Ne-cliticisation and split intransitivity

Abstract

I consider a number of constructions with ne-cliticisation, which at first sight would seem to be problematic vis-à-vis the hypothesis that the Italian partitive clitic ne is a diagnostic of unaccusativity. Structures with ne-cliticisation can receive an existential interpretation in sentence focus. I argue that, in the putatively non-canonical domains, ne realises the argument of a stage-level existential predicate (see Carlson 1977; Diesing 1992; Pustejovsky 1995), which is not spelled out in syntax, but only figures in the semantic representation of the sentence. My findings highlight the role of focus structure in unaccusativity phenomena (see Van Valin 1993a; Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995; Lambrecht 2000, among others), and support the analysis of split intransitivity in terms of non-deterministic correspondence between discourse, semantics and syntax.