A Markedness Account of Romance Clitic Systems

Project Information

MARCS

Grant agreement ID: 658784

DOI

10.3030/658784

Project terminated on 31 March 2017

EC signature date 25 March 2015

Start date 1 January 2016

End date 1 August 2018

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 171 460,80

EU contribution

€ 171 460,80

Coordinated by

JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE-UNIVERSITAET FRANKFURT AM MAIN
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MARCS (A Markedness Account of Romance Clitic Systems)

Reporting period: 2016-01-01 to 2017-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

This project deals with Romance clitic pronouns, i.e. pronominal elements that i) cannot bear primary stress and ii) may have a strong counterpart occurring in a different syntactic position.
The project aims to combine evidence from different empirical domains (historical linguistics, synchronic comparison of present day vernaculars, L1/L2 acquisition, pathology) to elaborate a markedness model accounting for the organization of Romance clitic systems.
First of all, I have tried to single out the factors that shape clitic inventories and constrain clitic syntax. These factors can be reduced to abstract parameters, i.e. binary choices with two possible values (positive/negative) dealing with the degree of markedness of syntactic, phonological and morphological structures.
Parameters having a negative value act as filters preventing the occurrence of certain configurations across languages. Languages, however, tend to avoid such configurations by means of different repair strategies, which in turn can be ranked according to a scale of markedness. This hypothesis (namely, a parametric account based on a markedness model with repairs) may provide a better account of the number of variants displayed by grammatical systems w.r.t. cliticization.

The work plan of the proposed project envisages the following phases (part of them overlap because some activities are expected to be carried out at the same time):
Phase A: Review of existing material (months 1-8): In this preliminary stage I have studied in detail the vast existing literature on Romance clitics.
Phase B: Selection of relevant phenomena (months 8-12). A provisional list of relevant factors is reported below:
- phonological factors: stress assignment, constraints on syllabifications, alignment conditions, etc.
- morphological factors: paradigmatic gaps, syncretism, suppletion, etc.
- syntactic factors: clause type, type and position of doubled XP, verbal features (TAM, auxiliary selection), etc.
- semantico-pragmatic factors: information structure, presuppositions, etc.
Phase C: Data collection (months 13-17)
Phase D: modelling (months 12-24): In this phase, I have formalized empirical observations to build a principled model in which the above factors are translated in binary, ranked parameters having to do with the structural properties of clitic elements.
Phase E: preparation of the monography (18-24)

Deliverables:
At the end of each phase, I will write either a report (for internal purposes) or a paper (to be submitted to conferences/journals) summarizing the findings of previous activities. The list of deliverables is as follows:
A) report on the existing literature
B) report summarizing the relevant phenomena to be addressed
C) report on fieldwork activity
D) articles
E) book proposal

Due to the early termination of the project, I have completed Phases A and B, skipped phase C, and tackled phase D and E. Results are listed in the following section.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

As planned in the project proposal, I have submitted and presented my work at major conferences on dialectology and Romance linguistics.

‘vP movement and pied-piping: revising the Tobler-Mussafia law’, Workshop on Formal Approaches to Romance Microvariation, University of Bucharest, 24th-25th November 2016.
'vP movement and pied-piping: revising the Tobler-Mussafia law' Going Romance 30; 8 December - 10 December 2016, University of Frankfurt (selected as alternate speaker; I did not attend the conference)
‘L’evoluzione delle legge Tobler-Mussafia: indizi sintattici in varietà italiane alto-meridionali’ CILFR 28, Rome, 18th-23rd July 2016.
‘Non-canonical enclitics are not weak pronouns’ 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 46), March 31-April 3, 2016; Stony Brook University.

Moreover, I've given several invited talks on the topics of the project:

‘V2 and scrambling in old Romance: a reassessment’ Università di Verona, 20.02.2017
‘Interpolation and vP scrambling’ Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 10.02.2017
‘The Ins and Outs of Romance microvariation’ CNRS UMR 7320 Bases, Corpus, Langage, Nice, 17th November 2016.

The first results of the project are to be made available through book chapters and articles submitted to the main peer-reviewed journals in the field of Romance and of General Linguistics. All publications, single authored, are in press; papers have been uploaded in the Zenodo repository and are fully accessible in compliance with EU/H2020 regulations:
[in press] ‘Parametrising arbitrary constructions’ Probus 29.2.
[in press] ‘Subject and impersonal clitics in northern Italian dialects’ in R. Petrosino, P. Cerrone, H. van der Hulst Beyond the veil of Maya - from sounds to structures. Berlin, Mouton De Gruyter.
[in press] ‘Stressed enclitics are not weak pronouns: a plea for allomorphy’ Romance Linguistics 2016, Selected papers from the 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
[in press] ‘An emergentist view on functional classes’. In L. Franco, P. Lorusso, Festschrift in honour of Rita Manzini (provisional title). Berlin, Mouton De Gruyter.

With R. D'Alessandro (Utrecht) and A. Gallego (Barcelona) I organised a workshop within the 49th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea entitled 'Formal Approaches to Romance Microvariation' (http://sle2016.eu/downloads/workshops/Formal%20Approaches%20to%20Romance%20Microvariation.pdf). Most talks were about Romance clitics.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

I am currently drafting a book proposal for a monography on the emergence of Romance clitic systems. The book aims to revise clitic placement in early Romance by suggesting an alternative explanation of verb movement.

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