Antitopic and Word Order in Conversational French

Journal of Portuguese Linguistics

In Portuguese, though not in French, postverbal subjects provide new information, i.e. in the unmarked case postverbal subjects are foci in Portuguese, not topics, as claimed in Ambar (1988). However, in Portuguese or French wh-questions the postverbal subject does not provide or ask for new information. These postverbal subjects are not foci. These facts lead one to raise the following two questions: (i) why is it that Portuguese syntax allows for a postverbal topic in wh-questions, an option it typically bans elsewhere?; (ii) why does French only allow for postverbal subjects in stylistic inversion sentences where the postverbal subject is a topic? We shall attempt to provide a unified answer to these two questions here. In line with Kayne & Pollock (1998)-(2001), our main claim will be that despite appearances a topic DP does stand in the left periphery of the input structures in the two languages. That topic position in the CP domain is analogous, though not identical, to the position in which a clitic left dislocated DP stands. The postverbal occurrence of the (topic) subject must result from further remnant movement of the whole IP to a position past the topicalized subject.

… the Left Periphery: The Cartography of …, 2011

University of Pennsylvania …, 2008

It is widely accepted that subjects of verbs are base-generated within the (extended) verbal projection. In this paper I argue that the same is not true for predicative adjectives. In line with Baker (2003), I argue that while subjects of adjectives originate below spec,TP, they are not generated within the AP (or aP), but rather in the specifier of a higher functional projection, PredP. I further propose that the semantic relation between an adjective and its subject is not established by direct θ-role assignment. Unlike in the verbal domain, one of the adjective's θ-roles is lexically marked to undergo λ-abstraction in the semantic interface, and cannot be assigned syntactically to the subject. The discussion has consequences for the debate over the base position of subjects of verbs, providing evidence that they are generated in the specifier of the lexical verb, rather than in that of a higher " little-v " head.

2017

Of the five questions which 'I-Subjects' set out to answer, the four summarized in (1) continue to be at the forefront of linguistic investigations three decades later: 2 1 'I-Subjects' was originally published in Linguistic Inquiry in 1986 (17.3, 375-416). A lightly edited version is to appear in Linguistic Analysis, 41 3-4 (2018), accompanied by this preface which places the article in its historical contexts, points out to its continuing relevance, and summarizes the parametric model in Borer (1983). The edited version of 'I-Subjects' will be uploaded separately 2 Here and throughout this preface and the endnotes, 'I-Subjects' refers to the article, and Isubject(s) is in reference to the term defined in 2. CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2015

The paper raises the topic of what the functional and logical notion of subject is. It examines the syntax-semantic nature of Icelandic and Polish quirky subject constructions (subjectless clauses in which the initial DP bears oblique Case) with psych-verbs. Of main interest is the full vs. default agreement on V which nominative DPs and quirky subjects always trigger, respectively. We attempt to define the primitive notion of subject from two standpoints – its LF representation and how it is mirrored syntactically by the predication relation of the subject with respect to vP/VP and the proposition of the sentence in TP between the subject and T′. We discuss the semantic and configurational dependencies between quirky subjects and nominative DPs and vP and TP/CP. The paper investigates also the landing site for non-nominative initial DPs and argues for the Topic Phrase in the Left Periphery (Rizzi 1997) as a most natural candidate to host quirky subjects. Hopefully, the conclusions ...

In: G. Grewendorf & W.Sternefeld eds. Scrambling and Barriers. Amsterdam: Benjamins (p. 93-112), 1990

This paper analyzes the syntactic properties of sentences with a V-projection in clause initial position, so-called VP-topicalization. The analysis pursues two theoretic claims. First, it will be claimed that this construction provides an argument for a representational conception of Generative Grammar (cf. Koster 1987) and against the standard GB-model with derivation by movement. It will be shown that VP-topicalization defies a derivational analysis. Secondly, this construction provides evidence for the claim that in German the subject is internal to V-max. In section 2, the relevant syntactic aspects of the construction are introduced. Section 3 provides arguments that a movement analysis cannot capture the relevant generalizations. A representational account is presented in section 4, together with an explanation of the syntactic behavior described in section 2. Section 5 discusses some consequences of the representational account. Key words: VP-internal subject; movement paradox; VP topicalization, representational versus derivational accounts.

Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 2008

The paper explicates the notions of topic, contrastive topic, and focus as used in the analysis of Hungarian. Based on distributional criteria, topic and focus are claimed to represent distinct structural positions in the left periphery of the Hungarian sentence, associated with logical rather than discourse functions. The topic is interpreted as the logical subject of predication. The focus is analyzed as a derived main predicate, specifying the referential content of the set denoted by the backgrounded post-focus section of the sentence. The exhaustivity associated with the focus, and the existential presupposition associated with the background are shown to be properties following from their specificational predication relation.