Matteo Greco | IUSS Pavia (original) (raw)

Papers by Matteo Greco

Under review, 2024

Natural languages contain elements that do not contribute to the propositional meaning of a sente... more Natural languages contain elements that do not contribute to the propositional meaning of a sentence. Among these, certain forms, such as the Ethical Dative (ED), are less studied. The ED serves the specific function of identifying a person who is affected by the event described by a sentence. This is exemplified by the Italian sentence "Tommaso mi ha camminato fino al parco da solo" (literally, 'Thomas ED has walked to the park alone', meaning 'Tommaso walked to the park alone'). ED does not change the truth-value conditions associated with the sentence in which it occurs, thus being 'expletive' in a sense. In this paper, I will argue that the interpretative nature of these expletive elements depends on their syntactic configuration. More specifically, I will describe key aspects of ED and I will propose a syntactic analysis for it. Specifically, I will argue that this non-core / non-argumental dative is introduced as the head of an Applicative Phrase generated outside the thematic domain of the syntactic tree, in the CP domain. This hypothesis accounts for its expletive nature and various other properties. Additionally, I will reference the Speech Act Phrases theory to explain the preference of the ED for the first and second singular persons.

Greco Matteo & Davide Mocci (Eds.). (2024). A Cartesian Dream: A Geometrical Account of Syntax. In honor of Andrea Moro. Rivista di Grammatica Generativa/Research in Generative Grammar Monographs. Lingbuzz Press ISBN 978-2-8399-4196-9. , 2024

Andrea's idea that there is an expletive of the predicate was adopted, with interesting results, ... more Andrea's idea that there is an expletive of the predicate was adopted, with interesting results, in Hale and Keyser's (2002: 189-203) restrictive theory of argument structure.

Cerebral Cortex, 2024

Understanding how language is elaborated in the brain is particularly challenging since different... more Understanding how language is elaborated in the brain is particularly challenging since different morphological, lexical, and syntactic information are simultaneously conveyed. Disentangling the contribution of each is not an easy challenge. In the present paper we aimed at statistically evaluating the contributions of morphological, lexical and syntactic information in the electrophysiological signal. We recorded EEG responses from 32 participants listening to affirmative active declarative sentences containing homophonous phrases (HPs), constituting either noun phrases (NP) or verb phrases (VP). Using the same acoustic sequences in different syntactic contexts allowed us to avoid the acoustic confounding. Moreover, we controlled the relation between the syntactic and the surprisal information by modulating the predictability of the syntactic structure. We found activations correlating with syntactic and lexical processing in different electrodes, different frequency bands and different time windows, respectively. As expected, only the syntactic surprisal could capture the syntactic neural modulation elicited by the HPs. Using different statistical and computational tools, the present study shows that surprisal models based only on morphological information (category to which a word belongs) are not sufficient: hierarchical models that contain syntactic information are needed to fully characterize the neural activity elicited by our stimuli. Moreover, the temporal dynamics of the NP vs. VP contrast mirrored the expected timing of occurrence of the syntactic processing. Our findings replicated our previous results with SEEG recordings, opening new research and treatment possibilities as EEG is much simpler to record than SEEG, and comes with fewer limitations. Further expanding on the surprisal models, the present paper substantially refines the understanding of the neural correlates of basic syntactic structures such as NPs and VPs by highlighting the sensitivity of the brain to syntactic information and ultimately pave the way to a better understanding of linguistic computation in the brain

Cortex, 2023

We aim at offering a contribution to highlight the essential differences between Large Language M... more We aim at offering a contribution to highlight the essential differences between Large Language Models (LLM) and the human language faculty. More explicitly, we claim that the existence of impossible languages for humans does not have any equivalent for LLM making them unsuitable models of the human language faculty, especially for a neurobiologically point of view. The core part is preceded by two premises bearing on the distinction between machines and humans and the distinction between competence and performance, respectively

Frontiers in Language Sciences, 2023

A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who... more A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who believe that statistical surface distributions, in particular using measures like surprisal, provide a better understanding of language processing, vs. those who believe that discrete hierarchical structures implementing linguistic information such as syntactic ones are a better tool. In this paper, we show that this dichotomy is a false one. Relying on the fact that statistical measures can be defined on the basis of either structural or non-structural models, we provide empirical evidence that only models of surprisal that reflect syntactic structure are able to account for language regularities.

Languages, 2022

This article aims at investigating some diachronic aspects of the Italian negative system, consid... more This article aims at investigating some diachronic aspects of the Italian negative system, considering a time span ranging from Old Latin to Modern Italian. Most of the negative polarity phenomena populating the Modern Italian system are consequences of a crucial change that occurred in Old Latin: The Latin negative morpheme nōn (“not”), which initially displayed a maximal projection status, and became a syntactic (negative) head. This change caused the shift from a double negation system to a negative concord one, which affects many Romance languages (and their dialects). It also determines the availability of the expletive reading of negation in Italian, as well as in other Romance languages (ex. French), calling for a new generalization: only languages (and structures) displaying a negative head allow the expletive interpretation of negation, languages displaying a maximal projection status do not.

In Conversazioni sull'origine dell'Uomo. 150 anni dopo Darwin, (eds.) Di Vincenzo Fabio, Salomone Flavia. Roma: Edizioni Espera, pp. 245-258., 2021

Interrogarsi sull’evoluzione del linguaggio umano presuppone una chiara conoscenza di che cosa si... more Interrogarsi sull’evoluzione del linguaggio umano presuppone una chiara conoscenza di che cosa sia. Si è spesso tentati di associare la spiegazione di una qualche facoltà mentale, o anche di un organo, indicandone le funzioni. Ad esempio, si potrebbe rispondere alla domanda sulla natura del linguaggio, dicendo che è semplicemente un mezzo di comunicazione. Attenzione però, sarebbe come studiare lo sviluppo dell’evoluzione dell’occhio dicendo che è un organo che serve per leggere e, portando il ragionamento all’estremo, che si sia evoluto esattamente per questo scopo. Nessun biologo accetterebbe mai questa spiegazione, così come non si può accettare l’idea che il linguaggio sia un semplice mezzo comunicativo. Che cos’è dunque il linguaggio? Siamo di fronte a una delle domande più complesse di tutta la storia del pensiero umano, una ricerca che ci accompagna da sempre. Si potrebbe rispondere con le stesse parole che Sant’Agostino riservò alla domanda su che cosa fosse il tempo “Se nessuno me ne chiede, lo so bene: ma se volessi darne spiegazione a chi me ne chiede, non lo so”. In questo capitolo tenteremo di dare, quanto meno, una cornice teorica per individuare gli elementi essenziali per poter rispondere a questa domanda.

Proceedings ExLing 2021: 12th International Conference of Experimental Linguistics, 11-13 October, Athens, Greece, 2021

This paper aims to discuss some good techniques gaining better results in second language acquisi... more This paper aims to discuss some good techniques gaining better results in second language acquisition during L2 classes. The core idea is that the "whole" person is involved in the learning activity and, therefore, the teaching experience has to deal with a multidimensional approach: it should adopt creativity tasks, such as painting and drawing, as well as practical ones, such as cooking and reciting; it should adopt unmoving activity, such as singing, as well as moving activity, such as jumping and dancing; etc. Each technique will be discussed on a theoretical-driven background.

Lingue antiche e moderne

This work focuses on a particular diachronic transformation of a syntactic category, that is the ... more This work focuses on a particular diachronic transformation of a syntactic category, that is the propositional negation. I consider a time span ranging from archaic Latin to modern Italian, passing through the ancient forms of medieval documents. I will show that some negative phenomena endured in different diachronic transformations, while others changed over time, confirming generalizations such as those formalized as espersen's cycle. rom this point of view, the change in the syntactic nature of the Latin negative morpheme n n was crucial: it started as a maximal pro ection and it became a head. This change caused the multiple negation constructions that still occur in Italian. inally, I will also discuss some negative phenomena occurring in odern Italian, which are not well studied.

Oxford University press, 2021

Function words are commonly considered to be a small and closed class of words in which each ele... more Function words are commonly considered to be a small and closed class of words in which each element is associated with a specific and fixed logical meaning. Unfortunately, this is not always true as witnessed by negation: on the one hand, negation does reverse the truth-value conditions of a proposition, and the other hand, it does not, realizing what it is called Expletive Negation. This chapter aims to investigate whether a word that is established on the basis of its function can be ambiguous by discussing the role of the syntactic derivation in some instances of EN clauses. Both a theoretical and an experimental approach will be adopted.

Italiano LinguaDue, Jul 1, 2021

This article aims to be a brief guide for L2 teacher education – issue arising a growing interest... more This article aims to be a brief guide for L2 teacher education – issue arising a growing interest in the last decades since the pioneering work of Richards and Nunan (1990) (see also Burns, Richards, 2009 and the references therein) – moving from some conceptual bases, but with the main goal to discuss the techniques in themselves. More specifically, according to the six domains classification proposed by Richards (1998: xiv) on the content and knowledge of L2 teacher education, this paper will address the first issue, i.e. general theories of teaching, adopting a practical perspective. This point of view is specifically modulated on the second language teacher needs and profiles (Tarone, Allwright, 2005)3, from novice teachers, who may experience a “reality shock” (Veenman, 1984: 143; Farrell, 2008) when they start their teaching activity, to the more expert ones, who want to adopt new strategies in order to improve their results. Therefore, this paper adopts a twofold approach to the teaching experience: on the one hand, it gives some brief practical strategies on how to plan a good L2 course; on the other hand, it discusses the theoretical reasons undergoing those strategies.

Proceedings of the Fifty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 2019

Babylonia, 2020

Teaching a second language is an increasing necessity in a lot of countries due to many factors s... more Teaching a second language is an increasing necessity in a lot of countries due to many factors such as, among other things, the migration flows. Two situations man- date such a necessity: teaching the local language to foreign people and teaching
a foreign language to local people. As a primary consequence of this fact, teachers are more and more demanding of successful techniques in order to improve their ability and efficiency, particularly in relation to the environment in which the course is conducted. The present work aims to present a project of teaching Italian as L2, which took place in Philadelphia (USA) at the William M. Meredith School with stu- dents from 5 to 7 years old. The main goal is twofold: describing the socio-cultural environment in which the project was conducted and introducing some teaching techniques. The combination of these two elements gained an unexpected involve- ment of the students and their families.

Lingua, 2020

This work explores two kinds of asymmetries within the class of nominal copular (NC) construction... more This work explores two kinds of asymmetries within the class of nominal copular (NC) constructions under the unified theory of copular sentences deriving the two basic configurations from a unique underlying structure via raising, namely canonical vs. inverse. Using acceptability judgments, we first tested wh- sub-extraction from both determiner phrases (DPs) in both configurations. We then collected acceptability for the same sentences without involving sub-extraction, and compared these results with the acceptability of pre- and post-verbal subject placement in transitive, unergative and unaccusative predicates. We observed the following. (i) Sub- extractions from predicates in canonical form are the most acceptable. (ii) In the remaining conditions, sub-extractions from predicates are more acceptable than those from subjects, and those from canonical are more acceptable than those from inverse NC sentences. The preference for canonical NC sentences is also confirmed when sub-extraction is absent. (iii) There is a general preference for pre- verbal subjects with all verbal predicates (especially strong in transitive and unergative predicates, milder with unaccusatives). The best acceptability results obtained with sub-extraction from predicates in canonical form are in line with the unified theory; the necessity to occupy a pre-verbal position for (presuppositional) subjects captures all the major remaining contrasts.

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2020

This work focuses on a particular case of negative sentences, the Surprise Negation sen- tences (... more This work focuses on a particular case of negative sentences, the Surprise Negation sen- tences (SNEGs). SNEGs belong to the class of expletive negation sentences, i.e., they are affirmative in meaning but involve a clausal negation. A clear example is offered by Italian: ‘E non mi è scesa dal treno Maria?!’ (let. ‘and not CLITIC.to_me is got off-the train Mary’=‘The surprise was that Maria got off the train!’). From a theoretical point of view, the interpretation of SNEGs as affirmative can be derived from their specific syntac- tic and semantic structure. Here we offer an implementation of the visual world paradigm to test how SNEGs are interpreted. Participants listened to affirmative, negative or exple- tive negative clauses while four objects (two relevant—either expected or unexpected—and two unrelated) were shown on the screen and their eye movements were recorded. Growth Curve Analysis showed that the fixation patterns to the relevant objects were very similar for affirmative and expletive negative sentences, while striking differences were observed between negative and affirmative sentences. These results showed that negation does play a different role in the mental representation of a sentence, depending on its syntactic deri- vation. Moreover, we also found that, compared to affirmative sentences, SNEGs require higher processing efforts due to both their syntactic complexity and pragmatic integration, with slower response time and lower accuracy.

Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 2019

Expletive Negation is widespread in human languages. Although many semantic, pragmatic and syntac... more Expletive Negation is widespread in human languages. Although many semantic, pragmatic and syntactic hypotheses about it have been advanced, it still remains puzzling. Two questions, particularly, need to be faced: (i) what are the contexts, mainly syntactic, where negation receives its vacuous interpretation? (ii) Is EN a phenomenon grammatically distinct from standard negation or are they the same one? In this article I will provide empirical and theoretical arguments to show that EN derives from a particular syntactic configuration by investigating a case of Italian EN, i.e. Surprise Negation Sentences. More specifically, I will propose that the Italian negative marker “non” (“not”) has a twofold interpretation encoded in syntax: (i) when it is merged in the TP-area during the v*P-phase, it gives the standard negative interpretation reversing the truth-value conditions of a sentence; (ii) when it is merged in the CP domain and the v*P-phase is already closed, it gives the expletive interpretation shown in Snegs. From this point of view, the expletive reading of negation is just a reflex of the syntactic context in which negation is introduced.

Proceedings of the 36° West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 2019

Expletive negation (EN) is commonly considered to be a unitary phenomenon cross-linguistically (H... more Expletive negation (EN) is commonly considered to be a unitary phenomenon cross-linguistically (Horn 1989; Van Der Wouden 1994; Makri 2013). I will provide empirical arguments to show that in fact EN consists of distinct subtypes and I will propose a twofold partition between weak and strong EN. Moreover, I will propose an analysis of a specific case of EN in Italian I dubbed “Surprise Negation Sentences” showing that their
proprieties are the result of interaction of independent syntactic principles.

Lingue e Linguaggio, 2019

Expletive negation (EN) is commonly considered to be a unitary phenomenon cross-linguistically c... more Expletive negation (EN) is commonly considered to be a unitary phenomenon cross-linguistically codified. In this article I provide empirical arguments to show that in fact EN consists of distinct subtypes and propose a twofold partition between weak and strong EN. More specifically, by investigating Italian, I show that weak EN structures maintain some features typically associated to standard negation (for example, they allow weak-NPIs and n-words) whereas strong EN structures do not, forming a natural class within. Moreover, I highlight a previous unnoticed case of Italian EN clauses I dubbed “Surprise Negative (SNEG) Sentences”. SNEGs are distinct from any other EN type sentences for their semantic, syntactic and pragmatic features. I will provide tests based on Ethical Dative, Expletive e, discourse- related constructions (like focus and topic phenomena) and mirativity value; moreover, I characterize them on the basis of intonational features showing that they blend interrogative and exclamative acoustic features.

Under review, 2024

Cerebral Cortex, 2024

Cortex, 2023

Frontiers in Language Sciences, 2023

Languages, 2022

In Conversazioni sull'origine dell'Uomo. 150 anni dopo Darwin, (eds.) Di Vincenzo Fabio, Salomone Flavia. Roma: Edizioni Espera, pp. 245-258., 2021

Proceedings ExLing 2021: 12th International Conference of Experimental Linguistics, 11-13 October, Athens, Greece, 2021

Lingue antiche e moderne

Oxford University press, 2021

Italiano LinguaDue, Jul 1, 2021

Proceedings of the Fifty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 2019

Babylonia, 2020

Lingua, 2020

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2020

Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 2019

Proceedings of the 36° West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 2019

Lingue e Linguaggio, 2019

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020

Negation is one of the main elements characterizing the human language. From the semantic point o... more Negation is one of the main elements characterizing the human language. From the semantic point of view, negation is a one-place operator reversing the truth-value conditions of the sentence in which it occurs (Bernini&Ramat 1996; Horn&Kato 2000; Speranza&Horn 2012). A sentence like “Luca is not smart” is true if and only if the correspondent affirmative sentence “Luca is smart” is false, and vice versa.
However, this logical mechanism underling negation is not always employed. Consider, for example, the sentence “He is richer nor you’ll ever be “(Yoon 2012). In this case negation does not reverse the truth- value conditions of the sentence giving an example of what it is called expletive negation (cfr. Jespersen 1917; Horn 1989).
Many semantic, pragmatic and syntactic hypotheses have been advanced to explain expletive negation (cfr. Yoon 2011; Makri 2013 among others) but it still remains puzzling. Two questions, particularly, need to be faced: (i) what are the contexts where negation receives an expletive interpretation? (ii) Is expletive negation a phenomenon grammatically distinct from the standard negation or are they different instances of the same phenomenon?
The main scope of this book is to face these questions through the discussion of a previously unnoticed case of Italian expletive negation: the “Surprise Negation Sentences” (Snegs). Consider, for example, the following sentence:

(1) Ieri, non è scesa dal treno Maria ?!
(Yesterday Sneg be.3rdsing.pres. got off-the train Maria)
“Yesterday, Maria got off the train!”

Snegs are limited to a specific context in which a speaker is struck by an unexpected fact (in the previous case, the fact that Maria got off the train) and show a marked intonation blending acoustic features of questions and exclamatives (hence the ?! diacritics). Their distribution sets them apart from any other case of expletive negation clauses. More specifically, Snegs do not allow polarity-sensitive elements usually associated with the negation (ex. strong and weak NPIs); they interact with the left periphery allowing only topicalized structures and rejecting the focalized ones; they are often accompanied by the emphatic particle E and by the Ethical Dative; they cannot be embedded under any kind of predicate; etc.
To account for all these apparently distinct phenomena in a unified way. I will propose a syntactic representation of Snegs which combines some crucial assumptions of the cartographic project (Rizzi 1997- 2004; Cinque 2002-2006; Belletti 2004; Cinque&Rizzi 2010) and of the minimalist program (Chomsky 1995- 2001-2008). More specifically, I will propose that the same Italian negative marker non can receive both the standard and the expletive interpretations depending on its syntactic derivation: when it is merged above the TP during the vP-phase, it reverses the truth-value conditions of the sentence (cfr. Belletti 1990; Zanuttini 1996-1997; Frascarelli 2000); when it is merged in the CP domain when the vP-phase is already closed, it gives the expletive interpretation showed in Snegs. In this way the expletive reading of negation is just a reflex of the syntactic context in which the negative marker non is merged suggesting, among others, that standard and expletive negation are different instance of a unique grammatical phenomenon.
Besides the syntactic characterization of Snegs, I also investigate their on-line processing. Starting from the basic observation that expletive negative sentences are affirmative in meaning, I wondered whether the elaboration of Snegs is more similar to the one of affirmative sentences rather than to the one of negative sentences. To investigate this idea, I built a psycho-linguistic experiment adopting the eye tracker methodology in a picture-word paradigm (cfr. Orenes, Beltrán&Santamaría 2014). My prediction was that Snegs reproduces the pattern of affirmative sentence requiring less time and only one mental representation to be elaborated (cfr. Carpenter&Just 1975; Carpenter et al. 1999; Kaup, Lüdtke&Zwaan 2006; Kaup et al. 2007). I will show that both the predictions are correct.

Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2018

«Il mistero del linguaggio. Nuove Prospettive» è un volume di Noam Chomsky che raccoglie due test... more «Il mistero del linguaggio. Nuove Prospettive» è un volume di Noam Chomsky che raccoglie due testi inediti, la lezione magistrale tenuta presso il Pontificium Concilium Culturae nello Stato del Vaticano nel gennaio del 2014 e la conferenza tenuta alla Trippenhuis di Amsterdam nel dicembre dello stesso anno, accanto ad un lavoro pubblicato su una rivista di psicologia nel 2015. Questo volume può essere considerato una summa aggiornata della rivoluzione che Chomsky ha portato nella linguistica. In particolare, i tre testi qui raccolti discutono tre domande fondamentali: che cos’è il linguaggio umano? qual è l’origine del suo uso creativo, cioè quella proprietà che permette a ogni uomo di ricombinare un insieme limitato di elementi discreti (in prima approssimazione, le parole) generando un insieme potenzialmente infinito di espressioni (le frasi)? quali sono le caratteristiche specifiche che lo differenziano dal linguaggio degli altri esseri viventi? Chomsky affronta tutte queste questioni attraverso una trattazione esemplare, dettagliata ed esauriente ma al contempo sintetica, ricca di notazioni storiche e filosofiche e accessibile anche ai non addetti ai lavori che nutrono interesse per la natura e la struttura del linguaggio umano.