Comparative Romance Syntax

[Alain Rouveret]

RAPPEL

La deuxième séance du séminaire d'Ana Maria MARTINS a lieu aujourd'hui 
vendredi 16 novembre, UFR L, 30 rue du Château des Rentiers, 75013. 
Paris, de 13h30 à 15h30, salle 124.



L'UFR de Linguistique et le Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle de 
l'Université Paris-7 vous invitent à participer à quatre conférences 
données par

ANA MARIA MARTINS

de la Faculté des Lettres de Lisbonne

sur le thème

COMPARATIVE ROMANCE SYNTAX

Lieu:  UFRL, 30 rue du Château des Rentiers, 75013. PARIS

Salle 124

Horaire:  le vendredi de 13h30 à 15h30

This course falls within the premises of the generative Principles and 
Parameters approach to the study of human language. The comparative 
perspective will be taken as a central guiding line while seeking to 
explain where language varieties can differ, what the boundaries of 
variation are and which grammatical properties correlate with each 
other. The Romance languages (in particular, Portuguese) will be the 
main object of inspection (but the comparative approach will not be 
restricted by language-family considerations). Variation is to be 
understood in a broad sense, ranging over diachronic and dialectal 
varieties of a single language or Old and Modern varieties of different 
languages. The nature of the links between syntactic change and 
first-language acquisition will be examined under the general conception 
of diachronic generative syntax established by David Lightfoot in the 
nineties.

Session 1
Aspects of the syntax of positive disagreement across the Romance languages

Questions to be tackled:
1. Why different Romance languages resort to different syntactic 
strategies to express emphatic affirmation (verb reduplication in 
European Portuguese vs. sí que in Spanish and Catalan, for instance)
2. How the different patterns of neutral affirmative answers to yes/no 
questions correlate with the above-mentioned strategies
3. Which grammatical correlations beyond the answering system come into 
sight once the role played by the functional categories C and S/Pol with 
respect to the expression of positive disagreement is acknowledged

Session 2:
Issues on clitics in Old and Modern Romance

Questions to be tackled:
1. Why the availability of enclisis in finite clauses correlates with 
the availability of verbal answers to yes/no questions (and more 
generally with the availability of VP-ellipsis)
2. Which widespread ideas about historical change in the domain of 
clitic placement in Romance are probably wrong
3. How can a diachronic and cross-linguistic analysis integrate in a 
coherent way the different patterns of clitic placement found in Old and 
Modern Romance, besides accounting for the correlation mentioned in 1.

Session 3:
Subject doubling with impersonal se in European Portuguese dialects

Questions to be tackled:
1. Why sentences like (i) and (ii) below are found in European 
Portuguese dialects but excluded in the standard variety
(i)    A gente chama-se rãs a isto. (FLF)
     the people calls-SE rãs-PL  to that
     ‘We call rãs (frogs) to these ones.’ (‘we’ = ‘people here, 
including myself’)
(ii)    Há várias qualidades que até ainda nós não se conhecemos. 
(CORDIAL-SIN. ALV)
     there-is several species that even already we-NOM not SE know-1PL
     ‘There are so many species among fish, that even we (fishermen) do 
not know all of them yet.’

2. What the structural analysis for (i) is
3. In which respects EP subject doubling with se shares or does not 
share properties with the subject doubling constructions found in Dutch 
and Finnish
4. What the subject doubling se construction can tell us about standard 
impersonal se constructions in the Romance languages

Session 4
Coordination, gapping and the Portuguese inflected infinitive: the role 
of structural ambiguity in syntactic change

(How the inflected infinitive came to be an option in the clausal 
complements of causative and perception verbs from the 16th century on)

or

Syntactic change as chain reaction: the emergence of hyper-raising in 
Brazilian Portuguese

(or both topics if time permits; the main issue in both cases is the 
rationale of change)




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