Differential object marking in Modern Romanian

Chapter 4 focuses on DOM in Modern Romanian, for both direct and indirect objects. The data are organized according to the type of DOM mechanisms, with separate sections for CD, DOM-p, and CD+DOM-p. The pragmatic effects noticed for Old Romanian DOM are re-assessed, considering that the contrasting interpretation of CD versus DOM-p is neutralized. The major changes concern the loss of CD with direct objects and its recycling in conjunction with DOM-p. While DOM-p declines and becomes more specialized for the end of the specificity scale, CD+DOM-p turns into the default option for DOM with direct objects, as opposed to CD, which becomes the default option for DOM with indirect objects. Increased productivity for CD+DOM-p coincides with the parallel expansion of Clitic Left Dislocation in the language, which completely replaces the constituent fronting through Topicalization.

On “partitive dislocation” in Sardinian: A Romance and Minimalist perspective

The traditional philological literature on Sardinian claims that Sardinian has a “partitive object” construction, arguing that it is either inherited from Latin or due to Catalan influence. Under closer examination, however, the construction at issue turns out to be a common Romance clitic right dislocation (CLRD) structure involving the preposition de and a partitive clitic. The article presents the syntactic distribution of this Sardinian construction and its clitic left dislocation (CLLD) counterpart and compares it to similar structures in French, Catalan, and Italian. The result is that the structure appears in all these languages when a bare NP is dislocated, including split-QP/NumP/NP constructions: In all these languages, the dislocated indefinite NP is marked by de/di and a partitive clitic (Sardinian nde, French en, Italian ne, Catalan en/ne) shows up. The article ends with a Minimalist analysis, in which clitics are the spell-out of a probe in v that triggers movement of a complement to the specifier of vP to overcome a phase boundary. In this account, a probe that targets indefinite NPs assigns partitive case, while the probe itself is spelled out as a partitive clitic. While taking Sardinian as a starting point, the article bears on more general issues and unveils a common mechanism in one group of Romance languages.

ARGUMENTOS FRONTEADOS NA PERIFERIA À ESQUERDA DE ORAÇÕES CONDICIONAIS CENTRAIS NO PORTUGUÊS BRASILEIRO: UM PROCESSO DE CLITIC LEFT DISLOCATIONCOM RETOMADA PRONOMINAL VISÍVEL OU NULA

Haegeman (2012) observa que, em orações condicionais centrais em inglês, não pode haver topicalização de argumento. Em sua análise, a autora propõe que o movimento do argumento para a periferia da sentença bloqueia o alçamento do operador condicional de TP para CP. Em português, diferentemente do inglês, é possível o fronteamento de argumentos. Para explicar essa diferença, propomos que, em português, quando há fronteamento de argumento em orações condicionais, o elemento fronteado é um constituinte gerado diretamente na periferia à esquerda. Nossa proposta é que tais sintagmas deslocados são retomados por um pronome visível ou nulo, tendo em vista o fato de o português ser uma língua de objeto nulo (CYRINO, 1994). Nesse sentido, as construções de fronteamento em orações condicionais do português brasileiro são, portanto, estruturas com deslocamento à esquerda clítica (Clitic Left Dislocation - CLLD), já que não houve movimento do elemento fronteado. O fato de não haver movimento sintático do argumento topicalizado tornaria possível o alçamento do operador condicional para o sistema CP.

Clitic Doubling in a Doubling World

This chapter places Clitic Doubling in Argentinean Spanish into the broad perspective of pronominal doubling phenomena. A series of diagnostics is presented based on the interaction of Clitic Doubling with its PF/pragmatic effects, on the one hand, and its syntactic/LF effects, on the other. An important conclusion is that Clitic Doubling must be kept apart from Clitic Right Dislocation and Clitic Left Dislocation. Clitic Doubling is thus conceived of the morphological reflex of the abstract composition of object DPs; concretely, it is an A-dependency triggered whenever the object possesses a [person]-feature, an observation called the Person Feature Condition. So, under the minimal assumption that [3P] features can be optionally encoded on lexical DPs in Argentinean Spanish, but that it is only specified for pronouns in other Spanish dialects, variation facts associated with this phenomenon are explained. By the same token, the different behavior of doubled and nondoubled objects in several syntactic/LF configurations also follows.

Topic Strategies and the Internal Structure of Nominal Arguments in Greek and Italian

In this article, we argue that a set of unexpected contrasts in the interpretation of clitic-left-dislocated indefinites in Greek and Italian derive from structural variation in the nominal syntax of the two languages. Greek resists nonreferential indefinites in clitic left-dislocation, resorting to the topicalization of an often bare noun for nonreferential topics. By contrast, clitic left-dislocation is employed in Italian for topics regardless of their definite/indefinite interpretation. We argue that this contrast is directly linked to the wide availability of bare nouns in Greek, which stems from a structural difference in the nominal syntax of the two languages. In particular, we hypothesize that Greek nominal arguments lack a D layer. Rather, they are Number Phrases. We situate this analysis in the context of Chierchia’s (1998) typology of nominals. We argue that, on a par with Italian nouns, Greek nouns are [−arg, +pred]. However, they do not employ a syntactic head (D) for type-shifting to e . Rather, they resort to covert type-shifting, a hypothesis that is necessary to account for the distribution and interpretations of bare nouns in Greek, vis-à-vis other [−arg, +pred] languages like Italian and French.

Look before you move

The present study examines whether, as proposed by the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011), the syntax-discourse interface is especially vulnerable to non-native optionality even at very advanced levels. I focus on the acquisition of Clitic Left Dislocation in Spanish (CLLD), a structure that involves both syntax and discourse, when it combines with other structures at the left periphery (iterative topics, Fronted Focus, and wh-constructions). CLLD is a realization of topicalization requiring the integration of syntactic and discourse knowledge. This study provides data from an audio-visual rating task completed by 120 learners of Spanish of different proficiency levels and 27 monolingual native speakers. Results showed evidence that the most advanced learners had acquired the restrictions of these structures in a native-like way and supports López’s (2009) syntactic analysis of CLLD, whereby CLLD is generated through movement so that the pragmatic features [+anaphor]/[+contrast] can be assigned to the dislocated element.

Topics at the left edge of infinitive clauses in Spanish and Catalan

This paper deals with clitic left dislocation (CLLD) in infinitive clauses (IC) in Spanish and Catalan. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, I provide evidence that CLLDed constituents can target the left edge of ICs, contrary to previous claims in the literature (e.g. Ojea 2013). The results should not be surprising, considering that Romance CLLD is not a Main Clause Phenomena (Jiménez-Fernández & Miyagawa 2013, Authier & Haegeman 2015). Second, this sets aside CLLD from other left peripheral fronting operations in these languages, which are systematically unavailable at the left edge of IC. I argue that the data presented here does not obviously follow from any current approach about the deficiency of non-finite domains. I defend, instead, that the data can be accounted for under Ott (2015)'s proposal about CLLD, where the dislocated constituent is the remnant of a clause ellipsis operation and it is paratactically integrated in the host clause. Further, I will speculate about how this approach can account for the linear positions where CLLDed phrases can occur.

Topic extraction from adverbial clauses

This paper offers new data to support findings about Topic extraction from adverbial clauses. Since such clauses are strong islands, they should not allow extraction of any kind, but we show here that if the appropriate conditions are met, Topics of the CLLD kind in Romance can move out of them. We propose that two conditions must be met for such movement to be possible: the first is that the adverbial clause must have undergone topicalisation in the first place; the second is that the adverbial clause is inherently topical from a semantic viewpoint. Contrast with other language families (Germanic, Quechua and Japanese) is provided and the semantic implications of the proposal are briefly discussed.Keywords: topicalisation; Clitic Left Dislocation; syntactic islands; adverbial clausesEste artículo ofrece nuevos datos sobre la extracción de Tópicos desde oraciones subordinadas adverbiales. Dado que dichas oraciones son islas fuertes, no deberían permitir extracción de ningún tipo, pero mostramos que si se dan las condiciones apropiadas, los Tópicos del tipo CLLD en lenguas románicas pueden desplazarse fuera de ellas. Proponemos que se deben cumplir dos condiciones para que ese movimiento sea posible: la primera es que la propia subordinada adverbial se haya topicalizado en primer lugar; la segunda es que la subordinada adverbial sea inherentemente un Tópico desde el punto de vista semántico. Proporcionamos también algunos contrastes con otras familias lingüísticas (germánica, quechua y japonés) y se discuten brevemente las implicaciones semánticas de la propuesta.Palabras clave: topicalización; dislocación a la izquierda con clítico; islas sintácticas; oraciones adverbiales