Search Results (2)

The observation that not all grammatical realizations in heritage languages can be attributed to transfer from a dominant language has been emphasized in several recent works. This paper provides further arguments in this direction from heritage Romanian. As opposed to standard Romanian, the heritage Romanian data examined here do not exhibit a restriction which blocks overt definiteness on a differentially marked object (DOM), when the latter is unmodified but interpreted as definite. Moreover, in heritage Romanian there appear to be differences between the differential marker and (other) prepositions when it comes to interactions with overt definiteness. It is shown that the preservation of overt definiteness cannot be reduced to transfer; some of the dominant languages at stake, namely Serbian and Russian are determinerless, with nominals being used bare regardless of their syntactic function. The heritage data in turn give support to a theory under which the differential marker must be structurally set aside from (other) prepositions. If the latter spell out a P projection, the differential marker is the spell out of complex internal structure of certain classes of objects, which must project at least a DP. This structural complexity for DOM is transparent in other Romance languages, where definiteness is equally obligatory on the surface, if a definite interpretation is intended. Thus, the DOM-overt definiteness setting in the heritage data follows from predictable paths of language variation. Full article

In this paper, we investigate zero-derived nouns based on irregular verbs in Greek. This is an under-explored area in Greek morpho-syntax, and in this paper, we will make three main contributions. First, we will discuss the fact that the overwhelming majority of these nouns are feminine, while neuter nouns are considerably less represented and masculine nouns are almost nonexistent. As feminine is taken to be the semantically marked gender in the case of animate nouns, asserting female sex, and neuter is argued to be the default gender in Greek for inanimates, the fact that zero abstract nouns are feminine is surprising. We will argue that feminine is the default in the case of zero derivation by exploiting an analysis of flavors of n. Second, we will show that, contrary to the findings in earlier literature, certain zero-derived nouns do have argument structure, similarly to their affixed counterparts. As not all zero-derived nouns have argument structure, we will appeal to complex head formation to explain the properties of those zero-derived nouns that have an eventive interpretation but do not surface with arguments. Finally, we will turn to an examination of the size of the domain that is nominalized. Since, in our cases, we observe root allomorphy conditioned by a nominal affix in the presence of a zero verbal head, we will suggest that Pruning is the mechanism that allows this. Full article