On clitic placement and gradience of strength of FP in Western Ibero-Romance

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Lamar A. Graham
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Clitic Placement

Abstract Old (Medieval and Classical) Spanish permitted finite enclisis and as such is classified as a strong-F language, as are many archaic varieties of Romance languages. Notable about Old Spanish is that, prior to the 1500s, interpolation arrangements were acceptable and rather common, as is still the case of Galician and some dialects of Portuguese. However, from the 1500s onward, interpolation in Old Spanish was no longer productive, much like modern Asturian. This is evidence that the “strong-weak” dichotomy of FP is insufficient to explain the situation of the languages. I argue that the strength of FP should be described as not only “weak” or “strong,” but instead on a gradient scale to distinguish languages that permit a range of possible clitic arrangements.

Romance Object Clitics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Pescarini
Keyword(s):  
Previous Literature ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Generative Theory ◽  
Morphological Aspects ◽  
Object Clitics ◽  
Clitic Placement ◽  
Theoretical Side

This book focuses on the evolution of object clitic pronouns in the Romance languages. It aims to explore the empirical facets of cliticization and elaborate on the theoretical ramifications of the topic. On the empirical side, the book deals with data ranging from Latin to modern languages and less well-known dialects from all areas of Romance. Medieval vernaculars take centre stage both in the reconstruction of the evolution from Latin to Romance and in the modelling of clitic placement in the modern languages. Syntactic, phonological, and morphological aspects are examined, but the main focus is on syntactic placement, which is the hallmark of Romance clitics. On the theoretical side, the books engage with the previous literature, in particular with Generative literature. In recent decades, our understanding of Romance clitics has grown in symbiosis with the Generative theory, and the importance of most empirical findings cannot be fully appreciated without being acquainted with the terms of the ongoing debate. The book challenges the received idea that cliticization resulted from a form of syntactic deficiency. Instead, it proposes that clitics resulted from the feature endowment of discourse features, which caused freezing of certain pronominal forms first and—through reanalysis—their successive incorporation into verbal hosts. This approach entails revising analyses of well-known phenomena such as interpolation, climbing, and enclisis/proclisis alternations (the so-called Tobler-Mussafia law), and addressing orthogonal phenomena such as V2 syntax, scrambling, and stylistic fronting.

The V2 syntax of Medieval Romance

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Sam Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
Old French ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Medieval Romance ◽  
Quantitative Evidence ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Old Occitan ◽  
Old Portuguese ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Detailed Presentation

This chapter provides a detailed presentation of the main data and arguments which have been proposed in favour of claiming that the Medieval Romance languages were V2 systems and considers data from Old French, Old Occitan, Old Italo-Romance varieties, Old Spanish, and Old Portuguese. It provides new qualitative and quantitative evidence to show the nature of the prefield, Germanic inversion, matrix/embedded asymmetries, and the precise types of verb-first and verb-third-or-greater orders provide new evidence in favour of the V2 hypothesis. It also suggests that the diachronic emergence of a V2 grammar is entirely plausible on the basis of the available data. The main objections to the V2 account proposed in the literature are evaluated and argued to face empirical and theoretical problems.

New insights into an old form: A variationist analysis of the pleonastic possessive in Guatemalan Spanish

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Elsig
Keyword(s):  
Interview Data ◽  
Central American ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Structural Position ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Indefinite Article ◽  
American Spanish ◽  
Context Specific

AbstractRomance languages differ as regards the adjectival or article-like status of prenominal possessives. While in Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and Old Spanish, they pattern like adjectives and co-occur with articles, and in French and Modern Spanish, they compete with the latter for the same structural position. The different distribution of possessives is claimed to reflect distinct stages on a grammaticalization cline (Alexiadou, 2004). This paper focuses on a variety of Central American Spanish where the Old Spanish co-occurrence of an (indefinite) article and a possessive in the prenominal domain has been maintained (as in una mi amiga ‘a my friend’). Based on a variationist study of interview data extracted from the Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish for Spain and America (PRESEEA) Guatemala corpus, I will argue that it is indeed the indefinite article that shows signs of retarded grammaticalization. Yet, rather than extending to the variety as a whole, this retardation is context-specific.

Constructions of uncontrolled state or event

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Elvira
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Construction ◽  
Semantic Values

Spanish and other Romance languages inherited from Latin the seeds of a new construction that is common to the syntax of some verbs belonging to the field of emotions, feelings, pain or modality. The semantic values of this construction are strange to prototypical transitivity and are coupled with a marked argument structure, compared with the more common transitive sentence. In the early centuries of the history of Spanish only a few verbs were integrated in the new scheme, which could receive an experience, modal or quantitative meaning, depending on an analogical association with certain frequent verbs. As the construction gained productivity, the importance of these few specific verbs as models for the newly integrated ones was reduced and the construction as a whole was understood in a more general sense of uncontrolled state or event. This paper provides a history of the construction in its different stages and tries to uncover the mechanism and factors that favored the increase in its productivity over the centuries. It also attempts to understand these facts from a typological standpoint, as an effect of some kind of a transitivity split that took place in Old Spanish, which gave rise to a type of marked construction, associated to some specific verbs.

scholarly journals A evolução da mesóclise

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 113-121
Author(s):  
Ildikó Haffner
Keyword(s):  
Early Stage ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Romance Language ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Complementary Distribution ◽  
Rules Set ◽  
Clitic Placement

The aim of the paper is to give an overview of the development of mesoclisis, a peculiar area of pronominal clitic placement. Mesoclisis is a particular instance of enclisis (Verb-clitic) when a clitic is placed inside a morphological word, surfacing in between the verbal root and the inflectional suffixes. Mesoclisis only appears with future and conditional forms of the verb, clearly showing the origins of the inflexion, namely the Vulgar Latin auxiliary, habere. In most Romance language the analytic future and conditional became synthetic at an early stage and could not be divided by a constituent (clitic) but in Old Spanish and Portuguese mesoclisis was still a preferred option. It was also natural for both Spanish and Portuguese authors to use the mesoclitic form in the 16th century. With the explosive growth of proclisis (clitic-Verb) in Spanish, mesoclisis became gradually unused and disappeared, whereas Portuguese preserved this archaic structure and it is still in use if there is no triggering condition in the sentence (negation, wh question, adverbs, etc.) Today they are in complementary distribution with enclisis and well defined rules set their use, it is the morphology of the verb that defines the choice.

Synchronic and diachronic analysis of prepositional multiword modifiers across Romance languages

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Piunno ◽  
Vittorio Ganfi
Keyword(s):  
Functional Relation ◽  
Prepositional Phrase ◽  
Quantitative Approach ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Middle French ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Multiword Expressions ◽  
Diachronic Analysis ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Lexicological and lexicographical studies on multiword expressions in Romance languages have significantly increased in recent years. Even though some attention has been paid to Multiwords functioning as adjectives and adverbs, the structural and the functional relation between them has not been clarified yet. Employing both a qualitative and quantitative approach, this corpus-based investigation aims at exploring the diatopic distribution and the evolution of Romance multiword lexemes having the form of a prepositional phrase and the function of an adjective or/and an adverb (or both functions). According to data taken from corpora of Latin, Old Italian, Old Spanish and Middle French, this contribution investigates the relationship between the different degrees of schematicity and the productivity of this kind of multiword lexemes in order to highlight the evolutional path and the diachronic/diatopic principles engaged in the multiword modifying system across the different Romance languages taken into consideration.

scholarly journals The relationship between palatalisation and labial consonants in Castilian Spanish

Loquens ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. e071
Author(s):  
César Gutiérrez
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Data ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Sound Changes ◽  
The Many ◽  
Castilian Spanish ◽  
The Relationship

In spite of the many studies devoted to the palatal outcomes of the Latin clusters PL and FL in Old Spanish, some other clusters and sequences composed of labial consonants such as -PUL-, -BVL-, -BE,I-, -VE,I- and -MI- have received little attention. The aim of this paper is to analyze the phonetic aspects of the diachronic evolution of these clusters and sequences into their Old Spanish outcomes [ʎ], [ɟ] y [ɲtʃ]. To this end, experimental, dialectal and comparative data from Old Spanish as well as from other Romance languages will be used. This will lead to the conclusion that the sound changes in both [Clabial + l] and [Clabial + j] clusters were based on the same articulatory mechanisms: a strengthening of the segment following the labial consonant and the later deletion of the labial, if it was a stop, or its assimilation to the point of articulation of the palatal, if it was a nasal. The implications of these conclusions for the evolution of pl and fl clusters in Old Spanish, as well as for the methodology in historical phonetics, will be pointed out.

scholarly journals The Syntax of Clitic Placement in European Portuguese

2009 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-109
Author(s):  
Michael Barrie
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Item ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Clause Structure ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Lexical Feature ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Small Set ◽  
The Right ◽  
Clitic Placement

ABSTRACT In most Romance languages, object clitics appear to the left of the verb (proclitics); in European Portuguese (henceforth, EP) they appear to the right (enclitics). Furthermore, several syntactic environments trigger proclisis in EP, which usually have no effect on clitic placement in other Romance languages. These environments can be roughly split into two categories: those in which CP is filled (Wh-questions, focus constructions, subordinate clauses), and those in which a head position between CP and TP is filled (negation, special adverbs). To account for this, I propose that C0 in EP has the strong feature [+lexical] which must be checked by a lexical item before Spell-Out. I also propose the following clause structure: TopP>CP>AdvsP>NegP>TP>vP>VP. AdvsP is a functional projection which hosts any one of a small set of special adverbials. If CP is filled by Spell-Out (either in its head or specifier position), the [+lexical] feature will be checked and erased. If not, then C0 attracts the closest lexical item.

Competencia entre palatalización y nasalización en las secuencias ‑ngul‑ en castellano

2018 ◽  
Vol 134 (2) ◽  
pp. 404-418
Author(s):  
César Gutiérrez
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Sound Changes

AbstractThe Latin sequences ‑ngul‑ in words such as cingulum, ungulam or singulos have evolved into two possible outcomes in Spanish: a palatal sonorant ([ɲ] or [ʎ]), or [nd]. The purpose of this paper is to provide a phonetically-based explanation to account for the sound changes that led to these outcomes in Old Spanish, as well as in other Ibero-Romance languages. In this regard, it will be shown that palatalization and nasalization were competing processes in the development of the sequences ‑ngul‑, as well as in the other structurally comparable sequences ‑ndul‑ and ‑mbul‑.

Intervocalic lenition and word-boundary effects

Diachronica ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Ignacio Hualde
Keyword(s):  
Sound Change ◽  
Word Boundary ◽  
Boundary Effects ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Explanatory Account ◽  
History Of

The lenition of intervocalic consonants is typically phonologized in sound change only within word domains. At first blush, this morphological restriction might seem to contradict the Neogrammarian hypothesis of exclusively phonetic conditioning in sound change. In this paper I examine the weakening of intervocalic voiced stops/affricates in Istanbul Judeo-Spanish. Comparison with Old Spanish shows that in the native lexicon intervocalic lenition has affected only word-internal consonants. Even consonants following a prefix boundary remain unaffected. I argue that, at the time of the expulsion of the Spanish Jews, the language already had the spirantization process, at least in incipient form. This process, which continues to operate across the board in Mainstream Spanish, became restricted at the word level in Judeo-Spanish. This interpretation, consistent with the Neogrammarian hypothesis, is the only one that offers an explanatory account and is supported by the evidence from other similar developments in the history of the Romance languages and with results from recent acoustic studies on incipient or optional lenition processes.

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