Pseudo-right dislocation, the bare-topic construction, and hanging topic constructions

In many Romance languages, negative expressions exhibit a robust distributional asymmetry.When in post-verbal positions, they require theco-presence of negation; when in pre-verbal positions,they are incompatible with it. In the same languages, bare nominals exhibit a distribution that parallels the negativeone in some striking respects. They are possible in post-verbal positions, but infelicitous as pre-verbal subjects. Similar distributionalparallelisms between these expressions are shown toobtain cross-linguistically and diachronically and are argued to derive from their common internal syntactic and semantics properties. Both expressions have a 'deficient' DP, lack quantificational force, and are unable to check the D feature of EPP. Bare nominals may lack D0, but negative expressions contain a null D0syntactically licensed under DP internal Spec Headagreement or head movement. As these operations result from parametricoptions in DP syntax and have consequences on the semantic nature of these expressions, the central result of the paper isto derive cross-linguistic variations in negative concord from independentchoices in DP syntax.

“Infinitival clauses” are constructions with a clausal status whose predicate is an infinitive. Romance infinitive clauses are mostly dependent clauses and can be divided into the following types: argumental infinitival clauses (such as subject and object clauses, the latter also including indirect interrogatives), predicative infinitival clauses, infinitival adjunct clauses, infinitival relative clauses, and nominalized infinitive clauses (with a determiner). More rarely, they appear as independent (main) clauses (root infinitival clauses) of different types, which usually have a marked character. Whereas infinitival adjunct clauses are generally preceded by prepositions, which can be argued to be outside the infinitival clause proper (i.e., the clause is part of a prepositional phrase), Romance argumental infinitive clauses are often introduced by complementizers that are diachronically derived from prepositions, mostly de/di and a/à. In most Romance languages, the infinitive itself is morphologically marked by an ending containing the morpheme {r} but lacks tense and agreement morphemes. However, some Romance languages have developed an infinitive that can be inflected for subject agreement (which is found in Portuguese, Galician, and Sardinian and also attested in Old Neapolitan). Romance languages share the property of English and other languages to leave the subject of infinitive clauses unexpressed (subject/object control, arbitrary control, and optional control) and also have raising and accusative-and-infinitive constructions. A special property of many Romance languages is the possibility of overtly expressing a nominative subject in infinitival clauses, mostly in postverbal position. The tense of the infinitive clause is usually interpreted as simultaneous or anterior to that of the matrix clause, but some matrix predicates and infinitive constructions trigger a posteriority/future reading. In addition, some Romance infinitive clauses are susceptible to constraints concerning aspect and modality.

One of the most interesting aspects of the faire-Inf construction in the Romance languages concerns the properties and the structural position of the causee. In the relevant literature, the most consensual hypothesis is that, in these languages, the causee is the grammatical subject of the embedded domain, although it occurs in a post-verbal position and is introduced by a preposition whenever it is dependent on a transitive verb (see Kayne, 1975; Raposo, 1981; Burzio, 1986; Villalba, 1992; Guasti, 1993, 1997, among others). The aim of this paper is to present some evidence against the idea that the causee, in European Portuguese, is the subject of the embedded domain. I will claim that this domain is the projection of a null affix that incausativizes the embedded verb, suspending the assignment of the external θ -role of this verb. In consequence, the causee is merged in the positions classically associated to objects.

This study deals with the problems presented by postverbal subjetcs in constructions with unaccusative verbs, because they apparently are counterexamples to the explanatory power of the Unaccusative Hypothesis. The paper defends the position that such examples do not weaken the hypothesis since it is assumed that such postverbal subjects ought to leave the original object position and move to a position where nominative case is regularly assigned. This account is supported by two kinds of consideration. On the one hand, there exists no inherent partitive case to justify the lack of movement, and on the other, agreement facts and distribution of expletive pronouns in different Romance languages and in German show that the postverbal position of subjects are not but the result of movements compatible with the assignment of nominative case.