Romance languages like Modern French (1a) and Modern Standard Italian (1b) show a variety of apparent incongruences regarding copula sentences in polite speech towards a single addressee with respect to Number or Gender:

(1) a. Mod. Fr. VousNUM=PL êtesNUM=PL loyalNUM=SG

‘You are loyal’

b. Mod. St. It. LeiGEN=FEM è generosoGEN=MAS

‘You are generous’.

Latin-American Spanish varieties like Modern Chilean Spanish display so called voseo (2a-c). Vos and the corresponding verb form sois (or any other verb) are the historical forms of polite address. In these varieties, the apparent incongruences also occur with respect to Number (2c being like French).

(2) Mod. Ch. Sp. a. VosNUM=PL eresNUM=SG generosoNUM=SG

b. TúNUM=SG soisNUM=PL generosoNUM=SG

c. VosNUM=PL soisNUM=PL generosoNUM=SG

‘You are generous’.

Remarkable efforts have been made to investigate incongruences of the French type syntactically: cf. Pollard & Sag (1994), Kathol (1999) and Wechsler (2011), among others. However, all of these works are exclusively restricted to Modern Standard French copula sentences. A cross-linguistic approach including more Romance languages with respect to the grammatical interfaces involved is lacking so far. The talk tries to fill this gap by proposing an analysis for French, European Spanish, Chilean Spanish and Italian within the theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), from both a synchronic as well as from a diachronic perspective.

The basic claims of the talk will be as follows:

A pragmatic feature HON=+ will be postulated to solve the incongruences in 1a,b. This feature impedes via a syntactic constraint the clash of the conflicting features in 1a,b. Moreover it will be shown how pragmatic pressure during the 15th century has generated the system in 1b although Old Italian was like French. We shall focus especially on modelling the intermediate steps. With respect to Modern Chilean Spanish it will be shown that vos (and corresponding verb forms) are morpho-syntactically PERS=2, NUM=SG. The diachronic change from 2PL to 2SG was also due to pragmatic pressure. This will be modeled on the grounds of Old Spanish and Colonial Chilean Spanish examples.

References

• Kathol, A. 1999. Agreement and the syntax-morphology interface in HPSG, in R. D. Levine and G. M. Green (eds.): Studies in Contemporary Phrase Structure Grammar. Cambridge: CUP. 223-274.
• Pollard, C. & I. A. Sag. 1994. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Stanford: CSLI.
• Wechsler, S. 2011. Mixed agreement, the person feature, and the index/concord distinction. NLLT 29: 999-1031.