Adjectival Concord in Romance and Germanic

This chapter provides a unified analysis of adnominal and predicate adjectives in Romance and Germanic by distinguishing three types of feature sharing: agreement, concord and projection, along the lines of Giusti (2015). It claims that in both Romance and Germanic, an uninterpretable feature of N agrees with possessive adjectives, while adnominal adjectives concord with N in a Spec-Head configuration checking an uninterpretable feature bundle on A. Romance and Germanic only differ in how concord is spelled out. Romance adjectives (with the exception of Walloon) are inflected for nominal features and concord with null head. German adjectives are uninflected and concord with an overt N-segment. The proposal argues against a unification of concord and agreement and in favour of an autonomous category adjective crosslinguisticall

Demonstratives as arguments and modifiers of N

The aim of this paper is to provide a minimalist account of adnominal demonstratives along the lines of a recent proposal by Giusti (2015) which distinguishes three types of feature sharing: Agreement, Concord, and Projection. As demonstratives bind and identify an open position in the argument structure of N, they are claimed to be arguments and, as such, to undergo Agreement. But unlike possessor arguments, which are assigned genitive and are sent to the interfaces independently of the possessee phase, demonstratives are probed to the Edge of the phase and are interpreted as part of it. In order to do so, they must also concord with N, namely, they must check and delete uninterpretable N-features. This dual nature of demonstratives as agreeing arguments and concording modifiers can explain the different positions demonstratives display across languages, as well as their apparently ambiguous behavior as determiners, as adjectives and as exophoric elements, as claimed by Diessel (2006)

Arguments for the universality of DP and determiners

The presence of D as part of the structure in the Nominal Expression (henceforth NE, a label that allows referring to the whole nominal construct, remaining agnostic as regards the highest label, parallel to the notion of “clause”) has taken many forms that have different consequences in the argumentation in favour or contra its universality. In the introduction, I provide an overview of the seminal works dealing with this question putting them in the perspective of being initiators of different lines of research

Psychological verbs as a vulnerable syntactic domain: A comparative study of Latin and Italian

So-called psychological verbs such as Italian temere ‘fear’ preoccupare ‘worry’ and piacere ‘like’ denote a particular state that involves an Experiencer and a second role taker that causes, initiates or is related to the psychological state. They present an extremely varied argument structure across languages that arranges these two roles in apparently inverted hierarchies and assigns them different grammatical functions (subject, direct, indirect and prepositional objects). This paper aims to provide a descriptively adequate taxonomy of psych-verbs in Latin in a comparative perspective with Italian. We individuate seven classes of psych-verbs and show that they distribute across the transitive, unergative, unaccusative pattern with the possibility of externalising either argument, therefore creating three “direct” and three “inverted” classes. The seventh class is impersonal, with no external argument. We show that the diachronic variation and apparent idiosyncrasies displayed by some verbs can be explained by the proposal that the seven classes are potentially available to all psych-roots. For this reason, psych-verbs present a high degree of vulnerability in language contact and change which results in intra-language optionality and diachronic variation

Some notes on outro in Portuguese

This paper studies the syntactic behavior of outro(s) in Brazilian and European Portuguese. Starting from the syntax of its Italian counterpart un altro/(degli) altri, we argue that outro(s) in prenominal position is neither an adjective nor a determiner, but an existential quantifier and that the presence of the indefinite article, um outro/uns outros, gives rise to a complex existential quantifier, like the corresponding Italian form. We also argue that outro(s) and um outro/uns outros do not specialize for different interpretations since they both substantially show the same ambiguity (one/some more or a/some different one(s)) and behave in the same way in relation to possible semantic interpretations typical of existential quantifiers

Indefinite determiners in informal Italian: A preliminary analysis

This paper presents the results of a pilot study on the distribution of indefinite determiners in contexts with narrow scope interpretation in current informal Italian. It individuates the available forms and presents their diatopic distribution. The research is based on data collected through an online questionnaire designed to detect optionality. The results show that in narrow scope indefinite contexts, i.e. negative statements, both the zero determiner and the definite article are widespread throughout the country. The partitive determiner is only found in episodic sentences and is limited to restricted geographic areas. In all contexts and areas, a large degree of optionality is found. In some context and area, however, it is possible to identify one form more prominent than the others. This can be related to the context, which may favour some specialized meaning of one specific form, e.g. saliency and small quantity, or to diatopic variation due to language contact with the dialect, as shown by comparing present-day informal Italian with the dialectal data reported in AIS and analysed in Cardinaletti and Giusti (2018)

Dependency, licensing, and the nature of grammatical relations

Dependency is a general term that refers to different structural relations. We highlight three very general classes of phenomena that are often captured by this term: (i) the structural relation between a lexical head (e.g., V, N, A) and the functional structure projected by it such as the relation between a verb and an auxiliary or between a noun and a determiner; (ii) the local selectional relation between a lexical head and the constituents that are combined merged with it to satisfy its argument structure, as in the case of the verb and the direct and indirect objects; (iii) the structural relation created by two different constituents that share the same referential index. In the latter case, we observe two major types: a constituent is displaced, as in the case of the subject of a passive clause or a wh-constituent; or two constituents share the same referent but have different functions in the clause (or in different clauses), as is the case of pronouns and their antecedents