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Part of
Romance Linguistics 2013: Selected papers from the 43rd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), New York, 17-19 April, 2013
Edited by Christina Tortora, Marcel den Dikken, Ignacio L. Montoya and Teresa O'Neill
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 9] 2016
► pp. 119–138

Romanian tough-constructions and multi-headed constituents

| The ‘Iorgu Iordan - Alexandru Rosetti’ Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest

I propose an account for the absence of agreement on tough-words in Romanian tough- constructions (TCs). I argue that absence of agreement cannot be explained by an A-bar movement derivation, because Romanian TCs involve A-movement, the non-finite complement having passive properties. I also argue against an adverb analysis of Romanian tough-words and against a subject analysis of the clausal argument of the tough-word. I propose a novel analysis, which is supported by West Germanic data: non-agreeing TCs are multi-headed constituents, in which the adjective is the internal head, selecting the supine CP, and the supine C is the external head. Since the adjective is not the external head, it cannot take part in agreement relations involving the [Adjective+Supine] constituent. I provide a technical implementation of the notion of multi-headed constituents which relies on Citko’s (2008) flexible label projection: in this case, it is the label of the complement that projects (an instance of Project-Goal). Finally, I discuss the correlation between the availability of multi-headed TCs and the morphological (in)distinctness between adjectives and adverbs.

Published online: 3 February 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.9.07giu
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