Volume 27, Issue 1 -

The main aim of this article is to provide a detailed analysis of particular structures found in Italian, especially as spoken in central and southern Italy, and in Sicilian. These structures are very similar in the two languages, in that they involve the grammaticalization of the same verb of saying or epistemic adjective followed by the complementizer (cf. Italian dice che , capace che , and Sicilian dicica , capacica ), but in fact they display different properties. I investigate the function and the syntactic behaviour of these constructions, which seem to instantiate two types, stages or degrees of grammaticalization. More specifically, I show that in Italian these predicates are functional heads followed by the complementizer che , while in Sicilian the resulting units are now sentence adverbs. The present work therefore deals with grammaticalization and language change, but also with the two categories with which these structures are associated, namely, evidentiality and epistemic modality. A broader theoretical question lies in the background of the discussion, which challenges the ‘morphocentric’ perspective on the grammatical expression of certain categories such as evidentiality (cf. Aikhenvald 2004). Following Cinque (1999, 2004), I claim that adverbs can also be seen as the overt manifestation of functional distinctions, similarly to particles, auxiliaries and overt morphology. Under this view, sentential adverbs are functional in nature, and have the same meaning and function as the corresponding grammatical elements occurring as the head of the corresponding functional projection.

This paper investigates the restrictions on movement to the left periphery found in non-root environments such as French central adverbial clauses and argues that an analysis of main clause phenomena based on intervention/Relativized Minimality is to be preferred to one based on structural truncation. The empirical basis for this claim consists of an examination of some asymmetries between French infinitival TP ellipsis and infinitival TP Topicalization. Adopting Authie's (2011) approach to TP ellipsis whereby the to-be-elided TP undergoes fronting in the computational component but fails to be spelled out at PF, we argue that these asymmetries follow from the fact that in French, while a spelled out fronted TP is an intervener for wh -movement in adverbial clauses, leading to a PF crash, the ellipsis of this fronted TP leads to a convergent derivation via Bošković's (2011) mechanism of “rescue by PF deletion.” This account entails that adverbial clauses involve wh -movement (Haegeman 2006, among others) and that the landing site for TP Topicalization is available in a non-root environment, two conclusions that militate against the hypothesis that non-root clauses have an impoverished left periphery.

This study investigates the link between interrogative intonation and meaning in child-directed speech (henceforth CDS) and how this is reflected in the early development of yes-no -interrogatives of Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children. Previous research found that children before the two-word period produce several types of interrogatives and that their productions generally reflect the adult inventory pattern (Lleó & Rakow 2011; Prieto et al. 2012). Yet prior studies have not included an analysis of the pragmatic meanings that are encoded intonationally. This investigation takes an integrated approach to the study of intonational development within the domain of yes-no questions, exploring further the correspondence between intonational form and meaning in early interrogative production and relating it to the pragmatics of interrogative intonation in child-directed speech. A set of 723 interrogative utterances produced by 3 Catalan- and 2 Spanish-acquiring children between the onset of interrogative production and 2;4 were pragmatically and then prosodically analyzed, as well as a set of 867 utterances from Catalan and Spanish CDS. The data were extracted from the Serra-Solé Catalan Corpus and the Ojea and López-Ornat Spanish Corpora in CHILDES. Production results show that all children perform some instance of questioning before the two-word period and that their productions generally reflect the adult inventory patterns. Moreover, the results show a preference relationship between the different types of nuclear pitch configurations and the pragmatic meanings that underlie the yes-no -interrogative forms. Finally, these results highlight the importance of the assessment of form-meaning relationships for the understanding of intonational development.

It has been suggested that the Romance first person singular indicative constitutes a natural class with the present subjunctive paradigm for the purposes of stem selection (Maiden 2005), thus forming a kind of ‘diagonal syncretism’, as the latter shares no morphosyntactic features with the former. The existence of such patterns has been taken to be an argument for autonomous morphology and the existence of unnatural ‘morphomes’, in the sense of Aronoff (1994). Our experimental investigations with native speakers of Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish reveal that this pattern is underlearned, and that speakers do not generalize it to novel forms, instead preferring the 2nd person singular indicative to the 1st person as the base for the derivation of the subjunctive paradigm (and the 2nd person indicative as opposed to the 2nd person subjunctive as the base for the derivation of the 1st person indicative as well). The results implicate a role for naturalness biases in morphological structure, and an awareness that the first person singular is an unreliable and idiosyncratic base for productive inflectional identity. We then study the underlearning of the L-morphome in terms of historical change in the salience of these patterns. We demonstrate, through means of diachronic corpus studies spanning five centuries, a change in the ratio of first conjugation verbs to second & third conjugation verbs, and a resulting decrease in the relative type frequency of where morphomic verbs reside. If indeed learners need increased evidence in order to incorporate and actively uptake unnatural patterns, this lexical support has dwindled over time. Even though many of the morphomic verbs have maintained a very high token frequency (allowing them to survive as memorized), their productivity has diminished over time, and hence they go unlearned as a generalizable pattern. When the distribution of irregular alternations is overshadowed in the lexicon, a morphologically unnatural pattern may cease to maintain its status as part of the grammar.

This paper investigates the syntactic properties of a construction with aller ‘to go’ and venir ‘to come’ followed by an infinitive, where these verbs express the speaker’s emotions (surprise, annoyance, disapproval, etc.) about the event, and particularly about the agent responsible for bringing it about. It is shown that the infinitive following expressive aller and venir does not have clausal properties: it cannot be preceded by perfect auxiliaries nor can it bear sentential negation. In contrast with other uses of aller and venir (periphrastic future/past, conjectural, etc.), which are shown to be raising verbs, expressive aller and venir are argued to be functional verbs, merged into a functional head within the same clause as the infinitive (Cardinaletti and Giusti 2001, Cinque 2001, 2004a), in the modal domain below TP.