Syntactic Variation: The Dialects of Italy

by Edited by Roberta D'Alessandro , Adam Ledgeway , Ian Roberts

• ISBN13: 9780521517362
• ISBN10: 0521517362
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-02-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The study of Romance languages can tell us a great deal about sentence structure and its variation in general. Focusing on the dialects of Italy - including the islands of Sardinia and Sicily - the authors explore three thematic areas: the nominal domain, the verbal domain and the left periphery of the clause. The book gives fresh attention to the dialects, arguing that they offer an unprecedented degree of variation (not found, for example, in Germanic languages). Analysing a host of new data, the authors show how the dialects can be used as a test-bed for investigating and challenging received ideas about language structure and change. Coherent and wide-ranging, this is a vital resource for those working in syntactic theory, historical linguistics, and Romance languages.

Table of Contents

Syntactic variation and the dialects of Italy: an overview

Nominal Structures

Headless relatives in some Old Italian varieties

On Old Italian uomo and the classification of indefinite expressions

Syncretism and suppletion in clitic systems: underspecification, silent clitics or neither?

Lexicalization of 3rd person object clitics: clitic enclisis and clitic drop

Proclitic vs enclitic pronouns in northern Italian dialects and the null-subject parameter

Domains of clitic placement in finite and non-finite clauses: evidence from a Piedmontese dialect

Verbal Structures

Prohibition and Romance: negative imperatives in the early vernaculars of Italy

The periphrasis aviri a + infinitive in contemporary Sicilian dialect

A formal typology of person-based auxiliary selection in Italo-Romance

The Abruzzese T-v system: feature spreading and the double auxiliary construction

Perfective auxiliaries in the pluperfect in some southern Italian dialects

The logic of Romance past participle agreement

The Left Periphery

Fronting as focalization in Sicilian

Focus fronting and the left periphery in Sardinian

In focus: an investigation of information and contrastive constructions

Criterial conditions for wh-structures: evidence from wh-exclamatives in northern Italian dialects

The distribution of the complementizers /ka/ and /ku/ in the North Salentino dialect of Francavilla Fontana (Brindisi)

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