Volume 37, Issue 1

This paper provides a case study of the grammaticalization of ‘do’ as a support verb in the northern Italian dialect of Camuno. It demonstrates the relative compatibility of fa ‘do’ with different semantic types of supported verbs through the results of an elicitation experiment. A comparison of results from adjacent dialects reveals a series of progressively more grammaticalized forms with three stages: ‘pragmatic’ ‘do’-support, largely restricted to agentive-subject, activity verbs, where question type depends mainly on the pragmatics; ‘agentive’ ‘do’-support, where use with that core group of verbs is largely categorial, and there is more use with theme-subject, change-of-state verbs and a few experiencer-subject, stative verbs; and ‘generalized’ ‘do’-support where optionality remains only with the most resistant stative verbs. Along with loss of lexical content in ‘do’, comes a reduction in salience of the special question meaning. Furthermore, a question with lexical fa ‘do’ (in an optional FS dialect) implies physical evidence exists to determine the truth of a proposition. In a question with bleached fa ‘do’ (in an obligatory FS dialect) the connection to reality has been lost leaving only the implication, and fa ‘do’ has then become an epistemic modal.

Capitalizing on the basic distinction between central and peripheral adverbial clauses, the main aim of this contribution is to shed some light on certain left-right asymmetries in the distributional properties of integrated and non-integrated (concessive) conditional clauses in standard Italian, drawing indirect evidence from multiple complementizer constructions in (early) Romance. By exploring the distribution of preposed central conditional clauses in multiple complementizer constructions in some early Italo-Romance varieties and in modern Ibero-Romance, I argue, following previous analyses, that this kind of adverbial clauses occupy a topic-related specifier position within the left periphery of embedded clauses; similarly, in modern Italian and in some Italo-Romance varieties, central (concessive) conditional clauses may undergo fronting to the specifier of a functional projection situated within the higher Topic field, but crucially below the Force node. I claim that, unlike central conditionals, non-integrated addressee-oriented conditional clauses should be analyzed as sentential speech event modifiers generated within the specifier of a speech-act related projection in the left-periphery above the Force node of the main clause, which accounts for their peculiar distributional properties.

In Spanish lexical compounds, stress on the final constituent is consistently preserved; however, it is uncertain whether stress on the initial constituent is preserved as well. Some linguists claim that stress is deleted from the initial constituent, whereas a few argue, instead, that it is demoted from primary to secondary. Given that empirical evidence has been scarce, this issue remains unresolved. To inform the debate, the present study examines all known phonetic correlates of stress in both accented and unaccented contexts. The acoustic measures of lexical compounds are compared to those of non-compound words and phrases that have a similar segmental structure. The results demonstrate that the initial constituent of lexical compounds bears secondary stress. This secondary stress, as a result of stress demotion, differs from rhetorical secondary stress both phonetically and phonologically. These findings provide fresh insights into the definitional properties as well as the prosodic structure of Spanish compounds.

This study explores the concept of morphomic coherence in Spanish PYTA ( perfectos y tiempos afines , ‘perfects and related tenses’) verb forms and the notion of the morphome diachronically. The Spanish PYTA form comes from the Latin perfectum , and comprises the preterit, imperfect subjunctives, and future subjunctive. PYTA is marked by a loss of perfective function, and semantic cohesion, causing some to propose that it is morphomic in nature, or, purely morphological with no syntactic or semantic justification. One argument used in support of the notion of the morphome is the concept of “coherence” suggesting that diachronic changes affect all members of the morphome simultaneously. However, analyzing corpus data from the 13-17th century unveils uneven temporal development and inconsistent coherence within speakers. This questions the notion of coherence and provides insights into diachronic shifts in verb morphology. Such corpus results raise questions whether native speakers abstract morphomic patterns over time.

This work presents original results from a new experimental approach to Differential Object Marking (DOM) using customized Acceptability Judgment Tasks (AJTs) in varieties of Spanish (Iberian, Mexican, Peruvian, and River Plate) and Portuguese (Brazilian, European), together with data from Catalan varieties obtained with the same methodology, Differential object Marking in Romance: The third wave , 279–314. Berlin & Boston: de Gruyter). We show that AJTs can be used to produce a fine-grained picture of similarities and contrasts in the variation of Ibero-Romance DOM along well-established prominence scales, such as the Extended Animacy Hierarchy. We also test a series of predictions from the literature for each variety. Although we find clear evidence for scalar effects, we question the explanatory potential of a finite set of categories on prominence scales, and we argue that in order to explain DOM in the varieties under investigation, the nature of such scales needs to be better understood.