Year: 2002
Type: article
Abstract: Recent work on the acquisition of the binding conditions suggests that pronominal clitics (PCs) encode the presence of an unsaturated argument position.In other words, PC-constructions encode functional abstraction: the argument position related to the PC is re-opened.This interpretation represents a radical departure from traditional analyses (in virtually every syntactic framework, including HPSG and Principles&Parameters), which take PCs to reduce the valence of the predicate to which they are linked, either in the lexicon (HPSG) or in syntax (P&P).In this contribution, I will provide conceptual and empirical motivation for this radical reinterpretation of PC-constructions, by claiming that it considerably enhances the prospects of explanatory adequacy in (at least) the following domains: (a) the acquisition data relative to Principle B Effects in Romance languages; (b) the familiar vs. bound-variable interpretation of PCs; (c) the diachronic relationship between clitic left-dislocation constructions (CLLD) and PC-constructions; (d) the properties of Romance CLLD which are still in need of a deep conceptual account, like the (optional) presence of a resumptive clitic and the recursive nature of the topic projections in the left-periphery.
Source: Catalan Journal of Linguistics
DOI: 10.5565/rev/catjl.55
Author: Denis Delfitto
Institution: University of Verona
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1578753007