Stylistic fronting in Old Italian: A phase-based analysis

Franco, Irene

doi:10.1353/lan.2017.0048

Cited by 6 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…From this he concludes that T o does not project, that there is no designated subject position and no EPP in Old Neapolitan. This is, however, not the case for Old French or Old Italian, where it is standard to assume that the personal pronoun occupies SpecTP (Vance, 1997;Franco, 2017).…”

Section: Old Romancementioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Verb Second

Nilsen¹

2020

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This volume provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive treatment available of the Verb Second property, which has been a central topic in formal syntax for decades. While Verb Second has traditionally been considered a feature primarily of the Germanic languages, this book shows that it is much more widely attested cross-linguistically than previously thought, and explores the multiple empirical, theoretical, and experimental puzzles that remain in developing an account of the phenomenon. Uniquely, formal theoretical work appears alongside studies of psycholinguistics, language production, and language acquisition. The range of languages investigated is also broader than in previous work: while novel issues are explored through the lens of the more familiar Germanic data, chapters also cover Verb Second effects in languages such as Armenian, Dinka, Tohono O’odham, and in the Celtic, Romance, and Slavonic families. The analyses have wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of the language faculty, and will be of interest to researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of syntax, historical linguistics, and language acquisition.

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Section: Old Romancementioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Verb Second

Nilsen¹

2020

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“…2 From the latter, we select texts spanning from the mid-12 th to the mid-17 th century. As we discuss in more detail below, the diachronic path of the construction has been captured quantitatively in several studies (Labelle and Hirschbühler 2014, 2017, Olivier 2022a, therefore our contribution is to consider all of this data in parallel and to provide a (synchronic) formal analysis of infinitive fronting as it is found in earlier French.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Infinitive fronting as a transparency effect in Old and Middle French

Olivier,

Sevdali,

Folli

2024

isogloss

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In this article, we present a novel analysis of infinitive fronting in Old and Middle French (9th-16th century). We find that in sentences with modal verbs and clitic climbing, the infinitive may either follow the main verb or precede it. When the subject of the main verb is overt and the infinitive is fronted, the order is Subj-Vinf-Vfin. Moreover, we find that the object of the fronted infinitive either cliticises onto the main verb (i.e. clitic climbing) or moves as a full DP with the infinitive, in which case the order is Subj-Obj-Vinf-Vfin. We compare our data to Stylistic Fronting, and we show that infinitive fronting in Old and Middle French is a different mechanism. Our analysis takes infinitive fronting to be vP-movement to Spec,TP, an operation which patterns alongside other Transparency Effects. Therefore, infinitive fronting provides further evidence for monoclausal restructuring in earlier French.

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“…fifteenth century), from which this example is taken, word order was rather different from that of modern Italian. In particular, many elements could be scrambled in front of the past participle (see Franco 2009;Benincà and Poletto 2010), suggesting that the participle itself occupied a lower position in the clause. See for instance the following sentences from thirteenth-century Tuscan:…”

Section: Agreement In a Spec-head Configurationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agreement

D’Alessandro¹

2022

The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics

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GenderNoun Stem Masc Gender un M plural alumn M plural Chomsky (1965) refers to Postal's analysis in his Aspects, proposing a transformational mechanism for agreement, assigning a specification to every feature, according to the specification of the most prominent element. He states, for instance, that a grammar must contain transformational rules that assign to an article all the feature specifications of the noun it modifies. The copy mechanism is made more explicit in Chomsky's version of the agreement transformation. The rule he proposes reads as follows:where Article … N is an NP" (Chomsky 1965:175) This rule means that an article will take the α affix for Gender, the β affix for Number and the γ affix for Case if it appears before a Noun that carries an α affix for Gender, and so on. Observe that English, the language on which Chomsky based his theories in the early years, does not express gender morphologically. The reason why gender is included in the transformation is, arguably, the fact that Postal developed his rules on the basis of Romance. Spec-head agreementThe Government and Binding era that followed the publication of Chomsky's Introduction to Government and Binding (Chomsky 1981, henceforth GB) introduced several changes to the theory of agreement. There is a far-reaching change in the whole understanding of grammar that we cannot reproduce here. As far as agreement is concerned, one of the key concepts underlying the new system is the Mirror Principle, formulated by Baker (1985), according to which morphology reflects syntax.The definition is given in ( 8):8 The Mirror Principle (Baker 1985:376) Morphological derivations must directly reflect syntactic derivations (and vice versa) In (1978), Emonds, building on Kayne's (1975) observations regarding auxiliary deletion, clitic placement, and other phenomena in French, concludes that in this language auxiliaries and verbs are the same category, while in English they are not. Building on this observation Pollock (1989) brings the theory forward, proposing a rule of finite verb movement (the same movement that auxiliaries undergo) for French, but not for English. Pollock examines French and English finite verbs, such as those in (9)-(11), and concludes that the verb in French moves to receive its inflexion. Given that negation and frequency / temporal adverbs occupy a fixed position in the clause, the difference between English and French with respect to the position of the verb must be due, according to Pollock, to movement in French, and lack thereof in English. English and French (Pollock 1989:367) 9 a**John likes not Mary. b Jean (n') aime pas Marie. Jean NEG like.PRS.IND.3SG NEG Marie a**Likes he Mary? b Aime-t-il Marie? like.PRS.IND.3SG=he Marie 11 a**John kisses often Mary. b Jean embrasse souvent Marie. Jean kiss.PRS.IND.3SG often Marie c John often kisses Mary. d**Jean souvent embrasse Marie. Jean often like.PRS.IND.3SG Marie In (9), the finite verb precedes the negation in French (where negation is represented by pas), but not in Englis...

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Stylistic fronting in Old Italian: A phase-based analysis

Cited by 6 publications

References 57 publications

Rethinking Verb Second

Rethinking Verb Second

Infinitive fronting as a transparency effect in Old and Middle French

Agreement

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