Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11

Abstract

The second article in this section "Towards a Unified Treatment of Spanish Copulas", by Arche, Fábregas, and Marín adds to the ongoing debate of the distribution of the Spanish copulas ser and estar by accounting for their alternation in adjectival and passive clauses in a unified way. They propose that the properties of passive clauses are due to the properties of the copulas and not the participles, and further argue that only estar has an additional component of central coincidence with a stative nature. Charnavel analyzes French scalar particles même, quand même, ne serait-ce que, and seulement and compares them to English particles even and only. Her article, "How French Sheds New Light on Scalar Particles" proposes a new theory based on specific characteristics such as scalarity, additivity, and exclusivity and provides new empirical evidence about these French particles, which, despite widespread assumptions, behave differently from their English counterparts. The last article of the Syntax-Semantics section is by Donazzan and Tovena and investigates the semantics of semelfactive predicates in Italian. In "Pluralities of Events: Semelfactives and a Case of 'Single Event' Nominalisation", the authors analyze the notion of plurality and unity of events by looking at the two possible readings that ata-nominalisations, i.e.: nuotata, ombrellata, receive in instrument semelfactive verbs. They conclude that semelfactives, in their processive readings, have to considered activity predicates. The second section of the volume includes articles on Morphosyntax, beginning with "Laísmo and 'le-for-les': To Agree or not to Agree?", by Adolfo Ausín and Francisco J. Fernández-Rubiera, a novel exploration of an old problem in nonstandard Spanish pronominal paradigms. They propose a unified account for three apparently unrelated phenomena: the presence of the accusative clitic, the presence/ absence of number agreement in the dative clitic ('le-for-les'), and the presence/absence of gender agreement in the dative clitic in laísta dialects ('le-for-la'). They propose that agreement in these two nonstandard dative clitic constructions is related