Quaestio and L-perspectivation

Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2021, 2023

The paper examines the so-called sequence of similar events (SSE) interpretation in Serbo-Croatian (SC), which emerges with telic predicates expressed by imperfective verbs in the presence of bare plural objects. I show that this is an interpretation that, just as in English, allows the use of both durative adverbials (DurAds) and time-span adverbials (TSAds) at the same time. I argue that TSAds, as standardly assumed, modify a telic event predicate, while DurAds merge once the predicate has been made homogeneous/atelic by the plural operator (contra MacDonald's 2008 claim that DurAds combine with telic predicates in such cases). The fact that the SSE interpretation is available in SC (or Slavic more generally) for imperfective verbs-including simple ones-suggests that in Slavic there is a syntactic projection responsible for telicity analogous to that in English, and telicity of a verbal predicate can be triggered by the quantity properties of its internal arguments.

Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch, Neue Folge 1 (2013)

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.

This thesis investigates the diachronic behaviour of relative clauses across a broad sample of constructions from genetically and geographically diverse languages. Previous studies of change in relative clause constructions have most frequently been restricted to individual languages or language families. By comparing such studies with each other and with the historical records of languages that have less commonly been the focus of diachronic syntactic works, I examine the strength of evidence for developments that are predicted by earlier literature to be "natural" or even "universal'' pathways of change (for example, various sources of relative clause markers, the development of hypotaxis out of parataxis, shift from prenominal to postnominal relative clause position). I also look for evidence of changes that synchronic typological studies of relative clause constructions might lead us to expect to find (i.e., diachronic variation in the same parameters by which relative clause types distinguish themselves synchronically). I conclude that the sources of relative clause markers and the results of the extensions of these markers into other constructions are more varied then has generally been thought to be the case, including, for example, such sources as classifiers and discourse markers. Changes in other features of relative clauses, however, such as verb forms, embeddedness, and the relative position of the relative clause and its head tend to be remarkably stable over long periods of time. The factor that appears to have the greatest influence on whether changes in these otherwise stable features do occur is language contact. Features of relative clauses, markers, and even entire constructions can be copied from other languages, competing with pre-existing constructions until in some cases one replaces the other, and in others the two are redistributed according to considerations such as restrictiveness, animacy, case role or similar. These results point to the importance of incorporating the effects of language contact into models of language change rather than viewing contact situations as exceptional. There are also implications for the definition of relative clauses, their syntactic structures, and the relationships between the different "subtypes'' of this construction.

Spevak O. Some Remarks on Grammatical Aspect in Latin. Philologia Classica 2016, 11(2), 282–288., 2016

The existence of grammatical aspect in Latin is a much discussed issue. The main aim of this article is to review different approaches to this question and to discuss important arguments that have to be taken into consideration. Besides the traditional view according to which there is an aspectual difference between the infectum and perfectum stems, two other arguments claiming the existence of aspect in Latin have been proposed: aspect as a category inherited from Indo-European and aspectual difference between the Latin perfect and imperfect tense. On the one hand, I will argue that the difference between the perfect and the imperfect is of a temporal nature and that the Latin perfect is used both for telic (terminative) states of affairs and atelic (non-terminative) ones. Furthermore, the Latin perfect combines with expressions of duration which, except for special cases, are excluded with Russian perfective verbs.

Italian Journal of Linguistics, 2024

This paper provides a critical overview of previous research on the diachronic behavior of subordinate vs independent clauses. It is shown that most prior studies present considerable issues: the terms 'clause' and 'subordination' have been used with different meanings depending on the conceptualization of grammar, and the phenomena that have been analyzed are hardly comparable with each other. Additionally, most studies have either performed a quantitative analysis of one single language or compared a selective number of changes and linguistic features in a few languages from a qualitative point of view. Accordingly, the need for empirical studies drawing on large-scale cross-linguistic databases is highlighted. Moreover, on the basis of the papers gathered in this issue, we formulate the generalization that subordinate clauses may, in some cases, develop asymmetries with respect to independent clauses either through innovation or through preservation of archaic features, perhaps as a communicative need to formally distinguish different kinds of clauses. However, a general tendency is for subordinate clauses to change much in the same way as independent clauses.

PEOPLE: International Journal of Social Sciences, 2019

In order to answer this question, I put forward a cross-linguistic study of the Romance languages that aims at an interdisciplinary effort, a perspective that is going to add new and useful information to the literature, especially at the international level, that lacks, in many cases, examples from Romanian. On the basis of an original media discourse corpus, collected from three Romance varieties (Romanian, Italian and French), I advance a comparative perspective, focused on the connectors of the complex sentences. Since the aim of this paper is neither to defend/to contradict some linguistic theory of the syntactic variation, nor to develop a new grammatical theory, the focus will be on the description of the identified linguistic data, and on the motivation of their existence/absence in the three related languages.

Systasis, 2012

Benjamins current topics, 2016

English Studies, 2019

This paper sheds new light on the status of the fact that-clauses as a diagnostic alternation of factive that-clauses, which are traditionally defined as presupposed true by the speaker. It does so by tracing their diachronic sense development and shifting distribution in Late Modern English. The analysis shows that in early uses, the fact that-clauses were predominantly used in contexts in which require overtly nominalised form of the clause (e.g., following a preposition), or in the context of predicates which tend to be classified as non-factive (e.g., state, believe). In the latter case, the combination with a the fact that-clause is argued to realise a third construction type, in between "factive" and "reporting" ones, which allows for the combination of traditional "non-factive" predicates with complements that show a grammatical semantics and behaviour (nominalised status and conceptual independence) which is argued to be more characteristic of factive complements than truth presupposition.

The paper is organized as follows: after an introduction of the issue we will examine, in the first section we shall discuss the theory of the antisymmetry of syntax as specifically concerns relative clauses, evidencing also problems linked to the application of this theory to the syntax of relative clauses in Latin and in other Indo-European languages; the second section will present our first attempt at some analysis of the left periphery of the Proto-Indo-European sentence; in the third section we shall discuss the categorial status of the relative pronoun in Latin and we shall produce a model of the left periphery of the Latin subordinate clause, supplying examples taken from literary and epigraphic texts; in the fourth section we shall tentatively extend the analysis of the left periphery of the Latin sentence to the diachronic change that produced the structure of the left periphery in the Romance languages, attempting also to explain the local variations they manifest.

It has been claimed that Archaic and Classical Greek had two main types of headed relative clauses: (i) postnominal externally headed relative clauses, and (ii) internally headed relative clauses (Perna 2013a, b;. In this article, we take a closer look at the semantic and syntactic properties of the second category in Post-classical and Early Byzantine Greek (I-VIII AD). Analysing a corpus of documentary texts, we show that a good deal of the examples in this period do not correspond to the established properties of internally headed relative clauses in the history of Greek. This leads us to propose that at least some examples that are apparently internally headed should be revised as a third relative clause type, namely prenominal externally headed relative clauses. We hypothesise that such examples came into existence through form-function reanalysis of internally headed relative clauses, a process which we suggest took place already in the Classical period (V-IV BC). In the last part of our article, we investigate the motivation for the choice of internally headed and prenominal externally headed relative clauses over the postnominal ones: we show that such examples occur strikingly frequently in formal texts such as contracts, petitions and formal letters. We propose that in such texts, internally headed and prenominal externally headed relative clauses, which are syntactically more complex, function as 'transparent signifiers' , serving as a marker of a higher social level.

In this paper, I investigate the syntax of what looks like Relative Clause Extraposition in Turkish. In order to attain the final analysis, I first propose a split-CP for Relative Clauses in Turkish. Then, I apply it to the apparent case of Relative Clause Extraposition. Evidence from several environments (i.e. scope relations, binding, interaction of wh-elements with RCs and multiple copies) points to a leftward movement analysis.

Babeș-Bolyai University, 2011