Building on our previous work on Spanish (Eguren and Sánchez López 2023), in this paper, we present a novel contrastive analysis of the syntactic and semantic properties of Spanish and Portuguese bare and complex neuter interrogative pronouns (Sp. qué ‘what’, el/lo qué ‘the what’; Port. que ‘what’, o que ‘the what’). It is shown that Sp. qué is an unmarked form that occurs both when the speaker assumes that the inquired constituent is part of the Common Ground and when (s)he does not, whereas the complex form el/lo qué is only used in the first scenario, thus indicating that el and lo in el/lo qué are explicit definiteness markers. As for Portuguese, it is shown that que is a weak form (in Cardinaletti and Starke 1994/1999’s sense) with a highly restricted distribution, while o que is the unmarked form appearing in all types of wh-constructions and interpretive contexts, which suggest that o in o que has the status of a (meaningless) expletive article. In the light of these observations, it is claimed that the distribution of Sp. qué and el/lo qué is semantically driven, whereas the distribution of Port. que and o que has a morpho-phonological basis. A formal analysis is further provided that structurally captures the aforementioned properties of bare and complex neuter interrogative pronouns in Spanish and Portuguese.

Spanish demonstratives may appear before the noun (este libro ‘this book’) or after the noun (el libro este ‘the book this’). Despite their relevance for comparative syntax (Giusti 1997, 2015, Brugè 1996, 2002), little work has been done on their meaning. Based on elicitation data, this paper proposes the first formal semantic treatment of the two Spanish constructions, with a particular focus on the lesser studied postnominal demonstrative. The main proposal is that the postnominal is an indexed adjective, i.e. an adjective carrying a “silent pronoun”. Additionally, it is argued that the postnominal is a weak demonstrative, unlike its prenominal counterpart, which explains its reduced distribution in deixis. These two points capture previously unexplained differences between the two constructions, as well as another (better understood) alternation in Spanish, namely pre- and postnominal possessives. The paper contributes to the cross-linguistic study of demonstratives by examining an atypical adjectival demonstrative from a semantic lens.

In this paper, I discuss a new construction in Brazilian Portuguese, whereby the negative marker não ‘not’, which is syncretic with other types of negation in the language, appears in the slot [Aux_V] in periphrases, a position that is not common in other Romance languages. Among its properties, this type of negation must receive intonational stress, that is, it is a focus element and, as such, it conveys a specific meaning. A comparison with other types of low negation in the same position in Italian, Catalan and French shows that the new negator in Brazilian Portuguese is not the same as the ones that may occur in those languages. Observing this negation marker in relation to low adverbs and to the lexical verb in progressive and perfective periphrases in Brazilian Portuguese, I propose a syntactic position based on the nanosyntax approach, which can explain its focus nature and semantic/pragmatic properties.

In this study, we present the results of a linguistic survey conducted using AlpiLinK, a corpus of crowdsourced data, to highlight the potential of such a tool when dealing with areal contact. The data concern the syntax of clitics and prodrop phenomena in the Italo-Romance varieties spoken in North-Eastern Italy. We analyze (a) the dropping of the 2nd person singular clitic in Gardenese Ladin and (b) the distribution of the 3rd person singular clitic in constructions with weather verbs in the Italo-Romance varieties of Northeastern Italy, in particular, Venetan, Trentino and Friulian, using a dataset of over 250 localities. The results demonstrate the potential of AlpiLinK in both qualitative and quantitative research, allowing us to draw some conclusions about the dynamics of Germanic-Romance language contact in this area.

This paper investigates the processing and interpretation of non-culmination sentences and subjects’ agentivity in European Portuguese. A five-point Likert scale is employed to test the native speaker’s judgment regarding the acceptability of five types of non-culminating accomplishment sentences put forward in Guéron and Vogeleer (2021), providing evidence that speakers accept non-culminating accomplishments to a certain extent, albeit acceptance differs depending on the circumstance. Furthermore, while the subject’s agentivity does have some bearing on the acceptability rating, it does not appear to be a requirement for non-culminating accomplishments in European Portuguese. A self-paced reading experiment also shows processing differences amongst five types of non-culminating accomplishments and that subject agentivity does not affect processing time.

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This paper investigates the syntax and pragmatics of a peculiar type of wh-questions found in Martinican Creole and characterized by the presence of the clausal determiner la in sentence-final position. Regular and la-marked wh-questions do not differ as far as their internal and external syntax is concerned. Pragmatically, however, la-marked wh-questions stand out in the two following ways: (a) they cannot be uttered out of the blue, and (b) they do not tolerate nothing-type answers. I attribute these properties to the presence of la, which I argue is the spell-out of a [+familiar] feature. Accordingly, a la-marked wh-question will refer to a familiar QUD introduced through the prior addition of an existential proposition to the common ground. On the basis of the interpretational properties of la-marked wh-questions, as well as the distribution of la, I propose that la is merged in the Grounding layer proposed by Wiltschko (2021). This is consistent with the fact that it plays a role in the management of the common ground. Beyond Martinican Creole, this analysis lends support to the assumption that certain pragmatic functions are encoded in the grammar.

This paper presents VeLeCa, a new resource on Catalan verbal inflection containing the phonological form of 174,200 word forms from 3,484 lexemes and their respective lexical and morphosyntactic values and frequencies. We describe the challenges and procedure we followed in the compilation and phonemization of this resource, and conduct a computational analysis of the Paradigm Cell Filling Problem (i.e. morphological predictive complexity) in the system to contrast it with those from related Romance languages.

This paper identifies a micro-cue correlating to verb second word order (V2) in two closely related Medieval Romance languages. As V2 is asymmetrically distributed in main rather than subordinate clauses, an asymmetry would be expected in phenomena assumed to relate to V2, such as subject inversion, null subject and enclisis. The loss of that asymmetry should therefore indicate the loss of the V2 word order rule. These assumptions are tested here by a quantitative analysis of a treebank of calibrated data covering the crucial period of change (from the 14th to the 16th century) for Medieval French and Venetian. The hard quantitative evidence provided demonstrates that the main versus embedded asymmetry is indeed a micro-cue of V2 structure, and of its loss in one of the two investigated languages.

This study investigates the acceptability of constructions containing third-person possessives combined with singular and plural kinship terms in adult bilectal speakers of Italian and different Italo-Romance varieties spoken in six different geographic areas in northern, central, and southern Italy. The sentences to be judged vary according to the presence and position (prenominal vs. postnominal) of the possessive and the presence vs. absence of the definite article. For Italian, results were consistent with the patterns highlighted by previous studies. For the six dialects, much more variation and optionality were observed. Comparing the results of our questionnaire to data reported in AIS maps (Jaberg and Jud [1928] 1940), we found a situation that only partially replicated the picture presented in these documents in the first half of the last century. Regarding contact issues, we found cases of the influence of the dialect on Italian, instances of the influence of Italian on the dialect, and cases where the dialects have changed independently of Italian. By investigating whether participants’ language dominance modulated the acceptability of certain patterns, we found some influence of Italian on the dialect only for speakers with Italian dominance.