La variazione diatopica delle costruzioni con soggetto di nuova informazione

In this paper, a case of syntactic variation is discussed which emerges in the Italian spoken in Veneto. It concerns the position of subject noun phrases which represent the new information of the clause: While in Italian, a new information subject obligatorily follows the verb, it may precede the verb in Veneto Italian. When it precedes the verb, a new information subject is characterized by a special intonation which recalls similar patterns in languages like English and French. This instance of syntactic variation is presumably due to the contact between Italian and the dialectal varieties spoken by the same community. As in other cases of linguistic contact, it affects a word order motivated by discourse considerations and gives rise to unexpected optionality in the speakers: they display both preverbal and postverbal subjects. The interest of the construction also lies in the fact that it enters the debate on the properties of pro-drop languages. According to the first formulation of the pro-drop parameter (Rizzi 1982), a correlation exists between the availability of null subjects and the possibility of postverbal subjects. In this debate, it is important to notice that the Veneto dialects, like other northern Italian dialects, are not full pro-drop languages, but display overt pronouns in some persons of the paradigm. They expectedly display a syntax of subjects partially different from Italian. In bilingual communities and speakers, these dialectal properties influence the syntax of subjects in Italian too.