0000000000326627
AUTHOR
Ls Linguistics: Syntax & Language Variat
Verb-Second and (micro)-variation in two Rhaeto-Romance varieties of Northern Italy.
Rhaeto-Romance varieties are the only present-day Romance varieties which exhibit the Verb Second constraint (Benincà 1994, Poletto 2002, Salvi 2010). In this chapter we examine two properties typically ascribed to the Verb Second phenomenon, subject-finite verb inversion and restrictions on the co-occurrence of multiple constituents in the sentence-initial position, in two Rhaeto-Romance varieties spoken in South Tyrol (Province of Bolzano, Northern Italy). We demonstrate that both varieties behave like Verb-Second languages as far as both phenomena are concerned, but exhibit a specific Verb-Second system governed by the interplay between syntactic and discourse constraints which differs f…
Gerunds become prepositional infinitives in Romance Small Clauses: the effects of later Merge to the syntactic spine
This article offers a comparative analysis of ‘predicative’ gerunds (‘PGs’) and prepositional infinitives (‘PIs’), focussing on perception constructions in Spanish (PGs) and European Portuguese (PIs). I demonstrate that these two constructions are diachronically related and that they still have a similar syntax. The evidence discussed suggests that both constructions are Small Clauses headed by a preposition of central coincidence. In PGs, this preposition is merged in a low aspectual projection and incorporates into the verb. In PIs, an evolution of PGs, it is merged later in the structure. This leads to a layering process, i.e. the splitting of a single head into a series of heads and tra…