Resilient Subject Agreement Morpho-Syntax in the Germanic Romance Contact Area

Subjects, Tense and Verb-Movement in Germanic and Romance

This paper takes a closer look at the attraction properties of T. It highlights an empirically attested distinction between rich agreement inflection, exhibited by null-subject languages, and rich tense inflection, found in Romance, but not Germanic, and argues for the syntactic relevance of this distinction. We propose a novel typology of the ways in which T's featural requirements can be sati...

Constraint-Based Approaches to Germanic Syntax

Subject Pronoun Variation in Central Romance

A considerable amount of research in generative syntax over the last decade and a half has been based on the hypothesis that the settings of binary parameters, such as [± null subject], can exhaustively describe the full range of possible grammars of natural languages!. Indeed, the prime example used by Chomky (1981) is the so-called "null subject parameter", which was supposed to correlate a n...

Patterns of Object Agreement in Romance

1. GOAL: This paper puts forward a unitary account for a series of object agreement asymmetries in Romance by parametrizing the vP field. Adopting a microparametric perspective (Belletti & Rizzi 1996, Biberauer 2008, Fukui 1986, Kayne 2000, 2005, Roberts 2010, a.o.), and following numerous precedents on this topic (Koizumi 1993, Johnson 1991, Lasnik 2003, Torrego 1995, 1999, Lopez 2012), we cla...

On the morpho-syntax of possessive constructions

Possessive constructions in English, Spanish, and French differ in several ways. This article considers variation in word order, in the expression of agreement, and in the appearance of a preposition. The article generalizes to Spanish and French Bernstein & Tortora’s (2005) analysis of English possessive constructions, particularly the idea that the prenominal possessive constructions are dist...