Cartography of postverbal subjects in Spanish and Catalan
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Francisco Ordóñez
Abstract
Subjects in post-verbal position in Romance have been assumed to be in an in situ Spec VP position in many recent analyses in their V S O order (Motapayane1995, Ordóñez 1998, Costa 2000, Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 2001, Cardinaletti 2001). In this paper, we will give arguments for an alternative view in which post-verbal subjects in this order are moved to at least to an Spec positions above VP, which I will call SubjP, and below the final landing site of verbs in TP. Arguments in favor of this characterization come from the comparison of Catalan and Spanish, which differ minimally in patterns of subject inversion with respect to quantifiers, adverbs and restructuring contexts. This work presents new evidence that a richer inflectional structure in the postverbal field leads to a more parsimonious account for parametric difference in patterns of subject distribution in closely related languages.
Abstract
Subjects in post-verbal position in Romance have been assumed to be in an in situ Spec VP position in many recent analyses in their V S O order (Motapayane1995, Ordóñez 1998, Costa 2000, Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 2001, Cardinaletti 2001). In this paper, we will give arguments for an alternative view in which post-verbal subjects in this order are moved to at least to an Spec positions above VP, which I will call SubjP, and below the final landing site of verbs in TP. Arguments in favor of this characterization come from the comparison of Catalan and Spanish, which differ minimally in patterns of subject inversion with respect to quantifiers, adverbs and restructuring contexts. This work presents new evidence that a richer inflectional structure in the postverbal field leads to a more parsimonious account for parametric difference in patterns of subject distribution in closely related languages.
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
