THE SYNTAX OF THE DIALECT OF BARI LUIGI ANDRIANI Homerton College University of Cambridge This dissertation is submitted to the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2017 ii ABSTRACT THE SYNTAX OF THE DIALECT OF BARI Luigi Andriani This dissertation describes and analyses a selection of morphosyntactic phenomena from the nominal, verbal and clausal domains of Barese, an upper southern Italian dialect of Puglia. Chapter 2 analyses pragmatically unmarked and marked sentential word orders in Barese. On a par with most Romance varieties, Barese is a null-subject language whose unmarked transitive word order is SVO. In line with discourse-configurational languages, Barese can displace syntactic constituents in accordance with their pragmatico-semantic relevance to the discourse. In particular, Barese allows a ‘permissive’ encoding of both informational and contrastive foci in both clausal peripheries, unlike, for example, Italian where the left-periphery is dedicated to contrastive focus, and the right-periphery to informational focus. One notable pragmatico- semantic peculiarity of Barese regards intransitives encoding a loco-temporal (c)overt argument, where VS and, surprisingly from a comparative Romance perspective, SV orders may both mark sentence-focus. While VS encodes a null loco-temporal argument, SV serves to encode broad focus whenever S is ‘accessible’ in the mind of both discourse participants forming part of their ‘common ground’. Chapter 3 examines the structure of Barese nominal expressions, focusing on the interaction between adjectives, possessives and demonstratives. A notable tendency of Barese consists in the near-systematic placing of nominals to the left of such modifiers as adjectives and (tonic and clitic) possessives, with the exception of a small closed class of rudimentary evaluative adjectives which may occur in prenominal position. These orders derived via the phrasal movement of the nominal across its possessive and adjectival modifiers are contrasted with the head movement of a morpholexically restricted class of kinship nominals which are modified by a defective set of enclitic possessives. The final section of the chapter analyses the behaviour of Barese demonstratives, which only occur in prenominal position. In particular, a peculiar Barese structure which combines the definite article with the distal demonstrative pronoun is described and analysed, highlighting how it specifically marks discourse-old referents, which are otherwise marked by the bare demonstrative elsewhere in Romance. These facts demonstrate the tendency of Barese to mark the pragmatically-oriented concepts of speaker’s perspective and discourse- salient information in the nominal domain as well. Chapter 4 describes the mechanisms of auxiliary selection and past participle agreement operative in Barese. In relation to the former, Barese displays three different factors which may iii determine auxiliary selection replacing the original transitive-unaccusative split, namely person, tense and mood. These three dimensions of variation are described and analysed in terms of parameter hierarchies which formalise the complexity of the semantic features involved in the selection of the auxiliaries HAVE and BE. It is argued that this complexity reflects different diachronic stages of auxiliary selection across different generations of speakers. The final section of the chapter investigates Barese active past participle agreement which, unlike auxiliary selection, displays a conservative distribution licensed by direct objects and Undergoer subjects. The peculiarity of Barese, however, is that agreement is morpholexically limited to a small number of ‘strong’ participles which mark agreement exclusively through metaphonetic alternation. Despite the limited surface evidence, it is claimed that the syntactic mechanism of past participle agreement with (underlying) internal arguments has been preserved and is still fully operative in Barese, although never marked on the invariable ‘weak’ past participles. The final chapter is concerned with Barese progressive and andative periphrases which variously show inflected forms of the lexical verb restricted to the 2SG and 3SG of the present in place of the infinitive. These structures have been argued for Salentino and Sicilian dialects to have developed from instances of coordination with Latin AC ‘and’, which were then reinterpreted as instances of (pseudo-)coordination, namely subordination. In contrast, a different origin for these inflected forms of the lexical verb is proposed for Barese, where AC-coordination is not historically attested. It is argued that the loss of the infinitival ending -RE produced morphophonological identity, viz. syncretism, between the 3SG(/2SG) present and the infinitive, enabling the latter to be reinterpreted as a finite form within the periphrasis. This minimal extension of inflected forms in the Barese periphrases is shown to spread further across the neighbouring dialects to include more grammatical persons (3SG/2SG>1SG>3PL>all), as well as past and irrealis paradigms, even generalising to all periphrastic contexts in some varieties (cf. Salentino and some Sicilian dialects). iv DECLARATION This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted or is being currently submitted for a degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted or is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the relevant Degree Committee. Word count: 79,997 Luigi Andriani, May 2017 v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I should first generally thank everyone who, personally or virtually, dealt with me during such a decisive (and long) period of my life; thank you so much for your patience. Likewise, I should thank for their patience – and apologise to – those close people who understood that, on many occasions, work had to come first before ‘my own self’. For the rest, I will try to be concise. My biggest heart-felt ‘thank you’ goes to my PhD supervisor Prof. Adam Ledgeway, who has been both an excellent, always-present academic mentor and a dear friend to me during these years. He has blindly trusted my potential from the very first moment and, since then, has never stopped encouraging me, believing in my academic skills probably more than I myself did. I am also extremely thankful to my dear friend and colleague Norma Schifano, without whom I simply would not have managed to survive past week 1 of my very first term in Cambridge. I will never be thankful enough to Valentina Colasanti, Kim Groothuis, Giuseppina Silvestri, Maria Olimpia Squillaci and Cameron Taylor, my close friends and fellow-linguists from the Italian department who have always helped and supported me in both work-related and private matters. Many thanks also to the entire staff of the Italian Department (and, in particular, to Nan Taplin) for all their help over the years. Then, I would like to thank all the Cambridge linguists – either junior, senior or visiting – for their helpful comments and constant encouragement (or even just a relaxing chat): Alejo Álcaraz, András Bárány, Theresa Biberauer, Raluca Brăescu, Ana Calindro, Alice Corr, Silvio Cruschina, Elda De Santis, Jamie Douglas (whom I thank twice for accepting to proofread this work), Adina Dragomirescu, Adriana Fasanella, Jordi Fortuny, Ionuț Geană, Raquel Gonzalez Rodriguez, Georg Höhn, Kari Kinn, Alessandra Lombardi, Vania Masutti, Marios Mavrogiorgos, Alexandru Nicolae, Claudia Peverini, Afra Pujol i Campeny, Michelle Sheehan, Marcelo Sibaldo, Ian Roberts, Helena Sanson, Eleni Savva, Luca Sbordone, Giuseppe Torcolacci, Jenneke van der Wal and Sam Wolfe. I also thank all the linguists I have met over the years at conferences and seminars for their feedback and coffee-break chats; these would be too many to list, but they definitely deserve my gratitude. A special thanks goes to Roberta D’Alessandro, my former MRes supervisor, for her unconditional support and encouragement throughout the years, and to Martin Maiden for having trusted Adam’s word concerning my teaching skills, and having offered me the chance to lecture at Oxford. I am also grateful to the funding bodies which have financially supported my research, fieldwork, and participation at conferences: the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Cambridge Home & European Scholarship Scheme, Homerton College (and, particularly, my vii Graduate Tutor Melanie Keene), the Sydney-Perry Foundation, the Access to Learning Funding, the Italian Department, and the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. The second part of my acknowledgements is devoted to my linguistic informants and to those people who helped me with the empirical part of my research on Barese. Needless to say, my research would not have existed without these people. My deepest gratitude goes to Vittorio Polito, a dear friend and informant, who has covered me in books on/in Barese as soon as he realised how passionate I am(/we are) about