Wroclaw05



Dialectal variation in Romance
Cecilia Poletto

The handout for this course can be found here


In this course I will analyze in detail the way dialectal variation is distributed in the Northern Italian domain. The empirical field of investigation concerns different types of functional elements, which display the same type of geographical (and diachronic) distribution. It will be shown that the lexical realization of a given F° is submitted to general restrictions, and that there exist ?fields? of projections related to one another, although they are not necessarily adjacent to each other. The course has five parts:

  1. in the first class I will analyze the distribution of different classes of subject clitics and present a general constraint on the distribution of functional elements inside a field. Clitic doubling will be analyzed (following work by Kayne and Uriagereka) as internal to a complex DP.

  2. in the second I will analyze various types of sentential negation showing that their etymological origin is consistent with their syntactic properties. Several cases of ?enphatic? negation will also be taken into account showing in detail the passages of the ?Jespersen cycle? according to which a negative marker is reanalyzed as unmarked sentential negation. The same type of complex XP already postulated for clitic doubling will be shown to exist in cases of multiple negative markers.

  3. in this class I will consider the distribution of wh-items, including cases of wh in situ, wh-doubling and cleft sentences, showing that the same pattern already observed for subject clitics and sentential negation is found also in wh-doubling constructions.

  4. The pattern of sentential particles, which take in their specifier either a wh-word or the entire clause will be analyzed as left peripheral elements marking semantic values that provide a finer distinction among sentence types.

  5. In the last session I will show that several dialects have developed a number of different complementizers which specialize for modality, sentence type (for instance interrogative or exclamative complementizers have different properties) or appear when the CP layer contains a Topic.


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