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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

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Query Details


Query Subject:   Nested Restructuring
Author:   Eva-Maria Remberger
Submitter Email:  click here to access email
Subject Language(s):  Italian


Query:   Dear linguists,

studying the well-known restructuring phenomenon with modal and aspectual verbs and verbs of motions in Italian (Rizzi, 1982, Burzio 1986) I encountered a problem especially due to the widely contradictory or inconsistent judgements given to me by my informants.
The following examples are the ones commonly quoted to demonstrate how nested restructuring constructions work in Italian.

(1) Maria li avrebbe voluti andare a prendere lei stessa.
(2) *Maria li sarebbe voluti andare a prendere lei stessa.

Example (1) is quoted as grammatical by Burzio (1986:367/8) and by the Grande Grammatica di Consultazione by Renzi/Salvi (vol.II,519). Nevertheless my informants deny its grammaticality whereas they find (2) (almost) acceptable, which Burzio (1986) does not.
These examples are also the ones quoted to demonstrate that, in a restructured context of nested restructuring verbs with clitic climbing, auxiliary selection is dependent on the deepest embedded verb.
I would be very glad if somebody could give me a clearing hint as to this data.
Besides this, I would be especially interested in the question as to whether there is any example which allows restructuring in a sequence of verbs which select AVERE-ESSERE-ESSERE where the clitic climbs from the deepest embedded clause to the matrix clause while the auxiliary selection will be ESSERE.
I would be grateful for any bibliographic hints as well as personal opinions facing this problem.

Of course, I will be sending a summary to the list.

Thanks a lot,
Eva-Maria Remberger
LL Issue: 13.2093
Date posted: 15-Aug-2002



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