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The Syntax-Pragmatics Interface in North-Eastern Italian Dialects Consequences for the Geometry of the Left Periphery

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The Syntax-Pragmatics Interface in North-Eastern Italian Dialects Consequences for the Geometry of the Left Periphery The Syntax-Pragmatics Interface in North-Eastern Italian Dialects Consequences for the Geometry of the Left Periphery A Thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2018 Simone De Cia School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Table of Contents LIST OF TABLES 5 LIST OF FIGURES 5 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 6 ABSTRACT 7 DECLARATION 8 COPYRIGHT STATEMENT 9 DEDICATION 10 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 11 1. INTRODUCTION 12 1.1. Theoretical and Empirical Scope 12 1.2. The Interplay between Information Structure and Syntax 17 1.3. Principal Claims 21 1.3.1. Wh-Typology and the Microparametric Variation in the Locus of SCLI 21 1.3.2. Residual V2 and Pragmatically Motivated V2 Effects 23 1.3.3. Root Contrastiveness as a Supra-Informational Status 26 1.4. Data Collection: Sample, Methodology and Database 27 1.5. Conventions for Glosses, Translations and Orthographic Representations 34 1.6. Organisation 37 2. NORTH-EASTERN ITALIAN DIALECTS: AN OVERVIEW 39 2.1. The Northern Italian Dialects 39 2.2. NEIDs: Overview and Genetic Affiliation 43 2.2.1. Friulian and Fornese 46 2.2.2. Lamonat and Sovramontino 49 2.3. Subject Clitics: The Ambiguous Status of NIDs as Null-Subject Languages 54 2.3.1. Subject Clitics and the Null-Subject Parameter 55 2.3.2. SCLs across NEIDs: Preliminary Considerations 56 2.3.3. SCLs in Fornese and Sovramontino: Empirical Generalisations 57 2.3.3.1. SCLs in Declarative Clauses 59 2 2.3.3.2. SCLs in Negative Declaratives and Satellite Clitics 61 2.3.3.3. The Morpho-Phonetic Form of SCLs 64 2.3.3.4. SCLs in Root Interrogatives 65 2.3.3.5. SCLs in Root Negative-Interrogatives 68 2.3.4. SCLs in Different Syntactic Contexts 70 2.3.4.1. SCLs in Different Syntactic Contexts: Fornese and Sovramontino 70 2.3.5. The Morpho-Syntactic Status of SCLs: Further Assumptions 75 2.4. Conclusion 81 3. MICROPARAMETRIC VARIATION IN THE LOCUS OF SUBJECT CLITIC INVERSION: APPARENT WH-IN-SITU 82 3.1. Introduction 82 3.2. Bellunese Wh-In-Situ: Existing Analyses 85 3.3. The Behaviour of Wh-Words 94 3.3.1 Apparently In-Situ Wh-Words 95 3.3.2 “Canonical” Wh-Words 101 3.3.3 On the Nature of Wh-Clitics 107 3.3.4 Cleft-Questions, Clitic-Wh-Questions and Tonic-Wh-Questions 115 3.3.5. Preverbal Tonic Wh-Elements: A D-Linked Interpretation 120 3.4. Microparametric Variation in the Locus of SCLI 121 3.5. Conclusion 129 4. FOCUS STRUCTURE, PRAGMATICALLY MOTIVATED V2 EFFECTS AND SUBJECTHOOD 131 4.1. Introduction 131 4.1.1. Overview and Structure 133 4.2. Focus Structure 138 4.2.1. Narrow Focus 139 4.2.2. Subjects in Narrow Focus: Lamonat vs. Sovramontino 141 4.2.2.1. Accommodating Focal Subjects: Object Topicalisation 146 4.2.2.2. Accommodating Focal Subjects: Cleft Structures 147 4.2.2.3. Subjects of Core Unaccusatives 150 4.2.2.4. Subjecthood in Lamonat and Sovramontino 151 4.3. The V2 Nature of Lamonat and Sovramontino 157 4.3.1 V2 Diagnostics 157 4.3.1.1. What Moves? The preverbal XP and the Clitic Status of Auxiliaries 158 4.3.1.2. Subject Inversion 163 4.3.1.3. Linear restrictions: V1 and V3 164 4.3.1.4. The Root vs. Embedded Asymmetry 168 4.3.2. The Typology of V2: High vs. Low V2 Languages 170 4.3.2.1. Lamonat and Sovramontino: A High-V2 System 171 4.3.3. Comparing and Contrasting Romance V2 in Synchrony and Diachrony 180 3 4.3.4. Informational Narrow Focus: Against an In-situ Analysis in Lamonat and Sovramontino 187 4.4. The Pragmatically Motivated V2 Mechanism 191 4.5. Three Focal Positions: Friulian Marked Informational Focus 204 4.6. Broad Focus and SVO 209 4.7. Conclusion 215 5. ROOT CONTRASTIVENESS AND V2: A SUPRA-INFORMATIONAL STATUS 216 5.1. Introduction 216 5.1.1. Contrastiveness and V2: An Overview 217 5.1.2 A Unified Treatment of Contrastive XPs: Cross-linguistic Evidence 218 5.2. The Data: Contrastive XPs in Lamonat and Sovramontino 220 5.3. The V2 Nature of Lamonat and Sovramontino 224 5.4. The Preverbal XP: The Contrastive Field 225 5.4.1. The Hierarchy of Contrast 225 5.4.1.1. Dominant Contrast 226 5.4.1.2. Membership in a Finite Set of Entities 227 5.4.1.3. Highlighting 229 5.4.2. Topical and Focal Contrastiveness: The Revised Hierarchy of Contrast 231 5.5. The Case of D-Linked Wh-Elements 234 5.6. Conclusion 238 6. CONCLUSION 239 6.1. Summary of Findings 239 6.2. Challenges, Future Objectives and Concluding Remarks 242 BIBLIOGRAPHY 244 WORD COUNT: 76, 276 4 List of Tables 1.1 Participant distribution per speech community. 29 2.1 Comparison between Friulian’s and Sovramontino’s plural nominal morphology 51 and recostruction of Proto-Sovramontino’s plural morphology prior the loss of word-final –s. The masculine noun is ‘dog’ and the feminine noun is ‘chair’. 2.2 Tonic and atonic pronouns in Fornese. 57 2.3 Tonic and atonic pronouns in Sovramontino. 58 2.4 Renzi and Vanelli’s (1983) NID categories on the basis of the distribution of 59 obligatory SCLs across the different persons of the verb. 2.5 Negation and SCLs in Sovramontino and Fornese. 64 2.6 Atonic pronouns in Sovramontino. 66 2.7 Atonic pronouns in Fornese. 67 2.8 Present indicative conjugation of the verb ‘to eat’ in Friulian. 78 2.9 SCL forms vs. verb inflection forms in the relevant grammatical persons in 78 Sovramontino and Fornese. 3.1 Affirmative and interrogative SCLs in Lamonat and Sovramontino. 87 3.2 The internal makeup of the tonic wh-word aonde in Lamonat and Sovramontino 104 according to Munaro and Poletto (2014). 3.3 Tonic and clitic wh-elements in Lamonat and Sovramontino. 105 5.1 The typology of contrastive elements in Lamonat and Sovramontino with respect 231 to Molnár’s (2002, 2006) revised discourse-functions of contrastiveness. 5.2 Revised Hierarchy of Contrast for Lamonat and Sovramontino. 232 List of Figures 2.1 Geographical distribution of the four NEIDs under investigation and their 41 neighbouring Romance varieties. 4.1 Pitch contour of the root interrogative in (58) featuring an apparently in-situ 189 wh-element 4.2 Pitch contour of the root declarative in (60) featuring an XP in informational 189 narrow focus. 5 List of Abbreviations CL clitic COND conditional DAT dative EXIST existential EXPL expletive F feminine FOC focal Frl. Friulian GER gerundive IMP imperfective Lam. Lamonat LOC locative M masculine NEG negation NEID North-Eastern Italian Dialect NID Northern Italian Dialect OBJ object OCL object clitic PRN pronoun PL plural PTCP past participle PST past REFL reflexive SCL subject clitic SCLI subject clitic inversion SG singular Sovr. Sovramontino SUB subjunctive SUBJ subject 6 Abstract This thesis investigates a range of phenomena occurring at the syntax-pragmatics interface in four North Eastern Italian Dialects (henceforth NEIDs). The pragmatically motivated V2 system of Lamonat and Sovramontino provides valuable insights on the theoretical debate on the syntax-pragmatics interface, specifically: i) the make-up of the left periphery as the syntactic space that encodes discourse-pragmatic information cross-linguistically, and ii) the status of contrastiveness as a discourse-pragmatic notion. With respect to the first point, Lamonat and Sovramontino left peripheral space is less articulated or, put another way, more constrained than that of Friulian and Fornese, namely the other NEIDs under investigation in this thesis. The V2 constraint dictates certain restrictions in the make-up of the CP space: for example, the unavailability of clitic left dislocation of non-contrastive topics. In discourse-pragmatics terms, the left periphery seems to privilege elements that concern the management rather than the content of the interlocutors’ common ground. Despite the allegedly language-specific make-up of the C-domain, the actual left peripheral functional projections and their hierarchical order seem to be candidates for universal features of human language. As far as contrastiveness is concerned, Lamonat and Sovramontino show that it should be regarded as a complex discourse-pragmatic notion which is orthogonal to the topic-focus divide. More specifically, it should not be considered to be a discrete notion, but a continuum, in which the degree of contrastiveness is determined by the properties of the set containing the contrastive element with respect to the size and accessibility of alternatives. The present account offers a straightforward alternative for the analysis of wh-in- situ in Bellunese, whereby non-canonical constituent order in syntax is dictated by discourse-pragmatic needs. The present work also provides a new perspective on V2 as a syntax-pragmatics interface phenomenon: in the V2 system of Lamonat and Sovramontino, T-to-C movement is dictated by the discourse-pragmatic saliency of the fronted element. In fact, verb movement without the fronting of a salient XP in the C- space does not take place. Notwithstanding its discourse-pragmatic specialisation, the V2 system of Lamonat and Sovramontino is very likely a direct continuation of Medieval Romance V2. Finally, the V2 syntactic-pragmatic constraint of Lamonat and Sovramontino is not found in Friulian and Fornese. In these two NEIDs, residual V2 is in fact only manifested in T-to-C movement in root interrogatives and narrow focal element-verb adjacency in root declaratives. 7 Declaration I declare that no portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.
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