Word order and clause structure in Spanish and other romance languages.
Item
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Title
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Word order and clause structure in Spanish and other romance languages.
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Identifier
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AAI9807978
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identifier
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9807978
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Creator
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Ordonez, Francisco.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Richard S. Kayne
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics | Literature, Romance
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Abstract
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This dissertation explores various aspects of word order and clausal structure in the Romance languages, with special emphasis on Spanish. The different aspects are looked at in light of the highly constrained theory of word order proposed in the antisymmetry approach of Kayne (1994). This theory makes unavailable certain widely-assumed mechanisms of analysis such as right adjunction and multiple adjunction to the same head.;The first part (Chapters 1 and 2) explores new analyses of postverbal subjects in Romance, which had been assumed to be right adjoined. The alternation V S O/V O S shows that there are certain asymmetries between these orders that are inexplicable under a right-adjunct ion analysis. This same alternation is the same found in verb-final scrambling languages between S O V and O S V. I propose therefore that V O S is the output of the movement of objects to the left of the subject. Comparison between Spanish and the other Romance languages, such as Catalan, Italian, and French leads to the further elaboration on the analysis proposed. It is argued that the derivation of V O S also involves movement of the whole TP to a position above the subject.;The other aspects of clausal structure examined include interrogatives and the position of preverbal subjects. In Chapter 4, It is shown that the peculiar restrictions on the distribution of subjects in interrogatives cannot be explained by a obligatory overt verb movement to C{dollar}\sp0{dollar}. This last proposal is also incompatible with the assumptions made in Kayne (1994). The alternative proposed involves complementizer movement instead. This alternative makes an important assumption: pre-verbal subjects have to be left dislocated.;In the final chapter I link the obligatory left-dislocated nature of subjects to the rich inflectional system of the language. If we take person agreement to be a clitic argument that can receive case and be assigned a {dollar}\theta{dollar}-role, the need for an exclusive position for subjects disappears. Evidence for the clitic nature of person agreement is well motivated in the syntax as well as in the morphology.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
