University of Venice Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 18

2008

Building up Complex Temporal Constructions (8) a. antes *(de) las ocho Spanish prima *(del)le otto Italian Lit. 'before *(of) the eight' b. después *(de) la cena Spanish Lit. 'after *(of) the dinner' As the examples in (8) illustrate, in Spanish the functional preposition is de, the same particle which is used to express genitive case in nominal constructions. Marácz (1984), Plann (1986) and Bresnan (1994) argued that complex prepositions are some kind of defective nominals because they introduce genitive complements. 6 Across Romance languages, however, there is a microparametrical variation with respect to the realization or omission of this functional preposition. In standard Spanish, for instance, it always appears whenever a complement occurs, (8). The same situation holds for Portuguese: (9) a. antes/depois do atentado/ de mim Portuguese b. antes/depois de ocorrer o atentado c. antes/depois de que ocorresse o atentado In Catalan the same preposition, de, always appears except for inflected sentences: (10) a. abans/després de l'atemptat/ de mi Catalan b. abans/després de passar l'atemptat c. abans/després (*de) que passés l'atemptat 6. The distinction between two types of prepositions was noticed long time ago by Antonio de Nebrija (1492, cap. XV), the first Spanish grammarian. According to him, in Spanish there are prepositions that require genitive, such as cerca 'near/close'; antes 'before'; delante 'in front of'; dentro 'inside' (locative)/'in' (temporal), etc., and prepositions that introduce accusative complements, such as contra 'against'; hasta, 'until' (temporal)/'to' (locative); entre 'between/among' (locative), etc. Nebrija also pointed out that some of the prepositions of the first group might also be used without the genitive marker. This alternation goes on holding in contemporary Spanish (and Catalan) and nowadays a large microparametric variation within dialects and registers can be found: encima de la mesa/ col. encima la mesa (Spanish) 'on the table'; darrera de la casa/ (dar)rera la casa (Catalan) 'behind the house'. We refer the reader to Bartra and Suñer (1992) for more details about this topic. 7. Rizzi (1988:523) notes that in Italian the preposition di does not obligatorily follow dopo in the case in which the complement is a free personal pronoun, (i.a), and that the same preposition can never appear when the free personal pronoun is modified, (i.b): (i) a. Dopo (di) lui non c'è nessuno. 'After (of) him there is noboby' b. Gianni viene dopo (*di) noi tutti. 'G. comes after (*of) us all' We agree with Rizzi's judgements, but we also think that the optionality of di with free personal pronouns (cf. (13a) and (i.a)) is restricted to some particular cases. 8. In Romanian, unlike the other Romance languages, the sentence introduced by dupa 'after' cannot appear in infinitive: (i) *A sosit (cu dua zile) dupa ce a se intampla (atentatul). '(S/he) arrived (two days) after (the terroristic attack) take Inf place' 15 Laura Brugè and Avel. lina Suñer projected even though in some cases it is phonologically unrealized. 9 We also propose that this preposition-pronounced or unpronounced-is a Case marker that dominates the eventive nominal expression and that expresses the complement-relationship between this expression and a silent TIME that selects it, as we will discuss in section 3.3. 10 c) as Plann (1986) pointed out for locative particles, a related question to this last property is that in Spanish this 'particles' can combine with postposed possessives, detrás mío 'Lit. behind mine', delante tuyo 'Lit. in front of yours', etc. 11 These constructions are not allowed by prescriptive grammar, but they are extremely frequent in colloquial speech, and in Catalan they belong to the standard language, darrera meu, davant teu. 12 d) Larson (1985) pointed out another interesting property of this construction. While complex prepositions can be modified by certain adverbs with a focalizing function, 9. See the crosslinguistic data provided by Cinque (2008) and the references mentioned there for locative complex prepositions. 10. In this paper we will not deal with why this preposition can be either unpronounced or phonologically realized. Romance languages may differ in the way of assigning Case to sentential or nominal complements and perhaps the categorial origin of the particle in each language plays a crucial role in this choice. 11. See Terzi (2008: §3) for an explanation of these data with locative particles. Postposed possessives with temporal particles are much more restricted, but we can find some examples in very colloquial speech: (i) a. Leo Dan, que cantó antes mío… Lit. 'Leo Dan, who sung before mine Masc. Sing. b. Habló con Madelman y Unai (…) que pinchan después mío.

2014

Prepositional phrases are the commonest kind of postmodification in all registers of English (Biber et al. 1999: 634). The locative ones that can be expanded into a defining relative clause (the books [which are] on the table) are usually expressed by such a construction in Spanish (los libros que están encima de la mesa) or by a phrase introduced by de (los libros de encima de la mesa). Wonder (1979) argues that Spanish allows locative phrases with prepositions other than de in the case of"situaciones"activas"" (el aterrizaje en pleno campo) as against"situaciones estáticas" (*el sofá en la sala), and if the phrase can be given an adverbial rather than, or in addition to, an adjectival interpretation (el ruido en la calle), especially if that phrase implies an alternative location for an object or contrast with another similar object (el sofá en la sala contigua). This paper further investigates this claim and looks at Spanish equivalents of English po...

2017

In this work I investigate the syntax and semantics of two groups of spatial prepositions in Spanish. The first group, which I term "small Ps," includes forms like bajo 'under' (e.g. bajo la mesa 'under the table'), tras 'behind' (e.g. tras la columna 'behind the column') and ante 'front' (e.g. ante la catedral 'front the cathedral'). The second group, which I term "big Ps," is made up of the morphologically-related prepositions debajo 'DE.under' (e.g. debajo de la mesa 'DE.under of the table'), detrás 'DE.behind' (e.g. detrás de la columna 'DE.behind of the column') and delante 'DE.L.front' (e.g. delante de la catedral 'DE.L.front of the cathedral'). In this thesis I describe the different behaviors of the Ps in these two groups, illustrating first and foremost that "small" versus "big" Ps display a series of syntactic and semantic asymmetries, such as the ability (or lack thereof) to take bare nominals; the (un)availability of coordination and adverb intervention; and the (un)bounded interpretation of the nominal (among other differences). I propose that all of these apparently unrelated contrasts can be derived under the hypothesis that "small" versus "big" Ps project different structures. Specifically, I propose that "small" Ps select a single nominal complement, whereas "big" Ps select a more complex "Possessor-Possessum" structure, where the nominal occupies a specifier position, acting as a possessor of a silent PLACE element (in the spirit of Kayne 2004). Finally, I relate the contrast between "small" and "big" Ps to the contrast found with non-clitic doubled structures (e.g. Vi a María 'saw.1SG A María') versus their clitic-doubled counterparts (e.g. La vi a v María 'CL ACC saw.1SG A María'), showing that more abstractly, the syntactic and semantic parallels found across these seemingly unrelated phenomena further support the promise of the present proposal. vi Acknowledgments I have many wonderful people to thank for having helped me reach the end of this project. It is clear to me that without their contribution this thesis would not have been completed, and in some cases, it would not have even started. In the first place, my deepest thanks go to my advisor, Christina Tortora. Working with Christina has been one of the most enriching and fascinating experiences I have ever had. Her brilliant mind and sharp questions helped me give shape to this work from day one, and her belief in me pushed me to give more than I thought I could give. On a personal level, she provided guidance, support and encouragement every single step of the way, no matter how busy she was, no matter how far away I was. I am tremendously lucky to have had her as my advisor. I will be forever grateful to her.

Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2020

In this work I investigate the syntax and interpretation of two groups of spatial prepositions in Spanish: “small” Ps (e.g. bajo ‘under’) and “big” Ps (e.g. debajo ‘DE.under’). I show that small versus big Ps display a series of asymmetries, such as the (in)ability to take bare nominals and the (un)availability of coordination and adverb intervention. I propose that these contrasts can be derived under the hypothesis that small Ps select a single nominal complement, whereas big Ps select a more complex Possessor-Possessum structure, where the nominal occupies a specifier position, acting as the possessor of a silent PLACE element. Furthermore, I argue that unifying big Ps (but crucially not small Ps) with possessive structures accounts for the delimited versus non-delimited interpretation of these Ps.

Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics., 2022

In this paper, we propose a morphosyntactic analysis of Prepositional Compounds in Italian. We argue that while prepositions are not meaningless, their content isn't too rich, either. We propose that they can be treated as general relators (along the lines of Manzini & Franco's (2016) treatment of locative and oblique prepositions) which can express different directions of inclusion between the nominal items which are part of the compound. The lexicalization patterns are coherent with the syncretism found in other aspects of the grammar (e.g. locative/oblique prepositions). At the same time, the specific lexicalizations of these prepositions are ultimately determined by the morphosyntactic context in which they are embedded, highlighting the key role played by the syntactic context in shaping a vocabulary entry. One advantage of our proposal lies in its minimality: the prepositions only encode general relators with varying directionalities; they are not burdened with semantic content. The relevant interpretations of Prepositional Compounds are ultimately derived by pragmatic enrichment at the C-I interface on the basis of the elementary content expressed by the preposition.

Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 2005

In this article we analyze the formation of Spanish and Catalan phrases with an intransitive locative adverb preceded by a bare noun. These constructions can have a meaning of path and direction (i. e. Sp. río abajo, Cat. riu avall 'downriver') as well as body orientation (i. e. Sp. cara abajo, Cat. cara avall 'face down'). A detailed analysis of the available historical documentation suggests the hypothesis that these constructions derive from more complex expressions headed by a preposition that lost its phonological properties, without losing its semantic and syntactic features. The presence of a phonologically null preposition is licensed both by the meaning of the incorporated noun and by the presence of a predicative directional adverb phrase. The case of the Catalan preposition cap 'towards', from the noun cap 'head', shows one step further in the evolution of these constructions. * The research for this paper has been funded by grants from the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia-FEDER of Spain (reserch projects BFF2003-08364-C02-01 and HUM 2005-03508FILO) and from the Generalitat de Catalunya (2001SGR150). We authors want to thank Anna Beltra, Olga Fernández Soriano and especially José Ignacio Hualde for their valuable comments and observations. b. Cat. Les llàgrimes li queien galtes avall 'tears poured down his/her cheeks' The adverbs that participate in this type of construction have been traditionally characterized as postpositions, even though the noun phrase that precedes them is not really their complement. The goal of this paper is to trace the formation of these constructions and the changes they have undergone through the history of Spanish and Catalan. Our examples will be from Spanish for the most part, but we will also make use of Catalan data to strengthen some arguments and to point out differences between the two languages.

2005

Obviation characterizes the requirement of some anaphoric elements to avoid being coindexed with an element included within some syntactically defined domain, while proximation is the opposite requirement, that of being coindexed within such domain. Studies on obviation have focused on the distribution of syntactic elements, mainly pronouns and reflexives, as well as semantic phenomena like logophoric and other reference-tracking elements, and degree clauses (e.g., , Speas, to appear, Fox and Hackl 2007. Within Romance, much attention has been given to the obviative properties of null subjects of embedded clauses in subjunctive (see Constantini 2005 for a recent review), a phenomenon also found in Slavic languages (Progovac 1993, Avrutin and. In the GB tradition and in early Minimalism, a prominent line of explanation for these phenomena was framed within Binding theory, including its recent formulations in terms of feature sharing . Hale and Keyser (2003) explore the role that a system of obviation plays in explaining certain argument alternations, that is, the varying ability verbs show in expressing their lexical arguments with alternate syntactic frames. Their work thus shows that obviation also plays a role at the level of argument structure. This paper presents further evidence in this direction. After a quick revision of Hale and Keyser's (2003) proposal, their system is expanded to explain additional phenomena: the possible syntactic expressions of Spanish verbs that contain at least one argument introduced by a preposition, and the typological distinction English and Italian present when encoding the arguments of the so-called expanded unergatives (Levin and Rappaport 1998). The goal is to conclude that the system of obviation plays a role at the level of argument structure, in addition to the proven effects that have been observed at other grammatical levels.

2017

The null object/overt pronoun split in Brazilian Portuguese has been assimilated to differential object marking in some functionalist accounts (Schwenter and Silva 2002, Schwenter 2006). This paper examines further arguments for this connection; we evaluate a battery of more formal diagnostics under which the Brazilian Portuguese data pattern similarly to canonical instances of prepositional marking across Romance (Romanian, Spanish etc.). The application of other tests weakens the assumption of a unique licensing position for differentially marked objects in Romance languages.