The paper investigates the syntactic structure of wh-clauses in late Latin. The results show that, in sentences with a wh-phrase as direct object, the interrogative operator reaches FocP in the left ...periphery, with the finite verb raising to the Foc head. This spec-head relation accounts for why subjects and dislocated XPs (like topics or focus elements) can not be intervening constituents between the object wh-phrase and the verb. For wh-clauses in which the interrogative operator is an adjunct, the hypothesis is that the wh-phrase occupies Spec,IntP. Here, the verb does not move to the CP-field, thus explaining the possibility of intervening subjects and interpolated XPs between the adjunct wh-element and the verb. These results show that the verb second (V2) property of V-to-C movement, as seen in several old Romance languages, can be derived from late Latin, and not exclusively from a supposed influence of Germanic languages, as is assumed in the literature.
A previously unnoticed puzzle is presented concerning the distribution of wh-determiners in free relative clauses in Romanian: while care 'which' + NP can never introduce free relative clauses, ce ...'what' + NP does so productively, as do all other wh-words. New evidence is provided showing that care 'which' + NP in interrogative clauses in Romanian exhibits strong discourse-anaphoric requirements, unlike ce 'what' + NP. This feature of care 'which' + NP is suggested to be responsible for the puzzle by triggering a clash with the basic set-denoting function of a free relative clause, along the lines of what is observed in light-headed relative clauses.
L’objectif de cet article, fondé sur deux corpus oraux – le CFPP2000 et les ESLO 1 et 2 – est d’apporter une description des interrogatives indirectes totales et partielles en français informel, tout ...en proposant une analyse théorique qui tienne compte de l’ensemble des interrogatives indirectes. Est en particulier défendue l’hypothèse selon laquelle les interrogatives indirectes, non standard comme standard, se rapprochent de phrases autonomes. Il apparaît, en outre, que le français informel, présent dans ces corpus de l’oral spontané, produit massivement des interrogatives indirectes de type standard.
The paper studies the functions of negated indicative present forms of the verb vedere ‘to see’ that refer to the speaker and are followed by an indirect wh-interrogative subordinate clause. The ...investigation of an Italian written corpus of newspaper articles, reviews and forum posts shows that this construction set forms a discourse routine with a recurrent pragmatic function. It expresses a disagreeing action of rebuttal that includes the reformulation and critical assessment of an interlocutor’s preceding utterance and projects arguments sustaining the speaker’s standpoint. The routine is highly specialized: its functions are limited to those mentioned, whereas it does not express bare denial, counterarguments, or agreeing actions. The corpus analysis also shows that this specialization is a characteristic of the combination of the examined negated verb forms with indirect wh-interrogative clauses, whereas combinations with other complement types either do not occur at all in the corpus (indirect polar questions and complement clauses introduced by che) or have a broader range of diverse discourse functions (nominal complements with propositional meaning). The routine’s lexical and grammatical components (inferential lexical meaning, deixis, negation and its scope, the presupposing properties of indirect wh-interrogatives, mood) all contribute to realize its discourse function.
•Negated vedere + indirect wh-interrogative has evidential meaning and marks a disagreeing action.•The construction tends to express a rebuttal justified by explicit arguments given in the co-text.•Its function depends on lexical meaning, deixis, negation, presupposition, and mood.•The indirect wh-interrogative establishes a discourse relation with a preceding statement.•The combination of evidential verbs with negation raises specific problems of scope.
This paper focuses on the syntax of interrogative clauses in Istro-Romanian. The aim is to determine the parametric settings for V-to-C, subject placement (SVO or VSO) and the target for constituent ...movement under discourse triggers. The findings indicate that Istro-Romanian preserved the parametric settings from Old Romanian, especially those that converged with the parametric settings in Croatian grammar. In particular, SVO can be explained only through inheritance, whereas VSO, lack of V-to-C and scrambling are a matter of both inheritance and convergence with Croatian.
This paper presents different ways in which the Gallo-Romance data of the Atlas linguistique de la France (ALF) can contribute to syntactic description, typology and analysis. After briefly ...presenting the SyMiLa project, which aims at making such data accessible, it presents four case-studies. The first one focuses on wh-questions, which provide a horizontal perspective over the whole Gallo-Romance varieties. The complete data set shows how the dominant wh-structures distribute over the Gallo-Romance domain, and how the rarer ones argue for an articulated CP where que ‘that’ stands in Fin, and for a compositional nature of est-ce que. The next section turns to a vertical perspective on the data: it focuses on a very local phenomenon, complementizer doubling, and shows how the ALF reveals an optional but consistent behavior, which adds evidence to a head-movement analysis and suggests that complementizer doubling and recomplementation correspond to two different configurations. The last section deals with isolated data, that could not per se lead to any clear syntactic claim. Anecdotal and unsystematic as they may seem in the atlas, these data signal structures that, as further research shows, can enrich and/or challenge previous generalizations on interrogative clause typing and Negative Concord, respectively. In the latter case, they call for typologies and analyses of Negative Concord that include both optional concord and partial concord.
Czech infinitive phrases, usually introduced by interrogatives, are equivalent to interrogative clauses. In economy-oriented press, they appear mostly in headlines. In German, they correspond to ...direct or indirect clauses including modal verbs, infinitive phrases with "zu", passive verbs, or the indefinite subject "man".
We observe that the facts pertaining to the acceptability of negative polarity items (henceforth, NPIs) in interrogative environments are more complex than previously noted. Since Klima Klima, E. ...(1964). In J. Fodor & J. Katz (Eds.), The structure of language. Prentice-Hall, it has been typically assumed that NPIs are grammatical in both matrix and embedded questions, however, on closer scrutiny it turns out that there are differences between root and embedded environments, and between question nucleus and wh-restrictor. While NPIs are always licensed in the nucleus of root questions, their acceptability in the restrictor of wh-phrases and in the nucleus of any embedded question depends on the logical properties of the linguistic environment: its strength in terms of exhaustivity Groenendijk, J., & Stokhof, M. (1984). Studies on the semantics of questions and the pragmatic answers. Amserdam (NL), Post-Doctoral Dissertation. Heim, I. (1994). In R. Buchalla & A. Mittwoch (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th annual IATL conference and of the 1993 IATL workshop on discourse (pp. 128-144). Akademon, Jerusalem. Beck, S., & Rullmann, H. (1999). Natural Language Semantics, 7, 249-298. Sharvit, Y. (2002). Natural Language Semantics, 10, 97-123 and its monotonicity properties (in the sense of von Fintel von Fintel, K. (1999). Journal of Semantics, 16, 97-148).
This paper documents and analyzes the pattern used in the Northwest Caucasian language Adyghe (Circassian) to express what the following five different constructions convey in other languages: headed ...and headless relative clauses, embedded declaratives, embedded polar interrogatives, and embedded constituent interrogatives. We argue that Adyghe encodes the meanings of all these embedded structures by means of the same syntactic construction, a relative clause. This pervasive use of relative clauses is possible due to mechanisms that are independently attested not just in Adyghe but also in more familiar languages like English. These mechanisms include concealed questions, polarity operators, and nomináis such as fact and question that can connect propositional attitude verbs or interrogative verbs with embedded clauses. We suggest that this extensive use of relative clauses in Adyghe is triggered by the absence of non-relative complementizer. We further show that this use is facilitated by their morphological visibility: a relativizer realized as a prefix on the verb, verbal affixation, a rich system of applicative heads hosting indirect arguments, and the availability of a case marker suffixed to headless relatives. We conclude by discussing the implications of the Adyghe system for the general design of embedding and subordination in natural language.
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