Article published in:
Romance Linguistics 2013: Selected papers from the 43rd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), New York, 17-19 April, 2013Edited by Christina Tortora, Marcel den Dikken, Ignacio L. Montoya and Teresa O'Neill
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 9] 2016
► pp. 21–38
Old French possessives and ellipsis
Deborah Arteaga | University of Nevada
Julia Herschensohn | University of Washington
Sáez (2011), to account for Spanish definite articles in ellipsis contexts, such as mi libro y el [e] de Juan ‘my book and that of John’, proposes the Stress Condition on Remnants (SCR), which disallows unstressed syntactic elements to be anaphoric, while allowing definite articles to license empty categories. The focus of our paper is Old French (OF) possessive constructions and their elliptical expressions, such as le mien livre ‘my book’ and le [e] de Jean ‘that of Jean’. OF had a more extensive inventory of possessive constructions than Modern French (MF): lexical genitives, prenominal possessives, and lexical and possessive ellipsis constructions. Adopting Arteaga & Herschensohn’s (2010, 2013) proposal for lexical genitives, Sáez’s (2011) SCR, and Lobeck’s (1995) conditions on ellipsis, we argue that two major diachronic changes led to a difference in licensing of possessives from OF to MF: one, the erosion of morphological marking that led to a loss of the OF two case system, reducing feature strength to license ellipsis (Lobeck 1995), and two, the fact that definite articles became clitics and Phase Heads and thus became subject to the SCR as the prenominal nP domain (Carstens 2003) became a clitic zone prohibiting prenominal stressed possessives.
Published online: 03 February 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.9.02art
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.9.02art
References
Abney, Steven Paul
1987 The English Noun Phrase in its Sentential Aspect (Doctoral Dissertation), MIT.
Arteaga, Deborah
Arteaga, Deborah, and Julia Herschensohn
Arteaga, Deborah and J. Herschensohn
Bernstein, Judy
Cardinaletti, Anna, and Michal Starke
Chomsky, Noam
Delfitto, Denis and Paola Paradisi
Halle, Morris and Alec Marantz
Harley, Heidi and Rolf Noyer
Harley, Heidi and Elizabeth Ritter
Herslund, Michael
Lin, Yi-An
2008 “A Probe-Goal Approach to Parametric Variation in English and Mandarin Chinese Nominal Phrases.” In
Proceedings of the 20th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-20)
, 775-784.
Lobeck, Anne C
Longobardi, Giuseppe
Mallén, Enrique
Nussenbaum, Jonathan W
2000 Investigations of Covert Phrase Movement. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
Palm, Lars
Parodi, Claudia
Picallo, M. Carme
Sáez, Luis