1,720,986 research outputs found
What’s hidden below definiteness and genitive: on indefinite partitive articles in Romance
Get PDFIn French, Italian, and other Romance languages indefinite nominal phrases can be introduced by what appears to be the conflation of a genitive preposition and a definite article, the so-called “indefinite partitive articles” (e.g., Fr. Je cuisine de la soupe depuis deux jours. ‘I’ve been cooking soup for two days’). This is rather unexpected, since these nominal phrases are neither definite nor in a syntactic position in which we expect to find a genitive preposition. This led part of the literature to consider them as built by lexical items synchronically distinct from the genitive preposition/definite article but homophonous with them. This contribution shows how a constituent-based approach to the lexicon-syntax interface as nanosyntax, paired with a specific take on the sequence of syntactic functions, can capture their apparently conflicting distribution without stipulating multiple homophonous lexical items. The key factor in this proposal is a revised analysis of the Romance lexical item (LI) for (i) definite articles – linked to a constituent containing not only features of definiteness but also lower indefinite features and higher nominative/accusative case features – and (ii) the genitive preposition DE – linked to a constituent containing not only genitive features but also lower nominative/accusative features. Holding these LIs crosslinguistically stable, the variation attested in this domain is modeled as depending on the amount of functional structure lexicalized by the nominal root in the different languages
Deposing deponency: Latin non-denominal deponents are not grammatically idiosyncratic verbs
No full textLatin deponents are usually treated as morphological idiosyncrasies in which the Middle morphology is not related to an anticausative (change of state), reflexive or passive syntactic structure, in which it would be expected and grammatically justified (Embick, David. 2000. Features syntax and categories in the Latin perfect. Linguistic Inquiry 31(2). 185–230; Xu, Zheng, Mark Aronoff and Frank Anshen. 2007. Deponency in Latin. In Matthew Baerman et al. (eds.), Deponency and morphological mismatches, 127–144. Oxford: Oxford University Press). Focusing on the non-denominal deponents, I show that these verbs are always reflexives or anticausatives. In the reflexive and anticausative structures a single argument gains two thematic roles, the most external one, doer for the reflexives, undergoer for the anticausatives, and a lower one (holder of a state, benefactive, etc.). The Latin Middle morphology marks the external role as syntactically deactivated but semantically existential and allows for the assignment of the external role to a lower argument. The peculiarity of deponents is not the presence of the Middle, but the fact that, because of specific lexical constraints, these verbs cannot be present in an Active derivation. Similar lexically constrained verbs which can only appear in anticausative or reflexive structures are crosslinguistically attested: deponents are not Latin idiosyncrasies
Stuck in the Middle : a morphosyntactic analysis of the deponent verbs from Latin to Romance
No full textIn questa tesi propongo un'analisi sia sincronica che diacronica dei verbi latini che presentano obbligatoriamente la morfologia Media (deponenti). Dimostro come questo obbligo sia relazionato a diverse strutture sintattiche soggiacenti e, quindi, morfosintatticamente giustificato. Dimostro, inoltre, come sia la presenza stessa della morfologia Media all'interno del sistema linguistico latino a permettere la creazione delle diverse classi lessicali dei deponenti. La perdita di tale morfologia porta a una riorganizzazione delle classi lessicali verbali in latino tardo e medievale. Questa riorganizzazione, data l'analisi proposta, risulta prevedibile. Il fatto che un tratto morfosintattico come la morfologia Media condizioni la classificazione del lessico è un dato linguisticamente rilevante: supporta l'idea che sia la componente morfosintattica del linguaggio a precedere la suddivisione in classi lessicali e che non sia il lessico a determinare la struttura sintattica quanto, invece, la struttura sintattica a determinare il lessico
Two kinds of verbal roots in Latin: evidence from thematic vowels and word-formation processes
Get PDFThis paper aims at tackling under a new perspective a crucial asymmetry of Latin verb morphology, that is the distinction between stem and root in different kind of word formations. We do not concentrate here on the inflectional domain directly, but we address the issue taking in consideration two different ways of encoding agentivity in nominalizations, namely we will compare the -tor formations with the so called synthetic or root-compounds, in order to identify which rules select either the bare root (ponti-fek-s) or the perfect participle stem (cap-tor, lauda-tor) in different morphological environments. The theoretical framework we adopt is the Nanosyntactic one, which will allow us to account for the morphological operations according to a constrained set of principled rules. In § 2 we present the crucial properties of agentive nominalizations realized with -tor as well as those of root compounds, focusing on the different conditions which trigger the use of the root morpheme or the perfect participle stem; in § 3 we introduce the basic tenets of the Nanosyntactic framework; in § 4 the morphological properties of Latin roots and thematic stems are accounted for under the nanosyntactic principles; finally in § 5 we draw the general conclusions and point to the open issues
Word-order information in the Lexicon
Get PDFWe propose that crosslinguistic word-order variation (Greenberg 1963; Cinque 2005; Abels 2016) reflects information stored in the lexicon in the format of Lexical Items, and that the operations yielding word-order are the same that guide lexicalisation more generally in Nanosyntax (Starke 2009). We show that this lexicalisation-based approach shares the empirical coverage of current analyses (Cinque 2005; Abels & Neeleman 2012; Cinque 2023) without making reference to traditional syntactic movement. This spares the system from stipulating semantically vacuous structural dependencies triggering movement, and correctly separates subtypes of movements subject to different constraints. The proposal also favours a novel perspective on how the relevant Lexical Items are acquired and activated during processing, shedding new light on the different typological frequency of word-order patterns and structural priming
Chapter 15. Latin denominal deponents
No full textLatin deponent verbs are usually analyzed as idiosyncratic forms whose Middle morphology does not correspond to the subjacent syntactic/semantic structure (Embick 2000, Xu et al. 2007). This paper shows that, for the deponents produced after the first half of the II cent. BCE (ex. ancillor ‘I serve’, dominor ‘I rule’, aquor ‘I go to get water’), the presence of the Middle morphology is syntactically justified. These deponents are denominals. Their event structure involves two events, a stative one, v-be°, whose complement is the verbalized nominal element, and a dynamic one, v-do°. The unique argument is both the HOLDER of the state and the DOER of the dynamic event. The Middle morphology allows for the identification between these two positions, as in a Middle reflexive derivation (Spathas et al. 2015)
Indefinite Objects in Micro‐variation. A Cross‐linguistic Analysis of the Distribution of Partitives Articles, Bare Nominals and Definite Determiners in Northern Italy*
Get PDFThis contribution focuses on indefinite arguments in object position. We address this topic from the point of view of the crosslinguistic variation within the Romance continuum, especially looking at Northern Italian Dialects (NIDs). The target is to describe the distribution of the different possible realizations of this kind of arguments in this area by means of an in-depth analysis of the data coming from the ASIt database and from three new fieldwork sessions. We show that the microvariation attested in this area reflects and refines the “macro” variation attested among the major Romance languages. The fine-grained picture that can be drawn from a closer look to a set of minimally varying languages helps crosslinguistic comparison and, consequently, the modeling of more precise analyses
An indefinite maze : on the distribution of partitives and bare nouns in the Northern Italian dialects
Get PDFSome Romance languages, like Spanish, encode narrow scope indefinite objects without any over determiner (Bare Nouns; como pan 'I eat bread'), while others, like French, require the insertion of an overt prenominal marker, labeled Partitive Article (PA; je mange du pain 'I eat bread'). This asymmetry has been related to overt number marking on the noun (Delfitto & Schroter, Stark 2016 a.o.), leading to the hypothesis that number morphs on N license indefinite arguments and that PAs appear in those languages in which they are absent. Languages as Italian, in which narrow scope indefinites can be introduced both by BNs and PAs, challenge this hypothesis. By enlarging the view to Northern Italian Dialects, we update the correlation with number marking (the relevant factor being the absence of number morphs on masculine Ns) and show that Italian-like languages are not problematic, once we develop an analysis of the alternation between PAs and BNs in these languages in terms of two kinds of indefinites, differentiated by the presence/absence (PAs/BNs) of a feature (tentatively identified as a Choice function, Reinhart 1997)
Partitive Articles and Indefinites, Micro and Macrovariation
Get PDFThis introductory paper provides an overview of the main phenomena investigated in this Special Issue, such as the relation between the encoding of indefinites and the presence of genitive and definite markers, the relation between partitivity and indefiniteness and the distribution of these phenomena in minority, or “micro”, varieties – such as Italian dialects, Galloromance varieties, North and South Saami – compared to the distribution of the same phenomena in majority, or “macro”, varieties – such as French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Estonian, Finnish, Czech and Serbian. The second part of the paper, then, provides an overview of the content of each original paper collected in the special issue
Asymmetry as a general cue for V2 (loss)
Get PDFThis paper identifies a micro-cue correlating to verb second word order (V2) in two
closely related Medieval Romance languages. As V2 is asymmetrically distributed in
main rather than subordinate clauses, an asymmetry would be expected in phenomena
assumed to relate to V2, such as subject inversion, null subject and enclisis. The loss
of that asymmetry should therefore indicate the loss of the V2 word order rule. These
assumptions are tested here by a quantitative analysis of a treebank of calibrated data
covering the crucial period of change (from the 14th to the 16th century) for Medieval
French and Venetian. The hard quantitative evidence provided demonstrates that the
main versus embedded asymmetry is indeed a micro-cue of V2 structure, and of its
loss in one of the two investigated languages
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