Syntactic variation
Subtitle: the dialects of Italy
By: edited by Roberta D'Alessandro, Adam Ledgeway, Ian Roberts
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 351
ISBN-13: 9780521517362
Description: "The study of Romance languages can tell us a great deal about sentence structure and its variation in general. Focusing on the dialects of Italy - including the islands of Sardinia and Sicily - the authors explore three thematic areas: the nominal domain, the verbal domain and the left periphery of the clause. The book gives fresh attention to the dialects, arguing that they offer an unprecedented degree of variation (not found, for example, in Germanic languages). Analysing a host of new data, the authors show how the dialects can be used as a test-bed for investigating and challenging received ideas about language structure and change. Coherent and wide-ranging, this is a vital resource for those working in syntactic theory, historical linguistics, and Romance languages"--Provided by publisher.

"In particular, the books brings together a rich and varied collection of essays on a number of topics in Italian dialect syntax written by leading researchers in the field of Italian dialectology and, in many cases, also in the field of syntactic theory. The 17 essays, which fall into three thematic areas of the nominal domain, the verbal domain and the left periphery of the clause, present data from the dialects of northern, central and southern Italy, as well as the islands (Sardinia, Sicily), that directly bear on a range of diachronic and synchronic issues and problems"--Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Syntactic variation and the dialects of Italy: an overview / Roberta D'Alessandro, Adam Ledgeway and Ian Roberts; Part I. Nominal Structures: 1. Headless relatives in some Old Italian varieties / Paola Beninc...; 2. On Old Italian uomo and the classification of indefinite expressions / Verner Egerland; 3. Syncretism and suppletion in clitic systems: underspecification, silent clitics or neither? / M. Rita Manzini and Leonardo M. Savoia; 4. Lexicalization of 3rd person object clitics: clitic enclisis and clitic drop / Leonardo M. Savoia and M. Rita Manzini; 5. Proclitic vs enclitic pronouns in northern Italian dialects and the null-subject parameter / Anna Cardinaletti and Lori Repetti; 6. Domains of clitic placement in finite and non-finite clauses: evidence from a Piedmontese dialect / Christina Tortora; Part II. Verbal Structures: 7. Prohibition and Romance: negative imperatives in the early vernaculars of Italy / Mair Parry; 8. The periphrasis aviri a + infinitive in contemporary Sicilian dialect / Luisa Amenta; 9. A formal typology of person-based auxiliary selection in Italo-Romance / Geraldine Legendre; 10. The Abruzzese T-v system: feature spreading and the double auxiliary construction / Roberta D'Alessandro and Adam Ledgeway; 11. Perfective auxiliaries in the pluperfect in some southern Italian dialects / Michela Cennamo; 12. The logic of Romance past participle agreement / Michele Loporcaro; Part III. The Left Periphery: 13. Fronting as focalization in Sicilian / Silvio Cruschina; 14. Focus fronting and the left periphery in Sardinian / Guido Mensching and Eva-Maria Remberger; 15. In focus: an investigation of information and contrastive constructions / Sandra Paoli; 16. Criterial conditions for wh-structures: evidence from wh-exclamatives in northern Italian dialects / Nicola Munaro; 17. The distribution of the complementizers /ka/ and /ku/ in the North Salentino dialect of Francavilla Fontana (Brindisi) / Paola Vecchio.