Residues and Extensions of Perfective Auxiliary be: Modal Conditioning

Abstract

This article provides both a diachronic and synchronic account of the generalization of perfective auxiliary be in specific irrealis modal contexts across numerous Romance varieties spoken in Italy and more widely within the Romània, which has essentially gone unnoticed in the descriptive and theoretical literature. In some cases (southern Calabrian, Latin American Spanish, Portuguese), the distribution of be is to be interpreted as a residue of an original unaccusative syntax which was exceptionally preserved under higher V-movement in irrealis contexts, whereas in others (person-driven dialects of central and southern Italy, southern peninsular Spanish, Romanian) this original unaccusative signal has been reanalysed as a specialized marker of irrealis (lexicalizing a high Mood head) and extended to all verb classes. In the case of Alguerès, by contrast, the generalization of irrealis be is argued to be the result of language contact with surrounding Sardinian dialects where a specific pattern of dedicated irrealis marking of Mood° has been replicated. Finally, the reverse pattern with generalization of irrealis have, the reanalysis of an aspectual distinction between resultative and experiential perfects found in early Romance varieties (Neapolitan, Sicilian, Spanish, Catalan), is shown to involve a similar pattern of dedicated irrealis marking in Mood°.

Exploring Microvariation in Verb-Movement Parameters within Daco-Romanian and across Daco-Romance

“…103-6;Schifano 2015Schifano , 2018. At the macro level, there are some broad similarities in the distribution of V-movement across Romance, inasmuch as all varieties appear to show some degree of raising (though for Brazilian Portuguese, see Tescari Neto 2013, 2020a, 2020b, 2022a, 2022bTescari Neto and Pataquiva 2020;Araújo-Adriano 2020, 2022, 2023, a view widely reported in the literature since Pollock's (1989) and Belletti's (1990) seminal contrastive studies of English, French and Italian (cf. also, Emonds 1978), witness the contrast between (1a) and (1b,c).…”

“…Schifano 2015Schifano , 2018Ledgeway and Schifano 2022), both synchronically and diachronically (cf. Ledgeway and Schifano 2023), in terms of the role of factors such as finiteness (Groothuis 2020(Groothuis , 2022 and mood (Ledgeway 2009a(Ledgeway , 2022bLedgeway and Lombardi 2014), ultimately leading Schifano (2018) to relate such variation to the 'paradigmatic instantiation' of aspect, tense and mood in individual Romance varieties. Armed with these assumptions about a universal fixed hierarchy of adverb positions and corresponding functional projections broadly divided into the lower adverb space (LAS) and the higher adverb space (HAS), 1 we can now construct a fine-grained typology of Romance varieties along the lines sketched in (2a-c): Although in all three varieties exemplified in (2) the finite lexical verb invariably leaves its base position to vacate the v-VP complex, witness its position to the left of the very low completive adverb COMPLETELY immediately adjacent to the v-VP complex, it raises to different functional projections within the I-domain, as illustrated by its differential position with respect to different adverb classes.…”

“…12 When the auxiliary verb exceptionally raises to T in the south, as can happen in irrealis contexts, active-stative effects may persist, as demonstrated in Ledgeway (2022b) for Ibero-Romance. It is not by chance that western Daco-Romanian employs fi 'be' with transitive participles.…”