Volume 4
2005
The co-editors of the second volume are Eric HAEBERLI and Genoveva Puskas.
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Léna Baunaz
(lena.baunaz@lettres.unige.ch)
The purpose of this paper is to provide a new analysis of French Universal Quantifiers, Existential Quantifiers and wh in-situ. Taking into account syntax, semantics, and prosody, I provide a new and more detailed characterization of these elements. I also show that Existential QPs and wh in-situ are both interpreted as indefinites coupled with either an Opwh or an Op$, and that at LF some give rise to Split-DP constructions, while others do not (as in Mathieu 2002).
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Lena Baunaz (Lena.Baunaz@lettres.unige.ch)
Andrea Cattaneo (andreacattaneo@bluewin.ch)
This paper is about economy and optimality in language use. Following relevance theory, it is argued that utterance interpretation is geared by the principle of relevance, which allows the addressee to presume the optimal relevance of the speaker’s utterance. The data examined are concerned with temporal inferences, either triggered by linguistic items (tenses, predicates, connectives) or by accessible contextual information. We argue that relevance is not only governed by economy (the less cognitive effort, the more relevance), but also by optimality (avoid contradiction in encoding temporal information).
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Amy Rose Deal (amyrose@brandeis.edu)
This paper addresses the grammatical and typological complexity of pro-drop systems through an exploration of Nez Perce, a language in which pro-drop is constrained by person. Since Nez Perce has only minimal verbal agreement, it problematizes Taraldsen’s generalization that pro-drop is dependent on rich inflection. In this it adds to the body of evidence often summarized by the case of Chinese. In considering the various kinds of pro-drop found in Nez Perce, Hebrew, Finnish, French, and Chinese, this paper concludes that pro-drop can result from a number of different factors which can be stated via an articulated version of the traditional pro-drop parameter. Taraldsen’s generalization, though it presents a simple and elegant picture of pro-drop, is found to be flawed in that it links the licensing of pro too tightly to its recoverability for interpretation.
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Stephanie Durrleman (stephanie.durrleman@lettres.unige.ch)
This work examines topicalization, focalization and interrogatives in Jamaican Creole (JC), and determines to what extent this language gives evidence for an articulate left-periphery.
We observe that argument topicalization differs syntactically from fronted scene-setter modifiers by targetting a higher position than the latter. Moreover, the data illustrate that argument topicalization occurs with a marker deh and a resumptive clitic, while adjunct topicalization does not. Scene-setters and topics are then shown to precede focussed elements as well as wh-elements. We point out that Focus-Movement and Wh-movement differ in many respects from topicalization : both of the former involve resumptive clitics, both yield Weak-Crossover Effects, and both occur with the marker a. Moreover the Focus and Wh movement are in complementary distribution. We argue therefore that these movements are subcases of an A’ movement operation targeting [Spec,Focus/WhP], situated lower in the clausal architechture then Scene-Setter ModifierP and TopicP. We observe that constituents hosted by [Spec,FocP] are nominal constituents, including focussed predicates. This analysis is proposed on the basis of the observation that fronted focused predicates cannot be modified by Tense Mood or Aspect markers, do not readily appear with their complements, can occur with a determiner and can be modified by adjectives. The hierarchy yielded by this examination of the JC complementizer system is as follows: ForceP> ModifierP > TopicP > Focus/WhP > FinP.
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Gregory Campbell Ellison (ellison2@etu.unige.ch)
This article looks at two characteristics of English which are traditionally considered highly idiosyncratic: the overwhelming tendency to use identical forms for both variants in the causative-inchoative alternation, and the lack of a verbal reflexive marker. It offers a reanalysis which not only explains these peculiarities, but eliminates them in the process. It will be argued that, via a null morpheme, English produces constructions of a semantic range similar to the array realized through equivalent overt verbal reflexive markers such as Spanish and French se, Italian si, and German sich. Just as in these languages, it is asserted that one of the productive functions of this morpheme in English is to derive the inchoative alternant from a lexically basic causative verb. That the two forms are phonologically identical conceals an underlying morphological distinction. This reanalysis not only presents evidence that it is the causative variant, not the inchoative, which is basic in English alternations (a much debated issue which continues to go unresolved to general satisfaction), but it does so using a broader, more ‘universal’ approach in a matter for which language-specific explanations are typically sought.
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Tabea Ihsane (tabea.ihsane@lettres.unige.ch)
This paper focuses on the French du/des ‘of.the’ constructions, which involve the so-called ‘partitive articles’ du / de la / des ‘of.the’. The issue is the syntactic structure of these constituents, and in particular the status of the element de generally translated as ‘of’. There is no consensus on the question in the literature. For some linguists de is an article (Frei, 1960; Damourette and Pichon, 1952) – i.e. it is part of the nominal structure - and for others it is a preposition (Clédat, 1901; Gross, 1967; Wagner and Pinchon, 1962) - i.e. it is outside the nominal structure. More recently, it has been proposed that de has a dual status – preposition or quantificational head (Kupferman, 1994). Although the dual status of de ‘of’ is attractive, we explore an alternative here, suggesting that de ‘of’ in du/des ‘of.the’ constituents is a functional head of the nominal extended projection, whether the construction is partitive or indefinite. In partitive structures, we propose that de ‘of’ realises the head of the highest projection of the extended nominal, whereas in indefinite structures, we argue that it is the head of a nominal Aspectual Phrase.
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Christopher Laenzlinger (laenzlinger@lettres.unige.ch)
The aim of this paper is to investigate the current hypothesis that the clause and the noun phrase share not only structural properties, but also transformational ones. On the basis of French (and English), we provide pieces of evidence in favour of a complex noun phrase structure based on the intermingled placement of noun’s modifiers and arguments (for argument-bearing nouns). In addition to the Mittelfeld, the noun phrase’s Vorfeld is a complex structure which hosts preposed adjectives and genitive arguments. We show that Romanian brings strong support for various types of DP-internal movement: NP-movement, (extended pied-piping) FPagr-movement, adjective and demonstrative fronting, and genitive argument preposing.
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Eszter Varga (eszter.varga@lettres.unige.ch)
The development of do-insertion in English can be linked to the loss of lexical verb movement in the Middle English period. The change is often considered complete by the end of the seventeenth century. However, for some time after English started to resort to do-support, some occurrences of lexical V-to-I movement could still be observed. These instances have often been categorized in the literature as intended archaisms. This paper takes a closer look at the frequency of such occurrences in Late Modern English novels, looking at questions and sentential negatives in particular. We have found that lexical verb movement still occurs with non-negligible frequencies in the nineteenth century. This would indicate that the impossibility to raise the lexical verb was established much later than do-insertion had entered the language and that rich agreement morphology had been lost.
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