Volume 34, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Romance Syntax and Cartographic Studies; Guest Editors: Luigi Rizzi and Giuseppe Samo

Cartographic studies have been pursued for over a quarter of a century, offering new insights on the nature and fine details of syntactic structures. The study of Romance languages and dialects has played a critical role in these advances. The following introductory remarks illustrate the general lines of this trend, without attempting at an exhaustive review.

The paper has a specific and focused aim: to unveil a possible route to DOM, the crosslinguistically widely attested phenomenon whereby direct objects are introduced by a preposition, with interpretive constraints. The prepositional marker is ‘a’ in Italian and in (the majority of) Romance. The investigation is based on both comparative data from Romance and on some relevant experimental results from the acquisition of Italian involving a-Topics. The insights that syntactic cartography may provide on the characterization of such route is the leading note of the investigation: a-marking starts out on direct objects topics, only occurring when the (animate) direct object is preposed in the left periphery of the clause; then a-marking involves clause internal direct object topics in the vP-periphery; and finally a-marking is Case related in the small ‘v’ spine; the latter, is also implicated in causatives and in constructions involving benefactive arguments. The acquisition results reviewed indicate the use of left peripheral a-Topics in children’s elicited productions in Italian, which are not attested in the target language, thus illustrating a cartographically defined space of children’s grammatical creativity.

This article presents experimental data assessing the acceptability status of long subject questions (LSQs) in French. It shows that their suboptimal score does not reflect dialect variation and it fails to detect a change in progress. An analysis, developing further the rescuing strategy proposed in Rizzi and Shlonsky's freezing account, is presented. The crux of the proposal is that a Case mismatch obtains within the embedded complementizer, which is shown to be necessarily syncretic in LSQs. The full acceptability of embedded subject questions is then discussed and accounted for within this framework.

If cross-linguistic word order variation is a function of the movement of the head of each (sub)projection of an extended projection (in one of the possible ways movement can take place: with or without pied piping) there will be novel evidence for the correct constituencies of the clause and its major phrases. Here I will try to illustrate this by looking at two specific sub-projections of the nominal extended projection in a number of Romance languages: the sub-projection of locative adverbs and elevation and exteriority/interiority particles, and the sub-projection containing ‘other’, and ordinal and cardinal numerals.

This paper describes and analyses two discourse particles that are found in polar questions and in some declarative structures in central Sicilian. The analysis adopts an interface approach, relying on the cartographic framework. It is proposed that each particle conveys in all its uses one and the same conventional implicature, relating to the epistemic state of one of the discourse participants. The interaction of the two particles with left-peripheral elements, in particular topics, vocatives, fronted foci, and speaker-oriented adverbs, supports the view that the speaker, the hearer, and the commitment anchor are syntactically represented in sentence structure.

In addition to the Qu-est-ce que questions in (1) which, as their translations indicate, are mono-clausal despite their bi-clausal form, French has yes/no questions such as (2) in which the est-ce que sequence shows up again. (1) a. Où est-ce qu’il est parti? ‘Where is ce that he is gone?’ = Where did he go? b. Qu’est-ce qu’il fait? ‘Que is ce that he does ?’ = What is he doing? (2) a. Est-ce qu’il est parti? ‘Is ce that he is gone?’ = Has he gone? b. Est-ce qu’il fait beau? ‘Is ce that it is nice?’ = Is the weather nice? (2) are also ‘ordinary’ polar questions. Since French seems to be unique in the Romance domain in accepting the Qu-questions in (1) and the polar questions in (2) it is tempting to suggest that a proper analysis of the former should also shed light on the latter. This article will verify whether this a priori desirable generalisation is valid. As a first step, it will look at the analysis of Est-ce que as an interrogative head ESK merged in the CP domain suggested by Cheng and Rooryck (2000. Licensing WH-in situ . Syntax 3.1. April 2000, 3–19.) which expresses it in its strongest possible form: Est-ce que yes/no questions like (2) would seem to only differ from their Qu-counterparts in missing the Qu-element. The article will show that their ESK proposal should be challenged empirically and theoretically in sections 2, 3 and 4. It will investigate Est-ce que polar questions and related constructions in detail in section 5 and will show in 6 that they do indeed share one crucial property with qu’est-ce que questions, although the generalisation it arrives at in section 7 substantially differs from Cheng & Rooryck’s proposal.

In this article, we explore how cartographic maps interact with a concept of parameters in terms of syntactic operations triggered by morphosyntactic features in the spirit of Rizzi (2017. On the format and locus of parameters: The role of morphosyntactic features. Linguistic Analysis 41. 159–191). Adopting the guidelines of a criterial approach to verb second, in which the inflected verb creates a Spec-Head configuration (verb adjacency) with the highest activated criterial head in the syntactic architecture, we discuss microparametric variation among Swiss Romansh varieties concerning the activation of ModP, a dedicated criterial position for “highlighted” adverbials (Rizzi 2004. Locality and left periphery. In Adriana Belletti (ed.), Structures and beyond [the Cartography of syntactic structures] , Vol. 3, 223–251. Oxford: Oxford University Press) within the left periphery of the clause.

This paper revisits the issue of verb raising in two closely related languages, namely Angolan Portuguese (AP) and Mozambican Portuguese (MP). Cinque’s (cartographic) hierarchy of adverbs is used to examine microvariation in these two varieties of Portuguese. The empirical data, gathered through experiments on acceptability rating tasks (to detect the position of the V(erb) in relation to adverbs) and cloze tests (to diagnose the adverbial classes which can be recovered by the elliptical VP), have been collected among university students in Luanda and Maputo, the capitals of Angola and Mozambique, respectively. The cutting points within the functional hierarchy where the V goes, be it mandatorily or optionally, are different in the two languages. In AP, the verb must raise past the frustrative aspect adverb ( em vão/à toa ‘in vain’), while in MP the verb must raise to the left of the singular completive adverb ( tudo ‘everything’). The main verb cannot raise past the Asp Terminative adverb ( já não/não mais ‘no longer’) in MP. In AP, it can optionally raise over the highest projection in the inflectional domain. Such a difference may explain the recovery of high adverbs in VP-ellipsis structures, only possible in AP. The corollary of the inter-linguistic study developed for Comparative Syntax is the adequacy of the cartographic démarche when it comes to establishment of strict boundaries in the study of microvariation among closely related grammars.

Despite the vast literature which has accrued on the fine structure of the Romance left periphery, there exists no diachronic account of the emergence of the considerable microvariation between Romance varieties today. Focussing in particular on the syntax of French and Venetan varieties, this article suggests that certain northern Romance varieties have diverged maximally from an Early Medieval Romance norm in which each left-peripheral Head attracts a wide variety of suitable Goals for movement, unlike the ‘innovative’ Romance grammars which emerge in the post-medieval period where the suitable class of Goals becomes restricted along categorial or information-structural grounds. The account predicts that the most ‘conservative’ Modern Romance grammars allow widespread argument fronting via movement, whereas their most ‘innovative’ counterparts show heavy restrictions on such operations.