Journal articles by Alice Corr
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This paper explores the hypothesis that wide-focus subject-verb inversion in Ibero-Romance is a t... more This paper explores the hypothesis that wide-focus subject-verb inversion in Ibero-Romance is a type of locative inversion, involving a null locative argument. Ibero-Romance displays fine-grained, systematic variation determined by verbal class and variety, offering evidence that Ibero-Romance neutral word order is SVO, rather than VSO as claimed by some null-subject accounts. It is proposed that ‘locative’ subject-verb inversion is a consequence of grammatically-encoded deictic features correlating with the semantic properties of the verbs involved. The locative element, available unequally across Ibero-Romance, can surface in different positions in the left periphery, yielding the variation encountered. The data indicate that the licensing of these constructions depends neither on the null-subject parameter, since this type of inversion also occurs in non- and partial null-subject varieties, nor on the unaccusative/unergative division, though in both cases a degree of correspondence exists. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.85
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This article analyses the function and distribution of the so-called “overt subject expletive” el... more This article analyses the function and distribution of the so-called “overt subject expletive” ello/ele/ell in certain non-standard Ibero-Romance varieties. Novel empirical facts are presented to illustrate the phenomenon’s heterogeneous characterization, the present-day variation of which is argued to be explained by the different degrees of change undergone by the expletive element in each Ibero-Romance variety. The pragmatic import of today’s Iberian expletive resembles the semantic value of the oldest and most commonly attested examples of the phenomenon in the historical corpora used. This observation serves as the point of departure for the diachronic reconstruction of the element’s development from its proposed origin in epistemic contexts to the present day, where the alleged Iberian expletive exhibits both expletive and pragmatic characteristics even within the same variety.
En este artículo se analiza la función y distribución del llamado “sujeto expletivo visible” ello/ele/ell en ciertas variedades ibero-románicas no estándares. Se presentan nuevos datos empíricos con el fin de demostrar la caracterización heterogénea del fenómeno, cuya variación actual, según se argumenta, se ve explicada por los distintos grados de cambio sufridos por el elemento expletivo en cada variedad ibero-románica. La contribución pragmática del expletivo ibérico actual semeja el valor semántico de las pruebas empíricas más antiguas y más frecuentes del elemento en los corpus históricos consultados, observación que sirve de punto de partida para reconstruir la trayectoria diacrónica del elemento desde su propuesto origen en contextos impersonales y epistémicos hasta la actualidad, en que el presunto expletivo ibérico demuestra características tanto expletivas como pragmáticas incluso dentro de la misma variedad.
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This paper examines the present-day characterisation and historical development of non-referentia... more This paper examines the present-day characterisation and historical development of non-referential uses of the pronoun ello/ele/ell (ELLO) in certain Ibero-Romance varieties. Since overt expletives are predicted to be incompatible with referential null subjects, the appearance of ELLO in an apparently expletive position and function is typologically anomalous with respect to the null subject parameter as traditionally conceived. Recent treatment in the literature places ELLO in the C-domain, and exceptionally in SpecTP. However, existing accounts tend to assume a unified characterisation across varieties for what we claim is actually a heterogeneous phenomenon. Novel empirical data show that ELLO displays both expletive-like and discourse-oriented properties even within the same variety, targeting different structural positions cross-dialectally. Today’s variation is argued to be an effect of ELLO reaching different stages of grammaticalisation across varieties, originating from its usage in impersonal epistemic contexts. We may therefore wish to revise our typology of expletives so as to encompass a more nuanced range of parametric values.
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Book chapters by Alice Corr
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Journal articles by Alice Corr
En este artículo se analiza la función y distribución del llamado “sujeto expletivo visible” ello/ele/ell en ciertas variedades ibero-románicas no estándares. Se presentan nuevos datos empíricos con el fin de demostrar la caracterización heterogénea del fenómeno, cuya variación actual, según se argumenta, se ve explicada por los distintos grados de cambio sufridos por el elemento expletivo en cada variedad ibero-románica. La contribución pragmática del expletivo ibérico actual semeja el valor semántico de las pruebas empíricas más antiguas y más frecuentes del elemento en los corpus históricos consultados, observación que sirve de punto de partida para reconstruir la trayectoria diacrónica del elemento desde su propuesto origen en contextos impersonales y epistémicos hasta la actualidad, en que el presunto expletivo ibérico demuestra características tanto expletivas como pragmáticas incluso dentro de la misma variedad.
Book chapters by Alice Corr
Conference Presentations by Alice Corr
En este artículo se analiza la función y distribución del llamado “sujeto expletivo visible” ello/ele/ell en ciertas variedades ibero-románicas no estándares. Se presentan nuevos datos empíricos con el fin de demostrar la caracterización heterogénea del fenómeno, cuya variación actual, según se argumenta, se ve explicada por los distintos grados de cambio sufridos por el elemento expletivo en cada variedad ibero-románica. La contribución pragmática del expletivo ibérico actual semeja el valor semántico de las pruebas empíricas más antiguas y más frecuentes del elemento en los corpus históricos consultados, observación que sirve de punto de partida para reconstruir la trayectoria diacrónica del elemento desde su propuesto origen en contextos impersonales y epistémicos hasta la actualidad, en que el presunto expletivo ibérico demuestra características tanto expletivas como pragmáticas incluso dentro de la misma variedad.
Recent work (Silva-Villar 1998; Carrilho 2005, 2008; Hinzelin & Kaiser 2006; Camacho 2013b) typically adopts a left-peripheral analysis of ELLO; some postulate a TP-expletive analysis for Dominican Spanish (Martínez-Sanz & Toribio 2008; Martínez-Sanz 2011; Camacho 2013a; Muñoz Pérez 2014). However, the problem with previous accounts is that they tend to offer a homogeneous characterisation for what, when cross-dialectal data is considered, appears to be a heterogeneous phenomenon. I argue that modern-day ELLO demonstrates both expletive-like and discourse-related properties even within the same variety, and that an analysis locating ELLO in a low CP position (viz. Fin) within the fine structure of the left-periphery (Rizzi 1997) is more appropriate.
Using comparative evidence from other Ibero-Romance varieties as well as diachronic data found in historical Spanish texts from both the New and Old Worlds, I demonstrate that – contrary to previous hypotheses (Henríquez-Ureña 1939, Bartra-Kaufmann 2011, Gupton & Lowman 2013) – modern-day ELLO has an unexpected origin in epistemic impersonal constructions from the 15th century onwards, specialising in function and extending into other contexts through the processes of grammaticalization/pragmaticization and analogy. Starting life as a referential subject pronoun, it develops into a pragmatic marker of (epistemic) value, from which the modern heterogeneous characterisation of ELLO across different varieties – both within Spanish and more widely across other Ibero-Romance varieties – is derived. As such, the grammaticalization of ELLO reflects the leftward progression up through the clausal architecture as predicted by, amongst others, Roberts & Roussou (2003); van Gelderen (2004); Roberts (2010, 2011).
Chapter 2 argues that Ibero-Romance vocatives and discourse particles exhibit syntactic behaviour which cannot be accounted for within a clausal architecture whose topmost layer is the CP. Instead, these utterance-oriented items’ behaviour and sentential distribution is indicative of an internally-articulated dedicated utterance field, which we call the Utterance Phrase (UP), above the CP, divisible into a higher, externally-oriented layer and a lower, internally-oriented layer (itself decomposable into dedicated projections for addressee and speaker). The remainder of the dissertation describes and analyses three types of illocutionary complementiser attested in Ibero-Romance, and shows that each item differs from the others not only in interpretation, but also in terms of their formal and distributional properties, and availability across Ibero-Romance dialects. Only one of these complementisers (quotative que, Chapter 4) patterns like a C-head; the other two (exclamative and conjunctive que, in Chapters 3 and 5 respectively) show distinct behaviour which we argue is evidence that they lexicalise separate U-heads within an expanded and revised cartographic left-periphery. The bundling of features on functional heads at the UP/CP boundary —the locus of the split Rizzian ForceP, or Speas & Tenny’s (2003) SentienceP— is unique to European Portuguese, contrasting with feature-scattering (following Giorgi & Pianesi 1997) across projections in other Peninsular Ibero-Romance varieties. This variation in feature distribution is argued to be responsible for microparametric differences in the availability and behaviour of illocutionary complementisers across Ibero-Romance. The compositionality of sentence-typing; fine-grained differences in the specification of complementisers; and gradient judgments on the constructions in which the illocutionary complementisers participate are also accounted for in these terms.
The dissertation proposes that, despite the progressive obsolescence of such items in standard, contemporary European Portuguese, the ubiquity of matrix illocutionary complementisers in European/Peninsular Ibero-Romance is a defining characteristic of this branch of the Romance languages. On the view that their loss in European Portuguese is counterbalanced by verb-based mechanisms for sentence- and illocutionary-typing, Chapter 6 concludes by exploring the possibility that the prevalence of illocutionary complementisers, and other utterance-oriented elements, correlates inversely with verb height.