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Satisfying V2 in early Romance: Merge vs. Move1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2008

ADAM LEDGEWAY
ADAM LEDGEWAY*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge & Downing College
*
Author's address: Downing College, Regent Street, Cambridge CB2 1DQ, U.K.[email protected]
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Abstract

In early Romance the finite verb raises in root clauses to the vacant C position, a movement operation frequently accompanied in turn by fronting of a pragmatically salient constituent to a preverbal position within the C-domain. Although this structural characterization of early Romance V2 word order overwhelmingly accounts for the core cases, there remains a smaller number of contexts in which the V2 effect appears to be satisfied by other means. More specifically, in addition to the move option, we argue that the V2 constraint may be met in early Romance by the Merge option: in the former case this involves movement of the finite verb to the empty C head, whereas in the latter case the V2 requirement is met by merging sì (<sic ‘thus, so’) directly in C°. This analysis radically departs from traditional analyses of Romance sì, which characterize it either as a coordinating conjunction or, in recent generative analyses, as a pleonastic phrasal category associated with a specifier position within CP. Our proposed analysis makes some interesting and novel predictions both about the rather restricted distribution of sì in Old Neapolitan, many aspects of which remain unexplained under the alternative accounts, and the C-related functional positions involved in medieval Romance V2.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , July 2008 , pp. 437 - 470
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[1]

The research reported here was conducted as part of a larger research project dedicated to the writing of a diachronic grammar of the Neapolitan dialect. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the University of Cambridge for providing generous funding for this research project by way of research leave during the academic year 2005–6. I should like to thank two anonymous JL reviewers for their extremely useful comments on an earlier version of this article. I am also grateful to the audiences of the VII Incontro di dialettologia (University of Bristol, February 2006) and the XIII Giornata di dialettologia (University of Padua, June 2007), where earlier versions of this article were presented.

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