Catalan Journal of Linguistics

Preface

2022-10-14T13:44:44+02:00

Preface

An Unexpected Pronominalization of Some Temporal Measure Phrases

2022-02-10T14:48:50+01:00

Catalan partitive case, as well as the clitic en that represents it, is usually described as the case of the indefinite (or bare) direct object of transitive verbs and the indefinite (or bare) postverbal subject of unaccusative predicates. However, in quasicopulative constructions we can find some temporal measure phrases showing partitive case which have the appearance of an adjunct phrase. The paper provides evidence that these temporal measure phrases are not an argument of the verb, but an argument of a syntactic structure where an abstract Place preposition has been incorporated into the verb. This analysis of the partitive case as the inherent case assigned by a Place preposition incorporated into a verb is extended to other Catalan syntactic configurations with verbs which have lost their dynamic meaning, such as passar ‘to pass’ and portar ‘to bring’.

On Psych Verbs and Optional Clitic Doubling in Catalan and Other Ibero-Romance Languages

2022-03-31T17:40:30+02:00

Although undesired under a theoretical viewpoint, natural languages often show cases of “true” optionality. According to a reformulation of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace 2006), highly complex constructions are more susceptible to optionality and change. Psych verbs that select a subject dative experiencer fall under this definition. Ibero-Romance languages use different strategies to reduce this morphosyntactic inconsistency. Whereas Catalan and Spanish reinforce the deviant construction through additional morphological markers (dative clitic doubling and subsequent grammaticalization of the clitic as subject-verb agreement marker), Portuguese avoids inherent datives at all, using structural case instead. These innovations in argument structure have significant consequences: clitic doubling with full DPs and the grammaticalization of the clitic pronouns are blocked, in contrast to Catalan and Spanish. It becomes evident that a closer look at how argument structure is codified in the lexicon is needed in order to better understand processes of language change.

The Syntax of Old Catalan Clitics: “Llibre dels Fets”

2022-03-18T12:19:17+01:00

Although the distribution of pronominal clitics in Old Catalan has been described in general terms (Fischer 2002; Batllori et al. 2005), there are no quantitative studies detailing the frequency of preverbal or postverbal clitics nor their diachronic evolution. The clitics appearing with verbs in the future and conditional tense (FC) are worth a separate mention, since these forms originate from periphrastic structures that involve an infinitive and the auxiliary verb habere, and which could appear as an analytic (dir-li he) or a synthetic form (li diré or diré-li). This paper describes the general clitic positioning and the one encountered with FC in order to verify the claim that they display parallel distributions, using a text from the 13th century, to wit Llibre dels Fets. This article analyses the pragmatic-syntactic environments in which the clitic are found, as well as the degree of grammaticalization and univerbation of the FC. Following previous work (e.g., Bouzouita & Sentí 2022), it is argued that the FC in Catalan appear to exhibit a more advanced degree of grammaticalization than the western languages of the Iberian Peninsula.

On (apparently) synonymous affixes: A contrastive analysis of Catalan “des-” and “es-”

2022-03-11T10:17:12+01:00

It is commonly assumed that the Catalan prefixes des- and es- are synonymous, since they can be found attached to the same base in change of state verbs with an apparently identical meaning; cf. desgranar and esgranar ‘to extract the grain’. The aim of this paper is to show that these two prefixes are non-trivially different, as suggested by the fact that only the latter, but not the former, is attested with an ingressive (or Goal-oriented) meaning; cf. estovar ‘to soften’. Following a nanosyntactic approach to grammar, I claim that the trees lexicalized by des- and es- are not composed of the same morphosyntactic features, which accounts for their different morphosyntactic behaviour as well as for their semantic contrasts. It is proposed that des- lexicalizes a Source Path, whereas es- lexicalizes a Goal Path in addition to a root node. The paper is also a contribution to the long-standing debate of how morphemes with similar meanings compete for insertion.

When Restructuring and Clause Union Meet in Catalan and Beyond

2022-03-02T10:27:40+01:00

This paper considers what happens when clause union meets restructuring by examining contexts where the causative FACERE verb takes a restructuring verb as its complement in Catalan, in comparison with French and Italian. We show that in Catalan and Italian and to some degree also French, in such contexts, the case realisation of the causee as accusative/dative depends on the transitivity of the next clause down. We call this effect, first discussed by Burzio (1986) for Italian, ‘restructuring for transitivity’. We then move our attention to the interaction between restructuring for transitivity and other restructuring and clause union phenomena such as clitic climbing and se deletion, and discuss several theoretical challenges posed by these interactions.

Variable First Person Singular Subject Expression in Spoken Valencian Catalan

2022-02-22T17:04:10+01:00

In this paper, I analyze first person singular subject pronoun expression in spoken Valencian Catalan varieties. I present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 7 interviews from the corpus Parlars, examining 1sg subject rates regarding tense markings (syncretic vs. non-syncretic forms), verb type, and discourse type (monologues vs. conversations). It will be shown that the factor of morphological syncretism as well as verb type influence 1sg subject expression rates. Differently from what has been observed in some previous studies on Spanish, cognitive verbs are not associated with particularly high 1sg subject expression rates, but verbs of saying are. Looking at frequent verb forms in the spoken interviews, it will be shown that (jo) dic ‘(I) say’ plays an important role, direct speech being a commonly used mechanism in the data examined here. Furthermore, discourse type (monologue vs. conversation) affects subject expression rates. These results suggest that 1sg subject expression is influenced by an interaction of verb morphology, verb type and specific verb forms, but that subject expression rates and the factors influencing them vary depending on particular pro-drop varieties, discourse types and the type of data. Looking at the contexts in which the strong pronoun jo ‘I’ is used with verbs of saying in spoken Valencian Catalan, I argue that subject expression triggers a perspectival, rather than referential shift in several cases.

A Surprise in the Past: The Historical Origins of the Catalan go-past

2022-02-27T11:59:02+01:00

Crosslinguistically, the development of the verb go into a future tense is a common path of grammaticalization. In contrast, the past meaning of the go-periphrasis in Catalan is unexpected. Detges (2004) claims that the process of grammaticalization of the Catalan periphrastic perfect went from inchoative to foregrounding to past. We compare data from the Corpus informatitzat del Català antic with modern Sicilian, where a similar go-periphrasis is used with a foregrounding function that resembles that of Old Catalan. This comparison confirms a foregrounding usage but fails to support the origin in an inchoative usage. We propose that the grammaticalization from movement to foregrounding does not require an intermediate inchoative stage, but that it rather results from a modal implicature of surprise and unexpectedness that was associated with the construction. Indeed, the function of go to foreground and express surprise or noteworthiness can be inferentially viewed as movement away from the speaker’s expectations. Under this usage, Catalan go-periphrasis was employed to refer to ‘surprising’ events that took place in the past. Once this additional meaning was lost, the reference to the past was generalized beyond the implicature.

The Morphological and Syntactic Status of the Analytic and Synthetic Future in Medieval Catalan

2022-01-30T13:03:38+01:00

The goal of this paper is to investigate the morphological and syntactic properties of the synthetic and analytic future in medieval Catalan. The main claim is that the two future forms are independent structures. Despite their shared historical origin, they are not synchronically derived from a common syntactic structure. Both forms are words and, while the synthetic future is a word form consisting of a stem and inflectional affixes, like other verb forms, the analytic future is a compound consisting of an infinitive, a clitic cluster, and a bound auxiliary. The presence of socalled clitics in the analytic future is consistent with the claim that the analytic future is a word, if we assume the affixal status of clitics in medieval Catalan, an assumption that is supported by abundant evidence. The analysis of the analytic future as a compound shows that compounding, though generally found in lexeme-formation, is a morphological device that can be used to derive word forms in an inflectional paradigm.