ON THE POSITION OF FOCUSSING ADVPS IN THE UNIVERSAL HIERARCHY: A CARTOGRAPHIC STUDY

• Grant number: 13/04001-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: June 01, 2013
• End date: August 05, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Sonia Maria Lazzarini Cyrino
• Grantee: Aquiles Tescari Neto
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Although the study of focussing adverbs has been approached in Generative Syntax at least since Chomky (1971) (cf. Bayer 1990, 1996, Longobardi 1992, Zubizarreta 1998, Kayne 1998, Krifka 2007, Ambar 2008, Shu 2011, Munaro 2012, a.o.), none of these proposals attempted to establish the position that focussing adverbs from different semantic classes (e.g., even, only) occupy in the structure of the clause, in terms of hierarchies. Given the recent advances of the Cartography Framework, the project presented here is relevant for two main reasons. First, because of the general goal of this program which aims at providing a map as detailed as possible of the structure of the clause and its main phrases (Cinque 2002, 2006, Cinque & Rizzi 2010; Benincà & Munaro 2011). Second, given the belief that each syntactic category would have a fixed position in the hierarchies, as expressed by the "One feature, one head" principle (Kayne 2005), which is the starting point of every research in Cartographic Syntax (Cinque & Rizzi 2010). Despite its comprehensiveness, Cinque (1999) did not include focusing adverbs like only, even as well as other subclasses of focussing adverbs in his hierarchy of clausal projections. Therefore, the present project aims at establishing the position that each one of the main classes of focusing adverbs occupies in the hierarchy, i.e., the position that each focussing adverb occupies with respect to other verbal modifiers (e.g. AdvPs from different classes (Cinque 1999), floating quantifiers (Fitzpatrick 2006), negation (Zanuttini 1997), etc.). It also seeks to understand the types of movements that derive the orders of focussing adverbs in different languages, paying special attention to Romance and English. The present work assumes the Cartography Framework (Cinque & Rizzi 2010, a.o.) and Kayne's (1998) theory of scope-assignment.

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

AQUILES TESCARI NETO. “SÓ”, “EXCLUSIVAMENTE” E SUAS POSIÇÕES NA SENTENÇA. Alfa, rev. linguíst. (São José Rio Preto), v. 59, n. 3, p. 573-602, 2015-12-00. (13/04001-1)