[LaGraM] Margherita Pallottino (U. Genève)

Margherita Pallottino (U. Genève)

Restructuring contexts, hybrid projections and last resort Case assigning strategies.

This talk will bring the discussion on Tunisian differently marked objects introduced by fi to a comparative level. The presentation will revolve around three critical points of this research. First, I will address the topic of grammaticalized prepositional elements to evaluate where in the syntactic structure this item could merge. The comparison with French and Italian grammaticalized prepositions will show neither the IP domain, nor the DP domain appear to be suitable target zones for the insertion of this functional item.

Pursuing the same question I will then look at the wider syntactic domain in which fi is triggered and compare these contexts with Italian so called restructuring constructions (Rizzi 1976). I will explore the possibility that the difference between the two construction types, Tunisian and Italian, amounts to distinct selectional properties of the respective dominating verb. I will propose that Tunisian selects a nominal projection whose identity needs to be refined where Italian selects a CP.

This consideration will lead the discussion to the final point, namely the hypothesis that Tunisian imperfective predicates engaged in aspectual clusters merge with a nominal layer at some stage of their derivation (similar to nominal gerunds in English, Alexiadou 2013). If this is the case, not only we may be in the position to provide a possible answer to the initial question of where fi is merged, that is a Genitive assigning position within this nominal extended domain, but also it provides a collateral answer to the question of why fi replaces Accusative Case.