Andrea Matticchio

RTG PhD student, member 2021-2023

Project "From discourse to syntax"

My project focuses on embedded verb-second and its alternation with other possibilities offered by the grammar of the same language without a straightforward difference in meaning.

The first part of the project investigates verb-second-related phenomena in old Romance languages (with a focus on old Italian) and discusses whether the notion of "relaxed" verb-second can return new insights about the general phenomenon, as often claimed in the literature. The corpus data collected for the first part of the project supports the idea that this notion is not well defined and suggests undesirable conclusions about the syntax of old Romance varieties and verb-second in general.

The second part of the project experimentally investigates the interaction between embedded verb-second in modern German and semantic factors such as polarity and factivity. Building on the intuition that embedded verb-second is a type of main clause phenomenon, an account will be developed that predicts its distribution and anti-licensing effects. This part of the project also explores some related problems about clause embedding.

Career

I studied Classics and Linguistics at the University of Padua, Italy, before joining the RTG 2636 "form-meaning mismatches" in September 2021. In Göttingen, I also developed a strong interest for formal semantics.

Research interests

- Syntax: movement, subject position, word order, conjunction of imperatives, clause embedding.

- Semantics: attitude reports, factive predicates as presupposition triggers, neg-raising, conditionals, imperatives.

- Interplay between different domains of grammar: syntax-semantics interface, effects of focus and information structure.

- Experimental linguistics, quantitative approaches to linguistic analysis.

Publications:

Matticchio, Andrea and Sanfelici, Emanuela (2021). A hierarchical TP structure in Ancient Greek. Journal of Historical Syntax 5(41), 1–46.

Matticchio, Andrea (in preparation). V1 clauses and EPP in Old Italian.