been assumed to relate to one another or to result from a common cause. The required ..... (34) Do [ DP/PP quelqu'un [ de [IP [AP célèbre] Io t ]]]. (Kayne 1994).
PARALLEL (A)SYMMETRIES AND THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF N-WORDS Viviane Déprez Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 18: 253-342 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Abstract: In many Romance languages, negative expressions exhibit a robust distributional asymmetry. When in post-verbal positions, they require the co-presence of negation, when in pre-verbal positions, they are incompatible with it. In the same languages, bare nominals exhibit a distribution that parallels the negative one in some striking respects. They are possible in post-verbal positions, but infelicitous as pre-verbal subjects. Similar distributional parallelisms between these expressions are shown to obtain cross-linguistically and diachronically and are argued to derive from their common internal syntactic and semantics properties. Both expressions have a “deficient” DP, lack quantificational force and are unable to check the D feature of EPP. Bare nominals may lack D0 , but negative expressions contain a null D0 syntactically licensed under DP internal Spec Head agreement or head movement. As these operations result from parametric options in DP syntax and have consequences on the semantic nature of these expressions, the central result of the paper is to derive cross-linguistic variations in negative concord from independent choices in DP syntax.
1
1. Introduction: Parallel asymmetries In many Romance languages, the distribution of N-words, that is the negative words in negative concord constructions (Laka 1990) manifests a well-known asymmetry. As illustrated in (1&2) when N-words are in post-verbal positions as complements of verbs or prepositions, they require the co-presence of negation: (1)
It Sp Po Sard
*(Non) ho visto nessuno *(No) compre nada Claudia *(não) convidou ninguém *(No’)appo comporatu nudda
(2)
It Sp
Mario *(non) ha parlato con nessuno *(Non) ablo con nadie
anyone
Po Sard
Claudia *(não) saiu con ninguém Juanne * ( n o n )pessat a n e u n e
I did not see anyone I did not buy anything Claudia did not invite anyone I have not bought anything Mario has not talked to anyone I don’t speak to anyone
Claudia does not go out with anyone John does not think about
This requirement also obtains for subjects in post-verbal positions, as illustrated in (3): (3)
It Sp Po Sard
*(Non) ha telefonato nessuno *(No) comió nadie *(Não) saiu ninguém *(No’) est vennitu neune
Not has called anyone Not ate anyone There got out no one There came nobody
But this requirement fails when N-words occur in pre-verbal positions. In these positions, Nwords no longer require negation for their licensing. Quite on the contrary, they appear to be essentially incompatible with it. More specifically, the co-presence of negation and N-words, which in cases such as (1) to (3) lead to a characteristic ‘negative concord’ reading with a single semantic negation, produces instead in (4) a double negation reading, which cancels out to a positive statement. That is, the negative concord effect, which obtains in (1) to (3) breaks down in (4) when the N-word is in pre-verbal position: (4)
It: Sp Po Sa
Nessuno (*non) ha telefonato Nadie (*no) comió Ninguem (*não) saiu Ninguém (não) comprou o quadro Neune (*non) est vennitu
No No No No
one one one one
No one called ate went out bought the painting has come
The canceling effect is well illustrated by the Sardinian contrast given in (5) from Jones (1993), as (5a) and (5b) clearly have opposite meanings: (5)
a.Neune at mai peccatu Nobody has ever sinned = b.Neune no’at mai peccatu Nobody has never sinned =
Concordant reading Adamic innocence Double negation reading Original sin
Parallel to the distributional asymmetry of N-words, the same Romance languages manifest yet another well-known distributional asymmetry in their nominal paradigm. As illustrated in (6), (7) and (8) respectively, bare nominals can occur in post-verbal positions as complements of verbs or prepositions and as subjects: (6)
It:
Gianni vide cani per strada
John saw dogs in the street 2
(7) water
(8)
Sp Po Sa
Tengo dinero Compro salsichas Laura est toddende frores
I have money I bought sausages Laura is picking flowers
It Sp
Gianni lavora con cani Los niños no jugaban con agua
Gianni works with dogs The children don’t play with
Po Sa
As criancas não fallam con gatos Semus ponnende vinu in ampullas
The children don’t speak with cats We are putting wine in bottles
It Sp Po Sa
Qui la notte arrivano cani jugaban niños en el parque Estão criancàs a gritar ao telefone. B’at arrivatu pitzinnas
Here at night come dogs played children in the park Are children screaming in the telephone There have arrived girls
B’at cantatu tenores
There have sung tenors
But as shown in (9), bare nominals are, generally excluded from pre-verbal subject positions under unmarked intonation:1 (9)
It Sp Po Sa
* Marocchini telefonano sempre * Niños jugaban en el parque ??Criancas estão a gritar ao telefone *Sórrikes an mandicatu su casu *Vinu at crentiatu sa tiadza *Piztinas sun arrivatas
Moroccans always called up Children are playing in the park Children are screaming in the telefone Mice ate the cheese Wine stained the table cloth Girls have arrived
In these Romance languages then, we observe that N-words and bare nominals exhibit an interesting correlated asymmetry in their pre-verbal and post-verbal positions. Where Nwords are incompatible with negation, bare nominals are excluded and where N-words are compatible with negation, bare nominals are possible. While these two distributional asymmetries have been previously noted in the generative literature, they have not generally been assumed to relate to one another or to result from a common cause. The required absence of negation in (4), on the one hand, has mostly been analyzed as a side-effect of a Spec-head agreement relation between a negative head and its specifier disfavoring the redundant overt spell out of both of these elements (Laka 1990, Zanuttini 1991 and Haegeman 1995). The asymmetric distribution of bare nominals, on the other hand, has commonly been regarded as an effect of the ECP and the lack of proper lexical government of a null determiner in subject position (Contreras (1986), Longobardi (1994))2 . On such views, since each of these asymmetries results from conceptually distinct syntactic constraints, the correlated distribution in (1) to (9) is coincidental. This paper argues that this parallelism is not a coincidence but rather a direct consequence of common properties in the semantic nature and the syntactic structure of these expressions. N-words in Romance languages have been argued to be negative (universal3 ) quantifiers subject to the Neg-Criterion, a syntactic principle parallel to the wh-criterion (Rizzi 1991). The Neg-Criterion enforces their A’ movement to a relevant Spec position, i.e. Spec NegP. (Zanuttini 1990, Haegeman 1995, Haegeman & Zanuttini 1997, among many others). While this perspective emphasizes the similarity between negative constructions and whconstructions (Klima 1964), it does not provide particular reasons to expect similarities between the distribution of N-words and bare nominals. There is, however, an alternative view of negative constructions which takes N-words to be indefinite terms whose distribution and properties parallel in essential respects those of other indefinite expressions (Laka 1990, Ladusaw 1992, Acquaviva 1992, Uribe-Etxebaria 1994, Déprez 1995, 1997, Gianakidou and 3
Quer 1996, Gianakidou 1997). On this view, if bare nominals are a type of indefinite expression (Wilkinson 1991, Diesing 1992), a parallelism with the distribution of N-words is natural. This paper argues that the paradigms in (1) to (9) exemplify this parallelism and provide interesting support for an approach to negative concord conceived as a type of indefinite licensing (Ladusaw 1992). More specifically, the paper explores the idea that like other indefinite expressions, Nwords can be expressions of variable types. Diesing (1992) has proposed a typology of indefinites based on differences in presupposition, the presence or absence of intrinsic quantificational force and the availability of QR. Transposed to N-words, this perspective brings a new outlook on the parallel distributional asymmetries discussed above and more generally on cross-linguistic differences among various Romance languages that manifest negative concord in some form.4 Paralleling the distinctions between quantificational and non-quantificational indefinites, cross-linguistic variations in negative concord languages are derived from the differing quantificational nature of their N-words. I argue that this distinction is reflected in the internal syntactic structure of these expressions and provides evidence for a DP internal syntax/semantic mapping that links DP structure and quantificational force. I go on to show that the internal syntactic structure of these expressions plays an important role in their external sentential distribution. That is, “internal structure” determines “external” behavior. From this perspective, the distributional asymmetries of N-words and bare NPs in (1) through (9) signals a parallelism in their internal structure. The idea is that these nominal expressions feature a common “poverty” in their syntactic structure that is responsible for their parallel behavior. More precisely, both expressions are taken to feature a “deficient” DP in the sense that their nominal constituents either contain a null determiner or lack a DP layer altogether. This parallelism in structural deficiency is in synchrony with the semantic nature of these expressions. Structural poverty, we suggest, essentially mirrors “poverty” in quantificational force. N-words are argued to contain a null determiner. Syntactically, this null head can be licensed DP -internally under Spec Head agreement or head movement, a choice that reflects independent parametric options in the DP syntax of a given language. Thus, if a language manifests evidence for internal head movement to Do , then this movement is expected t o affect N-words as well. Similarly for movement to Spec DP. I assume that a null determiner translates as a variable with no intrinsic quantificational force and must be operator bound. But if Do gets filled under head movement, the expression acquires its own quantificational force and no longer acts as a variable. As a result, binding by an external operator is no longer needed or possible. Given this result, N-words with a null determiner are essentially predicted to require the presence of negation, and N-words with a filled determiner to preclude it. Structurally deficient DPs, I propose, lack the ability to check the EPP feature -- a Dfeature in Chomsky’s (1995) Minimalist model -- unless they are internally licensed. Only languages that can license deficient DPs under Spec-head agreement or head movement will allow them in the Spec of an EPP checking pre-verbal position. Clearly, DP internal licensing is possible only for constituents with a null Do , not when the D layer is missing, a distinction that is shown to derive independent differences between N-words and bare nominals. In other words, the perspective explored attempts to derive cross-linguistic variations in the licensing of N-words not from the internal structure of NegP, or from its sentencial position but rather from the internal syntactic structure of the N-words themselves. The central claim is that it is first and foremost the internal composition of these expressions that matters for their external distribution. The paper is organized as follows. In section 2, on the basis of cross-linguistic and diachronic data, I provide further evidence for a distributional correlation between N-words and bare nominals. As I show, this correlation is not restricted to languages with a distributional asymmetry, it is also manifest in languages in which the distribution of N-words and bare nominals is fully symmetric. In these symmetric languages, either N-words are generally incompatible with negation and bare nominals are excluded from argument positions, or N4
words generally require negation and bare nominals are possible everywhere. Based on the existence of these straightforward symmetric cases, languages with an asymmetric distribution are argued to be hybrid cases combining two distinct sets of conditions on N-words and bare nominals in a single language. To understand the conditions at work for N-words in the simpler symmetric cases, section 3 reviews Déprez’(1997) comparative analysis of negative constructions in two opposite symmetric languages and section 4 provides a detailed exploration of the internal syntax of their N-words. The analysis of N-words in the symmetric languages sets up the stage for our investigation of the asymmetric cases taken up in section 5. This section provides empirical evidence for the hybrid nature of N-words in the asymmetric languages based on their internal structure and on the type of negative concord they license. Section 6 turns to a discussion of the structure of bare nominals in asymmetric languages and provides the final account for the parallel distribution in (1-9). Section 7 closes the paper by summarizing the predictions of the proposed account and its possible extensions. 2. Symmetric languages Apart from the parallelism observed in (1) though (9), evidence for a correlation between the possible co-occurrence of N-words with negation and the distribution of bare nominals comes from cross-linguistic comparisons. In contrast to the above Romances languages, in which the distribution of N-words and bare nominals is asymmetric, there are also languages that are fully symmetric in both regards. There are essentially two ways in which a language could fail to exhibit the asymmetric distribution of N-words in (1-9). One way is for N-words to co-occur with negation in all argument positions, including pre-verbal subjects, the other way is for negation to be incompatible with N-words in all argument positions, not just pre-verbal subjects. Both patterns are exemplified in the negative concord languages of the world. In some negative concord languages such as Haitian Creole, Old French, and Russian, negation is always required with N-words in all positions, including the pre-verbal subject one. Of particular interest to us here is that in these languages there is no asymmetry in the distribution of bare nominals either. That is, bare nominals occur uniformly in all argument positions, both pre-verbal and post-verbal. Remaining within the boundaries of Romance related languages, this correlation is illustrated here with data from French lexifier creoles. As shown in (10-12), negation is always required with N-words in these languages. The b-examples of (13-15) show that negation is required with pre-verbal subject N-words and that it does not trigger a double negation reading. Rather in these creoles, co-occurring negation and N-words are always interpreted in the same way in post-verbal and pre-verbal positions, i.e. with negative concord and a single semantic negation: (10)
(11)
(12)
Louisiana French Creole a. Mo te pa wa pe(r)son b. A(r)jen gruj pa
I did not see anyone Nothing moves
Seychelles Creole c. pa fer narien b. person pa kontan mua
does not do nothing (It does not matter) Nobody loves me
Haitian Creole a. M pa we pèsonn b. Pèsonn pa rele ‘m
I did not see anyone Nobody called me
Correlatively, as illustrated in (13), (14), (15), bare nominals are licensed in all argument positions in these languages, including the pre-verbal subject position:
5
(13)
Louisiana French Creole a. malor capa rive mouen Terrible things could happen to me b. O Pon Bro je pa gen koton ditu, je t’abitsyd lonton pase In Breaux Bridge we don’t have cotton anymore, but we used to
(14)
Seychelles Creole a. lakaz selma ti brile House only burnt b. ka u kapab gayn larzan u pa i kompran mizer when you make money you don’t understand poverty
(15)
Haitian Creole a. Mari achte flè Mary bought flowers b. Vwayèl kon chante. Yo gen bèl vwa. Konsòn fe bwi. Yo pa kap chante Vowels can sing. They have a beautiful voice. Consonants make noise. They cannot
sing
The reverse type of language also exists. That is, there are negative concord languages for which the co-occurrence of N-words and negation is impossible, no matter which positions the N-words occur in. More exactly, in these languages, the co-occurrence of N-words and negation systematically leads to a double negation reading that is acceptable only under narrow pragmatic conditions. Within Romance, standard French illustrates this type of language: 5 (16)
a. Personne n’est pas venu = DN reading For no one it is the case that they did not come = everyone came b. Je n’ai pas rien fait = DN reading I did not do nothing c. Jean n’est pas parti avec personne = DN reading John did not leave with no one
Correlatively, it is well known that in standard French, bare nominals are impossible in argument positions, pre-verbal (subject) or post-verbal ones, as illustrated here in (17): (17)
a.*Castors construisent des barages b.* J’ai vu souris dans le grenier c.*Il a parlé avec gens
Beavers build dams I saw mice in the attic He talked to people
While such bare nominals are generally excluded in Modern French, such was not always the case throughout the history of the language. Indeed, they used to be frequent in Old and Middle French, remaining common in restricted environments up to almost the 17th century: (18) soul
a. Old French (cited in Brunot et Bruneau 1937) Buona pulcella fut Eulalia good virgin was Eulalia Bel avret corps, bellezour anima beautiful had body and more beautiful b. 17th French (ibid) Il y a grand disette d’eau par toute cette contrée (Vaugelas) There is great lack of water in the whole area Il faut ordre nouveau (Corneille) There is needed new order Le Vicomte lui coupa chemin (Racine)
6
The Vicecount to him cut way (cut his way) Of particular interest to us is the fact that correlatively, at about the same period, negation could co-occur with N-words in all positions.6 Note that, at time, negation was the monomorphemic ne and that pas, an N-word itself, could be optionally present as a reinforcer as for instance in (19c): (19)
a. Il ne li a riens teu. He not to him something hid He did not hide anything from him b. Ne vous vaut riens li escondit Not to you worth thing to deny It is not worth anything for you to c. pas ne man poise PAS neg to me weighs d. del suer mie ne quiert of the sister MIE not wants e. Ne faites pas semblant de rien Do not fake anything
(Charroi 657in RDL p 97)
deny (Foulet, 260) (Hulfk & Van KEMENADE p 197) (Moliere cited in Bernini &Ramat 96:174)
Thus, it would seem that the parallelism noted here between the co-presence of negation in negative concord constructions and the distribution of bare nominals has diachronic as well as cross-linguistic manifestations.7 As we have seen, French based Creoles, Old French and Modern French are negative concord languages with a symmetric distribution of their N-words and bare nominals. Yet they also maintain the intriguing correlation observed above. Where N-words concord with negation, bare nominals are possible and where N-words cannot concord with negation, bare nominals are impossible. In other words, the conditions observed for post-verbal positions only in asymmetric languages like Italian or Spanish are seen to generalize to all positions in the first type of symmetric languages, i.e. the French based Creoles. Conversely, the conditions observed for pre-verbal positions only in the asymmetric languages generalize to all positions in the second type of symmetric languages such as Modern French. This clear division of labor suggests that in the Romance languages of section 1, the asymmetric distribution of N-words and bare nominals represents a hybrid situation which results from the combination of two distinct sets of simpler conditions separately observed in the symmetric languages. That is, while the symmetric languages each present a unique and distinct type of N-word, subject to given licensing conditions, the asymmetric languages appear to combine within a single language, one type of N-word and associated conditions in preverbal positions and another type of N-word and associated conditions in post-verbal positions, with only the second one paralleling the distribution of bare nominals. That is, simplifying somewhat, Italian, Spanish and Sardinian N-words appear to have-chameleon like properties which make them behave like French based creole N-words in post-verbal positions and like French N-words in pre-verbal positions. This view is explored and elaborated in the rest of the paper. The idea that N-words in the asymmetric languages are ambiguous is of course not new (se Longobardi 1986 and Herburger 1996 among others). The originality of the proposal made here however, is that the ambiguity arises not from a lexicon with two distinct type of Nwords, but from the internal syntax of the N-words themselves. I argue that, contrary t o appearances, N-words feature a complex internal syntactic structure that may vary with their position in the sentence and with general principles governing DP syntax in the relevant languages. The core of my proposal is that N-words in the asymmetric languages are syntactically ambiguous between two possibilities, each at work separately in the distinct symmetric languages. This syntactic ambiguity correlates with diverging semantic properties, and in particular, with a difference in quantificational force. 7
Tackling the hybrid properties of N-words in the asymmetric languages in this fashion requires first that the properties of N-words and negative concord in the simpler cases of the symmetric languages be clarified. To this effect, we turn in the next section to a comparative study of negative constructions in two illustrative symmetric languages, French and Haitian Creole. We then return to the asymmetric languages in section 5, where I argue that they feature syntactically ambiguous N-words corresponding to the two symmetric types identified in section 3 and 4. 3. Two distinct cases of Negative concord: French and Haitian Creole This section compares the negative constructions of two opposite symmetric negative concord languages, French and Haitian Creole. Following Déprez (1995,1997, 1999) their similarities and differences are shown to derive from the semantic properties of their respective N-words. In section 4, Déprez results are extended with a detailed study of the internal syntax of these N-words and evidence is provided for a correlation between these semantic properties and their syntactic structure. 3.1 Common Properties of French and Haitian Creole N-words Three characteristic properties distinguish the French and Haitian Creole expressions pèsonn/personne (no/anyone), anyen/rien (no/anything) from standard NPIs. First, they behave distinctly in comparable contexts of occurrence. For instance, in the prostasis of a conditional (20a), in a comparative (20b) or in the first argument of a universal quantifier (20c), the HC expressions are excluded and the French ones have a negative meaning8 : Haitian Creole (20) a.*Si ou touye pèsonn, ou pral nan prizon en If you kill anyone you will go to jail
French a’. Si tu tues personne/quique ce soit tu iras prison If you kill no one/anyone, you will go to prison b’. Jean est plus gros que
b.*Jeanpi gwo pase pèsonn (??personne)/quique ce soit John is bigger than anyone John is fatter than no one/anyone c.*Tout timoun ki wè anyen dwe di'm c’.Tout enfant qui voit rien/quoique ce soit doit le dire Every child who sees anything must tell me Every child who sees nothing/anything must tell me Second, when occurring in isolation as in (21), both expressions have a negative interpretation. (21) a. Kimoun ki vote pou Manigan? Pèsonn Who voted for Manigan? No one/ *Anyone
a’. Qui a voté pour Manigan? Personne
Third, in contrast to NPIs, these expressions support modification by universal modifiers such as almost or absolutely. (22)
a. Jan pa te envite prèske pèsonn b. Jean n’ a invité presque personne John invited almost no one / *did not invite almost anyone c. *Jean n’a pas invité presque qui que ce soit John did not invite almost anyone
These expressions also differ from negative quantifiers such as nobody/nothing because, like NPIs, they are interpreted as non-negative indefinites when in the scope of appropriate
8
negative expressions. If as argued by Zanuttini (1991), these properties characterize N-words as opposed to NPIs then both HC and French can be classified as “negative concord” languages on a par with the Romance languages in section 1. In fact, DeGraff (1993)and Moritz and Valois (1994) have analyzed these languages along the lines proposed by Zanuttini’s (1991) for Italian. On their views, HC and French N-words are negative quantifiers that A’-move to Spec NegP to satisfy the Neg Criterion in (23). Their concord reading derives from negation absorption as described in (24): (23) (24)
The Ne g Criterion: Each negative Xo must be in a Spec-head relation with a negative XP Each negative XP must be in a Spec-head relation with a negative Xo Ne gation Absorption Rule (Negative concord) [∀x¬] [∀y¬] [∀z¬]→ [∀x, y, z] ¬
3.2 Differences between the two negative constructions One salient difference between the negative constructions of French and Haitian Creole concerns the possible co-occurrence of N-words with negation. In HC, overt negation can (and must) co-occur with N-words in all syntactic positions, as shown in (12). In French, this cooccurrence always leads to a double negation as in (16). The two negative constructions also clearly differ in their locality restrictions (Déprez 1995, 1997, 1999). As the summary in table (25) shows, HC negative constructions are unbounded dependencies, but unlike wh-movement, they are insensitive to some typical islands. i.e. wh-islands, and they do not manifest characteristic subject/object assymetries. In this respect, they quite resemble NPI dependencies. French negative constructions, on the other hand, appear sensitive to island constraints. Déprez argues however, that this sensitivity is merely a result of their being bounded dependencies.9 Their locality conditions resemble those of QR. _________________________________________________________________________ ___ (25) Haitian Standard Standard French N e g Concord NPIs wh-movement Neg Concord ____________________________________________________________________________ Obey Strong islands Yes Yes Yes Yes Obey wh-islands NO No Yes Yes Subj/obj asymmetry NO No Yes Yes Unbounded Yes Yes Yes NO _________________________________________________________________________ ___ The Neg Criterion perspective, which emphasizes a cross-linguistic similarity between N-words, takes the opposite compatibility of negation with N-words in the two languages to be a consequence of distinctions in the syntactic structure of NegP. Negation would be a Spec in French and a head in HC. On this view, French N-words are incompatible with negation because pas in Spec NegP blocks their movement to this position, in violation of the Neg Criterion10 . In HC, in contrast, since negation is a head, Spec NegP is empty. Thus N-word movement is not blocked, the Neg Criterion can be satisfied and negation absorption derives a concord reading. As Déprez (1997) has shown, however, this structural account of the compatibility of N-words with negation faces both empirical and conceptual problems. First, the Spec/head NegP opposition of French and HC does not generalize to other closely related concord languages. Cross-linguistically, the Xo / XP status of negation appears in fact to be a poor
9
predictor of its (im)possible co-occurrence with N-words. There clearly are languages in which negation is a Spec that co-occurs with N-words as well as languages in which co-occurrence fails, although negation is a head. Second the semantic parallelism between concord and whabsorption on which the account is based leaves unexplained important empirical differences between the two processes. For instance, while concord between an N-word and a propositional negation operator is possible in HC, absorption between a wh-term and a propositional question operator is precluded (cf. * I wonder if /whether John saw who). In French, while concord between two N-words is local, absorption between two wh-terms is not. Wh-absorption and negative concord thus clearly have different properties. Moreover, as noted above, the locality restrictions of French and HC negative constructions differ both from one another and from the standard case of A’ movement, i.e. wh-movement. Since a difference in the Spec/head status of negation cannot explain these contrasting locality properties, Déprez concludes that there must be other differences between the two negative constructions. Her proposal is that the differences are located in the nature of their N-words and not in the structure of NegP. 3.3 Déprez 1997 analysis Déprez (1997)’s proposes that the similarities and differences between negative constructions in HC and in French derive from the semantic nature of their N-words. Although both are indefinite expressions, they crucially differ in their quantificational force. French Nwords, like numeral indefinites, have intrinsic quantificational force but Haitian N-words, like bare plurals do not. 3.3.1 French Negative concord. Déprez proposes that French N-words like rien/personne have properties comparable to those of numeral indefinite expressions like zero. That is, French N-words, like numerals, are indefinite terms with intrinsic quantificational force that have, following Diesing (1992), a strong and a weak reading. On their strong reading, numerals undergo QR and have a tripartite structure with a variable in a restrictive clause, like other quantificational terms. On their weak reading, they are cardinality predicates in a nuclear scope. The results of this proposal can be summarized as follows. First, since French N-words differ from NPIs, they are naturally behave distinctly in identical contexts (cf. 20). Second since adverbs like almost can modify numerals (Partee 1986), French N-words are expected to support such modifiers (cf.(22)).11 T hird, the proposed meaning similar to that of the numeral zero accounts for the negative reading of French N-words in isolation (cf. 21). Fourth, this also explains the incompatibility of French Nwords with negation. Since N-words have their own quantificational force, they do not act like variables. Thus negating a French N-word is equivalent to negating a zero numeral, which produces the characteristic canceling effect of double negation: (26)
Je n’ai pas vu personne = Je n’ai pas vu “zéro” personne I did not see zero person ----> hence I saw at least one person
Fifth, as the only possible movement of N-words is QR, which is clause bounded, long distance movement is not expected. Hence the bounded character of French negative concord follows. In Déprez’s, view French concord involves the process of “paired” or “resumptive” quantification (May 1989),12 illustrated here through an example. Consider (27) in the context of a charity bake sale where participants are counting the results of their efforts: (27)
a. Zéro personnes ont mangé zéro gateaux Zero people ate zero cakes = no one ate any cakes b. Zero [person x, cakes y] [ ate’(x, y) ] c. There were zero pairs in the eating relation
On the relevant reading, (27) amounts to a financial disaster as it is understood that there were zero pairs in an eating relation. The salient point here is that this is a 10
characteristic “negative concord” reading that involves non-negative numeral indefinites. This reading is indeed synonymous to a sentence with a single semantic negation (No one ate any cake). Déprez idea is that the same resumptive quantification process is at stake in French negative concord constructions. Since resumptive quantification requires a shared absolute scope and semantic/syntactic parallelisms between the quantifiers involved (May 1989), French negative concord is predicted to be possible only when N-words have no relative scope and when the parallelism conditions are met. The fact that the pairing of French N-words with negatively marked NPs cannot lead a concord reading in (28) shows that these two expressions are neither syntactically nor semantically parallel and that concord cannot involve the negative absorption described in (24), which wrongly predicts a concord reading for such cases: (28)
b. Pas une personne n’a rien mangé Not a person ate zero thing = everyone ate something
3.3.2 Haitian Creole Negative concord. Déprez proposes that HC N-words, on the other hand, are indefinite expressions with no intrinsic quantificational force. In this regard, they resemble bare plurals, which in Diesing’s view also have a weak and a strong reading, as they can be variables in the nuclear scope or in the restrictive clause of appropriate operators. Haitian N-words are thus similar to French N-words in being indefinite terms with strong and weak readings. They differ in having no intrinsic quantificational force. While French N-words are akin to numeral indefinites, HC N-words instead resemble bare plurals. This proposal accounts for the properties of Haitian N-words as follows. Strong indefinites with generic value support modifiers like almost (Kadmon and Landman 1995). Since HC N-words permit strong generic readings, they are correctly predicted to support them as well13 . Their isolated negative reading can be captured as in Laka (1990) with an elliptical negation present in answers t o questions such as (21a’). As Déprez (1995) notes, bare nominals can also manifest an isolated negative reading in comparable contexts as illustrated in (30), an example from earlier French: (29)
A qui avez-vous parlé ? A âme To whom did you speak? To soul = to no one
(up to 1638)
Since N-words are semantic variables in HC, concord can be analyzed as (unselective) binding by a negative operator14 . As for the locality properties of HC negative constructions, two predictions are made. First, since on their weak readings, HC N-words are nuclear scope variables just like NPIs, they are expected to manifest similar locality properties. Table (25) showed this prediction to be verified. For strong readings on the other hand, N-words undergo QR, a bounded process. Thus, these are predicted to be possible only in clause bounded contexts, a prediction, which is in fact confirmed. As (30) shows, HC N-words licensed by a non-clausemate negation contrast with clausemate licensed ones in failing to support modification by almost. Thus while in non-local contexts, HC N-words are essentially like NPIs, in clause bounded contexts, they differ from NPIs in allowing strong readings under QR: (30)
a. M pa di (*prèske) pèsonn ap vini I did not say almost anyone will come b.*M pa mande poukisa Jan mange (*prèske) anyen I don’t ask why John ate almost anything
To sum up, Déprez argued that French and Haitian Creole manifest respectively two different types of negative concord. The first involves paired or resumptive quantification of N-words with quantificational force (May 1979); the second, (unselective) binding of indefinite variables by a negative operator. These two types of negative concord have different properties. The former is essentially clause- bounded and is subject to parallelism constraints between the terms of the concord relation. The latter is possible in non-local domains, but is 11
distinct in local and non-local domains, strong readings being licensed in local domains only. These properties follow from the differing quantificational force of the N-words, French Nwords are akin to numeral indefinites in their semantic properties and HC N-words to bare plurals. Déprez further suggests that the differing semantic nature of N-words is reflected in their internal syntax. In the next section, we explore the syntactic properties of N-words in the two languages and argue that this suggestion is confirmed since their distinction in quantificational force is both mirrored and constrained by their syntactic structure. 4. The internal syntax of N-words This section explores the internal syntax of N-words in French and Haitian Creole. Both expressions are argued to contain a null D0 head. It is proposed, that this D0 gets filled under head movement by substitution in French. In HC, on the other hand, it remains null and is licensed under Spec Head agreement with NP. Evidence are provided that head movement under substitution, unlike Spec Head agreement, affects the quantificational properties of Nwords. This derives the quantificational properties of these respective N-words from their internal syntax. 4.1 French N-words At the end of her paper, Déprez (1997) suggests that French N-words have a complex internal structure which involves head movement into a functional Do head as in (31): (31)
DP D’ D personne
NP
t
In this section, empirical support is provided for a somewhat more complex internal structure for French N-words which preserves Déprez original insight. Déprez conceived of the DPinternal head movement in (31) as the reflection of a grammaticalization process whereby a regular noun such as personne acquires a determiner/pronominal like status in the course of its historical evolution. On this view, personne, in standard modern French, is a determiner head or equivalently, following Postal (1969), a kind of pronoun. This proposal is in keeping with the French grammatical tradition that views rien/personne as “indefinite pronouns”. Putting this structure together with the semantic properties of French N-words discussed above, I further suggest, that the intrinsic quantificational force of French N-words is a consequence of this internal head movement up the DP structure. That is, like Longobardi (1994), I will provide evidence that DP internal head movement under substitution has semantic consequences. In the present case, however, the semantic effect amounts to a change in the nature of the raised element from a nominal predicate to a weak quantifier. In other words, head movement inside DP functions as a trigger for a semantic type shift (Zamparelli 1996).15 Let us begin by comparing French N-words to other French DPs of the same nature. If Déprez’ proposal that N-words are numeral indefinites is correct, the syntax of these expressions should mirror the syntax of other French “numeral” DPs. In (32) are examples showing that this is correct. French N-words clearly parallel other numerals and indefinite terms in at least one of their characteristic syntactic properties, namely modification. (32) shows that like the indefinite quantifiers quelqu’un/quelque chose in (32b) and like the emphatic numerals indefinites in (32c), French N-words require the presence of the prepositional determiner de for adjectival modification:
12
(32)
a.Personne d’ important No one/nothing important b.Quelqu’un d’important Someone important c.TROIS voitures de rouges (pas quatre) THREE car of red
a’. *Personne/rien important No one/ nothing important b. *Quelqu’un important Someone important c. AUCUNE voiture de rouge NO car of red
Kayne (1994:108-109) argued that de modification implies the existence of a complex structure involving the DP internal movement of the modified noun. On the basis of stacking possibilities such as (33a), to which I add the parallel (33b), he rejects the idea that de modification involves adjunction or complementation and proposes instead a structure with a DP internal relative clause as in (34): (33) (34)
a. Quelqu’un d’autre de célèbre Someone else (of) famous b. Personne d’autre de célèbre Noone else (of) famous Do [ DP/PP quelqu’un [ de [IP [AP célèbre] Io t ]]] |________________________|
(Kayne 1994)
(34) features a complex DP with an internal clause-like IP constituent, an inverted predicate and a subject moved to the Spec position of de, argued to be a DP internal complementizer. The parallel with relative clauses is in the movement of quelqu’un to the Spec of this CP like projection. An interesting fact not noted by Kayne is that in French, this DP-internal fronting is limited to indefinite expressions. As shown in (35), universal quantified DPs with chaque ‘every’ or tout ‘all’ do not allow a comparable de modification pattern even when they are bare or carry focal stress. They either require direct modification as in (35a’) or if bare, they must be modified with a sentential relative clause as in (35b’):16 (35) a . *CHAQUE/TOUTEi d é ed’importante importante Each/every idea of important Each/every important idea b. *Tout (d’)important Everything important
a’.
Chaque/
toute
idée
Each/every idea important Each/every important idea b’. Tout ce qui est important Everything that is important
The possibility of de modification thus provides important DP internal evidence that the French N-words are indeed indefinite terms17 . This confirms Déprez’ (1997) previous demonstration that French N-words contrast with universal quantifiers in felicitously occuring in existential sentences:18 (36)
Il y a *chaque enfant/*tous les enfants/ personne ici There is/are each child/all children/noone here
De modification also provides a first argument for the relevance of DP internal movement t o the structure of N-words. But if, as proposed by Kayne, movement to de is movement to a specifier position, evidence for a head movement to Do like the one suggested by Déprez (1997) is lacking. Within (34), I would like to propose that N-words like personne or rien do in fact undergo further head movement from the Spec of d e position to the head of a dominating Do , as in (37): (37)
[ Do / Numo [ DP/PP personne [ de [IP AP Io t ]]] |_____________| |__________________| 13
Note first that, in this regard, N-words appear to closely parallel the indefinite expression quelqu’un, in which an adjectival like element quelque has arguably cliticized, i.e. head moved, to the numeral un. For personne, the suggestion is that head movement is to an empty numeral zero and involves substitution. Indirect evidence for this head movement proposal is provided by an intriguing aspect of French DP syntax. As argued by Longobardi (1994), modification possibilities can serve as a diagnostic for the structure of DPs. Pre-nominal modifiers, it was noted, are generally impossible for nominals that have moved to high functional DP heads. As predicted by (37), N-words do indeed fail to support pre-nominal modification. It is furthermore notable that in this respect, they differ from a few remnant-bare nominals that can still occur in modern French in restricted contexts. (38a) gives examples of these essentially frozen expressions which contain a bare N like chose ‘thing’ and monde ‘world’ and the pre-nominal modifier grand ‘big’. As (38b) shows, grand is excluded with the bare N-word personne: (38)
a. Je n’ai pas vu grand chose/ grand monde I did not see grand thing (many things)/ grand world (a lot of people) b.*Je n’ai (pas) vu grand personne I did not see grand personne
This is as it should be, if personne, when used as a bare N-word, sits in a high internal head for which pre-nominal modification is unavailable.19 For the remnant-bare NPs, in contrast, the possibility of pre-nominal modification suggests that there is no comparable internal head movement to a Do position. Their head noun remains low in the DP structure, at least within the borders of a NP shell that permits pre-nominal modifiers. Of great interest to my proposal then is the correlated observation that, as opposed to N-words, these remnant-bare NPs appear to behave essentially like NPIs. As shown in (49), they cannot occur in simple affirmative contexts without the presence of negation. Furthermore, they also fail to support modification by almost or absolutely: (39)
a. *J’ai vu grand chose I saw grand thing (i.e. many things) b. Je n’ai pas vu (*absolument/presque) grand chose I did not see (*absolutely/almost) grand thing (i.e. anything)
Factually then, there are two characteristic distinctions between the remnant-bare nominals and the French N-words: the formers allow pre-nominal modification and require the presence of overt negation. The latter preclude both. These observations invite two conclusions. First, it is clear that French N-words, despite appearances, cannot be assumed to have the same internal structure as bare nominals. Second, should these two expressions differ in the movement of their head noun to Do , as proposed here, then we have evidence that this DP internal head movement goes hand in hand with a change in semantic status. The correspondence between the syntactic structure of these expressions and their semantic nature is rather clear. As indicated by pre-nominal modification, remnant-bare nominals occur low in the DP structure. Correspondingly, they are observed to act as variables that require binding by an external operator. As indicated by the lack of pre-nominal modification, N-words, in contrast, occur high is the DP structure. Correspondingly, they have intrinsic quantificational force and preclude external binding. We thus reach, on this comparison, a conclusion parallel to Longobardi’s (1994) insight: head movement into Do has semantic effects. In Longobardi (1994), head movement into Do is restricted to proper names and serves to confer referential properties to the moved element. Our present results suggest, however, that there is a more general mapping between the internal syntactic structure of nominal expressions and their quantificational force. Expressions with quantificational force have DP structures with a filled Do and expressions with no quantificational force have structures with NP internal elements. In 14
other words, this correspondence provides evidence for the existence of a DP internal syntax/semantics mapping. Of yet further interest to us is the fact shown below that French remnant-bare nominals also permit de modification:20 (40)
Il n’a pas dit grand chose d’important He did not say big thing of important/ anything important
Within our set of assumptions, (40) shows that they are indefinite expressions with a complex structure as in (41) that permit the DP internal movement to Spec de: (41)
[ DP
Do
[ DP/PP grand chose [ d’ [ IP AP I t ]]
The differences observed above between the remnant-bare nominals and the N-words must then involve the upper part of the structure. If so, we have indirect evidence for the structure (37) and the proposal that N-words and remnant-bare nominals differ with respect to head movement to the upper Do . N-words, we conclude, occupy the upper Do position in the structure, remnant-bare nominals leave it empty, as in (41). Besides accounting for similarities and differences in modification possibilities, (37) and (41) have interesting further consequences for the sentential distribution of these expressions. First, assuming with Kayne (1981) that a null Do functions as a variable, structure (41) provides a very natural explanation for the fact that remnant-bare nominals require the co-presence of an overt negation. When negation is present, the null Do variable is appropriately bound. Thus (40b) is good. But when negation is missing, the null Do variable fails to be bound and Full Interpretation is violated. (40a) is thus appropriately excluded. With N-words in contrast, since Do is filled, there is no null Do variable. Hence binding by an external operator is neither required nor permitted. In short, structure (37) and (41) provide evidence for the following generalization: (45) If a variable is syntactically realized as null Do , then its binder must also be syntactically realized.When Do is filled, in contrast, there is no syntactic variable and the presence of an overt binder is precluded. A further contrast in the sentential distribution of these expressions provides empirical support for the proposed structures (37) and (41). Observe that in (42a), the remnant-bare nominals are infelicitous in pre-verbal subject positions even when Full Interpretation could be satisfied by the presence of a matrix negation. That the problem is structural is demonstrated by (42b) where the remnant-bare nominal is felicitous in a post-verbal position: (42)
a.*Je ne crois pas que grand monde vienne ce soir I don’t believe that great world will come tonight b. Je ne crois pas qu’il vienne grand monde ce soir I don’t believe that there will come great world tonight I don’t believe that many people will come tonight
The contrast in (42) is reminiscent of the asymmetric distribution of Romance bare nominals. This asymmetry follows from the ECP if a null D must be properly governed (Contreras 1986 and Longobardi 1994). Assuming for the moment that this is essentially correct (see section 6 for a reformulation), the ungrammaticality of (42a) is straightforwardly predicted if remnantbare nominals are indeed dominated by an ungoverned null Do , as proposed in (41). In contrast, since French N-words have a filled Do , their distribution is expected to be symmetric, as is indeed the case (see (16)).21 Additional support for the structures (37)and (41) and for the semantic correlate of DP internal head movement is provided by the striking behavior of yet another archaic French nominal expression, âme qui vive ‘soul that lives’. There are three notable facts about this expression. First, it features an overt relative clause structure parallel to the abstract one 15
proposed for personne in (37). Second, it has, in the literary register of some speakers, a distribution parallel to that of personne . It can co-occur with n e and have an apparent intrinsic negative meaning in pre- and post-verbal positions: (43)
a. [DP Ame [ CP qui [ IP t vive ]]] ne pourrait vous sauver d’une telle situation Soul that lives could not save you from such a situation b. Je ne connais âme qui vive dans cette ville I don’t know soul that lives in this town
Third, it has, for other speakers, a distribution similar to NPIs. It requires the co-presence of overt negation in post-verbal positions and cannot occur in pre-verbal subject positions: (44)
a. *Ame qui vive ne saurait (pas) vous sauver d’un tel danger Soul that lives could not save you from such a danger b. Je ne connais *(pas) âme qui vive dans cette ville. I don’t know soul that lives in this town
The point of interest here is that this quite surprising array of facts receives a straightforward account within the proposal outlined here. First, note that the frozen relative clause structure of âme qui vive quite transparently reflects the abstract relative structure propose in Kayne (1994), 22 suggesting (45) as the structure of this expression: (45)
[ DP Do [DP/CP âme [ qui [ t vive ]]
Given (45), the shifting behavior and interpretation of âme qui vive can be straightforwardly predicted if we take it to ambiguously manifest the two structures proposed above for N-words and remnant-bare nominals respectively. That is, for the speakers for whom âme qui vive acts like personne, âme moves into the head of the upper Do as in (46). Given the structural identity with personne, the expression is expected to require no external binding by negation and to have a similar interpretation, as is indeed the case in (43) above: (46)
[ DP âme [ t
qui [ t vive]]]
For the other speakers, âme is a remnant-bare nominal and does not move into Do . It has the structure (45) and contains a null Do that requires overt negation to be bound. As expected, given the presence of this null Do , this second âme qui vive manifests a pre-verbal/postverbal distributional asymmetry, as shown in (47): (47)
a.??(*) Je ne crois pas que âme qui vive viendra a cette soirée Je ne crois pas qu’il viendra âme qui vive a cette soirée I don't believe that soul that lives will come to this evening event
In sum, with the proposed structures, the shifting distribution and interpretation of âme qui vive can be taken to simply reflect the presence or absence of string-vacuous internal head movement into Do . Since there are no other apparent distinctions between the two interpretations, it is quite unclear, apart from my proposal, how the ambiguous behavior of this expression could be predicted. These facts thus provides quite striking evidence that head movement into Do can have non-trivial consequences for the semantic nature and the sentential distribution of the constituents that manifests it. 23 To sum up, this section has argued that the contrasting behavior of French N-words and remnant-bare nominals is a reflection of their differing internal syntactic structure. Both expressions are a kind of indefinite expression that supports adjectival modification with de. They differ with respect to their determiner structure. While the remnant-bare nominals feature an null Do , the Do position is filled in French N-words through the head movement of 16
the noun personne or rien into the head of a DP internal functional projection. I have argued that this kind of head movement confers intrinsic quantificational force to these expressions as it suppresses their internal Do variable. My evidence suggests that head movement into Do can have the effect of shifting a nominal predicate into an expression with intrinsic quantificational force. Given the highly articulated DP structure assumed in current models, it may well be that Longobardi’s (1994) referential interpretation for N to Do movement and my own quantificational force distinction are both instantiated. Distinct DP layers could indeed be associated with distinct semantic interpretations, as proposed for instance in Zamparelli (1996) . On his view, the lowest structural DP layer hosts the predicative part of a nominal projection, the intermediate layer hosts weak quantifiers and the topmost layer strong quantifiers and referential elements. (The labels that may translate in other models as 'DP', 'NumP' and 'NP' are of little importance here, as the functional structure of DPs is still a matter of debate): (48) Strong Det
SDP F
Strong determiners= Referential/strong Qs PDP
Weak Det
KIP of
Weak determiners = Numerals, Proportionals.. Predicate layer NP Zamparelli (1996)
My evidence suggests that head movement into Do is not restricted to the attribution of referential properties to nouns. Rather, it would seem, the properties resulting from such a movement may be determined by the nature of the functional layer reached. Within this perspective, the proposal made here regarding French N-words is that bare nouns like personne or rien have (historically) climbed up the structural ladder of the DP, now having reached the second level of the DP structure. Hence, they have the status of weak numeral quantifiers or more precisely of numeral determiner heads. The remnant-bare NPs on the other hand, are at the bottom of the DP structure and lack any quantificational force. In regard to the sentential distribution of French N-words, the picture resulting from the study of their internal syntax is as follows. We have seen that DP internal head movement affects the external distribution of N-words in two respects. First, because they have a filled Do , their distribution is symmetric, i.e. not subject to a “proper government” restriction or its equivalent, and they can occur in all syntactic positions including the pre-verbal subject one. Second, because they have intrinsic quantificational force and no internal syntactic variables ( no null Do ), co-occurrence with an external negative operator is not allowed. In contrast, the remnant-bare nominals that contain a null Do are asymmetric in their distribution and require the presence of a negative operator to bind their internal Do variable. In the coming sections, cross-linguistic data on the internal structure of N-words is examined and the internal structural/semantic mapping observed here with French expressions is shown to be replicated in the negative constructions of other languages. Section 4.2 considers in detail the structure of HC N-words and argues that they contain a null Do . Section 5 returns to the asymmetric languages and shows that their N-words are structurally ambiguous between the French N-word type with a filled Do , and the HC N-word type with a null Do . Their asymmetric distribution is then argued to follow from this syntactic ambiguity. 4.2 Haitian N-words Déprez (1997) argued that HC N-words resemble bare plurals in their semantic properties. 24 Based on this similarity, the syntactic structure of HC N-words like pèsonn could
17
either be a truly “bare” NP as in (49a) or feature a null Do as in (52b), both structures having been previously proposed for bare nominals: (49)
a.
NP | N
b.
DP D
NP
My arguments here will support a variant of (49b) for Haitian N-words. A drawback of (49a) is that it leaves unexplained the fact that pèsonn contrasts with other HC bare nominals in that it always requires a syntactically overt binder. As shown in (50) indeed, in HC, a bare nominal like moun ‘person’can occur in an affirmative context with no overt binder:
18
(50)
Moun vini nan fèt la People came to the party
M envite moun nan fèt la I invited people to the party
This is not true of pèsonn which, as shown above, generally requires the co-presence of pa. If as proposed by Kayne (1981) and Zamparelli (1996), a null Do functions as a variable, then on the alternative (49b), the necessary co-presence of pa is expected as a consequence of Full Interpretation, in similarity with our proposal for the French remnant-bare NPs. On this ground, the proposal that Haitian Creole N-words have a complex internal syntactic structure with a null Do appears preferable. Adopting it, however, raises an apparent problem. We have assumed so far with Longobardi (1994), that a null Do is subject to syntactic constraints akin t o “proper government”. If HC N-words contain a null D0 , their distribution should be asymmetric as “proper government” fails in pre-verbal subject positions. But this is incorrect. Recall that HC N-words are uniformly possible in all NP positions, including the pre-verbal subject ones, and can uniformly co-occur with negation. Conceptually, the ‘proper government’ requirement on a null Do can be understood as a need for some form of syntactic licensing. Being defective in some sense, a null Do may fail to be an interpretable object if it is not appropriately identified. Proper government, in a preMinimalist perspective, was assumed to provide such an identification (see for example Rizzi 1990 on ‘formal licensing’) and the asymmetric distribution of constituents with a null Do thus followed from a lack of identification in given syntactic positions. Note, however, that a distributional asymmetry of constituents with a null Do is expected only if the means of identification are external to the constituent containing the null Do . This is presupposed in the notion of government which always involves a relation between a (null) category and a head external to its projection (V for example). Suppose instead that a null Do could be appropriately identified from within its containing projection. Then no distributional asymmetry would arise, as identification would not depend on external conditions and a uniform distribution would be expected. On this view, a distributional asymmetry should arise only for constituents in which a Do fails to be internally identified, not for those that have this option. This is in essence the solution proposed here for the uniform distribution of HC Nwords. (51) outlines their proposed internal structure: (51)
DP [NP pèsonn]
D’
D
NP
0
t
In (51), the NP projection containing the bare N pèsonn undergoes DP internal movement t o the specifier of the dominating null D0 . 25 As a consequence, null Do can be syntactically licensed through Spec Head agreement. If this is sufficient to meet its identification condition, this null Do will no longer need external licensing, i.e. proper government, and the distribution of its containing constituent is correctly predicted to be symmetric. Let us further assume, that in contrast to head movement into Do , movement to Spec DP does not affect the semantic nature of the constituent, as it does not suppress the null Do . If so, null Do will still function as a variable and the presence of negation will be uniformly required to satisfy FI. (51) then, provides the basis of an explanation for both the syntactically symmetric behavior of Haitian Creole N-words and for the ubiquitous presence of the negative operator in postverbal as well as pre-verbal subject positions. Negation is necessary to bind, i.e. m-command, the null Do of N-words which is syntactically licensed through NP to Spec DP movement. This proposal, although technically adequate for our purposes, would nevertheless be quite stipulatory if no independent support for the existence of NP to Spec DP movement 19
could be found in the language. As it turns out, however, there is in fact strong evidence that movement of NP to Spec DP is independently motivated in Haitian Creole, and moreover that this movement is obligatory in at least some cases. Consider in this respect the structure of HC definite DPs such as (52): (52)
a. kay la/ sa a/ li House- the/this/his
A hallmark characteristic of HC DPs is that their determiners, whether definite, demonstrative or possessive always occur in final positions. This is, in fact, a rather surprising order, given that HC is in other respects a very strictly head initial language. The apparent anomaly of this marked DP head final order has, in fact, often been cited as a serious sore point for Bickerton’s elegant Bioprogram hypothesis, which views creoles as exemplifying unmarked UG properties. If movement of NP to Spec DP is assumed to be generally possible in HC, this problem disappears. The head final position of Do , being derived, no longer stands in contradiction to the otherwise general head-initial base order of the language. Quite obviously then, there is a rather strong conceptual argument in favor of the existence of such a movement. There is also empirical evidence. As (53) shows, the order of complements and modifiers in the Haitian DP, explored in Lumsden (1989), provides clear support for the hypothesis that the whole NP moves to spec DP. (53)
machin wouj papa m nan car red father my the the red car of my father
We see in (53) that, as expected under this hypothesis, the determiner follows not only the nominal head but both its modifying adjectives, its post-nominal complement and a dependent relative clause. This order is easily accounted for under the structure (54), with NP movement to Spec DP occurring systematically and recursively: (54)
DP NP N’
D' DP
No AP NP machin wouj papa
nan
t
D' m
t
Unpacking the structure, (54) shows first a movement of the NP headed by papa ‘father’ t o the Spec of its dominating DP whose head is the possessor m . This leads the intermediate order “nan machinn wouj [ papa m t ]” ‘the car red (of) father my’. After that, the whole NP headed by machin moves into the Spec of its DP headed by nan, with both its postnominal modifier wouj and its postnominal complement papa m resulting in the final order [[machinn wouj [papa m t]] nan t ]. While easily derived under recursive NP to Spec DP movement, this order proves rather difficult to get otherwise and thus provides quite strong empirical support for this movement .26 Additional indirect evidence for our proposed structure (51) comes from extraction data. As noted by Koopman (1981), extraction out of HC DPs is generally excluded. A question term cannot be moved out of DP and the only possibility to relate to this position is with a resumptive strategy available only in relative clauses: 20
(55)
a. *ki moun ou te wè pitit (li) a Who you past saw child the Whose did you see the child of b. chen an ou pa kwè m di ke li kraze a dog det you not believe I said tail his broken det The dog that you don’t believe I said his tail was broken
If, as convincingly argued by Giorgi and Longobardi (1986), movement out of DPs must generally proceed through Spec DP, the ungrammaticality of (55) is straighforwardly expected under my proposal. As Spec DP is occupied by the moved NP in HC, there is no room for additional movement to this position and extraction out of DP is ruled out. Summing up, given the empirical evidence for a process of NP to Spec DP movement in HC, the structure (51) is in no way exceptional within the language. It can, in fact, simply be said to conform to the general requirements of its DP syntax. In the spirit of Chomksy (1995), we can assume that HC Do contains a strong feature that must be checked under regular movement to Spec DP. This movement, in turn, provides the necessary “identification” for both overt and null Ds in the language27 . 4.3 Summary: negative concord in the symmetric languages We have now arrived at a clear picture of the properties of N-words and of negative concord constructions in the symmetric languages. Two types of negative concord have been distinguished, a first one which involves resumptive quantification between two indefinite Nwords with intrinsic quantificational force, and a second one which involves (unselective) binding of an (indefinite) variable by a negative operator. The choice between these two systems was argued in Déprez (1997) to be determined by the semantic properties of N-words in the respective languages. I have argued here that these semantic properties are mirrored and constrained by their syntactic structure through different ways of suppressing or licensing a null Do . In French, the head movement of personne into Do suppresses the null Do and has the effect of a type shifting operation which provides the N-word with an intrinsic quantificational force. Thus French N-words are equivalent in their semantic properties to indefinite numeral expressions. In HC, on the other hand, null Do is internally licensed under NP to Spec Do movement, a movement which leaves the semantic nature of these expressions unaffected, as it does not suppress the null Do . Thus, the N-words continue to function like indefinite variables with no quantificational force, similar in this respect to bare plurals. Being internally licensed, the null Do of HC N-words is not subject to external “proper government” licensing. Consequently, the distribution of its containing constituents is symmetric and uniform. As noted above, French and Haitian Creole also differ in their ability to allow bare nominals. Apart from the few idiosyncratic expressions dubbed ‘remnant-bare nominals’, 28 French essentially disallows bare nominals in all positions while HC, in contrast, allows them everywhere. This contrast can now be understood in the light of the differing licensing for null Do that the two languages have independently been argued to manifest. In French, we have evidence that Do must be overtly filled quite generally, while in HC it may be licensed DP internally through Spec Head agreement. Given the assumption that French Do must always project and get filled under either lexical insertion (Merge) or head movement it follows that that bare nominal and N-words with null Do heads are generally excluded in this language.29 In HC, on the other hand, since a null D0 ’s can be internally licensed through NP to Spec DP movement, bare nominals and N-words with a null Do are allowed and their distribution is symmetric. As our proposed structures for N-words can be understood to reflect possibilities independently at work in other DPs of the relevant languages, what Déprez (1997) had argued to be the distinct semantic properties of N-words and negative concord in the two symmetric languages can now be reinterpreted as a consequence of independent parametrization in the DP syntax of the respective languages. 21
5. The hybrid syntax of N-words in asymmetric languages Having clarified the properties of N-words and negative concord in the symmetric languages, we are now in a position to return to the asymmetric distribution of N-words and bare nominals in the Romance languages of section 1. Recall that regarding the compatibility of N-words and negation, asymmetric N-words behave essentially like French N-words in preverbal positions and essentially like Haitian N-words in post-verbal positions. That is, the copresence of negation leads to double negation for the former and is required for the latter. In view of the proposal made above for symmetric languages, this distribution suggests that Nwords in the asymmetric languages have a structure and a semantic nature similar to French Nwords in pre-verbal positions and to Haitian N-words in post-verbal positions. If so, effects of their diverging properties that go beyond their asymmetric distribution with negation should be observable. Indeed, if N-words in the asymmetric languages have a distinct internal syntax in pre-verbal and post-verbal positions then evidence of this difference should be detectable within their DP structure as well as in the type of negative concord they allow. In section 5.2 and 5.3, empirical evidence supporting these predictions is provided. But before turning to this evidence, the general predictions of my proposal are spelt out to better illuminate these rather complex facts. 5.1 General predictions The idea that N-words in the asymmetric languages have a parrallel nature to the two types examplified in the distinct symmetric languages French and Haitian creole commits us t o the claim that pre-verbal N-words have an intrinsic quantificational force that the post-verbal N-words lack. This on my view is expected if, on a par with French N-words, pre-verbal Nwords in the asymmetric languages manifest a process of head movement up the functional structure of DP, resulting in a structure with a filled Do . That is, leaving aside for the moment a more articulated DP structure, pre-verbal N-words should have the structure (56) with an Nword moving to fill up Do : (56) [ DP [N-word]Do [ NP t ] ] |___________| Of relevance to this proposal are Longobardi’s (1994) independent evidence for the existence of a process of N to Do raising in Romance languages. Arguments for X0 movement in Romance DPs have also been made by Cinque (1995), Giusti (1995), Cardinaletti and Starke(1995) and Zamparelli (1996) among others, although they have generally invoked adjunction structures rather than substitution. For Longobardi (1994), N to D raising under substitution is a parametric option of Romance languages which reflects the strength of their Do features. If this is correct, then structure (56) is clearly in tune with the general syntactic properties of Romance DPs and can plausibly be thought as essentially determined by them. On a par with the proposal made above for French N-words, we take the process of head movement into Do to endow N-words with quantificational force. Given Zamparelli’s three level DP-structure, head movement in N-words could in principle involve movement t o the intermediate layer of DP, or alternatively, movement all the way up to the top level of the structure. On the first option, asymmetric pre-verbal N-words are expected to have essentially the same properties as the French ones, i.e. to be weak, numeral like indefinites. On the second option, they are expected to be strong quantifiers and closer in nature to universal quantifiers. At this point in my study, I will leave both possibilities open. What is of relevance to my proposal is the fact that, under either option, negation is expected not to be able to cooccur with these N-words. Under either option indeed, N-words have intrinsic quantificational force and are unlike variables as they have no null Do . Consequently, they should neither
22
require or nor permit binding by overt negation. With these N-words then, the co-presence of negation is predicted to be as unacceptable as it is in French. Turning to post-verbal N-words, the proposal entails that, as opposed to pre-verbal ones, these N-words have a structure similar to that of the HC N-words. By this I mean that like HC N-words, they contain a null Do as in (57): (57)
[ DP Do [NP N-word]]
The presence of this null Do ensures that N-words will function as variables. Thus, in Italian and other asymmetric languages, N-words with the structure (57) are expected to require binding by an overt negative operator. 30 As argued by Contreras (1986) and Longobardi (1994), null Do in the asymmetric languages require external syntactic licensing: i.e. they must be properly governed (see section 6 for an alternative). On my view, this will be the case only if, contrasting with Haitian N-words, the null Do of Romance N-words cannot be internally licensed under movement of NP to Spec DP. Empirical evidence supporting this conclusion is found in the asymmetric languages. The lack of NP movement to Spec DP in these languages appears indeed largely dictated by general considerations of their DP syntax. While there is ample independent support for a general process of head movement in Romance DPs (see references above), no comparable evidence for a generalized movement of NP to Spec DP has been presented.31 As seen above, such a movement predicts that determiners should occur in post-nominal positions, a prediction verified in HC, but not in Italian, Spanish or Portuguese.32 As Giorgi and Longobardi (1991) have argued, moreover, extraction out of DPs must generally proceed through Spec DP. There is ample evidence that such extractions, although impossible in HC, are quite generally possible in the asymmetric languages. 33 In the spirit of Kayne (1994), this contrast can be taken as an additional confirmation that Spec DP is generally filled in HC, thus blocking extractions from DPs, and generally free in the asymmetric languages, thus permitting such extractions. In sum, independent evidence for a generalized NP to Spec DP movement in the asymmetric languages DPs is lacking. It is thus rather natural to conclude that this movement is not available for N-words either. Suppose, then that the only internal movement available for N-words in the asymmetric languages is head movement to Do under substitution. Should this movement apply, the result will be the structure (56) with it associated semantic properties -- i.e. intrinsic quantificational force and the consequent impossibility to function as a variable bound by a negative operator. Suppose further that for N-words in the asymmetric languages, head movement into Do is a last resort rescue process. That is, suppose that head movement to Do is possible only when it is required. A more precise formulation of the relevant notion of last resort will be discussed in section 6, but for the moment, as our aim is merely to sketch the broad consequences of our account, this general statement will do. If proper government or some equivalent constraint suffices to syntactically license a null Do , then in post-verbal positions, the structure of N-words will be as in (57). That is, in “governed” post-verbal positions, movement to Do cannot occur as it is not required. Thus Do remains empty. In “ungoverned” pre-verbal positions in contrast, as external licensing/government cannot be satisfied, movement to Do is now a last resort, and it can take place to rescue (i.e. suppress) an unlicensed null Do . The prediction of this proposal is that N-words in post-verbal governed positions will have a null Do , as in (57), but in pre-verbal ungoverned position they will have a filled Do , as in (56). This suffices to correctly predict that the co-presence of negation will be required with post-verbal N-words and infelicitous with pre-verbal ones. In sum, on this view, the asymmetric distribution of negation with Romance N-words is derivable from their internal structures. A more general result of this proposal is that the observed differences between the symmetric and the asymmetric languages can be reduced to differences in their DP syntax and, more specifically, to differing syntactic options for licensing a null Do . I have argued that in French N-words, a null Do is eliminated under head movement. In HC, null Do is licensed 23
internally through movement to Spec DP . In Italian and other asymmetric N-words, movement to Spec DP is unavailable, and internal head movement to Do operates only as a last resort process. 34 These differences suffice to accurately predict the distribution of Nwords and negation in all these languages and to account for their correlated distribution with bare nominals. As null Do is eliminated under head movement, in French, both N-words and bare nominals with null Do are excluded. In HC in contrast, since null Do is internally licensed, both N-words and bare nominals distribute symmetrically. In the asymmetric languages finally, since Do is not licensed internally, it is subject to external conditions that determine the asymmetric distributions of N-words and bare nominals. Within a Minimalist perspective these differences can be seen as reflecting distinct feature value of Do (see section 6). Null Do can be assumed to carry a strong feature in French and in HC, which enforces Xo and XP movement respectively . In the asymmetric languages in contrast, if a null Do is sometimes strong and sometimes weak or if the relevant feature is an interpretable feature (Chomsky 1995), apparent optionality of movement will expected. On this perspective then, the parametrization that derives the co-distribution of N-words with negation and the correlated distribution of bare nominals is located within DPs. 5.2 Empirical evidence for the structure of asymmetric N-words The previous section exposes in broad outline my proposed account of the distribution of N-words and negation in the asymmetric languages. In the sections that follow, this proposal is fleshed out first with a detailed study of the empirical evidence in a variety of asymmetric languages and second with a better worked out theoretical account of the syntactic conditions on null Do (section 6). Recall that if N-words are “syntactically” ambiguous, differences in their behavior independent from their asymmetric co-occurrence with negation are expected. In the coming sections, empirical evidence of such differences in pre and postverbal positions is provided. Section 5.3 first considers DP internal evidence, then section 5.4 turns to evidence based on the type of negative concord licensed by the distinct N-words. My survey of the empirical evidence is here limited to N-words in pre-verbal subject vs. post-verbal complement positions. Leftward fronted N-words are left for future work. This choice was dictated partly by the available data in the literature and partly by evidence that leftward fronted N-words do not always behave homogeneously in the asymmetric languages considered here, thus deserving a more detailed study of their own . The Romance “left periphery” as Rizzi (1997) calls it, has rather varied properties which are still largely unexplored. As is apparent from even a single language, i.e. Italian, fronted N-words do not always behave uniformly. According to Zanuttini (1991) and Haegeman (1995), the behavior of fronted N-words essentially parallels that of pre-verbal subject N-words. But according t o Sameck-Lodovici (1997) this is not the case, as fronted N-words cannot license other N-words in their c-command domain. A sketch of how fronted N-words fit in our model is given in section 6, but a detailed empirical study of their properties has to await a clarification of the facts. 5.3 DP internal evidence 5.3.1 The asymmetric structure of Sardinian DPs : Interesting evidence for the differing internal syntax of pre- and post-verbal N-words is quite readily available in at least one of the asymmetric Romance languages considered here, namely Sardinian. As this subsection reveals, Sardinian manifests a clear pre-verbal/post-verbal asymmetry in the internal structure of its DPs. The relevant contrasts support our proposal that DP internal head movement filling up a Do is involved in distinguishing the two positions. The evidence, given in (58) to (60), concerns both the syntax of weak indefinite terms and that of negative concord expressions and provides, in this respect, further support for their parallelism. Consider first the examples given in (58): 35
24
(58)
a. Appo mandicatu (un’) adziccu de pane kin (un’) adziccu de casu I ate a little of bread & a little of cheese b. (*Un’ ) adziccu de pane est rutt’a terra A bit of bread fell on the floor
We see in (58a) that, in Sardinian, the weak quantifier adziccu 'a little' may optionally be preceded by an indefinite determiner un when it is part of a DP in a post-verbal complement position. But when the containing DP occurs in a pre-verbal subject position, the determiner un is no longer optional. It must necessarily be present or else the sentence is excluded. Thus in Sardinian, there is an interesting asymmetry between subject and complement DPs with regards to the determiner position. A determiner position that can remain optionally empty in complement positions must obligatorily be filled in pre-verbal subject positions. Another pre-verbal/post-verbal asymmetry is observed with the weak quantifiers meta 'lots' and pace 'little'. As shown in (59), meta and pace can optionally occur either in a prenominal or in a post-nominal position whenever their containing DP is in a complement position. But when the containing DP is in a pre-verbal subject position, only the pre-nominal position is acceptable: (59)
a. Amus bitu [{meta, pacu} vinu] Amus bitu [vinu { meta, pacu}] We drank much/little wine b. ??Vinu pacu est restatu Pacu vinu est restatu Little wine is left c. ?? Turistas meta(s) sun vennitos Metas turistas sun vennitos Many tourists came
According to Jones (1993), post-nominal meta and pacu have the categorial status of adjectival modifiers as they can, for example, be predicates in copular sentences. In prenominal positions, however, these elements no longer have an adjectival status. Rather, they act like determiners. If Jones’ insight is correct, (58) and (59) can be seen as parallel consequences of the same requirement for an overt determiner in a pre-verbal subject DP. In (58), on the one hand, an optional determiner becomes obligatory. In (59), on the other hand, an adjectival modifier becomes determiner-like. Such data provide direct evidence that Sardinian pre-verbal and post-verbal DPs have a distinct structure that involves the filling of the determiner position. While (58) and (59) concern Sardinian indefinite DPs, comparable evidence for negative concord expressions is given in (60): (60)
a. No appo lessu [ perunu libru ] No appo lessu [ libru perunu ] I did not read any book b. *[Libru perunu] m’est piaghitu [Perunu libru] m’est piaghitu No book pleased me
In (60), we see that the contrast observed above between pre-nominal and postnominal meta and pacu is here replicated with the N-word perunu (any/no). In complement DPs (60a), perunu can be either pre-nominal or post-nominal. In pre-verbal subject DPs, however, it must pre-nominal. Of particular interest, moreover, is the fact that the asymmetric distribution of perunu correlates with the now familiar restriction about the cooccurrence of negation. As shown in (60a), Sardinian post-verbal DPs with perunu, like other post-verbal N-words in asymmetric languages, require the overt presence of the negation no t o 25
be licensed. With pre-verbal subject N-words on the other hand, negation is not required and, when present, it leads to double negation as in (5) above. The relevant facts having been presented, let us foray into Sardinian DP syntax t o detail the structure of these asymmetric DPs. Along with Jones (1993), let us assume that on a par with meta and pacu, perunu has the ambiguous syntactic status of an adjectival modifier or of a determiner. Structurally, this intuition can be implemented as follows. When DPs are in post-verbal complement positions, perunu is an adjectival modifier that occurs either as a rightward adjunct to the nominal projection or as its Specifier36 . In either positions, adjectival perunu is compatible with a null determiner which, like the null Do of other N-words, requires the overt presence of negation to be bound. This proposal is schematized in (61): (61)
a. [DP 0 [NP [N’ libru ] [ADJ perunu] ] b. [DP 0 [ NP [ADJ perunu] [N’ libru]]
In pre-verbal subject positions, however, following the evidence in (58) that a determiner position cannot remain empty, we take perunu ( as well as meta and pacu) to raise to Do under substitution. The resulting structure (62) features the determiner perunnu in pre-verbal subject DPs: (62)
subject position [ DP [Do perunu] [NP t libru ]]
Here as before, if Do is filled, the expression cannot function as a variable. Incompatibility of these pre-verbal N-expressions with overt negation is thus straightforwardly predicted. Note that in elaborating the structure of these Sardinian DPs, we have extended the possibility of head movement into Do to elements other than nouns. That is, besides the N into Do -movement turning a noun into a determiner argued for in French, (62) a movement into Do that affect a modifier. Such an extension seems in fact fairly natural. The idea that lexical formatives can be ambiguously modifier-like and determiner-like is indeed not new. Linguists have previously made comparable proposals for numerals, which share properties with both modifiers (under their weak cardinal interpretation, they are “numeral adjectives”) and determiners (under their strong quantificational interpretation) (Kadmon, Bowers 1991, Guisti 1993). Similarly, the ambiguous interpretation of weak terms like many/few between a proportional and a cardinal reading (discussed in Partee 1989) has been argued to correspond t o different syntactic structures (see for instance Babko-Malaya 1992 for Russian, cf. Bowers 1991 for English, Guisti 1993 for Italian).37 (62) above is thus merely an extension of these possibilities to N-words that manifest a distribution comparable to these weak terms. Summing up, we have seen that Sardinian manifests a number of interesting pre/postverbal asymmetries in the distribution of its indefinite expressions. I have argued that these asymmetries reflect strategies to fill up the Do position of a pre-verbal nominal expression under insertion of an otherwise optional determiner or under movement of a modifier into the head of Do . N-words such as perunu occupy alternatively a modifier and a determiner position, an ambiguity detectable in their DP internal distribution that correlates with the differing co-occurrence of negation. These contrasts thus provide significant confirmation that N-words in asymmetric languages can have an ambiguous syntax involving a null determiner in post-verbal positions and a filled determiner in pre-verbal subject positions. The following subsections review comparable evidence in the other asymmetric languages. 5.3.2 Asymmetries in Italian DPs . Looking next at Italian, we begin by observing a comparable distributional asymmetry with the NPI expression alcun 'any'. As shown in (63), alcun can occur in a pre-nominal position or marginally in a post-nominal position when its containing DP occurs in a post-verbal position. 38 But when the DP is a pre-verbal subject, only the pre-nominal position is possible as in (64):
26
(63) (64)
Non ho visto alcun ragazzo/ (?) ragazzo alcuno I haven’t seen any boy /boy any Non credo che alcun ragazzo/*ragazzo alcuno abbia parlato I do not believe that any boy/boy any has spoken
This distribution is reminiscent of the one observed above with perunu. That alcun, like perunu, can have an ambiguous adjectival status is also supported by the agreement pattern it displays. In post-nominal positions, alcun agrees overtly with its modifying noun, as do other post-nominal Italian adjectives. In pre-nominal position, however, alcun has no overt agreement and acts in this regard more like the determiner un. We may take this contrast t o indicate that pre-nominal alcun is farther from its modifying noun as a result of its higher position within DP. In (65) are my proposed structures for this asymmetry: 39 (65)
a. [DP [Do 0] [NP ragazzo [ADJ alcuno]] a’. [DP [Do 0] [FP ragazzo [NP [ADJ alcuno] t] b. [DP/NumP alcun [Do /Num 0] [NP t [ragazzo ]]]
In (65a), post-nominal alcuno is an adjective adjoined to the NP ragazzo. Alternatively, it could also be is in the Spec of this NP with ragazzo moved over it, as in (65a’). (65a’) follows Cinque’s (1996) proposal for the post-nominal position of modifying adjectives40 and has the advantage over (65a) of allowing a standard Spec Head account of the agreement pattern. For pre-nominal alcun, (65b) proposes that it occupies the Spec of a functional projection, either NumP or DP, and licenses a null head in its projection under Spec head agreement. As a result, (65b) is expected to be possible in pre-verbal subject positions with a c-commanding negation, a correct result that derives (64). In contrast to Sardinian, the asymmetric pattern observed with a l c u n does unfortunately not extend to N-words such as nessun in Italian. Nessun indeed always occurs pre-nominally, independently of the position of its containing DP. This lack of alternation, although unrevealing, is nonetheless compatible with my proposal, as it could well encode the string vacuous movement of nessun from a Spec position to a head position, as in (66a) or from a lower head position to a higher one as in (66b): 41 (66)
a. [DP 0 [ NP nessun [ ragazzo]]] ---> [DP Nessun [NP t [ragazzo]]]] b. [DP 0 [ NumP nessun [NP ragazzo]]] ---> [DP Nessun [NUmP t [NP ragazzo]]]]
Interestingly, some asymmetry in the distribution of nessun expressions appears detectable when their structure is more complex. As shown in (66), when a nessun DP is further modified by an adjective that can be pre- or post-nominal, like bel , a contrast arises. In a post-verbal complement DP as in (66a), the adjective bel can be in either order with respect to the head noun. But when these DPs are pre-verbal subjects, as in (67b), the pre-nominal bel is preferred : 42 (67)
a. Non ho visto nessun bel ragazzo/ nessun ragazzo bello I have not seen no beautiful boy/ no boy beautiful b. Nessun bel ragazzo/?? nessun ragazzo bello ha parlato No beautiful boy/ no boy beautiful has spoken
Let us see what this contrast suggests about the structure of these DPs. The goal of course is t o derive the infelicity of post-nominal bello in pre-verbal DPs from their internal structure. Consider first cases with a pre-nominal bel. Bernstein (1993) proposed that such pre-nominal adjectives are heads. For concreteness, I will assume that a pre-nominal bel heads a NumP projection. The preceding nessun would then have to be either in the Spec of this projection as in (68a) or in the head of a higher DP projection as in (68b):43
27
(68)
a. [DP 0 [Numpnessun [ bel] [NP ragazzo]]] b [DP Nessun [NumP/FP t [bel] [NP ragazzo]]]
As the structure (68a) has a null Do which is not internally licensed, it is limited to post-verbal positions. Only (68b) with a filled Do is expected in pre-verbal positions. With these structures, a pre-nominal bel is correctly predicted to be possible both in pre and post verbal DPs, as in (67a) and (67b) respectively. Consider now cases of post-nominal bello. As above, the post-nominal adjective is base generated in Spec NP with the N moving over it, as in (69): (69)
[DP Do [NUMP nessun [ FP /Num ‘ ragazzo [NP [ ADJ bello] t ]]]] |_________________|
Movement of nessun to a higher Do position may then be precluded in (69) if nessun is needed to properly identify the null Numo head. That is, plausibly in Italian, a null Numo head cannot be adjoined to unless it is independently identified by an element in its Spec.44 This has the following consequence. In (68) above, when Numo is filled (and thus identified) by pre-nominal bel, nessun is free to remain in a specifier position or to move up into Do . With bel in Spec NP in contrast, nessun must stay in the Spec of NumP, or else N will be unable to move and the result is again a DP with a pre-nominal bel.45 But with nessun in Spec NumP, structures as (68) with a post nominal bel contain a non-internally licensed null Do and are excluded from pre-verbal subject positions. Thus the asymmetry displayed in (67) is derived. Here as well then, the licensing of a null head appears to be at the heart of this pre-verbal/post-verbal asymmetry, providing evidence for a differing structure of Italian N-expressions in pre-and post-verbal positions. (70) reflects yet another interesting asymmetry in the behavior of Italian N-words. As (70a) shows a pre-verbal subject nessuno can create a licensing context for another N-word (niente) in its modifying relative clause. But this is not possible for a post-verbal nessuno. What this asymmetry suggests is that the licensing potential of nessuno in pre-verbal and postverbal position is distinct. Assuming that it is the N-word itself and not the c-commanding negation that is responsible for the licensing of the relative clause internal N-words in (70b), it follows that the two N-words have a different semantic nature: 46 (70)
a. Nessuno che ha visto niente avra il coraggio di testimonare. No one who has seen anything will have the courage to testify b. Non conosco nessuno che sia capace di fare *niente/*nulla/??alcunche I don’t know anyone who is capable of doing nothing/anything
It is well known that existential terms do not license NPIs in the relative clause they head while universal terms can. The contrast in (70) thus suggests that Italian pre-verbal subject Nwords have a universal force that the post-verbal N-words lack. This follows on my view if the N-word in (70a) is the head of a Do projection with strong quantificational force, while in (70b), it functions as a variable with a null Do. 47 Summing up, although the distributional asymmetries found with Italian DPs are not as striking as in Sardinian, there is nevertheless suggestive evidence for distinct DP structures in the distribution of alcun and of some complex nessun expressions. My hope of course is that a deeper foray into the Italian DP structure will uncover further asymmetries of this kind, but the above evidence appear sufficient to make my syntactic hybrid approach worthy of pursuit.48 5.3.3 Asymmetries in Spanish DPs. In this section, we turn to Spanish and survey the evidence it provides that negative expressions have a hybrid nature and a distinct syntax in pre-verbal and post-verbal positions. In contrast to Italian, we find that Spanish still manifests an overt asymmetry in the distribution of its N-word ningún. As (71) shows, ningún has a 28
distribution comparable to the Sardinian N-word perunu. It can be either pre-nominal or postnominal in post-verbal complement DPs (71a &71a’). But it must be strictly pre-nominal in pre-verbal subjects DPs. To be sure, the post-nominal position of ningún is not entirely natural. To most speakers in fact, it feels rather archaic. Nevertheless, while a post-nominal ningún is relatively acceptable in post-verbal DPs, it is fully excluded in pre-verbal ones as in (71b’). Thus, despite the 'archaic' feeling evoked by post-nominal ningún, the contrast between (71a’) and (71b’) is robust, providing support for differing structures for pre-verbal and post-verbal Spanish N-words: (71)
a. No veo a ningún hombre a’. ?No veo a hombre ninguno I don’t see any man/ man any b. Ningún hombre ha llamado b’ *Hombre ninguno ha llamado 'No men have called'
Moreover, when the structure of a ningún containing DP is made more complex, a contrast akin to the one detected above in Italian is also found in Spanish. However, there are some interesting differences. With a pre-nominal ningún, an adjective like buen can occur either in pre-nominal or in post-nominal positions as in (72). There is no asymmetry. But with a postnominal ningún, buen can only occur pre-nominally and under very restricted conditions. First, it cannot have its regular meaning but must form an idiom with hombre to mean something like gentleman. Second, even under its idiomatic meaning pre-nominal buen is excluded in a pre-verbal subject DP. Thus here again, the familiar asymmetry surfaces: (72)
a. No veo a ningún (buen) hombre (bueno) I did not see any good man b. Ningún (buen) hombre (bueno) ha llamado No good men came
(72')
a. No veo a [buen hombre] ninguno b. *[Buen hombre] ninguno ha llamado
I did not see any gentleman No gentleman came
What do these facts reveal about the structure of Spanish N-words? Suppose that like perunu, Spanish ningún has the ambiguous status of an adjective and a determiner. Note that it also manifests an agreement contrast comparable to that of alcun. Agreement is overt with a postnominal adjective-like ningún but not with a pre-nominal determiner-like one. Agreeing postnominal ninguno, I take it, is generated in Spec NP with the head noun moving over it as in (73): (73) [ DPDo [ NumP/FP hombre [NP [ ADJ ninguno ] t] ]] Note that this excludes right away the option of a post-nominal bueno co-occurring with a post-nominal ninguno, as bueno presumably would have to occupy the same Spec NP position as ninguno in (73). The obligatory idiomatic reading of buen hombre in (72'a) provides in fact interesting evidence for a head movement derivation of post-nominal ninguno. Suppose as before that a pre-nominal buen is a head (Bernstein 1993). The impossibility of *buen hombre ninguno with a regular meaning suggests that pre-nominal buen may as a head block the movement of the N hombre over ninguno by occupying the head position targeted by the N movement. If so a derivation such as (74) with a regular meaning for a pre-nominal buen is excluded : (74)
[ DP Do [FP buen [NP [ADJ ninguno] hombre]]] |_____________________|
The only possibility for buen to occur with hombre before ninguno is by forming a head with the noun prior to movement over ninguno . That is if buen and hombre form a compound, then they can move together over ninguno as a single head (75), but they will of course have a 29
necessary “idiomatic” or compound reading. Otherwise pre-nominal buen blocks the head movement of hombre as in (74): (75)
[ DP Do [FP
[NP [ ADJ ninguno] buen-hombre]]] |_____________________|
In sum, the “idiomatic” reading of buen hombre in (72'a) can be predicted only if post nominal ninguno is necessarily derived from movement of No over it. Note that in the structures (74) & (75) , since we have evidence that ninguno occupies a low position in the DP, it will not be able to move over the head noun to a determiner position. Hence in DPs with post-nominal ninguno, the determiner position must remain empty correctly predicting that these will be excluded from pre-verbal subject positions. Turning now to structures with a pre-nominal ningún and a pre-nominal buen, I assume as above for Italian, that ningún is either in the Spec of the projection headed by buen or in the head of Do : a. [DP Do [FP/NumP ningún [ buen [NP hombre]]]] b. [DP ningún [FP/NumP t buen [NP hombre ]]] Finally, for the cases of pre-nominal ningún with a post nominal buen, I take buen t o be in the Spec of NP with the noun moving over it. Ningún in such structures could again be either in Spec NumP or in the head of Do : (76)
(77)
a . [DP Do [FP/NumP ningún hombre [NP [bueno] t ]]] b. [DP ningún [FP/NumP t hombre [NP [bueno] t ]]]
Since in (76b) and (77b), Do is filled through head-movement, these DPs can occur in a preverbal subject positions where they are predicted to be incompatible with overt negation. (76a) and (77b), on the other hand illustrate possible post-verbal DPs with a pre-nominal ningún and an alternating buen. It is notable that these somewhat different Spanish facts could be accounted for with essentially the same structures as their Italian counterpart. Only one difference appears relevant. We suggested above that in Italian a null NumP cannot support N adjunction if it is not independently “identified” by the presence of an overt specifier. This requirement does not seem enforced in Spanish, so post-nominal buen is compatible with a pre-nominal ningún. It may be that this difference relates to the existence of a partitive clitic ne in Italian (for Zamparelli (1996) ne is the head of NumP), and to its absence in Spanish. The important point here is that in Spanish as well, we have found evidence that negative DPs have a different internal syntax in pre and post-verbal positions, just as in Italian. To sum up, this section has provided DP internal evidence that N-words and comparable expressions in various asymmetric languages manifest distinct syntactic properties in pre-verbal subject and in post-verbal positions. This evidence proved to be sufficiently similar in all the languages considered to be expressible with parallel DP structures. Although the details of DP structure in each language may require further refinements, the reviewed evidence provides on the whole significant support for the proposal that N-expressions feature a null D in post-verbal positions and a filled D in pre-verbal subject position. In this sense, we have evidence that pre-verbal N-words have a structure comparable to those of French Nwords with a filled Do , while post-verbal N-words resemble instead those of Haitian Creole with a null Do . In the next section, we examine the properties of negative concord licensed by each type of N-expression and argue that these too provide support for a hybrid view of the properties of N-words in the asymmetric languages. 5.4 Properties of negative concord in asymmetric languages
30
Apart from the internal structure of DPs, an independent source of potential evidence for my proposal comes from the distinct type of negative concord licensed by N-words of different nature. If N-words in pre-verbal and post-verbal positions differ in their quantificational force, it is expected that the type of negative concord they license should differ too. Recall that negative concord in French and Haitian Creole show distinct properties that correlate with the different nature of their N-words (Déprez 1997). The question is whether comparable differences can be found with pre-verbal and post-verbal N-words in the asymmetric languages. This section provides supporting evidence for such a conclusion. Although rarely discussed in the literature, interesting differences can be observed in the asymmetric languages between the concord relation obtaining with negation proper and the concord relation obtaining with a pre-verbal N-word. As shown in (78) and (79) for Italian and Spanish, negation can co-occur with a variety of N-word types in post-verbal positions under a systematic negative concord reading. (78)
a. Non ho mangiato niente/nulla I haven’t eaten anything b. Non ho visto nessuno I haven’t’ seen anyone c. Non ho visto nessun studente I haven’t seen any student d. Non ho letto nessun libro d’esta lista I haven’t read any books on this list
(79)
a. No comió nada I didn’t eat anything b. No he visto a nadie/ninguno I didn’t see anyone c. No he visto a ningún estudiante I did not see any student d. Non ha leìdo ningún libro en la lista/ ninguno de los libros en la lista I haven’t read any books on the list/any of the books on the list
Of great interest therefore are the surprising contrasts observed with pre-verbal N-words. As shown in (80) for Italian (examples from Manzotti and Rigamont 1991) only some combinations of pre-verbal N-words with post-verbal ones lead to a concord reading. Others do not. Concord is readily available in standard cases like (80a) with niente or nulla, but distinctly more difficult with other N-expressions, and particularly, with N-expressions that have a more complex syntactic structure. Contrasting with (78), (80b-e) for instance are often judged unacceptable or interpreted with a double negation reading: (80)
a.
Nessuno a letto niente No one has read anything b. ?*Nessuno le ha scritto nessuna cartolina No one has written any post-card to him c. ?* Nessuno ha portato nessun regalo No one has brought any present d. ?* Nessuno studente ha letto nessun libro No student has read any book e. ?* Qui, nessuno aiuta nessuno studente Here no one helps any student
That is, concord readings between a pre-verbal subject N-word and various types of post-verbal N-words do not uniformly obtain. With negation, in contrast, they are always successful. The 31
exact same phenomenon can also be observed in Spanish. Apart from the classic case of (81a), negative concord is degraded in constructions with a pre-verbal subject N-word and various post-verbal N-words. But no such degradation arises with negation: (81)
a.
Nadie comió nada No one ate anything b. ??Nadie comió ningún pastel No one ate any pastry c. *Ningún niño comió ningún pastel No child ate any pastry d. *Ninguno de estos etudiantes leyó ninguno de estos libros None of these students have read none of these books As reported by several speakers, the reading for (81d) is one of double negation, comparable t o the English translation with two negative quantifiers: None of these students have read none of these books. That is, if felicitous at all, (81d) is interpreted with a positive meaning, where some students have read some books. Yet another interesting distinction between the two types of negative concord is reported for Spanish in Español-Echevarría (1994). As shown in (82a), post-verbal N-words with negation can be modified by casi 'almost' under a negative concord reading. This reading, however, does not obtain when the same modified N-words co-occur instead with a pre-verbal subject N-word. (82b) is a double negation, as indicated in the translation. And (82c), with a rather complex N-word in pre-verbal subject position is judged unacceptable (see EspañolEchevarria 1994,ex (24)): 49 (82) a. No he visto casi nada not have-1SG seen almost nothing I have seen almost nothing b. Nadie ha visto casi nada No one has seen almost nothing “Everybody has seen few things’ c. ?* Ninguno de mis hermanos ha visto casi nada None of my brothers has seen almost nothing Clearly, these intriguing distinctions in negative concord between cases with negation and cases with a pre-verbal subject N-words are rather unexpected if they are both assumed t o involve exactly the same type of semantic and syntactic operations. Under an approach that posits an empty negation (or NegP projection) and a process of movement to Spec Neg in all cases (Zanuttini 1991, Haegeman 1995), uniformity is expected for all these cases. On the view defended here in contrast, differing semantic effects are expected if, on the one hand, pre-verbal subject N-words have a different semantic nature than the post-verbals ones and if, on the other hand, the properties of negative concord in the former case are distinct from those of the latter case, as argued in Déprez (1997). For post-verbal N-words, since negation is always present, negative concord is similar to the Haitian Creole case, which, on Déprez (1997) view, involves unselective binding by negation. With pre-verbal N-words, in contrast, since there is on our view, no hidden sentential negation or negative head, negative concord could, in principle, be different. Negative concord involves a negation to N-word relation with post-verbal N-words. But with pre-verbal N-words, it is an N-word to N-word relation. If so, the latter case may involve pair quantifier or resumptive quantification, as suggested in Déprez (1997), a form of negative concord not available in a negation to N-word relation. Recall that these two types of negative concord are not subject to the same restrictions. N-word to N-word concord manifests an apparent parallelism requirement between N-words that does not obtains in the case of negation to N-word relation. Thus, failure of negative concord in (80) and (81) may be a consequence of this parallelism requirement on pair quantifier formation. That is, concord may be fully natural in (80a) and (82a) because the N-words are parallel in the required
32
sense, and fail in the other cases for lack of parallelism. Further pragmatic and semantic restrictions on pair quantifier formation, which are as yet ill understood, may also be involved. Clearly, further research is needed to better characterize these different types of negative concord and to sort out their potential interactions. But what is of direct interest t o us here is the fact that the non-uniformity of negative concord observed above with pre-verbal subject N-words in the asymmetric languages is quite narrowly replicated in French. As shown in (83), negative concord does not evenly succeed with all types of French N-words either. While perfect and distinctly preferred in (83a), at least under neutral intonation,50 the negative concord reading is optional in (83b), disfavored in (83c) and quite impossible in (83d), which, for some speakers, has only a double negative reading: (83) reading
a. Personne n’a rien mangé No one ate anything b. Aucunenfant n’a rien mangé
NC reading Oscillating
No child ate anything/nothing c. Personne n’a mangé aucun gateau No one ate (?? any cake)/no cake d. Aucun enfant n’a mangé aucun repas No child ate (*any meal)/no meal
NC/
DN
DN reading favored DN reading only
Naive native speakers find most of these examples (apart from (83a)) either marginal or infelicitous and assign meaning to them only with difficulty. Moreover, similar to the Spanish examples given above in (82), in classic cases such as (87a) modification of complement Nwords with presque 'almost' also leads to marginality and favors a double negation reading: (84)
a. Personne n’a presque rien mangé No one ate almost nothing = everyone ate quite a lot b. ??/*Aucun de mes cousins n’a vu presque personne
DN reading
None of my cousins saw almost no one = all of my cousin saw many people In these respects then, we see here that negative concord between French N-words presents striking similarity in its restrictions to the type of negative concord that arises with a preverbal subject N-words in the asymmetric languages. Both license negative concord nonuniformly, depending on the type of N-words they co-occur with and behave quite alike with respect to how modification affects the availability of concord. Such a similarity is expected if, as we propose, French N-words and pre-verbal N-words in the asymmetric languages are of the same nature. In contrast, non-uniform negative concord is, to my knowledge, not observed with negation and N-words in post-verbal positions or in HC, where examples comparable to (83) are understood to have a concord reading: (85)
a. Pèsonn pa manje anyen No one has eaten anything b. Okenn ti moun pa manje anyen No child has eaten anything c. Pèsonn pa manje okenn gato No one has eaten any cake d. Okenn ti moun pa manje okenn gato No child has eaten any cake
The difference here, of course, is that negation is present in all these cases. There is thus no direct concord relation between two N-words. Rather concord is here a relation between negation and a multiplicity of N-words. These all are, in Déprez (1997)'s view, instances of 33
u
n
s e l e c t i v e b i n d i n g . Further differences between negative concord with pre-verbal subject N-words and negative concord with negation can be observed in long distance contexts. Although the data are rather intricate and surely in need of further exploration, two cases contrast for at least some speakers. While negation can easily license negative concord in embedded contexts, preverbal subject N-words either fail to do so or do so only with greater difficulty. The observed difference also concerns the kind of reading permitted. While it seems possible for negation t o allow an embedded any reading, with the embedded N-word interpreted essentially like an NPI, the reading with a pre-verbal subject N-word, if the sentence is accepted at all, is more often one of double negation. Granted, it is not always easy to bring out a clear semantic difference between the two readings and the judgments are thus quite delicate. But when appropriate scenarios are constructed, native speakers are able to make judgments that go in the direction of our expectations. For the examples in (86), for instance, consider the scenario of a faculty meeting in which student progress is considered. In (86a), a case where an embedded N-word is licensed by matrix negation, Pedro is judged as an essentially lazy student who has done very little for a given class, since he has not read any of the books on the reading list. In (86b), however, where the embedded N-word is now in relation with a matrix N-word, this is no longer the case. Such a statement, if accepted at all, implies rather that no one believes that Pedro has read none of the book on the list. That is, in everyone’s view, Pedro has not been utterly lazy, as he has read at least some of the books on the list. The same is true of (86c). (86)
a. No creo que Pedro haya leído ningún libro en la lista I don’t believe that Pedro has read any book on the list b. (??)Nadie cree que Pedro haya leído ningún libro en la lista51 No one believes that Pedro has read (??any )/no books on the list c. (*)Ningún profesor cree que Pedro haya leído ningún libro en la lista No professor believes that Pedro has read any book on the list
These examples show that while a long distance negative concord reading is possible with negation, it is much harder and sometimes impossible with a pre-verbal subject N-word. The difference observed between these examples recalls in fact the difference observed by Déprez (1997) between the bounded character of negative concord in French and the unbounded character of negative concord in Haitian Creole. As far as I have been able to assess, it would appear that long distance negative concord with negation in the asymmetric languages resembles Haitian Creole unbounded negative concord in being essentially like NPI dependencies. Bosque (1980) observed, for instance, that long distance negative concord is possible in Spanish inside wh-islands as in (87). Thus Spanish negative concord with negation, like the HC type of negative concord (see section 3) appears to be insensitive to wh-islands: (87)
No sé qué dijo nadie I don’t know what anyone said
As Bosque noted, embedded wh-questions are in fact the only embedded contexts in which long distance negative concord is possible with non-subjunctive verbs.52 Further evidence that negative concord licensed by negation in Spanish can be immune to island effects is given in (88), an adjunct island context: (88) 36)
Juan no hizo ese trabajo para ayudar a nadie
(Español-Echebarria 1994 ex
John didn’t do this job to help anyone
But note that in such island contexts, modification by casi is impossible. In these contexts, Nwords clearly have properties that are closer to those of NPIs:
34
(89)
?*Juan no hizo esse trabajo para ayudar a casi nadie (E-E (94) ex 40b) John didn’t do this job to help almost anyone Comparable facts about modification also obtain for Haitian N-words in embedded contexts (see Déprez (1997)) as well as in Italian. As in Spanish and HC, modification of an Italian Nword by quasi is possible with a clausemate negation, but not when negation is in a distinct (matrix) clause. More precisely, modification by quasi fails if the N-words bear normal stress (90a). But it becomes acceptable when the N-words are stressed as in (90b). In this latter case, however, the N-words are interpreted with double negation and not with concord: 53 (90)
a. Non credo que tu abbia comprato (*quasi) nessun libro I don’t believe that you have bought (*almost) any book b. Non credo que tu abbia comprato QUASI NESSUN libro I don’t believe that you have bough ALMOST NO books
To recap, the evidence reviewed in this subsection reveal an intriguing parallelism between the type of negative concord found with pre-verbal subject N-words in the asymmetric languages and the type of negative concord found with French N-words. In particular, it was shown that both are subject to an apparent parallelism requirement between concording expressions. Evidence of common features between the type of negative concord found with post-verbal N-words in the asymmetric languages and the type of negative concord found in Haitian Creole were also found. In particular, we have seen that both seem insensitive to the type of N-word involved and that both manifest parallel differences between clause internal and long distance negative concord. While it is clear that much further study is needed t o elucidate their source, these parallelisms nevertheless provide interesting confirmation for our proposal that N-words in the asymmetric languages have hybrid properties that mirrors those found in the symmetric languages French and Haitian Creole. 5.4 Summary In sum, this section has established that there are significant differences between preverbal N-words and post-verbal ones in the asymmetric languages, both in regard to their internal DP structure and in regard to the type of negative concord they allow. As far as I have been able to assess, the properties of pre-verbal N-words in the asymmetric languages essentially mirror those of French, while the properties found with post-verbal N-words are parallel to those observed in Haitian Creole. While such differences are expected my view, since asymmetric pre-verbal and post-verbal N-words are structurally and semantically distinct, they are surprising for approaches that consider N-words as uniform and subject to identical syntactic and semantic conditions in all syntactic positions (Zanuttini 1991, Haegeman 1995, among others). I thus take the evidence reviewed above to provide support for a hybrid view of N-words in the asymmetric languages and for the proposed structural difference between post-verbal N-words and pre-verbal N-words and its semantic reflection. 6. N-words and bare NPs: similarities and differences Having drawn a detailed picture of the syntax of N-words in the asymmetric Romance languages, we are now finally in a position to address their parallelism with bare nominals and to explore a principled explanation of their common asymmetric distribution. We begin with a discussion of the structure of bare nominals and suggest that, in contrast to N-words, Romance strictly bare nominals do not feature a null Do . Rather, they lack a DP layer altogether. This proposal will lead us to abandon the Longobardi-Contreras ECP account of their distributional asymmetry and to propose a new analysis in terms of checking of the EPP feature within Chomsky’s 1995 Minimalist model.
35
6.1 The structure of bare NPs An influential proposal made by Longobardi (1994) is that all nominal arguments must project a DP. As a consequence of this proposal, strictly bare nominals arguments have often been assumed to project a null Do . Should this view be correct, then the distributional parallelism observed above with N-words is hardly surprising. Since N-words have been argued to also contain a null determiner, the expectation is that both expressions should be excluded in positions that do not license them. For N-words, however, it was also argued that null Do can get filled under a last resort DP internal head movement. If bare nominals contain a null Do , the question arises as to whether they allow a comparable option. As we will see however, this possibility does not appear available for strictly bare nominals54 . Consequently, either head movement to Do must be restricted, or strictly bare nominals and N-words must be assumed t o have different structures. My arguments here will favor this second option. In section 1 and 2 we have focused on the distributional similarities of N-words and bare nominals. The fact is, however, that in the asymmetric languages, there are also interesting differences in the behavior of these expressions. First, it is well known that Romance N-words are ambiguous between two readings, a universal reading and an existential one (Zanuttini 1991, Laka 1990 among many others), and that this ambiguity essentially follows the pattern exemplified in the co-distribution of negation. Just as well known, is the fact no comparable ambiguity seems to be available for strictly bare nominals in Romance . As has been often noted (Longobardi 1994, Mc Nally 1995),55 Romance bare nominals differ from the Germanic ones in failing to allow a (definite) generic reading, genericity in Romance being most naturally expressed with a definite determiner: (91)
*Castori build dams Beavers build dams
As shown in (92), moreover, even when, under particular circumstances (see below), bare nominals can occur in pre-verbal positions, they can still maintain an existential interpretation: (92)
Vaste foresti tropicali furono distrutte dal cataclisma Large tropical forest were destroyed by the cataclism
On my view, the fact that Romance bare nominals manifest no semantic ambiguity comparable to the universal/existential shift observed with N-words suggests that they do not have an ambiguous syntax. That is, they must lack the DP-internal head movement here taken to be at the root of the N-words' ambiguity. Another interesting difference between bare nominals and N-words concerns their respective distribution in fronted positions. We have seen that bare nominals are excluded from pre-verbal subject positions under unmarked intonation.56 But as illustrated here in (93), it is rather well known that they can occur in fronted pre-verbal positions when receiving contrastive stress. There is, thus, a clear distinction for bare nominals between unstressed preverbal subject positions and fronted positions (Suñer 1982). Notably, however, in these fronted positions, bare nominals maintain an existential interpretation (Casielles 1996): (93)
a. ESTUDIANTES no creo que vengan Students, I don’t think will come b. CAFE no creo que haya Coffee I don’t think there is c. ACQUA ho preso dalla sogente Water, I took from the spring d. MARROCINI incontro sempre in quest’ufficio Moroccans, I always meet in this office 36
Contreras (1986)
Longobardi (1994)
As reported in the literature (Zanuttini 1991, Haegeman 1995), N-words, in contrast, appear to behave essentially alike in subject and fronted pre-verbal positions. In both cases, they can receive a strong universal like interpretation, they can license other N-words in post-verbal positions and they are incompatible with overt sentential negation under a concord reading: (94)
Niente ho detto (Zanuttini 1991) Nothing I have said A nessuno Gianni (*non) dice niente (Haegeman 1995) To no one Gianni Gianni non says nothing
On my view, these facts suggest that in fronted positions, N-words have a filled Do and intrinsic quantificational force.57 For bare nominals, however, there is no evidence that this is ever possible as fronted bare nominals are interpreted existentially (Casielles 1996):58 That substitution into Do should not be allowed for Romance bare nominals is also a conclusion reached by Longobardi (1994). He proposes a Minimalist account that aims at limiting N to D raising to LF. He argues that head movement in bare nominals with null D is associated with a generic reading and is possible at LF only in the Germanic languages. Its impossibility in Romance is seen as a consequence of the fact that DP internal movement must take place by Spell Out in these grammars. Longobardi’s assumptions are that Do is generally strong in Romance and weak in Germanic and that “checking” of an null Do can be satisfied either if Do gets interpreted as an existential quantifier ranging over N or N raises into Do triggering a generic interpretation. These assumptions succeed in explaining why N to D raising is not required for Romance bare nominals. As Do is strong in Romance, checking must occur by Spell Out. For a null Do , checking can be satisfied through existential quantification, and once chosen, this option prevents further covert LF raising, as no checking remains to be done. Consequently, Romance bare nominals are interpreted existentially. Although compatible with my perspective, Longobardi’s restrictions on head movement for bare nominals nevertheless present a number of shortcomings. First, his proposal leaves unclear why N to D raising by Spell Out is not a possible option to check the strong feature of a Romance null Do . Longobardi invokes Economy, but the extent to which an interpretative strategy which involves the introduction of an existential quantifier at Spell Out, can be said to be more economical than N to Do raising is unclear. This strategy also makes a non-trivial extension of the notion of checking to a non- syntactic operation -- i.e. the insertion of an existential quantifier -- that raises unresolved interface questions with regards t o interpretation.59 Finally, since it aims at preventing all raising into null Do in Romance DPs, the proposal is clearly too strong for our purposes as it would also prevent head movement by Spell Out in N-words and predict that they too should only have an existential interpretation.60 A plausible alternative solution to distinguish N-words and bare nominal would be t o assume that they have a distinct syntactic structure. Suppose for example that only N-words have a null determiner, while bare nominals in contrast project no DP at all, being structurally truly “bare NPs” as in (97b): (97)
a. post-verbal Romance N-words : b. post-verbal Romance bare nominals:
[ DP 0 [NP N-words]] [ NP Nouns]
A comparable proposal was previously made for Spanish bare nominals by Lois (1985) and Casielles (1996). I am here simply extending this proposal to the other asymmetric languages with similar bare NPs. The strongest drawback of (97b) appears to be that it contradicts Longobardi’s generalization about argument DPs. There seems, however, to be a rather simple way out. It was proposed by Mc Nally (1995) that Spanish bare NPs are interpreted more as “properties” than as arguments. Assuming this “property” analysis to be generally possible for bare nominals in the asymmetric languages, then Longobardi’s (1994) generalization can 37
perhaps be maintained in a more restricted version that would take into account the predicative rather then the argument nature of bare nominals. (97b) then, has the advantage of preserving a straightforward mapping between the syntactic structure of these nominal expressions and their semantic interpretation. 61 As the lowest projection of the nominal structure, strictly bare NPs have no quantificational force and are interpreted as predicates. From my perspective, the structural proposal in (97) has a number of advantages. T o begin with, it trivially predicts the head movement differences between Romance N-words and strictly bare nominals. Romance N-words can move into a Do because they have one, but Romance bare nominals cannot, because they lack a Do head to move into. (97) thus provides a simple account for their lack of semantic ambiguity. If as proposed by Longobardi (1994), the generic interpretation is triggered by head movement, then Romance bare nominals having no Do are predicted to lack this reading.62 N-words, in contrast, will continue to be semantically ambiguous, having or lacking intrinsic quantificational force on the basis of whether or not they have undergone internal head movement into Do . (97) accounts for yet another distinction between N-words and bare nominals. Should the latter have a null Do it would be unclear why only N-words require the presence of an overt syntactic binder. With (97), the answer can be straightforward: constituents with null Do require an overt binder, others do not. Apparently, then, (97) quite naturally captures a number of properties of bare nominals. As we will see below, it has also positive consequences for their external distribution. From my perspective, however, it raises the question of why N-words and bare nominals, if structurally distinct, should ever manifest a parallel distribution. With (97), indeed, the observed parallelism between N-words and bare nominals no longer follows from a shared internal structure. Thus an ECP account of their asymmetric distribution, while perhaps still plausible for N-words, clearly makes incorrect predictions for bare nominals. It may seem, at this point, that there is an almost equivalent trade off in opting for either of the competing structures considered here for Romance bare nominals. If they have a null Do , then their parallelism to N-words and their asymmetric distribution is straightforward. But problems arise in preventing DP internal head movement in a principled manner. If they have no DP layer, then the properties relating to their lack of head movement follow but it is their asymmetric distribution and their parallel with N-words that is then mysterious. In the next section, this trade off is argued to be more apparent than real. Once the parallelism in the distribution of Nwords and bare nominals is accounted for without recourse to “government” or the ECP, it becomes apparent that (97) presents a number of empirical advantages. 6.2 A Minimalist account of the parallel asymmetric distribution One salient respect in which Chomsky’s Minimalist framework differs from the Principles and Parameters model is in giving up the theoretical notion of “government”. In the context of this shift away from “government”, a Longobardi/ Contreras ECP style account of the asymmetric distribution of bare nominal and N-words looses much of its attraction. For mere theoretical coherence then, an alternative approach to the asymmetric distribution of Romance bare nominals is desirable. But as this section shows, expressing the appropriate constraint in Minimalist terms goes beyond formal coherence: it also has positive empirical consequences. The alternative analysis developed here makes crucial use of Chomsky’s (1995) reformulation of the Extended Projection Principle in terms of the checking of a D feature. Its core idea is that, in the asymmetric languages, certain kinds of nominal expressions are not fit to check the EPP feature and thus cannot occur in pre-verbal positions. As this account has consequences for other EPP checking languages, it raises potential questions for languages in which bare nominals have a symmetric distribution . The section will briefly discuss possible parametrizations that makes our account compatible with the cross-linguistic facts. But a detailed consideration of the general cross-linguistic conditions on bare nominals is beyond the scope of this paper.
38
6.2.1 Pre-verbal positions and the EPP We begin with the asymmetric languages. As pointed out in section 5, these languages manifest a requirement for a filled Do in pre-verbal subject DPs, which is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the behavior of Sardinian DPs. The key idea here is that this requirement is a reflection of the necessity for pre-verbal subjects to check the EPP feature. As proposed by Chomsky (1995), EPP can involve the checking of a D feature. Within this perspective, it is rather natural to propose that in contrast to constituents with a filled Do , constituents headed by a null determiner are in some sense “too weak” to perform this EPP checking. Suppose for concreteness that what we have so far informally described as a “null Do” is in fact a null head that lacks a categorial D feature.63 It will follow that constituents headed by such null heads are unable to check the D feature of EPP. If so, derivations in which these constituents are moved to a pre-verbal EPP checking position will crash because the EPP feature remains unchecked. Consequently, only constituents that have a categorial D feature will be able t o occuppy pre-verbal subject positions. This much suffices to set the stage of my account. Let us now flesh out further details. 64 Suppose that in the asymmetric languages, N-words with the structure (57) contain a null head that lacks a D feature. The consequences are as follows. Assuming that the EPP feature is strong in the relevant languages (Torrego 1998, among others), these N-words will be unable to check it, and will fail to occupy a pre-verbal subject position. Whether this “preverbal subject position” is labeled Spec AgrP, TP or IP is of little relevance to us, as nothing here hinges on any of these labels. The only point essential to the proposal is that this position be the one in which the EPP is checked. 65 As for the N-words with a filled Do in (56), suppose, in contrast, that they do qualify as “strong” enough to check the EPP feature. This will be the case for instance, if their functional head contains some feature, say a phi feature,66 checked under head movement and there is an implicational relationship between the checking of this feature and a categorial D feature.67 The occurrence in pre-verbal subject positions of these N-words is predicted as the EPP D feature can now be checked. However, as head movement into Do suppresses the null Do , the semantic nature of these expressions is affected. They now have intrinsic quantificational force and no longer require or allow the co-presence of negation. Hence the observed incompatibility between pre-verbal subject N-words and negation in the asymmetric languages is derived. As is of course desirable, the present EPP checking proposal also accounts for the asymmetric distribution of Romance bare nominals, and does so, notably, independently of their ultimate syntactic structure. If, Romance bare nominals have a null determiner (Longobardi 1994), they would be excluded from pre-verbal subject positions as long as this null head lacks a categorial D feature. If , as assumed here on the other hand, Romance bare nominals have no DP layer, they will also fail to check the D feature of EPP. Consequently, derivations in which “truly” bare NPs occur in EPP checking positions will crash. On this perspective, bare nominals fail to occur as pre-verbal subjects not because they have an ungoverned null Do , but because they are intrinsically unable to check EPP for lack of an appropriate D projection. What they share then with null headed N-words is that both nominal expressions lack an appropriate D feature to check the EPP. But in my view, this lack is encoded differently. With Romance N-words on the one hand, the null determiner projection lacks a D feature. With Romance strictly bare nominals on the other hand, the DP projection is missing altogether. We have reached at this point a rather simple account of the parallel asymmetric distribution of N-words and bare nominals. Both expressions fail to occur in pre-verbal subject positions simply because they lack the ability to check the EPP. But an obvious question that arises on this account is how the asymmetric languages can be distinguished from the symmetric ones. If symmetric languages are also EPP-checking languages, as seems to be the case for HC (Déprez 1994), my proposal appears at this point to predict that bare nominals and expressions headed by a null Do should be banned from pre-verbal subject positions in these languages as well. This is evidently the wrong result. Clearly, bare nomimals can be pre-verbal 39
subjects in many languages and, as argued above for Haitian Creole at least, so can subject Nwords containing a null D. As it now stands then, the proposal is too strong. Within our set of assumptions, there are at least two options for amending this situation. The first option is t o parametrize the EPP and the second one, to parametrize the structure of bare nominals. I’ll briefly consider each in turn, but arriving at a final decision, as in depth consideration of the general cross-linguistic distribution of bare nominals and null determiners lies beyond the scope of this paper. Besides the strong/weak opposition standard in Minimalist accounts, parametrization of the EPP could involve the nature of the feature being checked. In Chomsky (1995), it is proposed that EPP involves the checking of either a D or an N feature. This dual possibility could easily be parametrized. Let us assume then that EPP-checking can involve a D feature in some languages, and an N feature in other languages and furthermore that the division is by and large located along the lines of the pro-drop/rich agreement parameter. Within the generative tradition, rich agreement has long been conceived as implying a “pronominal” nature (Chomsky 1981) and “pronouns” have in turn been thought to share categorial properties with determiners (Postal (1969)). Thus the proposal that rich agreement languages should be associated with the checking of a D feature seems rather natural. For languages with poor agreement on the other hand, EPP could involve the checking of an N feature. The relevant consequence for my proposal is that in languages where an N feature is sufficient to check the EPP, bare nominals can satisfy this checking without a DP layer. Should such a language feature expressions that are strictly bare NPs, the prediction is now that they should be possible in pre-verbal subject positions. EPP checking should also be successful for nominal constituents with null determiners if the N feature of their projection is visible, as would presumably be the case if a DP-internal movement brings the nominal projection within the checking domain of the null D under Spec head agreement as in HC. In these N-EPP checking languages then, bare NP nominals and empty headed N-words with internal checking will be able to occupy pre-verbal subject positions. The reader can verify that this parametrization maintains our current results for asymmetric languages and correctly predicts the possible occurrence of pre-verbal bare nominals in EEP checking languages with poor agreement, such as English, German, Haitian Creole68 and the French based creoles. The second option involves parametrizing the structure of bare nominals. That is, although I have argued that in Romance, bare nominals lack a DP layer altogether, it may well be that in other languages they do project a DP with a null Do . There is, here as well, a rather natural motivation for this parametrization. We have seen above that Romance strictly bare nominals lack a generic interpretation, which both the French based creoles (cf. 15b above) and the Germanic bare nominals allow. If following Longobardi (1994), LF head movement into Do is the trigger for this interpretation and if this movement requires that DP be projected, then this interpretational difference may simply coincide with the parametrized structure: bare nominals with a null determiner can have a generic reading; truly bare NPs with no DP layer cannot. Furthermore, if null Ds in these languages contain a categorial D feature, then EPP on this option may involve checking of a D feature in all relevant languages and still be checkable by these bare nominals and by N-words with a null D. These expressions will then be able to occur in the pre-verbal subject positions of the relevant languages. 69 In sum, I have entertained two rather simple possibilities for languages to allow preverbal subject bare nominals. Such languages may either check the EPP differently or they may have a different structure for their bare nominals. The first option essentially predicts that in languages with poor agreement and bare nominals, the latter should be allowed as pre-verbal subjects. The second option predicts that languages with bare nominals as pre-verbal subjects should also be languages in which bare nominals can express genericity. Either one of these possible parametrizations appears empirically well motivated and suffices to ensure the possible occurrence of bare nominals and N-words with null Do in the pre-verbal subject positions of the relevant languages. But a detailed study that could motivate a choice between these two options lies beyond the scope of this paper. I will thus simply leave the choice open, noting that, ultimately, it may well be that the correct solution lies in a combination of the two. For our 40
more limited goals here, the important point is that my alternative EPP account be able t o correctly derive the lack of bare nominals in the pre-verbal subject positions of asymmetric languages without enforcing this result universally. This much has been accomplished. 6.2.2 Some empirical consequences of the EPP account Returning to asymmetric languages, we are now in a position to show that the EPP account has interesting empirical consequences for the more fine-grained distribution of bare nominals and N-words in the asymmetric languages. Three empirical facts which have traditionally been difficult to capture under the Contreras/Longobardi ECP perspective can receive an elegant account in my proposed alternative. These concern the possibility of fronting bare nominals to pre-verbal non-subject positions, the distribution of bare nominals in PPs and the possible occurrence of certain more complex bare nominals in pre-verbal subject positions. Let us consider each of these cases in turn. Recall that as shown above, bare nominals in the asymmetric Romance languages can be fronted to some pre-verbal positions when contrastively stressed. Relevant examples are repeated here: (98)
a. ESTUDIANTES no creo que vengan Students, I don’t think will come b. ACQUA ho preso dalla sorgente Water, I took from the spring
Contreras (1986) Longobardi (1994)
On an ECP account, this possibility was problematic as it is clear that these positions are not properly governed. In my view, however, if, as is likely, fronting does not involve the checking of a D feature, -- i.e. fronting is not here motivated by the EPP -- then bare nominals are predicted. 70 Suppose for instance that fronting requires the checking of a lexical categorial feature. Then (98) is not surprising, as the categorial N-feature of bare NPs will be sufficient for the relevant checking. Consider in contrast the case of N-words. Recall that N-words in such fronted positions appear to be essentially parallel to those in pre-verbal subject positions. On our view, this implies that they have a structure in which their Do position is filled. I have suggested above that N-words with a null head lack a categorial D feature. Suppose that the presence of this dominating null head further has the effect of preventing access to the categorial N feature of the N-word. Then fronting of N-words will be possible only if the N-categorial feature is somehow made accessible for checking. On independent grounds, Déprez (1998) motivated the Feature Accessibility Constraint in (99), which states that a feature is accessible for Move/Attract only if it is part of the top structural layer of the relevant projection. (99) head of
Feature Accessibility Condition (FAC) (Déprez 1998) F is accessible to Move/Attract only if F is a feature in the checking domain of the the minimal pied-piped XP
Within the present context, this constraint has the effect of enforcing internal head movement in N-words to make a categorial feature visible for fronting. Without this movement, fronting of N-words could not occur, as they would simply fail to be “visible” for Attraction by the relevant pre-verbal functional projection (Top, Foc …see Rizzi 1995). (99) thus correctly predicts that only N-words with the structure in (56) can occur in pre-verbal fronted positions. Note that this account has implications for the structure of bare nominals. To be specific, if the categorial feature of bare NPs is to be visible for Move/Attract, then it must be that no layer of functional structure dominates it.71 This will be true only if as I have proposed bare nominals are truly “bare” NPs.
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With the proposed structural difference in (97), my proposal can account for the distributional parallelism of bare nominals and N-words in pre-verbal subject positions, as well as for their diverging behavior under fronting. The distinction here follows from a difference in the nature of the feature checked in each of these positions and from condition (99). As the pre-verbal subject position requires checking of a D feature for EPP, “truly” bare NPs are excluded from these positions. But no problem arises for fronting if checking involves a lexical categorial feature. As for N-words, since their empty head lacks both a functional categorial feature (D) and a lexical categorial feature, internal head movement is required in both cases t o satisfy the relevant feature checking. The second empirical domain for which my EPP account presents an advantage concerns the occurrence of bare NPs as complements of prepositions. In the government approach, the occurrence of bare nominals in these positions presupposed that Romance prepositions are “proper governors” for Do . This presupposition, however, conflicted with what was observed with extraction facts. Since extraction from the complement of prepositions (i.e. preposition stranding) is uniformly excluded in Romance, prepositions are often assumed to lack proper government capacity. No such conflicting assumptions are needed in the EPP account. As EPP is not checked in the complement of prepositions, bare NPs, and N-words with null Do , are expected to be possible. A third puzzling fact in the distribution of bare nominals concerns their distribution in pre-verbal subject positions. As discussed above, strictly bare nominals are generally excluded from pre-verbal subject positions in Romance. Somewhat surprisingly, however, the conjunction of two such bare nominals is quite generally accepted. (99) a. viejos y niños escuchaban con atención sus palabras Contreras (1986) Old people and children have listened with attention to his words b . c a n ie g a t t si i e r a n og i aaddormentati Longobardi (1994) dog and cate have already fallen asleep As it is difficult to see how conjunction could affect the “proper government” status of a null D, facts such as (99) have remained mysterious given an ECP account. Within the EPP alternative, however, this rather surprising fact can easily be accounted for. Assume with Kayne (1994), that in coordinated structures, the conjunction is the head of the constituent as in (100). Since conjunctions have a syntactic status close to that of determiners, they can quite plausibly be assumed to have a categorial D feature. If so, conjoined bare nominals should be able to check the EPP, which predicts that they will be felicitous in pre-verbal subject position: 72 (100) ConjP = + D NP Cani
Conj’ e
NP
It thus appears that besides its formal compatibility with the Minimalist Program, the EPP proposal developed here has empirical advantages over an ECP account, notably for the distribution of bare nominals in pre-verbal positions. 73 The proposed account also has different implications for post-verbal N-words. Contrary to the ECP approach, the EPP account imposes no particular syntactic condition on a null Do besides the requirement of being properly bound (i.e. m-commanded) by a relevant operator to satisfy FI. Thus N-words with null Do s are of course allowed in complement positions but they should also be allowed in positions that are not so clearly properly governed. That this is indeed the case is shown by examples like (101), where the post-verbal subject position is arguably not lexically governed.
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(101)
'Non ha mangiato la torta nessun bambino/nessuno'74 Not has eaten the tart no child/noone
An important question that arises for post-verbal positions in this account is whether they allow N-words with a filled Do . It was suggested in section 5.1 that, in the asymmetric languages, movement into Do is only a “rescue” process that does not take place in post-verbal positions for reasons of Economy. But how Economy comes into play in the present account has yet to be spelled out . We turn to this task in the next subsection. 6.3 Post-verbal N-words : Economy and last resort In this section, the consequences of my proposal for N-words in post-verbal positions are considered and a more technical characterization of the Economy condition pertinent t o their distribution is sketched. I consider the empirical limitations on N-words with filled Do in these positions and a formulation of the constraints on DP internal head movement that enable their derivation. Let us first consider the empirical consequences of movement into Do for post-verbal N-words. Since N-words with a filled Do are incompatible with overt negation, allowing head movement in post-verbal N-words predicts that they should be able to occur at least in some cases without an accompanying negation. The question then is, are such examples possible and if not, how can this impossibility be derived in the present account. Let us first survey the empirical evidence. As reported in various places in the literature, post-verbal N-words without a negation appear to be possible at least in some informal Italian registers. Ladusaw (1992, fn. 10) for one, notes that contrary to the predictions of his analysis of negative concord, sentences such as (102) are possible in the informal register of one of his informant (A. Zucchi): (102)
Mario ha visto nessuno Mario has seen noone Ha telefonato nessuno Noone has called Similarly, Bernini and Ramat (1996) note that “The reduction of NEG2 (concord) to NEG3 (single negation) in sentences of the type exemplified in (7) [here 103] is typical of substandard, colloquial and popular varieties (particularly in the North)” (p 21). (103) Ma c’ era niente da fare but there was nothing to do Seppi nulla fino a che andai a casa I knew nothing before I came home Politicamente erano niente Politically, they are nothing These authors even go as far as asserting that these are “constructions consistently attested at a non-literary level, particularly in northern Italy” (p 21). In Spanish, attested examples of post-verbal N-words without an accompanying negative term are provided in Herburger (1996). (104) ...dije bajito a nadie que todo era mio I said softly to no one that everything was mine Se lo conte exactamente A NADIE I told it exactly to noone I conclude from this evidence that the occurrence of N-words with a filled Do in post-verbal positions is not systematically excluded. However, it is also undeniable that this possibility, 43
apart from dialectal or register variation, has a rather marked status. Thus, freely allowing Nwords will a filled Do to occur in post-verbal positions will not account for this marked status. This is where, I suggest, Economy considerations can come into play. I have proposed that N-words with filled Ds are derived under DP-internal head movement checking a phi-feature, an interpretable feature in Chomsky (1995) of the kind that allow but does not require checking. In terms of global Economy, all other things being equal, a derivation with a filled D-N-word is more costly than a derivation with an unraised null D N-word. The former involves an additional movement operation that the latter lacks. For pre-verbal (subject) positions, as a derivation with unraised N-words simply crashes, the more costly derivation with the raised N-word can win out. That is, Economy considerations do not come into play here, simply because there is only one convergent derivation. The relevant Economy cases then are the post-verbal positions. The situation there, however, appears at first somewhat complicated by the fact that besides having distinct structure for N-words, examples with post-verbal raised N-words such as (102) also differ from the more regular cases by the absence of overt negation. An Economy story thus seems to have to compare derivations that contain distinct lexical items i.e. distinct numerations, with or without an overt negation. This kind of comparison, however, is excluded in most current approaches t o Economy, where only derivations with identical numerations can be compared (Chomksy 1995). This apparent problem however, can be avoided if following Laka (1990), all sentences are assumed to equally project a functional projection GP that can be spelled out positively, with no overt marker, or negatively with a negation marker. On this view, the numerations for the sentences in (102) and the regular cases with negation are equal: both contain a GP head whose spell out is indifferent from the point of view of syntax. When N-words have the structure (57) with a null Do , binding is required and, on a par with all accounts of NPIs, we may assume that the null Do of N-words require a binder with specific semantic properties (antiaddicity, .... or downward entailingness). In this view, a derivation in which ZP is spelt out as positive will fail interpretation unless some other operator present in the numeration can satisfy the semantic requirement for the N-words. A derivation in which ZP is spelt out as negative, on the other hand, will automatically succeed. This derivation, moreover, is the least costly option, as it does not entail any internal movement in the N-word. Derivations in which N-words have the structure (56) with a filled Do and an internal head movement will thus be appropriately disfavored for reasons of Economy. They involve one more operation than the unmarked neg + unraised N-word cases, and thus cannot win out when all other things are kept equal. This proposal thus correctly accounts for the unmarked status of the regular cases of negation + post-verbal N-words in the asymmetric languages. It further predicts that for any languages that have comparable dual possibilities for its N-words, the pattern of negation + null D N-words will be the least marked option for post-verbal positions. Thus on this view, cases like (102) are appropriately conceived as marked options. The fact that they are possible at all suggests that in the relevant dialects or registers, Do may be in the course of being reanalyzed as containing a strong morphological feature which enforces obligatory internal head movement of N-words as in French. For other cases, such as the Spanish ones, it may be that the internal head movement is motivated by semantic considerations, which, as proposed by Fox (1995) for example, may override Economy to produce a specific meaning not derivable otherwise. 75 Leaving the complex consequences of these suggestions for future research, the important point for our present concern is that the regular cases of negation + unraised N-word is appropriately favored by Economy considerations. 6.4 Summary In this section, I have proposed a new account of the distribution of N-words in the asymmetric languages and shown that this account also derives the asymmetric distribution of bare nominals. In this account, both expressions lack the categorial D feature that they would
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need to check the EPP and consequently they cannot occur in pre-verbal subject positions. In post-verbal positions, as EPP checking is not required, both bare nominals and N-words with a null D are straightforwardly allowed. I have argued, moreover, that N-words with a filled Do are disfavored in these positions for reasons of Economy. As they feature an additional internal movement, derivations that contain raised N-words in post-verbal positions are more costly than derivations that contain unraised N-words with a null Do . Consequently, raised N-words are predicted to occur only when Economy considerations can somehow be overridden by morphological change or, perhaps, by semantic considerations.
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7. Conclusions and further typological considerations This paper has discussed different negative concord languages, in which a parallelism in the distribution of N-words and bare nominals was observed. In French, N-words can never cooccur with overt negation under a concord reading and, correlatively, bare nominals are impossible in argument positions. In HC, N-words require the co-presence of negation in all positions and, correlatively, bare nominals are possible in arguments positions. In the asymmetric Romance languages considered here, N-words asymmetrically require the copresence of negation in post-verbal positions, but not in pre-verbal positions and, correlatively, bare nominals are asymmetrically possible in post-verbal positions but not in pre-verbal subject positions. I have proposed that these differences are conditioned by general syntactic constraints on DP syntax in these respective languages, which influence the internal structure of N-words and bare nominals and their interaction with the EPP. For N-words, I have argued that distinct options reflect various syntactic licensing for a null Do under XP movement to Spec DP or Xo movement into Do . The table in (105) summarizes the proposals made and their consequences: (105) Different ways of licensing null Ds in N-words French: D= filled [ DP N-word [NP t ]] |_______|
Xo movement to D ( substitution) (obligatory) + Q-force * Neg + N-word
Haitian Creole: D = empty [ DP [NP N-word ] [Do 0] t ] |____________|
XP movement to Spec D (obligatory) -Q-force Neg + N-word
Asymmetric Romance languages: Complement N-words: D = empty [ DP [ Do 0] [NP N-word]]
Do incorporates into lexical head -Q-force Neg + N-word
Subject N-words : D = filled [ DP N-word [NP t ]] |_______|
Xo movement to D (substitution) (Last resort) + Q-force *Neg + N-word
French exemplifies N-words with a strong Do in which movement of N to Do is systematic and obligatory, so that Do always ends up lexically filled and correlatively, these expressions have intrinsic quantificational force and disallow co-occurrence with negation. Comparable constraints are responsible for the lack of bare nominals with a null Do in this language. Haitian Creole on the contrary, features N-words where Do remains null and is internally licensed by the movement of NP to Spec DP. Correlatively, N-words have no quantificational force and the co-presence of negation is required to bind the null Do variable. The same internal licensing possibility predicts a uniform distribution for bare nominal with a null Do . The asymmetric Romance languages discussed here exemplify a hybrid case in which N-words with a null Do occur in post-verbal positions, and N-words with a filled Do occur in pre-verbal (subject) positions. The two are related by a process of Economically costly internal head movement which eliminates the null Do and can be enforced by the EPP or by the checking of a categorial feature (i.e the fronting cases). Correlatively, the post-verbal Nwords with a null Do have no quantificational force and require negation. And the pre-verbal N-
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words with a filled Do have intrinsic quantificational force and cannot co-occur with negation under a concord reading. Bare nominals in these languages have been argued to lack a DP layer altogether. Like N-words with a non-internally licensed null Do , they lack the ability to check the D feature of EPP and cannot occupy pre-verbal positions. Given the typological array that my proposal carves out, further options that are yet unexplored seem theoretically possible. I have assumed that in HC, Do is uniformly licensed under movement to Spec DP. To my knowledge, indeed, HC presents no evidence of a structural asymmetry in the distribution of its nominal expressions that would support a “last resort” view of movement to Spec DP, enforced only for pre-verbal expressions in this language. The possibility, however, remains open for other languages. That is, it could be that in yet another negative concord language movement to Spec DP is a “last resort” operation which takes place only for pre-verbal N-words. Such a language should manifest an homogeneous distribution of its N-words with respect to negation, since movement to Spec DP does not suppress null D. That is both pre-verbal and post-verbal N-words should contain a null Do and should uniformly require the co-presence of negation. Superficially then, such a language would look like HC for the distribution of its N-words. Differences, however, should arise in the distribution of other nominal expressions where the familiar asymmetric distribution could surface. As described in Gianakidou (1997), Greek could perhaps exemplify this option. As shown in (106) and (107), Greek N-words uniformly require the presence of negation in both pre-verbal and post-verbal positions, 76 but the familiar pre-verbal/post-verbal asymmetry is manifest in the distribution of its bare nominals. For Greek N-words to undergo a last resort movement to Spec DP appears, moreover, to fit the parametric options of Greek DP syntax, since as argued by Androstopoulou (1995), there is independent evidence for the possible movement of NP to Spec DP in Greek DPs: Greek N-words: (106) Complement position a. Den ida kanenas plousio. NEG saw no one rich. Pre-verbal subject position b. Kanenas plousios den perase apo ti zoi mou. No one rich NEG passed-by from the life my. c. Tipota to endiaferon den simveni se afti tin poli. nothing the interesting NEG happens in this the city Greek bare nominals (107) object position a.Thelo mila/ rizi / hrimata I want apples/ rice / money
proi
Complement of a preposition b. Megriro me mila I cook with apples
Pre-verbal subject position c.*Pedhia epezan sto dromo
morning
d.*Fili mou tilephonisan simera
Children were playing at-the street
to
Friends to-me calledtoday the
Another theoretical option not explored in this paper is the possibility that the Do of N-words be internally licensed under head adjunction. The availability of such an option depends in part on the theoretical status of adjunction to a null head. But if this is a possibility, and Do is not suppressed by adjunction, my approach predicts that N-words in this case will uniformly require the co-presence of negation. An asymmetric version of this option may be exemplified in the interesting case of Romanian. First, Romanian presents solid evidence for N to Do adjunction in regular definite nominal expressions since determiners commonly follow
47
their head nouns (Giusti 1993). Second, its N-words uniformly require the presence of negation in pre-verbal and post-verbal positions. Finally, the familiar asymmetric distribution is manifest in the distribution of its bare nominals. These are exactly the properties expected if EPP involves a D feature checking in Romanian, its N-words are internally licensed under “last resort” N to Do adjunction and its bare nominals have no DP layer as in the other asymmetric Romance languages. A more thorough investigation of the properties of negative concord in these languages is clearly beyond the scope of this paper. My goal here was merely to spell out the possibilities so as to be able to summarize their predictions. In this paper, I have examined in detail cases of licensing of null Do under movement to Spec DP and under head substitution. Clearly, however, the possibilities allowed by my proposal are more diverse, yet at the same time tightly constrained. Possible variations indeed go only as far as available syntactic options for the internal licensing of a null Do under head movement substitution, adjunction and movement to Spec DP, all of which are standard checking options. From our perspective, the type of negative concord exemplified in a given language cannot be determined without a thorough investigation of the internal structure of its N-words and other DPs. My approach makes some very clear general predictions. A first prediction is that Nwords will be in harmony with the DP syntax of the languages they occur in. I predict the nonoccurrence of a language with N to D raising in N-words but no evidence for this movement elsewhere in its DP syntax. And similarly for the other licensing options. In this respect, then my approach entails that the properties of negative concord in a given language are dictated by the syntax of its DPs. A second prediction of my approach is that languages in which N-words uniformly require the co-presence of negation should also be languages that generally allow bare NPs. In this sense, there should be a correlation between the distribution of N-words and bare NPs. The reverse implication, however, does not hold. That is, although it appears true that languages in which N-words must co-occur with negation are also languages that allow bare NPs, it is not true that languages that uniformly license bare NPs necessarily license N-words that co-occur with negation. Standard English and German, for example, are languages that generally allow bare NPs, yet do not license such N-words. One might say that these languages do not have N-words at all, as they do not license negative concord. There are however, many dialects of English and German that have such constructions. For these dialects, the prediction of my proposal is that they should differ from the standard dialects in their internal DP syntax. Quite generally, this paper has proposed that the cross-linguistic variations observed in differing negative concord languages derive from differences in the internal syntax and in the semantic properties of their N-words. The proposals for N-words, however, are not specific t o negative concord. Rather, they have been argued to follow from independently motivated syntactic and semantic principles operative in the DPs of the relevant languages. This paper is thus a step in the direction of eliminating construction specific principles in the account of negative concord phenomena.
48
REFERENCES Acquaviva, Paolo. 1995. ‘Operator Composition and the derivation of Negative concord’, ms., University College. Dublin Androustsopoulou, Antonia. 1995. ‘The licensing of adjectival modification’. Proceedings of West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Stanford, CA. CSLI. Baker, Mark. 1988. Incorporation, Chicago University Press. Bernini, Guiliano and Ramat, Poaolo. 1996. Negative Sentences in the Languages of Europe: A Typological approach, Mouton De Gruyter. Bernstein, Judy. 1997. ‘Demonstratives and reinforcers in Romance and Germanic Languages’. Lingua 102: 87-113 Boscovic, Zelco. 1998. ‘Sometimes in Spec CP, sometimes in-situ’, ms., University of Connecticut Bosque, Ignacio. 1980. Sobre la negación, Cátedra: Madrid Bowers, John. 1991. ‘The Syntax and Semantics of Nominals’ in Steven Moore and Adam Wyner (eds), Proceedings of SALT I, Cornell Working Papers in Linguistics, 10: 1-30. Cornell. Brunot, Ferdinand et Bruneau, Charles. 1937. Précis de Grammaire Historique de La Langue Francaise, Masson et Cie, Paris. Casielles, Eugenia. 1996. ‘On the Misbehavior of Bare Nouns in Spanish’, in Claudia Parodi, Carlos Quicoli, Mario Saltarelli, Maria Luisa Zubizarreta (eds), Aspects of Romance Linguistics. , 135148. Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C. Carlson, Gregory. 1977. ‘A unified analysis of the English bare plural’, Linguistics and Philosophy 1: 413457. Cardinaletti, Anna and Starke, Michal. 1994. ‘The Typology of Structural Deficiency’, ms.,University of Venice and Geneva . Chierchia, Genaro. 1998. ‘Kinds across languages’, ms.,University di Milano. Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program, MIT Press, Cambridge. Cinque, Guillermo. 1995. ‘Partial N-movement in the Romance DP’, in G. Cinque, J. Koster, J-Y.Pollock, L. Rizzi, Zanuttini, R. eds. Paths Towards Universal Grammar: Studies in Honor of Richard S.Kayne, 85-110. Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C. Contreras, Heles. 1986. ‘Spanish Bare NPs and the ECP’, in Yvonne, Bordelois, Heles, Contreras and Karen, Zagona (eds) Generative Studies in Spanish Syntax, 25-51. Foris, Dordrecht. Corne, Chris. 1977. Seychelles Creole Grammar.TBL Verlag Gunter Narr. Tubingen . Dayal, Veneeta. 1995. ‘Licensing Any in Non-Negative/Non-Modal Contexts’ in Mandy Simons and Teresa Galloway (eds). Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory V:72-93. Dayal, Veneeta. 1998. ‘Any as Inherently Modal’, Linguistics and Philosophy 21.5:433-476. DeGraff, Michel. 1993. ‘A Riddle on Negation’, Probus 5:63-93. Delfitto, Denis. and Schroten, Jan. 1991. ‘Bare Plurals and the number affix in DP’, Probus 3:2 155-185. Den Dikken, Marcel. 1995. Copulas. Ms Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam/HIL Déprez, Viviane. 1995. ‘The Roots of Negative concord in French and French based Creoles’, ms., Rutgers University/MIT Déprez, Viviane. 1996. ‘Subject/Object assymetries in Indefinite Licensing’, GLOW abstracts. Déprez, Viviane. 1997. ‘Two types of Negative concord’, Probus 9:103-143. Déprez, Viviane. 1998a. ‘On the Semantic effect of agreement: the case of the French past -participle’,Probus 10: 1-85. 49
Déprez, Viviane. 1998b. ‘French Negative Concord’. Talk given at the SALT IV Workshop in French Syntax and Semantics, MIT. Déprez, Viviane. 1999. The Roots of Negative Concord in French lexifier Creoles , in Michel DeGraff (ed) Language Creation and Language Change: Creole, Diachrony and Development , MIT Press. Cambridge. Diesing, Molly. 1992. Indefinites, MIT Press, Cambridge. Español-Echevarría, Manuel. 1995. ‘A Typology for NPI-Licensing’, ms., UCLA. Fox, Dany.1995. ‘Economy and Scope’, Natural Language Semantics 3:283-341. Gerzoni, E. 1998. Summary of Master Thesis, ms, University of Milan. Giorgi, Alessandra and Longobardi, Giuseppe. 1991. The syntax of noun phrases. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Giannakidou, Anastasia. & Quer, Josep. 1995. ‘Long distance licensing of Negative Indefinites’, ms. Groningen & Utrecht. Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1997 . The Landscape of Polarity Items, Ph. D dissertation, University of Groningen. Giusti, Guiliana. 1993. La sintassi dei determinanti, Uni Press, Padova. Haegeman, Liliane. 1995. The syntax of Negation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Haegeman, Liliane and Zanuttini, Rafaella. 1991. ‘Negative heads and the Neg Criterion’, The Linguistic Review 8:233-51. Herburger, Elena. 1998. ‘Spanish N-words: ambivalent behavior or ambivalent nature?’in O.Percus, U.Sauerland (eds). MIT Working Paper in Linguistics 25: 86-102. Kayne, Richard. 1975. French Syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Kayne, Richard. 1981. ‘Catégories vides en français’, in Pierre, Attal and Claude, Muller (eds), Actes du colloque de Linguistique de Rennes, Benjamin, Amsterdam. Kayne, Richard. 1984. Connectedness and Binary Branching, Dordrecht: Foris. Dordrecht. Kayne, Richard. 1994. The Antisymmetry of Syntax. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA. Klima , Edward. 1964. ‘Negation in English’, in J. Katz and J.Fodor eds. The Structure of Language, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs. Laca, Brenda. 1990. ‘Generic objects: some more pieces of the puzzle’, Lingua, 81: 25-46. Ladusaw, Williams. 1979. Polarity Sensitivity as Inherent Scope Relations. Ph. D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. Ladusaw, Williams. 1992 ‘Expressing negation’, in Chris Barker and David Dowty (eds). Proceedings of the second Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory.. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics, 40: 237-261. Columbus. Laka, Miren Itziar. 1990. Negation in Syntax: On the Nature of functional categories and projections, Ph. D. dissertation MIT. Lois, Ximena. 1985. ‘Les Groupes Nominaux sans déterminants en Espagnol’, ms. Université de Paris VIII. Longobardi, Guiseppe. 1991. ‘Islands Effects and Parasitic Constructions’, in Huang, J and May.R (eds) Logical Structure and Linguistic Structure, Kluwer, Dordrecht. Longobardi, Guiseppe. 1994. ‘Reference and proper names: A theory of N-movement in syntax and Logical form’, Linguistic Inquiry 25(4): 609-665. Lumsden, John. 1991. ‘La distribution des modificateurs dans le syntagme nominal en Haitien’, in Alain Kihm (ed), Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 20:47-64 . Presses Universitaires de Vincennes Mc Nally, Louise. 1995. ‘Bare plurals in Spanish are interpreted as properties’, in Glyn Morrill & Richard Oehrle (eds) Proceeding of ESSLI Worshop on Formal Grammar, 197-212. 50
Barcelona: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. May, Robert. 1989. ‘Interpreting Logical Form’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 12: 383-405. Moritz, Luc. & Valois, Daniel. 1994. ‘Pied-Piping and Specifier Head Agreement’, Linguistic Inquiry: 25(4): 667-707. Muller, Claude. 1991. La négation en francais. Genève: Librairie Droz Ordonez, Francisco. 1997. Word Order and Clause Structure in Spanish and Other Romance Languages,Ph. D. dissertation, CUNY Graduate Center. Postal, Paul. 1969. ‘On so-called “pronouns” in English’, in David Reibel and Sandford Schane (eds), Modern Studies in English, 201-224. N.J. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs. Rizzi, Luigi. 1990. Relativized Minimality. MIT Press, Cambridge. Rizzi, Luigi. 1991. ‘Residual Verb Second and the Wh-criterion’, Technical Reports In Formal and Computational Linguistics 2, University of Geneva. Rizzi, Luigi. 1995. ‘The fine structure of the left periphery’, in Liliane Haegeman (ed), Elements of Grammar:Handbook in Generative Syntax. 281-337, . Kluwer. Dordrecht. Rowlet, Paul. 1996. Negative configurations in French, Ph. D. dissertation, University of York. Rulman, Hotze. 1997. ‘Book review: Liliane Haegeman The Syntax of Negation’, in The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 1(2): 157-176. Samek-Lodovici, Vieri. 1997. ‘Focus in Italian’, ms., Rutgers University. Suñer, Margarita. 1995. ‘Negative elements, island effects and resumptive pro’, The Linguistic Review. Wilkinson, Karina . 1991. Studies in the Semantics of Generic Noun Phrases, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachussetts, Amherst. Uribe-Etxebarria, Myriam. 1994. Interface Licensing Conditions on Negative Polarity Items: a theory of polarity and tense interactions, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut Van der Wouden, Ton and Zwarts, Frans. 1993. ‘A Semantic Analysis of Negative Concord’, in Utpal Lahiri & Adam Wyner (eds), Proceeding of SALT III, 202-219, Cornell University Zamparelli, Roberto. 1995. Layers in the Determiner Phrase, Ph.D. dissertation. University of Rochester. Zanutttini, Rafaella. 1991. Syntactic Properties of Sentential Negation: A Comparative Study of Romance Languages. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Zanuttini, Rafaella. 1995. ‘Re-examining negative clauses’, in G.Cinque, J. Koster, J-Y Pollock, L Rizzi, R.Zanuttini (eds). Path Towards Universal Grammar: Studies in Honor of Richard Kayne, 427-453, Georgetown University Press.
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Acknowledgments This paper develops ideas originally presented at the 1996 GLOW meeting in Athens, at LSRL 1997 and Going Romance 1997, in Grenoble, Tours and HESS- Paris and at MIT, CUNY and SUNY Stony Brook. I wish to thank the linguists present at these talks and more particularly Richard Kayne, Gennaro Chierchia, Chris Corne, Anastasia Giannakidou, Manuel Espanol-Echvarria, Marcel Den Dikken, Judy Bernstein, Richard Larson, Pino Longobardi, , Roger Schwartzshild , Karina Wilkinson, Norbert Hornstein, Ian Roberts, and Liliane Haegeman for useful comments and discussions at various points of this work. Many people have generously contributed their native speaker judgments on various languages. I am grateful to Anna Pairet, Eric Bakovic, Itziar Laka for Spanish, Manuela Ambar, Juan Costa for Portuguese, Roberto Zamparelli, Anna Cardinalletti, Vieri Sameck-Lodovici , Cecilia Poletto, Fabio Pianesi, Alessandra Giorgi for Italian, Patrice Kuzniak, Blandine Laferrere, Gilles Martin, Christian Graff, Catherine Laforest and Marie-Odile Junker for Standard French, MarieTherese Vinet and France Martineau for Quebec French, Michel DeGraff, Claudie and Josiane Hurdicourt Barnes, Jean Louis Coquillot and Francois Canal for Haitain Creole, Sabine Iatridou, Annastasia Giannakidou and Ahonto Terzi for Greek. Thanks finally to the anonymous reviewers who have contributed to positive improvements of this paper. All remaining errors are my own. 1
2
We return to sentences containing stressed pre-verbal fronted bare NPs and N-words in section 6. Other accounts have involved Case marking or incorporation. See Lois (1985) and references therein.
3
That N-words are universal quantifiers is proposed in Zanuttini (1991) but abandoned in Zanuttini (1995). Haegeman (1995), who adopts Zanuttini (1991) for her semantic characterization of Negative Concord, also takes N-words to be negative quantifiers but offers no details as to their semantic nature. Van den Wouden and Zwart (1993) explicitly assume that N-words are semantically ambiguous, one of their meanings being that of a universal quantifier. 4
For an investigation of negative constructions in Germanic languages, see Haegeman (1995). She takes negative concord to be a “by-product of the application of the Neg-Criterion”, which is a universal syntactic principle, and leaves cross-linguistic variations among concord languages unexplained. Haegeman writes: “There is no general correlation between NC and the presence of an overt Nego....... We leave the issue of what determines the availability of NC for future research.” (p 166). My proposal, which links negative concord to DP structure, makes predictions for Germanic languages. As it turns out, Dutch and West Flemish N-words share many of their properties (in particular scrambling) with other indefinites. For a critic of Haegeman’s Neg Criterion perspective and interesting arguments linking the behavior of Dutch negative expressions to their indefinite nature, on a par with my proposal for Romance see Rullman (1997). 5
This situation may also be present in at least one French based Creole, namely Tayo, the French based creole of New Caledonia. Thanks to Chris Corne for Tayo data . 6
Bernini and Ramat 1996 note: “ In Medieval French, it is possible to find the type: Pierre n’a pas vu personne, where the negative quantifier still maintains its original meaning of ‘person’ : P. didn’t see any person” (p 174). 7
For further discussion of the historical evidence, see Déprez (1994)’s unpublished manuscript. For a discussion of some creolization issues, see Déprez (1999). 8
The occurrence of N-words in yes/no questions shows dialectal differences in Haitian Creole and is at best marginally acceptable in formal registers of French. See Déprez (1995) for discussion. In HC, Nwords are further licensed in the embedded complement of affective predicates as well as in the complement of the preposition san (without) but apparently again with dialectal differences. French N-words are interpreted negatively in the first of these contexts and existentially in the second one.
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9
For a thorough discussion of the claim that French Negative Concord is clause bounded, see especially Déprez (1995, 1999) and for a summary, Déprez (1997). 10
Note that on this NegP account sentences like (16) are expected to be fully ungrammatical because they violate the Neg Criterion. Unexplained is the fact that they are in fact acceptable under a double negation reading. Déprez (1997) on the other hand correctly predicts the availability of the double negation reading. 11
Although presque 'almost' can be used with the numeral two, absolument 'absolutely' cannot. But it can modify zero. (i) a. Il lit presque/*absolument deux livres par jour. He reads almost/absolutely two books a day b. Ce lait contient absolument zéro grammes de matière grasse This milk contains absolutely zero grams of fat 12
May (1989) distinguishes “absorbed” quantification from “resumptive” quantification in several respects. Crucial for Déprez’s proposal is the fact that relative scope is only possible for the component quantifiers of “absorbed quantifiers” not of “resumptive quantifiers”. Since negative concord is resumptive quantification, this implies that there are no possible relative scope dependencies between two N-words in a concord relation. Thus if anything enforces relative or absolute scope between two N-words, concord is predicted to be impossible. These differences and their consequences are further spelt out in Déprez (1998), where the semantic nature of French negative concord is argued to resemble the non-scopal cumulative readings of plurals. 13
As (i) shows, the common belief that bare NPs systematically disallow these modifiers is not fully correct : (i) John and Mary are almost doctors. For a semantic account of why generic bare NPs, although universal in character, disallow such modifiers, see Kadmon and Landman (1993). Their account can be adapted to pèsonn. 14
Giannakidou (1997) makes a related proposal to account for Greek negative constructions. She differs from Déprez (1995, 1997) in assuming that some N-words (the emphatic ones) still covertly move to Spec NegP. In this regard, her proposal is syntactically equivalent to Zanuttini’s 1991 (but not to Haegeman’s stronger Neg Criterion proposal), although the semantics of NC is distinct. Déprez (1997) proposes instead that the strong reading is obtained under QR. 15
I explore the correct formulation of this type shift operation in forthcoming work.
16
The DP internal movement discussed here is different from the one proposed by Abney ( 1987) to derive the post-nominal position of modifiers with English bare quantifiers (cf. everything precious). In English, but not in French, the movement generalizes to all quantifiers. 17
Complex N-word expressions such as aucun livre ‘no book’ behave in this respect like stressed numeral DPs: (i) Je n’achète AUCUNE jupe de rouge I buy NO skirt of red As these expressions parallel simplex N-words in most of their properties, the paper will only make a few remarks on their behavior, leaving a more detailed study for future work. 18
Additional evidence that N-words are indefinite expressions comes from the fact that they cannot occur in Stylistic Inversion contexts. As pointed out by De Cornullier (1974) and Kupferman (1994), SI contexts always exclude indefinite expressions: (i) *Quel livre n’a lu personne/ aucun étudiant Which book read none/no student ? 19
Notably when personne is used as noun in French, it requires a determiner and can be modified prenominally as shown in (i): (i) J’ai rencontré une charmante personne. I have met a charming person.
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Pre-nominal modification is also possible with rien not used as an N-word : (ii) Un petit rien le dérange A little thing bothers him As (i) and (ii) confirm, the lack of pre-nominal modification for N-words is due to their DP positions, not to their intrinsic nature. 20
French NPIs also require modification with de as is expected if they are indefinite expressions: (i) Il n’a pas dit quoique ce soit d’important He didn’t say anything important 21
The same distributional characteristics are observed with complex N-words like aucun livre 'no/any book'. I assume that the Do position here is filled with the term aucun. Historically, aucun derives from the incorporation of the adjectival element aucque to the numeral un and is, in this respect, structurally parallel to quelqu’un. 22
As (i) shows, the presence of the relative clause is required, suggesting that it may be an integral part of the structure of these expressions and perhaps also of personne. (Consider also the French NPI qui que ce soit 'who that there be') (i) *Je ne connais âme I Ne know soul This recalls the English subtrigging effect discussed in Dayal (1996), where the presence of a relative clause is shown to license the NPI any in a non-modal, non-negative contexts. 23
The indefinite nature of âme qui vive is confirmed by the fact that it requires the de pattern for modification (i) Je ne crois pas qu’il viendra âme qui vive (*d’) intéressant à cette soirée. I don’t believe anyone interesting will come to this party 24
Déprez (1997) is based on a Diesing type approach to bare NPs.
25
Within a Minimalist perspective, this implies that the null D of Haitian N-words always contains at least one strong feature. In this respect, it differs from the null D of asymmetric languages discussed in the next section. 26
Post nominal adjectives have been argued to derive from the head movement of N. Should this be the case for wouj in (54), my argument remains unchanged : the N could undergo a first head movement inside the NP structure and then the whole NP would move further up. 27
In contrast to definite determiners, indefinite yon is pre-nominal in HC as are all numerals and weak quantifiers. This suggests that these expressions are not determiners, but pre-nominal adjectives. 28
There are a few non-idiomatic constructions that have been argued to contain null Ds or bare NPs in French: the [de NP] constructions discussed in Kayne (1981); certain PP constructions, such as sans argent/amis 'without money/friends' , en danger 'in danger' etc…and conjoined constructions such as in (i): (i) Parents et enfants sont conviés à se joindre à nous pour les fêtes Parents and children are invited to join us for the festivities I leave the investigation of such cases for further study. 29
I take the property that French Ds must always be projected and lexically filled to be a parametric choice of the language. Assuming that Do is strong in the Minimalist sense will only derive part of the desired result. Strength here must additionally enforce projection to eliminate the possibility of strictly bare NPs. Conceivably, it may derive from the necessary representation of a number feature (an interpretable feature) and the fact that number is only marked on Do in French, not on N. Putting aside a formalization of the notion of “strength”, once the assumption is made, the proposed structure for N-words is predicted. Assuming furthermore that Merge generally takes precedence over Move (Chomksy (1995)), French DP with a merged lexical D are expected to be the normal case and Xo movement to D, the more marked case. This seems to be generally correct. As it turns out, there appears to be a general constraint on N to D movement requiring N to lack phi-features. Historically, personne and rien did not become Do until they had lost all gender and number specification. A better understanding of the circumstances and the consequences
54
of this interesting and apparently required “feature” bleaching must await a detailed consideration of the historical evidence. 30
The term 'negative' here should really be understood to mean antiadditive or downward entailing. I leave aside here potential differences in the precise semantic nature of the licenser. 31
Some instances of internal NP to Spec movement would be consistent with my proposal: crucial to my point is that there be no such movement to the Spec of the highest DP projection. see Bernstein (1997) and Déprez 1998 for potential cases of intermediate movements. 32
To my knowledge, Romanian is the only Romance language to feature regular post-nominal determiners. These are assumed to result from the adjunction of N to D, not from movement of NP to Spec DP (Ref) . Note, however that in similarity to HC, Romanian has fully symmetric negative concord. That is, negation is obligatorily both with pre-verbal and with post-verbal N-words. Recall that on my view, only null Do that are internally licensed are expected to be able to occur in pre-verbal positions. Within my perspective , the symmetric behavior of Romanian N-words suggests that a null Do can be licensed under adjunction. See section 7 for a discussion of this option. 33
See Chomsky (1986) for Spanish examples of extractions from DPs attributed to Torrego.
34
A fourth case is in principle possible: an asymmetric language in which movement to Spec DP operates as a last resort . For N-words, this would in fact result in an apparent homogenous distribution as the null Do of pre-verbal N-words would have to be bound by an overt negation. The potential distinction between such a language and Haitian Creole thus resides in the distribution of bare nominals. If internal movement to Spec DP is precluded for bare nominals (on a par with head movement see section 6), then such a language would manifest an asymmetric distribution for bare nominals but not for N-words. See section 7 for discussion of potential cases of this type. 35
The Sardinian examples are taken from Jones (1993).
36
Depending on how many functional projections a DP structure may contain, an alternative structure could have pacu and perunu generated in Spec NP with N moving up to an intermediate functional projection, dominated by an null D position as in (i): (i) [ DP D0 [FP N [ NP meta/pacu/perunu t ]]] Pre-verbal subject DPs would then differ from (i) in requiring an additional movement of these modifiers/determiners up to Do. This structure has the advantage of offering a unified structure for prenominal and post-nominal modifiers in the complement structure : they always occur in Specifier positions aligning with Cinque (1996) proposal for all modifiers. 37
In French traditional grammars, the same indefinite expression quelque 'some' is called an adjective when it co-occurs with a noun as in (les) quelques amis '(the) some friends' and a determiner or an indefinite pronoun when it precedes the cardinal one as in quelqu’un 'someone'. On this view, the cliticization of quelque to the numeral un in fact provides overt support for the possibility of head movement of an adjectival term to a determiner position. 38
The post-nominal position is literary and not of common usage, but Italian speakers do have contrastive judgments about it. 39
It is very likely that the structure of Italian DP is far more complex than my discussion suggests. I believe, however, that my main point would nevertheless carry over. For a thorough discussion of the structure of Italian DPs, see for example Guisti (1993). 40
If N-movement is adjunction here, no semantic consequence is expected.
41
See Guisti (1993) who suggests comparable ambiguous structures for weak quantifiers such as molti 'many', pochi 'few'.
55
42
It is important that the intonation be kept neutral for the judgment to obtain. In particular, a dislocation intonation should be avoided. 43
A possible alternative to (61a) would be to have bel generated in the head FP above NP and nessun in the head position of NumP with an empty D dominating it, as in (i) below: (i) [DP 0 [NumP [Num’ nessun [FP [ bel] [NP ragazzo]]]]] On this view, nessun would always be a head, which might explain why it can never occur in a post-nominal position. But I do not pursue this alternative. 44
45
The marginality of post-nominal alcuno may follow from the same requirement. This may in fact be an alternative structure for post-verbal nessun DPs with a pre-nominal bel.
46
Note that the presence of a c-commanding negation does not suffice to license an NPI within a relative clause even in French: (i) *Je ne connais pas un homme qui a dit quoique ce soit. I don’t know a man who said anything. 47
One clear distinction between pre-verbal and post-verbal nessun (valid also for the other weak quantifiers of Italian) concerns the asymmetric possibility of ne clitizisation. As is well known, ne cliticization is possible from post-verbal positions, but not from pre-verbal ones. (i) a. di questi libri, non ne ho compro nessuno of these books, I did not buy any b. *di questi libri, nessuno ne sono venduto of these books, none were sold If this distinction could be argued to derive from the internal structure of N-words, then it may provide strong support for my proposal. But I leave this issue for further research. 48
Rather strong evidence for the asymmetric structure of pre-verbal and post-verbal Italian DPs is found with nominalized adjectives. As noted in Chierchia (1998), nominalized adjectives can have an optional determiner in post-verbal positions (ia). But the presence of the determiner is obligatory when they occur in preverbal positions, as in (ib): (i) a. Ho visto (i) ricchi rubare I have seen (the) rich steal b. *(I) richi sono avidi The rich are greedy This contrast clearly recalls the one observed above in Sardinian. 49
Yet another interesting piece of evidence for the distinct property of negative concord with negation and negative concord with a subject N-word is provided by M.Español-Echevarria (1994) who notes the following contrast: (i) a.?*Casi nadie comió nada mas que judias Almost no one ate anything other than beans b. No comió nada mas que judias Not ate-SG nothing other than beans She did not eat anything but beans (ia) differs from (ib) is that in the former the post-verbal N-words is licensed by a pre-verbal N-one and in the latter it is licensed by negation. 50
Note that even in the most solid cases of concording N-words such as (66a) (67a) and (68a), a double negation can obtain under a certain intonation. As indicated by the French example in (i), such an interpretation is favored when at least one N-words is stressed and/or focused. Similar examples obtain in Spanish. (i) Est-ce qu’il y a des invités qui n’ont rien mangé ? Are there guests that ate nothing? Non, PERSONNE n’a rien mangé. Ils ont tous au moins gouté un plat. No, NO ONE ate nothing. They have all tasted at least one dish.
56
To my knowledge, however, such a suspension of negative concord is not possible in an obligatory Neg /Nword relation. In Haitian Creole, for instance, since Neg is always required, the question answer exchange in (i) cannot be replicated with pèsonn. 51
Such examples are possible for some speakers with a negative concord interpretation. For example UribeEtxebarria reports the following as acceptable: (i) a. Nadie creia que Maria hubiera dicho que la debieras ningún dinero. b. Noboby believed that Mary had said that you owed her any money c. Nobody believed that Mary had said that you owed her no money Note that the meaning difference between the translation (ib) given by Uribe Etxebarria and a double negation example in English (ic) is rather unclear for native speakers of English, despite the fact that no money/ any money are not ambiguous in this language. It is thus rather unclear what reading the Spanish speakers who accept these sentences have in mind. But even if Uribe Etxebarria is right in her judgment, this fact does not invalidate the distinction I propose, nor Déprez’s (1995) conjecture that cumulativity can be at stake in Nword/N-word negative concord in Spanish (contra Herburger 1996). Given the ambiguous status of N-words in Spanish, matters will indeed be fairly complex. On Déprez’s (1997) view, there are at least 3 ways that a “negative concord” interpretation can occur. One is between two N-words under pair quantifier formation or cumulativity just like in French, a second is under binding by negation or a negative operator essentially like NPIs i.e. with N-words as variables in the nuclear scope and the third is under binding by negation or a negative operator with N-words in the restriction of that operator. The second option is clearly expected to be possible in long distance contexts, even if the first and the third are not). Evidence that unselective binding may indeed by involved in (i) is shown by the impossibility of modifying the embedded N-words with casi in such contexts. This shows that in cases such as (i) the embedded N-words can be interpreted only like an NPIs. The distinction between (i) and the judgment reported by my informant may then be attributed to a variation in the type of semantic licensing (antiadditivity, antimorphicity, monotone deacrinsingness…) required by N-words under such interpretation for different speakers. 52
As ( i) shows, it is not the wh-term that licenses the embedded N-word, but rather the matrix negation. (i) *se que dijo nadie I know what anyone/none said
53
This data is taken from Gerzoni 1997.
54
The structure of modified bare nominals may differ. See note 73 below for a discussion.
55
As pointed out by Longobardi, generic readings are available for bare nominals modified with expression comparable to the English expression “of this kind”. Because such readings are also possible with indefinite articles, he call these “indefinite generics”. (i) (Dei) castori di questo tipo non costruiscomo mai dighe (Part Art) beavers of this kind never build dams See Wilkinson (1995) for a discussion “of this kind” of bare NPs in English and Zamparelli (1995) for a demonstration that such bare nominals have a different structure from the unmodified ones considered here. See also fn.73 for the suggestion that modified bare nominals may structurally differ from unmodified ones in that they may project a null determiner. 56
See, Casielles (1995) for a very clear distinction between bare NPs in pre-verbal subject positions in preverbal non-subject positions in Spanish. 57
As mentionned in Zanuttini (1991), the co-occurrence of fronted non-subject N-words with negation under a concord reading is judged somewhat better than comparable subject N-words cases. She suggests that this may be due to a marginal reconstruction option available for fronted N-words but not for subject ones. On my view, such an option would involve unraised N-words. 58
Bare NPs and N-words seem to present yet another distributional distinction in the subject positions of ECM contexts. While N-words are fine, bare NPs are excluded. This seems, however, to reflect ill
57
understood additional constraints on indefinites in these contexts. As shown for instance by Lois (1985), Spanish indefinites with an overt determiner are also excluded from this position. (i) *Creia/consideraba (a) unos estudiantes inteligentes I consider some students intelligent I leave the study of these additional constraints for further research. 59
English seems also to be problematic in Longobardi’s model as he assumes that empty Do must be universally properly governed at LF. This implies that movement into Do should be obligatory for English bare NPs in subject positions, thereby always deriving a generic interpretation. The problem is avoided by proposing that the existential interpretation can optionally take place at S-structure in English while it must obligatorily do so in Italian. Such a move, however, blurs even further the notion of Economy required to obtain the right result for Italian. 60
Movement into Do could potentially be blocked for bare nominals on the basis of their plurality. Such a possibility, however, raises apparent difficulty with mass nouns (such as café) that are morphologically singular but subject to the same restrictions as bare plurals. A potential unification seems possible if as proposed by Chierchia (1998), mass nouns are semantically plural. I leave the exploration of this matter for future work. 61
A reviewer objected that if bare nominals are bare NPs, desirable distinctions between argument bare nominals and predicate bare nominals in constructions such as (i) may be obscured: (i) Maria es doctora Maria is a doctor This objection, however, crucially relies on the premise that the bare nominal in (i) is a simple NP. Suppose, however, as proposed by Bowers (1996), predicative constructions like (i) have a PredP projection. Then potential differences may result from the presence of this additional functional projection, and its fusion with the head of N under head movement, as in (ii): (ii) Maria es [PredP [[Ndoctora] Pred] [NP t]] 62
There are, in this view, at least two possible ways of allowing a generic reading for Germanic bare NPs. They could be assumed to have a base structure with a null Do or, conceivably, a null Do with a strong feature could be introduced at LF along the lines of Boskovic's (1998) proposal for a null Co. That bare NPs may have distinct structure cross-linguistically is also entertained by Chierchia (1996) (1998). His proposal, however, differs from mine, as he assumes that Romance bare NPs always have a null determiner. Incidentally, it could be that more complex bare NPs in Romance permit a null D. The predictions of my analysis in this case would be that they would be semantically ambiguous, permitting at least sometimes a generic like reading and being capable of occurring in pre-verbal subject positions. This may be a possibility within the asymmetric languages to account for the marginal possibility of modified bare nominals in preverbal subject position. Quite plausibly, the presence of an adjective could be sufficient to license a null Do that would be internally licensed either by the adjective in Spec Do or by the movement of N to some higher head under adjunction. The study of these bare NPs is outside the scope of this paper. 63
Such a functional head may in fact be similar to Abney’s Agr position within DP than to D itself or alternatively to NumP, if NumP is the head that contains number features. I will keep ignoring matters of labeling here and continue to use D for convenience. 64
My account is here developed in terms of EPP, or more exactly in terms of the checking of a D feature. Conceivably of course, the relevant feature checked in this pre-verbal position could be something else than D itself. What is crucial for this account is that it a feature that is contained in a D projection be absent from a NP projection. Clearly, several alternatives are plausible, but to keep things simple I continue to speak of 'D feature'. 65
Alexiadou and Anastopoulou (1997) (hence A&A) have proposed that EPP is checked under V movement in pro-drop languages. For compatibility with this proposal, the feature checked by a moved DP in preverbal subject position could be nominative Case instead of EPP. Assuming that the Case feature of DPs are located in D (or Ko above DP), my analysis would remain essentially unchanged. This alternative is not
58
pursued here because A&A’s evidence for the left dislocated status of all pre-verbal subjects in Null Subject Languages remains inconclusive. In Italian or Spanish. indeed, there are a number of nominal expressions that cannot be left dislocated, and yet can appear in pre-verbal subject positions. N-words in particular are examples of such DPs (Rizzi 1981). For simplicity, I assume here with Rizzi (1981) that in pro-drop sentences the EPP is checked by an empty pronominal with a categorial D feature. A third alternative for EPP checking in NSLs involves a mixed system in which the EPP D feature can be checked by V and by a pre-nominal DP. Such a view is explored in Déprez (1998). Contra Rizzi (1981) and A&A above, Ordonez (1997) argues that EPP is weak in Spanish, a position not immediately compatible with the account presented in the text, but potentially compatible with the Case version suggested above. 66
Note that incorporation of negation could not be the motivating 'force' behind the N to D movement. In so far as Italian N-words can be assumed to have a negative morphology, nessuno derives from ne sunt unus..., they have it in both pre-verbal and post-verbal positions. Thus a distinction of structure cannot be motivated on the basis of negative features. See Bernini and Ramat (1996) who argue that Italian N-words are of the suppressive kind and cannot be considered as synchronically decomposable into a nominal head and a negative morpheme. 67
As suggested below, an implicational relationship between phi features and D may also be true for the rich verbal agreement features of the so-called Pro-drop/inflectionally rich languages. That is, overtly checked Agr features may imply the presence of a D feature both in the DP structure and in the clause structure. 68
For arguments that HC is not a Null-Subject language, see Déprez (1994).
69
This second proposal has one potential drawback. It appears to contradict the generalization in (45) concerning null determiners and overt binders. If bare nominals also have a null D, the generalization fails. Within the Minimalist framework, however, it has been suggested that null heads with a strong feature can be inserted during the derivation after Spell Out (Boscovic 1998). If the null head of bare nominals are such heads then two facts follow. First, the fact that bare nominals do not require an overt syntactic binder is derived: they have no null Do by Spell Out. Second, Longobardi’s insight that head movement in bare NPs is possible only at LF is also derived. If Do is introduced at LF, head movement cannot occur before this point. I explore this possibility in forthcoming work. 70
As the nature of fronted bare nominals may not be uniform across the asymmetric languages considered here, my discussion of these facts will remain at a rather general level. For Spanish, Casielles 1994 has argued that fronted bare NPs can be topics. For Italian, it would seem rather that fronted bare NPs are focused, as topics usually involve the presence of a clitic. If Rizzi 1995 is right in distinguishing several functional projections such at ToP, or FocP etc in what he calls the left periphery, then there may well be several possibilities. The minimal requirement for my proposal is that the EPP not be involved in the motivation of any of these frontings, so that the feature being checked is different from the pre-verbal subject case. 71
Or, alternatively, a lexical category-bearing projection can move to its Spec, an option presumably not open in Romance, but clearly possible for HC. 72
Some further facts about pre-verbal bare nominals seem amenable to a similar treatment. It has been repeatedly noted that modified bare nominals are distinctly more acceptable in pre-verbal subject positions than simple non-modified ones. Some Spanish and Italian examples are given in (i) (see also Delfitto and Schroten 1991): (i) a. Hombres asi no vienen a menudo por aqui Men like that don’t often come by here a’.*Hombres no vienen... b. Ucelli di queste varieta sono rari (Zamparelli 1995) Birds of this kind are rare b’.*Ucelli sono rari c. Soldati che si reggevano a stento in piedi camminavano per le strade Soldiers who could hardly walk on their feet were walking in the streets c’.* Soldati camminavano per le strade
59
In a government account, such facts remained elusive, as it is unclear how modification could affect the governing status of an empty D. Within the EPP perspective, however, modified bare nominals can plausibly be assumed to have a complex internal structure involving a DP projection with an internally licensed null D. If so EPP checking should be possible and the contrast above are explained. As a detailed study of the internal structure of modified bare nominals is beyond the scope of this paper, I leave this interesting prediction aside, noting however, that a more complex structure for modified bare nominal follows quite straigtforwardly on Kayne’s 1994 Antisymetry hypothesis or on Chomsky’s Bare Structure version of X’ theory. See also Zamparelli (1995) for arguments that kind denoting DPs of the type in (i)b have a complex structure. In contrast to us, however, Zamparelli (1995) adopts Longobardi’s proposal that strictly bare nominals have an empty D in Italian. 73
Like the proper government account, the EPP proposal of the text does not yet account for the fact that bare nominals cannot occur in the object position of predicates that require generically interpreted objects. (i) *Leo odia gatti Leo hates cats For Chierchia (1995), (i) reflects the presence of a lexically selected aspectual head associated with a generic operator. If this is correct, (i) can then be straightforwardly predicted within the EPP perspective, if this Aspect head (or AGR-O) is assumed to contain a D feature. D-feature checking will then be enforced for the objects and it will fail in (i) for the same reason as in the subject case, as the bare NP lacks the appropriate D-feature to permit this checking. 74
I thank Richard Kayne for pointing out this example to me.
75
As argued by Herburger (1998), N-words in examples like (104) do have a distinct semantic interpretation. A reviewer objected to the text's Economy proposal on the basis that is not compatible with a theory of movement restricted by local Economy. The two may be compatible however, if the domain of local Economy is restricted to the checking of uninterpretable features. On this view, checking of interpretable features involves a movement that satisfies Last Resort, but that is not enforced, as deletion is not required or even possible. (See Chomsky’s (1995) where checking of an interpretable feature may fail to have to occur without preventing convergence, or may occur repeatedly). I have proposed in section 6.1.2 that N-words with a filled D are N-words in which Phi -features are checked. If Phi features are interpretable, their checking should be “optional”, enforceable by external considerations such as the EPP but not disfavored under Global Economy considerations on the number of operation as in the present context. If so, there is no contradiction between my proposal and local Economy. The two types of Economy simply have different domains as recently proposed in Reinhardt 1999. 76
As observed by Giannakidou (1997), there appear to be two types of N-words in Greek distinguished by emphasis. Only the emphatic ones are possible in pre-verbal subject positions. Emphatics N-words may be N-words that have undergone a DP internal movement to the Spec of the null D, base on Kayne (1994) observation that DP internal movement to Spec de in French presents properties similar to emphatic fronting at the sentential level in Italian.
60
