘and he sees. . . and that his daughter is a grown-up girl, and that at the same time her mother, his wife, has died’ (Plautus, Trin. 109–111)

predicative construction as in for example Sp. este libro es mío ‘this book is mine’, in which the possessive is clearly adjectival and not part of the determiner system, or in many southern Italian dialects where the equivalent sentence requires the definite article and can also involve de/di in a pseudo-partitive construction, as for example Calabrian ‘ssu libbru è du mia (= del mio) (Adam Ledgeway, p.c.).

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Within Romance this complementarity has for the most part been lost.16 On the one hand the reflexes of suus across the whole family have come to mark third person possession regardless of the grammatical status of the antecedent, as in for example the French or Italian renderings of the NEs in (32): sa fille/sua figlia, sa mère/sua madre, sa femme/sua moglie. On the other hand, with the exception of Spanish and Portuguese, and more generally non-Catalan varieties within the peninsula such as Galician and Asturian (Lorenzo 1998), the modern languages have innovated a form to distinguish third person plural possession derived from the same source as their definite article, hence illorum, the genitive plural of ILLE , or in Sardinian ipsorum, the genitive plural of IPSE . These items, unlike the other possessives, do not in general agree in gender with the noun they modify, though some languages have developed an analogical plural as Cat. llurs, Fr. leurs, Occ. lors. Beside this general unity of form there lies considerable diversity in the (morpho) syntax. One dimension of difference, which we have already had cause to mention, concerns co-occurrence with the definite article. We noted above the equivalence of French sa fille/mère/femme and Italian sua figlia/madre/moglie, but this is a special instance due to the fact that these examples refer to close family members. With all other categories of noun, French does not permit the article and the possessive to co-occur, while Italian, and Italo-Romance dialects more generally, require it. The Romance languages split fairly evenly in this respect. European Portuguese behaves like Italian, hence o nosso carro ‘our car’, as tuas amigas ‘your (SG ) friends’, while Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese pattern like French: su amigo ‘his/her friend’, mi novela ‘my novel’. Standard Catalan requires the article: el teu projecte ‘your (SG ) plan’, el nostre avi ‘our grandfather’, as does Asturian: la mía vaca ‘my cow’, los sous xatos ‘her calves’ (Lorenzo 1998). Rhaeto-Romance dialects split; Ladin does not require the article, hence mies cazes ‘my houses’ and vossa visita ‘your visit’, but Friulian does: il gno cjan ‘my dog’ and la mê torbe ‘my folder’ (Haiman/Benincà 1992). Romanian likewise requires the definiteness marker, consistent with what we have already seen, on the first word of the NE, be that a noun or an adjective: copilul meu ‘my child’, frumoasa mea prietenă ‘my beautiful.DEF friend’. In those languages which require the article, the exclusion of terms referring to close family members is part of a larger pattern across Romance whereby inalienable and alienable possession are treated distinctly. In their typological survey, Nichols/ Bickel (2013) note that many languages operate different ways of encoding possession, most commonly with a binary system in which one structure provides the default means of expressing possession regardless of who or what the possessor is, and with

16 An exception is Romanian, which retains an alternation in the third person singular, but both forms are now, apart from differences of register, synonymous; mașina sa/lui ‘his car’, while a contrast is still preserved in Istro-Romanian (Martin Maiden, p.c.).

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a second system restricted to a defined nominal sub-class. This latter ‘inalienable’ class typically includes kin terms, body parts and words such as ‘house’ which, while not strictly speaking inalienable, are part of the immediate environment or culture (Nichols 1988). There are additional constraints; for example in Italian the relevant items must be in the singular and not modified, hence tua sorella ‘your sister’ but la tua simpatica sorella ‘your nice sister’ and le tue sorelle ‘your sisters’. In many southern Italian dialects and in Romanian the distinction is realised through the use of enclitic possessives on the inalienable items: Calabrian mugghjéra-mma ‘my wife’, Barese kas-tə ‘your (SG ) house’, Gallipoli zia-sa ‘his/her aunt’, Rom. mamă-ta ‘your (SG ) mother’, soru-sa ‘his/her sister’, stăpân-su ‘his/her master’ (Dumitrescu/Saltarelli 1998; D’Alessandro/Migliori 2013). At the same time there is variation between dialects as to which family members fall within this system of marking, with words meaning ‘cousin’, ‘father-in-law’ and the like sometimes taking enclitic possessives and sometimes not (Adam Ledgeway, p.c.). What is striking about these Romance patterns in the broader typological context is that the markers of both classes are derived from the same etymological source, the differences in form being the product of contrasting phonological changes in tonic and atonic environments. Although, as we have said, by far the most widely attested pattern in these cases is an enclitic expressing singular person attached to a singular noun, enclitics attached to plurals are attested: Marchigiano nepóte-mi ‘my nephews’, Pugliese serúre-te ‘your sisters’. Much rarer are plural possessives as in San Donato nònnə-nə ‘our grandfather’, nəpútə-nə ‘our nephews’ (Rohlfs 1965–1969, §430), and in such cases there is a strict hierarchy, with extension to the second person plural implying extension to the first person plural but not vice versa (Benincà/Poletto 2005). Once again factoring in the diachronic evidence changes the picture. Although it is only in the mainland of southern Italy that we find enclitic possessives in the modern dialects, they are amply attested in early Umbrian maritoto ‘your husband’ (Jacopone da Todi, 13th c.), Tuscan signorso ‘his master’ (Dante, Inf 29, 77), and Old Sicilian patruma ‘my father’, fratuta ‘your brother’ (Rohlfs 1965–1969, §430). In Old Romanian there are examples of plural person enclitics: casa-ne ‘our house’ and plural nouns with enclisis: părinți-vă ‘your parents’ (Pană Dindelegan 2013, 345), though here the markers are dative clitic pronouns not possessive adjectives.17 It looks therefore as if the possibility of enclisis was formerly available across the whole of Romance territory south and east of the La Spezia–Rimini line, and in a wider spectrum of contexts.

17 As Martin Maiden points out, this is consistent with the more general possibility in Romanian of using datives to express possession; contrast the rather stilted nu știu numărul meu de telefon with the more natural nu-mi știu numărul de telefon ‘I don’t know my phone number’.

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Sardinian provides an interesting contrast, since here we find that, although the posssessive is obligatorily postnominal, as in the examples in (33), there is no evidence of enclisis and the article is required (Secci 2006):18 (33) Srd. a. s(u) ammigu DEF . MSG friend.MSG ‘his/her friend’ b. us ammigus DEF . MPL friend.MPL ‘our friends’

suu 3SG . POSS . MSG nostros 1PL . POSS . MPL

These forms are clearly tonic and adjectival and parallel to the Spanish pattern seen in forms such as un amigo mío ‘a friend of mine’ and unos parientes suyos ‘some relatives of his/hers’. Unlike Sardinian, however, Spanish also has the atonic and prenominal forms mi(s)/tu(s)/su(s), sometimes referred to as proclitic, which inflect for number but not for gender. As Ledgeway (2012, 112) argues, “although this dual adjectival-determiner paradigm can be assumed to underlie all Romance varieties historically, it has been lost in most varieties in favour of the generalization of one of the two paradigms”. Another dimension of difference is that, as discussed in Section 4, in some Romance languages the possessive co-occurs with the definite article, and the languages which require this also permit combinations of a possessive with an indefinite article or a demonstrative as in It. questo tuo amico ‘this friend of yours’ or una mia sorella ‘one of my sisters’. Before concluding this survey of the Romance possessive patterns we should make mention of two further features, one general and one particular. The general one is that, in comparison say with languages like English, the definite article by itself is often sufficient to convey possessive meaning, particularly as in the following examples where we have to do with inalienable possession: (34) a. Sp.

Junté las manos y bajé la cabeza. join.PST . 1SG DEF . FPL hand.FPL and bow.PST . 1SG DEF . FSG head.FSG ‘I joined my hands and bowed my head.’ b. Rom. Închide ochii și deschide gura! close.IMP .2SG eye.MPL . DEF and open.IMP .2SG mouth.FSG . DEF ‘Close your eyes and open your mouth.’

18 Secci (2006) is based on the author’s native Baunese dialect, which is located in the centre of the island. However, as she notes, the principles governing the position of the possessive and its cooccurrence with other determiners apply to all varieties of Sardinian.

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We can contrast too the original Italian title of the prize-winning novel L’amica geniale by Elena Ferrante with its translation into English (My brilliant friend) or Swedish (Min fantastiska vännina) while the versions in Spanish (La amiga estupenda) and Portuguese (A amiga genial) retain the definite article. The more specific feature is the behavior of the so-called ‘possessive article’ al in Romanian. This form, which has no equivalents elsewhere in Romance, is derived from Lat. A ( D )+ ILLE and is required if the possessor is not immediately adjacent to the determiner of the preceding possessum phrase. Hence the ungrammaticality of (35a) in contrast to (35b,c) (Ledgeway 2012, 115): (35) Rom. a. [câine-le ] *al [fetei] girl.GEN . FSG . DEF dog.MSG . DEF AL . MSG b. [câine-le frumos] al [fetei] AL . MSG girl.GEN . FSG . DEF dog.MSG . DEF pretty ‘the girl’s pretty dog’ c. [acest/un câine] al [fetei] AL . MSG girl.GEN . FSG . DEF this/a dog ‘this/a dog of the girl’ Accommodating the data we have just reviewed leads to the same differences in approaches we have noted in other contexts. The cartographic approach seeks to integrate all the variation into a single sentential architecture. In Section 4 we saw how Brugé’s (2002) analysis requires possessives to be in a functional projection below demonstratives and just above NP if we are to account for the order el libro este suyo ‘this book of his, lit. the book this his’. Hence a structure like that in (36) in which the NP raises successively past both the demonstrative and the possessive: (36) Sp.

[DP [D el] libroi [FP [DemP este] F] [PossP suyo] [NP ti]]

Secci (2006) adopts a very similar structure as her starting point, the difference being that in Sardinian the possessive is an adjective and not inherently [+definite], and therefore always stays in its base position. In this way both the postnominal surface position of the possessive and its occurrence with a prenominal article, either definite or indefinite, is accounted for. For enclitic possessives, on the other hand, nouns with meanings like ‘mother’ and ‘house’ are treated as inherently [+definite] and thus it is the noun that moves to the Det position, as in Longobardi’s (1994) treatment of the string Gianni mio, with the possessive then cliticizing to it. For an alternative analysis, in which enclitic possessives are derived from a copula construction [mamma [V Ø] mia] see D’Alessandro/Migliori (2013). It will be evident that analyses of this kind, which depend on the availability of syntactic movement operations, are not open to non-derivational models such as HPSG and LFG. For these the solution lies in treating the different syntactic

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patterns as a reflex of whether the possessive is taken to be an adjective (as in Sardinian) or a determiner (as in French) or as both (as in Spanish), with the shared meanings across the different structures following automatically from the semantics of the items in question.19 Yet a third type of approach is to treat each pattern as a separate and independent construction and to deploy the analytical framework of Construction Grammar (for Romance work in this direction, see Boas/ Gonzálvez-García 2014).

6 Diachrony As we have noted at various points, the exponents of the grammatical and semantic categories discussed in this chapter are for the most part the outcomes of processes of grammaticalization and/or reanalysis starting from Latin, and ultimately proto-IndoEuropean, elements. There is not space here to cover all the relevant diachronic dimensions (for a good overview with references see Ledgeway 2012 and the relevant chapters in Ledgeway/Maiden 2016, ↗23 Syntheticity and Analyticity), but we have picked three issues for particular attention.

6.1 Headedness If, as we have seen, the superficial features of the Romance languages, and in particular the frequently obligatory presence of articles or other determiners, might predispose us in favour of the DP hypothesis, the converse is the case in Latin, where the absence of a category of article, the relative freedom of word order and the general grammaticality of bare common nouns seem to argue in favour of an NP analysis. Such a conclusion would be in line with the broad syntactic dichotomy of DP vs NP languages proposed by Želko Bošković (2008; 2009; 2012), in turn building on the semantic typology developed by Gennaro Chierchia (1998). For Bošković, NP languages are characterized not only by their lack of articles, but also by the presence of some syntactic properties, including extraction, scrambling and radical pro-drop, and the absence of others, including negative raising, clitic doubling and a dedicated tense head.20 Latin fits this typology very well. Sentences (37a,b) exemplify respectively

19 Similar reservations about using the syntax of NEs to do what is in reality the job of the semantics are also expressed within a derivational framework by Bošković (2009, 188). 20 Not all of Bošković’s tests are relevant. In particular his discussion of differences in multiple whfronting need not concern us since neither Latin nor Romance languages other than Romanian exhibit this feature, and its presence in Romanian is arguably due to contact effects with surrounding Slavic languages. In general, his argument is that certain properties are ones that a DP language may, but does not have to, display; those same properties will by contrast be unavailable in an NP language.

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adjunct and left-branch extraction (see also Danckaert 2012), while scrambling covers the phenomenon described in many studies as Latin’s ‘free’ word order (Devine/ Stephens 2006). (37) Lat.

a. torcularium si aedificare voles quadrinis vasis pressing-room.ACC if build.INF want.PRS . 2SG four.ABL . PL vat.ABL . PL ‘if you want to build a pressing-room with four vats’ (Cato, De Agri Cultura xviii.1) b. duas in castris legiones retinuit two.ACC . FPL in camp.ABL . PL legion.ACC . FPL keep.PRF . 3SG ‘he kept back two legions in the camp’ (Caesar, De Bello Civili 3.75)

Radical pro-drop, in other words the possibility of null objects as well as subjects,21 is also characteristic of Latin as in (38). (38) Lat.

Novistine hominem? Novi. know.PRF . 2SG . INT man.ACC . SG know.PRF . 1SG ‘Do you know this man? Yes, I know him.’ (Plautus, Bacchides 837)

We will not go into detail here but ample evidence for the presence in Romance of other properties which Bošković claims are associated with DP languages such as negative raising, tense auxiliaries, clitic doubling and more constrained word order options is to be found elsewhere in this volume. On this view, the evidence we have seen for the postulation of a DP in the modern languages in the family is reinforced by a range of typological properties, although it should be noted that the presence of a single overt D head is sufficient for these purposes. The case for further sub-heads within DP therefore has to be made on different grounds, as we have indicated in the preceding sections. A contrasting view is that of Giusti/Iovino (2016), who argue that despite appearances Latin is also a DP-language, albeit one with a different internal organization of the DP to that found in the modern Romance languages. Their position relies in part on challenging the relevance or the accuracy of Bošković’s tests as applied to Latin, but more important in the present context is the other part of their argument in which the ordering and movement properties of Latin and Romance (represented here by Italian) are compared. While Romance does not permit the extraction of a numeral or

21 Portuguese is an exception to the general rule that Romance languages do not freely allow null objects, but this is clearly a late (eighteenth/nineteenth century) and independent development (Raposo 1986).

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modifier as in (37b), fronted genitives are said to be possible as in (39b) (= their (20b) where capitals indicate emphatic stress) as a translation of (39a): (39) a. Lat. b. I t.

summi oratoris habuit laudem great.GEN . MSG orator. GEN . MSG have.PRF . 3SG praise.ACC . FSG DI GRANDE ORATORE ha sempre avuto la of great orator has.PRS . 3SG always have.PTCP DEF . FSG reputazione. reputation.FSG ‘He had (always) the reputation of being a great orator.’

It has to be said, however, that a structure like (39b) is rhetorically highly marked in Italian, or indeed in any other Romance language, while the patterns exemplified in (39a) is attested in various registers of Latin. At the same time, although Latin does allow demonstratives to occur postnominally, the overwhelming majority are prenominal, and Giusti/Iovino therefore postulate a prenominal D position for Latin just as for Romance but with a discourse-motivated left peripheral position (LPP) within the NE from which a fronted element such as di grande oratore in (39b) can be extracted. In short, the structure for Latin is argued to be as in (40a) and for Romance as in (40b): (40) a. Lat. b. It.

[ LPP [DP[D Case + Num] [NP] ] ] [DP [D Case + Num] [ LPP [NP] ] ]

They go on to argue that what motivated the shift from a structure of the type (40a) to (40b) was the gradual disappearance in most of the attested languages of Latin case morphology and its replacement by articles but in a crucially different position in the hierarchical configuration of the DP. This possible link between the decline of case and the rise of the article is taken up in the next section.

6.2 Word order, articles and case A longstanding idea in Romance historical syntax holds that there is a link between the loss of Latin case morphology and the development of a fixed linear order. For example, Meyer-Lübke (1890–1902, vol. 3, §746) observed that “ce qui s’exprimait dans une époque antérieure au moyen des terminaisons, c’est actuellement l’ordre des mots qui l’indique”. Whereas in a language with overt case morphology the grammatical role of an item is evident from the form of that item, whatever position it occurs in within the clause, once that case morphology has been lost, it is the position that the item occupies which signals its function and therefore the possibilities for movement are severely reduced. More recent versions of this idea such as the afore-

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mentioned proposal by Giusti/Iovino (2016) incorporate the development of definite articles into the story and see the emergence of the category of definite article as a means of marking grammatical function and thus as replacing case in that role. Some caveats are nonetheless in order. First, on typological grounds, we know that there are languages such as Nahuatl or Zulu which have neither case morphology nor articles, so there can be no automatic guarantee that the loss of one will precipitate the rise of the other. Conversely, languages like German and Icelandic have both cases and definite articles. Second, and perhaps more problematic, is the existence in the specialist literature of different senses of the term ‘case’. Within Chomskyan frameworks such as Government and Binding and Minimalism (Hornstein/Nunes/Grohmann 2005, ch. 4; Butt 2006, ch. 4), it is usual to distinguish so-called abstract Case (written with an initial capital) from morphological case. The former is postulated to be part of Universal Grammar and thus by hypothesis to be present in all natural languages regardless of their family. In what follows we will be concerned with case in its traditional, morphological sense. The first to link case and order in this way was Renzi (1987), who argued that as a consequence of the development from Latin ‘modifier-head’ to Romance ‘head-modifier’ order, the case ending was out of alignment whereas a prenominal article (assuming of course that the article is indeed the head as is consistent with the DP hypothesis) was able to restore the required structural symmetry. It is this line of thinking which has been developed in work over the years by Giuliana Giusti – see now the synthesis in Giusti (2015) – and which we have seen playing out in Giusti/Iovino’s account of the shift from Latin to Romance, and with particular reference to the history of Romanian in Stan (2015). As Manzini/Savoia (2011, 277) observe, in effect what such a stance does is to give case priority over definiteness in determining the function of the definite article. The latter is seen as part of what Giusti calls a ‘scattered nominal head’. In other words, the article and the noun are together ingredients of the larger nominal category and may be realized, or ‘scattered’, across different locations in the overt morpho-syntactic structure. On this view “articles are not genuine determiners but segments of scattered Ns with which the determiner or the proper name merges” (Giusti 2015, 164). It is this ‘scattering’ effect which plays out differently in Romanian as opposed to the rest of Modern Romance. While this account enables typological links to be established between Romanian and other languages with suffixed definite markers such as Albanian and the modern Scandinavian languages, it at the same time makes it harder to understand the roles of ILLE and IPSE as the sources of the Romance articles since what unites them is the semantic link between their deictic and/or anaphoric functions and the notion of definiteness. A second issue is the diachronic profile of articles and case inflection. Partial case marking for subjects as opposed to other uses of the noun survives into Old French and Old Occitan, where the two forms of a noun such as OFr. li reis and li rei ‘the king’ are labelled respectively as cas sujet and cas régime (Buridant 2000, 62–82), although it is already showing signs of decline. More robust, as we have seen, is the case marking on

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Romanian determiners and feminine adjectives and nouns, which has survived to the present day. When it comes to articles, even if the etymologies are uncontested, the semantic trajectories and timelines are far from being agreed on. We have already noted that, traditional terminology notwithstanding, there is no intrinsic connection between definite and indefinite articles and it is no surprise therefore that they exhibit differing diachronic profiles. As discussed by Ledgeway (2012, 84–89), it is not until at least the fourteenth century that we can speak of the reflexes of UNUS showing the distribution that is characteristic of an article, while studies such as Stark (2006) for Old Italian and Carlier (2013) for Old and Middle French document in detail the way the various markers of indefiniteness, including quantifiers, partitives and bare NEs interact with the emerging article in the early stages of this historical development. While there is a consensus that the definite articles have stabilized prior to this date, precisely when that should be is still a matter of discussion. A text which has been a particular focus of attention in this connection is the late fourth/early fifth century Itinerarium Egeriae (also known as Peregrinatio Aetheriae) and various studies have examined the role therein of ILLE and IPSE (see Vincent 1997; Fruyt 2003 and references therein). The most recent contributions to this debate have gone in different directions. Adams (2013, ch. 21) and Ledgeway (2012, 89–96) emphasize the desirability of looking at a broader range of texts, while Hertzenberg (2015) subjects the entire Itinerarium to a rigorous statistical analysis rather than simply selecting individual examples, as previous scholars have in general done. Here is not the place to go into detail but there is a broad consensus around a number of conclusions that emerge from all this work, namely: a) That the emergence of even definite articles is later than has traditionally been believed, probably not until at least the eighth or ninth centuries AD and even later in some areas. In this connection, Varvaro (2013, 31–32) provides a valuable compilation of the earliest attestations of the definite article across the whole family (excluding Romanian, for which we simply do not have the necessary documentary evidence from the relevant period). This in turn tends to undermine the hypothesis that the rise of the definite article is connected to the loss of morphological case, since the latter is likely to have begun to take effect rather earlier even if it was a very long drawn out process. b) That, although both ILLE and IPSE give rise, as we have seen, to items that can reasonably be labelled definite articles, the diachronic trajectories are different both semantically and chronologically. This is much as is to be expected from the perspective of cross-linguistic work on grammaticalization since the semantic starting points are quite distinct. c) That their development as pronouns is in some measure separate from their development as determiners, a conclusion which tends to suggest that there is not, or not necessarily, a unified category D in the way some advocates of the DP hypothesis have supposed.

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6.3 Univerbation The concept of univerbation, that is to say the historical mechanism whereby an item that starts out as an independent word comes to be attached to and develop as part of another word, has been well documented and analysed in the domain of verbs. A classic instance from within Romance is the genesis of the future and conditional endings through the fusion of appropriate forms of Latin habere onto the infinitive: Fr. chanterai ‘sing.FUT . 1SG ’ < Lat. cantare habeo; It. canterebbe ‘sing.COND . 3SG ’ < Lat. cantare habuit. The phenomenon is perhaps less well documented in the nominal domain but the case of Romanian enclitic articles discussed above is clear evidence that the same process can apply here too. The synchronic consequences of such changes vary according to the theoretical perspective adopted. Thus, on a paradigm-based view of morphology (Stump 2016), in which the Romance morphomic developments find a natural place (Maiden 2016a), the incorporation of the auxiliary into the main verb creates a new series within a system which is organized along fundamentally different lines compared to the syntactic component from which it emerged. By contrast, in an approach such as Distributed Morphology (DM), in which the architecture of the phrase is projected below the level of the word and in which the concept of morphome is not easily accommodated (Nevins/Rodrigues/Tang 2015), the change relates more to the nature of the external realization of the form than to its underlying structure. In similar vein, Manzini/Savoia (2011), in developing their account of the Romanian definite ending, specifically argue against a DM approach, and in favour of a view in which the nominal morphology has expanded its domain of operation to include a new set of structures. One may compare here the insistence by Cornilescu/Nicolae (2011) that Romanian definiteness markers are indeed suffixes and not enclitics, as evidenced by the fact that they attach to both adjectives in a conjoined expression such as frumosul și marele oraș ‘the beautiful and big cities’ with the form of the suffix varying with the gender and inflection class of the noun to which it attaches. As they go on to show, the suffixal analysis can in turn be integrated into a phrasal architecture that includes the full range of nominal functional heads. Following the same logic one can ask whether the enclitic possessives cited in Section 5 above have not by now achieved the status of autonomous word forms, in a sense therefore constituting a possessive sub-paradigm for the nouns in question. Some evidence that the existence of the clitic has been obscured comes from the fact that there are attested instances of double marking such as sordata (< SOROR TUA TUA ) (Rohlfs 1965–1969, §430). Another instance of univerbation concerns the development of the various ‘articulated’ prepositions that are to be found to different degrees and involving different items across the family. What is striking here is the way forms such as Fr. du ‘of.MSG . DEF ’ , It. sui ‘on.MPL . DEF ’, Pt. numa ‘in.FSG . INDEF ’ give expressions to clusters of categories that are not well-formed sub-constituents of the relevant phrasal trees. All of the above instances involve suffixation or enclisis. Two other possibilities are prefixing and compounding. The latter can be seen in many of the complex

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quantifiers discussed in Section 3, as witness the fact that some formations even include the residual presence of a conjunction as in It. ciascheduno.

7 Conclusion In this chapter we have seen that from a structural point of view Romance NEs display what we might call ‘diversity within unity’. The unity lies in the fact that all the languages in the family have developed overt determiner systems which give realization to the semantic categories of (in)definiteness, possession, quantification and deixis. In this they differ from their Latin ancestor where such categories either go unexpressed or are realized through items that fall within the broader class of adjectives. The diversity is to be seen in the different ways the items within the sub-systems of articles, quantifiers, possessives and demonstratives combine and interact. We have also touched, albeit briefly, on the question of how these patterns can be modelled in theoretical terms. Finally, in order fully to appreciate the range – and limits – of these developments we have had recourse to data drawn from earlier historical stages of these languages. That such a double perspective, both diachronic and synchronic, is possible constitutes an empirical advantage which is, in the words of Elcock (1960, 33), a “special privilege” conferred on those who engage in Romance linguistics by the richness and variety of a textual tradition which thereby provides a valuable complement to the diversity of evidence derivable from the modern languages.

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Dryer, Matthew S. (2013b), Indefinite articles, in: Matthew S. Dryer/Martin Haspelmath (edd.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, Leipzig, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info/chapter/38 (26.12.2015) Dumitrescu, Domnita/Saltarelli, Mario (1998), Two types of predicate modification. Evidence from the articulated adjectives of Romanian, in: José Lema/Esthela Treviño (edd.), Theoretical Analyses on Romance Languages: Selected Papers from the 26th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL XXVI), Mexico City, 28–30 March, 1996, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 175–192. Egerland, Verner (2013), On the grammar of kinship. Possessive enclisis in Italian dialects, in: Kirsten Jeppesen Kragh/Jan Lindschouw (edd.), Deixis and Pronouns in Romance Languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 69–83. Elcock, W. D. (1960), The Romance Languages, London, Faber/Faber. Emiliano, Antonio (2003), Latim e romance na segunda metade do século XI. Análise scripto-linguística de documentos notariais do “Liber Fidei” de Braga de 1050 a 1110, Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Eynde, Frank van (2006), NP-internal agreement and the structure of the noun phrase, Journal of Linguistics 42, 139–186. Fouché, Pierre (1924), Morphologie historique du Roussillonnais, Toulouse, Privat. Reprint 1980 Genève, Slatkine. Fruyt, Michèle (2003), Anaphore, cataphore et déixis dans l’“Itinerarium” d’Égérie, in: Heikki Solin/ Martti Leiwo/Hilla Halla-aho (edd.), Latin vulgaire/Latin tardif VI, Hildesheim, Olms-Weidmann, 99–119. Giusti, Giuliana (2015), Nominal Syntax at the Interfaces. A Comparative Study of Languages with Articles, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Press. Giusti, Giuliana/Iovino, Rossella (2016), Latin as a split-DP language, Studia Linguistica 70, 221–249. Haiman, John/Benincà, Paola (1992), The Rhaeto-Romance Languages, London/New York, Routledge. Harris, Martin (1977), “Demonstratives”, “articles” and “third person pronouns” in French, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 93, 249–261. Harris, Martin (1980), The marking of definiteness in Romance, in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Historical Morphology, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 141–156. Haspelmath, Martin (1995), Diachronic sources of ‘all’ and ‘every’, in: Emmon Bach et al. (edd.), Quantification in Natural Languages, Dordrecht, Springer, 363–382. Hertzenberg, Mari J. (2015), Third Person Reference in Late Latin: Demonstratives, Articles and Personal Pronouns in the “Itinerarium Egeriae”, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter. Hornstein, Norbert/Nunes, Jairo/Grohmann, Kleanthes K. (2005), Understanding Minimalism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Jensen, Frede (1994), Syntaxe de l’ancien occitan, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Jones, Michael Allan (1993), Sardinian Syntax, London/New York, Routledge. Jungbluth, Konstanze/Da Milano, Federica (edd.) (2015), Manual of Deixis in Romance Languages, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter. Kabatek, Johannes/Wall, Albert (edd.) (2013), New Perspectives on Bare Noun Phrases in Romance and Beyond, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Kleiber, Georges (1987), L’opposition CIST/CIL en ancien français ou Comment analyser les démonstratifs?, Revue de Linguistique Romane 51, 5–35. Körner, Karl-Hermann (1987), Korrelative Sprachtypologie. Die zwei Typen romanischer Syntax, Stuttgart, Steiner. Korzen, Iørn (1996), L’articolo italiano fra concetto ed entità: uno studio semantico-sintattico sugli articoli e sui sintagmi nominali italiani con e senza determinante, Copenhagen, Tusculanum.

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Lapesa, Rafael (1961), Del demostrativo al artículo, Nueva Revista de Filología Española 15, 23–44. Reprinted in Lapesa, Rafael (2000), Estudios de morfosintaxis histórica del español, Madrid, Gredos, vol. 1, 360–387. Ledgeway, Adam (2009), Grammatica diacronica del napoletano, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Ledgeway, Adam (2012), From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Ledgeway, Adam/Maiden, Martin (edd.) (2016), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Ledgeway, Adam/Smith, John Charles (2016), Deixis, in: Adam Ledgeway/Martin Maiden (edd.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 879–896. Levinson, Stephen C. (1983), Pragmatics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Longobardi, Giuseppe (1994), Reference and proper names: a theory of N-movement in syntax and logical form, Linguistic Inquiry 25, 609–666. Lorenzo, Guillermo (1998), Possessive constructions in the dialects of Asturian. A micro-parametric approach, Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics 6, 23–39. Lyons, Christopher (1999), Definiteness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Maiden, Martin (1995), A Linguistic History of Italian, London, Longman. Maiden, Martin (2016a), Morphomes, in: Adam Ledgeway/Martin Maiden (edd.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 708–721. Maiden, Martin (2016b), The Romanian alternating gender in diachrony and synchrony, Folia Linguistica Historica 37, 111–144. Maiden, Martin/Robustelli, Cecilia (2000), A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian, London, Arnold. Manzini, M. Rita/Savoia, Leonardo M. (2011), Grammatical Categories. Variation in Romance Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Mari, Tommaso (2016), Third person possessives from early Latin to late Latin and Romance, in: James Adams/Nigel Vincent (edd.), Early and Late Latin: Continuity or Change?, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 14–46. Martzloff, Vincent (2014), Some remarks on the prehistory of “omnis” and other Latin pronouns and adjectives meaning ‘all’ or ‘whole’, Journal of Latin Linguistics 13, 211–241. Märzhäuser, Christina (2013), Co-ordinated bare nouns in French, Spanish and European Portuguese, in: Johannes Kabatek/Albert Wall (edd.), New Perspectives on Bare Noun Phrases in Romance and Beyond, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 283–300. Matthews, Peter (2007), Syntactic Relations. A Critical Survey, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1890–1902), Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen, 4 vol., Leipzig, Reisland. Nevins, Andrew/Rodrigues, Cilene/Tang, Kevin (2015), The rise and fall of the L-shaped morphome: diachronic and experimental studies, Probus 27, 101–155. Nichols, Johanna (1988), On alienable and inalienable possession, in: William Shipley (ed.), In Honor of Mary Haas: From the Haas Festival Conference on Native American Linguistics, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 557–609. Nichols, Johanna/Bickel, Balthasar (2013), Possessive classification, in: Matthew S. Dryer/Martin Haspelmath (edd.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, Leipzig, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info/chapter/59 (30.01.2016) Nicolae, Alexandru (2015), The parameter of definiteness in Romanian: diachronic and synchronic evidence, in: Virginia Hill (ed.), Formal Approaches to DPs in Old Romanian, Leiden, Brill, 17–61. Pană Dindelegan, Gabriela (ed.) (2013), The Grammar of Romanian, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Picallo, M. Carme (2008), Gender and number in Romance, Lingue e Linguaggio 7, 47–66.

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Pinkster, Harm (2015), The Oxford Latin Syntax. Volume 1: The Simple Clause, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Pires de Oliveira, Roberta/Rothstein, Susan (2011), Bare singular noun phrases are mass in Brazilian Portuguese, Lingua 121, 2153–2175. Pollard, Carl/Sag, Ivan A. (1994), Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press. Pomino, Natascha/Stark, Elisabeth (2009), Losing the “neuter”: the case of the Spanish demonstratives, Probus 21, 217–247. Pountain, Christopher (forthcoming), The development of the articles in Castilian: a functional approach, in: Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen/Mar Garachana Camarero (edd.), Studies in Spanish Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Exaptation, Refunctionalization and Beyond, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Ramat, Paolo (1996), Perché “veruno” significa ‘nessuno’, in: Paolo Ramat/Elisa Roma (edd.), Sintassi storica. Atti del XXX Congresso Internazionale della Società di Linguistica Italiana, Roma, Bulzoni, 397–409. Ranson, Diane (2005), Variation of the Spanish demonstratives, in: Roger Wright/Peter Ricketts (edd.), Studies on Ibero-Romance Linguistics Dedicated to Ralph Penny, Newark, Juan de la Cuesta, 187–214. Raposo, Eduardo (1986), On the null object in European Portuguese, in: Osvaldo Jaeggli/Carmen Silva-Corvalán (edd.), Studies in Romance Linguistics, Dordrecht, Foris, 373–390. Renzi, Lorenzo (1987), Le développement de l’article en roman, in: Claude Buridant (ed.), Romanistique – Germanistique: une confrontation, Strasbourg, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 297–317. Rohlfs, Gerhard (1965–1969), Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, 3 vol., Torino, Einaudi. Sandfeld, Kristian (1930), Linguistique balkanique, problèmes et résultats, Paris, Champion. Secci, Martina (2006), Sardinian possessive constructions and adnominal adjectives, Tesi di Laurea, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia. Sleeman, Petra/Perridon, Harry (edd.) (2011), The Noun Phrase in Romance and Germanic. Structure, Variation and Change, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Stan, Camelia (2015), Some functions of the definite article in Old Romanian, in: Gabriela Pană Dindelegan et al. (edd.), Diachronic Variation in Romanian, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Press, 55–65. Stark, Elisabeth (2006), Indefinitheit und Textkohärenz. Entstehung und semantische Strukturierung indefiniter Nominaldetermination im Altitalienischen, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Stark, Elisabeth (2008a), The role of the plural system in Romance, in: Ulrich Detges/Richard Waltereit (edd.), The Paradox of Grammatical Change. Perspectives from Romance, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 57–84. Stark, Elisabeth (2008b), Typological correlations in nominal determination in Romance, in: Henrik Hoeg Müller/Alex Klinge (edd.), Essays on Nominal Determination. From Morphology to Discourse Management, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 45–61. Stark, Elisabeth/Pomino, Natascha (2010), How the Latin neuter pronominal forms became markers of non-individuation in Spanish, in: Katerina Stathi/Elke Gehweiler/Ekkehard König (edd.), Grammaticalization. Current Views and Issues, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 273– 291. Stump, Gregory (2016), Inflectional Paradigms, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Varvaro, Alberto (2013), Latin and the making of the Romance languages, in: Martin Maiden/John Charles Smith/Adam Ledgeway (edd.), The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, vol. 2: Contexts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 6–56.

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Antonio Fábregas

21 Adjectival and genitival modification Abstract: This chapter offers an overview of the classes of adjectival and genitival nominal modifiers in Romance. We discuss the ordering between PPs and APs, the internal typology of PP-modifiers, the hierarchy of adjectives, and the distinct properties of different PP and AP classes as they are instantiated in Romance. We will discuss in some detail a proposal in which Romance has DP-internal NP-movement, so that the ordering between modifiers and their position with respect to N is a function of (i) a strict internal hierarchy that places modifiers in designated positions inside the DP; (ii) a set of restricted movement operations that carry the NP up that hierarchy.  

Keywords: modification, adjectives, prepositional phrases, genitive marking, NP-internal arguments, possessives, (in)direct modification, (non)intersective adjectives, relational adjectives, classificatory modifiers, compounds  

1 The big picture: modification within DPs This chapter discusses the classes of NP-modifiers, with particular attention to genitive PPs and adjectives. Due to limitations of space, we will concentrate on the question of which subclasses should be differentiated and what their ordering tells us about the internal syntax of the Romance DP.1 The schema in (1) presents the (simplified) unmarked ordering of modifiers inside the Romance DP, using the D(eterminer), the Num(eral) and the N(oun) as landmarks with respect to which the other elements are placed.

1 A terminological note is in order; here we take for granted a division of the nominal domain into at least a Determiner layer (DP) and a nominal layer (NP). The kinds of modifiers discussed in this chapter are introduced lower than the Determiner, so in general we will refer to NP-modification. However, the term can be misleading if one takes into account the fact that the modifiers discussed here are introduced in functional layers that are larger than NPs, and the only cases of true modifiers of the NP (adjuncts or specifiers) should be very low modifiers, such as the classifiers discussed in Section 5. Whenever the term may be confusing, a clarification has been introduced. The chapter does not address a number of issues having to do with noun modification: the proposal that Romance languages, unlike Germanic ones, lack a generalised rule of modification through direct merge (Snyder 1995; 2012); modification of proper names (Noailly 1991; Matushansky 2012); and the syntax of adjectives preceding the numeral (prenumeral adjectives, Marušič 2011). DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-021

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(1) Sp. D> A> Num > A > N> A> PP > las interesantes tres grandes ideas locas de él the interesting three big ideas crazy of him ‘the interesting three crazy big ideas of him that (I told you about)’

RelC que… that…

Some preliminary observations are in order. PPs and Relative Clauses (RelC) must always appear to the right of the noun, while (some) adjectives can appear to the right or to the left of the noun, with strict semantic and syntactic consequences (cf. Section 3). When adjectives, PPs and RelCs co-occur to the right of the noun (2)–(4), the unmarked order is A > PP > RelC, with one systematic exception that will be discussed in Section 5. (2)

Fr.

a. le livre rouge de the book red of b. *le livre de Paul rouge ‘Paul’s red book’

Paul Paul

A > PP

(3) It.

a. la cravatta rossa che mi hai prestato the tie red that me you.have lent b. *la cravatta che mi hai prestato rossa ‘the red tie that you lent to me’

A > RelC

(4) Pt.

a. a gravata de João que tu perdeste the tie of João that you lost b. *a gravata que tu perdeste de João ‘João’s tie that you lost’

PP > RelC

Divergences from this surface ordering are allowed only if they involve a marked information structure organisation, typically with intonational breaks (5a),2 or if the AP carries a lot of phonological material ((5b), Heavy AP shift; cf. also Baltin 1987; Giorgi/Longobardi 1991). (5) Sp.

a. un abrigo de Juan, elegantísimo a coat of Juan very-elegant ‘a coat of Juan, very elegant’

2 Sandra Ronai (p.c.) reports that, somewhat marginally, Romanian allows a N > PP > A order, without intonational breaks, provided the adjective behaves as contrastive focus: the translation of the example in (2) can be cartea [roșie]A, [a lui Paul]Genitive or ?cartea [a lui Paul]Genitive [roșie]A.

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b. ese libro de Juan [tan difícil de entender] that book of Juan [so difficult to understand] ‘that book of Juan, so difficult to understand’ This chapter is organised as follows. Section 2 discusses (genitival-marked) PPs inside the NP, their morphological marking, their classification and the way in which they combine with different classes of nouns to denote event-participants and other notions. Section 3 discusses adjectival modifiers, their hierarchical organisation, their ordering restrictions and the analyses that have been proposed to deal with these facts. Section 4 focuses on relational adjectives, i.e., the class of adjectives able to express participants or define subclasses of the head noun, rather than describe it. Section 5 discusses low PPs with a classificatory function, as the only case of PP that have to precede adjectives postnominally, and Section 6 offers some conclusions.  

2 Genitival modifiers and argument structure All Romance languages have genitive modifiers able to introduce participants in the situations denoted by the head noun. There are three main morphosyntactic manifestations of genitive modifiers: i. Possessive pronouns and/or adjectives (in all Romance languages) (6) Cat.

un llibre meu a book mine ‘a book of mine’

In (6) the possessive has the morphological shape of an adjective; in French and Spanish, there are also prenominal possessives which are incompatible with a determiner, something that has been interpreted as a sign that they are pronouns that fill the D slot (cf. Ihsane 2008 for details):3 (7) Fr.

(*il) mon ami the my friend ‘my friend’

This is not always the case; in Italian, Portuguese or Catalan prenominal possessives have the shape of an agreeing adjective and are compatible with articles:

3 See Zribi-Hertz (1999) for the alternation between dative and genitive marking in French possessives.

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(8) It.

{il / un} mio amico the / a my friend ‘my friend / a friend of mine’

Even some languages that behave like French allow the possessive to combine with the demonstrative, a construction associated to a hyper-formal style: (9) Sp.

este nuestro país this our country ‘this country of ours’

ii. PPs introduced by the prepositions de/di ‘of’ (in all languages but Romanian): (10) a. Cat.

b. Pt.

un amic de Monzó a friend of Monzó ‘a friend of Monzó’ um amigo de Duarte a friend of Duarte ‘a friend of Duarte’

iii. DPs containing a determiner marked in genitive/dative case (in Romanian): (11) Rom. cas-a vecin-ului house-the neighbour-the.GEN ‘the house of the neighbour’ Note that in (11), the genitive modifier is case-marked in its definite determiner, which is postnominal. This case marking is identical to the one that dative DPs receive. (11) is an instance of the “synthetic genitive”, and is restricted to contexts where the genitive modifier immediately follows a definite article. Otherwise, the so-called “analytic genitive” has to be used (12):  

(12) Rom. o casă a vecin-ului a house PA. FSG neighbour-the.GEN ‘a house of the neighbour’ In this construction, the genitive-marked DP has to be embedded under an invariable particle, the possessive article (PA), which in turn combines with an article agreeing in gender and number with the head noun (null marked in the feminine singular, as in (12)). For further details about these constructions we refer the reader to DobrovieSorin/Giurgea (2007, Section 6.2).

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Note that Romance languages vary with respect to whether they extend any form of genitival marking to subordinate clauses used as arguments or modifiers of head nouns. Spanish and Portuguese can combine subordinate clauses with the prepositions de/di (13), a property that contrasts with what happens, for instance, in English (14): (13) a. Sp. b. Pt.

la afirmación de que estás a afirmação de que estás the statement of that you.are ‘the statement that you are alone’

(14)

the statement (*of) that you are alone

solo sozinho alone

Catalan, French, Italian and Romanian behave like English in this respect: (15) a. Cat.

l’afirmació the-statement b. Fr. l’affirmation the-statement c. It. l’affermazione the-statement d. Rom. afirmația the-statement

(*de) que estàs sol of that you.are alone (*de) que tu es seul of that you are alone (??di) che sei da solo of that you.are by yourself (*a) [că ești singur]-(*lui) GEN of that you.are alone

In what follows, we will concentrate on the following properties of genitival modifiers: the classes of genitival modifiers that can be identified (2.1); the behaviour of thematic genitival modifiers (2.2); the special behaviour of thematic modifiers with some noun classes (2.3).

2.1 Classes of genitival modifiers Let us start with the observation that there are three classes of modifiers with different syntactic behaviour: thematic genitives – further divided into argument-denoting and adjuncts –, possessor-denoting genitives and locator-denoting modifiers (cf. Fábregas 2013). Thematic genitives express the agent, experiencer or patient of an event denoted by the main predicate, as illustrated by the following Portuguese examples:

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(16) a.

b.

c.

a visita [de João]Agent the visit of João ‘João’s visit’ a preocupação [de João]Experiencer the concern of João ‘João’s concern’ a morte [de João]Patient the death of João ‘João’s death’

All these express arguments of the noun and can be pronominalised by a possessive: (17) sua his

{visita / preocupação / visit / concern /

morte} death

Other theta-roles, such as goal, will typically be expressed by means of other prepositions not allowing substitution by the possessive (18a), even when they correspond to arguments. These non-genitive marked PPs tend to follow genitive PPs. PPs corresponding to adjuncts in the verbal domain (18b) are never substituted by possessives either, and in fact they are typically expressed with prepositions other than de/di. Other adjunct PPs are expressed with de/di, especially if the preposition they would require given their meaning is not available in the nominal domain (18c). Even in such cases, adjunct PPs are external to PPs denoting argumental theta-participants and are not substitutable by the possessive: (18) It.

a. la consegna [dei libri]Patient [a Maria]Goal the delivery of.the books to Maria ‘the books’ delivery to Maria’ b. la visita [di Maria]Agent [con Gianni]Comitative the visit of Maria with Gianni ‘Maria’s visit with Gianni’ c. una conferenza [di Eco]Agent [{di / *per} due ore]Duration a conference by Eco of for two hours ‘a two-hour long conference by Eco’

The second class of genitive-marked modifiers mentioned above is possessor-denoting genitives. These appear with non-event denoting nouns, especially those that refer to physical objects, and denote the entity that owns the object or, more generally, an individual that holds some pragmatically salient relation with it (cf. Downing’s 1977 R-relation). (19b) does not necessarily mean that Louie owns the bus; it can be the bus that Louie has to take, the bus that Louie is supposed to fix, etc. These PPs can also be substituted by a possessive pronoun (19c):

Adjectival and genitival modification

(19) Fr.

a. le chapeau the hat ‘Louie’s hat’ b. le bus de the bus of ‘Louie’s bus’ c. son {chapeau his hat

de of

777

Louie Louie

Louie Louie / bus} / bus

The third class of PPs, locator modifiers, is introduced with prepositions such as de/di ‘of’, but it is unclear whether, beyond the identity of the preposition used in languages such as Spanish, French, Catalan or Portuguese, they can be described as genitive constituents. Take for instance (20b): this DP is used when in the salient context there are several identifiable buses, and the one to which the speaker refers is precisely the one (somehow) located at 14:30. This class introduces a definite entity – typically, places (20a) and times (20b), but see footnote 5 – that is used to identify the referent of the DP inside a bigger class. Note that they cannot be substituted by possessives (20c): (20) a. Cat.

b. It.

c.

l’autobús de l’aparcament the-bus of the-parking-lot ‘the bus that is in the parking lot’ il bus delle 14:30 the bus of-the 14:30 ‘the bus that {leaves / arrives} at 14:30’ #el seu autobús / #il suo bus

Locator PPs must contain a definite DP, as the ungrammaticality of (21a) shows. This definiteness restriction does not apply to possessive (21b) or argumental (21c) genitive PPs:4

4 These PPs have been assimilated to adjunct denoting PPs in some previous studies (e.g., Rigau 1999, 344–346, for Spanish; Badia 2002, 1623–1626, for Catalan). This cannot be exact, given that adjuncts do not need to be definite DPs: (i) Sp. un hombre con un sombrero rojo a man with a hat red ‘a man with a red hat’ Note also that, while (i) contains an adjunct PP, the similar modifier in (ii) is better analysed as a locator-PP which uses association with a definite hat as a way to identify the specific man referred to inside a larger domain: it must be definite. (ii) el hombre de{-l / *un} sombrero rojo the man of the a hat red ‘the man with a red hat’

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(21) Sp.

a. *{el/un} autobús [de una esquina]Loc the/a bus of a corner ‘the bus standing at a a corner’ b. el abrigo [de un amigo]Poss the coat of a friend ‘a friend’s coat’ c. la visita [de un colega]Arg the visit of a colleague ‘a colleague’s visit’

When a locator PP co-occurs with thematic or possessor-denoting genitive modifiers, it has to be external to them (22a,b); they are even external to adjunct-denoting PPs, with which they can co-occur (22c): (22) Sp.

a. la visita [de Juan]Pat [de las 15:30]Loc the visit of Juan of the 15:30 ‘Juan’s visit at 15.30’ b. el traje [de Juan]Poss [del perchero]Loc the suit of Juan of.the rack ‘Juan’s suit in the rack’ c. la conferencia [de dos horas]Dur [del viernes]Loc the conference of two hours of-the Friday ‘Friday’s two-hour long conference’

Locators are explicitly marked as non-genitives in some Romance languages. In Romanian (Dobrovie-Sorin/Giurgea 2007, Section 8.2.2.1) they involve the combination of the functional preposition de ‘of’ with a locative PP: that is, the construction involves two prepositions, the second of which specifies the type of locative/temporal relation: (23) a.

b.

cărți-le de pe masă books.the of on table ‘the books on the table’ știri-le de la ora 5 news.the of at hour 5 ‘the 5 o’clock news’

2.2 Argument-denoting genitives: distribution and co-occurrence Let us now focus on thematic PPs denoting arguments. For a genitive to express an argument, it must combine with an event-denoting noun, specifically a complex event

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noun (Grimshaw 1990) that inherits its argument structure from the verb it is derived from (envair ‘invade’, in (24a)). It is controversial whether simple event nouns (24b), that is, nouns denoting events but not derived from verbs, also carry some form of argument structure. In any case, genitive PPs combined with them can also be interpreted as event-related participants. The difference between the two classes is that, with complex event nouns, a constituent corresponding to the patient/theme is required, but not with simple event nouns: (24) Cat.

a. la invasió ??(de Romania) the invasion of Romania (complex event) ‘the invasion of Romania’ b. la guerra (de Romania) the war of Romania (simple event) ‘the war of Romania’

With the systematic exception noted in Section 2.3, two argument-denoting genitive PPs cannot co-occur (25a): a lexical preposition has to be used in order to spell out the argument corresponding to the agent (25b), or the agent-participant has to be expressed through a special kind of adjective, a relational adjective (cf. Section 4) (25c); this is illustrated for French. (25) a.

b. c.

*l’invasion [de la France]Pat [de l’Italie]Ag the invasion of the France by the Italy Intended: ‘Italy’s invasion of France’ l’invasion [de la France]Pat [par l’Italie]Ag the invasion of the France by the Italy l’invasion [italienne]Ag [de la France]Pat the invasion Italian of the France ‘the Italian invasion of France’

While patient-denoting genitive PPs can only combine with event-denoting nouns, agent-denoting genitive PPs have a wider distribution, and can be documented also with deverbal nouns that denote the result of previous events (“result-denoting nominalisations”). (26a) is an event noun in combination with a patient-denoting PP; (26b) shows that when the same noun denotes a physical object, that PP is ungrammatical; (26c) shows that even in that context, a genitive interpreted as the agent of the associated event is not excluded: (26) It.

a. la costruzione di un grattacielo the building of a skyscraper ‘the construction of a skyscraper’

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b. La costruzione (*di un grattacielo) pesa tre the building of a skyscraper weighs three ‘The building (*of a skyscraper) weighs three tons.’ c. La costruzione di questo architetto pesa tre the building of this architect weighs three ‘The building of this architect weighs three tons.’

tonnellate. tons tonnellate. tons

There is a debate with respect to whether the genitive PP of some nouns, known as ‘relational nouns’, has the status of an argument or not (Adger 2013, 51–90). These nouns typically denote kinship and family relations, and other social roles that have to be defined, necessarily, by the referent’s relation to another entity. Out of context, and excluding discourse-related ellipsis, the nouns in (27) do not sound natural without the genitive PP: (27) Pt.

a. o pai ??(de João) the father of João ‘João’s father’ b. o marido ??(de Julia) the husband of Julia ‘Julia’s husband’ c. a vizinha ??(de José) the neighbour of José ‘José’s neighbour’ d. o chefe ??(de João) the boss of João ‘João’s boss’

When the relation expressed is symmetric,5 some Romance languages can use the preposition equivalent to with to introduce the second participant: (28) a. b. c. d.

Fr. Rom. Sp. Cat.

ami avec Maria prieten cu Maria amigo con María [in some Latin-American areas] amic amb la Maria friend with (the) Maria ‘friend with Maria’

5 We assume that a relation R is symmetric when saying that x holds relation R with respect to y entails that y holds the same relation R with respect to x.

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2.3 Representation nouns In this section we will study the combination of genitive complements with the class of so-called representation nouns, which denote artefacts that represent, in some medium, another entity (Taylor 1996, 259) (29): (29) Rom. portret ‘portrait’, sculptură ‘sculpture’, poveste ‘tale’ Their properties with respect to the class and number of genitive modifiers they allow are special. One first interesting property is that these nouns, even when they clearly denote physical objects, allow patient-denoting genitive PPs that refer to the entity represented (contrast with (26b)): (30) a. Cat.

b. It.

20 quilos. L’escultura [de Moisès]Pat pesa the sculpture of Moses weighs 20 kilos ‘The sculpture of Moses weighs 20 kilos.’ La traduzione [delle poesie]Pat è sul tavolo. the translation of-the poems is on the table ‘The translation of the poems is on the table.’

Second, representation nouns allow two thematic genitive PPs: one denoting the patient (representee) and one denoting the agent (author). Contrast this with (25a): (31) Sp.

la traducción [del Ulises]Pat [de Valverde]Ag the translation of-the Ulysses of Valverde ‘the translation of Ulysses by Valverde’

This means that representation nouns can combine with more genitive PPs than other classes of nouns. In the Italian example (32), we add a possessor PP: (32)

il ritratto [di Napoleone]Pat [di Appiani]Ag [di Rockefeller]Poss the portrait of Napoleon of Appiani of Rockefeller ‘Napoleon’s portrait by Appiani, owned by Rockefeller’

A fourth PP marked with what seems to be a genitive preposition (de, di…) can be added, one placing the referent in time and space coordinates ((33), from Spanish): (33)

el retrato [de Lenin]Pat [de Rivera]Ag [de Rockefeller]Poss the portrait of Lenin of Rivera of Rockefeller [de Nueva York]Loc of New York ‘the portrait of Lenin by Rivera that Rockefeller owns and that is in New York’

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As can be seen in (33), the unmarked order is Patient > Agent > Possessor > Locative.6 It can be further shown that the farther a PP is from the head noun, the higher it is inside the structure:7 when several co-occur, a possessive pronoun can substitute only the most external PP. If Patient and Agent co-occur, the possessive substitutes the agent, never the patient (34); if Patient, Agent and Possessor co-occur, the possessive substitutes the possessor (35). (34) Sp.

a. el retrato [de Napoleón]Pat [de David]Ag the portrait of Napoleon of David ‘David’s portrait of Napoleon’ b. suAg retrato [de Napoleón]Pat his portrait of Napoleon ‘his portrait of Napoleon’ c. *suPat retrato [de David]Ag Intended: ‘the portrait by David that represents him’

(35) Pt.

a. o retrato [de Napoleão]Pat [de David]Ag [de Rockefeller]Poss the portrait of Napoleon by David of Rockefeller b. o seuPoss retrato de Napoleão de David the his portrait of Napoleon of David ‘the portrait of Napoleon by David that he owns’ c. *o seuAg retrato de Napoleão de Rockefeller d. *o seuPat retrato de David de Rockefeller

6 Romanian is, once again, the outlier here: the unmarked order if both constituents are marked as genitive (Sandra Ronai, p.c.) is Agent > Patient: Infernului lui Dante]Pat (i) traducere-a [lui Coșbuc]Ag [a translation-the.GEN Coșbuc PA Inferno.GE N GEN .Dante ‘Coșbuc’s translation of Dante’s Inferno’ 7 “Structurally higher” means that, in the structure, the constituent is introduced modifying a bigger constituent than the lower modifiers: in [XP [AP] X [YP [BP] Y. . .]], BP modifies Y (and whatever its complement contains) while AP is combined with X, which in turn contains YP. In a context like this AP is structurally higher than BP, and several other properties follow, such as that AP can control BP. This can have a more or less direct correlation with the linear order between AP and BP. If nothing moves, AP will also be, in the linear ordering, more external to Y than BP, that is, farther away from Y than BP. It tends to be assumed that in principle being higher in the structure implies being more external in its linear order.

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(36) DP

This pattern can be seen as a standard Relativised Minimality Effect (Rizzi 1990): if the possessor can substitute any genitive, and patient, agent and possessor are all genitives, the highest genitive PP (Poss in (36)) will block all other genitives from establishing a syntactic relation with the possessive pronoun, so only the possessor will be substituted by the possessive determiner. If the structure in (36) is right, with PPs above NPs, why do PPs eventually follow NPs, rather than precede them? We can assume a roll-up movement derivation: the NP moves up the structure, stopping in each FP, and carrying with it in the next movement operation that FP. First, NP moves to an XP head above the closest FP (with the patient genitive, (37a)). Then, the whole XP moves up to a YP dominating the FP containing the agent genitive (37b), and so on. (37) a. […[XP [NP] X [FP [PPPat] F [NP]]]] portrait of Napoleon b. […YP [XP] Y [FP [PPAg] F [XP…]]] portrait of Napoleon of Delaroche The data in (34)–(35) constitute, then, evidence that there is DP-internal NP-movement in Romance, a proposal that, as we will see right now, can also help understand the facts about adjective ordering.

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3 Adjective interpretation and linear order Let us start with the question of how adjectives are ordered with respect to each other and the head noun.8 Even though it is not formulated specifically for Romance, an important background is the proposal that it is possible to define a semanticallymotivated ordered sequence of adjectival modifiers. There is a variety of different specific proposals (38), but they all share the claim that if an adjective at the beginning of the sequence is materialised to the right of the head noun, all adjectives that follow it will also appear to the right of the object denoting noun (and symmetrically for those at the end). Some of these hierarchies are hyper-specific (38c) and others abstract away from the conceptual domain that the adjective denotes and define the hierarchy on the basis of their general semantic properties (38d): (38) a. Quality > Size > Shape > Color > Provenance (Sproat/Shih 1991) b. Quantification > Quality > Size > Shape > Color > Nationality (Cinque 1994) c. (Ordinal Number > Cardinal Number >) Subjective Comment > Evidential > Size > Length > Height > Speed > Depth > Width > Weight > Temperature > ?Wetness > Age > Shape > Color > Nationality / Origin > Material > Compound Element (Scott 2002) d. Gradable, Subsective Adjectives > Non-gradable, Intersective Adjectives > Idiomatic Adjectives (Svenonius 2008) All these approaches – with the arguable exception of (38a) – share a set of assumptions: (i) a syntactic hierarchical structure underlies this linear order generalisation; (ii) adjectives are specifiers of functional categories dominating the NP; thus, underlyingly all adjectives c-command the head noun; (iii) if there are no N(P)-movement operations, adjectives will precede nouns by default (cf. English); (iv) in languages where some adjectives follow the noun, this is obtained by moving up the head N0, the NP or a bigger constituent containing the NP – depending on the analysis – to an intermediate position above some adjectives (cf. Laenzlinger 2005).

8 We leave out of the discussion NP-internal depictive modifiers, such as (i). These modifiers provide properties of a thematic argument of the head noun, and combine only with deverbal complex event nouns (ia) or representation nouns (ib); they are always forced to follow the head noun (ic). (i) Sp. a. la llegada de los obreros agotados > su llegada agotada the arrival of the workers exhausted > their arrival exhausted b. el retrato del Rey desnudo > su retrato desnudo the portrait of-the king naked > his portrait naked c. #su desnudo retrato his naked portrait (*his portrait naked) See Himmelmann/Schultze-Berndt (2005).

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In what follows we will concentrate on three issues: what characterises the first classes of adjectives in the sequence, that tend to precede the noun in Romance (3.1); what other differences follow in Romance from whether an adjective precedes or follows the noun (3.2); how these facts can be analysed using movement of a nominal constituent, and what challenges that proposal faces (3.3).

3.1 Semantic relations between A and N Adjectives that are at the beginning of the sequence in (38) include several classes that, given their semantic relation to the head noun, receive the label of non-intersective adjectives. An adjective is intersective when the semantic statement in (39) holds for the A+N combination: that is, red is intersective in a red car because a red car denotes the intersection between the set of objects that are red and the set of objects that are cars. If an object is a red car, then it is both a red object and an object we can call a car. They tend to be gradable: (39) ||AN|| = ||A|| ∩ ||N|| Non-intersective adjectives include a number of subclasses, all generally unable to appear as predicates after copulative verbs (cf. Hall Partee 2010 for further details about the semantic characterisation). Interestingly, all these classes tend to linearly occur to the left of the head noun they modify. i. Subsective adjectives: an adjective is subsective when the A+N combination denotes a subset of the denotation of N (||AN||⊆||N||), while A cannot be directly applied to the referent (||AN|| ≠ ||A|| ∩ ||N||. (40) is an example of this class. Note that (40) entails that Gianni is a violinist, but it does not entail that Gianni is a skillful person: it only states that, as a violinist, he is skillful, while he can be generally clumsy as a person: (40) It.

Gianni è un bravo violinista. Gianni is a skillful violinist ‘Gianni is a skillful violinist.’

Intensificative adjectives such as Spanish verdadero ‘true’, principal ‘main’ or auténtico ‘true’ – which emphasise how appropriate it is to use the noun to describe the referent or the prototypicality of the token as a representative of the class, as in un auténtico idiota ‘a perfect idiot’ – also fall in this class. Adjectives expressing the manner or frequency of an event associated to the head noun are also part of this class: Catalan freqüent ‘frequent’, ocasional ‘occasional’, constant ‘constant’ or NPs like una ràpida resposta ‘a quick answer’, meaning ‘an answer that was offered quickly’.

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ii. Plain non-subsective adjectives, which carry no entailments at all about the relation between the denotation of A+N and the denotation of N (||AN|| ⊄ ||N||). Modal adjectives (alleged, would-be, disputed, possible, probable, certain, so-called…) belong to this class. (41) does not say whether Joan is a murderer or not, and it is nonsensical to say that Joan is alleged: (41) Cat.

Moriarty és el presumpte assassí. Moriarty is the alleged murderer ‘Moriarty is the alleged murderer.’

iii. Privative adjectives (a subclass of non-subsective adjectives), where the A+N denotation actually implies that the object cannot be characterised as N (||AN|| ∩ ||N|| = 0). Here we find some time-denoting adjectives (42a) and some intensional adjectives, which is the class that qualifies the manner in which a noun applies to a referent (42b): (42) a. Sp.

b. Fr.

el anterior presidente the former president ‘the former president’ un faux nez a fake nose ‘a fake nose’

As said, non-intensional adjectives tend to precede the noun. However, it is by no means true that these adjective classes cannot follow the noun. Subsective adjectives can be documented to the right of the head noun (43a); interestingly, they can also be used as predicates (43b). It is not difficult to find some privative adjectives also to the right (43c). Non-subsective adjectives are those that most systematically appear to the left, but in French for instance they can be documented to the right (43d): (43) a. It.

b. It.

c. It.

d. Fr.

un violinista bravo a violinist skillful ‘a skillful violinist’ Questo violinista è bravo. this violinist is skillful ‘This violinist is skillful.’ una pistola falsa a gun fake ‘a fake gun’ un assassin présumé a murderer alleged ‘an alleged murderer’

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The following diagram summarises the semantic classes of adjectives.9 Table 1: Semantic classes of adjectives Semantic relation between A and N

Intersective ‘yellow cake’ ||AN|| = ||A|| ∩ ||N||

Non-intersective ||AN|| ≠ ||A|| ∩ ||N|| – Tend to appear before N – Tend to be unable to appear after the copula

– A can appear before or after N – A tends to be gradable – A can appear after the copula

Subsective ‘beautiful dancer’ ||AN||⊆||N|| – A tends to allow degree



   



Non-subsective ||AN|| ⊄ ||N|| Plain ‘former president’

Privative ||AN|| ∩ ||N|| = 0 ‘fake gun’

3.2 Right-left asymmetries in adjectives A property of Romance is that (intersective) qualificative adjectives can follow or precede the noun. However, there is a set of documented semantic and syntactic contrasts that show that the position of the adjective is not free, but is dictated by semantic and syntactic considerations (see Cinque 2010, 5–25, for a more complete list). i. Restrictive interpretations to the right If the property denoted by the (necessarily intersective) adjective is used to define a subset inside the set of nouns denoted by the DP, the adjective is called restrictive;10 otherwise, it is non-restrictive (Bolinger 1967; Bouchard 1998). In Romance, postnominally, adjectives can be restrictive; prenominally, they are necessarily non-restrictive – see (44), from Italian –: (44)

a. i tuoi amici noiosi the your friends annoying ‘those of your friends that are annoying’ (restrictive or non-restrictive) b. i tuoi noiosi amici the your annoying friends ‘your friends, all of whom are annoying’ (non-restrictive)

9 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for the suggestion. 10 More technically, we adopt Piñón’s (2005) definition: a modifier M restrictively modifies the head H only if the set of objects denoted by the modified head HM in a context S is properly included in that set of objects denoted by H in that context.

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ii. Stage-level readings to the right Another contrast that has been argued to be reflected through the adjective position is the Individual-Level (IL) / Stage-Level (SL) distinction (Milsark 1974; Carlson 1977). Romance adjectives force an IL interpretation prenominally, and accept (but do not force) an SL interpretation postnominally. (45a) must refer to the nose of an animal, which is inherently red (e.g. Rudolph the Reindeer); (45b) can refer to a nose that has got red due to a cold, even if the previous reading is still accepted. (45) Sp.

a. su roja nariz his red nose ‘his red nose’ (IL) b. su nariz roja his nose red ‘his red nose’ (SL or IL)

iii. Relative readings to the right Another relevant contrast in adjectives is the absolute/relative distinction (Kamp 1975). A class of witches can be good-looking in absolute terms – good-looking people – or just good-looking when one takes as a reference the normal appearance of witches. Again, in Romance, the prenominal position forces an absolute reading, while the postnominal position also allows a relative reading: (46) Pt.

a. várias lindas bruxas some good-looking witches ‘some witches that are good-looking people’ (absolute) b. várias bruxas lindas some witches good-looking ‘some witches that are good-looking people’ ‘some witches that are good-looking for the average look of witches’ (relative or absolute)

iv. Absolute vs relative readings of superlatives Similarly, superlative adjectives to the left of N must have an absolute reading, while to the right they can have a relative reading: the one displaying the highest degree of a property inside a defined group, not in absolute terms (Cinque 2010, 12):

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a. Chi ha scalato la più alta montagna? who has climbed the more high mountain ‘Who has climbed the highest mountain (in the world)? (absolute) b. Chi ha scalato la montagna più alta? who has climbed the mountain more high ‘Who has climbed the highest mountain (in the world)?’ ‘Who has climbed a mountain that is higher than the one the others climbed?’ (relative or absolute)

v. Non-specific readings to the right inside indefinite DPs The adjective’s position also has an impact on the specificity of the whole DP (Bosque 2001; Ticio 2003). Prenominal adjectives force a specific reading of the indefinite DP, while the postnominal adjective allows specific and non-specific interpretations: (48) Sp.

a. Vendrá un famoso cantante. will.come a famous singer ‘A certain famous singer will come.’ (specific) #‘Some famous singer or other will come’ b. Vendrá un cantante famoso. will.come a singer famous ‘A certain famous singer will come.’ (specific) ‘Some famous singer or other will come.’ (non-specific)

As the reader has certainly noted, there is a systematicity here: prenominal readings allow a subset of the postnominal readings. This fact has to be combined with the observation that non-intersective adjectives tend to appear prenominally, but can also be documented postnominally: Table 2: Some of Cinque’s contrasts between prenominal and postnominal adjectives Prenominal (A > N)

Postnominal (N > A)

Restrictive?

Necessarily non-restrictive

Restrictive or non-restrictive

IL or SL?

IL

SL or IL

Relative or absolute?

Absolute

Relative or absolute

Superlative?

Absolute reading

Relative or absolute readings

Specific?

Specific

Specific or non-specific

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There are also syntactic contrasts that affect the right-left asymmetry in Romance. A well-known property, that is not exclusive of Romance languages, is that prenominal adjectives cannot carry PP complements: (49) Rom. a. un om [mândru de a man proud of b. *un [mândru de fiul a proud of son ‘a man proud of his son’

fiul său] son his său] om his man

3.3 Technical implementations and challenges How are these facts expressed? The most influential theory nowadays is the cartographic account by Cinque (1994; 2005; 2010). He proposes a system where differences of interpretation are due to structural differences in the position where the adjective is introduced. In his account, the underlying structure of adjectives in the DP is the one represented in (50): (50)

Modification can take two forms: direct modification is performed through AP phrases that are merged as specifiers of functional heads immediately dominating a NP. Adjectives introduced in this way are non-intersective adjectives and cannot act as predicates (Section 3.1); these modifiers are also non-restrictive, as they just express additional properties to the kind defined by the noun, and are possibly under the scope of a generic operator, forcing an IL reading (Larson 2000). Thus, obligatorily prenominal adjectives in Cinque’s proposal are actually lower, syntactically, than postnominal ones. The second way of introducing modifiers is as reduced relative clauses (indirect modification). These are merged above the XP constituent; adjectives included inside them must be intersective, must be able to act as predicates, and are necessarily restrictive (note that the men that are clever necessarily restricts the set denoted by the

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NP to those being clever). An adjective that can be used as intersective and nonintersective can be base-merged both as a direct as an indirect modifier. From this base structure, ordering facts are accounted for through movement. Two movement operations are proposed: i One compulsory in Romance, whereby a constituent YP containing XP moves above the merge position of reduced relatives. This explains that restrictive, intersective, SL readings must be postnominal. ii A potential one, whereby there is NP movement internal to the YP; whereby the noun precedes some non-restrictive, non-intensional, IL, absolute adjectives. If this movement happens, these readings follow the noun. If it does not happen, they will precede the noun. In both cases, when there are several (in)direct modifiers, movement will proceed cyclically, stopping above each one of them, producing a roll-up movement configuration that will reverse the base hierarchical order within each one of the domains. This produces several possible orderings: i Direct modifier > N > Indirect modifier (51) Sp.

[presunto asesino] sanguinario alleged murderer bloodthirsty ‘(the) bloodthirsty alleged murderer’

Inside YP, there is an XP constituent where alleged modifies the NP. YP (containing the NP) moves above a reduced relative clause containing bloodthirsty. ii Direct modifier > Direct Modifier > N (52) Sp.

un posible dulce amor a possible sweet love ‘a possible sweet love’

There is no reduced relative. Inside YP, there are two adjectives directly modifying YP, neither of them restrictive. NP does not move, so the ordering of adjectives prenominally reproduces the ordering of the hierarchy. iii Direct Modifier > N > Direct modifier (53) Rom. posibil zăpadă possible snow

albă white

In this example, there are two direct modifiers inside YP. The modal one is higher than the one referring to colour. NP moves inside YP to a functional position between the two adjectives. Note that both modifiers are non-restrictive, that is, we talk about

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snow, which is typically white, not about the snow that is white, versus that which is grey. The previous analysis, appealing as it is, faces some challenges. Leaving aside the potential problem of finding (independently motivated) positions as landing sites for the NP and of restricting movement so that unattested orderings are not generated, the analysis can deal with cases of direct modification to the right, but not of indirect modification to the left – because extraposition of the reduced relative clause is assumed to be compulsory in Romance. Thus, the analysis does not expect – for instance – restrictive adjectives to the left, but they are found in some Romance languages. In French, adjectives like beau ‘fine’, bon ‘good’, bref ‘brief’, grand ‘big’, petit ‘small’, joli ‘pretty’ or mauvais ‘bad’ generally appear prenominally, even when they are restrictive and intersective; this is a clear exception to the set of properties summarised in Table 2. (54) Fr.

une vieille voiture an old car ‘a car that is old’

The conditions under which these adjectives are (sometimes marginally) allowed to the right include situations where they are accompanied by degree markers (cf. Knittel 2005), contexts where the adjective is a contrastive focus (‘not an UGLY girl, but a PRETTY girl’). Lacking these factors, the postnominal order is marked for many speakers: (55) Fr.

une fille ??(très) belle a girl very pretty ‘a very pretty girl’

The interpretation of these facts is unclear. One could think that there are prosodic conditions: most of these adjectives are monosyllables, and in combination with a degree modifier they become larger prosodic constituents. Perhaps phonological constraints force a phonological reordering that linearises the monosyllabic adjective to the left, unless it forms a polysyllabic constituent with its modifiers. However, this would introduce extra machinery, and on top of it not all of these adjectives are monosyllables. Another radical assumption would be to propose that in French these adjectives are grammaticalised as direct modifiers, and thus displace together inside the YP constituent. The existence of such counterexamples, still not well-understood, has triggered alternative explanations that do not postulate a fixed syntactic hierarchy combined with NP movement. An influential alternative explanation begins with the observation that the adjectives that behave unexpectedly denote very basic qualities: good– bad, big–small, old–new. Bouchard (1998; 2002) proposes a representational semiotic

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theory in which different (families of) languages define different linear principles to express different modification relations between adjectives and nouns. Depending on the semantic notions expressed, the modifier will be placed to the left or to the right: in Romance, if the adjective modifies the class denoted by the noun defining a subset, a linearisation parameter places it to the right (postnominally); when the adjective is not intersective, and thus only modifies a semantic subcomponent of the head noun, the parameter is reverted to a default value and the adjective precedes the noun.

4 Adjectives and argument structure Some adjectives express participants in the events denoted by head nouns, and then they are obligatorily postnominal in Romance. The class of adjectives able to do so is known as “relational”, “referential” or “non-predicative” in the literature. Relational adjectives express connections or relations between the head nouns and other domains that are external to them (Bosque 1993, 9–10). Typically, relational adjectives are derived from nouns or at least receive a definition that presupposes an inherent relation with a noun, as illustrated below for Spanish: (56) a. presidenc-ial president-ial b. bélico ‘related to war’ Many of their properties show that, as a class, they have to be kept apart from predicative, quality-denoting adjectives. First, they do not combine with non-proportional degree modifiers (57a); second, unlike quality-denoting adjectives (57b), two relational adjectives in the singular can modify a noun in the plural – suggesting that they contain an interpretable number feature that makes it possible to build a plural denotation from the coordination of two singulars (57c); third, they must always occupy a postnominal position in Romance languages (58): (57) a. Fr.

transport (*très) aérien transport (very) aerial ‘air transport’ b. Rom. *băieți-i [înalt și frumos] boys-the.PL . tall.SG and beautiful.SG Intended: ‘the (two) boys, the tall and the beautiful’ c. Rom. ambasadori-i [spaniol și francez] ambassadors-the.PL Spanish.SG and French.SG ‘the (two) ambassadors, the Spanish and the French’

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It. Sp. Pt. Rom. Fr.

una (*presidenziale) decisione una (*presidencial) decisión uma (*presidencial) decisão o (*prezidențială) decizie une (*présidentielle) décision a presidential decision ‘a decision by the president’

presidenziale presidencial presidencial prezidențială présidentielle presidential

Relational adjectives must be closer to the noun than any class of qualificative adjectives: (59) Cat.

a. pel·lícula francesa avorrida film French boring b. *pel·lícula avorrida francesa ‘a boring French movie’

The property of relational adjectives we will concentrate on is that they are able to express participants of the events denoted by the head noun, or to relate the head noun to other domains used to classify them. When they denote event participants they are sometimes called “thematic relational adjectives”, to capture the intuition that the participants they introduce receive a theta role from the head noun. Relational adjectives can denote agents (cf. (58)), patients ((60a), pace Bosque/Picallo 1996), themes (60b) and experiencers (60c). Goals and other classes of dative-marked arguments are generally excluded from the theta-roles that relational adjectives can receive, for reasons that are obscure; the interpretation is documented, however, in some semi-lexicalised expressions (60d): (60) Sp.

a. producción maderera production wood.REL ‘production of wood’ b. llegada papal arrival Pope.REL ‘arrival of the Pope’ c. preocupación presidencial worry presidential ‘worry of the president’ d. donaciones marianas donations Mary.REL ‘donations to (the Virgin) Mary’

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Relational adjectives can also receive thematic roles that are generally associated to adjuncts: comitative (61a), instrument (61b), locative (61c), time period (61d) or subject matter (61e), among others: (61) It.

a. seguito papale entourage Pope.RELATIONAL ‘Papal entourage’ b. apertura elettrica opening electric ‘opening with electricity’ c. battaglia marittima battle sea.RELATIONAL ‘sea battle’ d. letteratura medievale literature medieval ‘literature of the Middle Ages’ e. preoccupazione economica worry economic ‘worry about the economy’

When several of these thematic adjectives co-occur, adjectives denoting “adjunct” participants precede argument-denoting ones; patients precede agents: (62) Pt.

francesaAg a. batalha marítimaPlace battle sea.RELATIONAL French ‘French sea battle’ italianaAg b. produção elétricaPat production electric Italian ‘Italy’s production of electricity’

The head nouns presented so far in this section are deverbal or have a denotation that is directly associated to an event; for this reason the adjectives are argued to receive a theta-role in some way. The second class of relational adjectives, classificative relational adjectives, expresses connections to external domains that are used to produce taxonomies of the class denoted by the head noun; thus, it does not need to combine with event-related nouns. These relational adjectives can express a wide variety of meanings, such as material (63a), origin (63b), constituent parts (63c) or means of operation (63d) of an object: (63) Cat.

a. taula metàl·lica R ELATIONAL table metal.RELATIONAL ‘metal table’

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b. formatge francès cheese French ‘French cheese’ c. estructura dental structure dental ‘structure formed by teeth’ d. tren elèctric train electric ‘train that functions with electricity’ Classificative relational adjectives precede all thematic relational adjectives. In (64), naval ‘naval’ classifies the battle by defining the means (‘boats’) with which it took place; the following adjective is an adjunct informing about the time period when the battle took place, and francesa ‘French’ defines the agent: (64) Sp.

una batalla [naval]Class [medieval]Time [francesa]Ag a battle naval medieval French

There are several analyses of relational adjectives. Currently, the leading proposal is that, in some sense, relational adjectives are still underlyingly nouns, and because of this they can receive theta roles from the head noun, lack degree modification and have an interpretable number feature. In this sense, the adjectival marking is interpreted as performing a function similar to case marking (Bosque 2006; Fábregas 2007). This analysis, however, faces some challenges, that are only answered in part in the current literature. One is that relational adjectives can be reclassified as qualificative adjectives, as in (65a); the other one is that some relational adjectives are derived from verbs, not nouns (65b):11 (65) Fr.

a. froid sibérien cold Siberian ‘Siberian (= extreme) cold’ b. terme dénominatif term denominative ‘denominative term’

11 With respect to the position inside the DP, Cinque (2010) proposes that they are (low) direct modifiers; for reasons still to be explored, NPs must always move above them. Other authors treat them as NP-internal modifiers (e.g. Bosque/Picallo 1996) in order to explain their adjacency to N.

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5 Low PP modifiers and their morphological status There is only one class of systematic exceptions to the generalisation that PPs must be external to APs, noted first by Sánchez (1996), who used it as an argument that N0 movement is not enough to explain the internal ordering of modifiers inside DPs in Romance (here illustrated for Spanish): (66) a. un ladrón [de joyas]PP [astuto]AP a thief of jewelry cunning b. *un ladrón [astuto] [de joyas] ‘a cunning jewelry thief’ Note that a crucial property of these PPs is that they must contain a bare noun. If the nominal expression inside the PP is a DP, the adjective must precede it: (67) *el the

ladrón [de las joyas] [astuto] thief of the jewelry cunning

What seems to be at play here is the different status of the PPs in (66) and (67). In (67), we have an argument-denoting PP which introduces a referential participant of the stealing event associated by the head noun. The PP in (66), in contrast, does not express a participant in the event, but is rather used to denote a particular type of thief. In other words: while the PP in (67) expresses an argument of the noun, the PP in (66) has a classificatory function that provides further properties that define the kind denoted by the head noun. Two further contrasts support this conclusion: the PP in (66), but not the one in (67), can be used as predicate in a copulative sentence (68); and (67), but not (66) can be substituted by a possessive pronoun (69): (68) Este ladrón es {de joyas / *de las joyas}. this thief is of jewelry / of the jewelry ‘This thief is a jewelry thief.’ (69) a. un asesino de niños a murderer of children ‘a child murderer’ b. #su asesino their murderer a’. el asesino de los niños the murderer of the children b’. su asesino their murderer

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The distinction seems to confirm Longobardi’s (1994) proposal that only nominal expressions structurally headed by D can act as arguments, because only they have the capacity to saturate open predicate variables. In contrast, classificatory PPs directly modify the head noun, composing with them a complex predicate that denotes a subtype of the head noun. The position of classificatory PPs is extremely low, to the point that they even precede relational adjectives: (70) Rom. vin de desert franțuzesc wine of dessert French ‘French dessert wine’ Even though the preposition used to introduce these modifiers is typically de/di, other prepositions are allowed, sometimes depending on the type of property denoted by the PP. In Italian, for instance, the preposition da is used to express the finality of the object, while a is used when expressing the material (Johnston/Busa 1999): (71) a. bicchiere da vino glass DA wine ‘a glass intended to drink wine’ b. porta a vetri door A glass ‘a door made of glass’ In French, the material of which an object is made can be expressed with en (cf. Portuguese vestido em seda ‘dress in silk’, cf. Brito/Raposo 2013) while the finality and the means of operation of the object is expressed with à. Romanian would use de with all these notions but the last, expressed with cu ‘with’: (72) a. manteau en fourrure coat EN fur ‘fur coat’ b. couteau à viande knife À meat ‘meat knife’ c. train à vapeur train À steam ‘steam train’ The fact that these PP modifiers have to precede even relational adjectives has brought up the question of whether the constituents they form with the head nouns are compound words or phrases. As is well known, a common property used to identify compounds is that no constituents can be introduced between their internal

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constituents ((73); cf. Scalise 1984). In this sense, the set N + PPclass behaves in a way similar to a compound: (73) It.

a. lava-piatti wash-dishes ‘dishwasher’ b. lava-(*grandi)-piatti wash-big-dishes Intended: ‘machine that washes big dishes’

However, it cannot be said in the general case that these N+PP combinations display the behaviour of compounds for all tests (cf. Fábregas/Scalise 2012, 120–124). It is useful to differentiate between two classes of N+PP combinations: those which are compositional, and denote a proper subset of the entity denoted by the head noun (our examples (68)–(71)), and those with a lexicalised meaning (74). This second class is sometimes referred to as ‘nominal locutions’: (74) a. Pt.

boca de incêndio mouth of fire ‘fire hydrant’ b. Cat. calaix de sastre drawer of taylor ‘hotchpotch’ c. Rom. porc-de-mare pig-of-sea ‘scorpion fish’ d. It. gioco di parole game of words ‘pun’

The behavior of this second class, in opposition to the first, is closer to compounds. For instance, when two N+PP combinations with lexicalised meaning share the head noun, ellipsis of the second N is not possible (75); compositional N+PP constituents allow it: (75) Sp.

a. un ojo de buey y un ojo de gallo an eye of ox and an eye of rooster ‘a porthole and a corn’ uno ei de gallo b. *un ojoi de buey y an eye of ox and one of rooster Intended: ‘a porthole and a corn’

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However, these N+PP combinations still do not fulfill all prototypical compounding properties. Interestingly, and with a few individual exceptions (76a), N+PP non compositional combinations display internal inflection: the N hosts number inflection, which cannot attach to the whole N+PP constituent (76b). Prototypical compounds, however, show external inflection, irrespective of their internal (morphological) structure (76c): (76) It.

a. pomo-d-oro > pomo-d-or-i apple-of-gold apple-of-gold-s ‘tomato’ ‘tomatoes’ b. dente di leone > denti di leone / *[dente di leon]-i tooth of lion teeth of lion / tooth of lion-s ‘dandelion’ ‘dandelions’ c. sord-o-mut-o > sord-o-mut-i / *sord-i-mut-o > deaf-MSG -mute-MPL deaf-MPL -mute-MSG deaf-MSG -mute

Then, if these combinations do not show all the properties of compounds, what is their status? Some authors assign them the label “syntagmatic compounds”, intended as an intermediate category between words and phrases: starting from a motivated N +PP syntactic combination, through historical erosion, combined with a progressive loss of the semantic motivation of the expression in the speaker’s mind, the combination acquires some word properties, such as lexical listedness, but in an incomplete way. Inside Construction Grammar, they are considered ‘phrasal names’ (Booij 2009). The other option is to treat the N+PP combinations in (70)–(72) as the combination of a noun and a very low PP constituent, merged below any other constituent – perhaps directly merged in NP –, which sometimes develops a demotivated meaning which can be listed as an idiom (77): (77) [. . . [RelA] F. . . [NP N [PPclass]]]

6 Conclusion: back to the big picture This cursory overview of the main classes of adjectival and genitival noun modifiers has shown that Romance grammaticalises a wide variety of semantic notions as distinct natural classes. The ordering of modifiers inside the DP suggests a very rich and articulate structure. The NP is immediately dominated by a set of projections that introduce different kinds of arguments. We have seen evidence that there is NP-movement internal to the DP, and that this movement applies cyclically – stopping above any projection containing a modifier – and in a roll-up fashion – pied-piping the modifierprojection in the next movement operation. The underlying order seems to reflect

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more a semantically-based classification than a categorical one: even though PPs tend to be higher and to follow adjectives, this is not always the case: (78) [Locator PPs … [Possessor PPs… [Thematic PPs… [Indirect AP-modifiers… [Direct AP modifiers… [Relational adjectives… [Classificative PPs… [N]]]]]]]] The ordering is, however, quite intuitive from one perspective: modifiers that define subclasses of the noun are the lowest in the hierarchy (relational adjectives and classificative PPs); modifiers receiving a theta role from the N are also quite low (relational adjectives), unless they receive genitive case (thematic PPs). This is expected if genitive case has to be assigned by a (functional) head that is relatively high, above indirect AP-modifiers, and where a DP has to move in order to become marked with the genitive. Irrespective of where it is generated, then, such a constituent will end up being external to all adjectives; if we assume that only arguments have to get (genitive) case, then we derive the contrasts noted in Section 5: (79) [Locator PPs… [GenP

[PP]

Gen0 [Indirect AP…]]]

Finally, modifiers that have a direct impact on the definiteness of the DP and help locate the referent inside a larger domain (Locator PPs) are quite high in the hierarchy. There are several remaining issues: Why should fully-projected relative clauses be more peripheral than reduced relatives (indirect modifiers)? What happens with the counterexamples noted in Section 3.3? What principles dictate which prepositions are available to introduce arguments and modifiers in each language? However, despite these problems, we hope to have provided the reader with a sufficient general overview of this fragment of the syntax of Romance languages to encourage further investigations.

7 References Adger, David (2013), A Syntax of Substance, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Badia, Toni (2002), Els complements nominals, in: Maria-Rosa Lloret/Joan Mascaró/Manuel Pérez Saldanya (edd.), Gramàtica del català contemporani, Barcelona, Empúries, 1593–1642. Baltin, Mark (1987), Do antecedent-contained deletions exist?, Linguistic Inquiry 18, 579–595. Bolinger, Dwight (1967), Adjectives in English: attribution and predication, Lingua 18, 1–34. Booij, Geert (2009), Phrasal names: a constructionist analysis, Word Structure 2, 219–240. Bosque, Ignacio (1993), Sobre las diferencias entre los adjetivos relacionales y los calificativos, Revista Argentina de Lingüística 9, 9–48. Bosque, Ignacio (2001), Adjective position and the interpretation of indefinites, in: Javier GutiérrezRexach/Luis Silva-Villar (edd.), Current Issues in Spanish Syntax and Semantics, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 17–38.

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Bosque, Ignacio (2006), Coordinated adjectives and the interpretation of Number features, in: Laura Brugè (ed.), Studies in Spanish Syntax, Venezia, Cafoscarina, 47–60. Bosque, Ignacio/Picallo, Carme (1996), Postnominal adjectives in Spanish DPs, Journal of Linguistics 32, 349–385. Bouchard, Denis (1998), The distribution and interpretation of adjectives in French: a consequence of Bare Phrase Structure, Probus 10, 139–183. Bouchard, Denis (2002), Adjectives. Number and Interfaces: Why Languages Vary, Oxford, Elsevier. Brito, Ana M./Raposo, Eduardo P. (2013), O sintagma nominal, in: Eduardo Raposo et al. (edd.), Gramática do Português, Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1045–1113. Carlson, Gregory N. (1977), Reference to kinds in English, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Ph.D. dissertation. Cinque, Guglielmo (1994), On the evidence for partial N-movement in the Romance DP, in: Guglielmo Cinque et al. (edd.), Paths towards Universal Grammar, Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 85–110. Cinque, Guglielmo (2005), Deriving Greenberg’s Universal 20 and its exceptions, Linguistic Inquiry 36, 315–332. Cinque, Guglielmo (2010), The Syntax of Adjectives: A Comparative Study, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen/Giurgea, Ion (2007), A Reference Grammar of Romanian, vol. 1: The Noun Phrase, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Downing, Patricia A. (1977), On the creation and use of English compound nouns, Language 53, 810–842. Fábregas, Antonio (2007), The internal syntactic structure of relational adjectives, Probus 19, 1–36. Fábregas, Antonio (2013), Multiple genitives and the Distinctness Condition: the case of the Spanish DP, Iberia: An International Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 5, 1–44. Fábregas, Antonio/Scalise, Sergio (2012), Morphology: From Data to Theories, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Giorgi, Alessandra/Longobardi, Giuseppe (1991), The Syntax of Noun Phrases, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Grimshaw, Jane (1990), Argument Structure, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Hall Partee, Barbara (2010), Formal semantics, lexical semantics and compositionality: the puzzle of privative adjectives, Philologia 7, 7–19. Himmelmann, Nikolaus/Schultze-Berndt, Eva (2005), Secondary Predication and Adverbial Modification: The Typology of Depictives, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Ihsane, Tabea (2008), The Layered DP. Form and Meaning of French Indefinites, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins. Johnston, Mark/Busa, Federica (1999), Qualia structure and the compositional interpretation of compounds, in: Evelyne Viegas (ed.), Breadth and Depth of Semantic Lexicons, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 167–187. Kamp, Hans (1975), Two theories about adjectives, in: Edward L. Keenan (ed.), Formal Semantics of Natural Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 123–155. Knittel, Marie-Laurence (2005), Some remarks on adjective placement in the French NP, Probus 17, 185–226. Laenzlinger, Christopher (2005), Some notes on DP-internal movement, Generative Grammar in Geneva 4, 227–260. Larson, Richard K. (2000), Temporal modification in nominals, Handout presented at the International Round Table “The syntax of tense and aspect”, Paris, November 15–18. Longobardi, Giuseppe (1994), Reference and proper names, Linguistic Inquiry 25, 609–665. Marušič, F. Lanko (2011), Review of “The Syntax of Adjectives”, Guglielmo Cinque, Lingua 121, 1853–1858.

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Matushansky, Ora (2012), The other Francis Bacon: on non-bare proper names, Ms., Utrecht University. Milsark, Gary (1974), Existential sentences in English, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Ph.D. dissertation. Noailly, Michèle (1991), “L’énigmatique Tombouctou”: nom propre et la position de l’épithète, Langue Française 92, 104–113. Piñón, Christopher (2005), Comments on Morzycki / Katz, Ms., Université Lille 3. Rigau, Gemma (1999), La estructura del sintagma nominal: los modificadores del nombre, in: Ignacio Bosque/Violeta Demonte (edd.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, vol. 1, Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 311–363. Rizzi, Luigi (1990), Relativized Minimality, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Sánchez, Liliana (1996), Syntactic structure in nominals: a comparative study of Spanish and Southern Quechua, University of Southern California, Ph.D. dissertation. Scalise, Sergio (1984), Generative Morphology, Dordrecht, Foris. Scott, Gary-John (2002), Stacked adjectival modification and the structure of nominal phrases, in: Guglielmo Cinque (ed.), Functional Structure in DP and IP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures Volume 1, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 91–116. Snyder, William (1995), Language acquisition and language variation: the role of morphology, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Ph.D. dissertation. Snyder, William (2012), Parameter theory and motion predicates, in: Violeta Demonte/Louise McNally (edd.), Telicity, Change and State, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 279–299. Sproat, Richard/Shih, Chilin (1991), The cross-linguistic distribution of adjective ordering restrictions, in: Carol Perkins Georgopoulos/Roberta Lynn Ishihara (edd.), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 565–593. Svenonius, Peter (2008), The position of adjectives and other phrasal modifiers in the decomposition of DP, in: Louise McNally/Chris Kennedy (edd.), Adjectives and Adverbs: Syntax, Semantics and Discourse, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 16–42. Taylor, John R. (1996), Possessives in English: An Exploration in Cognitive Grammar, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Ticio, Emma (2003), On the structure of DPs, University of Connecticut, Ph.D. dissertation. Zribi-Hertz, Anne (1999), Le système des possessifs en français moderne, Langue Française 122, 7–29.

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22 Relative clauses Abstract: In this chapter we present an overview of the relative clause system in Romance languages and offer a number of cross-linguistic descriptive generalizations. We will make use of both diachronic and geographical variation, viewing them as two sides of the same coin, which both reveal the type and number of syntactic processes active in relative clauses. The empirical domain we take into consideration includes three different aspects: the paradigm of lexical relativizers, the presence of resumption, and the lack of lexical relativizers in both restrictive and appositive relative clauses. The aim of this article is not to provide new analyses for these phenomena, but to show how cross-linguistic variation can direct our research towards precise generalizations, which in turn have their theoretical relevance for syntactic theories.  

Keywords: relative clauses, Romance languages, complementizers, resumption, zero relativization, syntax, diachronic and geographical variation  

1 Introduction In this work we provide an overview of the relative clause system in Romance languages and dialects and try to systematize our observations on the basis of general factors involved in the variation within this linguistic domain. Relative clauses are defined here as subordinate clauses or clause-like constructions that provide some kind of specification about a nominal which has a semantic and syntactic role in both the main clause as well as the subordinate clause (along the lines proposed in Lehmann 1984; de Vries 2002; Cristofaro 2003). Being subordinate, relative clauses can be finite clauses, infinitival clauses or reduced structures, i.e. participial or adjectival structures. Here we will concentrate on finite relative clauses, leaving the other types aside. Usually, finite relative clauses are introduced by various elements, here labeled with a pretheoretical term as “relativizers”, which signal the syntactic role played by the modified nominal in the relative clause.1 Although several authors (see Grosu/Landman 1998) have shown that there are various types of relative clauses, we will discuss the properties of relative clauses  

1 A few methodological remarks are in order. The label “relativizer” is used here as a hyperonym for what is usually defined as complementizers, que/che-type relativizers, and relative pronouns, lequel/il quale-type ones. We will use “relativized element” and “head noun” as synonymous to refer to the noun phrase that is modified by the relative clause (more generally, to the head noun to which the relative clause refers). For a cross-linguistic classification of relativizers we refer the reader to De Vries (2002). DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-022

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following the two main types standardly assumed in the literature, i.e. appositive and restrictive relatives: the former adds additional information to the reference of the head noun; the latter restricts the reference of the head noun. Due to the wide empirical domain considered and the amount of possible variation, this article cannot be exhaustive, but only present the general picture of relative clauses in Romance in broad brushstrokes, leaving a detailed description of single phenomena and single languages to the cited literature. Nevertheless, we will see that there are clear recognizable tendencies throughout Romance and phenomena which present themselves with an astonishing uniformity especially with respect to the sensitivity to factors influencing the choice of the relativizer. In detail we will show that although in many cases relativizers are sensitive to the grammatical function of the head noun according to the Accessibility Hierarchy proposed by Keenan/Comrie (1977), their form as well as the series of phenomena we deal with ultimately depend on the categorial nature of the relativized element, i.e. nominal or prepositional phrase, and on the syntactic-semantic type of relative clause, i.e. restrictive or appositive. The chapter is structured as follows: we first present the distribution of two main classes of relativizers (i.e. agreeing and non-agreeing ones) in restrictive and appositive relative clauses (Section 2). Then, we discuss two types of relativizers, adverbial and possessive relativizers and we will show how their different forms interact with the type of antecedent and the type of relative clause. In this context, we analyze a phenomenon typical of Romance, namely the possibility to double the head noun inside the relative clause through a clitic pronoun, which primarily occurs with non-agreeing relativizers, but can marginally be found also with agreeing ones (Section 3). We then concentrate on so-called ‘zero relativization’, i.e. the absence of a relativizer introducing the relative clause, which is possible under some specific conditions (Section 4). Finally, in Section 5 we conclude by recapping all the empirical generalizations formulated in the previous sections.  









2 The paradigm of lexical relativizers Relative clauses in Romance languages can be introduced by four types of elements: (a) the same invariable form that introduces complement clauses, such as Fr./Sp. que, It. che; (b) interrogative elements, Fr. où/It. dove/Sp. donde; (c) pronominal elements which show agreement with the relativized noun, such as Fr. lequel/It. il quale/Sp. el cual; (d) pronominal elements which appear only in relative clauses and only in some argumental functions but differently from (c) do not show any overt agreement with the head noun, such as Fr. dont/It. cui/Sp. cuyo.2

2 On the French item dont ‘of whom/which’ we refer the reader to Godard (1989), Jones (1996, ch. 10.5.8). The status of this relativizer is difficult to determine. Since it does not inflect for gender and  

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While the Classical Latin system had pronominal agreeing relativizers with specialized forms throughout the whole paradigm, as shown in Table 1, the various Romance languages have all evolved towards systems that do not mark agreement on the relativizer and use the same invariable element introducing complement clauses, namely the form que/che (which we will refer to as k-, since the vowel is probably only a word marker) also in restrictive and appositive relative clauses.3 Table 1: Relative system in Classical Latin Singular

Plural

Masculine

Feminine

Neuter

Masculine

Feminine

Neuter

Nom.

quī (quei)

quae

quod

quī (quei)

quae

quae

Acc.

quem

quam

quod

quos

quas

quae

quorum

quarum

quorum

4

Gen.

cuius (quoius)

Dat.

cuī (quoi)

Abl.

quō

quā

quibus (quis) quō

quibus (quis)

There exist Romance varieties which have reached the final point of this evolution, i.e. the only possible relativizer is always the invariable k-form in both restrictive and appositive relatives. This is the case of Colloquial Italian, where forms of the il quale type and of the cui type are non-existent (Fiorentino 1998) and the k-form is often accompanied by a clitic pronoun inside the relative clause (see Section 3 for a discussion of the distribution of clitics).  

(1)

a. Subject It. La donna che pulisce le scale oggi cleans the stairs today the woman REL ‘The woman who/that cleans the stairs is sick today.’

è malata. is sick

number and it is insensitive to the semantic properties of its antecedent, it can be considered a ‘relative adverb’. However, dont indicates the syntactic function of the constituent it relativizes, i.e., complements or adjuncts introduced by de. On this topic, see Stark (2009). 3 The inflection of relative pronouns was greatly leveled already in Late Latin (Vineis 1994; Pinkster 2012). In Vulgar Latin the forms of interrogative and relative pronouns were interchangeable and the masculine relative qui took the place of the interrogative quis as well as of the feminine relative quae (Grandgent 1907; Pompei 2011). On the diachronic changes in the inflection of the relative pronoun from Vulgar Latin to early Romance we refer to Folena (1961) and Pompei (2011). 4 The form of the neuter relative pronoun can also be: Gen. Sg. cuius rei, Dat. Sg. cui rei, Abl. Sg. qua re; Gen. Pl. quarum rerum, Dat. and Abl. Pl. quibus rebus.

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b. Direct Object It. Il ragazzo che ho incontrato ieri era REL have.1SG met yesterday was the boy il fratello di Maria. the brother of Maria ‘The boy that I met yesterday was Maria’s brother.’ c. Indirect Object It. Il mio amico che gli parlo tutti i giorni him. DAT speak.1SG all the days the my friend REL verrà a trovar=mi in estate. in summer come.3SG . FUT to visit. INF =me ‘My friend, to whom I talk every day, will come to visit me in summer.’ d. Possessive It. Il professore che conosco bene i suoi lavori REL know.1SG well the his.PL works the professor parlerà alla conferenza. at.the conference speak. 3SG . FUT ‘The professor whose works I know well will give a talk at the conference.’ e. Temporal It. L’ anno che sono nato ha nevicato moltissimo. born has snowed a-lot the year REL am ‘The year when I was born it snowed very much.’ A tendency to generalize the k-form to all relativized functions, both with and without resumptive expressions, is also reported in studies on spoken Modern French, Spanish and Portuguese (Lefebvre/Fournier 1978; Bouchard 1982; Schafroth 1995; Fiorentino 1998; Cresti 2000; Stark 2009; 2016). Contrary to non-standard varieties, the system of most standard Romance languages still presents a mixed system of agreeing and non-agreeing forms. Most Romance standard languages display relativizers that agree with the head noun in gender and number, cf. (2a), (3a), (4a), as well as invariable ones, usually the k-form, cf. (2b), (3b), (4b). (2)

Fr.

a. Laure, laquelle a 48 ans, a une fille daughter Laure the.which:REL .F has 48 years has a qui est mon amie. REL is my friend ‘Laure, who is 48 years old, has a daughter who is my friend.’ b. Le chien que j’ ai vu est à mon voisin. REL I have seen is at my neighbour the dog ‘The dog that I saw is my neighbour’s.’

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(4) Pt.

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a. Cerré la puerta, detrás de la door behind of the. F shut.PST . 1SG the fiesta continuaba. party continued ‘I shut the door, behind which the party continued.’ b. La mujer que vive allí es mi lives there is my the woman REL ‘The woman that/who lives there is my aunt.’

cual la which: REL the

tía. aunt

a. O ator sobre o qual falei é muito the actor over the.M which: REL talked.1SG is very talentoso. talented ‘The actor whom I talked about is very talented.’ b. O homem que encontramos ontem é meu amigo. REL met.1PL yesterday is my friend the man ‘The man whom we met yesterday is my friend.’

Differently from the other Romance languages, Romanian has been claimed to lack invariable relativizers and to use only the relative pronoun care (Dobrovie-Sorin 1990; 1994), which agrees in number and gender with the extracted noun in oblique relatives. (5) Rom. a. Copilul care plânge e nepotul meu. cries is nephew.the mine child.the REL ‘The child who is crying is my nephew.’ am întâlnit=o6 b. Fata pe5 care have.1SG met=3SG . F . ACC girl.the pe REL studentă. student ‘The girl who(m) I have met is a former student.’ c. Femeia căreia i=am vorbit woman.the REL . DAT . SG . F 3SG . DAT = have.1SG talked e actriţă. is actress ‘The woman to whom I talked yesterday is an actress.’

e is

o a

fostă former

ieri yesterday

5 On the accusative case-marking preposition pe we refer to Horvath/Grosu (1987) and Dobrovie-Sorin (1994). 6 In Romanian the relativized element is marked by the presence of a ‘doubling’ Accusative or Dative clitic pronoun within the relative clause (see =o in (6b)), which is independently found with nondisplaced noun phrases under special circumstances. On this topic we refer to Dobrovie-Sorin (1990; 1994) and von Heusinger/Gáspár Onea (2008).

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The relative system in Romanian can be then seen as more conservative than the ones instantiated by the other Romance languages. However, on closer inspection, it turns out that Romanian also displays the double relative system typical of the other Romance languages. For instance, a more archaic use of the language allows for restrictive relative clauses to be introduced by the uninflected relativizer de, as in (6). (6) Rom. Cina de ai gătit=o ieri have.2SG cooked=SG . F . ACC yesterday dinner.the REL a fost delicioasă. has been delicious ‘The dinner that you cooked yesterday was delicious.’ Furthermore, Grosu (1994) notes that contemporary non-literary standard Romanian displays ce instead of de in subject and direct object relatives: ce being homophonous with the wh-element what, but insensitive to the [+/–human] distinction that is on the contrary present in interrogatives, where [–human] is expressed by ce ‘what’7 and [+human] by cine ‘who’. (7) Rom. a. Am citit cartea ce a publicat-o has published=SG . F . ACC have.1SG read book.the REL Paul anul trecut. Paul year.the last ‘I read the book that Paul published last year.’ b. Fata ce a venit e actriţă. has come is actress girl.the REL ‘The girl that came is an actress.’ We then conclude that the pattern shown by all Romance languages, at least in their standardized form, is to have a mixed system of relativizers including both invariant and agreeing forms. As for the features expressed on the agreeing relativizer, we saw that the typical features in Romance are number and gender: (8) Fr.

a. Voilà la piscine dans laquelle je here.is the pool inside the.which:REL . F . SG I ‘This is the pool in which I swim.’

nage. swim

7 Whether ce corresponds to forms like che/que or cosa is an issue we leave to etymological research.

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b. La dame pour laquelle je travaille est très sévère. is very severe the woman for the.which:REL . F . SG I work ‘The woman for whom I work is very severe.’ However, in some languages relativizers can also reflect a distinction in terms of animacy, i.e. some relativizers can only be used with animates like the Spanish quien:8  

(9) Sp.

He leído dos cuentos que /los REL /the.M . PL have.1SG read two stories /*quien me han divertido mucho. me have enjoyed a_lot /which:REL . AN ‘I read two stories that I enjoyed very much.’

cuales which:REL . M . PL

The question is then whether the distribution of invariant and agreeing forms of the relativizer can be described by specific rules. Abstracting away from animacy, we will show that the distribution of agreeing relativizers and non-agreeing ones is determined by two factors: i) the grammatical function of the head noun in the relative clause (subject, direct object, possessive, etc.) and ii) the syntactic-semantic type of relative clause (i.e. if the relative clause is appositive or restrictive).  

2.1 The function of the head noun In general, morphologically more complex relativizers tend to co-vary with the grammatical function of the relativized noun: (10) Fr.

a. la fille *laquelle /que tu connais know the girl the.which:REL . F . SG / REL you ‘the girl that you know’ b. la fille avec laquelle /*que tu danses / REL you dance the girl with the.which:REL . F . SG ‘the girl with whom you dance’

The above examples show that French agreeing relativizers are generally found when the relativized noun is the complement of a preposition, since que is not compatible with prepositions, and that on the other hand the invariant form occurs when the element is a direct object (or a subject, in which case it takes the form qui). The same

8 French lequel occurs with animates or inanimates, while qui is in general only animate when it is combined with a preposition, but not when it refers to the subject.

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is true in Italian, but not for instance in Modern Portuguese or Spanish, where the element que is compatible with prepositions (11).9 (11) Pt.

para o outro dia em que se REL REFL . 3 for the other day in ‘for the other day in which they killed themselves.’

matavam killed.3PL

Galician displays a different pattern: whereas the simple que is used to relativize subjects and direct objects, que must be combined with other elements, such as adpositions, articles, or personal pronouns, which signal the syntactic role, gender and number of the antecedent when the relativized element is the complement of a preposition (Cristofaro/Giacalone Ramat 2007, 72–73): (12) Gal. a rapaza co-a the girl with-the.F . SG ‘the girl with whom we travel’

que REL

viaxamos travel.1PL

Hence, similarly to French and Italian, when the relativized noun is the complement of a preposition, Galician must resort to the presence of the agreeing relativizer. Although this is only a tendency and not a fixed rule, as (11) shows, using agreeing relativizers when the relativized noun is the complement of a preposition might be seen as an instance of the well known Accessibility Hierarchy proposed by Keenan/Comrie (1977), namely that relativizers are sensitive to the grammatical function of the head noun. The lower the function is in the scale in (13), the more morphologically complex the relativizer will be: (13) Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan/Comrie 1977) Subject > Direct Object > Indirect Object > Oblique > Genitive > Object of comparison However, the implicational scale in (13) does not really capture the distribution of agreeing/non-agreeing relativizers in Romance languages. As Cinque (1978; 1982) and Stark (2016) clearly showed, the distribution of agreeing or non-agreeing relativizers

9 This observation also holds for older stages of Italian and Spanish. For instance, see (i), an example in Old Florentine (see Sanfelici/Poletto 2015). (i) Mostrami la lancia con che Cristo fu ferito nel fianco. ‘Show me the lance with which Christ was wounded in his side.’ (Cronica fiorentina, 911) Notice, however, that in Spanish and Portuguese the possibility of a preposition occurring with the relativizer que is lexically restricted. On the conditions licensing its occurrence see Brucart (1992) and Veloso (2013).

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depends on the distinction between nominal vs prepositional relativized arguments. While the former usually occurs with che (the k- form), the latter tends to occur with the morphologically complex relativizer. Indeed, relative clauses with predicative and temporal adverbials as antecedents, which should be placed after Oblique or even Genitive in the scale, are necessarily introduced by the non-agreeing form of the relativizer. This is exemplified in (14) with an Italian relative clause having the temporal adverbial domani ‘tomorrow’ as the antecedent. (14) It.

a. Domani che sarò in ferie mi riposerò. be.FUT .1SG in holidays REFL . 1SG rest.FUT .1SG tomorrow REL b. *Domani il quale sarò in ferie holidays tomorrow the.M . SG which: REL be.FUT .1SG in mi riposerò. REFL . 1SG rest.FUT .1SG ‘Tomorrow when I will be on holiday I will rest.’

We can thus formulate the first empirical generalization: Generalization 1: PP complements tend to appear with agreeing relativizers while subject and object relatives, predicative complements and nominal adverbials are rather expressed by non-agreeing ones. The distribution of agreeing/non-agreeing relativizers is more intricate, especially in subject relative clauses. An apparent exception to the generalization above is the standard French subject relativizer qui, which is more complex than que, the one used in object relatives. This means that in French, a special form is found with the case that is in the highest position on Keenan and Comrie’s scale, which is unexpected under Generalization 1. In any case, the form qui does not agree with the head noun in gender, number or animacy (contrary to Spanish quien), when it represents the subject. (15) Fr.

a. l’homme/la fille qui/*que est venu(e) the man/the girl REL / REL is come ‘the boy/the girl that came’ b. l’homme/la fille *qui/que tu connais the man/the girl REL / REL you know ‘the boy/the girl that you know’

The semantically neutral qui is generally analyzed as a positionally triggered allomorph of the relativizer que ‘that’ (as it cannot appear after prepositions, has a phonetically reduced form and also occurs in subordinate sentences with subject extraction other than relative clauses, the so-called ‘que-qui rule’; cf. Kayne 1976;

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Jones 1996, 507; Taraldsen 2001; Rizzi/Shlonsky 2005; Sportiche 2011). We can conclude that French qui only encodes a nominative feature and thus does not represent a real exception to Generalization 1. On the contrary, a true counterexample to our first empirical generalization is represented by some North-western Old Italian varieties which have special relativizers for the subject that are sensitive to animacy and the gender of the head noun (Sanfelici/Caloi/Poletto 2014). For instance, the relativizer form introducing subject relative clauses is sensitive to the animacy of the head noun in Old Ligurian as the following pattern shows: chi appears only when the relativized element is animate (16a), otherwise cue is found (16b). (16) Old Ligurian a. questa femena chi m’ à spanyunto questo inguento me.DAT has spread this unguent this woman REL adosso on.back ‘this woman that spread this unguent on me’ b. Receveyva tuto zo che era dayto a Criste. that REL was given to Christ received.3SG all ‘He received all that was given to Christ.’ (Old Ligurian Passione 28) The fact that a highly specialized form surfaces with the case which is at the beginning of the scale is unexpected under (13) and Generalization 1 and might be interpreted as an indication that Keenan and Comrie’s Accessibility Hierarchy as well as our first generalization are the result of the combination of different factors, one of which singles out the subject with respect to all other grammatical functions and the other which can indeed be formalized as the co-variation of the morphological complexity of the relativizer and the complexity of the syntactic function of the head noun in the relative clause encoded by Case. That subject relatives are special with respect to object relatives and to all other relatives has been shown for several languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and Italian on the basis of psycholinguistic tests on adults and acquisition experiments on children (e.g., Pérez-Leroux 1995 for Spanish; Guasti/Cardinaletti 2003 for French; Utzeri 2007 for Italian ; Costa/ Lobo/Silva 2011 for Portuguese; Gavarró/Cunill/Muntané/Reguant 2012 for Catalan; Benţea 2012 for Romanian). In this perspective, the phenomenon of Old Ligurian chi is not surprising at all, it is simply the morphological evidence that the nominative subject has to be singled out from all other arguments.10

10 That subject relatives have a special status is a claim grounded on robust empirical evidence. Indeed, in the last forty years linguists have dedicated a lot of attention to the issue of the asymmetry

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This could explain the following empirical generalization, for which we have found no counterexamples: Generalization 2: If a language has three different forms of relativizers, one will be dedicated to subject relativization. This means that subject relatives are special, and languages like Old Italian varieties provide a very clear indication of this.

2.2 The relative clause type Besides the grammatical function of the relativized element, the other factor ruling the distribution of agreeing relativizers is the type of relative clause. Setting aside free relatives,11 most studies in the literature take the dichotomy between restrictive and appositive relative clauses for granted, although there clearly exist other relative types, notably kind-defining relatives (see Benincà/Cinque 2014), which cannot be placed in either of the two main categories. Here we will focus only on restrictive and appositive relative clauses (cf. Alexiadou et al. 2000, 1–52; Bianchi 2002a,b for a theoretical overview on the types of relative clause). Restrictive relative clauses are defined as predicates denoting properties that combine with the meaning of the nominal head they are attached to in an intersective way. As such, they restrict the set denoted by the nominal expression they modify (Partee 1973; Heim/Kratzer 1998). In

between subject and other relatives, with subjects being easier to comprehend and process and acquired earlier than all the other relatives. A variety of accounts has been proposed throughout the decades to individuate the cause(s) at the origin of the special status of subject relatives and a considerable amount of data supporting different theories has been provided. Most accounts can be grouped into two different classes. One group argues that the asymmetry stems from fundamental structural properties of subjects and objects and has therefore to be investigated in a syntacticcartographic perspective (e.g., Relativized Minimality, cf. Rizzi 1990; 2004). The second group claims that the asymmetry is actually related to enhanced processing difficulties for object relatives, and that questions on the role of components such as working memory and the information integration process in the processing of relative clauses have therefore to be addressed (e.g., the Active Filler Strategy, Clifton/Frazier 1989). We refer to Sanfelici/Caloi/Poletto (2014) for a summary of the various theoretical accounts on the topic. 11 Free Relatives (FRs) in general are definite descriptions that denote maximal entities (Jacobson 1995; Caponigro 2003): (i) It. non conosco [FR chi è stato invitato a cena] ‘I do not know who was invited to dinner’. FRs are embedded clauses with a gap in an argument or adjunct position and a clause initial wh-element. Two types of FRs are individuated in the literature (Munaro 2000; Benincà 2010; 2012): (a) FRs without an overt lexical head as in (i); and (b) FRs headed by a light head, usually a pronoun (ciò/quello ‘it/that’) as in (ii) It. non conosco [quello [FR che è stato invitato a cena]] ‘I do not know the one that was invited to dinner’.  

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semantic terms, restrictive relative clauses act like intersective modifiers, such as adjectives or predicates (Heim/Kratzer 1998; von Stechow 2007, among others). With respect to their semantic type, restrictives appear to be simple predicates of the type , like intransitive verbs or common nouns (Heim/Kratzer 1998). Appositive relatives do not combine directly with the denotation of a nominal head, rather they convey additional information about the referent of the DP they relate to and they contain an element that stands in a discourse anaphora relation to the NP they modify (Sells 1985). The interpretation of appositives is similar to a subsequent independent sentence of the type (Sells 1985; Demirdache 1991; Del Gobbo 2003). The semantic difference between restrictives and appositives has been syntactically captured by proposing that restrictive relative clauses are attached at the nominal phrase level, whereas appositives are attached at the determiner phrase level (Partee 1973; Jackendoff 1977; Demirdache 1991; Cinque 2013, among many others).12 A general tendency found across Romance is that agreeing relativizers (i.e. morphologically more complex forms) tend to surface with appositive rather than with restrictive relative clauses. For instance, French can use lequel for subject and, though rarely, direct object in appositive relatives (17a), but not in restrictive relative clauses (17b) (Damourette/Pichon 1983/1927–1940):  

(17) Fr.

a. Marie, laquelle Marie the.which:REL . F . SG ‘Marie, whom you know’ b. la fille *laquelle the girl the.which:REL . F . SG ‘the girl that you know’

tu connais you know tu connais you know

The same distribution based on the type of relative clause is found for Spanish quien and el cual, as well as for il quale in Italian (see Cinque 1978; Brucart 1992; Benincà/ Cinque 2010): the agreeing relativizer is found in appositives but not in restrictives: (18) Sp.

a. ?el bolígrafo, el cual the pen the.M . SG which:REL . M . SG ‘the pen, which does not write well’ b. *el bolígrafo el cual the pen the.M . SG which:REL . M . SG ‘the pen which does not write well’

no escribe bien not writes well no escribe bien not writes well

12 In recent decades a lively debate has developed concerning the proper syntactic analysis of relative clauses. Due to space limits, we cannot summarize the different approaches (for an overview, see the introduction in Alexiadou et al. 2000; Bianchi 2002a,b; De Vries 2002).

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If morphological and semantic complexity go hand in hand as suggested by Keenan and Comrie’s generalization, then this points towards the conclusion that appositive relative clauses involve semantically more complex operations than restrictive relatives (see Potts 2005). Not only do appositives differ from restrictives in terms of their semantics, but they also involve an additional operation that is not present in restrictives. Von Stechow (2007) proposes that appositives are similar to restrictives in being predicates of the type , but that in addition to restrictive relatives, they have a further modification rule that expresses a presupposition on the reference of the head noun. Del Gobbo (2007) assumes that at LF appositives are moved and interpreted outside the matrix clause as an independent utterance. Given the more complex semantic operations involved in appositives, we may conclude that this complexity is reflected in the use of morphologically complex relativizers. It is nonetheless the case that appositive clauses can also be introduced by the kform. The alternation between agreeing and k-forms in appositives is an issue too complex to be dealt with here. We simply mention that Cinque (2008) identifies at least two types of appositive relative clauses: (a) integrated ones, which are integrated in the DP projections as adjectives are, thus having a derivation similar to that of restrictive relatives, and which occur with the k-form, and (b) non-integrated ones, which are not integrated in the DP projections but linked to the antecedent at the discourse level and which generally occur only with agreeing relativizers, such as il quale but never with the k-form. Hence, the possibility to have more than one type of relativizer in appositive relative clauses might be related to the fact that appositive relatives are most probably not a unitary type and each subtype requires a different relativizer (cf. Del Gobbo 2007 and subsequent work).

2.3 Other forms of the relativizer: relative adverbials and possessive relativizers Further support for the claim that the distribution of the type of relativizer depends on the categorial nature of the relativized element, i.e. whether it is nominal or the complement of a preposition as proposed in Generalization 1, can be found in relative clauses on temporal and locative adverbials. Cinque (2013, ch. 10) distinguishes three classes of temporal adverbials: (a) temporal adverbials that optionally take a preposition (19a), (b) adverbials that obligatorily take a preposition (19b), and (c) adverbials that never take a preposition (19c).  

(19) It.

a. La proposta Banfi è stata discussa (in) quel the proposal Banfi is been discussed in that ‘Banfi’s proposal was discussed (on) that day.’

giorno. day

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b. La proposta Banfi sarà discussa *(in) quella occasione. that occasion the proposal Banfi be.FUT .3SG discussed in ‘Banfi’s proposal will be discussed on that occasion.’ c. Gianni sbaglia (*in) ogni volta. Gianni makes-mistakes in every time ‘Gianni makes a mistake every time.’ (from Cinque 2013, 124) Given our Generalization 1, we formulate the following predictions: (a) We should expect that, relativizing on an adverbial of class (a), the relative clause will be introduced either by a preposition plus a relativizer of the type cui/ il quale or by che, depending on whether a preposition has been selected for the adverbial position in the relative clause, or not. (b) On the other hand, we should expect that, relativizing on an adverbial of class (b), the relative clause may never be introduced by che but will be introduced by prepositions plus a relativizer of the type cui/il quale. (c) We should expect that, relativizing on an adverbial of class (c), the relative clause will only be introduced by che, never by prepositions plus a relativizer of the type cui/il quale. These predictions are borne out as shown in the examples under (20). (20) a. Class (a) It. il giorno che/ in cui/ nel quale è stata in.the.M . SG which:REL . SG is been the day REL / in REL . DAT / discussa la proposta Banfi discussed the proposal Banfi ‘the day (on) which Banfi’s proposal was discussed’ b. Class (b) oknella quale It. per l’occasione *che/ okin cui/ in REL . DAT / in.the.M . SG which:REL . SG for the occasion REL / si discuterà la proposta Banfi CL . REFL discuss.FUT .3SG the proposal Banfi ‘for the occasion on which Banfi’s proposal will be discussed’ c. Class (c) It. dalla volta che /*in cui /*nella quale / in REL . DAT / in.the:M . SG which:REL . SG from.the:F . SG time REL l’ ho conosciuta CL : ACC have:1.SG known ‘since the time I met her’ (adapted from Cinque 2013, 125)

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This shows that our first generalization (cf. Generalization 1) is descriptively more accurate than the Accessibility Hierarchy proposed by Keenan/Comrie (1977): the distribution of relativizers depends on the distinction nominal vs prepositional arguments. Non-prepositional adverbials (classes (a) and (c)), both locative and temporal ones, can also be relativized by dedicated forms of the relativizers, such as Fr. où ‘where’, Cat. quan ‘when’, on ‘where’, Sp. donde ‘where’ or cuando ‘when’, Rom. când ‘when’ and unde ‘where’. These relativizers are interrogative non-agreeing forms, which can appear in both restrictive and appositive relatives. As claimed by Munaro/ Poletto (2014) looking at many Italian varieties, locative and temporal adverbials are morphologically complex elements. For instance, the decomposition of the various formatives of the wh-item ‘where’ in Italian varieties has revealed that the relativizer dove ‘where’ is made up of at least three types of elements: (a) a prepositional formative, which can correspond to the preposition in ‘in’, di ‘of’ or da ‘from’ or a combination of them, (b) a vocalic formative o/u derived from the u- of Latin ubi (or possibly unde), which probably marks the wh-value of ‘where’, and (c) a deictic distal locative element of the ‘there’ type derived from various sources such as illac, -nd of unde and –v corresponding to the b- formative in Latin ubi. We might think that Romance languages differ with respect to the number of formatives morphologically realized in the locative relativizer. For instance, in French the relativizer où lacks the lexical realization of the prepositional formative, which suggests that French où is less specified than Italian dove. That Italian dove and French où are different is shown by studies on acquisition. Indeed, it has been reported that French-speaking children produce subject and object relative clauses with the uninflected relativizer où more often and earlier than relative clauses with the relativizer qui/que (Guasti/Cardinaletti 2003). On the contrary, in no acquisitional study on Italian, Spanish and Romanian, languages in which the locative relativizer is morphologically richer, are children reported to resort to this strategy: children produce relative clauses introduced by the uninflected que/che (Pérez-Leroux 1995 for Spanish; Belletti/Contemori 2010 for Italian; Sevcenco/Avram/Stoicescu 2014 for Romanian). These results might be taken as evidence that French où is less specified than Italian dove and hence, it can appear in broader contexts. Besides the grammatical role of the antecedent, the distribution of relativizers is also regulated by the relative clause type. This is shown by possessive relativizers. As seen in the case of adverbials, there are several options for expressing possession in a relative clause. Possessors are relativized by uninflected French dont, the genitive form of the relative pronoun care in Romanian, and the inflecting relativizers Sp. cuyo and It. cui. Besides these relativizers, possessors can also be introduced by the agreeing relativizer, It. il quale/Sp. el cual, usually preceded by the preposition di/de ‘of’. In spoken varieties, speakers tend to use an alternative construction, i.e. the uninflected relativizer che/que followed by the noun modified by the possessive determiner. The following word orders are attested within Romance languages, here  

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exemplified with examples from Spanish and Italian (Cinque 1978 for Italian; Suñer 1998 for Spanish). (21) a. P + cui/cuyo …. N It. il professore di cui conosco il figlio REL . GEN know.1SG the son the professor of ‘the professor of whom I know the son’ b. cuyo/cui + N Sp. el padre cuyo hijo vino son came the father REL . GEN ‘the father whose son came’ c. N + P + qual-/cualSp. el padre el hijo del cual vino the father the son of.the.M . SG which:REL .M . SG came ‘the father the son of whom came’ d. que/che + POSS + N Sp. el padre que su hijo vino the father REL his son came lit. ‘the father that his son came’ e. qual-/cual- + POSS + N Sp. el padre el cual su hijo vino the father the.M . SG which:REL . M . SG his son came lit. ‘the father who his son came’ Not all the word orders are grammatical in each Romance language. For instance (21a) is not attested in Spanish, whereas (21e) is not attested in Italian; Catalan only allows the strategy (21c) (see also Brucart 1999, 504–505; Dobrovie-Sorin/Giurgea 2013, ch. 6 and 10).13 A shown by Cinque (2008), it is only when the possessor is realized by the relativizer qual- that the noun can precede it. Indeed, a sentence like *il padre il figlio di cui arrivò with the noun preceding the relativizer di cui leads to ungrammaticality. According to Cinque, strategy (21c) can only appear in a subclass of appositive relative clauses (cf. Cinque 2008), suggesting that when the possessor is relativized, the distribution of the type of relativizer may also depend on the type of relative clause.

13 With a special intonation break before the N, in Colloquial Italian the word order P + cui + N may also be acceptable: il professore di cui il figlio conosco ‘the professor of whom the son I know’.

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2.4 Cumulative effects So far we have tried to provide evidence for the fact that two parameters are responsible for the alternation between uninflected and inflected relativizers, namely the categorial nature of the extracted element, i.e. DP or PP (see our first generalization (Generalization 1)) and the type of relative clause. However, in all Romance languages we observe an interaction between the two parameters: for instance, in Standard Italian the form of the agreeing relativizer found in appositive relative clauses as in (22a) is also found in oblique restrictive relatives selected by a preposition (22b).14  

(22) It.

a. Mario, il quale mi piace which:REL me.DAT likes Mario the.M . SG ‘Mario, whom I like very much’ b. il ragazzo con il quale ho the boy with the.M . SG which:REL have.1SG ‘the boy with whom I spoke yesterday’

molto a_lot parlato ieri spoken yesterday

We can then formulate the third empirical generalization: Generalization 3: If a language has two forms of relativizers which are sensitive to the relative clause type, the one used in appositive relative clauses will also be used in restrictive relative clauses with prepositions. This seems to indicate that complex morphology is sensitive to both factors singled out above; i.e. the relative clause type and the syntactic function of the head noun in the relative clause.15 In other words, if we have at least two relativizers, they tend to realize both complements of prepositions and the more complex case of relatives, namely appositives with respect to restrictives. This can be interpreted as a reflex of a general principle, namely that a complex semantics and/or a complex syntax give rise to a more complex morphology.16  

14 The same is true of written French, where appositive subject relatives can have lequel as their relativizer: Elle était avec son mari, madame Homais et le pharmacien, lequel se tourmentait beaucoup sur le danger des fusées perdues (Flaubert, Mme Bovary, II, 8). 15 This suggests that there must be a structural link between appositive and restrictive oblique relative clauses. Whether they involve the same structure, the same derivation and/or the same type of movement will be our next research topic. On a proposal to unify their derivation see Cinque (1978; 1982). 16 This could be seen as a loose version of Baker’s (1985) mirror principle, which states that morphology and syntax reflect each other, but it is most probably a condition suggesting that the various modules of grammar work in parallel, i.e. that the interface is not as complex as one might think. In our case, it is not the order of the syntactic projections that gives rise to the order of the morphemes; rather,  

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3 Doubling phenomena The same two factors singled out above to account for the distribution of relativizers (i.e. the grammatical function and the relative clause type) also determine the distribution of doubling in Romance languages: doubling phenomena are in general more frequently found in the low oblique positions of the Accessibility Hierarchy and in appositive relative clauses.17 The doubling strategy is usually characterized in the literature as typical of nonstandard relative clauses in Romance (cf. Schafroth 1993). Overall, relative clauses with resumptive pronouns are relatively rare both in the history of Romance standard languages (Schafroth 1993, 81–164) and in contemporary corpora of spontaneous speech (Stark 2009, 6) in French, Italian, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. In addition, doubling is a typical non-standard phenomenon (Stark 2009), since it is criticized as a redundancy by prescriptive grammarians. There is no agreement about the exact socio-stylistic marking of resumption in relative clauses.18 As Stark (2016, section 4.4) states, using resumptives is most certainly not directly bound to informality, but perhaps to phonic communication (Alfonzetti 2002, 31; Stark 2009, 8 and 10). Whereas no resumption tends to occur in the highest position of the hierarchy, resumptives are obligatory in all non-subject relative clauses in Romanian.  

(23) Rom. a. Arată=mi pisica (pe) care cat.the which:REL show=me. DAT fugăreşte. chase.3SG b. *Arată=mi pisica (pe) care cat.the which:REL show=me.DAT ‘Show me the cat that the dog chases.’

câinele dog.the

o her.ACC

câinele dog.the

fugăreşte. chase.3SG

the existence of a complex morphology is justified by the existence of complex semantic and/or syntactic operations. 17 Three types of resumptive pronouns with respect to their syntactic distribution are distinguished in the literature: optional, which occur in DP argumental positions; obligatory, occurring with PPs and in possessive positions; intrusive, allowed only in certain contexts, e.g., rescuing island violation (cf. Shlonsky 1992; Suñer 1998). Since the three types of resumptive pronouns behave quite differently and a characterization of their properties is beyond the scope of this work, we will limit ourselves to briefly deal with obligatory resumptive pronouns as in (24b,c) and optional ones, as in (24a). For a treatment and a theoretical account of resumption in relative clauses we refer to Bianchi (2011). 18 Cf. Gadet (1995, 153) for French, Schafroth (1993, 303–306), Alfonzetti (2002, 162) for Italian, Suñer (1998) for Spanish, Blanche-Benveniste (1990, 324–325) for French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

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In sub-standard Colloquial Italian, whereas in direct object relative clauses the resumptive pronoun is usually optional, in the lower oblique positions, resumptive pronouns tend to be obligatory.19 (24) It.

a. Mario, che (l’) ho incontrato ieri è partito yesterday is left Mario REL CL . ACC have.1SG met per Milano. for Milan ‘Mario, whom (him) I met yesterday, left for Milan.’ b. Mario, che *(gli) ho parlato ieri è partito have.1SG talked yesterday is left Mario REL CL . DAT per Milano. for Milan ‘Mario, to whom (to him) I talked yesterday, left for Milan.’ c. Mario, che *(ne) ho parlato ieri, è partito have.1SG talked yesterday is left Mario REL CL . GEN per Milano. for Milan ‘Mario, about whom (of whom) I talked yesterday, left for Milan.’

However, older stages of Italian suggest that the link between resumption and the grammatical function according to the Accessibility Hierarchy is not so straightforward. It seems indeed that the emergence and spreading of resumptives in relative clauses does not properly follow the Hierarchy. For instance, in a corpus study of twenty-nine Old Florentine texts dated around the thirteenth century, the pattern che plus resumptive clitics appears in object relative clauses first (De Roberto 2008, 314– 316). The situation is replicated in the fourteenth-century texts. For the arguments in the lower position of the hierarchy, such as indirect object, the relativizer cui (or cui preceded by a preposition) appears. This finding suggests that the generalization according to which resumptives follow the Accessibility Hierarchy is partial and that the interaction between resumption and relative clauses is governed by other factors, i.e. the relativizer paradigm, for instance, rather than only by the grammatical function of the relativized element. As already shown in Section 2.1, subject relatives are special in many ways. Another phenomenon showing that they behave differently from other relatives is  

19 Evidently, the use of resumptive pronouns in relative clauses is crucially linked to the more general system of clitics and accordingly, their being obligatory or optional should also be seen in that perspective. This picture is simplified and all the claims should be intended as such. The phenomenon of resumption is indeed heterogeneous depending on the type of resumptive, i.e. obligatory, optional and intrusive (see fn. 17), the properties of the clitic system, the grammatical function and the syntactic context in which it appears.  

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doubling. For instance, some varieties of French, such as Quebec Colloquial French, display cases of subject relative clauses introduced not by the relativizer qui, but by que, obligatorily followed by a resumptive expression, either a clitic or a pronoun, coreferential to the antecedent (Auger 1993; 1994, 76–91). (25) Fr.

J’ étais pas une personne que j’ avais beaucoup d’ amis. REL I had a.lot of friends I was not a person ‘I was someone who didn’t have a lot of friends.’ (from Auger 1994, 77)

The forms qui and que plus subject clitics seem to be in complementary distribution in Quebec Colloquial French. It can be hypothesized that the function of marking the subject relative is transferred from the relativizer itself to the clitic in Quebec Colloquial French, and this is probably also what happens in languages such as Venetian for the whole paradigm and not only for the subject (see Benincà/Vanelli 1982).20 Resumption is not a phenomenon linked only to the grammatical function of the relativized element: its distribution is also sensitive to the relative clause type. Resumption is indeed more often attested in appositive relative clauses (cf. BlancheBenveniste 1990, 333 for French; Bernini 1991, 179 and Alfonzetti 2002, 69–96 for Italian; Brucart 1999, 405 for Spanish). Moreover, in certain northern Italian dialects (Venetian, Paduan), resumptive pronouns can optionally appear but only in appositives (26a), whereas they are excluded from restrictive relative clauses (26b). (26) Vto. a. Mario, che LO go visto ieri, ze partio. Mario REL him.ACC have.1SG seen yesterday is left ‘Mario, whom I saw yesterday, left.’ b. *El fio che LO go visto ieri ze partio. the boy REL him.ACC have.1SG seen yesterday is left ‘The boy, that him I saw yesterday, left.’ The Venetian situation resembles the pattern identified for Old Florentine, which allows a clitic resumptive only in appositive relatives, but not in restrictive or in free relatives (Benincà/Cinque 2010). On the basis of this evidence, we can formulate the following empirical generalization:

20 Many (Gallo-)Romance varieties exhibit obligatory subject clitics in relative clauses, e.g., Picard, some Swiss Francoprovençal dialects, and northern Italian dialects other than Friulian (Cennamo 1997). See also Gadet (1995) for different regional and social French varieties.

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Generalization 4: First attempt If resumption is allowed in restrictive relative clauses then it is also allowed in appositives. Once again, this seems to suggest that appositive relative clauses may involve more complex processes either in the syntax or in the semantics or in both components. At the same time, there is actually evidence that the implicational scale is more complex than what is stated in Generalization 4. Romance languages like Spanish or certain Italian dialects show that two types of restrictive relatives must be individuated on the basis of the possibility of allowing optional resumptives: only specific restrictive relatives allow for resumptive pronouns, while in non-specific relative clauses, e.g., those whose antecedent has a generic interpretation, resumptive pronouns cannot appear (cf. Bianchi 2011). This restriction is exemplified in (27) with Spanish examples: (27) Sp.

a. ?Yo conozco un doctor que él gana mucho I know a doctor REL CL . NOM . 3SG earns much Lit. ‘I know a doctor that he earns a lot of money.’ b. Un doctor que (*él) gana mucho dinero no CL . NOM . 3SG earns much money not a doctor REL ser honesto. be honest Lit. ‘A doctor that he earns a lot of money cannot be honest.’ (from Bianchi 1999b, 93)

dinero. money puede can

The same specificity effect is also attested in some northern Italian dialects: if the antecedent in a restrictive relative clause has a specific interpretation, then a resumptive clitic appears (28a); on the contrary when the antecedent is not specific, clitics are not allowed (28b). (28) Northern It. dialect (Dosolo, Lombardy) a. U vest an gat ca l gneva in ca’ tua. cat REL CL . NOM . 3SG entered in house your have.1SG seen a Lit. ‘I saw a cat that he entered your house.’ b. An gat ca (*l) ven in ca mia l’ è a cat REL CL . NOM . 3SG enters in house my CL . NOM . 3SG is fürtünà. lucky Lit. ‘A cat that he comes into my house is lucky.’ The link between the presence of resumption and the specificity effects suggests that it is the resumptive that reflects the specific interpretation of the antecedent. In

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conclusion, examples (27) and (28) show that optional resumption in relative clauses follows a more fine-grained implicational scale which identifies two types of restrictive relative clauses, specific and non-specific ones: appositive > restrictive specific > restrictive non-specific/maximizing.21 Generalization 4: If resumption is allowed in specific restrictive relative clauses then it is also allowed in appositives. We conclude that the distribution of doubling varies according to three factors: (a) the type of relative clause, (b) the grammatical function of the head noun in the relative clause, and (c) the nature, i.e. definiteness and/or specificity, of the nominal expression. Besides, resumption also varies according to specific conditions under which each argument enters doubling in each language, i.e., languages with differential object marking have a different syntax from those that do not have it, and languages where clitics are obligatory with all types of nominal expressions will also display them in relative clauses.22 The last point we would like to address here regards the link between resumption and the lexical type of relativizer. The typological literature has proposed the empirical generalization according to which in every language a relative pronoun – such as It. il quale – excludes a resumptive pronoun or clitic (Downing 1978; Lehmann 1984; De Vries 2002, among others). At first sight this seems to hold also in Romance. Indeed, in all the examples above the resumptive expression always occurs inside a relative clause introduced by the k-form and not by the agreeing relativizer. Although the tendency is clearly to use the resumptive expression with the k-form in all Romance languages, the presence of resumptive expressions with morphologically complex relative pronouns is nonetheless attested. This is the case, for instance, of sub-standard Modern Colloquial French:23 in (29) the genitive form of the relative pronoun dont is doubled by the clitic en (Fiorentino 1999, 37).  



21 While the literature usually agrees in claiming that non-restrictive relative clauses can encode a variety of semantic relations and hence have different syntactic representations (on this topic we refer to Del Gobbo 2007), this may also be true for restrictive relative structures, which may also be a heterogeneous category among which different types can be singled out not only across different languages, but also within the same language (as already proposed by Aoun/Li 2003). 22 For instance, in the Italian dialect spoken in Bassano, dative clitics are obligatory. Hence, the prediction will be to find dative clitics also in free relative clauses. This prediction is borne out: Mi so a chi che te ghe ghè comprà i ociai ‘I know to whom you (to him) gave the glasses’. It then must be stressed that the implicational scale in (34) refers to optional resumptive expressions only. 23 Note that (35) is marked as sociolinguistically extremely low, as a signal of lack of education (cf. Stark 2009).

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une chose dont tu peux en you can CL . GEN a thing REL . GEN Lit. ‘a thing of which you could be proud of it’

être be

fier proud

The same observation holds for Italian. In (30) the form of the relative introduced by the preposition is doubled by the resumptive clitic ne, both with cui- and qualerelativizers (Fiorentino 1999, 32). (30) It.

a. È il problema aldilà della modellizzazione di cui is the problem beyond of.the modeling of REL . GEN ne abbiamo parlato. CL . GEN have.1PL talked Lit. ‘it is the problem beyond the modeling about which of it we talked.’ b. […] dei quali nessuno naturalmente ne CL . GEN of.the.M . PL which:REL . PL nobody obviously parla. talks Lit. ‘[…] about whom nobody obviously talks of them.’

Instances like (29) and (30) are scarcely attested and are defined as cases of hypercorrection (cf. Stempel 1964; Godard 1989; Gadet 1995; Fiorentino 1998; Stark 2004, among others). However, these examples are enough to cast doubts on the universality of the empirical generalization and revise it as a tendency: Generalization 5: If there is a resumptive expression in the relative clause, the relativizer usually displays the non-agreeing form.

4 Zero relatives The typological literature reports that relative clauses can also lack the lexical relativizer. Romance languages, however, have always been claimed to never instantiate such an option: indeed, the standard languages do not allow for any drop of the relativizer. Contrary to this observation, it is possible to find cases of zero relativizers (i.e. the lack of a relativizer at the beginning of the clause) in various Old and Modern Romance varieties. As seen for the phenomena discussed above, we see that the distribution of zero relativization also depends on the same two parameters, i.e. the grammatical function of the head noun and the type of relative clause. For instance, in the older stages of Romance zero relativization most frequently occurred in non-subject relatives (e.g., in Old Italian, Old Spanish, Old Portuguese, cf. Scorretti 1991, and references cited therein). The Tuscan variety of the fourteenth and  



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fifteenth centuries studied by Benincà (1995) also allows for zero relativization, which is mainly found in restrictive object relative clauses (see also Bianchi 1999a, 237): (31) OIt.

Ruppe una legge Ø aveano law Ø had.3PL broke.3SG a ‘He broke a law that the Pistolesi had.’ (Compagni, Cronica, I, XXV, p. 103)

i Pistolesi. the Pistolesi

Note that in (31) the lexical subject in the relative clause appears in a postverbal position. Usually in object- as well as in oblique-relative clauses, the subject is also a null pronominal element as in (32). (32) OIt.

In capo non portano nulla, se no una corda lunga .x. palmi on head not wear nothing if not a rope long X palms Ø si volgono atorno lo capo. around the head Ø CL .3PL wrap ‘They wear nothing on their head, except a rope ten palms long that they put around the head.’ (Milione, XLV, 7, p. 62)

It seems that Old Florentine allows for zero relativization in non-subject relatives, but only under specific conditions: the subject in the relative clause must be a full lexical noun in postverbal position as in (31) or a silent pronoun as in (32). Examples (31) and (32) confirm the observation by Downing (1978) and Comrie (1981) according to which zero relativization is avoided with subject relatives: subject relatives demand a sentence-initial relative element. Hence, these examples strengthen the observation that subject relativization should be singled out with respect to the relativization of all other grammatical functions (see Section 2.1 and example (25)). Nevertheless, there exist languages that display zero relativization when the relativized element is the subject of the relative clause, hence this generalization is at most a tendency, not a universal ban against zero relativization in subject relatives (Lehmann 1984, 80–85; De Vries 2002, 37).24 For instance, in Old Occitan (33), Old French (34) and Renaissance Florentine (35) the subject relative clause is not introduced by any lexical relativizer.25

24 See Lehmann (1984, 80–85) on zero relativization in Appalachian English. Furthermore several languages even use zero relativization as a main strategy also in subject relative clauses, e.g. Lakota and Yucatecan. 25 On the contexts in which zero relativizes are licensed in Old Romance languages we refer to Folena (1961), Alisova (1965), Lefebvre/Fournier (1978, 282), Wanner (1981), Jensen (1990), Kunstmann (1990), Buridant (2000) and Labelle (2006).

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(33) OOcc. No i aura un Ø no veia son arnes. NEG there be.FUT one Ø not see.SBJV .3SG his equipment ‘There will not be one who does not examine his equipment.’ (from Jensen 1986, 364) (34) OFr. Mais il n’ a menbre Ø ne li dueille. Ø NEG him.DAT hurt.SBJV .3SG but he NEG has limb ‘But he does not have a limb that does not hurt.’ (from Jensen 1990, 498) (35) OIt.

Fece venire Papa Eugenio tutti e’ dotti the educated made.3SG come.INF Pope Eugene all uomini Ø erano in Italia. men Ø were in Italy ‘Pope Eugene gathered all the educated men who were in Italy.’ (Bisticci da Vespasiano, Le vite, 15, 1, 17)

The other factor influencing the possibility of zero relativization is the type of relative clause: again, the typological literature (De Vries 2002; 2005) observes that zero relativization is found in restrictive but not in appositive relative clauses: “at least in the Romance and Germanic languages (and perhaps in any language) appositive relative clauses must be introduced by a relative element” (De Vries 2002, 226). This observation is supported by the overview in De Roberto (2008) on Old Florentine: only restrictives allow for zero relativization. However, Benincà (1995) notes that Modern Florentine does not tolerate zero relatives in restrictive relatives but does so in appositives.26 (36) Florentine a. *L’ ho detto al ragazzo Ø l’ ho visto CL . ACC have.1SG said at.the boy Ø CL . ACC have.1SG seen ieri. yesterday ‘I said that to the boy that I saw yesterday.’

26 Since Cinque (2008) has shown that there are at least two types of appositive relative clauses, one might wonder whether zero relativizers are only possible in one subtype. We leave this problem to future research.

Relative clauses

b. L’ CL . ACC

ho detto a have.1SG said at

Mario, Ø Mario Ø

l’ CL . ACC

829

ho visto have.1SG seen

ieri. yesterday ‘I said that to Mario, whom I saw yesterday.’ Furthermore, looking at the relative clauses in the ASIt database27 on Italian varieties, we found ten instances of zero relativization and all of them were appositive relative clauses, as for example in (37). On the contrary restrictive relative clauses were always introduced by a lexical relativizer. (37) Calabrian

Mario Ø mi imbattiu aieri yesterday Mario Ø me. DAT met.1SG stamattina partiu. this.morning left ‘Mario, whom I met yesterday, left this morning.’ (Locri, Calabria)

Two further factors that seem to play a role in licensing zero relativization are the definiteness of the antecedent and the mood of the predicate in the relative clause. For instance, Romanian does not usually allow zero relativization, but under specific conditions the relativizer can be absent: (a) with an indefinite or negatively quantified antecedent, or (b) with the predicate in the relative clause inflected for subjunctive mood.28 (38) Rom. Nu-i nimeni Ø să mă=ajute. NEG -is nobody Ø SBJV . MRK me-help.3SG ‘There is nobody that helps me.’ For the time being, we are not in a position to propose any implicational scale with respect to the above mentioned factors that allow the occurrence of zero relativization. A larger corpus is needed to formulate empirically grounded hypotheses. What is crucial to underline is that the observations by Downing (1978) and De Vries (2002; 2005) must be revised and taken at most as a tendency: (a) subject relatives also allow for zero relativization and (b) both restrictive and appositive relatives allow for the lack of lexical relativizers.

27 http://asit.maldura.unipd.it/ (22.04.2016). 28 In Quebec French the relativizer que can be deleted. The mechanisms behind this possibility are still under debate, as it is not clear whether que-deletion is induced by contact with English (cf. Martineau 1988).

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In any case, we can conclude that the same factors, i.e. the syntactic function of the head noun in the relative clause and the type of relative clause, that are at work in the distribution of the different types of relativizers and in doubling phenomena are also found in the (few) cases of zero relativization existing in Romance.  

5 Conclusion In this brief overview of the relativizing system in Romance languages we concentrated on three aspects, namely the paradigm of lexical relativizers, the presence of resumption and the lack of lexical relativizers. As for the paradigm of lexical relativizers we showed that Standard Romance languages exhibit a mixed system of both non-agreeing relativizers, usually the same element introducing complement clauses, and agreeing relativizers. Both the distribution of the forms of lexical relativizers, the presence of resumption and the (few) cases of zero relativization have been argued to be sensitive to the interplay of two factors: (a) the categorial nature of the relativized element and (b) the syntactic-semantic type of relative clause. On the basis of the data observed, we formulated five empirical generalizations repeated in what follows, which should be understood as tendencies more than rules. The first three generalizations are related to the paradigm of relativizers and suggest that agreeing relativizers and non-agreeing ones co-vary with the categorial nature of the relativized element and the syntactic-semantic type of relative clause. This alternation can be formalized as the co-variation of the morphological complexity of the relativizer and the complexity of the syntactic/semantic function of the head noun in the relative clause encoded by Case on the one hand, and the semantic operation involved in the relative clause, on the other. – Generalization 1: PP complements tend to appear with agreeing relativizers while subject and object relatives, predicative complements and nominal adverbials are rather expressed by non-agreeing ones. – Generalization 2: If a language has three different forms of relativizers, one will be dedicated to subject relativization. – Generalization 3: If a language has two forms of relativizers, which are sensitive to the relative clause type, the one used in appositive relative clauses will also be used in restrictive relative clauses with prepositions. Two generalizations concern the presence of resumption and capture the fact that resumption is sensitive to the type of relative clause and to the nature of the nominal

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expression. At the same time, resumptive expressions seem to be linked to the type of relativizer. – Generalization 4: If resumption is allowed in specific restrictive relative clauses then it is also allowed in appositives. – Generalization 5: If there is a resumptive expression in the relative clause, the relativizer usually displays the non-agreeing form. Zero relativization is allowed in both restrictive and appositive relatives as well as with all types of grammatical functions of the head noun. In non-subject relatives, zero relativization exhibits the following pattern: in non-subject relative clauses the subject of the relative clause tends to always be either a silent pronominal element or a lexical noun in postverbal position. Further research is needed to understand the rules regulating the distribution of zero relativization. Finally, Romance languages (and maybe all languages) have devices to single out the subject with respect to all other grammatical functions, at least in relative clauses (cf. the second generalization). Moreover, subject relatives are also different from other relatives with respect to resumption. In Quebec French, for instance, extracting a subject from the relative clause requires having a dedicated form of relativizer or a resumptive expression, which suggests that the subject position in the relative clause must be marked in some way. In conclusion, we provided a brief overview of three phenomena related to relative clauses in Romance languages and dialects and we tried to systematize the data and our observations according to precise (when possible) generalizations or at least tendencies. Indeed, although this chapter is not meant to be exhaustive, we saw that there are clear tendencies and parallelisms throughout Romance in the phenomena investigated here which provide insights into and pieces of evidence for various syntactic theories of relative clauses. Although Keenan/Comrie’s hierarchy can account for many phenomena related to relative clauses, we found exceptions and counterexamples which support the claim in Cinque (1978; 1982) that relativization strategies ultimately depend on the categorial nature of the relativized element, namely whether a nominal or prepositional phrase is relativized (see also Stark 2016). Finally, our overview highlighted that the semantics of relative clauses can have morphological and syntactic reflexes. This finding suggests a compositional approach to semantics as proposed in Del Gobbo (2007) and Bianchi (2011).

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Martineau, France (1988), Variable deletion of “que” in the spoken French of Ottawa-Hull, in: David Birdsong/Jean-Pierre Montreuil (edd.), Advances in Romance Linguistics, Dordrecht, Foris, 275–287. Munaro, Nicola (2000), Free relative clauses as defective wh-elements: evidence from the Northwestern Italian dialects, University of Venice Working Papers in Linguistics 10, 89–120. Munaro, Nicola/Poletto, Cecilia (2014), Synchronic and diachronic clues on the internal structure of “where” in Italo-Romance, in: Paola Benincà/Adam Ledgeway/Nigel Vincent (edd.), Diachrony and Dialects, Grammatical Change in the Dialects of Italy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 279–300. Partee, Barbara (1973), Some transformational extensions of Montague Grammar, Journal of Philosophical Logic 2, 509–534. Pérez-Leroux, Ana Teresa (1995), Resumptives in the acquisition of relative clauses, Language Acquisition 4, 105–138. Pinkster, Harm (2012), Relative clauses in Latin: some problems of description, in: Paula Da Cunha Corrêa et al. (edd.), Hyperboreans: Essays in Greek and Latin Poetry, Philosophy, Rhetoric and Linguistics, São Paulo, Humanitas CAPES, 377–393. Pompei, Anna (2011), Relative clauses, in: Philip Baldi/Pierluigi Cuzzolin (edd.), New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax, vol. 3, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 427–547. Potts, Christopher (2005), The Logic of Conventional Implicatures, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Rizzi, Luigi (1990), Relativized Minimality, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Rizzi, Luigi (2004), Locality and left periphery, in: Adriana Belletti (ed.), Structures and Beyond. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures Volume 3, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 223–251. Rizzi, Luigi/Shlonsky, Ur (2005), Strategies of subject extraction, in: Hans-Martin Gärtner/Uli Sauerland (edd.), Interfaces + Recursion = Language? Chomsky’s Minimalism and the View from Syntax-Semantics, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 115–160. Sanfelici, Emanuela/Caloi, Irene/Poletto, Cecilia (2014), Subject object asymmetries in relative clauses: an investigation into three new empirical domains, in: Diego Pescarini/Silvia Rossi (edd.), Atti della XIX Giornata di dialettologia, Quaderni di lavoro ASIt 18, 127–160. Sanfelici, Emanuela/Poletto, Cecilia (2015), On complementizers: insights from Italian restrictive relative clauses, Paper presented at the 48th Congress of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Leiden University. Schafroth, Elmar (1993), Zur Entstehung und vergleichenden Typologie der Relativpronomina in den romanischen Sprachen. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Substandards, Tübingen, Niemeyer. Schafroth, Elmar (1995), À propos d’une typologie panromane des relatifs “non normatifs”, in: Catherine Bougy/Pierre Boissel/Bernard Garnier (edd.), Mélanges René Lepelley. Recueil d’études en hommage au Professeur René Lepelley, Caen, Musée de Normandie, 363–374. Scorretti, Mauro (1991), Complementizers in Italian and Romance, Amsterdam, doctoral dissertation. Sells, Peter (1985), Restrictive and Non-restrictive Modification, Stanford, CA, CSLI. Sevcenco, Anca/Avram, Larisa/Stoicescu, Ioana (2014), Relative clauses: a linguistic marker of developmental dyslexia in Romanian, in: João Costa et al. (edd.), New Directions in the Acquisition of Romance Languages: Selected Proceedings of the Romance Turn V, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 285–301. Shlonsky, Ur (1992), Resumptive pronouns as a last resort, Linguistic Inquiry 23, 443–468. Sportiche, Dominique (2011), French relative “qui”, Linguistic Inquiry 42, 83–124. Stark, Elisabeth (2004), L’italiano parlato – varietà storica o variazione universale?, in: Federico Albano Leoni et al. (edd.), Il parlato italiano, Atti del convegno nazionale, Napoli, 13–15 febbraio 2003 (CD-ROM), Napoli, D’Auria Editore–CIRASS.

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Stark, Elisabeth (2009), Romance restrictive relative clauses between macrovariation and universal structures, Philologie im Netz 47, 1–15, http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/phin47/p47t1.htm (28.02.2016). Stark, Elisabeth (2016), Relative clauses, in: Adam Ledgeway/Martin Maiden (edd.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1029–1040. Stechow, Arnim von (2007), Schritte zur Satzsemantik II, Script Einführung in die Semantik, in: http:// www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~astechow/Aufsaetze/SchritteII.pdf (28.01.2016). Stempel, Wolf Dieter (1964), Untersuchungen zur Satzverknüpfung im Altfranzösischen, Braunschweig, Westermann. Suñer, Margarita (1998), Resumptive restrictive relatives: a crosslinguistic perspective, Language 74, 335–364. Taraldsen, Knut Tarald (2001), Subject extraction, the distribution of expletives and Stylistic Inversion, in: Aafke Hulk/Jean-Yves Pollock (edd.), Subject Inversion in Romance and the Theory of Universal Grammar, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 163–182. Utzeri, Irene (2007), The production and acquisition of subject and object relative clauses in Italian, Nanzan Linguistics Special Issue 3, 283–314. Veloso, Rita (2013), Subordinação relativa, in: Eduardo Paiva Raposo et al. (edd.), Gramática do português, Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2061–2136. Vineis, Edoardo (1994), Latino, in: Anna Giacalone Ramat/Paolo Ramat (edd.), Le lingue indoeuropee, Bologna, il Mulino, 289–348. Vries, Mark de (2002), The Syntax of Relativization, Utrecht, LOT. Vries, Mark de (2005), The fall and the rise of universals on relativization, The Journal of Universal Language 6, 1–33. Wanner, Dieter (1981), Surface complementizer deletion, Italian “che” = ø, Journal of Italian Linguistics 6, 45–83.

Typological aspects

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23 Syntheticity and Analyticity Abstract: The present chapter critically reconsiders the traditional typological distinction between Latin and Romance in terms of a syntheticity-analyticity opposition, according to which core grammatical categories and distinctions are marked morphologically in Latin but syntactically in Romance. After considering a wide selection of the Romance evidence for innovative analytic structures manifested in the emergence of a series of functional categories lexicalizing various functional heads within the nominal, verbal and clausal domains, a number of empirical and theoretical problems and limitations with this superficial dichotomy are reviewed. These highlight how the observed differences between Latin and Romance cannot be simplistically reduced to a synthetic-analytic opposition. Rather, it is argued that the observed rise of Romance analyticity should be considered an epiphenomenal development, ultimately the manifestation of a deeper change, but not, significantly, its cause, related to a change in the head directionality parameter from head-finality to head-initiality.  

Keywords: syntheticity, analyticity, functional categories, determiners, auxiliaries, complementizers, head parameter, configurationality, grammaticalization, functional structure  

1 Introduction It has become commonplace in descriptions of the Latin-Romance transition to highlight a typological shift from the morphologically-oriented structures of Latin to the increasingly syntactically-oriented structures of Romance.1 By way of illustration, consider Table 1 where we see in accordance with the traditional Latin-Romance synthetic-analytic dichotomy that, in contrast to Romance, Latin lacks functional categories in that none of the core grammatical categories such as subordination, tense, aspect, mood, transitivity or definiteness is expressed analytically. At the same time, we also observe how there is significant variation across Romance in which of the functional categories are realized and the overt distinctions they mark. For instance, only French lexicalizes all functional categories in Table 1, including an overt transitive/causative light v(erb) fait, whereas Italian only optionally encodes the partitive distinction through an overt DET (erminer) (cf. Stark 2008). By contrast, Romanian fails to overtly mark either of these categories, but uniquely displays robust

1 Meillet ([11937] 1964, 439), Bourciez (41956, 23), Harris (1978, 15–16), Schwegler (1990), Posner (1996, 156–157). DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-023

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marking on the COMP (lementizer) for the realis/irrealis opposition, otherwise paralleled in the indicative/subjunctive distinction realized on the perfect AUX (iliary), in turn further distinguished by way of the HAVE /BE split in Romanian (Ledgeway 2014a). Table 1: Synthetic vs analytic marking of core grammatical categories in Latin and Romance C OMP

A UX

v

D ET DET

Lat.

dico/uolo

Ø

eum

Ø

Ø

coxisse

Ø

panem

Fr.

je dis/veux

qu’

il

a/ait

fait

cuire

du

pain

It.

dico/voglio

che

ha/abbia

Ø

cotto

(del)

pane

că/să

a/fi

Ø

copt

Ø

pâine

that(real/irreal) him/he

hasI N D /(be)S B J V

made

bake(d)

some

bread

Rom. spun/vreau I say/I want

‘I say that he has/I want him to have baked some bread.’

This synthetic-analytic dichotomy, which goes back to the pioneering work of Schlegel (1818),2 highlights a Sapirian “drift” from the predominantly synthetic structures of Latin towards the characteristically analytic structures of Romance in accordance with a tendency considered by Tekavčić (1980, 15) to be ‘the guiding principle underlying the whole of Romance morphosyntax and undoubtedly its deepest and most important characteristic’.3 Consequently, there is general recognition among Romanists of all theoretical persuasions that, in the passage from Latin to Romance, the morphosyntax of the emerging languages underwent significant changes in three fundamental areas of the grammar, readily observable in the gradual reduction and/ or eventual loss of the Latin morphological case system (1a), synthetic verb forms (2a) 2 For an historical overview of the use of the terms “synthetic” and “analytic”, see Schwegler (1990, ch. 1). 3 Coseriu (1987) reinterprets the traditional synthetic-analytic dichotomy as a distinction between “internal” and “external” structures, respectively (cf. Coseriu [11971] 1988, 211, 224). Accordingly, the Romance languages are not characterized by a tendency towards analyticity, but, rather, by a tendency to distinguish between external and internal determination and between relational and non-relational functions. Although it is undoubtedly true that the internal (viz. synthetic) determination of syntactic structures predominates in Latin, Coseriu makes the original observation that this is not the distinctive structural characteristic of Latin; rather what sets Latin apart from Romance is its failure to make any formal distinction between relational and non-relational functions. By contrast, Romance stands out, not by its admittedly steady increase in the number of externally-determined (viz. analytic) structures, but, rather, by its consistent formal distinction between relational and non-relational functions, the former aligned with externally-determined (= analytic) structures and the latter with internally-determined (= synthetic) structures. Thus, the real change in the passage from Latin to Romance is not to be seen as a move from syntheticity to analyticity, but is to be identified with the emergence of a new formative principle of mapping relational and non-relational functions respectively onto externallyand internally-determined structure (see Ledgeway 2012, 26–28).

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and implicit subordination (viz. accusative and infinitive (AcI); cf. (3a)) in favour of analytic structures based on functional categories like determiners (viz. articles) and prepositions (1b), auxiliaries (2b) and complementizers (3b): (1)

a. Lat.

b. It.

(2)

a. Lat.

b. Fr.

(3) a. Lat.

b. Cal.

consules senatui paruerunt obeyed consuls.NOM . PL senate.DAT (Cic. Red. sen. 17) i consoli furono ossequienti al senato the consuls were subservient to.the senate ‘The consuls were obedient to the senate.’ larem corona nostrum decor-ar-i uolo decorate-INF - PASS I.want Lar.ACC crown.ABL our.ACC (Plautus, Trin. 39) je veux que notre Lare soit honoré I want that our Lar be.SBJV . 3SG honoured d’ une couronne of a crown ‘I wish for our Household God Lar to be adorned with a crown.’ tacitum te dicere credo… I.believe silent.ACC you.ACC say.INF (Mart. 6.5.3–4) criju ca ti sta diciennu… I.believe that yourself=PROG .2SG saying ‘I fancy you say to yourself…’

The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from these introductory observations is that marking of definiteness, various verb-related grammatical categories and sentential boundaries in Romance increasingly becomes associated with specific positions, namely the left edge of the nominal, verbal and sentential domains, lexicalized by functional markers belonging to the categories of DET (erminers), AUX (iliaries) and COMP (lementizers). This reflects the traditional intuition popularized within syntheticity-analyticity approaches, which highlights the emergence in Romance of articles and clitics, auxiliaries, and a whole host of finite and non-finite complementizers, all generally absent from Latin. In current theory, grammatical elements of this type are generally considered to head their own functional projections DP, I(nfl)P, and CP which provide the locus of grammatical information for the nominal group, verbal group and the sentence, respectively. On this view, one of the most significant generalizations of the traditional synthesis-analysis approach can now be insightfully rephrased in terms of the emergence of these functional categories and the grammaticalization of a number of correspond-

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ing functional elements that lexicalize these positions (Ledgeway 2011a), a small selection of which we briefly review in Section 2 (for a fuller treatment, see Ledgeway 2012, ch. 4). Following an examination of some of the principle evidence for the emergence of Romance analyticity, we then consider in Section 3 some of the problems and issues surrounding traditional descriptions of the Latin-Romance transition in terms of a simple syntheticity-analyticity dichotomy. This will lead us to exclude the possibility of an independent synthetic-analytic parameter. Finally, we argue in Section 4 that the rise of Romance analyticity should be considered an epiphenomenal development, ultimately the manifestation of a deeper change related to a reversal in the head directionality parameter (Schwegler 1990; Bauer 2006; Ledgeway 2014b; in press a,b).

2 Romance analyticity: some examples 2.1 Nominal group Quintilian’s (Inst. 1.4.19) oft-quoted observation “noster sermo articulos non desiderat” (cf. also Donatus’ Ars major I, 1–3) highlights not only that Latin lacked articles but, more fundamentally, that it lacked a dedicated position for articles and other types of determiner (Lyons 1999, 155). This is further supported by the observation that other determiner-like elements such as demonstratives and possessives, which fill the same syntagmatic slot (or area) as the article (Vincent 1988, 53–54), also come to typically fill the prenominal determiner position in Romance, whereas in Latin – questions of markedness aside – they could occur in pre- or postnominal position just like adjectives. In this light, the emergence of a DP can be seen to provide the relevant (in)definiteness marking of its associated NP, and in some Gallo-Romance varieties like French the accompanying determiner is not simply a spell-out of (in)definiteness, but now also a quasi-obligatory element of the nominal group as the sole exponent, in most cases, of number and gender (Harris 1980, 67).

2.1.1 Articles The clearest evidence for the rise of analyticity in the Romance nominal domain comes from the appearance in all varieties of indefinite and definite articles (↗20 Determination and quantification). The former continues a weakened form of the Latin numeral for ‘one’ UNUM /- AM ( M / F ) (> Cat./It./Sp. un/una, Fr. un/une, Pt. um/uma, Rom. un/o), and in some varieties formally contrasts with the fuller forms of the numeral (Cal. unu/ una vs nu/na + figliu/-a ‘one:M / F ’ vs ‘a:M / F ’ + ‘son/daughter’). Unlike the earlier emergence and grammaticalization of the definite article from around the eighth century (Lyons 1999, 333; Ledgeway 2012, 96), systematic usage of the indefinite article

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does not emerge until around the fourteenth century (Pozas-Loyo 2010, ch. 5; Ledgeway 2012, §4.2.1). Before then the indefinite article is reserved for particularized new referents, presumably a residue of its numeral origin, whereas bare NPs are employed for non-particularized referents (Price 1971, 118–119; Stark 2002; Parry/Lombardi 2007, 91–92; Pozas-Loyo 2010): OTsc. donami cavallo da cavalcare ‘give=me (a) horse to ride.INF ’; OSp. como faz buen pastor ‘as does (a) good shepherd’. Revealing in this respect is the eleventh-century French Vie de St Alexis where the article is not employed in the prayer of a childless couple in their request to God, Enfant nos done ‘Child us=give.IMP . 2SG ’, since the meaning of the NP is ‘any child’. When, however, God blesses them with a child, a specific individual, this is reported with the indefinite article: Un fi lor donet ‘A son to.them=he.gives’. In the modern languages, by contrast, indefinite NPs, whether particularized or not, require the article, witness the following Catalan extracts from a not too dissimilar Mallorquin fairy tale: Bon Jesús! Enviau-mos un infant! ‘Good Lord! Send.IMP . 2SG =us a child!’ […] els deixa un infantó ben garrit i condret ‘to.them=he.leaves a large.child very handsome and healthy’. Plural forms from the accusative plural UNOS /- AS , best considered indefinite quantifiers rather than plural articles since, unlike the corresponding singular articles, they generally prove optional, are found in Ibero-Romance (Extremaduran unus pocus de limonis ‘some few of lemons (= a few lemons)’), Occitan (Langadocian ausissiái unis gemècs ‘I.heard some groans’), and, until the sixteenth century, also in French (avoit unes grandes joes ‘he.had (some) great cheeks’), where they were principally employed with collective plurals (Woledge 1956). In Romanian, the plural form is most frequently used in the genitive/dative, with a zero form or lexical quantifier being employed in other cases, e.g. (nişte) sfaturi unor colegi ‘(some) advice some.GEN / DAT colleagues’. Turning now to the definite article, this continues a weakened form of the Latin distal demonstrative ILLE (> Cat./Sp. el/la, Fr./Occ. le/la, It. il/lo/la, Pt./southern ItaloRomance o/a, Rom. -(u)l/-a) or, more rarely, the Latin intensifier IPSE ‘-self’ (> Balearic/Costa Brava Cat. es/sa, Srd. su/sa; Aebischer 1948, 193; Ravier 1991, 89).4 In many late Latin texts both ILLE and IPSE frequently (co-)occur in contexts where their spatial deictic function is considerably weakened, and their principal role is limited to marking anaphoricity and/or definiteness (Väänänen 1987; Nocentini 1990; Vincent 1997b; 1998), a precursor to the modern article famously termed by Aebischer (1948) an “articloid”. Traditionally, then, the principal question has been whether the latter is a demonstrative with a much-increased frequency (Herman 2000, 84–85) or an

4 Note that in contrast to other Romance varieties where the definite article is prenominal, e.g. Cors. u vechju portu ‘the old port’, in Romanian the article apparently shows a greater degree of syntheticity attaching enclitically to the head noun, e.g. portul vechi ‘port=the old’, or a prenominal adjective, e.g. vechiul port ‘old=the port’ (Dobrovie-Sorin/Giurgea 2006; Nicolae 2015a). The exception is the genitive singular lui, which is prenominal with (masculine) personal proper names, e.g. mașina lui Ion/Alice ‘car=the the.GEN Ion/Alice’.

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article, but with a still-limited range of use (Lyons 1999, 333). Undoubtedly, there are elements of truth in both positions, which can be more appropriately considered as the start and the end points in an unresolved and ongoing process of grammaticalization. In terms of their distribution, Renzi (1976), Selig (1992), and Zamboni (2000, 116) argue that IPSE was predominantly used anaphorically in conjunction with secondmention items (cf. (4a)), whereas ILLE could be used both anaphorically and cataphorically with first-mention items (cf. (4b)), as illustrated from the following examples taken from the late fourth-century Peregrinatio Aetheriae: (4) Late Latin a. montes illi… faciebant uallem infinitam… endless.ACC mountains th(os)e made valley.ACC Uallis autem ipsa ingens est ualde huge.NOM is truly valley.NOM indeed self‘th(os)e mountains… formed an endless valley… The (= aforementioned) valley is indeed truly huge’ (Per. Aeth. 1.1–2.1) b. montes illi, inter quos ibamus, aperiebant we.went opened mountains th(os)e between which.ACC ‘the mountains, between which we were going, opened out’ (Per. Aeth. 1.1) To this picture Vincent (1997b) adds that IPSE , unlike ILLE , performed a topic-marking function, only picking out informationally prominent second-mention items (hence an unsuitable candidate for the object clitic paradigm). However, in his critical review of the late Latin evidence, Adams (2013, 506–527) finds that claims about the “articloid” status of IPSE in late Latin, principally based on its presumed innovative anaphoric function, are completely unfounded (cf. also Fruyt 2003, 102; Ledgeway 2012, §4.2.2.1), and that genuine article-like instances of ILLE (though not IPSE ) only occur, and then only occasionally, from the sixth century (cf. (5)). Rather, we have to wait until at least the eighth century (e.g. The Rule of Chrodegang) to find a muchweakened, quasi-obligatory use of ILLE (Muller 1929, 84; Calboli 2009, 118–119). (5) Lat.

nam si in feruenti aqua missa fuerint, for if in boiling.ABL water.ABL placed.NEUTPL will.have.been albumen coacolat et mediolum illut tarde that.NOM slowly egg.white.NOM coagulates and yolk.NOM sentit feels ‘If they [the eggs] are put in boiling water, the white goes hard and the yolk scarcely feels the heat.’ (Anthimus 17.5)

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Where, however, the definite article does occur in early Romance, it displays considerable attenuation of its original deictic force, increasingly coming to mark shared cognition between speaker(s) and addressee(s). Nonetheless, it still retained considerable identifying force, witness its exclusion in early texts with unique (Old Romanesco come femina ke non temea morte ‘like (a) woman who not feared death’), abstract (Old Gascon leichatz estar ypocresie ‘let.IMP . 2PL be.INF hypocrisy’), and generic (OFr. Paien unt tort e chrestïens unt dreit ‘Pagans are wrong and christians are right’) referents which, by definition, cannot be singled out (Parry/Lombardi 2007, 83–84; Renzi 2010, 318–319, 329–330, 332–337), a usage often fossilized in modern proverbs (Fr. Noblesse oblige ‘Nobility obliges’) and set expressions (Cat. parar/desparar taula ‘to lay/clear (the) table’). In the modern languages, by contrast, shared cognition between speaker(s) and addressee(s) assumes increasing importance, such that the article is now generally required with unique, abstract, and generic referents (Rom. Injustiția este regula vieţii creștinului ‘injustice=the. NOM . FSG is rule=the. NOM . FSG life=the.GEN . FSG christian=the.GEN . MSG ’), as well as with inalienable possessa (Ast. Tien el pelo roxo ‘he.has the hair red’). Catalan varieties have moved the furthest in this direction (Wheeler/Yates/Dols 1999, 67–68), developing a specialized paradigm for proper names which, in the standard language, blends ILLE -derived forms ( female names, vowel-initial male names, e.g. la Mònica, l’Òscar) with a reflex of DOMINUS ‘master’ > en (consonant-initial male names, e.g. en Pere), whereas the colloquial language, especially in the north-western dialects, often extends ILLE forms to the whole masculine paradigm, e.g. el Pere (Badia Margarit 1962, I, 158; 1995, 446–447; Veny 1982, 36, 95). In Balearic varieties, by contrast, forms derived from DOMINUS / DOMINA ‘master/ mistress’ are extended to the whole paradigm, e.g. en Pere, n’Òscar, na Mònica, n’Alba (Veny 1982, 67). Catalan is also of interest for those varieties spoken in the Balearics and some areas of the coastal mainland which contrast reflexes of both IPSE , the so-called article salat, and ILLE (Moll 1993, 40–41, 69–71; Badia i Magarit 1995, 444–446; Perea 2005, 69–73; Busquet Isart 2010; Ledgeway 2012, §4.2.2.2.1). While both forms have definite reference, only the article salat has truly deictic force and is able to identify both anaphorically and cataphorically definite referents ([+definite, +particularized, ±given]): Maj. Cat. se bevia tota s’aigo que duia es torrent ‘he drank all the water which the river brought’. By contrast, the ILLE -derived forms are confined to marking fully-identifiable unique referents ([+definite, -particularized, +given]), e.g., el Bon Jesús ‘the Christ child’, la casa ‘the home, house’, l’Universitat ‘the University (of Palma)’, occurring precisely in those contexts in which, we saw above, the definite article is typically absent in early Romance, namely in conjunction with unique, abstract and generic referents (cf. una fia blanca com la neu i garrida com el sol ‘a daughter as white as (the) snow and as attractive as the sun’). In a number of contexts, minimal pairs based around this [±deictic] contrast can be constructed: Maj.Cat. Jo m’en vaig a córrer el món ‘I’m off to go around the world’ vs es meu món és la música ‘(the) my world is music’.

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Finally, some mention of Romanian must be made which, in contrast to other Romance varieties, also presents two other analytic markers of definiteness in the DP, the so-called demonstrative and possessive articles cel (< ACCU - ILLE ‘behold-that’) and al (< AD ‘to’ + ILLE ‘that’), respectively. Essentially, the former functions as a last resort strategy pressed into service whenever the canonical enclitic article is not available (Cornilescu 1992; Nicolae 2015b). This arises whenever the head noun is null, hence unable to host the enclitic article, e.g. vinul ieftin ‘wine=the cheap’ vs cel Ø ieftin ‘the cheap (= the cheap one)’, or whenever the first constituent of the nominal phrase is a quantifier preventing the nominal head from reaching the determiner position, e.g. cei patru câini ‘the four dogs’ (cf. *patrui câini ‘four=the dogs’). As for the so-called possessive article al (Cornilescu 1995; Cornilescu/Nicolae 2009; Giurgea 2012), this surfaces in genitival structures whenever the genitive phrase fails to occur strictly adjacent to a canonical enclitic article: (6) Rom. a. banii (*ai) doctorului doctor=the.GEN money.PL =the.MPL ai.MPL ‘the doctor’s money’ b. banii furați /(niște) bani some money.PL money.PL =the.MPL stolen.MPL *(ai) doctorului ai.MPL doctor=the.GEN ‘the doctor’s stolen money/(some) money of the doctor’ This analytic marker of definiteness is also employed in non-genitival functions as a last resort strategy before ordinal numerals which are incompatible with the standard enclitic article, e.g. al doilea autobuz ‘al.MSG second.MSG bus (= the second bus)’ (cf. *doileaul autobuz ‘second=the bus’).

2.2 Verbal group Without doubt, the most striking development affecting the verb system in the passage from Latin to Romance is the transferral of numerous verb-related inflectional categories to analytic preverbal auxiliaries or invariable particles (Vincent 1987; 2014, §5), the overt realization of a functional category Infl(ection). The overt lexicalization of an Infl head thus correlates directly with the grammaticalization of a number of originally lexical verbs to produce a wide range of auxiliaries, a process whose effects are not uniformly mapped onto the semantic, phonological, morphological and syntactic structures of the various Romances varieties (Ledgeway 2012, §4.3.1), which not only show considerable differences in relation to otherwise similar constructions (Green 1987; Pountain 1982; Vincent 1987; Remberger 2006), but which individually also display considerable variation from one auxiliary construc-

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tion to another (Pottier 1961; Jones 1988; Alboiu/Motapanyane 2000, 14–20; Monachesi 2005).

2.2.1 Romance auxiliaries Despite difficulties in identifying a discrete class of Romance auxiliaries (↗7 Auxiliaries), it is possible to recognize some general crosslinguistic parameters of auxiliation (see Heine 1993), which variously characterize those Romance verbs that realize verb-related categories such as tense, aspect, mood and voice. For example, semantically it is not difficult to recognize a number of verbs that have undergone various degrees of semantic impoverishment, including such cases as Srd. torrare ‘return’ and Ibero-Romance acabar ‘finish, complete’, whose original lexical meanings are still transparent, though weakened, in their respective iterative and retrospective aspectual periphrases with a following infinitive (e.g., Srd. lu torro a fakere ‘it= I.return to do.INF (= I’ll do it again)’; Ast. acabé xintar ‘I.finished lunch.INF ( = I had just had lunch)’), and RtR. gnir ‘come’, which has been completely desemanticized in its passive auxiliary function with the participle (Gardenese [la beʃ iə uˈnida laˈveda] ‘the washing is come (= has been) washed’; cf. Salvi 2016, §11.5.3). In accordance with well-attested crosslinguistic pathways of auxiliation (see Heine 1993, 45–48), the core Romance verb-related grammatical categories are thus derived from original lexical predicates variously indicating location (e.g. stative/dynamic passive STARE ‘stand’/ESSE ‘be’: Pt. a porta estava/era pintada de branco ‘the door was/ was being painted white’; Pountain 1982; Ledgeway 2008a, 298–299), motion (e.g. conative *AD - RIPARE ‘arrive’: Occ. soi arribat a emplenar aquel botelhon ‘I am arrived (= managed) to fill.INF that bottle’), possession (e.g. iterative TENERE ‘hold, have’: Pie. [i ˈtenu braˈja] ‘they hold shouted (= keep shouting)’; cf. Ricca 1998), volition (e.g. future *VOLERE ‘want’: Friul. voj parti ‘I.want (= will) leave.INF ’; Vegliote ju blai ̯ inplenúr la kikza ‘I want (= will) fill the marrow’; cf. Bartoli 1906, II, 423–424), and obligation (e.g. future HABERE DE ‘have of’: Catanzarese ha de nivicara ‘it.has of (= will) snow.INF ’). In the area of morphosyntax, Romance auxiliation is clearly visible in the process of decategorialization, whereby the emergent auxiliary progressively jettisons the typical morphosyntactic properties of its erstwhile lexical status such as the ability to select its own arguments (cf. Harris/Campbell’s 1995, 193 Heir-Apparent Principle). Other reflexes include: a) the emergence of gaps in the verb paradigm, including the lack of compound forms with the Italian dynamic passive auxiliary venire ‘come’ (It. vengono puniti ‘they.come (= are (being)) punished’ vs *sono venuti puniti ‘they.are come punished’), the incompatibility of French retrospective venir de ‘come of/from’ + infinitive with the preterite in contrast to its Ibero-Romance equivalent acabar de ‘finish from’ (e.g. Fr. il vient/*vint d’accuser son compagnon ‘he.comes/came from accuse.INF (= has just/had just accused) his companion’ vs Sp. acaba/acabó de acusar a su compa-

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ñero), and the lack of an infinitival form for the reflex of perfective HABERE ‘have’ in Romanian (e.g. am râs ‘I.have laughed’ vs înainte de a fi/*avea râs ‘before of to be.INF /have.INF laughed’); b) the inability to form passives, witness the infelicity of It. progressive aspectual periphrasis stare ‘stand’ + gerund in the passive *la tenda sta essendo montata ‘the tent stands (= is) being pitched’; c) the conservation of verb-subject inversion (namely, V-to-C movement) in GalloRomance which otherwise proves increasingly infelicitous and/or ungrammatical with lexical verbs (cf. Ledgeway 2015, §3.2), e.g. Fr. je suis ‘I am’ (from être ‘be’) or ‘I follow’ (< suivre ‘follow’) → Suis-je? ‘Am I/*Follow I?’; d) the inability to take a nominal complement, as exemplified by Cat. perfective haver ‘have’, now replaced by a reflex of TENERE ‘hold’, e.g. *havia/tenia els cabells curts ‘he.had the hair short’; e) the reduction and loss of verb inflection, as exemplified by the Salentino progressive aspectual marker sta (< STARE ‘stand’) now used in all six grammatical persons (Leccese sta bbegnu/bbieni ‘PRO G I.come/you.SG .come’; Ledgeway 2016b), the Italian deontic modal of necessity bisognare ‘need’ today characterized by severe inflectional restrictions which limit it to occurring in the 3SG of a handful of synthetic forms (e.g. bisogna(va) agire ‘it.is(was).necessary act.INF ’; cf. Benincà/Poletto 1997), and the fossilization of *VOLET ‘wants’ > o in the Romanian colloquial future construction o + să (COMP . SBJV ) + subjunctive, e.g. o să mergem ‘FUT COMP . SBJV we.go (= we’ll go)’. The increased semantic integration between auxiliary and verbal complement produces an extreme case of interlacing (Lehmann 1988) between matrix and dependent clauses, effacing surface clausal boundaries ([VP]+[VP] → [AUX+VP]) and licensing a range of local phenomena assumed to hold exclusively of monoclausal structures (Cinque 2006), including: a) climbing of negators and clitic pronouns (↗5 Clitic pronouns) to the auxiliary (e.g. Nap. nu t’aggiu (*nun) vasato (*te) ‘not you= I.have (not) kissed (=you)’) and, in Ibero-Romance and Romanian, the impossibility of intervening adverbs between perfective auxiliary and participle (Sp. todavía no ha (*todavía) llegado ‘still not he.has (still) arrived’) (↗7 Auxiliaries); b) the impossibility of cleft sentence formation (e.g. Fr. *c’est tout expliquer que je pourrai ‘it is everything explain.INF that I will.be.able’), since the non-finite lexical verb forms a constituent with the auxiliary; c) transparency of perfective auxiliary selection according to the transitivity of the dependent infinitive in modal and aspectual periphrases, e.g. Gsc. qu’as anàt cuélhe aigo ‘(that) you.SG . have gone fetch.INF water’ vs que soun poucuts càye ‘(that) they.are been.able fall.INF ’; d) long object preposing in passive se/si constructions, e.g. Sp. los documentos no se pueden/?puede cargar ‘the documents not self=can.3PL / 3SG upload.INF (= the documents cannot be uploaded)’.

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In an apparently paradoxical fashion, then, we witness in an original analytic development unmistakable signs of growing syntheticity as the auxiliary and dependent non-finite verb form progressively coalesce in accordance with the cyclical nature of the syntheticity-analyticity continuum (cf. Section 3.2). Frequently, this increased semantic and structural integration is manifested morphophonologically in the emergence of specialized (and often synchronically irregular) auxiliary paradigms displaying phonologically reduced (typically clitic) forms, which, in certain cases, contrast with morphophonologically regular and full paradigms preserved for the original lexical meaning of the same verb (cf. STO ‘I.stay’ > Cal. ste (+ penzannu) ‘I’m (thinking)’ vs staju (+ a ra scola) ‘I stay (at the school)’). Illustrative in this respect are Rom./Gsc./Cors. (a) avea/aver/avè ‘have’ which in their grammatical uses as perfective auxiliaries have developed specialized, reduced forms in a number of persons (e.g. Cors. avete camere ‘you.PL .have bedrooms’ vs ate capitu ‘you.PL .have understood’), as shown in Table 2. Table 2: Morphophonological distinctions in lexical/auxiliary uses of HA BERE Rom. avea

Gsc. aver

Cors. avè

Lexical

Auxiliary

Lexical

Auxiliary

Lexical

Auxiliary

am

am

èi

èi

aghju

aghju

ai

ai

as

as

ai

ai

are

a

a

a





avem

am

avem

am

avemu

emu

aveți

ați

avetz

atz

avete

ate

au

au

ann

ann

anu

anu

Similarly, Sardinian (Jones 1988), Romanian (Monachesi 2005, 133–134) and Catalan (Pérez Saldanya/Hualde 2003; Juge 2006) contrast a lexical paradigm, respectively, for ‘owe’ (dévere) and ‘want’ (a vrea), and ‘go’ (anar) with a morphophonologically specialized paradigm of the same now employed as future and preterite auxiliaries, respectively: Srd. mi devet meta vinu ‘me= he.owes much wine’ vs det próere ‘must.3SG (= it will) rain.INF ’; Cat. dilluns van al teatre ‘Monday they.go to.the theatre’ vs dilluns và(re)n anar al teatre ‘Monday they.go go.INF (= they went) to.the theatre’; Rom. vrem o schimbare ‘we.want a change’ vs vom vrea o schimbare ‘we’ll want a change’. The paradigms of all three verbs are given in Table 3:

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Table 3: Lexical/Auxiliary paradigms of DEBERE , *VOLERE and *ANDARE Srd. dévere

Rom. vrea

Cat. anar

Lexical

Auxiliary

Lexical

Auxiliary

Lexical

Auxiliary

devo

de(v)o

vreau

(v)oi

vaig

và(re)ig

deves

des

vrei

(v)ei, ăi, îi

vas

và(re)s

devet

det

vrea

(v)a, o

va

va

devimus

demus

vrem

(v)om

anem

và(re)m

devites

dedzis

vreți

(v)eți, ăți, îți, oți aneu

và(re)u

deven

den

vor

(v)or

va(re)n

van

2.2.2 Romance synthetic future(-in-the-past) With the exception of Old French and, perhaps, ModSp. eres ‘you.SG .are’ (< ERIS ‘you.SG .will.be’), both synthetic paradigms of the Latin future (AMA - BO ‘love- FUT . 1SG ’, LEG - AM ‘read- FUT . 1SG ’), as well as the ESSE ‘be’ + future active participle periphrasis, left no trace in Romance. With the exception of Sardinian, Romanian, Dalmatian and possibly some Gascon varieties (Rohlfs 1970, 220), in their place we find, alongside the present and various grammaticalized periphrases involving auxiliaries like those seen in Table 2, a newly synthesized future derived from an erstwhile periphrasis consisting of the present infinitive followed by a weakened form of HABERE ‘have’ (e.g., UIUERE ‘live.INF ’ + *aio/as/a(t)/Vmo(s)/ete(s)/Vn(t) > Gal. vivir-ei/-ás/-á/-emos/ -edes/-án ‘I/you/(s)he/we/you/they will live’), forms which have now been largely jettisoned in the modern dialects of southern Italy (Loporcaro 1999).5 Similarly, the Romance synthetic future-in-the-past derived from the infinitive followed by a past tense form of HABERE , the perfect HABUI (> *HEBUI ‘I.had’) in northern and central Italo-Romance (e.g., It. viv(e)r-ebbi > vivrei ‘I would live’) and the imperfect HABEBAM ‘I.had’ elsewhere (e.g., Gal. vivir-ía), has traditionally been considered a development parasitic on that of the future, such that once infinitive + HABEO had H ABEBAM to mark come to mark the future, this opened the way for infinitive + HABUI / HABEBAM future-in-the-past. However, Benveniste (1968, 89–90) and Coleman (1971, 224) convincingly argue that the documentary evidence shows the HABERE periphrasis to have

5 For further discussion of the development of the Romance future(-in-the-past) and conditional, see Thielmann (1885), Valesio (1968; 1969), Coleman (1971), Harris (1978, ch. 6), Fleischman (1982), Pinkster (1987; 1989), Adams (1991), Roberts (1993), Maiden (1996), Bentley (2000a,b), Nocentini (2001), D’hulst (2004), Bourova (2005; 2007), La Fauci (2006), Bourova/Tasmowski (2007), Slobbe (2008), Parkinson (2009), Ledgeway (2012, 134–140).

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first emerged as a future-in-the-past, with the future construction following later. There is, however, greater consensus among scholars that the irrealis conditional meaning represents a secondary development from an original future-in-the-past value in accordance with the crosslinguistic tendency for future forms to develop irrealis modal functions (Coleman 1971, 217; Fleischman 1982, 64). Traditional accounts trace the Romance synthetic future(-in-the-past) back to a substandard spoken Latin innovation (cf. Varvaro 2013, 32–36) which was severely repressed and hence barely attested in the written language (Haverling 2010, 397– 398), a view which finds some initial support in the characteristically Latinate postposition of the auxiliary typical of OV languages (Fleischman 1982, 119, 121). Consequently, the future(-in-the-past) construction represents the gradual grammaticalization and desemanticization of HABERE from a full verb of possession (Slobbe 2008, 109–112), where it could often imply unrealized actions in conjunction with a transitive infinitive (7a), towards a deontic modal of obligation from the first century AD (7b), before emerging from around the third century AD (though see Pinkster 1987, 206), and now also in conjunction with intransitive and passive infinitives, as a simple future auxiliary (7c) and ultimately as a future inflectional ending. This latter stage is famously represented in the late seventh-century Fredegar’s Chronicle from Gaul (7d), where the Classical Latin future dabo ‘give.FUT . 1SG ’ is juxtaposed with the now synthesized HABERE periphrasis daras (< DAR ( E ) ‘give.INF ’ + cliticized *as ‘you.have’; Fleischman 1982, 68; Haverling 2010, 398). However, the apparently more emphatic reading of the latter (‘you WILL (give me them)’) might indicate an early functional specialization of the two paradigms (Adams 1991, 160–161; ↗11 Tense, aspect, mood). (7) Latin a. nihil habeo ad te scribere nothing I.have to you write.INF ‘I have nothing to write to you’ (Cic. Att. 2.22.6) b. quid habui facere? what I.had do.INF ‘what was I supposed to do? (Sen. Controv. 1.1.19) c. tempestas illa tollere habet totam paleam de area all chaff from threshing.floor storm that remove.INF has ‘that storm will carry off all the caff from the threshing floor’ (Aug., Evang. Iohan 4.12) d. ille respondebat: non dabo. Iustinianus dicebat: he replied not I.give.FUT Justinian.NOM said daras you.give.FUT

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‘and he replied: I will not give [them to you]. And Justinian replied: but you will give [them to me]’ (Fred. Chron. 2.62) Already in the earliest Romance texts the component parts appear firmly fused together, witness forms such as prindrai ‘I shall take’ and salvarai ‘I shall save’ (alongside older ert < ERIT ‘will be’) in the Strasbourg Oaths, jrás ‘you will go’, farás ‘you will do’, and tornarás ‘you will return’ in the Emilian Glosses (Menéndez Pidal 41956, 361), farai ‘you will do’ in the Umbrian Confession Formula, and monstero- ‘I will show’ in the Ritmo Laurenziano (Varvaro 2013, §7). Despite such evidence, it is not at all certain that the periphrasis had fully grammaticalized by the early Romance period, inasmuch as the constituent parts still preserve a certain degree of autonomy in early Ibero-Romance, Occitan, and northern Italian dialects (e.g., Old Gascon diser t’an ‘say. INF you=they.have (= they will tell you)’, Old Lombard turbar se n’a lo sol ‘disturb.INF self= thereof= has (= will be blurred) the sun’), as well as in literary registers of Modern European Portuguese where the reflex of HABERE can be separated from its infinitive by an intervening mesoclitic, e.g. garanti-los-ia ‘guarantee.INF =them=had. 1SG (= I would guarantee them)’.6

2.2.3 Clitic pronouns On a par with the development of the article in the nominal group (cf. Section 2.1.1), the verbal group witnesses a related development with the emergence of another DET (erminer) category in the form of object clitic pronouns (Wanner 1987, ↗5 Clitic pronouns), which in the third person are often formally identical with the article (e.g., Fr. le maire, je le connais bien ‘the.MSG mayor, him= I.know well’). Following Vincent (1997b; 1998), we can thus talk of the emergence of a “D-system” in Romance which in the nominal domain gives rise to articles (reflexes of ILLE , IPSE ), initially limited to subject nominals and constituents fronted to the pre-verbal topic/focus field, and to object clitics (restricted to reflexes of ILLE in the third person) in the verbal domain (cf. late eighth-century Latin clitic left-dislocation ipsa cuppa frangantla tota ‘the.FSG drinking.cup.FSG they.break.SBJV =it.FSG all (= let them break the whole drinking cup)’). Consequently, Vincent (1997b, 149) argues that “the different patterns of morphological realization of the third-person clitics […] and the articles […] reflect two independent and convergent developments, one involving the verb-object relation and one the clause-subject relation”, ultimately giving rise to a subject-object asymmetry in line with the emerging pattern of configurationality.

6 Menéndez Pidal (41956, 358 and 377), Rohlfs (1968, 334–335), Roberts (1994), Luís/Spencer (2005), Monachesi (2005, 152–158).

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In Gallo- and Rhaeto-Romance varieties, as well as northern Tuscan, the object clitic referencing system observed above is extended over time to the subject relation, such that between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there emerges a series of subject clitics derived from weakened nominative subject pronouns (cf. Vanelli/ Renzi/Benincà 1985; Poletto 1995), as exemplified by the representative present tense paradigms in Table 4 where the distribution of subject clitics can be observed to affect different persons in different varieties.7 Table 4: Some Romance subject clitic paradigms spoken Fr. ‘speak’

Occ. (Eymoutiers) ‘be’

Comasco ‘sleep’

Florentine ‘speak’

ʃ paʁl

jo se

ˈdɔrmi

(e) parlo

ty paʁl

te se

ta ˈdɔrmat

tu parli

i/ɛl paʁl

ej

al/la ˈdɔrmi

e/la parla

ɔ̃ paʁl

nu sũ

dɔrˈmum

si parla

vu paʁle

vu se

dɔrˈmuf

vu parlate

i paʁl



ˈdɔrmaŋ

e/le parlano

These former dependents have migrated towards the verbal head Infl where they analytically spell-out the features of the finite verb (8a). In some varieties, the clitics have become obligatory even in the presence of a preverbal lexical subject (8b), or even in conjunction with an indefinite quantifier (8c), such that today they must be considered agreement markers ultimately representing an ongoing synthetic development of person-marking on the verb (see further Poletto 2000). (8) a. Genoese

b. Pie.

c. Milanese

vegne]] [IP [proi] [Infl' ai SCL .FSG comes pro ‘She’s coming.’ ui travaja]] [IP [Ceci] [Infl' SCL .MSG works Cec ‘Francesco is working.’ riverà in ritart]] [IP[ Un quiduni] [Infl' eli SCL . MSG will.arrive in late a somebody ‘Somebody will arrive late.’

7 Kayne (1975), Renzi/Vanelli (1983), Vanelli (1987), Roberge (1990), Poletto (1993; 1995; 2000), Cardinaletti (1997; 2004), Heap (2000), Oliviéri (2004; 2010; 2011), Manzini/Savoia (2005, I, ch. 2), Sauzet (2007), Poletto/Tortora (2016).

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2.3 The clause In the same way that DET and Infl constitute the spell-out of grammaticalized categories related to their associated NP and VP complements, the sentential core too, formally represented by IP, is embedded within a further layer of functional structure CP. In the passage from Latin to Romance, exploitation of this COMP (lementizer) position most noticeably surfaces in the grammaticalization of verb fronting in declarative root clauses as part of the late Latin/early Romance V2 syntax (Benincà 1994; 2013; Salvi 2004),8 which imposes generalized V-to-C movement on the finite verb and, in accordance with individual Romance variation (cf. Wolfe 2015a,b,c,d), optional fronting of one or more constituents to the Topic-Focus field: Com tanta paceença [C-FinP sofria with so.much patience suffered [TP ela sofria esta enfermidade com tanta paceença]]] she this illness ‘She demonstrated enormous patience suffering from this illness.’

(9) OPt. [FocP

However, this traditional interpretation of satisfying the V2 requirement in terms of Vto-C movement represents just one of two possible licensing mechanisms made available by the grammar: alongside the more marked Move option, the system also makes available the less costly Merge option whereby the V2 requirement on C can be satisfied analytically by direct lexical insertion of a suitable head. Ledgeway (2008b) shows that in medieval Romance this latter option is realized by insertion of the analytic marker sì/si (< SIC ‘thus’), as illustrated by the Old Neapolitan near minimal pair in (10a,b) exemplifying the competing Move and Merge options, respectively: (10) ONap. fuorti cuolpi [C-FinP li donava a. [FocP sì such strong blows him=he.gave [IP li donava sì f. cuolpi]]] b. [FocP spissi cuolpi mortali [C-FinP sì [IP le dava spissi c. m.]]] many blows mortal sì him=he.gave

8 However, it also surfaces indirectly in the loss of the accusative and infinitive construction (cf. (3a)), one of the most notable causalities of the widespread development of CP structure, which increasingly in the postclassical period was replaced by a finite complement clause introduced by the complementizers QUOD and QUIA (cf. (3b)), a usage finally consolidated as the core complementation pattern in vulgar texts after the fall of the empire (Väänänen 1982, 273; Herman 1989; 2000, 88–89; Zamboni 2000, 119–120; cf. also Ledgeway 2016a, §63.2.3).

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Arguably, the Merge option also characterizes many modern Gascon varieties which, despite not displaying the Move option (namely, generalized V-to-C movement), obligatorily lexicalize [+declarative] root C with que ‘that’:9 (11) Gsc. [TopP ta pay [C-FinP qu’ [TP èy arribat]]] your father that is arrived ‘Your father has arrived.’ Although Gascon is unique in its systematic overt analytical marking of declarative force, it is not uncommon across Romance to find various analytic markers of more marked illocutionary force types, variously lexicalized by a series of different Crelated particles and complementizers which explicitly encode different clause types (Cruschina/Ledgeway 2016, §31.3.2; Giurgea/Remberger 2016; Corr 2017). Among numerous examples, here we can recall optatives (12a,b), interrogatives (12c,d), exclamatives (12e) and imperatives (12f). Que la preparin ells! that it= prepare.PRS . SBJV . 3PL they ‘Let them prepare it!’ Pt. Oxalá não venha! (oxalá < Arabic ua šā Allāh ‘if God wanted!’) hopefully not he.come.PRS . SBJV ‘Would that he not come tomorrow!’ Srd. A kerres vennere a domo mea? (a < AUT ‘or’) Q you.want come.INF a house my ‘Do you want to come to my house?’ Gsc. E l’ as audit? (e < ET ‘and’) Q him= you.SG .have heard ‘Have you heard him?’ Sp. ¡Cuán rápido que habla Bruno! how quick that speaks Bruno ‘How quick that speaks Bruno!’ NESic. Mi trasi! (mi < ( QUO ) MODO ‘how’) that.IRREALIS enter.3SG ‘Please do come in!’

(12) a. Cat.

b.

c.

d.

e.

f.

9 For discussion and relevant bibliography, see Ledgeway (2012, 173–175; 2015, §3.2).

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2.3.1 Complementizers A further area highlighting the consolidation of analytic marking within the C(omplementizer)-domain is evidenced by the emergence in Romance of non-finite complementizers derived from the prepositions DE ‘of’ and AD ‘to’ introducing infinitival clauses (13a), which to all intents and purposes parallel the use of finite complementizers derived from QUOD (/ QUID ) and QUIA ‘that’ ((13b); cf. Ledgeway 2016a, §63.1, §63.2.1). (13) Cat.

a. Digues-li de tell=him of.COMP b. Digues-li que tell=him that ‘Tell him to come!’

venir! come.INF vingui! he.come.SBJV

Although such pairs reveal strong structural parallels in the distribution and behaviour of finite and non-finite complementizers, the similarity is spurious inasmuch as different clausal introducers may occupy distinct positions. For instance, whereas Italian finite che precedes topics and foci (so che la data l’ho sbagliata ‘I.know that the date.TOP it=I.have mistaken’) occupying the leftmost position within the left periphery, non-finite di follows them (so la data di averla sbagliata ‘I.know the date.TOP of have.INF =it mistaken’), occurring in the right margin of the left periphery. Evidence like this has led many researchers investigating the structure of the left periphery in Romance to propose a split C-domain (Rizzi 1997; Benincà/Poletto 2004; Dufter/Octavio de Toledo 2014), hierarchically articulated into several functional fields whose simplified linearization can be summarized as CForce > Top > Foc > CFin. Table 5: Romance dual complementizer systems ‘I think that he’s coming’

‘I want that he should eat’

Romania

cred că vine

vreau să mănânce

Sicily

pensu ca vèni

vògghiu chi mmanciassi

Sicily (Messina)

critu ca vèni

ògghiu mi mancia

Southern Calabria

pensu ca vèni

vogghiu mu (mi) mangia

Northern Calabria

criju ca vèni

vuogliu chi mmangia

Salento

crisciu ca vène

ogghiu cu mmancia

Naples

pènsə ca vènə

vògliə chə mmangə

Northern Apulia

pènsə ca vènə

vògghiə chə mmangə

Abruzzo

pènsə ca vènə

vòjjə chə mmangə

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Indeed, some Romance varieties such as Romanian (Alboiu/Motapanyane 2000, §4.2) and many southern Italian dialects (Calabrese 1993; Ledgeway 2004; 2005) present dual finite complementizer systems (cf. Table 5), distinguishing between a complementizer derived from QUIA (> ca, că) specialized in introducing realis (indicative) complements and a complementizer derived from QUID (> upper southern Italian dialects che [ke/kə], chi), ( QUO ) MODO ( > SCal., NESic. mu/ma/mi), or QUOD ( > Salentino cu) heading irrealis (subjunctive) complements. These dual complementizer systems appear to exploit both the higher and lower complementizer positions within the left periphery just outlined, inasmuch as the realis complementizer lexicalizes the higher CForce position, and therefore precedes topics/ foci, and the irrealis lexicalizes the lower CFin position from where it follows topics/foci: (14) Salentino

ticu ca lu libbru lu kkattu it=I.buy I.say thatR E A L I S the book. TOP ‘The book, I say that I buy it.’ lu libbru cu lu kkattu b. ojju thatI R R E A L I S it=I.buy I.want the book. TOP ‘The book, I want to buy it.’

a.

Indeed, in Romanian in the presence of a fronted topic or focus both complementizer positions can be simultaneously realized in irrealis complement clauses (15a). Such recomplementation structures are also frequent in many early Romance varieties (Wanner 1998; Paoli 2005; Ledgeway 2004, §4.3.2.2; 2005, 380–381; Vincent 2006) as well as many other modern varieties (Ledgeway 2012, §4.4.2.2) where they are equally found in realis (indicative) complement clauses (15b,c). MÂINE să meargă. (15) a. Rom. Vreau ca I.want thatR E A L I S tomorrow.FOC thatI R R E A L I S he.go.SBJV ‘I want him to go tomorrow.’ b. OFr. Je te adjure par le vray Dieu I you=beseech by the true God fille Tarsienne, que tu ne la que ta that your daughter Tarsienne that you not her donnes a mariage a autre que a moy. give to marriage to other that to me ‘I beseech you before God that your daughter Tarsienne you may give her to me alone in marriage.’ a ese rapaz que c. Gal. Dixéronme que they.told=me that to that boy that o coñecemos na festa. him=we.knew in.the party ‘They told me that that guy we met him at the party.’

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Unlike in Latin where the clausal boundary was not overtly signalled in the accusative with infinitive construction (cf. (3a)), we thus see that in Romance not only is the clausal boundary overtly marked by an overt complementizer, but that even the lower and higher confines of the entire left periphery may be analytically spelt out.

3 Problems Although we have seen above that, superficially at least, there is unmistakable evidence in certain areas for the greater analyticity of Romance in contrast to the typical synthetic tendencies of Latin, this traditional divide between Latin and Romance in terms of a synthetic-analytic split proves problematic on several accounts, as does the fundamental typological distinction on which it rests (cf. Schwegler 1990, 4–5; Bauer 1995, 10–11, 138, 166; Vincent 1997a, 99–100, 105). Indeed, Humboldt (1836) considered contrasts between Latin and Romance such as those exemplified in Section 2 as purely superficial, external differences since, at a deeper, internal level, the Romance languages are of the same inflectional type as the ancestor language, and hence ultimately constructed according to the same structural principles. Consequently, Humboldt concludes (pp. 288–289) that, although individual inflectional forms were lost, inflection as a whole was not lost (‘Es sanken Formen, nicht aber die Form’). Though this idea might be difficult to maintain in its strongest form, it does underline how the Latin-Romance transition cannot be characterized tout court in terms of a shift from synthetic to analytic structures as long as Romance continues to display extensive syntheticity involving nominal and verbal inflections. Furthermore, as Coseriu (1987, 58) observes, there is little justification for lumping all presumed Romance analytic developments into a single all-encompassing principle, since they represent a collection of extremely heterogeneous changes, the diatopic distribution, individual chronologies and details of which vary enormously from one construction to another.

3.1 Languages or constructions? Among various difficulties associated with the traditional synthesis-analysis dichotomy, one observes above all an erroneous tendency to define Latin and Romance in absolute terms as synthetic and analytic languages, respectively, for both languages clearly also display, even if in smaller measure, tendencies in the opposite direction (Coseriu [1971] 1988, 210; 1987, 56; Schwegler 1990, 28; Vincent 1997a, 99). For example, among other things Latin boasts within the nominal group numerous prepositions (including A ( B ) ‘(away) from, by’, CUM ‘with’, DE ‘(down) from’, AD ‘to(wards)’, EX ‘out of’, IN ‘in, on’; see Hewson/Bubenik 2006, 248–255), and within the verbal group a perfective middle periphrasis consisting of ESSE ‘be’ + PFV.PTCP (e.g.

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arma sunt humi inuenta ‘weapons.NOM . NEUTPL are ground.LOC found.NOM . NEUTPL (= the weapons have been found on the ground)’) and independent markers of sentential negation (quem non amat, non amat ‘whom not she.loves not she.loves’).10 Equally at the level of the clause Latin shows analyticity in a number of overt markers of subordination, including the subjunctive complementizers UT / NE ‘that/ that…not’ (e.g. Pompeius suis paredixerat ut Caesaris impetum exciperent ‘Pompey.NOM his.men.DAT . PL had.fortold that Caesar.GEN charge.ACC they.received.SBJV ’), and a series of question markers such as ne- ‘is it the case that…?’, nonne ‘is it not the case that…?’, num or an ‘surely it is not the case that…?’ (e.g. Num negare audes? (Cic., Cat. 1.8) ‘Q deny.INF you.dare (= you surely don’t dare to deny it)?’). Conversely, in Romance number and gender marking on nouns and adjectives is still typically suffixal (16a),11 as are person/number (16b) and temporal, aspectual and modal categories (16c) on finite verbs.  

(16) a. Sp.

est-e(-os)/-a(s) niñ-o(s)/-a(s) travies-o(s)/-a(s) this-MSG ( MPL )/- F ( PL ) child-M ( PL )/- F ( PL ) naughty-M ( PL )/- F ( PL ) b. Rom. alerg-am/-ai/-a/-am/ați/-au run-IND . PST . IPFV .1SG / 2SG / 3SG / 1PL / 2PL / 3PL c. Gsc. cant-i/-èvi/-èi/-erèi/-erí/-èssi sing-1SG . PRS . IND ~ SBJV / PST . IPFV . IND / PST . PFV . IND / FUT / COND / PST . SBJV

To these we can add the widespread use of evaluative suffixes (e.g. It. cas-etta ‘houseGsc. hemna-assa ‘woman-PEJ (= spiteful woman)’, Pt. ric-aço ‘rich-AUG ’, Rom. frumuş-el ‘beautiful-DIM ’, Extremaduran pelot-açu ‘ball-AUG ’),12 superlative and residual comparative forms (e.g. Ast. munch-ísimu ‘much-SUPERL . MSG ’, Cat. fred-íssim ‘cold-SUPERL . MSG ’, mill-or ‘good-COMPR . SG ’, pitj-or ‘bad-COMPR . SG ’, It. noios-issimo ‘boring-SUPERL . MSG ’, super-iore ‘high-COMPR . SG ’, infer-iore ‘low-COMPR . SG ’, Pt. felicíssimo ‘happy-SUPERL ’, mai-or ‘big-COMPR . SG ’, men-or ‘small-COMPR . SG ’), and the frequent retention of case distinctions in pronouns (e.g. Basilicatese (Muro Lucano) iə ‘1SG . NOM ’ , (a) mì ‘(P.ACC - DAT . MRK ) 1SG . ACC - DAT ’ , (pə) mévə ‘(for) 1sg.OBL ’ , (cu) mìchə MR K ) 1SG . ACC ’ , mie ‘1SG . DAT ’ , meu ‘(with) 1SG . COM ’ ; Ro. eu ‘1SG . NOM ’ , (pe) mine ‘(P.ACC . MRK ‘1SG . GEN ’; cf. Loporcaro 2008). Furthermore, we should recall that Romance languages also display a whole host of innovative synthetic structures (Coseriu 1987, 59), notably DIM ’,

10 Highly exceptional are lexicalized cases of univerbation of the negator NE ( C ) ‘not’ in such cases as N OLO ‘I do not want’ and NE NESCIO SCIO ‘I do not know’ (cf. UOLO ‘I.want’, SC IO ‘I.know’; cf. Ernout/Thomas [11953] 1993, 149–150). 11 In many Occitan varieties the original synthetic marking of plural number has optionally been reinforced with the creation of doubly marked inflectional plurals (Wheeler 1988, 256) such as pial ‘hair’/pial-s ‘hair-PPLL ’ (> pials-es ‘hair.P L - PL ’), amì ‘friend’/amì-s ‘friend-PL ’ (> amiss-es ‘friend. P L - PL ’). 12 In Modern French these are generally no longer productive, e.g. fill-ette ‘girl-DIM ’, but not *chaussur(e)-ette ‘shoe-DIM ’, which has to be expressed by the analytic petite chaussure ‘little shoe’.

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the future and conditional derived from an erstwhile infinitival periphrasis in conjunction with HABERE ‘have’ (cf. Section 2.2.2), sentence and manner adverbs in -men(t(e)) (17a),13 internal morphophonological alternations such as metaphony and related types of stressed vowel alternation to mark number and/or gender in nominal categories (17b,c,d), and inflected non-finite verb forms such as the infinitive (Table 6) and gerunds and participles (Table 7).14 In this light, the presumed inexorable driving force underlying Romance analyticity appears seriously undermined. (17) a.

DISTRACTA + MENTE MEN TE > Cat. distreta-ment distracted-ly divided.ABL mind.ABL ‘with (an) absent mind’ > ‘absent-mindedly’ b. eastern Abruzzese ˈfaksə / ˈfiksə fax\PL fax\SG c. Pt. p[o]rc-o / p[ɔ]rc-a(s)/-os dirty\MSG - MSG dirty\- F ( PL )/- MPL d. Rom. boal-ă / bol-i illness\- FPL illness\FSG - FSG

Table 6: Romance inflected infinitives (cant- ‘sing’) Infinitive

1 SG

2SG

3 SG

1PL

2 PL

3PL

Gal.

cantar+



-es



-mos

-des

-en

OLeo.

cantar+



-es



-mos

-des

-en

ONap.

cantar(e)+







-mo

-vo (-ve)

-no

(E)Pt.

cantar+



-es



-mos

-des

-em

Srd.

cantare+

-po

-s

-t

-mus

-dzis

-n

13 See the discussion in §3.2, as well as Karlsson (1981), Bauer (2001; 2003; 2006), Ricca (2010, 181– 185), Hummel (2011; 2014; in press). 14 For discussion and relevant bibliography, see Ledgeway (2012, 293–295).

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Table 7: Romance inflected gerunds and participles (cant- ‘sing’) Gerund

Present/Past Participles

Gal.

Pt. (Póvoa de Atalaia)

ONap.

cantando+

cantand(o)+

cantanno+

cantante+

cantato+

1 SG











2 SG



-s







3 SG











1PL

‑mos

‑mos

-mo





2 PL

‑des

-eis

-vo (-ve)





3 PL



‑em

-no (-ne)

‑no

‑no

In short, considerations such as these reveal that, if they are to be employed at all, the terms synthetic and analytic should not be predicated of languages but, at best, of individual constructions (cf. also Schwegler 1990; Vincent 1997a). Thus, to the extent that any generalizations can usefully be made in relation to the synthetic and analytic typology, they must be made in relation to specific construction types, rather than individual languages. Exemplary in this respect is the often overlooked observation (though see Meyer-Lübke 1894, 2–3; Coseriu 1987, 58; La Fauci 1998, 524–525) that the fate of Latin inflection is different in the nominal and verbal domains: whereas all but a few isolated residues of the rich Latin nominal declension – early Gallo-Romance, Rhaeto-Romance, and Romanian aside (cf. Dragomirescu/Nicolae 2016) – have survived into Romance, the Latin verbal conjugation formally continues largely intact, even accommodating, in some cases, several new additions such as the future and the conditional (Section 2.2.2; see Maiden 2011a,b). This observation apparently explains why analytic developments occurring within the nominal domain typically assume a substitutive function replacing earlier synthetic structures (e.g. A NN - AE ‘Anna-GEN ’ vs IO R ‘hard-COMPR ’ vs Pt. mais dur ‘more hard (= harder)’), Fr. d’Anne ‘of Anne’, DUR - IOR unlike in the verbal domain where, rather than replacing earlier synthetic structures, they usually come to mark new functions that complement those already marked ABEO synthetically within the system. For instance, Romance reflexes of FACTUM HHABEO (‘ do.PFV . PTCP I.have’) do not replace, at least not initially, the synthetic perfect FECI (‘I did, I have done’), but variously come to assume novel ancillary functions of the perfect (Harris 1982; Squartini/Bertinetto 2000), ranging from a present resultative ((18a); Alfonzetti 1998) to a present perfect with marked iterative function ((18b); Leal Cruz 2003, 132), before ultimately encroaching upon (some of) the functions proper of the original perfect, witness its canonical present perfective reading in standard peninsular Spanish ((18c); Penny 2000, 159) and its full-fledged punctual perfective value in modern spoken French ((18d); Harris 1970, 79–83).

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(18) a. Acireale, Sicily N’haiu vivutu nenti. not I.have drunk nothing ‘I’m sober (because I haven’t been drinking).’ b. Spanish of La Palma No ha llovido nada. not it.has rained nothing ‘We continue not to have had any rain whatsoever.’ c. ESp. ¿Quién ha roto esta ventana? who has broken this window ‘Who has broken the window?’ d. Fr. Elle est morte au début du 17ème siècle. she is died at.the beginning of.the 17th century ‘She died at the start of the seventeenth century.’

3.2 Absolute vs relative interpretations Even assuming that the synthetic-analytic parameter is to be interpreted in relation to specific constructions, we have to recognize that it is often erroneously applied in absolute terms, whereas individual constructions can display varying degrees of syntheticity and analyticity (Vincent 1997a, 100). A case in point concerns what is called “mesoclisis” in the future and conditional (cf. Section 2.2.2) of numerous early Romance varieties and today still attested in literary European Portuguese (e.g. OGsc. Poder l’i tornar ‘I could turn it’), where the possibility of separating the person/number inflection (e.g. -i ‘1SG ’) from the future/conditional stem (e.g. poder‘be.able.INF ’) with an intervening object clitic (e.g. l’ ‘it’) casts some doubt on the simple suffixal nature of the former. Similar problems arise for diminutive forms like Pt. pãozinho ‘roll’ (< pão ‘bread’ + DIM -zinho), which in the plural are marked not only in the desinence of the diminutive, but also in the nasal vowel alternation on the nominal stem (namely, pãe-zinho-s ‘bread\PL - DIM . M - PL ’ ). Another important case is constituted by the Romance FACERE ‘make’ causative construction, which, although clearly analytic inasmuch as it involves two separate lexemes (viz. reflex of FACERE + infinitive), mimics the syntax of a morphological causative with both verbs behaving as a single verbal complex (see Sheehan 2016; Vincent 2016, §4.2.5), licensing monoclausal properties such as clitic climbing, e.g. Cat. No em facis plorar(*-me)! ‘not me= make.2SG . PRS . SBJV cry.INF (=me) (= Don’t make me cry)!’, and a single case frame with transitive infinitival subjects occurring in the dative, e.g. Cal. cci fazzu cunzà a machina a Cicciu ‘to.him= I.make repair.INF the car to Cicciu (= I’ll make Cicciu repair the car)’. Similarly, an often-cited case of greater Romance analyticity concerns the marking of sentential negation in Gallo-Romance, northern Catalan dialects, and Arago-

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nese,15 which is frequently expressed discontinuously by a reflex of the original preverbal negator NON ‘not’ and a postverbal grammaticalized minimizer (e.g. PASSUM ‘step’, RES / REM ‘thing’, MICAM ‘crumb’, PUNCTUM ‘point; stitch’), in some cases leading to the loss of the preverbal negator (Stage II > Stage III in terms of Jespersen’s (1917) cycle; cf. Dufter/Stark 2007), e.g. Aragonese no faré yo pas ‘NEG I.will.do I NEG ’, Pie. capissu nɛŋ ‘I.understand NEG ’. The greater autonomy of such negative structures is, however, only apparent. For instance, confining ourselves just to French, with finite verbs pas is always immediately postverbal and can never, for example, be separated from the finite verb by a nominal, participial or infinitival complement, e.g. je (n’)ai pas vu (*pas) la maison (*pas) ‘I (NEG ) have NEG seen (NEG ) the house (NEG )’. This lack of autonomy manifested in the rigidly fixed positioning of pas is hardly what would be expected a priori of a supposedly analytic structure; on the contrary, pas and similar postverbal negators display a high degree of bonding with respect to their associated verb. Analogous issues arise from a consideration of the Romance sentential and manner adverbs in -men(t(e)) and the Romance compound perfect discussed in (6a) and (7a–d) above, respectively. Beginning with the former, on the one hand, the evidence of coordination from modern varieties such as French, Italian, and Occitan points to the synthesized suffixal nature of the original ablative nominal MENTE ‘with (a) mind’ (e.g. ModFr. humblement et doucement ‘humbly and sweetly’, ModIt. villanamente e aspramente ‘cruelly and bitterly’, Langadocian doçament e simplament ‘quietly and simply’), whereas the same coordination facts in Modern IberoRomance, on the other hand, reveal how -ment(e) retains a greater degree of analyticity (e.g. Cat. dolçament i suau ‘sweetly and soft(ly)’, Pt. intensa e constantemente ‘intense(ly) and constantly’, Sp. impensada pero providencialmente ‘unexpected(ly) but providentially’), parallel to Old French and Old Tuscan (OFr./OTsc. humeles e dulcement/umile e dolcemente (CDR 1163/Nov. 4) ‘humbly (lit. ‘humble’) and gently’). Even greater autonomy can be seen in Old Occitan where not only is the reflex of MENTE (variously -men(s), -menz, -ment) usually attached to just one of the adjectives in coordinated structures (usually the first, e.g. cruelmen et amara ‘cruelly and bitter (ly)’, but also suau e bellament ‘soft(ly) and beautifully’; Diez 1874, 429), but the two constituent parts of the adverbial structure can be also separated by intervening material (e.g. epsa…ment ‘identical…ly’; Grandgent 21909, §105). Turning now to the analytic perfect, this is characterized by converse patterns of syntheticity and analyticity: whereas in modern French, Italian, and Occitan varieties the component parts continue to display considerable autonomy, witness the interpolation of such elements as adverbs of varying sizes (e.g. It. abbiamo fortunata-

15 See, among others, Price (1962; 1986), Posner (1984; 1985a,b), Zanuttini (1997, ch. 3), Parry (2013), Poletto (2016).

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mente già pagato ‘we.have fortunately already paid’; Monachesi 2005, 134), in Modern Ibero-Romance auxiliary and participle, despite continuing to be written as separate words, never allow interpolation of any sort (e.g. Pt. não tinha (*nunca) falado nunca comigo ‘not he.had (never) spoken never with.me’). Examples like these, coupled with the problem of how one is to correctly measure the autonomy of linguistic units (Schwegler 1990, ch. 2), frequently obscured by conventional, yet non-systematic, orthographic representations of the “word” (cf. Sp. tal vez ‘such time’ vs Fr. peut-être ‘can-be’ vs Pt. talvez ‘such.time’, It. chissà ‘who.knows’, all meaning ‘perhaps’), lead Schwegler (1990, 193) to conclude that the labels synthetic and analytic can, at best, be understood as nothing more than “the rough measure of the morphemic interdependence of speech units” [italics A.L.]. Yet even adopting a relativized interpretation of the traditional usage still fails to make any intuitive sense of many developments. For example, in the wake of Schwegler (1990, xv), Vincent (1997a, 99–100) proposes a scalar definition of the syntheticanalytic distinction in terms of the degree of phonological and morphosyntactic autonomy borne by the constituent grammatical properties of a given construction. On this view, however, one of the most important consequences of the presumed synthetic to analytic drift, manifested in the gradual replacement of an original “free” word order with a “fixed” (S)VO order, must now, despite the obvious contradiction, be treated as a synthetic development. In particular, the remarkable syntactic autonomy and independence of the core constituents of the Latin sentence which could, in accordance with pragmatic principles, not only occur in all possible permutations (see Ledgeway 2012, chs 3, 5), but whose internal structure, when complex, could, in certain cases and in specific registers, be scattered discontinuously across the sentence (cf. Section 4 below), must be taken as an indication of greater analyticity. By the same token, the greatly reduced positional autonomy, coupled with the increased semantico-syntactic interdependence, of the core constituents of the Romance sentence which can now only be interpreted relative to each other, and whose constituent parts are cohesively bound together, are to be understood within the current approach as a synthetic development.

3.3 Morphophonological erosion and its effects It has often been claimed that there is a strict correlation between the rise and fall of analyticity and syntheticity, respectively, with processes of morphophonological weakening and erosion. A prime example concerns the phonetic erosion of the case system which has frequently been considered the trigger for an increased use of prepositions (Väänänen 31966, 115–119; 1982, 157–195; Bauer 1995, 137–139; Molinelli 1998, 147). By the same line of argument, the weakening of the Latin case system is also believed to produce an increasingly rigidified word order able to unambiguously distinguish between subject and object (Vennemann 1974; 1975; Bichakjian 1987, 89;

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Bauer 1995, 5–6), a development which, in turn, correspondingly renders the original case system increasingly redundant (Bourciez 41956; Zamboni 2000, 102). Yet, claims that such grammatical changes do not happen unless they are rendered necessary by concomitant changes in the phonology are simply not borne out by the Latin or Romance evidence. Beginning with the increased use of prepositions, on the basis of late Latin evidence Adams (2011, 264) questions whether it is “convincing to see the change as having a neat single cause, such as attrition of case endings determined by phonetic developments” since a “switch to prepositions is attested long before the phonetic changes usually cited in this connection (loss of final -m and -s, shortening of long vowels in final syllables) took place.” Indeed, on this point Pinkster (1990, 195–196) observes that as early as the archaic period Latin prepositions had already developed very specific uses and characteristics of their own and were not simply analytic alternatives to the morphological case system, despite the documentation of the loss of final consonants in nominal forms from the early inscriptions onwards, including nominative MSG -S from around 250 BC (e.g. Cornelio ORNELIUS S ), though restored by the classical period and gener(CIL I2.8) for classical C ORNELIU ally retained even in late non-literary texts, and the somewhat later ACC . SG -M . Although a trace of final -M continues to surface in the form of nasalization and lengthening of the preceding vowel in the classical period, from around 150 AD (Beckmann 1963, 180–182) the presence of -M in texts represents nothing more than a conservative spelling convention (Pinkster 1990, 199; 1993, 240; Adams 2013, 128– 132). Thus, the loss of final consonants, even from an early period, apparently had no repercussions on the case system, which continued unscathed and unchanged for centuries (Pinkster 1990, 200). Indeed, even when in later texts we apparently come across neologistic uses of prepositions in place of traditional case forms, the complements of such prepositions always occur in a particular case form, often an indiscriminate ablative or accusative employed as a generalized prepositional case as in in eadem diem (A.Vales. 56) ‘in same.ACC day.ACC ’ (‘on that same day’; cf. Classical Lat. IN EO DIE ‘on that.ABL day.ABL ’), an observation which incontrovertibly demonstrates that neologistic prepositional uses cannot be determined by phonetic erosion (Pinkster 1993, 243). Rather, the growing use of prepositions cannot be considered a single unified development, but instead covers a variety of heterogeneous cases differentiated by chronology and register (Adams 2013, ch. XIII). Whereas it is commonplace to retrace the Romance prepositional dative and genitive to early Latin uses (e.g. Plautus) of the prepositions AD ‘to(wards’) and DE ‘(down/away) from’, respectively, Adams’ examination of such cases in early, Classical, and late Latin reveals that the resemblance between Latin and Romance is misleading and merely superficial. In particular, the evidence he adduces highlights how there was no abrupt move from syntheticity to analyticity, inasmuch as the Romance prepositional types emerged slowly over centuries from the gradual broadening of classical uses long before processes of phonetic erosion could have played a role in any such developments.

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Not dissimilar considerations apply to the presumed effects of phonetic erosion on the verbal paradigm, where the weakening and/or loss of inflectional marking of person and number on the verb have often simplistically been identifed as the cause of the progressive establishment of subject clitics in Gallo-Romance. This erroneous correlation is, however, immediately dispelled by varieties such as the dialect of Vicenza where all synthetic marking for person and number on the finite verb remains intact, yet the verb paradigm shows subject clitics for all six grammatical persons. Even in varieties like French where the present indicative of regular first-conjugation verbs notoriously displays considerable syncretism in all persons apart from the first and second persons plural, distinctive synthetic marking of person and number continues in other paradigms such as the future. In short, the rise of analytic marking of person and number in conjunction with the Romance verb through subject clitics cannot be associated tout court with inflectional weakening, as the relevant facts in Table 8 demonstrate (↗2 Subjects). Table 8: Romance synthetic and analytic marking for person and number Vicentino

French

present tense vendare ‘sell’

present tense pousser ‘push’

future tense pousser ‘push’

a ˈvɛndo

ʒ(ə) pus

ʒ(ə) pus(ə)ʁe

te a ˈvɛndi

ty pus

ty pus(ə)ʁa

el/a ˈvɛnde

i(l)/ɛl pus

i(l)/ɛl pus(ə)ʁa

a vɛnˈdɛmo

nu pusɔ̃

nu pus(ə)ʁɔ̃

a vɛnˈdi

vu puse

vu pus(ə)ʁe

i ˈvɛnde

i(l)/ɛl pus

i(l)/ɛl pus(ə)ʁɔ̃

3.4 Change and competition The wide-spread survival in Romance of synthetic forms, particularly in the verbal domain, observed above in Section 3.1, also poses a serious challenge to traditional accounts which identity phonetic erosion with the rise of analyticity (Wüest 1998, 94). Indeed, the survival of such forms highlights the fact that the emergence of analyticity in Romance does not involve a wholesale unitary move away from synthetic to analytic structures, but involves gradual changes and extensive periods of complementarity between competing synthetic and analytic structures (Bauer 2006). Latin comparative constructions, for instance, have since the earliest times displayed variation in the encoding of the standard of comparison, which could be marked synthetically through the ablative (e.g. SOLE CLARIOR ‘sun.ABL clear.COMPR ’ (= ‘brighter than the sun’)) or analytically through the particle construction introduced by the complemen-

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tizer QUAM ‘than’ (e.g. CLARIOR QUAM SOL ‘clear.COMPR . NOM than sun.NOM ’ ). However, as has long been recognized (cf. Bennett 1914, 292–297; Adams 1976, 83–86), in most cases the two were not simple free variants but were generally in complementary distribution, the ablative construction typically occurring, for example, in proverbial expressions, negative structures, and rhetorical questions. Remaining with the comparative, we may also note that alongside the synthetic formation in -IOR (as well as the superlative in -ISSIMUS ) analytic formations with PLUS and MAGIS ‘more’ (and MAXIME or PLURIMUM ‘most’ in the case of the superlative) are also attested since the CLARISSIMUS ISSIMUS vs MAXIME / PLURIMUM earliest period (e.g. CLAR IOR vs MAGIS / PLUS CLARUS , CLAR CLARUS ; Lindsay 1907, 38; Wüest 1998, 92), and indeed were obligatory with those adjectives ending in -VUS (e.g. PLUS / MAXIME IDONEUS ‘fitter/fittest’). In both cases, we know that it is the analytic variant that wins through in Romance, but this was not an immediate or foregone conclusion in the Latin period. Similar early synthetic-analytic variations are found in other areas, including the expression of the future and the present perfect, where from an early date the synthetic forms were, to some extent, in competition with periphrastic HABERE formations (Pinkster 1987; Bauer 2006, 289). In the case of the future it is the analytic structure (itself eventually synthesizing) which ultimately triumphs (Section 2.2.2), but in the case of the perfect the original synthetic construction lives on and the competition between the two forms is far from over (Harris 1982), with the division of labour between the two available paradigms resolved differently across the Romània (cf. discussion of examples (7a–d) above). The case of the future considered here also raises the related issue of competing analytic structures: assuming that there was a general drift towards analyticity, how are we then to explain the fact that the already existing periphrastic future forms of the classical period (cf. SUM ‘I am’ + future active and passive participle) were themselves replaced by the new HABERE future periphrasis (Pinkster 1987, 221)? In short, it is demonstrably false to portray the passage from Latin to Romance in terms of a simple and unified linear development from the synthetic to the analytic. In many cases, synthetic and analytic developments occurred in parallel and co-existed over long periods of time as contrasting and/or stylistic variants, in some cases up until the present-day. Where analytic structures have won through, these typically show a gradual development rather than a saltational change and co-exist alongside many original synthetic structures that have survived into Romance from the ancestral language. Furthermore, in some cases these same analytic innovations have ousted earlier classical periphrases and/or have gone on themselves to become synthetic, developments which are patently incompatible with the traditional thesis of an inexorable shift away from syntheticity towards ever-greater analyticity.

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3.5 Explanatory power: conclusive remarks By way of conclusion, we note that the postulation of an independent syntheticanalytic parameter is undermined by the general observation that all presumed cases of analytic development can otherwise be independently subsumed within the general theory of grammaticalization (Hopper/Traugott 1993, 17), integrating synthetic forms as those having achieved the highest degree of grammaticalization (Klausenburger 2000, 105, 152; Bauer 2006, 288). In particular, the analytic developments witnessed in the history of Romance are clearly not in any way exclusive to the Romance family, but simply exemplify a crosslinguistic tendency for synthetic structures, once weakened through phonetic erosion or other forces within the system, to be progressively replaced by new competing structures which “given the nature of syntactic change, cannot help but be analytic” (Vincent 1997a, 101). Analyticity therefore turns out to be a secondary development, ultimately the manifestation of a deeper change, but not, significantly, its cause (cf. also Schwegler 1990). By way of illustration, one only has to consider the parallel analytic developments in the nominal and verbal domains such as the use of prepositions and auxiliaries replacing earlier inflections: here the chief issue is not the replacement of synthetic forms with analytic ones, but, rather, a structural change in linearization involving the head parameter that affects both inflectional morphology and syntax alike (Harris 1978, 6; Bauer 1995, 10, 24, 166; Oniga 2004, 52, 75). Accordingly, the principal innovation in inflectional morphology has been the move away from structures in which grammatical modification (head; henceforth in bold) follows the lexical element (dependent/modifier; henceforth underlined) to structures in which the relevant grammatical modification (head) precedes the lexical element (dependent/modifier), e.g. P AUL - O ‘Paul-DAT ’ vs Fr. à Paul ‘to Paul’, COGITA - UERAT ‘think-PFV . PST . 3SG ’ vs Cat. havia pensat ‘he.had thought’. In syntax too, verbal and nominal heads, once frequently preceded by such modifiers as direct objects/genitives and manner adverbs/adjectives, come instead to precede all such modifiers, witness the following Latin vs Italian contrasts: AMOREM UOLUNT AS UULT ‘love.ACC he.desires’ vs desidera l’amore ‘he.desires the love’, AMORIS UOLUNTAS ‘love.GEN desire.NOM ’ vs il desiderio dell’amore ‘the desire of.the love’, FORTITER PUGNAT ‘bravely he.fights’ vs combatte coraggiosamente ‘he.fights fiercely’, FORTIS MILES ‘brave soldier’ vs soldato coraggioso ‘man brave’. These latter examples, which clearly do not involve analyticity, therefore highlight that the relevant change in linear order in syntax is consistent with that observed in inflectional morphology, ultimately both derivable from a single integrated and comprehensive structural change involving a reversal in the head parameter, the significance of which we explore in the following section (cf. also Baldinger 1968).

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4 Head parameter: deriving analyticity and configurationality Without doubt the biggest problem for the traditional synthetic-analytic interpretation of the Latin–Romance transition is that it offers no explanation whatsoever for the observed changes. At bottom, the predominant analytic patterns noted in Romance are nothing more than the partial surface reflex of a more deep-rooted structural change, interpreted here as the result of a change in the head directionality parameter (cf. Tesnière 1959; Chomsky 1981; Hawkins 1983; Travis 1984). At least in its earliest attestations, Latin was predominantly head-final (19a) whereas Modern Romance is head-initial (19b), with Classical Latin representing a transitional stage in which both conservative head-final (20a) and innovative head-initial (20b) orders are found (Adams 1976; Ledgeway 2012, ch. 5). (19) a. Archaic Lat. uirtutei parisuma quoius forma most.equal.NOM whose beauty.NOM valour.DAT (CIL 12.7) b. Rom. a cărui frumuseţe fuse GEN . FSG whose beauty.F was cu vitejia sa egală equal.FSG with valour his ‘whose beauty was fully equal to his valour’ (20) Lat.

fuit was

a. constantibus hominibus par erat men.ABL equal.NOM it.was resolute.ABL . PL ‘[our apprehension] was equal to that of men of strong character’ (Cic. Diu. 2.113) ceteris b. libertate esse parem be.INF equal.ACC rest.DAT . PL freedom.ABL ‘the being equal to the rest of the citizens in freedom’ (Cic. Phil. 1.34)

In terms of structural organization, Latin has also been argued to exhibit a nonconfigurational syntax in which relationships between individual linguistic items are signalled lexocentrically through the forms of the items themselves (case inflections, agreement), whereas in Romance relationships between related linguistic items are encoded by their fixed positions relative to each other (Vincent 1988, 53–54, 62–63; 1997b, 149, 163; 1998, 423–424; Ledgeway 2011b, §3; 2012, ch. 3). Consequently, in Latin not only is it difficult to establish fixed orders for individual heads and their associated complements or modifiers within their given phrase (21a,b), even adja-

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cency between semantically-related items is not a requirement (Marouzeau 1949, 42; 1953, 62; Ernout/Thomas 11953, 162; Oniga 2004, 101–102; Powell 2010), witness frequent discontinuous structures such as (22a) where, for example, noun and modifier are separated by an intervening nominal. In Romance, by contrast, all elements appear to have pre-established positions (21c) and the languages do not readily license hyperbaton (22b). (21) a. Lat.

b. Lat.

c. Fr.

Caesar suas copias in proximum Caesar.NOM his.ACC troops.ACC in next.ACC collem subducit hill.ACC withdraws ‘Caesar leads off his forces to the next hill.’ (Caes. B.G 1.22.3) Caesar in proximum copias suas his.ACC Caesar.NOM in next.ACC troops.ACC collem subduxit hill.ACC withdrew ‘Caesar drew off his forces to the next hill.’ (Caes. B.G. 1.24.1) César retire ses troupes (*ses) (*César) Caesar withdraws his troops his Caesar

legio pompeiana, celeris spe hope.ABL legion.NOM Pompeian.NOM quick.GEN subsidii confirmata help.GEN assured (Caes. B.C. 3.69.2) b. Rom. legiunea pompeiană, întărită de (*rapid) legion=the Pompeian strengthened by quick nădejdea unui ajutor rapid hope=the of.a help quick ‘the Pompeian legion, encouraged by the hope of speedy assistance’

(22) a. Lat.

At the macroparametric level, the passage from Latin to Romance is therefore arguably marked by a reversal in the head (cf. (19)–(20)) and configurationality (cf. (21)– (22)) macroparameters. However, following Ledgeway (2012, ch. 5; in press a,b), both perceived changes can be reduced to a single macroparametric change, with the effects of configurationality derived from the reversal in the head parameter. In essence, the perceived non-configurationality of Latin can be broken down into two main ingredients: (i) grammatically-free word order which a priori allows complements to occur on either side of their head; and (ii) pragmatically-driven word order, often producing discontinuous structures resulting from the greater accessibility of

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topic- and focus-fronting to positions situated in the left edge of individual functional projections.

4.1 Grammatically-free word order The gradual rigidification of word order in the passage from Latin to Romance is to be understood as the surface effect of a progressive reversal of the directionality parameter (for in-depth qualitative and quantitative analyses, see Ledgeway 2012, 202– 235). Assuming the ordering of heads and complements in the development from archaic Latin to Romance to have undergone a shift from head-last (cf. (19a)) to headfirst (cf. (19b)), the greater freedom of word order traditionally recognized for Classical Latin can be seen as a result of its occupying an (artificially sustained) intermediate position in this change, resulting in mixed (dis)harmonic linearizations like (20a,b).16 Formally, this linear variation can be captured in terms of the application or otherwise of a L(inearization)-movement termed roll-up (cf. Ledgeway 2012, ch. 5; Biberauer/ Holmberg/Roberts 2014). Thus, assuming the Universal Base Hypothesis (Kayne 1994), when a complement surfaces to the left of its head, it must have moved leftwards, i.e. rolled up, across the latter from its base-generated position to a derived (inner) specifier. Both options from the verbal and nominal domains are exemplified with the following (near-)minimal pairs:  

[DP aciem]] (23) a. [v-VP instruit drew.up.3SG battle.line.ACC (Liv. 33.15.19) instruit [DP aciem]] b. [v-VP [Spec aciem] battle.line.ACC drew.up.3SG (Liv. 7.37.7) ‘(he/the Samnite army) drew up battle line’ (24) a. [DP metum fear.ACC

[DP rerum things.GEN

nouarum]] new.GEN

16 In particular, this oscillation between head-last and head-first structures in the history of Latin can be captured along two axes of variation (cf. Ledgeway 2012, 236), the first in terms of diachronic variation (head-last (archaic Latin) → head-initial (early/late Latin)) and the second in terms of diaphasic (and no doubt diastratic and diamesic) variation (head-final (formal, literary) vs head-initial (subliterary, colloquial)). The facts can therefore be interpreted in terms of a progressive reversal of the head parameter from a regular head-final setting towards a head-initial setting, with Classical Latin displaying an ambivalent behaviour on account of its non-uniform characterization in relation to these two dimensions of variation (cf. 20a–b), namely, non-archaic (predominantly head-first), but formal and literary (predominantly head-final).

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‘fear of revolution’ (Cic. Att. 5.21.3) rerum] metum [DP urbanarum r.]] b. [DP [Spec urbanarum things.GEN fear.ACC urban.GEN ‘because of concern about the situation in the city’ (Cic. Att. 5.18.1) In this light, the distinct grammatical organization of Romance and, in particular, its rigid head-complement order, now finds a straightforward explanation in terms of the loss of roll-up from the grammar, as exemplified in the corresponding French structures: (25) Fr.

a. ils (*en ligne) they in line b. la (*des choses) the of.the things

se rangèrent en ligne self=arranged in line crainte des choses fear of.the things

4.2 Pragmatically-driven word order Besides fluctuation at the syntactic level between a conservative head-final and an innovative head-initial order, pragmatics is also recognized to play a significant role in determining Latin word order. This aspect of Latin sentential organization, largely absent in Romance (↗14 Focus Fronting), can be captured by assuming the greater accessibility of topic- and focus-fronting to left-peripheral positions situated in the left edge of individual functional projections in apparent violation of the Left Branch Condition (LBC; Ross 1967). In Romance, we have seen (cf. Section 2) that functional structure is readily made visible through the lexicalization of head positions with functional categories such as determiners, auxiliaries and complementizers. By contrast, Latin lacks such functional categories, but displays ubiquitous evidence for the presence of functional structure through its extensive exploitation of topic- and focusfronting to the left-edge specifier positions of these same functional projections. By way of illustration, consider the examples in (26), where SpecDP is overtly signalled by the discontinuous focused adjective summo in the Latin example (26a), whereas in its Spanish translation (26b) it is the head of DP that is overtly spelt out by the presence of the indefinite article un while the adjectival modifier del más alto remains in situ. summo] [D ' Ø [NP homo [summo ingenio]]]] man.NOM talent.ABL highest.ABL (Cic. De or. 1.104) más alto talento]]]] b. [DP [Spec Ø] [D' un [NP hombre [del a man of.the more high talent

(26) a. [DP [Spec

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c. *[DP [Spec del más alto] [D' un [NP hombre[del más alto of.the more high a man ‘a man of the highest ability’

talento]]]] talent

However, the availability of edge-fronting cannot be reduced to the absence/presence of articles and concomitant availability of functional categories like determiners in the two languages (for detailed discussion, see Ledgeway 2014b; in press a), but follows from the head parameter, the setting of which directly determines the application or otherwise of antilocality in constraining movement.17 In particular, we propose that antilocality is not a blanket constraint on all instances of local movement, but should be parametrized across languages, a conclusion already independently forced upon us by our analysis of grammatically free word order in Latin where head-finality was interpreted as the output of a roll-up operation that raises the complement to the specifier to the left of its selecting head. Antilocality, however, predicts that roll-up should be excluded as a movement which is a priori too local/ short. The suspension of antilocality therefore appears to constitute a sine qua non for languages like Latin which exhibit head-final orders derived through roll-up movement in accordance with the proposals in Kayne (1994, 47–48, 52–53) and recent work on the Final-Over-Final-Constraint (cf. Biberauer/Holmberg/Roberts 2008; 2009; 2014; Biberauer/Newton/Sheehan 2009; Biberauer/Sheehan 2012). In Romance, by contrast, the head parameter is consistently aligned with the head-initial setting such that roll-up, and hence antilocal movement, never arises in the grammars of these varieties. We thus naturally derive from the different settings of the head parameter a concomitant parametrization in the role of antilocality in constraining movement. In short, the application or otherwise of antilocality is predicted to be parasitic on the head-initial vs head-final parametric distinction: once its potential effects are quashed by the positive evidence of head-finality required to motivate rollup, it fails to apply across the board licensing other short/local movements such as edge-fronting in apparent violation of the LBC.

4.3 Head parameter and syntheticity-analyticity distinction We have observed how perceived changes in configurationality in the Latin-Romance transition, reducible to the progressive loss of roll-up and left edge-fronting, can ultimately be derived from a gradual reversal in the head directionality parameter. This is a significant result as it allows us to explain a series of significant changes 17 In very basic terms, antilocality is a principle which rules out uneconomical movements considered “too” local/short, forcing movement to involve at least raising outside of the immediate minimal domain or phase thereby crossing at least one (phasal) XP boundary (cf. Grohmann 2000; 2003; Abels 2003; Bošković 2005).

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between Latin and Romance in terms of a single macroparametric change, doing away with the need for a somewhat dubious independent configurationality macroparameter, the relevant effects of which now fall out for free as part of the head parameter. In addition to deriving the superficial effects of (non-)configurationality, the reversal in the head parameter also allows us to understand the observed changes in syntheticity and analyticity in the Latin–Romance transition. In particular, we take Romance analyticity to follow from a rigidification of the head parameter and its consequences for antilocality leading to the loss of edge-fronting to the DP left periphery. In this regard, we have seen that whereas Latin typically spells out left-peripheral specifier positions through roll-up and edge-fronting (cf. (24a)), Romance typically spells out the corresponding head positions with functional categories (cf. (24b)), giving rise to an important typological difference in the syntax of Latin and Romance which privilege an XP-type and X-type syntax, respectively (cf. Koopman’s (1996) Principle of Projection Activation, and the discussion of the head-/dependent-marking distinction in Ledgeway 2012, ch. 6). We thus conclude that the shift from syntheticity to analyticity represents a reflex of the change from head-finality to head-initiality, signalling a move away from a Latin dependent-marking syntax, in which various dependents are raised to lexical and functional left-peripheral specifier positions in apparent violation of antilocality, towards a Romance head-marking syntax in which functional head positions are increasingly spelt out under direct lexicalization or movement (for a theoretical implementation of this generalization, see Ledgeway 2014b; in press a). There thus emerges a correlation between head-finality and syntheticity on the one hand, and between head-initiality and analyticity on the other (Bauer 1995, 166; Dryer 2009; Ledgeway 2011b, 440–442), inasmuch as “left-branching morphological structures tend to become synthetic forms, whereas right-branching elements remain separate” (Bauer 1995, 125–126). Significant in this regard is Ledgeway’s (2012, §5.4.2) observation that Latin displays a degree of competition across different areas of the grammar between inherited head-final structures and innovative head-initial structures, where the relevant functional head is systematically phonologically null and overt, respectively. This can be seen in the following examples which contrast the AcI (27a), a head-final construction introduced by a null head-final complementizer (cf. Cecchetto/Oniga 2002), with a finite complementation structure introduced by an overt head-initial complementizer QUOD (27b), and bare case-marked nominals (28a), here analyzed as silent postpositional phrases headed by a head-final null adposition (cf. also Emonds 1985, 224), with head-initial prepositional structures (28b): te dicere V-TP] Ø CP] credo (27) a. [[tacitum you.ACC say.INF I.believe silent.ACC ‘I fancy you say to yourself’ (Mart. 6.5.3)

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b. scis enim [CP quod [V-TP epulum dedi]] you.know for that feast.ACC I.gave ‘for you remember that I gave a public banquet once’ (Petr. Sat. 71.9) (28) a. Pompeius […] proficiscitur [[Canusium] Ø PP] sets.out Canusium.ACC Pompey.NOM ‘Pompey…sets out for Canusium’ (Caes. B.C. 1.24.1) b. miles [PP ad [Capuam]] profectus sum I.am soldier.NOM to Capua.ACC set.out ‘I set out as a soldier for Capua’ (Cic. Sen. 10) We thus witness a parallel development in the sentential and nominal domains where an archaic head-final structure headed by a null complementizer (AcI) or null adposition (bare case-marked nominal) is progressively rivalled, and eventually replaced in Romance, by an innovative head-initial structure headed by an overt complementizer and preposition, respectively. This is also what we see in the development of the DP, which passes from an original head-final arrangement with a null D head (Latin, without articles) to a head-initial arrangement with an overt D head (Romance, with articles). Remarkably, then, many further well-known changes in the passage from Latin to Romance traditionally classified as part of the drift from syntheticity to analyticity, including the replacement of the AcI with finite complementation and the loss of the case system in favour of prepositions and the emergence of articles, can also be shown to follow from the progressive reversal in the head parameter (for further discussion, see Ledgeway 2014b; in press a).

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Biberauer, Theresa/Holmberg, Anders/Roberts, Ian (2008), Structure and linearization in disharmonic word orders, in: Charles Chang/Hannah Haynie (edd.), Proceedings of the 26th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Somerville, MA, Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 96–104. Biberauer, Theresa/Holmberg, Anders/Roberts, Ian (2009), Linearization and the architecture of grammar: a view from the Final-Over-Final Constraint, in: Vincenzo Moscati/Emilio Servidio (edd.), StiL - Studies in Linguistics (Proceedings of XXXV Incontro di Grammatica Generativa) 3, 78–91. Biberauer, Theresa/Holmberg, Anders/Roberts, Ian (2014), A syntactic universal and its consequences, Linguistic Inquiry 45, 169–225. Biberauer, Theresa/Newton, Glenda/Sheehan, Michelle (2009), Limiting synchronic and diachronic variation and change: the Final-over-Final Constraint, Language and Linguistics 10, 701–743. Biberauer, Theresa/Sheehan, Michelle (2012), Disharmony, antisymmetry, and the Final-over-Final Constraint, in: Myriam Extebarria/Vidal Valmala (edd.), Ways of Structure Building, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 206–244. Bichakjian, Bernard (1987), The evolution of word order: a paedomorphic explanation, in: Anna Giacalone Ramat/Anna Onofrio Carruba/Giuliano Bernini (edd.), Papers from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 87–107. Bošković, Željko (2005), On the locality of left branch extraction and the structure of NP, Studia Linguistica 59, 1–45. Bourciez, Édouard (41956), Éléments de linguistique romane, Paris, Klincksieck. Bourova, Vaira (2005), À la recherche du “conditionnel latin”: les constructions “infinitif + forme de ‘habere’” examinées à partir d’un corpus électronique, in: Claus Pusch/Johannes Kabatek/ Wolfgang Raible (edd.), Romanistische Korpuslinguistik II. Korpora und diachrone Sprachwissenschaft, Tübingen, Narr, 303–316. Bourova, Vaira (2007), Les constructions latines infinitif + “habebam” vs infinitif + “habui” et le développement du conditionnel roman, in: David Trotter (ed.), Actes du XXIVe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes, Aberystwyth 2004, vol. 2, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 461–474. Bourova, Viara/Tasmowski, Liliane (2007), La préhistoire des futurs romans – ordre de constituants et sémantique, Cahiers Chronos 19, 25–41. Busquet Isart, Núria (2010), El parlar salat: Descripció, àmbit geogràfic i ús, Universitat de Barcelona, unpublished thesis. Calabrese, Andrea (1993), The sentential complementation of Salentino: a study of a language without infinitival clauses, in: Adriana Belletti (ed.), Syntactic Theory and the Dialects of Italy, Torino, Rosenberg & Sellier, 28–98. Calboli, Gualtiero (2009), Latin syntax and Greek, in: Philip Baldi/Pierluigi Cuzzolin (edd.), New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax, vol. 1: Syntax of the Sentence, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 65–193. Cardinaletti, Anna (1997), Subjects and clause structure, in: Liliane Haegeman (ed.), The New Comparative Syntax, London, Longman, 33–63. Cardinaletti, Anna (2004), Toward a cartography of subject positions, in: Luigi Rizzi (ed.), The Structure of CP and IP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures Volume 2, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 115–165. Cecchetto, Carlo/Oniga, Renato (2002), Consequences of the analysis of Latin infinitival clauses for the theory of case and control, Lingue e linguaggio 1, 151–189. Chomsky, Noam (1981), Lectures on Government and Binding, Dordrecht, Foris. Cinque, Guglielmo (2006), Restructuring and Functional Heads. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures Volume 4, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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Vanelli, Laura (1987), I pronomi soggetto nei dialetti italiani settentrionali dal Medio Evo a oggi, Medioevo romanzo 12, 173–211. Vanelli, Laura/Renzi, Lorenzo/Benincà, Paola (1985), Typologie des pronoms sujets dans les langues romanes, in: Actes du XVIIe Congrès International de Linguistique et Philologie Romanes, vol. 3, Aix-en-Provence, Université de Provence, 163–176. Varvaro, Alberto (2013), Latin and the making of the Romance languages, in: Martin Maiden/John Charles Smith/Adam Ledgeway (edd.), The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, vol. 2: Contexts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 6–56. Vennemann, Theo (1974), Topics, subjects, and word order: from SXV to SVX via TVX, in: John Anderson/Charles Jones (edd.), Historical Linguistics, Amsterdam, North Holland, 339–376. Vennemann, Theo (1975), An explanation of drift, in: Charles Li (ed.), Word Order and Word Order Change, Austin, TX, University of Texas Press, 269–305. Veny, Joan (1982), Els parlars catalans (Síntesi de dialectologia), Mallorca, Moll. Vincent, Nigel (1987), The interaction of periphrasis and inflection: some Romance examples, in: Martin Harris/Paolo Ramat (edd.), The Historical Development of Auxiliaries, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 237–256. Vincent, Nigel (1988), Latin, in: Martin Harris/Nigel Vincent (edd.), The Romance Languages, London/ New York, Routledge, 26–78. Vincent, Nigel (1997a), Synthetic and analytic structures, in: Martin Maiden/Mair Parry (edd.), The Dialects of Italy, London/New York, Routledge, 99–105. Vincent, Nigel (1997b), 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. Vincent, Nigel (1998), Tra grammatica e grammaticalizzazione: Articoli e clitici nelle lingue (italo)romanze, in: Paolo Ramat/Elisa Roma (edd.), Sintassi storica. Atti del XXX Congresso Internazionale della Società di Linguistica Italiana, Pavia, 26–28 settembre 1996, Roma, Bulzoni, 411–440. Vincent, Nigel (2006), Il problema del doppio complementatore nei primi volgari d’Italia, in: Alvise Andreose/Nicoletta Penello (edd.), Laboratorio sulle varietà romanze antiche. Giornata di lavoro sulle varietà romanze antiche, Padova, Università degli Studi di Padova, 27–42. Vincent, Nigel (2014), Similarity and diversity in the evolution of Italo-Romance morphosyntax, in: Paola Benincà/Adam Ledgeway/Nigel Vincent (edd.), Diachrony and Dialects. Grammatical Change in the Dialects of Italy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1–21. Vincent, Nigel (2016), A structural comparison of Latin and Romance, in: Adam Ledgeway/Martin Maiden (edd.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 37–49. Wanner, Dieter (1987), The Development of Romance Clitic Pronouns. From Latin to Old Romance, Berlin, De Gruyter. Wanner, Dieter (1998), Les subordonnées à double complémentateur en roman médiéval, in: Giovanni Ruffino (ed.), Atti del XXI Congresso Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Romanza. Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani, Università di Palermo 18–24 settembre 1995, vol. 1, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 421–433. Wheeler, Max (1988), Occitan, in: Martin Harris/Nigel Vincent (edd.), The Romance Languages, London/New York, Routledge, 246–278. Wheeler, Max/Yates, Alan/Dols, Nicolau (1999), Catalan. A Comprehensive Grammar, London/New York, Routledge. Woledge, Brian (1956), The plural of the indefinite article in Old French, The Modern Language Review 51, 17–32. Wolfe, Sam (2015a), Microvariation in Old Italo-Romance syntax: evidence from Old Sardinian and Old Sicilian, Archivio Glottologico Italiano 100, 3–36.

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Wolfe, Sam (2015b), Verb initial orders in Medieval Romance. A comparative perspective, Revue roumaine de linguistique 60, 147–172. Wolfe, Sam (2015c), The nature of Old Spanish verb second reconsidered, Lingua 164, 132–155. Wolfe, Sam (2015d), The Old Sardinian Condaghes: a syntactic study, Transactions of the Philological Society 133, 137–205. Wüest, Jakob (1998), Pour une linguistique historique non linéaire: Les formes analytiques du latin, in: József Herman (ed.), La transizione dal latino alle lingue romanze. Atti della tavola rotonda di linguistica storica, Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia, 14–15 giugno 1996, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 87–98. Zamboni, Alberto (2000), Alle origini dell’italiano. Dinamiche e tipologie della transizione dal latino, Roma, Carocci. Zanuttini, Raffaella (1997), Negation and Clausal Structure. A Comparative Study of Romance Languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Manuel Leonetti

24 Basic constituent orders Abstract: The basic, unmarked order in Romance declarative clauses is SVO, and marked orders are obtained by subject inversion (VS, VOS, VSO), by fronting (OVS) and by the reordering of verbal complements. These orders express different interpretive instructions for information packaging. Cross-linguistic variation in this domain depends on how each language constrains the mapping from syntax to Information Structure, i.e. how syntax maps into informational partitions (Topic-Comment, Focus-Background). The main loci of variation in Romance concern the productivity of fronting constructions (in the particular case of non-focal fronting) and the rate and availability of subject inversion (especially in VOS and VSO patterns). A survey of these phenomena leads us to distinguish between a group of “restrictive” languages, basically comprising French, Catalan and Italian (Central Romance), and a group of “permissive” languages that includes European Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian. The same factors underlying synchronic variation are relevant to explain diachronic changes in word order.  



Keywords: word order, information structure, focus, topic, inversion, fronting, reordering, subject, markedness  

1 Preliminaries As far as word order is concerned, modern Romance languages show a remarkable level of homogeneity: they all correspond to the SVO (subject-verb-object order) family, and display the major features of SVO languages, such as having prepositions (instead of postpositions), postnominal genitives (instead of prenominal ones) and auxiliary-verb sequences (instead of verb-auxiliary sequences). If the relative order of heads and complements inside phrases is taken as a classificatory principle they can all be described as consistent head-initial languages (cf. Arnáiz 1998). However, a closer look at their properties – in particular, at the conditions that determine how the basic SVO order alternates with other patterns – reveals interesting differences, essentially concerning subject inversion, fronting possibilities, and, to a more limited extent, scrambling of verbal complements.1 Such differences emerged in the Romance

1 There is only one (partial) exception to the previous generalization concerning SVO order: a group of Rhaeto-Romance varieties, spoken in Switzerland (Swiss Romansh) and Northern Italy (Dolomitic Ladin), exhibit a word order pattern that is common in Germanic languages, the so-called Verb-second (V2) constraint (Kaiser 2002; Kaiser/Hack 2013; Benincà 2013). The constraint forces the finite verb to occur in second position in main declarative clauses. This gives rise to the SVO/SVX order when the DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-024

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domain after an initial phase in which medieval Romance varieties were in fact much closer to each other than they are now in their constituent order rules – an expected situation, since at that time they were much closer to their common Latin origin. In this chapter, both the synchronic comparative point of view and the diachronic perspective on word order will be considered. Before starting an overview of the relevant data, some methodological issues must be addressed, in order to provide the key concepts and assumptions for the ensuing discussion and set its limits. (a) First of all, it has to be stressed that this overview is not intended to cover absolutely all aspects of constituent order. On the one hand, only the major constituents in the clause – subject, verb, and verbal complements – will be taken into account, so that other phenomena concerning minor constituents, such as the relative order of nouns, adjectives, genitives, numerals and determiners inside noun phrases, will not be discussed here, despite their interest for typological research (see Arnáiz 1998 for a panoramic view; ↗21 Adjectival and genitival modification). Crucially, the position of pronouns is not a topic of this chapter (but see ↗5 Clitic pronouns). Moreover, we will deal with declarative clauses only (root or embedded). On the other hand, certain non-canonical patterns of constituent order concerning peripheral positions in clausal structure deserve a specific treatment, and are thus also excluded from the contents of this chapter: dislocations are the topic of Chapter 13 Dislocation and framings, and Focus Fronting is the topic of Chapter 14 (though some constructions described in Section 3 are closely related to Focus Fronting, and thus connected to the cluster of phenomena currently analyzed under the label of Left Periphery; ↗16 Interrogatives). According to these two conditions, only a limited set of facts involving constituent order is considered. (b) Second, and following a well-established use in linguistic typology, we will assume that when different word order patterns are available in a single language – which is by far the commonest situation – one of them is considered as the basic, canonical or unmarked order, and the rest are taken as non-canonical or marked. The main criteria for determining the basic word order are pragmatic neutrality, textual frequency and formal markedness. Pragmatic neutrality is the most relevant one: the  





subject occupies the initial position, and to the XVS order, with subject inversion, when a constituent other than the subject is placed in initial position. The examples in (i)–(iii), from Kaiser (2002), illustrate the V2 property in Swiss Romansh (Sursilvan). (i) RtR. La dunna ha legiu in cudisch. read a book the woman have.PRS . 3SG ‘The woman has read a book.’ (ii) In cudisch ha la dunna legiu. (iii) *In cudisch la dunna ha legiu. The existence of a strict V2 syntax in modern times in Rhaeto-Romance may be due to prolonged German influence (Haiman 1988; Kaiser/Hack 2013). However, V2 has often been considered a typical property of Old Romance. This issue is briefly discussed again in Section 5.2.

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basic word order should be the stylistically neutral formal pattern that is compatible with the greatest variety of contexts, i.e. the one that imposes the least number of restrictions on possible contexts of use. Marked orders typically place heavier constraints on contexts, and are thus compatible with fewer discourse environments – sometimes they specialize in one or two particular contexts. As for textual frequency, the basic word order is assumed to be the most frequent, though this is not always a reliable criterion, since frequency may vary from one type of text to another. With respect to markedness, the basic word order should be less complex than its competitors. In the Romance domain, as already indicated, it is SVO that is usually considered as the basic word order. It is important to recall that, although SVO can alternate with other patterns in many contexts, and in most cases Romance word order shows a remarkable degree of flexibility, Romance languages are not “free word order languages”. The classical procedure for establishing the compatibility of a pattern with respect to different contexts is the question test: by checking what kind of questions an utterance could be an answer to, it is possible to determine the nature of the constraints that a specific word order places on possible contexts. The Spanish SVO example in (1), for instance, could be used to answer any of the three questions in (2) – this holds for SVO examples in any other Romance language, and confirms the pragmatic neutrality of SVO.  



(1)

Sp.

Joaquín terminó el the Joaquín finish.PST . 3SG ‘Joaquín finished the painting.’

cuadro. painting

(2)

Sp.

a. ¿Qué pasó? what happen.PST . 3SG ‘What happened?’ b. ¿Qué hizo Joaquín? Joaquín what do.PST . 3SG ‘What did Joaquín do?’ c. ¿Qué terminó Joaquín? Joaquín what finish.PST . 3SG ‘What did Joaquín finish?’

In what follows the question test will be repeatedly invoked to show what the difference is between SVO and its competitors. (c) Examining the contextual conditions for choosing one order or another in a language leads us to formulate the basic assumptions for investigating word order. The following three ideas are essential starting points for this overview. 1. It is important to distinguish aspects of constituent order that are syntactically determined from aspects that result from the communicative choices of the speaker.

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The first are strictly obligatory, leave no room for optionality, and are thus devoid of any interpretive load; the most representative case is subject inversion triggered by the fronting of interrogative and exclamative expressions (↗16 Interrogatives, ↗17 Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives), illustrated by the contrast in (3) in Italian, or by the fronting of a phrase interpreted as a contrastive or emphatic focus (↗14 Focus Fronting), illustrated by the contrast in (4) in Spanish.  

(3) It.

a. Come sta tua your how be.PRS . 3SG ‘How is your mother?’ b. *Come tua madre sta?

madre? mother

(4) Sp.

a. UN MERCEDES se ha CL have.PRS . 3SG a Mercedes ‘A Mercedes [is what] Jorge bought.’ b. *UN MERCEDES Jorge se ha comprado.

comprado bought

Jorge. Jorge

In both constructions fronting of a constituent (by wh-movement or Focus Fronting) bans the possibility of having preverbal subjects; as VS becomes obligatory, it has no interpretive effects. By contrast, modifications of word order that depend on the speaker’s choice are usually significant: it is the case of subject inversion when it is not syntactically triggered (in so-called “free inversion”). In this chapter, only this second case is considered, and marked orders in non-declarative sentences will thus not be treated. 2. If word order can have interpretive effects, the question arises how to describe its contribution to meaning. The best way to capture such a contribution is to assume that word order encodes instructions concerning information packaging, i.e. it reflects the speaker’s assumptions about the hearer’s state of mind – what is already known to him, what is new information, what is still active in his short term memory. Word order instructs the hearer about how to integrate linguistic information into the set of contextual assumptions available for interpretation; as already pointed out, it determines the compatibility of a sentence with different discourse environments. The part of the grammatical system that controls the design of information packaging is known as Information Structure (IS). Therefore, word order, together with intonation and possibly other grammatical devices, encodes instructions related to IS – though it does not necessarily determine every aspect of IS. Researchers in comparative syntax try to ascertain to what extent word order can be used for information packaging in different languages – or, from another perspective, how much effect IS has on the linear disposition of syntactic elements. 3. Once the way in which word order contributes to sentence meaning has been introduced, we need to know what descriptive tools IS provides the linguist with. In this chapter only two basic notions will be relevant: the concept of (sentence) topic,  

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and the focus/background distinction. The topic is the constituent that refers to what is talked about in a sentence, hence the more specific term aboutness topic. It occupies a prominent position, typically the initial one. In (1), when the sentence pairs with questions like (2b) or (2c), it is natural to understand that the topic is the subject, the name Joaquín. In SVO, in fact, the subject is the unmarked topic. Marking a nonsubject as topic usually requires a special construction, dislocation or topicalization (↗13 Dislocations and framings). Topics tend to convey given information, but this is not a necessary condition for being a topic. A related notion is that of stage topic (cf. Erteschik-Shir 1997; Lahousse 2011): locative and temporal expressions can play the role of sentence topic when no other aboutness topic is present (for instance, in V-initial orders): when they specify the frame within which the predication holds, they are considered as stage topics.2 There is an important correlation between subject inversion in Romance and the presence of stage topics. As for the focus/background distinction, it will play a major role in our treatment of word order. It is traditionally assumed that focus is represented by the constituent carrying new, noteworthy information, and thus providing answers to the possible questions that the sentence could be related to in a discourse context; for instance, in (1) the focus could be the object DP – if the question is (2c), or the predicate (the VP) – if the question is (2b), or even the entire sentence – if the question is (2a). In the first case, with focus on the object DP only, we have an instance of narrow focus; in the remaining cases, focus extends to a wider syntactic constituent, and we have instances of broad focus/wide focus. When all the material in the sentence is in focus, it is usual to characterize the sentence as thetic or all-focus; thetic sentences typically present a situation as a single unit of information, with no focus-background or aboutness topic-comment partition (though thetic sentences are in fact associated with a stage topic). If a syntactic constituent represents the focus, the rest of the sentence is called background, and is understood as conveying given or presupposed information. Both focus-background and topic-comment are basic informational partitions. Relating a word order pattern with IS means imposing some kind of informational partition or split on it that specifies the way its propositional content must fit into the context. More precisely, word order has the role of constraining informational partitions. A different, but compatible, way to define the notion of focus is to assume that focus provides a set of contextual alternatives that are relevant for interpretation. Alternatives play a role in contextualizing interpretation since they relate the sentence to a particular question that has to be solved: for instance, if narrow focus on the

2 For instance, in (i), from Erteschik-Shir (1997, 27), the stage topic is implicit, and corresponds to the here-and-now of the utterance: (i) It is raining. The utterance is assessed by examining the situation to see if it is true that it is raining there. The stage topic is explicit in examples like Now it is raining and There it is raining.

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object in (1) is considered, the relevant question will be (2c), and the hearer will have to take into account a set of alternative propositions of the form Joaquín finished x as part of the context. For our purposes, an intuitive idea of focus will suffice to understand the role of word order. One last basic assumption that is needed is that ordinary, unmarked focus – what is usually called informational focus – corresponds by default to the rightmost constituent in VO languages like the ones in the Romance family. In (1) this includes the three options we considered: the object DP, the predicate, and the entire sentence, if so-called focus projection takes place. In the rightmost position the focused constituent is assigned sentence nuclear stress, since focused elements must be prosodically prominent. If a different constituent has to be focused, the speaker resorts to a marked strategy, either prosodic – with emphatic stress – or syntactic – with fronting plus emphatic stress. However, such marked devices are outside the scope of this chapter (↗14 Focus Fronting). This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 is devoted to subject inversion, i.e. to those patterns of word order in which the subject is placed after the verb, thus departing from the basic, canonical SVO: special attention is paid to the distribution of the VOS and VSO patterns. Section 3 deals with a special kind of fronting construction, in which a non-subject constituent occurs in preverbal position and relegates the subject to a postverbal position. In this case, subject inversion is a result of the fronting of another constituent. Section 4 is a brief review of reordering and scrambling phenomena that are usually considered as minor aspects of constituent order from a comparative point of view, but still deserve some attention. In Section 5 the diachronic perspective is added, in order to obtain a wider picture of word order facts in Romance that encompasses the evolution from Latin to the medieval Romance varieties, and the changes that led to the configuration of modern Romance languages. Section 6 contains the conclusions.  



2 Subject inversion 2.1 The properties of VS All Romance languages, except French and to a certain extent Brazilian Portuguese, are null subject languages, i.e. they have the option of having null DPs as subjects (↗2 Subjects). As null subject languages, they also display a correlated property, namely subject inversion: the subject can be licensed either in a preverbal or in a postverbal position. Even French actually displays this option, though subject to heavier constraints than other Romance languages. Thus, the SV/VS alternation is generally available in Romance. What is its communicative role? It is obviously related to IS. If the SV pattern is chosen, an instruction is conveyed to take the subject as the aboutness topic, thus establishing a topic-comment partition, or alternatively to assign a thetic, all-focus reading, to the sentence, possibly with stage topic 



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comment as the only possible informational partition. The first option is by default preferred. If, on the other hand, the VS pattern is chosen, the interpretation of the subject as a topic is excluded: VS conveys the instruction to assign a focal reading to the subject, either as narrow focus or as a part of wide focus. This is a basic feature of verb-initial orders in Romance. It is the flexibility of Romance syntax that counts as the key factor for defining the mapping from word order onto IS. The preference for a topic-comment interpretation of Romance SV(O) is a consequence of optionality: if the speaker has chosen the SVO option, VS being an alternative grammatical possibility, it is reasonable to infer that the interpretive effect of this choice is one that would be unavailable with VS, i.e. that the subject be understood as topic. What motivates SVO in a language that allows for VS is the possibility of triggering informational partitions that cannot be obtained by means of an alternative order. Notice that this means that preverbal subjects are not necessarily topical, and that their ultimate informational value is pragmatically inferred. Of course, the extended preference for subjects as topics may be overridden if certain factors conspire to impose another interpretation, namely a thetic one, with the subject as a part of wide focus. How is the precise interpretation of SV and VS accessed by the hearer? In a few cases it is fully specified by the grammar, but in most occasions it is pragmatically inferred on the basis of the condition encoded in the syntax plus the information provided by a small set of factors that determine the plausibility of informational partitions. The main relevant factors are the argument structure of predicates, lexical aspect, and the thematic prominence of arguments (cf. Sornicola 1994 for an analysis of the factors conditioning inversion). Argument structure is important because it is well known that intransitive – monoargumental – verbs favor VS, partly because a simple combination of verb plus argument is the ideal format for a thetic, all-focus interpretation, with the subject “integrated” into the predicate. Such integration is harder to obtain when the predicate is transitive. The class of verbs that most clearly gives rise to inversion structures is unaccusatives, i.e. intransitive verbs with an internal argument as subject – among them, verbs of motion, appearance and change of state. Lexical aspect also plays a crucial role. Stative predicates – in particular, socalled individual-level predicates – tend to block integration, since they require a topic-comment partition, and do not make good candidates for subject inversion (except when the inverted subject is under narrow focus). Eventive predicates, on the other hand, favor the integration of arguments into complex predicates – thus, without partitions – and make subject inversion much easier. Incidentally, most unaccusative verbs are aspectually eventive. Grammatical aspect, or point of view aspect, is also an important factor in the acceptability of inversion. Finally, the degree of prominence of thematic roles is relevant too (Contreras 1978; Gutiérrez Bravo 2007). While non-prominent roles such as theme or patient favor integration of the argument into a complex predicate and do not call for an informational partition, prominent roles such as agent – the highest ones in the thematic  



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hierarchy – tend to require a partition: topic-comment, by default, or alternatively focus-background. This means that, when the predicate has no external or prominent argument, it will be easier to have informational integration and obtain a wide focus reading by means of inversion, whereas, if the predicate has a prominent argument as subject, integration will be hindered and subject inversion will tend to include a partition, with the subject under narrow focus. Internal, non-prominent thematic roles fit well in presentational contexts where new referents are introduced in the discourse. According to this, inversion with unaccusative verbs and wide focus interpretation should be the most natural and widespread kind of inversion, followed by inversion with unergatives – intransitive verbs with prominent subjects – and by inversion with transitive verbs, the case in which inversion is subject to the highest number of constraints. A brief illustration of the effects that these factors can have is given by the contrast in (5), with two SVO sentences in Spanish. (5) Sp.

a. El Sevilla elimina al Valencia. to-the Valencia the Seville eliminate.PRS . 3SG ‘Seville eliminates Valencia.’ b. Mi vecino tiene dos hijas. daughters my neighbor have.PRS . 3SG two ‘My neighbor has two daughters.’

While the most natural reading of (5a) is thetic,3 (5b) can only have a categorical reading, one with a topic-comment partition. The contrast is due to the aspectual features of the two verbs: eliminar ‘eliminate’ is eventive, and takes an agent as subject argument, but tener ‘have’ is stative and its subject is interpreted as a possessor. Thus, even though both verbs are transitive, they have opposite effects in the calculation of informational partitions. This said, our review of subject inversion in Romance starts with the simplest cases, namely inversion with intransitive verbs (the patterns involving transitive verbs will be examined in Sections 2.3 and 2.4). Due to their aspectual and thematic properties, unaccusative verbs (↗4 Argument structure and argument structure alternations) give rise to subject inversion as their default syntactic expression, as shown in the examples in (6), where the inverted subjects are in bold. (6) a. Fr.

Alors sont arrivés trois then be.PRS . 3PL arrived three ‘Then three armed men arrived.’ (Marandin 2003, 347)

hommes men

3 A topic-comment partition is also possible in (5a) in the appropriate context.

en in

armes. arms

Basic constituent orders

Faltam poucos meses para few months for be.PRS . 3PL ‘It’s few months until the elections.’ c. Rom. A căzut o bombă în bomb in have.PRS . 3SG fallen a ‘A bomb fell in the garden.’ d. It. Si è sciolta la neve. CL be.PRS . 3SG melted the snow ‘The snow melted.’ e. Sp. Quedan pocos tomates. few tomatoes be.PRS . 3PL -left ‘There are few tomatoes left.’

b. Pt.

as the

895

eleições. elections

grădină. garden

Notice that in French this ordinary kind of inversion requires the insertion of some element in preverbal position, either an expletive pronoun or an expression that counts as a stage topic. In the remaining languages stage topics may be implicit. However, some qualifications are in order. First, inversion with unaccusative and presentative predicates is not strictly obligatory, and most unaccusative verbs are also perfectly compatible with SV order; in such case, a categorical reading of the sentence, with a topic-comment partition, is strongly favored. Second, unergative verbs occur in VS sentences not only with a narrow focus reading for the subject, but also with a wide focus reading, under certain conditions, as in the examples in (7); at the same time, not all unaccusatives fit equally well in wide focus inversion, as shown in Benincà et al. (1988) and Tortora (2001) for Italian, with contrasts like the one in (8): both arrivare ‘arrive’ and partire ‘leave’ are unaccusative, but only the first selects a Goal locative argument, implicit in (8a), and the absence of such a locative in (8b) – in an unmarked context – is responsible for the slight anomaly of inversion and the difficulty of obtaining a wide focus reading4 (in fact, the subject Maria would only receive a narrow-focus, contrastive reading in [8b]).

4 The contrast in (8) is not equally salient for all speakers of Italian. For those that accept it, it is most probably related to the connection between wide focus inversion and stage topics: a predicate that selects a goal locative argument provides an accessible stage topic that favors inversion (cf. Benincà et al. 1988, 124), whereas a predicate lacking such an argument requires the presence of some additional factor for wide focus inversion to succeed (for instance, a second internal argument) – otherwise, a narrow focus reading must be assigned to the subject. Other factors, such as grammatical aspect and (in)definiteness, may alter acceptability judgements. This confirms the relevance of the notions wide focus / narrow focus for the acceptability of inversion patterns in Romance; further evidence is presented in Sections 2.3 and 2.4.

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(7) a. Sp.

b. Fr.

c. It.

(8) It.

Ha llamado el called the have. PRS . 3SG ‘The lawyer called.ʼ Il souffle un vent wind it blow.PRS . 3SG a ‘A north wind is blowing.’ Sta piangendo la crying the be.PRS . 3SG ‘The child is crying.’

abogado. lawyer du of-the

nord. north

bimba. child

a. Arriva Maria. arrive.PRS . 3SG Maria ‘Maria is arriving.’ b. #Parte Maria. Maria leave.PRS . 3SG ‘Maria is leaving.’

The possibility of having wide focus in VS with unergative verbs is actually much clearer in Spanish and Romanian than in French, Catalan, Italian and Portuguese. This fact is only a particular manifestation of a systematic property of Spanish and Romanian that will take form in the next sections. Third, there is another class of verbs that is intimately connected to subject inversion, but is unrelated to unaccusativity, namely communication verbs. They give rise to what is usually called Quotative Inversion. The examples in (9) and (10), from Matos (2013), show that quotative inversion is obligatory in Portuguese and Spanish; this is a common pattern in Romance, again due to the focal nature of the subject in the construction. (9) Pt.

a. É tarde! – disse late say.PST . 3SG be.PRS . 3SG ‘It’s late! – said the boy.’ b. *É tarde! – o rapaz disse.

(10) Sp.

a. No es un enanito – rectifica dwarf correct.PRS . 3SG not be.PRS . 3SG a ‘It’s not a dwarf – corrects the old man.’ b. *No es un enanito – el viejo rectifica.

o the

rapaz. boy

el viejo. the old-man

The case of Brazilian Portuguese is significantly different from what we find in the rest of the Romance domain. The language has undergone a series of syntactic changes that distinguish it from its close relative European Portuguese. The main change is that Brazilian Portuguese is losing the possibility of licensing null subjects and, as a

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result, the related property of subject inversion. The consequences can be observed both with intransitive verbs and in inversion with transitives (cf. Costa/Figueiredo Silva 2006). The first case is illustrated in (11), which reflects the judgements of Brazilian speakers, in striking opposition to the corresponding judgements of speakers from Portugal;5 the second case corresponds to the examples in (12), where inversion is excluded regardless of the focus domain, wide or narrow. (11) BPt. – Quem tossiu? who cough.PST . 3SG ʻWho coughed?ʼ a. – *Tossiu um a cough.PST . 3SG b. – UM MENINO ‘A child coughed.’

menino. child tossiu.

(12) BPt. – O que é que aconteceu? / that happen.PST . 3SG the what be.PRS . 3SG Quem comeu o bolo? the cake who eat.PST .3SG ‘What happened?’ / ‘Who ate the cake?’ a. – *Comeu o João o bolo. the João the cake eat.PST . 3SG b. – *Comeu o bolo o João. c. – {O João / O JOÃO} comeu o ‘João ate the cake.’

bolo.

Focused subjects cannot occur in postverbal position in Brazilian Portuguese. They are marked as focused elements by heavy stress in preverbal position, because once the syntax of Brazilian Portuguese had evolved to a stage in which subject inversion was banned or severely constrained, and SV order was the only option left, the language exploited what would otherwise be a marked strategy for expressing focus – emphatic stress – as a last resort operation, instead of relying on word order. This is not totally

5 Subject inversion seems to be acceptable in Brazilian Portuguese only in a restricted set of environments with unaccusative predicates and wide focus interpretation, as in (i) and (ii), with different positions for indefinite and definite DPs: (i) Apareceu um menino na reunião. a child in-the meeting appear.PST . 3S G ‘A child appeared at the meeting.’ (ii) Apareceu na reunião o João. in-the meeting the João appear.PST . 3S G ‘João appeared at the meeting.’

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impossible in other Romance varieties – for instance, in Argentinian Spanish, according to Gabriel (2010) – but represents a marginal option for informational focus. It is relevant to point out that also in European Portuguese, according to recent research (Eide 2006), there has been a shift in the frequencies of SV and VS from the eighteenth century on: a clear decrease of inversion patterns took place in the last three centuries, both in transitive and intransitive constructions, even with unaccusative verbs. In the analysis of subject inversion it is convenient to distinguish the constructions in which VS freely alternates with SV from those in which VS is triggered by the occurrence of some element in initial position. The data presented until now – and those that will follow in the rest of Section 2 – correspond to the first case, which we can refer to as absolute inversion (inversion absolue in the French tradition; cf. Lahousse 2011, ch. 2) or as verb-initial order. In the second case, when inversion is triggered by fronting of a non-subject, inversion becomes obligatory and devoid of interpretive effects; as already pointed out, this kind of inversion is beyond the scope of this chapter. In spite of this announced exclusion, some aspects of this kind of inversion will be dealt with in Section 3.2.1.

2.2 Constraints on VOS All Romance languages display VOS sentences.6 The core meaning of VOS is the same in all cases: VOS encodes an instruction to limit informational focus to the postverbal subject, i.e. to interpret the subject as narrow focus. This complies with the general requirement to align informational focus with the most prominent stress in the sentence, i.e. as the rightmost constituent in the sentence. VOS typically appears in the answer to a question about the subject: the natural context for the examples in (13) is a question like Who did X?, which guarantees that the content of the VO sequence is discourse-given and acts as the background.7  



(13) a. Pt.

b. Sp.

Comeu a sopa o soup the eat.PST . 3SG the ‘It was Paulo who ate the soup.’ (Costa 2000a, b) Ganó la Copa el Cup the win.PST . 3SG the ‘It was Barça that won the Cup.’

Paulo. Paulo

Barça. Barça

6 It is important to note that from now on we deal with inversion patterns such as VOS and VSO with a neutral intonation, i.e. without intonational breaks. If one of the constituents were dislocated or placed in an external position, we would have a different word order pattern. 7 Lahousse (2011, ch. 4) demonstrates that in French VOS, VO behaves as a unitary constituent, which is correlated with the strict focus-background partition that such word order imposes in French.  

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899

Ha mangiato la torta un gatto. eaten the cake a cat have.PRS . 3SG ‘It was a cat who ate the cake.’ (Benincà et al. 1988) d. Fr. Paieront une amende tous les automobilistes a fine all the drivers pay.FUT . 3PL en infraction. in infraction ‘All drivers in breach of the law will pay a fine.’ (Lahousse/Lamiroy 2012) e. Cat. Havia comprat la casa el metge. bought the house the doctor have.PST . 3SG ‘It was the doctor who bought the house.’ f. Rom. Scrie un articol Ion. article Ion write.PRS . 3SG an ‘It is Ion who writes an article.’ (Soare 2009) c. It.

In Italian, Catalan and Portuguese (Benincà et al. 1988; Zubizarreta 1998; 1999; Costa 2000a,b; 2004; Vallduví 2002; Belletti 2004; Vanrell/Fernández Soriano 2013), a preference has been repeatedly signaled for a “lighter” structure with the object cliticized or even dislocated, as in the examples in (14): briefly, in these languages there is a tendency to reduce the weight of the background constituent – VO – to maintain the focus-background partition. Spanish does not seem to be sensitive to these factors. (14) a. It. b. Cat. c. Pt.

(La torta), l’ha mangiata un gatto (, la torta). ‘The cake, it was a cat that ate it.’ (La casa,) l’havia comprat el metge (, la casa). ‘The house, it was the doctor who had bought it.’ (A sopa,) comeu o Paulo. ‘The soup, it was Paulo who ate it.’

These facts reveal that in several Romance languages VOS, though being a grammatical option, is subject to certain constraints that are possibly related to processing and to the “heaviness” of the background constituent. On the contrary, as pointed out in Zubizarreta (1998, 135), inversion in Spanish is not sensitive to any constraint based on the relative heaviness of postverbal constituents. There is, in fact, cross-linguistic variation in the conditions that determine the use of VOS. Lahousse (2007) and Lahousse/Lamiroy (2012) have shown that the discourse functions of VOS differ in French, Spanish and Italian. French is the most restrictive language: in VOS, the postverbal subject must be interpreted as exhaustive identificational focus – a specific

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interpretation of narrow focus by which the subject is intended to identify all and only the referents that satisfy the predicate (cf. the notion of ‘inversion focus’ defined in Lahousse 2011). It seems that a simple interpretation of the subject as new information is not enough to license VOS, and examples like (15) are deemed unacceptable in Lahousse/Lamiroy (2012); on the other hand, contexts such as enumerations and definitions in administrative texts, together with the presence of focus particles such as seul ‘only’, provide an optimal support for the acceptability of VOS, as shown in (16). lettre letter

une a

étudiante. student

(15) Fr.

*A écrit la written the have.PRS . 3SG ‘A student wrote the letter.’

(16) Fr.

a. Seuls comptent le travail et la discipline. the work and the discipline only count.PRS . 3PL ‘It’s only work and discipline that count.’ b. Recevront un bulletin de vote les étudiants et ballot paper the students and receive.FUT . 3PL a le personnel académique. the staff academic ‘Students as well as academic staff will receive a ballot paper.’

Italian is not as restrictive as French, since speakers admit the use of VOS with a basic new information reading for the subject, not necessarily exhaustive, but is certainly not as permissive as Spanish. Lahousse (2007, 393) points out that a wide focus interpretation is not excluded in Italian VOS, as the default interpretation of (17) confirms: (17) could be used as an answer to a What’s happening? question. (17) It.

Prende il microfono il direttore tecnico Ross Brown. technical Ross Brown take.PRS . 3SG the microphone the director ‘The technical manager Ross Brown takes the microphone.’

Catalan, Romanian and Portuguese behave essentially like Italian (Ordóñez 1998; Alboiu 1999; López 2009), while Spanish is the least restrictive of Romance languages as far as VOS is concerned – we will see that this is not an isolated fact, but a particular case of a more general cross-linguistic difference. Though the common assumption (Zubizarreta 1998, 125; 1999, 4233) is, again, that Spanish VOS is always associated with narrow focus on the subject, it is true that a wide focus reading is also perfectly possible, if the usual factors – aspect, thematic roles, indefiniteness of the subject, prosodic phrasing – favor it, as in the example in (18).

Basic constituent orders

(18) Sp.

Ha comprado el edificio the building have.PRS . 3SG bought ‘A Chinese company bought the building.’

una a

empresa company

901

china. Chinese

To sum up, following the conclusions reached by Lahousse/Lamiroy (2012), what we have is a scale that goes from the most restrictive conditions on VOS (French) to the least restrictive (Spanish): the scale in (19) reflects an ongoing grammaticalization process “which is more advanced in French than in Italian, and more in Italian than in Spanish” (Lahousse/Lamiroy 2012, 14). (19) Narrow focus with exhaustive interpretation < narrow focus (contrastive or not) < both narrow and wide focus The degree of grammaticalization of word order patterns is determined by the amount of constraints on focus structure that are active in each language. The number of constraints is the lowest in the least grammaticalized system, Spanish. The distribution of VOS has a functional counterpart in the distribution of cleft sentences, as the two constructions can be described as specificational sentences: the decrease in discourse functions for VOS is compensated by an increase in the use of clefts, which is confirmed by the more frequent use of clefts in French compared to Italian and Spanish (cf. Lahousse 2007; Lahousse/Lamiroy 2012). A look at the distribution of VOS shows that grammatical variation in this domain in Romance depends on the constraints that each language puts on the mapping between syntax and IS. Focus structure, with the distinction between wide and narrow focus, is the key notion. Further confirmation of these assumptions comes from the other inversion pattern with transitive verbs, VSO.

2.3 The distribution of VSO While all Romance languages employ VOS to a certain extent, VSO gives rise to a neat asymmetry between two groups of languages: Spanish, European Portuguese8 and Romanian accept it, but French, Catalan, Italian and Sardinian – the central Romance languages – reject it, as shown by the contrast between (20) and (21), where inverted subjects are marked in bold (Ordóñez 1998; 2007; Zubizarreta 1998; 1999; Bossong 1998; Costa 2000a,b; 2004; Belletti 2004; Soare 2009; Gallego 2013; Leonetti 2014a,b).

8 Whereas European Portuguese accepts VSO, Brazilian Portuguese excludes this option, as shown above in example (12). This is expected, due to the heavy restrictions that Brazilian Portuguese places on subject inversion.

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Ha comprado María bought María have.PRS . 3SG ‘María bought the newspaper.’ b. Pt. Partiu o Paulo a Paulo the break.PST . 3SG the ‘Paulo broke the window.’ c. Rom. A făcut mama o made mom a have.PRS . 3SG ‘Mom made a cake.’

(20) a. Sp.

el the

periódico. newspaper

janela. window prăjitură. cake

*Ha comprato Maria il giornale. bought Maria the newspaper have.PRS . 3SG ‘Maria bought the newspaper.’ b. Cat. *Ha comprat la Maria el diari. bought the Maria the newspaper have.PRS . 3SG ‘Maria bought the newspaper.’ c. Fr. *A acheté Marie le journal. bought Marie the newspaper have.PRS . 3SG ‘Marie bought the newspaper.’ d. Srd. *A’ tankatu karkunu su barkone. shut someone the window have.PRS . 3SG ‘Someone shut the window.’ (Jones 1988, 339)

(21) a. It.

In the languages that allow for both VOS and VSO, the two orders clearly differ in their informational properties. Whereas VOS is designed to encode narrow focus on the subject, VSO is usually associated to a thetic, wide focus interpretation: both subject and object are inside the focal domain, and narrow focus on only one of them is excluded (cf. Costa 2004, 88–90 for the ban against narrow focus on the rightmost constituent in VSO). Thus, the main feature of VSO is that it precludes any internal informational partition. In Spanish and Romanian it is adequate for answering neutral What happened? questions, and it acts as a device to present events as single informational units, which makes it much more restrictive than SVO. In Romanian, it is often considered as the basic, unmarked word order, due to its frequency (cf. Soare 2009, 32). According to Costa (2000a,b; 2004), VSO in Portuguese corresponds to a slightly different discourse context: both subject and object must be new information, as in (22), and the subject must bear heavy stress, but this is not the adequate way to communicate that the whole sentence is in focus in Portuguese. (22) Pt.

A: –

Ninguém sabe línguas languages nobody know.PRS . 3SG ‘Nobody speaks languages in this group.’

neste in-this

grupo. group

Basic constituent orders

B: –

Sabe o Paulo know.PRS . 3SG the Paulo ‘Paulo speaks French.’

903

francês. French

There seems to be some dialectal variation in Spanish: whereas verb-initial sequences are widely attested in European Spanish, certain varieties, like Mexican Spanish (Gutiérrez Bravo 2007), tend to reject VSO if some element does not occupy the initial position.9 A preference for XVSO in contrast with VSO has also been noticed in the literature (cf. Zubizarreta 1998, 101; Sheehan 2010), but it is possibly due to the role of initial stage topics for the acceptability of subject inversion: as thetic sentences must be connected to a stage topic, inserting an explicit constituent, mostly locative or temporal, in initial position simply provides the stage topic, or contextual anchor, that otherwise – in verb-initial sentences – is covert, and therefore makes contextualization easier. So this is just another instance of the well-known correlation between stage topics and wide focus inversion. The dividing line drawn by VSO in Romance is obviously related to the existence of more or less restrictive systems with respect to subject inversion, with French as the most restrictive grammar and Spanish as the least restrictive one, as already pointed out in the previous section. There are two possible ways to account for this kind of variation. One is to assume that the (un)availability of VSO is a purely syntactic matter, either because less restrictive languages display an extra postverbal position for subjects – different from the one involved in VOS – that is not available in more restrictive languages (cf. Ordóñez 1998; 2007; Gallego 2013), or because the licensing conditions for the direct object in VSO are different in the two groups of languages (Belletti 2004). A strictly syntactic approach, in any case, can hardly explain the informational properties of VSO and its place in a global view of IS marking in Romance. An alternative way to tackle the problem consists in locating the difference between the two groups in the mapping from syntactic structure to IS, as proposed in Leonetti (2014b). In the previous sections some data were introduced that supported a

9 It is worth mentioning, however, that, surprisingly, VSO is precisely one of the hallmarks of the typical style of Mexican newspaper headlines. The following examples appeared in the El Universal newspaper: (i) Elogia Bush al senado por reformas. RS . 3S G Bush to-the senate for reforms praise.PPRS ‘Bush praises the senate for reforms.’ (ii) Celebra Fox reforma migratoria en EU. reform migratory in USA celebrate.PRS . 3SG Fox ‘Fox celebrates immigration reform in USA.’ (iii) Bate cuadro de Frida récord de arte latinoamericano. picture of Frida record of art Latin-American beat.PRS . 3SG ‘A painting by Frida beats the record in Latin American art.’

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view of Romance languages as elements occupying different points along a scale that goes from the most restrictive pole (French) to the least restrictive one (Spanish, Romanian), presumably showing a continuum of grammaticalization degrees. Such a scale reflects the constraints that each language places on word order patterns, and the constraints concern IS, in particular focus structure. If this is correct, then the distribution of VSO should fit in the scale as a result of the relative restrictiveness of languages in the encoding of conditions on informational focus. Some Romance languages show a strong tendency to impose neat informational partitions (either topic-comment, or focus-background) on marked orders, as soon as the basic factors that favor partitions are met – aspect, thematic prominence, number of arguments and complexity. French, Italian and Catalan are the main representatives of this group, to which we can refer as the Central Romance group (Brazilian Portuguese shares important properties with Central Romance, in particular constraints on subject inversion). Particularly in informal use, they make a pervasive use of syntactic devices such as dislocation, focus fronting and cleft sentences to avoid the formation of complex sequences without partitions; as a result, very strict conditions limit the occurrence of wide focus readings (basically, they are reduced to SVO and VS with unaccusative verbs and presentative predicates). An interesting piece of evidence for this tendency is the fact that non-focal constituents in Italian and Catalan must systematically undergo detachment (left or right dislocation) in order to minimize the weight of the focal domain: the syntactic organization of the Catalan example in (23), from Vallduví (1995, 128), is a clear manifestation of this information packaging strategy. (23) Cat.

L’hi ficarem, al calaix, CL - CL put.FUT . 1PL at-the drawer ‘We will put the knife in the drawer.’

el the

ganivet. knife

Spanish and Romanian, again, show the opposite tendency: they are less restrictive, in the sense that they allow for wide focus readings not only in SVO and VS, but also in marked orders, as we noticed for VOS. In this group of languages, the choice between wide or narrow focus in interpretation is often context-dependent, and not strictly encoded in the syntax of word order. Thus, marked orders without informational partitions are accepted more naturally than in Central Romance. To sum up, two ways of mapping the syntactic configuration into IS emerge. In Central Romance, the mapping is quite straightforward and maximally transparent: this is achieved by means of formal strategies that encode informational partitions. In Spanish and Romanian, the mapping is less straightforward and grammar underdetermines interpretation to a major extent – though the same syntactic strategies for managing partitions are, of course, also available. As the processing of marked orders is less constrained, and there is low sensitivity to the factors determining informational integration, even patterns like VSO are acceptable and interpreted as single informa-

Basic constituent orders

905

tional chunks. This is the sense in which these languages can be characterized as “permissive”. Central Romance languages, being more restrictive, cannot accept VSO without partitions: they are highly sensitive to the factors that control informational integration, and such factors tend to block integration in VSO (due to the presence of two verbal arguments, one of them thematically prominent and interfering in the dependency relation between V and O). Therefore, they exclude this pattern, and the VSO asymmetry is derived from the way syntax maps into IS. The grammaticality of VSO in Romance ultimately depends on the eventual success of the integration process. This approach, if correct, opens the way for integrating the problem of the distribution of VSO in the wider context of subject inversion in Romance.

2.4 Generalizations on subject inversion From this panorama of Romance subject inversion three generalizations emerge that allow us to put some order in the data: (a) All Romance languages display some kind of subject inversion, even French, which is a non null subject language10, and Brazilian Portuguese, which is becoming a non null subject language. (b) The distribution of subject inversion reflects a scale of “markedness” that goes from the simplest, core cases of VS with unaccusatives in presentational contexts to the most complex case of inversion with transitive verbs, VSO. The scale is reproduced in (24). (24) unaccusative inversion > VS with unergatives > VOS > VSO The markedness status of different inversion types predicts that as we proceed towards the right pole, constraints on inversion become heavier: unaccusative inversion – i.e. wide focus inversion with a presentative value – is the least constrained, followed by VS with unergatives, and the two inversion patterns with transitives occupy the rightmost half of the scale, with VOS being usually subject to strong restrictions and VSO being even excluded in a large linguistic area. It is expected that the least marked patterns be the most widespread, and, conversely, that the most marked ones be the least natural and common. If comparative data are placed along the scale, a hierarchy of languages appears, probably mirroring a more general hierarchy based on degrees of grammaticalization, as proposed in Lahousse/Lamiroy (2012): the languages we characterized as “restrictive” accept only the least marked kinds of inversion and put severe restrictions on the marked ones, or even reject them, whereas the languages we described as “permissive” accept any kind of inversion.  

10 See Vermandere/Lahousse (2016) for arguments supporting this view.

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Table 1 provides a global view of the distribution of inversion, and shows that the restrictive vs permissive distinction sets apart the group comprising Brazilian Portuguese, French, Catalan and Italian from the group of European Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish (the table does not include data from Sardinian, Occitan, Sicilian or Rhaeto-Romance). Table 1: Distribution of inversion in Romance unaccusative VS

unergative VS

VOS

VSO

Brazilian Portuguese



?

*

*

French



√ (constrained)

√ (highly constrained)

*

Catalan





√ (constrained)

*

Italian





√ (constrained)

*

European Portuguese





√ (constrained)



Romanian









Spanish









(c) The position each language occupies in the hierarchy depends on the extent to which it allows for wide focus interpretation in inversion, i.e. a reading without informational partitions. As shown in Table 1, all languages admit unaccusative inversion, the context where wide focus is the most natural reading;11 all of them – except Brazilian Portuguese – accept VS with unergatives, but French bans wide focus readings (the core cases of “inversion focus” in Lahousse 2011), and Catalan and Italian tend to exclude them; a similar situation obtains with VOS, where French absolutely rejects wide focus, Italian, Catalan and European Portuguese allow for it with strong limitations, and the permissive languages seem to accept it; finally, as wide focus is the only interpretive option for VSO – with some proviso for Portuguese –, it is possible only in the three permissive languages. To sum up, there is cross-linguistic variation in the distribution of subject inversion, and this variation is related to the conditions that control the mapping of syntactic configuration onto IS. The phenomena described in the following sections provide further support for the generalizations on inversion.  





11 Recall that French is restrictive even in unaccusative/presentational inversion: absolute inversion with wide focus is excluded, and some initial constituent representing a stage topic is needed for inversion to be felicitous. There is no such strict requirement for overt stage topics in the rest of the Romance domain.

Basic constituent orders

907

3 Fronting 3.1 The OVS pattern The label OVS is used here to refer to a marked word order in which the object – actually, any non-subject constituent, so that perhaps XVS would be more adequate – is fronted and, as a result, forces the subject to appear in postverbal position. Crucially, the fronted constituent and the verb must be adjacent: no other constituent can appear between them, thus giving rise to the typical pattern of V2 syntax. This implies that either the fronted constituent rises to the canonical subject slot, i.e. it competes for this slot with the subject (as in Zubizarreta 1998; Barbosa 2009 and Giurgea/Remberger 2012), or it rises to a different position, triggering subject inversion for some independent reason. We will not discuss the theoretical consequences of the two options here; it will suffice to recall that this issue is related to the general problem of subject inversion in interrogative and exclamative sentences (↗16 Interrogatives, ↗17 Exclamatives, imperatives, optatives). What is, by contrast, crucial is keeping OVS distinct from other fronting constructions that imply a different syntax and a different mapping to IS, namely dislocation (↗13 Dislocations and framings) and focus fronting or focalization (↗14 Focus Fronting). While dislocation is a device for topic marking, and focus fronting is a device for marking (mostly) contrastive focus, OVS, as it is conceived here, represents neither: the fronted constituent is not interpreted as a topic or as a focus (contrastive or informational), and there are no intonational breaks (cf. Leonetti/Escandell-Vidal 2009; Leonetti 2016 for a basic description). The hallmark of the constructions described in this section is precisely this: their contribution to IS and interpretation is not by means of an informational partition between the fronted constituent and the rest of the sentence, but rather through the opposite, i.e. by forcing the absence of any overt informational partition. On the one hand, no constituent is singled out as topic or focus: fronting does not have this function. On the other hand, fronting triggers subject inversion, with no interpretive effects apart from excluding both topic and narrow focus readings for the subject – recall that inversion is obligatory, though there is some cross-linguistic variation (see below). As a result, the sentence is taken as a single informational chunk. In what follows, the term Non-Focal Fronting is used to cover all constructions showing these properties. The main problem raised by non-focal fronting is that, from a strictly syntactic point of view, it is essentially identical to focus fronting, but its intonational properties, its interpretation and its discourse value are completely different: there is no emphatic stress, and there is no contrast. Thus, the interpretive contribution of fronting in this case seems to be related to IS, but in some indirect way. Throughout this section, two basic types of non-focal fronting are individuated, with two different discourse functions, but the list could perhaps be extended. It is beyond the limits of this chapter to ascertain whether a unified account of all varieties is feasible. An interesting property of non-focal fronting is that it does not appear in subordinate  





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clauses, except in those that behave as independent sentences (for instance, subordinates to communication verbs): it is, then, a root phenomenon, limited to main clauses. Subject inversion, instead, is perfectly acceptable in both main and subordinate clauses, and quite often subordinate contexts even favor it (for instance, in French; cf. Lahousse 2011, ch. 3). The synchronic perspective in this section has to be completed by taking into account the fact that OVS was common and widespread in Old Romance, much more than in modern Romance languages. A historical process of decrease gave rise to its irregular distribution nowadays. This process is discussed in Section 5, together with other changes that affected the encoding of IS.

3.2 Non-focal fronting 3.2.1 Resumptive Preposing The first type of non-focal fronting corresponds to what Cinque (1990) dubs Resumptive Preposing (cf. anteposizione anaforica in Benincà et al. 1988): as shown in the examples in (25), the fronted constituent – in bold – contains an anaphoric element that creates a textual connection with a discourse antecedent (Leonetti/EscandellVidal 2009; Cardinaletti 2009; Costa/Martins 2011). (25) a. It.

b. Sp.

c. Cat.

d. Fr.

Allo stesso modo si comportò CL behave.PST . 3SG at-the same way ‘His son behaved in the same way.’ (Cinque 1990) Eso creo yo. I that think.PRS . 1SG ‘That’s what I think.’ (Leonetti/Escandell-Vidal 2009) Això em van dir. that me tell.PST . 3PL ‘That’s what I was told.’ Ainsi écrivait Alexandre. Alexandre so write.IMP . PST . 3SG ‘That’s how Alexandre wrote.’ (Lahousse 201112)

suo his

figlio. son

12 Lahousse (2011, 94) considers ainsi as a fronted restrictive focus in example (25d), but it is doubtful whether it may be focal in any sense. As the adverb requires a discourse antecedent, it fits nicely in the pattern of resumptive preposing.

Basic constituent orders

Isso quería o director. the dean that want.IMP . PST . 3SG ‘That’s what the dean wanted.’ (Costa/Martins 2011) f. Rom. La fel de reuşită a fost the same of successful have.PRS . 3SG been ‘Equally successful was the conference dinner.’ (Giurgea/Remberger 2012)

909

e. Pt.

cina dinner

festivă. festive

Notice that although the fronted elements convey given information, they cannot be considered as (aboutness) topics: in such cases, a resumptive clitic would appear, at least for fronted direct objects, and subject inversion would not be compulsory. The anaphoric items in the examples are demonstratives, identity adjectives like stesso ‘same’ and adverbials like ainsi ‘so’ – recall that one of the inversion patterns traditionally identified in English is ‘so inversion’ –, but not all languages admit the same range of possibilities. Fronted demonstratives give natural results in Spanish and European Portuguese, but they are rejected in French, and their use obeys heavy restrictions in Catalan and Italian, so that the usual divide between restrictive and permissive languages reappears here. The data that Costa/Martins (2011) gather under the label of Deictic Fronting confirm that the construction is as productive in Portuguese as it is in Spanish (though we do not assume that the examples in (26) are cases of focus fronting, as the authors claim); notice that the fronted elements in (26) are deictic adverbs, pronouns and demonstratives. (26) Pt.

a. Assim se vê a força do PC. CL see.PRS . 3SG the force of-the PC so ‘That’s how you see the force of the Communist Party.’ b. Aqui me criei. CL grow.PST . 1SG here ‘It was here I grew up.’ c. E neste regime me tenho mantido. CL have.PRS . 1SG kept And in-this register ‘And it is in this register that I keep myself.’

In Spanish also fronted comparatives trigger resumptive preposing, as in (27)–(29): these items are anaphoric because the entity with which comparison is established must be retrieved from the previous context.13 13 Similar examples can be obtained in French and Italian: (i) Fr. … mais plus encore balançaient but more even waver.IMP . PST . 3PL ‘… but even more my thoughts wavered.’

mes my

pensées. thoughts (from Lahousse 2011, 99)

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(27) Sp.

A: –

B: –

¡Qué bien huele! how well smell.PRS . 3SG ‘How good it smells!’ Y mejor sabrá. and better taste.FUT . 3SG ‘And it will taste better.’

(28) Sp.

Peor me pareció su anterior worse CL seem.PST . 3SG his previous ‘His previous work seemed worse to me.’

(29) Sp.

Más alumnos teníamos more students have.IMP . PST . 1PL ‘We had more students last year.’

el the

trabajo. work

año year

pasado. past

Though resumptive preposing seems to be more productive in permissive languages (Spanish and European Portuguese), there are still some features that are common to all Romance: on the one hand, there is a general preference for fronting of “light” items – single words – instead of complex phrases, probably due to the need to maintain a single informational chunk – otherwise a topic-comment partition would arise; on the other hand, there is some preference for preposing PPs and adverbials instead of DPs, which is possibly due, again, to the need to avoid confusion with fronted topics.14 Non-focal fronting, and in particular resumptive preposing, must be classified as an instance of argument reversal, following Ward/Birner (1998; 2011). Argument reversal involves the non-canonical leftward placement of a constituent and the noncanonical rightward placement of another constituent – the subject. In English,

It.

Peggio ancora andò la seconda riunione. second meeting worse even go.P ST . 3SG the ‘Even worse went the second meeting.’ 14 It is worth mentioning that subject inversion plays a major role in distinguishing genuine resumptive preposing from the occurrence of initial elements that have nothing to do with this construction. Take the following contrast in Italian: (i) It. Così finì la storia di Michele. story of Michele so end.P ST . 3SG the ‘So finished Michele’s story.’ (ii) It. Così, la storia di Michele finì. thus the story of Michele end.P ST . 3SG ‘Thus, Michele’s story ended up.’ Whereas (i) is a clear case of resumptive preposing, with an anaphoric reading of così ‘so’, (ii) is a completely different sequence: there is no inversion because in this case così is a discourse marker and occurs in a position that is external to the clause.

911

Basic constituent orders

according to Ward/Birner, the construction is felicitous if the preposed constituent does not represent less familiar information in the discourse than does the postverbal constituent. This implies that the fronted element mostly conveys discourse-old information. The Romance data fit this pattern quite naturally. The connection can be strengthened if we observe that at least some cases of what has traditionally been called locative inversion – a type of argument reversal – are nothing else than special uses of resumptive preposing; some examples of locative inversion – in a broad sense – are given for Spanish in (30), for Italian in (31) and for French in (32) (according to Kaiser/Zimmermann 2011, 377, cases of non-focal fronting in Modern French should be considered as “learned vestiges of an older language stage”; (32b), from Lahousse 2011, 66, is the beginning of a poem by Apollinaire), showing that inversion is related to the absence of a topic-comment partition and gives rise to a presentational reading.  

(30) Sp.

a. Aquí llega el tren. the train here arrive.PRS . 3SG ‘Here comes the train.’ (cf. *Aquí el tren llega. / Aquí, el tren llega.) b. A la sequía siguió el the to the drought follow.PST . 3SG ‘The fire followed the drought.’ (cf. *A la sequía el incendio siguió.)

incendio. fire

(31) It.

a. Da questo dipende il nostro futuro. the our future from this depend.PRS . 3SG ‘Our future depends on this.’ (cf. *Da questo il nostro futuro dipende.) b. Dal soffitto pende una lampada veneziana. a lamp Venetian from-the ceiling hang.PRS . 3SG ‘A Venetian chandelier hangs from the ceiling.’ (cf. *Dal soffitto una lampada veneziana pende.)

(32) Fr.

a. À chaque jour suffit sa peine. trouble to every day suffice.PRS .3SG its ‘Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.’ (cf. *À chaque jour sa peine suffit.) b. Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la under the bridge Mirabeau flow.PRS . 3SG the ‘Under the Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine.’ (cf. *Sous le pont Mirabeau la Seine coule.)

Seine. Seine

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3.2.2 Quantifier Fronting The second type of non-focal fronting is usually called Quantifier Fronting, as the presence of bare quantifiers and quantified phrases in initial position has attracted the attention of linguists with particular force (Zubizarreta 1998; Hernanz 2001; Leonetti/Escandell-Vidal 2009; Escandell-Vidal/Leonetti 2014; Poole 2016 for Spanish; Quer 2002; Vallduví 2002; Gallego 2007; Batllori/Hernanz 2015 for Catalan; Costa 2004; Barbosa 2009 for Portuguese; Benincà et al. 1988; Cinque 1990 for Italian). The examples in (33) illustrate this core case of fronting for several languages,15 but the same construction is possible, depending on the language, with a variety of preposed constituents (APs, PPs, adverbials, bare nominals); it is important to recall that there cannot be intonational breaks or emphatic stress, and that the quantified expression is not in focus – the same examples could be pronounced with heavy stress on the initial phrase, but in that case there would be genuine focus fronting. (33) Sp.

Pt.

Cat.

It.

a. Bastante trabajo tengo ya. already enough work have.PRS . 1SG ‘I have enough work already.’ (Leonetti/Escandell-Vidal 2009) b. Poucos colegas consultei. few colleagues consult.PST . 1SG ‘I consulted few colleagues.’ (Costa/Martins 2011) c. Algú hi trobaràs, a la casa. CL find.FUT . 2SG at the house someone ‘(For sure) you will find someone at the house.’ (Quer 2002) d. Qualcosa farò (non preoccuparti).16 something do.FUT . 1SG not worry.IMP ‘Something I will do (don’t worry).’ (Benincà et al. 1988; Cinque 1990)

15 It seems that French lacks this kind of non-focal fronting. Examples like (i), from Abeillé/Godard/ Sabio (2008), look very similar to the core cases of quantifier fronting – their Spanish equivalents can be used as instances of non-focal fronting, in fact –, but they are surely closer to focus fronting, perhaps with a mirative nuance: (i) Fr. À peine huit ans il avait. just eight years he have.IMP . PST . 3SG ‘Just eight, he was.’ 16 In this case a topic interpretation of the indefinite qualcosa is also possible, even though there is no resumptive clitic.

Basic constituent orders

Rom. e. Pe nimeni nu am to nobody not have.PRS . 1SG ‘I didn’t see anybody in the park.’ (Soare 2009)

întâlnit seen

în in

913

parc. park

The most salient features of quantifier fronting are the following: (a) Despite the absence of overt informational partitions, the sentences cannot receive a thetic reading. (b) Fronting gives rise to a typical emphatic flavor, sometimes described as “affective”, or “evaluative”, or “exclamative”17; this subtle additional value, though it does not affect truth conditions, makes the sentences in (33) semantically distinct from their unmarked counterparts without fronting. (c) The fronted quantified expression receives a non-specific, narrow scope reading, and there is a preference for weak, indefinite quantifiers – only bare indefinite quantifiers appear in Cinque’s (1990) Italian examples. The condition on non-specificity goes hand in hand with a restriction against the fronting of heavy, complex constituents: in fact, maintaining a single informational chunk – with the corresponding prosodic contour – when a heavy constituent is fronted is a difficult task, as heaviness calls for some informational split to make processing easier. Points (a) and (b) can be explained along the following lines. In Leonetti/Escandell-Vidal (2009) it is claimed that the marked, emphatic status of the sentences in (33) can be explained if we assume that fronting triggers a ‘verum focus’ interpretation, i.e. an interpretation in which there is in fact a covert focus-background partition, with narrow focus falling on the positive polarity of the proposition, and the overt constituents of the sentence form a single informational chunk – the background. Focus on the positive polarity leads to reinforcing the strength of the assertion. Thus, the typical emphatic character and the argumentative orientation of the utterance are a result of this specific focus structure.18 It is non-focal fronting that  

17 A specific construction has been described in European Portuguese under the label ‘evaluative exclamative sentences’ (Ambar 1999; Costa/Martins 2011) that can be considered an instance of nonfocal fronting. A representative example is given in (i): (i) Pt. Muito whisky bebeu o capitão. the captain much whisky drink.PS T . 3SG ‘Much whisky drank the captain.’ Evaluative and exclamative interpretations are in fact common in non-focal fronting. What makes Portuguese evaluative exclamatives different from the rest of the Romance data is that here subject inversion is optional: (i) is also grammatical with SV order. (ii) Muito whisky o capitão bebeu. 18 The emphatic nature of Verum Focus Fronting is salient in the role of fronting in exclamative sentences in Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, as in (i), and in the productivity of the construction for the expression of irony, as in (ii).

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produces a sentence with no overt informational partitions and thus forces narrow focus to fall on polarity, as a last resort interpretive mechanism. Verum Focus Fronting could then be an adequate denomination for the construction. As for point (c), the constraint against specific indefinites is again rooted in IS. A specific reading of the fronted indefinite would typically trigger an informational partition, with the fronted expression processed as a topic, in particular in languages that are sensitive to prominence factors and easily resort to informational splits, like “restrictive” languages. The fact that specific fronted indefinites are usually interpreted as topics forces a correlation between non-focal fronting and non-specificity, since a non-specific reading is a basic condition for banning a topical interpretation of the fronted constituent (cf. Leonetti 2016). Bare quantifiers and negative indefinites fit the construction particularly well just because they are by default non-specific and can hardly be processed as dislocated topics. The best candidates for non-focal fronting are the expressions that are not good candidates for dislocation. This is the reason why many languages allow for constructions like Negative Fronting, a particular instance of non-focal fronting: negative items are the prototypical case of expressions that are incompatible with dislocation. From a comparative perspective, quantifier fronting, or Verum Focus Fronting – in all its varieties, including cases where elements other than quantifiers are preposed – shows a distribution that, at this point, is no longer surprising: it is excluded in French, limited to core cases with negative and indefinite quantifiers in Italian19 and Catalan,20 the other restrictive languages, and productive in European Portuguese and Spanish, the permissive languages – to some extent also in Romanian. Beyond this cline of productivity lies the divide between restrictive and permissive languages: only permissive ones can fully accept a marked order with no (overt)  

Rom. Frumoasă casă şi-a cumpărat Maria! bought Maria beautiful house cl-have.PRS . 3SG ‘What a beautiful house Maria bought!’ (Giurgea/Remberger 2012) (ii) Sp. ¡Bonita faena me has hecho! CL have.PRS . 2SG done beautiful job ‘A nice chore you’ve done for me!’ (Escandell-Vidal/Leonetti 2014) 19 Italian allows for quantifier fronting with a small set of elements only (qualcosa ‘something’, qualcuno ‘somebody’, poco ‘few’, negative quantifiers). With other quantifiers and other categories – APs, PPs, adverbs –, fronting is fully acceptable only if the initial constituent is pronounced with a prominent pitch accent, i.e. with the prosodic pattern of focus fronting, and with a focus-background partition (cf. Leonetti 2016). 20 Catalan tends to reject the pervasive use of quantifier fronting that is typical of Spanish, but intense language contact somehow blurs the differences and makes speakers’ judgements often insecure and contradictory. Gallego (2007) first noticed that counterparts of Spanish fronting examples are not idiomatic in Catalan, but Quer (2002) and Vallduví (2002) give several acceptable examples (see Leonetti 2013 and Batllori/Hernanz 2015 for discussion). (i)



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915

informational partition; restrictive languages limit non-focal fronting to the few cases that clearly do not force a partition.

3.3 Non-focal fronting and Romance word order If OVS is understood as non-focal fronting, according to the view adopted here, the picture that results from a survey on Romance languages includes the following facts: (a) OVS was highly productive in Old Romance, as we will see in Section 5, but is not so anymore in modern Romance languages, except in Spanish and Portuguese. (b) Not surprisingly, the languages in which it is still productive are the most “permissive” ones, as far as word order is concerned. The other varieties make a very limited use of the construction, since they obey the tendency to impose an informational partition between the fronted constituent and the rest of the sentence. Certain languages (Italian, Sardinian) systematically resort to focus fronting instead of nonfocal fronting. (c) The construction survives in two basic formats, resumptive preposing and socalled quantifier fronting. The same divide between restrictive and permissive languages holds in both cases. In a cross-linguistic view of quantifier fronting, the set of expressions that better fit the construction corresponds to the set of the worst candidates for aboutness topic, namely negative quantifiers and bare indefinites. This is, obviously, rooted in the particular informational articulation of non-focal fronting. (d) Though more detailed descriptions are needed, the distribution of OVS nowadays follows – with little variation – the same hierarchy of languages that determines subject inversion in Table 1. It is reproduced here as (34). (34) French > Italian > Catalan > European Portuguese > (Romanian) > Spanish The main conclusion of this discussion of OVS is that, once more, variation in word order in Romance is determined by conditions on the mapping from syntax to IS.

4 Scrambling and reordering The syntax of Romance is flexible enough to allow for the possibility of reordering verbal complements (including both arguments and adjuncts). Reordering phenomena, also known as scrambling – in this case, ‘short scrambling’ – affect postverbal constituents, and are motivated by IS considerations. Zubizarreta (1998, 124–146) dubs p-movement (for prosodically motivated movement) the operation that alters the neutral word order to ensure that the phrase that the speaker intends to focalize occurs in the rightmost position, where it receives prosodic prominence. Notice that the idea of reordering implies assuming that there is in fact a neutral order: in

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Romance, this neutral order is ‘verb + direct object + indirect object or prepositional complement + adjuncts’.21 In the following examples, p-movement scrambles the locative argument over the object in (35), the indirect object over the direct object in (36), the secondary predicate over the object in (37), and the direct object over the adverb in (38), where bem precedes the object in its basic position.

(35) Sp.

a. Se

dejó el leave.PST . 3SG the ‘He left the book at home.’ (López 2009, 174–175) b. Se dejó en CL

(36) It.

a. Abbiamo dato un given a have.PRS . 1PL ‘We gave a prize to Dina.’ (Belletti/Shlonsky 1995, 491) b. Abbiamo dato a ‘We gave Dina a prize.’

libro book

en in

su his

su

casa

el

casa. home

libro.

premio a prize to

Dina. Dina

Dina

premio.

un

(37) Fr.

a. Cette musique rend son his this music make.PRS . 3SG b. Cette musique rend fou ‘This music makes his son mad with joy.’ (Abeillé/Godard 2006, 12)

(38) Pt.

a. O João fala bem well the João speak.PRS . 3SG ‘João speaks French quite well.’ (Martins 2011, 135) b. O João fala francés

fils son de

fou mad joie

de of son

joie. joy fils.

francés. French

bem.

21 As for the relative order of adjuncts, we should at least distinguish between adverbs and PPs, because adverbs can occur in different positions in clausal structure depending on their semantic properties, and thus deserve a specific treatment. There are interesting asymmetries concerning the position of adverbs, like the contrast between Italian and Spanish illustrated in (i)–(ii), but they are outside the scope of this chapter. (i) It. Lei beve sempre il tè. / *Lei sempre beve il tè. always the tea she drink.PRS . 3SG ‘She always drinks tea.’ (ii) Sp. Ella bebe siempre té. / Ella siempre bebe té. always tea she drink.PRS . 3SG

Basic constituent orders

917

Reordering in the (b) examples imposes a reading with narrow focus on the final constituent – a reading that would not be available in the neutral order. At the same time, the displaced constituent escapes narrow focus assignment and is made less salient. This explains that examples (a) and (b) may be answers to different questions. Reordering is, thus, a strategy that creates, through defocusing of the scrambled constituent, a more transparent relation between word order and focus structure. As it is an optional operation, it may be favored or determined by a series of factors that are known to be relevant for word order in many, if not all, languages: (a) heavier or longer constituents tend to follow shorter ones, and are processed more easily if they occur in final position – cf. the rule of Heavy NP Shift in English; the contrasts in (39)– (40), in French, are due to the “light” status of elements such as bare nouns and quantifiers, which excludes them from the final position (cf. Abeillé/Godard 2006); (b) given information tends to be presented before new information; (c) the need to avoid ambiguity and to mark contrast transparently may force reordering; (d) the formation of complex predicates, collocations and idiomatic expressions usually has “freezing” effects on word order. (39) Fr.

a. Cet endroit fait this place make.PRS . 3SG b. *Cet endroit fait ‘This place scares children.’

peur fear aux

(40) Fr.

a. Paul expliquera tout à son to his Paul explain.FUT . 3SG all b. ?Paul expliquera à son fils ‘Paul will explain everything to his son.’

aux to-the enfants

enfants. children peur.

fils. son tout.

Though the grammar of reordering is essentially the same in all Romance languages, the asymmetry we observed between restrictive and permissive languages reappears here again in subtle ways. The most significant evidence concerns the distribution of wide focus readings. In the relevant literature (Belletti/Shlonsky 1995; Zubizarreta 1999; López 2009) it is usual to observe that the ambiguity between wide focus and narrow focus readings in the neutral order – the (a) examples in (35)–(38) – vanishes after reordering, given that this operation gives rise to a different focus configuration; briefly, only the neutral order admits focus projection. This is surely true for Central Romance. However, Martins (2011) and Leonetti (2013) point out that in Portuguese and Spanish the wide focus reading survives reordering, in adequate contexts, although the other interpretation – narrow focus on the last constituent – may be the preferred one. This is just another piece of evidence for the diverging behavior of the two groups of Romance languages. Further confirmation comes from the contrast between Italian and Spanish in (41):

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Manuel Leonetti

(41) a. It. b. Sp.

*Ha dato a Maria un libro Gianni. given to Maria a book Gianni have.PRS . 3SG Le ha dado a María un libro Juan. CL have.PRS . 3SG given to María a book Juan ‘Gianni/Juan gave a book to Maria / Gianni/Juan gave Maria a book.’

In these sentences, reordering is combined with subject inversion (VOS), which makes them particularly marked. Whereas in Italian the resulting string is ill-formed, due to the fact that the direct object un libro and the inverted subject Gianni compete for narrow focus, and only one of them can receive it, in Spanish the corresponding sentence is still acceptable, in a context favoring theticity. Obviously, the acceptability of (41b) is due to the tolerance of Spanish for marked orders with no partitions. Usually, in permissive languages the neutral order of postverbal elements is less “visible”, since it can be easily modified; in restrictive languages, it has a more salient role. A nice example of the visibility of neutral order in Central Romance comes from the type of inversion labelled inversion focus in French in Lahousse (2011, 197): the subject must occupy the final position, after the verb and the complements, but, crucially, the order of such complements must respect the neutral pattern (‘direct object + indirect object + adjuncts’). The contrast in (42) shows that in this kind of inversion the indirect object cannot be scrambled over the direct object, in accordance with the rigidity of French syntax in this respect. (42) Fr.

a. Ne donneront de l’argent aux pauvres que les riches. that the rich not give.FUT . 3PL of the money to-the poor ‘Only the rich will give money to the poor.’ b. *Ne donneront aux pauvres une très grosse somme que les riches.

Needless to say, scrambling would be acceptable in the corresponding sentence in a permissive language like Spanish.

5 From Old Romance to Modern Romance 5.1 Latin word order It is widely accepted that Latin was in many aspects a free word order language – although word order was not absolutely free, with SOV as its most frequent word order pattern, and SVO, VSO, OVS and other competing orders as alternative options (cf. Salvi 2004; Ledgeway 2011; 2012). SOV was certainly the most conservative order, possibly only dominant in the written language, and its competitors were justified by the need to express different features of IS. In Latin, word order was not necessary for

Basic constituent orders

919

the identification of grammatical functions, since they were marked by the morphological form of words; therefore, it is not surprising that alternations in word order were mainly conditioned by pragmatic or processing considerations. As argued in Ledgeway (2011; 2012), Latin showed all the main features of a non-configurational syntax: there were no fixed positions for syntactic elements, there were no phrasal categories, discontinuity between related items was common, and the internal organization of sentences was apparently flat, deprived of hierarchical structure. The most significant innovation in the transition from Latin to Romance, then, was the gradual transformation of the original non-configurational system into “an increasingly configurational syntax” (Ledgeway 2012, 31). Changes in word order from Latin to Romance must be seen as a part of this development of configurationality (see also ↗23 Syntheticity and Analyticity). In the new grammatical systems that appeared, word order became more rigid and less pragmatically determined, and the mapping from syntax to IS became gradually subject to stricter conditions.

5.2 Word order in Old Romance The historical development of Latin led to a decrease in verb-final orders, to an increase in verb-initial orders, which had marked discourse functions in Classical Latin and became common – and unmarked – in Late Latin, and, crucially, to a tendency towards verb-medial orders, i.e. patterns with the verb placed between the subject and the object, in whatever order (SVO, OVS), that were widespread in Old Romance. In these verb-medial orders, the initial position immediately before the verb was exploited as a landing site for fronting of discourse-salient constituents, either with topic value or with a focal interpretation. This formal pattern became the most frequent one in Old Romance, and is usually known as V2 (verb second), on the basis of a parallelism with Germanic languages that obey a V2 constraint in main clauses, like German (cf. footnote 1 on Rhaeto-Romance). The alternation of the two orders compatible with the verb in second position – SVO, OVS – eventually resulted in the prevalence of SVO, due to the progressive reanalysis of fronted topical subjects as occupying a canonical position inside the sentential core. The crucial feature of the V2 pattern is that the preverbal field is not specialized for subjects, so that it hosts topical subjects as well as all kinds of fronted complements – in this case giving rise to subject inversion. It is controversial, to say the least, that Old Romance languages were strictly V2 as Germanic languages are, given that sentences with V1 order – verbinitial – and even V3 – verb in third position – are also attested, but it is true that the development of verb-medial orders in Late Latin had a major role in the emergence and consolidation of SVO as the unmarked order in Romance (see Benincà 2004 and Salvi 2004 for the V2 hypothesis for Old Romance, and Kaiser 2002; Kaiser/Zimmermann 2011; Sitaridou 2011; 2012 for a critical assessment of this idea).  

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Manuel Leonetti

If the position of the finite verb in the main clause is taken as a sign of the development of a more rigid syntax, a sharp contrast emerges between Old French and the rest of Old Romance varieties (cf. Kaiser/Zimmermann 2011; Sitaridou 2012, 578): first, in Old French V1 was very restricted, whereas in Old Ibero-Romance and Old Italo-Romance it was widespread; second, Old French had the highest percentage of V2 clauses (more than 80%); lastly, Old French had a lower percentage of V3 clauses. Whether this is evidence for a genuine V2 syntax in Old French or simply evidence for a more advanced process of grammaticalization of word order in this language, it is clear that French has stood out as a differentiated system among its relatives since the Middle Ages. One of the consequences of the vitality of the linear V2 pattern is that OVS – or, more precisely, XVS – is well attested in Old Romance (cf. Sornicola 2000). It seems that the interpretation of the fronted constituent was underspecified and context dependent: it could be a topic, or an informational focus, or be devoid of any specific informational load, as in non-focal fronting (cf. Sitaridou 2011 for an analysis of fronted elements in Old Spanish). This last option is particularly significant. Old Romance displays constructions that conform to the properties of Resumptive Preposing – examples in (43) – and Quantifier Fronting or Verum Focus Fronting – examples in (44) and (45); notice that if the fronted phrase is a direct object, there is no resumptive clitic (Benincà 2004; 2013); with this kind of fronting, there is obligatory proclisis. (43) a. OFr. Ceste promesse fist li rois a the king to this promise make.PST . 3SG monseigneur Gauvain. monsignor Gauvain ‘The king made this promise to monsignor Gauvain.’ (Mort le roi Artu 128, 13–14) b. OIt. Queste parole gl’ insegnaro i savi CL teach.PST . 3PL the wise these words del regno. of-the kingdom ‘The wise old men of the kingdom taught him these words.’ (Novellino VIII, 74) c. OSp. Esto é yo en debdo. I in debt this have.PRS . 1SG ‘This I owe you.’ (Cid 225) d. OVto. Questo avrò=e’. this have.FUT . 1SG I ‘This I will have.’ (Lio Mazor 45)

vecchi oldmen

921

Basic constituent orders

e. OPt. Tal serviço lhe pode fazer CL may make such service ‘A small man may make such a service.’ (Huber 1933, in Benincà 2004)

hûn a

homen man

pequeño. small

(44) a. OSp. Mucho se maravilló estonces el rey CL wonder.PST . 3SG then the king much Nabucodonosor … Nebuchadnezzar ‘King Nebuchadnezzar was then much amazed.’ (General Estoria 4, 265) b. OOcc. Motas autras consolacions li= fes le Senhers. CL make.PST . 3SG the Lord many other consolations ‘The Lord made her many other consolations.’ (Douceline 47) c. OCat. … molt me enuja la vostra partida. your departure much me upset.PRS . 3SG the ‘Your departure upsets me greatly.’ (Curial e Güelfa; Batllori/Hernanz 2015) d. OIt. E niente poteva acquistare contro a against to and nothing be-able.IMP . PST . 3SG gain quel populo. that people ‘And he could not gain anything against those people.’ (Novellino XXXVI, 210) Maestro, di grande scienza ti credo. CL believe.PRS . 1SG master of great science ‘Master, I consider you of great knowledge.’ (Novellino II, 45) b. OFr. … grant duel firent et li povre and the poor great mourning do.PST . 3PL et li riche por le roi Artu. and the rich for the king Artu ‘Both the poor and the rich made a great mourning for King Arthur.’ (Mort le roi Artu 136, 16–179) c. OPrv. Mal cosselh donet Pilat. Pilatus bad advice give.PST . 3SG ‘Pilatus gave bad advice.’ (Venjansa de la mort de nostre Senhor 106)

(45) a. OIt.

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d. OCat. …

de bon grat li-n complaurien. CL - CL please.COND . 3PL of good will ‘… their wish would be happily attended to.’ (Bernat Metge, Lo somni, 158) e. OSp. … grand ondra auredes vos. you great honor have.FUT . 2PL ‘You will have great honor.’ (Cid 3565) f. OPt. Gran misericordia fez o Senhor the Lord great mercy make.PRS . 3SG connoso. with-us ‘The Lord bestows great mercy upon us.’ (Cron. De D. J. I., cap. CLI, 316)

Deos God

The position of the fronted complement in these examples must be adjacent to the finite verb: in much recent literature on the V2 hypothesis, this is identified as the Focus position in the left periphery of the sentence. It is important to recall that, despite its being compatible with focus interpretations, the preverbal position does not trigger a focus-background partition, as it does in several modern varieties – the restrictive ones (cf. Vanelli 1986, 261; Cruschina 2011): in fact, it can host nonfocal constituents, as in the examples in (43)–(45). Incidentally, this suggests that the label Focus is used quite misleadingly here. In all the recent literature, OVS is treated as focalization (Benincà 2004; 2013; Salvi 2004; Fernández-Ordóñez 2009; Cruschina 2011; Sitaridou 2011; Poletto 2014; Remberger 2014; Batllori/Hernanz 2015), basically because the syntax of OVS is the syntax of focus fronting (fronted element adjacent to the verb, subject inversion, no resumptive clitics). The problem is that, despite the formal similarity, OVS is not necessarily interpreted as focus fronting in Old Romance. Examples such as those in (43)–(45) show that fronting regularly gave rise to sentences interpreted as single informational chunks, either with wide focus readings or with emphatic values derived from Verum Focus. The generalization we can draw is that, as for OVS, Old Romance behaved like the languages in the permissive group today: marked orders were compatible with the absence of informational splits, and there were no restrictive conditions on fronting. This does not necessarily imply that the discourse value of OVS has not changed in Spanish and Portuguese since the Middle Ages: the productivity of OVS has certainly diminished, and some of the examples in (43)–(45) would not be acceptable in modern varieties. Poole (2014) suggests that OVS was associated to a wide focus interpretation in Old Spanish, and only later specialized in a Verum Focus interpretation. In any case, it seems clear that permissive languages in our days are much closer to old word order patterns than restrictive languages (cf. Leonetti 2016).

Basic constituent orders

923

The historical processes affecting OVS can be described in the following way: in some cases – with restrictive languages – the informational conditions on fronting became progressively more severe, both by constraining non-focal fronting to its core cases and by favoring interpretations based on a focus–background partition, mostly with a contrastive value in Italian and Catalan (cf. ↗14 Focus Fronting); in other cases – with permissive languages – the range of phrases amenable to fronting simply became narrower, and a specialization in favor of Verum Focus prevailed, but the construction survived in good health. What was lost in all modern Romance languages, except Sardinian, Sicilian and southern Italian dialects, was the possibility of interpreting the fronted constituent as an informational focus. Thus, it seems that the syntax of OVS remained the same, but the progressively stricter conditions on its informational value considerably reduced its use; in Central Romance, this reduction was particularly dramatic. Together with OVS, instances of OSV order are also attested in Old Romance. As OSV is usually the result of combining a dislocated topic with a SV order, it will not be discussed here. As in the case of fronting/OVS, the evolution of subject inversion patterns is again a story of a gradual reduction in existing options. However, in this case, the process took place in Central Romance only; Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian maintain the old system for subject inversion with few modifications. The relevant facts are essentially two: the loss of VSO, and the evolution of informational conditions on the rest of inversion patterns. As already pointed out, VSO was common in Late Latin; verb-initial orders in declarative clauses had become typically associated with thetic interpretations in narrative and presentative contexts. In Old Romance VSO maintained its wide focus reading. It was soon lost in Old French, and examples like (46) are marginal, and rarely found, but in the rest of Old Romance languages, including Italian and Sardinian, VSO was a possible order, as shown in (47)–(48):  

(46) MidFr.

Or entendi messires mister now understand.PST . 3SG les nouvelles … the news ‘Mister Robers Canolles got the news …’ (J. Froissart, Chroniques I, 1, 757)

Robers Robers

Canolles Canolles

(47) a. OSp. E por eso dio Dios al ome God to-the man and for that give.PST . 3SG entendimiento e razón … understanding and reason …’ ‘And this is why God provided man with understanding and reason.’ (Zifar 269)

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Manuel Leonetti

b. OPt. Em várias partes das fronteiras fizeram in several parts of-the borders make.PST . 3PL os castellanos fumo. the Castilians smoke ‘In several parts of the border the Castilians made smoke.’ (Gazeta) c. OSrd. Posit Iorgi Capai terra de Gavini Capra Iorgi Capai land of Gavini Capra donate.PST . 3SG a chiesa. to church ‘Iorgi Capai donated Gavini Capra’s land to the church.’ (SMDB 116) (48) OIt.

a. Aveva Pericone un fratello d’età Pericone a brother of age have.PST . 3SG venticinque anni. twenty-five years ‘Pericone had a brother who was twenty-five.’ (Decameron II, 7, 32) b. Meravigliossi Melisso della risposta della Melisso of-the reply of-the marvel.PST . 3SG ‘Melisso marveled at the woman’s reply …’ (Decameron IX, 9, 25–26) c. Un giorno tolse questo re molto this king much one day take.PST . 3SG ‘One day this king took a lot of gold …’ (Novellino VIII, 75)

di of

donna … woman

oro … gold

Sornicola (2000, 108) notes that in Old Italian and Old Spanish VSO often appears with a stylistic value of ‘turning point in the narration’, which is, not surprisingly, one of the prototypical discourse functions of VSO in Modern Spanish too. Old Spanish is the language that shows the highest rate of subject inversion (VS, VSO, VOS), and this is another stable feature of the language in the Romance context. Thus, a look at the evolution of VSO indicates that the languages in the permissive group have retained this pattern with the same value it had in the Middle Ages, while the languages in the restrictive group have lost it. It is reasonable to think that the disappearance of VSO in Central Romance – first in French, later in Catalan, Sardinian and Italian – is due to a change in the constraints on focus structure that must have had effects on other phenomena as well. In fact, certain aspects of the use of VS and VOS in Old Romance confirm this assumption. Any kind of inversion could receive a wide focus interpretation in the old languages, in contexts where Modern central Romance tends to reject it in favor of a narrow focus reading for the subject – i.e. in favor of an interpretation  

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Basic constituent orders

based on an informational partition (cf. Vanelli 1986, 257; Sornicola 2000, 108; 2004, 201–202). VS and VOS sentences were used with the textual function of turning point in the narration, with subjects that were discourse-given and were not in focus, as can be observed in (49)–(52): (49) OSp. E tomó el açor el the goshawk the and take.PST . 3SG ‘And the emperor took the goshawk and …’ (Zifar 395–396) (50) OSp. Reçibiolo el the receive.PST . 3SG –him ‘The Cid received him.’ (Cid 203)



e… and

Çid. Cid

(51) OPt. E fez muito dano much damage and make.PST . 3SG ‘And the storm caused great damage.’ (Gazeta) (52) OIt.

enperador emperor

a the

e quivi ismontoe Pernam Pernam and here dismount.PST - 3SG ‘… and here Pernam dismounted in order to drink.’ (Tristano Riccardiano, quoted in Vanelli 1986, 258)

tempestade. storm

per for

bere. drink

Once again, the data show that Old Romance word order is much closer to the patterns that we find in modern permissive languages than to the properties of restrictive languages. The major changes that led to the current splitting between the two groups consisted in the development of stricter conditions on focus structure in central Romance, which led to a severe limitation of the possibility of having wide focus in marked orders. Ultimately, this implies that the highest percentage of inversion is found in Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian – though the rate of inversion has been decreasing over the last two centuries in Portuguese. All the patterns discussed until now have survived in at least some of the modern languages. However, there is one marked order, SOV – presumably a Latinism, never too productive –, which disappeared in Modern Romance (except in some residual cases, such as so-called ‘middle scrambling’ with deictic locatives in Portuguese, cf. Costa/Martins 2010). This is a common feature in the Romance domain, as noted in Section 4 on scrambling. Some examples of SOV/SXV in Old Romance are reproduced in (53), with the scrambled complement in bold; all of them are unacceptable in modern varieties.

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Se l’avessi a mente tenuto CL have.PST . 1SG at mind had if ‘If I had kept it in mind’ (Bono Giamboni, Libro, cap. 6, par. 6) b. OIt. La quale il suo desiderio le lodò molto. CL praise.PST . 3SG much the which the her desire ‘She praised her will very much.’ (Decameron V, 2, 38) c. MidFr. Lors chacun sa joye renforça. then each-one his joy reinforce.PST . 3SG ‘Then everyone reinforced his joy.’ (Le petit Jehan de Saintré, 35) d. OPt. Nem os que esta estoria desta guisa contam. nor those who this story in-this manner tell.PRS . 3PL ‘Nor those who tell this story in this manner.’ (from Martins 2011, 147) e. OPt. quem vos tall cousa disse … who you such thing tell.PST . 3SG ‘whoever told you that …’ (from Pádua 1960, 73; in Martins 2011, 149) f. OSp. … cuando Nabucodonosor allí llegó d’aquella when Nebuchadnezzar there arrive.PST . 3SG of that vez. time ‘… when Nebuchadnezzar arrived there that time.’ (General Estoria 4, 187–188)

(53) a. OIt.

The generalized loss of SOV must be due to a syntactic change, possibly the deactivation of the position where complements could be moved across the verb in Old Romance (cf. Poletto 2014 for an analysis of Old Italian scrambling in terms of focus movement). This may be unrelated to changes in IS, but the informational properties of SOV may nonetheless offer some clue about the way word order was connected to IS in Old Romance. Martins (2011) notes that short scrambling is compatible with a ‘flat’, wide focus reading in Modern European Portuguese, and middle scrambling of the kind illustrated in (53d,e) had the same property in Old Portuguese – though scrambling is essentially a defocalizing strategy. Thus, the two stages of the language “do not diverge with respect to the informational/pragmatic import of scrambling” (Martins 2011, 151), which is valid for Spanish too (cf. Section 4): the tolerance for wide focus readings even in marked orders is constant throughout the history of both languages. This provides further evidence for the assumption that the group of permissive languages today retains the core properties of word order in the old varieties.

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5.3 Changes affecting IS If we leave aside the general process of development of a configurational syntax, which affects the core of the grammatical system (see ↗23 Syntheticity and Analyticity), an analysis of changes in word order from Old Romance to Modern Romance leads us to the conclusion that the major changes are related to the management of IS and take place at the interface of syntax and IS (cf. Sitaridou 2012, 594–595). The main change is the progressive reduction of the option of assigning wide focus interpretations to marked orders, and the concomitant specialization of such orders (for instance, the specialization of fronting for contrastive focus, or the restrictive conditions on VOS). This took place mostly in central Romance, and the result was the creation of syntactic patterns that require informational partitions – and, in some cases, the loss of certain orders, such as VSO, or OVS in French. The development of stricter conditions on focus structure gave rise to the split between restrictive and permissive languages, which has proved quite useful from a comparative point of view. Incidentally, the whole process may be seen as a consequence of the rise of configurationality, if restrictive languages are considered as more discourse-configurational than permissive ones. A secondary process is the gradual loss of productivity of certain patterns that still remained active. This is, for instance, the case of OVS in languages that retained the syntactic option of non-focal fronting but reduced the range of expressions that may occur in fronted position, such as Spanish and Portuguese. IS considerations may ultimately be behind this change in productivity: in modern varieties, fronted constituents belong to the set of optimal candidates to fit in non-focal fronting, while in old varieties any kind of constituent could be fronted. Again, IS constraints become stricter, though the syntax remains the same. Table 2 shows the results of the main historical changes in four Romance languages. The first two columns from the left represent what is common to all of them: the change from OV to VO syntax. The remaining three columns represent the locus of variation: briefly, subject inversion – VOS and VSO – and fronting – OVS. Table 2: Reduction of the initial range of possible orders in four languages SOV

SVO

VOS

VSO

OVS

French

*



highly constrained *

almost excluded

Italian

*



constrained

*

highly constrained

Portuguese

*



√ (constrained)





Spanish

*









What changed in inversion and fronting? Considering only marked contexts for inversion, i.e. with transitive verbs, the story is quite simple: VOS and VSO naturally  

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accepted wide focus interpretations in Old Romance, but their original values survived only in Spanish and to a lesser extent in Portuguese; in French and Italian, VOS specialized as a device for (restrictive) narrow focus on the subject, and VSO disappeared, being incompatible with the focus-background partitions required in these languages. As for fronting in OVS, the status of the preverbal constituent in Old Romance was not informationally specified, but its status changed in all Romance varieties: on the one hand, topic marking gave rise to Clitic (Left) Dislocation, a different construction; on the other hand, fronting lost the informational focus reading, and retained the contrastive focus reading if paired with emphatic stress (Focus Fronting); finally, in the case of non-focal fronting, restrictive languages reduced it to a minimum, due to their low tolerance for non-partitioned chunks, and permissive languages retained it, with some loss of productivity. To sum up, the whole set of changes can be reduced to a basic tendency towards a more transparent encapsulation of IS. As suggested in Lahousse/Lamiroy (2012) and Sitaridou (2012), the reorganization of IS can be seen as a grammaticalization process. This does not necessarily result in a more fixed word order, but rather in a more restrictive mapping between syntactic positions and focus structure.

6 Conclusions The following points provide a synthesis of the contents in this chapter: 1. The basic order in Romance declarative clauses is SVO. Marked orders are obtained by subject inversion (VS, VOS, VSO), by fronting (OVS; only non-focal fronting considered here) and by reordering of complements or short scrambling. 2. Different orders express different interpretive instructions for information packaging (IS): to this end, the syntax of order provides clues for establishing possible informational partitions. 3. Cross-linguistic variation in Romance word order depends on how, and to what extent, each language constrains the mapping from syntax to informational partitions. In other words, it depends on how each grammatical system instructs the hearer about the possible partitions associated with a word order pattern. 4. Two groups of Romance languages can be identified. The central Romance group (French, Italian, Catalan) is characterized by the need to impose informational partitions, by means of syntactic or prosodic mechanisms, on marked orders, in order to get a maximally transparent mapping of syntax onto IS. The languages in this group are especially restrictive with wide focus interpretation: it is straightforward only in SVO and VS with unaccusatives. The peripheral group (Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian) shows the opposite behavior: these languages mark informational partitions like any other SVO language, but are quite permissive with the assignment of wide focus readings to marked orders. The most salient consequences of this property are the acceptability of VSO, rejected by central Romance, the productivity of OVS,

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understood as non-focal fronting, and the high rate of subject inversion in all its versions. 5. A look at word order in Old Romance clearly shows that there was greater freedom than in modern languages: in addition to the Latin SOV pattern, which later disappeared in the Romance domain, all modern patterns were possible, and, most notably, they were not subject to restrictive informational conditions. Thus, Old Romance word order was much closer to what we currently find in the languages of the permissive group than to the grammars of the restrictive group. The major changes from Old to Modern Romance concern the expression of IS, in particular the conditions on informational partitions, which became stricter. 6. The factors governing synchronic cross-linguistic variation in word order are, not surprisingly, the same ones that determine diachronic variation.

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List of Contributors Delia Bentley is Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Manchester. Her principal research interests are the semantics-syntax interface and morphosyntactic variation in Romance. She is also actively involved in the documentation of the Romance dialects of Italy. Delia has published in Language, Journal of Linguistics, Linguistics, Transactions of the Philological Society and Rivista di Linguistica. She is the author of Split Intransitivity in Italian (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006) and a joint author of Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy (Oxford University Press, 2015). The latter monograph is the principal output of a major research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2010–2014), on which Delia was the Principal Investigator. Between 2006 and 2012 Delia was an Honorary Member of Council of the Philological Society, with sole responsibility for the publication of the Society’s monographs. Patricia Cabredo Hofherr is a researcher at the UMR 7023 Structures formelles du langage (CNRS & Université Paris 8). Her research focuses on the interface between morphology, syntax and semantics. She has worked on passives, aspect and verbal plurality, pro-drop and definite determiners. Her current research focuses on the syntax and semantics of agent-backgrounding constructions crosslinguistically. Silvio Cruschina is University Assistant in the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Vienna. He specializes in Romance linguistics and Italian dialectology from a theoretical perspective. His area of expertise is syntax and his research interests include synchronic and diachronic syntactic variation in word order, syntactic and pragmatic issues on information structure, dislocation and clitic resumption, the syntactic marking of special questions, as well as the category of evidentiality and its grammatical manifestations. He is the author of Discourse-Related Features and Functional Projections (OUP, 2012) and co-author of Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy (OUP, 2015). He has published in journals such as Lingua, Probus, Semantics & Pragmatics, and has co-edited The Boundaries of Pure Morphology: Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives (OUP, 2013) and Studies on Negation: Syntax, Semantics, and Variation (V&R, 2017). He acts as reviewer for various journals, conferences, and funding institutions. Anna-Maria De Cesare is currently Professor of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the Italian Institute of the University of Basel. She holds a Ph.D. in linguistics (University of Geneva, 2001) and a Habilitation in General linguistics and Italian linguistics (University of Basel, 2013). Her research interests include lexical semantics (in particular focus adverbs) and syntax (marked syntactic constructions), two research domains that she investigates from a formal, sociolinguistic and functional point of view. Her research, mainly devoted to contemporary Italian and French, has been published in journals such as Revue Romane, Italian Journal of Linguistics, The Italianist and Folia Linguistica. She was the principal investigator of the SNF funded projects Italian Constituent Order in a Contrastive Perspective (2011–2015) and Italian Sentence Adverbs in a Contrastive Perspective (2015–2017).

DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-025

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Andreas Dufter holds the chair of Romance linguistics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU). His research interests include the historical syntax of Romance languages, the syntax– information structure interface, and variationist linguistics, with a focus on French and Spanish. He has co-edited volumes on Describing and Modeling Variation in Grammar (De Gruyter, 2009), Focus and Background in Romance Languages (Benjamins, 2009), Syntaxe, structure informationnelle et organisation du discours dans les langues romanes (Lang, 2011) and Left Sentence Peripheries in Spanish (Benjamins, 2014). He is series editor of Orbis Romanicus (Narr), associate editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Romance Linguistics (OUP), and member of the Scientific Committee of the Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica (Colegio de México). He has acted as a reviewer for various linguistic journals and funding institutions, and is on the board of speakers of the doctorate program Class of Language at LMU. Antonio Fábregas is Full Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Tromsø-Norway’s Arctic University. His research focuses on the morphosyntactic structure of words and phrases, and particularly on how the syntactic principles and operations that build phrases and sentences are also used to construct complex words. He has also worked on aspectual structure, argument structure, directionals and negation. He is the author of three monographs, the editor of several published works – thematic issues and handbooks – and has published many articles in journals such as The Linguistic Review, Linguistic Analysis, Revue Romane, Linguistics and Probus. Since 2012 he has been the chief editor of Borealis. An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, and since 2016, an associate editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Morphology. Mara Frascarelli holds a chair of General Linguistics at the University of Roma Tre. Her major research interests include the interface analysis of discourse categories (mainly based on naturalistic data), the impact and interaction of discourse phenomena on conversational dynamics and the comparative study of typologically different languages, aiming at the identification and distinction of universal properties from elements of parametric variation. She has published 3 volumes, 2 monographs and various papers in journals such as Lingua, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and Probus. She is a member of the scientific boards of Brill’s Annual of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics and Advances in Language and Literary Studies. Since 2012 she has been the director of a number of research groups in the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Roma Tre and a member of major international projects (such as PRIN 2012 on Distance Dependencies in the forms of linguistic diversity and the “Proyecto de Excelencia” on Estructura informativa y estructura argumental: investigación de interfaz en la sintaxis comparada de las lenguas germánicas y románicas). David Heap is Associate Professor in the French Studies Department and the Linguistics Program at the University of Western Ontario (UWO). His research focuses on the dialect morphosyntax of pronouns in nonstandard Romance varieties, particularly object clitics and clitic combinations in Ibero-Romance and subject clitics, including partial subject paradigms, in Gallo-Romance. As a Membre associé with the UMR CNRS 7320 “Bases, Corpus, Langage” at the Université Nice Côte d’Azur, he works with the “Dialectologie et linguistique formelle” team on the “Thesaurus Occitan” (THÉSOC ) database. He is part of the international team of scholars who are editing and publishing the

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fieldwork data from the Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica (alpi.csic.es). His publications include co-editing the Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on Methods in Dialectology (Lang, 2011) and Selected Papers from the 44th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (Benjamins, 2017). Olga Kellert is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Göttingen. Her main interests are the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of questions, negation and polarity, focus and discourse particles, and possessive constructions in Romance languages, with a focus on French and Italian. She has published several papers in this area in journals such as Italian Journal of Linguistics and Lingvisticæ Investigationes. She works in a project on the diachronic development of quantifiers (http://www. quantification.eu) and she is interested in experimental studies, e.g. on reaction time experimentation in prosody research. Marie Labelle retired in September 2017 from the linguistics department of Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Her research interests cover aspects of French syntax and semantics (denominal verbs, causative and locative alternations, reflexivity, causative and perception verbs, clitics, tense and aspect, negation), historical syntax (negation, object clitic placement, verb second, participle fronting, stylistic inversion, information structure), and first language acquisition (relatives, root infinitives, postverbal subjects, tense and aspect, inflectional morphology, categorization, metasyntax). She has published in journals such as Lingua, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Theoretical Linguistics, Probus, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, International Journal of Bilingualism, Journal of Child Language, and Language Acquisition. She is a member of the Advisory Editorial Board of the Journal of French Language Studies. Pierre Larrivée is Professor of French Linguistics at Université de Caen Normandie. His current research focuses on principles of language change, especially relating to the syntax-pragmatics interface. These are investigated with reference to the empirical fields of negation, indefinites and interrogatives in English and French. He has authored 5 monographs, edited 22 volumes, and pub 

lished over a hundred papers in journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Lingua, Linguistics, Journal of French Language Studies and English Language and Linguistics. He has initiated a number of research projects, and is currently directing an international network on the description of the grammar of contemporary vernacular French with Florence Lefeuvre. These projects have led to the development and dissemination of acquisitional, contemporary and diachronic corpora that help formulate and answer new research questions. Adam Ledgeway is Professor of Italian and Romance Linguistics at the University of Cambridge where he is also Chair of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages. His research interests include Italian dialectology, the comparative history and morphosyntax of the Romance languages, Latin, Italo-Greek, syntactic theory, and linguistic change. His single-authored books include A Comparative Syntax of the Dialects of Southern Italy: A Minimalist Approach (Blackwell, 2000), Grammatica diacronica del napoletano (Niemeyer, 2009) and From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change (OUP, 2012); among others he has co-edited volumes on Syntactic Variation: The Dialects

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of Italy (CUP, 2009), The Cambridge History of the Romance languages. Volume 1: Structures. Volume 2: Contexts (CUP, 2011, 2013), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages (OUP, 2016), and The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax (CUP, 2017). He serves on the editorial boards of numerous international journals, and is currently the general co-editor of two book series for Oxford University Press (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Syntax; Oxford Guides to the World’s Languages). Géraldine Legendre is a Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her main research interests focus on a comparative approach to adult (morpho)syntax and to L1 acquisition of morphosyntax. She publishes in Linguistics journals (Language, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Lingua, etc.) and in Psychology/Cognitive Science journals. She is the co-editor of two volumes on Optimality Theory in Syntax and Semantics/Pragmatics (MIT Press, 2001; OUP, 2016). Manuel Leonetti is Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Alcalá (Madrid). He is currently President of the Spanish Linguistics Society. His main research interest is the interaction of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, from a formal, synchronic and cognitive perspective; he has worked on topics such as information structure and word order, tense and mood, coercion, reference, definiteness and specificity. He has co-edited volumes on Procedural Meaning (Emerald, 2011), 60 problemas de gramática (Akal, 2011), and New Perspectives in the Study of “Ser” and “Estar” (Benjamins, 2015). He acts as academic reviewer for various linguistic journals, and is a member of the scientific boards of Revista de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística, Borealis, Isogloss and Cuadernos de Lingüística de El Colegio de México. He directed the project Archivo Gramatical de la Lengua Española (AGLE) for Instituto Cervantes. Jan Lindschouw holds a chair in Romance linguistics with a special focus on French at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His main research and teaching interests include language variation in the verbal system both in a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, as well as foreign language acquisition and teaching, with special attention paid to writing and cultural didactics. He has published the monograph Étude des modes dans le système concessif en français du 16e au 20e siècle et en espagnol moderne. Évolution, assertion et grammaticalisation (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2011) and has co-edited volumes on Deixis and Pronouns in Romance Languages (Benjamins, 2013) and Les variations diasystématiques et leurs interdépendances dans les langues romanes (ELiPhi, 2015). He has published in journals such as Cahiers Chronos, Revue de Linguistique Romane, Pratiques, and Synergies Pays Scandinaves. He acts as a reviewer for various linguistic and didactic journals and has organized several seminars and conferences on language variation and change. He is currently taking part in the national research project on Developing Early Foreign Language Learning and Teaching financed by the A.P. Møller Foundation. Maria Lobo is Associate Professor at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas – Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Her research interests include the acquisition of syntax and syntactic variation, focusing primarily on Portuguese. She has published in journals such as Lingua, Probus, Language Acquisition, Dialectologia and Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, among others, and she has contributed several

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chapters to volumes such as The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics (Wiley-Blackwell), Gramática do Português (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian) and Manual de Linguística Portuguesa (De Gruyter). She has participated in several projects funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation (focusing on the acquisition of syntax and on syntactic variation) and in several European Research Projects. Ana Maria Martins is Professor of Linguistics at the School of Arts and Humanities and director of the Linguistics Center at the University of Lisbon. Her main areas of interest are comparative, historical, Romance and theoretical syntax, more precisely word order, clitics, infinitival constructions, se constructions, emphatic polarity, negation and negative polarity items, as well as metalinguistic negation. She has published in journals such as Probus, Lingua, Catalan Journal of Linguistics, Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Linguistic Inquiry, and book series such as Oxford Linguistics, Oxford Studies in Diachronic & Historical Syntax, Benjamins’ Current Issues in Linguistic Theory and Benjamins’ Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory. She is the editor (with Ernestina Carrilho) of De Gruyter’s Manual de Linguística Portuguesa/Manual of Portuguese Linguistics (MRL 16), and co-editor of the journal Estudos de Lingüística Galega, and she has directed funded projects (grants from FCT) resulting in parsed corpora for the study of the syntax of European Portuguese dialects (project CORDIAL-SIN) and the syntax of Old Portuguese (project WOChWEL). Guido Mensching obtained his Ph.D. in Romance Philology at the University of Cologne in 1992 with a commented edition of an Old Spanish medieval medico-botanical dictionary. He then worked for some years in computational linguistics, at the same university. During this time, he turned to generative grammar, obtaining his Habilitation in 1997, with a thesis on Romance infinitive constructions (published in 2000 as Infinitive Constructions with Specified Subjects: A Syntactic Analysis of the Romance Languages, OUP). In 2000, he was appointed full professor at the Freie Universität Berlin. Since 2013, he holds the chair of Romance Linguistics at the University of Göttingen. Apart from his interest in synchronic and diachronic syntax, Guido Mensching has also continued his philological work (mostly on medieval Judaeo-Romance texts), and he is a specialist on Sardinian. He is the editor of the Romanische Bibliographie and of the linguistic part of the Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur and has directed numerous third party-funded projects. From 2008 to 2016, Mensching was an elected member of the linguistic review board of the German Science Foundation (DFG). Michèle Oliviéri is Professor in Linguistics at the Université Nice Côte d’Azur and specializes in dialectology and syntax. She is also a member of the laboratory UMR CNRS 7320 “Bases, Corpus, Langage” where she heads the “Dialectologie et linguistique formelle” team and leads the development of the “Thesaurus Occitan” (THESOC ) database, dedicated to Occitan dialects. Her research focuses on the syntax and the morphosyntax of Romance varieties, such as oral French and Occitan dialects, in the generative framework. She has mostly studied the behaviour of clitics: object clitics in French as well as subject clitics in Occitan dialects, which exhibit partial paradigms. The latter issue was the topic of the ANR-DFG project DADDIPRO she co-directed (2012–2015). She also works on other aspects of Occitan dialectal syntax, such as negation and subordination, and the structure of the left periphery of the clause. She has contributed to collective publications such as The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages (OUP, 2016), has edited or co-edited several books or journals (Corpus), and

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participates in a number of ANR projects. She is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Edizioni dell’Orso’s series Lingua e società (Turin). Katerina Palasis is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France. Her research focuses on language acquisition, morpho-syntax and French. Her recent topics of interest have been the description and analysis of nominative clitics, subjects, negation and wh-questions in child French within the diglossic hypothesis (publications in Journal of French Language Studies and Lingua). She has contributed to CHILDES by sharing a naturalistic video-recorded corpus of French children’s interactions in kindergarten. She now also works in experimental settings, with children and adults, with elicited production, eye-tracking and lexical decision tasks. Cecilia Poletto holds positions at University of Padua and at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt. Her main research interests are in the diachronic evolution of the Romance languages and dialects in terms of sentence structure (verb second, word order of the clause and in the nominal domain) from the medieval stages to modern ones. She has worked on the syntax of northern Italian dialects and is one of the founders of the ASIt project (Syntactic Atlas of Italy, http://asit.maldura.unipd.it/), she cooperated in the Edisyn project (European dialect syntax) and is currently responsible for two DFGfinanced research projects on Old Italian (one on relative clauses, http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/ ~tezimmer/HP_FG-RelS/projects.htm and one on quantification, http://www.quantification.eu/). She has published two books with Oxford University Press and papers in journals such as Linguistic Variation, Lingua, Probus, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. She is a member of the Graduiertenkolleg “Nominal modification” and of the Ph.D. doctoral school at the University of Padua and at present a member of the Italian ministerial committee for habilitations in general linguistics. Natascha Pomino is Professor in Spanish Linguistics at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal. Her teaching and research interests embrace mainly grammar theory, generative syntax, Distributed Morphology as well as language change and language variation. A special focus of her research is interface phenomena, which require an in-depth understanding of the interaction of the different components of grammar (especially between morphology, syntax and phonology). Her most current publications, published inter alia in Probus, Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft and Journal of French Language Studies, are devoted to various agreement phenomena in Romance as well as to the clitic nature of certain (inflectional) elements. Eva-Maria Remberger is Professor in Romance Linguistics in the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Vienna. She is mainly interested in grammatical theory, historical linguistics and minority languages in the Italo-Romance area (Sardinian, Greek in Southern Italy). She has worked on the morphosyntax of verbal periphrases, mood and modality as well as various interface phenomena (focus fronting, discourse particles, volitionality, evidentiality and quotation) in Romance. She acts as a reviewer for various funding agencies and linguistic journals. Her most recent publications include two co-authored chapters in The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages (OUP, 2016), various articles in the new Manuals of Romance Linguistics series (De Gruyter), and a co-edited volume on Studies on Negation: Syntax, Semantics, and Variation (V&R, 2017).

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Cristina Sánchez López holds a chair of Hispanic Linguistics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). Her research interests include the syntax and semantics of determiners and quantifiers, the lexicon-syntax-semantics interface, exclamatives and optatives, and micro-variation in Spanish and Romance, both in a synchronic and diachronic perspective. She is the author of El grado de adjetivos y adverbios (2006); editor of Las construcciones con “se” (2002); co-editor, with L. Sáez of Las construcciones comparativas (2015); and co-editor, with Manuel Leonetti and Victoria Escandell, of 60 problemas de gramática (2011). She has published numerous articles and book chapters in both international journals and collections, and has contributed several chapters to major reference works on Hispanic Linguistics (Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (Bosque/Demonte (edd.), 1999); Sintaxis histórica de la lengua española (Company Company (ed.), 2009–2015); Enciclopedia de lingüística hispánica (Gutiérrez-Rexach (ed.), 2016). She leads a research group on the lexiconsyntax-semantics interface at UCM, and a research project on sentential modality and the left periphery that has received public financing. Since 2011 she has headed the Department of Spanish Linguistics at UCM. Emanuela Sanfelici is a post-doctoral researcher in the Romance and Psycholinguistic departments at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt. She received her doctoral degree from the Scuola Normale Superiore in 2011. Her research interests are centered on modeling syntactic variation and change both in a synchronic and diachronic perspective. She has been working on micro-variation in Italian and Italian varieties, and on the history of Irish, Hittite and Romance syntax. She is also interested in language acquisition, with a focus on the acquisition of syntax and word order variation, as a way to better understand the mechanisms behind language change. She is currently collaborating with the University of Pennsylvania on the construction of the syntactically-annotated corpus of Old Italian texts. Ioanna Sitaridou is University Senior Lecturer in Romance Philology in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies in Linguistics and Modern and Medieval Languages at Queens’ College, Cambridge (2004–). She works on synchronic and diachronic syntax and has published extensively in Lingua, Diachronica, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and Glossa, while her book on Word Order in Old Romance (with Prof. Montserrat Batllori) will be published by CUP in 2018. For her work on Old Romance syntax she was awarded an Early Career Fellowship by CRASSH, Cambridge in 2008 while in Lent 2012 she received a research buyout by the ISWOC project at the University of Oslo. For (re)discovering the last Greek infinitive in the Black Sea in Turkey she was awarded the Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellowship in  

Hellenic Studies by Princeton University in Spring 2011 and a Research Fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University in Winter 2015. Elisabeth Stark holds a chair of Romance linguistics at Zurich (UZH). Her core interests are the comparative morphosyntax of Romance nominals (with a focus on partitivity, also in a cross-linguistic perspective) and micro-variation in French (register variation), both in a synchronic and diachronic perspective and including variationist and formal approaches to language. She has published in journals such as Linguistic variation, Journal of Semantics, Linguistics and Probus; she is a member of the scientific boards of Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft and Langages and of the book series

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Linguistische Arbeiten at Mouton de Gruyter and Orbis Romanicus at Narr, and acts as academic referee for various institutions and publishers. Since 2011, she has been the director of two large interdisciplinary research projects (grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation) on multilingual variation in WhatsApp messages and text messages. She is the director of a research group (on nominal determination) within the Zurich research priority program “Language and Space” and the director of the Zurich Competence Center for Linguistics (ZüKL) and the Doctoral Graduate Program in Linguistics at UZH. She was elected as a member of Academia.net in 2012. Xavier Villalba is Associate Professor of Catalan Linguistics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. His core research interests are the interface of syntax with information structure (with a focus on right dislocation) and semantics (with a focus on exclamative and existential sentences). He has published in international linguistics journals such as Caplletra, Catalan Journal of Linguistics, International Review of Pragmatics, Italian Journal of Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, Lingua, and The Linguistic Review, and he has contributed to several collective volumes (Gramàtica del Català Contemporani, Advances in the Analysis of Spanish Exclamatives, Definiteness Effects: Bilingual, Typological and Diachronic Variation, Enciclopedia de Lingüística Hispánica, Per una gramàtica del català antic). He is the co-editor of Catalan Journal of Linguistics, and head of the Master Program Estudis Avançats de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes (UAB-UB). Nigel Vincent is Professor Emeritus of General & Romance Linguistics at The University of Manchester following his retirement from the Mont Follick Chair of Comparative Philology in 2011. He has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Pavia and Roma Tre, the Romansk Institut in Copenhagen and an Erskine Fellowship at the University of Canterbury (NZ). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the Academia Europaea. His research concerns the modelling of the mechanisms of morphosyntactic change from the perspective of Lexical-Functional Grammar and with special reference to Latin and Italian and to parallels and differences between developments in Romance and Germanic. Recent publications include Dialects and Diachrony: Grammatical Change in the Dialects of Italy (OUP, 2014, co-edited with Paola Benincà and Adam Ledgeway) and Early and Late Latin: Continuity or Change? (CUP, 2016, co-edited with J.N. Adams) and articles in Language and Transactions of the Philological Society. Richard Waltereit is Full Professor of Romance Linguistics at Humboldt-University Berlin. His main research interest is language change in French and other Romance languages. In particular, he has published widely on grammaticalization, reanalysis, argument structure, and the impact of language change on the semantics–pragmatics interface. He is the author of three research monographs: Metonymie und Grammatik (Niemeyer [De Gruyter], 1998), Abtönung (Niemeyer [De Gruyter], 2006), and Reflexive Marking in the History of French (Benjamins, 2012). He is chief editor (linguistics) of Revue Romane, and is on the editorial or advisory board of Journal of French Language Studies, Histoire et évolution du français (Classiques Garnier), Historical Syntax, and Cahiers AFLS. He has reviewed grant applications to the British, Belgian (Flemish and Walloon), and French government funding agencies.

Index A΄-position (see: non-argument position) ablative 183, 191, 192, 207, 208, 740, 760, 841, 844, 860, 863, 865–867, 869, 870, 872 aboutness 39, 40, 472, 476, 477, 496, 498 – aboutness-shift phrase 476, 477, 489 – aboutness-shift topic (A-Topic) 39–41, 472, 476–481, 485–489, 496, 498 – aboutness topic 39–41, 50, 55, 891, 892, 909, 915 Abruzzese 264, 279, 291, 292, 352, 695, 697, 856, 860 (see also: Italian dialects, Southern Italian dialects) Accessibility Hierarchy 805, 811, 813, 818, 821, 822, 870 accusative 16, 27, 30, 41, 43, 91–93, 96, 98, 102, 103, 105, 117, 122, 142, 167, 169–171, 183, 189–193, 195, 196, 205, 207, 256, 257, 273, 300, 302, 304, 305, 307, 311, 312, 314, 315, 317, 321, 325–327, 353, 354, 359, 370, 382, 384, 388, 389, 503, 692, 702, 704, 738, 742, 754, 808, 841, 843, 854, 858, 865, 874, 875, accusative-and-infinitive 369, 370, 381, 382, 384, 392, 393, 754, 841, 854, 858 addition 10, 11, 67, 179, 238, 246, 249, 346, 374, 384, 406, 451, 453, 455, 485–487, 503, 513–515, 517, 522, 526, 538, 539, 541, 542, 619, 651, 653, 672, 674, 699, 701, 703, 704, 718, 719, 741, 745, 752, 756, 781, 790, 805, 815, 816, 861, 874, 895, 913, 929 adjacency 11, 48, 49, 311, 312, 505, 511, 512, 520, 523, 527, 576, 752, 758, 796, 846, 907, 922, adjective 7–9, 14, 15, 103, 154, 155, 164, 166, 167, 234, 238, 242, 265, 333, 335–337, 344, 346–348, 353, 371, 376–378, 392, 508, 517, 526, 606, 607, 612, 618, 655– 657, 680, 691, 692, 694–696, 698, 699, 702, 703, 708–711, 727, 730, 731, 733, 735, 736–738, 743, 744, 747, 752–759, 763– 765, 771–801, 804, 815, 816, 842, 843, 859, 863, 867, 868, 872, 888, 909 – (non-) intensional adjective 786, 791 adjunct 51–53, 70, 96, 119, 132, 138, 163, 164, 167, 192, 309, 318, 319, 354, 372, 380, 488, 495, 507, 550, 552–555, 558, 559, 572, 573, 664, 665, 760, 771, 775–778, 795, 796, 806, 814, 915, 916, 918 DOI 10.1515/9783110377088-026

adposition 811, 874, 875 adverb / adverbial 7, 8, 11, 15, 42, 43, 63, 68, 72, 74, 99, 103, 192, 219, 233, 240, 249, 250, 398, 335, 336, 355, 372, 388, 390, 392, 393, 400, 401, 402, 403, 405, 406, 412, 413, 414, 415, 417, 418, 420, 421, 429, 434, 435, 450, 451, 480, 481, 487, 489, 507, 522, 524, 526, 544, 549, 552, 555, 560, 637, 650, 652, 653, 655, 656, 671, 672, 677, 680, 682, 805, 806, 812, 816–818, 830, 848, 860, 863, 868, 908, 909, 910, 912, 914, 916, 922, 939, – temporal adverb 43, 400, 401, 402, 405, 413, 414, 415, 417, 418, 420, 652, 812, 816, 818 adversative coordination 647, 651, 652, 674, 676, 678, 682, 683 (see also: coordination) advice (see: speech act, directive) Afrikaans 454 agent 16, 90–93, 96, 100, 120, 155–158, 161, 168, 170, 171–173, 176, 177, 230–232, 235, 239, 241, 243, 248, 249–254, 260, 264, 273, 274, 277, 286, 288, 289, 303, 324, 378, 386, 641, 775, 776, 779, 781–783, 794–796, 893, 894 agreement 8, 9, 11, 12–15, 17, 27, 28–31, 46, 50, 52–57, 60, 62, 63, 67, 68, 71, 73, 77, 89, 92, 94–96, 111–116, 120, 123, 136, 142, 160, 168–170, 193, 194, 210, 245, 252–259, 265, 290–293, 332, 333, 337–339, 343, 364, 351–355, 357–361, 370, 388, 389, 393, 423, 464, 549–551, 583, 584, 590, 656, 661, 668, 670, 671, 678, 680, 681, 691–703, 705, 706, 709, 714, 718, 720, 740, 745, 755, 773, 774, 805–808, 810– 812, 814–816, 818, 820, 821, 825, 826, 830, 831, 869 – agreement marker 49, 56, 57, 62, 63, 71, 73, 116, 120, 123, 189, 213, 214, 217, 219, 220, 577, 853 – past participle agreement 11, 13, 89, 95, 101, 106, 111–116, 142, 168–170, 202, 244, 245, 272, 290–293, 300 Airole 215 (see also: Italian dialects, Northern Italian dialects) Aktionsart 397, 400, 411, 419, 420 Albanian 17, 737, 738, 762

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alignment 129, 131, 170, 206, 232, 273, 274, 286, 290, 477, 752, 762, 840, 873, 898 – active / stative 273, 274, 290 allomorphy 17, 183, 196–198, 217, 218, 282, 290, 597, 812 analytic / analyticity 13, 14, 104, 232, 398, 400–402, 405–410, 421, 424, 442, 444, 475, 459, 551, 650, 727, 759, 774, 839– 842, 846, 849, 853–869, 873–875, 919, 927 – analytic future 397, 399–405, 424, 441 – analytic pluperfect 400, 408 animate / animacy 64, 65, 107–110, 120–122, 126, 177, 183, 189, 193, 195, 196, 246, 247, 253, 303, 304, 342, 462, 691, 699–701, 785–787, 810, 812, 813 anticausative 176–178, 230, 231, 247–251, 254, 259, 266 antilocality 873, 874 (see also: locality) applicative 97, 132, 314, 316 appositive relative 560, 804–806, 810, 814, 815, 816, 818–821, 823–825, 828–831 Apulian 279, 280, 293, 348, 352, 353, 856 (see also: Italian dialects, Southern Italian dialects) Aragonese 349, 490, 778, 863 areal contact (see: language contact) argument 4, 7, 9, 12, 15, 27, 29, 37, 38, 40–42, 45, 50, 52, 55, 57, 71, 75, 77, 89, 90, 92–97, 111, 114, 116, 118, 119, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133, 136, 138, 140–143, 154–180, 189, 192, 213, 214, 216, 217, 219, 230, 244, 247, 251, 254, 260, 273–275, 277, 279, 280, 282, 286–288, 291, 293, 294, 307–309, 319– 321, 323, 324, 326, 327, 334, 341–343, 346, 347, 349, 353–355, 357, 361, 371, 372, 380, 382, 384, 386, 455, 472, 484, 488, 492, 495, 507, 546, 548, 553, 578– 580, 584, 590, 594, 597, 655, 665, 669, 670, 678, 712, 732, 733, 745, 771, 773, 775–780, 784, 793–795, 797, 798, 800, 801, 805, 812–814, 818, 821, 822, 825, 847, 893–895, 904, 905, 910, 911, 913, 915, 916 – alternation 12, 15, 154, 174, 175, 360, 628, 816 – external argument 13, 92, 93, 95, 126, 280, 287, 288, 291, 309, 319–321, 323, 324, 326, 327, 342, 384, 489, 574, 662, 696,

699, 700, 743, 744, 764, 776, 778, 782, 793, 795, 797, 801, 840, 894, 898, 910 – inheritance 11, 136, 166, 272, 343, 354, 463, 779, 874 – internal argument 75, 92–96, 100, 111, 116, 126, 132, 133, 136, 141, 198, 280, 287, 288, 293, 314, 326, 386, 497, 691, 771, 783, 784, 791, 796, 798, 800, 840, 893–895 – reduction 230, 247, 254, 260, 383, 384, 391, 539, 541, 543, 558 – structure 12, 15, 90, 154, 176 Armenian 717 Aromanian 120, 121 (see also: Romanian) article 7, 16, 17, 30, 53, 54, 98, 102, 113, 114, 141, 160, 193, 197, 239, 264, 302, 308, 338, 372, 373, 298, 398, 464, 607, 667, 696, 697, 706, 707, 713, 727–737, 739–745, 748, 749, 751–755, 757–759, 761–765, 773, 774, 811, 841–846, 852, 872, 873, 875 (see also: determiner) – definite article 17, 102, 141, 193, 197, 372, 373, 392, 696, 697, 727, 728, 733, 735, 736, 739, 744, 748, 749, 751, 752, 754, 755, 757, 758, 762, 763, 774, 842, 843, 845 – indefinite article 30, 53, 54, 98, 113, 114, 160, 264, 302, 308, 713, 728–730, 733, 740–742, 744, 747, 753, 757, 763, 842, 843, 972 article salat 728, 740, 845 ascriptive 248, 332, 335, 337, 343, 353, 361 aspect 8, 13, 15, 124, 128, 138, 142, 169, 230– 233, 236–239, 249, 253, 266, 272, 279, 285, 287–289, 294, 333, 334, 341, 343, 346, 374, 377, 392, 397, 398, 400, 405, 410–422, 441, 444, 522, 551, 556, 603, 604, 616, 635, 640, 668, 839, 847, 848, 851, 859, 893, 894, 895, 900, 904 – aspectual choice 412, 413, 415–417 assertion / non-assertion 287, 338, 348, 397, 426, 429, 430–433, 435, 436, 439, 440, 451, 452, 454, 473, 474, 477, 480, 486, 489, 498 510, 520, 521–526, 573, 608, 616, 617, 667, 913 Asturian 124–127, 186, 194, 195, 198, 350, 352, 517, 518, 692, 695, 696, 748, 755, 845, 847, 859 Astur-Leonese 3 asymmetric coordination 658–663, 679, 682, 683 (see also: coordination)

Index

asyndesis / asyndeton 654–656, 661, 682, 851 A-Topic (see: aboutness) auxiliary 9, 11, 13, 16, 17, 34, 38, 96, 111, 112, 114–116, 138, 142, 169, 170, 197, 198, 200, 202, 204, 208, 230–238, 240–242, 245, 246, 247, 254–256, 266, 272–275, 277– 290, 292–294, 301, 304–309, 320, 322, 326, 345, 346, 369, 387, 398, 399, 401, 404, 408–410, 424, 454, 518, 559, 620, 637, 639, 657, 668, 760, 764, 839–841, 846–851, 864, 868, 872, 887 – selection 11, 116, 272, 274, 275, 277, 279–290, 292–294, 848 – split 272, 274, 278, 280 Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (ASH) 285, 288, 289 Aux-to-Comp 387, 388 background 40, 119, 230, 260, 264, 411, 416–418, 476–479, 487, 491, 496, 504, 515, 520, 521, 527, 544, 587, 887, 891, 894, 898, 899, 904, 913, 914, 922, 923, 928 Balearic 107, 292, 735, 740, 843, 845 (see also: Catalan) Bantu languages 50, 744 bare nominal / noun 89, 912, 265, 663, 712, 713–715, 727, 733–735, 744, 759, 763, 797, 843, 874, 875, 912, 917 Basque 17, 168, 414, 509, 707 Basso Polesano 243 (see also: Italian dialects, Northern Italian dialects) Bergamasco 351, 540, 556 (see also: Italian dialects, Northern Italian dialects) Brazilian Portuguese 4, 9, 28, 29–31, 33, 34, 36–38, 40, 43, 45, 46, 50, 52, 56, 60, 64–69, 72, 73, 76, 77, 89, 95, 100, 124, 125, 132, 133, 135–138, 143, 198, 211, 261, 265, 305, 349, 352, 353, 360, 453, 454, 464, 512, 518, 519, 537, 539–542, 551, 556, 580, 581, 585, 589, 625, 606, 692, 710, 713, 714, 734, 735, 751, 755, 821, 892, 896, 897, 901, 904–906 (see also: Portuguese) Bulgarian 738 by-phrase 238, 239, 243, 315, 319–321, 323, 324, 326, 327 Calabrian 115, 203, 245, 292, 352, 353, 636, 754, 756, 829, 841, 842, 849, 856, 862

943

(see also: Italian dialects, Southern Italian dialects) Campidanese 100, 349, 350, 387, 729, 730, 739, 724 (see also: Sardinian) Cantabric 695 (see also: Ibero-Romance) cardinality 606, 730, 744, 784 case 8, 14, 27, 28, 31, 50, 52, 54–56, 77, 89–96, 98, 100–106, 109, 118, 119, 122, 127, 142, 159, 160, 168, 183, 189–192, 195, 196, 205, 209, 273, 280, 299, 300, 302, 305, 308, 311, 312, 314, 319, 321, 325, 327, 337, 353, 354, 359, 369, 370, 381, 382, 384, 386, 388, 389, 740, 741, 761–763, 774, 796, 801, 808, 812, 813, 830, 840, 862, 864, 865, 869, 874, 875 – assignment 28, 54, 92, 93, 96, 100, 119, 189, 302, 311, 312, 321, 327, 354, 382, 384, 388, 389, 662, 801 – nominative case 27, 28, 31, 50, 52–54, 68, 91– 94, 96, 100–104, 106, 122, 183, 189, 190, 196, 205, 221, 232, 242–244, 265, 273, 302, 308, 315, 335, 337, 338, 353, 369, 370, 381, 382, 385, 386, 388, 389, 393, 453, 606, 640, 662, 663, 702, 704, 736–738, 740– 742, 754, 813, 824, 841, 844, 845, 851, 853, 859, 865, 867–870, 872, 875 Catalan 1, 3, 28, 29, 32, 38, 40, 51, 56–59, 71, 80, 99, 100, 105–108, 111, 112, 118–120, 122, 123, 138, 141, 173, 189, 192, 194, 196, 197, 200, 203, 204, 207, 208, 213, 219, 220, 220, 233–240, 242, 246, 249, 253, 254, 258, 259, 262–264, 274, 292, 299, 300, 303, 305, 310–312, 316- 318, 320, 321, 323, 324, 335–337, 339, 343–346, 348– 350, 352, 355, 356, 360, 369, 370, 384, 387, 392, 398, 399, 409, 450, 451, 455, 461, 462, 465, 490, 50- 512, 515–518, 520, 540, 575, 592, 598, 606–611, 614, 616, 618, 620–622, 624, 625, 628, 630–632, 637, 638, 640, 648, 650–653, 660, 665, 672, 674, 676, 677, 679, 681, 692, 693, 02, 704, 710, 718, 719, 728–730, 735, 736, 740, 741, 746, 747, 751, 754, 755, 773–775, 777, 779– 781, 785, 786, 794, 795, 799, 813, 818, 819, 842, 843, 845, 848–850, 855, 856, 860, 862, 863, 868, 887, 896, 899–902, 904, 906, 908, 909, 912, 914, 915, 923, 924, 928 (see also: Balearic, Valencian) – Colloquial 208, 751

944

Index

– Modern 96, 343 – Old 4, 185, 252, 740, 751, 921, 922 – Standard 106, 208, 755 categorical / thetic 7, 39–41, 46, 50, 55, 64, 894, 895 Caucasian languages 185 causative 11, 13, 15, 16, 115, 124, 142, 160, 177, 199, 232, 245, 246, 290, 293, 294, 299–305, 307, 309, 310, 313, 325, 326, 383, 384, 393, 508, 668, 839, 862 c-command 65, 92, 310, 320, 484, 496, 784 Celtic 546, 547 Chinese 60, 136, 474, 712 classifier 711, 713–715, 717, 771 clausal negation / clausal negative 301, 306, 307, 320, 449–452, 454, 456–459, 461, 463, 465–467 clause structure 9, 50, 55, 318, 327, 369, 370, 384, 391, 393, 558, 848, 888, 916 cleft 10, 14, 15, 32, 33, 43, 44, 340, 472, 503, 509, 515, 536–561, 587–589, 591, 598, 848, 901, 904 – cleft constituent 537–539, 541, 543–560 – cleft type 538, 539, 544, 561 – implicit cleft 539, 541, 548, 556–558, 561 – que-cleft 553, 554 clitic 11–13, 16, 17, 40, 41, 44, 49, 55–57, 61, 62, 71, 73, 75, 89, 92, 95, 98–100, 105, 107, 110–112, 114, 116–120, 123, 125–142, 160, 183–222, 241, 243, 244, 254, 255–257, 259, 260, 264, 272, 276, 281, 283, 284, 287, 290, 292, 294, 300, 301, 303–308, 314–321, 325–327, 332, 339, 348, 350, 351, 356–358, 382, 384, 389–393, 452– 454, 456, 456, 461, 472, 475, 476, 479, 481–484, 486–497, 505–508, 511–513, 516–519, 521–523, 526, 537, 543, 548, 571, 572, 574, 576–578, 587, 593, 595, 597, 615, 617, 620, 625, 629, 630, 639, 663, 702, 717, 728, 733, 736, 737, 749, 751, 756–760, 764, 805, 806, 808, 817, 822–829, 841, 843, 844, 846, 848, 849, 851–853, 862, 866, 888–890, 895, 904, 908–910, 912, 914, 916, 918, 920–922, 926, 928 – clitic climbing 89, 123–127, 142, 199, 200, 254, 272, 290, 294, 318, 320, 325–327, 390–392, 862 – clitic cluster 125, 126, 183, 203, 206, 207, 456

– clitic doubling 16, 49, 89, 107, 110, 118–123, 131, 142, 187–189, 292, 215, 216, 358, 512, 759, 760 – clitic left dislocation 13, 49, 119, 129, 475, 476, 481, 482, 484, 490, 491, 493, 495, 497, 498, 852 – clitic pronoun 11, 12, 16, 17, 55–57, 71, 73, 98, 100, 119, 123, 126, 127, 142, 183–185, 187, 189–199, 204, 209, 210, 222, 259, 264, 287, 290, 389, 458, 490, 492, 495, 497, 537, 539, 543, 548, 547, 557, 558, 571, 572, 576, 577, 587, 593, 692, 756, 805, 806, 808, 848, 852, 888 – clitic resumption 356, 472, 475, 481, 487, 490, 492, 493, 496, 505, 522, 823 – clitic right dislocation 119, 129, 475, 476, 482, 490, 491, 493–496 – partitive cliticization 114, 221, 283, 284, 287, 483 – subject clitic 49, 56, 57, 61, 62, 71, 123, 125, 183, 184, 188, 189, 209–214, 216–221, 254, 260, 332, 351, 491, 537, 571, 572, 577, 578, 587, 823, 853, 866 coda 347, 354–357, 358 – coda constraint 355, 357, 358 Comelico 135 (see also: Italian dialects, Northern Italian dialects) comitative 494, 661, 670, 776, 795, 859 – coordination 661 command (see: speech act, directive) comment 40, 47–49, 336, 338, 784, 997, 891–895, 904, 910, 911 comparative 47, 418, 455, 651, 680–683, 859, 861, 866, 909 – correlative 680–683 comparative linguistics 2–5, 10, 15, 40, 276, 403, 467, 472, 480, 482, 488, 502, 648, 888, 890, 892, 905, 914, 927 complement / complementation 7–9, 11, 12, 40, 41, 43, 74, 75, 89, 90–92, 96, 99–102, 113, 121, 123, 138, 155, 160, 162, 163, 166, 167, 220, 221, 235, 245, 246, 254, 294, 299, 300, 302–307, 310, 314, 319, 320, 322, 324–326, 332–334, 337–341, 344, 353, 361, 371, 373, 375–378, 382, 388, 398, 416, 420, 425, 429, 430, 433, 454, 455, 459, 480, 490, 504, 506, 525, 543, 558, 584, 587, 590, 594, 662, 664, 715, 718, 733, 744, 750, 765, 781, 782, 790, 805,

Index

806, 810–812, 816, 820, 830, 848, 854, 857, 861, 863, 865, 869–874, 887, 888, 915, 916, 918, 919, 922, 925, 926, 928 complementizer 7, 8, 11, 57, 59, 75, 77, 91, 96, 100, 112, 113, 121, 128, 130, 133, 136–141, 187, 300, 369, 373, 375, 376, 377, 384, 387, 388, 393, 506, 536, 540, 543, 552, 555, 560, 569, 587, 588, 591–593, 595–597, 603, 605, 607, 612, 613, 629, 631, 636– 639, 642, 656, 669, 677, 694, 695, 804, 839–841, 848, 854–859, 872–875, 887 – interrogative complementizer 592, 597 – complementizer phrase 8, 13, 47, 119, 221, 382, 384, 390, 494, 495, 497, 506, 558, 559, 573, 587, 588, 590, 592, 596, 597, 656, 718, 841, 854, 874, 875 – complementizer question 569, 570, 591, 597, 598 complex inversion 571–574, 598 complex predicate 294, 299, 311, 312, 314, 318, 384, 798, 893, 917 compositionality 8–10, 536, 559, 560, 596, 597, 799, 800, 831 compound / compounding 8, 17, 95, 111, 202, 203, 238–240, 243, 244, 307, 308, 310, 311, 313, 398–400, 404, 405, 409, 435, 441, 442, 747, 764, 771, 784, 798–800, 847, 863 conditional 202, 397, 398, 400, 423–427, 435, 437–439, 441, 442, 466, 474, 475, 481, 491, 539, 542, 543, 614, 633, 635, 637–640, 659, 677, 748, 764, 850, 851, 859–862, 922 configurational / configurationality 281, 290, 727, 839, 852, 869, 870, 873, 874, 919, 927 conjunction 27, 49, 185, 189, 372, 436, 437, 440, 468, 477, 544, 632, 633, 635, 647– 683, 748 conjunction phrase 662, 664 constituency 1, 7–9, 12–15, 27–32, 37, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 62, 65, 70, 91, 92, 94, 97, 104, 117, 119, 120, 123, 157, 189, 214, 303, 315, 319, 338, 340, 354, 373, 391, 450, 459, 460, 461, 464, 465, 472, 475–477, 479, 481, 482, 484, 487, 489–498, 502–515, 518, 521, 523, 524–527, 537, 546, 553, 558, 569, 575, 580, 581, 596, 609, 610, 647, 648, 650, 652, 656, 659, 660, 664–666, 679, 736, 743, 746, 764, 777, 779, 782, 784, 795,

945

790–792, 795, 798–801, 806, 846, 848, 852, 854, 863, 864, 887–929 Construction Grammar 9, 10, 559, 759, 800 contrast / contrastive 31, 53, 37, 47, 49, 64, 73, 119, 131, 185, 189, 190, 191, 212, 336, 339, 343, 450, 460, 461, 464, 465, 472, 473– 477, 484, 485, 487, 489, 498, 502, 504– 506, 508–521, 524, 527, 573, 544, 547, 558, 575, 576, 603, 625, 642, 652, 653, 665, 667, 674–676, 677–679, 683, 772, 775, 792, 890, 895, 901, 907, 917, 923, 927, 928 – contrastive-corrective function 544 control 27–29, 51–53, 100, 107, 114, 245, 284, 285, 288, 300, 303, 310, 314, 319, 338, 351, 353, 354, 359–361, 369, 378–381, 385–393, 698, 699, 735, 782, 890, 905, 906 conversational dynamics 472, 477, 479–481, 489, 537, 545 Coordinate Structure Constraint 647–649, 666 coordination 8, 14, 16, 28, 47–49, 51, 62, 68, 184, 187, 214, 215, 217, 221, 234, 308, 462, 464, 465, 595, 596, 632, 647–683, 781, 793, 863 – deferred coordination 660 – disjunctive coordination 652, 659, 671, 672, 674, 678 copula 13–15, 41, 55, 167, 232–234, 238, 242, 254–258, 264, 266, 272, 332–361, 507, 536–541, 543, 544, 548–551, 556–560, 587, 588, 590, 647, 649–654, 659, 661, 663, 668, 671, 672, 674, 675, 678–683, 714, 758, 785, 787, 797 – copular clause 536–541, 543, 548, 549, 588 – copular construction 242, 332–336, 338, 339, 341–343, 345–347, 355–359, 361, 507, 649–651, 653, 668, 675, 683, 758, copulative coordination 651, 659, 663, 668, 671, 672, 681 (see also: coordination) correction 515, 676, 683, 826 correlative 8, 14, 17, 455, 632, 647–652, 657, 664, 670–673, 679–683 – correlative construction 14, 647, 672, 679 Corsican 3, 106–108, 277, 293, 352, 650, 653, 676, 677, 843, 849 Cremonese 292 (see also: Italian dialects, Northern Italian dialects) C-Topic (see: topic)

946

Index

Dalmatian 850 Danish 546 dative 9, 16, 41, 42, 50, 51, 89, 91, 92, 96, 98, 99, 100, 103, 105, 106, 117–119, 122–124, 127, 129–132, 137, 142, 143, 172–174, 183, 186, 188–193, 195–197, 199, 200, 202, 205–207, 209, 218, 221, 234, 244–246, 251, 261, 265, 278, 300, 303–305, 307, 308, 310, 311, 314–319, 321, 325–327, 379, 383, 398, 511, 512, 516, 517, 522, 526, 527, 633, 675, 700, 736, 737, 741, 749, 756, 773, 774, 794, 807, 808, 813, 817, 820, 821, 822, 825, 828, 829, 841, 843, 859, 863, 865, 868, 869 (see also: case) – ethic(al) datives 89, 127–132, 142, 143, 192 declarative 12, 14, 39, 43, 49, 117, 127, 371, 374, 384, 388, 521, 524, 526, 579, 591, 592, 603, 617, 854, 855, 887, 888, 890, 923, 928 declarative clause 39, 43, 49, 127, 371, 524, 526, 579, 603, 887, 888, 890, 923, 928 declension class 692, 693, 718–720 definiteness 15, 17, 40, 41, 47, 89, 98, 98, 102, 107–109, 121, 135, 141, 193, 195, 197, 212, 214, 235, 239, 243–244, 258, 265, 278, 282, 285, 332, 333, 338, 352, 355, 357–361, 372–374, 392, 414, 456, 463, 464, 467, 483, 485, 505, 510, 523, 558, 578, 581, 593, 596–598, 606, 612, 637, 696, 697, 712– 714, 727–745, 747–755, 757, 758, 761–765, 774, 777, 789, 801, 814, 825, 829, 839, 841–843, 854, 846, 853, 872, 895, 897, 900, 912–915 – Definiteness Effect 41, 332, 333, 357, 360 deixis 15, 37, 110, 221, 341, 350, 402, 405, 441, 467, 656, 702, 728, 733, 740, 750, 751, 762, 765, 818, 843, 845, 909, 925 demonstrative 17, 391, 402, 523, 548, 593, 651, 680, 697, 701, 702, 709, 710, 727, 729, 730, 733, 735, 736, 738, 739, 743, 749.753, 757, 758, 761, 765, 766, 774, 842, 843, 846, 909 dependency 1, 8, 9, 12, 13, 34, 38, 89, 99, 166, 294, 309, 370, 371, 374, 376, 388, 391, 435, 465, 472–474, 482, 485, 492, 544, 558, 658, 727, 742, 745, 746, 749, 759, 764, 792, 808, 815, 816, 818, 826, 842, 848, 849, 852, 853, 859, 868, 905, 907, 908, 920

desire (see: speech act, exhortative) determiner 7, 14, 16, 17, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 108, 183, 234, 256, 325, 392, 402, 462, 467, 477, 495, 496, 504, 558, 571, 596, 657, 668, 678, 691, 696, 697, 706–714, 718, 720, 727, 728, 733, 735, 743, 744– 746, 750, 753, 754, 757–763, 765, 771–774, 783, 798, 818, 839–842, 846, 852, 854, 872, 873, 875, 888 – determiner phrase 7, 14, 28, 41, 42, 49, 51, 52, 62, 100, 104, 110, 117, 119, 141, 160, 162, 169, 234, 235, 248, 250, 252–259, 312, 325, 373, 386, 392, 393, 478, 483, 494– 496, 503, 504, 507, 523, 558, 571–573, 575–578, 596, 597, 656, 664, 691, 696, 697, 699, 700, 701, 703–710, 712–716, 718, 720, 727, 733, 744, 745, 750, 753, 758–763, 771, 774, 777, 783, 787, 789, 790, 796, 797, 800, 801, 815, 816, 820, 821, 842, 846, 871–875, 891, 892, 897, 910 diachrony / diachronic 1, 3, 13, 14, 16, 28, 31, 50, 57, 60, 104, 107, 111, 114, 127, 142, 158, 171, 173, 177, 219, 233, 272, 274, 276, 286, 290, 400, 403, 449, 451, 587, 625, 692, 702, 728, 729, 739, 743, 745, 747, 756, 759, 762, 763, 765, 804, 806, 871, 887, 888, 892, 929 Differential Object Marking 12, 16, 89, 101–111, 118, 120, 122, 135, 139, 140, 142, 159, 255– 257, 300, 301, 304, 353, 382, 700, 732, 825 direct modification 710, 771, 790–792, 796, 798, 801 disjunction 14, 189, 353, 544, 647, 649–655, 659, 671–674, 678, 679, 682 dislocation 12, 13, 15, 31, 32, 41, 49, 68, 70, 110, 116, 117, 119, 120, 122, 131, 188, 210, 217, 339, 356, 357, 472, 472, 475, 477–479, 481–483, 485, 487–498, 502, 505, 506, 571–576, 578, 610, 750, 852, 888, 891, 898, 899, 904, 907, 914, 923, 928 distal 350, 728, 750, 751, 818, 843 Distributed Morphology 7, 184, 201, 206, 209, 325, 764 double object construction 89, 117, 118, 120, 142 doubling 16, 46, 49, 66, 68, 69, 89, 107, 110, 118–123, 127, 129, 131, 142, 187–189, 201, 202, 212, 214–16, 218, 274, 314, 356, 358,

Index

402, 449, 450, 464, 511, 512, 525, 673, 679, 735, 739, 759, 760, 764, 805, 808, 809, 821, 823, 825, 826, 830 Dutch 288, 546, 560, 743 East-West-Split 704, 705 echo question 580–583, 585, 598 edge-fronting 873, 874 ellipsis 138, 143, 592, 595, 596, 607, 647, 658, 661, 664–668, 683, 780, 799 – gapping 647, 664–668 – sluicing 647, 667, 668 enclisis 112, 126, 183, 185–187, 198–201, 203, 204, 221, 308, 390, 512, 603, 629, 630, 637, 639, 642, 663, 728, 733, 736, 737, 751, 756–758, 764, 843, 846 Engadinese 106, 109, 291, 292, 692 (see also: Rhaeto-Romance) English 10–13, 17, 33, 39, 57, 59, 68, 69, 71, 73, 117, 119, 142, 240, 273, 357, 358, 370, 373, 375, 381, 392, 409, 424, 450, 451, 463, 476, 481, 489, 524, 537, 539, 540, 546, 558, 561, 592, 605, 682, 701, 702, 711, 712, 733, 748, 757, 758, 775, 784, 827, 829, 909, 910, 917 event structure 154, 156–158 exceptional case marking 299, 300, 302–307, 317, 326, 327, 369, 382, 384, 389 exclamation (see: speech act, expressive) exclamative 12, 14, 15, 27, 31, 32, 46–50, 77, 424, 429, 455, 502, 505, 522, 524, 526, 603–619, 641, 642, 855, 890, 907, 913 exclamative sentence 47, 502, 524, 526, 603–606, 611, 612, 614, 617–619, 907, 913 existential 13, 15, 39, 55, 234, 238, 261, 264, 265, 332, 333, 343, 346–361, 455, 467, 586, 613, 746 – existential construction 13, 15, 55, 234, 238, 332, 343, 346–361 – existential pivot 347, 348, 351–354, 358– 361 – existential proform 138, 332, 333, 346–361 expletive 27, 30, 31, 34, 43, 45, 53–55, 57, 62, 70, 71, 75–77, 170, 171, 183, 187, 212, 234, 235, 332, 347–349, 351, 352, 354, 355, 358, 455, 536, 548, 549, 557, 558, 603, 605, 614, 642, 895 Extended Projection Principle 55, 92–95

947

factive / factivity 48, 430, 480, 481, 526, 616, 617 faire faire 299, 301–303, 305, 325, 327 faire-infinitive 299, 305–307, 309, 313–317, 319–323, 325–327 faire-par 299, 305, 315, 318–320, 322–327, 744, 758, 783 familiar / given topic (G-Topic) 472, 477–481, 484, 485, 487, 488, 490, 492, 493, 495, 496 feature 7–10, 13–15, 17, 32, 46, 55, 62, 71, 92– 94, 107, 132, 136, 138, 142, 143, 159, 168, 183, 187, 189, 193–196, 204–209, 211, 220, 289, 317, 333, 338, 348, 354, 360, 388, 389, 392, 423, 442, 461, 475, 488, 498, 505, 510, 538, 539, 545, 546, 551, 556, 557, 559–561, 588, 596, 597, 603–605, 613, 615, 616, 625, 634, 637, 641, 652, 656, 663, 680, 691, 692, 705, 718, 720, 730, 738, 744, 745, 749, 740, 757–759, 793, 796, 809, 813, 853, 887, 893, 894, 902, 910, 913, 918, 929, 924, 925 feminine 29, 52, 54, 65, 76, 98, 102, 103, 111, 113–116, 122, 165, 168, 169, 177, 188, 189, 193–196, 202, 204, 205, 207–209, 218, 220, 240, 253, 255, 263, 290, 291, 300, 304, 307, 308, 310, 315, 321, 337, 338, 346, 454, 479, 482–484, 497, 605–613, 615, 619, 624, 625, 629, 631, 632, 634, 635, 637, 638, 640, 691–703, 706–710, 712, 713, 730, 736, 737, 740, 741, 744, 758, 763, 774, 783, 807–811, 815, 817, 842, 859, 860, 869, 896 Finnish 60, 67 Flemish 488, 489 Florentine 241, 360, 491, 552, 576, 591, 594, 596, 598, 751, 811, 822, 823, 827, 828, 853 (see also Italian dialects) focus / focalization 12, 14, 15, 27, 31–40, 50, 64, 68, 73, 77, 104, 117, 120, 214, 250, 338, 339, 342, 343, 345, 348, 349, 356–359, 418, 422, 423, 429, 450, 455, 459, 461, 472, 474, 475, 477, 492, 502–527, 536, 537, 539, 542, 544, 557, 558, 560, 571, 575, 582, 583, 587, 588, 593, 608, 660, 665, 676, 680, 772, 792, 825, 854, 856, 857, 871, 872, 887, 888, 890–928 – contrastive focus 31, 37, 339, 502, 504, 506, 512–515, 518–520, 558, 665, 772, 792, 907, 927, 928

948

Index

– focus marker 503, 415, 542, 557, 560, 892, – focus phrase 12, 476, 489, 493, 503, 504, 526, 559, 854, – focus position 358, 509, 513, 515, 558, 922 – information focus 38, 502, 513, 514, 516–518, 520, 524, 527, 558, 892, 898, 904, 920, 923, 928 – mirative focus 502, 515, 518–524, 526, 527, 912 – narrow focus 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 50, 503, 511, 515, 516, 521, 522, 525, 527, 891, 893–895, 897, 898, 900–902, 904, 907, 913, 914, 917, 918, 9224, 928 – verum focus 502, 510, 517, 521, 525, 527, 913, 914, 920, 922, 923 – wide focus 35, 39, 40, 50, 343, 515, 519, 571, 891, 893–897, 900–906, 917, 922, 923– 928, focus fronting 12, 13, 15, 104, 117, 472, 474, 475, 502–527, 593, 871, 872, 888, 890, 892, 894, 907, 909, 912–915, 920, 922, 923, 928 (see also: fronting) force marker 612, 613 force phrase 12, 506 framing 12, 15, 31, 119, 165, 188, 325, 472, 474, 475, 479, 486, 487, 489, 502, 505, 576, 578, 888, 891, 907 Franco-Provençal 56, 60, 71, 97, 211, 263, 264, 277, 343, 349, 352, 410, 594, 707, 708, 823 French 1–4, 6–9, 11–14, 16, 28–34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 43, 44–46, 49, 51, 53–60, 66, 68–76, 89, 90, 92–106, 110–116, 118–120, 122– 125, 131–133, 135, 138, 140, 141, 143, 157, 159–165, 167, 170–179, 183–194, 196–206, 209–211, 213, 214, 217–222, 230, 232–237, 245, 246, 247, 249–251, 253, 255, 262– 266, 273–277, 279, 282–294, 299, 300– 303, 305–309, 311, 312, 314–322, 325, 326, 335, 339, 343, 346, 347, 349, 351–353, 358. 359, 360, 326, 369–379, 381–386, 390–394, 397–428, 430–444, 449–456, 458–468, 473, 478, 479, 481–486, 488, 490, 494, 497, 501, 512, 515, 516, 519, 520, 523, 536–544, 546–561, 569–574, 576– 580, 582, 583, 585–587, 589, 590, 593– 598, 606, 607, 609, 611, 616–622, 625, 629–635, 641, 648–653, 655–657, 660, 666, 667, 670, 672, 674, 676, 677, 679, 682, 683, 692, 694, 699–702, 704, 706– 708, 719, 728–734, 737, 740–743, 746,

747, 749, 751–755, 759, 762–765, 772, 773, 775, 777, 779, 780, 786, 792–796, 798, 805, 807, 809–813, 815, 818, 820, 821, 823, 825–827, 829, 831, 839–843, 845, 847, 848, 850, 852, 853, 859, 861–864, 866, 868, 870, 872, 887, 892, 894–896, 898–906, 908, 909, 911, 912, 914–918, 920, 923, 924, 927, 928 – Acadian 275, 276 – Advanced 69, 574 – Belgian 219 – Colloquial 7, 58, 70–73, 120, 122, 123, 170, 188, 193, 201, 204, 217–220, 515, 574, 598, 731, 823, 825 – Informal 398, 406, 410, 436, 443, 444, 574, 632 – Louisiana 276, 452 – Medieval 71, 72 – Middle 58, 402, 439, 451, 550, 732, 763, 923, 926 – Modern 96, 171, 172, 177, 265, 294, 398, 399, 402, 406, 406, 410, 423, 426, 430, 432, 444, 733, 741, 751, 807, 859, 863, 911 – North American varieties 275, 276 – Old 4, 58, 68, 72, 101, 102, 104, 115, 172, 177, 219, 273, 389, 399, 430, 431, 439, 453, 467, 732, 742, 743, 747, 748, 751, 752, 762, 763, 827, 828, 845, 850, 857, 863, 920, 921, 923, 927 – Quebec 201, 204, 217, 219, 276, 450, 453, 454, 458, 464–466, 571, 823, 829, 831 – Regional Southern varieties 2 – Renaissance 732 – Spoken 44, 66, 70, 490, 546, 548, 574, 577, 853, 861 – Standard 28, 36, 57, 69, 112, 113, 116, 122, 123, 132, 199, 200, 202, 302, 210, 211, 217–220, 542, 574, 812, 902 – Vernacular 452, 453, 455, 459, 460, 552, 571 Friulian 3, 112, 113, 242, 277, 349, 351, 352, 360, 606, 640, 740, 755, 823, 847 (see also: Rhaeto-Romance) fronting 12, 13, 15, 32, 104, 117, 314, 472, 474, 475, 502–527, 584, 593, 638, 639, 759, 761, 852, 854, 857, 871–874, 887, 888, 890, 892, 898, 904–915, 919, 920, 922, 923, 927–929 (see also: focus fronting) – quantifier fronting 502, 507, 510, 511, 513, 521, 522, 912–915, 920

Index

functional category 7, 8, 11, 423, 468, 561, 715, 718, 784, 839, 841, 846, 872–874 functional structure 12, 839, 854, 872 future / future tense 36, 106, 126, 131, 131, 160, 184–186, 188, 194, 202, 231, 241, 241, 250, 300, 303, 306, 308, 309, 311, 312, 314, 315, 319–322, 335, 397, 399–495, 410, 419, 424–426, 435, 438, 438, 441– 444, 460, 482, 483, 491, 512, 549, 551, 606, 624, 625, 632, 641, 659, 666, 667, 671, 681, 764, 807, 812, 817, 847–851, 859–861, 862, 866, 899, 900, 904, 910, 912, 917, 918, 920, 967 Galician 3, 56, 71, 100, 106, 114, 186, 190–193, 198, 220, 344, 345, 350, 352, 370, 388, 505, 511, 512, 594, 598, 605, 608, 609, 612, 613, 619, 650–652, 672, 674, 676, 677, 679, 702, 740, 755, 811, 850, 857, 860, 861 Gallo-Italian 343, 360, 393, 732 Gallo-Romance 101, 106, 343, 683, 823, 842, 848, 853, 861, 862, 866 Gascon 193, 277, 386, 848, 849, 850, 855, 859 – Old 845, 852, 862 gender 8, 14, 16, 17, 98, 101, 102, 105, 127, 183, 189, 193–196, 209, 210, 263, 290, 291, 293, 337, 680, 691–703, 718–720, 730, 736, 739, 740, 744, 752, 755, 757, 764, 774, 805–809, 811–813, 842, 859, 860 – gender mismatch 692, 699, 700 – gender phrase 691, 718, 719, 801 Generative Grammar 3, 5, 10, 11–14, 89, 90, 92, 100, 116, 184, 210, 282, 373, 375, 378, 381, 382, 384, 385, 388, 390, 393, 472, 475, 493, 557, 662, 743 genitive 99, 103, 122, 129, 183, 191, 192, 239, 318, 338, 718, 736, 737, 741, 754, 755, 758, 761, 771–783, 801, 811, 812, 818, 819, 822, 825, 826, 843, 845, 846, 859, 861, 865, 868–872, 887, 888 genitive marking 771, 773, 774, 776, 801 genus alternans 692, 697, 698 German 3, 4, 161, 185, 255, 265, 288, 370, 375, 381, 476, 484, 520, 546, 548, 572, 698, 733, 748, 762, 888, 919 Germanic languages 7, 234, 272, 375, 462, 463, 546–548, 771, 828, 887, 919

949

givenness 41, 472, 473, 477, 480, 485, 487, 496, 498, 504, 506, 520, 523, 527, 575, 845, 864, 869, 891, 898, 909, 917, 925 government 8–10, 12, 90, 97, 123, 140, 142, 143, 167, 177, 197, 282, 393, 428, 586, 738, 743, 744, 747, 757, 762 gradience 286, 288, 289 grammaticalization 1, 13, 16, 17, 64, 71, 125, 219, 230, 233, 242, 247, 265, 266, 273, 274, 397, 403, 432, 559, 560, 592, 598, 651, 652, 672, 750, 753, 759, 763, 792, 800, 839, 841, 842, 844, 846, 850–852, 854, 863, 868, 901, 904, 905, 920, 928 G-Topic (see: familiar / given topic) Haitian Creole 334, 452, 458 (see also: French) headedness 7, 8, 14, 15, 40, 59, 92, 97, 100, 119, 127, 132, 136, 138, 140, 155, 159, 163, 166, 171, 184, 187, 206, 214, 218, 291, 309, 311, 314, 321, 325, 337, 372, 388, 390, 478, 503, 504, 508, 509, 558, 570, 588, 591, 592, 635, 656, 657, 662–664, 691, 699, 703, 710, 713, 714, 717–720, 731, 738, 743, 744, 753, 759, 760, 762, 764, 773–775, 782–787, 790, 793–799, 801, 804, 805, 807, 810, 811–816, 820, 825–827, 830, 831, 839, 841, 842, 843, 846, 853, 854, 857, 868–875, 887 head parameter 839, 868–871, 873–875 Hebrew 144, 718 high degree quantification 615 Hungarian 514, 713, 714, 717 Ibero-Romance 72, 73, 107, 114, 192, 238, 343, 346, 350, 361, 606, 629, 651, 674, 676, 677, 683, 692, 695, 752, 843, 847, 848, 852, 863, 864, 920 Icelandic 50, 762 illocutionary force 12, 14, 57, 374, 477, 479–481, 603, 604, 619, 641, 855 imperative 12, 14, 15, 32, 46, 130, 183, 187, 197, 200, 201, 204, 205, 240, 308, 341, 402, 423, 424, 429, 450, 453, 457, 458, 524, 581, 603, 604, 608, 619–635, 638, 639, 641, 642, 658, 659, 679, 738, 757, 843, 845, 855, 890, 907, 908–910, 912, 921 imperfect 42, 101, 132, 134, 210, 312, 325, 332, 336, 341, 348, 350, 355, 397, 405, 408,

950

Index

410–424, 427, 435, 438–444, 520, 525, 617, 634–638, 640, 743, 742, 850 imperfective 165, 168, 172, 173, 175, 176, 230–233, 236, 237, 239, 240, 242, 243, 249, 250, 266, 411–413, 419, 420, 575, 859 indicative 42, 48, 74, 109, 169, 170, 210, 231, 232, 278, 334, 397–399, 401, 418, 423, 424, 428–444, 551, 559, 590, 604, 620– 624, 628, 629, 840, 857, 859, 866 indirect modification 710, 790, 791, 792, 801 individual-level 343–345, 788–791, 893 (see also: stage-level) Indo-European 185, 452, 462, 759 Indonesian 185 infinitival clause 11, 13, 15, 16, 28, 29, 51–53, 100, 369, 370–375, 377, 378, 381, 382, 385, 386, 388, 390, 392, 393, 541, 556, 631, 804, 856 infinitive 11, 16, 27, 29, 30, 43, 48, 52–54, 63, 71, 72, 96, 100, 104, 106, 115, 118, 120, 122–126, 128, 129, 133, 134, 137, 138, 140, 141, 154, 160, 163, 165, 172, 186, 199–202, 204, 207, 208, 240, 244–247, 251, 252, 254, 255, 257, 258, 262, 264, 266, 299– 305-327, 346, 348, 350, 358, 369–375, 378, 379, 381–384, 386–394, 401, 403, 407, 410, 424, 475, 453, 458, 459, 481– 484, 492, 494, 506, 508, 518, 525, 541, 549, 556, 604, 614, 617, 623, 624, 628, 630–633, 636–641, 653, 673, 681, 733, 736, 747, 748, 754, 760, 764, 807, 828, 841, 843, 845, 847–852, 855, 856, 858– 860, 862, 869, 874 – historical infinitive 370, 374, 388 – inflected infinitive 16, 100, 302, 387 – personal infinitive 63, 100, 386, 387–389, 393, 860 inflection / inflectional 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 16, 28, 55, 63, 89, 100, 104, 142, 185, 201, 213, 214, 219, 291, 302, 326, 357, 370, 375, 388–390, 392, 393, 401, 424, 692, 693, 696–698, 707, 718–720, 728, 736, 738, 740, 741, 757, 762, 764, 800, 805, 806, 809, 818, 820, 829, 846, 848, 851, 853, 854, 858–862, 866, 868, 869 – inflectional phrase 8, 12, 221, 313, 384, 476, 484, 492–496, 666, 853, 854 information packaging 887, 890, 904, 928

information structure 12–15, 33, 34, 50, 64, 119, 332, 333, 349, 356, 357, 361, 475, 480, 498, 504, 505, 544, 575, 576, 587, 772, 887, 890–892, 901, 903, 904, 906–908, 914, 915, 918, 919, 926, 928 interface 8, 9, 15, 135, 180, 183, 272, 286, 358, 472, 475, 480, 486, 583, 605, 820, 927 interrogative 11, 12, 14, 15, 31, 214, 219, 371, 384, 429–431, 450, 455, 502, 505, 518, 524, 525, 539, 542, 543, 548, 569–598, 603, 605, 606, 609, 610, 613, 649, 654, 805, 806, 809, 818, 855, 888, 890, 907 (see also: question, wh-question) – clefted interrogative 587 – root interrogative 578 intervention effect 214–216, 219, 233, 303, 310, 496, 498, 510, 512, 583, 752, 848, 852, 862, 863, 870 inverse locative 355–358, 360, 361 inversion 31, 32, 34, 36–43, 46, 47, 49, 50, 55–57, 59, 62, 67, 68, 73, 75, 77, 203, 207, 209, 210, 221, 264, 384, 336, 342, 355– 361, 480, 496, 503, 539, 541, 569- 579, 598, 603, 605, 608–610, 634, 637, 639, 642, 719, 848, 887, 888, 890–901, 903– 915, 918, 929, 922–925, 927–929 Irish 546 Istro-Romanian (see also: Romanian) 755 Italian 1–8, 11, 13–15, 19, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35–38, 40, 51, 56–62, 64, 67–69, 71–75, 92, 95– 100, 105, 106, 111–118, 120, 122–126, 133, 135, 136, 139–141, 154, 155, 161, 164, 165, 168, 170, 173–176, 179, 186, 188, 190–194, 197, 199, 201–203, 205, 207, 209–212, 214, 219–221, 232, 234–241, 245, 246, 250–257, 259, 261–265, 266, 274, 276, 277, 279, 281–283, 285–289, 290–294, 299, 300, 302–306, 308, 310, 312, 313, 316, 317, 319, 321–323, 325, 332, 336–343, 346–349, 352, 356, 357, 359, 360, 369–380, 382– 385, 387, 388, 390–394, 397–401-409, 411, 413–424, 426–444, 450, 452–464, 466, 467, 473, 475–479, 482–484, 486– 488, 491–494, 496–498, 506–508, 510, 512, 514, 515, 518, 522, 523, 525, 536, 537, 539–543, 545–561, 569, 570, 575, 576, 580–582, 585–587, 591, 592, 594, 598, 604, 606, 608–611, 613, 615, 616, 619, 625, 628–630, 633–638, 640, 648, 650–

Index

654, 657, 658, 672, 674–677, 679, 681, 683, 692–696, 698, 699, 701, 702, 704– 708, 712, 720, 728–735, 737, 741, 742–751, 753–758, 760, 761, 763, 764, 772–777, 779, 781, 785–787, 789, 794, 795, 798– 800, 805–807, 811–826, 829, 839–841, 843, 847, 848, 850, 852, 856, 857, 859, 863, 864, 868, 887, 890, 895, 896, 899– 902, 904, 906, 908–918, 923, 924, 926– 928 (see also: Italian dialects) – Colloquial 192, 806, 819, 822, 845, 851, 871 – Modern 96, 237, 398, 399, 403, 431, 432, 439, 444, 730, 747, 751, 756, 823, 850, 863, 869, 911, 927 – Old 4, 5, 115, 169, 177, 235, 237, 241, 251, 252, 265, 266, 292, 370, 387, 399, 403, 504, 743, 748, 751, 756, 763, 811, 813, 814, 822, 823, 826–828, 852, 854, 863, 920, 921, 924–928 – Standard 98, 106, 112, 113, 115, 120, 122, 202, 239, 245, 291, 387, 426, 456, 610, 613, 692, 701, 704, 706, 707, 729, 732, 735, 751, 820, 822, 845, 851 Italian dialects 5, 56, 60–62, 111, 215, 220, 293, 409, 522, 598, 824, 825 – Central Italian dialects 120, 124, 194, 276, 290, 352, 403, 407, 591, 695, 728, 732, 735, 850 – Northern Italian dialects 5, 56, 60–62, 69, 71, 72, 73, 97, 111, 122, 124, 135, 188, 196, 211, 212, 213, 215, 221, 243–245, 343, 349, 351–353, 398, 403, 407, 411, 444, 518, 540, 542, 556, 591, 610, 613, 630, 695, 729, 732, 751, 813, 823, 824, 845, 850, 852, 853, 856, 887 – Southern Italian dialects 92, 111, 113, 115, 116, 120, 219, 245, 279, 290, 343, 345, 349, 352, 353, 361, 370, 398, 407, 444, 518, 591, 636, 695, 728, 729, 732, 735, 754, 756, 850, 856, 857, 923 Italo-Romance 5, 112, 116, 238, 244, 277, 279, 280, 289, 292, 339, 343, 345, 349, 351– 353, 361, 569, 570, 591, 683, 692, 695, 697, 709, 719, 741, 755, 843, 850, 920 Jespersen Cycle 13, 16, 449, 451, 452, 456, 546 juxtaposition (see: asyndesis / asyndeton) Ladin 201, 352, 455, 461, 692, 709, 741, 754, 755, 887 (see also: Rhaeto-Romance)

951

Lakota 827 language contact 104, 449, 456, 509, 546, 547, 914 Latin 1, 4, 7, 14, 16, 17, 28, 30, 56, 73, 96, 101, 103, 104, 110, 115, 121, 133, 134, 142, 169, 173, 177, 185, 193, 194, 196, 208, 219, 230– 233, 235, 241, 247, 264, 266, 272, 273, 337, 342, 343, 349, 352, 382, 397–399, 401, 428, 443, 444, 452, 453, 456, 460, 463, 545, 546, 619, 625, 650, 651, 663, 673, 675, 677, 682, 692, 693, 695, 698, 699, 704, 705, 727–731, 736, 738, 739, 740, 743, 745, 746, 748, 749, 751, 753, 754, 758–762, 764, 765, 806, 818, 839–844, 846, 850–852, 854, 858, 859, 861, 864– 875, 888, 892, 918, 919, 923, 925, 929 – Archaic 247, 865, 869, 871, 875 – Classical 231, 232, 272, 273, 342, 453, 619, 806, 851, 854, 865, 867, 869, 871, 919 – Vulgar 103, 104, 401, 692, 806, 854 left periphery 1, 11–13, 15, 32, 41, 47, 49, 68, 70, 119, 127, 140, 309, 311, 318, 369, 370, 371, 375, 392, 393, 475, 486–490, 492, 494–496, 503, 505, 506, 509, 513, 522, 558, 593, 597, 603, 608, 639, 642, 710, 760, 761, 772, 785, 787, 792, 793, 841, 856–858, 871–874, 888, 910, 922 Leonese 3, 370, 860 (see also: Ibero-Romance) lexical aspect 237, 343, 397, 400, 419–422, 893 Ligurian 221, 347–349, 351, 813 (see also: Italian dialects, Northern Italian dialects) limiting topic (L-Topic) 472, 473, 475, 485, 486– 489, 498 linearization 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 123, 198, 206, 221, 457, 489, 503, 504, 658, 648, 649, 727, 761, 782, 784, 785, 792, 793, 856, 867, 868, 871, 890, 920 linking 31, 90–92, 101, 154, 156–158, 167, 168, 170–174, 287, 342–344, 354, 399, 401, 402, 405–407, 413, 423, 426, 432, 477, 496, 544, 545, 561, 582, 583, 611, 625, 641, 652, 654, 656–658, 662, 664, 665, 672, 675, 678, 679, 683, 694, 701, 718, 744, 745, 740, 750, 761, 762, 816, 820, 822– 825, 831 locality 264, 380, 401, 472, 495–497, 574, 692, 703, 720, 848, 873, 874 (see also: antilocality)

952

Index

locative 37, 41, 43, 50, 55, 99, 100, 128, 183, 191, 192, 196, 200, 208, 264, 281, 221, 240, 306, 314, 322, 332, 333, 335, 338, 345, 347, 350, 354–358, 361, 402, 482, 488, 552, 613, 625, 631–633, 778, 782, 795, 816, 818, 859, 891, 895, 903, 916, 925 – locative alternation 178–180 – locative construction 332, 338, 343, 350, 354–358, 778 locative inversion 36, 37, 43, 55, 355, 357, 358, 360, 361, 480, 488, 911 Logudorese 241, 349, 350, 352, 356, 357, 359–361, 592, 729 (see also: Sardinian) Lombard 351, 453, 455, 735, 824, 852 (see also: Italian dialects, Northern Italian dialects) L-Topic (see: limiting topic) Macedonian 738 masculine 29, 52, 54, 99, 101, 102, 169, 189, 193–197, 204, 205, 209, 217, 218, 221, 244, 245, 257, 263, 293, 302, 306, 307, 315, 318, 320, 335, 337, 351, 373, 607, 633, 691–703, 706–713, 730, 736, 737, 740, 741, 749, 753, 806, 808, 810, 812, 815, 817, 819, 820, 826, 842, 843, 845, 859, 862, 865 middle 169, 170, 230, 232, 248–251, 266, 858, 925, 926 Milanese 490, 748, 853 (see also: Lombard; Italian dialects, Northern Italian dialects) minimality 472, 495, 510, 744, 783, 814, 873 mirative / mirativity 502, 515, 518–524, 526, 527, 912 modality 15, 58, 274, 282, 423, 426, 428–430, 527, 603, 620, 634, 639, 641 – exclamative 12, 14, 15, 27, 31, 32, 46–49, 50, 77, 424, 429, 455, 502, 522, 524, 526, 603–619, 641, 642, 855, 890, 907, 913 – imperative 12, 14, 15, 32, 46, 183, 187, 200, 201, 240, 341, 402, 423, 424, 429, 450, 453, 457, 458, 524, 581, 603, 604, 619– 635, 638, 639, 641, 642, 659, 679, 855, 890, 907 – imperative, negative 200, 201, 457, 458, 626–629 – optative 12, 14, 15, 32, 46, 424, 429, 524, 603, 604, 607, 630, 632–642, 855, 890, 907 – optative, counterfactual 274, 439, 440, 635, 638, 640

modal verb 71, 123, 127, 128, 138, 254, 255, 257, 294, 385, 391–393, 460, 604, 636 modifier 7, 14, 115, 55, 163, 166, 248–250, 265, 341, 354, 488, 489, 580, 596, 606, 607, 608, 612, 655, 691, 697, 698, 703, 710, 713, 714, 719, 727, 732–734, 736, 737, 743, 755, 756, 762, 771, 773, 774–778, 781, 782, 784, 785, 787, 790, 791–793, 796, 797, 798, 800, 801, 804, 814–816, 818, 868, 888, 869, 870, 872, 923 Molisan 353 (see also: Italian dialects, Southern Italian dialects) monoclausal analysis 13, 299, 305, 307, 318– 320, 326, 327, 369, 370, 374, 391, 537, 547, 588–590, 848, 862 mood 8, 13, 15, 110, 169, 190, 210, 211, 219, 277, 278, 333, 341, 397–444, 551, 556, 603, 604, 619, 630, 633–635, 640, 641, 829, 839, 847, 851 – conditional 202, 397, 398, 400, 423–427, 435, 437–439, 441, 442, 466, 474, 475, 480, 481, 491, 539, 542, 543, 633, 638, 640, 659, 677, 764, 850, 851, 860, 861, 862 – imperative 12, 14, 15, 32, 46, 183, 187, 200, 201, 240, 341, 402, 423, 424, 429, 450, 453, 457, 458, 524, 581, 603, 604, 619– 635, 638, 639, 641, 642, 659, 679, 855, 890, 907 – indicative 42, 48, 74, 169, 170, 210, 278, 397–399, 401, 418, 423, 424, 428–444, 551, 559, 590, 604, 620–624, 628, 629, 840, 857, 866 – optative-conditional 635, 639 – subjunctive 200, 201, 210, 219, 370, 397– 400, 418, 423, 426, 428–440, 442–444, 457, 584, 603, 604, 620, 627, 628, 631, 633–635, 639, 642, 829, 840, 848, 857, 859 morpheme 7, 50, 62, 176, 201, 231, 254, 260, 375, 392, 560, 678, 702, 711, 713, 717, 718, 820 movement 7, 11, 15, 31, 43, 47, 55, 57, 59, 67, 72, 75, 92, 93, 95, 104, 111, 116, 117, 119, 123, 125, 130, 131, 138, 140, 141, 170, 189, 206, 207, 209, 280, 282, 291, 294, 300, 311–314, 325, 341, 342, 381, 456, 458, 464, 472, 476, 477, 480, 481, 484, 485, 489, 492, 493, 495–498, 502, 503, 505, 506, 508–510, 513, 515, 520–522, 524, 557, 558,

Index

569, 583,, 593, 597, 603, 608, 629, 630, 639, 642, 663, 666, 667, 717, 718, 720, 744, 745, 750, 758, 760, 761, 771, 782–785, 791, 792, 796, 797, 800, 801, 816, 820, 848, 854, 855, 868, 871, 873, 874, 890, 915, 916, 926 – quantificational movement 502, 503, 505, 506 Nahuatl 762 Neapolitan 5, 106, 112, 113, 115, 122, 125, 168, 169, 245, 278, 292, 294, 346, 370, 490, 561, 735, 736, 751, 752, 848, 854, 856, 860, 861 (see also: Italian dialects, Southern Italian dialects) negation 11, 13, 15, 16, 47, 67, 108, 109, 125, 127, 132, 134, 136, 138, 162, 165, 172, 174, 183, 185, 186, 189, 193, 196, 199–201, 203, 205, 207, 214–216, 218–221, 241, 244, 250, 256–258, 264, 276, 301–307, 320, 321, 326, 341, 347–351, 353, 354, 358, 359, 370, 373, 383, 390–393, 420, 431–433, 436, 449–468, 476, 481, 487, 491, 494, 496, 497, 502, 510, 511, 515, 516, 525, 582, 583, 595, 603–605, 614, 615, 618, 625–630, 632, 633, 642, 648, 651, 656, 667, 673, 674, 676, 678, 729, 731, 734, 747, 748, 828, 829, 859, 862, 863 – constituent negation 450, 459–461, 464, 465, 510 – double negation 450, 464, 673 – expletive negation 603, 614, 642 neuter 193–195, 207, 208, 339, 607, 612, 692, 694–699, 702, 735–737, 806 neutro de / di materia 194, 691, 692, 695–697 NID (see: Italian dialects, Northern Italian dialects) Nissart 192, 210 (see also: Occitan dialects) NOD (see: Occitan dialects) nominal 7, 12, 14, 17, 37, 43, 52, 55, 56, 95–98, 101, 102, 104, 164–166, 184, 188, 190, 193, 194, 202, 210, 217, 219, 222, 233, 324, 325, 336, 373, 375, 382, 400, 417, 490, 508, 571, 578, 579, 581, 607, 656, 661, 664, 665, 678, 680, 691, 693, 694, 696–699, 701, 703, 704, 706, 708–712, 714, 718–720, 727, 730, 732, 733, 736–741, 744, 747, 749, 752, 753, 755–758, 761, 762, 764, 771, 773, 774, 776, 779, 785, 787–793, 797–799, 804, 812, 814–816, 818, 825, 830, 831, 839, 841–843,

953

846, 848, 852, 858–863, 965, 868, 870, 871, 874, 975, 887, 912 nominalization 75, 95, 164–166, 325, 720, 736, 779 non-argument position 129, 140, 472, 732, 742 Norwegian 546 noun 7, 9, 17, 89, 92, 95, 97, 98, 101–103, 108– 110, 121, 154, 155, 164–167, 183, 194, 210– 212, 215, 217, 230, 264, 265, 332, 335–339, 341, 348, 349, 355, 357, 358–361, 371, 375–377, 382, 388, 392, 420, 464, 505, 526, 612, 656, 657, 661, 663, 664, 668, 680, 691–703, 706–715, 717–720, 727, 730–738, 740, 743, 744, 746–749, 752, 753, 755–759, 762, 764, 771–776, 778–782, 784–791, 793–801, 804, 805, 807, 808, 810–813, 815, 816, 818–820, 825–827, 830, 831, 843, 846, 859, 870, 888, 917 – ambigeneric 697, 698, 736 – count nouns 97, 420, 713 – event noun 164–166, 779, 784 – mass noun 97, 98, 713, 735, 744, 747 noun phrase 7, 36, 49, 75, 110, 120, 129, 141, 184, 188, 189, 210–212, 215, 217, 219, 253, 281, 284, 332, 335–339, 341, 346, 348, 349, 355, 357–361, 371, 373, 380, 382, 391, 392, 495, 505, 553, 571, 656, 659, 661, 678, 680, 715, 718, 727, 733, 743–745, 750, 753, 758, 759, 761, 771, 773, 783, 784, 790–792, 796, 800, 804, 808, 815, 842, 843, 846, 854, 872, 873, 888, 917 null object 89, 133–138, 760 null subject 10, 27, 28, 31, 51, 56–60, 62–65, 67–69, 71–74, 77, 123, 125, 126, 136, 142, 264, 319, 323, 351, 378, 478, 482, 896 null subject language 11, 27, 31, 55–57, 60, 63– 69, 71, 73, 75–77, 141, 170, 211, 213, 219, 559, 892 null subject parameter 1, 11, 27, 31, 57, 63, 72, 73, 75, 77, 136, 210, 211 number 8, 9, 14, 16, 17, 29, 55, 90, 98, 101, 102, 126, 127, 183, 189, 196, 204, 221, 277, 279, 280, 290, 291, 293, 337–339, 352, 355, 358, 360, 392, 549–551, 590, 656, 680, 691, 699, 703–708, 711, 714, 717–720, 733, 740, 742, 744, 745, 752, 754, 757, 761, 771, 772, 774, 781, 784, 793, 796, 800, 805– 809, 812, 842, 859, 860, 862, 866 – number phrase 691, 717–720, 744

954

Index

Nuorese 334, 348, 349, 352, 354, 360, 592, 729 (see also: Sardinian) n-word 13, 433, 449, 450, 461–467 object 8, 11, 12, 14–17, 30, 38, 40–42, 44, 52, 53, 72, 75, 89–143, 154, 155, 158–160, 162, 167–172, 175–179, 183–185, 187, 189–195, 198, 202, 206–209, 219–222, 234, 245, 246, 254–257, 273, 274, 280–282, 290– 294, 299–301, 304–308, 310–312, 314, 315, 317–323, 325–327, 342, 353, 354, 371, 374, 376, 377–380, 382, 383, 386, 388, 392, 393, 420, 428, 456, 465, 467, 472, 483, 485, 488, 490, 492, 493, 503, 506, 512, 550, 552, 553, 558, 559, 575, 665, 691, 699, 702, 712, 714, 715, 731, 732, 749, 740, 776, 779, 781, 784, 785–787, 795, 798, 807, 809–815, 818, 822, 825, 827, 830, 844, 848, 852, 853, 862, 864, 868, 887, 891, 892, 899, 902, 903, 905, 907, 909, 916, 918–920 – direct object 89–93, 95–98, 100, 102, 105, 106, 109, 111, 112, 114–121, 129–131, 135, 142, 155, 157–160, 162, 167–172, 175, 178, 189, 208, 209, 273, 274, 280–282, 290, 291, 294, 300, 307, 311, 317, 322, 371, 378, 383, 386, 420, 476, 479, 481–784, 486, 490–497, 506, 550, 597, 665, 712, 807, 809–811, 815, 822, 868, 903, 909, 916, 918, 920 – indirect object 90–92, 97–99, 102, 105, 117– 120, 122, 131, 142, 159, 160, 171, 172, 189, 202, 307, 314, 378, 379, 380, 479, 482, 485, 488, 490, 491, 493, 494, 496, 497, 552, 553, 575, 665, 749, 807, 811, 822, 916, 918 – object clitic 11, 40, 100, 105, 123, 127, 129, 131, 132, 189, 198, 202, 207–209, 220–222, 290, 292, 294, 301, 304, 305, 307, 318, 236, 327, 844, 852, 853, 862, 899 – object marking 12, 16, 89, 100, 101, 106, 127, 142, 159, 255–257, 311, 353, 382, 732, 825 – prepositional object 41, 90, 92, 99, 142, 158– 160, 171, 172, 175, 179, 371, 393, 553 oblique 40, 50, 101, 102, 127, 155, 243, 260, 338, 490, 491, 620, 662, 663, 808, 811, 812, 820, 821, 822, 827, 859 Occitan 2, 56, 69, 71, 97, 111–113, 125, 169, 171, 186, 192, 200, 205, 216, 219, 220, 263,

264, 277, 292, 294, 339, 369, 370, 384, 386, 393, 409, 455, 518, 603, 604, 606, 608, 620–622, 628, 629, 637, 639, 650, 676, 692, 702, 704, 707, 732, 740, 746, 754, 755, 843, 847, 852, 849, 853, 863, 906 (see also: Occitan dialects) – Modern 264 – Old 4, 103, 742, 743, 762, 827, 828, 863, 921 Occitan dialects 56, 57, 60, 61, 71, 97, 111, 125, 171, 194, 200, 205, 210–212, 215, 216, 220, 264, 455, 707, 853 (see also: Nissart, Périgord) optative 12, 14, 15, 32, 46, 424, 429, 524, 603– 605, 607, 630, 632–642, 855, 890, 907 OV / VO (see: word order) Paduan 279, 288, 613, 823, 926 (see also: Italian dialects, Northern Italian dialects) pair-list reading 586, 588 paradigm 14, 17, 53, 50, 60, 61, 67, 68, 73, 101– 103, 105, 183184, 186, 189–193, 196, 207, 209–213, 216, 219, 220, 222, 231–233, 266, 272, 274, 290, 343, 350, 398, 423, 424, 442–444, 453, 552, 603, 619, 620, 624, 626, 629, 642, 649, 650, 704, 728, 738, 752, 757, 764, 804–806, 822, 823, 830, 844, 845, 847, 849–851, 853, 866, 867 participial construction 281, 283, 284, 287 partitive 16, 98, 114, 178, 183, 191, 192, 206, 221, 241, 281, 283, 284, 287, 308, 398, 479, 483, 491, 495, 607, 617, 709, 731– 733, 754, 763, 839 – partitive article 16, 98, 308, 398, 731–733 – partitive cliticization 114, 221, 283, 284, 287, 483 passive 11, 12, 92, 96, 111, 115, 117, 128, 155, 160, 169, 230–257, 259–261, 264, 266, 272, 273, 280–282, 284, 287, 290, 293, 302, 304, 312, 318, 319, 321–327, 346, 386, 692, 841, 847, 848, 851, 867 – passive auxiliary 230, 232–234, 237, 238, 241, 242, 245, 246, 266, 322, 847 past anterior 400, 408–410 past participle agreement 11, 13, 89, 95, 101, 106, 111–116, 142, 168–170, 202, 272, 290–293, 300 (see also: agreement) past tense 98, 114, 128, 133, 135, 172, 176, 193, 195, 197, 198, 200, 216, 221, 231, 235, 278,

Index

300, 304–307, 310–312, 316, 318, 319, 321–324, 346, 356, 374, 397, 398, 400, 403–413, 416, 419–426, 435, 436–438, 441–444, 461, 482, 486, 487, 494, 503, 507, 508, 510–514, 516, 517, 520, 552, 523, 527, 542, 607, 608, 612–614, 619, 637, 638, 640, 700, 729, 732–734, 741, 749, 750, 757, 808, 850, 859, 868, 889, 896– 899, 902, 908–913, 916, 920, 921, 923– 926 patient 90, 93, 157, 158, 173, 240, 247, 252, 253–255, 257–259, 286, 314, 378, 386, 775, 776, 778, 779, 781–785, 893 perception / perception verbs 11, 13, 15, 16, 42, 199, 246, 273, 294, 299–303, 306, 309, 323, 326, 382, 384, 389, 393 perfect 13, 36, 114, 169, 170, 230–233, 236, 237, 249, 266, 272–274, 278, 283, 290, 343, 398, 404–406, 409, 411, 414, 419, 420, 421, 425, 441–443, 444, 454, 638, 640, 840, 848–850, 858, 861, 863, 867 – perfect auxiliaries 114, 169, 170, 232, 272, 274, 283, 840 perfective 169, 230–233, 236, 237, 242, 247– 250, 252, 253, 262, 265, 266, 273, 343, 409, 411, 414, 419, 420, 454, 637, 638, 640, 848, 849, 858–861, 868 Périgord 169 (see also: Occitan dialects) person 8, 9, 11, 29, 36, 50, 53, 55, 58, 60–65, 68, 71, 73, 76, 100, 105, 107, 126–128, 159, 170, 171, 183, 189–193, 196, 201, 204–211, 218–221, 230, 234, 238, 243, 244, 247– 249, 251, 253–256, 258–266, 277, 279, 280, 284, 289, 291, 292, 320, 332, 338, 351, 352, 360, 372, 377, 384, 386, 387, 392, 416, 457, 468, 549–551, 584, 590, 618,-624, 626, 628, 631, 651, 656, 691, 692, 699–702, 745, 750–752, 754–756, 811, 848, 849, 852, 853, 859, 862, 866 Piedmontese 125, 203, 259, 277, 355, 847, 853, 863 (see also: Italian dialects, Northern Italian dialects) pluperfect 231, 278, 400, 408, 409, 421, 438, 439, 441–444 plural 14, 28–30, 46, 50, 53, 54, 58, 61, 64, 68, 76, 96, 98, 98, 101–103, 105, 110, 111, 113, 114, 159–163, 168, 173, 179, 186, 189–196, 200, 201, 206, 207, 209, 220, 230, 240, 242, 244, 247, 251, 253, 255, 259–264,

955

265, 290, 291, 293, 302, 308, 355, 420, 457, 491, 492, 524, 551, 604–607, 610, 612,-616, 619, 621–624, 626–628, 231– 633, 637, 638, 647, 661, 667–670, 692– 694, 697–700, 702, 704–715, 717, 718, 729–731, 733–737, 741–745, 748, 751, 755, 756, 760, 793, 806, 807, 810, 826, 841, 843, 846, 849, 859, 860, 862, 866, 869, polar question 569–571, 592 polarity 184, 433, 440, 464, 466–468, 521, 525, 569–571, 592, 608, 614, 659, 661, 666, 667, 673, 747, 914 – negative polarity 13, 15, 449, 450, 454–456, 463–467, 509, 614, 653, 666 – positive polarity 465, 467, 505, 509, 614, 913 Portuguese 1–4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 18, 19, 28, 29, 31– 34, 36–38, 40, 43, 47, 48, 51–53, 56–60, 63–68, 71, 74, 77, 96, 100, 105–109, 114, 115, 118, 120, 122–127, 133–137, 161, 166, 173, 185, 186, 196, 198, 202, 210, 234, 235, 242, 246, 249, 251–253, 261, 262, 274, 293, 299, 300, 302, 305, 310, 312, 314, 316, 320, 321, 333, 344–346, 349, 352, 361, 369, 370, 378, 388, 389, 392–394, 398, 399, 442, 443, 450, 456, 457, 460, 463, 466, 467, 509, 515, 521, 522, 526, 536, 537, 539–542, 546–557, 559–561, 569, 570, 575, 578, 580–582, 585, 588–591, 594–597, 609, 612–614, 625, 626, 628, 629, 634, 635, 637, 638, 640, 648, 650–653, 655, 656, 659, 661, 668–670, 672, 674, 676, 677, 679, 681, 692, 702, 704, 706, 707, 712, 719, 727–730, 732, 734–736, 741, 744, 746, 749, 751, 753–755, 758, 760, 764, 772–775, 777, 780, 782, 788, 794, 795, 798, 799, 807, 808, 811, 813, 821, 826, 842, 847, 855, 859–864, 887, 895, 896, 898–902, 906, 909, 910, 912, 913–917, 922, 923, 925–928 (see also: Brazilian Portuguese) – Angolan 706 – Cape Verdean 77 – European 3, 28, 29, 30, 32–43, 47, 48, 52, 53, 57, 63–68, 124, 125, 127, 133, 134–137, 186, 198, 202, 210, 220, 221, 261, 299, 302, 305, 310, 314, 333, 344–346, 349, 352, 355, 361, 388, 389, 451, 452, 461, 462, 507, 509, 515, 516, 521, 522, 526, 537, 541, 542, 548, 556, 692, 850, 735, 751, 755, 852,

956

Index

862, 887, 896, 898, 901, 906, 909, 910, 913–915, 926 – Modern 852, 926, – Old 251, 252, 826, 854, 921, 922, 924–926 – Standard 704, 707 possessive 9, 103, 127, 129, 239, 265, 273, 282, 335, 338–340, 343, 355, 361, 485, 700, 707, 727, 728, 743, 747, 749, 752–759, 764, 765, 771, 773, 774, 776, 777, 782, 783, 797, 805, 807, 810, 816, 818, 819, 821, 842, 846, 847, 851 – alienable 129, 755 – enclitic 728, 756, 758, 764 – inalienable 129, 755–757, 845 predicative complement 99, 155, 163, 319, 326, 334–343, 345, 353–359, 361, 372, 376, 392, 393, 517, 618, 754, 793, 812, 830 preposition 7, 9, 15, 41, 50, 90, 92, 98, 99–100, 102, 103, 106, 120, 122, 123, 131, 142, 155, 158–160, 167, 171, 172, 175, 179, 189, 235, 241, 336, 347, 348, 354, 349, 370–377, 392, 393, 398, 462, 482, 483, 490, 503, 553, 556, 651, 656, 657, 661, 666, 678, 702, 712, 730, 731, 734, 743, 753, 764, 771, 774–781, 798, 801, 805, 808, 810–812, 816–820, 822, 826, 830, 831, 841, 856, 858, 859, 864, 865, 868, 874, 875, 887, 916 – articulated 730, 731, 764 – prepositional object 41, 90, 99, 142, 158–160, 171, 172, 175, 179, 371, 393, 553 prepositional phrase 15, 155, 159, 161, 171, 189, 311, 319, 347, 348, 375, 380, 392, 393, 462, 478, 488, 503, 507, 546, 553, 559, 656, 661, 666, 734, 771–773, 777–783, 790, 797–801, 805, 812, 820, 830, 831, 875 present 58, 184–186, 188, 190, 192–200, 202– 204, 207–213, 215–219, 221, 230, 231, 232, 236, 237, 240, 243, 244, 249, 250, 272, 274, 278, 333, 350, 398, 401–408, 413, 421, 424–426, 428, 435, 438–444, 451– 454, 461, 551, 559, 590, 620–622, 627– 629, 633, 634, 639, 641, 729, 731–735, 737, 739, 741, 742, 745, 747, 749, 750, 752, 754, 760, 761, 850, 853, 855, 859, 862, 888, 890, 894–897, 899–903, 908, 909– 914, 916–918, 920–922, 926 presupposition 39, 429, 430, 431, 436, 440, 467, 476, 481, 504, 506, 525, 526, 537,

579, 582, 586, 588, 616, 640, 793, 816, 891, preterite 397, 405, 406, 409–421, 423, 441, 442, 626, 847, 849 PRO 28–30, 51–54, 60, 65, 66, 74, 94, 112, 116, 136–138, 141, 142, 156, 157, 171, 264, 294, 310, 319, 369, 378–381, 386, 393, 476, 478, 487, 853 Procidano 278 (see also: Italian dialects, Southern Italian dialects) proclisis 126, 183, 185, 186, 198–203, 221, 294, 390, 511, 522, 630, 728, 736, 757, 920 pro-drop 27, 28, 30–33, 36, 40, 42, 50, 56–65, 68, 69, 71–73, 75, 89, 136, 143, 211, 261, 262, 537, 543, 548, 574, 733, 759, 760 – partial pro-drop 27, 31, 33, 36, 40, 60, 64, 136 progressive 132, 249, 302, 341, 680, 841, 848 prohibition (see: speech act, directive) pronoun 11, 12, 16, 17, 28, 47, 49, 50–57, 61– 69, 71–75, 94, 95, 98, 100, 101, 103, 105– 110, 113, 115, 119, 120, 122, 123, 126, 127, 129, 131, 136, 138, 141, 142, 155, 159, 167, 170, 172, 183–222, 230, 232, 252, 255, 259–266, 287, 290, 325, 339, 341, 347, 349, 351, 353–358, 360, 373, 378, 381, 283, 284, 386, 389, 458, 462, 478, 482, 490, 492, 495, 497, 512, 536–538, 540, 543, 545, 548–550, 552, 554, 557, 570–573, 575–578, 580, 584, 587, 593, 596, 597, 618, 625, 629, 651, 656, 668, 671, 691, 692, 697, 700–702, 733, 741–748, 754, 756, 763, 773, 776, 782, 783, 797, 804– 806, 808, 811, 814, 818, 821–825, 827, 831, 848, 852, 853, 859, 888, 895, 909 – impersonal human pronoun 230, 481 proposition 12, 13, 47–49, 128, 131, 348, 351, 430, 473, 474, 476–480, 489, 498, 510, 517, 520, 521, 523, 525, 537, 538, 577, 614–617, 640, 671, 673, 675, 702, 891, 892, 913 proto-role 90, 157, 158, 173 Proto-Romance 169, 170 Provençal 56, 60, 71, 97, 211, 263, 264, 277, 343, 349, 352, 410, 594, 707, 708, 823, 921 (see also: Occitan) quantifier 14, 75, 76, 95, 97, 98, 108, 312, 383, 459, 502, 505–507, 510, 511, 521, 522, 583,

Index

678, 692, 703, 713, 717, 727, 736, 739, 741–743, 745–750, 753, 763, 765, 843, 846, 853, 912–915, 917, 920 – existential quantifier 746 – negative quantifier 583, 747, 914 – quantifier fronting 502, 507, 510, 511, 521, 522, 912–915, 920 – quantifier phrase 715, 746, 750 – universal quantifier 736, 748, 750 question 32–34, 38, 130, 133, 374, 429, 466, 472–475, 477, 480, 506, 514, 516, 517, 520, 521, 524, 525, 542, 547, 569–572, 574–598, 616, 617, 637, 750, 859, 867, 889, 891, 892, 898, 900, 902, 917 – embedded question 569, 570, 576, 578, 584, 585, 593 – est-ce que-question 569, 570, 574, 579, 583, 584, 587–589, 591, 593, 598 – root interrogative 578 question particle 589, 592 raising 73, 299, 300, 357, 385, 386, 389, 392, 393, 456, 460, 696, 750, 753, 758–760, 873, 874 – raising construction 369, 370, 381, 384–386 reconstruction 472, 484, 485, 488, 493, 496, 497, 667 reflexive 28, 29, 42, 44, 51, 52, 63, 70, 112, 113, 116, 118, 19, 121, 128, 130, 131, 133, 136, 139, 140, 163, 167, 169, 172, 176, 177, 183, 191, 192, 196, 197, 201, 204–209, 215, 218, 221, 230, 232, 235, 245–260, 262–266, 274–279, 282, 284, 286, 291, 293, 297, 291–293, 302, 310, 316, 317, 319, 325, 327, 345, 353, 483, 493, 491, 511, 513, 518, 519, 524, 526, 608, 609, 613, 619, 623, 625, 629, 630–632, 636, 638, 653, 670, 700, 731, 733, 754, 811, 812, 817 – reflexive anticausative 176, 177, 230, 247–251, 254 – reflexive impersonal 67, 136, 206, 230, 248, 249, 251, 254–256, 258–260, 266 – reflexive middle 248–251 – reflexive passive 230, 235–237, 245, 247, 248–251-256, 259, 260, 264, 266 relational adjectives 771, 773, 779, 793–796, 798, 801 relative 14, 15, 43, 117, 157, 158, 173, 205, 206, 220, 221, 265, 373, 570, 593, 610, 680,

957

788, 789, 791, 801, 804–831, 862, 854, 869, 887, 888, 899, 916 – free relative 540, 552, 554, 570, 593, 594, 597, 814, 823, 825 – restrictive relative 110, 341, 416, 417, 433, 538, 805, 809, 814, 815, 816, 820, 823– 825, 828–831 – semi-free relative 570 – zero relative 804, 805, 826–831 relative adverb 552, 555, 806, 816 relative clause 11, 14, 15, 32, 43, 110, 140, 265, 341, 348, 373, 400, 416, 417, 433, 434, 472, 489, 495, 536, 538, 540, 552, 560, 570, 571, 587, 588, 710, 727, 743, 772, 790–792, 801, 804–831 relative pronoun 219, 349, 373, 540, 544, 552, 554, 700, 804, 806, 808, 818, 825 relativizer 138, 140, 341, 537, 538, 540, 543, 551–553, 555, 557, 559, 560, 700, 794, 804–831 – possessive relativizer 805, 816, 818 reordering 546, 792, 887, 892, 915, 917, 918, 928 reported speech 301, 351, 397, 400, 424, 427, 441, 442, 444, 574, 617, 843 request (see: speech act, directive) restructuring 123, 187, 230, 231, 272, 294, 318, 369, 370, 383, 390–393 resultative 169, 237, 242, 274, 346, 861 resumption 14, 356–358, 472, 473, 475, 478, 481–483, 487, 488, 490–493, 496, 505, 522, 573, 578, 804, 807, 821–826, 830, 831, 908–910, 912, 915, 920, 922 Rhaeto-Romance 89, 98, 101, 103, 106, 120, 143, 190, 194, 196, 108, 209, 220, 238, 277, 291, 292, 337, 343, 398, 626, 627, 755, 847, 853, 861, 887, 888, 906, 919 roll-up 783, 791, 800, 871–874 Romance languages / Romance 1–7, 10–17, 27, 28, 30–34, 36, 38–40, 44, 46, 50, 53, 55– 60, 63, 65, 71–73, 76, 77, 89–92, 95–98, 100, 101, 103–107, 110–114, 116–124, 127– 129, 131, 133, 138, 143, 143, 154, 159–161, 167–171, 173, 175–177, 183–185, 188–190, 192–104, 196, 198, 199, 203, 205–207, 209–211, 214, 219–222, 230–235, 238, 241, 242, 244–248, 251–255, 260, 262, 265, 266, 272, 274–280, 282, 286, 288–292, 294, 299, 301, 304, 308, 313, 321, 325,

958

Index

332, 333, 335–337, 339, 342, 343, 345, 346, 348–353, 355, 357–361, 369–371, 373–379, 381, 382, 384–387, 390–394, 397–405, 407–412, 418, 423, 424, 429– 438, 441–444, 449–452, 455–457, 459, 461–467, 472, 475, 481–483, 485, 489, 498, 502–505, 507–509, 513–519, 522, 524, 526, 527, 536–542, 544–549, 551, 552, 554, 558, 560, 561, 569–571, 574, 576–578, 580, 582, 585, 586, 591–598, 603, 605, 607, 609, 612, 619, 623, 626–629, 634, 6335, 641, 642, 647–652, 656–660, 666–668, 672–677, 679, 680, 682, 683, 691–695, 697, 702, 704, 705, 707, 709–714, 718– 720, 727–729, 731–735, 737, 739–741, 743–746, 748–762, 764, 765, 771, 773, 775, 778, 780, 783–785, 787, 788, 790– 793, 797, 800, 804–809, 811, 815, 818– 821, 823–828, 830, 831, 839–843, 845– 848, 850–875, 887–889, 891–896, 898– 901, 903–906, 908, 910911, 913, 915–920, 922–929 – Eastern Romance 683, 704 – Western Romance 547, 704, 705 Romanian 1–4, 6, 18, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 38, 40, 41, 47, 49, 51, 56–60, 71, 74, 89, 101, 103, 105–111, 118–125, 139, 140, 142, 161, 174, 188–190, 193, 194, 196, 198, 202, 203, 206, 210, 220, 233, 234, 235, 238, 239, 242–244, 250–254, 256, 262, 278, 293, 299, 335, 337–339, 343, 346, 349, 352, 360, 369, 370, 375, 387, 390, 392, 393, 394, 398, 449–454, 457, 458, 460–464, 466, 467, 473, 483–485, 505, 507, 511, 514, 518, 519, 522, 524, 526, 545, 547, 575, 585, 586, 604, 606, 614, 623, 624, 628–632, 634–641, 648–653, 667, 672, 674–677, 679–683, 692–694, 697–699, 702, 704– 706, 712, 727, 729, 731, 732, 734, 736–739, 741, 742, 744, 746–759, 762–764, 772, 774, 775, 778, 780–782, 790, 791, 793, 794, 798, 799, 808, 809, 813, 818, 821, 829, 839, 840, 842, 843, 845, 846, 848– 850, 856, 857, 859–861, 869, 870, 876, 887, 895, 896, 899–902, 904, 906, 909, 913–915, 923, 925, 928 – Daco-Romanian 121 – Modern 98, 103, 252, 738 – Old 4, 650, 752, 756

Romansh 56, 57, 352, 692, 704, 887, 888 (see also: Rhaeto-Romance) root (clause / phenomenon) 32, 42, 49, 70, 134, 157, 374, 388, 480, 505, 512, 513, 520, 538, 578, 592, 694, 711, 720, 854, 855, 888, 908 Russian 39 Salentino 245, 348, 352–354, 259, 591, 735, 848, 856, 857 (see also: Italian dialects, Southern Italian dialects) Sardinian 1, 3, 56, 100, 106, 108, 109, 111, 124, 192, 241, 243, 277, 279, 334, 350, 348, 350, 352, 354, 356, 357, 359–361, 369, 370, 383, 387–394, 398, 502, 504, 507– 509, 511, 512, 516–518, 520, 521, 524, 525, 592, 624, 628, 637, 692, 728–730, 737, 739, 741, 742, 746, 749, 751, 754, 757–759, 843, 847, 849, 850, 855, 860, 901, 902, 906, 915, 923, 924 Scandinavian language 762 scope 13, 115, 140, 415, 418, 433, 459, 460, 462, 467, 489, 493, 496, 524, 581, 583, 656, 673, 674, 678, 679, 790, 913 Sicilian 100, 106, 274, 339, 343, 389, 502, 507–509, 511–513, 516, 518, 520, 524, 525, 561, 592, 704, 756, 856, 862, 906, 923 (see also: Italian dialects, Southern Italian dialects) SID (see: Italian dialects, Southern Italian dialects) Slavic 185, 276, 449, 547, 585, 759 Somali 476 Spanish 1–4, 6, 12, 13, 16, 28, 29, 31, 32, 35, 38–40, 50, 51, 56–60, 63, 64, 67, 69, 71, 73, 74, 94, 96, 98, 100, 104–111, 114–132, 134–139-141, 157, 159–162, 164, 165, 168, 170, 172–174, 176, 177, 184–186, 188–191, 193–196, 198–210, 219–222, 234–237, 239–242, 247–263, 265, 274, 275, 284, 289, 292, 293, 299, 300, 301, 303–307, 318, 312, 316–318, 320–322, 324, 334, 336, 339, 340, 341, 343–346, 350, 352, 360, 369–373, 376, 377, 379–385, 387, 390–394, 397–425, 427–428, 430–432, 434–444, 450, 452, 453, 457, 458, 460, 461–463, 467, 473, 476, 482–485, 488, 503, 506–512, 514, 516, 518, 519, 521–523, 526, 527, 536, 537, 539–544, 546–555, 560, 561, 569, 570, 572, 574–578, 580–582,

Index

585–587, 593–598, 604–609, 611–615, 618, 619, 622–625, 628, 630, 631, 633– 638, 640, 641, 647–663, 665–681, 692, 693, 695, 699, 701, 702, 704–707, 712– 714, 717–720, 728–732, 734–736, 740– 743, 746–755, 757–759, 772–775, 777, 778, 780–782, 784–786, 788, 789, 791, 793, 794, 796, 797, 799, 801, 805, 807, 808, 810–813, 815, 818, 819, 821, 823, 824, 826, 842, 843, 847, 848, 855, 859, 863, 864, 872, 887, 889, 890, 894–896, 898– 904, 906, 908–918, 920, 922–929 – (Latin) American 4, 56, 67, 69, 110, 120–122, 125–127, 129, 130, 132, 134, 135, 137, 170, 191, 201, 207, 352, 407, 413, 443, 444, 453, 508–510, 536, 539–542, 553, 554, 576, 606, 619, 622, 623, 624, 661, 677, 709, 735, 780, 827, 898 – Andalusian 705 – Canarian 862 – European 60, 121, 126, 202, 207, 134, 350, 352, 428, 443, 539, 548, 553, 554, 561, 606, 622, 861, 862, 903 – Judeo 201, 594–596, 598 – Modern 96, 398, 399, 432, 439, 440, 444, 736, 850, 924, 927 – Old 104, 185, 208, 251, 265, 274, 399, 400, 430, 651, 677, 626, 843, 920–926 – Vernacular 201, 206, 207, 209, 402, 427 speaker orientation 42, 49, 132, 603, 615, 616–618, 641 specificity 41, 89, 106–110, 114, 120, 132, 135, 141, 143, 162, 163, 189, 206, 253, 278, 287, 288, 341, 359, 360, 377, 392, 420, 422, 458, 489, 502, 505, 515, 536, 537, 559, 621, 634, 636, 641, 651, 663, 664, 715, 758, 777, 784, 789, 804, 806, 813, 824, 825, 831, 843, 845, 899, 901, 913, 914, 920 specifier 55, 91–94, 96, 97, 100, 111, 116, 142, 326, 354, 484, 503, 506, 572, 573, 576, 588, 662, 663, 753, 771, 784, 790, 871– 874 specifying 97, 125, 132, 210, 285, 287, 294, 332, 334–336, 338–340, 342, 344, 347, 353, 354, 357, 361, 389, 392, 420, 426, 486, 537, 663, 698, 700, 731, 742, 778, 818, 891, 893, 920, 928 speech act 477, 480, 489, 603, 604, 615, 618, 624, 626, 630, 641

959

– directive 377, 379, 404, 458, 460, 466, 477, 593, 603, 604, 615, 619, 624–626, 629– 631, 633, 641, 642, 843 – exhortative 430, 452, 603, 634, 639–64 – expressive 103, 198, 374, 467, 604, 608, 618 stage-level 343, 345, 788, 789, 791 (see also: individual-level) structural deficiency 187 subject 1, 8, 10–15, 27–53, 55–77, 89, 91–93, 95–97, 109, 111, 115–119, 123, 125, 126, 136, 138–143, 154, 155, 158, 159, 161, 167– 174, 176, 177, 179, 183, 187–192, 208–222, 231, 232, 234, 246, 248–256, 258, 260– 264, 273, 274, 280, 284, 290–294, 299, 300, 302–314, 316, 319, 320, 323–327, 332, 333, 336–342, 344, 346, 347, 351, 353354, 359–361, 369–374, 376–389, 392, 393, 473, 478, 482, 484, 485, 490–494, 503, 504, 512, 537, 548–550, 552, 553, 556, 558–560, 569–579, 587, 589, 598, 603, 605, 608–611, 617, 618, 625, 637, 639, 642, 661, 663, 665, 666, 668, 670, 671, 701, 712, 732, 735, 747, 749, 754, 760, 762, 763, 795, 806, 809–815, 818, 820–823, 826, 827, 829–831, 848, 852, 853, 863, 864, 866, 887, 888, 890–910, 913, 915, 918, 919, 922–924, 927–929 – subject clitic 56, 57, 61, 62, 71, 123, 125, 183, 184, 188, 189, 209–2104, 216–222, 254, 259, 260, 332, 350, 351, 491, 537, 572, 577, 578, 587, 823, 853, 866 – subject-clitic inversion 49, 571, 572, 574, 576, 578, 579, 598, – subject-DP inversion 571–574, 598, – subject-object asymmetries 89, 142, 852 – subject-verb inversion 31, 37, 40, 43, 55, 59, 62, 67, 75, 77, 342, 569, 570, 574, 576, 577–579, 603, 605, 608–610, 637, 639, 642 subjunctive 96, 100, 121, 130, 139, 140, 172, 174, 200, 201, 210, 219, 254, 266, 339–341, 370, 397–400, 418, 423, 426, 428–444, 457, 482, 495, 518, 519, 584, 603, 604, 620, 627, 628, 630–642, 652, 681, 748, 828, 829, 840, 841, 848, 852, 855–857, 859, 862 subordinate clause 7, 8, 32, 42, 43, 58, 75, 219, 397, 409, 412, 416, 425, 426, 429, 431, 435–437, 443, 444, 480, 496, 537, 551,

960

Index

556, 559, 604, 607, 635, 668, 775, 804, 812, 907, 908 subordination 8, 15, 32, 369, 392, 417, 418, 428, 435–438, 440, 444, 455, 460, 604, 648, 653, 655, 658, 667, 681, 682, 804, 812, 839, 841, 859, 908 superlative 434, 467, 788, 789, 859, 867 Sursilvan 57, 98, 103, 196, 198, 337, 338, 626, 627, 754, 888 (see also: Rhaeto-Romance) swarm-alternation 179 Swedish 546, 758 syncretism 68, 102, 105, 183, 189, 190, 193, 196, 198, 210, 622, 966 syntax / syntactic 1–19, 27, 32, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 46, 47, 50, 53, 53, 5–57, 59–63, 69, 72, 73, 77, 89–91, 9, 97, 104, 110, 111, 116, 117, 118, 127, 131–133, 135, 136, 139, 155–159, 163, 164, 167, 168, 171, 180, 183–187, 190, 204, 206, 207, 209–211, 213–219, 222, 233, 238, 240, 243, 254, 259, 272, 273, 280–283, 286–291, 294, 313, 319, 332, 333, 336, 339, 342, 346, 439, 354–361, 376, 380, 382, 392, 393, 398, 409, 410, 412, 419, 423, 428, 430, 444, 450, 454, 460, 464, 472, 475–477, 482, 485, 487, 490, 493, 495–497, 502–506, 508, 509, 513–515, 520, 521, 524, 526, 527, 536, 538, 539, 542, 543, 545, 546, 548, 552, 553, 556, 557, 560, 561, 570, 574, 581, 583, 584, 587, 588, 596, 603, 605, 608, 619, 625, 634, 641, 647–649, 652, 659–661, 663, 664, 682, 683, 691, 692, 696, 699, 700, 702– 705, 710, 715–719, 720, 727, 729, 743–750, 753, 755, 758, 759, 761, 762, 764, 771–773, 775, 783, 784, 787, 790, 792, 800, 801, 804–806, 810, 811, 813–815, 820–822, 824, 825, 830, 831, 839, 840, 846, 847, 854, 862, 864, 868, 869, 872, 874, 887– 892, 894, 896, 901, 903, 904–907, 915, 919, 922, 923, 926–928 – syntactic categories 1, 8, 13, 15, 97, 133, 423 – syntactic relations 1, 8, 14, 783 synthetic / synthesis / syntheticity 14, 104, 231, 232, 272, 274, 397–401, 405–408, 410, 424, 444, 549, 557, 650, 727, 759, 762, 774, 839–843, 848–851, 853, 858, 859, 861–869, 873–875, 919, 927 (see also: analytic / analyticity)

– synthetic future (-in-the-past) 397, 399–405, 424, 425, 441, 850, 851 – synthetic passive 230–232, 266 template 183, 204–207, 209 tense 7, 8, 12, 13, 15, 17, 58, 71, 91–94, 96, 111, 126, 132, 169, 202, 203, 210, 211, 231–233, 236, 238–240, 244, 250, 251, 266, 272, 274, 276–278, 291, 294, 300, 313, 327, 333, 350, 370, 374, 388, 390, 392, 393, 397–413, 415, 416, 419, 421, 423, 441, 442, 444, 551, 556, 559, 572, 573, 590, 615, 619, 620, 624, 635, 639–641, 651, 718, 759, 760, 839, 847, 850, 851, 853, 866 tense phrase 8, 12, 13, 91–94, 96, 300, 327, 559, 572, 573, 588, 656, 657, 667, 668, 854, 855, 874, 875 that-trace effect 59, 73, 77 theta role / theta marking 89–91, 127, 131, 189, 342, 378, 379, 384–386, 776, 794–796, 801 thetic / theticity 27, 31, 32, 39, 40–46, 50, 55, 77, 571, 891–894, 902, 903, 913, 918, 923 (see also: word order) topic / topicalization 12, 13, 31, 32, 34, 39, 40– 43, 46, 47, 50, 55, 56, 64, 67–69, 107, 119, 120, 126, 133, 136, 143, 253, 335, 336, 355– 357, 359, 472–490, 492–498, 502, 505, 506, 511, 558, 576, 578, 598, 610, 665, 667, 720, 752, 844, 852, 854–858, 871, 872, 887, 888, 890–895, 903, 904, 906, 907, 909–912, 914, 915, 919, 920, 923, 928 – contrastive topic (C-Topic) – stage topic 40, 43, 55, 56, 891, 892, 895, 903, 906 – topic phrase 12, 506, 855 topic drop 56, 133 transitivity 32, 34, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 50, 92, 93, 95, 96, 107, 129, 131, 132, 154, 168– 172, 174, 176, 177, 234, 236, 248, 252, 254, 261, 273, 276, 277, 281, 282, 284, 290, 291, 302, 305, 307, 208, 311, 319, 322, 326, 354, 382, 383, 665, 669, 839, 848, 851, 862, 893, 893, 897, 898, 901, 905, 927 Tuscan 115, 352, 387, 407, 591, 592, 732, 735, 743, 756, 826, 843, 853, 863 (see also: Italian; Italo-Romance) Umbrian 735, 751, 756, 852 (see also: Italian dialects, Central Italian dialects)

Index

unaccusative / unaccusativity 11, 33, 40–43, 45, 53, 55, 75, 76, 89, 92–96, 111, 170, 176, 280–284, 286–290, 293, 294, 320, 377, 378, 387, 712, 893–898, 906, 928 – unaccusative inversion 34, 37, 40, 41, 43, 55, 284, 905, 906 Unaccusative Hypothesis 93, 272, 274, 279, 280, 284 unergative 34, 37, 42, 53, 93, 95, 170, 261, 280–282, 284, 286–290, 293, 294, 894– 896, 905, 906 univerbation 764, 859 Valencian 196, 292, 345, 751 (see also: Catalan) valency 9, 12, 154, 159, 161, 164, 230, 260, 334, 744, 745 Vallader 109, 291 (see also: Rhaeto-Romance) variation 1, 2, 11, 14–17, 23, 31, 50, 55, 57, 64, 68, 77, 89, 91, 107, 108, 111, 112, 115, 120, 125–128, 136, 140, 142, 143, 175, 176, 178, 183, 197, 198, 205, 207, 209, 214, 244, 245, 248, 277, 279, 288, 289, 292, 294, 327, 332, 333, 351–353, 359, 360, 369, 390, 391–393, 394, 397, 408, 409, 418, 419, 423, 424, 431, 434, 435, 443, 444, 449, 454, 459, 460, 464, 467, 502, 505, 507, 512, 513, 515, 527, 536, 544–548, 554, 571, 580, 603, 612, 613, 642, 682, 683, 696, 699, 711, 720, 727, 728, 730, 732, 734, 735, 742, 751, 756, 758, 764, 775, 804, 805, 809, 810, 813, 830, 839, 846, 854, 858, 862, 863, 866, 867, 871, 887, 889, 899, 901, 903, 906, 907, 915, 927–929 Venetian 61, 242, 349, 350, 352, 453–455, 823, 854, 920 (see also: Italian dialects, Northern Italian dialects) verb 7–9, 11–17, 27–34, 36–38, 40–45, 47–64, 67, 68, 70–77, 89–93, 95–97, 110–112, 114, 116, 119, 120, 123, 125–129, 132, 138, 142, 155–158, 161, 162, 164–171, 173–180, 184– 187, 189–192, 198–203, 206, 209, 210, 214–216, 218, 220–222, 230–236, 238– 240, 243, 254–248, 252–255, 258–261, 264, 265, 272, 273, 275–277, 279, 280, 282–294, 299–327, 332–334, 337–339, 342, 343, 346, 347, 353, 357–359, 361, 369–372, 374–393, 398, 401, 404, 407– 411, 416, 419–425, 429–433, 439, 441– 444, 449, 452–454, 456, 458–461, 463,

961

467, 480, 481, 484, 492, 502–504, 506, 508, 509, 511, 512, 515, 516, 520, 521, 523, 525, 527, 542, 543, 549, 551, 553, 556, 557, 559, 569–580, 584, 585, 587, 590, 594, 597, 598, 603–605, 608–611, 614, 615, 620–622, 624, 626, 629, 630, 635, 637– 639, 642, 651, 652, 656, 657, 661, 664, 665, 667, 668, 670–673, 676, 677, 682, 705, 712, 718, 731, 734, 737, 740, 743, 745, 749, 764, 776, 779, 784, 785, 795, 796, 815, 827, 839, 840, 841, 846–849, 851– 854, 858–863, 866, 868, 871, 887, 888, 890, 892–899, 901, 903–905, 907, 908, 912, 915, 916, 918–920, 922, 923, 926–928 – verb of perception 11, 13, 15, 16, 42, 199, 246, 273, 294, 299–303, 306, 309, 323, 326, 382, 384, 389, 393 verb movement 47, 138, 311, 313, 342, 458, 492, 509, 603, 629, 639, 642, 848, 854, 855 (see also: movement) verb phrase (VP) 7, 55, 91–93, 100, 111, 138, 142, 281, 310, 319–321, 325, 327, 338, 339, 341, 342, 347, 355, 383, 391, 480, 848, 492, 493, 497, 508, 509, 573, 656, 661, 666, 667, 848, 854, 871, 891 verb second (V2) 72, 209, 488, 489, 504, 584, 572, 854, 887, 888, 907, 919, 920, 922 verb-subject order 27, 31, 95 voice 11, 13, 15, 16, 132, 169, 179, 230–232, 272, 325, 326, 847 VOS / VS (see: word order) Walloon 292, 708, 709 (see also: French, Belgian) weak crossover effect 118, 472, 482, 483, 505 Welsh 546 wh-in situ 140, 569, 570, 574, 578, 579–585, 590, 593, 595, 596–598 wh-question 11, 32–34, 38, 130, 472, 516, 569– 572, 578, 582, 585, 588, 590, 591, 595, 597, 611, 613 (see also: interrogative) – multiple wh-interrogatives 569, 570, 582, 585, 586, 588, 591, 597, 598 wh-word 11, 314, 356, 569, 570–573, 576, 578–580, 582, 584–586, 588, 590, 593, 596, 606, 608, 610, 612, 809, 814 WordMarkerPhrase 718, 719 word order 19, 28, 31, 32, 41, 47, 49, 50, 58, 60, 68, 72, 73, 77, 94, 104–106, 117, 119, 313,

962

Index

314, 336, 338, 342, 349, 390, 393, 456, 503, 504, 546, 547, 578, 609, 650, 759– 761, 818, 819, 864, 870–873, 887–893, 897, 898, 901, 902, 904, 907, 915, 917– 920, 922, 925–929 – OV: 15, 650, 851, 927 – OVS: 887, 907, 908, 915, 918–920, 922, 923, 927, 928 – SV: 28, 30, 31–34, 39, 42, 43, 50, 52, 53, 55, 887, 892, 893, 895, 897, 898, 913, 923 – SVO: 14, 31, 41, 44, 46, 55, 117, 342, 456, 463, 887, 889, 891–894, 902, 904, 918, 919, 927, 928 – VO: 650, 864, 892, 898, 899, 927

– VOS: 27, 31, 32, 36–38, 50, 77, 887, 892, 898–906, 918, 924–928 – VS: 15, 28, 31–34, 36, 40–46, 50, 53, 55, 77, 355, 559, 887, 888, 890, 892, 893, 895, 896, 898, 904–906, 920, 924, 925, 928 – VSO: 27, 31, 32, 38, 40, 41, 42, 46–50, 55, 77, 887, 892, 898, 901, 902–906, 918, 923, 924, 927, 928 – VSX: 40, 343, 344 – XVS: 888, 907, 920 X-Bar Theory 7 Zulu 762