Demonstratives and reinforcers in Romance and Germanic languages

Abstract

Abstract Recent work on the internal structure of noun phrases has argued that several word order differences between Romance and Germanic languages may be explained by the presence of syntactic movement of the noun in Romance, and by the relative absence of this movement in Germanic. This paper examines constructions consisting of demonstrative and reinforcer elements. It is argued that prenominal deictic demonstratives in Romance and Germanic languages, generated in a specifier position below DP (Giusti, 1993a,b), raise to D overtly. In several languages the demonstrative may be ambiguous between a deictic interpretation and what is labelled an indefinite specific interpretation. A deictic demonstrative must raise up into the DP projection overtly; with an indefinite specific, only covert feature movement to D takes place. With respect to the demonstrative reinforcement construction, both the demonstrative and its reinforcer precede the noun in Germanic languages, while the demonstrative precedes, and the reinforcer follows, the noun (plus modifiers) in Romance. Under the assumption that the demonstrative and its reinforcer are base-generated as the specifier and head, respectively, of a functional projection FP, the pattern in Romance is argued to involve syntactic movement of a phrasal category to the left of FP, deriving the postnominal position of the reinforcer. The Germanic pattern is explained by the absence of this movement. The behavior of demonstratives and reinforcers in relative clause constructions is also examined.