Abstract
The SCLs in the NIDs have been the object of linguistic examination since they were attributed the status of elements of agreement (Brandi and Cordin 1981, 1989; Burzio 1986; Rizzi 1986a; among others). The literature comprises a vast number of works which, elaborating on this idea, aim at establishing the precise structural position of SCLs, their relation with Nominative Case assignment and licensing of null subjects (Cardinaletti and Roberts 1991; Roberts 1993b; Poletto 1993a; among others), and deal with the relation between their syntactic properties and their morphology (Poletto 2000b; among others). These works on SCLs all rely on the existence of one or more projections designated exclusively to contain agreement features. In particular, Poletto’s (2000b) work magnifies the agreement status of SCLs by assigning them several independent positions within an expanded agreement domain, i.e. the Agreement Field.
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Notes
In addition to the authors cited here, other discussions about the similarities and differences between affixes, clitics and full words are to be found in Carstairs (1981); Klavans (1979, 1985); Zwicky (1977, 1985). For a treatment of clitics/affixes/full pronominals in terms of their functional rather than structural properties, see Bresnan (2001b), Börjars, Vincent, and Chapman (1997), Vincent (2001) among others.
Note that the validity of this criterion is weakened by inflectional morphemes such as those on inriectea infinitives and gerunds in Neapolitan (see chapter 7 and references therein) which are optional, but still qualify as affixes.
This view of SCLs fits in with Torrego’s (1998b:207 fn.1) suggestion that in NSLs, but not in nonNSLs, the features in T are encoded on a separate head D. Note, however, that the similarity between my and Torrego’s (1998b) proposals is restricted to its application to SCLs. Specifically, in this discussion I intend to make no claims about the differences between NSLs and non-NSLs.
The most comprehensive work in this direction is Cinque’s (1999) study of adverbs in Romance. Several authors have subsequently adopted it (Benincà and Poletto 2001; Poletto and Pollock 2000; Pollock 2000; among many others).
See chapter
for a discussion against this trend with respect to interrogative structures. 6 See Zubizareta (2001), Cardinaletti (2002b), Suñer (2003), among others, for further proposals along the line that unmarked preverbal subjects in Romance are below CP.
The reader is referred to Barbosa’s (1995) own work for the details of her tests.
In her argument against the dislocated analysis, Poletto (2000b:152–153) also makes reference to the following points: i) preverbal lexical subjects raise to a topic-like CP moving cyclically through the specifiers of a number of projections headed by different SCLs. As this operation is related to Case, assignment is incompatible with the fact that dislocated elements are base-generated. ii) dislocated XPs occur on the left of the subject, hence in a higher position inside the CP domain. Nonetheless these points follow directly from Poletto’s subject-in-CP proposal (see later in the text), which is rejected here.
The tripartite division (strong/weak/clitic) of the pronominal system in Italian is due to Cardinaletti (1994); Cardinaletti and Starke (1996, 1999).
As topic XPs in Italian may precede or follow FocusP (Rizzi 1997) the ungrammaticality of sentence (27) in the text reveals that the preverbal position occupied by egli is not FocusP.
For detailed treatments of Aux-to-Comp and Complementiser Deletion see Rizzi (1992) and Poletto (1995) respectively.
See Zubizarreta (1998) for the idea that discourse related features are not universally merged into the derivation as independent projections.
For the idea, strongly promoted here, that deictic SCLs are not in CP, see also Cardinaletti and Repetti (2002),
De Crousaz and Shlonsky (2000). Zanuttini (1997) proposes a different grouping of imperative forms. As this is discussed in details in chapter 5, here it suffices to say that Zanuttini’s distinction is inadequate with respect to Piedmontese, as it fails to capture that non-trivial observation that SCLs are banned with 2sg, 1pl and 2pl imperative forms. For this reason Graffi’s grouping is adopted.
See also Rivero (1994b) Rivero and Terzi (1995), Rooryck (1992), for different analyses involving V to C movement in imperative structures.
See Chomsky (2000, 2001) for the idea that the features of the probe (C in this analysis of imperatives) are unspecified and unvalued, and acquire content through Agree with an active goal (here V).
See Rivero (1994a, 1994b) for the idea that suppletive imperatives with subjunctive morphology do not move to C, because the illocutionary force is in a head lower than C.
I thank Anna Cardinaletti (p.c.) for directing my attention to the possibility of dispensing with V to Focus movement.
See chapter 6 for a detailed discussion of interrogatives in Piedmontese and their treatment adopting Poletto’s approach.
See also Cardinaletti and Repetti (2002) for a similar claim that SCLs are not in CP.
In the literature it is also suggested that VSO too involves overt movement operations: namely V to C movement (Emonds 1985; Stowell 1989), or subject raising (Bobalijk and Carnie 1992). These proposals reinforce the view that the EPP is universally strong (Donati and Tomaselli 1997; Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 1998a).
This idea is based on the distinction between strong and weak agreement languages (Speas 1994, 1995, cited in Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 1998a). In the former, but not in the latter, agreement morphemes are listed in the lexicon independently and then either merged onto the verb before the Numeration is formed (affixes) or merged directly into the Numeration as heads of their own projection (clitics).
It is worth noting that all of these proposals bear on the fact that in the NSLs which they take into account the finite verb has overt and rich agreement morphology. It is therefore legitimate to ask how they provide for satisfaction of the EPP where there is no agreement morphology as in the case of nonfiinite forms or in the case of NSLs with poor agreement morphology.
I thank A. Ledgeway (p.c.) for this observation.
For a detailed discussion on the agreement in presentative constructions, the reader is referred to Parry (1999) and Samek-Lodovici (1996) (among others).
See Parry (1999 and references therein) for a detailed discussion about the status ofje/j.
Needless to say that this observation no longer holds if the elimination of pro is adopted (see Manzini and Savoia 2002 for an analysis along these lines). Here, a pro-less analysis is rejected as it is grounded on the idea that there is no A-position for preverbal subject and that SCLs in the NIDs check the EPP (see sections 3 and 4).
See Tortora (2001) for a similar proposal about the competition between pro and LOC.
I refer the reader to Ledgeway’s (2000) and Torrego’s (1998b) own works for more detail on this issue.
This observation stems originally from Benincà (1983).
The WhCP on the right of deictic SCLs is the position of weak wh phrases. Strong wh phrases are on the left of these SCLs (Poletto 2000b:27).
The claim that vocalic SCLs are in CP goes hand in hand with Poletto’s (Poletto 1998, 2000b:41ff analysis of interrogative inversion (Subject Clitic Inversion (SCI)). As interrogatives inside the Agreement Field are dealt with in detail in chapter 6 here it suffices to say the co-occurrence of vocalic clitics with ICLs is interpreted by Poletto as evidence for postulating the CP section of her Agreement Field.
After observing that the SCLs in this position are always distinct for number but not always for gender, Poletto concludes that gender is parasitic on number, so that gender does not “project an independent node in the syntax” (2000b:37).
In the following sections, I will highlight a number of differences between Turinese and Astigiano. Hence, the two varieties are kept distinct, avoiding using the general label Piedmontese when it might cause ambiguity.
The labels Deictic System and Person System were introduced in section 5.3.3, while the choice of the label Basic System will become clear in chapter 4. All labels will be revised in later chapters and for the purpose of this discussion they need no further explanation.
(155) and (156) in the text were produced by the same speaker.
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Goria, C. (2004). Optimal Agreement: The Position and the Function of SCLS. In: Subject Clitics in the Northern Italian Dialects. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 60. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2738-3_3
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