Volume 17, Issue 2

In this contribution, we intend to offer an interesting exemplification of the kind of positive interaction that may arise between acquisition studies and linguistic theory. Starting from a full range of comparative studies showing the presence of a delay in the acquisition of the interpretive properties of non-reflexive pronominals and the absence of such a delay in languages where clitic pronominals are involved, we argue that this range of effects is elegantly derived from a general constraint on extra-lexical operations of valency-reduction, turning relations into one-place predicates. This analysis leads to a sort of cross-modular (re)interpretation of Principle B of Binding Theory and to a radically new analysis of the relation between (semantic) binding and coreference. Another important consequence of the proposed analysis is that it supports the view of Romance clitics as morphosyntactically encoding a lexical operation of reflexivization. In the second part of this article, we show that this analysis explains some intriguing and so far poorly understood asymmetries between reflexive and non-reflexive clitics arising within the domain of complex predicate constructions in Romance.

This paper introduces a typology of adjectives and adjective uses in French that is based on a division between NP-internal and NP-external adjectives. These two classes may be distinguished by their lexico-semantic relationship to the noun, and also by their syntactic properties. I argue that adjectives entering into a close relation with nouns exhibit positional properties that leads to the idea that they are NP-internal. It is shown that, in contrast, regular qualificatives admit postcopular use and thus occur NP-externally. The last part of the paper sets up a syntactic analysis of postnominal NP-external adjectives according to which these adjectives enter into a marked predication relationship with the noun they qualify.

Intervocalic s -voicing in Italian has been frequently used to motivate or illustrate theoretical concepts, such as the prosodic word or base-output correspondence. In this paper, I provide a detailed examination of the pattern in two varieties of Italian, Lombardian and Tuscan. This closer look at the data reveals problems for previous accounts. I will provide an analysis of the pattern within Optimality Theory and show that derived environment effects can be accounted for by recourse to the featural level in the interpretation of alignment constraints and by the use of a lesser studied faithfulness constraint, i.e., the contiguity constraint. Furthermore, I will give an account of the fact that only s shows this pattern while all other consonants are excluded.

This paper presents a constraint-based analysis of a process that in Traditional New Mexico Spanish (TNMS) generates a syllabic consonant from a sonorant consonant + stressed high vowel combination. It is argued that although vowels are more suitable than consonants to function as prosodic heads, consonants may sometimes be favored over vowels in the role of foot and syllable head. This situation arises when a positional markedness constraint barring the marked value on the place-of-articulation scale (e.g., Dorsal) from the position of foot DTE becomes active. Contrary to previous approaches that assume that vowel deletion is a condition for the syllabization of the consonant, it is argued that the vowel that disappears in the process of syllabizing a consonant is not deleted but either absorbed by that consonant or assimilated to it. It is also demonstrated that syllabic consonants are subject to two universal alignment constraints that govern their distribution by forcing them to be coarticulated with another consonant. Although languages may vary as to whether the syllabic consonant is coarticulated with a preceding or with a following consonant, there are no languages where syllabic consonants appear between two vowels or between a vowel and a pause precisely because in such environments there is not an adjacent consonant available for coarticulation. The condition that the syllabic consonants of TNMS be coarticulated not with a preceding, but with a following consonant, is the reason why they do not occur in prevocalic or prepausal position.