Abstract
The pronominal system of Piedmontese, as that of most NIDs, involves two series of subject pronouns: the strong series which is syntactically autonomous and behaves like free morphemes, and the clitic series, i.e. SCLs. Both paradigm from Turinese and Astigiano are illustrated in Table 1. This book is concerned exclusively with SCLs:
Strong Subject Pronouns | Turinese SCLs | Astigiano SCLs | |
1sg | mi | i | a |
2sg | ti | it/’t | at;’t |
3sg masc | chiel (masc.) | a | a; al; el; ’l; ir; o |
3sg fem | chila (fem.) | a | |
1pl | noi/noiautri | i | a |
2pl | voi/voiautri | i | a |
3pl | lor | a | a |
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Notes
See Parry (1991; 1995) on the enclisis of complement clitics to non-finite forms in Piedmontese.
The label Piedmontese is used in this book to refer to literary Piedmontese and Turinese. It is be used when it is not relevant to make a distinction between different varieties of this dialect. If, however, it becomes necessary to make such a distinction the variety will be specified.
I have examined a contemporary unpublished version of Gironi edited by Renzo Arato. In this version, the editor (Renzo Arato p.c.) aimed at keeping as close as possible to the spoken language.
Throughout the book, the label Astigiano refers to Marettese and Roattese, unless otherwise specified.
See Parry (1999) for an extensive discussion on this construction in Piedmontese.
Notice that the Precedence Hierarchy appears as the exact mirror of the Grammatical Relation hierarchy (GR) (Keenan and Comrie 1977): Subject < Object < Oblique < others. “[...], one observes that the GR hierarchy [...] is directly manifested in the linear order of the arguments of the clause.” (Croft 1990:108). In other words, subjects generally precede objects, objects generally precede obliques, and so on. “[...] the conceptual ranking of arguments as described by the GR hierarchy is directly mirrored in the physical sequence of arguments in the phrase.” (ibid). The Precedence Hierarchy is a word order hierarchy, and despite appearing as the reverse of the GR hierarchy, the word order that results from it is the one expected. In fact, the linear order of the clitics is the same as the linear order of the arguments predicted by the GR hierarch. That is, subject clitic precedes the others. Notice that the position of CL-1‘/j’ is irrelevant with respect to the GR hierarchy, since the CLl‘/j’ differ from the other clitics in that they do not mark any relation between the arguments and the predicate.
The relevant preverbal negative marker is what Zanuttini (1997) calls strong negation and exemplifies with Italian non. Not all preverbal markers are strong: those which need to be accompanied by postverbal negation are weak and syntactically different from the strong ones (see chapter 3 and 5).
Cairese is a dialect spoken in the upper Val Bormida area of the Ligurian hinterland. As Parry points out: “the syntax of [the dialects spoken in this area] is basically of the Piedmontese type, as is the morphology, but they exhibit many Ligurian phonetic features” (Parry 1997a:244 fn. 4).
In some varieties, ICLs may be found in other contexts which involve verb movement to the CP field, i.e. exclamatives, counterfactual, hypothethical, disjunctive (Poletto 2000b). In the varieties examined here I have found no instances of the use of ICLs in these contexts.
Interrogative structures in the NIDs are dealt with in chapter 6. For further discussions, I direct the reader to Benincà and Poletto (1997), Goria (2000, 2002), Hulk and Pollock (2001), Parry (1998a), Poletto (1998, 2000b), Munaro (2001), among many others.
See chapter 6 for a discussion of the same lack of difference between direct questions with ICLs and those without.
See Benincà and Cinque (1993) for a detailed discussion of different coordination types.
Note that there is another version of the same nursery rime in which the expletive SCLa is used with the verb pieuv. In my opinion this corroborates the free variation typical of these SCLs.
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© 2004 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Goria, C. (2004). The Data. 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_2
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