Verner Egerland

The Affectedness Constraint and AspP

The present article is an attempt to derive the Affectedness Constraint on the assumption that delimited predicates project an Aspect node with the feature [+delimited], in the spirit of Tenny (1987) and Borer (1993). This feature triggers movement of a delimiting argument to the specifier of Asp for checking reasons. Also, it is assumed that a predicate needs a subject and that the specifier of Asp counts as subject of the predicate from which Asp has been projected. If affectedness constructions are distinguished by the fact that their external argument is missing, having been lexically oppressed, it follows that a derivation converges iff an internal argument can be promoted to subject position; externalization of the internal argument can be driven only by delimited predicates, because only a delimiting object can be triggered to move to the specifier of Asp [+delimited]. The article concentrates on an affectedness construction in Swedish: have of possession + DP + passive participle. However, it will be argued that the solution carries over to other affectedness constructions.

Diachronic change and pronoun status: Italian dative 'loro’

Abstract From a historical perspective, personal pronouns in Romance languages display a tendency to undergo changes in syntactic status in a particular order, namely; strong > weak > clitic. This article discusses the possible reasons behind the final step of this sequence of development, that is, that from a weak form to clitic status. It will be argued that the external trigger for this kind of diachronic change has to be a morphophonological one; if a weak pronoun is morphophonologically reduced over time, language learners may at some point come to analyze the pronoun as a clitic. A number of syntactic properties are expected to change as a consequence of the switch from weak form to clitic. This view gives support to Cardinaletti and Starke’s (1999) approach which argues for a principled link between the morphophonological make-up of pronouns and their syntactic status. Furthermore, it is shown that the Italian dative pronoun loro ‘to them’ during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries underwent changes that corroborate the above hypothesis in an interesting way. Originally, loro was a weak pronoun but in some central Italian varieties, above all in the town of Siena, a reduced form lo’ emerged, which had clitic properties. Arguably, the phonological change preceded the syntactic one. For a period, both loro and lo’ are attested in rather free distribution. Later on, however, the Sienese grammar makes a clear distinction between them, analyzing lo’ as a dative clitic and loro as a strong pronoun.

Kinship Nouns in Possessive Constructions in Italian and Scandinavian

We intend to point out some quite striking similarities of dialects of Italian and Scandinavian, concerning kinship nouns. One common property of some of these varieties is that such nouns tend to make the definite article superfluous. We will show that although these dialects are only distantly related and typologically quite different in many ways, they display several similar restrictions with regard to the possessive construction. Our aims are descriptive and comparative. Instead of giving a formal semantic or syntactic account of the facts, we will discuss some possible implications. We will discuss many different properties of the construction; it will be shown that word order, definiteness and number interact in an intricate manner with the alienability of the head noun. Therefore we will not be able to present the properties of the different dialects in exactly the same way, but we will show the similarities as best we can. We will only consider nominal expressions that are arguments (such as subjects and objects). Nominal predicates and vocative noun phrases are different from arguments in many respects, notably with regard to articles, which are relevant here. We will not take into consideration kinship nouns without possessive pronouns, even though these have similar restriction with regard to the lack of the article. In both Italian and Scandinavian, we consider the strength of the possessive pronoun. Strong pronouns can be stressed, co-ordinated and modified (see KAYNE 1975). Weak adjectives lack these properties. For our purposes it is not necessary to distinguish clitic pronouns

First Person Readings of MAN : On semantic and pragmatic restrictions on an impersonal pronoun

This book reconsiders the role of order and structure in syntax, focusing on fundamental issues such as word order and grammatical functions. The first group of papers in the collection asks what word order can tell us about syntactic structure, using evidence from V2, object shift, word order gaps and different kinds of movement. The second group of papers all address the issue of subjecthood in some way, and examine how certain subject properties vary across languages: expression of subjects, expletive subjects, quirky and locative subjects. All of the papers address in some way the tension between modelling what can vary across languages whilst improving our understanding of what might be universal to human language.Cinque (1988) notices that Italian impersonal si can be interpreted so as to include the speaker and that such a reading is actually mandatory in certain contexts. A similar conclusion holds for impersonal man in a language such as Swedish, with the difference that, in the relevant contexts, man takes on the reading of 1st person singular, hence ‘I’ and not ‘we’. In this paper, I argue that Cinque’s observation can only be understood in a theory explaining how impersonal readings (generic and existential) are restricted, rather than in a general theory of “inclusiveness”. The first part of paper is dedicated to showing how impersonal readings are restricted by the temporal and aspectual specification of the clause. This part summarizes some by now well-known facts concerning the interpretation of man. The second part of the paper discusses a further restriction on impersonal readings, stemming from focus and contrastiveness. The relevant effect is shown in cases of topicalizationof SELF-anaphora in impersonal constructions in some Germanic languages.To my knowledge, these data have so far gone unobserved in the literature. (Less)