Old French possessives and ellipsis
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Deborah Arteaga
Abstract
Sáez (2011), to account for Spanish definite articles in ellipsis contexts, such as mi libro y el [e] de Juan ‘my book and that of John’, proposes the Stress Condition on Remnants (SCR), which disallows unstressed syntactic elements to be anaphoric, while allowing definite articles to license empty categories. The focus of our paper is Old French (OF) possessive constructions and their elliptical expressions, such as le mien livre ‘my book’ and le [e] de Jean ‘that of Jean’. OF had a more extensive inventory of possessive constructions than Modern French (MF): lexical genitives, prenominal possessives, and lexical and possessive ellipsis constructions. Adopting Arteaga & Herschensohn’s (2010, 2013) proposal for lexical genitives, Sáez’s (2011) SCR, and Lobeck’s (1995) conditions on ellipsis, we argue that two major diachronic changes led to a difference in licensing of possessives from OF to MF: one, the erosion of morphological marking that led to a loss of the OF two case system, reducing feature strength to license ellipsis (Lobeck 1995), and two, the fact that definite articles became clitics and Phase Heads and thus became subject to the SCR as the prenominal nP domain (Carstens 2003) became a clitic zone prohibiting prenominal stressed possessives.
Abstract
Sáez (2011), to account for Spanish definite articles in ellipsis contexts, such as mi libro y el [e] de Juan ‘my book and that of John’, proposes the Stress Condition on Remnants (SCR), which disallows unstressed syntactic elements to be anaphoric, while allowing definite articles to license empty categories. The focus of our paper is Old French (OF) possessive constructions and their elliptical expressions, such as le mien livre ‘my book’ and le [e] de Jean ‘that of Jean’. OF had a more extensive inventory of possessive constructions than Modern French (MF): lexical genitives, prenominal possessives, and lexical and possessive ellipsis constructions. Adopting Arteaga & Herschensohn’s (2010, 2013) proposal for lexical genitives, Sáez’s (2011) SCR, and Lobeck’s (1995) conditions on ellipsis, we argue that two major diachronic changes led to a difference in licensing of possessives from OF to MF: one, the erosion of morphological marking that led to a loss of the OF two case system, reducing feature strength to license ellipsis (Lobeck 1995), and two, the fact that definite articles became clitics and Phase Heads and thus became subject to the SCR as the prenominal nP domain (Carstens 2003) became a clitic zone prohibiting prenominal stressed possessives.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
- Root gerunds in Old Romanian 1
- Old French possessives and ellipsis 21
- The generalization of preposition para via fusion and ensuing loss of compositionality 39
- On capacities and their epistemic extensions 59
- Beyond the subject DP versus the subject pronoun divide in agreement switches 79
- Epistemic adverbs, the prosody-syntax interface, and the theory of phases 99
- Romanian tough-constructions and multi-headed constituents 119
- Depictive secondary predicates in Spanish and the relative/absolute distinction 139
- Gender agreement with animate nouns in French 159
- French loanwords in Korean 177
- Affirmative polar replies in Brazilian Portuguese 195
- Participle fronting and clause structure in Old and Middle French 213
- “Toned-up” Spanish 233
- On null objects and ellipses in Brazilian Portuguese 257
- Age effects and the discrimination of consonantal and vocalic contrasts in heritage and native Spanish 277
- The linguistic competence of second-generation bilinguals 301
- The X 0 syntax of “dative” clitics and the make-up of clitic combinations in Gallo-Romance 321
- Some notes on falloir , devoir , and the theory of control 341
- The phonology of postverbal pronouns in Romance languages 361
- From N to particle 379
- Marsican deixis and the nature of indexical syntax 399
- Index 415
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
- Root gerunds in Old Romanian 1
- Old French possessives and ellipsis 21
- The generalization of preposition para via fusion and ensuing loss of compositionality 39
- On capacities and their epistemic extensions 59
- Beyond the subject DP versus the subject pronoun divide in agreement switches 79
- Epistemic adverbs, the prosody-syntax interface, and the theory of phases 99
- Romanian tough-constructions and multi-headed constituents 119
- Depictive secondary predicates in Spanish and the relative/absolute distinction 139
- Gender agreement with animate nouns in French 159
- French loanwords in Korean 177
- Affirmative polar replies in Brazilian Portuguese 195
- Participle fronting and clause structure in Old and Middle French 213
- “Toned-up” Spanish 233
- On null objects and ellipses in Brazilian Portuguese 257
- Age effects and the discrimination of consonantal and vocalic contrasts in heritage and native Spanish 277
- The linguistic competence of second-generation bilinguals 301
- The X 0 syntax of “dative” clitics and the make-up of clitic combinations in Gallo-Romance 321
- Some notes on falloir , devoir , and the theory of control 341
- The phonology of postverbal pronouns in Romance languages 361
- From N to particle 379
- Marsican deixis and the nature of indexical syntax 399
- Index 415
