New Analyses in Romance Linguistics: Selected Papers from the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages XVIII, Urbana-Champaign, April 7-9, 1988

425 Pages·1991·35.03 MB·English

by  Dieter Wanner

NEW ANALYSES IN ROMANCE LINGUISTICS
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
Henning Andersen (Los Angeles); Raimo Anttila (Los Angeles)
Thomas V. Gamkrelidze (Tbilisi); Hans-Heinrich Lieb (Berlin)
J. Peter Maher (Chicago); Ernst Pulgram (Ann Arbor, Mich.)
E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.); Danny Steinberg (Tokyo)
Volume 69
Dieter Wanner and Douglas A. Kibbee (eds)
New Analyses in Romance Linguistics
NEW ANALYSES
IN
ROMANCE LINGUISTICS
Selected papers from the
XVIII Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages
Urbana-Champaign, April 7-9, 1988
Edited by
DIETER WANNER
Ohio State University
and
DOUGLAS A. KIBBEE
University of Illinois
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1991
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (18th : 1988 : Urbana, Champaign)
New analyses in Romance linguistics : selected papers from the XVIII Linguistic Sym­
posium on Romance Languages, Urbana-Champaign, April 7-9, 1988 / edited by Dieter
Wanner and Douglas A. Kibbee.
p. cm. -- (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science.
Series IV, Current issues in linguistic theory, ISSN 0304-0763; v. 69)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Romance languages — Congresses. I. Wanner, Dieter, 1943- . II. Kibbee, Doug­
las A. III. Title. IV. Series.
PC11.L53 1988
440--dc20 90-23247
ISBN 90 272 3566 X (alk. paper) CIP
© Copyright 1991 - 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.
Acknowledgments
On April 7-9, 1988 the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign hosted
the 18th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 18). The
preparation of the indexes to this volume has brought home to us just how
broad the range of topics and approaches was. Cited names range from
Abney to Zwicky, languages from Akkadian to Yazghulani concepts from
Α-Chains to Zero-Level Categories. The quality of the presentations was
equally impressive, and the level of attendance was good evidence of that:
on a beautiful spring weekend few strayed away from the meeting rooms.
Such a conference takes many months of planning, and the successful
execution of those plans is due in large part to the work of Ms. Zoann
Branstine, who coordinated the student volunteers and attended to a
thousand other details and to Ms. Marita Romine, administrative secretary
of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, who attended to the
bookkeeping, among many other tasks. We are also indebted to the readers
who helped us make the difficult selection of the program: Curtis Blaylock,
Paul Gaeng, James Harris, Gabriella Hermon, Henry Kahane, Michael
Kenstowicz, Maria Manoliu Manea, Donna Jo Napoli, María-Luisa Riv-
ero, Samuel N. Rosenberg and Douglas  Walker. During the conference,
student helpers Ruthie Darling, Fenfang Hwu, Brian Imhoff, Jennifer
Jacobsen, Jeffery Kaze, Mary Ellen Kohn, Ronald Leow and José Luis
Suárez assisted in innumerable ways. The conference would have been
impossible without their selfless efforts.
Such a conference also requires a considerable amount of money, over
and above the contributions of the registrants, and here we must thank the
generosity of the George A. Miller Endowment, which permitted us to
bring the distinguished German scholar Georg Bossong to campus, the Col­
lege of Liberal Arts and Sciences of the University of Illinois, the Depart­
ments of Classics, French, Linguistics, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, the
Division of English as an International Language, the Center for Latin
American and Caribbean Studies, the School of Humanities, and the Office
of International Programs and Studies.
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the preparation of this volume we are indebted to the Research
Board of the University of Illinois, whose generosity permitted us to hire a
graduate assistant to help prepare the texts for publication. That assistant,
Ben Sanders, has done the bulk of the work for this collection, assisted by
Ronald Leow and Zoann Branstine. Special thanks go to Lynne Murphy
who made the final corrections on a very tight schedule. We must also
thank our wives, Brigitte Wanner and Jo Kibbee, for their support (and
patience) before, during and after the conference.
Dieter Wanner
Douglas A. Kibbee
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments v
Introduction ix
Summaries of Part One: Phonology and Morphology χ
Summaries of Part Two: Syntax and Semantics xii
Part One: Phonology and Morphology
The Acquisition of Spanish Syllable Structure 3
Maria Carreira
Syllabification and Resyllabification in French 19
Christiane Laeufer
Length in Milanese 37
Jean-Pierre Y. Montreuil
Old French Stress Patterns and Closed Syllable Adjustment 49
Yves-Charles Morin
Contrastive and Allophonic Properties of Brazilian Portuguese
Vowels 77
W. Leo Wetzels
On Deriving Specifiers in Spanish: Morpho-Phono-Syntactic Inter­
actions 101
Uthaiwan Wong-opasi
Part Two: Syntax and Semantics
Subjunctive and ECP 125
Philippe Barbaud
Differential Object Marking in Romance and Beyond 143
Georg Bossong
Case Absorption, Theta Structure and Pronominal Verbs 171
Héctor Campos and Paula Kempchinsky
viii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Latin Prepositions and Romance Syntax 187
John E. Joseph
In Search of the Spanish Personal Infinitive 201
John M. Lipski
Some Stops on the Modality Line 221
Patricia V. Lunn
Clitic Climbing in Infinitival Constructions of Middle French 235
France Martineau
On Comparing French and Italian: The Switch From ilium mihi to
mihi ilium 253
Elizabeth Pearce
Exceptional Case Marking Effects in Rumanian Subjunctive
Complements 273
María-Luisa Rivero
On the Recoverability of Null Objects 299
Yves Roberge
VP-Nominative Constructions in Italian 313
Mario Saltarelli
Thematicity and "Objec"-Participle Agreement in Romance 335
John Charles Smith
The Ambivalent Nature of Spanish Infinitives 353
James H~S. Yoon and Neus Bonet-Farran
Deriving Expletives as Complements: French Ce 311
Laurie Zaring
Index of Names 389
Index of Languages and Language Families 396
Index of Concepts 400
Introduction
The eighteenth edition of the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Lan­
guages brings together a set of interesting, important and challenging
papers on very diverse aspects of the Romance languages and Romance lin­
guistics. They are a true reflection of the current state of Romance studies
in North America and of the particular outlook among the international
group of contributors and participants to LSRL on what constitutes a thriv­
ing research front. The many problems addressed here find a unity of goal
in the central importance accorded to formal questions. The actual spread
of positions on a given formal issue will again be considerable, as derives
from the realities of current linguistic discourse. These concerns radiate
from a number of conceptual centers along vectors of innovative explora­
tion, capitalizing on the rich range of data and previous analyses charac­
teristic of the Romance tradition.
This eighteenth volume in the series of annual conference proceedings
reunites papers written by scholars active in North America, Europe and
Oceania, fitting them into one intellectual quilt of analytic endeavors in
Romance languages. The predominant dynamic perspective is synchronic,
but the group of seven historical and typological papers amounts to a strong
presence. Several papers demonstrate a rather pronounced tendency to
treat the group of Romance languages not only as a well-defined, almost
exclusive research province, but to move from Romance phenomena out­
ward to other language types, even to genuinely universal dimensions.
Other contributions maintain a more circumscribed outlook which allows
them to exploit the properties of the typological closeness of some or all of
the Romance idioms documented in many diachronic, diatopic and dias-
tratal instantiations.
The unconstrained fertility of multiple approaches, subjects and lin­
guistic materials renders any detailed content oriented ordering scheme for
these twenty-one articles arbitrary. With not too much controversy the two
broadly conceived groupings of Phonology and Morphology on the one