The Development of Exceptional Case Marking in Romance with a Particular Focus on French

• Published in: Probus 2020-11, Vol.32 (2), p.367-400
• Main Author: Sheehan, Michelle
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: agree; Case marking; Catalan language; Causative verbs; causatives; Chomsky, Noam; Clitics; Complements; diachrony; ECM; French language; Grammatical agreement; Grammatical subject; Infinitives; Italian language; Light verbs; Morphology; permissives; Phase Impenetrability Condition; phases; Portuguese language; Romance languages; Spanish language; Syntactic phases; Syntactic structures; Syntax; verbs of perception
• ISSN: 0921-4771; 1613-4079
• DOI: 10.1515/probus-2020-0002

This paper traces the development of so-called Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) under perception, permissive and causative verbs in Romance. Synchronically, we can observe various patterns in the distribution of ECM complements under these verbs. In Portuguese and Spanish, ECM is often possible under all permissive and causative verbs, whereas in French, Catalan and Italian it is usually restricted to perception and permissive verbs. A detail that has not been much discussed is the fact that, for many speakers, ECM with a given verb is often restricted to contexts in which the embedded ‘subject’ is a clitic. Some speakers of Modern French display this pattern with the verb ‘make’, for example (Abeillé, Anne, Danièle Godard & Philip Miller. 1997. Les causatives en français : Un cas de compétition syntaxique. 115. 62–74. ). In this paper, I claim that ‘let’ probably also displayed this pattern in Middle French. In Old French, however, what appears to be the opposite pattern is observed. Following (Pearce, Elizabeth. 1990. . Dordrecht: Kluwer), I attribute this to the morphological variability of dative case in Old French. I propose a case-based analysis of the clitic ECM pattern, whereby ECM complements in Romance are phases unlike clause union complements (see Sheehan, Michelle & Sonia Cyrino. 2018. Why do some ECM verbs resist passivisation? A phase-based explanation. In Sherry Hucklebridge & Max Nelson (eds.), (vol 3), 81–90. University of Massachusetts). Where such complements are embedded under light verbs, the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Michael Kenstowicz (ed.), , 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) prevents accusative case from being assigned to the lower subject except in instances of cliticization. When the matrix verb is reanalysed as a full verb, however, v becomes the case-assigning head and so ECM becomes generally available, regardless of the clitic/non-clitic status of the causee.