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- Title
Object shift in Romance.
- Authors
Gallego, Ángel
- Abstract
This paper discusses the properties of VOS sentences in Romance and their bearing on Case assignment, verb movement, parametric variation, and the structure of the vP periphery / low IP area. The literature on Romance VOS has argued that this order is derived either through object shift (Ordóñez , , ) or VP fronting (Belletti , ; Zubizarreta ), providing empirical evidence in support of both derivations. In this paper, I focus on various aspects of VOS sentences in Romance languages. First, I argue that both object shift and VP-fronting strategies are actually available, but subject to a very specific parametric cut: Western Romance languages (Galician, European Portuguese, and Spanish) resort to object shift, whereas Central-Eastern varieties (Catalan and Italian) fail to do so, requiring the VP-fronting derivation instead (López ). Second, I put forward a previously unnoticed generalization that reveals that only those varieties licensing object shift based VOS can generate VSO sentences, which I refer to as the VOS- VSO Generalization. Finally, I claim that object shift in VOS sentences of Western Romance languages displays a cluster of unnoticed properties that pattern with Scandinavian-style object shift (Bobaljik and Jonas ; Bobaljik and Thráinsson ; Collins and Thráinsson ; Holmberg , ; Vikner ), thus obeying Holmberg's Generalization (Holmberg , ). If on track, the present account not only reveals interesting syntactic similarities between Scandinavian and Romance object shift, but also reinforces a well-known micro-parameter that disentangles Western from Central-Eastern Romance languages.
- Subjects
ROMANCE languages; VOS (The Spanish word); SENTENCES (Grammar); ROMANTICISM; VERBS; SCANDINAVIAN languages
- Publication
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 2013, Vol 31, Issue 2, p409
- ISSN
0167-806X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11049-013-9188-6