Grammatical Categories

Abstract

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.

Collectivizers in Italian (and beyond). The interplay between collectivizing and evaluating morphology (and the Div paradox)

“…In what follows, we will hold on to the analysis of the internal structure of noun proposed in Manzini & Savoia (, , ,b), Savoia et al. (2017); this will provide the framework for a morphosyntactic analysis of collectivizers, capable to account for the linguistic variation.…”

“…Thus, we may suppose that the plural of gatt‐o / gatt‐a in (8), namely gatt‐i ‘cats', gatt‐e ‘she‐cats' has the structure in (8), where the specification [⊆] is associated to the morpheme –i , specialized for this interpretation. The [⊆] property (“divisibility”, see Manzini & Savoia ,b) is introduced as a specification of the noun in Class Plural node.…”

“…Therefore, the ‐ a plural can be differentiated from the – i plural by associating with the former the property of [aggregate]; it is of note that these nouns can admit also the –i plural when the set of singletons interpretation is possible, as suggested in (24c). The latter is associated with the property [⊆], which specifies the normal plural, identifiable with the relation of set inclusion/subset formation (Manzini & Savoia ).…”

“…In what follows, we will keep the assumption that Agree also applies within DPs. We assume that what impels Agree to apply is the necessity of creating equivalence classes of phi‐feature bundles denoting a single referent (the equivalent of uninterpretable feature deletion) (Manzini & Savoia , ). In other words, departing from current minimalist practice, we assume that there are only positive properties in language.…”

(Definite) denotation and case in Romance: history and variation

“…For instance, it predicts that we should find some Romance language (or language stage) where case is realized exclusively on the determiner -but in Old French both determiners and nouns have case (though the determiners may be argued to have a fuller set of case distinctions); and in Italian neither does. A potentially better argument for determiners bearing case to the exclusion of nouns is Romanian; in Romanian however the article is postnominal, and can be argued to be an inflection (Manzini & Savoia 2011). What is more, indefinite nouns of the feminine class also have an inflection for dative/ genitive, as opposed to nominative/accusative.…”