Sebastià Salvà: Si n’eren uns clítics de subjecte evidencials en català central

Seminari del CLT

Si n’eren uns clítics de subjecte evidencials en català central
SEBASTIÀ SALVÀ (UAB)

Divendres, 5 d’octubre de 2018

The goal of this talk is to show that some sort of «subject clitics» (SCls), in a broad sense, indeed existed in a previous stage of Central Catalan (∼17th, 18th and 19th centuries), especially in traditional Catalan folk songs and tales (e. g.: Si n’eren tres tambors que envenen de la guerra; Ja n’eren tres ninetes assentades en un banc), and to provide a syntactic analysis for them. In particular, we are claiming that Central Catalan recycled the partitive clitic en/ne/n’as an evidential SCl, usually preceded by a deictic adverb/particle (si, ja). We propose that this clitic is the overt manifestation of an AgrNum head, specified by an «expletive» deictic operator (overt or null). This operator (Op) then moves higher in the CP domain, in order to bind its variable in the IP field and value an evidential Force[uDeictic] head, modifying the illocutionary force of the whole sentence and, therefore, presenting the source of information on the grounds of which the speaker justifies or supports a given speech act: the deictic Op maintains a D-linked or anaphoric relationship to a previous intervention in a discourse/dialog or to an implicit context, real or unreal, so the truth value of the statement remains suspended. Along its way to [Spec, ForceP], the deictic Op stops at several intermediate projections: ΣP/PolP, Focweak and DeixisP —and, sometimes, also FoccontrastP, provided the Op possesses a [+contrast] feature. This talk also compares the similarities and differences between the Catalan evidential clitic en/ne/n’ and other SCls found in some Romance languages (Northern Italian dialects and Galician).