The paper provides a comprehensive study of the syntactic and informational structural restrictions ruling the distribution of subjects in main clauses of Cimbrian, a Germanic dialect spoken in the village of Luserna, Trentino (Northern Italy). In this variety post-verbal subjects necessitate the presence of a subject clitic pronoun or of the element da (which is homophonous with the locative pronoun “here”) cliticized onto the finite verb, while a preverbal subject excludes these elements. Based on novel data collected in our own fieldwork, we provide a theoretical account of the distribution of "da" in Cimbrian showing "da" lexicalises Fin° and its distribution is fed by the V2 nature of Cimbrian. We then show that discourse-given NP subjects are licensed in [Spec,FinP], where Fin° serves to anchor the utterance to the context. The cases in which a subject does not raise to [Spec, FinP] and clitics or da lexicalise Fin° in order to anchor the utterance to the context are twofold: i) the subject is semantically inert to anchor the utterance and ii) the subject is syntactically inert to move into the position required for anchoring.
Syntactic and semantic restrictions in the licensing of subjects in Cimbrian main clauses
Cognola, Federica;Roland Hinterholzl
2020-01-01
Abstract
The paper provides a comprehensive study of the syntactic and informational structural restrictions ruling the distribution of subjects in main clauses of Cimbrian, a Germanic dialect spoken in the village of Luserna, Trentino (Northern Italy). In this variety post-verbal subjects necessitate the presence of a subject clitic pronoun or of the element da (which is homophonous with the locative pronoun “here”) cliticized onto the finite verb, while a preverbal subject excludes these elements. Based on novel data collected in our own fieldwork, we provide a theoretical account of the distribution of "da" in Cimbrian showing "da" lexicalises Fin° and its distribution is fed by the V2 nature of Cimbrian. We then show that discourse-given NP subjects are licensed in [Spec,FinP], where Fin° serves to anchor the utterance to the context. The cases in which a subject does not raise to [Spec, FinP] and clitics or da lexicalise Fin° in order to anchor the utterance to the context are twofold: i) the subject is semantically inert to anchor the utterance and ii) the subject is syntactically inert to move into the position required for anchoring.File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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