The seem-class verb paradigm and restructuring in Romance
This paper examines clitic climbing in contexts
featuring Spanish parecer ‘seem’, a verb that has
been claimed to lack restructuring altogether in Spanish (Gallego, 2009; Torrego, 1996; Zagona, 1982). The paper
identifies several contexts favoring clitic climbing with
parecer. In particular, 3rd person clitic
climbing is favored with psychological predicates and functional
elements such as negation, temporal priority adverbs, and left
dislocated elements. It is argued that Spanish
parecer is a bona fide example of restructuring
(R-parecer). This paper offers an account of
R-parecer in terms of Cinque’s (2004, 2006) approach to restructuring. Moreover,
this paper also investigates whether R-parecer is
subject to Cinque’s
(2004, 2006)
rigidly ordered functional hierarchy of the clause. It is shown that
Spanish parecer and French sembler
‘seem’ deviate from Cinque’s functional hierarchy. The paper
concludes that we must leave open the possibility that lexical verbs
may also give rise to restructuring in Romance.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Observations on Spanish parecer
- 2.1Syntactic properties of Spanish
parecer
- 2.2Previous studies on parecer
- 3.Spanish parecer and restructuring
- 3.1Restructuring in Romance syntax
- 3.2Cinque’s restructuring approach
- 3.3Restructuring in contexts featuring Spanish
parecer
- 3.4Parecer and experiencer arguments
- 4.Cinque’s functional hierarchy and R-
parecer
- 4.1Ordering of functional heads in Cinque’s hierarchy
- 5.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
References
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