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Italian Dialectology at the Interfaces
Edited by Silvio Cruschina, Adam Ledgeway and Eva-Maria Remberger
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 251] 2019
► pp. 131–154

The morphosyntax-semantics interface and the Sicilian Doubly Inflected Construction

| CLLE-ERSS (CNRS & Université de Toulouse II Jean Jaurès)
| CLLE-ERSS (CNRS & Université de Toulouse II Jean Jaurès)

We examine the Doubly Inflected Construction of Sicilian (DIC, Cruschina 2013; also known as Inflected Construction, Cardinaletti and Giusti 2001, 2003), in which a motion verb V1 is followed by an event verb V2, both verbs being inflected for the same person and TAM features. We propose to regard DIC as a Serial Verb Construction and analyze it in terms of an operation of lexical concatenation, whereby V1 and V2 are semantically composed as lexical verbs denoting spatio-temporally contiguous events and displaying argument sharing, to yield a complex predicate denoting concatenated events. The data we consider crucially include the causative motion verb ‘send’ and bring out a mismatch between the person features realized on V1 and V2 and semantic interpretation. We show how our analysis allows for a principled account of the morphology-semantics mismatch. The semantic analysis is implemented in a neo-Davidsonian framework (Parsons 1990).

Keywords: Doubly Inflected Construction, serial verb constructions, motion verbs, morphosyntax-semantics mismatch, event semantics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Main properties of DIC
    • 2.1Morphosyntactic properties
      • 2.1.1Feature Matching
      • 2.1.2No intervening elements
      • 2.1.3No syntactic dependency
    • 2.2Semantic properties
    • 2.3No grammaticalization of V1 as a tense/aspect marker
  • 3.Serialization of events
    • 3.1Definition and properties of Serial Verb Constructions
    • 3.2The empty marker
    • 3.3No idiomaticity
    • 3.4Argument sharing
    • 3.5Feature Matching
    • 3.6Single event
  • 4.The analysis
    • 4.1DIC with the causative motion verb mannari
  • 4.2Formal analysis
    • 4.2.1Morphosyntax
    • 4.2.2Semantics
      • 4.2.3Application of the analysis to some examples
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.251.07tod
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