Comparative Syntax of the Balkan Languages (Oxford ... - Cryptm.org

156 DALINA KALLULLIpresumably responsible for dative Case assignement (i.e., AgrlO-heads in the sense ofChomsky 1995).28. The idea that focus is involved in scrambling phenomena is extensivelydiscussed in Reinhart (1996). While Reinhart argues that a scrambled constituent cannotbe focus, she favors a PF approach to focus (cf. Cinque 1993), which crucially involvesthe notion of stress prominence. However, as stated in note (18), I wish to leave open thepossibility that the syntactic feature of focus may have PF correlates that are differentfrom (and perhaps exclude) stress prominence. Therefore, I will not undertake to presentReinhart's account.29. An anonymous reviewer points out that scrambled noun phrases may havecontrastive focus, as in the Dutch example below:(i) Ik heb slechts EEN van de boeken nog niet gelezen.I have only ONE of the books yet not readHere the DP 'the books' is marked [-Focus], but 'one' is [+Focus]. However, inAlbanian and Greek contrastively focused direct object DPs are incompatible withdoubling. The reason why the parallel between scrambling and doubling breaks downwhen contrastive focus is involved is not entirely clear to me. It might be stipulated,though, that contrastive focus is fundamentally correlated with stress prominence at PF.However, since clitics are incompatible with PF stress (i.e., marked [-stress]), thederivation crashes because of value divergence with respect to PF stress. The nonovertclitic head in the Case of scrambling might, however, be totally underspecified for the PFstress value; as such, a [+stress] element moved to its specifier position in the syntax willnot render the derivation illicit at PF.30. In fact, this claim only holds for those bare plurals that receive an existentialinterpretation. This is explicated in section 4.3.2.31. As it happens, even closely related languages differ with respect to the possibilityof instantiating their direct objects by count bare singulars. Thus, while countbare singulars are virtually nonexistent as direct objects in English, across Balkan andMainland Scandinavian languages they may occur as direct objects of all predicateswhose bare plural direct objects cannot get a generic (either referential and kind denotingor quantificational) interpretation but get an existential one. In German, on the otherhand, count bare singulars do occur as direct objects but are much more restricted than inBalkan and Mainland Scandinavian. Note in this context that of all the languagesmentioned above, only English disallows count bare singulars in predicate nominalposition. Finally, note that count bare singulars are found also in English as objects ofcertain prepositions, e.g., go to sclwol/cluircli/market, travel by train/plane, etc.32. Throughout, I use the term a-expression (cf. Chastain 1975) to refer tononquantified singular indefinite noun phrases with articles.33. The relation between bare singulars and bare plurals is discussed in detail insection 4.3.2.34. Here I am not implying that if a constituent occurs clause initially it necessarilyoccupies Spec of CP. I am only assuming with Brody (1990) that Spec of root CPs is one(of the) canonical position(s) for [+Focus] phrases, and since the fronted constituents in(40) are indisputably [+Focus], it makes sense to assume that they occupy precisely thisslot. However, I remain open to the idea that there is above the CP node a projectionheaded by some operator that licenses d-linking in its specifier position (cf. Pesetsky1987).35. In some Balkan languages (e.g., Greek, Bulgarian), bare singulars may occur aswhat looks as subjects of unergative predicates as in (i) below. In this case they arenecessarily focused, as the English translation in (i) indicates.