3.2.1 Semantic features of inversion verbs allowing an SV/VS alternation

The relevant features pertaining to Ibero-Romance wide-focus ‘locative’ inversion are path, location and deixis, which we will propose in §4 to be formally encoded in Ibero-Romance.

The notion of PATH refers (here) to a telic trajectory which involves either a SOURCE (the start-point of the trajectory e.g. ‘the bird fell from the sky’) or a GOAL (the end-point of the trajectory e.g. ‘the bird fell to the ground’). The term LOCATION refers to a static spatial co-ordinate (e.g. ‘the bird lay on the ground’). The concept of deixis, which anchors a sentence relative to a contextual index (the ORIGO, or deictic centre, which is typically, but not necessarily, ego-centric), is variable in the strength of its meaning contribution in the relevant verbs. Thus, a strongly deictic verb such as venir/vir ‘to come’ obligatorily encodes a location proximal to the speaker (cf. fn 13), whereas other verbs occur in structures entailing a more general notion of deixis, linking the sentence only loosely to the utterance context (e.g. irse ‘to leave’, cf. §3.2.4). In §4, the ‘variability’ in the deictic strength of the structures under investigation is shown to be an effect of the compositionality of syntactically-encoded deictic meaning, which, following Sigurðsson (2004; 2010), is understood here to be divisible into co-ordinates relative to an agentive interlocutor (typically the speaker), a patient interlocutor (typically the addressee) and the speech time, location and wider discourse context.

In the following sections, we base our classifications according to the presence of these key units of meaning – i.e. whether a verb is [± goal, source, location, deixis] – in the semantics of inversion verbs (for further discussion, cf. Corr 2012: 23–27). Anticipating the exposition of the theoretical analysis in §4, it is these pragmatico-semantic features which are encoded in the clausal architecture, triggering the movement of different sizes of complex null locative prepositional arguments that are proposed to be c-selected by inversion verbs.

3.2.2 Class A: +goal, +location, +deixis

Class A verbs (e.g. unaccusative venir/vir, ‘to come’) encode the key features of goal, location and deixis. With these verbs, both the inverted and non-inverted order are permitted across Ibero-Romance:

However, the subject tends to surface post-verbally with such verbs in Asturian (17) and Spanish, whereas it tends to occur preverbally in Portuguese (18):¹²

Verbs in this class involve inherently-directed motion (Levin 1993; Fábregas 2007), which may be strongly deictic in the Ibero-Romance varieties considered here.¹³ Comparison with Catalan, which we leave to future research, would be worthwhile in this respect, since its motion verbs, demonstratives, and locatives have different deictic paradigms from those of Spanish (Vann 1997: 307–8).

The relevant semantic features of Class A are motion to a fixed point (i.e. telic direction), location (the static location where the event is situated or to which, in this case, movement occurs) and deixis. However, given that not all inversion verbs are motion verbs, we prefer to capture the idea of directionality using the term PATH as discussed in §3.2.1 above, for which we can replace the notion of ‘to a fixed point’ with GOAL (cf. Zwarts 2005 for a discussion of paths, and relevant terminology). (19) illustrates these features:

3.2.3 Class B: +goal, +location

The key features of Class B verbs are [+goal, +location]. Like Class A verbs, both orders are permitted across Ibero-Romance with Class B verbs (e.g. unaccusative entrar, ‘to enter [go in]’):

However, whereas in Asturian and European Spanish inversion is preferred with Class B verbs in wide-focus contexts (21), in Portuguese and Mexican Spanish the subject tends to surface in a non-inverted order with these verbs (22):

While both orders are acceptable in River-Plate Spanish within this category, the VS order is preferred with the unergative llamar, ‘to call’ (23); conversely, the unaccusatives entrar, ‘to enter’ (24) and morir, ‘to die’ (25) are both favoured with the non-inverted order:

(23) demonstrates that the patterning of inversion verbs does not strictly follow the unergative/unaccusative distinction in Ibero-Romance.

The variation in the degree to which Class B verbs permit wide-focus inversion is a function of the individual semantics of each verb. Llamar/ligar (‘to call’) denotes the transfer of information from one participant to another. The verb entails a notion of direction towards a participant within the speech act, a relation between speech participants that does not obtain in ‘to die’ or ‘to enter’. Morir/morrer (‘to die’) plausibly involves movement away from one state (sc. being alive) to another (being dead) (Theresa Biberauer, p.c.): the change of state in morir/morrer is thus analogous to the change of location involved in entrar (‘to enter’). This difference may be reflected in the temporal (rather than locative) interpretation of morir/morrer constructions (cf. Pinto’s 1997: 23) example: È morto Fellini, ‘Fellini has (just) died’).

3.2.4 Class C: (-goal), +source, +location

The key semantic features of Class C verbs (e.g. unaccusative salir/sair ‘to leave’) are [+source, +location]. With this group, only the non-inverted order is permitted with Portuguese (26) and Latin-American Spanish (thus patterning with Italian e.g. partire ‘to leave’, for which only an SV order is felicitous in wide-focus contexts, cf. Bentley 2006):

Both orders are still permitted in Asturian and European Spanish (27):

However, in European Spanish, a preverbal subject is strongly preferred with salir (28), whereas it is only weakly preferred in Asturian (29):

The absence of a goal feature in the semantics of Class C verbs is potentially crucial, since its presence or absence appears to correlate with tendency towards or away from the inverted order. While Class C verbs imply movement away from an unspecified location, there is a contrast between those with no deictic reference (e.g. salir/sair) and those which are also (subtly) participant-oriented (e.g. Spanish irse). In the latter example, the presence of the reflexive clitic se gives a deictic/indexical dimension to the verb, making irse plausibly participant-oriented in a way that salir/sair is not. Thus, in Spanish, irse (30) is more likely to figure in an inverted construction than salir (31):

In fact, the use of the reflexive in a recipient/benefactive role often gives a participant-oriented interpretation to a sentence in Spanish. Compare the difference in meaning between the following sentences with and without the clitic se:

MacDonald (2004: 5–6) understands such instances of se to be introduced as the complement of a null locative preposition, where the PP expresses that the direct object (los cordones ‘the shoelaces’, in this case) is in the same location as the denotation of the reflexive, i.e. the subject. The (loco-temporal) co-ordinates of the event are thus restricted to those of the subject, such that the interpretation of (33) is that the event of shoelace-tying occurs where the shoelaces (los cordones) are, and these shoelaces are located where the subject is (via the co-indexation of the clitic with the subject), and thus the shoelace-tying necessarily takes place at the speaker’s location. If indeed a locative analysis is appropriate for se constructions (see also de Cuypers 2006; Armstrong 2013) and can be extended to lexicalised irse, the preference for inversion with irse over salir follows as a consequence of the ‘extra’ locative properties of the former (and lack thereof in the latter), a finding which lends plausibility to our hypothesis that a null locative is responsible for wide-focus inversion constructions.

3.2.5 Class D: +location (-goal, -deixis)

Of the varieties surveyed, only Asturian permits inversion with Class D verbs, such as the unergatives llorar/chorar (‘to cry’), gritar (‘to shout’) and dimitir/demitir/renunciar (‘to resign’):

However, the SV order is preferred in Asturian with these verbs:

Why Asturian should permit inversion with these unergatives is not immediately clear, but what may differentiate non-inversion unergatives (e.g. bailar ‘to dance’, brincar ‘to play’) from inversion unergatives like llorar, gritar and dimitir is that the former class encodes non-directional movement but not static location whereas the latter can plausibly involve static location since no movement¹⁴ is encoded in these verbs. Alternatively, an anonymous reviewer suggests that Asturian might categorise such verbs as containing source: Old Spanish llorar ‘to cry’, for example, could select an overt source, such as llorar de los ojos (‘to cry from the eyes’). Whilst this option is unavailable in Modern Spanish, it is possible that Asturian might still preserve such ‘substance emission’ verbs as source verbs. Approached in this light, dimitir ‘to resign’ could be viewed as a figurative source verb (cf. dimitió del gabinete palestino ‘he resigned from [out of] the Palestinian cabinet’). However, in this case, it would be necessary to explain why Spanish dimitir/renunciar encodes source yet does not allow wide-focus inversion (cf. #dimitió/renunció Putin ‘Putin resigned’).

The patterning of verbs which trigger subject-verb inversion in wide-focus contexts across Ibero-Romance are summarised in Table 1 (where both orders are possible, the ‘preferred’ order precedes):¹⁵

4.1.1 The structure of null locative PPs

The basic structure of the null locative PP combines and replicates previous analyses of spatial PPs (Koopman 1993; 2000; Cinque 1999; den Dikken 2010; Pantcheva 2010; Svenonius 2010), which advocate the cartographic encoding of spatial relations within hierarchies of varying complexity. Relevant here is that these accounts propose unique projections for direction (or Path) and location (or Place), with the former layer dominating the latter, as in (38):

Support for such an analysis is found in Terzi’s work on null spatial prepositions in Greek. In (39), the Greek directional/locative preposition se (appearing in contracted form before the definite determiner) is optionally realised:

When se is absent, a null directional PP is assumed to obtain with the following structure:

Terzi argues that Greek null spatial PPs are associated with an unpronounced DP PLACE, following Kayne (2004; 2005).²¹ Incorporating the silent PLACE into the structure of the null locative could account for the subject-like properties locative inversion constructions have been observed to display. We replace the Path projection with individual projections for Source and Goal following Pantcheva (2010)’s proposal that there is not a unique Path functional head. Instead, Pantcheva argues that source and goal paths form separate syntactic structures, postulating three different types of spatial PP (Pantcheva 2010: 1052):

Further, Svenonius (2010) identifies deixis as a functional layer above a projection dedicated to the expression of static location or place.²² Combining Pantcheva’s spatial PPs with Svenonius’ functional projection for deixis and Kayne’s silent noun PLACE provides four different sizes of null locative layered PP, which incorporate projections for source (SourceP), deixis (DeixisP), goal (GoalP) and location (LocationP).

4.1.2 SourceP

SourceP has projections for each of the proposed functional layers:

Class C verbs (e.g. salir/sair ‘to leave’), involving a source feature, are predicted to c-select for SourceP. As inversion is only licensed with these verbs in Asturian and European Spanish, we assume that SourceP is available in the lexical entry of these varieties only. Conversely, inversion constructions are not licensed with Class C verbs in Portuguese and Latin-American Spanish, so SourceP is assumed to be unavailable in these varieties. Thus, in European Spanish, a Class C verb can appear in two possible configurations, as follows:

The full structure of the inversion construction is illustrated in (44):

When the null locative is present, it values the relevant features, anchoring the sentence to the speaker’s deictic centre, thus allocating the deictic interpretation. As observed in the existing literature on ‘locative’ wide-focus inversion, a temporal as well as locative interpretation is available for the null argument, which we explain in terms of formal features (viz. Sigurðsson’s 2004; 2010) Speech Time and Speech Location features) in §4.3.3.

In the varieties in which SourceP is unavailable, this alternation is not possible:

The availability of SourceP in some varieties of Ibero-Romance suggests that the lack of null source PPs in English, Greek and Italian is due not to the impossibility of covertly realising a directional source PP (as proposed in Terzi 2010), but to its absence in these varieties.

4.1.3 DeixisP

DeixisP, with functional projections for deixis, goal and location, corresponds to Class A verbs such as venir/vir (‘to come’), whose semantic features in turn correspond to the PP’s functional projections:

As all varieties permit wide-focus inversion with Class A, it is assumed that DeixisP is available across Ibero-Romance. Therefore, the following configurations are possible in Ibero-Romance:

The internal structure for the inverted construction is:

4.1.4 GoalP

The third type of locative PP is GoalP, which encodes goal and location in its functional projections:

Since all varieties permit inversion with Class B verbs, the prediction would seem to be that all have GoalP in their lexical entries. However, we modify this hypothesis in §4.3.1, for reasons which will become apparent. For now, the occurrence of GoalP in Ibero-Romance is illustrated as follows:

The internal structure for GoalP is:

4.1.5 LocationP

The fourth type of layered PP is LocationP, which encodes a functional layer for (static) location only:

This null locative must be unavailable across Ibero-Romance, except in Asturian, where Class D verbs can c-select for LocationP:

The underlying structure of the construction, where it is available, is:

This class of unergatives which c-select for LocationP fits with the type of verb described in Pinto (1997), such as Italian abitare ‘to live, dwell’, with which wide-focus inversion is licensed only when the locative PP is overt (since, presumably, LocationP is unavailable in Italian also). This makes the prediction that i) Asturian should license wide-focus inversion with a null locative with verbs such as vivir (‘to live’), and ii) in general, it should show a much greater incidence of inversion constructions in wide-focus contexts than the other Ibero-Romance varieties discussed here, since Asturian could potentially have “free” inversion with any relevant verb (presumably classified within Class D) c-selecting for LocationP. Nevertheless, intuition suggests there must be some limit to the number of verbs for which Asturian licenses wide-focus inversion as it would seem anomalous for this variety to exhibit so little restriction on the licensing of VS orders relative to other Ibero-Romance varieties. However, I leave investigation of such possibilities to future research.

4.3.1 Reconsidering the availability of the null locative

The hypothesis that GoalP and DeixisP are available across Ibero-Romance makes the wrong predictions as it suggests a three-way divide in wide-focus inversion patterning, a distribution in contradiction of the fine-grained variation observed. We therefore readjust our account as follows.

The original hypothesis assumes both GoalP and DeixisP are available in European Portuguese. However, suppose that, in a given scenario, a Class B verb such as entrar (‘to enter’) c-selects for a GoalP, resulting in an inversion construction. A deictic interpretation should be unavailable because neither verb nor locative argument encodes a deictic feature. Nevertheless, Sheehan (2006; 2010) has independently established that wide-focus inversion does entail a deictic interpretation in this context. As elsewhere, we assume an empirically-justified syntactic explanation is preferable to the postulation of a pragmatic procedure. Since deixis is always involved in the interpretation of null locative inversion in Italian (Pinto 1997), it follows that Italian only has one type of covert argument, which must be DeixisP.²⁶ Given the parallels observed between Italian and European Portuguese elsewhere (sc. unavailability of SourceP and LocationP; restricted inversion relative to Spanish; subject prominence), it is plausible that European Portuguese parallels Italian in that it also only has one null locative argument, DeixisP.

If this is the case, then this cross-varietal distribution of null locatives should be revised as follows:

The structural explanation below completes the account of Ibero-Romance wide-focus inversion.

4.3.2 A structural explanation

Intuition suggests that Ibero-Romance’s fine-grained variation is a result of differences in where the locative surfaces at the TP/CP border and left periphery. Since deixis is a key element in ‘locative’ wide-focus inversion, an explanation of the variation observed would logically involve the C-domain, the area of the clausal spine associated with discourse. Yet deixis is the concept which has been least clearly defined in the proposal so far. Informants suggest that locative constructions can be more strongly or weakly deictic in the scope of their reference.²⁷ For example, in the following inversion construction with the Class A verb venir/vir, the sentence is unambiguously anchored in the speaker’s domain, necessarily referring to the speaker’s location:

However, in an inversion construction involving a Class B verb, such as Spanish Murió la abuela (‘Grandma died’), the deictic interpretation is less clearly defined: here, the event happened recently according to the speaker’s timescale, but its temporal coordinates are less exact than their spatial counterparts in (57). If we accept that languages may have multiple subject positions (Diesing 1992; Kiss 1996; McCloskey 1997; Cardinaletti 2004; Ledgeway 2010), we can plausibly assume that, given its subject-like properties, the null locative may surface in more than one structural position, where each position is associated with a (subtly) different deictic/pragmatic interpretation. A corollary assumption is that the different types of null locative surface in a position encoding a corresponding feature.

Thus we would expect that in European Portuguese, which has only one null locative (DeixisP), only one corresponding position should be available. Likewise two, three and four structural positions should be available respectively in River-Plate Spanish, European Spanish and Asturian, reflecting the number and types of null locatives lexicalised in each variety. The availability of the null locatives, and their predicted corresponding structural positions, yields the number of “preferences” observed per variety (cf. Tables 3, 4, 5). However, since the different positions in which the subject or null locatives could appear have not been tested here, the analysis remains speculative. Nevertheless, the following section captures these intuitions in formal terms.

4.3.3 A formal analysis

The traditional formulation of the EPP – which we have thus far assumed the null locative is capable of satisfying – requires a preverbal subject to surface in SpecTP. However, various authors (for instance, Rizzi & Shlonsky 2006 for English; Sheehan 2010 for Romance) have suggested that, in locative inversion constructions, the locative PP surfaces in SpecFinP (where Fin is the lowest available position within a Rizzian split CP). Thus we assume that: i) the null locative does not necessarily have to surface in SpecTP in order to satisfy the EPP, and ii) the C-domain has its own internal structure (Rizzi 1997; Speas & Tenny 2003; Sigurðsson 2010).

Sigurðsson (2010: 161) proposes that Fin “splits into two separate (but commonly indistinguishable) head features, a temporal one and a locational one, that is, Speech Time and Speech Location, S_T and S_L (the basic NOW and HERE of the utterance)”. In his account, there are context-linkers and speaker and hearer features encoded in the CP which are “inherent features of the syntactic speech event” (2010: 162).²⁸ Context-linking is understood to be a general notion that involves setting the values of argumental and adverbial topics according to elements in the deictic or discourse context; dedicated projections for topics are thus replaced by the more general CL_N, which licenses context-sensitive semantic variables:

Between CL_N and Fin are features for speaker (or logophoric agent, Λ_A) and hearer (logophoric patient, Λ_P). The structure assumed for the CP is thus:

We can extend our previously-established analogies (cf. Table 5) between the various elements associated with ‘locative’ wide-focus inversion to include Sigurðsson (2010)’s features, as illustrated in Table 6:

CL_N corresponds to SourceP and Class C verbs due to these elements’ associations with a weaker or more generalised deixis. Λ_A relates to DeixisP and Class A verbs on account of their association with (interpretations involving) speaker orientation. Fin corresponds to GoalP and Class B verbs since Fin either encodes Speech Time or Location, which relates to the interpretations of the pertinent verbs, and these c-select GoalP.³⁰ Furthermore, the correspondences allow us to predict the structural position corresponding to LocationP and the (Class D) unergative verbs encoding static location (only). We deduce that this position is either a) T, a logical conclusion since an argument surfacing in T can satisfy the EPP (i.e. in SpecTP); or b) a projection internal to, or corresponding to, Fin that encodes Speech Location (S_L) only, also a logical conclusion since LocationP involves a deictic interpretation. We opt for the second possibility, as this allows us to maintain the crucial deictic interpretation for the VS order, and link it to an independently-motivated locative feature. This gives us the following structural positions (if the second hypothesis, viz. that LocationP corresponds to S_L, is correct, we reason that, since the structure of LocationP is a subset of GoalP’s structure, S_T must be higher than S_L in the functional structure, as is also suggested in Sigurðsson 2004):

If Sigurðsson’s heads have movement-triggering features on them, then, depending on the head(s) associated with a given interpretation, the null locative could surface in different positions within the clausal architecture. The combination of different structural positions associated with Sigurðsson’s features plus the availability of different types of null locative could plausibly account for Ibero-Romance variation. We posit a possible account below.