24.2851, Review: Romance; General Linguistics: Franco, Lusini & Saab (2012)

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Subject: 24.2851, Review: Romance; General Linguistics: Franco, Lusini & Saab (2012)

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Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 18:33:44
From: Anna Alexandrova [aaalexand at gmail.com]
Subject: Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2010

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-446.html

EDITOR: Irene  Franco
EDITOR: Sara  Lusini
EDITOR: Andrés  Saab
TITLE: Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2010
SUBTITLE: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' Leiden 2010
SERIES TITLE: Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 4
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2012

REVIEWER: Anna Alexandrova, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

SUMMARY

The present volume contains a selection of ten papers presented at the
twenty-fourth edition of the annual conference series ‘Going Romance’, which
was held at Leiden University. It represents a variety of fields, including
syntax, semantics, morphology, phonetics, and phonology. As the conference was
preceded by a workshop on morphosyntax-phonology interface theories, research
into interfaces appears to be one of the central issues of the volume (see the
papers by D. Embrick, F. Torres-Tamarit & C. Pons-Moll, V. Déprez, K. Syrett &
S. Kawahara). The papers range in topics that cover, among others, argument
structure, differential object marking, stem alternations, nominalizations,
event structure, word stress, the interaction of information structure with
syntax and prosody, and ellipsis. The diversity of Romance languages is
represented in the collection mainly by Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese,
Romanian, and Spanish; it is also worth noticing that two of the articles are
dedicated to Capeverdean, a Portuguese-based Creole language. Apart from the
papers, the volume also consists of a short foreword by the editors (p. VII)
and a subject index (pp. 221–223).

Each of the papers is summarized briefly here, in the order that it appears in
the volume.

“From Romance clitics to case: Split accusativity and the Person Case
Constraint”, by Maria Rita Manzini, provides a new account of interactions
between dative and 1st/2nd person in Romance within the minimalist framework.
The author proposes a syntactic account which links both split accusativity
phenomena and person-case interactions in the Person-Case constraint, which
becomes possible as the notion of a dative is reconstructed in terms of a Q(⊆)
category, denoting an ‘inclusion’ relation. The analysis focuses on Italian,
though Romanian, Arbëresh (an Albanian variety spoken in Italy) and Greek data
are also considered. As is well-known, many Romance varieties present the same
clitic form for the accusative and the oblique in the 1st/2nd person, while in
the 3rd person, accusative and dative are distinguished. A widely accepted
approach to this type of asymmetry is to postulate a single underlying case
system for all the persons, while the surface syncretism is considered to be
of morphological nature. Manzini’s objection is that within this type of
account, morphology’s only function is “opacizing the syntax” (p. 6).
According to Manzini, Italian 1st/2nd object clitics should be analyzed in
terms of split accusativity because they show overt dative morphology, as they
have the same -i inflection as the 3rd person dative ‘gli’, and thus, are
embedded as datives. Moreover, the paper suggests a reworked version of the
Person Case Constraint as a constraint on the interpretation of Q(⊆), such
that 1st/2nd person objects must be interpreted as the argument of Q(⊆), if
present, so the dative clitic is left without an interpretation.

“Contextual conditions on stem alternations: Illustrations from the Spanish
conjugation”, by David Embick, examines the phenomenon of stem alternation, or
stem allomorphy. In Spanish, there are numerous verb-specific alternations in
stem-vowels, e.g., the 1SG form of the verb ‘pensar’ (‘think’) is ‘pienso’,
and the 1PL form is ‘pensamos’. Such alternations are morphological, as
diphthongization applies only to certain root morphemes with /o/ and /e/ stem
vowels, whereas other verbs do not undergo this process, and this distinction
cannot be predicted synchronically. At the same time, the received view is
that the alternation is conditioned by stress, so there is nothing
morphological about it. The interpretation of such alternations is
controversial because in principle, in such cases, one can postulate a single
underlying form (Morphophonological Theory) or different irregular alternants
that are listed in the memory as separate vocabulary items (Stem Storage
Theory). The author’s claim is that this controversy cannot be solved without
a general theory of the locality conditions under which stem alternations take
place. On the basis of several case studies, he arrives at the conclusion that
morphological or lexical conditioning does not imply storage of alternants;
at least some morpheme-specific alternations must be treated as part of the
morphonology. The alternations under analysis cannot be treated with stored
stems because they don’t occur under the locality conditions that apply to
contextual allomorphy, so they must be treated (morpho)phonologically.

In “State nouns are Kimian states”, by Antonio Fábregas and Rafael Marín, the
recently established distinction between the so-called Kimian (e.g. be tired,
know, resemble, etc.) and Davidsonian (e.g. sit, stand, sleep, etc.) states is
extended to state denoting nouns (though they don’t consider this
classification exhaustive). The paper is aimed at filling a gap in the
existing literature on deverbal and verb-related nouns which is mainly focused
on nominal constructions denoting events, while those denoting states have
received little attention. The analysis is based on European Spanish data. The
relevant features of Spanish state nouns are the rejection of the plural, the
incompatibility with the predicate ‘tener lugar’ (‘take place’) and manner
denoting adjectives, and the unavailability of a temporal reading with
adjectives ambiguous between a time and a degree interpretation. The authors
argue that all state nouns behave like Kimian states, even when they are
derived from a verb which is a Davidsonian state. However, only the
Davidsonian-state-denoting verbs that contain a gradable property equivalent
to a Kimian state as a part of their internal structure (Flexible D-States)
are associated with state nouns.

In “‘I know the answer’: A Perfect State in Capeverdean”, by Fernanda Pratas,
a solution to the puzzle of the temporal reference of Capeverdean bare verb
forms is suggested. It has been claimed that in Capeverdean, as well as in
many other Creole languages, stative predicates unmarked for tense and/or
aspect have a present reading, whereas bare eventive predicates have a past
reading. However, the lexical stativity criterion fails to account for the
fact that a series of stative verbs consistently patterns with eventives,
i.e., their bare forms cannot have a present reading (e.g. kridita ‘believe’,
lenbra ‘remember’, ama ‘love’, odia ‘hate’, etc.). In order to provide a
solution to the problem, the author resorts to the concept of ‘Perfect State’.
The structure of bare predicates can be better accounted for if a zero
operator is introduced, which is a null Perfect marker. In this analysis, all
bare verbs in simple sentences, both stative and eventive, are marked with a
null Perfect morpheme. For predicates such as ‘sabe risposta’ (‘know the
answer’), the Perfect State is a type of result state of past eventuality,
whereas for other predicates, it is merely an abstract state of an event that
has occurred.

“Stressed vowel duration and stress placement in Italian: What paroxytones and
proparoxytones have in common”, by Stefano Canalis and Luigia Garrapa,
examines some controversial points of the interplay between stressed vowel
duration and word stress in Italian. According to the standard position,
Italian stressed vowels in non-final open syllables are lengthened (no matter
whether they are penultimate or antepenultimate), whereas all other vowels are
considered to be short. However, in many works, stressed vowels in open
syllables are reported to be shorter in proparoxytones than in paroxytones.
The paper presents experimental data suggesting that penultimate and
antepenultimate stressed vowels have roughly the ‘same’ duration in Italian:
absolute duration is slightly longer in paroxytones, as reported in previous
studies, while relative duration is constant. The ratio between stressed vowel
duration and post-tonic duration is demonstrated to be unaffected by stress
position. The experiment also shows that there is a final, secondary stress in
proparoxytones. As for weight-sensitivity in Italian, stress placement in
loanwords, acronyms and non-standard pronunciations provides evidence that it
is no longer productive. As the result of a conflict between a preference for
penultimate stress and the need to parse all syllables, even-syllabled words
tend to receive penultimate stress, whereas odd-syllabled ones tend to be
antepenultimate.

“Serial prosodification and voiced stop geminates in Catalan”, by Francesc
Torres-Tamarit and Claudia Pons-Moll, provides an account of the process of
voiced stop gemination in Central Catalan within the framework of Harmonic
Serialism. In Catalan, root-final clusters consisting of a labial or velar
stop followed by an alveolar lateral undergo gemination. If these clusters
appear before a vowel belonging to the root, voiced stops spirantize and the
cluster is parsed as a complex onset. Gemination can be triggered only when
the voiced stop is syllabified in coda position in order to fix ill-formed
rising sonority arising through intersyllabic contact. An epenthetic schwa or
a vowel-initial suffix do not block gemination, although due to their
presence, a phonological context capable of bleeding the application of
gemination is created, i.e., the voiced stop syllabified as part of a complex
onset. An account of these data requires the ordering of different
phonological operations. Thus, Harmonic Serialism, as it posits serial
derivations with intermediate steps, provides a straightforward explanation of
the data in question.

“Interfacing information and prosody: French wh-in-situ questions”, by Viviane
Déprez, Kristen Syrett and Shigeto Kawahara, discusses the interaction of
information structure, pragmatics, prosody and syntax in the licensing of
wh-in-situ questions in French. The authors support the viewpoint that in
French information structure, syntax, and prosody are tightly intertwined in
the formation of questions. The paper presents an experimental study based on
Cheng and Rooryck’s (2000) proposal, which attributed to the above-mentioned
questions some particular properties. One of them is licensing by an
intonation morpheme that induces an obligatory sentence-final rising
intonation contour, also present in purely intonational yes/no questions. The
experimental data indicates that the intonation contours of wh-in-situ and
yes/no questions are both rising, but distinct from each other: most, but not
all participants produced a rising contour in wh-in-situ questions, while the
slope was not as steep as in yes/no questions. The authors also explore
discourse conditions that affect the felicity of wh-in-situ questions and
develop an analysis appealing to movement through givenness-marking that
appears to provide an explanation for the observed pitch compression.

“VP Ellipsis: New evidence from Capeverdean”, by João Costa, Ana Maria Martins
and Fernanda Pratas, examines a non-trivial pattern of verb-phrase ellipsis
(VPE) in Capeverdean. In this language, VPE can occur in answers to yes/no
questions, whereas it is unacceptable in coordination structures of the type
“You bought a new book and Maria did too”. At the same time, both polar
question/answer pairs and coordination structures are considered to be typical
licensing contexts for VPE in the languages exhibiting this phenomenon, for
instance, English or Portuguese. The paper aims to identify the structural
locus of cross-linguistic parametric variation in the domain of VPE. It is
claimed that VPE is licensed by the polarity-encoding head Σ. In contrast to
coordination structures, in answers to yes/no questions, Σ is projected above
VP in Capeverdean. Only in this configuration, the verb may move out of the VP
such that VPE is licensed. The availability of VPE in a language is claimed to
be dependent on the interaction between clause structure, the ±V-relatedness
of Σ, and verb movement.

“Anti-repair effects under ellipsis: Diagnosing (post-)syntactic clitics in
Spanish”, by Andrés Saab and Pablo Zdrojewski, examines clitic doubling and
its relation with extraction and ellipsis in ‘Rioplatense’ Spanish
(Argentina). The paper aims to show that accusative doubling ameliorates the
same types of island effects as clitic left dislocation (CLLD), although both
doubling configurations exhibit different behavior in other relevant respects.
Island repair effects disappear under ellipsis only with clitic doubling. This
fact can be explained if one assumes that resumption can take place at the
syntactic level or at the level of phonetic form (PF) and that certain island
effects are only calculated at PF. A further proposal is to consider CLLD as
an instantiation of syntactic resumption and CD as a case of PF resumption. PF
resumption is bled under ellipsis and, consequently, there is no island repair
effect in contexts of CD and ellipsis. Thus, anti-repair effects under
ellipsis can be diagnostic when (post-)syntactic processes are at stake. It
can be concluded that Kayne’s Generalization, implying that clitic doubling is
dependent on differential object marking, must be treated as a purely
PF-phenomenon.

“On the argument structure of the causative construction: Evidence from scope
interactions”, by Francesco Costantini, is dedicated to the argument structure
of the causative construction (namely, the so-called ‘faire-infinitive’) in
Romance languages and the respective empirical evidence in the domain of scope
interactions. The data discussed in the paper show that the Romance causative
construction does not share its argument structure properties with the double
object construction. The cause and the object appear to be arguments of the
causativized predicate, while the causer is introduced outside the
causativized vP, arguably by the causative head, as was previously proposed in
the literature. Moreover, the causee moves from its merger position to a
higher functional position and checks dative case.

EVALUATION

On the one hand, this collection of papers covers a wide range of topics and
theories, and for this reason it can be useful for many linguists, whether
they are specializing in Romance languages or not. On the other hand, each of
the papers is a highly specialized contribution to the discussion of some hot
issue in a particular field, so the reader needs to have a good background in
specific formal approaches in order to be able to appreciate it. It should be
noted that in spite of the strong theoretical focus of the volume, empirical
evidence is given much importance by all the authors, which is undoubtedly
positive.

For instance, Pratas, in her paper, successfully applies the theory of
Aktionsart to the Capeverdean verb system in order to account for apparent
idiosyncrasies in the expression of tense, uniting semantic theory and solid
typological evidence, which is valuable, as contemporary approaches to the
classification of eventuality types can yield interesting results when applied
cross-linguistically, both for the theory itself and for language description.
Since the limits of space prevent discussion of every contribution, I would
like to mention just one more paper I found particularly compelling, namely
“State nouns are Kimian states”, by Fábregas and Marín, which not only
provides new insights into the semantic structure of nominal states, poorly
covered in the existing literature, but also gives rise to new questions
concerning the (un)availability of certain types of nominalizations for
different subclasses of stative verbs to be explored in further research.

As for the quality of editing, numerous misprints and various inconsistencies
(for instance, the lack of an abstract and key words on p. 115) are somewhat
deluding, especially for such a prestigious (and expensive) volume. However,
on the whole the book leaves a very good impression due to the high quality of
its contents.

REFERENCES

Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen & Rooryck, Johan. 2000. “Licensing wh-in-situ.” Syntax 3:
1–19.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Anna Alexandrova holds a degree in Russian and English philology. Now she is a
second year PhD student of linguistics at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
(Italy). Her research interests include linguistic typology, Aktionsart,
aspectual systems and verbal morphology both in synchrony and diachrony.








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