Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' Amsterdam 2007

300 Pages·2009·5.04 MB·English

by  Enoch O. Aboh

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory (RLLT)
The yearly ‘Going Romance’ meetings feature research in formal linguistics
of Romance languages, mainly in the domains of morphology, syntax, and
semantics, and, to a certain extent, phonology. Each volume brings together a
peer-reviewed selection of papers that were presented at one of the meetings,
aiming to provide a representation of the spread of topics at that conference, and
of the variety of research carried out nowadays on Romance languages within
theoretical linguistics.

Volume 1
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory. Selected papers from ‘Going
Romance’ Amsterdam 2007
Edited by Enoch O. Aboh, Elisabeth van der Linden, Josep Quer and Petra Sleeman
Romance Languages
and Linguistic Theory
Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’
Amsterdam 2007
Edited by
Enoch O. Aboh
Elisabeth van der Linden
University of Amsterdam
Josep Quer
Pompeu Fabra University
Petra Sleeman
University of Amsterdam

John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Romance languages and linguistic theory : selected papers from ‘Going romance,’ Amster-

dam, 2007 / edited by Enoch O. Aboh ... [et al.].
p. cm. (Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, issn 1574-552X ; v. 1)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Romance languages--Congresses. I. Aboh, Enoch Oladé.
PC11.R637 2003
440--dc22 2009038954
isbn 978 90 272 0381 6 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 8870 7 (Eb)
© 2009 – 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
Table of contents
Foreword vii
Tense domains in BP and EP – vP, CP and phases 1
Manuela Ambar, Esmeralda Negrão, Rita Veloso & Luís Graça
Variable-behavior Ps and the location of PATH in Old French 25
Heather Burnett & Mireille Tremblay
Hebrew and Arabic children going Romance: On the acquisition
of word order in Semitic and Romance 51
João Costa & Naama Friedmann
Adjectives and deleted nominals in Spanish 67
Luis Eguren
On the nature of covert operations: The case of focus
in Spanish pseudoclefts 87
Olga Fernández-Soriano
Ellipsis and Restructuring in European Portuguese 109
Anabela Gonçalves & Gabriela Matos
The early steps of modal and negation interactions: Evidence
from child Italian 131
Andrea Gualmini & Vincenzo Moscati
Structural patterns blocki ng plural in Romance nominalizations 145
Gianina Iordăchioaia & Elena Soare
On the distribution of adjectives in Romanian: The cel construction 161
Mihaela Marchis & Artemis Alexiadou
Subject doubling in European Portuguese dialects: The role
of impersonal se 179
Ana Maria Martins
On the Quebec French interrogative particle tu 201
Annick Morin
vi Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2007
Autonomous typological prosodic evolution versus
the Germanic superstrate in diachronic French phonology 223
Roland Noske
Dummy prepositions and the licensing of null subjects
in Brazilian Portuguese 243
Jairo Nunes
OV sequences in early child Catalan and English 267
Susagna Tubau
Index 287
Foreword
From early on Going Romance became the reference conference in the area of
formal linguistic research on Romance languages, both at the European and inter-
national level, and it has kept this status to date. Organized every year at a different
university in the Netherlands, its continuity and quality standards are guaranteed
by a steering committee formed by Romanists from all the participating institutions.
This yearly meeting features research mainly in the domain of morphology, syntax
and semantics and, to a certain extent, phonology too and it attracts speakers and
attendees not only from Europe but also from the rest of the world (North and
South America mostly). This volume assembles a significant number of selected
papers that were presented at the 21st edition of Going Romance, which was orga-
nized by the Chair of Romance Linguistics of the University of Amsterdam and
hosted in December 2007 by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura per i Paesi Bassi.
The main two-day programme had no specific theme and it included 16 selected
presentations, 3 alternate papers, as well as two invited addresses by Jairo Nunes
(Universidade de São Paulo) and Dominique Sportiche (University of California,
Los Angeles). The third day of the conference was devoted to a workshop with the
topic ‘L1/L2 acquisition of word order and information structure in Romance’,
with 6 selected papers, one alternate presentation and an invited talk by Marina
Nespor (Università di Ferrara). The volume you have before you features 14 papers:
10 papers and one of the invited addresses from the main session, as well as 3 papers
from the thematic workshop. As is common practice in the publication of volumes
from Going Romance, all the submissions were thoroughly peer-reviewed by exter-

nal referees and on the basis of those judgements the editorial team decided which
ones to publish and asked for revisions where required.
The result is quite representative of the spread of topics at the conference itself,
but also of the variety of research carried out nowadays on Romance languages
within theoretical Linguistics. Over the last three decades, the contribution of
Romance to the range of empirical phenomena that underlie the research agenda
has grown exponentially. Moving forward beyond the initial interest of syntacti-
cians in pro-drop, subject inversion or clitics, for instance, linguistic theorizing
has incorporated Romance ‘problems’ into virtually every single topic addressed
in theoretical approaches to phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, informa-
tion structure and their multiple interfaces, as well as in the study of diachronic
development, (monolingual and bilingual) acquisition, creoles, language contact,
language attrition or language deficits. In many cases existing descriptions from
viii Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2007
more traditional analyses have been revitalized, reinterpreted and incorporated
into discussions of a very different nature from the original ones. In parallel, as a
consequence of the methodology used, new data have been incorporated into the
picture which shed new light on the problems and they are often put in connection
with other sets of data that were previously considered to be unrelated. The inter-
est for the differences within the established ‘languages’ of the same family has
progressively drawn more and more attention to the dialects and spoken varieties
of those languages as a window into microvariation.
The range of languages (both standard and non-standard varieties) analyzed
in this volume is also significant: Catalan, French, Italian, European and Brazilian
Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish.
Several contributions deal with rather different phenomena related to the syntax
of subjects. Annick Morin discusses interrogative force in Quebec French. While
standard French mainly expresses interrogative force by means of intonational pat-
terns, Quebec French involves a question particle tu. At first sight, this particle could
be regarded as a typical question particle that occurs sentence-finally. However, it
exhibits a distribution similar to that of clitic doubling, and it appears to require
definite subjects. The author proposes that the question particle tu and the pronomi-
nal subject clitic are endowed with the feature [Definite]. The two elements differ,
however, in that the pronominal clitic tu is marked as [+definite; +interpretable],
while the question particle tu expresses [+ definite; –interpretable]. The distribution
of these two elements and the interaction with clitic doubling is further accounted
for by assuming that the [Definite] feature on the pronominal clitic must agree with
a [Definite] feature on the subject NP, in a Spec-head relationship at LF.
Ana Maria Martins offers a ‘big-DP analysis’ for the impersonal se-construction
in dialects of European Portuguese, whereby the clitic se is doubled by a strong
pronoun or a DP. In her account, the clitic ends up in T and the pronoun or DP

lands in a subject position. The doubling of the subject by se is possible because
this element is ϕ-incomplete.
Jairo Nunes provides further evidence for the status of referential null subjects
in Bazilian Portuguese as traces of A-movement and not as null pronouns on the
basis of their distribution in different types of noun complement clauses. The
dummy preposition de ‘of’ is argued to be the realization of inherent Case assigned
to the embedded clause by the subcategorizing head. The basic logic of the analysis
is extended to object control structures and to impersonal constructions involving
an infinitival clause.
Still dealing with syntactic varieties of Portuguese at the clausal level,
Manuela Ambar, Esmeralda Negrão, Rita Veloso, and Luís Graça discuss varia-
tions in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) in structures
that involve Aux-to-Comp movement, Complementizer Deletion, verbal complex
Foreword i
gerunds, and adjunct gerunds licensing. The paper investigates to what extent the
variations observed between BP and EP involve properties of the tense system,
and how these properties correlate with other aspects of the two grammars in
consideration. In this regard, the authors show that the variations are related to
the presence versus absence of V raising to the CP field: BP has no V-to-C. It is
shown that the verb does not move out of the first phase (i.e., vP) in this language.
In EP, however, T has different specifications and the verb can move out of vP and
subsequently target C.
Three papers deal with ellipsis at the clausal level and in DPs. Anabela Gonçalves
and Gabriela Matos derive the complementary distribution of Null Complement
Anaphora (NCA) and Restructuring in European Portuguese from the selectional
properties of the main predicates licensing them: verbs allowing for NCA select
for a sentential complement with an active T domain, whereas Restructuring verbs
select a defective T.
Mihaela Marchis and Artemis Alexiadou also contribute to the discussion
on ellipsis. They examine nominal ellipsis in Romanian with cel (cel frumos ‘the
beautiful one’) and another cel construction, in which cel follows a lexically
expressed noun (băiatul cel frumos ‘the boy cel nice’). For both cases they present
an analysis of cel as involving an appositive specification clause, building on De
Vries (2002).
In line with Corver & van Koppen’s (2006) claim that nominal ellipsis is licensed
by contrastive focus, Luis Eguren proposes that the restricted distribution of adjec-
tives in Spanish elliptical DPs can be reduced to a contrastive focus condition on
nominal ellipsis, whereby only adjectives that create Roothian sets of alternatives,
giving rise to a partitive set-subset relation, can combine with an elided noun.
Still within the domain of nominal syntax, Gianina Iordăchioaia and Elena Soare
contribute with their paper to the ongoing discussion on nominalizations, see, e.g.,

Roodenburg (2006), Sleeman & Brito (in progress), and Alexiadou (2009). They
show that the Romanian infinitive contradicts the generalization in Grimshaw
(1990) according to which Complex Event Nominals do not pluralize, although
the Romanian supine and the Spanish nominal infinitive obey this generalization. The
authors explain the availability and the blocking of pluralization in relation to
the internal structure of the Complex Event Nominal, more specifically in relation
to the (un)boundedness of aspect.
Besides Eguren’s paper there is another contribution that deals with focus,
but this time at the clausal level. Olga Fernández-Soriano analyzes a specific type
of pseudoclefts in spoken Spanish as an instance of monoclausal structure where
the focus of the construction propagates after covert reconstruction of the clefted
element into the relative CP, and she finds additional support for the proposed
analysis in the so-called split interrogatives in the same language.
 Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2007
Roland Noske’s paper is the only phonology paper in this volume. He argues
that the traditional idea that in Early French the Frankish superstrate had a major
influence on the phonology is mistaken. Noske proposes to consider the evolution
of the entire prosodic system of the language to account for the Early French data.
Heather Burnett and Mireille Tremblay investigate the interaction between
lexical semantics and syntactic structure in the interpretation of prepositional
phrases, concentrating on the expression of directionality in prepositions and par-
ticles in Old French (OF). This language has a series of locative and directional
prepositions that may be interpreted to encode direction or aspect when used
intransitively. The authors show that this semantic variation can be accounted for
in a principled manner by assuming that the distinct meanings stem from the syn-
tactic configurations in which the prepositions occur. The discussion here reminds
us of the ongoing debate on the structure of prepositional phrases (Svenonius to
appear) which itself has to be anchored in the context of the general discussion of
argument structure (e.g., Burzio 1986; Hale & Keyser 1993).
Acquisition of word order and phenomena related to information struc-
ture was the topic of the thematic workshop and three of those contributions are
included in this volume. Two of them concentrate on word order acquisition and
the third one on the interpretation of scope bearing elements.
João Costa and Naama Friedmann studied the acquisition of word order in
two Semitic languages (Palestinian Arabic and Hebrew) and two Romance lan-
guages (Spanish and European Portuguese). In all four languages, SV as well
as VS word order is possible in the adult variety, but these options are not used
to the same amount in all languages by the children studied: in the first stage,
Hebrew and European-Portuguese children use both SV and VS orders with
unaccusative verbs, but only SV with unergative and transitive verbs. In Spanish
and Palestinian-Arabic, on the other hand, children prefer VS order with unac-

cusative, unergative, and transitive verbs. The authors argue that children at this
stage cannot move the subject outside of VP yet, and the cross-linguistic differ-
ence stems from the identification of Spell-Out Domains (Fox & Pesetsky 2004).
Spanish and Palestinian-Arabic allow the verb to appear before the subject, whereas
Hebrew and European-Portuguese do not allow the verb to move to I until the
Spell-Out domain widens beyond VP, which takes place after subject movement
to Spec,IP is acquired.
Susagna Tubau also tackled word order, comparing OV Sequences in Early
Child Catalan and English. OV sequences are rare in both VO languages but they
do occur between approximately 19 months and 2 years of age. Tubau claims that
these OV sequences emerge in child English and Catalan after Telicity Phrase
and Aspect Phrase have been acquired but are still underspecified, thus not forc-
ing movement of objects and verbs to Tel0 and Asp0 respectively. While V-to-Asp0