Gabriela Alboiu

Moving Forward with Romanian Backward Control and Raising

Gabriela Alboiu York University

Optionality at the Interface: Triggering Focus in Romanian

The present paper focuses on the construal of various focus effects in Romanian. The deeper questions relate to the triggers involved in what appear to be optional dislocation operations in various languages. Given that optionality of movement in one and the same language cannot be reduced to a choice between overt and covert movements, the paper proposes a solution that relies on the division of labour between displacement per se and chain formation/linking for feature valuation. Some of the general questions addressed refer to the role of prosodic properties of phrases and information structure in triggering movement. I show that not all possible triggers for word order phenomena are morphosyntactic in nature and argue that interface factors also play a role. While the main line of inquiry is concerned with contrastive focus operators, rhematic focus constructions are also investigated where appropriate for the general discussion. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the puzzle with respect to focus operators and optional dislocation. Section 3 discusses some of the empirical and theoretical problems of optional displacement, while Section 4 focuses on the syntax of contrastive focus. Section 5 provides an analysis of the data from a minimalist perspective, which is strengthened by the discussion of rhematic focus and object shift presented in Section 6. Section 7 is a conclusion.

Grammaticalization of auxiliaries and parametric changes

Abstract This paper looks at constructions with non-clitic auxiliaries in Old Romanian, which precede the generalized option for clitic auxiliaries in the same language. We argue that non-clitic auxiliaries belong to a grammar with genuine SVO, scrambling to Spec, AspP, and subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI as AUX-to Fin). The generalization of the clitic auxiliary entails the loss of these properties, while triggering a parametric shift in word order to VSO, discourse oriented fronting of constituents (to CP only instead of Spec, AspP), and Long Head Movement (LHM through V-to-Focus) instead of SAI. Implicitly, this analysis supports the distinction between A (AUX-to-Fin) and A-bar (V-to-Focus) head movement of verbal elements, and further refines it by showing that these two types of movement do not concern two specific types of heads (i.e., operator for the C domain versus non-operator for the T domain; Roberts 2001, Head movement. In Mark Baltin & Chris Collins (eds.), The handbook of contemporary syntactic theory, 113–147. Oxford: Blackwell), but can affect either of them.