Article published in:
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2008: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' Groningen 2008Edited by Reineke Bok-Bennema, Brigitte Kampers-Manhe and Bart Hollebrandse
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2] 2010
► pp. 59–76
Middle scrambling with deictic locatives in European Portuguese
João Costa | Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Ana Maria Martins | Universidade de Lisboa
This paper discusses the peculiar ability of certain deictic locatives (like lá ‘there’) to appear left-adjacent to the verb in European Portuguese. We propose that leftward movement of lá (and similar deictic locatives) is middle scrambling, understood as movement to Spec,TP. In order to explain why lá-preposing to Spec,TP is not always permitted, we elaborate on the hypothesis of Costa & Martins (2003, 2004) that in EP the strong nature of the polarity-encoding head Σ requires it to be ‘lexicalized’ either by syntactic merger or by morphological merger under adjacency. Middle scrambling is barred whenever Σ and V must be adjacent. The analysis derives the particular syntax of the deictic locatives (in different clausal structures, including restructuring infinitives) and its puzzling parallelism with clitic placement. Finally, we suggest that speaker/utterance-anchorage is what links together deictic locatives and tense, enabling the former to enter the syntactic domain of the latter.
Published online: 24 November 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.2.05cos
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.2.05cos
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Martins, Ana Maria
Nkollo, Mikołaj & Alexandra Fiéis
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