Cycles of Agreement: Romance Clitics in Diachrony
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CYCLES OF AGREEMENT: ROMANCE CLITICS IN DIACHRONY BY MATTHEW LEROY MADDOX DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Spanish with concentrations in Romance Linguistics and Medieval Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2019 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor José Ignacio Hualde, Chair Associate Professor Jonathan E. MacDonald, Director of Research Professor James Yoon Professor Martin Joseph Camargo Professor Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University ABSTRACT In this dissertation I investigate two linguistic cycles in Romance per van Gelderen’s (2011) framework: the Subject Agreement Cycle (SAC) and the Object Agreement Cycle (OAC). These grammaticalization cycles turn pronouns into agreement morphology on the verb. Both cycles are comprised of three stages. At stage (a) the pronoun is a full DP. At stage (b) the pronoun is reanalyzed as a D-head and at stage (c) it is reanalyzed as a T-head in the SAC or a v- head in the OAC. I extend the SAC to account for the grammaticalization of impersonal pronouns. I show that Modern French on is at stage (c) of the Impersonal Subject Cycle (ISC). Old Spanish (OldS) omne was on this cycle but it disappeared only to be replaced by Modern Spanish (ModS) uno. I propose that the reason for this disappearance was that impersonal subject pronouns will only be reanalyzed if personal subject pronouns are being reanalyzed first via the SAC. I also build upon van Gelderen (2011) by examining the OAC in Spanish in more detail. I show that in OldS, object clitics were full DPs and thus OldS was at stage (a) of the OAC. Based on diagnostics of coordination, modification, and movement, ModS object clitics are more deficient than OldS object clitics. Patterns of clitic doubling are evidence that standard ModS is at stage (b) of the OAC while Rioplatense Spanish is at stage (c). I adopt an analysis of accusative clitic doubling (ACD) based on Harizanov (2014) and Kramer (2014) whereby the object merges and moves to Spec,v (object shift) as a DP. I also show how object movement feeds the OAC. Object movement results in the object pronoun being in Spec,v, where it is associated with the v-head. Since ACD depends upon object shift to Spec,v, we expect ii languages that have developed ACD to have had object movement at an earlier period. This is the case for Romance. I show that the reflexive clitic se in ModS has been subjected to a type of OAC which I label the “Reflexive Object Cycle” (ROC). The ROC is a grammaticalization cycle that takes a reflexive object pronoun and turns it into a valency-marking morpheme, a Voice or v-head. I present evidence that in Latin and OldS, the reflexive pronoun was a full DP. It was later reanalyzed as a D-head and then a Voice head. This reanalysis is supported by diagnostics of interpolation, modification, coordination, and doubling. I demonstrate that null subjects and null objects relate to the stages of the SAC and the OAC. Null arguments are allowed in a language only if that language has reached stage (c) of the relevant cycle. I extend a D-feature and topic-identification type of analysis based on Holmberg (2005, 2010) and Holmberg et al (2009) to the licensing of null objects; i.e., null objects are licensed by a D-feature in v. I argue that this D-feature is only present on v in some varieties of Spanish because the clitic’s D-feature has been reanalyzed as a feature of v, which is a result of how the OAC works. I show how clitic left-dislocation and ACD are tied to the stages of the OAC, which accounts for their cross-linguistic distribution. I propose a typology of null object languages based on Holmberg’s (2005, 2010) typology of null subject languages. As for null subjects, I illustrate how the SAC and the ROC have interacted in the history of Spanish to give rise to passive se (Passse). In order to develop passive se, two elements are need: null subjects and a reflexive Voice head. These elements are present due to the SAC and the ROC, respectively. This also accounts for the presence or absence of passive reflexive constructions crosslinguistically. Passse develops when a language has subject pro and se as a Voice head. iii Acknowledgements I first travelled to Urbana-Champaign in April 2012 to visit with faculty and find an apartment. I am now putting the finishing touches on this dissertation while living in Lincoln, Nebraska, and it is currently April 2019. How can I describe the seven years in between? Intellectually stimulating, sure. Personally revelatory, of course. However, the adjective that seems appropriate as this phase of my life draws to a close is: busy. Now that I have successfully defended, I actually have some time to write a few words of gratitude to those people who have helped me along the way. First, I am grateful to the audiences at the conferences and other venues where this material has been presented. I thank specifically the organizers and participants at LSRL 45 in Campinas, Brazil, and LSRL 46 at Stony Brook University. I also thank the audiences at HLS from 2015-2017. I received very helpful feedback during the Worskhop on Romance Se-Si at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016. I am grateful to Francisco Ordóñez, Paula Kempchinsky, Grant Armstrong, Anne Wolfsgruber, Javier Ormazabal, Juan Romero, and Alexandru Nicolae. I also thank the audiences at ICHL 23 at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DiGS 18 at Ghent University. I thank the members of my dissertation committee: José Ignacio Hualde, James Yoon, and Martin Camargo. I am grateful to Elly van Gelderen for participating as an external member. Her insight was crucial since this research has been carried out in the grammaticalization framework she formulated. I also thank my advisor Jonathan E. MacDonald. His support and collaboration was critical during the dissertation. Also, if it hadn’t been for one fateful conversation he and I had on the Gold line bus early in the Fall semester of 2012, I doubt I would have chosen to write roughly 250 pages about theoretical syntax. iv I have received a lot of support from colleagues at my former institution as well. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln my thanks goes to Errapel Mejías-Vicandi, Catherine Johnson, and Jordan Stump. And of course I must thank Isabel Velázquez who was not visibly disappointed (I think) when I told her I was switching from sociolinguistics to diachronic syntax. I am also grateful to my parents and other family members for their encouragement over the years. Finally, I thank my partner Sean for his love and support. Not only was he patient during my three-and-a-half year residence in Champaign, but he was also a major source of motivation during the writing process. And, naturally, I have to thank my writing buddies, Bowie and Kihei (the dogs). They were present on the chair in my office for almost every word I wrote. Without their “help” I would likely have finished the first draft much more quickly. The critics who Can’t break you They somehow help to make you. The critics who Can’t break you Unwittingly they make you. (Morrissey) v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction.………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter 2: Impersonal Pronouns and the Subject Agreement Cycle……………………….32 Chapter 3: Object Agreement and Object Movement in Spanish…………………………..69 Chapter 4: The Reflexive Object Cycle from Latin to Spanish…..………………………...126 Chapter 5: Agreement Cycles and the Licensing of Null Arguments……………………...158 Chapter 6: Conclusion………………………………………………………………………...201 References……………………………………………………………………………………...205 vi Chapter 1: Introduction Preliminary remarks In this dissertation my primary goal is to illustrate how van Gelderen's (2011) formal theory of linguistic cycles provides a principled explanation of clitic-related phenomena in the Romance language family, focusing on Spanish and French pronominal clitics. In doing so I show how these agreement cycles interact with other parts of morphology, syntax, and information structure. As a first step toward this goal, it necessary to start with some preliminary discussion. This introductory chapter is formatted as follows. In Section 1.1, I briefly review the central questions addressed in previous literature on clitics and discuss why clitics should be of interest to theories of language change. Next, in Section 1.2, I present some of the diachronic work that has been carried out from a generative perspective. I also present van Gelderen's (2011) theory of linguistic cycles which is the framework that I adopt throughout this dissertation. Section 1.3 is an overview of the two specific cycles that will be relevant for what follows: the Subject Agreement Cycle and the Object Agreement Cycle. The format of the dissertation as a whole is summarized in Section 1.4. 1.1 Overview of clitics 1.1.1 Definition and typology Clitics are unstressed linguistic elements, often pronominal, that share properties with full words and inflection. In a sense, clitics are somewhere in between syntax and morphophonology. As an example, consider the English pronoun him. This pronoun can appear in reduced or contracted form <'em> in a phrase like the following: "we're gonna get'em!"1 This 1 Actually there may be more than just one clitic element in this example, Given the presence of two other contracted forms: 're for are and gonna for going to. 1 type of reduction is typical of clitics and the fact that in that example the contracted form is attached to the verb get suggests that 'em is not a full "word" in the conventional sense.