Eventive existentials in Catalan and the topic-focus articulation

(Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Filologia Catalana)

Data:	2013
Resum:	The role of codas in existential sentences has been a matter of debate since the early 70's, but under this label a quite heterogeneous set of material has been included, leading to much misplaced discussion. A case which is so far unresolved is that of eventive existential sentences: Yesterday, there was a live pig roasted. This existential construction asserts the existence of a situation involving the pivot (a live pig) and the coda (roasted) rather than just the existence of the individual denoted by the pivot. In this article I will revisit this construction in light of partially unattested data from Catalan, a Romance language which is well-known for showing a systematic violation of the Definiteness Effect in existentials. I will concentrate on extraction facts and information structure to show that recent proposals favouring a small clause analysis of eventive existentials in Catalan (Leonetti 2008) are weak on syntactic grounds, and inconsistent on semantic and informational grounds. Given this evidence, I will defend a VP-adjunct analysis of codas in eventive existentials, where both the pivot and the coda form part of the assertion, and a null stage topic, optionally restricted by an overt locative, counts as the topic of the sentence.
Drets:	Tots els drets reservats.
Llengua:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Publicat a:	Rivista di linguistica/Italian Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 25, núm. 1 (2013) , p. 147-173, ISSN 1120-2726

28 p, 254.8 KB

Registre creat el 2014-10-15, darrera modificació el 2023-11-13