Since Hauser-Chomsky-Fitch (2002) the operation Merge has been taken to be the discriminating bou... more Since Hauser-Chomsky-Fitch (2002) the operation Merge has been taken to be the discriminating boundary between language and non-language. In our talk, we propose some reflections on the simplest stage of this syntactic mechanism, namely the so-called Head-head Merge (Primary Merge in Rizzi’s 2010 Complexity Scale), showing that silent functional categories must be necessarily assumed in order to explain the realization of the most basic hierarchical structure. In this perspective the notion of “protolanguage” turns out to be as contradictory as the notion of “protogrammar”
Questo volume offre un\u2019introduzione ai contesti d\u2019uso dei verbi modali nella lingua ted... more Questo volume offre un\u2019introduzione ai contesti d\u2019uso dei verbi modali nella lingua tedesca: il lavoro si propone principalmente di descrivere quelli in cui emergano le differenti letture che possono essere attribuite a un verbo modale tedesco. A seconda dello specifico contesto \u2013 come \ue8 noto \u2013 un verbo modale pu\uf2 esprimere un obbligo, una capacit\ue0 soggettiva, l\u2019indicazione di un permesso ma anche il grado di conoscenza del parlante rispetto a un certo stato di cose. Dopo una introduzione generale alle analisi semantica e sintattica dei verbi modali sono presi in considerazione le specificit\ue0 dei costrutti modali tedeschi e i contesti che ne determinano (cio\ue8 favoriscono o sfavoriscono) l\u2019interpretazione
In this paper, we consider mood selection in embedded clauses by focusing on a German-based minor... more In this paper, we consider mood selection in embedded clauses by focusing on a German-based minority language, Cimbrian, which is spoken in a northern Italian enclave. Mood selection in Cimbrian relies on the presence of two different complementizers, az and ke (the latter being borrowed from Romance varieties), each of which selectively require a specific mood. Az selects the mood subjunctive in modal sentences introduced by non-factive verbs, whereas ke co-occurs with the indicative in purely declarative clauses introduced by factive and semi-factive verbs. However, this binary distribution is challenged in the two following contexts, and it is precisely at this point that feature borrowing comes into play: (i) with the verb gloam ‘to believe/to think’, the expected binary pattern appears (irrealis az + subjunctive and the realis ke + indicative), but, crucially, a third construction emerges, namely ke + subj.; (ii) surprisingly, az + subj. displays some ‘gaps’ in its paradigm, sp...
Nel contributo viene analizzato il ruolo del contatto linguistico romanzo-germanico quando, nello... more Nel contributo viene analizzato il ruolo del contatto linguistico romanzo-germanico quando, nello specifico, i prestiti linguistici sono "parole-funzione" come le congiunzioni subordinanti di tipo 'che'
VInKo is a spoken corpus based on crowd-sourced audio recordings that has been designed to provid... more VInKo is a spoken corpus based on crowd-sourced audio recordings that has been designed to provide relevant linguistic information about the minority languages and dialects spoken in the area between Innsbruck and the Po Valley. The corpus contains audio recordings from local languages and varieties spoken in the regions Trentino-Alto Adige/S\ufcdtirol, Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, with particular focus on the so-called 'language contact' between Germanic (Cimbrian, M\uf2cheno, Tyrolean, Saurano) and Romance (Ladin, Trentino and Veneto dialects). The data collection took place from June 2017 to May 2021
In our paper, we deal with the Germanic–Romance language contact, focusing on Cimbrian, a Germani... more In our paper, we deal with the Germanic–Romance language contact, focusing on Cimbrian, a Germanic minority language spoken in Northern Italy. Specifically, we focus on the violation of the well-known that-trace filter, as it appears to be an interesting case of the superficial convergence that we ascribe to the status of T, which is either too rich (model language) or too weak (replica language) to represent a viable landing site for subject extraction.
The phenomena described in this paper ideally represent the convergence of two apparently distant... more The phenomena described in this paper ideally represent the convergence of two apparently distant fields in linguistics, namely language contact and grammatical change. Taking into account minority languages in contact with standard languages, we will show that contact itself can actually play a role in affecting the speed of ongoing changes in both the “stronger” and the “weaker” language. The intuitive idea that syntactic structures per se can be borrowed from neighboring languages will be proved false – or too coarse – as only in rare cases do grammatical phenomena manifest themselves as replicas of their counterparts in the other language: our major claim is that borrowing occurs at a more abstract level, i.e. the level of formal features. 0. Introduction This paper presents results of the research carried out within the European Research Project AThEME (http://www.atheme.eu), that stands for “Advancing the European Multilingual Experience”. One of the main questions and objecti...
Cimbrian is a German(ic) minority language which has long been in contact with Romance varieties ... more Cimbrian is a German(ic) minority language which has long been in contact with Romance varieties in the Northeast of Italy and represents an ideal object of analysis for investigating some specific issues in language contact, such as the borrowing of functional words. In this article, we first provide a detailed description of the Cimbrian subordination system putting forward an analysis of both the Romance loanword ke and the native complementizer az; secondly, we try to generalize the concept of \u2018functional loanword\u2019 comparing Cimbrian with typologically different languages. In a nutshell, we propose a common grammaticalization path, by which functional words borrowed from a model language always enter the topmost positions of the left periphery of the replica language and possibly end up occurring in lower positions
кандидат психологических наук, доцент, профессор кафедры психологии и педагогики учреждения образ... more кандидат психологических наук, доцент, профессор кафедры психологии и педагогики учреждения образования «Академия МВД Республики Беларусь» Поступила в редакцию 29.12.15.
Contemporary generative grammar assumes that syntactic structure is best described in terms of se... more Contemporary generative grammar assumes that syntactic structure is best described in terms of sets, and that locality conditions, as well as cross-linguistic variation, is determined at the level of designated functional heads. Syntactic operations (merge, MERGE, etc.) build a structure by deriving sets from lexical atoms and recursively (and monotonically) yielding sets of sets. Additional restrictions over the format of structural descriptions limit the number of elements involved in each operation to two at each derivational step, a head and a non-head. In this paper, we will explore an alternative direction for minimalist inquiry based on previous work, e.g., Frank (2002, 2006), albeit under novel assumptions. We propose a view of syntactic structure as a specification of relations in graphs, which correspond to the extended projection of lexical heads; these are elementary trees in Tree Adjoining Grammars. We present empirical motivation for a lexicalised approach to structure...
Cimbrian is a German(ic) VO heritage language that does not display the linear V2 restriction: th... more Cimbrian is a German(ic) VO heritage language that does not display the linear V2 restriction: the DP subject can show up before the finite verb together with other constituents, while German-like verb-subject inversion only obtains with clitic pronouns. In recent literature on Cimbrian, pronominal subject inversion has been taken as a traditional argument in favour of mandatory V-to-C movement (assuming a split-C configuration). Building on this assumption, the syntax of the enclitic expletive subject, -da/-ta, (which shows up whenever the DP subject does not raise in the C-domain) makes the Cimbrian data particularly relevant, since it casts light on the correlation between V2 and Nominative case licensing. The stance in this chapter is that Nominative case in Cimbrian is assigned by C—as generally assumed for Germanic V2 languages—but in an idiosyncratic way: (i) it applies within the C domain, i.e. FinP; (ii) expletive -da/-ta absorbs Nominative case and acts as a defective goal...
In English the verbs that collocate with prepositions are called prepositional verbs (V+P) and ar... more In English the verbs that collocate with prepositions are called prepositional verbs (V+P) and are often subsumed under the class of phrasal verbs (V+ particle) although they should be kept distinct: in fact, it is easy to show that prepositions and particles have different syntactic behaviors. One of the most striking characteristics of these verbs is that they can passivize, i.e. the prepositional object can be extracted from inside the PP and become the subject of the corresponding passive sentence. Not all prepositional verbs have a passive counterpart, though. Why? This paper addresses this question by regarding the prepositions entering (V+P) as functional elements, especially in view of their relationship with (“prepositional”) objects.
1. What is Cibrian? What is a "semi-speaker"? 1 Cimbrian is a Germanic minority languag... more 1. What is Cibrian? What is a "semi-speaker"? 1 Cimbrian is a Germanic minority language (ML) formerly spoken in an area crossing the border of three adjacent Italian provinces, namely the Province of Trento, in the Region Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, and the provinces of Verona and Vicenza in the Veneto Region. The small enclave in the Province of Trento, i.e. Luserna, preserves the remainder of Cimbrian speakers as the varieties of Cimbrian spoken in the Veneto area have practically died out: nowadays just a small bunch of older speakers are found in Giazza-Ljetzan (in the Lessinia, northern Province of Verona) and Roana in the Asiago Plateau (Province of Vicenza). In this paper some data concerning the variety of Luserna are presented: differently from the other Cimbrian varieties, Luserna Cimbrian is the only one it is possible to carry out extensive research on, as a full proficiency continuum is found, i.e. from full-fledged fluent speakers to the the so-called &quo...
Since Hauser-Chomsky-Fitch (2002) the operation Merge has been taken to be the discriminating bou... more Since Hauser-Chomsky-Fitch (2002) the operation Merge has been taken to be the discriminating boundary between language and non-language. In our talk, we propose some reflections on the simplest stage of this syntactic mechanism, namely the so-called Head-head Merge (Primary Merge in Rizzi’s 2010 Complexity Scale), showing that silent functional categories must be necessarily assumed in order to explain the realization of the most basic hierarchical structure. In this perspective the notion of “protolanguage” turns out to be as contradictory as the notion of “protogrammar”
Questo volume offre un\u2019introduzione ai contesti d\u2019uso dei verbi modali nella lingua ted... more Questo volume offre un\u2019introduzione ai contesti d\u2019uso dei verbi modali nella lingua tedesca: il lavoro si propone principalmente di descrivere quelli in cui emergano le differenti letture che possono essere attribuite a un verbo modale tedesco. A seconda dello specifico contesto \u2013 come \ue8 noto \u2013 un verbo modale pu\uf2 esprimere un obbligo, una capacit\ue0 soggettiva, l\u2019indicazione di un permesso ma anche il grado di conoscenza del parlante rispetto a un certo stato di cose. Dopo una introduzione generale alle analisi semantica e sintattica dei verbi modali sono presi in considerazione le specificit\ue0 dei costrutti modali tedeschi e i contesti che ne determinano (cio\ue8 favoriscono o sfavoriscono) l\u2019interpretazione
In this paper, we consider mood selection in embedded clauses by focusing on a German-based minor... more In this paper, we consider mood selection in embedded clauses by focusing on a German-based minority language, Cimbrian, which is spoken in a northern Italian enclave. Mood selection in Cimbrian relies on the presence of two different complementizers, az and ke (the latter being borrowed from Romance varieties), each of which selectively require a specific mood. Az selects the mood subjunctive in modal sentences introduced by non-factive verbs, whereas ke co-occurs with the indicative in purely declarative clauses introduced by factive and semi-factive verbs. However, this binary distribution is challenged in the two following contexts, and it is precisely at this point that feature borrowing comes into play: (i) with the verb gloam ‘to believe/to think’, the expected binary pattern appears (irrealis az + subjunctive and the realis ke + indicative), but, crucially, a third construction emerges, namely ke + subj.; (ii) surprisingly, az + subj. displays some ‘gaps’ in its paradigm, sp...
Nel contributo viene analizzato il ruolo del contatto linguistico romanzo-germanico quando, nello... more Nel contributo viene analizzato il ruolo del contatto linguistico romanzo-germanico quando, nello specifico, i prestiti linguistici sono "parole-funzione" come le congiunzioni subordinanti di tipo 'che'
VInKo is a spoken corpus based on crowd-sourced audio recordings that has been designed to provid... more VInKo is a spoken corpus based on crowd-sourced audio recordings that has been designed to provide relevant linguistic information about the minority languages and dialects spoken in the area between Innsbruck and the Po Valley. The corpus contains audio recordings from local languages and varieties spoken in the regions Trentino-Alto Adige/S\ufcdtirol, Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, with particular focus on the so-called 'language contact' between Germanic (Cimbrian, M\uf2cheno, Tyrolean, Saurano) and Romance (Ladin, Trentino and Veneto dialects). The data collection took place from June 2017 to May 2021
In our paper, we deal with the Germanic–Romance language contact, focusing on Cimbrian, a Germani... more In our paper, we deal with the Germanic–Romance language contact, focusing on Cimbrian, a Germanic minority language spoken in Northern Italy. Specifically, we focus on the violation of the well-known that-trace filter, as it appears to be an interesting case of the superficial convergence that we ascribe to the status of T, which is either too rich (model language) or too weak (replica language) to represent a viable landing site for subject extraction.
The phenomena described in this paper ideally represent the convergence of two apparently distant... more The phenomena described in this paper ideally represent the convergence of two apparently distant fields in linguistics, namely language contact and grammatical change. Taking into account minority languages in contact with standard languages, we will show that contact itself can actually play a role in affecting the speed of ongoing changes in both the “stronger” and the “weaker” language. The intuitive idea that syntactic structures per se can be borrowed from neighboring languages will be proved false – or too coarse – as only in rare cases do grammatical phenomena manifest themselves as replicas of their counterparts in the other language: our major claim is that borrowing occurs at a more abstract level, i.e. the level of formal features. 0. Introduction This paper presents results of the research carried out within the European Research Project AThEME (http://www.atheme.eu), that stands for “Advancing the European Multilingual Experience”. One of the main questions and objecti...
Cimbrian is a German(ic) minority language which has long been in contact with Romance varieties ... more Cimbrian is a German(ic) minority language which has long been in contact with Romance varieties in the Northeast of Italy and represents an ideal object of analysis for investigating some specific issues in language contact, such as the borrowing of functional words. In this article, we first provide a detailed description of the Cimbrian subordination system putting forward an analysis of both the Romance loanword ke and the native complementizer az; secondly, we try to generalize the concept of \u2018functional loanword\u2019 comparing Cimbrian with typologically different languages. In a nutshell, we propose a common grammaticalization path, by which functional words borrowed from a model language always enter the topmost positions of the left periphery of the replica language and possibly end up occurring in lower positions
кандидат психологических наук, доцент, профессор кафедры психологии и педагогики учреждения образ... more кандидат психологических наук, доцент, профессор кафедры психологии и педагогики учреждения образования «Академия МВД Республики Беларусь» Поступила в редакцию 29.12.15.
Contemporary generative grammar assumes that syntactic structure is best described in terms of se... more Contemporary generative grammar assumes that syntactic structure is best described in terms of sets, and that locality conditions, as well as cross-linguistic variation, is determined at the level of designated functional heads. Syntactic operations (merge, MERGE, etc.) build a structure by deriving sets from lexical atoms and recursively (and monotonically) yielding sets of sets. Additional restrictions over the format of structural descriptions limit the number of elements involved in each operation to two at each derivational step, a head and a non-head. In this paper, we will explore an alternative direction for minimalist inquiry based on previous work, e.g., Frank (2002, 2006), albeit under novel assumptions. We propose a view of syntactic structure as a specification of relations in graphs, which correspond to the extended projection of lexical heads; these are elementary trees in Tree Adjoining Grammars. We present empirical motivation for a lexicalised approach to structure...
Cimbrian is a German(ic) VO heritage language that does not display the linear V2 restriction: th... more Cimbrian is a German(ic) VO heritage language that does not display the linear V2 restriction: the DP subject can show up before the finite verb together with other constituents, while German-like verb-subject inversion only obtains with clitic pronouns. In recent literature on Cimbrian, pronominal subject inversion has been taken as a traditional argument in favour of mandatory V-to-C movement (assuming a split-C configuration). Building on this assumption, the syntax of the enclitic expletive subject, -da/-ta, (which shows up whenever the DP subject does not raise in the C-domain) makes the Cimbrian data particularly relevant, since it casts light on the correlation between V2 and Nominative case licensing. The stance in this chapter is that Nominative case in Cimbrian is assigned by C—as generally assumed for Germanic V2 languages—but in an idiosyncratic way: (i) it applies within the C domain, i.e. FinP; (ii) expletive -da/-ta absorbs Nominative case and acts as a defective goal...
In English the verbs that collocate with prepositions are called prepositional verbs (V+P) and ar... more In English the verbs that collocate with prepositions are called prepositional verbs (V+P) and are often subsumed under the class of phrasal verbs (V+ particle) although they should be kept distinct: in fact, it is easy to show that prepositions and particles have different syntactic behaviors. One of the most striking characteristics of these verbs is that they can passivize, i.e. the prepositional object can be extracted from inside the PP and become the subject of the corresponding passive sentence. Not all prepositional verbs have a passive counterpart, though. Why? This paper addresses this question by regarding the prepositions entering (V+P) as functional elements, especially in view of their relationship with (“prepositional”) objects.
1. What is Cibrian? What is a "semi-speaker"? 1 Cimbrian is a Germanic minority languag... more 1. What is Cibrian? What is a "semi-speaker"? 1 Cimbrian is a Germanic minority language (ML) formerly spoken in an area crossing the border of three adjacent Italian provinces, namely the Province of Trento, in the Region Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, and the provinces of Verona and Vicenza in the Veneto Region. The small enclave in the Province of Trento, i.e. Luserna, preserves the remainder of Cimbrian speakers as the varieties of Cimbrian spoken in the Veneto area have practically died out: nowadays just a small bunch of older speakers are found in Giazza-Ljetzan (in the Lessinia, northern Province of Verona) and Roana in the Asiago Plateau (Province of Vicenza). In this paper some data concerning the variety of Luserna are presented: differently from the other Cimbrian varieties, Luserna Cimbrian is the only one it is possible to carry out extensive research on, as a full proficiency continuum is found, i.e. from full-fledged fluent speakers to the the so-called &quo...
In this presentation we deal with the so-called "residual" Verb Second found in Cimbrian (a Germa... more In this presentation we deal with the so-called "residual" Verb Second found in Cimbrian (a Germanic minority language spoken in Northern Italy) and its connection with nominative case assignment
According to traditional grammars of the Cimbrian language 1 , the verb for 'think/believe', gloa... more According to traditional grammars of the Cimbrian language 1 , the verb for 'think/believe', gloam, triggers the presence of subjunctive in the embedded clause, as is the case of Italian. Subjunctive mood, in turn, cooccurs with the modal complementizer, az 'that'. However, examples under (1) manifest a puzzling behavior:
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