| Description |
The declarative and interrogative clefts of Trevigiano, a Venetan dialect, and of contemporary oral French, have morpho-syntactic peculiarities that can help refine the existing rich analysis of the fine structure of clefts (Reeve 2000, Belletti 2015). In this work, I present novel data on the it/ce-clefts of these two Romance varieties, and show how a systematic comparison between the two can shed light on lesser discussed aspects like S extraction, the structure of the TP of the copula-selected clause, and the very nature of the copula itself and of the quasi-argument, among others. As a consequence of these observations, I argue that minor revisions of Belletti’s "embedded" analysis (in Haegeman et al.’s 2015 terms) are needed to accomodate my data.
Selected references
Belletti, A. (2015) "The Focus map of clefts: Extraposition and Predication."In U. Shlonsky (ed) Beyond Functional Sequence. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures10. Oxford University Press. 42–59.
Cardinaletti, A. (2004) "Towards a cartography of subject positions." In L. Rizzi (ed) The cartography of syntactic structures. Vol 2. The structure of CP and IP. New York: Oxford University Press. 115–165.
Carter-Thomas, S. (2009) "The French c’est-cleft: Function and frequency." In D. Banks (ed) La linguistique systémique fonctionnelle et la langue française. L’Harmattan. 127–157.
Haegeman,L.,A. Meinungerand A. Vercauteren(2015). "TheSyntax ofIt-clefts and the Left PeripheryoftheClause." InU. Shlonsky (ed)BeyondFunctionalSequence.TheCartographyof SyntacticStructures.Vol10.OxfordUniversityPress.
Karssenberg, L. and K. Lahousse (2018) "The information structure of French il y a clefts & c’est clefts: a corpus-based analysis."[accepted] Linguistics.
Katz, S. (2000) "Categories of c’est-cleft constructions." Canadian Journal of Linguistics. 45(3/4). 253–273.
Mathieu, E. (2009)"Les questions en français: micro- et macro-variation."In F.Martineau, R.Mougeon, T.Nadasdi andM.Tremblay (eds) Le français d’ici: études linguistiques et sociolinguistiques de la variation.GREF.Toronto. 37-66.
Reeve, M. (2010) Clefts. PhD dissertation. University College London.
Reeve, M. (2011) "The syntactic structure of English clefts." Lingua 121. 142–171.
Rizzi, L. (1982) Issues in Italian Syntax. Dordrecht, Foris.
Rizzi, L. (1990)Relativized Minimality. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
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In this talk, I would like to propose an ideal mechanism for V2 adopting the guidelines of the Cartography of Syntactic Structures (Cinque & Rizzi 2010; Rizzi & Cinque 2016).
After having presented Cartographic guidelines and discussed the drawbacks of mainstream analyses concerning V2, I will develop a Criterial V2.
I consider V2 as a sum of "residual" V2 (Rizzi 1991). Each "residual V2" targets a different functional projection in the LP in a Spec-head configuration, similar to the Wh-criterion.
I propose that scrambling means movement to the LP: the inflected verb undergoes movement through all the activated LP heads until it lands in the highest one, giving raise to V2 order.
As a result, there is no "bottleneck effect" in SpecFinP (Roberts 2004), but ordinary violations in terms of RM "of the same structural type". (Rizzi 2004).
In the second part of the talk, I will discuss some problems concerning this approach. As for embedded clause, I propose that the nature of the complementizer does not allow V2 in embedded contexts; as for canonical subjects and expletives, the cause may rely on the head parameter within the IP.
Finally, I will discuss V3 orders in V2 languages, since these orders were adopted as diagnostics for a typology of V2 languages. What I find is that not all the leftmost elements in a V3 order can be depicted as base-generated (uncovering "superficial V3" orders, especially those involving Schweikert's 2005 hierarchy of complements) since there are asymmetries between subject-initial and non-subject initial sentences. In other words, locality should play a role.
Main References
Cinque, G., Rizzi, L., 2010. The Cartography of Syntactic Structure STiL – Studies in Linguistics CISCL Working Papers.
Rizzi, L., 1991. Residual Verb Second and the Wh-Criterion. Technical Reports in Formal and Computational Linguistics 2.
Rizzi, L., 2004. Locality and Left Periphery, in: Belletti, A. (Ed.), Structures and Beyond, The Cartography of Syntactic Structures. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Rizzi, L., Cinque, G., 2016. Functional categories and syntactic theory. Annual Review of Linguistics 2, 139–163.
Roberts, I., 2004. The C-System in Brythonic Celtic Languages, V2, and the EPP, in: Rizzi, L. (Ed.), The Structure of CP and IP, The Cartography of Syntactic Structures. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 297–328.
Schweikert, W., 2005. The Order of Prepositional Phrases in the Structure of the Clause. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam.
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