Title: | Syntactic Effects Of Verum Focus In Romanian |
Authors: | Ion Giurgea, Carmen Mîrzea Vasile |
Publication: | Revue roumaine de linguistique, LXII (3), p. 323-338 Information structure and the left periphery / La structure informationnelle et la périphérie gauche Edited by Ion Giurgea |
p-ISSN: | 0035-3957 |
Publisher: | Editura Academiei |
Place: | București |
Year: | 2017 |
Abstract: | We argue that verum focus (understood as focus in which the propositional part of the sentence is constant across alternatives, the focused part being the illocutionary component or the degree of certainty) is manifest in Romanian not only prosodically, by main stress on the finite verbal complex, but also syntactically, by raising of the verbal complex to a Focus position. To the instances of VS orders analyzed in this way by Giurgea and Remberger (2012, 2014), we add another pattern, consisting of an emphatically stressed verb followed by an overt subject pronoun in a context which would have allowed the use of pro. We derive the affective values of this pattern (reassurance, threat, strong conviction, concession) from verum focus (which also explains the emphatic stress on the verb). We propose that an overt pronoun instead of pro is used in order to signal that the verbal complex has moved from its ordinary position Infl0, undergoing focus fronting. This pattern underwent grammaticalization in some regional varieties, yielding the so-called ‘double subject’ construction, in which the pronoun is an expletive which fills the SpecInfl position. |
Key words: | verum focus, focus fronting, double subject construction, Romanian, subject pronouns, expletives |
Language: | English |
Links: | pdf html |
Citations to this publication: 3
0 | Nicoleta Sava | Question-answer word order and informational narrow focus | AOU, XXXII (1), 129-146 | 2021 | pdf html |
0 | Florin Sterian | Bibliografia românească de lingvistică (BRL, 60, 2017). Lucrări de lingvistică apărute în țara noastră în cursul anului 2017 | LR, LXVII (2), 127-254 | 2018 | |
1 | Ion Giurgea | Verum Focus in Polar Questions in Romanian: Prosodic Effects | RRL, LXII (1), 59-76 | 2017 | pdf html |
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