Chapter published in:
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2018: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 32, Utrecht
Edited by Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen and Luisa Meroni
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 357] 2021
► pp. 303–316

Chapter 16
Fission in Romance demonstrative-reinforcer constructions

| Utrecht University
This paper proposes a new approach to Romance demonstrative-reinforcer constructions. The account is based on a binary valued feature system for deictic person and is embedded in the Distributed Morphology framework. Looking at data from Romance varieties, some (implicit) shortcomings of previous accounts are repaired via a morphological operation: Fission. Specifically, those accounts do not provide formal means to make sense of the deictic compatibility constraint between the demonstrative and its reinforcer, nor do they discuss categorisation issues relative to reinforcers. Via Fission, instead, a featural reason is given to ensure deictic compatibility, and I put forward a new approach to the category of reinforcers, aiming to overcome their problematic categorisation as DP-internal adverbs.
Keywords: demonstrative-reinforcer constructions, deixis, person, features, Distributed Morphology, Fission
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data: Romance demonstratives and DRCs
  • 3.Fission
  • 4.Beyond deictic fission: [Focus]
  • 5.The category of reinforcers
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 December 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.357.16ter
References
Alexiadou, Artemis
2001 Functional structure in nominals: Nominalization and ergativity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bernstein, Judy B.
1997 Demonstratives and reinforcers in Romance and Germanic languages. Lingua 102. 87–113. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2001 Focusing the “right” way in Romance Determiner Phrase. Probus 13. 1–29. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Brugè, Laura
1996 Demonstrative movement in Spanish: A comparative approach. University of Venice Working Papers in Linguistics 6. 1–61.Google Scholar
2002 The positions of demonstratives in the extended nominal projection. In Guglielmo Cinque (ed.), Functional structure in DP and IP: The cartography of syntactic structures, 15–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo
1993 A null theory of phrase and compound stress. Linguistic Inquiry 24. 239–297.Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger
1999 Demonstratives. Form, function, and grammaticalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Halle, Morris
1997 Distributed Morphology: Impoverishment and fission. In Benjamin Bruening, Yoonjung Kang & Martha McGinnis (eds.), PF: Papers at the Interface [MITWPL 30], 425–449. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lander, Eric & Liliane Haegeman
2018 The nanosyntax of spatial deixis. Studia Linguistica 72(2). 362–427. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ledgeway, Adam & John C. Smith
2016 Deixis. In Adam Ledgeway & Martin Maiden (eds.), The Oxford guide to the Romance languages, 879–896. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nevins, Andrew
2007 The representation of third person and its consequences for person-case effects. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 25. 273–313. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Noyer, R. Rolf
1992 Features, positions and affixes in autonomous morphological structure. Ph.D. Dissertation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Roehrs, Dorian
2010 Demonstrative-reinforcer constructions. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 13. 225–268. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Terenghi, Silvia
2019 Demonstrative-reinforcer constructions and the syntactic role of deictic features. Linguistics in the Netherlands 36. 192–207. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Terenghi, Silvia & Jan Casalicchio
2019 Demonstrative-reinforcer constructions: Variation in Italo-Romance. Paper presented at 14th Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology Meeting (CIDSM 14), Prague, May 27–29.
Zubizarreta, María L.
1998 Prosody, focus, and word order. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar