Little Emphasis Type="Italic"v/Emphasis and pa

Authors: Kay GonzálezVilbazo Luis López

Publish Date: 2011/06/08

Volume: 30, Issue: 1, Pages: 33-77

PDF Link

Abstract

Much current work assumes that “little v” henceforth v is a universal functional category directly involved in the building of predicates As a functional category one would expect v to be the locus of parametric variation as predicted by Hagit Borer’s 1984 original hypothesis Some analyses have shown that v is involved in parametric variation concerning Case Legate 2008 and probably Object Shift Chomsky 2001 In this article we argue that v is also involved in other forms of crosslinguistic variation thus extending parameter theory in some unexpected directions In particular we argue that v is involved in three different features of crosslinguistic variation the order of verb and complements their prosodic structure and the expression of focus/background articulationOur data come from a codeswitching variety called Esplugish part and parcel of the Ilanguage of a community of German/Spanish bilinguals In Esplugish as in other codeswitching varieties it is possible to switch between v L1 and its complement VP/RootP L2 Surprisingly we find that the grammatical properties of the VP/RootP are those of L1 and not those of L2 a fact that we account for by arguing that the source of those properties is the vThis research project has been carried out under auspices of the UIC Bilingualism Research Laboratory and we would like to thank the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIC for the financial support that made it possible We would also like to thank Karlos Arregi Jeff MacSwan Marcel Den Dikken and two anonymous reviewers for feedback on previous versions or this article and the audiences that heard various incarnations of this project Deutsche Romanistentag Vienna October 2007 Linguistic Symposium of Romance Languages Urbana April 2008 University of Chicago May 2008 International Symposium on Bilingualism Utrecht July 2009 Purdue University April 2010 Special thanks go to the fellow members of the BRL for their feedback and support Our gratitude goes as well to our language consultants and to Susanne Müller for providing us with valuable codeswitching data All errors are ours

Keywords: