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Valentina Brunetto THE PRONOUN INTERPRETATION PROBLEM IN ITALIAN COMPLEX PREDICATES Valentina Brunetto Submitted in accordance with the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Modern Languages and Cultures October, 2012 ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been given to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgment. ©University of Leeds and Valentina Brunetto iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work is indebted to the encouragement and support of many people and I will try to express my gratitude as I can. Luckily, those I am grateful to know it well and have excused my kooky manners many times. The first person I want to thank is Cécile De Cat, for making me a better person and for her caring, thoughtful, insightful feedback, and for being a substitute mum. I am heartily grateful to Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi for everything they taught me, for giving me the passion and for believing in me. This thesis would have not been possible without the inspiring, encouraging words I received from Tom Roeper. I am also grateful to those who patiently and kindly put up with my visionary emails, Ángel Gallego, Ken Wexler, Eric Reuland. I feel privileged to have received support from my heroes. Thanks to Kleanthes Grohmann, Ianthi Tsimpli, João Costa, Vina Tsakali and all the people at the CYCL1A for their fruitful comments. I wish to thank Harald Baayen, the man of the Providence, and Cécile for the spiritual afternoons spent with R. Thanks to Melinda Whong for helping me to get to Leeds and supporting my application, and to the University of Leeds which funded these three years of philosophising, and much more. Thanks to Cat Davies for giving me the inspiration that set off this research to the right direction, but, most of all, for being an extraordinary woman. My affection and gratitude goes to Hannah Sowden, Barry Hezelwood, Leendert Plug and everyone in the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics. I would like to thank the Brotherton library, my second home. And, of course, all the children who collaborated in this research, and the teacher who asked me which class I was in. Thanks to Hyde Park, the Brudenell and the musical dreams and Charlie the dog. Thanks to Nicole for – I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Thanks to Shaun and the City Yelps band for giving me a drum kit to smash in the bad – but even more in the good – days. Thanks to my cat Joanne for the meaningful discussions. And obviously to my beloved Ged. This is dedicated to him. iv ABSTRACT This thesis explores the syntactic and pragmatic factors involved in the interpretation of clitic pronouns in Principle B contexts in both theoretical and acquisition perspective. The Pronoun Interpretation Problem, i.e. children’s apparent difficulty with the application of Principle B, defines a stage lasting up to about age 6: (1) Mama Beari is washing heri (50% correct at age 5;6) (2) Lo gnomoi lo*i lava (85% correct at age 4;8) Italian The gnome him.washes It is assumed that clitic pronouns like lo are exempted from interpretation problems because they can only be interpreted via binding. Romance children, however, show interpretation problems in complex sentences like (3): (3) La niñai lai ve bailar (64% correct at age 5;6) Sentences like the above, which involve Exceptional Case Marking, are the main focus of the present research. We maintain that (3) can only be explained if Principle B does not apply to these structures, as also proposed by Reinhart and Reuland’s (1993) and Reuland’s (2001) alternative binding theories. In order to explain (i) why clitics can only be interpreted via binding in simple sentences like (2) and (ii) why binding does not apply to (3), we draw on two fundamental assumptions: (i) binding effects in object cliticization are the output of the narrow syntactic derivation, specifically, of movement to the left edge of v*P; (ii) under a phase‐based model of syntactic derivations (Chomsky 2001), the binding domain is not the sentence, but the vP phase. We argue that the derivation in (3) contains an unbound occurrence of the pronoun, which allows children to covalue the matrix subject and the pronoun in pragmatics; such hypothesis receives support by our experimental finding that another complex predicate in Italian, causative faire‐par, triggers PIP. Ultimately, we suggest that the PIP can be ascribed to a unitary cause across languages, namely, the delayed pragmatic acquisition of local coreference. v CONTENTS Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................................. iii Abstract ................................................................................................................................................................... iv List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................................................................ xi Chapter 1 Principle B and the Acquisition Research 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 1 2. The Pronoun Interpretation Problem .................................................................................................... 3 3. The Quantificational Asymmetry ............................................................................................................. 4 4. Binding and Coreference at the Interface .............................................................................................. 6 5. The Clitic Exemption Effect ........................................................................................................................ 7 5.1 Pragmatic explanations for the Clitic Exemption Effect ................................................... 11 5.2 Non‐pragmatic explanations for the Clitic Exemption Effect ........................................ 13 6. The ECM puzzle ............................................................................................................................................. 16 7. Binding as Reflexivity ................................................................................................................................. 19 7.1 The distribution of anaphors and pronouns ......................................................................... 19 7.2 Syntactic and Semantic predicates ............................................................................................. 23 8. Children’s interpretation of ECM ............................................................................................................ 27 8.1 The incomplete lexical feature acquisition hypothesis ...................................................... 27 8.2 Problems with the Incomplete lexical feature acquisition account ............................. 29 8.3 The processing argument of feature retrieval in Baauw and Cuetos (2003)........... 32 9. Conclusions …………………............................................................................................................................. 34 vi Chapter 2 Processing accounts of Romance PIP 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 37 2. Primitives of Binding ................................................................................................................................ 38 3. Binding in Semantics and in Narrow Syntax (Baauw et al. 2011) ......................................... 40 4. Scope Economy: Di Sciullo and Agüero‐Bautista (2008) .......................................................... 43 5. Some Problems in Di Sciullo and Agüero‐Bautista’s Semantic Analysis ............................. 45 6. Conclusions .................................................................................................................................................. 47 Chapter 3 Romance Complex predicates and Restructuring 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ 50 2. Restructuring ............................................................................................................................................... 51 2.1. Defining Restructuring ................................................................................................................. 51 2.2. Monoclausal Approaches to Restructuring .......................................................................... 53 2.3. Functional and Lexical restructuring: Wurmbrand (2004) .......................................... 56 2.3.1. Problems for “only functional” analyses ................................................................... 56 2.3.2. Lexical Restructuring ........................................................................................................ 58 2.3.3. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 60 2.4. An alternative solution: Incorporation .................................................................................. 6 1 2.4.1. Incorporation
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