Arbeitspapier Nr. 123 Proceedings of the Workshop “Null-subjects, expletives, and locatives in Romance” Georg A. Kaiser & Eva-Maria Remberger (eds.) Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Konstanz Arbeitspapier Nr. 123 PROCEEDINGS OF THE WORKSHOP “NULL-SUBJECTS, EXPLETIVES, AND LOCATIVES IN ROMANCE” Georg A. Kaiser & Eva-Maria Remberger (eds.) Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft Universität Konstanz Fach 185 D-78457 Konstanz Germany Konstanz März 2009 Schutzgebühr € 3,50 Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Konstanz Sekretariat des Fachbereichs Sprachwissenschaft, Frau Tania Simeoni, Fach 185, D–78457 Konstanz, Tel. 07531/88-2465 Michael Zimmermann Katérina Palasis- Marijo Marc-Olivier Hinzelin Sascha Gaglia Georg A. Kaiser Jourdan Ezeizabarrena Jürgen M. Meisel Francesco M. Ciconte Esther Rinke Eva-Maria Franziska Michèle Oliviéri Julie Barbara Alexandra Gabriela Remberger M. Hack Auger Vance Cornilescu Alboiu Table of contents Preface Marc-Olivier Hinzelin (University of Oxford): Neuter pronouns in Ibero-Romance: Discourse reference, expletives and beyond .................... 1 Michèle Oliviéri (Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis): Syntactic parameters and reconstruction .................................................................................. 27 Katérina Palasis-Jourdan (Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis): On the variable morpho-syntactic status of the French subject clitics. Evidence from acquisition ........................................................................................................ 47 Michael Zimmermann (Universität Konstanz): On the evolution of expletive subject pronouns in Old French ................................................ 63 Esther Rinke (Universität Hamburg) & Jürgen M. Meisel (Universität Hamburg and University of Calgary): Subject-inversion in Old French: Syntax and information structure ........................................ 93 Georg A. Kaiser (Universität Konstanz): Losing the null subject. A contrastive study of (Brazilian) Portuguese and (Medieval) French .................................................................................................................. 131 Franziska Maria Hack (Universität Konstanz and University of Oxford) & Sascha Gaglia (Universität Konstanz): The use of subject pronouns in Raeto-Romance. A contrastive study ................................... 157 Francesco Maria Ciconte (University of Manchester): Pro-forms in existential constructions of early Italo-Romance vernaculars .......................... 183 Alexandra Cornilescu (Universitatea din Bucureşti): Restructuring strategies of the Romanian verb fi ‘be’ and the analysis of existential sentences ........................................................................................................... 199 Eva-Maria Remberger (Universität Konstanz): Null-subjects, expletives and locatives in Sardinian .............................................................. 231 Preface This volume is a collection of papers given at the workshop Null-subjects, expletives, and locatives in Romance at the University of Konstanz in March 2008. This workshop was a joint conference organised by the projects A-19 (Evolution and Variation of Expletive and Neuter Pronouns in Romance Languages / Georg Kaiser) and A-27 (Romance Auxiliary Verbs: Status – Development – Variation / Eva-Maria Remberger) within the SFB 471 “Variation and Development in the Lexicon”, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The aim of the workshop was to bring together different views on the interpretation of null subjects, expletives and locatives in order to explore the syntactic, semantic and morphological correlations of these pronouns in Romance. The authors of the papers given at this workshop analysed empty and phonologically realised elements that show the typical behaviour and characteristics of expletives in all Romance languages, i.e. Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian and Raeto-Romance, and frequently also in their regional or diachronic varieties. The correlation between non-null subjects and obligatory expletive pronouns is one of the best established parametrisations in Generative Grammar. However, it has been shown that both the null subject parameter as well as the presence or absence of overt expletives do not just depend on a simple binary parameter setting, but must be seen in a more complex system of interdependencies involving conditions such as deixis, topicality, person, referentiality, movement etc. The first seven papers published in this volume (Hinzelin, Oliviéri, Palasis- Jourdan, Zimmermann, Rinke & Meisel, Kaiser, Hack & Gaglia) adopt an analysis of null subjects and subject expletives from this point of view. Yet, as far as overt expletive pronouns are concerned, there are (at least) two categorial types, one stemming from the form of a neuter pronoun (like English it, German es, French il, Dominican Spanish ello, Catalan ell etc.) and one having a clear locative origin (like English there, German da, Sardinian bi, Italian ci, French y etc.). Locative elements also play a role in existential as well as impersonal auxiliary constructions in several Romance languages and varieties, i.e. these constructions often show overt locative and expletive elements; however, where they do not (e.g. in Romanian), null or implicit locatives can be assumed. The elements of locative origin among the expletives, the role of locative features in existential and certain impersonal constructions, and the auxiliary selection involved are discussed in the last three papers (Ciconte, Cornilescu, Remberger). Unfortunately, four papers presented at the workshop have not been included in this volume, either because they were published elsewhere or due to other purely technical reasons. These are the talks given by Gabriela Alboiu (Null Expletives and Case Values), Julie Auger (Two neuter pronouns in Picard), Maria José Ezeizabarrena (Null and non-null subjects in the early acquisition of some pro-drop languages), and Barbara Vance (The evolution of subject pronoun systems in Medieval Occitan). These talks were also extremely pertinent to the overall topic of our workshop. The proceedings of the workshop will also be available online at the following URL: http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/publ/arbeitspapiere.html or http://www.ub.uni-konstanz.de/kops/schriftenreihen_ebene2.php?sr_id=1&la=de On the technical side, we would like to especially thank Linda Maria Bauser and Florian Scheib as well as Christian Ferraro and Céline Lehnhoff (all at the Universität Konstanz) for their proficient help with the preparation of the manuscript. Konstanz, March 2009 Georg A. Kaiser Eva-Maria Remberger In: G.A. Kaiser & E.-M. Remberger (eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop “Null-subjects, expletives, and locatives in Romance”. Arbeitspapier 123. Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Konstanz 2009, 1-25. Neuter pronouns in Ibero-Romance: Discourse reference, expletives and beyond1 Marc-Olivier Hinzelin 1. Introduction: uses of neuter pronouns in Ibero-Romance In this contribution, I want to show that neuter pronouns in Ibero-Romance lend themselves to different kinds of uses, implying the loss of some of their features or even their class membership as pronouns, and that neuter ‘personal’ pronouns in impersonal constructions which have been described as expletives fulfil a rather different role. In this section, I am presenting the different uses of neuter pronouns in Ibero-Romance, and then focus on a discussion of Spanish and Portuguese in the second section. A corpus study of neuter pronouns in Catalan is presented in the following section and afterwards their status as ‘true’ expletives and other possible analyses are considered. In the last section, my conclusions on this issue are presented. Already the development of Romance 3rd person subject pronouns from the Latin demonstrative presupposes a grammatical and pragmatic shift by losing deictic force and even syntactic independence in the case of Gallo-Romance clitics (for a study of Gallo-Romance expletive (clitic) pronouns, cf. Hinzelin & Kaiser, to appear). A very similar change may also be observed in neuter Ibero- Romance demonstrative pronouns, which in some cases lose their deictic force and are reduced to mere sentence connectors like Catalan per ço, per això, malgrat això, Spanish por eso, and Portuguese por isso or even to expletives in copular constructions. This change is primarily triggered by the loss of neuter gender in Romance – the ‘neuter’ ‘personal’ pronouns and demonstratives, thus, must serve a different purpose in Romance. Especially the medial demonstratives are frequently used in new functions like sentence connectors. The system of demonstrative and / or neuter pronouns in Ibero-Romance (Catalan, Aragonese, Spanish, Asturian, Galician, and Portuguese) is shown in table 1, the medials are shaded in grey. 1 This study has been carried out as part of the research project “Evolution and Variation of Expletive and Neuter Pronouns in Romance Languages”, directed by Georg A. Kaiser. This project is funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation) within the framework of the Research Centre SFB 471 “Variation and Evolution in the Lexicon” at the University of Konstanz. I would like to thank the whole project team, especially Georg A. Kaiser and Philipp Flad. The responsibility for the contents of this study lies with the author. 2 Neuter pronouns in Ibero-Romance Table 1. System of neuter demonstratives