Chapter published in:
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2018: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 32, UtrechtEdited by Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen and Luisa Meroni
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 357] 2021
► pp. 249–262
Chapter 13
Very …. extracted
On old Italian molto
Silvia Rossi | Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Cecilia Poletto | Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
In this paper we consider cases of extraction of the degree word molto “very, much” from its modifier position within an AdjP (Giusti 2010a; b; Poletto 2014) in Old Italian. Such cases are reminiscent of Left Branch Extractions (LBE; Ross 1967), but, differently from what happens with adverb extraction in Slavic (Talić 2017), the conditions under which molto-extraction is possible are very restricted: molto can be extracted only when the AdjP is (or modifies a nominal expression) in post-copular predicative position but not outside a fully-fledged DP. We propose that the reason why the structure is so restricted has to do with the presence/absence of a phase boundary, while the reason why this has been lost in modern Italian is the loss of the target position in the CP layer. This allows us to show that the loss of the Verb Second property (V2) in Italian has fine-grained consequences in unexpected domains like quantifier extraction.
Keywords: degree words, old Italian, modifier extraction, left periphery
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The data: When and where is extraction possible?
- 3.The movement path of molto ex
- 4.Concluding remarks
-
Acknowledgements -
Notes -
References -
Sources
Published online: 17 December 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.357.13ros
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.357.13ros
References
Abels, Klaus
Belletti, Adriana
Benincà, Paola
Camus Bergareche, Bruno & Manuel Pérez Saldanya
Carlier, Anne
Chomsky, Noam
Corver, Norbert
Garzonio, Jacopo & Cecilia Poletto
Giorgi, Alessandra
Giusti, Giuliana
Longobardi, Giuseppe
Obenauer, Hans-Georg
2018 L’etimologia come finestra sulla sintassi, evidenza empirica dai dialetti italiani. In Martin-Dietriech Glessgen, Johannes Kabatek & Harald Völker (eds.), Repenser la variation linguistique. Actes du Colloque DIA IV à Zurich (12–14 sept. 2016), 107–121. Strasbourg: Éditions de linguistique et de philologie.
Rizzi, Luigi
Rohlfs, Gerhard
Ross, John Robert
Rossi, Silvia & Cecilia Poletto
Forthcoming. Bare quantifiers and verb second: The view from Old Italian. In Nicholas Catasso, Marco Coniglio & Chiara De Bastiani eds. Language change at the interfaces. Interasentential and intersentential phenomena Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sources
DCompagni = Dino Compagni
De Amore = Anonymous
Distruzione di Troia = Anonymous
FR = Bono Giamboni
FSI = Anonymous
Rettorica = Brunetto Latini
Rime Cavalcanti = Guido Cavalcanti
Seneca = Anonymous
Tesoro
Il Tesoro di Brunetto Latini volgarizzato da Bono Giamboni (raffrontato col testo autentico francese edito da P. Chabaille, emendato con mss. ed illustrato da Luigi Gaiter, Bologna, Presso Gaetano Romagnoli, Volume 4, 1878–83)
VeV = Bono Giamboni