Subject Clitics in the Northern Italian Dialects: A Comparative Study Based on the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory: 60 (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory) - Tapa blanda

1. 0 INTRODUCTION This book provides an encompassing analysis of Subject Clitics (SCLs) by giving a detailed description of these elements in two varieties of Piedmontese, a Northern Italian Dialect: Astigiano and Turinese spoken in the areas of Asti and Turin respectively. It accounts for the structural position and function of these elements inside the computational system and for their morphological and distributional properties. It also provides an empirical and theoretical comparison between Piedmontese SCLs and SCLs in other Northern Italian Dialects (NIDs). of SCLs types in the NIDs have been regarded as Since the 1980s, the majority elements of agreement, in that they contribute to the realisation of subject verb agreement by expressing features of the subject similar, in a way, to verbal inflection. Nonetheless, SCLs are not to be assimilated to verbal affixes as they exhibit different properties. Most distinctively, they can be separated from the verb by other clitic elements and, in the case of the varieties considered here, SCLs are optional in all contexts and may be omitted in coordination. A more refined identification of SCLs separates SCLs which encode agreement features from those which do not and are related to pragmatic factors, as originally observed by Beninca (1994) with respect to the clitic a in Paduano The different morphological and syntactic properties that characterise SCLs across the NIDs have justified numerous accounts which regard them as head of their own projection.

This book provides an analysis of Subject Clitics concentrating on Astigiano and Turinese, two dialects spoken in the North of Italy, in the areas of Asti and Turin respectively. In the wake of structural economy, this book accounts for the structural position and function of Subject Clitics inside the computational system and for their morphological and distributional properties. It also provides an empirical and theoretical comparison between Piedmontese Subject Clitics and Subject Clitics in other Northern Italian dialects.

At the theoretical level the higher goal of this book is to promote structure minimality by proposing a treatment of elements of agreement such as Subject Clitics which is compatible with the elimination of Agreement central to the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995).

*It has a significant empirical impact as it deals with data not discussed in previous works on Subject Clitics;
*It presents a novel theoretical treatment of Subject Clitics by incorporating minimalist guidelines and Optimality Theory to such a complex topic;
*It presents a detailed review of recent works on Subject Clitics;
*It proposes a novel theoretical treatment of the variation that characterises the use of Subject Clitics across the Northern Italian Dialects;
*It opens several paths for future research in the fields of Romance Linguistics and Theoretical Syntax.

Overall the view of Subject Clitics and sentence structure maintained in this book contrasts with the breaking down of functional categories into a myriad of syntactically and semantically distinct projections that has prevailed in several recent studies on Subject Clitics and Romance Syntax in general.