Proclitic vs enclitic pronouns in northern Italian dialects and the null-subiect parameter

The unstressed subject pronouns of northern Italian dialects (NIDs) are usually considered (clitic) heads different from, for example, their French preverbal counterparts, which are considered maximal projections. As these clitic forms have been considered to be realizations of Infl, NIDs have consequently been analyzed as Null Subject Languages (NSLs) on a par with Italian. Differently from Italian, however, subject clitics are needed (in some persons of the paradigm) to enrich Infl in order to license pro. Language-internal, cross-linguistic, diachronic and neurolinguistic data have led us to reconsider the status of NIDs as NSLs. We claim that NIDs are not full pro-drop languages. They allow pro only in some persons of the paradigm, trivially those in which no clitic pronoun appears. In the other persons, the clitic pronoun is the true subject, and no pro occurs. This novel approach allows us to analyse the different distribution of subject pronouns in proclisis and enclisis without resorting to the ‘two-paradigm’ hypothesis. We show that subject clitics compete with null subjects, and that competition is resolved in an intricate way across sentence types (and across dialects). This analysis of subject clitics raises a number of questions with regard to the properties of NSLs: the relationship between rich inflection and pro, the lack of overt expletives, and the existence of subject inversion phenomena.