On word order and Case in Old Italian past participle constructions
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
While in Modern Italian, V1 is mandatory in absolute constructions, no such restriction is operative in Old Italian. On the surface, such a fact could be interpreted as a sign of residual V-to-Comp movement in Modern Italian. However, it is not: In Old Italian, participles targeted a position lower than Comp and, hence, the V1 pattern of Modern Italian is an innovation rather than a residue from the earlier stage. The difference between the two grammars lies in the interaction of independent properties of Old Italian and Modern Italian: First, in Old Italian, two arguments can be case licensed because of the presence of a Tense Phrase in the participle clause. In Modern Italian, where no Tense Phrase is projected, nominative can only be licensed by focus as an instance of default case assignment. Second, a general change relating to information structure has as its consequence that a focused argument is realized post-verbally in Modern Italian, which explains the obligatory V1 pattern.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
(c) Verner Egerland, 2022
Primary sources
Cronica delle cose occorrenti ne’ tempi suoi, in Dino Compagni e la sua Cronica, ed. by I. Del Lungo, Le Monnier, Firenze 1887.
Cronica fiorentina compilata nel XIII secolo, in Testi fiorentini del Dugento e dei primi del Trecento, ed. by A. Schiaffini, Sansoni, Firenze 1926.
Inferno, Dante Alighieri, ed. by G. Petrocchi, Mondadori, Milano 1966-1967.
Nuova Cronica, Giovanni Villani, ed. by G. Porta. Fondazione Pietro Bembo – Guanda, Parma 1990-1991.
I fioretti di San Francesco. In Scrittori di religione del trecento: Volgarizzamenti, tomo quarto. Classici Ricciardi, ed. by di Don Giuseppe di Luca, Einaudi 1977.
I fatti di Enea, Guido da Pisa. Libro secondo della Fiorita d'Italia, sec. XIV p.m., ed. by Domenico Carbone, Barbera, Firenze 1868.
Il Libro de’ Vizî e delle Virtudi e Il Trattato di Virtù e Vizî, Bono Giamboni, ed. by Cesare Segre, Einaudi, Torino 1968.
Il Novellino, Anonimo, ed. by Guido Favati, Genova, Bozzi, 1970.
Storia di fra’ Michele Minorita, ed. by Emanuele Trevi. Salerno Editrice, Roma 1991.
Vita Nuova, Dante Alighieri, ed. by G. Gorni, Einaudi, Torino 1996.
References
Ageno, Franca. 1971. Osservazioni sull’aspetto e il tempo del verbo nella ‘Commedia’. Studi di Grammatica Italiana I: 61-100.
Akmajian, Adrian. 1984. Sentence Types and the Form-Function Fit. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 2: 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00233711
Belletti, Adriana. 1990. Generalized Verb Movement. Aspects of Verb Syntax. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier.
Belletti, Adriana. 1999. Inversion as focalization and related questions. Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics 7: 9-45. http://hdl.handle.net/2072/452615
Benincà, Paola. 1983/1984. Un’ipotesi sulla sintassi delle lingue romanze medievali. Quaderni Patavini di Linguistica 4: 3-19.
Benincà, Paola. 2006. A Detailed Map of the Left Periphery of Medieval Romance. In L. Haegemena, R. Zanuttini, H. Campos, E. Herburger, & P. Portner (eds.), Negation, Tense, and Clausal Architecture: Crosslinguistic Investigations, 53-86. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Besten, Hans den. 1983. On the interaction of root transformations and lexical deletive rules. In W. Abrahams (ed.), On the formal syntax of the Westgermania, 47-131. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.3.03bes
Bianchi, Valentina. 2003. On finiteness as logophoric anchoring. In J. Guéron & L. Tasmovski (eds.), Temps et Point de Vue / Tense and Point of View, 213-246. Paris: Université Paris X Nanterre.
Bianchi, Valentina & Mara Frascarelli. 2010. Is topic a root phenomenon? Iberia: An International Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 2: 43-88.
https://revistascientificas.us.es/index.php/iberia/article/view/86
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783112316009
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110884166
Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by Phase. In M. J. Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: a life in language, 1-52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/4056.003.0004
Cruschina, Silvio. 2010. Fronting as focalization in Sicilian. In R. D’Alessandro, A. Ledgeway & I. Roberts (eds.), Syntactic Variation. The Dialects of Italy, 247-260. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
D’Alessandro, Roberta & Ian Roberts. 2008. Movement and Agreement in Italian Past Participles and Defective Phases. Linguistic Inquiry 39: 477-491. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.2008.39.3.477
Egerland, Verner. 1996. The Syntax of Past Participles. A Generative Study of Nonfinite Constructions in Ancient and Modern Italian. Lund: Lund University Press.
Egerland, Verner. 2010. Frasi subordinate al participio. In G. Salvi & L. Renzi (eds.) Grammatica dell’italiano antico, 881-901. Bologna: Il Mulino. https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/1627848
Hernanz, M. Lluïsa. 1991. Spanish Absolute Constructions and Aspect. Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics 1, 75-128. https://ddd.uab.cat/record/20962
Holmberg, Anders & Christer Platzack. 1995. The Role of Inflection in Scandinavian Syntax. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Horvath, Julia. 1986. Focus in the Theory of Grammar and the Syntax of Hungarian. Dordrecht: Foris. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110849165
Jacobs, Joachim. 1984. Funktionale Satzperspektive und Illokutionssemantik. Linguistische Berichte 91: 25-58.
Kayne, Richard. 1989. Facets of Romance Past Participle Agreement. In P. Benincà (ed.), Dialect Variation and the Theory of Grammar, 85-103. Dordrecht: Foris. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110869255-005
Kiss, Katalin É. 1998. Identificational Focus versus Information Focus. Language 74(2): 245-273. https://doi.org/10.2307/417867
Krifka, Manfred. 2001. Quantifying into question acts. Natural Language Semantics 9: 1-40. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1017903702063
Loporcaro, Michele. 2010. The logic of Romance past participle agreement. In R. D’Alessandro, A. Ledgeway & I. Roberts (eds.), Syntactic Variation. The Dialects of Italy, 225-243. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-38631
Loporcaro, Michele & Sarah Seiler. 2009. Aspetti dell'evoluzione diacronica delle subordinate participiali in italiano. In A. Ferrari (ed.), Sintassi storica e sincronica dell’italiano. Subordinazione, Coordinazione, Giustaposizione, 485-512. Firenze: Franco Cesati Editore.
McCloskey, James. 1985. Case, movement, and raising in Modern Irish. In Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 4: 190-205. Stanford: Stanford Linguistics Association.
McFadden, Thomas & Sandhya Sundaresan. 2011. Nominative case is independent of finiteness and agreement. http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001350 [accessed 20 of April 2014].
Mensching, Guido & Eva-Maria Remberger. 2010. Focus fronting and the left periphery in Sardinian. In R. D’Alessandro, A. Ledgeway & I. Roberts (eds.), Syntactic Variation. The Dialects of Italy, 261-276. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/handle/123456789/15152
Paoli, Sandra. 2010. In focus: an investigation of information and contrastive constructions. In R. D’Alessandro, A. Ledgeway & I. Roberts (eds.), Syntactic Variation. The Dialects of Italy, 277-291. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parrott, Jeffrey. 2007. Distributed Morphological mechanisms of Labovian variation in morphosyntax. Ph.D. thesis, Georgetown University.
Pérez Jiménez, Isabel. 2006. La gramática de las cláusulas absolutas de predicación en español. Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Pesetsky, David & Esther Torrego. 2001. T-to-C movement: Causes and consequences. In M. J. Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: a life in language, 355-426. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/4056.003.0014
Poletto, Cecilia. 2012. Word Order in Old Italian. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199660247.001.0001
Rizzi, Luigi. 1982. Issues in Italian Syntax. Dordrecht: Foris.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110883718
Salvi, Giampaolo. 2020. V2. Un paio di malintesi. Verbum analecta neolatina 21(1-2): 251-290. https://verbum.ppke.hu/index.php/verbum/article/view/260
Sigurðsson, Halldór. 2003. Case: abstract vs. morphological. In E. Brandner & H. Zinsmeister (eds.), New Perspectives on Case Theory, 223-268. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Schütze, Carson. 2001. On the Nature of Default Case. Syntax 4(3): 205-238. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9612.00044
Szabolcsi, Anna. 2009. Overt Nominative Subjects in Infinitival Complements Cross-linguistically: Data, Diagnostics, and Preliminary Analyses. NYU Working Papers in Linguistics 2.
Szendröi, Kriszta. 2006. Focus Movement (with Special Reference to Hungarian). In M. Everaert & H. van Riemsdijk (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Syntax, II, 272-337. Malden, MA: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996591.ch26
Tallerman, Maggie. 1998. The uniform Case-licensing of subjects in Welsh. The Linguistic Review 15: 69-133. https://doi.org/10.1515/tlir.1998.15.1.69
Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1986. V1, V2, V3 in Icelandic. In: H. Haider & M. Prinzhorn (eds.): Verb Second Phenomena in Germanic Languages, 169-194. Dordrecht: Foris. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110846072.169
Tuller, Laurice. 1992. The Syntax of Postverbal Focus Construction in Chadic. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 10: 303-334. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133815
Vikner, Sten. 1990. Verb Movement and the Licensing of NP-Positions in the Germanic Languages. Ph.D. thesis, Université de Genève.
Vermeulen, Riko. 2005. Possessive and Adjunct Multiple Nominative Constructions in Japanese. Lingua 115: 1329-1363. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2004.06.001
Watanabe, Akira. 1993. Agr-Based Case Theory and Its Interaction with the A-bar System. Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Zagona, Karen. 2002. The syntax of Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511613234
Zwart, Jan-Wouter. 1988. The first case: The nominative as a default case and consequences for control theory. M.A. thesis, University of Groningen.