On the Syntax of Number in Romance

Abstract

Inflectional languages, and Romance languages in particular, display morphological variation in plural marking within the nominal domain. While standard varieties show plural inflection on all the constituents within the DP, other varieties show this plural marking only on some of its constituents. We investigate a set of puzzling data and propose that Number in Romance is not a head, but an adjunct, an optional and bi‐valent morphosyntactic feature. We single out the hypothesis that, within the nominal domain, the pluralizer is in unmarked cases adjoined to D (i.e., a categorized d root), and in marked cases it is adjoined to a noun or an adjective (i.e., a categorized n/a root). We also discuss that instantiations of plural marking within the nominal domain should be conceived as the output of morphophonological concord, a post‐syntactic operation that is sensitive to c‐command.

A syntactically-driven approach to indefiniteness, specificity and anti-specificity in Romance

“…However, de in Spec,DP never obtains such a form. Therefore, we postulate that our abstract operator DE is a head adjoined to D, following independent argumentation developed in Cyrino & Espinal (2020). Structure (13b) shows that the definite D can also be modified only once, when number does not play a role.…”

“…8 Third, note that examples (1)-(3) contain plural expressions. We assume, following Cyrino & Espinal (2020), that within the nominal domain, the PLURALIZER in Romance is syntactically adjoined to D (alternatively, a categorized d root), as in (4), and it is syntactically opaque; hence, the newly formed object has the same label [8] According to Heim (2011Heim ( : 1006, in languages without articles 'the ambiguous DPs … are simply indefinites. They are semantically equivalent to English indefinites but have a wider range of felicitous uses because they do not compete with definites and therefore do not induce the same implicatures'.…”

Microvariation in Verbal and Nominal Agreement: An Analysis of Two Lombard Alpine Dialects

“…Various explanations have been discussed in the recent literature to account for variation in asymmetric/partial/"lazy" agreement systems (for an overview, see Stark & Pomino 2009). Variation in nominal agreement may depend on where Number is probed/merged/interpreted: D (Delfitto & Schrotten 1991, Bouchard 2002, Num (Rasom 2008), D or n (Dobrovie-Sorin 2012), D, n orto a lesser extent -A (Cyrino & Espinal 2020). Additionally, scholars such as Bonet, Lloret & Mascarò 2015, Cyrino & Espinal 2020 entertain the hypothesis that asymmetric agree may results from postsyntactic concord, which triggers the externalisation of Number/Gender features within a given Spell-Out domain (Cyrino & Espinal 2020: 187; see also Manzini & Savoia 2019, Manzini et al 2021.…”

“…In Bregagliotto the plural verbal ending -n undergoes metathesis when it is followed by the feminine plural enclitic la, yielding the order Root > la > -n that is unparalleled in the other Italo-, Gallo-, and Rhaeto-Romance dialects. I argue that this morpho-phonological irregularity triggered a sequence of three cascading changes: i) first, -n was reanalysed as an adjunct PLURALISER (Wiltschko 2008;Dobrovie-Sorin 2012;Cyrino & Espinal 2020), which is not incorporated by the verb.…”

“…iii) Differences between the two varieties result from the status of n: in Bregagliotto n still lexicalises the adjunct PLURALISER, whereas in Mesolcinese it externalises number agreement via morphophonological concord (Cyrino & Espinal 2020).…”