The present dissertation intends to investigate the syntactic nature and L2-acquisition of passive sentence structure in two Romance varieties, Italian and Spanish. First, I will present an analytic proposal couched within the Generative Approach (Chomsky, 1957, and subsequent work); from there, and following Perlmutter and Postal's (1977)…

This dissertation examines the extent to which lexical aspect and grounding influence the acquisition of tense and aspect by ninety-four instructed adult learners of Italian in two academic settings in North America. The semantic notions of tense and aspect have been extensively investigated in the domain of second language acquisition. After more…

Distributed Morphology (DM; Halle & Marantz 1993; Marantz 1997) is founded on the premise that the syntax is the only computational component of the grammar. Much research focuses on how this premise is relevant to the syntax-morphology interface in DM. In this dissertation, I examine theory-internal issues related to the syntax-semantics…

In this dissertation I provide a principled, unified account of modality and causation in Serbian dative anticausatives using a typological, cognitive approach. This analysis is set within a larger claim that the causative and modal meanings crosslinguistically arise in the same morphosyntactic environments, indicating a shared conceptual base…

This work investigates the differences between two widespread types of causative constructions: the so called lexical causative as in Gianna opened the door or the corresponding Italian sentence Gianna ha aperto la porta, and the periphrastic causative, as in the Italian Gianna ha fatto aprire la porta (Gianna had the door opened/made the door…