Online adult processing of English pronouns is subject to early structural constraints. However, if a sentence fails to provide a licit antecedent for a pronoun, ungrammatical antecedents may be fleetingly considered, causing processing disruption. This paper investigates whether illicit antecedents exert any interference in the processing of clitic pronouns. Given an established asymmetry between simple and Exceptional Case Marking predicates in the acquisition of binding Principle B (Baauw & Cuetos 2003), this study asks whether the notion of coargumenthood plays a role during the online processing of clitic pronouns by Italian-speaking adults. I report experimental evidence from a self-paced reading study suggesting that the time course of pronoun resolution is affected by coargumenthood. In Exceptional Case Marking predicates, comprehenders appear to temporarily consider a feature-matching local antecedent as soon as the clitic trace is processed in its thematic position.
Assuming the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) (Lardiere 2008, 2009), we argue that the acquisition of Exceptional Case Marking (ECM), Inflected Infinitive Structures (IIS) and Prepositional Infinitival Structures (PIC) by Spanish learners of European Portuguese (EP) presents different challenges. Two Acceptability Judgment Tasks show that identifying and reconfiguring the specific features associated with the PIC is a difficult task and that Spanish native speakers perform better in the case of ECM, whose properties can, for the most part, be transferred from the L1. However, the absence of an overt morphosyntactic counterpart for features related to Differential Object Marking (DOM) in EP represents a challenge. Finally, the results for the IIS present an interesting case study, since they force us to question the usual descriptions of the native grammar.
It is commonly held that focus fronting exhibits similar properties to wh-movement. The syntactic parallelism between the two types of movement has been supported by the semantic analyses of wh-questions that assume that when wh-words function as interrogative operators, they are inherently focal. The main goal of this paper is to challenge this highly attractive picture of the relationship between wh-words, focus, and movement, and to claim that wh-phrases are not inherently focal. The results of a prosodic production experiment on the distribution of the nuclear pitch accent in Sardinian wh-questions, together with the syntactic properties related to the asymmetry between direct and indirect wh-questions, form the empirical basis of this study.
This paper explores the temporal construals of perfective vs. imperfective aspect in Sequence of Tense contexts in Spanish and French, in particular, under ellipsis. The distribution of past-shifted vs. simultaneous, as well as sloppy vs. strict, temporal construals is taken to support extending to viewpoint aspect a referential approach to tense, as Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria (2014) contend. I derive the distribution of simultaneous vs. past-shifted readings by extending their analysis of imperfective vs. perfective to embedded contexts. The intricate distribution of strict vs. sloppy (simultaneous, as well as past-shifted) readings is explained by extending the LF-parallelism constraint on ellipsis (Fox 2000) – specifically, the assumption that structural parallelism yields sloppy readings, while referential parallelism yields strict readings – to temporal anaphora under ellipsis.
The goal of this paper is to analyze the properties of (a special type of) ‘split interrogative’ (SI) constructions in Spanish. SIs are wh-questions followed by a phrase that constitutes a possible answer, the ‘tag’. The overall structure is interpreted as a yes/no question (as in what did John bring, a book?). In standard cases, the tag matches the (case and thematic) features of the wh-element. Nevertheless, in (spoken Peninsular) Spanish what I will call ‘Non-matching Split Interrogatives’ (NMSI) are also possible. In these cases, the wh-element and the XP in the tag may not match; instead, it is the dummy (neuter) qué “what” that heads the wh-clause. I investigate these cases and propose a (biclausal) analysis involving an ellipsis process similar to the one taking place in fragments (Merchant 2004). To support this hypothesis, I focus on a the fact that: in NMSI there is a form-meaning mismatch that, to my knowledge, has gone unnoticed both in theoretical and descriptive studies.
This paper focuses on some problematic aspects of the diachrony of differential object marking in Old Catalan and Old Romanian (11th to 17th centuries). Corpus data from both languages reveal two unexpected facts: (i) there is a prominence of 3rd person to the exclusion of 1st and 2nd person, contrary to what the Animacy/Person scale would predict; (ii) differential marking appears to be present on nominals (especially proper names), to the exclusion of pronouns, this time contrary to the Specificity/Definiteness Scale. The account we propose for these types of scale reversals builds on the idea that languages can have more than one differential object marking strategy, as well as more than one type of structure for pronouns and animate nominals. Moreover, the co-existence of various mechanisms for nominal licensing can explain why, in some instances, classes lower down the hierarchies can get signaled to the exclusion of higher ones.
Against the common-sense notion that bilinguals have two grammatical systems I argue that the linguistic system of a bilingual should be integrated, following ideas developed in more detail in López (2020). In particular, I argue that both the lexicon and the post-syntactic operations that lead to the externalization systems are integrated. I further argue that the distinction between code-switching and borrowing is spurious and I extend the integrated hypothesis to syntactic transfer. I use Distributed Morphology to formally describe how an integrated system may work.
We focus on North Lombard -a and -n feminine plurals, for which we provide a morphological analysis. At the syntactic level, the relevant varieties are characterized by the phenomenon of Differential Plural Marking, whereby phasal domains have different realizations of plural morphology on the head of the phase and on the complement of the phase. We provide an account of DPM based on the assumption that under the PIC the complement of the phase and its head are externalized separately. We draw consequences concerning clitics as phasal heads as well as object agreement with participles and with finite verbs.
This paper rethinks Holmberg’s (2005) characterization of partial vs. consistent null subject languages (NSL) based on data from Brazilian and European Portuguese, the former a partial, the latter a consistent NSL. The paper proposes that rather than overt morphological distinctions, what is relevant for null subject licensing is the underlying feature specification of the verbal inflection, after agreement between T and a pronominal subject values the relevant person/number/gender/Case feature. Hence, only close inspection of the pronominal and agreement systems of individual NSLs permits an adequate characterization of them, for the same language may behave as a ‘partial’, ‘consistent’, or ‘radical’ NSL depending on the morphological feature specification of its nominative pronouns and T heads.
The present study investigates the development of the expression of the locative paradigm in the L2 Spanish of Italian-speaking learners. We investigate (i) whether the developmental stages proposed for English-speaking learners (VanPatten 1987; Perpiñán, Marín & Moreno Villamar 2020) hold for Italian-speaking learners; and (ii) whether Italian, a language that partially overlaps with the distribution of the Spanish copulas has a facilitative role in the process. 33 Italian-speaking learners of Spanish and 21 monolingual Spanish speakers completed a short proficiency test, an acceptability judgement task, and a picture matching task targeting these constructions. Results indicate that unlike what VanPatten (1987, 2010) has proposed for English-speaking learners of Spanish, Italian speakers do not present a delay in the acquisition of estar, but instead, it is overproduced in locative contexts from very early on. We argue that this overproduction of estar is due to the readily available mapping of ‘temporal boundedness’ with estar in the grammar of these L2 learners, whereas the presence of the feature ‘dynamicity’, even though it is relevant in the distribution of copulas in Italian, comes later in L2 development.
In this paper we analyze, from an experimental and formal perspective, the interaction and the implicational relationships between vowel reduction and word-final nasal deletion in Catalan loanwords. We present the results of both a production and a perception test carried out with 31 young speakers from the Barcelona area. Loanwords susceptible to undergoing both nasal deletion and vowel reduction display different patterns, which, according to the tests, show different degrees of likeliness. The most common pattern is underapplication of both processes, followed closely by underapplication of nasal deletion alone and at a large distance by the application of both processes. Finally, underapplication of vowel reduction and application of nasal deletion is unattested in the production test and obtains a very low score in the perception test, that is, it is a very unlikely nativization pattern. The typology of possible nativizations and the implicational relationships between the processes under scrutiny are analyzed in the framework of Harmonic Grammar under Weighted Scalar Constraints, following recent proposals by Hsu & Jesney (2017, 2018).
Recent descriptions have argued that what seem to be past tense markers in Capeverdean, a Portuguese-related language spoken in Cabo Verde, are instead allomorphs of a temporal agreement morpheme (Pratas 2018a). The rationale for this goes as follows. It is true that both -ba, from the variety of Santiago, and the related (and more complex) form tava, from São Vicente, are sometimes associated with a past tense in the terms of Klein (1994): the Topic Time is located before the Time of Utterance (Pratas 2014). This is the case in (i) past progressives and past habituals. But they also appear in (ii) subordinate clauses where no past interpretation is certain, such as some conditionals and other modal contexts. Since this subordinate lexical item is often licensed in the context of past situations denoted by their respective main clauses, it seems indeed better accounted for by this recent agreement proposal. That analysis, however, still leaves open the question of what this morpheme agrees with, and this is even more intriguing when it occurs fully separated from past situations. Alternatively, the approach taken in Pratas (2021) identifies a common point between (i) and (ii): all these structures denote situations with a low degree of accessibility from the speaker’s perspective. This (in)accessibility is perceived in terms of time: in the first case, we cannot go back to the past; in the second case, external factors may (have) provide(d) an (in)accessible time location. The main goal of this paper then is to further defend this novel insight on that apparent mismatch, which can bring clues to similar problems crosslinguistically.
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.
The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) to discuss the validity of Lobo’s proposal (2003) of distinguishing two types of adverbial perfect participial clauses (APC) in European Portuguese; and (ii) to ascertain the key factors behind their temporal interpretation. To achieve these aims, we compare and contrast patterns displayed by APC in European, Brazilian, Mozambican and Angolan Portuguese and British English across a corpus built from newspapers. Our research reveals that the data do not reflect the bipartite division argued for by Lobo and that, for Portuguese varieties, the position of APC in the sentence and the combinations of some aspectual classes are important to infer temporal relations, whereas, for British English, the anterior orientation/perfect aspect of the perfect participle imposes for most cases an anteriority temporal relation, surpassing the influence of any other factor.
This paper investigates the distribution of expletive negation in the complement clause of craindre (“fear”) in French. Building on Anand & Hacquard’s (2013) proposal that fear verbs are hybrid attitude verbs, featuring both a doxastic and a (dis)preferential component, this paper argues that these two components are conveyed by different layers of meaning (in line with Giannakidou & Mari (2020)). More precisely, I argue that, in actual discourse context, craindre may receive two main interpretations: a volitive (dispreference-related) or a psychological (belief-related) interpretation, depending on whether the verb asserts or presupposes dispreference. Based on a diachronic corpus study of the distribution of expletive negation, I show that expletive negation, in the earliest stages of French, places semantic restrictions on the main verb, which are met when the interpretation of craindre is volitive.
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.
Online adult processing of English pronouns is subject to early structural constraints. However, if a sentence fails to provide a licit antecedent for a pronoun, ungrammatical antecedents may be fleetingly considered, causing processing disruption. This paper investigates whether illicit antecedents exert any interference in the processing of clitic pronouns. Given an established asymmetry between simple and Exceptional Case Marking predicates in the acquisition of binding Principle B (Baauw & Cuetos 2003), this study asks whether the notion of coargumenthood plays a role during the online processing of clitic pronouns by Italian-speaking adults. I report experimental evidence from a self-paced reading study suggesting that the time course of pronoun resolution is affected by coargumenthood. In Exceptional Case Marking predicates, comprehenders appear to temporarily consider a feature-matching local antecedent as soon as the clitic trace is processed in its thematic position.
Assuming the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) (Lardiere 2008, 2009), we argue that the acquisition of Exceptional Case Marking (ECM), Inflected Infinitive Structures (IIS) and Prepositional Infinitival Structures (PIC) by Spanish learners of European Portuguese (EP) presents different challenges. Two Acceptability Judgment Tasks show that identifying and reconfiguring the specific features associated with the PIC is a difficult task and that Spanish native speakers perform better in the case of ECM, whose properties can, for the most part, be transferred from the L1. However, the absence of an overt morphosyntactic counterpart for features related to Differential Object Marking (DOM) in EP represents a challenge. Finally, the results for the IIS present an interesting case study, since they force us to question the usual descriptions of the native grammar.
It is commonly held that focus fronting exhibits similar properties to wh-movement. The syntactic parallelism between the two types of movement has been supported by the semantic analyses of wh-questions that assume that when wh-words function as interrogative operators, they are inherently focal. The main goal of this paper is to challenge this highly attractive picture of the relationship between wh-words, focus, and movement, and to claim that wh-phrases are not inherently focal. The results of a prosodic production experiment on the distribution of the nuclear pitch accent in Sardinian wh-questions, together with the syntactic properties related to the asymmetry between direct and indirect wh-questions, form the empirical basis of this study.
This paper explores the temporal construals of perfective vs. imperfective aspect in Sequence of Tense contexts in Spanish and French, in particular, under ellipsis. The distribution of past-shifted vs. simultaneous, as well as sloppy vs. strict, temporal construals is taken to support extending to viewpoint aspect a referential approach to tense, as Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria (2014) contend. I derive the distribution of simultaneous vs. past-shifted readings by extending their analysis of imperfective vs. perfective to embedded contexts. The intricate distribution of strict vs. sloppy (simultaneous, as well as past-shifted) readings is explained by extending the LF-parallelism constraint on ellipsis (Fox 2000) – specifically, the assumption that structural parallelism yields sloppy readings, while referential parallelism yields strict readings – to temporal anaphora under ellipsis.
The goal of this paper is to analyze the properties of (a special type of) ‘split interrogative’ (SI) constructions in Spanish. SIs are wh-questions followed by a phrase that constitutes a possible answer, the ‘tag’. The overall structure is interpreted as a yes/no question (as in what did John bring, a book?). In standard cases, the tag matches the (case and thematic) features of the wh-element. Nevertheless, in (spoken Peninsular) Spanish what I will call ‘Non-matching Split Interrogatives’ (NMSI) are also possible. In these cases, the wh-element and the XP in the tag may not match; instead, it is the dummy (neuter) qué “what” that heads the wh-clause. I investigate these cases and propose a (biclausal) analysis involving an ellipsis process similar to the one taking place in fragments (Merchant 2004). To support this hypothesis, I focus on a the fact that: in NMSI there is a form-meaning mismatch that, to my knowledge, has gone unnoticed both in theoretical and descriptive studies.
This paper focuses on some problematic aspects of the diachrony of differential object marking in Old Catalan and Old Romanian (11th to 17th centuries). Corpus data from both languages reveal two unexpected facts: (i) there is a prominence of 3rd person to the exclusion of 1st and 2nd person, contrary to what the Animacy/Person scale would predict; (ii) differential marking appears to be present on nominals (especially proper names), to the exclusion of pronouns, this time contrary to the Specificity/Definiteness Scale. The account we propose for these types of scale reversals builds on the idea that languages can have more than one differential object marking strategy, as well as more than one type of structure for pronouns and animate nominals. Moreover, the co-existence of various mechanisms for nominal licensing can explain why, in some instances, classes lower down the hierarchies can get signaled to the exclusion of higher ones.
Against the common-sense notion that bilinguals have two grammatical systems I argue that the linguistic system of a bilingual should be integrated, following ideas developed in more detail in López (2020). In particular, I argue that both the lexicon and the post-syntactic operations that lead to the externalization systems are integrated. I further argue that the distinction between code-switching and borrowing is spurious and I extend the integrated hypothesis to syntactic transfer. I use Distributed Morphology to formally describe how an integrated system may work.
We focus on North Lombard -a and -n feminine plurals, for which we provide a morphological analysis. At the syntactic level, the relevant varieties are characterized by the phenomenon of Differential Plural Marking, whereby phasal domains have different realizations of plural morphology on the head of the phase and on the complement of the phase. We provide an account of DPM based on the assumption that under the PIC the complement of the phase and its head are externalized separately. We draw consequences concerning clitics as phasal heads as well as object agreement with participles and with finite verbs.
This paper rethinks Holmberg’s (2005) characterization of partial vs. consistent null subject languages (NSL) based on data from Brazilian and European Portuguese, the former a partial, the latter a consistent NSL. The paper proposes that rather than overt morphological distinctions, what is relevant for null subject licensing is the underlying feature specification of the verbal inflection, after agreement between T and a pronominal subject values the relevant person/number/gender/Case feature. Hence, only close inspection of the pronominal and agreement systems of individual NSLs permits an adequate characterization of them, for the same language may behave as a ‘partial’, ‘consistent’, or ‘radical’ NSL depending on the morphological feature specification of its nominative pronouns and T heads.
The present study investigates the development of the expression of the locative paradigm in the L2 Spanish of Italian-speaking learners. We investigate (i) whether the developmental stages proposed for English-speaking learners (VanPatten 1987; Perpiñán, Marín & Moreno Villamar 2020) hold for Italian-speaking learners; and (ii) whether Italian, a language that partially overlaps with the distribution of the Spanish copulas has a facilitative role in the process. 33 Italian-speaking learners of Spanish and 21 monolingual Spanish speakers completed a short proficiency test, an acceptability judgement task, and a picture matching task targeting these constructions. Results indicate that unlike what VanPatten (1987, 2010) has proposed for English-speaking learners of Spanish, Italian speakers do not present a delay in the acquisition of estar, but instead, it is overproduced in locative contexts from very early on. We argue that this overproduction of estar is due to the readily available mapping of ‘temporal boundedness’ with estar in the grammar of these L2 learners, whereas the presence of the feature ‘dynamicity’, even though it is relevant in the distribution of copulas in Italian, comes later in L2 development.
In this paper we analyze, from an experimental and formal perspective, the interaction and the implicational relationships between vowel reduction and word-final nasal deletion in Catalan loanwords. We present the results of both a production and a perception test carried out with 31 young speakers from the Barcelona area. Loanwords susceptible to undergoing both nasal deletion and vowel reduction display different patterns, which, according to the tests, show different degrees of likeliness. The most common pattern is underapplication of both processes, followed closely by underapplication of nasal deletion alone and at a large distance by the application of both processes. Finally, underapplication of vowel reduction and application of nasal deletion is unattested in the production test and obtains a very low score in the perception test, that is, it is a very unlikely nativization pattern. The typology of possible nativizations and the implicational relationships between the processes under scrutiny are analyzed in the framework of Harmonic Grammar under Weighted Scalar Constraints, following recent proposals by Hsu & Jesney (2017, 2018).
Recent descriptions have argued that what seem to be past tense markers in Capeverdean, a Portuguese-related language spoken in Cabo Verde, are instead allomorphs of a temporal agreement morpheme (Pratas 2018a). The rationale for this goes as follows. It is true that both -ba, from the variety of Santiago, and the related (and more complex) form tava, from São Vicente, are sometimes associated with a past tense in the terms of Klein (1994): the Topic Time is located before the Time of Utterance (Pratas 2014). This is the case in (i) past progressives and past habituals. But they also appear in (ii) subordinate clauses where no past interpretation is certain, such as some conditionals and other modal contexts. Since this subordinate lexical item is often licensed in the context of past situations denoted by their respective main clauses, it seems indeed better accounted for by this recent agreement proposal. That analysis, however, still leaves open the question of what this morpheme agrees with, and this is even more intriguing when it occurs fully separated from past situations. Alternatively, the approach taken in Pratas (2021) identifies a common point between (i) and (ii): all these structures denote situations with a low degree of accessibility from the speaker’s perspective. This (in)accessibility is perceived in terms of time: in the first case, we cannot go back to the past; in the second case, external factors may (have) provide(d) an (in)accessible time location. The main goal of this paper then is to further defend this novel insight on that apparent mismatch, which can bring clues to similar problems crosslinguistically.
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.
The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) to discuss the validity of Lobo’s proposal (2003) of distinguishing two types of adverbial perfect participial clauses (APC) in European Portuguese; and (ii) to ascertain the key factors behind their temporal interpretation. To achieve these aims, we compare and contrast patterns displayed by APC in European, Brazilian, Mozambican and Angolan Portuguese and British English across a corpus built from newspapers. Our research reveals that the data do not reflect the bipartite division argued for by Lobo and that, for Portuguese varieties, the position of APC in the sentence and the combinations of some aspectual classes are important to infer temporal relations, whereas, for British English, the anterior orientation/perfect aspect of the perfect participle imposes for most cases an anteriority temporal relation, surpassing the influence of any other factor.
This paper investigates the distribution of expletive negation in the complement clause of craindre (“fear”) in French. Building on Anand & Hacquard’s (2013) proposal that fear verbs are hybrid attitude verbs, featuring both a doxastic and a (dis)preferential component, this paper argues that these two components are conveyed by different layers of meaning (in line with Giannakidou & Mari (2020)). More precisely, I argue that, in actual discourse context, craindre may receive two main interpretations: a volitive (dispreference-related) or a psychological (belief-related) interpretation, depending on whether the verb asserts or presupposes dispreference. Based on a diachronic corpus study of the distribution of expletive negation, I show that expletive negation, in the earliest stages of French, places semantic restrictions on the main verb, which are met when the interpretation of craindre is volitive.
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.