Volume 35, Issue 1

This paper addresses the restrictions of Italian relative che ‘what’ to finite environments and direct case gaps. While the standard analysis takes these restrictions to follow from the C status of che , this paper argues for an alternative approach, according to which che is a DP, on a par with other interrogative and relative elements. Specifically, it is argued that relative che is identical to interrogative che and relative cui ‘what .obl ’ in the narrow syntactic derivation, up to the point of transfer . Realization of relative che is then blocked at ext with oblique case gaps by the more specific cui , along the lines of the Elsewhere Principle. The status of cui as a specialized relative element is also discussed. The restriction to finiteness for relative che is treated as an instance of a more general phenomenon that precludes bare DPs from occurring at the edge of infinitival relatives. Here I adopt and extend (Richards, Norvin. 2010. Uttering trees . Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press) Distinctness Theory to account for the facts of Italian.

Recent studies using the Demonstrative Choice Task (DCT), where participants pair words with a demonstrative with no additional context, have shown that this choice is influenced by word semantics. Here, we applied the DCT to Catalan. We aimed at replicating previous findings and assessing how semantic factors play out in Catalan. We focused specifically on the second term aqueix (that), currently falling out of use. We hypothesized that its residual use would be influenced by the semantic factor valence , due to a hypothesized derogatory meaning. We also explored whether its use differed across varieties (Central Catalan versus Balearic Catalan). Our results replicate previous findings from English and Spanish on the role of manipulability , valence and psychological proximity to the self in preferences for proximal versus distal forms, reinforcing the hypotheses that these factors underlie demonstrative choices in the DCT, cross-linguistically. The use of aqueix was overall infrequent, highlighting the ongoing reduction of Catalan demonstratives from a three- to a two-term system. No significant association between valence and aqueix was found, but a small unpredicted effect for taste/smel l indicated an increased use of aqueix . Frequency in the use of aqueix , but not semantic factors driving its use, differed across peninsular and insular speakers.

In this experiment, 62 university students, native speakers of Italian living in Northern Italy, were asked to choose between two nearly identical sentences featuring intransitive verbs which, according to the literature, can take either auxiliary (AUX) essere “be” or avere “have” in compound tenses. A binary logistic regression showed that for 40% of the time, participants preferred one AUX over the other. In general, the frequency of verbs and association scores between the AUX and the past participle in the input straightforwardly determined the remaining preferences, and especially the choice of essere . The impact of verb semantics on participants’ choices depended on the AUX. In the presence of telic completions and inanimate subjects, the likelihood of AUX essere to be chosen increased, whereas no effect of animacy and completion type was found for the AUX avere . Based on these data, one may conclude that (a) AUX essere is more permeable to both frequency effect and verb semantics than avere ; and (b) among educated young adult native speakers living in Northern Italy, there is much less optionality in the choice of the AUX than it is assumed by some linguists.

This paper investigates two Italo-Romance discourse particles, which we analyze as ‘cooperativity markers’, conveying the conventional implicature that a future action to be accomplished by the speaker fulfills a set of maximal preferences that they share with the addressee; by means of this implicature, the speaker conveys that they intend their action to be cooperative. We show that clauses introduced by these particles share core syntactic and semantic properties with jussive expressions such as imperatives, most notably future orientation and a constraint on the person specification of the null subject. We argue that these particles occupy a functional projection which encodes preferential meanings and takes scope above Tense.

French hypercomplex inversion can be used as a probe into the question whether or not the language faculty countenances the existence of true expletive pronouns, i.e. pronouns that make no interpretive contribution of any kind. The conclusion is that there are no expletive pronouns (in any language) in the strict sense of the term.

In this article we bring to light one additional factor underlying so-called Jespersen’s Cycle (JC) in Romance which has to date gone unnoticed, namely the varying position of the finite verb within the IP. More specifically, we show that there exists an empirical correlation between the availability of clause-medial/high verb-movement and Stages II–III of JC in which a postverbal negator is licensed. Drawing on novel data, we demonstrate that this correlation holds not only across modern Romance varieties, but also across early varieties. Formally, we explain this link between negation and verb-movement from the (in)active status of the T-domain and the consequent (im)possibility of donating a [Neg] feature to the lower v -VP domain. Although verb-movement in itself is not a sufficient condition to trigger a shift towards Stages II–III negation, we argue that it is a necessary one, a fact which explains the peculiar distribution of negation strategies across the Romània.

While French does not display the kind of VP-ellipsis found in languages like English, it effects verbal anaphora by means of two constructions that have received relatively little attention in the literature. Both of these combine the generic ‘action verb’ faire ‘do’ with what appears to be a pronoun. The first one, which I call le-faire anaphora (LFA), uses the clitic le , whereas the second one, which I call faire-ça anaphora (FCA), brings into play the strong pronoun ça ‘it/that’. Taking such pronouns to be substitutive pro-forms devoid of inner structure cannot, however, explain why LFA, but not FCA, can appear in the standard of a comparative, a property that distinguishes English VP-ellipsis from VP-pro-forms like do it/that/so , which behave like FCA. On the other hand, LFA, unlike English VP-ellipsis, does not allow wh -extraction from a VP-internal position outside the realm of comparatives, which leads to a paradox left unresolved in the literature. In this article, I argue that LFA involves ellipsis of a whole v P phase. Specifically, I argue that faire in LFA, but not in FCA, is a (semi)auxiliary verb that takes a v P complement and bears an E-feature lexicalized by the clitic le . I show that this correctly predicts that A-movement out of the ellipsis site is possible and that A-bar movement of a degree wh -phrase out of v P in comparatives is made possible by the fact that French licenses Quantification at a Distance, a grammatical operation that allows degree quantifiers to escape v P before the next phasal head (C) is merged and triggers ellipsis. Other wh -quantifiers that do not benefit from the Quantification at a Distance option are then expected to not be able to escape v P prior to ellipsis, hence run-of-the-mill wh -extraction out of VP is correctly predicted to be incompatible with LFA. I then turn to what appears to be a related anaphoric phenomenon, which consists of the predicational copula être ‘be’ and the clitic le , which I call l’être anaphora (LEA), and show that it too is an instance of ellipsis in that it allows the full range of extraction phenomena out of the missing constituent introduced by the copula. I assume that in those cases in which the copula takes a small clause, it participates in an asymmetric structure where it lexicalizes Pred, a head that mediates between subject and predicate. In those cases in which the copula introduces a passivized VP, on the other hand, I assume that it lexicalizes v , an assumption in line with theories that posit multiple instantiations of predicate mediators (so-called ‘flavors of v ’). In both cases, the copula in LEA heads a phase, bears an E-feature lexicalized by le , and is argued to license ellipsis of its phasal complement. Thus, elements are allowed to escape ellipsis by moving to the edge of the phase headed by the copula, and this correctly predicts that LEA permits a wider range of extractions out of the ellipsis site than LFA does.