Search results for " Left periphery"
showing 7 items of 7 documents
Wh-Relative Clauses and Left Periphery from Latin to some Romance Languages
2011
The paper is organized as follows: after an introduction of the issue we will examine, in the first section we shall discuss the theory of the antisymmetry of syntax as specifically concerns relative clauses, evidencing also problems linked to the application of this theory to the syntax of relative clauses in Latin and in other Indo-European languages; the second section will present our first attempt at some analysis of the left periphery of the Proto-Indo-European sentence; in the third section we shall discuss the categorial status of the relative pronoun in Latin and we shall produce a model of the left periphery of the Latin subordinate clause, supplying examples taken from literary a…
Defectivitat morfològica i variació sintàctica
2021
This paper discusses a case of parametric variation between Catalan and Spanish that concerns the fronting possibilities within the CP domain (the so-called ÇLeft PeripheryÈ). In particular, attention is paid to Catalan’s weak left peripheral activity, which prevents it from generating sentences that involve a Çmild focalizationÈ pattern very common in Spanish (e.g., «Mucha tontería dice el Gobierno» vs. *«Molta ximpleria diuel Govern»), first noted by Torrego (1980) and further explored by Uriagereka (1988). Interestingly, the same behavior is observed in the v*P domain, which accounts for the fact that VSO sentences (generated through movement of the subject to a specifier position, as Or…
A Few Remarks on the Left Periphery in Indo-European
2011
The paper is organized as follows: the first section describes the different perspectives which separate generative historical linguistics and conventional comparative philology; since a generative approach to Indo-European linguistics does not appear more hypothetical than the way of dealing with de syntax of the ancestor language adopted by conventional comparative philology, in the second section an attempt is made to apply the formal apparatus of generative grammar to Indo-European syntax by making some brief remarks about the so-called left periphery of the sentence of the proto-language.
Expressing perception in parallel ways. Sentential Small Clauses in German and Romance
2021
This chapter compares Pseudo-relatives (‘PRs’), a construction found in most Romance languages, with ‘Subject-wieclauses’ (‘SWs’), a German construction in which the subject of an embedded wie-clause precedes the complementizer wie (‘how’; e.g. Ich sah Maria, wie sie sang, lit. “I saw Mary, how she sung”, i.e. ‘I saw Mary singing’). We show that both constructions mainly occur with perception verbs, and that they have a very similar syntactic behaviour; e.g., they can be coordinated with adjectival or prepositional small clauses and have anaphoric tense. Furthermore, they both have a clausal nature but can modify a DP. We thus propose to extend Casalicchio’s (2016) analysis of PRs to SWs: t…
Verb-Second and (micro)-variation in two Rhaeto-Romance varieties of Northern Italy.
2018
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…
On the Syntax of Fronted Adverbial Clauses in Two Tyrolean Dialects: The Distribution of Resumptive Semm
2023
Abstract This chapter discusses adverbial resumption in two Tyrolean dialects, Meranese and Mòcheno, which represent two privileged environments for investigations on microvariation. We show that certain classes of fronted adverbials are resumed in both languages by the resumptive element semm (lit. “there, then”), which behaves semantically like a generalized resumptive because it is used with a variety of adverbial clauses. However, unlike the Norwegian generalized resumptive studied by Christine Meklenborg, semm is a maximal category and cannot resume nominal arguments. We demonstrate that resumption with semm is limited to central adverbial clauses (e.g. temporal clauses), while periphe…
Un tipus especial d'oracions interrogatives: les interrogatives escindides
2014
This paper deals with the properties of interrogative sentences with a split constituent (or split interrogatives) in Catalan and Spanish. We compare split interrogatives with Wh-questions, yes/no questions, different kinds of confirmatory questions and clitic left dislocation constructions. Split interrogatives show a very clear-cut syntactic and phonological distinction between those constituents to be interpreted as shared or old information (theme) and the constituent which receives the focus of the sentence. Following recent theoretical work on the left periphery of the sentence, we propose that the Ground Phrase projection (placed below ForceP) is especially relevant in split interrog…