OUTSTANDING DlSSERTATIONS IN LINGUISTICS Edited by Laurence Horn Yale University A ROUTLEDGE SERIES OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS IN LINGUISTICS LAURENCE HORN, General Editor PRONOUNS AND WORD ORDER IN OLD ENGLISH With Particular Reference to the Indefinite Pronoun Man Linda van Bergen ELLIPSIS AND WA-MARKING IN JAPANESE CONVERSATION John Fry WORKING MEMORY IN SENTENCE COMPREHENSION Processing Hindi Center Embeddings Shravan Vasishth INPUT-BASED PHONOLOGICAL ACQUISITION Tania S.Zamuner VIETNAMESE TONE A New Analysis Andrea Hoa Pham ORIGINS OF PREDICATES Evidence from Plains Cree Tomio Hirose CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF WORD STRUCTURE Jennifer Hay THE PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY OF GUTTURALS A Case Study from Ju’hoansi Amanda Miller-Ockhuizen TRUE TO FORM Rising and Falling Declaratives as Questions in English Christine Gunlogson PHONOLOGICAL AUGMENTATION IN PROMINENT POSITIONS Jennifer Smith CATEGORY NEUTRALITY A Type-Logical Investigation Neal Whitman THE UPS AND DOWNS OF CHILD LANGUAGE Experimental Studies on Children’s Knowledge of Entailment Relations Andrea Gualmini MARKEDNESS AND FAITHFULNESS IN VOWEL SYSTEMS Viola Miglio THE SYNTAX-INFORMATION STRUCTURE INTERFACE Evidence from Spanish and English Eugenia Casielles-Suarez LENITION AND CONTRAST The Functional Consequences of Certain Phonetically Conditioned Sound Changes Naomi Gurevich SYNTACTIC FORM AND DISCOURSE FUNCTION IN NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION Cassandre Creswell THE INFLECTED INFINITIVE IN ROMANCE LANGUAGES Emily Scida THE INFLECTED INFINITIVE IN ROMANCE LANGUAGES Emily Scida ROUTLEDGE New York & London Published in 2004 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 http://www.routledge-ny.com/ This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” Copyright © 2004 by Taylor & Francis Group, a Division of T&F Informa. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Catalog record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-203-48876-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-58086-9 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-97106-3 (Print Edition) For G. Acknowledgments I would like to express my sincere thanks to the members of my committee-Linda Waugh, Jay Jasanoff, and especially Carol Rosen—for their guidance and advice as I was completing this project. I am also grateful to the Department of Romance Studies and the Department of Modern Languages at Cornell University for many years of support while in the graduate program. Any errors or shortcomings are entirely my own. I would like to thank my family for encouraging me along the way, and especially my parents for instilling in me a love of learning. I am also extremely grateful to Doris Borrelli, Christine Swain, Lisa Welton-Lair, and Julie Dogil for their devoted friendship, constant inspiration, and moral support without whom I would not have survived my many years at Cornell. Special thanks goes to Ti Alkire for reaching out to me during a difficult period, and for his encouragement and tremendously therapeutic sense of humor. I owe the completion of this thesis to the pact we made one October night. Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: The Syntactic Distribution of the Inflected Infinitive 6 Chapter 3: Previous Accounts of the Distribution of the Inflected Infinitive 31 Chapter 4: Theories of the Origin of the Portuguese Inflected Infinitive 74 Chapter 5: The Imperfect Subjunctive in Latin 93 Chapter 6: Distribution of the Inflected Infinitive in the Romance Languages 111 Chapter 7: Conclusion 126 References 129 Index 136 THE INFLECTED INFINITIVE IN ROMANCE LANGUAGES OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS IN LINGUISTICS CHAPTER 1 Introduction The inflected infinitive in Portuguese has een considered an anomaly among the Romance languages. No other major Romance language possesses an infinitive with verbal inflection, whereas in Portuguese the use and distribution of this form is quite extensive. In Portuguese the inflected infinitive exists along with an uninflected infinitive; their forms are similar except for the addition of verb endings which produces the inflected form, but their syntactic distribution is not entirely equivalent. amar ‘I love’ amarmos ‘we love’ amares ‘you love’ amardes ‘you love’ amar ‘he/she loves’ amarem ‘they love’ Two prominent issues have arisen regarding the inflected infinitive. The first concerns the distribution of the inflected infinitive in modern Portuguese; its occurrence in varied contexts has made a description of its use difficult. The second issue concerns its probable origin and development in Portuguese, which is obscure considering its absence in the other major Romance languages and the completion of its evolution prior to the appearance of Old Portuguese texts. Many attempts have been made to provide a description of the use of the inflected infinitive in Portuguese. Previous descriptions have included long lists of rules and examples intended to predict its use in such different contexts as the following: (1) O viajante viu entrarem e saírem as abelhas. ‘The traveler saw the bees enter and leave’ (Corvo, Seleta Nacional, 350) (2) Frade, tu mentes, sem saberes que mentes. ‘Friar, you lie, without knowing that you lie’ (Garrett, Viagens na minha terra, 17, 89) (3) Eu estou contentíssimo de virmos para esta casa. ‘I am very happy that we are coming to this house’ (Garrett, Frei Luís de Sousa, II, III) However, these previous attempts were based on an atheoretical approach that did not provide an explicit structural analysis. Consequently, the rules and norms proposed were inconsistent and contradictory, and allowed for numerous counterexamples. For almost any rule stated, an exception could be found in written and spoken language. For that reason, some have asserted that there are no dependable rules governing the use of the inflected infinitive in Portuguese. We will see that this claim is not entirely accurate. Using the framework of Relational Grammar, chapter two examines the syntactic distribution of the inflected infinitive in Portuguese to uncover the environments for its use. First, I provide a background on the theory of Relational Grammar, discussing various types of structures, including monoclausal and biclausal structures, and The inflected infinitive in romance languages 2 diagnostics for clause membership. After a careful study of the structure and distribution of the inflected infinitive and related syntactic phenomena, I propose a general condition on its use which correctly predicts the precise range of environments where the inflected infinitive will be acceptable and others where it will be excluded. My analysis differs from many previous descriptions of the inflected infinitive in that it uses a theoretical approach to provide a precise syntactic investigation of the phenomenon. In contrast to other studies which present long lists of rules and norms, my analysis offers one concise condition restricting its use which predicts all possible occurrences of the inflected infinitive in Portuguese. Chapter three discusses the previous accounts given for the distribution of the inflected infinitive in Portuguese and Galician and examines the rules of each as they compare to my proposed condition on the use of the inflected infinitive. We will see that many of these previous attempts to explain its occurrence are vague and contradictory and fail to capture the true nature of the inflected infinitive in these languages. Instead, it will be shown that all the rules and examples given by other accounts are entirely predictable under my analysis. Although some of these accounts recognize important characteristics of the inflected infinitive, only my analysis presents a unified account of all the possible syntactic environments for this form in Portuguese and Galician. While the first section of this dissertation offers a synchronic study of the distribution of the inflected infinitive, the second section investigates another prominent issue regarding this form, which is its origin and development. Chapter four describes the theories that have been proposed to explain the development of the inflected infinitive in Portuguese. Early theories contended that the inflected infinitive was an innovation unique to Portuguese which arose out of analogy with the future subjunctive, or with the infinitive with nominative subject construction, or with both. After the discovery of an inflected infinitive in other Romance languages, some scholars proposed that the inflected infinitive was a historical development rooted in the Latin imperfect subjunctive. The inflected infinitive has been found to exist in languages other than Portuguese, namely Galician, Sardinian, Old Neapolitan, Old Leonese, and Mirandese. GALICIAN (4) Un amigo co que, contrariamente aos que teño agora, raramente falaba, xa que non eran necesarias as palabras pra nos entendermos . ‘A friend with whom, contrary to those I have now, I rarely spoke, since words were not necessary for us to understand each other’ (A orella, 69) SARDINIAN (5) Juanne at tuncatu su barcone pro non s’ istremparet sa janna.