Virginia Hill
Biographic Data
| ID | 998256 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Virginia Hill |
| GIVEN NAMES | Virginia |
| FAMILY NAME | Hill |
| SIGNATURE | HILL V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of New Brunswick |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5850-1666 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 41 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Romanian DOM and Loss of Analyzability
This paper revisits the diachronic changes to Romanian DOM by focusing on the emergence of the DOM particle pe: the prenominal preposition pe is shown to undergo loss of analyzability when (i) the adjacent noun phrase is the direct object of the verb; and (ii) pe-DP falls under a certain pragmatic treatment. In other contexts, pe continues as a preposition. Loss of analyzability entails modification of the feature bundle associated with pe, as we…
Mapping the pragmatic field: In how many ways
This review provides comments on the attempts made in the literature to capture the way in which elements of conversational pragmatics impact the syntax of clauses. The focus is on the neo-performative and the interaction-based models, such as presented in Martina Wiltschko's target paper. Briefly, the observation is that the differences noticed in the technical implementation and the type of empirical data that support these models are quite sup…
The acquisition of object clitic pronouns in Heritage Romanian
This paper examines the acquisition of object clitic pronouns in Heritage Romanian (HR) by school-age children in Toronto who are second-generation speakers of Romanian—i.e., children of first-generation immigrant parents. These children have been exposed to Romanian as their first language (L1) since birth within the home, while English has served as the societal language, primarily encountered outside the home. Additionally, they were enrolled …
Commitment Phrase: Linking Proposition to Illocutionary Force
This article provides empirical support for the projection of a Commitment Phrase (CommitP) in the field that maps the conversational pragmatics at the periphery of clauses. Krifka (2015, 2019, 2020) proposes CommitP as a projection that maps the speaker's commitment to act on the proposition insofar as the speaker has evidence for the truth condition or expects the addressee to produce and commit to such evidence. CommitP replaces Ross's (1970) …
The commitment of rhetorical questions
Rhetorical questions have received a detailed treatment in semantic studies that defined them in terms of common ground updating, assertion and lack of information seeking. How these semantic traits interact with the syntactic derivation of a rhetorical question has been less debated in the literature (with some notable exceptions). This paper adopts the findings of the semantic studies and considers them from a syntactic perspective: to what deg…
Istro-Romanian Subjunctive Clauses
This paper aims to define the featural composition of the complementizers that introduce subjunctive complements in Istro-Romanian, and to identify the internal organization of the subjunctive clause in terms of subject positions, verb movement, clitic placement and constituent fronting. In a nutshell, the observation is that the complementizer neca replaces se within the syntactic pattern of Old Romanian; that is, a pattern that displays intra- …
Introduction: Balkan Romance Within the Balkan Sprachbund
This article provides a short introduction to Balkan Romance, examining and exemplifying a number of its principal features. In particular, the discussion begins in §2 with a review of the main morphosyntactic features of the four principal sub-branches of Old Romanian spoken today within the Balkan Sprachbund (Daco-Romanian, Aromanian, Istro-Romanian, and Megleno-Aromanian), tracing the treatment of such Balkanisms both in the traditional philol…
Subjunctives in Romanian Languages: Micro-Parametric Variation in Complement CPs and the Periphrastic Future
This paper aims to (i) establish the micro-parametric variation in the development of the subjunctive CP in Romanian languages (Daco-Romanian/DR; Aromanian/AR; Megleno-Romanian/MR; Istro-Romanian/IR) and (ii) account for derivations in which the subjunctive is integrated into the formation of the periphrastic future in these languages. Briefly, the analysis points out that the subjunctive CP in Romanian languages can display a split Fin (unlike i…
The syntactization of kinship in vocative phrases
Current studies point out that vocative phrases encode the social relation between speaker and addressee by the interaction of various means, i.e., prosody, lexical options, morpho-syntactic operations. As a contribution to this body of research, this paper focuses on reversed vocatives, and develops two main arguments: (i) vocative phrases provide the default domain for the morpho-syntactic encoding of speaker’s social superiority; and (ii) reve…
The acquisition of adverbs in child L3 French in Canada
This paper1 focuses on the acquisition of adverbs in French L3 and aims to identify the possible role of transfer in this particular linguistic context. The data come from children born in Canada who speak Romanian as a heritage language and are exposed to English as the societal language as well as to French (L3) in school. The variable under scrutiny is the position of adverbs in light of Cinque’s (1999) universal hierarchy. The results indicat…
Differential subject marking through SE
An outstanding question in current studies concerns the status of Romance SE that does not obviously mark reflexivity or anticausativity. This paper signals the presence of such constructions in Old and Modern Romanian, where SE occurs with unergative verbs and qualifies as pleonastic according to traditional grammars (i.e., it makes no difference for the truth conditions or for the argument structure). The main argument is that such construction…
Overt speakers in syntax
This paper focuses on a type of direct address in Sason Arabic that fails to behave like a regular vocative phrase. In particular, unlike regular vocative phrases, this form of address spells out both the speaker and the addressee, and it is conditioned by the speaker’s expression of affection towards the addressee. A DP and its adjacent invariable clitic (i.e., a frozen 3rd person singular form of a possessive pronoun) are the constituents of th…
Grammaticalization of auxiliaries and parametric changes
This paper looks at constructions with non-clitic auxiliaries in Old Romanian, which precede the generalized option for clitic auxiliaries in the same language. We argue that non-clitic auxiliaries belong to a grammar with genuine SVO, scrambling to Spec, AspP, and subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI as AUX-to Fin). The generalization of the clitic auxiliary entails the loss of these properties, while triggering a parametric shift in word order to V…
Vocatives in the Balkans
This paper argues that: (i) vocative nouns project beyond DP, to a VocP level that maps the basic pragmatic features involved in the derivation of nominal expressions conveying a direct address; (ii) this pattern can be generalized cross-linguistically; (iii) variations within this pattern are predictable in a principled way, and one particular example arises in the case of reverse vocatives; (iv) reverse vocatives are areally restricted in a way…
Evidentiality and Raising to Object as A′-Movement: A Romanian Case Study
Romanian displays a construction in which the subject of an embedded indicative clause surfaces with accusative form in the matrix clause. This resembles Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) and occurs with matrix verbs of knowledge and perception. We argue that: (i) such derivations arise from Raising to Object (RtoO) across the phasal indicativeCP; (ii) RtoO in Romanian is an instance of A′-movement with A-movement effects derived from the v-related …
Formal Approaches to DPs in Old Romanian
Formal approaches to DPs in Old Romanian offers the first collection of papers on this topic published in English. All the analyses adopt the conceptual tools of generative grammar to explain the syntactic peculiarities of Old Romanian nouns, synchronically and diachronically. Old Romanian noun syntax displays non-trivial peculiarities both in the internal structure of the DP (e.g., inflected possessive marker, polydefinite agreement, optional de…
Discourse-driven V-to-C in Early Modern Romanian
The emergence of the Romanian supine
The supine starts to occur in Early Modern Romanian (EMR) by the late 16th century, during the general process of replacement of infinitives in subordinated clauses. The supine replaces the infinitive in non-finite relative clauses. In this article, I argue that EMR, but not other languages (e.g., Balkan Slavic) provided ambiguity in the primary linguistic data in the context of infinitival de -relatives, because of the underspecification of de f…
The emergence of the Romanian subjunctive
This paper argues that să -subjunctives arise and spread in Early Modern Romanian (EMR) because of two properties: (i) să values the complementizer head (C) as unambiguously irrealis ; and (ii) the subjunctive clause is systematically phasal. The emergence of să is kept distinct from the emergence of the subjunctive in the Balkan Sprachbund, and is situated, instead, in the context of a more generalized shift in the list of EMR complementizers. T…
The Direct Object Marker in Romanian: A Historical Perspective
So far, most analyses assume that DOM and clitic doubling (CD) are two sides of the same mechanism, arising from a structure-dependent condition (i.e. Case for nouns). This assumption concerns Romance languages in general, including Romanian (old or modern). This paper points out that data from Early Modern Romanian (EMR) and data from other Balkan Romance languages contradict this assumption. The analysis I propose disengages DOM from CD and fro…
Modal grammaticalization and the pragmatic field: A case study
This paper proposes a diachronic syntactic analysis of the Romanian verb putea “can”. It is argued that the grammaticalization of putea consists of several upward reanalyses, and the gradual stripping of semantic features set off its reclassification as control verb > raising verb > auxiliary > pragmatic marker. This analysis accounts for ambiguous epistemic/deontic readings on the modal, which were considered mysterious under lexical/semantic ap…
Mapping the information structure in Early Modern Bulgarian clauses with the particle TA
Romanian adverbs and the pragmatic field
Romanian constructions in which a sentential adverb precedes a ‘that’ clause raise questions about the status of the adverb, the status of the selected clause, and the structure of the left periphery that allows for such a word order. The proposal is that certain pragmatic features ensuring the evidential reading on the adverb (i.e., features of speech acts in Speas & Tenny 2003) become visible to the syntactic computation. Accordingly, the struc…
Vocatives and the pragmatics-syntax interface
Adhering Focus
January 01 2002 Adhering Focus In Special Collection: CogNet Virginia Hill Virginia Hill University of New Brunswick, Saint John Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Virginia Hill University of New Brunswick, Saint John Online ISSN: 1530-9150 Print ISSN: 0024-3892 © 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2002 Linguistic Inquiry (2002) 33 (1): 164–172. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.200…
Vocatives and the pragmatics-syntax interface
Evidentiality and Raising to Object as A′-Movement: A Romanian Case Study
Romanian displays a construction in which the subject of an embedded indicative clause surfaces with accusative form in the matrix clause. This resembles Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) and occurs with matrix verbs of knowledge and perception. We argue that: (i) such derivations arise from Raising to Object (RtoO) across the phasal indicativeCP; (ii) RtoO in Romanian is an instance of A′-movement with A-movement effects derived from the v-related …
The Direct Object Marker in Romanian: A Historical Perspective
So far, most analyses assume that DOM and clitic doubling (CD) are two sides of the same mechanism, arising from a structure-dependent condition (i.e. Case for nouns). This assumption concerns Romance languages in general, including Romanian (old or modern). This paper points out that data from Early Modern Romanian (EMR) and data from other Balkan Romance languages contradict this assumption. The analysis I propose disengages DOM from CD and fro…
Commitment Phrase: Linking Proposition to Illocutionary Force
This article provides empirical support for the projection of a Commitment Phrase (CommitP) in the field that maps the conversational pragmatics at the periphery of clauses. Krifka (2015, 2019, 2020) proposes CommitP as a projection that maps the speaker's commitment to act on the proposition insofar as the speaker has evidence for the truth condition or expects the addressee to produce and commit to such evidence. CommitP replaces Ross's (1970) …
Istro-Romanian Subjunctive Clauses
This paper aims to define the featural composition of the complementizers that introduce subjunctive complements in Istro-Romanian, and to identify the internal organization of the subjunctive clause in terms of subject positions, verb movement, clitic placement and constituent fronting. In a nutshell, the observation is that the complementizer neca replaces se within the syntactic pattern of Old Romanian; that is, a pattern that displays intra- …
Subjunctives in Romanian Languages: Micro-Parametric Variation in Complement CPs and the Periphrastic Future
This paper aims to (i) establish the micro-parametric variation in the development of the subjunctive CP in Romanian languages (Daco-Romanian/DR; Aromanian/AR; Megleno-Romanian/MR; Istro-Romanian/IR) and (ii) account for derivations in which the subjunctive is integrated into the formation of the periphrastic future in these languages. Briefly, the analysis points out that the subjunctive CP in Romanian languages can display a split Fin (unlike i…
Discourse-driven V-to-C in Early Modern Romanian
Mapping the information structure in Early Modern Bulgarian clauses with the particle TA
The gray area of supine clauses
This paper aims to clarify the categorial and syntactic status of supine forms in Romanian. It appears that the supine is a [+N][+V] category that lacks o-features and differs from adjectives with reference to distribution, thematic properties, and syntactic checking. Crucially, the absence of o-features reflects on the syntactic configuration, which becomes valid in only two instances: within a DP, or within a CP structure. Supine complementatio…
Adhering Focus
January 01 2002 Adhering Focus In Special Collection: CogNet Virginia Hill Virginia Hill University of New Brunswick, Saint John Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Virginia Hill University of New Brunswick, Saint John Online ISSN: 1530-9150 Print ISSN: 0024-3892 © 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2002 Linguistic Inquiry (2002) 33 (1): 164–172. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.200…
The gray area of supine clauses
This paper aims to clarify the categorial and syntactic status of supine forms in Romanian. It appears that the supine is a [+N][+V] category that lacks o-features and differs from adjectives with reference to distribution, thematic properties, and syntactic checking. Crucially, the absence of o-features reflects on the syntactic configuration, which becomes valid in only two instances: within a DP, or within a CP structure. Supine complementatio…
Romanian adverbs and the pragmatic field
Romanian constructions in which a sentential adverb precedes a ‘that’ clause raise questions about the status of the adverb, the status of the selected clause, and the structure of the left periphery that allows for such a word order. The proposal is that certain pragmatic features ensuring the evidential reading on the adverb (i.e., features of speech acts in Speas & Tenny 2003) become visible to the syntactic computation. Accordingly, the struc…
Vocatives and the pragmatics-syntax interface
Modal grammaticalization and the pragmatic field: A case study
This paper proposes a diachronic syntactic analysis of the Romanian verb putea “can”. It is argued that the grammaticalization of putea consists of several upward reanalyses, and the gradual stripping of semantic features set off its reclassification as control verb > raising verb > auxiliary > pragmatic marker. This analysis accounts for ambiguous epistemic/deontic readings on the modal, which were considered mysterious under lexical/semantic ap…
Mapping the information structure in Early Modern Bulgarian clauses with the particle TA
The emergence of the Romanian supine
The supine starts to occur in Early Modern Romanian (EMR) by the late 16th century, during the general process of replacement of infinitives in subordinated clauses. The supine replaces the infinitive in non-finite relative clauses. In this article, I argue that EMR, but not other languages (e.g., Balkan Slavic) provided ambiguity in the primary linguistic data in the context of infinitival de -relatives, because of the underspecification of de f…
The emergence of the Romanian subjunctive
This paper argues that să -subjunctives arise and spread in Early Modern Romanian (EMR) because of two properties: (i) să values the complementizer head (C) as unambiguously irrealis ; and (ii) the subjunctive clause is systematically phasal. The emergence of să is kept distinct from the emergence of the subjunctive in the Balkan Sprachbund, and is situated, instead, in the context of a more generalized shift in the list of EMR complementizers. T…
The Direct Object Marker in Romanian: A Historical Perspective
So far, most analyses assume that DOM and clitic doubling (CD) are two sides of the same mechanism, arising from a structure-dependent condition (i.e. Case for nouns). This assumption concerns Romance languages in general, including Romanian (old or modern). This paper points out that data from Early Modern Romanian (EMR) and data from other Balkan Romance languages contradict this assumption. The analysis I propose disengages DOM from CD and fro…
Formal Approaches to DPs in Old Romanian
Formal approaches to DPs in Old Romanian offers the first collection of papers on this topic published in English. All the analyses adopt the conceptual tools of generative grammar to explain the syntactic peculiarities of Old Romanian nouns, synchronically and diachronically. Old Romanian noun syntax displays non-trivial peculiarities both in the internal structure of the DP (e.g., inflected possessive marker, polydefinite agreement, optional de…
Discourse-driven V-to-C in Early Modern Romanian
Evidentiality and Raising to Object as A′-Movement: A Romanian Case Study
Romanian displays a construction in which the subject of an embedded indicative clause surfaces with accusative form in the matrix clause. This resembles Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) and occurs with matrix verbs of knowledge and perception. We argue that: (i) such derivations arise from Raising to Object (RtoO) across the phasal indicativeCP; (ii) RtoO in Romanian is an instance of A′-movement with A-movement effects derived from the v-related …
Grammaticalization of auxiliaries and parametric changes
This paper looks at constructions with non-clitic auxiliaries in Old Romanian, which precede the generalized option for clitic auxiliaries in the same language. We argue that non-clitic auxiliaries belong to a grammar with genuine SVO, scrambling to Spec, AspP, and subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI as AUX-to Fin). The generalization of the clitic auxiliary entails the loss of these properties, while triggering a parametric shift in word order to V…
Vocatives in the Balkans
This paper argues that: (i) vocative nouns project beyond DP, to a VocP level that maps the basic pragmatic features involved in the derivation of nominal expressions conveying a direct address; (ii) this pattern can be generalized cross-linguistically; (iii) variations within this pattern are predictable in a principled way, and one particular example arises in the case of reverse vocatives; (iv) reverse vocatives are areally restricted in a way…
Overt speakers in syntax
This paper focuses on a type of direct address in Sason Arabic that fails to behave like a regular vocative phrase. In particular, unlike regular vocative phrases, this form of address spells out both the speaker and the addressee, and it is conditioned by the speaker’s expression of affection towards the addressee. A DP and its adjacent invariable clitic (i.e., a frozen 3rd person singular form of a possessive pronoun) are the constituents of th…
The syntactization of kinship in vocative phrases
Current studies point out that vocative phrases encode the social relation between speaker and addressee by the interaction of various means, i.e., prosody, lexical options, morpho-syntactic operations. As a contribution to this body of research, this paper focuses on reversed vocatives, and develops two main arguments: (i) vocative phrases provide the default domain for the morpho-syntactic encoding of speaker’s social superiority; and (ii) reve…
The acquisition of adverbs in child L3 French in Canada
This paper1 focuses on the acquisition of adverbs in French L3 and aims to identify the possible role of transfer in this particular linguistic context. The data come from children born in Canada who speak Romanian as a heritage language and are exposed to English as the societal language as well as to French (L3) in school. The variable under scrutiny is the position of adverbs in light of Cinque’s (1999) universal hierarchy. The results indicat…
Differential subject marking through SE
An outstanding question in current studies concerns the status of Romance SE that does not obviously mark reflexivity or anticausativity. This paper signals the presence of such constructions in Old and Modern Romanian, where SE occurs with unergative verbs and qualifies as pleonastic according to traditional grammars (i.e., it makes no difference for the truth conditions or for the argument structure). The main argument is that such construction…
Subjunctives in Romanian Languages: Micro-Parametric Variation in Complement CPs and the Periphrastic Future
This paper aims to (i) establish the micro-parametric variation in the development of the subjunctive CP in Romanian languages (Daco-Romanian/DR; Aromanian/AR; Megleno-Romanian/MR; Istro-Romanian/IR) and (ii) account for derivations in which the subjunctive is integrated into the formation of the periphrastic future in these languages. Briefly, the analysis points out that the subjunctive CP in Romanian languages can display a split Fin (unlike i…
The commitment of rhetorical questions
Rhetorical questions have received a detailed treatment in semantic studies that defined them in terms of common ground updating, assertion and lack of information seeking. How these semantic traits interact with the syntactic derivation of a rhetorical question has been less debated in the literature (with some notable exceptions). This paper adopts the findings of the semantic studies and considers them from a syntactic perspective: to what deg…
Istro-Romanian Subjunctive Clauses
This paper aims to define the featural composition of the complementizers that introduce subjunctive complements in Istro-Romanian, and to identify the internal organization of the subjunctive clause in terms of subject positions, verb movement, clitic placement and constituent fronting. In a nutshell, the observation is that the complementizer neca replaces se within the syntactic pattern of Old Romanian; that is, a pattern that displays intra- …
Introduction: Balkan Romance Within the Balkan Sprachbund
This article provides a short introduction to Balkan Romance, examining and exemplifying a number of its principal features. In particular, the discussion begins in §2 with a review of the main morphosyntactic features of the four principal sub-branches of Old Romanian spoken today within the Balkan Sprachbund (Daco-Romanian, Aromanian, Istro-Romanian, and Megleno-Aromanian), tracing the treatment of such Balkanisms both in the traditional philol…
Romanian DOM and Loss of Analyzability
This paper revisits the diachronic changes to Romanian DOM by focusing on the emergence of the DOM particle pe: the prenominal preposition pe is shown to undergo loss of analyzability when (i) the adjacent noun phrase is the direct object of the verb; and (ii) pe-DP falls under a certain pragmatic treatment. In other contexts, pe continues as a preposition. Loss of analyzability entails modification of the feature bundle associated with pe, as we…
Mapping the pragmatic field: In how many ways
This review provides comments on the attempts made in the literature to capture the way in which elements of conversational pragmatics impact the syntax of clauses. The focus is on the neo-performative and the interaction-based models, such as presented in Martina Wiltschko's target paper. Briefly, the observation is that the differences noticed in the technical implementation and the type of empirical data that support these models are quite sup…
The acquisition of object clitic pronouns in Heritage Romanian
This paper examines the acquisition of object clitic pronouns in Heritage Romanian (HR) by school-age children in Toronto who are second-generation speakers of Romanian—i.e., children of first-generation immigrant parents. These children have been exposed to Romanian as their first language (L1) since birth within the home, while English has served as the societal language, primarily encountered outside the home. Additionally, they were enrolled …
Linguistics (22 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (19 works) · Romanian (14 works) · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity (10 works) · Syntax (10 works) · Verb (10 works) · History (8 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (8 works)