Refining the Italian clausal spine in light of Central Adverbial Clauses
While adjuncts like adverbs (AdvPs) and prepositional phrases (PPs) have been shown to be hierarchically merged in a fixed, universal order along the clausal spine (Cinque 1999, 2006), the external syntax of adverbial clauses (Adv-CPs) remains rather underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by f...
| Autores: | , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2025 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ddd.uab.cat:322177 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://ddd.uab.cat/record/322177 https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.574 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Central adverbial clauses Adjuncts Italian External syntax Hierarchical merge |
| Sumario: | While adjuncts like adverbs (AdvPs) and prepositional phrases (PPs) have been shown to be hierarchically merged in a fixed, universal order along the clausal spine (Cinque 1999, 2006), the external syntax of adverbial clauses (Adv-CPs) remains rather underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on a specific subset of Italian Adv-CPs, Central Adverbial Clauses (CACs), i.e., adjunct clauses that structure the event with which they are related (Haegeman 2003). We aim for a twofold goal: (a) to establish which is the first-merge position of CACs and whether they are hierarchically ordered similarly to AdvPs/PPs and, consequently, (b) to provide a comprehensive architecture of adjuncts and, more broadly, to refine that of the (Italian) clausal spine. We argue that CACs are merged at the vP/VP level, below the functional projections hosting postverbal subjects, and then we propose a derivational approach in which their surface order is determined by hierarchical merge and VP-movement plus, eventually, pied-piping (Cinque 2005). Thus, our work ultimately offers new empirical support for Cinque's (2023) theory of linearization in the verbal extended projection. |
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