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This paper discusses null objects (NOs) in Ibero-Romance. European Portuguese (EP) has both definite and indefinte NOs, but Castillian Spanish (CSpanish) only allows NOs when the antecedent is a bare plural nominal or a mass noun. The paper argues that these differences are related to the distribution of bare nominals in each language and proposes that the same underlying mechanism is at the root of indefinite and definite object drop, namely a rootless [ nP n ] proform. [ nP n ] denotes a contextually salient property, its possible interpretations being derived by general type-shifting operations. In CSpanish, the property denoted by [ nP n ] is interpreted as a restrictive modifier of the predicate and the relevant variable is bound under VP level Existential Closure. Focusing on EP, there are striking similarities between definite NOs and other types of nominal anaphora, including epithets. In particular, like epithets, NOs are subject to an Antilogophoricity Constraint. This affinity between NOs and epithets constitutes a case in favor of the idea that the NO is a base-generated nominal. The difference with respect to CSpanish lies in the possibility of interpreting the null nominal by a choice function, a function maps a property onto an entity that has the property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Holmberg (Holmberg, Anders. 2005. Is there a little pro? Evidence from Finnish. Linguistic Inquiry 36(4). 533–564) and its revised version in Holmberg et al. (Holmberg, Anders, Aarti Nayudu & Michelle Sheehan. 2009. Three partial null-subject languages: A comparison of Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish, and Marathi. Studia Linguistica 63(1). 59–97) derive the availability of null subjects in a given language from the interaction between T with/without a D(efiniteness)-feature and the features of subject pronouns. Their theory predicts the existence of consistent null subject languages, whose T has the D-feature, and partial null subject languages, whose T lacks the D-feature. This paper examines this D-feature approach to null subjects against the empirical evidence provided by Brazilian Portuguese, a partial null subject language, and European Portuguese, a consistent null subject language, showing that it cannot account for the range of microvariation observed with respect to different null subject pronouns and the type of T (finite vs. participle vs. gerund). We argue that, in comparison, the ellipsis account of null subject licensing put forward in Martins and Nunes (Martins, Ana Maria & Jairo Nunes. 2021. Brazilian and European Portuguese and Holmberg’s 2005 typology of null subject languages. In Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen & Luisa Meroni (eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2018. Selected papers from “Going Romance” 32, Utrecht, 171–190. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins) fares better. It retains from Holmberg (Holmberg, Anders. 2005. Is there a little pro? Evidence from Finnish. Linguistic Inquiry 36(4). 533–564 et seq.) the insight that the licensing of null subjects depends on the interaction between the features of T and the features of subject pronouns but resorts only to ϕ-features and Case. Crucially, it relies on the (theoretically and empirically) plausible assumption that the relation between abstract ϕ-features and verbal agreement morphology need not be transparent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is an editorial introducing the second issue of Probus 36, which is dedicated to Mary A. Kato on her 90th anniversary. The issue focuses on comparative syntax across grammars and structures. The editorial discusses the importance of comparative syntax in improving our understanding of human language grammar and highlights the role of cross-linguistic comparison in uncovering properties of language. It also provides an example of a contrast between European Portuguese and Spanish to illustrate the value of comparative syntax. The issue includes articles on topics such as null subjects, null objects, gerund clauses, and syntactic change in Brazilian Portuguese. The paper by Andrés Saab discusses the null subject property in different languages and its relationship to abstract/syntactic Agree and agreement dissociation at PF. Saab argues that for subject ellipsis to occur, there must be both syntactic Agree and proper dissociation of T0 and agreement at PF. Based on this, Saab categorizes languages into radical null subject languages (NSL), non-NSL, partial NSL, and consistent NSL. The paper also examines the behavior of the pronoun "a gente" in European Portuguese, which does not allow ellipsis despite having abstract Agree. The article concludes by discussing the relevance of microvariation in understanding subject ellipsis in natural language. The given text is an editorial that includes acknowledgments and references for a publication project dedicated to Mary A. Kato. The editors express their gratitude to the authors and reviewers [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the relationship between theory and observation in scientific research, specifically in the field of linguistics. It discusses different perspectives on the role of observation and data in linguistic research, with a focus on generative syntax. The article emphasizes the importance of intuitive judgments and introspective data in this field, while also acknowledging the value of linguistic corpora and experimental methods. It concludes by presenting two papers that offer new perspectives on existing data in linguistics. The article is part of a collection of papers written to honor the 90th birthday of Mary A. Kato, a respected linguist. These papers cover various topics in linguistics, including language acquisition, syntax, semantics, and the use of judgment data in research. The authors present their findings based on extensive research and analysis of data from different sources, such as corpora and experimental studies. The papers provide valuable insights into the field of linguistics and highlight the significance of judgment data in linguistic research. [Extracted from the article]

Hypocoristics have received considerable interest from phonologists in recent decades, particularly within the Optimality-theoretic literature. While most of these analyses have been situated in parallelist OT, I claim that this architectural choice entails hidden complexities. It is cross-linguistically common for multiple hypocoristics to be formed from a single proper noun, e.g., Matthew → Matt/Matty. In this case, parallelist OT must resort to co-phonologies to avoid ranking paradoxes, which results in significant analytical complexity. By contrast, I argue in this paper that a stratal analysis is crucial for capturing multiple patterns of Hypocoristic Formation (HF) within a single architecture. I present here data of disyllabic hypocoristics from Standard Chilean Spanish. These hypocoristics are derived from the proper nouns by means of two separate anchoring sites: to the left edge of the full name, or to prominence in the full name, i.e., the tonic syllable. In addition, hypocoristics may be prosodically- or morphologically-driven: they may solely be formed by truncating the material of the proper noun, or, in the latter case, there may also be additional suffixal material provided. These data, therefore, lend themselves to a four-way categorisation. I show that this categorisation can be fully accounted for within a stratal architecture, and without the need for additional co-phonologies. Within the analysis, I locate each of the anchoring sites within the lexical phonology: edge-anchoring occurs at the stem level, along with syllabification and stress assignment, while prominence-anchoring occurs at the word level. In this way, the input to edge-anchoring at the stem level comprises a string of segments, while the input to prominence-anchoring at the word-level contains prosodic units up to the foot, which permits word-level HF to anchor to prominence. I further posit that prosodic- and morphologically-driven HF are caused through the passing of hypocoristic morphemes from the morpho-syntax to the phonology. Purely prosodic HF is triggered through a null or covert morpheme, while morphological HF triggered by an overt one. The hypocoristic morphemes themselves are stored as diacritics in the proper nouns' lexical entries. Furthermore, the constraints that select the hypocoristic forms as optimal are sensitive to the presence of this hypocoristic morpheme, which is reflected in tableaux through indexing. When a hypocoristic morpheme is present in the input of a proper noun to a particular stratum, these highly-ranked indexed constraints select a corresponding hypocoristic form as optimal. If the hypocoristic morpheme is absent, these constraints do not assign violations, and the proper noun is instead (vacuously) found optimal. This analysis thus unifies two distinct patterns of HF in one phonological grammar through the inclusion of indexed-constraints and the serial derivation in a constraint-based architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the verbal morphology of Latin in terms of the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). In addition to providing a synchronic analysis of the verbal system of Latin, this paper discusses the development of the thematic vowel system and of athematic perfect forms in this language from their reconstructed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) antecedents and demonstrates the role of morpho-syntactic structure in constraining the historic analyses, and specifically the role that morpho-syntactic locality played in this historical development. It will be shown that despite radical changes in the exponence, the morpho-syntax and the semantics, of the verbal forms, the (local) structural relation between roots as the repositories of idiosyncratic morphological information and aspectual morphemes displaying special (irregular) exponents was consistently preserved across the millennia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the restrictions of Italian relative che 'what' to finite environments and direct case gaps. While the standard analysis takes these restrictions to follow from the C status of che, this paper argues for an alternative approach, according to which che is a DP, on a par with other interrogative and relative elements. Specifically, it is argued that relative che is identical to interrogative che and relative cui 'what.obl' in the narrow syntactic derivation, up to the point of transfer. Realization of relative che is then blocked at ext with oblique case gaps by the more specific cui, along the lines of the Elsewhere Principle. The status of cui as a specialized relative element is also discussed. The restriction to finiteness for relative che is treated as an instance of a more general phenomenon that precludes bare DPs from occurring at the edge of infinitival relatives. Here I adopt and extend (Richards, Norvin. 2010. Uttering trees. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press) Distinctness Theory to account for the facts of Italian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing mostly on European Portuguese, this paper proposes that the internal syntax of Portuguese gerund clauses and the gradience in their degree of defectiveness may be explained by an interplay between their external syntax (locus of merge), agreement relations between embedded Tense and matrix Tense and the presence/absence of an intervening head. We first revisit the distinction between peripheral adverbial gerund clauses and central adverbial gerund clauses and show that their internal syntax correlates with their external syntax: central adverbial gerund clauses are merged in lower positions and appear to be more defective. We derive their defectiveness from the agree relation established between embedded T and matrix T. We then consider predicative gerund clauses and show that they are even more defective and restricted in their aspectual value, lacking a T head. Finally, we consider predicative gerund clauses introduced by como ‘as’ and show that, although they are merged in a low position, they are less defective than central adverbial gerund clauses. We attribute this mismatch between the internal and external syntax of this specific type of gerund clause to the presence of the Predicate head como, which intervenes between matrix T and embedded T and blocks the agreement relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a new characterization of the Null Subject Parameter (NSP). I contend that the NSP must be modeled referring to two main properties of the Agree/agreement systems: (i) presence/absence of abstract Agree, and (ii) presence/absence of agreement dissociation at PF. The first property results in the division between radical argument ellipsis languages of the Japanese type and consistent null subject languages of the Spanish type, including languages like Central Trentino, i.e., languages with some obligatory clitic subjects but with rich agreement and free inversion. The second property results in the division between consistent null subject languages and consistent non-null subject ones. The agreement dissociation hypothesis also accounts for the partial null subject type, which characterizes languages like Brazilian Portuguese that have impoverished agreement expansion at PF (perhaps, only for number features). From a theoretical point of view, this study focuses on the agreement dissociation property showing why abstract Agree cannot guarantee subject ellipsis even in those perplexing cases in which it produces enough agreement distinctions at PF. The reason is that only an expanded agreement morpheme adjoined to the T0 node can serve as a licit antecedent for ellipsis of a subject D0 head at PF. Therefore, the theory derives the bimorphemic principle in Koeneman and Zeijlstra (Koeneman, Olaf & Hedde Zeijlstra. 2021. Pro-drop and the morphological structure of inflection. Ms. Available at: https://www.heddezeijlstra.org/bio) without further ado, i.e., the observation that null subject properties correlate with a bimorphemic T0 node expressing tense and agreement separately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we review current novel work across several languages and instances of bilingual acquisition (2L1 and child L2), whose focus is on the syntax and semantics of different linguistic phenomena with a range of naturalistic and experimental methodologies (e. g. grammaticality judgments, truth-value judgment task, semantics entailment experiments in on-line and off-line modalities and longitudinal data) to determine at which age one can say that the influence of one language over the other diminishes or disappears. Moreover, we discuss the central issue of what may trigger the end of the influence of one language over the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the L2 acquisition of Spanish object drop by advanced learners whose L1s are English and Brazilian Portuguese, in order to assess effects on their knowledge of the interpretable and uninterpretable features conditioning the realization of object drop in their L2 Spanish. Object drop in Spanish is subject to semantic restrictions related to definiteness and specificity, as well as syntactic restrictions related to subjacency. Current debates about second language acquisition (SLA) have led to different hypotheses. On the one hand, the Interpretability Hypothesis/IH (Hawkins, Roger & Hajime Hattori. 2006. Interpretation of English multiple wh-questions by Japanese speakers: A missing uninterpretable feature account. Second Language Research 22. 269–301) claims that uninterpretable features will not be completely acquired. On the other hand, the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis/FRH (Hwang, Sun Hee & Donna Lardiere. 2013. Plural-marking in L2 Korean: A feature-based approach. Second Language Research 29. 57–86; Lardiere, Donna. 2009. Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 25. 173–227) does not distinguish between interpretable and uninterpretable features for the purposes of SLA, arguing that the difficulty of the acquisition task hinges on the required amount of feature reassembly from the L1 to the L2 lexicon. Finally, the Full Transfer/Full Access (FT/FA) (Schwartz, Bonnie & Rex Sprouse. 1996. L2 cognitive states and the Full Transfer/Full Access model. Second Language Research 12. 40–72; Schwartz, Bonnie & Rex Sprouse. 2000. When syntactic theories evolve: Consequences for L2 acquisition research. In John Archibald (ed.), Second language acquisition and linguistic theory, 156–186. Malden, MA: Blackwell; White, Lydia. 2003. Second language acquisition and universal grammar. New York: Cambridge University Press) hypothesis treats SLA as equivalent to first-language acquisition, in terms of the potential for ultimate attainment. Both the FT/FA and the FRH are in principle compatible with full attainment in L2 acquisition. To assess these hypotheses, this study tests the L2 acquisition of the semantic and syntactic restrictions on Spanish object drop by learners whose L1 either lacks widespread object drop (English), or has regular object drop but realizes it differently from Spanish (Brazilian Portuguese). The Full Transfer/Full Access hypothesis seems to best explain the results of the two experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the means of expressing positive epistemic judgement in Spanish and Italian: modals in their epistemic interpretation, epistemic adverb + indicative/subjunctive, with particular attention to the verbs creer/credere and their possible combination with the subjunctive. The constructions are analysed through the prism of cognitive grammar, specifically Langacker's theory of grounding. It is argued that the different types of epistemic judgement are analogous to nominal grounding elements (demonstrative pronouns, the definite article and relative quantifiers). The subjunctive after epistemic adverbs and verbs (such as tal vez or credere) is seen as the verbal counterpart of the relative quantifier some. Analyses suggest that this analogy helps to define the semantic difference between similar structures with the indicative and to resolve questions concerning the function of the subjunctive in epistemic contexts, such as the degree of uncertainty or the speaker's attitude towards the propositional content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the contemporary use of the Portuguese simple and two compound pluperfect forms (with the auxiliary verbs ter, and haver) of the indicative mood in written texts. Four topics are addressed. First, the claim that the simple pluperfect is currently a defective paradigm lacking the third person plural; this claim is confirmed and substantiated by looking at specific distinguishing contexts in corpora. Secondly, the competition between the three pluperfect forms, in written contemporary European and Brazilian Portuguese; it is shown that – contrary to some frequent comments in the literature – all three forms still have widespread usage, and occur in a relatively balanced way, in the type of registers considered (newspaper writing, modern literary texts, modern literary translations), in both varieties of the language. Thirdly, as regards semantic polyvalence, the possible existence of a deictic rather than anaphoric (temporal) pluperfect; it is argued that this type of pluperfect does indeed exist, and deserves separate grammatical recognition. Fourthly, the well-known cases of ambiguity in structures with pluperfect and temporal locating adjuncts, where the latter can act either as markers of the past perspective point required by the pluperfect, or as markers of the location time of the described eventualities; facts in English and Portuguese are compared, with some differences highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In some finite clauses only one of the subjunctive and indicative moods might occur, while in others there is option between these two moods. This is the basic distinction between intensional and polarity subjunctive. This paper questions the sustainability of such division in Portuguese, providing a critical analysis of the major arguments sustaining that those two types of subjunctive need to be considered. Instead, it is shown that a semantic analysis of the indicative and subjunctive moods accounts for the distribution of these moods in European Portuguese (EP), no different explanations being needed for the cases of lexical selection and those of mood choice. In both cases Indicative signals that only p-worlds are taken in account, while Subjunctive signals the consideration of non-p worlds. This allows a comprehensive account of the EP data: Subjunctive or Indicative occurs depending on whether the meaning of the sentence leads to the consideration of non-p worlds or not. However, in other varieties of Portuguese, Indicative occurs in some sentences whose meaning involves the consideration of non-p worlds. Such is the case of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), where, in colloquial speech, the use of Indicative is common in complement clauses of querer ('to want'), a paradigmatic domain of Subjunctive. The conjecture is made that in this variety resorting to one or another mood is used as a pragmatic, discursive, strategy, even if the meaning of the sentence leads to the other mood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an experimental approach to subject inversion in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We investigated the acceptability of SV and VS sentences by two groups of speakers: monolingually-raised and bilingual heritage speakers of BP, using acceptability judgment tasks to test the effect of verb type, definiteness and pragmatic context. Results confirm that BP lost VS order with the exception of unaccusative constructions. Both speaker groups accept SV orders in all contexts, rejecting VS in sentences with transitive and unergative verbs. With respect to unaccusative verbs, pragmatic context and definiteness play a role in the acceptance of VS structures: with narrow focus on the subject, monolingual speakers accept VS order with definite and indefinite postverbal subjects. However, in all-new contexts, they tend to reject definite postverbal subjects. Given this differential behavior in the two contexts, we assume that BP exhibits two different syntactic positions for postverbal subjects in unaccusative constructions. Heritage speakers of BP are generally stricter in rejecting VS order. They do not allow for postverbal definite subjects in VS clauses independent of pragmatic context, indicating that they are progressively eliminating a residual postverbal focus position in unaccusative constructions. We take this as another indication that heritage speakers may promote and accelerate ongoing diachronic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several languages allow for hyper-raising, a structure in which a DP that is interpreted as the subject of a finite complement clause is spelled-out as the subject of the matrix clause. Hyper-raising challenges certain core concepts of syntactic theory related to movement and locality. Various proposals have been made for analysing these structures, the main difference being whether the final position of the DP results from movement or not. It has often been assumed that European Portuguese, in contrast to Brazilian Portuguese, does not allow hyper-raising, or only allows it in very limited contexts. In this paper, we present empirical data extracted from written corpora and experimental results attesting to the production and acceptance of hyper-raising structures by a number of native speakers of European Portuguese. We contribute to identifying the contexts that favour hyper-raising in this variety and outline a preliminary analysis to explain what leads these speakers to produce and accept hyper-raising, while many others systematically reject it. In our proposal, this difference results from the properties of the embedded functional heads T and C, and the way in which their formal features are checked. Specifically, we propose that those speakers dissociate Case features from person-number features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates two Italo-Romance discourse particles, which we analyze as 'cooperativity markers', conveying the conventional implicature that a future action to be accomplished by the speaker fulfills a set of maximal preferences that they share with the addressee; by means of this implicature, the speaker conveys that they intend their action to be cooperative. We show that clauses introduced by these particles share core syntactic and semantic properties with jussive expressions such as imperatives, most notably future orientation and a constraint on the person specification of the null subject. We argue that these particles occupy a functional projection which encodes preferential meanings and takes scope above Tense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we will present a morpho-syntactic analysis of the class of Italian adverbs signalling bodily movements and postures ending with the suffix -one/i. The present work will investigate the significant differences between the uses of this type of adverbs in Old Italian vs. Contemporary Italian. Whereas it seems reasonable (following e.g. Cinque 1999, 2006a) to argue that they are merged in the Specifier of a low Manner Projection above the VP, there are many puzzling facts about them that we will try to account for in this paper. We will propose that, akin to CP adverbials, adverbs in -one/i have an inner prepositional value in their 'bare' form and we will show the consequences of this proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a preface to a special issue of the Probus journal dedicated to Professor Mary Aizawa Kato. The papers in this volume were presented at a workshop in May 2023 and celebrate her 90th anniversary. The preface provides a brief biography of Professor Kato, highlighting her Japanese-Brazilian heritage and her trilingual upbringing. It also discusses her academic achievements and her contributions to linguistics, emphasizing her collaborative and caring nature. The preface is written by Fernanda Pratas and Ana Maria Martins. [Extracted from the article]

This paper offers a compositional interpretation of Spanish simple conditional morphology (cantaría 'would sing') in independent sentences set within the semantic situations framework. It proposes that Spanish simple conditional morphology is composed of (a) a past component that encodes a topic situation, (b) a universal future operator with either an epistemic flavor or a temporal (i.e. historical) flavor/accessibility, and (c) a universal imperfective operator with a variety of flavors. Based on the interactions of these three components, the paper develops derivations for (1) past-oriented inferential readings that distinguish Spanish from French and Italian, (2) future-oriented conditionals involving past plans, which are apparently shared with French and Italian, and (3) future-in-the-past conditionals, where Spanish appears to resemble French and differs from Italian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that constructions with subject-experiencer psychological verbs are adjectival passives, contra the received view that constructions are verbal passives across the board. We put forth a battery of morphological, syntactic and semantic tests to support our claim. The divide, we argue, is based on the individual-level/stage-level distinction, rather than on the lexical category of the participle. We provide a theoretical, aspect-based account that generates the distribution of ser and estar in verbal and adjectival participles and paves the way for a comprehensive analysis of the ser and estar distribution across other constructions where the alternation is attested, such as underived adjectives and prepositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the development of so-called Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) under perception, permissive and causative verbs in Romance. Synchronically, we can observe various patterns in the distribution of ECM complements under these verbs. In Portuguese and Spanish, ECM is often possible under all permissive and causative verbs, whereas in French, Catalan and Italian it is usually restricted to perception and permissive verbs. A detail that has not been much discussed is the fact that, for many speakers, ECM with a given verb is often restricted to contexts in which the embedded 'subject' is a clitic. Some speakers of Modern French display this pattern with the verb faire 'make', for example (Abeillé, Anne, Danièle Godard & Philip Miller. 1997. Les causatives en français : Un cas de compétition syntaxique. Langue Française 115. 62–74. https://doi.org/10.3406/lfr.1997.6222). In this paper, I claim that laisser 'let' probably also displayed this pattern in Middle French. In Old French, however, what appears to be the opposite pattern is observed. Following (Pearce, Elizabeth. 1990. Parameters in Old French syntax: Infinitival complements. Dordrecht: Kluwer), I attribute this to the morphological variability of dative case in Old French. I propose a case-based analysis of the clitic ECM pattern, whereby ECM complements in Romance are phases unlike clause union complements (see Sheehan, Michelle & Sonia Cyrino. 2018. Why do some ECM verbs resist passivisation? A phase-based explanation. In Sherry Hucklebridge & Max Nelson (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 48 (vol 3), 81–90. University of Massachusetts). Where such complements are embedded under light verbs, the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Michael Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken hale: A life in language, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) prevents accusative case from being assigned to the lower subject except in instances of cliticization. When the matrix verb is reanalysed as a full verb, however, v becomes the case-assigning head and so ECM becomes generally available, regardless of the clitic/non-clitic status of the causee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a series of morpho-syntactic properties of Romance languages that have the functional projection vP as its locus, showing a continuum that goes from strongly configurational Romance languages to partially configurational Romance languages. It is argued that v-related phenomena like Differential Object Marking (DOM), participial agreement, oblique clitics, auxiliary selection, and others align in a systematic way when it comes to inflectional properties that involve Case-agreement properties. In order to account for the facts, I argue for a micro-parametric approach whereby v can be associated with an additional projection subject to variation (cf. D'Alessandro, Merging Probes. A typology of person splits and person-driven differential object marking. Ms., University of Leiden, 2012; Microvariation and syntactic theory. What dialects tell us about language. Invited talk given at the workshop The Syntactic Variation of Catalan and Spanish Dialects, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, June 26–28, 2013; Ordóñez, Cartography of postverbal subjects in Spanish and Catalan. In Sergio Baauw, Frank AC Drijkoningen & Manuela Pinto (eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2005: Selected papers from 'Going Romance', Utrecht, 8–10 December 2005, 259–280. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007). I label such projection "X," arguing that its feature content and position varies across Romance. More generally, the present paper aims at contributing to our understanding of parametric variation of closely related languages by exploiting the intuition, embodied in the so-called Borer-Chomsky Conjecture, that linguistic variation resides in the functional inventory of the lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the steps and analyses the processes by which a concrete change of location unaccusative construction based on a venitive verb grammaticalizes in Romanian as a modal construction exhibiting a variety of desiderative meanings, the most prominent of which is the urge-type of desiderative meaning. This diachronic change is atypical: the venitive verb underwent desemanticization but does not show any detectable morphophonological erosion or decategorialization. Furthermore, the desiderative meaning arises only when the venitive verb is accompanied by a dative clitic (originally, a goal of motion) and a subjunctive CP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the issue of verb raising in two closely related languages, namely Angolan Portuguese (AP) and Mozambican Portuguese (MP). Cinque's (cartographic) hierarchy of adverbs is used to examine microvariation in these two varieties of Portuguese. The empirical data, gathered through experiments on acceptability rating tasks (to detect the position of the V(erb) in relation to adverbs) and cloze tests (to diagnose the adverbial classes which can be recovered by the elliptical VP), have been collected among university students in Luanda and Maputo, the capitals of Angola and Mozambique, respectively. The cutting points within the functional hierarchy where the V goes, be it mandatorily or optionally, are different in the two languages. In AP, the verb must raise past the frustrative aspect adverb (em vão/à toa 'in vain'), while in MP the verb must raise to the left of the singular completive adverb (tudo 'everything'). The main verb cannot raise past the AspTerminative adverb (já não/não mais 'no longer') in MP. In AP, it can optionally raise over the highest projection in the inflectional domain. Such a difference may explain the recovery of high adverbs in VP-ellipsis structures, only possible in AP. The corollary of the inter-linguistic study developed for Comparative Syntax is the adequacy of the cartographic démarche when it comes to establishment of strict boundaries in the study of microvariation among closely related grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes and analyses two discourse particles that are found in polar questions and in some declarative structures in central Sicilian. The analysis adopts an interface approach, relying on the cartographic framework. It is proposed that each particle conveys in all its uses one and the same conventional implicature, relating to the epistemic state of one of the discourse participants. The interaction of the two particles with left-peripheral elements, in particular topics, vocatives, fronted foci, and speaker-oriented adverbs, supports the view that the speaker, the hearer, and the commitment anchor are syntactically represented in sentence structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper has a specific and focused aim: to unveil a possible route to DOM, the crosslinguistically widely attested phenomenon whereby direct objects are introduced by a preposition, with interpretive constraints. The prepositional marker is 'a' in Italian and in (the majority of) Romance. The investigation is based on both comparative data from Romance and on some relevant experimental results from the acquisition of Italian involving a-Topics. The insights that syntactic cartography may provide on the characterization of such route is the leading note of the investigation: a-marking starts out on direct objects topics, only occurring when the (animate) direct object is preposed in the left periphery of the clause; then a-marking involves clause internal direct object topics in the vP-periphery; and finally a-marking is Case related in the small 'v' spine; the latter, is also implicated in causatives and in constructions involving benefactive arguments. The acquisition results reviewed indicate the use of left peripheral a-Topics in children's elicited productions in Italian, which are not attested in the target language, thus illustrating a cartographically defined space of children's grammatical creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides empirical evidence showing that the clause-taking nominals el hecho de (Spanish) and o facto de (Portuguese) are not reliable tests of factivity of predicates, as commonly assumed in the literature. Naturally occurring data from both languages show that these nominals are compatible with a wide range of predicates and that they occur in sentences with both factive and non-factive interpretations. Our findings contribute to the debate on the syntactic and semantic properties of clause-taking nominal constructions, clausal nominalization in Ibero-Romance, and to current research on the nature of factivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on islands has been central to linguistic theory for more than 50 years. Its importance relies on the theoretical consequences islands posit for movement and long distance dependencies. In this paper we aim to explore the contrast between a variety of islands in Spanish relative clauses to reveal whether there is any gradience in the strength of the island effects. In order to tease apart fine-grained contrasts we run an acceptability judgment study based on the factorial definition of island, an experimental paradigm that aims to isolate the various factors that can affect the acceptability of a sentence involving island violations. Overall, we found that the five constructions tested (embedded wh-questions, whether-clauses, adjuncts, complex NPs and relative clauses) show island effects in Spanish and that there are limited differences in the size of these effects, which points to a more categorical view of islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the results of an experimental investigation designed to test the interpretation of the optional doubling of the negative markers no and pas in Expletive Negation (EN) contexts and in preverbal Negative Concord Items (NCI) contexts in Catalan. We show that in EN contexts a negative interpretation of no is preferred to an expletive one, with non-negative readings being less widespread than expected from what is described in traditional grammars. In NCI contexts the overt presence of no basically contributes to a single negation interpretation, thus confirming the status of Catalan as a Negative Concord language. We also show that, in the absence of discourse environments, pas in both EN and NCI contexts shows a variable interpretation, a characteristic of negative polarity items. Our results indicate that pas does not increase the amount of negative interpretation of no in EN contexts, or of double negation in NCI contexts, but is an item dependent on the interpretation of no. We conclude that the strengthening role of Catalan pas (at stage two of Jespersen's cycle), while associated with the expression of metalinguistic negation, does not reverse the truth or falsity of a proposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creole languages have generally not figured prominently in cross-linguistic studies of word-prosodic typology. In this paper, we present a phonological analysis of the prosodic system of Lung'Ie or Principense (ISO 639-3 code: pre), a Portuguese-lexifier creole language spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe. Lung'Ie has produced a unique result of the contact between the two different prosodic systems common in creolization: a stress-accent lexifier and tone language substrates. The language has a restrictive privative H/Ø tone system, in which the /H/ is culminative, but non-obligatory. Since rising and falling tones are contrastive on long vowels, the tone must be marked underlyingly. While it is clear that tonal indications are needed, Lung'Ie reveals two properties more expected of an accentual system: (i) there can only be one heavy syllable per word; (ii) this syllable must bear a H tone. This raises the question of whether syllables with a culminative H also have metrical prominence, i.e. stress. However, the problem with equating stress with H tone is that Lung'Ie has two kinds of nouns: those with a culminative H and those which are toneless. The nouns with culminative H are 87% of Portuguese origin, incorporated through stress-to-tone alignment, while the toneless ones are 92% of African origin. Although other creole languages have been reported with split systems of "accented" vs. fully specified tonal lexemes, and others with mixed systems of tone and stress, Lung'Ie differs from these cases in treating African origin words as toneless, a quite surprising result. We consider different analyses and conclude that Lung'Ie has a privative /H/ tone system with the single unusual stress-like property of weight-to-tone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the position of object and adverbial clitic pronouns in coordinated affirmative verb-first declaratives introduced by e(t) "and" in Old Occitan and early Old French, a context in which clitics are variably preverbal or postverbal. An empirical study reveals that this variation is principled and reflects semantico-discursive properties in the same way in these two related and grammatically similar medieval Gallo-Romance varieties. On a theoretical level, I posit that preverbal clitics occur when conjunction occurs at the TP level, and postverbal clitics occur when conjunction occurs at the CP level, and that the choice of clause structure (TP vs. CP) for second conjunct clauses depends on illocutionary force, which in turn depends on discourse coherence relations and the semantics of verba dicendi (verbs of utterance). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the role of the interaction between syntax and semantics in determining the mixed agreement patterns shown by Spanish partitive constructions when they appear as subjects. These patterns follow straightforwardly from the dual nature of nominal features (concord and index features organized in bundles) and from the assumption that Agree is a feature-valuation process in which the unvalued features of a Probe seek matching parallel valued features of a Goal under locality constraints and a maximization principle. After discussing previous approaches and justifying our syntactic analysis, we demonstrate that interaction for agreement between syntax and semantics is articulated via the nominal index features of the head nouns in the partitive structure, so singular and plural agreement, linked to the valuation/non-valuation of the number index feature, correlates with a group/atomic entity vs. a plurality/distributive reading, respectively, the meaning of the verbal predicate also being relevant. The empirical basis for this analysis is provided by a corpus search whose results are carefully described in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is most often claimed that in Spanish constituents in narrow presentational or information focus appear rightmost, where they also receive main sentence stress, while shifting the stress to the focus in its canonical position is infelicitous. Some, however, claim that Spanish in fact has recourse to both strategies for making the focus prominent, and some recent quantitative work has shown support for this alternative view. The present paper contributes to this debate by experimentally testing the realization of presentational focus in Mexican Spanish using an acceptability judgment task. The results of the experiment reveal that, for these speakers, focused constituents need not be rightmost and can in fact be stressed in non-final position, contra the consensus view. These findings expand the database on focus in Spanish and indicate that theories of the prosody/syntax interface may need to be revised, especially those theories that motivate discourse-related syntactic movement based on the requirements of the prosody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of the first study of the acquisition of Accusative clitics in Romanian by Romanian–Hungarian bilingual children. Our data show that the acquisition route is similar to the one in a monolingual setting. An interesting observation which arises from this study is that two structures which are superficially similar in the two languages favour the occurrence of non-target constructions, unavailable in either of the two languages. They occur under bilingual conditions via non-language-specific mechanisms, such as comparison and analogy. This is why their use, age of onset, and end of influence are subject to individual variation. Their analysis reveals that even structures which are the result of non-language-specific mechanisms, when drawing on morpho-syntactic knowledge, can fall within the range of constructions made available by Universal Grammar. The same superficial similarity seems to boost the acquisition of clitics by Romanian–Hungarian bilinguals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In bilingual child language acquisition research, a recurrent learnability issue has been to investigate whether and how cross-linguistic influence would interact with the non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories. In this paper, we analyze the omission/production of subject pronouns in the earliest stage English grammar and the earliest stage Spanish grammar of two English–Spanish simultaneous bilingual children (FerFuLice corpus in CHILDES). We base this analysis on Holmberg's (2005, Is there a little pro? Evidence from Finnish. Linguistic Inquiry 36. 533–564) and Sheehan's (2006, The EPP and null subjects in Romance. Newcastle: Newcastle University PhD dissertation) formulation of the null subject parameter and on Liceras et al.'s (2012, Overt subjects and copula omission in the Spanish and the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals: On the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence. First Language 32(1–2). 88–115) assumptions concerning the role of lexical specialization in cross-linguistic influence. We have conducted a comparative analysis of the patterns of production/omission of English and Spanish overt and null subjects in two bilingual children, on the one hand, versus the patterns of production/omission of one monolingual English child and one monolingual Spanish child, on the other. The results show that while there is no conclusive evidence as to whether or not English influences the higher production of overt subjects in child bilingual Spanish, the presence of null subjects in Spanish has a positive influence in the eradication of non-adult null subjects in bilingual English. We argue that in a bilingual situation, as compared to a monolingual one, lexical specialization in one of the languages of the bilinguals (the availability of an overt and a null realization of the subject in Spanish) facilitates the acquisition of the other language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses recomplementation (i.e. double-complementizer constructions) in Spanish, comparing Latin American Spanish (LAS) and European Spanish (ES). I make the novel observation that in spite of a superficial difference whereby a lower que after a left dislocate (LD) surfaces in ES but not in LAS, LAS does have recomplementation. In fact, LAS patterns with ES in that there are two constructions in each variety, i.e. a construction in which an intonational break following the LD is present and a construction in which the break is absent. I argue that the constructions with the break differ from the constructions without it with regard to reconstruction effects, no insertion and the position of high adverbs, which arise due to a locality violation in the former but not in the latter. I propose a syntactic analysis in terms of phases and argue that the locality violation is circumvented in the constructions with no break via verb movement, which is not possible in the constructions with the break. I further propose a mapping from the syntactic structures of recomplementation into prosody that correlates with the presence/absence of the intonational break in these constructions, hence providing prosodic evidence for phasal structure more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Romance, Focus Fronting (FF) is generally related to a contrastive or corrective function. In this paper, I show that Spanish may resort to FF to express a special evaluative meaning, namely, a mirative (conventional) implicature of surprise and unexpectedness. Mirative FF is problematic for the traditional analyses of FF because it is not necessarily contrastive and does not guarantee the traditional articulation of the sentence into a new and a given part. The results of a syntactic experiment on the distribution and interpretation of FF in European Spanish show that speakers accept FF not only in the corrective but also in the mirative context. The acceptability of mirative FF thus proves that FF in Spanish is not exclusively limited to contrast or linked to information-structural requirements such as the new-old information distinction. FF may also be used to express a mirative implicature that requires a set of focal alternatives in order to be interpreted correctly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the variation found in Majorcan Catalan regarding the realizations of /i/ and /u/ in contact with other vowels, which depend on the nature of the vocoids themselves, the syllabic position in which they occur, their surrounding segmental context, and the geographic origin of the speakers. Leaving aside faithful hiatic solutions, their realizations range from different degrees of strengthening to fusion and deletion, and further coexist with some instances of /v/-weakening. To account for these patterns, we provide a unified analysis within the split margin approach to syllable organization (Baertsch 1998, 2002), with phonetic grounding supporting the distinction between [+high] and [–high] for palatal glides (but not for their labial counterparts) and the approximant character of /v/ in intervocalic position. We also show that, in order to explain the whole variation, markedness constraints referring to the harmony of segments in intervocalic position (Kirchner 1998; Uffmann 2007), and their specific interaction with faithfulness constraints, are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the restrictions on movement to the left periphery found in non-root environments such as French central adverbial clauses and argues that an analysis of main clause phenomena based on intervention/Relativized Minimality is to be preferred to one based on structural truncation. The empirical basis for this claim consists of an examination of some asymmetries between French infinitival TP ellipsis and infinitival TP Topicalization. Adopting Authie's (2011) approach to TP ellipsis whereby the to-be-elided TP undergoes fronting in the computational component but fails to be spelled out at PF, we argue that these asymmetries follow from the fact that in French, while a spelled out fronted TP is an intervener for wh-movement in adverbial clauses, leading to a PF crash, the ellipsis of this fronted TP leads to a convergent derivation via Bošković's (2011) mechanism of 'rescue by PF deletion.' This account entails that adverbial clauses involve wh-movement (Haegeman 2006, among others) and that the landing site for TP Topicalization is available in a non-root environment, two conclusions that militate against the hypothesis that non-root clauses have an impoverished left periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the syntactic properties of a construction with aller 'to go' and venir 'to come' followed by an infinitive, where these verbs express the speaker's emotions (surprise, annoyance, disapproval, etc.) about the event, and particularly about the agent responsible for bringing it about. It is shown that the infinitive following expressive aller and venir does not have clausal properties: it cannot be preceded by perfect auxiliaries nor can it bear sentential negation. In contrast with other uses of aller and venir (periphrastic future/past, conjectural, etc.), which are shown to be raising verbs, expressive aller and venir are argued to be functional verbs, merged into a functional head within the same clause as the infinitive (Cardinaletti and Giusti 2001, Cinque 2001, 2004a), in the modal domain below TP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cartographic studies have been pursued for over a quarter of a century, offering new insights on the nature and fine details of syntactic structures. The study of Romance languages and dialects has played a critical role in these advances. The following introductory remarks illustrate the general lines of this trend, without attempting at an exhaustive review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intervention effects have been thoroughly studied in formal syntax in the domain of weak islands. They also have recently been appealed to in the study of language acquisition, to capture certain difficulties that young children manifest in the mastery of some object A'-bar dependencies (relatives, questions, topicalizations). Can one unify such distinct utilizations of the concept of intervention under a single formal locality principle? This paper explores the possibility of a unitary approach by proposing solutions for observed discrepancies between the effects in adults and children, and more generally between the different utilizations of the concept of intervention in recent work on adult grammar and language acquisition. Relativized Minimality (RM) is seen as a formal principle penalizing configurations as a function of the distinctness between target and intervener in local relations, where distinctness is precisely expressed as a grammar-based notion. A unitary system consisting of RM and an explicit distinctness hierarchy is argued to be operative in intervention effects in grammar and language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates object omissions in the spontaneous production of European Portuguese by second-generation Portuguese-German bilingual speakers and compares them to first-generation migrants, and two age-matched groups of monolingual speakers. The results show that bilingual speakers as well as the younger generation of monolinguals show a higher number of null objects in their speech than the two older generations. This may reflect an inter-generational development that favours null objects, which is independent of language contact. The analysis of the syntactic and semantic conditions determining the occurrence of null objects in the speech of the different groups reveals that the semantic properties of the null objects realized by the bilinguals, particularly the higher rates of animate and non-propositional null objects, show that they extend the semantic-pragmatic conditions of null object realization along a referential hierarchy. The bilingual speakers may reflect a language-internal pathway that appears to resemble a diachronic change observed in BP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the grammatical status of el que in Spanish prepositional relative clauses (el lugar en el que vivo) [the place where I live] from a variationist perspective of the theory of grammaticalization. At least from the nineteenth century onwards, several authors have defended the nature of el que as a compound relative pronoun, even if these forms continue alternating today with others without the article [el lugar en que vivo], in contrast to el cual, a fully grammaticalized relative since the late fifteenth century. Based on a 3,200,000 word corpus of immediacy text (mainly private letters), we test the hypothesis of el que being a case of grammaticalization in progress from a variationist point of view, examining in depth what happens inside the grammar and the socio-stylistic matrix in different periods of history, from 1700 to 1960. The idea underlying this approach is that the structure of changes as well as the grammaticalization in progress can be inferred from the comparative analysis between different quantitative magnitudes of functionally similar variants. To do so, we have performed three independent mixed-effects regression analyses (Rbrul), one for each century. The results of these comparative analyses confirm the progression of el que in prepositional subordinate clauses between the early eighteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Yet, this progression has taken place at a slow pace and, objectively, can only be described as moderate. Moreover, a number of elements of continuity in history are revealed, such as several conditioning factors that are systematically selected and with the same explanatory direction in all periods. This casts serious doubt on the existence of a grammaticalization in progress in the case of el que, and sees the evolution as not essentially different from other morphosyntactic changes that have taken place in the history of Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that <ser ‘to be’ + past participle> constructions with subject-experiencer psychological verbs are adjectival passives, contra the received view that <ser + past participle> constructions are verbal passives across the board. We put forth a battery of morphological, syntactic and semantic tests to support our claim. The divide, we argue, is based on the individual-level/stage-level distinction, rather than on the lexical category of the participle. We provide a theoretical, aspect-based account that generates the distribution of ser and estar in verbal and adjectival participles and paves the way for a comprehensive analysis of the ser and estar distribution across other constructions where the alternation is attested, such as underived adjectives and prepositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I provide an analysis of Spanish stress with the following three characteristics: (a) both verbal and non-verbal stress are accounted for in a single, unified, system, (b) the three-syllable window for stress is accounted for in a principled way, and (c) the stress algorithm has no access to the morphosyntactic structure. I do this by extending Roca's analysis of variable edge parameters for stress in Spanish non-verbs to verbs, and by arguing that morphemes which mark for only person, number, and gender (φ-features) are outside of the domain of stress because they are prosodic adjuncts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the properties of Spanish DPs including a possessive pronoun and a relative clause are thoroughly described and analyzed. Adopting a raising analysis for both prenominal possessives and restrictive relatives, it is claimed that the incompatibility of a determiner possessive and a restrictive relative in current standard Spanish is due to the violation of an interpretive constraint sanctioning subextraction from [Spec, CP]. It is further proposed that, in constructions in which a possessive pronoun does combine with a relative clause, the possessive is not subextracted from [Spec, CP]. It is finally shown that this proposal accounts for different well-formed dialectal and Old Spanish patterns with a prenominal possessive and a restrictive relative and also applies to data from other Romance languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many varieties of Romance show more than one intonation contour available for polar question (PQ) marking. Understanding the pragmatic licensing conditions for these contours is no easy task. Experimental work has tended to account for the variation in terms of dichotomies like information-seeking vs. confirmation-seeking or neutral vs. biased. In this paper I use production data to argue that different languages and dialects will encode different types of information intonationally in PQs, but that the type of information that we find encoded through intonation is quite similar to the type of information encoded through sentence-final particles in languages like Cantonese or Lao. These meanings lie on an epistemic gradient, and the points on the gradient that are encoded linguistically through intonation are language-specific (i.e. language X encodes meaning A, but language Y might encode meaning B, or meanings A & B, etc.). I explore three contours in Puerto Rican Spanish, their phonetic implementations, and their meanings with respect to this epistemic gradient. I argue that we should keep in mind the range of possible meanings of SFPs in other languages in order to refine our methodology in a way that allows us to make better predictions about the pragmatic division of labor among intonation contours, specifically for PQs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across dialects, Spanish uses the third person forms usted and ustedes to refer to the addressee. In this squib, we propose an imposter analysis of these forms in the framework of Collins and Postal (2012. Imposters. MIT Press, Cambridge.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]