The Higher Functional Field

The Higher Functional Field OXFORD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE SYNTAX Richard Kayne, General Editor Principles and Parameters of Syntactic Saturation Gert Webelhuth Verb Movement and Expletive Subjects in the Germanic Languages Sten Vikner Parameters and Functional Heads: Essays in Comparative Syntax Edited by Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi Discourse Configurational Languages Edited by Katalin E. Kiss Clause Structure and Language Change Edited by Adrian Battye and Ian Roberts Dialect Variation and Parameter Setting: A Study of Belfast English and Standard English Alison Henry Parameters of Slavic Morphosyntax Steven Franks Particles: On the Syntax of Verb-Particle, Triadic, and Causative Constructions Marcel den Dikken The Polysynthesis Parameter Mark C. Baker The Role of Inflection in Scandinavian Syntax Anders Holmberg and Christer Platzack Clause Structure and Word Order in Hebrew and Arabic: An Essay in Comparative Semitic Syntax Ur Shlonsky Negation and Clausal Structure: A Comparative Study of Romance Languages Raffaella Zanuttini Tense and Aspect: From Semantics to Morphosyntax Alessandra Giorgi and Fabio Pianesi Coordination Janne Bondi Johannessen Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective Guglielmo Cinque A Handbook of Slavic Clitics Steven Franks and Tracy Holloway King XF'-Adjunction in Universal Grammar: Scrambling and Binding in Hindi-Urdu Ayesha Kidwai Multiple Feature Checking and Grammatical Functions in Universal Grammar Hiroyuki Ura The Higher Functional Field: Evidence from Northern Italian Dialects Cecilia Poletto THE HIGHER FUNCTIONAL FIELD Evidence from Northern Italian Dialects CECILIA POLETTO New York Oxford Oxford University Press 2000 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 2000 by Cecilia Poletto Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Poletto, Cecilia, 1962- The higher functional field : evidence from northern Italian dialects / Cecilia Poletto. p. cm.—(Oxford studies in comparative syntax) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-513356-0; ISBN 0-19-513357-9 (pbk.) 1. Italian language—Dialects—Italy, Northern. I. Title. II. Series. PC1841.P65 2000 457'.!—dc21 99-20704 I 35798642 Printed in the United .States of America on acid-free paper A Chicco e Dado con amore This page intentionally left blank Preface he original project for this book about agreement and subject clitics in north- Tern Italian dialects dates back about six years; it was supposed to be the En- glish version of my doctoral thesis. Since then, I decided to widen the database of my research, which was originally restricted to just fifty dialects, belonging mainly to the northeastern area, to include several northwestern dialects and Rhaetoromance. Moreover, the development of the theoretical framework had to be taken into account and integrated into the analysis. With the help of Paola Beninca, Richard Kayne, and Laura Vanelli, who co- operated in the project that started in 1990 and involved devising a syntactic atlas of northern Italy, I have been able to extend and deepen the empirical domain of my investigation. The database on which this work is now based includes more than 100 dialects, extending its scope across both northeastern and northwestern Italy, which have been extensively tested by using the same questionnaire to col- lect comparable data. The geographical domain of this inquiry has been so inter- esting because the dialectal varieties spoken throughout this area seem to share a fundamentally homogeneous basic grammar and lexicon. They tend to differ in a minimal way, and this fact becomes fruitful once we have made the preliminary hypothesis that microvariation is not at random, or at best is a purely lexical phenomenon. This book is set within the comparative linguistic perspective that has recently emerged from the work of Richard Kayne and Paola Beninca (among others), who have investigated microvariation in syntax and developed it into a powerful tool for observing clusters of properties that are linked together in a complex and in- teresting manner. In my attempt to account for dialectal variation, I have not based my expla- nations merely on the different parametric choices made by different dialects, as the variation patterns that have been observed are too narrow and detailed to be explained in terms of parameters (as they are conceived in the current generative viii Preface theory). I have endeavored to explore an alternative method of accounting for microvariation, using it to prove that syntactic structure is much more complex than has been assumed until now. Different dialects only have different moving or merging possibilities for the same elements, such as the inflected verb or the complementizer, though the syntactic structure and constraints at work are assumed to be always the same. The general picture that has emerged from this investigation is certainly provisional, as it is based on a limited sample of dialects; it is expected to change as our knowledge of this linguistic area improves. The project involving the drawing up of a syntactic atlas for northern Italy is still continuing, and it seems to me an exciting challenge to be able to provide a systematic account of what at first sight would appear to be no more than wild variation; it also proves that dialectal variation is not a random procedure at all but follows well- determined general principles and can be described in terms of implicational gen- eralizations, which in turn can be accounted for by linguistic theory, thereby im- proving our knowledge of the i-language. The new phenomena that I discovered caused me to change part of the analysis I had proposed in my thesis and urged me to more deeply investigate certain aspects, such as subjunctive and verb second sentences, which I had neglected in my earlier studies. My interest in subject clitics and agreement patterns is reflected in the second and sixth chapters, whereas the central part of my work focuses on verb movement and the left-peripheral positions of the sentence and the complementizers and particles that occur in this syntactic domain. This book offers a methodical investigation of subject clitics in declarative clauses, which show that what has been assumed until recently to be a single agreement projection actually consists of a complex set of different functional layers. I have extensively exam- ined several contexts in which the left periphery of the sentence structure is activated, namely, main and embedded interrogative sentences, verb second clauses (in those dialects that display these properties in a generalized fashion), and subjunctive clauses. The distribution of complementizers, subject clitics, and sentence particles, as well as the behavior of the inflected verb in these types of structures, shows that the Comp domain is a set of functional projections with distinct fea- tures and checking requirements. Moreover, the position of preverbal nominal subjects is identified as a SpecC position with topic properties, whereas the position of preverbal quantifier subjects displays a number of A' properties. Examina- tion of the left periphery in several different types of clauses unveils the number and type of CPs activated in each sentence type, which all display two fundamen- tal properties: (1) activated CPs do not need to be adjacent, and (2) they are activated by means of a bottom-up procedure; that is, the higher CPs can be activated only when the lower ones are. The complex structure I provide here may also serve as a basis for compar- ing the structure identified in northern Italian dialects with other Romance and non-Romance languages and to test whether the two properties in the activation of distinct CPs have a more general basis. Padova, Italy C. P. November 1998 Acknowledgments his book is the result of a ten-year study that has involved a large number of Tpeople. I would like to thank my first linguistic mentor, Guglielmo Cinque, who managed to instill in me his fascination for research into language diversity and unity. His rigor and precision in handling data and his intuition about far- reaching hypotheses have been a valuable model. The person I have to thank most for having made me a dialectologist is Paola Beninca, whose ideas and inspira- tion are present throughout all the work I have been doing in these years. I am aware of the fact that I would have never written this book if it had not been for her constant help and support. I also wish to thank her for being a sensible friend and a generous linguist, as well as for teaching me the real meaning of teamwork. I also benefited from the support of other friends from the Linguistics Depart- ment of Padova: Laura Vanelli, who has spent many long hours discussing with me all the problems regarding the phenomena at the interface with phonology, as well as a great many pragmatic questions; Teresa Vigolo, who has been my con- sultant for etymological issues; and Alberto Mioni and Alberto Zamboni, the former and present directors of the Centra di Dialettologia, and now the Istituto di Fonetica e Dialettologia, who have given me the opportunity to continue with this work. Many other linguists have visited during these past few years to dis- cuss matters of data and ideas with me at length: Richard Kayne encouraged me to begin this undertaking and suggested many of the solutions I have adopted here.

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