Introduction to 34th Going Romance Proceedings. In
The Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory (RLLT
series 17), editor-in-chief Haike Jacobs

Ora Matushansky, Laurent Roussarie, Michela Russo, Elena Soare, Sophie

Wauquier

► To cite this version:

Ora Matushansky, Laurent Roussarie, Michela Russo, Elena Soare, Sophie Wauquier. Introduction to 34th Going Romance Proceedings. In The Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory (RLLT series 17), editor-in-chief Haike Jacobs. Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, 2022, 8 (2), 1-8. https://revistes.uab.cat/isogloss/article/view/v8-n2-matushansky-roussarie-russo-et-al. 10.5565/rev/isogloss. hal-03558676

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# Introduction

Ora Matushansky
Laurent Roussarie
Michela Russo
Elena Soare
Sophie Wauquier

UMR 7023 SFL *Formal Language Structures* CNRS University of Paris 8

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

Received: XX-XX-XX

Accepted: XX-XX-XX

Published: XX-XX-22

How to cite: Ora Matushansky, Laurent Roussarie, Michela Russo, Elena Soare, Sophie Wauquier) « Introduction » *The Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory* (RLLT series: 17), *editor-in-chief Haike Jacobs, Isogloss Journal* (ro appear 2022).

## Introduction

The RLLT series (*The Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory*) publishes a peer-reviewed selection of papers presented in the annual meeting of the *Going Romance* conference.

*Going Romance* is a European conference series that focuses on Romance languages from the perspective of current linguistic theorizing and experimental research. It gathers scholars especially interested in the emerging theories of generative grammar applied to Romance languages. It has developed into a major conference in the Romance field offering papers of consistently high quality.

This volume offers a selection of works presented at the XXXIV *Going Romance*, hosted by the UMR 7023 *Formal Language Structures* (CNRS / U. Paris
8 / U. Paris-Lumières, France). The XXXIV first digital edition of *Going Romance* opened on November 25, 2020 with a special session on *Preposition-determiner contractions: architectural considerations, enriched by Professor Anne Carlier (Sorbonne University) as keynote speaker*. This session focused on the syntax and semantics of partitive determiners and preposition-determiner contractions or omissions, the diachrony of P+D contractions and partitive determiners, on the morphology-phonology interface, as well as on the syntax-phonology interface.

The program for each of the three days included equally remarkable keynote speakers: Birgit Alber (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) and Anna Gavarro (U. Autònoma de Barcelona), among a broad array of presentations and posters. We greatly thank the participation of our three keynote speakers.

There were more than 500 registrants, and nearly 150 participants each day, perhaps a record for the *Going Romance* conference, coming from across United States, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Brazil, the Netherland and the United Kingdom. From the call for papers circulated in spring of 2020, we received over 130 abstracts, with topics on syntax, syntax-semantics interface, language acquisition, morphology, phonology, phonology-phonetics interface. 64 of which were accepted for oral presentation or poster at the conference or as alternate. Unlike previous *Going Romance* conferences, a high number of papers in phonetics and phonology were presented, a field that was marginal in the *Going Romance* tradition. Nonetheless, due to a rich set of languages data, the phonology session had a great impact among attending participants. The conference brought a great profit for students and scholars from other universities who become more and more interested in Romance linguistics.

In many respects, the XXXIV *Going Romance*, as first digital edition during Covid-19 pandemic, was a very important event. It has provided us an opportunity to rethink the scientific conference, we have learnt transitioning to a *digital* conference. Given that this was the first time that the conference was organized digitally beyond frontiers, this conference raised high expectations in the linguistics community.

In this collection, the papers reflect various interests in the field today. A wide range of Romance data (French, Italian, Ladin, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Romanian, Aromanian) of non-standard language varieties are presented and are crucial to authors’ arguments. The papers, exposing novel phenomena, enrich our understanding of languages.

Formal approaches to syntax and phonology are regularly applied, also to historical data. Grammatical phenomena dealt with in the papers in this volume are analyzed in different theoretical models such as generative syntax, the Minimalist Program, Nanosyntax, the Distributed Morphology and the Optimality Theory frameworks in their recent theoretical developments. In the papers on generative phonology, some authors used instrumental evidence to support their claim.

Thereafter, twenty selected papers have been grouped into two very broad categories: Syntax, Morpho-Syntax, Semantics, Acquisition (15 papers) and Phonetics & Phonology (5 papers). Some articles have been left out by choice of the authors. The participating reviewers helped us organize the present volume. These articles greatly contribute to having new and better insights for a range of different intriguing linguistic phenomena.
The following summaries should provide the reader with an orientation to the content of the volume.

Elena Soare and Isabelle Roy’s paper “Arguments and modifiers in deverbal nominals: Romanian Genitives and *de*-PPs” addresses the issue of the argument structure of agent and instrument –*tor* nominals in Romanian. In the literature, agent and instrument derived nominals continue to be a subject of debate with respect to whether they have an argument structure or not. According to the authors, the distribution of Genitive case-marked satellites of agent nominals supports the distinction between argument and non-argument structure –*tor* nominals: only agent –*tor* nominals support Genitive-marked arguments. Instrument –*tor* nominals, in turn, are deprived of argument structure. In the case of dispositional agent nominals, the impossibility of Genitives is explained through a correlation between Genitive case arguments and specificity, which are both absent with the dispositional reading. The paper includes an analysis of dispositional agent nominals as involving pseudo-incorporated arguments and some final remarks on cross-linguistic variation in –*er* nominals.

Aurore Gonzalez and Justin Royer’s paper entitled “An expletive negation unlike any other in Québec French: Exploring a ‘complex NPI’ analysis” analyses expletive uses of the negative marker *pas* in Québec French, which does not pattern with previously-documented cases of expletive negation. Thus, most previous accounts of expletive negation cannot explain *pas’s* distribution. The authors propose a preliminary analysis of the expletive negation *pas* as part of a ‘complex’ NPI, which realizes one of two pieces in the composition of an NPI: (i) it does not contribute existential quantification of its own, but (ii) requires that the predicative existential expression it co-occurs with activate a set of domain alternatives. In the last part of the paper, an unexpected property is addressed, namely that expletive negation *pas* must appear in configurations in which a universal DP has been relativized, a fact which is compatible with the analysis but does not follow from it, and which the authors leave for future work.

In her paper “Distinguishing between accounts of the A/A’-distinction: the view from Argentinian Spanish Clitic Doubling”, Suzana Fong addresses the issue of two different accounts for the A/A’ distinction, put forward by Van Urk (2015) and Safir (2019). The A/A’ distinction covers structural differences in case, agreement, and binding properties of moving DPs, and determines possible movement paths. The two accounts under study take this distinction not to be a primitive of the grammar; but rather to derive from independent principles. While the two approaches equally explain the properties that it is based on, they differ in which grammatical components they derive the A/A’-distinction from. The author argues that it is possible to distinguish between the two approaches via empirical comparison, namely how they fare with respect to clitic doubling in Argentinian Spanish. It is shown that only Van Urk’s theory does account for the actual properties of this phenomenon.

Kryzzya Gomez, Maia Duguine, and Hamida Demirdache “Interpretive asymmetries between null and overt PRO in complement and adjunct infinitives in (Colombian) Spanish” argue that despite certain differences linked to its null or overt status, the subject of *para*-finality adjunct clauses in (Colombian) Spanish has the same distribution and interpretive properties as that of complement infinitives and that it should be analyzed as a controlled PRO. The interpretive asymmetry
allowing only overt *para*-subjects to have a coreferential reading under ellipsis
under association with focus is explained by assuming that while null anaphors
must, overt ones can but need not be semantically bound.

In his paper “PCC Effects with Expletives and Non Associate Postverbal
Subjects in Bolognese”, Edward Rubin proposes a Minimalist account of a
Bolognese postverbal subject construction with particular properties: lack of
subject agreement, the occurrence of a special invariable clitic (AI) and a person
restriction of the postverbal subject. The proposal amounts to treat the expletive as
an independent second nominal in the domain of the sole agreement and Case-
Licensing probe T.

Naomi Kurtz’s in her article “Persons and Pronouns: Exploring Clitics in Judeo-Spanish” notes that in Judeo-Spanish clitic doubling is obligatory only for third person accusative strong pronouns. To account for this, she appeals to the hypothesis that the lack of an overt clitic arises when the relevant argument agrees for person with a functional head X⁰ (which also generates PCC repair), while overt cliticization is derived via agreement with v⁰. Presupposing from earlier work that third person accusative strong pronouns lack person features, they can only agree with v⁰, yielding an obligatory clitic.

Pierre Larrivée in his article “Is Medieval French diglossic? New evidence on remnant V2 and register” investigates diglossia in Medieval French through the analysis of unambiguous V2 configurations and novel data. Previous studies have already correlated word order and informational structure to different registers. His method is a quantitative analysis measuring diglossia via the variation in Verb-second word order (V2) behavior. In V2 configurations the verb follows an initial projection (XP), which is with the verb, in a high syntactic position, the left periphery. His starting point is the idea brought by Massot (2010), Zribi-Hertz (2011) that contemporary French is diglossic, since grammatical features act differently in vernacular and Standard French. He applies two methods, a 13th century prose texts analysis, as well as a targeted study of the correspondence members productions originating from different social classes in 15th century. He claims that word order was sensitive to register (with a correlation between register and V2 configuration), already in Medieval French in a diglossic manner.

“Old French SI, Syntax and Function in Diachrony” by Wyn Shaw is a generative account of the diachrony of the Old French particle SI. The study deals with the function and syntax of Old French *si* from the 12<sup>th</sup> to 14<sup>th</sup> centuries. It shows that this particle has a complex history, fulfilling a variety of functions throughout the period, from a subject continuity marker to a resumptive and an expletive among others. The use of these functions varies idiosyncratically between different texts, even those of the same text-type and time. *Si*'s syntax is defined by its proximity to the verb, occupying the specifier of the left-peripheral head which hosts the verb. This head changes through the Old French period from the lower left peripheral head *Fin* to the higher head *Force*.

Irene Amato’s article, “Auxiliary selection is Agree: person-driven and argument-structure-based splits”, compares the perfect auxiliary selection systems in Southern Italo-Romance and in Standard Italian. Although these systems show an apparently large variety of realizations, Amato shows that they are not as different as they seem, and she proposes that the auxiliary selection can be unified as the result of person Agree.
Valentina Bianchi and Silvio Cruschina's paper "Ignorance and competence implicatures in central Sicilian polar questions" examine the distribution and functions of two optional particles found in polar questions in the central Sicilian dialect of Mussomeli (Caltanissetta): *chi* and *cusà*. The authors seek to pinpoint the contribution of these particles by analysing their distribution in various types of 'non-canonical' questions, based on Farkas (2020), which characterizes (non)-canonical questions in terms of speaker ignorance and addressee competence. This allows them to capture the distribution of the two particles, showing that *chi* is conventionally associated with addressee competence, while *cusà* is conventionally associated with speaker ignorance. The analysis is framed in a version of the inquisitive semantics model, and can be successfully extended to capture the uses of the particles at study beyond polar questions.

Emanuela Sanfelici and Camilla Gallina's article "The timing of production: on the acquisition of Italian prepositions" presents a longitudinal corpus study which investigates the acquisition of Italian prepositions. It aims at determining the timing in which different prepositional items emerge in children's speech, and their analysis shows that different prepositional items are produced at different stages following the geometry of the syntactic tree proposed in the cartographic literature.

The four following contributions were included in the thematic session on "Preposition-determiner, which aimed to highlight current research on this subject. The proposed papers for this session have undergone the normal refereeing process parallel to the *Going Romance* main session.

In the article "Indefinite determiner in two northern Italian dialects. A quantitative approach", Gianluca E. Lebani and Giuliana Giusti focus on indefiniteness and 'partitive' determiner in Standard Italian and Italian varieties. In Italo-Romance, indefiniteness is not expressed in a unique way: some varieties have a null determiner as in other Romance languages, while others have a full-fledged article made up of 'di', not functioning as genitive preposition, combined to the definite article, as it is in French (with parallel 'de' + article, called 'partitive' article). Their analysis is set in the minimalist tradition combined with a quantitative methodology. Based on Cardinaletti and Giusti (2015; 2016; 2018; 2020), the authors argue that 'di' is an indefinite determiner merged in SpecDP with the article featured in gender and number under D. They particularly investigated two dialects, spoken in Rovigo (in the Veneto region) and Piacenza areas (in the Emilia-Romagna region), and tested the distribution of determiners with Mass/Count nouns along two syntactic parameters, telicity vs. atelicity of predicates, and negative vs. positive structures. Their conclusions suggest that the distribution of determiners is linked to a hierarchy for each of these two parameters, in the sense that less complex determiners are found in negative and atelic contexts, while more complex determiners in positive and telic contexts.

Ludovico Franco and Paolo Lorusso's paper "On the interpretation of proper temporal adverbs in Italian: the role of P and D" analyze the correlation between the (non-)bareness of the name of a weekday and its interpretation: a temporal proper name is interpreted punctually if bare, and as habitually if preceded by a definite determiner or an adpositional item. The paper proposes that N-to-D movement occurs to enable individual reference as in Longobardi's work.

Francesco Pinzin and Cecilia Poletto in the article "An indefinite maze: on the distribution of partitives and bare nouns in the Northern Italian dialects" also
explore the behavior of indefinite determiners and objects in Italo-Romance varieties, compared to other Romance languages, such as Spanish and French. They examine the asymmetry and the competition between cover determiners/bare nouns, such as in Spanish *como pan* 'I eat bread' vs. prenominal overt determiner partitive article, which combine the preposition *de* 'of' and the definite article, such as in French *je mange du pain* 'I eat bread', in relation to the nominal overt marking. In these languages there is a clear opposition: languages such as Italian represent a challenge since indefiniteness can be reached through both strategies, bare nouns and partitive articles, even though number marking on nominals is present. It is generally admitted that indefinite / partitive markers appear where nominals cannot license, through number morphs, indefinite arguments. The authors affirm that in Romance this correlation does not hold as such, since there are languages like Italian in which number marked nominal can have both bare Ds and indefinite articles. Thus, they abandon the idea of having a single indefinite function for partitive and bare nominals, and provide a new account for the correlation between nominal number marking and the indefinite arguments. They reinterpreted the connection between the number nominal marking and the presence/absence of the indefinite markers through a feature called a *Choice function*, an additional layer to the set of syntactic functional projections within the DP. Its input is the semantics of the functional set FNP.

Tommaso Mattiuzzi in the article “This might be the PLACE. Spelling out a covert D in Fodom spatial PPs” examines the interaction between preposition and determiners involving a D-layer in the Ladin variety of Livinallongo/Fodom. He analyzes article-drop, which is only possible in (spatial) PPs and only with certain nouns, possibly interpreted as both specific (strong) and non-specific (weak) definites. An account is proposed in the framework of phrasal Spell Out, which is argued to be superior to others in handling the relevance of the structural properties of the nominal complement.

The article-drop in Fodom PPs is tied to structural restrictions, particularly to the internal properties of the nominal complement, number features, since article-drop is only possible with singular nominals. Omissions are only allowed with nominals that have ‘spatially salient referents’. For him, the feature [+LOC]/PLACE is at the origins of article-drop in spatial PPs, he explains the restriction to a specific range of ‘locative’ nominals. His evidence also suggests that temporal PPs exhibit parallel behavior. Ladin article-drop also seems to recall article-drop in Romanian and the other cases of bare PPs.

The following part contains reviewed papers which were presented in the Phonology session.

In their paper “Typology and language change: The case of truncation”, Birgit Alber and Joachim Kokkelmans study grammatical change in a specific domain of prosodic morphology: the domain of the word formation process of name truncation. They have a typological approach supporting a relative chronology of French and German truncation patterns and propose an analysis where minimality in language change is defined in terms of the ranking conditions. According to those results, they show that unlike the diachronic change of stress, language change in name truncation is very fast.

Eirini Apostolopoulou, in her article “Where *r* you going? A typology of long-distance metathesis of liquids”, also addresses a diachronic phenomenon from
a typological perspective. She explores metathesis of liquids from a non-initial consonant-liquid configuration towards the left periphery of the word, which may be accompanied by metathesis of post-vocalic liquids and be subject to locality restrictions. The cornerstones of the analysis are two ranking constraints that trigger/block metathesis from a post-consonantal and a post-vocalic environment (a constraint imposing/lifting locality restriction, and a constraint determining the least tolerated marked structure in a given language, choosing between a non-initial post-consonantal liquid and a post-vocalic one).

Heglyn Pimenta's article "The matter with |U| and |I|: on nasal vowel diphthongization and element asymmetry" addresses the question of the sonority asymmetry of the elements |I| and |U| which have never been distinguished in this respect so far. She studies the nasal vowel diphthongization in non-standard European Portuguese, which reveals a preference for the front offglide over the back offglide, [j] appearing even in some contexts where [w] would be expected. She argues that this preference has its origin in sonority asymmetry, |I| being less sonorous than |U|.

In her article "On the prosodic realization of Spanish ¿no?-tags from a pragmatic perspective", Anna Gazdik aims to study empirically the prosodic realization of the Spanish tag ¿no? added to host clauses with different clause types, realizing various speech act types. She observes that the contour over the tag is influenced both by the clause type of the host clause (exclamatives / imperatives/ declaratives) and by pragmatic considerations: the function of the tag is also the attribution of the whole discourse move to the addressee and would signal a call on the addressee to interpret the whole discourse move as a meta-question on the attribution of the realized speech act to the addressee.

Annie Helms "Bay Area Spanish: regional sound change in contact languages" addresses the influence of the California Vowel Shift on Bay Area Spanish. Analysis of word list tasks given to bilingual speakers of Bay Area Spanish and monolingual speakers of Mexican Spanish reveals a more compressed vowel space in Bay Area Spanish and patterns that mirror changes in progress in California English. These results broaden the scope of regional sound change by suggesting that regional sound changes can influence production within contact languages and may provide evidence for perceptual category assimilation among Spanish-English bilinguals in the Bay Area.

Ora Matushansky, Laurent Roussarie, Michela Russo, Elena Soare, Sophie Wauquier

UMR 7023 SFL "Formal Language Structures" (CNRS / U. Paris 8 / U. Paris-Lumières, France)

December 2021

## Acknowledgements

The XXXIV edition of *Going Romance* was hosted, in its first digital edition, by the UMR 7023 *Formal Language Structures* (CNRS / U. Paris 8 / U. Paris-
Lumières, France), on November 25-27, 2020. We wish to thank our Research Unit who gave financial support, as well as the numerous individuals who contributed to making *Going Romance* XXXIV a success with their stimulating research presentations and engaged discussions. We also wish to reiterate our gratitude to the scholars who helped us with the selection process, to the session chairs, to our co-organizers: Patricia Cabredo Hofherr and Michela Russo, to the scientific committee: Claire Beyssade, Joaquim Brandão de Carvalho, Carlo Cecchetto, Ora Matushansky, Léa Nash, Laurent Roussarie, Elena Soare, Carla Soares-Jesel, Francesc Torres-Tamarit, Sophie Wauquier, as well as to the students Zoom technical assistants, Chang Liu, Timothée Premat, Xiaofang Zhou, Viktor Andreevski, Jimmy Josseron, Anthony Malhomme.

We would like to thank Bronwyn Bjorkman and Sarah Murray for generously sharing their experiences with the online organization of the 2020 CLA Meeting and of SALT 30 (August 2020).

Finally, thanks to the RLLT (*Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory*, hosted by *Isogloss*, *Open Journal of Romance Linguistics*) editor, Haike Jacobs (Radboud University in Nijmegen), and to two editors-in-chief, Roberta D'Alessandro (Utrecht University) and Ángel J. Gallego (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) for their unfailingly prompt responses to our questions.