Expressing perception in parallel ways. Sentential Small Clauses in German and Romance

This chapter compares Pseudo-relatives (‘PRs’), a construction found in most Romance languages, with ‘Subject-wie clauses’ (‘SWs’), a German construction in which the subject of an embedded wie-clause precedes the complementizer wie (‘how’; e.g. Ich sah Maria, wie sie sang, lit. “I saw Mary, how she sung”, i.e. ‘I saw Mary singing’). I show that both constructions mainly occur with perception verbs, and that they have a very similar syntactic behaviour; e.g., they can be coordinated with adjectival or prepositional small clauses and have anaphoric tense. Furthermore, they both have a clausal nature but can modify a DP. I thus propose to extend Casalicchio’s (2016) analysis of PRs to SWs: they are Small Clauses (i.e., they have a typical subject-predicate configuration but no temporal independence) and they project a ForceP that hosts both the subject of the SW and the complementizer 'wie'.