On the marking of negative presupposition in regional varieties of Italian

In the present study, we aim to discuss the result of a parallel investigation that we carried out across further localities of the Italian peninsula in order to broaden our understanding of the interpretation and syntactic distribution of the adverb "ben" in regional Italian and to contribute to the wealth of literature on this topic, which still awaits an in-depth investigation into Italo-Romance. In line with Cognola & Schifano (2016), we take ben to exhibit the properties of a discourse particle, i.e. an element which conveys information about the epistemic state of discourse participants and does not contribute to the descriptive content of the utterance (Zimmerman 2011). We extend the same analysis suggested for Tr. ben in Cognola & Schifano (2016) to all investigated Italian varieties, i.e. ben is located in NegPresuppositionalP and is licensed by a negative operator in ForceP, and also refine it by showing that there exists a close relationship between Italian "ben" and German "doch".