Proceedings of the V NEREUS International Workshop “Mismatches in Romance”
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Arbeitspapier Nr. 125 Proceedings of the V NEREUS International Workshop “Mismatches in Romance” Natascha Pomino & Elisabeth Stark (eds.) Proceedings of a Workshop sponsored by: Hochschulstiftung der Universität Zürich The publication of these proceedings is being funded by: Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Konstanz Arbeitspapier Nr. 125 Proceedings of the V NEREUS International Workshop: MISMATCHES IN ROMANCE NATASCHA POMINO & ELISABETH STARK (EDS.) Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft Universität Konstanz FACH D 185 D-78457 Konstanz Germany Konstanz September 2011 Schutzgebühr € 3,50 Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Konstanz Sekretariat des Fachbereichs Sprachwissenschaft, Frau Tania Simeoni, Fach 185, D – 78457 Konstanz, Tel. 07531/88-2465 Table of contents Preface Louise McNally (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) M. Teresa Espinal (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) / Semantic diversity in event-related nominals: Evidence from Spanish and Catalan object bare nominal constructions...................................................................................1 Marco García García (Universität Freiburg) Attributive subjects and case-marked objects: a concatenation of mismatches?..................................................................................................................13 Klaus von Heusinger (Universität Stuttgart) / Sofiana Chiriacescu (Universität Stuttgart) Pe-marked definite NPs in Romanian and discourse prominence................................33 Mihaela Marchis (Universität Hamburg) Syntax/Morphology Mismatches in Romance..............................................................55 Natascha Pomino (Universität Zürich / Universität Konstanz) Number Mismatches within the Italo-Romance DP.....................................................75 Klaus von Heusinger (Universität Stuttgart) / Georg A. Kaiser (Universität Konstanz) Mismatching the first person in Romance.....................................................................95 Susann Fischer (Universität Hamburg) Some notes on the rise of mismatches: the Person Case Constraint...........................113 Anna Bartra Kaufmann (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) From mismatch to transparent argument structure: Some remarks on Old Romance Complex Predicates.....................................................................................................127 Preface This volume is a collection of papers presented at the V NEREUS (http://www.ilg.uni- stuttgart.de/Nereus/) international workshop on the topic Mismatches in Romance, held at the University of Zürich on October 8th and 9th, 2010. “Mismatches”, i.e. linguistic phenomena with ‘feature contradictions’ on different levels of linguistic structure, like deponentia in Latin (passive morphology with an active semantics), are a recently much discussed linguistic topic (cf. e.g. the volume Mismatch: Form-Function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar edited by Elaine J. Francis and Laura A. Michaelis, 2002, CSLI Publications). Therefore, the fifth NEREUS workshop focussed on different cases of mismatches in Romance languages, discussing theoretical aspects as well as concrete cases of e.g. ‘problematic’ arguments and argument-marking patterns (cf. the contributions by McNally/Espinal, García García and von Heusinger/Chiriacescu), agreement and other mismatches inside DPs (cf. the contributions by Marchis and Pomino), subject verb- agreement and clitics (cf. the contributions by von Heusinger/Kaiser and Fischer), and complex predicates (cf. the contribution by Bartra Kaufmann). While the contributions by McNally/Espinal and Bartra Kaufmann address syntax-semantics mismatches and Marchis a categorial mismatch, García García and von Heusinger/Chiriacescu focus on syntax- morphology mismatches. The contribution of Pomino deals both with syntax-morphology and syntax-phonology mismatches, and the one by von Heusinger/Kaiser with syntax-morphology and syntax-semantics mismatches. The languages discussed range from Catalan and Spanish (McNally/Espinal, García García, Fischer, Kaufmann, Marchis) over Romanian (von Heusinger/Chiriacescu, Marchis) and Brazilian Portuguese (von Heusinger/Kaiser) to a multitude of different Italo-Romance varieties (Pomino). Though some authors present at the workshop could not include their presentation in this volume, we would like to thank all the contributors and participants at the workshop for their talks and interesting discussion. We would like to thank particularly the University of Zurich (UZH) and the Hochschulstiftung of the University of Zurich (UZH) for funding the workshop, as well as Gabrielle Hess, Charlotte Meisner and Kathrin A. Neuburger, who contributed to the success of the workshop. Special thanks go to Sebastian Basler (Universität Konstanz) for preparing the manuscript. Zürich, July 31th 2011 Natascha Pomino Elisabeth Stark In: N. Pomino & E. Stark (eds.), Proceedings of the V NEREUS International Workshop “Mismatches in Romance”. Arbeitspapier 125. Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Konstanz 2011, 1-12. Semantic diversity in event-related nominals: Evidence from Spanish and Catalan object bare nominal constructions Louise McNally & M. Teresa Espinal Louise.McNally<at>upf.edu Teresa.Espinal<at>uab.cat 1. Introduction* We have shown in previous work (see most recently Espinal & McNally 2011) that Spanish and Catalan productively allow bare count nominals unmarked for Number (BNs) as the complement to a small class of verbs, subject to certain semantic and pragmatic conditions. An interesting feature of this construction is that despite serving as a complement, the BN is not a semantic argument of the verb. In this respect, this construction constitutes a paradigmatic example of a mismatch at the syntax-semantics interface. In this paper we examine one particularly interesting subcase of this construction, involving the verbs tener / tenir ‘have’ and (existential) haber / haver-hi ‘there be’. These verbs can combine with a very limited set of simple event BNs,1 as shown in (1a) and (2a); what is curious is that not just any event nominal can appear in this construction, as the unacceptable data in (1b) and (2b) demonstrate. (1) Spanish (a) Tengo partido / reunión / cena / visita / boda. have.1SG game / meeting / dinner / visit / wedding ‘I have a game / meeting / dinner / visit / wedding.’ (b) * Tengo disculpa / beso / abrazo / cumplido. have.1SG apology / kiss / hug / compliment (2) Catalan (a) Tinc partit / reunió / sopar / visita / casament. have.1SG game / meeting / dinner / visit / wedding ‘I have a game / meeting / dinner / visit / wedding.’ (b) * Tinc disculpa / petó / abraçada / compliment. have.1SG apology / kiss / hug / compliment The goal of this paper is to offer a preliminary account of this contrast, building on our previous analyses of object BNs and the predicates that take them as complements (Espinal & McNally 2009, 2011). This account will provide, we hope, some novel insight into the semantic richness of event nominals. We proceed as follows. In section 2 we present a series of distributional contrasts between the event nominals that can appear in sentences like (1) and (2) and those that cannot. In * We are grateful to the organizers of the 2010 NIAS Workshop on Weak Referentiality and the audience there for comments on this work, as well as to the organizers of the V NEREUS Workshop in Zurich for inviting us to participate in that workshop and to contribute to this volume. This research has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (HUM2006-13295-C02-01FILO, HUM2007-60599FILO, HF2007-0039), the Generalitat de Catalunya (2009SGR-1079, 2009SGR-0763), and Fundació ICREA. 1 See Grimshaw (1990) for the term ‘simple event nominal.’ Grimshaw contrasts simple event nominals with so-called complex event nominals, which can be identified among other ways by the obligatory expression of their arguments. Grimshaw’s classification has been the subject of some debate (see e.g. Alexiadou 2001, Borer 2005; see e.g. Meinschäfer 2005 for the Romance languages); we will not be concerned with this debate here, but have chosen to describe the nouns of interest as simple event nominals because they generally appear in our examples without any description of any participants of the events they denote. Event-related bare nominals 2 section 3 we briefly review the relevant aspects of our analysis of object BN constructions and show how some relatively simple assumptions about the semantics of event nominals allow us to account for the facts in (1) and (2) and the contrasts in section 2. 2. Event-related BNs: Identifying properties The event-related nominals that are acceptable as BN complements to tener / tenir ‘have’ and haber / haver-hi ‘there be’ share an important property that distinguishes them from the nominals which are not licensed, namely, they allow temporal modification by phrases that refer specifically to times; indeed, these nominals describe events that are scheduled and are associated with one or more stereotypical participants. For example, if the speaker asserts Tinc partit ‘I have a game’ (lit. have.1sg game) it is entailed that (s)he will be involved in a sports event at a certain time in which (s)he will play with and against other people. In contrast, it is interesting to note that unacceptable event nominals (e.g., disculpa ‘apology’) do not allow such modification and do not denote what we would typically consider schedulable events. Furthermore, the event nominals