The quirky case of participial clauses
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Asier Alcázar
Abstract
Adverbial participial clauses exhibit quirky case properties. The internal argument of a transitive verb may bear accusative or nominative morphological case in Romance. Unlike gerundivals, these clauses lack T and v*, among other heads, undermining a standard case licensing approach. We propose that absolutes are VPs that value the case of their internal argument. Other alternatives like a morphological default/inherent case fail to capture the paradigm in Romance. Our approach finds independent support in data from Medieval and Renaissance Italian, an accusative system, as well as the ergative system of Basque.
Abstract
Adverbial participial clauses exhibit quirky case properties. The internal argument of a transitive verb may bear accusative or nominative morphological case in Romance. Unlike gerundivals, these clauses lack T and v*, among other heads, undermining a standard case licensing approach. We propose that absolutes are VPs that value the case of their internal argument. Other alternatives like a morphological default/inherent case fail to capture the paradigm in Romance. Our approach finds independent support in data from Medieval and Renaissance Italian, an accusative system, as well as the ergative system of Basque.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Foreword v
- Table of contents vii
- The quirky case of participial clauses 1
- Answering strategies: A view from acquisition 19
- Transfer in periphrastic causatives in L2 English and L2 Spanish 39
- Clitic omission, null objects or both in the acquisition of European Portuguese? 59
- Metrical structure, tonal association and focus in French 73
- On affixal scope and affix-root ordering in Italian 99
- Scope economy in positive polarity: Extreme degree quantification 115
- The acquisition of aspect in L2 Portuguese and Spanish. Exploring native / non-native performance differences 131
- Mechanisms of scope resolution in child Italian 149
- When scope meets modality: The scope of indefinites in subjunctive environments 165
- Listen to the sound of salience: Multichannel syntax of Q particles 185
- Instability and age effects at the lexicon-syntax interface 201
- On the ambiguity of N-words in French 213
- Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children: The case of dislocation 229
- Cartography of postverbal subjects in Spanish and Catalan 259
- Mismatches between phonology and syntax in French DP acquisition 281
- Pragmatic solutions for syntactic problems: Understanding some L2 syntactic errors in terms of discourse-pragmatic deficits 299
- A poverty-of-the-stimulus argument for the innateness of the identification conditions on VP ellipsis 321
- Index 335
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Foreword v
- Table of contents vii
- The quirky case of participial clauses 1
- Answering strategies: A view from acquisition 19
- Transfer in periphrastic causatives in L2 English and L2 Spanish 39
- Clitic omission, null objects or both in the acquisition of European Portuguese? 59
- Metrical structure, tonal association and focus in French 73
- On affixal scope and affix-root ordering in Italian 99
- Scope economy in positive polarity: Extreme degree quantification 115
- The acquisition of aspect in L2 Portuguese and Spanish. Exploring native / non-native performance differences 131
- Mechanisms of scope resolution in child Italian 149
- When scope meets modality: The scope of indefinites in subjunctive environments 165
- Listen to the sound of salience: Multichannel syntax of Q particles 185
- Instability and age effects at the lexicon-syntax interface 201
- On the ambiguity of N-words in French 213
- Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children: The case of dislocation 229
- Cartography of postverbal subjects in Spanish and Catalan 259
- Mismatches between phonology and syntax in French DP acquisition 281
- Pragmatic solutions for syntactic problems: Understanding some L2 syntactic errors in terms of discourse-pragmatic deficits 299
- A poverty-of-the-stimulus argument for the innateness of the identification conditions on VP ellipsis 321
- Index 335
