Concord and agreement in the Romance nominal expression

Why are Nominal Expressions (NEs) and clauses so similar and yet so different? Can we derive all the differences between these two syntactic objects from a unique formal feature of either and the similarities from general requirements on syntactic structure? This paper reduces the similarities between NEs and clauses to three recursive relations triggering “Merge”: selection, modification, and projection. The differences are reduced to the propositional vs. referential properties of the these syntactic objects. The truth value resulting from the propositional nature of clauses is the intersection of Person, Time and Polarity, while nominal reference is uniquely related to Person (which includes Number). Intersection occurs with the person feature of a possessor when present. 1. Aims and structure of the paper Nominal structure is assumed in the literature to display three main layers (1b) parallel to clausal structure (1a). In particular, both clausal and nominal structure establishes semantic/thematic relations in a lexical layer (VP, NP), realizing the morpho-syntactic requirements in an extended projection (IP, AgrP), and are topped by a peripheral layer (CP, DP) which has two functions: its hosts the elements that are evaluated for propositional/ referential interpretation and at the same time satisfies the syntactic requirements of the superordinate structure: (1) a. [CP (Complementation layer) [IP (Inflectional layer) [VP (lexical layer)]]] b. [DP (Complementation layer) [AgrP (Inflectional layer) [NP (lexical layer)]]] In both kinds of syntactic objects, the three layers have been shown to be “split”, resulting in much larger structures. The split is the consequence of the fact that different features can be realized by separate morphemes which are hierarchically ordered in the structure. Features can however be bundled and can appear in a single functional head in which case there is no split, as will also be argued for below. The tripartite structure is a parallel between NEs and clauses as well know as the fact that NEs display a “defective” behavior with respect to clauses that is summarized in (2) (also cf. Giusti (1996)) which call for an explanation: (2) a. reduced capacity of expansion in each of the three layers, b. optionality of arguments, c. only one structural case, d. highly restricted occurrence of argument clitics, e. lack of interrogative features (cf. English *I wonder what answer). In a minimalist approach to language (cf. Chomsky 1995-2005 and too many others to be mentioned here), both the necessity of a tripartition in the structure of nominal and clausal * I thank the audience of the 2007 Bucharest Conference and in particular Alexandra Cornilescu, Larisa Avram, Jaqueline Guéron, Norbert Corver, Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin, Manuela Ambar, Liliane Tasmowski, Martine Coene and Iulia Zegrean for comments, criticism and sympathy. I am also grateful to the editors of this Working Paper for the patience they had with my timing. My gratitude to the Romanian linguistic community goes far beyond the scope of this paper. All errors are obviously mine. 1 Among many others cf. Cornilescu (1995), Giusti (1996), Cardinaletti and Starke (1999), Bernstein (2001). Giul ia na GIUSTI 30 objects and its imperfect realization in NEs can either be viewed as accidental properties of the biological nature of UG, or as a necessity due to logical properties and the respective interpretive mechanisms. The latter is the null hypothesis and will be pursued in this paper. I will derive the tripartition from three recursive structure building relations: selection, modification, and projection, and reduce the defective behaviour summarized in (2) to the difference between the propositional value of a clause and the referential value of a NEs. Throughout the paper, I assume that “Merge” is ruled by universal hierarchies of theta-roles, modifiers, and formal features, which hold for NEs and clauses. The differences between NEs and clauses can be reduced to the propositional vs. referential values related to different formal features merged (and checked) at different stages in the three layers. In section 2, I motivate the tripartite structure for Nominal Expressions (from now on NEs). In section 3, I observe how the structural notion of “subject” related to the presence of an EPP feature carried by a probe, is realized in the inflectional layer. I follow main stream literature in labeling the feature transfer operation triggered by the probe as Agree. This section motivates the prenominal position of possessive adjectives as opposed to the postnominal position of PP possessives in Romance, by arguing that the person features of possessives are targeted by the optional EPP feature of the NE. In section 4, I claim that the feature transfer operation required by Romance adjectives is obtained by copying the features of the head onto the Specifier . It does not imply merge of a probe and movement of the goal. I label this SpecHead relation Concord. In that section we observe that the multiple nature of concord is due to its interaction with projection of the functional features of N up in the syntactic tree. In section 5 I draw some conclusions. 2. The tripartite structure It is generally agreed upon that the internal layer is the result of the selection requirements of the lexical head onto its arguments. If there is one or more arguments in the NE, the external argument is singled out to satisfy an EPP requirement checked by a probe merged at the left edge of the intermediate layer. This EPP requirement is not obligatory in the NE. The intermediate layer also realizes the relation of modification (characteristic of adverbs and adjectives). This relation is not obligatory either in the clause or in NEs. I propose that modification holds between a copy of the lexical head (crucially including its functional features) and its specifier (the well-known Spec-Head configuration). The functional head is the result of projection (copy and remerge) of the lexical head and its functional structure (here I reformulate a previous proposal of mine, cf Giusti 2002). This operation takes place only if needed and is recursive. The external layer is a (split DP) structure where not only determiners, but also discourse features are projected (for this latter phenomena cf. Giusti 1996, 2005, 2006). The functional head(s) of the external layer are also the result of projection of the lexical head. These three types of relations are represented in (3). Selection holds between a lexical head and its arguments as represented by the lower, dark arrows: X selects YP and K selects WP. Modification holds between a lexical head and appropriate specifiers: JP and LP modify K, as represented by the superscript K. Merger of modifiers requires the projection of copies of the lexical the head as represented by the upper arrow: (3) [XP X [YP LP K [Y’ Y [ZP JP K [Z’ Z [KP K [WP . ]]]] Concord and agreement in the Romance nominal expression 31 Thus, if in (3) X = V, it selects a Nominal Expression YP, which is the extended projection of K = N. YP satisfies the semantic and formal selectional requirements of X (theta-role and Case assignment). At the same time, it contains all the formal features of K, since it is projected by K. The layer realizing the theta-role is also the layer in which the referential value of the Nominal Expression is computed at LF. The upper projection (DP in (3’)) hosts the determiner is visible at LF for interpretation. I claim that only the specifier and not the head of D is relevant for LF-interpretation. The intermediate layer (ConcP in (3’)) captures the wide spread phenomenon of inflectional concord, apparently necessary to license modifiers (when present). By means of projection, all formal features (gender and word class, number, and reference) are shared at all levels, reaching the topmost projection and the left edge DemP.