Animacy features and object realization in romance: a comparative study

• Grant number: 14/17477-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: March 15, 2015
• End date: March 14, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Sonia Maria Lazzarini Cyrino
• Grantee: Sonia Maria Lazzarini Cyrino
• Host Investigator: Francisco Ordoñez
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Stony Brook University (SB), United States

Abstract

A recurring observation in the study of object realization in some Romance languages is the fact that animacy features seem to determine the form of the object: a pronoun, a clitic, a null object. In this research I propose to investigate that topic, focusing on phenomena that involve animacy and that have been observed separately in the literature on Romance languages: Differential Object Marking, leism, and the Person-Case Constraint. In this research I propose to analyze those phenomena and compare them to the null object in Brazilian Portuguese, with the aim of determining what role the feature [animacy] has in syntax. Having in mind the different proposals for the structure of pronouns, clitics and DPs, I also aim to investigate how to accommodate animacy features in a specific DP structure. As far as I know, no such attempt has been worked out in syntactic comparative studies. (AU)