Majorcan Catalan: A wintow to analyse past participle agreement as an epiphenomenon

Abstract

[eng] The use of past participle agreement (PPA) in Majorcan Catalan has decreased over the last hundred years when the object remains in situ (PPAOIS), but PPA keeps clearly stronger when the object is preposed – in clitic, wh-, and other fronted constructions (pace Loporcaro 1998). The goal of this paper is to critically analyse previous accounts for PPA, in order to synthesise them and provide a new formal analysis, flexible enough to explain the data of several Romance varieties: the conclusion is that PPA is not a unified phenomenon, but an epiphenomenon, which can be regarded as the by-product of several syntactic mechanisms – as already proposed by Georgi & Stark (2021) for French. One of these mechanisms is Chomsky’s Agree, but PPA could also be the result of Concord (as in passive constructions) or it could come from “resumption by extraction, stranding, and incorporation” of a functional head H, as a strategy for marking information structure. Additionally, at least for some speakers of some villages (like Llucmajor and Montuïri), PPA with the object in situ can also be used for marking those internal arguments which are (given or aboutness-shift) topics and, at the same time, affected by a dynamic event with [+bounded] o [resultative] aspect.