Search results for "complementizer"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
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…
On the social practice of indirect reports (further advances in the theory of pragmemes)
2010
Abstract This paper deals with the social practice of indirect reports and treats them as cases of language games. It proposes a number of principles like the following: Paraphrasis/Form Principle The that-clause embedded in the verb ‘say’ is a paraphrasis of what Y said, and meets the following constraints: should Y hear what X said he (Y) had said, he would not take issue with it, as to content, but would approve of it as a fair paraphrasis of his original utterance. Furthermore, he would not object to vocalizing the assertion made out of the words following the complementizer ‘that’ on account of its form/style. Furthermore, it connects such principles with Relevance Theory consideration…
Sandwich EPP hypothesis: Evidence from child Finnish
2010
It is well-known that grammatical movement is somehow linked to functional heads. There is less agreement on the excact nature of this correlation. According to one view, phrases are moved to the specifier positions of functional heads because functional heads attract them. According to another view, movement is not triggered by functional heads alone, but depends on the larger grammatical context. For instance, one such proposal says that T (tense) becomes attractive only when selected by finite C (complementizer), while V becomes attractive when selected byv* (transitivizer). What attracts phrases are therefore the C–T system and thev*–V system as a whole, not the individual functional he…
Contact-induced phenomena in the Alps
2019
The main question underlying this chapter is to what extent language contact can affect syntactic structure. To tackle this issue we examine two relevant phenomena found in two minority languages spoken in the region Trentino-Alto Adige/South Tyrol: clitic climbing in Dolomitic Ladin and the use of the Romance complementizer ke in Cimbrian. Both phenomena are usually considered as the result of a contact-induced change influenced by the neighbouring Italo-Romance varieties. However, it is shown that the rising of clitic climbing is a language-internal process which is only accelerated by the contact with Italian. Similarly, the lexical borrowing of the complementizer ke in Cimbrian does not…
Das zweifache Komplementierersystem im Zimbrischen: Romanische Entlehnung und Eigenentwicklung
2018
Cimbrian is a German(ic) minority language which has long been in contact with Romance varieties in the Northeast of Italy and represents an ideal object of analysis for investigating some specific issues in language contact, such as the borrowing of functional words. In this article, we first provide a detailed description of the Cimbrian subordination system putting forward an analysis of both the Romance loanword ke and the native complementizer az; secondly, we try to generalize the concept of ‘functional loanword’ comparing Cimbrian with typologically different languages. In a nutshell, we propose a common grammaticalization path, by which functional words borrowed from a model languag…