Volume 13, Issue 1

This article examines constructions involving DP-final demonstratives, possessive adjectives, indefinite quantifiers, and demonstrative reinforcers in several Romance languages. Across these languages the DP-final position of these elements yields a focus interpretation, whereas the prenominal position yields a neutral interpretation. Other approaches to these sorts of facts have (tacitly) treated the two available word orders as equivalent constructions. They have not considered, and so cannot easily account for, the distinct interpretation that each of the word orders yields. Under the assumption that the prenominal position of these elements is basic, the current approach develops the idea that the DP-final element is “stranded” DP finally as a result of the leftward movement of a syntactic phrase consisting of an extended NP. The facts examined here recall those characterizing the expression of focus in the Romance clause, recently analyzed as a case of scrambling (Ordóñez 1997, Zubizarreta 1998). If on the right track, the current analysis therefore provides further evidence for the parallelism between noun phrases and clauses. In certain Romance languages, an intermediate (postnominal) position is also available for these DP elements , although the interpretation associated with this position does not exactly match that of either the prenominal or DP-final position. It is proposed that the intermediate position is derived by crossing the noun over the demonstrative (reinforcer), possessive, or indefinite quantifier, whose base positions within DP are relatively high. The prediction then is that only those languages with robust noun movement (that is, movement to a relatively high functional head) will exhibit this word order.

In this paper we discuss the properties of the fictional context created by the verb dream, focusing on Italian data. The relevance of these contexts is twofold: on the one hand, they exhibit very consistent behaviour across Romance languages with respect to mood selection, in that they always select the indicative in their complement clause, rejecting the subjunctive. On the other hand, their interpretive properties change according to the tense used: when containing a subordinate imperfect indicative tense, dream reports have the property that the dreamed eventuality need not be temporally anchored; at the same time, they do not seem to ascribe any specific attitude to the subject (the dreamer). When containing a non-imperfect indicative tense, temporal anchoring is available, and a particular evidential meaning can be detected, revealing the presence of a speaker-oriented attitude towards the content of the dream. The connection between temporal anchoring and the presence/absence of a propositional attitude will be investigated: semantically, within an extensional, truth-theoretical framework by arguing in favour of a reflexive/tensed-thoughts approach to propositional attitudes; and in its morphosyntactic aspects, by motivating a conception according to which the interaction between the temporal features of T and the features of C provide the interface conditions for the interpretive facts to arise.

This article focuses on child speech sequences which diverge from their corresponding adult counterparts in terms of the order of their constituents. Adult Catalan does not allow neutral preverbal objects whereas early Catalan seems to allow objects preceding verbs in the very early stages. We analyse the OV sequences found in our data and show how these only show up co-occuring with a certain type of verbs, namely, ‘telic’ verbs. In line with this observation we propose that aspect is a crucial feature of these sequences projecting whenever one of these verbs is selected and providing a landing site for object movement. Another part of the analysis of the OV constructions implies noticing that the morphological make-up of the verbal elements is not always non-finite. The alternation that we observe between VO-OV constructions seems to be determined by the verb type but it is only fully accounted for if we allow for a framework in which the AGR parameter is not yet set. This possibility follows from the bilingualism proposal in Roeper (1999) where child language permits different grammars to co-exist in a particular stage. In the case under consideration the AGR feature would be allowed to have two values and thus the verb would not raise obligatorily.

An analysis of the interpretation of indicative/subjunctive contrasts in embedded clauses is pursued here that, rather than attaching rigid meanings to each mood, views mood shifts as the overt marking of a change in the model for the evaluation of the proposition or property expressed by the embedded clause. From this perspective, mood morphology conveys information about model flow in discourse, which can be determined by a variety of factors ranging from lexical meaning of embedding predicates to different aspects of discourse interpretation and context change. The proposal identifies and analyzes the parameters that induce model shift in subordinated domains. This allows us to distinguish core cases of subjunctive selection from more peripheral ones, both within a language and crosslinguistically, and it also provides us with an explanation for several empirical problems that a rigid interpetation of mood leaves unresolved. The analysis offered concentrates on mood distribution in Catalan and Spanish.

In this paper, a semantic analysis of several contrasting properties between the Spanish plural existential determiners unos ‘a-pl.’ and algunos ‘some-pl.’ is presented within the framework of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). Some of these properties can be directly related to the distinction between the thetic and the categorical judgment, as understood by Kuroda and Ladusaw. Others, related to plurality and the interaction of quantifiers, provide evidence for an extension of the scope of the distinction and its implementation as a procedural semantic difference. It will be argued that the determiner unos contributes a group discourse referent to a Discourse Representation Structure (DRS). This discourse referent is subject to a no linking constraint, and does not trigger box-splitting of the DRS. This forms the basis for the claim that this plural determiner participates only in thetic judgments. On the other hand, the determiner algunos is not subject to a no linking constraint and may contribute a duplex condition to the DRS. Thus, it can participate in categorical judgments. This type of judgment corresponds to a set of construction rules which yields an updated DRS in which a new discourse referent has been introduced and, in contrast to the thetic judgment, a linking condition and a duplex condition are introduced. The analysis is extended to account for the effects of contrastive focus and scopal interactions with other operators in the semantics of Spanish existential determiners.