Copular inversion and non-subject agreement
In this thesis I propose an explanation for the facts of copular inversion in Spanish, Catalan, and other Romance languages, as well as in German. Copular inversion is a phenomenon found in some languages, in which, at least superficially, the copula may be found agreeing with the postverbal DP inst...
| Autor: | |
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2016 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | CBUC, CESCA |
| Repositorio: | TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/397778 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10803/397778 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Linguistics Syntax Lexical-functional grammar Optimality theory Copular sentences Copular inversion Agreement Oblique subjects Cleft sentences Lingüística Sintaxis Gramática Léxico-Funcional Teoría de la optimidad Oraciones copulativas Concordancia Sujetos oblicuos Oraciones escindidas 81 |
| Sumario: | In this thesis I propose an explanation for the facts of copular inversion in Spanish, Catalan, and other Romance languages, as well as in German. Copular inversion is a phenomenon found in some languages, in which, at least superficially, the copula may be found agreeing with the postverbal DP instead of the preverbal DP. At first sight it appears that the agreeing postverbal DP is the subject of the sentence, but in this work I provide evidence that this is not the case: the agreeing postverbal DP is, in fact, the complement of the copula. This yields a singular case of non-subject agreement in Spanish, Romance and the rest of copular inversion languages that is not found in the rest of the grammar of these very same languages (e.g. they do not ever show object-agreement in transitive sentences). This requires an explanation that is integrated with the rest of the grammars of the languages. I claim that coreference is the driving force behind the presence of copular inversion: in copular inversion languages, all verbs actually seek agreement with it and all those grammatical functions that are coreferential with the subject. In intransitive and transitive sentences, the only possible candidate is the subject, but in copular sentences the complement is usually coreferential with the subject. The choice of the agreeing function among the possible candidates is decided with respect to a Person-Number Hierarchy: the copula will always agree with the function that has the most marked person and number agreement features with respect to it. This requires challenging the standard view of LFG by which the lexical entries of verbs determine the person and number features of the subject: the solution requires accepting that the person and number features of the verb must be represented in a function-independent “bundle” that is unified with the right grammatical function according to syntactic well-formedness constraints in an OT setting. Additionally to explain the facts of copular inversion languages, the proposed OT-LFG hypothesis predicts why other languages do not have copular inversion. Moreover, the proposed hypothesis can easily be extended to other phenomena of non-subject agreement, e.g. Catalan cleft sentences, Icelandic non-subject agreement in “quirky case” constructions, English locative inversion and agreement phenomena in the Dargwa family of languages. |
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