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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ 29, Nijmegen
Edited by Janine Berns, Haike Jacobs and Dominique Nouveau
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13] 2018
► pp. 55–74

On ben in Trentino regional Italian

| Sapienza University of Rome | University of Cambridge

The aim of the present article is to discuss the syntactic distribution and semantic/pragmatic interpretation of the discourse particle ben (lit. ‘well’) as used in the Trentino regional variety of Italian. Regarding its distribution, the results of our investigation with native speakers show that ben is admitted in any of the tested TAM contexts (save for non-root embedded clauses) and always sits between the lexical/auxiliary/restructuring verb and the non-finite form. As for its interpretation, it is shown that ben is used to negate an implicit or explicit negative presupposition, i.e. it is primarily connected with negation. These syntactic and interpretative properties are captured by claiming that ben sits in NegPresuppositionalP, where it is licensed by the (c)overt operator no located in ForceP.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The data
  • 3.Towards an analysis for Trentino ben
    • 3.1Previous works on Italian ben
    • 3.2Propositional vs expressive level
    • 3.3The semantic contribution
    • 3.4On anaphoricity
    • 3.5On emphatic polarity
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.13.05cog
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