VP fronting and complement stranding

An important difference between Old Italian and Icelandic is visible in example (234) above and regards VP fronting. As (234) shows, the SF of the past participles linearly follows the phrases da me and mio erede. I have already discussed the possibility to have more than one constituent in preverbal position in Old Romance, due to the presence of a relaxed V2, so this is not a difficulty. Other similar cases are found in Old Italian, as shown below:

(237) a. traditor del paese, dinanzi a costor venire ài ardimento

betrayer of.the country, before to those come(inf) have.2s impudence

“Betrayer of the country, before them you dare come” [FR, 24, 5] b. che dalle genti quella cosa lodata non sia

that from people that thing praised not be.3s.Subj

“That that thing is not praised by people” [FR, 80, 4] c. se profetato era che Troia disfar non si potea

if foretold was that Troy destroyed not PASS could3s sanza le saette d’Aloteta

without the lightnings of Aloteta

“If it were foretold that Troy couldn’t be destroyed without Aloteta’s lightnings” [FR, 31, 3] Neither Icelandic, nor Old Scandinavian SF allows for such a possibility. Furthermore, Icelandic SF cannot give rise to complement stranding, as shown by (27) and (28) above, repeated below for convernience, whereas this is possible in Old Swedish, as in (240):

(238) *Stelpan sem út hefur sloppið ___ kettinum (Icelandic) Girl.the that out has let cat.the

“The girl that has let out the cat”

(239) *þeir sem __ í hafa búið __Ósló they that in have lived Oslo

(240)a. allum þem til liggia __bolbysyns (Old Swedish) all those to lie village.GEN

“all those of the village to lie”

b. Nu kunnu þer koma sum i aghu __sakinne Now may they come who in own legal.case.DAT

“Now those who have a legal case may come” [Delsing 2001, ÖgL] The facts in (240) and the similarity between Old Swedish and Old Italian seem to correlate with the fact that Old Swedish has basic OV order (cf. Delsing 2001), whereas Old Italian has OV order derived by object movement to a Focus position in the low left periphery, which results in a contribution to the sentence information structure. The (basic or derived) OV in the two varieties mentioned above can in fact explain why SF is much less restricted than in Icelandic.

The contrast between Icelandic and Old Swedish/Old Italian cannot be satisfactorily explained just as dependent on a different setting of the V2 parameter (i.e. its “relaxed” vs. “strict” character). Such distinction would simply be descriptive. Instead, I assume with Poletto (2005) that both OV and complement stranding depend on a property of the left periphery which is “uniform across phases” (see Poletto 2005; discussion in Section 3.3. and in Chapter 4. below). In this perspective, the CP periphery may reveal a potential parallel activation of the left vP (and DP) periphery.

A further indication for the possible derivation of the sentences above comes from the presence/absence of VP fronting in the languages under examination. I have already mentioned that Icelandic does not allow VP-fronting, and I report the relevant examples below:

(241)a. *Keypt nokkrar bækur hefur hún (Icelandic) Bought some books has she

“She has bought some books” b.*Lesa allar bækurnar mun hún read all books.the will she

“She will read all the books” [Thráinsson 2007, 349, 7.18] Old Italian, on the contrary allows VP-fronting:

(242) E se fare proemio non vuole (Old Italian) and if do.INF preamble not wants

“And if he doesn’t want to make a preamble” [FR, 54, 3] (243) Dei nostri nemici cercare e prendere vendetta dovemo dentro a nostra magione Of our.pl enemies find.INF and take.INF revenge must.1p inside to our mansion “We must find and take revenge of our enemies inside our mansion” [FF, X, 26] Examples (242) and (243) can be analysed as cases of SF of VP. Under this hypothesis, SF would be a case of phrasal movement, in apparent contrast with all the accounts of

the Icelandic counterpart of the phenomenon as head movement (cf. Section 2. of the present chapter). Nonetheless, as all cases of long head movement, an analysis of SF in terms of head movement is problematic for locality constraints (such as the HMC). Why is VP fronting possible in Old Italian but not in Icelandic? Following the intuition presented in Section 3.3. and above (cf. Poletto 2005), Old Italian can be considered a “uniform-periphery language”, so to speak, where related projections are activated at all phases (CP; vP and DP), without entailing identical feature reduplication on each periphery. In syntactic terms, this setting results in a generalized “scrambling”: marked OV orders, discontinuous DPs, V2 topicalization (or focalization, according to which head requires feature-checking). Assuming a connection between the CP and vP peripheries, VP fronting in Old Italian would depend on the possibility to front the whole VP to a functional projection of the vP periphery first, in order to verify a feature, allegedly connected to a specific eventive structure, where the agent is missing or extracted and is not the thematic subject of predication in clause-initial position. Successively, the verbal phrase would front to the CP in order to be visible for interpretation.74 _{The possibility to front the whole VP is instead missing in Icelandic, but}

a real explanation is not available yet.