‘E sí la hoïren tots’: sí and emphatic positive polarity in Old Catalan
Abstract
This paper explores the semantic value and syntactic distribution of the lexical item sí in Old Catalan. After examining data extracted from El Llibre dels Fets, a 13th century chronicle, it is concluded that sí was an Emphatic Positive Polarity Particle (EPPA) whose appearance was restricted to non-veridical contexts already in this period. This finding strongly contrasts with analyses put forward for sí in Old Catalan and Old Spanish, that date its grammaticalization as an (EPPA) two centuries later, and with analyses of sí in other Old Romance languages, where it has been linked to the satisfaction of the V2 parameter.Keywords
Positive Polarity, sí, Old Catalan, grammaticalisationReferences
Adams, Jim Noel. 1994. “Wackernagel’s Law and the Position of Unstressed Personal Pronouns in Classical Latin.” Transactions of the Philological Society 92: 103–78.
Adams, Marianne. 1987. “From Old French to the Theory of Pro-Drop.” Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 5 (1): 1–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4047573.
Batllori, Montserrat, and M. Lluïsa Hernanz. 2013. “Emphatic Polarity Particles in Spanish and Catalan.” Lingua 128. Elsevier B.V.: 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2012.11.010.
Batllori, Montserrat, and Maria Lluïsa Hernanz. 2008. “Emphatic Polarity from Latin to Romance.” Poster. The 10th Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference. New York. http://habilis.udg.edu/~info/Activitat_Docent_Recerca_Gestio/Montserrat_Batllori/BatlloriHernanzPosterDIGSXCornell.pdf.
Benincà, Paola. 1984. “Un’ipotesi Sulla Sintassi Delle Lingue Romanze Medievali.” Quaderni Patavini Di Linguistica, no. 4: 3–19.
———. 2004. “The Left Periphery of Medieval Romance.” Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 2: 243―297. http://www.doaj.org/abstract?id=106082&toc=y.
———. 2006. “A Detailed Map of the Left Periphery of Medieval Romance.” Edited by Rafaella Zanuttini, Héctor Campos, Elena Herburger, and Paul Portner. Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics Negation Tense and Clausal Architecture 2. Washington : Georgetown University Press : 53–86. http://www.doaj.org/abstract?id=106082&toc=y.
Benincà, Paola, and Cecilia Poletto. 2004a. “A Case of Do-Support in Romance.” Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 22 (1): 51–94.
———. 2004b. “Topic, Focus, and V2.” In The Structure of CP and IP, edited by Luigi Rizzi, 52–75. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Biberauer, Theresa, and Ian Roberts. 2008. “Subjects, Tense and Verb Movement in Germanic and Romance.” Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics 3: 24–43.
Bruguera, Jordi. 1991. El Libre Dels Fets Del Rei En Jaume. Barcelona: Barcino.
Clackson, James. 2007. Indo-European Linguistics : An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Danckaert, Lieven. 2014. “Quidem as a Marker of Emphatic Polarity.” Transactions of the Philological Society 112 (1): 97–138. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.12009.
Devine, A. M., and Laurance D. Stephens. 2006. Latin Word Order. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Donaldson, Bryan. 2016. “Preverbal Subjects, Information Structure, and Object Clitic Position in Old Occitan.” Journal of Linguistics 52 (01): 37–69. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226714000619.
Ernst, Thomas. 2009. “Speaker-Oriented Adverbs.” Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 27 (3): 497–544. https://doi.org/10.1007/sl.
Farkas, Donka F., and Kim B. Bruce. 2010. “On Reacting to Assertions and Polar Questions.” Journal of Semantics 27 (1): 81–118. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffp010.
Fleischman, Suzanne. 1991. “Discourse Pragmatics and the Grammar of Old French: A Functional Reinterpretation of Si and the Personal Pronouns.” Romance Philology 44: 251–83.
Garrett, Jordan. 2013. “Which Que Is Which ?: A Squib on Reduplicative Que Complementizers in Iberian Spanish Embedded Clauses.” Indiana University Linguistics Club Working Papers 13 (5): 1–9.
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1998. Polarity Sensitivity as (Non)Veridical Dependency. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
———. 1999. “Affective Dependencies.” Linguistics and Philosohy 22: 367–421.
———. 2001. “Varieties of Polarity Items and the (Non)Veridicality Hypothesis.” In Perspectives on Negation and Polarity Items, edited by Jack Hoeksema, Hotze Rullman, Víctor Sánchez-Vanencia, and Ton van der Wouden. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
———. 2008. “Negative and Positive Polarity Items: Variation, Licensing, and Compositionality.” In Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, edited by Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, and Paul Portner. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Haegeman, Liliane. 2003. “Conditional Clauses: External and Internal Syntax.” Mind & Language 18 (4): 317–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0017.00230.
———. 2009. “The Movement Analysis of Temporal Adverbial Clauses.” English Language and Linguistics 13 (October 2009): 385. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674309990165.
———. 2010. “The Internal Syntax of Adverbial Clauses.” Lingua 120: 628–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2008.07.007.
Holmberg, Anders. 2001. “The Syntax of Yes and No in Finnish” 55 (2): 141–75. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198701859.001.0001.
———. 2015. “Verb Second.” In Syntax - Theory and Analysis : An International Handbook., edited by Tibor Kiss and Artemis Alexiadou, 342–83. Berlin, Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.
———. 2016. The Syntax of Yes and No. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198701859.001.0001.
Hooper, Paul J., and Sandra. A Thompshon. 1973. “On the Applicability of Root Transformations.” Linguistic Inquiry 4: 465–97.
Krifka, Manfred. 2008. “Basic Notions of Information Structure.” Acta Linguistica Hungarica. https://doi.org/10.1556/ALing.55.2008.3-4.2.
Laka, Miren Itziar. 1990. “Negation in Syntax: On the Nature of Functional Categories and Projections.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ledgeway, Adam. 2007. “Old Neapolitan Word Order: Some Initial Observations.” In Histories and Dictionaries of the Languages of Italy, edited by Anna Laura. Lepschy and Arturo. Tosi, 121–49. Longo: Ravenna.
———. 2008. “Satisfying V2 in Early Romance: Merge vs. Move.” Journal of Linguistics 44 (02): 437–70. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226708005173.
Leonetti, Manuel, and Victoria Escandell Vidal. 2009. “Fronting and Verum-Focus in Romance.” In Focus and Background in Romance Languages.
Marchello-Nizia, Christiane. 1985. Dire Le Vrai : L’adverbe “si” En Français Médiéval : Essai de Linguistique Historique. Genève: Droz.
Martins, Ana Maria. 2013. “Emphatic Polarity in European Portuguese and Beyond.” Lingua 128. Elsevier B.V.: 95–123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2012.11.002.
Poletto, Cecilia. 2005. “Sì and e as CP Expletives in Old Italian.” In Grammaticalization and Parametric Variation, edited by Montserrat Batllori, Maria Luisa Hernanz, Carme Picallo, and Francesc Roca, 206–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199272129.003.0013.
———. 2014. Word Order in Old Italian. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Poletto, Cecilia, and Raffaella Zanuttini. 2013. “Emphasis as Reduplication: Evidence from Sì Che/No Che Sentences.” Lingua 128. Elsevier B.V.: 124–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2012.10.016.
Pujol i Campeny, Afra. 2018a. “Recomplementation in Old Catalan: Data from ‘El Llibre Dels Feyts.’” Cambridge.
———. 2018b. “Verb First Clauses in Old Catalan.” In The Determinants of Diachronic Stability, edited by Anne Breitbarth, Miriam Bouzouita, Melissa Farasyn, and Lieven Danckaert. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
———. 2018c. “Word Order in Old Catalan.” University of Cambridge.
Reenen, Pieter van, and Lene Schløsler. 2000. “The Pragmatic Functions of the Old French Particles Ainz, Apres, Donc, Lors, or, Puis, and Si.” In Textual Parameters in Older Languages, edited by Susan C. Herring, Lene Schøsler, and Pieter van Reenen, 59–109. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Riquer, Martín. 1964. Història de La Literatura Catalana. Barcelona: Ariel.
Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. “The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery.” In Elements of Grammar, edited by L. Haegeman, 1997th ed., 281–337. Dordrecht, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Roberts, Ian. 1993. Verbs and Diachronic Syntax. A Comparative History of English and French. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Roberts, Ian, and Anna Roussou. 2003. Syntactic Change: A Minimalist Approach to Grammaticalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rodríguez Molina, Javier. 2014. “La Gramática Oculta de La Polaridad Positiva En Español Antiguo.” Revista de Filología Hispánica 30 (3): 861–915.
Salvesen, Christine Meklenborg. 2013. “Topics and the Left Periphery. A Comparison of Old French and Modern Germanic.” In In Search of Universal Grammar : From Old Norse to Zoque, edited by Terje Lohndal, 131–72. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Salvesen, Christine, and George Walkden. n.d. “Diagnosing Embedded V2 in Old English and Old French.” In From Micro-Change to Macro-Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Salvi, Giampaolo. 2002. “Il Problema Di e l’uso Riflessivo Di Essere.” Verbum IV (2): 377–328.
Sitaridou, Ioanna. 2003. “On the Licensing of Null Subjects in Old French.” Syntactic Structures and Morphological Information.
———. 2018. “Word Order in Old Spanish: V2 or Not V2?” In The Determinants of Diachronic Stability, edited by Anne Breitbarth, Miriam Bouzouita, Melissa Farasyn, and Lieven Danckaert. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Spevak, Olga. 2012. “Les Enclitics Enim et Autem Dans La Diachronie Du Latin.” In Les Evolutions Du Latin, edited by Alain Christol and Olga Spevak, 335–52. Paris: Assotiation Kubaba.
Steiner, Britanny Devan Jelm. 2014. “The Evolution of Information Structure and Verb Secpnd in The History of French.” Indiana University.
Vance, Barbara. 1993. “Verb-First Declaratives Introduced by et and the Position of pro in Old and Middle French.” Lingua 89 (2–3): 281–314. https://doi.org/10.1016/0024-3841(93)90055-2.
———. 1997. Syntactic Change in Medieval French : Verb-Second and Null Subjects. Dordrecht, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Vance, Barbara, Bryan Donaldson, and B. Devan Steiner. 2010. “V2 Loss in Old French and Old Occitan: The Role of Fronted Clauses.” In Romance Linguistics 2009 - Selected Papers from the 39th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Tucson, Arizona, March 2009, edited by Sonia Colina, Antxon Olarrea, and Ana Maria Carvalho, 301–20. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Vanelli, Laura, Lorenzo Renzi, and Paola Benincà. 1986. “Quaderni Patavini Di Linguistica.” Quaderni Patavini Di Linguistica 5: 49–66.
Villa-García, Julio. 2015. The Syntax of Multiple-Que Sentences in Spanish: Along the Left Periphery. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Wolfe, Sam. 2015. “Microvariation in Medieval Romance Syntax: A Comparative Study.” University of Cambridge.
Published
Downloads
Copyright (c) 2020 Afra Pujol Campeny
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
