“Diacronia” bibliometric database (BDD)
Title:

Barese unmarked constructions and the case of preverbal intransitive subjects

Author:
Publication: Limba română: diacronie și sincronie în studiul limbii române, I, p. 39
Editors:Rodica Zafiu, Adina Dragomirescu, Alexandru Nicolae
Publisher:Editura Universității din București
Place:București
Year:
Abstract:In the survey of pragmatically unmarked sentential word orders of Barese, a dialect of the Upper-South of Italy, we come across a pragmatico-semantic phenomenon involving the fronting of a subset of intransitive subjects, which generally surface post-verbally in many (Italo-)Romance varieties. I argue that the availability of both pre- and post-verbal intransitive subject positions in Barese responds to two different semantic requirements: the ability to access the relevant information by both interlocutors, which triggers subject-fronting, and the covert presence of a pre-verbal loco-temporal deictic argument, which blocks subject-fronting. The latter situation is extensively discussed in the literature, whereas the former has always gone unnoticed. I discuss the fine-grained semantics of such fronted subject by means of Lambrecht’s (1994) ‘Topic Acceptability Scale’, in order to capture the pragmatico-semantic mechanism that determines the fronting of ‘accessible’ information to both interlocutors.
Language: English
Links:  

Citations to this publication: 1

References in this publication: 1

The citations/references list is based on indexed publications only, and may therefore be incomplete.
For any and all inquiries related to the database, please contact us at [Please enable javascript to view.].

Preview: