Browsing by Author "D'Alessandro, Roberta Anna Grazia"

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Impersonal si constructions : agreement and interpretation
(2004) D'Alessandro, Roberta Anna Grazia; Alexiadou, Artemis (Prof. Dr.)
This dissertation investigates the syntax of impersonal si constructions (ISC henceforth) in Italian in a minimalist framework, focusing on their peculiar agreement patterns and on their interpretation. ISCs introduce a generic, unspecified subject in a clause. Italian is a pro-drop language, and a sentence like (1) is interpreted as referring to a specific subject, deictically recoverable or already expressed in the discourse: (1) Canta pro sings- 3rd sg He/she sings' The introduction of an impersonal si in (1) determines the interpretation of the sentence as referring to an unspecified subject, roughly equivalent to the English people', as in (2): (2) Si canta si sings-3rd sg People sing' Impersonal si constructions present a number of puzzling properties which have often been considered as idiosyncratic or accidental. They exhibit peculiarities in their agreement patterns, both in the present tense and in the past tense. Moreover, they present consistent variability in interpretation. The aim of the present work is twofold: on the one hand, I attempt to provide an explanation for previously overlooked phenomena involving ISCs, such as the transitive agreement alternation, the person restriction on the object, and past participle agreement with unergative and unaccusative verbs and in copular constructions. On the other hand, I wish to contribute to the development of current syntactic theory by showing the necessity of considering additional syntactic features, which I call sigma-features, that encode semantic/deictic information. Moreover, I propose a new' syntactic operation: Concord, which targets precisely these semantico-pragmatic features and locally determines adjectival and participial agreement. Concord is a special form of Chomsky's Agree, which targets a different feature set and is active on a phrasal domain. Thus, I distinguish between Agree, which targets the traditional phi-features and may act long-distance to obtain subject-verb agreement, and Concord, which targets the semantico-pragmatic sigma-set, and acts within a phrasal domain to obtain adjectival and participial agreement. Up to now, verbal semantics or Aktionsart has been hardly taken into account in the literature on ISCs. The present work is framed in such a way as to capture the contribution of verbal semantics to the agreement patterns of ISCs. More specifically, assuming that the verbal semantics is reflected in the syntax of a VP, I show that the semantic configuration determines the agreement patterns of ISCs. A large part of this work is also devoted to the interpretation of ISCs: ISCs may be interpreted as generic, existential, or inclusive. In other words, the reference set that si selects may be a purely generic one (generic reading), or there may be a group of people satisfying the property expressed by the predicate (existential). This group may be specified for inclusiveness (inclusive), i.e. it may include the speaker, or it may not. This work is aimed at identifying the causes for the generic/inclusive alternation. A pragmatico-syntactic analysis for the phenomenon of inclusiveness is also provided. The present work is organized in 5 chapters, which address different aspects of Italian ISCs. As stated above, this study is concerned with agreement and interpretation of ISCs, and in particular with those aspects that have often been considered as accidental or not so relevant for the understanding of the problem as a whole. I start from secondary' phenomena and show how they help drawing the general picture of ISCs. The accurate analysis of agreement patterns and interpretation of ISCs also helps to shed some light on other issues that would not seem related to this at first sight, like the person restriction on the object in Icelandic quirky dative constructions.