Formal Approaches to Romance Morphosyntax

Marc-Olivier Hinzelin, Natascha Pomino, Eva-Maria Remberger, Marc-Olivier Hinzelin, Natascha Pomino, Eva-Maria Remberger

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783110718805
• eBook ISBN: 9783110719284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: German Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Recent years have witnessed a (re)surfacing of interest on the interaction of morphology and syntax. For many grammatical phenomena, it is not easy to draw a dividing line between syntactic and morphological structure. This has led to the assumption that syntax is the module responsible not only for deriving syntactically complex phrases but also for deriving morphologically complex items, both in inflection and word formation. There are however also good reasons to think that syntax is not involved in all morphological processes and that there are consistent areas of morphology that are independent from syntactic processes. This book presents a collection of papers where phenomena from Romance languages and varieties are analysed under contrasting views on how morphology and syntax interact. All the contributions follow the aim to investigate what the analysed phenomena tell us about their structural make?up and the grammatical processes involved.

Part 1: Agreement

Past participle agreement in French – one or two rules?

Doreen Georgi

Elisabeth Stark

Abstract

Past participle agreement in French has been taken to be conditioned (among other factors) by movement of the internal argument out of the VP, i.e. as a reflex of movement. However, drawing on data that have been neglected so far in the formal literature on the topic (Lahousse 2011), we show that this characterization is in part misguided: past participle agreement is also possible with in-situ internal arguments of unaccusative/passive verbs (that combine with the perfect auxiliary être), and hence cannot generally be considered a reflex of movement. We argue that a unified analysis of all past participle contexts in French is not only difficult – the sole attempt at a uniform analysis of a very similar pattern in Italian by D’Alessandro and Roberts (2008) cannot be extended to French – but also undesirable, because past participle agreement in contexts with the auxiliary avoir differs in a number of properties compared to past participle agreement in contexts that require the auxiliary être. We thus argue that past participle agreement in French is in fact not a homogeneous phenomenon but results from two different mechanisms: agreement between the past participle and the internal argument in its base position (not in a Spec-head configuration as is usually assumed), or from resumption (following a suggestion by Boeckx 2003).

Keywords: past participle agreement, French, agreement in-situ, resumption, reflexes of movement,

1 Introduction

A well-studied phenomenon in the morphosyntax of Romance languages is past participle agreement (PPA): in sentences with a perfect or passive auxiliary, the past participle can (and sometimes must) agree in (a subset of) phi-features with an argument. In this paper, we will reconsider PPA in French and argue that despite the intensive research on this phenomenon, a comprehensive integration even of the basic facts in a formal analysis is still lacking. In particular, we will argue that a unified analysis of PPA under the auxiliaries avoir and être is not only difficult, but actually undesirable, since PPA has different properties in these contexts. Hence, we claim that PPA under avoir has a different status / source than PPA under être.

The paper is structured as follows: in the remainder of section 1 we will remind the reader of the distribution of PPA in French. Furthermore, we show that important facts in the context of the auxiliary être, though available in the descriptive literature, have not been considered in formal analyses of PPA; in fact, these data are unexpected in previous approaches. Section 2 summarizes the main ideas of existing analyses and points out their shortcomings. In section 3 we argue, based on a whole series of corpus facts, why, in our view, PPA in French is not a unified phenomenon and should be considered the result of two different syntactic mechanisms. In section 4 we present a formal implementation of these ideas. Finally, section 5 concludes.

From a descriptive point of view, the rules of PPA in standard French can be formulated as follows, in the terminology of Relational Grammar (following e.g. Perlmutter & Postal 1983):

Accordo del PP in francese

Sia b una proposizione, a un nominale di b e p un participio passato di una forma verbale perifrastica di b. p si accorda in genere e numero con a se e solo se:

I. la proposizione è finalemente intransitiva [= internal argument is not in its post-verbal base position].

II. a è legittimato al controllo dell’accordo.

Un nominale è legittimato al controllo dell’accordo sse:

(a) non è chômeur [= a is in an argument position]

(b) è il 2 inizializzato da p [= is the internal argument of p].

(Loporcaro 1998: 53)¹

II(a) in the Italian quote above can be translated as “a is in an argument position” and II(b) as “a is the internal argument of p”. Generally, in a pan-Romance perspective and still following the observations in Loporcaro (1998), two factors determine past participle agreement in Romance: auxiliary selection (être, `to be’, with unaccusatives (3), passives (2a), reflexive constructions; avoir, `to have’, with unergative verbs and active-transitive constructions), and, in the case of active-transitive constructions, linear order between past participle and internal argument (DP_int). In French, PPA is only p...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Romance Morphosyntax: Interpreting data from a theoretical perspective
• Part 1: Agreement
• Part 2: Clitics and Null Subjects
• Part 3: Functional Categories and the Verb