"In this book, the traditional definition of 'grammaticalization' is challenged in the light of current developments in grammar theory. The main innovation of this approach is the focus on the feature composition of lexical items. From this perspective, the loss of past participle agreement in Catalan is analyzed on the basis of newly collected data as a consequence of the grammaticalization of formal features. The emergence of syntactic formal features through grammaticalization is understood as a last-resort repair mechanism for pragmatically costly derivations. Further far-reaching implications of this proposal under discussion are: the interplay between (re-)parametrization, economy, cyclicity and grammaticalization; the characterization of free variation under a modified version of the Interface Hypothesis; and the precedence of syntactic over morphological change. This book is not only of interest to specialists in Romance languages but also to anyone working on diachronic linguistics"--.

• Past Participle Agreement
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and symbols
• Introduction
• Part 1. Past participle agreement in Romance languages: General properties and previous accounts
• 1. General remarks on past participle agreement
  • 1.1 Past participle agreement in French and Italian
    • 1.1.1 Basic data
    • 1.1.2 Descriptive generalizations
  • 1.2 Previous accounts
    • 1.2.1 Traditional approaches
    • 1.2.2 Some sociolinguistic and stylistic considerations
    • 1.2.3 Semantic/pragmatic approaches
    • 1.2.4 Syntactic approaches: Position, Spec-Head relations and AgrO
    • 1.2.5 More recent accounts from a minimalist perspective
• 2. Optionality and language change: PPA as an interface phenomenon
  • 2.1 Optionality: Competing grammars and interface effects
  • 2.2 Interface effects on PPA
    • 2.2.1 Information structure–syntax interface
    • 2.2.2 Semantics/pragmatics–syntax interface
  • 2.3 Object phenomena related to specificity
    • 2.3.1 Object movement, CLD and DOM
    • 2.3.2 PPA and object movement
    • 2.3.3 PPA and DOM
    • 2.3.4 PPA and CLD
  • 2.4 Interim summary
• 3. Past participle agreement in Catalan
  • 3.1 Peculiarities of PPA in Catalan
  • 3.2 PPA as a case of doubt: A digression on normative grammar and the realization of PPA
  • 3.3 PPA in Catalan: A phenomenon at the interfaces?
    • 3.3.1 The role of specificity in Catalan PPA
    • 3.3.2 Correlations among object phenomena
    • 3.3.3 Further evidence: Definiteness effects in absolute small clauses
• 4. Standpoint and research outlines
• Part 2. Theoretical background: Universal grammar and language change
• 5. On clausal structure and universal grammar
  • 5.1 Universal grammar and the clausal spine
  • 5.2 Parameters and variation
  • 5.3 Formal features and Agree
• 6. On grammaticalization and language change
  • 6.1 Grammaticalization as a descriptive tool
  • 6.2 Grammaticalization clines: From semantic to formal features
  • 6.3 Some thoughts on the question of morphology
  • 6.4 Economy and cyclicity
  • 6.5 Summarizing
• 7. Subject-verb agreement revisited
  • 7.1 Preliminaries: Some problematic issues
  • 7.2 Two diachronic stages in subject-verb agreement
  • 7.3 On the role of case in grammaticalization and language change
• Part 3. Past participle agreement in Catalan: An empirical study
• 8. Data collection
  • 8.1 Old Catalan (11th–15th centuries) and ‘Decadença’ Catalan (16th–19th centuries)
    • 8.1.1 General methodological issues
    • 8.1.2 Text selection
    • 8.1.3 Coded features and coding criteria
      • 8.1.3.1 The verb
      • 8.1.3.2 The object noun phrase (NP/DP)
      • 8.1.3.3 The clause
  • 8.2 Modern Catalan
    • 8.2.1 Target constructions of the test
    • 8.2.2 Structure of the questionnaire
    • 8.2.3 Participants
• 9. The PPA cycle
  • 9.1 Old Catalan: Results of the corpus analysis
    • 9.1.1 The verb
      • 9.1.1.1 Verbal lexeme
      • 9.1.1.2 Auxiliary verb
      • 9.1.1.3 Participle agreement
    • 9.1.2 The object noun phrase (NP/DP)
      • 9.1.2.1 Gender and number
      • 9.1.2.2 Person
      • 9.1.2.3 Case
      • 9.1.2.4 Definiteness and specificity
      • 9.1.2.5 Genericity
      • 9.1.2.6 Animacy
    • 9.1.3 The clause
      • 9.1.3.1 Construction type
      • 9.1.3.2 Word order, position with respect to the verb, adjacency
  • 9.2 Results of the questionnaire for Modern Catalan
    • 9.2.1 Interpolation
    • 9.2.2 Causatives
    • 9.2.3 Partitive objects
    • 9.2.4 Influence of dialect and language dominance
  • 9.3 Interpreting the data: A PPA-cycle
• 10. Diachronic analysis of past participle agreement in Catalan: A grammaticalization approach
  • 10.1 Additional assumptions
  • 10.2 Grammaticalizing formal features and avoiding redundancy
    • 10.2.1 Stage 1: Obligatory agreement
    • 10.2.2 Stage 2: PPA controlled by specificity?
    • 10.2.3 Stage 3: Positional rules on agreement
    • 10.2.4 Stage 4: Optional agreement
    • 10.2.5 Stage 5: Loss of agreement
  • 10.3 Outcomes, shortcomings, outlook
    • 10.3.1 The division between narrow syntax and the interfaces
    • 10.3.2 Consequences of grammaticalization for accusative case
    • 10.3.3 Some remarks on unaccusativity
    • 10.3.4 Open issues
• Concluding remarks
• References
• List of texts used in the Old Catalan corpus
  • 11th–13th century
  • 14th century
  • 15th century
  • 16th century
  • 17th–19th century
• Index