Imperative Vs with distinctive morphology either have a distinctive syntax (Modern Greek, Spanish), or distribute like others Vs (Serbo-Croatian, Ancient Greek). The contrast follows from properties of the root C. The first type has a strong Imperative V-feature in C, and under Chomsky's Greed Principle, Imperative Vs raise overtly to check this feature. The second type is the Wackernagel language, whose C hosts no features, but V-features are in I. If no phrase fronts, Vs move to C to support second position items. V-to-C affects all Vs, is last resort, follows Lasnik's Enlightened Self-Interest, and escapes Greed.
The paper examines variation in the interpretations of imperfectives in Slavic, Romance, and Jê (Mẽbengokre). It develops a core modal analysis for an imperfective operator (IMPF) within situation semantics, coupled with languagespecific constraints formally encoded in modal bases. Cross-linguistic contrasts in the interpretation of imperfectives are explained in terms of variation in modal bases for IMPF, lexicalization patterns, and its interactions with other operators. The proposal accounts for why Romance languages use imperfectives to make reference to past plans while most Slavic languages do not, as well as for narrative uses specific to Romance languages, and factual uses specific to some Slavic languages. The proposal also accounts for lexically specified aspectual operators in Mẽbengokre, as well as language-specific interaction between IMPF and other modal operators, as in the Bulgarian Renarrated Mood, and two different semantic instances of Slavic Involuntary States. Appealing to cross-linguistic evidence to argue for a view according to which IMPF makes significant semantic contributions in all occurrences, the paper shows how a modal analysis can account for well-known temporal properties of imperfectives. It also demonstrates that data from closely related as well as unrelated languages provide evidence for an invariant semantic core behind imperfectivity.
Romanian participates in the so-called dative alternation, offering four syntactic types of ditransitive sentences. On the one hand, it exhibits two types of double object constructions (DOCs) corresponding to English Jane sends Bill a letter. In one of them, the goal corresponding to Bill is a morphological dative, and in the other it follows the preposition la. On the other hand, Romanian also exhibits two types of prepositional ditransitive constructions (PDCs) corresponding to English Jane sends a letter to Bill, with a goal that can be a morphological dative or follow the preposition la. Such Romanian ditransitive sentences correspond to DOCs when they contain a dative clitic, and to PDCs when they contain a goal and show no dative clitic. It is proposed that Romanian DOCs and PDCs have different syntactic structures. DOCs contain a low Applicative Phrase with the dative clitic as head, the goal as specifier, and the theme as complement. Thus, in DOCs the goal c-commands the theme. By contrast, in PDCs the theme is the specifier of a PP that c-commands the goal as the complement of P. Due to these different hierarchical structures, DOCs and PDCs contrast in behavior concerning binding, frozen scope, and weak crossover relations between goal and theme.
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