Root Contrastiveness and V2: A Supra-Informational Status. The Case of Two North-Eastern Italian Dialects

Simone De Cia — 2019-05-10

In the literature on Romance and Germanic V2, the fronted XP in the preverbal field is generally described as pragmatically salient, tacitly implying a crucial relationship between the V2 phenomenon and information structure. The degree to which discourse-pragmatics is pervasive in the V2 syntax is subject to cross-linguistic variation; nevertheless, the discussion of the phenomenon is often marginal in the literature. This paper sheds more light on the interaction between the V2 constraint and information structure by investigating two North-Eastern Italian dialects, Lamonat and Sovramontino, whose V2 constraint is solely linked to the unpackaging of discourse-pragmatic information. V2-motivated T-to-C movement ensures: (i) adjacency of the verb to the pragmatically salient element that, hence, receives discourse prominence; and (ii) the correct interpretation of contrastive elements, which are structurally realised in the preverbal field. The investigation of contrastive XPs suggests that contrastiveness should be regarded as an independent discourse-pragmatic status that supersedes topic and focus. In this respect, contrastiveness should not be considered a categorical notion, but a continuum in which the degree of contrastiveness is determined by the properties of the set containing the contrastive element.

Some characteristics of Southeast English preposition-dropping

Laura R. Bailey — 2019-05-10

Preposition-dropping is widespread in British English varieties, but the construction found in Southeast England differs from the descriptions of Northwest Englishes, patterning more closely with Greek and Romance varieties. The determiner is obligatorily absent, the argument must be a directional Goal, the verb must be semantically weak come or go, and the location must be familiar, anaphoric or a place name. These characteristics are explained if the noun undergoes N-to-D movement to gain a definite interpretation, requiring omission of the determiner and lack of modification, and the null directional preposition to conflates with v for licensing, removing the possibility of manner-of-motion verbs.

IBERIA: An International Journal of Theoretical Linguistics

Root Contrastiveness and V2: A Supra-Informational Status. The Case of Two North-Eastern Italian Dialects

Some characteristics of Southeast English preposition-dropping