On nó an optional expletive in vietnamese

Null Subjects and Control Theory  On the difference between exhaustive and partial control Michelle Sheehan  Diachronic change and the nature of pronominal null subjects: Nerea Mada

Null Subjects in Generative Grammar

Null Subjects in Generative Grammar

A Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective

Edited by

F E D E R I C A C O G N O L A and

J A N C A S A L I C C H I O

1

3Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX   DP , United Kingdom

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

© editorial matter and organization Federica Cognola and Jan Casalicchio 

© the chapters their several authors 

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 

Impression:  All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted

by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

 Madison Avenue, New York, NY , United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 

We dedicate this book to Paola Benincà who inspired our way of looking at linguistic data.

 On the null-subject phenomenon: An example of successful

Federica Cognola and Jan Casalicchio

Part I Properties of Null-Subject Languages

 On nó as an optional expletive in Vietnamese Ciro Greco, Trang Phan, and Liliane Haegeman

 Developing pro-drop: The case of Cimbrian Ermenegildo Bidese and Alessandra Tomaselli

 Null subjects, expletives, and the status of Medieval French Michael Zimmermann

 Pro-drop and emergent parameter hierarchies Theresa Biberauer

Part II Types of Null Subjects and Identification

Part IIa Null Subjects and Control Theory

 On the difference between exhaustive and partial control Michelle Sheehan

 Diachronic change and the nature of pronominal null subjects:

Nerea Madariaga

 On the interpretation of gerundival null subjects and

Verner Egerland

Part IIb Null Subjects between Discourse and Agreement

 The interpretation of pro in consistent and partial null subject

languages: A comparative interface analysis Mara Frascarelli

 Syntactic representation of null arguments: [NPe] as [nPn]

Marta Ruda

 Referential null subjects in German: Dialects and diachronic

Helmut Weiß and Anna Volodina

 Null subjects and Distinct Agreement in Modern Germanic Henrik Rosenkvist

viii Contents

The chapters in this volume are based on papers presented at the conferenceUnderstanding Pro-drop: A synchronic and diachronic perspective, held at theDepartment of Humanities, University of Trento (Italy) in June 

We would like to thank all the speakers and the participants for making it such astimulating event The conference was one of the activities organized within thethree-year project Mòcheno-InBetween led by Federica Cognola from  to  atthe University of Trento and financed by the Autonomous Province of Trento(Bandi-PostDoc-) We would like to express our gratitude to the AutonomousProvince of Trento and the Department of Humanities for their financial support forthe organization of the conference We are also grateful to Ermenegildo Bidese,Patrizia Cordin, Fulvio Ferrari (head of the Department of Humanities of theUniversity of Trento), Manuela Moroni, and Antonella Neri for their help in allpractical aspects connected to the organization of the conference

All the chapters in the volume have been peer reviewed The editors have counted

on the precious cooperation of the following colleagues who have served as reviewers:Boban Arsenevic, Pilar Barbosa, Theresa Biberauer, Adriana Belletti, ErmenegildoBidese, Silvio Cruschina, Mara Frascarelli, Elly van Gelderen, Roland Hinterhölzl,Anders Holmberg, Eric Mathieu, Svetlana Petrova, Christine Mecklenborg-Salvesen,Eva Schlachter, Michelle Sheehan, Halldór Sigurðsson, Lukas Szucsich, SatoshiTomioka, Egor Tsedryk, Helmut Weiß, and Roberto Zamparelli Our deepest grati-tude goes to all of them Moreover, we want to express our gratitude to the twoanonymous OUP reviewers, who reviewed the entire manuscript, for their verypositive evaluations and for their very helpful suggestions

Our deepest thanks to the authors and Julia Steer from Oxford University Press fortheir collaboration during all stages of the publication process, which made our work

as editors much easier

Federica Cognola andJan Casalicchio

Trento

August 

List of abbreviations

ACC Accusative

ADE adessive

Agr/AGR Agreement

AGRS Subject Agreement

AgrSP Subject Agreement Phrase

Appl(P) Applicative (Phrase)

A-Topic Aboutness Topic

ECM Exceptional Case Marking

ENHG Early New High German (–)

EP European Portuguese

EPP Empty Projection Principle

EXP Expletive

F (i) Feminine; (ii) Form

Fam(P) Familiar Topic (Phrase)

FE Feature Economy

FinP Finiteness (Phrase)

Foc(P)/Focus(P) Focus (Phrase)

FOFC Final-over-Final Condition

Force(P) Illocutionary Force (Phrase)

FP Functional Projection

FQ Floating Quantifier

FUT Future

GB Government and Binding Theory

G-Topic Given (i.e Familiar) Topic

H tone High Tone

IVC Interface Visibility Condition

L tone Low tone

LF Logical Form

MHG Middle High German (–)

MMM Maximize Minimal Means

MTC Movement Theory of Control

n(P) Little n Phrase

NegP Negation (Phrase)

NHG New High German (–today)

NOC Non-Obligatory Control

OV ‘Object Verb’ order

P (i) Phrase; (ii) Pronoun

PDR Present Day Russian

Pers(P) Person (Phrase)

PF Phonological Form

List of abbreviations xi

PIC Phase Impenetrability Condition

SubjP Subject Phrase

SVO ‘Subject Verb Object’ order

SVX ‘Subject Verb X’ order

T(P) Tense (Phrase)

Top(P) Topic (Phrase)

TRANSL Translative case

VO ‘Verb Object’ order

Voice(P) Voice (Phrase)

WP Wackernagel Position

XP Constituent

θ-role thematic role

xii List of abbreviations

of Afrikaans in particular being major research foci She has worked on three large researchprojects since , the first of which investigated null subjects and parametric theory,revealing just how rich a domain of enquiry the focus of the present volume is.

ERMENEGILDOBIDESEis associate professor of German Linguistics at the University of Trento.His main research interests are devoted to German minority languages within a general theory

of language contact He spent the academic year – at MIT (Cambridge, MA) asFulbright research fellow under the supervision of Kenneth Wexler He has edited a number

of volumes and special issues including German Complementizers in Contact (with M Putnam,

De Gruyter, ) and Theoretical Approaches to Linguistic Variation (with F Cognola and

M Moroni, Benjamins, ) Amongst his publications are Die diachronische Syntax desZimbrischen (Narr, ) and several contributions published in international venues He iscurrently involved in the European research consortium AThEME (Advancing the EuropeanMultilingual Experience), financed by the th Framework Programme (grant agreement

FEDERICACOGNOLAis a Lecturer in German Linguistics at La Sapienza University in Rome.After receiving her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Padua in , she worked as aResearch Fellow at the Universities of Trento (–) and Venice Ca’ Foscari (–), and

as a contract lecturer in German linguistics at the Universities of Trento and Verona She hasalso been a visiting scholar at the University of Tromsø, Cambridge, and Potsdam Herresearch interests include verb second, OV/VO word orders, overt and null referential andexpletive subjects, scrambling, contact linguistics, monolingual and bilingual language acqui-sition, language variation and change, and diachronic syntax She is the author of two

monographs, Syntactic Variation and Verb Second A German Dialect in Northern Italy(Benjamins, ) and Acquisizione plurilingue e bilinguismo sbilanciato: uno studio sullasintassi dei bambini mocheni in età prescolare (Unipress, ), and co-editor of two volumes,Introduzione alla linguistica del mòcheno (with E Bidese; Rosenberg & Sellier , and Theor-etical Approaches to Linguistic Variation (with E Bidese and M C Moroni; Benjamins, ).

VERNEREGERLANDis professor of Romance Languages at Lund University His PhD is fromLund University on the topic of participial constructions in Italian He has researched the non-finite verb and pronominal syntax in Old Italian, the grammar of impersonal pronouns, as well

as on issues relating to word order and information structure in Germanic and Romance.Verner has collaborated on La grammatica dell’italiano antico (il Mulino, ), and theEnciclopedia della lingua italiana (Treccani, ) He teaches Italian language and literature atLund University

MARAFRASCARELLIholds a chair of General Linguistics at the University of Roma Tre Her majorresearch interests include the interface analysis of discourse categories (also from an evolutionary,acquisitional perspective), the impact of discourse phenomena on conversational dynamics, and thecomparative study of typologically different languages She has published three volumes, twomonographs, and papers in journals such as Lingua, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory,and Probus She is part of the scientific boards of ‘Brill’s Annual of Afro-asiatic Languages andLinguistics’ and ‘Advances in Language and Literary Studies’

CIROGRECOobtained his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and Linguistics from the University

of Milan-Bicocca under the supervision of Carlo Cecchetto () He has been visitingstudent at MIT () and postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University under the supervision ofLiliane Haegeman (–) He is currently founder and Chief Executive Officer at Tooso(www.tooso.ai)

LILIANE HAEGEMAN obtained her PhD from Ghent University in  Currently, she is aprofessor of English linguistics at Ghent University, where, between  and , shedirected the FWO funded project ‘Comparative syntax Layers of structure and the cartographyproject’ She is a member of the research group DiaLing She is the author of a number oftextbooks in formal syntax Liliane has undertaken extensive research on a range of phenom-ena in the syntax of English and of West Flemish, her native languages Her recent work adoptsthe cartographic approach In  she published Adverbial clauses, main clause phenomenaand the composition of the left periphery as a synthesis of her cartographic work on the leftperiphery in English

NEREAMADARIAGAis professor of historical linguistics and Russian language, and coordinatesthe Section of Slavic Philology at the University of the Basque Country She is the author ofvarious works on formal syntax and diachronic change, in which she analyzes the development

of case, predicatives, non-finite structures, floating quantifiers, scrambling, null categories, etc.,

in Russian and other languages She has recently contributed to the reference handbook ongenerative diachronic syntax The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax with a chapter onreanalysis Currently, she is working on Russian numeral constructions and agreement

TRANGPHANcompleted her PhD on the syntax of Vietnamese Tense and Aspect under theguidance of Nigel Duffield at the University of Sheffield (England, ) She was subsequently

a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University’s Odysseus project on ‘Comparative syntax:

xiv Notes on contributors

Layers of structure and the cartography project’ directed by Liliane Haegeman (Belgium,

–) Her current work is concerned with how Vietnamese challenges the pro-dropparameter (Rizzi, ), the plural/classifier parameter (Borer, ), and the NP/DP param-eter (Boskovic, ), and also how to formalize the notion of topic-prominence from aVietnamese perspective

HENRIK ROSENKVIST started working with dialect syntax in  after having defended histhesis on grammaticalization theory in  Since then, he has headed a number of researchprojects concerning Scandinavian dialects, and he has a particular interest in Övdalian andlittle-known varities of Swedish such as Estonian Swedish At present, he is a professor ofScandinavian languages at Gothenburg University

MARTA RUDA is assistant lecturer at the Institute of English Studies of the JagiellonianUniversity in Kraków, Poland She studied and conducted her research at the University ofMaryland, Indiana University Bloomington, the Research Institute for Linguistics of theHungarian Academy of Sciences, the University of Potsdam, and Utrecht University Shehas published and presented her work on topics from the areas of syntactic theory (includingargument drop and other elliptical phenomena), the syntax–morphology and syntax–semantics interfaces, and the theory of linguisitc variation at various venues

MICHELLESHEEHANis reader in English Language and Linguistics at Anglia Ruskin University

in the UK She has worked extensively on control, null subjects, word order, and case/agreement alignment in transitive, ditransitive, and causative contexts in a variety of languages.She is the co-author of Parametric Variation (Cambridge University Press, ), The Phil-osophy of Universal Grammar (Oxford University Press, ) and the first author of TheFinal-over-Final Condition (MIT Press, )

ALESSANDRATOMASELLIis professor of German Linguistics at the University of Verona Herrecent research interests are focused on the history of the German language, Germaniccomparative syntax, and the theory of language contact Her publications include an intro-duction to German Syntax (Introduzione alla sintassi del Tedesco, BA Graphis, ) andseveral papers published in international journals (Linguistische Berichte, Sprachtypologie undUniversalienforschung) She is currently involved in the European research consortiumAThEME (Advancing the European Multilingual Experience), financed by the th FrameworkProgramme (grant agreement n )

ANNAVOLODINAis senior researcher at the department of Grammar at the Institute for theGerman Language (Mannheim) and is currently substitute professor of German Linguistics atthe University of Leipzig She is one of the authors of the ‘Handbuch der deutschen Konnek-toren’ () and she has published various articles and book chapters on German connectives.Her current research interests include corpus based, diachronic, and syncronic syntax and thesyntax–semantics interface

HELMUT WEIß is full professor for historical German linguistics at the Goethe-UniversityFrankfurt a.M He is one of the leading experts on the syntax of German dialects and heco-edited the Syntactic Atlas of Hessian dialects (http://www.syhd.info/startseite/) and a volume

on Bavarian syntax (with G Grewendorf) He is the author of the Syntax des Bairischen ()and he has published many studies in journals and books on topics such as complementizeragreement, negative concord, possessive constructions, and pronominal syntax

Notes on contributors xv

MICHAELZIMMERMANNis a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Romance linguistics at theDepartment of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, Germany He has authored variousarticles in international journals and edited volumes, particularly on word order and subjects

in diachronic and modern varieties of French, and he is the author of a monograph on theevolution of the expression of subject pronouns in French Currently, he is also working onword order in varieties of modern Spanish, with a special focus on interrogatives

xvi Notes on contributors

Part I Properties of null-subject languages

On nó as an optional expletive

in Vietnamese

CIRO GRECO, TRANG PHAN, AND LILIANE HAEGEMAN

  Introduction: optional expletives in pro-drop languages

The focus of this chapter is the use of the pronoun nó as an expletive in spokenVietnamese, a radical pro-drop language We will describe the distribution andinterpretation of this element against the background of a general discussion of theplace of overt expletives in pro-drop languages Having provided a detailed descrip-tion of the empirical data, our discussion will then attempt to relate the distribution

of nó to the internal structure of the predication and to the well-known distinctionbetween thetic structures and categorical structures In the present section we presentthe theoretical background of the discussion § . is a description of the empiricaldata § . relates these data to the articulation of subject predicate structures § .summarizes our main findings

.. Expletives and pro-drop languages

Traditionally, expletives have been analysed as elements inserted to satisfy purely formalrequirements, such as the EPP requirement, which requires the canonical subjectposition to be filled in every finite clause (Chomsky , ) Under this view,expletives are obligatory constituents which are deployed as a last resort device when-ever the relevant formal requirement is active and a referential (overt) subject is notavailable, either because there is no subject argument (as with weather or impersonalconstructions) or because the relevant argument does not move to the canonical subjectposition (as is typically the case of existential and presentational sentences) Beingusually pronominal type elements, expletives can, like all other pronominal elements,

be non-overt Since expletives cannot be contrastively stressed, where a language canexhibit non-overt pronouns (pro), its expletive(s) will also be expected to be non-overt.According to the view just outlined, pro-drop languages are not predicted todisplay overt expletive elements: depending on the specific theory of pro-drop that

is adopted, it is expected the EPP requirement can be satisfied through some othermechanisms (e.g through the insertion of a null expletive element; Rizzi , a,

Null Subjects in Generative Grammar First edition Federica Cognola and Jan Casalicchio (eds) This chapter © Ciro Greco, Trang Phan, and Liliane Haegeman  First published 

by Oxford University Press