Parallel Phases: a study on the high and low left periphery of Old Italian

In this work I will investigate a set of OV constructions in Old Italian (OI), a phenomenon which has been up to now neglected in the literature on Old Romance languages. Some cases of OV structures can be analyzed as V2 cases, with the Object in (some) SpecC position and the inflected verb in the corresponding C° head. There are however further cases which require a different treatment as the verbal form involved is a past participle, not an inflected verb.I intend to put forth an analysis in terms of movement of the XP to a low Focus (or Topic) position located to the left of the low vP phase, similar to (at least one type of) scrambling studied in the Germanic languages.