Cecilia Poletto

On wh-clitics and wh-doubling in French and some North Eastern Italian dialects

Abstract The main goal of this paper is to shed light on the doubling wh structures that many North Eastern Italian dialects exhibit, on the one hand, and on the ‘hidden’ doubling at work in French que questions, on the other. Both constructions we claim should be analysed as the A-bar counterparts of pronominal clitic doubling. The execution of these ideas rests on a highly split left periphery and Remnant movement to the different layers of the CP domain.

Word Order in Old Italian

1. The Old Italian left periphery 2. Scrambling in vP 3. Scrambling in the DP phase 4. The vP left periphery in different sentence types 5. Quantifier movement 6. Negative words 7. The grammar of OI in a broader perspective

The ASIS enterprise: a view on the construction of a syntactic atlas for the Northern Italian dialects

In this article we intend to illustrate how the ASIS (Atlante Sintattico dell’Italia Settentrionale “Syntactic Atlas of Northern Italy”) project has been created and developed. We discuss the theoretical, empirical, and practical problems that we encountered working on such an enterprise, and the choices we made in order to solve them. We have created a layered methodology, which has proved useful in gathering more and more detailed data in an interplay between theoretical analysis and field work. As no method is perfect, we will here also outline some of the problematic aspects of our project.

On the diachronic origin of sentential particles in North-Eastern Italian dialects

In this article we try to determine the diachronic origin of a few sentential particles attested in some North-Eastern Italian dialects on the basis of their syntactic properties. The particles we consider are associated to specific clause types and can only appear in matrix nondeclarative clauses; they generally occur in sentence final position, and only some of them can follow the wh-item in an interrogative clause. They display the typical properties of X°-elements, and can therefore be analyzed as functional heads of the CP layer; we present an analysis exploiting movement of the wh-item or of the whole clause to the specifier corresponding to the head occupied by the particle. The different distribution that characterizes the two main types of particles seems to depend on whether they derive etymologically from pronouns or from adverbs; the new properties developed in the grammaticalization process suggest that when an element is reanalysed as a functional category, it can further acquire the value of functional projections merged close to it in the structure.