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

70 CARMEN DOBROVIE-SORINand NP raising assumed here, some alternative explanation must be found tor the peculiaritiesin the distribution of de.12. For reasons that I will not try to understand, Balkan languages differ with respectto the productivity of raising to subject: Romanian accepts this constructionwith verbs such as epistemic a putea 'may', a pared 'to seem', and a se nimeri 'tohappen'. In Bulgarian and Greek, however, speakers tend to accept as "natural" onlythe impersonal use of these verbs. Greek shows interesting differences in meaningbetween the impersonal and the personal constructions, for those verbs that acceptthe two environments (Philippaki-Warburton 1987).13. Manzini and Roussou assume 8 roles to be Asp features. This is reminiscentof Borer (1994), although the implementation is different: there are no functionalAsp projections (their role is played by recursive V projections), and DPs are not firstmerged in the Spec positions of AspP but directly merged in their overt position. Tokeep the discussion as simple as possible, I will talk about 6 features.14. By assumption, once a 6 feature is attracted (see the 8 feature of started inthe case at hand), its trace does not block the attraction of another 8 feature (that ofto work) by the same attractor.15. This generalization should probably be relaxed: a number of interesting exceptionsdo exist (see Ruwet 1984 and section 6.3).16. Rivero (1989) solves this problem by stipulating that Balkan subjunctiveshave an ambiguous status depending on the context in which they appear: in raisingconfigurations, they cannot count as the GC of their subject, whereas in obviationcontexts they must count as such. This ambiguous status of subjunctives clauses isnot supported by independent evidence.17. Chomsky (1981) uses the Avoid Pronoun Principle in order to account forthe fact that in English, genitive pronouns may be dropped in certain NPs. Jaeggli(1982) uses the same principle to capture the fact that empty subjects and object cliticsare used instead of phonologically realized pronominal subjects and noncliticpronominal objects, respectively. Chomsky (1981.142.note 45) also reports a suggestionby J. Gueron, who proposes to derive the obviation effect from AvoidPronoun. Bouchard's (1984) Elsewhere Principle and Farkas's (1992) "blocking approach"constitute two other slightly different attempts at using versions of theAvoid Pronoun Principle in order to account for the obviation effect.18. The existence of this element is language specific. Thus, although allBalkan languages have subjunctive particles comparable to sa, they may lack a counterpartof ca (see Modern Greek in particular).19. In oral speech, examples of this kind are acceptable with heavy focus stresson the dislocated constituent.20. Arguably, the verb raises to T rather than to sa itself, regardless of whetherwe assume inflected verbs to be formed in the lexicon (and raised to an abstract T inthe syntax) or to be formed in the syntax, by raising a V root to the tense features,hosted under T.21.1 follow Dobrovie-Sorin (1994) and Chomsky (1995. chap. 4) in assumingthat Agr does not project a functional category of its own but merely adjoins to tense.22. Apparent counterexamples exist:(i) /- can permis lid Ion[Ij him-CL.ACC have allowed him to Johnca mdine sa stea a casa.that tomorrow sa stay-3SG.SL'BJ at home