Current Issues in Romance Languages: Selected Papers from the 29th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (Lsrl), Ann Arbor, 8-11 April 1999

412 Pages·2002·13.57 MB·English

by  Teresa Satterfield

CURRENT ISSUES IN ROMANCE LANGUAGES
AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND
HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE
General Editor
E.F. KONRAD KOERNER
(University of Ottawa)
Series IV – CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY
Advisory Editorial Board
Raimo Anttila (Los Angeles); Lyle Campbell (Christchurch, N.Z.)
John E. Joseph (Edinburgh); Manfred Krifka (Berlin)
Hans-Heinrich Lieb (Berlin); E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.);
Hans-Jürgen Sasse (Köln)
Volume 220
Teresa Satterfield, Christina Tortora and Diana Cresti (eds)
Current Issues in Romance Languages
Selected papers from the 29th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages
(LSRL), Ann Arbor, 8–11 April 1999
CURRENT ISSUES IN
ROMANCE LANGUAGES
SELECTED PAPERS FROM THE
29TH LINGUISTIC SYMPOSIUM ON
ROMANCE LANGUAGES (LSRL), ANN ARBOR,
8–11 APRIL 1999
Edited by
TERESA SATTERFIELD
CHRISTINA TORTORA
DIANA CRESTI
University of Michigan
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
8 National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (29th : 1999 : Ann Arbor, Mich.)
Current issues in Romance languages : selected papers from the 29th Linguistic Symposium
on Romance Languages (LSRL), Ann Arbor, 8–11 April 1999 / edited by Teresa Satterfield,
Christina Tortora, Diana Cresti.
p. cm. -- (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series IV,
Current issues in linguistic theory, ISSN 0304-0763 ; v. 220)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Romance languages -- Congresses. I. Satterfield, Teresa, 1965– II. Tortora, Christina.
III. Cresti, Diana. IV. Title. V. Series.
PC11.L53 2001
440--dc21 2001035803
ISBN 90 272 3727 1 (Eur.) / 1 58811 089 3 (US)
© 2002 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other
means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 36224 • 1020 ME Amsterdam • The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA
CONTENTS
Preface ix
On Becoming a Clitic 1
Nancy Mae Antrim
Primary Stress in Spanish 17
Zsuzsanna Bárkányi
Spanish Clauses without Complementizers 33
Claudia Brovetto
On the Nature of Bare Nouns in Haitian Creole 47
Viviane Déprez
Towards a Syntax of Adult Root Infinitives 67
Ricardo Etxepare, Kleanthes K. Grohmann
Re-examining Spanish 'Resyllabification' 81
Timothy L. Face
On Preverbal Subjects in Spanish 95
Grant Goodall
The Semantics of Spanish Free Relatives 111
Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach
Split Subject Pronoun Paradigms: Feature Geometry
and Underspecification 129
David Heap
Locative Inversion, PP Topicalization and the EPP 145
Paula Kempchinsky
Contrast Maintenance and Intervocalic Stop Lenition
in Spanish and Portuguese: When is It Alright to Lenite? 160
Anthony M. Lewis
Epenthesis vs. Elision in Afro-Iberian Language: A Constraint-based
Approach to Creole Phonology 173
John M. Lipski
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contrastive Discourse Markers in Spanish: Beyond Contrast 189
Monica Malamud
Coda Obstruents and Local Constraint Conjunction in North-Central
Peninsular Spanish 207
Richard E. Morris
Bare Nouns and the Morphosyntax of Number 225
Alan Munn, Cristina Schmitt
Non-Logical if 241
Josep Quer
Selecting Atomic Cells from Temporal Domains: Fixing Parameters
in Romance 255
Joan Rafel
Non-Homorganic Nasal Clusters in Northern Italian Dialects 271
Lori Repetti
Romanian Nominal Structure, Proforms, and Genitive Case Checking .. 287
Edward J. Rubin
Adjectival Agreement within DP without Feature Movement 301
Petra Sleeman
A Constraint-Based Analysis of Intraspeaker Variation:
Vocalic Epenthesis in Vimeu Picard 317
Jeffrey Steele, Julie Auger
Aspects in the Prepositional System of Romance 337
Esther Torrego
A Unified Analysis of French and Italian en / ne 359
Dieter Vermandere
Variation in Spanish Aspiration and Prosodic Boundary Constraints 375
Caroline R. Wiltshire
General index 391
PREFACE
The present volume emerges from the 29th annual conference of the
Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) held at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, in the spring of 1999. This 29th meeting continued many of
the past LSRL traditions, maintaining the refereed conference as an engaging
forum for diverse aspects of the Romance Languages and current developments
in linguistic theory. The selected papers from the symposium were revised in light
of conference-based discussions and comments.
We wish to acknowledge several individuals and organizations for their cooperation
and support in making LSRL 29 a successful endeavor. We are indebted to the
graduate students in the Romance Languages & Literatures Department and the
Department of Linguistics for their valuable help throughout the course of the
conference. Sincere thanks also go to the collective University of Michigan
administrative and academic units who generously contributed their funds and
encouragement, and who were instrumental to the quality of this enterprise. We
are especially grateful to the Department of Linguistics and its secretarial staff,
Professor Steven Dworkin and the Department of Romance Languages &
Literatures, the Institute for the Humanities, the Center for European Studies,
Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Office of the Vice President for
Research, the Office of the Associate Provost for Academic Affairs, the Rackham
Graduate School, and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. The
Department of Linguistics and the Rackham Graduate School deserve special
recognition for providing additional discretionary support to cover publication costs.
We deeply appreciate the conscientiousness and prompt assistance shown
by the conference reviewers worldwide: without their professionalism in the face
of a record number of submitted abstracts, LSRL 29 would have been impossible.
Likewise, we owe a debt of gratitude to the participants themselves, among these
our invited speakers, James Harris, Esther Torrego, Enric Vallduvi, and Dieter
Wanner. The level of excellence evident at the symposium clearly reflects the
outstanding contributions of this entire group.
In closing, we are grateful to graduate student Annemarie Toebosch for
her assistance in preparing the camera-ready version of this volume. We also
wish to thank Anke de Looper from John Benjamins Publishing Company and
the series' editor, Konrad Koerner, for their useful input and direction.
The editors
Diana Cresti
Teresa Satterfield
Christina Tortora
April 2001

ON BECOMING A CLITIC
THE PRENOMINAL POSSESSIVE IN ROMANCE *
NANCY MAE ANTRIM
University of Texas at El Paso
0. Introduction
Prenommai possessives in Romance languages (e.g. French, Spanish and
Italian) occur in various forms. In Spanish and French, the prenominal possessive
is a reduced form preceding and appearing with a noun: Possessive + Noun. In
Italian, the prenominal possessive is preceded by a determiner, which is required
in the case of common nouns: Article + Possessive + Noun.
Previous analyses have treated the possessive as an argument, as an adjunct
or as a clitic. Giorgi and Longobardi (1991) propose that the prenominal possessive
is an argument realized as a determiner in French and Spanish and as an adjective
in Italian. As an adjective, they propose that the possessive is generated
postnominally and then moved and adjoined to NP prenominally. Their distinction
between possessive as determiner and possessive as adjective proves problematic
as they, themselves, admit. They resort to a weak/strong distribution to account
for the distribution of possessives, but this distinction also proves problematic in
that it has to be modified language internally as well as cross-linguistically.
Observing that the genitive in an NP is optional, Zubizarreta (1987) suggests
that the genitive is an adjunct in the Spec of the NP, which assigns a value to an
argument variable in the lexico-semantic structure in the head of N' by means of
modification. She assumes that both a determiner and a genitive phrase are
dominated by a Spec node at the same time. Zubizarreta captures the predicational
aspect of the possessive and argues, in part, for the interdependency of semantics
and syntax. But by assuming both a determiner and a genitive phrase dominated
by a single complex Spec node, she is unable to explain the exclusion of an overt
Det with English, Spanish and French prenominal possessives. She states that
their co-occurrence is not possible in English, but offers no explanation as to
why; nor does her proposed structure allow for an account of the Italian and
Portuguese possessives with the article.
* I am indebted to Paola Benincà and Gloria Cocchi for their assistance with the examples from
Tuscan and Mario Saltarelli for the data on Marsian. Earlier versions of this paper benefitted
from discussions with Mario Saltarelli. I wish to thank the participants of LSRL 29 for their
comments and suggestions. All errors remain my own.