Skip Nav Destination
Close Modal
Update search
NARROW
Format
Journal
Date
Availability
1-3 of 3
Caterina Donati
Close
Follow your search
Access your saved searches in your account
Would you like to receive an alert when new items match your search?
Sort by
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2024) 55 (1): 1–37.
Published: 22 December 2023
Abstract
View article
PDF
In this article, we analyze five reduced structures in Italian that display morphological agreement between their past participle and their internal argument. Three of the five structures have full illocutionary force despite lacking the middle field and the left periphery. We explain this fact (and the differences with the two remaining participial structures) by extending to object agreement cases Chomsky’s (2019) hypothesis that clauses are exocentric but can be labeled by a mechanism of feature sharing. This goes against the hypothesis that all reduced structures interpreted as clauses must be elliptical.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2022) 53 (3): 522–550.
Published: 06 July 2022
FIGURES
| View All (8)
Abstract
View article
PDF
This is a reply to Caponigro 2019 , which argues that the phrase structure theory proposed in Donati and Cecchetto 2011 and Cecchetto and Donati 2015 falls short of accounting for the attested patterns of free relative clauses. Caponigro questions the reliability of the data supporting D&C’s hypothesis that ever -relatives introduced by a phrase ( ever +NP relatives) should not be assimilated to free relatives. This reply reports the findings of four controlled experiments in English and Italian and discusses five properties that set free relatives apart from full relatives (occurrence with a complementizer, occurrence with a relative pronoun, infinitival use, absolute use, adverbial use). Crucially, ever +NP relatives do not pattern like free relatives in any of these five domains, either in Italian or in English. This clearly shows that ever -relatives are not a counterexample to D&C’s phrase structure theory. Another potential counterexample, Romanian free relatives, is also discussed. As for ever +NP relatives, in Italian they are shown to be garden-variety headed relatives, while in English they are headed relatives that involve a D-to-D movement that is responsible for the syntactic formation of the complex determiner what + ever .
Includes: Supplementary data
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2011) 42 (4): 519–560.
Published: 01 October 2011
Abstract
View article
PDF
A tenet of any version of phrase structure theory is that a lexical item can transmit its label when merged with another category. We assume that if it is internally merged, a lexical item can turn a clause into a nominal phrase. If the relabeling lexical item is a wh -word, a free relative results; if it is an N, a full relative results; if it is a non- wh D, a pseudorelative results. It follows that the head of a relative construction cannot be more complex than a lexical item. We show massive evidence that when it is otherwise (e.g., the book about Obama that you bought ), the modifier is late-merged after the noun has moved and relabeled the structure.