Grammatical categories (e.g. complementizer, negation, auxiliary, case) are some of the most important building blocks of syntax and morphology. Categorization therefore poses fundamental questions about grammatical structures and about the lexicon from which they are built. Adopting a 'lexicalist' stance, the authors argue that lexical items are not epiphenomena, but really represent the mapping of sound to meaning (and vice versa) that classical conceptions imply. Their rule-governed combination creates words, phrases and sentences - structured by the 'categories' that are the object of the present inquiry. They argue that the distinction between functional and non-functional categories, between content words and inflections, is not as deeply rooted in grammar as is often thought. In their argumentation they lay the emphasis on empirical evidence, drawn mainly from dialectal variation in the Romance languages, as well as from Albanian.

No abstract

No abstract

The nominal inflection system of Albanian includes specifications of case, definiteness, number and nominal class (gender). Our analysis recognizes three types of properties as theoretically relevant, namely N(ominal class), Q(quantification), D(efiniteness). Q inflections are responsible for the socalled oblique case effectively a dyadic operator yielding a zonal inclusion (possession) relation between the element to which it attaches and the internal argument of the verb (dative) or the head of a noun phrase (genitive). Q inflections are further responsible for plurality, while N inflections satisfy argument-of contexts (accusative) and D characterizes EPP contexts (nominative).Syncretisms (e.g. of dative and genitive, nominative and accusative) are not the result of morphological rules requiring Late Insertion of exponents (Distributed Morphology). Rather they are instances of ambiguity, resolved in the syntax (different embeddings) or at the interpretive interface. As such they are compatible with projection of the morphosyntax from lexical entries. KeywordsCase, nominative, accusative, oblique, syncretism, nominal class, plural, definiteness, possessor, locative. Empirical and theoretical backgroundSome difficulties attach to the notion of case in minimalist theory; for instance, for Chomsky (1995) case is uninterpretable on both the probe and the goal, unlike other features that are interpretable at least on the goal. These difficulties are caused by the fact that while bona fide features correspond to inherent properties of certain lexical items (e.g. phi-features correspond to referential properties of nouns), the traditional notion of case is relational in nature. This makes it ill-suited to feature status, more or less as argued by Chomsky (1995) for theta-roles. More recent minimalist literature, explicitly or implicitly, recognizes these difficulties and correspondingly attempts a reduction of case to phi-feature checking (Chomsky 2001(Chomsky , 2008, to T feature relations Torrego 2004, 2008), or in general to independently motivated relations of grammar.We pursue the same general line of research, of reducing case to independently established The article is articulated into three sections. In section 1 we lay out the background to our discussion, including the empirical evidence, some relevant literature, and preliminary analyses of non-case inflections (also in section 2.1). Section 2 presents the analysis of the basic case system of Albanian, including nominative, accusative and oblique. In section 3 we discuss further refinements, namely prepositional contexts, the ablative case and genitive contexts. Nominal paradigms in the Geg Albanian variety of Shkodër.Albanian varieties have a definite and an indefinite noun declension. The singular declension in the variety of Shkodër is illustrated in (1)-(4); the indefinite is exemplified in (a) and the definite in (b).We generally exemplify four lexical bases, namely vajz girl , msus-E teacher (feminine) , burr man and dial boy . The nom...

Romance clitic pronouns appear to the left of the verb in I and to the right of the verb in C. This alternation correlates with: (a) allomorphy, specifically l-vs. zero; (b) stress shifts; and (c) reordering of the clitic string. The alternations in (a)-(c) are also observed between non-negative and negative contexts. The key points of our analysis are: (i) the l-segment is associated with definite content; (ii) interpretively, pronouns scope out of modal/non-veridical operators; (iii) syntactically, the exponent for modality/nonveridicality may have the pronoun in its domain; (iv) externalization of the l-segment is found when semantic scope (ii) and syntactic configuration (iii) are mismatched. Therefore allomorphies (including stress), far from being morphophonological quirks, contribute to the externalization of syntactico-semantic notions of non-veridicality. In dealing with clitic (re)ordering we propose a model based on the dissociation between Merge and linear order. Phrasal constituents are ordered to the right of the verb in Romance; clitics mirror them in that they are ordered to the left, while keeping the Merge relations constant.