Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 6, Issue 2, 1982

Defining the syntactic class of a lexical form by means of its graphic ending: In order to recognize the syntactic class of a word, a statistical study on a corpus of over 150,000 words has been performed. The result of various experiments is reported, essentially the rate of recognition for endings of length 1 to 5.

Among Italian verbs that co-occur with short and long clitic placement, we will analyse those traditionally called "aspectual" and "movement" verbs. However, our treatment of long clitic placement is firstly exemplified using modal verbs. This treatment is quite different from Rizzi's, because the verbs that trigger long clitic placement are considered to be auxiliairies. The verbs that are the main object of this article present some peculiarities not to be found in the case of modals, such as the preposition before the infinitive and the possible complement of a movement verb. Our treatment of the first of these two points is closely linked to the analysis of the verbal locution avere da~ infinitive which we will present in detail. Both this locution and the possible complement of movement verbs represent new data with respect of the syntax of long clitic placement. Some remarks on the idiosyncrasies of the verbs in question when occuring with long clitic placement precede a more detailed comparison of the restructuring hypothesis with the auxiliary one.

In contemporary French, we can observe the emergence of new prepositions borrowed from the lexicon of nouns. The most frequent ones are côté and question but others that must be mentioned are façon, genre, style and version.

This article deals with the so-called "middle" reflexive construction (se-moyen) of French (e.g. Cette racine se mange, "this root is edible"). It is first postulated that se-moyen appears in early Romance — as shown by Stéfanini 1962 — as a variant of the Passive construction. A first, descriptive, part reviews the various properties usually attributed to se-moyen, as opposed to Passive: it is shown that most of these properties have been inadequately formulated, from an empirical point of view, and that two properties (one of which is never mentioned in specialized literature) must be singled out: the restitution of a human agent in the semantic interpretation, and the restriction of the construction to transitive VPs.The second part aims at offering a principled explanation for the properties of se-moyen, within a générative transformational framework. After having reviewed — and discarded — various analyses previously proposed in transformational literature, we suggest an alternative account, involving an analysis of middle se as a morphophonological manifestation of the trace left by the NP-Preposing rule.