Roberta D'Alessandro

Movement and Agreement in Italian Past Participles and Defective Phases

In this article, we propose a phase-based alternative to Kayne’s (1989) analysis of past participle agreement in Italian. This analysis captures the principal facts without making reference to specifier-head agreement. Instead, the possibility of overt past participle agreement is determined by the Phase Impenetrability Condition and is linked to the surface position of the past participle. The analysis has interesting crosslinguistic implications, notably in that it predicts a general asymmetry between subject and object agreement.

The syntax of the indefinite pronoun nome

Abstract This paper examines the syntax of the indefinite pronoun nome in Eastern Abruzzese. Nome is syntactically intriguing as it appears in a subject position which is not available to other NPs. Moreover, it does not have any corresponding form in any other Italian dialect, except for Sardinian and some Marchigiano varieties. We first show that nome is a clitic subject, more precisely a weak pronoun subject in the sense of Cardinaletti and Starke (1999). Then, we draw a tentative sketch for the syntactic word patterns in EA. We argue that the properties and the behavior of nome support those views that recognize the need for specialized subject positions (Cardinaletti 1997, 2004).

On the Diversity of Linguistic Data and the Integration of the Language Sciences

An integrated science of language is usually advocated as a step forward for linguistic research. In this paper, we maintain that integration of this sort is premature, and cannot take place before we identify a common object of study. We advocate instead a science of language that is inherently multi-faceted, and takes into account the different viewpoints as well as the different definitions of the object of study. We also advocate the use of different data sources, which, if non-contradictory, can provide more solid evidence for linguistic analysis. Last, we argue that generative grammar is an important tile in the puzzle.