Introduction

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Book Chapter

Reference

Introduction

SMITH, Jason, IHSANE, Tabea

SMITH, Jason, IHSANE, Tabea. Introduction. In: Smith, J. & Ihsane, T. Selected papers from the 42nd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) . Amsterdam : J.

Benjamins, 2015.

DOI : 10.1075/rllt.7.001int

Available at:

http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:93880

Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.

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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory (RLLT)

ISSN 1574-552X

The yearly 'Going Romance' meetings and 'Linguistic Symposia on Romance Languages' feature research in formallinguistics of Romance languages, mainly in the domains of morphology, syntax, and semantics, and, to a certain extent, phonology. Each volume brings together a peer-reviewed selection of papers that were presented at one of the meetings, aiming to provide a representation of the spread of topics at that conference, and of the variety of research carried out nowadays on Romance languages within theoreticallinguistics.

Editor

Frank Drijkoningen Utrecht University

Volume7

Romance Linguistics 2012. Selected papers from the 42nd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Cedar City, Utah, 20-22 April2012

Edited by Jason Smith and Tabea Ihsane

Romance Linguistics 2012

Selected papers from the 42nd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL),

Cedar City, Utah, 20-22 April2012

Edited by

Jason Smith

Southern Utah University

Tabealhsane

University of Geneva

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam 1 Philadelphia

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI z39 .48-1984.

DOI 10.1075/rllt.7

Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress:

LCCN 2015016586 (PRINT) /2015020118 (E-BOOK) ISBN 978 90 272 0387 8

ISBN 978. 90 272 6831 0

(HB)

(E-BOOK)

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John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 ME Amsterdam · The NetherlaiJ.ds John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 · USA

Introduction

The 42nd Annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL XLII) was held on April20-22, 2012 at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah.

The conference attracted more than 60 scholars from North America, Brazil, and Europe, who presented a total of 56 papers on syntax, phonology, second language acquisition, historicallinguistics, semantics, and psycholinguistics. Of these, 33 articles were submitted and reviewed for the proceedings. Following this extensive review process, the 19 articles summarized below were carefully selected for the present volume.

The first section includes four articles that apply experimental approach~s to issues in Romance linguistics. In their article, Halloran and Rothman contrib- ute to the debate concerning the degree to which adult L2 learners have access to Universal Grammar (UG). Specifically, they evaluate English (Ll) speakers' acquisition of restrictions on clitic placement in Spanish (L2). Through the use of a grammaticality judgment task, they find that advanced proficiency Spanish speakers demonstrate native-like knowledge of proper clitic placement and they argue that this knowledge supports Full Access approaches to UG with respect to adult L2 learners. In the following article, Lopes examines Ll acquisition of ellipsis in verbal phrases in Brazilian Portuguese among children aged 4-6. Utilizing a Truth Value Judgment Task; she measured the children's ability to correctly identify the matching condition (and th us demonstrate retrieval of the elided antecedent) and their success at rejecting false interpretations. Her results reveal that the children are indeed able to identify the correct interpretation at an adult-like level, but that only the 6-yeai olds (and to a lesser extent the 5-year olds) mirror the adult grammar in their capacity to reject mismatching conditions.

. The final two articles in this section apply experimental methods to examine language contact situations. Post evaluates the predictions of two previously proposed universal syntactic constraints on code-switching - the Complement Adjunct/Distinction and the Funètional Head Constraint - in the context of two groups of bilingual French-Arabie speakers. She found significant differences between Tunisian Arabie speakers and Moroccan Arabie speakers in terms of their acceptance of switches between French and the respective Arabie dialects that they were exposed, to in this aurai study. Her results suggest that the constraints may simply reveal probabilities in code-switching rather than universal restrictions

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vur Romance Linguistics 2012

on such switches. In the concluding article in this section, Lipski presents results obtained from experimental studies he conducted of speakers of the Palenquero creole language (LP) in Colombia in order to determine the psycholinguistic boundaries between it and its main historicallexifier, Spanish. His analysis of the data indicates a resistance to code-switching in this community, but, at the same time, gives evidence that grammatical boundaries between LP and Spanish are more indeterminate than they may first appear.

The first article in the Phonology section also applies experimental methodol- ogy to reach its conclusions. Shosted presents the results of a study in which he used electromagnetic articulography to examine the assumption that oral and nasal vowels share a vocal tract configuration and differ only in the presence (or not) of a velopharygynal opening. He finds evidence among four Brazilian Portuguese speakers that weakens this Minimal Difference assumption. Specifically, he notes consistent lingual elevation in the production of /ë ï ü a/, relative to their oral counterparts, as weil as a reduction in labial aper"ture in the nasals /ï ü a/.

The next two articles draw on Optimality Theory to analyze language variation. Bradley expands and develops the OT analysis he presented at the symposium as one of the invited plenary speakers. Specifically; he examines two types of secondary articulations - labialization and palatalization - that are documented in Judeo-Spanish, but notàbly absent from other Spanish dialects. His OT analysis is a novel and unified account of these phenomena that integrates both phonological an·d phonetic constraints - arguing for variance in the syllabification of glides in the former, and for distinct gesturafcoordination ofvowel-consonant sequences in the latter. In his article, Montreuil analyzes variation among the Norman varieties of French spoken on the northern tip of the Cotentin peninsula and on the Channel island ofJersey. His OT with candidate chains.(OT-CC) analysis provides an account of hs/ -assimilation in these dialects at the same time that it contributes to the current debate between localism and globalism in OT. His arralysis demon- strates how OT-CC overcomes the limitations of global evaluation models through the integration of candidate chains that allow a degree of derivation in arder to account for such variation as weil as types of opacity.

The final two articles in this section are historical in their focus. Jacobs analyzes stress shift and vowel deletion in Latin within the framework of the Harmonie Serialism variant of OT. He overcomes a previously problematic issue for Harmonie Serialism in cases of stress shift such as mulierem > mul[j]erem and jiliolus > jil{j}olus through an analysis that includes faithfulness constraints based on foot position rather than the stress position of individual vowels, as had been previously argued. In her article, Dalola evaluates the predictions of three models of loanword adaptation - the phonological approach, the perceptual approach, and the hvbrid phonological-perceptual approach- within the context of French

Introduction IX

loanwords ofthree /h/-bearing Germanie varieties between the 8th and 14th cen- turies. Her examination of the dataset reveals various adaptation strategies, many of which call into question predictions of current models that emphasize mapping ofL2 segments onto similarly existing LI segments.

Not limited to diachronie phonology, this volume also includes three articles that bring contemporary syntactic theory to bear on historical data from Old French, ltalo-Romance, and Classical Portuguese. In an article based on her invited plenary talk, Arteaga focuses on the syntax of the subjunctive in Old French (OF), comparing it to Modern French (MF). In MF, in contrast to OF, obviation effects occur between the subject of a volitional complement and the subject of the embedded clause. Arteaga daims that obviation in OF, and its evolu- tion into MF, can be explained if we assume that the complementizer que was not required to introduce the subjunctive in OF, that Complementizer Deletion trig- gers V2 word order in subjunctive contexts, and that the uninterpretable irrealis feature of CForce is valued by that of Mood via Agree (San Martin 2007).

Pescarini's article sheds light on variation in clitic clusters, language change, morphological operations and micro-variation. The author examines the make-up of Italo-Romance clitic sequences and argues that the currently common o~ject

clitic ordering dative-accusative reflects a historical development that must have involved incorporation of the dative di tic into the accusative one. Support for this view is given from syntactic and morphological properties of these clitic clusters in synchronie varieties.

In his article, Antonelli discusses the status of que-less clauses in Classical Portuguese. Based on facts related to the linear arder of subjects and adverbs, - the author daims that such clauses display a CP layer, and not just a TP layer.

The main argument in favour of the idea is that que is not present due to verb movement to C. Under a split CP view (Rizzi 1997), this movement causes the peripheral heads Force and Fin to be projected in a syncretic way, preventing the activation of discursive projections like TopP or FocP, and thus explaining why fronted phrase is impossible in clauses lacking que.

The final section includes syntactic analyses of synchronie data in Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, and Romanian. In their article, Castroviejo, Oltra- Massuet, and Pérez-Jiménez examine Spanish sin-bare PPs, that is, without-PPs in which the noun following the preposition is bare, and show that these phrases share semantic and syntactic properties with constructions involving light verbs that select for bare nouns. To account for the facts, the authors daim that sin can be decomposed into two layers of functional elements, negation and a HAVE

relation (Mclntyre 2006). They further propose that sin-PPs can be coerced into gradable properties as long as the bare noun is cumulative and homogeneous.

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x Romance Linguistics 2012

Cyrino and Espinal focus on bare nominals (BNs) in Brazilian Portuguese and show that these nominals come in two shapes. Sorne of them are real BNs in that they represent bare count nouns that can only occur as objects of HAVE-

predicates and that are interpreted as property-type expressions. These nominals are not specified for number and definiteness, in contrast with the second type of BNs. The latter occur in other argument positions, introduce a discourse referent and are interpreted as entity-type expressions. According to the authors, real BNs are NPs whereas the BNs of the second type are DPs with a null D that carries Number specifications.

Atkinson examines Frençh animate nouns, foF which natural sex and grammatical gender can interact and sometimes even conflict. To account for ·the problematic French data, she argues for a two-feature analysis, following Kramer's (2009) proposai for Amharic: natural sex and grammatical gender are represented independently in the syntax of the nominal phrase. The idea is that there is a feature on n that represents natural sex and another on the root that represents grammatical gender.

Sleeman and Niculescu assume that the distinction between verbal and adjectival participles can be fine-grained into four stages in Germanie languages:

adjectival participles can be stative or resultative, and verbal participles are fully eventive only when postnominal. When they are prenominal, Sleeman (2011) shows that they are less eventive. In this article, the authors argue that Romance languages also display these four stages in the adjectivization process. On the basis of an analysis of the French passive participle combined with the adverb très 'very' and the Romanian present participle in modifier position preceded by cel, it is argued that the less fully eventive verbal participle does exist in Romance.

Arche and Marin examine derived categories, focusing on the properties of nouns derived from adjectives. They discuss the event structure underlying such nouns and argue that in addition to the categories generally assumed in the lit- erature, namely deadjectival no uns denoting states or qualities, there is a group of deadjectival nominalizations that refer to occurrences of events (Beauseroy 2009).

Examples would be nouns like imprudence and cruelty. The authors show that the particularity of nominalizations in this category is that they are derived from evalutative adjectives. This is due, they argue, to the fact that such adjectives can be predicated of events in addition to the sentient individual (Stowell1991).

McDonald focuses on the case marking of the indirect object di tic se in Spanish and daims that this pronoun bears accusative case, not the expected dative. This is supported by the facts that se cannot be found in the passive, that it behaves like an accusative di tic in Romanian, and that the restrictions on se are the same as on the accusative clitic la in laista dialects. The author proposes that it

Introduction

is Multiple Agree, between the probe v and two nominal goals, one of which being se, that is r;esponsible for the accusative marking on se.

Eguren and Pastor analyze two patterns of nominal expressions including a measure phrase (MP) in Spanish, [MP +de+ N] and [D + N +de+ MP]. They propose that the former represents a (predicate-specifier) reverse predication structure, whereas the latter is an instance of (predicate-complement) straight predication (den Dikken 2006). By positing that a small-clause like Relator Phrase un dedies the two constructions, the account expresses configurationally the predi- cational relationship between the measure phrase and the noun in both sequences.

Furthermore, it structurally represents the fact that the first pattern hasan attribu- tive interpretation, lacking in the second one.

Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to those who have been so instru- mental in the success of both the conference and the present volume. Southern Utah University Provost Bradley Cook, the Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, James McDonald, and Raymond Grant, the Distinguished Fellow for Creative Engagement, not only provided critical sponsorship of LSRL 42, but along with our wonderful faculty, staff, and student volunteers, they gave gener- ously of their time to ensure the conference went off without a hitch. Also, we are so impressed by and grateful to the dedicated group of reviewers who provided invaluable feedback on both the abstracts submitted to the conference and the articles for this volume. A great debt is owed to the RLLT series editor, Frank Drijkoningen, and the wonderful team at John Benjamins, particularly Anke de Looper, who have given us indispensable guidance and support in seeing this proj- ect to fruition. Christina Tortora and Julia Herschensohn were extremely genereus with their time and always quick to answer our inquiries. Special appreciation goes to E. F. K. Koerner for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Of course, the following pages would be sadly blank without the tremendous efforts and scholarship of the authors of these articles - thank you.

References

Beauseroy, Delphine. 2009. Syntaxe et sémantique des noms abstraits statifs. Ph.D. dissertation, Nancy University.

Dikken, Marcel den. 2006. Relators and Linkers. The Syntax of Predication, Predicate Inversion and Copulas. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Kramer, Ruth. 2009. Definite Markers, Phi-Features, and Agreement: A morphosyntactic investiga- tion of the Amharic DP. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz.

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XII Romance Linguistics 2012

Mcintyre, Andrew. 2006. "The interpretation of Germanie datives and English have': Datives and Other Cases, ed. by Daniel Ho le, André Meininger & Werner Abraham. Amsterdam &

Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOl: 10.1075/slcs.75.09mci

Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. «The Fine Structure of the Left Peripherf. Elements of Grammar, ed. by Liliane Haegeman, 281-337. Dordrecht: I<1nwer. DOl: 10.1007/978-94-011-5420-8_7 San Martin, Itziar. 2007. "Beyond the Infinitive vs. Subjunctive Rivalry: Su.rviving changes in

mood': Coreferenœ Modality. and FoctlS: St:udies 011 the Syntax..Semantics Interface, ed.

by Luis Egu.reo & Olga Femandez-Soriaoo, 171-190. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOl: 10.1075/la.111.09mar·

Sleeman, Petra. 2011. "Verbal and Adjectival Participles: Internai structure and position''. Lingua

121: 1569-1587. DOl: 10.1016/j.lingua.2011.05.001 ·

Stowell, Tim. 1991. "The Alignment of Arguments in Adjective Phrases': Perspectives on Phrase Structure: Heads and licensing, ed. Susan Rothstein, 105-135. New York: Academie Press.

PART 1

Introduction

Book Chapter

Reference

Introduction

SMITH, Jason, IHSANE, Tabea

SMITH, Jason, IHSANE, Tabea. Introduction. In: Smith, J. & Ihsane, T. Selected papers from the 42nd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) . Amsterdam : J.

Benjamins, 2015.

DOI : 10.1075/rllt.7.001int

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory (RLLT)

Romance Linguistics 2012

Selected papers from the 42nd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL),

Cedar City, Utah, 20-22 April2012

Edited by

Jason Smith

Tabealhsane

Table of contents

Introduction

Experimental app~oaches