Romanian tough-constructions and multi-headed constituents
Ion Giurgea | The ‘Iorgu Iordan - Alexandru Rosetti’ Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest
I propose an account for the absence of agreement on tough-words in Romanian tough- constructions (TCs). I argue that absence of agreement cannot be explained by an A-bar movement derivation, because Romanian TCs involve A-movement, the non-finite complement having passive properties. I also argue against an adverb analysis of Romanian tough-words and against a subject analysis of the clausal argument of the tough-word. I propose a novel analysis, which is supported by West Germanic data: non-agreeing TCs are multi-headed constituents, in which the adjective is the internal head, selecting the supine CP, and the supine C is the external head. Since the adjective is not the external head, it cannot take part in agreement relations involving the [Adjective+Supine] constituent. I provide a technical implementation of the notion of multi-headed constituents which relies on Citko’s (2008) flexible label projection: in this case, it is the label of the complement that projects (an instance of Project-Goal). Finally, I discuss the correlation between the availability of multi-headed TCs and the morphological (in)distinctness between adjectives and adverbs.
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Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
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2020.
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Langages N° 218:2
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Tayalati, Fayssal & Lieven Danckaert
2020.
The syntax and semantics of Modern Standard Arabic resumptivetough-constructions.
Folia Linguistica 54:1
► pp. 197 ff.
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Tayalati, Fayssal, Vassil Mostrov & Danièle Van de Velde
2020.
Les constructions Tough : syntaxe, sémantique et interfaces. Présentation.
Langages N° 218:2
► pp. 7 ff.
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