Issues in Italo-Romance Morphosyntax

Diego Pescarini,Silvia Rossi

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.24

Abstract

The present monographic issue collects several selected papers presented at the 2014 Cambridge Italian Syntax-Morphology Meeting, with the intent of offering a clear, bird-eye overview on recent advances in a series of empirical and theoretical issues in Italo-Romance morpho-syntax. The contributions here collected are up-to-date in-depth studies by both prominent experts and promising young scholars who address some classical topics in (Italo)Romance linguistics such as particle syntax, subject clitics, verbal morphology, negation, and nominal inflections, presenting new empirical findings on both well-known distributional patterns and previously unnoticed correlations. In line with most of the formal studies in Italo-Romance linguistics of the past two decades, the strong idea underlying all the contributions is that the high degree of microvariation exhibited by Italo-Romance varieties in all areas of grammar offers a large empirical domain for investigating and identifying new generalizations on and correlations among major linguistic phenomena. Since Kayne (2005), microcomparative environments are taken as an ideal test-bed for predictions and hypotheses since certain syntactic properties and distributions, which can be seen at work on a greater scale in many different languages, can be more easily controlled for in closely related languages where they vary minimally while the core of the grammatical system remains uniform. Thus, taking a wealth of microcomparative evidence as their starting point, one of major aims of all the contributions in this issue is to refine, critically discuss or even challenge some of the major theoretical tenets and results of generative frameworks such as Distributed Morphology, Minimalism and Cartography, with innovative analyses, which can be extended to similar phenomena within the Romance domain and beyond. Moreover, besides purely syntactic analyses, this volume offers also a number of insights on other subbranches of formal linguistics and explores grammatical puzzles at the interface between syntax and semantics or pragmatics. The first contribution, Guido Mensching’s paper, explores exactly the

Highlights

Taking a wealth of microcomparative evidence as their starting point, one of major aims of all the contributions in this issue is to refine, critically discuss or even challenge some of the major theoretical tenets and results of generative frameworks such as Distributed Morphology, Minimalism and Cartography, with innovative analyses, which can be extended to similar phenomena within the Romance domain and beyond
Unlike traditional accounts of Central-Southern Italian neuter which maintain that –o is a gender morpheme with no interpretative content, the authors’ proposal is to treat –o as an instance of N class morphology encoding mass/count distinction. This is in turn a reflex of a more primitive property opposing non-individual vs. individual denotation as the –o inflection is found in other domains outside the strictly nominal one
From a more theoretical perspective, the analysis proposed departs from the standard Minimalist view of Agree as it is argued that there are no uninterpretable features and agreement morphology is always interpretable

Summary

Introduction

Taking a wealth of microcomparative evidence as their starting point, one of major aims of all the contributions in this issue is to refine, critically discuss or even challenge some of the major theoretical tenets and results of generative frameworks such as Distributed Morphology, Minimalism and Cartography, with innovative analyses, which can be extended to similar phenomena within the Romance domain and beyond.

Results

Conclusion