Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 43, Issue 1, 2020

In this article, we propose a treatment of French clitic climbing as an instance of morphological periphrasis. In particular we reexamine the evidence in favour of argument composition and a flat VP structure with tense auxiliaries (Abeillé & Godard, 2002) and show (i) that the V (vs. VP) status of the complement does not strictly correlate with the possibility of clitic climbing, (ii) that transparency in bounded dependencies transcends the class of argument composition verbs, and (iii) that a flat VP structure complicates the treatment of modification and coordination. Adopting an approach in terms of periphrastic realisation along the lines of Bonami (2015), we provide a treatment of the climbing facts that does full justice to the limited mobility and their morphologically bound status (Miller, 1992) without having to rely on a flat VP structure. Finally, we show that the pronominalisation and extraction facts can be dealt with in a uniform fashion by way of constraints on canonical vs. non-canonical argument realisation.

In this paper, we model the left-bounded state reading and the true reflexive reading of the se clitic in the Spanish psychological domain. We argue that a lexical analysis of se provides us with a more accurate description of the different classes of psychological verbs that occur with the clitic. We provide a unified analysis where the use of the two readings of se are modeled by means of lexical rules. We take the morphologically simple but semantically more complex basic items (e.g. asustar ‘frighten’) as input of the lexical rules, getting as the output a morphologically more complex but semantically simpler verb (e.g asustarse ‘get frightened’). The analysis for psych verbs correctly allows only those verbs assigning accusative to the experiencer or the stimulus to combine with se, hence preventing dative verbs from entering the lexical rules. The analysis also demonstrates how to account for punctual and non-punctual readings of psych verbs with se incorporating ‘boundaries’ into the type hierarchy of eventualities.

We present new experimental results (corpora and experiments) showing that extraction out of subject, compared with extraction out of object, obeys a pragmatic constraint and not a syntactic constraint. We show how such a constraint can be formalized in an HPSG grammar of French which views relative clauses, wh-questions and it-clefts as different constructions.

The paper discusses the occurrence of emphatic negative polarity items (NPIs) in high degree result clause constructions. We will identify four distributional patterns for Romanian emphatic NPIs. These will range from NPIs that only occur occasionally in result constructions to NPIs that are bound to such constructions and even do not show any truth-conditionally relevant semantic contribution. We reformulate a scalar, pragmatic theory of NPIs in a constraint-based, representational framework, Lexical Resource Semantics. We propose a scalar extension of a standard semantics of result clauses in order to capture the high degree, i.e. intensification readings. The constraint-based, representational perspective of this paper allows for an elegant modeling of the data: (i) We can capture the four distributional patterns as a lexical property of the discussed NPIs. (ii) The semantics and pragmatics of Romanian result clause constructions is accounted for by lexical properties of the result clause complementizers. (iii) A scalar analysis of emphatic NPIs can be applied in embedded clauses and even when the NPI itself does not contribute to the at-issue content of the overall utterance.