Virginia Hill

Romanian adverbs and the pragmatic field

Abstract Romanian constructions in which a sentential adverb precedes a ‘that’ clause raise questions about the status of the adverb, the status of the selected clause, and the structure of the left periphery that allows for such a word order. The proposal is that certain pragmatic features ensuring the evidential reading on the adverb (i.e., features of speech acts in Speas & Tenny 2003) become visible to the syntactic computation. Accordingly, the structure of the left periphery extends further than ForceP (Rizzi 1997), as it also maps out the discourse set-up at the pragmatics-syntax interface.

Object Clitic Omission in French-Speaking Children: Effects of the Elicitation Task.

In French, the acquisition of object clitics seems delayed, and omissions are documented. In this article, we look at the experimental paradigm traditionally used to elicit object clitics and propose a new elicitation procedure that is closer to how clitics are produced in spontaneous production. We show that under the proposed new experiment, the results in elicited production align with those in spontaneous production, and omission of object clitics is minimal. We briefly outline the implications for the analysis of the omission phenomenon.

The emergence of the Romanian subjunctive

Abstract This paper argues that să-subjunctives arise and spread in Early Modern Romanian (EMR) because of two properties: (i) să values the complementizer head (C) as unambiguously irrealis; and (ii) the subjunctive clause is systematically phasal. The emergence of să is kept distinct from the emergence of the subjunctive in the Balkan Sprachbund, and is situated, instead, in the context of a more generalized shift in the list of EMR complementizers. The investigation resorts to cartography and addresses the issue of cross-linguistic variation in the mapping of modality at the left periphery of subjunctive clauses, which is finer-grained in EMR compared to other Romance (Balkan) languages.

The Direct Object Marker in Romanian: A Historical Perspective

So far, most analyses assume that DOM and clitic doubling (CD) are two sides of the same mechanism, arising from a structure-dependent condition (i.e. Case for nouns). This assumption concerns Romance languages in general, including Romanian (old or modern). This paper points out that data from Early Modern Romanian (EMR) and data from other Balkan Romance languages contradict this assumption. The analysis I propose disengages DOM from CD and from structure-dependent constraints, and brings evidence for a discourse-based approach to both DOM and CD, separately or in conjunction with each other.

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.