http://hdl.handle.net/10278/2482 2013-05-18T22:27:49Z http://hdl.handle.net/10278/2537 Title: Rivista di Grammatica Generativa, vol. 33 (2008) 2007-12-31T23:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10278/2509 Title: The CP of clefts Author⁄s: Belletti, Adriana Abstract: I have argued in recent work (Belletti 2008) that the CP of cleft sentences has some peculiar properties, the crucial ones being the following two: i. it is a reduced CP; ii. the reduced CP may or may not be endowed with an EPP feature. In the pages that follow I would like to review the main arguments for i.-ii. in light of the different kinds of focalization that the two CP structures lead to in clefts. The main emphasis of the discussion here will be on the particular shape of the articulated CP projection in clefts. Throughout I will limit my attention to structures where the clefted constituent is a DP (or a PP), either a subject or a direct /indirect object. 2007-12-31T23:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10278/2508 Title: Arguing against obligatory feature inheritance: Evidence from French transitive participle agreement Author⁄s: Vincent, Michèle; Radford, Andrew Abstract: In this article, we accept the view that the relevant type of case/agreement features originate on phase heads, but argue against a strong view of the Percolation Hypothesis on which uninterpretable features obligatorily percolate down from a phase head onto a selected head: on the contrary, we maintain that there are structures in which uninterpretable case/agreement features remain on the phase head throughout the derivation. The main empirical evidence we adduce in support of our claim comes from a novel analysis of French past participle agreement which builds on earlier work by Radford and Vincent (2007) and Vincent (2007). In section 2, we briefly characterise French past participle agreement, and outline the key assumptions which our analysis makes. We show how our analysis handles past participle agreement with a local direct object in section 3, and go on to show how it correctly specifies when (and why) agreement can take place with the subject of an embedded infinitive complement in section 4. In section 5, we present further empirical evidence against the Percolation Hypothesis from a range of independent phenomena, and highlight some theoretical inadequacies of the hypothesis, as well as reconsidering the motivation for feature percolation. Finally, in section 6 we summarize our overall conclusions. 2007-12-31T23:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10278/2507 Title: From mihi est to'have' across Breton dialects Author⁄s: Jouitteau, Melanie; Rezac, Milan Abstract: In this paper, we turn to the variation of „have‟ across Breton dialects, which goes far beyond the morphological regularization note in J&R and indicated in Table 1d. The variation instantiates key points in the development from the analytic construction of the other Celtic languages to a fully transitive „have‟ where full assimilation to regular transitive verbs has taken place, tracing an evolutionary path in UG parameter space. We follow this route, noting that it maps reasonably onto a procession among Breton dialects from the conservative peripheral regions to the innovative centre. 2007-12-31T23:00:00Z