On merging positions for arguments and adverbs in the Romance Mittelfeld

The major aim of this paper is to propose a computational system based on multiple phases capable of accounting for the positioning of the arguments and of the verb in the domain of the clause referred to as the Mittelfeld. This paper will be mainly concerned with the Romance Mittelfeld though numerous references will be made to English. The assumption will be made that the domain situated between the complementizer system and the VP-shell consists of Cinque’s (1999) functional hierarchy of adverbs and of recursive chunks of A-positions interspersed among each adverb class. The hypothesis to explore is that all arguments must leave the VP-shell in order to have their A-features (Case, phi-features) as well as their IS-features (topic, focus etc) checked/matched. It ensues that scrambling is applicable not only to OV languages like German or Japanese but also to VO languages like English and the Romance languages. Variations in the Information Structure in the Romance languages are responsible for the different configurations found in these languages, esp. with respect to adverb intervention. The configurations to focus on are: (i) SVO, (ii) VSO, and (iii) VOS and the languages to consider are French, Italian, Romanian and Spanish.

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