Economy and optionality: Interpretations of subjects in Italian

• Published in: Probus Vol. 8; no. 2; pp. 117 - 136
• Main Author: ADGER, DAVID
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, New York Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1996
• Subjects: Discourse; Discourse Analysis; Government Binding Theory; Grammar; Italian; Italian language; Language; Linguistics; Movement; Subject; Well Formedness
• ISSN: 0921-4771; 1613-4079
• DOI: 10.1515/prbs.1996.8.2.117

To account for apparently optional movement in a theory of grammar that incorporates the notion of economy, a theory of the interface between formal discourse structure & syntactic structure is proposed. Alternative pre- & postverbal subject placement with unaccusatives in Italian is shown to be unexplainable in terms of Case assignment; instead, it is argued that subject movement choices & interpretational effects on preposed subjects are conditioned by discourse felicity judgments under an effability constraint specifying for any well-formed discourse representation structure (DRS) there must be a corresponding terminal syntactic structure (TSS). Discourse felicity is formalized in terms of a familiarity condition as part of a set of well-formedness conditions on DRSs that is independent of the set of well-formedness conditions on TSSs; the removal of interpretive motivations to the level of DRS is held to reinforce the notion of an autonomous syntax. 30 References. Adapted from the source document