Abstract

This article defends that the restricted distribution of strong pronouns in the pivot position of Catalan existential sentences is not a consequence of the Definiteness Effect, as commonly assumed, but rather of the conjunction of the information conditions imposed by the existential sentence, which requires the pivot to be contrastive, with the pragmatic nature of contrast in the pronominal system, which blocks the contrastive reading of pronouns in precisely this position. Henceforth, it is argued that pronominal pivots can only obtain the required contrastive reading by external means, namely by means of the particles només ‘only’ and mateix ‘same’. This analysis is extended to languages respecting the Definiteness Effect, as English or Spanish.

Abstract

Abstract: This article discusses the evolution of degree wh-exclamatives from Old Catalan to Modern and Contemporary Catalan. Two major changes can be identified which transformed these constructions from a general pattern common to most Romance languages without obligatory inversion or a complementizer in the 16th century, to a less common one with obligatory inversion already in the 18th century and a complementizer in the 19th century. To account for this process, we argue that obligatory inversion is a general phenomenon related to the checking of [wh]/[focus] features, affecting also interrogatives and focus preposing, whereas the emergence of the complementizer is a result of the lexicalization of the exclamative Force head, and hence a specific and restricted phenomenon. Key words: exclamatives, subject-verb inversion, conjunction, Force, focus.

Abstract

Abstract: In Modern Italian (MI), negative additives are focalizing elements that typically obey negative concord with a clausal negation or another licensing negative element. In this paper we investigate the diachronic evolution of one negative additive element, neanche ‘neither/not even’. In Old Italian (OI, Florentine variety of 1200-1370), there is no evidence of morphologically complex negative additive focalizers such as neanche. Instead, the non-negative additive counterpart of neanche, anche, could combine with a negative marker or some other negative element: e.g. né/non… anche ‘neither/not even’. We show that, in OI, (i) the morphologically non-negative additive anche can be used both as a negative and as a positive polarity item; (ii) anche can function either as an aspectual marker with the meaning ‘(not) yet’, or as an additive focalizer with the meaning ‘neither/not even’; (iii) its different interpretations are mirrored by different syntactic positions, i.e. anche has an aspectual interpretation in the postverbal position taking scope over a verbal phrase (vP), and it has an additive interpretation in the preverbal position taking scope over a determiner phrase (DP); and (iv) anche triggers a focus semantic interpretation under both conditions: as an additive and an aspectual marker (see Rooth 1985, Chierchia 2013 on focus semantics). We account for the diachronic evolution from neg(ation) + anche in OI to neanche in MI by suggesting that the grammaticalization of neanche originates from a particular construction in which the additive anche is immediately to the right adjacent to the negative disjunction né (i.e. né+anche"neanche). Key words: additive, negative additives, focus, aspectual marker, grammaticalization.