Middle scrambling with deictic locatives in European Portuguese
This paper discusses the peculiar ability of certain deictic locatives (like lá ‘there’) to appear left-adjacent to the verb in European Portuguese. We propose that leftward movement of lá (and similar deictic locatives) is middle scrambling, understood as movement to Spec,TP. In order to explain why lá-preposing to Spec,TP is not always permitted, we elaborate on the hypothesis of Costa & Martins (2003, 2004) that in EP the strong nature of the polarity-encoding head Σ requires it to be ‘lexicalized’ either by syntactic merger or by morphological merger under adjacency. Middle scrambling is barred whenever Σ and V must be adjacent. The analysis derives the particular syntax of the deictic locatives (in different clausal structures, including restructuring infinitives) and its puzzling parallelism with clitic placement. Finally, we suggest that speaker/utterance-anchorage is what links together deictic locatives and tense, enabling the former to enter the syntactic domain of the latter.
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Nkollo, Mikołaj & Alexandra Fiéis
2020.
The não interpolation in Classical and early Modern European Portuguese and the mapping between syntactic and phonological structures: An empirical study
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Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 13:1
► pp. 115 ff.
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Martins, Ana Maria
2014.
How much syntax is there in metalinguistic negation?.
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 32:2
► pp. 635 ff.
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Costa, João & Ana Maria Martins
2011.
On focus movement in European Portuguese.
Probus 23:2
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