158 research outputs found
Towards a hierarchy of clause types
No full textThe article analyzes a morphosyntactic phenomenon attested in many North-Eastern Italian dialects, namely the encliticization of a pronominal subject onto the inflected verb; the author tries to determine, from a comparative perspective, the range of possible interpretations that can be associated with clauses containing the relevant verbal form and shows how the crossdialectal variation can shed light on the functional articulation of the left periphery
Verbless exclamatives across Romance: standard expectations and tentative evaluations
No full textThis article develops an analysis of verbless exclamative clauses in Romance; in this type of reduced clause the predicative complement precedes the subject and is separated from it by an intonational break, while the missing verb is interpreted as a copula. After the discussion of some peculiar properties of evaluative predicates, the crosslinguistic interpretive hallmarks of verbless exclamatives are described on the basis of data from Italian, Spanish and French. It will be argued that the absence of a wh-modifier in this structure corresponds to the speaker’s intention to establish a relation between the subject and an evaluative predicate. The fact that the property expressed by the predicate must belong to the individual-level category follows from its being presented as an intrinsic feature of the subject. Moreover, the fact that comparatives and relative superlatives are generally excluded from verbless exclamatives witnesses that no comparison with other entities is allowed, as this would restrict the validity of the evaluation.1 1. This paper develops some aspects of Munaro (2005a), a preliminary descriptive work I carried out on this topic. I owe thanks to Adriana Belletti and Paola Benincà for discussing various aspects of the analysis and to Laura Brugè and Maria Martínez-Atienza for reading and commenting on a previous version of this article. I also wish to thank Cassian Braconnier for providing the judgements on some of the French data. The usual disclaimers apply
Mapping the Left Periphery
No full textThe research work carried out on the CP-structure within the cartographic framework has led to the identification of restrictions in the relative sequence of elements appearing in the left periphery, which on the one hand qualify the clause type or mark the kind of subordination, and on the other attract operators and elements carrying information tied to the speaker's point of view and his individual evaluation of the event. The contributors were asked to identify the precise positions of functional heads already postulated in the literature, or identify new functional projections; the authors were also encouraged to discuss – on the basis of substantial empirical evidence – general or specific parts of the theoretical framework, or to submit the richly articulated CP structure to further typological checking.
The universal restrictions on ordering have been discovered in an inductive way; the papers in this volume, even those that appear to be predominantly descriptive, have the empirical value of reinforcing the general hypothesis; new generalizations take form that raise new questions, in general about the relation between form and function, between visible elements (particles, derivational and inflectional morphology) and syntactic phenomena.
Although the main aim of the present volume is to promote further research on the rich functional articulation of the highest structural layer of sentence structure, the so-called complementizer system, the papers can be subdivided into two main groups. Some of the papers present evidence in favor of ordering restrictions among projections located within the CP layer proper and analyze their semantic content and syntactic properties (Aboh & Pfau, Badan & Del Gobbo, Hernanz, Lipták, Munaro). Others discuss phenomena that illustrate the evident solidarity among points of the structure that are not adjacent and do not belong to the same 'field' (Damonte, Haegeman, Ledgeway, Poletto & Zanuttini); this is an area that deserves further investigation, and perhaps also new creative hypotheses, concerning the design of the structure as a physical object, in some sense
Synchronic and diachronic clues on the internal structure of 'where' in Italo-Romance
No full textIn this article we try to identify the morphological formatives found across different Northern Italian dialects and to provide a first overview of the possible morphemes that can contribute to the compounding of the wh-item ‘where’. This wh-item displays a wide range of different crosslinguistic lexical realizations, allowing us to formulate a typology
of possible formatives; moreover, the same lexical formatives occur in rather distant areas, which suggests that the ‘morphological pieces’ with which this wh-item is construed are recurrent across varieties. Our account is based on the
(non-trivial) underlying assumption that each morphological formative corresponds to a functional projection, and that it is possible to reconstruct the internal layering of wh-words starting from their morphological composition
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