Silvio Cruschina

The expression of evidentiality and epistemicity: Cases of grammaticalization in Italian and Sicilian

Abstract The main aim of this article is to provide a detailed analysis of particular structures found in Italian, especially as spoken in central and southern Italy, and in Sicilian. These structures are very similar in the two languages, in that they involve the grammaticalization of the same verb of saying or epistemic adjective followed by the complementizer (cf. Italian dice che, capace che, and Sicilian dicica, capacica), but in fact they display different properties. I investigate the function and the syntactic behaviour of these constructions, which seem to instantiate two types, stages or degrees of grammaticalization. More specifically, I show that in Italian these predicates are functional heads followed by the complementizer che, while in Sicilian the resulting units are now sentence adverbs. The present work therefore deals with grammaticalization and language change, but also with the two categories with which these structures are associated, namely, evidentiality and epistemic modality. A broader theoretical question lies in the background of the discussion, which challenges the ‘morphocentric’ perspective on the grammatical expression of certain categories such as evidentiality (cf. Aikhenvald 2004). Following Cinque (1999, 2004), I claim that adverbs can also be seen as the overt manifestation of functional distinctions, similarly to particles, auxiliaries and overt morphology. Under this view, sentential adverbs are functional in nature, and have the same meaning and function as the corresponding grammatical elements occurring as the head of the corresponding functional projection.

Existentials and locatives in Romance dialects of Italy

List of figures and tables List of abbreviations Dialect maps 1. Existentials and locatives in Romance dialects of Italy: Introduction 2. Focus structure 3. Predication and argument realization 4. Definiteness effects and linking 5. Historical context 6. Conclusion Appendix 1: Early Romance sources Appendix 2: Latin sources References Index

On the syntactic status of sentential adverbs and modal particles

Abstract This paper sets out a number of reasons for establishing a distinction between sentential (modal) adverbs and modal particles. Adverbs and particles are generally difficult to define as two distinct and independent word classes in terms of unitary criteria and distinctive properties. The traditional role of an adverb is that of modifying a verb or a verb phrase. In reality, adverbs also modify adjectives, sentences, and other adverbs. Particles also serve a sort of ‘modification’ function. Modal particles, for example, take the whole sentence as their object and fit its content to the context of speech. This ‘vague’ similarity, though, should not be interpreted as a motivation for assimilating the two categories, especially when other syntactic properties, such as the sentential position, the distribution, and the sensitivity to sentence types, together with their correlated semantic interpretations, are taken into consideration.