Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Ce séminaire reçoit des conférenciers invités spécialisés dans différents domaines de la linguistique. Les membres du Département, les étudiants et les personnes externes intéressées sont tous cordialement invités.

Description du séminaire Print

Titre Feature merger and feature realization, a unifying approach to the NP/DP-dispute.
Conférencier Giuliana Giusti (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
Date mardi 05 février 2019
Heure 12h15
Salle L208 (Bâtiment Candolle)
Description

In current generative literature, there is a large consensus on the presence of some functional categories in the nominal expression. The disagreement regards the number and category of the functional projections and how parametric variation is treated: Cartography seeks to find the universal hierarchies of functional heads, assumes strict right-branching, and excludes head movement (cf. Cinque and Rizzi 2008). Minimalism (Chomsky 1995) eliminates labels, freely allow right- or left-branching, and only merges the items that are in the numeration.

This talk attempts a unification of the two approaches based on Giusti (2015, 2018), along the following lines:

·    Heads are hierarchical bundles of features.

·    The head N, bundled with its features, remerges as many times as necessary in order to

o    saturate open positions of N (its arguments),

o    saturate open positions of modifiers (A),

o    externally agree with a possessor (if present) and assign Case to it, at the highest non-phasal projection, (Richards 2007),

o    internally agree with an indexical (cf. Arsenijević 2007, 2015), and

o    value an uninterpretable Case feature at the phasal level.

 

The structure of complex NPs such as Italian (1)-(2)or English (3)is given in (4):                             

(1)     le  sue tre simpatiche amiche americane

(2)     le  tre simpatiche amiche americane di Maria

(3)     her/Mary’s three nice American friends

(4)        [NP6 indP N6 [NP5 Card N5 [NP4 NPposs N4 [NP3 AP N3 [NP2 AP N2 [NP1 NPposs N1]]]]]]

 

N1, N2, etc. are identical segments of the same head N. Parametric variation regards which segment(s) is/are realized (thereby deriving head-movement effects). Economy prohibits the realization of more than one identical segment (cf. Nunes 2004).

·          In English, nominal expressions with a possessor (NPposs) realize N1 and no other segment.

·          In Italian two different segments are realized: the definite article (N5) realizes Case features. The lexical N is realized in N3. Number and gender overlap on both.

In both languages, IndP is covert.

In both languages, N4 activates a probe feature that assigns case to NPposs.

·          In English NPposs remerges in SpecNP4, irrespective of whether it is a pronoun or a full NP.

·          In Italian NPposs only remerges if it is a pronoun. If it is a full NP, it remains in place and possessive case is realized as di (a segment of the possessive NP).

The contribution will provide an answer to long-standing questions, such as

·          Are nominal functional categories justified? Yes, but they are not independent heads. They are bundled with N.

·          Are determiners phrasal? “Determiner” is a spurious category: articles are high segments of N, in languages that have such segmentation; demonstratives and cardinals are phrasal.

·          What is double definiteness? It is the overt realization of one or more segments of N, or of a segment of N cooccurring with an overt IndP.

References: • Arsenijević, Boban (2007) “The syntactic triangle: phases, categories and reference”. In C. de Cuba & I. Mitrovic (eds.), Proceedings from the Novi Sad Generative Linguistics Workshop 2006. Novi Sad: Filozofski fakultet u Novom Sadu, 5-25. • Arsenijević, Boban (2015) “The syntactic triangle: phases, categories and reference (extended version) ms. • Chomsky, Noam (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. • Cinque, Guglielmo and Luigi Rizzi (2008). The Cartography of Syntactic Structures. Studies in Languistics 2, 1-58. • Giusti, Giuliana (2015). Nominal Syntax at the interfaces. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. • Giusti, Giuliana (2018) Demonstratives as modifiers and arguments of N. In Coniglio, Marco, Andrew Murphy, Eva Schlachter, Toenjes Veenstra Atypical Demonstratives. Berlin: de Gruyter, 23-55. • Nunes, Jairo (2004) Linearization of chains and sideward movement. Boston: MIT Press. • Richards, M. On feature inheritance: an argument from the Phase Impenetrability Condition. Linguistic Inquiry 38:563-572.

   
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