scholarly journals The Syntax of Clitic Placement in European Portuguese

2009 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-109
Author(s):  
Michael Barrie
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Item ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Clause Structure ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Lexical Feature ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Small Set ◽  
The Right ◽  
Clitic Placement

ABSTRACT In most Romance languages, object clitics appear to the left of the verb (proclitics); in European Portuguese (henceforth, EP) they appear to the right (enclitics). Furthermore, several syntactic environments trigger proclisis in EP, which usually have no effect on clitic placement in other Romance languages. These environments can be roughly split into two categories: those in which CP is filled (Wh-questions, focus constructions, subordinate clauses), and those in which a head position between CP and TP is filled (negation, special adverbs). To account for this, I propose that C0 in EP has the strong feature [+lexical] which must be checked by a lexical item before Spell-Out. I also propose the following clause structure: TopP>CP>AdvsP>NegP>TP>vP>VP. AdvsP is a functional projection which hosts any one of a small set of special adverbials. If CP is filled by Spell-Out (either in its head or specifier position), the [+lexical] feature will be checked and erased. If not, then C0 attracts the closest lexical item.

Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Clause Structure ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Right ◽  
Theoretical Analyses

Over roughly the last decade, there has been a notable rise in new research on historical German syntax in a generative perspective. This volume presents a state-of-the-art survey of this thriving new line of research by leading scholars in the field, combining it with new insights into the syntax of historical German. It is the first comprehensive and concise generative historical syntax of German covering numerous central aspects of clause structure and word order, tracing them throughout various historical stages. Each chapter combines a solid empirical basis and valid descriptive generalizations with reference also to the more traditional topological model of the German clause with a detailed discussion of theoretical analyses couched in the generative framework. The volume is divided into three parts according to the main parts of the clause: the left periphery dealing with verbal placement and the filling of the prefield (verb second, verb first, verb third orders) as well as adverbial connectives; the middle field including discussion of pronominal syntax, order of full NPs and the history of negation; and the right periphery with chapters on basic word order (OV/VO), prosodic and information-structural factors, and the verbal complex including the development of periphrastic verb forms and the phenomena of IPP (infinitivus pro participio) and ACI (accusativus cum infinitivo). This book thus provides a convenient overview of current research on the major issues concerning historical German clause structure both for scholars interested in more traditional description and for those interested in formal accounts of diachronic syntax.

A Computer Corpus-Based Study of Subject Raising in Modern Portuguese

1997 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-400
Author(s):  
Mark Davies
Keyword(s):  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Clause Structure ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Comprehensive Data ◽  
Production Strategies ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Subject Raising

This study is the first comprehensive, data-based examination of subject raising in Portuguese, and is based on 4500+ tokens in more than 26,500,000 words of text from both the written and spoken registers of Brazilian and European Portuguese. We have suggested that there are important differences in raising between the spoken and written registers, which are related to presumably universal production strategies for the two registers. Evidence suggests that morphological factors such as subject-verb agreement play an important role in determining whether raising occurs with first, second, and third person subjects. In terms of differences between the European and Brazilian dialects, we find that split agreement (eles parece saberem) and obligatory coreference {me parece ver um fantasma) are both more common in European Portuguese. Finally, these last two facts, along with a number of related phenomena, suggest that there are important differences in the underlying clause structure of European and Brazilian Portuguese, which can further be extended to include other languages such as Spanish.

Romance Object Clitics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Pescarini
Keyword(s):  
Previous Literature ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Generative Theory ◽  
Morphological Aspects ◽  
Object Clitics ◽  
Clitic Placement ◽  
Theoretical Side

This book focuses on the evolution of object clitic pronouns in the Romance languages. It aims to explore the empirical facets of cliticization and elaborate on the theoretical ramifications of the topic. On the empirical side, the book deals with data ranging from Latin to modern languages and less well-known dialects from all areas of Romance. Medieval vernaculars take centre stage both in the reconstruction of the evolution from Latin to Romance and in the modelling of clitic placement in the modern languages. Syntactic, phonological, and morphological aspects are examined, but the main focus is on syntactic placement, which is the hallmark of Romance clitics. On the theoretical side, the books engage with the previous literature, in particular with Generative literature. In recent decades, our understanding of Romance clitics has grown in symbiosis with the Generative theory, and the importance of most empirical findings cannot be fully appreciated without being acquainted with the terms of the ongoing debate. The book challenges the received idea that cliticization resulted from a form of syntactic deficiency. Instead, it proposes that clitics resulted from the feature endowment of discourse features, which caused freezing of certain pronominal forms first and—through reanalysis—their successive incorporation into verbal hosts. This approach entails revising analyses of well-known phenomena such as interpolation, climbing, and enclisis/proclisis alternations (the so-called Tobler-Mussafia law), and addressing orthogonal phenomena such as V2 syntax, scrambling, and stylistic fronting.

scholarly journals Making questions with tone: Polar question formation in Kinyarwanda

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 213
Author(s):  
Alexander Jarnow
Keyword(s):  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Bantu Language ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Question Formation ◽  
The Right

Kinyarwanda is a Bantu language with one phonemic (H) tone (Kimenyi 2002). This can phonetically realized as high, low, rising, and falling. This talk addresses the tonological discrepancy between declaratives and polar questions in Kinyarwanda. Kimenyi(1980) briefly addresses Kinyarwanda polar questions and describes them as “a rising pitch at the sentence final position”. This generalization captures crucially cannot predict polar questions in which there is no LHL contour at the end of the sentence. I argue that what polar questions share is (a) suspension of downstep on the rightmost lexical H and (b) deletion of all word-final prosodic H. Kinyarwanda forms a prosodic structure that takes the scope of the question. This expands on Richards (2010) analysis of wh-questions. Kinyarwanda marks the right edges of prosodic words using boundary tones, similar to Chichewa (Kanerva 1990; Myers 1996).

Structural Adjacency and the Typology of Interrogative Interpretations

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vera Gribanova
Keyword(s):  
Single Pair ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
The Right

I point out that the generally accepted theory of single-pair versus pair-list readings for multiple wh-questions in the Slavic family, as instantiated in Bošković 2001a, predicts the wrong result for Russian multiple wh-questions and for coordinated multiple wh-questions in several languages. I suggest a reformulation of the connection between the structure and the interpretation of multiple wh-questions that relies on the structural adjacency of two or more wh-items at LF, and I discuss a number of cases in which this reformulation appears to make the right predictions for multiple wh-questions containing clitics.

Public understanding of language planning and linguistic rights: The debate on the current Portuguese orthographic reform

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Language Planning ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Public Understanding ◽  
Endangered Languages ◽  
Language Policies ◽  
Linguistic Rights ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Ideological Debate ◽  
The Right

AbstractThis study focuses on the tensions around Portugal's language policies and citizens’ perceptions of their linguistic rights in the context of the current orthographic reform. Unlike other linguistic rights studies, this enquiry does not focus on endangered languages or linguistic minorities. Instead, there are three major ingredients that embody linguistic-rights claims by European Portuguese speakers: the right to be heard on orthographic reform in a democratic society, ownership and authenticity of the Portuguese language, and the need for protection against external (or, more specifically, Brazilian) hegemony. A critical discourse analysis approach to the arguments put forward by European Portuguese opponents of the orthographic reform shows that the ongoing discussion: (i) is neither about language nor about rights, but about competition; (ii) is based on linguistic dichotomies and recategorization of speakers and languages; (iii) manipulates the rhetoric of threat, endangerment, linguistic rights, and democracy; and (iv) opens up intra-linguistic and inter-variety spaces for conceptualizing linguistic rights claims. (Language ideological debate, public understanding, language planning, linguistic rights, orthographic reform)

The Playful Lexicon in the Romance Languages: Prosodic Templates, Onomatopoeia, Reduplication, Clipping, Blending

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Pharies
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Item ◽  
Repeated Sequences ◽  
The Other ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Social Convention ◽  
Separate Category ◽  
Semantic Effect ◽  
Full Form ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Lexical Items

A lexical item is described as “playful” or “ludic” when it shows evidence of manipulation of the relation that inheres between its form (signifier) and its meaning (signified). The playful lexicon of any given language, therefore, is the sum total of its lexical items that show signs of such manipulation. Linguists have long recognized that the only necessary link between a word’s form and its meaning is the arbitrary social convention that binds them. However, nothing prevents speakers from creating additional, unnecessary and therefore essentially “playful” links, associating forms with meanings in a symbolic, hence non-arbitrary way. This semantic effect is most evident in the case of onomatopoeia, through which the phonetic form of words that designate sounds is designed to be conventionally imitative of the sound. A second group of playful words combines repeated sequences of sounds with meanings that are themselves suggestive of repetition or related concepts such as collectivity, continuity, or actions in sequence, as well as repeated, back-and-forth, or uncontrolled movements, or even, more abstractly, intensity and hesitation. The playfulness of truncated forms such as clips and blends is based on a still more abstract connection between forms and meanings. In the case of clipping, the truncation of the full form of a word triggers a corresponding connotative truncation or diminution of the meaning, that is, a suggestion that the referent is small—either endearingly, humorously, or contemptuously so. In blending, truncation is often accompanied by overlapping, which symbolically highlights the interrelatedness or juxtaposition of the constituents’ individual meanings. Prosodic templates do not constitute a separate category per se; instead, they may play a part in the formation or alteration of words in any of the other categories discussed here.

A cross-linguistic perspective on the Right-Hand Head Rule: the rule and the exceptions

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdel Rahman Mitib Altakhaineh
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Right Hand ◽  
Systematic Pattern ◽  
The Right ◽  
Germanic Languages

AbstractThe study investigates the patterning of headedness in compounding, in particular the patterning of regularities and exceptions to the Right-Hand Head Rule (RHHR). An examination of the grammatical descriptions of compounds in English, French, Italian, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch and Spanish indicates that languages such as German and Dutch are strongly right-headed, other languages such as French and Arabic are strongly left-headed, whereas English, Spanish and Italian tend to be mixed between left-headed and right-headed. Despite the existence of some exceptions to RHHR in some of these languages, the rule remains viable, as these exceptions may have a systematic pattern. While in Romance languages the exceptions seem to be phonologically conditioned, in Germanic languages the exceptions appear to be syntactically conditioned. This study raises the question whether internal headedness in a language could be regarded as a fairly arbitrary property, unconnected to the language’s other characteristics, or not.

On Expletive Negation Some Remarks With Regard to Catalan

1991 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Teresa Espinal
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Item ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Subordinate Clause ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Especial Reference ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Comparative Structure ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Logical Specifications

The aim of this paper is to identify which syntactic structures allow the interpretation of meaningless or expletive negation and under what conditions formal negation appears in the syntax of natural languages, with especial reference to Central Catalan. I shall describe two syntactic environments: (a) the negation which occurs at the subordinate clause of a comparative structure of inequality, and (b) the negation which occurs at the subordinate clause in the subjunctive tense-mood of certain predicates. In both structures I shall assume that there is a lexical item at the main clause which subcategorizes, among other possible complements, for a que (than, that) clause. At D-structure there is, furthermore, a NegP which is the complement of this conjunction. At the level of LF no expletive is specified, because the logical specifications of the lexical items which subcategorize for these subordinate clauses absorb the value of the negative operator.

scholarly journals Sentential Negation and Verb Movement in Bantu Languages

2002 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 201
Author(s):  
Deo Ngonyani
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Clause Structure ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Sentential Negation

This paper explores a well-known asymmetry between negation marking main clauses and subordinate clauses in Bantu languages (Gilldemann 1999:551, Meeussen 1967:114). It is noted that pre-initial negation marking is usually restricted to main clauses, while post-initial marking is rarely restricted. Various studies have explored the diachronic origins of the various strategies. This paper focuses on how the strategies are constrained by clause structure. It is argued that negation projects a NegP as an element of Infl. Asymmetrical negation marking is due to two NegPs, one selecting TP, and the other selected by TP.

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