Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
The aim of this thesis is to provide a novel account for the linguistic phenomenon that is commonly referred to as ‘fragments’. I will provide a novel account, utilising the syntax-prosody...Show moreThe aim of this thesis is to provide a novel account for the linguistic phenomenon that is commonly referred to as ‘fragments’. I will provide a novel account, utilising the syntax-prosody interface, to account for the fact that fragments appear to be derived from a larger structure. I aim to deal with some of the inadequacies of previous syntactic analyses, and to provide an account that may be better reflected in the data. The analysis that I will detail in this thesis will treat the deletion we find in fragments as prosodic deletion: such an approach has not been attempted so far. Importantly, whilst the main focus of this thesis is investigating the deletion in fragments, we will see that we may also be able to account for further cases of ellipsis, such as sluicing, right node raising and gapping.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
This thesis aims to give a syntactic account of the inflected infinitive in five Romance languages: European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Galician, Sardinian and Old Neapolitan. In these...Show moreThis thesis aims to give a syntactic account of the inflected infinitive in five Romance languages: European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Galician, Sardinian and Old Neapolitan. In these languages, infinitives agree with their nominative subject, but lack tense, mood or aspect morphology. The analysis is based on the idea that φ-features originate on C (Chomsky 2004) and can be kept on C, shared with T or inherited by T (Ouali 2008). It is argued, however, that T in infinitival clauses is defective and therefore cannot inherit the φ-probe; this probe is instead located on another functional head (cf. Miyagawa 2010). Which functional head exactly is determined by the semantics selected for by the matrix verb. The difference in locus of the φ-probe accounts for the different word orders attested.Show less
