Some considerations on the syntax of expletive subjects in Old Venetan and the emergence of subject clitics

Old Venetan varieties display different forms of third person subject pronouns. In particular, the reduced monosyllabic and asyllabic forms are stronglyrelated to the expletive subject function. Even if the reduced forms do not have the same distribution of subject clitics in Modern Venetan, it can be argued that these forms have become clitics before the other pronouns. The article takes into consideration the syntax of expletive subjects in Old Venetan in relation to the rise of subject clitics in these varieties.

La relation entre accord et concordance dans deux dialectes des Grisons

This article deals with the agreement system of two dialects spoken in southern Switzerland. In both, FPL agreement is marked by the suffix -n, which is a reflex of the 6th person verbal ending. In Bregagliotto, the more conservative dialect of the two, -n occurs in the second position of FPL NPS (FPL and FSG NPs are otherwise identical). In Mesolcinese, -n occurs on all inflected elements that agree with a feminine plural controller (including finite verbs), except definite articles and subject clitics.

Subject Clitics in Microcontact: A Case Study from Heritage Friulian in Argentina and Brazil

In this paper we present data from first generation immigrants (G1) and second and third generation heritage speakers of Friulian, a Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in North-Eastern Italy and also found in Argentina and Brazil. The target phenomenon is subject clitics (SCL s). We show that SCL s in heritage Friulian are in a process of being reanalyzed from being agreement markers to pronouns. While SCL s are obligatory in Friulian as spoken in Italy, they are often dropped in heritage Friulian in Argentina and Brazil; this phenomenon, we argue, needs to be interpreted as the drop of pronominal subjects, and not of agreement-like SCL s. We also demonstrate that the use of SCL s (reanalyzed as pronominal subjects) is conditioned both by grammatical factors (it happens more in some grammatical persons than in others) and by discourse factors (they are used more in the case of a continuation topic than in other topicalization contexts). This means that in heritage Friulian, discourse constraints on the expression of subjects are not being lost or weakened; in fact, against the general grammaticalization trend of pronominal forms, new discourse constraints are introduced.

Genus-Zuweisung bei der Pronominalisierung von Personen in den Südwalser Dialekten

The Alemannic dialects in linguistic islands in Northern Italy have been undergoing strong changes since the second half of the 20th century. One of these changes concerns the assignment of gender with persons. Generalized neuter abolishes the coupling of gender with male/female and transfers both female and male persons into neuter. This in turn has its effect on verbal inflection. The post-verbal subject clitics mutate in the 3rd person singular to verb endings void of male/female connotations. This change, as it is now spreading, is not in itself a recent phenomenon. In early written dialectal records it already occurs in single documents even at the beginning of the 19th century.

Variable subject pronoun expression in Cabo-Verdean Creole

The Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC) subject domain has clitic and tonic pronouns that often amalgamate in double subject pronoun constructions; the possibility of a zero-subject and the formal category underlying subject clitics are disputed (Baptista 1995, 2002; Pratas 2004). This article discusses five variable constraints that condition subject expression across three descriptive and inferential analyses of a corpus of speech collected from 33 speakers from Santiago and Maio. Double subject pronoun constructions and zero-subjects were promoted by a persistence effect, though for the former this applied across nonadjacent clauses since double subject pronoun constructions are switch reference and contrastive devices resembling the doubling of agreement suffixes by independent pronouns in languages traditionally classified as pro-drop. Zero-subjects were favored in third-person contexts as previously observed by Baptista and Bayer (2013), and when a semantically referentially deficient (Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016) DP antecedent was in an Intonational Unit that was prosodically and syntactically linked to the Intonational Unit containing the target anaphor (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019). Results support reclassification of CVC subject clitics as ambiguous person agreement markers (Siewierska 2004) and suggest that CVC is developing a split-paradigm for person marking and subject expression (Wratil 2009; Baptista & Bayer 2013).

Sandawe

Sandawe (Khoisan, Tanzania) is a highly suffixal language with an intricate system of marking grammatical relations and number. The language makes extensive use of derivation between word classes and uses tone to create genitive noun phrases and distinguish certain clause types. The realis/irrealis distinction is key to understanding the different means of subject marking in Sandawe. Realis verbs allow multiple pronominal subject clitics and a subject focus marker, whereas in the irrealis, the subject is marked only on the verb itself. Aspect marking is achieved by coordinating verbs or through object marking. Conjunctions which are marked for the subject of the clause are used to express consecutive events in narratives. Constituent order is SOV, but preposing and postposing of constituents may take place, according to information structure considerations.

East Cushitic

This chapter discusses the internal classification of East Cushitic, alongside a brief history of the debate, and different classificatory proposals. The aim being genetic classification, typological and areal features are mentioned only in so far as they impinge on matters of genetic subgrouping. The chapter proposes a classification based upon shared innovations and successive binary splits. The soundness of the old and elusive concept of “Lowland East Cushitic” is discussed. In the end, an overarching opposition between a Lowland and Highland branch is proposed, with the latter being the result of specific innovations. Within Lowland, the development (not shared by Saho-Afar) of preverbal subject clitics gave rise to a majority group (Southern Lowland), which was in its turn split into a Nuclear subgroup made up of Oromoid and Omo-Tana (with Oromo and Somali as major representatives), with the Dullay cluster and Yaaku as residual peripheral languages (possibly a genetic subgroup of its own).

Parameters and the design of the Language Faculty

Following Berwick and Chomsky (2011), parameters are degrees of freedom open at the externalization (EXT) of syntactico-semantic structures (SEM) by sensorimotor systems (PHON) (Section 1). Within this framework, in Section 2 I focus on a case study concerning Northern Italian subject clitics, also raising the well-known question how to reconcile observable microvariation with the desideratum of a reduced number of (macro)parameters. Sections 3 reviews recent relevant models of parameterization, the Rethinking Comparative Syntax model (ReCoS, Biberauer et al. 2014) and the Parameters & Schemata model (Longobardi 2005, 2017). Sections 4–5 return to the case study, taking the reductionist view that parameters may be just categorial cuts, such as the 1/2P vs 3P split, interacting with externalization and other general principles of grammar.

Slovensko-romanski jezički kontakt na primeru dve pojave iz rezijskog

Slavic-Romance language contact: the case of two phenomena in Resian This paper investigates the mechanisms of language contact in shaping two aspects of Resian nominal and clausal syntax, the quantifier karjë ‘many, much’ and the rise of subject clitics. Resian is a definitely endangered Slavic variety spoken by not more than 1000 speakers in the Italian Alps, which has been in intense contact with Romance (Friulan and Italian) for centuries. It is well known that language contact is the principal trigger for language change (Kroch, 2001). The contact, indeed, has been readily invoked in some descriptive work on Resian (Skubic, 2000) to account for the observed Romance-like traits of Resian grammar. In order to account for the observed changes, which point to the direction of developing Romance-like traits, I propose instead a scenario which relies on the interplay of both internal and external causes (along the lines of Heine and Kuteva, 2005), with the initial trigger being provided internally (e.g. phonological changes, structural gaps). Słowiańsko-romański kontakt językowy na przykładzie dwóch zjawisk z dialektu rezjańskiego W artykule przeanalizowano mechanizmy kontaktu językowego w kształtowaniu się dwóch aspektów składni nominalnej i zdaniowej Rezjan – funkcjonowanie kwantyfikatora karjë ‘wiele, dużo’ oraz tworzenie się klityk. Rezjański jest silnie zagrożonym dialektem słowiańskim używanym przez nie więcej niż 1000 osób w Alpach włoskich, które od wieków pozostawały w intensywnym kontakcie z ludnością romańską (posługującą się językiem friulskim i włoskim). Wiadomo, że kontakt językowy jest głównym czynnikiem powodującym zmiany w idiolekcie (Kroch, 2001). O kontakcie międzyjęzykowym mówi się w wielu opisach gramatycznych, np. w Skubic, 2000, gdzie przedstawiono zaobserwowane romańskie cechy gramatyki dialektu rezjańskiego. Analizowane w artykule sytuacje potwierdzają tezę, że konstrukcje rozwinięte na skutek kontaktu językowego są nie tylko rezultatem wpływu zewnętrznego, ale także pro­cesów wewnątrzjęzykowych (za Heine i Kuteva, 2005) – początkowe „wyzwalacze” zazwyczaj pochodzą z systemu rodzimego (np. zmiany fonologiczne, luki strukturalne).