Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

This paper focuses on the very specific linguistic domain of nominative (nom) clitics of the ‘number’ class (Poletto 2000). Here, I adapt Roberts’ (2007) analysis of French nom enclitics in ‘complex inversion’ structures as an inflectional φ-set that the residual-V2 hlp of interrogatives fails to pass to T, à la Chomsky (2005), to both the assertive and the interrogative nom clitics of Trevisan, a Venetan dialect. Contra many works that take Northern Italian subject-clitic inversion to be the result of movement of phrasal chunks (Poletto & Pollock 2000, Munaro et al. 2001), I claim that Trevisan subject-clitic inversion is a canonical instance of V-to-C movement. This movement, I argue, enhances the activation of φ-features in the hlp, which are then Spelled-Out as interrogative nom clitics. Similarly, although contra Roberts (2010), I analyse the series of assertive nom clitics of Trevisan as an inflectional φ-set in Cardinaletti’s (2004) Subj°, activated in the presence of relevant spec-head configurations.

Chomsky, N. (2005) On Phases. Ms. MIT.

Munaro, N. & Poletto, C. & Pollock, J.-Y. (2001) Eppur si muove! On comparing French and Bellunese wh -movement. In P. Pica (ed.) Linguistic Variation Yearbook 1. John Benjamins. 147–180.

Poletto, C. (2000) The Higher Functional Field. Evidence from Northern Italian Dialects. Oxford University Press.

Poletto, C. & Pollock, J.-Y. (2000) On the Left Periphery of Some Romance Wh-Questions. University of Venice Working Papers in Linguistics 20 (2).

Roberts, I. (2007) A Deletion Analysis of Null Subjects: French as a Case Study. In A. Holmberg & I. Roberts (eds.) Null Subjects: the structure of parametric variation. Cambridge University Press.

Roberts, I. (2010) Agreement and Head Movement. Clitics, Incorporation, and Defective Goals. The MIT Press.