Verb Movement in Romance

Abstract

This book provides a detailed account of verb movement across more than twenty standard and non-standard Romance varieties. It examines the position of the verb with respect to a wide selection of hierarchically ordered adverbs, as laid out in Cinque’s (1999) seminal work. The volume uses extensive empirical data to demonstrate that, contrary to traditional assumptions, it is possible to identify at least four distinct macro-typologies in the Romance languages: these macro-typologies stem from a compensatory mechanism between syntax and morphology in licensing the Tense, Aspect, and Mood interpretation of the verb. It adopts a hybrid cartographic / minimalist approach, in which cartography provides the empirical tools of investigation, and minimalist theory provides the technical motivations for the movement phenomena that are observed. It provides a valuable tool for the examination of fundamental morphosyntactic properties from a cross-Romance perspective, and constitutes a useful point of departure for further investigations into the nature and triggers of verb movement cross-linguistically.

Mica preposing as focus fronting

“…The intuition behind this divide lies behind the type of verb movement and the grammaticalisation status of the negator. Similarly, Schifano (2018) builds a taxonomy of verb movement in Italo-Romance by deploying mica as one diagnostic test (more on this in section 4.1.1). In short, these constructions can be geographically marked.…”

“…If this is the case, it could occupy a position in its specific projection in the negative circuit, MinimizerP (in Poletto's system). Following the description of TP as two fields, High Adverb Space (HAS) and Low Adverb Space (LAS) (Ledgeway & Lombardi 2005;Schifano 2018), built upon Cinque (1999), mica is base-generated at the left boundary of LAS before the T (anterior) phrase occupied by già 'already'. Similarly, Poletto (2020) reviews the possible merging positions of negative elements and puts the presuppositional negation in a T-anterior position.…”

Dependency, Licensing, and the Nature of Grammatical Relations

“…In (5), the grammatical positions of The micro-variation observed in verb placement, both language-internally with regard to different verbal forms (e.g. finite vs non-finite in French) and cross-linguistically among different Romance languages, has been recently investigated by Schifano (2018), who suggests that the morphological shape of paradigms devoted to the expression of Tense, Aspect, and Mood determines whether the licensing is achieved through movement (syntactic strategy) or not (morphological strategy).…”

Residual Verb Second in French and Romance

“…We therefore exclude them from our discussion of the postverbal subjects in the inflectional layer most relevant to residual V2. 11 Wolfe (2021a: 127-131) presents independent evidence from adverbial placement that finite verb movement in Renaissance and Classical French declarative clauses targets a position within the T-layer, as in the modern language (Pollock 1989;Schifano 2018). 12 I explicitly exclude from the discussion of verb movement cases where a postverbal subject occurs low in the functional structure and the verb does not move higher than its unmarked position.…”