RRL, LXV, 2, p. 199–204, Bucureşti, 2020
ALEXANDRU NICOLAE, Word Order and Parameter Change in Romanian. A Comparative
Romance Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019, 256 p.
The book Word Order and Parameter Change in Romanian addresses the main issues related to the major word order changes affecting the clausal and the nominal domains in the passage from old to modern Romanian. As mentioned in the Preface (xii-xiii), the aim of the book is the study of parameter change, the understanding of the nature of linguistic parameters, and of parameter resetting.
The empirical investigation is always doubled by formal analyses of the phenomena investigated. The author believes that before analysing diachronic data, one should understand the synchronic ones, for which we employ grammaticality judgements; therefore the phenomena investigated are first analysed from a synchronic point of view. The book discusses phenomena which are quantitatively relevant, phenomena which are rare in Romance or specific to old Romanian, from a comparative Romance perspective and from a double diachronic perspective (quantitative and qualitative); the relevance of language contact in diachrony is also assessed.
Chapter 1, Word order and parameter change in Romanian. An introduction (pp. 1–9), briefly presents the structure of the book (and the main issues discussed in every chapter), the theoretical framework (the second version of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program), the periodization of Romanian and the corpus used for research, certain methodological problems (among which distinguishing between non-translated writings and translations and the way in which a diachronic syntactician should deal with parametrically ambiguous structures), the “foreign” syntactic features, and the way examples and glosses are presented.
Chapter 2 is devoted to Inversion as a residual old Romance V2grammar (pp. 10–62). The structures investigated here – verb-auxiliary, verb-clitic, and verb-clitic-auxiliary in non-imperative sentences – are specific to old Romanian, where they were already residual, and they have been eliminated in the passage to modern Romanian. Before proceeding to the analysis of these constructions, the author offers a background on the strategy of verb movement in Romanian and the specificity of the “relaxed” V2 grammar in old Romance, contrasting with the strict V2 grammar of the Germanic languages. A claim introduced in this chapter will prove insightful for the entire book:
there is an important difference between verb-auxiliary and verb-clitic-auxiliary structures, on the one hand, and verb-clitic structures, on the other hand. While the former structures are clearly derived via V-to-C movement, the later are systematically ambiguous between a V-to-C and V-to-I analysis, a distinction which will be taken into account for the quantitative analyses presented in this chapter.
Comparing the situation in old Romance to the one in old Romanian, the author convincingly shows that old Romanian also had a “relaxed” V2 grammar, conceived of not as a surface phenomenon but as a structural constraint requiring V-to-C movement in non-directive clauses. In the first Romanian texts (of the 16th century), this was already a residual option, a fact supported by the quantitative study of verb-auxiliary and verb-clitic structures and by taking into account the matrix-embedded asymmetry, specific to V2 systems. In the following centuries, this residual feature of the grammar is reanalyzed as a focus-marking strategy, restricted to matrix clauses, before it is finally eliminated altogether from the grammar.
Chapter 3, Discontiguous linearizations in the sentential core. Interpolation, scrambling, and related phenomena (pp. 63–107), analyses several phenomena having in common the lack of adjacency
between functional elements (auxiliaries, pronominal clitics, the subjunctive complementizer să, the negator nu) and the lexical verb. The empirical data from old Romanian is always presented, when possible, alongside their Romance counterparts. This chapter is impressive not only because of the clear theoretical account, but also by the enormous amount of data (illustrating different verbal structures and the range of interposed constituents) and the quantitative analysis presented for each type of discontiguous structure, taking into account again the matrix-embedded asymmetry. The findings of this chapter support the hypothesis formulated in the previous one, i.e. old Romanian has residual lower verb movement on the clausal spine, especially in embedded clauses. Given that auxiliaries are placed in a high position in the IP, there are intermediary positions which can accommodate (multiple) interposed constituents. Supplementary support for this claim comes from the vP-periphery of complex predicates, briefly analysed in the last section.
The two following chapters are dedicated to the nominal domain. Chapter 4 addresses the general issue of Word order in the nominal phrase (pp. 108–162). Given that the nominal domain seems to have been subject to more visible changes than the clausal domain in the passage from old to modern Romanian, the author devotes a large chapter to the main syntactic changes characterizing it:
(i) the availability of two different definiteness valuation patterns in old Romanian, one preserved in the modern language (i.e. the definite article is hosted by the first constituent of the nominal phrase) and one jettisoned (i.e. the low definite article), the elimination which having the effect of word order rigidification, due to the loss of long distance valuation (ii), the greater accessibility and flexibility of the prenominal domain, which could host not only qualifying adjectives (as in modern Romanian), but also relational adjectives, genitives and possessive adjective, nominal arguments, etc., and (iii) discontiguous structures (hyperbaton) in the nominal and adjectival domains which are intimately related to the existence of head-final structures in the nominal domain.
Chapter 5, Demonstrative specialization and the emergence of the determiner cel (pp. 163–216), is devoted to the diachronic restructuring of the system of Romanian demonstratives, the specialization of short prenominal demonstratives as heads and of long postnominal demonstratives as phrases, and the grammaticalization of a distal weak form, cel, as a freestanding definite article (in competition with the suffixal definite article in old Romanian and in complementary distribution with it in modern Romanian) and as an adjectival article.
Chapter 6, Diachronic features of Romanian in a broader comparative setting (pp. 217–222), summarizes the main findings of the book and their relevance for Romance linguistics, for diachronic and comparative linguistics and for current syntactic theory.
As conclusions, instead of a summary, it is rather worth mentioning that the most salient feature of this book is richness: in selecting the data, in presenting the relevant literature, both traditional and new, in bringing together the interpretations available for different phenomena. We should also point out that Alexandru Nicolae’s book is not only a book on word order in Romanian (from a comparative perspective), but also a book which aim to clarify the (formal) analysis of other syntactic phenomena, such as: the strategy of verb movement, the nature of auxiliaries, the double realization of pronominal clitics, the position of negation on the clausal spine, the nature of the subjunctive complementizer să, the relevance of the main clause subjunctive for identifying the height of verb movement, the suffixal nature of the Romanian definite article, polydefiniteness, etc.
Adina Dragomirescu
“Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” Institute of Linguistics/
Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest
KATALIN NAGY C., Data and Argumentation in Historical Pragmatics: Grammaticalization
of a Catalan Motion Verb Construction, Sheffield/Bristol, Equinox Publishing,
2019, 252 p.This book is devoted to the analysis of the diachronic processes by which the Catalan structure anar ‘go’ + infinitive grammaticalized as a perfective past. It is an interesting piece of research for at least the two following reasons: on the one hand, this process of syntactic and semantic change is cross-linguistically uncommon, and, on the other hand, the author chooses to approach it not only using the current theories of grammaticalization, but especially the tools offered by historical pragmatics. Therefore, the book can also be seen as a pleading for historical pragmatics, a linguistic subdiscipline established in the 1990s.
In the introductory chapter (p. 1-9), the author presents the relevant information related to historical pragmatics, a discipline which explores the pragmatic motivations for language change and also the semantic changes occurring in grammaticalization. From this point of view, grammaticalization is a discourse-pragmatic phenomenon. The already traditional concept of grammaticalization is re-evaluated at a micro-level (highlighting the concrete contexts in which grammaticalization takes place and exploring the pragmatic inferences, often conventionalized, which could influence semantic change) and at a macro-level (focusing on cross-linguistically repeatable paths of semantic change and the cognitive mechanisms underlying it). The attention paid to historical pragmatics is, in general, not random, since one of the aims of the book, the theoretical one, is to investigate the methodology of this domain. The empirical aim is represented by the investigation of the grammaticalization of the medieval Catalan anar + infinitive construction. The main research questions are also mentioned in this chapter (p. 3): which morphological variant of the structure is to be considered the starting point of the semantic change, what meaning the structure acquired in an intermediate stage of the grammaticalization process, what the context in which semantic change took place is, what data and methods historical pragmatics uses in the study of semantic change in grammaticalization, what the role of the context is in the methodology of the discipline, and how one can explore the metatheoretical consideration of deciding between divergent hypotheses. The research is based on a corpus study (a historical corpus of texts ranging from the 13th to the 16th centuries, explored qualitatively and quantitatively) and it uses the comparison between Catalan and Spanish parallel structures, given that the Spanish correspondent (ir ‘go’ + infinitive), which seems to behave similarly in the old texts, therefore having followed the same path of grammaticalization/semantic change, coming to express the immediate future. A description of every Catalan text in the corpus is also provided in a section of this chapter, followed by a summary of the entire book.
Chapter 2, Object-scientific part of the study: initial stage of grammaticalization of the Catalan anar + Inf construction (p. 10-111) starts by analysing the semantic changes involving the verbs of motion in the languages of the world. It then moves to a discussion about the use of anar + infinitive and ir + infinitive in medieval and present-day Catalan and Spanish. These structures were already attested in the Romance languages, Catalan and Spanish included, in the Middle Ages and it seems that they began to grammaticalize as past tense constructions, but this process did not reach the final stage, because the structures disappeared from the language. The concept of shared grammaticalization, taken from the recent literature, characterizes the process by which motion verbs tend to become past tense markers, and, theoretically, it can be explained by universal principles of language change, language contact, formal coincidence within contact, or common ancestry. Shared grammaticalization can apply to the construction under scrutiny in this book, since the process started in the same way in many Romance languages, but the construction disappeared in the 16th-17th centuries. However, the Catalan structure ended up differently, thus illustrating a case of rare grammaticalization. The author provides a summary of the previous literature on the grammaticalization of anar + infinitive structure (the historical present hypothesis, the inchoative hypothesis, the deixis hypothesis, the preterit hypothesis). The necessity of a new approach is justified
by the fact that these different semantic changes would imply different syntactic analyses of the structure. A large section is devoted to the theoretical background in historical pragmatics, precisely to the role of implicatures in semantic change. A morphological analysis of the historical examples is also presented, the author focusing on the presence/absence of the preposition a (Cat. anar/Sp. ir a + infinitive), the tense of the verb ‘go’ (present vs past, with an obvious proliferation of the present in later Catalan texts, indicating a grammaticalization process in progress). Another section deals with local schemas used in the motion verb constructions mentioned above and in other synonymous constructions. A large section is devoted to the importance of the context in semantic change, which triggers mechanisms of pragmatic inference and to the role of the semantically ambiguous structures in which both the original motion meaning and another meaning (‘motion-then-action’ in the first texts) are possible.
As its title suggests, chapter 3, Methodological part of the study: data and argumentation in historical pragmatics (p. 112-179), is devoted to methodological issues, especially to data sources in historical pragmatics. In the author’s view, the data problem in historical pragmatics has two facets:
first, historical research in general works with a limited set of data, therefore the empirical support (especially for the spoken language) is problematic; second, pragmatics deals with linguistic phenomena which are difficult to access, such as implicatures and other inferences. Several solutions are at play: contextual analysis is a central tool of this domain; moreover, it is important to apply the p-model (which “emphasizes the usefulness of taking into account metalinguistic considerations in order to decide between competing hypotheses in linguistic research and to judge the reliability of certain claims”, p. 143) and its notion of data: data are more or less insecure, therefore they are rather
‘plausible’ that certain; finally, one can put to use two old key concepts in historical research:
frequency and analogy. A large section discusses the issue of how to decide between competing hypotheses. The author’s position on the semantic change investigated is presented, emphasizing the role of pragmatic inferences in the process. Towards the end of the chapter, possible typological parallelisms are mentioned.
After briefly discussing the explanations provided in the previous literature for this grammaticalization phenomenon, in chapter 4, Grammaticalization of the Catalan anar + Inf construction (pp. 180–191), the author summarizes her own hypothesis: the construction under study did not contain initially the preposition a, which was inserted as a mean of differentiating among the original construction, with the lexical verb anar, and the new grammaticalized one (with a); the proliferation of this construction with the verb anar in the present tense also indicates an ongoing grammaticalization process; in an intermediate stage, it had an intentional meaning; perfectivity was inferable in most early contexts; in the end, the construction fulfilled a discourse-structuring function.
Chapter 5 (pp. 192–202) is a summary of the entire book, highlighting the achievements of this research from an empirical and a methodological perspective. The book ends with an appendix containing all the occurrence of the Catalan construction anar + infinitive in the corpus, followed by historical sources and references.
In conclusion, although the subject of the book seems to be a very specific Catalan construction, this research can be of interest for a larger group of linguists because it debates central issues in historical pragmatics, a relatively young linguistic discipline.
Adina Dragomirescu
1“Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” Institute of Linguistics / Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest
1 This work was supported by a grant of the Ministery of Research and Innovation, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0341, within PNCDI III.
DENNIS WEGNER, The Underspecification of Past Participles. On the identity of passive
and perfect(ive) participles, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2019, XII+356 p.
This monograph is the revised version of Dennis Wegner’s PhD dissertation, held at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, in 2017. The author takes an in-depth look at participles, with special focus on past participles (PPLE), which have not been under thorough scrutiny (the author even calls the participle “the odd man out”, p. 1) until recently. Stretching on an impressive number of XII+356 pages, this monograph opens with the Acknowledgements, Contents, and Abbreviations, and is followed by five chapters of unequal size: 1. Introduction (33 pages), 2. Empirical data (100 pages), 3. Past participial (non-)identity in the literature (36 pages), 4. A compositional approach to the identity of the past participles (149 pages), and Conclusions (7 pages), followed by References and a very useful Index. The theoretical framework adopted by the author is the Minimalist Programme, as put forward by Chomsky (1993) and subsequent papers.
In Introduction, Dennis Wegner discusses whether participles are a designated linguistic category or they are included within the larger category of V or ADJ. The author tackles the participles in Germanic and Romance languages, distinguishing between active (simultaneous active meaning) vs past participles. Past participles have two homophonous readings: passive and perfect(ive), hence the ambiguity vs identity approach. The author adopts the latter approach, focusing, as stated above, on the past participles in Germanic and Romance languages, willing to answer the question whether passive and perfect(ive) participles can be traced back to the same PPLE form or whether the two are homophonous by accident. His novel approach to the identity of past participles is based on: 1) PPLE morphology lexically marks the external argument (if present for existential binding); and 2) PPLE marker brings with it aspectual information, namely defective perfectivity (it may or may not induce completion).
In Empirial data, the title of this monograph’s second chapter, the author scrutinizes the occurrences of past participles, focusing on the interpretation of the problem of PPLE (non-)identity. In order to do so, Dennis Wegner takes a closer look at the morphology of participles, starting from the assumption that in Romance and Germanic languages, the passive and the perfect are encoded analytically by PPLE, following Ackema & Marelj (2012: 228). This does not stand for Slavic languages, where such homophony is excluded, partly due to the fact that they are “aspectual languages” (p. 51), showing various degrees of (in)consistency in marking perfectivity. Past participles are very flexible in terms of their distribution: they can occur in passive and perfect periphrases, plus other types of periphrastic constructions, in pre- and post-nominal position, as part of adverbial sentential modifiers, and with (raising-)verbs subcategorizing for adjectival complements. Some questions of category also arise, given the same flexibility of past participles;
other than the traditionally assumed adjectival (attributive) and verbal (periphrastic) distribution, the situation is more complex (p. 73). An important element in the verbal semantics of past participles is related to auxiliary selection. In German, for example, the combination of the auxiliary HAVE with the past participle elicits a perfect reading, while the passive auxiliary warden and a past participle only elicits an (eventive) passive reading (p. 79). Starting from the already stated identity of passive and perfect participles in Germanic and Romance, the author brings evidence from Slavic (Bulgarian and Slovenian), where such morphophonological identity is absent. The polymorphy of past participles is not general, and divergent realizations of past participles occur, discussed by Dennis Wegner in subchapters dedicated to Perfect(ive) Participle Paradox (PPP), Infinitivus pro Participio (IPP), and Participium pro Infinitivo (PPI). The synchronic development of past participles is added by diachronic data in subchapter 2.6 (pp. 121–133), bringing further evidence for the author’s view on the identity of past participles, to be further exploited in Chapter 4.
Chapter 3, Past participial (non-)identity in the literature, builds on the ambiguity of past participles, as “passive participles are just coincidentally realized by morphological markers that are homophonous with those used to realise perfect(ive) participles” (p. 135), building on Wunderlich (1997:2), who raises the two major directions of interpretations of participles: are they distinct items or does the same element trigger two realisations: as perfective participles and as passive participles?
Subchapter 3.2, Identity in form equals identity in meaning, distinguishes (pp. 143-144) between a) a biased identity: PPLE morphology basic meaning is temporal or aspectual – the ‘tense/aspect’
hypothesis; the underlying meaning of PPLE marker is ‘passive’ – the ‘argument structure’
hypothesis; and b) a neutral identity: PPLE markers include a both passive and perfect(ive) meaning (either or both being underspecified) – the ‘amalgamation’ hypothesis; the PPLE marker is semantically vacuous – the ‘semantic vacuity’ hypothesis. All these hypotheses are individually dealt with in great detail in dedicated subchapters.
Chapter 4, A compositional approach to the identity of past participles, starts from the conclusion of the previous three chapters, namely that “there is no principled reason to subscribe to the non-identity of past participles” (p. 171). To establish whether a participial form is passive or perfective depends on the properties of the verb from which the participle is derived from, as well as the context in which a participle is used, most prominently which auxiliary verb is selected. In his approach, Dennis Wegner assigns a participial form with information of both argument structure and aspect, summing up that “past participles conflate essential ingredients of a passive as well as a perfect kind” (p. 171). To prove his theory, the author details in dedicated subchapters discussions on the argument structural effect of past participles, the aspectual contributions of past participles, and the role of auxiliaries, while relying on periphrastic participles, alongside bare occurrences (stative adnominals, e.g. the disappeared girl, and absolute clauses, e.g. The lawn mowed, he went home).
After identifying the compositional ingredients, the author focuses on the syntax and semantics of past participles: derivation from the lexical verb and their further combination with auxiliaries to form participial periphrases (focusing on the two major uses: the periphrastic passive and the analytic perfect). Getting back to the bare uses of past participles, Dennis Wegner concludes that they are based on the same forms as periphrastic constructions.
The fifth and last chapter of this monograph is dedicated to Conclusions, in which the author thoroughly summarizes the contents of Chapters 2 through 4, followed by References (mostly generative grammar oriented papers) and the Index. To sum up, Dennis Wegner’s The Underspecification of Past Participles. On the identity of passive and perfect(ive) participles is a well-written theoretically sound monograph. The focus on Germanic and Romance from a both synchronic and diachronic perspective is clearly stated from the introductory part, but of course references to other languages are in place (mostly Slavic). Through its contents, this book is useful for a broad category of linguistic fields, such as theoretical linguistics of (mostly) generative orientation (through the various analyses of participles, perfective forms and passives), and language typology (Romance linguistics, Germanic linguistics, in part Slavic linguistics).