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Papers by Michela Cennamo
... 4. Conclusion The data so far discussed point to an area of Late Latin syntax showing an acti... more ... 4. Conclusion The data so far discussed point to an area of Late Latin syntax showing an active-like coding, paralleling the well-known active alignment of Grammatical Relations, the so-called'extended accusative'(Plank 1985; 1995; La Fauci 1994; also Pinkster ... Burzio, Luigi. ...
Periphrasis and Inflexion in Diachrony
This chapter reports the findings of a survey of V–S agreement in thetic broad focus in Emilian-R... more This chapter reports the findings of a survey of V–S agreement in thetic broad focus in Emilian-Romagnol, a group of northern Italo-Romance dialects. The survey was devised to test the claim that verb–subject agreement, unlike subject–verb agreement, is sensitive to discourse and thematic properties of the controller. While a great deal of variation was found in the dialects investigated, a general tendency towards the lack of number V–S agreement emerged from the findings. Qualitative analysis suggested that V–S agreement correlated with the definiteness of S and the lexical class of V. Furthermore, quantitative analysis uncovered the statistical significance of two predictors: whether S was a pronoun and its thematic status, the latter being defined as the position of the argument in the lexico-aspectual structure of the verb. Assuming that verb agreement is a subject diagnostic in the dialects under investigation, our results support the distinction between aboutness and thematic...
Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Auxiliary Selection. …, 2006
Historical Linguistics 2017, 2020
This article discusses some aspects of the reorganization of voice distinctions in the transition... more This article discusses some aspects of the reorganization of voice distinctions in the transition from Latin to Romance, namely the grammaticalization of activity (do / make) and change of state (become) verbs as markers of the passive voice, and the reanalysis of the reflexive morpheme se as a voice modulator, focussing on patterns of invariance (i.e., persistence) of Latin inheritance and principled differences (i.e., divergence) in the type and extent of variation and further developments in this area of Romance morphosyntax.
Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2017
Perspectives on Language Structure and Language Change
The Role of Semantic, Pragmatic, and Discourse …, 2009
... function, in Latin the unmarked linking of arguments is for A/S to occur in the nominative in... more ... function, in Latin the unmarked linking of arguments is for A/S to occur in the nominative in the active voice, functioning as subjects (3): (3) poeta umbram amat poet. nom shadow. acc love. pres. ind. 3sg 'The poet loves the shade' Page 331. 1 Michela Cennamo Passive ...
Valency over Time
This article explores the interplay of the event structure template of verbs with the verb's inhe... more This article explores the interplay of the event structure template of verbs with the verb's inherent meaning (the 'root') and the nature of the subject (e.g., animacy and control) in shaping the distribution of the different strategies available to mark anticausativization-the active intransitive (i.e. lability) and the reflexive (se)-in Italian and French, both diachronically and synchronically, in light of their Latin antecedents, the-r form, the reflexive and the active intransitive. It is shown that both in Italian and French se comes to be gradually associated with verbs lexicalizing telic change, interacting with the voice domain, starting from the alternation between the reflexive and the active intransitive in Old Italian, and from the active intransitive as the sole/main anticausative strategy in Old French. The aspectual specification of verbs also affects the synchronic distribution of the anticausative strategies, with the reflexive being not only a marker of thematic reduction, but also signalling in some of its uses the presence of a final goal/result or target state in the lexical meaning of a verb, occurring with verbs lexically encoding a scalar change, either in all their uses or in some of them.
Linguistics, 2015
The diachrony of valency patterns is generally an understudied phenomenon. The present article in... more The diachrony of valency patterns is generally an understudied phenomenon. The present article investigates anticausativization from a diachronic perspective, highlighting the parameters determining the morphosyntactic encoding of this type of intransitivization in two early Western Indo-European languages, Latin and Old Norse-Icelandic. It is shown that the structural and lexical aspects of a verb’s meaning and their interplay with the inherent and relational characteristics of verbal arguments affect the synchronic distribution and the diachronic development of the anticausativation strategies in the languages investigated. These features interact, in the course of time, with changes in the encoding of voice and grammatical relations, such as the demise of the synthetic mediopassive and the recasting of the case system.
Linguistics, 2015
The diachrony of valency patterns is generally an understudied phenomenon. The present article in... more The diachrony of valency patterns is generally an understudied phenomenon. The present article investigates anticausativization from a diachronic perspective, highlighting the parameters determining the morphosyntactic encoding of this type of intransitivization in two early Western Indo-European languages, Latin and Old Norse-Icelandic. It is shown that the structural and lexical aspects of a verb’s meaning and their interplay with the inherent and relational characteristics of verbal arguments affect the synchronic distribution and the diachronic development of the anticausativation strategies in the languages investigated. These features interact, in the course of time, with changes in the encoding of voice and grammatical relations, such as the demise of the synthetic mediopassive and the recasting of the case system.
Studies in Language Companion Series, 2011
Grammatical Change in the Dialects of Italy, 2014
... 4. Conclusion The data so far discussed point to an area of Late Latin syntax showing an acti... more ... 4. Conclusion The data so far discussed point to an area of Late Latin syntax showing an active-like coding, paralleling the well-known active alignment of Grammatical Relations, the so-called'extended accusative'(Plank 1985; 1995; La Fauci 1994; also Pinkster ... Burzio, Luigi. ...
Periphrasis and Inflexion in Diachrony
This chapter reports the findings of a survey of V–S agreement in thetic broad focus in Emilian-R... more This chapter reports the findings of a survey of V–S agreement in thetic broad focus in Emilian-Romagnol, a group of northern Italo-Romance dialects. The survey was devised to test the claim that verb–subject agreement, unlike subject–verb agreement, is sensitive to discourse and thematic properties of the controller. While a great deal of variation was found in the dialects investigated, a general tendency towards the lack of number V–S agreement emerged from the findings. Qualitative analysis suggested that V–S agreement correlated with the definiteness of S and the lexical class of V. Furthermore, quantitative analysis uncovered the statistical significance of two predictors: whether S was a pronoun and its thematic status, the latter being defined as the position of the argument in the lexico-aspectual structure of the verb. Assuming that verb agreement is a subject diagnostic in the dialects under investigation, our results support the distinction between aboutness and thematic...
Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Auxiliary Selection. …, 2006
Historical Linguistics 2017, 2020
This article discusses some aspects of the reorganization of voice distinctions in the transition... more This article discusses some aspects of the reorganization of voice distinctions in the transition from Latin to Romance, namely the grammaticalization of activity (do / make) and change of state (become) verbs as markers of the passive voice, and the reanalysis of the reflexive morpheme se as a voice modulator, focussing on patterns of invariance (i.e., persistence) of Latin inheritance and principled differences (i.e., divergence) in the type and extent of variation and further developments in this area of Romance morphosyntax.
Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2017
Perspectives on Language Structure and Language Change
The Role of Semantic, Pragmatic, and Discourse …, 2009
... function, in Latin the unmarked linking of arguments is for A/S to occur in the nominative in... more ... function, in Latin the unmarked linking of arguments is for A/S to occur in the nominative in the active voice, functioning as subjects (3): (3) poeta umbram amat poet. nom shadow. acc love. pres. ind. 3sg 'The poet loves the shade' Page 331. 1 Michela Cennamo Passive ...
Valency over Time
This article explores the interplay of the event structure template of verbs with the verb's inhe... more This article explores the interplay of the event structure template of verbs with the verb's inherent meaning (the 'root') and the nature of the subject (e.g., animacy and control) in shaping the distribution of the different strategies available to mark anticausativization-the active intransitive (i.e. lability) and the reflexive (se)-in Italian and French, both diachronically and synchronically, in light of their Latin antecedents, the-r form, the reflexive and the active intransitive. It is shown that both in Italian and French se comes to be gradually associated with verbs lexicalizing telic change, interacting with the voice domain, starting from the alternation between the reflexive and the active intransitive in Old Italian, and from the active intransitive as the sole/main anticausative strategy in Old French. The aspectual specification of verbs also affects the synchronic distribution of the anticausative strategies, with the reflexive being not only a marker of thematic reduction, but also signalling in some of its uses the presence of a final goal/result or target state in the lexical meaning of a verb, occurring with verbs lexically encoding a scalar change, either in all their uses or in some of them.
Linguistics, 2015
The diachrony of valency patterns is generally an understudied phenomenon. The present article in... more The diachrony of valency patterns is generally an understudied phenomenon. The present article investigates anticausativization from a diachronic perspective, highlighting the parameters determining the morphosyntactic encoding of this type of intransitivization in two early Western Indo-European languages, Latin and Old Norse-Icelandic. It is shown that the structural and lexical aspects of a verb’s meaning and their interplay with the inherent and relational characteristics of verbal arguments affect the synchronic distribution and the diachronic development of the anticausativation strategies in the languages investigated. These features interact, in the course of time, with changes in the encoding of voice and grammatical relations, such as the demise of the synthetic mediopassive and the recasting of the case system.
Linguistics, 2015
The diachrony of valency patterns is generally an understudied phenomenon. The present article in... more The diachrony of valency patterns is generally an understudied phenomenon. The present article investigates anticausativization from a diachronic perspective, highlighting the parameters determining the morphosyntactic encoding of this type of intransitivization in two early Western Indo-European languages, Latin and Old Norse-Icelandic. It is shown that the structural and lexical aspects of a verb’s meaning and their interplay with the inherent and relational characteristics of verbal arguments affect the synchronic distribution and the diachronic development of the anticausativation strategies in the languages investigated. These features interact, in the course of time, with changes in the encoding of voice and grammatical relations, such as the demise of the synthetic mediopassive and the recasting of the case system.
Studies in Language Companion Series, 2011
Grammatical Change in the Dialects of Italy, 2014