Object shift in Romance

• Published in: Natural language and linguistic theory Vol. 31; no. 2; pp. 409 - 451
• Main Author: Gallego, Angel J
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer 01.05.2013; Springer Netherlands; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Cartography; Catalan; Children; Complements; Descriptive studies and applied theories; Dissertations & theses; Empirical evidence; Focus; Galician; Generalization; Italian language; Language varieties; Licensing; Linguistics; Movement; Natural Language Processing (NLP); Nominative case; Object pronouns; Philosophical object; Philosophy of Language; Portuguese; Predicate; Romance Languages; Scandinavian Languages; Sentences; Social Sciences; Spanish; Syntactic Analysis; Syntactic movement; Syntax; Theoretical linguistics; Theory; Verbs; Holmberg’s Generalization; Parametric variation; Romance; Minimality; VP fronting; Object shift; Verb movement; Movement; Syntactic structure; Case assignment; Word order; Syntax; Holmberg's Generalization
• ISSN: 0167-806X; 1573-0859
• DOI: 10.1007/s11049-013-9188-6

This paper discusses the properties of VOS sentences in Romance and their bearing on Case assignment, verb movement, parametric variation, and the structure of the vP periphery / low IP area. The literature on Romance VOS has argued that this order is derived either through object shift (Ordóñez 1997, 1998, 2000) or VP fronting (Belletti 2001, 2004; Zubizarreta 1998), providing empirical evidence in support of both derivations. In this paper, I focus on various aspects of VOS sentences in Romance languages. First, I argue that both object shift and VP-fronting strategies are actually available, but subject to a very specific parametric cut: Western Romance languages (Galician, European Portuguese, and Spanish) resort to object shift, whereas Central-Eastern varieties (Catalan and Italian) fail to do so, requiring the VP-fronting derivation instead (López 2009a). Second, I put forward a previously unnoticed generalization that reveals that only those varieties licensing object shift based VOS can generate VSO sentences, which I refer to as the VOS-VSO Generalization. Finally, I claim that object shift in VOS sentences of Western Romance languages displays a cluster of unnoticed properties that pattern with Scandinavian-style object shift (Bobaljik and Jonas 1996; Bobaljik and Thráinsson 1998; Collins and Thráinsson 1996; Holmberg 1986, 1999; Vikner 2006), thus obeying Holmberg's Generalization (Holmberg 1986, 1999). If on track, the present account not only reveals interesting syntactic similarities between Scandinavian and Romance object shift, but also reinforces a well-known micro-parameter that disentangles Western from Central-Eastern Romance languages.