Structures and Strategies

Adriana Belletti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135898182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Italian Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Following crucial insights on the functional structure of the clause and recent developments within the cartographic projects and minimalism, this book addresses various central themes in Italian and Romance syntax ranging from verb syntax and the syntax of verb-related phenomena of agreement and cliticization, to word order issues and their status in discourse contexts. It illustrates a research program where the basic formal components of grammar, the rich cartographic syntactic structures, are directly implicated in morphosyntactic computations proper as well as in the articulation of discourse strategies.

Part I
Clause Structure and Verb Related Syntax

1 Generalized Verb Movement

1 INTRODUCTION

Recent work in syntactic theory has developed two far-reaching ideas: the extension of the X′-schema to the projection of functional heads (Chomsky 1986a) and a more articulated and abstract conception of sentence structure (Pollock 1989; Chomsky 1989). These two ideas have been shown to interact in a very productive way once they are combined with the general principles of UG. The proposals that head movement processes are Structure Preserving in Emonds’ (1976) sense and that they are constrained by the general ECP (Baker 1988) play a crucial role in this connection. Pollock’s (1989) article has convincingly shown that, once this set of assumptions is adopted and put into work, previously mysterious phenomena related to word order variations and adverb placement can be given a rational account.

The present chapter is a contribution in the same direction. The syntax of verbs in Italian will be analyzed both in tensed and infinitival clauses. As in Pollock’s article, the relative position of the inflected verb and adverbs of different sorts, negation, and floated quantifiers will be interpreted as explicit evidence illustrating the occurrence or nonoccurrence of a verb movement operation, under the fundamental assumption that no special process of adverb movement is at work in the syntax. In order to do that, special attention will be devoted to the empirical issue concerning the determination of the base position of different classes of adverbs. This is indeed a fairly central issue once instances of word order variation involving adverbs and verbs provide arguments revealing the various different scopes of application of V-movement. This investigation will lead us to a fairly articulated typology of different classes of adverbs.

It will be shown that the verbal head systematically moves, in Italian, to the highest inflectional head position assumed, with no difference between tensed and infinitival environments. This generalized application of verb movement gives rise to significant differences with a closely related language like French, which will be discussed throughout the chapter. The proposed analysis also has a direct bearing on different independent issues such as the proper analysis of certain kinds of small clauses as complements of perception verbs and related structures and the existence in Italian of absolute past participial clauses with peculiar properties. We will address these topics toward the end. Finally, in the last section, we will present a possible formalization of the V-movement operation in a language like Italian.

2 ON SENTENCE STRUCTURE

In Chomsky (1986a) it has been proposed that the clausal system is not exceptional with respect to the X′-schema but conforms to it. Heads can be attributed to the traditional S′ and S, the functional categories C(OMP) and I(NFL) respectively. S′ and S are analyzed as the CP projection of C° taking the IP projection of I° as complement, in the sense of X′-theory, as illustrated in (1):

(1)

with the Spec of CP position to be filled only through movement and the Spec of IP position identified with the NP subject position. Since this proposal has been put forth, various authors¹ have pointed out that, despite its being an important step toward a constrained conception of sentence structure, it still suffers from some conceptual deficiencies. The major conceptual problem has been recognized in the fact that if I° is a head in the sense of X′-theory, it should not simultaneously contain all the material commonly associated to it, that is to say both agreement features (AGR) and tense features (T), two independent sets of features often distinguished in the verbal morphology of different languages. AGR and T should rather be seen as two independent functional heads. If this is the case, they should give rise to their own projections in terms of the X′-theory:

(2)

The most important contribution of ...