Subjects, Topics and the Interpretation of Referential pro.

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(5) PROPERTIES OF pro a. it has a theta-role, when selected by a verb; b. it has ϕ-features and Case; c. it is subject to Principle B. Properties (a) and (b) are uncontroversial: theta-roles are defined in the vP phase (cf. Chomsky 2005). Therefore, a NS is assigned a theta-role as a consequence of Merge and checks its (Nominative) Case features via Agree with the Agr/T head (cf. note 1 and section 5.2 below). Pronominal properties (c), however, are not straightforward. As is shown in (6) below, NSs cannot be treated on a par with overt pronouns in a pro-drop language like Italian (cf. Calabrese 1986) since pro and overt pronouns are allowed in different contexts: (6) a. Jim andrà se *lui/pro si sentirà bene b. Se *lui/pro si sentirà bene Jim andrà ‘Jim will go if he feels well’ ‘If he feels well, Jim will go’ c. *Lui/*pro andrà se Jim si sentirà bene d. Se Jim si sentirà bene *lui/pro andrà *‘He will go if Jim feels well’ ‘If Jim feels well, he will go’ On the other hand, sentences like (6c) show that NSs do not pattern (exactly) the same as ‘weak’ pronouns of the English-type (cf. Cardinaletti and Starke 1999). In fact, NSs can always be bound by a quantified NP (cf. (7) below), while a pronoun like he in English obtains ambiguous readings in the same context: (7) [ogni studente]k pensa che prok /lui*k/j è un genio [every student]k thinks that hek/j is a genius In the following sections, evidence will be provided that a morphological characterization of the strong/weak dichotomy is not adequate and that overt pronouns must be analyzed as strong or weak depending on their phonological properties. 8 In this perspective, pronouns are intonationally strong insofar as they are produced with a rising tone, while weak pronouns are produced with a low tone and are generally integrated in the intonational contour of the sentence. This means that a pronoun like lui can also be weak, when destressed, while indefinites like uno (‘one’) may be strong if they are marked by a peak. 9 This distinction is crucial to understand the use and interpretation of overt pronouns. We will see that null and weak subjects form a consistent group in interpretive terms and can be reasonably considered as constituents belonging to the T-domain. Strong pronouns and full DPs, on the other hand, do not sit in SpecAgrsP as ‘grammatical subjects’ but belong to the C-domain and serve some discourse function (as Topics or Foci). Before starting the analysis, a final note on the status of the Avoid Pronoun principle is in order. This is postulated in Chomsky (1981) as a “principle of grammar”. Its nature, however, is not clarified and this point appears to be an open issue in the literature: “[The Avoid Pronoun principle] might be regarded as a subcase of the conversational principle of not saying more than is required, or might be related to a principle of deletion-up-to recoverability, but there is some reason to believe that it functions as a principle of grammar.” (Chomsky 1981, p. 65) 8 Therefore, the strong/weak dichotomy assumed here does not follow from Cardinaletti and Starke’s (1999) morpho-syntactic tripartition. 9 In fact, Cardinaletti (2004: note 32) acknowledges the possibility of a ‘weak’ lui in “colloquial Italian” to explain its presence in “complementizer deletion” contexts. The present analysis, on the other hand, shows a systematic use of lui/lei as weak pronouns, related to their discourse function in the C-domain (see section 4.2). 4
The problem is, therefore, to define the level of grammar where this condition is operative: is it a principle of pragmatics or, does it rather concern the core syntax of a language? The present paper will provide substantial evidence for the latter option. 3. The Cartography of Discourse Categories and the Syntax-Intonation Interface The study of spoken corpora shows that the use of overt/covert pronouns in a NS language crucially depends on discourse-structural requirements. The notions of ‘Topic’ and ‘Focus’ and their formal correlates in a Minimalist framework is therefore a key point for the present analysis. It is well established that (narrow) Focus represents the informative part of the sentence (cf., among others, Horvath 1986; Kiss 1998 and section 6.2 below), while Topic is generally understood as ‘what the sentence is about’ (Reinhart 1981). However, Topics ‘do different things’ and several authors have addressed their structural and pragmatic properties, offering different characterizations (cf., among others, Vanelli 1986; Ambar 1992; Benincà et al. 1988; Lambrecht 1994; Büring 1999; Cecchetto 1999; Molnár 2002; Benincà and Poletto 2004; Frascarelli 2004a). In a cartographic approach to discourse properties, the original CPnode (a recursive phrase, targeted by different categories) has therefore been reanalyzed as an array of functional projections, each dedicated to a specific function related to Information Structure (cf. Rizzi ed. 2004; Belletti ed. 2004). In this line of analysis, Focus and Topic have been allotted specific positions, based on syntactic diagnostics. It is clear, however, that discourse grammar categories also influence the shape of the prosodic realization of a sentence, both in the location of tonal events and in prosodic phrasing. 10 The pragmatic properties and tonal events characterizing the different types of Topic have been the subject of several works (cf., among others, Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990; Féry 1992; Büring 1999), although no attempt, it would appear, has been made to connect intonational properties to syntactic structures. On the other hand, F&H (2007) first showed that there is a systematic correlation between the formal properties of Topics and their function in the discourse, which is encoded in a strict hierarchy in the Cdomain and provides intonational and syntactic evidence that different types of TopP projections must be posited in the left periphery of the sentence: “Discourse properties have structural correlates both in phonology and in syntax. In other words, […] different types of Topics show different intonational properties and are realized in a specific order in the CP-system. A free recursion analysis will thus be refuted and a hierarchy [is] proposed in which different functional projections are distinguished in terms of prosodic and syntactic properties.” (F&H 2007, p. 89) In particular, intonational investigation of spontaneous data shows that Topic constituents are associated with three different tonal events which, according to the Autosegmental-metrical 10 The connection between syntax and intonation in the realization and interpretation of discourse categories is a much debated issue in the recent literature. According to the generative approach, there is a correspondence between grammatical and prosodic boundaries (Selkirk 1986; Nespor and Vogel 1986; Truckenbrodt 1999) and patterns of default phrase stress result from Spell-out conditions (Selkirk 2000; Selkirk and Kratzer 2007). In marked patterns, on the other hand, the position of stress can be assumed to be determined prior to syntactic movement (Zubizarreta 1998), or a base-generated extraposition can be invoked for [-focus] constituents (i.e., Merge in the C-domain), so that Foci always mark a major phrase boundary, while Topics form independent Intonational Phrases (Frascarelli 2000). For a modular view of the syntax-prosody interface in the OT framework, see Samek-Lodovici (2005) and for an analysis in a semantic perspective, assuming isomorphism between prosodic, syntactic and topic-comment structure, see Steedman (2000). 5
Page 1 and 2: Subjects, Topics and the Interpreta
Page 3: (2) Aboutness-shift Topic > Contras
Page 7 and 8: Among the different types of Topic
Page 9 and 10: As is shown, the tonic vowels of th
Page 11 and 12: lunatico, è capace che domani non
Page 13 and 14: guarda devi uscire (Figure 10) a Ma
Page 15 and 16: Figure 11 Also in this case, recove
Page 17 and 18: introduce an overt one and consider
Page 19 and 20: Figure 14 Then, a new Topic is prop
Page 21 and 22: The subject QP in sentence (23) can
Page 23 and 24: in Frascarelli 2000, 2004a). As an
Page 25 and 26: 5.3 Rizzi’s (2006) Subject Criter
Page 27 and 28: component can forget about the othe
Page 29 and 30: the spirit of the present proposal,
Page 31 and 32: . [la storia che ha raccontato Leok
Page 33 and 34: (54’) … e [ [ [ogni studentej]
Page 35 and 36: Calabrese, Andrea. 1986. ‘Pronomi
Page 37 and 38: ⎯⎯⎯ 1989. ‘The Null Subject
Page 39: SigurDsson, Halldór Á. and Joan M

Subjects, Topics and the Interpretation of Referential pro.

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