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Building complex events

The case of Sicilian Doubly Inflected Construction

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Abstract

We examine the Doubly Inflected Construction of Sicilian (DIC; Cardinaletti and Giusti 2001, 2003; Cruschina 2013), in which a motion verb V1 from a restricted set is followed by an event verb V2 and both verbs are inflected for the same person and tense features. The interpretation of DIC involves a complex event which behaves as a single, integrated event by linguistic tests. Based on data drawn from different sources, we argue that DIC is an asymmetrical serial verb construction (Aikhenvald 2006). We propose an analysis of DIC in which V1 and V2 enter the semantic composition as lexical verbs, with V1 contributing a motion event and projecting a theme and a goal argument which are identified, respectively, with an agent and a location argument projected by V2. A morphosyntactic mechanism of feature-spread requires that the person and tense features be realized both on V1 and on V2, while, semantically, these features are interpreted only once, in a position from which they take scope over the complex predicate resulting from the combination of V1 and V2. The semantic analysis is based on an operation of event concatenation, defined over spatio-temporally contiguous events which share specific participants, and is implemented in a neo-Davidsonian framework (Parsons 1990).

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Notes

  1. Throughout this paper we use data from the variety of the western Sicilian province of Trapani, spoken natively by one of its two authors. The data come from three sources: the previous literature, the web, and a questionnaire that was administered to seven native speakers by one of the two authors. Notice that there are no generally accepted orthographic rules for Sicilian words. The writing conventions that we adopt in this paper are based in part on the previous linguistic literature.

  2. In this paper we will not have anything to say about such uses of DIC as exemplified in (i) and (ii) (Sornicola 1976; Cruschina 2013):

    1. (i)
      figure b
    1. (ii)
      figure c

    Sornicola (1976:68–69) and Cruschina (2013:278–279) discuss these and similar DIC sentences, in which the verb iri is used to introduce an unexpected or surprising event, and Cruschina (2013:281) describes iri in such examples as an “emphatic past marker employed in narrative contexts.” Although we agree with these authors on the desemanticization of the motion verb in examples of this kind, we note that the relevant use of the ‘go’ verb is something orthogonal to the question of the semantic composition of DIC—notice that this use is also possible in the infinitival construction of standard Italian, as in (iii):

    1. (iii)
      figure d

  3. See also Manzini and Savoia (2005:700–701) and Cruschina (2013:268) on this point.

  4. We note that this way to prove the single event interpretation of DIC is related to the definition of the so-called Macro-Event Property provided by Bohnemeyer et al. (2007), as discussed in Sect. 3.6.4.

  5. Contrasts similar to the one between (10a) and (10b) have been used by other scholars in the literature on Serial Verb Constructions to show that serial verbs refer to complex events qua unitary events (e.g., Bamgbose 1974:18–19).

  6. Cardinaletti and Giusti also consider the use of the Italian verbs andare ‘go’ and venire ‘come’ as passive and progressive auxiliaries as an instance of complete desemanticization of a motion verb. We believe however that the case of progressive uses of andare and venire might call for a more nuanced and scalar conception, based on varying degrees of grammaticalization. Indeed, from the point of view of the presence of a deictic motion component, it seems to us that andare and venire, in their progressive uses, might still retain the deictic aspects they have in their lexical uses (see Bertinetto 1989/1990).

  7. Cardinaletti and Giusti report that, at least in American English and Swedish, the inflected construction is also possible with V1s that are not motion verbs, e.g., try and stay in American English (e.g., He’ll try get a parking spot near the entrance, from Shopen 1971:255). In this paper we do not consider the question whether Sicilian DIC is possible with non-motion verbs in V1 (for possible realizations of the Sicilian DIC with non-motion verbs, e.g., the aspectual verb accuminciari ‘to begin’, see Di Caro 2014; also Di Caro and Giusti 2015 on the variety of Deliano).

  8. The point made here does not hinge on the choice of a particular language (Jackendoff 1990).

  9. On the subject of locative modification of statives, see Maienborn (2008), Moltmann (2013), Ernst (2016), among others.

  10. Other evidence bearing on the lexical status of the motion verb in DIC comes from the ungrammaticality of (i):

    1. (i)
      figure w

    Notice that motion verbs used as auxiliaries clearly allow for two-verb constructions in which V1 and V2 appear to be the same verb. This is shown by the French sentence (ii) (and by its English translation as well):

    1. (ii)
      figure x

    See Aurnague (2011) for a semantic account of the unacceptability of motion sentences similar to (i) in French.

  11. Building on the observation that the English progressive is incompatible with purely stative VPs (e.g., *I am being sick, *She is not knowing what to do), an anonymous reviewer suggests that if DIC were seen as a periphrastic construction with aspectual meaning (i.e., andative/venitive, for V1 = iri/vèniri), the ban against pure statives would be expected. This view, however, would not be general enough, since the andative/venitive aspectual classification does not apply to DICs with mannari ‘to send’ or passari ‘to pass by’ but the latter too present a ban against pure statives.

  12. An anonymous reviewer suggested that the contrast relations that are relevant for interpreting negation in (25a,b) may be activated by lexical oppositions (iddru stessu vs. the implicit indefinite object of manna in [25a], ddra vs. ccà in [25b]) rather than by a prosodically marked focus. Notice that this possibility would not undermine our argument: whether the semantic scope of negation is determined by a focus marked by prosody or by some other mechanism, what matters here is that negation can take semantic scope over one of V1 and V2, to the exclusion of the other.

  13. The distinction in question appears to correspond to the one found in French between (i) and (ii):

    1. (i)
      figure ae
    1. (ii)
      figure af

    The French construction in (i) might have relevant properties in common with the Sicilian DIC with respect to single event interpretation and extensionality, while the one in (ii) might be closer to the Infinitival Construction (Philippe Schlenker, p.c.; thanks to Anne Condamine for her judgment). We leave a closer examination of this correspondence for future research.

  14. Sornicola (1976) recognizes the purpose reading (what she calls valore finale) as a fundamental semantic value of the infinitival construction (tipo ipotattico), as distinct from the DIC (tipo paratattico). Regarding the DIC, she proposes as a tentative hypothesis that it might have acquired the purpose reading typical of the infinitival construction—her hypothesis is based on diachronical considerations about Southern Italian dialects that need not concern us here (Sornicola 1976: 70). In our view, however, her argument is not conclusive as to DIC having a purpose reading and rather bears on the different issue of the lexical status of V1 as a motion verb in DIC.

  15. We note in passing that the fact that one and the same constituent may bear more than one thematic role is observed in Right Node Raising structures, e.g., (i) (from Wilder 1997): (i) I [talked to] without [actually meeting] everyone in the committee. What DIC has in common with these structures is that some element (i.e., the locative adverbial a casa in [32a]) is shared by multiple verbal heads.

  16. The property of DICs with mannari described here is not a quirk of Sicilian but is an instance of a general phenomenon attested across typologically diverse languages. In her work on Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs), Aikhenvald (2006) discusses this phenomenon for the Niger-Congo language Akan (spoken in Ghana) and the Arawakan language Tariana (spoken in Amazonas, Brazil) under the general heading “Concordant Marking of Different Underlying Subjects.” She reports that the single verb components of a SVC may have different underlying subjects which acquire the same surface marking (Aikhenvald 2006: 40) and she gives the following examples:

    1. (i)
      figure ap
    1. (ii)
      figure aq

    Concerning (i), the two verb components of the SVC, take and flow, have different underlying subjects (I and corn respectively), but they receive the same surface subject marker, that is, the 1SG person feature is present on both verbs. As for (ii), although the subject of prevent is the 3SG noun child, and the subject of work is the 1SG I, the whole SVC takes third person singular cross-referencing. These examples are interesting for us as they show that morphosyntactic markers of person may have multiple realizations in certain constructions, not all of which are semantically interpreted, hence they help putting the Sicilian data in a broader typological perspective.

  17. The configuration of the paradigm is also affected by great diatopical variation (see Di Caro and Giusti 2015 for an overview). Cardinaletti and Giusti (2001) put forward a suggestion to the effect that the defectivity of the paradigm would be related to the allomorphy of the motion verb. We leave this as an open problem.

  18. We refer the reader to Cruschina (2013) for an in-depth analysis of the relevant data based on Maiden’s (2004) concept of N-pattern configuration.

  19. Accattoli and Todaro (2017) suggest that reduced forms with iri ‘go’ can be analyzed as a case of morphologization (Lehmann 2002) of V1 as an andative prefix (Nicolle 2007). We shall not discuss this issue any further in this paper.

  20. The variable assignment gshould properly be seen as one of the coordinates of the utterance context (Heim and Kratzer 1998; Del Prete and Zucchi 2017). Since the point is orthogonal to our present concerns, we’ll stick to the standard practice of specifying the assignment as an independent parameter on the denotation function.

  21. Champollion (2015) argues for a neo-Davidsonian event semantics in which verb predicates have a more complex interpretation than assumed here, i.e., they denote generalized quantifiers over events (semantic type <<E,t>,t>) whereby existential quantification of the event variable is introduced already at the lexical level. Since Champollion’s motivation for providing the more complex interpretation is based on data that lie beyond the scope of this paper, we’ll stick to the simpler denotation for verb predicates in terms of sets of events and assume that existential closure of the event variable is triggered by tense.

  22. From now on, we will refer to the element connecting V1 and V2 in DIC as ac, relying on its derivation from the Latin coordinating particle written in the same way (see fn. 2).

  23. We specify the concatenating function through a lexical entry for the element ac. This choice is only made for the sake of concreteness and we might have proposed instead that the concatenating function is the semantic correlate of the particular mode of composition that combines V1 and V2 in DIC.

  24. As in Heim and Kratzer (1998: 34–35), the lambda-term \(\boldsymbol{\lambda x}_{ \mathbf{T}}\): . represents a partial function f which is defined for an object of type T if and only if condition (the domain condition) is satisfied. If fis defined for x, then the value it assigns to xis whatever value is described by .

  25. Given the first person singular morphology on the verb in (53), the implicit subject is understood as referring to the speaker.

  26. When λx: [x]. [x] represents the partial function f, we represent the result of applying f to an object denoted by a constant a via the notation {[a]} [a], which means that we obtain ψ[a] under the supposition thatφ[a] is satisfied.

  27. Aiming at a more complete account of the syntax-semantics interface of DIC (which lies beyond the scope of this paper), an alternative route one might explore would consist in assuming a rule of restructuring along the lines of Rizzi (1978). We thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing our attention to the possible relation between our proposal and Rizzi’s restructuring analysis.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank five anonymous NLLT reviewers for their helpful comments and the participants in CIDSM11 (Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology Meeting) in Vienna, in the workshop The profile of event delimitation at the 2016 SLE conference in Naples, and in an Institut Jean Nicod language seminar in Paris for invaluable feedback on previous versions of this work. We are grateful to Marta Abrusan, Patrícia Amaral, Valentina Aristodemo, Michel Aurnague, John Beavers, Basilio Calderone, Laura Caponetto, Vincenzo di Caro, Lucas Champollion, Silvio Cruschina, Carlo Geraci, Giuliana Giusti, Tatiana Nikitina, Philippe Schlenker, Jesse Tseng and Sandro Zucchi for discussion of specific aspects of our analysis and/or assessment of the empirical data.

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    Fabio Del Prete & Giuseppina Todaro

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Del Prete, F., Todaro, G. Building complex events. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 38, 1–41 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-018-09439-2

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