Morpho-syntactic Variation in Romance v: A Micro-parametric Approach

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.

Challenges in Kazakh Auxiliary Selection

This paper proposes an account for the four auxiliaries in Kazakh that express the imperfective aspect. The main factors – the auxiliary, the main verb, their inflections and the aspectual specifications reveal a complicated system, which can be captured with an appropriate monotonic, multiple inheritance type hierarchy using online-type construction with the implementation of Pāṇinian competition. This analysis sheds light to a very different auxiliary system that we find in Indo-European languages.

Unaccusativity and Perfect Auxiliary Selection in Romance: Theory and an Observational Study in Second Language Acquisition

The aim of this paper is to investigate the properties associated with unaccusativity and the selection of auxiliary verbs (AUX) in the perfect tenses of the modern Romance languages. The modern languages that have a split-AUX system (such as Italian and French) operate under a principle in which some intransitive verbs select the equivalent of to be as their AUX in the compound past tenses, and others select the equivalent of to have. In research I have conducted over the past decade in the Italian language classroom, Bentley and Eythórsson’s auxiliary selection hierarchy (ASH) is best suited to explain how L2 Italian learners acquire the ability to make the appropriate surface AUX selection.

Changing alignments in the Greek of southern Italy

This article investigates a peculiar pattern of subject case-marking in the Greek of southern Italy. Recent fieldwork with native speakers, coupled with the consultation of some written sources, reveals that, alongside prototypical nominative subjects, Italo-Greek also licenses accusative subjects, despite displaying a predominantly nominative-accusative alignment. Far from being random replacements within a highly attrited grammar, the distribution of these accusative subjects obeys specific structural principles, revealing similarities with historical attestations of the so-called “extended accusative” in early Indo-European. On the basis of these data, Italo-Greek is argued to be undergoing a progressive shift towards an active-stative alignment, a claim supported by additional evidence from auxiliary selection, adverb agreement and sentential word order.

A comparative analysis of French auxiliation, with new evidence from Montréal

This chapter provides an overview of various auxiliation patterns that occur in French since many dialectological and sociolinguistic studies suggest that in various parts of the Francophonie (in Laurentian and Acadian French, and in certain regions of France and Belgium) native speakers employ both auxiliaries, être BE and avoir HAVE, in the spoken language with the twenty-or-so intransitive verbs that, prescriptively, require the exclusive use of être. The chapter also provides new evidence from a 2016 corpus of spoken Montréal French, which will be contrasted with syntactic/semantic theories of auxiliary selection, and shows that these theoretical approaches are inadequate to account for the Canadian French patterns.

Optical variability of faint quasars

The variability properties of a quasar sample, spectroscopically complete to magnitude J = 22.0, are investigated on a time baseline of 2 yr, using three different photometric bands (U, J and F). The original sample was obtained using a combination of different selection criteria: colours, slitless spectroscopy and variability, based on a time baseline of 1 yr. The main goals of this work are two-fold: first, to derive the percentage of variable quasars on a relatively short time baseline; secondly, to search for new quasar candidates, missed by the other selection criteria, and thus to estimate the completeness of the spectroscopic sample. In order to achieve these goals, we have extracted all the candidate variable objects from a sample of about 1800 stellar or quasi-stellar objects with limiting magnitude J = 22.50 over an area of about 0.50 deg2. We find that > 65% of all the objects selected as possibly variable are either confirmed quasars or quasar candidates, on the basis of their colours. This percentage increases even further if we exclude from our lists of variable candidates a number of objects equal to that expected on the basis of ‘contamination’ induced by our photometric errors. The percentage of variable quasars in the spectroscopic sample is also high, reaching about 50%. On the basis of these results, we can estimate that the incompleteness of the original spectroscopic sample is < 12%. We conclude that variability analysis of data with small photometric errors can be successfully used as an efficient and independent (or at least auxiliary) selection method in quasar surveys, even when the time baseline is relatively short. Finally, when corrected for the different intrinsic time lags corresponding to a fixed observed time baseline, our data do not show a statistically significant correlation between variability and either absolute luminosity or redshift.