Easter Term 2023
Tuesday, 25 April 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Alice Corr (University of Birmingham) & Onkar Singh (University of Cambridge) – Adjective-Noun orders in Turkish Judeo-Spanish: a case of conservatism or innovation in the nominal domain?
Abstract: By means of novel diachronic and synchronic dialectal data from Judeo-Spanish dialects -a variety for which there exists a notable paucity in dialectal data and proposals within the scholarship-, this paper explores the case of Adjective-Noun orders attested in the Turkish dialect of Judeo-Spanish. Frequently attested in speakers of Turkish Judeo-Spanish post-1930, these nominal patterns contrast with the expected Noun-Adjective orders otherwise generally attested in southern Romance, whereby it is assumed that these varieties display high N-to-D movement of nominals within the DP (viz. Strong D-languages à la Ledgeway 2015; see also Ledgeway 2020). The orders found in Turkish Judeo-Spanish are striking whereby: (i) they are indicative lower noun movement within the nominal spine à la Cinque (1999), (ii) they are not attested in other dialects of Judeo-Spanish such as those spoken in the Balkans and those in Northern Africa, and (iii) modern Turkish has a default Adj-.N order in the DP. By means of empirical data and qualitative analyses, this paper thus examines whether these Adj.-N. Orders are instances of calquing from Turkish or conservatism from old Spanish, whereby old Romance has been suggested to have had a less systematic noun movement (Ledgeway 2007, 2009). We propose these orders to be lower noun movement as part of a syntactic calque from Turkish among L1 Turkish speakers after 1930, i.e., the date when Turkish became the obligatory language of instruction in the newly-formed Republic of Turkey. Strikingly, the data from before this date shows the expected Romance pattern of higher noun movement in Turkish Judeo-Spanish, also patterning with 15th century old Spanish prior to the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula (Singh, in prep.). All in all, this paper adds to a growing literature that bridges the gap between central Ibero-Romance and Ladino varieties, whilst also adding to an increasing scholarship on internal variation in noun movement within the DP.
Tuesday, 2 May 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Víctor Acedo-Matellan (University of Oxford) & Isabel Oltra-Massuet (Universitat Rovira i Virgili), Prepositional verbs in Catalan: From event to argument structure
Abstract: Drawing on Catalan, we show how the aspectual classification of intransitive prepositional verbs—pensar en ‘think of’, al·ludir a ‘allude to’, patir de ‘suffer from’, etc.– is, partially, a predictor of their argument structure properties. Prepositional verbs qualifying as stage-level form a heterogeneous class, comprising both unergative and unaccusative verbs. By contrast, those prepositional verbs that qualify as individual-level predicates are homogenous as regards argument structure: their prepositional complement is robustly obligatory and their subject is not an external argument, suggesting that they involve an underlying small clause configuration whose predicate is the prepositional complement. This result supports a more general constraint against the encoding, as verbs, of individual-level property predicates.
Tuesday, 9 May 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Alina McLellan (University of Manchester) – ‘Sak’ relatives in Reunion Creole: light-headed or free?
Abstract: In this talk, I investigate the structure of free relative clauses in Reunion Creole (RC), a French-based Creole spoken on Reunion Island, using new data from corpora and fieldwork. The most frequent strategy for forming free relatives in RC is with sak, which has phonological variants sék, sat, sét and sad.
- Ti-Pierre té i agard trankiman sak té i espas.
Little-Pierre ipfv fin watch peacefully what ipfv fin happen
‘Little Pierre was peacefully watching what was happening.’ (Corpus, short story)
In the literature, free relatives are often described as wh-clauses because, in many languages, free relative pronouns are identical to interrogative pronouns. However, sak and variants are not interrogative pronouns, and in fact, interrogative pronouns receive low acceptability ratings (subject to syntactic, and possibly semantic, constraints) in free relatives in RC (McLellan 2023a). Instead, the form sak originates from the combination of a demonstrative (sa) and a complementiser (k), which formed a light-headed relative clause (a relative clause with a pronominal antecedent, cf. Citko (2004) among others). I argue that this once light-headed structure is developing into a true free relative structure, where sak and variants are free relative pronouns. However, at the same time that this new free relative pronoun was forming in RC, so too was a new demonstrative pronoun with the same five variant forms (sak, sék, sat, sét and sad).
- Pran loto-la, sat papa lé kasé.
take car-dem dem dad cop broken
‘Take that car, Dad’s is broken.’ (Armand 2014)
The existence of this demonstrative form is relevant to the relative clause context because I have found evidence of a second light-headed relative structure, where the new demonstrative pronoun is the head of the relative clause. The structure in (3), where sat is followed by a relative complementiser, is accepted by native speakers:
- Sat ke mwin la vi yèr lété shèr.
dem rel 1sg prf see yesterday be.ipfv expensive
‘The one that I saw yesterday was expensive.’ (Constructed; accepted in interviews)
Structures like that in (3), with a phonetically realised relative complementiser, did not occur in the corpus. However, their acceptance by native speakers raises an analytical question about sak-relatives without an overt relative complementiser (e.g. (1)): whether such relatives are light-headed relatives with a zero-marked relative clause (which is very common for headed relatives in RC (McLellan 2023a, 2023b)), or whether they are truly free relative clauses with sak (and variants) as free relative pronouns. Using Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997; Van Valin 2005, 2008; Bentley et al. forthcoming), I illustrate the differences in syntactic structure between light-headed relatives and true free relatives. I argue that sak-relatives of three different types exist or have existed at a previous stage of RC: a light-headed relative headed by sa (which is now largely obsolete), a light-headed relative headed by sak (and variants), and a true free relative. I argue that the two light-headed structures constitute two channels of grammaticalisation working towards the same result: the emergence of sak as a free relative pronoun. The diverse set of data and the co-existence of these three structures is reflective of the high degree of variation in RC and suggests that these structures are in the process of grammaticalisation, which might be at different stages for different linguistic groups or individuals on the island.
Tuesday, 16 May 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Imanol Suárez-Palma (University of Florida) – On dative possessors and middle-passive constructions in Spanish
Abstract: In this talk, I will revisit the phenomenon of inalienable possession (and lack thereof) and external possession by looking at data from different types of Spanish middle constructions. I will address issues pertaining to information structure and argument structure. First, I will look at middle-passive sentences, i.e., generic predicates denoting intrinsic properties of the verb’s internal argument, which surfaces preverbally as the grammatical subject due to its status as a sentential topic (Sánchez López 2002). When the theme in these sentences is a relational/body-part noun, it can be inalienably possessed internally or externally, by means of a possessive determiner (1a) or a dative possessor (1c-f), respectively; the dative DP in these contexts tends to occur preverbally (1c-e).
(1) What happens?
a. (Que) sus cicatrices se ven fácilmente.
b. ?(Que) se ven sus cicatrices fácilmente.
c. (Que) a Martai se lei ven [las cicatrices]i fácilmente .
d. (Que) [las cicatrices]i a Martai se lei ven fácilmente.
e. (Que) a Martai [las cicatrices]i se lei ven fácilmente.
f. ?(Que) [las cicatrices]i se lei ven a Martai fácilmente.
These configurations, therefore, can be used to provide further insight into the position preverbal datives and subjects occupy in Spanish. I will show data suggesting that the dative DP in (1c) occupies the preverbal subject position –presumably Spec,TP–, forcing the theme to remain inside the VP; this is also the case for the preverbal dative in (1d), whose theme appears left-dislocated. However, in (1e) the dative DP is the constituent that is clearly left-dislocated, while the theme appears to sit in the subject position. If that is the case, an analysis whereby the dative possessor DP originates in the specifier of a low applicative projection responsible for establishing the static relation of possession with the theme in its complement position (Low-ApplAT, following Cuervo 2003) will violate minimality when accounting for the derivation in (1e). In this scenario, an empty category of some sort would have to merge in Spec,ApplP to stand for the possessor, and this null pronominal –being structurally closer to Tº than the theme– would intervene when Tº tries to probe the latter to its specifier. In order to avoid this technical problem, I will propose that these preverbal dative DPs and theme DPs are in fact clitic left dislocations coindexed with resumptive empty pronominals inside the sentence; this proposal aligns with Barbosa’s (2009) analysis for preverbal subjects in Romance consistent null subject languages.
Additionally, I will address the fact that the inalienable possession construal that commonly arises between a dative DP and a body-part noun becomes optional in the context of verbs denoting a change of state (2a). I will offer an analysis to structurally account for these data that combines the notion of possessor raising (Deal 2017) and middle/affected applicatives (Cuervo 2003, 2010). This argument introducing functional head merges “sandwiched” between two subevents in change-of-state contexts, conferring the dative DP originating in its specifier the interpretation of affected by the theme’s resulting state (2b). Furthermore, the dative DP may be understood as the accidental causer of the change of state if Appl merges on top of a dynamic subevent (vGO, in Cuervo’s terms). In these two scenarios, the dative DP can also be interpreted as the alienable possessor of the theme. Crucially, I will show that the inalienable possessor reading of the dative in change-of-state contexts containing a body-part noun is only available when the possessor is also affected by the body-part, i.e., when ApplP merges below vP, but never when the dative is also the accidental causer, i.e., when Appl is on top of the outermost vP. I will explain how these contrasts can be accounted for by a hybrid approach to inalienable possession in Spanish.
(2) a. A Martai, [lasi/arb/tusk verrugas] se lei congelan fácilmente.
‘Marta’s warts freeze easily.’
‘(Your) warts freeze easily on Marta.’
‘Marta accidentally causes (your) warts to freeze easily.’
b. A Juani se lei quemó la hamburguesa.
‘The/his burger burned and Juan is affected by it.’
‘Juan accidentally caused (the/his) burger to burn.’
c. A Juani se lei congelaron [los dedos]i
‘Juan’s fingers froze, and he’s affected by it.’
Less transparent: ‘The fingers were frozen for Juan.’
Impossible: ‘Juan accidentally froze his own fingers.’
Tuesday, 23 May 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Chiara Gianollo (University of Bologna) – From “alter”/”alius” to “altro”: ambiguity and context-dependence of “other” in Latin and Italian
Abstract: The cross-linguistic investigation of the expression of ‘other’ is made challenging by a series of factors, among which the variety of lexicalization patterns, the widespread polysemy, and the strong context-dependence of the disambiguation strategies play a particularly relevant role (Beck 2000, Breban 2003, Eguren & Sánchez 2004, Oxford 2010, Charnavel 2015, Cinque 2015, Brugè 2017, 2018 a.o.). In Italian, as in many other languages within and outside Romance, a fundamental ambiguity is observable between the additive (1) and the substitutive (non-identity) reading (2):
(1) Il tracciamento dei contatti è essenziale per sconfiggere la pandemia. Un’altra misura da mettere in atto è, inoltre / # invece, il distanziamento sociale.
‘Contact tracing is essential to overcome the pandemic. A further measure to be applied is, moreover / # instead, social distancing.’
(2) Si ritiene che il virus sia stato trasmesso agli esseri umani dal pipistrello. Un’altra ipotesi riconduce il salto di specie, invece / #inoltre, al pangolino.
‘The virus is believed to have been transmitted to humans by the bat. A different hypothesis traces back the spillover, instead / # moreover, to the pangolin’
(Gianollo & Mauri 2020: 132)
In the disambiguation between the two readings, contextual factors such as discourse relations, definiteness / indefiniteness and grammatical number are crucial. In this talk, after discussing the main dimensions of variation and the contextual factors involved, I will explore to what extent the additive / substitutive ambiguity was present in Latin and how it interacted with the lexicalized difference between the dual determiner alter ‘other (of two)’ and alius ‘other (of more than two)’ and with the absence of articles (Bertocchi et al. 2010, Bortolussi 2015: 173-243). Historically, alter is continued as lexicalization of ‘other’ in Romance (e.g. Fr. autre, Sp. otro, Pt. outro, Rom. alt, Sard. àtteru , Rhaet. auter), which is in principle surprising in view of its more specialized meaning. Bertocchi et al (2010: 160-161) propose to connect the loss of the difference between Latin alter and alius to the development of articles. I will elaborate on this observation and discuss the contribution of the Late Latin in this respect.
References
Beck, Sigrid. 2000. The semantics of different: comparison operator and relational adjective. Linguistics and Philosophy 23, 101–139.
Bertocchi, Alessandra, Mirka Maraldi & Anna Orlandini. 2010. Quantification. In Philip Baldi & Pierluigi Cuzzolin (eds.), New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax, vol. 3, 19–173. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bortolussi, Bernard. 2015. Syntaxe des indéfinis latins. Quis, quisque, alius. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne.
Breban, Tine, 2003. The grammaticalization of adjectives of identity and difference in English and Dutch. Languages in Contrast 4.1, 165–199.
Brugè, Laura. 2017. Otras reflexiones sobre otro. Rassegna iberistica 40.108, 225–252.
Brugè, Laura. 2018. Otro: Consideraciones a favor de su no inclusión en la categoría determinante. Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, 7.2, 109–134.
Charnavel, Isabelle. 2015. Same, different and other as comparative adjectives – A uniform analysis based on French. Lingua 156, 129–174.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2015. A note on ‘other’. In Cinque, Guglielmo (ed.), Charting the Landscape of Linguistics. Webschrift for Josef Bayer. Konstanz: Universität Konstanz, 22–27.
Eguren, Luis & Cristina Sánchez. 2004. Contrast and addition in Romance: A case study in microvariation. In Auger, Julie, Clancy J. Clements, Barbara Vance (eds.), Contemporary Approaches to Romance Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 159–176.
Gianollo, Chiara & Caterina Mauri. 2020. Uno, l’altro e un altro ancora: ambiguità dell’alterità tra sincronia e diacronia. Quaderni di Semantica Special issue, 131–174.
Oxford, Will 2010. Same, other, and different: A first look at the microsyntax of identity adjectives. Proceedings of the 2010 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, 1–15.
Tuesday, 30 May 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Elena Isolani (University of Cambridge) – A parametric analysis of verb movement and non-standard questions in NIDs
Abstract:
Background: The Parametric Comparison Method (PCM) is a tool for language comparison developed over the last two decades (Longobardi, 2003, 2018; Longobardi & Guardiano, 2009; Longobardi et al., 2013, 2015; Guardiano & Longobardi, 2017; Ceolin et al., 2020) which takes sets of syntactic parameters from different languages as input to computations and output phylogenies of those languages. One of the main benefits of the PCM is the possibility of its expansion in terms of the languages under analysis and the parameters included. While Longobardi et. al focused on the nominal parameters and Baker & Roberts (2021) on the clausal parameters, this further expansion involves the complementizer domain (CP). As for the languages tested, whereas the studies on the other functional domains embraced the traditional language family (Romance, Germanic, Slavic, etc.), this research attempts to provide a more language-specific parametric comparison addressing the Romance varieties spoken in the Italian peninsula. This presentation aims to present some preliminary results retrieved from the application of the PCM to the CP on Northern Italian dialects (NIDs).
The parameters: The selection of the parameters was carriedoutby adopting the cartographic framework; for each head of the split CP (Rizzi, 1997), a sub-list of parameters was generated, for a total of 101 parameters. Several parameters were formulated in terms of formal features on functional heads. Following Gianollo et al. (2008), the grammaticalisation, checking, spreading, and strength of functional features were verified to account for numerous phenomena characterizing the CP. Other parameters, instead, account for further salient patterns of variations in CP. Once the value of each parameter was assigned, languages were compared in pairs by means of the syntactic distance: the distance between two languages is δ (0 > δ > 1) determined by the following formula for the ordered pair <i, d> (where i = the number of identities in parameter values and d = the number of differences): d/(i+d).
The parameterization of Verb Movement: In order to describe verb movement to the C-layer, it is vital to make a distinction between (at least) two possible target positions, namely FinP and ForceP, located at the two extreme edges of the CP (Rizzi, 1997).
| Verb to ForceP | Verb to FinP |
| Pc1 – Strong [F]: Does [F] move from a low position to ForceP? | Pc3: Strong [F]: Does [F] move from a low position to FinP? |
| Pc2: [F] on the verb: Does the verb, carrying [F], move from a low position to ForceP? | Pc4: [F] on the verb: Does the verb, carrying [F], move from a low position to FinP? |
| Pc5: Residual V2: Is V2 property only realized in embedded clauses? |
Pc1 and Pc3 ask whether a feature [F] carried by any element can move from a lower position to ForceP or FinP respectively. Pc2 and Pc4 regulate whether [F] can move while endowed by the verb. Finally, Pc5 determines an empirical context where V-FinP occurs, namely cases of Residual V2 that in Romance languages are characterized by the so-called Aux-to-Comp constructions. While this schema shows the specific relations between parameters, it fails to empirically represent V-ForceP. Traditionally, V-ForceP languages have a poor verbal pre-field resulting in a low occurrence of V3 and V4 (Wolfe, 2016). In this study, we find a similar pattern in Fiorentino compound structures where the complementizer ‘che’ (that) is omitted.Fiorentino stands out with respect to other Italo-Romance varieties as it accepts complementizer deletion (CD) in several syntactic contexts with, apparently, the sole requirement of an intervening clitic-nature element (a preverbal clitic, a preverbal negator or an auxiliary) between the matrix and embedded verbs (Cocchi & Poletto, 2002). According to Cocchi & Poletto (2002), this clitic element moves from an embedded position to Force°, traditionally filled by the declarative complementizer. In this presentation I will propose that the clitic forms a unique unit with the verb, meaning that embracing the idea that CD involves clitic movement to Force (Cocchi & Poletto, 2002), verb movement along with the clitic need to be hypothesized as well.
The Parametrization of Non-Standard Questions (NSQ): For NSQs, we indicate some interrogative structures that are not uttered in out-of-the-blue contexts, but that require a specific semantic/pragmatic context in order to be felicitous. More than two decades of literature on this topic provided a tripartite classification of NSQs (Munaro & Obenauer, 1999; Obenauer & Poletto, 2000; Obenauer, 2012; Hinterholzl & Munaro, 2021): Surprise-Disapproval Interrogative, Can’t-find-the-value-of-X Interrogative and Rhetorical Interrogatives. For each type of NSQ, four parameters were considered regulating the phenomena involved in their realizations.
- PC6: Are NSQs syntactically realized in the same way as standard questions?
- PC7: Are NSQs realized through a discourse particle?
- PC8: Are NSQs realized through wh-movement?
- PC9: Are NSQs realized through a cleft structure?
In this presentation, I will illustrate the parametrization of NSQs in several NIDs, primarily focusing on three Veneto dialects: Bellunese, Trevisano and a variety of Polesano. Although these three varieties have similar syntactic properties, they behave differently with respect to the realization of NSQs, indeed they set a positive value of PC6 and PC8 depending on the type of NSQ analysed. The analysis of NSQs is particularly relevant for the outcome of the study as it confirms a comparative pattern among these three varieties that is conclusively established by the calculation of the syntactic distance.
Selected references:
Guardiano, C., & Longobardi, G. (2017). Parameter theory and parametric comparison. In I. Roberts (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Universal Grammar (pp. 377–400). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Munaro, N., & Obenauer, H. (1999). On Underspecified Wh-elements in Pseudointerrogatives. University Of Venice Working Papers In Linguistics, 9(1-2), 181-25.
Rizzi, L. (1997). The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery. In L. Haegeman, Elements of Grammar (pp. 281– 337). Dordrecht: Springer.
Link: Please register via the following link: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJckdOyupzsjEtReuuPopJfbTOywhWTe3p1C.
Tuesday, 6 June 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Wyn Shaw (University of Oxford) – The History of Subject Verb Inversions in French
Tuesday, 13 June 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Susann Fischer (University of Hamburg) – On experiencer doubling and other internal arguments in Spanish and Catalan
Tuesday, 20 June 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
James Corbet (University of Newcastle) – The perfect road and imperfect reassembly: The use of Spanish tense-aspect morphology by heritage speakers in the UK
Tuesday, 27 June 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Marco Fioratti (University of Cambridge) – Microvariation in Romance inversion: from northern Italian dialects to a pan-Romance perspective
Lent Term 2023
Tuesday, 21 March 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Valentina Cojocaru (University of Bucharest and Romanian Academy, Institue of Linguistics) – Language contact and discourse markers. A case study on the Romanian variety spoken in Moldova
Abstract: The Romanian variety spoken in The Republic of Moldova, also known as Moldovan Daco‑Romanian, has recently aroused many linguists’ interest (Ștefănescu 2016, Costea 2017, 2018, a.o). For more than 200 years, Moldovan Daco-Romanian has been under intense language contact with Russian, being isolated from standard Daco-Romanian. These factors led to two unavoidable phenomena: (1) introduction of Russian elements into various areas of vocabulary, phonology, morphology, and syntax; (2) preservation of numerous features from old Romanian at all levels of the language.
Given sociolinguistic considerations, it is little surprising, therefore, that the syntax or morphology preserved certain features, but what is quite surprising instead is finding old Romanian features at the discourse level, the level of spontaneous speech, subject to change and innovation. Alongside Russian discourse markers, which are quite numerous and very frequent in spontaneous speech (koroche ‘in other words’/‘long story short’/‘so’/‘anyway’, ladno ‘ok’, polyubomu ‘anyway’, pohodu ‘looks like’/‘it seems that’/‘apparently’, tipa ‘seemingly’/‘sort of’/‘like’ (just to give very few examples with their approximate translations in English)), there are several “local” discourse markers, some of them being attested in the historical region of Moldavia since the end of nineteenth century: mătincă‘I think (that)’, psinică‘it seems (that)’/‘probably’, de-amu ‘already’/‘from now on’ (Iordan 1950, Dimitrescu 1958, Ivănescu 1980, Arvinte 2002).
In the present contribution we focus on the analysis of linguistic interferences at the level of discourse markers following two major lines of research: pragmatics and sociolinguistics. The pragmatic approach considers the types of discourse markers used, their functions, the context in which they appear, the type of speech acts they relate to, etc.; whereas the sociolinguistic approach explores the background of discourse markers production considering linguistic and extralinguistic factors. The socio-pragmatic analysis of discourse markers is based on a corpus that contains samples of text messages, chat conversations and recorded spontaneous speech (some of them are published in Bochmann 2002; and others (those recorded by myself) are to be published).
Tuesday, 14 March 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Norma Schifano (University of Birmingham) – Innovation and preservation in UK Ecuadorian Spanish: a preliminary morphosyntactic investigation
Abstract: Overlooked by official statistical data and largely absent from academic investigations, the Latin Americans living in the UK represent one of the least visible migrant communities of the country, despite being one of the fastest growing groups of the capital. While progress has been made in sociology, surprisingly little is known about the grammatical properties of their languages. Focusing on the Spanish-speaking population, the project ‘Heritage Speakers of Spanish: the case of Latin American Londoners’ aims to fill this gap by producing the first grammatical documentation and analysis of their varieties of Spanish. In this presentation, I will concentrate my attention on the preliminary results based on a first set of investigations centred on the Ecuadorian variety, with specific reference to the expression of evidential and (ad)mirative values via synthetic (canté ‘I sang’) vs analytic perfect (he cantado ‘I have sung’) verb forms. From a contact perspective, it has already been shown that these innovative values which characterise the he cantado form of Ecuadorian Spanish can be lost under the pressure exerted by other varieties of Spanish, as in the case of Ecuadorian speakers living in Madrid for a sustained period of time (Palacios 2007). The question therefore arises as to whether the same is happening in the UK and whether the attested changes (if any) can be ascribed to contact with English and/or with other Spanish varieties and/or are due to a process of spontaneous change. Preliminary results from 14 speakers (including one control group from Ecuador and one from Spain) will be presented, gathered via an aural preference task and a production task. It will be shown that patterns diverging from the Ecuadorian norm can be found not only among Ecuadorian speakers who have lived in Spain for a sustained period of time before reaching the UK, as expected, but also among speakers with a short-medium period of UK residency who have moved directly from Ecuador. Notably, my preliminary sample also includes speaker with a medium-long UK residency and middle-sustained English contact who have remained remarkably close to the Ecuadorian norm. The interplay between sociolinguistic and linguistic factors will be discussed, as well as some of the consequences for existing theories on language contact.
Tuesday, 7 March 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Guglielmo Cinque (“Ca’ Foscari” University of Venice) – A movement approach to DP-internal ellipsis
Abstract: In this talk I consider a particular generalization concerning ellipsis within the extended nominal projection: ellipsis can target a nominal modifier only if all constituents below it are also elided. Building on an analysis of ellipsis grounded on movement to left edges I suggest that this generalization follows from a condition on DP-internal movement proposed in Cinque 2005 to derive Greenberg’s Universal 20.
Tuesday, 28 February 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Maria Cristina Cuervo (University of Toronto) – The Problem of Tritransitives
Abstract: This research describes and analyzes a particular construction involving inalienable possession of a body part by an external dative possessor. The relevant sentences comprise four participants, three of which appear as internal arguments: a theme DP, a locative PP and a dative possessor DP, as illustrated in (1).
(1) a. Jean lui a mis un chapeau sur la tête. (French)
‘Jean put a hat on his head’
b. María le puso el bebé en los brazos a Emilio. (Spanish)
c. Maria i-a pus copilul in brate lui Emil. (Romanian)
‘Maria placed the baby in Emilio’s arms’
These tritransitives share properties with related constructions discussed in the literature on external possession but their specific properties have not been investigated. Tritransitives present several puzzles that are not straightforwardly explained, either by studies of verb classes, current theories of argument licensing or by typological approaches to external possession. In particular, tritransitives raise questions about argument licensing, syntactic relations between arguments and their interpretation, and the notions of valence and transitivity.
As the first step of a crosslinguistic investigation, the main focus is on Spanish, in which, similar to Romanian but in contrast with French, dative possessor constructions are less restricted along several dimensions, such as the types of nouns and possession relation involved, the referentiality of the possessum, the syntactic expression of the dative as a full clitic-doubled DP, and the types of verbs that are compatible with this construal. A descriptive overview of Spanish TTRs is presented.
The problem with tritransitives goes beyond the classic challenge of accounting for the apparent thematic licensing of the dative DP as the possessor of the locative and its status as a clausal, affected argument. Unlike other dative possessors in Romance, these datives cannot be analyzed as taking the possessum as its complement, in a double-object or Figure-Ground structure, as this seems to be the structural relation between the direct object and the locative PP to the exclusion of the dative DP. Further, corpus data show that TTRs are not restricted to inalienable possession, as evidenced in (2), which makes a raising analysis less attractive.
(2) Emilio le instaló una canilla nueva en la cocina a Gabi. [buscar en corpus]
‘Emilio installed a new faucet in the kitchen for Gabi/in Gabi’s kitchen’
These constructions are better explained by an applicative analysis whereby the dative DP structurally relates to the small-clause type relation between the theme and the locative. As such, this configuration—typically expressing a change of location event—is to be distinguished from the better studied Romance external possession cases in which the possessor relates directly to the other internal argument (French Jean lui a lavé les chevaux; Spanish Emilio la besó en la frente, Romanian Maria se spălat pe mâini). Instead, the dative DP in TTRs shares properties with datives in change of state constructions (both causative and inchoative) in which it is interpreted as the “possessor” of the the new state of the object (Emilio le rompió la radio a Carolina ‘Emilio broke Carolina’s radio on her’—> Carolina has a broken radio). This relation underlies the affectedness interpretation arising configurationally from arguments related to a state (or location) embedded under a dynamic event. This suggests, in line with much recent work on argument structure, that the underlying structure of TTRs is not exclusive of external possession, and, conversely, that external possession sentences can rely on distinct underlying configurations.
Some broader implications are considered for theories of valence, argument licensing and interpretation, and typological approaches to applicatives and external possession.
Tuesday, 21 February 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Paolo Acquaviva (University College Dublin) – Varieties of definiteness and constructionist interpretation
Abstract: Grammatical categories are not the same thing as logical ones, but logic is the necessary basis to model the meaning of morphemes expressing Boolean operators, (in-)definiteness, or universal/existential quantification. Yet these are distinctly linguistic elements, whose contents vary across languages and also across constructions. I would like to consider in some detail the variety of contents expressed by definite marking, focusing on the diverse but mutually comparable phenomena offered by the Romance family. Names, mass terms, and kind terms are particularly important as they highlight how definite articles can contribute to the interpretation of a complex structure without either being the source of definiteness (uniqueness, familiarity) nor being ‘expletive’.
Tuesday, 14 February 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Ares Llop Naya (Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge), Anna Paradís (University of Oxford), Eloi Puig-Mayenco (King’s College London) – An exploration of the development of Negative concord items in Ln Catalan: the case of L1 English, L1 Italian, L1 Portuguese and L1 Spanish speakers
Abstract: In this talk we are going to present a comprehensive study on the representation of negation in the multilingual grammars of non-native speakers of Romance languages throughout development. Our approach provides a fresh insight on how the negative system, specifically NCIs in non-veridical contexts, is represented in the grammar of learners of Catalan at different stages of development and how this non-native grammatical system interacts with both other already-acquired systems of negation and the implicit and explicit linguistic evidence about the way the negative system works in Catalan presented in Catalan Ln textbooks. Our study contributes to the further understanding of which intra and extralinguistic factors model L3/Ln developmental trajectories (e.g., Cabrelli Amaro et al., 2020; Cabrelli and Iverson, submitted; Puig-Mayenco, et al. 2022).
To do so, we examine Catalan Negative Concord Items (ningú ‘nobody’, res ‘nothing’, cap+DP ‘no+DP’ and mai ‘never’) in non-veridical contexts (questions and conditions) by 82 participants (L1 Portuguese, L1 Italian, L1 Spanish and L1 English speakers). The interpretation of Catalan NCIs patterns alike in these contexts with English NPIs and Italian NCIs and differently from Spanish and Portuguese NCIs. The choice of these L1s, contexts and items allows us to manipulate and explore the interaction between languages spoken, classroom evidence and availability in input and more importantly, how this might predict L3/Ln developmental patterns.
We devised a truth-value judgment task in Catalan that allowed us to tap into the interpretation of NCIs by the targeted learners. In the tasks participants read a context and saw a sentence with a target NCI and were asked to say whether the sentence was true or false. There were three main conditions (fillers, non-veridical condition and anti-veridical condition) with 32 items in each, each condition manipulated lexical item (ningú, res, cap, mai), directionality of truth-value (true vs false) and within the non-veridical condition, we further manipulated the operator (conditional and question). In total, there were 96 experimental items. In addition, participants responded a background questionnaire eliciting information regarding the language background, and exposure to Catalan and took a short proficiency test in Catalan.
The results of the study indicate that previously acquired knowledge plays an important role early on. Italian provides a facilitation effect from the very beginning, whereas Portuguese and Spanish provide non-facilitation. English does not provide facilitation where it could have done so. Regarding development, our results show that overcoming non-facilitation is not straightforward. L1 Portuguese and L1 Spanish speakers do not overcome such non-facilitation and L1 English speakers do so quite quickly. L1 Italian speakers do slightly worse as proficiency increases, which we argue it is potentially an effect from the actual teaching itself.
We discuss the results in in relation to current theories of morphosyntactic transfer (e.g., Fallah, et al., 2016; Rothman, 2015; Rothman et al., 2019; Slabakova, 2017; Westergaard, 2020) and recent proposals that explicate developmental patterns in L3 acquisition (Cabrelli and Iverson, Submitted) and we build links with language pedagogy research and how NCIs are taught in the Catalan Ln classroom. We will end the presentation by presenting an SLA-and-language-pedagogy-informed teaching sequence of the negative system of Catalan as a Foreign Language (CFL) for multilingual learners based on the results of the empirical study. The proposed sequence considers the evidence from our study and follows a spiral curriculum-based approach (Bruner, 1960) to the teaching of non-veridical contexts in Catalan, from ab initio (A1) to proficient (C2) levels. The learner is exposed to explicit input (with focus-on-form activities, Long 1991) and to implicit input throughout the learning path, and to multiple and various cues that allow them to subsequently access the properties of all NCIs (see encoding variability hypothesis, Edmonds et al. 2021). The proposal provides strategies to enhance the input and to increase the availability, saliency and the accessibility of the more difficult and opaque forms.
Tuesday, 7 February 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Julio Villa-García (University of Oviedo) – On the extrasententiality of left dislocations
Abstract: In this talk I argue for a bisentential, paratactic account of Hanging Topic Left Dislocations (HTLDs) in Romance and English, wherein the structurally unconnected hanging topic phrase (Cambridge) is the remnant of an elliptical copulative sentence linearly juxtaposed to the second, host sentence (I’ve been there) à la Ott (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017). This proposal represents a natural extension of Ott’s system for Clitic Left Dislocations (ClLDs) and predicative non-restrictive nominal appositives. At the same time, the analysis constitutes a radical departure from integrated, monosentential approaches which analyze HTs as intrasentential, albeit left-peripheral, constituents in the left spine of the clause.
The paratactic approach provides a principled account of various issues raised by monosentential analyses of HTs within cartography (e.g., anticonnectivity, agreement mismatches, coreference with the resumptive/epithetic correlate, insensitivity to locality constraints, islandhood, Case, potential presence of interjections between HT and host sentence, “comma intonation”/pause potential, different illocutionary force, amongst others). The account is also successful in capturing orphaned topics, which are not linked to any constituent in the sentence they occur with, alongside what I term hyperdetached HTs.
Tuesday, 31 January 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
James Hawkey (University of Bristol) – Variation in Spanish past perfectives: Aoristic drift in a situation of complex language contact
Abstract: Romance varieties differ in their usage of preterit and present perfect verb tenses. Both are past perfectives, but whereas Portuguese uses the preterit in most contexts, spoken French prefers the present perfect. Peninsular Spanish lies between the two, though evidence indicates that the present perfect is becoming the default past perfective (Schwenter and Torres Cacoullos 2008) in a process of ‘aoristic drift’ (Squartini and Bertinetto 2000). How does speaker multilingualism affect this? Semi-structured interviews were conducted with second-generation members of the Portuguese diaspora in Andorra. We might expect native competence in Portuguese to inhibit aoristic drift in Spanish, since contact has been shown to affect past perfective verb tense in other Romance varieties (Gili Gaya 1993, Hawkey 2020). Contrary to expectations, participants demonstrated aoristic drift. Dense and multiplex migrant networks are, however, shown to favour the maintenance of vernacular norms (Milroy 1980), including generalising the function of the present perfect.
Tuesday, 24 January 2023 (12-1pm, UK time)
Gabriel Martínez Vera (University of Newcastle) – ‘Dizque’ and ‘como que’: a comparative analysis
Abstract: Evidentiality encodes information about the speaker’s relationship to the source of a statement (v. Aikhenvald 2004). Although evidential marking occupies a fixed position in the clause in many languages, two evidential markers, dizque and como que, in Colombian Spanish (from Medellin) can appear in different positions (v. (1)-(2); these are based on Grajales 2017). We provide a unified account of the clausal- and constituent-scope of these markers in an approach that likens them to focus sensitive elements, such as even.
(1) a. Dizque va a llover esta noche.
‘Allegedly, it is going to rain tonight.’
b. Como que va a llover esta noche.
‘It looks like it is going to rain tonight.’
(2) a. Juan trajo dizque un compás marino, que resultó ser un visor de fotos.
‘Juan brought an alleged sea compass, that ended up being a photo viewer.’
b. Juan trajo como que un compás marino, que resultó ser un visor de fotos.
‘Juan brought a kind of a sea compass, that ended up being a photo viewer.’
References
Aikhenvald, A. (2004). Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grajales, R. 2017. La estrategia evidencial dizque en el español de Medellín, Colombia. Onomázein 37. 244–278.
**Thursday**, 19 January 2023 (**12.30-1.30pm**, UK time)
Afra Pujol i Campeny (University of Oxford) – XVS in old Catalan
Abstract: This talk explores the distribution, syntax, and information structure of XVS clauses in the narrative text and the reported speech of a 13th century Old Catalan chronicle, the Llibre dels Fets. It is shown that XVS occurs mainly within reported speech and in embedded clauses, responding to the archaising nature of these syntactic domains (the former reproducing syntactic structures echoing epic literature, the latter being inherently archaising syntactically), while XVS less frequent in narrative text, more innovative and closer to spoken language. The data presented demonstrates that by the 13th century, XVS constructions were mainly used to express verum focus within the scope of nonveridical operators and not to a structural V2 requirement. This conclusion is supported by 11th data from legal sources and data from a 14th century chronicle.
Tuesday, 10 January 2023 (**12-1pm**, UK time)
Fernanda Pratas (University of Lisbon) – Time notions in human language: empirical clues from Caboverdean
Abstract: This talk will focus on the expression of some temporal meanings in Caboverdean, a Portuguese-related language, under the assumption that a comprehensive analysis of these phenomena crosslinguistically must consider their relation to a few fundamental time notions, such as: (a) certain temporal locations are perceived/presented as somehow detached from the speaker (cf. Binnick 2010; Bybee et al 1994); in Pratas (2021) it is proposed that a low accessibility is indeed the value conveyed by the suffix -ba, which appears with verbs in some past meanings and also with verbs – in contexts which might otherwise be analysed as modal – that correspond to infinitives in other languages; and (b) the nature of time may be perceived/presented by the speaker as involving some kind of motion, which is expressed by the use of the verbs ben ‘come’ and bá ‘go’ with a specific temporal import (Pratas, forthcoming).
Michaelmas Term 2022
Tuesday, 11 October 2022 (1 – 2.15pm, UK time)
Ian Roberts (University of Cambridge) & Dalina Kallulli (University of Vienna) – On Voice
Abstract: In this talk, we focus on the morphosyntactic and semantic properties of a range of constructions involving non-active voice and/or reflexive morphology across Romance and beyond. We show that if we treat reflexives as involving Voice, they fit into a consistent, independently attested pattern of cross-linguistic variation in properties of functional heads, allowing us to derive the syntactically different constructions (reflexive, anticausative, middle, passive) exhibiting such morphology in a unified manner. Specifically, we will argue for the general cross-linguistic schema in (1), whereby (i) Voice licenses the Internal Argument in all cases but in differing ways; (ii) in the case of reflexives, there is a Voice-feature (refl) which marks the predicate as reflexive (along the general lines of Reinhart & Reuland 1993), with the dimensions of variation involving (a) the exponence of Voice (clitic, affix, auxiliary, zero …); and (b) the nature of the IA (pro, weak pronoun e.g. sich, special/body-part pronoun e.g. X-self, …), which in turn are part of a more general pattern of variation.
(1) [VoiceP Voice … [VP V IA ]]
We will conclude with some general reflections on the nature of the external argument of passives.
Tuesday, 18 October 2022 (1 – 2.15pm, UK time)
Prudence de Pontbriand (University of Göttingen) – Null Objects in Old French: Scoping out syntactic and semantic restrictions
Abstract: The aim of the talk is to provide a preliminary profile of null objects in Old French (with a particular emphasis on prose texts from the 13th century). The talk will focus on potential restrictions, either semantic or syntactic, that can be found with regards to null objects. In this research, null objects are taken to be phonologically null elements base-generated in the complement position of the verb (Roberge and Cummins, 2005). They correspond most frequently to a salient pronominal element with an antecedent mentioned in the preceding context.
(1) Et quant il voit venir Galaad si (-) vet a l’ encontre
and when he sees come.INF Galahad thus goes to the=meeting
‘And when he sees Galahad coming, he goes to meet (-)’ (Queste del Saint Graal, II, 43)
The present talk will show that, while Old French does not display absolute restrictions with regards to null objects, we can observe strong tendencies in their semantic and syntactic properties. This observation is especially true concerning their semantic properties, where animacy and specificity appear to play a very important role. With regards to their syntactic properties, null objects allow more variation but they still show a preference for a specific bundle of properties (namely 3rd person singular direct objects).
Tuesday, 25 October 2022 (1 – 2.15pm, UK time)
Annamaria Chilà (University of Messina) – La classe flessiva dei plurali in -a in calabrese meridionale e siciliano
Abstract: Le varietà calabresi meridionali e quelle siciliane presentano, accanto ai plurali in -i e, più raramente, in -ora, numerose forme di plurale in -a. Il talk si propone di offrire un confronto tra i dialetti calabresi e quelli siciliani, considerando in particolare i due seguenti aspetti:
1) Sul versante morfologico, i diversi meccanismi di espansione dei plurali in -a nel lessico. Nel solo siciliano, questi plurali scavalcano la barriera dell’inanimatezza, catturando i derivati [+ animati] e [+ umani] suffissati in -turi (piscatura ‘i pescatori’), -uni (patruna ‘i padroni’) ed -aru (putiara ‘i bottegai’), e sembrerebbero dunque più produttivi e vitali che non in calabrese. La produttività, tuttavia, non si misura solo in termini di type frequency sulla base di un’espansione interna al lessico, ma anche dalla capacità di innescare processi morfologici. Da questo punto di vista, il mantenimento della flessione in -a nelle forme alterate del calabrese (brazzicedda ‘braccini’, jiritedda ‘ditini’) diagnostica la non trascurabile vitalità di tale classe anche in queste varietà.
2) Sul versante sintattico, la presenza vs. assenza di un accordo dedicato in -a. Il calabrese meridionale mostra(va), seppur con tratti di forte recessività, una desinenza dedicata -a anche nei target dell’accordo. Ce ne sono esempi, per il calabrese di età medievale, nel ricettario medico di Luca Geracitano da Stilo (un poco de linni arsa ‘un po’ di legni bruciati’; falli bevere la celebrella de lo gallo ‘fagli bere le cervella del gallo’); per quello moderno, nelle cc. AIS 919-920 (i ligna cotta ndumanu boni ‘la legna secca brucia bene’). Questo accordo non è documentato in siciliano, dove, come conferma il corpus Artesia già per la fase medievale, tanto i nomi in -a quanto quelli in -ora presentano accordo plurale in -i.
Tuesday, 1 November 2022 (1 – 2.15pm, UK time)
Sonia Cyrino (State University of Campinas ‘UNICAMP’) – More on negation in Brazilian Portuguese
Abstract: It has been shown in several works (Schwenter 2005, Cavalcante 2007, 2012, Biberauer & Cyrino 2009, Cyrino & Biberauer 2009, Teixeira de Sousa 2015) that Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has three positions for the negative marker não in sentential negation (não-V, não-VP-não, and V-não), and they are related to different pragmatic/discourse functions. However, a fourth and reportedly recent position for the negative marker has been noted in the literature about BP (Cyrino 2010, 2013, De Paula 2014): não is possible between an auxiliary and an uninflected verb, that is, in the slot in the structure AUX ___ V[-finite]. In this talk, I advance an analysis for this new position of não in BP. Although syncretic with sentential negation, I show that this negative marker is an instance of constituent negation. Following the nanosyntax approach in DeClercq (2013), I entertain the hypothesis that this fourth não is a Focneg item in contemporary BP, as the result of a diachronic reanalysis. I propose that Focnão has its origin in prefixal não-, with which it is syncretic. It has been detected (Campos 2002, 2009; Pereira 2012) that prefixal não- was rarely used in the 16th century, becoming more frequent in the 20th century. Since contemporary BP has been shown (Cyrino 2010, 2013) to allow certain elements such as clitics and emphatic subjects to occur in the AUX ___ V[-finite] structure, the diachronic reanalysis of the prefixal não- into Focneg might have been facilitated.
Tuesday, 8 November 2022 (1 – 2.15pm, UK time)
Eva-Maria Remberger (University of Vienna) & Natascha Pomino (University of Wuppertal) – Romance theme vowels: Not just ornamental morphemes, but not syntactic elements either
Abstract: Theme vowels (ThV) are considered by many linguists (e.g. Oltra-Massuet 1999) to be mere ornamental elements without any effect on syntax and semantics (see however Fábregas 2017). We agree with the idea that ThVs are not to be confused with the realizations of the verbalizer v°, but we would like to show that they are not as ornamental as one may think. Work on the systematicity of stem allomorphy has shown that irregularity of inflected elements is related to a reduced number of affixes of these forms (cf. Vanden Wyngaerd 2018). In Romance, many irregular verbs lack a ThV, i.e. they are athematic. Thus, it seems as if ThVs have an impact on the (ir)regularity of verbal forms (Calabrese 2015). One central question is, however, how athematicity is implemented in the theoretical framework, in this case Distributed Morphology (DM, see Halle & Marantz 1993): Is athematicity explainable by zero exponence, by fusion or by cumulative exponence? The aim of this talk is to investigate more in detail the connection between irregularity and athematicity and to argue for an approach based on cumulative exponence.
Most Romance languages have reduced the Latin conjugation classes (CCs) maintaining only three main classes which are marked as general rule by different theme vowels (ThVs). The development in French, however, is different and has led to less transparent verbal forms and to a CC system that is not describable, at first glance, in terms of ThVs. In our talk, we will show that the link between athematicity and irregularity is attested also in other verbal forms in Romance and, more important, it holds also for French, a language for which the assumption of ThV is contradictorily discussed in the literature. We will discuss the CC system of French and propose that it has two thematic and several athematic CCs. Certain types of root allomorphy, e.g. the (non)appearance of root final consonants, depend, in essence, on whether or not there is a ThV-position available (cf. also Schane 1966). As will be shown, the athematic CCs are exactly the ones with the (most) irregular verbs, in French as in other verbal forms in Romance.
Following the DM-based Vocabulary Insertion-Only model proposed by Haugen & Siddiqi (2016), we will propose, for selected Romance verbal forms, an analysis for the mentioned link between athematicity and irregularity based on Spanning. Since the exact conditions and rules for Spanning are still to be investigated, we contribute to the discussion of this issue by the analyses of verbal forms in Romance. The core idea of the analysis proposed is that the spanning size of the vocabulary items (VIs) realizing the roots depends on the respective CC-features and is motivated by the (a)thematicity of the roots. What is more, our analysis is predominantly based on the general process of Vocabulary Insertion to correctly derive the Romance forms. There is no need for Fusion, Pruning nor Impoverishment; root allomorphy is instead explained in essence via Vocabulary Insertion only.
References
Calabrese, Andrea. 2015. Irregular Morphology and Athematic verbs in Italo-Romance. Isogloss, Special Issue on Italo-Romance morphosyntax: 69–102.
Oltra Massuet, I. 1999. On the constituent structure of Catalan verbs. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 33. 279–322.
Fábregas, A. 2017. Theme vowels are verbs. In Caha / DeClercq & Vanden Wyngaerd (eds.), The unpublished manuscript. A collection of Lingbuzz papers to celebrate Michal Starke’s 50th birthday. 51–62.
Halle, Morris, and Alec Marantz. 1993. Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection. En Kenneth Hale, and Samuel Keyser (eds.), The view of building 20: Essays in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, 111–176. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Haugen, Jason D. & Daniel Siddiqi. 2016. “Towards a Restricted Realization Theory. Multimorphemic monolistemicity, portmanteaux, and post-linearization spanning.” In Morphological Metatheory. Edited by Daniel Siddiqi and Heidi Harley. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 343–86.
Vanden Wyngaerd, Guido. 2018. Suppletion and affix reduction. Accessed October 29, 2021. https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/004095.
Schane, Sanford A. 1966. The morphophonemics of the French verb. Language 42/4: 746–758.
Tuesday, 15 November 2022 (1 – 2.15pm, UK time)
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen (University of Manchester) – Linear and non-linear pragmaticalization (and why it’s not just grammaticalization all the way down)
Abstract: In this paper I address the diachronic evolution of pragmatic markers, with a focus on what I call linear vs non-linear forms of pragmaticalization. The rise of pragmatic markers has been an increasingly popular research topic for more than three decades. The most frequently attested pathway involves linguistic items or constructions that originally have truth-conditional meaning and belong to « core » grammar, but which more or less gradually evolve non-truth-conditional, more (inter)subjective, uses that lie outside « core » grammar. This form of evolution is widely assumed to be regular, unidirectional, and thus fundamentally linear in nature. Saliently, the study of such cases been used to argue for a redefinition of the notion of grammaticalization.
The literature has, however, reported examples of markers that appear to have taken more complex, non-linear, paths at the semantic-pragmatic and/or the syntactic level. These types of cases have been/are the focus of two international research networks of which I was/am the PI : the British Academy-funded « Cyclicity in Semantic-Pragmatic Change : from Latin to Romance » (2017-18) and the AHRC-funded « The Role of Pragmatics in Cyclic Language Change » (2021-23). In my talk, I argue that because pragmatic markers may evolve along a variety of non-linear – including but not limited to cyclical – paths, it is not helpful to subsume the rise of pragmatic markers under the concept of grammaticalization. Instead, in order to arrive at a descriptively adequate account, it is more useful to draw on a distinction between grammaticalization, pragmaticalization and lexicalization. I identify four non-linear forms of pragmaticalization, based on attested patterns of evolution prominently involving interaction between, on the one hand, two levels of meaning (the Content Level and the Context Level), and on the other hand, two levels of grammar (Micro-Syntax and Macro-Syntax). My examples will be adduced from several Romance languages.
Tuesday, 22 November 2022 (1 – 2.15pm, UK time)
María Arche (University of Greenwich) – Modal and temporal issues of evaluative adjectival copular clauses in Spanish
Abstract: In this talk I will present work carried out with Tim Stowell on temporal and modal issues of copular clauses headed by dispositional evaluative adjectives. As discussed in Stowell 1991, Arche 2006, Martin 2011, Fabregas et al 2013, Arche & Stowell 2019, Arche et al 2021, a.o., these adjectives present straddling properties between dispositions and events. Illustrative examples are John was smart to sell his shares last year, John is cruel to scold little children. Drawing from data from Spanish, where tense and aspect are overt in the inflection of the copula, I will discuss the following facts: the adjective expresses the evaluation of a judge at the time of the attitude holder while the tense and aspect overt in the copula seem interpreted in the infinitival clause; when actuality entailments are associated to the event expressed by the infinitive, these depend on the aspectual value (perfective, imperfective) expressed in the copula; the copula choice seems mostly restricted to ser in Spanish, which we argue can be accounted for by the predication as individual-level between the infinitive and the adjective.
Tuesday, 6 December 2022 (***2 – 3.15pm***, UK time)
Judy Bernstein (William Paterson University) – On the morpho-syntax of Romance vocative expressions
Abstract: In this talk I resurrect an old idea, namely that vocative expressions involve a structure ‘smaller’ than true arguments and do not project up to a DP-external functional projection such as VocP (see Stavrou 2013, Hill 2014, Espinal 2013, Corr 2022, Slocum 2016, among others). I hope to show that at least some of the expressions taken to be vocatives do not actually meet the relevant criteria, mainly because they do not encode a required 2nd person feature (Szabolcsi 1994, Bernstein 2008). Several Romance languages (e.g., French, Romanian, Sardinian) display definite articles in vocative expressions, a fact that is problematic under some analyses of vocatives. These definite article facts are accommodated in the articulated DP structure developed in recent work by Bernstein, Ordóñez, and Roca (2018, 2019, 2021).
Tuesday, 13 December 2022 (1 – 2.15pm, UK time)
Oana Uță Bărbulescu (University of Oxford) – Analytic marking of obliques in Romanian: the case of lu(i) and le
Abstract: What is traditionally labelled in Daco-Romance varieties as analytic marking of obliques by lui, lu, li, ii, le, etc. is – if the grammars and monographs are anything to go by – a kind of Cinderella, a minor, marginal aspect of the morphosyntax of these varieties. The grammars and monographs of the Daco-Romance varieties offer an over-simplified picture and, most significantly, they ignore the diachronic aspect of analytic marking of obliques. In this talk, I aim to present the diachronic development of the analytic marking of obliques by lui, lu, li etc., taking into account the classes of nouns in which it first appeared, its syntactic configurations, and its extension over time, including its sensitivity to register. I also (re)assess the relationship between the feature ‘animate’ and this analytic marking. On the basis of new data, I discuss the status of lui / lu, le etc. (are they (pre)proprial articles, i.e. articles with a distribution limited to proper nouns? oblique case markers?) and their grammaticalization.
Romance Linguistics Circle 