LINGUIST List 7.199

Wed Feb 7 1996

Books: Syntax: Basque Spanish, Spanish

Editor for this issue: Ljuba Veselinova <lveselinemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. Ljuba Veselinova, New Dissertations (GSIL, University of Southern California) (fwd)

SYNTAX

Alazne Landa. Conditions on null objects in Basque Spanish and their
	Relation to `leismo' and clitic-doubling

USC Ph D. Dissertation. Distributed by GSIL Publications
(gsilusc.edu, http://www.usc.edu/dept/gsil/gsil.html)

 ABSTRACT

This dissertation provides an eclectic linguistic account of the
phenomenon of null objects in Basque Spanish and two other related
phenomena that are pervasive in the same variety, namely, leismo and
clitic doubling. Their syntactic distribution and coreference
relations reveal that null objects are pros that behave similarly to
the pro categories licensed by overt object clitics. Furthermore, this
investigation puts forward a crucial complementariness between the
semantic composition of NPs that can occur as null objects and that of
NPs that can be clitic doubled. Incidentally, clitic doubling in
Basque Spanish only takes place with the leista clitic system. These
facts strongly suggest that the three phenomena are different
manifestations of one single verb-object agreement relation. This
insight is developed under the light of the Agreement Hypothesis and
it is claimed that, for inanimate entities, the object drop parameter
is instantiated by default null clitic agreement morphology, whereas
the remaining third person object-verb agreement is done via the
LE-forms.



Juan Martin. On the Syntactic Structure of Spanish NP's.

USC PhD Dissertation. Distributed by GSIL Publications (USC)
(gsilusc.edu, http://www.usc.edu/dept/gsil/gsil.html)

				Abstract

	This dissertation studies lexical and syntactic aspects of
Noun Phrases in Spanish under the Principles and Parameters
framework. Whereas Nominal expressions may be seen as a continuum
towards reference, with propositional functions mapped onto
properties, verbs undergo prediction. As a result, N' can be a
semantically saturated expression, but V' cannot. This is the case of
Nouns that project an affected object. "Affectedness" is defined by
the ability of a cemplement to semantically saturate a lexical head.
	The stacked nature of nominal modification is captured through
a successive spec-head relationship between modifee and modifier.
This relationship occurs at the syntactic level of representation in
languages with overt nominal morphology. Otherwise it occurs at
LF. This explains the word order parameter between Romance and English
adjectival modification, and it allows us to further define previous
proposals for a weak and a strong determiner position. Finally, the
above analysis and the conditions on Spec-head agreement account for
the extraction facts in Spanish.