Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T12:51:44.382Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Defective object clitic paradigms and the relation between language development and loss1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2013

SANDRA PAOLI
SANDRA PAOLI*
Affiliation:
The University of Oxford
*
Author's address: Centre for Linguistics and Philology, Walton Street, Oxford OX1 2HG, UKsandra.paoli@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Through an investigation of morphologically defective pronominal object paradigms in a number of northern Italian dialects, this article offers a reflection on the relation between the development and the loss of linguistic items based on the reconstruction of the possible diachronic path that has led to the current situation. The paper sets out to achieve two objectives. First, it presents a detailed description of the peculiarities of the object clitic paradigm in the northern Italian dialects and places them within the wider Romance context. Secondly, it discusses and evaluates the way the processes of emergence and loss of linguistic items relate to one another, with specific reference to what appears to be a more general hierarchy operative in languages, the Referential Hierarchy (Silverstein 1976, Comrie 1981, and many others).

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 143 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[1]

The leave for the research presented here was funded by two grants from the John Fell Fund, reference 073/697 (Comelico) and 092/326 (Surselvan), which are gratefully acknowledged. Part of the data presented here appeared in Paoli (2009). I am greatly indebted to my Comelico informants and to the curators of the various libraries and archives. This article is only able to contain a small part of all the materials collected, but it is hoped that it can nevertheless give a glimpse of the linguistic value of these dialects. Special thanks also go to Giampaolo Salvi, Michele Loporcaro, Philomen Probert, Martin Maiden and Chiara Cappellaro for very helpful suggestions and bibliographical leads. The final version of this paper owes a great deal to the generous, perceptive and thought-provoking comments of four anonymous JL referees, and to the editorial team at JL. All errors remain, needless to say, my own responsibility.

References

TEXTS CONSULTED Comelico

Martini, Giovanni Battista. c. 1870. La Passion del nos Signor Gesù Cristu scritta da San Mattiu in lenghe d'Padle. In Tagliavini, 1932, 119–123.Google Scholar
Ronzon, Antonio. 1874. Da Pelmo a Peralba: Almanacco Cadorino II. Venezia: Tipografia Antonelli.Google Scholar
Tagliavini, Carlo. 1932. Testi dialettali comelicesi del secolo scorso. Rivista Italiana di Letteratura dialettale IV.2, 109–123.Google Scholar

Surselvan

Decurtins, Caspar (ed.). 1880–1883. Quattro testi soprasilvani. Archivio Glottologico Italiano 7, 151–364.Google Scholar

REFERENCES

Ascoli, Graziadio Isaia. 1880–1888. Annotazioni sistematiche al Barlaam e Giosafat soprasilvano. Saggio di morfologia e lessicologia soprasilvana. Archivio Glottologico Italiano 7, 406–612.Google Scholar
Azevedo, Milton M. 2005. Portuguese: A linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, Brian D., Davies, Keith G., Hermann, Bruce P. & Walters, Gina. 2000. Confrontation naming after anterior temporal lobectomy is related to age of acquisition of the object names. Neuropsychologia 38.1, 83–92.Google Scholar
Benincà, Paola & Poletto, Cecilia. 2005a. On some descriptive generalizations in Romance. In Kayne, Richard S. & Cinque, Guglielmo (eds.), The Oxford handbook of comparative syntax, 221–258. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Benincà, Paola & Poletto, Cecilia. 2005b. The third dimension of person features. In Cornips, Leonie & Corrigan, Karen P. (eds.), Syntax and variation: Reconciling the biological and the social, 265–299. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Benveniste, Emile. 1971. Problems in general linguistics. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press.Google Scholar
Cardinaletti, Anna & Starke, Michal. 1999. The typology of structural deficiency: A case study of the three classes of pronouns. In Riemsdijk, Henk van (ed.), Clitics in the languages of Europe, 145–233. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, consciousness and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago, IL & London: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. 1981. Language universals and linguistic typology. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cummins, Sarah & Roberge, Yves. 2005. A modular account of null objects in French. Syntax 8, 44–64.Google Scholar
Cyrino, Sonia. 1997. O objeto nulo no português do Brasil – um estudo sintático-diacrônico. Londrina: Editora da UEL.Google Scholar
Cyrino, Sonia, Eugênia, M.Duarte, L. & Kato, Mary A.. 2000. Visible subjects and invisible clitics in Brazilian Portuguese. In Kato, Mary A. & Negrão, Esmeralda Vailati (eds.), Brazilian Portuguese and the Null Subject Parameter, 55–73. Vervuert & Madrid: Iberoamericana.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duarte, M.Eugênia, L. 1989. Clítico acusativo, pronome lexical e categoria vazia no Português do Brasil. In Tarallo, Fernando (ed.), Fotografias Sociolingüísticas, 19–34. São Paulo: SP. Pontes.Google Scholar
Egerland, Verner & Cardinaletti, Anna. 2010. I pronomi personali e riflessivi. In Renzi, Lorenzo & Salvi, Giampaolo (eds.), Grammatica dell'italiano antico, vol. II, 401–467. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar
Fabbiani, Giovanni. 1964–1965. Notizie sul notariato cadorino. Rassegna Economica XII.6 (1964), 12–24; XIII.1 and 2 (1965), 34–52 and 7–21.Google Scholar
Farrell, Patrick. 1990. Null objects in Brazilian Portuguese. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 8.3, 325–346.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fónagy, Ivan. 1985. J'aime, je connais: Verbes transitifs à objet latent. Revue Romane 20, 3–35.Google Scholar
Forchheimer, Paul. 1953. The category of person in language. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Galves, Charlotte. 2000. Agreement, predication and pronouns in the history of Portuguese. In Costa, João (ed.), Portuguese syntax: New comparative studies, 143–168. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Haiman, John & Benincà, Paola. 1992. The Rhaeto Romance languages. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi & Ritter, Elizabeth. 2002. Person and number in pronouns: A feature-geometric analysis. Language 78.3, 482–526.Google Scholar
Hodgson, Catherine & Ellis, Andrew. 1998. Last in, first to go: Age of acquisition and naming in the elderly. Brain and Language 64, 146–163.Google Scholar
Jaberg, Karl & Judd, Jakob. 1928–1940. Atlante Italo-Svizzero – Sprach und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz. Zofingen: Ringier.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. 1941. Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. 1968. Child language and aphasia. The Hague: Mouton. [English translation of Jakobson 1941.]Google Scholar
Kaiser, Georg & Hack, Franziska M.. 2013. Language change in comparison: The (special) case of Raeto-Romance. In Fleischer, Jürg & Simon, Horst (eds.), Sprachwandelvergleich – Comparing diachronies, 44–73. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kayne, Richard S. 1975. French syntax: The transformational cycle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud & Lemoine, Kevin. 1996. Vers une grammaire des compléments d'object zero en français parlé. In Chuquet, M. Julien & Fryd, Marc (eds.), Absence de marques et représentation de l'absence (Travaux Linguistiques du CerLiCO 9), 279–310. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud & Lemoine, Kevin. 2005. Definite null objects in (spoken) French: A construction-grammar account. In Fried, Mirjam & Boas, Hans C. (eds.), Grammatical constructions: Back to the roots, 13–55. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Larjavaara, Meri. 2000. Présence ou absence de l'objet: Limites du possible en français contemporain. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica. http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/julkaisut/hum/romaa/vk/larjavaara/presence.pdf.Google Scholar
Lindsay, Wallace. 1891. Latin accentuation (concluded). The Classical Review 5.9, 402–408.Google Scholar
Lucchesi, Dante & Lobo, Tânia. 1996. Aspectos da sintaxe do Português Brasileiro. In Faria, Isabel Hub, Pedro, Emília Ribeiro, Duarte, Inês & Gouveia, Carols A. M. (eds.), Introdução à lingüística geral e portuguesa, 303–322. Lisboa: Caminho.Google Scholar
Maiden, Martin, Smith, John Charles & Ledgeway, Adam. 2011. Introduction. In Maiden, Martin, Smith, John Charles & Ledgeway, Adam (eds.), The Cambridge history of the Romance languages, xxi–xxii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Paoli, Sandra. 2009. Gerarchie di caso e persona nei paradigmi dei pronomi atoni obliqui: Il caso dei dialetti del Comelico. Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia 33, 59–84.Google Scholar
Pescarini, Diego. 2009. The evolution of the determiner el in Veronese. Presented at the IX Incontro di dialettologia, Bristol, 6–7 March 2009.Google Scholar
Philipp, Markus, Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina, Bisang, Walter & Schlesewsky, Matthias. 2008. The role of animacy in the real time comprehension of Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from auditory event-related brain potentials. Brain and Language 105, 112–133.Google Scholar
Poletto, Cecilia. 2012. Contrastive linguistics and micro-variation: The role of dialectology. Languages in Contrast 12.1, 47–68.Google Scholar
Priscian. Grammatici latini: Ex recensione Henrici Keilii, vol. III. http://www.archive.org/stream/grammaticilatin04hagagoog#page/n14/mode/1up.Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 1986. Null objects in Italian and the theory of pro. Linguistic Inquiry 17, 501–157.Google Scholar
Salvi, Giampaolo. 2001. La nascita dei clitici romanzi. Romanische Forschungen 113.3, 285–319.Google Scholar
Schwan, Eduard & Behrens, Dietrich. 1913. Grammaire de l'ancien français. Leipzig: Reisland.Google Scholar
Siewierska, Anna. 2004. Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Hierarchy of features and ergativity. In Dixon, R. M. W. (ed.), Grammatical categories in Australian languages, 112–171. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.Google Scholar
Tagliavini, Carlo. 1926. Il dialetto del Comelico. Archivum Romanicum X.1–2, 1–200.Google Scholar
Tagliavini, Carlo. 1988. Il dialetto del Comelico (Ristampa anastatica dell'edizione del 1926 con correzioni ed aggiunte). Feltre: Comunità montana del Comelico e Sappada. [Reprint of the 1926 article, with corrections and added comments.]Google Scholar
Vanelli, Laura. 1987. I pronomi soggetto nei dialetti italiani settentrionali dal Medio Evo a oggi. Medioevo Romanzo 12, 173–211.Google Scholar
Vàrvaro, Alberto. 1984. La parola nel tempo. Lingua, società e storia. Bologna: Società Editrice Il Mulino.Google Scholar
Wang, Luming, Schlesewsky, Matthias, Bickel, Balthasar & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina. 2009. Exploring the nature of the ‘subject’-preference: Evidence from the online comprehension of simple sentences in Mandarin Chinese. Language and Cognitive Processes 27.7–8, 1180–1226.Google Scholar
Wanner, Dieter. 1987. The development of Romance clitic pronouns: From Latin to old Romance. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar