“A nanosyntactic analysis of the Present tense”

Abstract

This dissertation proposes a new approach to the Present tense. It unifies its syntax, morphology, and semantics within the framework of Nanosyntax, which provides a fine-grained decomposition of morphosyntactic structure. The theoretical approach of Nanosyntax is explained in the first chapter, where I illustrate the main assumptions and the core technical machinery used in the nanosyntactic analysis, following Starke (2009), (2011), and Caha (2009). I also illustrates how Nanosyntax is strictly related to the cartographic approach, and I compare the nanosyntactic approach with the competitive theoretical one called Distributed Morphology. In the second chapter I analyse the morphosyntactic contrasts that lead to different readings of the Present tense. The languages analysed are Italian, English, Spanish, Czech and Russian. The judgment of native speakers was fundamental in order to classify the readings, and to individuate similarities and contrasts. I present the following interpretations: generic, state, ‘living in’, always combined with eventive predicates, potential, and ongoing. The third chapter has the aim to analyse all these readings, individuating their features, and ordering them in a fixed hierarchy cross-linguistically, confirming that *ABA is not attested. So, features are hierarchically ordered and each of them is considered a syntactic head. Furthermore, the phenomenon of syncretic forms, which can be only adjacent (Caha, 2009), is analysed through the Superset Principle, Cyclic Override, and the Elsewhere Condition.