A comparative grammar of Borgomanerese / Christina Tortora.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tortora, Christina, author.

Series:

Oxford studies in comparative syntax

Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Italian language--Dialects--Italy--Borgomanero--Grammar.

Italian language.

Italian language--Dialects.

Italy--Borgomanero.

Grammar.

Grammar, Comparative and general.

Gallo-Italian dialects.

Borgomanero (Italy)--Languages.

Borgomanero (Italy).

Italian language--Dialects--Grammar.

Language and languages.

Physical Description:

xiv, 401 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2014]

Summary:

This book presents and analyzes various features of the morphosyntax of Borgomanerese, a Gallo-Italic dialect spoken in the town of Borgomanero, in the Piedmont region of Northern Italy. The study is highly comparative, drawing on the literature on numerous other Italian dialects and Romance languages (as well as English), to inform our understanding of the Borgomanerese phenomena. Christina Tortora takes the many unusual and understudied (and often novel) facts of Borgomanerese grammar as compelling grounds for revisiting and reformulating current analyses of syntactic phenomena in these other languages. The phenomena treated include the syntax and semantics of the weak locative in presentational sentences; the syntax of object clitics and argument prepositions; the syntax of subjects and subject clitics; the syntax of interrogatives; clausal architecture; and the relationship between orthography and theoretical analysis. The principal value of this book lies both in the rich description of the morphosyntactic phenomena of Borgomanerese, many of which have not been previously reported in the literature, and in the consequent novel analyses developed, which contribute insights for other languages and dialects, and advance our understanding of syntax and syntactic theory in general. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Introduction 1

2 The Syntax and Semantics of the Weak Locative 5

Introduction 5

1 Unaccusative verb classes 7

1.1 GOAL-entailing vs. SOURCE-entailing verbs of inherently directed motion 9

1.2 α-telic verbs of inherently directed motion 11

1.3 Conclusions 12

2 The syntactic manifestation of the GOAL/non-GOAL distinction in Borgomanerese 12

2.1 The data 13

2.2 What is the ghi-construction? 16

2.2.1 Hypothesis: ghi is the morpho-syntactic instantiation of GOAL 26

2.2.1.1 Ghi is a locative 27

2.2.1.2 The 'expletive' status of the ghi in the ghi-construction 18

2.2.1.3 The semantic interpretation of 'expletive' ghi 24

2.2.1.4 Summary: The "locative expletive" is a weak locative goal argument 25

2.2.2 The structure projected by GOAL-entailing VIDMs 26

2.3 Preverbal ngh 29

2.3.1 Ngh is a subject clitic 29

2.3.2 Ngh: Evidence for a null locative in Spec, IP 30

2.3.2.1 Pro-loc: The null locative 32

2.3.2.2 Pro-loc and the i-subject 34

3 SOURCE-entailing verbs and the existential 39

3.1 Speculations on the relevant lexical semantic distinction between SOURCE vs. GOAL and LOCATION 40

3.2 Conclusions 43

4 The weak locative goal argument in Italian 43

4.1 Indirect evidence for the WLGA 45

4.1.1 GOAL and the unmarked i-subject 46

4.1.1.1 Come, return, and enter vs. escape and exit 46

4.1.1.2 α-telic VIDMs 47

4.1.2 Evidence for the syntactic presence of pro-loc in Italian 48

4.1.2.1 Prediction 1 of the Pro-loc Hypothesis 49

4.1.2.2 Prediction 2 of the Pro-loc Hypothesis 50

4.1.2.3 Summary on the Pro-loc Hypothesis 51

4.1.3 Further evidence for the WLGA, and some speculations 53

4.2 Pro-loc and the existential in Italian 54

5 English non-existential weak there as a weak locative goal argument 56

5.1 The lexical restriction of there 57

5.1.1 There is selected by GOAL-entailing VTDMs 58

5.1.1.1 Arrive-type, α-telic, and Manner of Motion Verbs 58

5.1.1.2 Verbs of Appearance 60

5.2 There is a WLGA 61

5.2.1 The semantic contribution of there 63

5.2.2 There is weak 63

5.2.3 The feature deficiency of weak XPs 67

5.2.3.1 The feature deficiency of weak there 68

5.2.4 The speaker-oriented Interpretation: Valuation of the [speaker] feature 70

5.2.4.1 The "default" interpretation 70

5.2.4.2 Other potential "anchors" in the linguistic context 71

5.3 Alternative analyses of weak there 73

5.3.1 There as an expletive 73

5.3.2 There as a raised predicate 75

5.3.2.1 The elimination of problems caused by an expletive analysis 77

5.3.2.2 Questions raised by the predicate analysis 78

5.3.3 There as a DP double 81

3 Object Clitics in Simple Tense, Complex Predicate, and Imperative Clauses 83

Introduction 83

1 Generalized enclisis in the simple tenses 86

1.1 Enclisis with the finite verb 86

1.2 Enclisis in the simple tenses with adverbs 91

1.2.1 Adverbs which allow enclisis 91

1.2.2 Adverbs which do not allow enclisis 93

1.2.3 Adverb order 94

1.2.4 The position of the clitic: The V-domain 99

1.2.5 The adverb maj 'never' 101

2 Enclisis with past participle in the compound tenses 105

2.1 Enclisis with past participle In the presence of adverbs 106

2.1.1 Tortora (2000) account 107

2.1.2 Problems with Tortora (2000) account 109

2.2 Compound tenses as "bi-clausal" structures 111

2.2.1 The notions of mono- and bi-clausality 111

2.2.2 Compound tense, clitic, and adverb: An analysis 113

2.2.2.1 Arguments in favor of an XP analysis of the PasPar+CL constituent 115

2.2.2.1.1 The form of the irregular past participle 115

2.2.2.1.2 Constituent behavior of verb+CL clusters in other dialects 116

2.3 Interim summary 118

2.4 Clausal architecture and cross-linguistic variation in OCL placement 120

2.4.1 The nature of the landing site in simple tense clauses: The Feature Content Hypothesis and the Feature Spreading Hypothesis 120

2.4.2 The nature of the landing site in the compound tenses and cross-linguistic generalizations 123

2.4.3 Other OCL placement patterns with participles in Romance 126

3 Variation in placement: The nature of the clitic itself 129

3.1 Borgomanerese impersonal and reflexive clitics 130

3.2 Syntactically conditioned allomorphy 132

3.2.1 Piedmontese reflexive clitics 133

3.2.2 Southern Italian OCLs 134

3.2.3 OCLs in Valdese Waldensian (Occitan) 134

4 Restructuring verbs 235

4.1 Restructuring verbs in Borgomanerese 237

4.2 Restructuring verbs in Standard Piedmontese 139

4.3 Restructuring in Italian: The current analysis in light of recent proposals 242

4.3.1 Casting Cinque (2004) in a bi-clausal light 243

4.4 More evidence for light bi-clausality: Clitic copying 148

5 Enclisis in causative constructions 249

5.1 OCLs in causative constructions in Italian: A brief overview 150

5.2 OCLs in causative constructions in Borgomanerese 253

5.2.1 Enclisis on the lexical verb in "apparent" causatives in Romance 156

5.2.2 Borgomanerese fe+infinitive is not an "accusative-infinitive" structure 159

5.3 Piedmontese causatives 160

6 Endisis with imperatives: Evidence for OCL placement within the lower functional field 163

6.1 OCL syntax in Borgomanerese imperatives 163

6.2 The missing SCL in imperatives 165

6.3 Standard Piedmontese indicatives vs. imperatives and nonfinites 166

6.4 Imperatives and nonfinites in Romanian: Savescu (2007, 2009) 167

6.5 Syntactically determined allomorphy: Indicatives vs. imperatives 169

7 Clitic combinations 172

8 Vowel changes under enclisis in Borgomanerese 180

8.1 The conditions of the vowel change 181

8.2 The nature of the vowel change 186

8.2.1 The "vowel reduplication" strategy 186

8.2.2 The "change to [a]" strategy 189

4 Object Clitics and Locative Prepositions 192

Introduction 192

1 Argument locatives as another type of "adverbial host" 193

1.1 Argument locatives and the AspP projection 195

1.2 The argument locative non-hosts 201

2 Class 2 prepositions and the preposition's complement 203

2.1 Class 2 prepositional enclisis in general Northern Italian 203

2.2 On the functional architecture within the Class 2 PP 205

2.2.1 The Class 2 PP's own Z head 206

2.2.1.1 The case of Borgomanerese prepositional enclisis with Class 2 prepositions 206

2.2.1.2 The case of Veneto prepositional enclisis with Class 2 prepositions 207

2.2.1.3 Application to other outstanding cases 209

3 Remaining issues 210

3.1 Movement to AspP within CP_Place vs. movement to matrix AspP 210

3.2 The lexical difference between denti (Class 1) and renti (Class 2) 212

3.2.1 Conceptual inseparability (spatial Inalienable possession) 215

3.2.2 A word about the observed variation in Class 1 vs. Class 2 membership 217

3.3 The preposition visij 219

3.4 OCL clusters and prepositional enclisis 220

5 Subject Clitics 225

Introduction 225

1 Subject clitic pronouns in Northern Italian dialects: A brief review of Poletto (2000) 226

1.1 The term "subject clitic" 227

1.2 Poletto's (2000) subject clitics 230

1.2.1 Invariable SCLs 230

1.2.2 Deictic SCLs 232

1.2.3 Person SCLs 235

1.2.4 Number SCLs 236

1.2.5 Syntactic positions of subject clitics 237

2 Subject clitics in Borgomanerese: An overview 239

3 The subject clitic i 242

3.1 The clitic i as an invariable SCL 243

3.2 The syntactic distribution of i 245

3.2.1 Borgomanerese i in Type 1 Coordination 245

3.2.2 Borgomanerese i and wh-elements 249

3.2.3 A final word on the prediction that Borgomanerese invariable i should exist 251

3.2.4 Arguments against i as a number or person SCL 252

3.3 The relative optionality of i 254

3.3.1 The SCL i and vocalic auxiliaries 256

3.3.2 The SCL i and unaccusatives vs.

unergatives 258

4 Third-person singular / and la 259

4.1 The clitics / and la as number/person SCLs 260

4.2 The restricted optionality of I and la 262

4.2.1 The SCL I with auxiliary verbs 262

4.2.2 Other syntactic contexts 265

4.2.2.1 Simple tense subject inversion and subject quantifiers 266

4.2.2.2 Wh-subject questions 269

4.2.2.3 Subject relative clauses 271

5 The second-person singular subject clitics tal and t 272

5.1 The SCL tal 273

5.1.1 The SCL tal as a person SCL 273

5.1.2 Speculations on the origins of the l of tal 274

5.1.3 Speculations on the syntax of tal 278

5.2 The SCL t 280

5.2.1 The SCL t as a person SCL 281

5.2.2 The exclusive use of t with vocalic (a)vej 'have' and (v)èssi 'be' 281

6 The subject clitic a 282

6.1 Deontic nè-gghi 283

6.2 Other contexts 285

6.3 Concluding remarks on a 289

7 The subject clitic ngh 289

7.1 On the variation between ngh and gh 290

7.2 The subject clitic (n)gh with and without ghi 294

7.3 Other points of ngh variation 295

7.3.1 What is the a? 296

7.3.2 Ngh as a vocalic auxiliary clitic 297

8 The impersonal clitic s 301

8.1 Preliminary observations about impersonal s as a SCL 301

8.2 The syntax of impersonal s 302

8.2.1 The high merge site of impersonal s 302

8.2.2 Two distinct morphological forms for two distinct syntactic positions 305

8.3 A brief note on the vowel of as and sa 306

6 Interrogatives 308

Introduction 308

1 Interrogative pronouns 309

2 The missing preposition 309

3 The difference between cus and que 311

4 Doubly-filled comp and cleft questions 313.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780199945641

0199945640

9780199945627

0199945624

OCLC:

898050928