Alessandra Tomaselli

La sintassi del soggetto nel quadro minimalista. Riflessioni su EPP e pro-drop

Under the radical shift of perspective due to the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), many theoretical principles of the generative framework need to be revised and deeply rethought. This paper proposes a reflection about the impact of this new revolution on two central aspects of subject syntax, namely the Extended Projection Principle and the Null Subject Parameter. The paper is articulated through the comparison of a number of typological unrelated languages : 1) S(...)V non pro-drop languages, such as English, French and German ; 2) pro-drop languages such as Italian ; 3) VS languages such as Irish. This brief survey leads us to conclude that both aspects of Subject syntax cannot be derived under the most elementary mechanisms of minimalism. They remain on the contrary two autonomous components of the theory : EPP a primitive of Universal Grammar concerning the domain of Tense ; pro-drop an independent parameter defined in terms of activation of a specific functional projection : AgrP

The syntax of subordination in Cimbrian and the rationale behind language contact

Abstract The aim of this contribution is twofold: (i) providing a detailed description of subordination in Cimbrian and (ii) discussing the concept of language contact in terms of feature transfer. As has been recently pointed out, Cimbrian declarative and relative clauses display a unique pattern among the German dialects w.r.t. embedding. In fact, different complementizers trigger different syntax as regards the position of the finite verb. In our contribution, we extend the analysis to adverbial clauses for the first time and also investigate the double pattern of embedding in indirect wh-questions. Our data suggest that contact-induced syntactic change can be explained in terms of transfer of single abstract features.