The Romance Inter-Views are short, multiple Q&A pairs that address key issues, definitions and ideas regarding Romance linguistics. Prominent exponents of different approaches to the study of Romance linguistics are asked to answer some general questions from their viewpoint. The answers are then assembled so that readers can get a comparative picture of what’s going on in the field.For the first Inter-Views we selected (morpho-)syntactic research, and asked 8 syntacticians, representing four approaches to the study of Romance linguistics, to answer our questions. The approaches we selected are Cartography, Distributed Morphology, Minimalism, and Nanosyntax. The scholars we interviewed are listed hereafter.For Cartography:Luigi Rizzi, professor of Linguistics at the Collège de France;Norma Schifano, lecturer in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham. For Distributed Morphology:Karlos Arregi, associate professor in Linguistics at the University of Chicago;Andrés Saab, associate researcher at CONICET, Buenos Aires and associate professor in Linguistics at the University of Buenos Aires. For Minimalism:Grant Armstrong, associate professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison;Caterina Donati, professor of Linguistics at the CNRS Laboratoire de Linguistique formelle, Université de ParisFor Nanosyntax:Karen De Clercq, CNRS researcher at the Laboratoire de Linguistique formelle (Université de Paris).Antonio Fábregas, professor of Linguistics at UIT, The Arctic University of Norway

This paper contributes to a body of research using parasitic gaps (PGs; Engdahl 1983, Culicover and Postal 2001, a.o.) to explore the nature of movement (Nissenbaum 2000, Legate 2003, Overfelt 2015b, Bondarenko and Davis 2019, Davis 2020, a.o.). In particular, this paper examines the implications of a particular variety of PG for the hypothesis that movement paths often involve several successive-cyclic steps:

Since Engdahl (1983), parasitic gaps (PGs) have been a longstanding topic of interest in syntactic theory (Culicover 2001). While PGs inside adjunct clauses have been relatively well-investigated, far less attention has been devoted to argument-internal PGs. In this paper, we present a novel observation about argument internal PGs: In the double object construction (DOC) in (1), movement of the lower object cannot license a PG in the higher object, whereas a parallel configuration is possible in other ditransitive frames such as the prepositional dative construction (PDC) in (2).

The grammatical notion of switch reference refers to morphological markers that track whether the subjects of two related clauses are coreferent (Jacobsen 1967 ). We argue in this article for a treatment of switch reference as index agreement, based on the behavior of switch reference in Washo (Hokan/isolate; USA). We propose that switch-reference marking arises as the result of multiple agreement between C in an embedded clause and the referential index values of the subject in that embedded clause as well as the subject in its superordinate clause. The morphemes representing both different and same subject marking are then the exponence of the presence or absence, respectively, of conflict in the featural makeup of C. We argue that, unlike alternatives based on coordination, control, or binding, an agreement-based account explains several core properties of this phenomenon in Washo, including the distribution and internal structure of clauses marked for switch reference, as well as the exponence of switch reference in cases of reference overlap. More generally, switch reference in Washo provides evidence that Agree can be bidirectional (downward and upward), as well as for the existence of referential indices as true syntactic objects that participate in syntactic operations.

We propose a theory of head displacement that replaces traditional Head Movement and Lowering with a single syntactic operation of Generalized Head Movement. We argue that upward and downward head displacement have the same syntactic properties: cyclicity, Mirror Principle effects, feeding upward head displacement, and being blocked in the same syntactic configurations. We also study the interaction of head displacement and other syntactic operations, arguing that claimed differences between upward and downward displacement are either spurious or follow directly from our account. Finally, we show that our theory correctly predicts the attested crosslinguistic variation in verb and inflection doubling in predicate clefts.

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Modal Ellipsis in French, Spanish and Italian Anne Dagnac

Higgins (1973) famously distinguished betweenpredicationalandspecificationalinterpretations of copular sentences. Since then, the literature has debated whether specificational interpretations exist and, if so, what they are. This paper contributes to this debate by providing three new arguments for recognizing specificational interpretations, and against the view, prevalent in the syntactic literature, that sentences with allegedly specificational readings actually involve predicational readings and a structure of predicate inversion. Our arguments support Romero's (2005) analysis of specificational readings as involving individual concepts. Our discussion also demonstrates that the question of the semantics of specification is entirely independent of the question of whether the syntax of specification involves inversion or not.

This chapter focuses on the mechanics of ellipsis at the syntax –morphology interface. It is shown that two of the adduced arguments against syntactic identity, namely, the distribution of traces within E-sites and certain types of inflectional mismatches, are illusory once phrasal ellipsis is explicitly defined as an operation of narrow syntax. On this theory, ellipsis bleeds vocabulary insertion at PF by deleting the variables that triggers late insertion of phonological material at PF. Phrasal copies and E-sites are both subject to ellipsis in this sense. The particular way in which these two silent objects interact explains why phrasal traces are irrelevant when it comes to calculating identity within a given E-site. This analysis not only answers well-known objections against syntactic identity but is also superior to competing semantic analyses in nontrivial ways. As for heads, it is proposed that they are subject to ellipsis at PF under identity and morphological locality. Among other important asymmetries between head and phrasal copies, this derives the lexical identity requirement in certain V-stranding VP-ellipsis languages (Goldberg 2005), even assuming syntactic head movement through adjunction. Finally, certain inflectional mismatches are derived by the syntactic nature of phrasal ellipsis and the timing of morphological operations. The broad picture is a model for the timing of ellipsis that covers not only surface anaphora, but other types of grammatical silences, as well.

This paper reports a case of true Backward Control which involves neither covert Amovement nor φ-agreement – two previously proposed mechanisms for Backward Control. Thus, these findings constitute evidence that Exhaustive Control is a phenomenon independent of A-movement and φ-agreement. I propose to model Exhaustive Control as index agreement whose semantic interpretation gives rise to obligatory argument sharing. On this account, A-movement and φ-agreement are compatible with but orthogonal to Control. Control constructions in Ndebele (Bantu, S44) allow the shared argument to surface in the matrix or the embedded clause – a fully productive alternation:1

Long head movement (LHM) shares properties of both short head movement (Short HM) and phrasal movement. While it specifically targets heads, it does not obey the strict locality conditions that Short HM is subject to, such as the Head Movement Constraint (HMC, Travis 1984). A well-known case of LHM is V-fronting in Breton (Anderson 1981, Stephens 1982, Borsley et al. 1996, Schafer 1994, Roberts 2010, Jouitteau 2012). In the following example, the moved verb hadet crosses the auxiliary neus (all Breton examples are in Standard Breton, unless otherwise noted):

The Minimalist literature contains several related proposals to the effect that upward head displacement (formalized as Head Movement) licenses phrasal movements that are otherwise not possible. All these proposals have in common the hypothesis that upward head displacement of the head H of a phase P to a higher head extends the phase defined by H, so that extraction of elements from P that is otherwise banned by Chomsky’s (2000) Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC) is made possible. We refer to this family of phenomena as phase extension, following den Dikken (2006:81–152, 2007). Other accounts along these lines include Gallego’s (2006) phase sliding (see also Gallego and Uriagereka 2007) and Bošković’s (2015) phase collapsing. See also Chomsky 1993:13–19 and Fox and Pesetsky 2005 for related proposals that do not involve redefining phase boundaries. Under GenHM, phase extension can be implemented in two different ways. First, we can supplement our analysis with the proposal that, along the lines of the works cited above, the boundaries of a phase are redrawn when the head of the phase establishes a GenHM relation with a higher head. This would predict that downward and upward head displacement would have the same phase-extending capabilities, since they are the result of the same syntactic operation. A second possibility is that phase extension is a postsyntactic effect, which predicts that downward and upward head movement behave differently with respect to phase extension, since, under our analysis, downward and upward head displacement have different postsyntactic properties. Following Fox and Pesetsky 2005, we claim that the latter account is correct, by concentrating on the set of phenomena that fall under Holmberg’s Generalization (Holmberg 1986:165–240, Vikner 2005).1 The rationale behind focussing on Holmberg’s Generalization is that it is the only detailed case study in which upward and downward head displacement have been compared with respect to phase extension in a single language or language family: in MSc, upward displacement of the main verb licenses object shift, but downward displacement to the verb does not. As argued in detail in Fox and Pesetsky 2005 (based in large part on data in Holmberg 1999), the crucial difference between upward and downward displacement that results in the licensing of object shift has to do with postsyntactic linearization. As we show below, Fox and Pesetsky’s (2005) cyclic linearization account of Holmberg’s Generalization is compatible with GenHM, which we take to be futher evidence for the view of head displacement adopted here. One of the basic contrasts covered by Holmberg’s Generalization is the following. In a V2 sentence in which the main verb is in C due to upward head displacement, the verb’s

This paper examines the significance plural suppletion in Barguzin Buryat (Mongolic, Russia). This suppletion pattern is of interest because it displays what recent work on allomorphy and the internal structure of case morphology would classify as an “ABA” distribution, which is predicted to be unattested. In particular, this suppletion pattern qualifies as ABA because it occurs in NPs with accusative (or genitive) case, but not in those with an oblique case. I argue that this unexpected pattern occurs because the suppletive plural morpheme in this language is a portmanteau that expresses some of the features upon which oblique morphology also depends, with the result that these two sorts of morphology cannot co-occur. Hence this suppletive plural superficially has an ABA distribution due to what is, in essence, a paradigm gap stemming from an independent conflict within this language. Consequently, this pattern does not falsify the morphological theories that ban ABA patterns under normal circumstances, but rather reveals a principled (though exceptional) way of deriving ABA within the context of such frameworks.

In this paper, I concentrate on the similarities in realization that Basque person/number features have across categories (nominal environments and verbal agreement), arguing that these features are realized by using affixes which are not specified for the category they are inserted in. Within the framework of Distributed Morphology, I develop an analysis which makes crucial use of two devices provided by this framework: underspecification in the Vocabulary Items realizing the features, and the mechanism of Fission.

Karlos Arregi (University of Chicago) & Asia Pietraszko (University of Connecticut) Existent analyses of do-support share one basic feature: do is required by a particular head (typically T) due to some special requirement of that head (e.g. its affixal nature). We argue that this characterization of dosupport is incorrect and instead propose that do-support arises as spellout of lexical verb chains when their integrity is disrupted. The analysis correctly predicts that do can surface in a variety of positions (sections 2–3) and is not due to failure to satisfy affixal properties of a particular head (section 4).

Predicational sentences like (1a) are semantically relatively unproblematic. There is wide consensus that, at a certain level of description, their interpretation is similar to that of copular constructions in which the main predicate is an adjective or a prepositional phrase. The subject noun phrase (e.g. Clara) is referential or quantificational, and the postcopular noun phrase (e.g. a/the lawyer) expresses a property of the things the subject noun phrase refers to or quantifies over. Within a standard model theoretic framework, and stated in settheoretical terms, the sentence has the truth conditions that the denotation of the subject is an element of that of the postcopular noun phrase, or vice versa in the case of quantification. Specificational sentences, in contrast, are highly controversial, and there is no consensus about either their structure or their interpretation. In this case, the precopular noun phrase is a definite description, whereas the second is a name. The controversy around specificational sentences revolves around their interpretation on the one hand, and on their relation, in terms of both interpretation and structure, to predicational sentences on the other. The two leading analyses of specificational sentences that make up this controversy are the so-called ‘predicate inversion’ analysis and the individual concept analysis. According to the predicate inversion analysis, specificational sentences are inverted predicational sentences. Semantically, this analysis assumes that, as is commonly assumed for predicational copular clauses, specificational copular clauses involve a predicational and a referential/quantificational noun phrase. In specificational sentences, the precopular noun phrase is predicative, denoting a property of the things that the postcopular noun phrase refers to or quantifies over (Heggie 1988, Moro 1997, Mikkelsen 2005, Barros 2016). According to the individual concept analysis, specificational sentences have an altogether different interpretation from predicational sentences, with the precopular noun phrase denoting an individual concept (〈s, e〉) (Romero ∗The order of authors is alphabetical. This paper grew out of a presentation at Sinn und Bedeutung 18 at the University of the Basque Country in Gasteiz in September of 2013. We thank the audience there and Caroline Heycock for useful feedback and discussion.

Harris and Halle (2005) present a framework (Generalized Reduplication) that unites the treatment of phonological reduplication and metathesis with similar phenomena in morphology, thereby accounting for the apparently spurious placement of the imperative plural - n in mesoclitic Spanish forms such as hága-lo-n ‘Do it!’, in which clitic lo is sandwiched between the verbal stem and the plural suffix. Kayne (2010) has challenged their analysis, arguing that such cases should be treated purely within the syntax. We reassess some of Kayne’s arguments, agreeing with his conclusion that the most important desideratum of any general analysis of such phenomena is restrictiveness. However, we contend that greater restrictiveness can be achieved through morphotactic constraints and repairs in the Generalized Reduplication formalism, triggered by a Noninitiality constraint on the positioning of the plural affix, and we develop constraints on these operations that situate interspeaker variation within the postsyntactic component.

We argue for a unified account of head movement and lowering in which lowering is in essence the covert movement counterpart of head movement. This proposal is supported by the existence of successive cyclic lowering (evidenced by relative prefix formation in Ndebele), in which complex heads built by lowering have the Mirror-Principle-obeying structure expected under a head movement derivation. It also predicts that lowering can feed head movement, giving the appearance of long head movement, which we argue is the case in Mainland Scandinavian V2.

We provide a counterpoint to Kiparsky’s “The morphology of the Basque auxiliary: Thoughts on Arregi & Nevins 2012” (Kiparsky this volume), an Optimality-Theoretic Lexicalist Morphology (LM) reanalysis of the Basque auxiliary systems that were characterized within a Distributed Morphology (DM) analysis in our book Morphotactics (Arregi & Nevins 2012). We discuss two of its major claims: that the derivational architecture of DM does not model opacity as closely as it should, and that it does not provide a satisfactory account of the types of word- and subword-level constituents. Our broadest conclusion is that comparison of different ways to model the microvariation in these phenomena—and perhaps in morphological explanation more generally—cannot be reduced to counting which analysis has “fewer,” partially overlapping modules, or which uses rules and constraints versus “only constraints,” but rather which specific set of generalizations and proposals lead to a better understanding of the nature and limits of the constraints and repairs that characterize Basque auxiliaries.

Switch reference (SR) is a cover term referring to grammatical markers that appear to track whether subjects of two clauses are coreferent (Jacobsen 1964:665, 1967, 1998, McKenzie 2015). In Washo, a Hokan/isolate language spoken around Lake Tahoe in the United States, switch reference morphology surfaces on embedded verbs only in the case that these subjects are not coreferent: the morpheme -š surfaces when the subject in its own clause differs from the one in the clause embedding it. This can be seen in (1), in which the subjects ‘woman’ and ‘heron’ are distinct, triggering the -š morpheme on the embedded verb ‘sit’; in (2), the subjects of both clauses are identical and -š is absent on embedded ‘see’.1

AbstractThis chapter examines the phenomenon of focus projection: a sentence with prosodic marking of focus on a word can lead to ambiguity, in that different constituents containing the word can be interpreted as focused. Two general approaches to focus projection are compared. In Default Prosody analyses, focus projection is epiphenomenal, a consequence of general principles requiring that focus be prosodically prominent, coupled with default principles of default prominence. In the F-projection approach, focus projection is encoded more directly, in terms of licensing rules for F-marking on constituents. Overall, the evidence in the literature favors the Default Prosody approach, and this chapter concentrates on comparing these two general approaches, as well as briefly summarizing other aspects of focus projection. The chapter ends with discussion of Basque data that are problematic for widely assumed generalizations about focus projection, and a possible way of understanding the data in the Default Prosody approach.