A Protocol for the Inflected Construction in Sicilian Dialects

Most Sicilian dialects display a monoclausal construction with a functional verb (usually of motion), followed by the linking element a and a lexical verb called Inflected Construction by Cardinaletti, Giusti (2001, 2003). This construction shows a high degree of cross-linguistic variation. The aim of the paper is to propose the protocols in the sense of Giusti, Zegrean (2015) to conduct fieldwork in this area. Protocol Linguistics is a metamodel of linguistic research that can be shared by linguists of different theoretical persuasion, can be accessible to non-linguists, and is meant to interface with a number of disciplines and environments such as social sciences and political planning, neuro-psychology and language rehabilitation, pedagogy and language education. The protocols consist of simple table-charts with the horizontal axis listing the empirical environments to be searched, e.g. the languages to be compared, and the vertical axis listing (clusters of) properties, named features, to be valued as +/- according to whether they are present or absent in each environment. The features relevant to the investigation on the Inflected Construction rely on preliminary work by Di Caro (2015), which highlights a finer grained variation than the one presented in previous literature (a.o. Cardinaletti, Giusti 2001, 2003, and Cruschina 2013). In the spirit of the principles-and-parameters approach, the protocols for the Inflected Construction are clustered around two main dimensions, each involving clusters of properties: (i) the lexical restrictions on the functional and/or the lexical verb; (ii) the person, tense and mood restrictions of the verbal paradigm.