The left periphery fragmented: Evidence from Italian

Tue, 14 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Cartography assumes that syntactic structures are more complex than the usual functional phrases; for example, CP is arguably made up of several projections, each of which is assigned specific scope-discourse features (such as focus and topic; Rizzi 1997). This paper contributes to the debate raging over whether all cartographic projections are always present. By looking at cross-clausal A-binding conditions in Italian, I show that an anaphor can be bound across clauses only when at the outmost phasal edge. This ultimately provides evidence that the full cartographic CP domain may not always be projected.

Greek Root Allomorphy without Spans

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, we focus on a set of data from Greek root-allomorphy that has been recently presented by Merchant (2015) as a counterexample to the strong hypothesis from Embick (2010) that linear adjacency between the trigger and the target is required for morphosyntactically-conditioned allomorphy to arise. We take issue with Merchant’s proposed alternative hypothesis which essentially eliminates adjacency as a locality condition for allomorphy, due to the fact that one such solution leads to the loss of a striking (and not language-specific) implicational generalization, namely, that root-allomorphy never occurs in the presence of overt verbalizers, a straightforward blocking effect under the linear adjacency hypothesis. We propose an alternative account of the problematic cases of Greek root-allomorphy, whereby ASP and VCE form a single node via post-syntactic re-bracketing, allowing us to save the linear adjacency hypothesis.

1 | Roberto Petrosino

The left periphery fragmented: Evidence from Italian

Greek Root Allomorphy without Spans